Django: An Unlikely Black Fairytale

I met Robert Croston in Teach for America purgatory summer training. Dude is an awesome school leader and had something smart to say about Django, so I'm turning over the mic.

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At it’s core, Django: Unchained is a counter-narrative and graphic fairytale about a black man’s commitment to honor his marriage vows and reunite with his wife despite the institutional fetters of slavery.

But of course, this is no kid's fairytale. The damsel in distress is an enslaved comfort woman and the knight in shining armor is a runaway turned bounty hunter. In this story, the dragon gets shot through the heart, the ogre gets kneecapped, and the castle is blown to smithereens.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a black slave that hooks up with a bounty hunter by the name of Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz), who gives him freedom and a new job: hunting white fugitives. Despite his new employment and emancipation, Django never gives up on rescuing his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold down the river to Mississippi's fourth largest plantation: Candieland. Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) owns the plantation and his loyal houseman Stephan (Samuel L. Jackson at his sinister best) runs the show. 

When Django tells Schultz his story, the German marvels at Broomhilda's name and recounts a Norse legend about a maiden named Broomhilda who was freed from mountaintop captivity by a shining knight. As the bounty hunters mount up for their quest, it's hard not to see the enterprise as a fairytale. 

Foxx does not have to act an ass like the last black actor to land a major role in a fairytale box office smash. In fact, Django, according to Monsieur Candie, is more than a Mandingo fighter, a violent black male slave dripping testosterone; he is a 1 in 10,000 type “nigger” (sic). His ability to defer gratification—for blood or sex—in order to carry out the clever ruse they use to purchase Broomhilda’s freedom distinguishes him summa cum laude from all other Romeos and Prince Charmings. 

Unfortunately for a fairytale about black lovers, Foxx’s and Washington’s performances are on the pedestrian side. Apparently all that was needed was pretty faces and household names to fill the roles. Interestingly, Django’s altruistic appeal to take Broomhilda’s beating for running away is the single most passionate scene they share during the entire film. Foxx and Washington spend little time on screen with each other expressing their love in words or touch beyond the predictable passionate kiss after the heroic rescue of the final scene.

Django’s selfless love compels him to traverse KKK-saturated lands and defy black codes to rejoin his wife. But beyond his death-defying conquest, Django’s love for Broomhilda is only weakly portrayed by his daydreams, which call to mind a General Mills farmer imagining his long-lost award-winning sunflower.  Broomhilda is more like Django’s stolen property, an object to be possessed rather than a cherished companion. As a married man, I would have preferred to see daydreams of the wedding ceremony, “honeymoon”, or a hand holding stroll through the field. 

Despite all this, Django is an American Legend. Django does what maybe 1 in 10,000 men would do as a fugitive: He risks almost certain death to infiltrate and destroy the master’s house in order to save his wife and restore his family. Django is more than a cinematic tale of gore. It's a clarion call to black men to fight for their families no matter the racially oppressive economic and social conditions of America. Even so, as Americans, we should consider the Broomhildas of our personal and collective hearts held captive by any number of institutional “isms,” especially racism and capitalism. Pursue her with a reckless abandon; there is no tomorrow.

-Robert Croston

 

My Peoples

How often do you look at a blog's links, anyway? They're just there. Half of them don't work. Some of them haven't been updated in twenty years. They're all out of context, with no description or reason for you to want to click on them.

So, as a public service, here's the rundown on my current list of "My Peoples" and why you should read them.

Crystal Wilkinson

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, Water Street, and Birds of Opulence (forthcoming). I had the pleasure of both taking a class and being an associate instructor for Crystal back in the good ole days at Indiana University. Even though I didn't get a chance to have her in workshop, she taught a young(ish) Misstra Knowitall a ton about writing and teaching.

Her blog is a must read because it gives you insights into not only the writer, but also writing and the writing biz. I would recommend starting with her post about how she has to remind her mama that she's a writer and what that actually means. She's also got a dynamite post about the pressures that writers feel now that social media and the writing business have formed such a close (incestuous?) relationship.

Pedro Bell

Pedro Bell  helped develop the P-Funk cosmology and his writing and visual art are essential to understanding any endeavor that purports to be "on The One". This links to Pedro's MySpace account. I haven't heard from my brother in a while, but there's some good autobiographical information and if you leave him a message he might write you back. You should check out the series of interviews I did with him. Dude is deep.

 "So I don't steal nothing." Miss you, ND.

Under the Blue Light: Indiana Review Blog

What can I say about my baby? She's grown up so much *sniff* since I was editor. Now they've got a new design and they do awesome contests and they have interviews and authors reading. *Sigh*. Well, check out the newest posts, but if you want to walk back down memory lane, take a look at the beautiful IR editors at AWP in 2007. 

Cake and Potatoes: Jackson Brown

Jackson Brown and I were roommates back at IU. I thought I had it going on, but this brother is a writer, cartoonist, musician, and one of the coldest MCs to darken (ahem) the hallways of Ballantine Hall. Cake and Potatoes is all that and a bag of corn chips. Funny, silly, searing, smart ass hell, and beautifully drawn. It looks like he's on hiatus (or is that "hi-itis?) but check out his greatest hits. For my taste, Off the Chain is one of my favs.

 

I so tried to find a pic without a Black hand holding a link card. Alas. 

Jericho Brown

I was lucky enough to meet this brother during my Funk Issue days. This links to the book site for his collection, Please, which if you ain't got, you need to get. It's funky and all that. I also did an interview with Jericho that is, of course, quite funky.

Remember me?

Post No Ills: Kyle Dargan

Post No Ills is Kyle's brain child, which like a lot of his brain chilluns, is both smart and cool. You can find great reviews of the latest in literature, movies, and politics here. They just did a review of Evie Shockley's The New Black, which I gotsta go cop. Oh, what's that you say? Did they do an interview with Misstra Knowitall himself? Well, as a matter of fact they did.

Patrick Rosal

My best memory of Patrick Rosal is at the end of the Indiana Review Funk Issue reading when he jumped on the piano and started everybody to singing Billy Ocean's "Suddenly." (I'm glad he knew all the words because I wasn't doing nothing but humming until "...wake up and suddenly you're in love!") Pat's an amazing poet and someone who writes with his heart. He's been blogging for a minute and on his site you can find everything from poetics to politics to boxing.Check him out.

Play Vicious: Ro Pulliam

I met Ro in Baltimore during my Americorps days. I lived in a house with four(!) roommates and somebody got the brilliant idea that we needed another one. Thank God we did. Ro's my man. A renaissance man who holds it down with the words, music, and web design. His site is complex and fly, just like him.

 
Datsun Flambe: Rion Scott

I met Rion Scott during the Funk Issue (see a pattern?) and if you want to read somebody, you should read him. He's smart and funny as hell (see another pattern). He's publishing some great stuff over at PANK magazine, but his updates at Datsun Flambe are keepers. 

The Spire: Shawna Ayoub

Shawna Ayoub is a writer of Lebanese-American descent that keeps it real. I met her at Indiana University and that was one of the first things I learned about her in workshop. She's thoughtfulness, humility, and honesty shine through in her work. She shares a lot of her work at The Spire, along with life reflections. Cool stuff.

Sorry, I couldn't resist

Tayari Jones

Writer, teacher, hustler. I picked up her first book, Leaving Atlanta, while I was still in the wilds of Minnesota, and I had to keep stopping myself from trying to write like her. This site is not only good for getting insights into her process, but it's essential for keeping up with what's going on with African-American fiction. Oh, and does she have any interviews with Misstra Knowitall? Funny you should ask.

Secret Inside Girl: Vanessa Mancinelli

From her "About" page:  Vanessa Mancinelli: 1. Writes fiction. 2. Teaches literature. 3. Lives in Los Angeles.

I would also like to add: 4. Is obsessive about her teaching 5. Is obsessive about her planning.  6. Sings a mean Bill Withers. You need to check out her Seriously, this just happened post. Hilarious.

Max = Not Marriage Material

When I was in kindergarten my dad taught me how to feed insects to ants. In the backyard of our house we squatted down, looking for bugs and swarming ant's nests. If you found the right size bug and the right location in an ant's nest, you'd have a show that beat anything on Wild Kingdom. Years later, my parents divorced and I spent a lot of time turning over stones in the dry brush of our backyard, "playing" with bugs by myself.

Thinking back on it, I'm a little shocked at the cruelty of the pastime. I like to think of myself as a compassionate person. Torturing bugs is the recreation of sociopaths, after all. But my regret is tempered by an appreciation for how I was battling my own loneliness and trying to assert some control over a world that seemed so far beyond me.

And it's also true that you end up doing a lot of (strange!) mean stuff when you're a kid.

So, watching Where the Wild Things Are, I felt partially transported back to that backyard, with it's rough stones and soft dirt, and solitary malice. Spike Jonze's beautiful adaptation of the Maurice Sendak story is picture-perfect in creating a world that is somber, hopeful, cruel, weird, melancholy, menacing, and joyful. The experience is similar to one of those strange dreams where you're know you're sleeping, but the dream world seems real anyway.

But I was not Max. Although I missed my mom and dad because they worked so much, in the movie Max's father is absent. It's never explained, but the sadness that hangs over the family suggests that the absence is permanent. My dad was still there to show me how to hit a baseball or play chess or drive a stick shift.

Plus, I never tweaked on my mom like Max does in the movie. He jumps on a kitchen counter, in full wolf costume, yelling at his mom to "make my dinner, woman," (even though she's got company and it's obvious she's trying to get her groove back.) He later takes a bite out of her shoulder and runs off like a wild animal. My mother is a kind woman, but I was smart enough to know that the consequences for that kind of behavior would be unspeakable.

And quick word of advice for all the single ladies out there trying to get someone to put a ring on it: if you find a wolf costume, with a pointy crown, in the closet of the man you are dating, keep stepping. As much as I like Where the Wild Things Are, it might as well be called Portrait of a Woman Batterer as a Young Man.

One of my quibbles with the movie is that I wasn't clear how the movie wanted me to feel about Max's cruelty to his mother. Early on we get that she cares a lot for him and is sacrificing for her son. (The scene with him dictating a story to her to make her feel better was a very "writerly" moment by the way. Word to Dave Eggers.) But then we see there's some new guy in the house who looks kind of wormy and mom is giggling with him and they're popping bottles. When Max comes through looking for some loving attention, all he gets is frozen corn. Although we empathize with the mother (even mama should get to swerve), the scene sets the stage for a justification of Max's crazy behavior.

Later, one of the movie's most touching moments is also one of its most troubling. When Max returns home, his mom doesn't say anything. I thought she might at least shake the teeth out his head, and then give him a hug, but no. From her reaction, I thought she was going to apologize for hurting his teeth with her skin. And despite his incredible and harrowing journey with the Wild Things that taught him about empathy and family and love, he doesn't have much to say to his mom when he gets home. No Sorry about that. No My bad. No My fault. No See what had happened was...

As a matter of fact, the main lesson he learns is that if he wants a home-cooked meal all he has to do is go missing for a couple hours. He gets all of mom's attention (no swerve for her!) and a fat piece of chocolate cake. The grin on his face as his mother falls asleep from exhaustion is not chastened with regret, but emboldened by self-satisfaction. That doesn't seem like a good sign.

Despite these quibbles, the movie is amazing. Visually it's stunning, but the characterization of the Wild Things is even more so. In fact, I haven't had this much fun since the great stink beetle/ant hill battle of 1988.

Rock Sex rocks!

It's Friday, so you should do yourself a favor and check out Rock Sex, a blog I stumbled on that charts the connections between blues, funk, rock, soul, and whatnot. Basically, it tracks how songs get adapted by different artists across different genres and features a lot of cool music so you can hear the similarities yourself. Instead of grumbling about how an artist has "stolen" a song from someone else (although the Beach Boys robbed Chuck Berry!), the site takes an enlightened approach. According to author Tym Stevens:

"Rock'n'Soul music is a baton relayed by everyone. ROCK SEX is about all of the creative connections that link our shared culture together."

A good place to start is Al Green's Take Me to the Water, which is a personal favorite of mine. Stevens shows how Bryan Ferry and the Talking Heads both made derivations of that excellent soul cut.

But you also got to check out how he tracks the development of "Tainted Love." I'm used to the Soft Cell Version, but I did not know that Gloria Jones recorded the Soul version first. Cool stuff.

Indiana Review 31.1

One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching this past year was that although I was teaching literature, I hardly got a chance to read literature (let alone write literature, but that's another story.)

Where the magic happens

That was a big change for me, coming from being editor at Indiana Review where I was constantly reading good (and not so good) fiction and poetry. We published two issues a year, but read constantly to find the best material. There was a lot of reading, a lot of meeting, and a lot editing, but the product was always so rewarding.

The Last (Fiction Meeting) Supper, 2007

Anyway, I recently got some time to sit down and read through the latest issue of IR, and although it made me a little misty-eyed to see my name not featured in the masthead, the material inside reminded me how excellent an institution IR remains.

Shelly Oria's story, "New York 1, Tel Aviv 0" is a gut punch of love story about a unrequited love in a three-way romance. It evokes the landscapes of both New York and Tel Aviv, while giving us a narrator whose voice is surprising and consistently engaging.

"When you smell another man on one of the women you love, you suggest we all hop in the shower; you say you feel sticky. When the same woman says, But I don't feel sticky, you say, Do it for me then, in a way that tells her a shower is easier than a conversation."

It's enough to make me miss the 1st reader box.

Melanie Rae Thon's story, "Seven Times Seven" is another piece that kept me turning pages. A fractured narrative about an uncle returning from war, still struggling with the voices of ghosts and monkeys and birds. Written in second person, Thon does an amazing job of juggling both her poetic and narrative instincts that allows us to both enjoy her language play and the story she's telling. Beautiful piece.

On the poetry side, Traci Brimhall's "Aubade in Which the Bats Tried to Warn Me," stands out. What a strange subject: a lover who beats bats with rackets for fun. But the piece has such a sense of lyricism and danger that you can't look away, even if you wanted to.

"How your father paid you to kill bats, a dollar a body/Last summer you let me watch./As you waited with a racket, timber wolves announced/ the moon, bats crept out of the attic. /The soft pulp of their bodies struck the house."

My thought: Dannnnnnnnnnng!

The non-fiction in the issue also nicely pushes the "typical" aesthetic for the genre, two of three pieces (Daniel Nester's "Cousin Mike: A Memoir" and Ander Monson's "The Essay Vanishes") offer engaging experiments with both structure and the interplay of the visual and literary.

I haven't finished with the issue, but I wanted to write something before I didn't get a chance (school starts soon. Ahhhhh!). If you're looking for some awesome late summer reading, go to the IR website and cop the new issue.

***Actually, it looks like you can score a free copy of the issue if you can answer a little Richard Pryor-related trivia.

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part II)

Mitchell Douglas has a new poetry collection out, Cooling Board. It's dope. Go buy it. This is the second part of our interview...

What's your favorite Hathaway cut?

That’s a toss up. It’s a tie between “Thank You Master (For My Soul)” and “For All We Know.” The former is on his first album Everything is Everything, the latter is on Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. “Thank You Master” gave me the title for the book. There’s a moment in the song that feels totally ad-libbed when he starts testifying with the familiar phrase “My bed was not my cooling board, my sheet was not my winding sheet.” When the music gets quiet and it’s just Donny on the piano delivering those words, you feel like you’ve witnessed the most private moment in the world. It’s not the kind of thing you can plan.

I'm real fond of "Be Real Black For Me" on that Roberta and Donny album. I think the title is a little corny, but there's a lyric, "Our time, short and precious/Your lips, warm and luscious/You don't have to wear false charms" that kills me every time. The "Thank You..." joint reflects how amazingly Donny could switch from gospel to secular.



What are you working on now?

I’ve got a manuscript of autobiographical family poems called stitch that is on its eighth or ninth life. I started working on that book before Cooling Board and I’ve continued to write new poems and revise it. Every time I think it’s done, I make another major change. We’ll see where it ends. I’ve also got two other projects I can’t say much about right now. Those works, in part, will be a return to persona poetry. One looks at an infamous death in the world of rock’n’roll, the other honors the life of an artist from my hometown, Louisville, KY. Of all these projects, stitch is nearest completion, the others are in early writing and research stages.

Last, but not leastly, where do you poets get all that money from? And how can I be down?

Ha! You know there ain't no money in this!!! When folks start making movies after books of poetry, the world will be a better place (lol).

Mitchell is a low-key brother, and I knew he was going to try and play it cool, but Misstra Knowitall was at Jericho Brown's book release party during AWP and has actual visual evidence of all the dollars these poets are clocking!

From left: Jericho Brown, Mitchell Douglas, and Frank X. Walker

Dang, I got to write me some poems.

**UPDATE:

This picture needs an appropriate caption. Ideas?

Everything is Everything: Mitchell Douglas' Cooling Board (Part I)

Photo by David Flores (dflo.net)

You couldn't tell Misstra Knowitall I wasn't going to change the whole game up when I first stepped up on that campus in Bloomington, IN. I going for an MFA, but I was going to show them Hoosiers something! I had my scholarship check (nobody told me it had to last all semester) and was about to let them square suckers know what was up! I thought I was too cool! That was, until I met Mitchell Douglas--who taught me what a for-real, smooth-writing-brother looks like.

Douglas' debut collection, Cooling Board, was published recently by Red Hen press. When I read that it was a "long running poem," I have to admit that I (briefly) thought: "Kneegropleeze. No way I'ma sit here and read a whole book of poetry in one sitting."

Next thing I knew: I was sitting there reading a whole book of poetry in one sitting.

Needless to say, it's dope and you need to get it (as in, buy it, not text message Mitchell to see if he's got a copy you can "check out"). It's all about the life of singer Donny Hathaway, a personal fave of mine. It's funky and soulful and beautiful. Just like Mr. Hathaway hisself.

Donny Hathaway - "The Ghetto"

I asked Mitchell some questions. He had some answers.


Taking the leap like you did with this book, investing so much time and creative energy into a collection that surrounds a single figure, must have made you nervous. What makes Donny Hathaway such a compelling figure for you?


My initial idea for the book was to have an entire collection devoted to my musical heroes. The catch was that they were all dead and the poems were a kind of commentary on their lives. The more I thought about it, the more I hated the idea. I stopped thinking about writing Hendrix and Cobain poems and narrowed the focus to Hathaway. The choice was easy because he was the artist I knew the least about. Also, there were plenty of books about the other artists I wanted to write about and none, at that time, about Hathaway. I wanted to give him his due. I did worry about doing Donny justice and writing poems that would capture his spirit , but the more I got into my research and talking to people that knew him, I stopped being afraid.

In your acknowledgments you big up Kevin Young, particularly his long form poetry class at Indiana University. How did the experience in that class inform your approach to Cooling Board?

That class was the start of the book. We had a great reading list: The Spoon River Anthology, Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and a book that opened my eyes for Cooling Board, Langston Hughes’ Montage of Dream Deferred. Kevin explained that Hughes intended the book to be a long poem and we discussed as a class if he succeeded. With each poem as a treatise on a different resident of Harlem, we decided that Hughes’ single focus in many poems/layers constituted a longer poem or narrative. What was also fascinating to me is how he used persona. There was, for example, the Southern dialect in the epistle “Letter” and a voice that could be considered a heightened sense of Hughes’ own in poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B.” Hughes taught me how to raise the hollers of many tongues to speak for one cause. We had the option of doing a research paper or turning in our own long poem as a final project. I chose the latter, and turned in 30 or so pages of Cooling Board. This was about four years before the book was published.

One of the things I admire most about this book is the breadth of voices that speak in these pages. I'm really interested in the way you begin by telling Hathaway's story through the voices of all these people who loved him (Miss Martha, Eulaulah, Roberta Flack, Curtis Mayfield), but then it seems like you start to mark his depression by introducing other "uninvited guests" that represent the voices of Hathaway's schizophrenia. What were you trying to achieve with this dynamic?

Donny was who he was because of love. I’m a father, so when I see kids and a parent is telling them to shut up, I wonder what their lives would be like with someone who took the time to say “Hush, baby. It’s time to be quiet.” He was nurtured as a musician early on by his grandmother, Martha Crumwell. Miss Martha had Donny on a stage at revivals playing the ukulele at three (she was known as a strong gospel performer herself). His mother, Drusella Huntley, wanted the best for Donny, so she moved from Chicago to St. Louis to be with her mother (Crumwell). If she hadn’t done that, the world may have never known Donny. So starting the book with the voices of those who loved him, as you note—his grandmother, his mother, his college sweetheart Eulaulah, his college friend Roberta Flack—was a way to show where he came from.

By introducing the “uninvited guests,” and the more frequent appearance of alternate takes, I hoped to disorient the reader and show him/her what living with schizophrenia was like. I think Donny was fiercely independent and, from what I’ve been told by family and friends, he didn’t like to take his medication. There is a published account by a friend that says in his last days, Donny would talk in one voice in the studio and answer himself in another voice. Sometimes, I think I could have added even more of the “uninvited,” but what is there now, I hope, gives everyone a sense of Donny’s struggle.

Donny Hathaway - A song for you

Next...

Everything is Everything (Part II): How do poets get all that money!?

The human condition no longer applies to you

It's ironic that Terminator: Salvation, a movie concerned with the destruction of humanity by machines, features a full cast of female characters who are more mechanical than the robots. Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in T2 had one of the best female action roles ever, but why are all the women in the new movie so pathetic?

First off, you have Star (Jadagrace Park). She's small, fluffy-haired, extremely loyal, soulful-eyed, and has a sixth sense for impending danger. Ms. Park does the best with the role she has, but her character is essentially just a friendly dog.

Rrruff!

Then there's Helena Bonham Carter taking on a minor part as Dr. Serena Kogan, the creator of Skynet. She makes out with a death row inmate to get him to donate his body to science. The worst part about the scene is that she's totally into the kiss, but gets totally "treated" (as the kids say) by a guy with no options. Later, she becomes the face of the malevolent computer program that destroys humanity. This brings up a bigger point: why is it that whenever the computers take over in a movie, they always seem to speak in that ice queen psycho bitch voice?

Dave, I will not be ignored, Dave.

Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Connor. Not much to say about her because she doesn't say much. All you need to know is that she wears this expression for pretty much the whole movie.

...

What about the feisty Blair Williams (Moon Goodblood)? She has a promising start, as a grizzled veteran pilot who fearlessly dogfights flying killing machines. You think she's going to be holding it down Sarah Connor style, but then she doesn't.

Are you feeling lucky, punk? Oh, wait...

Question: what tenet in screenwriting makes it necessary to add attempted gang rape scenes for females in action movies? I'm not sure, but usually the writer has the decency to let the woman kick the guys asses. Not so in this movie. Her man comes to her rescue, costing Blair almost all of her credibility. She loses the rest of her credibility by trying to "thank" said man by "keeping him warm" one scene later. Yuck.

I'm not sure how this fits into my feminist critique, but I should just say that Common needs to stop acting. Every scene does not call for the "open mic poet" voice and he showed more range when he was poverty pimping those kids in that Lincoln Navigator commercial. What, you don't remember?

Common - Lincoln Promo
Uploaded by corporatetakeover1 - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Common is officially not helping our efforts to bring light skinned brothers back. Where's that Keyboard Cat when you need him?

The Life of MF Grimm

Marcus Wicker has a new review in Indiana Review of Percy Carey's autobio(extra)graphical novel, Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm. The review is excellent and so is the book, which details the life of the underground rap legend, M.F. Grimm, who first starred on Sesame Street (for real) and ended up paralyzed from a gun attack. The art is off the hook and the story is a page-turner. Percy's also got a nice comic column over at Complex magazine. Here's a little sample of Grimm (with MF Doom) if you ain't heard.