the occasional free-associated afrofuturism roundup...

- One of these days I want to get reconnected to the poetry slam / spoken word scene out here and get back into the habit of writing. When I reflect on my older pieces I tend to view some of it as "Afrofuturistic" (whatever that means) but this summer I want to make the time to develop that more and flesh it out...

- Over at the Manrilla Blog, the post Nafs Ammarah points to some interesting connections between the film They Live and the lessons of the Quran. The post also alludes to some links between Terminator 2 and some events from the biography of Muhammad (saaws).

- Over at Post Black there is a nice interview: What is Afro-Futurism?: An interview with artist/education D. Denenge Akpem

- From the Liberator Magazine: Kodwo Eshun and Afro-futurism



- Above is a clip from the film "The Last Angel of History", an interesting documentary/surreal narrative on Afrofuturistic themes. Maybe by blogging I'm aspiring to be a "data thief"?

- The new Iron Man movie is coming out soon. I wonder how they are going to handle War Machine? Judging from the previews I've seen it seems like he is a fairly small part of the film but maybe I'll be surprised.

- Philosophical question: Is Morris Chestnut's character on the re-imagined V series Black? I mean, he's one of the reptilian Visitors so technically he's not even human but he experiences the world in a Black body. He is also a part of the subversive Fifth Column which has developed human emotions and is in solidarity with the human revolutionaries. I guess you could ask the same question about J'onn J'onzz (played by Phil Morris) or the occasional random "black" Kryptonian characters which have appeared on Smallville (see Vathlo Island). Come to think of, we could even ask the same about the unnamed title character of the film "The Brother From another Planet".


- And just for fun, a different take on Hermes Conrad from Futurama...

islamo-futurism?

From time to time here at (Planet) Grenada I bring in links/entries on Afro-futurism. Well, recently over at Hawgblawg, Ted Swedenburg has written a couple of entries on "Islamo-futurism". In Fun^Da^Mental's "786 All Is War": "Sufi surfing on boards of steel" Ted goes over the surreal and futuristic lyrics of Aki Nawaz. And in More on Islamic sci-fi/futurism he gives a heads up on Yusuf Nuruddin's recent article in Socialism and Democracy called "Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology". (Hopefully the article or a discussion of its contents will eventually be available online).

"that's wells, not ellison, in case you feel like being cute again."

Speaking of Afro-futurism,, it comes up in an interesting way in Mission: Impossible 3. Lawrence Fishburne plays the role of Theodore Brassel, the head of the IMF (Impossible Mission Force). He actually had me cracking up in the theater. In his big scene, he goes off on Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and Musgrave (Billy Crudd) in a hilarious piece of "dialogue" which made him sound like an erudite version of Eddie Murphy's boss in Beverly Hills Cop.

At one point, after describing how the central villain (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) has been difficult to catch and is an "invisible man" Fishburne says to Crudd: "That's Wells, not Ellison, in case you feel like being cute again."

I'm sure I'm over-analyzing this (at least, I wouldn't claim that the author of the screenplay had any of this in mind) but I think it's more than just a coincidence that Ralph Ellison's novel about an African-American man who is hidden and ignored and H.G. Well's science-fiction novel about a man who is literally invisible share the same title. Invisibility (secrecy, hiding) is a major component of the Black condition. For example, Afro-Latino invisibility is almost a cliche at this point.

Check out: Afro-Colombians:'Invisible' People Strive to Survive War, Racism by Saeed Shabazz, Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No hay Sangre Negra, So There is No Blackness by Taunya Lovell Banks, In Peru, Afro-Descendants Fight Ingrained Racism, Invisibility by Angel Paez and then invisibility blues and tuning out blackness

But it actually goes deeper than that... a few years ago I wrote a poem which started off with the 'joke' that from time to time, all the Black people in the world have secret meetings where we review and plan for all the various manifestations and expressions of Black culture. (e.g. "we decide what sounds will drip down from ghetto blasters to suburban frat parties for the next ten years") And in the middle of working on that piece I started to come up with example after example of how secrecy and hiding show up as themes in black history. (e.g. "we hid pyramid construction instructions in hieroglyphics and guarded them with mummy curses", "we hid getaway plans inside of gospel hymns" "we hid orishas under white-washed saints" etc.) In a Western context (especially under slavery) where Black existence is precarious, it makes sense that we would place a premium on being able to communicate among ourselves without being understood by others.

In working on this poem, what really surprised me is how far back it was possible to take this idea. We can even go back to the most ancient Black man of the Western Canon, namely Noah's son Ham, and read these themes into his story. Specifically, Ham's 'original sin' was that he "uncovered his father's nakedness", in other words, he revealed something which should have remained hidden, and as a result his descendents were cursed with slavery. And so for me, Ham's parting advice to his children was "Not every true thing need be told".

Of course, the above description only goes so far, and is only true from a certain vantage point. I wouldn't want to essentialize and romanticize Black invisibility. We should just acknowledge that it plays a large role, but then ultimately move past it.

Afrofuturism / Rebirth of a Nation

The journal Callaloo, recently issues a call for papers on Afrofuturism which described the movement as follows:

"Afro-Futurism is an emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and magic realism with non-Occidental cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past. Examples of seminal Afro-Futuristic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the vibrant, frenetic canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the provocative photography of Rene Cox; as well as the extraterrestrial mythos of Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra, and the recombinant sonic texts of Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky."

I think it will take some time for me to elaborate my thoughts on Afrofuturism as whole, anything I would say now would just be the tip of the iceberg. But I remember being pleasantly shocked and amazed to discover that a conscious movement existed along these lines because it seemed to sum up many of the creative goals which I try to achieve in my own poetry. (O.k. let me not front, I'm just a Black Trekkie trying to sound deep... lol). But I really can identify several of the "afrofuturist" themes in my poetry and I wonder what's the best way to come to terms with that fact. (Should I merely note the co-incidence and ignore the movement, or is it worthwhile to stop and actually explore this line alot further?)

In any case, once the label exists, it seems to open up a fissure where we can start to ask a whole series of questions. Is there a distintively Black attitude towards computers and technology? Can you build a ghetto/barrio in cyberspace? Is it possible to keep it "virtually real"? Why does science fiction seem like such a predominantly white genre? In many imaginings of the future (for example, even the Bahai faith's) humanity will be united and mixed in a kind racism-free wonderland. So will there still be Black people in a bazillion years? Why do most of the aliens on Star Trek look like white people with silly putty on their faces? And the list goes on. Much of the identity politics engaged in by people of African descent involves looking back to some idealized possibly mythical African past. So what will it mean to be Black in the future?

One of, if not the, the most important things I took away from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth is the idea that culture is something living and dynamic. Fanon gives the example of the colonized intellectual who goes to Europe and feels inferior, but then has a counter-reaction where they embrace a fossilized folkloric static idea of their own culture. They wear certain clothes. And practice certain rituals. And eat certain foods. Because "these are the traditions of my people" but in reality "the people" have already moved on to something new. It's not about wearing dashikis because the ancestors used to. The trick is to just live with "the people" and then do whatever makes sense. And remember change is a part of life.


...


I recently saw DJ Spooky perform "Rebirth of a Nation" which was a modern reply to D.W. Griffiths racist, but cinematically important silent film "Birth of a Nation" about the Civil War Reconstruction, and the Birth of the KKK. (Scenes from the original film were distilled, repeated, edited, combined with superimposed computer-generated images, and throughout "That Subliminal Kid" (another monicker of Miller's) was dj-ing on stage. The new film began with a sequence combining images of flags from all over the world juxtaposed to interesting political effect.

But that leads me to the most disturbing realization I had while watching the film: If I take "North" and "South" out of their normal context within United States history and instead think of "North" and "South" on the global scale, then all my normal associations of heroism and villany get overturned. So is the film really about the United States, racism and slavery or is it about nationalism and globalization in the contemporary world?

The global South is obviously being exploited by the global North and probably should "secede" in different ways (i.e. reclaim and maintain their autonomy in the interests of their citizens). Globalization really does threaten an older, traditional (possibly more humane ways of life. This is exemplified in the recent concept of Jihad vs. McWorld where "jihad" isn't specifically Islamic but also includes other struggles in many parts of the world towards local control and autonomy (whether in the Basque region of Spain, the nationalist struggles in the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union, or anywhere else on Earth).

It was honestly a bit disturbing (in a good sense) to see DJ Spooky play around with those associations of "North" and "South". It makes me want to get a new compass.

is wayne brady gonna have to choke a tau'ri?

so two very brief comments:
1. I don't know if more people are actually reading and linking to Planet Grenada or if the TTLB ecosystem changed its definitions recently but (for what it is worth) apparently after several long epochs of being a rodent or a marsupial, Grenada climbed back up the evolutionary ladder and is a large mammal among blogs again. Let's see how long it lasts.

2. C'BS ALife Allah recent comment on the previous post really got me thinking about how I had originally expected Afrofuturism to play a larger role in this blog. As a result, it inspired me to do a little more reading online and sowed the seeds for some future posts... but until then I'll just share one thing for now... even though I've been an on-again-off-again fan of Stargate SG-1 I was surprised to find out recently that Wayne Brady had played first prime (basically head slave) of one of the Goa'uld (the bad guys for the major part of the series). It is hard to explain but somehow that is really fitting and really ironic, all at the same time.

grenada and afro-futurism
ecological crisis
negrophobia, hope and gasoline
negrodamus 1
brian gumbel (sic) is looking like malcolm x?

day break

I haven't talked about Afro-futurism for a while, so I figure I should mention that I recently saw Day Break, a prematurely-cancelled television series starring Taye Diggs. It has a premise similar to Bill Murray's Groundhog Day in that Diggs' character keeps reliving a particular day until he gets it "right". But instead of being a cutesy romantic comedy, Daybreak is a somewhat violent drama series about a Black hero being apparently framed by the (mostly-white) powers that be. In this case, the role of "The Man" is played (in part) by members of a group called the Santayana Club. (George Santayana is the Spanish philosopher who is famous for having said: "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it". On the other hand, almost all the people of color are at least portrayed rather sympathetically (even the criminals). An interesting show... it manages to keep the suspense and interest going, revealing layer after layer of an intricate story.

Here are all 13 episodes

the wrath of farrakhan

I've been thinking more about Star Trek and Afro-futurism these days and so I thought I'd share this blast from the past... An old In Living Color sketch called: The Wrath of Farrakhan

saul williams

As I said before, I saw Saul Williams recently. The talk/performance was pretty good and raised some deep questions in terms of spirituality, culture, afro-futurism, gender, etc. Later, online I found several interviews with him which echoed alot of the same themes. I think I'm going to take advantage of them because that way you get to see his words verbatim.

One such interview is from Splendid online magazine:

Splendid: The book [Said the Shotgun to the Head] seems to touch on themes of enlightenment, particularly a thematic thread of pyramids. Does this allude to the way they were built (i.e. out of flesh) in the ancient Egyptian sense, or is there something more?

Saul Williams: The idea is simply that I'm dealing with ancient folklore surrounding the matriarchal essence and nature of an ideal society. That's all it has to deal with. So then we're learning about balance...balance, balance, balance. There's a Native American saying that if we're not careful, we'll end up exactly where we're heading. The whole idea is that, if thinking of God is male has led us to the state that we're in, and I would argue that it has, then maybe we should re-approach how we think of things. Get ourselves out from between this rock and a hard place. Re-imagine the world. Don't simply think of your god as this angry man who punishes you, but of this nurturing mother who loves you.

A previous Grenada entry, islam and the divine feminine touches on this idea and points out how there are feminine aspects to God "even" in Islam. One fact which we can briefly point out is that "Rahman" and "Rahim" the names of God which are used over and over again at the beginning of all but one sura of the Quran have a root RHM related to the word for "womb".

Splendid: The book tends to take a more utopian point of view when it comes to God as the eternal loving mother...

Saul Williams: That is the point of the book right there, to have that love and compassion with the harshness. That's why the book initially started off as a poem called "Kali-flower", an allusion to the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, the goddess who says everything must be destroyed in order for things to be rebuilt. Buildings have to fall, because that's the only way people are going to wake up. It's no different than Malcolm X saying, "You don't have a revolution unless you have bloodshed."

I don't have much more to say about the above, except that it is a good example of the freshness Saul William's wordplay; breaking words down and putting them back together like legos. Also, the larger point is dead on... any kind of change will involve sacrificing something old in exchange for something new... whether you are talking about the political world or your personal life.

Tastes like Chicken interview

V: So, you mentioned Kali. Did you study different religions?

S: Yeah, on my own. I’ve just always been interested by it. I guess my latest interest has been in just spirituality, and spiritual practice. And in searching for the spiritual practice that suits me best, I’ve often pulled from different religious practices. I find that a lot of what suits me comes from Hinduism and Buddhism, as many of us do. I think we pull from the East a great deal. It’s almost like we had a team of experts in the field of spirituality, and we sent them to the East and said, “Okay, you guys, work on that.” They did a great job. We can benefit ourselves by looking to the East for greater understanding and depth of our spiritual connection to reality.

A fact which I keep thinking back to is how, between Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bahais and all their offshoots and everything in between (e.g. Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mandeans, Samaritans, Gnostics, Druzes, Kairites, Noachides, Rastafarians, Hebrew Israelites etc.) in a literal sense more than half of all Earthlings worship the God of Abraham. They may disagree about all sorts of other people and concepts, but they all look back and acknowledge that there was a special covenant between God and Abraham which has some relation to their spiritual life today.

And then the other kind of deep fact is that a large chunk of the other half follow religious traditions rooted in India (Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, etc.)

And so India and Iraq (where Abraham was born) have an odd kind of near-monopoly in terms of being the sources of human spiritual life.

In his Pop Matters interview he says:

The biggest influences on my work, in that context, would have to be Hafiz and Rumi. Hafiz was a 12th century Persian poet whose name in Arabic means "One who remembers." He knew the Koran by heart, he knew his poetry by heart; he was a spoken word artist, if you will. Poetry has always been recited aloud, but besides that, the lightheartedness and spiritual nature of Hafiz's poetry has always been something that I've aspired to. And then there's Rumi; I've been deeply influenced by him. His work is very inspiring. There are tons of poets, moving chronologically from the past to the present, that have inspired me.

The same set of questions tend to run through my mind when I hear non-Muslims say they are into Hafiz or Rumi. First I wonder if as non-Muslims do they have the background to understand the religious references? Do they respects Hafiz and Rumi as products of Islamic civilization which can be part of an argument for Islam's validity? And then I actually have to ask myself the same questions. Do I really understand Hafez and Rumi? Are they really a part of Islamic tradition or are they rebels who are really outside of it? I tend to think that non-Muslims who think Rumi is "cool" are not recognizing the extent to which he was a practicing orthodox Muslim and so they might be misreading him somewhat, seeing what they want to see. But then again, I certainly couldn't claim to be a scholar on the subject. I actually have met at least one person who become Muslim by way of an interest in Rumi. So if we are concerned about dawa or even just about improving Islam's image in the West, it would be beneficial if someone could make and present a coherent argument pointing to the connection between Rumi, Hafiz and the other Sufi poets to orthodox Islamic spirituality.

Splendid: Your interpretation of religion is so much more human that what we're taught -- so much so that you almost feel sorry for those bound by religion, a bunch of sheep in a herd or something akin to a mob mentality.

Saul Williams: They become literalists, sure. But your beliefs can empower you, even if they're completely dogmatic. I think what's most important is that you have a daily practice in your life of prayer, meditation, something, so that even if you have dogmatic beliefs, you have that daily practice to open yourself up to being loving and compassionate to other people. Then everything's cool, even if you're not trying to find the [...] holy grail.

There is probably some more I could say but I'll just leave this alone for now. If he comes up, he comes up, but it will happen naturally.

Tastes like Chicken 2nd interview

Saul Williams Homepage

octavia butler

When I started this blog I called it *Planet* Grenada to try to evoke Afro-futurism as a theme. In reality, I've only touched on the subject occasionally. So I figure that now would be a good time to mention it again.

Recently, on Democracy NOW! there was an interview with Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming and Religion. The interview deals with Butler's new book Fledgling about a Black female vampire and also touches on the two books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents which are about a near-future world where ecological problems and certain other factors have led to a much more brutal and violent society. One of the few bright signs of hope in this future world is a particular woman with a unique gift for empathy. On top of that, her journal, a collection of revelations and insights she makes for herself at first, becomes the scripture for a new religious movement which helps to bring new life to a crumbling world.


Some excerpts:

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

and

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see even an obvious lie again and again and again, maybe to say it almost by reflex, and then to defend it because we have said it, and at last to embrace it because we've defended it.

Good advice in any world.

the mother of the matrix

I haven't done much blogging on Afro-futurism lately, even though I imagined it being a bigger part of Planet Grenada in the beginning. But apparently there has been a new development in the case of Sophia Stewart which makes me want to touch on the subject again.

If you haven't heard already, Stewart is a Black woman who was suing the Wachowski Brothers and Time-Warner on the grounds that she wrote a story called "The Third Eye" which both The Terminator and The Matrix were based on. (The connection is that unborn John Connor who grows up to heroically lead the humans against the machines in the Terminator films, is supposed to be Neo, or "the One" of the Matrix films.)

A recent development was reported in the LA Times in a story called The Billion-dollar Myth. Sadly, the case has been dismissed for lack of evidence, but the LA Times goes on to make some interesting points about how the case relates to other areas where blacks and whites seem to have very different perceptions of the same events.

To be honest, when I first saw the Matrix in the theater I keep thinking over and over again "hey I've seen this before". More than most films, there were many elements of the plot and the setting which I had seen in other works of sci-fi. So from a certain perspective, it wasn't surprising someone would accuse them of plagarism.

In the case of the Terminator, talk of plagarism is much older (in fact James Cameron had already settled with Harlan Ellison over such accusations)

An interview with Sophia Stewart talking about her work

The Mother of the Matrix: Sophia Stewart a website with more background on the case

Story from Salt Lake Community College paper which incorrectly reported that Stewart had already won.

First things first

This is the first post for Planet Grenada and my first attempt at "blogging". To be honest, I didn't spend a long time trying to find "just" the right name for this blog but I think this will do nicely. Grenada was last stronghold of the Muslims in Spain when the Christians took back the country in the Reconquista. Grenada is also the the name of the Caribbean country whose temporary Marxist regime was toppled by the Reagan Administration in the 1980's. (I can identify with both uses in interesting ways) Calling it *Planet* Grenada seems fitting to me since I've been thinking about and intrigued by the Afro-futurism movement recently and its ideas seem to resonate with some of my recent thoughts and activities. So for the moment, the name seems to evoke all the right things.

It also seems a bit fitting to get this thing going in the early hours of St. Patrick's Day. At least, according to one version of the the St. Patrick's day legend, the usual story of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland was actually a kind of bait-and-switch and the snakes are in reality a stand in for the Moors.

Anyway, this is enough introduction for now.

More to come later.