Centennial 2014

Centennial 2014

 

 

Dudley Randall (1914-2000), Daisy Bates (1914-1999), Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914 – 2005), Billy Eckstine [William Clarence Eckstine 1914-1993] Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), Joe Lewis [Joseph Louis Barrow 1914-1981], Sun Ra [Herman Poole Blount 1914-1993], Woody Strode [Woodrow Wilson Woodwine Strode 1914-1994], Sonny Boy Williamson I [John Lee Curtis Williamson 1914-1948], and Emmett Ashford (1914-1980) are all candidates for centennial celebration

 

It shall be edifying to chronicle how remembering will be divided among interest groups----- literary and social historians, patriotic warmongers, the musicologists, political analysts,  sports experts,  film critics, transnational theorists and  civil rights scholars. The year 2014 presents an opportunity to think again about 1714, 1814 and World War I.  Can we adequately assess the role of time and circumstance in the making of Americans if we segregate those listed above from Jiang Qing, William Westmoreland, Jonas Stalk, Joe DiMaggio, Daniel Boorstin, Clayton Moore, William S. Burroughs, Octavio Paz, Dylan Thomas, Lester Flatt, Bernard Malamud, and Ernest Tubb? What do we gain from selective celebration that is predicated on use of the social construction named “race”?

 

In ideal situations, it would be easy to have collective centennials. We live, however, in reality and amoral actuality. Our cultural studies and remembering thrive on interdisciplinarity which is governed more by ideology than by reason. Viewed comparatively, remembering the achievements and life histories of Dudley Randall and Joe Lewis or of Billy Eckstine and Sonny Boy Williamson might illuminate similar comparisons of William Westmoreland and Daisy Bates or of Sun Ra and Lester Flatt. We talk multiculturalism and the Omni-American.  We talk, make hot air, and put with Z “in conversation “A, but we do not have critical absorption that minimizes cultural amnesia.

 

In my work as one of the “little people” from Mississippi, the commitment of Dudley Randall as a poet and founder of Broadside Press is a stronger candidate for memory than Ralph Ellison and the novel Invisible Man. Putting Randall’s life and accomplishments under the microscope of 2014 does not minimize the need to attend to other writers born in 2014. It accelerates my interest in looking at the Black Arts Movement from the perspective of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in hearing Sonny Boy Williamson from the angle of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, in asking whether Daisy Bates made a more substantial contribution to the moral dimensions of the American mind than did William Westmoreland or William Burroughs.

 

For my centennial rituals in 2014, I shall examine again

 

Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

 

Miller, R. Baxter. “ ‘Endowing the World and Time’: The Life and Work of Dudley Randall.” Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960. Ed. R. Baxter Miller. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.

 

Thompson, Julius E.  Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      September 14, 2013   

PMLA (January 1998), pp. 130-131

To the Editor:

Referring to James Russell Lowell's importnce to her, Sandra M. Gilbert wrote in the 1996 Presidential Address (112[1977]:370-79) that "unless I am doing a grave injustice to one of the 103 colleagues who held this office between his tenure and mine, I believe I am the first poet to preside over the MLA since he did" (372). In MLA history, Houston A. Baker, Jr. stands between Lowell and Gilbert. Baker, who has published three books of poetry, was included in my anthology Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997) because he is one of our most accomplished poet-critics. Gilbert's claim in not necessarily a grave injustice but an oversight to be corrected.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Tougaloo College

Alice Walker

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Alice Walker, Autobiographical Contract, and Sciences of Memory

[By Jerry Ward, Jr.]

Definition is essential. What does womanist mean and what is its relation to feminist? Does the assertion that womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender explain saturation as a major difference in historical experience? The various essays, bits of interviews, poetry (inside prose frames) and reviews collected in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983) suggest an answer. They suggest that Walker the novelist is of a “revolutionary” mind like a furious flower, is as serious as was Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. These women assumed the freedom to create is an entitlement of nature not of man. And they have the backing of words attributed to Sojourner Truth in 1851: “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do wid Him.”

Walker’s attitude toward literature has a faint echo of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Do not confuse attitude with heritage. Mountains are gendered property, and in Walker’s case, Sojourner Truth holds the mortgage! Interpretation can take the guise of paying interest, escrow, and principle.

Walker’s trope of the garden has a great deal to do with memory and with the fact that canonized writers have no monopoly in cultivating ART. Context requires remembering that Walker first broadcast ideas about mothers and gardens at the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Festival in Jackson, Mississippi and remembering I had taught The Third Life of Grange Copeland the previous year. My memory of that event and of my teaching has been reactivated by how the biologist Steven Rose commented on the Rosetta Stone in The Making of Memory (1992):

Memory pervades ancient ballads and modern novels alike. Especially in the present century, from James Joyce and Marcel Proust to the new writing of Margaret Atwood, of J. G. Ballard, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Alice Walker, the theme of personal memory, of the constant examination, interpretation, and reinterpretation of lived experience, is central.

And Rose asked in the same paragraph: Or are we doomed to live always in the divided worlds of subjectivity and objectivity, with no translation possible between these languages? (7)

Mother transmits the seed of art and the desire to grow it into ART to daughter. We are expected to read the fine print in the title essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” as Walker’s autobiographical contract.

Walker’s recent thinking about her autobiographical contract appears in the appended reader’s guide for Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Asked what inspired her to write the novel, Walker replied: “So in Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart I set out to chart such a journey, the adventures of Kate Nelson Talkingtree, who is named partly for a grandmother, my father’s mother, who was murdered when he was a boy.” This novel incorporates Walker’s quest for the culture of the Grandmother, her keeping the faith with the autobiographical contract. Through fiction, Walker provisionally confirms Steven Rose’s idea that sciences of the collective -- “ecology and ethnology, sociology and economics” (7-8) -- are better instruments than the sciences of “individual psychology or neuroscience” (7) for exploring the nature of memory. The jury is still out, however, on any permanent conjoining of subjectivity and objectivity, inside or outside of fictions.

Jonathan Kline's first novel

Blurb for Wisdom of Ashes

 

Jonathan Kline’s Wisdom of Ashes is lagniappe for readers who know New Orleans intimately and for those who hunger for the carnivalesque secrets of the city. The novel echoes the realism of Honoré de Balzac, Mark Twain, and Flannery O’Connor; its texture is blessed by Saint Dymphna. Kline portrays his visions of the city’s time, characters, climates, and rhythms with remarkable distinction.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., author of THE KATRINA PAPERS: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery

17 Passages

17 Passages for 17 Poets

 

Language as form

flips flounders flaps

 

the fire is time  )1

 

God’s death

was not suicide.

 

It was the result

of a moral position

incompatible with life. (2

 

Deception:

a kerosene lamp

in the heart of darkness. )3

 

Your lips

purple the world. (4

 

Language

                burns

                blasts

                burnishes.

 

Music

                blooms. ) 5

 

When she extends

an invitation,

read her hips. (6

 

Colorblind candy,

you so dandy.

 

You so randy,

you so raunchy,

you can’t amos

or do the andy. )7

 

Refuse to hope

unless uncertainty

invents a virus

to murder hate. (8

 

                                                                                                17 Passages for 17 Poets, page 2.

 

 

Darkness of darkness

So logical it shines

 

Water enters before a man enters water,

Rides an ark of bones in a space which never heard of time  )9

 

Native son

did the right thing

In Fort Greene Park

by the soul of a prison ship

martyrs monument.

 

He wrote the book.(10

 

After hanging,

Through razoring rain,

Searing sun,

Whipping wind,

Scouring snow

                You shall be

                Lean, beautifully angeled,

                Superbly fit

                To wear designer clothes. ) 11

 

Your voice

Made the air

Bleed. (12

 

Shakespeare,

Paragon of plagiarists,

When imagination fails,

Old felon, fly down

From heavenly hell,

Bringing a mercy

Of rain dry as dust,

A cold awakening

For a brain’s slumber.  (13

 

 

A crane posed on the lawn for a photograph.

A lion growled at the door for milk.

I shall be surprised to not be at home. )14

 

 

 

17 Passages for 17 Poets, page 3

 

 

I need a sign

That you were there

The morning I walked

Out of your life

Into your soul. )15

 

 

 

 

You know what it means to be New Orleans/ when the trumpet takes a bath in Afro-Sheen (16

 

 

Then you pick up your life

After celebrating, barely recollecting

Where you left it, stuff it in

Whatever garments  come to hand, and violently

Hit the streets.  It’s your resurrection after all. )17

Sherman Alexie

For the Coeur d'Alene
(after reading Sherman Alexie's War Dances)



Three Jesuit crows sat on a telephone wire,
talking trash about Alexie.

Jesuit #1:  We must ask St. Ignatius to pray for his soul.

Jesuit #2:  Oh, hell no.

Jesuit #3:  Why not?

Jesuit #2:  His soul is praying for us.

Jesuit #1:  Ah, I once was blind but now I see.




September 4, 2013

Note for Richard Wright's 105th Birthday

Note for Richard Wright’s 105^th Birthday

 

                In 1942, the psychologist Fredrick Wertham sent Richard Wright two verses, one on January 15 and the other on May 27.  The haunting lines of the first

 

Where men have always looked around

And searched for secrets never found,

You saw a vision, dark, profound;

You heard beneath a distant sound;

You took the lid off the Underground.

 

are illuminated by the second verse entitled Underground

 

The Freudians talk about the Id

And bring it below

But Richard Wright took off the lid

And let us see the woe.

 

It is likely that the only works by Wright that Wertham might have read before 1942 were Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and 12 Million Black Voices. His insights about Wright’s intellectual acumen are germane in discussions of Wright’s fiction and non-fiction.  Like William Blake, Wright was a visionary, one who exposed deep recesses of human consciousness.  One is not surprised that he discovered quite early that Freudian theory might conceal as much as it reveals.  Pulling off the lid and urging people to ponder material and mental damages was Wright’s forte.

 

                On September 4, 2013, I celebrate the presence and power of Richard Wright’s mind.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

Note for the note:  Wertham’s correspondence with Wright is contained in the Wright Papers, JWJ Mss 3, Box 108, Folder 1677 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.