Sunday, June 17, 2018

Afro-fascism: A Manifesto

No more tiny prisons of the nondescript diaspora. No more Ezekiel luddite shit. No more capitalism. No more democracy. No more blackness. No more negation or shadow as scapegoat. Out in the open, our bloodthirst, our hunger for power is no longer a secret. Our evil is no longer a matter of being soulful and docile when the time calls for revolt. We can hold rallies for only those who love us indifferently, indignantly, too. Live in a bent grammar of fanatics. We can rent out the Louvre in gyrate about what’s reduced to beautiful in fluffy hems and sneakers cause that’s in style, cause that’s the truth. We can  gargle with magazines and be opulent runaways. Runaway in your best dress and jewels because later, for the war, if you need something to sell you’ll be wearing it. Promote your radiance because later if need the dark you’ll be its master. Say the word zeitgeist faster, we are all rappers. Nigga shit and all that, that’s ours. And then when you want to get sensual, and stop being so defensive, deliberate, didactic, you will have the rally’s momentum to hide behind and can glory in the privacy your spectacle creates and make something realer, less relatable. Your propaganda for a self will save you from yourself. And you’ll have the patience to tell a small town story about somebody regular, a girl walking through church as she’s tossed into a bomb, no not her. A girl walking to school along a rail of knotted ropes, impaled as she begins to skip. Not that girl either. A black girl without a care in the world because her fascist parents control your image of the world. Does she know how lucky she is, how many risks lift the roses to a terrace above it all where she can sit and think about egypt or the history of exoctic healing plants, or when she watched her daddy die and was told to clap, and he was clapping too and that was actually a movie in a reclusive benefactor’s house, she wasn’t supposed to see it but that’s ok because in this perfect private life he greases her scalp while she devises new ways to forget what she’s supposed to see. For a while the whole world forgot who to be angry at as black entertainers took over every system, for a while that forgetting was a kind of peace, a kind of renewal. We deferred everything. We let everything go, for a while. No more vulnerability around trees and oceans. The cross is an instrument of torture and we abdicated its tyranny for a new kind of rule. No more pretending God is dead. No one calls you too nuanced when you stop pretending.