Marcus and the Amazons on Power Talk Network

My interview with for the Miami Book Fair International with Edith Burney about Marcus and the Amazons on the PowerTalk Network: 

http://www.internetvoicesradio.com

We spoke about the inspiration for Marcus and the Amazons, Occupy Wall Street, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.




Edith also interviewed the following writers, who will also be appearing at the Miami Book Fair International:

Margaret Cardillo, Just Being Audry 

Christina Gonzalez, The Red Umbrella

Sandra Beasley, Poet, I Was the Juke Box

Rosalind Brackenbury, Becoming George Sand 

Kostya Kennedy, 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports 

Give thanks to Edith Burney, Lillian Cauldwell, Lisa Palley of Palley Promotes, Lissette, Mendez, Alina Interian and all the wonderful people at the Miami Book Fair International for their help with promoting Marcus and the Amazons:

Occupy Wall Street & Marcus and the Amazons

When I began writing Marcus and the Amazons, I never dreamt that I would live in a time when I would witness the confluence of a movement such as Occupy Wall Street and the revival of interest in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose role in the Civil Rights Movement has always been an inspiration for me.

One of the most common ways of telling the story of the African-American Civil Rights Movement is to invoke the name of Dr. King. While the intent is noble, the narrative of the movement is simplified, and in many children's books, young readers are confronted with a monolithic figure who does not engage their imagination, nor their "moral intelligence."

Marcus and the Amazons avoids that. On the surface, Marcus and the Amazons is the story about a courageous ant who saves his colony from an evil tyrant. But Marcus and the Amazons is more than that. This multilayered story, which explores themes of freedom and non-violence, dramatizes the values of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, which are eloquently stated in “Letter From Birmingham Jail”:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.

Indeed, when I wrote the chapter "Jailed!" I had a pen in one hand and a copy of “Letter From Birmingham Jail” in the other.

By placing the struggle for equal rights in a different context, Marcus and the Amazons allows a young reader to set aside her prejudices and to examine the values that Dr. King dramatized in the historic March on Washington.

Because Marcus Formica, the hero of Marcus and the Amazons, is a less imposing figure than Dr. King, young readers will experience the internal and external conflicts in a new way and gain a better understanding about this important era in American history.

I can only hope.

***


Marcus and the Amazons is available from Amazon.com as an E-book:

Or in print:

Mr. Spock: Occupy Wall Street

An Anthem for the 99%

Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" should be the anthem of the 99% movement:

Old pirates, yes, they rob I

Sold I to the merchant ships

Minutes after they took I

From the bottomless pit

In this song, Marley recounts the experience of New World Africans who have been treated as commodities rather than as human beings. Indeed, Marley's career was devoted to emancipating his people and their downpressors from the kind of thinking that values profits over people. From as far back as the song, "Slave Driver," written in 1973, Marley demonstrated his opposition to the Babylon system:

Ev'rytime I hear the crack of a whip,

My blood runs cold.

I remember on the slave ship,

How they brutalize the very souls.

Today they say that we are free,

Only to be chained in poverty.

Good God, I think it's illiteracy;

It's only a machine that makes money.

Slave driver, the table is turn, y'all.

It's a theme that Bob returns to time and time again, even in the deceptively bouncy tune, "One Drop":

They made their world so hard (so hard):

Every day we got to keep on fighting (fighting);

They made their world so hard (so hard):

Every day the people are dyin' (dying), yeah!

(It dread, dread) For hunger (dread, dread) and starvation

(dread, dread, dread, dread),

Lamentation (dread dread),

But read it in Revelation (dread, dread, dread, dread):

You'll find your redemption

And then you give us the teachings of His Majesty,

For we no want no devil philosophy;

A you fe give us the teachings of His Majesty,

A we no want no devil philosophy:

New World Africans have borne the brunt of the system that began in the Americas with the resistance of the Taino against genocide. This struggle continued with the opposition to colonialism in the Caribbean and Jim Crow in North America through the work of the heroes celebrated on this blog, Marcus Garvey, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bob Marley.

It's a struggle in the name of love, which extends to the 1% who have "hurt all mankind" as Bob sang in "One Love":

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (One love)

There is one question I'd really love to ask (One heart)

Is there a place for the hopeless sinner

Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own?

Believe me

The 99% movement has roots in the historic opposition to profiteering in human misery and the prophetic tradition rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics with which Marley repeats in "Redemption Song":

But my hand was made strong

By the hand of the almighty

We forward in this generation

Triumphantly

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

For us, the 99%, the dispossessed and disenfranchised sufferahs, it's all we've ever had.

We are the 99%

Image source: "Freedom March" in Marcus and the Amazons