February 2012
45 posts
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John Edgar Wideman →
“In a raceless society color wouldn’t disappear. Difference wouldn’t disappear. Africa wouldn’t disappear. In post-race America “white” people would disappear. That is, no group could assume as birthright and identity a privileged, supernaturally ordained superiority at the top of a hierarchy of other groups, a supremacy that bestows upon their particular kind the right perpetually to rule...
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This is a world where inertia, exhaustion and the sense of running hard to stay in the same place mark everyday life. They are as much a mark of the present depression as environmental degredation. There is a terrible tiredness around, a sense of having no energy, or of energy departing. In fact one can only understand this experience, and the connections between psychical myths and fantasies...
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“What we do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to...”
– - Junot Diaz
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“This model does not question the causes of poverty, either general or specific,...”
– Thorough critique of Nicholas Kristof’s “Starfish Parable” in Transition Issue 107
(via thebrightcontinent)
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Girl's Song, Tuareg (Sahara)
O my cousin, my beloved, Once I thought I did not love you. When they came back saying they had left you dead, I went up on the hill where my tomb will be. I gathered stones, I buried my heart. The odor of you that I smell between my breasts Shoots fire into my bones
translated from the Taitok by Willard R. Trask, in Bending the Bow: an anthology of African Love Poetry ed. Frank Chipasula p.62
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Elliot Ross for the Guardian | On the distraction... →
“The rights abuses and political repression carried out by Mutharika and his government are the noisiest aspect of a bigger story, that of an African society struggling through a global economic crisis at a relatively early stage in its multi-party democracy. Mutharika’s bizarre decisions – among them his refusal to devalue the kwacha and the expulsions of the country’s biggest...
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“The temporal elaboration of the act…A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of...”
– Michel Foucault | on marching, in Discipline and Punish, 1977 [p.149]
thinking about dance
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And when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard / nor welcomed / but when we are silent / we are still afraid / so it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.
from ’A Litany for Survival,’ by Audre Lorde [1978]
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“This regime will be firm, humane, and decisive. We will not condone nor...”
– General Sani Abacha’s 1993 Speech upon taking the position of Head of State & Commander in Chief of Nigeria
Talk about announcing yourself. And a statement with echoes of a contemporary Nigerian struggle: “On the current strike throughout the nation following the increase in the...
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Towards Paris
It’s getting to the point where I instinctively open my books to the right page when I want to quote. Books like body parts, for a while. #thesisgrind #dontletmegetinmyzone, that’s right, I’m reappropriating Kanye as a reader of books.
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“It was just a few years back that the nega man get to take on the responsibility...”
– Samuel Smith | from To Shoot Hard Labour: The Life and Times of Samuel Smith, an Antiguan workingman, 1877 - 1982
(via gravalicious)
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I Studied Abroad in Africa!: Fan Mail from Loyal... →
Fan Mail from Loyal GGTA Reader
If any of you wonder about what kinds of emails we get on the regular, here is a prime example. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did!
To Whomever it Concerns:
Have you ever been to Africa before? Do you do charity work? Maybe these girls are privileged, maybe they have more money than you and that makes you feel insecure but at least they’re making a...
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“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering...”
– Audre Lorde | The Uses of Anger
the above comes just after the below, which I also find very powerful, on thinking difference:
… for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial and immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea....
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Helon Habila | Measuring Time
“They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. This was why...
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Whenever, Wherever, Thereover, Hereunder
“It is not just that constitutional protections are indefinitely suspended, but that the state (in its augmented executive function) arrogates to itself the right to suspend the Consitution or to manipulate the geography of the detentions and trials so that constitutional and international rights are effectively suspended. The state arrogates to its functionaries the right to suspend rights...