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Books by Larry Neal
Black
Fire /
Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts
* * * * *
Larry Neal Speaks
on the Black Arts as
Folk-Based & Directed at Black People
Part I
Corruption: A Matter of Life & Death
What Miss Hansberry seems to be saying and somebody must
say it, is that the issue is not one of high ideals, but
really of life and death. That what Modern Man is faced
with is really survival, and that what we must recognize
is that where there is corruption nothing survives:
love, nobility, idealism, nothing; and like the ancient
Hebrews, we must seek corruption out and destroy it
viciously and relentlessly.
—Review of Loraraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney
Brustein’s Window. Liberator IV, 12 (December
1964), p.
25.
Official Opening of Black
Arts: April 30, 1965
The Black Arts
officially opened their school on April 30th
with an explosive evening of good poetry. (See April
Liberator) I say explosive because the black
community has not really been exposed to the work of her
sons and daughters who, for a myriad of reasons, have
been busy elsewhere. The idea behind . . . this event .
. . is to open a dialogue between the artist and his
people, rather than between the artist and the dominant
white society which is responsible for his alienation.
When one hears the
poetry of Rolland Snellings, David Henderson, Calvin
Hernton, and the other fine poets represented that
night, one is certain that soon there will be no need
for a dialogue, but that the artist and the community
will be one voice wedded in an assault on racist
America.
I believe that the highlight of the Black Arts weekend
was the short parade which it held on Saturday morning
in Harlem. Imagine Jazz musicians, African dancing, and
a group of groovy black people swinging down Lenox
Avenue; while every body freely plays their instruments,
and fine black girls give out bright yellow circulars
that say: THE BLACK ARTS IS COMING!. It was Garvey all
over again. It was informal and spontaneous and should
illustrate something of the potential for creative
encounter existing in our community.
—“The Cultural Front,” Liberator, V, 6 (June
1965), pp. 26-27.
The Proper Role
of Black Literature: Speaking to Black People
The writing had
become the voice of the educated Negro pleading with
white America for justice. The writing “was external to
the lives of educated Negroes themselves.” The best of
this writing was rarely addressed to the Negro, his
needs, his sufferings, his aspirations. . . .
Here is the
criterion on which this series is based. It is precisely
here that almost all Afro-American literature has
failed. Our literature has succumbed to the role of
merely providing entertainment to white people. We have
failed to create a dynamic body of Afro-American
literature, addressed, as Wright suggests, to the
suffering, needs, and aspirations of Black people.
The Black writer is, generally, caught up in the
artistic standard of Western capitalistic society. He is
a divided person, confused between loyalty to his own
people or to the oppressing society. His is a desire to
be accepted on his own terms. Rather than on those
forced upon him by white critics and others who are not
aware of his problems. Every Black writer is, somehow,
engaged in a battle with himself to discover his own
dynamic vis-a-vis his status as an artist and a
member of an oppressed group.
—“The Black Writer’s Role: Richard Wright,” Liberator,
V, 12 (December, 1965), pp. 20-22.
The Spiritual Destructive
Aspects of American Education
LeRoi, [was] born in the mid-thirties. . . . They [had]
almost a cosmic desire to tear out of the value system
that their parents had so much faith in. Large numbers
of this generation had the “benefits of a college
education. Like Jones they were sent off to obtain an
education which would insure them more freedom and
success, more security than their parents, and a greater
share of the American pie. But for the Negro, education
is full of interesting paradoxes. While the system
exposes its good face, its ugly one also comes into
view. And because the American educational system is
basically antagonistic to the Black man’s needs, the
student with any degree of sensitivity is able to
discern the spiritually destructive aspects of the
situation in which he finds himself. For those who
refuse to accept illusions, there is rebellion.
—“The Development Of LeRoi Jones” (Part I) Liberator, VI
1 January, 1966), 4-5.
The Futility of Protest
Literature That Pleads with Whites
LeRoi Jones called Malcolm a poet. I agree . . . Malcolm
has had a profound influence on the young; especially
writers and artists. This influence was not especially
linked to any wholesale conversion to Islam; although
the necessity of having a workable spiritual code played
a part in Black youth’s attraction to Malcolm. Most of
us who turned to Malcolm did so out of a sense of the
utter futility of the civil rights protest movement. . .
. We began to question the basic premises on which the
movement was built, and when we did, the results looked
bleak and sinister.
—“Malcolm and the Conscience of Black America,”
Liberator, VI, 2 (February, 1966), pp. 10-11.
The Need for a New Literary
Tradition
Once having had a
writer like Baldwin lay bare the corrupt morality of
America, and in so complete and thorough a manner, a way
was paved for another dynamic—a new force was unleashed
among younger Black writers which had as its purpose an
internal dialogue among Black people. Baldwin’s
impassioned essays and shrill outcries were directed
primarily at white America. Hence, he joined the
tradition of pleading with white America for the
humanity of the negro; instead of addressing himself to
Black people and their problems. . . .
The only way
humanity can find real substance is by placing it at the
center of the collective spirit of the group. The myth
and folklore, that you write about Ellison, must be
turned inward and explored in all of its dimensions by
our own people. For you are talking to white people
about a humanity, the existence of which, some Negroes
question themselves. . . .
The Negro writer did not evolve as an expression of
needs of the community, but merely to express his
individual suffering and estrangement from his
environment. This was not true of the folk performer,
the blues singers, the storyteller, and the folksinger.
They were an integral of the community, its voice and
consciousness, the bearers of myth and religion . . . in
order for the Negro to develop his craft, it was
necessary for him to adopt a Western attitude toward his
role as an artist . . . to seek out forms the whites
would evaluate artistically. . . . The writers must
grapple with the question of control and dissemination
of his work . . . consequently, the real revolution in
Black literature is occurring . . .
—“The Black Writer’s Role: James Baldwin,” Liberator,
VI, 4 (April 1966), pp. 10-11, 18.
The Need for a Folk-Based
Literature That Speaks back to the People
Who is the Black
writers’ audience? Who are we writing for—our
“neo-colonialist masters” or our own people? Finally,
this question transcends that of craft and form.
Specifically, although it may seem obvious, all creative
artists obtain their idea of excellence from some
standard—some isolatable set of values and judgments.
Lamming had spent two hours discussing Black literature
with no discernible audience in mind. But his answer to
the question, ‘are the people of the West Indies reading
your work” indicates that Lamming is not unaware that he
finds himself in a rather complicated trick.
These remarks are
not to be taken as an attack on Lamming. Most of us are
in the same situation, but have refused to be as honest
as Lamming. Few of us have accepted the responsibilities
of directing our work to the needs of our people.
Most of us simply seek entrance into the establishment;
thereby, never completely developing a literature that
mirrors the manifold realities of Black America.
Essentially, we are a glorified proletariat accepting an
occasional crumb from the tables of the establishment—an
establishment which has yet to concede that our work has
anything but exotic value.
Under such
conditions, the Black writer is another variation of the
court jester—a literary Stepinfechit performing for an
audience of white onlookers. . . .
The recent Negro
Arts Festival in Dakar immediately comes to mind. There,
hundreds of artists of African descent came to what
could have been a most significant event. Only, they
found that it was constructed to attract everyone but
Black people. The performances were attended by
ninety-percent European and American whites; while the
bulk of the Senegalese people either could not afford
the festival, or were somehow discouraged from going.
And Senghor can glibly write about negritude and
African Socialism.
The so-called
Harlem Renaissance of the Twenties, although it produced
a few excellent writers, is an example of a similar
phenomenon, maybe it’s the archetype. This
Renaissance occurred at a time when white America,
in a wild search for the unusual and exotic, came up to
Harlem to watch extravagant productions at places like
the Cotton Club, where Black people were not allowed.
Many writers—Black and white—capitalized on this sudden
interest in Afro-American culture by producing a
literature which simply titillated the suppressed sexual
urges of White America.
Meanwhile,
significant Black talent like Jean Toomer, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Claude McKay were never fully allowed to
develop a deeply rooted Afro-American literature. Very
few of our children grow up embracing the poems of
Langston Hughes, or the folk-oriented stories of Zora
Neale Hurston. Hence, there is a concrete relationship
between the overt socio-economic oppression of the Black
masses, and the suppression of their legitimate culture.
. . .
There is a new
Afro-American literature in the process of developing.
It has its antecedents in Afro-American folk culture,
the folktales, blues, spirituals, and the unrecorded and
recorded oral history of the people. Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison, to name a few,
have attempted to explore this culture for all of its
possibilities and ramifications.
There is, however,
a wider area of possibilities; and the more one proceeds
towards them, the more profound is the contact with the
essential reality of the Black man in the West. It is
this kind of contact with fundamentals that makes
Ellison’s Invisible Man one of the most
significant novels of the twentieth century.
It should be clear
that I am not advocating a “folk literature” per se.
Rather I am asserting the existence of a valid folk
culture. That is, a primary culture which underlines the
so-called higher levels of culture. . . .
The
best work of these writers grows out of the spirit of
the race and is rooted in the manifold experiences of an
oppressed people.
—“The Black Writer’s Role,” Liberator, VI, 6
(June, 1966), pp. 7-9.
The Need for a Model Form of
Cultural Nationalism
According to
Western aesthetics, art and life are separate; art has
no function save to “entertain.” Outside of the Western
world view, however, the function of art is to make man
stronger, to make it more possible for man to understand
the nature of the world he sees around him, and finally
to shape that world into a more meaningful entity. Art
and life are therefore integral to each other; and since
life is change in this cosmological view, art must be
change. There is no need to worry about permanence in
the sense that things can be deep frozen forever. The
universe is in motion. . . .
What is the function of criticism? It is merely a way
into things. And it is important only insofar as it
relates to the nature of the changing world. There are,
consequently, no steadfast critical values. Most western
critical assumptions deny change. It is for this reason
that we must discard them. We must develop our own
critical methodology, one that is more nearly related to
the condition in which we find ourselves. We must first
understand and utilize our own culture as the basis for
the creation of art. Otherwise, it will be impossible to
add anything new to the concept of the universe. . . .
I fully understand Cruse’s point of attack. I, myself,
wrote a series of articles several years ago in
Liberator on Black writers that dealt with the same
subject.
But given the understanding of any kind of historical
analysis. Cruse’s attack is somewhat unwarranted
because, until recently, there existed no viable form of
Black nationalism, culturally or politically, that a
sophisticated group of creative artists could adhere to.
The reason that
previous generations of Black writers were never able to
develop a viable cultural nationalism rests not with the
writers themselves per se, but with the social,
artistic, and political context in which they found
themselves. No one had developed a model form of
cultural nationalism that those writers could follow.
The writers of the
Harlem Renaissance were caught in the euphoria of
suddenly having been discovered by the white
intelligentsia; the thirties were dominated by leftwing
ideologies, and most importantly, as Cruse notes, Garvey
himself lacked a cultural philosophy. Therefore, there
were no nationalistic models. (The only writer whose
work seems consistently based on a nationalistic model
is Langston Hughes, but he was a poet, not a
theoretician.)
Consequently, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison, Julian Mayfield, and a great many other writers
moved toward what they considered to be viable
ideology—the ideology of the American leftwing, which
for all its faults, posited a theory of social change.
—"Cultural Nationalism and Black Theatre/Two On Cruse:
View of the Black Intellectual,” Black Theatre, 1
(1968), pp. 8-10.
A Collective Sense of Who We
Are
We bear witness to a profound change in the way we now
see ourselves and the world. And this has been an
ongoing change. A steady certain march toward a
collective sense of who we are, and what we must now be
about to liberate ourselves. Liberation is impossible if
we fail to see ourselves in more positive terms. For
without a change of vision, we are slaves to the
oppressors ideas and values—ideas and values that
finally attack the very core of our existence.
Therefore, we must see the world in terms of our own
realities.
—“Black Art and Black Liberation,” Ebony Magazine
(August 1969), pp. 54-56.
An Art That Addresses Itself
Directly to Black People
So when we speak of
an esthetic, we mean more than the process of making
art, of telling stories, of writing poems, of performing
plays. We also mean the destruction of the white thing.
We mean the destruction of white ways of looking at the
world. For surely, if we assert that Black people are
fighting for liberation, then everything that we are
about, as people, somehow relates to it.
Let me be more
precise: When artists like LeRoi Jones, Quincy Troupe,
Stanley Crouch, Joe Goncalves, Etheridge Knight, Sonia
Sanchaz, Ed Spriggs, Carolyn Rodgers, Don L. Lee, Sun
Ra, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Willie Kgositsile, Arthur
Pfister. . . . assert that Black Art must speak to the
lives and the psychic survival of Black people, they are
not speaking of “protest” art. They are not speaking of
an art that screams and masturbates before white
audiences. That is the path of Negro literature and
civil rights literature.
No, they are not
speaking about that kind of thing, even though that is
what some Negro writers of the past have done. Instead,
they are speaking of an art that addresses itself
directly to Black people; an art that speaks to us in
terms of our feelings and ideas about the world; an art
that validates the positive aspects of our life style.
Dig: An art that opens us up to the beauty and ugliness
within us; that makes us understand our condition and
each other in a more profound manner; that unites us,
exposing us to our painful weaknesses and strengths; and
finally an art that posits for us the Vision of a
Liberated Future.
—“Black Art and Black Liberation,” Ebony Magazine
(August 1969), pp. 54-56.
Ethics & Aesthetics
The Black Arts
movement is rooted in a spiritual ethic. In saying that
the function of art is to liberate Man, we propose a
function for art which is now dead in the west and which
is in keeping with our most ancient traditions and with
our needs. Because, at base, art is religious and
ritualistic; and ritual moves to liberate Man and to
connect him to the Greater Forces. Thus Man becomes
stronger psychically, and is thus more able to create a
world that is an extension of his spirituality—his
positive humanity. We say that the function of art is to
liberate Man. And we only have to look out of the window
to see that we need liberation. Right on, brothers. And
God Shango, help us. . . .
Merely to point out to Black people the economic and
political nature of our oppression is not enough. Why is
it not enough? It is so because people are more
than just the sum total of economic and political
factors. Man must exist on a more cosmic plane than
that. This is what Cecil Taylor, Phil Cochran, Aretha
Franklin, Milford Graves, Abdul Rahman, James Snead,
Loften Mitchell, Evan Walker, Ed Bullins, Ron Milner,
Maya Angelou, Jacob Lawrence, Tony Northern, Charlie
Fuller, Romare Bearden, Eleo Pomare, Judi Dearing, John
Parks and all of the names I have forgotten teach us.
Yeah.
—“Black Art and Black Liberation,” Ebony Magazine
(August 1969), pp. 54-56.
Source:
The above quotations were extracted from the
article "The Achievement of Larry Neal" by Eleanor
Traylor. In Callaloo 23 Volume 8, no. 1 (1985),
pp. 11-35. the quotations retain Dr. Traylor's
documentation but do not occur in the same order as they
appear in her articles. Here they are presented in the
order in the time period in which they were published.
* * * *
*
Part II "Black
Boogaloo"— Polemical &
Literary Poems
I remember we did the the Jitterbug and the Strand and
all those dances in the 1940s (late 1940s) and the
1950s. There was something about the Boogaloo. So I was
trying to make a statement about culture, and I was
trying to make a statement revolution in the title poem
of the book. It's kind of a young poet's poem. It's a
poem to revolution; it's a cultural revolution poem; and
it's kind of an anarchistic poem. I always thought of it
as a poster poem rather than as a literary poem. I still
see it that way, as a poem you post on wall. I wrote it
during a period when I was trying to be polemical—I
was about a polemic voice—and
I'm glad I went through that period now, because it
gives a lot of strength to have a position like
that; it gives me a lot of strength now when I want to
get into some fairly literary questions. . . .
I was very much influenced by Yoruba religious beliefs
and Yoruba mythology in the 1960s. As a matter of fact,
my wife and I were married by an African-American Yoruba
priest. At least culturally I was very much interested
in the Yorubas, and I still am, although I haven't had a
chance to do all the reading I want. I went to Nigeria
in 1971. . . . I
definitely wanted a tone that was sort of religious in
spirit but one that wasn't coming strictly out of the
gospel or spiritual. I wanted a tone that was religious
but felt old—an
old feeling that ran through it. Now I'm working
consciously with rhythms, and there may be some
influence of African poets in there, because, by that
time, I had read Senghor and Césaire
and Damas; I had read the Negritude poets. There may
even be a lit bit of Gerald Manley Hopkins in there,
too, because he was one of my favorite poets—one
of my favorite nineteenth century poets. At one point, I
decided I wanted to try to work with the African rhythms
or rhythmic patterns that I didn't see or hear in
Anglo-American poetry. I'm also again trying to get at
an emotional power which black poets seem to be afraid
of getting at. I was trying to break down that barrier,
to find my voice. . . .
I had come out of a very serious personal thing in the
1960s. I had been in the Movement, and I had been in the
Revolutionary Action Movement, which is like an
underground movement—RAM.
We were very much committed to African ideas and to
African liberation and to Afro-American liberation and
to African culture and to African perceptions. So the
whole revolutionary background is in the poems. And then
there was the broken love affair hanging in the air. A
girl I was really in love with . . . you know, losing
her. the pain of losing her, in some of these poems, is
really just like a whine to call this woman back. It
shaped a lot of my work. So a lot of that's there,
too. . . .
I don't feel the
same way about them today as I did, but at the time they
were written they were very important for me to write. I
had to write them. . . . We were looking for a big
feeling; we were really trying to connect. I was aware
of a whole kind of cosmology of love that I had never
dealt with before, and I was aware of it. I was trying
to sing to all of that . . .
What I like in Hopkins is the energy, and he and Dylan
Thomas are the two strongest influences on me in Western
world literature. They're stronger than the
Anglo-American poets. I like the strange imagery of
Thomas. I think in very strange imagery, you know; I
always had a very strange way of thinking about images,
so Thomas would appeal to me that way. I like Hopkins'
"Pied beauty" ("Glory be to God for dappled things. . .
.") and his "The Windhover." And there's his poem about
"Spring." All of the alliteration in Hopkins wiped me
out when I read "The Windhover." There's a certain kind
of magnificence and scope in Hopkins. I just envy that
scope, and I want to riff off that scope in my own
Afro-American language.
"Libations for Olorum" —
Apocalypse &
the Birth of a New World
It's a contorted poem, I remember, and it's packed.
Stanley Crouch likes that poem, too; he liked the
imagery in that poem. I saw an end—
it was apocalyptic. I was apocalyptic, and I still am. I
have to watch myself sometimes. I question whether or
not that is an image that can be furthered in terms of
humanity. The image of the apocalypse. I was constantly
haunted by the image. In the 1960s, a lot of us really
felt that something was going to happen. There was
always a sense that something was always going to
happen—that something bad was going to happen. Maybe it
was the influence of Max Stanford, who was a good friend
of mine. he always carried this image around. Max
Stanford, Askia Muhammad Touré,
and Al Haynes were friends of mine; we all were
together. We all believed that there was going to be
some kind of apocalypse, some kind of final end, that
was just going to come down. Maybe such an idea is
romantic. But in light of what was happening in the
world, it was quite rational in many ways.
Then Watts came, and the
assassination took place. I had seen Malcolm X killed
right before my very eyes. We had a sense of our own
doom; we had a sense that would be set up by someone, or
implicated for a crime or something, and trapped, or
that we would be killed. It was that feeling—or
paranoia there, too, to a certain extent. But I think it
was a vision of another world, a world where black
people were free. I had another poem that reaches for
the same kind of vision, that reaches for the vision of
freedom. There was a struggle to get to it though.
That's what the poem is about. There is a struggle with
the angel in that poems, "Who is her lover?" The angel
of the sword or the poet of the guitar? Is it the angel
of war or the singer? . . .
The poem is the
Earth Mother, too. . . . I never analyze my own poems. .
. . Who will own this earth? will the poets and the
singers own this fucking thing? Now will the generals be
running every goddamn thing? Naturally, I'm pulling for
the singers. . . . I don't know if that my romantic
thing. . . . I'd studied the romantics, you know. I
don't know if that was my Shelley talking to me there or
not.
"Love Song:
Middle Passage"—Polemical Stances, Poetic
Vision
Some of those poems are concessions in some sense to a
certain kind of militant posture that I felt I had to
have, you know? Well, they're polemics. Some of them are
polemical stances mixed in with a poetic vision. they're
also counter-statements to the idea that we have to love
everybody . . . that we must love everybody. I wasn't a
follower of [Martin Luther] King's ideas, but I would
defend him as a man of humanity. . . . There was
something about us, or there was something in the
situation which demanded that. It might be the influence
of Frantz fanon because we were reading fanon then. . .
. We're clearly in
the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage is symbolic of
our condition now. We're in the Middle Passage now
rather than the Middle Passage of the past. It's a good
polemic poem in one sense, because I pull up images like
McNamara and the ICBMs and all that shit, which I'm very
glad I did. I'm very glad that those polemics,
that those poems, took a stance at the time. Just the
way [Pablo] Neruda takes a stance against United Fruit
Company. In some poems you have to be very blunt even
with the chance of being awkward. Now there is a
literary school that would flinch at that kind of
bluntness, but there're certain statements that need to
be made at a certain time. You take the leap and you
make the statement. they may haunt you later, but you
make them.
"For Our Women"—A Need for
Celebration
The poem . . . is trying to celebrate the idea of
black woman-ness. Not a particular black woman, but
the idea of black womanness—by extension, the idea of
femaleness in the universe. The idea of the female
principle, in one sense, is what's out there. the
strength of all those women, the strength of the women
who gave us the great men, the strength of those women
in people singing the blues, the strength of those women
that are represented by the Harriet Tubmans and the
Sojourner Truths and the Margaret walkers and the Billie
Holidays, and all of those fantastically beautiful
people. There's a sense that black women hadn't really
been celebrated much before the 1960s. If you go back
and check it out in the poetry, you'll discover a few
things here and there. You have Langston Hughes' "When
Susanna Jones Wears Red," There was equivocation; there
was somebody [Waring Cuney] who began a poem with "She
does not know her beauty." . . .
I wanted a cosmic image, in other words. I wanted to
make the images larger than sociological images. . . .
So it was 'you came out of this earth, out of the earth
you came." . . . The women as earth symbols . . . and
there they were in all their magnificence, these women.
You saw them. Some of us saw these women suddenly.
"For Black Writers and Artists in Exile"—Looking
for the "City of Light"
Well, that was an early, early poem. it was written in
1964. I think I date it; maybe I didn't date it. But in
my new book—Hodoo Hollerin' Bebop Ghosts, which
is coming out in the spring from Howard University
press--I think I dated that poem. It was originally
published in Negro Digest in 1964. That's a poem
about exile. Isn't it? We go from New York. We go over
to Paris. I had Richard Wright in mind, and I had James
Baldwin in mind. I had Chester Himes. William Gardner
Smith, and all of those legions of black artists and
writers who went to Europe looking for the "City of
Light," and they found that it wasn't there, and were
frustrated. I think it goes on "until form becomes, or
life dances to incoherent conclusion," or something like
that. "Don't
Say Goodbye to Pork-Pie Hat"—No Voice
Like That
Ellison to me is one of the great living artists and
writers in the world . . . But I learned from Ellison,
and I learned from Langston Hughes, and particularly I
learned a lot from the jazz world. That's a big
influence on me. I grew up in Philadelphia with the
Bebop sound. I grew up in a good time to hear a lot of
good music, both the old and the new. The musicians were
my biggest heroes; my heroes had always been musicians.
In fact, I'm finishing up a play now about a musician
going to Philadelphia in 1945. So I've got a heavy thing
about this music that I've had a long time. The pork-pie
hat was Lester Young's symbol; he was best known for the
pork-pie hats sometimes. I had Langston Hughes in mind,
and I had Lester Young in mind . . . otherwise known as
Prez. The title comes from a song by Charles Mingus
called "Goodbye to the Pork-Pie Hat."
Now I added the
"don't." I took it further; I took it on out. I took it
into a kind of . . . what would you call that poem? It's
like a free-wielding solo, like a solo, like a horn
solo, if you will, that sort of riffs. The whole poem is
about riffing and traveling and moving through the
landscape of the musician, and it ends up in a kind of
jazz solo exchange. The hat was just a nice metaphor for
these cats. I could see these musicians flying through
space with a horn. It was supposed to be kind of
humorous too—to a certain extent. Almost like Lester
Young, or somebody of that stature, reigning above the
world—reigning above it and singing their song. And
their son was all these memories and all those freight
trains and all those blues whistles and all those clubs
and all those stops and all those women—just the color
and magnificence of all that I was trying to capture and
to celebrate. Actually I tried to celebrate the jazz
musician. I don't
know about the symbol so much—but the hat is the
musician, and the musician is the hat. I think it's a
poem that celebrates. I saw it as a jazz solo for
words—all kinds of funny little gimmicks here and there,
and changes of pace and mood. I consciously worked on
changing and varying the rhythm throughout and from line
to line. There are lines that run and then there's a
stop, and there's a staccato set of images, and there's
a burst, and little stories inside. At that time, I
tried to write big pieces, and I always wanted to tell a
story inside a poem, or tell little units of stories.
Some of the things I try to do in poetry very often is
to get an overall ambience, an atmosphere, in a poem,
and then I want to present little vignettes through
little images that make people recognize themselves.
"Who was that cat there that did so-and-so? Was she
so-and-so? Then you go on to something else. Then you go
on to ""Where'd you get that horn?' You try to get a lot
of data in this whole movement of words flashing
through, you see. Those were the kinds of forms I was
trying to perfect. I don't know if I was successful, but
there's something kind of unique about the voice in that
poem. "Don't Say Goodbye." There's something very unique
about it. At least I find it unique. There's no voice
like that. It comes from reading a lot of other poetry,
but a lot of it arises from my attitude towards the jazz
world, towards black music, which has been a major
influence on me, as well as my literacy training and
background.
"Harlem Gallery, From the Inside"—A
Counter-Statement
It's a counterstatement to
Tolson. Tolson—who I really
like, whose poetry I like—is so contorted and strange in
his way. I wanted to write a counter-statement not a
response. Mine was from the inside. I felt that Tolson
was from the outside. I thought I was closer to what the
gallery of Harlem was. I got that poem walking up 8th
Avenue one day in the summer. It was raining. I walked
up the strip all the way [into Harlem]. I was looking in
a bar—and I'm like that; I go anywhere at all in Harlem.
If I see some place that I haven't been and it looks
interesting, I go in. I don't care where it is. Some
people say, "Why are you going in that place? You could
get hurt." I don't care. I don't care. there are certain
places I try to stay away from, because they are problem
spots. I don't go in those places.
But I go in places and I look around and I think. I sit
there in the place and I feel. I forgot the name of this
place. I was passing by and there was a formica table by
the window, and I said let me go in there and sit down,
get a beer, and sit down by the window. I went in and I
sat down. It was a strange kind of place. There was just
so much shit going on in the place. Everybody was doing
something wrong. There was so much going on, so much
life, and so much tragedy, and so much comedy, all into
one. That was the gallery I saw. Tolson's was another
kind of gallery. His gallery was a real gallery. He's
got a curator and everything, and he's got a microcosm.
I was trying to get at something else. I was trying to
get at something more tragic. He is more comic. That's
why I call it a counter-statement. that's why it is
dedicated to
Melvin Tolson. . . .
Hoodoo Hollerin' Bebop Ghosts—Less
Polemical
This is a different kind of book. . . . takes up in some
places where Black Boogaloo left off. Again the
African and Afro-American mythologies are dealt with in
there. I put some of my Shine poems in there. This is
another that I'm going to have finished some day, a
volume called "Shine," which will be based on the
Afro-American folk character. The poems in
Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts
are stranger than the poems Black Boogaloo. They
are in many ways more haunted, there're more ghosts.
That's where the title comes from. It's a book full of
ghosts' voices. For example, the Garvey poem is in
Black Boogaloo, and when I put it that poem in Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts
it takes on another meaning in that context. Certain
poems are not in Hoodoo, partly for space
and partly for theme. You'll see. Thematically it's a
tighter book. It
tries to be encyclopedic, somewhat like a perception of
Afro-American reality. It covers a lot of different
kinds of people, and a lot of different situations.
There's a lot of strange people speaking through poems.
There're a lot of monologues: the poems have a persona,
and the persona speaks. I tried to develop a particular
kind of language, hoodoo as a unique language. I hope
that's a more controlled book. It's less polemical than
Black Boogaloo.
"The Black Arts Movement
"—Iconography
Iconography is the range of images. That's what I've
been talking about. . . . I'm sorry that essay was
placed in such a polemical context. What I means is
this: it's impossible for Afro-Americans to develop any
kind of unique literature, if they can merely imitate
the imagistic clusters of the Anglo-Americans. If they
don't begin to perceive their own reality, and perceive
the symbols and images and metaphors implicit in that
reality, they will not have an imagery that will be
fresh, a set of images and perceptions that will be
fresh. It is the
problem of Claude McKay and Countee Cullen.. They began
writing Keatsian and Shellyan, and their stock of
imagery, their metaphorical sense, is Western. One might
ask, "Well what's wrong with that?" Nothing's wrong with
that if that's what they want to write. But no one can
propose to me that McKay's and Cullen's poems are in
essence, by example, Afro-American in style and in
content because their poetry doesn't have content that
is derived from Afro-American culture. The content of
their poetry is not rooted there.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be rooted with reference to
other bodies of imagery. For example, in certain Asian
literature, the lotus as as an image means very certain
things. That's part of Asian iconography. Now if I
propose an imagery, for example, that grows out of the
blues, an imagery that grows out of jazz, an imagery
that grows out of black dance, out of black speech, out
of black history, then I've got an iconography that I've
lived, that I can claim as my own, as a primary basis
which means that I can therefore consciously contrast my
imagery with other kinds of imageries. Bebop is a
certain of acoustical iconography, you see, a certain
way of phrasing that is unique to jazz musicians like
Charlie Parker. That's another language. That's one of
the things I felt, that many of us felt.
Then the perception
of other so-called imagery—say the imagery of the
universe—achieved through an iconography that was
different; for example, the sun as an image, the moon as
an image. What do these images mean? Are we supposed to
inherit these images the same way the Western poets
inherit them? Or do we, as all poets do in all time,
bring to bear on the same images another consciousness.
The sin us with us. It's there. It ain't going nowhere.
It's here. So the question is this: How do I use a
symbol like that as opposed to the way Shelly or Keats
used it, or the way Eliot uses it, or the way that
Wallace Stevens or somebody else? I think the statement
might be attacked if I implied that all black writers
should do that. . . .
[If] somebody is interested in developing a black
aesthetic they have to consider what I'm talking about.
I don't see how they can't. Harsh as it may sound, and
even verging on the totalitarian to a certain extent,
but there was a point where I felt certain things had to
be said bluntly. That is, we're going to have to deal
with these aesthetic questions, and we'll have to look
at them and ask ourselves, "What is our relationship to
the literary heritage of the West?" Ralph Ellison had to
ask himself this question. Richard Wright had to ask
himself this question. All black writers that were
conscious of critical problems asked themselves this
question. And this
is true of Indian writers. This is true of Irish
writers. They have to ask themselves: "What is my
relationship to the established literary tradition in
which I find myself?" Since also I am in a unique
position, I feel oppressed. There is oppression. I'm
identified as belonging to a certain group, and I see
myself in a certain group. I know I'm different,
according to the laws of this country, according to the
perceptions of this country. What does that mean? What
parts of the literary tradition do I claim, and what
parts do I reject? Where do I add my own voice, and
where do I propose another way, another direction? These
are the kinds of things I ha don my mind at the time I
wrote that essay. . . .
"The Black Arts Movement
"—Critique
This is the most important, because the critique to me
assumes that you have information, that you've studied
the culture, and that you come to discuss the literary
culture with some sense of its various resources. If you
go to discuss black literature and the things that exist
in black culture, then that to me a priori
assumes some understanding of cultural sources and some
understanding of the tools of criticism. But it also
assumes an understanding of the development of a
critique that allows you to discuss your literature and
to move it forward, to a higher level—by a higher level
I mean a more serious level on its own terms . . . on
terms that are fresh, that are new. It doesn't mean that
you discount other terms. If a Western critic is going
to write about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and
he doesn't know anything about the culture from which
Ellison sprang, then, as a critic, he's a damn fool.
Now the same way
with me. If I sat down to write an article or an essay
or a book on James Joyce, I would think it wood behoove
me to know something about Irish culture—e.g., to know
something about Irish bar-rooms. What does an Irish bar
smell and look like? What are the Irish songs? The Irish
way of speaking? What is it like to be Irish? That's
what I mean by the basis of the critique.
This doesn't happen very often when a white faces black
art. I am not like
Hoyt Fuller and all those guys about
the white critic. I welcome the white critic as
adversary, in the field of black art, black criticism,
and black literature; or as a colleague, however it may
be. What I dislike is the glib assumption that he can
come to the culture without taking the culture seriously
enough to study the sources from which this literature
springs. I would never be so bold as to do that with
reference to—I used for example, Joyce, which is a very
accessible example—Yeats. Yeats is even harder. Some
guys have gotten famous writing works on the background
of Yeats. When these critics come to Richard Wright,
when they come to Ralph Ellison, when they come Imamu
Baraka,, to name a few, they often don't come. And it's
really detrimental in the theatre, where you see the
real ignorance of the white critics.
They are of
ignorant of black culture. Yet they still pontificate.
This means that criticism, even sometimes when it is
technically correct, lacks information. They might point
out some technical flaw in a black play or a black
novel, but their criticism lacks specific content. That
means there's a crisis in the white critic in that he
has not taken time to learn about black people so that
his criticism could be cogent—and be a welcome
criticism. . . . But
I'm not trying to ascribe devious intentions to the
critic. I'm trying to make certain assumptions, which is
what I have to do when I talk to you; I have to assume
that you are serious. I can't read your mind . . . I
can't begin to divine your intentions. . . . What I am
saying is I can't a priori condemn a white critic before
I see what he has written. It's too unscientific. . . .
Well, if I look at certain specific things, if I look at
something like Edward Margolies'
Native Sons, and I examine his book and I see in
there a perception that lacks an in-depth understanding
of black life and I point that out. . . . What I'm
saying now is that I point out to Margolies and I say "Margolies,
get your shit together and before you start writing
these essays on Richard Wright sit down and study
Afro-American culture—not only the sociological things
and the historical things, but the cultural things. How
people live? What it's like to be in this context?" I
believe the more people (of whatever race) are
discussing Afro-American literature and culture, then
the stronger it becomes. It become valid. I don't want
Afro-American literature to become the exclusive
property of blacks, just like I don't want e.e. cummings
to become the exclusive property of white critics.
I have a right to deal with e.e. cummings if I want to.
I can't demand my freedom and cut down on another man's
freedom. I can't say "I am free to discuss anything I
want and to study and to research it," and yet say that
another person is not free to do the same. You can't say
that in this society. It's not a proper critical stance.
Instead of having the white critic get out of this area,
the black critic is supposed to take upon himself the
job of writing strong criticism and establishing the
pace. When the white critic goes to discuss black
literature—if there's a high standard laid out there for
him—he'll have to meet the standard. The reason there's
been such poor criticism by white critics about black
literature is that there hasn't been a good standard
laid out there. When
the better standards are laid out, then the more
challenging it is. But some critics are better than
others. Gene Bluestein's essay—in
The Voice of the Folk—on the Blues as a literary
theme and the way he discusses Ellison and Faulkner . .
. a magnificent essay. But Gene Bluestein has studied
folk culture. He's studied it; he knows what he's
talking about. When he talks about a blues feeling, a
blues tone, a blues modality (then he moves over to
literature and discusses that), he knows when he's got
his hands on something. He's been in it, he's delved in
it, he's gotten to the nuances in it. You've got to have
that kind of tenacity. I respect that kind of tenacity,
regardless of color, because otherwise you're not being
scientific. There
are some obnoxious white critics. That guy David
Littlejohn . . . his book
White on Black is obnoxious. He has no love for
the culture, and no sympathy for the culture; and it
comes out in his writing. What you do is you challenge
that. When you run across that kind of writing you
challenge it and you destroy it, and you put it in its
place. But you don't handle that problem by saying a
priori that white critics have no place in black
art. This is a personal belief now; this is not a
scholarly belief. I believe that black critics should
dominate the area of black culture. But that's a
chauvinistic belief. That's what I would like.
I believe blacks should be telling everybody what the
whole thing is about. But that's chauvinism; that's
personal chauvinism. I can't let that get in the way of
my critical perception. When I look at a white critic, I
have to say I've got a critic, black or white. That's a
horrible book some guy who supposedly black, write on
LeRoi Jones. It's called
From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka. . . .
Theodore Hudson. I
have a student named
Kim Benston who's doing his senior thesis. I've been
his advisor for a year on his thesis.
Kim Benston is white. Dr. Hudson is black. . . .[His
book shows] disrespect for all that Baraka put into his
work. It doesn't do Baraka any justice whatsoever. That
Hudson is black doesn't mean he's going to be able to do
the work. Doing the work means you know something. It
means you have your skills, it means you have your
resources, it means you know what's being written and
being published and being studied about certain subjects
and you come to it. It also means you have some style.
It means you're informed. Now as far as I know, you get
these things by studying. Also by being humble—i.e., if
I'm interested in Dostoevski, I give in to Dostoevski's
experience. The problem with white people, white critics
very often, is that they refuse to give in to our
experience because maybe somehow it indicts them too
much. . . . I've never written anything about the white
critic that way either. I've never put that in print.
There's a fear of the black writer or black critic of
the critical establishment, maybe because blacks, until
recently, haven't had any critics. We had a lot of
writers and poets and people trying to create art, but
we didn't have any serious critics, which is very bad.
It takes a while to develop a critical class.
So
Hoyt [Fuller], coming along at a certain time,
represents the beginning of a certain kind of critical
class. That isn't something you develop overnight. It
takes a certain amount of leisure, it takes a certain
amount of studying, and then you have a number of people
who stand as critics in your group. Then you say, "Oh,
yeah, that's a critics." But it takes a while. These
people don't just come out of the air. We have not
developed our own critics, in the cultural areas--for
example, the area of black music, which was not
critically dealt with by black critics for a long time.
They didn't have time to deal with it. People thought
there were other things more pressing.
Du Bois certainly thought there were things more
pressing. He wrote one essay about black music in
The Souls of Black Folk. You have a few pieces
here and there. Black scholars were really concerned
with "high culture." You got Sterling Brown and you got
Alain Locke, but you don't have a school of black
critics who were dealing with black folk music back in
that period. As a matter of fact, these discussions were
frowned upon as topics of serious discussion by the
Negro colleges. It is impossible, then, to get a
critical body, particularly as I said in the area of
music, the white guys who had time and leisure and had
the sensitivity to deal with our music came in and
started writing criticism. Some of the first criticism
on black music was done by Frenchmen. The most serious
criticism was done by them.
They said, "This is art." But you got a guy working in a
steel mill and working from job to job and gets a chance
to play his horn . . . he's playing his horn. He's not
stepping outside of it and developing a critical stance;
that's Western. That's really Western. In our context
it's essentially Western, that particular approach. If
Hoyt [Fuller] would present a kind of historical
argument, he might be on better grounds than just a
blanket indictment of the white critic. You got to be
very careful with blanket indictments. There's always
going to be someone who'll turn up and who'll mess up
you a priori statement. All you need is one
person who's a good critic to come along and blow you
away. Engaged
Theatre of the 60s —"Black Labs of
the Heart"
Here in the 1960s black drama was flowering forth in its
fantastic ferment of revolutionary ideas and social
activism. I always wanted somehow to freeze that in this
moment in time, to put something down about that. Having
been given the opportunity to write the piece for Drama
Review I could put something down about that, this
moment, when there was more black theatre. Black theatre
was really asserting itself more then than at any other
time in history. There was the black theatre of the
1920s, which was mostly the theatre of the musical
comedy and dance type thing. There were a few other
things later on in the 1930s and a few other fairly
dramatic things, but mostly black theatre was the
musical thing and the dancing thing.
The new black theatre of the 1960s was a very engaged
theatre. This is a theatre that consciously—more than
any other time in history, and this is one of the things
the 1960s is most important for, for all of its ranting
and raving and bullshit—forced black artists to look at
black people, to address their art to black people,
which to me is absolutely necessary in order to get a
focus. To have an art that was addressed to black people
unapologetically, unequivocally . . .to say, "Yes, I'm
addressing this poem or this play to black people,"
because that is a mark of freedom in a way for us,
because our tradition had been one where the literate
men had many times been forced to address themselves to
white men of so called equal intellectual standing as
the black men. So
here was the literature, the drama, that was springing
up in black communities, in black theatres, that was
saying "We are dealing with black art." As LeRoi
said it in that poem, "We are black magicians. We work
something in black labs of the heart." There is an
attempt at a kind of collective intimacy. It was art.
It's a withdrawal. It's an exclusive kind of thing. But
this is good, to withdraw now and then.
The Audience of Black Writing—Primary
& Secondary Address
I always think, "Who is my work addressed to?" All
writers ask this question. Ellison asked this question.
I imagine every writer did, particularly anyone with
critical awareness. They ask themselves, "Who am I
writing to?" Now
Albert Murray might say he writes to anybody who
speaks English, and who understands English and is
interested in literature. Murray's a good friend of
mine, but I don't say that. My work is primarily
addressed to black people. primarily. I mean the primary
address is to black people. The secondary address is,
then, to whoever reads English. So that the primary
problems and the primary symbols I'm dealing with in my
work spring from my immediate reality as a black person
in America.
And my voice, even
though it may sometimes be a strange voice, is primarily
directed at black ears. As a matter of fact, I even
think about who I'm writing for in certain passages in a
play. I'll say this is for Nicki. She needs to see
somebody who loves this strongly. I'll do that in a
minute. This is for Hugh. He'll dig this. Or this is for
Mom. See what I'm getting at? This is me. I may have
been overstepping my bounds when I said somewhere that
black writers should address their works to black
people. . . . I'm
always editing myself. So you have to excuse me
sometimes. I'm aware of my positions at various stages.
I've been moving and parking around so much that I've
got to sort out these ideas. It was a revolutionary idea
to tell black people that they ought to address their
literature to themselves, and I'll stand on it. That's
that. It might need some modification, but it's correct.
I'm pretty certain that if you get down to it
Invisible Man is addressed to black people,
primarily. It's addressed to other people. he says in
one line, "Who knows, but maybe on the lower
frequencies, I speak for you." I think the "you" may be
the white man, but I think the story as a morality tale
is a morality tale for blacks. Now as far as a morality
tale for everybody else who identifies with the writer,
with the narrator of the novel . . . which is the way
literature becomes generalized. But I know that there's
specific content and there's specific thrust in writing.
I know there's a specific focus in the writer's mind.
You absolutely must have this as a writer. . . .
It's much more difficult . . . as Murray points out in
The Hero and the Blues, to utilize and to bring into
Afro-American fiction these untapped sources from
Afro-American culture and to present them in a way that
is aesthetically challenging to various kinds of people.
So in other words, it has both a specific and a general
character. What I like to do is get both; the happy
ground for me is to have a play or a novel or a poem
that is both specific and general. But it's got to first
spring from some specific ground, and this is what
Ellison is arguing about the way Hyman handles
Afro-American folklore. Ellison says that Hyman ignores
the specific character of Afro-American folklore. Hyman
has got to get the specific character and then he can
move to the general character.
What I was just trying to do was bluntly state the
specific. And this was coming out of the 1950s, when
people didn't want to be black anymore. It seemed as if
people were trying to forget the Afro-American
background. So I wanted to get back to that. Essentially
one of the reasons that black music has always been
strong is that it's always been specifically addressed
to black people. But because of the specific nature of
that address and because of the humanity of that
specificity, anybody who was resonating on a human wave
would reach out for it and identify with it.
Even though the blues were not addressed to white people
and were not created by white artists, when white people
heard the blues they knew it was formidable music. This
is the same with African sculpture. When African
sculpture was created in Africa, it was created in the
ritual tradition and the ethnic tradition, and there
wasn't a European in sight. But when Europeans, like
Picasso and the other artists, looked at African art
they were moved by its specific humanity. This is the
theoretical basis of that statement about the address. I
think I can stand on it even after all these years.
Zora Neale Hurston—Mules
& Men
["Characteristics of Negro Expression"] . . . it's not a
probing piece. It's just a piece in which she goes into
characteristics of Negro style. The thing about the
piece that's good is that Zora is always looking for
these Africanisms and these peculiar ways that
Afro-Americans did things. She was good, even in that
article, for showing you certain aspects of
Afro-American life, and pinpointing them. She was not
theoretical about them. She wasn't theoretical in the
same way as [Melville]
Herskovits or
[Franz] Boas were theoretical; they could put things
in a so-called larger system of activity. So Mules and
Men is a fairly good book; it's a good book of folklore
and a good book of a discussion of folk practices. She
was not analytical as we've come to read other
anthropologists. I
think she was primarily creative. I think that's for
somebody else to be. Maybe one of your students or one
of my students would one day sit down and do the
analytical work of examining Afro-American culture, its
ways and its modalities. I have this critical book I'm
doing on the 1960s, and I want to do a chapter on ethos.
In this chapter on the Afro-American ethos, I want to
take all those things and lay them out and examine them.
I want to deal with black culture in units. I want to
deal with speech, i want to deal with dance, I want to
deal with music. I want to deal with modes of doing
things that seem peculiar to Afro-Americans, and i want
to test how writers and various artists have tried to
depict them in art.
Mastering the Instrument—Mastering
Yourself
[An essay on Ellison in Black World (December
1970)] . . . What I mean was that it's not really enough
to be technical. The technical thing is cool, but it's
not enough to be technical. I meant that there's a
perception you have to have--and Ellison probably knows
this; I'm not telling him anything he doesn't know, and
I'm not really talking to Ellison. At one point I'm
talking to my colleagues, my fellow writers, guys around
my age. I'm having a little running battle with Don Lee,
Ron Karenga, and guys like that. I'm talking to Imamu,
trying to pull his coat to some things I think he
forgot. But mastering yourself means that you're not
apologetic to anybody about any of this.
You're together. And you're strong. And you're together
as a person of a particular so-called ethnic
group--Afro-Americans, in this case. You master that
part of yourself, and you get that part of yourself
cooled out, and you're never intimidated anymore.
Further on, I said in that essay, you master an
instrument, but you have to think about another
instrument too . . . . In other words, the idea is not
to settle, not to be settled, not to stop the
exploration of yourself . . . to be wide open to new
ideas, which is one of the things I found a little
disconcerting about Mr. Ellison, where there is a kind
of of implication in Ellison and in
Shadow and Act—in some spots ever so minute—that
the African reality or the African culture offered no
possibility of inquiry. There's sort of a subtle sense
of that in Ellison.
I don't know if you've ever seen it . . . that the most
important thing was the West and what the West was
about. Wright was into to that to a certain extent, too.
The idea is that the West had done all these things and
given you the literature and given you the criticism.
The West had given you a lot of the museums and
libraries, etc. I was just trying to say that the idea
is not to exclude any area from inquiry. When you're
secure within yourself and something comes along, you
find out what the truth is in it, what is in it that I
can use. You don't know what you can use until you
inquire. if somebody came up to me and said I'm studying
Sanskrit right now, I would n't say, "Well, there's
nothing relevant in Sanskrit."
The same with Don Lee
. He has this essay in
Dynamite Voices, in which he was trying to
discuss the literature, the culture, but he ends up at
one point saying he's trying to say something about the
white critic. He's trying to rationalize why the white
critic, can't discuss black literature. But he says:
"Well, take me for example, I don't know anything about
Chinese literature or Chinese art or Chinese music, so
therefore I would not be qualified to discuss Chinese
literature. My note on the side of the page of my book
of that was, "Well, Goddamit, you can study it. What's
to prevent you from studying?" It's learnable.
Is Afro-American culture learnable, or is something so
precious and so recondite that it is not learnable? Why
are Afro-Americans so afraid of somebody else learning
their culture? The only reason I can come up with is
that we're afraid of seeing the culture exploited for
commercial reasons. If we were the majority culture, it
would be reverse. If we were the majority culture, we
wouldn't give a damn about who studied or who wrote
about it. Do you see what I'm getting at? If you reverse
it, you see a whole different kind of thing. You can
study African mythology and culture and patterns of
making art and patterns of thinking, patterns of
storytelling, patterns of making music.
There are all kinds of things: patterns of doing drama,
patterns of perception and reality, say in the story,
time and space, for example, cosmology. You can go on
and on. So when you imply, however subtly, that that
area of study should be excluded, you're in a sense
implying a fear of dealing with it. Your rejection of it
is not objective at all; your rejection is subjective.
You're rejecting it on a subjective premise. This is the
point I was trying to get at: to master yourself means
you don't deal with certain questions or assumptions.
We're all going to get all the information that exists.
We're just here to get it. So the world itself becomes a
body of inquiry, and Afro-Americans are in a position to
inquire and to create out of all the world's knowledge.
Great Black Literature of the 1960s & 1970s
I don't know about the black aesthetic so much, but I
think in the 1960s we had some great literature. I think
that the works of Imamu Baraka, specifically
Dutchman,
Blues People, Slave Ship, some of the
stories in tales, some of the poems in
Black Magic
. . . he covers so many things beautifully. He's just a
master of genres. If he gave up this political thing
he's into today and came back out here and started
writing, he would probably blow away most of the cats
out here writing, because he's a good writer when he's
focused, when he's focused on the problems. After that
the novels and poetry of Ishmael Reed . . . particularly
Yellow Back Radio and
Mumbo Jumbo, are
excellent, new, and exciting pieces. Henry Dumas is
cool, and very good, and very unique and fresh.
Henry Dumas' books
Ark of Bones
and
Poetry for
My People . . . Henry Dumas and Ishmael Reed have a
nice sense of what to do with the Pan-African folk
materials and Pan-African mythological materials in
their work; that's the thing that's good about them . .
. there're a lot of good people. And then you're got
people . . . people who are not in the Movement who just
reign supreme on their own terms. Shadow and Act came
out during the 1960s, you know. Albert Murray's books,
the
Omni-Americans and
The Hero and the Blues,
came out in the late 70s. Then there're Ed Bullins and a
couple of his plays. I like
In The Wine Time. Ron
Milner's Who's Got His Own is a very fine play.
The quoted material above was taken from a taped
interview 12 March 1974 at Yale University published by
Callaloo #23 (1985)
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posted 3 December 2006 |
