Unghosting African American Literature
Unghosting, as the word is used in the title of Frank X.
Walker’s recent collection of poems, Turn
Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013), might refer to connotations
of “recovery” in the work of criticism and literary history. Aware that
“recovery” is a subjective action, we can strengthen our work by exploiting
that subjectivity more than we normally do.
Walker’s poems can be discussed in an interpretive context shaped by Michael
V. Williams’s Medgar Evers: Mississippi
Martyr (2011) and Minrose Gwin’s Remembering
Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (2013). When Gwin
remarks that Turn Me Loose “takes
measure of these long shadows of southern history and the bifurcating forms of
memory they elicit in lingering contemporary arguments” (21), we appreciate
more Williams’s caution that we not deify Evers but “analyze his contributions
so one might understand his overall impact on the movement for social,
political, economic, and racial equality” (11). Intensified awareness of
subjectivity might sharpen critique of how Williams’s writing of biography,
Gwin’s judgments about historiography, and Walker’s poetry cooperate in a
process of unghosting.
When I recovered my review in NOBO: A Journal of African American Dialogue of Askia Muhammad
Touré’s third book of poems, From the
Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance! (1990), I had a
shock of remembering. I had said nothing
about Touré’s liberating himself from his birth name, Roland Snellings, nor had
I mentioned his membership in Umbra Workshop (1962-65), which Lorenzo Thomas
and Michel Oren both recognized as a critical element in the formation of the
Black Arts Movement. Had I done so, I might have said something less “ book reviewish”
and more intellectually substantial. I did mention “his distinction as a
leading member of the Black Arts Movement and his importance in the history of
American American aesthetics.” Failure
lies in my not mentioning his name change was itself an unghosting of Askia
Muhammad Touré, an emperor of Songhai, a preparatory gesture I suspect for
writing the poems in Songhai (1972)
and Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (1972). I failed to establish a “thick”
context for my act of criticism. When I
write in a future about the Black Arts Movement, I shall be more responsible in
my use of unghosting tools to locate poetry in literary history.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. October 9, 2013
