OPEN LETTER TO NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS

Originally published in Steppingstones (1984): 86-89.

Dear Writers:

     Did I promise to write this letter , or did I create the promise in response to circuitous needs?  It does not matter.  The intensity of my experience during our workshop at Fayetteville State pressured up a letter or mediation or statement.  I write as much for myself as I write for you.  Meeting you, and meeting you on the grounds of your seriousness, talent, and ambition, reminded me we are closer to Charles W. Chesnutt than linear history reveals.  We were, after all, in his landscape, at his literary festival.  And April 9 conjured epiphany.

     Cyclic time and spiraling with ancestors.  An epic duel between the spirits of Sutton Griggs and Charles Chesnutt, the hindered power of Griggs’ hand trying to lasso the stallion rearing the marrow of Chesnutt’s  tradition.  Elliptical language of 1983 sliding into the grooves of 1899.  Strength, Lord, strength for the  agon of audience, of consciousness.  That was no workshop.  That was a revelation.

     Our discussion of craft, of character, plot, conflict, rhyme, of how the poem means and how fiction means, of how our best intentions invite understanding  --- whatever we said, and left unsaid, was important.  More critical was the echo I heard.  Why did I have to sound to myself like a voice crying from the wilderness of the Sixties, like Ras the Exhorter escaped into a soap opera?  Generational shift or distance is not good enough an explanation.  So, why?  Maybe I feel craft as technique is linked to the craft of peoplehood, and maybe I heard links breaking in a room in Fayetteville.  Brogans turning into Florsheims, denim pretending to be English tweeds, homebrew flowing as Chateau Petrus ’78.  Fusion as confusion.  Two thousand seasons of wisdom sacrificed on the altar of art.  Premier tricksters of the world, we shall always endure somehow.  So why do I worry for the echo of falling chains?

     Part of the answer does concern technique.  As a writer you can be technically excellent and empty, or technically deficient but powerful.  The judgment of technique can not  be  made according to Platonic ideals.  It is made in a living context by people  ---  witnesses, critics, beholders, readers, fellow writers.  I know of no writer worth reading who ever mastered technique in a vacuum, tramping after the solitary dictates of his private prejudices.  Technique can be mastered in a community, a speech community.  Can the circle of community be broken and technique prevail in isolation?  Surprisingly, the answer is yes.  For there are people in the world who revel in the aesthetic of disconnectedness.  But is that the audience for which we develop finger cramps and curse our typewriters?

     Part of the answer rests with the self-image of the African American writer in the Eighties.  Having the new freedom means, especially for some young writers, rejecting the notion that the writer is identified within a specific community or group.  Writing transcends that particularity.  A writer is a writer.  Period. A writer wants space to create.  A writer does not want a care-cluttered geography.  A writer elects the existential.  The writer of the Eighties is a free-agent.  If she or he is Black or white or Chicano or Jewish, it is an accident.  In the Eighties, the writer promotes the culture of narcissism.  Look in a mirror to see the visage of the Black writer of the Eighties.  What does the Black is Beautiful resemble.  You’re right.  It looks just like the Black Community.

     Another piece of the answer comes from my friend Tom Dent:

Perhaps we are witnessing a sailing further and further out into uncharted waters from the safe and secure port of racial “we-ness.”  Sometimes our poets get inundated in the Bermuda triangles of interpersonal relationship or they are blown to distraction by the tumultuous and unpredictable winds of fundamentally European concerns.  Sometimes, joyfully, they discover new harbors that bear enough resemblance to the home port as to make possible symbiotic identification, a broader concept of peoplehood, and a redefinition of who we are as individuals and as a people.  In my opinion, the wide dispersion of theme in contemporary black literature is certainly not deleterious; we are not seeing “things fall apart.”  We are simply experiencing an intense readjustment and experimentation process that reflects the intense pressures to which Blacks are being subjected in these late 20^th century United States.  One can only hope that our poets will provide new and meaningful statements that further develop the concept of racial and cultural “we-ness,” always such a strong source of black survival in the Western world.

Freedomways, 23 (1983), 48-49.

Amen. Amen.

     What Dent calls “a sailing further and further out” I would identify as our retreat into possibility, a sign that another breakthrough moment in our literary history is on the horizon.  I am convinced, however, the bright moments will come only as the result of writing that is responsive to the past in our present and responsible.  Responsible to someone other than our individual  selves.  We owe it to the community to be responsible iconoclasts like Ishmael Reed rather than Joycean puzzle-plotters. And we owe it to ourselves as writers to strengthen communications among ourselves.

     Caught in that duel between community and art in our workshop, I sensed how little we know about writers across the Black South region.  Some of the work you are doing should be published in Callaloo: A Black South Journal of Arts and Letters, edited by the Alabama poet/critic Charles H. Rowell.  Obsidian: Black Literature in Review is edited by Alvin Aubert, a Louisiana poet who is very receptive to work by “unknown” writers.  There should be more exchange of information about what is going on among North Carolina writers, the poets and dramatists in New Orleans and Jackson, the writers and critics in Atlanta.  In short, we need to communicate more with each other.  None of us can grow as writers in the vacuums of our individual states.  Nor can we grow very much unless we build communication networks with our states.

     There are two writers in North Carolina who should be focal points for state-wide development: T. J. Reddy in Charlotte and Lance Jeffers in Durham.  They both have much to say about the links I feel so strongly Black writers ought not to break.  Listen well to the first stanza of Reddy’s “On Needing Reference.”

I need a reference o f some other reflection that

I can relate to as a Black person, a reflection

that gives me a view that is sensible and not one

Eu rope ean or A mer i con.

And listen well to Lance Jeffers, a great teacher, a great writer, a great human being, whose work is sheer prophetic fire; listen to a bit of the vision he shared with writers at Howard University’s fifth Conference of Afro-American Writers:

I think that our literature  -- our poetry, our fiction, and our drama – can sharpen the sword of our struggle.  I think that our poetry and our fiction and our drama (if they are honest and analytical) can point the direction toward final victory, can tell us what we must do to achieve it.  But always and always, our most honest authors and our authors of greatest intensity, will slingshot their stones toward the forehead of privilege  ---however indirectly, however subtly: always and always our authors of greatest intensity will seek to reach a hand into the viscera of our people’s struggle and seek to heal and to embolden: the author of integrity will sharpen the sword of struggle so that our people may end their slavery here.  We must create prescriptive literature, literature that creates visions of and standards for a good society.  Our agony has enabled us to be in a better position than whites to prescribe what the individual should be, what the society must be.  The black author must fearlessly envision and prescribe, unafraid of what the literary establishment may say of his vision, of what it may say of his prescription.

     And April 9 conjured epiphany.  To be Black, Southern, and gifted is a blessing we must not abuse, neither by ignoring the full spectrum of our beauty and ugliness or by courting cultural fragmentation. WE must strive together for the omega point of excellence in the circle of community.

                                                                                                Sincerely,

                                                                                                Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

                                                                                                May 1983