Duro por mas de quatro horas! El campeon de Wimbledon 2008 es el tenista de Mallorca Rafael Nadal,o Rafa! No hay mas que decir--to lo dije!
Ahora esperemos por el US Open. Quien sabe este puede ser el 2008 de Rafael Nadal, no? Vale. El tenista Roger Federer, el suizzo no tiene mas que dar a el juego de tenis. Lo tiene todo y nunca ganara a el French Open mon ami, nunca.
Para a los que no soportarron a Rafa solo tengo esto que decir, "Vamos Rafa! Vamos!"
Monday, July 7, 2008
Sunday, June 8, 2008
En Honor de Rafael Nadal
Ya he visto el French Open de 2008 con los tenistas Rafael Nadal y Roger Federer. "Rafa," come el es llamado gano 6-1, 6-3, 6-0. Vamos Rafa! Tengo lo mas respeto por Federer pero nadie, nadie, nadie puede jugar el juego de tenis en Rolan Garros como Rafael Nadal--punto!
Tambien creo que Rafa va a ganar en Wimbledon. Me da muchisimo orgullo que en España tenemos un campeon quien es joven a solo 22 Rafa sigue adelante! Que celebramos a nuestro campeones en cada deporte donde los hispanicos establecen orgullo y amor y apollo y honor. Viva la patria! Viva España! Viva los hispanicos! Viva Rafa!
Ahora que esperemos por Wimbledon y por un nuevo campeon? Nadal v. Federer otrav vez? Quien sabe, no.
Tambien creo que Rafa va a ganar en Wimbledon. Me da muchisimo orgullo que en España tenemos un campeon quien es joven a solo 22 Rafa sigue adelante! Que celebramos a nuestro campeones en cada deporte donde los hispanicos establecen orgullo y amor y apollo y honor. Viva la patria! Viva España! Viva los hispanicos! Viva Rafa!
Ahora que esperemos por Wimbledon y por un nuevo campeon? Nadal v. Federer otrav vez? Quien sabe, no.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Good Scholarship: Not A and B; but, A and 1
As I sit here in front of my computer enjoying my "Cheap Red Wine," and I seriously mean the label here by Vin Ordinaire Ltd., I recall my conversation with a wonderful and seasoned Renaissance scholar at Harvard U. Her name you ask? Well it is none other than Professor MG.
In our car ride from the Indianapolis airport we began to engage in a rather light discourse regarding Shakespeare and Bioethics. The conversation ended with the following maxim:
Good scholarship is not necessarily between A and B; rather, good scholarship is between A and 1.
Ah! There it was as ripe for the picking as a French mango in the backyard of my St. Croix home. The position of parallelism and analogy is okay, but what happens when you gather the pick-worthy fruit of seemingly disparate subject matters and/or equally incongruent ideologies?
In the afore stated maxim then, good scholarship, if not good research avails itself to similar systems of codification that remain different enough to necessitate, if not warrant an arrest toward similarity. How is this done? In one word: abridgment.
As a Ph.D. student I am given the task to evaluate a given literature within a specific time period and reflect my findings accordingly. It is in the flames of balanced inclusion, however, that the phoenix of relevance not only fly--but soar!
My personal research seeks this type of understanding toward relevant inclusion, and further hunts the critical animal[s] within the forest of adventure. I exist then, as that Gawain in the hunt for, not the green girdle, but the phenomenology of the black phoenix. This is the mythical figure which in turn seeks beyond the mere boundary, and locates the multiple center[s]. To bring this back into focus then, I adhere that looking into seemingly diverse ideologies, and rigorously building a lattice framework that bridges such distinctions reveals what good scholarship is meant to be.
In our car ride from the Indianapolis airport we began to engage in a rather light discourse regarding Shakespeare and Bioethics. The conversation ended with the following maxim:
Good scholarship is not necessarily between A and B; rather, good scholarship is between A and 1.
Ah! There it was as ripe for the picking as a French mango in the backyard of my St. Croix home. The position of parallelism and analogy is okay, but what happens when you gather the pick-worthy fruit of seemingly disparate subject matters and/or equally incongruent ideologies?
In the afore stated maxim then, good scholarship, if not good research avails itself to similar systems of codification that remain different enough to necessitate, if not warrant an arrest toward similarity. How is this done? In one word: abridgment.
As a Ph.D. student I am given the task to evaluate a given literature within a specific time period and reflect my findings accordingly. It is in the flames of balanced inclusion, however, that the phoenix of relevance not only fly--but soar!
My personal research seeks this type of understanding toward relevant inclusion, and further hunts the critical animal[s] within the forest of adventure. I exist then, as that Gawain in the hunt for, not the green girdle, but the phenomenology of the black phoenix. This is the mythical figure which in turn seeks beyond the mere boundary, and locates the multiple center[s]. To bring this back into focus then, I adhere that looking into seemingly diverse ideologies, and rigorously building a lattice framework that bridges such distinctions reveals what good scholarship is meant to be.
Of the Cemetary: inescapable border[s]?
Recently, I had the honor of driving past a cemetary, but this particular encasement of the dead was different. How so? This particular cemetary was surrounded by a fence, or what I will call human-wire.
The question in my mind persisted: Why would anyone "fence" in/out the dead? I thought, well, of course--it is because of grave robbers, or because it was private property--and still, this particular inquest continued to work on my mind. I immediately recalled the need for private/public space distinction in the work of Hannah Arendt as well as the cosmopolitanism of the public sphere regarding "freedom" within the work of Jürgen Habermas. Still, why all the investment toward inclusion and exclusion? Essentially, what is the position of the cemetary?
The cemetary has often reflected a given society's need toward closure with respect to the living more than the dead. After all, one could argue that the dead no longer "tell tales," but in their silence, and in their own way--they signify. Can a cemetary as a miniature of that community's geopolitical space encase more than the corpus of the dead? That is, can it offer the living present-tense cognition?
In literature we are reminded of the locus of the cemetary, or meeting place of the dead. I am here referencing the respective position[s] and space[s] of the Hebrew Sheol, the Old Norse Valhöll, the Greek Hades, the Christian's Hell and so on. These encasements of the fallen, or translations from life toward death act as a reminder; a faithful (re)telling of a life lived; an awareness toward missed opportunity to do in the now, what cannot be done in the then; and, of course--an escape from and toward a new established order of space and behavior and responsibility.
Am I saying that in Hell there exists responsibility, or in Valhalla, or in Sheol there exists a measure of social aquisition and prosperous utility? At the risk of sounding like Swedenborg--I do apologize. Still, it is worth an examination, or some level of investiture.
In short, the next time you pass a cemetary note whether an additional encasement surrounds the property, the space, the human gathering grounds of the fallen, the loved, and others within the interstitial surroundings of the living and the unborn.
The question in my mind persisted: Why would anyone "fence" in/out the dead? I thought, well, of course--it is because of grave robbers, or because it was private property--and still, this particular inquest continued to work on my mind. I immediately recalled the need for private/public space distinction in the work of Hannah Arendt as well as the cosmopolitanism of the public sphere regarding "freedom" within the work of Jürgen Habermas. Still, why all the investment toward inclusion and exclusion? Essentially, what is the position of the cemetary?
The cemetary has often reflected a given society's need toward closure with respect to the living more than the dead. After all, one could argue that the dead no longer "tell tales," but in their silence, and in their own way--they signify. Can a cemetary as a miniature of that community's geopolitical space encase more than the corpus of the dead? That is, can it offer the living present-tense cognition?
In literature we are reminded of the locus of the cemetary, or meeting place of the dead. I am here referencing the respective position[s] and space[s] of the Hebrew Sheol, the Old Norse Valhöll, the Greek Hades, the Christian's Hell and so on. These encasements of the fallen, or translations from life toward death act as a reminder; a faithful (re)telling of a life lived; an awareness toward missed opportunity to do in the now, what cannot be done in the then; and, of course--an escape from and toward a new established order of space and behavior and responsibility.
Am I saying that in Hell there exists responsibility, or in Valhalla, or in Sheol there exists a measure of social aquisition and prosperous utility? At the risk of sounding like Swedenborg--I do apologize. Still, it is worth an examination, or some level of investiture.
In short, the next time you pass a cemetary note whether an additional encasement surrounds the property, the space, the human gathering grounds of the fallen, the loved, and others within the interstitial surroundings of the living and the unborn.
A Cruzan Medievalist Signifies
In Derek Walcott's Nobel lecture entitled: The Antilles: fragments of epic memory, a fondness and a nostalgia surfaced over my mind and heart like the mist in Christian mythlore that soaked the eorðan in le Jardin d'Eden.
It is difficult to engage in the discourse of memory without acknowledging the erudition found in the ouevre of Bergson, Russell, and Yates. Still, what interests me is how the Caribbean has come to be viewed as abject other--that extension of and from the center.
As Walcott notes: "Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed," and again, "[it is] the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized." Applied to St. Croix, the largest of the known U.S. Virgin Islands and my home--this is a case in point.
St. Croix is an island located Southeast of Florida and is nestled in the Caribbean Sea south of St. Thomas and St. John, and further east of Puerto Rico (Vieques and Culebra, respectively). Growing up in Christiansted, or the mid-east end of the island as oppose to the west-end of the island offered distinction and cultural stereotyping. That is, those who were a part of the east side were a bit more civil in terms of wealth, job opportunities, education, et cetera.
On the other hand, those who were part of the west side were a bit more rural and lived in the rain forest area, went to a more public education system versus private school opportunities offered on the east end, culturally represented the "savage" side of the island in terms of rastafarian ideology, children diving off of the pier performing for white tourists, et cetera. Of course, the above statement is not only racist and prejudicial--it is ridiculously essentialized and incorrect! This view, however, predominates and its misconceptions proliferate.
In terms of language and communication St. Croix is distinct and diverse. The island has boasted seven national flags, of which Dutch, English, French and Spanish tenure have affected its present standing. Dialect formation has taken effect, wherein Cruzan (also, Crucian) is the broken English spoken. Some areas still speak the Dutch language as well as French and Spanish. We turn to Walcott, himself a native son of St. Lucia, a French colonized island, and where my father was born, as he asserts:
Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries, and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions.
Growing up on St. Croix was a treat in itself, but there always seemed to be an asterisk next to my identification regarding citizenship of these United States of America. In other words, though born on an island and educated in the private school system--I was conferred U.S. citizenship status, but readily adhered to the cultural aesthetics of an island upbringing. I still carry this stigma wherever I happen to be stationed.
Currently, I am a medievalist studying at Purdue University--main campus, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Still, I am a Cruzan medievalist who breaks into my Cruzan dialect and accent on the phone with my family, Spanish with my peers and associates at school, French and attempted patois with my father and English with my professors in the Department of English.
Yet, how did an appreciation for Medieval Studies enter my mind? And, for that matter, how does a Cruzan signify? What literature gets privileged, and moreover, in what language does one read or misread the Caribbean mind? As a critic and writer I challenge myself with these inquests, which may seem familiar to other islanders. Again, we refer back to that Caribbean genius--Derek Walcott. He posits:
and what delight and privilege there was in watching a literature--one literature in several imperial languages, French, English, Spanish--bud and open island after island in the early morning of a culture, not timid, not derivative, any more than the hard white petals of the frangipani are derivative and timid [...] this flowering had to come.
At last then, there it was--signifying signification! The Caribbean had been de-flowered within its own borders by its own people as well as by those imperial controllers of sun and water and earth. I was given a grand opportunity, which I thought to be privilege, selectivity, Morrisonian access but, in reality my people and their mental vacuum proved to be the impetus for such intellectual depravity and disparity.
I am a reader of both culture and non-culture; an examiner of books and humans as text; and moreover, I am a seed of St. Croix that has traveled up until this point, perfect in time and purpose--to signify. As I open my mouth I signify, and as I close it--I signify. I am a product of a whatever it means to have a Cruzan education. This is not a secondary attempt at a real education, or a misgiving toward a prurient and savage identity construction away from the masters of power. I read, and am read--daily. As Walcott asserts:
Yet, deprived of books, a man must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to order it, wil come the urge to record, and in extremity, if he has no means of recording, recitation, the ordering of memory which leads to metre, to commemoration.
This is the charge and the methodology assigned, which leads me to raise my left fist, to place my right hand over my heart and to pierce the world with my light, brown eyes as I echo in present tense the Nobel laureate's chanson de tristesse et espère:
Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture.
St. Croix you are my home and I your native son, and wherever my travels occur, this Cruzan medievalist, will ever--always signify.
It is difficult to engage in the discourse of memory without acknowledging the erudition found in the ouevre of Bergson, Russell, and Yates. Still, what interests me is how the Caribbean has come to be viewed as abject other--that extension of and from the center.
As Walcott notes: "Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed," and again, "[it is] the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized." Applied to St. Croix, the largest of the known U.S. Virgin Islands and my home--this is a case in point.
St. Croix is an island located Southeast of Florida and is nestled in the Caribbean Sea south of St. Thomas and St. John, and further east of Puerto Rico (Vieques and Culebra, respectively). Growing up in Christiansted, or the mid-east end of the island as oppose to the west-end of the island offered distinction and cultural stereotyping. That is, those who were a part of the east side were a bit more civil in terms of wealth, job opportunities, education, et cetera.
On the other hand, those who were part of the west side were a bit more rural and lived in the rain forest area, went to a more public education system versus private school opportunities offered on the east end, culturally represented the "savage" side of the island in terms of rastafarian ideology, children diving off of the pier performing for white tourists, et cetera. Of course, the above statement is not only racist and prejudicial--it is ridiculously essentialized and incorrect! This view, however, predominates and its misconceptions proliferate.
In terms of language and communication St. Croix is distinct and diverse. The island has boasted seven national flags, of which Dutch, English, French and Spanish tenure have affected its present standing. Dialect formation has taken effect, wherein Cruzan (also, Crucian) is the broken English spoken. Some areas still speak the Dutch language as well as French and Spanish. We turn to Walcott, himself a native son of St. Lucia, a French colonized island, and where my father was born, as he asserts:
Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries, and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions.
Growing up on St. Croix was a treat in itself, but there always seemed to be an asterisk next to my identification regarding citizenship of these United States of America. In other words, though born on an island and educated in the private school system--I was conferred U.S. citizenship status, but readily adhered to the cultural aesthetics of an island upbringing. I still carry this stigma wherever I happen to be stationed.
Currently, I am a medievalist studying at Purdue University--main campus, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Still, I am a Cruzan medievalist who breaks into my Cruzan dialect and accent on the phone with my family, Spanish with my peers and associates at school, French and attempted patois with my father and English with my professors in the Department of English.
Yet, how did an appreciation for Medieval Studies enter my mind? And, for that matter, how does a Cruzan signify? What literature gets privileged, and moreover, in what language does one read or misread the Caribbean mind? As a critic and writer I challenge myself with these inquests, which may seem familiar to other islanders. Again, we refer back to that Caribbean genius--Derek Walcott. He posits:
and what delight and privilege there was in watching a literature--one literature in several imperial languages, French, English, Spanish--bud and open island after island in the early morning of a culture, not timid, not derivative, any more than the hard white petals of the frangipani are derivative and timid [...] this flowering had to come.
At last then, there it was--signifying signification! The Caribbean had been de-flowered within its own borders by its own people as well as by those imperial controllers of sun and water and earth. I was given a grand opportunity, which I thought to be privilege, selectivity, Morrisonian access but, in reality my people and their mental vacuum proved to be the impetus for such intellectual depravity and disparity.
I am a reader of both culture and non-culture; an examiner of books and humans as text; and moreover, I am a seed of St. Croix that has traveled up until this point, perfect in time and purpose--to signify. As I open my mouth I signify, and as I close it--I signify. I am a product of a whatever it means to have a Cruzan education. This is not a secondary attempt at a real education, or a misgiving toward a prurient and savage identity construction away from the masters of power. I read, and am read--daily. As Walcott asserts:
Yet, deprived of books, a man must fall back on thought, and out of thought, if he can learn to order it, wil come the urge to record, and in extremity, if he has no means of recording, recitation, the ordering of memory which leads to metre, to commemoration.
This is the charge and the methodology assigned, which leads me to raise my left fist, to place my right hand over my heart and to pierce the world with my light, brown eyes as I echo in present tense the Nobel laureate's chanson de tristesse et espère:
Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture.
St. Croix you are my home and I your native son, and wherever my travels occur, this Cruzan medievalist, will ever--always signify.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Identité as Metonymic Significance: Piri Thomas’ Memory as Imperfect Vesselage
The present project attends to de-stabilize the text of Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (herein, Streets), and seeks to do so in a three-prong process; first, the position and subject of memory shall be analyzed and appropriated to the mémoire that is Streets; second, the metonymic significance of Piri’s travels shall be examined via the “ship” motif of Gilroyan observance and the position of “space” as bridged by the physical and mental streets embedded within the novel itself; lastly, I will privilege select passages in order to conduct a close reading analysis on Streets in hopes to support my thesis: memory as recall and recollection is at once subject to the waves of an [im]perfect mind, and just as a ship can be carried by such vehement waves, the mind too faces similar subjugation; Piri Thomas’ Streets then, is an example of this striated “fiction,” embedded within the “real-time” event phenomena of existence, as a Black Puerto-Rican attempts to make sense of his and our world.
In the May/June 2006 issue of Poets & Writers, a magazine dedicated to their subheading: “From Inspiration to Publication,” a featured article “promoted” the rather distinguished career of Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate and Nigerian Maven. The article, written by Trent Masiki, introduced yet another installment of Soyinka’s ever-expanding [re]collection of thought; the text, You Must Set Forth at Dawn marks his fourth attempt at what Masiki asserts as: “his relentless pursuit of freedom in his homeland” (38). Moreover, the article privileges Soyinka’s thought on the matter of private/public cognition in the genre-writing framing of the memoir [con]text. As Masiki states: “You Must Set Forth at Dawn is more than the story of one man’s private life; it is a political record—the story of a nation” (40). Of interest here then, is whether or not such a view is privy to the memoir style of writing? That is, can someone comment on the interior of another’s ontological supposition? Put another way—can one know the purist and purest intent alongside the prurient writer within? In this latter inquest, it is the voice of Soyinka himself who comments:
I think it is impossible to bare one’s interior completely. I think what defines us as human beings is our sense of privacy, and while we are social beings, and political beings, and therefore public beings—whether we like it or not—there is a very viable, very valid core in the human personality which keeps certain things to itself. (42-3)
Recall, that the nature of this present section singular, and the present project proper is to de-stabilize, or to deconstruct what is meant by memory and the position of mémoire, as privileged within the embedded framing of the interior psyche that is Piri Thomas’ Streets. As Soyinka dmonishingly suggests, “whether we like it or not—there is a very viable, very valid core in the human personality which keeps certain things to itself,” and it is these “certain things,” which interest us here. For the present, however—we return to Masiki’s terminal statement concerning Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn, as he posits: “It is the story of a man who has dedicated his life to the cause of social justice, and the story of a nation that has yet to make him proud” (43). Comparatively then, la langue est un écho in the voice of Piri Thomas, at once the subject and the subjugated fractal of Spanish Harlem, as Soyinka, arguably, may have been in and for and even toward a Nigerian presence singular and Africa proper. Moreover, does Piri speak toward nation, or colonial dissension? In the “Afterforward” to Streets Piri has this to say:
Writing Down These Mean Streets was a soul-searching experience for me, in which I forced myself to go back into time to see the sees, do the dos, hear the hears, and feel the feelings over and over and over again, at times feeling certain past traumatic experiences seven times stronger. (327)
Is this not wriiten in the spirit, in the tenor, and in the likened-vein of Soyinka’s admonishment toward baring the interior of one’s soul? Further, could this be what Soyinka alludes to in terms of the “human personality” as compared alongside Piri’s “forced” to feeling “certain past traumatic” events? Again, these fascinating connections help to validate my earlier claim of travel, if not of mobile travail, within the physical and mental space[s]. What follows then, are additional views on the position of memory. The purpose is to create a varied lattice-work of the subject of memory, albeit a non-exhaustive list here, and then approach Thomas’ Streets not with trepidation, but with a well-armed reading that may elucidate more of the motive for memoir [re]visitation in the first place (after 30 years). I remind the reader here of Thomas’ intent, written under the euphemism of “hope,” which was recorded on January 1997:
In writing Down These Mean Streets, it was my hope that exposure of such conditions in the ghetto would have led to their improvement. But, thirty years later, the sad truth is that people caught in the ghettoes have not made much progress, and in fact, have moved backwards in many respects—the social safety net is much weaker now. Unfortunately, it’s the same old Mean Streets, only worse […] I propose we remove the blindfold from the eyes of Lady Justice, so for the first time she can really see what’s happening and check out where the truth lies and the lies hide. That would be a start. (337)
How do we “read” Thomas’ statement then in light of Soyinka’s earlier claims of “political being[s]”? In other words, how do the private holdings of one man’s psyche produce the necessary affectation into the public cauldron of the Spanish Harlem space, and beyond? Both Soyinka and Thomas share a similar ideology toward improving their world’s view, not their world view mind you, but their world’s view—and yes, the distinction is worth exploring—but I digress, slightly. In moving forward then, I too would like to propose and echo Thomas’s claim of “Where do we start?” His answer is also my answer, because I too “am concerned with words, names” (336).
According to the late twentieth century political philosopher Hannah Arendt the subject of “memory,” as tackled in her seminal work, The Life of the Mind, suggests that “memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisible present” (“Willing” 11). This perception of the unseen to be seen then is of strong interest for this present project.
Arguably, Piri Thomas had this in “mind,” forgive the pun, when suggesting his desire as a forced position upon himself; again, wherein he states: “I forced myself to go back into time to see the sees” (327). This rape of time and violence of the mind suggest a faulty approach to recall, and one that warrants suspicion as to the “full” story of authenticity. Did Piri Thomas tell all, or did he pre-set his mind to private? As we move along in this examination I hope to unveil the potential answers to such inquests. For the present they will remain. In further solidifying her position on memory, Arendt continues to argue that “memory is our mental organ for the past,” and that moreover, when invoking that great Patristic father of the Church St. Augustine, she asserts: “In On the Trinity, the most important mental triad is Memory, Intellect and Will […] the Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget” (13, 99). Though this project does not concern the latter two members of the “mental triad,” we can still note their influence and significance on the mind proper. Still, Arendt distinguishes the Memory from the other two, the Will and the Intellect. She states: “nowhere in our philosophical tradition does Memory again attain the same rank as Intellect and Will” (117). Why? The transient nature of human recall is subjective and subject to factors beyond cognitive control. Arendt suggests the reason is the loss of the “sense of the thoroughly temporal character of human nature and human existence, manifest in Augustine’s homo temporalis” (117). Arendt up until now has given her definition of memory, and its importance, but how can such an examination by a political philosopher assist us here in this present argument toward Piri Thomas’ intent, “hope,” recollection, et cetera? Is his memoir authentic, or is it that the memoir itself is a symbolic trope, or a metonym toward identité? We close with Arendt’s greatest and most relevant quote yet: “the faculty of memory (the innate lest-we-forget, which seems to belong to a temporal culture as much as the ability to form projects for the future) had never been broken” (212). How might this align with Thomas’ use of the word “forced” then, and more importantly how do we read “the ability to form projects for the future” as Author function rather than authorial intent? Is this not what Piri Thomas attempted—a future outlook toward change, distinct improvement, social awareness, all enveloped in his [re]telling, [re]capturing, [re]framing of story within the codified and striated genre of memoir.
The body, or physical corpus as center, and its adherents, that which influences the senses, serve as both conduit and conductor in the deciphering terrain of relevant memory. Utilizing the French critical thinker and social philosopher, Henri Bergson, in his Matter and Memory, we find a rather interesting position between the body and the “mental organ,” the mind. Bergson is useful to our present project because he quantifies the position of memory in two forms; in his own words then he states:
The first records, in the form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time; it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date […] (the second), always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future […] has retained from the past only […] it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it […] Of these two memories, of which the one imagines and the other repeats, the second may supply the place of the first and even be sometimes mistaken for it. (92-3)
Bergson’s ideology of memory and the bisection it represents suggests a possible separation from a memory, which I will here label as A, that imagines the events to be, and a memory, which I will here label as B, that in turn performs it into existence, albeit repetitiously. In terms of Piri Thomas and Streets such a dual distinction may in fact serve us here in terms of what I will label the framing of narrative schizophrenia; i.e. the selectivity process of what to include, and what not to include necessitates a future examination, and as such may suggest Thomas’ work of “memoir” to be nothing more than pre-meditated annotation. At the risk of sounding essentialist and reductive here, I am only suggesting a possible “reading” of the novel in inquest; however, in the latter section we shall entertain this ideation in full. Departing from Bergson’s ideology of dual-memory (icon and mimesis, or put another way—imagio and repetition) we move into the written encoding of yet another Nobel Laureate in Literature (1950); namely, philosopher, mathematician, and social critic Bertrand Russell. For Russell then, memory went beyond the external senses, and warranted a more careful study than behaviorists employed.
In the Analysis of Mind Russell argues for a different externalist account in terms of memory as an episteme amidst other factored influences: credence, desire, convention, denotation and causal law. He states: “MEMORY, which we are to consider to-day, introduces us to knowledge in one of its forms […] memory-knowledge, both as introduction to the problem of knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is presupposed in almost all other knowledge” (93). What concerns us here in this project, is the position of imperfect recall, due to a mind that is ever-always on the sea, like a ship, or a mind on the streets of transition, wherein static memory is moot, and dynamism, albeit of cultural, social, political, economical influence, yields a knowledge that is at once tangible, but tangible as fog. It does exist, but attempt to close your hand around it, and to accept that you have “fog” in your hand, is a suspicious claim at best. The subject of memory becomes cloudier still when we attempt to recover identity within such an already frail structure. Russel states it best, as he states: “Can we constitute memory out of images together with suitable beliefs? We may take it that memory-images, when they occur in true (whatever this means) memory, are (a) known to be copies, (b) sometime known to be imperfect copies” (95). It is this latter position of imperfection which situates our present concerns. We must then suggest, or rather to soften the assertion here, offer another possible reading of Streets. By utilizing the trope of metonymic semiotics one can begin to construct the genre form of memoir as the moving vessel of Piri Thomas’ imperfect mind. Moreover still, such an imperfection of memory warrants a closer investigation via the magnification lens powered vis-à-vis metonymic significance.
In this section we attempt to look once more at Paul Gilroy’s use of the ship to de-stabilize the text that is Piri Thomas’ Streets. This section looks to de-stabilize, briefly, the title to Thomas’ memoir: Down These Mean Streets. To begin, by default the position of “streets” suggests mobility in an idealized direction respective to forward and backward progression as well as regression. However, I offer a different reading in terms of mobility, and in fact borrow from the media res motif as privileged by Dante Alighieri’s famous Comedia Divina. We are here interested in only the first part of three, or the Inferno section, wherein Dante’s movement is to proceed through concentric circles of hell, sheol, hades, et cetera. The “image” is of one slowly walking down an ever-winding staircase to some sort of end in sight. As a disclaimer, we are not to read Thomas’ Streets in terms of the eschaton, or the end of all ages and times motif, but for Piri there is a familiar terminus, which begins his travels on the streets, both of the mind and in the physical locus, or space privy to NYC geo-political locus. Taking the image of Dante’s travels then, we note the linguistic measure of both the term “Down” and “Mean” with reference to “Streets,” respectively. How are these to be read exactly? Let us return to the metonymic significance of streets in terms of Gilroy’s “ship” imagery. Gilroy offers, and I quote it here at length:
I have settled on the image (emphasis my own) of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons […] Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs. (The Black Atlantic 4)
How then might the position of the ship reflect the memory of Piri Thomas, and prove an [in]adequate vessel over the streets as space? Piri, the novel-memoir’s protagonist, begins at the “Prologue,” but does memory carry such a distinction, or rather is such a privilege fit for what Wole Soyinka has determined not as fiction, but as the embellishment of facts, or “faction”? Moreover, the “ship,” like the “streets,” appears to provide movement, and cannot exist otherwise than mere object, that is a ship and a street are still these identifiers regardless of whether they function in their intended capacity or not. But once more, we digress—slightly. Recalling specific scenes as images within the embedded mind of Piri Thomas then, we proceed, but with the awareness that such a narrative is fraught with imperfection in terms of selective memoria. Also, if “ships” for Gilroy offer metonymic significance in terms of political ideology what can the “streets” offer the reader as a rhizomorphic space, wherein the multiplicities of self as subject is at once served, examined, weighed, re-examined, re-weighed and so on? The novel that opens with a shouting and exhaling Piri, is also the novel which ends in like manner with a Piri that is a lot older stating with the same strain and tenor: “Viva the children of all the colors! Punto!” (Streets 337). Piri’s mind then, is that Gilroyan system of political ideology as fleshed out in the movement of himself throughout the streets of memory, or the identité as metonymic significance. Armed with the competing discourses and philosophies and theories concerning our subject of memory and identity we progress into textual analysis as a whole, privileging some scenes over others. The method here has been to select scenes which privilege the themes raised in this rather brief analysis regarding the Streets of Piri Thomas.
Amongst the many descriptions afforded to reflect the text of Piri Thomas’ novel, memoir, fiction, et cetera the position of testimony and recorded witness have yet to enter this discourse proper. Why? Because of the justification of the “Afterword,” thirty years after its inception. Immediately what become of interest are the text’s authenticity artifacts similar to what Gilroy mentions as: “tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). In terms of Streets then we will begin with the “Prologue.”
Piri Thomas’ coming-of-age novel is representative of the struggle of a young man’s identity as reflective of the space which is Spanish Harlem. Piri begins the book with: “YEE-AH!! Wanna know how many times I’ve stood on a rooftop and yelled out to anybody” (ix). Such an inquest appears to be seeking for an answer, but upon closer analysis one realizes this inquiry is rhetorical in nature. What is more, Piri notes, “This is a bright mundo, my streets, my barrio de noche […] Sounds of joys and sobs that make music” (ix). Under the trope of an apostrophe the reader is first introduced to such a distinct voice, only to culminate in the metaphor of sound, a cadence of image and repetition. Recall, these were the Bergsonian tools and ingredients, which question the soundness of memory to begin with. Yet, how does he, that is Piri, describe himself? He states:
I’m a skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can—Unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching […] Yet when I look down at the streets below, I can’t help thinking It’s like a great big dirty Christmas tree with lights but no fuckin presents. (x)
The prose here adheres to a cadence much like the swells of a given ocean: turbulent, uneasy and tossed. This is reflective of the mind of Piri—a system of instability attempting to make sense of the world around him. And before we enter Harlem proper, we share with Piri his point of view, like a demi-god, with a grander scope of vision, albeit a rooftop, and armed with a me-against-the-world rant that asserts his position as: “Unless you cop for yourself!” (x). As scenes in a movie, frame by given frame we navigate through the “streets” of Piri’s recall, or mind—that mental organ, which Arendt so appropriately labeled, and yet, this organ is [dis]eased. In the opening chapter, “Cutting Out” to the first section labeled Harlem we discover a Piri who is in his element and on foot traversing what else but the streets. He states: “I had been walking around since 9 p.m. My thoughts were boiling,” (3) and again:
As I came out into the street. I saw the same shining badge. I just kept walking toward him. Man, I was going home. The cop came up to me and passed me without even giving me a second look. After all, a twelve-year old kid walking the streets at 3 a.m. was a nothing sight in Harlem. (6)
This occurrence with the policeman is not an original one, and in fact, the scene occurs in Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man, wherein his nameless protagonist also encounters a policeman who passes him by; moreover still, one can trace this event of invisibility via municipal authority in the work of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (also called the Underground Man). The point here is that the subject of “invisibility,” addressed by other authors, critics, writers ad nauseum is better left out of this present project, which regards memory as unsafe knowledge. What is of serious concern, however, is the phrasing: “a nothing site” in Streets. This line can be read in two ways; first, the term nothing, nihilo is suggestive of an ante-space, wherein in terms of volume and displacement, existence is warranted in the absence of what use to be; second, ex nihilo, or out of nothing suggests that a “sight” had occurred, but it was of no relevance to the political, social, economic awareness of the authority that particular evening; i.e. the cop was in a different world, realm, eorðan, et cetera outside of the scope and space, which is and was Piri. Lastly, such an observance of a twelve-year old child in the dark streets of Harlem at an early morning hour suggests a de-sensitized policeman who apparently may have witnessed an event of a similar degree in his years on the police force. At the risk of further speculation then, we depart from this scene and shift toward the hardships that memory affords and the levels of performance within the subtext of the 1930s depression, a historical artifact within real-time struggle, as Piri’s mother [re]collects her mental organ imaging of Puerto Rico, the utopic ideal space as contextualized against the space that is New York City proper, and Spanish Harlem singular.
Piri’s mother is his only “true” attachment to a more pure state of existence, wherein the “ship” that is the street of memory is imperfect. Why? Her children cannot “imagine” nor “repeat,” what their mother, a link to the past within their present, amidst her heavy and nostalgic accent of homelessness can conjure—seemingly, at will. One might even argue that her longing is reminiscent of Ovid’s poetic cries from exile, but I digress once more. Piri’s mother recalls an earlier time as “Momma talked about Puerto Rico and how great it was, and how she’d like to go back one day, how it was warm all the time there” (9). This utopic space is privileged, but only in the mental organ of Piri’s mother, and as it continues to unfold, the children cannot do otherwise than inquire. Here the narrator speaks, like Langston Hughes, but not of rivers, but of another metonymic significance tied to the identity of the self—the streets of recall. Nostalgically, Priri’s mother cries: “Dios mio,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever see my island again” to which Miriam mispronounces Puerto Rico as “Porto Rico” (9). This disconnect is quickly rectified by her mother’s correction as she states: “It’s not Porto Rico, it’s Puerto Rico,” and continues with the mimetic refrain: “I remember,” which occurs twice within the second chapter, “Puerto Rican Paradise” (9). Shifting gears, scenes and even ports, Piri’s travels take him toward the section in the novel called, “Suburbia.” This section opens with a subheading: “This Long Island ain’t nuttin’ like Harlem, and with all your green trees it ain’t nuttin’ like your Puerto Rico” (79). Piri, unsettled, selects to “tell” of his disfavor with the move from Harlem to Long Island. He states: “My face tried hard not to show resentment at Poppa’s decision to leave my streets forever. I felt that I belonged in Harlem; it was my kind of kick. I didn’t want to move out to Long Island” (81). Again, the reader encounters a Piri who is [dis]eased with the idea that Harlem is, for him, a sense of belonging, or home, and anything else, like Long Island, is mere counterfeit. This position finds green pasture when Piri decides to leave and head back into Harlem on his own [terms]. Before he leaves the house, his mother shouts after him, “Adios. Escribe!” And yet, it ends with Piri stating: “I didn’t look back any more” (91). Of interest is the intensity of such pathos; it is simply striking, and somehow reminds me of my Puerto Rican mother—and her painful cry at seeing her son pick up trash as a construction worker—who for whatever reason could not afford to go to college until the following year. The position to recall is a painful one then, and one can only wonder if such a recollection was set up to fail in the first place. When charged to “Esribe!” by his “moms” I wonder if such a charge is without merit, and if the result of Streets is not simply the fulfillment of a son’s obedience. Such a reading, although an interesting one, shall be left for another, more gifted critic and writer—at present what concerns us here is Piri’s travel spaces amidst the “streets” of memory.
In the nineteenth chapter entitled, “Las Aguas del Sur,” Piri finds himself a seaman; specifically, a Coast Guard hand. In terms of memory and recall, the chapter opens with a flashback to the figure of one Gerald Andrew West, a rather “conscious” brother on matters of race and passing beyond the [in]famous “one-drop rule.” Piri narrates: “At breakfast our heads cleared a little bit and our memories began to focus through the haze of a thirty-six hour hangover […] it wasn’t the chicas we remembered, but Mr. Gerald Andrew West, the blended wonder” (179). Turning to a more dark and sinister shade of the lunar side of Thomas’ Streets we note that such initial cynicism has a way to convert itself within the mental organ, and give birth, or produce a genesis accounting of inevitable and self-generative vice. Here, we get to view the interior, or what Winston Churchill once called, The Inside of the Cup, with respect to the inner sanctum of the mind’s invocation toward prayer, and I quote it here at length and without shame:
I learned more and more on my trips. Wherever I went—France, Italy, South America, England—it was the same […] My hate grew within me. Dear God, dear God, I thought, I’m going to kill, I’m going to kill somebody. If I don’t kill, I’m going to hurt one of these paddies. I was scared of the whole fucking world. (191)
What more can be mentioned about Piri’s story and the times in jail, the hospital, or jail and the “smell of the streets,” as a trope for freedom. Better still, what of the trope that is linked to imperfect memory, and why after thirty years did Piri Thomas come back, back, back like Milton’s Lucifer who remains falling, falling, falling, and never felled. Is memory like a ship, or different? More importantly, who decides, which of the legs, if not toes, of memory to keep, to handle, without emendation? For a last mental image we return to the Streets as Piri himself speaks and states:
Thoughts walked into each other through my mind—Everything happened yesterday. Trina was yesterday. Brew was yesterday, Johnny Gringo was yesterday. I was a kid yesterday and my whole world was yesterday. I ain’t got nothing but today and a whole lot of tomorrows. (330)
I have attempted here to offer a more informed reading of Piri Thomas’ “memoir” as existing within the creative parameters of metonymic significance. His identity is commensurate with his movement amidst the fluidity that is the “streets.” This brief analysis then, attends to the words, the cataloging of memory, the shifting in imperfect recall, and the need to return; to reclaim; to reconstruct and to re-deconstruct that which became image and mimesis. For Piri Thomas then, the adjectival position of “mean” prior to streets pales in comparison to the direction the “streets” have taken him—a place at once familiar and, like a ship is tossed on the sea, so too the mind is a frail vessel, selective and active in its fabrication[s] and fiction[s], and faction[s]. The Streets are of this “mean” constitution.
In the May/June 2006 issue of Poets & Writers, a magazine dedicated to their subheading: “From Inspiration to Publication,” a featured article “promoted” the rather distinguished career of Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate and Nigerian Maven. The article, written by Trent Masiki, introduced yet another installment of Soyinka’s ever-expanding [re]collection of thought; the text, You Must Set Forth at Dawn marks his fourth attempt at what Masiki asserts as: “his relentless pursuit of freedom in his homeland” (38). Moreover, the article privileges Soyinka’s thought on the matter of private/public cognition in the genre-writing framing of the memoir [con]text. As Masiki states: “You Must Set Forth at Dawn is more than the story of one man’s private life; it is a political record—the story of a nation” (40). Of interest here then, is whether or not such a view is privy to the memoir style of writing? That is, can someone comment on the interior of another’s ontological supposition? Put another way—can one know the purist and purest intent alongside the prurient writer within? In this latter inquest, it is the voice of Soyinka himself who comments:
I think it is impossible to bare one’s interior completely. I think what defines us as human beings is our sense of privacy, and while we are social beings, and political beings, and therefore public beings—whether we like it or not—there is a very viable, very valid core in the human personality which keeps certain things to itself. (42-3)
Recall, that the nature of this present section singular, and the present project proper is to de-stabilize, or to deconstruct what is meant by memory and the position of mémoire, as privileged within the embedded framing of the interior psyche that is Piri Thomas’ Streets. As Soyinka dmonishingly suggests, “whether we like it or not—there is a very viable, very valid core in the human personality which keeps certain things to itself,” and it is these “certain things,” which interest us here. For the present, however—we return to Masiki’s terminal statement concerning Soyinka’s You Must Set Forth at Dawn, as he posits: “It is the story of a man who has dedicated his life to the cause of social justice, and the story of a nation that has yet to make him proud” (43). Comparatively then, la langue est un écho in the voice of Piri Thomas, at once the subject and the subjugated fractal of Spanish Harlem, as Soyinka, arguably, may have been in and for and even toward a Nigerian presence singular and Africa proper. Moreover, does Piri speak toward nation, or colonial dissension? In the “Afterforward” to Streets Piri has this to say:
Writing Down These Mean Streets was a soul-searching experience for me, in which I forced myself to go back into time to see the sees, do the dos, hear the hears, and feel the feelings over and over and over again, at times feeling certain past traumatic experiences seven times stronger. (327)
Is this not wriiten in the spirit, in the tenor, and in the likened-vein of Soyinka’s admonishment toward baring the interior of one’s soul? Further, could this be what Soyinka alludes to in terms of the “human personality” as compared alongside Piri’s “forced” to feeling “certain past traumatic” events? Again, these fascinating connections help to validate my earlier claim of travel, if not of mobile travail, within the physical and mental space[s]. What follows then, are additional views on the position of memory. The purpose is to create a varied lattice-work of the subject of memory, albeit a non-exhaustive list here, and then approach Thomas’ Streets not with trepidation, but with a well-armed reading that may elucidate more of the motive for memoir [re]visitation in the first place (after 30 years). I remind the reader here of Thomas’ intent, written under the euphemism of “hope,” which was recorded on January 1997:
In writing Down These Mean Streets, it was my hope that exposure of such conditions in the ghetto would have led to their improvement. But, thirty years later, the sad truth is that people caught in the ghettoes have not made much progress, and in fact, have moved backwards in many respects—the social safety net is much weaker now. Unfortunately, it’s the same old Mean Streets, only worse […] I propose we remove the blindfold from the eyes of Lady Justice, so for the first time she can really see what’s happening and check out where the truth lies and the lies hide. That would be a start. (337)
How do we “read” Thomas’ statement then in light of Soyinka’s earlier claims of “political being[s]”? In other words, how do the private holdings of one man’s psyche produce the necessary affectation into the public cauldron of the Spanish Harlem space, and beyond? Both Soyinka and Thomas share a similar ideology toward improving their world’s view, not their world view mind you, but their world’s view—and yes, the distinction is worth exploring—but I digress, slightly. In moving forward then, I too would like to propose and echo Thomas’s claim of “Where do we start?” His answer is also my answer, because I too “am concerned with words, names” (336).
According to the late twentieth century political philosopher Hannah Arendt the subject of “memory,” as tackled in her seminal work, The Life of the Mind, suggests that “memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisible present” (“Willing” 11). This perception of the unseen to be seen then is of strong interest for this present project.
Arguably, Piri Thomas had this in “mind,” forgive the pun, when suggesting his desire as a forced position upon himself; again, wherein he states: “I forced myself to go back into time to see the sees” (327). This rape of time and violence of the mind suggest a faulty approach to recall, and one that warrants suspicion as to the “full” story of authenticity. Did Piri Thomas tell all, or did he pre-set his mind to private? As we move along in this examination I hope to unveil the potential answers to such inquests. For the present they will remain. In further solidifying her position on memory, Arendt continues to argue that “memory is our mental organ for the past,” and that moreover, when invoking that great Patristic father of the Church St. Augustine, she asserts: “In On the Trinity, the most important mental triad is Memory, Intellect and Will […] the Will tells the memory what to retain and what to forget” (13, 99). Though this project does not concern the latter two members of the “mental triad,” we can still note their influence and significance on the mind proper. Still, Arendt distinguishes the Memory from the other two, the Will and the Intellect. She states: “nowhere in our philosophical tradition does Memory again attain the same rank as Intellect and Will” (117). Why? The transient nature of human recall is subjective and subject to factors beyond cognitive control. Arendt suggests the reason is the loss of the “sense of the thoroughly temporal character of human nature and human existence, manifest in Augustine’s homo temporalis” (117). Arendt up until now has given her definition of memory, and its importance, but how can such an examination by a political philosopher assist us here in this present argument toward Piri Thomas’ intent, “hope,” recollection, et cetera? Is his memoir authentic, or is it that the memoir itself is a symbolic trope, or a metonym toward identité? We close with Arendt’s greatest and most relevant quote yet: “the faculty of memory (the innate lest-we-forget, which seems to belong to a temporal culture as much as the ability to form projects for the future) had never been broken” (212). How might this align with Thomas’ use of the word “forced” then, and more importantly how do we read “the ability to form projects for the future” as Author function rather than authorial intent? Is this not what Piri Thomas attempted—a future outlook toward change, distinct improvement, social awareness, all enveloped in his [re]telling, [re]capturing, [re]framing of story within the codified and striated genre of memoir.
The body, or physical corpus as center, and its adherents, that which influences the senses, serve as both conduit and conductor in the deciphering terrain of relevant memory. Utilizing the French critical thinker and social philosopher, Henri Bergson, in his Matter and Memory, we find a rather interesting position between the body and the “mental organ,” the mind. Bergson is useful to our present project because he quantifies the position of memory in two forms; in his own words then he states:
The first records, in the form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time; it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date […] (the second), always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future […] has retained from the past only […] it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it […] Of these two memories, of which the one imagines and the other repeats, the second may supply the place of the first and even be sometimes mistaken for it. (92-3)
Bergson’s ideology of memory and the bisection it represents suggests a possible separation from a memory, which I will here label as A, that imagines the events to be, and a memory, which I will here label as B, that in turn performs it into existence, albeit repetitiously. In terms of Piri Thomas and Streets such a dual distinction may in fact serve us here in terms of what I will label the framing of narrative schizophrenia; i.e. the selectivity process of what to include, and what not to include necessitates a future examination, and as such may suggest Thomas’ work of “memoir” to be nothing more than pre-meditated annotation. At the risk of sounding essentialist and reductive here, I am only suggesting a possible “reading” of the novel in inquest; however, in the latter section we shall entertain this ideation in full. Departing from Bergson’s ideology of dual-memory (icon and mimesis, or put another way—imagio and repetition) we move into the written encoding of yet another Nobel Laureate in Literature (1950); namely, philosopher, mathematician, and social critic Bertrand Russell. For Russell then, memory went beyond the external senses, and warranted a more careful study than behaviorists employed.
In the Analysis of Mind Russell argues for a different externalist account in terms of memory as an episteme amidst other factored influences: credence, desire, convention, denotation and causal law. He states: “MEMORY, which we are to consider to-day, introduces us to knowledge in one of its forms […] memory-knowledge, both as introduction to the problem of knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is presupposed in almost all other knowledge” (93). What concerns us here in this project, is the position of imperfect recall, due to a mind that is ever-always on the sea, like a ship, or a mind on the streets of transition, wherein static memory is moot, and dynamism, albeit of cultural, social, political, economical influence, yields a knowledge that is at once tangible, but tangible as fog. It does exist, but attempt to close your hand around it, and to accept that you have “fog” in your hand, is a suspicious claim at best. The subject of memory becomes cloudier still when we attempt to recover identity within such an already frail structure. Russel states it best, as he states: “Can we constitute memory out of images together with suitable beliefs? We may take it that memory-images, when they occur in true (whatever this means) memory, are (a) known to be copies, (b) sometime known to be imperfect copies” (95). It is this latter position of imperfection which situates our present concerns. We must then suggest, or rather to soften the assertion here, offer another possible reading of Streets. By utilizing the trope of metonymic semiotics one can begin to construct the genre form of memoir as the moving vessel of Piri Thomas’ imperfect mind. Moreover still, such an imperfection of memory warrants a closer investigation via the magnification lens powered vis-à-vis metonymic significance.
In this section we attempt to look once more at Paul Gilroy’s use of the ship to de-stabilize the text that is Piri Thomas’ Streets. This section looks to de-stabilize, briefly, the title to Thomas’ memoir: Down These Mean Streets. To begin, by default the position of “streets” suggests mobility in an idealized direction respective to forward and backward progression as well as regression. However, I offer a different reading in terms of mobility, and in fact borrow from the media res motif as privileged by Dante Alighieri’s famous Comedia Divina. We are here interested in only the first part of three, or the Inferno section, wherein Dante’s movement is to proceed through concentric circles of hell, sheol, hades, et cetera. The “image” is of one slowly walking down an ever-winding staircase to some sort of end in sight. As a disclaimer, we are not to read Thomas’ Streets in terms of the eschaton, or the end of all ages and times motif, but for Piri there is a familiar terminus, which begins his travels on the streets, both of the mind and in the physical locus, or space privy to NYC geo-political locus. Taking the image of Dante’s travels then, we note the linguistic measure of both the term “Down” and “Mean” with reference to “Streets,” respectively. How are these to be read exactly? Let us return to the metonymic significance of streets in terms of Gilroy’s “ship” imagery. Gilroy offers, and I quote it here at length:
I have settled on the image (emphasis my own) of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons […] Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs. (The Black Atlantic 4)
How then might the position of the ship reflect the memory of Piri Thomas, and prove an [in]adequate vessel over the streets as space? Piri, the novel-memoir’s protagonist, begins at the “Prologue,” but does memory carry such a distinction, or rather is such a privilege fit for what Wole Soyinka has determined not as fiction, but as the embellishment of facts, or “faction”? Moreover, the “ship,” like the “streets,” appears to provide movement, and cannot exist otherwise than mere object, that is a ship and a street are still these identifiers regardless of whether they function in their intended capacity or not. But once more, we digress—slightly. Recalling specific scenes as images within the embedded mind of Piri Thomas then, we proceed, but with the awareness that such a narrative is fraught with imperfection in terms of selective memoria. Also, if “ships” for Gilroy offer metonymic significance in terms of political ideology what can the “streets” offer the reader as a rhizomorphic space, wherein the multiplicities of self as subject is at once served, examined, weighed, re-examined, re-weighed and so on? The novel that opens with a shouting and exhaling Piri, is also the novel which ends in like manner with a Piri that is a lot older stating with the same strain and tenor: “Viva the children of all the colors! Punto!” (Streets 337). Piri’s mind then, is that Gilroyan system of political ideology as fleshed out in the movement of himself throughout the streets of memory, or the identité as metonymic significance. Armed with the competing discourses and philosophies and theories concerning our subject of memory and identity we progress into textual analysis as a whole, privileging some scenes over others. The method here has been to select scenes which privilege the themes raised in this rather brief analysis regarding the Streets of Piri Thomas.
Amongst the many descriptions afforded to reflect the text of Piri Thomas’ novel, memoir, fiction, et cetera the position of testimony and recorded witness have yet to enter this discourse proper. Why? Because of the justification of the “Afterword,” thirty years after its inception. Immediately what become of interest are the text’s authenticity artifacts similar to what Gilroy mentions as: “tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). In terms of Streets then we will begin with the “Prologue.”
Piri Thomas’ coming-of-age novel is representative of the struggle of a young man’s identity as reflective of the space which is Spanish Harlem. Piri begins the book with: “YEE-AH!! Wanna know how many times I’ve stood on a rooftop and yelled out to anybody” (ix). Such an inquest appears to be seeking for an answer, but upon closer analysis one realizes this inquiry is rhetorical in nature. What is more, Piri notes, “This is a bright mundo, my streets, my barrio de noche […] Sounds of joys and sobs that make music” (ix). Under the trope of an apostrophe the reader is first introduced to such a distinct voice, only to culminate in the metaphor of sound, a cadence of image and repetition. Recall, these were the Bergsonian tools and ingredients, which question the soundness of memory to begin with. Yet, how does he, that is Piri, describe himself? He states:
I’m a skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can—Unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching […] Yet when I look down at the streets below, I can’t help thinking It’s like a great big dirty Christmas tree with lights but no fuckin presents. (x)
The prose here adheres to a cadence much like the swells of a given ocean: turbulent, uneasy and tossed. This is reflective of the mind of Piri—a system of instability attempting to make sense of the world around him. And before we enter Harlem proper, we share with Piri his point of view, like a demi-god, with a grander scope of vision, albeit a rooftop, and armed with a me-against-the-world rant that asserts his position as: “Unless you cop for yourself!” (x). As scenes in a movie, frame by given frame we navigate through the “streets” of Piri’s recall, or mind—that mental organ, which Arendt so appropriately labeled, and yet, this organ is [dis]eased. In the opening chapter, “Cutting Out” to the first section labeled Harlem we discover a Piri who is in his element and on foot traversing what else but the streets. He states: “I had been walking around since 9 p.m. My thoughts were boiling,” (3) and again:
As I came out into the street. I saw the same shining badge. I just kept walking toward him. Man, I was going home. The cop came up to me and passed me without even giving me a second look. After all, a twelve-year old kid walking the streets at 3 a.m. was a nothing sight in Harlem. (6)
This occurrence with the policeman is not an original one, and in fact, the scene occurs in Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man, wherein his nameless protagonist also encounters a policeman who passes him by; moreover still, one can trace this event of invisibility via municipal authority in the work of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (also called the Underground Man). The point here is that the subject of “invisibility,” addressed by other authors, critics, writers ad nauseum is better left out of this present project, which regards memory as unsafe knowledge. What is of serious concern, however, is the phrasing: “a nothing site” in Streets. This line can be read in two ways; first, the term nothing, nihilo is suggestive of an ante-space, wherein in terms of volume and displacement, existence is warranted in the absence of what use to be; second, ex nihilo, or out of nothing suggests that a “sight” had occurred, but it was of no relevance to the political, social, economic awareness of the authority that particular evening; i.e. the cop was in a different world, realm, eorðan, et cetera outside of the scope and space, which is and was Piri. Lastly, such an observance of a twelve-year old child in the dark streets of Harlem at an early morning hour suggests a de-sensitized policeman who apparently may have witnessed an event of a similar degree in his years on the police force. At the risk of further speculation then, we depart from this scene and shift toward the hardships that memory affords and the levels of performance within the subtext of the 1930s depression, a historical artifact within real-time struggle, as Piri’s mother [re]collects her mental organ imaging of Puerto Rico, the utopic ideal space as contextualized against the space that is New York City proper, and Spanish Harlem singular.
Piri’s mother is his only “true” attachment to a more pure state of existence, wherein the “ship” that is the street of memory is imperfect. Why? Her children cannot “imagine” nor “repeat,” what their mother, a link to the past within their present, amidst her heavy and nostalgic accent of homelessness can conjure—seemingly, at will. One might even argue that her longing is reminiscent of Ovid’s poetic cries from exile, but I digress once more. Piri’s mother recalls an earlier time as “Momma talked about Puerto Rico and how great it was, and how she’d like to go back one day, how it was warm all the time there” (9). This utopic space is privileged, but only in the mental organ of Piri’s mother, and as it continues to unfold, the children cannot do otherwise than inquire. Here the narrator speaks, like Langston Hughes, but not of rivers, but of another metonymic significance tied to the identity of the self—the streets of recall. Nostalgically, Priri’s mother cries: “Dios mio,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever see my island again” to which Miriam mispronounces Puerto Rico as “Porto Rico” (9). This disconnect is quickly rectified by her mother’s correction as she states: “It’s not Porto Rico, it’s Puerto Rico,” and continues with the mimetic refrain: “I remember,” which occurs twice within the second chapter, “Puerto Rican Paradise” (9). Shifting gears, scenes and even ports, Piri’s travels take him toward the section in the novel called, “Suburbia.” This section opens with a subheading: “This Long Island ain’t nuttin’ like Harlem, and with all your green trees it ain’t nuttin’ like your Puerto Rico” (79). Piri, unsettled, selects to “tell” of his disfavor with the move from Harlem to Long Island. He states: “My face tried hard not to show resentment at Poppa’s decision to leave my streets forever. I felt that I belonged in Harlem; it was my kind of kick. I didn’t want to move out to Long Island” (81). Again, the reader encounters a Piri who is [dis]eased with the idea that Harlem is, for him, a sense of belonging, or home, and anything else, like Long Island, is mere counterfeit. This position finds green pasture when Piri decides to leave and head back into Harlem on his own [terms]. Before he leaves the house, his mother shouts after him, “Adios. Escribe!” And yet, it ends with Piri stating: “I didn’t look back any more” (91). Of interest is the intensity of such pathos; it is simply striking, and somehow reminds me of my Puerto Rican mother—and her painful cry at seeing her son pick up trash as a construction worker—who for whatever reason could not afford to go to college until the following year. The position to recall is a painful one then, and one can only wonder if such a recollection was set up to fail in the first place. When charged to “Esribe!” by his “moms” I wonder if such a charge is without merit, and if the result of Streets is not simply the fulfillment of a son’s obedience. Such a reading, although an interesting one, shall be left for another, more gifted critic and writer—at present what concerns us here is Piri’s travel spaces amidst the “streets” of memory.
In the nineteenth chapter entitled, “Las Aguas del Sur,” Piri finds himself a seaman; specifically, a Coast Guard hand. In terms of memory and recall, the chapter opens with a flashback to the figure of one Gerald Andrew West, a rather “conscious” brother on matters of race and passing beyond the [in]famous “one-drop rule.” Piri narrates: “At breakfast our heads cleared a little bit and our memories began to focus through the haze of a thirty-six hour hangover […] it wasn’t the chicas we remembered, but Mr. Gerald Andrew West, the blended wonder” (179). Turning to a more dark and sinister shade of the lunar side of Thomas’ Streets we note that such initial cynicism has a way to convert itself within the mental organ, and give birth, or produce a genesis accounting of inevitable and self-generative vice. Here, we get to view the interior, or what Winston Churchill once called, The Inside of the Cup, with respect to the inner sanctum of the mind’s invocation toward prayer, and I quote it here at length and without shame:
I learned more and more on my trips. Wherever I went—France, Italy, South America, England—it was the same […] My hate grew within me. Dear God, dear God, I thought, I’m going to kill, I’m going to kill somebody. If I don’t kill, I’m going to hurt one of these paddies. I was scared of the whole fucking world. (191)
What more can be mentioned about Piri’s story and the times in jail, the hospital, or jail and the “smell of the streets,” as a trope for freedom. Better still, what of the trope that is linked to imperfect memory, and why after thirty years did Piri Thomas come back, back, back like Milton’s Lucifer who remains falling, falling, falling, and never felled. Is memory like a ship, or different? More importantly, who decides, which of the legs, if not toes, of memory to keep, to handle, without emendation? For a last mental image we return to the Streets as Piri himself speaks and states:
Thoughts walked into each other through my mind—Everything happened yesterday. Trina was yesterday. Brew was yesterday, Johnny Gringo was yesterday. I was a kid yesterday and my whole world was yesterday. I ain’t got nothing but today and a whole lot of tomorrows. (330)
I have attempted here to offer a more informed reading of Piri Thomas’ “memoir” as existing within the creative parameters of metonymic significance. His identity is commensurate with his movement amidst the fluidity that is the “streets.” This brief analysis then, attends to the words, the cataloging of memory, the shifting in imperfect recall, and the need to return; to reclaim; to reconstruct and to re-deconstruct that which became image and mimesis. For Piri Thomas then, the adjectival position of “mean” prior to streets pales in comparison to the direction the “streets” have taken him—a place at once familiar and, like a ship is tossed on the sea, so too the mind is a frail vessel, selective and active in its fabrication[s] and fiction[s], and faction[s]. The Streets are of this “mean” constitution.
Can a Man Live--two lives?
Human: The Intent Thereof
Can a man live?
Two
Lives
For a period of time without
One
Life attacking
And consuming the other?
Part the First
I have begun a life in the Spirit and am
Finishing in the flesh; my end is destruction,
And death awaits me-for after this…
Judgment!
I am such a man in pursuit of the
Winds of ambition;
They are indeed fleeting and after all
Is said and done-
All?
Is vain!
Is there an example I should follow;
A High Priest and Bishopric to my soul;
A man who knows my pain, suffering, and
Disappointment?
My creed is Catholic,
Universal suffering in need of complete
Salvation!
He is, that High Priest
In the line of Melchizedek;
He is the one to whom
God, that Prime Mover
And Play-Do Maker, said,
‘You are My Clay.
Today
I have become your Hasbro’.
And again, ‘You are
A Priest forever
In the line of
Melchizedek’.
Then Justus, this Clay-Maker, is both Divine
And made in His own
Image.
He who offered prayers, delivered:
Pleadings, with love, cries and tears;
Is the
vessel
Chosen?
By You it is!
To re-present, in wrapping,
Humans?
Being in their dealings
With God?
In my folly, unlike Erasmus,
I had rather praise Wisdom and
Know what is
Right,
Know what is
Wrong;
Through obedience I have learned
The art of suffering;
Through suffering I have learned
The human chase for the skirts of obedience;
I have taught others
The Way,
But have lost my own;
I am-
Lost?
Like a babe who desires the milk of the
Logos,
But still content to drink milk
Beyond my well-tuned years of experience;
I can preach solid food,
But cannot partake of it;
I know about much and much is expected
From me;
Here then is the
Conclusion
Of the whole matter:
One is to follow
After God,
hard,
His Christ, true freedom,
With Salem’s Shalom-
Repeated Peace!
The Father in His Liberty,
Draws me upon the Son;
The Son, in turn, grants affinity to
The Father;
The Spirit acts between them.
Part the Second
God provides;
His literature to the masses;
His messengers, aflamèd;
His Spirit, with much grace and truth-
Prometheused!
I reject such fruit-for the hand that picks it,
Soiled,
With original dust,
Wills me to treason,
trial,
trumpet;
My flesh lusteth;
Earthly pleasure inflames my heart;
Scabbed I be, calloused from birth;
Engenderèd is the flow of youth;
Like Chaucer’s Reverdie,
In April’s showers of lost soul-gazing;
I have
More!
In common with Luciferius,
Than Satan,
Less
With Judas, than Justus;
I am a mess.
It is impossible to restore to
Repentance
Those who were once enlightened;
Impossible to bridge the chasm of the
‘What if’ soul;
Lost?
I am,
To this world or the next;
Tasted?
I have,
Of things to come:
Heaven,
Angels,
Valhalla,
Power,
Deus Pater.
Our Father?
Piacere, mio!
I am like Odysseus passing through the
Kingdom of the Dead,
Blessed!
By Circe’s wind;
Oh! How far indeed have I
Fallen!
Fallen!
Fallen!
Not unlike the Wandering Jew in
Search of Lost Tempus;
In search of the Prince of Barters crying-
‘Take, take! My life for a life!’
What then is man that thou,
Deus Pater,
Art,
Mind-Full
of
Them?
I take interest in the stars,
ignoring Socrates’ diatribe,
‘a Waste of time’!
Indeed, fairest Muse, there are many wastes,
Lands untreated,
But, He who placed such twinkling sights,
is due
Our praise, with
Up! Lifted orbs and bloody hearts;
Part the Third
I long for peace and harmony;
They are for War;
I long for the rhythmic workings and underpinnings of
Logic and Faith;
Fact and Fiction;
Reformation,
Revolution,
Transformation!
These are Foxe’s Martyrs,
Recorded with shaky hands,
Of a time past,
It is finished;
If words hold Power,
Then I shall be remembered,
Please?
My diatribe and song,
From a discourse of a
Vita Nuova
But one score, nine, and counting.
Fickle then, the man,
Designed to sip from the caffeine of
Experience;
The opiate of the being;
Human?
In this way La Vita Nuova
Del Mezzo Cammin, a middling
Of hope and repeated
Esperanza!
The Blakian contraries discovered in
The Ancyent Marineare’s woes;
The yield?
This present realm, an Age, where there is nothing
New!
Under the Sun!
Part [at] the Last
Terminus?
My poetic Edda;
My heapings, congeries, like Shakespeare, Milton,
Or Aquinian Philosophia;
From my stable, very stable hand;
My wayward, very wayward heart;
My electric, saucy, pedantic mind;
And these three exist as one,
In hope,
But the greatest of these,
Is the least of these.
I shall write a fiction and
YOU
Shall read it!
Can a man live?
Two
Lives
For a period of time without
One
Life attacking
And consuming the other?
Part the First
I have begun a life in the Spirit and am
Finishing in the flesh; my end is destruction,
And death awaits me-for after this…
Judgment!
I am such a man in pursuit of the
Winds of ambition;
They are indeed fleeting and after all
Is said and done-
All?
Is vain!
Is there an example I should follow;
A High Priest and Bishopric to my soul;
A man who knows my pain, suffering, and
Disappointment?
My creed is Catholic,
Universal suffering in need of complete
Salvation!
He is, that High Priest
In the line of Melchizedek;
He is the one to whom
God, that Prime Mover
And Play-Do Maker, said,
‘You are My Clay.
Today
I have become your Hasbro’.
And again, ‘You are
A Priest forever
In the line of
Melchizedek’.
Then Justus, this Clay-Maker, is both Divine
And made in His own
Image.
He who offered prayers, delivered:
Pleadings, with love, cries and tears;
Is the
vessel
Chosen?
By You it is!
To re-present, in wrapping,
Humans?
Being in their dealings
With God?
In my folly, unlike Erasmus,
I had rather praise Wisdom and
Know what is
Right,
Know what is
Wrong;
Through obedience I have learned
The art of suffering;
Through suffering I have learned
The human chase for the skirts of obedience;
I have taught others
The Way,
But have lost my own;
I am-
Lost?
Like a babe who desires the milk of the
Logos,
But still content to drink milk
Beyond my well-tuned years of experience;
I can preach solid food,
But cannot partake of it;
I know about much and much is expected
From me;
Here then is the
Conclusion
Of the whole matter:
One is to follow
After God,
hard,
His Christ, true freedom,
With Salem’s Shalom-
Repeated Peace!
The Father in His Liberty,
Draws me upon the Son;
The Son, in turn, grants affinity to
The Father;
The Spirit acts between them.
Part the Second
God provides;
His literature to the masses;
His messengers, aflamèd;
His Spirit, with much grace and truth-
Prometheused!
I reject such fruit-for the hand that picks it,
Soiled,
With original dust,
Wills me to treason,
trial,
trumpet;
My flesh lusteth;
Earthly pleasure inflames my heart;
Scabbed I be, calloused from birth;
Engenderèd is the flow of youth;
Like Chaucer’s Reverdie,
In April’s showers of lost soul-gazing;
I have
More!
In common with Luciferius,
Than Satan,
Less
With Judas, than Justus;
I am a mess.
It is impossible to restore to
Repentance
Those who were once enlightened;
Impossible to bridge the chasm of the
‘What if’ soul;
Lost?
I am,
To this world or the next;
Tasted?
I have,
Of things to come:
Heaven,
Angels,
Valhalla,
Power,
Deus Pater.
Our Father?
Piacere, mio!
I am like Odysseus passing through the
Kingdom of the Dead,
Blessed!
By Circe’s wind;
Oh! How far indeed have I
Fallen!
Fallen!
Fallen!
Not unlike the Wandering Jew in
Search of Lost Tempus;
In search of the Prince of Barters crying-
‘Take, take! My life for a life!’
What then is man that thou,
Deus Pater,
Art,
Mind-Full
of
Them?
I take interest in the stars,
ignoring Socrates’ diatribe,
‘a Waste of time’!
Indeed, fairest Muse, there are many wastes,
Lands untreated,
But, He who placed such twinkling sights,
is due
Our praise, with
Up! Lifted orbs and bloody hearts;
Part the Third
I long for peace and harmony;
They are for War;
I long for the rhythmic workings and underpinnings of
Logic and Faith;
Fact and Fiction;
Reformation,
Revolution,
Transformation!
These are Foxe’s Martyrs,
Recorded with shaky hands,
Of a time past,
It is finished;
If words hold Power,
Then I shall be remembered,
Please?
My diatribe and song,
From a discourse of a
Vita Nuova
But one score, nine, and counting.
Fickle then, the man,
Designed to sip from the caffeine of
Experience;
The opiate of the being;
Human?
In this way La Vita Nuova
Del Mezzo Cammin, a middling
Of hope and repeated
Esperanza!
The Blakian contraries discovered in
The Ancyent Marineare’s woes;
The yield?
This present realm, an Age, where there is nothing
New!
Under the Sun!
Part [at] the Last
Terminus?
My poetic Edda;
My heapings, congeries, like Shakespeare, Milton,
Or Aquinian Philosophia;
From my stable, very stable hand;
My wayward, very wayward heart;
My electric, saucy, pedantic mind;
And these three exist as one,
In hope,
But the greatest of these,
Is the least of these.
I shall write a fiction and
YOU
Shall read it!
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