People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don’t want to cop to God. (When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons “Gods” so you can understand the relativity of the term.) But for all our talk about the Creator, we rarely use that term for those moving among us whom we could concretely use that word to describe. And whose creations are knowable, tangible, though wonderful even if we could stand in a bar and have a beer with them. It is as if our familiarity with humanity downgrades its profundity. Like the only truly heavy stuff is what we don’t understand. Like the economy, what’s truly valuable is what we don’t have.
I’m saying this to wake us up to the value of our own earthly lives, and the great creators that have walked, do walk, among us. But also to help us appreciate the grand livingness of what some of us give to each other. Though the contradiction to this is that then we will understand how much we lose when one of those long time creators disappears. Sometimes we don’t even know who they are. What a tragedy, like the fog of ignorance which disconnects our heads from our hearts so that we can wander through the world and not even understand what’s going on. Though Louis kept telling us, Who Pays the Cost (1978), This One For You (1983), Scattered Scripture (1996) or that great anthology Bum Rush The Page (2001).
And we are always surrounded by Death. Now Death. Past Death. Death to Come. However we have to face it, it marks us one way or another. It is always much closer than we think and even what we think we see can suddenly disappear. Though there is always light if we know where to look. Our friend here, our brother, brought it to us direct and its brightness must help light the rest of our lives.
But the news of Louis’s passing was freezing and horrible. I read the words and emotionally couldn’t understand them. It didn’t make sense. It was absurd or confused or a lie or whatever is not true or real. But it was both. But how could it be? Amina and I had just seen Louis and Barbara and hung out all day and ate Cuban food and exchanged observations, experiences, facts, beliefs, maps of consciousness. We stood in front of the house and waved, “Take it Easy…See Ya later…Don’t Take No Wooden Negroes.”
If you know where the light is and it goes out, it frightens and pours ice through you. Like somehow you got put out in the cold and the darkness. There is no one I fear losing like the poets. Not just because we do that, but it means there is one less trusted mind and soul in the world. It is a loneliness that jumps us remembering someone like Louis Reyes Rivera whom we knew to speak the truth. In a world full of lies and surrounded by death and darkness, someone who would bring that wondrous light and truth to us. That we could count on to say one sentence that would, say, put the Republican maniacs in check or even give righteous criticism to some leader who still don’t know how to act. Or simply remark on a truth we needed but had momentarily forgotten, or simply make us hum that hip tune again like we sposed to.
He said in his wonderful essay “Inside the River of Poetry”: “Always there is need for song…and every human has a poem to write…”
This last line comes to mind because Louis was a live poet. And unlike we old heads Louis had mastered the art of memorization, which the generations after mine, have accomplished. So he was a spoken word speaker in the sense of textless recitation, though occasionally he would read. Louis also dug the enhancement that music gave to the word. Because poetry is the musicked word at base and the skilled recitation accompanied by or integrating the spoken word with music serves to emphasize both. His great poem “The Bullet Cry or A Place I Never Been” creates the living dimension of Malcolm’s murder, beginning with the tumultuous and relentless question, Was You There? That work must be dug by any who claim information about real life.
We have heard Louis read excerpts from his “Jazz In Jail,” his masterful word music symphony that speaks in multiple layers of metaphor about the music which is our literal as well as our figurative selves, and we must collectively and unceasingly signify and put the whisper to work until that work appears. These grand creators must not be treated like comets to blaze across our consciousness helping us more clearly dig the world, and then disappear. Especially recently we have been losing grand master poets like Louis, Sekou, Pedro, Mikey, Piri, Lorenzo Thomas, Gil Scott…What have we been doing wrong to deserve such spiritual wasting? It’s like your head and heart are shrinking.
Louis’s death seemed so unreal to me, because I always thought of him (and he was) younger than me. Even though he had the Imam’s long grey beard and the staff to go with it, the peripatetic prophet. We got together in the late 70’s around the time of his first book, Who Pays The Cost. With a lot of people who will add a deeper cast to any eulogy or obituary, some long gone like his man Zizwe Ngafua, or the cruelly under-known Safiya Henderson, or writers like Arthur Flowers and his De Mojo Blues, together with poets like my wife, Amina Baraka, Tom Mitchelson, Brenda Connor Bey, Layding Kaliba, Rashidah Ismaili, Gary Johnston and his Blind Beggars Press, Wanjiku Reynolds, Malkia Mbuzi, Mervyn Taylor, Akua Lezli Hope, loud ass Baron Ashanti.
And in the spirit of John Oliver Killens – Barbara’s father, Louis’s father in law – and his Harlem Writers Guild’s long historied nurturing of Black writers, we along with some others, put together for a brief storied moment a Black Writers’ Union, that met in Brooklyn and seemed similar (one of these writers commented recently) to the National Writers Union which it preceded. That’s the way that do, was my answer. Even so, Louis was chair of the New York chapter of Local 1981 of the National Writers Union since 2004 and active in it from its inception. And he functioned like a real union rep. It was not just a title. If you wanted to know something about the formal attempt to make these Publishing Corpses respect writers’ rights, Louis wd publish his work in the union regularly. In this effort were we all, certainly Louis and I and the rest of us brought closer.
I remember Louis talking about his effort helping John Killens put together his grand study of Pushkin, Great Black Russian. Lest we forget that until Pushkin made Russian a language that carried literature, the Russians wrote in French. Louis was one of the people most associated with self-publishing. Too many young people loiter unknown in the literary world because they think there is something negative about self-publishing. Thus this attitude keeps us subservient to the corpses. With Shamal press Louis championed the small press and self-publishing efforts that young poets should welcome.
Louis was always at heart the activist and this is why I always felt close to him. That the word was to spread the truth and the expression of that word was an act of liberation. It was the spirit of the Black Arts Movement, a more activist oriented reflection of the Harlem Renaissance, which gave us Negritude in Africa and the West Indies, Indigisme in Haiti and Negrissmo in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Spanish speaking territories of the Americas. That we would create an art that was rooted in our real cultural and historical experience. That we would create an art that would come out of the elitist dens of ambiguity and poet for and with the people. That we would create an art that would help liberate those people! Dig his two anthologies Bum Rush The Page & The Bandana Republic.
And you could hear Louis working at it whether in his twice a month workshops, his program on WBAI (until it was cut off by the white knights), his regular gigs and workshops at Sistah’s Place or his various academic gigs at Pratt, Stony Brook.
One of the most important of Louis’s formal or informal teaching gigs was his insistence on teaching, recognizing and living the Afro-Latin Hinge that characterizes the whole of the Western world. His rocked hat, swinging cane, his various dashikis above which lowered a long constantly stroked beard animated by a determined march to where ever, arriving with “What’s Happening” and leaving with “Later” the characteristic Rivera Profile.
Louis gave us the warmth of his feeling, always. We loved him because we knew that whatever he looked like to you, he was a soldier. That’s why we miss him so much. And it is the essence of his soldiering that must be passed on. That’s what we must urge on artists and scholars, not only cultural workers, but we need our most advanced folks fighting for equal rights and self-determination. To create art, and scholarship that is historically and culturally authentic, that is public and for the people, that is revolutionary.
But there has been a dangerous gap…part of the Sisyphus Syndrome, where we roll the rock to the top and then the Gods roll it back down on our head. It is intentional. The new fascists of the corporations have tried to erase all there was of the militant 60’s and 70’s. They are trying to make all us disappear. That’s why “Jazz in Jail” must be published. That’s why the whole pantheon of resistance, militancy, revolution must be re-raised to face the post-black neo-fascist attack. Obama or not. We have the resources – 700 billion dollars gross national product, 16th largest in the world. We have 50 million people. You might be disappointed in Obama but the republican maniacs shd show you what the right wing intends. Obama is gone in 4 years. Can we get a revolutionary party together by then – a national revolutionary united front of artists and cultural workers. We must roll the rock back up the mountain. They will let Obama be reelected because they see that he has been a soporific to us. Cooled us out. We must stop being cooled out.
This diatribe is the result of hearing some young negro writers union wag denigrate struggle and some old dude who shd know better. DOUGLASS must be kept alive and redistributed because that is part of our resistance.
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. – Frederick Douglass, Civil Disobedience Manual
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. – Frederick Douglass, Civil Disobedience Manual
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others. – Frederick Douglass, Civil Disobedience Manual
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
The Black Arts Movement raised a whole generations of soldiers. Obama or not we still need our soldiers. Our fighters. The two dudes who said there is no need for struggle have never really understood Louis, or their own lives. If there is no struggle, sd Fred, there is no progress.
This is the paradigm that Louis Reyes Rivera’s life and work presented. Unity with our people and struggle against our enemies. Anyone who really knew Louis wd tell you that. They would know that he was a soldier. And we all should know that here, at this precipice looking down into the jaws of corporate dictatorship and the new American Fascism, we need all the revolutionary cultural workers, all the soldiers we can enlist and develop. Louis Reyes Rivera was that to the bone, to the head of his swinging stick and screaming dashiki. This One For You he said, he meant us, all of us, all the time. Like Sekou Toure said, “Victory To Those Who Struggle.” Louis believed that. He told me so.
Unidad & Lucha Companero. Hasta la Vista. Hasta Manana. Venceremos! Later!