Saturday, 3 August 2019

'The diminishing of black America’s memory will have consequences for future generations of blacks'

The Price of the Ticket | Professor Harris

In continuation of our discussion on the legendary James Baldwin and his works, there was this book written by Professor Frederick C Harris, that I chanced upon quite recently, which gives added insights, of the incisive type, that also pays glowing tribute to Baldwin.

From Baldwin to Barack, the book titled, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics, does a pretty insightful take on the quintessentially Black achievers of all hues, paying glowing tributes to each of them! 

One of the noteworthy aspects that makes this study tick is found in the epigraph to the book, which is again drawn from an amazing quote of Baldwin’s, the sweep of its understanding not far to seek!

Here goes the epigraph -

Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

- James Baldwin

Cruising through the chapters in full throttle, I had to decelerate full quick and slack up for a pause just a few pages into chapter six! To be precise at page 189!

The lines read -

It was James Baldwin - who always encouraged survivors to bear witness - who wrote, “The Negro has been formed in this Nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other . . .

Set me thinking!

How much the importance for survivors to bear witness! And well, if the survivors have to bear witness, then the powers that be should facilitate in giving them their voice! For them to speak out their angst and their agonies! And for their voice to be heard!

Even legendary hermeneutic phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur vouches to the importance of the witnesses to voice themselves! To Ricoeur then, the alternative to storytelling is silence! Hence, with Baldwin, Ricoeur concurs full pedal, by saying that, a spontaneous willingness to face the past and its resultant loss is hence the beginning of healing and an opportunity to retrieve something from the seeming irreversibility of the past. A kernel of hope is there, a horizon of the future, amidst the debris, he quips.

On this note, Professor Harris continues -

The paradox is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent as long as he is ‘unwilling to accept his past.’

How much the importance of the survivors to willingly accept their past! And if the survivors have to accept their past, then their past should, using the likes of Freud’s repressed memory theory or through ‘recovery of memory’ projects or by any other like means, facilitate a conducive atmosphere for the survivors in allowing them to come to terms with their past!

This is where Professor Harris painfully rues the fact that, unless the survivors tell their stories, then the official version of the story – a tweaked or warped version of the real – would gain in validity, acceptance, prominence and pre-eminence!

How true does the axiomatic statement of Achebe prove here, when he says, ‘Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’

One reason why a great many survivors of the Holocaust, including Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, Elie Wiesel, amongst others have emphasized on the importance of narrating their stories by travelling back in time into their memories!

They also feel that, it is their  bounden duty and moral duty as well, to narrate their stories, failing which the events might otherwise be forgotten, and once they are forgotten, the same events may also stand a high chance of repeating themselves over again. 

So much for the importance of narrative memory!

To Ricoeur then, this narrative memory serves two important functions – first and foremost, it can help to represent the past as it really was, and secondly, it can help to re-invent the past as it might have been, as a gift to the future.

Professor Harris then continues –

It is possible that the newest descendants of the survivors will hear the official story of overcoming tragedy not by those who bore witness or by those who witnessed the bearing of witnesses, but by those who desire to maintain the nation’s reigning myths and ideas about equality and opportunity.

The diminishing of black America’s memory will have consequences for future generations of blacks. Will the “official” national history really tell them about how battles were won and of casualties lost along the way, so that tragedies will not be repeated?

Perhaps this is why the monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., on the National Mall - and the many comparisons of President Obama to the civil rights leader - disturbs memory but makes great history. Obama has been lifted up as the fulfilllment of Martin Luther King’s dream.

That dream was realized when the nation elected Obama - a black man - president of the United States. His election is a testament that he has been judged - and presumably all blacks are now judged—by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin, as King proclaimed in his 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

How future generations of Americans - both blacks and nonblacks - will interpret black America’s struggle from slavery to freedom, from civil rights to post–civil rights to the present day’s persistence of racial inequality, will be dominated by triumphant narratives extolling Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States.  

Like King’s granite image on the National Mall, the civil rights leader’s national memory is frozen in 1963, when King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The selective passages from King’s famous speech convey the spirit of the American promise and hope that the nation will one day live up to its true values of freedom and opportunity. But the King on the National Mall and the president in the White House are where memory fades and national mythology begins.

Now that King is a national hero - whose ideas and actions are no longer a threat to the American way of life - it is easy to erase from memory the last two years of his life, in 1967 and 1968. It was then when King became increasingly critical of America’s failure to deal with poverty and the war in Vietnam.

King believed that the bombs that were being dropped in Vietnam were taking away resources that could attend to the poor in the United States. He believed that the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and militarism worked together to perpetuate inequality in the nation.

He’s sure got a sensible proposition and a valid postulation here, I bet!

Well, again, me thinks it sure ain’t gotta be meet on my part to keep on a platter for y’all the profound study of Professor Harris on Black Politics. The book is available on all popular e-stores for grabs!

Happy reading folks!

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