political thought
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Flora and Fauna I wanted to bless my eyes this morning with flora and fauna so I came in from the cold of a dream full of unrelenting rain and opened my eyes to what is customarily my second sighting of the day: My ideological father shot down in the Audubon ballroom where the only…
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“We are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man war, poverty, and tyranny and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.” Adlai Stevenson
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Every artist, every scientist must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man’s literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist,…
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Elsewhere on the African continent, mission-educated men took power as Africa emerged from direct European colonial rule. The list is long. Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, now a member of the Academie Francaise, is a former seminarian and a leading Catholic intellectual. The late Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivorian president who constructed the world’s…
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(To Che, not in memoriam) Your skin linked to the bone was lost in the earth. The tear, the poem and the memory are carving on the fire the song of death with golden machine-guns from wherever you are. And here, each night your books are searched for the just motive of all action and…
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Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture by Angela Davis. Back blurb: In a series of intereviews given in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Angela Y. David explores how historical systems of oppression like slavery and lynching continue to influence and undermine democracy today. Davis builds on W.E.B DuBois’ view that when…
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The other day doing some Googling on anti-colonial poetics, I came across this fantastic article by Aimé Césaire. It is very long so I’m only going to quote the beginning. Click the link below to read the whole thing. Discourse on Colonialism A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a…
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Our women must not pull back in the face of the many different aspects of their struggle, which leads them to courageously and proudly take full charge of their own lives and discover the happiness of being themselves, not the domesticated female of the male. Today, many women still seek the protective cover of a…
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Roaming the blogosphere as I am wont to do, I came across a challenge on calyx press’ blog. Of course, at 43, I do not qualify as a “young feminist” (if I ever did) but still it set me to thinking about my intentions to write a review of Home Girls: A Black Feminist…
Tichaona Chinyelu 