Fire-Casting an Eternal De-Fascination with Death: Writing about the South, and the Responsible Necessity of Reading and Knowing Black South Writing in the Quest for Afrikan World Salvation and Restitution

Abstract

The Disdain of Duality This discussion cannot be advanced without an initial and immediate declaration of both affirmation and disdain. My sole reason for contributing to this journal at this time is because my Brother, Jerry W. Ward, Jr., asked me to write a manifesto on a subject of underrated but, nonetheless, profound importance. I believe Jerry Ward to be a person of integrity and intellectual rigor who is committed to the Pan Afrikan World and its people and their Collective Culture. In truth, were it not for that set of factors, I would not be contributing to a journal named Black- or anything. Like my Brother and fellow writer Ayi Kwei Armah, I am not interested in Tanzanian this, Ghanaian that, Jamaican this, Guyanan that, Nigerian this, African American that, ad infinitum. Today, as has been true for the better part of my life, I am concerned with the Afrikan experience and condition and exigency, wherever our Mother's children are in the world, and the unification and restitution of those children in what my friend has called The Way, Our Way. More than twenty years ago I wrote, americanize the Blackman is to dualize, invade, and render dependent upon the metropole and, as such, to strip him to impotence and nil-will .... That statement was articulated in response to my known reality that most Black people in America, in general and in the South, more specifically, never used American as a name for themselves. Instinctually and experientially, they had sense enough to know that name had nothing to do with them. (Furthermore, some elements of the Collective Sub-Conscious Memory were no doubt at work: Some old Black institutions still retain African as part of their original names, because it was only at the turn of this century that Afrikans began to accept an entrenching misnaming of themselves. To be sure, as great as the two mulatto leaders Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois had occasion to be, that very racial split-personality they both manifested caused them not only to mislead the Race from time to time but also to misname it: colored [Douglass] and negro [Du Bois]. In point of fact, Du Bois's double-consciousness had little to do with non-bourgeois, roots-living and poor Black people who knew who they were - even after they'd forgotten our name - and whose continued existence depended on their never unclear about that.) For certain, and even today, only the most foolish Afrikan in U.S. society believes that this society is his or acts in her best interest. They may not realize, or allow themselves to admit, that the U.S. exists on the backs of their near destruction, is maintained on the backs of their creeping destruction, and exists with their total destruction in mind, but they damn sure know they are in constant jeopardy in this society. They know also that they represent a separate and distinct culture which is the result of specifically distinct history and cosmology. And they know that that culture, like themselves, is constantly exploited, is constantly under attack, is constantly in serious trouble. As such, only legally - or maybe clinically - dead negroes needed the Kerner Commission to tell them that Black people in the U.S. represent a society unto themselves. We knew that - and that that society was/is an oppressed society second to none. Hence, the second reason my statement of more than twenty years ago was articulated was in response to Paulo Freire's clear sighting: If we consider society as a being, it is obvious that only a society which is a being for itself can develop. Societies which are dual, reflex, invaded and dependent on the metropolitan society cannot develop because they are alienated; their political, economic, and cultural decision-making power is located outside themselves, in the invader society. In the last analysis, the latter determines the destiny of the former: mere transformations; for it is their transformation - not their development - that is to the interest of the metropolitan society. …