Dr. Nathan Hare on Marvin X's autobiography Somethin' Proper
In Somethin' Proper, we quickly see that we are inside the pages not only of Marvin's private political papers, comprising a lyrical diary shaped to be read and enjoyed like a novel by the masterful hands of an internationally noted black poet, but we are being escorted to the cutting edge of a fascinating postmodern black literary genre in the making, the notes of an undying modern black warrior who refuses to give up, give out or give in!....
...If we honor the likes of Patrick Henry for saying "give me liberty or give me death," it is no matter that when the Negro says give him liberty or death the white man tries to give him death!....
...In his powerlessness and victimization, with nothing left to lean on, the black man is likely to mount the seesaw, if not the roller coaster of racial psycho-social dependency and messianic religiosity (becoming the mad-dog religious fanatic, believing in a savior other than himself) on the one hand, and the individual chemical dependent on the other.... Marvin deconstructs both. In the bottomless caverns of addiction in any form, there seems no amount of religiosity, coke, crack, alcohol or sex sufficient to sedate the social angst and shattered cultural strivings.
The more the black man attempts to medicate his anxiety and to mask his depression and self doubts with pretense and hostility, the more fhe finds himself in trouble with the persons he must love and be loved by than with the alien representatives of the society that would control and castrate his manhood....
--Dr. Nathan Hare, from the introduction to Somethin' Proper, autobiography of a North American African Poet, Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 1998.
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