Books By John Oliver Killens

 Youngblood  /  And Then We Heard the Thunder  /  The Cotillion  /  The Great Black Russian

A Man-Aint-Nothin But A Man Adventures of John Henry  /  Slaves  / Sippi A Novel /  Black-SouthernVoices: An Anthology 

Great-Gittin-Up-Morning: A Biography of Denmark Vesey

Keith Gilyard, Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens (2003)

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Excerpt

We are a great people. But where are the novels, the dramas, the epics about Saint Harriet of the Eastern Shore? Saint Medgar and Saint Fannie Lou of 'Sippi? Saint Rosa of Montgomery? Saint Malcolm of Nebraska? Saint Martin of Atlanta? The great Saint Paul of Rutgers? Where are the epics? Where are the monuments to their greatness? We need more literature and celebrations of our nobility as a people. However, some of our writers are too busy getting over with the people that despise us, which means that fundamentally some of us despise ourselves. Too many of us are afraid to rock the boat . . . .

Our purpose must be to capsize that sucker, if necessary, and construct a boat which will, in the immortal words of Margaret Walker, "accommodate all the faces/all the Adams and Eves and their countless generations." Black writers must be boat rockers. Rock the boat. Capsize it. Drown the racist occupants.

Sisters and brothers, the Black writer, educator, and communicator are in an all out war for the minds of our own people, especially with the corporate media. It is total war sisters and brothers. And in this cultural revolution, we must wage guerilla warfare, even as this country did in the revolution against the British, even as the valiant guerilla fighters did in Vietnam against the greatest amassment of power in the world has ever known, the armed might of the U.S.A. 

Even as our oppressors have used the English language as a weapon to degrade us, we must use the language to our own purposes. Metaphorically speaking, we must ambush the bastards, capture their weapons--the Anglo-Saxon language--and beat the hell out of them with their own weaponry. As my comrades used to say in the Army during World war II, "kicking asses and taking names." And in my humble opinion, that is precisely what the black writer must be about. Excuse me. Take note. I said "kicking," not "kissing," "k-i-c-k," not "k-i-s-s," Life can be so confusing if you prefer to be confused."

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We can take this beachhead and maintain it, if we work tirelessly, and fearlessly. We must push forward, for there is nought behind us save the open sea. The open sea and vicious sharks. And Moby Dick.

Source: Chapter 6 Liberation Memories by Keith Gilyard

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updated 12 June 2008