No More Water/Nommo
When a new generation addresses an old topic, the best it
should expect from its elders is respect for the effort. No more.
No less. The new generation
should anticipate, however, that elders might ask titanium questions that actually
have no answers.
Did the new
generation get the story right? For whom
are they really writing? So what?
Having fulfilled the responsibility of asking questions, the
elders may return to the bliss of silence.
They know when peace must be still.
Even the blind can see what the American publishing industry
is up to at present. True to what it has
become, it is playing the race card for profit and gambling with writers and a
diminishing cultural literacy. Read the
titles. What spirits are being conjured?
Henry Adams/ The
Education of Kevin Powell by Kevin Powell.
Harriet Tubman/ The
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Richard Wright/ Between
the World and Me by Ta'Nehisi Coates
James Baldwin/The Fire
This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward ( New
York: Scribner, 2016).
Fair enough. And the beat goes on. But is it necessary to hang neo-Cold War Iron
Curtains, Bamboo Curtains, and Oil Curtains between humanity and the regressive
progress of capitalism? Is the work of
Nature, terrorism and global warming insufficient? Must the Church, Synagogue, Temple, Mosque, and Shrine chant a
niggardly "Amen"? Who the hell
is to say?
In her introduction for The
Fire This Time, Jesmyn Ward believes it is necessary to have a book
"that would gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form,
and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to
witness, to reckon"(8). Kevin
Powell and Ras Baraka had a similar belief and did a similar thing for their
generation in editing In the Tradition:
An Anthology of Young Black Writers
in 1992. And then Powell took the Word
to a newer, higher level by editing Step
Into A World: A Global Anthology of
the New Black Literature in 2000. In
her contribution "Cracking the Code" (89-95) for The Fire This Time, Ward imagines she has "ancestors from
Sierra Leone and Britain, from France and the Choctaw settlement on the
Mississippi bayou, from Spain and Ghana…."
Should Ward's editor
at Simon and Schuster have advised that a generation speaking about race has to
be a bit more transparently international? Would such a suggestion have been an
act of treason within the American publishing industry?
For me, the provisional answers come most clearly from the
essays "White Rage" (83-88) by Carol Anderson and "The Condition
of Black Life Is One of Mourning" (145-155) by Claudia Rankine. The
American publishing industry has mastered the game of capitalism and knows how
to sniff out profits. I know why a caged
bird is entitled to sing about an
eternal problem named "race", and so too did James Baldwin in 1963
when he quoted the wisdom of an enslaved song. I respect the effort of the new generation despite the fact that
the effort is not lasting, that it
cannot burn systemic horrors into oblivion.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. September 28, 2016
