on Part 3 of Dark Princess presents a model of politics that forefronts the power of the political machine in Chicago. In this vein, “Cabinet Battle #1,” shows the same power of political grabs through the Hamilton storytelling.
on
“You’re ruling the way that I move
And I breathe your air
You only can rescue me
This is my prayer
If you were mine
If you were mine
I wouldn’t want to go to heaven
I cherish the day
I won’t go astray
I won’t be afraid
You won’t catch me running
You’re ruling the way that I move
You take my air
You show me how deep love can be”
The final chapter of Dark Paradise concludes with the riveting celebration and crowning of Matthew and Princess Kautilya’s son, Madhu. In this moment, all focus finally shifts from Matthew and Kautilya’s romance to the religious allusions, heavenly imagery, and cries for the new Maharajah of Bwodpur. Sade’s “Cherish the Day” evokes this sense of an important time in which all plights and failures fall into place, under an unnamed ruler and savior — “You’re ruling the way that I move, and I breathe your air, you only can rescue me.”
Matthew, Kautilya, and the cacophony of voices surround Madhu’s body as he is uplifted as their Prophet. As they sing and speak (another call for rescue which resounds throughout the novel), all the present individuals fixate upon the potential of this newborn child. The lyrics such as “this is my prayer,” encapsulates an inarticulable hope for freedom and liberation felt by people of color in a global struggle.
In Du Bois’ imagination of a better world – “I am seeking’ for a City— for a City into de Kingdom!”, they have found what they needed, the answer to their prayers, so fulfilling that one “wouldn’t want to go to heaven”. Sade sings, “Cherish the day, I won’t go astray, I won’t be afraid”. In the passage, a preacher reads from the book of Revelation, “…and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes!” The shared joy for the baby Maharajah drowns out Matthew and Kautilya’s anxieties and fears that once trailed behind them in the narrative; instead, “they were married, looking at neither mother nor son, preacher nor shining morning, but deep into each other’s hungry eyes”— the birth of the savior child fully bridges the Princess and Matthew, as Sade sings, “….you show me how deep love can be..”
on “Toiled in the trenches, faced judges on benches, betrayed by some that I fed not to mention, standing here now in the best condition, up outta the dirt so I suggest you listen, see money can’t make you or me, protect my mind with nines cuz it shines more than jewelry, used to do things that weren’t too productive, now I breathe life into mics for your comfort, I see past the groupies and goldiggers to find women, how I’m living? doing me and not savagely driven, taught the game of fortune and fame so I’m not playing no more I hold the torch with flames, I’ve lost and gained at the same time, mc’s biting and swagger jacking still commit the same crimes , once you see past the surface, that trash is worthless, with me you get a lasting purpose”
In Pt. III of Dark Princess, poignant reminders of Matthew’s personal strife continue to show themselves in the midst of intense, elaborate political schemes and the larger systems whose players employ his situation to their advantage. Matthew is abruptly fished out of jail by Sammy and Sara, in the duration of his punishment and self condemning labor; he comes out with a grim, defeated approach to his cause. His intense spiritual, emotional struggle post-incarceration becomes a vital key by which Sammy, and more importantly, Sara, forsee their own political reign. Guru’s “State of Clarity” felt lyrically relevant to Matthew’s efforts to reckon with his crushed sense of masculinity, “toiled in the trenches, faced judges on benches, betrayed by some that I fed not to mention, standing here now in the best condition, up outta the dirt so I suggest you listen…” Sammy notes that Matthew is frustratingly unresponsive to bribes, and his political popularity is supported by the fact that he seems unfazed by monetary rewards and possibilities– “see money can’t make you or me…”, “taught the game of fortune and fame so I’m not playing no more I told the torch with flames…” In being able to witness, acknowledge, and work in the darkness and corruption, Matthew begins to see ever too clearly his role as a pawn. Because he had “lost and gained at the same time”, Matthew attempts to find his footing by navigating through their intricate game with purpose, and eventually finds his way back to Kautilya. The (more upbeat) remix of State of Clarity shares such underlying tones of hope, atonement and redemption.
on I wasn’t ready. That’s really all there is to it: I wasn’t ready.
There was a post due soon, and I was rummaging through the few braincells I have left that haven’t been addled by aerosol mists and permanent marker fumes (among other anti-braincell agents like Rousseau, Hobbes, and Skunk), but I couldn’t come up with anything that added to the conversation—to the brilliance of my peers. And then one of my near-dead braincells wheezed: Why’ntchu googoo Chinese Salsa Music? So I did. And, really, I wasn’t ready.
Among the treasures I discovered was the Chinese version to Mandarina China Band’s “Historia de un amor.” The history of a love. The song, a throwback, full-throated salsa dive that would make Larry Harlow and The Fania All-Stars pop their hips, pulled me into proper posture.
“Historia de un amor” starts with a mini roll on the timbales and an eager piano who knew something big was up and wanted in on the action: in less than three seconds my ears knew—they knew. If love-at-first-sight has a soundtrack, then this is it. But even as I thought of salsa and referenced Fania as if salsa were a pure thing, and the All-Stars its keepers, the song marched a jazz-fiend’s bass line in to swing out—it was as if some ancient spirit had been summoned and possessed the composer with a simple thought: We ain’t keepin’ this shit to ourselves, are we? Of course not, so the veil was pulled back.
The veil? The video version of “Historia de un amor” slides past the song title on an umber background and brings the viewer into a hyper-saturated spectrumization of a woman behind the wheel of a car. Like the piano, she too knew something big was up: it isn’t long before her shoulders are swaying, her head bobbing behind the veil of colors. The veil tears and we see her; potentially any motorist enjoying the music on her stereo, possibly Asian, possibly not.
But then her voice, full and rich. She is not any motorist. She is this song’s singer, more than its midwife: the song is her child and she cradles it in the power of her vocals. I wasn’t ready. The band’s Facebook page told me that their music was “able to do the fusion between two cultures, two feelings, two countries,” and while I agreed with the spirit of the statement, it ultimately fell short of the reality because that binary limited not only its reality, but its ancestry.
I was also momentarily struck by the fact that while some distant part of me expected a slightly-inflected Spanish, the words I heard were initially impenetrable, but the emotion wasn’t. I was not just hearing an Asian woman sing salsa in Mandarin—which she is—I was hearing her interpellate the Caribbean and China, the blues and jazz; Africa, chains, the shores, the sands, the ships; the early slaves and the later indentured coolies. Maybe she is not burdened by this history; maybe she is free because of the congas and the timbales, the piano and the flute, all of which turned iron to glass, but she has crossed histories, and rendered the borders porous, and I was free with her.
I brought this iteration of “Historia de un amor” to the song’s original singer, Eydie Gorme y Los Panchos, and said to her, “Escucha. Oyete esto,” and I set them side by side. While Eydie’s tempo had been slower, slinkier, and her version had been sung in Spanish, she knew what she was hearing right away. This added more weight to the present and I turned from Eydie smiling. Yeah. I hadn’t been ready, but neither had she.
on “And then came what I shall always know to have been the greatest thing in my life. I saw your mother. No faith nor religion, Matthew, ever dies. I am out of the clan and land that gave Gotama, the Buddha, to the world. I know that out of the soul of Brahma come little separations of his perfect and ineffable self and they appear again and again in higher and higher manifestations, as eternal life flows on. And when I saw that old mother of yours standing in the blue shadows of twilight with flowers, cotton, and corn about her, I knew that I was looking upon one of the ancient prophets of India and that she was to lead me out of the depths in which I found myself and up to the atonement for which I yearned. So I started with her upon that path of seven years which I calculated would be, in all likelihood, the measure of your possible imprisonment. We talked it all out together. We prayed to God, hers and mine, and out of her ancient lore she did sacrifice of flame and blood which was the ceremony of my own great fathers and which came down to her from Shango of Western Africa.” – pg. 160, Pt. IV
As they engage in a passionate reunion, Princess Kautilya recounts her own story to Matthew. In this passage, she describes how she sought out Matthew’s mother upon his final request; this remarkable visit becomes the catalyzing force, by which the Princess is moved to join the working classes in manual labor. The imagery of Matthew’s mysterious, somewhat speechless, wise mother figure – “that old mother of yours standing in the blue shadows of twilight with flowers, cotton, and corn about her”, hearkens back to Matthew’s brief visit to his home in Virginia, in Pt. III— “she was sitting in the door, straight, tall, big and brown. She was singing something low and strong….” pg. 97
Before Kautilya began to speak, Matthew sings to her the Song of Emancipation again; this mirrors the auditory, visual imagery of his mother’s low-voiced singing,— and presumably, the same song of liberation is being sung at both times. The biblical story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt is stark here; Matthew’s mother’s body is imagined as the vessel that holds the ideas of spirit, redemption, salvation, birth and rebirth; Matthew is born from his mother, and then goes on to father the future “messiah of the darker nations” in Kautilya’s womb. In spirit of Du Boi’s use of parallelism, Kautilya recounts, “I knew that I was looking upon one of the ancient prophets of India and that she was to lead me out of the depths in which I found myself….”. It is also interesting how Kautilya preserves the undertones of a religious narrative by describing the “soul of Brahma” and the “little separations of his perfect and ineffable self and they appear again and again in higher and higher manifestations, as eternal life flows on.” By evoking ideas of karma, the author hints towards Kautilya’s hopeful perspective for unifying humanity in transnational, class struggle; by the “sacrifice of flame and blood”, the dialogue of pan-ethnic solidarity between the Indian princess and Matthew’s Black mother is turned into a spiritual, symbolic ritual under all their Gods (thinking back to Uses of the Erotic, this reads into ideas of the transcendent feminine, energy) that feeds into their fight.
on “Slowly Matthew lifted himself, arranged the golden glory of the Chinese rug again round her, tucking in her little feet and drawing it close at the side. Noiselessly he slipped to the fireplace and made the golden flames hiss and sputter and swirl up to the sun-drenched sky, and then he came back and stretched himself beside her, slipping, as she slept on, her head upon the curve of his elbow and looking down upon her face” (218-219).
In this scene Kautilya and Matthew finally reunite after years of estrangement and express their long-quelled love for one another. This scene is particularly striking as it enlists literary devices such as personification, alliteration, and imagery to descriptively convey the profoundness of their reunion.
The personification in this paragraph illustrates a contrast between the lack of desire between Matthew and Sara in Part III and the plethora of desire between Matthew and Kautilya in Part IV. Note the simultaneous alliteration and personification: “…golden flames hiss and sputter and swirl up to the sun-drenched sky…” In Part III, you’ll remember Sara never allowed Matthew to have real logs in the fireplace. Instead, she created holographic burning logs. Additionally, Matthew notes in Part III that he is confounded by the ability to be sexually intimate with Sara, but still feel like they are distant acquaintances. In short, their relationship was fake, cold, and distant. Through the use of the aforementioned literary devices, Matthew’s connection with Kautilya is characterized in extreme opposition to his expired relationship with Sara.
Personifying the fire as “hiss[ing]” exemplifies the carnal, animalistic pull between Kautilya and Matthew. There’s something innate and natural about their draw to one another. Furthermore, the alliteration here seems to indicate excess insofar that the sky is “sun-drenched.” As a symbol of life, hope, and even stability (re: the Baha’i faith), presenting the sun in excess marks a distinct positive shift for these two characters. In finding one another, their desire to live, their hope for the future of the “darker races of the world,” and their collective sense of self is rejuvenated.
Beyond excess, the alliteration in this paragraph simulates the ease between Kautilya and Matthew. Matthew “stretched himself beside her, slipping, and she slept on…” There is an undeniable ease and smoothness to every action Matthew takes in her presence. The “stretching” and “sle[eping]” nods to a relaxation and intimacy Matthew never experienced with Sara.
The employment of the “Chinese rug” struck me here. As Matthew “arranged the golden glory of the Chinese rug again round her” I began to ponder the significance of such an act. One might surmise that their union marks newfound hope for uniting the oppressed peoples of the world. Matthew does the labor of physically wrapping the rug around Kautilya, and it is Kautilya that utilizes the rug for an unexpected, yet important, function (simply, to keep her warm). Perhaps their union marks a new ability to unite people through love. Noting the rug as “Chinese” seems here to hold some significance.
In summary, what appears to be a simple act of care to keep Kautilya warm and lay by her side is actually illuminated here as an exclamation of hope for the future. And perhaps the message remains, that only through love can the oppressed peoples of the world prevail.
on One of the themes in Dark Princess: A Romance is internationalism and international solidarity, specifically amongst Black people and people of color. In the song “The Weather”, Hussle raps the line: “My fanbase I see em movin south/ I’m overseas eating f*cking croûte.” This shows his international outreach, stretching his audience from LA to Europe. Obviously in the novel we see Matthew experience solidarity when he goes to Germany. I probably should have done this song for last week’s reading, but it came on my shuffle when I was doing this week’s and this line just stood out to me. Earlier in the song he also talks about all the hard work he puts in, “Most the time, when it rain it start pourin/ But how we grind, it make the weather change for us.” I’m relating this to Matthew’s political career and his attempt to insight change. All the work he’s doing will hopefully “change the weather”, change the political scene of the United States and the world and encourage progress for Black people. This was literally what Hussle was all about, using his influence to build up his community and provoke positive change. The more I analyzed, the more similarities I found between Hussle and Matthew.
on « The earth below the city is full of secret things. Voices are there calling day and night from everywhere to everybody. I did not know before the paths they chose, but now I see them whispering over long gray bones beneath the streets. Lakes and rivers flow there, pouring from the hills down to the kitchen sinks with steady pulse beneath the iron street. Thin blue gas burns there in leaden pockets to cook and heat, and light is carried in steel to blaze in parlors above the dark earth. There is a strange world of secret things – of wire pipes, great demijohns and caverns, secret closets, and long, silent tunnels here beneath the streets.
The houses sag, stagger, and reel above us, but they do not fall : we hold them, force them back and prop them up. A slimy sewer breaks and benches us; we mend it and send its dirty water to the canal, the river, and the sea. Gas pipes leak and stifle us. Electricity flashes; but we are curiously armed with such power to command and such faith like mountains that all nature obeys us. Lamps of Aladdin are everywhere and do their miracles for the rubbing; great steel and harnessed Genii, a hundred feet high, lumber blindly along at our beck and call to dig, lift, talk, push, weep, and swear. Yesterday, one of the giants died; fell forward and crumpled into sticks and bits of broken steel; but it shed no blood; it only hissed in horror. We strain in vast contortions underneath the ground. We perform wast surgical operations with insertions of lumber and steel and muscle; we tear down stone with thunder and lightning; we build stone up again with water and cement. We defy every law of nature, swinging a thousand tons above us on nothing; taking away the foundations of the city and leaving it delicately swaying on air, afraid to fall. We dive and soar, defying gravitation. We have built a little world down here below the earth, where we live and dream. Who planned it ? Who owns it ? We don’t know.
And right here I seem to see the answer to the first question of our wold-work : What are you and I trying to do in this world ? Not merely to transpose colors, not to demand an eye for an eye. But to straighten out the tangle and put the feet of our people, and all people who will, on the Path. The first step is to reunite thought and physical work. Their divorce has been a primal cause of disaster. They that do the world’s work must do it thinking. The thinkers, dreamers, poets of the world must be its workers. Work is God .»
This passage is very interesting in the way Matthew is describing the construction of a new world, the gestation of a new civilization gathering the entire Humanity.
Matthew paints a world full of secrets and mystery, but also reminds us it is in fact already there, just « beneath the streets ».
This proximity is also visible through the juxtaposition of two different lexical fields with, on the one hand, some expressions such as « Lamps of Aladdin », « Genii » and « giants », which bring Mythology in our very familiar world, made of « gas pipes », « electricity » and « tunnels ».
The progression in « The canal, the river, and the sea » relates the expansion, the spreading of a universe. Indeed, if Matthew began as a porter for Pullman, it appears that through the construction of this tunnel, he is now part of the creation of the Path bringing Magic to the surface.
Here, a strong paradigm of Western thought is reversed : Magic and Hope do not come from Light, but from Darkness. A perspective shared by Audre Lorde in Poetry is not a Luxury, in which she says women shouldn’t be afraid by Darkness, but should embrace the power which/witch resides in it, the power that has been buried by « the White Fathers ».
The same White Fathers who separated Spirit and Body, as Matthew says : « The first step is to reunite thought and physical work. Their divorce has been a primal cause of disaster ».
Let’s not forget that one of the most famous philosopher of the « Lights Century » is Descartes, who built his thought upon the separation between spirit and body, human and animal, organic and machine, leading to a strong binary system sustaining several oppressions as racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonization, where one is the good dominant subject, and the Other the bad, ignorant object to whom the first has to show the light.
This very system has prevented Matthew to be an obstetrician, someone who helps giving birth, but now he is part of the gestation of a new world, and he is not alone : “We perform vast surgical operations “. And even if it comes with pain underneath the ground, it is more worth than as a God beneath the street than a slave on the surface.
Indeed, the repetition of « We » shows a true sense of collective, suppresses all kinds of hierarchy, and therefore the allegiance that usually goes with it. The absence of commas in the accumulation « Lumber and steel and muscle » creates the vision of one strong body working to achieve a common goal.
In this Genesis, the ancients gods are erased, and the new ones are simply the workers – « Work is God ». Former slaves built their dream, their new world from the darkness and the mud, their magic coming from their own bodies.
We can also see the connection with this powerful sentence at the end of Patrice’s “We are the future in the present” video : « From girl to woman to queen to slave to goddess ». Since the use of « Man” to qualify the entire Humankind is arbitrary, in a decolonial feminist perspective « Woman » could apply to everybody.
As he reminds their project in this letter addressed to his love – « What are you and I trying to do in this world ? Not merely to transpose colors, not to demand an eye for an eye. But to straighten out the tangle and put the feet of our people, and all people who will, on the Path », Matthew shows this new world beyond oppression can only be built by the ones who were formerly oppressed, through race or gender, and that this new Birth is like a promise to overcome them.