WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

UNFORGETTABLE

 

That day was circa 1962, a Sunday like most Sundays of my adolescence—or so the early afternoon initially appeared. Our hours-long church service had ended almost a half-hour earlier. Anxious to be gone, we had eagerly piled into the sedan; as best I can remember, Reverend Copelin had a long, large Oldsmobile. The founding pastor of the church, my grandfather usually was among the last to leave. We waited for him with the windows rolled down, fidgeting as youngsters do when forced to sit still in a parked automobile.

 

My mother, my two brothers and I were scrunched into the back seat. At four-foot eleven and weighing less than a hundred pounds, my mother was the smallest member of our family. Back then my brothers and I were referred to as Mrs. Ferdinand’s three strapping boys. We were fit to play the front line on anybody’s football team.

 

My grandmother, Theresa Copelin, the church matriarch, was in the front seat talking to one of the church sisters who was squeezed in next to grand ma. They were talking about some young man who attended service for the first time after a lengthy absence. My grandmother launched into one of her characteristic stories whose message you did well to decipher and heed.

 

After all this is the woman who could send you to get a switch from the whipping tree and you would not dare bring back anything less than at least a three-foot long, limber instrument of instant torture that whistled when flicked across your backside.

 

As young teenagers we most need instruction at exactly the time in our lives when we, on the threshold of adulthood, are generally least disposed to respond to elder advice and admonitions.

 

In post-fifties America, technology and other factors were radically changing society so that the latest fashion was far removed from yesterday’s norms. Moreover, each generation experienced faster and more liberal conditions than the immediately previous generation, which inevitably contributed to youth believing that grown folks were hopelessly out of touch.

 

When we are teenagers we certainly don’t think we know all the answers to life’s questions, however we are nonetheless equally, or should I say more certain that adults don’t understand present conditions. Hell, the average adult was dumber than the smart phone the adult doesn’t know how to fully utilize. Or if, for example, using the tv remote was too complicated, what could a middle-aged person possibly know to tell a teenager about negotiating modern life?

 

Moreover, in my particular case I was affected by a social conflict that at the time I didn’t even realize was playing out in our home. My mother, the Sunday school teacher and back-up pianist, was the eldest of three daughters. Her only male sibling was a slightly older brother who had married a seventh ward woman. My uncle Sherman’s two children were being reared as Catholics even though our grandfather was a prominent Baptist minister who founded a church in the city: Greater Liberty Baptist church located at 1230 Desire Street, outside of which we were waiting; and also founded an earlier church down in St. Bernard Parish in Violet, Louisiana.

 

On the paternal branch of my family tree, my country-bred, Donaldsonville, Louisiana-born father only occasionally attended church and rarely (as in once in a blue moon) contributed his melodious baritone to the church liturgy.

 

Consumed with my own fantasies, sublimated desires, and budding aspirations, I paid absolutely no attention to what must have been a major and ongoing family conflict about the role and requirement of religion in the lives of our family members.

 

I can imagine my soft spoken mother making quiet but persistent requests of my father, not to mention the more likely cutting asides, tsks-tsks, and whispered innuendos from older members of our close knit church community.

 

Two of Rev’s children had married Catholic, a third daughter was divorced, and here was my mother married to a man who didn’t regularly attend church. That was not the way the spiritual leader’s children were supposed to turn out.

 

I never directly heard any criticism addressed to me or even within my earshot, nor, once I left the church, did I ever feel any kind of major parental pressure to return to the fold. While I never gave it much thought back in the tumultuous times of the early sixties, nonetheless the abdication of Reverend Copelin’s grandson and star understudy had to have caused some consternation among the congregation and also caused far from negligible discomfort for my dear mother.

 

Although I never felt any heat, as an apostate who abandoned the teachings of his upbringing I must have left a good portion of the church members wondering what the devil had gotten into my mother’s eldest son, the same young man who seemed pre-ordained to build on the foundation laid down by his grandfather.

 

Not surprisingly, at the time I didn’t fully understand myself. I don’t remember what impelled me to flee from the cross. Although obviously I must have had some motives, I actually don’t remember embracing any particular philosophical beliefs that led me to reject the church.

 

Perhaps it was the Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Richard Wright books I was voraciously consuming. I can see the pattern now: Hughes’ sharply satirical short fiction that skewered church leaders; Baldwin a former child evangelist who not only left the church but also proclaimed his homosexuality; from a Christian perspective Jones was absolutely hopeless; and Richard Wright was writing godless, existential novels. At the time I didn’t believe what my writing mentors believed but in unconsciously following them, I was also unconsciously turning my back on people who loved me and were dismayed by the choices I made.

 

Sometimes you can be in worldly waters swimming for your life and not fully realize how wet you are, how out of it, how unconnected on a conscious level to the benevolent social forces around you. Perhaps that is a perfect description of what it means to be young and headstrong, moving on the ideas in our heads thinking that we know what we’re doing when in truth we are oblivious to critical concerns swirling all around us.

 

What a paradox: how wrong we can be in our self-assessments as we grow into full adulthood. We really think we know what we are doing and by the time we reach fifty we look back and, in amazement, wonder at how we survived our own naivete. We especially focus on how we came to be whoever we have become, and not infrequently linger as we self-examine our relationship with our parents and elder kin and acquaintances and their impact on our own individual personalities, beliefs, habits and ways of being in the world.

 

Although my mother had a deep-going and obvious affect on my development, and although she and I talked often and intimately about life experiences, nevertheless when she died I was counter-intuitively at peace with what church folk call “her home-going.” Conversely when we three sons nodded our consent for the medical people to pull the plug on my father who lay comatose a day and a half after falling into a fatal unconscious state of undetermined origin, whether because of all the uncertainty about the cause of his death or the bewildering swiftness of his unforeseen demise, I found myself all adrift emotionally, hopelessly unmoored, treading in a suffocating swamp, fighting for breath in a morass of feelings for which I had no name and very little understanding of why I was in so much pain.

 

Back when I was fifteen, I didn’t know I was hurting people. I thought I was simply a lone individual finding my own way in a hard, cruel world, a world about which I had only an abstract understanding of just how hard and how cruel was the road that lay ahead of me as I eagerly stepped into my tomorrows. Oh, the mistaken self-confidence of youth.

 

Of course, I had heard the saying “no man is an island” but I never realized that the lives of each of us is actually a country peopled by many others who are connected to us in diverse ways and to differing degrees of intimacy. Indeed and paradoxically, the great lesson I missed then but fully embrace now is that our individual identity is actually a social construct. Despite the conventional wisdom, who any of us is, is not simply a sui generis identity, not really a solipsism, not an unconnected unique individual but rather a conglomerate specific of various and diverse social influences, connections, and intersections.

 

Now that I have matured, I can really, really hear and understand what the old folks meant when they would ask: who that boy peoples is? Each of us is composed of all the people in us. No matter how we individually manifest our internal social multitudes, none of us are a simple individual. Both physically in our DNA and bodily makeup as well as socially in our beliefs, habits and tastes, all of us are complex combinations of other people and their influence on us.

 

My father’s people were country folk: raccoon and possum eaters, consumer’s of blackstrap molasses out of tin, one-gallon cans rather then maple syrup from small, store-bought, 12-ounce glass bottles. The elder members of Big Val’s extended clan all talked like they had mouths full of turkey stuffing. They gave us kids suffocating hugs you had to endure if you wanted to get at those lemon-coconut cakes and pans of yams with melted dollops of real butter or warm, deliciously gooey sweet-potato pone. Those relatives always called my father June, I didn’t know why. It never occurred to me, who was named Vallery Ferdinand III, that June might have been a familial, country-style contraction of Junior, which was of course how my farther was known to his close family.

 

Inherent in being city-bred was a dangerous disparaging of country ways. My formal education was teaching me to be ashamed of my social antecedents. Don’t talk like them, don’t dress like them, don’t eat like them, don’t be like them. And not unlike Chinua Achebe describes in his Things Fall Aparttrilogy, I was completely unaware of the social dissonance my formal education, or should I say social indoctrination, was engendering in me. By becoming an eager student I became complicit in the tearing apart and destruction of black traditions. Had it not been for my parents encouraging us to be active in the Civil Rights movement there is no telling how socially irrelevant and alienated I may have grown to be.

 

However, what I could not discern while encased in the fog of my coming of age, the elders surrounding me keenly spied and accurately identified, i.e. my quickly growing alienation, even in its early stages, was obvious to the unlettered and untutored Black people from whom I sprang. So there I sat, resentful of having to go to church even as I knew that as the oldest, Baptist-reared grandson I was fully expected to carry on the word of God. But being a young, budding militant, politically what we would later call “a neophyte,” I had no time for embracing old and out-moded ways. My future was in the future not the past, or so I thought, once again not realizing just how short-sighted was my thinking that my future was unconnected to my past.

 

I completely ignored that both my grandfathers were preachers, my mother’s father formally as a respected minister, and my father’s father informally as what was called a “jackleg” preacher. I didn’t understand that for most of the long and terrible history of being Black in America, preaching had been a profession that a colored brother could legally pursue, that delivering the word of god was a leadership position the formally uneducated could attain, that pastoring a church was one of the few socially honored positions available to the average black man. Even though I thought I was smart enough to figure stuff out for myself, in reality I was too dumb to know how ignorant I was. For example, as obvious as it may be, many years passed before I realized that my mother’s first name, Inola, came from the abbreviation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

 

So on that fateful Sunday I will always remember, on what might metaphorically be identified as my great getting up morning, I sat on the car seat completely oblivious that I was at a major turning point in my life. My grandmother cleared her throat and calmly declaimed a narrative about a man who resisted his calling. As the story unfolded the distinct impression gradually dawned upon me that the unnamed protagonist of my grandmother’s parable was the same young person who was so good at reading bible verse in the pulpit and seemed so gifted an orator whenever he led the church in conducting the order of service. Even though she was looking at the sister sitting to her right, a voice inside my head was asking a startling question: was grand ma really talking about me?

 

I don’t remember the details of her story but I will never forget the gist and ultimate meaning. Seems as though there was a young church goer who loudly and proudly proclaimed that he was called to be a preacher and announced that he planned to attend the seminary. However, after going off for religious study, he returned to church un-ordained.

 

As she paused for dramatic effect, I wondered but did not ask, what happened.

 

Grand ma now turned slightly sideways and spoke a little louder, so we in the back could clearly hear her. “I asked him what happened. Didn’t he say God had called him to preach.” she said he said yes. “Well,” she continued, “when God calls, you’re supposed to answer.”

 

“I did,” the young man had told her, “but when I got there and asked the Lord, what did he want of me, the Lord said ‘never mind!’.

 

My grandmother was not only looking at me who many thought would follow in my grandfather’s foot steps, I felt that my grandmother was also looking deeply into the me who was intent on walking his own path.

 

A strange but welcomed calm seeped through me, as warmly comforting as a hot shower on a winter day. I felt free at last.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

I KNOW YOU MARDI GRAS

A signification of recognition

of our aspirations and our social reality

 

Clyde R. Taylor is a sage—a wise and intelligent teacher; wise in that he knows what to do with all the information that he knows, intelligent in that he has, and utilizes, an astounding amount of information.

 

A five minute conversation with Clyde is enough to convince me, and anyone else of average education, that we really don’t know much of anything about, well, about anything. The work that Clyde self-depreciating simply calls a book, i.e. The Mask Of Art, is de facto proof of our ignorance. Clyde’s range of references is so vast that how much I don’t know became clear to me by page nine or ten. Were it not for Google, Wikipedia and other quickly available online resources, in order to read and fully digest chapter one alone would probably require my sitting in a major library for two or three weeks.

I don’t know about you but  I am certain that Clyde is a miracle in terms of studying and understanding the thought and behavior of our historic oppressors.

Let us be clear. Let us recognize the aroma of gunpowder, of conquest that whiffs and wafts through the halls of the academy—the academy is the intellectual superstructure, the intellectual citadel atop the hill. The main task of the academy, a task that the academy does exceedingly well, is, at the very least, to humanize oppression and at its very best is to glorify the oppressor. Period.

 

Reductively, the art that academy valorizes is the mask on the horrors of conquest.

 

 

I am a street level, organic intellectual. I did not learn what I know in any academy. The academic term for me is autodidact—I taught myself. Actually, that is not the case, it is just that the academy holds little if any recognition for the wisdom of the people who have taught me.

 

In the brief moments I have, I should like to offer a few observations, all of which have been sparked by conversations with Clyde Taylor and by reading and reflecting on his book, The Mask Of Art.

 

I will address three of the many concerns that Clyde has been instrumental in instigating.

 

1. Masking and my three categories of masking.

 

2. The deep “what does it mean to be human” focus of aesthetics.

 

3. The broad question of cultural critique within the context of oppression.

 

Perhaps, “address” is too specific a term for what follows, perhaps I should say I would like to mention three of the many concerns that Clyde has been instrumental in instigating. Adequately addressing any one of these concerns would require a rather dense book. I do not mean to present myself as a savant sharing a worldview, when it would be more accurate to say I am merely a fool asking a few questions.

 

ONE—MASKING.

 

The common conception is that the mask conceals but I believe the mask also reveals. The mask reveals the intentions and desires of the mask maker and the mask wearer. The mask also inherently raises the question of why? Why wear the mask? Is the mask a cover for feelings of individual or social inadequacy? Or, is the mask actually a recognition of individual or social inadequacy?

 

Of course the mask comes in numerous forms, too numerous to cover here, but I ask you to consider your clothing. My dashiki, your suit and tie, the color eyeglasses I wear, the color and style of shoes you have on. Clothing is the elemental mask we wear.

 

Clothing cloaks our physical vulnerability and enables us to, as the Europeans say, “withstand the elements.” In the Western urban world, clothing also signifies. It signals social status (or social aspirations) and many other concerns.

 

I do not need to go into the obvious. I think you understand that grooming is a mask: lipstick, deodorant, perfume, etcetera, etcetera. Any physical thing or social concept we attach to ourselves to distinguish ourselves, not only from our fellow humans but also, and more importantly, distinguish ourselves from who we are without whatever we have donned, any and all of that is a mask.

 

One of my students responding to questions of defining humanity during a discussion of the Epic of Gilgamesh compared and contrasted to the Epic of Bewoulf, offered the observation that being human is partly defined by being mobile, i.e. physical movement as a group or individual across the face of the planet. Implicit in that observation is a critique of the modes of mobility.

 

Think for a minute about the mask of mobility, how we choose to “get around” and what that choice says about us.

 

I’m sure some of you recognized that my use of the term “get around” implied far more than mere physical mobility. My usage also implied social mobility with a specific subtext of socio-sexual mobility. Yes, I mean to imply some of us wear the mask to bed, indeed, in a social sense, some of us never go to bed without wearing a mask.

 

So then the very process of masking, of concealing, is simultaneously a process of revealing; a process that reveals essential characteristics of the person who dons the mask, characteristics whose origins are often situated in desires that drive if not outright determine behavior, as well as characteristics and/or feelings of shame or inadequacy.

 

One function of the mask is to conceal, and in fulfilling that function the mask reveals.

 

When we wear the mask are we the same as we were before we put on the mask? Does a mask fundamentally change us or merely change the viewer’s perception of the wearer?

 

Speaking from the perspective of African-heritage cultures in general and New Orleans in particular, I believe that the mask can have transformatory powers, even if that transformation is solely a new surface identity for the wearer.

 

In New Orleans one traditional saying upon encountering a masked person whom one recognized beneath the mask is: “I know you Mardi Gras.” But the saying also has come to mean I recognize that you are masking, that you are celebrating, that you are transforming yourself. In that context the saying has application outside of the specific’s of Fat Tuesday traditions.

 

If you talk to the Mardi Gras Indians they will tell you, when they mask Indian, they become something else. Masking can be a conscious effort to transform the self, to contact the spirit world, to serve as a vessel for outside forces to manifest themselves. Masking can then transform the self, transform the wearer both physically and psychically.

 

Some of us know the transforming process as trance. Another example would be catching the spirit in church but there, it is interesting that the transformation is possible without the physical mask, even as the more perceptive cultural critics recognize that the church service is itself a mask to conceal the trance process. Christian liturgy was acceptable to the slave master, African religion was forbidden. Enslaved Africans masked the persistence of African religious practices in the outward dress, i.e. the mask, of conformity to Christian liturgy.

 

Masking also enables a transformation of perception, i.e. the viewer no longer sees the wearer but rather sees what the wearer is wearing and makes assumptions about the wearer based on that perception even as the viewer is partially (or fully) aware that they are looking at a person wearing a mask.

 

Obviously this discussion of masking and transformation could go on for centuries but we will stop here to go to the third element of masking.

 

Masking is an aesthetic statement, what we consider good and beautiful. In New Orleans on Mardi Gras day when the Indians come out, the perennial question is: who’s the prettiest? This emphasis on aesthetics is recent in the tradition and is attributed to one specific person: Big Chief Allison Tootie Montana.

 

Before Tootie, the Black Mardi Gras Indian gangs used to literally fight each other. After Tootie instead of the knife, hatchet or gun, the fighting was done with needle and thread, beadwork and feathers.

 

What a sight to see two chiefs meet and engage in an aesthetic battle: who is the prettiest, whose plumage the most colorful, whose design the most intricate, whose suit told the strongest story, etcetera, etcetera.

 

Although I have used the example of Mardi Gras Indians, obviously it applies to any and all forms of masking. The mask can be a positive statement of ideals or a negative statement of condemnation. Through the use of the mask the wearer can say this is beautiful or conversely this is ugly, for after all aesthetic statements are judgments.

 

The mask conceals/reveals, the mask transforms (not only the perception of the viewer but also the social, and sometimes even the physical, manifestation of the wearer), and the mask makes an aesthetic statement.

 

TWO—WHAT MAKES US HUMAN?

 

Ultimately the mask of art is a way of addressing the question at the core of human systems of thought: who am I, which reductively is the question of what does it mean to be human?

 

Throughout his book, Clyde Taylor prefaces the names of references with racial/cultural designations. Clyde will append “white” such and such to a person’s name. The tag is used as identifier. Only an outsider would think of using such a tag and in so doing identifying the limits of the person,  object, or construct so tagged.

 

This begs the stunning question: are white people humans? Of course that is a reversal of the usual use of the racial designation. For centuries whites have explicitly or implicitly asked that question about people of color. Similarly, for centuries some of us whom whites have designated as outsiders to humanity have been asking the critical question about Europeans, are they human?

 

For a very specific investigation of this question read Jewish authors such asPrimo Levi discussing Nazis who imprisoned and attempted to exterminate the Jews. Levi also asks the question: did the concentration camp dehumanize its victims.

 

If we restrict our investigation to Black and White we have unwittingly bought into the paradigm that our oppressor established. There are of course many other ways to approach this question of what makes us human human and the question of whether a sociologically, or racially, or politically defined group of people are humans.

 

By the way, I believe that the Middle East quandary is an example of forcing a European problem on non-Europeans to provide an answer. The national institutionalization of anti-Jewish, genocidal behavior happened in Europe, not in the Middle East. Why was not a piece of Germany or Austria carved out for the Jewish homeland?

 

Returning again to our study of The Epic of Gilgamesh compared and contrasted with the Epic of Bewoulf, we asked the question: is conquest and war intrinsic to human existence? We also asked our students to discuss the role of women in humanizing men.

 

One of my students noted in following up on the idea that it was women who humanized men, observed that men needed to be humanized while women were born human. During class discussion we formulated the theory that to be human is to become woman-like.

 

That’s an interesting discussion in light of the biological fact that all fetuses start off as females and that it is the introduction of the testosterone that facilitates the mutation of the fetus from female to male. Or, put another way, the basic, the elemental human condition is female. The art of Gilgamesh provides us a focal point to discuss the essence of being human.

 

The role of art is, or ought to be, an expression of our humanity, as complex and contradictory as our humanity is. Some of us believe in the maxim: cogito ergo sum. But does thinking prove being and is “being,” i.e. existence, ipso facto the central question for humanity?

 

Here is where art goes far beyond thought. One of the reasons I admire Clyde Taylor’s book is because he constantly probes at the question of what it means to be human.

 

Although I recognize that in the 21^st century it is inevitable that we will focus on European thought simply because our discussion mostly takes places within academe and we mostly utilize European languages for the discussion. While it is easy to recognize the role of European conquest, hence the color dynamic inherent in the use of European thought as the predominant reference for aesthetic discussion, there are not only other systems of thought outside of Europe, there is also a significant other discussion within Europe.

 

At the risk of shorting out the discussion by moving too quickly, let me simply say: not only was there a world of humanity before European world conquest, but indeed there was also a world before patriarchal conquest. Moreover, those pre-existing worlds, are far, far older and existed far, far longer than the current European era of dominance.

 

We reference Europe because we have been dominated by Europe but if we look at the history of humanity, we understand that human history stretches for tens of thousands of years prior to our current state of conflict and confusion.

 

To put it even more succinctly, the first gods that humans recognized were women of color. Women were our gods of antiquity. The revolt of men to erase that recognition and to impose male domination on women is the essential element of civilization as we know it.

 

In academic terms: to be human means to dominate women. The reason I say academic terms is because the academy situates itself in the written word. The development of the written word within civilization is congruent with and, as some of us would argue, a manifestation of the male dominance of the female.

 

Hence we privilege text in our discussion of humanity, especially when we discuss the universality of aesthetic concerns, a universality won and enforced by men with guns. Indeed, a succinct description of western civilization could be summed up in three words: men with guns.

 

From “men with guns” there is but one short step to the academy, i.e. men with books!

 

The irony of Clyde Taylor’s book, The Mask Of Art, is that the cover situates the female figure, or image, as the focus but the majority of the text actually focuses on the thoughts of males. Part of the reason for this is that the majority of texts have been authored by males. Taylor does not shy away from recognizing this limitation and redeems his text by privileging the critique and insights of Sylvia Wynter in the concluding chapter.

 

Additionally, in chapter 13, “Daughters of the Terreiros,” using a critique of Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust, Clyde Taylor identifies the importance of women “within” the discussion. On the last page of the chapter, Taylor also gives us a reading of the cover image.

 

My concern is that both the critique and the explanation of the cover are situated within the boundaries of civilized discourse, hence within the framework of male dominance. The female remains an object of male discourse, an object gazed upon by the male whose signification is explained not by her own words but by the interpretation of a male.

 

I am saying men with books is a problem whenever that formulation restricts the agency of women. To be clear, I am not arguing for the rise of women with books. My critique does not simply call for a change of author, i.e. I am not simply advocating women with books, nor am I simply advocating both women and men authoring books. I am also critiquing the use of the book as the defining object of civilization.

 

As long as the discussion is limited to text, the “other” (i.e. those whose origin is outside of Western civilization) is doubly at a disadvantage. One, we are disadvantaged because many of our strengths, particularly in the areas of music and kinetics, i.e. dance and procession, are excluded from the discussion. But, two we are disadvantaged because a major part of the problem is not that we don’t write books (whether the absent author be people of color, or be women, or both). The problem is that the very construct of text, as we know, is a problem, especially when text is established as the arbiter and authority on what it means to be human.

 

For those who are interested in “reading a text” which discusses this “text” dilemma, I refer you to The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain. Some of us believe we are living through a major transition, moving from text to image as the site of authorial social expression.

 

It seems significant to me that the chapter that focuses on a woman author is about a film and not a book. Of course, this has been one of Clyde Taylor’s abiding and essential strengths, as erudite as he is, he is comfortable, perhaps even “more” comfortable, in discussing the image as he is in explicating text. Clyde Taylor’s facility in critiquing both text and film is critical to my appreciation of his importance as a cultural critic.

 

3.—RETURN TO THE SOURCE

 

Finally, I think it important to acknowledge Clyde Taylor’s recognition that he is a spy behind enemy lines. The academy is not his home. His workplace is not his hearth. The contested and often conflicting dichotomy between home and work is a hallmark of modern society, a contradiction that has yet to be resolved.

 

Productive labor is one of the essentials of human activity. If there is a contradiction between where and how we earn our living, i.e. the workplace, and where and how we express and propagate our humanity, i.e. the home space, then, unavoidably, we find ourselves in a situation of anxiety and alienation. This anxiety and alienation is another hallmark of modern civilization, especially given that today there is very little, if any, overlap between the community of the workplace and the community of the home.

 

This alienation is particularly sharp for the outsider to the workplace whose success at fitting in at work creates a persona that is both alien to and uncomfortable within the home space, and vice versa. This workplace alienation is intensified if the workplace is academe. Working in the big house is strange enough but to be an intellectual personal “manservant” is particularly off-putting. Moreover, I fully recognize, as Condi Rice exemplifies, women can also be manservants.

 

In this regard, Amilcar Cabral’s famous dictum, “return to the source,” is of particular relevance. If, for whatever reasons, we can not return to our source, invariably we will establish a surrogate home in a space that is either not congruent with our original home or which is shallow in comparison to the social depth of our original home.

 

Alcoholism, and other forms of addiction, are major liabilities of a career in the academy. One must take something to deaden the pain of anxiety and alienation; the best, although far from easiest, prescription is return to the source.

 

While I often joke with my students: remember, we are sending you to college to bring back the fire, don’t stay and become fascinated with the light show, I recognize, however, and Clyde Taylor’s book reinforces, that in returning to the source we must go beyond the boundaries: both the boundaries of dominant civilization but also beyond the boundaries of our source.

 

Clyde Taylor and Amilcar Cabral realize that unless and until we are able to move through the world learning from and exchanging with all peoples inhabiting the planet without complexes of either inferiority or superiority, until such time we are not truly free.

 

Thank you for your attention and consideration of these brief remarks.

 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

photo by Cfreedom 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLIFFORD BROWN 

(you get used to it)

 

they used to call me brownie—clifford brown. i don’t have a name now, at least none that any of you can translate. i guess you can call me the spirit of brownie, except that’s so limiting and in the spirit world there are no limits. can you understand be everywhere all the time at the same time? never mind. this is about to get too out for you to dig.

when the accident happened, i had nodded off. i mean the ’56 pennsylvania crackup, not the one in ’50 that had me hung up in the hospital for a year. dizzy came and visited me, encouraged me to resume my career when i was released. not that one. instead i mean the big one where i woke up dead.

max and newk, they were in the other car, which had gone on ahead. so when they heard we had died, well, maxwell really took it hard. i guess because he knew richie’s wife shouldn’t have been driving because richie had only recently taught her how to drive—recently like a matter of weeks.

but when max, who was six years my senior and had seven on richie, tried to intervene, richie sounded on him. you know how we young cats asserting our manhood can run guilt trips, “max. max. why you always treating me like bud’s baby brother? i play as much box as earl does, more, ‘cause bud is so inconsistent, and me, i’m always there.”

which was true. he was on time, all the time. “plus i arrange and compose.” and he would touch his thick glasses in a disarming gesture that belied the stern words he was declaiming. “i’m a grown man, max. a grown, married man. i got a wife, a woman, a life, a man. why are you second guessing me on who can drive and who can’t drive? why you treat me like a boy?”

it was such a drag, such a drag seeing youngsters straining to act so old. but you know, like richie was carrying a gorilla on his back. what with richie tickling the ivories and being the younger brother of earl bud powell, the reigning rachmaninoff of jazz piano. i bet you if my older brother played trumpet and was named dizzy, i would play bass or drums. but then again, being who i was, what choice did i have but to play what i played or else not play at all? no one chooses to be born who they are.

but anyway, max, max starts drinking to get drunk. and drinking and drinking. no even tasting the liquor, just pouring it in trying to kill the pain. richie’s gone. his wife was gone. i was gone. max is whipping himself like a cymbal on an uptempo “cherokee”—ta-tah, ta-tah, ta-tah-tah, tat tah! and newk, newk just disappeared, was up in his room, standing in the middle of the floor, going deep inside himself trying not to feel nothing.

max was in his room drinking and crying, crying and drinking. and newk, in a room above max, was silent as a mountain. i had to do something, so i played duets with newk all that night. all night. we played and we played. and we played. all night. i was willing to play as long as newk was willing and newk stayed willing all night. it was like he was a spirit too, but that comes from being a musician. when you’re really into the music you get used to going into the spirit world all the time and bringing the peoples with you. that’s the real joy of playing, leaving this plane and entering the spirit world.

 

as much as me and newk played that night, that’s how much max drank and cried. finally, i couldn’t take it no more and i had to appear to max. i stepped in the seam between worlds. i was like translucent. that was as close as i could come to having a body but i was solid enough for max to peep me, and i spoke… well not really spoke, kind of sounded inside max’s head while i was shimmering in the shadows of that gloomy hotel room. 

“max, it wasn’t your fault, man. you can’t live other people’s lives. you’ve got to sound your own life.”

i couldn’t find the words to tell max how it was. we all live. we all die. the force that people on earth call god, gives us all breath but also, sooner or later, takes that breath away. in time, god gets round to killing each of us. whatever we do in between, we do or don’t do.

and max starts bawling even louder, talking about how i was too good for this world, how my example helped all of them clean up their particular indisciples. he was moaning, you know, crying and talking all out his head at the same time. crying pain like a man cries when he’s really broke down.

if i had still been alive i would have hugged him but i was dead and that’s why he was crying. so finally, all i could do was tell him the truth. “hey, max, it’s alright, max. it’s alright. get yourself together and keep playing. i’m cool where i’m at. it’s alright!

the next morning, when they left, max and newk got in the car and didn’t say a word. for the rest of their lives they never talked to each other about that scene. we all have different ways of dealing with death, even those of us who are dead.

and there it is. life is always about decisions and consequences made within a given set of circumstances. you can’t change the past. you can’t foresee the future. all you have is the clay of today to shape your existence. no matter what particular condition you are in, you can only do what you can do. you can only go with the flow of where you are at, and work hard to blow the prettiest song you can conceive. that’s all any of us can do in however many choruses we get the chance to take while we’re alive.

besides, believe me, death ain’t no big thing. you get used to it, after a while.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

Musical composition: "I Remember Clifford" by Benny Golson

Short Story by Kalamu ya Salaam 

 

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Wolfi Schlick – tenor

Frank Bruckner – guitar

 

Recorded: May 31, 1998 – Munich, Germany

_______________________

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CLIFFORD

• October 30, 1930 Clifford Brown, hall of fame jazz trumpeter, was born in Wilmington, Delaware. Brown started playing professionally after briefly attending college. He performed with Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey, among others, before forming his own group with Max Roach. Brown won the Down Beat critic’s poll for the New Star of the Year in 1954. Albums by Brown include “Clifford Brown: Jazz Immortal” (1954), “Study in Brown” (1955), and “Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street” (1956). Brown was killed in an automobile accident on June 26, 1956. Despite leaving behind only four years of recordings, Brown had considerable influence on later jazz trumpeters, including Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Wynton Marsalis. In 1972, Brown was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat Hall of Fame and each year Wilmington, Delaware hosts the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival. Brown’s biography, “Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter,” was published in 2001.

>via: http://thewright.org/explore/blog/entry/today-in-black-history-10302012

 

 

 

 

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

 

Tom Dent

 

 

DREAMS ARE REALLY REAL

 

Dreams are not just what we imagine at night, nor simply mental movies we passively watch in our sleep. Dreams are really pieces of everything we’ve ever felt, every reaction to every idea that’s ever crossed our mind, not just our sacred ideals but also all the unmentionables our tongues never say, the secrets repeated over and over to no one but ourselves and as such, dreams can be disconcerting.

 

At night we are a bright forest of feelings clawing at whatever containers cage our desires, hacking away at the behavioral tethers that hold us accountable to social authorities. Dreaming is not only subversive, sometimes dreams also awaken us to our real and deepest feelings.

 

Dreaming of Tom, I saw myself crying. I was neither shocked nor embarrassed. As we say, quoting or paraphrasing a well known Richard Pryor routine, ‘what had happened was’ I was talking to someone and felt the presence of someone else off to the side. I turned my attention to see who it was.

 

Though I had never known him in his youth, I was sure. It was Tom, a young Tom. I turned back to the person with whom I had been conversing and started crying. I thought Tom was dead.

 

I remember just before I embarked to Germany for a second time, I went to Tom’s hospital bedside.

 

A few days later I was in Munich and found myself visiting Dachau concentration camp.

 

The austere, wooden buildings were clean. There was no lingering smell of death but hard and horrible memories hung in the air, especially by the barbed-wire fences on the perimeter. I inspected faded photographs, my myopic eyes pressed nearly nose-length away from the glass-enclosed exhibits, squinting to make a closer examination of the gaunt prisoners who were literally the walking dead.

 

Just a few days earlier I had forced myself not to turn away from looking at my friend laying sick in a hospital bed. I had had the horrible premonition that he was going to die while I was gone.

 

He did.

 

I never thought I would have dug Germany, been comfortable there, learned so much there. America had taught me to think of Germans as “whites,” not people. On race and other matters Tom had constantly and sharply interrogated me, albeit with great affection. Rather than say I told you so, when I responded talking about what I learned or how I unexpectedly enjoyed some new or foreign experience, Tom would just pithily reply, “good.”

 

I loved our conversations. When I visited, if he was hard at work on a piece of writing, he would tell me so and I would ask my question and leave, but usually he paused for me and patiently listened to me babble. After a while he would ask had I considered such and such, or read so and so, or he’d point to the overstuffed book shelves and tell me to check out some guy from Uganda or an old article in Freedomways.

 

Every dwelling Tom had was open to me, including a couple to which he gave me a key. In my sixth decade, as I turn corners in my life, my life has become one of Tom’s ancestral homes. Concepts he taught or exemplified in his own being are now resurrected in me. Is that what friends are for?

 

My intellectual and spiritual flesh has grown out of what I learned from him, from people he introduced to me, from ideas he shared with me, places we frequented together, like: driving deserted, country byways in the heat of the Mississippi night on our way to a poetry reading or for me to sit in on one of Tom’s classes in the oxymoronically named town of “West Point,” which was located on the northeast edge of the state; or conducting the business of planning what we wanted to write or get published while we sat in Levatas Seafood House, he with oysters, I with shrimp; or the soirees with Danny Barker on Sere Street, the old musician schooling our young heads—Tom was older than me but we were both youngsters compared to Danny, whose eyes literally twinkled as he dropped witty one-liners and well-polished griot tales of early New Orleans life and the formative years of jazz; or the many beautiful midnight blue nights soaking up the blues moan and being cut to the bone by the razor-sharp guitar of Walter Wolfman Washington; and weekday evenings crowded into The Glass House enjoying not only the buckjump music of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band but also the entire ambiance, dancers, food, casual conversations, the guy at the door collecting dollars, the forty-year-old woman out-shaking the teenagers, all of that. Had Tom not taught me, had he not shared himself with me, given me access to the New Orleans treasures he had intimately mined, would I, could I have ever become who I am?

 

The old folks always asked: who your people—not just your blood family, but those whom you chose to love, to emulate, to run with and respect. The wise ones knew: your people are who you become, and if not become, they are the human forces that deeply influence your becoming.

 

Suddenly my emotional fog lifted. At that moment his absence overwhelmed me. I retched. The cathartic urge was irrepressible, except this nausea was not released through my mouth but rather through my eyes.

 

In my dream I wept, openly.

 

But crying was not what disturbed me. What really caused unease was a psychic jab that literally shocked open my eyes and propelled me out of bed.

 

For the first time in over a decade since his death, I recognized a reality I had neither fully realized nor acknowledged. I miss Tom terribly. Given our thirty year friendship and his mentorship, it should have been obvious, especially to me, but then most men are reluctant to publicly admit how much they miss another man.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

 

don’t ever grow old

 

don’t ever grow old, he said.

 

i had stood aside for the lady i assumed was his wife. with a painfully visible effort she haltingly scooted out of the narrow seat. i had told her, “take your time.” and then, with a tenuous grip on the seat back, he excruciatingly  rose and looked up at me, hesitating. i told him to go ahead. he chuckled, his eye twinkled and he advised me, don’t ever grow old. from behind me a middle-aged lady wryly intoned, what other option is there?

 

he slowly shuffled down the aisle, i was behind him, taking half steps so that i would not run up on his heels. once off the plane i darted around the old couple, someday i will be old like that but i hope... what do i hope? concerning growing old what hope is there?

 

i stopped at the kiosk where southwest airlines had complimentary orange juice and donuts. while holding down the tap to fill my cup, this guy approaches, picks up a napkin, and tries to decide what kind of donut he wants.

 

“you ever wonder what your life would be like if you and carol had got together?”

 

what? i look up but this guy is not looking at me and doesn’t even seem to be talking to me, even though i clearly heard him. how did he know about carol, about the crush i had on her in 7th grade?

 

“you know there is a parallel universe, another place where the path you didn’t take continues on. if you want, i can put you on that road.”

 

i almost spit up the juice. this time i’m sure the guy’s lips weren’t moving, yet i’m also sure i’m hearing strange things.

 

“but if you go, you can’t come back. you only get one chance to live again. i know you think this is a joke, but it’s not. it’s real.”

 

at that moment, i thought the strangest thought--what if i could be with any of the women i have ever loved, would i take it?

 

“i can hook you up with carol.”

 

i turned away and said in a low voice, no you can’t. carol died of breast cancer about a year ago.

 

“you’re wrong buddy, what i mean is you could rewind and have a life with carol. it wouldn’t stop her from dying but you would be there until she died and, hey, afterwards, you could marry another love, and...”

 

i walked away. i am on my second go-round already, i don’t have to travel back to get here. bustling forward, i mull over marrying a previous love and am forced to acknowledge donut man has a point: choosing one love over another is disconcerting.

 

like the summer i declined to choose jean kelly. at the time, i didn’t even know i was making a choice or, as it were, ignoring a choice i could have made. i simply basked in the moment, giving no thought to what could be. in fact, as many males do, i thought i was fortunate to be able to enjoy without being forced to choose. but then again, if i was not ready to choose, how ready would i have been to deal with the results had i made that choice? i thought about jean because even now, decades later, the residue of her unerasable tenderness continues to reside in the marrow of my being at an address deeper than bone. why couldn’t i then recognize her permanence...?

 

i guess that guy was trying to offer me a chance to both keep and savor two love cakes from the ingredients of one life time, or..., or maybe i’m being sentimental. i always want every love to be true and lasting; don’t we all? or am i just being male and desiring every woman i’ve every wanted? shit, life is too short and too complex to go back.

 

i hang a right at the newsstand where literally hundreds of glossy magazines are strung out in come-hither displays featuring all the flavors of the month, particularly the female-fleshy variety.

 

a security guard gives me a cursory glance. no matter how individual i believe myself to be, i’m still but one of thousands of travelers she scans every day. and then in a flash i know: the most important life choice is not who we hook up with but rather which route we trod. on the road is where we meet our mates, to go one way is to reject another. boy, i can be a philosophizing fool while walking my ass through an airport!

 

on the down escalator i vainly try to gather up my thoughts. few of the travelers around me look happy. are they scowling in disappointment about dead-ended routes?

 

the terminal doors open automatically. i step into the dallas morning sunshine, gently sit down the black briefcase that contains my laptop, unsling  my carry-on from my shoulder, and lean back against a concrete column, reprising my monthly waiting-for-my-ride routine.

 

mr. donut passes without even a glance in my grey-bearded direction. i’m not surprised. when you’re fixated on the past, you don’t recognize the future. on the other hand, to truly know yourself, you must recognize everything and everyone you’ve rejected or avoided.

 

i probably looked somewhat silly, standing there beaming my crooked-tooth smile at life’s little paradox: all the things we are is also a composite of all the things we chose not to be? is this how it feels to grow old?

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

 

Flying The Red, The Black and

The Green Flag of Liberation

 

In the Spring of ’69 the revolution had smashed full forced into Southern University New Orleans. We had taken over the school. Literally. We ran everything. Actually continued the classes and full day-to-day operations. But the nominal administration had no say so.

 

When we first took over we didn’t simply barricade a building and issue a list of ten demands. No, we were much more sophisticated. We marched into the administration building and one by one ran off the administrators, installed students in their place, and ordered that the school would keep on functioning but with a new and revolutionary leadership.

 

Two specifics will suffice to illustrate my point. When we went into Dean Bashful’s office, he was understandably outraged. He refused to move. So I motioned to a couple of the brothers who literally grabbed the dean and the chair he was in, lifted both from behind the desk and wheeled his ass on out into the corridor, slamming the door shut behind him. We then stationed two stalwarts on duty with orders not to let Bashful back in.

 

Second, we called the state government in Baton Rouge and told them we had taken over the school and would be in charge until new terms were negotiated and if they didn’t believe us, call back in five minutes and we would answer the phone. We had, of course, already commandeered the switchboard. When Baton Rouge called back, we answered with our same list of demands.

 

Some people thought they would just send in the police and force our hand but we knew differently. We had already had a major showdown with the police involving literally hundreds of students when we took down the American flag for a second time. A bunch of us were arrested but got out quickly and proceeded to organize a campus that was on fire because the police had gone crazy beating and maceing students who weren’t even initially involved in the demonstrations.

 

Our core leadership was not composed of teenagers but rather of veterans who were returning to school on the GI Bill. A number of us had served overseas, some in Viet Nam. By then, it was no secret, we were armed and dangerous but also extremely crafty. We didn’t flash our guns to the news media and we had made alliances with many of the faculty who were as opposed to the machinations of the administration as the students were.

 

Our all-male core leadership had been working together since the fall of 1968 and we kept the circle tight, did not recruit new members. We were wary of people who suddenly wanted to hang with us, in part because we were certain that undercover cops were trying to infiltrate. The Bad Niggers For Regression was more like a family than a political formation and we kept it that way. Our revolution only lasted two months so we never had to face major problems of losing leaders over time nor of bringing in new people. Questions, such as recruiting women into the inner circle never got raised as we careened through those two months at breakneck speed.

 

Everything was happening so fast and there was so much pressure on us, so many different forces at work both for and against us. We literally had to shape our revolution in the process of making revolution, there was no time off, no time to reflect, meditate and plan. Seems like it was one crisis after another than had to be addressed immediately with no room for error. Under such conditions, people tend to go with what they know, rely on what worked in the past, only trust tried and proven people.

 

One of the most profound contradictions of revolution is that during a revolution because events are moving fast and the opposition is fighting fiercely to unseat the revolution, what results is that the revolutionary leadership becomes both conservative and suspicious, unwilling to change itself in any major way and reluctant to admit new people into the core leadership. Of course, the average person lives their life without ever having to direct a revolution.

 

America was literally on fire and/or smoldering one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The winds of revolution were blowing everywhere. You either set sail or hunkered down until the storm passed over. Making a successful revolution is no joke. Indeed, as we quickly found out, overthrowing the old order was easy compared to running a new order. To me, taking over was not our major accomplishment. Our success was in running the school.

 

Initially we had focused on the lack of resources and the need for capital improvements. For example the library had empty bookshelves. We did not have enough professors to teach the classes we needed. There was no black studies department. We resisted the idea that college was simply supposed to train students to become workers in corporate America. We wanted community development.

 

Indeed, we did not have detailed demands. The second time we raised our flag of black liberation and the police attacked students and mercilessly beat us down we were prepared to defend ourselves in court but we did not fully realize that our next step was not simply to take over the school but to run the school.

 

Running the school demanded we create an administration. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but we chose students other than the core leadership to put in charge of day to day operations. Organizing resistance was one thing, maintaining social services a different discipline altogether. For the rest of my life I would be confronted with the contradiction of leading resistance to the status quo and the push for me to become an administrator of a new status quo. At the time I didn’t realize that one of the central contradictions all revolutions have to face is how to effect reconstruction after the overthrow of an existing order. We never got a chance to fully address that issue because we were only in charge for two months, April and May of 1969, but what a glorious two months that short time period was.

 

When the authorities visited the campus, everything seemed normal but the top administrators knew they were no longer in charge and many of them simply retreated in the face of our forces. One administrator I must mention was the treasurer, I believe his name was Mr. Burns. He took his job ultra-seriously and explained why he wouldn’t let us take over his office. He talked about sensitive financial information about each student and also all the financial instruments and what have you.

 

I remember looking into his eyes and saw something I had to respect. He knew we had the upper hand, knew that we had evicted Bashful, and also knew, I’m sure, that he didn’t have the force to stop us but he stood his ground and was ready to take whatever we might dish out to uphold his vow to do his job. We had to respect that. After all, he was not our enemy even though he was a functionary within a system against which we were waging war.

 

So we conferred amongst ourselves and came up with a solution. I don’t remember how thoroughly we discussed it or whether I thought if we did take over the bursar’s office we would have created a major headache for ourselves with the law enforcement officials, who would no doubt be called in any significant amount of money came up missing. So after a few minutes we returned to Mr. Burns office and told him we were closing his whole operation down. He could lock up everything, put whatever he needed to put in the safe and after securing whatever sensitive materials, equipment and money he felt necessary, he should lock his inner office and take the keys with him. We weren’t going to let him continue running the office but we wouldn’t put anybody in there either. That was the only office on campus we didn’t inhabit. We let it go dark.

 

I think we shook hands on it, maybe not. But I do remember he was one of the few that looked us in the eye without looking away. I didn’t see hatred or fear in his eyes, and I hoped we looked the same way to him. I may have some of the details mixed up but I’m certain that we worked out an agreement. He was a man of honor ready to face whatever for his beliefs and we in turn were also men of honor even if we were taking over. Our goal was to transform the school, not destroy it.

 

In the weeks that followed the take over, the school continued to function. We had no argument with the workers at the school, nor with the clerical staff and a number of key people in management. In fact for most of the workers and the faculty, we introduced a measure of freedom to do their jobs as they deemed best. We unleashed the productive force of experienced workers able to make decisions without some chump administrator riding their back. I’m convinced our decisions to safeguard the jobs and positions of the working personnel was another reason things went smoothly.

 

On one level, if you visited the campus during the take over, things seemed to be ordinary—well, ordinary once you got over the shock of seeing the red, black and green flag of liberation flying high in front the school. Our takeover was an extraordinary achievement. Not only did we keep the baby, we changed the water and kept the bathtub clean. During the whole takeover, on a day to day basis SUNO was functioning as well as, if not better than, it ever had.

 

The fact that operations proceeded at an orderly pace allowed the authorities to claim that we hadn’t really taken over. Of course, it didn’t matter to us what they said in the newspapers and on television. As long as the flag was flying, it was clear who was really running the school.

 

Another issue I’m clear about is this: history will not document much about our takeover. The master never gives the full 411 on slave revolts. Indeed, as much as possible they erase the event in the official records. So, I am never surprised when years later scholars, activists and even some progressive historians don’t know anything about the SUNO uprising. They never talk about those days when the lion not only ate the hunter but dared other hunters to come up in the jungle.

 

And, by the way, “jungle” is a loaded term. If we said rain forest, nobody would bat an eye in disgust or immediately imagine wild animals and savages. So not only does the lion never win in the hunter’s history books, we also have to put up with the indignity of our environments being termed a “jungle.” But then what would you expect from those who imagine that the “woods” and “forests” are a locus of evil—check European nursery rhymes, check Hollywood movies, indeed, check your own imagination—who lives in the woods?

 

In many, many ways we were not only in a physical battle, we were more importantly engaged in a propaganda battle. I believe the limited success we actually had was partially due to the fact that for the first time in a long time, the “trains” at SUNO ran on time. We received mad respect from students, faculty and staff for the way we conducted the takeover. We were not into revolution for the hell of it. We were determined to improve our school and that’s what we did.

 

Others may remember these times differently than I do. They can write their own versions of our common history. Ultimately, what matters most to me is that among the people who were there, the students who participated in the take over, there is general agreement—the spring of 1969, those were the real “good old days.”

 

While everything was cool on the campus, the state had a problem. John McKeithen, who was the reigning governor, had stated often that he was going to return law and order to the campus and that anarchy would not be tolerated. His specific response to our SUNO takeover was that he was not going to negotiate under threats and certainly was not going to visit the campus while student demonstrations were still going on.

 

McKeithen’s grandstanding was irrelevant as far as we were concerned. We had control of the campus and that was that. Then McKeithen made a gross mistake. He scheduled a public appearance in New Orleans at a church located one block off Canal Street in the heart of the downtown business district. We found out about the time and place of McKeithen’s speech and trapped him.

 

Our movement was notorious for our instant demonstrations. We would organize convoys and could mobilize a couple hundred students anywhere in New Orleans literally within fifteen or twenty minutes. McKeithen was speaking in a church that had only two doors: a front door and a side door that fed into an alley which ran along side the church but only opened to the front street address. In other words, if you blocked the street in front the church where was no other way out.

 

SUNO was located at least six miles away from that church and there was no direct route from SUNO to the church. McKeithen was to make a brief speech and then be whisked away, or so they thought. By the time McKeithen had concluded his speech we had over three hundred, chanting students in the street blocking his exit from the church.

 

The authorities were stymied. They didn’t want a repeat of the mob scene and wild melee that happened when we were arrested for taking down the American flag. We stood around outside in our usual jovial mood—we had the upper hand and we knew it. We even joked with the undercover cops whom we knew on sight, a couple of them we knew by name.

 

In a weird way, some of the detectives had a measure of respect for us because we were smart, quick and also fearless. They knew we had guns and that we were smart enough not to make stupid or needlessly provocative moves that would have given the police a chance to wipe us out. So there we were approximately ten-thirty in the morning, the streets full of fired-up SUNO students and the governor of the state trapped inside a church.

 

One of the cops asked me, what yall gonna do? I told him that was not the relevant question. The relevant question is what’s the governor going to do.

 

At first there was no direct communication. But all kinds of behind the scenes pressure must have been mounted because shortly somebody from the governor’s office came out to “talk.” What did we want?

 

Our position was simple. We were here to see the governor and we weren’t going to talk to anyone else. Period.

 

After a lot of back and forth which entailed us rejecting one ridiculous proposal after another, they finally relented and said the governor would talk to us. Pick one or two representatives and we could meet inside the church. No way, Jose. That’s not our style. We have open meetings. Everybody had to be able to hear what was going on. The governor had to meet with all of us or none of us.

 

The church was not big enough, or whatever. OK. Well, the only solution is for the governor to come to SUNO where we had spaces big enough for a public meeting. Agreed. The governor will meet yall at SUNO. No way, Jose. We are going to go to SUNO together.

 

I remember the tense moments after we allowed the governor to approach the state limousine. McKeithen’s big, beefy body guards were dwarfed by the press of students—nothing was going to move unless we said so. When it came time to get into the car, one of the body guards tried to push me aside. I pushed back. And for a moment there was a stand-off. We would not back down. McKeithen nodded at one of the guards and the guard let two of us get in the back seat next to the governor. And then we crept off as the student body slowly parted to make way for McKeithen going to SUNO.

 

This was a dangerous moment. I was not worried about being arrested. We formed a caravan on the way back to SUNO. McKeithen to his credit decided it was better to go to SUNO than to have what they surely would have called a riot.

 

We had already informed the assembled students of what was going on. Our cars had already begun forming up. The governor was not going by himself. Oh, no. We were going to convoy to SUNO.

 

The ride to SUNO was both quiet and uneventful, and at the same time tense and anxious. None of us knew exactly what the next step was going to be other than the governor was going to speak directly to SUNO students and bring McKeithen to the campus was a major victory for us. At moments such as those, you have to be able to think quickly in response to the pressures of time and circumstance. We sat side by side in the back seat, each of us silently trying to figure out our next move.

 

By the time we got to SUNO, the news media had cameras set up and it was the top of the hour item on all three local networks. McKeithen had vowed he would not negotiate with student protestors and now he was going to SUNO to speak to the students. The designated meeting spot was the school cafeteria. When we walked in a mighty cheer rang out.

 

McKeithen took one look at the stage and balked. He was not going to get on any stage with that flag on it. Everywhere we went, the red, black and green flag of black liberation was displayed. That is how our movement was known and now that McKeithen was at SUNO, the governor was threatening to leave without speaking because he was not going to share a stage with our flag.

 

As I remember it, there were three flags on the stage: the American flag, the state of Louisiana flag, and our flag of black liberation. McKeithen looked me in the eye and set his jaw in tense determination. If we wanted him to get on the stage, we would have to remove our flag. It was an obvious face-saving move on his part.

 

My solution to the conundrum was relatively simple. I said, OK, take all the flags off the stage. No flags. No problem. We outfoxed McKeithen. And that’s how Governor McKeithen went to SUNO and agreed to negotiate with the students.

 

That day he promised there would be negotiations about student demands and we in turn agreed that once the negotiations started in earnest we would cease demonstrations. All the way through the negotiation process, I kept expecting some sort of trickery but after close to a week of meetings an agreement was hammered out. Included in the agreement was the right to fly the black flag of liberation on the campus and that is why today, SUNO is probably the only college or university in the nation where the red, black and green can be raised and flown on its own flag pole in front the school.

 

There are two flag poles in front the administration building, facing the main avenue that runs in front the school. Alas, it has been years since the red, black and green has flown.

 

In June of 1969 SUNO closed for the summer and when it re-opened in the fall, over a thousand students were expelled and not allowed to enroll. Our leadership had court orders restraining us from setting foot on the campus. Nevertheless, none of that stopped the movement. Over the next two years there were more demonstrations, including another take over of the administration building.

 

The Spring of ’69 demonstrations and not been the first nor were they the last. Oretha Castle Haley and other students before us held demonstrations out at SUNO. After us, Earl Picard and another generation of students led major demonstrations. SUNO was full of older than average, working class students. Adults. People who had jobs and chidren to raise. People whom you could not treat like naïve teenagers. That is the background and the context within which my personal experiences were subsumed.

 

The SUNO struggle was who I was, everything else was secondary. Everything.

 

We modeled our movement on what we understood of the liberation struggles then coming to fruition in Africa. I was particularly impressed with Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC in Cape Verde/Guinea Bissau. One of Cabral’s clear directives, which I took as a personal maxim, was: “mask no difficulties, tell no lies, claim no easy victories!

 

For two months April and May of 1969, SUNO was a liberated zone. We ran a newspaper giving our analysis of things. Held daily meetings with students in the science lecture hall. Allowed any and everyone to speak at the meetings. And in general out-organized our oppositions.

 

One thing we did that was important. We delegated leadership positions far and wide, and not simply to those in our inner circle.

 

Once someone was put in charge, they were in charge and made all decisions. One of the brothers who ran the school paper was gay. My position was as long as the paper was coming out on time and was well done nobody had anything to say about who should or should not be running the paper. Period.

 

Forty years later I still run into comrades and fellow students from the SUNO Spring of ’69. I don’t know most of them personally but they know who I am and I embrace them, literally, embrace them in celebration for who they are and for their participation when it counted. For many, many people SUNO was a highlight of their life experiences.

 

Today, when I have these chance encounters, I am always proud. I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of the SUNO struggle. The majority of the lives that were touched were not the uppity-ups, the petit-bourgeoisie in training to become functionaries in the state machinery. No. I’m talking about ordinary street people. We speak with pride and love when we briefly reminisce about the SUNO days.

 

In the Spring of ’69, I had just turned twenty-two. I and most of my comrades were physically fit, mentally quick, and on revolutionary fire. Being the grandson of two preachers, some would say I had inherited the gift of gab, but in that department I was no different that local leaders in black communities and among black students all across America. We all could rap.

 

Of course, my commitment to writing and theatre was a big plus. I had the ability to utter witty phrases that captured the essence of what we wanted and often mercilessly ridiculed our opponents.

 

I had a poem I frequently performed during that period. The poem was called “Knuckle-headed Niggers.” I would run down a list of deficiencies evidenced by knuckle-heads. People would be falling out laughing. I ended the poem with my fist shot high in the air in a black power salute and urged my audience to do the same. And then, while bouncing my fist against my own head, I would say, “now tap your fist against your head—how does your head sound to you!”

 

We were determined to be true revolutionaries and not simple-ass, knuckle-heads thinking that revolution was a party. No, people were putting their lives on the line, some of us, such as my grandfather and Jean Kelly’s mother had actually died during this time period. We weren’t just college students playing pranks.

 

We knew: to play at revolution was to be put down. We were serious, the times were serious. One way or another, change was going to happen. Our goal was to the best of our abilities to direct the changes in our society, and where we lacked the ability to direct, we certainly had the ability to influence.

 

Our flag was flying, our people were on the move, change was being made. At SUNO, in New Orleans, and all across America, these were difficult and dangerous times and simultaneously was a beautiful era of revolutionary optimism and opportunity. Nineteen sixty-nine, a great time to be alive.

 

—kalamu ya salaam 

photo by Cfreedom

 

 

The Day I Got Killed

 

The day I got killed was a beautiful day—sunny, seventy-something degrees, the Saturday before a short work week on account of the upcoming Monday was a holiday; our favorite picnic spot in City Park was reserved, and I had stocked up on the fixings for my famous yellow mustard potato salad garnished with olives and pickles, plus I had burned a Frankie Beverly & Maze Mixtape CD, so I guess you can say I died happy although when a person is truly happy they don’t really want to die. But then again, who wants to die when you are sad? I mean I understand how when stuff is really, really messed up, troubles can drive you to jump off the Crescent City Connection or swallow a whole half a bottle of pills whose label says don’t take more than three a day but letting life’s low points permanently hold you down is for the weak minded.

 

What had happened was that some shit I did a long time ago caught up with me. I had touched Britnee because she was fine and firm and always dancing with half her clothes falling off, and I could see that she was ready to be fully a woman. Mainly what motivated me was the reality that caressing virgin flesh is erotically intoxicating, which is funny because doing the nasty with Britnee wasn’t nearly as exciting as getting down with Ruby—Britnee being so young didn’t have the moves her mother had.

 

It’s funny how one little moment can mess you up later in life but you can’t see that until it’s too late. What we males can’t do as a baby, what we dream of while we a teenager, stumble in and out of as young men, and fantasize about as we grow old is an eternal question: why is sex such a life-long preoccupation for our half of humanity? I don’t believe even that old dude Freud could explain man’s persistent taste for pussy.

 

At the time I had no way of knowing that my quickie would lead to a bullet entering my cranium just below my right eye. She could have shot me in the heart but I guess this assasination was just an ordinary getting-back-at me karma payback kind of thing and not about no serious love affair. Maybe Britnee just wanted me to see what I looked like when death caught up with me. Come to think of it, today is just about one year since Ruby-Nell died—I told Ruby she could of lived with it like me if she would just take her meds on the regular, but she didn’t, so she expired. Now it’s my turn. My end came so fast I can’t really tell you what my last sight was, all I can remember is everything turning a bright, bright white like fog set on fire.

 

I was twenty-nine when the deal went down, now it’s over seven years after I had infected her but her being HIV-positive was not why she shot me. The shooting was behind her mother Ruby-Nell dying; I guess a tall girl still need her mother when she is a teenager in a woman’s body and be needing for somebody to tell her why life’s so hard for a young, black and heavy-hipped female in 21^st century America.

 

Britnee was someone who had never held more than three hundred and fifty dollars in her hand at one time (and that was when I paid for the last of her school budget with the seven bills I gave her from my stash, not like I was paying Britnee for opening her legs to me but more like I was contributing to paying the bills which is what her mama’s boyfriend is supposed to do as the temporary man of the house). Shit, I provided for Britnee to have the latest shoes, a new phone with unlimited texting, and as much Manchu chicken as she wanted to eat. It wasn’t like I was no deadbeat or moocher. So it’s not like what I did was the mark of no beast or nothing.

 

I remember the sun was shinning when I strutted across the parking lot and Ruby was shouting out the window on the second floor landing something about how Britnee wasn’t nothing but fifteen years old and I was a grown man. Yeah, well where we come from that’s the way it goes, you either grows up quick or dies young. Besides Britnee should of knowed better, I’m sure Ruby told her that all men are dogs, or at least all men got dog in them, but I guess she just didn’t know that some of us are wolves—we will eat anything and anyone.

 

My body lay crumpled on the cement sidewalk bleeding from a jagged hole where the bullet entered my head. For forty-eight minutes I was ignored. Bleeding bodies crucified in the streets have become so common around these ways that even the mangy neighborhood stray mutt didn’t pause to sniff at my carcass. 

 

In fact it was over a half hour before a passer-by dialed 911 on their cell phone. And suddenly even though the day was warm, I felt cold. That’s my last memory: being cold.

 

By the time the police arrived Britnee was long gone and all that remained was the echo of those hard words she softly said; she didn’t shout, it was almost like she was just doing her duty or something, not like she was really crazy out of control or nothing, almost quiet, she had said: this for Ruby-Nell, for fucking up my mama with your diseased dick and for fucking me too, this for all the womens what been fucked over by fucked up men—and then Britnee pulled that trigger.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

TWO TRAINS RUNNING:

BLACK POETRY 1965-2000

(notes towards a discussion & dialogue)

 By Kalamu ya Salaam

 

What is poetry? That is not a rhetorical question. What it is we are discussing? I define poetry as "stylized language." Within the context of what is generally called literature, I further specify that poetry is language stylized to have an emotional impact on its audience. Within the world of English-language poetry, the chief methods of stylization are: 1. meter and/or rhythm 2. the specific use of sound usually in terms of a. rhyme b. assonance/consonance c. alliteration d. onomatopoeia 3. figurative language, chiefly similes and metaphors.

The canonical standards for contemporary American poetry have their beginnings in England with Shakespeare and their most important developments in the modernist movement of the 1920s (T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams). The fountain heads of contemporary American poetry are considered to be Walt Whitman and Emily Dickerson.

When we look at black poetry, however, we find another, and equally important, source: namely black speech and music, a distinct and distinguished oral and aural tradition which predates America and stretches back to Africa. These two trains are the twin engines of African American, or what I would prefer to call African Diasporan poetry. Most literary criticism gives short shrift to, and very little critical understanding of, black speech/black music as a source of black poetry. Most literary criticism does not consider that our ancestral mother tongues were tonal languages, which to some non-Africans sound like singing rather than talking.

My argument is that the best use of our language is in fact song. Is song, not sounds like song. And this song essence, this musical emphasis informs what we know as poetry. Indeed, while we may be unique in the degree of our congruity of speech and song, within the context of poetry, the fact is, all poetry, I repeat all poetry, started out as sound rather than text, closer to song than to monotone talking.

Moreover, even the paragon of English poetry, i.e. the work of William Shakespeare (whomever he or she, or they, may have been), even Shakespeare was primarily working in an oral tradition using the vernacular of his day. It is not inappropriate to argue that Shakespeare created the English language as a vehicle for literature. During his day, most literature was written in Latin or French. Shakespeare elevated folk forms and the peasant patois of his era to a literary art form. Shakespeare took the vernacular and created high art.

This brings us to the  Black Arts Movement. I know it probably seems like a major stretch to go directly from Shakespeare to the black arts movement of the 1960s, but if you understand that the effort of the black arts movement was to make art based on the speech and music of black people, drawn from the everyday lives of our people and returned to them in an inspiring and potent form; if you understand that the vernacular was the basis for the development of the art; and if you understand that text was not the singular consideration but rather one of a number of considerations, then you can appreciate the Shakespeares of Harlem, of Watts, of Detroit, Chicago, D.C., so forth and so on. And by the way, this artistic elevation of the vernacular is not limited to Shakespeare and the black arts movement.

This same concern shaped the work of the aforementioned founders and fountain heads of modern American poetry. Indeed, this same phenomenon is evidenced in the work of Homer and particularly in the work of Dante, just to name two very important poets from a global historical perspective. While I acknowledge there are other perspectives and considerations, I nevertheless proffer the theory that what was new about the black arts movement was that we were creating our own path rather than following the paths of others.

I also need to point out that the development of the Black Arts Movement had roots and precedents in earlier movements within black literature, as well as roots from outside the black literary tradition. For a general overview of the black arts movement, I refer you to my essay in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature. For a detailed investigation of the black arts movement, I refer you to my forthcoming book: The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement.

With that background I will now offer observations for discussion and dialogue. This is not a position paper; this is not an analysis; this is not a summary, but rather is simply a sharing of some ideas and observations toward the development of an assessment of black poetry 1965 to 2000. The black arts movement proper covers the time period of 1965 to 1976. In February 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated and shortly thereafter in March of 1965 a small group of artists and intellectuals coalesced in Harlem to take up work that Malcolm X had outlined in his vision for the Organization of Afro American Unity, the Oaau. Malcolm called for the developed of a cultural center in Harlem.

Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, Askia Muhammad Toure, then Roland Snellings, and numerous others responded directly to this call. It is important to point out that the concept for what became the black arts repertory theatre/school did not originate with Baraka although it was named and actualized by Baraka. The specific thrust came from Malcolm X, who in turn was influenced by the teachings of Elijah Muhammad from whom Malcolm had split and from the whole black nationalist tradition dating back to Garvey in Harlem, a movement which Malcolm had studied intently.

Moreover, although looking at the work of key individuals is extremely important, what is more important is to consider the ideas and institutions, the programs and production that is engendered by individuals in motion during a given era. In this case the black arts era is birthed with the death of Malcolm X and makes it's own transition in 1976 when its three major publishing institutions all, each for different reasons, cease functioning. The three major publishing institutions are Dudley Randall's Detroit-based Broadside Press (which by the way re-emerged and continues to operate today); Johnson publications, Hoyt Fuller editedNegro Digest/Black World; and The Journal of Black Poetry published and edited by Joe Goncalves, aka Dingane. Between these three institutions hundreds of poets were published and over thousands of poems distributed in the Black community of the USA and worldwide.

There has been no comparable output of published poetry by any other movement in the history of America. Negro Digest/Black World, with a circulation over 100,000 was the largest literary magazine in American history. White, black or otherwise. Period. Broadside Press with its poetry books, broadsides, tapes and lps, and short lived though very important series of critical monographs is without precedent as a publisher of American poetry. No other press was as influential in terms of poetry. And finally, although its circulation was not as large, the Journal of Black Poetry which published 19 issues between the mid sixties and the mid seventies, is one of the most vibrant examples of an independently published, non-academic poetry journal in the history of American publishing.

This period also produced three major poetry anthologies: Dudley Randall's The Black Poets, Abraham Chapman's New Black Voices, and Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. Of course, there is also the seminal anthology for the black arts movement, namely Leroi Jones and Larry Neal's Black Fire.

The next major period of black poetry is undefined in terms of a movement per se. This era of retrenchment from the ideals and actualities of black arts poetic production and movement toward, and indeed embracement of, more mainstream modes of poetic production finds its fruition in the work of poet, professor and anthologist Michael Harper. General acclaim given to Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyaaka and to national poet laureate Rita Dove, are both partially the result of the behind the scenes and extremely far reaching work of Michael Harper.

From his position as a professor of creative writing in the graduate program at Brown University, Harper has been able to mentor two generations of poets; champion numerous poets; bring back into print and cause a reassessment of earlier black poets, chiefly Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown; and publish a number of influential poetry anthologies including: every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945 (published in 1994) and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (published Feb. 2000). During this post-black arts period there has been a virtual proliferation of black poets coming through graduate programs in literature. One might call them mfa poets if it didn't have such an exclusive and exclusionary ring to it.

The fruition of Harper's vision is one of the most important developments of the 90s, namely the Cave Canem grouping of poets led by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eddy. Harper and Cave Canem are all academically-oriented, not exclusively so but in the main that is their orientation, and that means they are most concerned with text. Of course other currents were active during this period, and three of the most important figures in late 20th century poetry production in terms of editing, anthologizing, and championing the work of black poets, are Quincy Troupe, E. Ethlelbert Miller and the head of this crew Dr. Jerry Ward, whose 1997 anthology Trouble the Water-250 Years of African American Poetry is a quintessential embodiment of this viewpoint.

Additionally, from a pedagogic point of view, the most important of what I would term the third stream of modern Black poetry is found in the work of Joanne Gabbin with her furious flower conference and the extensions from that conference that include a four-volume video tape series, an online teacher's guide, an anthology of critical essays, and a forthcoming anthology of poetry.

Furious Flower represents an unparalleled summing up of mid to late 20th century Black poetry. Gabbin's vision embraces both trains of African American aesthetics, the text-oriented and the speech/music oriented, and manages to be both compact and comprehensive while acknowledging the strengths and importance of both schools of African American poetics. 

Here is text and context presented in multimedia appropriate for use in the classroom. The importance of the comprehensive third stream (as exemplified by Gabbin, Miller, Troupe and others) on the one hand and the academic poets (as clustered around Michael Harper and Cave Canem) on the other hand, are both eclipsed by the most recent development in African American poetry, namely the spoken word movement which began to dominate the production of black poetry in the late 1990s.

Watershed events in this regard are the nationally released motion pictures: Love Jones (1997) starring Lorenz Tate and Nia Long, and directed by Theodore Witcher, and Slam (1998) starring Saul Williams and Sonia Sohn and directed by Marc Levin. Although this movement was not started by these movies, these two films are collectively responsible for popularizing what is now the most dynamic movement in black poetry. If there is a watershed event it happened many, many years before: September 1979 with the release of Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang. This was the beginning of rap recordings.

Rap, as an art form, is the single most important influence on Black poetry at the turn of the century. 1. Stressed the vernacular, and therefore was accessible to young people who were otherwise shut out of artistic production and most of whom (but not all) were excluded from higher education, and thus not likely to be directly influenced by the text tradition in a pedagogical way. 2. Had a strong performance orientation which stressed working with a live audience as opposed to a text orientation. 3. Had a commercial base which stressed popularity often to the detriment of development.

Many, many people in the text and some in the third stream camps are extremely critical of the spoken word movement. They make the mistake of focusing on the movement's obvious shortcomings and ignoring the strengths and potentials. (Read Lorenzo Thomas.) Mention Giant Steps by Kevin Young--all the poets included are mfa poets. The spoken word movement is an American movement and not a black poetry movement in that it encompasses blacks, latino/a, asian, indigenous peoples and whites. The black branch has yet to produce major anthologies or recordings, and thus is not easily available for study and teaching in the classroom.

Major figures of this movement on the black side include: Patricia Smith, Tracie Morris, Roger Bonair-Agard, Reggie Gibson and Staceyann Chin among many, many others. There will be a proliferation of work in this regard arriving soon. There has yet to be an anthology (which will necessarily have to include a cd) that exemplifies this movement. I have not touched on, but do want to mention the whole jazzpoetry movement, championed by Jayne Cortez, Sekou Sundiata, Kamau Daaood and yours truly. This movement works to bring together black speech and black music into a unified artistic whole. Each of the aforementioned have recordings that exemplify their work.

Finally, I want to end with a challenge: 1. Bring back Bam’s  major works Black Fire and Understanding the New Black Poetry, now out of print. If the books were being used in the classroom, they would still be in print. 2. Encourage students to study BAM and study spoken word the way we encourage (by the example of the books we write, authors we assign, and texts we canonize) the study of the Harlem Renaissance. 3. Put together a journal dedicated to the publication and critique of black poetry and black poetics. This activity could be expanded into websites, listservs, cd roms, videos, audio cds and the like. Which institution, which individuals will take the lead in the study and development of Black poetry? 

The further development of Black poetry is what is to be done.

*   *   *   *   *

>via: http://nathanielturner.com/whatisblackpoetry.htm

photo by Lynda Koolish

 

 

 

The Black Arts Movement

---

Kalamu ya Salaam

Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.

Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

 

History and Context. The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.

While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover, Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: In 1960 a Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks. Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah Wright, among others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.

Another formation of Black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O. Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement's aesthetics.

When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Touré and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented "Uptown Writers Movement," which included poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal. Accompanied by young "New Music" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem. Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS.

Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark (N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was irrepressible mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-burgeoning Black Power movement.

The mid- to late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964, rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide explosions of resentment and anger following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s April 1968 assassination.

In his seminal 1965 poem "Black Art," which quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts literary movement, Jones declaimed "we want poems that kill." He was not simply speaking metaphorically. During that period armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm yourself or harm yourself' established a social climate that promoted confrontation with the white power structure, especially the police (e.g., "Off the pigs"). Indeed, Amiri Baraka (Jones changed his name in 1967) had been arrested and convicted (later overturned on appeal) on a gun possession charge during the 1967 Newark rebellion. Additionally, armed struggle was widely viewed as not only a legitimate, but often as the only effective means of liberation. Black Arts' dynamism, impact, and effectiveness are a direct result of its partisan nature and advocacy of artistic and political freedom "by any means necessary." America had never experienced such a militant artistic movement.

Nathan Hare, the author of The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University where the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during the 1968-1969 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.

The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them') organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

These three formations provided both style and ideological direction for Black Arts artists, including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the Black Arts movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major forces were located outside New York City.

As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership, particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the Journal of Black Poetry and the Black Scholar, and the Chicago-Detroit axis because of Negro Digest/Black World and Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) Black Theatre magazine published by the New Lafayette Theatre and Black Dialogue, which had actually started in San Francisco (1964-1968) and relocated to New York (1969-1972).

In 1967 LeRoi Jones visited Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of Karenga's philosophy of Kawaida. Kawaida, which produced the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles), Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names, was a multifaceted, categorized activist philosophy. Jones also met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and worked with a number of the founding members of the Black Panthers. Additionally, Askia Touré was a visiting professor at San Francisco State and was to become a leading (and longlasting) poet as well as, arguably, the most influential poet-professor in the Black Arts movement. Playwright Ed Bullins and poet Marvin X had established Black Arts West, and Dingane Joe Goncalves had founded the Journal of Black Poetry (1966). This grouping of Ed Bullins, Dingane Joe Goncalves, LeRoi Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, and Marvin X became a major nucleus of Black Arts leadership.

 

Theory and Practice. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings. The summer of 1968 issue of Drama Review, a special on Black theater edited by Ed Bullins, literally became a Black Arts textbook that featured essays and plays by most of the major movers: Larry Neal, Ben Caldwell, LeRoi Jones, Jimmy Garrett, John O'Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, Ron Milner, Woodie King, Jr., Bill Gunn, Ed Bullins, and Adam David Miller. Black Arts theater proudly emphasized its activist roots and orientations in distinct, and often antagonistic, contradiction to traditional theaters, both Black and white, which were either commercial or strictly artistic in focus.

By 1970 Black Arts theaters and cultural centers were active throughout America. The New Lafayette Theatre (Bob Macbeth, executive director, and Ed Bullins, writer in residence) and Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre led the way in New York, Baraka's Spirit House Movers held forth in Newark and traveled up and down the East Coast. The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) and Val Grey Ward's Kuumba Theatre Company were leading forces in Chicago, from where emerged a host of writers, artists, and musicians including the OBAC visual artist collective whose "Wall of Respect" inspired the national community-based public murals movement and led to the formation of Afri-Cobra (the African Commune of Bad, Revolutionary Artists). There was David Rambeau's Concept East and Ron Milner and Woodie King’s Black Arts Midwest, both based in Detroit. Ron Milner became the Black Arts movement's most enduring playwright and Woodie King became its leading theater impresario when he moved to New York City. In Los Angeles there was the Ebony Showcase, Inner City Repertory Company, and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PALSA) led by Vantile Whitfield. In San Francisco was the aforementioned Black Arts West. BLKARTSOUTH (led by Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam) was an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre in New Orleans and was instrumental in encouraging Black theater development across the south from the Theatre of Afro Arts in Miami, Florida, to Sudan Arts Southwest in Houston, Texas, through an organization called the Southern Black Cultural Alliance. In addition to formal Black theater repertory companies in numerous other cities, there were literally hundreds of Black Arts community and campus theater groups.

A major reason for the widespread dissemination and adoption of Black Arts was the development of nationally distributed magazines that printed manifestos and critiques in addition to offering publishing opportunities for a proliferation of young writers. Whether establishment or independent, Black or white, most literary publications rejected Black Arts writers. The movement's first literary expressions in the early 1960s came through two New York-based, nationally distributed magazines, Freedomways and Liberator. Freedomways, "a journal of the Freedom Movement," backed by leftists, was receptive to young Black writers. The more important magazine was Dan Watts's Liberator, which openly aligned itself with both domestic and international revolutionary movements. Many of the early writings of critical Black Arts voices are found in Liberator. Neither of these were primarily literary journals.

The first major Black Arts literary publication was the California-based Black Dialogue (1964), edited by Arthur A. Sheridan, Abdul Karim, Edward Spriggs, Aubrey Labrie, and Marvin Jackmon (Marvin X). Black Dialogue was paralleled by Soulbook (1964), edited by Mamadou Lumumba (Kenn Freeman) and Bobb Hamilton. Oakland-based Soulbook was mainly political but included poetry in a section ironically titled "Reject Notes."

Dingane Joe Goncalves became Black Dialogue's poetry editor and, as more and more poetry poured in, he conceived of starting the Journal of Black Poetry. Founded in San Francisco, the first issue was a small magazine with mimeographed pages and a lithographed cover. Up through the summer of 1975, the Journal published nineteen issues and grew to over one hundred pages. Publishing a broad range of more than five hundred poets, its editorial policy was eclectic. Special issues were given to guest editors who included Ahmed Alhamisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Ed Spriggs, and Askia Touré. In addition to African Americans, African, Caribbean, Asian, and other international revolutionary poets were presented.

Founded in 1969 by Nathan Hare and Robert Chrisman, the Black Scholar, "the first journal of black studies and research in this country," was theoretically critical. Major African-disasporan and African theorists were represented in its pages. In a 1995 interview Chrisman attributed much of what exists today to the groundwork laid by the Black Arts movement:

If we had not had a Black Arts movement in the sixties we certainly wouldn't have had national Black literary figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison because much more so than the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black artists were always on the leash of white patrons and publishing houses, the Black Arts movement did it for itself. What you had was Black people going out nationally, in mass, saving that we are an independent Black people and this is what we produce.

For the publication of Black Arts creative literature, no magazine was more important than the Chicago-based Johnson publication Negro Digest / Black World. Johnson published America's most popular Black magazines, Jet and Ebony. Hoyt Fuller, who became the editor in 1961, was a Black intellectual with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Black literature and seemingly inexhaustible contacts. Because Negro Digest, a monthly, ninety-eight-page journal, was a Johnson publication, it was sold on newsstands nationwide. Originally patterned on Reader’s Digest, Negro Digest changed its name toBlack World in 1970, indicative of Fuller’s view that the magazine ought to be a voice for Black people everywhere. The name change also reflected the widespread rejection of "Negro" and the adoption of "Black" as the designation of choice for people of African descent and to indicate identification with both the diaspora and Africa. The legitimation of "Black" and "African" is another enduring legacy of the Black Arts movement.

 

Negro Digest / Black World published both a high volume and an impressive range of poetry, fiction, criticism, drama, reviews, reportage, and theoretical articles. A consistent highlight was Fuller's perceptive column Perspectives ("Notes on books, writers, artists and the arts") which informed readers of new publications, upcoming cultural events and conferences, and also provided succinct coverage of major literary developments. Fuller produced annual poetry, drama, and fiction issues, sponsored literary contests, and gave out literary awards. Fuller published a variety of viewpoints but always insisted on editorial excellence and thus made Negro Digest / Black World a first-rate literary publication. Johnson decided to cease publication of Black World in April 1976: allegedly in response to a threatened withdrawal of advertisement from all of Johnson's publications because of pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist articles in Black World.

The two major Black Arts presses were poet Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit and Haki Madhubuti's Third World Press in Chicago. From a literary standpoint, Broadside Press, which concentrated almost exclusively on poetry, was by far the more important. Founded in 1965, Broadside published more than four hundred poets in more than one hundred books or recordings and was singularly responsible for presenting older Black poets (Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, and Margaret Walker) to a new audience and introducing emerging poets (Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee/Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez) who would go on to become major voices for the movement. In 1976, strapped by economic restrictions and with a severely overworked and overwhelmed three-person staff, Broadside Press went into serious decline. Although it functions mainly on its back catalog, Broadside Press is still alive.

While a number of poets (e.g., Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez), playwrights (e.g., Ed Bullins and Ron Milner), and spoken-word artists (e.g., the Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, both of whom were extremely popular and influential although often overlooked by literary critics) are indelibly associated with the Black Arts movement, rather than focusing on their individual work, one gets a much stronger and much more accurate impression of the movement by reading seven anthologies focusing on the 1960s and the 1970s.

 

Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology.

 

For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration.

 

The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.

Edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (1971) is significant because it both articulates and contextualizes Black Arts theory. The work of writers such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and J. A. Rogers showcases the movement's roots in an earlier era into sections on theory, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, Gayle's seminal anthology features a broad array of writers who are regarded as the chief Black Arts theorists-practitioners.

Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) is important not only because of the poets included but also because of Henderson's insightful and unparalleled sixty-seven page overview. This is the movement's most thorough exposition of a Black poetic aesthetic. Insights and lines of thought now taken for granted were first articulated in a critical and formal context by Stephen Henderson, who proposed a totally innovative reading of Black poetics.

 

New Black Voices (1972), edited by Abraham Chapman, is significant because its focus is specifically on the emerging voices in addition to new work by established voices who were active in the Black Arts movement. Unlike most anthologies, which overlook the South, New Black Voices is geographically representative and includes lively pro and con articles side by side debating aesthetic and political theory.

The seventh book, Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices, The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History (1976), is a surprisingly thorough survey that has been unjustly neglected. Although some of his opinions are controversial (note that in the movement controversy was normal), Redmond's era by era and city by city cataloging of literary collectives as well as individual writers offers an invaluable service in detailing the movement's national scope.

 

The Movement's Breakup. The decline of the Black Arts movement began in 1974 when the Black Power movement was disrupted and co-opted. Black political organizations were hounded, disrupted, and defeated by repressive government measures, such as Cointelpro and IRS probes. Black Studies activist leadership was gutted and replaced by academicians and trained administrators who were unreceptive, if not outright opposed, to the movements political orientation.

Key internal events in the disruption were the split between nationalists and Marxists in the African Liberation Support Committee (May 1974), the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania where race-based struggle was repudiated/denounced by most of the strongest forces in Africa (Aug. 1974), and Baraka’s national organization, the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP), officially changing from a "Pan Afrikan Nationalist" to a "Marxist Leninist" organization (Oct. 1974).

As the movement reeled from the combination of external and internal disruption, commercialization and capitalist co-option delivered the coup de grace. President Richard Nixon's strategy of pushing Black capitalism as a response to Black Power epitomized mainstream co-option. As major film, record, book, and magazine publishers identified the most salable artists, the Black Arts movement's already fragile independent economic base was totally undermined.

In an overwhelmingly successful effort to capitalize on the upsurge of interest in the feminist movement, establishment presses focused particular attention on the work of Black women writers. Although issues of sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement publications and organizations, the initiative passed from Black Arts back to the establishment. Emblematic of the establishment overtaking (some would argue "co-opting") Black Arts activity is Ntozake Shange's for colored girls, which in 1976 ended up on Broadway produced by Joseph Papp even though it had been workshopped at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre of the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Black Arts was not able to match the economic and publicity offers tendered by establishment concerns.

Corporate America (both the commercial sector and the academic sector) once again selected and propagated one or two handpicked Black writers. During the height of Black Arts activity, each community had a coterie of writers and there were publishing outlets for hundreds, but once the mainstream regained control, Black artists were tokenized. Although Black Arts activity continued into the early 1980s, by 1976, the year of what Gil Scott-Heron called the "Buy-Centennial," the movement was without any sustainable and effective political or economic bases in an economically strapped Black community. An additional complicating factor was the economic recession, resulting from the oil crisis, which the Black community experienced as a depression. Simultaneously, philanthropic foundations only funded non-threatening, "arts oriented" groups. Neither the Black Arts nor the Black Power movements ever recovered.

 

The Legacy. In addition to advocating political engagement and independent publishing, the Black Arts movement was innovative in its use of language. Speech (particularly, but not exclusively, Black English), music, and performance were major elements of Black Arts literature. Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience. This same orientation is apparent in rap music and 1990s "performance poetry" (e.g., Nuyorican Poets and poetry slams).

While right-wing trends attempt to push America's cultural clock back to the 1950s, Black Arts continues to evidence resiliency in the Black community and among other marginalized sectors. When people encounter the Black Arts movement, they are delighted and inspired by the most audacious, prolific, and socially engaged literary movement in America's history.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford UP.