#BLM

Personal Reflection 

W1

Something rings a Bell, A Door, A Jar, a poem ‘Daddy’.

Confessional school of Universal troops traipsing across

Malachite dreamscapes: the black and white silhouetted corridors holocaust tropes coast along.

I’ve been here before, when Lacan later on

Attempts to explain absolutely nothing.

Then, how to write about the dead?

How to structure what is no longer there.

At the bus stop after, they played ‘Twisted Hitler’.

No wonder New Crit stays days in the closet.

Let’s look instead at containment and shackles.

‘In the Wake’…creating space. It can take years

Renaming The Hold, The Chamber.

I’m late. The train has left, re-imaging The Railway, tracking diaspora.

Best we remember Lists, Brickwork and Memorial Walls

And never forget the respectful distance afforded

When grief is observed and collected

In one-minute units of silence.

The Present Tense of ‘When they call you a Terrorist’ Khan-Cullors/Bandele. I read the defence of the autobiographical example, the personal as political, individual voices/individual names feeding the collective story.  I appreciate her present tense and look for the voices around her. I read ‘A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garzais’, and start ‘#SayHerName: a case study of intersectional social media activism.’ I had heard of #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, the focus on violence against black women using the BLM hashtag. I must connect the recent conversations. I have been often absent. I need to get to know a movement. Their frames. Hers: Trayvon Martin. Back to Emmett Till. Forward to Michael Brown…reappearing signposts, collective narrative scrapbooking, the collage, recognition, markers.

W2

I return to her refrain, ‘We hold on to Hope. Because what else?’

Critical Summary BLM    Ferguson                                                                  

At the beginning of a speech by a guest speaker, it is traditional to thank the organisers for inviting you ‘here today’. In the thank you of her speeches collected in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.’ Angela Davies acknowledges place and time, expanding on the specific context of the room to include the many footsteps leading up to the moment of the gathering. In so doing, the now of the gathering is re-acknowledged as part of something bigger; the now of a speech insists on the importance of the moment.

The Truth Telling Project: Violence in America, Speech given in St. Louis, Missouri (June 27, 2015) is chapter seven. This speech was given not quite a year after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. It took place nights after Obama spoke the Eulogy of Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney after the church shooting in Charleston. The Truth Telling Project was set up by Dave Ragland in alliance with BlackLivesMatter, to provide safe spaces for Ferguson people to record testimony on their experience of police violence. The following/last two chapters were described by the editor Frank Barat as ‘Angela’s reflections on the political struggle from the sixties to the current era of Obama and on transnational solidarity… contributions that should give people tools and arguments to take up the fight’. Perhaps all her speeches/chapters do this, justifying the book-form as toolkit/handbook. Chapter seven opens acknowledging indigenous people, ‘the embeddedness of historical violence — of settler colonial violence against Native Americans and of the violence of slavery inflicted on Africans.’  Within six sentences, her scope has historical depth and geographical breadth: ‘Moreover, the violence of European colonization, including the slave trade, constitutes the common history of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the American hemisphere.’ She energises further research into a myriad of diverse connections. (Mine led back, forward, back to The IWO/McCarthy 1939-53 [1])

The eulogistic repetition of ‘If it had not been for Ferguson’ remembers black death at the hands of the police since Michael Brown. ‘Ferguson’ is then linked to various international social justice struggles and intersectional solidarity thereafter. For her, Ferguson was ‘the beginning’. It was partly due to the resilience of Ferguson protesters that a broader coalition has been built since. Davies praises protesters’ resilience, asserting ‘that Ferguson has become synonymous with progressive protest from Palestine to South Africa, from Syria to Germany, and Brazil to Australia. Her definiteness of message, to a target audience of Ferguson protesters/local activists, aims to orientate and inspire and must have been received as empowering. In a 2015 New York Times piece, Michiko Kakutani writes of President Obama’s Eulogy [2] (given nights before this gathering) for Reverend Pinckney, ‘Mr. Obama’s eulogy used the prism of history to amplify and crystallize the meaning of the occasion — a wide-angle lens that reminds us of the distance we’ve come from the days of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, and the distance we have yet to travel in addressing enduring prejudice and inequities.’ Davies does the same.

In the Forward, West writes, ‘In a clear and concise manner, she embodies and enacts “intersectionality”—a structural intellectual and political response to the dynamics of violence, white supremacy, patriarchy, state power, capitalist markets, and imperial policies. The content thereafter reflects this exactly.

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Bibliography

Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, edited by Frank Barat, Haymarket Books, 2015.

Kate McCabe, The Truth Telling Project: Confronting police violence by speaking truth http://www.eistworks.org/interview-ragland-ttp/

Mitchiko Kakutani Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/arts/obamas-eulogy-which-found-its-place-in-history.html

Notes

[1] Jennifer Young Fighting Anti-Semitism and Jim Crow: “Negro-Jewish Unity” in the International Workers Order http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/the-peoples-issue/fighting-anti-semitism-and-jim-crow-negro-jewish-unity-in-the-international-workers-order/

[2] Washington Post. Transcript: Obama delivers eulogy for Charleston pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/26/transcript-obama-delivers-eulogy-for-charleston-pastor-the-rev-clementa-pinckney/?utm_term=.8f50f7e6d7bc