BAM REVISITED
Finally. Kalamu ya
Salaam's The Magic of Juju: An
Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (Chicago: Third World Press, 2016), is in
print, twenty years after Salaam wrote "The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation
of the Sixties Black Arts Movement," an essay of 73 pages. Finally, we have a work that can serve as a
textbook in secondary and college classrooms as well as a reference book for
adjusting parameters of investigation.
Despite the unquestionable merits of Tony Bolden's Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture
(2004), James Edward Smethurst's The
Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), New
Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006) edited by Lisa Gail Collins and
Margo Natalie Crawford, The Black Arts
Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (2014) by Howard Rambsy II, and SOS --Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (2014) edited by
John H. Bracey Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, there remains the
unquestionable necessity of revisiting the Black Arts Movement (c. 1960-1975)
with the blueprint for appreciation provided by The Magic of Juju.
Appreciation provokes inquiry that is consonant with the kaleidoscopic uncertainties
of the 21st century.
An appreciation can simultaneously be a critique, a judgment, and a recognition. The Magic of Juju is a
quite valuable appreciation, especially when one considers Salaam's authority
and his prolific efforts to promote critical thinking about life and cultures.
In What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (Chicago: Third
World Press, 1994), Salaam wrote of himself: "Simply put, I'm an African
American man trying hard to live up to my fullest potential -- to do my best to contribute to the
empowerment of my people and the betterment and beautification of the whole
world -- in my own space and time"
(ii). This book is an installment of his
living up to his chosen mission and of assessing a historical process that was
(and still is) strategic, aesthetic, and political. As a thinker who is secure and brilliant,
Salaam has no need to endlessly announce that he is a public intellectual in
search of media attention. He is free to
reject that peculiar academic posture. For that reason and many others, he is one of my
most valued friends, one with whom I find the production of ideas for
pre-future social benefits to be essential.
His 1993 argument in "African American Cultural Empowerment: A
Struggle to Identify and Institutionalize Ourselves as a People," which
Julius E. Thompson referenced in Dudley
Randall, Broadside Press, and the
Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 (McFarland 1999) retains its
pre-future validity as a cognitive option that is magnified in The Magic of Juju.
Thus, this brief comment is objectively subjective, very
comfortable with irony and paradox. I
offer a moral/ethical challenge to college and university scholars and teachers who may devalue common
sense in a race to "interrogate" the Black Arts Movement. I invite them to prove that they are people
who possess integrity (a rare virtue in the 21st century) by using The Magic of Juju as a required
textbook in the courses they teach, particularly in courses devoted
to American and African American
literatures. In the substantial
amount of critical scholarship focused on literature and cultures, excessive
attention has been given to "the body" and its representations and
performances. Salaam's book will enable teachers and students to reclaim the fact that they have minds as well as bodies and to use
those priceless minds as instruments for critical thinking ( a rare exercise in
the post-whatever conditions that afflict the American body politic). In short,
his book is an opportunity to return to asking drylongso questions and engaging
the vernacular motions of a cultural movement that is not yet dead. That is the
opportunity a few people in my generation will grab, but it is not the
opportunity Salaam champions. "The
Magic of Juju," he informed Margo Crawford, "is not about
returning to the sixties and seventies. The Magic of Juju is my contribution to
the contemporary generation who must and, I believe, who will make their own
decisions in dealing with their own realities and in attempting to make real their
own visions. In that regard, The Magic of Juju is an attempt to
provide information and evidence for this current generation to make sense of
their history, present and future" (306).
After reading the first manuscript of "The Magic of
Juju" essay, I wrote to Salaam on 14 April 1996:
After hearing from a
young scholar at CLA that Ray Durem's poem "A decoration for the
President" splintered Umbra, I am more deeply convinced the critics need
your essay on BAM. If you have time for dark laughter, check out Gates on
Albert Murray in the April 8, 1996 issue of New
Yorker. Gates thinks there was a
"so-called Black Arts Movement."
- p. 3 --For Wright, black power had to be actualized in "the militarization of African life" in order to "project the African immediately into the twentieth century." The Black Panthers, then, moved closest to such a realization.
- p. 5 Br. Dubois > Dr. DuBois?
- p. 7 New Afrikan > New Afrika
- p. 8 I agree with your conclusion re: commercialization and commodification of post-modern literary culture. Radicalization has been reduced to aesthetic/critical gestures, insuring to some extent than an abyss between intellectual contests and material political struggles remains. Nevertheless, BAM's elders and heir continue to radicalize at some distance from the centers of post-whateverness.
- pp. 9-12 --questions on items #1 and #6 ----The dichotomy between the religious and the secular was blurred, I think. Perhaps black religiosity was displaced by black spirituality. In your remarks in #6 on technology you may want to mention in passing how media assisted in a new sound (ing) as you do in your poetry essay. [[ I was referring to unpublished book-length "The Sound (ing) of Black Poetry: A Study Guide to the Theory and History of Black Poetry" ]] You are on target with emphasis on the performative. Critics who would "freeze" BAMS into manageable form have to be warned that the historic performances were not determined by academic formulations.
- pp. 18-19 --check print merge error; you repeat with a variation the paragraph about On Guard For Freedom
- p. 21 --Black Arts Repertory > Black Arts Repertory
- pp. 28-32 --refer readers to your essay on Sound(ing) and to buttress your point about Baraka, Giovanni, Sanchez, and Madhubuti as the defining voices, you need to name in some way what you think the parameters of execution, performance, and theme/content were, i.e. do a verbal drawing of the paradigm.
- pp. 32-34 ---among the conferences that BAM ideas directly or sidewise were the Black Studies Conferences at Jackson State in 1972 (?) ---where I recall Henderson outline much of his music/speech theory and Sonia Sanchez had a most interesting exchange about Black English with Nick Aaron Ford -- and the Black Studies Conferences that Richard Long sponsored at Atlanta University (1969?-1973/75?)
- p. 34 --You may need to check with E. Ethelbert Miller about where (physically) Henderson's extensive videotapes from the conferences and IAH are.
- It is nice that BAM participants did not have to wait for Foucault and other Frenchmen to tell them what power was; as French as they got was Lumumba, Fanon, and their own brand of negritude.
- Black Fire (1968) needs to be credited as one of the major collection to include BAM theory along with Addison Gayle's Black Expressions. Anyone who was serious trying to theorize in the 1970s had to deal with these texts. I suggest mentioning the seminal importance of Black Fire in both the theory and anthology sections.
- p. 56 --virulently sexism > virulently sexist
- BAM's legacy ---very good closure for this piece
- a kind of afterthought: where do you put Bob Kaufman and Ted Joans with regard to BAM? And when I think of style, the portion of BAM you did not deal with is the visual arts and the reformation of black images and affirmation of color-sense. So you should refer readers to your interview with John Scott.
run document through
sell-check; there are typos I did not note
After 1996, Salaam
incorporated a few of my suggestions and rejected those that did not dovetail
with his vision. He expanded the scope
of the essay; he refined and deepened his
thinking about what deserved recognition
and critique. The main body of the book was completed in 1999, and it is now
enhanced by Salaam's preface, a study guide developed by Jiton Davidson,
photographs, documents, and historical archives compiled by Eugene B. Redmond,
and "The Wave of Black Aesthetics: The Deep Rivers of the Black Arts Movement:
A Dialogue between Kalamu Ya Salaam and Margo Natalie Crawford." The
Magic of Juju is a textual beacon for a future of thought and action.
It is reassuring to know The Magic of Juju will make its début at the BAM Conference at
Dillard University, September 9-11, 2016, and provide a Black South/New Orleans
catalyst for newer directions. It is
pleasant to imagine that participants who have agendas that scamper on tangents
will be given an opportunity to realign their thinking by reading and listening
to Kalamu ya Salaam. Better yet, I
imagine the book will collaborate with other documents that argue for holding
fast to sanity and producing ethical art and criticism in the chaotic Age of Trump/Clinton. The realities of now are mimetic of those
pre-1960 realities that warranted the birth of the Black Arts Movement.
Jerry
W. Ward, Jr. September 3, 2016
