From The Black Interior

Meditations on “Mecca”: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet
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  From Poets on Poetry

The Genius of Romare Bearden
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Black Alive and Looking Straight at You: The Legacy of June Jordan
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  From On ‘Amistad’ — Download Printable Version

From The Black Interior
 

 

Meditations on “Mecca”:
Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet

In the spring of 1967, Gwendolyn Brooks attended the second Fisk University Black Writer’s Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The times were famously tumultuous: the Tet offensive and the U.S. response had escalated the Vietnam War; the Watts riots ravaged Los Angeles; the worst race riots in U.S. history left 43 dead in Detroit. The Black Panther Party had been founded and Amiri Baraka and others had begun the Black Arts Movement. Just one year later, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would be assassinated, and Medgar Evers and Malcolm X had already been shot down. At the first Fisk Black Writer’s Conference in 1966, black writers defining the aims for a new black awareness clashed with Brooks’s contemporary, the poet Robert Hayden(1). Those writers wanted work that “promote[d] an aesthetic that furthered the cause of black revolution(2);” it is hard to imagine not needing to respond to the country’s ambient urgency. Hayden insisted that, when it came to his writing, he was a poet first and black, second. In 1978, he re-stated his view:

To put it succinctly, I feel that Afro-American poets ought to be looked at as poets first, if that’s what they truly are. And as one of them I dare to hope that if my work means anything, if it’s any good at all, it’s going to have a human impact, not a narrowly racial or ethnic or political and overspecialized impact(3).

The battle for the eloquent words of black writers to further the cause for black dignity and civil rights was, once again, on.

Brooks was at this point already a highly acclaimed author, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen in 1949 and published five books of poems and a novel. She was fifty years old. But despite her stature, the 1967 Fisk conference signaled her grand rebirth of consciousness. In her autobiography, Report from Part One, Brooks wrote:

I — who have “gone the gamut” from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun — am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.

I have hopes for myself (4).

Those moving words “I have hopes for myself” show us a writer who is open to the urgent cries of younger writers in trying times. But this moment also offers an opportunity to consider how public or communal pressures on a writer can dramatically affect the choices he or she makes in a career and in the writing itself. The 1968 volume In the Mecca would be Brooks’s last book with the mainstream publishers Harper and Row. After this, she would publish all of her books with black houses, and her poetic voice would be more consciously calibrated to an audience that would presumably understand her on street corners and in taverns as well as in universities and recital halls.

As with so many young readers, I first encountered Gwendolyn Brooks’s work when I was a child — I found “We Real Cool” in an anthology. Then as now, the poem’s tautness and economy thrilled and amazed me, along with the repetitions and sense of sound. As an older reader with aspirations to write poetry herself, it was the Brooks of The Bean Eaters and A Street in Bronzeville who took my breath away: her specialized vocabulary, the magic imbued in kitchenettes, cabbage and beans; the strange diction that could belong to no one else; the utter economy and tensile strength of each line; the words I didn’t know like “thaumaturgic” juxtaposed remarkably in the same stanza with “black and boisterous” and “bastard roses” in the very same poem where she rhymes “crescendo-comes” with “hecatombs,” “banshee. Gets” and “vinaigrettes,” “ribbonize” and “terrifies,” “tra la la” and “cinema(5).” If such wild and unexpected curiosities were possible in her language, then anything might be possible for me. No seaweedy, carbuncled constructions I might pull from the wrack and ruin of my imagination would be off-limits in poems. No music was too strange for poetry in the path Miss Brooks had cleared. And I revered the way that from her earliest work she was clearly committed to honoring the small details of “ordinary” lives and of seeking the plain beauty in surroundings that others would ignore. It would be some years before I would think about the poems that I loved in the context of the times and pressures under which they were written.

Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Writer and the Racial Mountain” offers perennially resonant words naming necessary freedoms for black artists. This anthem bears quoting at length:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves(6).

Black writers well know the perils of white racism and racist judgments against us and our work. That is a straightforward, if unpleasant, navigation for any African-American. But we are also, as ever, faced with judgments and injunctions from within that our work should perform a certain service as well as say and not say what is empowering or embarrassing to “the race” at large. The pressure on creative work can be intense for artists who belong to groups still struggling for their fair shake in society. The challenges to be published and heard, let alone to write well, lead to the understandable conclusion that every word counts, and that those who wish for much for the race would also wish their words could further the cause, however controversially that cause might be defined.

Brooks’s In the Mecca offers a meditation on the role of art and the artist during troubled times filled with philosophical and strategic challenges for black communities. The recurrent figure of the black poet in the book suggests that Brooks was wrangling with questions of the utility of poetry to a larger community’s struggle. She labored on the book’s centerpiece poem “In the Mecca” for some thirty years after working as a young woman for a “spiritual advisor” named Dr. E.N. French who sold charms and potions in the Mecca apartment building on the South Side of Chicago. Brooks is a master of the shorter lyric; at some 2000 lines, “In the Mecca” is the longest poem she has ever published, and it represents a clear turning point in her work and in her ongoing consideration of the role and responsibility of black poets in their communities.

Though an epic, “In the Mecca” is composed of linked portraits and as such is continuous with Brooks’s earlier work. From her first volume in 1945, A Street In Bronzeville, Brooks has shown herself to be the consummate portraitist, moving through loved and familiar black communities with a gimlet eye. She creates galleries of individuals who together make up a community. A Street begins in media res: “But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.” Something else has just been said “offstage” that this line counters. 1940’s black Chicago was the subject of much sociological inquiry, what poet Robert Hayden would call “the riot squad of statistics(7)” that so often describes black life. Brooks’s work illuminates many of the people and stories behind narrow, shopworn characterizations of the black urban poor. “A” street is singular, specific, though unamed; “in Bronzeville” is named, yet mythical. Like “Harlem” the name signifies more than simply the streets it bounds.

Brooks’s relationship to the urban Negro realism of the ‘forties best seen in Richard Wright’s Native Son (also set in Chicago) and Ann Petry’s The Street is discernable. But Brooks’s poetry made a space for something beyond realism as we see in her magnificent “kitchenette building”:

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it(8).

The first lines, “We are things,” suggests a people at war with the dehumanization of sociology and poverty who nonetheless constitute themselves as a community, a “we.” In the world of this poem, there is no fissure in the day for dreams. “We wonder” and “we think,” but we do not have time, “not for a minute,” to dream. “Dream” is never a verb in this poem. But “dream” is also the only word Brooks repeats and the word that lingers in the reader’s mouth after the poem is done. She lets her readers experience the high notes of “white” and “violet” before declining into the earthbound, stolid, round vowels of fried “potatoes.” We may end with the humble tuber, but “hope” is still the poem’s last verb, even if only for “lukewarm water.” When a starkly sociological approach to “the Negro problem” was the order of the day even in some black circles, it was bold of Brooks to name the imagination as a site worth tending, to honor the space of the dulce to go along with the utile.

The characters in “In the Mecca” are linked through the geography of living in the Mecca apartment building at the time of a great tragedy which unfolds as the poem progresses. Brooks’s choice of epic to tell this community’s tragic tale is particularly effective. The lack of aeration — the poem is not sectioned — emphasizes the claustrophobia of the world Brooks portrays. At some moments the poem feels pasted together, with set pieces that are not quite sure of why they are where they are in the poem, or why they are in the poem at all. But if we return to our earlier model of the Brooks poem as the community slice of life at any given moment, we can see that you could open any door in the building (any section or stanza) at any time and find anything; anything except what is most dearly sought, that is, the missing girl-child “Pepita” who, in the grisly end, we learn “never went to kindergarten.../never learned that black is not beloved(9).”

But that puts us ahead of the story in the poem. “In the Mecca” begins with epigraphs about the ironically-named Mecca apartment building, once a showplace, now decrepit. No one knows how many live there, and danger lurks within. Brooks quotes one Russ Meek in her last epigraph: “There comes a time when what has been can never be again.” We first encounter Mrs. Sallie, a “low-brown butterball” with an apartment full of children surviving on hamhocks and “a spoon of sweet potato.” St. Julia is parodied for her excessive credence in God: “...He’s the comfort/and wine and picallilli for my soul./He hunts me up the coffee for my cup./Oh how I love that Lord.” Prophet Williams is the “spiritual advisor” “who reeks/with lust for his disciples” as he peddles potions to the Meccans. There is Way-out Morgan who “smacks sweet his lips and adds another gun/and listens to Blackness stern and blunt and beautiful,/organ-rich Blackness telling a terrible story.” And there is great-great Gram who is still remembering slavery, providing a historical long view and example of the persistence of community memory.

Brooks presents these characters and many others, until the upper-case crisis of the poem: “WHERE PEPITA BE?” One of Mrs. Sallie’s children has gone missing. The mother searches from apartment to apartment; no one has seen the girl, most are indifferent, and it turns out that “Beneath [Jamaican Edward’s] cot/a little woman lies in dust with roaches,” murdered. The poem ends, its conclusions echoed later in the book:

And they are constrained. All are constrained.
and there is no thinking of grapes or gold
or of any wicked sweetness and they ride
upon fright and remorse and their stomachs
are rags or grit.

The character of Alfred, Mecca-dweller and would-be poet, is a key to considering Brooks’s thinking on the role of poetry in times of communal crisis. At first glimpse Alfred is exultant from the labors of poetry-writing:

To create! To create! To bend with the tight intentness
over the neat detail, come to
a terrified standstill of the heart, then shiver,
then rush — successfully —
at that rebuking thing, that obstinate and
recalcitrant little beast, the phrase!
To have the joy of deciding — successfully —
how stuffs can be compounded or sifted out
and emphasized; what the importance are;
what coats in which to wrap things.

Brooks then abruptly informs us, “Alfred is un-/talented. Knows.” The excitement of struggling to craft verse is undercut by Alfred’s artistic impotence. While Mrs. Sallie is frantic to find Pepita, Alfred is busy mooning over the work of the Senegalese poet and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor who, despite the wisdom of his words is imagined “in Europe rootless and lonely.” Alfred rhapsodizes, “To be a red bush!/In the West Virginia autumn” in the midst of the chaos that is the decaying Mecca building, the building standing in for the country that is literally burning and falling apart and for the black community that has no choice but somehow hold together. In the drama of the poem, the little girl is the hope of Negro tomorrow, the “little seed” who is missing in the warrens of the Mecca. “No, Alfred has not seen Pepita Smith,” Brooks writes, “But he (who might have been a poet-king)/Can speak superbly of the line of Leopold.” Dead Pepita speaks in memoriam, and her poetry is utterly useless: “‘I touch’ — she said once — ‘petals of a rose./A silky feeling through me goes.’”

The black nationalist poet Don L. Lee (now known as Haki Madhubuti) makes a mysterious but instrumental appearance in the poem. Among residents he is the lone non-Meccan. Lee serves as a foil to insignificant Alfred:

Don Lee wants
not a various America.
Don Lee wants
a new nation
under nothing;
and ....wants/
new art and anthem; will
want a new music screaming in the sun.

Lee’s section is lean and clean and imagines a contemporary black poetry that is “new,” relevant, and can move people to “music” and “screaming” at all that demands outrage. This seems like a refusal of the pre-1967 Brooks in favor of the new Brooks with hopes for herself and her work. Yet there is something about Brooks’s treatment of Alfred that saddens me. His exultant love of poetry itself and veneration of the sweat of the craft feels familiar and exciting, a pleasure I know myself and wish for others. It is that joy and struggle that is the work of writing. Context is of course all-important, and Brooks has placed Alfred’s exaltations in the midst of far more urgent matters indeed. He is certainly a rather silly man. But I wanted Brooks to transform him into a poet-hero, perhaps by his finding in the words of the poets he has read something that offers direction or succor to the community as it struggles through the crisis of Pepita. Poetry can have and does have that function and possibility, just as there are also many poets who lose themselves in stardust while the world falls apart around them, or, worse still, who claim themselves exempt from the responsibilities of citizenship — to tend to one’s community, to turn some portion of one’s energies and talents to the good of that community — in the name of the apolitical sanctity that they believe is the domain of poetry.

The rest of the book forms a crucial follow-up to the long opening poem. In it, the figure of the poet and the role of the poem are developed and then redeemed. The poet is more explicitly Brooks herself, in the midst of a black community offering words that both mark the times and gain her a place amongst her people. The second section is called “After Mecca,” and the first poem is “Boy Breaking Glass.” The boy cries, “I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.” The occasional poems “The Chicago Picasso” and “The Wall” commemorate events that took place two weeks apart in Chicago in August, 1967, one downtown — the dedication of a Picasso statue to the city — and the other on the city’s black South Side — the dedication of “The Wall of Respect,” a mural with portraits of black heroes. “All worship” [emphasis mine] at “The Wall:”

I mount the rattling wood. Walter
says, “She is good,” says, “She
our Sister is.” In front of me
hundreds of faces, red-brown, brown, black, ivory,
yield me hot trust, their yea and their Announcement
that they are ready to rile the high-flung ground.

The black community is shown multitudinous and varied but nonetheless unified and, crucially, embracing of the poet, Brooks herself, whose contribution is useful and welcomed. Her poetry has been explicitly accepted and has helped the people become “ready to rile.” The last stanza is a single line, “And we sing.” The poem and the event have helped reunify the community which is so shattered at the end of “In the Mecca;” there is a choral voice and a self-articulation as “we,” which is certainly the first step in understanding oneself as part of a larger whole with common aims. The audience is not passive like the downtown audience at the Chicago Picasso dedication: “(Seiji Ozawa leads the Symphony./The Mayor smiles./And 50,000 See.)” The downtowners are parenthetical here and make no noise, joyful or otherwise. Brooks is no stranger to commemorative, occasional poems, having written prefatory, tributory poems to her brother, father, and black war heroes. But the act of writing in tribute and on occasion assumes greater meaning and context after a black community has been shown in urgent need of reparation.

But the “we” is never without its complications and shortfalls. The same community of black poets who embraced Brooks and took her to a new stage of black consciousness was brutally judgmental of Robert Hayden. Yet his 1970 collection Words in the Mourning Time presents some striking points of comparison to In the Mecca. Just a few months after Brooks’s poems for the Chicago Picasso and the Wall of Respect, Hayden delivered an occasional poem, “And All the Atoms Cry Aloud,” just up Lake Michigan in Chicago for the Baha’i centennial. In Words Hayden mourns the country’s racial woes as he mourns the Vietnam War. Both poet’s books include Malcolm X poems. Hayden’s Malcolm is a great man because of his spiritual salvation rather than racial deeds or rhetoric. “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” concludes: “He fell upon his face before/Allah the raceless in whose/ blazing Oneness all were one. He rose renewed renamed, became/much more than there was time for him to be(10).” In Brooks’s Malcolm X poem in In the Mecca it is Malcolm’s black “maleness” that makes “us” “gasp” and characterizes him as someone to be revered, followed, and admired. Hayden, a devout Baha’i, is always interested in the spiritual strivings and human links that he believes invite transcendence and liberation. Brooks closes In the Mecca with two “sermons” addressed to “[m]y people, black and black,” an audience Hayden would neither name nor presume. In “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” Brooks writes: “This is the urgency. Live!/and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.” Though she may think of the book’s final words as evidence of her move toward a new understanding of her voice and responsibility as a black poet, she sounded similar notes in 1949 to end her book Annie Allen: “....Rise./Let us combine. There are no magic or elves/Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must/Wizard a track through our own screaming weed(11).” The two authors’ common concerns circa 1970 are worth noting because at the time Brooks might have been seen as the “blacker” poet and Hayden as the “spiritualist,” neither characterization being completely accurate.

The expectations placed on black poets by a larger public are one thing. The demands of one’s own people — however vexing it can be to draw parameters around that populace — have always been another. What does the race want from its poets? Different and usually unpredictable things, in my experience, and often nothing but the particular vision a particular poet has to offer. Who is “the race,” anyway? Yes, there are literary schools and establishments, but certainly no central committee deciding who is “in” and who is “out.” Calibrating these influences is close to impossible, inevitably imprecise, and draining of good energy from the work of writing poetry.

But I am sure I am not alone in wanting my own work to be useful, to find a voice which speaks to people and communities beyond myself. I have seen my work overpraised by narrow-minded white critics who seem relieved that some of my references and formal choices are familiar to their own cultural milieu. I have seen my work criticized small-mindedly by more than one black woman elder poets—the same poets I imagined would be pleased by it. Many audiences I read to are mostly segregated; I’ve been greeted with silences both appalled and appreciative by white audiences, been met with suspicious stares and raucous love by black audiences. I’ve been left out of anthologies and gatherings where I felt I should have been included and included where I felt like my work couldn’t possibly belong. I am most often surprised by who finds and appreciates my work, and for what reasons. I believe that poetry readers are largely eclectic and single-minded.

But the love that has meant the most, I have to say, has come from the black communities who I feel “get it” on myriad levels, who see what I am trying to do with words and with message, who see that, by speaking for myself in as true and articulate a voice as I can muster – regardless of what line I think that voices tows — perhaps my words might mean something for someone else. I do not seek their approval when I write, but it pleases me when it comes, to echo Hughes.

When students have asked me about the difficulties of writing poems that may reveal delicate family matters, I always tell them to write the poem and worry about who reads it later, to bring forth that which calls from within and separate that act from the matter of a poem’s public life. I do not consider it a betrayal of my muse to say there are a few poems that I might write but not attempt to publish (today) because I felt they would cause harm to that amorphous group called black people, poems that might perpetuate dangerous stereotypes if taken drastically out of context. How many African-Americans have modified what and where we say or do because we think it would reflect badly on “the race”? These considerations do not make us prudish. They do mean that there are familiar issues and degrees of self-censorship that we are faced with because of our history.

What does all this have to do with In the Mecca? The book has taught me that none of us lives outside of historical moments or quotidian pressures and concerns. The historical challenge to understand context in which the elders of our tradition had to labor to make their voices heard is unusually pointed for black writers, and thinking about 1967, Brooks, and Hayden helps us do so.

Before the famous paragraph from “The Negro Writer and the Racial Mountain” that opens this essay, Hughes wrote something else that bears consideration. “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly,” he wrote, “but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” Brooks never feared or shirked what she fervently believed was her responsibility; that sense of responsibility shaped her very aesthetic. Few poets walk with such integrity. Brooks’s career at this juncture reminds us that the matter of listening to the muse, of being utterly “free to choose,” is always interrupted by larger concerns that can at times come to constitute the muse’s voice. Whether those concerns are catalysts, straightjackets, or something in between is open to debate.

 

Footnotes:

1. James C. Hall’s wonderful book Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) offers a much more detailed account and analysis of the skirmishes at that conference. He points out that the poet Melvin Tolson was ironically the one who criticized Hayden most sharply, ironic because Tolson was Hayden’s age peer (rather than a member of a younger, presumably more rebellious generation) and was then and is still considered by many to be an esoteric poet whose work does not speak directly to timely “black” concerns.

2. The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, General eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977, p. 1498.

3. Robert Hayden, “‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’: Reflections on Poetry and the Role of the Poet,” in his Collected Prose. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 9.

4. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972, p. 86.

5. From “Annie Allen” in Annie Allen. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949.

6. Gates and McKay, 1271.

7. Gates and McKay, 1501.

8. Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street In Bronzeville. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishing, 1945, p. 2.

9. Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca. New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p.12. All subsequent quotations will be made from this edition.

10. Robert Hayden, Words in the Mourning Time. New York: October Press, 1971.

11. Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1949, p.60.

 

From Ports on Poetry
 

 

The Genius of Romare Bearden

It is difficult to imagine 20th century American art without Romare Bearden, and it is equally challenging to settle on a single topic when presented with the felicitous opportunity to write about his work. Do we choose a little-researched period in the artist's work, or in his life as a painter who was also a social worker, song-writer, traveler, intellectual? Or do we abandon scholarly methods and instead rhapsodize, exalt in the magnificent and meticulous scope of any given Bearden work? Do we think about the art in the context of New York City, Pittsburgh, Paris, St. Maarten, or Mecklenburg County, North Carolina? Do we focus on the medium of prints or consider also his early abstract oils? Dare we neglect the magnificent Bearden collage?

Grant Hill has wisely collected a dazzling group of Beardens that span the artist’s career, from the early gouache paintings “Serenade” (1941) and “They That Are Delivered from the Noise of the Archers” (1942) to the great collages of the ‘80s. Those early paintings give fascinating indications of what he achieves later on. We see his proclivities as the master colorist he fully becomes in the collage form; his interest in the (black) figure seen in geometric components; and, important Bearden icons such as the guitar. Viewers of this collection can begin to understand how a mature style develops by seeing these rarely-seen early paintings. The1979 collage in the Collection, “Time for the Bass,” gives us Bearden in his exhaustive jazz mode. These works translate the energy, rhythm, and movement of jazz music into the flat form. This collection also shows us Bearden’s urban and rural modes of Mecklenberg County and Harlem. Bearden’s work displays great intimate understanding of those landscapes that outlines the movement of so many black people from South to North in the Great Migration.

The Grant Hill Collection gives an opportunity to see not only the span on Bearden’s career but also a generous selection of his collage work. For Bearden’s work comes into its most mature form in collage, and it is not hyperbole to state that as a collagist he is without parallel. I want to focus on collage here first by discussing the work itself but then by thinking about how the Bearden collage gives us a way to think about the complexities of African-American identity. In that regard, we might look at Bearden as an important twentieth century African-American theorist as well as one of its most magnificent visual artists.

Bearden refigured collage via European Cubism, African-American quilting, and idioms of jazz and the blues. His subject matter has ranged from a re-telling of The Odyssey, in vibrant blacks and blues, to scenes from the North Carolina of his early childhood. His iconography is magically commonplace: trains seen through doorways, roosters, doves, saxophones, trumpets, washtubs, clouds. Bearden moved through phases of abstract oils and Cubist watercolors but found his fullest voice in the nineteen — ‘sixties, when he began to work extensively in collage. His work combines any number of media, from newspaper and magazine pictures, to brightly colored paper, to fabric, watercolor, and thick black “Speedball” pens.

Everything you read and the stories people tell about Bearden say that he was a very clever man, analytical and dazzlingly well-read, humble without being self-effacing, respectful, and aware of himself in relationship to myriad traditions. While writing a paper about him in college, I decided I wanted to speak to him, found him in the New York City phone book, called him, and found him in, answering the phone, and willing to entertain my questions. By the end of the conversation he had sent me to Sun Tzu's The Art of War, any stained glass windows I could find, and Earl “Fatha” Hines’s music, so that I might better understand his own work. Bearden had digested a wide range of influences to arrive at the specificity of his vision.

Here is a quotation from Bearden, on his own identity: “I think of myself first as an American, and being an American means four things. One, being in the tradition of Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Melville, Walt Whitman. Second, you have to have the spirit of the whole Negroid tradition. The third tradition is the frontiersman, like Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and the fourth tradition is the Indian(1).” The great W.E.B. Du Bois wrote these lines in 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder(2).” “One ever feels his two-ness” would become a veritable mantra to legions of students of blackness and Du Bois's image of an ineffably split African-American consciousness, and of bifurcation as the major twentieth-century trope for African-American consciousness, remains resonant today.

But over one hundred years later, the “two-ness” trope must be revised. I contend that if the African-American intellectual consciousness is split, it is split multiply rather than doubly, and that that so-called fragmentation, arisen from the fundamental fragmentation of the Middle Passage, has become a source of our creative power. The complex co-existence of a spectrum of black identities in a single space — think of Bearden’s own self-description above for example — represents a particular strength and coherence of African-American cultural production. Formal conflict is the locus of true innovation such as that which is evident in the twentieth-century African-American tradition from Souls back to Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South to Cane (Jean Toomer), to Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), to Mumbo Jumbo (Ishmael Reed), to The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison), among others. In order for Du Bois to make a space for his “type” on the literary continuum, that type being the twentieth-century heretofore unimagined African-American intellectual who would write a book with the formal multiplicity and referentiality of Souls, he had to “make” a multiple self in the text at hand. In other words, the structural hybridity of the book Souls necessarily makes the written space in which he can fully explore aspects of what I would call his “collaged” identity. And collage, as developed an employed by Bearden, is my model to describe the presentation of self-identities in African-American literature and culture. Critics have used collage to talk about the literary works of modernist writers such as Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, as well as in Dadaist novels and various post-modern forms, but the Bearden collage offers a more necessarily historical- and culturally- particular context for twentieth-century African-American literature and culture.

Collage lets us think about identity as a spoked wheel or gyroscope on which its aspects spin and recombine. Collage also allows us to see African-American creative production as cohesive rather than schizophrenic. In other words, the disparate aspects of personalities and of influence that might seem contradictory can actually coexist in a single personality, or a single identity. When the process of cutting and pasting is visually evident — as it is in the cut and torn edges within Bearden’s collages —, yet obscured — by the fact of the unified whole the picture represents —, creative/constructive process itself is valorized as a crucial and aesthetic component of the path to artistic coherence, and, indeed, an avenue to understanding how “coherence” itself is evaluated.

Collage, in both the flat medium as well as more abstractly in book form and as a metaphor for the creative process, is a continual cutting, pasting, and quoting of received information, much like jazz music, like the contemporary tradition of rapping, and indeed like the process of reclaiming African-American history (or of any historiography). African-American culture from the Middle Passage forward is of course broadly characterized by fragmentation and reassemblage, sustaining what can be saved of history while making something new. Collage constructs wholes from fragments in a continual, referential dialogue between the seemingly-disparate shards of various pasts and the current moment of the work itself, as well as the future the work might point toward. Ralph Ellison said, about Bearden:

[Bearden] has sought here to reveal a world long hidden by the clichés of sociology and rendered cloudy by the distortions of newsprint and the false continuity imposed on our conception of Negro life by television and much documentary photography. Therefore, as he delighted us with the magic of design and teaches us the ambiguity of vision, Bearden insists that we see and that we see in depth and by the fresh light of the creative vision. Bearden knows that the true complexity of the slum dweller and the tenant farmer requires a release from the prison of our media-dulled perception and a reassembling in forms which would convey something of the depth and wonder of the Negro American's stubborn humanity(3).

And here, a quotation from Picasso on collage: “If a piece of a newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. The displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring(4).” Picasso’s displaced “object” could be thought of as the African body, then the African-American body in migration, and collage as the process through which that “body” makes sense of itself in a hostile and unfamiliar environment.

Any discussion of the African-American collage must include a discussion of the quilt. Quilts embody the simultaneous continuity and chaos that characterize African-American history in all spheres. If African-American creativity is always in some way grappling with African-American history by trying to knit together the fragmentation that forms its core and the paradox of fragmentation as a center, quilting is a motif for a creative response to that history. Romare Bearden himself understands how quilting fits into African-American social, creative, and visual history. He has represented the act of quilting in his work and his collages allude to strip weaving, quilts and textiles. He also utilizes actual scraps of fabric. He has called his collage-making “precisely what the ladies (at the quilting bee) were doing(5).” The bits and pieces that make quilts as well as collages all refer to their uses and places in other lives; the life of the quilt is the aggregate of those pieces, and the work then becomes a referential discussion of both past and present at once.

West African, Mande-influenced strip weaving in which narrow strips of cloth, sometimes as many as one hundred, were sewn together to make larger pieces of cloth or garments, were a crucial precursor to the African-American quilt. The patterns that made their way into the African-American tradition were the so-called “crazy quilt” patterns, seemingly-irregular contrasts of color and line. These West African fabrics were collaged in the sense of being disparate pieces put together, though they do not have the same system of diverse referents as New World collages; once these textile traditions reached the Americas they arose of different material and historical circumstances, and the textile work, as with other arts and crafts, reflected those new circumstances Still, the concept of the process of putting pieces together and the improvisational possibilities inherent in the different color and pattern contrast relate to the concept of collage. Strip weaving and quilting are not the same as cutting a pattern for a dress, where each piece is predetermined and the end outcome of the whole can be anticipated. Rather, when strips of cloth are sewn together, like strips in a quilt, the creative process continues throughout that act, through the matching and setting of color to color and pattern to pattern.

Fon-influenced appliquéd textiles also found their way to the African-American quilting tradition. Those African textiles set up intricate symbolist landscapes and told stories, strongly derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphics. African-American story quilts, in particular Harriet Powers’ story quilts, between 1886 and 1898, blend the New World necessity of sewing bed covering with Old World information about textile work, are a New World manifestation of ancestral motifs and narrative impulses(6).

An African-American quilt might be made from pieces of blanket wool, worn cotton from an apron, a soft piece of calico from a fourth-hand dress, made of the materials of the new place but could nonetheless reflect the patterns of an ancestral heritage, just as slaves made instruments from whatever was at hand — washtubs, broom handles, even their own bodies in hambone and spoons. A washboard could make sounds and music but was also, or had been, an instrument of work, a historical referent of the condition of the creator. The object had its contemporary life and meaning as well as its ulterior “lives,” all in the same site. If nothing else was available, when even the body was not legally one’s own, the body nonetheless could become a site for creative assemblage.

Composite visual works are ancient and cross-cultural. In the twelfth century Japanese calligraphed poetry was made of cut and pasted pieces of delicate paper. Thirteenth century Persian artists cut leather into flowers for bookbinding. In the early seventeenth century and quite probably earlier Mexican feather mosaic pictures were made, and in the same century in Europe mosaic pictures were made of such earthly objects as beetles and corn kernels. Eighteenth-century European collages were made from butterfly wings, and in mid-century the still-familiar British tradition of Valentines commenced. According to art historian Herta Wescher, there is “nothing very new about the essential idea of collage, of bringing into association unrelated images and object to form a different expressive identity(7).” Eddie Wolfram observes, “besides their functional reality, some mundane objects have always held the potential of an ‘inner,’ more magical reality that is connected with man’s wonder about the nature of existence and his own destiny(8).”

Collage, per se, entered the art historical lexicon in the early pat of this century, as an outgrowth of Cubism, and Cubism, of course developed as its practitioners were becoming familiar with and consequently inspired by different kinds of African art. Gregory Ulmer calls collage“the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century(9),” and states that the innovation broke with traditional realism in its interplay between what Bearden called “mosaic-like joinings” and the unified image viewed from a greater distance. Wescher insists that twentieth century collage was scarcely influenced by these earlier developments by “craftsmen, folk artists, and amateurs” folk and religious artists, which seems dubious, but certainly this was the first time that collage was employed by creative artists as the outgrowth of a specific artistic movement.

The word “collage” comes from the French “coller” meaning to paste, stick, or glue. Claude Levi-Strauss would play with that root when in The Savage Mind he used the term “bricoleur,” for he or she who made do with whatever was at hand, “with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous(10).” The first collages recognized as such were Pablo Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning and Georges Braque’s Fruit Dish, both made in 1912; There is some dispute over who made the first of what we now call collages, Picasso or Braque; both claimed credit, and Picasso may not have pre-dated “Still Life” to place himself fist. But at this point of the Cubist movement both artists had similar aims.

In Cubism, painters attempted to show their subjects from as many sides or perspectives as possible at the same time. This concept revolutionized the world of possibilities in modern art by introducing the concept of simultaneity and a departure from the flat, literal surface. Collage juxtaposed seemingly disparate elements into a new context and a new whole. Braque said that in collage he could separate color from form, thus allowing both to “emerge in their own right,” (Perloff, 24) or, exist simultaneously together and apart.

The displaced “object” Picasso mentions in the above quotation is, in African-American terms, first and foremost the displaced African body. There is also a “displaced,” or, to riff on Carter G. Woodson, “mis-placed,” galaxy of cultural and historical references that African-American cultural worker draws upon. Historical distortions are deliberate and not at all haphazard; we are displaced in that we were taken from Africa, and we are misplaced in that we have been put in a place, both literally and figuratively, that does not acknowledge the full complex dimensions of our existence. Culture workers must then continually strive to create, validate, and keep in circulation written evidence, traces, of actual cultural existence. The quilt or collage creates something new that is simultaneously what is was and what it might be, due to its referentiality. The finished product is always a reflected breakdown of selections, the mechanics of choosing. The act of making is inherent in the finished thing itself.

When Bearden cuts colored paper rather than representational newspaper and magazine images, the shapes he makes from the paper become repeated motifs, his ritual shapes and images that continually call attention to a depth and a life behind the canvas itself. Bearden has said:

In most instances in creating a picture, I use many disparate elements to form either a figure, or part of a background. I build my faces, for example, from parts of African masks, animal eyes, marbles, mossy vegetation, [and corn] . . . .I then have my small original works enlarged so the mosaic-like joinings will not be so apparent, after which I finish the larger painting. I have found when some detail, such as a hand or eye, is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the photograph. (Bearden, A Memoria Exhibition, p. 26)

Bearden first ventured into collage explicitly in 1951 with “Untitled Duke (Ellington) and Billy (Strayhorn)(11)” , and he experimented with Egyptian hieroglyphics in a “Hierographs” show in the ‘forties as well as pointed shapes and a concern with black, line, and color that would recur in later collages(12). It was not until the 1960’s that he was fully involved in collage as his primary art form(13). His watercolors in the forties and early fifties are frequently separated by heavy black lines; hew was playing with the idea of blocks or patches of color that would resurface in the collages. But the crucial difference in collage is the concept of overlapping; that separated spaces and block of color do not represent an integration of disparate segments in the same way that overlap and consequent recombination underpins the very concept of collage, especially in the sense that I am using it to talk about identity formation, because I am arguing for an African-American identity that is not segmented but rather a curious whole. Collage becomes a way to remember, and the process of remembering and refiguring, whether literal or metaphorical, is inherent in the African-American literary critical enterprise and find a vehicle in the act of collage. A look at the process of piecing together in Bearden’s work will provide a bridge to understanding the same process at work later in African-American written works.

“Untitled: Duke and Billy,” which appears to be the earliest of Bearden's published collages, is a whimsical postcard (the catalogue lists size unknown). A dutiful Billy Strayhorn and a jaunty Duke Ellington stroll by a Paris bookstand in a snapshot on the left side of the plane. On the right, Bearden has made ink line drawings of cliché Paris postcard scenes: the Eiffel Tower reaching to the clouds, a bridge over the Seine, a jeune homme in ankle-pants and striped sailor shirt. The background is green, and red white and blue stripes to suggest the French flag govern the frame in titled rectangles. “Duke and Billy” is handwritten in red and blue underneath the photograph. What makes this collage most interesting is that Bearden has pasted cut sections of photo contact sheets of Ellington and Strayhorn in what looks like a Parisian train station. The contact sheet both represent time in the collage — the sense of a whirlwind trip as exemplified in the rapid shifts between the frames — as well as an intimacy: Was Bearden there? Did he take the pictures? They are not posed portraits but rather snapshots; how did he come upon them? Bearden leaves off the last names of his subjects to suggest that either he is intimate with them or that we should be intimate with the subjects, “Duke” and “Billy” to all. The public France of the postcard moves quickly to the intimate France, and the larger cultural juxtaposition is one of these two black American musical greats bringing their black jazz to Europe. This minor collage illustrates how referentiality embedded in the objects juxtaposed on the page opens up the fields of meaning in the work itself.

In Bearden’s collages, you see the simultaneous referentiality — the “past life” of the cut or torn fragment — as well as the contemporary moment or whole that these re-integrated fragments create. Bearden’s 1971 collage “The Block I,” is a long horizontal rectangle, setting up a sense of the forward movement of narrative from the start. Though Palmer Hayden and Archibald Motley are the artistic parents of the African-American street scene, Bearden was the first to go behind the facade of the black inside his subject’s homes and lives. For the buildings he has used plain brown papers, bricks he has painted himself, and what looks to be brick-patterned contact paper, reminiscent of the wood grain paper used by Picasso in those first collages. He has “cut” into the buildings not solely in the regular spaces where windows would be but rather at random spots, as though cutting through the brick. In this way the viewer feels less like a peeping Tom but rather like a privileged observer placed squarely in the middle of life lived. The irregularity of the cuts adds to the element of spontaneity and therefore “authenticity.” Yet he also makes a viewer aware of this status of invasion, of looking in without having asked permission. Additionally, because we do not see into every room, the viewer is aware that choices have been made of what to reveal and what to keep private. The grave boy looking out might be asking, who are you, as the viewer asks the same questions. The angels burst from the brick at the top of the work, making us aware of the constructed frame that defines and sometimes constricts a community as well as the spiritual necessity of imagining movement beyond those boundaries. Those angels make me think of Robert Hayden’s great poem, “Summertime and the Living...,” just as “The Block’s” urban episodic-ness recalls Hayden’s “Elegies for Paradise Valley.” In “Summertime,” he writes:

But summer was, they said, the poor folks’ time
of year. And he remembers
how they would sit on broken steps amid
The fevered tossings of the dusk, the dark,
wafting hearsay with funeral parlor fans
or making evenings solemn by
their quietness. Feels their Mosaic eyes
upon him...

Oh, summer summer summertime —
Then grim street preachers shook
their tambourines and Bibles in the face
of tolerant wickedness:
then Elks parades and big splendiferous
Jack Johnson in his diamond limousine
set the ghetto burgeoning
with fantasies
of Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings(14).

In the Grant Hill Collection, we see a similar scene in “The Street” (Watercolor and collage on board, 1985). The sense of a public black life and the private life beyond is made clear. The haunting black faces cut out from other places find themselves at home on this street. Yet their eyes speak of elsewhere, referring again, perhaps, to the Great Migration that was part of Bearden’s own experience and that he understood as emblematic to black people in this country as they have moved and reassembled from one country to another, one region to another, even one block to another, adapting and evolving with each geographic shift.

Bearden’s interiors also give us a sense of the intimacy with which he knew and saw black life, and his use of collage adds dimension to that sense of intimacy. In “Morning Gingham” (1985) two women prepare for the day, one bathing and the other preparing water or food. They occupy the same space, faced in opposite directions, each performing her own ablutions, distinct yet together. The gingham in the collage is actual fabric which serves both to represent a woman’s skirt and a window curtain, but also to allude to a culture where nothing is wasted, where materials are recycled, and where stories are imbedded in objects or materials. The recent Whitney Museum exhibit “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” magnificently showcases women who work together intimately — so in a sense this is collective or communal work — but their individual voices and aesthetics are also blazingly clear. The so-called Negro spirituals came from a collective context and collective authorship, yet they made space for the solo voice to be heard, individuality out of community.

You don’t have to believe in magic to believe that objects carry something from one person to another. Think of the old wedding tradition that a bride should wear something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The “something borrowed” is meant to bring good luck and blessings to the bride from the person who first wore the brooch or carried the handkerchief. Few would dare break with such tradition. So it isn’t a leap to understand that the bits of cloth that came from garments someone actually wore bring a bit of that person with them. To translate this to Bearden’s artistic practice, as one imagines that many of these previous owners were unknown to him, he is bringing something of the actual spirits of black people into his work in a way that paint alone never could. In the Grant Hill Collection we see this especially in “Morning Charlotte” (1985) and “The Evening Guitar” (1987). For what is DuBois’s double-consciousness than the sense that we are scrutinized even as we make private space, that we are imagined even as we imagine ourselves? Bearden understood that paradox profoundly, and he managed the feat of making it visibly manifest in his collaged work. He also gave us a world of its own integrity, that could be spectated, if you will, at the same time that it enjoyed the free play of imagination and self-invention, and that most importantly, it managed to convey profound intimacy. Bearden’s genius is placed in context of a long and fruitful career in this Collection.

(Published in Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African-American Art, ed. Alvia Wardlaw, Duke University Press 2003)

 

 

Footnotes:

1. Romare Bearden 1911-1988: A Memorial Exhibition. (New York: ACA Galleries, 1989), p.3.

2. W.E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Nathan Huggins, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: The Library of America, 1986), pp.364-5.

3. Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Romare Bearden,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), p.234.

4. Pablo Picasso in conversation with Francoise Gilot, quoted in Marjorie Perloff, “The Invention of Collage,” Collage (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1983), pp. 5-47.

5. Romare Bearden: Origins and Progressions. (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986), p.41.

6. Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 45-48. See also Gladys-Marie Fry, Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts in the Ante-Bellum South. (New York: Dutton Studio Books, 1990); Robert Farris Thompson, “Round Houses and Rhythmic Textiles: Mande-Related Art and Architecture in the Americas,” in his Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 193-224; Maude Southwell Wahlman and John Scully, “Aesthetic Principles in Afro-American Quilts,” in Afro-American Folk Arts and Crafts, ed. William Ferris (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), pp.79-97; and Alvia Wardlaw’s introduction to John Beardsley, et. al, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (Atlanta: Tinwood, 2002).

7. Herta Wescher, Collage (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), p.8.

8. Eddie Wolfram, History of Collage: An Anthology of Collage, Assemblage and Event Structure (New York: MacMillan, Inc. 1975), p.7.

9. Gregory Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), p.84.

10. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), p.17.

11. Bearden, A Memorial Exhibition, p. 21. This is the earliest published Bearden collage that I have found, though it is possible that others exist in private collections or family papers.

12. Ten Hierographic Paintings by Sgt. Romare Bearden. (Washington DC: G Place Gallery, 1944).

13. Mary Schmidt Campbell writes: “In 1964, [Bearden] abruptly abandoned his nonobjective oil paintings…when he began making his collages…Having lived with a number of different ideas of art, he had come back to the subject matter he started out with – Black American life as he remembered it in the South of his childhood in North Carolina, and in the North of his coming of age in Pittsburgh and Harlem, and, later in life, the Caribbean island of St. Martin.” Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987 (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1991), p. 8

14. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems (New York and London: Liveright, 1985), p.39.

 

 

Black Alive and Looking Straight at You: The Legacy of June Jordan

I have been thinking for a long time about poetry and politics through the instructive examples of June Jordan, the woman and her work. What is the “job” or the work of a poem, and what are its limitations? Why would a writer speak in the morning in the poems, in the afternoon their body while teaching or doing other activist wok, and in the evening in prose essays? What can each form do that the other cannot? Most specifically, what do we want to protect in poetry if we believe, as I do and as Jordan did, that poetry * is* sacred speech that marks the sacred in our lives?

There are poetry people who think that politics, per se, has no place in poetry. This is silly, and it is amazing how strong a hold this idea has had when it is so empty. For time immemorial, across geographies and peoples, poetry has taken as its subject politics, that is, the affairs of the polis, the community and its people. Some people think of themselves as gatekeepers, defenders of a culture, as though culture is something that can be owned by anyone. Culture is like ambient gas; once it is released, there is no collecting it and bringing it back home. This is a great and magical thing: Culture belongs to the world that occasions it. But we could usefully think about the rich and edifying aspects of form that mark discourses in particular genre. How should a poem attend to the business of its chosen form, the care and style with which the box is made rather than what is put inside the box? Poets do have responsibility to make images that compel, to distill language, to write with model precision and specificity that is what poetry has to offer to other genres. It makes something happen with language that takes the breath away or shifts the mind. For the poem, which is after all not the newspaper, must move beyond the information it contains while simultaneously imparting the information it contains. Jordan’s commitment to poetry was constant, and it is in those words that we find her simultaneous devotion to the largest possible picture — her keen analyses of the world situation — and to the smallest detail — her tending of language.

Jordan outlines many of these ideas in her book Poetry for the People, which chronicles that movement at U.C. Berkeley where she taught for many years and offers a try-this-at-home handbook for bringing together people across boundaries through the power of poetry in order, quite simply, to make the world a better place through reading, writing, and performing poetry. To be brave and then be braver. To do the work of learning and knowing so that when you speak to the issues of the world you know of what you speak. To travel, either literally or by learning another language and reading what people who think and speak in that language have seen the world. To come together under the umbrella of poetry knowing not only what we fight against but also where the love is that can unite us. “As I think about anyone or any thing,” she wrote, “—whether history of literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film — as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment/possibilities of anyone or anything, the decisive question is, always, where is the love? The energies that flow from hatred, from negative and hateful habits and attitudes, do not promise something good, something I could choose to cherish, to honor with my own life. It is always the love, whether we look to the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer, or to the spirit of Aghostino Neto, it is always the love that will carry action into positive new places, that will carry your own nights and days beyond demoralization and away from suicide.” (269)

June Jordan lived from 1936 to 2002 and was a poet, activist, essayist, and teacher. She published more critical prose than any other African-American woman writer in the twentieth century, as well as plays, anthologies, children’s books, and the tough-minded memoir, Soldier. She was a proud African American Brooklynite of Jamaican parentage, but she was not mired in racial, national, cultural, or ideological group-think. She wrote, for example, that after she was raped by a black man “[i]t became clear to me that I had a whole lot of profound and overdue thinking to begin on the subject of what it means to be female regardless of color.” (80)

Jordan tirelessly advocated for the rights of others both locally and internationally, and her essays articulated far-reaching, integrated points of view on culture and politics. She is perhaps best known as a prolific poet whose lyrical voice linked political struggle with an ethic of love. Anyone who ever met her knew she was a fierce, brilliant, tireless, brave, bawdy, luminous woman who exemplified life force even as — especially as — she fought for many years against cancer.

I first read her poems as a child in the beautiful collection, Who Looks at Me, that introduced African-American art to young people. “I am black alive and looking straight at you,” she wrote, which always seemed to me to be a credo for moving through this life and its challenges. Her work, then, has always been with me, as has her example of a committed, productive artist, who was sometimes afraid but was always courageous, who saw herself as a citizen of the world who traveled to Nicaragua and Lebanon and concluded, “The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully.” (117) She was simultaneously a pacifist and a fighter who knew that “all war leads to death and all love leads you away from death.” (121) She wrote, in her unsparing memoir Soldier, of the Jamaican immigrant father, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, who brutalized her, his only child, and yet made her a fighter. That fighter is everywhere in her work: the fighter who, as a student at the University of Chicago, knew that the teacher who told her she couldn’t write, who wondered if English was even her first language, was wrong, and would prove him wrong; the fighter who, as a teacher years later, told her students, “this is not my class, this is our class. I do not want to hear what I think. I need to know what you think.” (282)

I saw her read several times over the years and was too shy to go up and speak to her. I read every flinty word she wrote — on Chilean poetry, the Palestinian situation, bisexuality, any number of issues of justice — and she became an example to me of someone who made a righteous and beautiful life by poems, essays, and deeds and who did not shy away from what was difficult. A few years ago, when I was about to give a reading in her home of Berkeley, California, I wrote to her, introduced myself, and asked if I could visit her. She responded by giving me a long and magical evening that I will never forget, and an email friendship ensued until she died, just a short year after. There are some deaths where you feel the earth open up and leave a physically palpable void, and June Jordan’s death hit me and many others who knew her well and not at all. Her vitality, in word and in person, was extraordinary. Clichés such as “larger than life” and “force of nature” applied. She was utterly beautiful to behold, exquisite and exact and light-filled with an enormous, knowing laugh. She felt like life itself.

In her essay collection Civil Wars she wrote of her year teaching at Yale University in 1974-5, where I now teach: her love for students; the particular challenges of teaching “black studies” in the 1970s to “the descendants of slaves as well as the descendants of the slave owners;” and of challenging what she saw as hegemonic worship of Richard Wright in African-American Studies to the exclusion of necessary voices like Hurston’s. She decried an “either/or” approach to African-American canon formation and political thinking. “It is tragic and ridiculous to choose between Malcolm and Dr. King,” she wrote. “[E]ach of them hurled himself against a quite different aspect of our predicament, and both of them, literally, gave their lives to our ongoing struggle.”

At whichever institution employed her she pressed at the boundaries of the place and challenged the status quo. While at Yale she protested an impending campus visit by pseudo-scientific racist William Shockley, and along with students, she organized the Yale Attica Defense. At the anti-Shockley rally, she spoke questions that still echo for us as a community at Yale: “What freedom does this institution care about? Is it the freedom to maintain traditions based on hundreds of years of genocide, theft, rape, humiliation and hypocrisy? Is it the freedom to protect respectability for the forces of conservatism: social, political, academic conservatism: the conservation of bloody, terrifying, life-denying, arrogant traditions of a self-appointed elite of the world?... Show me the freedom that this University upholds: show it to me in its admissions policies. Show it to me in its financial aid programs. Show it to me in its curriculum, in its required readings, in the color, the sex, the viewpoints of its faculty. Show me this freedom that this institutions holds dear.” She offered an example for learning, living, and questioning in larger institutional contexts.

And she always wrote about love, be it in a whole book of love poems, Haruko, or her constantly asking, Where is the love? Do you know what you are fighting for as well as what you are fighting against? She wrote, “I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.” (219) It was love, in her unsentimental vision, that could blaze a path through a world in which multiple-scale violence is the rule.

I want to read some of Jordan’s poems and some of my own which I feel are in the spirit of her work and example. She wrote, “We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.” (284) That “we” is the site of Jordan’s poetry, over and over again, real we’s of the individuals and communities she has worked with, and imagined we’s of the difficult but optimistic future that calls for our clear-eyed love and bravery.