Black Bird Press News & Review

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Recently (24 January 2009), Marvin X, a well known writer and co-founder of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) sent out by email a provocative piece titled "Poetic Mission." On the surface the concern was the controversial investigation of the murder of the Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. But "Poetic Mission" goes farther and makes an argument about the role of the poet and poetry.

Here are some excerpts from "Poetic Mission.":

   The mission of the poet is to express the mind of a people, a
   culture, a civilization. He extends the myths and rituals, taking
   them to the outer limits like a Coltrane or Eric Dolphy tune,
   stretching, transcending all that is, was and will be. His tool is
   language, from which he cannot be limited by political correction
   or submission to the culture police on the left or the right.

   The poet is a healer in the time of sickness, inspiring wholeness
   and celebrating the positive. He must point out contradictions and
   lies....

   The poet's mission was well defined in Mao's classic essay Talks on
   Art and Literature at Yenen Forum. The poet is either part of the
   problem or part of the solution--is he with the oppressor or the
   oppressed? Or we can recall the words of ancestor Paul Robeson,
"The artist must become a freedom fighter." For whom does he write?
   Does he write to satisfy Pharaoh and his minions, or is his mission
   to liberate the suffering masses from ignorance, although he should
   never consider himself superior, since the teacher always learns
   from his students. If he listens, the poets will come to know the
   pain and trauma of his people and his duty is to relieve the pain
   and trauma with visions, plans and programs for the collective
   good.

   The poetic challenge is to take people to new vistas of
   consciousness that reveal the soul, individual and communal, which
   are one. Language is a communal experience that is not the property
   of the poet. He can add to it with his imagination, but is there
   imagination without myth-ritual? What is the source of imagery
   except the collective myth of a culture or civilization.

   In time of struggle and crisis, the poet must become a propagandist
   who whips defeat into victory, sadness into joy. Truth is
   paramount--there are lives at stake, hence this is no game, no job
   for money, no position for publicadoration, no ego trip. Call it
   revolution, change of the most radical form. Marvin X, "Poetic
   Mission." 24 January 2009

Reading Marvin's "Poetic Mission" provoked a slew of questions, which I emailed to him and others in my address book. Poets Jerry Ward, Jr., Mary Weems, and C. Liegh McInnis (with a poem) responded. Marvin responded to a number of my questions, directly. Below I will I place them in a Q & A format. After which, I will present the other responses.

Rudy: Maybe the subject should be "poetic missions." The heart of the problem for the poet is to discover what is the Mission, isn't it, if there is such a thing?

Marvin: Everyone, whether poet, scientist, lover, street sweeper, dope fiend, must ultimately define his/her life's mission or purpose. This is why brother Ptah suggested and I included the 13th Step in my How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy.

What is the mission of the poet--words can kill or heal. Sonia Sanchez says, "Will your book free us?" Apparently not since the stores are full of black books and we still ain't free.

The dope fiend must come to understand recovery is only a step--once clean and sober then what? Only to sit in meetings claiming sobriety while still drunk on recovery--so after recovery, then discovery of one's mission.

Remember that Nancy Wilson song, "I Never Been to Me"? So we can be poet, mother, wife, husband, yet never discover our true mission in life, and even when we discover our mission, we may be too fearful to execute it. …

In February of 1964 Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, won his first World Heavyweight crown after Sonny Liston refused to come out of his corner at the start of their fight’s seventh round. The boxers had a rematch clause in their contracts, and Liston’s capitulation to the young upstart (and Olympic champion) raised the spectre of a fixed fight, especially given Liston’s mob connections. The rematch was originally scheduled for November of that year, but delays lasted until May of 1965, in part because Ali had a hernia operation. In between, a lot went down.

Days after the fight with Liston came the revelation Clay joined the Nation of Islam as a convert and a storm of controversy erupted when the movement’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, announced Clay had changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Malcolm X introduced Ali to the Nation and encouraged him to join. Two months after the announcement, X broke with the movement, and was later assassinated in February of 1965 by Nation associates. Rumors of retaliatory death threats began to circulate around Ali, and supposedly even extended to Liston. Promoters didn’t want to touch the fight in lieu of all this, so it was eventually held in an ice rink in the tiny Maine town of Lewiston. On a historical side note, only 2,434 thousand people filled the rink’s 4900 seats, making it the smallest crowd to ever attend a heavyweight championship fight.

A slightly bizarre sideshow took place during all of this when Ali summoned former actor Lincoln Perry, aka Stepin Fetchit, to join him at his training camp in Chicago, and later introduced him during a press conference as his “secret strategist” (two days before Malcolm X’s assassination).

Will Power manipulates the timeline of Ali and Perry’s meeting for dramatic purposes in his thought-provoking, entertaining play Fetch Clay, Make Man, having Ali summon Fetchit just days before the fight in order to learn the secret of Jack Johnson’s “anchor punch,” which Ali believes Perry knows. In doing so, he creates a play that successfully examines both men’s legacies through their individual attempts to succeed as black men in a white man’s world. Power’s play suggests these two trailblazers, misunderstood by many and maligned by more, were two very different men who fought the same fight with different tactics.

Set in Ali’s locker room in Lewiston, with a goon from the Nation named Brother Rashid guarding (and sometimes blocking) the door, Fetchit shows up wondering why he’s been summoned, and as it soon becomes clear, because he has little else to do. The first black film star to become a millionaire was by this time scorned as an Uncle Tom, viewed by many as a traitor to his race for his part in perpetuating some of the worst black stereotypes on the silver screen, or worse, barely remembered, along with the hows and whys of his former success and how much he drove his own career to what was then an unprecedented level of success. The play frames Fetchit’s rise and fall during unobtrusive flashbacks with movie mogul William Fox. In the locker room, once Fetchit learns what Ali wants from him, his old ambition kicks in and he sees a potential opportunity he can play to his own advantage.

Ali has a maelstrom of things to contend with as he prepares for the fight including a wife ill-suited to her new role as a chaste, modest Muslim; pressure from the Nation to act as a mouthpiece for the movement; the fall-out and resulting threats in the aftermath of Malcolm’s assassination; and preparing for a formidable opponent he knows will try to destroy him. Fetchit initially won’t play along, claiming ignorance about Johnson’s secret punch while angling for his own aims, which include using Ali to reboot his film career. But as the men talk, Fetchit also becomes keenly interested in Ali as a person, and as a man, and it’s the development of mutual respect and trust between the two men amid a hostile and potentially explosive environment which forms the satisfying core of the play. The denouement is almost as graceful and satisfying to watch as Ali himself during his prime.

The production currently onstage at Marin Theatre Company boasts a superb cast. Roscoe Orman does a marvelous job of peeling off one layer at a time in revealing the man behind the character of Fetchit in a sharp, masterfully timed performance. Eddie Ray Jackson is a physical marvel as Ali: he’s quick, cut, and it’s easy to imagine him holding hold his own in the ring. Selling the physical part would be enough of a challenge, but he matches that with a portrayal loaded with nuance, empathy and wit. As Clay’s wife Sonji, Katherine Renee Turner smolders and then burns in a magnetic, convincing performance, reminding one of why Ali once said, “My toughest fight was with my first wife.” Jefferson A. Russell is so believable and menacing as the converted thug Brother Rashid I found myself wishing Ali would take him out with a single punch, just like he was about to do to Liston. Robert Sicular did fine work in the smaller role of William Fox.

Derrick Saunders’ taut direction flows smoothly. The set design by Courtney O’Neill works well, as does the video design by Caite Hevner Kemp which effectively frames the action on stage with real images from the time. The costumes by Heidi Leigh Hanson work well, but some budget considerations were observed from the small theater’s second row.

Fetch Clay, Make Man runs through September 7th. There are a limited number of discounted tickets available on Goldstar, but even if they’re gone by the time you read this, I encourage you to see it before it ends.

Marin Theatre Company

Understanding London--And Boston!

“If they are going to kill him, I don’t care. My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And, I don’t care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu Akbar!“--Mother of Boston Bombers

My Son the Fanatic

a film review

Marvin X

In light of recent events in London (and now Boston), I thought it would be important for a clearer understanding of London's Muslim community (and America's) to resend this review of the film My Son The Fanatic.

Most western politicians, media spooks and experts refuse to address the root cause of young men and women willing to self destruct as suicide bombers or why they choose to become fundamentalist Muslims. Westerners and the moderate Muslim experts continue in denial that white supremacy is the root cause of their former colonial subjects desire to remove the last vestiges of the disease of cultural imperialism.

White supremacy has spread hopelessness in young Muslims in Europe and cultural imperialism has spread it to the former colonies, now neo-colonial regimes best described by journalist Ayman Al Amir, who recently said, “Terrorism is the consequence of political ostracism, not religious fanaticism. It is fermented not in the mosques of Egypt or the madrassas of Pakistan but in solitary confinement cells, torture chambers, and the environment of fear wielded by dictatorial regimes.”

The film reveals that Muslims in Europe, and London in particular, are not only politically disenfranchised but culturally, economically, and spirituality alienated as well.

This alienation is simply the nature of the beast, the Mother Country, that devours the little people from the colonies who seek comfort in the Mother but are rejected for being less than human, thus in a twist of the Oedipus complex, they seek to destroy the Mother who has all but destroyed them, stunted their personalities and possibilities for human and spiritual development. (President Obama described the Boston bombers as stunted men!

The Review of the film My Son the Fanatic

…Essentially, it is about the colonized man, the colonized family and its attempt at de-colonization. Ironically, we are challenged to decide who is the fanatic, the father or the son, for both are battling their supposed demons. For the son, it is western culture—the father fights to escape eastern culture, i.e., his Pakistani roots. The son wants to return to his religious roots, Islamic fundamentalism. The father is fanatically in love with secularism—he is non-religious, in love with jazz, blues, alcohol and whores, one in particular.

What if Osama Bin Laden and his band of devils came to your house at the invitation of your son? When his son comes under the influence of fundamental Islam, he get his father to allow a Muslim teacher to visit from Lahore, Pakistan, turning the house into an Islamic center, which the father reluctantly allows because of his deep love for his son. Although he arranges for his son to marry a London policeman’s daughter, the son rejects his father’s request, opting for Islam, claiming the girl represents the worst of western culture. Couldn’t he see how the policeman abhorred him, the son asks the father.

The father is blind: his loveless job as a London taxi driver exposes him to street life and he succumbs, falling seriously in love with a whore, rejecting his homely wife who has failed to inspire him, perhaps because she doesn’t represent the decadent western culture he loves, symbolized and summarized in the whore. For him, the whore has life, love, tenderness, and freedom. Why can’t he get this at home? Is it because the wife represents the old world he rejects so totally? …After his son and comrades attack the whores for being whores—the son actually attacks his father’s whore, spitting on her, and striking her in a violent anti-prostitution riot, forcing the father to expel the imam, with the son departing in disgust.

…In the German trick Mr. Schitz, we see the arrogance of western man who derides the father for being the “little man.” What can the little man from the East do with the white whore, the symbol of western civilization? The little man is inferior by nature, with defects, genetic of course, which disqualifies him from being on par with western man.

Mr. Schitz can pat the “little man” or eastern man on the head, kick him to the ground and apply any number of verbal insults, until eastern man finds a bat in the truck of his car and threatens to use it. Of course, this is the colonized man fighting back, regaining his manhood. The father fights on a personal level, the son on a politico-religious level, but both are fighting colonialism.

Their misunderstanding each other’s fight is symbolic of the tension between moderate and fundamental Muslims. We know we cannot go back to Islam of the Prophet’s day, but nor can we accept the passivity of the moderates. There is no excuse for one billion Muslims being humiliated by a few million Jews in Israel. This is not a question of hatred, but the result of political backwardness, the non-use of power. With Muslim unity, the Palestinian problem could be resolved tomorrow morning.

Until contradictions between moderate and fundamental Muslims are resolved, eastern man will not be able to successfully challenge western man. This, of course, will necessitate revolution because moderate Muslims control most Islamic societies and have no plans to give up power without a struggle—those who struggle against them being described as terrorists to disqualify legitimate freedom fighters who will ultimately challenge the corrupt, undemocratic, secular Muslim nations.

The final question is what will be the nature of the new Nation of Islam. Can fundamentalism function in the modern era or is it antithetical? Will it be repressive, will it be democratic in any sense, not necessarily in the western democratic sense? Will Iran be an example? Tunisia? Turkey? For sure, the motion in the Muslim world will lead to a synthesis of the best of the old and the new.

Let us understand clearly, if the reactionary secular regimes cannot or do not eradicate ignorance, poverty and disease, they will be replaced.

The father’s love of the whore was real. She represented the poor underclass that even the revolutionary son could not accept because of his moral myopia. If the father had married her (another wife being acceptable in Islam), perhaps the son would have respected him and the tension between the old and new would have eased, allowing the possibility of a better day.

After the present convolutions, look for a marriage between old Islam and the new, between East and West. We will either come together or go to hell together. For all his attempts to claim allegiance to the Islamic past, Osama Bin Laden is the most modern of men, using modern technology, modern weapons, modern financial systems, and modern media techniques to the best of his ability.

* * * * *

This film review appears in Marvin X's book of essays, In the Crazy House Called America, Black Bird Press, 2002.

posted 5 August 2005

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Marvin X reviews the film My Son the Fanatic

Understanding London--And Boston!

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