When language explodes in your
mouth, the beauty of your brain begins.
This is March, Women’s History
Month. We shall have a moment of silence for Mother Africa and her
daughters ---for Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson, for Margaret Walker who
wrote for her people on Rampart Street, for the young woman who threw
her newborn in Lake Ponchartrain; for the girls and women raped and
maimed in Congo by men and boys who look like them; for Sara Baartman,
the so-called Venus Hottentot, displayed in the 19th century
like an exotic animal, whose genitalia were dissected and cast in wax
after her death for “scientific” speculation about her “primitive sexual
appetite;” for the lesbians raped in South Africa because some men want
them to be “proper” women; for the women in New Orleans who suffer
HIV/AIDS; for women who get their hair did while their children are
undone by systematic design; for the children of God in Dafur, Haiti,
New Orleans, Kenya and Senegambia ----tragic, fearful, confused, abused
because they are females by biology and women by gender; for women of
the earth! SILENCE!
SOCIAL CHANGE,
CULTURE, RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION
Thirty years ago I
published an article entitled “Unfunding the Arts in the Black
Community” [First World 2.3 (1979): 21-23]. My key points were:
-
If
Black people’s desires and struggles do not fit into profit schemes,
the struggles are systematically undermined
-
African American arts are unwilling victims of the war to reestablish
white hegemony in American culture
-
“The
arts in the Black community do have one choice: be political. The
choice involves arming themselves with the most complete information
about arts funding at all levels and using the information to turn the
game against the agencies.”(23)
Thirty years later, with a Kenyan
American sitting as President and a devastating global economic crisis
afflicting us, the points are still standing. They need modification,
especially if we are talking about New Orleans, culture and recovery.
In 2009, we have to be very clear about New Orleans, the vast process of
life-management that is culture, and social change (which is recovery
for some and reconstruction for others).
After August 29, 2005,
the demographics of New Orleans shifted dramatically. The shift, to
overstate the case, changed everything: how we shop and how we cook; how
we talk to one another; how we use celebrations as signs of hope and as
mechanisms of denial and how we deal with or pretend we do not have to
deal with racism, political corruption, and crime; how we educate and
miseducate young people as we watch them walk down the road to death.
We do, however, continue to invent bullshit excuses for our shortcomings
(lack of inforcible norms) and to perpetuate the myth of THE BLACK
COMMUNITY as if time has not moved since 1968. There are African
American communities in New Orleans, some of them very ancient and some,
quite new. No such animal named THE BLACK COMMUNITY any longer exists.
The sooner we understand
that social change demands our focusing energy on reconstruction of
culture rather than recovery of culture, the better. Brutal honesty and
audacity is required. For the next few years, WORK rather than LOVE is
primary. Recognition that white or non-black hegemony, particularly
with regard to how the arts and artists get funded in a depressed
economy, is still the poisonous snake in our Garden of Eden is crucial.
We have to learn what THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY is in 2009 and how we shall
change the game to benefit larger numbers of people we care about.
DISCIPLINE and CONTROL are the keywords.
We talk a lot about the
progress of African American history, but too many of us are far too
egotistical and opportunistic to apply the universal lessons of our
ancestors, the lessons of DISCIPLINE and DETERMINATION, in our daily
living. As we conduct debates during and after this summit, we need to
arm ourselves with two publications:
-
The
January/February 2009 issue of The New Orleans Tribune, which
has a most important article on the work of Carol Bebelle and Douglas
Redd and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center
-
The
March 2009 issue of Offbeat, which contains the article
“Irvin’s Art of the Deal”
We need to position ourselves at the
crossroads where these articles intersect. Only then will we be able to
control the reconstruction and a future of New Orleans culture(s) in the
dynamics of the American community.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
Professor of English
Dillard University
Copyright © 2009
by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
