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"Maya Angelou, Eugene B. Redmond, and me"

By Howard Rambsy II

http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/06/maya-angelou-eugene-b-redmond-and-me.html


Rambsy's blog extends the argument he made in

"Eugene B. Redmond, the Critical Witness." JEAL, Issue 1 (2011):69-89.

Remembering Maya Angelou

Remembering Maya Angelou

 

It is a surreal movie, my remembering a phenomenal woman who became an American icon and a national treasure. The movie misbehaves, or rather it behaves like a piece of conceptual music. A single note followed by 18 minutes of white noise followed by a blues passage from “Big Mama” Thornton singing “Summertime” followed by an hour of silence suddenly ending with Pavarotti singing James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” in Italian.  Remembering Maya Angelou is a cinema trip.

I need to remember “Sympathy,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem about that unhappy bird in a cage, and how Angelou knew why that caged bird sang.  And she elaborated the metaphor without a mask.

I need to remember the force and grace of her reading at Jackson State University, to remember Margaret Walker saying “I did not know she was so tall.”  And at that reading how Angelou explained nothing worthwhile is free, thus schoolchildren should learn responsibility by paying a dime to hear her read.

I need to remember why Angelou’s voice can’t be imitated, why now we have the echo of the voice on vinyl or CD, why I need to listen to her calypso songs. And the voice, its laughter, ringing in my memory of her being at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Festival.  I remember her smile as we danced together at a private party given by one of her aristocratic friends from Ghana in a fancy apartment in Washington, DC; I remember another party in DC at the home of the elegant Eleanor Traylor where Angelou told Paule Marshall and Eugene Redmond that they must come into the kitchen to hear a white Aborigine she had discovered sing ancient music.  That must have been the party at which I talked with her then husband Paul de Feu.  He reminded me of Austin Strauss who had been married to my classmate Anne Moody and then later to Wanda Coleman.  I guess I am remembering that love and integration and marriage are quite a trinity.

I remember Angelou reading at a National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta and how a young black woman from Canton, Mississippi cried out “You tell’em Maya.”  Dr. Angelou stopped, cast a stern gaze upon the woman, and said “You must not speak to your mother like that.”  Neither Maya Angelou nor Nina Simone suffered fools when they performed.

Eugene Redmond reminded me the day after Angelou died that he had a photograph of me and her at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn when she received the Langston Hughes Award.  I am talking.  She is listening intensely.  I am delivering a message from Grace Killens, the widow of Angelou’s mentor John Oliver Killens.  I remember she said, “I must send her something.  She and John were always so kind to me.”

I remember Angelou inviting me to sit at her special table during one Zora Neale Hurston Festival for dinner and drinks.  I remember her saying on another occasion to a group of us that we should pray for Nikki Giovanni.  “She is not well.” I remember Angelou telling me and Richard Long about a telephone call from some reporter for some New York newspaper, asking her about some unflattering statement Bill Cosby made about African American people.  Her response to the reporter was “Did he lie?”

I remember reading her poetry and prose, seeing her read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inaugural, reacting very positively and sometimes not so positively to her work.  I remember my parents taught me to have good manners and respect for my elders and to be humble in the presence of greatness.  I remember talking with and listening to Maya Angelou in the ambience of awe, pure awe.  But then too, I remember, that some famous people are ordinary people who have the gift of making themselves extraordinary, uncommon, phenomenal, unique. They touch the world.  And when they depart this world for elsewhere, what is most worthy of remembering is their legacy of struggle to make this planet Earth a place where equality, tolerance, and peace might flourish and that I am obligated somehow to continue the always unfinished work of their legacy.

I reckon I remember more about Maya Angelou than I am willing to tell, and the footage of what must remain private will never appear when my surreal movie is spoken.  It is sufficient that I understand the caged bird escaped and sing even more brilliantly than the woman commemorated in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.”

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 4, 2014

Tribute program at Café Istanbul, New Orleans, LA

 

Sam Greenlee

Death and Crucial Questions: Sam Greenlee (1930-2014)

Each death gives birth to new questions.  It matters not whether the dead person is so unaccounted for that she or he is unmourned and assigned to an unmarked grave in the cemetery of oblivion, or so assiduously documented during his or her brief span of living that remembering and rituals of respect become footnotes for history. Each death sharpens the agony of humanity and urges inquiry about our cultural and critical practices and memory. Our endless struggle for human rights is a braided rainbow if we carefully avoid having it become a rainbow-colored noose. Minimize self-anointed lynchings.

From January 2014 to now, we witness death and the transition of American moral voices. Death ought not be proud, but it is. Its visitations are spendthrift.  Consider the short, incomplete listing for writers:

Alvin B. Aubert, March 12, 1930-January 7, 2014

Amiri Baraka, October 7, 1934-January 9, 2014

Sam Greenlee, July 13, 1930-May 19, 2014

Vincent Gordon Harding, July 24, 1931-May 19, 2014

Maya Angelou, April 4, 1928-May 28, 2014

People more adept than I can do the numerology charts.  I am merely plain, vernacular, and youthfully elderly. I just listen.

Aubert says: “We walk to the proverbial different drummer.  The difference lies, I suppose, in whether or not you want to assume a particular political stance in your writing.  I don’t have that kind of systematic ideology --- which does not, in my view, reduce my commitment to my people.”

Baraka asks the primal, philosophical question: Who?

Greenlee fictionalizes a black Iraqi voice in Baghdad Blues (1976) to say: “But you cannot oppose progress forever.  The revolution must come, and it is a pity that, when it does, you will have been found neither sympathetic nor understanding of its causes.”

Harding, noted for his work with SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the Institute of the Black World and noted for such books as Hope and History and The Other American Revolution, is reported to have said that the key for the 21^st century is to answer the voice within us which instructs us to do something for somebody.

Angelou, teaching a lesson five days before dying, intones: “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”

Listen to lessoning until cognition arrives.

 

 

The death of Sam Greenlee, who worked for USIA from 1959-1965 and who witnessed revolution in the Middle East , is reason for quietly, very quietly, giving more  attention to writers and the intelligence agencies. There is some interesting material on YouTube regarding Greenlee and the making of the film The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Weird stuff, this silencing of work by men and women who say “I Am.” The FBI took exquisite care to limit distribution of the film, but that suggests we have not given sufficient attention to the whole history of African American film and the quintessential presence of blacks in American film and how film often nourishes and materializes the sinister motives of the State. To be sure, we have been derelict in attending to domestic surveillance. But how could we when the greatest commandment of brave new life in the United States is: THOU SHALT NOT KNOW? We are conditioned to worship tyranny. Listening to lessoning enables a handful of us to be transgressive in asking, with Angelou, that the world be responsible for tolerance, for equality and equity, and for peace.

 I'm not sure why Greenlee's second novel Baghdad Blues (1976) has got scant attention from critics who think they know everything about how the world turns to stand still. Greenlee was also a poet -----Blues for an African Princess (1971) and Ammunition!:Poetry and Other Raps (1975) and Be-Bop Man/Be-Bop Woman, 1968-1993 Poetry and Other Raps (1995), so why do we not have discussion of him in the context of the Black Arts Movement?

Obviously, I have to do much more research on Greenlee and address uncomfortable questions to my fellow critics, especially those who deal with the messy literary politics of the Chicago scene. I have not, I hasten to confess, done enough work with my own life-radical questions that are certainly under surveillance. Mary Helen Washington's excellent The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) paves the way for that kind of research.

Certain makers of cultural and political tastes in Chicago apparently did not like Greenlee and succeeded, to some degree, in urging  people to ignore him. Alas, the specialized problems of nationalism and nation time. Greenlee is an important figure in the whole history of black writing and the rainbow radical tradition of cultural expressiveness and performance, and we must give attention to the silence around him for the greater good of our people, for the good of all the generations as Margaret Walker instructed. Pass the word in the right places and study the kaleidoscopic patterns of the braided rainbow. Death and crucial questions bid us to be wise/whys!

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            June 3, 2014

Exclusive blog for BKNation

Richard Wright's THE LONG DREAM (play)

From:
Sent:
To:

 

Dear Colleagues,

Sitting at Cafe Tournon in 1995, I stared across the street at two fire-red gates. They may have been doors, but they looked like gates to me. "Aha," I thought as I sipped ordinary wine,"even in Paris, Wright could not escape hell."

Lack of income, intestinal problems, and surveillance by international agencies ensured that Wright's final two years would be hellish. Critics who proclaimed Wright was out of touch with racial progress in the United States added psychological hot pepper. Even at the remove of fifty plus years, one can empathize. Wright was not out of touch. He was too much in touch with what was diabolic in the Cold War. InThe Color Curtain he had sensed the world was in for a season of terrorism.

Having recently read Ketti Frings' adaptation of The Long Dream, I am beginning to understand nuances of Wright's plight. The 1964 revised script ofThe Long Dream: A New Play (D-207 135:9 in Special Collections, University of California, Davis) is a transmogrification of the novel, akin to the HBO castration of "Long Black Song." Why did Frings butcher what I assume to have been Wright's intentions by killing off the son Rex "Fishbelly" Tucker rather than the father Tyree Tucker as Wright had done? And why, as we can discover from Wright's correspondence with Frings, did Wright "like" her adaptation? Did he "like" her focus on the Gothic nature of interracial business arrangements in Mississippi? Why did Frings, who won a Pulitzer and the New York Drama Critics Award for her adaptation of Thomas Wolfe'sLook Homeward, Angel, transform Wright's novel into so dull a play that it lasted for only six performances? How out of touch was Frings with white language usage in black culture that the Chief of Police should refer to Fishbelly as an "uppity dinge"? "Dinge" is a contemptuous term for a black person from the 1850s not the 1950s. What was Frings' unwitting or knowing participation in the Cold War "torturing" of Wright?

Answering these questions requries work in the Wright papers at Yale, the Michel Fabre papers at Emory, and the Ketti Frings holdings at UC, Davis. It will be some time before I can do research in these archives. If any of you get to these places before I do, please let me know what you discover about the adaptation (and/or performance) of The Long Dream.

Best wishes for the summer,

Jerry

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden and Actuality Television

Fifteen minutes after the broadcast of the long-awaited “Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden,” the nicely photographed NBC interview with Brian Williams, we know little more about this brilliant man than we knew fifteen minutes before the program aired.  He speaks very good Standard American English. His presentation of self is disarmingly innocent.  In fact, he is so pristinely innocent that were he to be “disappeared” by aliens, the Roman Catholic Church would be obligated to give him sainthood immediately.  Edward Snowden is not one of us.

The bit of truth that Snowden communicated to Williams has to do with how the United States of American as a security state has held the United States Constitution hostage since 9/11 and how very powerful technology has destroyed belief that privacy can again become operative. Once destroyed, privacy is possible only in theory and fantasy. All world governments know that.  It is unpleasant to think about what world governments knew about our President and our military and our intelligence agencies prior to the advent of Snowden.  It is more disconcerting to think about what Snowden has enabled them to know as “fact,” because one is free to believe he only leaked an immense amount of encrypted NSA disinformation.  If that be true, our world has entered an advanced state of “science faction.” Damage is damage is damage.

 Snowden revealed little about his grandfather who allegedly worked for the FBI.  Given that the NBC program allowed us to guess whatever we wanted to guess, one might guess that the grandfather never told Snowden that the FBI and other surveillance agencies had a quite long history of spying on United States citizens at home and abroad. Thus, he had to discover the obscenity of reality by working not as a systems analyst but as a bona fide spy. It is easy to believe that Snowden does not have a family and the he would have great difficulty in producing a birth certificate. I believe Snowden did indeed lie about having destroyed information before he left Hong Kong for Russia.  One does not destroy information that is worth a trillion dollars in the blue market.

 In a very smart rhetorical gesture, Snowden asserted that he is still working for the United States, the country he loves passionately. I believe he did tell the truth about his current employment, although he failed to provide a job description. Had he been less “in love” with his country, Snowden would probably not have done the right thing wrongly or the wrong thing rightly.  He is as transparent as that marvelous novella by Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw.” And the television-viewing public has been royally corkscrewed. Do not blame Obama for that.  Blame the hidden and sinister powers that really control NBC and other forms of mass media.

It is not surprising that Snowden does not know whether he is guilty or blameless.  Were he merely an actor on reality TV, he would be able to explain his moral state, his ethics without engaging sophisticated trash talk.  But like Brian Williams, Snowden is trapped in actuality television, a research area that within less than a decade will become our most vital and viable non-academic discipline.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    May 28, 2014

Maya Angelou

From Gravity Comes the Grief

 

There is a language in silence you must use in communing with the living, the dying, and the dead.  Time ordains that you deal with the gravity and brevity of manifest being.  Humility demands that you accept legacies from word spirits with grace and respect. Time appropriates words from Amiri Baraka’s 1987 eulogy for James Baldwin, forcing out of your mouth “the intelligence of our transcendence” and forbidding you to traffic with bad faith in “retelling old lies or making up new ones, or shaping yet another black life to fit the great white stomach which yet rules and tries to digest the world.” Time and Baraka ignore your reluctance to speak and the dread in your saying the world is not white but pale brown pink. You have no choice but to close your eyes, open your mind, and let your fingers play respect for Marguerite Annie Johnson (April 4, 1928 –May 28, 2014).  Baraka smiles at you wisely and says “I know your parents reared you to stay more in the tradition than that!”

Your mind back flips to an iconic photograph of two people dancing on a marker for Langston Hughes at the Schomburg Research Center.  That is your clue. Speak of Maya Angelou.  Toni Cade Bambara, Alvin Aubert, Lorenzo Thomas, Audre Lorde, Tom Dent, John Oliver and Grace Killens, Margaret Walker, Wanda Coleman, Albert Murray, Louis Reyes Rivera and others and others nod approval. They give you the gravity of words from which comes the grief and its resolution. The heart that does not belong to your body pumps words.

You walk in the rivers of glass from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy.”  You feel with Maya Angelou why the caged bird sings, why inevitably the bird flings its spirit into the limitless cosmos. You regret the myopia of the New York Times headline that begins “Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South…” Balderdash. There is a Jim Crow North, West, and East, a Jim Crow Earth.  Maya Angelou was the phenomenal woman she said she was.  Birth in St. Louis, Missouri and death in Winston-Salem, North Carolina did secure her temporal being, along with Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells, a woman of the South.  But Maya Angelou’s fluent command of languages and her extensive work as dancer, poet, actress, writer, filmmaker and director, civil and human rights activist, singer, conscience of the grace that ought to obtain in earthly life ---all of this made her more than a mere witness to universal lynchings and human wantonness. She had a more powerful vision. She was the authority and author what all of us are existentially obligated to witness, existentially destined to do.  As her friend and “brother” Eugene B. Redmond might put it, we must excavate a heavy lode and lesson ourselves in the lore she created.

At this moment, it is sufficient that you know Maya Angelou touched the world with her brave and radiant spirit.  Documentation of her life in biographies, bibliographies, critiques, memorials, and writings seasoned with womanist theorizing is matter for a later moment. At this moment, ours is the work of spiritual renewal and creativity.  Maya Angelou has gone, her “blood breath beating/ through the dark green places (Audre Lorde, “To Marie, in Flight”). Return to the language of silence and find peace in its embrace.

Jerry W Ward, Jr.     May 28, 2014                                 

Returning to Narrative

Returning to Narrative

 

Hidden neatly in the hyperbole of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ “All Their Stanzas Look Alike” (The Maverick Room. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005. 114-115.) is a truth of sorts. There is a boring “sameness” in a substantial amount of contemporary “canonized” American poetry.  Perhaps the alleged excellence of how MFA programs teach the making of poetry is partially to blame. MFA is an acronym for an unprintable phrase.  In my scandalizing opinion, MFA programs promote craft as technical excellence and ego-interiority, minimizing the option of craft to speak with engaged boldness of the painful messiness of life and world affairs.  To be sure, aesthetics can evoke bright moments of pleasure or eargasms, even a bit of knowledge.  But the best poetry uses aesthetic properties to intensify the pragmatic, the always present need to deal with how people manufacture horrors for themselves and others. Jazz counts as some of our best poetry, and certainly John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor and other jazz people direct our minds to the “sound” science and physics of existing. Metaphysics for real. How refreshing it is to read John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) edited by Leonard L. Brown.  Abstain for a time from the sameness of poetry and look for practical and critical stimulation in the differentness of fictional and non-fictional narrative. Find alternative spaces where furious flowers bloom. We do not need to construct and deconstruct a bogus war between poetry and non-poetry, because in certain remarkable instances it is poetry and poetic equations that cut a pathway to narrative. Consider the importance of how poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Honoreé Fanonne Jeffers excavate histories, of how Rudolph Lewis employs the poetics of orality to craft fiction.

Yes, we have many lines to straighten and many “lost” narrative to read. And now is the time for the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) to resume its leadership in recovery work by way of the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial; PHBW can increase awareness of a humanistic tradition implicit in how the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (1973) was conceptualized and executed, in why Walker’s novel Jubilee initiated a call for rigorous examinations of histories. In one sector of American letters, Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Walker’s call in The Accursed (2013) and Larry McMurtry has done so in The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014). In another sector, Kiini Ibura Salaam,   James Cherry, Jesmyn Ward, Keenan Norris, and Anthony Grooms make answers in the tradition.  I am noticing a need, however,  to use the treasury represented by the PHBW novel database to say more about orality/orature and fiction from the Civil War/post-bellum period to the present. PHBW’s planned GEMS retrospective on John A. Williams can open up many issues about who gets taught in the academic world against who gets read by the non-academic public. Credit must be given to Ishmael Reed for suggesting some years ago that we pay tribute to John A. Williams by reinvesting effort in trying to understand the present relevance of Williams’ noteworthy but under-examined body of work. Let us not forget the importance of revisiting Reed’s own anthologies, novels and essays, his thoroughly multicultural conversation with America.

The reception of genres at any given period is central, of course, in recovery work, but so too is the matter of how themes can encourage or discourage discussion and examination in the public sphere. Kenton Rambsy’s work with short fiction for his dissertation is bringing some aspects of what I see as a major discursive problem in how we deal with literature to the foreground/ Mary Helen Washington’s  The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) and Keith Clark’s The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013) ask us from very different angles to reexamine "social realism" or socially/politically engaged fiction in light of what happens in American life beyond "literature."

I find myself generating questions in my writing about how Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring might connect us with the preoccupation in mass media with the antics of Jay-Z and Beyonce, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Or how his The Blacker the Berry obligates us to deal with the color-blindness of people of no-color who have 20/20 vision of racial colors as they project their unacknowledged pathologies on the screen of the American mind. Narratives by Waters Edward Turpin, Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar Micheaux, Lorenzo Dow Blackson, and Albert Evander Coleman may occasion a fresh vision of what the world is or wants to be in 2014.

 As I see things, PHBW has maximized attention to poetry and some twentieth-century fiction writers through its NEH-sponsored institutes and larger projects. Now is the time for PHBW to do more with non-canonized fiction and non-fiction. It is only fitting that more be done with the holistic, politically astute vision Margaret Walker Alexander had in nurturing African American humanism.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

May 24, 2014