The Liberator Magazine | Blog

A Philly Style celebration [event]

2010-02-08T14:01:00.007-05:00

This Friday, February 12th Live From the Planet Earth, and the city of Philadelphia...

The Liberator Magazine presents Philly Style, the celebration.
wsg/DJ Rocdaspot
+Photography by Kalima Thomas
+Chocolate Buffet

At:
Elena's Soul
4912 Baltimore Avenue
8pm-12am
No Cover

in conjunction with/
Blake Montgomery, LLC
Sankofa Community Empowerment
YFS of ADI
Ubuntu Media
Exodus Designs
AskForMercy

The Liberator Magazine
Emerging from the urban enclaves of America, it is a publication conscious of its own potential to contribute to and help maintain life. Yet, it has become a global phenomenon, embraced worldwide: from Minneapolis, Washington D.C., New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philly; to London, Nairobi, Kampala, Dakar, and Johannesburg.The Liberator will: provide an inlet to underexposed culture and political movements around the world, while providing creative and functional analysis of mainstream culture and politics in order to help build and maintain strong, culturally rich communities. It will: ensure that the artistic, cultural and political stories of individuals and communities around the world are told and heard, analyzed and respected.

The Liberator Magazine Philly Style Issue
Philly Style is the first in a series of localized feature articles that will reflect the experiences of various locales around the globe. The function of the Philly Style Issue is to provide a brief snapshot of the Philly that is often ignored.

A Little While by Edwidge Danticat [haiti]

2010-02-07T15:06:00.001-05:00

Was gonna wait till Monday to share this. But football preparations can be set aside for a meditation so eloquent and touching.

(SOURCE: New Yorker)

A Little While
by Edwidge Danticat

My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.

Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. “I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, “as though I spent all three days pushing him out of my eyes.” She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again.

Maxo often complained about his parents not celebrating his birthday. “Are you kidding me?” I’d say, taking his mother’s side. “Who would want to remember such an ordeal?” All jokes aside, it pained him more than it should have, even though few children in Bel Air, the impoverished and now shattered neighborhood where we grew up, ever had a birthday with balloons and cake.

When Maxo was a teen-ager, his favorite author was Jean Genet. He read and reread “Les Nègres.” These lines from the play now haunt me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If I ever return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”

Two days after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, on January 12, 2010, I was still telling my brothers that one night, as we were watching CNN, Maxo would pop up behind Anderson Cooper and take over his job.

Maxo was a hustler. He could get whatever he wanted, whether money or kind words, simply by saying, “You know I love you. I love you. I love you.” It always worked with our family members in New York, both when he occasionally showed up to visit and when he called from Haiti to ask them to fund his various projects.

The last time I heard from him was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild a small school in the mountains of Léogâne, where our family originated. The time before that, someone in the neighborhood had died and money was needed for a coffin. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, Maxo made each request sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him or herself.

When my eighty-one-year-old Uncle Joseph, a minister, left Haiti, in 2004, after a gang threatened his life, Maxo, his son, was with him. They travelled together to Miami, hoping to be granted political asylum. Instead, they were detained by the Department of Homeland Security and separated while in custody. When Maxo was finally able to see his father, it was to translate for the medical staff, who accused my uncle, as he vomited both from his mouth and from a tracheotomy hole in his neck, of faking his illness. The next day, my uncle was dead and Maxo was released from detention. It was his fifty-sixth birthday. Once the pain of his father’s death had eased, he joked, “My parents never wanted me to have a happy birthday.”

After unsuccessfully pursuing asylum, Maxo returned to Haiti. He missed his five young children, who were constantly calling to ask when he was coming home. There was also his father’s work to continue—small schools and churches to oversee all over Haiti. The return, though, was brutal. During our telephone calls, he talked about the high price of food in Port-au-Prince. “If it’s hard for me, imagine for the others,” he’d say.

His time in detention in the United States had sensitized him to prison conditions and to the lack of prisoners’ rights in Haiti. He often called asking for money to buy food, which he then took to the national penitentiary.

This generosity, along with the Haitian sense of kindness and community, is perhaps why, immediately after four stories collapsed on Maxo on January 12th, family, friends, and even strangers began to dig for him and his wife and their children. They managed to free his wife and all but one of his children, ten-year-old Nozial, from the rubble two days later. Even when there was little hope, they continued to dig for him and for those who had died along with him: some children who were being tutored after school, the tutors, a few parents who had stopped by to discuss their children’s schoolwork. We will never know for sure how many.

The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said, why not me?

By the time Maxo’s body was uncovered, cell phones were finally working again, bringing a flurry of desperate voices. One cousin had an open gash in her head that was still bleeding. Another had a broken back and had gone to three field hospitals trying to get it X-rayed. Another was sleeping outside her house and was terribly thirsty. One child had been so traumatized that she lost her voice. An in-law had no blood-pressure medicine. Most had not eaten for days. There were friends and family members whose entire towns had been destroyed, and dozens from whom we have had no word at all.

Everyone sounded eerily calm on the phone. No one was screaming. No one was crying. No one said “Why me?” or “We’re cursed.” Even as the aftershocks kept coming, they’d say, “The ground is shaking again,” as though this had become a normal occurrence. They inquired about family members outside Haiti: an elderly relative, a baby, my one-year-old daughter.

I cried and apologized. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you,” I said. “If not for the baby—”

My nearly six-foot-tall twenty-two-year-old cousin—the beauty queen we nicknamed Naomi Campbell—who says that she is hungry and has been sleeping in bushes with dead bodies nearby, stops me.

“Don’t cry,” she says. “That’s life.”

“No, it’s not life,” I say. “Or it should not be.”

“It is,” she insists. “That’s what it is. And life, like death, lasts only yon ti moman.” Only a little while. (source)

The African Cities Reader

2010-02-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga Magazine present
The African Cities Reader #1 (read/rightclick+download):

/////"In many senses African cities are amongst the most generative and vibrant places on the planet. Yet, we know next to nothing about what goes on in the places. Not that there is any shortage of caricature, hyperbole or opinion about what makes African cities such quintessential spaces of dystopia and atrophy. We believe that a range of interventions that seek to engage the shape-shifting essence of African cities are long overdue and present this modest initiative as one contribution to a larger movement of imagination to redefine the practical workings of the African city.

For us it is self-evident that one has to take the youthful demographic, informality and a non-conventional insertion in global circuits by African urbanites as a starting point for a sustained engagement and retelling of the city in contemporary Africa. The cultural, livelihood, religious, stylistic, commercial, familial, knowledge producing and navigational capacities of African urbanites are typically overlooked, unappreciated and undervalued. We want to bring their stories and practices to the fore in the African Cities Reader. In other words, the African Cities Reader seeks to become a forum where Africans will tell their own stories, draw their own maps and represent their own spatial topographies as it continuous to evolve and adapt at the interstice of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony.

In terms of focus, tone and sensibility, the Reader will be vibrant, unapologetic, free, accessible and open, provocative, fresh, not take itself too seriously, but also be rigorous and premised on the assumption that it will grow and evolve over time.

The launch issue (2008/9) is organised around the theme: "Pan-African Practices". The back story to this theme is the recognition that all African cities are the product of multiple trajectories and origins, which implies that that the living, breathing, pulsating fact of African cities adds up to a form of 'pan-Africanism' that is more interesting than the tired tropes of pan-African Nationalism that remains the stock and trade of many official discourses about transnational and trans-local practices on the continent. We believe that 'pan-Africanism as a practice' despite the repeated deaths of pan-Africanism as a nationalist discourse opens up multiple explorations into the spatial specificity of cities crafted in the border zones between informal/formal, licit/illicit, chaotic/ordered, etc. Furthermore, in terms of over-arching knowledge projects, we perceive a productive space between: on the one hand, the imperative to respond to and engage with the dismissal of blackness/blackhood by a stream of postcolonial philosophy - a move we suspect may be too soon and too definitive - and, on the other, the insistence of dominant discourses and institutions that some essentialist African exceptionalism and solidarity is possible. However, the idea is not to dwell here but simply to use the idea of materially and symbolically grounded practices to explore the public and popular cultural dimensions of pan-African cityness. Throughout, the critical focus will invariably fall on practices, phenomenologies and spatialities and their intersections.

Naturally, flowing from this exploratory vantage point, the African Cities Reader will be open to multiple genres (literature, philosophy, faction, reportage, ethnographic narrative, etc), forms of representation (text, image, sound and possibly performance), and points of view. The African Cities Reader will seek to embody and reflect the rich pluralism, cosmopolitanism and diversity of emergent urbanisms across Africa. Thus, the Reader invites and undertake to commission writing and art by practitioners, academics, activists and artists from diverse fields across Africa in all of her expansiveness."/////

Avatar: A Pop Culture Band-Aid in 3D

2010-02-06T14:58:00.000-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

Avatar: A Pop Culture Band-Aid in 3D
review by Angus McLinn, Liberator Mag Intern

[Editor's note: Contains some mild spoilers]

"Avatar," James Cameron’s special effects-laden box office hit, has garnered quite a bit of attention worldwide. It is now the highest grossing movie of all time and is already being compared with "Star Wars" as a milestone in special effects technology. Aside from the awe-inspiring visuals, "Avatar’s" popularity is at least partially due to the myriad of contemporary social issues it addresses. The audience sees criticism of privatized health care when wounded veteran and protagonist Jake Sully mentions that, due to a recession, he can’t afford surgery to restore the use of his legs, despite the existence of available technology. The conflict in contemporary society between spirituality, faith, and the secular desire to dismiss these two forces is reflected in the movie as well; the corporate bandits looting Pandora of its 'Unobtanium' reject these values as primitive and backwards, yet Jake discovers that the 'mysticism' of the Na'vi is based on some quite real scientific phenomena.

As many others have already brought up, the film is also implicitly critical of the Iraq War, and even includes a bit of “fighting terror with terror” by the imperialist military forces attempting to seize the valuable minerals found under foreign soil. This, of course, brings up issues of imperialism and globalization, albeit on an intergalactic scale. And, it’s a special effects-driven epic to boot. It includes a climactic "Independence Day"-style dog fight between the rag tag locals and the imposing, technologically superior alien invaders; all while a monolithic mother ship type carrying a deadly payload that bears a strong resemblance to a star destroyer grows ever closer to symbolically and metaphysically bombing the Na’vi to oblivion.

Simultaneously, a heroic and ultimately futile "Last Samurai"-esque cavalry charge into heavy machine gun fire is occurring on the ground, reminding us not to forget the film's omnipresent battle between tradition and technology. Add space marines in automated combat armor they must have borrowed from Ellen Ripley of "Aliens" fame, nine-foot tall blue feline/humanoid aliens, giant reptilian birds that look like dragons, floating mountain ranges, and even a cigarette-smoking-yet-still-a-good guy character and there can be no doubt that "Avatar" is indeed a sight to see.

Of course, as the film contains so much social commentary, it has drawn the attention of many cultural critics, some of whom have wasted no time in pointing out the ‘white savior myth’ plot arc, as seen in its spiritual predecessor "Dances with Wolves." The film does fit quite handily into this category. The 'hero' Sully manages, in just six months, to not only successfully assimilate into the Na’vi culture and officially become a member of the tribe, but also capture a legendary avian monster that only five others ever had in the history of the Na’vi, unite the tribes, successfully repel the imperialist forces the tribe themselves could only lose ground to, and marry the tribe’s gorgeous and capable princess, Omaticaya. This is indeed problematic, but "Avatar" ends up being counterintuitive to its own underlying commentary on contemporary social issues in other ways as well.

While the film does highlight the existence of several important social issues we face today, in the end its oversimplified solutions to complex problems provide an ersatz form of resistance to audiences. Sully’s big idea to resist the militarized forces of intergalactic capitalism and planetary imperialism turn out to be very similar to the Na’vi’s previous modus operandi: violent opposition, but this time with feeling. Sully was cast to be an easily relatable "everyman," and audiences can identify with his increasing cultural awareness and eventual disgust with the profit-driven rape of the newfound beings with little effort. This makes it all the more unfortunate that the ultimate expression of this dissatisfaction is accompanied by explosions. The result is a film that advocates opposition to a grim picture of the status quo, yet offers very little in the way of new modes of thinking about these issues. Having already paid $15 to see the feel-good hit of the winter in Imax 3D, audience members feel both reaffirmed in their right-minded opinions (senseless destruction of the environment is probably immoral; the rights of indigenous people should be respected at least enough to avoid genocide, etc.) and vindicated of the responsibility to approach complex issues with complex thought rather than simple statements of ‘no’ and ‘action’. You can’t physically fight corporate greed, and making a giant scaly bird rip a helicopter out of the sky is a dubious way to improve respect for cultural diversity -- at best.

Granted, "Avatar" is a major motion picture and was created to entertain and make money, both of which it does admirably. It is also not the responsibility of a film to do the thinking for the audience, but in the case of "Avatar" as it stands now, it amounts to more of a pop culture band-aid for the bruised consciences of American audiences than a rallying cry for social justice, as some have chosen to view it. Cameron simplifies issues America finds itself on the wrong side of all too often. This, combined with visceral escapism achieved both through the film's spectacular special effects and the plot itself (when Sully leaves his human shell behind for his alien avatar), warrants discussion. After all, record-breaking audiences bought in to get the social capital necessary, and it’s far from too late for "Avatar" to mean everything it always wanted to.

Dancehall Queen [film]

2010-02-06T12:37:00.003-05:00

(Watch in playlist mode)

The Story of Cap & Trade

2010-02-06T02:26:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting film from Annie Leonard (the creator of "The Story of Stuff") that attempts to put the less talked about details of "Cap & Trade" environmental law proposals into a common sense perspective.

Alice Walker: Goodbye to Howard Zinn

2010-02-04T12:24:00.004-05:00

(SOURCE: Boston Globe) On hearing the news of his death.

Me: Howie, where did you go?

Howie: What do you mean, where did I go? As soon as I died, I went back to Boston.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over. My African roommate and I got a good look at him every day when he came for his mail in the post office just beneath our dormitory window. He was always in motion, but would stop frequently to talk to the many students and administrators and total strangers that seemed attracted to his energy of non-hesitation to engage. We met formally when some members of my class were being honored and I was among them. I don’t remember what we were being honored for, but Howard and I ended up sitting next to each other. He remembered this later; I did not. He was the first white person I’d sat next to; we talked. He claimed I was “ironic.’’ I was surprised he did not feel white.

I knew nothing of immigrants (which his parents were) or of Jews. Nothing of his father’s and his own working class background. Nothing of his awareness of poverty and slums. Nothing of why a white person could exist in America and not feel white: i.e., heavy, oppressive, threatening, and almost inevitably insensitive to the feelings of a person of color. The whole of Georgia was segregated at that time; and in coming to Spelman I had had a run-in with the Greyhound bus driver (white as described above) who had forced me to sit in the back of the bus. This moment had changed my life, though how that would play out was of course uncertain to a 17-year-old.

One way it did play out was that the very next summer I was on my way to the Soviet Union to see how white those folks were and to tell as many of them as I could, even if they were white, that I did not agree to my country’s notions of bombing them. I didn’t see a lot of generals, but children and women and men and old people of both sexes were everywhere. They were usually smiling and offering flowers or vodka. There was no “iron curtain’’ between us, as I’d been told to expect by Georgia media. I love to tell the story of how I was so ignorant at the time I didn’t have a clue who folks were queuing up to see in Lenin’s tomb; nor did I even know what the Kremlin was. I also didn’t speak a word of Russian.

Coming back to Spelman, I discovered Howard Zinn was teaching a course on Russian History and Literature and a little of the language. I signed up for it, though I was only a sophomore and the course was for juniors (as I recall). I had loved Russian Literature since I discovered Tolstoy and Dostoevsky back in the school library in Putnam County, Georgia. As for the Russian language, as with any language, I most wanted to learn to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned $17 a week working 12-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: “Why, there’s nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!’’

It would be hard not to love anyone who stood in one’s corner like this.

Under the direction of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) many students at Spelman joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. Naturally, I joined this movement. Howie, taller than most of us, was constantly in our midst, and usually somewhere in front. Because I was at Spelman on scholarship, a scholarship that would be revoked if I were jailed, my participation caused me a good bit of anxiety. Still, knowing that Howard and others of our professors, the amazingly courageous and generous Staughton Lynd, for instance, my other history teacher, supported the students in our struggle, made it possible to carry on. But then, while he and his family were away from campus for the summer, Howard Zinn was fired. He was fired for “insubordination.’’

Yes, he would later say, with a classic Howie shrug, I was guilty.

For me, and for many poorer students in my position, students on scholarship who also worked in the Movement to free us from centuries of white supremacy and second-class citizenship, it was a disaster. I wrote a letter to the administration that was published in the school paper pointing out the error of their decision. I wrote it through tears of anger and frustration. It was these tears, which appeared unannounced whenever I thought of this injustice to Howard and his family - whom I had met and also loved - that were observed by Staughton Lynd, who realized instantly that a) there was every chance I was headed toward a breakdown; and b) the administration would quickly find a reason to expel me from school. Added to the stress, which nobody knew about, was the fact that I was working for a well-respected older man who, knowing I had to work in order to pay for everything I needed as a young woman in school, was regularly molesting me. Lucky for me he was very old, and his imagination was stronger than his grasp. As a farm girl and no stranger to manual labor, I could type his papers with one hand while holding him off with the other. What rankled so much, then as now, is how much others respected, even venerated him.

Perhaps this was one of many births of my feminism. A feminism/womanism that never seemed odd to Howard Zinn, who encouraged his Spelman students, all of them women, to name and challenge oppression of any sort. This encouragement would come in handy, when, years later, writing my second novel, “Meridian,’’ I could explore the misuse of gender-based power from the perspective of having experienced it.

With Staughton Lynd’s help, and after he had consulted with Howie (I did not know this), I was accepted to finish my college education at Sarah Lawrence College, a place of which I had never heard. I went off in the middle of winter, without a warm coat or shoes and ice and snow greeted me. But also Staughton’s mother, Helen Lynd, who immediately provided money for the coat and shoes I needed, as well as a blanket that had been her son’s.

In my solitary room, and knowing no one on campus, I hunkered down to write. Letters to the Zinns, first of all. To inform them I had been liberated from Spelman, as they had been, and had landed.

I was Howard’s student for only a semester, but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance: steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor, is a teaching I cherish. Whenever I’ve been arrested, I’ve thought of him. I see policemen as victims of the very system they’re hired to defend, as I know he did. I see soldiers in the same way. In some ways, Howie was an extension of my father, whom he never met. My father was also an activist as a young man and was one of the first black men unconnected to white ancestry or power to vote in our backwoods county; he had to pass by three white men holding shotguns in order to do this. By the time I went off to college, the last of eight children, he was exhausted and broken. But these men were connected in ways clearer to me now as I’ve become older than my father was when he died. They each saw injustice as something to be acknowledged, confronted, and changed if at all possible. And they looked for signs of humanity in their opponents and spoke to that. They both possessed a sense of humor and love of a good story that made them charismatic teachers. I recently discovered, and it amuses me, that their birth dates are close, though my father was 13 years older.

Howie and I planned to rendezvous in Berkeley in March, when he came out to spend a few weeks with his grandchildren. In April we planned to be on a panel with Gloria Steinem and Bernice Reagon at an event in New Orleans for Amnesty International. I had decided not to go, but Howie said if I didn’t come he would “sorely miss’’ me. I wrote back that in that case I would certainly be there as “soreness of any sort’’ was not to be tolerated.

Over the years I’ve been in the habit of sending freshly written poems to Roz and Howie. After her death, I continued to send the occasional poem to Howie. Last week, after the Supreme Court’s decision to let corporations offer unlimited financing to electoral candidates, I wrote a poem about what I would do if I were president, called: “If I Was President: ‘Were’ For Those Who Prefer It.’ ’’ My first act as president, given that corporations may well buy all elections in America from now on, would be to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, both men accused of murders I’ve felt they did not commit; both men in prison for sadistically long periods of time.

Howie’s response, and the last word he communicated to me, was “Wonderful.’’ I imagined him hurriedly typing it, then flying, even at 87, out the door.

The question remains: Where do our friends and loved ones go when they die?

They can’t all go back to Boston, or wherever they’ve lived their most intense life.

I fell asleep, after leaking tears for Howie most of the day: my sweetheart’s shirt was luckily absorbent and available to me, and after tossing and turning almost all night, I had the following dream: We (Someone and I) were looking for the place we go to when we die. After quite a long walk, we encountered it. What we saw was this astonishingly gigantic collection of people and creatures: birds and foxes, butterflies and dogs, cats and beings I’ve never seen awake, and they were moving toward us in total joy at our coming. We were happy too. But there was nothing to support any of us, no land, no water, nothing. We ourselves were all of it: our own earth. And I woke up knowing that this is where we go when we die. We go back to where we came from: inside all of us.

Goodbye, Howie. Beloved. Hello. (source)

BBC Radio 1: Essential Mixes (All of them!) [mp3]

2010-02-02T20:09:00.000-05:00

Essaywhuman?!!!??! Yes, this is true.

BBC Radio 1: Essential Mixes (download them)

An awkward interview with Nneka

2010-02-02T17:49:00.007-05:00

Nneka's beautiful U.S. debut album drops today: Concrete Jungle (she's also performing at S.O.B.'s tonight in New York for $15). Click the topic "Nneka" below to browse some of the free tracks we've shared with Liberator readers in the past. The lady has the magic in her as you'll glimpse in this interview, despite the interviewer's awkward incompetence.

New tracks from Sade [+ video]

2010-02-01T03:09:00.003-05:00

Soldier Of Love

(rightclick+download)

Skin

(rightclick+download)

In Another Time

(rightclick+download)

Moon and the Sky

(rightclick+download)

Mos Def + K'naan on Austin City Limits

2010-02-01T02:42:00.002-05:00

PBS' music series Austin City Limits reserves an entire night for master emcees Mos Def and K'naan. Catch the entire episode below, including live performances and some high quality conversation-style interviews with both artists.

Austin City Limits f. Mos Def + K'naan (watch full episode)

Dolphin: Mono vs Stereo [ep/mix]

2010-02-01T02:34:00.001-05:00

Funky electronica. No one is f*ckin with D'Angelo. Or Steve Spacek either for that matter. But as far as young folk in the apprenticeship tradition Dolphin is puttin in some serious work, sincerely. I'll be sharing much more of his work in the coming weeks. After reaching out to him, he dropped a whole bag of good 'ish for me to share. My favorites on this Mono vs Stereo project are "Fresh Flowers" and "Deserve You". Very right.

Mono vs Stereo (download it)

"The Revival": Conversations with Roxanne Shante and Bahamadia on disillusion, family and re-emergence [short film]

2010-02-01T02:14:00.001-05:00

Life is a wonder. The human connection makes it wonderful. The American ~~music~~ entertainment industry has a proven, severely habitual history of riding talent until technology can enable sexual and violent appeal to overshadow it with either no profit decline or a profit increase. So it's no surprise that when complimented by Bahamadia on a performance a night before, Roxanne Shante responds:

/////"Y'all know how I feel about performing. You know I don't like to do it." She later continues, "I started to see that towards the end, I started to feel that I gave more than I would ever get... I didn't want to stop being me... I didn't want to let hip-hop or them change me so I had to walk away."/////

Check out the short (17 min) film where that conversation and more are captured. It's called The Revival and is directed by one of Detroit's upcoming emcees, Invincible.

Bahamadia later says, "that's what I thought hip-hop was, you supposed to be yourself, you know I'm a single mom, I ain't never lied about my age, none of that. So when that sexy thing came out it sorta overshadowed it, but I don't wanna say it overshadowed it, it just kinda gave me another course to take... I felt like I gave so much of my life to the game, it started taking so much out of me and I didn't have nobody to talk to. And we probably were always there and could have been there as females in the industry -- a support group or something. But it was always a divide. It was always a group of males in the background whispering in your ear keeping it separated."

Roxanne Shante even admits, "I find myself supportive of female emcees now, I'm not gonna sit here and say I always felt that way because I'm sure from my past history of records you can tell it wasn't always that situation... this has been an eye-opening and spiritual experience. Unlike what people would think, there is no quarreling, we actually have just bonded immediately as a family and we literally live as sisters do."

And by the end of the short film Bahamadia's giving testimony to her own revival thanks to experiencing witnesses communally testify to her the role she has played in their lives:

/////"I realized that I wasn't by myself, that everybody in the industry is not competitive like that, and there are some people that wish the very best for you. And there are some people that are true to their word. There are some people that get the picture that it's strength in numbers, and are willing to get on the same plane with you and pool they resources together so y'all all can break bread fairly and justly. When I saw that with Stacy [Epps] I really felt humbled, even though I'm older than y'all and been in the industry longer. At that point I felt that it was still some hope for me and it inspired me to continue on."/////

Le Da Soul: 20 yrs of De La Soul remixed [ep/mix]

2010-02-01T02:13:00.000-05:00

Some of the hardest working folks in the underground "pay respects to the kings" over funky remixes of De La classics presented by mixtape masters Mick Boogie & Terry Urban. Features by Tanya Morgan, Homeboy Sandman, Phife Dawg, Talib Kweli, Asheru, Camp Lo, Tabi Bonney, Big Pooh, etc.

Le Da Soul: 20 Years of De La Soul (download it)

Hype! [film]

2010-02-01T02:10:00.000-05:00

Graph Nobel: Something 2 Die 4 [ep/mix]

2010-02-01T02:01:00.000-05:00

Graph's raspy vocal tones are simply beautiful.

Something 2 Die 4 (download it)

On Beauty: Dawn Okoro [visual art]

2010-01-23T15:39:00.001-05:00

{"Saturday's Best" © Dawn Okoro}

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

While the next few issues of The Liberator are cooking, we'll be sharing snippets of our Visual Arts interviews and articles. For the full versions, be sure to subscribe to the magazine for $10 a year. (Less than the cover charge at most clubs!)

As the readers of this here blog have gathered, I'm big on artists (and anyone else for that matter) who explore and challenge notions of beauty and identity. So it was a pure delight to come across the work of painter Dawn Okoro, who has been creating bold, sensual, and bright, color-saturated portraits of Black women for the past few years. Okoro, who holds a law degree and is currently based New York, was kind enough to talk with the Liberator a bit about her work.

To see more artwork from Okoro, visit dawnokoro.com, If you're in New York, she will be showing work next Friday at RFA Gallery for "Urban Pulse", described as "an exploration into identity, class and culture set against the ever evolving back drop of New York City, featuring the paintings and sculptural works of Dawn Okoro, Jordan!™ and Justin West."

(Note: This interview was co-edited by our winter intern, Angus McLinn, a student at Macalester College in St. Paul.)

LM: Who and what inspires your paintings?

DO: I grew up flipping through fashion magazines and imagining myself as part the fantasy world they presented. That is the foundation of a lot of my art concepts. I am inspired by fashion, television, advertising, and people.

LM: Also, would you mind talking a bit about your technique? What is it like working with models and taking the photos that become the blueprints for your paintings? Also, would you ever consider having your photos be the end product as opposed to a reference point for your paintings?

DO: I start out with a mood that I want to convey. I may browse photos from various sources to see examples of how I could have models pose in order to convey that mood. The models are sometimes friends or referrals. Other times they are models that I find online through a model networking site. The models usually wear their own clothes and makeup and we just experiment with different poses that I think fit the concept.

When I shoot the models, I try to imagine how the painting would look and then frame them accordingly. I use the resulting photos as inspiration and as a guide to keep the figures proportionate in my paintings. I change colors and other elements, depending on how I want the end product to look. I am very open to the idea of having some of the actual photos as the end product in the near future, although this will involve building settings for the models to pose in.

LM: I noticed that many of the women in your paintings tend to be dark-skinned and have amazing, perfectly coiffed afros. Is this a conscious decision to address our notions of "traditional" beauty and take on the perennial debates about complexion and hair texture? Also, I was wondering how you felt about Andrea Pippins' recently launched I Love My Hair project. It seems like you two are on the same wavelength visually and conceptually. (www.ilovemyhair.com)

DO: One of the reasons that I have painted the afros is simply because I find them aesthetically pleasing. In some of my paintings, I have taken an image that I saw in a mainstream fashion magazine reformed it. As I continue to create work like this, I do hope to incite conversation about this unconventional beauty that is missing from most of these magazines. My practice does overlap with Andrea's because we’re both putting a spotlight on beauty that hasn't gotten much shine in mainstream culture.

"Slow-motion hypnosis": The Liberators [visual art]

2010-01-23T15:35:00.003-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

While the next few issues of The Liberator are cooking, we'll be sharing snippets of our Visual Arts interviews and articles. For the full versions, be sure to subscribe to the magazine for $10 a year. (Less than the cover charge at most clubs!)

Novelist. MC. Filmmaker. Lawyer. Record label owner. Alan C. Page, wears many hats, and now one of his latest ventures is authoring the Liberators comic book, which follows the adventures of four young people who take on crime and corrupt politicians in Center City, USA, which could be any major metropolis in America. However, it’s not your average comic book, because the protagonists follow the example of the likes of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground and George Jackson.

Page was kind enough to tell the Liberator about the impetus for the Liberators, his background, and other projects in the works.

For more information on Page, check out lonegunmanmedia.blogspot.com and newgoldenera.com

LM: What inspired the Liberators comic book series?

AP: The Liberators script was initially written around 2001. The script is influenced by a lot of the Panther biographies and literature that I had read for several years prior to 2001 up until that point. I decided to work with [political emcee/former prison reform activist (and
prisoner)Jahi] Foster-Bey because I confided in him that I was seeking a visual artist and he told me he could draw. He was a political hip-hop artist whose first mixtape was called "Fall of America", so I knew this was someone who had no problem working on a revolutionary project! I met [Nigerian painter Aniekan Udofia]while he was live painting during an event where Pete Rock was DJ-ing. The first issue of The Liberators was completed but I wanted a more visually powerful cover. When I saw Aniekan's painting, I knew he had the look we needed. After the cover made such a strong impact on everyone who saw the book, I decided to approach Aniekan about illustrating the interior as well and the rest is history.

George Jackson's writings in Soledad Brother influenced me heavily because he spoke about the urgent need to act immediately in response to the repression of black people. His logic was sound and persuasive. However, he was in prison during his rise to political consciousness, so he had no opportunity to put his guerrilla military theory into practice. The Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army came the closest to doing this.

When the members of The Weather Underground saw that peaceful protest could not slow down the imperial machine, they began bombing key aspects of the machine, including two bombings of the Pentagon, bombing the Statue of Liberty, etc. They inspired me to wonder what it would be like if these activities never ceased, leading to the premise of the book where cells of urban guerrillas continued to operate until the present day.

LM: What do you hope people will get out of your work?

AP: I hope people will think seriously about the ramifications and possible effectiveness of militancy as a response to oppression. I hope the book will open up debate and dialogue.

LM: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by that? What do you see as the ramifications and benefits of militancy? How do you define militancy? How does this apply to 21st century living?

AP: By militancy, I mean armed guerrilla insurrection against a political structure that is wholly unresponsive to the needs of human beings, but instead is beholden to corporate profit.* Time and again, political operators pursue policies regardless of the will of the people and our cycles have become farces where one corporate-friendly politician is exchanged for another. The book is intended to implant into the mind's eye of the reader the vision of a much more physical alternative, the same alternative that our military metes out to people of foreign lands worldwide: policy at gunpoint, politics by bomb.

This is not to be confused with terrorism aimed at civilians, which I find to be wholly impractical and reprehensible.

LM: How do you feel art can address the issues that you bring up in the Liberators comic?

AP: The two-dimensional format seems more innocuous and is thereby more insidious. The images and words sear into the reader's mind as they move panel by panel. Slow-motion hypnosis, if you will.

*[Author's note: An especially interesting notion considering the Supreme Court's latest ruling, which essentially gives corporations the same constitutionally protected rights as people.]

The Pharcyde Suzu [visual art]

2010-01-23T15:31:00.001-05:00

I received this audio slideshow in my inbox a few days ago and I couldn't be happier. Narrated by the photographer, Suzu, and Slimkid Tre of the legendary hip-hop group The Pharcyde, The Pharcyde Suzu traces the group's reunion and performances in Japan and at the Rock the Bells tour in California.

Check it out here.

Liberator/Haiti fundraiser [Poet's Lounge: Jan 21]

2010-01-20T21:19:00.001-05:00

The Liberator Magazine is partnering with Inner Truth Collaborations to present a special one-year anniversary edition of Brooklyn's Poets Lounge Open Mic.

There is a $5 cover, with all proceeds benefiting The Liberator Magazine. We're also collaborating with House of Art to collect donations for Haiti throughout the evening.

Brown Sugar Bar & Restaurant
433 Marcus Garvey Blvd, Brooklyn
A/C trains to Utica Avenue

Thursday January 21st
730pm-1030pm
11pm afterparty celebration

Artists performing:
Mic Blaque
Bless Roxwell
Archie the Messenger and Lyrical the Lyricist
Cavalier
Charlotte Mishel
Eden Jeffries
Faro Z
God's Queen
Gial Hamilton
(i am) isis
King Tut from Sankofa Soulz
Paragraph
Paris Alexandra
Rainmaker
Redefining Freedome
Osunyoyin
Rich Story
Sabrina/Giorgio
Soulfolk Experience
Supanova

Music by rapper and DJ Warren Britt

Hosted by the one and only Supanova

Paintings from Demostina

$5 Drink and Food Specials

Special thanks to:
Mr. Will (Food 4 Thought)
Brown Sugar Bar and Restaurant
Karia Brathwaite
Brother Mike
(i am) isis
Brown Sugar Bar and Restaurant
New Rap Order (NRO)
Rising Sol Productions
Urban Juke Joint

facebook.com/poetslounge

What you're not hearing about Haiti (but should be)

2010-01-20T18:21:00.002-05:00

(SOURCE: Common Dreams) What You're Not Hearing about Haiti (But Should Be) by Carl Lindskoog

In the hours following Haiti's devastating earthquake, CNN, the New York Times and other major news sources adopted a common interpretation for the severe destruction: the 7.0 earthquake was so devastating because it struck an urban area that was extremely over-populated and extremely poor. Houses "built on top of each other" and constructed by the poor people themselves made for a fragile city. And the country's many years of underdevelopment and political turmoil made the Haitian government ill-prepared to respond to such a disaster.

True enough. But that's not the whole story. What's missing is any explanation of why there are so many Haitians living in and around Port-au-Prince and why so many of them are forced to survive on so little. Indeed, even when an explanation is ventured, it is often outrageously false such as a former U.S. diplomat's testimony on CNN that Port-au-Prince's overpopulation was due to the fact that Haitians, like most Third World people, know nothing of birth control.

It may startle news-hungry Americans to learn that these conditions the American media correctly attributes to magnifying the impact of this tremendous disaster were largely the product of American policies and an American-led development model.

From 1957-1971 Haitians lived under the dark shadow of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a brutal dictator who enjoyed U.S. backing because he was seen by Americans as a reliable anti-Communist. After his death, Duvalier's son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" became President-for-life at the age of 19 and he ruled Haiti until he was finally overthrown in 1986. It was in the 1970s and 1980s that Baby Doc and the United States government and business community worked together to put Haiti and Haiti's capitol city on track to become what it was on January 12, 2010.

After the coronation of Baby Doc, American planners inside and outside the U.S. government initiated their plan to transform Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean." This small, poor country situated conveniently close to the United States was instructed to abandon its agricultural past and develop a robust, export-oriented manufacturing sector. This, Duvalier and his allies were told, was the way toward modernization and economic development.

From the standpoint of the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Haiti was the perfect candidate for this neoliberal facelift. The entrenched poverty of the Haitian masses could be used to force them into low-paying jobs sewing baseballs and assembling other products.

But USAID had plans for the countryside too. Not only were Haiti's cities to become exporting bases but so was the countryside, with Haitian agriculture also reshaped along the lines of export-oriented, market-based production. To accomplish this USAID, along with urban industrialists and large landholders, worked to create agro-processing facilities, even while they increased their practice of dumping surplus agricultural products from the U.S. on the Haitian people.

This "aid" from the Americans, along with the structural changes in the countryside predictably forced Haitian peasants who could no longer survive to migrate to the cities, especially Port-au-Prince where the new manufacturing jobs were supposed to be. However, when they got there they found there weren't nearly enough manufacturing jobs go around. The city became more and more crowded. Slum areas expanded. And to meet the housing needs of the displaced peasants, quickly and cheaply constructed housing was put up, sometimes placing houses right "on top of each other."

Before too long, however, American planners and Haitian elites decided that perhaps their development model didn't work so well in Haiti and they abandoned it. The consequences of these American-led changes remain, however.

When on the afternoon and evening of January 12, 2010 Haiti experienced that horrible earthquake and round after round of aftershock the destruction was, no doubt, greatly worsened by the very real over-crowding and poverty of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. But shocked Americans can do more than shake their heads and, with pity, make a donation. They can confront their own country's responsibility for the conditions in Port-au-Prince that magnified the earthquake's impact, and they can acknowledge America's role in keeping Haiti from achieving meaningful development. To accept the incomplete story of Haiti offered by CNN and the New York Times is to blame Haitians for being the victims of a scheme that was not of their own making. As John Milton wrote, "they who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them of their blindness."

Carl Lindskoog is a New York City-based activist and historian completing a doctoral degree at the City University of New York. You can contact him at cskoog79@yahoo.com (source)

The ARE: Manipulated Marauders [ep/mix]

2010-01-20T17:51:00.000-05:00

A sweet sounding blend of A Tribe Called Quest remixes featuring production by The ARE. Definitely not your average remix project. It's no easy task to make ATCQ sound better than it already is.

Manipulated Marauders (download it)

Adult Swim/Beaterator: ATL RMX [ep/mix]

2010-01-20T17:50:00.000-05:00

It's ultimately a promo for a new Timbaland-inspired video game (Beaterator), but this free project features talented electronic production-folk like Flying Lotus, El-P, Hudson Mohawke, and Starkey remixing tracks from some of Atlanta's most popular hip-hop heroes (Cee-Lo, Lil Jon, Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Gorilla Zoe, B.O.B.). Whether you're ATL faithful already or a fan of imaginative electronic production, this project will both strengthen and diversify your bonds; exposing you to some legends in the broader hip-hop and electronic culture and pleasing you with some extremely well executed combinations. Don't look here for righteous lyrics or spiritual grooves though, this is straight ear candy. It's fresh hearing what someone like El-P -- who did a classic electro-jazz joint like Sunrise Over Brooklyn -- can do with some Young Jeezy lyrics.

ATL RMX (download it)

Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin White Masks" (Ch. 3) [finger on the page]

2010-01-20T17:40:00.000-05:00

{liberatormagazine.com exclusive feature}

The goal of these posts will be to conduct a chapter-a-week close reading of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, while analyzing, summarizing, and dialoguing with the text to provide readers with a better understanding of this crucial contribution to thinking about race. For those curious, I will be using the 1991 paperback reissue with [cover design by Liadain Warwick Smith]. Given the current debates raging about a post-racial America, the election of the nation's first black president, and continued disagreements over what really constitutes "blackness," we may find that Fanon provided some very intriguing answers -- over 50 years ago -- to our most pressing questions about black people.

Chapter Three: The Man of Color and the White Woman
(Last week: Chapter Two)

Fanon argues that the nature of this relationship is also rooted in the latent desire to become white. On page 63 he writes, "By loving me [a white woman] proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man."

As in the previous chapter, Fanon uses a work of literature to illustrate the psychological character of a black man who finds himself in love with a white woman. In the novel Un homme pareil aux autres (A Man Like Any Other) by René Maran, the protagonist, Jean Veneuse, was born in the Caribbean but has lived in Bordeaux, France since he was a child. Fanon notes, "he is a European. But he is Black; so he is a Negro. There is the conflict. He does not understand his own race, and the whites do not understand him" (64). We also find that because of these circumstances, Veneuse feels lonely and has developed into what many would call an introverted bookworm. While we might be led to think that Veneuse's desire is to prove to his white counterparts that he is their equal, Fanon believes that Veneuse himself is the man that has to be convinced.

Next, Veneuse ventures to account for his love of a white woman, Andreé Marielle. He cannot explain why he has chosen her as the primary object of his affections and he even appears to show a sense of guilt; however, he concludes that

I know nothing. I have no wish to know any more except one thing: that the Negro is a man like the rest, the equal of the others, and that his heart, which only the ignorant consider simple, can be as complicated as the heart of the most complicated of Europeans. (66)

Here we are presented with yet another dimension of Veneuse's dilemma: not only does he harbor feelings of guilt over loving a white woman, he also feels that his love must be on par with "white love" in order to be validated. And validation he seeks; even after Andreé professes her mutual love for Veneuse, he seeks out his European friend Coulanges to "authorize" his feelings. Coulanges explains that since Veneuse has lived in Bordeaux since he was three or four years old he is essentially a European or "one of us" (68). He stresses this point by reminding Veneuse that he would probably be unable to communicate with anyone from the Caribbean and that he has no resemblance to them. He goes further by saying

In fact you are like us--you are "us." Your thoughts are ours. You behave as we behave, as we would behave. You think of yourself--others think of you--as a Negro? Utterly mistaken! You merely look like one. As for everything else, you think as a European. And so it is natural that you love as a European. Since European men love only European women, you can hardly marry anyone but a woman of the country where you have always lived, a woman of our good old France, your real and only country. (68)

Fanon clarifies this passage by stating that this sort of white male approval can only come about if the black man ensures that he will have nothing to do whatsoever with black people.

Veneuse turns this over in his mind but is said to reject it and instead begins to wonder if his "love" for the white woman is merely a desire to enact revenge on whites by becoming the "master" of a white woman. He wonders if

...by marrying Andreé, who [is] a European, I may not appear to be making a show of contempt for the women of my own race and above all to be drawn by desire for that white flesh that has been forbidden us Negroes as long as white men have ruled the world, so that without my knowledge I am attempting to revenge myself on a European woman for everything her ancestors inflicted on mine throughout the centuries. (70)

Next, Fanon points to a passage by Louis T. Achille which posits the idea that whereas most interracial marriages are arranged so that one of the spouses is of a lower economic or cultural standing than the other in order to achieve the "deracialization" of both partners, when a white spouse is chosen by a black person, the black person's motive seems to be one of establishing equality with whiteness.

Fanon finally concludes that the root cause of Veneuse's neurosis lay in his isolated (i.e., from blackness) upbringing. With a nod to psychoanalysis, Fanon even flirts with the possibility of Veneuse's issues being caused by his feeling abandoned by his mother. The only solution to this problem for Veneuse is acceptance by whites.

Fanon also believes that Veneuse's problems cannot be extended to all black people simply because Veneuse is black (this would risk losing objectivity). He is simply suffering from basic and universal symptoms of the psychoanalytic problem of being an abandonment-neurotic.

To conclude, Fanon reminds us once more that such problems cannot be solved by buying into color hierarchies and alludes to another solution which he will reveal later.

Haiti's Earthquake = France's Problem

2010-01-15T12:02:00.013-05:00

In Mumia Speaks. Haiti: The Power of History Mumia Abu Jamal states: "History is important, it teaches us why things are the way they are. It teaches not only about yesterday, but about today." While this might seem obvious, there is much to be discovered in this statement. Why are things the way they are? Why is Hayti one of the "poorest" nations? How was Hayti the first free African nation in the Western Hemisphere, but now an island riddled with poverty, violence and corruption? Or IS it? Special thanks to TJ Dean for sharing the article below.

(SOURCE: The Daily Beast) Why Haiti's Earthquake Is France's Problem; When it came to Haiti, France was first a brutal colonizer, and then a usurious bully. Tunku Varadarajan on why it’s time for reparations:

As Haitians lurch destitute in the rubble, and as governments, churches, and NGOs do the best they can to bring succor to Haiti's hell, a vivid solution to the country's needs presents itself, one so obvious and irrefutable—so resonantly just—that it must be advocated with the greatest of energy: France must repay its colonialist debt to Haiti by paying for much of the island country’s reconstruction.

Haiti's chronic impoverishment began at its birth in 1804, when, having overthrown its French rulers in a bloody, 12-year slave revolt, the newborn nation was subjected to crippling blockades and embargoes. This economic strangulation continued until 1825, when France offered to lift embargoes and recognize the Haitian Republic if the latter would pay restitution to France—for loss of property in Haiti, including slaves—of 150 million gold francs. The sum, about five times Haiti's export revenue for 1825, was brutal, but Haiti had no choice: Pay up or perish over many more years of economic embargo, not to mention face French threats of invasion and reconquest. To pay, Haiti borrowed money at usurious rates from France, and did not finish paying off its debt until 1947, by which time its fate as the Western Hemisphere's poorest country had been well and truly sealed.

France must now return every last cent of this money to Haiti. In 2004, at the time of the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence, the Haitian government put together a legal brief in support of a formal demand for "restitution" from France. The sum sought was nearly $22 billion, a number arrived at by calculations that included a notionally equitable annual interest rate. (For a full account of the calculation, read Jose de Cordoba's excellent news story in The Wall Street Journal, published on Jan. 2, 2004.) The demand was made by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a firebrand ex-preacher who was forced out of office by a violent uprising that February. His successors, Boniface Alexandre and Gerard Latortue, controversially chose to renounce Haiti's claim for restitution/reparations. (There was, of course, much pressure exerted on them by France, which had found Aristide's demand politically disconcerting.)

This last act of renunciation weakens Haiti's legal case against France, notwithstanding the fact that the treaty under which France gouged 150 million gold francs from Haiti was clearly unconscionable and executed under duress. But this story is not one of law and legality alone, nor even one of wealth and poverty. (France's GDP is $2.85 trillion, while Haiti's is a mere $6.95 billion.) It is, rather, one of historical justice and political morality: No one can dispute that an extortionate and bullying treaty, concluded at a time when France was an imperial hyper-puissance and Haiti a friendless fledgling, is an ugly stain on France's national conscience.

The money involved is not a sum that will give sleepless nights to Christine Lagarde (France's finance minister) or Bernard Kouchner (its foreign minister) or President Nicolas Sarkozy. In this era of multibillion-dollar bailouts of private banking institutions, $22 billion should scarcely raise a Gallic eyebrow. But to Haiti, the sum would be a godsend.

More than that, however, this is money that is Haiti's own. As Haitians lie prostrate, buried under the rubble of their nation, France must do the moral thing, the just thing, the civilized thing: France must write Haiti a reparations check for $22 billion.

Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School. (source)