Malcolm’s character and beliefs changed over the years. Not deference, or trust, or gratitude for whatever comfort he might find in life.
They could not nurture Malcolm through childhood, but they steeled him with the truth: He owed white people nothing. Still, the influence of his parents, who were steeped in the teachings of Marcus Garvey, cannot be overstated. Malcolm, then 13, and his seven siblings were scattered into foster care and other arrangements. His mother, Louise, kept the family together as long as she could, but eventually succumbed to poverty and mental illness. His father, Earl Little, died when Malcolm (born Malcolm Little) was 6, the victim of a streetcar accident that Malcolm later suspected was a cover-up for the work of a racist mob.
Malcolm’s middle-class parents moved several times, often into neighborhoods they knew were hostile, confronting the Ku Klux Klan, local officials and bigoted employers. The Paynes’ research elucidates a family history of American racial terror that preceded his birth in 1925. This book reveals more of Malcolm’s childhood than we have ever seen. Nobody has written a more poetic account. Instead, it reconstructs the conditions and key moments of Malcolm’s life, thanks to hundreds of original interviews with his family, friends, colleagues and adversaries. Malcolm’s presence is beautifully rendered, but “The Dead Are Arising,” which was ultimately completed by Payne’s daughter and principal researcher, Tamara Payne, is not a tribute or enshrinement of achievements. Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who devoted nearly 30 years to the book before his death in 2018, meets these needs intermittently, but that is not his primary goal. Readers may pick up this biography hoping for a celebration of Black pride and resilience in the midst of madness. The book’s subject, Malcolm X, knows this place well, though he died in 1965. Les Payne’s “The Dead Are Arising” arrives in late 2020, bequeathed to an America choked by racism and lawlessness. They burn in the conflagration of their times.THE DEAD ARE ARISING The Life of Malcolm X By Les Payne and Tamara Payne
They live in the “fire” of art, as the Victorian aesthete Walter Pater urged his acolytes to do. The art of Gilbert and George is not explicable by tired textbook explanations of conceptual art. Somehow these men have made themselves into vessels of British (they’d surely say English) society. Is this the unconscious of the artists spilling out, or the collective madness of the city they channel, the scabrous soul of London expressing itself in taunts and insults? It feels like both. It has suddenly become powerfully claustrophobic, electrically nasty. Then I take another look at the Gilbert and George show. So I leave the room and go around an exhibition of paintings in White Cube’s larger galleries – lots of quite interesting canvases, but a bit bland overall. The Banners, as they call these text pieces, are white rectangles that all have the handwritten inscription “Gilbert and George say …” followed by a purportedly shocking pensée. But it’s impossible to be outraged, provoked or even mildly entertained because the artworks are so slight and trite – I think, as I first enter the room. What naughty boys they still are, after all these years. Photograph: Gilbert & George Courtesy White Cube
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