READING RACE READING AMERICA
April 10, 2010
Writing at the beginning of the 20th century about the responsibilities of educated African American women,
Mrs. Mary Church Terrell ended her remarks thus:
And so lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long. With courage born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we must continue to assume as we look forward to the future, large with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of our color or patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice and ask for an equal chance.
[See “What Role Is the Educated Negro Woman to Play in the Uplifting of Her Race?” in Twentieth Century Negro Literature, or a Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro. Ed. D. W. Culp (Atlanta: J. L. Nichols & Co., 1902)]
The image evoked by “buds and blossoms of our desires” is a quite lovely one, but loveliness becomes secondary when we address “a keen sense of the responsibility which we must continue to assume” . The strange fruits produced by our nation during the one hundred and eight years between us and Mrs. Terrell do not encourage us to be as genteel as she was in a time marked by lynchings and other forms of domestic terrorism which preyed upon African American people. Indeed, many of us would look to Ida B. Wells-Barnett for models of engaging our responsibility, and some of us might rewrite Mrs. Terrell’s title to read “What Role Are African American Persons to Play in the Survival of Their Race?”
The role to be played is heavy and complex. It has been transmitted to us by our foremothers, two of whom were gifted poets whose words ought to be branded on our consciousness. Listen. In “For My People,” Margaret Walker issued a mandate:
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be
written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
And in the sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle” Gwendolyn Brooks sketched the strategy and the desired outcome.
….Be remote
A while from malice and from murdering.
But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate
In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late
For having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace.
Whether we be female or male, we learn our most enduring life lessons from our mothers or grandmothers or some woman of the family who has the wisdom to say what must be done to endure and prevail in the waste-howling wilderness race has made of the United States of America. My writing of THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery is indebted to the wisdom I absorbed from my mother, from my friendship with Margaret Walker, and from my reading of Gwendolyn Brooks as well as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, and Angela Davis. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to speak about my book and about Reading Race Reading America, my book-in-progress.
As the more astute readers of The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery have sometimes remarked, the content of the book provokes many emotions ---pity, disdain, puzzlement, skepticism, wonder, admiration, disgust, uncertainty, disbelief, depression. When such emotions occur within their reading processes, readers may recognize that the book precludes their having a single, sustained response to the disaster out of which it germinated. The book provokes memory. Memory, positioned between time past and time future, is most often overshadowed by fresh, more immediate instances of disaster. The multiple ways I chose to present the immediacy of my responses to disaster is now less a tracing of what was happening than an invitation to pass through portals into a future. That future, for better or worse, is predicated upon dehumanization becoming a normal state of affairs.
The Katrina Papers did not seek to be normal. Its departure from what many readers assume a narrative about disaster and its aftermath should be is deliberate. Writing about one’s agonies, in my opinion, ought not satisfy a reader’s penchant, so pre-fabricated and so uncritical, to feel sorry for an alleged victim. Finding comfort in pathos is a cop-out. Story or narrative can dump us into the ditch of pathos; it has the potential to so distance us from horror that horror can be taken for granted as we immerse ourselves in painless forgetting. For that reason, the book does not have a narrative arc or the kind of plotting that enables easy access to the story.
The first university press to which I submitted the typescript of The Katrina Papers liked the book. The acquisitions editor was enthusiastic about what I was up to, but he thought I should incorporate a narrative arc, a plot to interrelate the complex, meandering elements with a story line. I told him in very polite language that he was full of merde. The wayward components, the doubling and sometimes tripling of voices, my use of ordinary fonts and special fonts, boldface and italics, the anarchy of Standard English academic prose sitting one seat over from some wild poetic utterance, the personification of a seagull (with whom I had delightful conversation) ---these mix-matched devices were the story. If the editor could not see that, he could not see or hear or understand. A narrative of troublem has its own mad design!
An ordinary reader who allows the text to read her or his responsive emotions actually participates in manifesting or bringing into being ---just for the moment—the story, which then swerves inward or outward in the telling. If The Katrina Papers decided it was a psychiatric case history, the history would be Wardian not Freudian. The book does have plot. It has lots of plots. It has plots that betray themselves and the author.
The difficulty of access should be the imaginative correlative to the dynamics of the pain jointly witnessed by reader and writer. Such a stipulation only came to the foreground after the book was written. Confession is good for one’s character. In the actual process of writing, I did not aim for a story; I aimed for the discovery of recovery. I had to write like a refugee, an exile, a consciousness divorced from its previous iterations and incarnations. Displacement was all.
What I deemed important was not verifiable analyses of natural and man-made disasters. Those require historical and interdisciplinary research, work I was not interested in doing in 2006. Nor was I interested in telling selected tales about a mythologized New Orleans to eclipse the tremendous loss and suffering that occurred from Texas to Florida during the closing days of August 2005 and the early days of September. It was the whole phenomenon labeled “Katrina” that agonized and fascinated me. “Katrina” as a matrix of stories. What haunted me were parallel matrices constituted by the theft from and genocide enacted upon indigenous populations in the Americas from the fifteenth century forward; resentment birthed by the Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the United States was another matrix; a third dystopian matrix was etched by the 9/11 assaults upon the twin World Trade towers of New York and the Pentagon, the dramatic announcements that “terrorism” had indeed become a permanent feature of human life.
The ghost of a poem I had written about the eruption of Mount Saint Helens threw a fishhook into my life: “Volcano: An African Phenomenon”
Ask not to be surprised
The morning the Africans and
The volcanoes belch ash in your eye,
The volcano/the Africans
Belch ash in your eye;
You couldn’t have thought,
But you did, but you did not think,
But you should have, but you should
Have thought not to think
Justice could be a virgin forever.
Perhaps it is some version of justice that wants to give the form of The Katrina Papers a generic name, but the form of the book is such that it evades naming. Is it really a journal? Is it a collage? Is it an autobiography or a memoir? Is it a work of fiction pretending to be a work of non-fiction? The poet Hank Lazer comes closest to the truth: it is “a fusion of many kinds of writing, including intellectual autobiography, personal narrative, political/cultural analysis, spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.”
There are several reasons that the form of the book must be evasive:
First, I did not want the book to be like anyone else’s book about the disaster. It was not supposed to be representative of anyone except me. To be more precise, it was symbolic of the total historical me that was in a weird state of becoming a different Self. It had to be a special instance of using play to catch consciousness.
Second, I did not want the book to be stereotyped as an African American autobiography, a ready genre for misinterpretation; I avoided playing black identity politics and attempting to answer a vicious question: What is it about the racialization process in the United States that places African Americans in the position of speaking from personal experience? That question is paraphrased from a blurb for Kenneth Mostern’s Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge UP 1999). Only the stupid and the permanently color-blind would be unable to discern that The Katrina Papers was not written by a colorless person, by a post-racial non-entity or by an invention; only the deaf would fail to hear one of the voices in the book mentioning having ancestry from three continents. The voice is obligated to stand behind the words. Black Americans do not have a monopoly on speaking from personal experience.
Some years ago, Sherley Anne Williams, in her essay “Telling the Teller: Memoir and Story,” [i]provided an interesting angle from which to deal with the issue of form that bedeviled me:
Autobiography and biography are the provenance of history, the factual, and the real; fiction is the provenance of imagination, and what happens there is only make-believe. There is some affinity between the two, however. Every fiction is about someone or something’s life story, whether in whole or in part. And writers in each discipline are challenged to select and arrange the events they tell in some purposeful sequence that is revelatory of meaning and insightful of nature, human or otherwise (179).
I chose to employ the liberties of purposeful sequence more akin to poetry than fiction, so that fictive elements and genuine facts in the book could be understood as the fragmented history of a person-in-process. Taken as a poem, the book tells a better story.
The third reason has to do with a partial truth articulated by Jason Epstein in the March 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books. In “Publishing: The Revolutionary Future,” Epstein alerts us to a crucial fact about the digital future that is already a part of our recent past:
Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter -- the human inability to read what is unreadable – will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. (4)
Epstein is speaking of a future that includes a future for narratives caught in the ineluctable web of social networking that is quite progressively enslaving people who “read” by way of Kindles, Sony Readers, and iPads, who find holding a book in hand and turning pages and writing marginal notes to be an ancient ritual practiced by people who know that “scroll” is both a verb and a noun.
Being a teacher, the author of The Katrina Papers had observed, well before the Storm (as we call it in New Orleans) that many of his students had difficulty encoding and decoding quite ordinary sentences that were not screened for them in TEXTING hieroglyphics. Lengthy exposure to electronic technology had begun to shorten the attention span of the multitasking minds of students and to impose within their brains a logic that belongs to the hegemony of the visual. People who do serious work in cognition rightly suspect and are trying to prove that long-term exposure to electronics will result in permanent changes in how the brain processes information items. As a pre-future thinker, the author of The Katrina Papers embraced certain possibilities of the visual, of what his friend Asili ya Nadhiri calls “tonal drawings” (verbal replacements of graphic presentations). He exploited, to a very small degree, the probability that older readers and newer readers might be shocked into odd recognitions by flashings of word clusters that do not admit of easy prediction. He exploited what the early days of hypertexting made possible ----a maximizing of a reader’s participation in the making of meaning over which the author can only fantasize he has any control .
The Katrina Papers is a pre-future forecast of a future for narratives, an example of what may happen to traditional narrative genres in the digital revolution. But it is more than that. Writing the book was an act of liberation, especially from the fear that is not uncommon among people who engage in academic writing. Fear of how one will be judged and critiqued operates like a death sentence in one’s mind. Free of such fear, I can now get on with a project that I talked about for many years as I dodged and danced around actually executing it. I wanted to collect some of my literary and social essays to show the indelible impact the scientifically bogus but socially omnipotent concept of race has upon perception and understanding of America. The ambiguous title of the project is READING RACE READING AMERICA. That title refers to my theory that one can dream of a future America as a raceless utopia, but reality condemns us to read and interpret how billions of words about race shapes everyone’s historical knowledge about a democracy that is actually a republic. READING RACE READING AMERICA, unlike THE KATRINA PAPERS, is a public rather than a private testimony.
Some essays in the work-in-progress such as “N. J. Loftis’Black Anima: A Problem in Aesthetics,” “Unfunding the Arts in the Black Community,” and “Southern Black Aesthetics: The Case of Nkombo” have been published and will be reprinted without change as documents of my early thoughts about race. Yet, to assume the keen sense of responsibility Mrs. Terrell mentioned and to activate contemporary thought about the centrality of race, I must write in new ways about
- “Benign Genocide: The Myth of Black Community”
- “Grand Theft: Herman Melville and Charles Johnson”
- “Racial Reading”
- “Exploding Language and Beautiful Minds,” an interlocking series of commentaries on Tom Dent, Sonia Sanchez, Sterling D. Plumpp, Lorenzo Thomas, Ernest Gaines, Arthenia Bates Millican, Asili ya Nadhiri, Toni Cade Bambara, and other writers
- “Some Literature from New Orleans,” which includes a review of selected works on Hurricane Katrina and commentary on Dave Brinks and authors from the 17 Poets Reading Series, Arthur Pfister, and Archbishop Alfred Hughes’ “A Pastoral Letter on Racial Harmony”
- “Spike Lee, Bamboozled, and the Failure of Satire in America”
- “Lance Jeffers’ novel Witherspoon”
- “1940: John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Carson McCullers
- “A Dreadful Code and Trap Named “People of Color”
- “Cosmic Evil and the Impossibility of Justice”
- “Race: A Vulgar Four-letter Word”
- “Uncertainty: Pre-future Approaches to Politics and Literacy”
- “On the Poetry of Asili ya Nadhiri”
- “A Fine Historical Discrimination: African Americans and American Africans
- “Tradition and Combat Zones: Acknowledge and Scholarly Iconoclasms of Race
- “Social Justice: A Post-Katrina Perspective on Thought and Action”
I very much appreciate your honoring me and my efforts to give some readable presence to a truth through your reading of THE KATRINA PAPERS. My profound hope is that your reading inspires you to create your own rich and necessary testaments for a future. No doubt, when you have digested THE KATRINA PAPERS, you will be empowered to understand how reading race is reading America.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Professor of English
Dillard University
[i] In The Seductions of Biography. Ed. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff. New York: Routledge, 1996. 179-184.
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