My Goodreads Review of Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1

 With all the sorrow of this month, I still haven't forgotten to take some time to honor our Indigenous family this month and I have an excuse to read American comic books again—something I hadn't done in a long time. 

Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven’t read an American comic book since 2021, so I know I was going to be a little rusty on reviewing one now. I am so use to manga now that several times while reading this I had to stop myself from reading the speech bubbles and text box from right to left. The fact is, I still have fairly substantial back-catalog of western comic books that I need to read and given this is November, good reason to read this short-anthology celebrating Marvel Comics’ Indigenous heroes. This is not the first time reading a comic anthology about Indigenous people as I previously read and reviewed This Place: 150 Years Retold an excellent historical narrative anthology on the history of Indigenous people in Canada. Like in that book, the illustrations vary in quality, but the stories are a good introduction/sample. I really wish there was more here to read, but better than nothing.

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My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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My Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Been awhile since I read something and been so angry—in a good way—at what was being written about. I felt so enraged about the crimes talked about in this book, but I think it is good to feel righteous anger at this. Well here is my Goodreads review/thoughts on this book.

  The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.


What is the duty a writer holds to their audience, themselves, the process? James Baldwin wrote a book of essays trying to answer that in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961 while working on his novel Another Country and as his direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was deepening. Now in 2024 we have Ta-Nehisi Coates writing the same sort of book about being a writer and this being a mea culpa about a section of his landmark essay The Case for Reparations in which he listed West Germany paying reparations to the State of Israel which he received immediate blowback for. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel/Palestine and writes what he sees and feels and it is a harrowing and deeply soul-searching travelogue. This book is 230+ pages, but it felt like it could've been 500 with the emotional weight it put on me. I am still taking in the information in the book, but I really was moved by this book and want to process it.

Senegal

No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without a culture is a people without human beings" - Léopold Sédar Senghor

Étoile de Dakar - Titeur

Back in 2020-21, I lost quite a few of my family members while the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing—chief among them my paternal grandmother. I hadn't seen her in person in years and she had been the one who kept so many stories of our family history. It dawned on me that with her gone I would be losing a lot of those stories so I decided to do some amateur genealogy and family history research to preserve the names and stories the best I could. When an African-American takes a consumer DNA test, what they are shown, among other things, is that they share ancestry not with one specific African ethnic group or tribe, but with multiple—sometimes over a dozen. One may share a plurality of ancestry with one ethnic group, but that still is not a lot. This makes claiming ancestry with one group based on biology a bit hallow given that you are related to a lot of different groups. Then you have to remember that most of your known history and culture only concretely begins in North America in 1619. Alex Haley has a lot to answer for. Still, it has always been for that reason that African-Americans have historically taken the lead when it comes to Pan-Africanism and countless figures from Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey (West Indian, but still important to African-American history) and so on have dreamed of a strong independent Africa and possibly a place to return to. Liberia and Sierra Leone were founded from such aspirations.

In 2022-23(?) (we are not told of when he went to Senegal, but it was before he went to the Middle East) Ta-Nehisi Coates makes his inaugural journey to Africa—specifically the Republic of Senegal and he spends his time there wrestling with the fact that he was physically in Africa, but it was not the mythical paradise his Black Panther father had told him about growing up nor was it the raging uncivilized hell-hole that white Americans have always told everyone it was. One feature of this book is that while he is telling us about his real-time experiences, he is also giving us background information and lessons on how and why he is experiencing things or what he is writing against. In this case it is hundreds of years of anti-Black racism distorting the history of Africa to justify slavery and colonialism. He is doing this while trying to reconcile if he and the Senegalese people he spends time with can truly close the gap with each other across cultures and histories. He is hopeful, but a bit uncertain. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed similar feelings in Americanah on interacting not just with African-Americans, but with other Africans in the novel. Blood ties can only bind people so much and one has to ask what else makes peoples, peoples. He comes to an understanding with himself about these things—what slavery and apartheid has done to him & colonialism and neo-colonialism has done to people in Senegal—and realizes that there has to be a little caution to being so hasty to want an imagined utopia so hastily....but we'll come back to that. There is hope here, as an Americanah, that a real connection in the African diaspora can be made on tangible ground, regardless of reality or myth. This Senegal section was the one that connected to me on the most personal record even if I don't have quite the naivete about Pan-Africanism that Coates has.

South Carolina

Marvin Gaye - Save the Children

"If...we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." - W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

I remember the 2020 era of Black squares and everyone promising to do better with "The Blacks." What a time! Before the year was even out, the reaction had begun and the first wave of book banning laws were being drafted. Whether it was called "woke" or "CRT" or now "DEI". It was basically a ban on teaching about whoever you didn't like whether it be Black people or LGBT people. One of these places that passed book banning laws was the state of South Carolina a state that had implemented a particularly brutal form of slavery, had one of the most violent reactions to Reconstruction, and fought racial integration particularly hard. The state house in Colombia celebrates all kinds of the worst people in human history and in Chapin, South Carolina the Lexington-Rchland 5 School Board and high school teacher Mary Wood were entering a showdown over Between the World and Me. Coates' book along with works like The Complete Maus, The Bluest Eye, and The Diary of a Young Girl are favorite targets of the right-wing school censors. That particular school board is prone to extreme right-wing parents. This chapter really has Coates reflect on his own time as a student, as well as the history of South Carolina and a deeper meditation of who writes the histories and who decides what histories are read. TNC goes to the school board meeting with Mary Wood that ultimately decided her fate: that we she would be allowed to keep teaching BTW&M. A battle won, but a temporary victory as the forces of white supremacy don't stop working just because they suffer a loss. We would do well to remember that.

Israel/Palastine

"But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. - James Baldwin "Open Letter To The Born Again" (September 29, 1979)

Marcel Khalife - My Mother

So here we are to the heart of the book. I tried to explain what parts 1 & 2 of this book were about because it is here in part 3 that the sum of both narratives reaches a dark conclusion. If part one ("On Pharohs") was about one of the most hated and wretched people of the world trying to connect to each other in a supposed homeland of paradise, but question if there can be such a thing as a utopian homeland; If part 2 ("Bearing the Flaming Cross") is about the fight to control the history, narrative, and basic information of this wretched people constantly; part 3 is a cautionary tale about another very despised people who manage to establish a homeland and promote their own narrative about it...at a terrible price. They make their land and their narrative according to the designs and whim of the very people who had spent thousands of years persecuting them. A freedom achieved not though good faith, but through the use of colonialism and apartheid against another group of people.

I'd known about this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians all my life, but it was witnessing the brutality against the Palestinians between 2009-2012 that made things clear to me on this issue. While for me it seemed clear, for others it as taken a lot longer to see and with genocide as the trigger. But this section is where Coates brings all of his journalistic efforts to bare as he goes through a very intimate look at how antisemitism and Zionism found a common goal with each other and the Holocaust became the perfect pretext to accomplish a two-fold goal:

1. Get the majority of Jewish people out of the West (something the Holocaust had two-thirds accomplished) and 2. Set-up a colonial state in the Middle East to keep the Arabs in-check. The natives (in this case the Palestinians) would be the only real losers so nobody would care.

Accomplishing this would see the United States as the main model (along with Apartheid South Africa after 1967). The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and the régime of racial segregation laws that spread throughout the United States of America and targeted only non-white people and effectively turned a quarter of the United States into an undemocratic totalitarian state. Imagine if Jim Crow-era South Carolina or Mississippi was transported to the Levant and funded by the United States and allies. The catalogue of atrocities, by which I mean not just the physical violence, but the violence of the state itself against through its laws and customs against all it deems outsiders or minorities that is so galling to comprehend. I currently live just across the highway from the former plantation that my family was enslaved on. I have talked with grandparents and a great-grandparent on their experiences living under the Jim Crow régime. I even found an old newspaper advertisement for the auctioning of one of my 3x great-grandparent and his siblings. It truly hits one to see such a legacy being alive and well today to be used against another people funded with my tax dollars (I had an antebellum-era newly-freed 4th great-grandfather who was taxed $5 a year for being a "free person of color" in Virginia. That money was used to fund the continued enslavement of his brother and family). It's made all the more tragic that the people doing it would by conventional-wisdom be the last folks to do this.

I had always suspected this as my knowledge of world history expanded, but being a victim does not preclude you from being a victimizer. Kendrick Lamar said, "Hurt people, hurt people." Alas, he was more right than he knew. Coates realized that even the victims of the Holocaust could endorse apartheid and ultimately genocide. It is a tragedy that Coates lays out in magisterial detail from the moment he begins this section at Yed Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) to the ending with Palestinian-Americans in Chicago. This is as much a long-form journalistic narrative and history as it is an example of writing to haunt...speaking of which.

To Sum It Up

The book's stated goal was to show young writers how to write to haunt the reader as Rakim the MC haunted him as a listener. Like Between the World and Me, this book is written as an epistolary non-fiction essay. For all his atheism, Ta-Nehisi Coates is seemingly trying to make the case for being the successor to Saint Paul as far as the use of letter-writing to tell his stories. I am not a big fan of this format, but I still appreciated what he wrote here and I was definitely haunted by it.

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