Nina Simone on racism, art and violence
“It's a lot of hell, a lot of violence, but I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life.” – Nina Simone
Blank on Blank is a Youtube channel full of animated versions of real life interviews. This time the chosen one was a little known interview with Nina Simone conducted by Lilian Terry in the 60s. This interview was aired on Italy and now we have access to Nina Simone talking of all things related to her life as an artist, mother and black woman.
When Anne-Marie Willis says that "we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us” the most obvious examples are those we already consider related to design, among these the fashion world is a good example, specially when Nina Simone talks about it:
“I love clothes. Yes, I do. I mean, if you come out and you look the way you want to look, you will create a mood before you open your mouth. And sometimes that can be enough to get your audience exactly in the groove, where you want them.
Like last year, I wore the same gown for a year, everywhere I went. I wanted people to remember me looking a certain way. I made it easier for me.
[…]
So when came on stage, the illusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.”
The interviewer asks about the last song she interpreted in her show. “The King of love is dead” was composed by the bassist of her band, Gene Taylor, one day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. In this music, as Nina Simone says, the climax is also it’s end. After questioning what would happen after his death the music ends. This musical interruption represents the fight for equality at the USA, a question mark after a bigger movement.
Even amid segregation and seeing people die due to the color of their skins, Nina Simone still found reasons to be optimistic. Not because she see the world as good, but because she knew her fight to be right and worth the efforts.
“It's a good time for black people to be alive. It's a lot of hell, a lot of violence, but I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live as I've dreamed.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that your child will be living through the revolutionary years?
I don't know, love. Whatever it is she's going to have pride in her own blackness. She's going to have a chance to be more than just somebody who's on the outside looking in. Like it's been for most of us, and my parents before me, but she may see more bloodshed than I've ever even dreamed of. I have no way of knowing that evolution. The cycle goes round and round. It's time for us."
We who are alive to see the future she couldn’t predict know that the blood still flows and racism is still a problem. However, if we try to be a little more like Nina Simone, strong and somewhat optimistic, then maybe something will console us and things can keep getting better.
See the animation here:
Intellectual cooptation and justifying the savagery. The Vietnam War by Noam Chomsky
“When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology." - Noam Chomsky
An intellectual with studies ranging from linguistics and philosophy to history and philosophy, Noam Chomsky was a great critic of the American military campaign in Vietnam and the consequences of the imperialistic politics. In the essay “The responsibility of intellectuals”, published in February of 1967, Chomsky bases himself in the previous work of Dwight Macdonald to think this subject under the specificities of the Vietnam War.
Chomsky starts affirming a concept that to him, should be obvious. And as we still see today, there are moments where even what’s is obvious can be put in danger due to general passivity and the intellectual dishonesty of those in power:
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.
[…]
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock. It is therefore useful to recall that although new levels of cynicism are constantly being reached, their clear antecedents were accepted at home with quiet toleration. “
Due to public cynicism and apathy the critics are divided as rational or hysterics, a category that has a lot to say about the role attributed to the intellectual in a society:
“The “hysterical critics” are to be identified, apparently, by their irrational refusal to accept one fundamental political axiom, namely that the United States has the right to extend its power and control without limit, insofar as is feasible. Responsible criticism does not challenge this assumption, but argues, rather, that we probably can’t “get away with it” at this particular time and place.”
In this scenario, the sharpest critics are silenced while some discourses are legitimated by a rise of the authority under the appeal of the specialist:
“Should decisions be left to “experts” with Washington contacts—even if we assume that they command the necessary knowledge and principles to make the “best” decision, will they invariably do so? And, a logically prior question, is “expertise” applicable—that is, is there a body of theory and of relevant information, not in the public domain, that can be applied to the analysis of foreign policy or that demonstrates the correctness of present actions in some way that psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, and philosophers are incapable of comprehending?
[…]
Responsible, nonideological experts will give advice on tactical questions; irresponsible, “ideological types” will “harangue” about principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights, or over the traditional problems of man and society, concerning which “social and behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivialities. Obviously, these emotional, ideological types are irrational, since, being well-off and having power in their grasp, they shouldn’t worry about such matters. “
Being an technician serving the State, we have the intellectual incapable of seeing the structure under which he lives and when he affirms his position he is also nodding to the very society he should be analyzing in order to criticize:
“When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.
[…]
we might say that the Welfare State technician finds justification for his special and prominent social status in his “science,” specifically, in the claim that social science can support a technology of social tinkering on a domestic or international scale. He then takes a further step, ascribing in a familiar way a universal validity to what is in fact a class interest: he argues that the special conditions on which his claim to power and authority are based are, in fact, the only general conditions by which modern society can be saved; that social tinkering within a Welfare State framework must replace the commitment to the “total ideologies” of the past, ideologies which were concerned with a transformation of society.”
This way Chomsky brings the intellectual closer to the role of a dissident and skeptic so his actions can be conscious not only of himself but also of the society he’s part of:
“Quite often, the statements of sincere and devoted technical experts give surprising insight into the intellectual attitudes that lie in the background of the latest savagery.
[..]
Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.”
“The responsibility of intellectuals” was the essay that gave Noam Chomsky a political projection and this short work was later developed in his book “American power and the new mandarins”. Sadly, his words are still much needed and, as Roland Barthes essay on the specialized critics, an advertence we should not dismiss.
The ultimate objective of the polarization is the rupture. About our stolen country.
“Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses.”
We’re divided. It’s impossible to pass a day without dealing with at least some kind of polarization. A conversation that for sheer lack of touch ends up in a critical subject in which you (and the other) will discover if the civilized person talking to you is a disgusting ignorant or a illuminated friend. The poles exist to include and to divide, left, right, liberals, socialists, feminists, machos, activists, homofobics, conservatives. In everybody’s mind there’s the idealized human being and also it’s imperfect counterpart, that person who agrees with evertyhing you think or the person who draws anger and resentment due to their foolishness, defending what can only be unthinkable.
This judgement by oposition, rushing to judge people based only in how they get close to our ideas is a childish and improductive way of recognize ourselves as part of certain groups and deny other people’s approaches. The pettiness lies in the fact that this behavior reinforces the idea of non communicant groups, penalize those who are open to change their minds and, if we consider the collective space, it’s also clear that the negotiations are out of question. The lack of interaction and flux of ideas suffocate the collective imaginary, limitating diversity and preventing alterations due to an ambient where everybody hold desperately to partidary positions that arise more from a midiatic and electoral game than from a real interest for the complexity involving bigger issues.
In the dicotomy terrain the only things thriving in all their charm and inconsequence are the leaderships, gathering the constant tension to idealize and therefore, to obscure the real problems and it’s nuances to create a well rounded story about good guys and bad guys where, be they a nazi right or a stalinist left, the outcome is a blind course of action in face of what’s, almost always a scarecrow. This way of acting becomes, due to a complete avoidance of the intelectual debate, sometimes mistaken by shallow screaming and Facebook posts (or even lower, columns of the big media), a script defining both the position and the level of engagement of it’s followers.
Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses. Without space for debate and negotiation the discourses are always the most radicalized and simplistic, common place and obvious, even if it’s disastrous, specially for those who have no space in the decision making proccess. However, the intensification of this scenario comes from a mixture of interests, prejudices and fears that were instaled over the years and now broke loose over our society still recovering from a sordid amputation.
The polarization can only be disputed in the political space since the other channels are closed, reinforcing the power of the official institutions making it easier to dominate both sides by those who can dominate the most powerful positions inside the pre-established structure. It was interesting to see these very institutions being used to disarm the entire society and then being responsible for their own social political subversion, a metamorphosis that goes way beyond the usual in moments of transition.
What happened was a profound rupture through the intentional and organized dismembering of the social, political and economical model that guided the country in the last years. A model developed over years of democratic decisions with all the agregated influences that arised from the power dinamics of the country, always dependent of certain respect to the institutions – even with all the expected troubles – not only as the law guided, but also as it existed on the nation’s imaginary and according to the project of nation that, for good or evil, was kept legitimate.
As the dichotomy allows the articulation of the assailants it becomes a duty to think the scenario as a whole in order to hold back this general structure that’s failing brazilians. Even a victory by strong opposition, as it was for them, wouldn’t not mean a return anymore, nothing will erase from our history, both in short and in the long term, this ideological shock. Fighting for a return if not conservatism is at least a dangerous longing that can leave us unable to act when action is needed the most.
The only option is to resist, to call out the lack of legimity and demand reparations for the damage being done to Brazil. However, we must have in mind that a return is impossible. It´s urgent the rise of a new objective, that also won’t come rescued from our past as a mask to the present. Our past struggles must stay there as history for now we have to organize a new action plan. Fighting is essential but we have to think, to elaborate not only the next steps but also the future goals and to do this we must not forget what was taken from us. What we lost wasn’t a project of nation, we lost the very own hability to project and no fight will be enough if we keep asking for the past to come back, because it will not come, they made it impossible. What’s to come is uncertain, a sad uncertainty for all of us who had any optimism with Brazil prior the coup. As consolation there’s only the possibility, because our uncertainty is also theirs.