African American
Haiku: Cultural Visions. John Zheng,
ed. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2016.
Pp. 197. $65.00
(cloth). ISBN: 978-1-4968-0303-0.
When John Zheng, a noted poet and Wright scholar, edited The Other World of Richard Wright:
Perspectives on His Haiku (2011),
he hoped that the collection of critical essays would "lead readers to the
fragrant tree of Haiku: This Other World
to read for aesthetic appreciation and for more criticism as well"
(xviii). His hope did not fall on barren
ground. Scholars and students who have a
dedicated interest in the totality of Richard Wright's works did indeed read
the book to discover facts about Wright's achievement as a poet who
experimented with an Asian poetic form to probe his Western identity and
African American sensibility. American
interest in Eastern culture and literary expressions has its origins in the
nineteenth century. Interest assumed special
articulation in the modernist period, including Lewis Grandison Alexander's
commentary on "Japanese Hokkus" in the December 1923 issue of The Crisis and the publication of Alexander's Tanka I-VIII and twelve haikus in
Countee Cullen's seminal anthology Caroling
Dusk (1927). Thus, we have evidence
---Cullen noted that Alexander specialized in Japanese forms -- for Asian influence in an evolving African
American poetic tradition. Zheng's editing a collection of essays on African American haiku
is at once logical and a signal that, ill-informed arguments notwithstanding,
black poetry has never chosen to inhabit ghettoes in the global community of
poetry and poetics.
The arrangement of essays in African
American Haiku: Cultural Visions demonstrates Zheng's focused
investment in enlarging the territory
for critical exploration. Opening with
Zheng's "The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright's Haiku" and Sachi
Nakachi's "Richard Wright's Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice,"
the book invites us to take a retrospective glance as preparation for the
essays on James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore
which direct us toward a future.
In this sense, African
American Haiku provides a model of how critical discourses may be
constructed. It also provides necessary
grounds for agreement and counter-argument.
For example, Yoshinobu Hakutani's "James Emanuel's Jazz Haiku and
African American Individualism" is a masterful treatment of how Emanuel's "haiku,
with sharp, compressed images, strongly reflect the syncopated sounds and rhythms
of African American jazz"(56). For
readers who might object that Hakutani's ideas about jazz, individualism, and
poetry are not sufficiently nuanced, Virginia Whatley Smith's "Afro-Asian
Syncretism in James Emanuel's Postmodernist Jazz Haiku" is a remedy. Smith's examination of Emanuel's work is precise,
surgical and very persuasive in making the case "that Emanuel's
postmodernist jazz haiku text projects African American culture more distinctly
into an already transnational space in which "jazz" music brings
together people from around the world in a common dialogue about universal
humanism" (59). Jazz is one of
several musical modes begot by the blues, and the point is not lost in Claude
Wilkinson's " 'No Square Poet's Job': Improvisation in Etheridge Knight's
Haiku," a provocative analysis of how "Knight's haiku exert a certain
bravura reminiscent of the toasts by which he honed his linguistic
skills"(107). Meta L. Schettler's
"An African High Priestess of Haiku: Sonia Sanchez and the Principles of a
Black Aesthetic" and Richard A. Iadonisi's "Writing the
(Revolutionary ) Body: The Haiku of Sonia Sanchez" address Sanchez's
unique womanist cultural visions and several of the issues associated with
reading haiku through the lens of the Black Arts Movement. These two essays are appropriately followed by a trilogy on the work of Lenard D. Moore,
who is the most prolific African American writer of haiku: Toru Kiuchi's "African American Aesthetic
Tradition in Lenard D. Moore's Haiku," Ce Rosenow's "Sequences of
Events: African American Communal Narratives in the Haiku of Lenard D. Moore"
and Sheila Smith McKoy's "Contextualizing Renso and Sankofa: A Cultural and Critical Exploration of Lenard
D. Moore's Haiku." Kiuchi writes
poignantly about his personal correspondence with Moore and how Moore "has
turned his life and experiences into expressions through imagistic haiku and
other poems with his African American aesthetics" (161). Rosenow applauds Moore's innovative gestures
in "the paradoxical choice to construct communal narratives using a
literary form that strives to distance itself from narrative conventions"
(164), and McKoy's essay is itself remarkably innovative in linking "renso and sankofa, two concepts that come to us from seemingly disparate
sources: ancient Japan and ancient Ghana" (180) to create a persuasive
argument that Moore's "contributions as poet and as teacher are indicative
of living a haiku life" (190).
It is unlikely that readers will examine the essays in just
the order Zheng has chosen, but the effort to do so is rewarding. The essays work as an ensemble that
illuminates Zheng's introduction, a concise and scholarly frame for inquiry
about how African American poets have studied, embraced, and made innovations
in an ancient Japanese genre. The
introduction is a valuable literary historical guide for sustained study of
haiku, African American modernity, and cross-cultural poetics. African
American Haiku: Cultural Visions
is seminal for future criticism regarding how Japanese formal aesthetics have
been liberated by poets, how haiku is transformed in literary contact zones,
and how diversity is constituted by the cosmopolitan practices of individual
African American poets. The book is
destined to have an impact on theoretically sophisticated directions in the study of modern and
contemporary African American poetry.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Central China Normal University
