Does the secret mind whisper?

de Bob Kaufman · Publicada por primera vez en 1960

"Comprising a single unpunctuated sentence, 'Secret Mind' rushes headlong through a murky and harrowing inner landscape that New World surrealists of African descent ... have made us somewhat cognizant of, if not familiar or comfortable with; but it also critically engages an external world of sterile information factories and sexualized commercial spectacle that nonetheless derives from an indigenous if not hybrid and murderous creative wellspring ... But while this litany of desirable status commodities is a typical Beat rant against materialism, Kaufman's critique is doubled in that the fetish objects shrugged off by counterculturals were also for the most part inaccessible to Black people ... Like Kaufman himself, an apocryphally Jewish and Martiniquan African American Catholic from New Orleans, the 'secret mind' represents the convergence of multiple cultural trajectories. It is the political unconscious of the US, which registers all the 'secret, terrible hurts' ... visited upon people who belong to an 'America not on any map' (Will Alexander), the disenfranchised who may ruminate silently on these social, spiritual and bodily injuries but who may speak of them openly only at their peril"--Maria Damon's "On Bob Kaufman, 'Does the secret mind whisper?'", Jacket2 Poetry in 1960, a symposium.