Birthday Tea Party

Yesterday afternoon we celebrated my birthday at The Terrace whose atrium and skylights overlook Piccadilly. We dined on a traditional English tea service (scones with jelly and clotted cream; cucumber, salmon and cheese cream finger sandwiches; brownies, strawberries, and other assorted sweets). To counter the detoxifying effects of the herbal teas, we ordered a bottle of champagne which lead to a fair share of silliness.

“The Mountaintop”

Coinciding with the debut of “The Mountaintop”, a fictional play about Dr. MLK Jr.’s final hours between delivering the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and his assassination, is the NAACP’s 100th anniversary. Ironically, the role of MLK Jr. is performed by a British actor and the play debuts in London rather than in America, the bloodiest battleground for people of African descent fighting for their rights in the New world.

More than that, America is the land from which history’s greatest orators for civil rights have emerged. Prior to seeing the show, I had read the coverage of BO’s address at the NAACP convention, an event which prominently announced the current President’s place in the literary lineage of great African-American orators. Perhaps the last time BO’s rhetoric for an A-A audience received as much or more press was during his campaign. Who will forget when Jesse J. made demeaning comments about BO’s speeches to A-A church audiences stating that A-A fathers need to take a more active role in their children’s lives?  Playfully pointing out that none of us know what the future holds and from where the next great A-A leaders will emerge, in “The Mountaintop” JJ is fashioned as the man who will continue MLK Jr.’s work and emerge as the next A-A leader. Clearly, no one could have foreseen both JJ’s quiet irrelevance in mainstream America and the emergence of a leader whose father was born on the African continent and mother in a state once known as “bleeding Kansas” over a dispute over whether slavery should extend west of Missouri.

While watching the play, which does an excellent job of communicating MLK Jr.’s biography in a non-didactic manner, I fondly recalled reading many of the greatest A-A oratorical texts while a graduate student of American literature and history. Later that night, I watched MLK Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on YouTube and marvelled at the growing tapestry of language which serves as the foundation of how A-A people have succeeded in gaining their freedom and asserting their rights. It was not the marches, the sit-ins, the picketing or the petitioning which were the Civil Rights Movement’s most instrumental weapons – it is the fluid use of the English language.

I remember reading Olaudah E. adventures as a naval slave; Frederick D.’s psychological insight into how Mrs. Auld’s character transformed upon becoming a slave owner (one from generosity and easy spirit to moral corruption and bitterness); James B.’s struggle with accepting the Church, the institution which serves as the bedrock of the Civil Rights Movement and whose seminal text is the origin from which many of the movement’s literary metaphors are derived; Ralph E.’s work of historical fiction which describes the power struggle between the various players during the Civil Rights Movement and how irrelevant these factional group identities are for the individual “invisible man”.

Words, the process of writing and their successful delivery, revel themselves as the chosen weapon for gaining freedom and rights during the abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements and in a “post-racial” world. During BO’s campaign, many commentators wondered whether his family history, biography and bi-racial identity affirmed that we live in a post-racial world. His speech at the NAACP Convention publicly confirms that we do not.

It was a premature and ignorant supposition that America has somehow evolved beyond its past. Integrating allusions to Biblical stories and wielding these stories as metaphors for freedom and equality serve as the basic foundation of the most prominent A-A texts. I posit that Christianity, a shared religion between both white and black Americans, as well as the ability to instrumentally use the shared values and language of the Bible to communicate at rallies and demonstrations, in books and pamphlets, underscore the success of the Abolitionist and Civil Rights Movements.

The African-American community’s success via the use of the English language and Christian metaphors exposes Native American Indians’ failure. NAI communities have their own religious traditions that pre-date the arrival of Christianity to America’s shores. The lack of a shared set of stories and the NAI communities’ oral versus written tradition impede the NAI tribal communities from emerging as a force to be reckoned with in the realm of identity politics and civil rights. Instead, NAI communities remain isolated from mainstream society, protecting us from being reminded that the country which is now ours was previously over-run by tribal peoples. The original dwellers’ conspicuous invisibility remain in the vast background, buried behind the high-tech TV adverts, larger-than-life highway billboards, and overwhelmingly vapid news cycles we are barraged with in the hopes that we are too tired and distracted to think.

Regent’s Park Summer Race 10k Run

This morning a handful of us from the WfWI Ldn JLC ran in the Regent’s Park Summer Race to raise money for women survivors of war. It was the first competitive sporting event I’d participated in since high school. The first two laps around Regent’s Park were easy, but the summer heat and blazing sun wore on me during the third and final lap. I still managed to beat my target time by a few minutes, finishing the 10k in 51 minutes and 45 seconds, ranking 29 out of 130 women running in the event.

Summer Soiree

Last week we hosted a summer soiree at Bungalow8 to raise money for women survivors of war.