Some time ago, it was 1991 I think, I can never seem to remember exactly in calendar terms, I moved to Brooklyn. I had been a performance poet in the LA scene and along with my fairly mature programming skills I was adding writing skills. I would bet there was even a time when I considered going to one of those writing programs. In retrospect, it's rather a good thing I didn't considering the life I have, but then again who's to say I'd want this one had I gone? Still, there were few things more exciting to me than landing in the Big City of Dreams with a book of rhymes and a heart full of passion.
Like most people I knew, I read the Village Voice. Like few people I knew, I read The Nation. Having not gone to Boston College or some such, I rather wished that The Nation ran personal ads. It was very difficult for me to find the right kind of mate. Yet and still, I managed to begin to ingratiate myself into that which I assumed to be the most intellectually advanced and progressive literary scene in the New World Afrikan diaspora. If there was a MA beneath your dreads, I was bound to get your phone number. Like most folks of this stripe, I read Greg Tate on the regular. As well, Lisa Smith's words tugged at me. It started when I began reading Toni Morrison a couple years earlier - an old story I'm sure I've told here too many times. I wanted to be a part of the great black literate scene. I ended up in Boston a couple years later trying to do multimedia and then gave the whole thing up when I recognized what hiphop had done to the egos of people in the proto-digital studios of the world. There was no way I was working for those fools. I soon realized it was the case for all creatives even though De La had spelled it out clearly years earlier - it's a full time era. Part timers like me were not welcome.
If I learned anything from those years it's that only critics write for free. In that respect, you get what you pay fore and you can dismiss the whole of the internet. And it is this axiom that best explains why at this late date that I feel strangely isolated from the world of black literary geniuses I loved so much 20 years ago. The only place I've met Stanley Crouch is in the aggregations of Booker Rising. And I don't expect that I ever will, because this is what I firmly believe: black writers cannot afford to write for free and that's why Jimi Izrael's blog gets shorter and shorter. That's why Michael Thelwell, a man whose writing blew my mind in an anthology by Gerald Early, has disappeared from sight. That's why Brent Staples, the man I really want to hear say something about Trinity Church is silent. Ain't nobody paying him to say so. Why would any of those writers condescend to write for free on the Internet?
Well, once upon a time I thought it would be for the love of writing, but apparently Sting's aphorism doesn't apply. If you love something, don't set it free, pimp it out.
Every six months or so I feel the itch. You know, to completely abandon the Web and write a book - take a year or so and get that game on. But I don't have that kind of time because I have a real job. And yet I think of men who have written thirty and forty books. In the end, it's a matter of what's important.
I'm a salon kind of guy. I love good company. And I think some days I'd like to have my own. If I had *that dinner* I can imagine sitting down with Jimi and Farai and Albert Murray and a bunch of others to hash things. I'd have to have Elvis Mitchell there and maybe Delroy Lindo. They say talk is cheap, but attention is very precious. It's all but impossible to get that kind of attention in one place to talk for free. Somehow I expected that to happen in black salons on the web, and as much as I love hosting Cobb I can't help but think somedays that we're across an insuperable gap.
I have been thinking about the extent to which it is a foolish vanity to have a certain quote about me in my intro. The Good Doctor and my friend Lester Spence has called me the Ralph Ellison of my generation. It is perhaps regrettable, I'm not sure that I have earned that, nor is it clear to me that my generation needs a Ralph Ellison. At the very least Ellison was formally published and I am not. So I'll remove that with no disrespect, and much thanks for the sentiment.
So this weekend, I looked at my 'incredible hyperbio', a collection of about 180 phrases about my life split up into 10 periods and began to flesh out the 180 stories behind them. It's time to admit, I think, how my life has led me to become the Lonely Man that I must finally admit that I am. The working title of my book is 'Up From Freedom' and I hope to illustrate how, at long last, I have acquired the mental liberation I believe that I possess. In short, it is a process of unlearning and appreciating from a distance - of becoming unblack in order to truly and reflectively appreciating what blackness is rather than staying in the grip of blackness and wishing yourself and all other blacks into impossible contortions. The hypocrites have company, I have a copy of 'The Magic Mountain' unread on the shelf. I know where I'm from and I have a feeling that I'm going into my old age with very few friends precisely because I have decided to make my life make sense to me. There will be contradictions.
I think in that way, black writers disappear. If my book would have a poem as a preface it would certainly be Nikki Giovanni's Revolutionary Dreams. This week people have been talking about LeBron James and whether or not he was posed properly for the cover of Vogue Magazine. Last week people were complaining about whether we should take Barack Obama's preacher seriously. I don't need a third sign to tell me that my generation does not need a Ralph Ellison. I simply cannot care about race any longer. I am now simply negotiating whether or not it has been a waste of time in my life. Writing must be an elevating activity in and of itself and if it works one must finally be rid of the covered subjects or be faced with the failure of writing. Either alternative is harsh but at least there is a lesson learned. And I believe that all of the black writers disappear from the dark subjects or remain living in the past. Spence illustrated that clearly of Amiri Baraka in consideration of his first generation mau mau politics. And now Kwame Kilpatrick has sealed the tomb of black power. It's overcooked. It's overwrought. It's over.
For me, I will be good for a half generation. And then, like Ellison perhaps, I might live to see myself irrelevant. I am to be a bouy around rocks in soupy seas to be sure, but I expect the trade routes of race to change and what I fathom to be eventually only curious. The black writer disappears in the same way the black bourgie disappears to the ghetto. He cannot survive talking about what he is to those who are not. That's sick and twisted. He must be amongst the living, no matter how small those square feet might be. Let the critics retrace my steps. I have a future to face.
Recent Comments