About The New Black Thought

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In tales of the Caribbean, published in Cuba by Casa de las Américas, Andrew Salkey's Anancy stands out; not for wrong reasons, it would be a mistake to criticize Cuban cultural policy at its greatest moment of prestige; but for the way it illustrates the errors that ruined that prestige, true even if manipulative. Anancy is not only a folkloric character from the Caribbean basin, but a divinity imported with his slaves; and in this story, he has a note from the translator, clarifying that this type of tradition used to have parabolic and moral value.

Salkey's tale undoubtedly has a parabolic and moral value, but that would be only its practical and minor aspect; logical at the time when enlightened rationalization was rushing into its decadence, from the vortex of its heyday. As of a divinity, Anancy's adventures explain the processes in which the Self is existentially resolved; from which to extract specific notes, to clarify also specific situations, but at the cost of their greater scope.

In this one, Salkey recounts how Anancy is betrayed by his spirit, which defeats him instigated by his enemies; from which the advice of never fighting with oneself is extracted, for this is what weakness consists of. Beyond this advice, Anancy could be prostrating the complexity of existential determinations; that being of extrapositive value, they would not be rationalizable, but no less true.

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It would be that, in the tense relationship with reality, the spirit is inevitably dissociated from the Self; but as a process, not a state, which thus points to its maturity, with its subsequent reconciliation. This would even be the case for black in the Americas, including that black depth of the Caribbean, in its tension with the West; the one he can even save from himself, but as long as he reaches this maturity of the spirit of Anancy reconciled with Anancy.

In this sense, the translator's reductive note would be pointing to the same process that impoverished culture; from the arrogance of modern immanentism, reducing everything to the positive aspect of reality; even when it refused to do so in the Germanic negativism, which was only its renomination, just as reductive. In both cases, it was the reduction of reality to its immanence, identified as positive or negative; but ignoring in any case the transcendent aspect, from which its determinations would come.

This explains the excesses of the tradition of German Idealism, no less than those of French Rationalism; to which it only replies, but incorporating in it its own formal determinations, as its mere contradiction. From that fatality, incorporated with the Manichaean Catholicism of San Agustín, is that we are saved this literature of the Caribbean; infusing in the West the sufficiency of African ontology, with the immense flow of its myths and cosmologies; no greater than those of the same Western tradition, but still incorrupt because its contraction to the reflective function of literature.

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It would have been the process of excellent rationalization of reflective practices that corrupted this function; giving rise to that other one, as excellent as it was excessive, which vitiates Western philosophy in its history. This would have been Senghor's intuition, in his search for an African philosophy, lost in his later subordination; when in search of the legitimacy of the enlightened elitism of the West, he turns to the Sartre that precipitates it in its abyss.

From that morass is that we are rescued by this Caribbean literature, recovering the reflexive function of art; that in its access to the transcendent determinations of reality, offers back the understanding of its ontology. This is what The New Black Thought is all about, in its attempt to rescue this much-needed contraction in a singular philosophy; not only by forming its critical body over that of early Black thought, but also —and better— over its art.

Gullah Geechee: What's in a language?

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What’s Italian but broken Latin, what’s Spanish but broken Latin, what’s French but broken Latin; so when you say Gullah Geechee is but broken language, you maybe talking about the next development of the west; started three centuries ago, as the Germans overtaking Europe from the Romans with a single but steady and long move. If Romans have had a powerful institution like the modern Academies of languages, we would haven’t evolved to our actual languages; like our mothers and family correcting our insistence in speak the way we do, as the best way to express our singularity. 

The only problem is that those languages reached maturity with their literature, while we persist in verbality; but that’s what’s in a language, and that’s what’s in a written literature, opposed to the spoken tradition. Oral tradition is a referential tool to guide the behavior and reflect about it, no to understand the world; that’s what literature do, setting the structure of the phrase, and linking everything (cosmos) in a drama.

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There’s still the undeniable fact of how logic is born, not from mathematics but from grammar, when Aristotle organized the relationship and functional links between subject and predicate. Not for nothing the old philosophers were called grammarians over properly philosophers, rather than mathematicians; but all the modern philosophers that leaded to the distortion of logic were magnificent mathematicians, not grammarians.

From Pythagoras postulating his intuition as a fact, the Plato that doesn’t dared to question it, to Descartes; from this late to Kant and Hegel, from this one to Heidegger understanding that something was wrong on all this. The total evolution of the west history of though is full of mathematicians, unable to understand reality in its own complexity; because rather than the flexibility of literature and arts in its reflection of reality as an object, they just tend to force its determination.

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It doesn’t matter anyway, all those languages struggled through centuries from their first attempts to maturity; but it may be about time for this ultimate transformation, organizing the understanding the world as a cosmos. Not even that first attempt of the Gullah Bible is enough or still good, on this sense of hermeneutical tools; because it doesn’t surpass that same insufficiency of the storytelling, as just a tradition with moral reference; not an actual tool to rationalize the world, which is what hermeneutics is about.

The bible is not a step, as neither the manuals of grammar, because they’re just a conventional interpretation; that working as the same effort of any conventional Academy, struggles to reflect the reality in its complex functions. As a reflection of life, languages are alive themselves, and Gullah Geechee need to breath by its own; that’s what Adam did naming the things, to give them a specifical human function, through the hermeneutical effort of understand the world as human.

That’s then what Gullah Geechee is called to be, as the last step of the struggling west to understand its own nature; a comprehension already distorted by the critical mas of its conventions, leading to the distortion of logic because this insufficiency. And that’s then what’s in a literature, as the ultimate organization of a language, the maturity of an entire world; that can this way rearrange new conventions as a new way of life, that gives humanity the new spaces it needs for rest and grow.

 All this is important for something more than its mere postulation, which refers only to political and fairness; this is important because the problem with Gullah Geechee is not just a problem of identity (political) or fairness. It solves the ontological contradiction of the whole humanity, and that’s more important than even the unfairness of history; that’s what’s in a language, and in its literature as its stage of maturity and sufficiency, not just the dignity of some people but the live of the world.