China 2009

Visual proof of Asian ancestry

Thinking about New Orleans

New Orleans:  A Crossroad of Axes

Never shy about proclaiming itself the birthplace of jazz or America’s classical music, New Orleans does not talk about itself as a point of origin for American literary traditions or movements.  The reason is not far to seek.  What is original in the literature of the Crescent City is French, West African, Creole (Spanish and French), Bambara and Mande, Cajun; it is rooted in Paris, Haiti, Martinique and St. Domingue, Senegambia; its debt to London and the King James Bible and the invention of American English is minimal.  The Louisiana Purchase was payment for property not for culture. From 1804 to the present, the constipation of America’s puritan ethos has been alien to the matrix of artisanship, musical genius, performance, and wordsmithery of New Orleans.  As Marcus B. Christian wrote in his famous poem “I Am New Orleans,” culture is a blending and reinventing “Of Creoles, Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards,/ Jews/Africans, mix bloods, Germans, Irishmen,/ and Indians” into “one common bond of defense.”  The city as “un entrepôt” defied the laws of thermodynamics and achieved perpetual cultural motion at very great cost, because it has never been free of racism, colorism, discrimination, classism, economic oppression, and sexism, the veneer of the carnivalesque notwithstanding.  New Orleans is New Orleans is New Orleans: an oscillating metropolis of entreposage.

Tom Dent, a native son of the city, put what is at issue clearly in “Report From New Orleans,” the prose coda in Magnolia Street (1976), his first collection of poems: “New Orleans is a weird town, wavering in the breeze of history.  An old place, one of the few towns in this country where one can look at the layers of two or three centuries in one glance.  Then there is the poised wrecking ball of ‘progress’.”

Perhaps the spirits provoked by the winds and waters of the Storm (2005), angered by the bloodless face of “progress now,” command us to make a fresh inspection of cultural layers in this laid-back and care-forgetting place.  Perhaps the x,y, and z coordinates of place demand a new articulation.

What have  L’Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littéraire (1843) and Les Cenelles (1845),  Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899) and Brenda Marie Osbey’s  Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983)  to do with Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945), the French Quarter-inspired work of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain; Poems 1956-1978, Tom Dent’s classic play Ritual Murder  , John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1987), or Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994)?   Does New Orleans ever take off the mask that grins and hides to coax dollars from tourists long enough to assess its own cultural wealth?

Truth be told, the necessary answers will only surface through dedicated, cross-generational  conversations and even more dedicated cross-class scholarship and public documentation among citizens of New Orleans and the artists, performers, writers, and  musicians who devote their considerable talents to preserving and recreating a unique, multi-faceted culture in a city whose essence is not exactly American.  The answers may produce joy, anger, disbelief, or despair.  They are beyond prediction.  What is most important is that we collaborate in producing cultural knowledge that may be critical and crucial for a future. For in the words of P. A. Desdunes:

Nul n’estime le people ingrate qui dans l’oubli

Profond laisse dormer ceux qui l’ont ennoble.

The remembering, of course, will be rendered in perfect New Orleans English.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

New Orleans:  A Crossroad of Axes

Never shy about proclaiming itself the birthplace of jazz or America’s classical music, New Orleans does not talk about itself as a point of origin for American literary traditions or movements.  The reason is not far to seek.  What is original in the literature of the Crescent City is French, West African, Creole (Spanish and French), Bambara and Mande, Cajun; it is rooted in Paris, Haiti, Martinique and St. Domingue, Senegambia; its debt to London and the King James Bible and the invention of American English is minimal.  The Louisiana Purchase was payment for property not for culture. From 1804 to the present, the constipation of America’s puritan ethos has been alien to the matrix of artisanship, musical genius, performance, and wordsmithery of New Orleans.  As Marcus B. Christian wrote in his famous poem “I Am New Orleans,” culture is a blending and reinventing “Of Creoles, Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards,/ Jews/Africans, mix bloods, Germans, Irishmen,/ and Indians” into “one common bond of defense.”  The city as “un entrepôt” defied the laws of thermodynamics and achieved perpetual cultural motion at very great cost, because it has never been free of racism, colorism, discrimination, classism, economic oppression, and sexism, the veneer of the carnivalesque notwithstanding.  New Orleans is New Orleans is New Orleans: an oscillating metropolis of entreposage.

Tom Dent, a native son of the city, put what is at issue clearly in “Report From New Orleans,” the prose coda in Magnolia Street (1976), his first collection of poems: “New Orleans is a weird town, wavering in the breeze of history.  An old place, one of the few towns in this country where one can look at the layers of two or three centuries in one glance.  Then there is the poised wrecking ball of ‘progress’.”

Perhaps the spirits provoked by the winds and waters of the Storm (2005), angered by the bloodless face of “progress now,” command us to make a fresh inspection of cultural layers in this laid-back and care-forgetting place.  Perhaps the x,y, and z coordinates of place demand a new articulation.

What have  L’Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littéraire (1843) and Les Cenelles (1845),  Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899) and Brenda Marie Osbey’s  Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983)  to do with Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945), the French Quarter-inspired work of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain; Poems 1956-1978, Tom Dent’s classic play Ritual Murder  , John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1987), or Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994)?   Does New Orleans ever take off the mask that grins and hides to coax dollars from tourists long enough to assess its own cultural wealth?

Truth be told, the necessary answers will only surface through dedicated, cross-generational  conversations and even more dedicated cross-class scholarship and public documentation among citizens of New Orleans and the artists, performers, writers, and  musicians who devote their considerable talents to preserving and recreating a unique, multi-faceted culture in a city whose essence is not exactly American.  The answers may produce joy, anger, disbelief, or despair.  They are beyond prediction.  What is most important is that we collaborate in producing cultural knowledge that may be critical and crucial for a future. For in the words of P. A. Desdunes:

Nul n’estime le people ingrate qui dans l’oubli

Profond laisse dormer ceux qui l’ont ennoble.

The remembering, of course, will be rendered in perfect New Orleans English.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

New Orleans:  A Crossroad of Axes

Never shy about proclaiming itself the birthplace of jazz or America’s classical music, New Orleans does not talk about itself as a point of origin for American literary traditions or movements.  The reason is not far to seek.  What is original in the literature of the Crescent City is French, West African, Creole (Spanish and French), Bambara and Mande, Cajun; it is rooted in Paris, Haiti, Martinique and St. Domingue, Senegambia; its debt to London and the King James Bible and the invention of American English is minimal.  The Louisiana Purchase was payment for property not for culture. From 1804 to the present, the constipation of America’s puritan ethos has been alien to the matrix of artisanship, musical genius, performance, and wordsmithery of New Orleans.  As Marcus B. Christian wrote in his famous poem “I Am New Orleans,” culture is a blending and reinventing “Of Creoles, Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards,/ Jews/Africans, mix bloods, Germans, Irishmen,/ and Indians” into “one common bond of defense.”  The city as “un entrepôt” defied the laws of thermodynamics and achieved perpetual cultural motion at very great cost, because it has never been free of racism, colorism, discrimination, classism, economic oppression, and sexism, the veneer of the carnivalesque notwithstanding.  New Orleans is New Orleans is New Orleans: an oscillating metropolis of entreposage.

Tom Dent, a native son of the city, put what is at issue clearly in “Report From New Orleans,” the prose coda in Magnolia Street (1976), his first collection of poems: “New Orleans is a weird town, wavering in the breeze of history.  An old place, one of the few towns in this country where one can look at the layers of two or three centuries in one glance.  Then there is the poised wrecking ball of ‘progress’.”

Perhaps the spirits provoked by the winds and waters of the Storm (2005), angered by the bloodless face of “progress now,” command us to make a fresh inspection of cultural layers in this laid-back and care-forgetting place.  Perhaps the x,y, and z coordinates of place demand a new articulation.

What have  L’Album Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de la Littéraire (1843) and Les Cenelles (1845),  Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899) and Brenda Marie Osbey’s  Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983)  to do with Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945), the French Quarter-inspired work of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain; Poems 1956-1978, Tom Dent’s classic play Ritual Murder  , John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1987), or Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994)?   Does New Orleans ever take off the mask that grins and hides to coax dollars from tourists long enough to assess its own cultural wealth?

Truth be told, the necessary answers will only surface through dedicated, cross-generational  conversations and even more dedicated cross-class scholarship and public documentation among citizens of New Orleans and the artists, performers, writers, and  musicians who devote their considerable talents to preserving and recreating a unique, multi-faceted culture in a city whose essence is not exactly American.  The answers may produce joy, anger, disbelief, or despair.  They are beyond prediction.  What is most important is that we collaborate in producing cultural knowledge that may be critical and crucial for a future. For in the words of P. A. Desdunes:

Nul n’estime le people ingrate qui dans l’oubli

Profond laisse dormer ceux qui l’ont ennoble.

The remembering, of course, will be rendered in perfect New Orleans English.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

v

Haiku

Peace is still budding


defiantly flame-colored:


a rose in winter.





August 18, 2011

American Fictions

WALKING THE TIGHTROPES

                The fame and infamy surrounding Kathryn Stockett’s The Help as novel and film has deflected the interest that should be taken in Minrose Gwin’s The Queen of Palmyra.  These first novels were written by women from Mississippi.  Stockett comes from Jackson; Gwin, from Tupelo.  The authors are white females.  The novels deal in varying degrees with race, identity, and summer in the sovereign State of Mississippi during the 1960s.  What has been missed by American readers and film spectators is an opportunity to make ethical judgments about the forking paths of contemporary American fiction.  Perhaps in time The Queen of Palmyra will be subjected to sensitive, critical readings; perhaps in time readers will discover the value of a narrative that demythologizes the nostalgia-haunted reconstruction of whiteness.  There is a grain of hope in knowing that two white female Southern novelists can occupy oppositional poles in attempting to say how black and white women have negotiated the combat zones of the South.

                The novels are thoroughly anchored in the white female imaginary, the psyche that yearns to confess itself.  That territory was plowed rather successfully by Ellen Douglas in her 1988 novel Can’t Quit You, Baby, which used clues from Willie Dixon’s blues song and from Douglas’s penchant for a kind of nude “truth” that is rare in Southern fiction.  That novel helps us to understand, to some degree, why The Help cavorts in the spotlight as The Queen of Palmyra stands in the shadows.

                The Help and The Queen of Palmyra expose as much about the culture-bound tastes of American readers and the bottom-line priorities of the American publishing industry (literary politics) as they do about aesthetics and ethics.  It is reasonable to believe that the power of hype attached to Stockett’s novel has pushed the work to the foreground of consciousness, while the small voice of discrimination that would speak of the enlightenment in Gwin’s novel can be but faintly heard.  Anyone who knows the history of Mississippi, who knows the kind of history one finds in John Dittmer’s Local People and Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested, will sense that Gwin’s use of history is more principled and sophisticated than Stockett’s.  In the realm of fiction, ruthless responsibility does not yield up great profits.  The real thing never does.  Fiction readers wish to be  entertained out of reality.  Rare is the reader who can find pleasure in the unvarnished “truth,” in Gwin’s deconstructive gestures that expose the fatality of invoking the myth of the universal.  The much touted “universal” is a code for affirming that “we” rather than “they” are the guardians of “the truth.”  The Queen of Palmyra refuses to displace a fine specificity with the artifice of universals.  Like Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Gwin’s novel bravely walks the tightrope of risk; unlike Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) and The Help, The Queen of Palmyra walks the tightropes without the Southern safety nets of the orthodox. It would come as no surprise to hear a certain class of Southern white reader say that Gwin is guilty of racial treason.

                Perhaps in time I shall perform a sensitive, critical reading of The Queen of Palmyra.  For the moment, it is refreshing to know that a white novelist has liberated herself from the ignorance of thinking that black domestics actually “loved” those who knowingly or unwittingly dehumanized them. Stupid “love” has never found a reason to exist in Mississippi.

Is civility still possible on this planet?

Lawrence W. Levine ends Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America with these words:

In defining and redefining the contours of culture, we are not merely dealing with intellectual abstractions; we are dealing with lives and minds, we are dealing with people, and we owe them more than the hubris of narrow self-defense; we owe them no less than the adoption of an open search for and a careful understanding of what culture has been in our past and can become in our future. (256)

The open search for culture in 2011 too often results in the utter ugliness of recognition. From the perspective of the United States of America, there is ample evidence that people are determined to murder civility in everyday life.

Playing in the Sunlight: Colors of Imagination, or Toni Morrison Revisited

Playing in the Sunlight: Colors of Imagination, or Toni Morrison Revisited

                Having made proposals about the continual and continuous Africanist presence in the American literary imagination, Toni Morrison positions herself to be questioned about the invisible presence of an other, neither black nor white, which does or should haunt the American use of language.  Should the case be otherwise, it would have to be claimed that the truly invisible other has  been so thoroughly erased in historical consciousness and printed text as to be of minuscule importance.  Morrison’s translation of her 1990 Massey lectures as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination raises serious questions about the “inadequacy and the force of the imaginative act,” particularly when that phrase is juxtaposed with the amazing utterance “How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art” (xiii).  One of Morrison’s most valuable points in the book concerns the debatable validity of certain constructions of knowledge. It is an invitation to ask about her own constructions, in light of her disclaimer that she does not bring to the critical project “even principally the tools of a literary critic.”  Do the tools of the literary artist suffice?  And in this instance, might we think (with a tinge of perversity) that failure would be more valuable than success in helping us to understand Morrison as novelist/critic?

One feature of Morrison’s prose style and style of thought might serve to open an investigation.  Consider these formations from pages 8 to 10 in Playing in the Dark:

• have disguised themselves and, in so doing, impoverished the literature
• its own implicit and explicit ideology
• that becomes and remains par of and significant within
• the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies
• What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination
• the invention and development of whiteness
• this large and compelling subject
• in matters of race, silence and evasion
• instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse
• literary and scholarly moeurs
• terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access

The singular feature of the formations is yoking, the joining by use of the conjunction and.  If one isolated and for notice in reading Playing in the Dark, its use might seem excessive. What does such highlighting of the possibility of joining at the syntactic level suggest?  Is her procedure use to stress the importance of reflection and critique of the enabling and disabling functions of American English: its assumed ability to mark categories, hierarchies, sameness, difference, unification, definition, to represent truths and confirm and disconfirm beliefs with lies?

        In calling attention to selectivity and avoidance (with a nod toward ignorance and not knowing), Morrison does not seek to persuade by rational argument and cold logic.  She will bedazzle with conjoined rhetorical moves.  The conjunctions to some extent ensure our interest in a project which always remains a centimeter beyond grasp.  Metaphoric force is dominant in what seems at first glance to be critical prose.  Morrison’s persuasion is poetic.

        The mode of persuasion does not diminish its meaning or significance, but it does set out more clearly where and how Morrison would have us look for the underexplored and the unsaid in American literature.  It locates where we should look for the constructing element of any “implied contract” we elect to have with Morrison and other writers as novelists or as critics. The site for exploration in her critical statements is conjunction.  As that grammatical item functions syntactically, we confront the apodictic: synthesis is never sufficient. And as we turn from the critic to the novelist, we eventually confront calculated spaces of absence in Morrison’s fictions. If Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko were reading Morrison’s novels, they might legitimately ask if the African American literary imagination deliberately erases the presence of indigenous peoples in its production of literature.  Does blackness like whiteness demand the annihilation of redness? And Alexie’s question would have the greater weight, because he has acknowledged Robert Johnson in Reservation Blues.

        Given the primacy of “race” in the United States, Morrison’s third essay (“disturbing nurses and the kindness of sharks”) in Playing in the Dark is especially on time and on target.  There she pursues race as metaphor in the primal play of color.  The idea that Africanism (invention of Africa and Africans) has come to have metaphysical necessity but has not lost its ideological utility (64) is frustratingly complex.  Is metaphysical necessity a kind of anti-matter philosophical glue?

        Morrison’s identification of linguistic strategies we should watch for is most enlightening:

1.       economy of stereotype

2.       metonymic displacement – ex. “bad hair”

3.       metaphysical condensation  -- collapsing into universal differences

4.       fetishization

5.       dehistoricizing allegory

6.       patterns of explosive, disjointed, repetitive language  (67-69)

After carefully illustrating how these strategies work in the writings of Ernest Hemingway, the John Wayne of American letters, Morrison concludes we ought not ignore the disrupting darkness: “All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes” (91). At the deepest frequencies, Morrison called for literary discourses that are more truthful about creative and critical practices.

                Morrison hints at but does not directly address what the omni-responsible American writer might do, but one can conclude that she is exceptionally responsible in her concern for the aesthetic, political, and social consequences of American English.  And her eloquent prose poetry urges us all to be so responsible.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 22, 1996/August 10, 2011

Introduction for Lance Jeffers's Novel

Jeffers, Lance.  Witherspoon. Atlanta: The George A. Flippin Press, 1983.

INTRODUCTION

Such Agonies Suffer Our Men of War

                Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality.  Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects.  He is too good and too honest an artist to engage in easy tricks.  He knows, as wordsmiths have known since the pre-history of Africa, that a good story told in language the community can understand is not to be surpassed.  The grace and strength of fiction are located in its ability to show us our lives with more order, insight, and clarity than we can normally obtain.   Good fiction pushes us toward recognition, toward a profound, relentless honesty about ourselves and others.  It forces us to make moral decisions while satisfying our penchant for narratives about man’s endless contest with the fate of being human.  Because it fulfills these criteria superbly, Witherspoon is a fine, important novel.

                In the poem “When I Know the Power of My Black Hand,” Jeffers wrote:

I see my children stunted,

my young men slaughtered,

I do not know the mighty power of my hand.

I see the power over my life and death in

another man’s hands, and sometimes

I shake my wooly head and wonder:

                Lord have mercy! What would it be like…to be free?

                Lucius Witherspoon, James Corwul, and Willie Armstrong are characters who, in varying degrees, come to know the power of their black hands, their interrelated life-stories being metonymic: the essence of Black life and the complexity of Black male psychology in the South are compressed in their ability or inability to assert power.  Through these characters, Jeffers examines what it means to be unempowered and how Black men and women do possess the inner strength (and latent social power) to be great and human without ambivalence.  Witherspoon does not seek to tell what it would be like to be Black, free, and Southern.  It shows what the unsung heroes among ordinary Black folk must do to achieve individual and collective freedom.  And what they must do involves tragedy and love, the willingness to push one’s humanity to irreversible extremes, and determination to stare death straight in the eye.  Black people, especially Black men, will know the power of their hands when they know themselves totally.

                Witherspoon does not validate how we are now, nor does it evade the Black man’s critical problem of confronting, in the words of Robert Staples, “the contradiction between the normative expectations attached to being male in this society and the proscriptions on [his] behavior and achievement of goals.”  With the skill of a surgeon, Jeffers performs an operation in the underexplored depths of Black male psychology.  Therefore, he enables us to discover the agonies suffered by our men of war and the long journey they and we must take to find psychological freedom.  The great achievement of Witherspoon is the destruction of the historical and social myths behind which men try to mask.

                Evoking the wisdom of the spirituals (a fact apparent in the novel’s original title The Lord is a Man of War), Lance Jeffers has given us fiction that is convertive and blacktrocuting.  In its affirmation that descent into the inferno of racism leads to rising like a phoenix, Witherspoon offers to us the grandeur that is ours.  Witherspoon is the sorrow song of our new day, the martial song for Black men who would know the power of their hands.  It is an ode to the invisible men and women whose authentic humanity must become the model of our lives.

                                                                                                                                Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

                                                                                                                                Tougaloo College

                                                                                                                                May 3, 1982