David Grundy

The five essays printed here are excerpted from Part I of Present Continuous, a book of prose written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London.

The essays in the present volume were written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Nearly two years on, following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from pandemic to endemic, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope they provide some sort of record, not just of where “we” were in 2020, but where “we” are – ​or might be – ​now. (David Grundy, London, January 2022)

“It’s 2018 and we’re still on a train out of London, it’s 1967 or 1970 and Coltrane and Ayler are still in their material form, it’s 1943 and Artaud’s letters spill their remainder on the page, it’s April 2020 and all those presences are gone but their traces remain in the split voice, the overtone, the greater frequency overwhelming that base note which no longer guides in circumscribed lines. The actual presence of actual ghosts, silver on the mirrors, lost poetry, the noise it makes. It’s from the condition of being in the abyss itself that we learn how to climb out of it.”

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future.

Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.

Askia Touré is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

Complete facsimile of The Cricket, an important but underknown music magazine edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, and Larry Neal in 1968–69—a rare document of the Black Arts Movement.

Published in the late 1960s by Baraka's New Jersey-based JIHAD productions around the time of the Newark Riots, The Cricket: Black Evolution in Music was an experimental music magazine running poetry, short plays, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anti-commercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and musicians (including Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Mtume, Albert Ayler, the Black Unity Trio) to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—"a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed," as Spellman write's in the books preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, "to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool," and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers "to finally make a way for themselves."

This publication gathers all issues of the magazine and a new substantial introduction by artist and writer Kodwo Eshun.

Preface by A. B. Spellman.
Introduction by David Grundy.

Texts by Billy Abernathy, Albert Ayler, LeRoi Jones / Imamu Ameer Baraka, Duncan Barber, Black Unity Trio, Hilary Broadus, Ben Caldwell, Stanley Crouch, Dan Dawson, Joe Goncalves, Milford Graves, Ronnie Gross, Clyde Halisi, E. Hill, Haasan Oqwiendha Fum al Hut, Norman Jordan, Larry A. Miller / Mwanafunzi Katibu, Willie Kgositsile, Don L. Lee, Mtume, Gaston Neal, Larry Neal, Ibn Pori, Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed, Roger Riggins, Sonia Sanchez, A. B. Spellman, James T. Stewart, Donald Stone, Askia Muhammad Touré.