Tradition and Acknowledgement in Combat Zones
Our tradition of black writing is coterminous with the tradition of black literature; whether we speak of literature or of writing depends on how we choose to position our necessary and creative acts of expression. Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script (handwriting) or print (mechanical reproduction) or cyberspace (digital imaging). On the other hand, literature (which embraces a dimension named orature or oral literature) refers to deliberately isolated instances of writing. Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature is constituted by fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, and the sound-crafting of lyrics by such artists as Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson and Marvin Gaye. Our literature includes blurred genres (mixed media) in want of adequate description. Our robust traditions of orature, literature, and music cause problems in the conduct of everyday life, not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable according to our needs. In turn, they demand that we acknowledge our ideologies that hibernate underground.
My critical thinking about writing and literature and my stance of being post-nothing and pre-future were shaped by the yoking of the cultural and the political in struggles for human and civil rights, for agency, and for conflicting values implicit in Black Arts/Black Aesthetic projects. The quality and quantity of affirmative African American ideas and creations do change. Emphases shift. It might be argued, however, that motives for affirmation of self and group identity are more stable and slower in changing than the expressions associated with them. Although belief in the wonderful illusion of “the black community” and its solidarity in America has given way to accepting the contentious realities of intra-ethnic fragmentation and synthesis (diasporic sprawl) and even hatred, I will not abandon some ancestral values always present in the unfinished enterprise labeled the Black Aesthetic. “Ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe” enable us to “play an endless satire upon Western assumptions of rationality” (Kent 692). Signifying alone does not kill the assumptions. As Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us in Mis-education of the Negro (1933), some of the assumptions find fertile ground in African American minds. [1]
In various combat zones, refusal to abandon the ideals and the authority of African American traditions puts one at risk. One becomes an outsider who is inside. One must be brave and ready to pay the price, even if the price is one’s sanity or one’s life. Activists who are not pimps know that. They do not confuse a combat zone with the theatre. For what does it profit a person to perform intellectual minstrelsy for the delight of the media and the academic “gods” who contend human suffering is merely symbolic? One reductive answer, of course, is a five-letter word: money.
As Ann duCille remarked in Skin Trade (1996), we do live in “ a country where ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism, heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism are on the rise” (172), and “the best thing we can do for ourselves and our country…is exactly to deromanticize it” (173). In my work with literature, writing, and people, I find duCille’s insights are pragmatic; they are consonant with my choice as an African American Southern male and my penchant for deromanticizing things in the spirit of David Walker. Wretchedness is still many years remote from resolution. Some Black Arts Movement ideas do influence my behavior in the combat zones created by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” [The American Scholar 77.3 ( 2008): 32-42], by calls to abandon our history in post-racial revisions, and by arguments that we should cast our expressive traditions prematurely into the machine of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). Those specifiable zones are minute in the context of the vast zones constituted by change itself, zones that evade naming. In those spaces, a soldier must depend on folk wisdom and common sense.
Ancestral integrity bids me to acknowledge that my ideas about combat zones are derived from accepting the imperatives in Gwendolyn Brooks’ magnificent sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle”. I am likewise indebted to Mary Louise Pratt’s speech “Arts of the Contact Zone” and to her description of those zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1). These spaces where people communicate inside and across cultures have crossroads that can be color-coded. Decisions about oppositions and dilemmas must be made there and then negotiated on fields where one can only hope mutual respect obtains. Nothing is guaranteed. Dealing with traditions and their revisions, however, obligates one to deal with an actuality that Pratt chose not to emphasize: the psychological violence that marks cultural encounters.[2]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we are embroiled in combat zones that the Internet, its social networks, and litigation regarding intellectual property highlight, and our battles have much to do with ideas about access, hegemony, the rites of capitalism, and authority. From elite sites that pretend to be race-free, both in print and online, we are told LITERATURE must be segregated by philosophical and linguistic sleight-of-hand from such democratic expressive categories as “writing” or “speech” (that is, speech associated with oral traditions). LITERATURE is a saintly commodity. Pray tell us how white bullshit can be.
In “Literacy and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn Rodgers” [Drumvoices 4.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1994/95): 62-65], I assigned “criticism to the realm of the pedagogy of the oppressed, because language is a political instrument”(63). Carolyn Rodgers’ four touchstone essays in Negro Digest and Black World between 1969 and 1971[3] obligate us to acknowledge how expertly she exploited the vernacular and illustrated the potential of speech act theory in promoting literacy. Rodgers addressed how the folk, whoever they are, use drylongso intuitions “as fundamental ingredients of reality and creativity as they construct their worlds” (63). In reclaiming what must still be dealt with in combat zones, perhaps we can finally acknowledge that Rodgers, a gifted poet, disclosed “crucial aspects of language’s behavior for those who would attain literacy in a space that is decidedly multiethnic” (65).[4] Perhaps we can acknowledge that her critical legacy has lasting value.
In 2011, we might ask ourselves whether cyberspace and advancing technologies are diminishing (or destroying) a tradition of black writing which had for a long time used both drylongso intuitions and rigorous scholarship as modes of interpretation.[5] Often life not literature was the object of interpretation. Are new technologies replacing it with traditions, freely embraced now by older and younger Americans, which are marked by effortless and non-critical consumption that was rarely countenanced by many Black Arts/Black Aesthetic thinkers? Can serious examination and reclaiming of what was positive, progressive, and black between 1960 and 1975 (imagined beginning and end points) help us to retard the downsizing of American critical thought and imagination?
Serious action in combat zones requires that we consider such questions. Serious action precludes nostalgia for a past that brought “culture” to the foreground but gave attention, in less obvious ways, to African American interest in the use and abuse of the sciences; black enterprise; nuclear proliferation; ending cycles of welfare, criminalization and poverty;, deliberate miseducation and vile uses of disinformation; invisible racism and benign genocide; alternative fuel sources; world affairs military and non-military, health care and the quality of human life. It is the less obvious that we should acknowledge and cultivate. From my perspective, we must acknowledge our indebtedness to an imperfect past (which included paradigms independent from the limits of Eurocentricisms and Afrocentricisms) and balance that imperfect past with dedicated acknowledgement of our oppositional roles in building a future. We must make hard decisions about who are our allies and who are our enemies as we deal with traditions and the inevitability of change. It is easy to become promiscuous in our intimacies with alienating methodologies and ideologies. Obviously we need to know who are our comrades, who can we trust to participate in our projects in black writing that extend beyond narrowly defined “literature” and creative expressions ; obviously, we need to be relentless in identifying our enemies, those who would destroy our memories and practices of tradition, or silence our utterance and make their terrorism legitimate by virtue of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. We must know our positions, our loyalties, and our beliefs that are justifications for battle in the combat zones of the intellectual and the practical. That we have traditions worth fighting for is beyond dispute.
Hortense Spillers partially mapped the territory of conflict in her essay, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date:”
We could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative intellectual has been more hesitant than not to acknowledge precisely where and how she “is coming from” and in what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the historical material. A more efficacious critique, or, I should say, one that is less loaded with pretenses and pretensions, altogether depends on such acknowledgements (449-450).[6]
I respect Spillers’ observation about hesitance, because it strengthens belief that creative intellectuals of all colors and in all locations should acknowledge where they are coming from. Given that American institutions of higher education rarely acknowledge that our nation is a post-colonial empire, that its social compact is a racial contract, or that its Constitution was ratified as a proslavery document which still legitimates deceptive forms of “enslavement,” they are de facto sites of combat and contact. Acknowledgement is only provisional evidence that a person is a potential friend or foe; the proof of the pudding is extended contact.
The tradition of black writing teaches me not to be stupidly colorblind. I know that skin-privilege cards are played more frequently than race cards both within and outside of spaces of education, social policy, cultural production, labor, and sports. Thus, I demand the improbable: others in the combat zone of traditions should bluntly acknowledge their designs and give a name to their complex ideologies. Sustained skepticism is a good policy or habit of mind.
Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon was at once necessary and limited in its duration. Nevertheless, both movements, in concert with the very old struggles for civil rights and self-determination (cultural and political nationalism) effectively exposed the nature of hypocrisy and hegemony in our republic which is not a democracy in the classic sense. As far as our tradition of black writing is concerned, I would argue that “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard Wright, “Myth of a Negro Literature” and “Black Writing” by LeRoi Jones, Ishmael Reed’s introduction in 19 Necromancers from Now, Stephen Henderson’s “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown” in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Hoyt W. Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” are crucial direction-scores to play according to one’s skills. Ishmael Reed did not lie when he proclaimed writing is fighting.
These words of wisdom from the “tradition” are but a small fraction of the ammo I need for combat. Every woman and man who struggles to write (to be an engaged writer) must gather her or his own arsenal of weapons. The arsenal must contain great amounts of interdisciplinary information, especially if the struggling writer is also a teacher. Items for the armory must be gathered by independent critical reading and critical thinking. Truth be told, acquiring weapons from various educational programs and communal discussions is necessary but not sufficient. The best instruments are forged in the discipline of one’s mind as Margaret Walker’s remembered voice intones “For My People” in the background. I acknowledge this is merely an opinion, neither a prescription nor an imperative. As far as tradition and acknowledgement in combat zones is a future priority, it is less than amazing that many of my comrades are not black and many of my enemies are not white in the permanent racial wars that give our nation its unique flavor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
WORKS CITED
Kent, George E. “Ethnic Impact in American Literature.” Black Voices. Ed. Abraham Chapman.
New York: Mentor, 1968. 690-679. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise.”Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991. 33-40.
3 June 2011. Web.
Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 428-470. Print.
[1] See Sandra Adell. Double-Consciousness/Double-Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Adell argued that while Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker, Jr. do not succeed in “their emancipatory goal of freeing Afro-American literature from the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses,” they do “bring into sharp relief what can best be described as a nostalgia for tradition”(137). Adell’s own nostalgia for hegemony led her to confuse literature with theory and to misidentify what Gates and Baker were growing in their respective gardens.
[2] In Autobiography and Black Identity Politics, Kenneth Mostern proposes that if a “general” United States popular culture does exist, it is “ ‘African,’ having been infused with the performance styles and musical beats of people of African descent for centuries to the point that these styles are clearly a large part of all performing traditions” (19). It seems that we find greater acknowledgement of his proposal in discussions of music than we find in racialized literary discourses about words. We find no acknowledgement of his proposal in the violence of American politics.
[3] Those essays are “Black Poetry ---Where It’s At.” Negro Digest 18.11 (1969): 7-16; “The Literature of Black.” Black World 19.8 (1970):5-11; “Breakforth. In Deed.” Black World 19.11 (1970): 13-22; “Uh Nat’chal Thang –the WHOLE TRUTH –US.” Black World 20.11 (1971): 4-14.
[4] Reading Elizabeth A. Flynn’s “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-69 can deepen our thinking about the combat zone wherein Rodgers did battle. Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938, 1976) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) are useful for studies of the tension between what is aesthetic and what is political in pedagogy and praxis and for knowing who our potential allies might be. For those who say they are interested in the historical importance of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic moment, acknowledgement must be given by reading Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1976, 1981). Fowler was one of the first people in higher education to accord the moment serious attention in teaching and writing and to use the concept of culture in a global sense that still resonates.
[5] Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) is a brilliant account of black and critical writing practices between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon.
[6] We note that Spillers refers to a black creative intellectual who is positioned “between a putative community on the one hand and the politics and discussions of the predominantly white academy on the other”(449). We do have among us black, creative, and intelligent people who realize that the white academy has no obligation or interest in dealing honestly with masses of conflict-marked people who are “have-nots.” Spillers makes it very clear that acknowledgement ought not be confused with commitment; brutally honest acknowledgement is very much needed to minimize the power of myth in the American Dream as we struggle to discover the “truth” in the American Nightmare. I am not optimistic that acknowledgement without commitment to the “have-nots” can give birth to anything other than new and deadly intellectual games. For that reason, all intellectuals who proclaim interest in African American culture should acknowledge whether they are serving the needs of people or the needs of institutions.
Tradition and Acknowledgement in Combat Zones
Our tradition of black writing is coterminous with the tradition of black literature; whether we speak of literature or of writing depends on how we choose to position our necessary and creative acts of expression. Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script (handwriting) or print (mechanical reproduction) or cyberspace (digital imaging). On the other hand, literature (which embraces a dimension named orature or oral literature) refers to deliberately isolated instances of writing. Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature is constituted by fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, and the sound-crafting of lyrics by such artists as Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson and Marvin Gaye. Our literature includes blurred genres (mixed media) in want of adequate description. Our robust traditions of orature, literature, and music cause problems in the conduct of everyday life, not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable according to our needs. In turn, they demand that we acknowledge our ideologies that hibernate underground.
My critical thinking about writing and literature and my stance of being post-nothing and pre-future were shaped by the yoking of the cultural and the political in struggles for human and civil rights, for agency, and for conflicting values implicit in Black Arts/Black Aesthetic projects. The quality and quantity of affirmative African American ideas and creations do change. Emphases shift. It might be argued, however, that motives for affirmation of self and group identity are more stable and slower in changing than the expressions associated with them. Although belief in the wonderful illusion of “the black community” and its solidarity in America has given way to accepting the contentious realities of intra-ethnic fragmentation and synthesis (diasporic sprawl) and even hatred, I will not abandon some ancestral values always present in the unfinished enterprise labeled the Black Aesthetic. “Ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe” enable us to “play an endless satire upon Western assumptions of rationality” (Kent 692). Signifying alone does not kill the assumptions. As Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us in Mis-education of the Negro (1933), some of the assumptions find fertile ground in African American minds. [1]
In various combat zones, refusal to abandon the ideals and the authority of African American traditions puts one at risk. One becomes an outsider who is inside. One must be brave and ready to pay the price, even if the price is one’s sanity or one’s life. Activists who are not pimps know that. They do not confuse a combat zone with the theatre. For what does it profit a person to perform intellectual minstrelsy for the delight of the media and the academic “gods” who contend human suffering is merely symbolic? One reductive answer, of course, is a five-letter word: money.
As Ann duCille remarked in Skin Trade (1996), we do live in “ a country where ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism, heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism are on the rise” (172), and “the best thing we can do for ourselves and our country…is exactly to deromanticize it” (173). In my work with literature, writing, and people, I find duCille’s insights are pragmatic; they are consonant with my choice as an African American Southern male and my penchant for deromanticizing things in the spirit of David Walker. Wretchedness is still many years remote from resolution. Some Black Arts Movement ideas do influence my behavior in the combat zones created by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” [The American Scholar 77.3 ( 2008): 32-42], by calls to abandon our history in post-racial revisions, and by arguments that we should cast our expressive traditions prematurely into the machine of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). Those specifiable zones are minute in the context of the vast zones constituted by change itself, zones that evade naming. In those spaces, a soldier must depend on folk wisdom and common sense.
Ancestral integrity bids me to acknowledge that my ideas about combat zones are derived from accepting the imperatives in Gwendolyn Brooks’ magnificent sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle”. I am likewise indebted to Mary Louise Pratt’s speech “Arts of the Contact Zone” and to her description of those zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1). These spaces where people communicate inside and across cultures have crossroads that can be color-coded. Decisions about oppositions and dilemmas must be made there and then negotiated on fields where one can only hope mutual respect obtains. Nothing is guaranteed. Dealing with traditions and their revisions, however, obligates one to deal with an actuality that Pratt chose not to emphasize: the psychological violence that marks cultural encounters.[2]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we are embroiled in combat zones that the Internet, its social networks, and litigation regarding intellectual property highlight, and our battles have much to do with ideas about access, hegemony, the rites of capitalism, and authority. From elite sites that pretend to be race-free, both in print and online, we are told LITERATURE must be segregated by philosophical and linguistic sleight-of-hand from such democratic expressive categories as “writing” or “speech” (that is, speech associated with oral traditions). LITERATURE is a saintly commodity. Pray tell us how white bullshit can be.
In “Literacy and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn Rodgers” [Drumvoices 4.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1994/95): 62-65], I assigned “criticism to the realm of the pedagogy of the oppressed, because language is a political instrument”(63). Carolyn Rodgers’ four touchstone essays in Negro Digest and Black World between 1969 and 1971[3] obligate us to acknowledge how expertly she exploited the vernacular and illustrated the potential of speech act theory in promoting literacy. Rodgers addressed how the folk, whoever they are, use drylongso intuitions “as fundamental ingredients of reality and creativity as they construct their worlds” (63). In reclaiming what must still be dealt with in combat zones, perhaps we can finally acknowledge that Rodgers, a gifted poet, disclosed “crucial aspects of language’s behavior for those who would attain literacy in a space that is decidedly multiethnic” (65).[4] Perhaps we can acknowledge that her critical legacy has lasting value.
In 2011, we might ask ourselves whether cyberspace and advancing technologies are diminishing (or destroying) a tradition of black writing which had for a long time used both drylongso intuitions and rigorous scholarship as modes of interpretation.[5] Often life not literature was the object of interpretation. Are new technologies replacing it with traditions, freely embraced now by older and younger Americans, which are marked by effortless and non-critical consumption that was rarely countenanced by many Black Arts/Black Aesthetic thinkers? Can serious examination and reclaiming of what was positive, progressive, and black between 1960 and 1975 (imagined beginning and end points) help us to retard the downsizing of American critical thought and imagination?
Serious action in combat zones requires that we consider such questions. Serious action precludes nostalgia for a past that brought “culture” to the foreground but gave attention, in less obvious ways, to African American interest in the use and abuse of the sciences; black enterprise; nuclear proliferation; ending cycles of welfare, criminalization and poverty;, deliberate miseducation and vile uses of disinformation; invisible racism and benign genocide; alternative fuel sources; world affairs military and non-military, health care and the quality of human life. It is the less obvious that we should acknowledge and cultivate. From my perspective, we must acknowledge our indebtedness to an imperfect past (which included paradigms independent from the limits of Eurocentricisms and Afrocentricisms) and balance that imperfect past with dedicated acknowledgement of our oppositional roles in building a future. We must make hard decisions about who are our allies and who are our enemies as we deal with traditions and the inevitability of change. It is easy to become promiscuous in our intimacies with alienating methodologies and ideologies. Obviously we need to know who are our comrades, who can we trust to participate in our projects in black writing that extend beyond narrowly defined “literature” and creative expressions ; obviously, we need to be relentless in identifying our enemies, those who would destroy our memories and practices of tradition, or silence our utterance and make their terrorism legitimate by virtue of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. We must know our positions, our loyalties, and our beliefs that are justifications for battle in the combat zones of the intellectual and the practical. That we have traditions worth fighting for is beyond dispute.
Hortense Spillers partially mapped the territory of conflict in her essay, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date:”
We could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative intellectual has been more hesitant than not to acknowledge precisely where and how she “is coming from” and in what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the historical material. A more efficacious critique, or, I should say, one that is less loaded with pretenses and pretensions, altogether depends on such acknowledgements (449-450).[6]
I respect Spillers’ observation about hesitance, because it strengthens belief that creative intellectuals of all colors and in all locations should acknowledge where they are coming from. Given that American institutions of higher education rarely acknowledge that our nation is a post-colonial empire, that its social compact is a racial contract, or that its Constitution was ratified as a proslavery document which still legitimates deceptive forms of “enslavement,” they are de facto sites of combat and contact. Acknowledgement is only provisional evidence that a person is a potential friend or foe; the proof of the pudding is extended contact.
The tradition of black writing teaches me not to be stupidly colorblind. I know that skin-privilege cards are played more frequently than race cards both within and outside of spaces of education, social policy, cultural production, labor, and sports. Thus, I demand the improbable: others in the combat zone of traditions should bluntly acknowledge their designs and give a name to their complex ideologies. Sustained skepticism is a good policy or habit of mind.
Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon was at once necessary and limited in its duration. Nevertheless, both movements, in concert with the very old struggles for civil rights and self-determination (cultural and political nationalism) effectively exposed the nature of hypocrisy and hegemony in our republic which is not a democracy in the classic sense. As far as our tradition of black writing is concerned, I would argue that “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard Wright, “Myth of a Negro Literature” and “Black Writing” by LeRoi Jones, Ishmael Reed’s introduction in 19 Necromancers from Now, Stephen Henderson’s “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown” in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Hoyt W. Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” are crucial direction-scores to play according to one’s skills. Ishmael Reed did not lie when he proclaimed writing is fighting.
These words of wisdom from the “tradition” are but a small fraction of the ammo I need for combat. Every woman and man who struggles to write (to be an engaged writer) must gather her or his own arsenal of weapons. The arsenal must contain great amounts of interdisciplinary information, especially if the struggling writer is also a teacher. Items for the armory must be gathered by independent critical reading and critical thinking. Truth be told, acquiring weapons from various educational programs and communal discussions is necessary but not sufficient. The best instruments are forged in the discipline of one’s mind as Margaret Walker’s remembered voice intones “For My People” in the background. I acknowledge this is merely an opinion, neither a prescription nor an imperative. As far as tradition and acknowledgement in combat zones is a future priority, it is less than amazing that many of my comrades are not black and many of my enemies are not white in the permanent racial wars that give our nation its unique flavor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
WORKS CITED
Kent, George E. “Ethnic Impact in American Literature.” Black Voices. Ed. Abraham Chapman.
New York: Mentor, 1968. 690-679. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise.”Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991. 33-40.
3 June 2011. Web.
Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 428-470. Print.
[1] See Sandra Adell. Double-Consciousness/Double-Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Adell argued that while Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker, Jr. do not succeed in “their emancipatory goal of freeing Afro-American literature from the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses,” they do “bring into sharp relief what can best be described as a nostalgia for tradition”(137). Adell’s own nostalgia for hegemony led her to confuse literature with theory and to misidentify what Gates and Baker were growing in their respective gardens.
[2] In Autobiography and Black Identity Politics, Kenneth Mostern proposes that if a “general” United States popular culture does exist, it is “ ‘African,’ having been infused with the performance styles and musical beats of people of African descent for centuries to the point that these styles are clearly a large part of all performing traditions” (19). It seems that we find greater acknowledgement of his proposal in discussions of music than we find in racialized literary discourses about words. We find no acknowledgement of his proposal in the violence of American politics.
[3] Those essays are “Black Poetry ---Where It’s At.” Negro Digest 18.11 (1969): 7-16; “The Literature of Black.” Black World 19.8 (1970):5-11; “Breakforth. In Deed.” Black World 19.11 (1970): 13-22; “Uh Nat’chal Thang –the WHOLE TRUTH –US.” Black World 20.11 (1971): 4-14.
[4] Reading Elizabeth A. Flynn’s “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-69 can deepen our thinking about the combat zone wherein Rodgers did battle. Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938, 1976) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) are useful for studies of the tension between what is aesthetic and what is political in pedagogy and praxis and for knowing who our potential allies might be. For those who say they are interested in the historical importance of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic moment, acknowledgement must be given by reading Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1976, 1981). Fowler was one of the first people in higher education to accord the moment serious attention in teaching and writing and to use the concept of culture in a global sense that still resonates.
[5] Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) is a brilliant account of black and critical writing practices between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon.
[6] We note that Spillers refers to a black creative intellectual who is positioned “between a putative community on the one hand and the politics and discussions of the predominantly white academy on the other”(449). We do have among us black, creative, and intelligent people who realize that the white academy has no obligation or interest in dealing honestly with masses of conflict-marked people who are “have-nots.” Spillers makes it very clear that acknowledgement ought not be confused with commitment; brutally honest acknowledgement is very much needed to minimize the power of myth in the American Dream as we struggle to discover the “truth” in the American Nightmare. I am not optimistic that acknowledgement without commitment to the “have-nots” can give birth to anything other than new and deadly intellectual games. For that reason, all intellectuals who proclaim interest in African American culture should acknowledge whether they are serving the needs of people or the needs of institutions.
Tradition and Acknowledgement in Combat Zones
Our tradition of black writing is coterminous with the tradition of black literature; whether we speak of literature or of writing depends on how we choose to position our necessary and creative acts of expression. Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script (handwriting) or print (mechanical reproduction) or cyberspace (digital imaging). On the other hand, literature (which embraces a dimension named orature or oral literature) refers to deliberately isolated instances of writing. Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature is constituted by fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, and the sound-crafting of lyrics by such artists as Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson and Marvin Gaye. Our literature includes blurred genres (mixed media) in want of adequate description. Our robust traditions of orature, literature, and music cause problems in the conduct of everyday life, not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable according to our needs. In turn, they demand that we acknowledge our ideologies that hibernate underground.
My critical thinking about writing and literature and my stance of being post-nothing and pre-future were shaped by the yoking of the cultural and the political in struggles for human and civil rights, for agency, and for conflicting values implicit in Black Arts/Black Aesthetic projects. The quality and quantity of affirmative African American ideas and creations do change. Emphases shift. It might be argued, however, that motives for affirmation of self and group identity are more stable and slower in changing than the expressions associated with them. Although belief in the wonderful illusion of “the black community” and its solidarity in America has given way to accepting the contentious realities of intra-ethnic fragmentation and synthesis (diasporic sprawl) and even hatred, I will not abandon some ancestral values always present in the unfinished enterprise labeled the Black Aesthetic. “Ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe” enable us to “play an endless satire upon Western assumptions of rationality” (Kent 692). Signifying alone does not kill the assumptions. As Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us in Mis-education of the Negro (1933), some of the assumptions find fertile ground in African American minds. [1]
In various combat zones, refusal to abandon the ideals and the authority of African American traditions puts one at risk. One becomes an outsider who is inside. One must be brave and ready to pay the price, even if the price is one’s sanity or one’s life. Activists who are not pimps know that. They do not confuse a combat zone with the theatre. For what does it profit a person to perform intellectual minstrelsy for the delight of the media and the academic “gods” who contend human suffering is merely symbolic? One reductive answer, of course, is a five-letter word: money.
As Ann duCille remarked in Skin Trade (1996), we do live in “ a country where ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism, heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism are on the rise” (172), and “the best thing we can do for ourselves and our country…is exactly to deromanticize it” (173). In my work with literature, writing, and people, I find duCille’s insights are pragmatic; they are consonant with my choice as an African American Southern male and my penchant for deromanticizing things in the spirit of David Walker. Wretchedness is still many years remote from resolution. Some Black Arts Movement ideas do influence my behavior in the combat zones created by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” [The American Scholar 77.3 ( 2008): 32-42], by calls to abandon our history in post-racial revisions, and by arguments that we should cast our expressive traditions prematurely into the machine of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). Those specifiable zones are minute in the context of the vast zones constituted by change itself, zones that evade naming. In those spaces, a soldier must depend on folk wisdom and common sense.
Ancestral integrity bids me to acknowledge that my ideas about combat zones are derived from accepting the imperatives in Gwendolyn Brooks’ magnificent sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle”. I am likewise indebted to Mary Louise Pratt’s speech “Arts of the Contact Zone” and to her description of those zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1). These spaces where people communicate inside and across cultures have crossroads that can be color-coded. Decisions about oppositions and dilemmas must be made there and then negotiated on fields where one can only hope mutual respect obtains. Nothing is guaranteed. Dealing with traditions and their revisions, however, obligates one to deal with an actuality that Pratt chose not to emphasize: the psychological violence that marks cultural encounters.[2]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we are embroiled in combat zones that the Internet, its social networks, and litigation regarding intellectual property highlight, and our battles have much to do with ideas about access, hegemony, the rites of capitalism, and authority. From elite sites that pretend to be race-free, both in print and online, we are told LITERATURE must be segregated by philosophical and linguistic sleight-of-hand from such democratic expressive categories as “writing” or “speech” (that is, speech associated with oral traditions). LITERATURE is a saintly commodity. Pray tell us how white bullshit can be.
In “Literacy and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn Rodgers” [Drumvoices 4.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1994/95): 62-65], I assigned “criticism to the realm of the pedagogy of the oppressed, because language is a political instrument”(63). Carolyn Rodgers’ four touchstone essays in Negro Digest and Black World between 1969 and 1971[3] obligate us to acknowledge how expertly she exploited the vernacular and illustrated the potential of speech act theory in promoting literacy. Rodgers addressed how the folk, whoever they are, use drylongso intuitions “as fundamental ingredients of reality and creativity as they construct their worlds” (63). In reclaiming what must still be dealt with in combat zones, perhaps we can finally acknowledge that Rodgers, a gifted poet, disclosed “crucial aspects of language’s behavior for those who would attain literacy in a space that is decidedly multiethnic” (65).[4] Perhaps we can acknowledge that her critical legacy has lasting value.
In 2011, we might ask ourselves whether cyberspace and advancing technologies are diminishing (or destroying) a tradition of black writing which had for a long time used both drylongso intuitions and rigorous scholarship as modes of interpretation.[5] Often life not literature was the object of interpretation. Are new technologies replacing it with traditions, freely embraced now by older and younger Americans, which are marked by effortless and non-critical consumption that was rarely countenanced by many Black Arts/Black Aesthetic thinkers? Can serious examination and reclaiming of what was positive, progressive, and black between 1960 and 1975 (imagined beginning and end points) help us to retard the downsizing of American critical thought and imagination?
Serious action in combat zones requires that we consider such questions. Serious action precludes nostalgia for a past that brought “culture” to the foreground but gave attention, in less obvious ways, to African American interest in the use and abuse of the sciences; black enterprise; nuclear proliferation; ending cycles of welfare, criminalization and poverty;, deliberate miseducation and vile uses of disinformation; invisible racism and benign genocide; alternative fuel sources; world affairs military and non-military, health care and the quality of human life. It is the less obvious that we should acknowledge and cultivate. From my perspective, we must acknowledge our indebtedness to an imperfect past (which included paradigms independent from the limits of Eurocentricisms and Afrocentricisms) and balance that imperfect past with dedicated acknowledgement of our oppositional roles in building a future. We must make hard decisions about who are our allies and who are our enemies as we deal with traditions and the inevitability of change. It is easy to become promiscuous in our intimacies with alienating methodologies and ideologies. Obviously we need to know who are our comrades, who can we trust to participate in our projects in black writing that extend beyond narrowly defined “literature” and creative expressions ; obviously, we need to be relentless in identifying our enemies, those who would destroy our memories and practices of tradition, or silence our utterance and make their terrorism legitimate by virtue of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. We must know our positions, our loyalties, and our beliefs that are justifications for battle in the combat zones of the intellectual and the practical. That we have traditions worth fighting for is beyond dispute.
Hortense Spillers partially mapped the territory of conflict in her essay, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date:”
We could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative intellectual has been more hesitant than not to acknowledge precisely where and how she “is coming from” and in what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the historical material. A more efficacious critique, or, I should say, one that is less loaded with pretenses and pretensions, altogether depends on such acknowledgements (449-450).[6]
I respect Spillers’ observation about hesitance, because it strengthens belief that creative intellectuals of all colors and in all locations should acknowledge where they are coming from. Given that American institutions of higher education rarely acknowledge that our nation is a post-colonial empire, that its social compact is a racial contract, or that its Constitution was ratified as a proslavery document which still legitimates deceptive forms of “enslavement,” they are de facto sites of combat and contact. Acknowledgement is only provisional evidence that a person is a potential friend or foe; the proof of the pudding is extended contact.
The tradition of black writing teaches me not to be stupidly colorblind. I know that skin-privilege cards are played more frequently than race cards both within and outside of spaces of education, social policy, cultural production, labor, and sports. Thus, I demand the improbable: others in the combat zone of traditions should bluntly acknowledge their designs and give a name to their complex ideologies. Sustained skepticism is a good policy or habit of mind.
Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon was at once necessary and limited in its duration. Nevertheless, both movements, in concert with the very old struggles for civil rights and self-determination (cultural and political nationalism) effectively exposed the nature of hypocrisy and hegemony in our republic which is not a democracy in the classic sense. As far as our tradition of black writing is concerned, I would argue that “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard Wright, “Myth of a Negro Literature” and “Black Writing” by LeRoi Jones, Ishmael Reed’s introduction in 19 Necromancers from Now, Stephen Henderson’s “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown” in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Hoyt W. Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” are crucial direction-scores to play according to one’s skills. Ishmael Reed did not lie when he proclaimed writing is fighting.
These words of wisdom from the “tradition” are but a small fraction of the ammo I need for combat. Every woman and man who struggles to write (to be an engaged writer) must gather her or his own arsenal of weapons. The arsenal must contain great amounts of interdisciplinary information, especially if the struggling writer is also a teacher. Items for the armory must be gathered by independent critical reading and critical thinking. Truth be told, acquiring weapons from various educational programs and communal discussions is necessary but not sufficient. The best instruments are forged in the discipline of one’s mind as Margaret Walker’s remembered voice intones “For My People” in the background. I acknowledge this is merely an opinion, neither a prescription nor an imperative. As far as tradition and acknowledgement in combat zones is a future priority, it is less than amazing that many of my comrades are not black and many of my enemies are not white in the permanent racial wars that give our nation its unique flavor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
WORKS CITED
Kent, George E. “Ethnic Impact in American Literature.” Black Voices. Ed. Abraham Chapman.
New York: Mentor, 1968. 690-679. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise.”Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991. 33-40.
3 June 2011. Web.
Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 428-470. Print.
[1] See Sandra Adell. Double-Consciousness/Double-Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Adell argued that while Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker, Jr. do not succeed in “their emancipatory goal of freeing Afro-American literature from the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses,” they do “bring into sharp relief what can best be described as a nostalgia for tradition”(137). Adell’s own nostalgia for hegemony led her to confuse literature with theory and to misidentify what Gates and Baker were growing in their respective gardens.
[2] In Autobiography and Black Identity Politics, Kenneth Mostern proposes that if a “general” United States popular culture does exist, it is “ ‘African,’ having been infused with the performance styles and musical beats of people of African descent for centuries to the point that these styles are clearly a large part of all performing traditions” (19). It seems that we find greater acknowledgement of his proposal in discussions of music than we find in racialized literary discourses about words. We find no acknowledgement of his proposal in the violence of American politics.
[3] Those essays are “Black Poetry ---Where It’s At.” Negro Digest 18.11 (1969): 7-16; “The Literature of Black.” Black World 19.8 (1970):5-11; “Breakforth. In Deed.” Black World 19.11 (1970): 13-22; “Uh Nat’chal Thang –the WHOLE TRUTH –US.” Black World 20.11 (1971): 4-14.
[4] Reading Elizabeth A. Flynn’s “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-69 can deepen our thinking about the combat zone wherein Rodgers did battle. Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938, 1976) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) are useful for studies of the tension between what is aesthetic and what is political in pedagogy and praxis and for knowing who our potential allies might be. For those who say they are interested in the historical importance of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic moment, acknowledgement must be given by reading Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1976, 1981). Fowler was one of the first people in higher education to accord the moment serious attention in teaching and writing and to use the concept of culture in a global sense that still resonates.
[5] Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) is a brilliant account of black and critical writing practices between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon.
[6] We note that Spillers refers to a black creative intellectual who is positioned “between a putative community on the one hand and the politics and discussions of the predominantly white academy on the other”(449). We do have among us black, creative, and intelligent people who realize that the white academy has no obligation or interest in dealing honestly with masses of conflict-marked people who are “have-nots.” Spillers makes it very clear that acknowledgement ought not be confused with commitment; brutally honest acknowledgement is very much needed to minimize the power of myth in the American Dream as we struggle to discover the “truth” in the American Nightmare. I am not optimistic that acknowledgement without commitment to the “have-nots” can give birth to anything other than new and deadly intellectual games. For that reason, all intellectuals who proclaim interest in African American culture should acknowledge whether they are serving the needs of people or the needs of institutions.
Tradition and Acknowledgement in Combat Zones
Our tradition of black writing is coterminous with the tradition of black literature; whether we speak of literature or of writing depends on how we choose to position our necessary and creative acts of expression. Writing refers to specific uses of verbal literacy either in script (handwriting) or print (mechanical reproduction) or cyberspace (digital imaging). On the other hand, literature (which embraces a dimension named orature or oral literature) refers to deliberately isolated instances of writing. Typical examples of writing are emails or letters between friends, captions linked to images, folklore, personal statements attached to applications, blogs and legal documents. Literature is constituted by fiction and non-fiction, play scripts and screenplays, poems, and the sound-crafting of lyrics by such artists as Billie Holiday, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson and Marvin Gaye. Our literature includes blurred genres (mixed media) in want of adequate description. Our robust traditions of orature, literature, and music cause problems in the conduct of everyday life, not because they are arbitrary but because we make them interchangeable according to our needs. In turn, they demand that we acknowledge our ideologies that hibernate underground.
My critical thinking about writing and literature and my stance of being post-nothing and pre-future were shaped by the yoking of the cultural and the political in struggles for human and civil rights, for agency, and for conflicting values implicit in Black Arts/Black Aesthetic projects. The quality and quantity of affirmative African American ideas and creations do change. Emphases shift. It might be argued, however, that motives for affirmation of self and group identity are more stable and slower in changing than the expressions associated with them. Although belief in the wonderful illusion of “the black community” and its solidarity in America has given way to accepting the contentious realities of intra-ethnic fragmentation and synthesis (diasporic sprawl) and even hatred, I will not abandon some ancestral values always present in the unfinished enterprise labeled the Black Aesthetic. “Ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe” enable us to “play an endless satire upon Western assumptions of rationality” (Kent 692). Signifying alone does not kill the assumptions. As Dr. Carter G. Woodson warned us in Mis-education of the Negro (1933), some of the assumptions find fertile ground in African American minds. [1]
In various combat zones, refusal to abandon the ideals and the authority of African American traditions puts one at risk. One becomes an outsider who is inside. One must be brave and ready to pay the price, even if the price is one’s sanity or one’s life. Activists who are not pimps know that. They do not confuse a combat zone with the theatre. For what does it profit a person to perform intellectual minstrelsy for the delight of the media and the academic “gods” who contend human suffering is merely symbolic? One reductive answer, of course, is a five-letter word: money.
As Ann duCille remarked in Skin Trade (1996), we do live in “ a country where ethnic rivalry, race hatred, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism, heterosexism, and even neo-Nazism are on the rise” (172), and “the best thing we can do for ourselves and our country…is exactly to deromanticize it” (173). In my work with literature, writing, and people, I find duCille’s insights are pragmatic; they are consonant with my choice as an African American Southern male and my penchant for deromanticizing things in the spirit of David Walker. Wretchedness is still many years remote from resolution. Some Black Arts Movement ideas do influence my behavior in the combat zones created by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative” [The American Scholar 77.3 ( 2008): 32-42], by calls to abandon our history in post-racial revisions, and by arguments that we should cast our expressive traditions prematurely into the machine of Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011). Those specifiable zones are minute in the context of the vast zones constituted by change itself, zones that evade naming. In those spaces, a soldier must depend on folk wisdom and common sense.
Ancestral integrity bids me to acknowledge that my ideas about combat zones are derived from accepting the imperatives in Gwendolyn Brooks’ magnificent sonnet “First Fight. Then Fiddle”. I am likewise indebted to Mary Louise Pratt’s speech “Arts of the Contact Zone” and to her description of those zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1). These spaces where people communicate inside and across cultures have crossroads that can be color-coded. Decisions about oppositions and dilemmas must be made there and then negotiated on fields where one can only hope mutual respect obtains. Nothing is guaranteed. Dealing with traditions and their revisions, however, obligates one to deal with an actuality that Pratt chose not to emphasize: the psychological violence that marks cultural encounters.[2]
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we are embroiled in combat zones that the Internet, its social networks, and litigation regarding intellectual property highlight, and our battles have much to do with ideas about access, hegemony, the rites of capitalism, and authority. From elite sites that pretend to be race-free, both in print and online, we are told LITERATURE must be segregated by philosophical and linguistic sleight-of-hand from such democratic expressive categories as “writing” or “speech” (that is, speech associated with oral traditions). LITERATURE is a saintly commodity. Pray tell us how white bullshit can be.
In “Literacy and Criticism: The Example of Carolyn Rodgers” [Drumvoices 4.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1994/95): 62-65], I assigned “criticism to the realm of the pedagogy of the oppressed, because language is a political instrument”(63). Carolyn Rodgers’ four touchstone essays in Negro Digest and Black World between 1969 and 1971[3] obligate us to acknowledge how expertly she exploited the vernacular and illustrated the potential of speech act theory in promoting literacy. Rodgers addressed how the folk, whoever they are, use drylongso intuitions “as fundamental ingredients of reality and creativity as they construct their worlds” (63). In reclaiming what must still be dealt with in combat zones, perhaps we can finally acknowledge that Rodgers, a gifted poet, disclosed “crucial aspects of language’s behavior for those who would attain literacy in a space that is decidedly multiethnic” (65).[4] Perhaps we can acknowledge that her critical legacy has lasting value.
In 2011, we might ask ourselves whether cyberspace and advancing technologies are diminishing (or destroying) a tradition of black writing which had for a long time used both drylongso intuitions and rigorous scholarship as modes of interpretation.[5] Often life not literature was the object of interpretation. Are new technologies replacing it with traditions, freely embraced now by older and younger Americans, which are marked by effortless and non-critical consumption that was rarely countenanced by many Black Arts/Black Aesthetic thinkers? Can serious examination and reclaiming of what was positive, progressive, and black between 1960 and 1975 (imagined beginning and end points) help us to retard the downsizing of American critical thought and imagination?
Serious action in combat zones requires that we consider such questions. Serious action precludes nostalgia for a past that brought “culture” to the foreground but gave attention, in less obvious ways, to African American interest in the use and abuse of the sciences; black enterprise; nuclear proliferation; ending cycles of welfare, criminalization and poverty;, deliberate miseducation and vile uses of disinformation; invisible racism and benign genocide; alternative fuel sources; world affairs military and non-military, health care and the quality of human life. It is the less obvious that we should acknowledge and cultivate. From my perspective, we must acknowledge our indebtedness to an imperfect past (which included paradigms independent from the limits of Eurocentricisms and Afrocentricisms) and balance that imperfect past with dedicated acknowledgement of our oppositional roles in building a future. We must make hard decisions about who are our allies and who are our enemies as we deal with traditions and the inevitability of change. It is easy to become promiscuous in our intimacies with alienating methodologies and ideologies. Obviously we need to know who are our comrades, who can we trust to participate in our projects in black writing that extend beyond narrowly defined “literature” and creative expressions ; obviously, we need to be relentless in identifying our enemies, those who would destroy our memories and practices of tradition, or silence our utterance and make their terrorism legitimate by virtue of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. We must know our positions, our loyalties, and our beliefs that are justifications for battle in the combat zones of the intellectual and the practical. That we have traditions worth fighting for is beyond dispute.
Hortense Spillers partially mapped the territory of conflict in her essay, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date:”
We could say with a great deal of justification that the black creative intellectual has been more hesitant than not to acknowledge precisely where and how she “is coming from” and in what ways location marks in fact a chunk of the historical material. A more efficacious critique, or, I should say, one that is less loaded with pretenses and pretensions, altogether depends on such acknowledgements (449-450).[6]
I respect Spillers’ observation about hesitance, because it strengthens belief that creative intellectuals of all colors and in all locations should acknowledge where they are coming from. Given that American institutions of higher education rarely acknowledge that our nation is a post-colonial empire, that its social compact is a racial contract, or that its Constitution was ratified as a proslavery document which still legitimates deceptive forms of “enslavement,” they are de facto sites of combat and contact. Acknowledgement is only provisional evidence that a person is a potential friend or foe; the proof of the pudding is extended contact.
The tradition of black writing teaches me not to be stupidly colorblind. I know that skin-privilege cards are played more frequently than race cards both within and outside of spaces of education, social policy, cultural production, labor, and sports. Thus, I demand the improbable: others in the combat zone of traditions should bluntly acknowledge their designs and give a name to their complex ideologies. Sustained skepticism is a good policy or habit of mind.
Like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon was at once necessary and limited in its duration. Nevertheless, both movements, in concert with the very old struggles for civil rights and self-determination (cultural and political nationalism) effectively exposed the nature of hypocrisy and hegemony in our republic which is not a democracy in the classic sense. As far as our tradition of black writing is concerned, I would argue that “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” by Richard Wright, “Myth of a Negro Literature” and “Black Writing” by LeRoi Jones, Ishmael Reed’s introduction in 19 Necromancers from Now, Stephen Henderson’s “Introduction: The Forms of Things Unknown” in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Hoyt W. Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison and Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory” are crucial direction-scores to play according to one’s skills. Ishmael Reed did not lie when he proclaimed writing is fighting.
These words of wisdom from the “tradition” are but a small fraction of the ammo I need for combat. Every woman and man who struggles to write (to be an engaged writer) must gather her or his own arsenal of weapons. The arsenal must contain great amounts of interdisciplinary information, especially if the struggling writer is also a teacher. Items for the armory must be gathered by independent critical reading and critical thinking. Truth be told, acquiring weapons from various educational programs and communal discussions is necessary but not sufficient. The best instruments are forged in the discipline of one’s mind as Margaret Walker’s remembered voice intones “For My People” in the background. I acknowledge this is merely an opinion, neither a prescription nor an imperative. As far as tradition and acknowledgement in combat zones is a future priority, it is less than amazing that many of my comrades are not black and many of my enemies are not white in the permanent racial wars that give our nation its unique flavor.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
WORKS CITED
Kent, George E. “Ethnic Impact in American Literature.” Black Voices. Ed. Abraham Chapman.
New York: Mentor, 1968. 690-679. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise.”Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991. 33-40.
3 June 2011. Web.
Spillers, Hortense J. “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date.” Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 428-470. Print.
[1] See Sandra Adell. Double-Consciousness/Double-Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Adell argued that while Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston A. Baker, Jr. do not succeed in “their emancipatory goal of freeing Afro-American literature from the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses,” they do “bring into sharp relief what can best be described as a nostalgia for tradition”(137). Adell’s own nostalgia for hegemony led her to confuse literature with theory and to misidentify what Gates and Baker were growing in their respective gardens.
[2] In Autobiography and Black Identity Politics, Kenneth Mostern proposes that if a “general” United States popular culture does exist, it is “ ‘African,’ having been infused with the performance styles and musical beats of people of African descent for centuries to the point that these styles are clearly a large part of all performing traditions” (19). It seems that we find greater acknowledgement of his proposal in discussions of music than we find in racialized literary discourses about words. We find no acknowledgement of his proposal in the violence of American politics.
[3] Those essays are “Black Poetry ---Where It’s At.” Negro Digest 18.11 (1969): 7-16; “The Literature of Black.” Black World 19.8 (1970):5-11; “Breakforth. In Deed.” Black World 19.11 (1970): 13-22; “Uh Nat’chal Thang –the WHOLE TRUTH –US.” Black World 20.11 (1971): 4-14.
[4] Reading Elizabeth A. Flynn’s “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-69 can deepen our thinking about the combat zone wherein Rodgers did battle. Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938, 1976) and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) are useful for studies of the tension between what is aesthetic and what is political in pedagogy and praxis and for knowing who our potential allies might be. For those who say they are interested in the historical importance of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic moment, acknowledgement must be given by reading Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1976, 1981). Fowler was one of the first people in higher education to accord the moment serious attention in teaching and writing and to use the concept of culture in a global sense that still resonates.
[5] Lawrence P. Jackson’s The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) is a brilliant account of black and critical writing practices between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic phenomenon.
[6] We note that Spillers refers to a black creative intellectual who is positioned “between a putative community on the one hand and the politics and discussions of the predominantly white academy on the other”(449). We do have among us black, creative, and intelligent people who realize that the white academy has no obligation or interest in dealing honestly with masses of conflict-marked people who are “have-nots.” Spillers makes it very clear that acknowledgement ought not be confused with commitment; brutally honest acknowledgement is very much needed to minimize the power of myth in the American Dream as we struggle to discover the “truth” in the American Nightmare. I am not optimistic that acknowledgement without commitment to the “have-nots” can give birth to anything other than new and deadly intellectual games. For that reason, all intellectuals who proclaim interest in African American culture should acknowledge whether they are serving the needs of people or the needs of institutions.
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