Lorenzo Thomas kys

Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

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Books by Lorenzo Thomas

Dancing on Main Street / Sing the Sun Up / Chances Are Few

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Report on

american studies association conference

houston, 15 november 2002

lorenzo thomas panel

By Kalamu ya Salaam

my vehicle is still in the shop awaiting a replacement engine--the second this year. i've rented a car and make the 5.5 hour drive over to houston, arriving an hour before my presentation. by the time i find the location in the galleria and set up, there is still a solid half hour before hit time. aldon nielson is there. he and i are doing multi-media. he

has an mp3 player and is sharing some audio clips, plus a very brief video clip from a vhs tape. the honoree lorenzo thomas arrives just as the panel is about to kick off. organized by barry maxwell of cornell university, the panel includes, aldon nielson, harryette mullen, maria damon (academic heavyweights all) and yours truly.

when moderator maxwell asked me to participate on a panel about lorenzo thomas, my initial impusle was to say "no." i'm through writing papers for academic panels. no mas. but i have a deep respect and admiration for the work of lorenzo thomas, plus we know each other from way, way back, so i feel obliged to do something. my compromise is that i will do a short video on lorenzo. maxwell buys my offer.

earlier this year, back in march, i drove over to houston to video interview lorenzo. we sat in an empty classroom at the university of houston. i wanted to shoot in his office, but lorenzo felt it was too junky, which is exactly

why i wanted to shoot in there. i guessed there would be books all over the place, hardly anywhere to walk or sit, a desk overflowing with work in progress, newspapers, magazines, maybe a bottle of water, a coffee cup stuffed with pens and pencils, a blinking computer behind the desk. a squat, black telephone sitting sentry like a hungry bulldog. maybe a window

overlooking nothing in particular. it would have made a great set, offering all kinds of interesting angles, but lorenzo's sense of propriety kicked in. he didn't want to look bad. didn't want to come off as the disheveled wacky professor. so we ended up in the sterility of a harshly lit, box of a classroom. a whiteboard behind him as he sat at a plastic-topped table.

utterly characterless. it was talking head hell.

after the shoot, lorenzo took me out to a mexican restaurant and we had a good meal, some engaging conversation and i turned around and got back on the highway, getting home around midnight. not a bad day's work.

once i looked at the footage i was both astounded and dispirited. astounded because a lot of what lorenzo had to say was not only interesting, he was occasionally amazing in how he hooked-up various threads of thought. but the look of the piece--it hurts my eyes, my sensibility as a movie maker to stare at a talking head for twenty minutes. and then there was the other problem of how to boil it all down into a cogent 12-minute piece.

enter jerry ward. professor ward and i have been friends for years and years and years. in the summer of 2002 he accepted an offer from dillard president michael lomax to become a distinguished scholar with an endowed chair. accepting the dillard offer meant jerry would be leaving his long-time stomping grounds of tougaloo college located on the outskirts of jackson, mississippi. jerry had been dedicated to tougaloo like a farmer to the land, but in a typical godfather move, lomax made one of those irrefusable offers.

by august jerry was in new orleans. and in september we began our weekly monday diner dates. we go to one of the thousands of restaurants or eating establishments dotting the new orleans landscape and hold court with the eruditeness of old heads on saturday at the barbershop. we have no specific agendas, and just talk about whatever we feel like pontificating on. except jerry is widely read, intellectually sharp, and given to precision in his pronouncements--hence his nickname: surgeon.

surgeon and i have worked together on a number of projects, including co-editing two issues of the african american review, which is when we officially adopted our "noms-de-intellectual guerre." so while he slices and dices, separating flesh from bone, artery from sinew, i be earning my stripes with overhead swipes and smashing hammer hits--they call me sledgehammer. so one evening while we're beating that boy, the idea occurs to me, why not include a segment with jerry and i deconstructing lorenzo's work. jerry agrees to be part of the video project.

i select about twenty minutes of the interview that i think are particularly insightful, burn a vhs tape and give it to jerry for his review. a week later jerry has made notes and points to four segments. i re-edit the lorenzo segments and then arrange to video jerry. i take my high school crew over to dillard and they do the actual shooting. typically, jerry has prepared his comments. two questions, one-take each, and we're in and out within 45 minutes. i spend about two more days editing, finalizing the cuts, figuring out how to do the transitions (i end up with page turns when lorenzo goes from topic to topic), use a hip titling device from a slick (that's actually the name of the product) plug-in for i-movie, and voila, i'm ready to participate on an academic panel.

i get the nod to lead-off the panel, followed by harryette mullen who has a plane to catch, then aldon followed by ms. damon, and then comments from lorenzo. using a video as my contribution is a little different for an academic panel, and the video is well received. following the video, i make a brief statement about the three major revolutions in the recording of speech. first came writing and the printing press, which strips away sound and gesture. then at the turn of the 20th century came recording and radio, which added back sound. the opening of the 21st century brings us digital video you can edit on personal computers, that brings back gesture. the importance of all of this is that african american culture is sound-intensive and gesture-sensitive, or to put it another way, there can be no appreciation of black culture without hearing it.

harryette follows with a paper that is both analytical and anecdotal, and more importantly, she also points to music. (a couple of days after the panel, mullen, nielson and damon email copies of their papers to all of the panelists.) here is a long quote from mullen's presentation:

>>In 1967 in a poem titled "Onion Bucket," he wrote "All silence says music will follow," suggesting to me a dialectical relationship between life and death, between art and the void of meaninglessness, and suggesting to any blocked writer that the blank page is ready to receive our creation. In the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, there is often an implicit soundtrack behind the words, an allusive, unheard but remembered music that helps to establish the mood, location, or social context of a given moment of the poet's observant participation. The musical influences so pervasive in his poetry include jazz, blues, R & B, rock, reggae, calypso, zydeco, disco, country western, western classical music, even Muzak. Often some particular musical allusion allows the poet to define intimate or social space, or the speaker in the poem may borrow a theme or a rhetorical stance from a specific type of music, as in "Blues Cadet" and "MMDCCXIII 1/2." (The title of the latter appears to be a street address, 2713 1/2, written in Roman numerals.)

In these poems, whether the blues is directly or indirectly evoked, and whether or not the poem itself includes blues allusions, the space of home is defined as a blues space whenever the poet sings of emotional discord and estrangement as individuals fail to connect. The poet sings the blues when love is off-key and a house is not a home. In "Blues Cadet," with its title and its epigraph "after Sonny Boy Williamson" we are alerted to the poem's origins in the blues. The colloquial voice, intimate address to an absent love, and household metaphors of the poem's troubled speaker would be appropriate for a traditional blues singer: "I've worn out the pictures on the carpet/Just pacing in my room//Ever since you went away." In "2713 1/2" something close to a classical metrical pattern can be felt in the lines, yet under this speaker's more formal diction it is still possible to hear the blues:<<

nielson then ups the music ante. first he plays a musical excerpt, the beach boys doing surfing usa. and follows with chuck berry's original "sweet little sixteen" thereby illustrating the source, but then going further and deconstructing the whole context. again i quote at some length:

Brian Wilson once explained to an interviewer from Time magazine: "We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white" (qtd. in Kirsch, 2). The real story was, as it always is in America's racial cosmology, considerably more complicated than the Beach Boys allowed. Lorenzo Thomas would have recognized that on first hearing. "Surfing U.S.A." had as co-author none other than Chuck Berry, whose melody, blues progression, patented guitar licks and even idealistic, adolescent longing are at the core of what Brian Wilson made from the materials of Berry's composition "Sweet Little Sixteen." Berry and the Beach Boys, too, shared a common shore of enunciation. The hard "R" sounds and wide open vowels of Brian Wilson's plain statement resemble nothing so much as the dialect of the plains, the natural affect of Missourians like Melvin B. Tolson and Chuck Berry. (It's a sound that marks the Beach Boys apart from the Oakie inflected pronunciation of so many of their neighbors, not to mention the Armenian strains of contemporaries of theirs such as Cher.) This, unlike the musical appropriations, was not a matter of conscious mimicry, the sort of thing that explains why so many fifteen-year-old white boys in Iowa now sound as though they'd grown up in the Bronx. But it does raise a rather obvious question: when white people say that someone sounds "black," what do they really mean? Brian Wilson says he sings white, and if that means that he sounds a lot like Chuck Berry, then we need to wonder just what is fit music for an America always at war with its own racial present?

what is totally tickling me is how the "literary" analysis is focusing on music, thereby reinforcing the centrality of sound in black culture.

the last presentation was by maria damon, and although she offers a more traditional literary exposition, her emphasis on "witnessing" (or as she wittily notes, lorenzo is a poet who puts the "wit back into witness," which is rap-like in its word play) establishes the cultural context within which sound is supreme. again, i quote at length:

In mainstream, or , to use Lorenzo Thomas's terminology, Eurocentric modern lyric poetry, the poet witnesses his or her own consciousness, the processes of observation and experience themselves, and comments on them. This private process, made public in suitably lovely language, ratifies the poet as a special, sensitive person who represents the ideal of the self-knowing human: an auto-erotic Socratic exhibition for the intellectual voyeur. What falls out of the equation for the most part is history, context, the social world. In this mainstream poetic arena, the private contract between the poet, performing for him or herself but disingenuously conscious of being under surveillance, and an audience hungry for personal insight, is a psycho-emotional one; if history intrudes, it functions as a "background" setting, insisted on, if at all, by the harsh, flat-footed critic, academically trained in the last 30 years perhaps, to bring "cultural context" into the picture to muddy the waters and tamper with the proper perspective of this private, self-regarding metaphysical striptease.

Fortunately, Lorenzo Thomas, the poets to whom he devotes his analytic energies, and the poetic scenes he documents and participates in are not mainstream or Eurocentric. For Thomas, Afrocentric poetry is historiography, and Afrocentric literary historiography is a form of *social* witnessing. As social and subjective witnessing are not separate events --that is, the poet's subjectivity has itself been touched by social trauma --the stakes are higher. To write literary history is to take extraordinary measures to ensure survival; to write the extraordinary linear measures of poetry is to link one's own survival to that of one's community. To write history through poetry and a poetic historiography is to knit oneself even more closely to community. Healing the split between history and poetry, literary history, itself a poetics, can be a way of situating poetic practice in a social context --one's own. By looking at Lorenzo Thomas's literary historiography, we get a sense of how a poet's rendition of history foregrounds the poetics of community formation and historical transformation.<<

after the four presentations, lorenzo briefly responded. he was thankful for everyone's contribution. it was a great panel with thoughtful and insightful commentaries. i was not only extremely pleased to participate, i also really enjoyed myself while listening to critics who were good at doing what lorenzo said on the videotape is one of the roles of the critic: to make clear what one gets from a particular piece of literary work.

my view of the future suggests that what is commonly called "multi-media" will be used more and more often as we realize two factors: one--multi-media is now accessible to everyone, you can use recordings, make movies, present slides and carry it all to the presentation in handheld computers, audio players and projection devices. two--multi-media enables a more accurate explication of black culture, a culture that can not be fully understood if one does not hear it. i believe the use of multi-media will not only facilitate presentations about black culture, more importantly multi-media will make it possible for a new type of critic to emerge, a critic who is grounded in sound, equal to if not moreso than being grounded in text.

think of what happened with music in the 20th century. once the technology of sound reproduction was effected, the dominance of classical music was ended as black music came to the fore thanks to records and radio. without recording and broadcast technology there would not have been a worldwide musical revolution because one can not appreciate or learn black music without hearing it. classical music can be passed on through written scores, but there is no manuscript that can represent blues and jazz, nor gospel or rhythm and blues, not to mention the current scene. try to imagine rap music represented as a musical score on paper.

my neo-griot concept is one of writing with text, sound and light. as far as i am concerned records and movies are a form of writing, a way to concretize language and make it possible for the audience to receive the message in the absence of the author presenting the message in real time. moreover, multimedia enables those who are proficient at the presentation of sound and visuals to represent themselves with authority rather than relying solely on those whose forte is words on paper.

as a writer i have a lot of respect for and proficiency with using text, but i am also aware that the dominance of text has been to the detriment of our culture not only in terms of the presentation of the culture but also in terms of the criteria that determine who is an expert, a critic. often a critic is considered an authority because they are proficient at writing, not because they have a real understanding of the culture, but now with multimedia, we can not only focus on the culture, we also enable other forms of intellectual insight. the ph.d. is no longer privileged just because they are adept at writing.

we are on the verge of the third major revolution in writing. multi-media in general and especially digital technology (particularly digital video) levels the playing field and makes it possible for non-textual languages to compete in all arenas. the lorenzo thomas panel exemplified the potential effectiveness of the multi-media third wave, and this was only the beginning.

personally, it became clear to me that the making of movies is not only a realistic alternative to writing a paper, digital videos are in fact able to present facets that text can't. to be clear, what i am calling for is not the elimination of text, but rather the addition of sound and gesture to text as a form of writing. i want to be proficient in all three areas, and i think that we all can use digital multimedia to now more fully and accurately represent black culture.

on the long drive back to new orleans that night, my imagination was buzzing, thinking about all the possibilities in terms of using digital video. next week i head out to san antonio for the guadeloupe inter-america bookfair and literary festival. report to come...

posted 15 november 2002

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update 8 July 2008