The Montgomery RiverFront Brawl (2): Real or Cinematic, The Chair's New Symbolism, Marvel's Memes, African Gods & Ancestors

  The Perched Eye blog is 14 years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

Original Title:        "The ‘Montgomery Brawl’ Revisited: Was it Real, or Cinema Realite’, (& The New Symbolism of the Chair - the 2 Hour Prior Orisha Ceremony (Homage to and Blessings Asked for the African Ancestors from the African Gods, the Orishas (Oshun, the River Goddess; Ogun, the Warrior; and Shango, Bringer of Thunder and Masculine Strength)"

As the (original, above) lengthy title suggests, things about The Brawl keep coming out. Now we learn that 2 hours prior to The Brawl, a group of African-American ladies ‘went to the River’ at the same dock to offer flowers to their enslaved African ancestors who were brought to Montgomery and sold at the slave market a few blocks from the dock. The ladies aksed blessings from the African River Goddess (the ORISHA, Osun). The awakened Goddess Oshun then invoked the chief God Ogun, the Warrior God, who sits on his sacred chair and provides mighty weapons such as The Chair (but who leaves their use to the recipient), and then Ogun was joined by the also awakened, mighty Shango, the God of thunder and power, AND MASCULINE STRENGTH.

Yoruba (West Africa) Sacred Chair:

In other words, The Brawl is contexted both by American pop media memes (e.g., Marvel’s ‘Aquamayne’), and by ancient African deities who had been awakened 2 hours earlier with offerings of flowers thrown into the river by African-American ladies, which consequently led to OGUN’s gifting of the Folding Chair to be used by the victims of The Brawl (and specifically by Ogun's hero, Mr. Ray)

(The Brawl’s confluence of ancient African and contemporary pop-media cultures (themes and memes) is astounding! And the synchronicity of it all makes one 'ponder'.)

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It’s 10 days after the peak internet exposure of/to the Aug 5, ’23, ‘Montgomery RiverFront Brawl’, and I am still digesting the many resulting internet pieces that message reactions, opinions, viewing angles, …about The Brawl.

All Americans, Black and White had the chance to empathize with the same clearly defined good guys…which they did (Did The Brawl give a new insight on ‘Southern Ways’, …that the Good Ole Boys (1) appreciate the good brawl, and (2) a good brawl doesn’t distinguish according to race if the morality is clear?)

Was the Montgomery Brawl real, or was it a great studio production — perfectly-cast, superbly-acted, Greek-chorused, even cinematic ‘theater-in-the-round’?’ (Keeping with the ‘uber-theme’ of hilarity, I prefer to ‘mentalize’ The Brawl’ as a neo-Greek Classical, Marvel Studio ‘joint’…same themes, almost verbatim memes or Marvel memes easily seen in The Brawl’s actions. (There, I said it…I think Marvel Studios is doing a great job of messaging positive, morally constructive, socially redemptive principles to America’s youth.)

The ‘Set’! Audience immersion…200+ viewers entrapped on a historically-replicated (ante bellum) tour boat stranded in an alligator-infested river, offshore the stage that was (really) the exact spot where slaves were sold 2 centuries ago. (This had to be a studio creation.)

The audience was out of earshot of the spoken dialect, but the entire, multi-segmented action was visible ….as the tour boat’s ‘Greek Chorus’ repeatedly chanted in unison, “Hey B..tch, Get out the Way’, (directly from a popular ’20s rap hit.)…at the private skiff owners parked at the dock space reserved for the tour boat…preventing the tour boat from docking more that 30 minutes. (What a perfect morality-play setting.)

And the script! Roles that connected with an audience already familiar with the script’s memes? And a clearly identified, and identifiable, victim (a descendent of slaves who had been sold in a market exactly on the tour boat dock.) Perfect setting, perfect ‘good-guy, bad-guy’ roles…all perfectly acted.

90% or more of internet reactions I’ve seen are a kind of amused veneer that is shattered to pieces by outbursts of natural, uncontrollable hillarity.

Though, for myself and apparently for many, many others, after each outburst, as I settle down between laughing spells, I am in wonderment why is The Brawl so amusing. What is so amusing about an assault on a elderly man just doing his job (or trying to do) to move a private skiff 3 feat along a city dock space reserved for a 200-passenger riverboat that had been delayed from docking more than 30 minutes by the skiff’s drunken, recalitrant, White crew and owners?

The answer, as much as I can figure, is the relief that no one was shot (this afterall is in the Deep South where guns are king), and no one was knifed — one White observer said if the White skiff crew had shown a gun, he would quickly have been “sliced catfish bait at the bottom of the river.”

‘Relief’ that everyone lived through The Brawl helped explain the amusement, but maybe, as I sensed and still do, there was more…that The Brawl was a rare occurence of unambiguous ‘Right and Wrong,’ and for once, African Americans were not only ‘Right’ but being right was acknowledged and protected, rather than being punished for being the victim.

(The elderly man-victim was incidentally African-American, a salient feature of the whole incident,…. but at the same time The Brawl was not just a racial ‘thing’, because a young White teen (15/16 yo) who came to the victom’s aid was also beaten and driven away.)

Maybe The Brawl was elementally amusing because even though racial-faces were predominant, it was not a race riot. The Brawl was more a Falstaffian morality play whose classic character roles, including the Fool, go back 4000 years or more! And the roles were ‘acted’ by real Black and White people…who incidentally performed ther roles superbly, including the Fool,…and according to a excellently written, wonderfully entertaining script with that must have come from senior writers at Marvel Studios (e.g., ‘AquaMAYNE!’)

A Lagos State of Mind: A 21st Century Meme to Those in the Know

You know. The Lagos thing, the unnamable name, the unique city of the demi-globe. The feeling when eyes open to a sunny, wood smoke wafting, grilled meats tantalizing, cool morning full of expectancy: there is yesterday's business to finish and today's new business to discover. People to meet and places to go. Broiling "suya" on the air. Maybe a stroll through the market on Balogun with a kabob of Suya (broiled goat kidney with superb dry-rub), yet-unkown but certainly already gestating drama where in a flourish of life affirmation, one might gift a market lady with a larger than normal gratis just to show one's appreciation of the human interaction that led to an apparent, but rarely real, bargain and tip. This gesture would be rewarded with the typical but always fresh Nigerian sales exclamation "You dash me?", as if such a gifting had never occured before (yet it has, many times, in the daily life of the market) but the phrase and joyfulness nevertheless always sounds as if the speaker is newly so surprised and amazed that he or she is so fortunate to be not only a witness to the noblisse gesture but to the more, he or she is furthermore the actual and real life recipient of the gesture. "Wah, you dash me??!!!" spoken with the questioning, mock innocent accusation that is the signature of spoken Yoruba where so much is carried by nuance and tonality. Yes, market lady, we have, the two of us, joined together in that 1000's of years old ritual of giving and acceptance that is mutually pleasing and brings smiles to all around who are privileged to witness and hear the joy and significance of this marketplace ritual.

Youruba spoken is the drum and the drum is of Yoruba. The two modes of communication in Lagos, and Yorubaland are so very much a symbiotic pairing. So much is drum. "B's are mouthed in a push of air both soft and purposeful as "Bwaa" and sometimes as "mBwmm". So the drum. The Yoruba Gods speak thru their specific drums and gave rise tothe New World "Voodoo, a religious belief focused on the intercessionary spirits to Vodon, the Orishas,...

[Voudou, Voodoo, Vudu] is a WestAfrican religion based on vodun spirits and other elements of divine essence that govern the Earth, a hierarchy that range in power from major deities governing the forces of nature and human society to the spirits of individual streams, trees, and rocks, as well as dozens of ethnic vodun, defenders of a certain clan, tribe, or nation. The vodun are the centre of religious life, similarly in many ways to the cult of intercession of saints and angels that made Vodun compatible with Christianity, especially Catholicism, and produced syncretic religions such as Haitian Vodou. Adherents also emphasise ancestor worship and hold that the spirits of the dead live side by side with the world of the living, each family of spirits having its own female priesthood, often hereditary.

I will no doubt return to this blog in days to come and embellish this thought.

Lagos is a state of mind. Lagos itself is a mass of life and a massive, crowd-large theater. All bustle and hustle. To survive, one has to join in. Then one becomes aware that as an initiated player on stage now, everyone one previously viewed nervously as impossibly glib and hustle-full are now your audience who are equally entertained by one's newly-donned thespian cloak...hopeful of your survival but not especially assisting and expecting to be properly entertained, too, by your efforts to cope. It is as if one is being judged and listened to, while being hustled, as if to evaluate whether one has acquired a certain panache, a style, enough vim and verve, nerve and audacity in one's even normal dealings, for the rest of the crowd to stop worrying about you and rejoice as they might celebrate the maturing of a favored small child. I have seen mature, seasoned and hard American businessmen literally frozen in step when emerging from Lagos airport (Murtala Mohammed) and barely able to turn back into the apparent safety of the airport lounge where...all is not a safe as might be expected for to turn back from the challenge of Lagos, before even one step into the Lagos whirl, dooms one to be looked at by the airport hustlers as cooked meat on the stick. More on this another day.

Northern Nigeria. Muslim without the politics and anxiety of the Middle East. Religious mien, prayer and conduct is the emphasis. The radio droning on and on with broadcast payer and Koranic readings in every settled background whether camel clogged Katsina or the riverside villages in western Sokoto. The still largely absence of the Mid-East "difficulties" results in a Muslim atmosphere that is stoically pure and clean. Under those circumstances one can appreciate and admire the religion of Mohammed.

The Griot traditions of oral historian/poet bring the past alive. If one is fortunate enough to have an audience with a genuine hereditary griot one might be confused thinking that one is impolitely easedropping on a conversation let's say between colonial Englishmen speaking about today's news only to occasionally hear references to give-away anachronisms that reveal the griot is speaking in the voices of participants in events that happened several centuries before.