The Dummy Men

Trues humbly united gathering souls for the Emancipatory dust up.

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DIALOGUES AT THE PORT OF THE UNBOUGHT: Part 1 By the DummyMen

“The Ethiopians are black, the Egyptians thieves, the North Africans cruel, the Damascans liars, and of these four peoples it is the Black who will soonest lose the imprint of the stamp which marks his nature.”

MZ(Dumdum): Part of the general unease of black Africans who come across the discourse of afropessimism, outside, of course, its coming on the heels of two distinct formulations in the 1980s and 1990s that go under the same name and thus may confuse the listener as to which afropessimism one is being confronted with (and this polysemic history of the term with regards to both inside and outside the continent I think is an underexplored theme) is where and how to situate oneself in regards to its locus of enunciation - the U.S-, its articulation of blackness, and its argument that blackness is in a symbiotic relationship with slavery, a symbiosis consummated in and as social death.

One way to broach this unease, or even attempt to abate it, is through the thematic of the black forced to leave and the African left behind. This approach that perhaps privileges an idea of a splitting of a once-whole unit, whether filial or affilial, is not unrelated to the popular rendition of a western modernity that goes on to stipulate the parameters of the properly political, philosophical, social, cultural, scientific and economic. The Atlantic basin, or the New World, thus offers us the proper subject of the political -in whatever guise- against which the rest of the globe now must stand in contention. In this scenario then, the black slave becomes the ultimate degraded non-subject whilst black Africa is geographically lumped in with the rest of the colonized world, and historically locked firmly within the 18th and 19th centuries  along with (anti)colonialism’s concomitant articulations of conflict, oppression, and most importantly of course, liberation.

But our African reader still has questions. How then is she to think of the slave relation in Mauritania between the Haratin and the al-beydan? What of the pressures exerted by the Egyptian and Ottoman forces, or at various periods the Hijaz, on the bilad al-Sudan (literally ‘’the land of the blacks’’ from Arabic which in turn was translated into English by British and American mappers as ‘’Negroland’’ and ‘’Nigritia’’ respectively) via a racialized permanent servile status of its inhabitants? Wherever one looks one is faced with provincially customary distinctions made between, say a Fur and a Fartit in Western Sudan, a Jilec and a Jareer in Somalia or a Habesha and a Barya in Ethiopia. These convoluted local histories themselves are then entangled within a wider orbit of a slaving, slave-trading or slave-holding (or all of the above and more) paradigm that boasts of a much older and long-standing appetite for African slaves in the Indian Ocean basin. If we take seriously the assertion by Frank Wilderson and others that slavery and blackness become imbricated at some point in the 7th century A.D. and follow Bernard Siegel’s thesis that “slavery must be considered in its relationships to the entire social structure’’, then the black African today is left with an unenviable task with regards to the ethics involved in making methodological and political sense of the aforementioned ‘’convolutions’’ and ‘’entanglements’’. But then again, when was the black African ever not in an unenviable position?

AJ(Yumyum): Exactly! The position is unenviable no matter what side of the Atlantic or Indian Oceans, Red or Mediterranean Seas one is on. And here, between all sides of the East & West and North & South divide there is an ontological sameness, a shared ontological misfortune, that often gets ignored. And those distinctions in Africa proper between a Fur and a Fartit or a Habesha and a Barya are unthought and unquestioned sociopolitical positions that have seemed to somehow come from the heavens. But you, as is Wilderson, are making the point that this has not always been the case. And this relational matrix in the hinterland and coastal regions is ignored because I think it is deeply painful to draw these sorts of conclusions that something is happening on the inside of our psyches and on the inside of our romanticized and prefixed places of species origin.

Now let me attempt to bring these twin universes (Africa and the Americas) of existence together. On the African continent you have, as Tsenay Serequeberhan points out, “the inherited and taken for granted self conception of African “liberation” as the guise and mask of neocolonialism”. And similarly in the US context Saidiya Hartman, when speaking to the legal emancipation of the slave, asks the question: “Suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather of intensifying it?” By connecting and thinking about these two historical happenings together we learn that liberation and emancipation as legal events do the work of intensifying the suffering of the afflicted in quotidian and lessly spectacular ways in the everyday. Hereby binding tighter and hiding more cleverly the unattended corrosive open flesh wounds derived from the cultural unconscious in the form of the stereotype beneath the ego structure of the slave’s psyche. That is to say that if we do not do the heavy lifting now and think about how we have been negotiating captivity and about how the ruses of liberation and emancipation have been originary to our political, social, cultural and economic delusions, then the tragicomedy, our existence in the invertible, will be on play ad infinitum.  

The truth is that, as David Marriott reminds us, “Fanon [in ‘Black Skin White Masks’] makes it difficult for us to avoid facing the fact that the ego just is where the stereotype returns - but the stereotype is just the real occupying the ego” and this trojan horse is “the enemy attacking the ego from within”. This means that the stereotype that seeks to disfigure the ego returns to itself as the psychic force that has been sent from without to terminate it. And this is all unconscious. One’s alienation of one’s self from certain aspects of one’s self is a mystifying and fetishizing practice that enables one to save themselves from themselves(??). We can call this objective vertigo a tragicomedy. You introduced me to this text by way of this quote taken from a larger one you first threw my way. And damn! It was a vibe I damn near couldn’t handle.    

Nevertheless, the ruse of liberation beyond the imposition of structural adjustment programs, unfair trade treaties and the like is that “just as Christianity and civilization once [were used to serve] the purposes of conquest and empire, [new code words like] "good-governance," "global stability," "development," "economic growth," "international cooperation," "food aid," "cultural exchange programs," "human rights," "rule of law," etc.[...are the way] the West now perpetuates its hegemony.” In light of this the Sisyphean like failures of post-colonial Africa we can see the same unconscious Fanon identified in ‘Wretched of the Earth’ is still operative. Hence, “at the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind hearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.” This unconscious line of thinking has been calibrated in very predictable and unethical ways as of late - spurring the growth in literature focused on pointing out the good that the colonial project in Africa brought to its inhabitants; even being bold to the point of recommending that these colonial arrangements be reduplicated.* Here the indelible legacies “of [irreparable] separation - and [eternally persisting] continuities” are the issues, that up to this point, “African philosophy has failed to take up”. The psychological effects (and affects) of the “the slave trade and colonialism” cannot be ignored by the Black-African. It is now more pertinent for us to look to this. For the “lingering doubt of the very possibility of self-government” is becoming ever more pronounced. And this entails for a inward look inside ourselves by ourselves and for ourselves as we simultaneously excavate (as best we can) the outside from within ourselves.   

I’m not sure if you remember the Africa-Compton map that Kendrick Lamar put on display during his 2016 Grammy performance, but it captured, to the great dismay and disapproval of Afropolitans everywhere (one can recall the flurry of op-eds and blog posts that came to the defense of the particularity of the ethnic and national identities of Africans. And the feverish way in which Lamar’s presumed ‘hotepery’ and penchant for race essentialism was rigorously denounced), the shared ontological sameness between the ‘beneficiaries’ of legal-politico ‘non-events’ of liberation and emancipation by way of unveiling the cartographic reality of international Blackness. The political and cultural conditions that made Fanon write that “colonialism, little troubled by nuances, has always claimed that the “nigger” was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a “nigger” are still in place. Still, Lamar’s Africa-Compton map in one fell swoop illustrated, as Sylvia Wynter put it, the “connections and correlations between the contemporary state of Africa and the United States’ Black jobless inner cities and their correlated prison system.” If the Americas are the Slave Estate proper then Africa is the den of slaves. I mean even aspiring African politicos with neoliberal proclivities such as Berhanu Nega (leader of the Ethiopian opposition group, Ginbot 7) understand this to a certain extent when he says: “whether you are called Abebe or Jimmy if you know how this country [(America)] works as you should, then, you must know that you are all ‘niggers’ in their eyes.”

[thedummymen-blog]

Today’s episode is a shout out to, as The Washington Post’s Paul Schemm would state in his article entitled  'Africa's real Wakanda and the struggle to stay uncolonized', “the source material” for Marvel’s the Black Panther. Mainly, this is a meditation on the opaque horizon of political and psychic symbolism that cloaks the Horn of Africa, its bi-located diaspora(s) and the greater Black diaspora. I contend that this murky horizon was birthed from the Prester John myth that was popularized in Europe during its Middle Ages up to its Renaissance period. This monarch, Prester John, who the Portuguese claimed was located in Abyssinia-Ethiopia (I presume they saw the figure of Emperor Susenyos I as Prester John), was besieged from all sides by pagans and Muslims (a geopolitical relation that Ethiopia has maintained to present day). A sovereign and Christian nation at the brink of dismemberment – one in dire need of Western support to defend itself from the much-persecuted Oromo and the Somali sultanates to the east and south of it. A nation that has loomed heavy in the cultural and political imaginary of the Black diaspora since the Battle of Adwa. But has it earned its clout? Or is it all just a ruse of Black anti-Black representation? The type Killmonger accused T’Challa and his contempories of in wake of their inaction to support the liberation struggles of a disenchanted Black diaspora and its own continental kin?

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(Aharon E. Joseph)

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Fade to Black (Final Vitamin D episode)

Today's episode will speak to Dr. Selamawit Terrefe and Dr. Frank Wilderson III focusing on the political discourse and theoretical project of Afropessimism. This conversation was recorded a day after the guests conducted a workshop introducing the key elements of the theory's formulation as well as its implication for black-led movement organisations, and took on questions and comments from the black participants present on the day. Following from that, the position of blackness within the symbolic order, and in turn, the differently gendered positions within the intramural, constituted some of the most stressed talking points as were Afropessimism's implications and relevance for black people across the globe, particularly those whose liberation discourse is tied to the claim to land.

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The Flow That Stills as it Kills

by Aharon E. Joseph

Speaking in general terms, Hip-Hop, and more specifically Rap, emerged from the de-industrial dystopia that is early 1970s New York City. Or to be more to the point, Hip-Hop is born in, as Hip-Hop sociologist Tricia Rose states, “the deindustrialization meltdown where social alienation, prophetic imagination, and yearning intersect”. A New York City space-time where Black and Hispanic communities would be the first to experience the terror of being alienated from the alienation they had experienced as racialized workers in the worker-capitalist relation. A New York city already facing the socioeconomic consequences of late 1960s white-capital flight. A city that would be amongst the first to be lashed and gutted out by the austerity measures of the burgeoning neoliberal political and economic order of the day. An era that would come to fruition in wake of both the collapse of the international monetary system created at Bretton Woods in 1944 and the collapse of the Great Society spurred on by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Here, we frame the political economic order that demarcates the libidinal economic scene that feeds the psychic unconscious needs of an anti-Black world, as it is and as it spins.

To put it crudely, the overcapacity of production and the resultant stagnation of production forced capitalists to find an elsewhere outside of production for un-investible surplus capital to be circulated for the purposes of profit generation. For the Capitalist West and its Liberal Democracies to survive the Financial and Labor regulations of the Bretton Woods institutions would have to be curtailed. Namely, so bankers could retool and repurpose international capital for speculative activities outside of production in the realm of finance.

Here the Marxian idea of capitalism always having to restructure itself in the midst of a crisis is disproved. Mainly, because in this period production - even as it is being redomiciled to the newly formed east Asian post-colonial states - was transformed, not restructured, in the American mainland by the advances in information and telecommunications technology. Coupled with this advance was the deregulation of labor. GDP still grows in this particular moment, albeit at a slower rate than the immediate post-war years. Therefore, the Mecca of Hip-Hop, New York City, as Tricia Rose points out, given “its status as hub city for international capital and information services” is the first to feel the social, economic and political consequences of these larger structural changes in capitalism.

To go back to this point of alienation. When we examine this scene we see that one is even alienated from the memory of being alienated. Of being dispossessed from the products of one’s labor. Neo-liberalism is slavery’s paragon. Namely, because in the neoliberal horizon one is constantly in a state of forgetfulness. One is in a perpetual state of out of mindedness. And this out of mind state is brought about by the unrelenting barrage of moves and techniques of capture made by the state, civil society and multinational corporations which intend to dispossess the Black. One is possessed by the desire for the body to think as it is shimming; and as the mind is captured the body drunkenly dances a fugitive dance. A back and forth Davidic-like dance that keeps oneself from falling into the abyss. But it is the stillness of the abyss that will free the mind from its shackles - that will bring about the conditions for the mind to think itself back into consciousness. Is this not the case? Is this not Fanon’s leap into invention? Nonetheless, these moves, the dance conceals, operate as the master's whip - drumming out of mind the memory of one being tied to the products in which they have labored to create; of being the possessor of labor time in the form of life, liberty and property. The recollection of memories in this scene are thus horrendously painful; one stands on knives as they think, as they remember. Here, one is alienated from their alienation. This obfuscation, this murky scene, marks the Black as Black and creates the conditions from where one is not able to see, nor be seen as, being. Indeed, as Anthony Paul Farley states, “we bear the deathly Black mark of dispossession.”

We are those captured from the formally stockpiled African seashores. Seashores stockpiled by loud shouting energetic bodies derived from the motherland’s monadic hinterlands. One thus becomes to be possessed not by an essence particular to themselves - of being for oneself and then for others - but is rather possessed by the wanton desires of market forces and the whimsical boom, bap and bust of the business cycle. This amnesia, this sleepy forgetfulness, is an endless repetition of one’s being alienated from their alienation, from memory- and this episode repeats endlessly like the sampled drum loop.

I talk of remembering forgotten aspects of the past not for the purposes of creating a vendetta, per se. But rather as a way to reconstitute one’s fragmented ego drives into a singular persona. Therefore, like the recurring dream that visits us in our sleep we must remember what is forgotten in order for the dream that eternally recurs to cease from ever returning again. One must recognize the message in the bottle offered up by the unconscious. And this is done so that we may be liberated from the Sisyphean scene repressed from the conscious parts of our psyche. Bringing on a remembering that would institute a violent self-making - an emergence of being - one Malcolm X often alluded to - by way of a healthy dialectical relationship with life and death. A dialectics that develops one’s ethical framework and disposition to the world through, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “a triumphant affirmation of oneself.” An encounter with death that would enable the Black to find themselves in deaths affirmation of life rather than in its negation. And if we are to go deeper with this life affirming ethos, one finds a transformative type of affirmation of the self in the negation of the self, by the self. In this way we are like Frantz Fanon, in that in “the world through which [we] travel, [we are] endlessly creating [ourselves].” Thus, a necessary self-making violence must take place. A self making that up until now has been sublimated and relegated to the imaginary by, as Fanon discovered in his classic ‘Wretched of the Earth’, the “symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and imagined multiple murders” projected by way of the mass media popular culture apparatus: namely, in the realms of film, song, dance, sport extravaganza, gaming and the numerous cults of celebrity/personality spread throughout the modern day temples of worship on the worldwide internet.

I offer no grandiose vision of Hip-Hop’s telos. I only offer up this particular heretical interpretation of its its origins and of its utility. Here, I want to focus on a particularly marginal aspect of Hip Hop: the Fast Rap vocal performance. A stylistic of Rap that merges both form and content into one - and indeed makes them indistinguishable features. I am therefore appealing to a style and technique that merges vocal delivery and lyrical content in such a way as to have each dynamic of the style eclipse the distinctness of the other. A style that perfects Hip hop’s modus operandi of being a supremely lit bombastic sonic light show, of being the grandest of stage spectacles one can encounter. Hip Hop is a universe where the speed of sound is equal to that of the speed of light. The sound and light wave are intermingled beyond relativity. Both vocal delivery and content merge and emerge as a harmonized singular continuum of flow - of a flow that shape shifts, morphs and mutates without beginning nor end. Albeit, a flow that stills as it kills.

This stylistic of Rap, the fast rap - if I may indulge myself in a basic and all too inadequate genealogy - found its most sophisticated articulation in the mid 1990s with the grammy award winning group Bone Thugs n Harmony. All though precedents for the style - going far back to, as pointed out to me recently by my fellow podcast colleague Mez G, the 1968 redo of James Moody’s “Moody’s Mood for Love” by King Pleasure. A style that would later be exhibited by rappers such as LL Cool J, Heavy D, Kool G Rap, Mc Ren, Jaz-O and Freestyle Fellowship (who were contemporaries of Bone in the early 1990s). Contemporaries of Bone, like Twista and Do or Die from Chicago, similarly like Bone claimed the tongue twisting fast rap as their sole creations. For me these posturings, albeit typical of Rap’s insistent need to appeal to the authentic, to the real, obscure for us the political and psychic significance of the style. These posturings obscured what it was that the fast rap in its most sophisticated articulations and enunciations aimed to convey, albeit unconsciously. For in a Gadamerian sense, the artist, as a conduit, is often unaware of the hidden meanings contained within the art they create. 

My point in all of this is to break the genrified bonds that have gentrified Rap music away from the styles of Black ‘new world’ musical articulation which have preceded it - of which it is merely a continuation of. Rap is seemingly a return of the Same - as a novel musical response to the eternally recurring ethical dilemmas that existence in the ‘new world’ has brought on. It is a death-bound scream to be seen, not heard.   

For when we look solely to those enacting the novel style of the fast rap and not to the conditions from which those enacting the style arose from, we mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon. We get caught up in an idolatrous relationship with the phenomena before us. Turning our heads from the real, from the thing that torments as it repeats. Forcing the real, that is the cause for suffering, to constantly re-present itself in new and obscuring ways. And If we are to do a cursory look at the conditions, both material and psychic, the neoliberal instant we are/were in currently in is none other than the paragon of slavery. It is none other than the perfection of the racial capitalism which created the slave estate. A slave estate that made modernity and its ethos of progress possible. Neoliberalism as slavery’s paragon disappears the abolitionist positionality of the Black. It imprisons Black positionality by terraforming it into the subject position of the self-advancing individual the Chicago school and its adherents deemed to be its own generator of capital: human capital. Into the self made entrepreneur. Into the human as capital. Here the Black framed as worker is doubly framed as capitalist, in waiting. And tell me, what is Hip-Hop other than the conversion of near zombified Blacks into entrepreneurs of the self? Into creators of the Self? When there is nothing of a self that exists there is nothing of a self to be saved, only a self to be made.

Neoliberalism in an oxymoronic sense is the death of human capital. Namely, because before this human capital can actually be actualized - this fictionalized form of capital in the form of the Black - it is rendered un-actualizable by the social, economic and political policies of austerity coterminous with neoliberalism. Human capital is a ruse. And as Peter Fleming would suggest human capital theory itself was a mere ideological tool the American empire would use to combat Soviet aims to bifurcate the world into workers and capitalists; where the Trotskyist-like notion of a permanent revolution would be taken up by the world’s proletariat, in an attempt to create a communist-socialist world order.    

Here, in this scene we have restaged in this piece, the hardcore sublime turn in rap, the fast rap, comes to its full fruition in a post-cold-war era - at human capitals end. What emerges after the demise of the idea of human capital is, as R.A. Judy states, “the “nigga”, who “understands that all possibility converts from capital, and [that] capital does not derive from [human] work.”  

In a purely economic sense, in neoliberalism, as Costas Lapvitsas writes, “monopolies generate an ever expanding surplus which cannot be absorbed by the sphere of production and thus results in stagnation. To relieve stagnation there is an inexorable rise in unproductive consumption (including pure waste).” There, in the rusting decaying industrial mainlands of the US, in places such New York City, the socio-economically immobile Black - out of work - was inundated with the pure waste, in a real material and psychic sense, created by the products derived from capitals overproduction. Rather than being the consumers of the frivolous products of consumption characteristic of mature capitalism, the Black was buried by the psychic and material waste stockpiled in the soon to be redeveloped, renewed and gentrified localities they had heretofore called home. Here, the abandoned subject, emptied and hollowed out, innovates new spasmodic and robotic means of life activity and vocal articulation to fight off being buried alive by the pure waste. One finds themselves in the break, in the dance that breaks, in the dance that intensifies the breaking of the self: the breakdance.

To return back to the fast rap now. The staccato fast rap style of the 1990s is the furthering of the innovations started by James Brown in the 1960s. Namely, Brown’s turning of the Bass and Electric Guitar into percussive instruments: into drums. The drum being the first mobile technology. The drum as the conveyer of messages across space-time boundaries. The fast rap staccato-legato vocal performative style particular to Bone Thugs n Harmony is the complete turning of the vocal into a drum. A war drum. A war drum mimicking the sounds of a machine gun. The voice becomes the simulacra of the machine gun. All of this signals to the death of call and response as a logos. It is John Coltrane throwing his saxophone to the side and beating his chest. It is Luther Vandross at the Five minute and Fifty-Seven second time mark of the song ‘A House is not a Home’ breaking down into repeated hushed tone utterances of the lyric, “are you gonna be”. An utterance popularized by its sampling in rapper Twista’s 2003 song ‘Slow Jamz’ featuring both Kanye West and Jamie Foxx.

The fast rap is the death of the call and response logos. It is the end of narration as a means to attaining self determination. The staccato-legato form of the fast rap foregoes the pretense of the want for recognition, of the pretense for the want for love and embraces death not as life’s ultimate end, but as life itself. It embraces Black life, as David Marriott writes, “as the work of death, [as] the work born of fidelity to death, but without transcendence.” Bizzy Bone sums up this sentiment rather cogently in the song “Father” when  he raps: “Life is a fight to the street life, tonight I might go meet the reaper, and I will give him a hug, And tell him ‘Thug love won, and I’m so glad to meet ya”.

Up to this point the rapper has been the spiritual descendent of the spurned native and slave estate informant. Presently, the stylistic development of the fast rap has created the conditions for the long overdue death of the informant. Reborn in this horizon is the warrior-chief who had formally chosen to commit suicide rather than to forego her/his life lived ethically for mere biological preservation. Now the possibility of a horizon without the deprived saboteur informant exists. The willfully ignorant unconscious saboteur who eagerly told tales of murder, sex, drugs, the sex trade, dilapidated housing, for nothing - the one who so eagerly revealed the territory covered by the map, who revealed the inner secrets of dead inner city space - who would be the primary source for the tales eager travelogues would scribble down in the precolonial and colonial periods.

This information gets distilled by the academic industrial complex - and to civil society writ large. It is then shuffled over to the governmental apparatus, to the city officials and then to private interest i.e. the developers and multinational construction conglomerates. These agents of societal change act as the missionaries, geographers, traders and anthropologists of times past. These agents of change - these gatherers of information - prod, open, investigate and analyze the content supplied by the street poets, rappers, graffiti artists and dj’s. These informants roles are no different than that of the griots, the coastal sultans who were tied up in the Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean slave trade, the guile merchants, and the slave raiding military regimes who ruled the African hinterlands. And all of this information is used to find new ways to dispossess and create new markets for exploitation; whether through imminent domain, redevelopment, gentrification or renewal projects. All of this is urbanization. And seen from the unthought position of the Black, urbanization is the means of capital accumulation that has replaced industrialization as the most dominant form of capital accumulation in this neoliberal era.

Nevertheless, the fast rap, as the flow that stills as it kills, is a love, a deathly type of love, a hara love. A love not included in the 6 forms of love identified by the Ancient Greeks. It is a love that submerges the surveiller/listener into the oceanic, into the quiet storm - it is the smooth killing of a smooth criminal. It is, subverting Tricia Rose’s words, an “aggressive public display of counter presence and voice” that forces the white, locked and sealed in a parasitic and eternally transcendent state of being-ness, to finally withdraw into the zone of non-being. Into the poetic mode of existence the Black has been encased into. A poetic mode of existence that midwife’s the burgeoning and dormant unmanifest life potential - the Platonic Ideas/Forms that lay latent in space - into the plane of the living: into time.

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The Battle of Carthage

Have you ever glimpsed a man in his brokenness? His despair nestled under his feet for no one to see. Mountain peaks his eyes peer from. Magnifying glasses protrude from his face – making the sun his aggrieving accomplice; setting fire to that which his heart is intent on having. For if I ruled the world, the tyranny lodged under my feet would be a scapegoat for slaughter – a meal of unfulfilled redemption for herds of leaderless sheep trudging through life’s turbulent waters to eat. Enclosed in this beast’s mane is the river Nile – hidden from the parched mouths of depraved tomb raiders. Tears of blood pump up stream to a decadent dream factory. Scorched by the fury of the Mountain Lion the Earth cries itself to sleep - flooding the valley lows to the mountain tops with its tears as it weeps.

What do I know? Nothing more than what pride and the caveats of my thinly veiled third eye tell me. Seated at the highland cliffs edge – behind the veil of mist - the seeker seeks oblivion. Free falling, the wisp of the wind whispers to me a last lullaby. The plundering ensues – my Kingdom will not suffice – the mob conspires to put my soul on a pike. For they know not that I am the soulless Northerner of ill repute. The legends were true – salvation came by the sword, not by virtue. For in battle the personage is crafted and in defeat the soul is created.

By Aharon E. Joseph

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GOD of noplace

Steam from sewers surrounding grey high-rises creep into the night sky as moments passed reminisce me back into a memory of me. A me forgotten by the me that is now remembering. From side to side the head atop these battle-tested shoulders shift. Old habits die a slow death, I guess. Strange eyes coyly touch mine, as lonely shoulders brush past each other - crashing into evanescence; like where mind meets matter.

The hand in my watch stops as the blood streaming up my face runs away. Jarring melodies play at the speed of light; fast forwarding me to a place these feet know all too well. This mind in rewind sends a shock to the snake wrapped around my spine - reminding it of a time capsule buried beneath the chewed up concrete. My eyes balls sit outside their sockets while a transient fog swoons them to sleep. My jaws part slowly as a vaporized version of myself emerges from of a crimson tinted silvery mist.

Caught in a west end dead end – the haunting ensues. Ghostly figures post up against a weather-beaten wall. Beer ceremoniously spills onto a broken earth as Psalm 88 inscribes itself onto a smoke screen blown from the nostrils of nameless faces that I cannot place; I know that I know but the bonds of friendship tied to memory have been so irreparably broken. The spilled beer makes ant sized rivers in the crevices of the floor. Buried memories reenact their ungodly dramas. Curse this libation.

Old friends die young. Memorials still lay unthought. For me, somewhere, still, not yet in the abyss, drifting, we all still live. Somewhere, nowhere, hidden to even me - by me. And as I await by the boarded up storefront footsteps shake the grieving ground out of its paralysis – taking me back from moment’s passed to now. Recapturing myself I am clothed in the spacetime saga this encounter has impressed on to me. Remembering not to forget that which has never been remembered not to be forgotten will not do. Therefore, then, like falling stars - we fading light's existent outside of the north star’s reach - hope hope away and embody a wish in our Black flesh of a metamorphosized life in another key of this otherwise ephemeral life. A wish - a willed forgetfulness - which pries open a space in spacetime - contriving a place in between the vicissitudes of a belated birth and an always-occurring death.

By Aharon E. Joseph

[thedummymen-blog]

How does the Broken Branch STAND after the Sisyphean Fall?

by Aharon E. Joseph

"Ned Charles. You see there? You see this branch? It comes from the main tree...And when you take this branch  from its homeland...and you plant it in a foreign country, the whole struggle is to try to grow its roots." Ashes and Embers.

I, the rootless exile stationed in the north come from a place where I had no place. I, the anthropologized, pathologized, psychoanalyzed and de-ontologized one have been conceived to be exogenous to the Wittgensteinian world while simultaneously being indigenous to no historical space known to that world. This is my vexing psycho-existential dilemma. It is as George Lamming so eloquently lamented, “I have lost my place, or my place has deserted me” in his essay “The Occasion for Speaking”. Therefore, I, the rootless exile must reclaim a place in a space where there is no space for my placement. This Gordian knot of a psycho-existential dilemma brings on a fatal disillusionment only the admonished blues player would know how to articulate. 

In a perturbed Senghorian manner I have peeked myself outside of myself from the eyes of the Other and have witnessed myself not to be one stasis self, but to be many, for the many, the multitude. Who, readied to be sacrificial scapegoat for the gluttonous overfed nonBlack and white masses dared to fight myself into existence. And I assure you that I have looked where they have told me not to look - into the abyss below the tight rope under my feet - and have seen the mass unmarked graves of our dead, with lilies and roses grown atop of them. Enough! This rank stench of Black social death can no longer be passed off as a southern wind blowing in by happenchance. This glaring realization opens one up to the possibility of experiencing a concerted form of conscious traumatization – the type my comrade Caldwell Williams speaks about - that transfigures truncated conceptions of Black psychic & social life and allows for, as David Marriott I presume would suggest, the racial stereotypes buried (like the fabled Trojan Horse of Troy) underneath the ego to be brought out into full conscious view.                                                      ~~~ When you see the Black community in Toronto (GTA) you mostly see a diverse mix of ‘third world’ immigrants, their children and their children’s children. A community who could be conceptualized as being an eternally incipient lumpen-proletariat underclass in the now globalized world order. This commune of peoples, from a vast array of nationalities, experience Toronto from seemingly different vantage points but are affected by its political-cultural structures in identical ways. In a most general sense, it is the pluralist model from which public policy is created that manufactures the illusion of unequivocal difference between various Black diasporic groupings by making equal ethnicity, culture, religion, language, occupation, level of income, gender and ideology. Fostering power relations which individualize us differently while simultaneously collectivizing us into ghettoized ethnic enclaves in a manner reminiscent - in conception/intention but not in appearance/consequence - to Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans. A perfected ancient Imperial Roman divide and conquer technique. This is why so many of our own activism are by design really forms of factionalism. Factionalizing activities given the appearance of united forward mobility. Pushing us farther from the ghettos of the political-economy deeper into the vagaries of its libidinal economic core. The paradox is this: every time we rise we are fated to fall. And that every time we mobilize we are destined to come to a halt. We are both that which is the unstoppable and that which is the immovable. Allow me to attempt a cursory explanation.

Canadian multiculturalism as a sociopolitical practice benumbs an already fragmented Black social (un)formation into a diverse but tame set of groupings. This is partly the case because in a market driven political-economy diversity(in identity) is taken to be a mere lifestyle choice, a commodity to be consumed at festivals and parades – it is not a political attitude nor is it a political virtue. This reality creates the ‘situationality’ of psycho-social entitlements that acculturates a political disposition in the nonBlack and white cosmopolitan types which engenders a political attitude that is both socially & culturally democratic and fiscally conservative. Spurring the negrophilic cultural aficionado to have both a cozy affectation and a cold and callous disdain for the producers (Blacks) of the cultural products that satiate their libidinal appetites. Thus, marshaling in a constant need to perversely consume, fetishize and be vitalized by Blackness; as it is perceived to be a natural reservoir - a stockpile - of ‘civilizations’ psycho-social discontents. This is the terrain from wherein the new world explorers/frontiersmen, the nouveau Christopher Columbus’, access their transcendence as self determining agents of history. And this eternally reoccurring event transpires on a site of exploration that is everywhere and on everyone but within themselves.

That bland and tasteless so called ‘Indigenous’ North American philosophy of Pragmatism and its Theodore Rooseveltian like ethics of progress and expansion deals with the uncanny, otherness, vis a vis processes of market-driven rationalization. A sociopolitical process which integrates and whole sale rejects the contents of ones cultural ensemble down and away to its most mass marketable parts. Only allowing for undifferentiated difference to be present for marketable and symbolic/signifying purposes. The American melting pot integrates while the Canadian multicultural mosaic rejects. My focus here is of course on Canadian multiculturalism. The multicultural hodgepodge mosaic purveys snippets of identity, ghettoizes differentiated Otherness, monumentalizes whiteness, altogether disposes of undifferentiated Blackness to the outermost margins of civil society and blankets anything else it cannot wholly devour with the elegant but reeking cloak of Canadian indifference (via the rhetorical ploy of Canadian innocence). When in doubt of these truisms, remember the city’s motto of, “Diversity our Strength”, or rather it should be ‘Diversity for sale to the highest bidder’!?

We are in dire need of an intramural discourse that would bind and bond us to one another. One that would silence our various isolation’s with a discourse that would be able to reinterpret our grammar of suffering. Why do this? Because we currently move with the perplexed motion of the exiled; who unsettled by the torrents of an antiBlack world are spinning in an unrelenting objective vertigo; and who, like the fearless Matigari from Ngugi Wa Thiong'O's extremely poignant and captivating novel 'Matigari', call the house which we have been barred from entering, the house we have labored to build, our home. But this house is not a home. This house is haunted. Namely because the whole world is haunted. And it is haunted by the never-dead always already-dead. By those whom lay in unmarked graves. And this dance we do to keep our eyes from seeing the haunting is our estrangement expressed in (dis)embodied form. This exercise in futility, is in simple terms: a ministrelsy. Therefore, in the midst of the pervasive Black social death that resists to desist we need to bare witness to the burial of our illusions and the nameless - of our ancestors - and we need to seek our martyrdom no matter how long it persists to evade us. Gabriel Garcia Marquez sums up this peculiar notion rather cogently in his classic novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, when the ineffable Jose Arcadio Buendia remarks: “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”

Many of Toronto's Black intelligentsia and literati were dumbfounded by the support the Black lumpen underclasses gave to the late and former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. Many rightly highlighted Ford’s questionable and dubious claim of being Toronto’s biggest supporter of the Black community. Indeed, while feigning negrophilia in public, in council he voted against the implementation of various social programs which would of been a boon to a major slice of the city's Black families. One can recall with heavy heart the Black men, who caught in the crossfire of the Rob Ford crack scandal, tragically lost their lives. Support for Ford in light of these realities was rather perplexing. But this support runs deep for mysterious but yet oddly intelligible reasons. I speculate that Ford’s demagogic right wing populism garnered support in certain sections of the Black community because at an unconscious level one surmised this: that Ford amorality so thoroughly dismantled and unveiled the cognitive and performative contradictions that underlie the city’s old moral Anglo-colonial codes of conduct. A morality we can tentatively call Victorian morality. This system of morals is coterminous with this city’s founding. Most will recognize its manifestation on a personal and existential everyday level in the passive-aggressive, arms length, overly polite, emotionally detached, screw faced, too eager to say sorry and slightly neurotic Torontonian. Elders from the former British colonies of the Caribbean and Africa vividly know and understand the hypocrisy, the scandal and untruth of Victorian morality. A morality that would rather keep up appearances then be true to its form. To be more to the point, Euro-America, as Aime Cesaire sagaciously points out in ‘Discourse On Colonialism’, is “unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience” that it itself as a civilization has deemed to have created. Thus, the appeal of Ford's demagogic right wing populism was not premised on Ford being a viable political alternative to the laissez-faire neoliberalism  of the Miller era. Both espoused antiBlack politics - and we can not forget that TAVIS was created and implemented under the David Miller administration. Ford's appeal was that he was a self-destructive force of amorality that brought a light to the moral incongruities of the cities plutocratic political-business elite, which is best represented in the figure of the current mayor of Toronto, John Tory. To put a Fanonian spin on it, the rot and gangrene that unremittingly festers outside of the city’s core found a way into the heart of the metropole. And this event, this invasion. was met with astonishment, bewilderment and tight fisted apprehension by the old guard and liberal humanist do-gooders, alike. During this time-period the antiquated nineteenth century notion, “Toronto the Good” was macerated – and I say good riddance. One might even call the fanfare of the Ford administration as a destructive destruction of destructors as a redemptive retribution for those who have been conscripted to making a decorative art form out of a blood sport. And this all happened without expectation of anything of substance being culled forth from the civil societal nor municipal governmental apparatus during of the tumultuous Ford mayoralty. And I know that many will object to this audacious claim that I have made.

One cannot classify this nontraditional activism as apathy nor as being naively apolitical. For this supposed apolitical activism is the very detestation of an optimistic or pessimistic politic - two political attitudes that if rebuffed bring on various forms of apathy. This is not apolitical it is anti-political. And no, this is not apathy it is nihilism – nihilism in the most edifying sense imaginable. I will call it an ‘edified Black nihilism’. This manner of nihilism involves an analectical questioning/dismissal of everything and anything deemed essential until a point of nothingness is faced and a something must be created without historical memory as an aid, ex nihilo. One must stand out of the damnation of hell, from non-Being-ness, and exercise power. An ego-power that is like the mythic Lernaean Hydra. A power that is not yet a will-to-Be, but is a regenerative destructive force. This is the place where Black social death comes to live. This is the ground so many have already chosen to stand on. Long gone are the fence sitting, waiting on heaven to come after the apocalypse, pseudo lily innocent, faux altruistic and praying in the rain days. We make our home in the ruins of Babylon.

What we need are institutions that will create anxieties wholly our own. That will push us forward into uncharted space. That will give us the incentive to be active in our Black body politic as power seeking ‘subjects’, rather than as ‘subjugated subjects’ divided by innately antiBlack rent seeking political processes. But these institutions will only be built when our edified Black nihilism is finessed into a power politic. A Black power that is not merely some antiquated idea from a bygone and unenlightened era. This Black power, constituted by conventions created vis a vis the years of submissive subversive resistance to oppressive and death dishing systems, will valuate new systems into existence – conventions that turn into new unsaid norms that valuate when structures deconstruct. We realize that we are a vast assimilation of non-assimilated values, that when conjoined together can build an edifice, a building to be housed within, a new timeline. It is this non-imperial imperialism, this temple building, that will enable us to be in Empire but not be of Empire, to be within Empire but to not be from Empire. We will be in our Being. For we have been Beings in their Being, which they have ontologized as being their non-Being/void for all of modernity(eternity?). Let them be for themselves so that they may finally deal with their deranged estrangement - with their void, with the galactic Black hole at the center of their historico-cultural horizon. Thus, let us commence with our project(ed) (movement): the creation of a Black space in Time & Space.