FUTURE REVOLUTION IN CRITICAL TALK
Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren 1881-1936), one of modern China’s most
important writers, understood the danger of premature celebrations. “The first thing is not to become intoxicated
by victory,” he wrote in an essay on success in Nanjing and Shanghai,” and not
to boast; the second thing is to consolidate the victory; the third is to give
the enemy the finishing stroke, for he has been beaten, but is by no means crushed.” Xun understood that intoxication blurs
awareness that victory is always provisional not permanent. Consider the “victory” of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The Randolph County Board of Education in
North Carolina wants to ban it. Or the “victory” of being a Nobel Laureate. Recently, Toni Morrison had to speak out
regarding the banning of The Bluest Eye
in her native State of Ohio. And Richard Wright has suffered many a year from
censorship by exceptional American patriots. International acclaim and respect
from some Americans does not preclude one’s being thrown under the bus by other
Americans. Such is the nature of
American peoplekind, the universal nature of human beings.
While we celebrate the prizes and more than 15 seconds of
fame earned and deserved by some African American writers, artists, and
thinkers [[especially those poets who, according to Charles Henry Rowell, “are
the first African Americans to be free of outside political and social dicta
from blacks and whites commanding them on what and how to write” (Angles of Ascent, xl)]], we still smart
from Helen Vendler’s Zimmerman-like dismissal of Rita Dove’s critical judgment. Gwendolyn Brooks reinforced Xun’s insight
when she enjoined us to fight before we fiddle.
Unfortunately, the gravity of 2013 (year of remembering the
fifty years between us and the murder of Medgar Evers; the March on Washington;
the publication of John A. Williams’s Sissie,
LeRoi Jones’s Blues People, James
Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, John
Hope Franklin’s The Emancipation
Proclamation, John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder; the
off-Broadway opening of Langston Hughes’s Tamborines
to Glory and William Hairston’s Walk in Darkness; the murder of four little girls in Birmingham,
and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy)—the gravity of this year
seems lost on our critics who blithely disconnect their aesthetic tropes of combative opposition from how the
world turned and continues to turn. We
are given so many subliminal smokescreens regarding binary opposition within
the colorblinded veil ---- W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, Richard Wright
and James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, Anita Hill and
Clarence Thomas, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, Amiri Baraka and J.
Saunders Redding, Sarah Webster Fabio and Melvin B. Tolson. It is obvious even
to the blind that victory is not consolidated.
Thin as a strand of hair is the line between love and hate.
DuBois’s quite valuable but exhausted idea about “double
consciousness” ought to be supplemented by what Chen Xu calls “triple
consciousness.” Victory will not be
consolidated until people of no-color behold their faces in their pre- and
post-colonial mirrors and truly see what condition their inadequate condition
is in. We can strengthen the integrity
of critical talk by allowing them the pleasure of worshipping the Golden Calf
and the Signifying Monkey.
Meanwhile, those of us who are not ashamed of being
pre-future humanists can take Lawrence P. Jackson’s superb Indignant Generation (2011) and Ira Katznelson’s challenging Fear Itself (2013) as models of genuine,
responsible scholarship for our investigations during 2014 (Dudley Randall /Romare
Bearden/Ralph Waldo Ellison /Owen Dodson Centennials) and 2015 (Margaret Walker/Willie
Dixon/Billie Holiday/John Hope Franklin Centennials). For 2015, Birth of a Nation shall flicker in the
background.
There is little to celebrate about the fragile state of
independent African American publishing ---newspapers, magazines, or
books. We are still obligated to deal
with drone attacks from ice-white caves on the meaning and legacy of the Black
Arts Movement. In our acknowledgement of
Margaret Walker’s legacy to the world, we ought to study
A Poetic Equation:
Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington: Howard University Press, 1974.
Give special attention to Giovanni’s “Postscript: Emotional
Outlaws: Poetic Equations.” It reveals
much about why oppositions are at once combative and complementary. To be sure, I prefer to align my thinking
with Lu Xun as I respect from a distance Gao Xinjian’s proposal that “literature is helped by people’s
life experiences, but its insights far surpass all prognostications” (Aesthetics and Creation, 235).
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 19, 2013
