Wednesday 19 August 2009

slurping in the slime-trail of trevor phillips: kwame kwei-armah gets lost up love's blind alley


kwame kwei-armah looks up to barack obama as the father-figure of 21st century civil-rights' activism and seems to have stereotyped barack obama as a modern-day william tell. well mr kwei-armah, i hope you trust your saviour's aim, son, because playwrights who go round with their eyes screwed tight shut are fuck all use to anyone.

our obama moment on comment is free, guardian.co.uk, 6th november 2008:

"Kwame Kwei-Armah
I make my living with words, which as you might expect gives me the greatest respect for their power, resilience, sheer and almost exclusive contribution and exploration to that which I believe most worthy – but it also allows me to understand and respect their limitations. And this, the election of Barack Obama to the office of the most powerful person in the world, is one such moment where my facility for words can never, should probably never, capture what it is that is going on in my heart.

I don't think I even know what is going on in my heart. But as I left the shores of the United States on Monday night – where everyone's nerves were on show – and although I have always maintained cautious optimism when it came to believing in Barack's success, I found myself having to rebuke those nerves and hold onto the mantra, the now iconic mantra, "Yes we can". And yes we did.

I ran about my house at 4am, as I screamed and woke my children to the chant, "We have a black president". We? Who is we? I honestly thought that I may have been going mad – for the tears and the screaming just would not stop. No matter how much I tried to calm myself it just would not stop and I thought I was going to go insane with joy and pride as I hugged my 12-year-old son and he said, "Dad, we have a black president"; and as my 16-year-old son asked if I believed that would happen in my lifetime and I replied, "Yes, the moment I heard Obama's 2004 speech in Boston"; and as I listened to my daughter, full of sleep, say "I need to go to an Obama party".

I knew that deep in my heart, despite all my words, that maybe I didn't quite ever believe that I would see this day. But now I have – my only sadness is that his mother and father, and my mother, were not here to see this. What a day, what a sleepless day, but a magnificent day."

and so now the first black president has proved himself to be a dirty double-talking war-criminal, where's the criticism wanker?

4 comments:

on-road rastaman said...

what gets me is how the success-smashed celebs and middle-class-clingons like kwame kwei-armah and jocelyn jee esien are (in the greedy hope of social advancement, professional publicity, power, influence and hollow status) continuing to 'praise o-ba-ma' whilst word-on-the-street has, for months, been that obama is an establishment stooge. seems to me that these guys need to get back to their roots man. and check the rancid vanity with which the kwei-armahs and david lammys of this world brag about how far back they go with bosom-buddy obama and how these dirty-dancers get a fancy frisson from the volksmusik then grin in tantalizing sin as they begin winding up against the wanderlusting souls of those high-ranking hitler-henchmen who in their hey-day sported nazi-membership-cards with the lowest-born serial-numbers - obtained by virtue of joining the slag-party back in the day of its ill-omened conception at an understate hate-orgy. cunts caught the strains of oom-pah-pah at concentration camp kandahar...

spark up said...

interesting. 24 hours after posting this piece i had had three visits to this site...and the third one was from manchester at 7:22:19 am, 20.08.09, ip address:

217.33.69.# (FTIP003050101 Commission for Equality & Human Righ)

since i barely get any traffic on this blog, and this blog does not appear in the first 30 pages or so of a google search for 'trevor phillips', i can only surmise that trevor phillips is keeping a very very close eye on me...is it racist to criticize the president and his men thesedays? how the hell did the commission for equality & human rights hear about this post so quickly - this blog has no traffic rank on alexa data, it is completely unrecognized. there was no referring url - the visit was direct to this post's individual blogpage...

dry rot said...

16:07

i guess that these obama supporters will claim that they are trying to bring change from the inside - unfortunately, in order to enter the establishment one has to be white, turn white, or act white, and acting white precludes doing anything to deliberately undermine the hegemonious white power structure - such as leaving to live independently from it, or criticizing it, for example.

missell obama said...

oh the queen's a real lovely lady, i must take kwame along next time we take tea at buckinghampton palace.