One celebrates Winin’ and the other celebrates Grindin.
Call it the absurdity of pathos vs. the pathos of absurdity.
Brooklyn annually presents a parade of pageantry, industry
and pleasure known as The West Indian Day Parade with
elaborate and expensive sound-trucks leading the charge.
Harlem puts on an African-American day parade whose floats
include a caravan of Prison buses.
Like his contemporaries Duke Ellington and Romare
Bearden, Césaire was obsessed with how much dark energy
was observable and how much could be revealed through
re-imaging and re-imagination.
Ellington, Césire and Bearden were all streetwise Aristocrats
— they all specialized in manipulating the most vernacular
formulations of the kulcha into reforms that bore the stamp
of their indelible artistic personae and signatures.
the
an
“You get you full essence of Harlem in Youair shaft. You hear fights, you smell
dinner,
hear people making love.
hear intimate gossip floating down.
You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great loudspeaker, you hear people
praying, fighting and snoring.
”
This led Duke Ellington to create his composition ‘Harlem
Air Shaft.’ Regarding the title, he explained, “You get the full
essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell
dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip
floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great
loudspeaker, you hear people praying, fighting and snoring.”
Harlem, then, is a community in full recognition and
acceptance of its negritude and negrocity, of blackness as a
gestalt response to ante-bellum and post-bellum group
oppression and resistance, and of the ferocity necessary to
impress upon the world how little tolerance the group has
for being fucked with as a group since the firestorm of
uprisings, rebellions and riots that swarmed on 100 American
cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Saying this requires us to delve into why, I believe, the first
jazz artist in the world was Toussaint L’Overture, leader
of the San Domingo revolution, which freed Haiti from the
oppression of global empires, not only in mind and body,
but as a body-politic.
Toussaint not only rallied his people to defeat various external
and internal brigades — black, white and mulatto — with
designs for keeping the status quo, but also, like the Vietcong,
260 years later, made statecraft and negotiation part of his
counterattack arsenal, arguably more so than the blood shed
on the battlefield. Moreover, he conceived of Haiti as a
self-governing Black nation among nations nearly 200 years
before the postcolonial leaders of various African, Asian
and Caribbean countries capitulated their sovereignty to the
World Bank and the imf.
Toussaint knew how to aim high and how to hit em
lowdown too. ?
15
Negritude is, of course, associated with an essentializing
literary movement that sought to identify the characteristics
of an African versus a European way of performing the self,
but if we read the poetry of Aimé Césaire, we know that his
notion of negritude was grounded in dark interior monologues.
The kulcha we call black would have never come into being
were it not for its negating corollary racism or white supremacy.
Or as the jazz saxophonist and Hollywood film composer
Oliver Nelson once said in an extraordinary burst of politically
incorrect exuberance, “Thank god for slavery because without
it there’d have been no Jazz.” One might also argue, Thank God
for Jazz because without it there’d have been no end to slavery.
BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE
Harlem, then, is the epitome and the epicenter of what we,
in black kulcha, like to refer to as Keeping it Real. For some
folk, in fact, Harlem is on a daily basis all too real.
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