Legitimate Rape

The Excellent Absurdity of Legitimate Rape: A Note on Art and History

 

The American mind seems to have a limited capacity for dealing with either the diachronic or synchronic aspects of issues.  That is unfortunate.  However, if we seek to overcome those limits, we discover a profound need to deal with the absurd.  In August 2012, we had occasion to consider the excellent absurdity of legitimate rape.

Representative Todd Akin of Missouri said on public television”

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.  If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Had Akin had momentarily become the anti-hero of Voltaire’s novel Candide and were his unguarded remarks  informed by the twisted beliefs of Dr. Pangloss?  Was he at all aware of what Mark Twain, a famous writer from Missouri, had said about the madness of “rape” in King Leopold’s Soliloquy?  Perhaps not.  Few of our politicians can demonstrate cultural literacy.  But from the angle of literary analysis, it seemed Akin had uttered a proposition about “rape” that was itself “legitimated” by the genocidal “rape” of indigenous peoples to obtain the Lebensraum that is now the United States of America.  From the angles of cultural analysis and biology, it seemed Akin was dead wrong,  because “legitimate rape” of the African female body during the period of slavery so frequently resulted in pregnancy. Akin suffered from the convenient amnesia that for thousands of years has made rape legitimate. Much of the outrage about his statement pertained, I suspect, to his treachery in revealing a secret that was no secret.

When I informed a friend that

I need your opinion on the absurd topic of "legitimate rape." Does it make any sense to use the wording as a category for analysis in history or as what I call an analytic metaphor? I want to write a short essay on the antiquity of the concept (the Romans legitimately raped people and territories to create the Roman Empire) and its contemporary uses (American citizens are legitimately raped by political uses of disinformation or misinformation).

he replied

The definition of rape has evolved over the centuries. As you state the Romans, and earlier civilizations did not consider what they did as "rape" by the traditional definition. It was an act of power, pillage and empire building. Much has to do with the position of women as subservient, "baby makers" and sexual objects historically. Also recall that under Greece and Rome, soldiers had young male escorts that accompanied them for sexual purposes that one could define as having been "raped" regardless of how Akin used this in reference to pregnancy and abortion. The entire concept is much broader and complicated than what the media has superficially attributed to (an ignorant Republican…--you get my drift). I think your inclusion of the political use of the term "rape" is right on and again reinforces the multiple uses and realistic definition outside of a violent sexual act against one’s consent. I recall a picture of a woman protesting the government and taxes. She held a sign that said something to the effect that "I don't have to worry about a sex life, the government fucks (i. e. rapes) me everyday...”

 

It is obvious, as my friend added in a later email, that “legitimate rape” as an analytic metaphor can indeed reveal much about “an historical continuum” that extends from such literary works as “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and the Homeric epics to aesthetic treatments of rape in the visual arts to  the political histories of the  Japanese rape of Nanjing and the recent and very costly rape of Iraq and to the contemporary  neo-colonial rape of the continent of Africa that must be studied in depth in the realm of the post-colonial.  In her forthcoming book, Policing the Womb: The New Cultural Politics of Reproduction (Cambridge University Press), Michele Goodwin promises to enlighten us, by using empirical evidence, about the “political and regulatory discourse on women’s reproduction.”  Nevertheless, something more is needed.   Akin’s opening of Pandora’s box warrants our giving literary and cultural attention to how the symbolic discourses of female and male bodies describe and indict what is after all these centuries still primitive in world civilizations. Perhaps when I do write “An Absurd Essay on the Absurdity of Legitimate Rape,” I shall be compelled to suggest : human beings still pray to an unknown God as John Donne did in Holy Sonnet 14 (1633)

Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You’enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                November 24, 2012

 

Eugene B. Redmond

Eugene B. Redmond and Cultural Documentation

Eugene B. Redmond turns seventy-five on December 1, 2012.  It is obligatory to make a few notes about his legacy to world culture and the world of letters.

How many of his fellow writers has he helped to scrub a river’s back by publishing them in Drumvoices Revue?  How has his invention of the “kwansaba” enriched poetics?  How does his extensive collection of photographs, housed in the Elijah P. Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville http://www.siue.edu/lovejoylibrary/ebr.shtml   , constitute an invaluable archive for research on writers and artists?  How do Redmond’s poems exist as works of art and as models for work to be assumed by individuals in a tradition, by people who have not committed artistic or intellectual suicide?  What impact has his neologic signature had on our use of poetic languages?  How does his now classic Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) serve as our prototype for critical, humanly engaged scholarship?

Answers to some of these questions may be contained in Redmond’s new book Arkansipp Memwars: 1962-2012, Poetry, Prose & Chants.  Observe a hint about the special conscience and consciousness that mark Redmond’s critical imagination.  He uses a soundsoulular gesture to refashion memoir as memwar. This transformation exposes the function of aesthetics in the social space occupied by our political and cultural investments.  Memwar is mano a mano, an adult reckoning with inevitable principles of uncertainty. The gesture is a response to Adesanya Alakoye’s request (tell me how willing slaves be), to June Jordan’s assertion (I must be a menace to my enemies), and to Gwendolyn Brooks’ admonition (first fight. then fiddle). The gesture is one that a man makes when he steps outside the comfort zone of ego to do battle for his people.

Redmond has mastered the art of using the simple neologism to create a mindscape.  And his conflating geographic territories in Arkansippi reminds me of how John Oliver Killens cooked down with black fire Nina Simone’s “Mississippi, Goddamn” into the gumbo of his novel ‘Sippi (1967).

Just as Robert Hayden paid homage in “Frederick Douglass” to a man who had a “dream of the beautiful, needful thing,” so too ought we pay tribute to Eugene B. Redmond for his lifetime of work in the field of “Parapoetics” where

Poetry is an applied science:

         Re-wraped corner rap;

         Rootly-eloquented cellular, soulular sermons.

 

We ought to pay tribute to Redmond for all of his cultural documentation, or ,in the words of Jerry Herman from the blurb assigned to Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), his “challenging man’s inability to control his savage quest for power in our modern nuclear jungle.”  Redmond is the poet-artist-thinker for all our seasons.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.   November 17, 2012                  

a new novel

T. Geronimo Johnson - HOLD IT ‘TIL IT HURTS

• Author Event

Start: 09/20/2012 6:00 pm

“The magnificence of Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is not only in the prose and the story but also in the book's great big beating heart. These complex and compelling characters and the wizardry of Johnson’s storytelling will dazzle and move you from first page to last.”
—ANTHONY SWOFFORD, author of JARHEAD

Please join us for a reading and signing with T. Geronimo Johnson featuring his riveting debut novel, HOLD IT ‘TIL IT HURTS.
Johnson is from New Orleans originally and although he now makes his home in Berkeley, he maintains a strong connection to his hometown - and New Orleans figures prominently in the novel. Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is one of the few literary takes on the war in Afghanistan and the veterans who served there. The plot centers around Achilles Conroy and his brother, Troy, whose white adoptive parents decide to provide them with their adoption papers upon their return from serving in the war. After Troy disappears, Achilles—always his brother’s keeper—embarks on a harrowing journey in search of his brother amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina.
It’s an intense modern day epic, and acts as a starting point for discussions on everything from transracial adoption to contemporary war narratives to portrayals of Hurricane Katrina. National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon recently called it “a novel about war that goes in search of passionate love, a dreamy thriller, a sprawling mystery, a classical quest for a lost brother in which the shadowy quarry is clearly the seeker’s own self, and a meditation on family and racial identity that makes its forerunners in American fiction look innocent by comparison.” And Publishers Weekly has called it a “powerful, stylish debut novel.”

Born in New Orleans, T. Geronimo Johnson received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’Workshop and has taught writing and held fellowships—including a Stegner Fellowship and an Iowa Arts Fellowship—at ASU, Iowa, Berkeley, and Stanford. His writing has appeared in Best New American Voices, the Indiana Review, the LA Review, and Illuminations, among others. He has worked on, at, or in brokerages, kitchens, construction sites, phone rooms, education non-profits, writing centers, summer camps, ladies’ shoe stores, nightclubs, law firms, offset print shops, and San Quentin. He is also a Niroga certified yoga instructor and trained rally driver. This is his first novel.

Lance Jeffers

Lance Jeffers (1919-1985): WRITING TOWARD BALANCE

 

Equating the power of Lance Jeffers’ mind with intellectual passion, Eugene Redmond proclaimed in his introduction for When I Know the Power of My Black Hand (1974) that Jeffers was “a giant baobab tree we younger saplings lean on, because we understand that he bears witness to the power and majesty of ‘Pres, and Bird, and Hodges, and all’ “(11).  In bearing witness to fabulous musicians, Jeffers left evidence in his poetry and his novel Witherspoon (1983) that the art of writing well entails finding a balance between the kind of humility to which Redmond alludes and the mastery of craft.

In an interview with Paul Austerlitz included in Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), Milford Graves speaks about his interest in Einstein and quantum physics.  John Coltrane was also immersed in study of Einstein’s physics. In the poetry of Asili Ya Nadhiri, one discovers his indebtedness to jazz and physics, just as one finds in Jeffers’ poetry an indebtedness to the study of anatomy, jazz and classical music.  Strong poets and strong musicians are receptive to mastering their craft by making intellectual investments in disciplines which, on the surface, seem remote from their own.  Assertive humility is important.

Humility may be alien in contemporary American life, but it is necessary for our respecting tradition and ourselves as saplings in need of guidance from baobabs, redwoods, and oaks.  Reading all of Jeffers’ poems in My Blackness is the Beauty of This Land (1970), When I Know the Power of My Black Hand, O Africa Where I Baked My Bread (1977) and Grandsire (1979) is a rewarding use of time.  We learn to locate ourselves in human history.  We learn that direct confrontation and battle with language is more valuable than intimacy with clichés.

Jeffers used rhyme with discretion, but he maximized repetition of parts to intensify the “epic line” American poets have inherited from Walt Whitman.  The epic line projected Jeffers’ passionate attention to small things and big events in historical experiences.  Surreal phrasing is a typical feature in his work, a feature that also flavors the poetry of Bob Kaufman. Consider Jeffers’ “in the sea the anchor of your/ soul rushes to the surface on flying fish’s wings” or “The hawk is slavery still alive in me/ my testicles afloat in cotton field.”  How many blues songs swam through his mind when he wrote “My own flesh has been nailed so strait/ I’ve been forgot by my own genius”?  Exploration of Jeffers’ poetic landscape yields moments of technical brilliance, moments that challenge us to find our own wordpaths to similar achievements.  We must know what the ancient rain can bring.

When I ended “Second April Poem (for Lance Jeffers)” with the lines

People who want to be

the alpha and omega

ought to take lessons

from my friend Lance

who made morality a verb.

I thought of how Old Testament his prophecy was.  He was unashamed in testifying about the evil and the good in human beings.  He had conviction and character.  He was willing to predict that a male poet “will explore the unexplored continent of himself and his people, will seek out the hidden caves and springs of beauty and hell, will seek out the hell and the complexity within his bones and within the viscera of his people” (“The Death of the Defensive Posture,” 259).  These thundering words come from his seminal essay in The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970), edited by Floyd B. Barbour. His referring us to land masses and body parts is indicative of his “scientific” posture with regard to discovering truths about humanity.  References to geography and anatomy recur in his poems; they reinforce the sense of greatness or grandeur.  His aesthetic is grounded in humanistic, pre-Black Arts assumptions about the human condition, but his poetics is grounded in relentless investigation of what the human condition is from the vantage of Blackness.  His “humanistic” response to writing as a way of knowing was an effort to balance logic with sensual saturation.  His writing is a fine example of how universally inseparable are art and ethos.

From reading Lance Jeffers, not once but many times, we may learn the value of disciplined uses of language, of exorcising demons that seek to persuade us that we have no obligations as poets to our biological and literary ancestors and descendents.  Truth be told, we can learn to write well from many poets other than Lance Jeffers.  Whether they can teach us as well as his works can the validating beauty of writing toward balance is a matter for contemplation.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                           

November 1, 2012

Lectures in China

PHBW blog –July 16, 2012

Lectures in China

                To address the growing interest in African American literature and culture at HuaZhong Normal University (Wuhan) and other institutions in China, I have given lectures there since 2009.   Chinese auditors, however astute and savvy they are, may be easily confused by the literary critical games played in the West.  Often they do not understand the cultural dynamics of academic trends.  Why do Western critics so dread the absolute, the essential, and the certain?  The reasons, of course, are at once philosophical, racial, and political.  One must exercise care in explaining that the universal is not universal but merely a smokescreen for intellectual hegemony, that deconstruction can too often be a weapon of massive destruction. 

                During May and June 2012, I presented nine lectures designed to plant seeds for critical growth.  The listing includes a post-delivery comment for each of them.

1)      Trickster Criticism: Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?--- In international forums for literary study, it is necessary to have a critique of Warren’s tendentious misreading of African American literary history and culture and its probable consequences of such misreading  in a future of African American literary study.  I am indebted to Maryemma Graham for drawing my attention to an important example of a consequence:  Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127.2 (2012):335-341.

2)      The Poetry of Natasha Trethewey ---Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012): 97-106. Access http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2012/spring/jeffers-contemporary-poetry

3)      The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History – This commentary seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed.

4)      On Reginald Martin’s Idea of Transcultural Theory –This discussion of Martin’s appropriation of transcultural theory as a method of reading texts foregrounds the need to make clear distinctions among theory, methodology, and method.

5)      The Tonal Drawings of Asili Ya Nadhiri: Temporality and Musicality – Given the absence of critical attention  to how Nadhiri  uses oral/aural memory , grammatical innovations regarding tense, ideas about music and art, and some problems of time and being dealt with in theoretical physics  in a conceptual poetic genre, this lecture acknowledges his unique contribution to African American poetry.

6)      Ishmael Reed and Multiculturalism –A  discussion of Reed’s sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote real rather than lip-service multiculturalism in the literature of the United States, this lecture suggests that Reed has provided a rich matrix for the delayed conversation on what it means to be an American.

7)      Acknowledgement: The Contact/Combat Zone ---A meditation on the function of the literary critic in the 21^st century, this lecture argues that warfare is the dominant but rarely acknowledged trope in discussions of the literature of the United States.

8)      Richard Wright and Twenty-first Century Questions ---The purpose of this lecture is to argue that significant research questions and making of transcendent connections (imaginative reflection) can be derived from close reading of Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and his novella The Man Who Lived Underground.

9)       American Literature and Digital Humanities ---This lecture involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature.

I have little interest in fashionable academic games, efforts to avoid telling a truth about the essential complexity of African American literature and its continuing evolution, or rhetorical lies about the existence of shared values among diverse citizens of the United States or Europe.  To promote honest exchanges among Chinese and American intellectual communities, I embrace an unfashionable humanism that minimizes post-human dominance. I want my Chinese colleagues to have more options for making conclusions about truth.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Wright, Hurston, and Bad Blood

Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bad Blood

Q:   I really want to read Richard Wright’s review of Their Eyes Were Watching God.  I wonder what caused the bad blood between him and Hurston.

A (1):  To read Wright’s review, access http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam854/summer/hurston.html

There you will find the in-house review by Hurston’s publisher and reviews by George Stevens, Lucille Thompson, Sheila Hibben, Otis Ferguson, Sterling Brown, and Alain Locke.  Wright was not the only male who did not praise Hurston’s novel in 1937.

A (2):  As one result of American cultural games, the bad blood has been so magnified that what is a sub-atomic particle looks like a Siberian tiger.  In literary circles, one game is played by driving a contrived wedge between selected African American iconic figures.  The divisive action is formulaic.  Select two people ---let us say, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, or Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.  Extract diametrically opposed quotations from each either in or out of context.  Magnify and distort the differences.  Claim the differences are symbolic of some more or less permanent fault line in the collective consciousness of a people, symbolic of a wailing wall of hate between the two people selected.  You do not have to provide proof, nor exercise the civility of waiting for an answer.

This very American game is replete with racialized ideological baggage.  It is marked by bad sociology, bad psychology, and bad history.  It is vicious.

Fortunately, we can speculate about the bad blood between Hurston and Wright outside the boundaries of this game as I have said in my unpublished essay “Hurston, Wright, and Literary History.”  In 1937, Wright published “Between Laughter and Tears,” a combined review of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds in the October 5 issue of New Masses. Wright’s evaluation of both novels was less than favorable.  Hurston had an opportunity to repay Wright in kind when she reviewed Uncle Tom’s Children under the title “Stories in Conflict” in the April 2, 1938 issue of Saturday Review of Literature.  Hurston was less than pleased with Wright’s accomplishment.

Wright had been critical of Hurston’s sentimentality, her exploration of the human heart and love at the expense of ignoring any impact systemic racism might have had on the lives of her characters.  Hurston in turn was critical of Wright’s preoccupation with race hatred, his exploitation of “the wish-fulfillment theme,” and his apparent fidelity, as she informed her audience, to “the picture of the South that the communists have been passing around of late.”  Hurston was not sympathetic to the restrictions of thought implicit in Marxism American style.  Wright became disillusioned with those restrictions in the early 1940s.  But in 1937, Wright had no patience with Hurston’s “facile sensuality,” the structure of feelings that could be a portal to the realm of minstrelsy.  The difference between the two writers is grounded in ideological opposition, incompatible ideas about the function of literature or writing in life and the obligations of the writer.  Hurston and Wright had genuine reasons for concern about the effects of writing upon the minds of racially embattled readers.

Wright and Hurston were at once blunt and considerate in their attacks.  They were careful in deflecting attention from personality to writing, from content of character to matters of technical skill.  “Miss Hurston can write,” Richard Wright admitted.  He found, however, that her dialogue “manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their simplicity but that’s as far as it goes.”  Hurston did not catch the “complex simplicity” that Wright had called for in “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”  That is to say, she succeed in simplicity but missed “all the complexity, the strangeness, the magic wonder of life that plays like a bright sheen over the most sordid existence….”[ Blueprint, section 6: Social Consciousness and Responsibility]  Wright misread his own critical language and failed to see the sheen in Hurston’s novel.  At second glance, it is not Hurston’s romanticism that he is criticizing.  He is condemning her failure to link folklore with “the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.” [Section 6]

Hurston complimented Wright by suggesting that “[s]ome of his sentences have the shocking-power of a forty-four,” a feature that confirmed for her that Wright “knows his way around among words.”  Nevertheless, she found his representation of dialect to be “a puzzling thing.”  How did he arrive at it?  “Certainly,” she proposed, “he does not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf.  But aside from the broken speech of his characters, the book contains some beautiful writing.”  What was not beautiful was Wright’s male-dominated subject matter.  “This is a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright,” according to Hurston, “serves notice by his title that he speaks of people in revolt, and his stories are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.  Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to pass in the entire work.”  By way of hyperbole, Hurston found the violence of black life in Wright’s stories to be excessive. In contrast, her novel was a testament that violence and hatred in fiction should be tempered by civility, love, and compassion.

It is reasonable to propose the two reviews are gestures of respect.   There is some degree of balance between the two reviews if we attend to what might have been reality for Hurston and Wright and their readers. Wright and Hurston were playing literary politics, and their discourses had to be social and political.  They were writers writing about writing. Wright was conserving the radical tradition of black nationalism; Hurston was subverting the idea that a black writer had to be radical according to an “ism” that was alien to deep roots of folk wisdom.  Perhaps we can avoid exaggerating bad blood and focus on how speech acts properly contextualized show that distinctions between the aesthetic and the political can be exposed as the fictions that they are.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            PHBW A/Q BLOG

October 28, 2012

On Being Made in America

I bought Gancho Cerrado, distributed by Crown Bolt, Aliso Viejo, CA 92656.  Gate Hook & Eye hecho en China.
I bought revestido de latex de uso general, firm grip gloves from Big Time Products, LLC, Rome, GA 30161.  They were made in China.
Caution/Advertenca: Este projecto contine latex natural de goma que puede causar an allergic reaction.
En el evento de una reaccion alergica causado por estes gloves de latex, para el uso y consulta your health care provider.
Americans who do not make work gloves y gancho cerrado talk much bad about the Asians.