“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

The Black Radical tradition has offered me a lot to learn in this course. It has taught me the violence of being static in a zone of non-being, of being defined by someone else, of being riddled out of history as if a certain history never existed at all. Reading about the African diaspora also taught me the tyranny of being uprooted, and then defining again what one’s home is, among many other things. But most of all, the Black Radical Tradition has taught me the importance of rising up from a silence that is somehow, in different levels, imposed upon all of us everyday. The quote by Audre Lorde above culminates in a sense my argument of what that means. It is the importance of recognition as well. The recognition of the violence of silence and language, the violence of definitions. And it has taught be that me that beyond that recognition, and even within it, lies a hope that looked to the future even beyond one’s own existence. Therefore, while I have learned of blackness as a wounded, traumatic history, I have also learned of blackness as the future.

The violence of language, the violence of naming was perhaps the biggest violence that existed in general relations of domination and subordination. Reflecting back on this, I think this idea became important even when we discussed Moscow as the new center during the time of the Communist International. In my second blog when we had to analyze some posters, I picked a one that inverted the moon laterally and that clawed into Moscow, and I said that this is what communism intended to do: it was changing the center. After having read so many more people in the course, I realize that that changing of the center was also a struggle against the preconceived naming of the West as the center. Naming something as static was the violence. And to change it was the struggle. This violence was addressed by many “prophets/prophetesses” we discussed. For CLR James, when he detailed the violence of the slave experience, he centered the history on blackness. For Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in the struggles of violence and nonviolence – for the former, even in naming the movement “Human Rights Movement”. For black women that became heroines for me: bell hooks, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and so many more, by reading whom I realised the double violence of being silenced by the oppressor outside and within, i.e. the black man.

In essence, what I learned from the Black Radical Tradition was this then: that to have a space in history, a history that was not chartered by the white man, was to recognize how one came to be called what they were and to recognize the inherent hierarchy and power in that. It made me realise the importance of the phrase: There is a space for everyone at the rendezvous of victory. I did not just learn about black history then. This tradition offered me an ethic: to be more aware of the power that exists not just in actions but also in words. To see the violence in preconceived categories. To the extent of making me aware what I write, who do I write about, and why do I write that. . . In the end, therefore, it has taught me to be aware of meaning, and the power within it.

“David, you will not be able to finish the temple. You will not be able to build it. But I just want to bless you, because it was within thine heart. Your dream will not be fulfilled. The majestic hopes that guided your days will not be carried out in terms of an actual temple coming into being that you were able to build. But I bless you, David, because it was within thine heart. You had the desire to do it; you had the intention to do it; you tried to do it; you started to do it. And I bless you for having the desire and the intention in your heart. It is well that it was within thine heart.”

I started with this quote because this was the first thing I was reminded of when I heard the two songs: the Not Yet. Why? Because both the songs were remarkable. They were so potent. So real. However, I also knew that what both of them did was describe not a scene from history, but a continued struggle. The sadness and anger in the songs show that there is knowledge of how things are not any better, however, they, in themselves, speak of a change that they hope would someday come, whatever the means.

Strange Fruit is considered a song highly relevant to this day. While it describes a haunting image of lynched bodies hanging from a noose on a pastoral Southern landscape, the meaning behind the portrayal of unabashed violence is as pronounced today as ever. The song was first performed in 1939 by Billie Holiday, and continues to be produced in other renditions to this day. Nina Simone performed the song in 1954.

The power of the song comes from how particular the image is but also how it speaks for numerous other cases. The song doesn’t shy away from describing the ‘bulging eyes’ and the ‘twisted mouth’. The pastoral imagery is also reminiscent of the ideas of the American frontier which is irreparably tainted by heinous crimes committed against the blacks. The relevance of the song continues to this as it is performed by different artists because as things get better, there is still too long till the struggle is complete.

Mississippi Goddam is different as it is faster, and has a lot more going on than a description of image as in Strange Fruit. This song is about remembering. It is about remembering with defiance. Simone’s voice is angry, it is loud. It is in direct contrast to the repetition of the phrase ‘Do Slow!’. She cannot go slow, because it has been enough. For every effort to legitimize their humanity, they have been told to go slow and wait for a gradual victory. Her fast tempo manifests her defiance with this constant dumbing down of their efforts.

She maps out the violence by naming the states with extreme violence as she says ‘Everybody knows about…’. It is almost like a threat, a firm statement which says that there will be no forgetting because she is not the only one who knows the atrocities black people go through, but everybody knows. It situates this violence in history. She says ‘Don’t tell me, I tell you’. Again, defying the idea that she will be told about the history of her people. She ‘bears witness’ to this history when she says, ‘I’ve been there so I know’. But at the same time, she brings in everybody to bear witness to this violence saying that everybody knows about it.

Both the songs are extremely tragic and powerful. They are filled with unceasing emotion and resistance. However, while Simone displays the evil, she also exists, with so many of her brothers and sisters, within the not yet. This is because, although, the remembrance is there, it is still far from reaping its fruit. While the songs bear witness to what happened, it does not mean it ceased to do so because of this. The profit of resistance was, and still is, yet to show itself. However, the act, the word, and the voice, is the marker of a start of a recognition of their own humanity and history. Simone, along with the others, unveils openly the history that could easily be swept under the rug. It is a different history. A history against the backdrop of the ‘purity’ of the pastoral landscape, against the Americanness of the South. It is the history of violence and oppression. A history of blackness.

“I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American. Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American.”

I was grappling with the idea of the urgency of the black/white divide in Malcolm X’s speeches. His absolute opposition to joining hands with the white man in any way and his arguments against integration seemed counter productive when I first read him. I understood the need to claim one’s own identity, and the fact that the white Civil Right leaders would obviously dilute the agendas of the movement by propagating compromise and negotiations. I also understood the argument about the House Negro and the Field Negro, the latter a figure too familiar as the moderator, or the native elite, we’ve read so far. However, why was it that he did not even call himself American? I questioned if there was not something to gain by being both American and African? Until I realised that blackness is only given a status of a footnote, an afterthought in white history, European or American.

When I read CLR James’ The Black Jacobins and Malcolm X’s speeches again after discussing the notion of ‘pride’ in class, I realized that perhaps the reason the latter insisted on a complete doing away of anything American and identification only with blackness was to emphasise the existence of the black individual as a human, as someone who had their own history. It was about remembering what the whites deemed so important to forget, or to claim to not exist at all.

In order to define this alternative history of the New World, CLR James goes to lengths to describe the torture that the slaves went through in the plantations in Haiti. He gives the slaves a face that was taken away from them in mainstream, Western history.While the fact that plantations were extremely tortuous and dehumanizing was not new, he also identifies the constant recognition of the slaves’ own humanity. For example, when he talks about how a traveller noted the difference of attitudes when the slaves were before their masters and when they were on their own, or that despite the fact the masters would “work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick”, there was still something invincibly human about them. He recognizes them more than just numbers, more than pawns in an entire system of economic and human exploitation.

Two of the most potent paintings I recently came across on the Middle Passage by an Haitian artist, Keith Morrison, captures what I mean by when I argue that CLR James shows the slaves’ perspective of this entire history:

The paintings show the middle passage from the eyes of the slave. The slave that was human more than anything else. We know the accounts of the journey, we know the conditions of the ships through accounts kept by merchants and ship captains. But these paintings evoke so much more because it places one inside and eyes of the slaves as they looked outside. It shows the suffocation, the claustrophobic conditions, the lack of light, and the ever present outside. When CLR James writes about the plantations in Haiti, he takes this vantage point as well. He shows history through the vantage point of those who were enslaved when he does not gloss over the details, or when he shows the sides of them that make them human.

When I read Malcolm X’s speeches in light of this perspective, the need to bifurcate the blacks and white became clearer. In one of his speeches, he points to the importance of the need to realize the ultimate goal behind any revolution: land. Blacks needed their own land, their own black nationalism, and they could not be made to sit on a table and reach a middle ground. They needed their own identity, their own humanity, which they defined themselves without any involvement with the whites. He seems to rejoice when he reflects back on the Bandung Conference, when he say that the only one who was kept away from the conference was the white. He brings together all of the colonizers and says that they are always Europeans, always white. The white, the European, who chartered the course of history and then presented it as the only history, the white history.

As CLR James draws a history of slavery and revolution from the black perspective, Malcolm X keeps the white at bay within that history. He does not want shackles that come with integration, he does not need limits that come with it. So much so that he does not even want the movement to be for civil rights, but for human rights. Because the black is also human. And this is the fact that white history did not emphasise. And this recognition comes from no one, but people who are consciousness of their blackness, of black history, and their black nationalism only. Malcolm X cannot be American because the American does not recognize him and his history existing in and of itself. In order to be recognized, he needs to carve out his own self, a self which is only black. And this is what CLR James and Malcolm X both do.

Amilcar Cabral’s view of culture is twofold. In his essay, “National Liberation and Culture”, he outlines the need for a realization of the colonized nations’ culture to oppose the colonizer. He looks at the importance of a distinct culture from the oppressors’ in order to stand up against it. Yet, in his view of the integrity of culture in for the colonized, he never solely propagates a look at the past alone. His idea is not based at the realization of a ‘break in history’, a going back to an untainted time before the colonizer ever came and find it untouched. Instead, he propagates that culture is grounded in both history and the material reality of the people. Furthermore, he puts it upon the Liberation Movement to be the flag bearer of cultural progress.

When Cabral talks about culture rooted in both history and culture, he converges two diverging ideas. He argues that history is influenced by the economic and political forces of society and thus the history of a people cannot be removed from the present time. He asserts: “The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign rule lies in the fact that, in the ideological or idealistic context, it is the vigorous manifestation of the materialist and historical reality of the society already under domination, or about to be dominated”. Therefore, for Africa, to imagine a virginal past, untouched by the colonizer at all would harm the struggle against the colonizer. On the other hand, to completely forget the history and be ‘assimilated’ in the culture of the colonizer would also discourage this struggle. Cabral argues that this assimilation has been sued as a tool by the colonizer to increase parity and divisions among the social strata of the colonized nation. Thus, “On the cultural as well as political level, vigilance is thus indispensable”.

Another major argument in Cabral’s essay is the role of the Liberation Movement in taking forward culture while maintaining reflixity. He acknowledges how African culture has been deemed irrational and forgotten to the point of invisibility by colonizers like the Portuguese, however, he warns against the uncritical acceptance of one’s own culture as well. He argues that to imagine a culture free from all flaws would be naive and so would be to lose sense of the particularity of culture. Not every social group would have the same culture, he says, and thus it is important to realize the diversity within the movement and the culture of people at large. While encouraging reflixity, Cabral also proposes that it is the Liberation Movement that could take culture forward. This is because by default, the movement requires some sort of education of those involved for the disciplined use of the machinery, along with the ideas of democracy, leadership, and equality of women. Therefore, it lies on the Movement’s soldiers to realize the complexity of the idea of culture and to ground it in the material reality and also take advantage of the progressive ideas they have evolved into.

Thus, Cabral’s idea of culture in his essay is holistic and wholesome. He acknowledges the urgency of realizing this culture in order to oppose the colonizer, yet he reminds people to take advantage of the positive aspects that have trickled down to them from that domination. In poses the Liberation Movement as central and instead of promising an African utopia, he encourages reflection and a merging of the past and the future within the present.

Raymond Betts argues in his book Decolonization: Making of the contemporary world that colonization was based on an assumed superiority on the basis of time. The colonized not only went through a ‘break in history’ from which they could never recover, but they were assumed to be behind actual time: words like pagan, primitive, native, all have connotations of bodies from the past as opposed to the Europeans and later Central America that looked towards the future. A chapter of Dada Amir Haider Khan’s travelogue is also entitled “Break from the Old World”. This highlights that it is this idea of time that the oppressed people collectively sought to address. A new center, away from the Western centre, prepared the unrecognized, oppressed people to learn to together oppose the powers through an education that not only enlightened them but also allowed for them to recognize their own distinct experiences and identity. Yet it was also collective. People from all over the world, differentiated by age, gender, religion, and the color of their skin united as one to march towards the Communist utopia: Moscow. This is what the poster of the oppressed, the workers, also shows. These people no longer accepted being left behind or to be perceived as a thing of the past. There time was now. It was the present that they aspired to change and looked towards a promising future.

In his travelogue, Chains to Lose, Dada Amir Haider Khan illustrates the hope of a promising tomorrow associated with this new center of the world and the Communist International. The above poster entitled ‘Workers have nothing to lose but their chains…’ also depicts this idea of collectivity and the convergence of difference under the red flag that encapsulates the entire circumference of the earth. By inverting the center and leaving United States absent from the face of the earth, Moscow resides in the virtual centre promising better world based on equality and equity. The inversion can also be seen literally in time as the crescent of the moon is laterally inverted. The poster shows a communist leader from whom others appear to be learning. Dada’s travelogue also highlights how in Moscow, the diversity wasn’t the only enchanting thing, instead, the University of the People of the East which harboured people from all parts of the world propagated principles of discipline and taught a new ethic which the people benefited from. The education then also entwined with the need to keep up with the time and to move forward to refute the conceptions of the colonized belonging to the past.

Along with time, the body became central in this new space. The body of the Other was viewed differently in Moscow, the same body that encapsulated threat in the West was celebrated here. The body that was merely tolerated was now intellectually and spatially liberated and was also heard. Dada Amir Haider Khan’s story also shines light on this. The idea of freedom is highlighted as soon as the Communist flag goes up on ship. He says: “As soon as the Soviet crew hoisted their flag and took charge of the steamer, we were free to wander the deck wherever we pleased”. The red flag, also depicted in the picture as going around the world as it almost claws into Australia, broke the shackles that Dada and other people of the oppressed classes, races, nations were bound by. People of different genders and colors are also shown in the poster. Earlier on the ship, he was not even allowed to voice his opinion about the quality of the food because they were Third Class Passengers. Their foreign status and their class position silenced them. However, in Moscow there was greater freedom of mobility as well the freedom to voice one’s opinion. Furthermore, debate and critical thinking was an integral part of the education. Dada asserts at the end of the travelogue that the perception in the United States was that critical thinking and dissent is not tolerated in the Soviet Union, however, it was the complete opposite of what he experienced in his time there. Dada’s class background, his lack of education, and the colour of his skin, as well as his Black companions’ skin colour, did not isolate them. While they were silenced and told to go back to their own countries if they ever voiced alternative opinions in the United States, they were encouraged to do so in Moscow.

The poster and Dada’s travelogue both show the expanse of possibility through the ethic of collective solidarity and education. They both also look at the future as at the end of the travelogue all the comrades go to different places and the poster also shows how the red flag takes over the world.