Free Southern Theater

 

Free Southern Theater

 

In his infrequently referenced African American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (1984), Michael G. Cooke used “intimacy” to denote “a full and unforced communication with the given, the available, and the conceivable in human experience in a particular time and setting”(x).  Twenty-first century usage corrupts “intimacy” with pseudo-erotic connotations.  Cooke’s specialized definition of “intimacy” is lost; the extension of “intimacy” to mean “communion” adds complexity to Cooke’s definition. Intimacy as communion aptly describes a few things that occurred during the “Talkin’ Revolution: FST at 50” convening, October 17-20, 2013, at Tulane University and Ashé Cultural Arts Center. People communed.

One poignant moment of communion that occurred between the two living Free Southern Theater founders, Doris Derby and John O’Neal, involved the late Gilbert Moses, the third founder.  O’Neal had the courage to make a public, confessional apology to Derby for the sexism that was commonplace fifty years ago.  He and Moses had been most unfair to Derby in 1963-64 in FST’s founding months. Although the idea for using drama as an instrument in civil rights struggles was Derby’s brainchild, Moses and O’Neal thought she should subordinate her ideas and walk behind what they thought.  Derby tacitly accepted O’Neal’s apology as she spoke eloquently about how the idea for FST emerged from her family’s notions about action for social justice and her growing up in New York with a special interest in the arts. Genuine intimacy of this kind necessitates our rethinking the motives of contemporary critics who gleefully magnify the confrontational anger between women and men in social struggles and in literature.

Free Southern Theater by Free Southern Theater (BobbsMerrill, 1969) is a partial documentary history of FST’s early years, but it demands such supplements as “The Legacy of the Free Southern Theater in New Orleans,” interviews with Karen-Kaia Livers and Chakula Cha Jua, which is available in the online magazine ChickenBones – http://www.nathanielturner.com/legacy/freesoutherntheater.htm  and “After the Free Southern Theater: A Dialog,” which Tom Dent and I wrote for The Drama Review 31.3 (1987): 120-125. But more important  is the spotlight FST veterans –Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, Frozine Thomas, Roscoe Orman, Kalamu ya Salaam,  Chakula Cha Jua, and Felipe Smith –used to focus on the history of Free Southern Theater from 1963 to 1985.  Stephanie McKee, Director of Junebug Productions (visit  Junebugproductions.Org ), has planned for eventual broadcasting of the videotaped documentation of “Talkin’ Revolution.” Future scholarship on FST requires working in the Free Southern Theater Collection, the Tom Dent Papers and the John O’Neal Papers at Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

Kalamu ya Salaam, a FST alum and Tom Dent’s protégé, provided crucial information about FST’s role in the Black Arts Movement in his remarks about Dent’s service (1965-1968) as FST associate director during O’Neal’s two year absence in New York and as director of the FST Writers’ Workshop (1968-1972). FST emerged from the ideology associated with SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), but Dent inserted the radical ideology associated with New York’s Umbra Workshop into debates regarding FST’s status as integrationist theater.  Under Dent’s leadership, FST became a black community theater.  It may be possible to verify that FST pre-dates Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater (BART) as an urban theater catalyst for Black Arts Movement ideologies.  Kalamu ya Salaam’s emphatic argument about FST’s primacy requires intimate investigation and revisiting of tentative conclusions in James E. Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s ( University of North Carolina Press, 2005). “Stories,” as Minrose Gwin suggested in Remembering Medgar Evers, “translate an ethics of collective social struggle based in memory”(172). Salaam’s witnessing transmits lore to ears willing to listen in the twenty-first century.  It inspires my need to ask:

WHY WAS  I  ON A PANEL WITH DORIS DERBY, JOHN O’NEAL AND ROSCOE ORMAN?

First, to say we ought to attempt to locate the origins, growth, decline and death of Free Southern Theater with the context of the revolution that was the long struggle for civil rights that began in the 18^th century and went into hibernation in the 1980s. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution, the long struggle culminated in legalistic  changes of the social contract under which people work and coexist. Given that aspects of what Charles W. Mills calls the racial contract were not  and may never be eradicated in the United States of America, the struggle for civil and human rights does not have historical closure.  It is continuing.  FST was a catalyst not a revolution. It intensified the possibility that a blending of politics and art might be effective in achieving certain ends of revolution, a limited number of ends.  I am adamant about clarity of defining so emotional a word as “revolution.”

Second, to shoot bullet-points of memory, the future memory of a twenty-year old senior mathematics major at Tougaloo College in 1963-64.  When I run out of ammo, read The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater .  That book is full of ammunition.

• Bill Hutchinson, Tougaloo’s speech teacher and theater director, asked me to talk with Gilbert Moses, Doris Derby and John O’Neal  about the feasibility of a theater that could promote critical thinking about dreadful conditions in segregated Mississippi and the South.  At our meetings I reviewed the initial draft proposals with the FST founders.  Drama as a weapon was a new idea for me.  Wasn’t the bloody drama of risky sacrifices made by local people and SNCC workers, of overcoming the paralysis of profound fear, the emotional cost of empathy  --was this not drama enough?  Obviously not.  My admiration for Doris’s bravery and intelligence, for John’s philosophical pronouncements, and for Gilbert’s boldness convinced me Tougaloo College should support the enterprise as much as it could.  The College with its traditions of supporting forms of resistance to gross injustice was the right space for developing and implementing theater as a form of education about social evils, state-sponsored terrorism, and our entitlement to Constitutional rights.  Cultivating non-academic audiences was a capital idea.
• What Frances Williams (1905-1995), a seasoned actress who had been an activist since the 1930s, said in conversations during her residency at Tougaloo opened our eyes about how drama could expose the fundamental theatricality of social and political action.  Those talks strengthen my conviction about the rightness of having FST.
• I was a critical witness at the creation.  FST’s work from 1963 to 1985 was proof that diverse roles and strategies are meaningful in life and death situations which are integral parts of change.
• Fifty years later we can learn ice-cold lessons about the present state and imagined future of African American theater and writing.  (A)  Although some black writing creates amnesia, much of it still has cantankerous vitality.  (B)  Politically conscious African American theater is pathetic.  It is so Americanized and homogenized as to have lost 95% of its potential to improve consciousness among large numbers of people. It is ill-equipped to deal with our lust for infotainment, our being enthralled and enslaved by endlessly new  visual technologies. I am not “hating” on any single playwright or theater group or spectacle  (performance effort).  I am simply convinced one FST product, Tom Dent’s Ritual Murder, remains unmatched for aesthetic economy and psychological depth in dealing with the major problem in 21^st century society ---namely, cultivated self-hatred and total negation of the sanctity of human life. A vital African American /Black theater would address the genocidal implications of nihilism and self-hatred.

In the early planning of FST, Gilbert Moses thought the ideal was to evolve forms of drama to deal with political and moral dilemmas ---to forge “a new idiom, a new genre, a theatrical form and style as unique as blues, jazz, and gospel.  Black music still succeeds in preserving the changing complexities of anchored Blackness and eternal problems.  Measured against FST ideals, contemporary African American theatre fails in general to do. It is patriotic and American, a dream deferred.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                  October 21, 2013

Literary Commerce

Literary Commerce

 

According to words provided on the publication page, The Wind Done Gone “is the author’s critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.”  We may suppose this statement and the dates January 1, 1940 (movie premiere of GWTW) and July 1936 (publication of GWTW) satisfy minimum requirements for cultural literacy in America.  Students in AP English courses are encouraged to know the phrase “gone with the wind”  is from Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non sum quails eram bonae sub rego Cynarae” (I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cyrana).  That information puts AP students a step ahead.  Those who get superior AP education will also know Dowson got the title for his poem from the Roman poet Horace.  In the antiquity of the early 20^th century, some black students took pride in retaining such information.

Now, it suffices for any American student to remix Alice Randall’s title The Wind Done Gone as Did the Wind Gone?  So much is missed.

Randall inserts her first novel into the American romance tradition by imitating Hawthorne’s Custom House preface for The Scarlet Letter. In “Notes on the Text,” she pretends to have discovered the document (a leather-bound diary) by Prissy Cynara Brown in the 1990s among “the effects of an elderly colored lady who had been in an assisted-living center just outside Atlanta” (v).  Inside the document was “a fragment of green silk.”  Inside his document, Hawthorne discovered a bit of cloth, a scarlet letter, an overtly historical textile.

Recall that neither Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne nor Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara was a lady.  They were useful tools in the making of whiteness.  Unlike the rich oral narration of the enslaved heroine in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (which tells us so much about the world described in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee), the febrile writerly narration of Prissy Cynara Brown tells us more about the pathology of Margaret Mitchell’s “New South” than it does about the slave community.  In that sense, it justifies Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s remark that The Wind Done Gone is “a moving act of political commentary.”  Randall’s novel deconstructs, however, the puffery of Gates’s saying that in The Wind Done Gone “at last the slaves at Tara have found their voice.”  Caveat Emptor.  When the wind leaves, the voice can’t be found.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                           

October 17, 2013

History Redux

History Redux 2013: Umbra and FST

 

Two symposia, “Talkin’ Revolution,” (New Orleans, October 17-20) and “ Celebrating the Umbra Workshop,” (New York, November 1) will cast light on the matter of history redux , the ways people remember and reconfigure specific moments of cultural development.

The wording of David Henderson’s announcement about the Umbra symposium is instructive:

Join us for a half century celebration of the Umbra Workshop! Founded on New York’s Lower East Side in 1961 and dispersed in 1964, Umbra’s influence on American literature continues to this day. The Umbra Workshop was comprised of an aesthetically diverse group of young artists, many with “a strong commitment to ‘nonliterary’ black culture.” The Workshop was nurtured by people as disparate as Langston Hughes and Andy Young, actively engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, in questions of diversity in letters, and, later, in the Black Arts Movement. The first in a series of gatherings, this event brings together several of the founding members, including poets, novelists, and activists Steve Cannon, David Henderson, Rashidah Ismaili, Joe Johnson and Ishmael Reed for readings and conversation and focusing on some of the complex aesthetic, political, social, and literary relationships that informed this legendary Workshop.

It whets our appetite to know what impact the post-dispersal activities of the participants –those named in the announcement and those to be remembered in the discussions had and may continue to have on the growth of African American literature.  Tom Dent, Calvin Hicks, Raymond Patterson, Askia Muhammad Touré, Lorenzo Thomas, Calvin Hernton, and Norman Pritchard and others are among those to be remembered.

In contrast, “Talkin’ Revolution” will make inquiries about the Free Southern Theater (FST) from 1963 to 1985 and about what FST may teach us about the present state and the future of African American theatre and writing.  Why was FST founded by John O’Neal, Doris Derby, and Gilbert Moses at Tougaloo College?  How did its early productions in Mississippi shape discussions regarding culture and civil rights struggles?  Why did FST move its homebase from Mississippi to New Orleans?  Although dispersal is an important feature of FST history, it is more necessary to account for the impact the institution had on the growth, rise, and decline of community  theater in New Orleans and other parts of the South. And we have to think about Tom Dent as a key figure in both Umbra Workshop and FST.

History redux is invaluable for assessing our contemporary use and abuse of culture(s).

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.          October 13, 2013          PHBW BLOG

 

Unghosting African American Literature

Unghosting African American Literature

 

Unghosting, as the word is used in the title of Frank X. Walker’s recent collection of poems, Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013), might refer to connotations of “recovery” in the work of criticism and literary history. Aware that “recovery” is a subjective action, we can strengthen our work by exploiting that subjectivity more than we normally do.  Walker’s poems can be discussed in an interpretive context shaped by Michael V. Williams’s Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr (2011) and Minrose Gwin’s Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (2013). When Gwin remarks that Turn Me Loose “takes measure of these long shadows of southern history and the bifurcating forms of memory they elicit in lingering contemporary arguments” (21), we appreciate more Williams’s caution that we not deify Evers but “analyze his contributions so one might understand his overall impact on the movement for social, political, economic, and racial equality” (11). Intensified awareness of subjectivity might sharpen critique of how Williams’s writing of biography, Gwin’s judgments about historiography, and Walker’s poetry cooperate in a process of unghosting.

When I recovered my review in NOBO: A Journal of African American Dialogue of Askia Muhammad Touré’s third book of poems, From the Pyramids to the Projects: Poems of Genocide and Resistance! (1990), I had a shock of remembering.  I had said nothing about Touré’s liberating himself from his birth name, Roland Snellings, nor had I mentioned his membership in Umbra Workshop (1962-65), which Lorenzo Thomas and Michel Oren both recognized as a critical element in the formation of the Black Arts Movement. Had I done so, I might have said something less “ book reviewish” and more intellectually substantial. I did mention “his distinction as a leading member of the Black Arts Movement and his importance in the history of American American aesthetics.”  Failure lies in my not mentioning his name change was itself an unghosting of Askia Muhammad Touré, an emperor of Songhai, a preparatory gesture I suspect for writing the poems in Songhai (1972) and Juju: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (1972). I failed to establish a “thick” context for my act of criticism.  When I write in a future about the Black Arts Movement, I shall be more responsible in my use of unghosting tools to locate poetry in literary history.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.       October 9, 2013       

LeRoi Jones/1963

LeRoi Jones /1963

 

It seems to be an innocent use of time when we celebrate memory at intervals of fifty years.  The ghosts of things past, however, can become rowdy.  Things can get out of hand.

Reflection on then and now, dignity, and solemnity could have marked celebration of the historic March on Washington. The March was not about Dr. King and a good Baptist sermon about dreaming.  The trek to the nation’s capital in 1963 was about the sacrifices made by thousands for social justice.  The ghosts of the past and the media gave scant attention to original intent. The cameras focused on bickering among heirs of history and the seduction of self-advertisement.

Time does not bow to desire for neat patterns.  James Weldon Johnson published Fifty Years and Other Poems in 1917 not 1913.  We have no opportunity to say he celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) fifty years later.  We could alter history and say LeRoi Jones’s publishing Blues People, a landmark work in vernacular cultural theory, in 1963 was a special salute to Johnson’s admonition “to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without.”  Without resorting to the ahistorical, we can say LeRoi Jones did salute Johnson.  He theorized that the music of the enslaved, the blues, and jazz was a better manifestation of racial spirit than what could be found in “Negro literature.”  In this way, Jones acknowledged Johnson’s insights about the ineluctable connections of music, poetry and spirit.  We celebrate Jones [Amiri Baraka] and Blues People fifty years later by asking what the book tells us about 2013.

The lines

Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother

Who killed Dr. King, Who would want such a thing?

 

                  Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

 

from Baraka’s long poem “Somebody Blew Up America”  (2001) is a dense warning that we may want to be careful in remembering November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  We do well to interpret Baraka’s questions in the context of political murder in the United States of American, a context saturated with awareness that terrorism is ferocious, amoral, and vengeful.  We benefit from remembering that for fifty years Jones/Baraka has sandpapered our minds with light.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.           October 7, 2013    

 

Answer to a Chinese Colleague

Wang: Besides “Race” or “Racial issues” in the study of African American literary criticism, “Gender issues,” or “Gender equality” has been foregrounded at least since the 1970s. What do you think of different approaches/aspects in black feminism and their possible tendencies in the new century?

 

 

Ward:  Any thinking I do in this area of cultural study is centered on womanism not feminism, because Alice Walker’s making a distinction between the womanist and feminist perspectives was a key moment in intellectual history.[1] Her distinction is a warrant for investigating gender as a thread of concern interwoven with other threads we call class, biology, race, and ethnicity, of seeing the fabric through the lens of American history. Inspecting the 19^th century fabric and texture enables us to find similar patterns in the literary criticism that has been manufactured since the 1970s.

Discussions of gender in the North were apparent in abolitionist debates about the evils of enslaving Africans and African Americans, and those debates were enlarged by proposals from the Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848. In the antebellum South, black women inscribed their gender issues in the narratives they wrote or dictated, in oral traditions, in successful flights to freedom.  After the American Civil War, African American women wrote what Claudia Tate aptly named “domestic allegories of political desire,” were exceptionally active in promoting literary and education, and in disputing with white feminists that women’s rights pertained to women as a class; in these quarrels we discern how race and economic status made gender equality problematic. Leap to 1920.  American women finally got the right to vote, but that political gesture left many gender and racial issues unresolved.  Just as abolitionist efforts in the 19^th century provided models for women’s assertive actions, so too did the long struggle of African American women (notably Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker ) and men for civil rights provide a template for political and literary actions among women, the upsurge of Women’s Liberation and feminist theorizing which smashed against the every-present wall of  race, ethnic, and class interests and the immense capability of globalization to reinforce abuses of women. 

Cultural critics should use the discipline of history to study the fragmentation and bifurcation of feminism and womanism. We should learn from such twentieth-century writers, scholars and critics as Trudier Harris, Carolyn Fowler, Farah Frances Smith Foster, Gloria T. Hull, Audre Lorde, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Deborah McDowell, Darlene Clark Hine, Elizabeth McHenry, Claudia Tate, Nell Irvin Painter, Andree Nicola McLaughlin, Nellie McKay, Joanne V.  Gabbin, Brenda Marie Osbey, Sherley Anne Williams, Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Thadious M. Davis, Hortense Spillers, Maryemma Graham, Barbara Christian and dozens of other women ----all of whom worked assiduously to build foundations for twenty-first- century work.

In a near future, the tendency in African American literary criticism may lean toward androgyny, more exploration of gender’s bending and blending without minimizing the need to use literary knowledge in substantive critiques of material conditions perpetuated by the gendered rhetorics of public policy, sex traffic and religious bondage, of the gap between wealth and poverty in the African Diaspora and everywhere else, and of  the now permanent threat of amoral terrorism. I would hope that significantly more attention would be given to excellent qualities in women’s minds and their contributions to science, sports, statespersonship, and life-affirming literature and culture and less to shameless praise of women’s bodies in the transnational neo-slave auctions of “beauty pageants.”  This new century offers many opportunities to spend our enormous intellectual capital wisely, particularly in efforts to minimize the cruelties human beings inflict upon human beings.  Many of our colleagues would argue rigorously that such is not the responsibility of scholars.  If they are right and I am wrong, I shall hold fast to my heresy and transgressions.

 

 

---

[1] See Alice Walker. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Eugene Redmond and Enlightenment

Eugene B. Redmond and Enlightenment

 

Responding to my comments on Angela Jackson’s Where I Must Go as a luminous web, Eugene B. Redmond raised the stakes.  Might we not need “a theo-religo-soular corollary,” namely a reconsideration of Howard Thurman’s The Luminous Darkness (1965)? The answer: Yes. In thunder.

Just as the literary discourse of Nathan A. Scott, Jr. drew my attention to presence within the text, Howard Thurman’s Christian writings quicken my noticing that theological and religious allusions in the novel’s text bespeak absence or yearning in the act of reading the text.  The critical absence pertains to subtle morality that makes the act of reading an existential act.  Once again, Redmond has done a bit of “re-w (rap) ping.”  Thurman’s meditation on what happens to the human spirit and neighborliness after the walls of segregation have tumbled down is explicit in the plot of Where I Must Go.  By way of making an intertextual connection, Redmond gave me an onus that exceeds any finitude I might assume exists in the aesthetics of reading.  Using the wisdom of racialized oral tradition, Redmond sends me back to roots.

I react to Redmond’s onus of memory much as I react to Curtis Mayfield’s Roots album, recorded at Chicago’s RCA Studios and released October 1971. Listen to the tracks “Underground” and “Keep On Keeping On.” Redmond has sponsored a shock of enlightenment, a shock of recognition.  Behind all the veils of spectacular theory and well-wrought criticism the obligation to examine one’s soul remains permanent. Nature abhors a vacuum.  The soul abhors absence.

Never underestimate the power of real poet/critics and righteous singers and philosopher/theologians in African/African American traditions to make a reader ponder how the souls of black folk got over the bridge of black writing.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                   

September 24, 2013