Malcolm X goes to Mecca

...and the Ks go camping.

So I'm reading Malcolm X's autobiography and it's pretty fascinating for the insight it offers into the background and reasoning of one of the great American anti heros. I was sitting waiting for the train to pull out of Heuston the other evening, leafing through the pages, trying to find where I'd left off - the book has the following image on its cover :


....when 3 burly Nigerians from Portlaoise hopped in beside me. What do you do? Malcolm Little (for that is his less than intimidating real name) throughout the book refers to all white people as "the white devil" and holds an incredibly unflattering candle up to 400 years of relations between white and black Americans and preached separation, neither segregation nor integration, of blacks from whites. What the parallels were between me, these fellas (who had apparently distributed equally a half moxy measure of talc between them prior to boarding the train) and black power is unclear but I know I felt slightly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to place the book on its cover with the spine facing me and to press pause on the Beastie Boys soundtrack on my earphones. The original white devils.

There's some strange passages in the book one of which describes Malcolm and some muslims congregating in a cockpit of a plane bound for Mecca. I find it funny in a quaint it-could-never-happen-today kind of a way.......

"The captain of the plane came back to meet me. He was an Egyptian, his complexion was darker than mine; he could have walked in Harlem and no one would have given him a second glance. He was delighted to meet an American Muslim. When he invited me to visit the cockpit I jumped at the chance. The co pilot was darker than he was. I can't tell you the feeling it gave me. I had never seen a black man flying a jet. The instrument panel : no one ever could know what all of those dials meant! Both of the pilots were smiling at me, treating me with the same honour and respect that I had received ever since I left America. I stood there looking through the glass at the sky ahead of us. In America I had ridden in more planes than probably any other negro, and I never had been up into the cockpit. And there I was with two Muslim seatmates, one from Egypt, the other from Arabia, all of us bound for Mecca with me in the pilots' cabin. Brother I knew Allah was with me."

And in the long introduction where it describes how his home is burned to the ground and its devestating effects on his family, it ends with the standalone "Malcolm X did not have fire insurance"........a warning to all of us but kind of jarring in the context of an assasinated 60s political historical figure who preached black power.

But an excellent read for all it's bizarreness.

On a completely unrelated note and much closer to home, (literally in our back yard) we went camping last weekend and baba took to it like a duck to water.


So now we know she's able for it we just need the weather to improve and we'll be on the road again :)

good to see that In-Tent Orange Glow back on the blog :)