Wesley Brown Revisited

Wesley Brown Revisited

 

Like the walking bodies in our country that are in a slow hurry to advertise the fine art of tattooing,  we best be asking hard questions about keeping Black real compared to what. Or can we defamiliarize an answer to Roberta Flack’s explicit question by saying Pink passing for White ain’t real?

In a pure fantasy that lacks referentiality, Wesley Brown’s second novel Darktown Strutters (New York: Crane Hill Press, 1994) is the inspiration for Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled ( 2000).  Fantasy precludes proof. But we can have a noisy shock of recognition by juxtaposing the mumbling surrounding the film with the silence that engulfs the novel.  Lee addressed the history of blacking up from the outside, from the vantage of an imminent present, and his satire sticks like water on Teflon.  Brown, on the other hand, dealt with the racecraft of minstrelsy in America from the inside, from the interiors of its languages by allowing his characters Jim Crow and Jim Crow Two to be the partial narrators of the story. His fiction informs a consciousness of American class and caste formation; Lee’s film trivializes that consciousness and cashes in on entertainment values.

We should note also that Wesley Brown has credentials in terms of cultural nationalism that Lee must envy.  In 1965, Brown worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; he became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968, a year marked by the publication of the landmark anthology Black Fire and a year that the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History so richly documented ( read  In Black America: 1968: The Year of Awakening ). Brown became a political prisoner in 1972 for refusing to be inducted in the military and spent eighteen months of his three-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. We have a conflicted romance with incarceration in America, but Brown’s excellence as a fiction writer and dramatist and editor is to be measured both because of his political sacrifices and despite them.  His mastery of craft is not innately wed to his ideology.  Let us be clear about that. The separation of realms is no excuse, however, for failing to honor those who teach us that art and ethos are united.

It helps greatly to suggest that Darktown Strutters is to African American fiction what Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) is to Euro-American critical theory. The books do the work of enlightenment.  Eric Lott tells us much that we do need to know about the centrality of race in the whole history of American entertainment, although he carefully avoids outing who now controls the entertainment industry in America.  Wesley Brown is exempt from having to deal with that vexed and dangerous subject in his novel, because his objective was to liberate the languages of minstrelsy to speak for themselves.  His superior artistry is implicated with a difference that Gayl Jones noted between Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) -----“Gaines has carried us beyond Hurston’s illusion of Janie’s voice to the full value and reality of Miss Jane’s tall-telling” (169).

We have too long denied ourselves the pleasure of Wesley Brown’s company and denied that he is one of our national treasures, and we have squandered much too much of our literary energy in consuming what the Idols of the Marketplace have hoodwinked us into believing is Black.  Do we have to remind ourselves that American Kente cloth is “made in China”? One purchases the real thing in Ghana.  Wesley Brown’s novels Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, and Push Comes to Shove may have been tossed under the bus by marketplace politics in twentieth-century African American literature, but we do know they survived the accident and are well. If it is probable that we can have a renaissance of intelligence about what is Black and real, we will find ourselves teaching young African Americans how to write well by reading Wesley Brown as we sing to them a memorable line from Darktown Strutters: “Our people pass the word more regular than we pass water”(47).

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                            PHBW BLOG

February 12, 2013

50 Years Ago in February

Fifty Years Ago in February

 

Fifty years ago, F. W. Dupee reviewed The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and John Thompson reviewed Sissie by John A. Williams in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1, 1963. With Richard Wright being dead and Ralph Ellison playing possum, Baldwin and Williams were the leading black male writers of 1963, competing with Martin Luther King, Jr. for the ears of American Negroes.  John Oliver Killens was doing what he did best; he was writing take-no-prisoners prose and fiction and waiting for retarded Americans to catch up with him. A young person named LeRoi Jones was swimming with genuine conviction toward fame.

One did hear of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, and Lorraine Hansberry in 1963, but black women writers had to wait a full decade until the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University, conceived by Margaret Walker, accorded them overdue attention and secular apotheosis.

 Dupee, a founding editor of The Partisan Review, was a white male in extremis, and he struggled like a Hebrew slave to give an Egyptian a fair reading. Thompson was an English sociologist, and his three point tendentious statement on Williams’s novel  was about as good as one could expect from a white male British sociologist who might have better spent his ink on a rigorous study of how swiftly the British Empire was dissolving in 1963.

Fifty years later, one finds it most bracing to read the comments of Dupee and Thompson and to have confirmed  one’s suspicion that “white”  white male writers are perpetually blessed by God to be wrongheaded.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            February 10, 2013

 

 

 

·        

James Baldwin and the “Man”

February 1, 1963

F.W. Dupee

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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
The Dial Press, $3.50

As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. Baldwin impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration. His role is that of the man whose complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. For he appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism; he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro question in the light of the Human Condition. So he wears his color as Hester Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. And like her he converts this thing, in itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of spirit. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation. He will be different and in his own way be better.

His major essays—for example, those collected in Notes of a Native Son—show the extent to which he is able to be different and in his own way better. Most of them were written, as other such pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. And their subjects—a book, a person, a locale, an encounter—are the inevitable subjects of magazine essays. But Baldwin’s way with them is far from inevitable. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, for him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a country’s culture. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. Of course the transfiguring process in Baldwin’s essays owes something to the fact that the point of view is a Negro’s, an outsider’s, just as the satire of American manners in Lolita and Morte d’Urban depends on their being written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic priest. But Baldwin’s point of view in his essays is not merely that of the generic Negro. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:

Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams. This former Harlem boy has undergone his own incredible metamorphosis.

His latest book, The Fire Next Time, differs in important ways from his earlier work in the essay. Its subjects are less concrete, less clearly defined; to a considerable extent he has exchanged prophecy for criticism, exhortation for analysis, and the results for his mind and style are in part disturbing. The Fire Next Time gets its title from a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/No more water the fire next time.” But this small book with the incendiary title consists of two independent essays, both in the form of letters. One is a brief affair entitled “My Dungeon Shook” and addressed to “My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” The ominous promise of this title is fulfilled in the text. Between the hundred-year-old anniversary and the fifteen-year-old nephew the disparity is too great even for a writer of Baldwin’s rhetorical powers. The essay reads like some specimen of “public speech” as practiced by MacLeish or Norman Corwin. It is not good Baldwin.

The other, much longer, much more significant essay appeared first in a pre-Christmas number of The New Yorker, where it made, understandably, a sensation. It is called “Down At the Cross; Letter From a Region of My Mind.” The subtitle should be noted. Evidently the essay is to be taken as only a partial or provisional declaration on Baldwin’s part, a single piece of his mind. Much of it, however, requires no such appeal for caution on the reader’s part. Much of it is unexceptionably first-rate. For example, the reminiscences of the writer’s boyhood, which form the lengthy introduction. Other of Baldwin’s writings have made us familiar with certain aspects of his Harlem past. Here he concentrates on quite different things: the boy’s increasing awareness of the abysmally narrow world of choice he inhabits as a Negro, his attempt to escape a criminal existence by undergoing a religious conversion and becoming at fifteen a revivalist preacher, his discovery that he must learn to “inspire fear” if he hopes to survive the fear inspired in him by “the man”—the white man.

In these pages we come close to understanding why he eventually assumed his rather specialized literary role. It seems to have grown naturally out of his experience of New York City. As distinct from a rural or small-town Negro boy, who is early and firmly taught his place, young Baldwin knew the treacherous fluidity and anonymity of the metropolis, where hidden taboos and unpredictable animosities lay in wait for him and a trip to the 42nd Street Library could be a grim adventure. All this part of the book is perfect; and when Baldwin finally gets to what is his ostensible subject, the Black Muslims or Nation of Islam movement, he is very good too. As good, that is, as possible considering that his relations with the movement seem to have been slight. He once shared a television program with Malcolm X, “the movement’s second-in-command,” and he paid a brief and inconclusive visit to the first-in-command, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his entourage at the party’s headquarters in Chicago. (Muhammad ranks as a prophet; to him the Black Muslim doctrines were “revealed by Allah Himself.”) Baldwin reports the Chicago encounter in charming detail and with what looks like complete honesty. On his leaving the party’s rather grand quarters, the leader insisted on providing him with a car and driver to protect him “from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he is going.” Baldwin accepted, he tells us, adding wryly: “I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town.”

He offers some data on the Black Muslim movement, its aims and finances. But he did a minimum of homework here. Had he done more he might at least have provided a solid base for the speculative fireworks the book abounds in. To cope thoroughly with the fireworks in short space, or perhaps any space, seems impossible. Ideas shoot from the book’s pages as the sparks fly upward, in bewildering quantity and at random. I don’t mean that it is all dazzle. On the cruel paradoxes of the Negro’s life, the failures of Christianity, the relations of Negro and Jew, Baldwin is often superb. But a lot of damage is done to his argument by his indiscriminate raids on Freud, Lawrence, Sartre, Genet, and other psychologists, metaphysicians and melodramatists. Still more damage is done by his refusal to draw on anyone so humble as Martin Luther King and his fellow-practitioners of non-violent struggle.

For example: “White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” But suppose one or two white Americans are not intimidated. Suppose someone coolly asks what it means to “believe in death.” Again: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Since you have no other, yes; and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance. Again: “A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white.” You exaggerate the white man’s consciousness of the Negro. Again: “The real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.” Of course they don’t, especially their lives. Moreover, this imputing of “real reasons” for the behavior of entire populations is self-defeating, to put it mildly. One last quotation, this time a regular apocalypse:

In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

Since whole cultures have never been known to “discard nearly all their assumptions” and yet remain intact, this amounts to saying that any essential improvement in Negro-white relations, and thus in the quality of American life, is unlikely.

So much for the fireworks. What damage, as I called it, do they do to the writer and his cause—which is also the concern of plenty of others? When Baldwin replaces criticism with prophecy, he manifestly weakens his grasp of his role, his style, and his great theme itself. And to what end? Who is likely to be moved by such arguments, unless it is the more literate Black Muslims, whose program Baldwin specifically rejects as both vindictive and unworkable. And with the situation as it is in Mississippi and elsewhere—dangerous, that is, to the Negro struggle and the whole social order—is not a writer of Baldwin’s standing obliged to submit his assertions to some kind of pragmatic test, some process whereby their truth or untruth will be gauged according to their social utility? He writes: “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.” I should think that the anti-Negro extremists were even better placed than the Negroes to precipitate chaos, or at least to cause a lot of trouble; and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter. Assuming that a book can do anything to either.

 

New Novels

February 1, 1963

John Thompson

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Eternal Fire
by Calder Willingham
Vanguard, $6.95

Occasion for Loving
by Nadine Gordimer
Viking, $5.00

Sissie
by John A. Williams
Farrar, Straus, $4.50

Calder Willingham has always been a spellbinder, and in his sixth novel, Eternal Fire, he is absolutely shameless about it. He has always been a knowing sort of fellow, too. He knows how thing work, how people talk, he knows the insides and outsides and the undersides. You won’t catch him up anywhere.

But, if there is one thing he knows best of all, it is his reader. Oh, the shameless tricks he plays on that reader’s nerves! Such cliffs, believe me, have not for years been hung from. All the way between the first page and, literally, the last page of this long novel the story races on cheerfully, dreadfully, from foreboding to disaster to foreboding. And because of this knowing way about things that Calder Willingham has, the reader does not have to forgive, as we usually have to for the sake of excitement and surprise, quantities of false morality and real ignorance. The novel is melodrama, but we are not required to transform ourselves either into schoolgirls or sadists to enjoy it. The novel is something of a fairy tale, too, but once we have accepted that premise, we find, I believe, that to our most instructed consciousness the surprises are truly surprising, the depravities of the villain truly outrageous, the hearts of the innocent as we feel their beats here are as the hearts of little birds caught in rough hands.

In addition to being a fairy tale, Eternal Fire is all the Southern novels there are, done up in one master recipe—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Light in August, and yes, even a little lick of that lollipop, To Kill a Mockingbird. The setting is that familiar Southern small town, the time, the nostalgic days of the thirties,. The heroine is the town Cinderella, Laurie Mae Lytle: young, poor, beautiful, sweet. The Prince is Randolph Sudderland Shepherdson III, young, rich, handsome, sweet. these two are about to marry, imagining that their only problems are a little opposition from the Prince’s guardian, and the stirrings of passion that trouble their old-fashioned innocence. But the wicked Judge is bringing into action against them all the forces of evil, in the person of Harry Diadem. This sublimely wicked young man, who was brought up in that mean Tennessee orphanage with Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, has the body of a Greek statue, the eyebrows of Mephistopeles, and the abilities as a seducer that would have made Don Juan, had he heard of them, ashamed to send off a valentine after that. To defend Cinderella and the Prince there are only their own two hearts and Cinderella’s pet dwarf, feeble-minded but in a pinch as strong as King Kong. Theft, blackmail, incest, suicide, and murder ensue, complete with a classic double-double-crossing trial scene.

It is all very grand, struggle upon struggle; good and evil become powerfully entangled with one another. Shameless as Calder Willingham may be, though, I do not like to think that he has not somewhere drawn the line. I believe he calls it quits just on the safe side of allegory. He seems much too good-humored and sensible to go over that edge. Furthermore, although the plot turns on questions of color, and there are Negroes and racists here embroiled, the theme of black man and white man is not of much real moment in Eternal Fire. One could make a moral from it if he wished, a version of the current much-moralized involvement of the black man, sex, and the white man’s failed instinct. But, again, basically Calder Willingham is too good-humored to do more than let this be there in the book as one more of the things he knows so well and brings so gleefully to life in his story.

The black man in the white man’s society is of very much moment in Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving. This, her sixth book of fiction, takes place like most of her work in her country of South Africa. The story concerns two couples of the Johannesburg intellectual class and a black South African artist. Jessie and Tom Stilwell supplement his university pay by boarding in their big old house the young newly-married Boaz Davis and his Ann. Boaz has lost interest in composing and is trying to collect the ancient tribal music of Africa before it disappears. Ann is an adventurous young lady who has to try everything once. After the fashion of their kind in Johannesburg, these four are much in the company of Africans.

The African in the story is Gideon Shibalo. He has been awarded a fellowship to study painting in Rome, his government has denied him a passport, he is in a slump over it. Ann tries a love affair with him. They all accept this, even the husband, on high sexual and racial principles. The affair gets serious and the lovers plan to run off together. That is the story.

In the telling, the story is all quiet intelligence and art. It is seen chiefly through the eyes of Jessie Stilwell, a good-willed, middle-class intelligent woman. She lives the familiar life of the more-or-less successful and more-or-less worthily occupied middle class, the life which seems somehow to have gone hollow the world over today. Jessie’s life is hollow until she gets some curious fulfillment from her relation to the love of Ann and Gideon.

The story itself moves rather dully until the black man appears, although everything is well told and beautifully understood. Author and narrator are absolutely full of observations and reflective generalizations, good ones, too. (Some little thing one day reassures Jessie when she has been upset: “It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down rather drunk, among the press at a party.”) Nadine Gordimer is very intelligent. These wise statements connect her characters—and they aren’t really very vivid, these people—with humanity. But they also convey a certain weariness as of foregone actions and feelings.

Without the drama of Johannesburg white-and-black behind it, this could be only another chronicle of the suburbs. As the story itself needs Gideon, the people in the story need him. The Stilwells and Davises, emancipated and intelligent, are dead on their feet. Family love is not enough. Jessie Stilwell, who knows too much about sexual love to believe in it very much—as do all the people in this story—yet gets caught up in it. And for its sake the whole show must go on, applecart and all. The whole show doesn’t go, of course, and the system destroys the love of Ann and Gideon.

Is this the final worst thing about it, worse than the black children starving so the white masters may dine well? Yet did not the system create this occasion for loving, did it not, this system, at the same time make Mrs. Stilwell’s heart empty? We know that for the most intense kinds of love, the occasion must be something like that which Johannesburg affords. Where love is most utterly forbidden it is most, at every moment, a possibility. In its quiet and thoughtful way, Occasion for Loving moves among the troubling depths of these questions. If it has a conclusion, it is the author’s own statement that one day her heroine will be out blowing up power stations. No more questions, then, when the blood bath comes.

John A. William’s Sissie is a good novel about an American Negro family. This is a tendentious statement in several ways. First, I think one of the reasons the novel is good is that it is about Negroes: in novels, subject matter counts. We read novels partly to confirm or to extend our own experience. And all of us need desperately to extend our knowledge of the life of American Negroes. Naturally, I do not exclude Negroes when I say “us.”

Second, I assume that this knowledge can be extended by a novel like Sissie. There are those who would contend that competent documents in the conventional forms of modern fiction cannot serve to discover or to convey this experience. They say this experience is unique and demands unique forms, developed like jazz, from Negro culture itself. Perhaps these forms may indeed be developed. But I would hope that the experience, though extreme, is human and can be made available to other human beings in the form that has, for modern Western society, worked best.

The experience recorded in Sissie is archetypal, that of the Negro family in the North cruelly hurt by American society. This society condemns most Negroes to the worst consequences of its reckless refusal to share among its members the fantastic riches they produce. For many of them this means, simply, death. Children die of this deprivation. The survivors are scarred, by the brutal struggle to live, by the guilt of survival, by the lunatic sadism of the American racial system. Sissie shows this directly and clearly. It is not sentimental and it is not apocalyptic. It records the facts with honesty, modesty, and craft. This novel will remain as one of the permanent records of the deadly shame of the America we live in. No solution. The power stations here, as in the Union of South Africa, remain intact.

 

 

 

Criminality and Culture

Incriminating Evidence and Interpretation

Negative and positive responses to “Django Unchained” and other commodities illuminate the complexity of popular disagreement in the United States.  The film is so multi-faceted, so open to an enormous range of readings and interpretations, that we must focus on small portions of Tarantino’s collage.  Representation of the institution of slavery, and the anger-making options of enslavement, serves as a distracting background for looking at the cultural triplets named Injustice, Violence, and Justice.  The family portrait of the triplets is more a painting than a photograph in the context of the film.  No amount of trompe-l’oeil succeeds in hiding how complicit the triplets are with bounty hunting, the primal center of “Django Unchained and other films that invite us to be spectators of law and disorder.  Common sense informs us that we are looking at incriminating evidence that pertains to the perverse, historical criminality of the American criminal justice system.  The visual and literary surface of the film is dense with familiar and obscure allusions.  What is fully available for popular discussion is a sop, a cheap sop.  It retards access to and robust public discussion of the dynamics of law and bounty hunting that so strongly impact the quality of our everyday lives.  As acts of interpretation, our responses shade off into hunting for violated boundaries or into quests to identify how the film insults our sensing of history.  Our interpretive responses wrestle less than they should with the ideology and economy of bounty hunting.  That fact, to borrow language from Tony Bolden, is “one of the signatures of our time.”

Rebecca B. Fisher’s “The History of American Bounty Hunting as a Study in Stunted Legal Growth” (N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change 33.199: 199-233) helps us to narrow and sharpen our interpretations.  Without drowning us in eight centuries of discussion about bounty hunting, Fisher directs attention to the American core: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which reinforced Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution regarding the return of runaway slaves, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, an item of great importance in studies of slave narratives and abolitionist literature and those narratives that function in our nation under the color of history.  Fisher’s conclusion is sobering and troubling, for she convincingly asserts that

The history of American bounty hunting, a profession virtually unregulated for hundreds of years, is certainly relevant to understand how increased privatization in the criminal justice system will impact the least empowered in our society (233).

Fisher’s critique of how any of us might become targets of mistaken identity for bounty hunters is frightening enough, but what she exposes about the legal system’s violation of its own ethics is frankly chilling! Keepers of power do not encourage us to connect acts of literary and cultural interpretation with that kind of ice. Wake up. Our Constitution entitles us to hunt down those who wish to neuter us with law and entertainment.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 4, 2013

Gaiter' s Study Questions for his novel

"

I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang"

- by Leonce Gaiter

Study Questions

1. Through his parents, who suffered forced relocation and slavery, Rufus Buck had felt the

sting of violent injustices perpetrated on his people. He was personally witnessing another—

the usurpation for promised Indian lands. How much of his crusade was based on a reaction

to injustice?

2. How would you describe Judge Parker’s attitude toward the Indians of Indian Territory?

3. What are the limits to fighting injustice against an infinitely more powerful force?

4. What are Judge Parker’s goals in his manipulation of Theodosia’s role in the Buck gang’s

trial, and why is it important to him to achieve those goals?

5. What would have prompted Rufus Buck to consider rape a legitimate weapon of war?

6. Why does Parker react so vehemently to the Darwinian text? How does he associate the texts

with his life as de facto ruler of Indian Territory?

7. Name historical instances in which tactics we would today label as “terrorist” have and have

not succeeded in achieving the aims of those who employ them.

8. Discuss the meaning of the following quote:

“Parker believed in retribution; he did not

believe in unpunished lies or unrequited obfuscations. He believed that deception and

injustice literally bred—that they spawned and reproduced themselves to even worse effect.

And in egregious cases, God in his wisdom made their bitter fruits manifest in flesh, and

sinners suffered at the hands of their own misdeeds. When he heard of Buck’s first warning,

and when he suffered the torturous details of the rape of Rosetta Hasson, he knew that Buck

was such a plague, more conjured than born.”

9. Do you see any similarities between the moral universe of Judge Parker, Rufus Buck and

Cherokee Bill and ours?

10. If you had been alive and Native American in 1895 and wanted the United States to honor its

commitment that the Indian Territory would be just that--Indian--what would you have done?

11. Name the fiction you've read or films you've seen that discuss Africa-Americans fighting

back against slavery and violent injustice with the same zeal and ruthlessness with which, for

instance, white Southerners fought "northern aggression."

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