Black Writing, Culture and Memory
To focus on black writing rather than black literature, it
might be argued, is to attend with greater passion to dynamics of literacy
within our culture. As theories of
modernism and globalization lead to camps of blissful forgetting, there is some
urgency in ordinary instances of black writing. Obviously, a young person
walking down a sidewalk on the way to somewhere as she or he practices “rapping
skills” is creating pre-conditions for literature. That young person may one day be viral on
YouTube or have work published in a best-selling anthology.
Pre-conditions for
literature also exist in commonplace email messages. They can inform us about our vibrant culture
and certain uses of memory, of cooperation as an act of resisting the
contemporary individualism that is quite the rage. Writers who are not
selfishly worshipping their own egos do
seek to help other writers. In the
antiquity of classic African American culture, cooperation was simply a matter
of being “in the tradition.”
Keenan Norris, author of the forthcoming and psychologically
provocative novel Brother and the Dancer,
was “in the tradition” when he sent out the following email on April 4,
2013. I quote the email with his
permission.
Hi everyone,
I'm writing on behalf of
Lynel Gardner and his debut book, BEAST: The Destruction of Charles
"Sonny" Liston. Lynel is looking for a publisher and for leads to
publishers. I've also included a bio about Lynel, whose life and work have been
both dramatic and inspirational. Lynel's work on the life of Liston will be
profiled on an upcoming ABC Sports show.
Lynel has an agent and
is working through his agent to find a publisher. However, he's also looking to
work through all other available channels as well. I figure this is as good a
forum as any to see if my virtual community of fellow writers and artists might
have connections with editors and publishers that would be appropriate for
Lynel's work. Lynel can be reached at lynel_gardner@yahoo.com
Below is his bio and a
synopsis of BEAST.
Thanks,
Keenan
Bio:
Lynel Gardner is a performance artist, novelist and
playwright. His work with the Hittite Empire Performance Art Group started in
1989. They toured the country and the UK doing work based on black male
silence. An all-male performance art group, they focused on issues of the day:
the “wilding incident”, the Central Park rape case in New York and the LA
riots. He has written a play called Stories I Never Told My Father about
growing up with a pimp for a father, how he survived, and found God in the
process of trying to find his father before he died. The life experiences of
Lynel's uncle (and several other family members) served as the basis for the
movie The Mack.
Lynel's debut book is based on the life of his
grandfather, heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston. The book dispells many
of the popular misconceptions about Liston. Lynel is the founder of Theater as
Prevention and frequently speaks to inmates in the California prison system
about fatherhood and reform.
Partial Synopsis:
When Muhammad Ali
explained to the world in 1965, that he had been taught the “Anchor Punch” from
Stepin Fetchit, who had learned it from Jack Johnson, the world stood in
disbelief. It would be the first time ever that Charles “Sonny” Liston, who was
trying to regain his title, would be knocked to the canvas, in his professional
career. Muhammad Ali had indeed “Shook up the world” in their first
championship fight together and in their second contest, he would boggle the
mind. And from that point on, boxing, and its fans, would never be the same.
The Liston Family, the Ali family and the Palermo family would forever be
remembered, for being a part of some elaborate conspiracy, fix, and or “Phantom
Punch.” Sonny Liston would go to his grave, never to be forgiven, by the public
at large, for what had happened in those two fights. And even though Muhammad
Ali would one day go down in history as “The Greatest” boxer of all time, the
public would forever hold him suspect; marking him with a “Scarlet Letter” for
somehow being partly responsible, for what is still believed to be, one of the
greatest hoaxes, of the twentieth century.
It struck me that BEAST: The
Destruction of Charles “Sonny” Liston had a no-nonsense title akin to some
made famous by Holloway House, and I suggested to Norris that Gardner should
explore the possibility of being published by that firm. Holloway House was
willing to give attention to core black culture well before academic guardians
of African American culture (including noted Black Arts Movement critics) were
willing to acknowledge the little people, the core that Langston Hughes
celebrated in poetry and fiction. From what Norris mentioned about the
projected ABC sports special, it was apparent that Gardner might get offers
from more powerful publishers who would want to cash in on a hot topic.
Nevertheless, racial wisdom teaches us to cover all bases, to leave little to
chance or accidents of fortune.
What Norris mentioned in the biographical sketch on Lynel Gardner and in
the synopsis set my ideas flowing. Gardner
has ancestral motives for wanting to tell his grandfather’s story (and his
grandmother’s) in a culture that feeds on mass media’s stew of confusions. His efforts to tell a story that rescues
Charles “Sonny” Liston from the shadows cast by Muhammad Ali are like those of
writers who rescue the real soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement from the
shadows cast by Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is, as the poet Sterling D. Plumpp has reminded us, a story always
untold, a story that should be told within the boundaries of African American
literature but often is destroyed by literary politics. I applaud the cultural authenticity of
Gardner’s efforts to broadcast “a truth.”
My applause is all the louder as a result of having read Thabiti Lewis’s
Ballers of the New School: Race and
Sports in America (2010) and his claims regarding the desperation of
mythologizing White masculinity in fiction and film. Referring to the Rocky films, Lewis indicts Stallone for
culling “portions of real fights ---along with the real personalities of
Frazier, Liston, Foreman, and Ali ---to write the four installments of the Rocky industry” (211).
Appropriation is a two-way street.
Recall Charles Johnson’s deformation of Herman Melville’s “Benito
Cereno” in the neo-slave novel Middle Passage. In the reclamation of
Liston’s story, Gardner is quite on point about race, sport, and the power of
re-enacting Puritan uses of the scarlet
letter in contemporary American culture. And he only has to appropriate his
family’s history. He is promoting one of
the key functions of black writing: the correction of misrepresentations or absences
that induce cultural amnesia about the being-in-this-world of African Americans.
Despite endless attempts to devalue it in favor of black literature, black
writing continues to be one of our strongest weapons in the post-whatever
combat/contact zone.
We should support Norris and Gardner as affirmative writers who use
their talents wisely in trouble-saturated times. They affirm the nexus of
writing, culture, and memory.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 5, 2013
