DuBois and the Blues

A Blues Moment in Dusk of Dawn: A Note on Autobiography

 

W. E. B. DuBois’s writing in The Souls of Black Folk (1901) is spiritual, and Dusk of Dawn (1940) complements the first installment of his autobiographical project with a secular sorrow song, with the blues.  Despite the magnification of difference between Booker T. Washington and DuBois, it is refreshing to know that DuBois admitted his kinship and parallelism with Washington in the matter of miscalculating a solution for the problems of black folk.  In Dusk of Dawn, Chapter 7, “The Colored World Within,” DuBois frees the cat from the bag. A truth scampers out.

Here in the past we have easily landed into a morass of criticism, without faith in the ability of American Negroes to extricate themselves from their present plight.  Our former panacea emphasized by Booker T. Washington was flight of class from mass in wealth with the idea of escaping the masses or ruling the masses through power placed by white capitalists into the hands of those with larger income.  My own panacea of earlier days was flight of class from mass through the development of a Talented Tenth; but the power of this aristocracy of talent was to lie in its knowledge and character and not in its wealth.  The problem which I did not then attack was that of leadership and authority within the group, which by implication left controls to wealth --- a contingency of which I never dreamed.  But now the whole economic trend of the world has changed.  That mass and class must unite for the world’s salvation is clear.  We, who have had least class differentiation in wealth, can follow in the new trend and indeed lead it.

Does one respond to DuBois’s idealism with a mixtape of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and Gil Scott Heron’s “Home is Where the Hatred Is”? It may be better to up the ante of ambivalence by reading Andrew Zimmerman’s “Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute and the German Empire: Race and Cotton in the Black Atlantic.” GHI Bulletin No. 43 (Fall 2008):9-20, the coat-pulling essay Gregory Rutledge brought to my attention.  Washington by way of a practical enterprise and DuBois by virtue of his German education came to unfortunate conclusions in the danger zone of global capitalism.  They ultimately had to pay the piper of grand designs.  DuBois lived long enough to recant; Washington died too soon to make amends.

 The blues moment does not eradicate our ambivalence, but it retards our temptation to settle for hasty conclusions about leadership.  We check ourselves by reading what Robert  J. Norrell says about Washington and Africa in Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). We reread DuBois’s The World and Africa (1946) with greater skepticism. We ask what is leadership to us.  A panacea is a mirage, and DuBois’s blues epiphany confirms that the unity of mass and class is an impossible dream, that salvation cannot materialize.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            January 26, 2013

Inaugural Poems

Inaugural Poems: Touching Bones of Consciousness

 

Rudolph Lewis, publisher of the online journal ChickenBones http://www.nathanielturner.com , has suggested that we welcome Richard Blanco’s use of proletarian elements in “One Today.”  I concur. With the exception of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” an old poem he substituted for “Dedication” which he had written for the 1961 inaugural, inaugural poems do refer to the proletariat or to labor. Frost could not read “Dedication” because the glare of sunlight on snow stabbed his eyes.  Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” refer to work.  One might argue that Frost also referred to the labor of colonizing.

What I remember best from Angelou is rock, river, and tree, how Nature’s work fits within her commentary on a narrative process:

 

History, despite its wrenching pain

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again. 

 

and from Alexander’s poem I ponder a single labored line:

 

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

It is the use of “we” in the four poems, however, that moves us from selective remembering to critical reflecting.  Frost’s “we” is unsurprisingly Eurocentric.   Angelou conjures Walt Whitman in nuancing “we” as a catalogue of ethnicities.  Alexander’s “we” is metonymic; it must be translated from six crucial lines:

 

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

 

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

 

Blanco gives identity to “we” by way of uttering greetings:

 

….Hear: the doors we open

for each other all day, saying: hello, shalom,

buon giorno, howdy, namaste, or bueno dias

 

And yet do I marvel not to hear ---zaoshang hao, yah’eh-the, suprabhat, and ohayogozaimasu.  Perhaps Blanco knows too well which immigrants are unmapped and unnamed, which immigrants and indigenous peoples are repressed in national consciousness.  When his poem speaks to us of “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain/ the empty desks of twenty children marked absent/ today and forever,” we sense that the “impossible vocabulary” silences the survivors of the American Holocaust and of the benign genocide that cultivates mass incarceration.  I do not marvel that inaugural poems touch bones of consciousness, for that is the function of poetry embroiled in ceremonies of the Republic.

Given the widespread consumption of poetry in the twenty-first century, it is understandable that we are blessed with a surplus of poets and poetry.  It is equally understandable that our appetite for poetry marked by proletarian elements may be increasing.

Consider that in the epilogue for Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Lawrence W. Levine highlights the anti-democratic conviction that informed Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, that still informs the jeremiads of Bloom’s ideological children: “that only the minority can fruitfully investigate and discuss the nature of the cultural authority which the majority needs to accept”(252).  Some contemporary poets and critics embrace this conviction without question, but the majority of us who write and consume poetry recognize the conviction is a pile of excrement.  Fully capable of distinguishing what is accomplished or dreadful in honest labor-respectful poetry from what has been trimmed by anti-democratic scissors and merchandized by Bloomians as masterpieces, we know which poems are painstakingly crafted to touch the bones of consciousness.  We know that Brenda Marie Osbey’s History and Other Poems (2013), David Brinks’s The Secret Brain; Selected Poems 1995-2012, Sterling D. Plumpp’s long poem “Mississippi Suite”(published on Triquarterly Online (http://triquarterly.org), Frank X. Walker’s Affrilachia (2000),  Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (2011), and Richard Blanco’s “One Today” are touching our bones of consciousness.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                            PHBW blog January 24, 2013

 

 

 

Against Academic Tyranny

AGAINST ACADEMIC TYRANNY

 

Although the Django Unchained syndrome will have a short life, it should convey a powerful lesson to scholars who teach American literature and culture:  Americans are exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking slantwise against the tyranny of literary and cultural criticism. The particulars of the syndrome will evaporate with the advent of Women’s History Month 2013. Reawakened interest in “History” and the sentient histories we inhabit, however, will prevail a bit longer.

 Scholars do not always know, as they argue about the validity of responses to a work of art, what is best.  Myopic albeit practical concerns regarding promotion and tenure, possession of authority, and esteem among their multiracial colleagues too often alienate scholars from their students and the general public.  They forget the excellence of Barbara Christian’s 1987 essay “The Race for Theory”  and of pioneering work by Carolyn Rodgers and Stephen Henderson regarding speech and music as interpretive referents;  of  Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (1938),  LeRoi Jones’s Blues People ( 1963),  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970),  George Kent’s Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (1972), Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985),  Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994), and Charles W. Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997).  These works and others assert the centrality of reader or viewer responses in our interpretations of literature and non-literary writing, and in interpretation of history as narratives of lived experiences.

The professional scholars dwell in dream-sprinkled elite and middle-class cloisters and worship the mysteries of the canon.  They forget the primal obligation of women and men to communicate with men and women.   Isolated by obtuse clerical languages, they minimize how self-publishing, the interests of global capitalism, newspapers, the spectrum of music and entertainment, specialized non-academic magazines, and the ocean of Internet social networking actually shape public tastes, consumption, and responses.  Either by intention or by accident, they are agents of academic tyranny.  Significant numbers of Americans have revolted against such tyranny. They have become students in the public sphere.  They refer to findings and opinions offered by traditional scholars and soi-disant public intellectuals, but their conclusions tend to be radical in the most positive sense of that word.  They teach themselves the contradictions.

“Students,” according to Richard Schramm, National Humanities Center vice president for educational programs, “learn subjects like history and literature best when they are put in the position of scholars  --  that is, when they study primary resources, draw their own conclusions from sometimes ambiguous or conflicting evidence, and make arguments that organize a host of details into a unified statement” (“Focus on Close Reading, Primary Documents Aligns Well with New Standards,” News of the National Humanities Center, Fall/Winter 2012, page 5).  Unlike the students Schramm has in mind, independent students are not bound to formalist assumptions in their quest for knowledge.  They penetrate form to access content and to discover how content has been socially constructed.  They are not stymied if they lack the jargon of literary and cultural criticism, if they can’t twist their mouths around tortured propositions.  Their ordinary, everyday language is sufficient.

Key documents for understanding what is happening in the revolt against academic tyranny are Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978) and Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). Americans who engage in democratic criticism are experimenting with what Rosenblatt called “efferent reading” (focus on what one carries away from one’s reading) and “aesthetic reading” (focus on what one experiences in the process of reading).  Redesigning an insight Said had about what traditional criticism must think itself to be, participants in the Django Unchained syndrome really do make critical thinking “life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom” (The World, the Text….29) Behold, however, an irony of irony. Democratic criticism in the interests of freedom of thought must deal with contradictions that are undeniably coercive.  That is the price of the ticket for passage to brutal honesty.

A film is only a film.  Our momentary fateful attraction to a film’s disturbing properties can be an empowering example of the work we must undertake in the face of overwhelming human problems ---global warming as Nature’s revenge and our ecological irresponsibility; genocide and systemic oppression; diabolical trends in capitalism, criminalization and mass incarceration; ethical issues embodied in technological and scientific progress; violence, terrorism, and the gap between poverty and wealth.  We have to triage our commitments.  Art is necessary and so too is minimizing academic and other forms of tyranny. The sooner we digest what Barbara Christian said eloquently in “The Race for Theory” and what David Walker appealed to the citizens of the world to do, we increase the probability of winning the absurd game of human survival with brutal honesty.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 13, 2013

"Django Unchained"

AMERICA’S SOUL UNCHAINED

 

“Django Unchained” is the most patriotic American film of 2012, because Quentin Tarantino plunged into the system of Dante’s Inferno and brought up the bloody, violent and unchained soul of the myth of the United States of America.  He succeeds in making viewers frustrated, angry, and anxious to debate the merits of reducing Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to a soap opera and ending a fragmented black love story with Broomhilda and Django riding off into the bliss of fugitive darkness.

 We have been trying, without much success, to have a conversation about what it means to be an American since the nineteenth-century publication of Alex de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  Although any revolution of consciousness occasioned by “Django Unchained” will not be televised, the grounds for a crucial conversation have been “immortalized” as a richly satiric cartoon, a cinematic allegory that divides spectators into pro-Django, anti-Django, and disingenuous neutral camps.  Unfortunately, the crucial conversation will evaporate as soon as the next film of outrage lights the screen.  Nevertheless, Tarantino’s genius deserves all the kudos and barbs, detractions and commendations we shall give it from here to infinity.  Indeed, the National Rifle Association should give Tarantino a special award for the patriotic fervor of “Django Unchained” in reaffirming the Constitutional entitlement of Americans to bear arms and make havoc among themselves and people on an endangered planet.  An Oscar will not suffice.

If there is credibility in Irving Howe’s famous Hebraic judgment that “[t]he day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever”   [“Black Boys and Native Sons.” Dissent, 10 (Autumn 1963): 353-368], there is equal credibility in the claim that the day “Django Unchained” was first screened, American cinema culture was altered.  While pure violence is a staple ingredient in our forms of mass entertainment, few films depict how Americans are permanently enslaved by love of violence. Like Richard Wright’s novel, Quentin Tarantino’s film broadcasts a message that the prudent among us will not ignore, a message that puts the agony of interpretation in a harsh, politically incorrect spotlight.

Our interpretation of “Django Unchained” is largely determined by the angles, prejudices, and ideological bags we bring to the acts of viewing and talking.  If the film is approached as an effort by a white director (although Tarantino is not exactly a “white” surname) to tell a black story, the viewing is shaped by assumed or specified expectations about how a black story of enslavement ought to be written and reconstructed or translated into film.  If it is assumed that “Django Unchained” attempts to be a multiethnic representation of American history circa 1858-1859, our attention is drawn to the legitimacy of violence in the shaping of the United States from 1619 to 1776 to the present; the presence of the black story is a kind of inner light that illuminates the gross and vulgar surface of American democracy’s saga.  In this instance, the film fails to challenge the exhausted black/white binary conventions of America sufficiently, but it does begin to expose a fantasy of oppositional progress.  It is neither good nor accurate history, nor was it meant to be.  It is mainly an exposure of American entertainment as national pathology. That fantasy undermines or erases fact works against sympathetic reception of the film, but it does not prevent our understanding why violation of the human body and the worship of violence is an innate element in our historical being.  Ultimately, “Django Unchained” is an anatomy of the imperfections of whiteness, the hypocrisy of Euro-American founding dreams, and America’s violent soul.

Ishmael Reed, one of our most astute cultural critics, notes in his review “Black Audiences, White Stars and ‘Django Unchained’ [“Speakeasy Blog,” The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2012] Black Audiences, White Stars and 'Django Unchained' - Speakeasy - WSJ  that the film is a representation of slavery for mainstream audiences.  Reed concludes Tarantino is not a responsible white historian and “the business people who put this abomination together don’t care what I think or about the opinions of the audience members who gave Tarantino a hard time during that recent q. and a.”  The q. and a. to which Reed refers is briefly described in Hillary Crosley’s “ ‘Django Unchained’: A Postracial Epic?,” The Root, 25 December 2012. http://www.theroot.com/views/django-unchained-postracial-epic 

Reed’s conclusion directs attention to the agony of interpretation and the cultural politics that informed the making of Tarantino’s film.  In suggesting that neither Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder nor Margaret Walker’s Jubilee would be a candidate for a film, Reed is silently telling us why his novels Flight to Canada and Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down would never fit into a Hollywood scheme of representation. It may be impossible to prove that Reed’s novels or Slaves ( 1969 )by John Oliver Killens  inspired Tarantino in the way Sergio Corbucci’s “Django” (1966) and “Mandingo” apparently did, but it is fascinating to speculate that Reed’s defamiliarizing of historical time and space played some role in Tarantino’s defamiliarizing of America’s core values.  Reed’s narrative strategies are neatly matched by Tarantino’s technical strategy of shooting the movie in anamorphic format on 35 mm film. Whether we like or dislike Tarantino, we do have to deal with his art. And we have to deal also with the stellar performances of Jaime Foxx, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Waltz;  Laura Cayouette’s face will be etched in memory as the perfect image of what a Southern belle looked like in 1859 and Samuel Jackson’s palpable discomfort in the role of Stephen, the HNIC, warrants several essays.  Were the acting in the film not so good, the agony of interpretation would be less intense.  It is downright unsettling that even the minor actors do not disappoint us as cartoon figures. It is deeply troubling that what George Kent named “ceremonies of poise in a non-rational universe” can be had at a discount.

Much has been made of the fact that Tarantino retrofits the Italian spaghetti Western into an American noodle narrative of the South. Thus, he achieves, if we must use a culinary metaphor,  a casserole of cinematic genres, a highly valued artistic abomination .In the world of filmmaking, an abomination may not be a failure, particularly if the aesthetic of merde and the mimesis of violence is at issue.  The visual allusions in “Django Unchained” lead us to suspect that Tarantino is much influenced by the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Bunuel, and Ingmar Bergman.  It is obvious that he is indebted to the accidental or intended comic excesses of blaxploitation film and to the cinema of cruelty exploited in Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade.” As future cultural studies of “Django Unchained” will demonstrate, Tarantino generously tips his hat to his ethnic and  cinematic ancestry by transposing elements of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo” (1975) into his film.  Pasolini, it must be noted, has the dubious honor of having produced the most reprehensible abomination in the history of film.  

Perhaps  Tarantino’s dwelling in the bowels of exaggeration by way of “Django Unchained”  is  just what Americans needed most to see. They need to look at themselves, at  who they were as they publicly “mourned” for the children and adults murdered in Sandy Hook. They were not mourning for hate crimes, self-hatred, or the condition identified by Carolyn Fowler as “racially motivated random violence.” They needed to see they were not mourning for the 506 victims of homicides in Chicago during 2012 or for the thousands of flesh and blood victims of rampant violence and abuse in America’s cities and suburbs. Americans simply do not grieve for the Zeitgeist that is seducing our nation to consider  social implosion as an option.  “Django Unchained” was perfectly timed to provide 165 minutes of violent entertainment and to cast light on the nature of America’s soul unchained.  That soul, which we all possess, is incapable of authentic grief. It has “normalized” violence.  Violence is salvation.  Our souls have  mastered the art of indifference, and we are post-humanly happy to have a tragic catharsis on the plantation of life and to walk hand in hand with blind fatalities and unqualified love for our country. Tarantino is alarmingly intimate with the habits of the American soul, and he serves us slice after slice of synthetic white cake.    

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 5, 2013                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

Poem by Jeremiah Ramcat

Slave Mother to Her Bi-racial Daughter



Child, make yourself useful.
Count the number of stitches in Jane Crow's bloomers.
I need to know
how many needles to stick in the doll.





Jeremiah Ramcat, January 2, 2013

Henry Van Dyke

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

Rereading Henry Van Dyke (3 October 1928--22 December 2011): The Pleasure of the Text

 

Often you can derive pleasure from rereading a novel by an author whose contribution to African American literary tradition is not a hot critical topic.  For example,   Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965) provokes laughter, the robust folk laughter of recognizing how rich and educational African American idioms can be.  On the surface, Van Dyke’s novel is a relatively slight Bildungsroman, the narrative of a young man’s learning that “when a peacock’s days are over, they’re over.” But the matter under the surface demands a reckoning.

Van Dkye is a fine storyteller.  Through the voice of Oliver Eugene, a naïve but reliable narrator, you hear about the melodramatic antics of Mrs. Harriet Giles, the Negro housekeeper, who is the narrator’s Aunt Harry and Mrs. Etta Klein, a wealthy Jewish widow who is overly fond of rum and who is as self-deceptive as the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.  Forty-seven years ago when the novel was published, you might not have noticed the gendered imbalance of the name “Aunt Harry.”  In 2012, you notice the name is metonymic, a shorthand for all the structural imbalances in the tragicomedy of Van Dyke’s first novel.  Etta Klein and Aunt Harry are one of the more remarkable odd couples in twentieth-century American literature, and the moral lessons implicit in their dealings and dalliance with the con-artist Maurice LeFleur are precious.  Precious is a sufficient description of the novel’s sexual identity.   Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes promotes a humor unto life rather than a sickness unto death.

As a novelist writing in the homophobic spaces provided by the integrationist discourses of the early 1960s, Van Dyke digested the practicality of Langston Hughes’ remark that if a Negro writer stepped outside of himself, he would see “how human, yet how beautiful and black [he is].  How very black –even when you’re integrated.”

The narrator deconstructs the hyper-pretense of American English by stepping outside just enough to expose the prohibitions and dispensations in the psychology of Black American English.  Van Dyke was a master chef in using racial flavors.  He was signifying twelve years before Geneva Smitherman dealt seriously with the linguistic dimensions of black modes of speech and twenty-three years before Gates discovered the signifying monkey was a literary critic. Only Zora Neale Hurston could beat Van Dyke to the punch.  His technical mastery of storytelling and language is matched only by the mastery of Al Young, Eudora Welty and Toni Cade Bambara.

Bright laughter is dominant during and after rereading Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, and Van Dyke’s artistry of complex simplicity is a reason to praise the power of blackness.  He took revenge on the post-racial prior to the nativity of the post-racial.  That achievement is cause for deep and satisfying laughter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 22, 2012

vvvvv

THE DEATH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE


Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. John 2.18



Most scholars, writers, and readers might agree that African American literature consists of orature (oral literary creations) and writings by people of African descent in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Once we move beyond so simple a definition, we forced to navigate a swamp of competing claims.

The definition of what was called Negro literature from the colonial period up to the 1960s was challenged by two of LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka's) essays ---"Myth of a Negro Literature" and "Black Writing" --in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966). Following the spirit of Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), Baraka argued successfully that Negro literature was created more for the inspection of white people than as a body of work that directly addressed the needs of African Americans; he called for black writing or black (African American) literature that would speak directly to black people. Thus, a new definition of African American literature came into being in the 1960s.

That definition prevailed until it was challenged by Trey Ellis' "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo 12.1 (1989): 233-243. By rejecting the ideological import of a Black Arts Movement definition of the literature, Ellis modified the definition to incorporate the interests of younger, often multiracial, writers who felt they could be more "mainstream" (have more aesthetic options) and not enslaved by responsibilities to the tradition associated with a narrative of struggle as promoted by Baraka. Without attachment to the ideological constraints of Baraka's notion of black writing, these artists could perfume themselves with exotic theories and create in brothels of free will.

 Ellis' essay forced a rethinking of what a definition of African American literature actually described. While Ellis's essay received some attention and then vanished, as it were, into an outburst of writing attached more to the wishes of individual writers than to any imagined needs of a "black community," the rupture of Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) has been more successful in creating uncertainty, confusion, and urgency regarding the definition of African American literature. The whiteness of blackness falls now like ancient acid rain, and the twin myths of a black community and a white community are moribund. The wasteland is decorated with the coffins of the colorblind.

Without giving any special attention to Ellis, the definition of the literature was adjusted by the essays in Redefining American Literary History (New York: MLA, 1990), particularly by Paul Lauter's essay "The Literature of America: A Comparative Discipline" and by the essays in the volume edited by Hortense J. Spillers, Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (Routledge, 1991). There was a region-specific modification of definition in the anthology Black Southern Voices (New York: Meridian, 1992), which I co-edited with John Oliver Killens and in Trudier Harris' earlier essay "Black Writer in a Changed Landscape, Since 1950" in The History of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985). Houston A. Baker, Jr. provided a race-wise matrix in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. went on safari in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). All this adjusting of definition was occurring during the period of canon/cultural wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I think the publication of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997) and Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998) made possible a temporary consensus about the definition of African American literature. Those anthologies emerged, however, from competing ideological vantage points. Thus, it is crucial to notice the current, shifting grounds of definition in Kenneth Warren's book. The Cambridge History of African American Literature basically follows what I would call the "consensual definition,” but Warren's book opens the gates for a flood of redefining and rethinking efforts. The consensual definition is fully operational mainly among African American scholars and non-black scholars who embrace its premises. With a few exceptions, American scholars (the majority of them are white) who deal with American literature still believe African American literature is not yet integrated into their definition of American literature.

  What Was African American Literature? was the topic for a roundtable at the 2012 MLA Convention, and the roundtable proceedings are available in "Assessing What Was African American Literature?; or, The State of the Field in the New Millennium," African American Review 44.4 (2011): 567-591. The commentaries from the roundtable give us a reasonable notion of what the contemporary views are.

  These views, however, are rooted in the thinking promoted by Charles Johnson’s “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77.3 (2008): 32-42, Gerald L. Early’s “The End of Race as We Know It,” The Chronicle Review (October 10, 2008) http://chronicle.com/wwwkly/v55/i07/07b01.htm ,Reginald Dwayne Betts’ “Why I’m No Longer a Black Poet,” Phillis Remastered, February 6, 2012 http://www.phillisremastered.wordpress.com, Joyce Ann Joyce’s “A Tinker’s Damn: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and The Signifying Monkey Twenty Years Later,” Callaloo 31.2 (2008): 370-380, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010) and the essays in Ishmael Reed’s Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2010) and Going Too Far (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012).

The death of African American literature will occur simultaneously with the death of American literature. It is prudent to write the obituary for both bodies while obituaries can still be written. Among the crucial documents for writing the subsequent eulogy are

Bolden, Tony, ed. The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Ernest, John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Ervin, Hazel Arnett, ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.

Jackson, Lawrence P. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Mullen, Harryette. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Napier, Winston, ed. African American Literary Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Young, Kevin. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012.

When the death of African American literature rises like the moon in Arab summer, the life of African American literature will be reborn in African winter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      December 1, 2012