Parable of Three Year Olds

On one occasion, Naima said, "Grandfather, when you gonna put me on the cover of your newspaper?"

Grandfather answered her with the above issue of his newspaper, she's in bottom center pic, on her first day to kindergarten . Her brother Jahmeel is on the left. His grandfather asked who dressed him so "clean"? The "Prophet" who's going to save the world said, "I dressed myself!" Young man on the right is a Moorish Science devotee, follower of Noble Drew Ali. His siblings are in the upper center of pic.

photo Adam Turner

The X Family at Dr. Cornel West and Marvin X's Conversation, Geoffrey's Inner Circle, Oakland, December 6, 2019. Left to Right: front, granddaughter Naima, Marvin X,  grandson Jahmeel, niece  Sheena Johnson: back row, daughter, Attorney Amira Jackmon, sister Debra Jackmon, grandson James Rhodes.

photo Adam Turner

Dr. Cornel West embracing daughters of Marvin X,

Nefertiti and Amira at Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness Concert,

San Francisco State University, April 1, 2001

A Marvin X Production

photo Kamau Amen Ra, RIP

Marvin X and grandchildren after his concert at Black Repertory Group Theatre, Berkeley

Jahmeel and Naima

photo Adam Turner

Left to Right: Marvin X, Jahmeel, Director Stanley Nelson, Amira and daughter Naima at Berkeley screening of Nelson's documentary film Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. Marvin X made a brief appearance. When Marvin X asked his grandson "Prophet" Jahmeel what he thought about the film, he said, "It was too much violence." Indeed it was between the black community and pigs, FBI, National Guard, CIA that is ongoing as we write in 2021. Does Black Lives Matter or Black Power Matter? Isn't it a shame our grandchildren may need to resolve the matter?

Marvin X's grandson James Rhodes embracing Grand Diva of the Black Arts Movement, Sonia Sanchez at her home in Philly. James accompanied his grandfather on his east coast tour from Duke University up north to Philly, Newark, Brooklyn and Harlem.

The X men left to right, bottom, grandson Jahmeel; back Marvin K, son, Marvin X, Jordan, grandson
 

Parable of Three Year Olds

Marvin X grandchildren: Left to right Naima, Mahadevi and Jahmeel, in Philly PA

The X Family in Los Angeles for B Day party for Mahadevi

Her mother Muhammida El Muhajir, flew in from Ghana, picked up her daughter in Philly and gave her a b day party at a dance studio in Los Angeles. Mahadivi is on front row, far right with sucker, mother behind her. We must say without training, Mahadevi excelled in the dance class with her pure energy and determination. We heard Beyonce had the same energy as a child, couldn't stop singing. 

I love three year old babies only. That's when they can talk. I have concluded babies are pure genius at three. Yes, they have absorbed their Mother tongue, but their genius minds have not been polluted by society, religiosity and most importantly, public education. The three year old says the most wonderful things from a mystery land beyond parent's imagination. Please tell me from what source did my grandson tell me at three, "Grandfather, you can't save the world but I can!" Firstly, I want to know how did he know I was trying to save the world?" Secondly, I want to know how he figured he could save the world?" What was the source of his wisdom, his most convincing conclusion that I couldn't save the world and that he could? No matter, his three year old prophetic announcement not only astonished me but relieved me of great stress. Imagine the task of one who thinks he can save the world!

Imagine the hubris, narcissism. Imagine how relieved to hear my grandson's pronouncement. I felt like Sisyphus except I was able to pass the rock to my grandson who accepted it with such self-confidence. I knew he was of my DNA because I knew I was one who dwelled in supreme self-confidence, still his utterance completely floored me as we walked from my Academy of Da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, to Lake Merritt so he could feed the ducks. 

He is fifteen now, feeling his manhood. Told me on his 15th b day, he knows he is no longer a child. He is confident and assured of his advance into manhood. I am elated the baby is no more, a man child has arrived. Yet I am sad to say I miss my three-year old prophet that I have no heard from since. I have heard him spout the wisdom of his father and mother, the schools and computer games. 

He does not know I have a challenge for him as per manhood rites. I want him to go into the jungle, bring back the lion on his back. Build the house without nails for his wife. Sleep with her without ejaculation until child is wanted. (See Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography Facing Mt. Kenya).

Yes, my three year old grandson is no more. He walks slowly, hair growing into locks. He has been around the world like no child born into Blackness, with a mother and father conscious and free. Even his baby sister is a monster, yes, she too at three. Coming home from a play, she said to me, "Grandfather, can you come to my house and talk to me on the couch for about 30 minutes?" How could I deny this request? I was shocked as when my grandson said I couldn't save the world but he could. I can't recall conversation with my granddaughter except I know it happened as per her request. How could I deny the profundity of a three-year old with wisdom and decorum transcending me?

Mahadevi at three, spoke French and Mandarin, could read and spell English. In the car with her mother, I said, "S.H.I.T.," my daughter said, "Dad, she know what you said, she can spell." At three at the Chinese restaurant in Berkeley, Devi played with the Chinese children, talking Mandarin to their utter shock. She rocked me planning her b day party. She said, "G-pa, I'm going to have a kitty cat party, no dogs can come!" I said, "Granddaughter, why can't dogs come?" She said, "G-pa. their poop is too big!"

--Marvin X

6/14/21

Parable of shooting down white folks stupid shit

 Parable of shooting down white folks stupid shit

"The white man at best is corny! Anything he says we have the superior intelligence

to shoot it down in a nano-second and we must do so without hesitation."--Amiri Baraka

Imagine, white folks are aghast at Critical Race Theory. Who cares? They are abhorred that their children can be subjected to a theory the white race can be pronounced as devils. Now, a theory may be proven wrong in the final analysis, but please tell me how many decades, no, centuries were black children subjected to white supremacy public school education that dehumanized them, reduced them to slaves and virtual slaves? In my high school civics class, when we were shown a film of us picking cotton I dropped my head in shame. After all, living in the Central Valley of California, I didn't need a film on cotton picking. There was more cotton in California than Mississippi. My great grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, mother and uncles picked their share as I did as well, How else did I and my friends buy school clothes except for cotton, cutting grapes and pitching watermelons? Did I need a film to remind me of our labor under the sun? Did I need a civics lesson the remind me we had to stop pitching watermelons at noon because the sun was too hot in Bakersfield?

My musician friends hear whites playing jazz and wonder at the source of their trauma that caused blacks to create jazz. They wonder when were whites in the cotton, cane and rise fields to suffer their souls to create jazz and blues? When were they lynched, tarred and feathered, labored from can't see to can't see to claim their ID card in the sacred world of jazz and blues?

So in their total rejection of the historical facts endemic to Critical Race Theory, even the most Miller Lite notion that white supremacy is pervasive, thus systemic in every institution of Americana, as if a system of slavey can be devoid of the ideology of free labor, yes, while a society pronounces democratic ideals in the foundation of its constitution. Opponents of Critical Race Theory wish to hide the plain facts that their champion of democratic ideals simultaneously maintained a love relationship with his favored slave child, Sally, and kept her in a room adjacent to his without sunlight while she sired six children for him. Yes, white supremacist opponents of Critical Race Theory wish to delete this wretched but critical fact of American history from the tender ears of their children, just as they suppressed the genocide of Black Wall Street for 100 years. 

Please tell us what facts of American history you wish your darling children to know? Should they know of slave revolts? Should they know that the slave auction was every New Year's Day, the most dreaded day in the life of North American African victims of the American slave system (Ed Howard term, Oakland, CA)?

Dear White Folks, what exactly is your version of American history that deconstructs the 1619 narrative? In all honestly, can you present a version of American history that excludes the narrative of the natives, the aboriginals, the kidnapped Africans, or shall we only hear the slave master's song of how he civilized the natives and graced them with the holy blessings of the blue-eyed blond savior Jesus Christ?

If you persist in your denial of the narrative of, by and for the oppressed, that you do not wish your children to hear, just know the day shall come when your children shall accept truth as truth and deny your narrative as a pact of lies fit for the dustbin of history, and they shall reject you as well for your sins to accumulate capital, an exercise they come to deem worthless and totally without any iota of moral quality.

--Marvin X

6/12/21

Parable of kibbles and bits in the dope game and beyond

Marvin X and Danny Glover, both attended San Francisco State University and are co-founders of

the Black Arts Movement.

photo Ken Johnson

Back in the Crack house days, the worse motherfucka was the crack head who served crumbs or kibbles and bits.Thus the term "serve me somethin' proper" and "show me some love" came in vogue. No one wanted to encounter a dealer on the street or in the crack house who didn't serve somethin' proper or serve with love. But if truth be told, discerning crack heads concluded the sisters served somethin' proper or with love. So on the street, brothers, including myself, sought out the sisters because they gave up love. We not only sought out the sisters, especially the big, yes, fat sisters with the package, who served a brother with love. Now, for sure, the brothers were well known for their sexual discrimination with their "bitch packages" for females with sexual possibilities the men didn't possess unless they were gay. The "bitch package" was known to be at least double the size of the "male" package. The "bitch package" was so well known, I told a friend who went to cope for me to tell the dope dealer to give him the "bitch package" because he had bitches in the car. 

But, on the most serious level, I had to literally train my dope dealers who served me. After Eldridge Cleaver demanded I only accept first class service when I worked for him dealing with white folks, I demanded first class service from black people, including dope dealers who often serve blacks pure garbage or dope cut so many times it is nothing but cut. After demanding dope dealers come to me with something proper, they realized I was serious so they told me the dope they were selling me they didn't sell to blacks, only whites, but since I demanded the best, they sold me the best and reserved the garbage for negroes with no problem accepting second class citizenship.

PROMO: THE WILD CRAZY RIDE OF THE MARVIN X EXPERIENCE, A VIDEO DOCUMENTARY OF THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

 COMING SOON

THE WILD CRAZY RIDE OF THE MARVIN X EXPERIENCE

A VIDEO DOCUMENTARY

OF THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

produced and directed

by

MARVIN X

The Wild Crazy Ride of the Marvin X Experience

Executive Producer Marvin X

Executive Editor Ken Johnson

A Black Bird Production

Copyright (c) 2021 by Marvin X/El Muhajir

Comments 

"Marvin reaches in and pulls from a life lived hard, deep, wide, high and low, i.e., a sacrifice in blood! At the root of sacrifice is sacred, which is of God and for God. He has lived and examined lives of the proverbial ten thousand black men and women. He gives us the truth of that experience, lived and examined."

--Fahizah Alim, Editor Emeritus, Sacramento Bee

"He is a deep sea diver who rarely comes up for air. And when he does, it is only for a moment!"

--Aishah Kokomon

"Courageous and outrageous, he walked through the muck and mire of hell but came out clean as white fish and black as coal!"

--James W. Sweeney RIP

"In terms of being modernist and innovative, he's centuries ahead of anybody I know!"

--Dennis Leroy Moore, filmmaker, Brecht Forum, New York City

Dear Friends,

Please consider a generous donation for this project. Donate to my GoFundMe campaign:

gf.me/u/zdpc8c

Any amount will be appreciated, $5.00 to $5,000. Our goal is $50,000.00.

Sincerely,

Marvin X, Executive Producer

Ken Johnson, Executive Editor

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Please call

510-575-7148

jmarvinx@yahoo.com

Parable of Violence in the World

 

Parable of Violence

Marvin X, Sunset at the Pacific Ocean

photo Adam Turner

I was born into a world of violence. A few days after my birth, America dropped the atom bomb on Japan. Then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Did you hear any member of the Democratic or Republican parties oppose the annual $700 billion dollar US defense budget? How ironic that the US spends a trillion dollars per year to defend its national security, yet cannot secure her borders, alas, cannot defend the US capitol! Baldwin told us, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe." But we don't get it. In our supreme arrogance and ignorance, we think we can conduct eternal warfare across the planet yet things will be peaches and cream at home. Come out of denial that we are predators who love, i.e., worship, violence. We are psychopaths, men and women, who adore death more than life. Death is the critical ritual in the hood. The Washington Post interviewed black children on their future. As per their future, the black children said their concern was what type of funeral they would have. In another interview, the WP said black women did not think they would ever be married. Black women with BAs, MAs, MBAs and PhDs are marrying brothers in prison doing 25 to life. Violence and other mostly petty crimes is taking its toll on life in the hood, but violence is the critical theme, often the perpetrators are the dual diagnosed, i.e., those suffering mental illness and drug abuse, 80%. Mental illness and drug abuse are in the deep structure violence. Alas, often homicide is often suicide, i.e., the person suffered homicide because he is too cowardly to commit suicide. My son was so brave he walked into a train. But though I suffer as any parent who’s lost a child, after working with mothers who’d lost sons in drive-by shootings, I was overwhelmed emotionally and dropped out of such meetings. My son's mental illness made him encounter a train, though clinical psychologist/sociologist Dr. Nathan Hare says, "Homicide and suicide are two sides of the same coin!" 

Noting my son was 39 at his demise, Dr. Hare said Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the same age but took a different route to solving their problem than my son in this age. "Of all the many disorders and distortions that plague the black male each and every day, perhaps the ones that take the heaviest toll on his ravished brain are those that, if not contained by armed resistance, revolve around the painful difficulty of gaining control over his individual and collective destiny, around what is known in mental health circles as 'the locus of control', i.e., the dilemma of resistance to the enemy from without and the enemy from within (including the self, if we consider that there can be no master without those who, for whatever reason, are willing to be the slave.” (See Somethin' Proper, Autobiography of Marvin X, introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland, CA., 1998).

 

 

What did H. Rap Brown (Imam Jamil Alamin) say, "Violence is as American as cherry pie."And surely we know Murphy's law: things go from bad to worse. 

 

In their full blown addiction to white supremacy, America is adamant and persistent in the belief that what goes around doesn't come around. We share no guilt of our ancestors. Did you share the wealth from the accumulated capital of your ancestors? Oh, you share the good but not the bad. Did all Germans participate in the genocide of Jews? No, did the German nation pay reparations to the Jews? Yes. Did all Americans participate in the genocide of Native Americans and Africans? Did Americans enjoy the accumulated capital from slavery? Why will it take 240 years for North Americans to acquire the wealth white Americans have today? Must we wait 240 years to achieve equity with you who have benefited from the economics of white supremacy? When we tried to accumulate capital independently of you, e.g., Black Wall Street, you burned our community to the ground and we were massacred in numbers yet untold. And in your dastardly attempt to hide your genocidal behavior, grounded in jealously and envy, you deleted your deeds from your history, denying generations the truth of America's white supremacist history. And even today you persist in your pathologic behavior of denial by attempting to deny the truth of American history. You made us primitive savages and claimed civility for yourselves, yet your behavior in the USA and throughout the Americas is a most critical exposure of your wickedness and debauchery that you seek to hide from your children. What about my children and grandchildren, alas, what about myself who had to sit in civics class to learn I was a cotton picker. I didn't know I was a cotton picker in the Central Valley, as were my great grandparents, grandparents, mother, uncles, myself and siblings. Alas, in 2021, in the state of Washington, you forced black children to participate in a contest to see how fast they could pick cotton. Did you ask the white students to see how fast they could pick cotton? Have you heard the white man's joke: "If I'd known how much trouble these niggas was gonna cause me, I'da picked the cotton myself!" FYI, on a trip back from the Central Valley, my wife and I pulled up to a field of cotton so our daughter could touch and feel a cotton plant. Thank you, we don't need your lesson on how fast we can pick cotton. Take your white ass to the cotton field and pick 100 pounds, then tell me why you deny and object to Critical Race Theory. Tell me why your children shouldn't know they are little devils and shall be beneficiaries of the white supremacist world you are determined to deliver to them for the perpetuation of your species or whatever it is you are seeking in your madness beyond money, love, sex, and whatever floats your boat that only devils can comprehend. Your children are today mass killers because of your mass murders across the planet and soon you shall attempt to do the same in outer space. Lie to your children and promise them you shall be kind and gentle when you stake claim to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Venus. Tell them you won't pollute the heavens as you have done earth with an island of plastic three times the size of Texas. Tell them your Green revolution will not cause the destruction of lithium mines in Bolivia, the cutting of hands beyond the butchery of King Leopold's Congo. Oh, violence, sweet violence!

 

In the grand denial of our blood thirsty capitalist greed, we cherish eternal war while imagining there should be peace at home. Our children should not be slaughtered at school, workers should be able to go to work and return home to their loved ones in peace. Our politicians should be able to tell their lies for lobbyists in peace. Why can't we party at night clubs without suffering death and injury when the club lets out? 

 

True, guns don't shoot people, people shoot people. Shall we add that crazy people shoot people? Further, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) said mental disease is epidemic in America. So insanity in its various stages, e.g., mild, moderate and severe, is normal rather than abnormal as one would suspect in a normal world, though you who claim a modicum of sanity and  a nano-degree of normality must confess this is not the world we used to know. Sun Ra told me, "Marvin this is not the world I used to know. These people are not the people I used to know back in Birmingham, Alabama!"

 

For sure, neither  is this the world my granny told me about in the Fresno projects as the train whistled in the night and mosquitoes tried to bite me. When they did, Granny made me get leaves off the Eucalyptus tree and rubbed me down. No hands more sacred than Granny's. She wasn't religious but told me not to shoot birds on Sunday with my BB gun. It was bad luck. Told my brother Ollie if he didn't stop being so hard-headed he was going to end up in the pen (penitentiary). He spent most of his life from CYA (California Youth Authority) to the California Department of Corrections and beyond. He was violent, so was I but not as violent as he. 

 

My brother and I were in Juvenile Hall for street fighting, stealing, GTA (grand theft auto). Both of us headed to CYA (California Youth Authority). My grades saved me (honor society nigga in Juvenile Hall. Years later I visited Oakland's Alameda County Juvenile Hall to do a reading. FYI, it costs $250,000 per inmate per year to be in Juvenile Hall. I met an eleven year old A student in the hall; there because he was bored with school and played hooky. Imagine, in Oakland 7,000 students played hooky from summer school.) Is it possible students were smarter than their teachers and didn't want to be bothered with white supremacist education?

 

The judge let me go because he said, "It would cost us as much to send you to college as CYA, so we want you to see you in college." He sent my brother to CYA and released me. When my mother and I were outside Juvenile Hall, I asked her why she wasn't crying? Mama said, "Son, I might not be crying on the outside but I'm crying on the inside!"

 

 

Nothing normal in the world these days. America is not the only purveyor of violence in the world, she has allies and sycophants who can be equally or more violent. In 1948, when the British departed the new-found state of Israel, America became the chief backer of the Zionists. Alas, it was a black American, Dr. Ralph Bunch as UN Undersecretary, who put the final nails in the House of Israel. Since 1948, America has supported and supplied Israel with funds, guns, and their undeclared nuclear arsenal. Thus America is equally guilty as the zionists in their displacement of Palestinians. With American support, Israel manifested its long held dream of a Jewish "only" homeland, not a purported democracy as eternally reported in the global fake news propaganda machine. It is an apartheid state that is as fanciful as the now defunct dream of an Apartheid South Africa. Furthermore, remember it took one hundred years before  Christian Crusaders were forced out of Jerusalem and the Holy Land by Saladin the Kurd.

Richard the Lionhearted was forced to make peace with Saladin and depart back to Europe. Similarly time is running out for Zionists aided by American and European tricknology of endless peace negotiations for the two-state solution ending with more land grabbing and displacement of Palestinians. Pervasive settler  occupation has made the two-state solution an anomaly. Yet the recent Gaza war has united Palestinians as never before: Gazans, Arabs in Israel 48, Jerusalem and the West Bank, plus millions in the diaspora, i.e., refugees from 1948 and since, have suddenly united and a people united cannot be defeated. Al Qur'an says persecution is worse than slaughter, i.e. liberty or death! Imam Jamil Alamin said, "No slave should die a natural death!"

 

We know when leaders don't deliver they can and will be removed by the masses. Our dearly beloved Ancestor, Dr. Julia Hare, used to say, "There are black leaders and leading blacks. The people choose leaders."  The oppressors choose leading blacks and other sycophants around the world, boot lickers and puppets the people ultimately reject. There is no doubt Hamas has inspired the oppressed Palestinians, those in occupied territory and beyond. And to the chagrin of the Zionist and their sycophant Americans and uncle Abdullah Arab collaborators, a new paradigm has appeared, a paradigm of unity among the masses of the oppressed, who clearly sense unity is their only weapon to victory.

 

Pay no attention to the Jerusalem Post's report of a possible Egyptian takeover of Gaza. If Palestinian unity can solidify, Zionist apartheid shall be ephemeral, not eternal as per the Zionist dream. Alas, after all the Jewish suffering before, during and after the Nazi holocaust, the Zionist dream of a purely Jewish state is pure poppycock, steeped in religiosity but devoid of justice, the critical factor in this Middle East quagmire that may indeed usher in the final battle of Armageddon! My prophecy is that there shall not be a Jewish state in occupied Palestine that does not give freedom, justice and equality to Palestinians.  I do not believe the Jews suffered only to make others suffer as they did. No, not in the Holy Land. How can the Mighty God allow injustice to reign in His name? How can a people who endured great suffering inflict the same upon others and pretend ancient myths and rituals preclude them from understanding the God of Justice?

 

When I arrived in New York, 1968, poet Askia Toure' and I had dinner with Sudanese diplomats since I was trying to get travel documents to the Sudan after being awarded a scholarship to the University of Umderman from the Muslim Students Association of the USA and Canada. As we consumed dinner with our hands in Muslim custom, we discussed Palestine with our Sudanese brothers. One brother said, "Nobody wants more than justice and nobody wants less!" 

 

Dear reader, please tell me when or how often or have you ever heard the term "justice" in the discussion of Palestine? For that matter, when or how often or have you ever heard the term "justice" in reference to the liberation of North American Africans? In the recent Gaza war, you heard of the need for the right to self defense for Israel. If you live in an open air concentration camp of two million hapless people, do they too have the right of self defense? After centuries of free labor, there is no need to discuss reparations for the descendants of African survivors of the American slave system. Again, white Americans have benefited from accumulated capital that will take North American Africans 240 years to equal the wealth whites  possess today. Yet white America persists in her full blown denial that North American African must have economic justice. With reparations we may decide to stay or go wherever the Creator guides us, perhaps through the door of no return from which we came. Former President Donald Trump recently demanded China pay reparations in the amount of ten trillion dollars for the Covid19 virus that infected America, not to mention the amount due to other nations. America has suffered 500,000 deaths. As per the 100 million Africans victims of the Triangular Trade or Maafa, what should be the bill due? You do the math.

 

The world did not stand for Jewish concentration camps, nor will it stand for the Gaza concentration camp and the ethnic cleansing of Israel 48, Jerusalem and the West Bank. If the billion plus Muslims had unity, it would be a simple matter of boycotts, similar to the anti-apartheid movement that dismantled white supremacy in South Africa. But it is becoming clear to the Palestinian masses that their unity shall be the critical factor of their national liberation. Their leaders are effete, corrupt and must be dismissed, along with the uncle Abdullah (Uncle Tom) Arab leaders whose autocratic regimes equal Zionism in repression and religiosity of the most reactionary and archaic kind. The Muslim reactionary regimes have not only sold out the Palestinians but the Uyghur Muslims held in Chinese concentration camps. Egypt and Persian Gulf regimes have deported Uyghurs back to China, no doubt to be "reeducated" into Chinese Communist ideology. The reason, of course, is Arab and Chinese economics. Donald Trump's Abraham deal with the Gulf states is another case of economics at the expense of Palestinian national liberation.

 

Violence continues throughout the global village, Yemen, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, Congo, Central African Republic, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Yes, follow the money trail, although often much violence in the world transcends money, alas, the main perpetrators of violence are members of the 1% club of billionaires already in possession of global finance. As we know, most often, those committing acts of violence get high and cannot stop until disarmed and perhaps confined to be "reeducated" in the Chinese manner, God forbid! For sure, those in violent societies will need to enter a long term recovery program for the very reason James Baldwin said, "The murder of my child will not make your child safe."

 

Although we abhor violence, we believe in armed self defense. If the 200,00 African warriors who fought in the Civil War had refused to disarm, I suspect we would be free today in a nation state of our own, either on a territory carved out of the United States or elsewhere. Under no circumstances should North American Africans disarm today since we see the white supremacists are well armed, and if America descends into a dictatorial regime, we will need arms to defend ourselves. Between police violence and internecine violence, the brother and sister with an iota of common sense do not go around unarmed today. Hamas and Hezbollah shall never disarm in surrender to the Zionists, nor should we disarm as we did in the Civil War that has us in the present quagmire and conundrum. For sure, North American Africans cannot put our national security in the hands of white people of Left or Right persuasion. 

--Marvin X

6/8/21

 

Parable of Free the Land

 Free the Land!

How can one divide that which has never been United? Just as slavery was forced upon us, the 14th Amendment forced US citizenship upon us, fake citizenship, otherwise the voting rights act would not need to exist, let alone renewed. Exactly when is this shotgun wedding to be consumated? When did we consent to be governed by the USA? When was a plebiscite or vote of the Black people taken? After the Civil War, the 200,000 African soldiers were disarmed and we have languished in virtual slavery ever since down to the present moment. Today if we had 200,000 armed North American Africans to defend our community, we would not be killing each other and nor would police be killing us.

Until we exercise sovereignty as North American Africans, we shall remain in virtual slavery, even under black face white men and women, neo-colonial African puppets, gatekeepers for white supremacy.

--MARVIN X

6/8/21

Marvin X Last Rites for Lil' Joe, Revolutionary Intellectual/Activist

  Marvin X

Last Rites for Lil' Joe

Revolutionary Intellectual Activist

Last Rites for Lil' Joe

Revolutionary intellectual/activist

For

Lil' Joe Johnson

In-naa lil-laa-hi wa in-naa i-layhi raa-ji-'oon

Surely we are Allah's and to Him we shall return.

Oh, Lil' Joe

I see you tonight

oh, it is early morn

but I see you

spitting your wisdom to all who seek

thank you for coming my way

Central Valley

cotton raisin land

lending your hands

to us deaf dumb blind

you and your blessed crew

conscious soldiers

bsu revolutionaries

I appreciate you L.A. peoples

strong dedicated troopers

My valley people will one day understand

your lending hand

they did what they could

my very best student

photographic mind

went to prison

burned down computer center

my

A Student

recited pages word for word

what a time then

what a time now

Lil' Joe

those who don't know

who never heard of you

your comrades in L.A.

who gave me that tour

Of UCLA

where Bunchy and John died

BSU room

BLOOD ON THE WALL

BLOOD OF WARRIORS

BUNCHY AND JOHN

LONG LIVE THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY WARRIORS

LONG LIVE BLACK STUDENT UNION WARRIORS

COMMUNITY BLACK STUDIES

FK TENURED NIGGA BLACK STUDIES

NEO-COLONIAL BLACK STUDIES

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

POWER TO THE REVOLUTIONARY BLACK STUDENT UNIONS

BLACK POWER MATTERS

IN THE NAME OF LIL' JOE

BLACK POWER MATTERS

NO POWER NO LIFE

PART II

I suspect Lil' Joe would expect a poem from me in his honor

on his joining ancestor world of eternity

he loved my revolutionary poetry

told me to publish a collection of revolutionary poems

I shall do so in his honor memory

Lil' Joe loved some of my not so revolutionary poetry

love poems

he found a way of radical analysis

no matter what I wrote

put me in historical and ideological perspective

when I had no idea what I was writing

Lil' Joe knew

like my mother knew everything about me

when I didn't know shit

Mama said I needed a maid secretary mistress

not a wife

said she wouldn't have me for a husband

she knew I dwelled on another plane beyond husband wife

In My Solitude Duke said

Like Mama, Lil's Joe's perception of me was acid tight

no one surpassed his revolutionary scholarship on any subject

footnotes plethora of references

who studied more than Lil' Joe?

he emailed me voluminousness replies to my writings

I shall treasure returning to his notes for edification

education

there was pure joy in his scholarship

like the joy in my writing

sometimes I write to "keep my chops up"

We think Lil' Joe wrote to wake up the dead

He didn't matter about overkill

No matter what Mao said,

"Cure the sickness to save the patient.

Don't doctor the patient to death."

Lil' Joe wrote on on on

As if I don't do the same

We both guilty of overkill

It is crystal clear to me the people can only take so much

their brain cells explode

even a black bourgeoisie school superintendent told me,

"I'm only using 25% of my brain."

You know that old joke about the white brain, Mexican and Black Brain.

A buyer wanted to know why the black brain was the most expensive?

The seller said, "Because it is the most unused!"

Yet, didn't Chairman Mao said, "When the black board is blank and unused, the most

beautiful inscriptions can be written upon it!"

Still, the people will let you know when your revolutionary knowledge is overwhelming their fragile minds. Many people tell me they can only take 30 to 60 minutes of conversation with me. I only know it is my duty to teach. You with Supreme Wisdom know the duty of the civilized man is to teach the uncivilized. If he fails to perform his duty he shall suffer a severe chastisement from Allah. I bear witness when I diverted from Sirata Al Mustaqim, i.e., the Straight Path, I did indeed suffer a severe chastisement by Allah, yes, administered by the people, e.g., I was bum rushed, robbed at gun and knife point, teeth knocked out by youngsters, suffered all manner of diseases for being in a toxic environment; suffered homelessness, slept in alleys, doorways, cardboard boxes, cars, subways, until I was ready to do as Shirley Caesar says in her song, "Come to the front of the line. You've been in the back of the line too long, it's time to come to the front...." Imagine, one day I departed from San Francisco's 6th Street to arrive in New York City, picked up by chauffeur and dropped off at my hotel around the corner from Wall Street! Did God take me to the front of the line? Well, we know God helps those who help themselves. As I say, the tide turns because you are turning the tide! And God is good to you, but are you good to God. He was standing there all the time waiting for you to take one step so he could take ten for you. But how could He put your blessing in your hand while your fist was balled up?

Part III

Por favor, let me make it clear that Lil' Joe was a Communist, thus he did not believe in God. We never debated this point of difference as I did not with most of my Communist or Marxist comrades, e.g., from the time I arrived at Oakland's Merritt College, 1962, e.g., Ernie Allen, Kenny Freeman, John Thomas, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Carol Freeman, et. al. And later Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Amiri and Amina Baraka. I experienced many of my friends switch from spirituality to Communism and back and beyond, some felt the need to experience all the isms and schisms, some reached a synthesis or perhaps a symbiosis in their ideological and spiritual quest.

We all change, after all, life is change and for sure experience changes everyone. Eldridge and Amiri were in constant change, especially from midlife to their endgame. Much change is due to experience, though some people change just to experience new things, new thought, myth-rituals. And some of us are simply lost and turned out on the way to Granny's house as the Whispers told us in their song Olivia.

As per Marxism and spirituality, I know my very dear friends, the Barakas, accepted prayers when their baby son Ahi was carjacked and shot in the head with a 357 Magnum. And let me ask my dearly beloved atheist friends and long time revolutionary comrades, to whom do you call when that plane hits turbulence at 30,000 feet? Do you call Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro? Hey, I believe in Allah but if that motherfuka' keep shakin', I might call on Jesus. LOL

PART IV

I don't know Miller Lite

Did Lil' Joe?

What did Miles tell Coltrane about his long solos

"Just take the horn out yo mouth!"

You know Lil' Joe loved jazz, aka Black Classical music

his scholarship blessed with jazz references

Cornel West may out do him with his jazz/blues leit motif

Yet, like Cornel, Lil' Joe was about finding one's revolutionary voice in our communal music and psyche, somewhere down in the deep structure of our North American African mind, body, space, time abyss, precipice, chasm, quagmire, conundrum as we forever seek our trek up the eternally eluding sisyphusian mountain with rock in hand.

PART V

Lil' Joe came in my life among black students from Los Angeles

UCLA, LA State, Compton College, Southwest College, LA City College, 1969

Los Angeles black student unionists conscious marxists black nationalists

my struggle in the media day after day

too much stress for baby boy everyday on nightly news too much

"Marvin X you still out there messing with them white folks?

You ain't dead yet?'

FSU not intense like black student strike at San Francisco State University

longest and most violent student strike in American academic history

well, no deaths like Kent State or Orangeburg massacre, South Carolina

You only know Kent State

never heard of Orangeburg

Yet bloody all SFSU visionaries morphed from Negro Students Association to Black Students Union

some wanted to stay negroes, even me

we wanted equity as per Associated Student funds

black students got none yet paid student fees

why no equity

wanted black ethnic studies

plenty white studies

drove us mentally ill with white studies

even told Nathan Hare he wasn't qualified for Creative Writing

greatest writer ever lived

Lil' Joe loved Dr. Nathan Hare

Two PhDs, Sociology/Clinical psychology

father of black studies at sfsu

too qualified too black

too black for Howard U yes

kicked out

should have followed Dr. E. Franklin Frazier

Black Bourgeoisie

Nathan said we Black Ango-Saxons

too black for black howard

Sfsu invited Nathan to be first black studies chair

major american university

too black

please go

sonia sanchez came

leroi jones/amiri baraka came

askia toure came

Marvin X first play produced by SFSU drama department

tone it down please

tone it down down down

Marvin X dropped out

founded black arts west theatre in fillmore

marvin x, ed bullins, ethna wyatt, hillary broadous, duncan barber, danny glover

jimmy garrett's We Own the Night

X's Flowers for the Trashman

Ed Bullins It Has No Choice

The Job and First Militant Preacher Ben Caldwell

First Militant Preacher turned out George Murray

departed daddy's Church of God in Christ

became strike leader, English lecturer

Minister of Education, Black Panther Party

Job turned out Benny Stewart

became Strike leader

power of drama what?

Eldridge Cleaver Marvin X founded Black House on Broderick St.

Black arts culture political center

Came Emory Douglas soon Black Panther Party Minister of Culture

Came Samuel Napier Black Panther Party Newspaper Minister of Districution

MX took Eldridge to meet Bobby Seale

Eldridge BPP Minister of Information

PART VI

Lil' Joe and Los Angeles students

drove up grapevine to FSU

supported my struggle to teach Black Studies

I came from Harlem, invited by Black Studies

same time Gov. Ronald Reagan kicked Angela Davis out of UCLA

black Communist

Gov. Reagan said go

White communists stay Marcuse et al.

Gov. Reagan say Black Muslim Marvin X go too

Nigga refused to fight in Vietnam for white supremacy

go nigga go

Nation of Islam separation go

didn't allow whites in classes go

Message to the Black Man textbook go

Muhammad Speaks Newspaper journalism class go

Mormons taught at FSU

believed in separation too

Mormons stay

Gov. Reagan say, "Get him off campus by any means necessary!"

FSU President Ness resigned, "pressured from above and below"!

Lil' Joe, Los Angeles bsu students rallied to my side at FSU

Drove all the way to my draft trial in San Francisco.

Yes, I refused to be a running dog for US imperialism in Vietnam.

Agreed with Muhammad Ali, "No Viet Cong called me a nigga!"

Lil' Joe and L.A. students issued press release:

"We, the United Black Students of California,

demand Marvin X not go to Vietnam or prison

We demand Marvin X teach black studies at Fresno State College/University!"

I love all you Los Angeles Black Student Union members

Especially those who came to Mexico looking for me when I

went into my second exile as Vietnam war resister

When you students came to Mexico

I had departed to Belize

against advice of my Mexico City contact

Elizabeth Catlett Mora, Grand Diva of Black revolutionary art

Betty Mora begged me not to go to Belize, aka, British Honduras, still a British colony.

Betty was right (ain't women always right? LOL)

Soon deported back to USA for teaching Black Power

One night on island hut I rented for $7.00 US monthly, drunk man came by the shack my pregnant wife Barbara Hall ( a student I kidnapped from FSU, LOL) singing,

"Day comin ta git ya in da mornin'

Yeah, day comin in da mornin'

Ya been down here teachin' dat black power

day comin' in da mornin'"

Barbara and I laughed and wished that drunk nigga get away from our door.

But in the morning I had to get on the boat to the city as our food was running out

I didn't know when I got on the boat I was under arrest de facto

A man was on board holding a rifle

undercover police no doubt

he said nothing during the five hour ride through the jungle to the city.

I got off the boat and went to my black power brother's house.

They were on trial for sedition

Sedition is saying or doing anything the government wants to charge you with saying or doing, anything.

The said the government's harassment of their black power movement was "games old people play." Simple stupid shit like claiming the January 6 riot in the US capitol was an insurrection.

In Mexico City I was blessed to meet young brothers from throughout the Americas who has really attempted insurrections and revolutions against their banana republics. I cannot forget the day we were sitting on an island in the middle of the street, brothers from Venezuela, Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, all of us refugees. I shall speak for them and say, "Thank you, Mexico, for giving us refuge from US imperialism and her banana republics where a few families own all the land, along with US corporations, e.g.., United Fruit, and, of course, the Catholic Church.

FYI, it was Lil' Joe who deconstructed the reason priests and nuns do not marry in the Catholic Church: so property would remain in the church and not be subjected to probate, thus sexual abuse of boys and girls was preferable to loss of church property in inheritance disputes if priests and nuns were married. Didn't Martin Luther (not King, Jr.) have a problem with this? Thank you Joe for your constant elucidation and ideological clarification when my poetic mind slipped into the darkness of poetic passion and emotionalism.

You had to pull my coat when I went stupid on the election of President Obama. You told me not to be moved but I was drunk on the passion of the moment. As you warned, Obama proved he was simply an imperialist in black face, as if Africa, Asia and Latin America doesn't have a plethora of such characters, no matter how many begin as revolutionaries but soon submit to neo-colonialism, best described by Kwame Nkrumah as "colonialism playing possum"!

Lil' Joe, I loved your critiques of my non-fiction or shall we call it creative non-fiction, since most of it is based on reality. I truly loved your deconstruction of my parable The Maid, the Ho, the Cook: "The Maid, The Ho', The Cook was one of the most beautiful pieces about real love that I've ever read. The image of 'crack-heads' as scandalous and without human dignity is destroyed by Marvin's recollection of this sister with whom he fell in love."

Thank you, Lil' Joe, for ideological clarity and revolutionary esthetics, and most especially your contribution to the revolutionary Black Student Unions throughout these United Snakes of America.

--Marvin X

6/6/21