Buddha Was a (Brown) Woman

Move over, Taylor Swift, who sings “Karma is my boyfriend/Karma is a cat/Karma is an acrobat”, and the public swoons as though she had sung a revolution into being.

Go back in time, and read what Marita Bonner has to share instead.

She speculates that perhaps the Buddha was a woman; a brown woman like herself.

In “On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored” (1925), Bonner evidences autonomous thinking:

“You see clearly–off there is infinity–Understanding. Standing alone, waiting for someone to really want her.

But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and really drag her in.

So–being a woman–you can wait.

You can sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden–and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty.

But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha–who, brown like I am–sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before that white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands.

Motionless on the outside; But inside?

Silent.

Still…”Perhaps Buddha is a woman.”

So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into you and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding into your self.

And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet–at your full height–at a single gesture.

Ready to go where?

Why…Wherever God motions.”

Bottoms Up

What a poignantly written novel on the birth and gradual fading away of a community of freed slaves.

Toni Morrison is a maestro of creating a village, as it were, in which individualism is not squelched per se, but is absorbed into the scheme of things.

The community in question is that of Bottom, a piece of badland that the whites gave away “free” to Blacks without telling them that the land is fallow, sterile, unproductive, and most importantly it’s atop the hill of a town named Medallion. The hilltop is named Bottom, and in the literal bottom live the white. The valley of whites is not only fertile, but it’s also protected from climactic shambles by Bottom. In other words, in case a climactic disorder hits the area, it hits Bottom first and a wilted version flies over the white valley.

How canny of the whites to have divvied up the land this way. They got to eat the cake of fulfilling the promise of post-emancipation reparation and eat it too.

I was particularly struck by a long passage that is a portal into survival of this community. The lesson is that if blacks survived slavery, then they would quite naturally survive climate change.

So, one day Sula returns to Medallion and to the village of Bottom to find the ground strewn with dead Robins.

“The little yam-breasted shuddering birds were everywhere, exciting very small children away from their usual welcome into a vicious stoning. Nobody knew why or from where they had come. What they did know was that you couldn’t go anywhere without stepping in their pearly shit, and it was hard to hang up clothes, pull weeds or just sit on the front porch when Robins were flying and dying all around you.”

The village of Bottom has collective memory of climate change thus:

“Although most of the people remembered the time when the sky was black for two hours with clouds of pigeons, and although they were accustomed to excesses in nature–too much heat, too much cold, too little rain, rain to flooding–they still dreaded the way a relatively trivial phenomenon could become sovereign in their lives and bend their minds to its will.”

Evil is fought off through an acceptance of it. While climate change is no longer a byname for the “evil” acts of nature, the following black communal psychology to not let any form of “evil” gain sovereignty over the minds and wills of folks points to Afrofuturism, a vision of the planet that looks to African modalities of being and becoming:

“In spite of their fear, they reacted to an oppressive oddity, or what they called evil days, with an acceptance that bordered on welcome. Such evil must be avoided, they felt, and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it. But they let it run its course, fulfill itself, and never invented ways either to alter it, to annihilate it or to prevent its happening again. So also were they people.”

Here is Afrofuturism for you:

“What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal […] They did not believe death was accidental–life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew–only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as “natural” as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows Robins could fall. the purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well, but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide–it was beneath them.”

A Gate to Enlightenment

The recent interview of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The New Yorker is eye-opening (a colloquialism for enlightenment).

Known as one of the main facilitators of the African American canon in Literary studies, Gates words and insights are as crisp as deep fried brinjal.

Here are some of the jewel-ish things he said:

1. Gates reminds us that black lives is not simply about loss, death and suffering and degradation. It’s also about achievement, dignity, overcoming and joy. The following lines from William Du Bois’ “The Soul of Black Folks” thoughtfully frame the original meaning of the Black Lives Matter slogan:

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found El Dorado of the West. They descended into hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and French Revolution.

2. Because something is not typical does not mean it’s not real. Gates grew up in the town of Peidmont, West Virginia. A rare black family in a dominantly white place (Piedmont being a Irish-Italian paper mill town). Says Gates, growing up he did not have a “typical black experience but it is a real Black experience.”

3. Gates attended an integrated school. He was never treated as a lesser human, neither was his humanity challenged or degraded. Segregation was subtle: “I never experienced racial discrimination in the classroom. But don’t even think of dating a white girl. We performed dances a lot and operettas every year. But never, ever, was a Black boy paired with a white girl. What they would do is pair me with a black girl in class. And then when they ran out of boy-girl combinations, they would put two black girls together, or two black boys together, or a Black boy and a white boy–that was very daring. But never did Skippy (Henry’s nick name) Gates dance with Brenda Kimmel.

4. When he got admitted (with full scholarship) at Yale, Gates’ father, a hard-working man who resisted the “Black” label without sucking up to whites and was inordinately reverential towards Jews, counseled him not to “Jim Crow” himself in Yale. “Don’t go sitting up there like a sitting at something like a Black table. Don’t go up there getting Black roommates. Get yourself some white roommates […] your ass been Black for eighteen years, and I ain’t paying for that.”

4. Without affirmative action he would not be getting into Yale.

5. Anti-slavery does not mean anti-Black.

6. American history can be framed within the Marxian dictum (In the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”) of history repeating itself twice, once as tragedy and then again as farce, but with an exceptional turn in its American applicability. History in this sense has been tragic repeatedly in the U.S. There is a similarity in the cycle of anti-Black ism during Reconstruction and the subterranean anti-black ism of the post-Obama years:

“The rise and fall of Reconstruction is the key to understanding how we could have our first Black Presidency and then have it be followed by an alt-right rollback and the clown of clowns Donald Trump. Reconstruction was a time when freed Black people enjoyed an enormous expansion of rights, with the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments, and later with the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The summer of 1867 was the first freedom summer. Black men in the South got the right to vote before Black men in the North. And in 1868, they voted. Ulysses S. Grant won the popular vote by just over three hundred thousand votes. A half-million Black men no doubt voted for Grant. Black men had elected a President.

Black power was in the vote. They took it away, because, until 1910, ninety per cent of all Black people lived in the former Confederacy. South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana were majority-Black states. Georgia, Alabama, and Florida were close to it. This was a huge concentration of power, and the fear was that Black people would dominate the politics of those states and eventually their economic relations. It never was a cakewalk to the voting booth, of course. With the rise in rights came the rise in white-supremacist terrorist tactics, leading to the Mississippi Plan of 1875 and then the new Mississippi state constitution of 1890, which is the urtext of voter suppression. Without using the word “Negro,” “Colored,” or “Black,” the new state constitutional convention had an article that instituted procedures to disenfranchise Black people. The Mississippi Plan spread to other Southern states. You want to know how effective it was? In 1898, there were one hundred and thirty thousand Black men registered to vote in Louisiana. By 1904, after Louisiana had adopted its anti-Black state constitution, in the wake of the Mississippi Plan, that number had been reduced to thirteen hundred and forty-two.

What those Reconstruction amendments granted was stripped away through sharecropping, vagrancy laws, peonage, and disenfranchisement, which is why what we’re seeing happening in so many Republican legislatures today should terrify anyone who loves the principles upon which our great country was founded.”

Leap forward to Trump after Obama. The Reconstruction legacy rollback.

7. Why West Virginians did not vote for Obama though they voted for JFK. Simple: Good times versus bad times. Economic uncertainty can turn reasonable folks into stupid monsters. When you have no hope, you start to hate people. You look for people you can scapegoat. Evil manifests.

8. The Obamas were noble. A Black Camelot flowed graciously.

9. The 1619 Project raised a furore and push back because one of its cardinal sins was to claim that the revolution (American war of independence) was not an unadulterated war for independence, but also a push back to protect the institution of slavery (abolished by Britain since long).

10. Neither Socialism nor Marxism can redeem society from racism. Gates, whose wife is Cuban, sees Cuba as even more racist than the U.S. Capitalism in its humane form is the only hope for Blacks. Problems of race and racism can only be solved economically.

11. There are forty-two million ways to be Black in America (not just one)

12. Reading list for African-American Literature:

Fiction:

1. “The Conjure Woman,” by Charles W. Chesnutt

2. “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” by James Weldon Johnson

3. “Cane,” by Jean Toomer

4. “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” by Zora Neale Hurston

5. “Native Son,” by Richard Wright

6. “Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison

7. “Mumbo Jumbo,” by Ishmael Reed

8. “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker

9. “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison (or “Sula,” “Song of Solomon,” or “Jazz”)

10. “At the Bottom of the River,” by Jamaica Kincaid

Nonfiction:

1. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” by Frederick Douglass

2. “A Voice from the South,” by Anna Julia Cooper

3. “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W. E. B. Du Bois

4. “Black Skin, White Masks,” by Frantz Fanon

5. “Notes of a Native Son,” by James Baldwin

6. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley

7. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou

8. “Angela Davis: An Autobiography,” by Angela Y. Davis

9. “Playing in the Dark,” by Toni Morrison

10. “In My Father’s House,” by Kwame Anthony Appiah

For reference:

1. “From Slavery to Freedom” (ninth edition or later), by John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

2. “The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson,” by Rayford W. Logan

3. “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877,” by Eric Foner

4. “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” by Annette Gordon-Reed