TO PIMP AN ICEBERG
Gifford, Justin. Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim. New York: Doubleday, 2015.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, American
literature and literary criticism have no immunity against the
"viruses" that afflict the American body politic. Indeed, it might be argued that as elements
of culture, literature and criticism can be made to serve the interests of an
imagined literary Center for Disease Control, the criticism being a Petri dish
for growing intellectual viruses for covert experiments in the managing of
American popular thinking. A reading of
Justin Gifford's biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. (aka Robert Beck/aka
Iceberg Slim) suggests the book has less-than-accidental kinship with the film
"Straight Outta Compton," a Hollywood virus. Under
the guise of being legitimate expressions of popular culture, the film and the
book achieve sinister, divisive ends.
Street Poison is a
breezy life history which positions itself to canonize Iceberg Slim, rather
than to present a judicious literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. or
Robert Beck. It is a narrative of a
commodified self-fashioned persona. As the
poet Dave Brinks said recently, we are now dealing with "magic
materialism." His quip points to
the Spinglish usage of "magic realism" as a category for critical
analysis, the gesture Justin Gifford makes in his effort to pimp an iceberg. Gifford's alabaster motives, and those of
other scholars who are complicit in servicing neogliberal agendas, warrant
censure rather than censorship. Despite
the antics, the cacophony of the literary marketplace and cultural studies that
affect all of us, a few of us have the ancestor-anointed right to standards of
judgment and the pursuit of honesty. To
acknowledge that pimping occurs in international politics, academic discourses,
the sex industry, and the conduct of everyday life is neither a necessary nor
sufficient condition for minimizing opposition to what is morally
reprehensible.
Gifford's book is predicated on an insulting, outrageous claim,
for he wishes to argue that for nearly half a century "Robert Beck's works
have quietly, from the underground, transformed African American literature and
culture. There would have been no street
literature, no blaxploitation, no hip-hop they way we know them today without Pimp: The Story of My Life. We might appreciate Beck's contributions to
American life more fully if we consider the everyday people who he moved"
(223). The automatic question Gifford refuses to answer is "Moved to do
what, to think what?"
Without gagging on the oily reference of "we" in
Gifford's claim, astute readers might indict him for incendiary rhetoric and
profiling hyperbole in his cultural performance. The history of African American literature
and culture and their multi-leveled transformations must be told by way of
principled explanations of accommodation, resistance, assimilation, and
damnation of hegemony in the American public/literary sphere. Gifford's claim is devoid of nuance. It borders on thuggish arrogance.
Three key terms in the motivating claim Gifford
proffers for venerating if not
canonizing Beck are underground, transform, and would have been no.
"Underground"[please listen to track #4 on Curtis Mayfield's
album Roots (1971)] ----underground is no exclusive African
American location in the American cultural imagination. It is the locus of Wall Street insider
trading and Ponzi schemes, labor exploitation, health-threatening practices in
the food industry, the drug traffic abetted by secret government agencies, the
viciousness which taints the music and
entertainment corporations, and the protocols of fascism. "Transform" --any change for which Beck's writings can
serve as a cause is not divorced from inter-ethnic struggles for human rights
and equitable action and the companion ethnic discord in ideological
trends. "Would have been no"
---it is three inches beyond omniscience to proclaim that street or urban
literature, hip-hop phenomena, and blaxploitation could not have developed
without Beck's writings. Gifford's claim
is disingenuous.
Despite his failure to apply due diligence in constructing a
literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr (August 4, 1918-April 30, 1992),
Gifford brings inevitable attention to links between American writing and commercialized American
sexualities. He does depict arresting
development and implacable abuse of women, and he does model the pathology which is
undermining the credibility of so-called mainstream cultural exploration. Had he demonstrated greater awareness of the
speculative, theoretical work in Street Lit.: Representing the Urban Landscape (2014) and Susanne Dietzel's
commentary on black literature and Holloway House in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Street Poison would be a stronger and
more persuasive book.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
August 31, 2015
