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 :)

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!

trapped

Anyone remember that Colonel Abrams song? (I keep showing my age up in this web!)... "Oh oh I`m trapped like a fool I`m in a cage."; that's me right now. Of course I'm ecstatic that I just handed in my dissertation for my Masters and I was really looking forward to some "downtime" but ALAS here comes October. It's Black History Month in the UK, I'm a Ghanaian writer (of, dark, very dark complexion Mr Soyinka...) and I can't afford to refuse the the system its opportunity to employ me and PAY ME 'cos I have bills waiting. So... I find myself working on things I would have loved to work on in another month of the year, and no time for ME and my dreaming at all! Regardless, I'm doing sleepless nights reading and I'm carrying on with my novel so if you see me and my eyes are red and I'm not making sense, just know that I'm trying to survive in a country that only wants me to exist for a month :)

on the road

So, you would think that a wedding getaway/holiday that started with some asshole (hereinafter known as Mr A) jumping a queue I'd been in for 30 minutes just because he was in business class could only go downhill. Well, I walked up to him and told him what I thought of him, and he wasn't at all repentant - the weird thing was the airline apologised for him! What? I asked the airline, to his hearing - of course - if it was fine for him to act like a jerk and have them apologise but they went quiet. So, the septuagenarian couple in front of me had to wait for Mr A to get checked in, but what was sweet was the couple and I became good travel buddies and Mr A couldn't look anyone in the eye for the entire flight - delicious 9 hour payback.

Anyway, it all got better... once on the plane it hit me how some things have become obsolete in my short lifetime - pretty wild to think about! One of them is airline ashtrays, and the whole idea of smoking on airplanes. The sight of all those glued-shut ashtrays just reminds you how old most planes are, but think about how far we've come: you could actually have lighters, lighter fuel, tobacco, smoke... all that good stuff up there in the air, and now you're not even allowed to carry a bottle of water to your seat - of course the duty-free shops are cleaning up :) There's always a good financial angle to all these alerts, prohibitions, curtailments of rights... I saw a guy who was transferring flights get stripped of two bottles of whiskey in Switzerland, yet he'd just bought them in duty-free and hadn't been warned. I see a whole new recycling sale industry developing... Biggest irony though? While we were limited to the tiniest carry on bags ever, the people who boarded in Switzerland seemed to have huge bags; a Jewish guy - of the big beard and long curly lock crew - on the plane even reached into his bag to get Pringles and - oh my God! - juice!! See how stupid it sounds that we were all staring open-mouthed at a guy becasue he took juice out of his carry on bag? But then again, two guys were thrown off a plane just for looking a certain way. I wonder what would have happened if they had reached into their bags for a bottle of fresh juice...

Shopping: I just found out that this really forward thinking basketball star - Stephon Marbury - started his own clothing label so young boys could have cool gear for less and not have to resort to crime to look fly. The label is called starbury (starbury.com) and they sell basketball shoes for $14.98, work boots for £9.98 and most of their other gear for $9.98. Of course I had to support the cause so I hooked my self up in Connecticut. Otherwise, I've been good!

The other great thing is because I'm here for family I've been road-tripping with my Mom and, man, have I been asleep with this writing stuff. Things have been going on around me and I have no idea; it's good to catch up...

Later.

what i'm reading/listening to

listening:
Woyaya by Osibisa

reading:
my own stuff to realign my writing in progess :)

imho - lmao

Can I just say, what is a humble opinion?? Think about it; if you have an opinion you already feel pretty good about yourself or what you're thinking - humility doesn't come into it. Respect, maybe... but humility? IMHO - In My Humble Opinion - Has no one ever wondered why the expression only exists in English? It's a typical English sucker-punch-type expression that allows one to kiss ass and speak their minds at the same time... of course, if you think that it originated from England and England still has 'the Royals' it makes a bit of sense. How do you advise someone who has the right to behead you at any time? Aha! In my own proud language of Ga, equivalent expressions for speaking one's mind are as clear as 'if I look' (ke mi kwe) or 'i don't feel that way'/ - more literally- 'it doesn't do me that way' (e fee mi nakai), in French it's 'a mon avis' - nobody puts humble in the mix except the English. Anyway, I've been thinking about the antidote for weeks, and it's another internet favourite: LMAO - Laughing My Ass Off (or in Ghana LMBO, where B=Buttocks!). The trick is once you laugh your ass off there is nothing left to kiss so IMHO can go bury itself!

So, I've been away beavering at a new interface for the Tell Tales site to restore interactivity after a long time away. The new link is at http://www.telltales.co.uk/tt_cafe/


Interesting stuff I've read over the last couple of days, are the use of the rings from female condoms as bangles in Ghana (link here). I mean, how can you not love a country where the mathematics of birth control can be turned into a distinct, economical fashion advantage, manipulated to ignite the chemistry of attraction and head back into the whirlwind of sexual activity. See, for years we've replaced the fan belts in our cars with stockings, created stretch limos by putting two halves of separate cars together... why would anyone be surprised that our women are so creative! The other thing I read is a perfect example of how a film might later be made about how a woman used the rings from female condoms to start a fashion empire BUT they just might forget to say she was from Ghana :) All hail Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, where a black ex-marine who helped save lives on September 11 was cast as a white man :) Well, I understand; there just aren't enough jobs out there for the struggling white actors in Hollywood (link here)

I'm listening to the poet - Bobby Womack - 'cos he's a lyrical mack with one of the most amazing voices in the world and I'm reading Roald Dahl 'cos I'm writing some kiddie stuff and Roald had that down! Speaking of kiddies, it's well past my bedtime - I need to go get my Horlicks and snoozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

what i'm reading/listening to

listening:
The Poet by Bobby Womack

reading:
Esio Trot by Roald Dahl

pasta

no listening, no reading, just talking... i'm away from home unwinding with some old friends 'cos my life's all twisted right now. of course, what do i get for dinner? pasta - spaghetti bolognese. you couldn't get more twisted than that - am i reading too many metaphors out here? well, the good thing is it tasted great and i ate it all. now if i could consume all my entangled problems in the same way, i wouldn't care if it came with good wine or not!