The route to take in order for a revolution to emerge and succeed has often been a point of contention. At this point people essentially separate into two camps, one siding with violence as the best route to take and the other siding with non-violence. However, both camps urge for some form of decisive and immediate action that would not let time and patience dull that passion. In Gil Scott Heron’s song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, that dullness and stagnation is exactly what is targeted and Heron attempts to replace it with a consciousness. It is a consciousness that is deeply aware of the time and place that it resides in and does not simply absorb what is placed before it. Throughout the song there is a slow and steady beat that can almost lull you to sleep if it weren’t for Heron’s urgent voice jolting you back into consciousness.

It is no doubt that this song also targets American consumerism as Heron references multiple advertisements through the course of the song yet it is that dulled, wilted and paralyzed consciousness that is on the receiving end of those advertisements that Heron criticizes and tries to revive. This consciousness has also been promoted in the two camps battling over the choice of violence and non-violence during the civil rights movement. In Malcolm’s speech “Message to the Grass Roots”, Malcolm X called for an outright revolution that is impossible to achieve without force. However, he uncovers the underlying reason for this continued oppression which is the stifled mode of consciousness that led African Americans to “suffer- peacefully” for years. The act of suffering peacefully in Heron’s song/poem is shown by the conveniences that Heron lists such as “stay home”, “plug in, turn out and drop out” and “skip out for beer”. He shows how these conveniences hide the reality that is lurking behind the TV screen and one can look at it if only one were to develop that consciousness. On the opposite side of the debate, Martin Luther King’s assertion on non-violence being the only mode of revolution also contained disdain towards these conveniences that only hold people back. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, King frames this convenience as the act of “waiting” and how “it has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.” What do these conveniences and the wait that King warns us against have in common? They are both ways through which the hard hitting realities are hidden way; there is something amiss in the world but no one can quite put their finger on it.

Heron’s entire song/poem would be incomplete and ineffective as a whole if it weren’t for the last line which declares: “The revolution will be live”. This not only places the consciousness that Heron desires from average American citizens in the present time but also gives it life. If one wonders what this consciousness would look like in reality perhaps a good example would be Alice Dunbar’s poem called I Sit and Sew which Dunbar wrote right after World War 1. In the poem Dunbar writes about the crippling realization of not being able to do anything and being restricted to your roles while a war is raging on elsewhere. She writes: “I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire/That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire/On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things/ Once men. My soul in pity flings”. In this poem even though Dunbar is within the safe confines of her house and is involved in a household task, she is painfully aware of what is happening outside. It is this burdensome consciousness that Dunbar bears and that Heron tries to evoke in his song and THAT is the first step towards a revolution.

In the preface for Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark, Morrison uncovers a certain ethic or as she calls it an “imagination” in writing that produces works which “invite rereadings”. Her formula requires one to don the hat of a reader and the writer, an imagination that is painfully aware of what it can contain and what it is unable to contain. Once the reader and the writer acknowledge these restrictions and freedoms, the act of understanding or creating that work opens up more possibilities.

Morrison places this responsibility mostly on the reader of such works as she teases out the secondary black characters from white washed literary texts such as Henry James’ What Maisie Knew and points out their significance in the texts despite the writer’s ignorance towards them and their presence in the story. But if one were to glance at the speeches crafted by Malcolm X, Malcolm’s status as a writer and a reader or, to be more specific, as a listener and a speaker is constantly in flux. Malcolm’s imagination as a speaker is accompanied with his imagination as a listener which enables his speeches to have a vitality that has kept them reverberating across history. Much can be said about the tiny nuts and bolts that piece together his speeches. The anaphora, the tone of urgency, the camaraderie, the pauses, the imagery, and the analogies are all parts of the journey that Malcolm experienced along with the listeners of his speeches. His words descending towards the audience invited them or nestled amongst them and made listening a collective activity for example when he said: “Three hundred and ten years we worked in this country without a dime in return – I mean without a dime in return. You let the white man walk around here talking about how rich this country is, but you never stop to think how it got rich so quick. It got rich because you made it rich” he speaks of a collective memory that cuts across time and reminds himself and the listeners of the centuries of hard work that has gone unnoticed.

However, there is one aspect in his speeches where his imagination as a speaker or as a writer reigns over the imagination of the reader. And those are the instances where he dares to say something despite it going against the larger narrative. It is where he breaks away from the comfortable and crippling illusion and speaks his truth. In his speech titled “Message to the Grassroots” he even admits “I know you don’t like what I’m saying, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Because I can prove what I’m saying”. It is also important to note how at times Malcolm X rebelled against his own imagination to put forth the cold hard truths to the people as his wavering support towards Elijah Muhammad or his other ideological changes would denote. All of this shows how powerful and cognizant Malcolm X was in his capacity as a listener and a speaker

For us to explore whether there is space for universalism in Senghor’s world of negritude it is important for us to define the concept of universalism itself and the different ways it manifests itself in this context. So in a way, we can unpack this question by unpacking the term “universalism” itself.

Does universalism imply an inclusionary space that invites everyone and anyone to participate in it? If so, then I believe Senghor does leave room for it when he defines negritude as “an opening to the world, contact and participation with others”. Senghor envisions a world that is captivated by negritude that finds a place alongside terms like “socialism” and “humanism” that have enjoyed their status in the intellectual world for years. Although Senghor exhibits the merits of negritude through examples of “African culture” he reiterates the transformative qualities of negritude that the whole world can experience. He presents it as an ethic that evolves and harmonizes itself with the rhythm of everyday life. Therefore, an ethic that is not just restricted to one race but can inevitably save it from the rigidity of the modern world.

However the origin of that ethic, is primarily an “African” one as Senghor repeatedly reminds the reader. It is the “African” that recognized the “interplay of life forces” or rather possesses them. Senghor inevitably places the duty on the “African” to pass this inherent ability to the Western world. Who that “African” is, Senghor never clearly demarcates. The “African” simply becomes a character that carries Senghor’s narrative forward. This leads to the question of whether universalism is an erasure of the particular or the individual. Although Senghor, through negritude, highlights a “network of life forces” that consists of family, tribes, nations and various other realities of one’s life he still in his vagueness, encases all “Africans” in one neat little category.

Though to isolate negritude and remove it from the time and place it emerged from, would be a severe injustice done to it. It is not simply a stylistic choice that Senghor takes great pains to define “negritude” multiple times in his article. His attempts to carefully point out the nuances that negritude is created out of show what’s facing him on the other side. And that is more categorization imposed onto him by the Western world. To merely call this conception of negritude reactionary would be unfair. It is more an act of retaliation that is relayed in a manner that the white race would understand or perhaps begin to. Through negritude and its aim of “revitalizing ourselves through art” Senghor presents one path we can follow to uncover more paths of living. Therefore if universalism is seen to emerge out of the particular, it definitely has a space in Senghor’s idea of negritude.

While culture reigns supreme in Cabral’s discourse on “National Liberation and Culture”, Cabral also develops a certain underlying ethic that he believes culture should be founded upon. Cabral places culture at the center of our realities, a center that he claims contains “the seed of protest, leading to the emergence and development of the liberation movement”. This beautiful analogy, if allowed, can be further extended to include water that nurtures and provides life to the fruit. This water is the ethic that accompanies a culture devoted to national liberation (my apologies if that was too corny).

This ethic includes a self-regulatory instinct that Cabral believes would keep culture from being exploited and falling into another cycle of oppression. Through constant “vigilance” of the type of culture being promoted, its origins, its strengths and its failings, we could gauge its impact and become more aware of our realities. But what does this extreme vigilance say about the national liberation itself?

Through this constant questioning Cabral makes the reader realize that the national liberation is always an ongoing and never ending process. Freedom is not simply handed to us once the oppressor leaves and the people are free from cultural domination. Since culture is ever-growing and evolving through the passage of time and is directly impacted by the political and economic spheres embedded in the society, the threat of it falling into the wrong hands is ever present. Thus, for Cabral true freedom is a process rather than a conclusive victory that is attained through remaining cognizant of one’s culture and history.

It is also important to note that this keen awareness of a culture’s ever changing nature shows how each nation has a different route to take on the road to liberation. It is simply not a one size fits all scenario but requires an acute understanding of the “historical and material realities” that shape that particular nation and a deeper knowledge regarding a popular culture that is present within the society.

Through this rigorous analysis, Cabral highlights one other feature of national liberation and its entanglement with culture. He points out how harmful the unwillingness of accepting the “positive contributions from the oppressors’ culture” can be and how the blindness towards the negative elements of one’s culture can hurt the movement. Essentially, there is no ‘perfect’ culture but through constant vigilance one could reach a safe middle ground.

There is much to see in Dada Amir’s account of his transformative experience as a young student in Moscow. His account has all the essential elements of a bildungsroman (a coming of age novel) as his successes and hardships, interactions with many influential people and newfound friendships all lead to his self-realization. Yet it is the journey, the literal journey of two and half months, to Moscow that is crucial to Dada’s eventual self-realization and remaps the world that he and all of us were accustomed to.

This remapping of the world, as he knew it, was a process that perhaps would be impossible without the travelling that preceded it. Along his travels from the US to Moscow we get to see Dada caught in the social hierarchies and his attempts to escape them when he rallies all the third class passengers with him to be treated with respect, we also get to see the confinements placed on him and his fellow Indian passengers and their mobility as they were headed to the “forbidden land” of USSR. But most importantly we see how that “forbidden land” turns into the promised land for Dada and many others like him as the journey progresses.

In many ways, Dada’s journey can be encapsulated in the poster above. Moscow transforms into a place where these borders drawn up by the imperial powers would dissipate and cease to matter and it becomes the hub of a mass movement, a grand revolution, a center of the Earth where the oppressed groups gravitate towards. Therefore, this journey that Dada starts upon draws up a new kind of a world, much like the world depicted in the poster above, where the lines of division slowly disappear and people belonging to different countries but carrying the same history of oppression with them are marching towards a grand task. The grand task in the form of a Kraken like creature with tentacles clasping the world looms over the people marching towards a single destination. Similarly, in Dada’s account there is a hovering sense of urgency as he nears Moscow and his presence in this narrative is made significant.  

It is through the act of traveling how we mostly map our world and where we belong in it. As Dada made his journey from the US to Moscow, the maps that he had consulted all his life became outdated and a new map started to emerge. A map that finally led him to the end of his journey.