In the footsteps of … Placing Remi D as an author

For glorification of establishment figures, please visit a different blog. No mediocrities here. This is Abracadia’s blog, where the noble lion tells the story and the cowardly hunter is not the hero!

Who are the main literary influences behind my writing? A simple question to answer; we’re all influenced by those we enjoy most:

Going up through the ages, we start with the African Homer (Omar), a griot taken as a prisoner of war by Greeks in their colonial wars around 1100 BC, and blinded to prevent escape. Remember, no establishment figures will admit the African origin of Homer because only toadying mediocrities can be embraced by the mentally ill established elites who fear exposure of their inherent unsoundness.

Homer never wrote a thing. Composed it all in his head and delivered it orally. The two great works attributed to him are The Illiad and the Odyssey. Both sing the praises of the European colonists. I won’t say too much about the Homer’s work as it will soon be featured as one of our Books of The Week and we can save the details till then. But I can say here that as a kidnapped enslaved African griot, blinded and in chains, Homer’s story-songs were seen as touched by divinity in Ancient Greece. Touched like a Donny Hathaway, a Bob Marley, perhaps. Some things do not change.

I like Homer for the action, the ideas and the window onto every-day ancient life and values. The imagery is so strong, but it’s all in translation so I can’t say much on the language itself; I’m sure it must have been a foot tapping rockin rollercoaster of an experience in the original spoken word though, especially with the kora or bouzouki he probably played too.

Skip to the 1500s for my next big influence: The African Jewess Amelia Bassano, the actual pen behind the works of ‘Willy Shakespeare’. (Don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself, read Hudson online at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship dot org or see him on Youtube for the details.)

Ever since I was a teenager I said Shakespeare must have been ‘Black’ or a woman to be so sensitive to wordsound and so natural with it. Anyone else would just sound ugly, affected and posturing, but Willy the shake was obviously real as can be, and way too soulful, too deeply human, to be an elite White male of the time: Hers was the age that conceived the mass genocide, kidnapping, human trafficking and enslavement project called ‘the new world’.

Hearing Hamlet’s speech on the record of the 70s rock-musical ‘Hair’ taught me how to read ‘Shakespeare’. I always loved her rhythmic songification of ultimate questions. She’s definitely one of my favourite authors of all time and one of the closest to my own style. As a child of 6, I was called ‘Little Shakespeare’ myself because I was so well spoken while those around me were most definitely not, ha. I discovered the plays at school: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet. Everyone else said it was too old-fashioned to relate to, I loved it though. Bought my own copy of her sonnets just to read at home, really got into the rhythms, very musical, kinda reminded me of Charlie Parker’s bebop, or maybe King Pleasure, with all the iambic pentameter and contrapuntal syncopation. Ain’t those some sweet thundering words.

When I look back on it I can see Amelia’s similarity to Omar too: both outshone their colonialist oppressors and gained immortal liberation through storytelling. Not bad.

Skipping ahead to the 1700s, I liked some of The Metaphysical poets. I remember thinking that all poems must be metaphysical because they touch the heart and mind together and they put us in a kind of space that’s different from the real world, not less real but more.

Bill Blake spotted the satanic writ large in the early dawn of capitalism and exposed it for all to see. More than any other English writer of the time, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience always reminded me of the blues, covering a similar range of emotions, minus the extreme trauma and sassy jass of slavery’s legacy, of course. Everything he wrote felt like he was on the right side of human history, using artworks to fight for Ubuntu as hard as he could.

‘One of the waitresses here is from out of town, so innocent. I asked her if she liked Dickens and she said she’d never been to one.’ That’s a genuine Ronnie Scott joke circa 1970. It was the age of love-ins and be-ins, so why not Dickens too, I suppose?

Dickens was the only Victorian I could ever stand. The ‘great’ women authors of the time, Austin, the Brontes, Eliot etc. just perpetuated the British imperial propaganda image of delicate White women in white lace, starched pinafores and straw hats wafting around country meadows and cottages. They invented the Laura Ashley theme park way before Stepford did.

Dickens told the Viccy age like it was: vicious, grimy and corrupt to the core. I always connected with the critique of capitalism in his work, and with Oliver Twist in particular. My adopted dad was a Jewish hustler nicknamed Fagin, my ganger was a villain nicknamed Dodger, but I was no ‘Oliver’.

Dostoyevsky. ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Crime And Punishment’. Glad I read them in my 20s. Too dense and heavy for me now. But his work gave me a feeling I rarely get: the sense that he is expressing my soul. In that sense, I believe his work touches greatness in places and expresses exactly what it means to be a human with a soul. No mean feat.

20th century-wise: as a young teen it was poet Wilfred Owen who stood out to me as capturing and conveying what is best and noblest in the human heart. No wonder he wrote it in the face of the screaming bloody mire of WW1 trench warfare: Seeing rats eat a teenage boy’s spilled entrails while he sobs like a child for his mum gives a poet depth, especially when the poet realises, as Wilf did, that instigating and perpetuating such horror is the express wish and purpose of the elites.

I enjoyed Damon Runyan from pre-teens. Lots of his contexts, characters and sentiments were within my frame of reference and I really enjoyed his uncynical and quite profound humour, his ridicules, his sympathies and his use of vernacular.

At 14, I stayed in a house with a big library, 20,000 books. I had my pick. James Baldwin caught my interest. I read ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’ in two or three days, quick for me. The effect? I had to read ‘The Fire Next Time’ right away afterwards. I read it fast again, not skimming, just not stopping. This man was essential! He had an important piece of the puzzle and his writing was so clear and bright, so sharp and focused, he knew exactly what he meant to say and found just the words to say it. If there’s been more of his works on the shelves I’d have read them too, and I never had time to revisit Mr Baldwin since, but I remember thinking at the time that one day I would have to reply to this most insightful and provocative of writers, not by way of riposte, but of amplification!

‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ came when I got back to my dad’s world. It was what lying around. I asked. He said it was good. I read it. On some pages half the words were swearing. Not very creative or artistic or deep or beautiful. Just a load of effing and jeffing. What stood out most for me was the contrast between the cultural perspectives reflected in this work and in Jame’s Baldwin’s. One so negative, one so positive. One so lost they’ve given up; the other still with a trace of dignity and wanting to claim back more. ‘Last Exit’ taught me that ‘White’ folks, the working class peasants of old, are even more debased than the survivors of slavery. What’s been done to ‘Black’ people for 400 years has been done to the English for 1,000 years, since the first king of all England: William The Conqueror.

‘Last Exit… ’ showed what’s become of the wretched of New York: Torn and discarded sweet-wrapper scraps of life left to the winds in the wake of colonial capitalism’s ‘progress’: tragic nihilist zombies surrendered to abandon, waiting to die. They’re on fentanyl now.

That kind of made me reflect on the situation in England, what was the average temperature here, what were most mid-status people saying, how did they identify? Hedonistic, nihilist, surrealist, like America? No. The English have given up too, beaten into submission, but in a different way. The structure of average middle-class English society (middle England) seems tighter due to its longer traditions being deeper embedded. It seems to hold together more than America, but it coheres not around reason, intellect, mission or spirit, for it has none of these in great measure, and these are what make a solid foundation for society. Instead it coheres solely around the so-called royal family (rofl) and their traditions: fake smiles, forked tongues, buttered scones and cricket on the village green, all curated by charmless establishment paedophiles at the laughing-stock Baby-Buggering-Club (aka BBC).

With no revolutionary element to their history, most of the English have forgotten their original and natural free state of Ubuntu. After 1,000 years of forced peasanthood under psychopathic elites they can imagine no other way of life, seeing any alternative to classist and racist colonial capitalism as as totally ‘unrealistic’. They will fete their foetid blow-up queen of bouncy castles for ever. Totally brainwashed surrender-monkeys. ‘Last Exit…’ got me thinking me a lot. You’ll see that in ‘The Songtree…’ for sure.

‘Ringolevio’, a book about a man who didn’t surrender, not to being shafted by the establishment and not to nihilism either. Emmet Grogan. It meant little that he was of Irish American stock and I wasn’t, I found him relatable. From a street-wilding childhood to the revolutionary underworld in young adulthood, Emmet lived it too. His book is more autobiography than novel, the flip side to mine. Particularly, one section of ‘The Songtree’ has a similar feel to parts of ‘Ringolevio’, similar action, giving a comparable vibe on one level. But as ‘The Songtree’ is a literary novel (unlike Emmet’s autobiography) it works on many levels simultaneously, some of which aren’t like anything in ‘Ringolevio’ at all. But I liked how the action in that autobiography read like a novel or movie; that whole mix of genres is present in my own work too.

Umberto Eco introduced me to novelisation of ancient conspiratorial mysteries. The genre is like the 3D chess of detective mysteries, with the extra dimension of ancient history.

Mysteries kept me gripped more than anything else most of the time. I graduated from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler, whose descriptive writing I often found more exciting than his actual stories. When I think back on it, that’s probably because he didn’t have much to say in terms of a message. He was a ‘White’ English elite uncritical of the status quo, but more observant of the environment and more articulate than most American crime writers of the time.

One crime writer who did have a message, was Chester Himes. Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed’s exploits were never to be missed, but his short stories were where a lot of his social message came out too, as well as his deep sensitivity and wisdom. I always had more respect for Chester Himes than Raymond Chandler, because I suspect Chandler was a racist and I know Himes wrote his way out of typical nazi US imprisonment for being a ‘Black man’.

Elmore Leonard can write dialogue like it’s spoken, and it’s not till you read his work that you see how rare that is. If that’s how we talk to each other, maybe it’s how our internal voice sound too. An important lesson for writing ‘naturally’. He’s way too street to be racist or capitalist at heart, like Chandler. You can tell the guy has a lot of heart.

Phil K. Dick. The only author all of whose novels I have read. 30 plus. Phil is a workmanlike writer, no painterly descriptive, no sparkling dialogue or whatever; his writing seldom made me excited. His ideas though! No wonder people call him a prophet. Phil is the most exciting transgressor out there:

Exciting because he captures the holistic multiverse of the matrix so well, bridging times, places, worlds and scenarios with spiritual realities beyond normal perception.

Transgressor because he breaks the rule of only being in a one time and place, his writing is like Bell’s theorem of super-luminal connections and quantum entanglement in literary form. That’s why he’s considered such a prophet. Phil taught me the role of the author’s personal journey in enabling past and future to coexist in the present world of a novel.

Beside that lot of novelists and poets, I read a lot of philosophy and psychology in my 20s: Plato was always an easy and enjoyable read, sometimes quite funny, great for the big picture handle on modern Western epistemology.

Neitzsche was least boring of all the philosophers, I liked him for that. They all used a pen, he used a hammer. Provocative as hell. I liked his gusto even if I didn’t agree much with his ideas. His critique of Christianity made me think long and hard. He never actually said the famous words usually attributed to him: ‘God is dead’, one his characters said it as part of a thought experiment. That’s what philosophers do, and I prefer free expression of thought experiments to bad-faith state censorship. But the one thing I didn’t like was his advocating for brute predatory ‘will to power’ as the only noble path of human development. I considered it symptom of the syphilis that eventually rotted his brain and killed him, and I still do.

Husserl lacked a funny bone. Very serious guy. 1930s. Jewish. In Germany. Serious times, serious stuff to deal with. I always thought all the professors got him wrong. No wonder. His work is hard to penetrate. He was making a last ditch attempt to save humanity from exactly what has taken over since then.

Wittgenstein was mentally ill. No wonder. He experienced the trenches of WW1 too, like Wilfred Owen. I have images of him wading in filthy trenchwater floating with rats, vomit and faeces, watching boys torn apart and dying, frozen, shaking hands putting pen to spattered paper, trying to find just the words that define exactly what we humans can positively know about life.

And then, at the end of the war, I see him taking the blood and mud spattered manuscript to an English alsoran name Bertie Russel who was top professor at Cambridge. Russel had written thousands of pages trying to get to the bottom line of what we can positively know logically speaking, and was still no closer to an answer. But when he saw Wittgenstein’s thin manuscript he bowed down and gave Wittgenstein his big chief’s chair.

Wittgenstein said we can only positively know seven things logically speaking. I like the last one best: ‘Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent’.

Wittgenstein inherited a fortune from his Jewish industrialist family, and gave every penny of it back to them ‘instead of corrupting the poor with it’, he said. He lived like a monk in one simple room like a cell, he didn’t care what he ate as long as it was the same thing every day, and he enjoyed playing planets, spinning around with people in orbits mimicking the solar system.

Jung and Joseph Campbell got me stated on archetypes in dreams and mythology.

When it came to the social cultural mission of writing, my awakening came early, from my old friend and mentor: Johan Borgen. One of Norway’s leading authors. He and his wife kind of took me under their wing for a few important years. Boomps, we called him. I loved how he broke the age gap, tore it up and stamped it into the ground right infront of me. Sixty years my senior, he was my friend. And with that friendship came exposure to his circle, people like Olof Palme and Elie Wiesel (look them up if you don’t know them), these were all big men in the struggle for Ubuntu; I watched, I listened and absorbed what I could.

Boomps taught me the social role of the artist: to nail your colours to the mast and give people something to talk about and wonder at. He and his wife, Annemarta, gave them plenty: They fought in the resistance against the occupying Nazi forces, he was imprisoned and tortured, she and four others rescued him, machine guns blazing, just like in the movies.

The next was Paulo Freire, Steve Biko’s great inspiration. I only met Paulo a couple of times, but his life and writings showed me what cultural action and social agency is all about. The Master.

Marcus Garvey opened my eyes to different possible arrangements: imagine that: kidnapped African’s descendents going back to Africa! After hundreds of years! Kind of like Israel; the Jewish people going back to Palestine. After 2,000 years! Marcus didn’t think we had to disrespect Africans or take their land, he just wanted to give people the chance to go back home. Interesting idea and one ‘The Songtree’ has something to say about.

I heard and read the words of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but it was the positive community action of Eldridge Cleaver that drew me most. A writer’s actions speak louder than her or his words. Eldridge shamed the devil by protecting the community from racist police and from the degrading drugs and vice forced on them by the deep state/mafia. He provided poor ghetto children and families with food and education denied by racist authorities, ensuring some pride and security in the ghetto despite the horrors intended for them by the criminal authorities.

But it was the prison writings of George Jackson that tuned me into the real issue: Our brightest and best, our finest and noblest and most able. George shows how they invent pretexts to criminalise and confine ‘Black’ male leaders in their prime to prevent them breeding! One way or another, this must be undone all the way to the ground. Brother George was a big motivator for me back in my teens. With slavery still legal in America’s prison system, and with 1 in 3 African Americans still confined in that slavery system …

And that’s my list of literary influences. Hope you found it interesting. Yes, there are a lot of male authors in the list, even if Amelia does stand out above all. If I needed a reason for being influenced by more male than female writers, I’d offer this one: Many great women authors tend to write more about characters, plumbing the internal depths of the human psyche in interaction with others, while more male writers tend to write about ideas externalised as action in the world. I’m just more into ideas and action than exploring the twisted convolutions of the social psyche.

Believe it or not, I’ve yet to read Ishmael Reed’s ‘Mumbo Jumbo’, mainly because early readers of my work in progress said it was the closest thing to ‘The Songtree’ and I wanted zero influence from other writers. If it helps you locate ‘The Songtree: A Windrush Tale’ on the literary map, a couple of readers have drawn comparisons with Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ too. Having never read it I cannot comment (I tried it but failed to get past page 10 when I was a kid, 15, too young.) They’re both on my list now, as soon as I get through the entire 8 volumes of the 1,001 Arabian Nights.

For more on all topics to do with Abracadia and its work, don’t forget to check Abracadia’s weekly spoken word offering at the ‘Bit Of Soul Podcast’. Come and say hi, pass by for a try. Be great to see you there. Just roll up anytime to listen, chill and reason at the lush and refreshing oasis that is Abracadia.

Until such time - In Ubuntu

Remi