Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

The American mind seems to have a
limited capacity for dealing with either the diachronic or synchronic aspects
of issues. ..

Yuval
Taylor and Jake Austen’s aptly titled Darkest
America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York: W. W. Norton,
2012) is a smart and timely book.Yuval
Taylor and Jake Austen’s aptly titled Darkest
America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York: W. W. Norton,
2012) is a smart and timely book.
It
is smart because Taylor and Austen chose not to ape Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) or
to mimic Robert C. Toll’s Blacking Up:
The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century
America (1974). Instead they focus
on the centrality of minstrelsy in cultural expressions and suggest we should
care about that expressive tradition because American “culture wouldn’t exist
without minstrelsy” (5). Take their
exaggerated claim with a grain of pepper: American culture would be duller and
safer without minstrelsy, but it would exist.
Nevertheless, their attractive work should have a companion volume
entitled Darkest America: White
Minstrelsy from Colonial Conquest to Social Pathology.

Taylor
and Austen’s book is timely because it enables a reader to have a moment of
enlightenment, an epiphany. Read against
the grain of how modern historiography uses the term polis (city-state), the book can be interpreted as a cutting
treatment of polis (nation-state) and
some of its spectacular characteristics.
Such displacement allows us to discover the red liberal/blue
conservative binary is not the only reason for finding ourselves in a
post-election swamp to be navigated between now and 2016. The swamp was made by
white minstrelsy. White political
minstrelsy daily nurtures the swamp.
Since
colonial days, white minstrelsy has been a practical art used by pink people of
color. These pink people distort their
collective ethnic identities by smearing white paint over their imagined
bodies. The audible and visual mask denies the biological verification of
ultimate African origins. The paint
invades the nervous system and manifests itself as random Gestalts, which in
turn produce dedicated scripts for the grand stage of American politics. The white minstrels take orgasmic delight in
performing these scripts to frustrate and misinform non-painted citizens. The
scripts are spin-driven histories; the comic deliveries block any clear vision
of the real political actions and policies that often prove fatal.
Just
as the charm of black minstrelsy pivots on “indefinite talk” routines, the
thrall of white minstrelsy depends on the 24-7 broadcasting of “definitive
trash-talk.” Long usage has made this
kind of discourse seem “normal” and has rendered white minstrelsy
indistinguishable from what is not theatrical.
It is merely insane or absurd to argue that American politics is not a
child begot from a strange marriage of black and white minstrelsy.
Taylor
and Austen open the closets of polis
in Chapter 3, “Of Cannibals and Kings: How New Orleans’s Zulu Krewe Survived
One Hundred Years of Blackface” and Chapter 10, “New Millennium Minstrel Show:
How Spike Lee and Tyler Perry Brought the Black Minstrelsy Debate to the
Twenty-First Century.” Rather than spoil
the unique pleasure of discovery in those two chapters, and indeed in the book
as a whole, I will leave you with the refrain of white minstrelsy’s theme
song: There is a bomb in Gilead that
kills the sin-sick soul.Yuval
Taylor and Jake Austen’s aptly titled Darkest
America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop (New York: W. W. Norton,
2012) is a smart and timely book.
It
is smart because Taylor and Austen chose not to ape Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) or
to mimic Robert C. Toll’s Blacking Up:
The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century
America (1974). Instead they focus
on the centrality of minstrelsy in cultural expressions and suggest we should
care about that expressive tradition because American “culture wouldn’t exist
without minstrelsy” (5). Take their
exaggerated claim with a grain of pepper: American culture would be duller and
safer without minstrelsy, but it would exist.
Nevertheless, their attractive work should have a companion volume
entitled Darkest America: White
Minstrelsy from Colonial Conquest to Social Pathology.

Taylor
and Austen’s book is timely because it enables a reader to have a moment of
enlightenment, an epiphany. Read against
the grain of how modern historiography uses the term polis (city-state), the book can be interpreted as a cutting
treatment of polis (nation-state) and
some of its spectacular characteristics.
Such displacement allows us to discover the red liberal/blue
conservative binary is not the only reason for finding ourselves in a
post-election swamp to be navigated between now and 2016. The swamp was made by
white minstrelsy. White political
minstrelsy daily nurtures the swamp.
Since
colonial days, white minstrelsy has been a practical art used by pink people of
color. These pink people distort their
collective ethnic identities by smearing white paint over their imagined
bodies. The audible and visual mask denies the biological verification of
ultimate African origins. The paint
invades the nervous system and manifests itself as random Gestalts, which in
turn produce dedicated scripts for the grand stage of American politics. The white minstrels take orgasmic delight in
performing these scripts to frustrate and misinform non-painted citizens. The
scripts are spin-driven histories; the comic deliveries block any clear vision
of the real political actions and policies that often prove fatal.
Just
as the charm of black minstrelsy pivots on “indefinite talk” routines, the
thrall of white minstrelsy depends on the 24-7 broadcasting of “definitive
trash-talk.” Long usage has made this
kind of discourse seem “normal” and has rendered white minstrelsy
indistinguishable from what is not theatrical.
It is merely insane or absurd to argue that American politics is not a
child begot from a strange marriage of black and white minstrelsy.
Taylor
and Austen open the closets of polis
in Chapter 3, “Of Cannibals and Kings: How New Orleans’s Zulu Krewe Survived
One Hundred Years of Blackface” and Chapter 10, “New Millennium Minstrel Show:
How Spike Lee and Tyler Perry Brought the Black Minstrelsy Debate to the
Twenty-First Century.” Rather than spoil
the unique pleasure of discovery in those two chapters, and indeed in the book
as a whole, I will leave you with the refrain of white minstrelsy’s theme
song: There is a bomb in Gilead that
kills the sin-sick soul...

Eugene B. Redmond turns seventy-five on
December 1, 2012. It is obligatory to
make a few notes about his legacy to world culture and the world of letters...

My discussion of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and
their use of African American Vernacular English in their short stories led me
to think about other short story writers and how their use of third person
narrative voice can possibly reveal insight into the relationship between black
writers and their reading audiences..

Often times, there is a major emphasis placed on the
ideological differences between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright...

Equating
the power of Lance Jeffers’ mind with intellectual passion, Eugene Redmond
proclaimed in his introduction for When I
Know the Power of My Black Hand (1974) that Jeffers was “a giant baobab
tree we younger saplings lean on, because we understand that he bears witness
to the power and majesty of ‘Pres, and Bird, and Hodges, and all’ “(11)Equating
the power of Lance Jeffers’ mind with intellectual passion, Eugene Redmond
proclaimed in his introduction for When I
Know the Power of My Black Hand (1974) that Jeffers was “a giant baobab
tree we younger saplings lean on, because we understand that he bears witness
to the power and majesty of ‘Pres, and Bird, and Hodges, and all’ “(11). In bearing witness to fabulous musicians,
Jeffers left evidence in his poetry and his novel Witherspoon (1983) that the art of writing well entails finding a
balance between the kind of humility to which Redmond alludes and the mastery
of craft.
In
an interview with Paul Austerlitz included in Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown, Ct:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005), Milford Graves speaks about his interest in
Einstein and quantum physics. John
Coltrane was also immersed in study of Einstein’s physics. In the poetry of
Asili Ya Nadhiri, one discovers his indebtedness to jazz and physics, just as
one finds in Jeffers’ poetry an indebtedness to the study of anatomy, jazz and
classical music. Strong poets and strong
musicians are receptive to mastering their craft by making intellectual
investments in disciplines which, on the surface, seem remote from their
own. Assertive humility is important.

Humility
may be alien in contemporary American life, but it is necessary for our
respecting tradition and ourselves as saplings in need of guidance from
baobabs, redwoods, and oaks. Reading all
of Jeffers’ poems in My Blackness is the
Beauty of This Land (1970), When I
Know the Power of My Black Hand, O
Africa Where I Baked My Bread (1977) and Grandsire (1979) is a rewarding use of time. We learn to locate ourselves in human
history. We learn that direct
confrontation and battle with language is more valuable than intimacy with
clichés.
Jeffers
used rhyme with discretion, but he maximized repetition of parts to intensify
the “epic line” American poets have inherited from Walt Whitman. The epic line projected Jeffers’ passionate
attention to small things and big events in historical experiences. Surreal phrasing is a typical feature in his
work, a feature that also flavors the poetry of Bob Kaufman. Consider Jeffers’
“in the sea the anchor of your/ soul rushes to the surface on flying fish’s
wings” or “The hawk is slavery still alive in me/ my testicles afloat in cotton
field.” How many blues songs swam
through his mind when he wrote “My own flesh has been nailed so strait/ I’ve
been forgot by my own genius”?
Exploration of Jeffers’ poetic landscape yields moments of technical
brilliance, moments that challenge us to find our own wordpaths to similar
achievements. We must know what the
ancient rain can bring.
When
I ended “Second April Poem (for Lance Jeffers)” with the lines
People
who want to be
the
alpha and omega
ought
to take lessons
from
my friend Lance
who
made morality a verb.
I
thought of how Old Testament his prophecy was.
He was unashamed in testifying about the evil and the good in human beings. He had conviction and character. He was willing to predict that a male poet
“will explore the unexplored continent of himself and his people, will seek out
the hidden caves and springs of beauty and hell, will seek out the hell and the
complexity within his bones and within the viscera of his people” (“The Death
of the Defensive Posture,” 259). These
thundering words come from his seminal essay in The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970), edited by Floyd
B. Barbour. His referring us to land masses and body parts is indicative of his
“scientific” posture with regard to discovering truths about humanity. References to geography and anatomy recur in
his poems; they reinforce the sense of greatness or grandeur. His aesthetic is grounded in humanistic,
pre-Black Arts assumptions about the human condition, but his poetics is
grounded in relentless investigation of what the human condition is from the
vantage of Blackness. His “humanistic”
response to writing as a way of knowing was an effort to balance logic with
sensual saturation. His writing is a
fine example of how universally inseparable are art and ethos.
From
reading Lance Jeffers, not once but many times, we may learn the value of
disciplined uses of language, of exorcising demons that seek to persuade us
that we have no obligations as poets to our biological and literary ancestors
and descendents. Truth be told, we can
learn to write well from many poets other than Lance Jeffers. Whether they can teach us as well as his
works can the validating beauty of writing toward balance is a matter for
contemplation.
..

Often
only a small portion of a work attaches itself to the mind as equipment for
living. “What happens to a dream
deferred?” (Langston Hughes,”Harlem”), “But what I killed for, I am! (Richard Wright, Native Son), or the words I never quote precisely
“You know…as well as I we have not been in this howling wilderness for four
hundred years for the right to be stupid.” (Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters) — words are weapons for war. ..

HBW Board Member Prof. Jerry Ward responds to questions posed on the HBW Blog and Facebook Accounts
..

Gwendolyn Brooks Maud
Martha (1953) is said to be an example of the decline of the protest novel
because it offers a shift to optimism. The novella is semi-autobiographical as
it does not offer a straight memoir of Brook’s lived experiences. Additionally,
Maud Martha is structured in vignettes which adds to the
very poetic personal story of the protagonist. Furthermore, the novella
presents a theme of domesticity that is also present in Brook’s poem
“Kitchenette Building” (1963)...