Jerry Ward: Ramcat Reads #10

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 21^st 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