Another Duke Ellington Story The dance had ended forty-some minutes ago but no one seemed to be in any rush to go anywhere. Though they usually clamored to be on the road, quickly gone from these hick towns after they played, tonight the musicians were casually strewn backstage; some even cradled their still warm horns, occasionally sounding a very soft note or two. Duke grinned inwardly. Collectively, these men were his instrument and it made Ellington feel good when they felt good. As always there was a coterie of jazz aficionados, aspirant entertainers, and non-music-related hopefuls who lingered in the hallway that led to the rear parking lot in which a bus waited to take the band back to the train depot where Duke's private pullman car was parked, well-stocked with appropriate food and other road comforts almost unknown to most musicians who crisscrossed America. One gentleman stood at the end of the slow moving queue crawling along the wall outside Duke's dressing room. This small farmer recently turned salesman patiently awaited his turn to thrust the evening's printed program into Duke's hands so that Mr. Ellington might grace him with the gift of an autograph and, hopefully, also a flash of that fabulous love-you-madly signature smile. A stone-faced woman stood stiffly at his side. She had had a long day, was tired, and was the only audience member not displaying a beatific expression. Unfurling the seduction of his whiskey-tinged baritone, Duke graciously received this last couple. "I am Duke Ellington. With whom do I have the pleasure of making an acquaintance?" "Ah, Squire, Joe Squire. You can just put: To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Squire. Please, I mean if you don't mine." "Mister. And madam. Joseph. Squire. Thank you so very much for gracing us with your appearance tonight. You, your lovely wife, and all the other audience members made each of us feel at home." Duke shook hands cordially and paused to sign the program that Joseph Squire had tentatively proffered. As Duke finished his inscription with a flourish, he turned to the woman who remained starkly still looking as though it would have pained her to move. "Mrs. Squire, I'm sure you have a lovely first name. Might I inquire what it is?" Duke held his gracefully manicured right hand waist high in front of Mrs. Squire. Mrs. Squire was slightly taken aback by the man's forwardness. She had not touched many negroes before and though she appreciated his musicianship she was not interested in any personal contact with this mister Duke Ellington. But he spoke with such manners and deference in his tone, and he bent at the waist slightly in sort of a half bow, and his smile seemed so sincere; her hand floated forward more drawn by Duke's personal magnetism than guided by her own will. "Her, her name is Rosemary," Joseph Squire spoke up on behalf of his silent wife. Joe knew that Rose was past ready to go home and she had begrudgedly accompanied him backstage in his quest for Ellington's autograph. Now that Joseph's search had been successful, they should go. But, she hesitated: Ellington's handshake was so smooth, so warm, so tender as he courteously held Rosemary's farm-roughened palm. "Mrs. Rosemary Squire would you please allow me to show you something stunningly beautiful which I have just recently discovered? Please indulge me. It won't take but a small moment of your time." Duke gently released Rosemary's hand after slowly guiding it back down to her side. He turned to the small group of people surrounding him. "Excuse us one moment please." Without hesitation Duke cleared a path with a regal sweep of his left arm. He touched no one, instead everyone instinctively melted back like room-temperature butter retreating from the radiance of a heated knife. With his right forearm Duke smoothly pushed open the dressing room door. The first object Rosemary admiringly focused on was Duke's stage shoes: a pair of gleaming patent leather pumps which sat languidly atop the dresser table next to a half drunk demitasse of tea--between two slivers of lemon a chamomile tea bag lay beside the china. Had Rosemary glanced at Duke's feet she would have spied black lambskin loafers, but at that moment Rosemary's nostrils flared as she inhaled the fragrance emanating from a spray of cut flowers which freshened the atmosphere as the bouquet lay beneath the over-sized dressing room mirror. Duke sensibly had left the door wide open. At a discreet distance Joseph Squire and a few other people peeped into the room hoping to also see whatever was the beautiful something Ellington had promised to show the tight lipped woman. "Rosemary Squire," Duke guided her forward with the faintest touch to her waist, "regard. Behold something beautiful." She turned to look at Duke. What was he saying? Duke nodded toward the mirror. She turned again. Duke stepped sideways so that he was out of the reflected line of sight. "Notice the elegance of the eyes. The determined jaw line which undoubtedly reflects a willful and passionate personality. But above all, the clean symmetry of the facial plane and the...aghhhhh," Duke intoned wordlessly, "but oh, you can see as well as I." Then Ellington stopped speaking. Someone nearby gasped almost inaudibly. Rosemary virtually transformed before their sight. What had once been a cold mask of tolerance warmed into a tender visage of contentment. And as she started a smile, Duke picked up his pair of shoes from the dresser and backed out of the room. In the hallway Duke paused and touched Joseph lightly on the shoulder, " Never forget , your wife is beautiful. Though youth may leave us, beauty can always find a home within. Sometimes beauty slumbers but even then requires merely an appropriately gentle nudge to reawaken." Then, on padded feet, Duke glided noiselessly down the carpeted corridor just behind Johnny Hodges who was already blasély ambling toward the back exit. Clark Terry had been patiently leaning against the wall opposite Duke's door; he grinned as he too shoved off to take his leave. Terry had seen the master do this many, many times before. Duke was casually adept at reading people and adroitly drawing out their best qualities regardless of how they felt at any given moment. Exhibiting a rainbow of diverse complexions, a small knot of people stood outside the auditorium's rear egress. Sporting their best coats and warmest hats, the locals huddled in the chilly Indian summer night exchanging murmured conversations with Ellington's worldly array of well traveled musicians. "Excuse me, the time of our departure draws neigh and I'm afraid we must bid you good night." Disappointed but understanding sighs drifted through the frosty air as Duke strove to extricate himself from the thinning throng. A lady who would not be denied sought Ellington's attention—an attractively tall woman, slightly darker than cinnamon. Duke signed her program "love you madly" and then climbed into the vehicle, the beginnings of a melody capering in and out of his consciousness. Suddenly realizing where she was, Rosemary Squire pirouetted in slow motion searching the dressing room for Ellington. Ellington however, by then, was reclining aboard the bus. Rosemary's gaze fell directly onto her husband. Joe was a bit blurry as Rose squinted at him through partially damp but very happy eyes. He smiled at her. She beamed back. And they walked off hand in hand. —kalamu ya salaam
LET'S HAVE SOME FUN
Hey, everybody, let’s have some fun.
You only live but once, and when you’re dead, you’re done.
Pleasure is essential to life. Indeed, the desire to fulfill the pleasure principle is the fundamental hunger of life. Even at the basic survival level of food, we prefer down home cooking that gives us pleasure to dishes that solely give us nutrients. The first law of human nature is survival. The second law is find a way to enjoy surviving!
While we all know the pursuit of pleasure can lead to excesses such as greed, gluttony and hedonism, we all also would prefer a smile to a scowl, a caress to a slap, a kiss to a moral lecture. Most of us would prefer to enjoy ourselves rather than grimly go through life rigidly disciplined. Why is this?
Pleasure is essential because life is hard. A grain of sugar (or a proverbial “taste of honey”) is never so sweet as when savored by a tongue accustomed to a poverty enforced regimen of starch and vinegar. Those who have had the harshest experiences possess the deepest appreciation of pleasure. Moreover, for those who live a life of toil rather than leisure, pleasure is not just a salve soothing over hard times, pleasure is also a necessary encouragement to optimistically face the future. Or, as the blues bards sing: I believe / the sun gonna shine / in my backdoor someday. We face the future because we believe there will be some pleasure to be gained by holding on, otherwise, why stay alive?
In the United States, the pursuit of pleasure is very often linked to popular music, and, in turn, the popular music of the United States is Black music and/or musical forms (such as Broadway show tunes, Country & Western, or Rock & Roll) that are strongly influenced by Black popular music.
This little essay will talk a bit about the function of Black popular music, specifically Rhythm and Blues (R&B)—and by extension Rap music, in modern American society. I understand that not everyone will appreciate popular music in America as being one and the same with Black music. Some argue that music has no color. Others argue that Black music is not the only popular music of America — such people, of course, deny any connection between country and western, for example, and Rhythm & Blues, or between bluegrass and traditional jazz. While I respect everyone’s right to their own beliefs, that right in no way negates an accurate appreciation of reality.
In reality there is no popular music in America that did not come from Black music or that is not strongly influenced by Black music. For example, the very notion of a backbeat and of swing is proof of the Black origins of popular music. If the rhythmic emphasis is on two and four, rather than one and three, better believe “Negroes” had something to do with it.
I use the term Negro both ironically and seriously. Ironically, because currently we former Negroes no longer use that term to identify ourselves, preferring African American or Black, and yet both African American and Black are ambiguous with respect to identifying us as specifically and/or exclusively coming from the USA; in reality all Blacks who are born and reared anywhere in the western hemisphere are African Americans. Moreover, just as African does not identify where in Africa our ancestors came from, American does not identify where in the western hemisphere we come from unless one assumes the great nation chauvinism which claims that when we say American we are ipso facto talking only about the United States and that anywhere else in the western hemisphere is not America.
I use the term “Negro” seriously to specify that we are talking about those of us in the African Diaspora who were culturally shaped by and in turn have shaped and/or significantly influenced the culture of the United States of America. The term “Negroes” differentiates us from Afro-Cubans, Brazilians, Haitians or others “Blacks” born and reared in the Western Hemisphere. Negroes initiated the backbeat and the concept of swing in music. Samba, zouk, calypso, etc. do not have a pronounced backbeat, and those forms which do, such as reggae, do so as a direct result of the influence of “Negro” music. The upshot of all of this is that when we abandoned “Negro” we actually muddied the water of self-identification, even as we thought we were making things clearer. In one sense we were clearer in identifying with Africa—which “Negro” obviously does not since there were and are no “Negroes” in Africa—but in another sense we confused the issue of the specificity of our Americaness by simply saying America. The irony is that we dropped one label and picked up another in an effort to be clearer, but our new term is actually more ambiguous than the older term even though the older term had its own limitations.
Although this is an obvious aside, it is an important digression in that it helps us understand how it is that our music can be identified primarily as “Black” music within the USA and primarily as American music outside the USA. Now, let us return to the main thread of our discussion.
Essentially, modern American pop music all started with the ragtime craze and minstrel music. We may not know Scott Joplin, the greatest composer of ragtime, but we do know Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
The invention of popular American music is distinct from the various popular ethnic musics—e.g. the polkas of the Polish peoples; the ballads of the English, Irish and Scottish peoples; the martial music of the Germans—the John Phillip Sousa inspired marching bands that still parade through downtown Main Street in the American heartland; the light opera of the Italians; all of these ethnically identified musical forms merged into and were subsumed by the wave of popular music unleashed by newly emancipated enslaved Africans (who by the turn of the century had officially become “citizens,” i.e. products of the American social matrix).
When people argue the existence of American popular music they are really acknowledging the disappearance of distinct European ethnic musical forms and the emergence of a unique music. By the twenties (which, incidentally, immediately follows World War I, the historical starting line for the rise of America as an international superpower), American music (i.e. “jazz”) sweeps Europe and the rest of the world for the “second” time. Before jazz, there was the ragtime craze and there was the near insatiable appetite for Negro spirituals. All of this was represented as “American” music, a music which did not exist anywhere else in the world unless exported by the U.S.A.
Added to this, is the technological dominance exerted by American “inventions” and “improvements” on twentieth century technology. Specifically, the phonograph (1917 was the first jazz recording, 1920 the first blues recording) and the cinema. Although photography was not invented in America, Hollywood is purely American in its exploiting of the technology. Moreover, the first “talkie” and first film musical was “The Jazz Singer” (1927) starring Al Jolson, a man of Jewish heritage performing in black face.
To raise the ante a bit, during the period of American ascendancy as a world power, Euro-ethnic immigrants signified their transformation into “Americans” via their (re)presentation of “American” music, i.e. music which had been initially created by “colored people.” What do I mean? I mean the Berlins, the Gershwins, the Goodmans, the Whitemans, not to mention Bing Crosby who started off singing jazz or Gene Autrey who sang blues! Check the records. To be an American was to be able to make or emulate some form of Black popular music.
The three major musical branches of “American music” were jazz, blues and gospel, and the three major musical roots were ragtime, minstrel and Negro spirituals. Everything we know as popular America music either came directly from these six elements or was indelibly influenced by those roots and branches. I do not claim the Broadway musical is “Black” but I do claim that the origins of Broadway music is directly inspired and influenced by ragtime and the minstrel tradition. The contemporary dominance of “rap” is nothing but a reoccurrence of the dominance of jazz and before that the dominance of ragtime. That is the history of American music in a cursory but not inaccurate nutshell.
“Black” is not solely a racial designation. For the purposes under discussion here, Black is a cultural designation that refers to a very broad, but nonetheless, specific cultural aesthetic. This aesthetic is sometimes misleadingly labeled “always for pleasure.” Actually, this music is produced by the same people who literally slaved to build America. Clearly there is more to “Blackness” than the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. At the same time however, in the case of what is popularly known as R&B, undoubtedly and unashamedly, pleasure is the primary purpose. And that’s good.
Acknowledging that pleasure is good is a given among those of us who like our good times hot and loud, but the philosophical goodness of pursuing pleasure is alien to the traditional, Anglo-oriented status quo of America. Engaging the body in dance and celebration specifically for the pleasure of the experience is a concept both integral to African-heritage aesthetics and as foreign to Anglicized, puritan philosophy as is the distance between tepid clam chowder spiced with only a pinch of salt and cayenne flavored filé gumbo.
Music, song and dance is the holy trinity of the Black music aesthetic, and R&B/Rap, in particular, is the paragon of pleasure seeking within the context of Black music. Plato never trusted music precisely because music foregrounded emotion and backgrounded cognition. Christian ministers were always condemning Black popular music as the “devil’s music” pointing out that such music inflamed pagan passions. When we say that “music” is the first aspect of the eternal triangle, we mean that music communicates at a visceral level, connects through sensations, feelings. Popular music is then a music you don’t have to think about, in fact, any thinking you may do is incidental or secondary. The first commandment is what is real, is what is felt. This only makes sense, when you consider that feeling precedes thinking—before you can think about the world, you must “feel” the world, or, as we commonly say in New Orleans, “I feel to believe.”
The second commandment is “sing,” express yourself lyrically. Singing represents your conscious thoughts about the world presented with emotional ardor. When we sing we are not only making music, we are also expressing our thoughts, and regardless of how base or ordinary the thoughts may be, and regardless of how emotionally charged the music may be, all popular music expresses thoughts as well as feeling. R&B is primarily a vocal music, i.e. the lyrics are sung, whereas jazz is primarily an instrumental music. In the early days of jazz, the music was both sung (vocal) and played (instrumental). In fact, jazz introduced “scat singing,” which was a new way to vocalize music. But when jazz ceased being popular music, the emphasis swung heavily toward instrumental music.
The vocal element, is then, a key element in popular music. It is significant that R&B/Rap has lyrics, significant that you can “articulate” (emotionally communicate) your thoughts and feelings without the need of an instrument other than your own body. Popular music is then literally “self”-sufficient—the body is the only vehicle absolutely required for presenting both sensation (feeling) and cognition (thought), whereas jazz is almost impossible without instruments, without the use of material objects (instruments of “noise making”) outside of the performer’s body. Moreover, it is extremely significant that jazz instrumental techniques mimic the human voice rather than some abstract pure tonality. The jazz “vocalization” emphasis for the playing of instruments points to jazz’s origin as popular music based in an African aesthetic. This vocal-orientation is a major demarcation between how one plays jazz and plays Euro-centric musics. “Vocalness” is then the second element of the tri-part focus.
Thirdly, R&B/Rap has a strong beat, it is dance music. The emphasis on dance is significant. Indeed, the birth of R&B happened precisely at the same time that jazz ceased being dance music. While I do not argue that dancing is necessary to receive pleasure from music, I do recognize that at the popular level in America, pleasure in music is equated with dance. Initially, R&B was nothing more than a branch of post-World War II jazz that emphasized lyrics (often humorous and/or bawdy) accompanied by a dance beat. A founding figure of this development was saxophonist / vocalist / bandleader Louis Jordan. Indeed, initially this precursor of R&B was sometimes known as “jump jazz,” a term which made the dance connection obvious.
America’s fascination with Black dance forms began with the “cakewalk” during the ragtime era and escalated from there. When we investigate the background of dancers whom are considered 100% American such as Vernon and Irene Castle, who made a career out of teaching popular (i.e. “ballroom”) dance in the twenties, or movie idol Fred Astaire, we find that they were not only directly influenced by Black dancers of their time, indeed they often studied Black dancers, both directly (as in were mentored by) and indirectly (as in imitated).
If not directly descendant from or primarily influenced by Black dance, all forms of popular America dance have an ethnic origin outside of American—need we point out that Cajun culture is French influenced? Although a case can be made for square dancing, even that has been transformed by Black contact as any quick perusal of country cable television will demonstrate. When we see contemporary country and western dance, what we are looking at is “cowboys” doing line dances whose structure and moves are clearly based on Black forms of dance. They don’t call what they do the “electric slide” or the “bus stop” but the resemblance is both obvious and unmistakable. In fact, if we look back to the late fifties/early sixties we find the immediate precedent for contemporary line dances, the “Madison” dance craze touted by Time magazine complete with a chart demonstrating the steps.
Musicality, lyricism and a dance beat are the triumvirate of essential ingredients in all popular American music.
One of the most significant “American” shifts in the Black music aesthetic is the separation of secular and spiritual forms of music, a separation which is reinforced by the mutually exclusive association of dance with secular music. Thus, although Black religious music (spirituals and gospel) clearly qualify as embodying the concepts of musicality and lyricism, spirituals are not dance music, and ditto for gospel (a music form which developed in the 1920s epitomized by the work of composer/pianist Thomas Dorsey and vocalist Mahalia Jackson). The recent attempts of Kirk “Stomp” Franklin and others within contemporary gospel notwithstanding, churches do not allow dancing.
This is a European splitting of the celebration of the body from the celebration of the soul. Moreover, because all Black dance celebrates the erotic, and because Christianity posits the body as sinful (as in “original sin”) there is a further demarcation and separation. But an African aesthetic does not consider the body sinful, nor does our aesthetic consider the erotic to ipso facto be lewd. Thus on the one hand dance and popular music are generally considered beyond the pale for good Christians, and at the same time within the Black community there is a constant cross-genre traffic.
Many of the major R&B artists originate in and get their basic foundation in the musical liturgy of the Black church and then cross over to the secular side of the street to become popular, secular music entertainers. These musicians carry the gospel way with them, for while gospel may have eschewed dancing, gospel retained a direct identification with emotionalism and with trance, which is a transformation of the body into a vehicle for sacred expression. We call it getting the holy ghost. While the number of R&B artists who started off as gospel artists is too many to shake a stick at, it is important to mention that it was Ray Charles who brought not just the expressiveness but adapted, on a wholesale level, the specifics of gospel and injected it into what was then newly emerged as R&B. For all practical purposes, if Louis Jordan was the John the Baptist of R&B, Ray Charles was the “Jesus” who had thousands of disciples, both male and female, who followed in his wailing footsteps.
At the same time that gospel was used to develop the “soul sound” of R&B, Black religious music was, and is, constantly re-energized by injections of Black secular musical forms. Gospel as we know it initially was spirituals “jazzed up.” In the twenties when Dorsey and Jackson first introduced this music they were accused of bringing he devil into the church and were actually forbidden to sing “gospel” in some churches because the church elders insisted that what they were really singing was the “devil’s music.” Mahalia Jackson’s retort is classic: Well that’s the way we sing it in the south.
What is even more significant than simply “jazzing up” gospel music, and also even more significant than injecting “rap” into gospel music, is the Afro-centric reintroduction of the drum into sacred musical liturgy. If any one factor represents both dance and Afrocentricity, it is the drum. That the drum is not only accepted, but is increasingly a mainstay of religious music, signifies a move toward the merging of secular and sacred music into an aesthetic (holistic) whole that is a hallmark of the African way of life.
In a very important and Afrocentic sense, music that does not merge both body and soul, feeling and thought, is not complete. Music that is truly a people’s music (i.e. truly “popular”) ought to contain and celebrate both elements as part of a continuum rather than separate one aspect from the other. What we are witnessing, whether we realize it or not, is the push and pull of African aesthetics toward wholeness.
The sound of Blackness is the aesthetic of psychological freedom.Understanding its psychological impact is the key to appreciating the attraction and importance of R&B specifically and Black popular music in general. This music is both a music of freedom and of honesty.
The freedom to acknowledge one’s self, body and soul, to say that I exist and I matter, and all of me matters, my physical and emotional as well as my mental and spiritual capacities — admittedly, the spiritual aspect of a music of pleasure is usually limited, but that part is there also. And the honesty to admit that the reality of the self, the spectrum of concerns we inhabit, is a spectrum whose poles are good and bad, beautiful and ugly. We all live on and in that sphere, and the extremes are never fixed—each quality is relative. What is good, bad, beautiful, etc. at any given moment changes as we change.
There are no absolutes except life itself, and even that is speculative, i.e. is there life after death? Many people don’t realize that all of this is contained in going up to Slim’s on Saturday night and dancing until you fall out and, hopefully, landing in the embrace of a special someone’s arms.
What is important to understand is that many of us have been taught that we are ugly, that the physical is sinful, that physical pleasure is wrong, and yet, through the magic of music we resist such teachings with a philosophy that refuses to separate feeling from thought, body from soul. When we dance we are arguing that life is wholistic.
R&B/Rap is philosophically important. To prioritize pleasure, a pleasure that we can produce and reproduce without “buying” something, is extremely important to maintaining mental health. To understand self-production as an activity that each of us can engage, rather than an artifact we own or purchase, such as an article of clothing, or a fat bank account, or even a fine physique; this understanding is key to why we persist in singing and dancing to the music. We do so because ultimately we can not exist without recreating our sense of self, our awareness of our own beauty and goodness. And that is why we could, indeed “had to” sing a song in a strange land.
In our communities, aesthetic (a sense of beauty and goodness) awareness is generally an unconscious awareness, nevertheless, such self awareness is absolutely necessary to life, for we can not go on if we do not believe that there is some good, some beauty within us. That screaming and hollering that the singers do, those songs that move us so, all of that informs us that within each of our lives there has been some good, some beauty, even if only momentary and fleeting, even if we are crying and moaning because that good thing is now gone, even if we believe the exquisite moment shall never return, we are still emboldened by the fact that we can stand and proudly proclaim, “I have had my fun / if I don’t get well no more.”
Finally, fun is subversive, especially when one is the object of oppression and exploitation. For when the sufferers find a way to have fun, we not only momentarily transcend our suffering, we affirm that there is a part of us, an enjoyment within us which we share with our fellow sufferers that is beyond the reach of the overseer, the master, the banker, our creditors, the boss, the hoss, and any damn other person or thing that is intent on making our lives miserable. This subversive factor is the ultimate meaning of R&B/Rap, and is also the source of why the music is always damned by the psychological gatekeepers, i.e. ministers, politicians, educators & status quo intellectuals. When social pundits argue that R&B, or Rap, or any other contemporary popular music is a morally corrupting force, or that those forms “are not music,” that our music needs to be censored if not actually prohibited, then what they are saying is that we have no right to decide what to do with our own bodies for good or for ill.
R&B asserts that “I’m three times seven / and that makes 21 / ain’t nobody’s bizness / what I do.” The ultimate determination of self is the right of self expression, and those who would limit, circumscribe, prohibit, or otherwise legislate our self expression are the very same people who have no problem with capitalism (and if they were alive during slavery time, ditto, they would have no problem with slavery). In fact, during slavery time there were those who tried to stop enslaved Africans from singing and dancing. The power of popular music is that it asserts our existence centered in a pleasurable self-determined celebration. When we holler, “let the good times roll / laissez les bon temps roullez,” we are actually uttering a war cry against psychological oppression. And when we produce our own popular music and dance outside of the purview of the status quo, then we are (re)creating the/our “living self.”
There is more, of course, just as surely as Sunday morning follows Saturday night, but that more is for another time. Right now, I just wanted to share with you the “psychological significance” and “aesthetically-African origins” of popular American music; in other words, I just wanted to tell you why it is so important for us to have some fun!
—kalamu ya salaam
DO RIGHT WOMEN: Black Women, Eroticism and Classic Blues 1. I'm going to show you women, honey, how to cock it on the wall. Now you can snatch it, you can break it, you can hang it on the wall Throw it out the window, see if you can catch it 'fore it fall --Louise Johnson "I fantasize spanking you. What sexual fantasies do you have?" an ex-lover intoned into the phone receiver. As she spoke I remembered a time when we were in one of those classical numeral positions and at a peak moment I felt the sharp smack of her bare palm on my bare butt--not in pain nor anger, but surprisingly, for me, I remember a tingle of pleasure, the pleasure in knowing that I had been the catalyst for her, a person of supreme sexual control, going over the edge. After I hung up, I admitted to myself that like many males my main fantasy was to be sexually attractive to and sexually satisfying for thousands of women. I "fantasize" sexually engaging at least a quarter of the women I see, ninety percent of whom I don't know beyond eyeing them for a moment as I drive down some street, spot them in a store, in an office building, in line paying a bill, or walking ahead of me out of a movie. I remember in one of my writing workshops in the fall of 1995 I shocked a room of young men by declaring that sexual expression among male homosexuals represented the fullest flowering of male sexuality. Some reacted predictably from a position of virulent homophobia and others were just genuinely skeptical. I explained that if he could, assuming that there were no restraints and that it was consensual sex between adults, then the average American male would engage in promiscuous sex every time they felt aroused--which undoubtedly would be often. A major brake on our promiscuousness is the unwillingness of women to cooperate with male socio-biological urges. I asked one of the more skeptical homophobes in my workshop, "haven't you seen a woman today you wished that you could get down with, a woman whom you didn't know personally?" He smiled and answered "yeah, on my way to class just now." After the laughter died down, I told him that this is indeed what often happens with gay sex precisely because there is no restraint other than desire and safety. American male sexuality is, among other characteristics, a celebration of the moment. Our fantasy is immediate sexual gratification with whomever catches our fancy. Most of the time we deny, transfer, repress, or misrepresent these fantasies. However, in popular music we forcefully articulate the male desire to wantonly enjoy coition with women. Thus, these 90's rap and r&b ("rhythm and booty") records about rampant sex with a bevy of willing cuties is not just adolescent, post-puberty fantasizing but rather is an accurate projection of ethically unchecked and socially unshaped male sexuality--a sexuality which projects the male as the dominating, aggressive subject and the female as the pliant (if not willing) object of consumption. Here is a significant cultural crossroads. I hold no truck in prudish and/or puritanical views of sex; while I abhor pornography (the commidifying of sex and the reifying of a person or gender into a sexual object), I am opposed to censorship. The status quo would have the whole debate about the representation of sexuality boil down to either reticence or profligacy. The truth is those extremes are not different roads. They are simply the up and down side of the status quo view which either come from or lead to the objectifying of sexual relations. Objectifying sexual relations is a completely different road from the frank articulation of eroticism. Within the American cultural context, this difference is nowhere as clearly presented as in the early, 1920's woman-centered music known as "Classic Blues." 2. You never get nothing by being an angel child, You better change your ways and get real wild, I want to tell you something and I wouldn't tell you no lie, Wild women are the only kind that really get by, 'Cause wild women don't worry, wild women don't have the blues. --Ida Cox Known today as "Classic Blues" divas, these women married big city dreams with post-plantation realties and, by using the vernacular and folk-wisdom of the people, gave voice to our people's hopes and sorrows and specifically spoke to the yearnings and aspirations of Black women recently migrated to the city from the country. While many women took up domestic and factory work, the entertainment industry also was a major employer of Black women. In Black Pearls author Daphne Harrison sets the stage: Young black women with talent began to emerge from the churches, schools, and clubs where they had sung, recited, danced, or played, and ventured into the more lucrative aspects of the entertainment world, in response to the growing demand for talent in the theaters and traveling shows. The financial rewards often out-weighed community censure, for by 1910-1911 they could usually earn upwards of fifty dollars a week, while their domestic counterparts earned only eight to ten dollars. Many aspiring young women went to the cities as domestics in hope of ultimately getting on stage. While the domestics' social contacts were severely limited, mainly to the white employers and to their own families, the stage performer had an admiring audience in addition to family and friends. (Harrison, page 21) The Classic Blues divas who emerged from this social milieu were more than entertainers, they were role models, advice givers, and a social force for cultural transformation. Ma Rainey is considered the mother of the Classic Blues. "She jes' catch hold of us, somekinaway." scripts poet Sterling Brown in giving a right on the money description of the cathartic power of Ma Rainey's majestic embrace which wrapped up her audience and reared them into the discovery of self-actulization's rarefied air. "Git way inside us, / Keep us strong" (Brown, pages 62 - 63). Birthed by these women, we became our selves as a people and as sexually active individuals. Twenties Classic Blues was the first and only time that independent African-American women were at the creative center of Black musical culture. Neither before nor since have women been as economically or psychologically "liberated". In a country dominated by patriarchal values, mores and male leadership (should we more accurately say "overseership"?), Classic Blues is remarkable. Remember that although slavery ended with the Civil War in 1866 and the passage of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, suffrage for women was not enacted until 1920 with the 19th amendment. The suffrage movement, which had been dominated by White women, was also intimately aligned with the temperance movement, a movement which demonized jazz and blues. Black women were a major organizing and stabilizing force in and on behalf of the Black community between post-Reconstruction and the Twenties. Historian Darlene Hine notes: The second period began in the 1890s and ended around 1930 and is best referred to as the First Era of the Black Woman...black women were among the most active and determined agents for community building and race survival. Their style was concentrated on internal developments within the black community and is reflected in the massive mobilization that led to the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that boasted a membership of over 50,000 by 1914. ... Black women perfected a "politics of respectability," a "culture of dissemblance," and a cult of secrecy and silence. (Hine, page 118-119) But a curious dynamic has always animated Black America--while those who hoped to assimilate, to be accepted and/or to achieve "wealth and happiness" strove for and advocated a "politics of respectability" the folk masses sang a blues song a la Langston Hughes' mule who was black and didn't give a damn, if you wanted him, you had to take him just as he am. In other words, the blues aesthetic upsets the respectability applecart. And at the core of the blues aesthetic is a celebration of the erotic. I content that this is a major cultural battle. Eroticism is the motor that drives Black culture (or, more precisely, drives those aspects of our culture which are not assimilative in representation). Whereas, polite society was too nice to be nasty, blues people felt if it wasn't nasty, then how could it be nice. As James Cone notes in his perceptive and important book The Spirituals and the Blues: It has been the vivid description of sex that caused many church people to reject the blues as vulgar or dirty. The Christian tradition has always been ambiguous about sexual intercourse, holding it to be divinely ordained yet the paradigm of rebellious passion. Perhaps this accounts for the absence of sex in the black spirituals and other black church music. ... In the blues there is an open acceptance of sexual love, and it is described in most vivid terms... (Cone, page 117) Many of us are totally confused about eroticism. Most of us don't appreciate the frank eroticism of nearly all African-heritage cultures which have not been twisted by outside domination (e.g. Christianity and Islam). Commenting on "Songs Of Ritual License From Midwestern Nigeria" African Art Historian Jean Borgtatti notes: The songs themselves represent an occasion of ritualized verbal license in which men and women ridicule each other's genitalia and sexual habits. Normally such ridicule would be an anti-social act in the extreme... In the ritual context, however, the songs provide recognition, acceptance, and release of that tension which exists between the sexes in all cultures, and so neutralize this potential threat to community stability. (Borgatti, page 60) The songs in question range from explicit and detailed put-downs to this lyric sung by a woman which could be a twenties blues lyric. When I Refuse Him When I refuse him, the man is filled with sorrow When I refuse him, the man is filled with sorrow When my "thing" is bright and happy like a baby chick, it drives him wild When my "thing" is bright and happy like a baby chick, it drives him wild My argument is that socially expressed eroticism is part and parcel of our heritage. In the American context, this eroticism is totally absent in the "lyrics" of the spirituals (albeit not totally suppressed in the rituals of black church liturgy). On the other hand, Black eroticism is best expressed and preserved in the blues (beginning in the early 1920s) and in its modern musical offshoots. Erotic representation is another major point of divergence. Euro-centric representations of eroticism have been predominately visual and textual whereas African-heritage representations have been mainly aural (music) and oral (boasts, toasts, dozens, etc.). The eye sees but does not feel. Mainly the brain responds to and interprets visual stimuli whereas the body as a whole responds to sound. Moreover, textual erotic representation invites and encourages private and individual activity. E.g. you are probably alone reading this--if not alone in fact certainly alone in effect as there may be others present where you are reading but they are not reading over your shoulder or sitting beside you reading with you. Moreover, you most certainly are not reading this aloud for general consumption. If you do read it aloud it is probably a one-to-one private act. Aural and oral erotic representation, on the other hand, require a participating audience, become a ritual of arousal. Music, in particular, is not only social in focus, music also privileges communal eroticism. Thus, whereas text encourages individualism and self-evaluations of deviance, shame and guilt; musical eroticism encourages coupling, group identification and self-evaluations of shared erotic values, sexual self worth and pleasure. Finally, within the African-American context, sound is used as language to communicate what English words cannot. The African American folk saying, "when you moan the devil don't know what you talking about" contains an ironic edge that goes beyond spiritual commentaries on good and evil. The White oppressor/slave master, i.e. "the devil," does not understand the meaning of moaning partly because of intentional deception on the part of the moaners but also because English lexicon is limited. Moans, wails, cries, hums and other vocal devices communicate feelings, moods, desires and are the core of blues expression. This is why the blues is more powerful than the lyrics of the songs, why blues lyrics do not translate well to the cold page (when the sound of the words is not manifested much of the true meaning of the words is lost), and why blues cannot be accurately analyzed purely from an intellectual standpoint. Moreover, erotic desires, frustrations and fulfillments--the most frequent emotions articulated in the blues--are some of the strongest emotions routinely manifested by human beings. In the 1920's mainstream America was nowhere near ready to acknowledge and celebrate eroticism. Thus, as far as most Americans were concerned, a frank and explicit expression of eroticism was shameful. This social "shame" became the singular trademark of the blues. Moreover, the identification of sexual explicitness with the blues was so thorough that sexually explicit language became known as "blue" as in "cussin' up a blue streak" or the kind of "blue material" which was often "banned in Boston." Within the context of American Puritanism and Christian anti-eroticism, it is important to note that "blue" erotic music was first brought to national prominence not by men but rather by women. This privileging of feminine sexuality was an unplanned result of the newly developed recording industry's quest for profits. When "Okeh Records sold seventy-five thousand copies of 'Crazy Blues' in the first month and surpassed the one million mark during its first year in the stores" (Barlow, page 128) the hunt was on. Recording and selling "race records" (i.e. blues) was like a second California gold rush. There was no aesthetic nor philosophical interest in the blues. This was strictly business. Moreover, during the first years of the race record craze, because race records were sold almost exclusively to a Black audience there was less censorship and interference than there otherwise might have been. Black tastes and cultural values drove the market during the twenties. There were both positive and negative results to this commercialization. On the positive side of the ledger, the mechanical reproduction of millions of blues disks made the music far more accessible to the public in general, and black people in particular. Blues entered an era of unprecedented growth and vitality, surfacing as a national phenomenon by the 1920s. As a result, a new generation of African-American musicians were able to learn from the commercial recordings, to expand their mastery over the various idioms and enhance their instrumental and vocal techniques. The local and regional African-American folk traditions that spawned blues were, in turn, infused with new songs, rhythms, and styles. Thus, the record business was an important catalyst in the development of blues that also facilitated their entrance into the mainstream of popular American music. On the other hand, the transformation of living musical traditions into commodities to be sold in a capitalist marketplace was bound to have its drawbacks. For one thing, the profits garnered from the sale of blues records invariably went into the coffers of the white businessmen who owned or managed the record companies. The black musicians and vocalists who created the music in the recording studios received a pittance. Furthermore, the major record companies went to great lengths to get the blues to conform to their Tin Pan Alley standards, and they often expected black recording artists to conform to racist stereotypes inherited from blackface minstrelsy. The industry also like to record white performers' "cover" versions of popular blues to entice the white public to buy the records and to "upgrade" the music. Upgrading was synonymous with commercializing; it attempted to bring African-American music more into line with European musical conventions, while superimposing on it a veneer of middle-class Anglo-American respectability. These various practices deprived a significant percentage of recorded blues numbers of their African characteristics and more radical content. (Barlow, pages 123-124) When the depression hit and Black audiences no longer had significant disposable income to spend on recordings, the acceptable styles of recorded blues changed drastically. The onset of the depression quickly reversed the fortunes of the entire record industry; sales fell from over $100 million in 1927 to $6 million in 1933. Consequently, race record releases were drastically cut back, field recording ventures into the South were discontinued, the labels manufactured fewer and fewer copies of each title, and record prices fell from seventy-five to thirty-five cents a disk. Whereas the average race record on the market sold approximately ten thousand copies in the mid-twenties, it plummeted to two thousand in 1930, and bottomed out at a dismal four hundred in 1932. The smaller labels were gradually forced out of business, while the major record companies with large catalogues that went into debt were purchased by more prosperous media corporations based in radio and film. The record companies with race catalogues that totally succumbed to the economic downturn were Paramount, Okeh, and Gennett. By 1933, the race record industry appeared to be a fatality of the depression. (Barlow, page 133) The Classic Blues divas founded and shaped the form of Black music's initial recording success in the twenties. By the thirties women were completely erased as cultural leaders of Black music. While there was certainly an overriding economic imperative to the cutback, there was also a cultural/philosophical imperative to cut out women altogether. There was no precedent in either White or Black American culture for women as leaders in articulating eroticism. This significant feminizing of eroticism was predicated on an unprecedented albeit short-lived change in the physical and economic social structure of the Black community converging with a period of massive national economic growth and far reaching mass media technological innovations in recordings, radio, and film. Despite optimal economic and technological incentives, the twenties rise of the newly emergent Classic Blues diva was no cakewalk, not only because of the virulence of class exploitation, racism and sexism but also because of cultural antagonisms. Regardless of race, there was an open conflict between the blues and social respectability. The self-assertive, female Classic Blues singer was perceived as a threat to both the American status quo as well as to many of the major political forces seeking to enlarge the status quo (i.e. the petty bourgeoise-oriented talented tenth). Moreover, unlike many post-Motown, popular female singers who are produced, directed and packaged by males, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace, and the incomparable "Empress" of the blues, Bessie Smith, were more than simple fronts for turn-of-the-century blues Svengalies. Yes, men such as Perry Bradford, Clarence Williams, and Thomas Dorsey were major composers, arrangers, accompanists and producers for many of the Classic Blues divas; and yes, these women often were surrounded and beset by men who attempted to physically, financially and psychologically abuse them, nevertheless the Classic Blues divas were neither pushovers nor tearful passive victims. Emerging from southern backgrounds rich in religious and folk music traditions, they were able to capture in song the sensibilities of black women--North and South--who struggled daily for physical, psychological, and spiritual balance. They did this by calling forth the demons that plagued women and exorcising them in public. Alienation, sex and sexuality, tortured love, loneliness, hard times, marginality, were addressed with an openness that had not previously existed. The blues women accomplished this with their unique flair for dramatizing their texts and performances. They introduced and refined vocal strategies that gave the lyrics added power. Some of these were instrumentality, voices growling and sliding like trombones, or wailing and piercing like clarinets; unexpected word stress; vocal breaks in antiphony with the accompaniment; syncopated phrasing; unlimited improvisation on repetitious refrains or phrases. These innovations, in tandem with the talented instrumentalists who accompanied the blues women, advanced the development of vocal and instrumental jazz. Of equal significance, because they were such prominent public figures, the blues women presented alternative models of attitude and behavior for black women during the 1920s. They demonstrated that black women could be financially independent, outspoken, and physically attractive. They dressed to emphasize their symbolic importance to their audiences. The queens, regal in their satins, laces, sequins and beads, and feather boas trailing from their bronze or peaches-and-cream shoulders, wore tiaras that sparkled in the lights. The queens held court in dusty little tents, in plush city cabarets, in crowded theaters, in dance halls, and wherever else their loyal subjects would flock to pay homage. They rode in fine limousines, in special railroad cars, and in whatever was available, to carry them from country to town to city and back, singing as they went. The queens filled the hearts and souls of their subjects with joy and laughter and renewed their spirits with the love and hope that came from a deep well of faith and will to endure. (Harrison, pages 221-222) Never since have women performed major leadership roles in the music industry, especially not African-American women. The entertainment industry intentionally curtailed the trend of highly vocal, independent women. Most of the Classic Blues divas, it must be noted, were not svelte sex symbols comparable in either features or figure to White women. The blues shouter was generally a robust, brown or dark-skinned, African-featured women who thought of and carried herself as the equal of any man. America fears the drum and psychologically fears the bearer of the first drum, i.e. the feminine heartbeat that we hear in the womb. Bessie Smith and her peers, were sexually assertive "wild" women, well endowed with the necessary physical and psychological prowess to take care of themselves. Actively bisexual, Bessie Smith belied the common "asexual" labeling of stout women, such as is suggested by Nikki Giovanni in "Woman Poem" it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat (Giovanni, page 55) "No sex" was not the reality of the Classic Blues divas. Yes, many of them were then and would now be considered "fat" but they were far from celibate (by either choice or circumstance). Or, as the sarcastic blues lyric notes: I'm a big fat mama, got meat shakin' on my bones A big fat mama, with plenty meat shakin' on my bones Every time I shake my stuff, some skinny gal loses her home In recent years the best description of the liberating function Blues divas served for the Black community is contained in Alice Walker's powerful novel, The Color Purple. Walker's memorable and mythic character Shug Avery is an active bisexual blues singer a la Bessie Smith. Shug instructs the heroine Celie in the recognition and celebration of herself as a sexual being: Why Miss Celie, [Shug] say, you still a virgin. What? I ast. Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody. It git hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But other parts good too, she say. Lot of sucking go on, here and there, she say. Lot of finger and tongue work. (Walker, page 81) Shug then instructs Celie "Here, take this mirror and go look at yourself down there, I bet you never seen it, have you?" The blues becomes a means not only of social self expression but also of sexual self discovery, especially for women. In a life often defined by brutality, exploitation and drudgery, the female discovery and celebration of self-determined sexual pleasure is important. Thus the blues affirms an essential and explicit reversal. We have been taught that we are ugly, the blues celebrates our beauty and this is especially true for Black women. I lie back on the bed and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick the looking glass tween my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose. It a lot prettier than you thought, ain't it. she say from the door. It mine, I say. Where the button? Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little. I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me this the right button to mash. (Walker, page 82) The major characteristic of the Classic Blues is that the vast majority of the songs were sexually oriented and nearly all of the singers were women. In his major study of Black music, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) notes: The great classic blues singers were women... Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson note from a list of predominately classic blues titles, taken from the record catalogues of three "race" companies. "The majority of these formal blues are sung from the point of view of woman... upwards of seventy-five per cent of the songs are written from the woman's point of view. Among the blues singers who have gained a more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man's name to be found." (Jones, page 91) Jones goes on to answer the obvious question of why women dominated in this area: Minstrelsy and vaudeville not only provided employment for a great many women blues singers but helped to develop the concept of the professional Negro female entertainer. Also, the reverence in which most of white society was held by Negroes gave to those Negro entertainers an enormous amount of prestige. Their success was also boosted at the beginning of this century by the emergence of many white women as entertainers and in the twenties, by the great swell of distaff protest regarding women's suffage. All these factors came together to make the entertainment field a glamorous one for Negro women, providing an independence and importance not available in other areas open to them--the church, domestic work, or prostitution. (Jones, page 93) Ann Douglas, in her important book Mongrel Manhattan In The 1920s, Terrible Honesty identifies the twenties as a period of (quoting from the dustjacket) "historical transformation: blacks and whites, men and women together created a new American culture, fusing high art and low, espousing the new mass media, repudiating the euphemisms of outdated gentility in favor of a boldly masculinized outspokenness, bringing the African-American folk and popular art heritage briefly but irrevocably into the mainstream." Douglas believes the birth of modernism required the death of the white matriarch. "The two movements, cultural emancipation of America from foreign influences and celebration of its black-and-white heritage, had for a brief but crucial moment a common opponent and a common agenda: the demolition of that block to modernity, or so she seemed, the powerful white middleclass matriarch of the recent Victorian past. My black protagonists were not matrophobic to the same degree as my white ones were, but the New Negro, too, had something to gain from the demise of the Victorian matriarch." (Douglas, page 6) Such anti-matriarch sentiments directly clashed with the reality of female-led Classic Blues. We are forced to ask the question: does the freedom of the Black man require the destruction of the Black woman? To the degree that the Black woman is a matriarch, a self-possessed and self-directed person, to that same degree there will inevitably be a conflict with the standards of modern America which are misogynist in general and anti-matriarchal in particular. Thanks to the revolt against the matriarch, Christian beliefs and middleclass values would never again be a prerequisite for elite artistic success in America. Nor would plumpness ever again be a broadly sanctioned type of female beauty; the 1920s put the body type of the stout and full-figured matron decisively out of fashion. Once the matriarch and her notions of middle-class piety, racial superiority, and sexual repression were discredited, modern America, led by New York, was free to promote, not an egalitarian society, but something like an egalitarian popular and mass culture aggressively appropriating forms and ideas across race, class, and gender lines. (Douglas, page 8) Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, et al may seem to contradict Douglas' thesis but actually the disappearance of big, Black women from leadership in entertainment is proof that Douglas was correct in her assessment of modern America. Among Black people, the Black matriarch continued to reign in the arenas of church, education and community service. However, to the degree that Black people adopt modern American ways to that same degree our culture inevitably becomes "masculinized" and "anti-matriarchal." This is inevitable because, as Douglas' book demonstrates in great detail, American modernism is based on the refutation of the woman as culture bearer. Yet culture bearer is precisely the role that the Black woman fulfills. "The blues woman is the priestess or prophet of the people. She verbalizes the emotion for herself and the audience, articulating the stresses and strains of human relationships" (Cone, page 107) proudly proclaims theologist James Cone, a Christian man who had sense enough to sus out the potency of blues priestesses, a potency which is overtly sexual but which also made strong social, political and economic statements (e.g. "T.B. Blues" by Ida Cox decrying poor health conditions and "Poor Man Blues" by Bessie Smith condemning class exploitation). 3. There's a new game, that can't be beat, You move most everything 'cept your feet, Called 'Whip it to a jelly, stir it in a bowl', You just whip it to a jelly, if you like good jelly roll I wear my skirt up to my knees And whip that jelly with who I please. Oh, whip it to a jelly, mmmmmm, mmmm Mmmmm, mmmm, mmmmm, mmmm --Clara Smith In western culture the celebration of dignity and eroticism does not and can not take place simultaneously. From Freud's theories of sexuality which focus for the most part on penile power to the church which goes so far as to debase the body as a product of original sin, there is no room for the celebration of eroticism, and certainly no conception whatsoever of the female as an active purveyor of erotic power. To me, the blues is clearly an alternative to Freud and Jesus with respect to coming to terms with our bodies. James Cone correctly analyzes this alternative. Theologically, the blues reject the Greek distinction between the soul and the body, the physical and the spiritual. They tell us that there is no wholeness without sex, no authentic love without the feel and touch of the physical body. The blues affirm the authenticity of sex as the bodily expression of black soul. White people obviously cannot understand the love that black people have for each other. People who enslave humanity cannot understand the meaning of human freedom; freedom comes only to those who struggle for it in the context of the community of the enslaved. People who destroy physical bodies with guns, whips, and napalm cannot know the power of physical love. Only those who have been hurt can appreciate the warmth of love that proceeds when persons touch, feel, and embrace each other. The blues are openness to feeling and the emotions of physical love. (Cone, pages 117-118) Moreover, the fact that Freud's theories find their first popular American currency in the 1920s at the same time as Black women's articulation of the Classic Blues suggests an open contest between widely divergent viewpoints. The Classic Blues offered an unashamed and assertive alternative to both the traditional puritanical views of sexuality as well as alternative to the new Freudian psychological views of sexuality. Bessie Smith and company were battling Jesus on the right and Freud on the left. The puritans with their scarlet letters projected the virgin/whore (Mary mother vs. Mary Madaglene) dualism. For the most part, Freud either ignored the psychology of women, thought they were unfathomable, or else projected onto them the infamous "penis envy." The period between the Civil War and World War II is the birth of American modernism. It is also the period when the bustle (an artificial attempt to mimic the physique of Black women) was a fashion standard. While it is not within the purview of this essay to address the question of how is it that Black buttocks become a standard of femininity for white society, it is important to at least mention this, so that we can contextualize the battle of worldviews. Freud proposed the "id" as the controlling element of the civilized individual. The purpose of Black music was precisely to surmount the "id." The individual looses control, is possessed. This trance state is a sought for and enjoyed experience. Rather than be in control we desire to be mounted, i.e. to merge with and be controlled by a greater force outside ourselves. Blues culture validated ritual and merger of the micro-individual into the social and spiritual macro-environment. In this way blues may be understood as an alternative conception of human existence. In a major theoretical opus on the blues, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, author Paul Garon argues To those who suggest that the blues singers are 'preoccupied' with sexuality, let us point out that all humanity is preoccupied with sexuality, albeit most often in a repressive way; the blues singers, by establishing their art on a relatively nonrepressive level, strip the 'civilised' disguise from humanity's preoccupation, thus allowing the content to stand as it really is: eroticism as the source of happiness. The blues, as it reflects human desire, projects the imaginative possibilities of true erotic existence. Hinted at are new realities of non-repressive life, dimly grasped in our current state of alienation and repression, but nonetheless implicit in the character of sexuality as it is treated in the blues. Desire defeats the existing morality--poetry comes into being. (Garon, pages 66-67) Musicologist/theologist Jon Michael Spencer takes Garon's argument deeper when he comments in his book Blues and Evil: Garon was seemingly drawing on the thought of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, who said in his history of sexuality that if sex is repressed and condemned to prohibition then the person who holds forth in such language, with seeming intentionality, moves, to a certain degree, beyond the reach of power and upsets established law. Sex also might have been a means for "blues people" to feel potent in an oppressive society that made them feel socially and economically impotent, especially since sexuality inside the black community was one area that was free from the restraints of "the law" and the lynch mob. In essence, the Classic Blues as articulated by Black women was not only a conscious articulation of the social self and validation of the feminine sexual self, the Classic Blues was also a total philosophical alternative to the dominant White society. In this regard two incidents in the life of Bessie Smith serve as archetypal illustration. The first is Bessie Smith confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan and the second is Smith's confrontation with Carl Van Vechten's wife. The Klan is the apotheosis of racist, right wing America. Carl Van Vechten is the personification of liberal America. In Chris Albertson biography of Bessie Smith he describes Smith's July 1927 confrontation with the Klan that occurred when sheeted Klan members were attempting to "collapse Bessie's tent; they had already pulled up several stakes." When a band member told Smith what was going on the following ensued. "Some shit!" she said, and ordered the prop boys to follow her around the tent. When they were within a few feet of the Klansmen, the boys withdrew to a safe distance. Bessie had not told them why she wanted them, and one look at the white hoods was all the discouragement they needed. Not Bessie. She ran toward the intruders, stopped within ten feet of them, placed one hand on her hip, and shook a clenched fist at the Klansmen. "What the fuck you think you're doin'?" she shouted above the sound of the band. "I'll get the whole damn tent out here if I have to. You just pick up them sheets and run!" The Klansmen, apparently too surprised to move, just stood there and gawked. Bessie hurled obscenities at them until they finally turned and disappeared quietly into the darkness. "I ain't never heard of such shit," said Bessie, and walked back to where her prop boys stood. "And as for you, you ain't nothin' but a bunch of sissies." Then she went back into the tent as if she had just settled a routine matter. (Albertson, pages 132-133) Bessie Smith was not an apolitical entertainer. She was a fighter whose sexual persona was aligned with a strong sense of political self-determination. This "strength" of character is another reason that singers such as Bessie Smith were widely celebrated in the Black community. Furthermore, Smith not only was not intimidated by the right, she was equally unimpressed with the liberal sector of American society, as the incident at the Van Vechten household demonstrates. Along with his wife Fania Marinoff, a former Russian ballerina, Carl Van Vechten ("Carlo") was the major patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Albertson describes "Carlo" as an individual who "typified the upper-class white liberal of his day." (Albertson, page 138) Van Vechten loved the ghetto's pulsating music and strapping young men, and he maintained a Harlem apartment--decorated in black with silver stars on the ceiling and seductive red lights--for his notorious nocturnal gatherings. His favorite black singers were Ethel waters, Clara Smith, and Bessie. (Albertson, page 139) Van Vechten persistently sought Bessie Smith as a salon guest. She resisted but finally relented after continuous entreaties from one of her band members, composer and accompanist Porter Grainger, who desperately wished to be included among Van Vechten's "in crowd." Smith finally agreed to make a quick between sets appearance. Bessie exquisitely sang "six or seven numbers" taking a strong drink between each number. And then it was time to rush back to the Lafayette Theatre to do their second show of the night. All went well until an effusive woman stopped them a few steps from the front door. It was Bessie's hostess, Fania Marinoff Van Vechten. "Miss Smith," she said, throwing her arms around Bessie's massive neck and pulling it forward, "you're not leaving without kissing me goodbye." That was all Bessie needed. "Get the fuck away from me," she roared, thrusting her arms forward and knocking the woman to the floor, "I ain't never heard of such shit!" In the silence that followed, Bessie stood in the middle of the foyer, ready to take on the whole crowd. "It's all right, Miss Smith," [Carl Van Vechten] said softly, trailing behind the threesome in the hall. "You were magnificent tonight." (Albertson, page 143) What does any of this have to do with eroticism? These are examples of Black womanhood in action accepting no shit from either friend or foe. Blues divas such as Bessie Smith were neither afraid of nor envious of Whites. This social self assuredness is intimately entwined with their sense of sexual self assuredness. As Harrison perceptively points out, the Classic Blues divas "introduced a new, different model of black women--more assertive, sexy, sexually aware, independent, realistic, complex, alive." (Harrison, page 111). These blues singers were eventually replaced in the entertainment sphere by mulatto entertainers and chocolate exotics, Josephine Baker preeminent among them. Significantly, the replacements for Blues divas were popular song stylists who aimed their art at White men rather than at the Black community in general and Black women specifically. The replacements for the big, Black, Classic Blues diva marked the consolidation of the modern entertainment industry's sexual commodification, commercializing and exoticizing of Black female sexuality. Although entertainers from Josephine Baker, to Eartha Kitt, to Dianna Ross, to Tina Turner all started off as Black women they ended up projected as sex symbols adored by a predominately White male audience. In that context, sexuality becomes, at best, symbolic prostitution. The Black woman as exotic-erotic temptress of suppressed White male libidos is the complete antithesis of Classic Blues singer. The Classic Blues singer did not sell her sexuality to her oppressor. This question of cultural and personal integrity marks the difference between the sexual commodification inherent in today's entertainment world (especially when one realizes that the major record buying public for many hardcore rap artists is composed of White teenagers) and the sexual affirmation essential to Classic Blues. Another important point is that Classic Blues celebrated Black eroticism based in a literal "Black, Brown or Beige" body rather than in a "white looking" mulatto body. When we look at pictures of Classic Blues divas, we see our mothers, aunts, and older lady friends. Indeed, by all-American beauty standards most of these women would be considered plain (at best), and many would be called "ugly." For example, Ma Rainey was often crudely and cruelly demeaned. Giles Oakley's book The Devil's Music, A History of the Blues quotes Little Brother Montgomery "Boy, she was the horrible-lookingest thing I ever see!" and Georgia Tom Dorsey "Well, I couldn't say she was a good-looking woman and she was stout. But she was one of the loveliest people I ever worked for or worked with." Oakley opines She was an extraordinary-looking woman, ugly-attractive with a short, stubby body, big-featured face and a vividly painted mouth full of gold teeth; she would be loaded down with diamonds--in her ears, round her neck, in a tiara on her head, on her hands, everywhere. Beads and bangles mingled jingling with the frills on her expensive stage gowns. For a time her trademark was a fabulous necklace of gold coins, from 2.50 dollar coins to heavy 20 dollar 'Eagles' with matching gold earrings. (Oakley, page 99) I'm sure the majority of Ma Rainey's female audience did not fail to notice that Ma Rainey resembled them--she looked like they did and they looked like she did. There is no alienation of physical looks between the Classic Blues singer and the majority of her working class Black audience. Physical-appearance alienation of artist from audience is another byproduct of the commodification of Black music. What started out as a ritual celebration of openly eroticized life was transformed by the entertainment industry into mass-media pornography--the priestess became a prostitute. Albertson's citing of a colorfully written Van Vechten assessment of a Bessie Smith performance clarifies the difference between Bessie Smith performing mainly for Black people and subsequent "Black beauties" (including the famous Cotton Club dancers and singers) performing almost exclusively for Whites. Van Vechten not only points out the literally Black make up of Smith's audience, he also points out how Black women identified with Bessie Smith. Now, inspired partly by the powerfully magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman with her plangent African voice, quivering with passion and pain, sounding as if it had been developed at the sources of the Nile, the black and blue-black crowd, notable for the absence of mulattoes, burst into hysterical, semi-religious shrieks of sorrow and lamentation. Amens rent the air. Little nervous giggles, like the shattering of Venetian glass, shocked our nerves. When Bessie proclaimed, "It's true I loves you, but I won't take mistreatment any mo," a girl sitting beneath our box called "Dat's right! Say it, sister!" (Albertson, page 107) The implication of such example is psychologically far-reaching and explicitly threatening to male chauvinism, as Harrison explicates: ...the silent, suffering woman is replaced by a loud-talking mama, reared-back with one hand on her hip and with the other wagging a pointed finger vigorously as she denounces the two-timing dude. Ntozage Shange, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston employ this scenario as the pivotal point in a negative relationship between the heroine/protagonists and their abusive men. Going public is their declaration of independence. Blues of this nature communicated to women listeners that they were members of a sisterhood that did not have to tolerate mistreatment. (Harrison, page 89) That these women--big, black, tough, non-virginal, sexually aggressive--were superstars of their era is testimony to the strength of a totally oppositional standard of human value. Their value was not one of physical appearance but one of spiritual relevance. And make no mistake, at that time there was no shortage of mulatto chorines and canaries--Lena Horne, archetypal amongst such "All-American beauties." Nor was there an absence of White male sex-lust for exotic-erotic mulattoes. The difference was that during the twenties there was an unassimilated Black audience which self-consciously embraced/squeezed the blacker berry, i.e. the Classic Blues diva. The Classic Blues diva was an extraordinary woman whose relevance to a Black audience has never been approached, not to mention matched. William Barlow's assessment is fundamentally correct. The classic blues women's feminist discourse grappled with the race, class, and sexual injustices they encountered living in urban America. They were outspoken opponents of racial discrimination in all guises, and hence critical of the dominant white social order--even while benefiting from it more than most of their peers. They identified with the struggles of the masses of black people, empathized with the plight of the downtrodden, and sang out for social change. Within the black community, the classic blues women were also critical of the way they were treated by men, challenging the sexual double standard. Concurrently, they reaffirmed and reclaimed their feminine powers--sexual and spiritual--to remake the world in their own image and to their own liking. This included freedom of choice across the social spectrum--from political to sexual resistance, from black nationalism to lesbianism. Like the first-generation rural blues troubadours, the classic blues women were cultural rebels, ahead of the times artistically and in the forefront of resistance to all the various forms of domination they encountered. (Barlow, pages 180-181) At the essential core of the Classic Blues was a throbbing, vital eroticism, an eroticism that manifested itself in the lifestyle and subject matter of the Classic Blues divas. Although we can analyze in hindsight, the ultimate manifestation of blue eroticism is not to be found nor appreciated in intellectualism but in its funky sound which must be experienced to be fully appreciated. Once again, Alice Walker's The Color Purple is exemplar in portraying the importance of the blue erotic sound--an eroticism best articulated by Black women. Shug say to Squeak, I mean, Mary Agnes, You ought to sing in public. Mary Agnes say, Naw. She think cause she don't sing big and broad like Shug nobody want to hear her. But Shug say she wrong. What about all them funny voices you hear singing in church? Shug say. What about all them sounds that sound good but they not the sounds you thought folks could make? What bout that? Then she start moaning. Sound like death approaching, angels can't prevent it. It raise the hair on the back of your neck. But it really sound sort of like panthers would sound if they could sing. I tell you something else, Shug say to Mary Agnes, listening to you sing, folks git to thinking bout a good screw. Aw, Miss Shug, say Mary Agnes, changing color. Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck. (Walker, page 120) WORKS CITED Albertson, Chris. Bessie. Braircliff: Stein and Day Paperback, 1985 (Originally issued 1972) Barlow, William. Looking Up At Down. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989 Borgatti, Jean. "Songs Of Ritual License From Midwestern Nigeria" in Alcheringa Ethnopoetics (New Series Volume 2, Number 1). Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg, editors. Boston: Boston University, 1976 Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Michael S. Harper, editor. Chicago: TriQuarterly Books, 1989 Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1972 Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995 Garon, Paul. Blues & The Poetic Spirit. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975 Giovanni, Nikki. The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. New York: William Morrow, 1996 Harrison, Daphne Duval. Black Pearls, Blues Queens of the 1920s. Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990 Hine, Darlene Clark. Speak Truth To Power. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1996 Jones, LeRoi. Blues People. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963 Oakley, Giles. The Devil's Music, A History of the Blues. New York: Harvest/HBJ book, 1976 Spencer, Jon Michael. Blues and Evil. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993 Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books/Washington Square Press, 1982 -------------------------- —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
4 MOVEMENTS / 12 MOMENTS
IN THE LIFE OF AN EX-SLAVE
Long Live Assata!
1.1
I'm not afraid to die but I am afraid I'm going to die. Afraid that, outside of a grave, there will not be one square inch of earth on which I can reside; afraid that my enemies will not allow me to breathe unless concrete and steel coffin me; afraid that this sweet island, which has been my sanctuary, will be curdled into a tropical casket.
1.2
For we who have been political prisoners, long term incarceration in modern Amerika is a certain death—it is not like South Africa's Robben Island where a number of movement men came out stronger, and it is certainly not the same as for those who go in unconscious and fly out as dragons both their wings and their fierceness engendered by the education and self-education that one can extract from the school of captivity. No, I am thinking about those of us whom they want not merely to confine and control, but those of us whose spirits they want to thoroughly crush; we are never released from prison unscathed—if we escape that is different, but if they release us, our freedom inevitably means the authorities have successfully, in some nefarious way or another, reprogrammed us to accept the world as they have constructed society or to either self-destruct in fits of rage or in spasms of insanity.
I know what I am saying. I know Huey Newton was never the same after prison. I know many of my comrades who remained there for ten, for twelve, for twenty years, I know if and when they are released they are deranged even if they really believe they are still ready for the revolution. I would never publicly give the government the satisfaction of recognizing such effectiveness, but I know there is no life after prison for people like me. The mind games, the chemicals they feed us in substances they claim is food, the constant dehumanization of strip searches: fingers forced into your everywhere, beneath each fold of flesh, piercing each cavity. And not just the dignity stripping of naked meat inspection, but also the simultaneous twisting of the ephemeral web that is one's consciousness, one's sense of self. Literally who we are becomes different after we have been systematically and scientifically fucked with by experts at mind games.
1.3
So you see, it was either escape, which I did, or die.
I am a runaway slave in an era when the descendants of slaves are well paid in the employ of both consuming and perpetuating big house fantasies. An era where living on the edge seems totally nonsensical, totally unnecessary to those reared on television and cyberspace, corrupted by creature comforts as seemingly innocuous as fast food hamburgers and video games, sports events and evangelical churches.
The mantle of conformity fits us so snugly that those of us who choose naked resistance rather than wear the weave of exploitation, we appear to be no more relevant than homeless bag people existing on the fringe of society, scavenging to survive as we mutter incoherent inanities about how bad the good life is.
Indeed, the guardians of good times tell everyone that not only are we maroons crazy, but worse, because we refuse to join the parade of collaborators with the status quo, we are painted as failures who are afraid to grasp the success that is available to any and all of us who would pledge allegiance to taking advantage of others.
And where can I run to now that capitalism is global and the liberated zones are nearly all paved over and billboarded? If Cuba goes under where will I be able to stand tall? What other country would endure the economic whippings administered to anyone who shelters me? What other nation would (or could afford to) refuse the bounty the government of my tormentors offer for my head, my body?
1.4
Though I rose from the dead once before, I do not believe in miracles. I do not believe if they entrap me this time that I will be able to live within the grip of their murderous clutches.
My strong instinct for survival, so strong at times that I have done what the normal person can not even imagine, indeed, I have done what I could not imagine, I have done whatever was necessary—and you know that necessity is unsentimental and often very, very ugly, if not sometimes downright amoral. My strong instinct for survival will not allow me to be locked down by them and turned into a person who accepts the status quo, or worse, a person who insanely (and ineffectively) rages against the dark of 24-7-365 nightmares.
After all is said and done, I am a human being who loves life, the beauty of quiet moments, the joy of conversation and sincere touch, the exhilaration of sweating as I labor, as I make love, as I exercise. My instinct for survival is no impulse merely to breathe, my instinct is to live, to love life freely and to be free to love life, and I will never accept slavery no matter how comfortable.
***
2.1
she followed instructions. got out with her hands up. and then the world exploded. she was on the ground, bullets in her. and she did not really know what happened.
a person caught up in the chaos is the most unreliable witness there is.
perhaps if she had been the bullet, she might have seen the whole scene more clearly, or if she were the gun, she would have known who the targets and who was calling the shots. or if she had been the finger on the trigger she might have known the time table, the sequence of events, but she was only the target, and before she was struck had no warning that the bullet was coming, after all, as the medical experts testified at her trial, given her wounds there was no doubt her hands were up in the gesture of surrender, she was following instructions.
she was not the bullet. so at that moment she did not know it had entered her torso, missed vital organs, and ended up lodged near her neck, leaving a mess of rented flesh in its wake, thin streams of thick blood seeping from the open door of the entry point.
nor did she know that the first bullet had a companion who followed closely on its heels like a younger sibling trailing an idolized big brother.
the impact of the first slug spun her around like a rapist sadistically intent on anal penetration.
the second bullet burrowed into her back.
immediately afterward, in the distance she could hear noises and voices. and thankfully so, for although the voices sounded muffled like that time as a child she had an ear infection and her mother poured some heated liquid in her ear and then plugged it with cotton and all day she kept loosing her balance and asking people "what did you say?" she was thankful because at this moment it was strangely comforting, reassuring even, to hear the words "she ain't dead yet" and to know that the "she" who was alive was her.
2.2
life is full of choices, most of them are minor, trivial details and inconsequential chains of events, but kernelled in the ordinary are those little nodes on which turn one's whole existence. why would an assata surrender? perhaps she did not see herself surrendering. perhaps this was just a momentary hassle, a stop and delay tactic. perhaps her gesture was meant to be a diversion. who knows. life is like that. sometimes we ourselves don't know what we are doing even though the doing will have profound and far reaching consequences. who knows. how can anyone know the future?
2.3
the discovery of the future is always an evaluation of the past. we only learn what the future means once it is over, once we have experienced it, once it has become history. and by then it is too late to change anything. we can never fully know anything, least of all exactly what we did and why. our ability to sense reality is too limited to take in everything. we can only ever grasp a small part of the totality of our existence. the trooper with the gun drawn, barking orders, at that moment what was assata thinking?
2.4
have you ever faced a gun beaded on you, an enemy hollering at you? do you know what you would do if you were shot and on the ground, or in the hospital chained to a gurney, or even in a courtroom and lie after lie after lie after lie was going on record against you, and the judge threatens to throw you out of the courtroom if you don't be quiet, and every fiber of your being is quivering with the urge to resist, even though enchained, even though guards are over you, and what do you do?
assata was removed from the courtroom and her comrade too. they were shunted into a side room while the trial proceeded and during that isolation they made love.
your enemies are kangarooing you to an almost certain death sentence or at least life imprisonment and you make the decision. to make love. think about choosing love as an act of resistance at that moment. then think about the bravery to make love.
you are a prisoner. on trial. armed agents are standing just outside the door. most of us would never even have thought of making love. and very few, very, very few of us would have had the bravery to bare our nakedness knowing that at any moment the guards could have busted us in the middle of getting it on.
oh, the adrenaline rush, to steal the sweetness of sex under such conditions. now if there was ever a definition of revolutionary fucking, that was it.
2.5
but every act has its consequence. every movement carries us somewhere else then where we were when we started. and sometimes we think we are ready to travel, but we really don't have a clue as to the magnitude of the trip we blissfully, or blithely, or unknowingly started on.
did assata know that she would become pregnant?
how many times did they do it in the dock?
and now it is decades later and kakuya, a girlchild, has grown up without the emotional anchor of a father's familiar words, without the rudder of a mother's daily teachings. a daughter has been reared by extended family. did assata reckon on that? of course not. sometimes we throw our rage at the state without a thought of where we will be thirty years later, who we will become, how our actions will affect those not yet born.
***
3.1
I am a warrior and I tell you I hate war. There have been so many times when I have had to go one on one with despair, and it was not always a given that I would win. Sometimes I battle day after day, other times, rare times, I have whole weeks, occasionally a month or two, when I am good to go, well, at least I am ok with being on the periphery of normalcy. My daily diet is the stress of uncertainty.
I know life back in the world is different from when I went underground. I know my people seem freer and hence less consciousness—the intoxication of options, the addiction of material acquisitions, the disorientation of commodification. People even come to Cuba for a vacation. A photograph with me becomes a trophy. It is hard not to be bitter.
3.2
The struggle has become so convoluted, so complex. I can understand the seduction of comfort corruption… even these words seem like so much political rhetoric.
When I was locked down, I kept myself defiantly alive, poised to escape. Now that I have escaped, I find that I am still in captivity, a qualitatively different captivity, a captivity where my range of motion is, of course, much, much wider, my ability to speak out significantly broader, and certainly my opportunities to love life infinitely greater, but I can not fool myself… as long as those who measure life by counting possessions and grading bottom lines are in charge of most of the earth, I remain either in captivity or on the run, never surrendering, constantly resisting, measuring how alive I am by how long, how well I am able to fight until death. What a hard way to live… but this is my life. My. Life.
***
4.1
the embargo is real. some times sanitary items are non-existent. there is nothing romantic about resistance. nothing romantic about the grind of constant vigilance, ceaseless struggle. romance is idealism. resistance is realism.
if you read about the struggle many years after, when victories are celebrated in textbooks, when most of the ugliness is erased, when the human costs are barely reckoned or recognized, if you only read about struggle then you can think of its beauty. but the runaway often literally stinks; they do not have the daily luxury of bubble baths or clean fluffy towels after a long, hot shower. the vegetarianism of a subsistence diet of beans and rice, or beans and tortillas is not a trendy choice. very few relationships last a life time in the field, or perhaps, that is the more brutal truth, such relationships only last the shortness of life in the field—life on the run is seldom very, very long and elderly runaways are rare.
people nostalgically talk about the good old days when the political struggle was on fire in the united states, but how many people are rushing to cuba to volunteer to live in exile with assata? we all like to dream, to fantasize about being heroes and to romanticize those individuals whom we consider our heroes. but, oh, the reality of being a runaway is a state embraced by only a very strong few, only a few, very, very few… while the rest of us rationalize about choosing to remain cocooned in the materialism of our relatively comfortable captivity.
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
LOVE AND LIBERATION:
Sonia Sanchez's
Literary Uses of Personal Pain
Today. My simple passion is to write our names in history and walk in the light that is woman. — Sonia Sanchez [WF 30] Although Sonia Sanchez has been publishing since the mid-sixties, there has been no diminishing of her poetic powers as she has aged; in fact, the exact opposite is the case--the poetry in her first book, Homecoming (1969), is no match for the brilliance of homegirls & handgrenades (1984) and is but a flicker when compared to the incandescent intensity of Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995). Rather than a brief candle who burned lyrically for a few years and then immolated herself in either self-destructive behavior or a selling-out of her talents to produce pap in exchange for momentary popularity and/or pecuniary reward, Sanchez instead has been a consistently blossoming beacon, ever shinning and in fact glowing brighter and brighter, while lesser lights dimmed around her. Like Langston Hughes and fine wines, over the years turned to decades, Sanchez ripened and matured rather than atrophied and lost potency. But her's has been a hard won consistency. Life for Sanchez has been no crystal stair, particularly in her attempts to actualize a stable woman/man relationship. She has slipped and been tripped, fallen down and sometimes briefly been turned around, but she has never quit, never stopped climbing. Sanchez has, with a minimum of whining and with a courageousness and feistiness inversely proportioned to her diminutive body build, demonstrated a remarkable staying power, an archetypal persistence in embodying the advice the old folks constantly admonished: you just got to keep on keeping on--to keep on going despite whatever hardships and disappointments you suffer in your personal life. Sonia Sanchez's keeping on has produced a body of work terrible in its honesty about the joys and pains of her personal life as well as profound in the relevance that the lessons drawn from Sanchez's bittersweet years impart to us. Chief among those lessons is a constant refutation of internalized oppression. While there is both greatness and suffering in Sanchez's work, there is no tragedy in the classic sense of the individual suffering because of an alleged fatal flaw in their makeup. As Sanchez sagaciously points out, the majority of our suffering is because of man's inhumanity to man--more specifically, Whites' historic inhumanity to people of color and men's general inhumanity to women. Although a philosophical investigation of the relationship between suffering and art as illustrated by the work of Sonia Sanchez would be of major interest, my purpose here is much more specific. I intend to review Sonia Sanchez's creative use of the personal pain which resulted from her attempts to actualize long term, intimate female/male relationships. Simultaneously, I will suggest how Sanchez's work and the attitudes expressed In her work mirror what I propose are tenets of a dialectical African-American, African-derived life philosophy/worldview. I will also ascribe to her creative prose a privileged position in both Sanchez's own body of work as well as within the context of 20th century American literature as a whole. Background. Born Wilsonia Benita Driver to Wilson L. and Lena Jones Driver on September 9, 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama (or "Bombingham" as she sometimes affectionately refers to her home town), Sonia Sanchez lived with her grandmother after Sanchez's mother died when Sanchez was about six years old. She moved to Harlem, New York with her father when she was approximately nine years old. Sanchez spent her adolescent and young adult years in New York city where she graduated from Hunter College as a Political Science major in 1955. Teaching has comprised a significant aspect of Sanchez's career. She has taught on the college level for many years, beginning with her stint at San Francisco State (1967-69) in the first Black Studies program under the directorship of Nathan Hare. Sanchez was chiefly responsible for bringing LeRoi Jones to San Francisco State as a writer in residence. Sanchez went on to teach at the University of Pittsburgh (1969-70), Rutgers University (1970-71), Manhattan Community College (1971-73) and Amherst College (1972-75). She is currently the Laura H. Carnell Professor of English, a chaired position at Temple University where she has taught since 1977. She has also taught in prisons, at libraries and in community workshops nationwide. Since the mid-sixties as both a writer and a teacher Sanchez has constantly been in the public eye. Seeking Reciprocity: A Stutterer's Articulate Battle Cry. As a child Sanchez stuttered and as a result was very reticent about verbally expressing herself. She remembers herself as a shy and private child. That she has become an articulate, outgoing, engaging poet with the oratory power to move audiences to laughing out loud and to unashamedly crying in public is a direct reflection of Sanchez's will to overcome. As her birth name implies: Wilsonia will sound on you. More than simply a survivor, Sanchez is a driver, a striver, always reaching for higher levels of consciousness and cultural expression. What is significant about Sanchez's remaking of herself is that it was not simply an emotional remake, it was also a conscious intellectual remake. She read and studied as well as disciplined and forced herself to achieve. Because her impact is so overwhelmingly emotional, many people do not appreciate Sanchez's philosophical depth, do not appreciate the rigorous intellect behind the visceral voice. This privileging of the emotional and neglect of the rational is particularly emblematic of western man's response to woman, regardless of the color of the man or of the woman. Men look at and react to Sanchez's poetry ("did she cry?") and react to the wetness of the emotions ("somehow she make you feel funny inside, almost like you too wants to cry!"), but to really consider what she is saying requires an acceptance of woman as mind, not only woman as fine (fine as in physically alluring, as in beautiful body). What confuses some of us is that Sanchez never comes on like a brain, never resorts to coldly analytical language, never overcompensates in order to prove that she can think, never negates the emotional aspects of her being to demonstrate that she can fit into logic's scheme. Even when in deepest thought she is always also feeling; always vibrant, coming from somewhere around the emotional equator (i.e. coming from where the sensuous sun do shine and the human temperament be warm). But just because she like to dance, don't think you can walk all over her. Just cause she like to laugh, don't think you can make fun of her. Just cause she woman, don't think she can't think. But that is exactly what western man does. Relegates women to a world where logic doesn't live, or if it lives, logic survives weakly and certainly doesn't have much say so; as if feeling and logic were mutually exclusive--which they are not. What some critics have failed to consider is that there is a sensibility to Sanchez's feelings; her emotions are reasoned and reasonable responses to and reflections on her life, a life that has been circumscribed by historic abduction, rape, and abandonment, and colored by specific male continuations of the historic and now canonical male-master/female-slave trope--a trope which has sexual abuse and sexual commodification at its core; a trope which suggests that man dominates woman and woman accepts being controlled; a trope which argues the essentialness of a male's brutish nature and the inevitability of female hurt. This female-denigrating trope is precisely what Sanchez sees and rejects. Even as she personally experiences the pain filled reality of misogyny and patriarchy, Sanchez asserts that there is another way to live, to be/come. Thus, her words are both critique and battle plan. Her writings are no mere plea for individual sympathy, they are actually a cry of resistance, a call for rebellion against both the historic systemic and the specific individual abuse of Black women, or as she intones in her prayer/psalm Poem for July 4, 1994: This is the time for the creative Man. Woman. Who must decide that She. He. Can live in peace. Racial and sexual justice on this earth. [WF 60] Sanchez challenges us to construct a humanity which, as she quotes Fanon, is "reciprocal." Fanon's quote at the end of Wounded is instructive because it identifies both the hope and the humanity of Sanchez's vision. Fanon declared "I do battle for the creation of a human world--that is, a world of reciprocal recognition." [WF 97] Imagine that this reciprocity is not just of White recognizing Black, but also of man recognizing woman. Further, imagine that this reciprocity is not just abstract, not just logical, but also experiential, also one that colors the reality of social relationships. This is what Sanchez is writing about. The search for that reciprocity is what her life has been about. The belief in the possibility of that reciprocity is one of the motivators sustaining her on this world's lifelong battlefield. In this short quote is summed up Sanchez's worldview. First ("I do battle"), she is a warrior and privileges the necessity of struggle. Second ("for the creation"), she is clear that her objective is not destructive behavior but rather constructive behavior. Third ("of a human world"), she is not fighting for control of possessions but rather she is fighting to inaugurate relationships. Fanon/Sanchez are calling for a "human world" rather than merely "food, clothing, and shelter"--thereby defining world in social rather than material terms. Finally ("of reciprocal recognition"), she is definitive that relationships based on reciprocity determine what it means to be human. Sanchez's Fanonian worldview enables her to survive the corrosive reality of a personal life which might otherwise doom her to a cynical pessimism regarding the possibility of reciprocity between races and genders. Direct references to and quotes from Fanon are evident throughout her work beginning with her first book. Moreover, one of Sanchez's poems from 1967 embodies the Fanonian dialectic between liberation and love. After The Fifth Day with you i pressed the rose you bought me into one of fanon's books. it has no odor now. but i see you handing me a red rose and i remember my birth. [LP 23] This poem accurately mates Sanchez's two major lifelong concerns and objectives. That the rose, a symbol of love, is placed inside a Fanon book demonstrates the centrality of both liberation and love for Sanchez. Indeed, Sanchez's heart is in the struggle, and, as Che Guevera made clear in his famous quote ("Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."), liberation (which Fanon's book symbolizes) necessarily contains and is motivated by love. Therefore, we can surmise that Sanchez loves liberation and that for Sanchez liberation is the best context for the preservation of love. Moreover, any analysis of Sanchez's creative work, especially one which focuses on her intimate personal life, must be framed within the context of the larger quest for liberation, hence the trope of the rose preserved within the pages of a Fanon book. If not approached in this way, Sanchez's personal life might be inaccurately construed as just another verse in the quasi-tragic "woe is me/another woman who been done wrong" soap opera/talk show melodrama rather than as a prime example of an ennobling and unending quest for human liberation and love. Time and time again, throughout Sanchez's work, this liberation/love dyad of essential concerns remains constant at the core of every word she writes. Although Sanchez has spent her entire adult life working as a professional, a college professor, she has never identified with the petit bourgeois or become an aspirant bourgeoisie. When we examine the people and struggles, the classes and social constructs that Sanchez writes about, we find that the majority of her characters are people who are either working-class poor or are activists/artists, or both. Sanchez's ethnic/gender/&class-conscious work proffers a significant alternative to the conventional academic poetic concern with the atomized individual, i.e. the individual considered apart from their social background; their class, gender and political outlooks and aspirations. While Sanchez is constantly writing about her personal life, she never writes from the perspective of navel gazing nor do we perceive Sanchez as being narcissistic, instead, Sanchez promotes comradery and makes one feel she is not only sharing experiences and insights but also, by revealing her own situation, she is declaring that I am in the same boat as you; I struggle and suffer the way you do, feel the same joys and pains you experience. Fanon believed in the ability of the wretched of the earth to rise above. Fanon defined the wretched as the peasants of non-industrial societies and the proletariat of industrial societies within the context of the so-called third world--this was Fanon's mating of class struggle with anti-White supremacy struggles. Further, Fanon identified the petit bourgeoisie as caught in the middle and forced to choose to identify with the wretched or the exploiters. Fanon believed that the professional classes would vacillate in allegiance to and identification with the wretched versus the exploiters. Significantly, Sanchez made her choice shortly after graduating from college and has remained constant in her allegiance to and identification with the wretched. Concerns about tenure, promotions, awards, material acquisitions and other trappings of professional success do not tattoo the body of Sanchez's creative work. Although she has gone through numerous job related confrontations and situations, it is noteworthy that Sanchez has chosen to focus on those aspects of her life that are most in common with her chosen audience of working class and activist readers/listeners rather than those aspects which seperate her from that audience and more closely align her with those who would psychologically and/or philosophically assimilate into the American mainstream. While I do not argue that Sanchez's, or anyone else's, professional concerns are irrelevant, we can not overlook that those concerns are not featured in Sanchez's body of creative work. My point is to note the range of Sanchez's selection of subject matter and to underscore her emphasis on themes of working class-oriented struggles to secure love and liberation on the one hand and her de-emphasis of professionally-related themes of integration into the status quo on the other hand. When Sanchez does write about "buppies" (young Black professionals) and the "upwardly mobile" it is with a critical assessment of their life styles and aspirations, particularly their pursuit of materialism and the morality they exhibit (or more likely, don't exhibit) in their quest to be accepted and to become like the maintainers and controllers of the status quo. Sanchez is more likely to write about the homeless than about suburban homeowners, about the unemployed rather than corporate executives, about women struggling for self-actualization rather than men ostentatiously displaying wealth. The people Sanchez chooses to celebrate by name are overwhelmingly either social activists or socially committed artists. This is another example of Sanchez's grounding in a Fanonian worldview. Additionally, Sanchez does not engage in nostalgic sentimentalizing of her African heritage, nor a romanticizing of her African-American history. Although she does acknowledge her people's traditional greatness, her focus is on the day to day struggle to regain the power to control the content and direction of our day to day lives. When you read or listen to Sonia Sanchez, you are not encased in fantasy, nor are you encouraged to escape reality, rather we are inspired to recognize, struggle with and ultimately change reality. Part of the reason Sanchez's poetry moves people is because that is Sanchez's overt intent, i.e. to literally "to move" people to action. The success of Sanchez's craft is that after experiencing her work, whether we agree or disagree with the content of her work, we are in fact moved by the emotional impact of Sanchez's writings and presentations. Sanchez's Fanonian worldview and her particular gender and social concerns have not only informed the content of her creative work, her philosophy and her social practice (i.e. her personal praxis), Sanchez's worldview has also helped shape the style and structure of her writings. The majority of her work is not intellectually oriented. Even though she has studied and understands world literature, Sanchez is not trying to prove that she has mastered conventional literature, therefore she is not trying to appeal to the heads of the professional class, rather her appeal is directed to the hearts and guts of the working class. This results in poetry and prose that is direct, often even didactic, in style. Although some of Sanchez's work is slippery because it is allusive in imagery and elusive in meaning, even in those cases, she eschews the use of obscure and difficult intellectualisms. Usually the pieces which are ambiguous or difficult to grasp, are so not because they are over the reader's head but rather because those pieces are very personal and sometimes require knowledge of Sanchez's intimate life to be fully appreciated. In any case, Sanchez's Fanonian identification means that she wants the bulk of her published work to be understood by specific groupings of people and therefore she tailors her work to their sensibilities in language, in imagery, in structure, in performance. Language, in particular, identifies Sanchez not only with working people through her upholding of the vernacular as her language of choice, she also utilizes the raw immediacy of "cursing" and "common language" to attack upperclass pretensions, evasions, elisions and dissemling (generally manifested by the employ of euphemisms, especially for body parts and functions). From Homecoming to Wounded, Sanchez has neither desalinated nor cooled down her salty, pepperhot tongue as she continues to call things by their rightful name, whether the name be sweet loverman or worthless motherfucker. Sonia Sanchez talks shit, kicks butt and takes no prisoners. Teaching and/or critiquing the words and work of Sonia Sanchez requires at minimum a willingness to accept that the vernacular is a fit vehicle for creating the art of literature. Class antagonisms notwithstanding, a positive critical reception of Sanchez's work has steadily grown over the years mainly because of two factors: 1. Sanchez has constantly improved as a writer, and 2. there has been an across the board increase in gender concerns mated with a deepening/broadening of the class gap between the haves and have nots both within the race and between races. All of this has led to Sanchez standing at the forefront of socially committed writers. In a sense after nearly thirty years of constant work, Sanchez's audience is beginning to catch up to her, beginning to understand and identify with her to the same degree that she understands and identifies with them. It is then, no surprise, that Sanchez not only continues to quote Fanon, but that almost thirty years after his death, Sanchez continues to use her own creative work to privilege the words and worldview of Frantz Fanon. Understanding Fanon and his analysis is a seminal key to understanding Sonia Sanchez the artist/activist. The Fanon quote declaring advocacy of the battle to create a human world of reciprocity is taken from the last page of Wounded in the House of a Friend(1995). Sanchez's first book was in 1969. She had a mighty long row to hoe between 1969 and 1995, a mighty long time to consider and reconsider her outlook on life. Throughout a long march which has included Black nationalism, pan-africanism, Black muslim membership, feminism, plus numerous personal battles on the social, economic and political fronts, throughout all of this, in addition to her unswerving commitment to struggle, Sanchez has been consistent in her championing of a Fanonian worldview. Defining the Womanself. In Homecoming, Sanchez's poetic debut, amid fanged poetry which snarls at and attempts to bite the alabaster hand of racism, there are also the first inklings that Sanchez's concern is with gender issues as well as race matters. The book ends with the short poem "personal letter no.2," a gem of unsentimental self-definition: but I am what I am. woman. alone amid all this noise. [H 32] Here, in a "personal" statement, Sanchez defines herself in terms of gender ("woman") and social condition ("alone / amid all this noise."). We are not told the specifics of the noise, but from the range of the twenty preceding poems we can surmise that the raucous din of racism and patriarchy are chief among the aural disturbances. While the racism is fairly easy to grasp, the gender oppression has often been overlooked even though Sanchez has been very clear in pointing out patriarchy's perniciousness. Throughout Homecoming, Sanchez directly addresses her brothers. She encourages ("this sister knows / and waits." [H 10] or "here is my hand. / I am not afraid / of the night." [H 11]); she cajoles ("don't try none / of your jealous shit / with me. Don't you / know where you / at?" [H 13]); and she criticizes ("and that so/ called/brother there / screwing u in tune to / fanon / and fanon / and fanon / ain't no re / vo/lution/ / ary" [H 31]). Some of her observations may be appreciated simply as general political positions, but there are specific instances where there can be no mistaking that we are dealing not only with a general political position but also with a particular individual in pain. For example, how does one respond when Sanchez writes in "summary": is everybody happy? this is a poem for me. i am alone. one night of words will not change all that. [H 15] Homecoming refers to returning to the ghetto (the segregated Black communities) after college graduation ("I have been a / way so long / once after college / I returned tourist / style to watch all / the niggers killing / themselves... now woman / I have returned" [H 9]). Notice that in this title poem which begins the volume, Sanchez defines herself ("now woman") in precisely the same way that she does at the end of the book ("woman."). Sanchez is telling us that her gender is definition and is both the beginning of her consciousness and literally the beginning of her adult life. Here her Blackness is presumed and articulated in the politics, but she specifies that which we might otherwise overlook. Sanchez knows that we will not overlook her Blackness, and she insists that we not overlook her gender. Because Sanchez was so strongly race-oriented in her early work, regardless of how overt her specification of gender, some have indeed overlooked or minimalized Sanchez's gender identification--she is seldom characterized as a feminist even though she specifically privileges her identity as woman as well as privileges the struggle to empower women as self-determining human beings. When we ignore the priority of Sanchez's self-definition it means that we have not really seen or understood Sonia Sanchez. Sanchez is so insistent on her identity as woman that if we have not seen it, if we do not recognize her inherent feminism, then it is because, like family members in denial, we choose to ignore whatever we are not prepared to deal with; this is especially true of Sanchez's male readers. Thus, the full import of one of Sanchez's most cutting and unsentimental love poems is dodged even as the poem is celebrated. short poem is perhaps the hardest hitting, and certainly one of the most quoted poems in Homecoming. my old man tells me I'm so full of sweet pussy he can smell me coming. Maybe I shd bottle it and sell it when he goes. [H 17] The preposition ("when") in the last line is the heart of the poem. Sanchez is not suggesting possibility--if she were, she would have used "if." The poet is instead proposing inevitability ("when"). Here Sanchez is unequivocally stating her position: suffering loneliness at some point during one's life is an almost inescapable aspect of social relations in America. Indeed, bouts with loneliness is a human fate which only a very few of us avoid. Within a racist and sexist culture, it should be no surprise that Blacks and women are particularly susceptible to the social disruption of loneliness especially because they are both the victims of the society at large as well as the victims of their peers. The lower on the pecking order one goes (glibly but not wrongly defined as White Male / White Female / Black Male / Black Female), the more one is subjected to pecks from above. Since most social behavior is learned behavior shaped by one's environment, then it is not surprising that the entity on the low end of the pecking order is the most alienated/oppressed and is also the most vested in the imperative to make change. The important point, however, is that loneliness--as well as other social ills--is not a racial or gender trait, but rather a human trait that can only be fully defined and understood within the specificity of its social context. In America women do not suffer because they are women, rather they suffer because they live in a sexist society. One's position in the pecking order is a major index of one's susceptibility to becoming a social statistic of individual, ethnic or gender disorder; this is what accounts for the fact that being lonely and being a Black women seem to go together like white on rice--this is particularly true when we recognize that rice does not start off being white and it is in fact industry processing that "polishes" the color off of rice so that it appears white. Once we recognize the seemingly unseverable linkage between being alone and being woman, then we understand that Sanchez's pain is the female pain of a social being who is abandoned by a man/society who had pledged love but who failed to keep his/its promise. Note also that in this poem the man/society relates to the woman mainly on the physical level. This love/loneliness cycle is, in a nutshell, the basic outline of Sanchez's life story of interpersonal relationships and though there are differences in details and particulars, Sanchez is nonetheless a representative member of the society which birthed, nurtured, oppressed, expolited and offers her both life and the imminent threat of death. Like all of us, Sanchez is both a respondent to and a creator of a myriad of complex social relationships and entanglements (some inherited, some selected, some imposed, some chosen). But through it all, she remains Black, woman and resistant to exploitation/oppression in both her personal and public life. In all her subsequent books the basic paradigm (abduction/rape/abandonment) and resistance to that paradigm reign in her relationships with men (and society). So then, what is surprising is not the inevitability of "when he goes" but rather Sanchez's forthrightness in documenting her hurt not in self pity but rather as instruction to her sisters and brothers, most of whom, to one degree or another, share her predicament; "sisters, watch out for this" and "brothers, don't be this way." In candidly sharing her personal life, Sanchez crafts powerful poems, especially the short haiku which are so precise: did ya ever cry Black man, did ya ever cry til you knocked all over? [LP 35] and if I had known, if i had known you, I would have left my love at home. [LP 50] Notice that both of these are blues which use the AAB format of stating a line, repeating the line, and then responding with a closing line that qualifies, comments on, or expands the opening lines. An accurate close reading of Sanchez's poetry requires an appreciation of Black music in general, and an appreciation of blues and jazz in particular. Moreover, a deep appreciation requires a working knowledge of the forms and techniques as well as knowledge of the history and personalities of Black music. In this case, blues is relevant because blues has been our traditional form for commenting on interpersonal social relationships, especially problematic and/or unsuccessful relationships. A quick survey of Sanchez's poetry will reveal her frequent use of blues forms and tropes even when, as is the case in the two poems cited above, Sanchez is working in poetic forms such as haiku and tanka, neither of which are African or African American in origin. Sanchez's use of foreign poetic forms and especially her syncretic grafting of afrocentric musical forms as well as musical content onto those foreign poetic forms is the essence of Black postmodernism--the Black, cross-discipline, multi-cultural appropriation of all existing forms to innovatively produce new forms which reflect and contemporarize not only a Black aesthetic but which also offer example and paradigms that others may use to express themselves. In this regard, Sanchez's technical prowess is a model of Black postmodernism. However, Sanchez is not simply a harsh-noted, monotone militarist; she is also a lyricist who makes her work sing regardless of the theme. Her poetry is shaped by a fondness for nature metaphors and similes: i saw you today swaying like a lost flower waiting to be plucked. [LP 52] and "your face like / summer lightning" [H&H 59] and my body is scarred by your dry December tongue i am word bitten [WF 87] Her lines are enlivened by brilliant usages of color: ("the pure / red noise of alone" [LP 45], "a green smell rigid as morning" [BB 45], "bright with orange smiles, may she walk" [IBW 99]). Incisive wit and wordplay are her signature ("don't play me no / righteous bros. / white people / ain't rt bout nothing / no mo." [H 26] and baby, you are sweet as watermelon juice run/ ning down my wide lips. [IBW 69] and never may my thirst for freedom be appeased by modern urinals. [IBW 72] The significance of these techniques is that they are employed to musical effect. Sanchez's poems become songs, and because of the personal pain which predominates, many of her psalms are blues songs. This is the key to fully appreciating Sanchez's poetry: the musical quality, a quality which is, of course, best experienced when the poetry is heard by the ear rather than solely looked at by the eye. Abduction, rape, abandonment are the dominate notes in the blues scale of Sanchez's early interpersonal poetry, and, to a more or lesser degree, these are the negative nodes of the majority of relationships experienced by Black women in America. In the context of Sanchez's poetry and prose, these dominate notes have a meaning slightly altered from textbook definitions. Abduction refers to denying women their own space by placing them--through either guile or force--in spaces which the male controls. Rape refers to engaging in sexual relationships based on power rather than consent. Although some might find it a stretch to define infidelity as rape, however, when the male knowingly leads the woman to believe that she is engaged in a relationship of reciprocal love and he in fact does not honor the fidelity of that relationship, well then he has raped the woman and used the "force" of false promises (rather than physical brutality) to effect his will on the woman. Note that many women feel violated, used, "raped" once they find out that they are in a relationship where the man has consciously deceived them. Abandonment is the famous footsteps of the man walking away from a relationship when the woman confronts sexist behavior or when the man simply (and often unapologetically) tires of the relationship. Sanchez's songs repeatedly delineate this triad of male-dominant/female-denigrated social realities. A significant percentage of Sanchez's poems either focus on or mention cross-gender relationships. For example, of 21 poems in her 1969 debut book, Homecoming, ten focus on personal relationships; of the 14 short poems which conclude her 1995 book, Wounded in the House of a Friend, eleven focus on personal relationships. Nearly every one of the 69 poems which make up the 1973 book Love Poems is focused on personal relationships. The nature and expression of interpersonal relationships, may, therefore, be seen as one of Sanchez's major concerns. Although we are discussing, as Sanchez does also, mainly the downside, the painful side of personal relationships, we should note that Sanchez also is eloquent in presenting the joys and ecstacies of intimacy as exemplified by the poem black magic which is included in Homecoming: magic my man is you turning my body into a thousand smiles. black magic is your touch making me breathe. [H 12-13] The norm of poetry about personal relationships is a romanticizing of the desire for and the struggle to achieve fulfilling intimate unions. But rather than an ingenue cooing romantic pop tunes in search of Mr. Right, Sanchez is a classic blues diva shouting away her blues and concluding that what she really needs is to be in control of herself and her social relations: i've been two men's fool. a coupla black organization's fool. if ima gonna be anyone else's fool let me be my own fool for awhile, [USS 99] This self-assertive, self-affirmative blues-based outlook informs the bulk of Sanchez's personal poetry. Yet as potent as Sanchez's poetry is, there is another aspect of her work which supersedes her poetic achievements. Her People's Mighty Mouth Although she is known primarily as a poet, Sanchez has made her strongest statements of personal hurt in prose. As illustration of this thesis, we will examine only three of a number of important prose pieces. The first is After Saturday Night Comes Sunday, the second is EYEWITNESS: CASE NO. 3456, and the third is Wounded in the House of a Friend. My assessment that the prose pieces are stronger is based on what Sanchez has been able to achieve with prose as text in comparison to what she has achieved with poetry as text. Specifically, Sanchez's prose evidences a number of important achievements, the most critical of which are: 1. Technical innovation, 2. Unflinching honesty, and 3. Emotional resonance. Technical innovation refers to Sanchez's form and style of writing. Sanchez successfully moves inside our heads and hearts. She does not describe like a camera eye but instead she sounds. So rather than see, we feel; rather than make deductions about what she means based on what she shows us, we find ourselves actually experiencing with her the painful reality. Like music, we end up dancing and singing along notwithstanding that the song is often either a militant war chant opposing injustice or a deep bluesy moan figuring the wound of personal pain. Unflinching honesty refers to Sanchez's use of her life as the example. Significant in this regard is that she manages to reveal so many particulars of her own life while honoring the privacy of those with whom she has interacted. Those who know her personally, know the names and ways of the men she writes about, know that Sanchez is revealing real wounds and not simply fictionalizing for art's sake. Emotional resonance refers to Sanchez's ability to make us feel intimately involved rather than stand back in aloof judgement. The question of naming is particularly salient. In After Saturday... Sanchez used pseudonyms, in other prose pieces she uses first names and childhood nicknames, but in a number of the selections in Wounded, Sanchez consciously does not use any names. Through an unparalleled artistry, Sanchez gives us both intimacy and anonymity. We know the people, the situation, but we do not know the particular names, resultantly, whomever the cap fits is whom we think about. Given the modern American emphasis on the individual, Sanchez's successful use of anonymity is even more extraordinary. But again, Sanchez is successfully leading us away from the tragic individual school of thought, into a more wholistic and communalistic approach to human behavior. Moreover, as a consummate wordsmith, Sanchez stands on its head the writer's axiom: show don't tell--indeed, how can a memsmerizing storyteller not tell. The difference is the voice. When the telling is done in the socalled objective third person, it comes out standoffish like snow covered concrete on what ought to be a warm day, but when the telling be in somebody's voice, especially a humor streaked, know what they talking about Black voice, well then it be like a handsewn comforter throwed up over you and your lover on a got nowhere else to be but in each other's arms, middle of February, Saturday morn. The African-derived penchant is to use voice as an instrument of conjuring and this is what Sanchez does. As you read her, you hear her or her characters spelling their lives, loves, rememberances and aspirations into your being's inner ear--the ear with which you hear and listen not only to what somebody says but also to the way they say what they got to say `cause that's the only way you can get the fullest feeling for what they be meaning. "Show, don't tell"--tell that to somebody else! The privileging of the eye (i.e. showing) is a eurocentric/bourgeoisie philosophical approach. The privileging of the ear (i.e. telling) is an afrocentric/communal approach. Although this is not the occasion to detail the philosophical differences, I will offer this one example to illustrate the relevance of this observation to the realm of literature. Generally, reading a book is a solitary activity--one book, one reader. Moreover, the creator/writer of the book is not part of the process of the real-time reading experience of the auditor/reader's decoding of the meaning of the book. However, if the book is read aloud, then immediately we have established a community, an exchange between the mouth of the reader and the ear of the listener (even if the mouth and the ear are part of the same body). In cultural terms, sound both requires and creates community; sight does not. Additionally, we experience sound by literally feeling the vibration on our ear drum, we use our physical bodies. Reading with the eye minimalizes the physical element. We are literally untouched by silent reading, and thus, what we feel is purely a matter of mentally decoded cues. But, sound, on the other hand, has a non-cognitive layer of meanings. Through sound, emotion is transmitted based on non-literal aspects. In addition to getting the literal meaning we also pick up the emotional meaning by interpreting the context, timbre, duration, inflection, and a host of other characteristics gleaned from how the word strikes us as it is sounded. None of this is directly connected to the literal "meaning" of a word. In fact, within the Black vernacular, the meaning of a given word might be reversed or be ambiguous until it is decoded on a non-literal level. The title of Sanchez's second book, We A Baddddd People, is a prime example. In any case, I am arguing that "sounding" is essential to the art of Black literature, and that through "sounding" we can be lead to "feel" as well as "cognitively understand" a given situation, emotion, character, etc. What Sanchez does with prose that she (nor anyone else) has been able to consistently master with poetry is figure out how to write down the musical qualities to such an extent that the reader is able to approximate the writer's sounding of the piece simply by reading it aloud. I am suggesting that almost any literate person could effectively communicate the feeling of the prose by reading it aloud and that almost no one but Sanchez, or someone familiar with her presentation style and adept at performing poetry, could communicate the feeling of much of her poetry. I think part of this has to do with the fact that the poems are literally thematic sketches that are the basis of a presentation shaped by oral/aural improvisation. The prose, on the other hand, is a complex orchestration, a specific arrangement that is seldom altered during presentation--or certainly not altered to the extent that the poetry is. The best example of this is to contrast the EYEWITNESS: CASE NO. 3456 with Improvisation, both of which are in Wounded. The printed poem Improvisation is actually a transcription of an improvisation between she and musician Khan Jamal. For the average person who has never heard Sanchez perform Improvisation, there is no way they would be able to read the piece aloud with any of the emotional resonance that Sanchez exhibited both in the initial performance and in subsequent readings. Perhaps a fellow performance poet or experienced actor adept at improv could fashion an arrangement which made sense and credibly sounded out Sanchez's emotional intentions, but even the most adept would find this particular poem a bit difficult to communicate. EYEWITNESS, on the other hand, posses no such presentational problems. The average person would be able to communicate a great deal of the emotional impact suggested by the text of EYEWITNESS. I do not argue that the average reader would be able to match Sanchez's presentation, but I do assert that they would be able to move the listening audience. Sanchez's singular achievement is in figuring out how to use words not merely to suggest sound but also how to use words to actually guide the reader in sounding the text. Indeed, to further drive home my point, I would suggest the following experiment. Type the text of both pieces into a computer equipped with text recognition software and set the computer to read back both pieces. There will literally be no comparison. Both in terms of meaning as well as emotion, the computer will be much more effective at rendering EYEWITNESS. On a technical level, Sanchez has figured out how to write prose that makes us both understand and feel rather than understand and infer. Additionally, Sanchez writes so that we are made to both emotionally and cognitively comprehend how hurt deforms the human spirit, and this is, of course, no easy achievement. Many people write about pain in personal relationships, but most of the writing is pro forma and cliched, we've heard it all before and have no heartfelt emotional response. However, Sanchez essays unique takes on timeless themes. I do not mean to imply that her poetry is second rate or that it is not innovative. But aside from her use of haiku and tanka forms--a use which has certainly inspired countless others to adopt these oriental poetic forms--Sanchez's most unique and influential poetic achievements have been in the oral and aural rather than in the textual arenas. In fact, much of her poetry requires her performance for its fullest realization. The reader can not totally understand the impact and import of much of Sanchez's poetry, until the reader literally becomes a listener. Within the performance context, although Sanchez certainly had her own distinctive voice, her emphatic and effective use of sounding as the basis for realizing her poetry's fullest potential is not a unique technique. Sanchez was but one of many dynamic poets of the Black Arts movement who literally ripped the poetry off the page and reinvigorated the artform by prioritizing sounding over literal writing. Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, and Haki Madhubuti among many, many others, collectively reintroduced nommo--the African concept of the power of the spoken word. Until one actually hears poems such as her early Coltrane influenced a/coltrane/poem, or the numerous poems which employ African chanting, Sanchez's work on the page, especially her early poetry, does not overly impress in comparison to the textual verse produced by her peers and predecessors. Indeed, some academic critics, solely using conventional textual analysis theories and techniques, consider much of Sanchez's early work under-realized as "quality" poetry. On the other hand, Sanchez's prose has never been considered less than breathtaking. Sanchez's creative prose is startling in intensity and impact as text while simultaneously rhythmic and lyrical when recited as oration. In fact, literary critics such as Joyce Ann Joyce identify Sanchez's prose as prose-poems, i.e. a mixture of the two forms. Sanchez has in fact done with prose what a generation of Black Arts writers did with poetry, she has made prose responsive to and reflective of the Black oral/aural traditions. The only precedent for her accomplishment is the prose of Jean Toomer's Cane. But unlike Toomer, who was not able to duplicate his singular success, Sanchez has continued to develop and has boosted short, creative prose into heretofore unimagined realms. At the core of Sanchez's achievement is voice. She writes in a vernacular that "orates." All of the creative prose pieces feature a voice, and most of them contain multiple voices. The use of multiple voices is another factor which distinguishes Sanchez's prose from her poetry. The poetry generally presents only one voice. In Sanchez's prose we hear an actual "we" rather than simply an "I" who identifies with "we." In her prose our people talk, and thus we are given a sense of community. As a rhetoritician of the Black experience Sanchez is peerless. In the seventies, Sanchez stylistically influenced countless Black female writers, Ntozake Shange chief among that number. This far ranging impact of her poetry notwithstanding, I nevertheless predict that Sanchez's blunt albeit graceful and lyrical albeit deeply bluesy prose stylings will be her most remembered legacy. Shanchez's prose is incandescent, and, in articulating the hard and lonely times of womanhood, she is a veritable Bessie Smith of literature--a poetic empress of the blues, a wordsmith of uncompromising power and importance. A mighty mouth. Her people's voice. Kicking The Habit Of A Love Jones When After Saturday... was first published in Black World magazine I distinctly remember my numbed shock as I read the short story--it certainly was not fiction. Sanchez had recently married poet Ethridge Knight and had moved to Indianapolis. Could this be the story of their relationship--NO is what I wanted to say. YES is what the specifics of Sanchez's words forced me to say. The stuttering. The writing out notes when she couldn't talk. The twins. This was no made up tale about a sister struggling with a junkie, this was Sonia struggling with Ethridge, no matter that she had change the names to Sandy and Winston. Damn. It had all started at the bank. She wuzn't sure, but she thot it had. At that crowded bank where she had gone to clear up the mistaken notion that she wuz $300.00 overdrawn in her checking account. [H&H 29] That is the opening paragraph. Immediately we are offered a dramatic realization of the economic foundation of the relationship: Sandy makes the money, Winston takes the money. Initially Sandy blames the system ("mistaken notion") but in this case, as we are shortly to experience, the fault was not caused by the system but rather by her man. Notice also that she has already personalized and defined the parameters ("her checking account") of the theft; Winston is stealing directly from Sandy. When she is shown the canceled checks which indicate that there had been withdrawals from her account, Sandy reacts physically. It wuz Winson's signature. Her stomach jumped as she added and readded the figures. Finally she dropped the pen and looked up at the business/suited/man sitten across from her wid crossed legs and eyes. And as she called him faggot in her mind, watermelon tears gathered round her big eyes and she just sat. [H&H 29] The point of view and voice of the narrative is totally unconventional. Although the piece is written mainly in the conventional omniscient third person singular--the narrator informs the reader what the characters are thinking rather than merely showing the reader what the characters are doing--the twist is that this is not an objective voice of god (which is generally de facto a eurocentric, male voice). Sanchez's voice is Black--hence the use of "dialect" as exemplified by not only the spelling but also by the imagery ("watermelon tears"). Although first person Black voices are not uncommon in literature, very few third person omniscient stories are narrated in a Black voice. Sanchez has introduced a significant breakthrough in privileging Black consciousness. And there is more. Sanchez does not make traditional use of dialogue. There is no he said, she said. Instead we are given brief, sometimes double-voiced, monologues. The reader witnesses both the exterior and the interior voice, what the character says aloud and what the character thinks. Sanchez indicates this shift in point of view by using italics. There are no quotation marks. The overall effect is that the story is written in three points of view: the omniscient Black narrator, and the characters Sandy and Winston. Sanchez shifts effortlessly between the voices and does so with such clarity that we are never confused about who is "speaking" even when the voice shifts mid-paragraph, between one sentence and the next. The following example takes place after Sandy has returned home from the bank and Winston is talking to her attempting to explain what happened. I can git clean, babee. I mean, I don't have a long jones. I ain't been on it too long. I can kick now. Tomorrow. You just say it. Give me the word/sign that you understand, forgive me for being one big asshole and I'll start kicking tomorrow. For you babee. I know I been laying some heavy stuff on you. Spending money we ain't even got--I'll git a job too next week--staying out all the time. Hitting you fo telling me the truth `bout myself. My actions. Babee, it's you I love in spite of my crazy actions. It's you I love... You the best thing that ever happened to me in all of my 38 years and I'll take better care of you. Say something Sandy. Say you understand it all. Say you forgive me. At least that, babee. He raised her head from the couch and kissed her. It was a short cooling kiss. Not warm. Not long. A binding kiss. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and the bare room that somehow now complemented their lives, and she started to cry again. And as he grabbed her and rocked her, she spoke fo the first time since she had told that wite/collar/man in the bank that the bank was wrong. The-the-the-the bab-bab-bab-ies. Ar-ar-ar-are th-th-th-they o-o-okay? Oh my god. I'm stuttering. Stuttering, she thot. Just like when I wuz little. Stop talking. Stop talking girl. Write what you have to say. Just like you used to when you wuz little and you got tired of people staring at you while you pushed words out of an unaccommodating mouth. Yeh. That was it, she thot. Stop talking and write what you have to say. Nod yo/head to all this madness. But rest yo/head and use yo/hands till you git it all straight again. [H&H 30] There we have three different voices--the third paragraph even mixes two different voices--yet the narrative is never jumbled, never impenetrable. Sanchez's command of prose is miraculous and exemplary, especially so because technically she is taking huge risks that could easily come off as gimmicky or artificial and thus would alienate the reader when the subject matter literally cries for empathy. Were this the only example of Sanchez's prose skill we could pass off her achievement as luck, but, as we will see with the two prose selections from Wounded, Sanchez has mastered mixed voices and points of view. If only for her technical mastery, she should be lauded as a major writer of the 20th century--but, of course, there is more. The honesty of After Saturday... is not simply in the concordance of what Sanchez writes with the actualities of her personal life. The honesty is in the fullness of Sanchez's presentation, a non-sentimental though nonetheless human presentation of contradictions rather than a tunnel visioned and ultimately false one-sided interpretation. Sanchez's prose is non-sentimental because she does not give us false hopes or storybook optimism. It is human because Sanchez renders the full and therefore necessarily contradictory range of her characters' experiences, experiences that are sometimes awful and sometimes awe-filled. Sanchez's emphasis is on survival and overcoming rather than succumbing to systemic oppression but she is not dealing with mythic personalities. Sanchez follows the admonition of sixties African liberation leader, Amilcar Cabral, who urged his comrades to "Mask no difficulties. Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories." And that is both the beauty and strength of Sanchez's refusal to tell the lie that love conquerors all. Rather than the television shibboleth: "don't try this at home," Sanchez goal is precisely to give us instructions for home use, thus, Sanchez prepares us to face reality by emphasizing what really happened rather than inducing us into a fantasy world of what she or we ideally/romantically may want to happen. Sandy loves Winston. Even after she has been economically raped, she is willing to forgive and to help him kick his drug habit. (By the way--and although this is not one of the themes we are focusing on, I will mention it in passing--the debilitating effect of drugs is a major concern in Sanchez's work whether she is remembering former high school classmates who succumbed, their beauty and talent destroyed, and, in some cases, their lives also destroyed; or whether recounting, as she does in Saturday, her own tussles with junkies who were also lovers; or whether looking at heart-renting scenarios as she does in Poem for Some Women which details a crack addicted mother leaving her seven year old daughter to be raped in exchange for drugs.) What is significant is that rather than showing us love conquering all, Sanchez prepares us for protracted struggle by boldly delineating the deep disappointments we will inevitably encounter in life. Winston responds to Sandy's attempt to help him kick by trying to persuade her to take drugs, and when that fails by stealing money from her again before abandoning Sandy and the twins. But, rather than end on the deathly downbeat of a ruptured relationship, Sanchez adopts the African worldview that death is not an end in itself because rebirth inevitably follows death. Thus, Sanchez's story does not conclude with Winston's abandonment on Saturday night but rather with Sandy's rebirth/resurrection on Sunday morning. She ran down the stairs and turned on the lights. He was gone. She saw her purse on the couch. Her wallet wuz empty. Nothing was left. She opened the door and went out on the porch, and she remembered the lights were on and that she was naked. But she stood for a moment looking out at the flat/Indianapolis/street and she stood and let the late/nite/air touch her body and she turned and went inside. [H&H 35] Which brings us to the issue of emotional resonance. Sanchez does not ask us to choose Sandy over Winston. In fact, Winston is portrayed as a victim of drugs who cannot control his actions although he desperately wants to kick his addiction. Sanchez is not a man hater, but she also is not a fool. Sanchez makes it clear that the Winstons of the world should be avoided and that simple one-on-one relationships will not save them from drugs. Sandy loves rather than hates Winston, but she recognizes that her love is not enough to save him or their relationship. Those who have had close encounters with drug addicts know that Sanchez has told the truth--love alone will not overcome addition. The emotional resonance comes from the accurate rendering of both the ups and downs, the sharply sounded conflicting and roller-coaster ride of inner emotions experienced by a person in love with a junkie, in love with someone whose drug dependency makes them physically and emotionally incapable of love. She ran to him, threw her body against him and held on. She kissed him hard and moved her body `gainst him til he stopped and paid attention to her movements. They fell to the floor. She felt his weight on her as she moved and kissed him. She wuz feeling good and she cudn't understand why he stopped. In the midst of pulling off her dress he stopped and took out a cigarette and lit it while she undressed to her bra and panties. ... It's just, babee, that this stuff kills any desire for THAT! I mean, I want you and all that but I can't quite git it up to perform. He lit another cigarette and sat up. Babee, you sho know how to pick `em. I mean, wuz you born under an unlucky star or sumthin'? First, you had a niguh who preferred a rich/wite/woman to you and Blackness. Now you have a junkie who can't even satisfy you when you need satisfying. And his laugh wuz harsh as he sed again, You sho know how to pick `em, lady. She didn't know what else to do so she smiled a nervous smile that made her feel, remember times when she wuz little and she had stuttered thru a sentence and the listener had acknowledged her accomplishment wid a smile and all she cud do was smile back. [H&H 33] At one time or another many of us have smiled at our own wretchedness as we were overcome by a situation we helped create but which we did not desire--the "got what you wanted but don't want what you got" syndrome. As Winston laughs harshly and Sandy smiles resignedly, we are able to empathize with Sandy even if we have never been in her particular predicament, even if we are not a woman hooked up with a junkie. Sanchez achieves this emotional resonance not because of the horror of the tale but rather because of the vulnerability of Sandy's smile. A writer has to work hard to realize such emotional moments. No matter if she is recalling a specific incident, the craft is still in the selection of specifics, the insight to realize that Sandy's smile is the most important image in this particular passage. Sandy's tale is replete with these vulnerable moments, vulnerabilities which, under varying circumstances, all humans have felt. Another example of emotional resonance is Sandy's moment of self doubt. When she came back up to the room he sed he was cold, so she got another blanket for him. He wuz still cold, so she took off her clothes and got under the covers wid him and rubbed her body against him. She wuz scared. She started to sing a Billie Holiday song. Yeh. God bless the child that's got his own. She cried in between the lyrics as she felt his big frame trembling and heaving. Oh god, she thot, am I doing the right thing? [H&H 35] Who has not thought that thought at one time or another? The smile, the question, those are the resonant hooks that help the reader not simply sympathize with Sandy's predicament, those are the resonances that set off sympathetic vibrations within each reader regardless of our race, gender or social condition. And that is Sanchez's achievement as a writer, that is the difference between an artist and a reporter, between someone with a finely tuned inner ear and someone with only a videocam eye who nonemotionally spies the externals. Sanchez successfully pierces the facade of appearances to present us with the internal emotions and rationalizations which accompany the actions. Sanchez is adept at identifying the underlying basic human emotions bubbling just beneath the surface of these particular and highly specific individual clashes and encounters. Your Best Friend Could Be Your Worst Enemy In Wounded... Sanchez flirts with cynicism and pessimism regarding intimate relations with men. Listen to the female palaver of blues haiku 1: all this talk bout love girl, where you been all your life? ain't no man can love. [WF 82] The insertion of "girl" suggests that this is one woman talking to another, certainly the poem is not addressed to men even though it is about men. The poem could be read as Sanchez's advice to women, or it could be read as a woman friend attempting to school Sanchez. In any case, the poem represents thoughts at a midnight hour, when the disappointing day has been so long, the lonely night even longer, and the dawn is a long, long ways off--possibly even too long a ways away to be endured. One might suppose that Sanchez had drowned in this poem's funk were it not for the fact that Wounded both opens and concludes with quotes from Fanon. The opening quote is prophetic: "I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me." [WF 1] Again, we witness the worldview that locates the fault not in the gods or in the stars but rather in the "absurd drama that others have staged around me." Sanchez is clear, no matter how menacing the forces arrayed against her, no matter how debilitating the betrayals, she as individual is not essentially flawed and she can overcome, she can "rise above." Likewise, the book concludes with a quote which starts with three assertive and affirmative words: "I do battle." To rise above. I do battle. Those are not victim sentiments, those are warrior chants, wild woman anthems. Because she is human like all of us, Sanchez has her moments of weakness and self pity, or as she asked in I've Been A Woman: what is it about me that I claim all the wrong lives, the same endings? [IBW 80] The key is not in denying such moments, but rather in acknowledging them and then moving on, continuing to rise above, continuing to do battle. Sanchez is no one dimensional writer, no heroic goddess. No. She is what we all are: human and subject to hurt, disappointment and even moments of despair, as well as, at her (and our) best, we/she is an agent of resistance and change who willingly embraces the eternal struggle to make life better and more beautiful, the ongoing and seemingly endless rolling of the rock of salvational humanness up the mountain of social and personal contradictions, consciously engaging in the lifelong contest to make this world human. Were it not for this bedrock foundational faith in herself and humanity, Wounded would be too terrible to bear. This book is Sanchez's most brutal and unsparing; it is also her most daring and most accomplished. We are discussing Sanchez's use of personal pain and heretofore we have assumed that personal meant autobiographical in the strict sense of the word. But Wounded offers us something more challenging. Just as Sanchez implicitly asks readers to identify with her personal life, Sanchez also identifies with the personal life of others, and in so doing expands the parameters of personal. Moreover, Sanchez chooses to identify with wretchedness and self-abasement, and not just with (s)heroism and self-actualization. So while there are tributes and celebratory poems/prose pieces for Spelman College grads and college president Johnetta Cole, for sister writer Toni Morrison and for socially-committed singing group Sweet Honey In The Rock, for James Baldwin and for President Vaclav Havel, and for Essence magazine and free Nicaragua, there are also tough, tough pieces which articulate voices many of us would really prefer not to hear. Voices such as the young woman who orally-sexed Tupac Shakur on a dance floor: Like All i did was go down on him in the middle of the dance floor ...cuz he's in the movies on the big screen bigger than life bigger than all of my hollywood dreams cuz see i need to have my say among all the unsaid lives i deal with. [WF 67 & 68] Voices such as the aforementioned crack-addicted mother who deposits her seven year old into the clutches of monstrous males who repeatedly rape the little girl and so i took her to the crack house where this man. This dog this former friend of mine lived wdn't give me no crack no action. Even when i opened my thighs to give him some him again for the umpteenth time he sd no all the while looking at my baby my pretty little baby. And he said I want her. i need a virgin. Your pussy's too loose you had so much traffic up yo pussy you could park a truck up there and still have room for something else. And he laughed this long laugh. And I looked at him and the stuff he wuz holding in his hand and you know i cdn't remember my baby's name he held the stuff out to me and i cdn't remember her birthdate i cdn't remember my daughter's face. And i cried as i walked out that door. [WF 72] Perhaps the most troubling voice is the valiant voice of a rape survivor who courageously refuses the false shelter of silence. i was raped at 3 o'clock one morning... And then he tore off my gown and pushed my legs up and went inside me. He was soft. i thought, this won't hurt too much. Then he screamed, move yo ass bitch cmon move yo ass with me you know you want this yeah that's it move yo ass i'm gon give you a fuck like you ain't never had and as he talked he got harder and harder and he jabbed his penis from one side to another up against my fibroids and i screamed and he socked me, said, start talking bitch say it's good it feels good tell me how juicy it is tell me how you love the pain go on talk to me bout big black dicks and sucking big black dicks yeh here i come with mine cmon suck me off cmon lick him suck him feel my balls. . . . Ahhhh yes yess. Smile bitch this here's mo fucking you've had in a long time. Go on suck him hard that's it oh that's it keep him hard cuz he gon rip you up inside. Turn over yeh turn over i want to see what you got back there. And i screamed O my God no don't. Don't. And he hit me in the head pushed my mouth flat down on the bed. i cdn't breathe. i thought i would suffocate then and there and he pulled my head up and whispered in my ear don't mess with me bitch. Push yo ass up and enjoy. . . . [WF 69-70] All three of these tough talkings by different women are in the first person. Does it mean that Sonia was addicted to wild sex, to crack, does it mean she was a rape victim (some questions we dare not ask because we really don't want to hear an affirmative answer)? But sister Sanchez is not letting us off so easily. Sanchez understands that if we are truly "we," then we are all of us, each one of us is identified with every other one of us--and not just the best of us, but also the wretched of us. Sanchez understands that to embrace Fanon is to fully identify with the wretched of the earth, not merely in an abstract philosophical sense but also as a lived identification which accepts down in order to reach up. Note Sanchez's use of double voice in the rape piece, how she has fine tuned her technique so that she does not even need to use italics, she can shift voices within a sentence, and never once are we confused--dismayed, repulsed, angered, shamed, but never confused. The construction of this short prose piece, aesthetically is an architectural marvel. Sanchez manages a near impossible feat: she simultaneously presents the voice of the rapist and the voice of his victim. This doubling of the first person point of view binds us even closer to what is happening. We are literally immersed in a negative union whose terror is more profoundly realized than if only one or the other were telling the story. Moreover, through the use of first person Sanchez has removed the distancing effect endemic to the use of the third person. This is one of the most harrowing texts on the rape theme ever written. There is no him and her for the reader to either condemn and/or identify with, there is only I and me. If one reads the piece aloud, what happens is that the reader becomes both parties in this assault. Moreover, although the opening establishes that the female is telling us about what happened to her, by presenting the rapist in the first person, Sanchez effectively disrupts a one-sided identification and forces us to participate in the actual rape. When you say the words aloud you become the rapist. There is a musical analogue to this doubling of the first person: the amazing leaping of intervals between the extreme upper register and the extreme lower register which was pioneered by free jazz saxophonists such as John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and especially Eric Dolphy, all of whom are well known to Sanchez. I am not suggesting that she consciously copied (or more precisely "copped") this technique from the musicians. Indeed, the musicians themselves were appropriating oratory techniques and injecting those techniques into instrumental music; they were literally making their horns talk, scream, sing, shout, wail, moan, etc. I believe that, within their respective disciplines, both the jazz musicians and Sanchez were making innovative use of the basic African derived cultural value of call and response, except rather than require an external audience, they fissured themselves, split one into two, and both issued the call and responded to the call. This is, of course, another instance of the principle of reciprocity at work, and reciprocity is itself a reflection of dialectics. So then, whether consciously or intuitively, Sanchez has disrupted non-dialectical linear progression with oscillating dialectical progression. This is the awesome achievement so brilliantly demonstrated in EYEWITNESS: CASE NO. 3456, Sanchez's rape piece. The "technical innovation/ unflinching honesty/emotional resonance" triad that we used to analyze After Saturday... is equally applicable to EYEWITNESS. We need not repeat the close reading to appreciate Sanchez's mastery; anyone who has read EYEWITNESS and who understands the analytical approach presented here can do their own basic critique. I do however think it instructive to note Sanchez's ongoing use of death/rebirth as a philosophical construct. If we experience the rape as a slaughter, as the victim psychologically dying beneath an onslaught from above--including the forced internalizing of the instrument of one's own destruction (oral sex: the literal ingesting of the rapist's penis), then we can more clearly appreciate Sanchez's use of the African rebirth-following-death belief system. We do not end with rape and the internalization of oppression, instead we end with survival and morning, living for a new day regardless of how terrible the night has been. When I awoke in the morning he was gone. I dragged myself out of bed and looked under beds, inside closets under beds, inside other rooms, under beds, ran out of the house, to the porch, and felt the blood on my legs held the blood in my hand saw that the morning had returned and put on my face. [WF 70] This is the same way in which After Saturday... ended. I cannot overstress the philosophical importance of this "morning/rebirth" trope. Although not as wrenching in its subject matter as EYEWITNESS, the title selection in Wounded is technically and emotionally one of the most complex tour de forces in Sanchez's body of published work. Whereas EYEWITNESS and the other prose pieces maintain a chronological narrative with only one theme and a limited well defined range of emotions and reasonings, Wounded knots together the diverse threads of 1. infidelity, 2. attempts at reconciliation, and 3. desperate acts to sometimes face and sometimes avoid the truth of a series of intimate encounters which take place over an unspecified time period. Sanchez does not use a neat and easily followed chronological narrative, nor does the story focus solely on one event or issue, and certainly there is no clear demarcation of emotions or reasonings, Wounded... is instead a tempestuous and disorienting experience which totters back and forth between tragedy and comedy, cool calculations and frantic reactions. As the marriage disintegrates, the narrative gathers up and ties together the resulting sadness and pathology into an intricately interwoven burial shroud which is used to wrap the remains of an intimate relationship gone to rot. Some pains cannot be borne in silence. Some pains can not be locked out of sight. They are too huge to carry alone. And thus Sanchez has vomited forth Wounded, and what a regurgitation of pain this prose piece is. Again there are multiple voices (male, female, and Black third person omniscient) orchestrated into a tapestry of intrigue and resentment. As the relationship lurches totally awry, we understand how unhappy they are making each other, yet neither can stop--the behavior has become compulsive. At some point, we wish that the unnamed "she" would have just put the philandering "him" out, but, no, instead she tries to pull him deeper in: two non-swimmers, pathetically flailing about as they drown in a sea of ersatz love. Witness--recall the use of nature images, the use of brilliant color, and the use of wordplay: i am preparing for him to come home. i have exercised. Soaked in the tub. Scrubbed my body. Piled myself down. What a beautiful day it's been. Warmer than usual. The cherry blossoms on the drive are blooming prematurely. The hibiscus are giving off a scent around the house. i have gotten drunk off the smell. So delicate. So sweet. So loving. i have been sleeping, no, daydreaming all day. Lounging inside my head. i am walking up this hill. The day is green. All green. Even the sky. i start to run down the hill and i take wing and begin to fly and the currents turn me upside down and i become young again childlike again ready to participate in all children's games. She's fucking my brains out. I'm so tired i just want to put my head down at my desk. Just for a minute. What is wrong with her? For one whole month she's turned to me every nite. Climbed on top of me. Put my dick inside her and become beautiful. Almost birdlike. She seemed to be flying as she rode me. Arms extended. Moving from side to side. But my God. Every night. She's fucking my brains out. I can hardly see the morning and I'm beginning to hate the nite. [WF 6] Speaking to his friend Ted, the male mate denounces his partner's attempt to bind up their wounded relationship with the gauze of unending sex: It ain't normal is it for a wife to fuck like she does. Is it man? It ain't normal. Like it ain't normal for a woman you've lived with for twenty years to act like this. [WF 7] By implication he is suggesting that his behavior is normal--his betrayal of their vows, his dalliances and debaucheries are all conduct befitting the male of the species, especially since he's been with her "for twenty years." This then is the bell that tolled the midnight hour and led to the sentiment that "ain't no man can love." Moreover, this is not a new thought, back in 1970 Sanchez said in Personal Letter No. 3: it is a hard thing to admit that sometimes after midnight i am tired of it all. [IBW 20] In the middle of the narrative are two interrogations, both of which feature one-sided attempts to talk out the problem. Anyone who has been involved in a discussion to save a doomed relationship will surely recognize the gregarious eagerness of one party which is offset by the terse sullenness of the other party. Additionally, in Sanchez's narrative the male is a lawyer, so the question/answer format has an additional layer of meaning. Sanchez balances the torment by switching the aggressive questioner and withdrawn respondent roles: first the woman questions and the man begrudgingly answers: Do they have children? one does. Are they married? one is. They're like you then. yes. How old are they? thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. What do they do? an accountant and two lawyers. They're like you then. yes. Do they make better love than I do? i'm not answering that. [WF 4-5] and then it is the male's turn to probe for understanding while the female smugly responds: yes. but enough's enough. you're my wife. it's not normal to fuck as much as you do. No? can't we go back a little, go back to our normal life when you just wanted to sleep at nite and make love every now and then? like me. No. what's wrong with you. are you having a nervous breakdown or somethin? No. [WF 8] Regardless of who is questioning whom, however, the upshot of it all, of course, is that no matter how sincerely one party may approach the discussion, to the other party the discussion resembles an inquisition more than a conversation. Moreover, Sanchez presents the female narrator with an unblinking honesty that helps us understand how it is that such a supposedly insightful and wise person can willingly drift so far away from dry land. Time and again, one of the first reactions exhibited by a rejected female is to question her self-worth: there must be something wrong with me: As I drove home from the party i asked him what was wrong? What was bothering him? Were we okay? Would we make love tonite? Would we ever make love again? Did my breath stink? Was I too short? Too tall? Did i talk too much? Should i wear lipstick? Should i cut my hair? Let it grow? What did he want for dinner tomorrow nite? Was i driving too fast? Too slow? What is wrong man? He said i was always exaggerating. Imagining things. Always looking for trouble. [WF 4] Clearly, in loveland there are no exemptions for poets or anyone else--nor should there be. After all, the index of humanity is social intimacy; all of us are capable of being open and some of us are willing to keep our word, some of us do struggle to live up to the values we espouse. The reality is, however, that it is impossible to distinguish in advance the some who will struggle from the all are capable but for various reasons do not live up to their capacity. And then too, we all have our breaking points, and until we are put to the test we never really know what we will do when the pressure is on or when certain temptations are placed in our path. Regardless of contingencies, the hard fact is that you can't swim in the sea of love without getting wet/hurt--if only momentarily. Sanchez has never presented herself as all wise or all knowing, as above the fray of human contradictions. There is no sense in thinking of Sanchez or anyone else as being either perfect or exempt. Every social choice we make is a chance, you can not predict with 100% certainty what some one will or won't do. You can do your best and you can hopefully encourage/inspire others to do their best. But that's about it. What is so clearly inspirational about Sanchez is that she has taken the advice offered by the old woman: Sanchez has never given up on love. (See Just Don't Never Give Up on Love [H&H 10]) This affirmative hope along with Sanchez's consistent resistance to oppression/exploitation is the sterling example of what it means to be a true revolutionary in America. In the final analysis, is not love and struggle all that life is ultimately ever about? Some might question: is this piece really autobiographical--maybe it's like Poem for Some Women about the crack addicted mother of the seven year old, maybe Sanchez is just using the first person as a means of identification with the general situation rather than as revelation of her own specific breakup? My response is twofold. First: names have been withheld to protect the guilty. Second: this is a composite story that draws on Sanchez's experience but also draws on the experiences of many other women, particularly women who have been in relationships with Black men who are professionals trying to excel in their chosen career areas--which areas are invariably White/sexist/&capitalist dominated. So Wounded both is autobiographical in essence and more than autobiographical in details. The crux of the matter, however, is that despite whatever the specific alterations, the overall arc of abduction, rape, and abandonment as we defined those terms earlier continues to apply, continues to characterize Sanchez's intimate relationships with men, except, in this particular case, the expression of the triad of base notes is much more convoluted. The question of abduction is also a question of displacement, of forcing a person out of a space they control into a space where they are controlled. The male as manipulator and controller is easy to see in this case. The opening suggests that he initially thinks he has succeeded at confining his mate to a position of blindness but then there comes a day when he realizes that somehow she knows.. She hadn't found anything. I had been careful. No lipstick. No matches from a well-known bar. No letters. Cards. Confessing an undying love. Nothing tangible for her to hold onto. But I knew she knew. [WF 3] However, the tables are turned when the female decides to take control of their sexual activity; rather then wait passively for him to initiate sexual contact, she now becomes the master of the bedroom. Not surprisingly the male feels displaced and characterizes the resulting repositioning as "not normal." The rape, in this case, begins with the male "fucking over" the female by engaging in extra-marital affairs. The infidelity is established as a fact in the opening. There is no question about whether the male was morally wrong. However, again, there is a switch. Rather than assume the traditional role of victim (i.e. the faithful wife who has been betrayed by a philandering husband), the female chooses to become sexually aggressive and she begins to force sex on an unwilling husband. Oddly but not inaccurately, both the female and the male feel abandoned. Rather than fly into a condemnatory rage at the male, the female plays out a perverse act of self-negation as exemplified by this haiku which is part of the text. if I become the other woman will i be loved like you loved her? [WF 8] This amounts to a double abandonment. First, the male has abandoned his wife to take up with other women, and second, the female abandons her position as wife in attempt to be like the other women based on the twisted, but not unrealistic, assessment that such role reversal is how she will win back his love. What we have is an act of self-negation in response to being negated by an intimate other. What we have is two wrongs vainly trying to make a right. What we have is a woman trying to actualize womanhood by acting like the man she loves whose behavior she hates. What we have is a mess that predictably cannot and does not last. Sanchez sums up the futility of this approach with a line that is raw in its articulation but subtle in its multiplicity of meanings: you can't keep his dick in your purse [WF 9] This statement could be read to mean: women cannot control men, or one can't possess another's sexuality, or one should not try to commodify/reify sexuality, or one should not place a dollar value on sex, and on and on. What is clear is that this marks the point when the female shifts from focusing on attempting to determine the male's behavior within the intimacy of their relationship to paying closer attention to controlling her own behavior. To use an old school phrase: the female decides it's time literally "to get herself together."Wounded... is divided into two parts or "sets," the second of which is a blues poem. Set one ends with a mantra: I shall become a collector of me. ishallbecomeacollectorof me. i Shall become a collector of me. i shall BECOME a collector of me. I shall Become A COLLECTOR of me. I SHALL BECOME A COLLECTOR OF ME. ISHALLBECOMEACOLLECTOROFME. AND PUT MEAT ON MY SOUL. [WF 10] Sanchez has blessed us with incadescent prose that rolls off the tongue when you speak it, blossoms like a multi-petaled rose when you closely examine it, and touches you with the intensity of that particular kiss that you will nver forget when you experience her read it or even when you are reading it alone. This is an accomplishment whose emotional impact is so thoroughgoing we might momentarily forget or ignore the element of craft that went into Sanchez's creative work. But no matter how smitten, we should never overlook Sanchez's technical mastery. As a writer, Sanchez works hard to reach the pinnacle of wordsmithing. Indeed, the other strengths of unblinking honesty and emotional resonance would not come across with such singular sincerity and searing intensity were Sanchez's control of the language not so magnificent, particularly in her innovative prose. A Luta Continua--The Struggle Continues There is much more that could be analyzed in Wounded, but the essential point is made. Technically and thematically this is one of the most moving pieces that Sanchez has written. That Sanchez chooses to open this book with this selection, and that this is also the title selection reinforces Sanchez's determination to tell us something. But what is she telling us? Sanchez is saying: hey, regardless of what you think and fantasize about me, I too--to use the title of one of Sanchez's earlier books--I've Been A Woman, and to be a woman means to be a sufferer. Although, to be sure, sufferer is not all that Sanchez is, nevertheless sufferer is an inextricable and unavoidable aspect of her identity as woman, an inextricable and unavoidable aspect of all of our gender/ethnic/cultural identities as human beings. It takes a great deal of strength to reveal one's weaknesses, especially in a society where style and artifice are often a substitute for substance and sincerity. It is not easy to publicly document private truths which seem too painful, which seem too ugly--what will people think of me?--to be revealed. But that is the beauty of Sonia Sanchez, she audaciously and bodaciously sashays beyond conventional boundaries of personal propriety in order to enter the ether of love and liberation. In the final analysis, Sanchez's sense of struggle combined with her unending attempts to sustain the struggle is her most salient characteristic. What is most instructive is not her mapping of the terrain of personal pain but rather the example that she offers of moving beyond the boundaries and barriers of hurt, a constant attention to rebirth rather than a morbid fascination with death. Moreover, Sanchez's struggle-oriented, rebirth sensibility concretely demonstrates the possibility of healthy survival in the fact of personal loss and pain. Sanchez's example informs us: regardless of the particulars of our own trials and tribulations, as long as we are willing to struggle, we can survive this journey through the long night of our individual victimizations. The choice is ours. In her prose pieces Sanchez asserts a terrible and timeless truth: no one goes unscarred. Once we admit, that to one degree or another, we are all counted among the walking wounded, then and only then can we be about the business of becoming/being well. If we are ever to be made whole, we must first admit we have been severed into conflicting and confusing pieces. Undoubtedly the revelation of such truths hurts, but articulating these abrasive albeit tender truths also enables us to heal. Our personal wounds must be cleansed if we are to be cured and refashioned as complete and compassionate human beings. The medication is stringent and the therapy excruciating, but there is no alternative. By citing her own situations and wrestlings, Sanchez challenges us not only to admit we suffer, she also challenges us to move beyond suffering. She challenges us not with lofty appeals to ideals but rather by pain filled sharings and by identification with the wounds of others, even identification with self-inflicted wounds. Thus, we now come full circle to understand that liberation and love go hand in hand: we need love to be truly human and without liberation (and the struggle to attain and maintain liberation) we are prevented from consummating true love. To love is to express our humanity, but love cannot exist in a vacuum nor can love flower in the dirt of racism, capitalism and sexism. Time and time again, as Sanchez's personal pain bears witness, we find that all our attempts at love are twisted by systemic exploitation and oppression that deform our psyches and personalities, especially the male psyche. If we are to achieve love, we must fight for liberation. That is the summation of Sanchez's creative use of personal pain. Sanchez's creative poetry and prose is not only physical evidence of an exemplary act of courage, her work is also, and more importantly, a significant contribution to the ongoing battle "to create a human world." A luta continua--the struggle continues. WORKS CITED BB = A Blues Book For Blue Black Magical Women (Broadside Press: Detroit 1974) H = Homecoming (Broadside Press: Detroit 1969) H&H = homegirls & handgrenades (Thunder's Mouth Press: New York 1984) IBW = I've Been A Woman -- New and Selected Poems (Third World Press: Chicago 1985) LP = Love Poems (The Third Press: New York 1973) USS = Under a Soprano Sky (African World Press: Trenton 1987) WF = Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press: Boston 1995)—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
THE MOMENT OF THE FIRST DAY
1.
people get married all the time. but not in congo square. eight o’clock in the morning — there is a softness about that time of day in place de congo, the sun has not yet risen past the trees, barely cleared the rooftops of nearby buildings. the birds have recently finished feeding and are chirping their contentment.
though this late may morning is early summer, the atmosphere is still pleasingly cool. instead of a breeze, the new day gently air-caresses like a lover alternately kissing and blowing unhurried exhales on intimate skin through partially parted lips. big, full smiling lips. laughing lips. tickling. lips. like that.
there are moments when romance is real. when every little thing really is alright. when people do lean close and be touching—admittedly rare but nonetheless simply beautiful.
i quietly draped my arm over nia’s shoulders and cozied close. whispered something, anything.
i wonder how many lovers danced together here during slavery times, here on this meeting ground just outside what was then the city proper, beyond the ramparts, the city’s earthen defense line, out on the plain next to the bend in the canal where the houmas and choctaws came to trade, and where our enslaved ancestors assembled to barter food and handicrafts, and to make music, sing and dance?
i wonder how many lovers met here, secretly in public—secretly because their “masters” didn’t know the full import of these assemblies, didn’t know the get togethers were also trysts. and in public because the community of captives all knew juba loved juline, were aware elise was dancing for cudjoe, and had no doubt that esmé with her brown eyes round as spanish coins cast shyly toward the ground was glowing in the spotlight of josé’s focused stare as her slow twirling kicked up bouquets of dust. how many black hearts have been entwined here?
who can know the specific answer? look. we are still meeting here without the consent of the authorities — we woke up, journeyed here howsoever we travel, and voila, requesting no permit, we gather a community of lovers. love needs no permission, and certainly black love requires no government approval.
2.
true beauty is elegant, a curved exhilaration without an iota of wasted motion or excessive flash. moreover, in an african aesthetic, elegance includes rhythm.
a straight line is monotonous, rhythmless. rhythm is but another name for diversity in motion, and in form, diversity is the curve. hence there are no straight lines on a beautiful human body, every would-be straightness arcs, curves.
cassandra is all curves. even ric with his honed physique, his steel-cabled arms, rippled with veins and muscular development: curves.
senghor said, the negro abhors a straight line. i would add, so does nature, and i would rather be in tune with nature than with rational abstractions. even light bends under the influence of gravity.
moreover, beyond the arc and the lean, when dealing with the human, surface prettiness alone does not give you beauty. physical perfection without inner warmth is cold, and all real human beauty is warm, reflects the rush of blood, the healthy heat of a passionate body, a beating heart…
cassandra is covered shoulder to toe in a sheath of dusky sorrel material embroidered with a flowered pattern in deep violet. she is holding a bouquet of velvety orchids in what appears to be an invisible basket: the soft off-white blossoms with delicate purple highlights dangle in an arrangement shaped like a stunning cluster of semi-sweet concord grapes. sand’s toenails are lacquered a burgundy to match the purplish-red (or is it reddish-purple) of her form-fitting, backless dress.
ric stands on two feet but leans majestically like a pine tree seeking sunlight. he is wearing cream (shirt) and brown (slacks), and i mean “wearing” those colors, in fact, he is wearing them out. plus, his skin has the smooth darkness of a country midnight. he is smiling without moving his lips. the luster of his skin is smiling. i imagine his eyes are smiling, but i cannot see his pupils through his shades. even the men are admiring how beautiful ric is. the women look at him and hold their breath.
i bet you two centuries ago, in 1799, on some may day a cool black man stood next to the enchanting winsomeness of a saucer-eyed, dark brown erzulie and their community of friends gathered around them. and smiled deeply felt, seriously contented smiles just like we are smiling now.
3.
the formal ceremony, such as it is, is extremely brief—not much was rendered to ceasar on that morning. carolyn jefferson administered the vows and signed the paper the state uses to hold one legally accountable. but the real signification of commitment came not from a mark on paper but from a leap over a rod.
sand’s friend vera had crafted a broom done up in french vanilla-colored raffia wrapped on the handle and outer straws spray painted dark purple (what a soothing combination). the matrimonial staff lay in the dust between pale, pale yellow candles. ric lights one, sand lights the other. they stand. hold hands. and jump.
why would educated individuals carry on a tradition from slavery?—only those who don’t believe in either ancestors or community would ask such a hopeless question. only those removed from the security of community would sneer at jumping the broom. to jump together is not a reminder of slavery, but rather a declaration of self-determination.
4.
afterwards we all went over to ric&sand’s apartment. we set up tables on the sidewalk, chairs on the front porch, and played music inside the house—hard wood floors, shiny with hand applied wax, buffed to an eat-off-the-floor sheen. candles in every room, flickering, some of them scented. here the quiet has a presence you can not ignore, like a precocious child, grinning, hands behind the back: guess what i got, and she stands before you until you tickle her or until he flashes deep dimples and covers his mouth where his front teeth are missing. inside ric&sand’s shotgun apartment, the rooms were happy like that.
the walls were bare except for strategically placed photographs hung in carefully selected frames. one frame is green wood. there are two pictures. sand at two with a hat slanted jauntily on her head, and a boyish ric that looks just like mannish ric except the clothes are smaller and from an earlier era. but even then the angle of a budding lean is obvious.
there are trays of food on the tables prepared by a local african restaurant: plantain, a spinach dish called jama-jama, a coconut rice, and chicken on skewers with a red sauce on one table, fruit and drinks on the other. a gigantic multi-fruit cream tart in a white cardboard box (the pastry didn’t last beyond a quarter hour).
we started the reception with nuptial toasts (libationally, i poured a sip of my juice at the foot of a tree). then we read poems and afterwards toasted some more. sand’s friend vera impishly offers: here’s mud in your eye. we all laugh. most of us are black, but there are latinas here and a sprinkle of americanos who thankfully think of themselves as human rather than the aggressive/impossible purity of white.
if you passed us that morning, people lounging on the porch, sipping on juice or beer or wine or sucking the nectar from cold watermelon and chilled cantaloupe, if you had seen us you would have thought this was one of those impressionistic paintings of happy darkies deep in the south circa some idyllic antebellum era, except, we, of course, were culturally afro-centric, in love with life and each other, savoring the day and dreaming about nothing but a peace-filled future.
around three in the mid-afternoon, people begin drifting off, their spirits thoroughly rejuvenated, satiated and smiling. before leaving, we exchange hugs. everything beautiful deserves to be embraced.
5.
so this is how we avoid insanity and suicide. we fly to love.
i had been thinking about ric&sand’s upcoming marriage as i drove around the city. that’s when an image gathered me into its center. you know how you will see something, know that the image is important but not be able to figure the specific meaning. this happened to me a day or so before the wedding. what i wrestled to understand then, is now so clear.
three green birds flew by. their feathered emeraldness disappearing into the sheltering palms that line elysian fields avenue. lime-colored bird feathers fusing with the camouflage of drooping olive-dark tree leaves.
in urban climes free beauty is seldom seen. amid regimentation disguised as daily life, true beauty appears but briefly. we spend eight hours working, a hour in transit to and fro the yoke, another hour or so trying to cool out from the yoke, maybe two hours doing things we need to do for the house but can’t do cause we be at the yoke, and, of course, we spend at least six hours sleeping to get ready for, yep, the yoke. the yoke ain’t no joke. and we really think we are free?
actually, we are so harassed by being city dwellers in postmodern america that we can hardly be sure what we would be like if we were unyoked, what we would discover in the world. who knows how hip we would be if we were unyoked. at the reception i joke on the porch: if i was in charge, this (sweeping my eyes across the array of relaxing black folk, couples snuggled up, singles sipping red dog or nibbling on jama-jama), this would be what monday is like. well.
i have never before seen uncaged green birds flying through the blueness of crescent city skies. the rare wonder of such a sighting almost made me doubt myself. did i actually spy three pea green streaks threading through the plain of weekday? after all, i could have been delusional. optical illusions are far more common than the miracle of genuine beauty on the wing. maybe it was pigeons. maybe i was sun blinded. the day so bright, maybe my sun-stabbed eyeballs were incapable of clarity. maybe my perceptual acuity had been mutated into fantasy and silliness.
nah, i was there. clearly these creatures were flying. whatever they were. zip and gone. but that is the way of life in the urban jumble. anything original is rare. everything self-determined is even rarer than originality — and undoubtedly love and beauty had to be on the fly, dodging the black and white manacles of what this society pretends is the lassez faire of living color.
and why were there three little birds—not a couple, but a community of birds, free and green? actually the cluster of their existence is the answer to the question of the why of their existence. they were three because it takes a community to be free—one is a goner, and two won’t last long, it takes at least three to be free.
6.
we will remember ric and sand’s wedding day—the first day we wore this couple as an amulet over our hearts. ric and sand’s first day becomes another jewel on the necklace of black love.
people get married all the time, but rarely is there this much love quietly shared. these are the days we shall surely remember, the gauge we shall use to determine how good is whatever the next goodness we encounter.
thank you ric&sand, for a moment, for a morning when the universe was beautiful, and peace and love were more than a slogan optimistically signed at the end of a desperate love letter sent to someone far, far away.
—kalamu ya salaam
I Do Not Protest, I Resist Like most writers, figuring out how to economically support myself is a major problem. I have worked as an editor, as an arts administrator, and as the co-owner of a public relations, marketing and advertising firm. I have freelanced on projects ranging from $10 record reviews to commissions from publishers. Economy necessity is a major influence on what I write. I have written commercials whose messages I personally reject like a radio jingle for a Cajun meat-lovers pizza when I don't eat red meat. Of course, like many others, while I try to steer clear of major contradictions, I have done my share of hack work. Doing what one must in order to survive is one major way in which the status quo effectively shapes us. As a writer, money making options are surprisingly limited. We all know and face the wolf of survival. There is no news in that story. But wolves run in packs, and survival is not the only predator. There is also our own desire to succeed—I remember reading about "the fickle bitch of success" and wondering why was success described as a "bitch." I have my own ideas, but that's a different discussion. Success is a very complicated question. We can easily dismiss "selling out" our ideals for a dollar, but what we can't easily dismiss either in principle or in fact, is that we all want our work to reach the widest possible audience. On the contemporary literary scene, reaching a wide audience almost requires going through major publishers. Participation in the status quo makes strenuous demands of our art to conform to prevailing standards, one of which is that the only overtly political art worthy of the title art is "protest art". Capitalism loves "protest art" because protest is the safety valve that dissipates opposition and can even be used to prove how liberal the system is. You know the line: "aren't you lucky to be living in a system where you have the right to protest?" Without denying the obvious and hard won political freedoms that exist in the USA, my position is that we must move from protest to resistance if we are to be effective in changing the status quo. The real question is do we simply want "in" or do we want structural change? Most of us start off wanting in. It is natural to desire both acceptance by as well as success within the society into which one is born. But, in the immortal words of P-funk President George Clinton: "mind your wants because someone wants your mind." Those of us who by circumstance of birth are located on the outside of the status quo (whether based on ethnicity, gender or class), face an existential question which cuts to the heart: how will I define success and is acceptance by the status quo part of what I want in life? While it is simple enough to answer in the abstract, in truth, i.e. the day to day living that we do, it's awfully lonely on the outside, psychologically taxing, and ultimately a very difficult position to maintain. Who wants to be marginalized as an artist and known to only a handful of people? Given the choice between having a book published by a mainstream publisher and not having one published by a mainstream publisher, most writers (regardless of identity) would choose to be published, especially when it seems that one is writing whatever it is one wants to write. Without ever having to censor you formally—after a few years of rejection slips most writers will censor and change themselves—mainstream publishers shape contemporary literature by applying two criteria: 1. is it commercial, or 2. is it artistically important. Either will get you published at least once, although only the former will get you published twice, thrice and so forth. Unless one is very, very clear about one's commitment to socially relevant writing, even the most revolutionary writer can become embittered after thirty or forty years of toiling in obscurity. As a forty-seven-year-old (this essay was written in 1994) African American writer, I know that if you do not publish with establishment publishers, be they commercial, academic or small independents, then you will have very little chance of achieving "success" as a writer. I sat on an NEA panel considering audience develop applications. One grant listed Haki Madhubuti as one of the poets they wanted to present. I was the only person there who knew Madhubuti's work. I was expected to be conversant with the work of contemporary writers across the board. But how is it that a contemporary African American poet with over three million books in print who is also the head of Third World Press, one of this country's oldest Black publishing companies, was unknown to my colleagues? The answer is simple: Madhubuti is not published by the status quo. He started off self publishing, came of age in the 60s/70s Black Arts Movement and is one of the most widely read poets among African Americans but all of his books have been published by small, independent Black publishers. Too often success is measured by acceptance within the status quo rather than by the quality of one's literary work. That is why we witness authors proclaimed as "major Black writers" when they have only published one or two books (albeit with major publishers) within a five year period. There is no surprise here. My assumption is that as long as the big house stands, "success" will continue to be measured by whether one gets to sleep in big house beds. This brings me to the subject of protest art. The reason I do not believe in protest art is because I have no desire to bed down with the status quo nor do I have a desire to be legitimized by the status quo. Instead, my struggle is to change the status quo. For me protest art is not an option precisely because in reality protest art is simply a knock on the door of the big house. There is a long tradition of African American protest art, especially in literature. As a genre, the slave narrative emerged as an integral part of the white led 19th century abolitionist movement. One major purpose of the slave narratives was to address Christian senses of charity and guilt—charity toward the less fortunate and guilt for the "sin" of supporting slavery. But even at that time there was a major distinction to be made between abolitionist sentiments and charity work on the one hand, and, on the other hand, active participation in the armed struggle against slavery, which included participation in the illegal activity of the underground railroad and support of clandestine armed opposition. This meant fighting with the John Browns of that era or joining the throng of insurgents storming court rooms to "liberate" detained African Americans who had escaped from the south and were then ensnared in the web of the Northern criminal justice system which continued to recognize the "property rights" of Southern slave owners. While the issues of today are no longer revolve around slavery, the distinction between protest and resistance, between charity and solidarity, remains the heart of the matter at hand. To protest is implicitly to accept the authority of the existing system and to appeal for a change of mind on the part of those in power and those who make up the body politic. To resist on the other hand is to fight against the system of authority while seeking to win over those who make up the body politic. "Winning over" is more than simply asking someone to change their mind, it is also convincing someone to change their way of living. In the 50s and 60s a debate raged among Black intellectuals about "protest art". Ironically, one of the chief opponents of protest art was James Baldwin—"ironically" because over the years the bulk of Baldwin's essays, fiction and drama can be read as a "protest" against bigotry and inhumanity, as a plea to his fellow human beings to change their hearts, minds and lives. When Baldwin started out he wanted to be "free" and to be accepted as the equal of any other human being. He did not want to be saddled with the "albatross" of racial (or sexual) themes as the defining factor of his work. Yet, as he lived, he changed and began to voluntarily take up these issues. I believe life changed him. The reality is that we can not continue to live in America with the social deterioration, mean spiritedness, and crass materialism which is polluting our individual and collective lives. We are literally a nation of drug addicts (alcohol and tobacco chief among our drugs of choice, with over-the-counter pain killers and headache remedies running a close third). We are suffering horrendous rates of violence and disease. There is a widening economic gap at a time when many of our major urban centers teeter on the brink of implosion: aging physical infrastructures such as bridges, sewer systems, housing; corrupt political administration; and increasing ethnic conflict. Something has got to give. My position is simple, we live in a period of transition. We can protest the current conditions and/or we can struggle to envision and create alternatives. We can plead for relief or we can work to inspire and incite our fellow citizens to resist. As artists, we have a choice to make. Indeed, there is always a choice to make. Protest art always ends up being trendy precisely because the art necessarily struggles to be accepted by the very people the art should oppose. Ultimately, protest artists are, by definition, more interested in relating to the enemy than relating to the potential insurgents. This is why we have protest artists whose cutting edge work is rejected by neighborhood people. Yes, neighborhood people have tastes which have been shaped by the consumer society. Yes, neighborhood people are parochial and not very deep intellectually. Yes, neighborhood people are unsophisticated when it comes to the arts. But the very purpose of resistance art is to confront and change every negative yes of submission into a powerful and positive no of resistance! Our job as committed artists is to raise consciousness by starting where our neighborhoods are and moving up from there. Resistance art requires internalizing by an audience of the sufferers in order to be successful. The horrible truth is that every successful social struggle requires immense sacrifices, and the committed artist must also sacrifice—not simply suffer temporary poverty until one is discovered by the status quo, but sacrifice the potential wealth associated with a status quo career to work in solidarity with those who too often are born, live, struggle and die in anonymous poverty. We think nothing of the millions of people in this society who live and die without ever achieving even one tenth of the material wealth that many of us take for granted. We think nothing of those who are literally maimed and deformed as a result of the military and economic war waged against peoples in far away lands in order to insure profit for American based billionaires. Somehow, while the vast majority of our fellow citizens are never recognized by name, we artists think it ignoble to live and die without being lauded in the New York Times. But if we remember nothing else, we should remember this. Ultimately, the true "nobility of our humanity" will be judged not by the status quo but by the people of the future—the people who will look back on our age and wonder what in the world could we have had on our minds. Protest is not enough, we must resist. ### —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
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 Alex Lear
BIRD'S SOLO
"Ornithology,”
Birdland, NYC June 30, 1950
Charlie Parker – alto, w/Fats Navarro (aka “Fat Girl”) - trumpet, Bud Powell - piano, Curly Russell - bass, Art Blakey - drums.
I see no one from the bandstand where I stand I see no one, a little to the side from me next to me but a ways off Fat Girl giggles silently, shows his famous smile to someone in the audience I do not bother to look at, deep Bud Powell sits astride a piano and waits to slaughter any key I call or do not call any key it is not really a wait because there is no expectation on his part, he is supreme supremely confident and wildly cool, cracks no smile, his eyes half closed do not even let on that he is here, he sits there like he is not here, who is on bass?, I sense Bu ready to blow, Bud starts without asking, without saying, we blow the head, god, Blakey drops bombs better than anybody, no not better than Max but better than anybody else, head time, I will give you something to play Fat Girl, play this play this play this play this and behind my solo play whatever you think.
Now. How do you, do I, does anyone take a sunset and make it more beautiful, beautiful than the beauty it is in both the now and in the eternity and in the medium of expressing this searched for more beauty that the artist seeks not through thought but through god.
Once you have witnessed a sunset's beauty that beauty will be in you not just the memory but the beauty will be in you as long as you are you, the artist seeks through god.
Thought is being.
God is creating.
Man thinks.
Gods create.
Are we men or gods? Can we be both or merely one or the other?
Artists are men who aspire to be god so they create work more beautiful than original beauty, more beautiful than the idea of beauty, more beautiful even than the ideal of beauty, more beautiful than a thought of beauty.
Things are ugly. Things are beautiful. Things are things. Ugly and beauty are not things. The most lasting beauty is that beauty that lasts only as long as it is beautiful and than submerges into the listener's head, damn, Blakey plays beautiful music is the only art that dies the moment it is created and must be constantly created over and over in order to and over to live I need music I need music I music I create I music I music create I need create I need I I need music.
Records. Tapes. Are not music they are a representation of music, merely an approximation of what music sounds like when sounded. Limited approximations. Very limited. So limited that everytime you play them they sound exactly the same but music never is exactly the same not music every time it is created especially when it "sounds" the same, our stomachs have different contents even when we listen to records, on some days we play records and don't even hear them on other days we play a record and hear things we never heard before even though we've listened to that record fifty, forty, a hundred, once before, in fact usually the first time we hear it we don't hear anything but our reactions so busy reacting we are paying attention to our reactions that we don't hear what is going on on the record imagine and that is only a reaction to a record so how can we really hear music? we can't, we can watch it with a distant eye, see what it does to us too does to others observe the various parts or we can experience it, submit to it, be a slave to the rhythm become the music rather than the listener to the music rather than merely try listening to what we can't all hear can't hear all of anyway.
Or we men. We are men can be gods. What gods do is make men aware of godliness and make men aspire to godliness and create beauty and men aware of beauty if they are really men want to create beauty and show beauty to other men want to be gods too.
To help a person move from someone who is just here occupying space while the sun shines, moon moves, crickets and cars cry in the twilight with yellow beam eyes and warm houses flow and row on row of apartments with radioed music, move from just being, attaining no more consciousness than a rock or grass receiving a dog's golden shower letting everything wash over us and not understanding who what when, why or where because the newspapers are words of men who want to be men and not men who want to be gods, beauty, gods helping persons move to gods ahhhhh.
Art. Art animates. Art is the breath of gods, moving, art moves us from witness to participate outside to inside creating pass passive recipient to active conspirator when we look at Picasso's bull's head without seeing the handle bars and the bike's seat we have seen nothing but when we see both the handle bars & the seat as well as the bull's head then we have seen everything for art tells us that it is possible for everything to be everything for the inanimate to become animate or rather for the inanimate to animate within us whatever potential we have to create, god is bull's horn from man's bike handles without man making bull without god making bike handles with both being beautiful, Stravinsky would dig this if he could hear, god, Blakey is beautiful for the blind to see for the unknown to become knowable to know what you did not know you knew for Monk to take three notes three notes three notes you have heard before and before and before and sound completely like something you don't know not by changing the notes but by changing the way those notes are perceived that is what we mean by genius or how to make us see the extraordinary qualities of things, common things extraordinary in common like life how to make life extraordinary.
Now. Fat Girl. Let's hear what you have to say...
—kalamu ya salaam
Emilio Santiago I woke up, slowly, or I thought I woke up. Maybe I was still dreaming. Next thing I knew I had quit my job at the factory, and at the office, and on the assembly line and I was sitting on the warm ground with my father fishing in City Park. We both had on freshly washed jeans and old shirts. His had a torn pocket and a hole in the left sleeve, mine had chocolate milk stains on it from that morning when I went to drink the milk and missed my mouth. My dad was showing me things he never showed me when he was alive, or maybe it was things he showed me but things somehow I was unable to see then even though he tried to show me. I smile as I see myself learning stuff from my dad. I was 13 and I was learning how to smile like a man. When the sun started going down we walked home. He walked slowly enough that I could keep up without rushing. I was holding the poles and the empty bucket, we had released all the fish we caught. Daddy had said there was no need to take what we didn't need, we had food at home. I asked him why had we come fishing then, and he put his arm around my shoulder, loosely around my shoulders, and kissed me on the nose. Fully awake now, I look over at you. You are still sleeping. The windows in our room are shaded but the morning light is spread around the edges like the crust on bread. You make a very light whistling sound as you inhale while sleeping. I don't want to turn the TV on. I don't want to see anymore hostages. If I turn the tv on I will become a hostage too. What does your mother think of me now? I am in the middle of my life and there are no bells on my shoulders, no post graduate degrees on my wall. I can hear the traffic in the street outside. Where do people think they are going? I wish everyday I could go somewhere I've never been before, touch the doors of houses I've never entered, walk in the wash of seas that have never wet me. I start to wake you and ask you the last time we walked along in the park wandering hand in hand through the flock of ducks or when was it I most recently kissed you in public. Over all I'm pretty satisfied with our furniture, it's just the nagging thought that we didn't really need a leather sofa and glass topped coffee table to be happy, but it's just a thought. I see the shape of you beneath the thin sheet pulled up almost to your shoulders. The radio has come on automatically, and as the jazz filters into the room and into my consciousness I realize it's on WWOZ and someone is on the radio saying that this is a gorgeous Monday, that Mondays are the best days of the week. I look at him queerly. The music is nice. Suddenly there is this sound, this song that doesn't quite sound like the average song, it sounds so, so, so I don't know, so lonely, no not lonely, so incomplete, unfinished. It sounds like he is in my head, or I mean that music is music that is inside me, and somehow he saw it. Did my father tell him to play this music? And then the track is over. I listen for who the artist is and the DJ calls my name, but I never made any music. I never made the music I wanted to, maybe he is trying to tell me something. The next song that plays is a ballad in some language I don't recognize but I clearly see myself singing this foreign song on a red tiled patio early in the morning with five freshly cut yellow roses in my hand. I stand up to listen to the music better. Both my hands are on top of my head with my fingers interlaced. I am nude. You wake up. I can feel you watching me. My eyes are closed. When the song ends you ask me what am I thinking. I tell you I don't know and you kiss my hand, the hand with which I reached down to touch your thick dark brown hair. Is this still a dream? No, my fingers are wet where you kissed me. The music is filling our bedroom. Maybe I am supposed to be an artist. Finally I tell you as much of the truth as I am able to understand at this moment, "I was just listening to that music and it made me think about a lot of things I've always wanted to do...." —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
