An
Interview with Jerry W.Ward, Jr.
Wang Zuyou：Prof
Jerry Ward, I am very glad that you grant me
such a rare opportunity to
interview you. We know that you and Richard Wright’s
daughter, Julia Wright, were among the founders of the Richard Wright Circle in
1990, an organization dedicated to the study of Wright’s life and work. Among
your many writings on the subject some of the most significant are: the
introduction to the Harper Perennial edition of Black Boy; Black Boy
(American Hunger) Freedom to Remember, a work you coauthored with Maryemma Graham; Richard Wright and the
Common Reader, written for Black Magnolia; and
an entry for the Mississippi Encyclopedia. Will you please illustrate your main thought on Richard Wright
study?
Jerry
Ward: Let me begin with a debatable claim. Among twentieth-century American writers,
Richard Wright is the one who disturbs readers in a unique way. He forces
readers to think. When we read his
published works, we find ourselves thinking about the long history of intrusion,
resistance, and conquest that pertains to the Americas, to what Europeans
called “The New World.” It is not the
case that other American writers, especially historians, have not addressed
those issues. Wright, however, deals
with the issues in his fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays by asking hard
questions, by challenging us with moral imperatives. James Baldwin, Lillian
Smith, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, W. E. B. DuBois, Toni Cade Bambara,
June Jordan, and Walt Whitman are other writers who entangle us with moral
imperatives, but they seem to be less forceful than Wright in exposing the
wounds of history that will not heal. I
may be the only person in my country who holds this opinion. Wright fully understood the nature and
consequences of the endless suffering human beings must endure. He understood mankind’s hunger. As Wright put
it, he was not concerned with making people happy, with entertaining them. He
was concerned with forcing people to look directly at whatever it is we believe
“Truth” to be. His works are
unsettling. Wright understood that the
primitive instinct of man and woman to be brutal in their interactions with
other men and women is one of the major aspects of human existence on this
planet. He knew what material and
spiritual poverty is and how such poverty is related to dehumanization, to
ethnic or racial hatred, to the psychological grip of religious beliefs and
practices, to capitalism and class warfare.
His perspectives were not always right, but he was brave enough to have
perspectives and to share them with the world.
He paid for his pursuit of truth, what Michel Fabre called his
unfinished quest, with his life. We
study Richard Wright in order to become more honest, to become brave and
critical thinkers.
Wang Zuyou：Richard Wright
is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the
most prolific. Best known as the author of Native
Son, he wrote 7
novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250
newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a
photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy
that other writers had failed to address, you revolutionized
American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the
African American experience. The Richard
Wright Encyclopedia (American Mosaic), of which you
and Robert J.
Butler are co-editors, is a guide to his vast and influential body
of works. What
prompts you into such a giant project?
Jerry
Ward: Robert Butler and I undertook the project
because it was necessary to provide a reference book for students, teachers,
and the general public. We wanted people
to have a resource for discovering basic facts about Wright and his works, and
we believe that good critical work on writers must start with facts rather than
with theoretical speculations. Like
Keneth Kinnamon’s two magnificent bibliographies of critical responses to
Wright, the Richard Wright Encyclopedia is an integral part of what
the Richard Wright Circle was established to accomplish. I should mention that
I have another big, ongoing project. I
am writing Richard Wright: One Reader’s Responses, a study of Wright’s
mind and his writings. I am not certain that I shall ever finish that project.
Wang Zuyou：Your countless works are expressions of your endless love of literature, esp. Afro-American literature. Besides Richard
Wright, who are those writers that absorb your
passion and devotion?
Jerry Ward: To use your words, I am passionately
devoted to many writers, particularly to writers other critics may have chosen
to overlook –Asili Ya Nadhiri, James E. Cherry, Sterling D. Plumpp, Harold
Clark, Julius E. Thompson, Eugene Redmond, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Tom Dent come
immediately to mind. Ishmael Reed and Lance Jeffers are at the top of my list. I
am passionately interested in writers who share all or a significant portion of
my commitment to struggling with whatever “Truth” might be.
Will you expound
upon them respectively?
Jerry
Ward:
That is impossible for me to do in this interview. I would need to write
several essays to expound. I will say a
little about Reed and Jeffers to give you a preview of my thinking. I first
read Reed when I was a soldier in Vietnam.
I later had the privilege of serving with him on the Coordinating
Council of Literary Magazines and of conducting extensive interviews with him
in the early 1980s. In his own way, Ishmael Reed continues and takes to a new
level the work Richard Wright did. I reject the idea which circulates like
HIV/AIDS and cancer among American intellectuals that Wright and Reed are
“protest writers.” All American writers protest something. I value Reed for his
sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote genuine multiculturalism in
our discussions of the literature and culture of the United States. His efforts
as a novelist, poet, dramatist, musician, essayist and cultural critic,
publisher and editor are special and unsurpassed. He is dedicated to providing
the grounds or the rich, always expanding matrix for the delayed conversation
about what it means to be an American.
He does not merely give lip-service to multiculturalism and
diversity. He is profoundly engaged in
the practice of inclusiveness. For this reason Reginald Martin (University of
Memphis) and I have begun to work on a book to be entitled Ishmael Reed’s Conversation with America. Lance Jeffers, with whom
I enjoyed a most rewarding friendship during the last decade (1975-1985) of his
life, was an excellent poet and critical thinker. He was a man who had absorbed
what Jean-Paul Sartre was talking about in Qu’est-ce
que la literature? (1947). He was engagé.
Engaged. Committed. For him, as for Reed, writing is an act of social
responsibility. I learned much from him about poetry, cultural nationalism, and
how to be a responsible person. I wrote the introduction for his novel Witherspoon, a novel that John Oliver
Killens commended highly. One of my former students, Howard Rambsy II,
published a most thoughtful essay on Jeffers and the Black Aesthetic in Kevin
Powell’s anthology Step Into A World
(2000). I intend to revise and expand a paper I wrote many years ago on
“Racialized Morality in Lance Jeffers’s Witherspoon.”
You remind me that I have so much work to do in fitting the writers for whom I
have a passionate devotion into literary history.
In The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery, you fuse autobiography, politics, spirituality, history, and poetry in
a highly inventive and unusual trip through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Your house and the university campus where you worked as a professor were both
flooded in the storm. It is from this trauma that you scramble to find hope and
sanity in a world ruled by the fact that thousands have been abused by Nature
and revenge is impossible. What is the mission there that you seem to try to
fulfill in this memoir?
Jerry Ward: I do not think The Katrina Papers has a mission. The book
has purpose. The initial purpose was to examine and document my mind as I dealt
with the trauma of loss. I wrote the
book as a journal, but if people wish to call it a memoir I do not object. It is journal about what was happening in my
mind. The first publisher to whom I submitted the manuscript said I needed to
revise it to incorporate a narrative arc.
I did not want to include a narrative arc. If my readers find one, that is an accident, a
fortunate accident. The ultimate purpose of the book is to inform readers that
they too can write their own stories and account to some for their historicity,
their participation in the making of social history. All of us have to deal with the wounds of
history that cannot be healed. What I
tried to do in The Katrina Papers was
to minimize the agony of the wounds.
I know that you also wrote poems, which you may have
forgotten, though you have a good memory. Do you think we should give special
attention to your poem "Jazz to Jackson to John"?
Jerry Ward: Yes, you should. “Jazz to Jackson to John” is
my signature poem. Of all the poems I have written, it represents best my
interests in history, music, and state of existence. It addresses what I think
the function of memory should be.
Wang Zuyou：In discussing the poetry of
Natasha Trethewey, you
call us attention to Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and
Native Guard and how her poems are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions.
To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper
perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The
Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” What is its special use
in understanding contemporary American poetry?
Jerry Ward: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s
essay is infused with honesty and integrity. It is a generous, scholarly and
civilizing statement about internal struggles within the field of contemporary
American poetry. Jeffers challenges us to be logical and sober about how those
struggles or negotiations among poets, critics, and readers of poetry are so
frequently racist, sexist, and, to be extremely candid, “bitchy.” Her essay bids us to meditate on poetry and
modernism as an asymmetrical affair, an affair that is saturated with conflicts,
taste and discrimination, desperate measures to protect privilege and maintain
hegemony and the mountains poets must conquer as they practice their craft.
Jeffers illuminates the conflicts, and her essay can be used as a powerful
guide for moving through the combat zone.
Her essay helps us to discern how political the position of Poet
Laureate of the United States might actually be. In an indirect way, the essay
also can be useful when we read Trethewey’s most recent collection Thrall (2012) and Brenda Marie Osbey’s History and Other Poems (2012). Osbey’s
is a rare book that secures our participation in and control of the dialogic
imagination.
Jerry Ward: No literary
history can account for all of a nation’s writers or for all of the writers who
have contributed something valuable to an ethnic tradition within a larger
national tradition of literary production. A definitive accounting would be
nothing more than an enormous listing of names, a literary telephone
directory. The population of people who
can make some legitimate claim to be writers has grown exponentially within the
last thirty years. Population size is
one reason for absence. Another reason has to do with how literary histories
are constructed and with the choices made by people selected to write chapters
of a literary history. In the United
States, most of the scholars and critics who write literary history work at
colleges and universities. Although some
well-informed literary historical comments might appear in blogs or in social
networks, it would be indeed rare to find any of those comments in a literary
history sponsored by a prestigious university press or a first-rate commercial
publisher. Academic circles in the
United States tend to be conservative and unwilling to take risks. Tenure and promotion depend greatly on one’s
publishing articles in the right peer-reviewed journals, publishing books with
the leading presses in one’s field, and publishing chapters in books that are
deemed to have great merit. Excellent
writers who are not canonized or strong candidates for canonization tend to be
ignored. The tyranny of the academy is
powerful.
Wang Zuyou：As an overseas professor at
Huazhong Normal University (Central China Normal University) in Wuhan, you have
deep interest in exchanges between the People’s Republic of China and the
United States of America, in promoting the mutual destruction of stereotypes. A
lecture you give
there on “American Literature and Digital Humanities” involves a series of
speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of
literature, especially of African American literature. Right?
Jerry Ward: That is correct. Digital
humanities is not a panacea or cure-all, but it is a crucial element in how
literature and culture will be written about and evaluated in the future. There
are still well-founded reservations about what digital humanities can achieve. I think for some time we will continue to
combine traditional methods with those emerging in the field of digital
humanities. Ultimately, our scholarly
practices as well as our scholarly questions will be altered by new
technologies.
Wang Zuyou：You have been involved with many professional
organizations, such
as the College Language Association, the Modern Language Association, and the
Southern Black Cultural Alliance. You have played a decisive role in the
Mississippi Humanities Council and were recognized for your contributions to
that organization by being given the Humanities Teacher Award, the Humanities
Scholars Award, and being elevated to an executive position in the Council.
Aside from your academic affiliation you served on the Mississippi Advisory
Committee to U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Jerry
Ward: I have profited intellectually from my
diverse professional involvements, because they have enabled me to have
exchanges with leading scholars, writers, and artists. Many of these people are more than names on a
page. I have had long-term
correspondence with some of them; others have become friends; some of the
younger people have chosen me to be an informal mentor. During my career as a
teacher from 1970 to 2012, working with professional organizations and such
cultural organizations as the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration and the
Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Florida has been meaningful. And I have worked
with the Project on the History of Black Writing since its inception in 1983.
Wang Zuyou：You received
numerous honors and awards throughout your career. What are your most cherished
awards? Why?
Jerry Ward: My most cherished awards are the Darwin T. Turner
Award of Excellence for Contributions in Research, Scholarship and Mentoring;
the “Teacher of the Year” award from Tougaloo College in 1992; the Richard
Wright Literary Excellence Award from the Natchez Literary and Cinema
Celebration; my induction as Honored Girot and Lifetime Member of the
International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent; and my induction
into the Tougaloo Hall of Fame. In January 2013, Tougaloo College designated me
Professor Emeritus. From 2002 to 2012, I was the Distinguished Eminent Scholar
and Professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. I retired from Dillard in August 2012
and now enjoy the life of an independent scholar. I appreciate the awards, and
I thank the people who thought I deserved them. I admit, however, that awards
frighten me. They are reminders that what
I have done in the past is less important than what I am doing in the
present. Making worthwhile contributions
depends on my continuing efforts to work harder and better. I do hope some of
my accomplishments provide ideas and models for invested behavior for younger
generations. I do remind myself daily
that if I stopped to admire accomplishments, I would become either a failure or
an arrogant fool.
Wang
Zuyou：We know that African American Studies is an
interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the
history, culture, and politics of Black Americans. Taken broadly, the field
studies not only the cultures of people of African descent in the United
States, but the cultures of the entire African
diaspora but
it has been defined in different ways. The field
includes scholars of African-American literature, history,
politics, religion and religious studies, sociology,
and many other disciplines within the humanities
and social sciences.
As
an expert in African American studies and a bridge between American and Chinese literary
academic circle, what are your suggestions for the
younger generation of scholars concerning their research and communication in the realm of African American studies?
Jerry
Ward:
You are referring to the broadest field, to the one called Black Studies or
Africana Studies or African Diaspora Studies.
African American Studies is an ally to the larger field, but it focuses
more precisely on studies of work produced in the United States. All of these
studies are like the threads of a spider’s web.
They are part of a larger design.
As a bridge between Chinese and American academic circles, I try to
promote cross-cultural discussions that are very necessary in the twenty-first
century. I am also something of an iconoclast. I like to knock down the false
idols of the mind that Sir Francis Bacon identified centuries ago. I have the
onus of providing viable alternatives to what I virtually destroy. Be wary of people who talk stridently about
revolutions and who have no rational programs to replace what they would
eradicate. They do more harm than good. I advise the younger generation of
Chinese scholars who do work in African American and American literatures and
cultures to arm themselves with in-depth knowledge about the history of the
United States. They must know that
history to prevent their being misled and mis-educated by either Eurocentric or
Afrocentric extremes. They should develop skills in making sharp critiques of
African American Studies. If they want
to publish their work in the United States or other countries outside of China,
they have to master the rhetoric and protocols of scholarship that may be
vastly different from scholarship published in Chinese. I urge these younger
scholars to remember that cultural expressions and everyday life exist in
symbiotic relationships, to remember that we are dealing with literary or
intellectual ecology.
