A.C.: By my beard! At’all. No! I am not a black hat. I can’t be enjoying while others suffer. This was why I was an activist.
A.E.: Beard? But you are bodiless!
A.C.: I mean by the grey heavy beard and lion mane I used to wear on earth.
A.E.: Yes, your activism in the 60s. Interviewing Malcom X for CBC and all that. Civil rights marches. That was something… Did you meet the soul of Malcom X since you arrived here?
A.C.: Blasted! Those were the days of struggle. I have not felt that soul around my soul. That jolly trouble maker on earth must be in Vaikunta already.
A.E.: What is the context when you say above that you are “darkness visible.” Although, I think I get it, but for our readers, you know….?
A.C: I use it in a literal and symbolic sense. I am ‘physically visible’ because I am black and invisible within Canadian society. Ironic da! I mean my visibility made me a known corporeal category that the system makes sure to avoid, impede, hold back, keep in the ghetto, deny rights, deny opportunities, mis-educate, manipulate with ‘Canadianspeak’ (that polluted ‘political correctness’ and ‘polite’ conversation that mocks me, derides me, looks down upon me, and puts me in ‘my place’)! I am over-controlled and checked and checked again and again. The system disappears my kind. Darkness visible. I am Ralph Ellison’s invisible man precisely because they look at me but do not see me. They only see darkness (i.e. nothing). They do not see me when it comes to housing opportunities, job opportunities, they impeded my kind by asking me for Canadian experience when I am just coming in from another world into theirs. And you know the greater irony? It is no one’s fault. Fuh-true? Kwablema! We are multi-cultural and one great family of Canadians! All equal. But as George Orwell is my witness, all Canadian are equal but some Canadians are more equal than others. I also use “darkness visible” to capture the hellish conditions which Mr. John Milton use it to describe for souls suffering in hades. It is the black or brown man or woman catching hell on earth. Please bear with me and let me quote:
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace [ 65 ]
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar’d [70]
Amatoritsero, in the above quote Milton is talking about the rebellious angel Lucifer (‘angel of light’) who was called ‘Satan’ after the rebellion and was cast down from heaven into the hell that the poet, Milton, so vividly paints above. When man falls he joins Satan in that hell too. Replace satan with the black man… from slavery to colonialism and the current imperial moment in humanity, the black man or woman has been demonized be-devil-ed, and satanized the better for him or her to be cast into a fire of suffering and servitude on earth. The last line above says: “Such place Eternal Justice had prepared”. Replace “Eternal Justice” with ‘Eternal injustice’ against blackness and you get my drift.
A.E.: Blasted! This is all heavy! Thank you. for the elaborate explanation; I am sure our readers appreciate it.
A.C.: Blasted indeed! Colour is heavy. Sorry I had to heap it all on you like that.
A.E.: What a life of it you must have had. Must have been irritating and annoying!
A.C.: They make an awful ruka-tuk about me being black panther and all that. I was simply a freedom fighter! The 60s especially was either fight or die! If you complain you are an “angry black man.”
A.E.: You wrote this in your memoir, Membering (2015): “I am living … in the sixties, in the atmosphere of great physical fear, of the expectation that a policeman might shoot me – bang, bang, you’re dead, dead – of being refused the renting of a basement room, or an apartment in a public building, that I would find myself standing noticeably longer than other customers at a counter in Eaton’s store, at the corner of Yonge and College Streets, that I might be thrown out, sometimes physically, from a restaurant, or a nightclub, as Oscar Peterson was, and face the embarrassment of being told by a barber that he does not cut niggers’ hair. This is my Toronto.” Has anything changed over the years?
A.C.: The only thing that changed is that the system has developed better ways to hide racial prejudice and injustices.