Thug Notes: Literary Analysis in Blackface

One of the perennial challenges of teaching literature is finding a way to make the text relevant to students’ interests. As a teacher of introductory courses in British, American, Caribbean, and African literatures, I’ve tried several methods—some successful; some abysmal failures-- to hold my students’ attention. So, I was intrigued when I saw a video series on You Tube, Thug Notes: Classical Literature. Original Gangster.

Thug Notes, “the illest literature show on the web,” has reviewed works such as Beowulf, Moby Dick, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, and 1984. With the team of Jared Bauer (show creator, co-writer), Joseph Salvaggio (researcher, co-writer), Jacob Salamon (producer, co-illustrator) Greg Edwards (aka Sparky Sweets, PhD.), Thug Notes offers cogent summaries and analyses with a faux hip-hop twist on books that many students find intimidating.

In his introduction to Lolita, Dr. Sweets explains, “I hope y’ll like R. Kelly this week. We be macking on jail bait.” Dr. Sweets also describes Oedipus Rex as a “search for motherf****ing truth.”

But don’t let Dr. Sweets' mugging for the camera, his language, do-rags, and tank tops fool you. Thug Notes’ exegesis of these works of literature is remarkable, and given the medium, the interpretation of Macbeth is one of the best I’ve seen.

What bothers me though is not the distance between the Dr. Sweets’ language and the analysis—which creates a kind of cognitive dissonance—but the character of Dr. Sparky Sweets. And all I can do is ask, “Why?”

Why, when you have a whole range of Black life from which to choose, would you reinforce one of the worst stereotypes of Black men?

Why didn’t the writers, producers, and the actor know the potential damage that they could cause with this racist stereotype? And if they knew, why did they continue?

Black actors and comedians have to walk a fine line between comedy, caricature, and realistic portrayals of black life. Hollywood Shuffle and most recently, Key & Peele’s “Thug English Actor" illustrate the dilemma. Dave Chappelle also faced a similar situation, which led to him leaving his popular comedy show when he felt that a staff member wasn’t laughing with him, but at him.

Thug Notes, as the New York Times reports, is an “example of a trend that has been around for years: the application of street sensibility to high-culture, high-concept areas and, more generally, any place where it’s not expected.”

Too bad they had to use a minstrel in blackface.

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The Coalition for the Exoneration of Marcus Garvey is petitioning President Barack Obama to exonerate Marcus Garvey:

https://www.causes.com/campaigns/71936-urge-president-obama-to-exonerate-marcus-garvey

Thank you for your support.

The Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature

The Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.

Postmark Deadline: July 30

The Vilcek Foundation shall award a prize of $25,000 to a foreign-born writer who demonstrates outstanding early achievement. In addition, four finalists will receive awards of $5,000 each. There is no fee to enter. Four categories of writers are eligible to apply:

Poets

Novelists

Short Fiction Writers

Short Creative Nonfiction Writers

ELIGIBILITY


To be eligible for The Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in the Arts and Humanities, applicants must meet all of the criteria listed below.

Applicant must have been born outside the United States.

Applicant must not be more than 38 years old as of December 31, 2010 (born on or after January 1, 1972).

Applicant must be a naturalized citizen or permanent resident (green card holder) of the United States.

Applicant must intend to pursue a professional career in the United States.

Applicant must be the individual who has authored the submitted work.

SELECTION PROCESS


A panel of distinguished members of the literary community will evaluate each application based on its quality, the level of creativity, clarity of vision, impact and the individual's ability to present his/her work in a professional manner.


The prize winner selected by the jury will be a candidate whose work best exemplifies the characteristics indicated above. Additionally, the jury will identify four finalists, each of whom will receive an award of $5,000. Recommendations of the jury will be submitted to the Vilcek Foundation's Board of Directors for final approval.


The winner will be notified in November 2010 and will be invited to attend an awards ceremony in New York City in the spring of 2011. Travel expenses and accommodations will be covered by The Vilcek Foundation. 

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3Quarks Contest

Robert Pinsky will be the judge of the 3 Quarks Daily’s Arts & Literature Prize.

The winners of the Arts &Literature Prize will be announced on March 20, 2010.

For more, please follow this link: 3Quarks

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New Book: Bougainvillea Ringplay by Marion Bethel

Bougainvillea Ringplay is the long awaited second collection by Marion Bethel, a poet who has long established herself as one of the most necessary voices in Caribbean poetry. These poems are finely crafted works that reveal a maturity of voice and a distinctive use of language that delves into the fruitful place of intersection between her Bahamian dialect and the English that she plies as a lawyer. Marion Bethel’s poems reveal a mastery of syntax that one finds in only the most sophisticated poets. Her poems eschew all but the most utilitarian of punctuation marks, (question marks, apostrophes, and inverted commas), but commas, periods, colons, dashes are all ignored, thus demanding everything of rhythm and syntax.

The achievement of these poems is that they read with such control of sound and breath that such markers seem completely superfluous in her hands. Her poems are rooted in the landscape of the Bahamas, and so we will find the flora, we will find the sea, we will find the food, we will find the dialect, and yet we are never for a moment allowed to imagine this place as a cliché, as a tourist location. Instead, Bethel’s sharp sense of detail, her unsettling truth-telling, and the risks she takes with narratives about love and hurt in all kinds of relationships open for us an emotional intelligence that is arresting. History is constantly present for her, and it is hard to walk away from her poems without feeling as if you have finally met her homeland.

These poems are sensual in the most literal sense - the poems are about the senses, the smell of vanilla and sex, the sound of waves - radio, voices, sea; the taste of crab soup; the texture of hurricane wind, and the chaos of colors bombarding the eye. Bahamian poetry is being defined in the work of Marion Bethel and in Bougainvillea Ringplay she is doing so with grace.

DECREE ABSOLUTE

a sparrow sits
on the window sill watching
a woman on fire

she longed for
a furnace red dress
to break an addiction

to her rainbow of sparrow bands
arcs of beigetan blouses
blackbrownnavy slacks

she wanted a red red dress
to bellow for all
those straightjacket years

a red dress like Dinah’s
a goodtime woman who breathed
fiery red right up to her wet veined eyes

right right down to her liquid red
toenails & golden Guiana anklet
on her left foot

she spreads her legs wide
paints one lip at a time with
mercurochrome

her shadow wrestles her
to the ground & paints iodine
on wounded knees & sight refracted

...and the judge grants her prayer
to wear a red dress
anytime anywhere anyhow

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Small Axe Literary Competition 2010

The Small Axe Project has initiated an annual literary competition to encourage the production and publication of Caribbean fiction and poetry. The Small Axe Literary Competition will focus on poetry and short stories from emerging writers whose work centers on regional and diasporic Caribbean themes and concerns. This competition is part of the Small Axe Project’s ongoing commitment to Caribbean cultural production and our mission to provide a forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean reality. With this competition, we hope to encourage and support the region’s rich literary heritage, in the tradition of precursors such as Bim, Kyk-over-al, Focus and Savacou.

The competition will consist of two categories: poetry and short fiction. Two winners will be chosen from each category. Winners will be chosen by a distinguished panel of judges. For the 2009 competition the judges for poetry were Edward Baugh, Lorna Goodison, and Mark McWatt; and for short fiction, Garfield Ellis, Geoffrey Philp, and Merle Collins.

First Prize: $750     Second Prize: $500

Winners of the 2010 competition will be published in Small Axe 35 (July 2011).

Submission deadline: April 30, 2010

Writers wishing to compete for a Small Axe Literary Prize must submit the following to litcomp@smallaxe.net:

    * A double-spaced Word document containing: an original, unpublished short story (maximum 7,000 words), or an original selection of poetry (maximum ten poems, not exceeding ten manuscript pages). Submissions must be blind.

    * A separate document with a one-page biography, including previously published works and full contact information (name, email address, mailing address and phone)

More information available at: http://www.smallaxe.net/literary_competition.php

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New Book: Lifelines: Black Book of Proverbs

Lifelines: Black Book of Proverbs

My sister-author Askhari Johnson and I were raised by elders who had a proverb for every occasion. We therefore consider ourselves blessed to have links with an oral tradition  that kept spirits free even when bodies were in chains.  In our book,  Lifelines: Black Book of Proverbs, we are happy to remind readers of a legacy of wisdom that can still guide us today.

The idea of writing this book arose  about three years ago when  Askhari and I were both approaching landmark birthdays. We had reached crossroads in our careers and personal lives; the time felt right to fulfill our common desire to commit our energies to writing. Proverbs strengthened us through our challenges, just as they sustained our elders before us.  We therefore decided to use modern means to keep our oral tradition alive and accessible to coming generations.

Askhari and I built sisterhood in cyberspace. Her home is in the United States and mine is in Jamaica. We met as members of a human rights mail list, and then for more than a decade we were fellow writers in an online workshop for Black writers. Over the years, proverbs flowed naturally through our email exchanges, since “a proverb is to speech what salt is to food.” So when we began to share our work and our writing goals, we used as subject title, “brick on brick [build house].”  In addition, when we came across mountains in our path, we reminded each other that “time longer than rope” – this too shall pass.

In writing Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs, we have pooled our skills as partners who share dreams and support each other’s desire to excel as writers. The proverb that best describes our approach is “when your sister does your hair, you do not need a mirror.” To this project, we brought habits of hard work, a feel for language and editing,  and a passion for the culture of our ancestors.  We had complementary abilities, such as Askhari’s  sharp eye for detail, and my focus on  the big picture. Conflicts were inevitable, and when they occurred, we remembered the proverb, “Black ants bite, but they do not bite each other.”

At first, we had in mind a text of about 6,000 African proverbs.  The proposed title was then “Daughters of Experience”, taken from the Sierra Leone saying, “proverbs are the daughters of experience.” Our Random House editor, Christian Nwachukwu, had other ideas. He suggested a greatly trimmed book – about 2,000 proverbs – arranged according to life passages from birth to death. Askhari and I did not need much convincing to see the value of  a book that offered gems under themes related to life passages. . . 

We chose the title because we intended readers to find ‘lifelines’ – words of support, guidance, and encouragement – in these proverbs. For example:

1. Health and healthcare: “Medicine left in the bottle cannot help.” (Yoruba)
2. Economy: “The poor person does not experience poverty all the time.” (Ghana)
3. Peace and War: “It is better to build bridges than walls.” (East Africa)
4. Education: “Nobody is without knowledge, except they who ask no questions.” (Fulani)
5. Spirituality: “The darkness of night cannot stop the light of morning.” (Burundi)
6. Collaboration: “People sailing in the same boat, share the same goal.” (Wolof)

Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs, is packaged as a 256-page gift book. We chose proverbs with clear messages and strong images, representing a variety of ethnic groups and countries. In addition, we arranged the proverbs so they would flow together to create story poems. Themes include Marriage, Sex, Closeness and Familiarity, and Home in the section titled “Love, Marriage, and Intimacy.”

The short essays at the start of each section are intended to show how each one of us can apply these proverbs to daily living. These vignettes are based on incidents I experienced or learned about in Jamaica and in Ghana where I spent four years. I felt honored to be able to share stories showing  the values passed on to me by my own elders...

Archbishop Desmond Tutu – whose life symbolizes to us the values enshrined in African proverbs – wrote the foreword to our book. We are honored by his association with our work.

We donate a portion of our royalties to Save Africa’s Children. This organization “provides direct support and care to orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS, poverty and war throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.”

To an extent, LIFELINES is spiritual, cultural, and sociological. But mostly it is a way of passing to our children the wisdom of our ancestors.

Yvonne McCalla Sobers, a former educator who studied at the University of the West Indies, is currently a human and community development consultant, and also a human rights activist and researcher. Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs (Random House, 2009) is her second non-fiction work. Her first was Delicious Jamaica! Vegetarian Cuisine (Book Publishing Company 1996). She has published short stories in British, Jamaican, and Caribbean anthologies. Apart from a four years spent in Ghana, followed by almost five years spent in England, Yvonne has lived all her life in Kingston, Jamaica.

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New Blog: Lifelines - African Proverbs for Daily Living

Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: "When the occasion arises, there is a proverb to suit it. (Proverb from Rwanda and Burundi)

Welcome to this space where we can talk at proverbs that we can relate to (or not), and proverbs that make sense to us (or not). Most of all we can discuss how proverbs make us think about life and living. We can also share experiences of proverbs that have provided us with lifelines or just the chance to reflect.

For more proverbs and for information on Lifelines: the Black Book of Proverbs, please visit us at www.lifelinesproverbs.com.

Enjoy!

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