two articles

First one makes me think, if he stole $1 million to become an MP, what is he hoping to gain in office? Hmm... Ghana politician accused of NY limo scam Link here »

The second says, well, politicians always have their hands in something :) 'cos Washington had slaves under the table, like Clinton had cigars in the drawer :); Slave passage found at Washington house Link here »

That's all folks :)

what's in a name?

My environmentally soft heart often leads me to recycled aisles, but I like to feel like I am not being treated like a recycled thing. So, last week I went to re-stock on toilet paper and found that Tesco had redesigned the pack; it now read ‘TESCO recycled toilet tissue.” I didn’t pay it much attention until I was sitting in that thinking position then I started toying with the possibility that they mean tissue made from recycled toilet – of course, I know I’m being silly, but language is such an abstract thing isn’t it? Lends itself to loading with images, meanings, attitudes... right? Precisely the point of this post…

I swear, I am of a peaceful demeanour 98% of my life; it is the oddest things that get me going – I can get apoplectic in 2 seconds flat sometimes. One of those odd things is the marketing of books – especially books about the supposed ‘other’ (that means anyone who didn’t invent the idea of races or the English language) – and I’m not just talking about those silly typefaces that have come to symbolise different peoples although my Ghanaian blog-brother deals with it in some fine detail on his post Types and Faces, I speak of entire ideas and book blurbs that toy with the very notion of justice in the quest to perpetuate the idea of the roving hero (read WMOMS - white [english, french, spanish, portugese, danish, dutch - important detail; apart from queen vic I have no beef with english women, and I certainly didn't see any Lithuanian's trying to steal my diamonds in 18**] man on a mission somewhere). I usually ignore these things; I have become thick-skinned with the years BUT I saw the cover for Allan Mallinson's Company of Spears and I had a hard time stopping myself from tearing all the copies in Waterstone's to shreds. I admit I haven't read the book, and I am told that Mr Mallinson handles the battle prose as battle prose, no prejudices, BUT the cover's tag line is 'on the plains of South Africa Matthew Hervey [the hero] confronts the savage Zulu' - I mean, wait a minute! One party gathers men, gets on a ship, travels halfway across the world to pick a fight, and it's the person who is protecting his homeland who is labelled 'savage'? Yes, we all know that the Zulu were/are renowned warriors, but can't they just be brave? Why is it that South American, Native American and African warriors are always immortalised in writing as fierce, savage and brutal? Who is it that invented concentration camps against the Boer and African populations in South Africa (let's not even get into how that affected the psyche of the Boer and indirectly perpetuated apartheid)? Who is it that decimated native Central & South American populations in the bid to convert them to Catholicism? Who is it that considered castration and the removal of eyes as legitimate forms of interrogation against the Mau Mau in Kenya? I could go on... but I'm not asking for a revolution, I'm asking for these things not to be accepted as norms anymore - otherwise, who are we to turn around and complain that cultures can't co-exist? The truth is, the twin constructs of borders and race have always bothered me, but that is a huge battle that must be fought in stages. For now, I don't think it's too much to ask that we start by fixing our language use.

In nicer, warmer anecdote on the appropriation of words/names, Ike Turner (who I mentioned in a previous post after he won a Grammy) apparently has a song on his album having a dig at Tina. He renamed Eddie Boyd's Five Long Years as 18 Long Years (which is how long he was married to Tina) and dropped the beautiful line 'I've worked 18 long years for one woman/And she had the nerve to kick me out ... and do a movie.' (full story here)

That's my fustian done!

what i'm reading/listening to

listening:
Shame & a Sin - by Robert Cray

Robert is a bluesman's bluesman. His lyrics are IT and his guitar playing is incredible. I was lucky to see him at the Jazz Cafe in London last year and was struck by the odd fact that his face shows more emotion when he's strumming than when he's singing. But, man, that voice! He could look as stone-faced as a Trafalgar Square lion and you'd still feel the emotion. My favourite album of his is actually Sweet Potato Pie (cover on the right) for the songs Nothing Against You, Do That For Me, The One in the Middle and Little Birds.

reading:
Turner by David Dabydeen & A Wedding in Hell by Charles Simic

After close to a year of self-imposed novexile, it is with a rare animal-like pleasure that I have turned back to poetry, devouring line-breaks like Kit Kats. I am also aware that soon I will be in the San Gabriel Valley in California as writer-in-residence running poetry workshops - I have to come correct :)

the Ghana effect

i wrote a short reflection piece for the BBC Africa Beyond site for today, Ghana's Independence Day. check it out at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/africabeyond/africanarts/18150.shtml

black & white

The school that made me, Achimota School in Accra, Ghana, has a black and white crest modelled on the piano, a play on the idea that you can't make good music with only the black keys or only the white keys. BTW the school was founded long before Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney sang Ebony & Ivory (yes, youtube have it!) - maybe we should ask for a cut of the royalties! Anyway, the old boys network just passed info on to me about a fund-raising website to help keep it in its glory so I guess I have to dig into my pockets pre-winter after all :) The website is www.ac2010.org if you're feeling generous! So... in the way random things happen to me that my mind manages to link or make sense of, I was doing research for some writing I'm doing and came across this interesting bit of information from wikipedia - "from age 16, millions of African-American men disappear from the census but women do not. In 2000, this came to 2.77 million individuals. Where did they go?" My first response, of course was, "why are you asking me? You built the prisons!" But then I thought they actually do count prisoners and 2.77 million prisoners would be an awful lot of prisoners to "disappear" (new usage learnt from my friend Hisham Matar when he wrote about what Qaddafi did to his father)... Not even Dubya could manage that... Then I read on... "The assumption... is that they redefined themselves as White." Of course, this is me diluting a lot of information, but the bottom line is, Dave Chappelle may not be the only Black man in the KKK; it's believed that a third of US Americans who identify themselves as white, have African ancestry. Though it's hard to believe, births were not officially recorded with the races of the parents in the US until about 1800. African people started arriving in the US in 1619 as indentured slaves - along with white slaves - who could work their way out of debt (and thus go free) almost 100 years before slavery was specifically linked to race in 1705 when the 'Slave Codes' came into effect. That means for close to 200 years, a child that was born and was 'light' enough would be assumed to be white, and by the time birth certificates kicked in - especially in the period between 1880 and 1965 when the US became obsessed with recording people's 'racial' origin - there would have been so many of them that they were, in fact, just 'American'. Being the nerd that I am, I extrapolated that against the 2000 US Census and the figure (of 1/3 of self-identified white having African ancestry) means the US is 50% white and that's not even counting the self-identified whites who may have Native American ancestry... Interesting stuff! Time for a Black President, or maybe, time for genetic tests on all the past US presidents... OK, I've messed about enough now - back to work!