The western coast of England at Merseyside is a place for reflection
It’s a privilege to be able to write and be published.
First of all, there is the matter of managing to feed, clothe and shelter yourself. The second issue, if you are not a lone wolf, is to provide for those you love.
Writing from exile, or prison or living on the streets is truly a new world for expressing oneself. For instance, you see much that others in society’s conveyor belt environments don’t see. The depth of memory and current experience is profound. You come to realize that your valuable writing is going to be despised and you will have to self publish. But that is freedom, too.
When I sit to write I am often in transit. I make notes or compose on a train or even during a pause during a walk.
As a youth I knew little of the writers who are made of what I am constructed of today.
It was an era when Carl Rowan, Alex Haley, Era Bell Thompson, Simeon Booker, Chuck Stone and the rest, journalists usually cozy with the American state featured in my reading. With few exceptions, these hard working periodical writers and sometime authors and editors lived long lives. One person daring to write authentically above the embattled MOVE collective in Philadelphia was ex Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal. The popular journalist and broadcaster lived and worked in North Philadelphia and was an often seen board member of a community center I worked out of as a youthful activist. I took keen notice of the fearless and technically sharp writing on the Philadelphia police attacks on MOVE and the cover-ups that Mumia exposed. An article I wrote in his defense when he was stitched up for a policeman’s murder in 1981 was censored by my “radical” comrades. From that point on, more than 25 years ago, I can count on one hand the investigative journalists that have done much at all to aid US Political Prisoners and Political Exiles. Mumia Abu Jamal is still facing the penalty of death after all this time. The MOVE 9 are seeking parole in 2008 after arrests in a politically motivated case against them. One woman died from medical neglect by Pennsylvania prisoncrats.
In this timeframe, the books of a James Baldwin or his forerunner, Richard Wright or anyone reflecting the experience of the people were rare and received with hostility. I recall being shocked to realize that such books were in the library in the early 1970s. Frank Yerby, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Chester Himes, Ted Joans, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Kwame Ture, Gil Scott Heron, Huey Newton all laid waste to illusions cultivated to a powerful machine called US publishing houses. These were just the surface though: what Dad had on the shelf such as autobiographies of Adam Clayton Powell or Reverend Leon Sullivan or Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait, did not exist even in medium and large city libraries.
But a combination of social and economic, not to mention mental, crises have occurred in what is called Black America since then. Despite the superficial-the prominence given on the internet to African people in America with websites, blogs and forums, there are far less writers of substance. In other words, essays and editorials tend to sprout from a reaction to what corporate news media produce.
In 2007, four decades after I began to read books adults read, the realities of most African people in/from America are hardly available to the public. That may be difficult for many to accept because of the saturation of a certain kind of American government label on us.
It is true, there is a woman who is officially the US Hip Hop Ambassador. And I hear there is something over there called Hip Hop Lit.
Is it an accident that the number of meaningfully written titles by African “American” authors from thirty to fifty years ago that have gone out of print may exceed present day titles?
I tend to pass by reading many writers from my experience who are published by university presses. I have lived long enough to know that truths told emphatically will negate contracts to write. But then, to me, self censorship is always at least lapping over the literary and analytical banks in America. It has long gone double for African so called Americans. Though he is a fine writer, and an inspiration of mine from years ago, Ernest J. Gaines cannot rationalize not dissecting the US government’s role in the Hurricane Katrina disaster in his native Louisiana. Maya Angelou, a millionaire, stood reading her poetry at the Bill Clinton inauguration some years back. Her books are also today banned in some US states.
In recent years, I have delved into a few writings in terms of autobiography and novels.
Clarence J. Cooper, long deceased, was someone I had to discover (titled Black) while living in exile at age 45 in a Dublin, Ireland cottage from 1803. Reginald Lewis, who I read online since he is incarcerated in Pennsylvania prison since the years when I felt the wrath of the FBI, is an excellent author. I took a chance on possible luggage woes and bought my wife, also exiled from the USA, Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl In Paris. It was well worth it as it captured a good deal of what it means to be in another land’s swirling currents. A book by John A. Williams, someone I had noticed and read thirty seasons ago was found once more in the dank library of a Bristol, England room. Lee Stringer, has a life story that emerged almost as quietly as he once did from below Grand Central station in New York City. The book, Grand Central Winter, was a gift to me by tearful Swedish supporters in November, 2002 in Stockholm. These writers, among a couple of others resonated because they told of the realities not often seen by the world: humanity in the face of oppression but also the alienation of persons who have triumphed somehow and eloquently commented on what they have seen, tasted and vowed to refuse forever.
In ways, that is my story. And that of Himes, Wright, Baldwin but also William Lee Brent, Art Taylor, Nina Simone, Terry Whitmore, Ollie Harrington, Assata Shakur and some other Sister or Brother who has been able to self publish copies of a pulsing lifetime.
One that is still being written; in the sun, wind, rain and stillness of exile I am the composer who lived to tell.
I’ll take the privilege.
I already have had to run with it.
15 August 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002
“The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.” ……J. Edgar Hoover [a.k.a "J. Edna Hoover,"] 1969. Hoover was variously rumoured to be a closet “cross-dressing homosexual.”
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