Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

CHRISTOPHER RICE – THE VINES – 2014

That’s a great page turner. It is highly entertaining and readable and two days is the maximum you must spend on it to get the full impact of this impressive power Christopher Rice captures in his book.

It deals with New Orleans. Welcome back to your nest, young man. You know that land so well and these marshes so marvelously that you can in no time recreate their black magic, because their magic is black, and being black it pushes its roots deep into the old slavery past of this land.

Sure enough we are entirely drowned in this context of the descendants of the slave-owners and the descendants of the slaves and how they cannot come together because there is a curse that separates the two races. The curse comes from Virginie Lacroix, the ghost of a slave who could communicate with and command the underground forces of the earth. She was betrayed in her days and she has been condemned to be a ghost there along with the last planter who betrayed her.

It is said that this Virginie Lacroix has to be re-substantiated, in other words re-incarnated by the conjunction of several guilty people being destroyed by the will of their surviving victims. The white descendant of the planters has no problem shedding her blood to the vines and getting her vengeance on her husband, the cheater. But she is a bitter person and she is eventually eaten up and ghostified by some black bugs and she takes over the ghost of Virginie Lacroix who cannot then be liberated from her state as long as this Caitlin Chaisson is controlling her after her rebirth from the vines.

Luckily a certain Blake Henderson who was bullied along with his lover when they were high school students, the lover being the son of the main coach of the High School, by three team members sent by the father and coach to “teach them a lesson” which eventually meant the death of his own son and the survival of Blake his lover. The reactivated vines want him to become the second blood shedder because the second but chained ghost, Felix Delachaise cannot find any peace if he does not help liberate Virginie Lacroix’s ghost and he can only do that if one person feeds his vines the blood he needs to take over but that only happens if this Blake refuses the blood-service and thus is forced to do it by of course the ghostified Caitlin Chaisson. He refuses of course and that makes the difference: it liberates Félix Delachaise.

Then the battle is between the black bugs of Caitlin Chaisson and the white-winged bugs of Félix Delachaise and there will be a happy ending. Christopher Rice somewhere is a sentimental person.

But the book is essential in the modern context.

It is the absolutely crystal clear embodiment of the Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome of American society. The Blacks will never find their freedom from this PTSS if they do not assume their past as slaves and recapture the positive, constructive and creative side of that ordeal slavery was. At the same time the whites will never be able to get out of the PTSS of their own if they do not assume their past as slave owners or overseers or slave-benefitting white folks and the positive sides of that experience.

It is easy to make people cry on the evil of the past but it is a lot more complicated to bring people to accepting that this evil past had positive sides. I regret this book does not insist on the musical heritage from slavery. But the book insists enormously on the power and fair dealing the slaves demonstrated in their days and at the same time the planters and other overseers were monsters with whips, no honor, no words to keep, with their sons (when the fathers did not join these too) who were purely raping women slaves as soon as they arrived and then repeatedly and collectively, in other words in the worst ever and most traumatic way possible. And Christopher Rice could have also insisted on the fact that males were just as much, often and well raped, and children of both sexes were not even mentioned or mentionable: they were natural toys. And yet these white monsters had a positive side: they built the country, the economy, this society with relentless energy and will.

We come to the idea that this country could not have been built if these relentless energy and will had not been associated to the resistance and fair dealing the black claves demonstrated all the time. The heritage of the USA is the result of these two dimensions: relentless energy plus relentless resistance. And the way out of their mutual PTSS is in recognizing this double positive heritage along with the evil side of things at the time. Would American music and even the music of the world today be the same if there were not the heritage of this slavery in the music of our whole universe? The black slaves saved from their culture their polyrhythmic traditions in order to resist the relentless exploitation that was their lot. By chanting their traditional rhythms when working in the fields they managed to all work at the same speed and thus to counterbalance the competition the planters wanted to introduce among the black slaves. They thus escaped the possible whippings and punishments, or at least minorized them. They thus made their survival easier. Without that resistance our musical world would be completely different and that resistance would not have been possible if slavery had not been used, and even overused, and without slavery the future of the Americas was practically unthinkable, at least the way it has been brought, which means the future of the West would have been very bleak, and thus the future of the world since the west has played an essential role in its development, a role that has come or is coming to an end.

All that si marvelously embodied in the book by Christopher Rice and I think his being gay and having suffered that kind of discrimination and bullying, known as gay-bashing, he is able to understand the suffering of the descendants of the slaves who are still submitted to that kind of segregation and violence which is known as crowd managing or riot managing or crime managing based on a racial and racist practice of profiling.

The best part of this book is that it is a tremendous entertainment and the serious questions are just in the wings, if you want to see them, in the white wings of Félix Delachaise’s bugs and in the black wings of Caitlin Chaisson’s bugs. And mind you miracles are possible and ghosts can be reborn. Somewhere Christopher Rice must be a Buddhist deep in his mind.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

D'une pièce géniale à la profondeur de notre Mère Nature

https://www.academia.edu/9058380/Dune_pi%C3%A8ce_g%C3%A9niale_%C3%A0_la_profondeur_de_notre_M%C3%A8re_Nature

Mettre ensemble ces œuvres est on ne peu plus justifié par le rôle de la mère. 

Il n’y a pas de Tom qui puisse être à la ferme sans la mère Agathe en l’occurrence dans la cuisine de la même façon qu’il ne peut pas y avoir de Jésus qui soit à la croix sans la mère Marie en l’occurrence à ses pieds.

C’est cette maternité, cette maternalité qui justifie la mise en commun.

J’ai ajouté la première publication de la critique du film car en plus celle-ci introduisait un CD de musique Maya et pour moi cette musique est celle de la Mère première, la terre, la glaise, la nature, notre mère à tous, comme le cosmos est notre père à tous.