There was this movie once. I can't remember the name of it - about a kid in a writing program. It had a big old house, a bunch of smart, good looking students, a brilliant, intimidating professor and the world of English Lit. For me at the time, that was a guaranteed hit. I have been, at many points in my life, very introspective. I expect that's one of the reasons I write.
I was talking literature with my boy Jimi the other day and I was struck by how much time has gone by since I was deeply motivated to write in other ways and forms than I do now with my blogging and whatnot. The same conversation made me think about what I read as well. And with specific regard to my attitude on black cultural production, an attitude I adopted at the very beginning of the 90s, I am a bit surprised to see how much I have changed. What are my expectations of literature and how have they changed?
I can remember something that marked me back in the day which had everything to do with being wrapped up in a black world. I have always been very pro-integration, because it had always seemed to me that unless and until there was a critical mass of blackfolks present, I couldn't fully be myself. It was something of a contradiction at the time, I now recognize, because most of the time I wanted to stand out in the black crowd in a classic Talented Tenth fashion. I suppose it was mostly a matter of comfort, but it might have been something less innocent. Today, I have no problem being the singleton black, and it's often the case. Then I wanted more blackfolks to represent even, and probably especially if they were different kinds of blackfolks than me.
Despite an early and well beaten-into-me understanding that there was no black American monolith in class or values, I did expect and still do expect certain fundaments to be shared amongst all. I have grown to call that thing, 'the sound of the drum' and in literary form it begins with Carter G. Woodson's 'The Miseducation of the Negro'. Oddly enough, I never read the book - I understood it implicitly by the way I was explicitly raised. I have thus never had the identity crisis I think most average blackfolks have to deal with which in any way gives white supremacy charge over their soul. While I can remember avoiding looking into the eyes of whites as a young child, it is a distant memory. I retain therefore a kind of skepticism of those who complain about black images in new and old media. (Apropos of those now raising a fuss over some Japanese cell phone commercial). Interestingly enough, I can remember when AT&T made a similar error back in 1993. We had a big hash about that in the good old days. I wouldn't go as far as boycott, and that was directly related to the extent to which:
- Blacks had achieved enough righteous identity not to be insulted.
- Blacks had recognized how insignificant such publications were.
- Blacks had their own [counter-]narrative of positive identity.
This is primarily leveraged by item three, and thus black literature was key. But beyond that was and still is the problem of media representations. Despite the fact that such retarded messages should not disable us personally, there is nevertheless, power in their distribution. I liken it to the fact of Gilligan's Island. Sure there's Shakespeare out there, but Shakespeare doesn't move the crowd like the Professor and Mary Ann. What's real about shady stereotypes is that they move the crowd and relatively few of us can move in a straight line against the mob. During my upbringing, I was still very close to the initial establishment of a proper study of African Americans in higher education, and so black cultural production was a very serious consideration for me.
As Cobb readers know, my expectations were rather dashed by the rise of vulgar hiphop and the failure of writers in my generation to capture the American imagination as had Wright and Baldwin, et al in prior generations. In a certain way, that should have been expected. The invention of the black man, beyond the New Negro, was a fait accompli. What more did that black man need? An entire blackity black world? I think not. But one cannot *ever*, I think, dismiss the strength of the optimism and energy brought to America by the confidence of the first post-Civil Rights generation, my peers and cohort. And out of the despair of 1968, a few years later we were a new America, and it surely wasn't all Reagan's doing. I think of the film Fame as the symbolic turning point and emblematic of my generation. It became and enduring theme of hard work, creative energy and optimism. We were going to live forever. That was good. We embraced America as a land of opportunity, and yet so many turned so sour so soon afterwards. One decade later Irene Cara was broke and Ice Cube was getting rich.
At that moment in my life when I felt that the popular culture was going bad, I looked for the highbrow to save us. I was guided by several literate threads. One of the critical race theorists, primarily Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Cornel West. One by the Culturalists on both sides of E. D. Hisrch. One by the IT revolution and my industrial peers as led by the Wellperns and the doyennes of Wired Magazine and panix.com. I was halfway right and gave up the Left half of those threads after spending more energy on them than I care to admit. But while I was in the middle of it, I had set out to write my great American novel, and it was one that presumed the success of my generation's exuberance, leavened by the choices of many factions within us and its cost to the unity that once was blackness. Unfortunately for me, it happened just before the LA Riots - which essentially destroyed all prior buoyant fictions and generated its own hegemony of doom. As I think about it now, I'm in a much better position to write that old book but I perish the thought.
In the post apocalyptic mindstate of the emergent Gangsta I felt a smaller part of a sane generation of black creatives who still needed a great deal of exposure. It was at that moment I expected to find some coterie of similar souls. It was at that moment when I began to approach the edge of merging my avocation and vocation - of using what technological skills I had gained to date and plunge them all into the service of a new media literature. I looked to pioneers at Voyager, and revered the new PowerMacs and looked for a multimedia escape from the increasingly dank dungeons of hiphop. For some reason, I thought the world was waiting for that. Living in NY can skew one's sense of perspective in that regard. Ultimately, I found little more than the same ex-drug dealer producers and the sorts at MTV who would make Kevin Powell a star.
Not to say there weren't bright spots. They were only pinpricks in the heavens when I expected kleig lights in the cities. High Cotton was the autobiography that felt closest to the flavor of my life, and it still continues to astonish me at how individual I have become. The amount of dissonance that has snuck in stolen away the easy existential partnership of the Talented Tenth - those expected to take from the literate treasure and meliorate glibly to the masses. A million grunts and 'uh' to the beat has become signal. The last time I hung out with Trey Ellis and Ishmael Reed in Boston, they didn't even know we were brothers. The last time I spoke to Charles Johnson in Brooklyn he assumed I wouldn't be interested in reading what he was reading. The last time I rapped with Haile Gerima we were a covey of 12 and he was waxing rhapsodic about opening night for Sankofa in Berlin. The first time I met Cornel West, he was astonished that I would bother to read all his stuff. I have a feeling that we're all shy, disarmed and dissembling in the street - we intellectual types have been housed on academic and media plantations and the only place we feel comfy to speak plainly as equals are still in blue light basement parties and bought out convention centers. God bless Jeremiah Wright. God bless Angela Davis. God bless Clarence Thomas. They never cared who you thought you might be - it was never in play for them. They have their vectors.
It's a young writer's dream to come correct with a cadre. Now I only try to insure that I don't get polluted by ambition that's not quite mine. Not that I have such a well crafted idea of what all my writing is supposed to mean in the end. I'm unlucky that way, in the same way that Wynton Marsalis is lucky. The last time I shook his hand, he was at ease and cordial. He and blown his horn and the evanescence of the performance was said and done, forever evaporated into the space time continuum, never to be spat back inquisition-like with a who knew what and when. You either got it in the moment or you didn't. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do blogging every day. To write in the moment.
If literature is to stand the test of time, then perhaps being true to the moment is good for a history. But I started thinking that I was to extend the sound of the drum. That I would teach and lead. And that is the great deception of the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth. They were crafted in an age less fully mobile and modern than ours, when the majority of the society available to an educated black man was not only degenerate but mostly indigent and left outside of the mainstream to rot. But now black women in plastic shoes fly thousands of miles for a week's salary.
I cannot forget and we cannot forget we are literate. And we cannot presume that what has been written has not been read. Nor can we presume that the desire to know is destroyed by some existential hunger or oppression. We find out what we want to find out, and we find ourselves there. Those who won't reach out and those who don't speak out - well we can only assume it is their choice to not communicate. I feel the need for a directive slipping away, because in fact life is simple and good. The sound of the drum is out there - if you don't understand me, it's your fault.
I have, we all have, dozens of generations of English literature with which to inform our world, 1000 channel on TV and a couple hundred more on satellite radio. We have a culture which is advancing toward multi-lingual pan literacy, global in nature because the smart money is already there. I have ceased looking blackwards towards the same 30 ideas, men and women. And I have stopped believing that those needing work are going to get worked so very well. That is, I think, a boat whose crew and passengers will have to work that out for themselves. I have taken a lifeboat and wished them well because I have become convinced they are sailing in circles and will never purchase land. In the meantime is the moment. I'm living in the moment.
Literature is not a means to a collective end. That's entertainment or propaganda. The rest is all on you.
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