NOTES ON POETRY AND ACTION

"Laocoön," William Blake (c. 1815).

I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities. A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric. 

— Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937) 

Reasons and opinions concerning acts are not history; acts themselves alone are history, and these are not the exclusive property of either Hume, Gibbon, or Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, or Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading. Tell me the What; I do not want you to tell me the Why and the How; I can find that out myself, as well as you can, and I will not be fooled by you into opinions, that you please to impose, to disbelieve what you think improbable or impossible. His opinion who does not see spiritual agency is not worth any man's reading; he who rejects a fact because it is improbable must reject all History, and retain doubts only. 

— William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (1809) 

Wordsworth devoted the greater part of his life to the study of political and social questions, and Marx a great part of his life to the study of poetry. For both men the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were supreme facts; and of the other chief ingredients of Marxism the poetry of the Romantic age is at least as important as the German metaphysics. Marx himself was once a young romantic poet, and if later on he and his friends were notably silent about the nature of their ideals, it was because they took these for granted and could confine themselves rigorously to building the road across chaos to the new world that the poets had seen in the distance. Today it may be time for Marxism to defend not only the economists of that age against their erring successors, but its writers, as men of revolutionary hopes and therefore in bad colour now, though in good company, with Milton. 

— Victor Kiernan, “Wordsworth and the People” (1954)  

"Sabra and Shatila Massacres," Dia al-Azzawi (1982-83).

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. 

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) 

Frequently Iqbal may seem to be urging us to action with only an indefinite indication of its motive, as if action were an end in itself. But Marx left his followers with only a very rough outline of the socialist society to come; and both men were right in implying that mankind could only advance by advancing, exploring, by trial and error. Iqbal’s Asia like the Germany of Marx’s youth had been for too long sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought: his contemporaries might have seen themselves, as Marx often did, in the mirror of Hamlet. In such a climate energy, resolve, action really were cardinal virtues, and no one has ever paid more glowing tribute to the splendor of mankind's capacity for them. The thought is always with him of the contrast between man’s physical frailty and grandeur of spirit, between the handful of dust and the limitless desire. His compass needle may have wavered, some of the symbols he made use of in his efforts to chart and unknown future may have been outworn; but the last lines of all in Payam-e-Mashriq are a call, once more repeated, to throw off the chains of the past, not to imitate but to create.  

— Victor Kiernan, “Iqbal as Prophet of Change: The Message of the East” (1980)  

Fuck poems 

and they are useful, wd they shoot  

come at you, love what you are,  

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder 

strangely after pissing. We want live  

words of the hip world live flesh &  

coursing blood. Hearts Brains 

Souls splintering fire.  

— Amiri Baraka, “Black Art” (1966)

"SCHOOL IS A FANTASY WORLD."

Ice Cube: … they don’t teach you how to cope in this motherfuckin’ society. Black kids are always going to be disinterested in school as long as school doesn’t teach them what they contributed to this country. The only time you learn about anybody who looks the same as our face is in February, Black History Month, and you learn about the same motherfucker, Martin Luther King. After twelve years of that shit you know the story back and forth. Him and Harriet Tubman. They were the only two I ever learned about in school. Until rap came along you wouldn’t learn about nobody else.  

Tate: Was that how you learned about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers?  

Ice Cube: Yep, through rap music and nothing else. Kids are starting to compare: I can learn more about my kind on a rap record than sitting here eight hours. School is a fantasy world.  

— Ice Cube interview with Greg Tate (1990)  

During the colonial epoch and afterwards, criticism was justly leveled at the colonial educational system for failing to produce more secondary school pupils and more university graduates. And yet, it can be said that among those who had the most education were to be found the most alienated Africans on the continent. Those were the ones who evolved and were assimilated. At each further stage of education, they were battered by and succumbed to the values of the white capitalist system; and after being given salaries, they could then afford to sustain a style of life imported from outside. Access to knives and forks, three-piece suits, and pianos then transformed their mentality. There is a famous West Indian calypsonian who in satirizing his colonial school days, remarked that had he been a bright student he would have learned more and turned out to be a fool. Unfortunately, the colonial school system educated far too many fools and clowns, fascinated by the ideas and way of life of the European capitalist class. Some reached a point of total estrangement from African conditions and the African way of life, and like Blaise Diagne of Senegal they chirped happily that they were and would always be “European.”  

— Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

"ALL OF THIS, FROM BEGINNING TO END, IS LIES."

Jacob Lawrence, "The Library" (1978)

To know where the Negro is going one must know where the Negro comes from. Capitalist history and capitalist science, taken as a whole, are designed to serve the needs of capitalist profit. Their studies of the Negro and his history have aimed at justifying his exploitation and degradation. They have excused the slave trade and slavery and the present position of Negroes as outcasts in capitalist society, on the ground that the Negro in Africa had shown himself incapable of developing civilization, that he lived a savage and barbarous life, and that such elements of culture as Africa showed in the past and shows today were directly due to the influence of Arabs and Europeans. All of this, from beginning to end, is lies.  

— C.L.R. James, “The Destiny of the Negro: An Historical Overview” (1939) 

All of the above points are taken from books and articles published recently, as the fruit of research in major British and American universities. They are probably not the commonest views even among European bourgeois scholars, but they are representative of a growing trend that seems likely to become the new accepted orthodoxy in metropolitan capitalist countries; and this significantly coincides with Europe’s struggle against the further decolonization of Africa economically and mentally. In one sense, it is preferable to ignore such rubbish and isolate our youth from its insults; but unfortunately one of the aspects of current African underdevelopment is that the capitalist publishers and bourgeois scholars dominate the scene and help mold opinions the world over. It is for that reason that writing of the type which justifies the trade in slaves has to be exposed as racist bourgeois propaganda, having no connection with reality or logic. It is a question not merely of history but of present-day liberation struggle in Africa.  

— Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdevrloped Africa (1972) 

It is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist that history is “lies agreed upon”; and to point out the danger in such misinformation. It is indeed extremely doubtful if any permanent benefit comes to the world through such action. Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great abd beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?   

Here in the United States we have a clear example. It was morally wrong and economically retrogressive to build human slavery in the United States in the eighteenth century. We know that now, perfectly well; and there were many Americans North and South who knew this and said it in the eighteenth century. Today, in the face of new slavery established elsewhere in the world under other names and guises, we ought to emphasize this lesson of the past. Out histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center. The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law.   

One reads, for instance, Charles and Mary Beard’s “Rise of American Civilization,” with a comfortable feeling that nothing right or wrong is involved. Manufacturing and industry develop in the North; agrarian feudalism develops in the South. They clash, as winds and waters strive, and the stronger forces develop the tremendous industrial machine that governs us so magnificently and selfishly today.   

Yet in this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted or half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific?  

Or, to come nearer to the center and climax of this fascinating history: What was slavery in the United States? Just what did it mean to the owner and the owned? Shall we accept the conventional story of the old slave plantation and its owner’s fine, aristocratic life of cultured leisure? Or shall we note slave biographies, like those of Charles Ball, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; the careful observations of Olmsted and the indictment of Hinton Helper?  

— W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935)  

NOTES ON LIVING AND WRITING IN AMERIKA PT. II

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1981)

I’m not of the Frankfurt School. One must live a life of relative privilege these days to be so dour about domination, so suspicious of resistance, so enchained by commodification, so helpless before the ideological state apparatuses to conclude there’s no conceivable end to late capitalism’s daily sacrifice of human life to the singular freedom of the market.

— Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1993)

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of India, and the "niggers" of Africa.

And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incom­plete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.

I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.

— Aimé Césaire (1950)

 André Fougeron, Atlantic Civilisation (1953)

As for the great tut-tutting and anxious concern about the supposed anti-Semitism of second-generation Arab, South Asian, and African immigrants, nobody wants to state the obvious: to the extent to which it exists among them, which it certainly does, this anti-Semitism is a sign of their having become fully European. The particular stereotypes evoked by the torturers and killers of Ilan Halimi, for instance—you Jews are rich, so pay up—are a fundamental part historically of the European social imaginary, not some Arab, Islamic, or African one. This supposedly “new” anti-Semitism is not an import into Europe from some other less enlightened region of the world. The European anti-Semitic tradition has been dusted up and moved from the shoulders of one set of social actors within Europe onto those of another, from the older, national traditions to the newer minority communities, given a new shape this time in relationship to the anger generated by Israel’s brutal and ongoing destruction of Palestinian society. This shift in definitions is part of the burden of being an “immigrant”—second and even third generation—in Europe today. So complete is this transformation that even those conservative forces that are the traditional source of Jew hatred as a force in politics and society can now wield the charge of anti-Semitism against the immigrant communities at large without batting an eyelid and without generating even a whimper of protest from the liberal mainstream at this at least highly ironic turn of events.

— Aamir Mufti (2007)

What you think can put you in jail

what you say may be used against you

whatever you do to protect yourself will be

Seen as a strike against the patriot act which

will strike you down for being patriotic to yourself

— Jayne Cortez (2009)

NOTES ON LIVING AND WRITING IN AMERIKA

Criticism is active class struggle…

— Amiri Baraka (2010)

What I have been calling contemporary "Left" criticism is vitally concerned with various problems stemming out of authority: such problematics as that of the "return" to Marx, Freud, Saussure and others, the issue of influence and intertextuality, the questions of  l’impensé and the undecidable in deconstructive criticism, ideology as a factor in literary creation and dissemination. Yet hardly anywhere in all this does one encounter a serious study of what authority is, either with reference to the way authority is carried historically and circumstantially from the State down into a society saturated with authority of one sort or another, or with reference to the actual workings of culture, the role of intellectuals, institutions, and establishments. Furthermore if the language of magazines like Critical Inquiry, Glyph, and Diacritics is brimming with sentiments of depth, radicality and insight there is never so much as a paragraph expended there on what in the way of ideas, values and engagement is being urged; nor, for that matter, will one ever stumble on a serious attempt made to characterize what historically (and not rhetorically) it is that we advanced critics are supposed to be opposing. One's impression is that the young critic has a well-developed political sense, yet close examination of this sense reveals a haphazard anecdotal content enriched neither by much knowledge of what politics and political issues are all about nor by any very developed awareness that politics is something more than liking or disliking some intellectual orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature.

— Edward Said (1979)

English Department Skull & Crossbones

New Critic Klansman is

Deconstructing the day

Name for night slaughter

They laugh, They soul they do not have

— Amiri Baraka (1993)

The Passagen-Werk, Benjamin's great unfinished work on Paris in the nineteenth century, includes several quotations from Lotze's Microcosmus, a book which was very popular in the late nineteenth century and is now forgotten. Lotze played an important and so far nearly unnoticed role in Benjamin's thought. One of the  central themes  of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the urge to "brush history  against the grain," developed Lotze's remarks on the redemption of the past within the  framework  of both Judaism and  historical materialism. "Like every generation that preceded  us," Benjamin  wrote, "we have been  endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim."

These words were written in 1940. In the light of what happened since then one is tempted to say that the last two generations have been endowed, on  the contrary, with a powerful, albeit  negative, messianic power. The end of history-not in the metaphorical sense, which became fashionable recently, but in a most literal sense—has been for the last half century a technical possibility. The potential self-destruction of humankind, in itself a turning  point in history, has affected and will affect the life and the fragmented memories, respectively, of all future and past generations—including "those that are past or future, ten thousand years backwards or forwards," as Aristotle wrote. The realm of what Aristotle called "general law" seems to have expanded accordingly. But to express compassion for those distant fellow humans would be, I suspect, an act of mere rhetoric. Our power to pollute and destroy the present, the past, and the future is incomparably greater than our feeble moral imagination.

— Carlo Ginzburg (1994)

Racist and sexual violence are practices that are not only tolerated but explicitly—or if not explicitly, then implicitly—encouraged. When these modes of violence are recognized—and they are often hidden and rendered invisible—they are most often the most dramatic examples of structural exclusion and discrimination. I think it would be important to go further developing that analysis, but I am going to conclude by saying that the greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call “intersectionality.” Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles.

— Angela Davis (2015)

...one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.

— W.E.B. Du Bois (1940)

THE DAMASCUS MEMOIRS — RASHID HUSSEIN

Born in 1936 in the small town of Musmus outside of Haifa and buried 41 years later in that same town, Rashid Hussein was one of the pioneers of Palestinian literature. Though buried in his homeland he died in New York City, where he had ended up after stints across the Arab world including Beirut and Damascus. 

Eqbal Ahmad wrote that Hussein lived in New York as if it were a Palestinian town. He served as the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s cultural attache at the United Nations. Ahmad said that Hussein lived against the odds of his environment—too indulgent—too altruistic. Hussein’s life and work deserves far more attention that it has received and his poetic and prose writing in Arabic and Hebrew ought to be translated in greater numbers.  

Below are three poems published in the May 1974 issue of Arab Palestinian Resistance, the magazine of Information Department of the Palestine Liberation Army.   

**** 

Last October, when Israel launched numerous air raids on Damascus, Rashid Hussein, “the pioneer of Palestinian resistance poetry” was in the Syrian capital. As he watched the courageous behavior of the people of Damascus in facing the Israeli aggression, he wrote daily memoirs in Arabic poetry. Excerpts of these poetic impressions are given below. The first of the following three poems from The Damascus Memoirs, was translated into English by the author; the second, “Children of Roses,” and the third, “Letter to Richard Nixon,” were translated by Mrs. Randa Khalidi.  

(1) From The Damascus Memoirs 

 

The greatest of the great loves 

Was this morning in Damascus. 

He walked through the market,  

Bought a rose for a child, 

A candle for a raided house, 

And blessed the wedding that Damascus lived. 

And when evening came, 

The Great Love spent the night in Damascus. 

Damascus is calling, 

Damascus is calling, 

Planes are dancing, murdering, falling. 

All the fire of the earth became a wedding ring 

Around the finger of love I call “Damascus”. 

Her is all the love on earth 

Here are all the fires 

Here are all the wounds wedded to fighters 

Damascus is calling, 

Fire is calling, 

Love is calling from Damascus. 

Oh you who plant stars and wounds in Sinai 

and the Golan Heights, 

With your blood and love our people are restored 

Here Palestine is calling, 

Here Egypt is calling, 

Love is calling you, 

Fire is calling you, 

Damascus is calling you. 

(2) Children and Roses 

They are trying to kill sleep 

In the eyes of the children of Damascus. 

They are trying, let them try. 

They are trying to kill what the youngest child in Damascus 

Has slain long ago. 

They are trying to kill roses in Damascus, 

Let them kill them —  

We can live without roses. 

When old and young are martyred in our country. 

The soil will accept them without rosy wreaths. 

Let them try to kill the roses in Damascus, 

But the roses go wounded 

But the people will remain. 

Oh most beautiful roses of Damascus. 

The fake representatives of the arts 

In New York, 

In Paris, 

In Rome — 

Weep, dance and drink 

To buy a plane 

To kill a child 

And the jasmine youth of Damascus. 

Simone de Beauvoir says that the return of a refugee 

To his home is not liberation. 

Elizabeth Taylor and the last of the divorced wives in Iran 

Have decided that love of country is an aggression 

Oh god, do these represent the arts? 

Do they represent love and literature? 

If those are our enemies; 

Multiply them, God, Multiply them. 

(3) Letter to Richard Nixon 

Mr. Nixon 

Watergate Street 

Washington, Israel 

From my refugee room in Damascus I address you. 

You have sent all you want in Napalm 

But — and thanks for the present – it did not fall in pieces; 

It tore the face of child, destroyed a hospital and the heart of a grandmother 

It kissed a resisting rose. Your Napalm died. 

Mr. Nixon, despite all the Napalm you have sent 

The doves have not flown away from the rooms of resisters in Damascus 

Our doves stayed 

Despite your planes 

Our arms have remained despite your planes 

All our fields are here, all our roses, our stars, 

All our doves are here 

They stayed despite your planes. 

Mr. Nixon 

In our banks we have peace in thousands 

We will send you none 

You wanted war, let it be war, we return it you you 

How did you kill all the poets in your country? 

How did you kill love in your country? 

How did you send fire to kill roses and children in Damascus? 

We are not here a God called Jesus for you to assassinate 

As you wish, crucify as you wish 

We are Jesus rejecting crucifixion, demanding to return 

To the mountains of Nazareth 

We, candidates for crucifixion 

Will not allow you this pleasure

We remain and resist in Damascus 

We remain and resist in Damascus