Happy Official Birthday Dr. King!

Today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday is observed. His vision of non-violent social change did not apply to just blacks in America or those in South Africa, it can be applied globally. His vision is not a classically Romantic vision, but one that is highly important if humanity is to survive.

It is very easy to be a murderer. It is very difficult to love one's enemy. Hate the enemy's deeds, not the enemy.

Africa's Tragic Romantic: Bessie Head

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk"
----Bessie Head

It is my desire that this blog will never become stale in its' subject matter, and even though my blog has a theme, there is a world of Romance out there both past and present to be written about.

Ardent's latest blog entry got me to thinking about my very first international sojourn, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the African nation of Botswana. African nations south of the Sahara get such bad press. It is always about disease, war, poverty, or genocide. There is little mention of the good of the extraordinary. The most recent case of bad news are the elections in Kenya. It has hit home with one of my neighbors, because presently he is hosting a student in his home who is Kenyan.

Botswana is one of the richest countries in Africa because of its' diamond resources. It does not get much attention because the people are quiet and peaceful with their neighbors. Also there are not a conglomeration of tribes there, so no tribal problems. The Batswana are very tolerant. I used to silently laugh when some Batswana would tell me, "Botswana is not true Africa. You have to got to West Africa, to see true Africa."

I was in Botswana when apartheid was running its' course in neighboring South Africa. In fact, depending on where I was, I sometimes lived as close as 15 miles from the South African border. As a non-white person I went to South Africa only once, because the climate there was very tense and even some British friends of mine who went were harassed by white South African soldiers.

There were a number of people both black and white whom the Batswana like to talk about when I was there. One of them was a person they held in high regard, the writer, Bessie Head. Bessie Head is one of Africa's greatest authors, dying at age 49 just when she was about to come into her own and get the recognition she deserved. Her life was short, difficult, lonely, and tragic. Nevertheless, out of her hardship, she birthed writing of get power and sometimes disturbing beauty.

Bessie Head was the daughter of a white South mother of patrician background and a black South African father who was a stable hand to her mother's family. The relationship was totally illicit because it broke apartheid laws which applied more to white women and black men than to white men and black women. According to my Batswana students and friends who related Head's story to me, when Bessie Head's white grandparents learned that their daughter was pregnant by their black stable hand, they had her committed to an insane asylum. There Bessie Head was born in 1937. Life was tough from the beginning. Of course, her mother's family did not want her, and neither did her father's family. Therefore, Bessie was placed in an orphanage where she grew up.

Having showed strong intelligence, Bessie went to school to become a teacher. Later she married a journalist and had a son, but she eventually became a divorcee.

Unable to tolerate life under apartheid, Bessie Head went to neighboring Botswana where she became a refugee. Even in Botswana life was hard, and Head lived in extreme poverty. She ended up in the village of Serowe, one of Botswana's most famous villages one reason of which is because it is the home of Botswana's first president, Sir Seretse Khama, another person common on the lips of many Batswana. In Botswana, Head found her calling and began writing. Also in the process she became an alcoholic and died of hepatitis in 1986.

Bessie Head's work is hard to classify under one genre. Unlike many African writer's her work is not very political. Her novels tend to be semi-autobiographical, with Biblical and classical imagery. She was also influenced by D. H. Lawrence.

Here can be seen an online project by students at the University of Botswana (which was spic and span and new when I visited it) concerning Bessie Head.

A Romantic Revolutionary

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this date in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. Next Monday, on the 21st, will be the official national holiday in celebration of his birthday.

Dr. King was a Romantic revolutionary because his vision to bring about change nonviolently was very unique to history. Few leaders in the history of the world have tried to initiate change without violence, but Dr. King was unique in this aspect. His ideas to elevate the existence of African-Americans and to usher in change was inspired by his admiration of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent struggle to free India from British rule and by, of course, the teachings of Jesus Christ.

I was 6 years old when Dr. King was assassinated, and I remember exactly where I was in our house the night we heard the news on the radio. When Dr. King was cut down, he was only 39. Along with playing his jazz albums, my father played over and over Dr. King's I Have A Dream speech when I was a girl. The words of this powerful speech became engrained in my memory. There was a period when I could almost recite the entire speech by heart.

My maternal grandfather's stepfather was related to the King family. When she was a girl my cousin Maxine, the daughter of one of my grandfather's half sisters, was invited and stayed for several weeks with Dr. King's widow Coretta and their children. My first year as an undergraduate, I attended Spelman College in Atlanta, which is the sister college to Morehouse College, which Dr. King attended. At the time, his younger son Dexter was a student at Morehouse, and he would come over to our school to attend classes. I passed him a few times on the sidewalk. As for getting very close to Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, my family and I have visited his grave and The King Center which is in Atlanta.

Dr. King's vision probably looks very naive and unsophisticated to many today who seem to understand only trying to bring about change violently, but I feel that if the human race is to survive, we had better get over our bloodthirsty tendencies and remember and emulate the ways of Dr. King.

A moving tribute to Dr. King can be seen on YouTube here. The song in the video is called Black Butterfly and is sung by Deniece Williams.

Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the price he might have to pay, just the way I believe Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated a few weeks ago understood too.

When God and The Prophets Were Black

The Green Pastures was a movie produced in Hollywood in 1936, the year my maternal grandparenst were married. It was adapted from the Pultizer Prize winning play of the same name. Like Disney's 1997 TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella which I wrote about in my December 30th post, the casting for The Green Pastures was like nothing the world had seen before or since at the cinema. The entire cast is African-American. God, the angels, the prophets, Adam and Eve, the King of Babylon, etc. are all blacks who speak in "old" black southern dialect. All of the stories in the film come from The Bible and are played out in the mind of a little black girl.

The characters of The Green Pastures may be offensive to some who despise old Hollywood films which too often portrayed blacks as ignorant, unlettered servants or slaves, or excessively comical, but the characters of The Green Pastures have a kind of dignity which is too lacking in what is considered by some to be "black culture" in America today. Current popular culture which is held too much in adulation by young African-Americans is a negative pool of gangsta's (gangsters), pimps, and ho's (whores). This, with a number of other issues, has damaged the black community in America. Even abroad some people believe current black stereotypes and cannot understand African-Americans who do not act "black." I would feel so ashamed sometimes when I was in Turkey and see some rap videos. Being someone who was 18 or 19 when the first rap songs went mainstream, I continue to view with distaste what rap has become since the first rappers I heard were The Sugar Hill Gang and

Kurtis Blow. They did not spew vulgarities, praise the gangster and thug life, and denigerate women. Not being a total prude, however, I do view some of the 1990s rappers like Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., and Bone, Thugs, and Harmony as rap artists inspite of everything.

When I saw The Green Pastures on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) about 3 years ago, I did not find it offensive. Here were black people who spoke like my rural grandparents and others I would be around during my summer vacations in Greene County, Georgia, the county seat of my mother's family. In fact, I understand less the dialect that young African-Americans speak today than I do these people's in the film.

The Green Pastures is rated with 5 stars on Amazon where it can be purchased in DVD here. Here is also an excerpt from the film.

Controversial still, stereotypical, naive, sentimental, whatever your opinion, The Green Pastures is a classic artifact of African-American cinema, and I recommend it as a Romantic, moving, heartwarming, creative take on The Bible, and a work of art.