Grab your piece of History . . .just $ 5.00 while supplies last . . . Include a magnificent foreword written by Robert Gibbons innerchildpress/mandela.php ****************************************************** Foreword by Robert Gibbons “ I was fighting because I wanted to say, I am African. This is my country, you are not going to oppress me in my own country” ~ for Nelson Mandela “Now come, you, House of Xhosa, I give you the Morning Star because it is the most important star, the star for counting the years, the years of manhood.” (Mqhayi, poet of the Xhosa people)! When the editors of this press approached me about writing the forward for this anthology I immediately became intimidated. How could I write a fresh take on one of the most documented men in the world? After his transition to the ranks of ancestors; some of the headlines come to mind: 1. The Mandela I Knew (New York Times) 2. Let him go, doctors urge Nelson’s family (Daily News) 3. Mandela’s Death Leave South Africa without a Moral Center ( New York Times) 4. Where Mandela Kept Hope, Guides Tell Their Shared Saga (New York Times) Even though Nelson Mandela received day to day press coverage during his lifetime the closest I ever came to Mandela was the appearance of Dennis Brutus in New York before his death. “ Brutus was arrested in 1960 for breaking the terms of his banning which he could not meet more than two people outside his family, and sentences to 18 months in jail. However he jumped bail and fled to Mozambique where Portuguese secret police arrested him and returned him to South Africa. There while trying to escape, he was shot in the back at point black range. After partly recovering from the wound, Brutus was sent to Robben Island for 16 months, five in solitary. He was in a cell next to Nelson Mandela.” (Wikipedia) To hear Brutus read some of his poems was a historic event. For those of us that never had a chance to witness a man who fought for equality all of his life. I think Derek Walcott was correct when he said, “the chronicler, the recorder, the diarist, writing of new and unexplored world.” (the Art of Derek Walcott) I think the stories in between the press coverage and the newspaper articles are just as important. We get a sense that these are real individuals, not some myth we have created in our heads. Often times we are so inundated with social media that we lose the sense of the struggle of these individual warriors. Brutus had his share of struggle, but he endured. This is one of my favorite poems by Brutus: if in fact it is all we shall know as indeed may be most probable and if as is reasonably certain we shall have no more on earth then it is wrong to lament ( Dennis Brutus) If it is wrong to lament then this should not be about biography or myth making, but how can I as an American; a colonial brother use the life and legacy of iconic figures such as Mandela and Brutus to understand the world we live in. Brutus was a traveler figure. He was an outsider, a detached observer after seeking asylum in London and then the United States. He wanted to tell his story in his own voice. This is what we must do, in my opinion, tell our own story in our voice. If Walcott is correct when he reports to us how we must forge language and memory. “It culminates into an image of sacrificial burning; the artist is released from his clay prison by the fires of inspiration.” (the Art of Derek Walcott) “wrong to wish for the end of life wrong to feel one must drag somehow through ad surely one must fill each day with living and do each day as much as we can” ( Dennis Brutus) If Mandela and Brutus sacrificed their entire lives for the cause of injustice, then how do we fit into the equation and what can be done to extend the legacy, if memory can sometimes be inconvenient and unreliable. To chronicle a man more iconic that President Obama or Frederick Douglass; to be a powerful witness to his legacy; to use the term loosely within the parameters of aesthetic distance. I am studied, cultured, and cosmopolitan. I should know Nelson Mandela. I should be able to track his years as a father, barrister, President, grandfather, icon, and now ancestor, but me, like many colonial brothers that are weaned from the diaspora; that have never set foot on African soil; never had the primacy of African culture, or the experience of a rites of passage; nor know the importance of oral tradition. The griot. The paramount chief. Never being privy to our ancestral biography it becomes complicated. We become conflicted that our lives are so torn. We become as lost as the middle passage. We contend that it does not relate to us. Reclaiming this heritage is not a part of our immediate agenda. So we seek solace in the immediate. We live in a romanticized version of it during Black History Month or during the killing of another man of color. The Basil Davidson version. The version we saw as youngster sitting in front of our comfortable televisions. Viewing African culture is distant from us. Living as separate as the white man that brought us here or the king that sold us. We are still benighted within ourselves. Clutching to some syncretic survivalism in style, in tongue, in church, in food, or vernacular. Because we do not understand the importance of reclaiming this history. We become a creation of a creation-shedding the original, forgetting lineage. Our background has been assassinated. That America is my motherland and my fatherland, until I am educated in the truth. But what about the brothers and sister that will never receive correction? It survives, too.I can not compete with the great biographers of this age. But, because I can not compete with the great biographers whether because of name recognition or credentials does not mean I can not have my sanfoka moment. It does not mean I can not look back diachronically and synchronically at this history. To those who have gone before me. The men and women that fought the good fight. This is reason I write these words. As Mandela lay in state in our national consciousness he is reported to have transitioned at 8:50 p.m. local time. He will be buried in the village of Qunu. A village where three of his exhumed children was interred earlier in 2013. We reach back to the beginning-to our beginning. The blood stain of history. The legacy and the peculiar institutions of the old and new regimes. we savor the moments as we mature. And we understand finally that the underground becomes the utmost. The last shall be first. The crowds that came to memorialize him chanted: Ngawethu (Power shall be ours) Mayibuye, iAfrika (Come back Africa) Batebegiyi (Those who die dancing) Nkosi SiKelel’ iAfrika (God bless Africa) Andizi ndisaqula (I will not come, I am girding for battle) Yes, we die dancing. We cry for our lands. Our landless and our landlocked mentalities. And we understand now he is being brought up here. We can no longer ask. We must act in the present. In that great getting up morning. In that great underground mission to glory full of warriors and warrior-womyn, conjurers, saints, elders, and ancestors. The heaven is full of Harriet, Denmark, Touissant, Nat, Frederick, Nkrumah, Sisulu, and Martin. We are free. No longer arrested. No longer illegal. No longer colonial, but we remember the words of Winnie when she said, “part of my soul went with him.” All the quotes and salutations and benedictions making him ready for sainthood. He will robe again in traditional Thembu costume known as the kaross. In which he wore on Earth before his ascension. the skins of jackals at an angle to expose his holy shoulder. Because we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. He will wear traditional beads around his neck and legs because he is not Zulu, he is Xhosa. We come back to the words of Walcott and Mqhayi: 1. maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor 2. if the writer is to grow he must go beyond the confrontation of history 3. it is therefore become necessary for the writer to make repeated, unending, exploration of the same territory since every journey throw up new truths. Let me die dancing. Let me chant their names internally and eternally. Let me remain here until the great getting up morning when I was only colonial. I was only history. I was only mimetic. In fact, I am merely pre-dawn-sharing half dark-half light. But now, To answer Countee Cullen famous question especially for him: What is Africa to me? And the answer would be: I am among the stars, because this is how one sunrise. Robert Gibbons New York City, 2014
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:42:55 +0000
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