MySpace


blogs.myspace.com/toromoreno
MySpace.com | rss | sign in
T



Last Updated: 3/21/2009

Send Message
Instant Message
Email to a Friend
Subscribe

Gender: Male
Status: Married
Age: 42
Sign: Pisces

City: DUNSTABLE
State: Massachusetts
Country: US
Signup Date: 6/18/2005
Tuesday, December 13, 2005 
Seems like I'm mostly moved to write when someone dies ... Renquist, the Pope, and now Richard Pryor. Of course I never knew him, never got to see him live, and didn't really like most of his movies. I hadn't even really thought about him lately, since he had fallen out of public view, but when I heard about his death during a news update on the car radio, I felt sad and nostalgic because Richard Pryor was like one of my teachers. Growing up in Brooklyn in the late 70's, early 80's, Richard Pryor was like audio pornography, for me. His comedy was the kind of thing I kept hidden from my parents. His act was filled with kind of filth I had to go to a friend's house to hear, because my parents would freak if they ever found out. We would gather, my friends and I, five or six at a time, and pull out the latest LP one of the group had been able to get his hands on. I don't remember all of the titles anymore, but some albums like, "That nigger's crazy", "Supernigger", "Wanted", "Live on the Sunset Strip", and "Bicentennial Nigger", we listened to over and over again. Pryor said some of the craziest and funniest and most painful things I had ever heard in my young life. He talked about things that weren't supposed to be funny, like racism, illness, poverty, ignorance, depravity, loneliness, and despair. He used obscene words that I knew, but wasn't supposed to say -- but somehow, coming from his mouth, in combination with the stories he was telling, they seemed just right. They were just right. Because Richard Pryor was talking for everybody about the things they wouldn't talk to each other about, and sometimes that took words like "motherfucker" and "bitch" and "fuck" to express. He also used nigger. A lot. Those early albums, some of them with the word right in the title, were laced with what white people can now only call the "N" word. Richard Pryor made it all right to say nigger where I lived, even if you weren't black, because we were hispanic and that left us feeling connected to the stories he told. I heard it everywhere in my neighborhood. Salvadoran kids calling their Dominican friends "my nigger". Colombians saying "those fucking Italian niggers are crazy". And everyone used to tell me that Puerto Ricans were the new niggers of America. Even I threw it around with my friends, black, white, latino, chino -- they were all my niggas. But then, on one album, Richard Pryor talked about visiting Africa ... and looking around, and realizing that he didn't see any niggers. (James Baldwin used to say that there are no white people in Europe -- only French, Swedes, Germans, etc.) In Africa what Pryor saw was different than what he was used to seeing in the US -- people of all shades doing everything it takes to keep the world from spinning into chaos. He recognized his own humanity, and realized how the word nigger had been embedded in his imagination. And he stopped using the "N" word in his act because he had an epiphany about words, and about the power that they have in how we see the world, ourselves and each other. Pryor used language to cut through the fabric of American culture, and into the heart of the American conscience. He was funny and foul, outrageous and dangerous, heroic and pathetic, and through all of it, painfully and hilariously human.  Pryor taught me that life is only funny, if you're willing to laugh even when you're in pain. He also taught me that words have meanings and power, measureable effects in how we understand reality. Words can make us laugh, make us cry, make us black, make us white, make us niggers. Words are what make us .... mean something.
6:39 AM
 
Print
Previous Post: Ignorance is bliss | Back to Blog List | Next Post: Dreaming of doing something you believe