POWELL , COATES,
WIDEMAN AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF TITLES
ABSTRACT: The
titles which Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates chose for their 2015 memoirs do matter as clues for
interpretation, because they invite, and perhaps compel, us to assume particular postures in the
making of meaning. Is Powell's titular echoing of The Education of Henry Adams, a classic example of American
autobiography, really a calculated gesture to emphasize the historical gap
between privilege and disadvantage in American life? By deliberately borrowing Between the World and Me, the title of
Richard Wright's stunning poem, does Coates affirm lynching as a death-bound
American ritual? Do the titles enlarge
or limit the force of indeterminacy in our construction of meaning? How we
answer these questions reveal deeper, more vexing questions about rhetorical
options in the writing of what William Andrews identified as the
"relativistic truth value of all autobiography" (3) in his influential
study To Tell a Free Story: The First
Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988). Do the rhetorical options John Edgar Wideman chose to
use in Writing to Save a Life
encourage critique of how black male autobiographical writing might evade
death-bound entrapment?
Coates, Ta'Nehisi. Between
the World and Me. New York: Spiegel
and Grau, 2015.
Powell, Kevin. The
Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood. New York: Atria Books, 2015
Wideman, John Edgar. Writing
to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. New York: Scribner, 2016.
Autobiography is one of the more intriguing mixed genres
of American writing. Elizabeth Bruss' Autobiographical Acts: The Changing
Situation of a Literary Genre (1976) may lead us to believe that the
"rules" governing autobiography are stricter than those which pertain
to drama, poetry, and fiction; that is to say demonstrating competence in
dealing with autobiography as genre may involve a more faithful observation of
conventions (traditional expectations)
and a greater belief in referentiality. Yet, the possibility of referentiality may
immerse us in a cycle of interpretive problems that resist clear resolution.
The awareness that
generic "rules" are based on abstractions from histories of
reading (traditional habits), however, invite us to amend them in our acts of
interpretation, in the cognitive acts we use in order to grasp the meaning of
texts. We are willing to break them,
because we recognize that autobiography is not a static, unchanging form, but
an effort to leave evidence (social, moral, aesthetic) of life experiences in
this world. We allow the writer of
autobiography great latitude in arranging language and rhetorical devices in
her or his effort to bear witness to "a truth, " because we associate the truth of what happened in
verifiable reality or actuality with the
individual's subjective
confessional, psychological ego-investments. In this sense, the autobiographical writings
of Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates appear to be relatively
"traditional" when they are read against the "avant-garde " features of Wideman's autobiographical
detective work on the "lynching" of Emmett Till's father. Wideman
frustrates conventional expectations by dwelling in the deep space of his own
creativity.
For example, the pervasive discussion in the United
States of why "Black Lives
Matter" may seem to have a
tremendous impact on how and why African American autobiographies are written
from multiple "black life" angles in the first quarter of this
century, because the simple sentence appears to be self-evident. It has been floating about in one language or
another since antiquity. Nevertheless, the fact that contemporary variations of the sentence are circulating in
arenas of social networking and mass media can tempt us to be skeptical , can
tempt us to ask what precisely is the sentence designed to have us think. The
terms "police brutality," "racism," and "tyranny of
law and order" do not have to be spelled out in post-Civil Rights black
autobiographies. Many American readers
will assume these terms inform the texts.
The terms are assumed to be
unspoken elements in the special attention we give to the lives of African
American males. And the assumptions have
become especially relevant in discussing the lives of Americans who are not
visually "white" (Caucasian) or self-identified as
"white." But such terms as
"inferior," "mental and physical abuse," and
"exploitation" apply as well to autobiographies by African
American women. Black men don't have a monopoly on being
targets, because the gendered aspects of
life do cross freely back and forth across borders. We do not forget (or should not forget) these
possibilities as we read what Kevin Powell , John Edgar Wideman, and Ta' Nehisi
Coates offer us as examples of
autobiography.
Adjustments,
exaggerations, forgetting and remembering, and selective displacements are in motion as part of the
shared authority of the writer and the reader.
Our own egos and needs as readers are implicated in judgments about what
is true or false. So too are our ideas
about collective features of life histories. What social and cultural
conditions affect the powerful motives in the act of writing? What counts most in our reading and
interpretation of autobiography, perhaps,
is the sense that the narrator as well as the persona who stands in for a
Self are reliable witnesses. We
demand, in most cases, assurances that
the autobiography is more than an absurd, commercial gimmick or a game of
linguistic whim. If the assurances fail,
we are not devastated. We all understand
how American citizens "play" (manipulate) one another. These
considerations allow us to have a rich transaction with The Education of Kevin Powell.
Even before we begin to read Powell's autobiography, we
may be given pause by his strategic choice of a title. The Education of Kevin Powell echoes the title of an older,
privileged, and seldom read autobiography, namely The Education of Henry Adams. Perhaps the choice was not merely
accidental. Perhaps the twenty-first
century Kevin Powell actually wanted to expose the vast and crucial differences
between his life journey and the one taken by Henry Adams, the elitist nineteenth-century descendent of
two American presidents. To recall a
well-known metaphor from Booker T. Washington's autobiography, we can say that
as writers Powell and Adams are connected in a national literary enterprise; as American citizens, they as separate from
one another as the little finger is from the thumb. The exact circumstances of
Powell's choice are, and should remain, a tantalizing mystery.
It suffices that The Education of Kevin Powell is a
magnificent deconstruction of the fiction named the "American Dream." Powell's autobiography or memoir is a
trenchant disrupting of the enabling grounds (assumptions about entitlement,
freedom and privilege) that inform The
Education of Henry Adams. Thus,
Powell secures his niche in the tradition of American autobiography by
maximizing the oppositional potency of the African American autobiographical
tradition, the telling a free story
about what is universally recognized as unfreedom. And we ought not minimize
the fact that Powell gives us both subjective and objective evidence of his
character and courage through writing as an act of brutal honesty.
It may be apparent to discerning readers that The Education of Kevin Powell is a
gendered, medium-crossing, asymmetrical
companion to The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill (Ruffhouse Records CK69035), a musical witness that conjures Carter G.
Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro
(1934). Other readers may think of The
Education of Sonny Carson (1972) and the 1974 film of the same title. They
may think of the education that is actually
located in the mean streets of our nation rather than in its
"celebrated "institutions of public schooling and higher
learning. The value of such associations
is to highlight what an American education outside the questionable "safe" zones of formal institutions
really is.
Focusing on American education prevents an automatic or passive reading of Powell's book as yet
another African American saga of abject disadvantage and noble struggle to
transcend. His writing pertains more to flight
into than flight from something. By way
of learning-oriented approaches to his text, we might discover what that something might be and why we need
to be better informed about it than most of us are. Giving priority to our education as
readers frustrates the banal tendency to
stereotype American and African American
autobiographies as stories of radicalization and identity politics and
racialization. An unorthodox reading of The Education
of Kevin Powell can expose how phony
is a
tearful and self-serving reception of the book. Reading against the grain reduces indulgence in the delusion and bad faith of
pity. It liberates us to grasp how raw
will power enables an American male to
prevail in the endless, uneven, traumatic attempt to reach the telos (desirable end) of being human, of being a good citizen in a chaotic
universe.
Powell's
autobiography makes a strong case for the power of the will. He reinforces the
idea of responsible agency which is central in the essays he collected and edited
in The Black Male Handbook (2008) and
in his own essays in Who's Gonna Take the
Weight?: Manhood, Race and Power in America (2003) and Someday We'll All Be Free (2006).
Indeed, we can learn from this autobiography what the American
entertainment/ disinformation industry wants us not to know about the essence
of being hip-hop or the
transformational complexity of
oppositional stances. Powell exposes the
education America imposes upon it male citizens outside and inside formal
classrooms.
This autobiography has two parts. Part 1 "trapped in a concrete box"
contains seventeen chapters which deal with the spatial origins of Powell's
long, unfinished journey; the thirteen chapters of Part 2 "living on the
other side of midnight" give specificity to the temporal, to the events
and people in the unique trajectory of Powell's life to the present. The introduction establishes the dominant
image of violence and being beaten, the image that haunts us frequently in the
autobiography and in our everyday lives.
Powell's exact words ---
"the beating as punishment for my life" --- operate in unsettling
concert with the line "trapped in a concrete box" from his poem
"Mental Terrorism" in Recognize (1995) and his plain assertion
that "writing is perhaps the most courageous thing I've ever
done." Through writing Powell
instructs us time and again that "there is something grotesquely wrong
with a society where millions of people face daily political, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and economic oppression by virtue
of their skin complexion." His recognition of what is at once explicit and
implicit in an American education justifies his desire to have writing
"open up minds, feed souls, bridge gaps, provoke heated exchanges"
and authorizes a yearning, present throughout world history, to have writing
"breathe and live forever."
Without saying so directly,
Powell challenges Allan Bloom's famous
lamentations in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and subverts Bloom's
complaint by writing to open the imagined mind of the United States of America
in the 21st century.
Critics who assign maximum value to aesthetics have no reason to fear that Kevin
Powell minimizes craft in contributing to the production of knowledge, because
he is appropriately literary in shaping autobiography. The title of his book is a very literary
gesture, a discriminating invitation to use uncommon cultural literacy about
the nature of American autobiography. He
is even more recognizably literary in using the device of the catalog of discoveries
(as Richard Wright used it in Black Boy)
to hammer ideas about the journey from boyhood to manhood -----"like the
rupture...like the longing...like the bewilderment...like the hostile
paranoia...like the cryptic sense of great expectations." And the latter
allusion is one result of Powell's having read both Edgar Allan Poe and Charles
Dickens in his youth. Powell's anaphoric
use of "I remember...I remember...I remember" attests to how he
inserts his poetic sensibility to serve the rhetorical ends of creative
non-fiction. And it is remarkable that he rewrites a passage from Black Boy about how adults use alcohol
and words to "corrupt" a child for their careless amusement to dramatize an educational moment.
Like Wright,
Powell uses what purports to be remembered dialogue to intensify our sense of
the affective properties of historiography and to suggest historical process
always comes back to us as narrative not as objective reporting that is in
denial of its inherent subjectivity.
Powell is crafty and exceptionally skilled in creating literature that
does not hesitate to critique the limits of moral imagination. Or, for that matter, to expose the innate
immorality of twenty-first century societies. He targets those wretched circumstances, so permanent in our heritage
of social and racial contracts, which
cast light on the moral dimensions of
his profound struggles with his own sexism and his anger, his male
American and African American identities.
The Education of Kevin Powell and Ta-Nehisi
Coates' Between the World and Me are
indebted to Wright and to The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, a fact that legitimizes comparison. But the comparison ought to be tough-minded
and should make a special note that Coates and Powell are writing from different
but convergent class positions.
Interpretive association of Coates with Benjamin Franklin (his
autobiography was intended, in part, to be a guidebook for his
descendents) and of Powell with Henry
Adams enables us to have fresh perspectives on representing privilege, race, and power without falling
into merely tendentious
literary and cultural criticism or drowning in lakes of fickle
public opinions. But we must remember that an understanding of
these autobiographical writings also imposes upon us the need to assess what we
know or do not know about our own
existential choices which pertain to leadership and activism. The books complement each other as we try to
make sense of individual plasticity in human response to Nature and multiple
environments.
Reading the two
autobiographies compelled me to make a choice.
I admit that the vernacular qualities of The Education of Kevin Powell instruct me more thoroughly about the
problematic nature of autobiography than
do the deliberate "literariness" of Between the World and Me.
His writing encourages me to
learn more about aligning the building of knowledge for everyday use with
critical aesthetic response, while the ego-focused rawness of Powell's confession
invites me to agonize that the lessons
in his openness may be casually dismissed by many young male readers who are
enthralled with being macho .
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates is not easy. The difficulty is constituted neither by his prose style nor
his subject matter, because the subject matter is familiar and his sentences
are music for the inner ear. Difficulty slams into you from a place he is not
exploring, from the badlands where signs defy decoding. You feel that his
having borrowed the title Between the
World and Me from one of the stellar poems of 20th century American poetry
transports you to a desert where the bones of David Walker, Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman, Alexander
Crummell, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison are strewn helter-skelter and the air
smells like Theodore Bilbo's breath. In
that arid, alienating place, you are hearing footsteps from In the American Grain by Williams Carlos
Williams and Brothers and Keepers by
John Edgar Wideman, although ultra-orthodox literary criticism wants you to hear a sermon from
James Baldwin that simply is not available. Toni Morrison's "amen
corner" blurb for Coates' book doesn't persuade me to read Coates as
Baldwin reincarnated. The blurb
persuades me that Morrison is complicit in an enterprise of which she once was
progressively critical. The difficulty
is also constituted by the idiosyncrasy
of how my mind reads, by my uncanny affinity with Richard Wright.
Idiosyncrasy begets temptations. Under the influence of Coates's tip of the
hat to Richard Wright and the space/time where an enormous number of males have
no sanctuary, you are tempted to listen once more to Billie Holiday sing
"Strange Fruit." But wouldn't
the mood produced actually prejudice your reading of how Coates depicts the
space of the hard place and the rock?
Listen to Thelonious Monk, October and November 1947, Blue Note LP 5002. Monk and Art Blakey provide the jazz against
which you to read Coates's blues (echoes of Ellison's calling Wright's Black Boy a species of blues
writing). You are tempted to ask why
Coates romanticizes life at Howard University beyond the classroom as the
Mecca. His idea of Mecca is a
translation of comments on a pilgrimage by Malcolm X, a man whom Ossie Davis eulogized as one who
made the cowardly "thoroughly ashamed of the urbane and smiling hypocrisy
we practice merely to exist in a world whose values we both envy and despise." Is it urbane or cosmopolitan to tell your son
about that Mecca and tell him nary a word about Chicago's Mecca, the 1891 apartment building, to tell
your son
nothing about what Gwendolyn Brooks said about that Mecca? She ordered us to "Sit where the light
corrupts your face." When you drop
knowledge for your son, employ economy.
Aretha Franklin's beautiful phrasing of "And temptation's
strong" cuts across Monk's "Humph."
Trying to accord
Mr. Coates the sympathy and respect he accorded Wright's illuminating
habitation of the black male body, you are tempted to say unto him invest more
in the vengeance of the Old Testament God for whom the pen is the sword. After Ferguson and the white magic of daily
systemic murder in the United States, you are tempted to suggest that the human
body in our nation professes the New Testament God to be an invisible shadow
and act. After all, who told Jesus he
could change his name? Who? Who?
The owl and Amiri Baraka?
Ah, Mr. Coates you use the word "body" too much
in Between the World and Me and are
too stingy in using the word "mind." Do you not recall that after Richard Wright
figured out what was truly between the world and himself and other black males,
he figured forth the lynching of the mind in The Outsider and The Long
Dream? When you play with allusions,
do not half-step. Temptations strengthen
idiosyncrasy.
You find it tantalizingly informative that Ta-Nehisi
Coates chose not to imprison his letter to his son in the ancient form that
letters can still assume. He begins
"Son," (page 5) and ends "Through the windshield I saw the rain
coming down in sheets." (page 152)
He did not begin "Dear Son," and end "Your father,
Ta-Nehisi". The lack of formality
says something about the 21st century, about the distance between what Mr.
Coates deems to be the proper shape of correspondence and the outmoded
antiquity of your ideas about how
courtesy ought to be signaled. Coates
operates against the formal properties of the model James Baldwin provided in
his letter to his nephew. So be it. Although generic form is an action, it is
superseded by substance. Substance is
what you are looking for in Coates's book.
You find it in the possibility that Coates is saying
something to his son from the region of mind that only he can access, that is
curiously represented when he writes of becoming a writer without a degree from
Howard University:
I felt that it was time to go, to declare myself a
graduate of The Mecca, if not the university.
I was publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local
alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more human beings. I had editors ---more teachers --- and these
were the first white people I'd ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions --- they were
afraid nether for me nor of me. Instead
they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured
and harnessed (62).
The slave trade treasured black bodies and harnessed them
on plantations in a new world of capitalism.
You write on the margins of page 62: "Reconstructing
the tragic chain of circumstances...." and "In the hope that there is
something to learn from this account, something to salvage from the grief and
waste, I've striven for accuracy and honesty." You quote from John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Vintage,
1984), page xi, hoping (with genuine desperation) that Wideman's honesty will
anoint your reading of Between the World
and Me. You begin to fear that
Coates is 100% American. You write words published in 1925 on a separate sheet
of paper: "Here Poe emerges --in no sense the bizarre, isolate writer, the
curious literary figure. On the
contrary, in him American literature is
anchored, in him alone, on solid ground." This assertion comes from
William Carlos Williams, In the American
Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), page 226. You are annotating
Coates's book because something is emerging.
Poe became a "major" American author by not graduating from
the University of Virginia. William
Carlos Williams, a doctor and poet, found something American to admire in Poe.
So too did Richard Wright, who said that had Poe not lived we would have
invented him. In the back of your mind,
memory whispers: one of Wideman's early novels is entitled The Lynchers.
Is Coates saying something to his son about narrative
that exceeds the conventional talk (recently rebaptized by necessity as THE
TALK) which non-white American fathers think they are obligated to have with
their non-white sons, saying something about the talk that ,apparently, white fathers never have with their white
sons? When it comes to how the talk and
lives of all color matter, the tongue of the white male American body is as
bound as the feet of a Chinese emperor's favorite wife. Perhaps Coates is quite indirectly telling
his son that the so-called white mind actually is a fiction without material
references.
"You have not yet grappled," Ta-Nehisi Coates
writes to his son, "with your own myths and narratives and discovered the
plunder everywhere around us "(21).
When and if the son does discover American history is an interlocked
series of subjective narratives , then he will have to weigh the commerce of
narrative and violence in maintaining America's social and racial contracts. Men created America by violating the minds
and bodies of men, women, and children. You think it would be good for Coates
to give his son copies of Robert G. Parkinson's The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Hayden
White's The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New
York: Pantheon, 1998), Tzvetan Todorov's The
Conquest of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), John Hope
Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans,
3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967) and Leslie Bow's Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated
South (New York: New York University
Press, 2010). The son might plunder these books at his leisure when he reaches
the age of reading. Or he might reject them and
choose to plunder a very different selection of texts. You guess that Ta-Nehisi Coates would have
his son plunder in the name of unqualified
love of himself. Should he do
so, he might indeed produce his own myths
and narratives and thereby rival those created by his father. Those myths and narratives just might resemble
the autobiographical ones created by John Edgar Wideman, who makes superb use
of his mind to document the homoerotic fascination white folk believe they are
destined to have with the bodies of black, red, brown and yellow folk. Your son, Mr. Coates, might empower himself to destroy (or at least
minimize) the ways the agents of mass media, social
networking, the ubiquitous Internet, and
the American police state work feverishly to constipate his mind as well as his
body and his spiritual essence.
Between the World
and Me is a strong, complex, provocative book. Like all American authors, Coates could not
avoid signing deals with demons in order to have his book published
commercially. You know that. You have
compassion for the book's instances of class-blindness. You make peace with its flaws, the moments when
specificity becomes generalization, because the book subverts gross ignorance
and exposes your nation's unique brand of denial. It is a brave book. It is a book that James Meredith, author
of A
Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America (New York: Atria
Books, 2012), might endorse if he is caught at just the right moment of
generosity. It is a truth-telling book
which inspires dread. It does not
inspire promises of false hope that shall never be delivered.
Dread is the real
deal in the United States of America and elsewhere. The Dream is an evil
fiction that attempts to enslave people, and
too often it succeeds beyond the expectations of its authors.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
has produced a first-rate secular jeremiad, an honest meditation on Dread. There is a thin but critical line between a
sermon and a jeremiad. Coates is neither
a priest nor a preacher.
You sit in the
desert, secure in your idiosyncrasy. You
and the ghost of Claude McKay, author of the sonnet "America" sit in
the sand and take bets on who shall be the first to see Time's unerring
terrorism, with much help from Nature,
dispatch the millions of people who worship in the temples and cathedrals and mosques of white supremacy.
Re-reading McKay's sonnet is a fine start for a judicious
probing, for engaging the endlessly provocative questions behind what Powell and Coates may be saying to their
native land:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
The sonnet is also a prelude to considering the question
of John Edgar Wideman and the contemporary functions of black male
autobiography. Do the rhetorical options
John Edgar Wideman chose to use in Writing
to Save a Life encourage critique of how black male autobiographical
writing might evade death-bound entrapment?
Permit repetition. The
autobiographical writings of Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates appear to be
relatively "traditional" (
conventional in reassuring readers that
aspects of the status quo are very much intact )when they are read against the "avant-garde " (making the
strange seem overtly familiar) features
of Wideman's autobiographical detective work on the "lynching" of
Emmett Till's father. Wideman frustrates conventional expectations by dwelling
in the deep space of his own creativity, the atypical anxieties that form and inform his
life history.
Like the poetic meditation of Philip C. Kolin's Emmett Till in Different States
(Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), a quite sensitive white male autobiographical
rendering of how language gives birth to images of an iconic moment in
America's violent past and present, Wideman's Writing to Save a Life is a remarkable exercise in the use of
language to save his own life, in scrutinizing the peculiar language of World
War II U. S. Army documentation to contextualize his individuality. His blending of fact and fiction is a
disarming revelation of the emotional truths which contest any
"rules" that might distinguish autobiography as a genre. What emotional truth pulsates in knowing
"Private Louis Till's file revealed he had been hanged July 2, 1945, by
the U.S. army for committing rape and murder in Italy" and that
"Revisiting trial testimony did not help me produce the Emmett Till fiction
I wanted to write…." ( Writing…12)?
That Wideman substituted an autobiographical project for one devoted to fiction
matters greatly, because it reminds that
the grossest obscenities of American history are not the stuff of fiction. They
may be present in fiction, but they lose the abrasive qualities that
non-fiction (or almost non-fiction) deliver.
And Wideman produces a noteworthy sandpapering of the mind in his
memoir. He vacillates between his
reading of the redacted Louis Till file
and the evidence of how that file was crucial in assuring that the murderers of
Louis Till's son would be absolved of guilt by the machinations of Southern
justice in Mississippi in 1955. The
sandpapering is made all the more effective by the references to the poetry of
Ezra Pound (the treason-smeared maker of
cantos) and Robert Hayden (the virtuous maker of minor epics), by multiple
allusions that examine the extent of one's cultural literacy and sophistication
in the sense of one's being a coloured citizen of the world still capable of
hearing the voice of David Walker's
Appeal (1829).
Truth be told , Wideman, Coates and Powell as writers of
autobiography do not escape the
death-boundedness of the existential choices available to American males. They
can no more evade entrapment than can Donald J. Trump, Barack Obama, and Warren
Buffett as makers of scary autobiographical propositions. But that's another story about global
capitalism and international political affairs.
Let it suffice that the implications of the titles chosen by Powell,
Coats, and Wideman shall haunt us for many decades.
POWELL , COATES,
WIDEMAN AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF TITLES
ABSTRACT: The
titles which Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates chose for their 2015 memoirs do matter as clues for
interpretation, because they invite, and perhaps compel, us to assume particular postures in the
making of meaning. Is Powell's titular echoing of The Education of Henry Adams, a classic example of American
autobiography, really a calculated gesture to emphasize the historical gap
between privilege and disadvantage in American life? By deliberately borrowing Between the World and Me, the title of
Richard Wright's stunning poem, does Coates affirm lynching as a death-bound
American ritual? Do the titles enlarge
or limit the force of indeterminacy in our construction of meaning? How we
answer these questions reveal deeper, more vexing questions about rhetorical
options in the writing of what William Andrews identified as the
"relativistic truth value of all autobiography" (3) in his influential
study To Tell a Free Story: The First
Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1988). Do the rhetorical options John Edgar Wideman chose to
use in Writing to Save a Life
encourage critique of how black male autobiographical writing might evade
death-bound entrapment?
Coates, Ta'Nehisi. Between
the World and Me. New York: Spiegel
and Grau, 2015.
Powell, Kevin. The
Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood. New York: Atria Books, 2015
Wideman, John Edgar. Writing
to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. New York: Scribner, 2016.
Autobiography is one of the more intriguing mixed genres
of American writing. Elizabeth Bruss' Autobiographical Acts: The Changing
Situation of a Literary Genre (1976) may lead us to believe that the
"rules" governing autobiography are stricter than those which pertain
to drama, poetry, and fiction; that is to say demonstrating competence in
dealing with autobiography as genre may involve a more faithful observation of
conventions (traditional expectations)
and a greater belief in referentiality. Yet, the possibility of referentiality may
immerse us in a cycle of interpretive problems that resist clear resolution.
The awareness that
generic "rules" are based on abstractions from histories of
reading (traditional habits), however, invite us to amend them in our acts of
interpretation, in the cognitive acts we use in order to grasp the meaning of
texts. We are willing to break them,
because we recognize that autobiography is not a static, unchanging form, but
an effort to leave evidence (social, moral, aesthetic) of life experiences in
this world. We allow the writer of
autobiography great latitude in arranging language and rhetorical devices in
her or his effort to bear witness to "a truth, " because we associate the truth of what happened in
verifiable reality or actuality with the
individual's subjective
confessional, psychological ego-investments. In this sense, the autobiographical writings
of Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates appear to be relatively
"traditional" when they are read against the "avant-garde " features of Wideman's autobiographical
detective work on the "lynching" of Emmett Till's father. Wideman
frustrates conventional expectations by dwelling in the deep space of his own
creativity.
For example, the pervasive discussion in the United
States of why "Black Lives
Matter" may seem to have a
tremendous impact on how and why African American autobiographies are written
from multiple "black life" angles in the first quarter of this
century, because the simple sentence appears to be self-evident. It has been floating about in one language or
another since antiquity. Nevertheless, the fact that contemporary variations of the sentence are circulating in
arenas of social networking and mass media can tempt us to be skeptical , can
tempt us to ask what precisely is the sentence designed to have us think. The
terms "police brutality," "racism," and "tyranny of
law and order" do not have to be spelled out in post-Civil Rights black
autobiographies. Many American readers
will assume these terms inform the texts.
The terms are assumed to be
unspoken elements in the special attention we give to the lives of African
American males. And the assumptions have
become especially relevant in discussing the lives of Americans who are not
visually "white" (Caucasian) or self-identified as
"white." But such terms as
"inferior," "mental and physical abuse," and
"exploitation" apply as well to autobiographies by African
American women. Black men don't have a monopoly on being
targets, because the gendered aspects of
life do cross freely back and forth across borders. We do not forget (or should not forget) these
possibilities as we read what Kevin Powell , John Edgar Wideman, and Ta' Nehisi
Coates offer us as examples of
autobiography.
Adjustments,
exaggerations, forgetting and remembering, and selective displacements are in motion as part of the
shared authority of the writer and the reader.
Our own egos and needs as readers are implicated in judgments about what
is true or false. So too are our ideas
about collective features of life histories. What social and cultural
conditions affect the powerful motives in the act of writing? What counts most in our reading and
interpretation of autobiography, perhaps,
is the sense that the narrator as well as the persona who stands in for a
Self are reliable witnesses. We
demand, in most cases, assurances that
the autobiography is more than an absurd, commercial gimmick or a game of
linguistic whim. If the assurances fail,
we are not devastated. We all understand
how American citizens "play" (manipulate) one another. These
considerations allow us to have a rich transaction with The Education of Kevin Powell.
Even before we begin to read Powell's autobiography, we
may be given pause by his strategic choice of a title. The Education of Kevin Powell echoes the title of an older,
privileged, and seldom read autobiography, namely The Education of Henry Adams. Perhaps the choice was not merely
accidental. Perhaps the twenty-first
century Kevin Powell actually wanted to expose the vast and crucial differences
between his life journey and the one taken by Henry Adams, the elitist nineteenth-century descendent of
two American presidents. To recall a
well-known metaphor from Booker T. Washington's autobiography, we can say that
as writers Powell and Adams are connected in a national literary enterprise; as American citizens, they as separate from
one another as the little finger is from the thumb. The exact circumstances of
Powell's choice are, and should remain, a tantalizing mystery.
It suffices that The Education of Kevin Powell is a
magnificent deconstruction of the fiction named the "American Dream." Powell's autobiography or memoir is a
trenchant disrupting of the enabling grounds (assumptions about entitlement,
freedom and privilege) that inform The
Education of Henry Adams. Thus,
Powell secures his niche in the tradition of American autobiography by
maximizing the oppositional potency of the African American autobiographical
tradition, the telling a free story
about what is universally recognized as unfreedom. And we ought not minimize
the fact that Powell gives us both subjective and objective evidence of his
character and courage through writing as an act of brutal honesty.
It may be apparent to discerning readers that The Education of Kevin Powell is a
gendered, medium-crossing, asymmetrical
companion to The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill (Ruffhouse Records CK69035), a musical witness that conjures Carter G.
Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro
(1934). Other readers may think of The
Education of Sonny Carson (1972) and the 1974 film of the same title. They
may think of the education that is actually
located in the mean streets of our nation rather than in its
"celebrated "institutions of public schooling and higher
learning. The value of such associations
is to highlight what an American education outside the questionable "safe" zones of formal institutions
really is.
Focusing on American education prevents an automatic or passive reading of Powell's book as yet
another African American saga of abject disadvantage and noble struggle to
transcend. His writing pertains more to flight
into than flight from something. By way
of learning-oriented approaches to his text, we might discover what that something might be and why we need
to be better informed about it than most of us are. Giving priority to our education as
readers frustrates the banal tendency to
stereotype American and African American
autobiographies as stories of radicalization and identity politics and
racialization. An unorthodox reading of The Education
of Kevin Powell can expose how phony
is a
tearful and self-serving reception of the book. Reading against the grain reduces indulgence in the delusion and bad faith of
pity. It liberates us to grasp how raw
will power enables an American male to
prevail in the endless, uneven, traumatic attempt to reach the telos (desirable end) of being human, of being a good citizen in a chaotic
universe.
Powell's
autobiography makes a strong case for the power of the will. He reinforces the
idea of responsible agency which is central in the essays he collected and edited
in The Black Male Handbook (2008) and
in his own essays in Who's Gonna Take the
Weight?: Manhood, Race and Power in America (2003) and Someday We'll All Be Free (2006).
Indeed, we can learn from this autobiography what the American
entertainment/ disinformation industry wants us not to know about the essence
of being hip-hop or the
transformational complexity of
oppositional stances. Powell exposes the
education America imposes upon it male citizens outside and inside formal
classrooms.
This autobiography has two parts. Part 1 "trapped in a concrete box"
contains seventeen chapters which deal with the spatial origins of Powell's
long, unfinished journey; the thirteen chapters of Part 2 "living on the
other side of midnight" give specificity to the temporal, to the events
and people in the unique trajectory of Powell's life to the present. The introduction establishes the dominant
image of violence and being beaten, the image that haunts us frequently in the
autobiography and in our everyday lives.
Powell's exact words ---
"the beating as punishment for my life" --- operate in unsettling
concert with the line "trapped in a concrete box" from his poem
"Mental Terrorism" in Recognize (1995) and his plain assertion
that "writing is perhaps the most courageous thing I've ever
done." Through writing Powell
instructs us time and again that "there is something grotesquely wrong
with a society where millions of people face daily political, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and economic oppression by virtue
of their skin complexion." His recognition of what is at once explicit and
implicit in an American education justifies his desire to have writing
"open up minds, feed souls, bridge gaps, provoke heated exchanges"
and authorizes a yearning, present throughout world history, to have writing
"breathe and live forever."
Without saying so directly,
Powell challenges Allan Bloom's famous
lamentations in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and subverts Bloom's
complaint by writing to open the imagined mind of the United States of America
in the 21st century.
Critics who assign maximum value to aesthetics have no reason to fear that Kevin
Powell minimizes craft in contributing to the production of knowledge, because
he is appropriately literary in shaping autobiography. The title of his book is a very literary
gesture, a discriminating invitation to use uncommon cultural literacy about
the nature of American autobiography. He
is even more recognizably literary in using the device of the catalog of discoveries
(as Richard Wright used it in Black Boy)
to hammer ideas about the journey from boyhood to manhood -----"like the
rupture...like the longing...like the bewilderment...like the hostile
paranoia...like the cryptic sense of great expectations." And the latter
allusion is one result of Powell's having read both Edgar Allan Poe and Charles
Dickens in his youth. Powell's anaphoric
use of "I remember...I remember...I remember" attests to how he
inserts his poetic sensibility to serve the rhetorical ends of creative
non-fiction. And it is remarkable that he rewrites a passage from Black Boy about how adults use alcohol
and words to "corrupt" a child for their careless amusement to dramatize an educational moment.
Like Wright,
Powell uses what purports to be remembered dialogue to intensify our sense of
the affective properties of historiography and to suggest historical process
always comes back to us as narrative not as objective reporting that is in
denial of its inherent subjectivity.
Powell is crafty and exceptionally skilled in creating literature that
does not hesitate to critique the limits of moral imagination. Or, for that matter, to expose the innate
immorality of twenty-first century societies. He targets those wretched circumstances, so permanent in our heritage
of social and racial contracts, which
cast light on the moral dimensions of
his profound struggles with his own sexism and his anger, his male
American and African American identities.
The Education of Kevin Powell and Ta-Nehisi
Coates' Between the World and Me are
indebted to Wright and to The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, a fact that legitimizes comparison. But the comparison ought to be tough-minded
and should make a special note that Coates and Powell are writing from different
but convergent class positions.
Interpretive association of Coates with Benjamin Franklin (his
autobiography was intended, in part, to be a guidebook for his
descendents) and of Powell with Henry
Adams enables us to have fresh perspectives on representing privilege, race, and power without falling
into merely tendentious
literary and cultural criticism or drowning in lakes of fickle
public opinions. But we must remember that an understanding of
these autobiographical writings also imposes upon us the need to assess what we
know or do not know about our own
existential choices which pertain to leadership and activism. The books complement each other as we try to
make sense of individual plasticity in human response to Nature and multiple
environments.
Reading the two
autobiographies compelled me to make a choice.
I admit that the vernacular qualities of The Education of Kevin Powell instruct me more thoroughly about the
problematic nature of autobiography than
do the deliberate "literariness" of Between the World and Me.
His writing encourages me to
learn more about aligning the building of knowledge for everyday use with
critical aesthetic response, while the ego-focused rawness of Powell's confession
invites me to agonize that the lessons
in his openness may be casually dismissed by many young male readers who are
enthralled with being macho .
Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates is not easy. The difficulty is constituted neither by his prose style nor
his subject matter, because the subject matter is familiar and his sentences
are music for the inner ear. Difficulty slams into you from a place he is not
exploring, from the badlands where signs defy decoding. You feel that his
having borrowed the title Between the
World and Me from one of the stellar poems of 20th century American poetry
transports you to a desert where the bones of David Walker, Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman, Alexander
Crummell, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison are strewn helter-skelter and the air
smells like Theodore Bilbo's breath. In
that arid, alienating place, you are hearing footsteps from In the American Grain by Williams Carlos
Williams and Brothers and Keepers by
John Edgar Wideman, although ultra-orthodox literary criticism wants you to hear a sermon from
James Baldwin that simply is not available. Toni Morrison's "amen
corner" blurb for Coates' book doesn't persuade me to read Coates as
Baldwin reincarnated. The blurb
persuades me that Morrison is complicit in an enterprise of which she once was
progressively critical. The difficulty
is also constituted by the idiosyncrasy
of how my mind reads, by my uncanny affinity with Richard Wright.
Idiosyncrasy begets temptations. Under the influence of Coates's tip of the
hat to Richard Wright and the space/time where an enormous number of males have
no sanctuary, you are tempted to listen once more to Billie Holiday sing
"Strange Fruit." But wouldn't
the mood produced actually prejudice your reading of how Coates depicts the
space of the hard place and the rock?
Listen to Thelonious Monk, October and November 1947, Blue Note LP 5002. Monk and Art Blakey provide the jazz against
which you to read Coates's blues (echoes of Ellison's calling Wright's Black Boy a species of blues
writing). You are tempted to ask why
Coates romanticizes life at Howard University beyond the classroom as the
Mecca. His idea of Mecca is a
translation of comments on a pilgrimage by Malcolm X, a man whom Ossie Davis eulogized as one who
made the cowardly "thoroughly ashamed of the urbane and smiling hypocrisy
we practice merely to exist in a world whose values we both envy and despise." Is it urbane or cosmopolitan to tell your son
about that Mecca and tell him nary a word about Chicago's Mecca, the 1891 apartment building, to tell
your son
nothing about what Gwendolyn Brooks said about that Mecca? She ordered us to "Sit where the light
corrupts your face." When you drop
knowledge for your son, employ economy.
Aretha Franklin's beautiful phrasing of "And temptation's
strong" cuts across Monk's "Humph."
Trying to accord
Mr. Coates the sympathy and respect he accorded Wright's illuminating
habitation of the black male body, you are tempted to say unto him invest more
in the vengeance of the Old Testament God for whom the pen is the sword. After Ferguson and the white magic of daily
systemic murder in the United States, you are tempted to suggest that the human
body in our nation professes the New Testament God to be an invisible shadow
and act. After all, who told Jesus he
could change his name? Who? Who?
The owl and Amiri Baraka?
Ah, Mr. Coates you use the word "body" too much
in Between the World and Me and are
too stingy in using the word "mind." Do you not recall that after Richard Wright
figured out what was truly between the world and himself and other black males,
he figured forth the lynching of the mind in The Outsider and The Long
Dream? When you play with allusions,
do not half-step. Temptations strengthen
idiosyncrasy.
You find it tantalizingly informative that Ta-Nehisi
Coates chose not to imprison his letter to his son in the ancient form that
letters can still assume. He begins
"Son," (page 5) and ends "Through the windshield I saw the rain
coming down in sheets." (page 152)
He did not begin "Dear Son," and end "Your father,
Ta-Nehisi". The lack of formality
says something about the 21st century, about the distance between what Mr.
Coates deems to be the proper shape of correspondence and the outmoded
antiquity of your ideas about how
courtesy ought to be signaled. Coates
operates against the formal properties of the model James Baldwin provided in
his letter to his nephew. So be it. Although generic form is an action, it is
superseded by substance. Substance is
what you are looking for in Coates's book.
You find it in the possibility that Coates is saying
something to his son from the region of mind that only he can access, that is
curiously represented when he writes of becoming a writer without a degree from
Howard University:
I felt that it was time to go, to declare myself a
graduate of The Mecca, if not the university.
I was publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local
alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more human beings. I had editors ---more teachers --- and these
were the first white people I'd ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions --- they were
afraid nether for me nor of me. Instead
they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured
and harnessed (62).
The slave trade treasured black bodies and harnessed them
on plantations in a new world of capitalism.
You write on the margins of page 62: "Reconstructing
the tragic chain of circumstances...." and "In the hope that there is
something to learn from this account, something to salvage from the grief and
waste, I've striven for accuracy and honesty." You quote from John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Vintage,
1984), page xi, hoping (with genuine desperation) that Wideman's honesty will
anoint your reading of Between the World
and Me. You begin to fear that
Coates is 100% American. You write words published in 1925 on a separate sheet
of paper: "Here Poe emerges --in no sense the bizarre, isolate writer, the
curious literary figure. On the
contrary, in him American literature is
anchored, in him alone, on solid ground." This assertion comes from
William Carlos Williams, In the American
Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), page 226. You are annotating
Coates's book because something is emerging.
Poe became a "major" American author by not graduating from
the University of Virginia. William
Carlos Williams, a doctor and poet, found something American to admire in Poe.
So too did Richard Wright, who said that had Poe not lived we would have
invented him. In the back of your mind,
memory whispers: one of Wideman's early novels is entitled The Lynchers.
Is Coates saying something to his son about narrative
that exceeds the conventional talk (recently rebaptized by necessity as THE
TALK) which non-white American fathers think they are obligated to have with
their non-white sons, saying something about the talk that ,apparently, white fathers never have with their white
sons? When it comes to how the talk and
lives of all color matter, the tongue of the white male American body is as
bound as the feet of a Chinese emperor's favorite wife. Perhaps Coates is quite indirectly telling
his son that the so-called white mind actually is a fiction without material
references.
"You have not yet grappled," Ta-Nehisi Coates
writes to his son, "with your own myths and narratives and discovered the
plunder everywhere around us "(21).
When and if the son does discover American history is an interlocked
series of subjective narratives , then he will have to weigh the commerce of
narrative and violence in maintaining America's social and racial contracts. Men created America by violating the minds
and bodies of men, women, and children. You think it would be good for Coates
to give his son copies of Robert G. Parkinson's The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Hayden
White's The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New
York: Pantheon, 1998), Tzvetan Todorov's The
Conquest of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), John Hope
Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans,
3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967) and Leslie Bow's Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated
South (New York: New York University
Press, 2010). The son might plunder these books at his leisure when he reaches
the age of reading. Or he might reject them and
choose to plunder a very different selection of texts. You guess that Ta-Nehisi Coates would have
his son plunder in the name of unqualified
love of himself. Should he do
so, he might indeed produce his own myths
and narratives and thereby rival those created by his father. Those myths and narratives just might resemble
the autobiographical ones created by John Edgar Wideman, who makes superb use
of his mind to document the homoerotic fascination white folk believe they are
destined to have with the bodies of black, red, brown and yellow folk. Your son, Mr. Coates, might empower himself to destroy (or at least
minimize) the ways the agents of mass media, social
networking, the ubiquitous Internet, and
the American police state work feverishly to constipate his mind as well as his
body and his spiritual essence.
Between the World
and Me is a strong, complex, provocative book. Like all American authors, Coates could not
avoid signing deals with demons in order to have his book published
commercially. You know that. You have
compassion for the book's instances of class-blindness. You make peace with its flaws, the moments when
specificity becomes generalization, because the book subverts gross ignorance
and exposes your nation's unique brand of denial. It is a brave book. It is a book that James Meredith, author
of A
Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America (New York: Atria
Books, 2012), might endorse if he is caught at just the right moment of
generosity. It is a truth-telling book
which inspires dread. It does not
inspire promises of false hope that shall never be delivered.
Dread is the real
deal in the United States of America and elsewhere. The Dream is an evil
fiction that attempts to enslave people, and
too often it succeeds beyond the expectations of its authors.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
has produced a first-rate secular jeremiad, an honest meditation on Dread. There is a thin but critical line between a
sermon and a jeremiad. Coates is neither
a priest nor a preacher.
You sit in the
desert, secure in your idiosyncrasy. You
and the ghost of Claude McKay, author of the sonnet "America" sit in
the sand and take bets on who shall be the first to see Time's unerring
terrorism, with much help from Nature,
dispatch the millions of people who worship in the temples and cathedrals and mosques of white supremacy.
Re-reading McKay's sonnet is a fine start for a judicious
probing, for engaging the endlessly provocative questions behind what Powell and Coates may be saying to their
native land:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
The sonnet is also a prelude to considering the question
of John Edgar Wideman and the contemporary functions of black male
autobiography. Do the rhetorical options
John Edgar Wideman chose to use in Writing
to Save a Life encourage critique of how black male autobiographical
writing might evade death-bound entrapment?
Permit repetition. The
autobiographical writings of Kevin Powell and Ta'Nehisi Coates appear to be
relatively "traditional" (
conventional in reassuring readers that
aspects of the status quo are very much intact )when they are read against the "avant-garde " (making the
strange seem overtly familiar) features
of Wideman's autobiographical detective work on the "lynching" of
Emmett Till's father. Wideman frustrates conventional expectations by dwelling
in the deep space of his own creativity, the atypical anxieties that form and inform his
life history.
Like the poetic meditation of Philip C. Kolin's Emmett Till in Different States
(Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), a quite sensitive white male autobiographical
rendering of how language gives birth to images of an iconic moment in
America's violent past and present, Wideman's Writing to Save a Life is a remarkable exercise in the use of
language to save his own life, in scrutinizing the peculiar language of World
War II U. S. Army documentation to contextualize his individuality. His blending of fact and fiction is a
disarming revelation of the emotional truths which contest any
"rules" that might distinguish autobiography as a genre. What emotional truth pulsates in knowing
"Private Louis Till's file revealed he had been hanged July 2, 1945, by
the U.S. army for committing rape and murder in Italy" and that
"Revisiting trial testimony did not help me produce the Emmett Till fiction
I wanted to write…." ( Writing…12)?
That Wideman substituted an autobiographical project for one devoted to fiction
matters greatly, because it reminds that
the grossest obscenities of American history are not the stuff of fiction. They
may be present in fiction, but they lose the abrasive qualities that
non-fiction (or almost non-fiction) deliver.
And Wideman produces a noteworthy sandpapering of the mind in his
memoir. He vacillates between his
reading of the redacted Louis Till file
and the evidence of how that file was crucial in assuring that the murderers of
Louis Till's son would be absolved of guilt by the machinations of Southern
justice in Mississippi in 1955. The
sandpapering is made all the more effective by the references to the poetry of
Ezra Pound (the treason-smeared maker of
cantos) and Robert Hayden (the virtuous maker of minor epics), by multiple
allusions that examine the extent of one's cultural literacy and sophistication
in the sense of one's being a coloured citizen of the world still capable of
hearing the voice of David Walker's
Appeal (1829).
Truth be told , Wideman, Coates and Powell as writers of
autobiography do not escape the
death-boundedness of the existential choices available to American males. They
can no more evade entrapment than can Donald J. Trump, Barack Obama, and Warren
Buffett as makers of scary autobiographical propositions. But that's another story about global
capitalism and international political affairs.
Let it suffice that the implications of the titles chosen by Powell,
Coats, and Wideman shall haunt us for many decades.
