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LATEST NEWS!
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel.
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Langston Hughes National Poetry Project
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EXCERPTS FROM 'THE KATRINA PAPERS' By Professor Jerry W. Ward, Jr. |
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April 4, 2006
On April 3, 2006 you had to contemplate emptiness, the oddly bounded space of air in the Grand Canyon. You have been near the Grand Canyon. You did not have time during your last visit to Arizona to have the eyegasm of viewing this natural wonder. You view it in your head. The spacescape is composed of memories of National Geographic photgraphs and frames from various films. Your visual recall is superior to your memory of the steak you had in Chicago for your 22nd birthday. Yes, taking out debris from your house yesterday dredged up the young you and your solitary celebration of being 22. If you want to know why that should have happened, ask God. Do not ask me. I have little patience when it comes to explaining emptiness to people. Most people can not deal with the topic without assuming a fatal fetal position.
The house is almost completely empty of contents. The workers have begun to tear up the ruined floors. They will attack the mole-infested walls next. They will destroy closets in order to make them new. They will destroy the smell of dying in the house.The house is being robbed of its integrity, its personality. However good it might look in late summer ---providing, of course, that the hurricane season does not finish what Katrina, Rita, and inadequate levees and floodwalls tried to accomplish in August 2005---it will not look right. However good it might look, it will only be a costumed ghost of the home you first slept in, in June 2003. The new walls and new floor and new electric wires will have no memory of the jubilation when 50 or 60 friends came in 2003 to warm the house. The new walls will speak post-Katrina, a language of emptiness that is intimate and vulgar. They will address, in late summer, the most dysfunctional aspects of the transforming New Orleans and their anger that the wrong person was elected mayor. They will only speak if weather does not make you homeless and houseless yet once more.
A friend remined you on Sunday that nature will continue to sponsor hurricanes in the Gulf Coast region. He said those of us who rush to repair may live to regret.
Please. May we have one regret now and deal with regrets to come when they arrive?
Yesterday, I regretted discarding five boxes of LPs. These were choice albums I spent more than forty years collecting. With dry eyes and a wet heart, I consign my music to the curbside. My music is trash. LPs, cassettes, and many CDs have become trash. Emptiness pains like a fishbone caught in the throat. You can have more CDs, but you are not fond of CDs. Aretha Franklin does not sound right on a CD. She sounds corrected. So too do Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. "Cold Shot." Perhaps classical music sounds very good on a CD. Classical music is, after all, hypercorrect. But Clifford Brown, Buddy Guy, Esther Phillips, Lynn Gold, Cassandra Wilson, Jerry Butler, the soundtracks of The Color Purple and For Colored Girls.. and Shaft, and Tommy James and the Shantells are not hypercorrect. They, the recorded traces of their creation, are human in the grooves. When you want to hear Roland Kirk's Oleo, you must hear the grooves and scratches. It took you twenty years to begin to understand the musical structures of Oleo, and you do not want to have that pain and pleasure cheapened by a CD. Only the original recording of "Crystal Blue Persuasion" can evoke the heat, sweat, terror,and comrades of Viet Nam. It was in Viet Nam that you first hear the song. And you were so overjoyed when you found the recording for $5.00 at a flea market in Jackson, Mississippi. All you have now are aurally unsatisfactory CDs.
Damn you. Grow up. Admit only live music is really worth the listening.
Today you regret that yesterday you threw away all the volumes of poetry you had collected since 1969. You are deeply hurt that all the signed copies of books by Margaret Walker were destroyed. I suppose you can live on the memory of having had long telephone conversations with Margaret about Demonic Genius. The rare and valuable sit in disgrace on many curbsides in New Orleans. Fanon's title The Wretched of the Earth (it sounds so much better if you translate the original French title as "The Damned of the Earth") wounds you again and again.
Some of your neighbors are more wretched than you are. Remember that.
To hell with memory. Memory does not recover your collection of OBSIDIAN. Memory does not restore your issues of Negro American Literature Forum, CLA Journal, African American Review, Negro Digest/Black World, New Literary History, Southern Quarterly. You will never again have your precious Black Box cassettes. It is strange. Emptiness fills you. It is strange. As you dump one load of the poetry chapbooks and poetry volumes from the wheelbarrow, two chapbooks fly to the sidewalk. They are works by Dudley Randall and Audre Lorde. You lovingly gather them up for deposit in a safe, dry place. There is a message here. The English language needs a new word: MISSAGE. The second message is this: For several years you had considered starting the Project on the History of Black Writing database by using your collection of hard -to-find or totally limited, self-published poetry books. The dream deferred is now your dream destroyed. Live with the emptiness.
Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers (who had very weird notions about what New Orleans deserved). They laugh at hubris. They laugh at you. Water invades your eyeballs. Man and nature have conspired to leave a grand canyon in your person. They have stolen years of investment. You are 22 again in the plenitude that is not. Now, go and find comfort. Given that you find hope meaningless and disgusting, hang on to charity and faith. You were able to write this in the emptiness of your house. Have faith. It will be an act of charity when something slouches into New Orleans to fill your grand canyon of emptiness.
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January 16, 2006: Dreamers Die Young; Dreams Die Eventually
One of the more compelling editorials to appear on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is Cynthia Tucker’s “Did King die so thug culture could live?” [The Times-Picayune, January 16, 2006, p. B-5] My automatic answer to the questioning title is YES. When King was assassinated in 1968, there was no thug culture as we now know it. Thugs have existed for eons. A few outlaws have achieved international fame. Brotherhoods and sisterhoods of the criminal have flourished for centuries in hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. They were a part of human cultures, but they were not generally discussed as a discrete culture. Prior to the late twentieth century, none of the thugs lived in “hoods,” although some of them wore hoods. They were not commercial objects to be sold back to themselves in the forms of expensive but trashy fashions and overpriced CDs that preserve and broadcast dubious talent. Martin Luther King, Jr. died because he, and thousands of other unnamed people, confronted the hypocrisy of the United States and demanded Freedom. Freedom embraces thug culture. Ms. Tucker’s calculated framing of the question by way of contextual displacement invites ironic affirmation.
Ms. Tucker’s indirect answer to her question is NO. She does not wish to consider that in time ultimate sacrifices may slip into the category of things done in vain. She wishes to protect the glory of the sacrifice against erosion. To be sure, King did not die so the clever and greedy might more easily exploit the oppressed. She castigates affluent blacks for pimping and earning handsome profits from the lawlessness and the outlaw choices of some young black women and men. She fails, however, to criticize the source: white, corporate America, the major sponsor of benign genocide. Pimps, we should recall, are themselves pimped by systems. “The popularity of thug culture” Tucker claims, “is among the most serious of modern-day threats to black America, far more dangerous than any lingering institutional racism.” In this sentence, the weakness of Tucker’s informal analysis erupts like a boil. Institutional racism is the very backbone of the industry that champions and valorizes thug culture. That some presumably intelligent African Americans should be gears in the machinery of institutional racism is not astonishing. They have embraced the current version of the American Dream. After all, they have no obligations under the laws of brute economy to be more noble than Africans who sold other Africans to Europeans. If Reginald Hudlin and Tracey Edmonds and the non-black black-oriented BET celebrate Kimberly Jones (aka Lil’ Kim) for her crimes, they are acting in ways that historical narratives allow us to predict. Although King did not include either thug culture or racial treason or sinister commodification in his dream-script, these things are undeniable components of our post-1968 America.
Ms. Tucker’s juxtaposing the memory of King’s death with the success of trafficking in lawlessness is sobering. It is regrettable, on the other hand, that she failed to place the abuse of King’s sacrifice in the context of the pervasive lawlessness that is honored at the highest level of American government and business. Her critique only urges us to recall that some dreamers die young and that their dreams eventually become material for nostalgia. Ms. Tucker teaches us a lesson that is probably quite remote from her intentions. History is a hurricane. It has no respect for the integrity of dreams or dreamers.
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December 22, 2005: Why Celebrate Kwanzaa?
It is 11:04 am. The air is cold. The sun is bright in Vicksburg. It is less than 72 hours before Christmas Day 2005, the day when the bright eyes of children who are still capable of being surprised are surprised. I shall be glad when December 26 arrives, bringing with it the colors and purposeful celebration of Kwanzaa and the eyes of children and adults, the eyes so utterly conflicted as they search for meaning. The eyes that interest me are those of people displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the eyes of children orphaned in the Sudan, in Calcutta and Jerusalem, in Iraq, in stranger places where they are subject to be auctioned off for adoption or something worse, or terminated if they annoy the tourists too much. Eyes that speak loudly of hunger and wrecked spirits. The eyes of people who are out of work, out of homes, out of love, and damn near out of hope. As I look at the world through those eyes, the signs of Christmas seem to be grotesque, obscene, on the brink of being Satanic. St. Nicholas the obese and Santa Claus the drunk and the excessive costs of commercial bread and wine. The truly wretched of the earth can not afford the price of such communion.
The cold air and the bright sunshine and the decorations on the apartments of neighbors do not remind me of a yam festival. In fact, overcoat, scarf, gloves and a grinning reindeer look slightly out-of-place at a yam festival. Nor do miles of gift-wrapping paper, bows and ribbons, and Hallmark messages belong to the same space as the fruits of the harvest. For once, be for real. Strings of lights and costly trinkets made in China or Japan are not life-saving; yams are. I render unto Christmas what belongs to Christmas: worship at Mass and prayers that the Prince of Peace will one day deliver what has been promised. The silence of night in New Orleans is an echo of pain. Kwanzaa offers the possibility of finding a healing balm.
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December 6, 2005: Reckoning with Displacement
People are possessed by hope, sensing at once its promise and its futility. One hopes to resolves economic difficulties by winning several million dollars. The probability that one can warp from poverty to wealth overnight is farfetched , a transparent fantasy. One might hope that tribesmen, dusted by Islam, would honor the Words of Allah and not murder , in the name of honor, women they believe have been violated . It is unlikely such virtue can unsettle the male-defined tribal mind. One does not discard root and branch an idea that has been growing since the invention of antiquity. In the fervent mind of the tribesmen, the hymen must be either intact or totipotent.
When such brave Muslim women as Serap Cileli (We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor) and Necla Kelek (The Foreign Bride) expose mortal sins, we may hope the lesson is not lost on Euroamerian wife-abusers. Hope on. The words of those who dissent, who transgress the pseudo-sacred, receive scant attention. Their words are hangnails to be clipped and discarded. Nevertheless, in our brave new world of electronic possibilities, hope refuses to die. It is brash and determined and survival-oriented. It lives.
One might hope that ordinary civilians would not become the collateral damage of warfare, knowing even in the moment of hoping that the God of War is blind and thirsty, incapable of discriminating the blood of the innocent from the wine of the guilty. Hope is absurd. Strangely, it is within the hopeless confines of the absurd that one hopes to find meaning in exile, in the diaspora occasioned by Hurricane Katrina.
From the vantage of a writer, the lack of a good library, or the pain of not having one’s dearly loved books at hand, is a bittersweet blessing. The writer in exile recalls that other writers have sometimes volunteered to exile themselves in artist and writer colonies. This places exile in arguable perspective. The disadvantages of forced exile, you can freely lie to yourself, are sweeter and yield higher dividends. Matthew Arnold thought sweetness and light were primal ingredients of the civilized mind. He was dead wrong. The truly civilized mind is a product of recurring darkness. It can not flourish where the dirt is not as saturated with bitter toxins like the soil of post-Katrina New Orleans. Examine the fabulous textures of writers exiled from the Crescent City for evidence. Or explore the weavings of writers who have returned to the Big Easy to create in the moldy stench, in an “exile” from the normal.
The writer in exile becomes a rabbit. She or he navigates the briar patch of memory. The rabbit does not forget convoluted paths, the tracks of reading and witnessing that have become matters of instinct. The rabbit remembers the lettuce of the King James Bible and munches on the carrots of expanding canons. Emersonian self-reliance increases tenfold and enables the rabbit to explore geographies of imagination. There critical foxes do not run you down and snap your neck. There you are immune to the intimidation of the book, to its power to batter you with exactness. You hop blissfully over alien terrain. The rabbit remembers what is most worth remembering.
Exile forces the writer to live outside the box, to be remote from textual or referential certitude. The writer has hope that odd combinations in a new context do work.
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October 8: When Music is a Poet's Tool
"Rising from the ashes," my friend Alice said, "is a hard job when everything is wet." Creating the poem is hard too when your spirits are soaked by tragedy. Turmoil , if you don't fight the feeling, will assassinate imagination. "What do you do to relax," Alice asks, "until the inner turmoil settles enough to function?" Go to war. Kick ass. Fight the evil stimuli. Listen to music, to jazz, to blues. If there is no electricity, sit in the dark and play your memory of "Backwater Blues," "So What?," "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On," "I'd Rather be Blind," "Take the A Train," or "A Love Supreme." If all that is brewing in your head is Sarah Vaughn's "Black Coffee," use it.
Tame turmoil. Transform all that bile-flavored anger and anxiety into words. Vent. Review the outburst to discover the pattern the turmoil never told you it had. Reshape the pattern into stanzas or lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narratives. Polish. Repolish. Publish.
There are times when poems must respond to natural disasters and subsequent pandemics, to the reflux acid of war, racism genocide. At those times, it is only normal for poets to let the turmoil roll. If you want a poem rather than the droppings of a vatic pigeon, you must dance in a music that takes you to the other side of natural disaster and national tragedy.
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September 30: Hurricane: A Matrix of Stories
In those brief, rare moments since August 29, 2005 when I am my old academic self, unburdened with sorrows and walking on a tightrope of despair, I allow myself to think about the origins and importance of stories. In the unsettling aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, my focus is on narratives and natural disasters. Mark Twain delivered a mouthful of truth when he proclaimed that nothing in our country is as interesting as the human mind. Despite the unprecedented damage and displacement that Hurricane Katrina and her sister Hurricane Rita accomplished, the minds and bottomless imaginations of survivors prevailed. The minds refused to release their grips on dreams of life, refused to cast faith in God and themselves to the winds. Women, men, and children survived. They told stories. They are telling stories. Those who survived and actively rebuilding are telling stories. And in the future those stories will become more elaborate and more polished and more suspect. That is not what is most important. What is most valuable is the fact that germs of great literature are preserved in raw, passionate, uncensored stories of survival rather than in media-constructed stories about survival.
The first type, in addition to the narratives of local victims and evacuees, must include the immediate stories of newspersons who defied the most basic human instinct and became intimate witnesses. The latter type is marked by the reporter’s sense of what is a “good” story, the newsworthy replete with inventions, ideological and political baggage, unverifiable rumors, threadbare stereotypes, angles and staging, cosmetic departures from “truth.“ The former is marked by the sense that story and survival into a future are symbiotic. The types are not discrete, because there is much overlapping of formal and emotive features. What emerges out of the matrix of natural disasters must be “messy” and generically unstable. We are still in the whirlwind of production. We know what seems to be happening, but we are incapable of seeing and naming the phenomena rationally. We are, truth be told, enslaved by habit and process, and tempted to theorize and interpret too soon. There is virtue still in the caution that one must have distance in order to render judgment. It is difficult , however, for literary scholars and scholars who do work in cultural studies to avoid the desire to construct metanarratives. We tend to want to be on the cutting edge of the action.
Perhaps we would do well to resist our acquired, self-conscious tendencies and test our abilities to do some preternatural listening to the rich multitude of stories issuing from the matrix of hurricanes. Perhaps a renewed appreciation for the power of story will come from the sympathetic ear given to the tale of spending twenty-six or more hours in a fetid attic with roaches and no water and no ax to break through the roof and being saved by the providence of a neighbor, who did have an ax, who returned in a boat, heard your cries, chopped a hole in the roof and transported you to an evacuation station; the outraged narrative of a woman who trudged through a water-logged New Orleans with family and friends --- a band of criminals in the eyes of some who had the authority and means to rescue them, endured many indignities because she was female and non-white, suffered the crowdedness, stench, hunger, heat, and frustrated displays of self-centeredness and ill-temper among strangers, and reluctantly accepted deportation to where she did not wish to go; the stories that evoke parallels between the New Orleans Superdome and Dante’s Inferno; the less frequently broadcast testimonials of people from the Mississippi Gulf Coast , from Texas, and from Mobile, Alabama; the pain-stitched final cries as water became their shrouds of the elderly and infirm abandoned in a nursing home. Perhaps our ears will reach into our hearts and bless us with an humble wisdom we have never known.
Perhaps those of us associated with the Project on the History of Black Writing can win something genuine and deeply humanizing from listening to or reading the emerging stories of people and natural disasters. These stories, I admit, may be neither breathtakingly “literary” nor “aesthetic” nor “original.”
They are simply real. They are the primary materials in the matrix of story that give evidence of how human beings always use languages to depict situatedness and resilience. It is out of such materials that we should seek to forge our literary and cultural histories. Privileged gazes upon the matrix without human feelings may only lead to curious rewritings of Sister Gertrude Morgan’s stunning statement: “I was so busy with the Lord, I didn’t notice the house across the street had burned.”
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