Autobiography
and Angles of Remembering
During
the October 28, 2015 PHBW webinar, it was refreshing to hear the poet Sharon
Strange mention that art bears witness. She gave voice to one angle of remembering. Contemporary memory has a very brief half-life. We need to hear what is obvious again and
again.
It is fashionable of late to applaud writers
who made careers of always bearing witness to something in their writings. We may downplay the fact that giving
testimony in a society that seems to despise morality, especially any ethics
associated with politics and art, requires more than ordinary strength. It is easier to pander to the mob and to act
out the role of the court jester in the
face of grave, compelling issues. Either
for votes, instant fame, shock value, or money, witnesses entertain the crowd.
Thus, Strange's comments brought
us down to earth without the explicit
preaching we find in John Gardner's
On Moral Fiction (1977) or
William F. Lynch's Christ and Apollo: The
Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
(1960) and by accident prepared us for a reading of
Pierce, Wendell. The
Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken.
New York: Riverhead Books, 2015.
Acclaimed for his
roles in the television series The Wire
and Treme and for his work in such films as Selma and Waiting to Exhale,
Pierce is a gifted actor. He is a proud
New Orleanian, grateful to "that northernmost Caribbean city, the last
bohemia, which instilled in [him] a truthful culture that identifies [his]
membership in that most beloved tribe that thrives in the Crescent City"
(343). Pierce is an actor not a writer,
but that fact does not compromise his ability to tell a free story. He is
a consummate reader and interpreter of words who has great respect for art
and religion as "ways of knowing, pathways to and channels of the
transcendent truths of our existence"(337). What does compromise The Wind in the Reeds, and reminds us of its kinship with the genre
of slave narrative, is his collaboration
with Ron Dreher in the writing of the story.
How do we assign credit for the crafting of
words? Or should we value the
affirmative content and character of the autobiography much more than its form? As is the case with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, we have to speculate about the
agency of the amanuensis. Pierce admits
that Dreher cleared the path for a "journey filled with fear, uncertainty,
joy, and fond memories"(343).
Dreher projects himself as a reluctant collaborator ("a white boy
from the Feliciana hills") who
gained "a much deeper appreciation of the African American
experience"(344). Dreher's wording
alerts us that Pierce is scrupulous in revealing that his life, his journey, is
an atypical example of ethnic American
experiences. He is a socially conscious
actor who transforms orality into writing or an actor who assumes orality is
writing.
However
curious we remain about Dreher's role, we can suspend disbelief and accept Pierce's dominant voice and historical
consciousness in the narration in just the way we honor the authenticity or
"truth-telling" of Malcolm X's autobiography. Language is social property, and in
collaborative autobiography it is not impossible for the subject to devise
clever, coded messages that minimize the authority of the subject's helper.
Even if the codes of enslaved ancestors now wear designer clothing, they have
not abandoned the awe-inspiring power of
the racialized code.
Pierce offers us an autobiography that distinguishes
itself from those which accommodate inane expectations of what an African American
male's life history ought to be, i.e. a confessional saga of fractured will
power, sprawling identity crises, cartoon masculinity, and minimal or
diminishing respect for the power of family history from slavery to
freedom. In one of the most important
paragraphs in the book, Pierce does not bite his tongue and extends a special
angle of remembering ----
The family values debate in our culture is more
politicized than it ought to be. Everybody
on both sides of the argument understands the value of the nuclear family. The fact is, when we had intact families, we
had fewer problems. As the history of my
own family demonstrates, when we African Americans held our families together,
we drew from them the strength and solidarity we needed to combat the evils of
racism, prejudice, and attack from the enemies of our community. (49)
This angle of remembering is not very popular in an American
culture that champions the deconstruction of character and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is a signal of the superior
qualities that obtain among African Americans from New Orleans who retain pride
in their uniqueness, in their un-American difference and their African- and French-inflected différence avec l'aide de Dieu.
Superior character as it is exemplified by Wendell Pierce is not the
exclusive property of Creoles and Roman Catholics, nor does it have much to do
with the production of culture for the pleasure of tourists and the strange
American invaders of all colors who are gradually reshaping post-Katrina New Orleans and maximizing the vulgarity of
corruption.
The
play referenced in the subtitle of Pierce's autobiography is Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It is refreshing to read Pierce's
explanations of why that particular play holds great significance for him as a Eurocentric
work of art that motivated him to make an Afrocentric contribution to
post-Katrina resurrection culture in his childhood neighborhood of Pontchartain
Park and why he chose in 2007 to produce that play in the devastated Lower
Ninth Ward.
Page
after page of The Wind in the Reeds
is informed Pierce's unfaltering belief in the value of art to motivate civic
responsibility and to negotiate with the unguaranteed future of New Orleans
without excuses and lamentations. Like
the novels of Ernest Gaines, Pierce's
autobiography is noteworthy for
affirming the Crescent City wisdom of
holding fast to black angles of remembering.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 10, 2015
