Jayne Cortez and Gil Scott-Heron were writers, activists, and performers. Known for their spoken word poetry over live instrumentals, both artists used their work as a catalyst for political resistance. Cortez was raised in Los Angeles and worked with activists in the 1960s to register Black voters. She later moved to New York City where she collaborated with an avant-garde jazz ensemble called The Firespitters, using experimental incantation to convey her poetry into a musical medium. Scott-Heron was raised in New York before attending Lincoln University in Oxford, where his greatest influence, Langston Hughes, was an alumnus. His recording career began in 1970 with the release of "Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.” This album included two of his famous poems “Whitey on the Moon” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which elicit the frustration and potency of revolutionary politics in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Selected works from each artist– Jayne Cortez’s “Cultural Operations” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Middle of Your Day”– work in tandem to convey life under global capitalism and Western imperialism, from the geopolitical to the interpersonal.
Cultural Operations
Cortez’s “Cultural Operations” (sometimes suffixed with the year 1992) sweeps through the mechanizations of the Western world and the cultural networks that normalize colonialism. “It’s operation ‘Same old bullshit,’” she says. “It’s operation ‘Same old right-wing, multinational think tank manipulation of history, geography, and information.’”
Even as her piece hails from over 30 years ago, the sharpness of her critique cuts through the same modern institutions that reinforce Western empire and legitimize its violence. We’re witnessing the manipulation of history as school systems eschew the role of slavery in the foundation of the United States; of geography as American border enforcement efforts escalate; and of information as social media networks censor the reality of genocide and occupation in Palestine and as US lawmakers institute book bans.
At one point in her poem, Cortez points her words towards the apartheid South African government. She names the country's project to rid itself of the word “apartheid” without “giving up the gold, the army, and the real estate,” as she puts it. Much like South Africa’s aversion to the word “apartheid,” Israel spends hundreds of millions of dollars to wash its hands of the term “genocide” from the public eye. Cortez’s invocation of real estate is particularly poignant in the context of Gaza. Israeli developers are already conjuring up plans to “develop” the region after leveling it into a “parking lot,” as one US congressman called it.
She also extends her polemic to cultural appropriation: “Operation ‘Thieves still giving music awards and patting each other on the back for stealing and imitating their asses off.’” She situates appropriation in the same realm of Western propaganda, which retools the revolutionary nature of Black music to sanction white supremacist power structures. She then implicates this dynamic as part of a larger project to bestow the values of institutional violence upon the masses. “Operation, ‘What does it matter, [...] as long as we act as silly and mediocre and corrupt and greedy and repressed as we are programmed to act?’” she says.
Jayne Cortez ends her poem with a wide range of cultural operations, each having its own effect on the world we occupy: “Operation Deforestation, Operation Deprivation, Operation Privatization, Operation Falsification, Operation Contamination, Operation Marginalization, Operation Militarization, Operation Polarization, Operation Subordination, Operation Toxification, Operation Destabilization, Operation Termination.”
The Middle of Your Day
If Jayne Cortez’s “Cultural Operations” speaks towards unjust systems of power, Gil Scott-Heron’s “Middle of Your Day” captures the somber attitude of living within these systems on a daily basis. He opens his song with, “Over the hill you see the middle of your day.”
Throughout his song, Scott-Heron characterizes the half-awake state of consciousness while surviving the machinery of colonialism and capitalism. He speaks to dissociation, fear, sadness, and isolation. At one point he questions the listener, “Where were you all morning, dodging life inside your heart?”
“The Middle of Your Day” heaves the sighs of the overwhelming realities constructed in Jayne Cortez’s “Cultural Operations.” Scott-Heron mourns the time lost to these realities, while acknowledging how political direction is forfeited in order to move from one moment to the next, singing, “Minutes fail you day by day, but there’s really nothing else.”
He also points to the limits of relationships within Western society’s underlying structures— familial ones specifically— to exemplify how emotional distance is a consequence of survival in global capitalism. In one moment, after speaking about his mother’s love and acceptance, he follows with, “But there’s no one here to guide you. You’ve got to do it by yourself.” Another verse sticks out as well, as Scott-Heron alludes to an absent father, but points to his enlightened words, “Go and tell your daddy. He was right in what he said. ‘Cause the laws of independence don’t apply until you’re dead.” This verse orients the listener to consider how white supremacist culture prohibits the living from obtaining freedom; how the masses are relegated to only leave behind their chains after death.
In the final third of “The Middle of Your Day,” Gil Scott-Heron turns to the courage required to wake up. He begins by asking, “How long must we live inside chains that anchor us to fear?” He then calls us to action: “Wake up to the middle of your day! Why don’t you welcome the middle of your day?”
Awakening
Jayne Cortez and Gil Scott-Heron show us the realities of harmful systems and the struggle we must fight to survive them. Their work is ultimately a catalyst to change. Cortez lists the cultural operations working against us, but she doesn’t limit our imagination to the possibility of building ones that work for us– just as Scott-Heron invites us to a new reality outside of the boundaries of oppression.
The word “woke” has become a loaded signifier in American politics, but the word isn’t actionable on its own, rather it describes the state of something or someone. Awakening, on the other hand, is an event. Politically, awakening often represents a reaction to another occurrence that shakes individuals into consciousness. The question remains then of whether we can build our own cultural operations that lead us to awakening.
As seen by the brutality Israel has committed following October 7, 2023, a new awareness emerged when the West was confronted with the violent foundation beneath its surface. Jayne Cortez and Gil Scott-Heron demonstrate, however, that awakening can be an act of self-determination. Our imagination has the power to transcend the limits of reaction, instead becoming an awakening in and of itself. The middle of our day is and always will be the grounds to bring forth a new cultural operation to awaken ourselves to the reality of our liberation.