ExiledOne Commentary

 


This child will never be patronized as in the past


They must instill wonder in Europe because their arrival has societies on edge. What worked in the past with the older generations, those who remember and have the colonialism in the marrow of their bones, won't register with the children of Africa born in the 1990s.

There are young women who are looking for groundings after enduring as child soldiers or being trafficked through Europe's network of prostitutes and exploited workers from Africa and Asia. There are young women who faced the terrible maternity odds of having one doctor for every 70,000 persons, the standard in much of Africa's four and a half dozen nations, according to Dr Grace Kodindo (2008). There many young men who took the task of crossing the Sahara desert and swimming rivers in the mountain valleys of Europe. Too many died there or lost their lives in the holds of ships, discovered dead at Rotterdam or Marseilles. In the wheel wells of aircraft departing Nairobi or Naples, the youth gambled and paid the ultimate cost, their plight never making news headlines and only once and awhile acknowledged on some obscure corner of a newspaper.

There are the little ones, who have witnessed Muqdishu, escaped the DRC and Darfur, carried infant horror within since Rwanda. The hardships any adult Westerner would fold under has been the weight ten year old Africans have borne.

These children of the nineties may frighten or captivate but taking the time to realize what has shaped their outlook has to be better for everyone instead of attempting to make them wear something that will never fit.

4 February 2010
From Exile,
Bankole

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Dirty Window On Africa (Exile 2009)

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Who You Callin' African? (Exile 2008)

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Tribes of Europe  (Exile 2009)

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From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives....the USA government under Obama has admitted there are at least 100 unsolved murders of African "Americans" during the 1950s and 60s. These were people demanding Human Rights, not just voting rights or moviehouse seats next to Whites. Silent about the international Human Rights violations even in Chicago, Obama's adopted hometown (Capt. Jon Burge of the police is a torturer but hasn't been imprisoned) it is unlikely that the USA will accept that it has a cancer within. Here is a piece from 2006 about Emmett Till who 55 years ago symbolized the horror of racist America.
****************************************************************************************************

Lifting a pen or microphone to speak of an America people don't want to hear about-it's something that I do.

I have done it in the hellfires of Virginia's countryside. When you see those three crosses on a patch of land, one taller than the other two, you know. What will you do?


Whites with the cross tattooed on the palm of their hand, yeh, you know what they are about. Blacks going from you to them to 'tell massa', you know them too.

In Philadelphia, Chicago and a lot of smaller and necessarily unknown
to the world places, like any African in America, I have tasted raw
naked hostility. From Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Scottish,
English and Dutch descended peoples now called Americans.

African so called American mayors, police chiefs and "law enforcement
professionals", trusted Blacks with huge payrolls and arsenals, now
ensure genocide in the streets and villages of the USA. Even the top
strata of US dominance has Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, and a
whole lot of other 'black achievers'.

I'm in exile for countering the flow of sewage they tried to force
upon me and any who stood with me. But I go forward. Human respect
for my people-or pay some prices.

Some years ago, a cycle of degradation and grimy meaness reared
itself.

In Italy, a man was lynched. He was an African, like most of us with
roots in the US South. He wore a US military uniform and in fact was
fighting for a government that said he was not human, his lot was
forever to be the footstool of Americans.

Before he had died though, the man had become a father. A two year
old played at home not knowing of the tragedy of Dad's murder. The
year was 1943 and America was screaming about liberty.

But the boy grew to only age 14, when he too was murdered-for being
Black and at the mercy of terrorists in Mississippi, where Dad had
come from. The train trip South from Chicago was fatal. A glance and
comment to a White woman was his doom.

Now, 51 years afterwards, the body of the boy has been dug from the
earth. Scientific tests, US government fact gathering (acknowledging
quietly that two White men confessed before they died) have been
finished.

No one is guilty, Washington, DC says. No federal charges, some Department of Justice drone emitted recently. Emmett's family and legal team did not obey a statute of limitations, 5 years to bring charges, the White House said.

Emmett Till's life and death did not exist, the nation of laws and
securing Civil Rights seems to be proposing. But few believe this.
The trial long ago, as it was called, was high profile and countries
all over the globe had pointed out to America it's hypocrisy.

Washington did not impose on Mississippi then and does not now. From 1956 to 1973, it had its own Mississippi Sovereignty Commission to destroy any attempts to hold it accountable for its systematic murders of voting rights, employment and Civil Rights activists. Most were "plain folk" whose ancestors built King Cotton by bloodstained hands for centuries.

The destruction of the boy was breathtaking in its cruelty. Televison
magnified for the first time what America was made of. And how it had
only hidden it's cancer: a racist system to rival Hitler, Verwoerd
and any other villain of the 20th century.

Even today, the image of the teen is horrifying-his mother demanded
an open casket funeral in 1955. Mamie Till Mobley fought from
the '50s to her death in this new century to gain justice. Emmett's
relatives, skeptical, keep up the cry of the wronged.

The boy survived the killing virus, polio. But not his father's
assassination.

Emmett Till was one of many who will never be known.

Now, in 2006, a further Human Rights violation is unfolding.

Today, ten million boys and girls like Emmett are not even seen as
human-the outrage is countered by few people with a pen, computer or the arms, legs, lungs and vocal chords to tell the world that a neo Ku Klux Klan inhabits the White House. It's economy is powered by prisons, schools that provide a child with a ticket to prison and police that
eliminate children before they can reach adulthood.

As an outcry over Iraq torture is spun out by corporate newsmills, the questions of a troubling nature is whispered.

Is it possible that the US is a Human Rights violator against African and Indigenous peoples?


Who will snuff out the third generation of Emmet's pain?

22 March 2006

From Exile,

Bankole


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Devastated minds of people in the west. That phrase doesn't sit well with people who are privileged because they have the self important idea that they are beyond attack, much less devastation. In truth, there has been a pin stuck in that balloon lately.

When we see the once everywhere Tony Blair showing up and ducking behind a security ring of police with heavy artillery later this week, let's be clear about his testimony at the Iraq Inquiry in London, England. Squinty eyed cops and plainclothes 'coppers' and a meeting place named after the wealth laden queen Elizabeth should leave no doubt as to whether this is a political circus. Maybe this is a diversion meant to be a balm for an island that increasingly complains of being under attack.

Accused war criminals, truly villified and hounded across continents and pressured to appear at the Hague, Netherlands international law courts usually don't spend time between alleged illegal acts writing books and launching lobbying bids to be top politico of the EU. They certainly don't garner even more millions traveling the world after 'retirement from public service'. The former head honcho of England, the north of Ireland, Scotland and Wales and best bud of ex USA president George Bush had been several years ago arrested by police. 2007 had seen Blair questioned by state police investigators right before he departed Downing Street for improper handling of money and arranging for certain individuals to get titles in the hallowed parliament of wig wearers.

But are his hands clean, the public asks, as the world did for three quarters of the first decade. The answer isn't going to be found in arguments erupting in the secured sessions of an Iraq Inquiry that has a few seats reserved for a screened public. How the UN (Blair's government decried UN weapons of mass destruction expert Hans Blix, who retreated to Sweden) will figure in condemnation of Blair is plain. They have not and likely will not.

No, Sherlock, the nearly censored realities of Iraq 2010, the diaspora of the millions, refugees and the dead of Iraq speak to solid, real time conclusions. Imagine the victims of Port au Prince multiplied twice or three times and that approaches the dead in Iraq during the Blair war years, 2002-2007.

Search as we may, it isn't going to be worth much even if Tony Blair said he was wrong, much less offered to do something about his government's lies. He is a born again spiritual person with a foundation and it was launched via George Bush's university, Yale. Nah, that would not get him to admit guilt.

28 January 2010
From Exile,
Bankole

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No Smile Expected in 2010: Tony Blair

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There's a lot to be said about the days we are living through.

How about if we take the advice of Mavis Staples and the Staples Singers in the 1970s, substituting "cough" with "talk"?

"Put your hand over your mouth when you talk, that will help the solution."

Is it that simple? I feel that this is the case. Did you hear this one: "Silence is golden". How about: "When all is said and done, more is said than done"?

I recall one that I used over the years and still can see the value in: "Action speaks louder than words."


There are plenty of these sayings but what all of them have in common is that they urge us to keep words to a minimum and deeds out front.

I'm going to shut up now.

24 January 2010
From Exile,
Bankole



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Lithuania





In the days to come we can all expect the shock to ripple.

I'm talking about the dialogue that's developing on the ground among ordinary people. Face to face, no wires involved, the heady first days of exile, freer than most, taught me that. Who told me about the wave effect? I figured out that people can radiate a vibration, there isn't a computer or other box that's going to establish anything for me in comparison.

Shocks jolt the familiar and throw off all kinds of myths here and there. It's not going to stop.

I know that's not supposed to be said, but that never stopped truth.

The other day a Lithuanian fellow told me that Russia and America, the politics at least, he said, were both sh*t. Interesting, I thought, guessing him to have been a baby when the Kremlin altered plans. I hadn't displayed my political portfolio to him and my 'exile tats' were under wraps-I was zipped up to my neck in terms of expounding on anything. I was startled, in a sense. All he knew was that I was out of America. For some reason we had cobbled together conversations full of smiles and arms pumping furiously in handshakes, two refugees from zones once holding the world hostage with Cold War geopolitical threats.

He was off to another country for a time and didn't think he would see me again.

Damn if I didn't take his good wishes to heart as the rangy form bounded on out the door.

I'll admit it, I was shocked.


22 January 2010
From Exile,
Bankole

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Twenty-Twenty

The 1920s began an era of hope for African people in America. One view was that the worst was in the past by 1920, the rocky first fifth of the century’s beginning. The great grandparents and grandparents older than sixty years were once in physical captivity. Some of them, and many more of their children could read and write. Family reunification, sometimes taking twenty five years in its pursuit was accomplished. Lingering were haunting social and family problems that were multiplied in a racist society.

 

Literacy: one of the gains was basic reading and writing

The global impact of African people from America was not limited to the famed James Reese Europe/Harlem Hellfighters soldiers and the emergence of the trumpet star Louis Armstrong. Hundreds of African people from America traveled to the nascent Soviet state that had captivated the world with it’s revolution and internal friction in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Africa’s potential, even as it writhed in European colonialism, drew African people everywhere to realize and propose the concept of Pan Africanism. One of the US government’s security directives was to monitor the radicalization of ‘negroes’ due to these earth rattling political and economic events. Democracy spreading worldwide couldn’t happen without keeping the Africans in check.

 

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) Publisher and Activist told the world about lynching of African people in America by White mobs. She clashed with NAACP four decades before WEB Du Bois, challenged passive Christianity and White feminists.

The relative healing of the people, along with the strains of unity that the 1800s freedom fight emboldened met with the doubling hostilities with Whites. The new Whites, the immigrants and the racist Whites maintaining dehumanization didn’t see what the sharing of land, property or even good health with African people had to do with their advancement. This scenario had millions exploring what their identity truly was and what would the future bring.

 

Both the speck of the African population able to progress economically, achieve university diplomas and professional status and those in shantytowns and sharecroppers in rags all needed ‘good White folks’ connections. It would be forty five years before there were 1500 lawyers of African descent in the’ world’s greatest democracy’. In American society, only the most ‘approved’ Africans were able to live beyond the crowded, illness rich ‘ghetto’, even  if they were a doctor or lawyer. When prosperity and self defense of ‘Black Wall Street’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) by it’s residents was displayed, Whites dropped dynamite from airplanes and set up concentration camps to imprison the determined women and men bound to live free or die. As was historical, Whites in mobs were part of the government whether masked in white hoods or openly in police and military uniforms. The previous years including the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919 saw Africans attacked and lynched across the USA, but fighting back. This natural law brought about a  degree of hesitancy on the side of the aggressors. The fact that resistance was necessary was not new. But looking ahead twenty years into the twentieth century, it was evident that new dimensions of resistance were needed.

 

 
James Baldwin  

born in 1924 in New York City, grew up in poverty in Harlem, named by the Dutch for Haarlem, its city. His legendary writing came to define the struggle with racism-and his gay sexual identity, international issues, religion and scholar activism. He passed on in 1987.

 

Promised Land 

Cardboard suitcase, food stained paper bags in hand, thin clothing no match for the US Northern winds and the stares of industrializing city dwellers-African people poured out of the US South. The now withered networks of Christian church, family and social links weakened under the weight of monumental change. Designated zones like Philadelphia’s 7^th Ward bulged with migrants and the descendants of so called free blacks. Mocking and resentment of the newcomers was vicious as the confined collective started to form lines of class and color that racist America created in the 1660s.

For more than a century, African men and women operated restaurants, were blacksmiths, barbershop owners, clothes launderers and coachmen and seamstresses, all profitable and secure businesses in the US North, and often service industries to Whites. The hard fought truce that made this possible was through street battles dating to the early days of America and the endurance in disease that resulted in short lives and high African and mixed race infant mortality. The denial of African humanity extended also to the call to arms Lincoln made to African men to fight the US South confederacy in the 1860s. Repeated firebombs, cobblestone and iron rod attacks made killings on the White side as well as the African a fact in the US North. Areas such as Grays Ferry in Philadelphia are to this day monuments to unresolved issues of race and violence.

Chicago, founded by an African from Haiti, Du Sable, has had just two African mayors in more than 200 years. It is more racially stratified than Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

New Settler State: Concrete And Steel

With the turmoil of Europe’s famines and wars, usually tied to the machinations of the royals, their contemporary feudal relations to peasants and excesses of corporations, America began to be a factor once more. Swedes and Dutch still went to Wisconsin and North Dakota, bound to farm and produce dairy products as their earlier experience had developed. Poles and Hungarians who knew coal mining did not always remain in pockets in cities but joined thoroughly ‘Americanized’ generational cousins in West Virginia and Pennsylvania mountainside towns. The USA’s borders had been largely locked down except to Anglo Saxons for decades but now expanded immigration doors opened to Southern Europeans and many other groups, some such as Germans getting a rough ride. Striving to escape Europe before and after the war of 1914-1918, White immigrants swarmed into capitalism’s American arms and in the process entered the competitive job market African people continued to lose out on. As the crowds at New York City’s Ellis Island were admitted after weeks on ships stuffed with the poor or working poor from England, France, Italy, Spain and Holland, a storm was brewing. Indigenous peoples and Africans had raged against slavery, confining living areas and control in New Amsterdam, New York City’s name when it was Dutch ruled and this continued through English domination and the American period. Their fiercest opponents were often new European immigrants who quickly seized the notion of White superiority inherent in a stolen land.

As quickly as many of these people Anglized their names and established cultural and economic unity, the industrial pistons of the USA shifted into very high gear. Detroit, one of the cities rapidly expanding was an upper Midwest lake port near coal and iron mining, steel production and Chicago’s rail links. Among several mass producers of the automobile was a company dominated by Henry Ford of Cork, Ireland. By paying a flat daily wage to assembly line workers and threats(no talking during lunch and short breaks), Ford was reaping great profits and fueling the idea that like train tracks, roadways could be splayed all over the continent. Detroit, to African people in America had another cultural and historical meaning. It would serve as a model, possibly more than any other, of the 20^th century experience of African people.

 

18 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

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The Obama Solution: Bring Guantanamo 'Home'

DPN#1

 

Educators aren’t just people who are acceptable to and don’t threaten the elites.

There are those of us who may be impoverished, who are exiles, who are prisoners are those folks whose vision is sharp and three hundred degrees wide because we are at the bottom of society. My own education isn’t just my total of school years or the books I have read. Early on I found myself being ‘tolt’ by older people. I have met so called famous people (almost always a let-down due to the celebrity both they and the public create) and have even written books myself. I have spoken in front of microphones and crowds of hundreds, communicated with people all over the world and from various cultures while living among them. But when it comes to being educated by others who have an experience I don’t have, because of age, life situation or a special event, I agree to be a student who can learn something.

 

 

In this first of the Dispatches from the Prison Nation (DPN) an African in America provides answers to questions I had for him about a writer’s book excerpt. It’s a fact that the youth, a generation behind him and several behind me, are going to make a difference in a crumbling America. The man is in the age group of an author (Ta-Nehisi Coates) and his opinion of hollywood actor Don Cheadle in response to an article feature is also noted.

 

No spelling corrections have been made.

 

Bankole

                                                 

 

                                                        2 December 09

 

“…I read the article you sent on Don Cheadle. He came into Hollywood at the right time. I believe his life dictates his rolls. He’s really about change for the have-nots. The poetry you sent is great. But the excerpt from Invisible Man is my favorite. The book is great. Have you read from From Superman to Man by AJ Rogers? I’m circulating it now around the prison.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates ‘Beautiful Struggle’ was great. I must get the book. I think the struggle would be not be dormant if more of us grew up with parents who were struggling. Maybe his book can spark an interest within the youth. We can all play a different roll in revolutionizing.

 

….What’s going on with the youth over there? Over here the youth are still on drugs (pills) but I can see a slight change. They are becoming more political.”

 

 

13 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

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Learning About Florence (Exile 2009)

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Oliver Wendell Harrington’s work was shaped by experiences in America and later as a 1940s war correspondent in Europe and North Africa for the famed Pittsburgh Courier

Ollie Harrington and ‘Dick’ Wright were middle aged friends on the other side of the ocean too. They both had  earlier made a break, got to the other side of the Atlantic ocean to Europe. Ollie, from the Bronx, New York City had a bone to pick, that’s one way of putting it.

 

In the ‘50s when they got together in Paris, which they called home, Ollie mocked Dick. What was he afraid of? Hadn’t Dick been away from US shores for more than a decade? The House Un-American Activities Committee people didn’t have that much sway. Later, McCarthy was dead, a disgraced alcoholic politician who had put so many writers, artists and others under such grief because they opposed the Cold War, lynching of African people in America and the decades of refusing to share the wealth.

 

A 60 year career

All right, Dick had a point: Paul Robeson or his wife Eslanda couldn’t leave America because of the FBI, CIA and the alphabet soup of other secret agencies Eisenhower oversaw. True, WEB Dubois, then progressing through his eighties and his dynamic wife Shirley Graham DuBois were enduring hassles for political belief and activities concerning racism and injustice, made in the USA. Claudia Jones, the tireless Harlem organizer born in the Caribbean had been imprisoned for the same resistance to American degradations of poor and dark people-deportation to London, England had been her fate. The death of actor Canada Lee at age 45, star of Native Son, the movie, didn’t have anything to do with you Dick. All right, the energetic actor was blacklisted from film roles and pressured by the Americans to call Robeson a traitor the way baseball’s Jackie Robinson did.

Going to Bandung, sitting with Nkrumah in ‘57 hadn’t helped your mindset, Ollie consoled. You are doing well enough. You’ve got your country home in rural France and the family you’ve raised here in the 12 seasons since your foresight to leave America. That should cure your damned fears of the White House.

 

Ain’t nobody trying to kill you.

 

Note: Richard Wright, born in Mississippi in 1908, was the author of several powerful books dealing with Africans in America and race relations in the United States of America. He had instructed friends to get him to a specific doctor if his medical problem (supposedly a serious stomach bug) got worse. Richard Wright was sent to another French hospital and died. Ollie Harrington (1913-1995) an ace political cartoonist, left America’s governmental harassment for his sharp satire with pen and ink in the early 1950s. He was convinced that Richard Wright was paranoid until Richard’s death at 52. Shocked, Ollie Harrington left France for communist East Berlin where he lived for the rest of his life behind the “iron curtain”. Continuing to attack through his cartoons America’s dominance and the absurdity of life, Ollie Harrington never forgot his moment of realization when Richard Wright’s words rang in his ears. To this day, fifty years after his passing, most of Richard Wright's FBI files are censored from the public.

12 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

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Early 1900s


From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives...

Culture is important to African people in America.

But what is that?

Is it fried chicken and basketball? Christian gospel music and ever
changing wordplay, superb (sometimes) fashion sense and gut shaking comedy? What of African traditional ritual of the precolonial era? Does this truly define culture of the 60 million African people born within US borders?

Culture is critical to any people's life.

When a people does not know what they have, they suffer.

They are exploited, their image and name are debased worldwide.

They don't care if they are despised-or just as bad they insanely
pronounce themselves as members of another, usually dominant, group in the world.

They will call themselves racial insults.

But explode in anger when others do.

Let's look at Africans in America breaking the USA mold for a moment.

To recall and base ones behavior the ones that began the grueling
march from physical and psychological chaingang in the centuries
called the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s is to be mocked. In fact, American films in the 21st century have parodied the 1960s, the recent past of battle for Human Rights to the point where the Afro hair style, a dominant cultural style symbolizing a break with self hate, is
ridiculed.

Long before the pressing of African hair to straighten it became
profitable, a dance sensation was made up by African people in
America. In the early 1900s era of the US Africans had little choice
but to try and lift themselves up. Doctors and laborers, maids and
teachers lived in the same apartheid areas. Any of these residents
were raped or lynched at any time. A White House employee was a cook.

Something uplifting happened to alter the public profile of African
people. A new dance sprang forth and became popular.

Besides being a creative way of countering the mainly White
minstrels who painted themselves black and bumbled about the theater stages all over the Western world destroying a human image of
African "Americans", it was radically different.

The men and women held themselves with dignity and dressed elegantly in clothing elite Whites wore. All the while they pranced and danced intricate steps that Whites could only stare at--there was no
duplicating the Cake Walk. A large sweet cake was often a prize for
the best couple. The American expression 'it was no cakewalk' today
means 'it wasn't easy'. Dozens of dances, some rooted in nations of
Africa the descendants emanated from, have since stunned the world
in their complexity and the exuberance of the human spirit.



Think Lindy Hop and later the expressive towers of dance climbed by
Talley Beatty (Duke Ellington choreographer) Alvin Ailey and Dance
Theater of Harlem.

A few hundred million people know of the glittery Diana Ross and the
Supremes of 1964 but a lot less know of Fannie Lou Hamer, who sang,
persuaded and built upon cultural work and resistance to Mississippi
injustice. Plain spoken Fannie Lou went from cotton field to the
congress and demanded an end to African people being exploited.

Even today though, ebony, stout freedom fighters are called 'homely'
while the tanskinned lithe women under the corporate stage lights
are seen as an ideal.

Africa, it must be realized has been publicly discreditied for
centuries in European institutions (while every grain of its ancient
philosophy, economics and military sciences have been coveted).

Teaching Africans to hate themselves has its rewards.

Getting a people into position to believing that they cannot be any
more "free" than they already are, is big business.

Gary, Indiana steelworks:  Michael Jackson’s (1958-2009) father worked there in the 1950s to buy the instruments for the family

An inner fear of oppressors, state violence, and that grief put upon
the people by Whites and group disunity halted a great many African
revolts in America. It played a part in the challenges to a racist
US government and society of the last 50 years also.

Though the basic foundation of African culture in America,
resistance, has been noted by many, it is in fact denied by the
people themselves.

An African in/from America failing to stand upon the mantle of
freedom for her people will only tear down a human legacy.

After all, it has been a fight for life for African people in
America.

Not a cakewalk.

27 April 2006

From Exile,

Bankole

 

 

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“As an elder of the Mayan people, I ask that you listen to the clamor of our people. We are not rich, but we have dignity. We have said many times that we don’t want mining, and we are tired of you not listening to us.”

 Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj

 Indigenous Ambassador to Guatemalan president Colom in 2008

There’s the saying that a glass half full of water or wine can be seen as half empty.

When we look at the Human Rights of others in the world, what is “just short of tragic” is often full catastrophe.

 

There is going to be more and more information fed to the public about the woes of the west. That’s a sure thing due to the mechanics of states and other bodies controlled by the rich. In this time, the shifts in money and where the super and almost super rich put it are affecting us all.

 

Blood flows from the impoverished during these kinds of times, even more than ever. Poor people, with a hunger not only of the stomach but of the soul cannot avoid slipping into the breach of the cave-in of Canary Wharf or Wall Street, and the Commerzbank towers in Germany’s Coin City,  Frankfurt. This reality extends to Central America and the Caribbean.

 

Canada and USA: 20,000 tax cheats confessed recently (to avoid arrest) for defrauding the governments (over $20 Billion dollars) mainly through one bank, UBS of Switzerland. Another 5,000 or more still have not settled.

Countries such as Honduras and Mexico have undisclosed political intrigue. Weight is thrown this way and that, the long term USA influence concerning Zelaya and Michelletti has been shown to be a cause and difficulty when viewed from any angle. Three thousand maquiladoras, the manufacturing backbone of world corporations that the USA government oversees line the Mexican side of the southwestern America places called Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. From here diseased men and women construct goods that America, Europe and prosperous Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea consumes, electronics being one of the most prized. Their illnesses are because they handle circuit boards and chemicals ‘no self respecting White person’ would. General Motors, Alcoa and other multinationals go to court to smash the unionized Central Americans in the maquiladoras fighting for a decent wage and medical care that the companies ignore in the advance for cash and stock exchange ratings. Cynically, the politicians swathed in red, white and blue demand American jobs for American workers and allow the uninformed US workers to feed into xenophobia and denial of the Human Rights of people who have ancestors who lived in the region for 15,000 years. Meantime, the port of Houston and New Orleans dockworkers have been offloading low cost, low quality  Chinese products, so the extreme profit making continues.

 

Guatemala’s government was recently ordered (Inter American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica) to pay €2 Million euros for its soldiers’ slaughter of 150 Indigenous people who would not fight for it’s USA backed army in 1982. There were half as many deaths as the USA lost in Vietnam in Guatemala alone (250,000) from the 1960s to the 1990s due to American corporate, political and military domination.

Scenes on electronic screens come to us again and again, relating horrors in Baghdad and Kabul, two locations of the so called global fight against terror. The backyard Washington DC rails about when it cares to, depicts Mexico that has gory drug networks that supply a rampant USA market. USA has answered by building border walls, sending guns and tactical military advisers southward. The  descendants of refugees from wars fought under the cover of racism and profit for at least a half century while the Kremlin ruled are called thugs and deported out of Los Angeles to El Salvador and Guatemala. Raids across the USA to root out the people for not having the right papers, for establishing themselves as best they can in an Anglo-first society doesn’t resonate with the steel eyed cops, judges and the insensitive that stand on their shoulders economically. The people are painted as a burden on the American Dream that only wants ‘hard workers under a rule of law’. That is a bird that is not going to fly in the 21^st century.

 

Those who struggle to keep this illusion aren’t half full of it, they’re a hundred percent full of it.

 

6 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

See Related Articles:

Fire Down Below (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/60940.html

 

Switzerland: Up High For How Long? (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/65577.html

 

Consciousness And Money (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/78418.html

If a migrant is successful, life is very hard.

The most widely known observations of the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (2010) may come from the EU politicians, their press corps and the corporate media. But if I may take a few minutes of your time, I have a viewpoint or two.

 

First, the wealth of Europe is profound and make no mistake, there is no great natural mineral wealth in the Western Europe zone, except for Russia's gas and oil deposits. If coal deposits in Poland count, that is fine, this helps heat-and pollute one of the largest geographical countries, mired in a second or third economic level below the leading economies of Germany, France the Netherlands and Spain. Europe is made up of financial, manufacturing, agricultural and varied economies. It is a processor of the money, the raw materials of other continents. A consumer of resources, Europe's west has been a developer of more ways to further exploitation. This is the reality over the centuries.

 

Where did the gold come from and why is little Denmark  (less than 6 million persons) an economic powerhouse worldwide? There is a relationship between the people of  Italy, Belgium and Portugal to their former and present day colonized lands worldwide. These citizens are still benefiting and are haunted by their governments actions of the times predating 1975. Every Western European country still has towering impact in Asia, the Caribbean, North America, South America and especially Africa in the 21^st century where colonies were maintained a few generations ago. Global wealth from genocide and domination was piled up, notably on top of that which royals and rich individuals, crime families and such had gathered while instigating war, famine and old European tribal conflict. A myth that feudalism was dead was erected as fast as capitalism was built. In the 20^th century, particularly after the second imperialist war of the 1940s, the Europeans on the street were given a high standard of living, when their plight was put side by side with much of the world. Dissent from those called the Left merged and deals were made with outright capitalists. USA occupied Germany (45 years), France, Netherlands (Holland) all got big investment injections and the deals were done as far as political and economic bedrock being built.

Berlin, 1989: Some people have never been freed-Eastern Germany suffers in 2010.

 

While the strength of social democracies in Europe will surely not be around for the one hundred year mark, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden until the 21^st century’s first decade all had traces of the once core principles. Someone who might actually benefit from the  European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion (2010)  has none of  what appears below, and a lot less:

High taxation of wages provides well put together town and city planning, public transit, public parks.

Artists and their work subsidized, nationalized theater, other artforms supported by taxes and state monies in addition to corporate and private individuals’ support.

Health benefits for all, guaranteed. Expert care for all.

Paid maternity leave from work for mother or both parents, sometimes up to a year.

Housing for all, guaranteed regardless of being employed or not.

Relative ease in receiving welfare money if unemployed, disabled or in some other crisis.

Workers of all classes, whether white collar (professionals, executives, etc) or blue collar (people working with their hands) receive extensive annual vacations from employment lasting from 30 days up to 90 days.

While only a brief look at the social democracy idea that took root in Sweden but was destroyed in Spain eighty years ago, it is important to recognize that there have been pitfalls and triumphs. There are even European nationals who have none of the above 'guarantees'.

As the globalizing capitalism’s struggle for oxygen creates new war fronts (the logic is that nation building is analogous to corporate market expansion in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and others) we see that the examination of all economic, political and cultural systems is not an option but a necessity.

Although people pushed to the edge have no microphone power to compete with the cameras,  lights, the graphs, speechwriters and the rest, we have a vision worth exploring.  Excluded and marginalized persons in Europe, and there are millions of us, are denied most if not all of the life possibilities but have a vantage point that can make a difference in crushing injustice.

 

4 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

See Related Articles:

Mountjoy And The Human Condition (Exile 2007)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/75804.html

 

Stuplicate (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/78836.html

 

The Supplicant (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/82472.html

 

 

After the 1960s rebellions, I was part of the first generation of Africans in America to go to a university.

In the days when I was beginning to irritate my parents and adults as a whole, such as teachers, I was considered one who ‘did things the hard way’. Especially after I turned ten years old in 1969,  I was passing the stage of being curious and was moving into ’being a pain’ territory.

 

I not only questioned that which wasn’t to be questioned, I formed my ideas of what might work. This often was what I voiced in the living room as the corporate American news was dictated from the family’s sole television. If there was freedom of speech, could someone please explain why all of the news programs on every channel had the same news stories and the same viewpoint? None of the pasted-on smiling or scowling White men were pleasant to me and I laughed and would parody their speech and manner. If one of ‘us’ was shown briefly stating weather report or a sports update, ‘we’ seemed grateful, delighted and afraid, all at once in thirty or forty five seconds of camera time. I rotated my neck to see one or both of my parents smiling or noting with confidence that so and so knew the tv guy climbing the ‘colored peoples’ social ladder.

If African women were not taken seriously during the 1960s social upheaval, the disturbed portrayal went into bizarre fantasy in the 1970s

 
 In time, there was no doubt in my mind that our family battled on a strange field of hostilities. I got fury boiling inside of me too. But then, what was what I was told to be concerned about and what was my own awakening?

 

 

I felt the odd but recurring sense of injustice at the holidays that never brought ‘us’ esteem. Martin Luther King and to say nothing of the rest of the heroines and heroes ‘we’ claimed -and America scorned- had no official recognition by the government and society. Our parents , even one of my grandmothers, had instructed we thin children that spring day in ’68, to speak up and note our MLK pride. That had flown in the tightened scarlet faces of nuns when I rose to my feet and held my chin up and made what was probably my first speech.

 

In time, eight years of insults, shoving matches and hubris at the Roman Catholic schools and churches, I declared that I wouldn’t return to either at age thirteen. Inside of five years I came to articulate my views and ploughed through enough books to gain a sense of personality. While I wouldn’t have to face the unvarnished racist barricades until the time that I skeptically made my way to a local university, I had been allowed the time to grow.

 

I grew as I witnessed the indignities of people at the mercy of White landlords who drove from one house to another on the same street, repossessing furniture at one address only to give a stern public lecture to a sixty year old grandmother about caring for the chance of using and payment of the same article. Then he told her to get a son or bystanding youth to help her get the tv, chair or cabinet up the porch stairs

 

I felt understanding creeping into my spine, seeing my father withdraw from contact even with other white collar businessmen, bitterly acknowledged as Black tokens at corporations. My mother insisted he get out of the house and walk two minutes to the neighbor and watch tv sports games he would otherwise view alone. It wasn’t likely he would do so with the talkative, good natured and bent backed garbage worker nearby. The gulf between his salary of one week and that of most African so called American men in our area was five to one. Dad and Mom had no car, the price of scrambling to pay the mortgage.

 

When I went off to the township high school, my own relations to most other students, including the ten percent of ‘us’ seemed to be a ball of string that I had to untangle. Was I considered ‘White’ by the cornrow haired crowd because I wasn’t lower class enough? What of the Whites who laughed with me sometimes (but whose vision couldn’t make you out on a street just outside) but who whose mouths gaped when I easily passed tests or entered top level courses?

 

Boston, Mass., 1970s

 

 

 

When the fading bells of high school were in the distance and the bags were packed to go away, I had seen our lower middle class survival’s benefits, as I was being told by society. I weathered the penetrating stares of ‘don’t rock the boat’ African people in America and their condescending (middle and upper class) and violent (lower class) White bosses. Recent Irish immigrants with a thick accent, initially friendly, would quickly learn from the other Whites what place we were occupying. A family close to ours forbid their daughter to get involved in the Black Student Union at school. We all knew as African so called American youth which areas to avoid that were all White and we could be subject to a mob beating. The police arriving on the scene wouldn’t care less if you were job hunting or looking for the discount clothing store. And the idea that they would arrest another Polish, Irish, Italian or Scottish American was cruelly laughable.

 

If there were a hundred thousand questions in front of me then, there may have been a million answers to be found.

 

1 January 2010

From Exile,

Bankole

 

 

See Related Articles:

 

 

On A Rainy Day In Ireland (Exile 2007)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/12473.html

 

Birth Of A Worldview (Exile 2008)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/44927.html

 

Twin Nickels Zero Niner (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/66675.html

 

Preference (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/77231.html

 

 

 

In 2009 Everyone Tightened Their Belt

 Three Years Going On Four

 2009 completes three years here on Livejournal. Two years before that on another now closed web blog system and the first year with this free account, I syndicated articles myself. That was quite a bit of work: I posted certain written pieces on three or four forums. I did a lot of outreach online then. And despite all the hoopla and screeching about Washington DC in that timeframe, 2004-2007 few fellow internet travelers wanted to reply or indicate that I had anything special to say. To this day, one idea that always makes me chuckle is that there are folks that say to me “I don’t understand.” “I want to help but I don’t know how to explain to people what you are dealing with”. That’s humorous-they have no problem reacting like Pavlov’s dogs to corporations, false experts and such. “ I don’t have time, resources…” A good many people have no problem whatsoever in giving time and credence to that which denies thinking for themselves. It is true, no one has to be interested in my plight or what I think and do. But I’ll never accept that I am just another person writing their views online, intellectual and vehement in my outlook because I feel I am right. Although many say they don’t see the context I am working from, I question their mental vision. Exile is forced travel, not to be confused with sight seeing or collecting information for a doctorate.

 

Right now, as I sit here typing this year’s end bulletin, I feel satisfied about battles won, those I slogged through to the finish, exhausted and the downsides to a fiftieth season in my life. I face it all the best way I can.

And so, it is going well today in late 2009. I’m satisfied in what I do with the blog. Except for not being able to conduct as many interviews as I would like with We’ll Talk Anyway, and a little feature, If I Was A Shepherd, both of which I have decided to retire for now, I’m going forward with that which I had planned. I’m interested in giving voice to more in the Prison Nation, exploring the new ExiledOne Cultural Perspectives series and features that are dedicated to deeper research. Security and time limits are a concern. This includes riding out the shaky economic situation the banksters will continue to make ordinary people pay for. Back up and secure your writing, I do!

 

Writing And Finding Topics

If you remember the mimeo you are 45 plus

 

For some people, finding topics is a difficulty. My situation is the time element. Engaging writing takes time to develop. Resources and a style, a slant and an original way to convey information is a challenge that I like. I enjoy researching information and since my ability to gather info rests on limited English language books and materials, I can be faced with what seems like a dead end. Books in English aren’t everywhere in the world! And yours truly has an interest in some other languages and cultures, the alternate world in which information is handled, but I also have little time to do this. And in my opinion, the internet isn’t as valuable a resource as many people think it is. Yes, I’m an dinosaur when it comes to collecting information in some ways. The machines involved have to be considered. If you remember the messy mimeo machine, raise your hand. Carbon copy paper? The typewriter, then  the electric one, the microfiche (does anyone recall making those wet, chemical laden, skin irritating copies from  that?!), microfilm viewers…maybe you can estimate how long I have been around digging up, defining information and putting my opinion out there.

 

Help Is Needed

 

How can I be helped? Write a comment, against or for my positions. Get some debate going with your friends and enemies. Purchase a book from me or a CD or DVD from the Soulful Expression, celebrating it’s 10^th Anniversary. (See link below) That supports independent artists who sing and say what they want to, no big business boardroom involved. Make your voice heard here on this blog. Sometimes I think that most people either speak only on what they feel is going to agreed upon, and they are becoming internet zombies the way that television has silent immobile viewers.

 

How Soon They Forget

 

Looking back on 2009 and this online effort, I’m pleased. Most months I was able to stay up on the number of posts and the quality. That’s important for me as far as what drives me and the other projects that I have going which involve writing and disseminating info. This requires effort and I would like to know that you have something to say too.

 

If you are reading the posts here for the first time, you’ll see that I concentrate not on the corporate stuff called news. There’s enough people pasting this fluff up and then ranting on it. The focus here is analysis and context, all from someone exiled for his political and cultural belief. That’s rare—in this time it is not going to be easy to find an African from America exiled for the stances my partner and I have taken. The unique perspective provided is serious.  Long before the internet, we took the heat for saying what many now acknowledge as that  which is within their rightful Human Rights. Yet just a dozen years ago, to speak of, much less take to task governments about surveillance was unheard of. Those of us who did it for our political opinion and the rights of those less able were risking being seen as lunatics. So, today, as the air rings with protest about what corporations do and governments, individuals and groups with outsized negative influence, the government intelligence agencies, lawless and unaccountable to anyone, it is all quite a relative picture for me.

 

As 2010 pops up on the Western calendars, I intend to continue to share some information in the reality of an exiled African from America. There’s my context.

 

Question me?

 

Absolutely! There won’t be a better world if there is first no arena for debate.

 

Thanks for reading ExiledOne Commentary.

 

All the best for the new year!

 

Bankole

 

28 December 2009

Music Website: http://soulfulexpression.tripod.com/

 

Also, yes, our geocities website is gone. Yahoo eliminated this free system in October ’09. A long planned new political website will appear in 2010.

 

At ExiledOne Commentary we could not end the year without mentioning some activities to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the Soulful Expression.

Below is an Appreciation I wrote, followed by an interview with the founder, Aisha.

 

An Appreciation 

 

Aisha’s Rainbow had some airplay on Toronto radio stations. I recall the positive reactions people had on hearing this tune. A creative whirlwind kicked up during the planning stages of what became the Soulful Expression. That was late’98 and early ’99 in Toronto. By the time Aisha performed her first Canadian band gig in November, 1999, she was beginning to blossom as a bandleader, solo performer, arranger; and as she stated above, composer and budding producer. This wasn’t all. She functioned as her own booking agent. Aisha, the artist, was also her own promotion person, the area I had some ability in. Together, we put on our own shows, renting venues, collecting the gate (tickets) and paid artists a decent wage. Once a German tourist paid her $50 tip at a hotel gig, not unusual for the effect her music had on audiences. Private parties were enthralled. She had the respect of veteran musicians who were from New York and Chicago and they came to perform with her. One special moment was the legendary Salome Bey and Aisha singing and playing in our apartment. Aisha had a regular gig in Kensington Market, hauling the heavy DX7 and stand, mic and speakers on her own on the TTC trams. In the spring of 2000 Aisha used her own money to have 500 CDs burned. This was from a dynamic live show, Aisha and The Soulful Expression in front of an audience of several hundred in downtown Toronto. Her solo Ontario and Quebec television appearance in 2000 was a surprise only to those who never heard the magic.

 

In years to come, I learned from her example. On the road I learned how to book gigs in Europe, arrange travel and lodging, handle CD and DVD packaging and shipping, be an MC, promote the music and I selected a portable baby grand piano she still has. I’ve advised her on publicity and been the roadie and cook for the diva across Europe. I’ve written poems, become a tambourine player and the Soulful Expression photographer, some of my work rivaling true professionals. A high point was our duet performances on the 2006 DVD.

 

I salute a great artist who defines independent artist power!

 

Thank you LovelyOne!

 

Bankole


27 December 2009

 

 

 The Midnight Sun In Sweden

 Aisha & The Politics Of Life Interview

 

EO: Why is the new CD being released in 2009?

 

A: I just got access to equipment to release it. I had tried to do it in 2007. Much of the music was on a tape. A highly specialized person, me, mastered it in 2009. One composition is from ’99, one from 2000. The bulk of the music was from London, July 2001 to January 2002, from the beginning of the journey in Europe. The CD is a rainbow on the horizon for a change in my personal situation, the end of the journey, that’s how I see it. It’s really something special.

 

EO: Any special recollections about recording these compositions from ten or more years ago?

 

A: With Aisha’s Rainbow, I had bought a Tascam tape recording (4 track) machine.  The year’99 was the first year I played for myself or was fronting a band. I experimented a lot with the board, the drum machine. I didn’t understand the science. I did a lot of solos; I didn’t have the understanding of the orchestration.

 

With Aisha’s Rainbow, this was one of the first compositions I did laying down more than one track, not just playing chords and playing. In Toronto I had recorded a live album, The Soulful Expression of an African from America, but hadn’t been satisfied. It was a thrill to have my music out there but the musicians didn’t have understanding or appreciation of what I was doing. I developed further as an instrumentalist and arranger in 2001 in Sweden. In early 2001, with the album Hustler’s Revolution I learned more about orchestration. In Stockholm a friend lent me a keyboard. I got a good grand piano sound, a good bassline and the nice percussion sounds that I wanted. There were fretless bass, slap bass and Fender sounds I needed. I was inspired by the midnight sun and the small Yamaha keyboard-it had a couple hundred really good sounds that I never got from my old DX7.

 

In Southall, a section of London, a woman allowed us to stay in her home in 2001. I set up a piano I bought in Notting Hill for £25 in a crowded  storage room along with the Tascam machine. The London environment was toxic and the people negative. Except for Aisha’s Rainbow done in Toronto, the rest of the album was recorded in London. Acid Rain, Statement of Your Life, Baba Yer Ray, these were created there with the Tascam brought from Toronto. Eventually the Tascam was demagnetized after numerous airplane, ferry, train and bus journeys.

EO: Where are you taking The Soulful Expression in 2010?

 

A: Southern Europe! I want to do the things I like to do. Some of my favorite gigs are in hotels, no pressure, getting paid well. I would like to do another DVD and have the freedom to do more things.

 

EO: Thank you for your time.

A: You're welcome.

 

 

Purchase The NEW CD "The Politics Of Life CD" for €15 (shipping extra-- e mail us at the addresses below)

 

 

"The Soulful Expression 10th Anniversary Gold Box"!  That's the entire collection of 6 CDs + "The Soulful Sessions" DVD (playable in all regions).

€100

You can pay via paypal.   e mail us at the addresses below)

Check out clips from "The Politics of Life" on our new music website!

 

http://soulfulexpression.tripod.com/

 

 Contact us today:

 

soulfulexpression@hotmail.com  (Aisha)

 

or

 

bankole_irungu@hotmail.com    (Bankole)  

 

 

Up to 90 percent of Africans in America lived in the rural US South

 

The year 1920 was exactly nine decades in the past as 2010 begins. Annually since then there have been astounding innovations in technology. The cost to human lives to gain such leaps are downplayed by lovers of Western so called civilization.

 

What took place in America concerning the African so called American in the 1920s is both complex and simple. In the decades after the 1860s Washington DC finally came to grips with a strategy on what to do about the Africans, who had with their bodies and minds, built the premiere industrialized country on earth. Just before the crest of the 20^th century, the 1890s,  marked four centuries since the Italian Cristobal Colon (Columbus) had washed up in the Western hemisphere and instituted Atlantic slavery, the millions of Africans that survived and  inhabited the USA were at a crossroads.

 

Law created and maintained by racist terror became consolidated (Plessy vs Ferguson, 1896) and the Reconstruction Era of the preceding three decades proved to in fact rebuild and compensate the interests of the Confederates, the Whites that had put Africans to deadly work for no wages in the first place. Indigenous peoples had been fighting the tide constantly but had been put onto remote concentration camps and severely forced to assimilate. Mixed Indigenous/African peoples chose ‘the reservation’ or the ghetto. This was underlined globally by the imperialist war of 1914-1918, defending White supremacy worldwide (colonial growth had to be bolstered) and tightened the chains of the oppressed in the ‘mother countries’. Paris, London, Washington all wondered what the oppressed wanted besides all the second class democracy that was being handed out. The Americans in the timeframe of the beginning of the 1900s had replaced Spanish domination in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The English, the other major but fading light was nudging ever closer to it’s former colony. In the coming eight decades, the Americans (and it’s War Department, later named the Pentagon) would enter wars when and where they wanted and profit in doing so. Age old differences in between Europe’s peoples was for the first time a commercial war on the part of mega gunmaking and supply networks headquartered among the wealthy Europeans settled on stolen American land.

 

Some banks established by migrants from the US South survived the economic tide of the late 1920s and 30s. One in Philadelphia was founded by a 'son of slaves'.

 

African people were facing numerous difficulties in the quickly moving intersection of history, cultures, politics and the unprecedented science of war by European peoples to further their systems. African people in America came face to face with confrontations internally. Assimilate or be Self Determined. Was Communism, Socialism, Islam, Christianity, Capitalism, Anarchism or African Spirituality the answer to their plight? There was no where to hide from such questions as a new century gained speed. The year 1920 saw these ramifications start to solidify and shape not only this point of the century’s social, economic and political realities, but the situation in present day USA.

 

1.       Continued economic degradation in one of the advanced capitalist engines.

2.      African cultural riches developed in America beginning to be harvested by Whites, and the technology used by the Americans to illuminate racist stereotypes, inflate illusions of White invincibility.

3.      Influx of European immigrants that took over employment, skilled and unskilled from Africans-the largest historical population boost of White immigrants began in the 1880s.

4.      Migration, often forced because of the US South terror (no land reform occurred after the 1860s for African people) combined with the pull from industries in US North cities saw a first large shift of  African people. There would be steady waves until the 1980s and 1990s when a reverse began.

5.      Restrictive ‘UpSouth’ racism in schools, employment, medical care, social settings, policing and housing began to be established into the vast northern ghetto structure in the late 20^th century US North.

6.      Growth of ‘educated colored people’, many from White fathers or grandfathers, needed for the new apartheid, increased a thin strand of the racially segregated upper class and middle class.  This group was still nearly all within the boundaries of racism’s wall and joined with the mass of Africans in their historical collective unity. But a change was evolving; solidarity with the whole gave way to greater individualism.

 

In this first of several parts of 1920s: Crossroads, it is important to have a context. That’s the purpose of this look back at one of the crucial decades in the recent history of African people in America.

 

 

26 December 2009

From Exile,

Bankole

 

 

New Website Coming!

 

See Related Articles:

 

Howlin’ Still Heard (Exile 2006)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/64533.html

 

One Hundred Thirty Years (Exile 2007)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/9978.html

 

1879 and the Exodus Factor (Exile 2008)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/20879.html

 

Self Reliance, 1800s (Exile 2009)

http://exiledun.livejournal.com/65286.html

 

 

 

From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives…besides the everyday, feet on the ground reality of Europe, there are the actions and reactions of politicos. Some of these characters are women-as if that changes anything. Outside of the attention given their vacations, state/corporation group orgies, (oops, summits) visits to hospitals and the rest, the big picture of how life for ordinary persons is shaped by history and culture. Fascism is an issue few look at that much. Or is it taboo to speak of? We’ll do it anyhow. As we did in '07.

German & Women's Heavyweight & Dalai Lama Of Tibet     "We must give Europe a soul. We have to find the soul of Europe," Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, 2007     Angela Merkel wants Europe to get in step with the world.   Now, a lot of Europeans and other people globally, might be shocked that she even brought this up. But many of us who are not Europeans but who have to traverse the continent that has been dominating the world for several longwinded, wrongheaded centuries can see her point.   Considering that bodies continue to wash up in lakes and coastal waters from the 1940s wars, it is a good idea to heed the meanings-the obvious White, rich peoples' message and the veiled threat to those of us who ended up here one way or another.   The European Union, of which Germany has the early 2007 president's chair, is comprised of mostly Western Europe and the aged former colonial griffins of yesteryear. Still, even without their empire teeth, the states have massive economic gums with which to mash hundreds of countries into submission. Merkel's Germany is leading the pro EU constitution effort before a possible 2009 meltdown during that year's EU parliamentary elections. Opposition and division are rampant. There is no agreement on how to attack a three level European constellation's historically and culturally rooted differences.   What the youth of Europe must face, however, if they are going to reach for the future distanced from the pall of Hitler's 1930s-40s Nazi regime, or less discussed, 1945-1989 occupation by American capital/military forces, are embers of these eras. Names like Le Pen, (French National Front) Mussolini,(descendant of Benito, Italy),Dewinter (Flemish Interest Party, Belgium) are bonding with notable strong racist political cohorts within new EU members Bulgaria and Romania.   If a soul can be found in this crater filled landscape, then there is the prospect of 26 other governments and societies coming to term with themselves and then the rest of the EU.   Angela Merkel's stalled German economy may depend on the unity thrust.   Politically, her life as federal chief depended on coalitions.   18 January 2007 From Exile, Bankole   www.geocities.com/exiledone2002   See Related Articles On This Weblog:   "Deal Me In, 'Sconi !" (Exile 2006)  12/6/2006   Guffaw of A Dubliner (Exile 2006)  9/22/2006   Hitler's American Bible (Exile 2006) 8/31/2006   Ins and Outs of Hell Part One: The EU/US Mob Gets Together (Exile 2006) 5/23/2006 Europe, Youth At The Crossroads (Exile 2006) 3/28/2006   NEW POSTS!   See Related Articles:   Ins And Outs Of Hell Part One (Exile 2006) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/84873.html   Troops In Germany (Exile 2008) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/54006.html   Food, Power And The Time (Exile 2009) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/60533.html   Women, Prisons And Resistance, Part Two: African "American" Women And International Law (Exile 2009) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/76607.html

 

There is a limit

BP24:

 

Watching the saint attack the hill, the BP felt strange waiting motionless at the snow covered bus stop. The racks, panniers and excellent long distance brand name bike was worth a long glance. He even had shin pads under his all weather suit. On rising at dawn, the BP had received word that he was to take public transit instead of riding a bicycle just cleaned and fitted with new brake pads. Groggy from the late evening before and the winter’s day walk from one form of locomotion to another, there were some stirring feelings inside.

 

No wheel envy, but the admiration of those who persevere when so many souls defer to ice, slush and all things subfreezing, cold and white.

 

In truth, he knew, the Tablet of Commandments had clearly stated that safety is first. And he also knew that he had, at fifty years old, to increase his knowledge and awareness of the previously stated fact. True enough, the passing snow soldier hadn’t even worn a helmet.

 

Most of all, he had to admit that the sermon had come down from On High, the Higher Calling was from the BPW (Bicycle Preacher’s Wife).

 

Amen

 

21 December 2009

Sarkozy in Martinique

Martinique, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, La Réunion all use the euro currency. Paris, France has for hundreds of years claimed these distant locations as its own.

The speech patterns of the French narcissist are no match for the isle of flowers.

Some 250 years ago, a white wigged group controlling France was about to face revolution. But first it had an adversary to contend with. The people, also wearing wigs, on land visible through the mists across the North Sea channel were also trying to take over the world.

But the revolt most urgently in front of the French royals and their militaries, navies and business leaders was that the Africans and the mixed races held in the prime capitalist engine, the Caribbean, had been determined to break free. A system created from human trafficking, the blood shed for plantation sugar cane and the basis of French wealth in the world might just collapse and it was obvious that solutions had to be found. The captives were not a monolith. Some just wanted the French to ease up. In the end, Toussaint, Dessalines got many to see that an uprooting of the tree, preparation for a new planting, was going to eliminate French domination in Haiti in 1804.

Martinique, pop. under 500,000, is larger than Tahiti but smaller than Okinawa, Japan.

Carrying Christian crosses and guns, farming tools and a grimace or a smile depending on the occasion, the French were appearing on shores in Honduras in the early 1700s and would eventually be in position to strategize the takeover of Mexico. If the resistance of Africans was crushed in Martinique, Haiti and other islands, the larger problem was the development of African religions, both transplanted and nurtured under the terror of the Europeans or nascent in the blend of Africans from numerous nations that survived the Atlantic ship genocide. Code, political education and lifting of a degraded mentality was led by a succession of Africans, no matter how many were discovered, exiled, tortured and killed. Buying off the ones who might be useful to Paris was only somewhat effective. Jesuit power was swept aside by African deities. In time, 250,000 of the French army and tens of thousands of British Empire soldiers were killed, defeated by Africans in Haiti.

SUGARCANE

In 1759 ten African drummers were kidnapped to England to march in the colonial parades in the English mother country. Admiral Boscawen of what became the Worcester Regiment ‘got’ them from Guadeloupe.

In a political cardgame with global ramifications, Guadeloupe and Martinique were swapped to France as the English began to pull back and build upon their famed divide-and-rule-from-a-distance tactics. England took what became known as Canada, accepting the constant threat of a French presence there. Their own internal problem, America, a British colony, was lost, though they would try and try again to take it. As London and the redcoats had done successfully across North America, the Indigenous people politically fled the razors of the numerous invaders, dealing in order to salvage what they could. Their Caribbean cousins were virtually wiped out by the Europeans.



Close to 500 riot police traveled across the world to put down the Martinique mobilization. 30,000 protesters protested in Paris during early 2009 (above)

Martinique, at the beginning of the year 2010 has a neo Napoleon, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French face to the world, talking about what Martinique wants, needs and what the people deserve and will have.

Dismissing the organized resistance that made the world take notice a year ago, he stood in Fort-de-France, the capital, proclaiming that autonomy but not independence would be the path.

The narcissist doesn’t get history’s point.


Self determination is a peoples' Human Right.

13 December 2009

From Exile,

Bankole

New Website Coming!

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From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives…When the pianists of great 1950s and 60s impact are considered, those that furthered the range of the ‘box’, Mal Waldron is included. A tribute to a master musician who left us seven Decembers ago last week!

Mal Waldron (1926-2002) The lanky figure of Mal Waldron "hippy dippin' " across stage to the grand piano said it all. Cigarette dangling from a dense brown face and a flat white afro/shag haircut, he made his partner, also a legend in his 7th decade, almost unnoticeable. Without looking up at the crowd of thousands cheering at the 2000 Montreal Jazz Festival, he flicked a hand skyward. And that was saying something, since Max Roach, also suited and elegant in his gait, approached his drumkit and mounted the conglomeration of assorted skins, high hats and stick holders like a driver of a space module. The set that followed put any and all who witnessed it in check. What genius! African people in America created wonders when the music misnamed jazz was shared with the world. Style and innovation were on display as the two legends used silence and barrages of chords at different junctures to evoke feeling. Even in the huge hall, up in the balcony where the cheap seats like ours were close to $20 Canadian dollars audience members felt the swing and pulse of the players. "Can you feel that?!" " No, wait, you dig my vibe?" This is what was communicated, though only Max announced a couple of compositions. As for the drummer who defines post 1945 drumkit expression, aside from Kenny Clarke, Max Roach was a pleasure to see in person. A treasured first exposure to him was in 1976. Max did a solo drum date in Philadelphia. Charles Mingus chose Mal Waldron for this seminal album in 1956 It was the first time for me to be a part of Mal Waldron's unique piano voicings, though I had been intimately in tune with Soul Eyes (with John Coltrane) Fire Waltz (with Eric Dolphy, Booker Little) and other great originals he pioneered. While I knew he had been Billie Holiday's pianist just before she died, in later years I found that he had left the US for Europe in the early 1960s. He had scored The Cool World, a Shirley Clarke film from 1964 that fictionalized the powderkeg called Harlem, NYC. On those same streets, Mal, born in the city, got a break from gritty soul sax royalty, Ike Quebec, the man who planted seeds for Blue Note Records' 1950s rise. Prior to that, he had studied European classical music and graduated from Queen's College. Unlike Gigi Gryce, JJ Johnson, Oliver Nelson, all arrangers and composers of world class, but who kept their operations based in the US, Mal Waldron didn't want the racist terms America handed out. Despite his respect for artists like Coltrane and Dolphy, he also saw the destruction of the musicians through heroin and alcohol. He recognized that he had to leave the American scene to be paid and have a moderate amount of artistic acknowledgment for the African culture that blossomed in America. From the mid 60s he began a life in Europe, but also toured the world. Rare live recordings today emanate from places like Japan. With unique power and a not so subtle music signature, Mal Waldron performed and recorded for the next 4 decades. He stood, eventually on the shoulders of his cultural elders such as Earl 'Fatha' Hines, Thelonius Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Elmo Hope and Bud Powell. His distinctive playing remains the mark of a true improvisational giant. He was respected by other "out" pianists like Horace Tapscott, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill and gigged with them in 1988. Known for collaborating with Steve Lacy, the soprano sax player, Mal's creativity found wide listening on independent labels. On 2 December, 2002, Mal Waldron "crossed over", Black Glory bound. He passed on in Brussels, Belgium where he had been living after many years in Berlin, Germany. This written piece is a tribute to Mal Waldron, who, four years ago, many of us were saddened to hear, had bent his last melodic equation. 3 December 2006 From Exile, Bankole OLD POSTS!! Stardust/JJ's Gone (Exile 2006) 10/31/2006 Shadow Boosting: Wilbur Ware (Exile 2006) 9/17/2006 5 Questions Posed in Europe (Exile 2005) 9/6/2006 Quincy Who? (Exile 2006) 8/5/2006 A Small Joy: The One And Only Page (ASJ 5) 6/3/2006 Music & Africans From America: The Global Cultural And Political War Continues (2005 Exile) 1/18/2006 New Music! New Music Website! Aisha & The Soulful Expression: http://soulfulexpression.tripod.com/ See Related Articles: The Flight Of Eric Dolphy (Exile 2007) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/3316.html Max Roach, Legacy V (Exile 2008) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/28086.html Byas The Beacon (Exile 2008) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/50757.html The Autobiography Of Little Richard (Exile 2009) http://exiledun.livejournal.com/81053.html

ExiledOne Commentary Cultural Perspectives #2

Howard Theater, built in 1910 in Washington DC: the plays, music and films of the 20th century often did not reflect reality for most African people.

I can count the theatre plays I have been to on one hand. My life has had it’s share of drama, comedy, tragedy and all that goes into what a live theatre presentation is. It is also true that going to a play was not a financial option for me for many years.

Personally, my theatre experience began in the late ‘60s when I went to see No Place To Be Somebody by Charles Gordone. We were a few busloads of ‘culturally disadvantaged’ children and teens leaving from our corner of the impoverished city. A temporary exit from the housing projects of South Philadelphia was called a field trip. Before that I had only looked at the slim Playbill programs of plays that my parents had attended, such as Purlie.



An modern day actress portrays freedom fighter Harriet Tubman

As a university student, I read many more plays. I read the plays of playwrights Ed Bullins, Leroy Jones (known today as Amiri Baraka), Lorraine Hansberry, Ron Milner, Langston Hughes, Woodie King and others. The definite impact of theatre was plain to me. It was an outlet for our people to have something to say about the realities we faced. Much of the work that was conceived of and produced during my childhood and early adulthood reflected the idea that we must tell our own stories. Many of these plays I could relate to. Though I could appreciate works about the US South, that was a window to see what my older relatives experienced. More urgently, I read of the US North, the urban streets that I saw crumbling around me, the human lives here today gone tomorrow without anyone caring. To those readers around the world who assume that African people in America have long been able to voice their lives in public, or counter the racist degradation as African so called Americans, this may be strange. But it must be remembered that even through music, most authentic voices have been controlled, monitored and are a stump of what the artists often wanted to convey. Only in the 1960s, along with the demand for better housing, food, decent employment, voting rights, health care and Human Rights generally did what is called Black Theatre come about. Those in the lower class and not necessarily writing with American government funding (for staging, promoting and paying salary to the administration and actors) began to have something to say about society. Issues of assimilation into White America, revolution, gender, class, cultural identity, centuries of psychological pain, money, drug addiction, the ghetto, marriage and intimacy with nonAfrican people all reflected shifts in America but through newer prisms of theatre. Being the writers and directors, people could say what was otherwise censored.



Actor James Earl Jones b. 1931- Most African so called American actors born in the first half of the twentieth century learned their craft in America’s racially segregated theatre world, long before there were a few picked for hollywood.

The most recent theatre visits that I can recall were in 1990, 2003 and 2004. During the late 1980s, Philadelphia had a few theatres that put on stage productions about the people’s lives. We certainly did not get this on television as a rule. Two places that I remember were Freedom Theatre and Bushfire Theatre. Long ago, I had seen plays at Freedom Theatre on north Broad street, which sat across the street from the Progress Plaza shopping area. Bushfire, on 52^nd street on the west side was a building being renovated step by step in the 80s. As a vendor, I stood across the street and sold items for African Cultural Arts Forum during those days. I saw that the theatre was open for business and it was there that I attended a play with a woman I was getting to know. I have long forgotten the family drama, other than it seemed to me to be a soap opera I could have seen on television. Since I was avoiding corporate movies and tv, which to me was almost never true in depicting the situation of African people in America, I wasn’t satisfied and told my date so.

I saw Call Mr Robeson in 2003 during Black History Month, which is October in England. In Liverpool, England’s northwestern port, my wife Aisha was on the same bill with an actor, Tayo Aluko, who brilliantly portrayed Paul Robeson in rich baritone song and thundering speech. It was just the man, spotlights and here and there, a couple of backup musicians. Call Mr Robeson was gripping and to his credit, Tayo expressed the principled political side of Paul Robeson and the cost to his career when the Americans opposed him. It was a very good transition when Aisha came on stage and delivered her dedication to Paul Robeson and began her set at the grand piano.

Lemn Sissay-authentic voice of dissent

In Glasgow, Scotland in the city center venue CCA, I was present for Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark, about his growing up in England. This was in 2004. The one man show was enlightening to me. There was the fact that he had lived his script: an African manchild who never knew his father until later in life, being raised as the only African in a small nearly all White town. Though I had traveled and lived across England, Scotland and Wales for several years, and met African people born there or who migrated, I got extra insight. Lemn Sissay is a dynamic poet, actor and was compelling. He spoke to his reality, using humor, sarcasm and this was raw and no doubt explains his success.

In it’s essence, theatre is an expression of life. For most African cultures, this is marked by not only contact with the harshness of captivity, colonialism and it’s centuries long after effects. Music and comedy are almost always present to pass along a message. There is the celebration of the life and love, the laughter in the face of what seems unending aggression. Theatre reflects truths, lies and scolds and cautions.

Theatre should, in this writer’s opinion, stir us into action and also remind us of our capacity to dominate that which holds us back.

10 December 2009

From Exile,

Bankole

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