Alvin Aubert:
Literature, History, Ethnicity II
March 12, 2015
Xavier University
Alvin Aubert would have been 85
years old today, and we gather to give a breathing dimension to words he wrote
on June 21, 1978:
I will be in language when I am gone in the flesh. (AAP, Box 41, Journal November 30,
1977-April 20, 1978)
I quote Aubert’s words from the end of Professor Ronald Dorris’
article “Alvin Aubert: Framing South Louisiana.” La Créole 7.1 (2014):16-21 to illustrate one pathway of scholarship
-----the transmission of Aubert’s words from a journal to Dorris’ article
and my repeating them (confident in the accuracy of what Dorris transferred
from the source) in my typescript
and then uttering them (oral repetition)
a few seconds ago. The trope of immortality only functions if
someone remembers particular words that were written or typed by someone else
in the vast duration we call time.
My remarks are titled “Alvin
Aubert: Literature, History, Ethnicity II” as a reminder that we are dealing
with another transmission of words, namely my interview with Aubert that was
published in Xavier Review 7.2(1987):
1-12. Part of that interview was
conducted through correspondence in March 1986 (typed) and part by way of my
taping Aubert’s words at Wayne State University on March 4, 1988. The correspondence is most likely in my
papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; the tape with
Aubert’s voice and my own has long since disappeared. Hurricane Katrina borrowed the tape and failed
to return it.
I am suggesting the centrality of archives and
archival work in assisting us to remember things about people, the body of
writing we call literature, the narratives of time that we call history which
are actually narratives of a process, and the prevailing importance of
ethnicity as identification and classification.
Being in language when one is gone in the flesh is not as simple as the
words that transmit such an idea.
It is wonderful that the Alvin
Aubert Papers are a part of the archives of Xavier University of Louisiana,
that a major portion of his legacy to American and African American literature
and literary history is preserved here. It is equally wonderful that the Tom
Dent Papers are preserved at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University,
and the Marcus B. Christian Papers are in the Special Collections at the
University of New Orleans and the Richard Wright Papers are deposited in the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. But wonderfulness is of little meaning if
students, teachers, and scholars do not use the sources of wonderfulness (the
archives) to do critical thinking and
then make choices regarding the flesh (our living and
breathing).
In 2015, a most troubled and troubling year,
and in a future, it is productive use of the Alvin Aubert Papers that can
transform mere wonderfulness into meaningful education, into understanding of
Aubert’s lasting contributions to the Black Arts Movement by way of his writing
and his publishing of OBSIDIAN magazine,
and into some grasping of how ethnicity is a permanent, vexed feature of social
and cultural existence in the United States of America. I make a special note that Aubert is not
mentioned in what to date is the leading study of the Black Arts/Black
Aesthetic phenomenon, James Smethurst’s The
Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005);
that he is mentioned only once (page 16) in the important reference book The Cambridge History of African American Literature (2011); that his
name appears only on pages 34 and 35 of Howard Rambsy’s The Black Arts Enterprise and
the Production of African American Poetry (2011). Only those who are as
blind as the proverbial bat fail to understand that Aubert contributed as much
to enterprise and production of Black writing as Mari Evans, Dudley Randall,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Hoyt Fuller, or Naomi Long Madgett. He worked assiduously without desire for
fanfare. Use of the Alvin Aubert Papers
is crucial if we are to fill the informational gaps and atone for our sins of
omissions. As co-editor of the CHAAL,
I must say “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
We can take for granted that Aubert is worthy of
attention with regard to the history of black/American poetry and black/American
publishing (print culture). That is a basic fact. What we cannot take for granted is that
people who can profit from remembering Alvin Aubert will do so. Thus, Irwin
Lachoff, the Associate Archivist at Xavier University, Ronald Dorris, Alumni
Class of ’58 Professor of Liberal Arts, African American and Diaspora Studies
and English, and I agreed to begin a public conversation and direct attention
to Aubert’s papers.
I shall refer to three comments
Aubert made in the interview about literature, history, and ethnicity and
reserve my own comments for the conversation with Mr. Lachoff, Dr. Dorris and
the audience.
LITERATURE—page 3
W. In your 1986 interview you said,
“Art, for me, is not the absence of social and political consciousness; rather,
it is the presence of an aesthetic quality, and that aesthetic quality can come
from one’s social and political consciousness.”
Would you clarify what you mean by “aesthetic quality?”
A.
I thought you’d ask me about the “absence” –“presence” bit. I’m glad you didn’t. As an Afro-American poet I would have to say
that the aesthetics of a work of art, of a poem or a story, say, derives from
the writer’s milieu, his cultural matrix.
This has to do with whatever in the poem the reader finds
appealing. Appealing in an entertaining,
instructive and informing way as well as in a structural sense --- realizing
that as operational categories these are not necessarily exclusive in a given
literary discourse. What I’m talking
about here touches on Stephen Henderson’s concept of “saturation.” In reading works of black American poets you
discover a great deal of affective material --
material that moves you in various ways because you recognize it as
coming from the culture you belong to, as having to do with your life in some
way, whether it refers to the kind of music you enjoy – blues, spirituals,
jazz, gospel, and so forth --- or jokes you have heard told or the way
people talk or tell stories or move about or dance or the kind of food that’s
eaten or a peculiar way of suffering and endurance and so forth. You recognize such things, cultural counters,
as they are, and your spirit responds “That’s good” and you enjoy the poem,
smiling to yourself a long time after reading it, entertaining good thoughts
about yourself and your people. That is
the basis of the Black aesthetic, a basically humanistic, celebratory standard
of literary appreciation that comes out of Black life. From the poet’s point of view, you recognize
in all of this a commitment.
HISTORY --- pages 9 and 10
W. We entertain the notion that the
past is completed.
A.
Well, the Euro-American sense of history encourages that, not the
African, in which past, present and future are coterminous, humanistically
so: the ancestors who are always with
us, as are the living and the yet to be born.
The ideal is of continuity rather than completion, and of satisfaction
in living with people in the present rather than a fretting about the past or a
yearning for the future. But I’m not
African, I’m African-American and must live and write out of that complexity.
ETHNICITY---pages 11-12
W. Denial of ethnicity is a
strategy for self-murder. In a larger
sense, genocide.
A. Those who would undo you begin
by chipping away at your ethnicity. What
we need in the U.S. is more mutual respect, ethnically, among people of
different ethnic backgrounds. If I’m
African-American and you are Italian-American, we relate to one another in
terms of our differences, first, then in terms of our common humanity. Ultimately it is the common humanity that
prevails, hopefully. I know this is all
very, very complex, involving politics and economics – especially economics –
as it does. Differences among people are not incidental, as some
would have it, but essential. Essential
incidental, if that’s philosophically tenable.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
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