Ranon Maddox, (AKA Ranonsense)
Bio: Ranon Maddox has been writing poetry for almost 40 years. Strongly influenced by Hip Hop music, he has written well over a thousand poems. As a spoken word artist, he has shared his work in Sacramento, Washington DC, New York and Oakland.
Contact ranon.maddox@gmail.com
“A Time of Possession” looks at how the structures in our society conflict with the principles of social justice. We live in an imperfect union, created by man that values possessions over people. Man creates imperfect laws that fail to embody the spirit of equality, justice, and fairness. The system defends and perpetuates itself. At its best it provides people with leisure time and opportunity for meaningful action. At its worst it forces people to produce for another’s benefit. The worst-case scenario shows up in communities in many ways, including toxic waste dumping, over-policing, voter suppression, disparities in life expectancy, education, incarceration, and overall quality of life. We only have one life…time.
Time of Possession
A time of possession
The obsession of possessing possessions
Called into question
Moral-less laws, we second guessing
more or less
Used as a weapon
Justice could never step in
Mortgage application
A tool of oppression
Leveraged into suppression
Of votes in an election
Impacts the education
And the regulation
Of a nation
Unnatural elements
No signs of intelligence
At the helm of it
Capitalize, therein lies to sell a bit
Another occasion we celebrate for the hell of it
This information
Or dis-information
In the form of misinformation
Causes you to miss information
And this limitation
Puts you in a situation
Where your whole presentation
Will face discrimination
Within a nation, its overt and its blatant
Almost naturally people hating
And believe me It’s frustrating
Over 400 years plus… waiting.
The Dialect of Freedom: An Analysis of Ranon Maddox’s Time of Possession, by Mark Carnero, Ed.D, Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Sacramento State
The reclamation of language is a de-colonial act. When subjugated peoples repurpose the tongues and tools of their oppressor, a step towards liberation is taken. A writer can become a swordsmith, wielding words like blades, severing ties between himself and the master culture. Poetry then is resistance, an act of disobedience, freeing the author’s consciousness from the domination of the societal constructs and structures that encage him.
Ranon Maddox’s poetry piece “Time of Possession” is a heavy rock aimed at the glasshouse of U.S. capitalism, racist policies, mass media culture, and white supremacy. At the very onset, Maddox calls to question the decadence of American excess glamourized through mass consumption, consumerism, and the over commercialization of religious holidays or as he states “the obsession of possessing possessions…another occasion we celebrate for the hell of it.” He then pivots to the usage of laws and governance systems that have been used to institutionally discriminate people of color; pointing to redlining, gerrymandering and racist bank lending practices (referenced as “a tool of oppression, leveraged into suppression, of votes in an election”) that have ultimately cemented intergenerational wealth gaps between White and Black communities and disenfranchised entire voting populations. Maddox correlates the disempowerment of voters to political outcomes seen in governmental offices and the 2016 presidential elections. He then analyzes both the power and misuse of the internet as a tool for “misinformation;” interestingly the same mechanism that was insidiously harnessed to help sway Trump’s rise to power that Maddox mentions in prior lines of the poem. Moving towards the conclusion, Maddox calls out society’s implicit biases towards people of color and intersectional discrimination stating “Where your whole presentation, will face discrimination, within a nation, it’s overt and it’s blatant, almost naturally people hating.” This line mirrors the current U.S. socio-political context of 2021 where police murders, anti-Asian hate crimes, migrant detention, and mass shootings are normative headlines. Maddox places a declarative stamp on the final bars of his piece saying “And believe me it’s frustrating, over 400 years plus waiting…” Artfully, Maddox’s final line pushes the reader to move back to the beginning of the piece, to realize that the same systems of capitalism, systemic racism, and white supremacy that he mentions are the foundational institutions that have catalyzed this unshakable 400 year cycle that he references.
In a short interview with Maddox, he said that humans only need to understand three things in this life, “how to be healthy, how to communicate, and how to understand money.” Interestingly, Maddox showcases all three of those ideas in his piece “Time of Possession,” using poetry as a cathartic process for mental health, communicating skillfully through conscious prose, whilst cautioning his audiences about their part in predatory system of U.S. capitalism and economics.