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Here are our artists in residence. Professor Michael D. Harris, who received the PhD degree in the history of art from Yale University. He also received the MA degree with distinction from Yale in African and African American

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studies. He received the BS degree in education from the Bowling Green State University. There are many things that I could say about him as an artist and as one who really relates art to the peculiar predicament of our people. Suffice it to say I think it is significant that we have with us this

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afternoon a poet, artist, and writer who's able to tell our story in order that it will not be as Tony Brown says so eloquently his story. I present to you now Michael D. Harris who will relate to us this afternoon around the topic of visualization and fracture reassembling the black male.

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It's a great pleasure for me to be here today. I've been on the faculty at Morehouse for a number of years but I've been on leave up at Yale for the last three years, so I have truly missed being here and working with the young women and men in the AU complex because they vitalize me, inspire me. This was a

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difficult topic to organize because there are so many aspects, so many ways of approaching it, so many factors that affect us. So I decided to write it out so that there would be some semblance of organization in my presentation.

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And because I'm an Africanist, I tend not to take the linear path, but I tend to take a spiral path so that as we go around and around, hopefully we're continuing to move upward toward a final point and resolution.

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I also was faced with the personal challenge of coming to speak in front of professional speakers. There are many preachers here today, and that's a dangerous enterprise when one is not in that realm.

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We used to say you don't sword fight with Zorro, throw stones at Superman, you know, things like that. So I will not preach today. I will talk and I will deal with ideas.

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There are a lot of specifics, but I'm hoping to develop ideas because ultimately I think that we can distill the nature of our circumstance in this country, the nature of our struggle at this point to a dialectic,

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to a struggle between ways of looking at the world, ideas. And a great many of the assumptions we have today have been constructed in these ivory towers that we like to poo-poo, push aside. The book Black Athena, the Afro-Asiatic Roots

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of Classical Civilization by Martin Bernal approaches that issue and shows how what we think about Greece and the heritage of Greece that so many people honor in the Western world is in fact a construction, an academic construction developed two

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centuries ago. But last week I was reading the New York Times. I like to see what's going on and I thumbed through it. And I saw an article by Anthony Lewis that says,

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but we close our eyes. And basically he delineated some of the significant problems that Americans have and how Europeans are beginning to deal with specific social problems through the great change

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in Eastern Europe, et cetera. and how we tended to turn a blind eye to significant problems in this country. And he listed some of those problems. He said America's problems are no secret.

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And then he starts and says education is an example. Then he goes into health and underneath health he talks about the infant mortality rate in this country and how terrible it is in certain places.

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And then he goes into homelessness, which is certainly a significant problem. And then there's a host of economic problems. And then he says, finally, there's the most profound problem

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of all, the environment. Now, I thought it was terribly ironic that this article talked about the avoidance of problems and problems that need to be addressed, and it avoided the greatest problem of all,

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and that's the problem of race, white supremacy. And that problem has been a problem that has affected the structure, assumptions, development, and history, and interpretations in this society

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for the last 400 years. It's a major problem. The war that was fought around this question and various interests around this question, the Civil War, cost more American lives

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than all the other wars combined. But this is the war we don't deal with. We're dealing with Vietnam. We're dealing -- we've dealt, of course, with World War II.

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Glory is one of the first significant looks into the Civil War in quite a long time, the movie Glory. So we avoid this problem again and again and having friends in psychology, I would begin to, based on the associative knowledge I've gained because I'm not a psychologist, I would

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begin to define this in a person as some kind of a neurosis or maybe a pathological problem. When you avoid a major component of your life, a major problem, it's like an alcoholic who does not acknowledge that he even drinks. And I think that we should challenge some of the basic assumptions that we operate under

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in the society. I would like to define the society as in many ways pathologically ill. And some of our own problems come from an attempt to identify and join that society uncritically.

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From the Bible, Mark 5, 34, "And he said unto her, 'Daughter, thy faith made thee whole. Go in peace and behold of thy plague.'" a plague at our door. There are forces assailing us, and these forces are gaining momentum. They've changed faces. There's always been dangerous forces at our doors, but there are

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plagues at our doors today, and we know about these things. We know about AIDS. We know about the drug problem. And this assault is insidious and devastating, and it's a threat It's insidious and devastating and continues to be. But I would like to then play on this verse

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with the notion of faith as a curative element as we deal with these problems and our reactions to them internally. I'm going to talk about some of the external forces

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as I define, but my concern is an internal problem we need to deal with with black men because I talk to some friends and I like to check things out on various levels. So I talk to scholars, I talk to my barber and people like that. And we talk about how if you can affect someone's mind, then you can have one soldier

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with one gun guarding a thousand people. However, with a different mind, you need a soldier for every person. You need a thousand soldiers. And we're getting to the point where it takes one soldier

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to guard ten thousand of us. And we begin to do the damage ourselves. Lynching is no longer something that goes on regularly, but we're dying faster than we were when that was the problem.

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We have an external assault, and we also have internal casualties. So the struggle in the streets during the decade of the '60s, the civil rights movement, et cetera, et cetera, I think is now a war being engaged in the areas of culture,

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concepts, and institution definition. Water hoses and police violence have been replaced with the precision bombing of Supreme Court decisions, guerrilla assaults on our community with drugs and AIDS,

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and the institutional sabotage of our families. And I'd like to say that there is evidence to suggest that the AIDS virus emerged from the control of biological warfare laboratories.

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Now we have a relationship with this society and I think that we need to reassess that to some extent. So, view of some of the problems internally. Fragmentation, fracture, and the psychological fragmentation

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of the black man is leading to a problem, a condition that I think is akin to the pathological definition of schizophrenia. Juliana Bruno in an essay about postmodern conditions and projections provided this description of schizophrenia.

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Schizophrenia results from a failure to enter the symbolic order. The schizophrenic condition is characterized by the inability to experience the persistence of the "I" over time. There's neither past nor future at the two poles of that which becomes a perpetual present.

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Jameson writes, "The schizophrenic does not have "our experience of temporal continuity, "but is condemned to live a perpetual present "with which the various moments of his or her past

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"have little connection and for which there is "no conceivable future on the horizon." And since this conference is dealing with injecting historical information,

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I think it's easy to see how, as we are fractured from our past, as African history becomes distorted, the interpretations get turned around,

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as we lose a sense of that continuum that goes back past slavery for another 5,000 years in documented record, and beyond that in undocumented record.

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As we lose ourselves in that continuum, there's a disorientation that results. Also, because of the conditions, the plague that assaults us, the responses that we continually have,

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we begin to lose a sense of hope for the future. So we focus on the here and now. History is no longer a desire to know, but I think in our community, it's a need to know.

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We've got to, we have to deal with these conditions because we have to define ourselves much more clearly. A much healthier definition is necessary. A much more complete visualization, I think, is necessary.

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And this process takes place on every level of this society, this fragmentation process, this distorted story. We get, first of all, if you look at which African, which black African-American, whatever the terminology is,

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we look at which voices are listened to. It's the entertainer. It's the performer. It's not the theoretician.

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It's not the scholar. If you deal with African writers, we know about Chinua Achebe and Wole Sayinka, beautiful writers, fantastic people. But Sheikhanta Jyap is pushed aside.

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The voice of the African does not get to tell his story except as a narrative, as a story, but not as a scholar. So we begin to undermine the reliance, the reliability in our -- in African-American young minds

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on the voice of our own. We think it has to come from a white scholar, a white anthropologist, sociologist, historian, et cetera. So what are these white voices telling our boys

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about our history, about who we are? Africa is underdeveloped, right? Personal income among the African, to validate this notion of underdevelopedness is in per capita dollars, right?

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Africans in these societies only make so many dollars per capita. Now I'm not sure what a per capita dollar is. I don't know where it's valid, how much, you know, how it's valid because everything is always compared to what?

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You always have to have a compared to what? So when people use these rationalizations, I've seen it used by Prime Minister Botha to justify the conditions of South African blacks,

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since this is a hot topic now with Mandela, because they said that the blacks in South Africa have a higher per capita income than the rest of most of black Africa.

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Now what he doesn't say is that the white per capita income is about 10 to 15 times that. And also, you know, we talk about assumptions. That makes the assumption that how much money you have,

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how many dollars you have, is going to somehow be a determinant of the quality and the health of your life. I don't buy it. We always hear these expressions like if a white European didn't see it or document it,

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it doesn't exist. So, we have a movie coming out called Mountains of the Moon. I think it either came out this weekend or it's coming out. And it's about two European explorers

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who discovered the source of the Nile. And their African guides took them there. The ancient texts say that the Egyptians said, "We're from the foothills at the mountains of the moon,

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the Ruz-en-Wari range." They told them where they came from. It's been on record for several thousands of years. but it wasn't true.

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You know, we didn't know where the wool now came from until these two British fellows went there. This is the process. So, what our boys and our own boyhoods end

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up with a history of slavery. And we know that we were slaves, right? We came from this. We have roots and we have trouble when we go beyond that.

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These distortions serve the interests of imperial or hegemonic domination, the groups, the economic interests that want to control, benefit from this. It defames our ancestors and it sows the seeds

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of this collective schizophrenia because we're fractured from that picture of ourselves. We should be able to look at our ancestors and their ancestors and we should be able to see a line that goes all the way back

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to God at the beginning of time. There should be no break in that line. There might be some fuzzy areas, but we should be able to look back and identify and identify, and you know where you are.

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You know where you are on that. You would create a timeline. You create a sense of health, a sense of placement, a sense of me. All right, when you come to the African-American world,

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and you want to make interpretations, let's say you're a scholar, you young students here, who knows where you may be. some may be historian or cultural scholars. There are 4,000 words from the Yoruba language

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that have been documented in use in Cuba. Pre-Civil War rice planters in South Carolina specifically requested slaves from the Senegambian coast because they knew

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that these people grew rice. We now know that there was a rice growing tradition on the Senegambian coast that goes back a thousand years before Christ. There was no rice growing in England.

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It's too cold. You can't grow that plant there. So what they did was bring in rice growing Africans and developed techniques for growing rice

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and they imposed European organizational methods for organizing the farms. But they knew who they wanted. They knew who these people were.

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They knew distinctions. We talk about Gullah and it comes from Angola, but there's another group of people up in the Senegambian region with a similar name that may have been the source

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of that Gullah distinction that we talk about. You can't translate this information properly until you look back to Africa. You look at religious traditions, Kandamble in Brazil, in Bahia,

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direct from spiritual practices in Nigeria and Dahomey and incorporates many Yoruba orisha. Vodun, I think there's so many elements in what we call voodoo and why it's denigrated because it has a Haitian origin,

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but that's another story, but it's called Vodun and it has traditions that go straight back to the Nigerians and people from Dahomey. This is a cultural fragment that can be called

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from just a huge body of information. And then when you see people in the community that do what they do, when the preachers preach how they preach, when we sing how we sing, there are ways you can look at this.

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And you can find out the cultural traditions that this comes from. There's a tremendous music tradition that we call blue tonality That's a major component of blues and jazz as you go and watch developments from the mid-18th,

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I mean mid-19th century, the documentation. My study of Yoruba suggests to me that blue tonality is a result of the linguistic characteristics of tonal languages that come from West Africa.

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When you speak in English, you may intone a word a certain way for accent, but basically you can write a word down and you can read it. And that's the way it is and the meaning comes from this.

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In Yoruba, the same word may have many combinations of patterns and meaning is dependent on that because they have a tonal structure that's the equivalent of do, re, mi.

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So the same word with a mi at the end means a very different thing than with a do at the end. So those speaking patterns as you go up and down, you know, I deal with my children all the time with the greetings, you know,

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[ Foreign Language Spoken ] And that may be a source of the blue tonality that we look for and we listen to in our music when the blues singer starts to moan or you hear it in church, you know.

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But you can't get that if you stop at slavery. Now, there are other aspects of this mental construction I'm trying to build on here. There's a fragmentation on a collective sense. What happened in our communities after we get into integration?

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you have the community fragmented by class. So people move out to the suburbs, another group moves into an all black community over here, and you've got this class here in the projects,

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you've got this class here in this community, you've got that class there. Whereas we had a more complete community prior to that, particularly in the South.

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Now, the good part about that is that we had a sense of community, so there was a stronger sense of definition, even though there was this assault from outside,

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but we had that sense of definition because we knew who we were and we knew what we had to deal with. And the young boy, and this is what I'm dealing with

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because he's going through a process of becoming this man and his life is being fragmented. But he, at that time, in our father's generations, could see a successful black man who was making it

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on his intelligence, on his work ethic, on his ingenuity, and he had access to that man. But now, in certain communities, the only access you have are who? Dealers, the -- it used to be the pimps, but people who were trying to hustle and scuffle

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and certain things, certain ways to get their money together. And, you know, we see that as the only alternative for some men. And what happens is these men are in a community

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that has begun to be defined as a permanent underclass. they're beginning to be told to see themselves as a permanent underclass. That means that they're supposed to be there

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until the end of this society. And that's the vision they're given. That's the goal that they are told to look for. Now, there are other, you know,

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we're not just in our own community. This fragmentation is taking place in the larger community too. People are becoming disembodied.

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I've been reading certain information about the nature of modern society and some of the assumptions that affect the individual. So these forces we have to deal with too.

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And Alice Jardine in an essay called Of Bodies and Technologies reports, "There are various and new ways of simulating "and actually becoming machines."

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Yeah, we're becoming mechanized. "One way of becoming a machine is to hook yourself up to one. Video games, media, television, the new non-umbilical telephones that transmit through walls, etc. This technology is described by some as an external nervous

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system connected to us by a variety of devices that radically change our sense of time and space. Another way to simulate a machine is to look like one. And then she goes into an an analysis of the punk groups who wear black and white and metal and, you know, do that.

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And then they talk about the square Grace Jones look in our own community. We've squared ourselves off and boxed ourselves up. It's not -- I'm not saying that that is necessarily true,

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but I'm saying at least we can begin to critically assess this and look at our relationship to the mechanical world, especially with television. And I'm going to really get into that.

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but the African world is a very human-centered world. The $5 word is anthropocentric, but it's a human-centered world. In Yoruba, if you talk about putting something

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on top of something, use the word for head. You said it's on the head. So structured into the language is a human-centeredness. Human interaction is important.

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there's a series of greetings you go through with the orbal. You may stand and see somebody and you just want to say, hey, what's happening, and move on, but you may be there for five minutes

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as you go through this series of greetings because people are forced to deal with each other on a personal level. We hear about our oral tradition.

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I found out from reading a book by Sylvia Boone that an oral tradition is also a philosophical statement because when you have an oral tradition, you can control who gets what information.

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And if you know that somebody is not ready for certain information, you don't have to give it to them. But if you write it or put it on television, you have no control of who gets it.

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So we get fragmented and our human interaction gets broken up and we sit and we watch television. The other aspect of that is experience begins to be vicarious.

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We disembody ourselves so we don't have to use our own bodies anymore. We can sit on the couch and, you know, munch on something and our eyes will tie us to this electronic system.

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The camera becomes our own eyes. The experience gets to be who does what on the soap opera. We don't have to do it. If you want to go somewhere,

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you watch the National Geographic Travel Program and you can see Egypt. You don't have to go. You don't have to deal with it.

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as if we can reduce experience to its mechanical components, as if we can fragment experience into replaceable part elements, as if we can mechanize life.

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You can't pick up on somebody's vibe, express, you know, you get certain visual expressions and inflections through the television, et cetera, but there's a missing thing that's there.

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There's a missing thing that human contact that forces you to deal in a certain way and interact in a certain way is not there. We're tying ourselves into that. This is a major, I think, consideration in the black community because it's changed the

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nature of family relationships in the black community. What happened to the days when we used to sit on the porch and talk after dinner or something in the evening? Not everybody did it, but people did it more often.

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People used to walk and go see the people down the street. They'd be on their porch, so you couldn't walk by them. Even now in certain small communities, I work with brilliant scholar John Blasingame.

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And John is from Georgia. He's from a small town over near Augusta. And he says when he goes home, he doesn't go walking at certain times of night

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because he knows it's gonna take him all day to get somewhere because he can't walk past these porches without saying something to people. All right, that was the kind of human interaction

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that we come from, that's part of an African continuum. And when you deal with Africa, you know that. And I think that that's very important. And I think it's also important to note

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that the television interaction deals with a passive mind, a receptive mind. So you begin to have values pushed on you. And then let's get back to that little boy.

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What's the man that he's going to deal with? And since we have so many black homes where the father is not in the home, what kind of manhood images is he gonna deal with?

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Fragments, he's gonna get pieces. He's gonna see talk on Oprah Winfrey about topics maybe, or maybe he's gonna see Color Purple or the Women of Brewster Place,

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because those are the images of black men that are allowed out now. Or perhaps he'll get a little bit of the Cosby Show and the young man on LA Law.

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But those are fragments. You know, how do you get behind that? There's always a facade, but how do you check him out further?

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How do you ask him further questions? You've got a lot of little shards, like fragments in a mirror. And how is that young man going to build

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a holistic picture of himself from a series of electronic fragments? Okay, so let's summarize a little bit. We've experienced a historical disconnection from Africa,

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and we're left as a people with a historical foundation of slavery, which is no positive identification. Our communities, which maintain a sense of collective identity, came apart as the pressures the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power

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movements in the '50s and '60s broke apart some of the barriers in American society. So as this sense of a community physically disintegrated, the necessity for an intellectual and historical

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sense of community became even more critical and becomes even more critical. At the same time, technological developments are leading to a fragmentation of human experience

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generally, so you have that one on top of the other, and we even begin to transfer our physical labor to mechanical surrogates, which is the advancement of technology.

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So we've got, if we want to have anything that resembles a healthy body, now we've got to artificially go to a gym and pump iron or do various things

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because it's no longer a part of our work. And that's not necessarily bad, but I'm trying to put it in a total picture that is breaking us apart, fragmenting us,

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and leading to this schizophrenic condition in our collective manhood. All right? Then there is the problem of visualization.

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You don't want to visualize yourself as a slave. You've got fragments of images to visualize with. You've got this notion of a permanent underclass. Then we've got the drug trade.

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80% of the cocaine addicts in this country are white. Why, when we deal with these issues in the media, do we see black pushers, black users, black communities devastated?

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And they are, we are suffering mightily. But why is it visualized as a black problem so that we identify it with the black community? Crack is not something that just lives in the black community.

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The other thing is Francis Cress Welshing pointed out that there's a whole system, there's a whole industry that deals with this product before it gets to our community.

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We don't grow it, we don't process it, we don't have the planes or the boats to bring it in, we didn't build them, we don't have the apparatus that imports it, we don't make the bags it comes in,

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we don't make the vials or the needles that people use or whatever paraphernalia, we don't make the guns or the ammunition that are used in the drug wars. All of that is in place when it comes to our community.

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So we need to pause and think about that, how much of it is conspiratorial. For those of you that remember the movie, The Godfather, they came right out and said,

00:33:28.280 - 00:33:38.920

okay, we won't deal drugs in our community, we'll deal it in the black community. That was about, what, 18 years ago or something like that, that the movie was out, but it was laid right out there.

00:33:38.920 - 00:33:54.760

Okay, it's something to certainly think about. So how come armed young men are the symbols of the trade? What does that do with the visualization? Then I saw a piece in the New Haven Register

00:33:54.760 - 00:34:08.140

about two weeks ago, and it talked about recovering cocaine addicts and there's a story about that. Of course, they had a black couple on the cover, but as I said, 80% of the addicts in this country are white.

00:34:08.140 - 00:34:19.760

So why is it always a black couple? Why are we always focusing on our community? We don't control this trade. Not only that, I heard some talk earlier about this trade

00:34:19.760 - 00:34:29.480

with the young men, and this is where I check with my barber. You know, we talked about this, and you know, sometimes when you go to the library, you get some information, then you go and check it

00:34:29.480 - 00:34:41.440

with your barber, and you know, you find out what's happening. So, he told me, he talked to the young men on the street dealing with the drugs, and he said, you know, you think that there's money involved,

00:34:41.440 - 00:34:48.960

but actually all the money goes right back into the white communities, just that they've gotten to the point where they don't have to deal with selling it on the streets and the violence.

00:34:48.960 - 00:34:59.000

Because when you get the money, what happens? You buy a car. We don't make them. And now that the labor for the cars is moving overseas

00:34:59.000 - 00:35:10.160

and UAW is catching it in this country, that manufacturing infrastructure is crumbling. We're not even as much a process of the assembly of the cars, and we're buying foreign cars.

00:35:10.160 - 00:35:21.140

We're buying gold. We're buying athletic outfits, Adidas, Nike, et cetera, and they're beautiful. So, you know, we get in the trade to get all this showed.

00:35:21.140 - 00:35:31.060

It goes right back to the black, to the white community. Then you get busted, so you go get a white bail's bondsman and you give up your money there, right? Then you go hire a white lawyer.

00:35:31.060 - 00:35:41.620

And so your money is just kind of passed through your hands. You get to, you get to be like a bank teller. You get to do like this. And then if you get busted, they confiscate your car

00:35:41.620 - 00:36:02.140

and things like that. And then, as was pointed out, most people don't survive more than a few years. It's time to take a look at certain things in a larger sense, not only because of what we're doing and how it affects us, but also to begin to assess the patterns and see what

00:36:02.140 - 00:36:16.800

patterns we're buying into. I think that this society has some insane elements, and I think that we have turned ourselves upside down trying to join the society. The metaphor that came to me this weekend is that the Titanic hit an iceberg, we're

00:36:16.800 - 00:36:43.000

trying to get on the Titanic, and the good news is there's a lot of seats in first class. The way it's turned upside down, this is kente cloth, and you see a lot of people with it, Dr. Carter has it on, and it's a symbol of status and accomplishment in the West African communities where this cloth is developed, particularly among the Asante. But what's

00:36:43.000 - 00:37:05.720

important is that this and the cowrie shell, which serves as money in many West African communities, are symbols of a status that you have attained. They represent what you have accomplished. But what we are doing in this society, we have turned it upside down in this present moment that we live in, and we focused

00:37:05.720 - 00:37:18.960

on the material as the conferral of status. We think that if we buy a Mercedes, it makes us something special. It doesn't -- you know, that's upside down.

00:37:18.960 - 00:37:33.240

Plus, the danger is you cannot let things outside of yourself define yourself. Your value has to come from who you are and how you are. What kind of a human being are you?

00:37:33.240 - 00:37:39.960

What do you do? What is your value? What is your conduct? It's not, you know, if you see a drug dealer

00:37:39.960 - 00:37:52.240

driving a $60,000 automobile, does that make him a valuable man? I don't think so. And I think that the values that allow that to be so

00:37:52.240 - 00:38:07.840

are part of the insanity that we are trying to buy into and some of us are buying into. All of us, I think, need to critically assess our position on that. Things don't make anything.

00:38:07.840 - 00:38:21.400

Don't make the man. The man makes the man. All right, now let's move on to visualization and reassembly. And I'm going to try to suggest some possible strategies

00:38:21.400 - 00:38:38.960

for rehumanizing black men, specifically in our community in general. I also meant to mention very quickly a topic that is kind of hot in certain aspects of the intellectual community, and those are, you know, the fragmentation of scholarship

00:38:38.960 - 00:39:06.000

into issues of gender and sexual preference. I think that those issues must be framed in the larger context of our community as a black community under assault because ultimately our treatment in this society ultimately depends upon who we are as a people in a cultural area that was defined as black African.

00:39:06.000 - 00:39:33.660

And those other issues are issues worth dealing with but not before we deal with that main issue because as we know when we looked at the history of our people in this country in the 30s, 40s, 50s, we're talking about men being dragged out and being lynched. And it didn't matter what their status was socially.

00:39:33.660 - 00:39:48.660

It didn't matter what their status was sexually, their preference or any of those things. I think that we have to subsume those things under the larger topic and then deal with them as family issues, okay?

00:39:48.660 - 00:40:01.740

Mark 11, 21 through 24. And Peter calling to remembrance, saith unto him, "Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursest "is withered away."

00:40:01.740 - 00:40:12.600

And Jesus answering, saith unto them, "Have faith in God. "For verily I say unto you that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, be thou removed,

00:40:12.600 - 00:40:26.400

and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass. He shall have whatsoever he saith.

00:40:26.400 - 00:40:38.600

Therefore, I say unto you, what things soever you desire, when you pray, believe ye receive them, and you shall have them." So theologians in the audience, please

00:40:38.600 - 00:40:52.560

Be patient with me. I would like to suggest that the concept of faith in the New Testament of the Bible can be read as an expression of visualization,

00:40:52.560 - 00:41:04.740

of projecting what you want to happen with such belief, faith, that you are sure that this is going to happen. Okay, as you theorize behind that,

00:41:04.740 - 00:41:14.540

it means that your mental state affects the reality that lay in front of you. You construct your future. It doesn't mean you can sit up and think it

00:41:14.540 - 00:41:25.580

and it's going to happen just like that, but it means you can have an impact. And we come from a spiritual universe. Dr. Henry Clark, John Henry Clark, in Atlanta last March

00:41:25.580 - 00:41:37.140

said that Africans had a spirituality that the rest of the world codified into religion. We come from a spiritual universe where you didn't have to name a denomination.

00:41:37.140 - 00:41:47.060

You had a belief system and that was the group you were in. If you look among the Dogon people, they organized that belief system so that it is in the structures of their society

00:41:47.060 - 00:41:56.320

to such a degree that it's unbelievable, symbolic on every level, because they decided that this is the reality that extends into the spiritual universe,

00:41:56.320 - 00:42:11.380

so I'm going to reflect that in my daily life, and I'm going to live with that. I'm going to live like that. Our internal condition is influenced by externals,

00:42:11.380 - 00:42:33.620

but we have the internal possibility, capability of faith as visualization to begin to reconstruct something else. We have to begin to get a picture of who we were from the behind, the ancestors, the old cultural view,

00:42:34.300 - 00:42:47.520

And then we begin to work with that as we decide who we are going to be and where we are going to go. Now that visualization means we have to deal with all the images of us that are around us and we cannot accept them.

00:42:47.520 - 00:43:09.060

I'm also aware that there's a historical and cultural tradition among African people to define and associate power with metaphysical association. beginning with Egypt and then you continue in many Sudanic and West African kingdom, there's a tradition of the concept of divine kingship.

00:43:09.060 - 00:43:30.600

You can study that historically. But then when we get in the new world in captivity, this is where we turned. CLR James had an account of Toussaint L'Otchour and the Saint-Domingue Revolution in Haiti. And he presents Toussaint, and L'Otchour was not his real name.

00:43:30.600 - 00:43:45.920

So, "chur" means the opening. So, I believe that Toussaint is constructed in such a way that he is associated with the Yoruba orisha that has been transposed in the Western world to Eshuelegba.

00:43:45.920 - 00:44:02.760

We can go into the -- and I think that the Sandemang Revolution being the only successful slave revolution for various reasons in the West is something that has led to the pejorative, the negative,

00:44:02.760 - 00:44:15.280

ugly descriptions that we get of voodoo and the practice of voodoo, sticking pens in dolls and all these other lies that are to just denigrate that culture.

00:44:15.280 - 00:44:24.080

Because this is the only place that the planners got wiped out. Not only did he drive the planners out, but then he defeated Napoleon's army

00:44:24.080 - 00:44:35.880

and it took a trick and a lie to get him, to take him out of Haiti, but they still won. Haiti was the sugar bowl. And there's some very interesting books

00:44:35.880 - 00:44:43.120

to deal with the nature of slavery when you take the whole thing into perspective, not just the United States, but the rest of the British colonies

00:44:43.120 - 00:44:50.680

and the relationships with the French and all that. So that's very interesting. You come here and you start talking about Nat Turner. Nat Turner had...

00:44:50.680 - 00:45:04.660

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