rootwork the rootsblog: a cyberhoodoo webspace

maintaining

whenever something like san bernadino happens my 1st response is sympathy for the fallen
my 2nd response is i hope the perps arent black, and if they are i cringe a little, knowing that it
will just reinforce all the negative stereotypes, knowing it will make us all look bad, i suspect the
islamic folk feeling that collective cringe right now, hard to explain collective shame but when
blackfolk achieve i achieve, blackfolk fall so do i & when blackfolk treated with contempt,
over achievers like me have to walk thru that fire with them

 

 

ben okri, “to poison a nation, poison its stories. a demoralized nation tells
demoralized stories to itself. beware of story tellers who are not fully conscious
of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of
their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people”

 

 

I cannot tell you how many young black writers I get in my workshops who consistently write stories with no black people in them, some misinformed attempt to be universal, some odd notion of what it takes to be successful - and I have to explain to them, look kid, as a writer you the voice of a specific culture in dialogue with your given literary traditions, dont be shamed of who you are, embrace it, thats where you get your power, I tell them this as a craft/vision note, I dont tell them they cant do it, I tell them they cant do it here, I mean whats the point if it aint got heart, I tell them far as im concerned rootless work aint worth the paper its printed on and far as success goes only a fool would just give up their diversity points

 

 

so this morning im extracting historicals from this book, black chronology by diggs for historicals im tell stories like galeano in memories of fire and i was taking this down this morning when i think what shall i call betrayal, dont judge the passage when im taking down the 'note' i just get it down, i got a million to get thru, i will clean it up later, im just showing you the process of the question betrayal:

in order to faciliate the slave trade, from kilwa ali ibn Hassan prince of shiraz bought treaties with the African chiefs and established dominion over the araband persion sultans of sofala, angoshe, Mozambique, zansibar, pemba, Mombasa, melindi, kismayu and magodoo,less sultans than slave merchants who ruled only their trading settlements in compliance with the chiefs of the interior who supplied them with a steady stream of slaves for export to india, Arabia and the slave markets of the east.

what shall we call this thing when you sell out your own for shortterm gain
those who do not yet realize we are only as strong as our weakest, how shall

we name betrayal, how do we define Clarence Thomas, uncle tom will not do, the

real unclue tom, Josiah Henderson, was a hero, as was the uncle tom in uncle tom cabin
the image of unle tom was a weakling was propogated in the unvle tom plays of the

period but he was written as a hero who did what he could when he could and he was

based on Josiah Henderson who did what he could when he ould in reallife but this

thing betrayal, we should give it a name of mythic quality, babajohn suggested gunga din
as in youre a better man than i am gunga din, but its not our culture, dont know it if will take
needs to be sometning folk already feel and incorporate

many times I have tried to implant concepts and words into afroam culture
high hoodoo being one, or my definition of hoodoo over conventional folk hoodoo
my definition of mojo as life power, my redefinition of goober dust, etc etc

don't know that any of them have took but you cant judge longgame in a

lifetime can you, one has to have faith (just thought, longgame is one of my implants
and one that has taken in some dialogues, now that i think about it . . )

i got to go, i got to get thru all this fugging research, i got four texts i feel need to do extraction
black chronology by diggs
pan african chronology by everett vols 1 thru 3
i

got others like africna by gates et al but i dont consider those critical
these 4 i want to have extracted and narratized by end of the year

then i got to go back to the myths and stories, about 6 criticals
and about id say 10 other books i consider critical

11/29 POSTSCRIPT: well that was a hot mess, ima have
to clean this up when i get a minute - aint that a joke

im gone, all my love

rdoc

props, i take them where i can get them

GUIDANCE

often nyame task anansi with matters of great importance, this show god has a sense of humor, when you that powerful a sense of humor is almost obligatory, I recall this one time soon after nyame begin the world, that this new thing, this thing he call people, was not doing too well, taking too long to figure things out, generating a lot of unnecessary suffering, so this when nyame brew up his 1^st batch of wisdom, this will take care of that, he say w/great satisfaction, this wisdom my best one yet, he put the wisdom in a pot and call anansi - anansi, say nyame, I want you to take this pot of wisdom here and spread it around, I need you to make sure everybody gets a heaping helping, so they all, every single one of them, know how to live life best they can, how to make the best of it, this is important, anansi, im depending on you – well, aint nothing like a little divine responsibility to puff anansi up proud, and he say I will not let you down lord, so anansi take that pot of wisdom down to earth but instead of spreading it around like nyame told him to he think if I keep this wisdom to myself, if im the only one understand the laws of living well, the only one know how to make the best of it, everybody have to come to me for knowledge and advice, master of the information flow, the gatekeeper, I will be a man of power - so anansi decide to keep all the wisdom for himself, he scheme he will take it high in his favorite baobab tree, the one hung with the blue bottles, he will take a heaping helping for himself and weave a web around the rest so strong nobody else will ever get any but when anansi try to hold on to all that wisdom, try to climb the tree and build a web too, even anansi don't have enuf hands for all that, and about halfway up the sunlight off those bottles confuse him and the pot slip from his fingers and hit the ground, and when that pot of wisdom hit the ground it break open so hard little pieces of wisdom fly all over the world and the cosmos too so anybody want some can get some, but you got to work for it now, got to get your allotted share, just a little piece cause that's all that's out there now, little pieces, but thats all you need, just enuf wisdom to know how to live life best you can, how to make a way

 

 

SUNDAY

 

nothing but sympathy for the lost souls of paris, went to paris for the 1st time last july
so im taking it personal, terrorism and the middle east, where does it end, guess we

just got to buckle down for a long haul battle on that, cause its ideological
not only do we have to defeat them, that mindset has to be discredited

only days before about 40 folk died in a suicide bombing in beirut but it didnt
get the play paris does because weve come to expect it in the middle east

also its hard to make common cause w/hezbollah and iran when they
dont seem to want to make common cause even against the same enemy

its a twisty situation, and israels intransigence is not helpful, all is see is war

gods i am in such a strange space, dug in deep on the hoodoo book of flowers
and im seeing what it can be and im seeing what it is and there is a big gap there

and whats frustrating me is that im in this major research mode, going thru this text
pan african chronology by everett and its amazing the level of historical detail but
whats happening is that i keep running up on folk that lead me into further research

so i just keep digging myself deeper and deeper into a temporal hole and the work
gets raggedier and raggedier and i can still hear that clock ticking and i want so

desperately to get back to my novel, so desperately but i feel the obligation to
get this done because as i work on it i can sense the kind of souls im trying to

build and how its going to make a difference (one hopes) in human and afroam destiny
and as i do certain passages im conscious of what they portend if this thing works as

i hope it does and i just want to finish a viable draft of it so i can move on
and whats happening is that its taking me to a new level of knowledge

and hopefully wisdom, im very conscious that its because of previous intense
research phases that my observations and strategic commentary is as

profound (theoretically) as it is, im very conscious of my knowledge base giving me an edge
well im about to expand that knowledge base exponentially and im like why so

late in my life when i wont have time to make maximal use of it but then you have to go with what
is not what could have been and this is the deal and it might be that the knowledge base

needed the greater life wisdom base that i bring to the game at 65 that i didnt
have as a young spring chicken of 45, who knows, who cares, just get the work

done and trust in the gods to give me the time to make them both happen
and dont take away my powers until they do - or something, im gone, i got

so much work need to get done today and i got to do schoolhouse catchup too

intersting that im willing to say things here i dont say on facebook, i figure
the few folk who come here, me and them got a deal, this where the real

me exist, this where i am the champion of the race i aspire to be
here i am one of humanitys great teachers, full out

everywhere else in the world i hide the real me, for
fear of being ridiculed or even worse, ignored

here and in my work the real me hang out
this where i let my freak flag fly

when you trying to nudge reality you have to establish the alternative reality
here and in my work, in my performances, here i am the high hoodoo

conduct yourself as you aspire to be an you are
this is the essence of conjuration

im gone

all my love

rdoc

 

 

I DONT RECALL WHAT DAY

props, i take them where i can get them, even when they misspell my name and confuse hoodoo for voodooo:

'One of the high points of the collection is the riveting "There Is No Rest," by Arthur F. Flowers, the opening chapter of a novel-in-progress in which Jubilation T. Conquer, a physician and voodoo practitioner, has a problem: "Somebody killing hoodoos. All over Memphis, hoodoos coming up dead," he thinks. "Somebody come to my town and start killing off hoodoos Ima take it personal." Flowers links this conflict with a tale of routine police work and wraps the whole around a richly detailed neighborhood suddenly stinking of danger.'