MALCOLM X SPECIAL (February 21, 1965 - February 21, 2005)
 The First Time I Saw Malcolm
by Wu Ming 1
(published in L'Unità daily paper on February 20, 2005)
Is it possible to write something about Hajj Malik El Shabazz alias "Malcolm X", on the fortieth anniversary of his assassination, that's not banal? Could it be possible to outline a medium length article not based on clichés and idiomatic phrases? In Italy? Where many people write his name "Malcom"?
The first time I saw Malcolm, it wasn't really him. He was played by an actor, Al Freeman Jr., many years before Denzel Washington and Mario Van Peebles played him. It was on an episode of Roots - The Next Generations in the 1970's, a television event par excellence. Together with Sandokán,  Roots was the miniseries (described like this at the time) that made the biggest impression on the people of my generation. Raise your hand if you didn't have a classmate in school or catechism nicknamed "Kunta Kinte" or "Chicken George". I was about ten years old, and I didn't know anything about Malcolm or Alex Haley (co-author of his biography and author of Roots). I never saw this episode again, but I remember every one of the scenes. Malcolm became imprinted in my neurons.
When an actor - any actor - plays the part of Malcolm X, it's as if Malcolm possesses him. Even his parody is loaded with his ethos. In a scene from the (awful) film Robin Hood: Men in Tights by Mel Brooks (1993), Dave Chappelle imitates Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X. That was the only scene that has stayed in my mind.
So, the first time I saw Malcolm, it wasn't him....but it was him, an electrifying presence.
And here we have our cliché! Malcolm is "electric", is "magnetic", and has "charisma", "he leaps off the screen". He is much more shamanic than any rock star that we squander this adjective on. His voice, a rhetoric that makes you lose your equilibrium (or reacquire it), his body language, his image, his presence... All contribute to perpetuate him here, necessary like a small domestic god, a Lare, an ancestor who inhabits a corner of the house.
Malcolm seems to trap the energy of the world, transform it and spread it around. He communicates with the public in a style so direct that it breaks the barriers of time. Forty years have passed; nevertheless, those husky sounds grab you by the shoulders and shake you. Those parables and stories replete with animals, those rhetorical questions, those "call and response" passages…
Even the image of Malcolm is vivid, vibrant, burning to the pupils. Photographs of him still tell you many things, they never stop talking, his smile continues to dazzle on the page and on the screen. The films force you to jump out of your chair, sending chills up your spine.
February 21, 1965, Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. A fight between rival clans (possibly fomented by the FBI) cut short the life of "our own black shining prince", like Ossie Davis would call him during his eulogy. Malcolm was assassinated, however in 2005 it's still hard to believe that he's dead; in fact it's so hard that his grave has never been made the subject of pilgrimage, like that of Martin Luther King. Not even able to think that Malcolm has a grave, because it seems that he is still here among us, every day more and more among us.
"The best thing that the white man ever did for me was to make me look like a monster all over the world. Because I can go any place on the African continent and our African brothers know where I stand." It's still like that: when Malcolm arrives, you already know where he stands.
On the entire planet, in an era of confrontation between great guiding empires and small men, the figure of Malcolm continues growing. For a long, long time he has been considered a simple "agitator". His colorful and direct language, language that touches the heart, has prevented him from being considered one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. Who issues the "thinker's" ID card?
Far from being unsophisticated, Malcolm X is a cultural leader who speaks to the human beings of the future. What he has to say will never be "outdated". Nor will the way he says it. Malcolm's speeches are masterpieces of composition, "spontaneous composition", semi-improvisations over an initial script. Each speech is a resounding story of affirmation, self-discipline and style confronting the enemy. You were stuck in the mud but you've left it, anyone can leave it. The fight for the memory and reconquest of dignity. George Washington exchanged his slave for a barrel of molasses, but your grandfather wasn't a barrel of molasses. Your grandfather was Nat Turner. Your grandfather was Toussaint L'Ouverture. Your grandfather was a "field negro", he thought about escaping and killing his master. Your grandfather is the one who doesn't bow down.
What's more, you aren't an American. I said: you aren't an American. You are sitting at the table together with the Americans, but your plate is empty. You can't be a dinner guest if they don't let you eat. Malcolm is beyond the USA, he's the global perspective against Yankee superiority. He has extended the term "African American" to the whole black Diaspora and anticipated the discourse concerning the Black Atlantic . He travels through the colonial revolutions armed with a film camera, relocating his own soul in the southern parts of the world.
I close with one last swipe of Malcolm's sword at the tangled knot of racism, a change in the point of view that speaks to us of our present: "I am tired of all the studies of the blacks in the USA, and the 'Black problem'. It's time for America to do a detailed study about what's wrong with white people!" He is referring to the segregationists, the Klan, and J. Edgar Hoover. It reminds us of the seminars about the Bible organized by Bush in the White House, apocalyptic speeches, the delirious neo-cons, the creationist offensive against Darwin…
Yes, it could be that Malcolm is right: there is a "white problem" on this planet. Condi Rice? Condi Rice is white; it's strange that you all haven't realized this yet. Malcolm is among us, today more than ever before. My grandfather was Spartacus. My grandfather was in the Paris Commune.
Translated from the Spanish by Robert Gillespie, Jr. and Virginia Ramos in March, 2006.
Malcolm's "X" and Memory
by Wu Ming 1
(published in the Sunday supplement of Liberazione daily paper, February 27, 2005)
 The "X" that replaces Malcolm's surname is the same one that appears on pirates maps: it indicates where the treasure is buried. The treasure to discover is dignity, and together with the treasure chest is the hatchet of war: memory. Renouncing the surname of a slave, the stigma of an ancient violation, pulls the present into the discussion, the imposed identity, the role that is assigned to us by the script of the winners. Putting into play a radical discussion, this is to say, one that descends to the roots to reconquer the negated memory.
Your ancestors were merchandise, 100% workforce to be exploited until it was exhausted. You didn't arrive in the USA on board the Mayflower, the foundational myth doesn't belong to you. At the bottom of the Atlantic are the remains of those that didn't survive the voyage of the slave ships (the Middle Passage). Misfortunate companions of your ancestors, dumped into the sea when dead or sick, human scum, chunks of flesh in the teeth of sharks.
No, the myth doesn't belong to you, the "founding fathers" used the whip on your grandfather and you still carry the marks. George Washington owned 316 slaves. Thomas Jefferson had 187, and several mulatto children.
Your ancestors were man-beasts, mules interchangeable with barrels of molasses. But they weren't stupid, although they pretended to be stupid in order to fool the foreman and work less. They pretended to say stupid things, not to know how to talk: yes, massa, you'se right, you jes right, massa…and meanwhile chatted in code that couldn't be understood and created a language, a culture, a world.
The "X" that replaced the surname of the Black Muslims degenerates into indoctrination, depersonalization, paranoia. Malcolm gets bigger and bigger and the Nation of Islam gets smaller and smaller. The Nation replaces the alienating foundational myth of the white racists with another, equally alienating but more extravagant and racist; that of the perfidious Yacub exiled from Paradise to the Island of Patmos, who experiments and produces the white man as the Uentermensch, the sub-human, discarding the black man.
In this way Malcolm abandons the sect, taking with him the "X", opening new horizons at the same time that he unfurls his relationship with the past. For Malcolm, memory is a perennial conflict, the image of the past is a sudden flash in the moments of danger. He says, "In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it". "Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy," he adds, "has not ceased to be victorious."
In fact, these aren't his words, they are Walter Benjamin's, but that's the idea. What drives us is the desire to rescue the enslaved ancestors, and only then can we think of their liberated descendants. "A man doesn't know how to act until he realizes what he's acting against. And you don't realize what you're acting against until you realize what they did to you."
There isn't any "bi-partisan memory". There can't be. You can't ask the slave to honor the memory of his slave master. Partisans and Collaborationists aren't on the same level. This doesn't mean we should be kept prisoners of the past, imprisoned in the cell of hate and thirst for revenge. It's true, the memory of slavery can turn into a mental ghetto, but it's important to know that in the moments of danger, a memory will shine in the margin of your visual field, you will extend your hand and gropingly find the past, the memory of your ancestor's dignity, of the fights, of their tricks to fuck with the foreman. The will to rescue is nourished by this and a few more things.
Malcolm's reflection is projected forward, striving to go further on. Much indeed can be constructed on the basis of that consciousness that he has established. "Those searching for the root of evil, encountered property relationships that were ever more deep, through a hell of atrocities ever more profound and ended up at the point where a small part of humanity had anchored its merciless dominion", said Bertolt Brecht in 1935, refuting to those who tried to attack fascism by pointing out its atrocities and defining them as "gratuitous" or "unjustified". On the contrary, those atrocities were necessary, because they served to defend another thing, something that was below and behind fascism. "Comrades, we have to discuss property relationships", was finally the invitation of the German writer.
Malcolm – freed from the racist doctrines of Elijah Muhammad – understands even better that the horrors of slavery, of segregation and inner colonialism of the U.S.A. don't depend on the "evilness" of the whites (the "devils with blue eyes"), they're not gratuitous nor unjustified, and what's more, they're necessary for the defense of property relationships. Those who maintain the memory of slavery in the center of their own reflection will arrive more easily at criticizing property. It's as easy as adding two and two: all of the African American experience is influenced by having been the property of someone. Here, memory becomes a pre-requisite for criticism.
The final Malcolm (1964-1965) runs less and less of the risk of remaining a prisoner of the past, and furthermore, he tends to use it in an ever more creative and radical way. To go "to the roots of evil". Excavating at the spot with the "X". The bullets which kill him on February 21, 1965 put an end to an amazing and enthusiastic search for treasure. The evolution of Malcolm would have brought the world many surprises. Too many for those who think that no route – initial journey, rediscovery of memory or exploration of the future - can go beyond the sign "Private Property".
Translated from the Spanish by Robert Gillespie, Jr. and Virginia Ramos in March, 2006.
From Malcolm to Hip Hop through Ghost Dog
 by Wu Ming 5
(published in the Sunday supplement of Liberazione daily paper, February 27, 2005)
I'm one of those people who think Hip-Hop isn't dead. I also think that the lesson of the great afro-American leaders of the twentieth century, especially Malcolm's, is still present. I even think Hip-Hop would have been impossible without Black Nationalism. These things have moved generations, the power of example is intact. At this point it's inevitable to resort to suggestions that make us notice the relationships between that time and the present-day. Cinema, the twentieth century's dream machine par excellence, can be used as a jumping-off point. Let's begin.
There's a recent movie in which the screen shows, indirectly and symbolically, the "commercialization" –the individualization- of Hip-Hop. Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1998) is an Old School allegory about values played by magnificent losers; but it is, above all, a reflection on effectiveness. As mechanical in the operative sense as it is deep in the existential sense, it is possible only for those inclined to wager it all on the reconstruction of a meaning. Ghost Dog - Forrest Whitaker chooses the way of devotion and sacrifice. Loyal to the Italian gangster who saved his life a few years ago, he's beyond all worry, whether it be collective or communitarian. His motivations have to do with honor and style. "Just my personal fucking war," is what Colle der Fomento would say. Ghost Dog learns from Malcolm, from Eldridge Cleaver, from Huey P. Newton and from Bobby Seale that you can be quick, precise, efficient, and impeccable, and that you should aspire to something higher. "The sky is the limit" (until you're cannibalized by MTV) was one of the Panther's slogans.
Militia est vita hominis super terram: Ghost Dog must have meditated a lot about that passage in the Book of Job. The lesson of style by the great leaders of Black Nationalism is put in the service – through his mind and body- of an unlikely messenger: a middle-aged Mafioso. The black samurai honors it in the style of the decadent Hagakure warriors. But the stylistic armor, perfection forged with sacrifice and renunciation, the post-apocalyptic version, can't protect Malcolm's or Huey's individualistic martial style from the backlash of destiny.
The metaphor is clear: the days of political Hip Hop are (at least for the mainstream) finished, its effectiveness is only concerned with the promotion of individuals, groups and gangs. In the struggle of the individuals, groups and gangs against the white power establishment - a struggle that is only implicit, on the level of style - the power of corporations wins.
Be that as it may, Ghost Dog decides to lose his final duel, which pits him against his Savior, Mentor, and Killer, who is loyal to an extortive community of criminals but not for the depth of their human relationships. Ghost Dog dies in the streets that, in some way, he had transcended. A little girl and a Haitian ice-cream man cry for the hero.
 "ISN'T IT TIME FOR CHANGE? ECONOMIC JUSTICE NOW. THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT OWES US: EQUAL EDUCATION, STRONGER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, WIDER ACCESS TO THE NEW AMERICAN DREAM. REPARATIONS ARE NOT A QUESTION OF RACE. IT'S AN AMERICAN JUSTICE ISSUE. REPARATIONS NOW."
This is neither an activist's pamphlet nor the platform of any African-American politician. It is the text of an ad from the Phat Farm, a brand of urban clothes, popular among urban black youth, which was published in the important magazine The Source in May, 2003. Malcolm is not mentioned so often in contemporary Hip Hop, but his political ghost and style are present. The questions of Black Nationalism are part of the worldview of extensive layers of the African-American population, and the music from the ghetto still represents – after more than 25 years – his voice. It is true, Hip Hop is everywhere. Moods and stylometrics of this sort already happened to be part of the mainstream, even in the most castrating and lethal adolescent pop. However, this fact must not deceive us. It is not what Hip Hop says, affirms or denies that makes this phenomenon a problem for White America: it is the existence itself, the concrete possibility for a young black person to access the privileged world of consumption, which marks the conflict, the racial division, the strangeness.
By way of hyperrealist snapshots of the streets of the forgotten and oppressed, a black person from the country can become rich (but certainly not like a Caucasian rapper), and this, to the eyes of WASP America, is scandalous. The reaction to the pervasiveness of Hip Hop, not entirely random, is often carried out in the courts. In October 2003, a judge from Michigan came down in favor of Eminem when a school mate of his, D'Angelo Bailey, filed a million dollar lawsuit against the rap singer for having portrayed him in a negative light in one of the songs of his debut album. As proof of Hip Hop's influence in today's America, judge Deborah Servitto recited part of the ruling in the form of rap verses: "Bailey thinks he's entitled to some monetary gain / Because Eminem used his name in vain / The lyrics are stories no one would take as a fact / they're an exaggeration of a childish act". This is one of the few rulings in favor of a rap singer in the course of a long history of trials, which point to names such as Snoop Dog, P. Diddy, Lil' Kim and many others. Therefore, we dare say that Hip Hop sums up the totality of the Afro-American experience in contemporary American society, as well as Malcolm's figure and biography covered the Afro-American experience of the last century.
A "stylistic" delinquent who used jazz, dancing, and sex as the starting points of a decisive spiritual experience, a Zoot suiter not totally indifferent to a cultural storm whose long-term consequences were to drive the freedom movements of successive decades, a recluse who adopted religion in an identifying and political way, an influential leader, an effective orator, a public threat. Malcolm's biography has everything. Malcolm discovered and revealed an alternative destiny to that of White America. His message was transposed upon individual and collective survival, the energy of the message is still incisive, transverse, all-inclusive, and is not showing signs of letting up. From style to politics, and back to style: the drum machine pumps out ground zero funk, stoically vibrating, minimalist, lucid like Malcolm's suit, like his close-cropped hair, like the rims of his glasses. The echo of his words is everywhere.
Translated from the Spanish by Robert Gillespie, Jr. and Virginia Ramos in March, 2006. |
