Donald Goines

Blog122912

 

Condemnation & Redemption: The Works of Donald Goines

 

Stallings, L. H. and Greg Thomas, eds. Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines. Baltimore: IMPRINT EDITIONS, 2011.

 

Addison Gayle, Jr. was not a signifying monkey.   Many contemporary scholars and critics ignore his existence; they dismiss his insights as strident sub-literary talk, noise not to invite to dinner at the Academic Big House.  A few critics of my generation refuse to erase him.  We do not embrace Gayle’s views without question.  We do, however, respect the historical importance and contemporary relevance of his thought.  We find his exploration of fiction in The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1975) to be bracing.  We find useful insights in the essays he collected in The Black Situation (1970), and one of those essays “Revolutionary Philosophy” seems poignant in the midst of debates about the status of the gun in the United States.  Rereading that essay casts light on issues explored in Word Hustle.

In the introduction to commentary on the works of Donald Goines, L. H. Stalling notes that Gayle  acknowledged neither the existence of street literature nor “its importance to a Black Arts or Black Power Movement” (21).  Nevertheless, Dennis Chester’s essay on Goines’ Daddy Cool (1974) recognizes the importance of contrasting Gayle’s quest for freedom, justice, and the creation of a new society with Goines’ s depiction of a new society which is deeply flawed and “whose fundamental principles are contradictory” (100-101).  Chester and other contributors to Word Hustle realize that critiques of street literature are necessary to continue the unfinished projects of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic cultural phenomenon.  As Candice Love Jackson argues in “The Paradox of Empowerment: Colonialism, Community, and Criminality in Donald Goines’s Kenyatta Series” (33-48), Goines’s works urge readers “to navigate new articulations of Black consciousness cautiously and soberly” (47).  The overseers of American literary acceptability miss a lot by trying to confine Goines to the outer reaches of the canonized plantation.  Bourgeois dismissal of Gayle as a critic and of Goines as a novelist only increases one’s appetite for a literary historical epiphany.

In one moment of reading Word Hustle, I imagined condemnation should be “con/damnation” and redemption should become “re/deepenation.”  Such linguistic sport can engender its own kind of hustle, a hustle to expose how the cunning of ex-cons who write novels (prison novels in particular) can advance dread-filled “truths” about the power of language much better than do many post-whatever novelists.  The sport can affirm hip-hop deconstruction of revolutionary dreams in fiction and become a timely enterprise for literary and cultural criticism.  Word Hustle warrants our engaging the counter-canon of American literature, the unsaintly works that boldly address certain realities of intraracial caste and class, of race-riddled sexism and homophobia, of confused descriptions of American masculinity, power and hegemony, and reform/revolutionary acts.  Like their elite and proletarian cousins, Goines’s novels do employ traditional narrative strategies, and they do belong “in non-Hegelian conversation” with criminalization and mass incarceration schemes, aesthetic smokescreens, subliminal concerns regarding praxis, economics, labor, and with the trauma of genuine historical consciousness that orthodox humanities, print or digital, desperately wish to conceal.

Literature is not salvific.  As Addison Gayle reminded us in “Revolutionary Philosophy,” some of us “dreamed not of integration but nationalism, not of a melting pot theory but of a pluralistic theory, not of a great society but a new one.  More important, we dreamed of fashioning Canaan out of the debris of American society, of erecting a nation predicated not upon the gun but upon morality, and if these dreams are hopeless, then  so too is the future of mankind” (221).  Literature can’t save us if we are determined like terrorists to destroy ourselves and everyone else.  But “in conversation,” Gayle and Goines promote recognition that the twenty-first- century world order is gangsta and ratchet. For a nice contextualization  of  “ratchet,” read Imani Perry’s “Of Degraded Talk, Digital Tongues, and A Commitment to Care,” Profession (2012): 17-24

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Our Assignment for January 1, 2013

I. Access

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_document/emanicpation_proclamation

II. Read

1) Manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation

2) The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 1862

3) John Hope Franklin's essay "The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice," which contains this noteworthy sentence: "The law itself is no longer an obstruction to justice and equality, but it is the people who live under the law who are themselves an obstruction to justice." Franklin also incorporates James Weldon Johnson's "Fifty Years" (New York Times, January 1, 1913) in his essay.

III. Remember

Forms of slavery and enslavement still exist on this planet.


Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 26, 2012
Kwanzaa Day One

Rereading Henry Van Dyke

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

v

Quare Jewish Meditations

Heilbut, Anthony. The Fan Who Knew Too Much.  New York: Alred A. Knopf, 2012.


The most valuable part of this book is Heilbut's confessional essay "The Fan Who Knew Too Much" (304-328) with its recognition that a fan is "someone who's discovered an endless storehoue of personal satisfaction" (304), the satisfaction derived primarily from the ability of the computer to "dissolve all the familiar hierarchies" (305).  A reader, however, can defeat the dissolving power of a computer by remembering that hierarchies did and shall once again exist.

The least valuable feature of this book is its lack of endnotes and bibliography, the minimal requisites if entertaining gossip about Aretha Franklin, the queer culture of gospel music, the Jewish contribution to the genre of soap opera, and quaint Jewish self-hatreds are to secure credibility.  We expect better of an author who possesses a Ph.D. from Harvard.  Perhaps we have no right to expect better from a man who has spent considerable time in the company of the gospel children.  It is sufficient that he has been slain by the Spirit and transformed from a scholar into a fan.  God is good and just.

December 16, 2012

Voices Beneath the Water: Arthenia Bates Millican (1920-2012)

 

Listen.  Be still and listen.  Be still and listen and learn something for everyday use.  Our ancestors are stern, purposeful and dignified, impatient with foibles, adamant that memory shall be. During her ninety-two years of navigating life on Earth, Arthenia Jackson Bates Millican listened faithfully. She translated the sounds of ancestral text-messages into the gestures that bespeak profound humanity and enviable modesty, into the works that one might argue leave this world somewhat better than when we arrived.  She produced seeds beneath the snow, the life-kernels we are obliged to cultivate as proof that we are worthy holding her legacy in our minds, our ears, and our hands.  Having given us a model of how to live and make contributions to humanity without pretense, having given us many lessons in altruism or the best habits of the heart, she is now speaking with the millions of voices beneath the water.  Listen to her.  Be still and listen to her. Be still, listen, and learn how best to use the gifts she gave us to do the work that is always there to be done.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 14, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salman Rushdie's Ritual Suicide

Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton.  New York: Random House, 2012.

It is rare to consider literature as a murder weapon, although in the eyes of some beholders Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) appears as the novel that killed the pretense of American innocence and ignorance in the United States. Seven decades later, the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie uses fictive biography as autobiography to commit ritual suicide. Fashioning Joseph Anton from the remains of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, Rushdie accomplishes what fatwa could not: the death of the author. Obviously, anxiety, fear, pints of guilt and gallons of spleen drove Rushdie to defend the moral rightness of The Satanic Verses. "He [Salman/Joseph] looked at himself in the mirror and loathed what he saw"(342).  What he saw was the image of an Anglo-Indian, a zigga (T. Geronimo Johnson's magnificent neologism), a male whose desire to become a British gentleman of letters could never be accomplished; thus, the man so alienated from his culture(s) as to become the Other of himself, chose the tragic action of self-murder.

Rushdie can write, can write well, even if the eloquence of his prose descends from time to time into the bowels of what is utterly arch.  But he lacks the deceptive masculinity of an Ernest Hemingway, a writer capable of making suicide the real thing. Instead, he manipulates the kindred genres of autobiography and biography to speak from the grave of being.

Rushdie's ritual suicide empowers him to let slip a truth from which much of the world retreats in fear and denial and trembling: the Sauds of Arabia are ultimately responsible for the tragedy of 9/11. As far as I know, this revelation puts the legitimacy of fatwa under erasure. For providing this choice insight about the cesspool of contemporary history, the intrepid Queen of England should tap him on head and shoulders and give him her garter.  An Anglo-Indian writer who possesses spleen enough to defy Islam deserves no less an honor.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
12/12/12

CHARLIE R. BRAXTON

As a poet, Braxton defies the premature comfort that may accompany change; his is the fierce preservation of traditions of the near past, an affirmation that genuine poetry involves tracing a people's diverse states of being and thought.  Braxton's work is an affirmation that the prophecy that lends power to the jermiad burns productively in "the suffering soul / of a real black artist." Do not ask what is real. Feel what is audacious in the flames of anger as redemption.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 10, 2011

The Death of African American Literature

THE DEATH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

John 2.18

 

Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims.

The definition of what was called Negro literature from the colonial period up to the 1960s was challenged by two of LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka's) essays ---"Myth of a Negro Literature" and "Black Writing" --in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966). Following the spirit of Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), Baraka argued successfully that Negro literature was created more for the inspection of white people than as a body of work that directly addressed the needs of African Americans; he called for black writing or black (African American) literature that would speak directly to black people. Thus, a new definition of African American literature came into being in the 1960s.

That definition prevailed until it was challenged by Trey Ellis' "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo 12.1 (1989): 233-243. By rejecting the ideological import of a Black Arts Movement definition of the literature, Ellis modified the definition to incorporate the interests of younger, often multiracial, writers who felt they could be more "mainstream" (have more aesthetic options) and not enslaved by responsibilities to the tradition associated with  a narrative of struggle as promoted by Baraka.  Without attachment to the ideological constraints of Baraka's notion of black writing, these artists could perfume themselves with exotic theories and create in brothels of free will. Ellis' essay forced a rethinking of what a definition of African American literature actually described.

While Ellis's essay received some attention and then vanished, as it were, into an outburst of writing attached more to the wishes of individual writers than to any imagined needs of a "black community," the rupture of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) has been more successful in creating uncertainty, confusion, and urgency regarding the definition of African American literature. The whiteness of blackness falls now like ancient acid rain, and the twin myths of a black community and a white community are moribund. The wasteland is decorated with the coffins of the colorblind.

Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985).  Houston A. Baker, Jr.  provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

All this adjusting of definition was occurring during the period of canon/cultural wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think the publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) made possible a temporary consensus about the definition of African American literature. Those anthologies emerged, however, from competing ideological vantage points. Thus, it is crucial to notice the current, shifting grounds of definition in Kenneth Warren's book. The Cambridge History of African American Literature basically follows what I would call the "consensual definition,” but Warren's book opens the gates for a flood of redefining and rethinking efforts. The consensual definition is fully operational mainly among African American scholars and non-black scholars who embrace its premises. With a few exceptions, American scholars (the majority of them are white) who deal with American literature still believe African American literature is not yet integrated into their definition of American literature.

What Was African American Literature?  was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.

These views, however, are rooted in the thinking promoted by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32-42, Gerald L. Early’s “The End of Race as We Know It,” The Chronicle Review (October 10, 2008) http://chronicle.com/wwwkly/v55/i07/07b01.htm  ,Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “Why I’m No Longer a Black Poet,” Phillis Remastered, February 6, 2012 http://www.phillisremastered.wordpress.com, Joyce Ann Joyce’s “A Tinker’s Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years Later,” Callaloo 31.2 (2008): 370-380, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) and the essays in Ishmael Reed’s Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010) and Going Too Far (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012).

The death of African American literature will occur simultaneously with the death of American literature.  It is prudent to write the obituary for both bodies while obituaries can still be written. Among the crucial documents for writing the subsequent eulogy are

Bolden, Tony, ed. The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspective on Black Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.

Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Mullen, Harryette. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Napier, Winston, ed. African American Literary Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012.

 

When the death of African American literature rises like the moon in Arab summer, the life of African American literature will be reborn in African winter.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                                            PHBW BLOG

December 1, 2012

 

 

 

 

THE DEATH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

John 2.18

 

Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims.

The definition of what was called Negro literature from the colonial period up to the 1960s was challenged by two of LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka's) essays ---"Myth of a Negro Literature" and "Black Writing" --in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966). Following the spirit of Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), Baraka argued successfully that Negro literature was created more for the inspection of white people than as a body of work that directly addressed the needs of African Americans; he called for black writing or black (African American) literature that would speak directly to black people. Thus, a new definition of African American literature came into being in the 1960s.

That definition prevailed until it was challenged by Trey Ellis' "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo 12.1 (1989): 233-243. By rejecting the ideological import of a Black Arts Movement definition of the literature, Ellis modified the definition to incorporate the interests of younger, often multiracial, writers who felt they could be more "mainstream" (have more aesthetic options) and not enslaved by responsibilities to the tradition associated with  a narrative of struggle as promoted by Baraka.  Without attachment to the ideological constraints of Baraka's notion of black writing, these artists could perfume themselves with exotic theories and create in brothels of free will. Ellis' essay forced a rethinking of what a definition of African American literature actually described.

While Ellis's essay received some attention and then vanished, as it were, into an outburst of writing attached more to the wishes of individual writers than to any imagined needs of a "black community," the rupture of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) has been more successful in creating uncertainty, confusion, and urgency regarding the definition of African American literature. The whiteness of blackness falls now like ancient acid rain, and the twin myths of a black community and a white community are moribund. The wasteland is decorated with the coffins of the colorblind.

Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985).  Houston A. Baker, Jr.  provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

All this adjusting of definition was occurring during the period of canon/cultural wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think the publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) made possible a temporary consensus about the definition of African American literature. Those anthologies emerged, however, from competing ideological vantage points. Thus, it is crucial to notice the current, shifting grounds of definition in Kenneth Warren's book. The Cambridge History of African American Literature basically follows what I would call the "consensual definition,” but Warren's book opens the gates for a flood of redefining and rethinking efforts. The consensual definition is fully operational mainly among African American scholars and non-black scholars who embrace its premises. With a few exceptions, American scholars (the majority of them are white) who deal with American literature still believe African American literature is not yet integrated into their definition of American literature.

What Was African American Literature?  was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.

These views, however, are rooted in the thinking promoted by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32-42, Gerald L. Early’s “The End of Race as We Know It,” The Chronicle Review (October 10, 2008) http://chronicle.com/wwwkly/v55/i07/07b01.htm  ,Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “Why I’m No Longer a Black Poet,” Phillis Remastered, February 6, 2012 http://www.phillisremastered.wordpress.com, Joyce Ann Joyce’s “A Tinker’s Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years Later,” Callaloo 31.2 (2008): 370-380, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) and the essays in Ishmael Reed’s Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010) and Going Too Far (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012).

The death of African American literature will occur simultaneously with the death of American literature.  It is prudent to write the obituary for both bodies while obituaries can still be written. Among the crucial documents for writing the subsequent eulogy are

Bolden, Tony, ed. The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspective on Black Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.

Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Mullen, Harryette. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Napier, Winston, ed. African American Literary Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012.

 

When the death of African American literature rises like the moon in Arab summer, the life of African American literature will be reborn in African winter.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                                            PHBW BLOG

December 1, 2012

 

 

 

 

Chinese Mexicans--Cultural Mobility

pop culture

Chinese Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

AP Photo: Marco Ugarte. IMAGE: Juan Chiu Trujillo, a Chinese Mexican, weeps as he recounts his life story in Mexico City.

10 hr ago By Olga R. Rodriguez

Dozens of Chinese Mexicans and their descendants planned to meet Saturday to celebrate their return to Mexico.

MEXICO CITY — Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father's hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.
Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.
Chiu's father took a job at a relative's bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.
They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese Mexicans after President Adolfo Lopez Mateos, trying to improve Mexico's global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.
Dozens of those Chinese Mexicans and their descendants planned a gathering Saturday at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City to celebrate for the first time the anniversary of their return, share memories and pay tribute to the late Lopez Mateos, who was being represented by his daughter.
For many, the commemoration has brought reflection on their status as Chinese Mexicans. It's a group that feels deeply Mexican but also has been scarred by persecution by their countrymen and still faces ethnic prejudice, despite growing acceptance.
"I thought: 'My children need to know this history. They need to know where we come from, and they need to know how much hard work it has taken for us to be here,'" said Chiu's youngest son, Ignacio Chiu Chan, a 46-year-old lawyer.
Chiu Chan began a Facebook page to share photographs of the repatriation that he found in his father's photo albums and to collect the stories of other Chinese Mexicans who were brought back by Lopez Mateos. So far, more than 260 people have joined his page, sharing images and recounting family stories.
Chiu Chan, who is married to a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indian descent and has four children, said he struggled with his identity while growing up because of bullying and got into several fights because of name calling.
He was a young bachelor when a group of elders invited him to lunch at a restaurant in Mexico City's tiny Chinatown. Three young women were at the table and he was asked to say which one he would like to marry.
"I thought, 'What are these dudes talking about?'" he recalled. "For the first time I felt Mexican and thought, 'I don't belong to this.'"
Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.
But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.
Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.
"Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat," said Fredy Gonzalez, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying the repatriations.
In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China.
In 1930, Mexico had 18,000 Chinese citizens and Mexicans of Chinese descent. By 1940, there were only 4,800, Gonzalez said.
Today, there are at least 70,000 Chinese citizens and Chinese Mexicans in the country, according to a report in 2008 by the Foreign Relations Department.
In China, Chiu Trujillo's Mexican mother spoke to her children in Spanish and often sang Mexican ranchera songs so loudly that she could be heard all around the stream where she washed the family's laundry.
Their mother also instilled in her children devotion for the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint.
"We would recite the rosary in Spanish, she would teach us," Chiu, 87, remembered during an interview in his small apartment in Mexico City's rough La Merced neighborhood, its walls decorated with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ, a couple of Chinese calendars and lots of family photographs. "She would tell us, don't forget you are Catholics, don't lose your religion."
Three years after his mother and two siblings returned, Chiu, his pregnant Chinese wife and four children finally were flown to Mexico.
After working at his brother's grocery store in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, he decided to move to Mexico City, where he worked as a cook and eventually opened his own cafeteria.
"I was able to give my sons an education. The boys all graduated from college," Chiu said. "The oldest is an accountant, the second is a chemist, the third is a mathematician, and the young one is a musician."
Chiu said he always felt more Mexican than Chinese.

"I have always thought that wherever you can find tranquility, that's where your home is," he said.

Legitimate Rape

The Excellent Absurdity of Legitimate Rape: A Note on Art and History

 

The American mind seems to have a limited capacity for dealing with either the diachronic or synchronic aspects of issues.  That is unfortunate.  However, if we seek to overcome those limits, we discover a profound need to deal with the absurd.  In August 2012, we had occasion to consider the excellent absurdity of legitimate rape.

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri said on public television”

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Had Akin had momentarily become the anti-hero of Voltaire’s novel Candide and were his unguarded remarks  informed by the twisted beliefs of Dr. Pangloss?  Was he at all aware of what Mark Twain, a famous writer from Missouri, had said about the madness of “rape” in King Leopold’s Soliloquy?  Perhaps not.  Few of our politicians can demonstrate cultural literacy.  But from the angle of literary analysis, it seemed Akin had uttered a proposition about “rape” that was itself “legitimated” by the genocidal “rape” of indigenous peoples to obtain the Lebensraum that is now the United States of America.  From the angles of cultural analysis and biology, it seemed Akin was dead wrong,  because “legitimate rape” of the African female body during the period of slavery so frequently resulted in pregnancy. Akin suffered from the convenient amnesia that for thousands of years has made rape legitimate. Much of the outrage about his statement pertained, I suspect, to his treachery in revealing a secret that was no secret.

When I informed a friend that

I need your opinion on the absurd topic of "legitimate rape." Does it make any sense to use the wording as a category for analysis in history or as what I call an analytic metaphor? I want to write a short essay on the antiquity of the concept (the Romans legitimately raped people and territories to create the Roman Empire) and its contemporary uses (American citizens are legitimately raped by political uses of disinformation or misinformation).

he replied

The definition of rape has evolved over the centuries. As you state the Romans, and earlier civilizations did not consider what they did as "rape" by the traditional definition. It was an act of power, pillage and empire building. Much has to do with the position of women as subservient, "baby makers" and sexual objects historically. Also recall that under Greece and Rome, soldiers had young male escorts that accompanied them for sexual purposes that one could define as having been "raped" regardless of how Akin used this in reference to pregnancy and abortion. The entire concept is much broader and complicated than what the media has superficially attributed to (an ignorant Republican…--you get my drift). I think your inclusion of the political use of the term "rape" is right on and again reinforces the multiple uses and realistic definition outside of a violent sexual act against one’s consent. I recall a picture of a woman protesting the government and taxes. She held a sign that said something to the effect that "I don't have to worry about a sex life, the government fucks (i. e. rapes) me everyday...”

 

It is obvious, as my friend added in a later email, that “legitimate rape” as an analytic metaphor can indeed reveal much about “an historical continuum” that extends from such literary works as “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and the Homeric epics to aesthetic treatments of rape in the visual arts to  the political histories of the  Japanese rape of Nanjing and the recent and very costly rape of Iraq and to the contemporary  neo-colonial rape of the continent of Africa that must be studied in depth in the realm of the post-colonial.  In her forthcoming book, Policing the Womb: The New Cultural Politics of Reproduction (Cambridge University Press), Michele Goodwin promises to enlighten us, by using empirical evidence, about the “political and regulatory discourse on women’s reproduction.”  Nevertheless, something more is needed.   Akin’s opening of Pandora’s box warrants our giving literary and cultural attention to how the symbolic discourses of female and male bodies describe and indict what is after all these centuries still primitive in world civilizations. Perhaps when I do write “An Absurd Essay on the Absurdity of Legitimate Rape,” I shall be compelled to suggest : human beings still pray to an unknown God as John Donne did in Holy Sonnet 14 (1633)

Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You’enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                           November 24, 2012

 

I do not want a microchip in my passport

India and China make their marks on disputed passports

17 min ago By Frank Jack Daniel of Reuters

India doesn't like the map on new Chinese passports, which includes territories that other countries count as their own.

NEW DELHI - India is stamping its own map on visas it issues to holders of new Chinese passports that contain a map depicting disputed territory within China's borders, the latest twist in tension in Asia over China's territorial claims.
China's new microchip-equipped passports contain a map that marks its claims over disputed waters and also show as its territory two Himalayan regions that India also claims.
The map means countries disputing the Chinese claims will have to stamp microchip-equipped passports of countless visitors, in effect acquiescing to the Chinese point of view.
In response, India is issuing visas stamped with its own version of the borders, sources with knowledge of the dispute told Reuters.
"The correct map of India is stamped on to visas being issued on such passports," said one of the sources, who declined to be identified.
China's long-standing territorial disputes with Japan and Southeast Asian neighbors have grown heated in recent months.
On Thursday, the Philippines responded angrily to the new passports, saying Chinese carrying the document would be violating Philippine national sovereignty.
India and China fought a brief, high-altitude border war in 1962.
The nuclear-armed neighbors have held multiple rounds of talks to resolve their disputed Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh regions where they fought the war but have made little progress.
In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing that China has selected the maps as background on the inside pages of the passports issued by the Ministry of Public Security in May.
"The design is not targeting a specific country," Hua said. "We hope that the relevant countries take a rational and sensible attitude ... to avoid causing interference with normal Sino-foreign personnel exchanges."

(Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing)

Minstrelsy

The White Minstrelsy of American Politics

Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s aptly titled Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012) is a smart and timely book.

It is smart because Taylor and Austen chose not to ape Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) or to mimic Robert C. Toll’s Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (1974).  Instead they focus on the centrality of minstrelsy in cultural expressions and suggest we should care about that expressive tradition because American “culture wouldn’t exist without minstrelsy” (5).  Take their exaggerated claim with a grain of pepper: American culture would be duller and safer without minstrelsy, but it would exist.  Nevertheless, their attractive work should have a companion volume entitled Darkest America: White Minstrelsy from Colonial Conquest to Social Pathology.

Taylor and Austen’s book is timely because it enables a reader to have a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany.  Read against the grain of how modern historiography uses the term polis (city-state), the book can be interpreted as a cutting treatment of polis (nation-state) and some of its spectacular characteristics.  Such displacement allows us to discover the red liberal/blue conservative binary is not the only reason for finding ourselves in a post-election swamp to be navigated between now and 2016. The swamp was made by white minstrelsy.  White political minstrelsy daily nurtures the swamp.

Since colonial days, white minstrelsy has been a practical art used by pink people of color.  These pink people distort their collective ethnic identities by smearing white paint over their imagined bodies. The audible and visual mask denies the biological verification of ultimate African origins.  The paint invades the nervous system and manifests itself as random Gestalts, which in turn produce dedicated scripts for the grand stage of American politics.  The white minstrels take orgasmic delight in performing these scripts to frustrate and misinform non-painted citizens. The scripts are spin-driven histories; the comic deliveries block any clear vision of the real political actions and policies that often prove fatal.

Just as the charm of black minstrelsy pivots on “indefinite talk” routines, the thrall of white minstrelsy depends on the 24-7 broadcasting of “definitive trash-talk.”  Long usage has made this kind of discourse seem “normal” and has rendered white minstrelsy indistinguishable from what is not theatrical.  It is merely insane or absurd to argue that American politics is not a child begot from a strange marriage of black and white minstrelsy.

Taylor and Austen open the closets of polis in Chapter 3, “Of Cannibals and Kings: How New Orleans’s Zulu Krewe Survived One Hundred Years of Blackface” and Chapter 10, “New Millennium Minstrel Show: How Spike Lee and Tyler Perry Brought the Black Minstrelsy Debate to the Twenty-First Century.”  Rather than spoil the unique pleasure of discovery in those two chapters, and indeed in the book as a whole, I will leave you with the refrain of white minstrelsy’s theme song:  There is a bomb in Gilead that kills the sin-sick soul.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.     November 18, 2012    

Eugene B. Redmond and Cultural Documentation

Eugene B. Redmond and Cultural Documentation

Eugene B. Redmond turns seventy-five on December 1, 2012.  It is obligatory to make a few notes about his legacy to world culture and the world of letters.

How many of his fellow writers has he helped to scrub a river’s back by publishing them in Drumvoices Revue?  How has his invention of the “kwansaba” enriched poetics?  How does his extensive collection of photographs, housed in the Elijah P. Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville http://www.siue.edu/lovejoylibrary/ebr.shtml   , constitute an invaluable archive for research on writers and artists?  How do Redmond’s poems exist as works of art and as models for work to be assumed by individuals in a tradition, by people who have not committed artistic or intellectual suicide?  What impact has his neologic signature had on our use of poetic languages?  How does his now classic Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) serve as our prototype for critical, humanly engaged scholarship?

Answers to some of these questions may be contained in Redmond’s new book Arkansipp Memwars: 1962-2012, Poetry, Prose & Chants.  Observe a hint about the special conscience and consciousness that mark Redmond’s critical imagination.  He uses a soundsoulular gesture to refashion memoir as memwar. This transformation exposes the function of aesthetics in the social space occupied by our political and cultural investments.  Memwar is mano a mano, an adult reckoning with inevitable principles of uncertainty. The gesture is a response to Adesanya Alakoye’s request (tell me how willing slaves be), to June Jordan’s assertion (I must be a menace to my enemies), and to Gwendolyn Brooks’ admonition (first fight. then fiddle). The gesture is one that a man makes when he steps outside the comfort zone of ego to do battle for his people.

Redmond has mastered the art of using the simple neologism to create a mindscape.  And his conflating geographic territories in Arkansippi reminds me of how John Oliver Killens cooked down with black fire Nina Simone’s “Mississippi, Goddamn” into the gumbo of his novel ‘Sippi (1967).

Just as Robert Hayden paid homage in “Frederick Douglass” to a man who had a “dream of the beautiful, needful thing,” so too ought we pay tribute to Eugene B. Redmond for his lifetime of work in the field of “Parapoetics” where

Poetry is an applied science:

         Re-wraped corner rap;

         Rootly-eloquented cellular, soulular sermons.

 

We ought to pay tribute to Redmond for all of his cultural documentation, or ,in the words of Jerry Herman from the blurb assigned to Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), his “challenging man’s inability to control his savage quest for power in our modern nuclear jungle.”  Redmond is the poet-artist-thinker for all our seasons.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   November 17, 2012