[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] upcoming events: "Birth of a Nation" w/panel tonight...

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A good note on Birth of a Nation from the editor of CounterPunch, Jeffrey St Clair]

Styron’s Historic Libel

I never took to William Styron’s writing. He aspired to be Virginia’s William Faulkner, but Styron never had the master’s heart or humor. Behind those ornate, fractured, Cubist sentences, Faulkner was a writer who was haunted the barbarities of his own nation’s history and he had a deep feeling for those on the losing end: the blacks, the poor, the dispossessed and, especially, the women, all straining under the cruel shadow of the debased Southern aristocracy. Check out Light in August, a searing testament to Faulkner’s extraordinary empathy.

By contrast, William Styron seemed obsessed by the failures of his own mind, which can make for powerful fiction in the hands of Dostoevsky. But Styron was no Dostoevsky, either. Styron’s self-loathing is projected onto his characters, nowhere more morbidly than in his book The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron’s portrait of the black revolutionary is depraved. His Turner is almost subhuman, a kind of black Caliban driven by animal instincts and wild emotions that overwhelm his intellect and sense of morality. This is white fantasy, since we know very little about the man himself, except for the brutal treatment he received from the Virginia slave masters. Styron’s own family were slaveowners and the most generous reading of the novel is as a kind of psychological exercise to purge those ancestral demons, at the expense of one of the most heroic black figures in American history.

My familial roots grow deep into the Virginia piedmont country and I went to school in DC, where I got to know many Virginia writers–novelists, essayists and poets. Few had any respect for Styron; some were embarrassed for him. Styron later blamed the hostile reaction toConfessions from black writers and intellectuals, such as Cecil Brown, for the onset of his crippling episodes of writer’s block, which seems like one more case of blaming the victims. Once Styron was considered one of the three Great White Male Hopes for the American novel, along with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Now Styron is regarded, if at all, for Darkness Visible, his rather austere chronicle of his battles with depression. Perhaps there’s a measure of cold justice in that fate.

Alexander Cockburn used to bump into the Styrons, Bill and Rose, when he lived on Cape Cod. He adored Rose and spoke glowingly to me of their dinner conversations. Alex claimed that Bill was usually plastered by 4 pm, babbling incoherencies deep into the evening.

Nat Turner’s life and fiery uprising against the slaveowners has been redeemed from Styron’s libels by Nathan Parker’s powerful new film,Birth of a Nation. Don’t let the manufactured outrage about what Parker may or may not have done as a teenager deter you from seeing this liberating film. Watch the movie and judge it on its own merits. I bet that, like me, you’ll leave the theater uplifted with a joyous anger, rather than depressed, which is exactly the way revolutionary art should make you feel.


> On Oct 9, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Stuart Levy via OccupyCU <occupycu at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> 7pm Sun 10/9 *tonight* - "Birth of a Nation" film at the Art Theater, 
>    with panel discussion to follow.  (The film is showing at many other times too over the next couple of weeks, but this is the only panel.)
> Nate Parker's acclaimed film about Nat Turner's slave revolt addresses U.S. history and revolutionary violence, and raises several necessary specters of discussion - on & offscreen.
> 
> More info: http://www.arttheater.coop/the-birth-of-a-nation/ <http://www.arttheater.coop/the-birth-of-a-nation/> 
> 
> Post-show panel:
> Malaika Mckee-Culpepper (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
> Charisse Burden-Stelly (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
> Robert King (Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault and the Breakfast Club)
> Lou Turner (Department of African American Studies, UIUC)
> Moderated by Sundiata Cha-Jua (Department of African-American Studies, UIUC)

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