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

Angela Jackson: The Novel as Luminous Web

Angela Jackson: The Novel as Luminous Web

 

It is not uncommon for writers to use many genres to provoke thought about historical time.  It is unusual, however, to consider that the interplay of genres shapes our larger visions of time and life.

 

Reading a stanza from Angela Jackson’s poem “The Spider Tells Her Horror Stories”

 

Even I

have no sufficient howl.

Not enough thunder

in the cups of my eyes

To slit irises, let out

the barren spaces, the

besieged lives.

 

[[Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books, 1993), pp. 38-39]]

against, or in tandem with, her novel Where I Must Go (Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2009), brings into being what Nathan A. Scott, Jr. described wonderfully in Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).  Echoing H. D. Lewis, Scott argued that the end toward which poetic art is devoted is the apprehension and disclosure of “the character of particular things in the starkness and strangeness of their being what they are” (2).  Along with the recognition that it is quintessentially “poetic,” Where I Must Go brings the mystery of presence into our line of vision. Jackson’s novel is a luminous web.  Once you enter the poetic architectonics of the web, you are caught in remembering the seductive discord between the popular culture in the 1960s and the life-serious activities of the Civil Rights Movement and integration in higher education, of the rise of Black Studies and Black Power and Afrocentricity, and of Time’s sweeping of us all into modes of the post-whatever.  The quality of remembering, need it be said, is directly dependent on whether you were there in the 1960s or only born into consciousness in the late 1990s.

 

The first-person narration Jackson uses in constructing a story about events at Eden University (substitute Northwestern University in your acts of discerning referentiality) obligates you to pay attention to the work of language in occasioning aesthetic experiences and in sponsoring perplexity about what you thought you understood about American and African American life in the last century. Jackson dislocates racially-marked certainty about the texture of urban experiences, education, and the properties of womanist thinking that has been baptized by Roman Catholic ideologies.  Jackson is a poet and novelist who demands much of her readers.  That fact may explain, in part, why Where I Must Go has not been anointed with rivers of praise and has received scant notice from those who canonize African American novels. Habitation in a luminous web requires labor and love.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                           PHBW BLOG

September 23, 2013

Upon Hearing That Kofi Awoonor Is Dead

Death, thou art derelict--

your flavor,
your edgeless sting,
your timeless amnesia


explain


your habit of arriving
after we are dead
of dying
after we are dead


Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 22, 2013