"Django Unchained " and Spike Lee

If Spike Lee is sincere about wishing to honor his ancestors, he should make a very dignified film about his great grandfather William James Edwards, who established Snow Hill Institute in 1893, and Edwards's great grandparents, Mike and Phoebe.  The germ for the screenplay is Fallen Prince: William James Edwards, Black Education, and the Quest for Afro-American Nationalism (1990) by Donald P. Stone.

Donald Goines

Blog122912

 

Condemnation & Redemption: The Works of Donald Goines

 

Stallings, L. H. and Greg Thomas, eds. Word Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Works of Donald Goines. Baltimore: IMPRINT EDITIONS, 2011.

 

Addison Gayle, Jr. was not a signifying monkey.   Many contemporary scholars and critics ignore his existence; they dismiss his insights as strident sub-literary talk, noise not to invite to dinner at the Academic Big House.  A few critics of my generation refuse to erase him.  We do not embrace Gayle’s views without question.  We do, however, respect the historical importance and contemporary relevance of his thought.  We find his exploration of fiction in The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1975) to be bracing.  We find useful insights in the essays he collected in The Black Situation (1970), and one of those essays “Revolutionary Philosophy” seems poignant in the midst of debates about the status of the gun in the United States.  Rereading that essay casts light on issues explored in Word Hustle.

In the introduction to commentary on the works of Donald Goines, L. H. Stalling notes that Gayle  acknowledged neither the existence of street literature nor “its importance to a Black Arts or Black Power Movement” (21).  Nevertheless, Dennis Chester’s essay on Goines’ Daddy Cool (1974) recognizes the importance of contrasting Gayle’s quest for freedom, justice, and the creation of a new society with Goines’ s depiction of a new society which is deeply flawed and “whose fundamental principles are contradictory” (100-101).  Chester and other contributors to Word Hustle realize that critiques of street literature are necessary to continue the unfinished projects of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic cultural phenomenon.  As Candice Love Jackson argues in “The Paradox of Empowerment: Colonialism, Community, and Criminality in Donald Goines’s Kenyatta Series” (33-48), Goines’s works urge readers “to navigate new articulations of Black consciousness cautiously and soberly” (47).  The overseers of American literary acceptability miss a lot by trying to confine Goines to the outer reaches of the canonized plantation.  Bourgeois dismissal of Gayle as a critic and of Goines as a novelist only increases one’s appetite for a literary historical epiphany.

In one moment of reading Word Hustle, I imagined condemnation should be “con/damnation” and redemption should become “re/deepenation.”  Such linguistic sport can engender its own kind of hustle, a hustle to expose how the cunning of ex-cons who write novels (prison novels in particular) can advance dread-filled “truths” about the power of language much better than do many post-whatever novelists.  The sport can affirm hip-hop deconstruction of revolutionary dreams in fiction and become a timely enterprise for literary and cultural criticism.  Word Hustle warrants our engaging the counter-canon of American literature, the unsaintly works that boldly address certain realities of intraracial caste and class, of race-riddled sexism and homophobia, of confused descriptions of American masculinity, power and hegemony, and reform/revolutionary acts.  Like their elite and proletarian cousins, Goines’s novels do employ traditional narrative strategies, and they do belong “in non-Hegelian conversation” with criminalization and mass incarceration schemes, aesthetic smokescreens, subliminal concerns regarding praxis, economics, labor, and with the trauma of genuine historical consciousness that orthodox humanities, print or digital, desperately wish to conceal.

Literature is not salvific.  As Addison Gayle reminded us in “Revolutionary Philosophy,” some of us “dreamed not of integration but nationalism, not of a melting pot theory but of a pluralistic theory, not of a great society but a new one.  More important, we dreamed of fashioning Canaan out of the debris of American society, of erecting a nation predicated not upon the gun but upon morality, and if these dreams are hopeless, then  so too is the future of mankind” (221).  Literature can’t save us if we are determined like terrorists to destroy ourselves and everyone else.  But “in conversation,” Gayle and Goines promote recognition that the twenty-first- century world order is gangsta and ratchet. For a nice contextualization  of  “ratchet,” read Imani Perry’s “Of Degraded Talk, Digital Tongues, and A Commitment to Care,” Profession (2012): 17-24

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Our Assignment for January 1, 2013

I. Access

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_document/emanicpation_proclamation

II. Read

1) Manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation

2) The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 1862

3) John Hope Franklin's essay "The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice," which contains this noteworthy sentence: "The law itself is no longer an obstruction to justice and equality, but it is the people who live under the law who are themselves an obstruction to justice." Franklin also incorporates James Weldon Johnson's "Fifty Years" (New York Times, January 1, 1913) in his essay.

III. Remember

Forms of slavery and enslavement still exist on this planet.


Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 26, 2012
Kwanzaa Day One

Rereading Henry Van Dyke

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

v

Quare Jewish Meditations

Heilbut, Anthony. The Fan Who Knew Too Much.  New York: Alred A. Knopf, 2012.


The most valuable part of this book is Heilbut's confessional essay "The Fan Who Knew Too Much" (304-328) with its recognition that a fan is "someone who's discovered an endless storehoue of personal satisfaction" (304), the satisfaction derived primarily from the ability of the computer to "dissolve all the familiar hierarchies" (305).  A reader, however, can defeat the dissolving power of a computer by remembering that hierarchies did and shall once again exist.

The least valuable feature of this book is its lack of endnotes and bibliography, the minimal requisites if entertaining gossip about Aretha Franklin, the queer culture of gospel music, the Jewish contribution to the genre of soap opera, and quaint Jewish self-hatreds are to secure credibility.  We expect better of an author who possesses a Ph.D. from Harvard.  Perhaps we have no right to expect better from a man who has spent considerable time in the company of the gospel children.  It is sufficient that he has been slain by the Spirit and transformed from a scholar into a fan.  God is good and just.

December 16, 2012

Voices Beneath the Water: Arthenia Bates Millican (1920-2012)

 

Listen.  Be still and listen.  Be still and listen and learn something for everyday use.  Our ancestors are stern, purposeful and dignified, impatient with foibles, adamant that memory shall be. During her ninety-two years of navigating life on Earth, Arthenia Jackson Bates Millican listened faithfully. She translated the sounds of ancestral text-messages into the gestures that bespeak profound humanity and enviable modesty, into the works that one might argue leave this world somewhat better than when we arrived.  She produced seeds beneath the snow, the life-kernels we are obliged to cultivate as proof that we are worthy holding her legacy in our minds, our ears, and our hands.  Having given us a model of how to live and make contributions to humanity without pretense, having given us many lessons in altruism or the best habits of the heart, she is now speaking with the millions of voices beneath the water.  Listen to her.  Be still and listen to her. Be still, listen, and learn how best to use the gifts she gave us to do the work that is always there to be done.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 14, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salman Rushdie's Ritual Suicide

Rushdie, Salman. Joseph Anton.  New York: Random House, 2012.

It is rare to consider literature as a murder weapon, although in the eyes of some beholders Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) appears as the novel that killed the pretense of American innocence and ignorance in the United States. Seven decades later, the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie uses fictive biography as autobiography to commit ritual suicide. Fashioning Joseph Anton from the remains of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, Rushdie accomplishes what fatwa could not: the death of the author. Obviously, anxiety, fear, pints of guilt and gallons of spleen drove Rushdie to defend the moral rightness of The Satanic Verses. "He [Salman/Joseph] looked at himself in the mirror and loathed what he saw"(342).  What he saw was the image of an Anglo-Indian, a zigga (T. Geronimo Johnson's magnificent neologism), a male whose desire to become a British gentleman of letters could never be accomplished; thus, the man so alienated from his culture(s) as to become the Other of himself, chose the tragic action of self-murder.

Rushdie can write, can write well, even if the eloquence of his prose descends from time to time into the bowels of what is utterly arch.  But he lacks the deceptive masculinity of an Ernest Hemingway, a writer capable of making suicide the real thing. Instead, he manipulates the kindred genres of autobiography and biography to speak from the grave of being.

Rushdie's ritual suicide empowers him to let slip a truth from which much of the world retreats in fear and denial and trembling: the Sauds of Arabia are ultimately responsible for the tragedy of 9/11. As far as I know, this revelation puts the legitimacy of fatwa under erasure. For providing this choice insight about the cesspool of contemporary history, the intrepid Queen of England should tap him on head and shoulders and give him her garter.  An Anglo-Indian writer who possesses spleen enough to defy Islam deserves no less an honor.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
12/12/12