The Consequence of Predication

W. E. B. Du Bois had a lot to say about other people’s fiction, in this Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader.  Reviewing Claude McKay’s “Home to Harlem” he said, made him want to take a bath.  Concerning Carl Van Vetchen’s “Nigger Heaven” he counsels the reader to put the book down and simply read the “Police Gazette” instead.  In 1928 the grand man of African American letter penned one of his five historical novels: “The Dark Princess” which I read a section of today.  Critics suggested and I guess I too felt like the setting was “melodramatic” and “bewildering.” 

The only other thing I’d read from the tradition during this particular gorging that was similarly “Afro-futuristic” was “Of One Blood” by Pauline Hopkins which was written a life time earlier in 1902.  Indeed, even then, W. E. B. Du Bois was Ms. Hopkins' mentor in that project.  Reading DuBois about the intrepid Mathew Towns’ improbable romance with the Indian princess Kautilya and their son who will one day lead the Great Council of Darker People, the core of a future world government, I was intrigued by the possible, and wondered if I couldn’t hear Claude McKay snickering as Dubois labors to keep things exciting and romantic without stooping to anything carnal or untoward. 

I’ve never read the eight volume futuristic series by David Wingrove “Chung Kuo” about a world two hundred years in the future where China dominates the earth, though I’ve heard good things about the series from people whose China perspective I appreciate.  Kang Youwei who shared time on earth with Dubois, dying in 1928, also tried to reimagine the world to respectfully accommodate imperiled ethnicity.  I’m not sure if Kang Youwei’s “Da Tong Shu” has ever been translated into English (it has, Laurence G. Tohmpson had translated “The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-Wei” in 1958)  but that is perhaps the better comparison of a contemporary trying to imagine glory and dignity for one’s people in the future, beyond a world, which then seemed dominated by western European science and prejudice.   Perhaps the only safe way to sketch out a future that isn’t quickly rendered irrelevant is to be like H. G. Wells and cast the future out so far, that devolution has begun, and you are unbound from the consequence of prediction.

Down and back today.  And then down and back to Westchester once again in the afternoon.   Each trip is a little over and hour.  They say my stepdad will be discharged tomorrow so the end of this is near.  But by the time I drop my mom off in the afternoon, I’m exhausted.  People will be expecting me on a call soon and my older daughter has a shopping list for me.  I call her and tell her it will have to wait till tomorrow.  I’m not shopping this evening.  I’m going home. 

Tuesday 6/30/20