Eugene B. Redmond and Cultural Documentation
Eugene B. Redmond turns seventy-five on December 1,
2012. It is obligatory to make a few
notes about his legacy to world culture and the world of letters.
How many of his fellow writers has he helped to scrub a
river’s back by publishing them in Drumvoices
Revue? How has his invention of the “kwansaba”
enriched poetics? How does his extensive
collection of photographs, housed in the Elijah P. Lovejoy Library at Southern
Illinois University Edwardsville http://www.siue.edu/lovejoylibrary/ebr.shtml , constitute an invaluable archive for
research on writers and artists? How do
Redmond’s poems exist as works of art and as models for work to be assumed by
individuals in a tradition, by people who have not committed artistic or
intellectual suicide? What impact has
his neologic signature had on our use of poetic languages? How does his now classic Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) serve as our
prototype for critical, humanly engaged scholarship?
Answers to some of these questions may be contained in
Redmond’s new book Arkansipp Memwars:
1962-2012, Poetry, Prose & Chants.
Observe a hint about the special conscience and consciousness that mark
Redmond’s critical imagination. He uses
a soundsoulular gesture to refashion memoir
as memwar. This transformation
exposes the function of aesthetics in the social space occupied by our
political and cultural investments. Memwar is mano a mano, an adult reckoning with inevitable principles of
uncertainty. The gesture is a response to Adesanya Alakoye’s request (tell me
how willing slaves be), to June Jordan’s assertion (I must be a menace to my
enemies), and to Gwendolyn Brooks’ admonition (first fight. then fiddle). The
gesture is one that a man makes when he steps outside the comfort zone of ego
to do battle for his people.
Redmond has mastered the art of using the simple neologism
to create a mindscape. And his conflating
geographic territories in Arkansippi reminds
me of how John Oliver Killens cooked down with black fire Nina Simone’s “Mississippi,
Goddamn” into the gumbo of his novel ‘Sippi (1967).
Just as Robert Hayden paid homage in “Frederick Douglass” to
a man who had a “dream of the beautiful, needful thing,” so too ought we pay
tribute to Eugene B. Redmond for his lifetime of work in the field of “Parapoetics”
where
Poetry is an applied
science:
Re-wraped
corner rap;
Rootly-eloquented
cellular, soulular sermons.
We ought to pay tribute to Redmond for all of his cultural
documentation, or ,in the words of Jerry Herman from the blurb assigned to Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970),
his “challenging man’s inability to control his savage quest for power in our
modern nuclear jungle.” Redmond is the
poet-artist-thinker for all our seasons.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. November 17, 2012
