Reading Kevin
Powell's Education
Powell, Kevin. The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey
into Manhood. New York: Atria Books,
2015
Autobiography is one of the more intriguing mixed genres of
American writing. Elizabeth Bruss' Autobiographical Acts: The Changing
Situation of a Literary Genre (1976) may lead us to believe that the
"rules" governing autobiography are stricter than those which pertain
to drama, poetry, and fiction; awareness that generic "rules" are based on abstractions from histories of
reading, however, invite us to amend them in our acts of interpretation, in the
acts we commit in order to grasp the meaning of texts. We are willing to break them. We allow the writer of autobiography great
latitude in arranging language and rhetorical devices in her or his effort to
bear witness to "a truth, " because we associate the truth of what happened with the
individual's confessional, psychological ego-investments. Adjustments,
exaggerations, forgetting and remembering, and selective displacements are in motion as part of the
shared authority of the writer and the reader. Our own egos and needs are implicated in judgments
about what is true or false. So too are
our ideas about collective features of life histories. What social and cultural
conditions are the powerful motives in the act of writing? What counts most in our reading and
interpretation of autobiography, perhaps, is the sense that the narrator as well as the
persona who stands in for a Self are
reliable. We demand, in most cases, assurances that the autobiography is more than
an absurd, commercial gimmick or a game of linguistic wilding. If the
assurances fail, we are not devastated.
We all understand how American citizens "play" one another.
These considerations allow us to have a rich transaction with The Education of Kevin Powell.
Even before we begin to read Powell's autobiography, we may
be given pause by his strategic choice of a title. The Education of Kevin Powell echoes the title of an older,
privileged, and seldom read autobiography, namely The Education of Henry Adams. Perhaps the choice was not merely
accidental. Perhaps the twenty-first
century Kevin Powell actually wanted to expose the vast and crucial differences
between his journey and the one taken by the elitist nineteenth-century
descendent of two American presidents. To imitate a well-known metaphor from
Booker T. Washington's autobiography, we can say that as writers Powell and
Adams are connected in a literary enterprise;
as American citizens, they as separate from one another as the little
finger is from the thumb. The exact circumstances of Powell's choice are, and
should remain, a tantalizing mystery. It
suffices that The Education of Kevin
Powell is a magnificent deconstruction of the fiction named the "American Dream." Powell's autobiography or memoir is a
trenchant disrupting of the enabling grounds that inform The Education of Henry Adams.
Thus, Powell secures his niche in the tradition of American
autobiography by maximizing the oppositional potency of the African American
autobiographical tradition, the telling
a free story about what is universally recognized as unfreedom. And we ought
not minimize the fact that Powell gives us both subjective and objective evidence
of his character and courage through writing as an act of brutal honesty.
It may be apparent to discerning readers that The Education of Kevin Powell is a
gendered, medium-crossing, asymmetrical
companion to The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill (Ruffhouse Records CK69035), a musical witness that conjures Carter G.
Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro
(1934). Other readers may think of The
Education of Sonny Carson (1972) and the 1974 film of the same title, of
the education that is actually located
in the mean streets of our nation rather than in its "celebrated "institutions
of public schooling and higher learning.
The value of such associations is to highlight what an American education outside the questionable "safe" zones of formal institutions
really is.
Focusing on American education prevents an automatic reading of Powell's book as yet
another African American saga of abject disadvantage and noble struggle to
transcend. His writing pertains more to
flight into than flight from something. By way of learning-oriented approaches to his
text, we might discover what that
something might be and why we need to be better informed about it than most of
us are. Giving priority to our education
as readers frustrates the banal tendency
to stereotype American and African
American autobiographies as stories of radicalization and identity politics and
racialization. An unorthodox reading of The Education
of Kevin Powell can expose how phony
is a
tearful and self-serving reception of the book. Reading against the grain reduces indulgence in the delusion and bad faith of
pity. It liberates us to grasp how raw
will power enables an American male to
prevail in the endless, uneven, traumatic attempt to reach the telos of being human, of being a good citizen in a chaotic
universe.
Powell's autobiography
makes a strong case for the power of the will. He reinforces the idea of responsible
agency which is central in the essays he collected and edited in The Black Male Handbook (2008) and in
his own essays in Who's Gonna Take the
Weight?: Manhood, Race and Power in America (2003) and Someday We'll All Be Free (2006). Indeed, we can learn from this autobiography
what the American entertainment/ disinformation industry wants us not to know
about the essence of being hip-hop or
the transformational complexity of
oppositional stances. Powell exposes the
education America imposes upon it male citizens.
This autobiography has two parts. Part 1 "trapped in a concrete box"
contains seventeen chapters which deal with the spatial origins of Powell's
long, unfinished journey; the thirteen chapters of Part 2 "living on the
other side of midnight" give specificity to the temporal, to the events
and people in the unique trajectory of Powell's life to the present. The introduction establishes the dominant
image of violence and being beaten, the image that haunts us frequently in the
autobiography and in our everyday lives.
Powell's words "the beating as punishment for my life" operate
in unsettling concert with the line "trapped in a concrete box" from his
poem "Mental Terrorism" in Recognize (1995) and his plain assertion
that "writing is perhaps the most courageous thing I've ever done." Through writing Powell instructs us time and
again that "there is something grotesquely wrong with a society where
millions of people face daily political, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and economic oppression by
virtue of their skin complexion." His recognition of what is at once
explicit and implicit in an American education justifies his desire to have
writing "open up minds, feed souls, bridge gaps, provoke heated
exchanges" and authorizes a yearning, present throughout world history, to
have writing "breathe and live forever." Without saying so directly, Powell challenges Allan Bloom's famous lamentations in The
Closing of the American Mind (1987), and subverts Bloom's complaint by
writing to open the imagined mind of the United States of America.
Critics who cohabitate with aesthetics have no reason to fear
that Kevin Powell minimizes craft in contributing to the production of
knowledge, because he is appropriately literary in shaping autobiography. The title of his book is a very literary
gesture, a discriminating invitation to use uncommon cultural literacy about
the nature of American autobiography. He
is even more recognizably literary in using the device of the catalog of
discoveries (as Richard Wright used it in Black
Boy) to hammer ideas about the journey from boyhood to manhood -----"like
the rupture...like the longing...like the bewilderment...like the hostile
paranoia...like the cryptic sense of great expectations." And the latter
allusion is one result of Powell's having read both Edgar Allan Poe and Charles
Dickens in his youth. Powell's anaphoric
use of "I remember...I remember...I remember" attests to how he
inserts his poetic sensibility to serve the rhetorical ends of creative
non-fiction. And it is remarkable that he rewrites a passage from Black Boy about how adults use alcohol
and words to "corrupt" a child for their careless amusement to dramatize an educational moment.
Like Wright, Powell
uses what purports to be remembered dialogue to intensify our sense of the
affective properties of historiography and to suggest historical process always
comes back to us as narrative not as objective reporting that is in denial of
its inherent subjectivity. Powell is
crafty and exceptionally skilled in creating literature that does not hesitate
to critique the limits of moral imagination.
Or, for that matter, the innate immorality of twenty-first century
societies, and those wretched circumstances, so permanent in our heritage of
social and racial contracts, which cast
light on the moral dimensions of his
profound struggles with his own sexism and his anger, his male American
identity.
The Education of Kevin Powell and Ta-nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me are indebted to
Wright and to The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, a fact that legitimizes comparison. But the comparison ought to be tough-minded
and should make a special note that Coates and Powell are writing from
different but convergent class positions. Interpretive association of Coates with Benjamin
Franklin and of Powell with Henry Adams enables us to have fresh perspectives
on representing privilege, race, and
power without falling into merely tendentious literary and cultural criticism or drowning in
lakes of fickle public opinions. But we must remember that an understanding of
these autobiographical writings also imposes upon us the need to assess what we
know or do not know about our own
existential choices which pertain to leadership and activism. The books complement each other as we try to
make sense of individual plasticity in human response to Nature and multiple
environments. Reading both compelled me
to make a choice. I admit that the
vernacular qualities of The Education of
Kevin Powell instruct me more thoroughly about the genre of autobiography. His writing encourages me to learn more about aligning the
building of knowledge for everyday use with critical aesthetic response.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
October 4, 2015
