Of Divine Warning

"Lewis is a Jamaican-American black existentialist philosopher who teaches in the United States. He has been called one of the most dangerous writers and intellectuals working in the US, which immediately attracts my attention, and should attract that of anybody with a taste for truth rather than opinion. Think Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon fused in the same person, but as well acquainted with the literary and philosophical tradition of Africans in the Americas and the Caribbean, as with the long memory of Jewish theology and European philosophy. Plus, like Alejo Carpentier, he’s also a musician and a musicologist, unafraid of using the codes of jazz and funk in his writing. That makes his books an amazing read. Jane Anna is a political scientist, and an expert on ‘creolisation’, the process by means of which different cultural strands are deconstructed and re-composed in totally new ways. She’s a woman with a mission: to find out about ‘newness’ in history, and creolisation is the key. ‘Creolisation’ is what happened when reggae, blues and rock ’n’ roll came together with nuyorican funk in New York in the 70s and punk was the result. Creolisation is the truth of globalisation, but one that refuses the worst consequences of homogenising globalism. It is the very spirit of history. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Lewis and Jane Anna have written this beautiful and amazing book about the way we deal with and ‘read’ catastrophes in the modern era. First, they teach us that we read not only books and papers, but also historical events, in much the same way our ancestors read the skies for signs of things to come among the stars. But that activity is now mostly done by ‘experts’ using fake scientific and mathematical models, announcing catastrophes in order to avert them. They read those signs as either fate or as external threats provoked by ‘monstrous’ foreign peoples. In doing so, these ‘experts’, mainly politicians as well as economic analysts, become that archetypical character of tragedy and literature who, in announcing a coming catastrophe to avert it (and in the process unifying the will of the people in themselves, as ‘protectors’ quickly becoming tyrants) end up bringing about precisely the very awful events they tried to stop, like Oedipus or those American crazy-cons in Fox News. Second, they teach us that ‘reading’ historical events and coming up with images of the future is a worthy endeavour characteristic of what makes us human. We need not invent monstrous peoples or figures of absolute necessity when moving towards the future. And we cannot do so blindly, for we have the power to create one. As such, the book argues, by looking at theology, literature and history, we find examples of what the authors call the ‘suspension’ of some of our more mainstream, but also mistaken, ethical and ontological assumptions. Chief among them, the notion that ‘everything happens for a reason’, and that we need to invent ‘monstrous’ peoples threatening our way of life, unable to communicate and reason with us, in order to make them responsible for all sorts of ills and catastrophes. Actually, not everything happens for a reason. There’re things that happen for no reason and cannot be justified, like 9/11 or Haiti’s earthquake. This is why the American pastor Pat Robertson was so wrong when he attempted to find a ‘reason’ for Haiti’s disaster in the rebellious character of the Haitians and their struggles against white domination. This is also why we need to take responsibility for the creation of future environments for all; because there’s no reason to assume that what works today will also work tomorrow. It won’t. The corollary is the fragility of everything that exists, and a renewed sense of collective responsibility. That, by the way, was the basis of the interrupted thought of the Amerindians and the maxim guiding the ‘new dispensation’ brought about by Latin Americans today. Lewis and Jane feel that studies such as these reveal that we must reject a particular assumption about people and reality. They feel that we must abandon the idea that similarity and unity must be a condition of ethical obligation and coexistence. On the contrary, in their book they argue that something like the fight against racism does not require the elimination of race or difference, but rather, it requires us to respect the humanity of all peoples and the wider significance that non-human environments have for the people who exemplify racial differences. Something else that I found very important about their book is the way they write about ideas. This particular book is written as a series of short chapters that at times take the form of existential vignettes. They’re carefully written but there’s nothing particularly ‘highbrow’ or obscure about their language. It isn’t simple, but it is written in a way that communicates directly with our everyday experience. This is something that people here in Europe were used to and read widely in the 1970s, for instance in the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre or Samuel Beckett. That tradition has long roots in the Americas in the testimonial literature of former African slaves, in the chronicles and in poetry. It is unfortunate that this tradition was lost, particularly in Europe and in North America, when philosophical writing became the prisoner of academic convention. Nowadays critics find this form of writing existential vignettes as purely anecdotal, which means that they find our daily experience irrelevant! But I think that a very important way of understanding what is most important about reality, history and life is through the stories we tell about the daily events of our lives."