Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul to Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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This is Soul to Soul, universal ideas for a Brighter Tomorrow. Today my guests are Glenda White, CSN Professor of Law, and Erica Fatal-Lazar. I never pronounced Erica's name exactly right. And she is also a professor at CSN English Literature. Erica, tell me what you actually teach.

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I teach creative writing and I also teach a literature course that I'm quite proud of. It's Marginal Voices in Dystopian Literature. That's why I can never get it right. So today we are going to talk about this person Fred Moten because he is from Las Vegas. He grew up in the West Side. So we're going to start with Glenda because Glenda was a friend of his for years. So Glenda first That he lived on D Street for over 60 years. That he was a mentor, a father, a brother, and husband, not only to his immediate family, but to the community as a whole. You could always stop by. He would be sitting in the yard when it's warm enough. He sold the pecans for Christmas, you know, how we like to make sweet potato pies. And so he was really the the go-to person, always there to lend a helping hand. And I think the most important things were the dinners around the QB Bush family table. That's where you got lectured, educated, reprimanded, chastised, and just given some really good advice about life, about Las Vegas, about blackness, and most importantly what contributions were you going to make to make things better. Wonderful, I really

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who became one of the God children in

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that household but also there was another play brother and his name was Fred Moten. Tell me about Fred. Well yes Fred is I say my little brother but he's quite a bit taller and a little thicker. I might say he won't that but I met Mike Davis who is another Nevadan, Las Vegan and he knew B Bernice Moten and she had a son Fred Charles Moten and so when I came to Vegas and was younger and we were out all the time running around we just met And we became friends. And as we developed that friendship, of course, we would talk about different things. He would take me out to the West Side community. And then he told me he wanted me to meet, as he called her, Ms. Moten. Ms. Moten was a school teacher. She taught Mike in elementary school, junior high, high school at Clark, and even I think a class or so out at UNLV. And so naturally when I met Ms. Moten, which is what I used to call her until about the late 80s, and one day she said to me, don't call me Ms. Moten anymore. And I said, okay, well, what do you want me to call you? And she was so emphatic, I don't know, but don't call me Mrs. Moton anymore. So I was like gosh you know I was taught to be respectful of elders and all. And I didn't want to call her Ms. Bernice. And so I decided I'm going to call you B. And so there began the name of B. Moton or B. Jenkins and everything. And so when I met her and as time went on of course I met Fred who was about 10 or 11. And she was so very active in politics and education, and she had to do a lot of traveling. And so a lot of times Mike would keep Fred or stay over on Rico Street. That's where they lived on Rico. I believe it was 401 Rico Street. after she met me and she had to travel to Carson, Seattle and all around, I began to keep Fred. So I am also the

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babysitter as well as a big sister and that's how I met young Mr. Moten.

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Wonderful. Now from there in classrooms all over the country people about you and your class and what you talk about when you talk about Fred Moten. What is the favorite book? What are some of the ideas that you pass along? Oh wow, I'm still caught up in the story. I'm still sitting at the table getting all this of that community with all of that love, and all of that education about what it is to be a human among other human beings. And so that's primarily what I teach in my Marginal Voices in Dystopian Literature course. It is about not only marginalized identities, black, brown, non binary identities, it is about what you do with that particular humanity, so that you not only survive, but you thrive, and that you also are able to be equipped intellectually, emotionally, to also see to intend to the survival of your community. So with that in mind, what I love, and I just introduced my students to snippets of Fred Moten from the Under Commons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study, because what I'm hoping to do, and I don't know if my dean will ever hear this, but what I'm hoping to do is to plant seeds of insurgency. And I know that's something you want to talk about, you know, that trilogy that comes out of consent not to be a single being. This is really what I want to impart. Yes, how to analyze and critique literature, how to really engage with a short story so that you can really see the theme and how it also reflects your own particular experience. Yes, I'm doing all those things, Dean, if you're listening. But I'm also hoping that I get young minds off the grid. And I think this is what Fred Moten really is able to do so beautifully. And though his study is about black social life and theories of blackness, and therefore just wonderful theories about again, not only surviving but thriving with our particular histories. But he's also deeply, I think, mining, investigating, and making it possible for us to see how we are beyond measure. We can be informed by our histories, informed by the histories of others, and not bound by. So Erica, this is probably one of the most complex books I've ever read. I'm reading two books by him. I'm reading Black and Blur and The Undercommons. I am learning to read again. I am learning to think in a new way. I am learning to be patient because this sentence is so complex. I have to tear it apart. I can't finish this book for the six months so I am learning to read all over again. How do you help me understand Fred Moten?

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Glenda, how do you help me understand what I'm doing, what I'm reading?

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Well let me say this, Fred Moten has been shaped by Kingsland, Arkansas with his grandparents and of course with his mom. And from that Kingsland, Arkansas came Las Vegas. And in Las Vegas, Fred Moten has followed around as I did when I met Bee to legal women voters meetings, of course they used to be held in her basement and we used to sit on the steps and listen in on the meetings and everything, to all types of community, political, NAACP meetings, to the blues, to the jazz, to the readings of all kinds of books to some travel internationally. I'll never forget when they shared with me that they had been into Africa and what it was like many, many years ago because his father at one time worked, I believe it was Pan Am Airlines and everything. So sitting around QB's Ben, we used to say you're dragging us everywhere to all of these meetings, going over to this house, getting out in the community, walking and talking to those people in the houses, in the churches. Molded, shaped Fred Moten.

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Be who you are, never forget to look back and to lend a helping hand. You have an opportunity, you need to pass that on to others. Thank you. Like I said, I'm learning to read again and I'm doing it on a level that I've never done before. Erica, without frightening your students, it's almost as though you are entering into another dimension. So I'm going in and I have to suspend, and I love the way that you described that experience as learning to read again, I have to suspend certain expectations because even as his philosophy of fugitivity being a fugitive, right, an escape from the norm. I think he writes in this way and the music. So when I hand just a snippet of the Undercommons, which, you know, I think has some moments that are very comprehensive, meant to be read by all, as all of his is. I advise my students, and I also have to dispense that advice to myself, you know, because you've got this title of professor, you're supposed to know everything when you read it, you're not supposed to be confounded, but I advise my students to take the unknown with a sense of joy and pleasure. Read as though you're listening to jazz. The music that comes through in the language. So even if you don't know a term, what I advise them, and which I follow my own advice, this counsel, circle it, but just let the music play. Just let it play. And even more notes will bring for you. And I consider myself, you know, reading is a water I swim in, right? But I'm going into like some water that gets a little, a little turbulent, right? But you start to shape, you know, muscles and take on like the rhythm of the water when you're reading Fred Moten. Wonderful. And he talks about sculpture, artists, writers, philosophers, and the music comes from all genres. He embraces classical, hip-hop, all forms of rap. Oh my God, it's just so eye-opening and head-opening mentally to read him. So ladies, I just love that I have been introduced to somebody different. So the last interview I conducted was with a Mrs. Davis, not the Davis that you just talked about, two days ago. I was in her house. I said, do you have anything else you'd like to add to this interview? She said, I want to talk about my favorite teacher. She said, I went to the West Side school at one time and my favorite teacher was Mrs. Moten. I almost fell out of the chair. And she said, because she finally told us how to be proud of being black. And she West Side, to embrace everything that we were learning here on the West Side, and to use it. I was just floored. And then I told Mrs. Davis about Fred, and she just, she was so thrilled. Her face lit up. She said, his mother, that's his

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So anything else about Fred Moten and

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his writing that you'd like to cover before we come back to the West Side in a different way? Well I just have to say you know Glenda is mentioned in his really big first critical book In the Break. He gives you an acknowledgement and you notice that within those those acknowledgements of the ladies from the West Side. I mean just reading that I already you can tell I'm already fangirling but the way he loves the voices of women, the way he pays so much honor, respect infused with so much joy just the way in which he is able to acknowledge the strength of that matrilineal presence, for me, that just expands the reverence I have for this man because he hasn't only become the scholar and great thinker and humanitarian and artist that he is without having that collective of women around him and he knows it and not says so much about him as a human being. So this complex thinker came from the historic West Side right here in Las Las Vegas. Why is that not surprising to us? It is not surprising to me at all Lavon Lewis did. Mabel Hogarth and shall I say Alice Keyes. You know so these women, thank you Erica, these women shaped Fred and picked up on me at 21 years old and began to help reshape, help me grow more, shape the Mike Davises, shape the people next door, shape the kids at Madison Elementary School. These women, that's why he is where he is today, that's why I'm not because just what I got in coming in in the early 70s has helped reshape, remold, and me to grow even further and take another path. Wonderful. So Erica could you name some of his ideas and investigations, because I don't think his ideas are ever complete. You know, he's always willing to see more and therefore say more, but that trilogy that comes under the concept not to be a single thing, to being a single thing, that's black and blur, was the first in that trilogy. And then the Universal Machine, which the Universal Machine takes a look at three philosophers that he's really putting in conversation with one another, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and of course, Frantz Fanon, which is the key to a lot of race theory, right, the rebel and seer. And the last one is stolen lives. And so that's a pushing back to the idea that in blackness, we've had something stolen that can never be reclaimed. Now, the fact that it was stolen, that something has been stolen, I don't think that's really an issue or question. But the reclaiming, I think, is really what Fred is interested in. So yes, those are three very pivotal works. And then the Undercommons in the break is just a beautiful celebration of voices and images of the black aesthetic. And Little Edges is just, I actually knew a Fred Moten first through his poetry. And then my friend Na'ilah Orr hipped me to the essay work and I was like oh oh my goodness and that's what that's what this friendship and what Fred Moten said so beautifully during a Trinity Church Sunday sermon you have to pick you have to see it it's on YouTube and I think it was from January 2020 and he talked about Kingsland Arkansas so beautifully and his grandfather and when his grandfather was ill and he had this riotous gorgeous you know truck garden and how the community particularly neighbors came in and helped to tend to this garden when his grandfather was ill and for all of this hard work they didn't want anything in return and the mother of that family when she refused anything, you know, because proud people will at least say, take something, you did. She said, this is how we fellowship. And so turning what is usually just an abstract noun into that verb, I think is what Fred Moten does. This is how he fellowships, which is to say, my friend, letting me know that this poet that I so loved was also an essayist. This is her way of fellowshipping with me. This conversation is the way that we fellowship. I think Fred Moten, he loves to begin conversation that does not end. Further inquiry, where are we going from this? So I spoke of this name as though I I have yet to meet this gentleman I

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plan to, but he's so intimate in the language and so free in what he wants to give you, which is freedom. Wonderful. So the next time he's in town, of course, we have to meet him, Glenda. Well, I will certainly, certainly make that happen. So NYU and he's in that Department of Literature and African-American and all those things that go together with that. He is still writing. I am hopeful that he may be here later in the summer. That was one of our some travel but he had told me that he was going to try to minimize some of that now. He has two, I think, teenage boys now.

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So now there's a different role to play.

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So he may not be traveling quite as much but he is in New York at NYU, both he and Laura, his wife at NYU. Wonderful. So So, Glenda, do you have any closing remarks about QB that you'd like to offer? I was at QB Bush's house on Sunday. It was Mother's Day. The kids are still there. table, although the dinner table is long and chairs are empty, but we still sit, we still talk, sometimes cry, we still

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laugh and remember when all those chairs were filled with good conversation, good good thoughts and directions and let me not leave out debates and arguments. Those are always welcome. Those make the dinner table. Yes, so that's what I would say. Wonderful, thank you. Erica, any closing remarks about the West Side? I'd like for you to talk about how the West Side is beginning to change now and you

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Would you like to just say a few words?

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I see the West Side as becoming a future place that's informed by the past. The fact that we celebrate so many great performers and spaces of performance that have been a part of that history, I am also excited by the fact that we can celebrate the intellect that comes out of the West Side, along with Fred right now being at NYU in New York. We have a young artist working in tech and diversifying the tech space and the arts in tech, Salome Asagai, who was also from the West Side. Rose McKinney-James is not from the West Side, but worked on the West Side with Ms. Ruby Duncan, and she's in the renewable energy field. So when I think of the West Side, I think of all the ways of celebratory blackness, right? What we see, what has been hyper-visible so beautifully. But I'm also excited about the things that run those spaces, and how blackness contributes and propels, pushes forward ideas for the future of that space. So, Oboto, which is the nonprofit that I

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founded with a good friend, Brian Dice, in which you are so blessedly on the board of, Clay Tee, we are hoping to be a part of that coming future. Wonderful. there furiously. So is there something else that you wanted to mention? I just want to say that I grew up in Tennessee. I came to Las Vegas and I grew up again. Yes. Because of all the names that we have mentioned and so many more that we didn't. And the West Side certainly prosperity and ever after. Yes I agree with that. When I started going to the West Side I was much older than that. I won't even say how old but my life was

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reshaped completely. So ladies thank you

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so much for this first episode of Soul

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Thank you so much.

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Music

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You've been listening to special programming, sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Transcribed with Cockatoo