Much of what I challenge in my work has to do with what I call the war attitude that comes from thought, that determines action, that employs silencing through death, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, economic oppression, discrimination of all kinds, within a hierarchical arrangement and monetary system meant to separate, exploit and divide, and it is this attitude that I view as central to the larger context of inhumane action that has occurred within the non-egalitarian paradigm of the male-oriented conceit, whether that conceit is maintained by men, women, whites, peoples of color, straights, gays, or transgender folk, for the thought of patriarchy is pervasive, structuring language, thinking, and being itself much as a literary conceit structures a poem, acting as the ongoing metaphor of its own idea or concept. This perspective gives me great pause when I consider literary technique as part of cultural technique, often wrapped in cultural debate that can't escape its own embroiled structure as it occurs within a paradigm whose language and sounds overwhelmingly perpetuate and reflect that structure, rather than provide something new in and of themselves to change it.
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Being possessed or dispossessed: being possessed of or dispossessed of: being committed or committed to: Anyone filling in the blanks with their own sense of further, humane potential will reveal a personal politic that might very well lend itself to a larger politic at hand, one that may help us as a species on a planet survive together in the understanding that, as a Nigerian friend has taught me to say in Yoruba, Igi kan ko le da igbo se: One tree does not make a forest, and that hegemony, as an expression of the patriarchal paradigm in its truest form, and at its worst exploitive extremes, is little more but the ongoing attempt to force its hold on its own failing statehood. The question is, today, will the earth—and we with it—be able to survive that failure?
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Whoever the first poet, whoever the first drummer may have been, whoever she is now and may be in the future, I write and drum to remember her and to claim her as a culture and a sound that is a part of every human being by virtue of our beating hearts. I stand to remember her sweet-voiced flower that was, and is returning as, her drum. My personal resistance to any paradigm that wants any peoples, like the word possibility, disappeared finds itself in a language and thought that continues to comparatively look at and actively reinforce peaceful, egalitarian culture, and to oppose the many forms of non-egalitarian weaponry used to exploit, oppress and murder as a means to construct the current conceit we find ourselves in, having dared to call it civilization.
Check out Leigh Herrick's music at http://www.cdbaby.com/lherrick.