Evie Shockley Addresses Thomas Jefferson

My interest in the ways that poets engage the past makes Evie Shockley's poems about figures like Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson in her book the new black especially appealing to me.

Evie is one among several contemporary poets such as Treasure Williams, Tyehimba Jess, Rita Dove, Honorée Jeffers, Kevin Young, and many many more who channel the spirits of historical figures in their works. Poets often engage aspects of African American history by writing persona poems in the voices of distinct personalities from the past.

Evie's poem "dependencies" extends the practice of a poet engaging history, but her mode of writing is less common. She writes her poem in the second person, and the "you" that she addresses is Thomas Jefferson.

In the opening stanza of "dependencies," she goes:

visiting monticello was
an education     of course    you
named your home in a romance
language    spent 40 years
constructing it     and the myth
of yourself.

Now first off, it's worth recognizing that the respected former president gets checked about constructing the myth of himself. It's a subtle yet defiant or dismantling comment for someone to make.

Huey Freeman vs. Intellectual Solitude

Every semester for the last couple of years that I’ve included Aaron McGruder’s collection of comic strips A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury in my African American literature courses, I’ve come to expect a few students pulling me aside after class to tell me about their connection to Huey Freeman, the protagonist of the strip. They express a connection to Huey.

“I feel a lot like Huey.”

“He’s dealing with a lot of what I’m dealing with.”

“I’m right with Huey on so many things.”

They convey those and other related comments.

As we extend the conversations, however, it becomes clear that what they really find valuable about McGruder’s main character is that they share an intellectual kinship with the rebellious and brainy 10-year old. Huey prevents them from certain feelings of loneliness and solitude.

In a way, it’s not unusual for students in literature classes to talk about their affinities to protagonists in the novels and short stories that we read. The medium of the comic strip, though, perhaps leads to important differences, which make it possible for some students to build a connection with Huey that is less likely with the characters we come across in novels and short stories.

For one, the brevity of individual story arcs and the large quantity of strips allows us to follow McGruder’s characters in various scenarios over an extended period of time.

Second, the combination of words and visuals, not to mention the sight of the main character Huey, creates a sturdier connection than we have with figures in novels. Finally, McGruder — through Huey and the strip in general — engages fairly contemporary subjects and pop culture, something most of the major novelists that we cover do not do.

The camaraderie that many of my students feel with a Huey Freeman, or more broadly with an Aaron mcGruder, indicate the importance of having more voices in the public sphere that address and critique the legacies of anti-black racism on the one hand and the troubling aspects of black culture on the other hand.

There might also be some value in introducing students to artistic works such as African American comic strips as viable “texts” for investigation. More importantly, I've learned that Huey serves as a valuable intellectual connector for young folks. 

Further Reading:
Huey vs. Riley

TNC, The Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 5

So we're moving along through TNC's The Beautiful Struggle. Chapter 5, like so many places throughout the book, contains these moments where Coates describes his developing "knowledge of self," as folks sometimes call it, which also amounts to readings and thought in black history and culture.

"My Consciousness grew," he writes at one point, "until I was obsessed with having been birthed in the wrong year." He even longed "to take the rope for John Brown or snuff the peon who dimed out Vesey."

He hung out "at bookstores built for the people" and had Malcolm X's "Ballot or the Bullet" on his Walkman (137).

But during school, perhaps bored, he was dismissive and at times disruptive. At one point, after pushing a teacher and then getting handcuffed by police, he receives a serious serious smack-down from his father (141).

We can talk about the punishment he receives from his father, but something that stood out to me as it related to the young brother we'll work with next year relates to a bright student (the young Coates) actively engaged with books, music, and ideas out in the world and yet begin disengaged and disruptive in the classroom. I'm not even really sure about the question I have about that right now, but it seems like a topic we'd want to discuss with young black men just starting out in college next fall.

Let me know what you think. What other topics from the chapter stood out to you?

Exhibit on Haki Madhubuti

 

Haki Madhubuti reading poetry at event.

Tuesday, February 15, The Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club hosted a talk and reading by poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti at the East St. Louis Higher Education Center. More than 100 people attended.

Redmond and Madhubuti have known each other since the mid-1960s as participants in common arts projects. Most notably, they are participants in the cultural enterprise known as the Black Arts Movement. Over the decades, they have collaborated on several projects.


As part of our contribution to the event, the black studies program curated an exhibit of Redmond's photographs of Madhubuti taken over a 20 year period. The exhibit panels in this exhibit, like all the panels in our black poetry mixed media project, were designed by my younger brother Kenton.

Audience member viewing the exhibit. 

The Madhubuti exhibit included several panels and gave audiences a chance to review him in various contexts over the years reading poetry, signing books, interacting with fellow artists, and leading arts activities.

(Funding for the exhibit was made possible by funds from the Illinois Humanities Council and the Black Studies Program at SIUE).   

Vanishing Black Men?

Photograph by Gordon Parks, inspired by Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

"Where did all the black men go?" That's the question I've been posing to some of my friends and colleagues here at SIUE.
 
After looking over the most recent edition of the university's Factbook, which provides statistics about the university, I noticed a relatively significant drop in black male faculty members. In the fall of 2009, there were 21 of us. In the fall of 2010, there were 15. That 28.6% decline is notable, especially when we consider that black men make up such a small proportion of the total faculty.

How small? Well, there are 877 total faculty members, which means we - black men - now constitute about 1.7% of the professors at the university.    

If it's true that college students are less inspired to pursue advanced degrees or become college professors when they do not see people who look like them in faculty positions, then we're in trouble.  

Another reason we should be concerned about the dramatic decline is because of how rare it is for us to hire black men as faculty members. Over the last ten years, the university has hired 9 black male faculty. 2007 was the last time a black male faculty member was hired.  He was the only black male professor hired that year.

TNC, the Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 4

If we could read Coates's book alongside other major autobiographical works by black men, we'd see some cool overlapping patterns in terms of them describing how they all came to a certain kind of intellectual consciousness.

You see it in Frederick Douglass's narrative. You see it in Richard Wright's autobiography. It's there in Malcolm. It's in Haki Madhubuti's autobiography. Yep, you see it in Obama's books. And here it is, there also, in Coates's The Beautiful Struggle. You read passages of all those men engaging various texts and getting a spark from those texts that, at least according to their accounts, is really important, transformational even.

Coates moves along in that tradition. One important difference, though, relates to what counts as the meaningful "text" for Coates. For him, it's not just books, but also music. At one point in chapter 4, he goes

I was twelve, but when I heard 'Lyrics of Fury' - 'A horn if you want the style I possess / I bless the child, the earth, the gods, and bomb the rest' - I put away childish things, went to the notebook, and caged myself between the blue lines. In the evenings, that summer, I would close the door, lay across the bed, and put pen to pad.

Later, he goes "I wrote every day that summer, rhymed over B-side instrumentals." He admits that his flow was "flicted and disjointed," and his words "were all braggadocious." However, "when done with the recital, even though I was alone, I felt bigger" (110).

It's really fascinating to follow him writing about what rap music meant to his intellectual and emotional development as well as to his practices as a writer.

Too often, I feel, we hear over-exaggerations about the goodness of rap only matched by the proclamations about its negativity. What I like about chapter 4 and the book in general relates to how it makes me think longer and harder about the things that might inspire, frighten, intrigue, and confuse young black men. That is to say I guess, the book might be giving me ideas for thinking about the young brothers that I work with at the university and in the community.

But what about y'all? What stood out to you concerning chapter 4? What else should we be thinking about right now?

Related:
Ta-Nehisi Coates the blogger vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates the memoirist

The Visual Experience of Evie Shockley’s the new black

I recently saw an announcement about an upcoming reading by Evie Shockley. I wondered about the term “reading” in relation to Evie’s newest book the new black, which offers a visual experience that requires readers to read in unconventional ways.

Just yesterday, I was looking at Evie’s book with Symmetry, one of the students in my black studies crew. We were preparing to head to an event organized by Eugene B. Redmond in East St. Louis, so we didn’t have enough time to talk about the poems in-depth.

But, we couldn’t resist pointing out all the intricately designed poems that amplify or vary the messages conveyed by the words in the piece. For instance, in her poem “x marks the spot,” she arranges combinations of two words, both of which begin with the letter a, in such a way that they resemble a large X.

Actually, each of the pairs of words begin with the letters “af” or “am” such as “affable african,” “amiable affliction,” affluent ambivalence,” and “affected american.” There's a jumble of words and thus ideas at the place at the cross-hair of X. That convergence of words and ideas in the middle say something about the vexing process of merging "african" and "american."

There’s another poem, “revisiting,” where every other line appears to the right. It’s an odd experience to read a poem take up so much of the full page, since poems are aligned along the left margin.

Evie also has this other poem “explosives” where she scatters or stretches a seemingly simple phrase like “a bomb is a statement” across the page.

There’s another poem “at the musée de l'homme” that appears in the shape of a small circle or ball. The artistic design of the poem might be linked to its initial site of publication Oranges & Sardines (Poets/Artists), which goes the extra step in producing really visually stimulating material. [See the online issue of the magazine where a version of Evie Shockley’s "at the musée de l'homme" appeared. You'll need to scroll through to page 42.]

Overall, Evie Shockley’s the new black is filled with many hard and heavy poems with words that convey powerful ideas. At the same time, the elaborate and sometimes bodacious designs of some of the poems in the book require various double-takes, at the very least.

Related:
Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency
Treasure Williams on Fannie Lou Hamer on Facebook
What Will Black Writing Be?

Mixed Media Poetry Project @ William Woods University

Students viewing the exhibit.

On February 9th and 10th, I shared our black poetry mixed media project with students at William Woods University in Fulton, Missouri. The mixed media project comprises a traveling exhibit that showcases a selection of about 100 images from Eugene B. Redmond's massive collection of photographs featuring black poets such as Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Margaret Walker.

Visitors to the exhibit can view selections of poems, and they can use our audio devices to hear poets reading their works.

 Students viewing the exhibit.

The two-day event at William Woods was coordinated by the university's marvelous and inspiring Tamara Carter, who directs the school's Office of Multicultural Affairs. When I was exchanging emails with sister Carter in the lead up to the event, I mistakenly assumed she was a mere mortal like the rest of us. Please.

Some of us regular folks are on facebook and twitter; that is, we contribute to social networks. Well, Tamara Carter on the other hand is a social network.  Moving around campus with her made it possible for me to friend all kinds of people and follow the many exciting threads taking place at the university. In short, the good sister Carter is a wonderful host.

[By the way, Carter and her students generously endured way too many questions from me about their renowned equestrian program.]
 

 

Students viewing the exhibit.  

Showcasing the Mixed Media Poetry Project in association with the Office of Multicultural Affairs at William Woods University allowed me to contribute to a long-running series of events highlighting cultural diversity and broader understanding of different groups of people. The notion that the presentation was about raising cultural awareness and expanding knowledge about race through the use of African American literary art was an important learning experience for me, and, I hope, for the students as well.

Related content: Eugene B. Redmond and the EBR Collection

Treasure Williams Channels Fannie Lou Hamer in STL

For some reason or another, I’ve attended less poetry readings these days. But this past Saturday, I was motivated to go out and catch Treasure Williams reading from her work-in-progress on Fannie Lou Hamer, which I first became aware of as she posted drafts of her Hamer poems on facebook.

Given my interest in Treasure’s project as well as the general subject of history and poetry, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see her showcase the poems live.

Treasure’s reading took place at the GYA Community Gallery & Fine Craft Shop located in St. Louis. The gallery and shop is operated by the Yeyo Arts Collective, which is “dedicated to women's art and topics surrounding women’s issues; including family youth, and community.” Treasure’s work definitely embodies the collective’s mission.

Treasure’s “reading” included poetry, discussions of African American history and culture, songs, and call and response with the audience. I was already familiar with her poems, her talents as a singer, and her ability to engage audiences. However, the discussions of history and culture related to Hamer, the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, black southern culture, and African American church practices served as important additions.

Actually, I’ve seen Treasure discuss black cultural issues in and in between poems at readings before, but the presence of Hamer really elevated the sense of history during the reading. Also, Hamer’s story ends up being a story or collection of stories involving a wide range of figures, including Hamer’s family and fellow activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, people Hamer encountered during her travels in West Africa, and her adversaries in the state of Mississippi.

So far, Treasure has written 29 kwansabas – 7-line poems with 7-words in each line with none of those words containing more than 7 letters – focusing on Hamer. Treasure writes almost all of the poems from the first-person persona of Hamer.

Channeling the spirit of a southern-born black civil rights worker gave Treasure the opportunity exercise a range of poetic and expressive modes and devices. For one, she was presenting snapshots of Hamer’s interior thoughts in these little 49-word poems. In addition, she was demonstrating how to blend poetry reading, history lesson, and black church music.

The calm and reflective nature of Treasure’s reading makes it hard for me to place her work in the categories of “performance poetry” and “spoken word.” That’s not a knock on performance poetry and spoken word; it’s just that the platforms and audiences for those modes typically demand that the practitioners focus quite a bit on entertaining listeners.

Yeah, Treasure’s reading was entertaining, but it was educational, informative, and paced in ways that are typically less common in the spoken word circles or performance-based cyphas.

But then too, Treasure’s mode of delivery is simply too soulful to fit easily within the more dominant strains of poetry reading that takes place in formal university settings. I mean, it’s rare to hear a poet who uses a fixed poetic form also regularly sing fragments of old gospel tunes during a reading.

I guess what I’m saying overall then is that Treasure showcased a multi-directional reading style, and that style served her poetry-based historical project really well.

Related:
Treasure Williams on Fannie Lou Hamer on Facebook

Presenting Poetry & Photos at St. Louis Community College

 Student viewing and listening to exhibit

 A week ago, on February 8, I produced a version of our black poetry mixed media project at St. Louis Community College - Meramec. The mixed media project comprises a traveling exhibit that features several panels showcasing Eugene B. Redmond's photographs of poets such as Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Margaret Walker.

The exhibit also displays select poems and makes it possible for visitors to listen to poets reading their works through the use of our audio devices. 

Student taking notes at the exhibit.

The event at St. Louis Community College was organized by Rita Reinhardt who, in addition to working in the Career and Employment Services office and teaching classes at the college, coordinates cultural activities and events. Rita is a also poet, which made her an especially welcoming host for the project.

Rita Reinhardt observing panel featuring Maya Angelou.

Presenting the Mixed Media Poetry Project at St. Louis Community College was an important opportunity to bring materials from the EBR Collection to St. Louis. SIUE is fairly close to the city, but for some reason, we have not had enough chances to share the wonderful images from the collection with citizens on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River.

Hopefully, the event at St. Louis Community College was the beginning of many future collaborations with their school and other organizations in the area.

(Funding for the exhibit was made possible by funds from the Illinois Humanities Council and the Black Studies Program @ SIUE).     

Related content: Eugene B. Redmond and the EBR Collection

Race, Science, & Choice

You’ve perhaps seen more science-related discussions from me lately. That’s because I’ve been following Alondra Nelson’s twitter page sociallifeofdna, which often leads me to interesting information about science and technology.

I’ve been looking at a few topics related to genomics, and so I took a few notes from a recent interview on Radio Boston about the exhibit “RACE: Are We So Different.”

In the interview, Alondra discusses the implications of the human genome project and points out that “it’s an occasion, I think, for us to think in new ways about race and science.” She extends by noting the recent history of genomics and why we might want to give thought to the choices we make about what we focus on in scientific results:

There’s this incredible moment where we use all of this technology and all of this genius to decode the human genome and to really sort of codify in important ways the fact that we’re 99.9% alike, the human species, right?

But at the same time, those tools bring with it the possibility of parsing in new ways the one tenth of percent in which, you know, individuals and populations might vary. And so one of the things I would want people to take away is to think about that decision as a choice that societies and communities make. We make a choice to look at the 0.1% rather than the 99.9%.

And you know there could be some arguments that will remain to be seen about whether or not that 0.1% is where medical utility might lie, and it might be practical to do so. But it’s just a general kind of broader issue the fact that we concentrate on the 0.1% I think should be noted as a choice that we make.

And there are other societies where people are struggling to get immunization, to get access to anti-viral medications and the like, where the 99.9% is a lot more important.

TNC, the Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 3

 

In chapter 3, Coates discusses his father's experiences as a panther

Next fall when I introduce chapter 3 of The Beautiful Struggle to the young brothers in our program, I’ll ask them to consider the amount of listening and research that Ta-Nehisi Coates had to do in order to produce such a thoughtful and engaging narrative about his father.

He writes about his father in a personal way, but he also situates his dad in the larger context of notable historical moments, including the activism of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. He also writes about how his dad had discovered Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and from Wright, his father “learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain. He bubbled on the edge of Consciousness.”

An entire shadow canon. Writers grabbing pens to break the chain. The edge of Consciousness.

You gotta give it to Coates on his ability to pack some big provocative ideas into such a small amount of space. It’s also wonderful and rare to witness a son writing about the intellectual development of his father in that way.

If you can think of a black man who writes as powerfully about his father as Coates does, please let me know. I’d love to find complementary pieces of literature for what we're seeing in The Beautiful Struggle.

Anyway, what did you think about the biographical and intellectual sketches that Coates draws of his father?

Toward the end of the chapter, Coates turns his attention to that moment when that new black music and its accompanying slang began to come into his life. It’s here at the end of the chapter where Coates describes his intricate processes of investigating the “noise” coming out of New York and how he began to “pull something from the literature.”

I'm curious on how folks are thinking about how Coates writes about the music. Also, what else should we be getting our folks to consider with this chapter?  


Related:
TNC, the Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 2
TNC, the Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 1
Ta-Nehisi Coates the blogger vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates the memoirist

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

 The following links include brief takes on Young’s volume Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels:

Discussion of Poems:
Cinque and Processional

General:

Kevin Young’s Expansive Body of Work
Brief Background on the Amistad Case
The Coverage of Young’s Book
The Design and Structure of Ardency
The Title Page

Ardency is a fascinating and expansive book, which would be difficult for me to adequately discuss in a single blog entry. So, over the next few weeks, I’ll extend my commentary in bits and pieces by discussing individual sections and poems from the book.

For now, it’s worth noting that Kevin Young seems very interested in showing how a book of poetry can also be a history book. In fact, the case can be made that Young is a cultural historian who produces volumes of poetry. Yeah, we can think of him as a poet and cultural historian.

Well, and then, if we say that, we might as well view him as a song writer of sorts, since the longest section of the book is a libretto chanted by Cinqué. Then, the design of the book has you viewing him as a curator. And then...ok, ok, you get my point here.

Anyway, there's more to say about this book.

Stay tuned.

The Coverage of Kevin Young’s Ardency

The coverage of Kevin Young’s newest book Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels is turning out to be quite impressive, especially when we consider how little commentary usually accompanies new volumes of poetry.

The following links constitute reviews and interviews related to Ardency. If you come across pieces I'm missing, please let me know.

On January 18, Publishers Weekly included a short write-up about Young's book.

On January 25, The New York Journal of Books published David Cooper's extensive review of Young's book. Cooper closes by noting that"Ardency is a book that deserves a wider readership than the genres of history and poetry normally enjoy. Its individual poems are also recommended to editors of high school history textbooks seeking ways to make the past come alive."

On Feb. 1, the California Chronicle published an article by Donna Seaman about Ardency, which also includes comments about the book from Young.

On Feb. 4, Studio 360 posted an interview with Young about Ardency, where he reads from one of the poems from the book and discusses various other issues. 

On Feb. 7, The Takeaway posted an interview with Young, where among other things, he discusses the musicality of the poems and the question of when, exactly, Africans became Americans or African Americans.

On Feb. 9, Atlanta's Creative Loafing published an article by Wyatt Williams about Young and Ardency.

In the Feb/March 2011 issue of Bookforum, Craig Morgan Teicher provides a review of Ardency. Teicher notes that this book "moves slower than Young's other book-length sequences, favoring an accumulation of perspectives over narrative momentum. But it's powerful stuff, some of the prolific Young's best, driven by his ventriloquistic skills and sense of loss."

On Feb. 13, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette published a review of Ardency by Elizabeth Hoover.

On Feb. 15, The Paris Review included an interview with Young about Ardency. What drew Young to his subject for the book? He says, "I stumbled on letters the Amistad prisoners wrote from jail. I was struck by their poignancy and how the prisoners spoke in this new language of English. But I was struck by what the letters didn’t say, what was permitted of them to say, and, then, what they did mange to say because of or despite those limits."

In early February, At Length online magazine published a few excerpts from Ardency. 

On Feb. 20, Playback: STL published a review of Ardency by Matthew Treon.  

On Feb. 24, The St. Louis American published an interview Kevin Young about Ardency. 

On March 3, Young noted on his twitter page that he "just heard" that  "ARDENCY is going into 2nd edition!"

On March 7, Young was interviewed about his book on The Leonard Lopate Show.

In March, Levi Rubeck's review of Ardency appeared on Thethe Poetry.

Related:

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

The Title Page of Kevin Young's Ardency

 
The title page for Ardency, presented above, alludes to the title page of A History of the Amistad Captives (1840) by John Warner Barber.

The full title for Barber's book was as follows: A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans.

You can see Barber's title page here.

Like Barber's book, Ardency, too, was "compiled from authentic sources." Young's title page reflects an interest on the part of him and his publisher Knopf to further align this book of poetry with a historical work as well.

There is a small yet notable difference with the titles. Instead of presenting "biographical sketches of each of the surviving Africans," Young's book includes "phrenological studies of several of the surviving Africans." The mention of phrenology alludes to the inclusion of such studies in Barber's book and by others of the Mendi.

The reference to getting into the heads of the figures is also fitting, though, given Young's use of persona poems, where he must speculate and write about what James Covey, Cinqué, and the other figures were thinking.

Related:

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

The Design and Structure of Ardency

Like all of Young’s books, this first edition of Ardency appears in hardcover. The book is approximately 272 pages long. Most volumes of poetry appear only in paperback, and they are typically under 100 pages long.

The front and back of the dust jacket for the book includes sketched profile images of the rebels/former captives from the Amistad. The images are from A History of the Amistad Captives (1840) by John Warner Barber.


The back cover includes an excerpt from a Washington Post Book World appraisal of Young: “Intoxicating . . . Young [places] himself squarely in the African American poetic tradition pioneered by such writers as Langston Hughes.” The placement of the blurb helps to nurture a view of Young as a literary descendant of Hughes.

Beyond the poems, the book includes a few extra illustrations, also from Barber’s book, including a portion of a map of West Africa; a drawing of James Covey, an African-born interpreter for the group; an image of an engraving of “the position as described by Cinqué and his companions, in which they were confined on board the slaver, during their passage from Africa;” an illustration of Cinqué; and a drawing of a “Village in Mendi, with Palm trees, &c.”
Young writes in persona verse throughout the book, adopting the voices of key figures associated with the Amistad and its aftermath. The book is divided into four main sections: “Buzzard,” told from the perspective of Covey; “Correspondence,” letters from the captives to abolitionists who sought to assist them; “Witness,” the book’s largest section, consisting of “a libretto chanted by Cinqué;” and “Afterword,” accounts from people who traveled with the former captives back to Sierra Leone.

Finally, the book includes a section of notes by Young describing several figures associated with the Amistad and case, and a brief discussion of key bibliographical sources that he used. Those sourced included John Wesley Blassingame’s Slave Testimony, William Owens’s Slave Mutiny (later renamed Black Mutiny), Mary Cable’s Black Odyssey, Muriel Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs: American Genius, and Barber’s A History of the Amistad Captives. Young notes that Rukeyser’s book was “the very one that influenced Robert Hayden’s classic poem ‘Middle Passage.’”

All in all, the dust jacket, illustrations, notes, title page, and book keeping list in Ardency accent and the mood of the enclosed poems as documents of history.

Related:

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

Kevin Young’s Expansive Body of Work

Kevin Young’s Ardency is a noteworthy addition to an already expansive and outstanding body of work.

Young’s volumes of poetry include Most Way Home: Poems (1995), To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor (2001) Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), Black Maria: Poems (2005), For the Confederate Dead (2007), and Dear Darkness: Poems (2008). He edited Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), Blues Poems (2003), John Berryman: Select Poems (2004), Jazz Poems (2006), and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (2010).

You want to talk about poets as historical researchers, then you certainly have to make Young a major part of the conversation. He’s published several poems over the years that exude a poet’s attention to historical records. Young has also frequently written poems that incorporate the sensibilities of music, most notably the blues.

In Ardency, he addresses historical events related to one of the most well-known slave revolt to take place aboard a ship, and he writes in the personas of James Covey, Cinqué, and others associated the rebellion and aftermath.

Young is, as you’ll see in various bylines, the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta. But what’s notable about that byline for our purposes is the level of curatorial work exhibited in the design and structure of Ardency.

Related:

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

Brief Background on the Amistad case

In 1839, a group of enslaved people aboard La Amistad, which was leaving from Cuba, led a revolt against their captors, demanding that they be returned to their homeland West Africa. The ship’s navigator said north instead, and the ship and travelers were eventually stopped by a U.S. vessel in New York. The group of “rebels” were sent to New Haven, Connecticut, to await legal decisions on who, exactly, the Africans belonged to and what their fate would be.

Sengbe Pieh, later known as Joseph Cinqué was considered the leader of the group and has become the more known representative. The Africans were primarily Mendi, an ethnic group from Sierra Leone.

The case ended up reaching the US Supreme Court, becoming known as United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, which ordered that the Mendi should be freed and returned to West Africa in 1842.

Related:

Multi-threaded Comments on Kevin Young’s Ardency

‘African Origins,’ ‘Space Age Aspirations,’ and the National Black Museum

Imagine a museum that features H. Tubman and H. Lacks.

On January 22, I read this article “The Thorny Path to a National Black Museum” by Kate Taylor about the long road to establishing the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The article concentrates on Lonnie G. Bunch III, the director, and his efforts to make sure the museum has support and holdings by the time it opens in a $500 million building in 2015 on the National Mall.

Among other things, the article mentions that Bunch and his staff are “grappling with fundamental questions about the museum’s soul and message.” In particular, they are wondering what “story” the museum will tell.

What story will it tell? As part of the Smithsonian, the museum bears the burden of being the “official” — that is, the government’s — version of black history, but it will also carry the hopes and aspirations of African-Americans. Will its tale be primarily one of pain, focused on America’s history of slavery and racial oppression, and memorializing black suffering? Or will it emphasize the uplifting part of the story, highlighting the richness of African-American culture, celebrating the bravery of civil rights heroes and documenting black “firsts” in fields like music, art, science and sports? Will the story end with the country’s having overcome its shameful history and approaching a state of racial harmony and equality? Or will the museum argue that the legacy of racism is still dominant — and, if so, how will it make that case?

Later, it is revealed that Bunch plans to divide the museum into thirds. “One third will be devoted to historical galleries, anchored by a slavery exhibit. Another will be devoted to culture, dominated by music, with smaller sections given to visual arts and sports. The last third will be devoted to the theme of community.”

I’ve been reading the editorial responses and comments about the article from readers, and among other things, I’ve become interested in how histories of science, technology, and speculative fiction might be incorporated into the museum.

One reader, Arnold Henderson, wrote that “One hopes that the museum planners will also take this opportunity to display African-American contributions to literature, medicine, science and engineering. These topics receive comparatively little attention but are also critical components of our society and culture.”

Former Congressman Major Owens wrote in, and though his whole letter is good food for thought, my afrofuturist leanings had me especially drawn to his quick critique of the building’s current design and his proposed solution: “The African kingdom design motif is interesting, but too traditional and classical. Why not a museum that mixes African origins with space age aspirations?”

Mixing African origins with space age aspirations! Wow!

Now Owens was referring to the design of the building, but wouldn’t it be something to take that kind of imperative forward with an approach to the museum's content and displays? The African origins part will certainly be done, but what about the space age aspirations?

What would that look like?

I’m sure there will be displays celebrating George Washington Carver and his work with the peanut. Important. Yes. But what about presenting a display concerning the Tuskegee Experiment at the museum? The troubling histories of race and eugenics? On a different and up side, what about the hair care products created by black women?  

Among other issues, there will certainly need to be something about the increasingly important role of DNA searches, which on the one hand helped police locate and arrest the Grim Sleeper and on the other hand has helped exonerate hundreds of wrongly convicted people, many of whom were black men.

Speaking of which, on sociallifeofdna, Alondra Nelson recently retweeted the Innocence Project’s Fact of the Day: “The 266 U.S. DNA exonerees served a combined 3,471 yrs in prison for crimes they didn't commit.”

Here’s hoping that the social and historical lives of DNA have a place at the National Black Museum.

I’m also hoping the director, staff, and advisory board for the museum give serious consideration to finding some hip, engaging ways to present speculative histories. You know, something that links the folklore tales of enslaved people to the sci-fi musings of Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and André 3000.

So yeah, a museum that takes black history and science seriously would mean visitors would leave the space thinking about Harriet Tubman and Henrietta Lacks

TNC, the Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 2

We're moving forward with chapter 2 of The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates (TNC). I'm interested in reading what folks have to think.

Among other things, Coates mentions the troubles of his city: "When crack it Baltimore, civilization fell" (29). And there was the ever-present violence. The young Coates listens as his dad explains how things were rough when he was younger but not nearly as dangerous as things were for a younger generation of black men. "I didn't fully get it then," writes Coates, "but this was an inglorious turn. The word was filled with great causes--Mandela, Nicaragua, and the battle against Reagan. But we died for sneakers stitched by serfs, coats that gave props to teams we didn't own, hats embroidered with the names of Confederate states. I could feel the falling, all around" (30).

We'll have to be sure to point out to the young brothers next year how much research Coates put into writing about his own life.

For instance, his observation that "I didn't fully get it then" suggests that he did "get it" later. When? How? There's suggestions here and there throughout the book that he gained knowledge later in life that allowed him to look back on his childhood and put things in context in illuminating ways.

I've been fascinated throughout that all the struggles, Coates had a particular edge, namely "conscious" parents.

Thus, along with his siblings "we were pushed through science camp, music lessons. Thick books were hurled at us from across the room" (30). Although his older brother, Big Bill, "saw himself strictly in the mode of athletes and rappers, and put no value on his own intellect and bookish wits," their father "struggles to make Bill see what he covered with a street pose, what he didn't even know was there."

Anyway, so just a couple of things. What else are people thinking about chapter 2 of the book? What's something we might want to note for the reading group who'll cover the book in the fall?

Related:
T. Coates's Beautiful Struggle, Chp. 1
Ta-Nehisi Coates the blogger vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates the memoirist

The Early Buzz on Colson Whitehead's Newest Novel

I'm in the thinking phases of some short entries here about buzz or publicity concerning books by black writers. I was thinking about the pre-publication buzz associated with novels by Colson Whitehead and the lack of buzz with some poets I follow.

I have to do more thinking before I can write out what I'm trying to say. In the mean time, here's something on the subject that just caught my attention.

Earlier today, maybe around noon or so, Whitehead announced the October release of his newest novel on his twitter page: "Ok: My new book is called Zone One & it comes out 10/18. It concerns the rehabilitation of NYC after the apocalypse."

Several folks started retweeting the news and within the hour, the GalleyCat blog ("The First Word on the Book Publishing Industry") posted a short entry "Colson Whitehead Unveils New Novel on Twitter" by Jason Boog:

Doubleday will publish Colson Whitehead‘s new novel on October 18th. Entitled Zone One, the book looks at a post-apocalyptic New York City.

The author of Sag Harbor and The Intuitionist tweeted the news today: “Ok: My new book is called Zone One & it comes out 10/18. It concerns the rehabilitation of NYC after the apocalypse.” The news has already earned a number of responses and retweets.

Amazon already has a pre-order page for the book (pictured, click to enlarge). Currently, the hardcover price is set for $25.95 and the Kindle edition price is set for $14.27.

A few hours after his initial tweet, Whitehead sent another message: "Thanks for the well wishes! If the book were a mash-up, it'd be Leonard Cohen's 'The Future' + Wire's 'Reuters' + Joy Division's 'Decades.'"

I'll try to keep an eye on how the publicity for the novel develops over the next several months.

UPDATE (Feb. 2): Today, in an entry on their site, bookforum mentioned the upcoming Whitehead book and closed with the following: "Whitehead is the author of, among other things, a nonfiction book about the city (Colossus of New York), a satire about branding (Apex Hides the Hurt), and the most hilarious Twitter feed we know of. Is it too much to hope that this postapocalyptic novel is a comedy?"


That question might suggest a developing phenomenon concerning how an author's twitter persona might effect audiences' expectations of that writer's literary work. Whitehead may have anticipated that affect on expectations when he joked a while back about someone's preference for "Twitter Colson" over "Writer-Guy Colson."

The March 2011 issue of Vogue magazine includes a photo spread featuring "a bohemian cast of artists and models." The artists include Savion Glover, Antonio Douthit, John Legend, Anthony Mackie, and Colson Whithead. The caption for the novelist is titled "Colson Whitead Man of His Word" and reads "The latest novel from the author--Zone One, due out this fall--is set in a post-apocalyptic New York. 'It's a lot like now. Long lines, can't get a cab. Wait, I have to write that down--I have ten pages left!' (560).   

Related:
What Will Black Writing Be?

Ta-Nehisi Coates the blogger vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates the memoirist

This coming September, if all goes well (which in this instance means if I can get the funding together), we’ll provide the new crop of 25 or so first-year black male college students I work with free copies of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle (2008). If things go really well, I’ll see to it that any student at SIUE who requests to read along with us gets the book free of charge as well.

Beyond the fact that I regularly teach African American literature, I expect to be especially prepared to introduce the fellas in our program to The Beautiful Struggle, because I have a team of black studies folks helping me think through approaches to sharing Coates’s book with the incoming group of collegiate black men. (Check out Symmetry’s comments, for instance, concerning just the first chapter of the book).

Over the years, our program has developed a fairly solid summer reading activity focusing on Frederick Douglass’s narrative for incoming students. I’ll see how long it takes the participants from the summer reading group who will read The Beautiful Struggle to figure out that both Douglass and Coates are from Maryland, among other interesting links that they share.

I also know the 18-year-old black men whom I work with well enough to know that they’ll love the fact that Coates uses curse words in his book. For the first time ever, I’ll have dudes begging to be the one to read certain passages aloud.

So I’m optimistic about how things will go exposing the guys to The Beautiful Struggle and Coates, the memoirist.

The bigger challenge that I foresee, though, relates to how I might go about introducing the young brothers as well as the students in my African American literature courses to Ta-Nehisi Coates, the blogger.

Interestingly, I’ve spent far more time reading and thinking about Coates’s blog entries than I have his memoir. I was there close to the beginning over two and a half years ago when Coates moved from here to here, that is, a little-known personal blog site to the more widely known venue of The Atlantic.