Black Writing and Blues Allegory

Black Writing and Blues Allegory

American politics will popularize exegesis in 2015, and so too might the publication of Toni Morrison’s eleventh novel God Help the Child.  Scheduled for release in April by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel rebroadcasts the title of a song written in 1939 by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr., “God Bless the Child,” and recorded for the Okeh label in May 1941.  The wheels of ideological state apparatus turn so rapidly that several commentators have confused the two titles as they assure us that Morrison’s novel is an instant classic.  The pre-publication “leak” from Knopf contains a tantalizing summary of plot and characters.  It encourages Morrison scholars and other critical readers to sharpen their tools and to engage the novel by way of allegorical readings.  General readers should listen to Billie Holiday’s trauma-drenched rendition of “God Bless the Child” as a prelude to discovering why in 2015 God really should help the child.

Adult readers, mothered and fathered by the child, will find enlightenment in twenty-first century exercises involving the traditional four levels of interpretation that are useful in unpacking allegories: 1)the literal or historical, 2) the allegorical or spiritual, 3) the typological or moral, and 4) the anagogical or mystical. The use of literacy is not an abuse of literature.  To understand where I came from with such an idea, people should read or reread Amiri Baraka’s Blues People (1963) and Ted Vincent’s Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age (1995).  These are two seminal works that warrant efforts to locate bridges between black writing and black music, to understand the bridges that Morrison builds in her fictions between American politics and the vicissitudes of ordinary life. It would not hurt to read or reread Stephen E. Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (1972), keeping in mind that poiesis includes narrative fiction.

American politics in 2015 will popularize exegesis because the majority of American voters have mandated that the United States of America shall reenact the Old Testament not the New Testament. Large numbers of readers will become aware, by choice and by accident, of the ancient properties of literary study. As American citizens suffer the daily installments of what their votes have written, they will be forced to acknowledge they are the “authors” of their history, their fate.  I suspect black writing, blues allegory, and God Help the Child will lessen the obligatory pains of political rebirth.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 4, 2015

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Black Writing: A New Orleans Example

Black Writing: A New Orleans Example

Seldom is the interrelated difference of black writing and black literature a topic of conversation or a point of sustained discussion in undergraduate and graduate courses.  Black writing in the United States of America includes the sounds and visual combinations (graphology) which represent the contours and nuances of African American thought; black literature is the body of work which is squeezed from black writing, filtered and otherwise processed by scholarship and criticism, poured into anthologies, and offered up to Culture as a consecrated wine.  Black writing is free from the rituals and niceties of wine-tasting.  It is just the robust wine that it is.

In everyday life, black writing is more widely read than black literature.  It might be argued that writing has greater practical value than literature.  It tends to be reader-friendly.  It rarely offers obtuse apologies for being didactic.  There is, of course, much back and forth slippage between literature and writing.  For the sake of cultivating literacy, this phenomenon of instability is a good thing.

One instance of black writing for a local scene that can appeal to a global audience is

Medley, Keith Weldon. Black Life in Old New Orleans.  Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2014.

The book is informed by a more intimate, personal vision of  historiography than such works as John W. Blassingame’s Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19730 and Lawrence N. Powell’s The Accidental City:  Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Read against Blassingame’s and Powell’s use of a full arsenal of scholarly devices to give persuasiveness and heft to their theses, Medley’s use of scholarship is skeletal.  He is not a neophyte in doing archival research and selecting visual evidence to buttress his assertions, so one must seek elsewhere to account for what severe readers might conclude is the book’s “thin” discussion of cause and effect.

 Aware of audience and purpose, Medley chose not to construct a dispassionate, profound, closed narrative of black presence in the making of New Orleans. His story-telling is open and deliberately episodic; it puts into motion authorial call and reader response; it evokes the shared authority that is a standard feature of oral history. Medley does not hesitate to locate his family’s history and himself in a meditation on space, time and place which bespeaks community.

In his first book, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (2003), Medley demonstrated his command of “academic” notions of what history as story should be. In the introduction for his most recent book, Medley’s purpose and aims are transparent.

The purpose of Black Life in Old New Orleans is to explore different eras of black New Orleans by focusing on specific institutions, social movements, and individuals.  Each chapter is self-contained.  When read cover to cover, the book provides a timeline of black New Orleans (12-13).

….

This book seeks to highlight the history of black New Orleans and recognize those who survived and achieved in spite of social and racial obstacles.  Thus, the book is inspirational as well as historically enlightening (13).

Medley is forthright about his populist intentions, and a reader is not misled into believing she or he understands the history of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. A reader understands the unfinished work of understanding the lived experiences of Africans and African Americans between the 1790s and the 2000s in a place named Nouvelle- Orléans.  Natives of the place as well as the newly arrived ----especially those tempted to gentrify the place in their own potentially ahistorical images ---can learn the discipline that history demands, the discipline employed yearly by Mardi Gras Indians in the tradition of making a new suit.  Medley’s writing is a crucial blueprint for young New Orleans citizens who desire to grasp the painful beauty of heritage, legacies, and traditions, and forking paths of DNA and ancestry.  Medley has written a noteworthy guide for acquiring authentic education. His book is a godsend for older citizens who want to strengthen their command of the art of memory and (re)membering. It is a document of importance for local and global participants in history as an unpredictable process.

As lagniappe, Black Life in Old New Orleans reveals that black writing and black literature are symbiotic.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

December 30, 2014

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Message for 2015

2015 is the year for cold, razor-thin, deliberate ACTION.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson's birthday greeting to

Isaac Newton (b. 25 December 1642) was an appropriate AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

2015 is the year during which we must not have the NEGATING ACTION

of GUANTANAMIZING ourselves.

Jeremiah Ramcat

December 28, 2014

An open letter to Howard Rambsy II

AN OPEN LETTER TO HOWARD RAMBSY II

December 26, 2014

Dear Howard,

Your email of December 24, 2014, “Is African American Literature Really American Literature?”, raises an excellent question, and your missive warrants the response of an epistle.  You illustrate well that the ontology of American literature is relative.  Given that African American literature is a philosophical member of the family, its ontology also changes in the four dimensions of the job market in American higher education and in the five dimensions of scholarly and critical thought.  From the angle of raw materiality, American literature is a body of moveable ethnic parts; your missive begins to expose how the parts of American literature are vulnerable in games of power where the rules are economic and ideological.  Our profession, like our nation, is reluctant to have full disclosure of the educational games we play.

It is to your credit that you agree in theory with the belief of your senior colleagues in the field of African American literary studies that African American literature is American literature.  It is legitimate for you to shift your theoretical opinion when you survey the contemporary job market for teaching positions. I encourage you, however, to think more deeply about the probable sources from which comes the authority of senior colleagues. 

Their graduate educations were remarkably different.  They might have been required, for example, to learn Anglo-Saxon in order to translate Beowulf, to study Shakespeare in depth, to take courses in linguistics and the history of the English language, and to read Jonathan Edwards, Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson as well as Chaucer, John Milton, Alexander Pope, the Romantic poets, Oscar Wilde, and Matthew Arnold (or some other combination of British and American authors).  They had to possess such cultural literacy if they were to pass their qualifying examinations before writing their dissertations. It is important that their minds were shaped by reading print materials rather than digitized echoes thereof.  Their ideas about theory existed in intimate connection with the works they read in historical perspectives.

Your  most senior colleagues got scant help from their graduate experiences in understanding African American literary history and slave narratives, works by David Walker and other black nationalists, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes, Anne Spencer and writers of the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances.  It was from such brilliant and visionary scholars as John Hope Franklin, Blyden Jackson, George Kent,  Martha Kendrick  Cobb, Saunders Redding,  Margaret Walker, Nick Aaron Ford,  Richard Barksdale,  Charles Nichols, Sterling A. Brown,  Sterling Stuckey and Darwin T. Turner that they learned to speak of American literature as African American literature. Those whom your contemporary  senior scholars respect  found the doors of the Profession closed against them;  they joined Hugh Gloster in founding a forum of their own, namely the College Language Association in 1938.

Testimonials from Trudier Harris, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Joycelyn Moody, Aldon Nielsen,  Maryemma Graham, R. Baxter Miller, Hortense Spillers and other scholars of their generation are needed to understand the journey to American literature professorships.

Howard, you need empirical evidence to support your claim that “hiring committees for assistant professors clearly do not believe that African American literature is American literature.”  Otherwise, you will lead me to think, quite irrationally, that hiring committees worship at white altars and detest “junior scholars who have been trained and identified as African Americanists” and who perhaps were baptized in black fire.  We need iron-clad evidence to describe what kind of Church, replete with canons, pagan rituals, and saints, the Profession ( defined variously by the Modern Language Association) actually is. The Profession can be murdered by its own metaphors.

You may be right in guessing that HBCUs and community colleges “are often willing to hire African Americanists for American literature positions.”  But we still need hard evidence to prove that your guess is accurate.  HBCUs and community colleges may have more expertise in capitalism and the fine art of exploitation than first-, second-, and third-rate American universities and colleges.  People who teach everything, as you put it, either have superior intellects and educations which qualify them to teach everything  or sacrifice careers to arm themselves to teach everything or content themselves with being divine agents in secular operations. After more than forty years of teaching in HBCUs, I know you are right; my knowledge is little more than a gnat in a hurricane when one is required, as you are, to make a thoroughly persuasive argument.

If “hiring committees want candidates who have familiarity with well-known white and black writers,” do tell me what happens to candidates who have extensive knowledge of Asian American, Native American, and Latino/Latina writers. Should I conclude that their graduate educations did not equip them with sufficient knowledge of black and white authors?  Are these candidates unfit to teach and expand knowledge about what American literature is?  Were their educations bereft of insights from African American Studies and American Studies?  And how and by whom is the “standard” for American literature constructed?  Unless the “standard” is an ideal which transcends human agency, I believe it is manufactured by the graduate faculty members who taught both the fortunate and unfortunate candidates for jobs.  This “standard” is subject to the historical conditions of the fourth and fifth dimensions of ontology and metaphysics.  I suspect that something akin to calculated, fishy “miseducation” is operative in American graduate education and that the quality of “pragmatic education” differs greatly among graduate programs.

Your question, Howard, is at once excellent and devastating.  Given the drastic changes occurring in American higher education, the day of the light teaching load may be ending for all scholars. The surreal luxury of living by reputation alone may be dying. Teaching in real-time, providing responsible mentoring and stronger career preparation at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and laboring to enhance the dignity of work may be dawning.  As we await evidence of things to come in a job market, I want to thank you for giving eyesight to the blind.

With best wishes for 2015,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Distinguished Overseas Professor

Central China Normal University

Howard Rambsy’s email of December 24, 2014 is appended with his permission.    

I realized that the semester passed without me sending out a missive 
on the professional. So here goes, beginning with a question: Is 
African American literature really American literature?

I hear many of my senior colleagues in the field of African American 
literary studies make that point, that Af-Am lit is American lit. I 
understand what they mean. And I agree. Well, I agree in theory, which 
is to say that my opinion shifts when I look at the job market. Here’s 
why.

I know several senior African American scholars who have appointments 
as “American literature” professors. My friend Joycelyn Moody has such 
an appointment. Aldon Nielsen, the black poetry scholar, has such an 
appointment. Thadious Davis has one of those appointments. I think 
William Andrews and John Ernest have such appointments. There are 
various others.

But I’ve had a really hard time identifying junior scholars who have 
been trained and identified as African Americanists gaining employment 
for American literature jobs. It almost never happens at the junior 
level. In other words, hiring committees for assistant professors 
clearly do not believe that African American literature is American 
literature.

There are two notable exceptions: HBCUs and community colleges. Those 
institutions are often willing to hire African Americanists for 
American literature positions. My friends at HBCUs and community 
colleges teach everything.

Perhaps one reason that universities hire senior African Americanists 
for American lit. positions is because they do not expect senior folks 
to carry heavy teaching loads. (Senior scholars are expected to assist 
with raising the scholarly profile of the department through 
publications and such). At many schools though, the teaching load 
matters for junior folks, and hiring committees and the department 
scheduler need to know that the new assistant professor for American 
literature is covering whatever the ‘standard’ is for American 
literature at the university. Obviously, we know that Douglass and 
Hurston and Wright and Morrison are part of the standard, but my sense 
is that for an interview, hiring committees want candidates who have 
familiarity with well-known white and black writers.

My friends who were trained in American literature seem, generally 
speaking, more capable and comfortable talking through the kind of 
“American literature” that search committees have in mind than those 
of us who are or were trained in African American literature. And that’s not a 
knock on training in Af-Am literary studies. In fact, the growth and 
accomplishments of the field over the last couple of decades explain 
why training in the field focuses more on depth in black subject 
matter than in giving attention to white subjects. (At some later 
date, we'll probably want to question the pluses and drawbacks to the 
"depth" or "specialized" approach).

Whatever the case, the unprecedented growth of “African American 
literature” jobs throughout the 1990s and early years of the 2000s 
gave our field confidence that people could and should specialize in 
African American literary studies in grad school in ways that were not 
as possible in previous decades. Back in the day, graduate students 
with interests in African American literature were obligated to 
nonetheless study large numbers of white writers. Remember that 
Houston Baker, for example, was initially a Victorian lit. scholar.

So, is African American literature really American literature? If 
you’re studying literature, or if you're a senior scholar, a scholar 
at an HBCU or community college, yes. If you’re trying to enter the 
job market, no.

HR

Reading Rudolph Lewis

Reading a Poem by Rudolph Lewis at Winter Solstice

Good readings are sometimes governed by iconoclasm, the smashing of established gestures of decoding.  A reader just walks out of the prison built by guardians of culture; she or he discards mindcuffs and explores; he or she discovers the wilderness is more intellectual than the glacial chambers in palaces of wisdom, the prisons of correctness.  Despite probable errors of misreading, the reader’s sense of being independent is rewarding.

When I first read the typescript of Rudolph Lewis’s Mockingbirds at Jerusalem, I felt that I was discovering traces of unbridled creativity.  The most important features of his craft and craftsmanship were derived from paying more attention to life rhythms than to treatises on prosody and monographs on how to write a poem.  The bane of much contemporary poetry is disingenuous professionalism. What does it profit a poet to achieve technical brilliance without fire?  Lewis has mastered fire and artistry.

After reading the published version of Mockingbirds at Jerusalem (Pikesville, MD: Black Academy Press, 2014), I have rediscovered “Defying Raging Night,” one of several touchstones in the book.  Lewis has the discipline needed to write such fresh, engaging villanelles as “The Thrill Is Gone: A Blues Villanelle” and “Get Up Dead Man: Blues Villanelle #2.”  I am attracted more, however, his playing a riff on the formality of the villanelle by invoking the blues in “Defying Raging Night.”  The poem is a defiant tribute to Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” a tribute that confirms the rightness of Thomas’s general imperatives to resist the inevitable by displacing them with specific, burning recognitions from African American blues ethos.  Thomas inspires. Lewis empowers.  Lewis demonstrates that fixed poetic structures can be unfixed to one’s advantage.

Lewis’s achievement in this poem depends on cultural literacy, a reader’s ability to grasp allusions: “in ancient cypress swamps” ---James Weldon Johnson; “ringing insect sounds affirmed” ---Richard Wright; “I’ve known black wonders”---Langston Hughes. Place names evoke knowledge of African geography and scenes of ethnic language creation as well as genocide—Bukavu, Lake Kivu, Goma, Grand Marché, and Kongo. A genuine reading of “Defying Raging Night” absorbs a reader, uniting her or him with the lyric persona as a Middle Passage survivor who can know “black wonder soothing enough to/write letters in hope of a Mockingbird spring.” 

The poems in Mockingbirds at Jerusalem are aesthetic tools for building something positive and as yet unknown during winter in America.  Read.  Use the tools Rudolph Lewis has given us to increase our collective ability to resist ignorant armies that clash in raging night.  Read. Build critical independence.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            December 21, 2014

Reading 2015

READING 2015, PART ONE

Having abandoned the bad faith of making New Year’s Resolutions, I am determined in 2015 to pursue three priorities:

CHINA

CULTURAL WORK IN NEW ORLEANS

RESEARCH, THINKING AND WRITING

The trio demands specialized kinds of reading.  2014 produced increased awareness of Cosmic Evil, of the international insanity that Cosmic Evil makes its primary work, and of the domestic insanity in European genocide, rape, and dispersal of indigenous peoples that is the origin of what is now called the United States of America. Using the bodies of Africans as objects of commerce is a nasty feature of American history; nastier still is the complicity of certain Africans, educated by an Arab slave trade, in supporting demeaning trafficking with human lives. The vulgar outcome is that Americans in 2014 are enslaved by custom, rancid ideologies, criminal passions, Darwinian penchants, and law.

 America’s history is stamped SNAFU.  Its contemporary chapters are written by people of no-color.  They are fully aware that theirs is a dying race in the global scheme of things.  Inspired by Cosmic Evil, they work feverishly to lay the groundwork of World War III and the near-total end of human and animal life on this planet and the dawn of post-whatever everything.  People of no-color may indeed succeed with generous help from a minority of Islamic demons and other beings who dance the militarized police foxtrot and procreate with Satan. One must be prepared for anything.

I have not abandoned hope that the story can end differently, but I have profound reservations about the efficacy of hope as an abstraction.  Some narcotics are not worth ingesting.

The reading plan for the first months of 2015 includes rereading W. Keorapetse Kgositsile’s essay “I Know My Name” [The Black Position, No. 3 (1973): 60-69], Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Henry Giroux’s Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education,  Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Antony Easthope’s Literary Into Cultural Studies,  Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain, Lucien Goldmann’s The Human Sciences and Philosophy, Origins of Terrorism, edited by Walter Reich,  Karl R. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land, and Floyd W. Hayes’s “The Paradox of the Ethical Criminal in Richard Wright’s Novel The Outsider: A Philosophical Investigation,” Black Renaissance Noire 13.1 (2013): 162-171.

Such revisiting, as it were, of old friends will strengthen me to grapple with such works as the Dao De Jing,  In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions (2010), edited by Clyde Woods,  Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (2006) and Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry (2014), edited by Ja A. Jahannes.   All of this is reading to inform my writing of READING RACE READING AMERICA: SOCIAL AND LITERARY ESSAYS, a book I may finish and publish before my burial.  Wish me luck.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 18, 2014

Bob Kaufman's Necessary Poem

Bob Kaufman’s Necessary Poem

Like Countee Cullen, you must doubt not that God is good, well-meaning, and kind.  Omnipotent in mercy, God is eternally watching and listening. If you are a hard-shell, titanium-plated Christian, you believe. Period.

Nevertheless, you ought not wear out your welcome with incessant knocking on heaven’s door and 24/7 requests that the Lord should resolve a problem that you can manage with help from poems by Bob Kaufman, Wanda Coleman, Walt Whitman, Amiri Baraka, Howard Nemerov,  Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez,  Lucille Clifton and a thousand other American poets.   Chinese philosophy, empirical evidence paid for with your tax dollars, and Einstein’s general and specific theories of relativity can also be of some assistance.  No, poems do not solve problems.  Poems put you in a state of mind to think about solutions. This is not a claim that poetry is innately more effective than prose, only that some readers are more stimulated by poetry.

The Old Testament prophet was right: there is a time for everything.  There is a time for torture and terror.  There is a time for beatitude There is a time for violence (racial and non-racial), for post-global insanity, for civility and tolerance, and for revenge. There is a time to be as brutal and dumb as war, and a time to be as still and wise as peace. There is a time for paradox.

 If the atomic clock is accurate, late 2014 is a time for interrogating Kaufman’s beautiful lyric “I Have Folded My Sorrows.” [See Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New York: New Directions, 1965.]

When you need the common words to deal with the surreal in 2014, you find them easily in televised Democratic, Independent, Republican and politically unidentifiable noises, in the clamor of those Kaufman identified as “addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters.”  Some of the speakers do employ poetic devices in their speech, but they usually intend to establish the shock of difference.

In reporting or commenting on “the news,” many journalists and pundits seem have a remarkable poverty of understanding that cheap reification of the threadbare “black and white binary” lacks credibility in a world that has many colors. If you want words that have a better claim on being “true” and worthy of communicating serious news rather than slimy distractions,  you have to risk getting them from combat zones created by morally compromised hackers. A safer alternative is to depend on common sense and instructive poetry.

Kaufman’s “I Have Folded My Sorrows” is designed to enlighten.  He begins the poem with a conceit of fictive truth:

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,

Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,

Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.

Six lines later, Kaufman asserts “Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey,” thereby establishing that an essentially American music can sponsor rational thought. The next three lines, marked by the anaphoric “And yes, I,” speak of searching “the rooms of the moon,” of refighting “unfinished encounters” although they “remain unfinished,” of wishing to be “something different.”

The poem ends with a poignant couplet:

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funeral of the poet;

The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

Does the initial “I” refer to Kaufman the poet, to a persona he constructed as a supreme authority, or to you the reader?  If you allow the lines to activate full affect, you can identify your existence in 21^st century “catastrophic histories.”  It is a mark of your intelligence to refuse to have your identity named by others, even by others who are said to look like you. Your intellectual soul can select its own society.

As you wrestle with Kaufman’s form and content, do memories of then link up with your ongoing awareness of now? Does a critical unification occur? Can the spatial and temporal patterns of a problem (or many problems) begin to give you greater focus and agency?  If you can honestly say “Yes” to each question, you have begun the work of determining what individual and collective solutions will be. Kaufman’s necessary poem has helped you to elect your destiny. Even if you absolutely reject theological narratives, you will have made a crucial choice in folding your sorrows.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 15, 2014