The Expanding Text

Drainage Ditch

2010-03-14T01:02:00.000-08:00

Behind the first house

I can clearly remember,

a big concrete affair

with thirty degree walls,

a foot of murky water,

three feet of weeds.

When it rained

it was an exciting time:

I was young, throwing sticks

crawling with mites and ticks

and mosquito larvae. Boy,

we were tiny living

things aswarm, blood-sucking

things buoyant with nothing

on our minds, nothing at all.

There was a family

down the street with

a little girl with a heart

murmur. They whispered,

“We know she will die,

attacked by irregular beats”,

so they let her play.

Her pacemaker strained

to keep time with her little feet

while she struggled to keep up

with her big brother, the only boy

she would ever love. Raining,

an exciting time, valves stuttering

blood in and out of her veins

along the drainage ditch.

The thirsty ditch

its vast tiny pageant

of thirsty animals

and her little feet

found the slick mud

and she fell

head over heels, her brother

turned to her gasp

as she tumbled

into a soft, slippery nest

of water moccasins.

Her family hoped

her heart attacked her

before the snakes had a go,

but I saw her brother,

his face the next day.

Her heart was never hers,

it was his from birth.

Too young to understand

such tiny, thirsty things,

he ran, fast, away.

Game Concept-- Terrene: Seed of Hope

2008-09-17T02:37:00.000-07:00

Terrene: Seed of Hope

Concept:

The mass appeal and age-transcendent qualities of Hayao Miyazaki’s artwork and storytelling are remarkable. He is especially fond of casting a young girl as the central/lead character in his animated films. This is a rare—if not unattempted—model for a videogame character.

A story in which a single hero struggles against great odds or greater evils becomes especially compelling when that person is a youth. My favorite examples of this idea manifest themselves in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus from Sony Computer Entertainment, and the Square-Enix and Disney Interactive Studios collaborations on the Kingdom Hearts series.

Terrene is best realized as an Action-Adventure RPG. This genre serves several desirable functions: it allows for an immersive story, a large and varied map (affording the player hours of exploration), player customization (abilities, inventory, item upgrades, etc), and any situational combination of other genres (puzzle-solving, fighting, racing, etc.)

The game world will be comprised of several continents, each with its own unique climate, inhabitants, creatures, and vegetation. The “combat” won’t really be combat at all… there won’t be weapons or violence in the conventional sense. Initially, the player will have to avoid combat by escaping into tree trunks, across streams, high into the limbs of giant trees, reflecting the appropriate timidity of a child. Eventually, however, she will learn how to unlock the magic hidden inside of various types of seeds. These “powers” will rarely be offensive; she will develop the ability to entangle enemies in thick vines, create a cocoon around herself, sprout plants which launch her high into the air, and use the earth and its vegetation in other phenomenal ways. Her name, Terrene, is a word that, when used adjectivally, means “earthy” or “worldly” and, in its noun form, means, simply, “the earth”.

When the character is fully developed and she has unlocked her skill set, barren environments and empty wastelands will grow green and lush in her wake. This will, in fact, become her goal: to breathe life into the weakened environments of the world.The visuals of the game should have a richly (but realistically) colored palette with a bold, animated feel, akin to the art design of The Mark of Kri (also Sony Computer Entertainment).

Our young female character’s movements will be animated to replicate the motor skills of, say, an awkward eight-year-old girl. As the story thickens and she begins to gain mastery of her skills and an understanding of her responsibility (eight to ten hours into gameplay), her animations will begin to subtly and slowly change to reflect her rise to maturity and an increase in her resolve. Her movements will become controlled and purposeful, providing the physical realization of a person rising to meet their fate.

Backdrop:

Our main character, a nine-year old girl named Terrene, lives with her aunt and uncle in a small village nestled in a mountain valley. The village, named Sowden after its rotund, pig-farming founder, is surrounded by dense deciduous forest and, on three sides, the huge dark cliff faces of the mountain. Her uncle Coren runs a tiny shop out of which he sells vegetable seeds to the local farmers. The farms of Sowden normally yield huge crops of big, luscious vegetables… but her uncle hasn’t received a shipment of seeds in many weeks. Needless to say, this has him—and the rest of the town—very worried.

When we first meet Terrene, she is running across a small, fenced-in field. We follow her clumsy gait and look of intense determination. The way she’s pictured here, we might think she is rushing to somebody’s aid… but she jumps high into the air and belly-flops wildly into a pile of leaves, laughing and rolling, scattering the pile. An annoyed woman turns and reprimands her: “Terrene, why don’t you do something useful? I’m sure your uncle could use a little help around the shop.”

Coren sold his last package of squash seeds to one of the town’s farmers one week ago. For the past few days, the farmers have grown increasingly angry at his inability to supply them with the source of their income—and the town’s livelihood. Terrene is preoccupied with the various concerns of a rambunctious squirt and understands very little about the village’s predicament.

One day, while playing in the house, she accidentally knocks into the kitchen table, sending a bowl of tomatoes upside-down on the floor. As the fruit splits and the juices run across the wood, Coren—a normally sweet and soft-spoken man—sends her outside in anger. While her aunt Besom (“Bess” for short) reprimands Coren for his harsh words, Terrene, now crying and frustrated with her uncle’s sudden outburst, overhears their conversation. She listens as Aunt Bess and Uncle Coren fret about their situation and the unanswered letters they’ve sent to the trade village. Half out of stubborn pride, half out of a deep affection for her family and home, Terrene decides to go to the trade village herself and bring home as many seeds as she can carry. She scrawls a note, packs a small bag, and, just before dawn the next day, begins walking toward the mountain trail.

While trekking along the steep mountain paths to reach the village on the other side, the terrain begins to change. The thick forest grows sparse, and the remaining trees seem somehow too short. At the top of the mountain, Terrene is shocked to look out upon a landscape that, although once tangled with forest, has become barren and hard.

She finally arrives at the trade village with ragged clothes and a dirt-covered face. The town is largely abandoned. But, as she approaches the center of town, she notices an old woman stooping at the roots of a twisting Banyan tree. After a few more steps, she stops in awe: the old woman is holding her hands just above the ground, urging a tiny green shoot out of the earth. Inch by inch over the course of a few minutes, the plant opens its leaves and reaches up toward her rising hands.

After regaining her composure, Terrene calls out and ambles toward the old woman, startling her out of her trance. She introduces herself as Geda and listens as Terrene explains Uncle Coren’s situation.Once Terrene has stopped her breathless story, Geda sets upon explaining what she knows of the disappearing landscape. A few months prior, the crops had stopped growing. Nobody could explain it; the soil had always been nutritious and fertile. And then, with little warning, the trees and grass, flowers and vines all began pulling themselves down into the earth. Acre by acre, all of the plants in the region withdrew completely into the soil. It was as if they were hiding.

Geda did not say from what; she could already see the concern on the poor girl’s face. As they sat in quiet conversation beneath the tree, the shoot that Geda had been tenderly urging from its hiding place now grows rapidly, flourishing and shuddering in the shade. Along the ground, in a line from the plant’s base, hints of green begin poking their heads above the soil. All around Terrene and the small area in which she is sitting, a green carpet emerges. Geda now realizes: this girl has a remarkable power. The concern on her face was not fear, it was compassion. And the determination which brought her through the mountains might be the key to reviving the world’s environments. She must be taught to actualize her potential. She could be the seed of a dying planet's last hope for survival.

Beatrix

2008-09-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

How long, time
at all measurable in this state,
had she pressed forward?

She was a child, once—a girl
with a vague concept
of her importance—but now,
now that everyone she knew
is in the past, now
it is clear: her path
winds broken, hard,
lit by an indomitable
will to regain her life.

In her reflection—
the end of a long
blade propped in
sand, striking
its length, whetstone
in palm, sparks
flying and dying
as quickly as
they were born—
in her reflection
something cold
forged, hard
in her skin, eyes
sharp with fear.

Giscome Road - C.S. Giscombe

2008-07-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

Almost Apparitional:
An Unrequited Attempt at Giscome Road

Note: The forum posts referenced can be accessed here.

As much pleasure as I took in the sometimes torrential, sometimes melodic nature of the text, I found C.S. Giscombe’s collection Giscome Road grueling – almost intolerably so! – in its ambiguity. I spent many cups of coffee, many hours of much-needed sleep attempting to understand exactly what is being communicated. I eventually questioned whether the text was communicating at all. And for all of my floundering, for all of my frustration, I realized that I would remain unclear about the specific meaning of the “long song” and the spiraling, surfacing ancestries which haunt Giscome Road. Last night, seconds before scrapping altogether my attempts at analysis, I found the beginning of an answer: this frustration and uncertainty is part of the message.

My classmates had this realization long before I did. For instance, in his post entitled “Identity”, Juan Garza began, “I’m not really sure of what’s going on in this poem. It’s a little confusing. It seems to me that maybe there is a good deal of history that one should know in order to better understand the context of this poem.” And he’s right. Giscombe traveled to western Canada to seek out this history in an attempt to better understand the context of his soon-to-be poems. At the end of the post, Juan states, “So I’m not really sure what all this is about, but identity and the loss of it seems to be important. Again, I think some historical context would probably make the message of this poem clearer.” At this point, let me say that we had a remarkable class; every student had a unique and thoughtful approach to the texts we covered. Juan was not alone in his uncertainty. He was surrounded by students who were also struggling to discover “what all this is about”.

I interpret Juan’s choice of the word “identity” as something closer to ancestry, or the possibility of reaching a firm understanding of one’s ancestry. And, in this way, I agree with his point. Even at the beginning of Giscome Road, Giscombe (I feel it’s safe to identify him as the speaker) recognizes the convoluted nature of identity as it relates to ancestry; his greatest challenge throughout the text is in the recapturing of a vague ancestral identity. For instance:

the rootless surname up on the river names rocks & water up there, the beauty

of apparitions is broken down & inflected both, the old Islands name,

the name that came & comes from the Islands,

the arrival, w/ John R. Giscome, of the blackest name’s edge
(& its variations & the effaced speaker’s own name & parentage (17)

The surname “Giscome” (however one spells it) carries, beyond any individual’s identity, a complicated history of movement and reinvention. The speaker seems to identify John R. Giscome as a type of floating origin – the man who delivered “the blackest name’s edge”, or transplanted the surname farther than anyone had before. And while the speaker sets out to mine this sparse, unincorporated slice of Canadian wilderness for “surfacings” of Giscome’s legacy, he is already aware that this lineage, by virtue of both human nature and encroaching wilderness, is now reduced to traces, whispers, has been, in a sense, consumed. The dated commentary from “Dr Rogers” regarding the dissemination and disappearance of “Negroid strain” – the quote’s simultaneous exposure of racial unease and slow, inevitable change – provides a foreboding ellipsis for the introduction of these concepts.

The musical aspects of the collection eluded me entirely; I would have remained ignorant of this central motif if I’d attempted an unassisted reading. I first became aware of the musicality of the text when I read Sable Woods’s post, “Northernmost Road”. At the end of her thoughts on “a sense of place” in the poem, Sable wrote, “I know there is some comparison to music in the poem but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.” I had noticed the music as well, but had pushed it aside as the vehicle to a metaphor that I wasn’t ready to unpack. Part of this stems from the fact that I am tragically unfamiliar with jazz. Thankfully, Myles Simcock is not:

The overall point of my post is that this book of poetry makes a great deal more sense if you approach it as if it were all one extended very intricate jazz composition like "Concierto de Aranjuez" by Miles Davis or "The Way Up" by Pat Metheny. There is improvisation, there is free association, but there is also a great deal of order- the work is meant to be an experience, not merely the vehicle for some simple message. Thus, to understand "Giscome Road", you must bring a great deal of patience and energy to it, because there is a lot more going on here than anything that a few quick readings could reveal.

Taking Myles’s sound advice, I prepared to devote an even greater amount of my near-depleted “patience and energy” toward my understanding of Giscome Road. And, just as he’d pointed out, the music existed beyond word choice – the phrase “long song” was, upon further reading, less musical than the way the song manifests itself in the stresses of the syllables, in the enjambment, and in the typeset of the poems.

In reaching the last lines of the text with my new ear, I was proud of my increased comprehension of a fixture in Giscombe’s poesy. But if I’d identified a central message in the song, it was still just beyond my articulation. I would like to use a quote here. That would be ideal. And there are plenty that I could pull from the text and parade around as representative of this central message. But it’s too hard to separate one from the next, to separate crescendo from its climax. That’s not the way this song works. There is no chorus, only the occasional return to a vaguely familiar riff. There is structure, but it is so fluid and evolving that its inconsistency – what I identify as the most important aspect of the poetic structure of Giscome Road – is impossible to capture in a short excerpt. So, instead, I’ll just state as plainly as possible what the song meant to me. It is the knowledge that there are many factors beyond your immediate control. It is the sense that the language of change cannot be transcribed with human language – no matter how talented the poet. It is loss and it is current and movement and it is impossible to surmount because we are always tossed around in its waters. It existed long before the “road in” was dreamt of, and will persist as the “road out” decays. And, at the end of the day, it gives a sense of life through its disregard for humanity: we, the class, understand the “long song” only slightly less than Giscombe did when he lost himself in it. And I’m proud to say that, as much as I’ve learned throughout the course, as many ideas and perspectives as I’ve encountered, my understanding of place, song, movement, violence, and time as they relate to race will always be incomplete; we could always use more “historical context”, a closer ear, more patience, more energy. And while these improvements will never be enough to reach an entire understanding of the innumerable factors which shape human lives, human races, the important thing is that we stop when we can, listen closely to “the long song” and squint hard to make out its apparitions.

In the final year of my truce

2008-07-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

with time, I gather my everythings
and take inventory of what I'll surrender
as humble tribute for another year of peace.

There is a front-leaning shelf
stuffed with words and
words. Pages, pages waiting
to be read. Books bought
because I want to have read
them but am lazy enough
to let them form my friends’
opinion of me without altering
my opinion of myself.
I want to finish
what's started and,
in the meantime,
keep up the ruse.

Roughly twenty times
each day, I pull fire
through and further down
a cigarette and I
snuff it on the sole
of my right shoe and
can’t imagine how burnt
and sour and raisin I
smell to the bright and
eager souls crammed
next to me
in an elevator.

My right eyelid
some afternoons
gifts itself with independent
motion and I wonder,
of professor and side-walker
passed just now and
the girl shooting me
glances from across
the lecture hall, who notices
this piece of skin ticking
each second against my vision?
It is impossible to ignore
the passage of time.

When the reelings of a day
overwhelm the prize-fighter
hidden in my brain, I
crash through a wooden door
and make way to the spigot and
trade identification
for a pint and three darts, drag
foot against line,
elbow sprung like a trap, fingers
a flickering blur, and steel-nose
throw after throw like silver
sprinters off the blocks
to the dartboard, and later,
the wall, and gulp
the last amber finger
of liquid from the glass:
live goldfish squirming
down my throat.

High in the corner
of my little bedroom,
a silver bowl the size of two
heads with mother
of pearl inlay on the inside
of its lip, a bowl mother
gave me the day I left
home. When I look inside,
I am upside-down,
I am buggy-eyed,
and this always sends me laughing
like the time mom had too
many margaritas--pole-dancing
in a subway car in Manhattan.

Nightstand, an aluminum
notebook with the name
of my father’s company
etched on its face
in thick, straight type.
On odd, particularly ambitious
nights, I write: to-do lists
on its pages and cross
off some (but never all) of
the items. Most nights
it’s used as a coaster
for glasses of bedtime
water, collecting dust--
peacefully stagnating--
until sunrise.

Before splashing
into my pillow
each night, I burn
the greens to brown
left-to-right, until
my brains are empty
bowls of ashes, until
I believe sleep
is my friend, not
a crouching inevitability.

When morning comes,
I chase the night
sip by black, hot, sip,
one hundred milligrams
of packed powder at a time
and, acid-tongued and anxious,
feel my heart beating
its fists against my breast-
bone. We are monsters most days,
and we fear each other--
and the torches and pitchforks
we carry inside our mouths.

Off-white and brown
stained coffee mug stolen
from work after a drill bit
of a shift, top shelf, cupboard
above the cutting boards. It is
heavy, and thick and the steam
rises across my face,
elbow stuck straight
out to raise the mug to my lips,
angular and methodical,
I slide a pen behind my ear
and a newspaper under my arm
to enhance the effect.
I feel so grown up that
I can feel the weight of our son
someday sitting on my lap and
offering pitiful suggestions for
the answers to my crossword puzzle.
Maybe his name will be Logan,
I will be supportive of his sexuality,
I will kiss him goodnight even when
we’re both men, I will create stories
for whispering, I will use Wikipedia
to answer all of his minute questions,
and I will try
so, so hard to be a father,
a father who loves
his son
as well as
my father loves me these days.

Discovery, 1992

2008-07-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

There was a brother
and a sister and a brother’s
friend all beneath a trampoline,
and jets of water
from a sprinkler shot
straight into the air
thick drops streaming
down through the black
canvas, a rainforest

in some small way.
All three of them lost
in the wet tension
between cold ground
and groaning springs
and a constant patter
above their heads.
Nobody watching
in a fenced backyard

in the middle of America
in the middle of July,
Mom making tuna
sandwiches and slicing
sweet fruit into a bowl
at the kitchen counter.

Last Summer

2008-07-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

snapped
photos of dead birds
and sketched sad,
flying teeth with angel
wings and tiny halos;
she understood how fine
filters yield fine results
and noted the sifted powder.

Autumn knew her
when she was in high school,
a cheerleader with a secret
penchant for visual
art, developing, within
herself, a vague sense
of some greater hypocrisy.

Winter, a lonely drunk
and a cocked eyebrow,
flipped through her
portfolio and sipped tequila
and lemonade and danced
between her couch
and her record player, down
the hall, past the toilet,
and into her bed.

Spring rolled his bicycle
to the bus stop, propped
it against the trash can,
which bore a bright green
parrot laying across
its black, rod-iron arms.
He snapped a phone
camera picture, sent
Summer a text message
labeled: Bus stop.
Thirty-Eighth and Duval.

Summer pressed and turned
the cap off an orange
bottle, translucent, the next
thirty days of time-
released relief rattling
inside, lifeless lightning-
bugs stuffed in a jar
by a thoughtless boy
in a white jacket
who forgot to add
the breathing holes.

Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

2008-07-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

In Search of a New Femininity

There is an external consciousness throughout Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, one which narrates the pageant of nature on the Isle des Chevaliers. And, at the end of Chapter 10, as Jadine’s plane lifts away toward Paris and she struggles to push away the nagging emotional aftermath of a failed relationship, this external consciousness takes hold of the text and makes a forest of her path to womanhood.

The “soldier ants” anecdote does not emerge from Jadine’s mind; it is rather a central metaphor in the external life of the rainforest. But it is concluded with her sentiments toward Son, “the man who fucked like a star”. (292) And the queen, though in control of the reproductive fate of the colony, the sex of her brood, and the armies of purposeful women, still wistfully reflects upon the time when she was girlish and vulnerable, the man she allowed to give her the “one, first and last copulation”. (291) The fact that a narrative voice offers up this information leads one, at first, to believe that the passage is the prediction of an unwritten future for Jadine. She is flying to Paris to “eat her own wing muscles”, to sustain herself on her own faculties, and to mentally digest her girlish flight with Son. And she now feels capable of this, “having refused to be broken in the big ugly hands of any man”. (275) Jadine exerts an amount of control over situations throughout the text, just as she corrected the slight flaw in her fingernail with “two swift strokes” of her emery board. (290) And it is reasonable to believe that her time in Paris will be without “shoulders and limitless chests”. Despite all of her previous psychological conflict with the “night women”, it is not difficult to believe – even though it is sudden – that she is ready to join the colony, to engage in “the life of their world” which “requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete.”

Black Boy - Richard Wright

2008-07-07T09:27:00.000-07:00

Literary Environment in Black Boy

At several points in Black Boy, Richard Wright mentions the literary movements Realism and Naturalism. Each occurrence follows a passage in which the young Richard Wright has immersed himself in books, from pulp fiction to modern literature. And Wright, it seems, ascribes to the idea of environmental causality; he draws upon his environment constantly, and uses the environments of his characters to form their descriptions. But he also expresses hope that, by changing his environment, he will grow and change into a person who, although southern at the core, defies his naïve upbringing.

Wright uses his reading as a form of escape from his anxieties, his physical hunger, and his environment as a whole. In this way, the literature he reads in the latter chapters of Part One becomes at once symbolic of the North and, remarkably, a formative environment in itself.

The novels created moods in which I lived for days. […] I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. (250)

By virtue of his reading, Wright begins more than ever to question the actions and authority of those around him and becomes fully aware of their confines, their stereotypical behavior. His reading allows him to grow and change in a way that neither his religious household nor his insufficient schooling would allow. And it is this reading which provides a catalyst; Wright, through the literature for which he hungers and voraciously consumes, becomes mentally and physically closer to his aspirations of traveling north. The books instill in him a distance between himself and his environment in the south, effectively uprooting him and transplanting him to the north while he was still sweeping floors, boarding with the Mosses, living his humble life in Memphis.

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

2008-07-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

Churches and Junkies:

The role of religion in James Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross”

If the title “Down at the Cross” doesn’t say it, the opening paragraph does: James Baldwin’s essay is, at least initially, a meditation on the functions of religion. Set against the particularly tumultuous social atmosphere of the early 1960’s, the text examines the differences – and, most notably, the similarities – between the few possible outlets of a Harlem youth. Baldwin examines the roles and functions of religion in an oppressed society, and his eventual equation of the junkie to the churchgoer carries societal implications rooted in a larger dialogue of sociological study.

The essay begins with what Baldwin calls a “prolonged religious crisis” (15). He retraces his Harlem upbringing and, in doing so, the footprints which led him to the door of the church. He depicts his move toward religion not as a spiritual calling, but as one option in a narrow set of possibilities:

Every Negro boy […] stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and – since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers – helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick. (24)

Baldwin doesn’t explicitly state that a career in the church is a “gimmick” for everybody, but his personal realization does imply that the church is both a mode of escape and a form of self-defense. He continues, “all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church” (27). It’s the diction in these passages that’s particularly compelling; Baldwin, in reaction to external stimuli, was “hurled” and “driven” into the church. These are not unlike the words of a person who, as the result of, say, a particularly unfavorable divorce settlement, is driven to drink (or shoot up, for that matter).

Baldwin uses this comparison repeatedly. As he lists the various escape routes of his Harlem friends, he acknowledges the limited possibilities for a young man in his situation.

[…] many of my friends fled into the service, all to be changed there, and rarely for the better, many to be ruined, and many to die. Others fled to other states and cities – that is, to other ghettos. Some went on wine or whiskey or the needle, and are still on it. And others, like me, fled into the church. (20)

This passage clarifies the relationship, for Baldwin, between the four routes mentioned. Each is qualified by the word “fled” or the notion of fleeing, and all are attempting to flee the same racial tension, the same oppression. But the basis for these escapes is a less compelling similarity than their respective destinations; each path mentioned – with the exception of the church – ends with a dismal fate. And although Baldwin doesn’t overtly condemn the Christian church at this early point in the text, he provides an equation with a dangling equal sign that, using the previous statements as a model, can only end in trouble. With this progression, Baldwin sets up a correlation between the church and the junkie – one which he maintains throughout the text.

In the second section of the essay, Baldwin recounts his meeting with Elijah Mohammad. From the moment he steps into Elijah’s mansion, Baldwin expresses hints of envy for the happiness and closeness of Elijah and his followers. Later, as they sit down to dinner, Elijah’s insistence that Baldwin become a member of the Black Muslim movement is reinforced by the audible assent of the other men at the table; the scene evokes the middle school skits designed to warn students about the ever-menacing “peer pressure” which precludes drug addictions and pregnancies. And, as he considers the words of the prophet, Baldwin draws upon his past to analyze Elijah’s meaning:

I remembered my buddies of years ago, in the hallways, with their wine and their whiskey and their tears; in hallways still, frozen on the needle; and my brother saying to me once, “If Harlem didn’t have so many churches and junkies, there’d be blood flowing in the streets.” (76)

And so, Baldwin’s equation of the church to the junkie does not stop at Christianity; he notes its application to the Nation of Islam movement as well. His brother’s comment is, at once, a testament to the pacifying powers of the church and an insinuation that religion is little more than a dose of dope for the oppressed many.

This marks the realization that propels Baldwin into the last section of the essay, and which primes the reader for his unflinching critique of religion as a propagating factor of the problem of race relations in America. Baldwin goes as far as to relate the extremism of the Nation of Islam movement to that of the American Nazi party. Similarly, in his meditation on the adopted surname “X”, Baldwin decries Christianity as a social construction which serves the purposes of white oppression. “I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross” (84). This specific mention of Christianity’s hand in the slave trade illuminates a dichotomy that Baldwin projects upon the difference – and, most importantly, the similarity – between Christians and Black Muslims: for Baldwin, an African American who identifies as Christian is playing into the designs and accepting the forces of white oppression while a Black Muslim is utilizing the same ideologies as the oppressor – is, in effect, no better than “they” are.

In light of Baldwin’s indictment of religion as a dividing institution and his prolonged conceit that religion and dope serve similar purposes in the ghetto, one is reminded of the words of Karl Marx:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

To make the argument that dope serves a positive function in society is to carry the opinion that “the oppressed creature” should be neutralized, rendered complacent and ineffective. And since, like Marx, Baldwin equates the church and the Nation of Islam movement to “the opium of the people”, he simultaneously recognizes their short-term benefits as pacifiers and their large-scale consequences as institutions which will, if not render their followers moot and useless, promote a racial violence that is not unlike the injustices perpetrated by white Christians at the dawn of American slavery.