Mad Babylon
STUART HOOD. 1, Post-prison Writings and Speeches Eldridge Cleaver edited by Robert Scheer (Cape 35s)
`It has been said that people get the ,rulers they deserve. I do not believe, however, that America has the rulers it deserves. The State of California, emphatically, could not deserve the rulers it has. Yet weohave them . . .' Thus Eldridge Cleaver in An Aside to Ronald Reagan, who had con- trived to boycott Cleaver's appointment to a lectureship at the University of Cali- fornia. From its opening sentence—'I never liked Ronald Reagan'—to its final, contemptuous dismissal—'Walk, chicken, with your ass picked clean'—it is five pages long. It shows Cleaver to be a master of concise invective and is easily the most brilliant of the present collection of his writings and speeches produced in the two years between his release from prison, where he had been serving a nine-year term for rape, and his disappearance in the autumn of 1968 into the underground of Black America where he is still hidden and no doubt active.
To read Eldridge Cleaver for the first time is like watching the projection of a negative film in which white is black and black is white. It is not a comfortable ex- perience; nor does he intend it to be. He is a revolutionary and polemicist whose aim is to shock and disturb his audience, to force it to consider the world as seen ,,,by a man who grew up in the black ghettoes, who first tangled with the law at the age of twelve and was jailed at eighteen for the possession of marijuana, who on his release — as he says in Soul on Ice,' the volume which made his reputation as a- writer—`became a rapist', because rape was an insurrectionary act, an attack on the white man's law and system of values.
The most startling and revealing analysis of the role of sex, sexual assault, sexual servitude, in the clash between black and white is to be found in his Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, written in prison and in- cluded in Soul on Ice. It examines what the social psychologist would call the stereo- types of the strong black woman. the beautiful dumb blonde and the black supermasculine menial to whom the white man concedes all the attributes of mascu- linity except one: sexual freedom. Rape was the reaction of the black man who found his manhood challenged; castration was the revenge of the white man whose woman was defiled. Imprisoned for .the crime of rape, Cleaver examined his con- science and was forced to admit to him- self that he had gone astray, not so much from the white man's laws as from the laws of humanity. He had lost his self- respect; his whole fragile moral structure had collapsed. Then he started to write to save himself. He came as a result to two conclusions: that it is easier to do evil than to do good; and that the price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. However important the sexual issue as an element in the race war, he felt it to be less important than the search for a politi- cal solution, a reshaping of society.
Cleaver's view of the society in which he lived could be formulated in the follow- ing terms: 'If we think of our surroundings, we must inevitably conclude that we are living in the kingdom of the mad — so terrible and unnatural are people's relations towards each other; so strange and unbe- lievable their attitude towards the mass of injustices, vileness and baseness that constitutes our social regime'. The words are not his but those of a writer whom he studied in prison and to whom he ack- nowledges an intellectual debt: Nechaev the Russian populist revolutionary, the man who—along with Bakunin—produced the Revolutionary Catechism, which expressed in absolute terms the hatred of the poor and oppressed in nineteenth century Russia. The legacy of Nechaev was the revolution of 1917. It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Cleaver's name for white American society is Mad Babylon, a society he feels to be so distorted that it is barely possible to achieve structural changes in it without resorting to civil war. That contingency he is prepared to contemplate.
It has led him to become a leading figure in the Black Panther party, which advocates black revolutionary violence if certain basic demands are not met—demands which echo the Bolshevik slogans of peace, bread and land. The Black Panthers want land, money, housing, clothing, education, justice and peace. To the accusation that the Black Panthers advocate violence, Cleaver's reply is that the violence was there already and that the coloured people of America are now beyond the point where they put any trust in passive resistance. He belongs to the generation of American negroes who, having tried to change the world by forcing America to re-examine its conscience, is angry and frustrated at its lack of success. In A Requiem for Non-Violence, an article written after the death of Martin Luther King, he poses the question whether the death of Dr King is a sad day for America? His answer is a decisive No, for it is 'a day consistent with what America demands by its actions'.
As with any collection of occasional writings, this volume is repetitive; many of the basic themes have already been deve- loped—and better formulated—in Soul on Ice. They are summarised clearly in an in- terview, printed as an appendix to the pre- sent volume, which Cleaver gave to Playboy. What the interviewer rightly seizes on is the apparent contradictions in Cleaver's thought-111e intertwining of themes of vengeance and forgiveness, of violent revolution and ndn-violent social reform'. There is indeed a curious ambiva- lence in Cleaver's attitude, for he is pre- pared to say that, if the reforms he demands are granted, the black revolutionaries `would be delighted to fold the whole thing up and call it a day'.
This is reformism—or seems such until one reflects that the reforms include such points as the exemption of all black men from military service as being colonial sub- jects within their own country; and the release of all black prisoners from jail on the ground that, having been tried by all-
white juries, they have not had fair trials. -"There he displays his true revolutionary temper is in his insistence on the fact that the moment of choice has come. This is I,&nin's Who? Whom? The white population of America, he states, must now make up its mind on which side it is ranged Whether it supports the system or is willing to cast its lot in with the black radicals. *here is, he believes, a substantial section of the young white generation that will do so,. The sins of the fathers, he comments. will be visited on the heads of the fathers--- but only if the children continue in the evil deeds of the fathers.
It may be that not only in America but elsewhere in the world the lines of a nem and terrible war are being traced—a racial war in which there will be a holocaust of innocents. At least, after reading Cleaver. we cannot say we do not know what the struggle is about.
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