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Books
by Afaa Michael Weaver
Water Song
(1985) / Multitudes (2000) /
Sandy Point (2000) /
The Ten Lights of God (2000) /
some days it's a slow walk to evening
These Hands I Know /
The Plum Flower Dance /
Multitudes /
Timber and Prayer /
Stations in a Dream /
The Ten Lights of God
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O Black and Unknown
Bards
How Do We Love Thee? Let Us Count the Ways . . .
By Afaa Michael
Weaver
“I am writing by
the pound,”
Hughes wrote to his longtime friend
Arna
Bontemps.
Hughes was in his 50th year of life, with
fifteen more active years before his death, and I was
not quite one year old. Now at 57, I sense a need to
once again take a cue from the old master and be busier
at my work. In that same letter
Hughes told
Bontemps he
had shipped some twenty pounds of manuscripts, including
all five drafts of his play Simply Heavenly, to Yale
University, the repository for his papers.
It was the
seriousness with which he took himself as a writer that
has so inspired me in my life. It was a seriousness that
George Houston Bass, my late mentor, worked to instill
more solidly in me. Bass had been one of Hughes’
secretaries, and
Hughes named him the executor of his
literary estate. I was receiving transmission from
Hughes through Bass, an experience I now value more than
I did at the time. It was 1985, and I was thirty-three
years old.
In a moment of
splendor, sitting as I was in his office there in the
African American Studies building at Brown, I looked
around to my left and upwards to the top of
Professor
Bass’s bookcase. He was explaining to me that
Langston Hughes was very much with us. Some of his ashes were in
the room. As often as I have told this story, I have
gotten smiles and chuckles each time, but the solemnity
of the moment will not go away for me when I am alone
and thinking of how things have been passed on, the gift
of knowledge and warnings of trials and challenges.
“Hughes fathered me
in the way that I am fathering you. Your responsibility
as a poet is to bring the respect of the critics to the
masses because you come from Blackbottom.” Bass was an
intense man, and when he focused on me that way with
those heavy eyebrows of his attuned like a hawk, the
southern son in me was all obedience.
Professor Bass was
trying to get me to understand the significance of class
in my own life. All full of expectations about getting
an ivy league degree and being a professor, I was not
quite sure of what to do with those feet of mine so
firmly rooted in the ground of the working class. At the
time that Hughes’ father sent him off to Columbia, my
grandparents were southern sharecroppers, and my
father’s grandparents lived in a log cabin packed with
mud and outfitted with wooden sliding windows.
Hughes was a member
of the black middle class, a fact I brought to the
attention of a white scholar at a conference not too
long ago, someone who dismissed my comment by saying,
“That adds nothing to the discussion of black poetry.”
His comment adds a
great deal to what I already suspect about the tapestry
of African American poetry, which is that it is largely
unknown and misunderstood across the racial board, as I
think there are very few younger black poets who have
really let the lives of the dead black poets inform
their own lives and work. Poets generally fade in the
minds of young poets caught in their ambitions and the
dead come to be regarded less and less as direct
influences.
I use the word
tapestry as I avoid the word “tradition” these days.
Tradition seems to imply more or less an adherence to
principles which are set forth to insure the
continuation of something, and that is perhaps where the
aforementioned scholar lives in his own critical world,
a place where expansiveness is not to be had. His
attitude is akin to one even more limiting, which is
that poetry by African Americans is in its own world,
something apart from the mainstream. It seems to me that
such a view guarantees the stasis of all American
poetry, when the truth is that black poetry has always
informed and energized American poetry in ways similar
to the effects of black demands on the democratic
system. Democracy has been taken to task by black folk
who have continually asked it to prove itself. Black
poets have taken democracy to task. These challenges to
America’s ideals have benefited everyone in this country
and beyond.
Kelly Miller, part
of the old guard at Howard University, would have
something to say about the supposed monolith of black
American culture, as would his daughter Mae Miller, a
poet and playwright herself, a gentle little old lady
with whom I had lunch as part of a reading I gave in
1985 at the Library of Congress at the invitation of
Gwendolyn Brooks.
She could not eat
all of her lunch, and she did not want to waste it.
“Here,” she said, “you can have my soup.”
Gwendolyn Brooks
was hosting me for the event and was at the other end of
the table. She looked down to get a fix on what Mae was
trying to do to me. It was all rather harmless, so
Gwen
left me to the task of eating the soup, which was Ms.
Miller’s gift to me.
We should all
inherit sustenance. We should all value the gift of
literary soup. In its heyday, Howard University had the
brown bag test for social life. Folks darker than a
brown paper bag were not allowed in certain social sets.
There was the
Jack and Jill Club. The dirty secrets of
color and hierarchy in the early formation of the black
middle class are still pretty much secrets, an area too
prone to bickering and hearsay for any but the most
brave and perhaps foolhardy of scholars to tread.
Nonetheless, it is an important aspect of cultural
self-knowledge and awareness.
I could very easily
say I wish more white poets and critics knew much more
about the tapestry of African American poetry, but it is
more the responsibility of African American poets to
know the distances between historicity and intimacy, to
know just how much the history of black poets before
them informs and challenges their present circumstance.
One should take up the difficult charge of honoring a
tradition that was held to be substandard and honor it
in a way that leads to the expansive growth of American
poetry as a whole. It is not easy, and many have written
about it, including
Derek Walcott with his trope of the
literary houseboy.
However substandard
these dead black poets were thought to be, they were the
embattled wellspring that is indispensable to the
definition of America’s poetry. I do not believe an
aesthetic that denies them will stand, nor do I believe
an aesthetic that refuses to move on from that
historical base will stand either. Cultural and racial
groups have to define their own humanity. If others
write the African American narratives and name what they
see as commonalities in the lives of blacks and whites,
the door is left wide open to the denial of the genuine
role of racial prejudice in American life.
The discussion of
class does not eliminate race, but it can illumine it,
make it accessible to a broader critique. There is a
story of race, class, and privilege inside black culture
that is waiting to be addressed.
Langston Hughes was a
middle class African American who wrote of ordinary folk
as an observer filled with love for the poor and the
working poor. Separated as he was from them by education
and family circumstance, he maintained his own sense of
cultural responsibility in his work. His faith was that
his work would be a structure that the unborn poets
would one day use. That is a profound commitment to the
writing life.
Professor Bass told
me of the evening walks they would take through Harlem.
Afterwards at his home, Mr. Hughes would ask him to talk
about what he saw. Then Hughes would give his view of
the neighborhood that evening.
“Well George, this
is what I saw.” Mr. Hughes went on to explain Harlem as
he saw it. It was the work of an observer, but it was
also the work of someone who very much knew he was a
member of a specific cultural group facing very clear
obstacles configured by racism.
We should all know
our origins. That’s easy. What’s not easy is
knowing where we are in a country where the obstacles
are not what they once were. However, I maintain that no
matter how clear your course seems to you as a poet,
there is something to be had in loving those black poets
who are now gone, and loving them as part of who you
are, even if you no longer think race so much defines
your life.
I believe the
ironic power of race and racism is rooted in denial of
the same. The suspension of race as a concept has to be
rooted in a complex critique of it, not by simply
declaring your transcendence over it. At this point in
history, that critique depends on the honest
confrontation of class and privilege as very real forces
within the African American literary community, for
better and for worse.
“Tell me, what do
you see?”
28 August
2009
Source:
EastBaltimoreMuse
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The Big
Boys / Industrial Me / When
Poets Grow in Factories
/ O Black and Unknown Bards
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''— NYTimes
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Take This
Hammer
KQED's film unit
follows poet and activist
James Baldwin
in the spring of
1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with
members of the local African-American community. He is
escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director
Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real
situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the
image San Francisco would like to present." He declares:
"There is no moral distance ... between the facts of
life in San Francisco and the facts of life in
Birmingham. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And
that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with
local people on the street, meetings with community
leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a
moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western
Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial
inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront
and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man
by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a
negro president of this country but it will not be the
country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive
would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the
merits of this film and for his determination that it be
preserved and remastered for posterity.
posted 27 June 2010
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
By
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a book
that is essential reading for every
American. In a forceful, impassioned, and
personal voice, he offers not only a searing
and incisive diagnosis of our country’s
economic ills but also an urgent call for
Americans to restore the virtues of
fairness, honesty, and foresight as the
foundations of national prosperity. Sachs
finds that both political parties—and many
leading economists—have missed the big
picture, offering shortsighted solutions
such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to
address complex economic problems that
require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that
we have profoundly underestimated
globalization’s long-term effects on our
country, which create deep and largely unmet
challenges with regard to jobs, incomes,
poverty, and the environment. America’s
single biggest economic failure, Sachs
argues, is its inability to come to grips
with the new global economic realities.
Sachs describes a political system that has
lost its ethical moorings, in which
ever-rising campaign contributions and
lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the
citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to turn
the crisis around. He argues persuasively
that the problem is not America’s abiding
values, which remain generous and pragmatic,
but the ease with which political spin and
consumerism run circles around those values.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 7 April 2012
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