People of Color Organize has a thought-provoking, powerful excerpt up from winning author and Professor Frank B. Wilderson III’s critically acclaimed memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. The excerpt was a response to a mandate that came down from the university where Frank was teaching to read Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to his classes in order to aid in the “healing process” immediately after September 11. You can read the full piece here. Below are highlighted excerpts.
The current media manipulation of national emotions urges people to join in a national-circling-of-the-wagons hysteria. Whitman celebrates our coming together as one people, but what are we coming together for? Conflict and antagonisms are erased in the celebration. Who is Whitman not speaking for and what would be their take on this moment of viewing “mast-hemm’d Manhattan,” if you consider, for instance, that ships carried slaves, carried products generated by slavery and stolen for the benefit of White Americans. And what do we make of the “splendor” he wants himself and “the men and women generations after” him to be “drenched” by? What generations is he speaking of? The generations lost through the genocide of Indians or the generations lost through the institution of slavery, or perhaps generations of Mexican Americans lynched in the southwest, or generations descendent of Japanese Americans interned in the camps, or generations of Chinese slaughtered by miners? What, besides blood, in the American legacy drenched these generations? The question is, who is Walt Whitman talking to and about? This is also the question begged by this national pageantry of mourning. As to the question of why this poem was sent out to us, if the intended interpretation was that it represents the arrogance of White America at work in the world, an arrogance that might have motivated the recent events, then perhaps our labor over this letter was not necessary
On the national pageantry of mourning
This national pageantry of mourning to which we are all being called is no more than an alibi for a patriotism that will consolidate the forces necessary to further militarize society. The national pageantry of mourning is now the new cultural accompaniment for the entrenchment of a security state that will spread its tentacles and probe into every facet of our lives. It calls upon the same structures of patriotic feeling present in Italy, Spain, and Germany which incubated fascism.
In lieu of the national pageantry of mourning
Refrain from the use of nostalgic poetry to valorize the country, take down the flags, stop the public vigils and refuse public demands of national allegiance, issue an apology from the US government to the entire world, stop funding Israel, stop Plan Columbia, dismantle NAFTA and NAFTA for Africa, dismantle the US government, and give the land and surplus value back to Indians and Blacks, respectively, (in the hopes that they will draw no borders and accumulate no wealth but institute a world whose pledge of allegiance is “Everything for everybody and nothing for ourselves”) and then walk away from “America,” the most deadly act of terrorism the world has ever known.
Powerfully written. Full piece can be found here.
See also: Ten Years Later, the Decline