“It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong.”
“maybe all names are illusions” –(OV)
The Modern Jazz Quartet, Valeria. No date for this recording (probably not from a MJQ studio album). Label : Amor Indiano (probably acquired the rights to re-issue the recording).
“of these optimists, the poet and scholar Fred Moten turns directly to Fanon’s writing on Césaire. In particular, Moten is interested in Fanon’s frustration with Césaire’s use of pidgin and words of his own coinage: “The new speech, which animates Césaire’s poetry as well as Fanon’s invocation of Césaire in the interest of disavowing the new speech, is where we discover, again and again, the various and unrecoverable natality that we share.” Connecting Fanon’s quarrel with Césaire to Hannah Arendt’s belief that all human activity, and especially political activity, carries the promise of new creation—a promise latent in the unrepeatable nature of each person’s birth, hence “natality”—Moten helps us to see the new dimensions that this debate has acquired over time. Césaire was self-consciously preoccupied with making something new in art and politics alike, but reading his poetry today (with a stronger sense of the historical specificity of his writing) provides the present with the kind of historical investigation of blackness that Fanon felt was unavailable. But more important, the fact that Césaire did so through the materiality of language indicates blackness’s power for a new “communicability” not rooted in an essentialized idea of race, but in new methods of critiquing the cultural machinery that essentializes. For Césaire, new words hold the promise of new worlds. Poetry isn’t the only expressive mode where this kind of language work can happen, but it still is the best.
[…]
Davis’s Journal (Journal of a Homecoming … a new translation appeared from N. Gregson Davis, a professor of ancient Greek and Latin poetry at Duke University who grew up in Antigua.) provides the most powerful articulation of Césaire’s “new speech,” along with the necessary contextualizing tools to recognize and appreciate this power. In doing so, Davis has not merely translated a great work of modernist poetry and an essential document in postcolonial history; he has created a present-day source of timely dissent.”
— (The New Worlds of Aimé Césaire by David B. Hobbs, The Nation, July 3, 2018)
“works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling. […] a world of pleasure, not just to escape the everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build community, establish fellowship, play and laugh, and plant seeds for a different way of living, a different way of hearing.” (RK)
“Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple” […] “a zone of attention in which heterotopic forms of life might build out.” (LB)
[The detective engaged in] “chasing the spirit of the truth.”
“The world owes me nothing, he thought, certainly not a perfect ending.” (ML)
“Grace Lee Boggs … to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge the humanity of all of us … When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present.” (RK, Freedom Dreams)
keep my heart forever filled anew
With dreams and wonders
“I became aware that my voice … had something charismatic in it, drawing people in.” (ZS)
“… André Breton […] described surrealism as a minority always “tending toward greater human emancipation,” and went on to add that it is “ceaselessly
renewable” and “acts as a lever.”
“It is the avowed aim of the surrealist movement to reduce and finally to dispose altogether of the flagrant contradictions that exist between dream and waking life, the ‘unreal’ and the ‘real,’ the unconscious and the conscious, and thus to make what has hitherto been regarded as the special
domain of poets, the acknowledged common property of all.” (David Gascoyne)
“In their vehement opposition to white supremacy, the surrealists were in fact
far to the left of the Socialist and Communist parties, in France and elsewhere,
most of which regarded the issue of race as decidedly less important than that of
class. In the collective statements quoted above, the Surrealist Group was very
much at odds with those parties but in close agreement with such renowned
black revolutionary internationalists as George Padmore, Garan Kouyaté, and
C.L.R. James.”
“… surrealists openly defined themselves as “traitors to everything that is not
freedom.”
“the Dictionnaire du surréalisme et ses environs (1982)—by far the best
reference work on the subject—asserts, in the entry for “noir,” that “black has
always been the color of surrealism.”
Invisible Surrealists, Black, Brown, & Beige Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Robin Kelley, Franklin Rosemont, 2009.
Related: Freedom Dreams The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley, 2002
