Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Correspondence (2)

Summary :  There's no such thing as a vindictive hero.  He shoved the naked black mannequins under the bed, but later parted with those too. Radical phantom, Henry Dumas. Local rapper gone international, underground. As stated in previous transmissions, the correspondence is wild, full of anti-social prophecies Dumas exchanged with Sun Ra, Malcolm X, Clarice Lispector, and Corretta Scott King, to name a few. There is the beginning of a script for a cinematic adaptation of Ark of Bones and list of black comedians he hoped would play the lead: Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor,  reads the list, and then a sketch of a cadillac in a cotton field surrounded by artificial carnations.  He was big on symbolism even in his private journals, hieroglyphics mingled with Sanskrit text, and images of his favorite entertainers were pasted between words and paragraphs like  an advanced system of punctuation by identity. He was always negotiating with himself in that way, letting the fray of persona unravel and recoil until a single character opened up and shared the other world with him.

I want a land where the sun kills questions.


Highlights : We find out Dumas fathered 3 children with whom he communicated only in writing. There are unsent letters to each of them detailing his plans to reunite the family and form what he called 'the glare of village' together. There's a copy of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks with extensive notes and pictures in the margins and sketches for a clothing line called "It's after the end of the war," comprised of 3-piece suits in Moroccan fabrics, are tucked into the back of the Prison Notebooks. There's a stack of love letters to Katherine Dunham, unsent, tenderly written. One begins, maybe the war is our second chance to dance our savage intuitions about ourselves toward some debonaire planet only we can invent and destroy together, for I, like you, grow weary of being an accomplice, no matter how great I am at this elsewhere amplitude.  And there are two plane tickets to Angola for April, 2017.