The Language of Immortality

   Today the dawn brought with it dark news. Chinua Achebe was dead.
    When I was young, I prided myself on reading books adjudged to be too mature for my reading. I read Doris Lessing's Nine African Stories just as often as I read Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun. The people I hung around with, as well as older family members of similar mind, suggested I read the work of Chinua Achebe. I neglected to do so. Again, in secondary school. In 1999, while watching BET, I saw the Roots had released an album called Things Fall Apart. Again, I neglected to read. Finally, in university, I had no choice. We had to read it for class. I took it home and felt regret soaking through my brain. This work was excellent. So too his other books, Arrow of God etc. Today, he is dead. Yet, I would argue, he is not lost to us.
    He remains with us because of the questions he posed with his work. The eternal conflicts of old traditions and principles meeting with the new. The positive and negative effects exposed at such meetings, and a person's willingness to adapt or hold firm formed the basis of a lot of his work. We dare ask questions now about communication between races, between religions, between ethnicities. This man did it at a most unfriendly time.Africa in the 1960's was not the safest time for an intelligent Black man to be writing thought provoking literature that hit so close to home. In doing so, he became a banner under which intellectuals and the average man could both draw inspiration and knowledge from.
    Today, you will hear the names of countless prominent Black artisans and academics. You will hear them all praise the name of Chinua. The man who mentally shuddered in disdain at references to Africa as the "Dark Continent" and went to intellectual war with any and all who would refer to his people as savages. When no one else would, he went to very public war with the images presented in Joseph Conrad's Heart of  Darkness book. A direct (If lengthy) quote:


Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language." And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.
   
     Today, you will hear many people laud this man. You will probably read about Maya Angelou praising him. Nelson Mandela once said that when he was imprisoned, he read Achebe and "...the prison walls seemed to fall away." You may not hear about the opposition he met when he published his books in English and was at first reviled by his peers for using the "language of the oppressors". Though he recognized the argument, an issue for non English literary figures worldwide, he persevered, and the widespread appeal of his work bore out his decision.

   The man was filled with golden quotes. Asked about the fact that he never won a Nobel prize among his many accolades, he responded "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize, not an African prize..." The one that stays with me the most is this. "The man that would hold his brother down in the mud, in order to achieve this, has to stay in the mud himself."

   Today, Chinua Achebe is dead. His work, his tireless spirit, his philosopher's attitude to life and its inner workings....these things may never die. So long as his teachings, his trailblazing for literary figures in Nigeria and worldwide live on, his legacy cannot fall apart.

The Art of Terror

First, let me say that I am terrible with horror movies. Really bad. My mother would routinely laugh every time I left the room and went to bed rather than watch X Files with her and my cousin. The one time I let my friends take me to the movies for my birthday, they chose The Grudge. That was the last time my friends took me to the movies for my birthday. I watched "It" through a crack between couches. Yet I have read probably 90% of Stephen King's books. Yes, that Stephen King. "From A Buick 8" peeks at me from the shelf as I speak. So why am I a fan of these and not the movies?
   The stuff I am drawn to is not shock. After all these years, stuff jumping out in your face is still effective. Annoying, and effective to the point of feeling cheap, but effective. If I know that throwing something in your face is the easiest way to get you to jerk, why would I do anything but that? It has led to some of the most successful Halloween movies being simply a guy creeping in a dark hallway, a shape moving quickly, a deadly attack and a scream. That's fine, and if you make those movies, keep raking in that money. What I am drawn to is suspense. We must refer to one A. Hitchcock on this subject. He believed in the art of keeping one drawn into the scene emotionally with his stories rather than just scared. It was more of an emotional spectrum. This interview is one of the best ways to explain how his creative process worked, where he explains how he would set up a scene. In another interview, he explains that, to him, the actual facts of the movie are meaningless. What is important, he says, is how the story is told.
   Which brings us to Stephen King. What he manages to do with his books is, bluntly, genius. He melds the otherworldly with the mundane at such a level that it becomes less scary and more fascinating. Concepts that would otherwise die pretty quickly in anyone else's hands become magic. I think part of it is because he works in so much day to day life that one cares about the individual in general, and not just how grisly of a kill they will make. It is a fine line to walk without losing the edge of the story or becoming cheesy, yet he pulls it off time and again. Put a person you meet for five minutes in danger, yes, your instinct would be to be concerned. Put someone you have known for a year in the same danger and it becomes way more crucial.
   Even in games, some companies are able to generate this emotional response. Mass Effect 2, for example, universally regarded as one of the best games of our time, if not all time, earns such platitudes by taking a page from Hitchcock. In the face of death on the horizon, day to day activities take on new meaning and are soaked in suspense. ME2 works this by telling you at the start that at the end of the game, you will be going on a suicide mission that no one expects you to come back from. You have to build a team of agents that will work with you, and sorting out their personal troubles before the end feels very ominous, like the prisoner on death row clearing his conscience before death. By the end, when people start falling, it becomes much more significant that these people are dying.
   However, death is not the only tool of the artist who wishes to create suspense. The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite TV shows, and while they tend away from Hitchcock style techniques, their ability to create tension without death is a testament to their skill. Probably the most well known episode is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Young William Shatner sits at the window seat of his plane and watches as a gremlin tears at the wing, yet disappears whenever he tries to point it out to anyone else. If the gremlin were on the loose in the plane biting people, I would have lost interest rapidly, as would most people. However, it is done far better than that and by the end you are wondering if it was a nightmare or reality. I won't spoil the end itself for you but it is a fine piece of fiction.
      So, going to watch a movie? Pause for a while and check out some Twilight Zone, or some old Hitchcock movies. More than one way to get the blood pumping.

Interracial Marriage

By my self imposed deadline of Friday, this post is late. I am going to get into why that is.

About a week ago today, I got onto Facebook and was poking around when I saw a post from a guy I know. The headline picture was a split image; first of two black people in traditional Egyptian garb holding hands, then of a pregnant white lady with her black husband behind her and a superimposed image of the word "Why??" Decided to read. The content was a response to a letter published by a (newspaper? magazine? never got to verify) about how a strong and respectable black man could never choose to be with a white female as opposed to a black woman. Said person commented on the link "And the church said Amen!"

   Those of you who know me know that I am currently married to a white woman as of 2007. Instantly I got upset, and I was going to get very annoyed, put people on blast and generally fly off the handle. Not generally my style, but things that hit close to home are usually emotional triggers. I waited til this long because I wanted to calm down and approach this situation rationally. First I had to understand why I was upset. Reason being that condemnation of interracial union in 2013 struck me as petty to the point of being ridiculous, especially by black people. So many centuries of struggling to be free of condemnation only to inflict it on each other. Seems highly illogical. Then after consultation with like minded individuals, I dug deeper, and found a lot of interesting information.
   One might think that the furor over interracial relations is a feature exclusive to black and white relations, but not so. In my research I found that Nazis and Jews had their own issues with this theme. No one wants to compare themselves to the Aryan nation, yet on an almost daily basis their concepts bias our interactions. "Keep the bloodline pure!" "We grow weaker when our genes are spread around!" "S/he doesn't look like us, and I can't abide that." Oh sure, this exact phrasing isn't used, but the concept is there. The idea. Ideas are bulletproof, after all, everyone is quick to cite from the V For Vendetta film, yet cannot see how it applies to daily life.
   So why did everyone fight so hard to end apartheid, to bring the struggle for equality to a world spotlight, to battle dogs and hoses and lynchings for all these years to get to this point, where what racial intolerance there is is frowned upon (but not nonexistent, I can personally attest to that)...and then have all of it go out the window because of people who choose to view equality only as a way to get money, or to sustain a lifestyle, instead of a way of life? Why must I be told I have "sold out" because my wife is not Cleopatra? Why must whispers dog my heels as I go down the street with my mixed son?
   After more research, I think the answer goes back many years, into the doctrines of one Willie Lynch. I urge everyone to look into this speech as much as possible. I can already tell that some will stop to question the veracity of such a speech, and I say to you you are being bogged down in semantics. Look at what it says, then look around at many of us. Europeans have used the principle of divide and rule for so many years to conquer African countries, one of the major results being the Genocide in Rwanda after Belgian immigrants enlarged racial divides between warring factions, for their benefit. Distrust and envy still abound today in black communities and it does not have to be this way. I hear the phrase "sell out" and think about it. To sell out indicates that someone has given up everything of value to attain something. What of value has been given up by either member of an interracial relationship? The chance to stay single? Values? What values would forbid someone from loving another because of the color of their skin or their race? Does that not in itself form the foundation for what we openly condemn as racism?
By the way, I know the word miscegenation is used quite often to describe interracial relations...this is why I shy away from it now. Anyways, back to the point.
   The distrust and envy entrenched in so many societies worldwide is leading us down a path of futility that is quite frustrating to watch. Far from unifying to better ourselves, we insist on fragmenting along lines that we claim we fought to erase decades ago. I waited this long to air out my thoughts because I thought that this issue deserved more than a knee jerk reaction spiel of "Y'all just hatin'!" I provided ample reading material here for anyone reading to dig into themselves, and I think it helped me too doing the research on this.
I went back to that guy's Facebook wall tonight to get that picture so you guys could see it.....and he had deleted the link. I hope that was done for the right reasons. Yet one more thing to think about, something I have had to do a lot of.
     One more thing. Since I wrote this on her birthday, check out this lady.