Eugene B. Redmond and Enlightenment
Responding to my comments on Angela Jackson’s Where I Must Go as a luminous web, Eugene
B. Redmond raised the stakes. Might we
not need “a theo-religo-soular corollary,” namely a reconsideration of Howard
Thurman’s The Luminous Darkness
(1965)? The answer: Yes. In thunder.
Just as the literary discourse of Nathan A. Scott, Jr. drew
my attention to presence within the
text, Howard Thurman’s Christian writings quicken my noticing that theological
and religious allusions in the novel’s text bespeak absence or yearning in the act of reading the text. The critical absence pertains to subtle
morality that makes the act of reading an existential act. Once again, Redmond has done a bit of “re-w (rap)
ping.” Thurman’s meditation on what
happens to the human spirit and neighborliness after the walls of segregation
have tumbled down is explicit in the plot of Where I Must Go. By way of
making an intertextual connection, Redmond gave me an onus that exceeds any
finitude I might assume exists in the aesthetics of reading. Using the wisdom of racialized oral
tradition, Redmond sends me back to roots.
I react to Redmond’s onus of memory much as I react to Curtis
Mayfield’s Roots album, recorded at
Chicago’s RCA Studios and released October 1971. Listen to the tracks “Underground”
and “Keep On Keeping On.” Redmond has sponsored a shock of enlightenment, a
shock of recognition. Behind all the
veils of spectacular theory and well-wrought criticism the obligation to
examine one’s soul remains permanent. Nature abhors a vacuum. The soul abhors absence.
Never underestimate the power of real poet/critics and
righteous singers and philosopher/theologians in African/African American
traditions to make a reader ponder how the souls of black folk got over the
bridge of black writing.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 24, 2013
