Distress Calls and the Black Arts Movement
Bracey, John H. Jr., Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst,
eds. SOS --Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
In discussions of literary and cultural periodicity, there
is no consensus regarding the beginning and ending points of the Black Arts
Movement. At best, one can say the
enterprise occurred between 1960 and 1980.
It persuaded significant numbers of Negroes (colored people) to call
themselves Blacks, Afro-Americans, or African Americans. Adopting new terms of
identity was not a total erasure of the marker “Negro” or the more imprecise
marker “colored people,” because the NAACP didn’t swiftly become the NAAAA or
the NAABP. The change was psychological, not a merely cosmetic substitution of
racial markers. Some of the positive attitudes and values forged by the BAM can
still be found in certain manifestations of hip hop ideologies.
The change was at once political, cultural, and social. It
strengthened resolve to work more assiduously for the realization of
political aims implicit in the long struggle for human rights called the Civil
Rights Movement, an actualization that confused desegregation with integration.
For some Blacks, the establishment of Black Power was of greater importance
than changes in law that adjusted interpretations of the United States Constitution
and gave birth to new legal remedies and policies. It encouraged a stronger embrace, for some
but not all Black Americans, of the social science fiction of cultural unity
(the Black Community or the Black Nation), and it produced indelible changes in
conception of the primal myth of the American Dream and its systemic
entrapments; it sponsored recognition of the Amerikkkan Nightmare, a horror that had (and still has) a racialized impact
on the everyday lives of American citizens.
Thus, the Black Arts Movement warrants comparison with the
radical abolitionist and nationalist activities of the 19th century as
well as the “enthralling/charming,” cultural expressions of the New Negro
Movement and the Harlem Renaissance.
Study of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement is too important to be
confined to the whims of higher education and to imprisonment in the pedagogy
of oppression. The movement did not begin in any classroom discussion of
literary theory and culture, although it was defanged by the reconstruction of
instruction and ostracized by the politics of new aesthetics. The editors of SOS do not say that directly. They do not have to repeat what the
dedication to Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) and the allusion to his poem “SOS”
(1969) articulate for people who have resisted becoming post-whatever robots
bereft of historical consciousness. The anthology itself asserts that it
belongs to discussions in prisons, in homes, among groups that assist young
people to recognize their options in a selectively “democratic” society, in community centers where immediate local
problems and local remedies are debated, and in seminars at non-American
universities where scholars and students are not encaged by versions of white
hegemony that have apoplexy when Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” (2001) is voiced.
In short, SOS merits being used “in
the tradition.”
The anthology has
five major sections: 1) theory/criticism; 2) statements of purpose; 3) poetry;
4)drama, and 5) fiction/narrative, and these are framed by the editors'
diplomatic introduction and three very challenging “afterword” essays by James
G. Spady, John H. Bracey, Jr., and Audre
Lorde. The mission of the anthology, the
editors assure us, is to remedy problems associated with “ideological, aesthetic,
and geographical breadth” (10), difficulty in obtaining access to essential
documents, and contextualization. The first two aims of the mission are
satisfied as well as any collection might, but it is wanting in providing
crucial identifications and contextual information. The very good bibliography
sends readers to primary BAM texts and Post-BAM scholarship and anthologies,
but SOS would have been enhanced by
information not contained in the section introductions by A. B. Spellman, Sonia
Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, and Eleanor Traylor. The editors and their publisher
must bear the onus for shortcomings. The
book lacks an index. It provides no notes on contributors, as if the juju of
the Internet should be invoked to figure out who were or are Sam Cornish, Ronald Milner, Louise
Meriwether, Tom Dent, Ebon Dooley, Joe Goncalves, Carolyn Gerald [Carolyn
Fowler], James G. Spady and Ahmos
Zu-Bolton, The source information for
section 2 is spotty ---who formulated the by-laws for the Southern Black
Cultural Alliance?---and the acknowledgements (courtesy of specifying
indebtedness) demanded by copyright law
are nowhere to be found. This is
surprising. The University of Massachusetts
Press and the editors do know the protocols to be
observed in responsible publishing.
Those protocols were faithfully observed in Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary
Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill:
University
of North Carolina Press, 2005) and in the two-volume African
American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-first
Century (Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Pearson, 2004), edited by
Bracey and Manisha Sinha. Better s.o.s
(standards of scholarship) ought to have been observed in preparing SOS. Picky readers demand assurance
that the Black Arts Movement is accorded due symbolic respect.
Aside from these shortcomings, SOS does, as Arnold Rampersad remarked, “add immeasurably to our
ability to understand and teach a crucial aspect of modern African American and
American literary history.” Rampersad’s
“our” has exclusionary force when
potential readerships for the anthology are imagined. If "our ability" is most
immediately attached to the desires of people who teach in academic
institutions, the phrase overlooks a large number of non-academic activists who
still believe it is their duty to use products of the Black Arts Movement in
addressing the social and cultural conditions of contemporary life. They are not excluded from the discourse
focused on literary history, but their
desires will be different in kind and degree, more related to acquiring
utilitarian literacy. One of the great
lessons of BAM was how and what words do not mean in non-academic
enterprises. The point must be
stridently emphasized, so that the BAM messages will continue to be fresh
grapes rather than raisins.
Readers, especially
adolescent readers, may care little for literary history and care a great deal
for cultural history which does not apologize for its political dimensions, for
the American cultural history anchored in both the liberated and the
commodified funk ontology of hip hop’s evolution in the vast territory of African Diaspora. Younger readers have
excellent reasons for processing the contents of SOS in contexts described in Robin D. G.
Kelley's Yo' Mama's Disfunktional
(1997), Tricia Rose's The Hip Hop Wars (2008),
and Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow
(2010) and the special segment of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015) that is
devoted to "The Trouble With Race."
It would be good if social activists really did help young people to
read and critique SOS and to make practical connections. Ideas provided by
Spellman, Sanchez, Madhubuti, and Traylor should be lifted from the page and
used in everyday speech.
If a few subversive teachers opt to deploy ideas from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as they work
through the 666 pages of SOS, they and their history-challenged students might discover such assisting and seminal
works as Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black
Woman: An Anthology (1970), Joyce A.
Ladner’s Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971), Carolyn Fowler’s Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A
Bibliography, 2nd ed (1981), Vincent Harding’s The Other American Revolution (1980),
Tony Bolden’s Afro-Blue: Improvisations
in African American Poetry and
Culture (2004) and his crucial essay
“Theorizing the Funk: An Introduction” in The Funk Era and Beyond: New
Perspectives on Black Popular Culture (2008), and Larry Neal’s Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts
Movement Writings (1989). Readers who are less ambitious can sit on the
ground with their friends and discuss the contents of SOS in concert with the
daily saturation from social networking and mass media. What laid-back readers
have in common with more ambitious readers is arming themselves with critical
consciousness.
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka spend a lifetime preparing materials
for the practices of everyday life by those willing to answer the call to “come
in,” and pragmatic use of SOS is a proper way of honoring his
blazing work, his Black Fire!!!. Allowing praxis as it can be guided by Black
Arts Movement insights to dominate theory as such in 2015 is still an option in
the vortex of implacable, global disorders.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. June 24, 2015
