Leviathan

I am having a hard time today. I am depressed about New Orleans and worried about my cousins' welfare in Slidel. I have only meet a couple of them. It was the Christmas when I was 14 and my cousin Annette took me to a bunch of bars and we got drunk, then went and saw the Eddie Murphy's movie The Golden Child. I was not that tall, but I could carry myself pretty well in a room full of adults. All I needed was a cigarette, and my cousin just had a cup of white wine. She wasn't legal either. I drove home from the movie cause she was sleepy.

I am worried about my grandmother in Picayune, which is located on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain and East of New Orleans. I just don't think America cares about the Gulf, and is willing to show more optimism, support and cash to Iraq than to us.

But is that really the case? Friends of mine in Europe say that through Katrina, they see why Iraq is a disaster. This is the way we manage our wars and disasters in America, without a plan and by the seat of our pants. Sometimes it is a good idea, and sometimes you come up with craps.

New Orleans is a whole world that is falling into disarray. Its francophone remnants will be swallowed by the sea I am afraid, but time and migrating generations have already eroded much of that underlying fabric. Sometimes I wonder if the spirits have ordained it. I wonder if they are claiming it back, if their moment there of preeminence is long gone, and there is something in our lethargy towards the spirits that is causing this shake down. All this commercialism and the turning of fetishes into mere gimmicks has punched a whole in the levy. Maybe the spirits are inviting Our Lady of Guadaloupe (who is a synchronization of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin) to take up some of the slake caused by the Anglo invasion. She is an earth goddess and I think that the marsh lands are in need of some serious sexual healing after all this erosion. . .

But what do I know. I am just babbling. For right now, I just can't get over the parallels between Gonaive in Haiti and New Orleans. Rivers. Honey. Hurricanes. Erzulie Frida. Erzulie Dantor. Neglect. Pandemonium. Poverty. Floating black bodies. Bloated black bodies. And this feeling that the Anglos never understood or cared about the creoles . . . really. That strange and Firmin feeling I got when I was growing up. People talking about us because we ate so much fish in our house. In Germany sitting with many African-Americans and listening to gospel music and talking about how "we" shall over come and what "we" want for "the people", and there being something else in the back of my mind. Something about our prosperity and a floor wash I found in my father's closet next to his shoe shine polish. Watching him pour rum and read book after book. Telling us it is time to "go make groceries" and pushing us around in the cart when we were small enough to fit. His baby blue blue jeans from Sears and the flip flops on his ashen feet that he was not ashamed of made everybody turn at Winn Dixie. He walked and carried himself with a jiggle, that I think I have inherited. Something just mud ridden and cast iron about him then as compared to now. His youth and vitality is still intact, but now expressed with an austerity that is broad and silent like his shoulders in a suit that fits and falls perfectly. He still has room to grow, but such marks of the Delta have been erased. He is and is still becoming an American cosmopolitan. It has taken me sometime to see that my father actually immigrated from the coast into mainstream culture and has not really looked back except for moments when he brought us ginger beer and sugar cane on a summer afternoon, or put molasses onto my pancakes. Red beans and okra were all right for everyday.

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Today I read over my blogs and decided that I did not like the one about my trip to Atlanta and the party at A's house last week. Too many "cools" and repetitive sentence structures dot its progression. I have also been glancing over the blogs of other black writers and academics. It has been "cool", but sometimes I think it is a world that I somehow remember being in, but left a little while a go to get some air. And now that I am sticking my head back into the rooms of chatter and dealing with the students and administrations of various university, I, all of a sudden, remember that I could not breath in those "spaces" (and I mean that in the full cultural theorist and just plan "theorist" sense of the word).

Mind you, I did all of this Africana blog surfing while listening to the song "I Am Afraid of My Cum" by the group Pissed. Had the demo on repeat. I downloaded it from Jockohomo's blog. I was also thinking about the next time I am going to shave my head.

Not to digress, but I think that the other part of me that can't find a place to express itself in the reading groups and woman dominated classes on Caribbean literature is not so willing to disappear just yet. -- this half of myself many people find to be weird, or as Das Experiment says: "It does not match the rest of you (me)." A lot of people think that when I say I lived in NYC, that I am from NYC and that since I love hip-hop music, rap, house music, etc . . . , that I don't listen to punk or rock music. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee that should give a couple of mofo's a major hint.

I mean I sat through the first semester of my 9th grade English class with 19-year-old white boys that smelled like Marlboros and wet hair. I learned a lot about sex from a curly red hair grease monkey who was on the wrestling team. The guys that I liked and had crushes on in physical education were a bunch of 15 -year-olds that hit puberty early and drank cokes in the parking lot only to disappear during 3rd period. I remember that they would shower and laugh and play after swim class; meanwhile, all the black guys were very modest and maybe they were scared. Conversations switched to Brass Monkey by the Beastie Boys (who no one could believe were white) when we finally all put on our underwear, before putting my underwear on my heart just pumped like a hummingbird. I was very shy. The only thing left in my head concerning those brief naked times was everybody speaking so slow. Guys calling each other "dawg" and stuff like that. The white guys did not act that way. They were still busy screaming and laughing under the shower heads.

I remember smiling at one of these "white" guys, the darkest one. He smiled back in "that" way, and I guess he knew that I like him. But he did not go any further. He seemed straight but not to care. And I think that has influenced me in a way. I had crushes on both black guys and white guys in high school, but I could only smile that way to the white guys. The black guys would simply call me faggot and with time I became an outcast until I hit puberty and grew up like a vine. Then, at seventeen, I heard less of the name calling.

But anyway, I am moving to something I have to think about more later. I could develop it into a nice essay I think, but I need to remember that world.

To sum up the post, I don't always feel comfortable with all the definitions of what it means to be black in the academe and at this point I doubt if I ever will. And just like the locker rooms of 1986, it is the boundaries built by the black guys that make me feel uncomfortable. There is a code of conduct concerning black professors and our various projects in the Western Cannon that baffles my sensibilities. If we can't talk about the spirits, drink beer, learn about the punk and ska movement, and kiss white boy grease monkeys I am not sure if I can participate. But of course, I do participate. Just in another way.