15 year old Eritrean Arsema Dawit was murdered in London on June 2nd 2008.

Via Africa Rise

Rethabile remembers Malcolm X on Poefrika. It’s an easy day for me to remember as it’s also my son’s birthday. He spent the day looking at some of his maternal ancestors over at the British Museum in London meanwhile here is Rethabile’s post

For Malcolm X

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brain
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?
© Margaret Abigail Walker

Malcolm X was born on 19 May 1925. Happy birthday to him.

Links: Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

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In Prison The Whole Of My Life is a documentary covering the arrest, trial, imprisonment and fight for a retrial for Mumia Abu Jamal. Mumia’s is presently undergoing a complex appeal process which focuses on three major trial violations - the racism of the judge who was heard by the stenographer at trial to make a racist comment about Mumia; the racial bias of the jury members; the prosecutor’s direction to the jury which “attempted to reduce jurors’ sense of responsibility by telling them that a guilty verdict would be subsequently vetted and subject to appeal”. Mumia remains on death row and the new trial will is to decide on whether Mumia should continue to face the death penalty or face life imprisonment with no parole. The campaign for a complete new trial on guilt or innocence remains.

Trailer Film in prison my whole life

The film links Mumia Abu Jamal with the many incidents of human rights violations and militarism in the United States such as the Iraqi war, Guantanamo Camp X-Ray, Abu Ghraib , Katrina. It also brings together the racialisation of the US justice system and the “prison industrial complex, the racialised death penalty and overall assault on dissent by the state and the federal government. One begins to see that US foreign policy of aggression actually starts at home.

One particularly obscene example is the bombing of the MOVE community on May 13th 1985. The film includes the actual footage showing the plane flying over the houses and dropping a bomb. Five children and six adults were killed, many injured and their homes destroyed…….more here and here.

More images here including the actual bombing.

How to choose a jury US style:

I also believe the incarceration of Mumia Abu Jamal, the severe irregularities surrounding his trial, the racism and what I see as the US government’s systematic and continuous attack on the progressive and radical Black community are not disconnected from US foreign policy in Africa. For example the support of the continued occupation of the Niger Delta by the Nigerian military to protect US oil interests, the establishment of AFRICOM whether based in Africa or in Europe (deployment is instant either way). I also believe this is a Pan African issue in the sense that Africans and African descendants in the Americas and Caribbean (including and especailly Haiti) are in the words of Angela Davis

“…..have a special responsibility [to each other] not by virtue of their biological connection or racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent is populated by black people, not only because we trace our origins to Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism and imperialism. ….” “Abolition of Democracy”

The phrase “No Visible Movement” is taken from the film in a discussion between Angela Davis and the film’s narrator, William Francome, on the differences between the campaign to free Angela Davis and the Mumia campaign. In the case of Angela Davis there was a far more cohesive and much stronger radical and visible movement in the 1970s than we see today.

Links: In Prison video trailer.

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In Prison The Whole Of My Life
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Prophecy

There,
where adventure keeps a clean eye
there where women shimmer with language
there where death is beautiful in the hand like a milk season bird
there where on bended knee the underground gathers a wealth of sloes more violent than caterpillars
there where for nimble wonder anything goes

there where vigorous night bleeds the speed of true vegetables

there where bees of stars sting a hive’s sky brighter than night
there where my heel sound fills space and counts down the removal of the face of time
there where my word’s rainbow must bring together tomorrow and hope, infante and queen.

for having insulted my masters bitten the sultan’s soldiers
for having moaned in the wilderness
for having called out to my guards
for having appealed to jackals and hyenas shepherds of caravans

I watch
the wild horse of smoke hurry on the stage hem for an instant the lava of its fragile
peacock’s tail, then tearing off its shirt suddenly split its chest and I watch it as
the British Isles as islets as broken rocks melting bit by bit into the lucid sea of the air
where bathe ominously
my face
my revolt
my name.

by Aimé Césaire

translated by Rethabile Masilo (with apologies to Mr Césaire)

Aimé Césaire was born on 26 June 1913 in Basse-Pointe and died on 17 April 2008 in Fort-de-France. May he rest in peace. While studying in Paris he came into contact with African students, among which were Léopold Sédar Senghor. They struck a friendship and exchanged ideas and experiences, founding the Negritude movement in the process.

They first set up the magazine L’étudiant Noir (The black Student), in whose pages the term négritude first appeared. The essence of negritude was the rejection of assimilation by colonialism and other racial systems, and the expression of one’s own being. It was mostly cultural and less political. When Aimé Césaire declared that je suis de la race de ceux qu’on opprime (I am of the race of the oppressed), there was little colour in the meaning, but much harmony with oppressed people, full-stop. He fought that battle and others till today, the 17th of April, 2008. Mr. Césaire has left for us volumes of poems, plays, essays and other genres:

Poésie
* Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Paris, Présence africaine, (1939; 1960)
* Les Armes miraculeuses (1946; Paris, Gallimard, 1970)
* Soleil cou coupé (1947; Paris, Editions K., 1948)
* Corps perdu (gravures de Picasso), Paris, Editions Fragrance, (1950)
* Ferrements, Paris, Seuil, (1960; 1991)
* Cadastre, Paris, Seuil, (1961)
* Moi, laminaire, Paris, Seuil, (1982)
* La Poésie, Paris, Seuil, (1994)

Théâtre
* Et les chiens se taisaient, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1958; 1997
* La Tragédie du roi Christophe, Paris, Présence Africaine, (1963; 1993)
* Une saison au Congo, Paris, Seuil, (1966, 2001)
* Une tempête, d’après La Tempête de William Shakespeare : adaptation pour un théâtre nègre), Paris, Seuil, (1969; 1997)

Essais
* Esclavage et colonisation, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. Réédition : Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage, Lectoure, Editions Le Capucin, 2004.
* Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris, éditions Réclames, 1950 ; éditions Présence africaine, 1955.
* Discours sur la négritude, (1987).

Histoire
* Toussaint Louverture, La révolution Française et le problème colonial, Paris, Présence Africaine, (1962.

Entretiens
* Rencontre avec un nègre fondamental, Entretiens avec Patrice Louis, Paris, Arléa, 2004.
* Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005.

Enregistrement audio
* Aimé Césaire, Paris, Hatier, “Les Voix de l’écriture”, 1994.
[source…]

NOTE: Please read another of our post on Mr. Césaire

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The Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright and activist, Aime Cesaire died today aged 94. I feel sad that the last of our literary and ideological [negritude] warriors is now gone.

Sad that we people of African descent remain at odds with each other. Where the people who stayed behind have forgotten those who were stolen from their villages and towns. We stand before each other staring at myths and lies constructed not by us, but by those who wish to divide us. But still we believe not what we see but what we are told.

My friend Marian who has also written a tribute in English and French sent me this from a friend of a Martiniquan friend of hers in DC.

Dear Colleagues:

The following is to announce the passing of Aime Cesaire. A poet, playwright, writer, Mayor of Fort-de-France, Congressman, pillar of the Negritude movement, thinker of the African independence movements, Cesaire leaves us with a long legacy of struggle for the dignity of people of African descent around the world, for human rights. As heads of state and dignitaries especially from Africa and the Caribbean are making their way to Martinique to attend his funeral on Sunday, we cannot help but think of the number of people he has influenced world wide through his writings. Cesaire is taught in the majority of the French language departments in universities across the United States and around the world. Among his works “Discourse on Colonialism”, “A Season in the Congo”, “The tragedy of King Christopher” or “Return to My Native Land” have resonated in the 1960s and beyond and have been seminal to liberation struggles around the globe.

Today I also mourn the personal friend and mentor that I visited on every trip to Martinique. I will miss his guidance, strength of character and dignity shrouded in simplicity.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.

Your colleague, Marilyn Sephocle

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