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BRIEF TOUR ACROSS AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Mireia Sentís
During this talk I will attempt to do a tour across Afro-American literature. This tour will be more personal than academic as my relation with this culture is also more vital than academic. As a background I will use pictures from a photo series called Black Suite, exhibited at the Tribes gallery in New York in April 1999. The project consisted in papering the room walls with six hundred photos 20 x 30 centimetres, representing a fragmentary tour across my Afro-American library. Let's say it's the plastic equivalent of an intellectual project I finished a year before -when En el pico del águila was published. This is an book introducing the reader to Afro-American culture through conversations with sixteen different artists and intellectuals. The photos represent a summary of their history, which started in 1616 when a Dutch ship arrived in Virginia with the first twenty Africans. The photographic sequence is all mixed up just as memories usually are. First I'll show the editing and later a few pictures separately. I think there are about a hundred and fifty.
Something characteristic in Afro-American history is the huge number of photographic documents existing. The first text was written in 1789 and one of the first intellectual figures, Sojourner Truth, was photographed around 1860. Thus Afro-American literary history can almost be visually followed from the beginning - which turns out to be very exciting.
Another characteristic of this culture is the peculiar origin of its literary tradition, born out of a political necessity. In some northern states slavery had been abolished by 1800, and in others later - in New York it was legal until 1827. It took more than sixty years and a civil war for abolition to reach the South. During these years an extradition law existed: any slaves escaping towards the North in search of freedom had to be brought back to their masters. This happened quite often, but there was also an active abolitionist movement whose members used to employ these fugitives and teach them how to read and write. Both terrified and fascinated by the stories told by the Southerners, the abolitionists thought their stories could become powerful tools. Public opinion at the time was quite unenthusiastic about the matter and they believed they could convince everybody of how outrageous the so-called Peculiar Institution was. The abolitionists decided to publish these witnesses with a preface written by an Anglo-American person who took responsibility for the veracity of the text. This was how The Slaves Narratives were born. It was an autobiographic genre used both as a political argument and a declaration of principles. At the same time in Europe the Romantic era had started, the interest in subjectivity being one of the main features of the movement.
Freedom and writing are remarkably linked in the Afro-American community. In fact, the slaves who learnt how to read and write were the first to look for freedom, and due to this alphabetisation attempts were severely punished -sometimes with a death sentence- in the South. However, slaves arriving in the North, were keen on continuing their hard and often basic alphabetisation. Out of six thousand fugitives who got to the North, it is estimated that around a hundred of them managed to write their history before the end of the civil war. Some others told their history orally; like Sojourner Truth, this determined woman who crossed the country not only to talk about abolition but also about a jail reform, improvements in work conditions, etc). Finally other fugitives' witnesses were given in interviews, remarkably collected by the Federal Writers Project between 1920 and 1930. We can see then that this first Afro-American genre -autobiographies- is strongly related to the oral form; it's true that spoken language was the only way they were allowed to express themselves, but it's also true that it's their own cultural feature and that it comes straight from Africa.
Although new manuscripts are discovered from time to time and that consequently changes some details, it is agreed that the first biography was written in 1789 by Gustavus Vassa. He was also called Olaudah Equiano -ex-slaves often changed names, either because they were given different names by several masters, or because they hid their identities not to be caught and extradited. This first story was published in England, as many other slaves' biographies and other artistic or literary productions; for instance we have the famous drawings by Audubon (Birds of America) or Phillis Wheatly poems… The most well known of these early stories are Harriet Jacobs' -also called Linda Brent- and Mary Prince's. These autobiographies have formal elements in common: a description of the process towards freedom -always requiring careful organisation; an account of psychological and physical humiliations -sexual abuse, family separations, descriptions dangers they came across when travelling north; hard survival conditions when arriving in pseudo-free lands… After these first stories written by "anonymous" people, others came up; they were written by people who did not only manage to have a place in a free world but also stood out and fought openly for abolition. Among them we find Frederic Douglass, whose autobiography was published in 1845 and reached an unexpected spreading, William Wells Brown or Josiah Henson. Douglass was an extraordinary speaker who became Abraham Lincoln's adviser and he also worked as a journalist, who founded The North Star -an influential newspaper. William Wells Brown became a writer and a historian. Josiah Henson worked as a preacher and an educator, hugely active with the Underground Railroad, the wide net -a real secret chain- that organised the flight towards the North. Henson inspired Harriet Beecher Stove, the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin who used him as a role model for her novel's main character.
Autobiographies appearing after this first period became more private; they stopped being the key for a chance for the anti-slavery movement. However for Afro-Americans problems were not solved with formal abolition: they still needed their people's witness. They had to stay hopeful and they had to comprehend the details of a hostile society. Brooker T. Washington was an eminent educator who founded the Tuskegee institute -the first black trade school. In 1901 he wrote an autobiography that became very popular; Up from Slavery wanted to prove the spirit of self-sacrifice and the eagerness to be integrated among black people; likewise it warned about how much there was still to be done. This piece of work closed the period of slave narrative, but not the autobiographic genre. If we bear in mind the work done by Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Langston Hughes, Billy Holliday, Charles Mingus, or biographic writing such as Jubelee, by Margaret Walker -the great novel about the civil war, Black Boy by Richard Wright, or Beloved, by Toni Morrison, we can understand that the role played by autobiographies in Afro-American literature is, still nowadays, predominant.
The next great period to be considered in Afro-American literature is the Harlem Renaissance. It shares time with the Great Migration; a huge amount of black peasants travelled from the rural South to industrial areas up North in search for work. Between 1923 and 1929 the Great Migration reaches its most agitated period. Cities with the highest density of Afro-American population were Detroit, Chicago and New York. The three became big capitals of Afro-American music: jazz; however it's in New York where the literary movement also develops. The most relevant intellectual figure at that time was W. E. B. Du Bois, an economist and a historian who came from Harvard -he was the first black man to graduate from this university and also a professor in Santayana. He was also an essayist, novelist, political activist and the NAACP director, an influential association from which the leaders of the Civil Rights fight would eventually appear.
In order to understand the Harlem Renaissance, the Afro-American situation after the First World War has to be taken into account. In 1917, the U.S. entered the war with black soldiers on their side, partly thanks to Du Bois, who had been encouraging his people to prove that they felt integrated in the country. He was sure that after the war black people would be finally accepted as equal citizens. Reality turned out not to be the same. These soldiers, sent out to segregated battalions, had a tough ride back home. Jobs were invariably taken by white men and foreign immigration increased again after the war. Du Bois therefore changed his strategy: if the blacks did not achieve integration through politics or economics they would get it through cultural contribution; the artistic means of the Afro-American community would develop civil rights and let tolerance make its way through. By that time Marcus Garvey was gaining popularity with an extremely different political proposal: he was calling to forget integration and supported the idea of going back to Africa, where Afro-Americans would create a separate nation. Between both options, institutions declared themselves closer to Du Bois' view. However tension between separatists and integrationists has always been one of the main driving forces in Afro-American thought.
The period called Harlem Renaissance or The New Negro Movement -conceived and directed by black people themselves, was initially sponsored by white private enterprises or institutions. Associated with editing houses, newspapers and new pro-civil rights organisations, an influential group of personalities who shared a common belief gathered together: each intellectual victory would become a weapon against old race stereotypes. In 1921 the poet Langston Hughes published The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, which was considered the Renaissance Manifesto. For almost fifteen years it represented a meeting point for Afro-Americans of all origins who trusted the idea that things could only get better. It brought up such positive energy that the word Harlem got to mean not only a geographical point but also a state of mind and a symbol for hope for the black America.
For the first time in history white America understood that it was profitable to include black creativity to its image. Also for the first time ever both communities had something in common: they were both committed to the search for a national identity. To Europeans, America was seen as a land of foreigners, and Afro-Americans had the same feeling within their own borders. The root search carried out by a whole continent made something obvious; something that Afro-Americans had already discovered through their own music: black culture added the differential element with regard to European heritage. In American popular culture, the twenties are known as the era of jazz. And jazz was the Harlem Renaissance soundtrack. Painters, sculptors, writers and thinkers listened to jazz in night clubs, which started to spread over the city after the dry law enactment in 1919. It's the time of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters...
Neither African nor European, the mixture that gave rise to jazz could only happen in the United States. James Weldon Johnson, one of the main Renaissance promoters, said: "Our music not only expresses the soul of our race but the soul of the whole America." He composed Lift Every Voice and Sing, which would be later adopted as the Afro-American anthem. He also wrote a memorable autobiography anonymously published: The autobiography of an Ex-colored man (1912), in which he talks about a social phenomenon widely treated at the time: the passing, black people passing themselves off as whites. The list of writers from this period is very long; writers who were also musicians or sociologists. Here I'm going to name a few: Zora Neale Hurston is still very influential on Afro-women writers nowadays -Alice Walker, for instance. She travelled South in order to pick up the black way of speaking. Her friend Langston Hughes, poet, essayist and playwright, translated Lorca and Nicolás Guillén, and was a correspondent in Spain during the civil war. Dorothy West recreated his writing on the life of wealthy black people from the East Coast. Gwendolyn Benett was also a painter. Richard Bruce Nugent wrote the first gay Afro novel and was also an illustrator. Walter White edited many other writers' work and published valuable documents on racism thanks to his white appearance. The radical Claude McKay from Jamaica, Alain Locke, philosopher, Jean Toomer, who wrote what might be the most important novel at the time: Cane. We also have the Russian mystic Gurdjiejj, and Wallace Thurman, a literary critic who dared to talk about delicate subjects such as abortion or the troublesome relationship between black Americans and black Caribbean in The Blacker The Berry. He also wrote about the Renaissance itself -Infants of the Spring. Nella Larsen dealt wisely with the passing. Rudolph Fisher wrote The walls of Jericho..The black folklore theorist was Sterling Brown. Arna Bontemps was a careful bookseller who wrote about Haiti, slave uprisings, life in southern villages... Finally I would like to mention three more characters: the mysterious Countee Cullen, who won innumerable prizes; the caustic George Skyler, who satirised everybody in Black No More; and Carl Van Vechten, who was a friend of Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein. He was also a photographer -almost all the Renaissance members were portrayed by him- and he was the only white who was committed to the movement right until the end.
Some of these writers founded and directed several publications, therefore giving others a chance to be published. The Crisis, opportunity and The Messenger were the ones that lasted longer. Negro World was Garvey's separatist instrument. Amsterdam News still exists nowadays and Fire!! was a powerful magazine founded by Richard Bruce Nugent that did not last long. There were also Age, Tattler, Dunbar News, Harlem Review, Bronzeman… The perservering Renaissance made cultural ties with Europe, specifically with Paris -where a movement called La négritude existed, led by Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire- and London -from where Nancy Cunard would move to Harlem and publish Negro, a kind of calendar in which several authors from the Renaissance participated.
This fruitful creativity lasted until the 1929 stock market crash; that meant the beginning of the end for the Renaissance and also for the assimilation dream. Franklin Roosevelt, whose Afro-American had supported him to the extent that they massively abandoned Abraham Lincoln's party, failed to keep his promises. In 1934, a disappointed Du Bois declared that separation and self-administration might be the only way to physical and moral survival; consequently, he resigned his nationality and went into exile in Ghana.
The next movement would be the civil rights one. The Civil Rights Movement, deep rooted in resistance and a tradition of self-expression, started to take place after the Second World War; it reached its best in the sixties and culminated in Black Power's cultural victories and political tragedies. The bus boycott that occurred in Montgomery City, Alabama, in 1955, became an internationally known episode and made Luther King the visible leader of the movement. However the fight was coming from long before. For instance in 1941, Philip Randolph got the reversal for racial discrimination in weapon factories; in 1942 CORE was created, a congress for racial equality and non-violent resistance, that took inspiration from Ghandi. CORE began the famous sit-ins in restaurants and coffee shops in Washington, which were carried out by students from the black Howard University. The Afro sociologist Gunnard Myrdal wrote An American Dilema, which would become a classic, in which he declared that the problem of the American nation was placed in the distance existing between the rhetoric of democracy and the reality of racism.
That was the time when preachers became political activists or rather the time when they had names and surnames. Black churches were always a meeting point where people not only prayed -as the whites believed- but where all sorts of information was also transmitted. When the slave trading got started, priests and doctors were not interesting as trade goods, since only the youngest and strongest were a target: they were a long term investment that guaranteed the master high productivity and reproduction. When the old tribal scheme disappeared, a new social form emerged from their memories. The new doctors, named conjurers or necromancers, inherited some of the parts played by priests and became important within the community. They were asked about health matters but also about new moral and spiritual dilemmas, which came out of their new character.
Most of the Afro-American political leaders came from the clergy; that is to say the people who displaced the necromancers from their status of community leaders. Churches became forums of political debate as they were the only space where black people met with themselves. From the pulpit, preachers talked as much about religion as about politics. Malcolm X, Luther King, Jesse Jackson and even Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslims leader, are good examples of this. Malcolm X and Luther King wrote essays on political and moral thought that were widely read at the time. Coming from opposite ideas at the beginning, their thoughts ended up merging when, not by chance, they were both assassinated. They were both eminent preachers. Luther King was even flattered by whites. When he realised his methods were not taking him where expected, he went through his ideas again and started to wonder about joining Malcolm X, once he had left the Muslims aside. If they had not died three years apart they would have gathered such strength that they would have dragged -no doubt- practically the whole black population with them. There is a saying from an African tribe called Bambara (Senegal, Mali) that says that the ones who always tell the truth are the ones who walk around wearing their own shroud.
Violent outbreaks and prevailing confusion in the air gave place to powerful novels. The finest is undoubtedly The invisible man by Ralph Ellison. It deals with the difficult experience of a black man in search for his identity in a country plunged into disorder. The title is about the invisibility of a whole ethnic group in relation to the mainstream. Ellison won the National Book Award in 1952 and guaranteed himself a place among the most eminent American writers. The Invisible man marked a whole generation. Other remarkable writers from that time were Ann Petry (In Darkness and Confusion) , Lorraine Hansburry (A Raisin in the Sun) and James Baldwin; his influential essays compiled in The Fire Next Time, Nothing Personal and No Name in the Street made him one of the most singular voices in American literature. To me Baldwin is a very bad novelist but an extraordinary essayist. We have to bear in mind he is one more character coming out of the church who was a preacher back in his youth. Another writer from this period was Gwendolyn Brooks. She can be seen as the example for a change in direction taken by many intellectuals from that time onwards. Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1950. She became aware, once famous, of how important the arguments presented by the new civil leaders were and she joined the incipient Black Arts movement. And this would be the next intellectual stream.
The right to vote was finally obtained by Afro-Americans without having to pass previously an exam on history, reading and writing -which had been especially designed for them. Real integration in schools was also happening. That was around the mid-sixties and the Civil Rights Movement kept going. The popular motto "We shall overcome", even pronounced by President Lyndon Johnson, was turning into "We shall overrun" in young rebel mouths. Stokely Carmichael, from the same organisation as Luther King's, took over as the new generation leader. "Freedom Now!" became under his leadership, in 1966, " Black Power!", with an obvious separatist connotation. Carmichael wrote that that motto meant that "all those who are black should gather, get organised and fight for freedom". Motto's and mere statements were becoming a real movement.
The most famous Black Power icons were the Black Panthers, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. Ideologically they got inspiration from Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, and also took Mao Tse-Tung as a reference. This party was ambiguous for its goals and contradictory in its political consequences. However they had liberating effects in their cultural implication. It might be helpful to be reminded here that this period of protest in the United States did not come from the black side only. A strong feminist movement, total opposition to the Vietnam War and a powerful alternative culture were coming forth.
The cultural side of Black Power became the Black Arts Movement. Its intellectual head and organiser, was the poet LeRoi Jones; who by following the slogans from that moment, got rid of his "slave name" and renamed himself, in 1967, Amiri Baraka. The Black Arts Movement refused the idea that integration would lead to the assimilation of rules and values coming from the establishment. They condemned the reaching of equality by denying their roots. That's how literature and poetry based on the most Afro-American native creation emerged: jazz. Amiri Baraka has written the two most important books on jazz critics: Blues People and Black Music. Likewise he's been a distinguished anthologist (Black Fire and Black Voices); he has written theatre plays that have a place in a classic repertoire such as Dutchman or The Dead Lecturer. He has written short stories, essays, and a brave and exciting autobiography. There is of course his poetry, starting from Preface to twenty volume Suicide Note (1961), to Somebody Blew Up America. This last one, by the way, was written right after the Twin Towers collapsed, which has got him into serious trouble, something he is quite familiar with... Still nowadays he's an awkward element for the authorities -something essential for the Black Arts Movement aesthetics is socio-political commitment-; at the same time he's the driving force behind the most contemporary poetry: Spoken Word.
The Black Arts Movement started in Harlem, but the Umbra group, one of the most active factions, was born in Lower East Side, with Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon, Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent and David Henderson. They were all poets who opened doors to the new comers and demanded freedom for the Congolese Lumumba; art and politics, according to the movement's beliefs. Another subgroup was the Harlem Writers Guild, where the now celebrated Maya Angelou comes from. The movement took over cities like Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco. Part of this movement were Nikki Giovanni, Ed Bullins, Sonia Sánchez, Larry Neal, Ntozake Shange... Also Haki Madhubuti, who directs a school in Chicago where -as he says- students are taught what the system forgets to teach them, and finally Maulana Karenga, the Kwanzaa initiator. The Watts poets faction from this neighbourhood in Los Angeles was another prominent group within the movement. They put together names such as Ojenke, Quincy Troupe, Eric Priestley, Jayne Cortez, Curtis Lyle, Kamau Daaood...
Simultaneously to the Black Arts Movement, Afro-centrism grows; this trend spread along the first half of the eighties and nowadays finds wide recognition in university circles. The Afro-centric perspective has changed the nature of Afro-American studies and also the way to face American sociology as a whole. And that is such because this perspective leads you not to consider the Anglo-Saxon tradition as the centre of the American culture but to take into account all the different origins feeding this tradition. This Afro-centric theory is better and extensively explained in Kete Asante's trilogy, published between 1987 and 1990. As for popular culture Afro-centrism has established the Kwanzaa celebration ("first fruits"), a pan-African tradition that has taken root among Afro-Americans. It's celebrated on Christmas time during seven days, each day proposing a subject to meditate on.
Besides defending political participation, the Black Arts Movement has been extremely innovative in its language. They added music and performance in their poetry readings -which give us a hint about the Rap and Spoken Word origins. They bravely mixed up Standard English with Black English. Those poets and musicians who use Spanglish owe them part of their success, since Black English gave the OK to languages resulting of an ethnic mixture - and so, examples of what live languages are. Black English -recently renamed as Ebonics, probably to give it a more real identity-had been cautiously being used since the Harlem Renaissance. Authors such as Williams Wells Brown or Sterling Brown, or poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar or Charles Chesnutts had used Black English before the end of the century. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer were the first ones to use it more assertively, as they based their work on their own linguistic studies. In 1940 Richard Wright wrote an important piece of work for American literature -Native Son- using Black English through the main character's mouth. And that boy was the spitting image of what the young people would not long away be like in ghettos.
In 1979 James Baldwin wrote an essay titled "If Black English isn't a language, then tell me, what is?". However he did not write it in Ebonics, and he never diffused it. It was June Jordan, in 1971, in His Own Where, who would use it exclusively for the first time. This poet and magnificent essayist, who has been dead for just over a year now, was a professor at the University of Berkeley. Together with her students she elaborated a grammar from what she called the native Afro-American language. She also claimed not to disqualify students who did not speak Standard English, since consequently that takes them down to the lowest level in the educational system. Deep down, her theory is close to the one defended by those who support bilingual education Spanish-English: if you understand and give value to what you say, you have the basis to understand any other languages. In 1982 the most well known novel was published: The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sánchez in her We a BaddDDD People, and needless to say Toni Morrison had used Black English before. This linguistic richness, sometimes very creative and often funny, inevitably melts away when translating. Nowadays Black English is found anywhere it's natural for to be used: in novels, theatre - one of the most well known writers and directors at the moment, the Pulitzer Prize August Wilson, is the most relevant example- and cinema. Some actors not only speak Black English, but also in particular slangs from different towns or generations. Sometimes subtitles have been used. The first 100 % Black English film was Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, by Melvin Van Peebles, in 1971. Needless to say that in Rap music, Black English is almost the only language used.
From the Black Arts Movement, Afro-American writers know that the American society is not free enough from racial prejudice to attempt to deal with black culture in real terms. When in 1976 Alex Haley searched for his ancestors and wrote Roots, the book sparked off general interest among the Afro population in trying their hardest to reconstruct their lineage. Between the sixties and seventies a new group of writers appeared. Their writing reproduced the vast mixture existing in a country where all sort of origins came together. They created Multiculturalism; far from any dogmatisms and interested in different sources, they are a radically individualistic generation who dare attacking anything they find feasible to be attacked, even their own culture.
The most distinguished example of Multiculturalism is Ishmael Reed. He created the term neohudú. Hudú is the English version for vudú, a Gallicism for the religion name Yoruba. It's in New Orleans where this term was used for the first time. According to Reed -and other writers such as Steve Cannon, Larry Neal, Al Young or Ahmos Zu-Bolton- this term represents, especially with the prefix "neo", the iconoclast mixtures existing in the United States. Hybridism is taken as style, inspiration, reflection of reality. The result is an extremely complex writing, both for cultural references as for stylistic genres. Groove, Bang and Jive Around (1969), by Steve Cannon, is one of its representative pieces; however, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), by Ishmael Reed, would sum up this trend, widely followed by a new group of young, inhibited and irreverent writers such as Darius James or Paul Beatty.
I would like to finish by talking about a very new genre in the Black American community: the black black novel, the noir noir as some say using French; black novels are also called hard-boiled and recently pulp fiction -which name was given to cheap publications before. They are even called African American Street Novels. From the first Chester Himes publication, in 1945, the genre became extremely popular among the non-specialists. Chester Himes managed to reach everybody's imagination; and it was not because he put forward a mystery, but because he wrote about the atmosphere around him, his own experience, his own history, in which many men from tough areas could see themselves. Himes started to write it in prison so he knew what he was talking about just as his readers did. We should not forget that thirty per cent of black men between twenty and twenty-nine years old are or have been in prison. Himes, basically because he went into exile in 1952, is internationally known. We cannot say the same for these two very popular writers who saved a small editing house in California: the Holloway House. Today they are specialised in black pulp fiction, and their huge distribution is done by non-conventional means: groceries, stalls, barber shops, local libraries, jails... They remain out of the advertisement circuit and literary critics. One of these two writers is Iceberg Slim. Like Himes, he started to write in jail and described his own experience in a world full of drugs and prostitution. The second writer is Donald Goines, who has a similar curriculum. However, he could never overcome his drug addiction. Iceberg Slim died in 1992, when he was 84, and he left behind ten novels, translated into French and German, that are still widely read, not only in prisons but also in university campus. He gave his negative opinion on the American legal system and presented his political ideas without constraint He gained his reputation right from the first novel from 1967: Pimp. Donald Goines started to write after having read Iceberg Slim and was killed in 1972, when he was 37. He wrote his sixteen novels in five years and he has found enthusiastic recognition among the hip-hop public.
I finish with black novels since it's a literary branch directly connected with autobiographies; and to me the autobiography is the thread of Afro-American literature thread. I'm interested in all sorts of black novels. I'm a devoted fan of the witty Walter Mosley; I sporadically read Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley -her detective woman is from New Jersey, and Eleanor Taylor Bland... I'm intending to go for Gary Phillips and Robert Pharr. I have just read the first mystery novel by the well-read law professor at the University of Yale, Stephen Carter… However Himes, Slim and Goines got me, just as snakes are, hypnotised.
I'm aware of hundreds of details that could have been added; however conferences have a time limit and that is why I called this one a BRIEF TOUR ACROSS AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE.
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