(Excerpt) Author’s Preface

The virtues of true and real democracy are indubitably under assault, plunging humanity in one of the greatest crises of civilization. A prevailing wave of unbridled capitalism is sweeping over the world, unparalleled in history, threatening to eliminate everything that is treasured in human society. Are humans to live as free citizens of democracies, or are they to be acquiescent followers of repressive, capitalist, market forces; bound to evolve the servile mass mentality demanded by laissez-faire and laissez-aller policies? Thus the world of Madness of Angels to some degree is a response to this world of instability and oppression because it articulates disquiet, simultaneously exposing the shortcomings of unbridled capitalism. Certainly, destiny could not have found another literature; a metaphorical knight in shining amour to advocate he cause. The close attention to people and events in various historical and social locations, alongside the fact that it presents futuristic visions in works such as The State of Black Britain and Oppression illustrates how Madness of Angels oppugns and animadverts the conventions of social realism; often taking a philosophical stance. The allegories in the main request us to rethink the conventions bequeathed to society.

The Allegories, poems, prose-stories and apophthegmatic nature of this work should not be visualized as a rant or for that matter, seething with rage. Instead, they should be regarded as a challenge and animadversion of the epistemological religious and political bulwarks, operating as canons of righteousness. The matrixes of ideological and socio-political tenets are oppugned in allegories such as The Terrorist’s Riposte, My Kinsfolk and Paul the Blasphemer. The dialectics of the aforementioned provide both a voice and audience vis-à-vis the aspirations of the downtrodden; existing in anti-dialogical social milieux as seen in the Terrorist’s Riposte below:

-------------

(Excerpt) Voice of the Lunatic Angel

You sedate me to control me. Detain me to tame my resentment and make me docile so I can conform to your images and desires. You compartmentalize me to stereotype me after which you vanquish my individuality and conscript me as a member of the human collective. Remorseful seasons plague me plundering the harvest of exultation; transforming sterile energies into vulgarities.

Texts and studies compose magnificent lies to disarm what emerge like ugly truths, proffering explanations to demean the Madness that is awe-inspiring. My efforts like exhausted mariners sleep walk without a mustard seed of hope.

Society’s kiss is cold and the embrace malicious and uncaring. I mark these glacial moments with crystal deluge. I have cried for so long my howls are transmuted to whimpers. Daily, I despoil my conscience because jollity is repulsive and high-spirited moments few and far between. Praise is derelict and I labour to discern the revelation that must eclipse the hideous present, while accumulating in my coffer abuses and disappointments.

Mother, Father, Time and Distance, this is not the son you bore. Envy’s barbed arrows assail me unfeelingly and so for now I leave the canvas blank. The pallid haze and the first panting rays of daybreak ferry hope to my heart but only for a moment. What surfaces as glimmers are indeed the glares of penitent nightmares employing the lustrous rays of daylight to mount chilling attacks on my enchanting insanity.

I grow sadder each day as saboteurs of Truth rally morality to their malevolent intentions to plunge humanity over the precipice of self-indulgence. What then remains? I have conserved the only souvenirs creditable to safeguard; my insanity and veracity. With these I have no wish to be sane or subscribe to the values of this routine world in its incessant yearning for material goods and normality; for sanity bequeaths detestable legacies that unbar the gates of hell and lunacy is the ladder to the seventh heaven.

I scattered seeds so that fruits may be rich and that for once, the soil of my birth would yield to my people morsels of food but the harvest was bitter because my neighbours reaped and bartered the grain to the god of mammon while closing their ears to the cries of hungry children and starving mothers. My neighbours became invaders and obliterated our language, derided our religion, ridiculed our differences, pilfered our resources, undermined our customs, denigrated our values, assigned our inferiority, exhausted our energies and while we were on our knees pleading for mercy, our un-appointed, overweening, supercilious overlords, christened it peace.