Tacit Knowing/Explicit Knowledge
Tom Dent's one-act Ritual
Murder (1967), first performed in 1976, is a classic of Black South drama .
Dent minimized plot and depended on the
Narrator's investigation and the
individual testimonials of type-cast
characters (the wife, the public school teacher, the boss, the
anti-poverty program administrator, the mother and father, the chief of police, a black psychiatrist,
the victim and the murderer) to sketch a
communal story. His verbal economy is
effective. The only action is focused speech.
Spectators can experience the play as an investigative tool, a
device for analyzing a familiar
event in modern life: African American men killing African American
men. As we move from the particular to
the general, especially in 2015, we
recognize that what demands investigation is why in the United States officers
of the law take pathological pleasure in killing unarmed civilians inside and
outside of prisons (literal and figurative) and why our nation's primary story (myth) is one of death, dying and despairing rather than one of life, living and loving.
Thanks to the unrelenting immediacy of visual and verbal evidence, we
have no escape route from a most disturbing question: in which place of human
habitation will the next accidental or intended "ritual murder" occur
and necessitate our speaking the words "lives matter"? In 2015, we are condemned to knowing that our
beloved democracy is a cuckoo's nest. Just as Ken Kesey could not predict that his
1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest would become emblematic of American history, Tom Dent could not be
certain that his play would universal applicability in the United States and
beyond.
What Dent did know,
however, was that Ritual Murder figuratively incorporates its audience. Written in the early years of what we now
call the Black Arts Movement, the play
provokes those who witness it to speak at the end of the performance. Even spectators who refuse to speak become
characters in a theatrical ritual. Ultimately, Ritual Murder is metadrama, i.e., a play that explains how a play
may have a socially engaged purpose. Thus,
it is at once a local (New Orleans) and a transcendent example of art
for life, or in the more familiar wording of the Black Arts Movement, the
indivisibility of art and politics.
It is noteworthy that Dent
remixed elements of tragedy as described in Aristotle's Poetics with some of the dark, biting humor Bertolt Brecht used in writing the libretto
for The
Threepenny Opera (1928). The aesthetic effect of Ritual Murder is cool and
unsettling. It does not provoke fear and
pity; its performance does not lead spectators to have any feeling of catharsis, of being purged and cleansed. On
the contrary, because one witnesses the collection and broadcasting of opinions about the crime rather than
specific visual details about Joe
Brown's knifing his friend James Roberts on a Saturday night, one feels moved
to have compassionate disinterest. One
experiences the frustration of the need
to clarify a recurring social problem that defies resolution.
For some of its readers,
Bracey, John H., Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst,
eds. SOS --Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
will produce renewed interest in problems that we can't
resolve. The book is an invitation to
think about how a moment in American cultural history still compels us to deal
with the implications of human knowledge.
Such thinking can benefit from a possibility set forth by Michael
Polanyi in The Study of Man (1959). Polanyi proposed that written knowledge is
"only one kind of knowledge; while unformulated knowledge, such as we have
of something we are in the act of doing, is another form of knowledge. If we call the first kind explicit knowledge,
and the second, tacit knowledge, we may say that we always know tacitly that we are holding our explicit knowledge to be
true. If, therefore, we are satisfied to hold a part of our knowledge
tacitly, the vain pursuit of reflecting ever again on our own reflections no longer arises" (12). Such anthologies as SO--Calling All Black People suggest our ability to forget is stronger than
our capability to remember. They serve
as forms of explicit knowledge to help us with the job of tacit knowing,
because reflecting on what we have failed to remember is not a vain pursuit. Common sense instructs us that we need to
remember and use works created by the artists and thinkers of the Black Arts
Movement.
Weighing in at 666+ pages, SOS---Calling All Black People
might be one of the primary texts in community or academic seminar, an investment
in remembering that might include Black
Fire (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, Drumvoices:
The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) by Eugene B. Redmond, The
Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., The
Black Arts Enterprise and the
Production of African American Poetry (2011) by Howard Rambsy II, and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005) by
James Edward Smethurst. Arnold
Rampersad's recommending that the anthology can "add immeasurably to our
ability to understand and teach a crucial aspect of modern African American and American
literary history" is wonderful as far as colleges and university might be
concerned, but out-of-school people deserve
to share its wealth. They are the troubled citizens who can benefit most
from the renewal of tacit knowing, from
considering how an anthology assassinates time and freezes particular
"documents" for everyday use.
The book has five major sections ----1) theory/criticism, 2)
statements of purpose, 3) poetry, 4) drama, and 5) fiction/narrative---and
concludes with commentary by James G. Spady , John H. Bracey, and Audre Lorde. In the introduction, the editors inform us
the anthology is intended to provide access to "the ideological,
aesthetic, and geographical scope of the movement"(10). The editors went a
step beyond on September 17, 2015 in modeling how to contextualize this access
in a panel "First
Fires & the Black Arts Movement in the South" at the Sonja Haynes Center, University of
North Carolina--Chapel Hill.
The book provides a great amount of material for study, but it
falls short in matters of identification and internal contextualizing. This failure may be a result of haste in
making editorial decisions. For example,
the book does not have an index, the apparatus needed for quick comparison with
other indexed compilations or for highlighting areas of emphasis. The book does not provide notes on
contributors. Younger readers may be
familiar with the names Amiri Baraka, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks,
but they may need to visit the Internet to discover who were Carolyn Gerald
[Carolyn Fowler], Ebon Dooley, Ahmos Zu-Bolton, Joe Goncalves, A. B. Spellman, and Henry Dumas. People of a certain age who belong to special
communities of reading need no special assistance in knowing why Ronald Milner,
Louise Meriwether, Tom Dent, James G. Spady, and Sam Cornish are important, but
it is wrongheaded to assume general readers will possess such knowledge.
Those readers do need the apparatus or metadata commonly
used in the best contemporary anthologies.
Moreover, serious scholarship is obligated, for example, to provide more
than a single descriptive paragraph to cast light on such documents as
"NKOMBO, Food for Thought," "Southern Black Cultural Alliance,
By-Laws," and "Umbra, Foreword to Issue 1.1." Indeed, scholarship demands some annotation
regarding Tom Dent's formative role in the intellectual process of bringing
Umbra, Southern Black Cultural Alliance , and NKOMBO into being. Yes, we can turn to books by James Smethurst
and Howard Rambsy; to The Cambridge History of African American
Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); to New
Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), edited by Lisa Gail Collins
and Margo Natalie Crawford; to Tony Bolden's Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004),
and to many journal articles for supplemental information. But the habits taken for granted within
academic settings may not obtain when SOS--Calling
All Black People circulates in more public communities of reading and
discussing and agonizing over the recurrent issues and problems of African American life (and indeed all
lives) in the United States of America. The editors might have used their tacit
knowing to anticipate such a possibility.
This editorial shortcoming does not undermine the invaluable
contribution of the anthology as a resource for dealing with seismic and paradigm
shifts in American culture. And it is probable that like Tom Dent's Ritual Murder, SOS---Calling All Black People will be welcomed as an investigative
tool for examining contemporary American pathologies which unite politics and
art.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 20, 2015
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