“We, Spoken Here,” which Nate Mackey discussed at his de Young Museum performance in 09/2007: his discomfort with the poetic I, his tendency to write the poetic we, and his deep understanding of that historically, culturally, and politically determined we.
“Me … We,” Muhammad Ali says. In the Forbes magazine article he wrote in 1999, he discussed “convergence,” his individual accomplishments earning the title of the heavyweight champion of the world, and what these accomplishments meant for the African and African American people of the world, what he could do, given his accomplishments, for the people. Coming off watching When We Were Kings (1996) yesterday evening, digging through the theatrics of his bravado, this point is so clear, his membership with the Nation of Islam, his Black Nationalism, his unapologetic anti-war stance: ”I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong … They never called me [N--].”