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would lie or faint at once for long laughing, because laugh was his profession.
    When laughter presents such power, what are we to make of the African’s attitude toward lust, the inevitable kuntu of
fuck
— yes, every word will have its relation to the primeval elements of the universe. “The word,” says a Dogon sage named Ogotemmêli, “is water and heat. The force that carries the word comes out of the mouth in a water vapor which is both water and word.” Nommo is at once the name of the word and the spirit of water. So Nommo lives everywhere: in the vapor of the air and the pores of the earth. Since the word is equal to water, all things are effected by Nommo, the word. Even the ear becomes an organ of sex when Nommo enters: “The good word, as soon as it is received by the ear, goes directly to the sex organ where it rolls in the uterus.…”
    What exhilaration! This small fine book,
Bantu Philosophy
, and then a larger work bursting with intellectual sweetmeats,
Muntu, the New African Culture
by Janheinz Jahn, is illumining his last hours in New York, his flight on the plane — a night and a day! — his second impressions of Kinshasa. It has brought him back to a recognition of hisold love for Blacks — as if the deepest ideas that ever entered his mind were there because Black existed. It has also brought back all the old fear. The mysterious genius of these rude, disruptive, and — down to it! — altogether indigestible Blacks. What noise they still made to the remains of his literary mind, what hooting, screaming and shrieking, what promise of oblivion on the turn of a card.
    How his prejudices were loose. So much resentment had developed for black style, black snobbery, black rhetoric, black pimps, superfly, and all that virtuoso handling of the ho. The pride Blacks took in their skill as pimps! A wrath at the mismanagement of his own sensual existence now sat on him, a sorrow at how the generosity of his mind seemed determined to contract as he grew older. He could not really bring himself to applaud the emergence of a powerful people into the center of American life — he was envious. They had the good fortune to be born Black. And felt a private fury at the professional complacency of Black self-pity, a whole rage at the rhythmic power of those hectoring voices, a resentment at last of their values, of that eternal emphasis on centrality — “I am the real rooster on this block, the most terrible cock, the baddest fist. I’m a
down
dude. You motherfuckers better know it.”
    Yet even as he indulged this envy, he felt a curious relief. For he had come to a useful recognition. When the American Black was torn out of Africa, he was ripped out of his philosophy as well. So his violence and his arrogance could be a fair subject for comprehension once more. One had only to think of the torture. Everything in African philosophy was of the root, but the philosophy had been uprooted.What a clipped and overstimulated transplant was the American Negro. His view of life came not only from his livid experience in America but from the fragments of his lost African beliefs. So he was alienated not from one culture but from two. What idea could an Afro-American retain, then, of his heritage if not that each man seeks the maximum of force for himself? Since he lived in a field of human forces that were forever changing, and changing dramatically, even as the people he knew were killed or arrested or fell out on junk, so he had to assert himself. How else could he find life? The loss of vital force was pure loss, equal to less ego, less status, less purchase on the availability of beauty. By comparison to the American Black, a white Judeo-Christian could live through a loss of vital force and feel moral, unselfish, even saintly and an African could feel himself in balance among traditional forces. An African could support the weight of his obligation to his father because his father was one step nearer in the