Ramcat Reads #10 April
25, 2016
Borders, James B.
IV, ed. Marking Time, Making Place: An Essential Chronology of Blacks in New
Orleans Since 1718. Silver
Spring, MD: Beckham Publications Group, Inc., 2015.
"As editor of the compilation," Anitra D. Brown wrote
in her review for the March 2016 issue of The
New Orleans Tribune, Borders has
done the heavy lifting for us ---- researching and assembling in one place many
of the names, moments, facts, events, actions and activities that construct and
define the history of the existence of Black people in what is sometimes
described as the most Africanized city in the America [sic]"(14).
Collier, Paul. Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in
Dangerous Places. New York:
HarperCollins, 2009.
This is a witty
British treatment of "the abuse of democracy in the acquisition of power,
the misuse of power once acquired, and the structural insecurity that has beset
the societies of the bottom billion" (226). Wit ultimately proves to be a
teaser, because Collier fails to tell us anything of substance about the
problems of democracy in South America.
Kolin, Philip C. Emmett
Till in Different States: Poems. Chicago : Third World Press, 2015.
This collection takes us into the territory of abrasive
remembering, the space where language gives birth to images of an iconic moment
in America's violent past; these morph into kindred images of a terrible
present; Kolin's poems deliver us into
the dread of an existential future.
Lee, Steven S. The
Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Groundbreaking in its exposing of the abject poverty of the
white/black binary, Lee's study of
aesthetics and politics outlines new directions for inquiry about which
cultures are giving palpable shape to which kinds of revolution. The new territory to be examined , as Lee
keenly recognizes, may demand that we redefine "avant-garde" in
African and Asian terms and relegate the pompous West to a subaltern position
in our tentative conclusions about what world revolution entails. It is an interesting experiment to compare
Lee's ideas about redefining with those provided by eleven pieces collected
under the title "Adjust Your Maps: Manifestos from, for, and about United
States Southern Studies," PMLA
131.1 (2016): 153-196.
Medina, Tony, ed.
Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the
Sky. Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2016.
Two aspects of this collection deserve special attention.
"Proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to the' Whitney M.
Young Social Justice Scholarship' sponsored by The Greater Washington Urban
League, Thursday Network" [verso of
the title page]. Tony Medina is indeed
in the tradition of writing/editing work
(and encouraging his fellow writers to do likewise) that minimizes
amnesia as Americans resist having their minds arrested
Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the Legendary Black
Newspaper Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
The phrase "how X changed America" is cliché-code for
"this book will serve well as a smokescreen for bloody flaws in the
constitution and evolving character of the United States of America
." This is not to imply that books
having the phrase in their subtitles are themselves flawed. On the contrary, many of them are damned
good. But we must not be taken in by the
rhetorical gestures of mainstream publishers to assure readers that the process
of change merits great praise.
In the case of
Michaeli's The Defender, it is apt to
say the book is meticulous, necessary, and rewarding for people who have the
discipline to read more than a tweet.
After reading 534 well-written pages, it is rewarding to read Michaeli's
crowning assertion: "Working at The
Defender allowed me to see the truth about America, that 'race' is a pernicious
lie that permeates our laws and customs, revived in each generation by
entrenched interests that threaten to undermine the entire national enterprise,
just as it is challenged in each generation by a courageous few who believe
that this nation can truly become a bastion of justice and equality"
(535).
The Defender did
not change America. It was one of many uses of African American literacy in our
endless war with forms of dehumanization in our nation. Let us give due credit to Michaeli for
constructing a history which can retard
the velocity of disremembering.
And while we are doing so, we can explore James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First
Lady of the Black Press. New York: Amistad, 2015. Payne was the Washington
correspondent for the Chicago Defender.
Moore, Lenard D.,
William F. Gross, and Larry D. Lean.
The Satire Project: a
collaboration of art, music, and poetry (book + DVD). Mount Olive, North Carolina: University of Mount Olive,
2016. ISBN 978-0-692-68026-1. $15.00
Gross, Lean, and Moore based their satiric project on two
primary beliefs: (1) combining painting, poetry, and music can produce "a
work that would be more imaginative than any of the single disciplines could
create alone" and (2) Aristotle was correct in proposing "the whole
would be greater than the sum of its parts." If one likes the sonic work of the avant garde chamber music
ensemble Imani Winds or The Cosmic Quintet (Kidd Jordan, Douglas Ewart, Alvin
Fielder, Chris Severin, and Luther Gray), the poetry of Bob Kaufman (check out
his magnificent poem "The Ancient Rain") and Safia Elhillo (check out "a suite
for ol' dirty" in The BreakBeat Poets), and paintings of Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Paul Klee, Miles Davis, and
Pavel Tchelitchew, it is probable that one will like The Satire Project. It does
not disappoint in its outroducing of expectations.
Gross, Lean, and Moore assume that satire can direct
"attention to shortcomings in our society." In the 21st century, however,
satire directs far greater attention to the yearnings of artists than to
violations of or failures to live up to
American social values . Ask
Spike Lee who struggled to give us redemptive satire in "Bamboozled"
and guilt-inducing satire in "Chi Raq." Or you might ask Lee's nemesis, Quentin
Tarantino, who filmed over-the-top revenge satire in "Django
Unchained." The success of satire depends on some consensus regarding
desirable values and behaviors. In some
dim past there may have been such nominal consensus in our body politic, but in
the present we can only agree that we do not agree. The success of The Satire Project isn't located in moving
us to make things better (whatever
"better" might entail) but in moving us closer to aesthetic
recognitions. And the most important recognition is that time does more to outroduce expectations than to introduce them.
Moving forth and back between Lean's paintings and Moore's ekphrastic poems in the book
constitutes a special exercise in visual rhetoric, but the more rewarding
aesthetic pleasure comes from negotiating the atonal offerings of Gross, the
graffiti acrylic paintings of Lean, and vocal performances of Moore on the
DVD. Inspired no doubt by Gross's
unpredictable soundings, Moore
transforms his print texts into minutes of ear-jazz, and, in many
instances, Moore "sounds" better off the page than
he does on it because he liberates the words. The outroducing of expectations
in The Satire Project as book and DVD
is a fine investment of American time.
O'Neal, John. Don't
Start Me To Talking…Plays of Struggle and Liberation: The Selected Plays of
John O'Neal. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2016.
John O'Neal is a co-founder of the Free Southern Theater and
founder of "Junebug Productions, a
professional African-American arts organization in New Orleans. For FST, O'Neal
worked as a field director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and worked as a national field program director with the Committee for Racial
Justice" [information from the back cover of Don't Start Me…] Scholars who are now reassessing the
cross-fertilization of the Civil Rights
Movement with the Black Arts and the Black Power Movements and all that followed it will
appreciate having the texts of five of the plays from the Junebug Jabbo Jones cycle
"along with four of O'Neal's large-scale ensemble productions, performed
by his company Junebug Productions and in cross-cultural collaborations with A
Traveling Jewish Theatre (San Francisco), Roadside Theater (Kentucky) and
Pregones Theater (Bronx, New York)" [information from the back cover].
Osbey, Brenda Marie. All
Souls: Essential Poems. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015.
Rather than republishing all the poems from her five previous collections, Osbey has culled those
poems that she deems to be essential. As
Deborah McDowell remarked in her blurb for All
Souls, the poems are essential "in every meaning of the term:
Essential to readers who love exquisite language, expansive knowledge, amazing
erudition, fascinating rhythm, formal elegance.
Essential to readers unafraid of tunneling through the dark corridors of
history, memory, and desire; readers who can bear to have their eyes forced
open…."
Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the
Laws of the Universe. New York: Vintage, 2007.
If one reads the 1049 pages of this tome, one acquires a
liberal education in contemporary physics. Writers who are receptive to
enlivening their imaginations with facts about magical complex numbers, Fourier
decomposition and hyperfunctions, the
ladder of infinity, and the entangled quantum world will dance circles around
critics who believe literary and cultural theories provide answers for
everything. Penrose also makes a
wonderful suggestion about using www.arxiv.org where scientists "communicate new ideas
at an incredibly high speed" (1050).
Reed, Ishmael,
ed. Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary
on the State of Black Hollywood. Chicago: Third World Press, 2015.
The twenty-eight contributors create a provocative dialogue
about race, cinema, and how the film industry enslaves the American mind.
Reed, Ishmael. The Complete Muhammad Ali. Montreal:
Baraka Books, 2015.
Reed provides a unique portrait of Muhammad Ali in the
intersecting contexts of Black Nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and American
sport. He rewards us with yet one more
instance of the extent to which writing is fighting.
Roy, Darlene. Afrosynthesis:
A Feast of Poetry and Folklore. East
St. Louis, IL: Kuumba Scribes Press, 2015.
A cofounder of the legendary Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club,
Roy provides us with stellar examples of the kwansaba, a form "developed by Eugene B. Redmond and refined
in an EBRWC summer workshop in 1995" (60). Afrosynthesis
should be read along with Treasure Shields Redmond's chop: a collection of kwansabas
for fannie lou hamer. Stow, OH: Winged City Press, 2015.
Zheng, John, ed. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2016.
When John Zheng, a noted poet and Wright scholar, edited The Other World of Richard Wright:
Perspectives on His Haiku (2011),
he hoped that the collection of critical essays would "lead readers to the
fragrant tree of Haiku: This Other World
to read for aesthetic appreciation and for more criticism as well"
(xviii). His hope did not fall on barren
ground. Scholars and students who have a
dedicated interest in the totality of Richard Wright's works did indeed read
the book to discover facts about Wright's achievement as a poet who
experimented with an Asian poetic form to probe his Western identity and
African American sensibility. American
interest in Eastern culture and literary expressions has its origins in the
nineteenth century. Interest assumed special
articulation in the modernist period, including Lewis Grandison Alexander's
commentary on "Japanese Hokkus" in the December 1923 issue of The Crisis and the publication of Alexander's Tanka I-VIII and twelve haikus in
Countee Cullen's seminal anthology Caroling
Dusk (1927). Thus, we have evidence
---Cullen noted that Alexander specialized in Japanese forms -- for Asian influence in an evolving African
American poetic tradition. Zheng's editing a
collection of essays on African American haiku is at once logical and a
signal that, ill-informed arguments notwithstanding, black poetry has never
chosen to inhabit ghettoes in the global community of poetry and poetics.
The arrangement of essays in
African American Haiku: Cultural
Visions demonstrates Zheng's focused investment in enlarging the territory for critical
exploration. Opening with Zheng's
"The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright's Haiku" and Sachi
Nakachi's "Richard Wright's Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice,"
the book invites us to take a retrospective glance as preparation for the
essays on James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore
which direct us toward a future.
In this sense, African
American Haiku provides a model of how critical discourses may be
constructed. It also provides necessary
grounds for agreement and counter-argument.
For example, Yoshinobu Hakutani's "James Emanuel's Jazz Haiku and
African American Individualism" is a masterful treatment of how Emanuel's
"haiku, with sharp, compressed images, strongly reflect the syncopated
sounds and rhythms of African American jazz"(56). For readers who might object that Hakutani's
ideas about jazz, individualism, and poetry are not sufficiently nuanced,
Virginia Whatley Smith's "Afro-Asian Syncretism in James Emanuel's
Postmodernist Jazz Haiku" is a remedy.
Smith's examination of Emanuel's work is precise, surgical and very
persuasive in making the case "that Emanuel's postmodernist jazz haiku
text projects African American culture more distinctly into an already
transnational space in which "jazz" music brings together people from
around the world in a common dialogue about universal humanism" (59).
Jazz is one of
several musical modes begot by the blues, and the point is not lost in Claude
Wilkinson's " 'No Square Poet's Job': Improvisation in Etheridge Knight's
Haiku," a provocative analysis of how "Knight's haiku exert a certain
bravura reminiscent of the toasts by which he honed his linguistic
skills"(107). Meta L. Schettler's
"An African High Priestess of Haiku: Sonia Sanchez and the Principles of a
Black Aesthetic" and Richard A. Iadonisi's "Writing the
(Revolutionary ) Body: The Haiku of Sonia Sanchez" address Sanchez's
unique womanist cultural visions and several of the issues associated with
reading haiku through the lens of the Black Arts Movement. These two essays are appropriately
followed by a trilogy on the work of
Lenard D. Moore, who is the most prolific African American writer of
haiku: Toru Kiuchi's "African
American Aesthetic Tradition in Lenard D. Moore's Haiku," Ce Rosenow's
"Sequences of Events: African American Communal Narratives in the Haiku of
Lenard D. Moore" and Sheila Smith McKoy's "Contextualizing Renso and Sankofa: A Cultural and
Critical Exploration of Lenard D. Moore's Haiku." Kiuchi writes poignantly about his personal
correspondence with Moore and how Moore "has turned his life and
experiences into expressions through imagistic haiku and other poems with his
African American aesthetics" (161).
Rosenow applauds Moore's innovative gestures in "the paradoxical
choice to construct communal narratives using a literary form that strives to
distance itself from narrative conventions" (164), and McKoy's essay is
itself remarkably innovative in linking "renso and sankofa, two
concepts that come to us from seemingly disparate sources: ancient Japan and
ancient Ghana" (180) to create a persuasive argument that Moore's
"contributions as poet and as teacher are indicative of living a haiku
life" (190).
It is unlikely that readers will examine the essays in just
the order Zheng has chosen, but the effort to do so is rewarding. The essays work as an ensemble that
illuminates Zheng's introduction, a concise and scholarly frame for inquiry
about how African American poets have studied, embraced, and made innovations
in an ancient Japanese genre. The
introduction is a valuable literary historical guide for sustained study of
haiku, African American modernity, and cross-cultural poetics. African
American Haiku: Cultural Visions
is seminal for future criticism regarding how Japanese formal aesthetics have
been liberated by poets, how haiku is transformed in literary contact zones,
and how diversity is constituted by the cosmopolitan practices of individual
African American poets. The book is
destined to have an impact on theoretically sophisticated directions in the study of modern and
contemporary African American poetry.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Central China Normal
University
Ramcat Reads #10 April
25, 2016
Borders, James B.
IV, ed. Marking Time, Making Place: An Essential Chronology of Blacks in New
Orleans Since 1718. Silver
Spring, MD: Beckham Publications Group, Inc., 2015.
"As editor of the compilation," Anitra D. Brown wrote
in her review for the March 2016 issue of The
New Orleans Tribune, Borders has
done the heavy lifting for us ---- researching and assembling in one place many
of the names, moments, facts, events, actions and activities that construct and
define the history of the existence of Black people in what is sometimes
described as the most Africanized city in the America [sic]"(14).
Collier, Paul. Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in
Dangerous Places. New York:
HarperCollins, 2009.
This is a witty
British treatment of "the abuse of democracy in the acquisition of power,
the misuse of power once acquired, and the structural insecurity that has beset
the societies of the bottom billion" (226). Wit ultimately proves to be a
teaser, because Collier fails to tell us anything of substance about the
problems of democracy in South America.
Kolin, Philip C. Emmett
Till in Different States: Poems. Chicago : Third World Press, 2015.
This collection takes us into the territory of abrasive
remembering, the space where language gives birth to images of an iconic moment
in America's violent past; these morph into kindred images of a terrible
present; Kolin's poems deliver us into
the dread of an existential future.
Lee, Steven S. The
Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Groundbreaking in its exposing of the abject poverty of the
white/black binary, Lee's study of
aesthetics and politics outlines new directions for inquiry about which
cultures are giving palpable shape to which kinds of revolution. The new territory to be examined , as Lee
keenly recognizes, may demand that we redefine "avant-garde" in
African and Asian terms and relegate the pompous West to a subaltern position
in our tentative conclusions about what world revolution entails. It is an interesting experiment to compare
Lee's ideas about redefining with those provided by eleven pieces collected
under the title "Adjust Your Maps: Manifestos from, for, and about United
States Southern Studies," PMLA
131.1 (2016): 153-196.
Medina, Tony, ed.
Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the
Sky. Durham, NC: Jacar Press, 2016.
Two aspects of this collection deserve special attention.
"Proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to the' Whitney M.
Young Social Justice Scholarship' sponsored by The Greater Washington Urban
League, Thursday Network" [verso of
the title page]. Tony Medina is indeed
in the tradition of writing/editing work
(and encouraging his fellow writers to do likewise) that minimizes
amnesia as Americans resist having their minds arrested
Michaeli, Ethan. The Defender: How the Legendary Black
Newspaper Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
The phrase "how X changed America" is cliché-code for
"this book will serve well as a smokescreen for bloody flaws in the
constitution and evolving character of the United States of America
." This is not to imply that books
having the phrase in their subtitles are themselves flawed. On the contrary, many of them are damned
good. But we must not be taken in by the
rhetorical gestures of mainstream publishers to assure readers that the process
of change merits great praise.
In the case of
Michaeli's The Defender, it is apt to
say the book is meticulous, necessary, and rewarding for people who have the
discipline to read more than a tweet.
After reading 534 well-written pages, it is rewarding to read Michaeli's
crowning assertion: "Working at The
Defender allowed me to see the truth about America, that 'race' is a pernicious
lie that permeates our laws and customs, revived in each generation by
entrenched interests that threaten to undermine the entire national enterprise,
just as it is challenged in each generation by a courageous few who believe
that this nation can truly become a bastion of justice and equality"
(535).
The Defender did
not change America. It was one of many uses of African American literacy in our
endless war with forms of dehumanization in our nation. Let us give due credit to Michaeli for
constructing a history which can retard
the velocity of disremembering.
And while we are doing so, we can explore James McGrath Morris's Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First
Lady of the Black Press. New York: Amistad, 2015. Payne was the Washington
correspondent for the Chicago Defender.
Moore, Lenard D.,
William F. Gross, and Larry D. Lean.
The Satire Project: a
collaboration of art, music, and poetry (book + DVD). Mount Olive, North Carolina: University of Mount Olive,
2016. ISBN 978-0-692-68026-1. $15.00
Gross, Lean, and Moore based their satiric project on two
primary beliefs: (1) combining painting, poetry, and music can produce "a
work that would be more imaginative than any of the single disciplines could
create alone" and (2) Aristotle was correct in proposing "the whole
would be greater than the sum of its parts." If one likes the sonic work of the avant garde chamber music
ensemble Imani Winds or The Cosmic Quintet (Kidd Jordan, Douglas Ewart, Alvin
Fielder, Chris Severin, and Luther Gray), the poetry of Bob Kaufman (check out
his magnificent poem "The Ancient Rain") and Safia Elhillo (check out "a suite
for ol' dirty" in The BreakBeat Poets), and paintings of Jean-Michel
Basquiat, Paul Klee, Miles Davis, and
Pavel Tchelitchew, it is probable that one will like The Satire Project. It does
not disappoint in its outroducing of expectations.
Gross, Lean, and Moore assume that satire can direct
"attention to shortcomings in our society." In the 21st century, however,
satire directs far greater attention to the yearnings of artists than to
violations of or failures to live up to
American social values . Ask
Spike Lee who struggled to give us redemptive satire in "Bamboozled"
and guilt-inducing satire in "Chi Raq." Or you might ask Lee's nemesis, Quentin
Tarantino, who filmed over-the-top revenge satire in "Django
Unchained." The success of satire depends on some consensus regarding
desirable values and behaviors. In some
dim past there may have been such nominal consensus in our body politic, but in
the present we can only agree that we do not agree. The success of The Satire Project isn't located in moving
us to make things better (whatever
"better" might entail) but in moving us closer to aesthetic
recognitions. And the most important recognition is that time does more to outroduce expectations than to introduce them.
Moving forth and back between Lean's paintings and Moore's ekphrastic poems in the book
constitutes a special exercise in visual rhetoric, but the more rewarding
aesthetic pleasure comes from negotiating the atonal offerings of Gross, the
graffiti acrylic paintings of Lean, and vocal performances of Moore on the
DVD. Inspired no doubt by Gross's
unpredictable soundings, Moore
transforms his print texts into minutes of ear-jazz, and, in many
instances, Moore "sounds" better off the page than
he does on it because he liberates the words. The outroducing of expectations
in The Satire Project as book and DVD
is a fine investment of American time.
O'Neal, John. Don't
Start Me To Talking…Plays of Struggle and Liberation: The Selected Plays of
John O'Neal. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2016.
John O'Neal is a co-founder of the Free Southern Theater and
founder of "Junebug Productions, a
professional African-American arts organization in New Orleans. For FST, O'Neal
worked as a field director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
and worked as a national field program director with the Committee for Racial
Justice" [information from the back cover of Don't Start Me…] Scholars who are now reassessing the
cross-fertilization of the Civil Rights
Movement with the Black Arts and the Black Power Movements and all that followed it will
appreciate having the texts of five of the plays from the Junebug Jabbo Jones cycle
"along with four of O'Neal's large-scale ensemble productions, performed
by his company Junebug Productions and in cross-cultural collaborations with A
Traveling Jewish Theatre (San Francisco), Roadside Theater (Kentucky) and
Pregones Theater (Bronx, New York)" [information from the back cover].
Osbey, Brenda Marie. All
Souls: Essential Poems. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015.
Rather than republishing all the poems from her five previous collections, Osbey has culled those
poems that she deems to be essential. As
Deborah McDowell remarked in her blurb for All
Souls, the poems are essential "in every meaning of the term:
Essential to readers who love exquisite language, expansive knowledge, amazing
erudition, fascinating rhythm, formal elegance.
Essential to readers unafraid of tunneling through the dark corridors of
history, memory, and desire; readers who can bear to have their eyes forced
open…."
Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the
Laws of the Universe. New York: Vintage, 2007.
If one reads the 1049 pages of this tome, one acquires a
liberal education in contemporary physics. Writers who are receptive to
enlivening their imaginations with facts about magical complex numbers, Fourier
decomposition and hyperfunctions, the
ladder of infinity, and the entangled quantum world will dance circles around
critics who believe literary and cultural theories provide answers for
everything. Penrose also makes a
wonderful suggestion about using www.arxiv.org where scientists "communicate new ideas
at an incredibly high speed" (1050).
Reed, Ishmael,
ed. Black Hollywood Unchained: Commentary
on the State of Black Hollywood. Chicago: Third World Press, 2015.
The twenty-eight contributors create a provocative dialogue
about race, cinema, and how the film industry enslaves the American mind.
Reed, Ishmael. The Complete Muhammad Ali. Montreal:
Baraka Books, 2015.
Reed provides a unique portrait of Muhammad Ali in the
intersecting contexts of Black Nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and American
sport. He rewards us with yet one more
instance of the extent to which writing is fighting.
Roy, Darlene. Afrosynthesis:
A Feast of Poetry and Folklore. East
St. Louis, IL: Kuumba Scribes Press, 2015.
A cofounder of the legendary Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club,
Roy provides us with stellar examples of the kwansaba, a form "developed by Eugene B. Redmond and refined
in an EBRWC summer workshop in 1995" (60). Afrosynthesis
should be read along with Treasure Shields Redmond's chop: a collection of kwansabas
for fannie lou hamer. Stow, OH: Winged City Press, 2015.
Zheng, John, ed. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2016.
When John Zheng, a noted poet and Wright scholar, edited The Other World of Richard Wright:
Perspectives on His Haiku (2011),
he hoped that the collection of critical essays would "lead readers to the
fragrant tree of Haiku: This Other World
to read for aesthetic appreciation and for more criticism as well"
(xviii). His hope did not fall on barren
ground. Scholars and students who have a
dedicated interest in the totality of Richard Wright's works did indeed read
the book to discover facts about Wright's achievement as a poet who
experimented with an Asian poetic form to probe his Western identity and
African American sensibility. American
interest in Eastern culture and literary expressions has its origins in the
nineteenth century. Interest assumed special
articulation in the modernist period, including Lewis Grandison Alexander's
commentary on "Japanese Hokkus" in the December 1923 issue of The Crisis and the publication of Alexander's Tanka I-VIII and twelve haikus in
Countee Cullen's seminal anthology Caroling
Dusk (1927). Thus, we have evidence
---Cullen noted that Alexander specialized in Japanese forms -- for Asian influence in an evolving African
American poetic tradition. Zheng's editing a
collection of essays on African American haiku is at once logical and a
signal that, ill-informed arguments notwithstanding, black poetry has never
chosen to inhabit ghettoes in the global community of poetry and poetics.
The arrangement of essays in
African American Haiku: Cultural
Visions demonstrates Zheng's focused investment in enlarging the territory for critical
exploration. Opening with Zheng's
"The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright's Haiku" and Sachi
Nakachi's "Richard Wright's Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice,"
the book invites us to take a retrospective glance as preparation for the
essays on James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore
which direct us toward a future.
In this sense, African
American Haiku provides a model of how critical discourses may be
constructed. It also provides necessary
grounds for agreement and counter-argument.
For example, Yoshinobu Hakutani's "James Emanuel's Jazz Haiku and
African American Individualism" is a masterful treatment of how Emanuel's
"haiku, with sharp, compressed images, strongly reflect the syncopated
sounds and rhythms of African American jazz"(56). For readers who might object that Hakutani's
ideas about jazz, individualism, and poetry are not sufficiently nuanced,
Virginia Whatley Smith's "Afro-Asian Syncretism in James Emanuel's
Postmodernist Jazz Haiku" is a remedy.
Smith's examination of Emanuel's work is precise, surgical and very
persuasive in making the case "that Emanuel's postmodernist jazz haiku
text projects African American culture more distinctly into an already
transnational space in which "jazz" music brings together people from
around the world in a common dialogue about universal humanism" (59).
Jazz is one of
several musical modes begot by the blues, and the point is not lost in Claude
Wilkinson's " 'No Square Poet's Job': Improvisation in Etheridge Knight's
Haiku," a provocative analysis of how "Knight's haiku exert a certain
bravura reminiscent of the toasts by which he honed his linguistic
skills"(107). Meta L. Schettler's
"An African High Priestess of Haiku: Sonia Sanchez and the Principles of a
Black Aesthetic" and Richard A. Iadonisi's "Writing the
(Revolutionary ) Body: The Haiku of Sonia Sanchez" address Sanchez's
unique womanist cultural visions and several of the issues associated with
reading haiku through the lens of the Black Arts Movement. These two essays are appropriately
followed by a trilogy on the work of
Lenard D. Moore, who is the most prolific African American writer of
haiku: Toru Kiuchi's "African
American Aesthetic Tradition in Lenard D. Moore's Haiku," Ce Rosenow's
"Sequences of Events: African American Communal Narratives in the Haiku of
Lenard D. Moore" and Sheila Smith McKoy's "Contextualizing Renso and Sankofa: A Cultural and
Critical Exploration of Lenard D. Moore's Haiku." Kiuchi writes poignantly about his personal
correspondence with Moore and how Moore "has turned his life and
experiences into expressions through imagistic haiku and other poems with his
African American aesthetics" (161).
Rosenow applauds Moore's innovative gestures in "the paradoxical
choice to construct communal narratives using a literary form that strives to
distance itself from narrative conventions" (164), and McKoy's essay is
itself remarkably innovative in linking "renso and sankofa, two
concepts that come to us from seemingly disparate sources: ancient Japan and
ancient Ghana" (180) to create a persuasive argument that Moore's
"contributions as poet and as teacher are indicative of living a haiku
life" (190).
It is unlikely that readers will examine the essays in just
the order Zheng has chosen, but the effort to do so is rewarding. The essays work as an ensemble that
illuminates Zheng's introduction, a concise and scholarly frame for inquiry
about how African American poets have studied, embraced, and made innovations
in an ancient Japanese genre. The
introduction is a valuable literary historical guide for sustained study of
haiku, African American modernity, and cross-cultural poetics. African
American Haiku: Cultural Visions
is seminal for future criticism regarding how Japanese formal aesthetics have
been liberated by poets, how haiku is transformed in literary contact zones,
and how diversity is constituted by the cosmopolitan practices of individual
African American poets. The book is
destined to have an impact on theoretically sophisticated directions in the study of modern and
contemporary African American poetry.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Central China Normal
University
