American Ethnic Writers
MAGILL’S C H O I C E
American Ethnic Writers
Editors, Revised Edition
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American Ethnic Writers
MAGILL’S C H O I C E
American Ethnic Writers
Editors, Revised Edition
The Editors of Salem Press Editor, First Edition
David Peck California State University, Long Beach
SALEM PRESS, INC. Pasadena, California Hackensack, New Jersey
Cover image: Ejla/Dreamstime.com
Copyright © 2000, 2009, by Salem Press, Inc. All rights in this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the publisher, Salem Press, Inc., P.O. Box 50062, Pasadena, California 91115. These essays originally appeared in Issues and Identities in Literature (1997), edited by David Peck; Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition (2003); Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2000); Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002); Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition (2003); Magill Book Reviews (online); Magill's Survey of American Literature (2006); Masterplots II, African American Literature Series (1994); Masterplots II, Women's Literature Series (1995); Notable African American Writers (2006); and Notable Latino Writers (2005). New material has been added. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American ethnic writers / editors, the editors of Salem Press. — Rev. ed. p. cm. — (Magill’s choice) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58765-462-6 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-463-3 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-464-0 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58765-465-7 (vol. 3 : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Minority authors—Bio-bibliography— Dictionaries. 2. Minority authors—United States—Biography—Dictionaries. 3. Ethnic groups in literature—Dictionaries. 4. Minorities in literature—Dictionaries. I. Salem Press. PS153.M56A414 2008 810.9′920693—dc22 2008018357 First Printing
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Contents Publisher’s Note . . . . . . . . . . xix List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . xxi Pronunciation Guide . . . . . . . xxix
¡Yo! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 In the Name of Salomé . . . . . . . . 33
Rudolfo A. Anaya. . . . . . . . . . 35 Bless Me, Ultima . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Heart of Aztlán . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Tortuga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Cruelty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Greed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Maya Angelou . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Meena Alexander . . . . . . . . . . 5
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings . . . . . . . . . . . . All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes . . . . . . I Shall Not Be Moved . . . . . Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now. . . . . . . .
House of a Thousand Doors . . . . . . 6
Sherman Alexie . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . Reservation Blues . . . . . . Indian Killer. . . . . . . . . One Stick Song . . . . . . . Ten Little Indians . . . . . .
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10 11 12 12 13
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Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . 49 Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star . . . . 51 The Pentagonía . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
17 18 19 19
Molefi K. Asante . . . . . . . . . . 54 Erasing Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Jimmy Santiago Baca . . . . . . . 58 Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Black Mesa Poems . . . . . . . . . . 60 Working in the Dark . . . . . . . . . 61
Isabel Allende . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The House of the Spirits Of Love and Shadows . . Eva Luna . . . . . . . . The Infinite Plan . . . .
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The Promised Land . . . . . . . . . . 47
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Mary Antin . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Paula Gunn Allen. . . . . . . . . . 15 The Sacred Hoop . . . . . Spider Woman’s Granddaughters . . . . Grandmothers of the Light Life Is a Fatal Disease . . Off the Reservation . . . .
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22 23 24 25
James Baldwin . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Go Tell It on the Mountain The Amen Corner . . . . . Notes of a Native Son . . . Giovanni’s Room . . . . . Another Country . . . . .
Julia Alvarez . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 In the Time of the Butterflies . . . . . 29 v
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65 66 68 69 70
American Ethnic Writers 71 71 73 75 76 76
Edward Kamau Brathwaite . . . 114
Toni Cade Bambara . . . . . . . . 78
The Devil in Texas . . . . . . . . . . 124
The Fire Next Time . . . . . . . . “The Man Child” . . . . . . . . . “Going to Meet the Man” . . . . . “Sonny’s Blues” . . . . . . . . . The Evidence of Things Not Seen . The Price of the Ticket . . . . . . Gorilla, My Love . . . . . . “Medley” . . . . . . . . . . The Salt Eaters . . . . . . . “Raymond’s Run”. . . . . . Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions . . . . . . . . .
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The Arrivants . . Mother Poem. . . Sun Poem . . . . Middle Passages .
79 80 81 82
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116 119 120 121
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128 129 130 131 132
Sterling A. Brown . . . . . . . . . 141
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Slim Greer Poems . . . . . . Southern Road . . . . . . . . “The Last Ride of Wild Bill” “Remembering Nat Turner” .
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Before and After . . . . . . . . . . . 140 . . . .
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143 143 145 146
William Wells Brown . . . . . . . 147 The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave . . . . . . . . . 149 The American Fugitive in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Ed Bullins . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Dialect Determinism. . . . . The Twentieth Century Cycle Street Sounds . . . . . . . . The Taking of Miss Janie . . Boy x Man . . . . . . . . . .
Arna Bontemps . . . . . . . . . . 103 . . . . . .
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Rosellen Brown . . . . . . . . . . 138
The Adventures of Augie March . . . 98 Seize the Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Humboldt’s Gift . . . . . . . . . . . 100 More Die of Heartbreak . . . . . . . 101 . . . . . .
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Manchild in the Promised Land . . . 136
Saul Bellow . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
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Claude Brown . . . . . . . . . . . 135
88 88 90 91
The Plum Plum Pickers . . . . . . . . 96
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A Street in Bronzeville . . . “The Mother” . . . . . . . “We Real Cool” . . . . . . The Warpland Poems . . . “The Blackstone Rangers”.
Raymond Barrio . . . . . . . . . . 95
God Sends Sunday . . . “A Summer Tragedy” . Black Thunder . . . . . Drums at Dusk . . . . . Great Slave Narratives The Old South . . . . .
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Gwendolyn Brooks . . . . . . . . 126
Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 . . . .
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Aristeo Brito . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
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Blues People . . . . . . . . . . . The Baptism . . . . . . . . . . . . Dutchman . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The Screamers” . . . . . . . . . Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones . . . . . . . . . . Daggers and Javelins . . . . . . . Conversations with Amiri Baraka . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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105 105 107 107 108 109
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155 156 157 159 160
Carlos Bulosan . . . . . . . . . . 162 America Is in the Heart . . . . . . . 163
Julia de Burgos . . . . . . . . . . 165
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard . . . 111
“To Julia de Burgos” . . . . . . . . 166
Woman with Horns, and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Octavia E. Butler . . . . . . . . . 168 Kindred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 The Patternist Series . . . . . . . . . 170 vi
Contents The Xenogenesis Series . . . . . . . 172 Parable of the Sower . . . . . . . . 174
Alice Childress . . . . . . . . . . 225 Trouble in Mind . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Wedding Band . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Wine in the Wilderness . . . . . . . 229
Abraham Cahan. . . . . . . . . . 176 The Rise of David Levinsky . . . . . 177
Hortense Calisher . . . . . . . . . 179
Frank Chin . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 The Chickencoop Chinaman. . . . . 232 The Year of the Dragon . . . . . . . 233 Donald Duk . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
In the Palace of the Movie King . . . 181
Bebe Moore Campbell . . . . . . 182 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine . . . . . 183 Brothers and Sisters . . . . . . . . . 184 Singing in the Comeback Choir . . . 185
Lorene Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Louis H. Chu . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Eat a Bowl of Tea . . . . . . . . . . 237
Sandra Cisneros . . . . . . . . . . 239 The House on Mango Street . My Wicked, Wicked Ways . . Woman Hollering Creek . . . Loose Woman . . . . . . . .
Black Ice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 The Price of a Child . . . . . . . . . 190
Carlos Castaneda . . . . . . . . . 191 The Teachings of Don Juan . . . . . 194
Good Times . . . . . An Ordinary Woman. Two-Headed Woman Good Woman . . . . Quilting . . . . . . . The Terrible Stories .
Barbara Chase-Riboud . . . . . . 204 . . . .
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206 207 208 209
Denise Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . 210 The Last of the Menu Girls . . . . . 211 Face of an Angel. . . . . . . . . . . 211 . . . . . . . . .
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240 241 242 243
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249 251 251 252 252 252
Jesús Colón . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 A Puerto Rican in New York . . . . . 255
Lucha Corpi . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Delia’s Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Victor Hernández Cruz . . . . . . 259 Snaps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mainland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tropicalization . . . . . . . . . . By Lingual Wholes. . . . . . . . . “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” . . . . . . . . . . Rhythm, Content & Flavor . . . . Red Beans . . . . . . . . . . . . . Panoramas. . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mountain in the Sea. . . . . .
Charles Waddell Chesnutt . . . . 213 “The Goophered Grapevine” . “Po’ Sandy” . . . . . . . . . . “The Conjurer’s Revenge” . . “The Wife of His Youth” . . . “The Passing of Grandison” . . “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” . “Cicely’s Dream” . . . . . . . The House Behind the Cedars . The Marrow of Tradition . . .
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Lucille Clifton . . . . . . . . . . . 248
“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 . . . .
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Soul on Ice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Lorna Dee Cervantes . . . . . . . 201
Sally Hemings . . . . . . Valide . . . . . . . . . . Echo of Lions . . . . . . The President’s Daughter
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Eldridge Cleaver . . . . . . . . . 245
Ana Castillo . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 So Far from God. . . . . . . . . . . 198 Watercolor Women/Opaque Men. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
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215 216 217 218 219 220 220 221 223 vii
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260 261 262 262
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263 264 264 265 265
American Ethnic Writers
Countée Cullen . . . . . . . . . . 267 The Black Christ . . On These I Stand. . “Yet Do I Marvel” . “Heritage” . . . . .
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Rita Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
269 271 272 273
Grace Notes . . . . . . Through the Ivory Gate Mother Love . . . . . . The Yellow House on the Corner . . . . . Museum . . . . . . . . Thomas and Beulah . .
Nicholas Dante . . . . . . . . . . 275 A Chorus Line . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
Angela Davis. . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Angela Davis . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
The Philadelphia Negro . . . . The Souls of Black Folk . . . . Black Reconstruction . . . . . The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . . . . . . . .
. . 284 . . 286 . . 287 . . 288 . . 289
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Lyrics of Lowly Life . . . . . . Folks from Dixie . . . . . . . . Lyrics of the Hearthside . . . . The Strength of Gideon . . . . The Heart of Happy Hollow . . Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow
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293 294 294 295 296
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304 305 306 306
Frederick Douglass . . . . . . . . 308 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 My Bondage and My Freedom . . . 311 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
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329 332 334 336 337 337
Cornelius Eady . . . . . . . . . . 342 Kartunes . . . . . . . . . . . Victims of the Latest Dance Craze . . . . . . . . . . . The Gathering of My Name . You Don’t Miss Your Water . The Autobiography of a Jukebox. . . . . . . . . . Brutal Imagination . . . . .
Michael Dorris . . . . . . . . . . 303 . . . .
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Intercourse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
The Shining Town . . . . . . . . . . 300 Divine Comedy . . . . . . . . . . . 301 The Garden of Time . . . . . . . . . 301 . . . .
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Andrea Dworkin . . . . . . . . . 339
Owen Dodson . . . . . . . . . . . 298
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water . The Broken Cord. . . . . . . Working Men . . . . . . . . Cloud Chamber . . . . . . .
. . . 324 . . . 324 . . . 325
Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . 328
Toi Derricotte . . . . . . . . . . . 292 The Empress of the Death House. . . . . . . . . . Natural Birth . . . . . . . Captivity . . . . . . . . . . Tender . . . . . . . . . . . The Black Notebooks . . .
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W. E. B. Du Bois. . . . . . . . . . 322
Samuel R. Delany . . . . . . . . . 281 Dhalgren . . . . . . . . . . . . . Triton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tales of Nevèrÿon . . . . . . . . Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . The Motion of Light in Water . . Times Square Red, Times Square Blue . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Lonne Elder III . . . . . . . . . . 349 Ceremonies in Dark Old Men . . . . 350 Charades on East Fourth Street . . . 353
Stanley Elkin . . . . . . . . . . . 355 The Franchiser. . . . . . . . . . . . 356 The MacGuffin. . . . . . . . . . . . 357
Ralph Ellison . . . . . . . . . . . 359 Invisible Man . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 Going to the Territory . . . . . . . . 362 viii
Contents “Flying Home” . . . . . . . . . . . 362 Juneteenth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
Maria Irene Fornes . . . . . . . . 398
Louise Erdrich . . . . . . . . . . 365
Charles Fuller . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Love Medicine . . . . . The Beet Queen . . . . Tracks . . . . . . . . . “Where I Ought to Be” Baptism of Desire . . . The Bingo Palace . . . Tales of Burning Love . The Antelope Wife . . . Four Souls . . . . . . .
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The Conduct of Life . . . . . . . . . 400
366 367 368 368 369 370 371 371 372
The Brownsville Raid Zooman and the Sign A Soldier’s Play . . . We . . . . . . . . . .
Percival L. Everett . . . . . . . . 378 American Desert . . . . . . . . . . . 380 Damned If I Do . . . . . . . . . . . 381
Jessie Redmon Fauset. . . . . . . 382 . . . .
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Catherine Carmier . . . . . . Of Love and Dust . . . . . . Bloodline. . . . . . . . . . . “A Long Day in November”. “The Sky Is Gray” . . . . . . “Three Men” . . . . . . . . . “Bloodline” . . . . . . . . . “Just like a Tree” . . . . . . The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman . . . . . . . In My Father’s House . . . . A Gathering of Old Men . . . A Lesson Before Dying . . .
“Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” . . . . . . 376
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402 402 404 405
Ernest J. Gaines . . . . . . . . . . 407
Martín Espada . . . . . . . . . . 374
There Is Confusion. . . . Plum Bun . . . . . . . . The Chinaberry Tree. . . Comedy, American Style.
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383 384 385 386
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408 409 411 412 413 414 414 415
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416 417 418 419
Ernesto Galarza . . . . . . . . . . 421 Barrio Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Cristina García . . . . . . . . . . 425
Rosario Ferré . . . . . . . . . . . 388
Dreaming in Cuban . . . . . . . . . 426
The House on the Lagoon . . . . . . 389
Lionel G. García. . . . . . . . . . 428
Harvey Fierstein. . . . . . . . . . 391
Leaving Home . . . . . . . . . . . . 429
Torch Song Trilogy . . . . . . . . . 392
Rudolph Fisher . . . . . . . . . . 395 The Conjure-Man Dies . . . . . . . 396
Allen Ginsberg . . . . . . . . . . 437 Howl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439 Kaddish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. . . . . . . 431 The Signifying Monkey Loose Canons . . . . . Colored People . . . . The Future of the Race
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Nikki Giovanni . . . . . . . . . . 443
433 434 434 436
Black Feeling, Black Talk . . . . . . 444 Gemini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 My House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446 ix
American Ethnic Writers
. . . 448 . . . 448 . . . 449
Nightmare Begins Responsibility . . . . . . . . . . 489 Healing Song for the Inner Ear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 Songlines in Michaeltree . . . . . . 490
Joanne Greenberg. . . . . . . . . 451
Wilson Harris . . . . . . . . . . . 492
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 Of Such Small Differences . . . . . . 453
Fossil and Psyche . . . . . . . . . . 494 The Womb of Space . . . . . . . . . 494
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles . . . . . . . . . . . Racism 101 . . . . . . . . . . Blues: For All the Changes . .
. . . 447
Robert Hayden . . . . . . . . . . 497
Jessica Hagedorn . . . . . . . . . 455
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498
Dangerous Music . . . . . . . . . . 456 Danger and Beauty . . . . . . . . . 457 The Gangster of Love . . . . . . . . 458
Le Ly Hayslip . . . . . . . . . . . 501 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502
Janet Campbell Hale . . . . . . . 460
Oscar Hijuelos. . . . . . . . . . . 504
The Jailing of Cecelia Capture . . . 462
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505 The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien . . . . . . . . . 505 Mr. Ives’ Christmas . . . . . . . . . 506
Alex Haley . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 The Autobiography of Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 Roots: The Saga of an American Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
Chester Himes . . . . . . . . . . . 508
Virginia Hamilton. . . . . . . . . 468 Zeely . . . . . . . . . . . . . The House of Dies Drear . . The Planet of Junior Brown . M. C. Higgins the Great . . .
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Short Stories . . . Early Novels . . . Detective Novels. Autobiographies .
469 470 471 471
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510 513 513 516
Bell Hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 Ain’t I a Woman . . . . . . . . . . . 525 Yearning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
Langston Hughes . . . . . . . . . 529 The Big Sea . . . . . . . . . I Wonder as I Wander . . . . The Ways of White Folks . . Selected Poems of Langston Hughes . . . . . . . . . . Ask Your Mama . . . . . . . The Panther and the Lash . . The Return of Simple . . . .
Michael S. Harper. . . . . . . . . 485 . . . .
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Volcano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
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Garrett Kaoru Hongo. . . . . . . 520
In Mad Love and War . . . . . . . . 482 The Woman Who Fell from the Sky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483 . . . .
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Klail City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
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Joy Harjo . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
Dear John, Dear Coltrane. . . History Is Your Own Heartbeat Song: I Want a Witness . . . . Debridement . . . . . . . . . .
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Rolando Hinojosa . . . . . . . . . 517
Lorraine Hansberry. . . . . . . . 473 A Raisin in the Sun. . . . . . . . The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. . . . . . . . . . . . To Be Young, Gifted, and Black . Les Blancs . . . . . . . . . . . .
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486 487 488 489 x
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534 535 536 536
Contents
Zora Neale Hurston . . . . . . . . 538 “John Redding Goes to Sea” . . “Spunk” . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Sweat” . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jonah’s Gourd Vine . . . . . . . Their Eyes Were Watching God . Moses, Man of the Mountain . . Dust Tracks on a Road . . . . . Seraph on the Suwanee . . . . .
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Cynthia Kadohata. . . . . . . . . 591
539 540 541 542 543 544 545 545
The Floating World . . . . . . . . . 592 In the Heart of the Valley of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
William Melvin Kelley . . . . . . 595 A Different Drummer . . . . . A Drop of Patience . . . . . . dem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dunfords Travels Everywheres
David Henry Hwang . . . . . . . 547 The Dance and the Railroad. Family Devotions . . . . . . M. Butterfly . . . . . . . . . Bondage . . . . . . . . . . .
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Funnyhouse of a Negro . . . . . . The Owl Answers . . . . . . . . . A Rat’s Mass . . . . . . . . . . . . A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White . . . . . . . . . . .
Typical American . . . . . . . . . . 555 Mona in the Promised Land . . . . . 556 The Love Wife . . . . . . . . . . . . 557
At the Bottom of the River . Annie John . . . . . . . . . Lucy . . . . . . . . . . . . The Autobiography of My Mother . . . . . . .
Poet and Dancer . . . . . . . . . . . 561
Ha Jin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
Stride Toward Freedom . Letter from Birmingham City Jail . . . . . . . Why We Can’t Wait . . . A Testament of Hope. . .
Charles Johnson. . . . . . . . . . 567 . . . . .
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569 570 572 573 574
Holding the Line . . . . Homeland, and Other Stories . . . . . . . Animal Dreams . . . . Another America . . . . Pigs in Heaven. . . . . High Tide in Tucson . . The Poisonwood Bible .
Eva’s Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 582
June Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . 584 . . . .
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Barbara Kingsolver . . . . . . . . 622
Gayl Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581
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. 605
Green Grass, Running Water . . . . 620
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man . . . . . . . . 577 Along This Way . . . . . . . . . . . 578 Saint Peter Relates an Incident . . . 579
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. 602 . 603 . 604
Thomas King . . . . . . . . . . . 619
James Weldon Johnson . . . . . . 576
Some Changes . . . . Naming Our Destiny. Technical Difficulties Kissing God Goodbye
596 598 598 599
Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . . . 613
Under the Red Flag . . . . . . . . . 564 In the Pond . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 . . . . .
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Jamaica Kincaid. . . . . . . . . . 607
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala . . . . . . 559
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Adrienne Kennedy . . . . . . . . 601
548 550 550 551
Gish Jen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 554
Faith and the Good Thing . Oxherding Tale . . . . . . The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . Middle Passage . . . . . . Dreamer . . . . . . . . . .
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586 588 588 589
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624 625 625 626 627 627
Maxine Hong Kingston . . . . . . 630 The Woman Warrior . . . . . . . . . 631 China Men . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632 xi
American Ethnic Writers Tripmaster Monkey . . . . . . . . . 633 The Fifth Book of Peace . . . . . . . 635
Li-Young Lee . . . . . . . . . . . 686
Etheridge Knight . . . . . . . . . 637
Gerda Lerner . . . . . . . . . . . 689
“Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” . . . . . . . . . 639 “The Idea of Ancestry” . . . . . . . 640
The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . 691
The Winged Seed . . . . . . . . . . 687
Audre Lorde . . . . . . . . . . . . 693 The First Cities and Cables to Rage . . . . . . . . . . . . . From a Land Where Other People Live and Between Our Selves . . . . . . . . . . . Coal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cancer Journals. . . . . . . . Zami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Undersong . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance . . . . . . . . . . .
Joy Kogawa . . . . . . . . . . . . 642 Obasan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643
Yusef Komunyakaa . . . . . . . . 645 Copacetic . . . . . . . . Dien Cai Dau . . . . . . Neon Vernacular. . . . . Thieves of Paradise . . . Talking Dirty to the Gods Pleasure Dome . . . . .
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647 648 649 649 650 650
Jerzy Kosinski . . . . . . . . . . . 652
. 694
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695 696 697 698 698
. 700
Eduardo Machado . . . . . . . . 702
The Painted Bird. . . . . . . . . . . 654 Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 655
Gender-Bending Plays. . . . . . . . 704
Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . 706
Stanley Kunitz. . . . . . . . . . . 657
Home to Harlem . Banjo. . . . . . . Banana Bottom . Poetry . . . . . .
“Father and Son” . . . . . . . . . . 660 “Three Floors” . . . . . . . . . . . . 661
Tony Kushner . . . . . . . . . . . 663 Angels in America . . . . . . . . . . 665
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707 708 709 710
Reginald McKnight . . . . . . . . 713
Jhumpa Lahiri . . . . . . . . . . 667
“Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” . The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas . . . . . . . . . . “Quitting Smoking” . . . . . . “The White Boys” . . . . . . .
The Namesake . . . . . . . . . . . . 668
Nella Larsen . . . . . . . . . . . . 670 Quicksand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 671 Passing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 672
. . . 714 . . . 715 . . . 716 . . . 717
Terry McMillan . . . . . . . . . . 719
Evelyn Lau. . . . . . . . . . . . . 675
Mama . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disappearing Acts . . . . . . . Waiting to Exhale . . . . . . . How Stella Got Her Groove Back . . . . . . . . . . . . A Day Late and a Dollar Short The Interruption of Everything
Runaway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676 Fresh Girls, and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677
Wendy Law-Yone . . . . . . . . . 679 The Coffin Tree . . . . . . . . . . . 680 Irrawaddy Tango . . . . . . . . . . 681
. . . 720 . . . 721 . . . 721 . . . 722 . . . 723 . . . 723
Gus Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 683
D’Arcy McNickle . . . . . . . . . 725
China Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 684
The Surrounded . . . . . . . . . . . 726 Wind from an Enemy Sky . . . . . . 727 xii
Contents
James Alan McPherson . . . . . . 729 “Gold Coast” . . . . . . . . “A Solo Song: For Doc” . . . “Why I Like Country Music” “A Loaf of Bread” . . . . . .
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730 732 732 733
Haki R. Madhubuti . . . . . . . . 735 Think Black . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Pride . . . . . . . . . . . . Don’t Cry, Scream . . . . . . . . . We Walk the Way of the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Book of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors . . . . . . . . . . . . Heartlove . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. 736 . 737 . 739 . 740 . 742
Louise Meriwether . . . . . . . . 772 Fragments of the Ark . . . . . . . . 774
Arthur Miller . . . . . . . . . . . 775 Death of a Salesman . . . . . . . . . 777
Henry Miller. . . . . . . . . . . . 779 Tropic of Cancer. . . . . . . . . . . 782 Tropic of Capricorn . . . . . . . . . 783
Anchee Min . . . . . . . . . . . . 785 Red Azalea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786 Empress Orchid . . . . . . . . . . . 787
Nicholasa Mohr . . . . . . . . . . 789 El Bronx Remembered . . . . . . . . 790
. 742 . 743
N. Scott Momaday . . . . . . . . 792 House Made of Dawn . . . . . . . . 793 The Ancient Child . . . . . . . . . . 794 The Man Made of Words. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 795
Clarence Major . . . . . . . . . . 745 “An Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere” . . . . . Fun and Games . . . . . “My Mother and Mitch” . “Ten Pecan Pies” . . . . “Scat” . . . . . . . . . .
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746 746 747 748 748
Alejandro Morales . . . . . . . . 797 The Rag Doll Plagues . . . . . . . . 798
Toni Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . 800 The Bluest Eye . . Sula . . . . . . . Song of Solomon . Tar Baby . . . . . Beloved . . . . . Jazz . . . . . . . Paradise . . . . .
Bernard Malamud . . . . . . . . 750 The Natural . . . . . . . . . . . . . 751 The Assistant. . . . . . . . . . . . . 752 The Fixer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 753
Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 The Autobiography of Malcolm X . . . . . . . . . . . . 756 . . 759 . . 760 . . . . .
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762 763 764 765 765
Ved Mehta . . . . . . . . . . . . . 767 Continents of Exile . . . . . . . . . 768
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801 802 804 805 807 808 808
Walter Mosley . . . . . . . . . . . 810 A Little Yellow Dog . . . . . . . . . 813
Paule Marshall . . . . . . . . . . 758 Brown Girl, Brownstones . . . . Soul Clap Hands and Sing. . . . The Chosen Place, the Timeless People . . . . . . . . . . . . Praisesong for the Widow . . . . Reena, and Other Stories . . . . Merle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daughters . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Thylias Moss. . . . . . . . . . . . 814 Pyramid of Bone . . . . . . . . . . . 815 Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress . . . . . . 816
Bharati Mukherjee . . . . . . . . 817 The Middleman, and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 818 “The Management of Grief ” . . . . 818 The Holder of the World . . . . . . . 820
Albert Murray. . . . . . . . . . . 822 The Spyglass Tree . . . . . . . . . . 824 xiii
American Ethnic Writers The Blue Devils of Nada. . . . . . . 824 The Seven League Boots . . . . . . . 825
Simon J. Ortiz . . . . . . . . . . . 846
Walter Dean Myers . . . . . . . . 827
Judith Ortiz Cofer . . . . . . . . 850
Hoops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 829 Fallen Angels . . . . . . . . . . . . 830 Monster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 831
Silent Dancing . . . . . . . . . . . . 851 The Meaning of Consuelo . . . . . . 852
Woven Stone . . . . . . . . . . . . . 848
Louis Owens . . . . . . . . . . . . 854
Gloria Naylor . . . . . . . . . . . 833 The Women of Brewster Place. Linden Hills . . . . . . . . . . Mama Day . . . . . . . . . . . Bailey’s Café . . . . . . . . . The Men of Brewster Place . .
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834 835 836 837 838
Fae Myenne Ng . . . . . . . . . . 840 Bone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 841
The Sharpest Sight . . . . . . . . . . 856 Bone Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . 856
Cynthia Ozick . . . . . . . . . . . 858 The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 859 “The Shawl” . . . . . . . . . . . . . 860
Grace Paley . . . . . . . . . . . . 862 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. . . . . . . . . . . . 864 Later the Same Day . . . . . . . . . 865
John Okada . . . . . . . . . . . . 843 No-No Boy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 844
“The Necessary Knocking on the Door” . . . . . . . . . . “The Bones of Louella Brown” “The Migraine Workers” . . . “Mother Africa” . . . . . . . .
Gordon Parks, Sr. . . . . . . . . . 867 A Choice of Weapons . . . . . . . . 869 Voices in the Mirror . . . . . . . . . 871
Suzan-Lori Parks . . . . . . . . . 873 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom . . . . . . . . Venus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Blood . . . . . . . . . . . Topdog/Underdog . . . . . . . .
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875 876 876 877
Ann Petry . . . . . . . . . . . . . 879 The Street . . . . . . . . . . . Miss Muriel, and Other Stories “Like a Winding Sheet” . . . . “In Darkness and Confusion” . “The New Mirror” . . . . . . .
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880 881 881 882 882
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883 884 885 885
Marge Piercy . . . . . . . . . . . 887 Gone to Soldiers . . . . . . . . . . . 889
Darryl Pinckney . . . . . . . . . . 891 High Cotton . . . . . . . . . . . . . 892
Miguel Piñero . . . . . . . . . . . 894 Short Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 896
Mary Helen Ponce. . . . . . . . . 898 The Wedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . 900
Chaim Potok. . . . . . . . . . . . 902 My Name Is Asher Lev. . . . . . . . 904 Davita’s Harp . . . . . . . . . . . . 905
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Contents
Dudley Randall . . . . . . . . . . 906
Ninotchka Rosca . . . . . . . . . 952
Poem Counterpoem . . . . . . . . . 909 Cities Burning . . . . . . . . . . . . 910
State of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . 953 Twice Blessed . . . . . . . . . . . . 954
John Rechy . . . . . . . . . . . . 913
Henry Roth . . . . . . . . . . . . 956
City of Night . . . . . . . . . . . . . 914 This Day’s Death . . . . . . . . . . 915 The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens . . . . . . . . . . . 916
Call It Sleep . . . . . . . . . . . . . 957 Mercy of a Rude Stream . . . . . . . 959
Philip Roth. . . . . . . . . . . . . 961 Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories . . . . . . . . . . . 962 Portnoy’s Complaint. . . . . . . . . 963
Ishmael Reed . . . . . . . . . . . 918 The Free-Lance Pallbearers. . . Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mumbo Jumbo . . . . . . . . . . The Last Days of Louisiana Red. Flight to Canada. . . . . . . . . God Made Alaska for the Indians . . . . . . . . . . . . The Terrible Twos . . . . . . . . Reckless Eyeballing . . . . . . . New and Collected Poems . . . . The Terrible Threes . . . . . . . Japanese by Spring . . . . . . .
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920 921 922 923
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923 924 925 925 926 926
Muriel Rukeyser . . . . . . . . . 965 “Ajanta” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 966 “Eyes of Night-Time” . . . . . . . . 967
Luis Rafael Sánchez. . . . . . . . 970 Macho Camacho’s Beat . . . . . . . 971 Quintuplets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 972
Sonia Sanchez . . . . . . . . . . . 975 The Bronx Is Next . . . . . . . Sister Son/ji . . . . . . . . . . We a BaddDDD People . . . . Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us? . . . . . . . . . . I’ve Been a Woman . . . . . . Homegirls and Handgrenades. Does Your House Have Lions?
Adrienne Rich . . . . . . . . . . . 928 Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 929 An Atlas of the Difficult World . . . 930
Mordecai Richler . . . . . . . . . 932
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978 979 980 980
Son of a Smaller Hero . . . . . . . . 933 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz . . . . . . . . . . 934
Thomas Sanchez. . . . . . . . . . 983
Alberto Ríos . . . . . . . . . . . . 937
Black No More. . . . . . . . . . . . 987
Mile Zero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 984
George S. Schuyler . . . . . . . . 986
“The Purpose of Altar Boys” . . . . 939
Delmore Schwartz. . . . . . . . . 989
Tomás Rivera . . . . . . . . . . . 941 . . . and the earth did not part . . . . 942
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities . . . . . . . . . 990
Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. . . . . . 944
Ntozake Shange . . . . . . . . . . 993
The Boy Without a Flag . . . . . . . 945
for colored girls who have considered suicide . . . A Photograph . . . . . . . Boogie Woogie Landscapes From Okra to Greens . . . Spell #7 . . . . . . . . . . Betsey Brown . . . . . . .
Richard Rodriguez . . . . . . . . 947 Hunger of Memory. . . . . . . . . . 948 Days of Obligation . . . . . . . . . 949 Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 950
xv
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994 995 997 997 998 999
American Ethnic Writers
Bapsi Sidhwa . . . . . . . . . . . 1001
Victor Villaseñor . . . . . . . . . 1056
An American Brat . . . . . . . . . 1002
Macho! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1058 Rain of Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . 1059
Leslie Marmon Silko. . . . . . . 1005 Storyteller. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1006 Almanac of the Dead . . . . . . . . 1007
Isaac Bashevis Singer . . . . . . 1009 “A Crown of Feathers” . . . . . . . 1011 “Gimpel the Fool” . . . . . . . . . 1012
Cathy Song . . . . . . . . . . . . 1014 Picture Bride . . . . . . . . . . . . 1015
Gary Soto. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1017 A Summer Life . . . . . . . . . . . 1018 New and Selected Poems . . . . . . 1019
Shelby Steele . . . . . . . . . . . 1021 The Content of Our Character . . . 1022
Virgil Suárez . . . . . . . . . . . 1024 The Cutter . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1025
Amy Tan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027 The Joy Luck Club . . . . . The Kitchen God’s Wife . . The Hundred Secret Senses. Saving Fish from Drowning
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1028 1028 1030 1030
Sheila Ortiz Taylor . . . . . . . 1032 Faultline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1033
Piri Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . 1035 Down These Mean Streets . . . . . 1037
Jean Toomer . . . . . . . . . . . 1039 Cane . . . . . . . . . . “Esther” . . . . . . . . “Blood-Burning Moon” “Cane, Section 2” . . . Kabnis . . . . . . . . . “Blue Meridian” . . . .
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1040 1041 1042 1043 1044 1045
Helena María Viramontes. . . . 1060 The Moths, and Other Stories . . . 1061 Under the Feet of Jesus . . . . . . 1062
Gerald R. Vizenor . . . . . . . . 1064 Wordarrows . . . . . . . . . . . . 1065 Interior Landscapes . . . . . . . . 1067 The Heirs of Columbus . . . . . . . 1068
Alice Walker . . . . . . . . . . . 1070 Once: Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . The Third Life of Grange Copeland . . . . . . . . . . . . Meridian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning . . . . . . . . . You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down . . . . . . . . . . The Color Purple . . . . . . . . . . The Temple of My Familiar . . . . Possessing the Secret of Joy . . . . By the Light of My Father’s Smile . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1071 1072 1074 1076 1077 1078 1079 1080 1081
Joseph A. Walker . . . . . . . . 1083 The Harangues . The River Niger. Yin Yang . . . . District Line . .
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1085 1085 1086 1087
Booker T. Washington. . . . . . 1088 The Story of My Life and Work . . . 1089 Up from Slavery . . . . . . . . . . 1091
Wendy Wasserstein . . . . . . . 1093 The Heidi Chronicles. . . . . . . . 1094 The Sisters Rosensweig. . . . . . . 1095
Luis Miguel Valdez . . . . . . . 1048
James Welch . . . . . . . . . . . 1098
Zoot Suit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1050
Fools Crow . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1099 The Heartsong of Charging Elk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1100
José Antonio Villarreal . . . . . 1053 Pocho . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1054
Ida B. Wells-Barnett . . . . . . . 1102 Crusade for Justice . . . . . . . . . 1103 xvi
Contents
Cornel West . . . . . . . . . . . 1105 Prophesy Deliverance! . . The American Evasion of Philosophy . . . . . . Race Matters . . . . . . . Democracy Matters . . . .
Jitney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1155 King Hedley II . . . . . . . . . . . 1155
. . . . . 1107 . . . . . 1108 . . . . . 1109 . . . . . 1110
Jade Snow Wong . . . . . . . . . 1157 Fifth Chinese Daughter . . . . . . 1158
Jay Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . 1160 The Homecoming Singer . . . . Soothsayers and Omens . . . . Explications/Interpretations . . Dimensions of History . . . . . The Double Invention of Komo. Elaine’s Book. . . . . . . . . . Boleros . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transfigurations . . . . . . . .
Phillis Wheatley . . . . . . . . . 1112 The Political Poems . . . . . . . . 1114 The Elegies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1117 Poems of Fancy and Memory . . . 1120
John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . 1123 A Glance Away . . . . . . Hurry Home . . . . . . . The Homewood Trilogy . Brothers and Keepers. . . Reuben . . . . . . . . . . Fever . . . . . . . . . . . Philadelphia Fire. . . . . The Stories of John Edgar Wideman . . . . . . . Fatheralong . . . . . . . The Cattle Killing . . . . Two Cities . . . . . . . .
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1124 1125 1127 1127 1128 1129 1130
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1131 1131 1132 1133
Elie Wiesel . . . . . . . . . . . . 1135
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1161 1162 1164 1164 1166 1167 1167 1168
Richard Wright . . . . . . . . . 1170 “Fire and Cloud” . . . Native Son . . . . . . “The Man Who Lived Underground” . . . Black Boy . . . . . . . The Outsider . . . . . Lawd Today . . . . . American Hunger. . .
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1175 1177 1178 1179 1180
Mitsuye Yamada . . . . . . . . . 1183 Camp Notes, and Other Poems. . . 1184
Night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1138 A Beggar in Jerusalem . . . . . . . 1139 All Rivers Run to the Sea . . . . . . 1140
Hisaye Yamamoto . . . . . . . . 1186
John A. Williams. . . . . . . . . 1142
Frank Yerby . . . . . . . . . . . 1189
The Angry Ones . . . . . Night Song . . . . . . . . Sissie . . . . . . . . . . . The Man Who Cried I Am Captain Blackman . . . . !Click Song . . . . . . . . Jacob’s Ladder . . . . . .
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1144 1144 1145 1145 1146 1146 1147
August Wilson . . . . . . . . . . 1148 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . . Fences . . . . . . . . . . . . Joe Turner’s Come and Gone The Piano Lesson. . . . . . . Two Trains Running . . . . . Seven Guitars. . . . . . . . .
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“Seventeen Syllables” . . . . . . . 1187 The Foxes of Harrow . Griffin’s Way . . . . . An Odor of Sanctity. . The Dahomean . . . .
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1190 1192 1194 1195
José Yglesias . . . . . . . . . . . 1197 The Truth About Them . . . . . . . 1199
Al Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1200
1150 1150 1152 1152 1153 1154 xvii
Dancing . . . . . . . . . Snakes . . . . . . . . . . The Song Turning Back into Itself . . . . . . . Who Is Angelina?. . . . . Sitting Pretty . . . . . . . The Blues Don’t Change .
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1207 1208 1209 1211
American Ethnic Writers Seduction by Light . . . . . . . . . 1212 The Sound of Dreams Remembered . . . . . . . . . . 1213
General Bibliography . . . . . . . 1217 Electronic Resources . . . . . . . 1226
Author Index . . . . . . Authors by Ethnic Identity . . . . . . . . Titles by Ethnic Identity Titles by Genre . . . . . Title Index. . . . . . . .
xviii
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1254 1258 1271 1284
Publisher’s Note Diverse ethnic literatures are more than ever a mainstay of the high school and undergraduate curriculum. This edition of American Ethnic Writers covers not only the core writers and the classics of African American, Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, Jewish American, and Native American novels, short stories, plays, and poetry—but many recent voices as well. These volumes offer authoritative coverage, essential for the school and college library shelf. This significantly expanded edition more than doubles the length of the original two-volume set (published in 2000) by adding a third volume: 89 new authors have been added to the original 136, and 493 works have been added to the original 217, for a total coverage of more than 700 literary works. Material has been added from the best of Salem’s previously published essays in Critical Survey of Drama, Second Revised Edition (2003), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2000), Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002), Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition (2003), Magill Book Reviews (online), Magill’s Survey of American Literature (2006), Masterplots II, African American Literature Series (1994), Masterplots II, Women’s Literature Series (1995), Notable African American Writers (2006), and Notable Latino Writers (2005). In addition, new material has been added: All listings of the authors’ works and the “Suggested Readings” have been updated, and the biographies of many authors who have recently died as well as those still living have been updated as well. The result is a fully current collection, in one compact set, of the best of our coverage of the most important ethnic literary voices—ranging from the Harlem Renaissance through the blossoming of Chicano literature to contemporary American ethnic and multiethnic voices in the twenty-first century. All major American minority cultures are covered: African American, Asian American, Jewish American, Hispanic/Latino, Native American; the set also includes 94 women. The authors represented here are identified with one or more of the following ethnicities: African American (103), Caribbean (5), Chilean American (1), Chinese American (14), Cuban American (7), Dominican American (1), Filipino American (4), Japanese American (7), Jewish American (31), Korean American (1), Mexican American (24), Native American (20), Peruvian American (2), Puerto Rican (12), South and Southeast Asian American (6), Spanish American (1), and Vietnamese American (1). The works covered are equally diverse in genre, falling into one or more of the following categories: autobiographies and biographies (43), children’s and young adult literature (7), drama (71), essays (35), ethnography (1), family histories (2), history (3), letters (2), memoirs (13), novellas (5), novels (259), philosophy (1), poetry (159), short fiction (99), social criticism (10), sociological study (1), and speeches (3). Arranged alphabetically by author, each essay begins with the name of the writer as best known; any “also known as” name (such as a birth name or pseudonym); birth date and place; and death date and place (if applicable); an identification of the author’s ethnicity or ethnicities (e.g., Japanese American); a summary description of the writer’s significance. The text of each essay opens with a biographical sketch, which includes a guide to the pronunciation of the author’s name, if difficult to pronounce. There follow one or more analytical sections focusing on xix
American Ethnic Writers up to ten of the author’s best-known and most often studied works. For each of these core novels, plays, short stories, or poems, we list the work’s title, genre, and year of publication, followed by at least a page of analysis. A fully updated “Suggested Readings” section, which closes every essay, lists up to a dozen print resources for further study. Altogether, more than 1,500 additional reading sources are listed. Finally, each essay is signed by the academicians and other experts who contributed it. Volume 3 concludes with a General Bibliography and a list of Web Sites for further study, as well as five indexes: Author Index, Authors by Ethnic Identity, Titles by Ethnic Identity, Titles by Genre, and a straight alphabetical Title Index. These indexes are designed to give students and others the greatest variety of access to the essays’ coverage. In addition, the front matter to each volume provides a Complete List of Contents. We are indebted to the more than 280 scholars who contributed to the revised edition; their names and affiliations are found in the list of contributors that follows.
xx
List of Contributors McCrea Adams
James Barbour
Independent Scholar
Oregon State University
Timothy Dow Adams
Paula C. Barnes
University of West Virginia
Hampton University
Patrick Adcock
Dan Barnett
Independent Scholar
Butte College
Cami D. Agan
Henry J. Baron
Oklahoma Christian University
Calvin College
Vivian R. Alexander
Kathleen M. Bartlett
Independent Scholar
Brevard Community College
Amy Allison
Margaret Kent Bass
Independent Scholar
St. Lawrence University
Heather Russell Andrade
Margaret W. Batschelet
Barry University
University of Texas
Debra D. Andrist
Joseph F. Battaglia
University of St. Thomas
Rutgers University
Karen Antell
Cynthia S. Becerra
University of Oklahoma
Humphreys College
Gerald S. Argetsinger
Kate Begnal
Rochester Institute of Technology
Utah State University
Karen L. Arnold
Carol F. Bender
Independent Scholar
Alma College
Angela Athy
Robert Bensen
Bowling Green State University
Hartwick College
Lisa R. Aunkst
Alvin K. Benson
Independent Scholar
Brigham Young University
Philip Bader
Jacquelyn Benton
Independent Scholar
Edgewood College
JoAnn Balingit
Milton Berman
University of Delaware
University of Rochester
Jane L. Ball
Cynthia A. Bily
Independent Scholar
Adrian College
Janet M. Ball
Margaret Boe Birns
The Mogollon Gazette
New York University and The New School for Social Research
Carl L. Bankston III
Mary A. Blackmon
Tulane University
Hardin-Simmons University
Jack Vincent Barbera
Franz G. Blaha
University of Mississippi
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
xxi
American Ethnic Writers Sandra F. Bone
Russ Castronovo
Arkansas State University
University of Miami
Jo-Ellen Lipman Boon
Christine R. Catron
Independent Scholar
St. Mary’s University
J. H. Bowden
Susan Chainey
Indiana University Southeast
Sacramento City College
Jay Boyer
Cida S. Chase
Arizona State University
Oklahoma State University
Muriel W. Brailey
Nancy L. Chick
Wilberforce University
University of Georgia
Harold Branam
Renny Christopher
Savannah State University
California State University, Channel Islands
Marie J. K. Brenner
C. L. Chua
Bethel College
California State University, Fresno
Wesley Britton
J. Robin Coffelt
Grayson County College
University of North Texas
Carl Brucker
David Conde
Arkansas Tech University
Metropolitan State College of Denver
Faith Hickman Brynie
Holly Dworken Cooley
Independent Scholar
Independent Scholar
Lori Hall Burghardt
Virginia M. Crane
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
California State University, Los Angeles
Roland E. Bush
Shira Daemon
California State University, Long Beach
Independent Scholar
Rebecca R. Butler
Dolores A. D’Angelo
Dalton College
Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools
Susan Butterworth
Joyce Chandler Davis
Independent Scholar
Gadsden State Community College
Gena Dagel Caponi
Barbara Day
University of Texas, San Antonio
City University of New York
Emmett H. Carroll
Frank Day
Seattle University
Clemson University
Warren J. Carson
Jodi Dean
University of South Carolina, Spartanburg
Hobart & William Smith Colleges
Linda M. Carter
Mary Jo Deegan
Morgan State University
University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Leonard Casper
Frenzella Elaine De Lancey
Boston College
Drexel University
Mary LeDonne Cassidy
Bill Delaney
South Carolina State University
Independent Scholar
Thomas Cassidy
Francine Dempsey
South Carolina State University
The College of Saint Rose
xxii
List of Contributors Joseph Dewey
Tanya Gardiner-Scott
University of Pittsburgh
Mount Ida College
Richard A. Eichwald
Scott Giantvalley
Independent Scholar
Independent Scholar
Thomas L. Erskine
Jill B. Gidmark
Salisbury University
University of Minnesota
Don Evans
Craig Gilbert
Trenton State College
Portland State University
Grace Farrell
Joyce J. Glover
Butler University
University of North Texas
Nettie Farris
Dennis Goldsberry
University of Louisville
College of Charleston
Howard Faulkner
Vincent F. A. Golphin
Washburn University
The Writing Company
James Feast
Charles A. Gramlich
Baruch College, City University of New York
Xavier University of Louisiana
John W. Fiero
James Green
University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Arizona State University
Edward A. Fiorelli
Robert Haight
St. John’s University
Kalamazoo Valley Community College
David Marc Fischer
Elsie Galbreath Haley
Independent Scholar
Metropolitan State College of Denver
T. A. Fishman
Joyce Ann Hancock
Clemson University
Jefferson Community College
Anne Fleischmann
Betty L. Hart
University of California, Davis
University of Southern Indiana
Ben Forkner
Nelson Hathcock
Independent Scholar
Saint Xavier University
Robert Frail
David M. Heaton
Centenary College
Ohio University
Dean Franco
Terry Heller
Wake Forest University
Coe College
Tom Frazier
Diane Andrews Henningfeld
Cumberland College
Adrian College
Chris Freeman
Cheryl Herr
St. John’s University
Independent Scholar
Janet Fujimoto
Sarah Hilbert
California State University, Fresno
Independent Scholar
Constance M. Fulmer
Cynthia Packard Hill
Pepperdine University
University of Massachusetts—Amherst
Ann Davison Garbett
Kay Hively
Averett College
Independent Scholar
xxiii
American Ethnic Writers Arthur D. Hlavaty
Rhona Justice-Malloy
Independent Scholar
Central Michigan University
James L. Hodge
Theresa M. Kanoza
Bowdoin College
Eastern Illinois University
Nika Hoffman
Leela Kapai
Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences
University of the District of Columbia
Pierre L. Horn
Deborah Kaplan
Wright State University
Independent Scholar
Edward Huffstetler
Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt
Bridgewater College
Rider University
Theodore C. Humphrey
Richard Keenan
California Polytechnic University, Pomona
University of Maryland, Eastern Shore
E. D. Huntley
Steven G. Kellman
Appalachian State University
University of Texas at San Antonio
Andrea J. Ivanov
Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
Azusa Pacific University
Governors State University
Maura Ives
Anne Mills King
Texas A&M University
Prince George’s Community College
Martin Japtok
Christine H. King
University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
Helen Jaskoski
Judith Kitchen
Independent Scholar
State University of New York, College at Brockport
Philip K. Jason United States Naval Academy
Shakuntala Jayaswal University of New Haven
Jeffry Jensen Independent Scholar
Jeff Johnson Brevard Community College
Sheila Golburgh Johnson Independent Scholar
Judith L. Johnston Independent Scholar
Andrew O. Jones University of California, Davis
Jane Anderson Jones Manatee Community College
Leslie Ellen Jones Independent Scholar
David Jortner University of Pittsburgh
Laura L. Klure Independent Scholar
Lynne Klyse Independent Scholar
Mildred C. Kuner Hunter College, City University of New York
Vera M. Kutzinski Yale University
Gregory W. Lanier The University of West Florida
Douglas Edward LaPrade University of Texas—Pan American
Donald F. Larsson Mankato State University
Norman Lavers Arkansas State University
Michele Leavitt University of North Florida
Katherine Lederer Southwest Missouri State University
xxiv
List of Contributors Linda Ledford-Miller
Daryl F. Mallett
University of Scranton
Independent Scholar
Richard M. Leeson
Anne B. Mangum
Fort Hays State University
Bennett College
Christine Levecq
Lois A. Marchino
University of Liege
University of Texas at El Paso
Leon Lewis
Peter Markus
Appalachian State University
Independent Scholar
Guoqing Li
Charles E. May
The Ohio State University
California State University, Long Beach
Janet E. Lorenz
Julia M. Meyers
Independent Scholar
North Carolina State University
Michael Loudon
Michael R. Meyers
Eastern Illinois University
Shaw University
Bernadette Flynn Low
Paula M. Miller
Dundale Community College
Biola University
R. C. Lutz
Kathleen Mills
University of the Pacific
Independent Scholar
Joanne McCarthy
Laura Mitchell
Tacoma Community College
California State University, Fresno
Barbara A. McCaskill
Christian H. Moe
University of Georgia
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Robert McClenaghan
Anna A. Moore
Independent Scholar
Independent Scholar
Gina Macdonald
Robert A. Morace
Nicholls State University
Daemon College
James C. MacDonald
Earl Paulus Murphy
Humber College
Harris-Stowe State College
Grace McEntee
Jamie Myers
Appalachian State University
Penn State University
Margaret McFadden
H. N. Nguyen
Appalachian State University
University of California, Riverside
Ron McFarland
Margarita Nieto
University of Idaho
California State University, Northridge
S. Thomas Mack
John Nizalowski
University of South Carolina—Aiken
Mesa State College
Sheila McKenna
Emma Coburn Norris
University of Pittsburgh
Troy State University
Joseph McLaren
Sally Osborne Norton
Hofstra University
University of Redlands
A. L. McLeod
Rafael Ocasio
Rider University
Agnes Scott College
xxv
American Ethnic Writers Patrick O’Donnell
Louise Connal Rodriguez
West Virginia University
Truman College
Peter D. Olson
Mary Rohrberger
Independent Scholar
University of Northern Iowa
Cynthia Packard
Robert L. Ross
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Texas at Austin
Leslie Pearl
John K. Roth
San Diego, California
Claremont McKenna College
David Peck
Mark Sanders
University of California, Long Beach
College of the Mainland
Allene Phy-Olsen
Alexa L. Sandmann
Austin Peay State University
University of Toledo
Adrienne Pilon
Richard Sax
Independent Scholar
Madonna University
Marjorie Podolsky
Daniel M. Scott III
Pennsylvania State University, Behrend College
Rhode Island College
Andrew B. Preslar
Barbara Kitt Seidman
Lamar University at Orange
Linfield College
Josephine Raburn
Frank W. Shelton
Cameron University
Limestone College
Brian Abel Ragen
Chenliang Sheng
Southern Illinois University—Edwardsville
Northern Kentucky University
Honora Rankine-Galloway
Nancy Sherrod
University of Southern Denmark
Georgia Southern University
Ralph Reckley, Sr.
John C. Shields
Independent Scholar
Illinois State University
Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman
Wilma Shires
Independent Scholar
Cisco Junior College
Barbara Cecelia Rhodes
Amy Beth Shollenberger
Central Missouri State University
Independent Scholar
Janine Rider
Hugh Short
Mesa State College
Independent Scholar
David Rigsbee
Debra Shostak
Virginia Tech
The College of Wooster
Christy Rishoi
R. Baird Shuman
Michigan State University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Danny Robinson
Thomas J. Sienkewicz
Bloomsburg University
Monmouth College, Illinois
St. John Robinson
Charles L. P. Silet
Montana State University at Billings
Iowa State University
Larry Rochelle
Carl Singleton
Johnson County Community College
Fort Hays State University
xxvi
List of Contributors Joseleyne Ashford Slade
Richard Tuerk
Michigan State University
East Texas State University
Genevieve Slomski
William Vaughn
Independent Scholar
Appalachian State University
Marjorie Smelstor
Martha Modena Vertreace
University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire
Kennedy-King College
Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith
Emil Volek
University of Nebraska—Omaha
Arizona State University
Rebecca G. Smith
Edward E. Waldron
Barton College
Yankton College
Virginia Whatley Smith
Kelly C. Walter
University of Alabama—Birmingham
Southern California College
Traci S. Smrcka
Qun Wang
Hardin-Simmons University
California State University, Monterey Bay
Katherine Snipes
Gladys J. Washington
Eastern Washington University
Texas Southern University
Sherry G. Southard
Patricia L. Watson
Oklahoma State University
University of Georgia
P. Jane Splawn
Ron Welburn
Purdue University
Western Connecticut State University
Brian Stableford
Craig Werner
University College (Winchester, U.K.)
University of Wisconsin
Trey Strecker
John T. West III
Ball State University
Grambling State University
Philip A. Tapley
Gary Westfahl
Louisiana College
University of California, Irvine
Australia Tarver
Barbara Wiedemann
Texas Christian University
Auburn University, Montgomery
Judith K. Taylor
Kathryn Ervin Williams
Northern Kentucky University
Michigan State University
Thomas J. Taylor
Patricia A. R. Williams
University of Akron
Amherst College
Betty Taylor-Thompson
Judith Barton Williamson
Texas Southern University
Sauk Valley Community College
Julie Tharp
David Willinger
University of Wisconsin Center—Marshfield Wood College
City College of New York
Terry Theodore
Western Illinois University
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston—Downtown
Tony Trigilio
Cynthia Wong Pat M. Wong Binghamton University
Gay Annette Zieger Santa Fe Community College
Northeastern University
xxvii
Pronunciation Guide Many of the names of personages covered in American Ethnic Writers may be unfamiliar to students and general readers. For these unfamiliar names, guides to pronunciation have been provided upon first mention of the names in the text. These guidelines do not purport to achieve the subtleties of the languages in question but will offer readers a rough equivalent of how English speakers may approximate the proper pronunciation. Vowel Sounds Symbol Spelled (Pronounced) a answer (AN-suhr), laugh (laf), sample (SAM-puhl), that (that) ah father (FAH-thur), hospital (HAHS-pih-tuhl) aw awful (AW-fuhl), caught (kawt) ay blaze (blayz), fade (fayd), waiter (WAYT-ur), weigh (way) eh bed (behd), head (hehd), said (sehd) ee believe (bee-LEEV), cedar (SEE-dur), leader (LEED-ur), liter (LEE-tur) ew boot (bewt), lose (lewz) i buy (bi), height (hit), lie (li), surprise (sur-PRIZ) ih bitter (BIH-tur), pill (pihl) o cotton (KO-tuhn), hot (hot) oh below (bee-LOH), coat (koht), note (noht), wholesome (HOHL-suhm) oo good (good), look (look) ow couch (kowch), how (how) oy boy (boy), coin (koyn) uh about (uh-BOWT), butter (BUH-tuhr), enough (ee-NUHF), other (UH-thur) Consonant Sounds Symbol Spelled (Pronounced) ch beach (beech), chimp (chihmp) g beg (behg), disguise (dihs-GIZ), get (geht) j digit (DIH-juht), edge (ehj), jet (jeht) k cat (kat), kitten (KIH-tuhn), hex (hehks) s cellar (SEHL-ur), save (sayv), scent (sehnt) sh champagne (sham-PAYN), issue (IH-shew), shop (shop) ur birth (burth), disturb (dihs-TURB), earth (urth), letter (LEH-tur) y useful (YEWS-fuhl), young (yuhng) z business (BIHZ-nehs), zest (zehst) zh vision (VIH-zhuhn)
xxix
Ai (Florence Anthony) Born: Albany, Texas; October 21, 1947 African American, Native American, Japanese American
Ai renewed the dramatic monologue in poems that record moments of public and private history. Principal works poetry: Cruelty, 1973; Killing Floor, 1979; Sin, 1986; Cruelty/Killing Floor, 1987; Fate: New Poems, 1991; Greed, 1993; Vice: New and Selected Poems, 1999; Dread, 2003 nonfiction: “On Being One-Half Japanese, One-Eighth Choctaw, One-Fourth Black, and One-Sixteenth Irish,” 1974 (in Ms. magazine 6, no. 11) Ai (ah-EE) was born with a rich multicultural heritage. Her mother’s immediate ancestors were African American, Native American (Choctaw), and European American (Irish and Dutch). Her father’s ancestors were Japanese. Ai once said that the history of her family is the history of America. Rather than defining her identity through ethnicity, however, she would insist on the uniqueness of personal identity. Accordingly, one of the aims of her work is to destroy stereotypes. She has said that she is “irrevocably tied to the lives of all people, both in and out of time.” Consequently, whoever “wants to speak” in her poems “is allowed to speak regardless of sex, race, creed, or color.” Ai grew up in Tucson, Arizona. When she was seven, her family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, for a year, then spent two years in San Francisco, California, before returning to Tucson. They moved again when Ai was twelve, this time to Los Angeles, California, returning again to Tucson three years later, when Ai was fifteen. Ai attended Catholic schools until the seventh grade. Her first poem, written when she was twelve, was a response to an assignment by the nuns to write a letter from the point of view of a Christian martyr who was going to die the next day. When she was fourteen, intending to enter a contest for poems about a historical figure, Ai began writing poems regularly. History was Ai’s best subject in high school, which she attended in Tucson. At the University of Arizona, also in Tucson, Ai found her identity in the “aesthetic atmosphere” of intellectual life. She graduated from the university in 1969 with a degree in Oriental studies. She earned an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine in 1971. When Ai published her first book 1
2
/
Ai
of poetry, Cruelty, in 1973, she became a nationally known figure, so striking were her grimly realistic and violent poems. Ai married the poet Lawrence Kearney in 1976. In 1979, her second book, Killing Floor, won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She separated from Kearney in 1981, and the couple divorced in 1984. In 1986, her third book, Sin, won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her 1999 collection of new and selected poems, Vice, won the National Book Award and established her as a major poet despite the controversy surrounding her work. Ai held the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing for 2002-2003 at Southwest Texas State University. She became a professor of English at Oklahoma State University and moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she continued to write.
Cruelty Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973 Ai is more concerned with social class than with racial identity or gender in Cruelty. The book is a series of poetic dramatic monologues spoken by members of the underclass in America. It is a searing indictment of societies that permit the existence of poverty. Life itself is cruel for the speakers in Cruelty. The speaker in “Tenant Farmer” has no crops. The couple in “Starvation” have no food. In “Abortion,” a man finds the fetus of his son wrapped in wax paper and thinks: “the poor have no children, just small people/ and there is room for only one man in this house.” Men and women become alienated from each other in these conditions. The speaker in “Young Farm Woman Alone” no longer wants a man. In “Recapture,” a man finds and beats a woman who has run off from him. In “Prostitute,” a woman kills her husband, then goes out to get revenge on the men who use her. Out of the agony of their lives, some of Ai’s characters achieve transcendence through love. The couple in “Anniversary” has managed to stay together, providing a home for their son for many years, in spite of never having “anything but hard times.” In “The Country Midwife: A Day,” the midwife delivers a woman’s child for “the third time between abortions.” Beneath the mother “a stain . . . spreads over the sheet.” Crying out to the Lord, the midwife lets her bleed. Ending the cycles of pregnancy for the woman, in an act of mercy, the midwife takes upon herself the cross of guilt and suffering. Ai extends her study of the causes and consequences of poverty to other times and places in the second half of Cruelty. The figure in “The Hangman” smells “the whole Lebanese coast/ in the upraised arms of Kansas.” In “Cuba, 1962,” a farmer cuts off his dead wife’s feet, allowing her blood to mix with the sugarcane he will sell in the village, so everyone can taste his grief. Medieval peasants are evoked by “The Corpse Hauler’s Elegy,” although the plague victims he carries could also be contemporary. Violence increases in the final poems of the book, a sign of the violence in soci-
Ai
/
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eties that perpetuate social injustice. In “The Deserter,” a soldier kills the woman who gave him shelter in order to leave everything of himself behind. In “The Hitchhiker,” a woman is raped and killed by a psychopath in Arizona. In “The Child Beater,” a mother beats her seven-year-old daughter with a belt, then gets out her “dog’s chain leash.” Ai has compassion for all of these people—including the killers—and she demands compassion for them from her readers.
Greed Type of work: Poetry First published: 1993 Greed is a collection of poems about the identity of America in the late twentieth century. In dramatic monologues spoken by famous or obscure Americans, Ai exposes amorality in the institutions of society, business, and private life. For most of the speakers, America has not kept its promises. Truth and justice are illusions in a society made more vicious, because of greed, than the Darwinian struggle for survival among animals. Money, power, drugs, sex—these are the gods of late twentieth century America. To the African American speakers, slavery is still alive in the “big house” of white America. Violence is the result. In “Riot Act, April 29, 1992,” a black man, going to get something on the day the wealth “finally trickled down,” threatens to “set your world on fire.” In “Self Defense,” Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, D.C., trapped using crack cocaine by the FBI, warns: “The good ole days of slaves out pickin’ cotton/ ain’t coming back no more.” In “Endangered Species,” a black university professor, perceived as “a race instead of a man,” is stopped by police while driving through his own neighborhood. In “Hoover, Edgar J.,” Ai indicts the director of the FBI for abuse of power. Hoover admits he has “files on everybody who counts” and “the will to use them.” Deceptions by government are implicated in poems concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In “Jack Ruby on Ice,” Ruby is refused sanctuary, in exchange for his testimony, by the Chief Justice of the United States. In “Oswald Incognito and Astral Travels,” Oswald finds himself “trapped/ in the palace of lies,/ where I’m clothed in illusion/ and fed confusion with a spoon.” Other poems explore domestic violence and sexual abuse of children. In “Finished,” a woman kills her husband after repeated episodes of physical abuse. In “Respect, 1967,” such a man expresses rage “against the paycheck that must be saved for diapers/ and milk.” The speaker in “Life Story” is a priest who sexually abuses young boys. As a child, he was abused by his uncle, also a priest. In “The Ice Cream Man,” the speaker lures a little girl inside his truck to sexually molest her. He tells of his own abuse by his stepfather and his mother. Ai offers little hope for the promise of America in Greed. She closes the book with the title poem, about the savings and loan scandal of the 1980’s. The responsible working man in “Family Portrait, 1960” has little chance to succeed. Even so, he
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takes care of his sick wife, cooks dinner, oversees the baths of his young daughters, then dozes—“chaos kept at bay” for one more day.
Suggested Readings Ackerson, Duane. “Ai: Overview.” In Contemporary Poets, edited by Thomas Riggs. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Bellamy, Joe David, ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Cramer, Steven. Review of Fate, by Ai. Poetry 159 (November, 1991): 108-111. Field, C. Renee. “Ai.” In American Poets Since World War II, Third Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn. Vol. 20 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1992. Flamm, Matthew. “Ai Came, Ai Saw, Ai Conquered.” The Village Voice 31 (July 22, 1986). Kilcup, Karen. “Dialogues of the Self: Toward a Theory of (Re)reading Ai.” Journal of Gender Studies 7, no. 1 (March, 1998): 5-20. Monaghan, Pat. Review of Fate, by Ai. Booklist 87 (January 1, 1991): 902. Ostriker, Alicia. Review of Sin, by Ai. Poetry 144 (January, 1987): 231-237. Seidman, Hugh. Review of Killing Floor, by Ai. The New York Times Book Review, July 8, 1979, 14. Seshadri, Vijay. Review of Dread, by Ai. The New York Times Book Review, May 4, 2003. Contributor: James Green
Meena Alexander Born: Allahabad, India; February 17, 1951 South Asian American
Alexander’s work examines women in society from the perspective of an expatriate feminist. Principal works poetry: The Bird’s Bright Ring: A Long Poem, 1976; I Root My Name, 1977; Without Place, 1978; Stone Roots, 1980; The Storm: A Poem in Five Parts, 1989; Night-Scene, the Garden, 1992; River and Bridge, 1995; Illiterate Heart, 2002; Raw Silk, 2004 long fiction: Nampally Road, 1991; Manhattan Music, 1997 nonfiction: The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism, 1979; Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley, 1989; Fault Lines: A Memoir, 1993; The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, 1996 edited text: Indian Love Poems, 2005 miscellaneous: House of a Thousand Doors: Poems and Prose Pieces, 1988 Meena Alexander (MEE-nah al-ehks-ZAN-dur) spent her early life in Kerala, a state at the southwestern tip of India. She received her English education in the Sudan, traveling between her parents’ home in Africa and her grandparents’ home in India. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1969 from the University of Khartoum and a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in 1973. After teaching at universities in Delhi and Hyderabad, she moved to New York City in 1979. By that time she had already published three volumes of poetry; many more, along with literary studies and works in other genres, would follow. Alexander describes herself as a “woman cracked by multiple migrations,” acted on by the disparate and powerful influences of the languages and customs of the four continents on which she has lived. Although her works are written in English, she grew up speaking Malayalam, a Dravidian language of southwest India, and Arabic, the language of her Syrian Christian heritage, spoken in North Africa. Her writing reflects the tension created by the interplay of these influences and serves as a way to derive meaning from her wide range of experience. The most prominent theme of Alexander’s work is the difficulty inherent in being a woman, of having a woman’s body and coping with the societal, physiological, and personal pressures on and responses to that body as it develops through childhood into maturity and middle age. Her grandmothers serve as mythical fig5
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ures with whom Alexander closely identifies. Her perspective is further complicated by her alienation from the language and culture of her childhood and by her need to recover something of that past. The images of fecundity and beauty with which Alexander’s work is suffused derive from her youth in Kerala; these images may be juxtaposed with images of infirmity, sterility, or brutality, underscoring the writer’s need to integrate the fragmented components of her life as an expatriate woman. The imagination provides a synthesis of the elements of history and personality in Alexander’s work. Her poems “begin as a disturbance, a jostling in the soul” which prompts her to write, seeking “that fortuitous, fleeting meaning, so precious, so scanty.”
House of a Thousand Doors Type of work: Poetry First published: 1988 House of a Thousand Doors is a collection of fifty-nine poems and prose pieces that reflect Alexander’s multicultural heritage and the tension it creates. The book is organized into three sections, the first and third sections serving as a synthesis for the wide variety of subjects and themes treated in the body of the work. Many of the poems reflect the writer’s subjective response to her experience; many also project or create new experiences that underscore the importance of imagination as a lens through which to focus the inner life into poetry. The title poem of House of a Thousand Doors uses the title metaphor to describe the variety of forces that operate on the persona: gender, heritage, language, experience, ideology, and the search for meaning. A complex array of images embodies these forces in the book, reflecting the author’s sensitivity to their influence. Alexander uses her writing to integrate the diversity of her experience. Dominating the persona’s early life is the figure of her grandmother, a powerful member of the family who learned to exercise some control over the many lines of force that affected her life. The mature awareness of the persona is imposed on the re-created memory of herself as a girl watching the figure of the grandmother kneel in turn before each of the thousand doors on a never-ending pilgrimage, “a poor forked thing” praying for the favor of her ancestors. The grandmother becomes a figure of myth and a symbol of tradition serving as the focus of many of the poems in the collection. Conciliation and unity with the culture and solidity of the past are central to House of a Thousand Doors. The three major sources of imagery in the book are family, culture, and nature. Family images, though literal, have a universal quality—she describes finding her grandmother’s letters “in an old biscuit box” and wonders if her grandmother was, like herself, “inventing a great deal.” Other images reflect the diminution of women at the behest of a patriarchal society; a cell door closing on a woman raped by the police clangs “like an old bell left over by the British,” while a portrait of the pacifist leader Mohandas Gandhi looks down from the wall. A third class of imagery,
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the imagery of nature, reflects the persona’s romantic theory of art; she laments, “My body/ part water/ part rock/ is searching for heaven.” This searching brings her back to her past, real and mythical, and ultimately back to herself and her need for meaning.
Suggested Readings Dave, Shilpa. “The Doors to Home and History: Post-colonial Identities in Meena Alexander and Bharati Mukherjee.” Amerasia Journal 19 (Fall, 1993): 103. Perry, John Oliver. Review of Nampally Road, by Meena Alexander. World Literature Today 65 (Spring, 1991): 364. Contributor: Andrew B. Preslar
Sherman Alexie Born: Spokane Indian Reservation, Wellpinit, Washington; October 7, 1966 Native American
Alexie, an accomplished writer of poetry and fiction, is a spokesperson for the realities of reservation life. Principal works children’s literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, 2007 short fiction: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993; The Toughest Indian in the World, 2000; Ten Little Indians, 2003 long fiction: Reservation Blues, 1995; Indian Killer, 1996; Flight, 2007 poetry: I Would Steal Horses, 1992; Old Shirts and New Skins, 1993; The Man Who Loves Salmon, 1998; One Stick Song, 2000; Dangerous Astronomy, 2005 screenplays: Smoke Signals, 1998; The Business of Fancydancing, 2002 miscellaneous: The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, 1992; First Indian on the Moon, 1993; The Summer of Black Widows, 1996 (poems and short prose) Sherman Alexie (SHUR-mahn ah-LEHK-see) is a Spokane-Coeur d’Alene Indian who grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on a reservation. Alexie’s father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and his mother worked as a youth drug and alcohol counselor. The first of their five children to leave the reservation, Alexie attended Gonzaga University in Spokane for two years before entering Washington State University, where he studied creative writing with Alex Kuo. He graduated in 1991. The seventy-seven-line free-verse poem “Horses,” from Old Shirts and New Skins, typifies the passion, anger, and pain in some of his most effective poems. Focused on the slaughter of a thousand Spokane horses by General George Wright in 1858, the long lines echo obsessively: “1,000 ponies, the United States Cavalry stole 1,000 ponies/ from the Spokane Indians, shot 1,000 ponies & only 1 survived.” The poem is one of Alexie’s favorites at readings, where it acquires the incantatory power of the best oral poetry. Although Alexie’s poems often have narrative and dramatic qualities, he is also adept at the short lyric, and his published work includes examples of the sestina and the villanelle. “Reservation Love Song,” from The Business of Fancydancing, reflecting on the poverty of reservation life, with its government-built housing and low-quality food, begins: 8
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I can meet you in Springdale buy you beer & take you home in my one-eyed Ford.
First Indian on the Moon is largely composed of prose poems. “Collect Calls” opens with an allusion to Crazy Horse, who appears often as a mythic figure in Alexie’s writing: “My name is Crazy Horse, maybe it’s Neil Armstrong or Lee Harvey Oswald. I am guilty of every crime; I was the first man on the moon.” As in his fiction, Alexie tempers the anger and pain of his poems with satiric wit, as in “The Marlon Brando Memorial Swimming Pool,” from Old Shirts and New Skins, in which activist Dennis Banks is imagined as “the first/ Native American real estate agent, selling a 5,000 gallon capacity dream/ in the middle of a desert.” Not surprisingly, there is no water in the pool.
Sherman Alexie (© Marion Ettlinger)
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1993 Alexie’s initial foray into fiction (except for a few stories sprinkled among his poems), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven appeared before his twentyseventh birthday and was awarded a citation from the PEN/Hemingway Award committee for best first book of fiction in 1993. Praising his “live and unremitting lyric energy,” one reviewer suggested that three of the twenty-two stories in the book “could stand in any collection of excellence.” Critics have noted that the pain and anger of the stories are balanced by his keen sense of humor and satiric wit. Alexie’s readers will notice certain recurring characters, including Victor Joseph, who often appears as the narrator; Lester FallsApart, the pompous tribal police chief; David WalksAlong; Junior Polatkin; and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller to whom no one listens. These characters also appear in Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), so the effect is of a community; in this respect, Alexie’s writings are similar to the fiction of William Faulkner. One reviewer has suggested that The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is almost a novel, despite the fact that Alexie rarely relies on plot development in the stories and does not flesh out his characters. It might more aptly be said that the stories come close to poetry, just as Alexie’s poems verge on fiction. The stories range in length from less than three to about twenty pages, and some of the best, like “The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue,” leap from moment to moment, from one-liner to quickly narrated episode, much like a poem. That story begins, “Someone forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA.” The next sentence concerns Victor playing the piano just before the barbecue: “After the beautiful dissonance and implied survival, the Spokane Indians wept, stunned by this strange and familiar music.” Survival is a repeated theme in Alexie’s work. The story then jumps to a series of four short paragraphs, each beginning “There is something beautiful about. . . .” Then we are told that Simon won at horseshoes, and he “won the coyote contest when he told us that basketball should be our new religion.” A paragraph near the end is composed of a series of questions, each beginning “Can you hear the dreams?” The last paragraph features a child born of a white mother and an Indian father, with the mother proclaiming: “Both sides of this baby are beautiful.” Beneath the anger, pain, and satiric edge of his stories, often haunted by the mythic figure of Crazy Horse and tinged with fantasy, Alexie offers hope for survival and reconciliation.
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Reservation Blues Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues, was published before his thirtieth birthday and after the striking success of The Business of Fancydancing, a collection of poems and stories published by a small press when he was twenty-six. By the time his novel was being reviewed, nearly eight thousand copies of The Business of Fancydancing were in print, along with two additional collections of poetry, Old Shirts and New Skins and First Indian on the Moon, and a heralded book of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, all published in 1993. In his novel Alexie reasserts an equation that he formed in “Imagining the Reservation,” from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: “Survival = Anger × Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.” Reservation Blues is arguably the most imaginative of his works to date, blending, among other things, the Faust myth with life on the “rez” and the dream of making it big in the music world. Alexie has performed in his own blues band. The novel is haunted by the bad memories (the essence of the blues) and by several characters’ nightmares, including Junior Polatkin, Victor, and Thomas Buildsthe-Fire, all of whom are familiar from other stories and poems by Alexie. The role of the deity in the novel is played by Big Mom, who lives atop a mountain on the reservation and has powerful magic. The story gets under way when a black blues guitarist from Mississippi, Robert Johnson (a historical personage) who has sold his soul to the devil (a white man known as “The Gentleman”) for a magic guitar wanders onto the reservation and passes his literally hot guitar to Victor. On their way to success and fame the group acquires a pair of vocalists in Chess and Checkers, two Flathead women, and two groupies, Indian “wanna-be’s,” Betty and Veronica, named after characters in the Archie comic series. When Betty observes that white people want to be like Indians so they can live at peace with the earth and be wise, Chess says, “You’ve never spent a few hours in the Powwow Tavern. I’ll show you wise and peaceful.” The destruction of the dream comes when the group goes to New York, where they find that their exploitative agents are none other than Phil Sheridan (source of the words “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and George Wright (who commanded the soldiers that slaughtered the Spokane ponies in 1858, a recurring motif in Alexie’s work). They work for Calvary Records. This novel encompasses broad humor, but the laughter is almost always painful. The satiric thrust, the travel, and the ironies attendant on innocents abroad suggest that Reservation Blues belongs to the tradition of Voltaire’s Candide (1759).
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Indian Killer Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 Unlike Alexie’s earlier works, Indian Killer is starkly tragic. It begins with injustice, the virtual kidnapping of a newborn Native American baby so that a white couple can have the child they desire. Although at first their love seems enough to guarantee his happiness, in time John Smith comes to feel that he does not belong with them. However, not knowing even his mother’s tribe, John cannot rejoin his people. He moves to Seattle, and there he finds an answer. He will become an Indian warrior, killing whites as a form of initiation into Native American society. Informed that a Native American is responsible for the murders, a seemingly enlightened city reveals its deep-seated prejudice. A talk show host inflames the public and prompts acts of violence. However, he is really no worse than the “wannabe” Indians who profit by attaching themselves to a culture about which they know nothing. Alexie does not waste much sympathy even on well-meaning whites, like John’s adoptive parents, and he ends his novel by predicting that other Native Americans will arise to avenge their people. Indian Killer is perceptive, wellcrafted, and suspenseful; unfortunately, it does not offer much hope for the establishment of a peaceful, multicultural society.
One Stick Song Type of work: Poetry First published: 2000 The dark humor, deep feeling, and supple style that distinguish Alexie’s novels and short stories about Native American experience in the United States are present in an especially forceful manner in One Stick Song, a collection of poems that function as a personal memoir that recollects and comments on his life as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian in contemporary America. Capitalizing on the possibilities for a multiplicity of expressive modes that a collection of poems affords, Alexie offers both a singularly personal and dauntingly candid vision of Indian society while recalling close friends and members of his family whose lives augment and personify the patterns he identifies. The poems in the book are bracketed by two extended autobiographical fragments, “The Unauthorized Biography of Me,” which conveys the content of Alexie’s mind and spirit through the tone of its idiosyncratic observations, and “Sugar Town,” which is a lament for and tribute to his father, as well as a meditation on his own growth toward maturity. Within this flexible frame, Alexie effectively uses a wide range of poetic forms to establish a recognizable, singular voice: Essentially laconic but capable of considerable passion; generally poised but sometimes very vulnerable; wary in anticipation of insults and rebuffs without closing contact
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with the world. Alexie often speaks with his own version of a contemporary American vernacular, characteristically in an expressionistic narrative called “The Warriors” which begins, “I hate baseball,” and combines incidents from his youth with pointed, cogent cultural analysis. This mode is enlivened by sometimes startling moments of lyric fire, an introduction of the singing language that is at the core of the Native American oral tradition, which Alexie uses to create the emotional responses that mark his vivid depictions of humans in contact with one another, with the natural and with the supernatural or spirit world. The title poem is a particularly powerful evocation of this tradition, a recollective story/song that works to reclaim centuries of loss by placing people in living memory. Its repetitive choral figures move toward a mood of revelation in which Alexie guides the reader to a view of a culture that is aslant from most popular conceptions, a new perspective on ancient ways that combats stereotypes while assembling an alternative identity that is compelling and persuasive in its vivid gathering of a life’s imagery.
Ten Little Indians Type of work: Short fiction First published: 2003 In Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie continues his writing’s practice of undermining the white world’s expectations of Native Americans. All the old stereotypes are held up for ridicule at one time or another in these stories in which the Indians (they frequently call themselves by that term) mostly do not live on reservations, are mostly not alcoholic, do not necessarily have a special sense of union with the earth, and may in fact hold important jobs in computer technology or major in English at a university. At the same time, these characters are highly aware of their unique position in American culture and of whites’ biased ideas about them. In “The Search Engine,” for example, Corliss is a Washington State University English major. Good brains, helpful high school teachers, and intense ambition got her to the university, despite discouraging comments from her family. Now, by accident, she has found a volume of poetry by a Native American on the library shelves. Many of the poems are set on the Spokane reservation, Corliss’s own home, and she wonders why she has never heard of Harlan Atwater, their writer. Although she knows that the volume is uneven, she feels a special kinship with its author and longs to meet and talk with him. After an exhausting search, she locates him and finds that instead of the reservation, he had been adopted and raised in the city by a loving white couple. Her last gesture in the story is to place Atwater’s book, face out, on a bookstore shelf, so that all the world will see his poems. Like almost all Alexie’s characters, she will combine respect for her origins with an ironic smile and a willingness to make her way as a Native American in the urban world of whites.
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Suggested Readings Alexie, Sherman. “Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview with Sherman Alexie.” Interview by Dennis West. CINEASTE 23, no. 4 (1998): 28-32. Caldwell, E. K. Dreaming the Dawn: Conversations with Native Artists and Activists. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Fast, Robin Riley. The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspectives of Native American Fiction. 2d ed. Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1997. Grassian, Daniel. Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. McFarland, Ron. “‘Another Kind of Violence’: Sherman Alexie’s Poems.” American Indian Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 251-264. Vickers, Scott B. Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Contributor: Ron McFarland
Paula Gunn Allen Born: Cubero, New Mexico; October 24, 1939 Died: Fort Bragg, California; May 29, 2008 Native American
As a novelist, poet, literary critic, and scholar, Allen preserves and creates Native American literature. Principal works long fiction: The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, 1983 poetry: The Blind Lion, 1974; Coyote’s Daylight Trip, 1978; A Cannon Between My Knees, 1981; Star Child: Poems, 1981; Shadow Country, 1982; Wyrds, 1987; Skins and Bones, 1988; Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems, 19621995, 1997 nonfiction: The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, 1986; Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book, 1991; As Long as the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans, 1996 (with Patricia Clark Smith); Off the Reservation: Reflections on BoundaryBusting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons, 1998; Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, 2003 edited texts: Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, 1989; Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970, 1994; Hozho: Walking in Beauty, 2001 (with Carolyn Dunn Anderson) Paula Gunn Allen (PAH-luh guhn AL-lehn), as an American Indian woman, saw her identity in relation to a larger community. She was proud to be part of an old and honored tradition that appreciates the beautiful, the harmonious, and the spiritual. She also recognized that since in the United States there are more than a million non-Indians to every Indian, she had to work to stay connected to her heritage. Allen frequently referred to herself as “a multicultural event”; people of many ethnicities related to her. Her mother was a Laguna Indian whose grandfather was Scottish American. Allen said that she was raised Roman Catholic, but living next door were her grandmother, who was Presbyterian and Indian, and her grandfather, who was a German Jew. Her father’s family came from Lebanon; he was born in a Mexican land-grant village north of Laguna Pueblo. She grew up with relatives who spoke Arabic, English, Laguna, German, and Spanish. Her relatives shared legends from around the world. Even with such cultural diversity in her family, as a teenager Allen could find 15
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no Native American models for her writing. Consequently, she read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) about twenty times; her other literary favorites were Louisa May Alcott, Gertrude Stein, and the Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When she went to the University of New Mexico and wanted to focus on Native American literature in her Ph.D. program in English, it was impossible. The scholarship was not there to study. She came to write the books that she wanted to read and teach the courses that she wanted to take. Allen taught at San Francisco State University, at the University of New Mexico, in the Native American Studies Program at the University of CaliforPaula Gunn Allen (Tama Rothschild) nia at Berkeley, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. In enumerating her influences, Allen first honored her mother, who taught her not only to think like a strong Indian woman but also to treat animals, insects, and plants with the deep respect one customarily reserves for high-status humans. She honored her father for teaching her how to weave magic, memory, and observation into the tales she tells. Finally, the Indian collective unconscious remained the source of her vision of spiritual reality throughout her life and career.
The Sacred Hoop Type of work: Essays First published: 1986 The collection of essays The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions documents the continuing vitality of Native American traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions. The title comes from a lesson Allen learned from her mother: that all of life is a circle—a sacred hoop—in which everything has its place. These essays, like tribal art of all kinds, support the principle of kinship and render the beautiful in terms of the harmony, relationship, balance, and dignity that are the informing principles of Indian aesthetics. Indians understand that woman is the sun and the earth: She is grandmother, mother, thought, wisdom, dream, reason, tradition, memory, deity, and life itself. The essays are all characterized by seven major themes that pertain to Native American identity. The first is that Indians and spirits are always found together.
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Second, Indians endure. Third, the traditional tribal lifestyles are never patriarchal and are more often woman-centered than not. Tribal social systems are nurturing, pacifist, and based on ritual and spirit-centered, woman-focused worldviews. The welfare of the young is paramount, the complementary nature of all life forms is stressed, and the centrality of powerful, self-defining, assertive, decisive women to social well-being is unquestioned. Fourth, the physical and cultural destruction of American Indian tribes is and was about patriarchal fear and the inability to tolerate women’s having decision-making capacity at every level of society. Fifth, there is such a thing as American Indian literature, and it informs all American writing. Sixth, all Western studies of American Indian tribal systems are erroneous because they view tribalism from the cultural bias of patriarchy. Seventh, the sacred ways of the American Indian people are part of a worldwide culture that predates Western systems. These powerful essays are divided into three sections: “The Ways of Our Grandmothers,” “The Word Warriors,” and “Pushing Up the Sky.” All of them testify to the value of American Indian traditions and the strength of the voices of Indian women. Allen identifies the Indian roots of white feminism as well as the role of lesbians in American culture, and she projects future visions for American Indian women, tribes, and literature.
Spider Woman’s Granddaughters Type of work: Biography and short fiction First published: 1989 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, edited by Allen, is a collection of two dozen traditional tales, biographical writings, and short stories by seventeen accomplished American Indian women writers. All the women follow the tradition of Grandmother Spider, who, according to the Cherokee, brought the light of thought to her people, who were living as hostages in their own land. These stories are war stories, since all American Indian women are at war and have been for five hundred years. Some of the selections are old-style stories; others deal with contemporary issues. All are by women intimately acquainted with defeat, with being conquered, and with losing the right and the authority to control their personal and communal lives. They have experienced the devastating destruction of their national and personal identities. They powerfully demonstrate the Indian slogan: We shall endure. The first selection, “The Warriors,” contains eleven stories of strong women who are self-defining, fearless, respectful, prayerful, and self-assertive. Their warpath is an odyssey through a brutal and hostile world. Each recognizes that the Indian family must continue to cling to tradition. A warrior must remember where she comes from; beauty is what gives human beings dignity; and the young must be taught how to keep their sense of value intact. These women warriors do not give up hope, even when they are dying, their children are stolen, and they are undergoing
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emotional and physical battering. They continue to resist when all the forces of a wealthy, powerful, arrogant, ignorant, and uncaring nation are mustered against them in order to coerce their capitulation. The second section, “The Casualties,” contains five selections about Indian women who have been wounded in the continuing war that seeks to destroy rather than enhance their individual and collective spiritual power. For example, Linda Hogan’s “Making Do” is about a mother’s powerlessness in the face of loss and grief. She clings to her tribal traditions and carves wooden birds, hoping to regain the power, healing, and grace that were traditionally put into carvings. The third section, “The Resistance,” contains eight selections that are more hopeful. Since the 1960’s, Native Americans have become more involved in the administration of the economic and legal affairs of their tribes. “Deep Purple,” by Allen, a Native American urban lesbian who loves a white woman, addresses the issue of colonization in the women’s movement and tries to reclaim her connection to the spiritual powers of the past. Like all the granddaughters of Spider Woman, she is aware of her responsibilities, gifts, and identity.
Grandmothers of the Light Type of work: Essays and Native American tales First published: 1991 Described as a sourcebook for medicine women of the twenty-first century, Grandmothers of the Light does not provide actual instruction on how to become a medicine woman. It does, however, provide delightful tales from Native American oral tradition. Allen’s book is divided into four sections, three of which contain the tales. Part 1 introduces the reader to the mindset and concepts that will be encountered throughout the book. Allen explains the ritual tradition and the “Seven Ways of the Medicine Woman.” The Universe of Power and female supernaturals are also discussed. Part 2 presents tales of creation and the establishment of order in the cosmos and among the people. Including tales from the Keres, Maya, Cherokee, and Navajo, Allen notes similarities among the beings depicted in these diverse sources. Especially interesting is an Aztec tale set prior to the Spanish Conquest, concerning the troubled visions of Aztec priest-leaders who foresee the end of their empire with a fatalistic acceptance. The tales in Part 3 contain female characters who exemplify proper conduct in dealings with supernatural persons and magical circumstances. A Lakota tale explains how the tribe came by its gift of the sacred pipe and the religion that helped them to live in harmony. Part 4 addresses more contemporary issues, such as how the medicine ways have changed with the coming of modern civilization. Allen does not view these changes as always detrimental to what are living beliefs. Some of the accompanying tales are set in modern times, emphasizing the continued presence of supernaturals.
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The last section gives brief histories of the tribes whose tales have been adapted for the book, followed by a glossary and bibliography.
Life Is a Fatal Disease Type of work: Poetry First published: 1997 Life Is a Fatal Disease brings together poetry Allen published over thirty years. Grouped thematically, the poems first explore the deadly condition that is American life—in its cities, on Indian reservations, in a mother’s grief at the loss of her son, in the violence committed in the name of love—between men and women, between political enemies. The second part of the collection testifies to the toxicity of human existence: “we live in a browning season/ the heavy air blocking our breath.” She records the “despair rising/ brown and stinking” in her students’ eyes as they sit in her high school classroom, daring not to dream because “there is no future they can bear.” The third part takes the words of the Bhagavadgita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” as an ironic affirmation. Only in claiming the union of both life and death, spirit and flesh, present and past, and traditional Laguna and contemporary urban American life can meaning be achieved. Allen states, “to me a poem is a recording of an event of the mind.” Critic Kenneth Lincoln says of Allen’s poetry, “impression leads toward thought.” A child’s death, the victims of the war in Vietnam and on the streets, a grandmother’s photograph, a hoop dancer at a powwow, a trendy Los Angeles street, and strong Indian women of history are events of the mind leading to thoughts on the nature of evil, the wholeness of the universe, the strength of will that survival demands. Despite its title, Life Is a Fatal Disease expresses the hope of those who live thoughtfully and spiritually. In the wonderful poem “The Text Is Flesh,” Allen draws together aspects of her culture and identity as Lebanese, Laguna Pueblo/ Sioux, and poet when she remarks that in the coffeehouses of Beirut and on “the res,” people know “What there is is text and earth./ What there is is flesh./ And chanting flesh into death and life.” This collection is such a chanting, unifying the disparate elements of her life, all of our lives.
Off the Reservation Type of work: Essays First published: 1998 The twenty pieces collected in Off the Reservation chart Allen’s intellectual evolution since the 1960’s and offer a provocative introduction to what she calls “contemporary coyote Pueblo American thought.” Like the coyote, she assumes a self-
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consciously renegade stance vis-à-vis the Establishment, asserting through the book’s subtitle that creativity lies, not in the wall-building divisiveness of Western thought, but in “Boundary-Busting” and “Border-Crossing” (activities for which her upbringing on the culturally heterogeneous Laguna Pueblo has aptly prepared her). Allen thus delivers repeated challenges to the assumed primacy of “pure” forms, whether they involve internal debates within the Native American community about standards for measuring one’s authentic “indianness” or the literary preoccupation demanding that writers obediently refrain from mixing genres. Autobiographical reflection and academic discourse merge throughout these essays just as the sacred and secular coalesce within Native thought. Off the Reservation is a learned, humane, and thoughtful book albeit one occasionally marred by ungrounded generalizations and dogmatic pronouncements. Allen offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes and leaves one mulling over her ideas long after the book is closed. For some readers her blend of erudition and political critique will violate the traditions of academic decorum; for others it will provide an inspiring example of academic work urgently conceived as an extension of a potent moral vision.
Suggested Readings Allen, Paula Gunn. Interview by Quannah Karvar. Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 25, 1987. _______. Interview by Robin Pogrebin. The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 1984. Cook, Barbara. “The Feminist Journey in Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.” Southwestern American Literature 22 (Spring, 1997): 69-74. Ferrell, Tracy J. Prince. “Transformation, Myth, and Ritual in Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light.” North Dakota Quarterly 63 (Winter, 1996): 77-88. Fisher, Dexter, ed. The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Hanson, Elizabeth I. Paula Gunn Allen. Edited by Wayne Chatterton and James H. Maguire. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1990. Keating, AnaLouise. Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Perry, Donna. “Paula Gunn Allen.” In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, edited by Donna Perry. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Purdy, John.“‘And Then, Twenty Years Later . . .’: A Conversation with Paula Gunn Allen.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9 (Fall, 1997): 5-16. Toohey, Michelle Campbell. “Paula Allen Gunn’s Grandmothers of the Light: Falling Through the Void.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 12 (Fall, 2000): 35-51. Contributor: Constance M. Fulmer
Isabel Allende Born: Lima, Peru; August 2, 1942 Chilean American
Allende brings a feminist perspective to the traditions of Latin American literature. Principal works children’s literature: Ciudad de las bestias, 2002 (City of the Beasts, 2002); El bosque de los Pigmeos, 2004 (Forest of the Pygmies, 2005); La gorda de porcelana, 1984; El reino del dragón de oro, 2003 (Kingdom of the Golden Dragon, 2004) long fiction: La casa de los espíritus, 1982 (The House of the Spirits, 1985); De amor y de sombra, 1984 (Of Love and Shadows, 1987); Eva Luna, 1987 (English translation, 1988); El plan infinito, 1991 (The Infinite Plan, 1993); Hija de la fortuna, 1999 (Daughter of Fortune, 1999); Portrait sépia, 2000 (Portrait in Sepia, 2001); Zorro, 2005 (English translation, 2005); Inés del alma mía, 2006 (Inés of My Soul, 2006) short fiction: (Cuentos de Eva Luna, 1990 (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991) nonfiction: Civilice a su troglodita: Los impertientes de Isabel Allende, 1974; Paula, 1994 (English translation, 1995); Conversations with Isabel Allende, 1999; Mi país inventado, 2003 (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, 2003) miscellaneous: Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisiacos, 1997 (Afrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998) The daughter of a Chilean diplomat, Isabel Allende (IHZ-ah-behl ah-YEHN-dee) was born in Lima, Peru. Following her parents’ divorce, she lived first with her grandparents in Santiago and later with her mother and stepfather in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to Chile as a young woman and began her career as a television and newsreel journalist and as a writer for a feminist journal. In 1973, Allende found herself at the center of Chile’s turbulent political life when her uncle and godfather, the country’s Marxist president Salvador Allende, was assassinated during a military coup. In the months that followed, Allende worked to oppose the new dictatorship headed by General Pinochet until fears for her safety led Allende to move to Venezuela with her husband and two children. Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits, was published to international acclaim. It is a family saga set against a backdrop of political upheaval in an unnamed South American country. Her second book, Of Love and Shadows, followed two 21
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years later and also drew on her country’s troubled history. Both works placed Allende firmly within the Latin American tradition of novels that take a strong stand in their fictionalized portrayals of political events. Allende’s third novel, Eva Luna, traces the extraordinary life of its title character and the Austrian journalist who becomes her lover. All three novels are examples of the literary style known as Magical Realism, in which strange, supernatural occurrences are intermingled with everyday events. Allende’s work, however, brings a distinctly feminist perspective to a literary style that is predominantly male. Following her divorce from her husband of twenty years, Allende moved to the United States in the 1980’s, where she remarried and settled in California. Her next novel, The Infinite Plan, draws on her American experience in its story of a man’s life from his childhood in the barrios of Los Angeles to his adult search for meaning and happiness. In 1994, Allende published one of her most personal works, Paula, a chronicle of her daughter’s death following a long illness. Allende examines her experience as a woman and a mother in her portrayal of love, pain, and loss. Allende’s position as a woman working within the traditions of Latin American literature has led her to create strikingly original stories and characters, and she remains a consistently intriguing and rewarding writer.
The House of the Spirits Type of work: Novel First published: La casa de los espíritus, 1982 (English translation, 1985) The House of the Spirits, Allende’s first novel, established her international reputation and remains her best-known work. Drawing on the Latin American literary style known as Magical Realism, the book tells the story of the Trueba family over several generations. Set in an unidentified South American country that resembles Allende’s homeland, the novel chronicles the social and political forces that affect the family’s fate. The story begins with Esteban Trueba and his marriage to Clara del Valle, a young woman who possesses clairvoyant gifts and communicates easily with the spirit world. Their marriage produces a daughter, Blanca, and twin sons. Esteban also fathers a son by one of the peasant women on his family estate; years later his illegitimate grandson, a member of the secret police, will torture his legitimate granddaughter, Alba, a political prisoner. Esteban’s political ambitions take him to the country’s senate, where he opposes left-wing reform efforts, while Blanca’s affair with an idealistic peasant boy results in Alba’s birth. The boy becomes a populist songwriter and a leading figure in the Socialist movement. A subsequent leftist victory is short-lived, however, and the elected government is deposed in a military coup. Alba, who has married one of the leftist leaders, is arrested and tortured before her grandfather can secure her release. In an effort to come to terms with all that has happened to her and to her family, she sets about writing the book that will become The House of the Spirits.
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Allende’s novel has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970) in style and structure and in the use of Magical Realism, a technique that combines ordinary events with the fantastic and miraculous, giving rise to startling and vivid imagery. Allende herself maintains that much that seems incredible in the book is drawn from memories of her childhood. The characters of Esteban and Clara Trueba are based on her own maternal grandparents, and she began the book not as a novel but as a letter to her aging grandfather meant to reassure him that the family stories would live on through her. The book’s political themes are also taken in part from Allende’s family history; her uncle was Salvador Allende, the SoIsabel Allende (Reuters/Gustau Nacarino/Archive Photos) cialist president slain in Chile’s 1973 military coup. The House of the Spirits brings a strong female voice to the forefront of Latin American literature and offers a collection of vital female characters who embody the book’s spirit of endurance, resilience, and courage.
Of Love and Shadows Type of work: Novel First published: De amor y de sombra, 1984 (English translation, 1987) The protagonist of Of Love and Shadows, Irene, the daughter of an impoverished upper-class mother and her wayward husband, enjoys her life as a reporter of minor news items for a local women’s magazine. Her stories are often accompanied with the photographs of Francisco Leal, who, unable to support himself with his degree in psychology, has taken up photography in the hope of earning his living in journalism. Francisco and Irene are caught up in their country’s political intrigue when they are accidentally involved in a minor military skirmish while covering a story on a rural faith healer. From that moment, their lives remain in danger. Although Francisco’s father is a refugee from Fascist Spain who issues antigovernment broadsides from his kitchen, it is not until his own run-in with the mili-
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tary authorities that Francisco really comes to understand the power and malignancy of the military government that controls his destiny. After the couple discover the secret burial ground of the police assassins, Irene is shot and the pair are in constant danger of being killed by the authorities. By the end of the novel, they have fled their native country for a life of exile and resistance. This is a chilling novel. The presence of the military junta takes on a Kafkaesque quality as the young lovers become more and more involved in uncovering the secrets of the death squads. Isabel Allende has sketched a vivid portrait of what it means to be caught up in a world beyond one’s own control.
Eva Luna Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 (English translation, 1988) Eva Luna begins with the protagonist’s account of her origins: My name is Eva, which means ‘life,’ according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of these things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.
Conceived illicitly in a South American jungle, Eva Luna guides the reader through the picaresque story of her life. Like her mother Consuelo, she was born poor and was orphaned young. Unlike her mother, however, Eva rises to a position of relative power by the novel’s end. Besides its wealth of poetically rendered detail and thoroughly believable characters, this novel is astoundingly rich in tenderness and insight, drama and humor, satire and compassion, history and myth. Eva is, like Allende, a seemingly natural and naturally inventive storyteller. Indeed, outdoing her rum-addled godmother, who creates her own Catholic saints, Eva creates Bolero, a mirror image of Eva Luna, for “The National Television.” What she offers her television-viewing audience toward the novel’s end is what Allende has already given her readers: that is, among other things, “clashes of snakebitten Indians, embalmers in wheelchairs, teachers hanged by their students, Ministers of State defecating in the bishops’ plush chairs, and other atrocities that . . . defied all laws of the commercial television romance.” Thanks must go to Allende for writing an excellent work of literature and for thereby defying with Eva Luna all the prevailing laws of America’s commercial publishing industry.
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The Infinite Plan Type of work: Novel First published: El plan infinito, 1991 (English translation, 1993) The Infinite Plan was Allende’s first novel following her move to the United States. Although it was written in Spanish, the book is set in California and chronicles the life of a European American man. Allende uses her characters’ experiences to examine the factors that shaped the United States’ social history in the decades following World War II. Her focus is the Latino culture in California, in which the main character comes of age. As the book opens, young Gregory Reeves and his family are living a nomadic life as his father preaches a spiritual doctrine he calls the Infinite Plan. When the elder Reeves falls ill in Los Angeles, the family settles in the barrio (although they are not Latino). Gregory grows up experiencing life as a member of a minority group within the community. His closest friend is Carmen Morales, whose family comes to regard him as an honorary son. Following high school, Gregory leaves home for Berkeley and college while Carmen remains in the barrio until an unwanted pregnancy and near-fatal abortion make her an outcast. Gregory leaves an unhappy marriage to serve a harrowing tour of duty in Vietnam, while Carmen lives abroad and begins designing jewelry. Both meet again in Berkeley, where Gregory embarks on an ambitious quest for success that leads him away from his youthful idealism and into a second failed marriage and problems with alcoholism. Carmen adopts her dead brother’s half-Vietnamese son and discovers a strong sense of herself, marrying an old friend and settling in Italy. Gregory begins at last to take stock of his life and to see the pattern—the infinite plan— that has shaped it. Allende’s first novel set in her adopted country reflects her perspective on the United States as an immigrant. Her delight in tolerance and openness—matters of great importance to a writer whose life was marred by the repressive military coup in Chile in 1973—is apparent in her affectionate portrait of the freewheeling Berkeley of the 1960’s. Her cultural identity as a Latina also comes into play in her portrayal of life in the barrio and the effect that religion and a patriarchal society has on Carmen. Allende makes use in the novel of some aspects of the Latin American literary style known as Magical Realism, bringing a kind of heightened realism to the story, which blends realistic events with exaggerated or improbable ones. The result is a book filled with memorable characters that brings a fresh perspective to the postWorld War II history and culture of the United States.
Suggested Readings Allende, Isabel. Conversations with Isabel Allende. Edited by John Rodden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. _______. My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
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Correas Zapata, Celia. Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2002. De Carvalho, Susan. “The Male Narrative Perspective in the Fiction of Isabel Allende.” Journal of Hispanic Research 2, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 269-278. Hart, Patricia. Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende. Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989. Levine, Linda Gould. Isabel Allende. New York: Twayne, 2002. Marketta, Laurila. “Isabel Allende and the Discourse of Exile.” In International Women’s Writing, New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown and Marjanne E. Gooze. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Rojas, Sonia Riquelme, and Edna Aguirre Rehbein, eds. Critical Approaches to Isabel Allende’s Novels. New York: P. Lang, 1991. Roof, Maria. “Maryse Conde and Isabel Allende: Family Saga Novels.” World Literature Today 70, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 410-416. _______. “W. E. B. Du Bois, Isabel Allende, and the Empowerment of Third World Women.” CLA Journal 39, no. 4 (June, 1996): 401-416. Contributor: Janet E. Lorenz
Julia Alvarez Born: New York, New York; March 27, 1950 Dominican American
Alvarez expresses the complexities of having a cross-cultural identity and being an immigrant to the United States. Principal works children’s literature: The Secret Footprints, 2000; How Tía Lola Came to Stay, 2001; Before We Were Free, 2002; Finding Miracles, 2004; A Gift of Gracias, 2005 long fiction: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994; ¡Yo!, 1997 (sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents); In the Name of Salomé, 2000; The Cafecito Story, 2001 poetry: Homecoming: Poems, 1984 (revised and expanded, 1996, as Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, 1996); The Other Side/El otro lado, 1995; Seven Trees, 1998; Cry Out: Poets Protest the War, 2003 (multiple authors); The Woman I Kept to Myself, 2004 nonfiction: Something to Declare, 1998 edited text: Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, 1979 Although she was born in New York City, Julia Alvarez (JEW-lee-ah AHL-vahrehs) spent much of her childhood in the Dominican Republic. Her parents were from the island. Her mother came from a well-positioned and wealthy family, but her father was rather poor. The family’s divided economic position was tied to political problems within the Dominican Republic. Her father’s family, which once was wealthy, supported the losing side during the revolution, while her mother’s family benefited from supporting those who gained power. Julia’s family, although poorer than most of their relatives, enjoyed a privileged position in the Dominican Republic. Although she was raised in the Dominican Republic, Alvarez describes her childhood as “an American childhood.” Her extended family’s power, influence, American connections, and wealth led to Alvarez’s enjoying many of the luxuries of America, including American food, clothes, and friends. When Alvarez’s father became involved with the forces attempting to oust the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafaél Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the secret police began monitoring his activity. Immediately before he was to be arrested in 1960, the family escaped to the United States with the help of an American agent. In an article appearing in American Scholar (“Growing Up American in the Dominican Republic”) published in 27
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1987, Alvarez notes that all her life she had wanted to be a true American girl. She thought, in 1960, that she was going to live in her homeland, America. Living in America was not quite what Alvarez expected. As her fictional but partly autobiographical novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents hints, Alvarez was faced with many adjustments in America. She experienced homesickness, alienation, and prejudice. Going from living on a large family compound to living in a small New York apartment was, in itself, quite an adjustment. Alvarez’s feeling of loss when moving to America caused a change in her. She beJulia Alvarez (Algonquin Books) came introverted, began to read avidly, and eventually began writing. Alvarez attended college, earning degrees in literature and writing. She took a position as an English professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. She has published several collections of poetry, but her best-known work is her semiautobiographical novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Alvarez can be praised for her portrayal of bicultural experiences, particularly for her focusing on the women’s issues that arise out of such an experience.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Set in New York City and the Dominican Republic, Alvarez’s novel traces the lives of the four García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia—as they struggle to understand themselves and their cross-cultural identities. The novel is structured in three parts, focusing on the time spans of 1989-1972, 1970-1960, and 1960-1956. Throughout these years the García girls mature and face various cultural, familial, and individual crises. The sisters’ mother, Laura, comes from the well-known, wealthy de la Torre family, who live in the Dominican Republic. The third part of the novel narrates the Garcías’ flight from their homeland due to political problems within the country. The Garcías immigrate to the United States, planning to stay only until the situation in their homeland improves. Once arriving in America, the sisters struggle to
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acclimate themselves to their new environment. The second part of the novel traces the sisters’ formative years in the United States. Included among the numerous stories told are Yolanda’s struggle to write an acceptable speech for a school event, Carla’s trial of attending a new public school where she is bombarded by racial slurs, and Sandra’s hatred of an American woman who flirts with her father during a family night out. In addition, part 2 narrates the García girls’ summer trips to the Dominican Republic—their parents’ way to keep them from becoming too Americanized. During these trips the García sisters realize that although they face great struggles as immigrants in the United States; they have much more freedom as young women in the United States than they have in the Dominican Republic. Part 1 of the novel begins with Yolanda, who is known as the family poet, returning to the Dominican Republic as an adult. She discovers that the situation in her country has not changed. When she wants to travel to the coast alone, her relatives warn her against it. This early chapter sets Yolanda up as the primary narrator and introduces the tension between the traditions of the island and the new and different culture of the United States. In this first part, readers learn about the girls’ young adult lives, primarily about their sexual awareness, relationships, and marriages. Virginity is a primary issue, for the sisters’ traditions and customs haunt them as they negotiate their sexual awakenings throughout their college years in the United States. In short, it is in this first part in which readers learn precisely how Americanized the García girls have become, and throughout the rest of the novel readers learn how the girls have lost their “accents” gradually, throughout the years.
In the Time of the Butterflies Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 Three of the four daughters of Enrique and Mercedes Mirabal were murdered by the secret service of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo on November 25, 1960, as they returned from Puerto Plata, after paying their weekly visit to the imprisoned husbands of two of the sisters. Julia Alvarez, whose own family fled the Trujillo regime in August of 1960, when she was ten years old, captures in spine-tingling detail more than two decades of events that preceded these murders. The first three sisters, Patria, Dede, and Minerva, were born between 1924 and 1926. Teresa Marie, nicknamed Mate, followed in 1935. Of the four, only Dede survived assassination, because she was unable to travel to Puerto Plata with her sisters on the appointed day. Alvarez, using first-person narration and dividing her book into sections headed always by the name of the sister who is talking, achieves a uniquely well-rounded development of her characters, who reveal themselves in their own sections but who are further revealed by each of the other sisters in their sections. In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of how four conventional, Roman Catholic sisters evolved into revolutionaries code-named “Mariposa”—“butterfly”
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in Spanish—after being reared as typical, submissive Hispanic women. By defying Trujillo, Minerva, the most independent and iconoclastic sister, gains both his respect and rage. As his megalomania increases, however, the Mirabals become his obsession. He arrested three of their husbands as well as Minerva and Mate, ultimately releasing the women to house arrest in Ojo de Agua. As Trujillo’s obsession grows, he orchestrates their murders, which transform the sisters into martyrs venerated throughout Latin America.
¡Yo! Type of work: Novel First published: 1997 What readers learn about Yolanda García, the protagonist of this novel, they glean through sixteen discrete sections, all of which directly concern Yolanda. Many of these sections are interconnected. People who have known Yolanda reveal facets of her personality as they relate their encounters with her. From their revelations emerges a well-developed and complex portrayal of a multifaceted creative artist. The arrangement of the separate portions, each about twenty pages long, is vital to the cohesiveness of the book. Although any of the sections might be read meaningfully as separate entities, it is their placement that justifies identifying the book as a novel rather than a collection of character sketches or short stories. Yolanda is permitted to tell her own story only in the dialogue she has with the characters of each section, identified by such designations as “The Sisters,” “The Mother,” “The Caretakers,” “The Maid’s Daughter,” and “The Third Husband.” The result is a carefully structured novel from which the protagonist emerges as one of the best developed protagonists in recent literature. Alvarez’s structure, perfect for the telling of her highly autobiographical tale, allows for the presentation of a central character more complex and diverse than she would have seemed had any other method of presentation been used. The clue to the novel’s autobiographical nature lurks in the title itself. Yo is both a shortened form of Yolanda and the Spanish word for “I.” Readers, however, must be cautioned to remember that ¡Yo! is a work of fiction and cannot be read as an autobiography presumed to be accurate in all of its details. Each of the sketches in this novel, along with presenting one or more characters as they interact with Yo, deals with some global theme. A political current relating to the despotic dictatorship of strongman Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic underlies many of the individual sketches, in which Alvarez also deals with such broad and compelling matters as political oppression, spousal abuse, homosexuality, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), poverty and exploitation in the Third World, the problems faced by immigrants trying to reestablish themselves in alien cultures, and the effects of the creative temperament on those whose lives intersect with the life of an artist. The first section of ¡Yo!, called “Prologue,” consists of one sketch, “The Sis-
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ters.” It, like each sketch in the book, is identified with a descriptor, in this case “fiction.” Other sections have such descriptors as “nonfiction,” “poetry,” “revelation,” “confrontation,” “characterization,” and “tone,” suggesting that Alvarez, a professor who was teaching writing at Middlebury College in Vermont when she wrote this book, perhaps composed along with her students, producing a sketch for each week of a sixteen-week semester, each sketch reflecting some major aspect of composition and contributing to an overall piece of creative writing, in this case a compelling novel. The prologue is central to the novel as a whole. Yolanda García’s sisters are uneasy about the liberties their sister takes in her writing with bits of private information she possesses about members of the family. They are concerned, as is Yolanda’s mother in the first sketch in part 1, with what they regard as a violation of their privacy by a sister and daughter who, as the novel continues, is shown to be a natural storyteller but whose stories have sometimes created threatening situations. The very last sketch, “The Father,” touches on this subject as Carlos García, a member of the Dominican underground during the early years of his marriage, recalls how Yolanda, as a small child in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, placed the family in grave danger. Watching a movie with the family’s neighbor General Molino, she boasted that her father—living in a dictatorial society where the possession of firearms by civilians was strictly banned—had a bigger gun than the one carried by the cowboy in the film. This sketch is particularly telling because it contains the veiled suggestion that Molino took some sexual liberties with the small child. Bouncing Yolanda on his knee and tickling her from time to time, the general says, watching the television screen, “Ay, look at that big gun, Yoyo!” to which she replies, “My papi has a bigger gun!” The sexual implications here are inescapable. Each section carries its own specific theme that relates to a prevailing social or political crosscurrent. “The Landlady,” whose descriptor is “confrontation,” makes a strong feminist statement about spousal abuse. Marie Beaudry, who becomes Yolanda’s landlady, suffers frequent beatings from a brutish husband who drinks too much. Like many abused wives, she denies that she is being abused, while blaming herself for motivating her husband’s beatings. Yolanda finally confronts Clair Beaudry, the abusive husband, then forces Marie to confront him and to turn her life around. This section reveals Yolanda striving for tenure at the college in which she teaches. She needs a quiet place in which to work, but having signed a lease on the apartment the Beaudrys own, located above their own home, she finds that she cannot work there because their noise as they fight intrudes on her space, upsetting her greatly. Also, when the first rains come, she realizes that Clair Beaudry has, quite without conscience, rented her an apartment that floods in wet weather. The first flood destroys much of the material she has been working on in preparation for writing the book that she hopes will assure her being granted tenure. Clair’s reluctance to release Yolanda from her lease precipitates the confrontation that results, at Yolanda’s instigation, in Marie’s liberating herself from her abusive marriage. Clair Beaudry has reached the conclusion that Yolanda is a lesbian, although she is not, and accuses his wife of being drawn into Yolanda’s web. Yolanda does have a close lesbian friend, Tammy Rosen, but the two are no more
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than friends. Yolanda also has been close to a male homosexual, Jordan Garfield, her college English professor, with whom she has maintained contact through the years. Garfield, married for more than thirty years, finally leaves his wife, Helena. He soon enters into a homosexual relationship with a much younger colleague, Matthews, who eventually takes a teaching job in San Diego, putting the two a continent apart. Their relationship, nevertheless, continues on a long-distance basis, with Garfield counting the time until he can retire, which will enable him to live with Matthews. Before this dream can be realized, however, Matthews reveals that he is dying of AIDS. Garfield, ever the caregiver, takes him in and tends him throughout what remains of his life. Alvarez is particularly sensitive in presenting the details of relationships that skirt the fringe of what society regards as normal and usual. She also retains a great consistency in developing her characters. Garfield, for example, is ever the caring person, fully aware of his commitment and responsibility to others. A major concern in this novel is the Dominican Republic. Carlos García has immigrated with his wife and four daughters to the United States, giving up his profession, medicine, to do so. Only after years of doing menial work is he finally able to be certified to practice medicine in his adopted country. The family brings Primitiva, who worked for Laura García’s family in the Dominican Republic, to the United States to be their maid. She eventually is able, with their help, to bring her daughter, Sarita, to live with her. The entire Primitiva/Sarita episode is intriguing in that it deals with a problem common in societies where large numbers of people are oppressed and live in grinding poverty. Primitiva, apparently, was impregnated by the husband of the family for whom she worked in the Dominican Republic, the well-to-do de la Torre family, from which Laura García comes. Primitiva’s illegitimate daughter is, in all probability, the cousin of the García girls, although her social position is quite different from that of their cousin Lucinda, who also appears in the novel. Sarita is bright and is not bound by the social constraints that keep Lucinda from obtaining a college education, so, ironically, Sarita becomes a physician while Lucinda, brought back to the Dominican Republic before she has finished her formal education, is never able to have a career. The message is clear: Immigration to the United States places enormous hurdles before Third World people, but, as both Carlos and Sarita demonstrate, the United States is also a land of great opportunity in which immigrants of any social class can ultimately succeed and become contributing members of society. Alvarez’s technical experiments in this novel are noteworthy. Whereas most of the sketches focus on a central character who has in one way or another been a part of Yolanda García’s life, two of the sketches, “The Sisters” and “The Caretakers,” present two central characters who have had some crucial contact with the protagonist. Alvarez’s most daring section, however, is “The Wedding Guests,” in which the author experiments with the presentation of her narrative through the eyes of several characters, presented in brief segments, to whom she has introduced her readers earlier in the novel. This section, for all of its technical complexity, succeeds admirably and helps achieve a unity that adds an overall coherence to the larger work.
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In ¡Yo!, Alvarez consistently addresses the question of what it is to be a sensitive creative artist in the modern context and to be dissociated from one’s native society. In this regard, ¡Yo! is similar in its nostalgic tone to Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997).
In the Name of Salomé Type of work: Novel First published: 2000 In the Name of Salomé is intricately structured. It interweaves two stories: one of revolutionary Dominican poet Salomé Urena and one of her daughter, referred to as Camila. Camila was three when Salomé died. The stories of these two women unfold in alternating chapters. Those numbered in Spanish recount Salomé’s story, those in English Camila’s. Salomé’s story develops from beginning to end, Camila’s story from the end of her professional life and her retirement to Cuba. As the book progresses, Camila’s story moves backward through her earlier years. Only in the final pages do the two story lines coalesce. Julia Alvarez explores timely issues of lasting social concern: Latin American politics, being orphaned, blended families, family relationships, the status of women, martial infidelity, forgiveness, lesbianism, multiculturalism, duty to one’s country, and adjustment problems facing immigrants. Salomé, a revolutionary poet born in 1850, is a truly gifted writer. She marries Francisco Henriquez, nine years her junior, who, after her death, serves a four-month term as president of the troubled Dominican Republic. Salomé’s children are forced by Dominican political instability to disperse. Pedro immigrates to Argentina, becoming an eminent scholar and eventually a Norton lecturer at Harvard. Camila, after teaching in Cuba, becomes a Vassar professor. Her distinguished career ends in 1960 with her retirement and her return to Cuba, once her childhood sanctuary but now politically turbulent. Alvarez, herself a Dominican, often focuses on the political unrest in the Dominican Republic. This book makes political statements in beguilingly personal and historically accurate ways.
Suggested Readings Alvarez, Julia. “A Citizen of the World: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” In Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, edited by Bridget Kevane and Juanita Heredia. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. _______. “On Finding a Latino Voice.” In The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and How They Work, edited by Maria Arana. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2003.
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_______. “An Unlikely Beginning for a Writer.” In Máscaras, edited by Lucha Corpi. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1997. Bing, Jonathan. “Julia Alvarez: Books That Cross Borders.” Publishers Weekly 243 (December 16, 1996). Echevarria, Roberto Gonzalez. “Sisters in Death.” The New York Times Book Review (December 18, 1994): 28. Garcia-Johnson, Ronie-Richele. “Julía Alvarez.” In Notable Hispanic American Women, edited by Diane Telgen and Jim Kamp. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. Julia Alvarez: Writing a New Place on the Map. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. “A Clean Windshield: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” In Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Ortiz-Marquez, Maribel. “From Third World Politics to First World Practices: Contemporary Latina Writers in the United States.” In Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, edited by Ghosh Bishmupriya and Bose Brinda. New York: Garland, 1997. Rosario-Sievert, Heather. “Conversation with Julia Alvarez.” Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 54 (Spring, 1997): 31-37. Rosenberg, Robert, ed. and director. Women of Hope/Latinas Abriendo Camino: Twelve Ground Breaking Latina Women. Bread and Roses Cultural Project. Princeton, N.J.: Films for Humanities, 1996. Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Contributors: Angela Athy and R. Baird Shuman
Rudolfo A. Anaya Born: Pastura, New Mexico; October 30, 1937 Mexican American
Anaya became one of the foremost Chicano novelists of the twentieth century. Principal works children’s literature: The Farolitos of Christmas: A New Mexico Christmas Story, 1987 (1995; illustrated edition); Maya’s Children: The Story of La Llorona, 1997; Farolitos for Abuelo, 1998; My Land Sings: Stories from the Rio Grande, 1999; Roadrunner’s Dance, 2000; The Santero’s Miracle: A Bilingual Story, 2004 (illustrated by Amy Cordova, Spanish translation by Enrique Lamadrid) drama: The Season of La Llorona, pr. 1979; Who Killed Don José?, pr. 1987; Billy the Kid, pb. 1995 long fiction: Bless Me, Ultima, 1972; Heart of Aztlán, 1976; Tortuga, 1979; The Legend of La Llorona, 1984; Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl, 1987; Alburquerque, 1992; Zia Summer, 1995; Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert, 1996; Rio Grande Fall, 1996; Shaman Winter, 1999; Jemez Spring, 2005 poetry: The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas, 1985 (epic poem); Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chávez, 2000 (juvenile) screenplay: Bilingualism: Promise for Tomorrow, 1976 short fiction: The Silence of the Llano, 1982; Serafina’s Stories, 2004; The Man Who Could Fly, and Other Stories, 2006 nonfiction: A Chicano in China, 1986; Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya, 1998 edited texts: Voices from the Rio Grande, 1976; Cuentos Chicanos: A Short Story Anthology, 1980 (with Antonio Márquez); A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 16801980, 1981 (with Simon Ortiz); Voces: An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicano Writers, 1987; Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, 1989; Tierra: Contemporary Short Fiction of New Mexico, 1989 miscellaneous: The Anaya Reader, 1995 Rudolfo Anaya (rew-DOHL-foh ah-NI-yah) began writing during his days as a student at the University of New Mexico. His poetry and early novels dealt with major questions about his existence, beliefs, and identity. Anaya ended that phase of his life by burning all of the manuscripts of his work. After college he took a teaching job and got married. He found his wife to be a great source of encouragement and an excellent editor and companion. Anaya be35
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gan writing Bless Me, Ultima in the 1960’s. He struggled with the work until in one of his creative moments Ultima appeared to him. She became the strongest character of the novel as well as the spiritual mentor for the novelist and the protagonist. Ultima led the way to a successful work. Anaya’s next task was to get his novel published. After dozens of rejection letters from major publishers, Anaya turned to Quinto Sol Publications, a Chicano small press in Berkeley, California. The publishers not only accepted the work for publication but also recognized Anaya with the Quinto Sol Award for writing the best Chicano novel of 1972. Bless Me, Ultima represents the first novel of a trilogy. The other two are Heart of Aztlán and Tortuga. Heart of Aztlán came as a result of Anaya’s travels in Mexico during the 1960’s, which raised the question of the relationship between the preColumbian Aztec world, called Aztlán, and Chicano destiny. Tortuga was inspired by a diving accident at an irrigation ditch during Anaya’s high school days. The accident left Anaya disabled; the protagonist in the novel also experiences such events. The quality of the first three works enshrined Anaya as the foremost Chicano novelist of his time. His numerous other excellent works have confirmed this high regard. The essence of his literary production reflects the search for the meaning of existence as it is expressed in Chicano community life. Anaya’s works blend realistic description of daily life with the hidden magic of humanity; his work may be categorized as having the qualities of Magical Realism, which mingles, in a straightforward narrative tone, the mystical and magical with the everyday. Most of his developed characters reflect this duality.
Bless Me, Ultima Type of work: Novel First published: 1972 Bless Me, Ultima is Anaya’s first novel of a trilogy that also includes Heart of Aztlán (1976) and Tortuga (1979). It is a psychological and magical portrait of a quest for identity by a child. In this classic work, Antonio, the protagonist, is subjected to contradicting influences that he must master in order to mature. These influences include symbolic characters and places, the most powerful of which are Ultima, a curandera (healer) who evokes the timeless past of a pre-Columbian world, and a golden carp, which swims the river waters of the supernatural and offers a redeeming future. Antonio is born in Pasturas, a very small village on the Eastern New Mexican plain. Later, the family moves across the river to the small town of Guadalupe, where Antonio spends his childhood. His father belongs to the Márez family and is a cattleman; Antonio’s mother is of the Luna family, whose background is farming. They represent the initial manifestation of the divided world into which Antonio is born. Division is a challenge he must resolve in order to find himself. Antonio’s father wants him to become a horseman of the plain. Antonio’s mother wants him to become a priest to a farming community, which is in the highest tradition of the Luna family.
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The parents’ wishes are symptoms of a deeper spiritual challenge facing Antonio involving his Catholic beliefs and those associated with the magical world of a pre-Columbian past. Ultima, the curandera and a creature of both worlds, helps guide Antonio through the ordeal of understanding and dealing with these challenges. Ultima is a magical character who touches the core of Antonio’s being. She supervised his birth. Later she comes to stay with the family in Guadalupe when Antonio is seven. On several occasions, Antonio is a witness to her power. Antonio’s adventure takes him beyond the divided world of the farmer and the horseman and beyond the Rudolfo A. Anaya (Michael Mouchette) Catholic ritual and its depictions of good and evil. With Ultima’s help, he is able to bridge these opposites and channel them into a new cosmic vision of nature, represented by the river, which stands in the middle of his two worlds, and by the golden carp, which points to a new spiritual covenant. The novel ends with the killing of Ultima’s owl by one of her enemies. He discovered that the owl carried her spiritual presence. This killing also causes Ultima’s death, but her work is done. Antonio can choose his destiny.
Heart of Aztlán Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Heart of Aztlán is Anaya’s second novel of a trilogy that includes Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Tortuga (1979). It is a psychological portrait of a quest for Chicano identity and empowerment. It is the story of the Chávez family, who leave the country to search for a better life in the city only to discover that their destiny lies in a past thought abandoned and lost. The story is carried by two major characters, Clemente Chávez, the father, and Jason, one of the sons. Jason depicts the adjustments the family has to make to everyday life in the city. Clemente undergoes a magical rebirth that brings a new awareness of destiny to the community and a new will to fight for their birthright. The novel begins with the Chávez family selling the last of their land and leaving
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the small town of Guadalupe for a new life in Albuquerque. They go to live in Barelas, a barrio on the west side of the city that is full of other immigrants from the country. The Chávezes soon learn, as the other people of the barrio already know, that their lives do not belong to them. They are controlled by industrial interests represented by the railroad and a union that has sold out the workers. They are controlled by politicians through Mannie García, “el super,” who delivers the community vote. In Barelas, Clemente also begins to lose the battle of maintaining control of the family, especially his daughters, who no longer believe in his insistence on the tradition of respect and obedience to the head of the family. The situation gets worse when Clemente loses his job in the railroad yard during a futile strike. Clemente becomes a drunk and in his despair attempts to commit suicide. Crespín, a magical character who represents eternal wisdom, comes to his assistance and points the way to a new life. With Crespín’s help, Clemente solves the riddle of a magical power stone in the possession of “la India,” a sorceress who symbolically guards the entryway to the heart of Aztlán, the source of empowerment for the Chicano. Clemente’s rebirth takes the form of a journey to the magical mountain lake that is at the center of Aztlán and Chicano being. Reborn, Clemente returns to his community to lead the movement for social and economic justice. It is a redeeming and unifying struggle for life and the destiny of a people. The novel ends with Clemente physically taking a hammer to the Santa Fe water tower in the railroad yard, a symbol of industrial might, before coming home to lead a powerful march on his former employers.
Tortuga Type of work: Novel First published: 1979 Tortuga is Anaya’s third novel of a trilogy that also includes Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Heart of Aztlán (1976). It is a tale of a journey to self-realization and supernatural awareness. In the story, Benjie Chávez, the protagonist, undergoes the ordeal of symbolic rebirth in order to take the place of Crespín, the keeper of Chicano wisdom who, upon his death, leaves that task to the protagonist. At the end of Heart of Aztlán, Benjie is wounded by his brother Jason’s rival. Benjie falls from a rail yard water tower and is paralyzed. He is transported to a hospital in the South for rehabilitation. His entry into the hospital is also symbolically an entry into a world of supernatural transformation. The hospital sits at the foot of Tortuga Mountain, from which flow mineral springs with healing waters. Benjie is also given the name Tortuga (which means “turtle”) after he is fitted with a body cast that makes him look like a turtle. What follows is a painful ordeal. The protagonist is subjected to demanding therapy and
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is exposed to every kind of suffering and deformity that can possibly afflict children. Not even this, however, prepares him for the visit to the “vegetable” ward, where rotting children—who cannot move or even breathe without the help of an iron lung—are kept alive. It is in the vegetable ward that Tortuga meets Salomón, a vegetable, but one with supernatural insight into the human condition. Salomón enters Tortuga’s psyche and guides him on the path to spiritual renewal. Salomón compares Tortuga’s challenge with the terrible ordeal newly born turtles undergo as they dash to the sea. Most of them do not make it, as other creatures lie in wait to devour them. Tortuga must survive the path of the turtles’ dash in order to arrive at his destiny, which is called “the path of the sun.” Another part of Tortuga’s ordeal includes a moment when Danny, another important character, pushes him into a swimming pool, where he nearly drowns, surviving only because other people rush to his aid. Tortuga symbolically survives the turtle dash to the sea. The vegetables are not so lucky. One night Danny succeeds in turning off the power to their ward. With the iron lungs turned off, they all die. The end of the novel and Tortuga’s rehabilitation also bring the news that Crespín, the magical helper of Tortuga’s home neighborhood, has died. The news of Crespín’s death arrives along with his blue guitar, a symbol of universal knowledge, which is now in Benjie’s care.
Suggested Readings Baeza, Abelardo. Man of Aztlan: A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 2001. Dick, Bruce, and Silvio Sirias, eds. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Fernández Olmos, Margarite. Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. González-Trujillo, César A., ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism. La Jolla, Calif.: Lalo Press, 1990. Klein, Dianne. “Coming of Age in Novels by Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros.” The English Journal 81 (September, 1992). Taylor, Paul Beekman. “Chicano Secrecy in the Fiction of Rudolfo A. Anaya.” Journal of the Southwest 39, no. 2 (1997): 239-265. Vasallo, Paul, ed. The Magic of Words: Rudolfo Anaya and His Writings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Contributor: David Conde
Maya Angelou (Marguerite Johnson) Born: St. Louis, Missouri; April 4, 1928 African American
Through poems and autobiographical narratives, Angelou describes her life as an African American, single mother, professional, and feminist. Principal works children’s literature: Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, 1986 (illustrated by Étienne Delessert); Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, 1993 (poetry; illustrated by Jean-Michel Basquiat); Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 1993; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me, 1994; Kofi and His Magic, 1996; Angelina of Italy, 2004; Izak of Lapland, 2004; Mikale of Hawaii, 2004; Renie Marie of France, 2004 drama: Cabaret for Freedom, pr. 1960 (with Godfrey Cambridge; musical); The Least of These, pr. 1966; Encounters, pr. 1973; Ajax, pr. 1974 (adaptation of Sophocles’ play); And Still I Rise, pr. 1976; King, pr. 1990 (musical; lyrics with Alistair Beaton, book by Lonne Elder III; music by Richard Blackford) poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’ fore I Diiie, 1971; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975; And Still I Rise, 1978; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, 1983; Poems: Maya Angelou, 1986; Now Sheba Sings the Song, 1987 (Tom Feelings, illustrator); I Shall Not Be Moved: Poems, 1990; On the Pulse of Morning, 1993; The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, 1994; Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, 1994; A Brave and Startling Truth, 1995; Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem, 2005; Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me, 2006 screenplays: Georgia, Georgia, 1972; All Day Long, 1974 short fiction: “Steady Going Up,” 1972; “The Reunion,” 1983 teleplays: Black, Blues, Black, 1968 (10 episodes); The Inheritors, 1976; The Legacy, 1976; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1979 (with Leonora Thuna and Ralph B. Woolsey); Sister, Sister, 1982; Brewster Place, 1990 nonfiction: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970 (autobiography); Gather Together in My Name, 1974 (autobiography); Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, 1976 (autobiography); The Heart of a Woman, 1981 (autobiography); All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986 (autobiography); Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, 1993 (autobiographical essays); 40
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Even the Stars Look Lonesome, 1997; A Song Flung Up to Heaven, 2002 (autobiographical essays); Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes, 2004 (memoir and cookbook) Born Marguerite Johnson, rechristened Maya, and taking the professional name Angelou (an adaptation of the name of her first husband, Tosh Angelos), Maya Angelou studied music and dance with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Ann Halprin. Her early career was as an actress and singer, to which she quickly added the roles of civil rights worker (as the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC], 1959-1960), editor (as associate editor for the Arab Observer, 1961-1962), educator (beginning with the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, 1963-1966), and finally writer—first as a reporter for the Ghanaian Times (1963-1965). During the late 1960’s and 1970’s she taught at many colleges and universities in California and Kansas. Since joining the faculty at Wake Forest University in 1981, she has been a sought-after speaker and is in many respects regarded as America’s unofficial poet laureate, although she has yet to receive that honor. Undoubtedly, Angelou’s legacy will be her writings: Although the best-selling I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was censored, her excellent work as an author in all genres has kept her story before the world. Angelou’s early years have been burned into the minds of numerous readers. An image from this work centers on three-year-old Marguerite and four-year-old Bailey Johnson aboard a train, alone, traveling from California to their grandmother’s home in Stamps, Arkansas, after the breakup of their parents’ marriage. The two children wore their names and their destination attached to their clothes. This locomotive quest for family is both a factual part of and an apt metaphor for the life of the world-famous poet. Her first feeling of being truly at home, she has said, came in Africa, after she accompanied her second husband to Egypt and then traveled to Ghana. A second image from Angelou’s childhood involves the seven-yearold’s rape by her mother’s boyfriend. When no legal punishment followed, the rapist was murdered, possibly by the victim’s uncles. Guilt following this incident drove Angelou inward, and she began reading the great works Maya Angelou (AP/Wide World Photos)
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of literature. Reading her way through the Stamps library, she fell in love with William Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others. The child of a fractured nuclear family came to see herself as a child of the fractured human family. By age thirteen Angelou had grown closer to her mother; at sixteen she became a mother herself. To earn a living for herself and her son Guy, she became a waitress, a singer, and a dancer. These and other occupations were followed by acting, directing, producing, and the hosting of television specials. She loved to dance, but when her knees began to suffer in her early twenties, she devoted her attention to her other love: writing. She began supporting herself through her writing in 1968. Her family came to include “sister friends” and “brother friends,” as her troubled brother Bailey became lost in the worlds of substance abuse and prison. She married, but she has refused to attach a number to her marriages, as that might, she says, suggest frivolity, and she insists that she was never frivolous about marriage. To “brother friend” James Baldwin she gives much credit for her becoming an autobiographer. She assisted “brother friends” Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X in their work and pursued her own work to better the entire human family. The hope that she found so significant in the 1960’s is reflected in the poem she composed for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. The dream of King is evident in the words written and delivered by Angelou “on the pulse of [that] morning.”
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1970 Angelou begins her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with reflections about growing up black and female during the Great Depression in the small, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. Following their parents’ divorce, Angelou, then three years old, moved to Stamps with her brother Bailey to live with their paternal grandmother and their uncle Willie. Their home was the general store, which served as the secular center of the African American community in Stamps. Angelou’s memories of this store include weary farmworkers, the euphoria of Joe Louis’s successful prizefight, and a terrifying nocturnal Ku Klux Klan hunt. Angelou also recollects lively African American church services, unpleasant interracial encounters, and childhood sexual experimentation. An avid love of reading led the young Angelou to African American writers, including the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, from whose verse Angelou borrows the title for her narrative. Singing is heard in Angelou’s memories of her segregated Arkansas school. At their grade-school graduation ceremony, Angelou and her classmates counter the racism of a condescending white politician with a defiant singing of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” For Angelou this song becomes a celebration of the resistance of African Americans to the white establishment and a key to her identity as an African American poet.
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Angelou spends portions of the narrative with her mother in St. Louis and in California. She has a wild visit to Mexico with her father and is even a homeless runaway for a time. As a girl in St. Louis, Angelou is sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Following his trial and mysterious death, Angelou suffers a period of trauma and muteness. Later, an adolescent Angelou struggles with her sexual identity, fears that she is a lesbian, and eventually initiates an unsatisfactory heterosexual encounter, from which she becomes pregnant. Angelou matures into a self-assured and proud young woman. During World War II, she overcomes racial barriers to become one of the first African American female streetcar conductors in San Francisco. Surviving the uncertainties of an unwanted pregnancy, Angelou optimistically faces her future as an unwed mother and as an African American woman.
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1986 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes belongs to a series of autobiographical narratives tracing Angelou’s personal search for identity as an African American woman. In this powerful tale, Angelou describes her emotional journey to find identity and ancestral roots in West Africa. Angelou reveals her excitement as she immigrates to Ghana in 1962 and attempts to redefine herself as African, not American. Her loyalty to Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, reflects hope in Africa’s and her own independence. She learns the Fanti language, toys with thoughts of marrying a prosperous Malian Muslim, communes with Ghanaians in small towns and rural areas, and identifies with her enslaved forebears. Monuments such as Cape Coast Castle, where captured slaves were imprisoned before sailing to America, stand on African soil as vivid reminders of an African American slave past. In Ghana Angelou hopes to escape the lingering pains of American slavery and racism. Gradually, however, she feels displaced and uncomfortable in her African environment. Cultural differences and competition for employment result in unpleasant encounters between Ghanaians and African Americans. Despite such frustrations, Angelou’s network of fellow African American emigrants offers mutual support and continuing hope in the African experience. A visit by Malcolm X provides much-needed encouragement, but his presence is also a reminder of ties with the United States. Angelou and her African American friends express their solidarity with the American Civil Rights movement by demonstrating at the United States embassy in Ghana. As she sorts through her ambivalent feelings about Africa, Angelou also rethinks her role as mother. At the beginning of All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, Angelou’s son Guy almost dies in an automobile accident. Later in the narrative he develops a relationship with an older woman and struggles to gain admit-
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tance to the University of Ghana. In dealing with all these events, Angelou learns to balance her maternal feelings with her son’s need for independence and selfexpression. Finally recognizing the powerful ties binding her to American soil, Angelou concludes her narrative with a joyful journey home from Ghana and a renewed sense of identity as an African American.
I Shall Not Be Moved Type of work: Poetry First published: 1990 Maya Angelou’s poetry draws on the rhythms of jazz, blues, and spirituals; despite its tough look at the hard facts of black life, it is ultimately forgiving and celebratory. Angelou’s long poem “Our Grandmothers,” perhaps her best, is emblematic of the entire work. It features the refrain, “I shall not be moved,” epitomizing the love and determination of black women. The first woman who appears in this poem is significantly nameless, a slave mother running away with her children because the master is going to sell her and divide the family. Other women also appear as Angelou moves from the days of the slave trade to the modern-day black woman standing in the welfare line. Each of these women, however, has enormous resistance and resilience. Angelou sympathizes as well with other struggling members of society. Her poems about the working poor are especially poignant—the girl who asserts, “Even minimal people/ can’t survive on minimum wage,” and Coleridge Jackson, a warehouse worker who is berated and diminished daily by his “little/ white bag of bones” boss. Yet Angelou has the largeness of spirit to forgive even the former slave state of Virginia. She uses its natural beauty to signify the change, writing that dogwood blossoms form “round my/ head ringlets/ of forgiveness.” Indeed, although Angelou presents a harshly realistic picture of black life, she also sees the humor, joy, and triumph of it. The final poem is a dirge for dead friends. She first mourns their loss, then looks at the larger picture, finding that “after a period peace blooms.” Finally, because they were, “We can be. Be and be/ better. . . .” The entire volume is a triumph of overcoming.
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now Type of work: Essays First published: 1993 Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now is a collection of twenty-four meditations, many of special interest to women, expressing Maya Angelou’s views on subjects ranging from fashion and entertainment to sensuality and pregnancy, rac-
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ism, and death. Two of the essays contain new poems, one for Angelou’s mother, “Mrs. V. B.,” and the other, untitled, on the similarities among all people despite racial diversity. Among the best pieces here are those that begin with some autobiographical incident from which Angelou draws an insight or lesson. The most interesting include “Power of the Word,” focusing on the power of faith, particularly as illustrated in Angelou’s own experience and in her grandmother, “Mamma,” in Stamps, Arkansas, during the Great Depression; “Getups,” demonstrating not only Angelou’s love of richly colorful clothing but also a painful event from her years as a single mother of a small boy; and “Extending Boundaries,” recounting an embarrassing experience from Angelou’s early days as a writer in New York City. Angelou uses each incident to draw some point, though generally she offers her moral or advice with a light hand, often with humor, despite the seriousness of some of her subject matter. Her recurrent themes include self-knowledge and the necessity of honesty, prudence, and respect in the treatment of oneself and others. Written in the simple, direct style that also characterizes Maya Angelou’s poetry, these essays are particularly suitable for morning or evening reflection. They range in length from several pages to one paragraph, and each is an independent piece. They offer insight into the experience and philosophy of one of America’s most celebrated women writers and practical advice for responsible yet pleasurable living.
Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Elliott, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Hagen, Lynn B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. King, Sarah E. Maya Angelou: Greeting the Morning. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1994. Lisandrelli, Elaine Slivinski. Maya Angelou: More than a Poet. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. McPherson, Dolly A. Order out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou. New York: P. Lang, 1990. Pettit, Jayne. Maya Angelou: Journey of the Heart. New York: Lodestar Books, 1996. Shapiro, Miles. Maya Angelou. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Williams, Mary E., ed. Readings on Maya Angelou. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Contributors: Thomas J. Sienkewicz, Judith K. Taylor, and David Peck
Mary Antin Born: Polotzk, Russia; June 13, 1881 Died: Suffern, New York; May 17, 1949 Jewish
Antin’s The Promised Land is the classic Jewish American immigrant autobiography. Principal works nonfiction: From Plotzk to Boston, 1899; At School in the Promised Land: Or, The Story of a Little Immigrant, 1912 (selections from The Promised Land); The Promised Land, 1912; They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration, 1914 (illustrated by Joseph Stella) Mary Antin (MEHR-ree AN-tihn) was born in Polotzk in what was then czarist Russia. Antin’s place of birth and her Jewishness determined what her identity would have been had her family stayed in Polotzk. Had they stayed, she would have been an Orthodox Jewish wife of a Jewish man, the mother of Jewish children, and a woman with only enough education to enable her to read the Psalms in Hebrew. As a Jew, she could not live beyond the pale of settlement in Russia and could never become assimilated into Russian society. As a young child, she felt stifled by this identity. In The Promised Land she compares her moving at age thirteen to America, where she felt she had freedom to choose her own identity, to the Hebrews’ escape from bondage in Egypt. In America, she received a free education in Boston public schools. She had access to public libraries. She had access to settlement houses, like Hale House (in which she later worked), where she experienced American culture. She had a freedom of which she could hardly dream in Europe. The woman who in Polotzk would never have become more than barely literate chose for herself in the New World the identity of a writer and social worker. At fifteen, she published her first poem in the Boston Herald. At eighteen, she published her first autobiographical volume, From Plotzk to Boston, which resulted in her being hailed as a child prodigy. Eventually, she reworked the material from this book into her masterpiece, The Promised Land. After graduating from Girl’s Latin School in Boston, Antin went to the Teachers’ College of Columbia University in New York City and then to Barnard College, where she met and married Amadeus W. Grabau, a geologist, Columbia professor, and Gentile. She felt that her marriage cemented her chosen identity as a fully assimilated American. Although her husband eventually left her and set46
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tled in China, she never lost her faith in the possibilities of total assimilation into American society. She felt that since she had become fully assimilated, so could all other Jewish immigrants to the country she spoke of without irony as the promised land.
The Promised Land Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1912 The Promised Land is Antin’s mature autobiography. In it, she tells the story of what she considers her escape from bondage in Eastern Europe and her finding of freedom in America. Early in the book, she compares herself to a treadmill horse who can only go round and round in the same circle. She sees herself in Polotzk in what was then Russia as imprisoned by her religion (Jews were allowed to live only in certain places in czarist Russia and to work only at certain trades) and her sex (among Orthodox Jews in Eastern Europe, women were not permitted education beyond learning to read the Psalms in Hebrew). After her father suffered a long illness and as a result failed in business, he went to America. His family followed him to Boston, where Mary grew up. In America, she felt that she had all the freedom she lacked in the Old World. She could get free secular education. The public schools of Boston, she felt, opened new intellectual vistas for her. She also had access to public libraries and settlement houses that provided her with cultural activities. Thus, she felt she had “a kingdom in the slums.” She responded to America’s possibilities by doing extremely well in school and by publishing her first poem when she was fifteen. Her father proudly bought copies of the newspaper in which it appeared and distributed it to friends and neighbors, bragging about his daughter the writer. She became a member of the Natural History Club of Boston and, through it, learned about the lives of its members who, she felt, represented what was best about America, a country in which she felt she was a welcomed participant. Visiting many of the members in their homes, she became convinced that she had true equality in America. In her book, Antin says that if she was able to accomplish so much, so can all immigrants. She admits that her father, because of an inability to master the English language and because of bad luck, did not prosper in the New World, but she still remains optimistic about America and about the possibilities of total assimilation for America’s immigrant population. Whereas the Old World represents, for her, lack of freedom and a predetermined identity, she sees the New World as representing freedom and the ability to choose her own identity.
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Suggested Readings Antin, Mary. Selected Letters of Mary Antin. Edited by Evelyn Satz. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Liptzin, Sol. The Jew in American Literature. New York: Bloch, 1966. Mindra, Mihai. Strategists of Assimilation: Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska. Bucharest: Romanian Academy, 2003. Tuerk, Richard. “Jewish-American Literature.” In Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution, edited by Robert J. DiPietro and Edward Ifkovic. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. Contributor: Richard Tuerk
Reinaldo Arenas Born: Holguín, Oriente, Cuba; July 16, 1943 Died: New York, New York; December 7, 1990 Cuban American
Arenas’s novels reflect his rural upbringing and his fight against Cuban revolutionary institutions that condemned him because of his homosexuality. Principal works drama: Persecución: Cuatro piezas de teatro experimental, pb. 1986 long fiction: Celestino antes del alba, 1967 (revised as Cantando en el pozo, 1982; Singing from the Well, 1987; part 1 of The Pentagonía); El mundo alucinante, 1969 (Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Life and Adventures of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier, 1971; also as The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, 1987); El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, 1975 (as Le Palais des très blanches mouffettes, 1980; The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990; part 2 of The Pentagonía); La vieja Rosa, 1980; Otra vez el mar, 1982 (Farewell to the Sea, 1986; part 3 of The Pentagonía); Arturo, la estrella más brillante, 1984 (Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star, 1989, in Old Rosa); La loma del ángel, 1987 (Graveyard of the Angels, 1987); El portero, 1989 (The Doorman, 1991); Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories, 1989 (a combination of La vieja Rosa and Arturo, la estrella más brillante); Viaje a La Habana, 1990; El color del verano, 1991 (The Color of Summer: Or, The New Garden of Earthly Delights, 2000; part 4 of The Pentagonía); El asalto, 1991 (The Assault, 1994; part 5 of The Pentagonía) poetry: El central, 1981 (El Central: A Cuban Sugar Mill, 1984); Voluntad de vivir manifestándose, 1989 short fiction: Con los ojos cerrados, 1972 (revised as Termina el desfile, 1981); Adiós a mamá: De La Habana a Nueva York, 1995; Mona, and Other Tales, 2001 nonfiction: Necesidad de libertad, 1985; Antes que anochezca, 1992 (Before Night Falls, 1993) Reinaldo Arenas (ray-NAHL-doh ah-RAY-nahs) overcame a poor rural upbringing to become a renowned novelist and short-story writer. He belongs to a generation of young writers who received literary training in official programs to promote literacy among the Cuban poor. Such training, however, also involved heavy indoctrination by political organizations that promoted only revolutionary readings. 49
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Although his career depended upon his incorporation into such a political agenda, Arenas refused to take an ideological stand. His decision caused him prosecution by legal authorities, imprisonment, and exile. A superb storyteller, Arenas, in his first novel, Singing from the Well, presents young peasant characters who find themselves in an existentialist quest. Surrounded by a bleak rural environment, these protagonists fight the absolute poverty that keeps them from achieving their dreams. They also must confront their homosexual feelings, which force them to become outcasts. Although the subject of homosexuality is not an essential theme of the novel—the subject is merely hinted—Arenas’s novel received a cold reception from Cuban critics. Hallucinations brought Arenas’s first confrontations with revolutionary critics and political authorities. Dissatisfied with the Castro regime, Arenas in the novel equates the Cuban Revolution to the oppressive forces of the Spanish Inquisition by drawing parallels between the persecutory practices of the two institutions. He also published the novel abroad without government consent, a crime punishable by law. That violation caused him to lose job opportunities and made him the target of multiple attempts at indoctrination, which included his imprisonment in a forced labor camp in 1970. In spite of constant threats, Arenas continued writing antirevolutionary works that were smuggled out of the country by friends and published abroad in French translations. The theme of these works is constant: denunciation of Castro’s oppressive political practices, most significantly the forced labor camps. The novels also decry the systematic persecution of homosexuals by military police and the relocation of homosexuals in labor camps. After an incarceration of almost three years (1973-1976), Arenas made several attempts to escape from Cuba illegally. He finally succeeded in 1980, when he entered the United States by means of the Mariel boat lift. In the United States he continued his strong opposition to the Castro regime and re-edited the literary work he had written in Cuba. In addition, he intensified his interest in homosexual characters who, like his early young characters, find themselves in confrontation with the oppressive societies that punish them because of their sexual orientation. His open treatment of homosexuality makes him a forerunner of writers on that subject in Latin American literature. In 1987, Arenas received a diagnosis of AIDS and three years later took his own life by deliberately overdosing on drugs and alcohol. He had remained a staunch opponent of the Cuban government; in a suicide note he encouraged his compatriots to “continue fighting for freedom. . . . Cuba will be free. I already am.”
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Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star Type of work: Novel First published: Arturo, la estrella más brillante, 1984 (English translation, 1989) Arenas’s commitment to resisting and denouncing Cuba’s indoctrination practices is evident in his short novel Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star. This work is also significant in that Arenas links his political views on the Cuban Revolution with his increasing interest in gay characters. The plot was inspired by a series of police raids against homosexuals in Havana in the early 1960’s. The process was simple: The police picked up thousands of men, usually young men, and denounced them as homosexuals on the grounds of their wearing certain pieces of clothing commonly considered to be the garb of gay men. Those arrested had to work and undergo ideological training in labor camps. Arturo is one of the thousands of gay men forced into a work camp. He becomes a fictional eyewitness of the rampant use of violence as a form of punishment. The novel’s descriptions of the violence coincide with eyewitness accounts by gay men who have made similar declarations after their exile from Cuba. Arturo faces the fact that a labor camp foments homosexual activity between the prisoners and the guards. A dreary and claustrophobic existence prompts some men to do female impersonations. If caught, those impersonators become a target of police brutality. Arturo, a social outcast, suffers rejection by his fellow prisoners because initially he does not take part in the female impersonations. Partly as the result of verbal and physical abuse, he joins the group at last and becomes the camp’s best female impersonator. His transformation, especially his fast control of the female impersonator’s jargon, reminds the reader of the revolutionary jargon forced upon the prisoners, which at first they resist learning but later mimic to ironic perfection. Arturo’s imagination forces him to understand his loneliness in the camp. In order to escape from the camp, he strives to create his own world, one that is truly fantastic and one of which he is king. The mental process is draining, and he has to work under sordid conditions that threaten his concentration, but he is successful in his attempt, and his world grows and extends outside the camp. The final touch is the construction of his own castle, in which he discovers a handsome man waiting for him on the other side of the walls. In his pursuit of his admirer, Arturo does not recognize that his imaginary walls are the off-limits fences of the camp. When he is ordered to stop, he continues to walk out of the camp, and he is shot dead by a military officer. Arenas’s novel represents the beginning of a literary trend in Latin America that presents homosexuals as significant characters. It also focuses on the sexual practices of homosexual men, something that was a literary taboo.
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The Pentagonía Type of work: Novels First published: Celestino antes del alba, 1967 (Singing from the Well, 1987); El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, 1975 (The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990); Otra vez el mar, 1982 (Farewell to the Sea, 1986); El color del verano, 1991 (The Color of Summer, 2000); El asalto, 1991 (The Assault, 1994) The Pentagonía documents life in Cuba from the early 1950’s onward. Although the novels deal with a variety of themes and with diverse characters, one subject stands out as a common denominator: homosexuality. Many characters face sexual oppression by Cuban society and must fight for their incorporation into productive social roles. Arenas’s novels document the lives of various male characters from their childhood to adulthood, including their handling of their homosexuality. Singing from the Well opens the set by presenting children oppressed by poverty; these children also face the sexual dynamics of a highly chauvinistic society. The nameless characters are representative of Cuban homosexual youth and return as more mature characters in subsequent novels, which can be read as sequels. The Palace of the White Skunks takes Arenas’s coming-of-age themes one step further by removing an unhappy young man from his restrictive society. Inspired by claims of social equality, Fortunato joins Castro’s guerrilla forces in the fight against the Cuban dictator. His dreams are shattered, however, by the strong antihomosexual attitude of men in the military forces. As a result of his being homosexual, Fortunato is labeled weak and imperfect, certainly not the model of the revolutionary man. Farewell to the Sea abandons young characters to explore the life of a married man, who appears to be living a full life. Héctor is married and a proud father. He expresses total commitment to revolutionary ideology, for which the state has awarded him a free trip to a beach resort. There he meets a young man, with whom he has romantic encounters. When his friend is found dead in a remote area of the beach, Héctor decides to abandon his vacation. The reader comes to understand that Héctor is a homosexual man who despises the revolution, who has experienced homosexual life, but who is forced to live as a prorevolutionary heterosexual in order to survive. Arenas wrote the last two novels while fighting AIDS-related illnesses. With The Color of Summer he makes his most direct attacks against revolutionary persecution of homosexuals. Characters have to lead lives of pretense in order to avoid the economic disaster that follows revelation of homosexuality. The Assault focuses on revolutionary censorship, showing how homosexuals are forced to turn against their own relatives. Physical violence abounds in Arenas’s novels, reflecting on a violent revolutionary society.
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Suggested Readings Arenas, Reinaldo. “Reinaldo Arenas’s Last Interview.” Interview by Perla Rozencvaig. Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 44 (January/June, 1991): 78-83. Foster, David W. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Ocasio, Rafael. A Gay Cuban Activist in Exile: Reinaldo Arenas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Paulson, Michael G. The Youth and the Beach: A Comparative Study of Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig” (“Death in Venice”) and Reinaldo Arenas’s “Otra vez el mar” (“Farewell to the Sea”). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1993. Santí, Enrico M. “The Life and Times of Reinaldo Arenas.” Michigan Quarterly Review 23 (Spring, 1984). Soto, Francisco. Reinaldo Arenas: The Pentagonia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Zéndegui, Ileana C. The Postmodern Poetic Narrative of Cuban Writer Reinaldo Arenas. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Contributor: Rafael Ocasio
Molefi K. Asante (Arthur Lee Smith, Jr.) Born: Valdosta, Georgia; August 14, 1942 African American An authority on race and racism in America and author of more than fifty books, Asante is best known as a prolific activist, scholar, and spokesperson for Afrocentricity. Principal works poetry: The Break of Dawn, 1964 nonfiction: Rhetoric of Black Revolution, 1969; Transracial Communication, 1973; Epic in Search of African Kings, 1978; Mass Communication: Principles and Practices, 1979 (with Mary Cassata); Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, 1980 (revised 1988); The Afrocentric Idea, 1987 (revised and expanded 1998); Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, 1990; The Book of African Names, 1991; Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans, 1991 (revised as The African American Atlas: Black History and Culture, 1998; with Mark T. Mattson); Thunder and Silence: The Mass Media in Africa, 1992 (with Dhyana Ziegler); Malcolm X as Cultural Hero, and Other Afrocentric Essays, 1993; Classical Africa, 1994; African American History: A Journey of Liberation, 1995; The African American Book of Names and Their Meanings, 1999 (with Renée Muntaquim); The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism, 1999; The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten, 2000; Culture and Customs of Egypt, 2002; One Hundred Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia, 2002; Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation, 2003 edited texts: The Voice of Black Rhetoric, 1971 (with Stephen Robb); Language, Communication, and Rhetoric in Black America, 1972; The Social Uses of Mass Communication, 1977 (with Mary Cassata); Handbook of Intercultural Communication, 1979; Contemporary Black Thought, 1980 (with Abdulai Vandi); African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, 1985 (with Kariamu Welsh Asante); Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, 1989 (with William Gudykunst); African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources, 1996 (with Abu Abarry); Socio-cultural Conflict Between African American and Korean American, 2000 (with Eungjin Min); Transcultural Realities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Relations, 2001 (with Virginia H. Milhouse and Peter O. Nwosu); Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy, 2002 (with Ama Mazama); Encyclopedia of Black Studies, 2005 (with Mazama) 54
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Born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., to Arthur L. Smith and Lillie B. Wilkson Smith, Molefi Kete Asante (moh-LAY-fee KEH-tay ah-SAHN-tay) was reared in Valdosta, Georgia, where he experienced racial prejudice but also the sustaining influence of the black church. He attended Southwestern Christian College, receiving his associate of arts degree in 1962. He earned a bachelor’s degree (cum laude) from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964, the year he published a collection of poems, The Break of Dawn. In 1965, he received a master’s degree from Pepperdine University and, in 1968, a doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1966, Asante began his teaching career at State Polytechnic College in California. Two years later, he secured a position in communication at Purdue University and chaired the Indiana State Civil Rights Commission on Higher Education and the Afro-American. In 1969, the year he became the founding editor of the Journal of Black Studies, he began teaching speech at UCLA. Under the name Arthur L. Smith, Jr., Asante published Rhetoric of Black Revolution in 1969, during the height of the Black Power movement. The book traces black rhetoric from the nineteenth century to the 1960’s. In 1970, Asante was appointed director of the UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, where he remained until 1973, after which he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He chaired the school’s Department of Communication and was curator of the Center for Positive Thought. Published during this period, Transracial Communication addresses black-white interaction and emphasizes cultural perspectives. One of the major turning points in Asante’s identification with Africa occurred in 1975, when he changed his name. (The southern African name Molefi means “he keeps traditions.”) During this period, he was appointed external examiner for the universities of Ibadan (Nigeria) and Nairobi (Kenya). In 1979, after a yearlong visiting professorship at Howard University, he traveled to Africa as a Fulbright professor at the Zimbabwe Institute of Mass Communication. In 1980, the year he received the Outstanding Communication Scholar Award from Jackson State University, Asante published his first major work defining Afrocentric theory, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, which includes a foreword by his wife, Kariamu Welsh. (“Afrocentricity” can be defined as an attempt to place Africa at the center of black reality.) Afrocentricity, which discusses the contributions of such figures as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Maulana Karenga, examines the spiritual concept of Nija, “collective” presentation of an Afrocentric worldview. Afrology, a methodological approach to the study of black people, is also addressed, along with “breakthrough strategies” to counter negative attitudes resulting from the “breakdown” of the West. In 1984, Asante was appointed chair of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University, where he created the first Ph.D. program in African American studies. In 1985, in collaboration with his wife, he edited African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, an impressive collection of articles by such writers as Wole Soyinka and John Henrik Clarke. The Afrocentric Idea continued the critique of Eurocentrism, arguing against the universality of Western conceptions and proposing explanations of such African
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American characteristics as Ebonics, or black language expression. Following publication of the revised edition of Afrocentricity in 1988, Asante published another collaborative work, Handbook of Intercultural Communication. In the 1990’s, he explored Afrocentricity with an emphasis on Egyptian civilization in Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, which poses alternate conceptions for understanding Afrocentricity. He also published a collaborative reference work providing maps, statistical data, and cultural information, the Historical and Cultural Atlas of African Americans. Another reference work, The Book of African Names, organizes African names by region. Thunder and Silence, a joint project with Dhyana Ziegler, explores from a historical perspective both print and electronic media in Africa. In 1993, Asante’s Malcolm X as Cultural Hero, and Other Afrocentric Essays was published, containing one essay on Malcolm X and, among others, “Afrocentricity, Women, and Gender,” in which Afrocentricity is viewed as a humanizing force that challenges gender oppression. Furthermore, Asante addressed the need for Afrocentric perspectives in the schools by publishing such textbooks as Classical Africa and African American History. African Intellectual Heritage, edited with Abu Abarry, brings together a wide range of writings covering Africa and the African diaspora from ancient times to the late twentieth century. He also published books about Egypt, The Egyptian Philosophers and Culture and Customs of Egypt, and edited Egypt vs. Greece and the American Academy. He took up the question of cultural relations by coediting the texts Socio-cultural Conflict Between African American and Korean American and Transcultural Realities. In the mid-1990’s, Asante was made a traditional king in Ghana: Nana Okru Kete Asante Krobea I, Kyidomhene of Tafo.
Erasing Racism Type of work: Social criticism First published: 2003 Asante’s knowledge of race and racism in America is sweeping, and he brings much of this knowledge to Erasing Racism. There are really two powerful visions in America, Asante argues, the Promise and the Wilderness, and African Americans live for the most part in the Wilderness, without access to the Promise. In seven chapters, he details the systemic racism in America, the history of injustice toward African Americans from slavery through current cases of police brutality, and describes the “wall of ignorance” keeping this long history of racial injustice from the public consciousness. Much of Asante’s book is a history of the abuse, but he ends with a call for unity and a six-point program for national survival. The key steps are an apology to the descendants of enslaved Africans for slavery itself, the retelling of American history in order to see the Wilderness as part of the national story, and an effort to open discussion of reparations as a way to repair that history. “I offer the suggestion that
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reparations will free whites from some degree of guilt and liberate African Americans from most of the heavy burden of inferiority and self-hatred rooted in the fact that the nation has never apologized for the historical abuse measured out to their ancestors.” Americans need to listen to Asante’s arguments and confront the tough truths within them.
Suggested Readings Asante, Molefi K. “Afrocentric Curriculum.” Educational Leadership 219 (December, 1991-January, 1992): 28-31. _______. “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” The Journal of Negro Education 62 (Spring, 1991): 170-180. Chowdhury, Kanishka. “Afrocentric Voices: Constructing Identities, [Dis]placing Difference.” College Literature 24, no. 2 (June, 1997): 35. Esonwanne, Uzo. Review of Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, by Molefi K. Asante. Research in African Literatures 23 (Spring, 1992). Ziegler, Dhyana, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Afrocentricity: In Praise and in Criticism. Nashville: James C. Winston, 1995. Contributor: Joseph McLaren
Jimmy Santiago Baca Born: Sante Fe, New Mexico; January 2, 1952 Native American, Mexican American
Baca’s poetry expresses the experience of a “detribalized Apache,” reared in a Chicano barrio, who finds his values in family, the land, and a complex cultural heritage. Principal works drama: Los tres hijos de Julia, pr. 1991 poetry: Jimmy Santiago Baca, 1978; Immigrants in Our Own Land, 1979; Swords of Darkness, 1981; What’s Happening, 1982; Poems Taken from My Yard, 1986; Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley, 1987; Black Mesa Poems, 1989 (includes Poems Taken from My Yard); Immigrants in Our Own Land, and Selected Earlier Poems, 1990; In the Way of the Sun, 1997; Set This Book on Fire, 1999; Que linda la brisa, 2000 (with Benjamin Alier Sáenz; photographs by James Drake); Healing Earthquakes: A Love Story in Poems, 2001; C-Train (Dream Boy’s Story) and Thirteen Mexicans, 2002; Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande, 2004; Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande, 2007 screenplay: Bound by Honor, 1993 (with Floyd Mutrux and Ross Thomas) short fiction: The Importance of a Piece of Paper, 2004 nonfiction: A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet, 2001 miscellaneous: Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio, 1992 (essays, journal entries, and poetry) Jimmy Santiago Baca (JIH-mee sahn-tee-AH-goh BAH-kah) began to write poetry as an almost illiterate vato loco (crazy guy, gangster) serving a five-year term in a federal prison. He was twenty years old, the son of Damacio Baca, of Apache and Yaqui lineage, and Cecilia Padilla, a Latino woman, who left him with his grandparents when he was two. Baca stayed with them for three years, then went into a boys’ home, then into detention centers and the streets of Albuquerque’s barrio at thirteen. Although he “confirmed” his identity as a Chicano by leafing through a stolen picture book of Chicano history at seventeen, he felt himself “disintegrating” in prison. Speaking of his father but alluding to his own situation when he was incarcerated, Baca observed: “He was everything that was bad in America. He was brown, he spoke Spanish, was from a Native American background, had no education.” As a gesture of rebellion, Baca took a guard’s textbook and found that “sounds created music in me and happiness” as he slowly enunciated the lines of a poem 58
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by William Wordsworth. This led to a zealous effort at self-education, encouraged by the recollection of older men in detention centers who “made barrio life come alive . . . with their own Chicano language.” Progressing to the point where he was writing letters for fellow prisoners, he placed a few poems in a local magazine, New Kauri, and achieved his first major publication with Immigrants in Our Own Land, a book whose title refers to the condition of inmates in a dehumanizing system and to his own feelings of estrangement in American society. This was a turning point for Baca, who realized that he could reclaim the community he was separated from and sing “the freedom song of our Chicano dream” now that poetry “had lifted me to my feet.” With this foundation to build on, Jimmy Santiago Baca (Lawrence Benton) Baca started a family in the early 1980’s, restored an adobe dwelling in Albuquerque’s South Valley, and wrote Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley because “the entire Southwest needed a long poem that could describe what has happened here in the last twenty years.” Continuing to combine personal history and communal life, Baca followed this book with Black Mesa Poems, which links the landscape of the South Valley to people he knows and admires. Writing with confidence and an easy facility in Spanish and English, Baca uses vernacular speech, poetic form, ancient Mexican lore, and contemporary popular culture.
Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley Type of work: Poetry First published: 1987 Told in the semiautobiographical voice of Martín, the two long poems “Martín” and “Meditations on the South Valley” offer the moving account of a young Chicano’s difficult quest for self-definition amid the realities of the barrio and his dysfunctional family. Abandoned by his parents at a young age, Martín spends time with his Indio grandparents and in an orphanage before striking out on his own at the age of
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six. His early knowledge of his grandparents’ heritage gives him the first indication that his quest for identity will involve the recovery of a sense of family and a strong connection with the earth. As Martín grows older and is shuttled from the orphanage to his bourgeois uncle’s home, he realizes that his life is of the barrio and the land and not the sterile world of the rich suburbs. Martín’s quest eventually leads him on a journey throughout the United States in which he searches for himself amid the horrors of addiction and the troubled memories of his childhood. Realizing that he must restore his connection with his family and home, he returns to the South Valley by way of Aztec ruins, where he ritualistically establishes his connection with his Mother Earth and his Native American ancestry. “Martín” ends with the birth of his son and Martín’s promise to never leave him. The cycle of abandonment and abuse seems to have ended, and Martín is on his way to becoming the good man he so strongly desires to be. “Meditations on the South Valley” continues the story of Martín, reinforcing his newfound sense of identity. The poem begins with the burning of his house and the loss of ten years of writing. In the process of rebuilding his life, Martín and his family must live in the Heights, an antiseptic tract housing development that serves to reinforce his identification with the land of the South Valley. Told in brief sketches, the insights in “Meditations on the South Valley” encourage Martín to nurture the growing connections with his new family and his promise to his young son. The poem ends with the construction of his new home from the ruins of an abandoned flophouse in the South Valley. Martín’s friends come together to construct the house, and, metaphorically, Martín and his life as a good Chicano man are reborn from the garbage piles and ashes of the house they reconstruct.
Black Mesa Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 Set in the desert of New Mexico, Baca’s Black Mesa Poems explores the poet’s continuing search for connections with his family, home, and cultural heritage. In vivid detail and striking imagery, the loosely connected poems catalog the poet’s complex relationships with his past and the home he makes of Black Mesa. Baca’s intricate relationship to the land includes his knowledge of its history. He is keenly aware of the changes the land has gone through and the changes the people of that land have experienced. He writes of his personal sense of connection with arroyos and cottonwoods and of the conflicts between the earlier inhabitants of Black Mesa and the changes brought by progress. Dispossessed migrant workers are portrayed as the price of Anglo progress, and the arid land that once nourished strong cattle now offers only “sluggish pampered globs” from feedlots. Even the once sacred places have been unceremoniously “crusted with housing tracts.” His people have been separated from their ancestral land, yet Baca celebrates
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his identification with the old adobe buildings and Aztec warriors in the face of modern Anglo society. Despite nostalgia, Baca eludes naïve sentimentality by attaching himself to the land. His sense of self and identity with his race is rooted in the physical landscape of Black Mesa. He evokes a strong connection with the history of his people through rituals, including drum ceremonies that “mate heart with earth.” Sketches evoke a rich sense of community life in the barrio. The poet presents himself in terms of his own troubled history, but he knows that the conflict between the “peaceful” man and the “destructive” one of his past is linked to the modern smothering of noisy jet fighters and invading pampered artists looking to his land for a “primitive place.” Memories and images of snapshotlike detail combine in these poems to create a portrait of a man defining himself in relation to his personal and cultural history. The poet knows he is “the end result of Conquistadores, Black Moors, American Indians, and Europeans,” and he also notes the continuing invasion of land developers. Poems about his children combine memories of his troubled past with Olmec kings and tribal ancestors. The history of his ancestors’ relationship with the land informs his complex and evolving sense of identity. Throughout the Black Mesa Poems, Baca’s personal history becomes rooted in Black Mesa.
Working in the Dark Type of work: Essays, journal entries, and poetry First published: 1992 Baca’s collection Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio is a blunt and honest gathering of essays, journal entries, and poetry that describes some of the more poignant incidents in a long journey that Baca has made from a “troubled and impoverished Chicano family” to a position of prominence as a widely admired poet. Baca’s subject as a writer is the life and history of Albuquerque’s South Valley. Baca passionately explores the crucial episodes in a process of self-growth and self-discovery beginning with his most desperate moments as an empty, powerless, inarticulate young man, through an expanding series of revelations about life and language in prison, and ending with his eventual construction of a self based on his relationships to the land, his family, and his identity as a “detribalized Apache” and Chicano artist. The heart of the book is the fourth section, “Chicanismo: Destiny and Destinations.” After covering his discovery in prison of the redemptive powers of language and his sense of a loss of Chicano culture in an Anglo world, Baca recalls the one positive feature of his youth: the three years he spent in the home of his grandparents before he was five. This memory kept a dim vision alive through the years when Baca began to realize that “none of what I did was who I was.” In the first part of the “Chicanismo” section, Baca delivers a systematic critique of the methods used by a dominant Anglo culture to stereotype, demean, and distort Chicano life.
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Drawing on his prison experience and on his troubles in school and in various temporary jobs, Baca describes how he felt doubly imprisoned as an immigrant in his own land and as one under the control of unknowing authorities. As part of a plan to reclaim his cultural heritage, Baca reaches back into history to show how valuable and vital Chicano culture has been. In a satirical commentary on the Columbus quincentennial, which Baca debunks with a punning title “De Quiencentennial?” (whose quincentennial is it, anyway?), Baca introduces some of the positive, admirable facets of the life of the South Valley near Albuquerque. One of the strongest features of the life of la raza (the race) has been an oral tradition that, as Baca points out, has defied attempts to suppress or extinguish its vitality: “Our language, which I have inherited, is a symphony of rebellion against invaders.” In the last section of the book, “Gleanings from a Poet’s Journal,” Baca demonstrates this linguistic power as he explains how he wrote in the dark when Chicanos could not find access to print, how the barrio is like an “uncut diamond” for the artist to shape, and how Baca responds to queries about his “Indian-ness.”
Suggested Readings Coppola, Vincent. “The Moon in Jimmy Baca.” Esquire, June, 1993, 48-56. Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Levertov, Denise. Introduction to Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley, by Jimmy Santiago Baca. New York: New Directions, 1987. Rector, Liam. “The Documentary of What Is.” Hudson Review 41 (Summer, 1989): 393-400. Schubnell, Mathias. “The Inner Landscape of the Self in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley.” Southwestern American Literature 21 (1995): 167-173. Contributors: Leon Lewis and William Vaughn
James Baldwin Born: New York, New York; August 2, 1924 Died: St. Paul de Vence, France; November 30, 1987 African American
Baldwin’s experiences as an African American gay man became the source for essays and fiction that were often angry but always honest. Principal works children’s literature: Little Man, Little Man, 1975 drama: The Amen Corner, pr. 1954, pb. 1968; Blues for Mister Charlie, pr., pb. 1964; A Deed from the King of Spain, pr. 1974 long fiction: Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953; Giovanni’s Room, 1956; Another Country, 1962; Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, 1968; If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974; Just Above My Head, 1979 poetry: Jimmy’s Blues: Selected Poems, 1983 screenplay: One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” 1972 short fiction: Going to Meet the Man, 1965 nonfiction: Notes of a Native Son, 1955; Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, 1961; The Fire Next Time, 1963; Nothing Personal, 1964 (with Richard Avedon); No Name in the Street, 1971; A Rap on Race, 1971 (with Margaret Mead); A Dialogue, 1975 (with Nikki Giovanni); The Devil Finds Work, 1976; The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985; The Price of the Ticket, 1985; Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989; Collected Essays, 1998; Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth-Century, Notes of “A Native Son,” 2004 (with Sol Stein) James Baldwin once dismissed his childhood as “the usual bleak fantasy.” Nevertheless, the major concerns of his fiction consistently reflect the social context of his family life in Harlem during the Depression. The dominant figure of Baldwin’s childhood was clearly that of his stepfather, David Baldwin, who worked as a manual laborer and preached in a storefront church. Clearly the model for Gabriel Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain, David Baldwin had moved from New Orleans to New York City, where he married Baldwin’s mother, Emma Berdis. The oldest of what was to be a group of nine children in the household, James assumed a great deal of the responsibility for the care of his half brothers and half sisters. Insulated somewhat from the brutality of Harlem street life by his domestic duties, Baldwin, as 63
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he describes in The Fire Next Time, sought refuge in the church. Undergoing a conversion experience— similar to that of John in Go Tell It on the Mountain—at age fourteen in 1938, Baldwin preached as a youth minister for the next several years. At the same time, he began to read, immersing himself in works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the novels of Charles Dickens. Both at his Harlem junior high school, where the African American poet Countée Cullen was one of his teachers, and at his predominantly white Bronx high school, Baldwin contributed to student literary publications. The combination of family tension, economic hardship, and religious vocation provides the focus of much of Baldwin’s greatest writing, most notably Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, and James Baldwin (© John Hoppy Hopkins) Just Above My Head. If Baldwin’s experience during the 1930’s provided his material, his life from 1942 to 1948 shaped his characteristic approach to that material. After he graduated from high school in 1942, Baldwin worked for a year as a manual laborer in New Jersey, an experience that increased both his understanding of his stepfather and his insight into America’s economic and racial systems. Moving to Greenwich Village in 1943, Baldwin worked during the day and wrote at night for the next five years; his first national reviews and essays appeared in 1946. The major event of the Village years, however, was Baldwin’s meeting with Richard Wright in the winter of 1944-1945. Wright’s interest helped Baldwin secure first a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Award and then a Rosenwald Fellowship, enabling him to move to Paris in 1948. After his arrival in France, Baldwin experienced more of the poverty that had shaped his childhood. Simultaneously, he developed a larger perspective on the psychocultural context conditioning his experience, feeling at once a greater sense of freedom and a larger sense of the global structure of racism, particularly as reflected in the French treatment of North Africans. In addition, he formed many of the personal and literary friendships that contributed to his later public prominence. Baldwin’s well-publicized literary feud with Wright, who viewed the younger writer’s criticism of Native Son (1940) as a form of personal betrayal, helped establish Baldwin as a major presence in African American letters. Although Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was well-received critically, it was not
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so financially successful that he could devote his full time to creative writing. As a result, Baldwin continued to travel widely, frequently on journalistic assignments, while writing Giovanni’s Room, which is set in France and involves no black characters. Returning to the United States as a journalist covering the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin made his first trip to the American South in 1957. The essays and reports describing that physical and psychological journey propelled Baldwin to the position of public prominence that he maintained for more than a decade. During the height of the movement, Baldwin lectured widely and was present at major events such as the March on Washington and the voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama. In addition, he met with most of the major African American activists of the period, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Elijah Muhammad, James Meredith, and Medgar Evers. Attorney General Robert Kennedy requested that Baldwin bring together the most influential voices in the black community, and, even though the resulting meeting accomplished little, the request testifies to Baldwin’s image as a focal point of African American opinion. In addition to his political activity, Baldwin formed personal and literary relationships—frequently tempestuous ones—with numerous white writers, including William Styron and Norman Mailer. A surge in literary popularity, reflected in the presence of Another Country and The Fire Next Time on the best-seller lists throughout most of 1962 and 1963, accompanied Baldwin’s political success and freed him from financial insecurity for the first time. He traveled extensively throughout the decade, and his visits to Puerto Rico and Africa were to have a major influence on his subsequent political thought. Partly because of Baldwin’s involvement with prominent whites and partly because of the sympathy for homosexuals evinced in his writing, several black militants, most notably Eldridge Cleaver, attacked Baldwin’s position as “black spokesman” beginning in the late 1960’s. As a result, nationalist spokesmen such as Amiri Baraka and Bobby Seale gradually eclipsed Baldwin in the public literary and political spotlights. Nevertheless, Baldwin, himself sympathetic to many of the militant positions, continued his involvement with public issues, such as the fate of the Wilmington, North Carolina, prisoners, which he addressed in an open letter to Jimmy Carter shortly after Carter’s election to the presidency. In his later years, though he returned periodically to the South, Baldwin lived for much of the time in France and Turkey. It was in St. Paul de Vence, France, that he died, in 1987.
Go Tell It on the Mountain Type of work: Novel First published: 1953 The protagonist of Go Tell It on the Mountain, John Grimes, wants to be a man standing on his own; at the same time, he wants his father, Gabriel, to love him. He feels oppressed by his father and by his circumstances as a black youth in New York during the Depression. To achieve manhood, he must either accept his
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heritage or embrace a world he instinctively feels is evil: the materialistic and oppressive white world. In order to accept his heritage in the religious terms he understands, he must come to terms with his father, the prophet and preacher. To John, it appears that Gabriel loves neither John nor his mother. John both loves and hates Gabriel; he wants to kneel before God but not before his father. Gabriel is a hard and passionate man who sees himself as chosen by God to found a long line of preachers of the true gospel. Gabriel has made himself hard in order to control his strong desires for worldly pleasure. If Gabriel does love his wife and stepson, it is with the stern love of a judging God rather than the forgiving love of Jesus. Gabriel seems to reserve tenderness for his wayward, natural son, Roy. Gabriel prefers that Roy continue the line of preachers and resents the fact that John is more likely to be a preacher. In the third of the novel’s three parts, John experiences a religious conversion. Though this conversion does not make his father love him as John hopes it may, it allows John to feel compassion for Gabriel and for all suffering people whose hearts’ desires conflict with their souls’ aspirations. Baldwin has drawn on his childhood in Harlem to give authenticity to his story. Because John, Gabriel, and other family members are so fully and deeply portrayed, this is a powerful first novel. Though the religious experiences of these characters may seem sectarian, they are really universal. All of the major characters are trying to build and sustain community in the face of dehumanizing oppression. Their particular version of Christianity is an effective response to being captives in a racist culture.
The Amen Corner Type of work: Drama First produced: 1954, pb. 1968 Like Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Amen Corner challenges the dichotomy between the holy Temple and the sinful Street, a tension that shapes the play’s entire dramatic structure. Accepted unquestioningly by most members of Sister Margaret Alexander’s congregation, the dichotomy reflects a basic survival strategy of blacks making the transition from their rural southern roots to the urban North during the Great Migration. By dividing the world into zones of safety and danger, church members attempt to distance themselves and, perhaps more important, their loved ones from the brutalities of the city. As Baldwin comments in his introduction to the play, Sister Margaret faces the dilemma of “how to treat her husband and her son as men and at the same time to protect them from the bloody consequences of trying to be a man in this society.” In act 1, Margaret attempts to resolve the dilemma by forcing her son David, a musician in his late teens, into the role of servant of the Lord while consigning her estranged husband Luke, a jazz musician, to the role of worldly tempter. Having witnessed the brutal impact of Harlem on Luke, she
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strives to protect her son by creating a world entirely separate from his father’s. Ultimately, however, the attempt fails as David’s emerging sense of self drives him to confront a wider range of experience; meanwhile, Luke’s physical collapse, which takes place in the “safe zone,” forces Margaret to acknowledge her own evasions. The most important of these, which reveals Margaret’s claim to moral purity as self-constructed illusion, involves her claim that Luke abandoned his family; in fact, she fled from him to avoid the pain caused by the death of a newborn daughter, a pain associated with sexuality and the Street. As he did in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin treats the collapse of the dichotomies as a potential source of artistic and spiritual liberation. David recognizes that his development as a musician demands immersion in both the sacred and the secular traditions of African American music. Margaret attempts to redefine herself in terms not of holiness but of an accepting love imaged in her clutching Luke’s trombone mouthpiece after his death. Both resolutions intimate a synthesis of Temple and Street, suggesting the common impulse behind the gospel music and jazz that sound throughout the play. The emotional implications of the collapse of the dichotomies in The Amen Corner are directly articulated when, following her acknowledgment that the vision on which she bases her authority as preacher was her own creation, Margaret says: “It’s a awful thing to think about, the way love never dies!” This second “vision” marks a victory much more profound than that of the church faction that casts Margaret out at the end of the play. Ironically, the new preacher, Sister Moore, seems destined to perpetuate Margaret’s moral failings. Although Sister Moore’s rise to power is grounded primarily in the congregation’s dissatisfaction with Margaret’s inability to connect her spiritual life with the realities of the Street (Margaret refuses to sympathize with a woman’s marital difficulties or to allow a man to take a job driving a liquor truck), she fails to perceive the larger implications of the dissatisfaction. Sister Moore’s inability to see the depth of Margaret’s transformed sense of love suggests that the simplifying dichotomies will continue to shape the congregation’s experience. Thematically and psychologically, then, The Amen Corner possesses a great deal of potential power. Theatrically, however, it fails to exploit this potential. Despite Baldwin’s awareness that “the ritual of the church, historically speaking, comes out of the theater, the communion which is the theater,” the structure of The Amen Corner emphasizes individual alienation rather than ritual reconciliation. In part because the play’s power in performance largely derives from the energy of the music played in the church, the street side of Baldwin’s vision remains relatively abstract. Where the brilliant prose of Go Tell It on the Mountain suggests nuances of perception that remain only half-conscious to John Grimes during his transforming vision, David’s conversations with Luke and Margaret focus almost exclusively on his rebellion against the Temple while leaving the terms of the dichotomy unchallenged. In act 3, similarly, Margaret’s catharsis seems static. The fact that Margaret articulates her altered awareness in her preacher’s voice suggests a lingering commitment to the Temple at odds with Baldwin’s thematic design. Although the sacred music emanating from the church is theoretically balanced by the jazz trombone associated with Luke, most of the performance power adheres to the
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gospel songs that provide an embodied experience of call and response; taken out of its performance context, the jazz seems a relatively powerless expression. As a result, The Amen Corner never escapes from the sense of separation it conceptually attacks.
Notes of a Native Son Type of work: Essays First published: 1955 Many readers consider Baldwin’s nonfiction to be even finer than his fiction. His essays, which may be found in collections such as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), are passionate and often scathing. His personal feelings and experiences are freely expressed in his essays. His anger at black-white relations in America, his ambivalence toward his father, and his thoughts on such writers as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and William Faulkner are displayed openly. He is honest, and made enemies for it. On the other hand, he has many readers’ respect for saying what he thinks. Notes of a Native Son was Baldwin’s first nonfiction collection, and it contains his “Autobiographical Notes” and three sections totaling ten essays. In “Autobiographical Notes,” Baldwin sketches his early career—his Harlem birth, his childhood interest in writing, his journey to France. “Autobiographical Notes” and various essays describe the difficult process of Baldwin’s establishment of his identity. Part 1 of Notes of a Native Son includes three essays. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” examines Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), which Baldwin considers self-righteous and so sentimental as to be dishonest. “Many Thousands Gone” examines Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which Baldwin describes as badly flawed. “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough” is another biting review, of the Hollywood motion picture musical Carmen Jones (1955). Baldwin says that the film lacks imagination and is condescending to blacks. Part 2 contains three essays. “The Harlem Ghetto” is one of the most powerful, digging into the physical and emotional turmoil of Harlem, including problems between blacks and Jews. “Journey to Atlanta” looks at an African American singing group’s first trip to the South. It is a humorous, cynical look at the treatment that the group, which included two of Baldwin’s brothers, received. “Notes of a Native Son” examines Baldwin’s anger and despair after his father’s death. Part 3 contains four essays. “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” and “A Question of Identity” are about the feelings and attitudes of Americans in Paris in the 1940’s and 1950’s. “Equal in Paris” is Baldwin’s account of being arrested and jailed, temporarily, in a case involving some stolen sheets that he did not steal. Baldwin describes the insight he had while in the hands of the French police: that they, in dealing with him, were not engaging in the racist cat-andmouse game used by police in the United States. Finally, “Stranger in the Village”
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discusses Baldwin’s time in a Swiss village and the astonished curiosity of people who had never seen a black person before. In all these essays, Baldwin explores his world and himself.
Giovanni’s Room Type of work: Novel First published: 1956
Giovanni’s Room was Baldwin’s second novel, after Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). It was a risky book for Baldwin because it openly explored male homosexuality at a time when few writers discussed gay themes. It almost went unpublished. Knopf had taken Baldwin’s first novel but rejected Giovanni’s Room and may even have suggested that Baldwin burn the manuscript to protect his reputation. Other rejections followed before Dial Press accepted the book for publication. Baldwin, who was gay, had touched on homosexual love in “The Outing” (1951) and toward the end of Go Tell It on the Mountain, but Giovanni’s Room was a frank portrayal of a gay man’s feelings and torments. The book involves white rather than black characters, which added to the book’s commercial and critical risk. Giovanni’s Room focuses on David, an American expatriate living in Paris, France. Other characters include Hella, an American woman and David’s lover, and Giovanni, an Italian who becomes David’s gay partner. The story is narrated in first person by David. Part 1 begins with Hella having left for America and Giovanni about to be executed. The rest is told primarily in flashbacks. In the flashbacks, David comes to Paris after a homosexual affair and attaches himself to Hella. He asks her to marry him, and she goes to Spain to think about it. During Hella’s absence, David meets Giovanni, who works in a bar owned by a gay man. David and Giovanni are immediately drawn together and become lovers. David moves into Giovanni’s room and the two are happy for a time. David cannot fully accept his gay identity, however, and reminds himself that Hella will return. In part 2, Giovanni and David’s relationship sours, mainly because David begins to despise his own feelings and to resent Giovanni’s affection. The tension increases when Giovanni loses his job. Hella comes back and David returns to her without even telling Giovanni. He pretends to be purely heterosexual and finally breaks off his relationship with Giovanni, who is devastated emotionally. David and Hella plan to get married but then hear that Giovanni has murdered the owner of the bar where he once worked. Giovanni is sentenced to death. David stays with Hella during Giovanni’s trial but finally gives in to his feelings and goes to the gay quarter. Hella sees him with a man and realizes David will never love her fully. She leaves for America, and David is left to think of Giovanni and to feel empty. David can neither accept his nature nor escape it.
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Another Country Type of work: Novel First published: 1962 Another Country, Baldwin’s greatest popular success, analyzes the effects of deforming pressure and experience on a wide range of characters, black and white, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual. To accommodate these diverse consciousnesses, Baldwin employs the sprawling form usually associated with political rather than psychological fiction, emphasizing the diverse forms of innocence and experience in American society. The three major sections of Another Country, “Easy Rider,” “Any Day Now,” and “Toward Bethlehem,” progress generally from despair to renewed hope, but no single consciousness or plot line provides a frame similar to that of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Rather, the novel’s structural coherence derives from the moral concerns present in each of the various plots. Casting a Melvillean shadow over the novel is the black jazz musician Rufus Scott, who is destroyed by an agonizing affair with Leona, a white southerner recently arrived in New York at the time she meets him. Unable to forge the innocence necessary for love in a context that repudiates the relationship at every turn, Rufus destroys Leona psychologically. After a period of physical and psychological destitution, he kills himself by jumping off a bridge. His sister Ida, an aspiring singer, and his friend Vivaldo Moore, an aspiring white writer, meet during the last days of Rufus’s life and fall in love as they console each other over his death. Struggling to overcome the racial and sexual definitions that destroyed Rufus, they seek a higher innocence capable of countering Ida’s sense of the world as a “whorehouse.” In contrast to Ida and Vivaldo’s struggle, the relationship of white actor Eric Jones and his French lover Yves seems edenic. Although Baldwin portrays Eric’s internal struggle for a firm sense of his sexual identity, their shared innocence at times seems to exist almost entirely outside the context of the pressures that destroyed Rufus. The final major characters, Richard and Cass Silenski, represent the cost of the American Dream. After Richard “makes it” as a popular novelist, their personal relationship decays, precipitating Cass’s affair with Eric. Their tentative reunion after Richard discovers the affair makes it clear that material success provides no shortcut to moral responsibility. The majority of the narrative lines imply the impossibility of simple dissociation from institutional pressure. Ultimately, the intensity of Rufus’s pain and the intricacy of Ida and Vivaldo’s struggle overshadow Eric and Yves’s questionable innocence. As Ida tells Vivaldo, “Our being together doesn’t change the world.” The attempt to overcome the cynicism of this perception leads to a recognition that meaningful love demands total acceptance. Ida’s later question, “How can you say you loved Rufus when there was so much about him you didn’t want to know?” could easily provide the epitaph for the entire society in Another Country.
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The Fire Next Time Type of work: Civil rights manifesto First published: 1963 Baldwin frames the substance of his sermon inside a dedicatory letter to his nephew, “On the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” He advises the nephew to accept white Americans—and do so lovingly—even though they have established a society that considers most black men worthless. Why? Because, says Baldwin, son of a minister and himself a former boy evangelist, all men are brothers and America is the black as well as the white man’s house. He then testifies to this text with an account of his youth and young manhood, covering events he previously narrated in essays collected as Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name, and in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. As a teenage preacher he finds himself active in the “church racket,” which is only marginally superior to gambling, pimping, or trafficking in drugs. He soon becomes disillusioned with what he discovers to be a white man’s God, in whose name white “Christians” behave arrogantly, cruelly, and self-righteously. The next and more powerful temptation is represented by the Nation of Islam movement, headed by Elijah Muhammad and dedicated to the premises that, while Christianity is the white man’s wicked rationale for oppressing blacks, the true religion is that of Allah; all white people are cursed devils whose sway will end forever in ten to fifteen years, with God now black and all black people chosen by Him for domination under the theology of Islam. Baldwin describes an audience with Elijah: Muhammad is lucid, passionate, cunning—but he preaches a dogma of racial hatred that is no better than the reverse of whites’ hatred for blacks. Baldwin rejects it, saying to himself: “Isn’t love more important than color?” He recognizes that the American blacks’ complex fate is to deliver white Americans from their imprisonment in myths of racial superiority and educate them into a new, integrated sensitivity and maturity. Should such an effort fail, then the words of a slave song may come true: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
“The Man Child” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1965, in Going to Meet the Man In Baldwin’s collection of short fiction, three short stories are repeatedly anthologized and studied: “The Man Child,” “Going to Meet the Man,” and “Sonny’s Blues.” “The Man Child,” the only story in Going to Meet the Man that has no black characters, scathingly describes whites, especially their violent propensities. The central character is Eric, an eight-year-old. The story opens as he, his mother, and
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his father are giving a birthday party for Jamie, his father’s best friend. In the next scene Eric and his father walk together and then return to the party. After a brief summary of intervening events, the story moves forward in time to a day when Jamie meets Eric, entices him into a barn, and breaks his neck. The story described thus, its ending seems to be a surprise, and it certainly is a surprise to Eric. In fact, his sudden realization that he is in grave danger is an epiphany. “The Man Child” is thus a coming-of-age story, an account of a young person’s realization of the dark side of adult existence. Eric, however, has little time to think about his realization or even to generalize very much on the basis of his intimation of danger before he is badly, perhaps mortally, injured. The story, however, contains many hints that violent action will be forthcoming. A reader can see them even though Eric cannot, because Eric is the center of consciousness, a device perfected, if not invented, by Henry James. That is, Eric does not narrate the story so the story does not present his viewpoint, but he is always the focus of the action, and the story is in essence an account of his responses to that action. The difference between his perception of the events he witnesses (which is sometimes described and sometimes can be inferred from his actions) and the perception that can be had by attending carefully to the story encourages a reader to make a moral analysis and finally to make a moral judgment, just as the difference between Huck Finn’s perception and the perception that one can have while reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) at first stimulates laughter and then moral evaluation. Eric’s lack of perception is a function of his innocence, a quality that he has to an even larger extent than has Huck Finn, and thus he is less able to cope in a threatening world and his injury is even more execrable. If the measure of a society is its solicitude for the powerless, the miniature society formed by the three adults in this story, and perhaps by implication the larger society of which they are a part, is sorely wanting. To be more specific about the flaws in this society and in these persons, they enslave themselves and others, as is suggested very early in the story: “Eric lived with his father . . . and his mother, who had been captured by his father on some far-off unblessed, unbelievable night, who had never since burst her chains.” Her husband intimidates and frightens her, and his conversation about relations between men and women indicates that he believes she exists at his sufferance only for sex and procreation. Her role becomes questionable because in the summary of events that happen between the first and last parts of the story one learns that she has lost the child she had been carrying and can no longer conceive. The two men enslave themselves with their notions about women, their drunkenness (which they misinterpret as male companionship), their mutual hostility, their overbearing expansiveness, in short, with their machismo. Eric’s father is convinced that he is more successful in these terms. He has fathered a son, an accomplishment the significance of which to him is indicated by his “some day all this will be yours” talk with Eric between the two party scenes. Jamie’s wife, showing more sense than Eric’s mother, left him before he could sire a son. Jamie’s violent act with Eric is his psychotic imitation of the relation of Eric’s father to Eric, just as his whistling at the very end of the story is his imitation of the music he hears coming from a tavern. Eric is thus considered by
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the two men to be alive merely for their self-expression. His father’s kind of selfexpression is potentially debilitating, although somewhat benign; Jamie’s version is nearly fatal.
“Going to Meet the Man” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1965, in Going to Meet the Man The title work of the collection, “Going to Meet the Man,” is a companion to “The Man Child.” Whereas the latter story isolates whites from blacks in order to analyze their psychology, the former story is about whites in relation to blacks, even though blacks make only brief appearances in it. The whites in these stories have many of the same characteristics, but in “Going to Meet the Man” those characteristics are more obviously dangerous. These stories were written during the height of the Civil Rights movement, and Baldwin, by means of his rhetorical power and his exclusion of more human white types, helped polarize that movement. The main characters in “Going to Meet the Man” are a family composed of a southern deputy sheriff, his wife, and his son, Jesse. At the beginning of the story they are skittish because of racial unrest. Demonstrations by blacks have alternated with police brutality by whites, each response escalating the conflict, which began when a black man knocked down an elderly white woman. The family is awakened late at night by a crowd of whites who have learned that the black perpetrator has been caught. They all set off in a festive, although somewhat tense, mood to the place where he is being held. After they arrive the black man is burned, castrated, and mutilated—atrocities that Baldwin describes very vividly. This story, however, is not merely sensationalism or social and political rhetoric. It rises above those kinds of writing because of its psychological insights into the causes of racism and particularly of racial violence. Baldwin’s focus at first is on the deputy sheriff. As the story opens he is trying and failing to have sexual relations with his wife. He thinks that he would have an easier time with a black woman, and “the image of a black girl caused a distant excitement in him.” Thus, his conception of blacks is immediately mixed with sexuality, especially with his fear of impotence. In contrast, he thinks of his wife as a “frail sanctuary.” At the approach of a car he reaches for the gun beside his bed, thereby adding a propensity for violence to his complex of psychological motives. Most of his behavior results from this amalgam of racial attitudes, sexual drives, fear of impotence, and attraction to violence. For example, he recalls torturing a black prisoner by applying a cattle prod to his testicles, and on the way to see the black captive he takes pride in his wife’s attractiveness. He also frequently associates blacks with sexual vigor and fecundity. The castration scene is the most powerful rendition of this psychological syndrome. The deputy sheriff, however, is more than a mere brute. For example, he tries to think of his relation to blacks in moral terms. Their singing of spirituals disconcerts
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him because he has difficulty understanding how they can be Christians like himself. He tries to reconcile this problem by believing that blacks have decided “to fight against God and go against the rules laid down in the Bible for everyone to read!” To allay the guilt that threatens to complicate his life he also believes that there are a lot of good blacks who need his protection from bad blacks. These strategies for achieving inner peace do not work, and Baldwin brilliantly describes the moral confusion of such whites: They had never dreamed that their privacy could contain any element of terror, could threaten, that is, to reveal itself, to the scrutiny of a judgment day, while remaining unreadable and inaccessible to themselves; nor had they dreamed that the past, while certainly refusing to be forgotten, could yet so stubbornly refuse to be remembered. They felt themselves mysteriously set at naught.
In the absence of a satisfying moral vision, violence seems the only way to achieve inner peace, and the sheriff’s participation in violence allows him to have sex with his wife as the story ends. Even then, however, he has to think that he is having it as blacks would. He is their psychic prisoner, just as the black man who was murdered was the white mob’s physical prisoner. Late in this story one can see that Jesse, the sheriff’s eight-year-old son, is also an important character. At first he is confused by the turmoil and thinks of blacks in human terms. For example, he wonders why he has not seen his black friend Otis for several days. The mob violence, however, changes him; he undergoes a coming-ofage, the perversity of which is disturbing. He is the center of consciousness in the mob scene. His first reaction is the normal one for a boy: “Jesse clung to his father’s neck in terror as the cry rolled over the crowd.” Then he loses his innocence and it becomes clear that he will be a victim of the same psychological syndrome that afflicts his father: “He watched his mother’s face . . . she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her. . . . He began to feel a joy he had never felt before.” He wishes that he were the man with the knife who is about to castrate the black captive, whom Jesse considers “the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen.” Then he identifies totally with his father: “At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever.” For Jesse this brutality is thus a kind of initiation into adulthood, and its effect is to ensure that there will be at least one more generation capable of the kind of violence that he has just seen.
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“Sonny’s Blues” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1965, in Going to Meet the Man Whereas “The Man Child” has only white characters and “Going to Meet the Man” is about a conflict between whites and blacks, “Sonny’s Blues” has only black characters. Although the chronology of “Sonny’s Blues” is scrambled, its plot is simple. It tells the story of two brothers, one, the narrator, a respectable teacher and the other, Sonny, a former user of heroin who is jailed for that reason and then becomes a jazz musician. The story ends in a jazz nightclub, where the older brother hears Sonny play and finally understands the meaning of jazz for him. The real heart of this story is the contrast between the values of the two brothers, a contrast that becomes much less dramatic at the end. The two brothers have similar social backgrounds, especially their status as blacks and, more specifically, as Harlem blacks. Of Harlem as a place in which to mature the narrator says, “boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in a trap.” Even when he was very young the narrator had a sense of the danger and despair surrounding him: When lights fill the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure.
For example, he learns after his father’s death that his father, though seemingly a hardened and stoical man, had hidden the grief caused by the killing of his brother. At first the narrator believes that Sonny’s two means for coping with the darkness, heroin and music, are inextricably connected to that darkness and thus are not survival mechanisms at all. He believes that heroin “filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality.” Later, however, he realizes that jazz is a way to escape: He senses that “Sonny was at that time piano playing for his life.” The narrator also has a few premonitions of the epiphany he experiences in the jazz nightclub. One occurs when he observes a group of street singers and understands that their “music seemed to soothe a poison out of them.” Even with these premonitions, he does not realize that he uses the same strategy. After an argument with Sonny, during which their differences seem to be irreconcilable, his first reaction is to begin “whistling to keep from crying,” and the tune is a blues. Finally the epiphany occurs, tying together all the major strands of this story. As he listens to Sonny playing jazz, the narrator thinks that freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through.
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The idea in that passage is essentially what Baldwin is about. Like Sonny, he has forged an instrument of freedom by means of the fire of his troubles, and he has made that instrument available to all, white and black. His is the old story of suffering and art; his fiction is an account of trouble, but by producing it he has shown others the way to rise above suffering.
The Evidence of Things Not Seen Type of work: Essay First published: 1985 An extended development of an essay on the Atlanta child murder case originally published in Playboy magazine, this extended essay examines the relationship between that case and the larger context of racial tension in the United States. Concentrating on the trial of Wayne Williams, Baldwin reiterates numerous themes from his past works: the interrelationship of victim and victimizer and the absence of any real concern on the part of the government for the black underclass. Taking into account the political pressures on the black administration of Atlanta to close the case, Baldwin argues convincingly that the trial failed to establish Williams’ guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. Some of the most fascinating material in the book concerns the pattern of murders that provided the center of the persecution case. Emphasizing the continuity between the events in Atlanta and the history of racism in the United States, Baldwin points out that any set of events can be interpreted as a pattern, and that the pattern perceived reveals more about the perceiver than the events themselves. Much of the cultural analysis in this book will be familiar to readers of Baldwin’s previous novels and essays. Alternating between journalistic observation and historical meditation, Baldwin combines the rhetorical flourishes and moral intensity of the Afro-American preacher with a finely polished literary irony. Nevertheless, the new book lacks the power of Baldwin’s best work, in part because of the familiarity of his positions and in part because of what seems a lingering uncertainty—perhaps inherent in the events—concerning the actual significance of the Atlanta tragedies.
The Price of the Ticket Type of work: Essays First published: 1985 Bringing together all of the author’s substantial (and much of his relatively ephemeral) nonfiction, this volume provides a welcome opportunity for reassessing the development of James Baldwin’s encounter with the political, moral, and intellectual complexities of the modern world. This opportunity seems particularly impor-
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tant since so much of Baldwin’s work—and the reaction to that work—was, and is, intertwined with volatile racial issues and events that frequently excite a greater degree of passion than useful insight. Happily, what emerges from these diverse pieces, ranging from the early aesthetic essays through the politically influential The Fire Next Time to the introductory essay written specifically for the collection, is a clear sense that a large percentage of Baldwin’s insights remain as relevant in 1985 as they were at the height of the civil rights movement. In addition to providing a montage-style autobiography, Baldwin’s essays provide an excellent introduction or recapitulation of the development of American racial relations since the 1930’s. Reflecting the transitions from the relative optimism of the integrationist era to the militance of the late 1960’s and on to the wary (and, at times, weary) determination of the Ronald Reagan backlash, Baldwin insists on clear acknowledgment of the conditions of life in black America. Perhaps his most important contribution to American culture, however, rests on his ability to address the interrelationship between those conditions and the spiritual dilemmas confronted by white Americans.
Suggested Readings Balfour, Lawrie Lawrence, and Katherine Lawrence Balfour. The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking, 1991. Kinnamon, Keneth, comp. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. McBride, Dwight A. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Porter, Horace A. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Scott, Lynn Orilla. James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989. Contributors: Charles A. Gramlich, Terry Heller, Robert McClenaghan, Thomas J. Taylor, Terry Theodore, and Craig Werner
Toni Cade Bambara (Miltona Mirkin Cade) Born: New York, New York; March 25, 1939 Died: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; December 9, 1995 African American
Bambara saw herself as a literary combatant who wrote to affirm the selfhood of blacks. Principal works long fiction: The Salt Eaters, 1980; Those Bones Are Not My Child, 1999 screenplays: The Bombing of Osage Avenue, 1986 (documentary); W. E. B. Du Bois—A Biography in Four Voices, 1995 (with Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown, and Thulani Davis) short fiction: Gorilla, My Love, 1972; The Sea Birds Are Still Alive: Collected Stories, 1977; Raymond’s Run: Stories for Young Adults, 1989 edited texts: The Black Woman: An Anthology, 1970; Tales and Stories for Black Folks, 1971; Southern Exposure, 1976 (periodical; Bambara edited volume 3) miscellaneous: “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” The Writer on Her Work, 1981 (Janet Sternburg, editor); Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, 1996 Given the name Miltona Mirkin Cade at birth, Toni Cade acquired the name Bambara (BAHM-bah-rah) in 1970 after she discovered it as part of a signature on a sketchbook she found in her great-grandmother’s trunk. Bambara spent her formative years in New York and Jersey City, New Jersey, attending public and private schools in the areas. Although she maintained that her early short stories are not autobiographical, the protagonists in many of these pieces are young women who recall Bambara’s inquisitiveness as a youngster. Bambara attended Queens College, New York, and received a bachelor of arts degree in 1959. Earlier that year she had published her first short story, and she also received the John Golden Award for fiction from Queens College. Bambara then entered the City College of New York, where she studied modern American fiction, but before completing her studies for the master’s degree she traveled to Italy and studied in Milan, eventually returning to her studies and earning the master’s in 1963. From 1959 to 1973, Bambara saw herself as an activist. She held positions as social worker, teacher, and counselor. In her various roles, Bambara saw herself as 78
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working for the betterment of the community. During the 1960’s, Rutgers State University developed a strong fine arts undergraduate program. Many talented black artists joined the faculty to practice their crafts and to teach. Bambara was one of those talented faculty members. She taught, wrote, and participated in a program for raising the consciousness of minority women. Like many artists during the 1960’s, Bambara became involved in the black liberation struggle. She realized that all African Americans needed to be liberated, but she felt that black women were forgotten in the struggle. She was of the opinion that neither the white nor the black male was capable of understanding what it means to be a black female. White and black males created imToni Cade Bambara (Joyce Middler) ages of women, she argued, that “are still derived from their needs.” Bambara saw a kinship with white women but admitted: “I don’t know that our priorities are the same.” Believing that only the black woman is capable of explaining herself, Bambara edited The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). In 1973, Bambara visited Cuba, and in 1975 she traveled to Vietnam. Her travels led her to believe that globally, women were oppressed. Her experiences found expression in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. In the late 1970’s, Bambara moved to the South to teach at Spellman College. During this period she wrote The Salt Eaters, which focuses on mental and physical well-being. With her daughter, Bambara moved to Pennsylvania in the 1980’s, where she continued her activism and her writing until her death from complications of colon cancer, in 1995.
Gorilla, My Love Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1972 Published in 1972, Gorilla, My Love is a collection of short stories written between 1959 and 1971. The book is an upbeat, positive work that redefines the black experience in America. It affirms the fact that inner-city children can grow into strong, healthy adults. It indicates clearly that black men are not always the weak,
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predatory element in the family but can be a strong, protective force. It intimates that African Americans are not the socially alienated, dysfunctional people that the mainstream society sometimes suggests. Instead, the stories project an image of a people who love themselves, who understand themselves, and who need no validation. The fifteen short stories that compose the text are set in urban areas, and the narrative voices are usually streetwise, preadolescent girls who are extremely aware of their environment. The titular story, “Gorilla, My Love” is centered in the misunderstanding between a child and an adult. Jefferson Vale announces that he is getting married, but he has promised his preadolescent niece, Hazel, to marry her. Hazel sees her “Hunca” Bubba as a “lyin dawg.” Although her uncle and her grandfather attempt to console her, Hazel believes adults “mess over kids, just cause they little and can’t take em to court.” All of the stories are informative and entertaining. A story that typifies the anthology is “Playin with Ponjob,” which details how a white social worker, Miss Violet, underestimates the influence of a local thug and is forced to leave the community. “Talkin Bout Sunny” explores the effects of the mainstream on the black male by pointing out how pressures from the larger community cause Sunny to kill his wife. “The Lesson” points out the disparity between the rich and the poor by telling of children window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. “Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird” details how one man protects his family from prying photographers employed by the welfare system. What is significant in “Playin with Ponjob” is that Bambara does not depict Ponjob as being predatory. He is male, “jammed-up by the white man’s nightmare.” To the community, he is “the only kind of leader we can think of.” In “Talkin Bout Sunny” Bambara indicates that the larger community is partly responsible for Sunny’s actions, but she also indicates that the community of Sunny’s friends is also responsible because they know of his distemper but do nothing. “The Lesson” teaches children that what one wealthy person spends on one toy can feed eight of them for a year. “Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird” indicates that the patriarch of an extended family can protect his own. The collection depicts African Americans as a strong, progressive people.
“Medley” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1977, in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive The most popular story from The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, “Medley” is the tale of Sweet Pea and Larry, a romantic couple who go through a poignant breakup in the course of the story. Though neither of them is a musician, both are music fans, and their showers together are erotic encounters in which they improvise songs together, pretending to be playing musical instruments with each other’s bodies. Sweet Pea is a manicurist with her own shop, and her best customer is a gambler
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named Moody, who likes to keep his nails impeccable. Because he goes on a winning streak after she starts doing his nails, he offers to take her on a gambling trip as his personal manicurist, for which he pays her two thousand dollars. Sweet Pea takes the offer, though Larry objects, and when she gets back, he seems to have disappeared from her life. Nonetheless, she remembers their last night in the shower together, as they sang different tunes, keeping each other off balance but harmonizing a medley together until the hot water ran out. Though Sweet Pea is faced with the choice of losing two thousand dollars or her boyfriend and chooses the money, the story does not attempt to say that she made the wrong choice. Rather, it is a snapshot of the impermanence of shared lives in Sweet Pea’s modern, urban environment. This transience is painful but is also the basis for the enjoyment of life’s beauty.
The Salt Eaters Type of work: Novel First published: 1980 The Salt Eaters opens with Velma Henry sitting on a stool in the South West Community Infirmary of Claybourne, Georgia, being healed by Minnie Ransom. Claybourne is a beehive of progressive activity. The Academy of the Seven Arts, run by James “Obie” Henry, Velma’s husband, is the center of intellectual and social activities. Velma, performing the duties of seven employees, keeps the institution running. Overwhelmed by the infighting at the academy, her domestic problems with Obie, and her refusal to accept her spiritual powers, Velma has attempted suicide, and Minnie is laboring to “center” Velma, to make Velma whole. The novel includes a spiritual plane where mortals interact with other life forms. Minnie Ransom operates on both planes. She is sitting opposite Velma while surrounded by her twelve disciples, the Master’s Mind. Sometimes she reaches out and touches Velma physically. Other times she does “not touch [Velma] flesh on flesh, but touch[es] mind on mind from across the room or from across town.” While Minnie is having these telepathic tête-à-têtes with Velma, she also confers at times with a spirit guide who helps her with the healing. When “centering” Velma becomes difficult, Minnie makes telepathic trips to the Chapel of the Mind to recharge her psychic energies. The healing, which should take minutes, takes two hours—the time span of the novel. Velma, like Minnie, takes telepathic trips, during which she bumps into other characters, human and spiritual. These characters, filtered through Velma’s subconscious, are for the most part what people the novel. Bambara skillfully combines the European American traditional mode of storytelling with African and African American concepts and traditions. The Academy of the Seven Arts is concerned with empirical knowledge, but the institution is also concerned with teaching folk art and folk traditions. The medical center accommodates physicians who practice modern medicine, but the center also makes use of
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the skills of Minnie Ransom. The spring celebration is a ritual performed by human beings, but in Claybourne the quick and the dead perform this rite. Bambara’s concepts of the new age, guiding spirits, out-of-body experiences, and telepathic visions were not, at first, taken seriously. Reality is not, however, measured only by empirical evidence. Near-death experiences, guardian angels, and intergalactic travel are part of popular understanding. As the concept of reality expands, the significance of The Salt Eaters deepens.
“Raymond’s Run” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1989, in Raymond’s Run: Stories for Young Adults “Raymond’s Run,” a short story that forms the title of Bambara’s collection for young adults, is about the relationship between the narrator, Hazel (not the same girl from “Gorilla, My Love,” but about the same age); her retarded brother, Raymond; and another girl on the block, Gretchen. Hazel’s reputation is as the fastest thing on two feet in the neighborhood, but coming up to the annual May Day run, she knows that her new rival, Gretchen, will challenge her and could win. Mr. Pearson, a teacher at the school, suggests that it would be a nice gesture to the new girl, Gretchen, to let her win, which Hazel dismisses out of hand. Thinking about a Hansel and Gretel pageant in which she played a strawberry, Hazel thinks, “I am not a strawberry. . . I run. That is what I’m all about.” As a runner, she has no intention of letting someone else win. In fact, when the race is run, she does win, but it is very close, and for all her bravado, she is not sure who won until her name is announced. More important, she sees her brother Raymond running along with her on the other side of the fence, keeping his hands down in an awkward running posture that she accepts as all his own. In her excitement about her brother’s accomplishment, she imagines that her rival Gretchen might want to help her train Raymond as a runner, and the two girls share a moment of genuine warmth. The central point of the story is captured by Hazel when she says of the smile she shared with Gretchen that it was the type of smile girls can share only when they are not too busy being “flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.” The honest competition that brought out their best efforts and enticed Raymond to join them in his way brought them all together as people, not as social competitors trying to outmaneuver one another but as allies.
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Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions Type of work: Short fiction, essays, interview First published: 1996 After her death from cancer in December, 1995, Toni Cade Bambara’s friend and editor, Toni Morrison, pledged to collect Bambara’s previously unpublished work. The result of that pledge, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, edited and prefaced by Morrison, is Bambara’s first book since the early 1980’s. The anthology includes many selections that have never before appeared in print. The compilation of six stories, five essays, and an interview with the author showcases Bambara’s extraordinary range as a writer, film critic, activist, and cultural worker. Bambara’s fiction is incisive and satisfying. “Going Critical” examines the relationship between Clara, a woman dying from radiation poisoning, and Honey, her spiritually gifted daughter whom Clara hopes will carry on her mission as a community advocate. All of the stories in the collection are about relationships, responsibility, and community. Bambara’s expertise and passion for filmmaking is evident throughout the book but especially in two essays. In “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” Bambara explores the black independent film movement with a meticulous analysis of Julie Dash’s 1992 lyric masterpiece, Daughters of the Dust. “School Daze” is an insightful appraisal of the complex themes, meanings, and implications of Spike Lee’s film about class, caste, culture, and intracommunity dynamics at a southern black college. In the essay “Deep Sight and Rescue Missions,” Bambara takes the reader on a journey through downtown Philadelphia. Along the way, she examines the independent media movement as well as issues vital to people of color, including assimilation, accommodation, opportunism, and resistance. “How She Came by Her Name,” an interview by Louis Massiah, offers insights into Bambara’s battle with cancer and into her development as a writer and activist. In Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Bambara’s prose is poetic and often confrontational, reflecting her honesty, passion, and commitment to issues of race, gender, and community.
Suggested Readings Alwes, Derek. “The Burden of Liberty: Choice in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.” African American Review 30, no. 3 (Fall, 1996): 353-365. Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Collins, Janelle. “Generating Power: Fission, Fusion, and Post-modern Politics in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.” MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 35-47.
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Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Hargrove, Nancy. “Youth in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Holmes, Linda J., and Cheryl A. Wall, eds. Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Vertreace, Martha M. Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1998. Willis, Susan. “Problematizing the Individual: Toni Cade Bambara’s Stories for the Revolution.” In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Contributors: Ralph Reckley, Sr., Thomas Cassidy, and Judith Barton Williamson
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) Born: Newark, New Jersey; October 7, 1934 African American
Baraka’s poetry, drama, and music criticism make him one of the most influential African American writers of his generation. Principal works drama: The Baptism, pr. 1964, pb. 1966; Dutchman, pr., pb. 1964; The Slave, pr., pb. 1964; The Toilet, pr., pb. 1964; Experimental Death Unit #1, pr. 1965, pb. 1969; Jello, pr. 1965, pb. 1970; A Black Mass, pr. 1966, pb. 1969; Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself, pr., pb. 1967; Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Madheart, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant, pr., pb. 1967; The Death of Malcolm X, pb. 1969; Bloodrites, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Junkies Are Full of (SHHH . . .), pr. 1970, pb. 1971; A Recent Killing, pr. 1973, pb. 1978; S-1, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; The Motion of History, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; The Sidney Poet Heroical, pb. 1979 (originally as Sidnee Poet Heroical, pr. 1975); What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?, pr., pb. 1979; At the Dim’cracker Convention, pr. 1980; Weimar, pr. 1981; Money: A Jazz Opera, pr. 1982; Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical, pr. 1984, pb. 1997; The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson, pr. 1991; General Hag’s Skeezag, pb. 1992; Meeting Lillie, pr. 1993; The Election Machine Warehouse, pr. 1996, pb. 1997 long fiction: The System of Dante’s Hell, 1965 poetry: Spring and Soforth, 1960; Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 1961; The Dead Lecturer, 1964; Black Art, 1966; A Poem for Black Hearts, 1967; Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art—Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, 1969; In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style, 1970 (with Fundi [Billy Abernathy]); It’s Nation Time, 1970; Spirit Reach, 1972; Afrikan Revolution, 1973; Hard Facts, 1975; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones, 1979; Reggae or Not!, 1981; Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka, 1995; Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995; Funk Lore: New Poems, 19841995, 1996; Somebody Blew Up America, and Other Poems, 2003; Poco Low Coup, 2004; Mixed Blood: Number One, 2005 short fiction: Tales, 1967; The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 2000; Tales of the Out and the Gone, 2006 85
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nonfiction: “Cuba Libre,” 1961; The New Nationalism, 1962; Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963; Home: Social Essays, 1966; Black Music, 1968; A Black Value System, 1970; Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, 1971; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971; Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party, 1971; Crisis in Boston!, 1974; The Creation of the New Ark, 1975; The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1984; The Artist and Social Responsibility, 1986; The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987 (with Amina Baraka); Conversations with Amiri Baraka, 1994 (Charlie Reilly, editor); Jesse Jackson and Black People, 1994; Eulogies, 1996; Digging: Afro American Be/At American Classical Music, 1999; Bushwacked! A Counterfeit President for a Fake Democracy: A Collection of Essays on the 2000 National Elections, 2001; National Elections, 2001; The Essence of Reparation, 2003; Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture, 2003 (with others) edited texts: The Moderns: New Fiction in America, 1963; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (with Larry Neal); African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, 1972; Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, 1983 (with Amina Baraka) miscellaneous: Selected Plays and Prose, 1979; The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 1991; Insomniacathon: Voices Without Restraint, 1999 (audiocassette) Amiri Baraka, as he has been known since 1967, was born Everett LeRoi Jones into a middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. An excellent student whose parents encouraged his intellectual interests, Jones graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1954 at the age of nineteen. After spending two years in the United States Air Force, primarily in Puerto Rico, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he embarked on his literary career in 1957. During the early stage of his career, Jones associated closely with numerous white avant-garde poets, including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Dianne DiPrima, with whom he founded the American Theatre for Poets in 1961. Marrying Hettie Cohen, a white woman with whom he edited the magazine Yugen from 1958 to 1963, Jones established himself as an important young poet, critic, and editor. Among the many magazines to which he contributed was Down Beat, the jazz journal in which he first developed many of the musical interests that were to have such a large impact on his later poetry. The political interests that were to dominate Jones’s later work were unmistakably present as early as 1960 when he toured Cuba with a group of black intellectuals. This event sparked his perception of the United States as a corrupt bourgeois society and seems particularly significant in relation to his later socialist emphasis. Jones’s growing political interest conditioned his first produced plays, including the Obie Award-winning Dutchman (1964), which anticipated the first major transformation of Jones’s life. Separating from Hettie Cohen and severing ties with his white associates, Jones moved from the Village to Harlem in 1965. Turning his attention to direct action within the black community, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem and, following his return to his native city in 1966, the
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Spirit House in Newark. After marrying a black woman, Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), in 1966, Jones adopted his new name, which means “Prince” (Ameer) “the blessed one” (Baraka), along with the honorary title of “Imamu.” Over the next half dozen years, Baraka helped found and develop the Black Community Development and Defense Organization, the Congress of African Peoples (convened in Atlanta in 1970), and the National Black Political Convention (convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972). As a leading spokesman of the Black Arts movement, Baraka provided support for young black poets and playwrights, including Larry Neal, Ed Bullins, Marvin X, and Ron Milner. During the Newark uprising/riot of 1967, Baraka was arrested for unlawful possession of firearms. Although he was convicted and given the maximum sentence after the judge read his poem “Black People!” as an example of incitement to riot, Baraka was later cleared on appeal. Baraka supported Kenneth A. Gibson’s campaign to become the first black mayor of Newark in 1970, but he later broke with Gibson over what he perceived as the bourgeois values of the administration. This disillusionment with black politics within the American system, combined with Baraka’s attendance at the Sixth PanAfrican Conference at Dar es Salaam in 1974, precipitated the subsequent stage of his political evolution. While not abandoning his commitment to confronting the special problems of African Americans in the United States, Baraka came to interpret these problems within the framework of an overarching Marxist-LeninistMaoist philosophy. In conjunction with this second transformation, Baraka dropped the title “Imamu” and changed the name of his Newark publishing firm from “Jihad” to “People’s War.” Baraka would continue to teach, lecture, and conduct workshops, and he is noted not only for his writings but also for his influence on young writers and social critics. As the editor of Black Nation, the organ of the Marxist organization the League of Revolutionary Struggle, Baraka exerted an influence that extended far beyond African American culture and politics to embrace other people of color. Native American writer Maurice Kenney, for example, credited Baraka for teaching ethnic writers how to open doors to important venues for their writing, to “claim and take” their place at the cultural forefront. Amiri Baraka (Library of Congress)
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Blues People Type of work: Essay First published: 1963 The first full-length analytical and historical study of jazz and blues written by an African American, Blues People: Negro Music in White America presents a highly original thesis suggesting that music can be used as a gauge to measure the cultural assimilation of Africans in North America from the early eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Broad in scope and insightfully opinionated, Blues People caused controversy among musicologists and other critics. Intending his remarks as negative criticism, Ralph Ellison was accurate in noting that Baraka is “attracted to the blues for what he believes they tell us of the sociology of Negro American identity and attitude.” Baraka contends that although slavery destroyed many formal artistic traditions, African American music represents certain African survivals. Most important, African American music represents an African approach to culture. As such, the music sustains the African worldview and records the historical experience of an oppressed people. Baraka also argues that while Africans adapted their culture to the English language and to European musical instruments and song forms, they also maintained an ethnic viewpoint that is preserved and transmitted by their music. Stylistic changes in the music mirror historical changes in the attitudes and social conditions of African Americans. The chapter “Swing—From Verb to Noun” compares the contributions of African American and white jazz musicians in the 1920’s and 1930’s, demonstrating how some artists developed and extended an ethnic folk music tradition while others added what they learned from that tradition to the vocabulary of a more commercialized American popular music. Baraka’s view that music is capable of expressing and maintaining a group identity leads to his assertion that even in later decades, increasingly dominated by the recording and broadcasting industry, African American artists continued to be the primary contributors and innovators. A classic work of its kind, Blues People offers an interesting view of how cultural products reflect and perhaps determine other social developments.
The Baptism Type of work: Drama First produced: 1964, pb. 1966 Baraka’s early plays clearly reflect both his developing concern with issues of survival and his fascination with European American avant-garde traditions. The Baptism, in particular, draws on the conventions of expressionist theater to comment on the absurdity of contemporary American ideas of salvation, which in fact simply mask a larger scheme of victimization. Identified only as symbolic types, Baraka’s
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characters speak a surreal mixture of street language and theological argot. While the slang references link them to the social reality familiar to the audience, their actions are dictated by the sudden shifts and thematic ambiguities characteristic of works such as August Strindberg’s Ett drömspel (pb. 1902; A Dream Play, 1912) and the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The play’s central character, named simply “the Boy,” resembles a traditional Christ figure struggling to come to terms with his vocation. Baraka treats his protagonist with a mixture of irony and empathy, focusing on the ambiguous roles of the spirit and the flesh in relation to salvation. Pressured by the Minister to deny his body and by the cynical Homosexual to immerse himself in the profane as a path to the truly sacred, the Boy vacillates. At times he claims divine status; at times he insists, “I am only flesh.” The chorus of Women, at once holy virgins and temple prostitutes, reinforces his confusion. Shortly after identifying him as “the Son of God,” they refer to him as the “Chief Religious jelly roll of the universe.” Given these irreconcilable roles, which he is expected to fulfill, the Boy’s destiny as scapegoat and martyr seems inevitable; the dramatic tension revolves around the question of who will victimize him and why. Baraka uses a sequence of conflicting views of the Boy’s role, each of which momentarily dominates his self-image, to heighten this tension. Responding to the Homosexual’s insistence that “the devil is a part of creation like an ash tray or senator,” the Boy first confesses his past sins and demands baptism. When the Women respond by elevating him to the status of “Son of God/Son of Man,” he explicitly rejects all claim to spiritual purity. The ambiguous masquerade culminates in an attack on the Boy, who is accused of using his spiritual status to seduce women who “wanted to be virgins of the Lord.” Supported only by the Homosexual, the Boy defends himself against the Women and the Minister, who clamor for his sacrifice, ostensibly as punishment for his sins. Insisting that “there will be no second crucifixion,” the Boy slays his antagonists with a phallic sword, which he interprets as the embodiment of spiritual glory. For a brief moment, the figures of Christ as scapegoat and Christ as avenger seem reconciled in a baptism of fire. Baraka undercuts this moment of equilibrium almost immediately. Having escaped martyrdom at the hands of the mob (ironically, itself victimized), the Boy confronts the Messenger, who wears a motorcycle jacket embellished with a gold crown and the words “The Man.” In Baraka’s dream allegory, the Man can represent the Roman/American legal system or be a symbol for God the Father, both powers that severely limit the Boy’s control over events. The Boy’s first reaction to the Messenger is to reclaim his superior spiritual status, insisting that he has “brought love to many people” and calling on his “Father” for compassion. Rejecting these pleas, the Messenger indicates that “the Man’s destroying the whole works tonight.” The Boy responds defiantly: “Neither God nor man shall force me to leave. I was sent here to save man and I’ll not leave until I do.” The allegory suggests several different levels of interpretation: social, psychological, and symbolic. The Boy rejects his responsibility to concrete individuals (the mob he kills, the Man) in order to save an abstract entity (the mob as an ideal man). Ultimately, he
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claims his right to the martyr’s death, which he killed the mob in order to avoid, by repudiating the martyr’s submission to a higher power. Losing patience with the Boy’s rhetoric, the Messenger responds not by killing him but by knocking him out and dragging him offstage. His attitude of boredom effectively deflates the allegorical seriousness of the Boy’s defiance, a deflation reinforced by the Homosexual’s concluding comment that the scene resembles “some really uninteresting kind of orgy.” The Baptism’s treatment of the interlocking themes of sacrifice, ritual, and victimization emphasizes their inherent ambiguity and suggests the impossibility of moral action in a culture that confuses God with the leader of a motorcycle gang. Baraka’s baptism initiates the Boy into absurdity rather than responsibility. If any sins have been washed away, they are resurrected immediately in pointless ritual violence and immature rhetoric. Although he does not develop the theme explicitly in The Baptism, Baraka suggests that there is an underlying philosophical corruption in European American culture, in this case derived from Christianity’s tendency to divorce flesh from spirit. Increasingly, this philosophical corruption takes the center of Baraka’s dramatic presentation of Western civilization.
Dutchman Type of work: Drama First produced: 1964, pb. 1964 A powerful one-act drama, Dutchman brought immediate and lasting attention to Baraka. The play is a searing two-character confrontation that begins playfully but builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance. Set on a New York subway train, Dutchman opens with a well-dressed, intellectual, young African American man named Clay absorbed in reading a magazine. He is interrupted by Lula—a flirtatious, beautiful white woman a bit older than he. As Lula suggestively slices and eats an apple, she and Clay tease each other with bantering talk that becomes more and more personal. She reveals little about herself, but Lula is clearly in control of the conversation and the situation as she perceptively and provokingly challenges Clay’s middle-class self-image. Lula is, in fact, a bit cruel. “What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie?” she asks. “Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.” Aware of his insecurities, Lula dares Clay to pretend “that you are free of your own history.” Clay’s insecurities about his race, social status, and masculine prowess—slowly revealed as his answers shift from machismo to defensiveness—become the targets for Lula’s increasingly direct taunts. Eventually, Lula’s attempt to force Clay to see in himself the negative stereotypes of the black male—as either oversexed stud or cringing Uncle Tom—goad him into an eloquently bitter tirade. Black music and African American culture, he tells her, are actually repressions of a justified rage that has kept African American people sane in the face of centuries of oppression. Clay seems as desperate to prove this to himself as he is to convince Lula. He does
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not seem to know whether the rage or the repression has taken the greater toll on African American sanity. The scene escalates in dramatic force until Lula unexpectedly stabs Clay to death. Baraka has said that Dutchman “is about how difficult it is to become a man in the United States.” Nevertheless, the ancient symbolism of apple and temptation, and the myth of the ghostly pirate ship, The Flying Dutchman, used in Richard Wagner’s opera and other literary works, are carefully suggested in Baraka’s play and amplify the dimensions of racial conflict.
“The Screamers” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1967, in Tales Reprinted at least a half dozen times since its appearance in Tales, generally in collections of African American fiction, “The Screamers” is by far Baraka’s bestknown short story. The narrative covers one night in a black jazz nightclub in Newark (probably in the early 1950’s) from the perspective of a young man listening to “Harlem Nocturne” and other popular dance tunes. What makes this night unique is the performance by saxophonist Lynn Hope, who in an inspired moment leads the musicians through the crowd and out into the streets. “It would be the form of the sweetest revolution, to hucklebuck into the fallen capital, and let the oppressors lindy hop out.” The police arrive and attack the crowd, a riot ensues, and the marchers “all broke our different ways, to save whatever it was each of us thought we loved.” The story has a number of elements common to Baraka’s fiction: the positive depiction of African American cultural forms (including a kind of “bop” jazz language), the conflict between this culture and white oppressors, and the metaphor of black art—here it is music, but it could as easily stand for writing—as an inspirational cultural form which, while it cannot finally overcome white oppression, at least achieves a moment of heightened consciousness for the people (here called “Biggers,” in reference to the central character, Bigger Thomas, of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son) listening to the music and moved by it.
Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones Type of work: Poetry First published: 1979 Baraka helped define the Beat generation and served as a guide for the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s. Baraka’s work is simultaneously introspective and public; his combination of unrhymed open forms, African American vernacular speech, and allusions to American popular culture produces poems that express
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Baraka’s personal background while addressing political issues. Baraka’s poetry draws upon the poetic techniques of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, and upon traditional oratory, ranging from the African American church to streetcorner rapping. Baraka has divided his work into three periods: his association with the Beats (1957-1963), his militant Black Nationalist period (1965-1974), and, after 1975, an adherence to Marxism and Third World anticolonial politics. These periods are marked by changes in the poet’s ideology but not in his poetic style. Early poems such as “Hymn to Lanie Poo”—focusing on tension between middle-class and poor black people—and “Notes for a Speech” consider whether or not African Americans have a genuine ethnic identity and culture of their own as opposed to a segregated existence that only mirrors white America. This theme receives more attention in poems of the 1960’s such as “Poem for Willie Best” and “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” that indict Hollywood stereotypes. Another collection, Transbluesency, represents much of Baraka’s work after 1979. Poems of the Black Nationalist period address questions of the poet’s personal and racial identity. The poems of this period suggest that poetry itself is a means of creating individual and communal identity. In “Numbers, Letters” Baraka writes: “I can’t be anything I’m not/ Except these words pretend/ to life not yet explained.” Explicitly political poems, such as “The Nation Is Like Ourselves,” propose that each person’s efforts or failings collectively amount to a community’s character. After 1975, poems such as “In the Tradition” argue—with some consistency with Baraka’s earlier views—that although Marxism is the means to political progress, only an art of the people that insists on showing that “the universal/ is the entire collection/ of particulars” will prepare people to work toward a better future. “In the Tradition” and a later series titled “Why’s” present musicians and political leaders as equally powerful cultural activists, reinforcing Baraka’s idea that poetry is a force for change.
Daggers and Javelins Type of work: Essays and lectures First published: 1984 The essays and lectures collected in Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979 represent Baraka’s vigorous attempt to identify an African American revolutionary tradition that could parallel anticolonial struggles in Third World countries of Africa, Asia, and South America. Baraka applies a Marxist analysis to African American literature in these essays. Having become disappointed with the progress of the Black Power movement and its emphasis on grassroots electoral politics, Baraka came to Marxism with the zeal of a new convert. “The essays of the earliest part of this period,” he writes, “are overwhelmingly political in the most overt sense.” While some of the essays in Daggers and Javelins address jazz, film, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, all
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of them do so with the purpose of assessing what Baraka calls their potential to contribute to a revolutionary struggle. In “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” Baraka distinguishes between the authentic folk and vernacular expression of African American masses and the poetry and prose produced by middle-class writers in imitation of prevailing literary standards. Considering the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and others as the beginnings of a genuine African American literature, he criticizes works that promote individualism or are merely “a distraction, an ornament.” Similarly, “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” and other essays consider how the economic structure of society affects the production and the appreciation of art. “Notes on the History of African/Afro-American Culture” interprets the theoretical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and draws parallels between colonized African societies and the suppression of African American artistic expression by the American cultural mainstream. Broadening his scope in essays on African and Caribbean authors, Baraka suggests that figures such as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the poet Aimé Césaire from Martinique can provide models for how African American artists can escape being co-opted into an elite that supports the status quo and, instead, produce art that offers a “cathartic revelation of reality” useful in promoting social change.
Conversations with Amiri Baraka Type of work: Letters First published: 1994 Readers of Amiri Baraka’s books know the intensity of his rage against racism and economic injustice. Readers of these interviews collected by critic Charlie Reilly will catch a glimpse of the author as his political views evolved through three decades. Those interested in a static or logically consistent portrait of the author will be dismayed. Those fascinated by how an author must explore numerous meandering detours before arriving at a clearly defined path will find much of fascination. Interviewers range from the famous (author Maya Angelou, television personality David Frost) to the obscure. Attitudes among these interviewers range from the fawning to the acidly critical. Baraka emerges from these interviews as a disarming mix of the erudite and the glib. His gifts as a satirist come to the fore when he pokes fun at white political leaders. He is less inspired when he lectures to his interviewers about his favorite cause of the time—whether Black Nationalism, Islam, or Marxism. As consistently lively as Baraka’s views on race and literature are, this collection makes for occasionally tedious reading. Baraka’s early ties to Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg are touched upon in identical fashion in several interviews. A more substantial introduction by the editor would have provided a comprehensive mapping of the key trends in Baraka’s literary career. As it stands, inter-
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viewers make references to Baraka’s books in ways that presuppose the reader’s acquaintance with such works. Nevertheless, the reader will find much to ponder as he or she witnesses Baraka shedding one ideological “suit of clothing” for another while maintaining a poetically lyrical perception of the world.
Suggested Readings Baraka, Amiri. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Edited by Charlie Reilly. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African-American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Fox, Robert Eliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delaney. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Gwynne, James B., ed. Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch. Harlem, N.Y.: Steppingstones Press, 1985. Lacey, Henry C. To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981. Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Woodard, K. Komozi. A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Contributors: Lorenzo Thomas, Robert McClenaghan, David Peck, Judith K. Taylor, Thomas J. Taylor, and Craig Werner
Raymond Barrio Born: West Orange, New Jersey; August 27, 1921 Died: Escondido, California; January 22, 1996 Mexican American
Barrio’s writing is concerned with gross inequalities in a capitalist system, and he bases many of his characters on the real lives of people he has known. Principal works children’s literature: The Fisherman’s Dwarf, 1968 drama: The Devil’s Apple Corps: A Trauma in Four Acts, pb. 1976 long fiction: The Plum Plum Pickers, 1969; Carib Blue, 1990 nonfiction: The Big Picture: How to Experiment with Modern Techniques in Art, 1967 (revised as Experiments in Modern Art, 1968); Art: Seen, 1968; The Prism, 1968; Mexico’s Art and Chicano Artists, 1975 Raymond Barrio (RAY-mohnd BAHR-ree-oh) was born in West Orange, New Jersey, on August 27, 1921, to Spanish immigrants. His father, Saturnino, worked in a chemical factory in New Jersey and died as a result of his exposure to poisonous fumes there. Raymond’s mother, Angelita (né Santos), was a Spanish dancer. Barrio once wrote in a letter that he and his brother lived with foster families while their mother pursued her career. He therefore grew up in a Protestant environment, despite his Catholic roots. In 1957, he married Yolanda Sánchez in Mazatlan, Mexico. They would have five children. From 1936 until his death in 1996 (with the exception of his military service in Europe during World War II), Barrios lived in California. There he earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1947 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Art Center College of Los Angeles in 1952. He taught courses in art, creative writing, Chicano culture and literature, and Mexican art in eight California institutions of higher education: San Jose State University, Ventura College, the University of California at Santa Barbara, West Valley College, De Anza College, Skyline College, Foothill College, and Sonoma State University. In 1964 he was awarded the Creative Arts Institute Faculty Grant by the University of California. Barrio’s major literary achievement was his novel The Plum Plum Pickers. Initially it was turned down by every publishing house to which Barrio offered it, so Barrios published it himself. It sold more than ten thousand copies in two years, becoming an underground classic. Barrio was as much a visual artist as 95
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he was a writer; he illustrated many of his own books. In fact, for most of his life he considered himself primarily an artist; teaching merely paid his family’s bills.
The Plum Plum Pickers Type of work: Novel First published: 1969 Set in California’s Santa Clara Valley during the summer and fall harvest season, The Plum Plum Pickers takes place in and around the fictional town of Drawbridge, and more specifically at the Western Grande Company’s migrant housing project. The novel presents the dehumanized conditions of the mostly Mexican plum plum, or prune, pickers at the hands of the fruit company representatives: Mr. Quill, the grounds boss, and his superior and the company owner, Mr. Turner. The squalor of the migrant camps is a major element of the narrative and enhances the brutalized relations between not only Anglo bosses and Mexican laborers but also different groups within the farmworkers’ Mexican community. The harsh reality of conditions is brought to the forefront in large part by the contrapuntal techniques employed in the narrative (which allow for contrasting views of the same topic) and the frequent attribution of animal qualities to individual characters. Barrio published The Plum Plum Pickers privately in 1969. Its publication coincided with the unionizing activities of César Chávez, and the book appeared to illustrate the very conditions that Chávez sought to improve. The book was therefore an immediate popular success, although it received little critical attention, perhaps because of the poor quality of print and paper employed in its first printing. The novel has since maintained its position as one of the key novels of the Chicano movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. A major reason for this is Barrio’s use of an unusual narrative form, which incorporates such items as newspaper clippings, radio announcements, handwritten notes, and even a government agricultural manual. The Plum Plum Pickers set a new standard for Chicano fiction to follow.
Suggested Readings Akers, John C. “Raymond Barrio.” In Chicano Writers, First Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí. Vol. 82 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1989. Gray, Linda. “The Plum Plum Pickers: A Review.” Peninsula Bulletin 11 (December, 1976). Lomelí, Francisco A. “Depraved New World Revisited: Dreams and Dystopia in The Plum Plum Pickers.” Introduction to The Plum Plum Pickers, by Raymond Barrio. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review Press, 1984. Contributors: Kathleen M. Bartlett and St. John Robinson
Saul Bellow Born: Lachine, Quebec, Canada; June 10, 1915 Died: Brookline, Massachusetts; April 5, 2005 Jewish
Bellow was perhaps the first Jewish writer in America to reject the categorization of his work as being Jewish American literature; he became a major American novelist. Principal works drama: The Wrecker, pb. 1954; The Last Analysis, pr. 1964; Under the Weather, pr. 1966 (also known as The Bellow Plays; includes Out from Under, A Wen, and Orange Soufflé) long fiction: Dangling Man, 1944; The Victim, 1947; The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Seize the Day, 1956; Henderson the Rain King, 1959; Herzog, 1964; Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1970; Humboldt’s Gift, 1975; The Dean’s December, 1982; More Die of Heartbreak, 1987; The Bellarosa Connection, 1989; A Theft, 1989; The Actual, 1997 (novella); Ravelstein, 2000; Novels, 1944-1953, 2003 (includes Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March) short fiction: Mosby’s Memoirs, and Other Stories, 1968; Him with His Foot in His Mouth, and Other Stories, 1984; Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales, 1991; Collected Stories, 2001 nonfiction: To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, 1976; Conversations with Saul Bellow, 1994 (Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, editors); It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, 1994 edited text: Great Jewish Short Stories, 1963 Saul Bellow (sawl BEHL-loh) grew up in the polyglot slums of Montreal and Chicago. He was saved from a bleak existence by his love of learning. He acquired a knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew, and French, in addition to Russian and English. His Russian immigrant parents were orthodox Jews; Bellow’s exposure to other cultures led him to reject a purely Jewish identity. He discovered the work of Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson, all leaders in shaping Americans’ consciousness of their national identity. After graduating from Northwestern University, Bellow obtained a scholarship to pursue graduate study in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin but found his real interest lay in creative writing. He considered his first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, “apprentice work.” Not until the publication of The Adventures of Augie March did he achieve recognition as a major new voice in Amer97
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ican fiction. He had forged a spontaneous, exuberant personal style that was a poetic synthesis of lower-class vernacular, Yiddishisms, profuse neologisms, the language of polite society, and the jargon of academia. Bellow thought too much had been made of persecution and exclusion. He pointed to the exciting opportunities for growth available to all Americans. He insisted on being not a Jew addressing other Jews but an American addressing other Americans. Creative writing for him was an adventure in self-discovery. He called his breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March because he considered life an adventure in spite of hardships, disappointments, and failure. Bellow was also inspirational as a teacher. He is most closely identified with the University of Chicago. The fact that Bellow was married and divorced four Saul Bellow (© The Nobel Foundation) times reflects the quixotic spirit seen in Augie March, Eugene Henderson, and other autobiographical creations. Among his numerous honors, Bellow received National Book Awards for The Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1964, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1970. His crowning achievement was the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. Most of his fiction concerns a search for self-realization in a confusing, often hostile world. Bellow’s heroes rarely know what they want but know what they do not want: They are chronically dissatisfied with the complacency, inertia, and materialism around them. Bellow will be best remembered for his example to writers attempting to discover and declare their identities, often as members of disadvantaged minorities. Bellow expressed—and was shaped by—the adventurous, iconoclastic, and fiercely democratic spirit of twentieth century America.
The Adventures of Augie March Type of work: Novel First published: 1953 The Adventures of Augie March is an autobiographical bildungsroman covering a Jewish American’s struggle to find himself, through trial and error, from the 1920’s
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through the 1940’s. Bellow’s hero-narrator Augie March is bewildered by the freedom and opportunities available to Jews in America after centuries of persecution and segregation in other lands. Augie is a resilient but not a strongly motivated character. Not knowing what he wants, he allows himself to be misguided by a succession of domineering personalities, beginning with the family’s tyrannical boarder, Mrs. Lausch, a refugee from czarist Russia, who tries to make him an Old World gentleman. Augie and his older brother Simon have to go to work while still children to supplement the meager family income. Both quickly become hardened by the streets of Chicago. Criminal acquaintances involve Augie in felonies that nearly get him sent to prison. Augie, however, has a love for education and self-improvement because they offer hope of finding self-realization and escape from the ghetto. The combination of slang and erudite diction Augie uses in telling his story is an outstanding feature of the novel. Simon is another domineering personality who tries to run Augie’s life. Ruthless, money-hungry Simon cannot understand his younger brother’s indifference to materialism and despises his bookworm mentality. They have a dynamic love-hate relationship throughout the novel. Simon marries into a wealthy family and becomes a millionaire, but Augie sees that his unhappy brother is suicidal. Augie wants more from life than money and a loveless marriage. He tries shoplifting, union organizing, smuggling illegal immigrants, managing a punch-drunk boxer, and other fiascos. He experiences many changes of fortune. He plunges into love affairs with women who try to redirect his life. The most formidable is a huntress who collects poisonous snakes and trains an eagle to catch giant iguanas in Mexico. When World War II comes, Augie joins the Merchant Marine and barely survives after his ship is torpedoed. After the war, he and his wife move to Europe, where he grows rich trading in black-market merchandise. At novel’s end he still has not found himself. Augie finds that he has settled for a comfortable but shallow existence, but he realizes that other people have no better understanding of who they are or what they want than he does himself. During the 1950’s and 1960’s The Adventures of Augie March was popular with young readers because they identified with a protagonist who rejected traditional values and sought self-realization in a world seemingly doomed to atomic annihilation.
Seize the Day Type of work: Novella First published: 1956 Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. He is divorced, unemployed, broke, undereducated, selfindulgent, and dependent (on pills and his father, among other things). He lives in a hotel in New York City and wants desperately to put his life in order. Tommy, like all Bellow protagonists, has trouble determining how to cope with the modern world.
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One of the symbols of Tommy’s problems, and those of modern society generally, is his relationship with his father. Tommy’s father lives in the same hotel and is disgusted with his son’s weakness. He refuses to give the one thing Tommy wants most—sympathy. Tommy makes one last grasp for success by investing in the commodities market under the dubious influence of Dr. Tamkin. His money quickly evaporates and with it his hopes. At this lowest point, however, Tommy has an epiphany. He accidentally happens into a church during a funeral and, after looking at the body of a man he does not know, breaks into uncontrollable weeping. Tommy weeps for the man, for himself, and for the human condition. He is transported beyond his own particular problems to a cathartic suffering for all humankind. Bellow sees the problems of the modern world as essentially matters of the spirit. In a high-pressure, pluralistic, threatening, materialistic world, people must find a way to live and to remain human. Tommy does this by recognizing that human beings, for all their weaknesses—or perhaps because of them—must accept and share one another’s burdens. Bellow offers this important response to the modern condition in a comic tale that is a contemporary classic, one which later helped win for him the Nobel Prize.
Humboldt’s Gift Type of work: Novel First published: 1975 The narrator of Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine, is a somewhat diminished version of Bellow, a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose career and reputation have flourished during the same years that Humboldt’s have declined. Even after death, the outrageous, eccentric figure of Humboldt looms large in Charlie’s life, never far out of sight as Charlie grapples with a late-midlife crisis populated by agents, lawyers, accountants, gangsters, lovely ladies, and former wives (his own and Humboldt’s). Set mainly in Chicago in the early 1970’s, with frequent flashbacks to an earlier New York, the novel in fact begins when Charlie’s Mercedes is vandalized by an ambitious young hoodlum to whom he owes a small gambling debt. The hoodlum, known variously as Ronald or Rinaldo Cantabile, soon intervenes in Charlie’s life as a strange kind of “angel” bent on reacquainting him with the life of the common man. Here too the figure of Von Humboldt Fleischer looms, as Cantabile’s wife is preparing a doctoral dissertation on Humboldt’s life and work. Haggling over children and finances with his former wife Denise, inevitably attracted to the treacherous young divorcée, Renata Koffritz, Charlie is again haunted by Humboldt’s memory when he learns that Humboldt has bequeathed him some apparently worthless papers. Later, marooned in Madrid with Renata’s young son after she has deserted them both to elope with a prosperous undertaker, Charlie will
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learn from the ubiquitous Cantabile that Humboldt’s papers indisputably prove his and Charlie’s authorship of a pirated script that has since been very profitably filmed. Although daunted by the prospect of further legal action, Charlie will in fact take steps to recover Humboldt’s “gift,” the tangible evidence of his warped but gifted personality. James Atlas’s life of Schwartz, published in 1977, revealed that many of Humboldt’s more implausible actions were directly drawn from Schwartz’s life, leaving the line between life and art even more blurred than before. The novel remains one writer’s eulogy, testament, and testimony to a difficult but oddly rewarding friendship.
More Die of Heartbreak Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 For its first thirty pages or so, More Die of Heartbreak is exhilarating. Sentences that no one else could have written follow one another in rapid-fire bursts: “What you have to consider is a Jew who moves into the vegetable kingdom, studying leaves, bark, roots, heartwood, sapwood, flowers, for their own sake.” They come to the reader via the narrator, thirty-five-year-old Kenneth Trachtenberg, a professor of Russian literature at a midwestern university. While it is abundantly clear that the self-deprecating Kenneth is not to be confused with his creator, he voices many of Bellow’s concerns (and is given many good lines). Thus, the novel’s opening pages report on America’s (and the modern world’s) spiritual malaise, updating the diagnosis offered in Humboldt’s Gift and The Dean’s December. All this, the reader assumes, is a prologue to the unfolding of the action—which, as Kenneth outlines it, centers on his relationship with his widowed uncle, Benn Crader, an eminent botanist and a good man, and Benn’s disastrous marriage to a much younger woman, Matilda Layamon, not long after having escaped at the last minute from what would have been an equally unsatisfactory union. As Kenneth’s narrative proceeds, however, the reader gradually comes to realize that the “prologue” is of a piece with the rest: This is a story in which virtually all the action takes place offstage or in the past, to be recounted in Kenneth’s summary or in his reconstruction of conversations with Benn. Clearly Bellow was aware of the risks: that his readers, deprived of suspense, would quickly weary of Kenneth’s digressive ways; that the novel’s diagnosis and obliquely proposed cure would remain at the level of commentary. The result is a challenging and at times exasperating book—one that frustrates while it enlightens and delights.
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Suggested Readings American Studies International 35 (February, 1997). Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000. Bellow, Saul. “Moving Quickly: An Interview with Saul Bellow.” Salmagundi (Spring/Summer, 1995): 32-53. Bigler, Walter. Figures of Madness in Saul Bellow’s Longer Fiction. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1998. Bloom, Harold, ed. Saul Bellow. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Boyers, Robert. “Captains of Intellect.” Salmagundi (Spring/Summer, 1995): 100108. Cronin, Gloria L., and L. H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980’s: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989. Freedman, William. “Hanging for Pleasure and Profit: Truth as Necessary Illusion in Bellow’s Fiction.” Papers on Language and Literature 35 (Winter, 1999): 3-27. The Georgia Review 49 (Spring, 1995). Hollahan, Eugene, ed. Saul Bellow and the Struggle at the Center. New York: AMS Press, 1996. Kiernan, Robert. Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum, 1989. Miller, Ruth. Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Contributor: Bill Delaney
Arna Bontemps Born: Alexandria, Louisiana; October 13, 1902 Died: Nashville, Tennessee; June 4, 1973 African American
Bontemps, recognized as a scholar and historian of the Harlem Renaissance, is considered one of the most significant African American writers. Principal works children’s literature: Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, 1932 (with Langston Hughes); You Can’t Pet a Possum, 1934; Sad-Faced Boy, 1937; The Fast Sooner Hound, 1942 (with Jack Conroy); We Have Tomorrow, 1945; Slappy Hooper: The Wonderful Sign Painter, 1946 (with Conroy); The Story of the Negro, 1948; Chariot in the Sky: A Story of the Jubilee Singers, 1951; Sam Patch, 1951 (with Conroy); The Story of George Washington Carver, 1954; Lonesome Boy, 1955; Frederick Douglass: Slave, Fighter, Freeman, 1959; Famous Negro Athletes, 1964; Mr. Kelso’s Lion, 1970; Young Booker: Booker T. Washington’s Early Days, 1972; The Pasteboard Bandit, 1997 (with Hughes); Bubber Goes to Heaven, 1998 drama: St. Louis Woman, pr. 1946 (with Countée Cullen) long fiction: God Sends Sunday, 1931; Black Thunder, 1936; Drums at Dusk, 1939 poetry: Personals, 1963 short fiction: The Old South, 1973 nonfiction: Father of the Blues, 1941 (with W. C. Handy; biography); They Seek a City, 1945 (with Jack Conroy; revised as Anyplace but Here, 1966); One Hundred Years of Negro Freedom, 1961 (history); Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1971; Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967, 1980 edited texts: The Poetry of the Negro, 1949 (revised 1971; with Langston Hughes); The Book of Negro Folklore, 1958 (with Hughes); American Negro Poetry, 1963; Great Slave Narratives, 1969; Hold Fast to Dreams, 1969; The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, 1972 Arna Bontemps (AHR-nah bahn-tahm), at age twenty-one, accepted a teaching position in New York City at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Through his poetry, novels, short stories, and essays, he became one of that movement’s defining writers. Bontemps, whose father was a bricklayer and whose mother, a school103
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teacher, instilled in him a love of books, was born in Louisiana but, because of white threats against his family, was reared and educated in California, where he graduated from Pacific Union College in 1923. The Bontemps family settled in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1905. At the time, they were the only African American family in the neighborhood. When Bontemps was twelve years old, his mother died, and he was sent to live with relatives in the California countryside. There, by becoming his Uncle Buddy’s “companion and confidant in the corn rows,” Bontemps gained access to a living embodiment of southern black folk culture. According to Bontemps, Uncle Buddy was an “old derelict” Arna Bontemps (Library of Congress) who drank alcohol and loved “dialect stories, preacher stories, ghost stories, slave and master stories. He half-believed in signs and charms and mumbo-jumbo, and he believed wholeheartedly in ghosts.” Concerned by Uncle Buddy’s influence, Bontemps’s father sent his son to a white boarding school, admonishing him, “Now don’t go up there acting colored.” Fifty years later, the rebuke still rankled: Recalling his father’s advice in 1965, Bontemps exclaimed, “How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored?” Pride in color and heritage stamps all Bontemps’s works. The African American experience is at the heart of all Bontemps’s work. His novel God Sends Sunday, which he and Countée Cullen adapted for Broadway in 1946, is based loosely on the life of Uncle Buddy. The work offers a glimpse of the southern racing circuit through the eyes of a black jockey in the late 1800’s. Another novel, Black Thunder, is based on Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion. Bontemps edited an anthology, Great Slave Narratives, and The Book of Negro Folklore in 1958. With Langston Hughes, Bontemps edited The Poetry of the Negro 1746-1949 (1949). Bontemps was a central figure in the rediscovery and dissemination of African American literature. Bontemps was a librarian at Fisk University from 1943 to 1965. Although he left to teach at the University of Illinois and then at Yale during the late 1960’s, he returned to Fisk in 1971 and remained there until his death in 1973.
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God Sends Sunday Type of work: Novel First published: 1931 In God Sends Sunday, set in the 1890’s, Bontemps depicts a diminutive black jockey, Little Augie, who lives on a Red River plantation in Louisiana with his older sister. Because he was born with a caul over his face, he is thought to be lucky. He discovers a talent for riding horses, which serves him well when he escapes to New Orleans on a steamboat and becomes a jockey. Augie grows rich, arrogant, and ostentatious. He falls in love with a beautiful young mulatto, Florence Desseau, but learns, to his sorrow, that she is the mistress of his rich white patron. Going to St. Louis to find a woman like Florence, Augie falls in with a crowd of prostitutes, gamblers, and “sugar daddies,” one of whom he murders when the man bothers Augie’s woman. Returning to New Orleans, Augie at last has Florence as his lover. However, she deserts him, taking his money and possessions. Augie’s luck fades, and he declines rapidly into penury and alcoholism. In California, Augie commits another “passion murder” and escapes to Mexico. The novel exhibits a remarkable joie de vivre among its black characters, but they are primarily caricatures within a melodramatic plot. Bontemps uses black dialect and folklore effectively, making especially good use of the blues, for which Augie has a great affection.
“A Summer Tragedy” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1935, in Opportunity “A Summer Tragedy” is Bontemps’s best-known, most frequently anthologized, and perhaps most successful short story because of its artistic interlacing of setting, symbolism, characterization, and folklore. As Bontemps’s biographer, Kirkland C. Jones, has observed, this story is “to the Bontemps canon what ‘Sonny’s Blues’ has become to Baldwin’s short fiction efforts—outstanding.” An elderly black couple, Jennie and Jeff Patton, have for decades been tenant farmers on Greenbrier Plantation in an unnamed southern state. The Pattons are ill, frail, and barely ambulatory; Jennie is nearly blind. Their five adult children have all died in violent situations, none of which is specified, suggesting that life for blacks, particularly the young, was dangerous and uncertain in the South. The opening scene reveals the old couple dressing in their clean but threadbare black “Sunday-best.” Their actions are described slowly and painfully as they prepare for some great, momentous occasion. The story is set in the fullness of the green, fecund, early summer fields; all of nature—plants, animals, and birds— seems to be celebrating life, youth, warmth, and procreation, as contrasted with the aging, pinched, wintry, weary, and deathlike lives of Jennie and Jeff. Nevertheless,
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they affirm their love for each other and resolve to persevere in their plans, which are not clear to the reader until late in the story. At first, Bontemps’s narrative seems almost naturalistic in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser as the Pattons reflect upon their lives of hard, monotonous, futile labor which has left them only more debtridden. Their existence seems to be a cruel trap, a vicious, meaningless struggle. They own an old, battered, hard-to-crank Model-T Ford that will later serve a vital but ominous purpose. Yet the story is not merely documentary with dreary details. Jeff and Jennie are presented as three-dimensional characters through a psychological point of view that allows the reader to share their thoughts, feelings, and memories. Bontemps has also skillfully used folk motifs to provide both verisimilitude and foreshadowing. For example, the Pattons’ sickly “frizzly” chickens, which are supposed to protect the farm from evil spirits by devouring them, seem to be as death-doomed as their owners. Jeff reflects on the many mules he has worn out in his years of plantation toil. His stingy employer has allowed him to have only one mule at a time; thus a long succession of mules has been killed by excessive and unremitting toil. Jeff is not aware that he is symbolically a mule for whom the callous old Major Stevenson has also had no sympathy. Moreover, Jeff himself has never felt pity for a man who is too weak to work. Passing a neighbor’s house on the journey through the countryside, Jennie is silently amused to think that their neighbor, Delia, who sees the Pattons’ car drive past, is consumed with curiosity to know their destination. Delia, it seems, had once made passes at Jeff when he was a young married man. By refusing to supply Delia with any information, Jennie feels she is punishing her neighbor for her long-ago indiscretion. Such details help to humanize and individualize Bontemps’s characters, making them psychologically credible. The reader gradually becomes aware that because of the couple’s love for each other and their fear that one may grow too weak to help the other, they are determined to perish together. As the Pattons near the high banks of the river levee, they can hear the rushing water. They drive over the levee and into the dark, swirling water. (Some readers contend that the stream is Louisiana’s Red River, which flows near Bontemps’s birthplace.) In death, Jeff and Jennie have preserved their independence and dignity. As the car sinks, one wheel sticks up out of the mud in a shallow place—fate’s ironical monument to the lives and courageous deaths of Jeff and Jennie Patton. Free of histrionics and sentimentality, this well-handled story is, as critic Robert Bone contends, truly “compelling.”
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Black Thunder Type of work: Novel First published: 1936 Black Thunder, Bontemps’s defining novel, is a fictionalized account of the early nineteenth century Gabriel Insurrection, in Virginia. The novel, which chronicles the Gabriel Prosser-led rebellion against the slave owners of Henrico County, was generally lauded by critics as one of the most significant black American works of fiction. Richard Wright praised the work for dealing forthrightly with the historical and revolutionary traditions of African Americans. Gabriel Prosser, a slave convinced that anything “equal to a grey squirrel wants to be free,” urges the other slaves to revolt against their owners. The rebellion is hastened when a brutal slave owner whips a slave, Bundy, to death. Even though the rebellion ultimately fails, Gabriel Prosser nonetheless emerges as a potent hero. The “power of black folk” credo is central to Black Thunder. Bontemps’s treatment of Bundy’s funeral is faithful in detail to the customs of the time. Bontemps’s use of signs and portents pushes the story to its heroic ending. Stunning characterizations of Pharaoh, Drucilla, Ben, and Gabriel become multileveled, believably universal personalities through Bontemps’s skillful use of folk material. Elements of magic appear in Black Thunder just as they appear in folktales and beliefs as recorded by collectors. Bundy’s spirit returns to haunt Pharaoh, the slave who betrays the rebellion and whose death is foreshadowed. Use of charms and countercharms is rampant, conjurepoisoning looms at all times, and rebellious slaves debate omens in the stars. The tapestry that Bontemps weaves shows the intricate beliefs of slaves to be colorful and compelling. Bontemps’s narrative techniques have origins in black folklore about death, ghosts, and spirits. Black Thunder’s strength, largely, is in its depiction of an alternate worldview, which, while retaining the power to sanctify or punish, is painfully adapting to a new land and people. Critics note that Bontemps situates his story in the politics of the times: Readers see blame for slave unrest placed at the feet of Thomas Jefferson during John Quincy Adams’s bitter reelection campaign. Bontemps depicts the Virginia legislature debate considering sectional segregation of blacks, slaves and free, and chronicles the press. Black Thunder was written during the 1930’s; some critics believe it reflects the mood of the Depression.
Drums at Dusk Type of work: Novel First published: 1939 Drums at Dusk, like Black Thunder, is a historical novel in which Bontemps makes use of slave narratives and legal records to establish background for the black rebel-
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lion leading to Haiti’s independence and Toussaint-Louverture’s ascendancy. Bontemps centers the story on a young girl of French ancestry, Celeste Juvet, and Diron de Sautels, an aristocratic young Frenchman who claims membership in Les Amis des Noirs, embraces enthusiastically the ideas of writers of the French Revolution, and works as an abolitionist. Celeste and her grandmother reside on a large plantation where the owner’s cousin, Count Armand de Sacy, abuses ailing slaves and mistreats his mistresses, abandoning them at his uncle’s. De Sacy is deeply disliked, and when several slaves foment an insurrection, the aristocrats are overturned and rebel leaders successfully seize power. Diron de Sautels’s radical opinions influence young blacks, and they fight with three other groups for political control of Santo Domingo: rich aristocrats, poor whites, and free mulattos. Drums at Dusk describes with melodramatic sensationalism the sybaritic lives of the wealthy and their sexual exploitation of light-skinned black women. Moreover, the novel describes graphically the heinous conditions on the slave ships and on many of the plantations. The patricians’ cruelty and abuse lead to a rapid spread of liberal ideology and the rise of such leaders as ToussaintLouverture. In spite of its faults, Bontemps’s last novel, like his second one, emphasizes the universal need and desire for freedom, which he intimates is as necessary for the survival of human beings as water, air, food, and shelter.
Great Slave Narratives Type of work: Edited text First published: 1969 Great Slave Narratives, Bontemps’s 1960’s revival of a once-popular American literary genre, is a compilation of three book-length narratives written by former slaves. During much of the nineteenth century, slave narratives were best sellers for American publishers. The reintroduction of this literary form was inspired by the Black Power movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s and the resurgent interest in black culture and the African American experience. Readers were again curious about how it felt to be black and a slave; they wanted to know how the world looked through the eyes of one who had achieved a measure of freedom by effort and suffering. Who, readers wanted to know, were the people who had passed through the ordeal, and how had they expressed their thoughts and feelings? Bontemps chose for this book three outstanding examples of the genre. The first, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), by Olaudah Equiano, who was given the name Gustavus Vassa, gained wide attention, and is particularly interesting for the author’s vivid recall of his African background. In 1794, it went into its eighth edition, with many more to follow in America and Europe. The second book, The Fugitive Blacksmith; Or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in
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the State of Maryland, United States (1850), is the tale of a full-blooded African who was honored with the degree of doctor of divinity by the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Yale University denied him admission as a regular student but did not interfere when he stood outside the doors of classrooms in order to hear professors lecture. Pennington also was the first black to write a history of his people in America: A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841). The final narrative in the trilogy, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860), an exciting story of a courageous slave couple’s escape, is perhaps the high point in the development of the slave narrative genre. Apparently no two slaves in their flight from subjugation to freedom ever thrilled the world so much as did this handsome young couple. Not everyone was pleased, however. President James Polk was so infuriated by their success that he threatened to use the Fugitive Slave Law and the military in their recapture. By then the Crafts were in England. Bontemps, in his introduction to Great Slave Narratives, explained the importance of this “half-forgotten history,” placing it in the context of American literature: “Hindsight,” he wrote, “may yet disclose the extent to which this writing, this impulse, has been influential on subsequent American writing, if not indeed on America’s view of itself. . . . The standard literary sources and the classics of modern fiction pale in comparison as a source of strength.”
The Old South Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1973 The Old South, Arna Bontemps’s collection of short stories, contains fourteen selections, the first of which is an important essay, “Why I Returned,” an account of his early life in Louisiana and California and his later life in Alabama and Tennessee. All of the selections are set in the South of the 1930’s (a time when this region was yet unchanged and thus “old”) or concern characters from the South. Some of the stories are also autobiographical—“The Cure,” “Three Pennies for Luck,” “Saturday Night”—and some are sharply satirical portraits of influential white women: a wealthy patron of young black musicians in “A Woman with a Mission” and a principal of a black boarding school in “Heathens at Home.” The titles of these latter stories are self-explanatory. Bontemps was brought up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, for which his father had abandoned the Creoles’ traditional Catholicism. The boarding school and college Bontemps attended as well as the academy where he taught in Alabama were sponsored by the Adventists. Though Bontemps did not remain active in this church, he was deeply religious all his life. Several of his stories thus have religious settings and themes, including “Let the Church Roll On,” a study of a black congregation’s lively charismatic church service. Bontemps was early influenced by music, since his father and other relatives had been blues and jazz musicians in Louisi-
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ana. “Talk to the Music,” “Lonesome Boy, Silver Trumpet,” and “A Woman with a Mission” all concern young black musicians. Several selections concern black folk culture and folklore: “The Cure,” “Lonesome Boy, Silver Trumpet,” and “The Devil Is a Conjurer.” The latter story reflects the human desire to invest nature with a sense of the mysterious, which unimaginative men find foolish and unprofitable. In addition, at least seven of Bontemps’s stories, including the three named above, involve a young boy or man seeking or discovering meaning and worth in family and community, which some Bontemps scholars believe was a principal desire in the author’s own life. Bontemps’s short stories treat sensitive political, economic, and social themes that are also employed in his two novels of slave revolts, Black Thunder and Drums at Dusk. “Boy Blue” concerns an escaped black murderer who is hunted down and killed after he commits a second homicide. The action in this story is seen from two perspectives, that of a young child and of the criminal himself. Critic Robert Bone argues that the criminal named Blue is in fact “Bontemps’s apotheosis of the blues hero.” In his best stories Bontemps achieves an aesthetic distance, a mastery of literary form, and a belief in transcendence in spite of his characters’ struggles in a world that often denies them human value. Though Bontemps’s stories have been compared with those of Richard Wright, Bontemps’s are less angry and acerbic.
Suggested Readings Bone, Robert. “Arna Bontemps.” Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975. Canaday, Nicholas. “Arna Bontemps: The Louisiana Heritage.” Callaloo 4 (October-February, 1981): 163-169. Jones, Kirkland C. “Bontemps and the Old South.” African American Review 27, no. 2 (1993): 179-185. _______. Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Reagan, Daniel. “Voices of Silence: The Representation of Orality in Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder.” Studies in American Fiction 19 (Spring, 1991): 71-83. Stone, Albert. “The Thirties and the Sixties: Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder.” In The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Yardley, Jonathan. Review of The Old South. The New York Times Book Review, December, 1973, 11. Contributors: Barbara Day and Philip A. Tapley
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard Born: Cebu, Philippines; November 21, 1947 Filipino American
Brainard has reminded American readers of how Filipinos earned their independence. Principal works long fiction: Song of Yvonne, 1991 (pb. in U.S. as When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, 1994); Magdalena, 2002 short fiction: Woman with Horns, and Other Stories, 1987; Acapulco at Sunset, and Other Stories, 1995 nonfiction: Philippine Woman in America: Essays, 1991; Cecilia’s Diary, 19621969, 2003 edited texts: Fiction by Filipinos in America, 1993; Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, 1997; Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults, 2003 Born one year after the Philippines gained its independence, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard (seh-SEE-lee-ah mahn-GEHR-rah BRAYN-urd) was surrounded from the start with a sense of her country’s having been born at almost the same time as herself. After centuries of Spanish colonialism, more than four decades of American control, and four years of Japanese occupation, finally, in 1946, Filipinos were free to determine their own future. The Americans had helped prepare for this moment through elective models and had fought side by side with Filipinos during the war, and the Americans were vital to the difficult postwar reconstruction, but Brainard grew up well aware of her fellow Filipinos’ own proud contributions toward establishment of an independent Philippines. The street on which she lived in Cebu was called Guerrillero Street in honor of her father, a guerrilla and then a civil engineer involved in rebuilding shattered Philippine cities. Many of the anecdotes in her first novel, Song of Yvonne, came from tales of war remembered by her family. As a result, even when Brainard left home for graduate studies at the University of California at Los Angeles in the late 1960’s, she brought with her an identity as a Filipina. She married a former member of the Peace Corps, Lauren Brainard, who had served on Leyte, an island close to Cebu. In California, she worked on documentary film scripts and public relations from 1969 to 1981. Then she began the newspaper columns later collected in Philippine Woman in America, which describe the enrichment and frustration felt by Philippine Americans who are strad111
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dling two cultures. Conscious of her own Americanization and anxious to provide her three sons with cultural choices, she formed Philippine American Women Writers and Artists, an organization intent on publishing remembered legends and scenes from the contributors’ childhoods. Brainard’s organization was intended to provide a continuum of presence from varied pasts to a shared future. Such dedication to the “memory of a people” is in the ancient Philippine tradition of the female babaylan, or priestess.
Woman with Horns, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1987 The stories in this collection by Brainard derive from the author’s attempt to compensate for the fact that Filipino culture, for hundreds of years, was considered too primitive to be significant in the eyes of nations such as Spain, the United States, and Japan. The author’s nationalism (reinforced by nostalgia after her immigration to California) is reinforced by her placing many of the tales in Ubec—the reverse spelling of Cebu, the Philippine island of the author’s birth. The fact that invading forces so often destroyed or neglected native records provided the final impulse for Brainard to depend on her imagination for invention of details wherever history has been forced to remain silent. Her stories also show her division of allegiance between her native land and her adopted country. An example of Brainard’s creative approach to history is found in the story “1521.” The failure of Ferdinand Magellan to complete his circumnavigation of the world is usually explained by his coming between two hostile Filipino chiefs. Yet “1521” suggests that Lapu-Lapu may have killed Magellan in revenge for the death of Lapu-Lapu’s infant son at Spanish hands. “Alba,” however, shows more tolerance when, in 1763, during the English occupation of Manila, Doña Saturnina gives birth to a fair-skinned son. The son is accepted by her husband. Similarly, in “The Black Man in the Forest” old guerrilla general Gregorio kills an African American soldier but will not let his body be cannibalized despite near-starvation brought on by the Philippine-American War. The title story recounts how, in 1903, an American public health director finds renewed interest in life, after the death of his wife, with Agustina, a seductive Filipina widow. The effects of war are remarked in “Miracle at Santo Niño Church,” in which Tecla suffers nightmares about the Japanese who bayoneted her family. “The Blue-Green Chiffon Dress” uses the period of the Vietnam War as occasion for a brief encounter between Gemma and a soldier heading back to combat. “The Discovery” describes a Filipina’s torn loyalties between her American husband and a former Filipino lover who, like her homeland, seems ravaged by time and violent circumstance. The collection does not observe the historical sequence. For the modern Filipino, perhaps, all past time is being experienced for the first time by a people whose history has been withheld from them. In any given period, however, Filipino resil-
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ience has proved to outweigh victimization. Melodrama in the stories’ circumstances repeatedly gives way to quietude and certitude.
Suggested Readings Casper, Leonard. Sunsurfers Seen from Afar: Critical Essays, 1991-1996. Metro Manila, Philippines: Anvil, 1996. Zapanta Manlapaz, Edna. Songs of Ourselves. Metro Manila, Philippines: Anvil, 1994. Contributor: Leonard Casper
Edward Kamau Brathwaite Born: Bridgetown, Barbados, West Indies; May 11, 1930 African American Caribbean
Brathwaite epitomizes the intensified ethnic and national awareness of his generation of writers, whose writing seeks to correct the destructive effects of colonialism on West Indian sensibility. Principal works drama: Four Plays for Primary Schools, pr. 1961; Odale’s Choice, pr. 1962, pb. 1967 poetry: Rights of Passage, 1967; Masks, 1968; Islands, 1969; The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 1973 (includes Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands); Days and Nights, 1975; Other Exiles, 1975; Black + Blues, 1977; Mother Poem, 1977; Word Making Man: A Poem for Nicólas Guillèn, 1979; Sun Poem, 1982; Third World Poems, 1983; Jah Music, 1986; X/Self, 1987; Sappho Sakyi’s Meditations, 1989; Shar, 1990; Middle Passages, 1992; Words Need Love Too, 2000; Ancestors: A Reinvention of “Mother Poem,” “Sun Poem,” and “X/Self,” 2001; Born to Slow Horses, 2005; DS (2): dreamstories, 2007 short fiction: DreamStories, 1994 nonfiction: Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica, 1970; The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, 1971; Caribbean Man in Space and Time, 1974; Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean, 1974; Our Ancestral Heritage: A Bibliography of the Roots of Culture in the English-Speaking Caribbean, 1976; Wars of Respect: Nanny, Sam Sharpe, and the Struggle for People’s Liberation, 1977; Barbados Poetry, 1661-1979: A Checklist, 1979; Jamaica Poetry: A Checklist, 1979; The Colonial Encounter: Language, 1984; History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, 1984; Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature, 1993; The Zea Mexican Diary, 1993 edited text: New Poets from Jamaica: An Anthology, 1979 Edward Kamau Brathwaite (kah-MAW BRATH-wayt) was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, on May 11, 1930, the son of Hilton Brathwaite and Beryl Gill Brathwaite. He enrolled at Harrison College in Barbados but won the Barbados Scholarship in 1949, enabling him the next year to read history at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, England. He received an honors degree in 1953 and the Certificate of Education in 1955. 114
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His earliest published poems appeared in the literary journal Bim, beginning in 1950. The poems of that decade, some of which are collected in Other Exiles and, in revised form, in The Arrivants, portray an estranged world fallen from grace, a world that can be redeemed through poetic vision—a creative faith that sustains the more complex fashionings of his later work. Brathwaite shared with other West Indian writers of his generation a strong sense of the impossibility of a creative life in the Caribbean and the equal impossibility of maintaining identity in exile in England or North America. That crisis of the present he understood as a product of his island’s cultural heritage fragmented among its several sources: European, African, Amerindian, and Asian. His reading of history at Cambridge heightened both his sense of the European culture that had been the dominant official culture of the West Indies and his need to understand the African culture that had come with the slaves on the Middle Passage. His search led him to Africa, where from 1955 to 1962 he served as an education officer in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. His career in Ghana (and in Togoland in 1956-1957 as United Nations Plebiscite Officer) provided the historical and local images that became Masks, the pivotal book of The Arrivants. In Ghana, he established a children’s theater and wrote several plays for children (Four Plays for Primary Schools, 1961, and Odale’s Choice, 1962). He married Doris Welcome in 1960, and has a son, Michael Kwesi Brathwaite. Brathwaite returned to the West Indies after an exile of twelve years to assume a post as Resident Tutor at the University of the West Indies in St. Lucia (1962-1963) and to produce programs for the Windward Islands Broadcasting Service. His return to the Caribbean supplied the focus that his poetry had lacked: I had, at that moment of return, completed the triangular trade of my historical origins. West Africa had given me a sense of place, of belonging; and that place . . . was the West Indies. My absence and travels, at the same time, had given me a sense of movement and restlessness—rootlessness. It was, I recognized, particularly the condition of the Negro of the West Indies and the New World.
The exploration of that sense of belonging and rootlessness in personal and historic terms is the motive for Brathwaite’s subsequent work in poetry, history, and literary criticism. He began in 1963 as lecturer in history at the University of the West Indies at Kingston, Jamaica; he became a professor of social and cultural history there. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in England (1965-1968). His dissertation became The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, a study of the assimilation of cultures by various groups within the colonial hierarchy. During the 1980’s, Brathwaite continued to produce important literary criticism and poetry collections. The 1986 death of his wife, Doris, marked a critical juncture in his career. The shock came in the midst of a series of publications that year: a retrospective collection of essays (Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature); a retrospective collection of poems (Jah Music); and Doris’s own labor of love, the bibliography EKB: His Published Prose and Poetry, 1948-1986. Another blow came in
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1988, when Hurricane Gilbert virtually destroyed Brathwaite’s house and buried most of his library in mud, entombing an unequaled collection of Caribbean writing as well as Brathwaite’s own papers. Even more harrowing was a 1990 break-in and physical attack against Brathwaite in his Marley Manor apartment in Kingston, Jamaica. These events helped in his decision to leave Jamaica in 1991, when he began his tenure at New York University, teaching comparative literature. He would later remarry, to Beverley Reid, and spend the years 1997-2000 at his home CowPastor in Barbados. He was the winner of the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize, the world’s richest poetry prize. Other honors include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, and the Casa de las Américas Prize.
The Arrivants Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973 That movement can be discerned in the three books of The Arrivants through the poet’s reconstruction of racial history and his tracing of his personal history. Rights of Passage, the first book of the trilogy, contains the restless isolation of his early life in Barbados that sends him into exile in England and Africa, as well as a recollection of the first phase of the black diaspora, the advent of the slave trade and the Middle Passage. The original dispersal of tribes from Ethiopia to West Africa, as well as his own search for his African origins, is the subject of Masks. In Islands, racial and personal histories merge in the exile’s return to the West Indies. The fruits of that return will become manifest in his planned second trilogy. Readers of The Arrivants who focus on its historical dimension figure Brathwaite as the epic poet of the black diaspora, while those who focus on the autobiography make him the hero of the poem. Taking both approaches as valid, with the binocular vision that the poem requires, one can see that the central figure of the rootless, alienated West Indian in exile and in search of home is the only possible kind of hero for a West Indian epic. That questing poet’s voice is, however, often transformed into the voice of a precolonial African being fired upon by a white slaver; the Rastafarian Brother Man; Uncle Tom; a houngan (male high priest) invoking Legba; or some other historic or mythic figure. Brathwaite’s use of personas, or masks, derives equally from the traditions of Greek drama (dramatic monologue) and African religious practice (chant or invocation). One communal soul speaks in a multiplicity of guises, and the poet thereby re-creates not only his own quest as victim and hero but also the larger racial consciousness in which he participates. The poet’s many masks enable him to reconstruct his own life and the brutal history that created “new soil, new souls, new ancestors” out of the ashes of the past. Combining racial history and personal quest in The Arrivants, Brathwaite has fashioned a contemporary West Indian myth. It is not the myth of history petrified into “progress” but that of a people’s endurance through cycles of brutal oppression. Across centuries, across the ocean, and across the three books of this poem,
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images, characters, and events overlie one another to defy the myth of progress, leading in the poem only to heaven swaying in the reinforced girders of New York and to the God of capitalism floating in a soundless, airtight glass bubble of an office, a prisoner of his own creation. For the “gods” who tread the earth below, myth is cyclical, and it attaches them to the earth through the “souls” of their feet in repetitions of exodus and arrival. The trilogy begins with one tribe’s ancient crossing of the Sahara Desert, their wagons and camels left where they had fallen, and their arrival at a place where “cool/ dew falls/ in the evening.” They build villages, but the cattle towns breed flies and flies breed plague, and another journey begins, for across the “dried out gut” of the riverbed, a mirage shimmers where trees are cool, there leaves are green, there burns the dream of a fountain garden of odours soft alleyways.
This is the repeated pattern of their history: exodus across desert, savanna, ocean; in caravan, ship, or jet plane; visitations of plague, pestilence, famine, slavery, poverty, ignorance, volcanoes, flood. The promised land is always elsewhere, across the parched riverbed (“Prelude”) or in the bountiful fields of England, not in Barbados (“The Cracked Mother”). The connections between history and biography and the difficult process of destroying the colonial heritage in favor of a more creative mode of life are evident in the six poems that constitute the “Limbo” section of Islands. In “The Cracked Mother,” the first poem of “Limbo,” the dissociation of the West Indian’s sensibility—regarding attitudes toward self, race, and country—threatens to paralyze the poet’s dialectical movement toward a sustaining vision. The poet’s rejection of his native land in favor of England is an acceptance of the colonial’s position of inferiority. That attitude is instilled in young West Indians, historians such as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Brathwaite have argued, by the system of colonial education that taught an alien and alienating value system. The debilitating effects of such an education are the subject of “The Cracked Mother.” The three nuns who take the child from his mother to school appear as “black specks . . . / Santa Marias with black silk sails.” The metaphor equates the nuns’ coming with that of Columbus and anticipates the violence that followed, especially in the image of the nuns’ habits as the sails of death ships. With her child gone, the mother speaks in the second part of the poem as a broken (“cracked”) woman reduced to muttering children’s word games that serve as the vehicle for her pain:
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Edward Kamau Brathwaite See? She saw the sea . . . I saw you take my children . . . You gave your beads, you took my children . . . Christ on the Cross your cruel laws teach only to divide us and we are lost.
History provides the useful equation of nuns’ habits with sails and the nuns’ rosary with the beads that Columbus gave to the inhabitants of his “discovered” lands, but it is Brathwaite’s own biography that turns metaphor into revelation in the last two parts of the poem, showing how ruinous the colonial mentality is, even to the point of rejecting the earth under one’s feet (another “cracked mother”) because it is not England. Brathwaite’s corrective begins in “Shepherd,” the second poem of the “Limbo” section. Having recalled the damage of his early education and having felt again some of the old abhorrence of the colonial for himself, the poet returns to the African drumbeats of Masks to chant a service of possession or reconnection with the gods of his ancestors. The poet then addresses his peers in proverbs, as would an elder to his tribe: But you do not understand. For there is an absence of truth like a good tooth drawn from the tight skull like the wave’s tune gone from the ship’s hull there is sand but no desert where water can learn of its loveliness.
The people have gifts for the gods but do not give them, yet the gods are everywhere and waiting. Moving in Islands toward the regeneration promised in Masks, Brathwaite continues with “Caliban” to explore the potential for liberty inherent in the Cuban Revolution, then moves at the moment of triumph back into the slave ship and the limbo that contained the seeds of African religion and identity. The “Limbo” section ends with the beautiful poem “Islands,” which proposes the alternatives that are always present in every moment of Caribbean history: “So looking through a map/ of the islands, you see/ . . . the sun’s/ slums: if you hate/ us. Jewels,/ if there is delight/ in your eyes.” The same dichotomy of vision has surrounded every event and personage in the poem, all infolded upon the crucial event of the Middle Passage: Did it destroy a people or create one? Brathwaite’s account of the voyage in “New World A-Comin” promises “new worlds, new waters, new/
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harbours” on one hand, and on the other, “the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed/ fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.” The gods have crossed with the slaves to new soil, and the poet has returned to the origin of his race to discover his communal selfhood in African rite, which requires participation by all to welcome the god who will visit one of them. The Arrivants is a long historical and autobiographical poem, and it is also a rite of passage for the poet-priest who invites the god to ride him. Brathwaite’s incantatory poems in Masks are his learning of the priest’s ways, which restores his spirit in Islands. The refrain “Attibon Legba/ Ouvri bayi pou’moi” (“Negus”) is the Voodoo houngan’s prayer to the gatekeeper god Legba to open the door to the other gods. The prayer is answered in the final poem “Jou’vert” (“I Open”), where Legba promises hearts no longer bound to black and bitter ashes in the ground now waking making making with their rhythms something torn and new.
Mother Poem Type of work: Poetry First published: 1977 In Mother Poem, the first book of Brathwaite’s planned second trilogy, the central figure is not the restless poet but the mother he has left and returned to, the source of his life. The types of motherhood established in “The Cracked Mother” (The Arrivants) are reiterated here as the poet’s human mother and his motherland, Barbados. Both “mothers” are established in the first poem, “Alpha,” the origin. Barbados is the mother-island of porous limestone (thus absorbing all influence of weather and history), cut by ancient watercourses that have dried up in sterility. Her dead streams can be revived only by the transfigured human mother who “rains upon the island with her loud voices/ with her grey hairs/ with her green love.” The transfiguration that occurs in the last lines of the book must wait, however, for the woman to endure the dream-killing, soul-killing life of the island that is dominated by “the man who possesses us all,” the merchant, the modern agent of bondage (“nametracks”). The mother is his victim, no matter whether she “sits and calls on jesus name” waiting for her husband to come home from work with lungs covered with jute from the sugar sacks or whether she goes out after his death to sell calico cloth, half-soled shoes, and biscuits, or persuades her daughter to sell herself to the man who is waiting: “It int hard, leh me tell you/ jess sad/ so come darlin chile/ leh me tell he you ready you steady you go” (“Woo/Dove”).
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She gets no help from her men, who are crippled, destroyed, frightened, or sick from their lives of bondage to the merchant. One man goes to Montreal to work for nine years and sends back nothing (“Woo/Dove”), and another goes to work for life in the local plantation, brings nothing home, and loses three fingers in the canegrinder (“Milkweed”). Nor does she receive comfort from her children, “wearing dark glasses/ hearing aids/ leaning on wine” (“Tear or pear shape”), who were educated by Chalkstick the teacher, a satirical composite of the colonial educator whose job is to see that his pupils “don’t clap their hands, shake their heads, tap their feet” or “push bones through each others’ congolese nostrils” (“Lix”). Nor does her help come from her sisters (“Dais” and “Nights”) or from her Christianity (“Sam Lord”). Rather, the restoration of her powers as life-giver begins in the guttural, elemental, incantatory uttering of “Nametracks,” where, as a slave-mother beaten by her owner, she reminds herself and her huddled children in dark monosyllables like the word game of “The Cracked Mother” that they will endure while “e di go/ e go di/ e go dead,” that despite all his power, he “nevver maim what me.” Her eyes rise from the plot of land she has bought with her meager earnings, the land that has sustained her and her children, to the whole island and a vision of revolutionary solidarity with her people: “de merchants got de money/ but de people got de men” (“Peace Fire”). With full realization that her child will be born to the life of “broken islands/ broken homes” (“Mid/Life”), in “Driftwood,” the human mother still chooses to suffer the “pour of her flesh into their mould of bone.” The poem ends with the mother re-created in clay by the potter who can work again, in stone by the sculptor whose skill has returned, and in her words gathered by the poet as rain gathering in the dry pools flows once more past the ruins of the slave and colonial world, refreshing and renewing the ancient life of the island.
Sun Poem Type of work: Poetry First published: 1982 Brathwaite’s second volume on Bajun life moves from Mother Poem’s focus on the female characters (and character) of the island to the male principle of the tropical sun and of the various sons of Barbados. The pun of sun/son is derived from a number of historical and mythological associations, including that of Christianity (Brathwaite renames himself Adam as the boy-hero of the poem and spells the pronoun “his” as “ihs” or Iesu Hominum Salvator) and various African traditions. The sun, for instance, contains “megalleons of light,” the invented word associating it with the Egyptian god Ra’s sun-ship, the galleons of European explorers, and the enormous nuclear energy that eclipses or perhaps anticipates the holocaust that Western man has in his power. The complexity of the sun/son as controlling metaphor, as it evokes various ethnic and historical images, extends through time and geographic space the significance of the narrative, even as it complements and completes the female principle of Mother Poem.
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The mythologies evoked in the poem contribute to the meaning of the life of the son Adam, as he begins to understand the West Indian male’s sunlike course of ascent, dominance, and descent, played out through the rituals of boyhood games and identity seeking, adolescence, adult sexual experience, marriage and paternity, and finally death. In an early encounter, Adam wrestles the bully Batto underwater in a life-or-death rite of passage that initiates him into the comradeship of his peers, but which, Brathwaite suggests, fails (as the other games that “had little meaning” fail) to prepare him for the struggles of adult manhood (“Son”). The types of fathers portrayed (“Clips”) fall into roles available from Christian, bourgeois, and Rastafarian cultures that are equally dead-ended. These fathers are unable to pass on to their sons any mode of fulfilling identity or action, even as in his soliloquy the father laments his own diminishment, his being displaced as the head of his family by his own son. The central incidents of Adam’s life introduce him to the cares and costs of adulthood. On his Sunday school trip to the Atlantic coast, he enters the adult world, in part by hearing the story of Bussa’s slave rebellion, a story of the painful price one pays for asserting his personhood (“Noom”). He conducts his courtship of Esse (“Return of the Sun”) with a blithe but growing awareness of the consequences of one’s sexual life in determining social and political roles (“Fleches”). The death of Adam’s grandfather (“Indigone”), the final event in the poem, reveals to him the cyclical nature of manhood in which he begins to locate himself: “and i looked up to see my father’s eye: wheeling/ towards his father/ now as i his sun moved upward to his eye.” The cultural determinants of dispossession and lack of identity that so condition the natural progress and decline of masculine life are transcended in the poem’s ultimate vision of a world capable of beginning anew. The final section (“Son”) returns to the cosmic, creative domain of the poem’s invocation (“Red Rising”) but with a clarified focus on creation and growth as the first principles of the natural and hence human world. The image of emerging coral returns the reader to the genesis of the island at the beginning of Mother Poem (“Rock Seed”), completing the cycle of the poems with the “coming up coming up coming up” of his “thrilldren” to people a world renewed.
Middle Passages Type of work: Poetry First published: 1992 A collection of fourteen poems, Middle Passages has a running theme regarding the effects of slavery on Caribbean culture and on the world. The title also seems to evoke the grief caused by his wife’s death in 1986, an event he personally referred to as “middle passages” in his book with excerpts from his personal diary, The Zea Mexican Diary. Thus the title also suggests a spiritual passage that death entails for both the dead and the living. Journeys, especially those to African roots, is a recurring theme in this volume.
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“Columbe” suggests the beauty that Christopher Columbus and his entourage must have discovered upon their arrival in the Caribbean: “Yello pouis/ blazed like pollen and thin waterfalls suspended in the green.” Told from the perspective of an island inhabitant watching the arrival, it also asks whether Columbus understood the violence to which his discovery would lead: “But did his vision/ fashion as he watched the shore/ the slaughter that his soldiers/ furthered here?” Music and musicians are a strong presence in the collection as well. “Duke Playing the Piano at 70” pictures Duke Ellington’s wrinkled hands as alligator skins gliding along a keyboard. Brathwaite uses a number of devices to evoke a sense of music to the printed page. Several poems call on the rhythm and cadence of different instruments to heighten the theme at hand: “Flutes” lyrically describes the sounds of bamboo flutes, while “Soweto,” written about the Soweto massacre, draws on the rhythm of drums. The history of violence against Africa plays a dominant role here, as it does in so many of Brathwaite’s literary works. “The Visibility Trigger” surveys European history of using guns to kill and subdue Third World peoples. Another, “Stone,” is dedicated to Mickey Smith, a poet and political activist who was “stoned to death on Stony Hill, Kingston” in 1983.
Suggested Readings Brown, Stuart. The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren, 1995. Gowda, H. H. Anniah. “Creation in the Poetic Development of Kamau Brathwaite.” World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (Autumn, 1994): 691. McWatt, Mark A. “Edward Kamau Brathwaite.” In Fifty Caribbean Writers, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Povey, John. “The Search for Identity in Edward Brathwaite’s The Arrivants.” World Literature Written in English 27 (1987): 275-289. Rohlehr, Gordon. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981. Ten Kortenaar, Neil. “Where the Atlantic Meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (Winter, 1996): 15-27. Thomas, Sue. “Sexual Politics in Edward Brathwaite’s Mother Poem and Sun Poem.” Kunapipi 9 (1987): 33-43. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetic: Towards an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Williams, Emily Allen. “Whose Words Are These? Lost Heritage and Search for Self in Edward Brathwaite’s Poetry.” CLA Journal 40 (September, 1996): 104-108. World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (Autumn, 1994). Contributor: Robert Bensen
Aristeo Brito Born: Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico; October 20, 1942 Mexican American
Brito writes about the history of his Chicano community and the relationship between the ruling class and its subordinates. Principal works long fiction: El diablo en Texas: Literatura chicana, 1976 (The Devil in Texas, 1990) miscellaneous: Cuentas y poemas de Aristeo Brito, 1974 (stories and poems) The Chicano writer, poet, and educator Aristeo Brito (ah-rihs-TAY-oh BREE-toh) grew up in Presidio, Texas, which is located across the Rio Grande from Ojinaga. The river, extending approximately two thousand miles from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast, forms a divisional line separating the United States from Mexico. More than just a border, the river is also an imaginary barrier between the ideas, hopes, and aspirations of the two cultures. In the introduction to Brito’s poignant novel The Devil in Texas, Charles Tatum discusses Brito’s life and the conditions in Ojinaga-Presidio during his youth, which spurred the writing of the novel. Brito was emotionally impacted by the plight of the Mexicans and Chicanos in Ojinaga-Presidio. These were poor people whose lack of education, lack of exposure outside their community, and domination by the white populace made only menial, low-paying, and backbreaking employment available to them: They worked in the irrigated fields that produced fruits, vegetables, and cotton. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848—the treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic—the Anglo population appropriated much of Texas from the Mexicans. The enforcers of the class system separating the poor Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the Anglos were the Texas Rangers. The Rangers were organized to restrict undocumented Mexican workers from crossing the border and to monitor the behavior of the Mexican and Mexican American population. Ongoing hostility existed between the Rangers and the Chicanos. The Rangers were regarded as protectors of Anglo interests, and they were terrorists against Mexicans and Mexican Americans. As described in The Devil in Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol was considered a counterpart to the Rangers and was equally repressive. When a bridge was built over the Rio Grande between Ojinaga and Presidio, it was the Border Patrol that prevented “illegal” crossings. This bridge, and the continual surveillance over it, 123
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restricted passage between Mexico and Texas. In the book, it represents an impediment to the Spanish-speaking people. His early experiences in Ojinaga-Presidio had a profound effect on Brito, which would haunt him throughout his adulthood. In 1961 he graduated from Presidio High School as class valedictorian. Despite his academic accomplishments, Brito was unable to qualify for induction into the U.S. military because of low intelligence aptitude test scores. Like many local Mexican American youth, his comprehension of English was low. He vowed to become literate in both English and Spanish. In 1965 he graduated with distinction from Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, with a major in English. He subsequently received a master’s degree in Spanish from the University of Arizona in Tucson. A turning point in Brito’s life occurred with his indoctrination into the Chicano movement. Nationwide, the Chicano movement had awakened cultural pride among Mexican American youth, and the movement was influential in assimilating these youth into American culture and waging war against social ills. Embittered by his experiences in Ojinaga-Presidio, Brito did not intend to return home. He felt compelled to go there, however, so that he could witness the changes he supposed had occurred in his absence. He took a leave from the completion of his doctoral studies in order to return home. Upon his arrival, he found that little had changed. People were still apathetic. Brito’s response was to write about the history of his community and the relationship between the ruling class and its subordinates. The result of his research and lifelong experiences was The Devil in Texas, a fictionalized version of his community’s history. The novel is divided into three sections that represent Presidio’s history in the years 1883, 1942, and 1970. The Devil in Texas was originally selfpublished in 1976. The book was translated into English in 1990. Aristeo Brito received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1978 and has taught at the University of Arizona, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Pima Community College in Tucson. He has been editor of the latter’s bilingual literary magazine, Llueve Tlaloc, and has taught creative writing.
The Devil in Texas Type of work: Novel First published: El diablo en Texas: Literatura chicana, 1976 (English translation, 1990) The Devil in Texas takes place in the town of Presidio, which means prison in Spanish. For the Mexicans who lived there when the town became part of Texas and for subsequent generations of Mexican Americans and Mexicans on both sides of the Rio Grande border, Presidio lived up to its name. The dry and barren land combined with rivalries and prejudice to imprison the workers in poverty and hopelessness. Brito’s fragmented vignettes evoke the brutality of life in three periods of the area’s history: 1883, 1942, and 1970.
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The first section focuses on Ben Lynch, an Anglo landowner who makes his fortune from land stolen from Mexicans. He massacres twenty-six of his own workers and exploits the rest. Francisco Uranga starts a newspaper of protest against such injustices, but he is scorned as a troublemaker even by his own people. By 1942, the United States Border Patrol has replaced the Texas Rangers as enforcers of Anglo interests, and the Mexican American workers have been displaced by the even-more exploited illegal immigrants. Much of this section is narrated by the unborn son of Francisco Uranga, who speaks from his mother’s womb. He has been waiting more than a century to be born, to be the poet and chronicler who leads his people out of sorrow. In the short section set in 1970, the embryonic narrator of part 2 is now an adult and returns to Presidio for his father’s funeral, musing on his father’s stunted opportunities. He is surprised to see how many of his father’s friends are still living despite the hardships and discrimination they have faced. Their presence raises the hope that his people will unite in a new and victorious struggle.
Suggested Readings Martinez, Julio A., ed. and comp. Chicano Scholars and Writers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Martinez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomeli, eds. Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Tatum, Charles. Review of El diablo en Texas, by Aristeo Brito. World Literature Today 51, no. 4 (Autumn, 1977). Contributors: Vivian R. Alexander and Lois A. Marchino
Gwendolyn Brooks Born: Topeka, Kansas; June 7, 1917 Died: Chicago, Illinois; December 3, 2000 African American
The first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Brooks affirms the power of ordinary people. Principal works children’s literature: Bronzeville Boys and Girls, 1956; The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, 1974; Very Young Poets, 1983 long fiction: Maud Martha, 1953 poetry: A Street in Bronzeville, 1945; Annie Allen, 1949; The Bean Eaters, 1960; Selected Poems, 1963; We Real Cool, 1966; The Wall, 1967; In the Mecca, 1968; Riot, 1969; Family Pictures, 1970; Aloneness, 1971; Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, 1971; Aurora, 1972; Beckonings, 1975; Primer for Blacks, 1980; To Disembark, 1981; Black Love, 1982; The Near-Johannesburg Boy, 1986; Blacks, 1987; Gottschalk and the Grand Tarantelle, 1988; Winnie, 1988; Children Coming Home, 1991; In Montgomery, 2003 nonfiction: The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1971; Report from Part One, 1972; Young Poet’s Primer, 1980 edited text: Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology, 1971 Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry bears the strong impress of Chicago, particularly of the predominantly black South Side where she lived most of her life. Although she was born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks was taken to Chicago before she was a year old. In many ways she devoted her career to the physical, spiritual, and political exploration of her native city. Brooks’s life and writings are frequently separated into two phases, with her experience at the 1967 Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in Nashville serving as a symbolic transition. Prior to the conference, Brooks was known primarily as the first black Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. Although not politically unaware, she held to a somewhat cautious attitude. The vitality she encountered at the conference crystallized her sense of the insufficiency of universalist attitudes and generated close personal and artistic friendships with younger black poets such as Madhubuti, Walter Bradford, and Knight. Severing her ties with the mainstream publishing firm Harper and Row, which had published her first five books, Brooks transferred her work and prestige to the black-owned and operated Broadside Press of Detroit, Third World Press of Chicago, and Black Position Press, also of 126
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Chicago. Her commitment to black publishing houses remained unwavering despite distribution problems that rendered her later work largely invisible to the American reading public. Educated in the Chicago school system and at Wilson Junior College, Brooks learned her craft under Inez Cunningham Stark (Boulton), a white woman who taught poetry at the South Side Community Art Center in the late 1930’s and 1940’s. Brooks’s mother, who had been a teacher in Topeka, had encouraged her literary interests from an early age. Her father, a janitor, provided her with ineffaceable images of the spiritual strength and dignity of “common” people. Brooks married Henry Blakely in 1939, and her family concerns continued to play a central role in shaping her career. Gwendolyn Brooks (© Jill Krementz) The eleven-year hiatus between the publication of Annie Allen and The Bean Eaters resulted at least in part from her concentration on rearing her two children, born in 1940 and 1951. Her numerous poems on family relationships reflect both the rewards and the tensions of her own experiences. Her children grown, Brooks concentrated on teaching, supervising poetry workshops, and speaking publicly. These activities brought her into contact with a wide range of younger black poets, preparing her for her experience at Fisk. As poet laureate of Illinois, she encouraged the development of younger poets through personal contact and formal competitions. The division between the two phases of Brooks’s life should not be overstated. She evinced a strong interest in the Civil Rights movement during the 1950’s and early 1960’s; her concern with family continued in the 1980’s. Above all, Brooks lived with and wrote of and for the Chicagoans whose failures and triumphs she saw as deeply personal, universally resonant, and specifically black. She died in Chicago on December 3, 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
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A Street in Bronzeville Type of work: Poetry First published: 1945 A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks’s first poetry collection, poignantly reflects the reality of oppression in the lives of urban blacks. The poems portraying ordinary yet unforgettable individuals—from the flamboyant Satin Legs Smith to the sad hunchback girl who yearns for a pain-free life—launched Brooks’s successful career. The poetic walk through Bronzeville begins with “the old-marrieds,” whose longtime exposure to crowded conditions has eliminated loving communication from their lives. The long-married couple is followed closely by poems exploring how life in a “kitchenette building” thwarts aspirations. Brooks wonders how dreams can endure in a fight with fried potatoes and garbage ripening in the hall. With honesty and love she portrays resilient characters: Pearl May Lee, whose man has been falsely accused of raping a white woman; Mame, the queen of the blues, who has no family and endures the slaps and pinches of rude men in the club where she sings; Moe Belle Jackson, whose husband “whipped her good last night”; and poor baby Percy, who was burned to death by his brother Brucie. Alongside this unblinking look at life’s pain, Brooks now and then gently conveys humorous moments, such as the woman at the hairdresser who wants an upsweep to “show them girls” and the domestic worker who thinks her employer is a fool. Alienation in city life is a theme Brooks explores unflinchingly. Matthew Cole seems to be a pleasant man, but in the dirtiness of his room, with fat roaches strolling up the wall, he never smiles. Maud, in the poem “Sadie and Maud,” tries to escape Bronzeville by going to college but finds herself living alone, a thin brown mouse in an old house. Composed of twelve poems, the last section of the book, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” is dedicated to Brooks’s brother, Staff Sergeant Raymond Brooks, and other soldiers who returned from the war trembling and crying. The second poem, “still do I keep my look, my identity,” affirms a soldier’s individuality even as he dons a government-issue uniform and goes off to meet death on some distant hill. Each body has its pose, “the old personal art, the look.” Ultimately, the critique of America plays itself out in a critique of traditional literary form. Brooks parodies the sonnet in content and form. She uses slant rhyme for the entire collection because she thinks life in Bronzeville is “an off-rhyme situation.”
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“The Mother” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1945, in A Street in Bronzeville One of the most powerful poems from A Street in Bronzeville is “The Mother,” an exploration of the impact of an abortion on the woman who has chosen to have it. Brooks states that the mother “decides that she, rather than her world, will kill her children.” Within the poem itself, however, the motivations remain unclear. Although the poem’s position in the collection suggests that the persona is black, the poem neither supports nor denies a racial identification. Along with the standard English syntax and diction, this suggests that “The Mother,” like poems such as “The Egg Boiler,” “Callie Ford,” and “A Light and Diplomatic Bird,” was designed to speak directly of an emotional, rather than a social, experience, and to be as accessible to whites as to blacks. Re-creating the anguished perspective of a persona unsure whether she is victim or victimizer, Brooks directs her readers’ attention to the complex emotions of her potential Everywoman. “The Mother” centers on the persona’s alternating desire to take and to evade responsibility for the abortion. Resorting to ambiguous grammatical structures, the persona repeatedly qualifies her acceptance with “if” clauses (“If I sinned,” “If I stole your births”). She refers to the lives of the children as matters of fate (“Your luck”) and backs away from admitting that a death has taken place by claiming that the children “were never made.” Her use of the second-person pronoun to refer to herself in the first stanza reveals her desire to distance herself from her present pain. This attempt, however, fails. The opening line undercuts the evasion with the reality of memory: “Abortions will not let you forget.” At the start of the second stanza, the pressure of memory forces the persona to shift to the more honest first-person pronoun. A sequence of spondees referring to the children (“damp small pulps,” “dim killed children,” “dim dears”) interrupts the lightly stressed anapestic-iambic meter that dominates the first stanza. The concrete images of “scurrying off ghosts” and “devouring” children with loving gazes gain power when contrasted with the dimness of the mother’s life and perceptions. Similarly, the first stanza’s endstopped couplets, reflecting the persona’s simplistic attempt to recapture an irrevocably lost mother-child relationship through an act of imagination, give way to the intricate enjambment and complex rhyme scheme of the second stanza, which highlight the mother’s inability to find rest. The rhyme scheme—and Brooks can rival both Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats in her ability to employ various types of rhyme for thematic impact—underscores her struggle to come to terms with her action. The rhymes in the first stanza insist on her self-doubt, contrasting images of tenderness and physical substance with those of brutality and insubstantiality (forget/get, hair/air, beat/sweet). The internal rhyme of “never,” repeated four times, and “remember,” “workers,” and “singers,” further stresses the element of loss. In the second stanza, Brooks provides no rhymes for the end words “children” in line 11 and “deliberate” in line 21. This device draws attention to the persona’s failure to answer the crucial questions of whether her chil-
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dren did in fact exist and of whether her own actions were in fact deliberate (and perhaps criminal). The last seven lines of the stanza end with hard “d” sounds as the persona struggles to forge her conflicting thoughts into a unified perspective. If Brooks offers coherence, though, it is emotional rather than intellectual. Fittingly, the “d” rhymes and off-rhymes focus on physical and emotional pain (dead/instead/made/ afraid/said/died/cried). Brooks provides no easy answer to the anguished question: “How is the truth to be told?” The persona’s concluding cry of “I loved you/ All” rings with desperation. It is futile but it is not a lie. To call “The Mother” an antiabortion poem distorts its impact. Clearly portraying the devastating effects of the persona’s action, it by no means condemns her or lacks sympathy. Like many of Brooks’s characters, the mother is a person whose desire to love far outstrips her ability to cope with her circumstances and serves primarily to heighten her sensitivity to pain. Perhaps the most significant change in Brooks’s poetry involves her analysis of the origins of this pervasive pain. Rather than attributing the suffering to some unavoidable psychological condition, Brooks’s later poetry indicts social institutions for their role in its perpetuation. The poems in her first two volumes frequently portray characters incapable of articulating the origins of their pain. Although the absence of any father in “The Mother” suggests sociological forces leading to the abortion, such analysis amounts to little more than speculation. The only certainty is that the mother, the persona of the sonnet sequence “The Children of the Poor,” and the speaker in the brilliant sonnet “My Dreams, My Works Must Wait Till After Hell” share the fear that their pain will render them insensitive to love. The final poem of Annie Allen, “Men of Careful Turns,” intimates that the defenders of a society that refuses to admit its full humanity bear responsibility for reducing the powerless to “grotesque toys.” Despite this implicit accusation, however, Brooks perceives no “magic” capable of remedying the situation. She concludes the volume on a note of irresolution typical of her early period: “We are lost, must/ Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.” The track, at this stage, remains spiritual rather than political.
“We Real Cool” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1966, in We Real Cool Perhaps Brooks’s single best-known poem is the title poem from the collection of the same name. In this poem, Brooks subjects a representative experience to intricate technical and thematic scrutiny, at once loving and critical. The poem is only twenty-four words long, including eight repetitions of the word “we.” It is suggestive that the subtitle of “We Real Cool” specifies the presence of only seven pool players at the “Golden Shovel.” The eighth “we” suggests that poet and reader share, on some level, the desperation of the group-voice that Brooks transmits. The final sentence, “We/ die soon,” restates the carpe diem motif in the vernacular of Chicago’s South Side.
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On one level, “We Real Cool” appears simply to catalog the experiences of a group of dropouts content to “sing sin” in all available forms. A surprising ambiguity enters into the poem, however, revolving around the question of how to accent the word “we” that ends every line except the last one, providing the beat for the poem’s jazz rhythm. Brooks said that she intended that the “we” not be accented. Read in this way, the poem takes on a slightly distant and ironic tone, emphasizing the artificiality of the group identity that involves the characters in activities offering early death as the only release from pain. Conversely, the poem can be read with a strong accent on each “we,” affirming the group identity. Although the experience still ends with early death, the pool players metamorphose into defiant heroes determined to resist the alienating environment. Their confrontation with experience is felt, if not articulated, as existentially pure. Pool players, poet, and reader cannot be sure which stress is valid. Brooks crafts the poem, however, to hint at an underlying coherence in the defiance. The intricate internal rhyme scheme echoes the sound of nearly every word. Not only do the first seven lines end with “we,” but the penultimate words of each line in each stanza also rhyme (cool/school, late/straight, sin/gin, June/soon). In addition, the alliterated consonant of the last line of each stanza is repeated in the first line of the next stanza (Left/lurk, Strike/sin, gin/June), and the first words of each line in the middle two stanzas are connected through consonance (Lurk/strike, Sing/thin). The one exception to this suggestive texture of sound is the word “Die” that introduces both a new vowel and a new consonant into the final line, breaking the rhythm and subjecting the performance to ironic revaluation. Ultimately, the power of the poem derives from the tension between the celebratory and the ironic perspectives on the lives of the plain black boys struggling for a sense of connection.
The Warpland Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968-1969 The Warpland poems—“The Sermon on the Warpland,” “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” and “The Third Sermon on the Warpland”—mark Brooks’s departure from the traditions of Euro-American poetry and thought represented by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). The first two appeared in In the Mecca, and the last appeared in Riot. The sequence typifies Brooks’s post-1967 poetry, in which she abandons traditional stanzaic forms, applying her technical expertise to a relatively colloquial free verse. This technical shift parallels her rejection of the philosophical premises of Euro-American culture. Brooks refuses to accept the inevitability of cultural decay, arguing that the “waste” of Eliot’s vision exists primarily because of our “warped” perceptions. Seeing white society as the embodiment of these distortions, Brooks embraces her blackness as a potential counterbalancing force. The first “Sermon on the Warpland” opens with Ron Karenga’s black nation-
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alist credo: “The fact that we are black is our ultimate reality.” Clearly, in Brooks’s view, blackness is not simply a physical fact; it is primarily a metaphor for the possibility of love. As her poem “Two Dedications” indicates, Brooks sees the EuroAmerican tradition represented by the Chicago Picasso as inhumanly cold, mingling guilt and innocence, meaningfulness and meaninglessness, almost randomly. This contrasts sharply with her inspirational image of the Wall of Heroes on the South Side. To Brooks, true art assumes meaning from the people who interact with it. The wall helps to redefine black reality, rendering the “dispossessions beakless.” Rather than contemplating the site of destruction, the politically aware black art that Brooks embraces should inspire the black community to face its pain with renewed determination to remove its sources. The final “Sermon on the Warpland” concludes with the image of a black phoenix rising from the ashes of the Chicago riot. No longer content to accept the unresolved suffering of “The Mother,” Brooks forges a black nationalist politics and poetics of love.
“The Blackstone Rangers” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1987, in Blacks Although her political vision influences every aspect of her work, Brooks maintains a strong sense of enduring individual pain and is aware that nationalism offers no simple panacea. “The Blackstone Rangers,” about one of the most powerful Chicago street gangs, rejects as simplistic the argument—occasionally advanced by writers associated with the Black Arts movement—that no important distinction exists between the personal and the political experience. Specifically, Brooks doubts the corollary that politically desirable activity will inevitably increase the person’s ability to love. Dividing “The Blackstone Rangers” into three segments— “As Seen by Disciplines,” “The Leaders,” and “Gang Girls: A Rangerette”— Brooks stresses the tension between perspectives. After rejecting the sociologicalpenal perspective of part 1, she remains suspended between the uncomprehending affirmation of the Rangers as a kind of government-in-exile in part 2, and the recognition of the individual person’s continuing pain in part 3. Brooks undercuts the description of the Rangers as “sores in the city/ that do not want to heal” (“As Seen by Disciplines”) through the use of off-rhyme and a jazz rhythm reminiscent of “We Real Cool.” The disciplines, both academic and corrective, fail to perceive any coherence in the Rangers’ experience. Correct in their assumption that the Rangers do not want to “heal” themselves, the disciplines fail to perceive the gang’s strong desire to “heal” the sick society. Brooks suggests an essential coherence in the Rangers’ experience through the sound texture of part 1. Several of the sound patterns echoing through the brief stanza point to a shared response to pain (there/thirty/ready, raw/sore/corner). Similarly, the accent cluster on “Black, raw, ready” draws attention to the pain and potential power of the Rangers. The descriptive voice of the disciplines, however, provides
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only relatively weak end-rhymes (are/corner, ready/city), testifying to the inability of the distanced, presumably white, observers to comprehend the experiences they describe. The shifting, distinctively black, jazz rhythm further emphasizes the distance between the voices of observers and participants. Significantly, the voice of the disciplines finds no rhyme at all for its denial of the Rangers’ desire to “heal.” This denial contrasts sharply with the tempered affirmation of the voice in part 2 that emphasizes the leaders’ desire to “cancel, cure and curry.” Again, internal rhymes and sound echoes suffuse the section. In the first stanza, the voice generates thematically significant rhymes, connecting Ranger leader “Bop” (whose name draws attention to the jazz rhythm that is even more intricate, though less obvious, in this section than in part 1) and the militant black leader “Rap” Brown, both nationalists whose “country is a Nation on no map.” “Bop” and “Rap,” of course, do not rhyme perfectly, attesting to Brooks’s awareness of the gang leader’s limitations. Her image of the leaders as “Bungled trophies” further reinforces her ambivalence. The only full rhyme in the final two stanzas of the section is the repeated “night.” The leaders, canceling the racist association of darkness with evil, “translate” the image of blackness into a “monstrous pearl or grace.” The section affirms the Blackstone Rangers’ struggle; it does not pretend to comprehend fully the emotional texture of their lives. Certain that the leaders possess the power to cancel the disfiguring images of the disciplines, Brooks remains unsure of their ability to create an alternate environment where love can blossom. Mary Ann, the “Gang Girl” of part 3, shares much of the individual pain of the characters in Brooks’s early poetry, despite her involvement with the Rangers. “A rose in a whiskey glass,” she continues to live with the knowledge that her “laboring lover” risks the same sudden death as the pool players of “We Real Cool.” Forced to suppress a part of her awareness—she knows not to ask where her lover got the diamond he gives her—she remains emotionally removed even while making love. In place of a fully realized love, she accepts “the props and niceties of non-loneliness.” The final line of the poem emphasizes the ambiguity of both Mary Ann’s situation and Brooks’s perspective. Recommending acceptance of “the rhymes of Leaning,” the line responds to the previous stanza’s question concerning whether love will have a “gleaning.” The full rhyme paradoxically suggests acceptance of off-rhyme, of love consummated leaning against an alley wall, without expectation of safety or resolution. Given the political tension created by the juxtaposition of the disciplines and the leaders, the “Gang Girl” can hope to find no sanctuary beyond the reach of the whirlwind. Her desperate love, the more moving for its precariousness, provides the only near-adequate response to the pain that Brooks saw as the primary fact of life.
Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945-1960. Chicago: Third World Press, 1999.
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Brooks, Gwendolyn. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Edited by Gloria Wade Gayles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Bryant, Jacqueline Imani, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks and Working Writers. Chicago: Third World Press, 2007. “Gwendolyn’s Words: A Gift to Us.” Essence 31, no. 11 (March, 2001): A18. Hill, Christine M. Gwendolyn Brooks: “Poetry Is Life Distilled.” Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2005. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Melhem, D. L. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Rhynes, Martha E. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet from Chicago. Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds, 2003. Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Contributors: Carol F. Bender and Craig Werner
Claude Brown Born: New York, New York; February 23, 1937 Died: New York, New York; February 2, 2002 African American
Brown’s autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land, is considered one of the best and most realistic descriptions of coming-of-age in a black urban ghetto. Principal works long fiction: The Children of Ham, 1976 nonfiction: Manchild in the Promised Land, 1965 By the time he was thirteen years old, Claude Brown had been hit by a bus, whipped with chains, thrown into a river, and shot in the stomach. Spending more time on the streets of Harlem than in school, Brown was an accomplished thief by the age of ten, when he became a member of the Forty Thieves, a branch of the infamous Buccaneers gang. In a desperate attempt to save their son from his early downward spiral into the penal system, the Browns sent Claude to live with his grandparents for a year. The sojourn seemed to have had little effect on him, because soon after his return to Harlem he was sent to the Wiltwyck School for emotionally disturbed boys. Brown’s early life was a seemingly endless series of events leading to one form or another of incarceration. All told, Brown was sent to reform school three times, and in between those times he ran con games and sold hard drugs. He avoided heroin addiction only because the one time he tried the drug he nearly died. Avoiding drug dependency may have been the key factor in his ability to escape the fate of early death or lengthy incarceration that met so many of his peers. Sensing that he would perish if he remained in Harlem, Brown moved to Greenwich Village at seventeen and began to attend night school. As he began to understand that living in the ghetto did not mean a certain destiny of crime, misery, and poverty, he no longer believed that living in Harlem would inevitably ruin his life. While selling cosmetics he devoted many hours daily to playing the piano and eventually enrolled in and graduated from Howard University. During Brown’s first year at Howard, he was urged to write about Harlem for a magazine by Ernest Papanek, who had been the school psychologist at Wiltwyck School. As Brown reflected on his life he began to understand what a difficult feat it is to survive the ghetto, and his writing describes the reasons for the general despair found there. The magazine article led to an offer from a publisher for Brown to write what eventually became Manchild in the Promised Land. 135
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Brown earned a law degree and spent his life working on behalf of rehabilitating African American youth caught in the criminal justice system. He died in 2002 of respiratory failure.
Manchild in the Promised Land Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1965 Brown’s classic autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land is a quintessentially American story of hardship and disadvantage overcome through determination and hard work, but with a critical difference. It became a best seller when it was published in 1965 because of its startlingly realistic portrayal of growing up in Harlem. Without sermonizing or sentimentalizing, Brown manages to evoke a vivid sense of the day-to-day experience of the ghetto, which startled many readers and became required reading, along with The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), for many civil rights activists. Manchild in the Promised Land describes Brown’s resistance to a life path that seemed predetermined by the color of his skin and the place he was born. In the tradition of the slave narrative of the nineteenth century, Brown sets about to establish his personhood to a wide audience, many of whom would write him off as a hopeless case. The book opens with the scene of Brown being shot in the stomach at the age of thirteen after he and his gang are caught stealing bedsheets off a laundry line. What follows is the story line most would expect of a ghetto child—low achievement in school, little parental supervision, and a sense of hopelessness about the future. There are crime, violence, and drugs lurking in every corner of Harlem, and young Sonny (Claude) falls prey to many temptations. In spite of spending most of his early years committing various petty crimes, playing hooky from school, living in reform schools, and being the victim of assorted beatings and shootings, Brown manages to elude the destiny of so many of his boyhood friends—early death or successively longer incarcerations. Sensing that he would perish, literally or figuratively, if he remained on the path that seemed destined for him, he leaves Harlem for a few years and begins to chart a different outcome for his life, which includes night school, playing the piano, graduating from Howard University, and beginning law school. Although Brown offers no formula for escaping the devastation that so often plagues ghetto life, he shows by example that it is possible to succeed in constructing, even in the ghetto, a positive identity.
Suggested Readings Baker, Houston A., Jr. “The Environment as Enemy in a Black Autobiography: Manchild in the Promised Land.” Phylon 32, no. 1 (Spring, 1971). Davis, Charles T. Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Liter-
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ature and Culture, 1942-1981. Edited by Henry L. Gates, Jr. New York: Garland, 1982. Fremont-Smith, Eliot. “Coming of Age in Harlem: A Report from Hell.” The New York Times, August 14, 1965, p. 21. Goldman, Robert M., and William D. Crane. “Black Boy and Manchild in the Promised Land.” Journal of Black Studies 7, no. 2 (December, 1976). Petesch, Donald A. A Spy in the Enemy’s Country. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Rampersad, Arnold. Review of The Children of Ham, by Claude Brown. The New Republic 174, no. 19 (May 8, 1976): 25-26. Contributor: Christy Rishoi
Rosellen Brown Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; May 12, 1939 Jewish
Brown is noted for her perceptive treatment of alienation, displacement, exile, and disaster in seemingly ordinary American families. Principal works long fiction: The Autobiography of My Mother, 1976; Tender Mercies, 1978; Civil Wars: A Novel, 1984; Before and After, 1992; Half a Heart, 2000 poetry: Some Deaths in the Delta, and Other Poems, 1970; Cora Fry, 1977; Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, 1994 short fiction: Street Games, 1974 edited text: The Whole Word Catalogue, 1972 (with Marvin Hoffman, Martin Kushner, Philip Lopate, and Sheila Murphy) miscellaneous: A Rosellen Brown Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1992 Born in Philadelphia to Jewish parents, who moved frequently and much of the time lived in non-Jewish neighborhoods, Rosellen Brown came to feel that she had no roots. She found, however, that she could escape her loneliness by writing, and by the time she was nine she had decided to become a writer. After earning a B.A. from Barnard College in 1960 and an M.A. from Brandeis University in 1962, Brown began working at her craft. In 1963, she married Marvin Hoffman, an English teacher, and in 1965 the couple went to Mississippi to teach at Tougaloo College and to participate with their black students in the Civil Rights movement. After the birth of her first child, Adina, Brown wrote most of the poems in her first published volume, Some Deaths in the Delta, and Other Poems, which were inspired by her often frightening experiences in Mississippi. After three years at Tougaloo, Brown and her husband moved to Brooklyn, New York, where their daughter Elena was born. In 1972, she collaborated on a lucrative nonfiction volume entitled The Whole Word Catalogue. Her real interest, however, was short fiction, and her stories were appearing in magazines and in anthologies, including in the annual publication O. Henry Prize Stories, 1972, 1973, and 1976. In 1974, her collection Street Games appeared, which contains stories drawn from her multiethnic Brooklyn neighborhood. Most of the stories involve problems with relationships, often within the family. Grants and honors signaled Brown’s increasing status as a writer. In 1973-1974, Brown won a National Endowment for the Humanities creative writing grant. From 138
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1973 to 1975, she was a Radcliffe Institute fellow. During the summer of 1974, she served as a member of the fiction staff at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. By that time, the family had moved to New Hampshire, where they lived for more than eleven years and where they continued to spend their summers, even after moving to Houston. One day, while weaving, Brown had the experience of seeming to hear a woman’s voice that she later identified as resembling that of a Jewish refugee she had met in Mississippi. The experience inspired Brown to write her novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Brown’s husband had been supportive of her writing from the start, but it was not until the children were in school that she began to have extended periods of time at her disposal. Even before then, she had been gaining insights and developing the themes that later dominated her novels. By having children, she said, she came to learn a great deal, not only about family ties but also about the precariousness of life. She first develops this theme fully in The Autobiography of My Mother. Haunted by a real-life story about a child who had fallen off a precipice when someone let go of its hand, Brown based her plot on that tragedy. Later works, too, reflect her belief that catastrophe is never far away. In Tender Mercies, a husband’s momentary foolishness results in his wife’s becoming a quadriplegic; in Civil Wars, the parents of two children die in an automobile accident, leaving the children to live with relatives they do not know; and in Before and After, whose plot was suggested by a murder trial in Houston, the teenage son of a respectable family commits a murder. In her essay “Displaced Persons,” Brown describes her fascination with the two most traditional regions of the United States, the South and New England. She was delighted with the southern atmosphere of Houston after moving there in the 1980’s. Like her early poems, the novel Civil Wars is set in Mississippi. The collections Cora Fry and Cora Fry’s Pillow Book describe the life of a New England woman, and both Tender Mercies and Before and After use similar small-town settings. In fact, in the latter novel the fictional family lives in Brown’s own house in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Half a Heart, a complex novel dealing with race, mothers and daughters, and the lack of social commitment in the late 1990’s, is set in the South. In 1982, Brown began teaching in the University of Houston’s creative writing program. She continued to win honors for her achievements, including being named “Woman of the Year” by Ms. magazine in 1984 and winning the Janet Kafka Award for best novel by an American woman for Civil Wars. With Before and After, she also attained popular success. Even before publication, the novel was scheduled for production as a motion picture, and soon after it appeared Brown’s earlier novels were reissued as paperbacks. In 2000, she became writer-in-residence at Northwestern University. Although Brown has published poetry and short fiction and even experimented with drama, it is her novels for which she is best known. Many consider her to be one of the most compelling contemporary writers.
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Before and After Type of work: Novel First published: 1992
Until Jacob Reiser admits to his parents that he killed his girlfriend, readers of Before and After are not sure that he committed the crime. The novel opens in a hospital emergency room as Carolyn Reiser, Jacob’s mother, administers to the girl. She soon finds out that her son is accused of bludgeoning her to death. None of the family members can believe that Jacob is guilty. His failure to appear at home casts suspicion on him, but Carolyn, his father Ben, and his sister Judith try to protect Jacob’s innocence, both in their own minds and in material ways. Ben goes the furthest in this. When he finds a bloody jack handle in his son’s car trunk, he removes that evidence before police can search the car. The police eventually capture Jacob. He refuses at first to speak to his parents; it is only after they hire a lawyer and get him released on bail that he confesses to them. The family then splits over the issue of whether Jacob should tell the truth to his lawyer or let the lawyer represent him without knowing the complete story. Chapters tell the story from three different characters’ points of view. Carolyn and Judith’s chapters are in the third person, but Ben relates events in the first person. This makes his emotions and his vehement defense of his son even more engaging. The conflict between Carolyn, a logical pediatrician, and Ben, a somewhat flighty artist, over how their son’s defense should be conducted forms one strand of the story. Judith’s chapters reveal Jacob’s character and destroy the innocent image of him created by his parents’ recollections, making plausible the idea that he could have killed his girlfriend. Jacob’s story comes only through the experiences of others.
Suggested Readings Craig, Patricia. “Cripples.” New Statesman 98 (July 13, 1979): 62-63. D’Erasmo, Stacey. “Home Fires.” The Nation, September 28, 1992. Epstein, Joseph. “Is Fiction Necessary?” The Hudson Review 29 (1976-1977): 593-594. Hulbert, Ann. “In Struggle.” The New Republic 190 (May 7, 1984): 37-40. Mehren, Elizabeth. “Making Mayhem in Ordinary Lives.” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1992. Rosenbert, Judith. “Rosellen Brown.” Publishers Weekly 239 (August 31, 1992): 54-55. Thurman, Judith. “Rosellen Brown.” Ms. 13 (January, 1985): 82.
Contributor: Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman
Sterling A. Brown Born: Washington, D.C.; May 1, 1901 Died: Takoma Park, Maryland; January 13, 1989 African American
Brown is considered an important transitional figure between the Harlem Renaissance era and the period immediately following the Depression. Principal works poetry: Southern Road, 1932; The Last Ride of Wild Bill, and Eleven Narrative Poems, 1975; The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, 1980 nonfiction: Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes, 1931; The Negro in American Fiction, 1937; Negro Poetry and Drama, 1937; The Negro Caravan, 1941 (Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, editors); A Son’s Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, 1996 (Mark A. Sanders, editor) Born into an educated, middle-class African American family, Sterling Allen Brown was the last of six children and the only son of Adelaide Allen Brown and the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown. His father had taught in the School of Religion at Howard University since 1892, and the year Brown was born, his father also became the pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church. The person who encouraged Brown’s literary career and admiration for the cultural heritage of African Americans, however, was his mother, who had been born and reared in Tennessee and graduated from Fisk University. Brown also grew up listening to tales of his father’s childhood in Tennessee, as well as to accounts of his father’s friendships with noted leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Blanche K. Bruce, and Booker T. Washington. Brown attended public schools in Washington, D.C., and graduated from the well-known Dunbar High School, noted for its distinguished teachers and alumni; among the latter were many of the nation’s outstanding black professionals. Brown’s teachers at Dunbar included literary artists such as Angelina Weld Grimké and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Moreover, Brown grew up on the campus of Howard University, where there were many outstanding African American scholars, such as historian Kelly Miller and critic and philosopher Alain Locke. Brown received his A.B. in 1922 from Williams College (Phi Beta Kappa) and his M.A. in 1923 from Harvard University. Although he pursued further graduate study in English at Harvard, he never worked toward a doctorate degree; however, Howard University, the University of Massachusetts, Northwestern University, 141
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Williams College, Boston University, Brown University, Lewis and Clark College, Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), and the University of Pennsylvania eventually granted him honorary doctorates. In September, 1927, he was married to Daisy Turnbull, who shared with him an enthusiasm for people, a sense of humor, and a rejection of pretentious behavior; she was also one of her husband’s sharpest critics. She inspired Brown’s poems “Long Track Blues” and “Against That Day.” Daisy Turnbull Brown died in 1979. The Browns had one adopted child, John L. Dennis. In 1927, “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home” won first prize in an Opportunity writing contest. From 1926 to 1929, several of the poems that Brown later published in Southern Road were printed in Crisis, Opportunity, Contempo, and Ebony and Topaz. His early work is often identified with the outpouring of black writers during the Harlem Renaissance, for he shared with those artists (Claude McKay, Countée Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes) a deep concern for a franker self-revelation and a respect for the folk traditions of his people; however, Brown’s writings did not reflect the alien-and-exile theme so popular with the writers of the Renaissance. Brown’s teaching career took him to Virginia Seminary and College, Lincoln University (Missouri), and Fisk University. He began teaching at Howard University in 1929 and remained there until his retirement in 1969. He was also a visiting professor at Atlanta University, New York University, Vassar College, the University of Minnesota, the New School, and the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle). Several years after coming to Howard University, Brown became an editor with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. Along with a small editorial staff, he coordinated the Federal Writers’ Project studies by and about blacks. Beginning in 1932, Brown supervised an extensive collection of narratives by former slaves and initiated special projects such as The Negro in Virginia (1940), which became the model for other studies. His most enduring contribution to the project was an essay, “The Negro in Washington,” which was published in the guidebook Washington: City and Capital (1937). Brown’s first fifteen years at Howard were most productive. During this period (1929-1945), he contributed poetry as well as reviews and essays on the American theater, folk expressions, oral history, social customs, music, and athletics to The New Republic, The Journal of Negro Education, Phylon, Crisis, Opportunity, and other journals. His most outstanding essay, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” which appeared in The Journal of Negro Education in 1933, brought attention to the widespread misrepresentation of black characters and life in American literature. Only after Brown’s retirement from Howard in 1969 did he begin reading his poems regularly there. This long neglect has been attributed to certain conservative faculty members’ reluctance to appreciate a fellow professor whose interests were in blues and jazz. Brown was widely known as a raconteur. Throughout his career as a writer, he challenged fellow African American writers to choose their subject matter without regard to external pressures and to avoid the error of “timidity.” He was a mentor who influenced the black poetry movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and poets such as Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks,
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Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps, along with critics such as Addison Gayle and Houston Baker, learned from him. In the five years before his retirement, Brown began to exhibit stress caused by what he perceived to be years of critical and professional neglect as well as unfulfilled goals. Inclined toward periods of deep depression, he was occasionally hospitalized in his later years. He died in Takoma Park, Maryland, on January 13, 1989.
Slim Greer Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1930-1933 The African American’s ability to survive in a hostile world by mustering humor, religious faith, and the expectation of a utopian afterlife is portrayed in poems depicting the comical adventures of Slim Greer. The Slim Greer poems—“Slim Greer,” “Slim Hears ‘the Call,’” “Slim in Atlanta,” “Slim in Hell,” and “Slim Lands a Job”—reveal Brown’s knowledge of the life of the ordinary black person and his ability to laugh at the weaknesses and foolishness of blacks and whites alike. With their rich exaggerations, these poems fall into the tall tale tradition of folk stories. They show Slim in Arkansas passing for white although he is quite dark, or Slim in Atlanta laughing in a “telefoam booth” because of a law that keeps blacks from laughing in the open. In “Slim Lands a Job,” the poet mocks the ridiculous demands that southern employers make on their black employees. Slim applies for a job in a restaurant. The owner is complaining about the laziness of his black employees when a black waiter enters the room carrying a tray on his head, trays in each hand, silver in his mouth, and soup plates in his vest, while simultaneously pulling a red wagon filled with other paraphernalia. When the owner points to this waiter as one who is lazy, Slim makes a quick exit. In “Slim in Hell,” Slim discovers that Hell and the South are very much alike; when he reports this discovery to Saint Peter, the saint reprimands him, asking where he thought Hell was if not the South.
Southern Road Type of work: Poetry First published: 1932 The poetry of Sterling Brown is imbued with the folk spirit of African American culture. For Brown there was no wide abyss between his poetry and the spirit inherent in slave poetry; indeed, his works evidence a continuity of racial spirit from the slave experience to the African American present and reflect his deep understanding of the multitudinous aspects of the African American personality and soul. The setting for Brown’s poetry is primarily the South, through which he traveled to listen to the folktales, songs, wisdom, sorrows, and frustrations of his people, and
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where the blues and ballads were nurtured. Brown respected traditional folk forms and employed them in the construction of his own poems; thus he may be called “the poet of the soul of his people.” Brown’s first published collection of poems, Southern Road, was critically acclaimed by his peers and colleagues James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke, because of its rendering of the living speech of the African American, its use of the raw material of folk poetry, and its poetic portrayal of African American folk life and thought. Later critics such as Arthur P. Davis, Jean Wagner, and Houston Baker have continued to praise his poetry for its creative and vital use of folk motifs. Some of the characters in Brown’s poetry, such as Ma Rainey, Big Boy Davis, and Mrs. Bibby, are based on real people. Other characters, such as Maumee Ruth, Sporting Beasley, and Sam Smiley seem real because of Brown’s dramatic and narrative talent. He is also highly skilled in the use of poetic techniques such as the refrain, alliteration, and onomatopoeia, and he employs several stanzaic forms with facility. Brown’s extraordinary gift for re-creating the nuances of folk speech and idiom adds vitality and authenticity to his verse. Brown is successful in drawing upon rich folk expressions to vitalize the speech of his characters through the cadences of southern speech. Though his poems cannot simply be called “dialect poetry,” Brown does imitate southern African American speech, using variant spellings and apostrophes to mark dropped consonants. He uses grunts and onomatopoeic sounds to give a natural rhythm to the speech of his characters. These techniques are readily seen in a poem that dramatizes the poignant story of a “po los boy” on a chain gang. This poem follows the traditional folk form of the work song to convey the convict’s personal tragedy. Brown’s work may be classed as protest poetry. Influenced by poets such as Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, he is able to draw upon the entire canon of English and American poetry as well as African American folk material. Thus he is fluent in the use of the sonnet form, stanzaic forms, free-verse forms, and ballad and blues forms. In Southern Road, several themes express the essence of the southern African American’s folk spirit and culture. Recurring themes and subjects in Brown’s poetry include endurance, tragedy, and survival. The theme of endurance is best illustrated in one of his most anthologized poems, “Strong Men,” which tells the story of the unjust treatment of black men and women from the slave ship, to the tenant farm, and finally to the black ghetto. The refrain of “Strong Men” uses rhythmic beats, relentlessly repeating an affirmation of the black people’s ability and determination to keep pressing onward, toward freedom and justice. The central image comes from a line of a Carl Sandburg poem: “The strong men keep comin on.” In “Strong Men,” Brown praises the indomitable spirit of African Americans in the face of racist exploitation. With its assertive tone, the rhythm of this poem suggests a martial song. Some of the endurance poems express a stoic, fatalistic acceptance of the tragic fate of the African American, as can be seen in “Old Man Buzzard,” “Memphis Blues,” and “Riverbank Blues.” Another important aspect of the endurance theme as portrayed by Brown is the poetic characters’ courage when they are confronted with tragedy and injustice. In the poem “Strange Legacies,” the speaker gives thanks to the legendary Jack Johnson and John Henry for their demonstration of courage.
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“The Last Ride of Wild Bill” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1975, in The Last Ride of Wild Bill Brown’s poems reflect his understanding of the often tragic destinies of African Americans in the United States. No poet before Brown had created such a comprehensive poetic dramatization of the lives of black men and women in America. Brown depicts black men and women as alone and powerless, struggling nevertheless to confront an environment that is hostile and unjust. In this tragic environment, African American struggles against the schemes of racist whites are seen in “The Last Ride of Wild Bill,” published in 1975 as the title poem of the collection of the same name. A black man falls victim to the hysteria of a lynch mob in “Frankie and Johnnie,” a poem that takes up a familiar folktale and twists it to reflect a personal tragedy that occurs as a result of an interracial relationship. Brown emphasizes that in this story the only tragic victim is the black man. The retarded white girl, Frankie, reports her sexual experience with the black man, Johnnie, to her father and succeeds in getting her black lover killed; she laughs uproariously during the lynching. “Southern Cop” narrates the mindless killing of a black man who is the victim of the panic of a rookie police officer. Yet Brown’s poems show black people not only as victims of whites but also as victims of the whole environment that surrounds them, including natural forces of flood and fire as well as social evils such as poverty and ignorance. Rural blacks’ vulnerability to natural disasters is revealed in “Old King Cotton,” “New St. Louis Blues,” and “Foreclosure.” In these poems, if a tornado does not come, the Mississippi River rises and takes the peasant’s arable land and his few animals and even traitorously kills his children by night. These poems portray despairing people who are capable only of futile questions in the face of an implacable and pitiless nature. The central character of “Low Down” is sunk in poverty and loneliness. His wife has left and his son is in prison; he is convinced that bad luck is his fate and that in the workings of life someone has loaded the dice against him. In “Johnny Thomas,” the title character is the victim of poverty, abuse by his parents and society, and ignorance. (He attempts to enroll in a one-room school, but the teacher throws him out.) Johnny ends up on a chain gang, where he is killed. The poem that most strongly expresses African American despair of the entire race is “Southern Road,” a convict song marked by a rhythmic, staccato beat and by a blues line punctuated by the convict’s groaning over his accursed fate: My ole man died—hunh— Cussin’ me; Old lady rocks, bebby huh misery.
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“Remembering Nat Turner” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1980, in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown Brown’s poems embrace themes of suffering, oppression, and tragedy yet always celebrate the vision and beauty of African American people and culture. One such deeply moving piece is “Remembering Nat Turner,” a poem in which the speaker visits the scene of Turner’s slave rebellion, only to hear an elderly white woman’s garbled recollections of the event; moreover, the marker intended to call attention to Turner’s heroic exploits, a rotting signpost, has been used by black tenants for kindling. A stoic fatalism can be seen in the poem “Memphis Blues,” which nevertheless praises the ability of African Americans to survive in a hostile environment because of their courage and willingness to start over when all seems lost: “Guess we’ll give it one more try.” In the words of Sterling Brown, “The strong men keep a-comin’ on/ Gittin’ stronger. . . .”
Suggested Readings Davis, Arthur P. “Sterling Brown.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. Ekate, Genevieve. “Sterling Brown: A Living Legend.” New Directions: The Howard University Magazine 1 (Winter, 1974): 5-11. Sanders, Mark A. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Thelwell, Ekwueme Michael. “The Professor and the Activists: A Memoir of Sterling Brown.” The Massachusetts Review 40, no. 4 (Winter, 1999/2000): 617-638. Wagner, Jean. “Sterling Brown.” In Black Poets of the United States, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Contributor: Betty Taylor-Thompson
William Wells Brown Born: Lexington, Kentucky; c. 1814 Died: Chelsea, Massachusetts; November 6, 1884 African American
A former slave and an outspoken critic of slavery, Brown wrote Clotel, which is the first known novel written by an African American. Principal works drama: The Escape: Or, A Leap for Freedom: A Drama in Five Acts, pb. 1858 long fiction: Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter, 1853 (revised as Miralda: Or, The Beautiful Quadroon, 1860-1861; Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States, 1864; and Clotelle: Or, The Colored Heroine, 1867) poetry: The Anti-Slavery Harp, 1848 nonfiction: Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, 1847; Three Years in Europe, 1852; The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad, 1855; St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots, 1855; Memoir of William Wells Brown, an American Bondman, 1859; The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 1863; The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity, 1867; The Rising Son: Or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race, 1873; My Southern Home, 1880; The Travels of William Wells Brown, 1991 (includes Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, 1847, and The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad, 1855; Paul Jefferson, editor) The Southern laws that made slave literacy illegal were on the books for a reason. William Wells Brown, a former slave, employed his talents as a writer to argue for African American freedom. In the pre-Civil War years, his eloquence as an orator made him an important figure in the abolitionist crusade, and recognition of his literary activities led to appreciation of his pioneering uses of fiction to critique slavery. Brown’s speeches were often incisive and militant. He showed little admiration for those patriots (such as Thomas Jefferson) who, Brown pointed out, owned and fathered slaves even as they founded a new nation dedicated to liberty and equality. He questioned the respect that is generally accorded to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolutionary War by revealing how these icons of American history failed to confront African enslavement. At an antislavery meeting in 1847 he 147
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said that if the United States “is the ‘cradle of liberty,’ they have rocked the child to death.” Opponents of abolition often founded their arguments on racist assumptions. Brown’s detractors made much of the fact that Brown’s father was a white man (probably his master’s brother) and implied that his achievements stemmed from the “white blood” of his father. For example, when Brown traveled to Europe to gain overseas support for abolitionism, an English journalist sneered that Brown was “far removed from the black race . . . his distinct enunciation evidently showed that a white man ‘spoke’ within.” Brown never sought to deny his racial heritage. In later versions of William Wells Brown (Associated Publishers, Inc.) Clotel published in 1860 and 1864, Brown recast his mulatto hero as a black rebel. As he makes clear in Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, his works were motivated by a deep commitment to the plight of the three million American slaves, a number that included his own family. Brown’s literary efforts undertaken in behalf of his enslaved brethren were no doubt supported by his earlier role in secreting fugitive slaves to Canada. These fugitives often fled slavery, as Brown had himself, at the price of severing familial ties. He dramatized the strain that slavery places upon family connections in Clotel, the first known African American novel. Creating a historical fiction from the well-known fact that Jefferson had a slave mistress, Brown details the outrage of the auction block, the struggle for autonomy, and the tragic ends of slave women who could trace their bloodlines to the author of the Declaration of Independence. The mixed heritage of his heroines—white and black, free and enslaved—points to the contradictions of a nation that idealized liberty even as it practiced slavery.
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The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1847 In his slave narrative, Brown assailed the prevailing notion of his time that slaves lacked legal or historical selfhood. His autobiography asserts that he has an autonomous identity. The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, like many of the stories written by former slaves, does more than chronicle a journey from bondage to freedom. The work also reveals the ways in which the former slave author writes a sense of self, denied by the South’s “peculiar institution,” into existence. So great was slavery’s disregard of black personhood that William, as a boy on a Kentucky plantation, is forced to change his name when his master’s nephew, also named William, comes to live as part of the white household. Brown never forgets this insult. He writes of his flight across the Mason-Dixon Line: “So I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for a name.” He finds a name by accepting as his surname that of an Ohio Quaker, Wells Brown, who gives him food and shelter during his escape. He also insists on retaining his first name, showing that his conception of freedom includes the ability to define, shape, and control one’s own identity. Brown is careful to record that his achievement of an unfettered identity is not without its tragic consequences. His personal freedom is undercut by reminders that his mother and siblings remain enslaved. When an escape undertaken in 1833 with his mother fails, his mother is sent to the Deep South, and Brown temporarily gives up his plans of liberty. His repeated sorrowful musings about his mother and sister suggest that Brown’s freedom and self-definition are processes infused not only with hope and triumph but also with alienation and loss. His statement that “the fact that I was a freeman . . . made me feel that I was not myself ” registers his ambivalence at forever leaving his family in order to find liberty. Although his purpose is at times weakened by a tragic family history that includes memories of his sister’s sale and visions of his mother performing hard labor on a cotton plantation, his understanding of national history lends resolve and determination to his quest. His thoughts of “democratic whips” and “republican chains” work to expose the severe contradictions that haunt the United States and reinforce his decision to risk becoming a fugitive once again in an attempt to reach Canada. In this way, Brown’s personal narrative functions as national criticism. His narrative is an American autobiography and an unflinching examination of America.
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The American Fugitive in Europe Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1855 Brown’s two travel narratives, The Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847) and The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855), were ably edited by Paul Jefferson in 1991, which made the 1855 sketches available in a modern edition. The narrative features Brown’s travels to an International Peace Conference at Paris (1849) and his residence in England, prolonged by the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law (1850). His encounters with the racial prejudice of Americans and his amazement at its European opposite form one fascinating dimension of the work. Also of interest are Brown’s impressions of European literary figures, statesmen, and institutions and his vivid descriptions of the people he encountered, their dress, occupations, and living conditions in London of the Crystal Palace era, in England’s Great Houses, and in laborers’ cottages.
Suggested Readings Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Ellison, Curtis W., and E. W. Metcalf, Jr. William Wells Brown and Martin R. Delany: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Farrison, William Edward. William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Jackson, Blyden. The Long Beginning, 1746-1895. Vol. 1 in A History of AfroAmerican Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Sekora, John, and Darwin T. Turner, eds. The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1982. Thorpe, Earl E. Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow, 1971. Whelchel, L. H., Jr. My Chains Fell Off: William Wells Brown, Fugitive Abolitionist. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985. Contributor: Russ Castronovo
Ed Bullins (Kingsley B. Bass, Jr.) Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; July 2, 1935 African American
Bullins’s work challenges easy preconceptions concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics. He sees no inherent contradiction between the use of experimental techniques and the drive to reach a mass audience alienated from the dominant social/economic/racial hierarchy. Principal works drama: Clara’s Ole Man, pr. 1965, pb. 1969 (one act); Dialect Determinism: Or, The Rally, pr. 1965, pb. 1973 (one act); How Do You Do?, pr. 1965, pb. 1968 (one act); The Theme Is Blackness, pr. 1966, pb. 1973 (one act); The Electronic Nigger, pr. 1968, pb. 1969 (one act); Goin’ a Buffalo, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; In the Wine Time, pr. 1968, pb. 1969; A Son, Come Home, pr. 1968, pb. 1969 (one act); Five Plays, pb. 1969 (includes Clara’s Ole Man, A Son, Come Home, The Electronic Nigger, Goin’ a Buffalo, and In the Wine Time); In New England Winter, pb. 1969, pr. 1971; The Gentleman Caller, pr. 1969, pb. 1970; We Righteous Bombers, pr. 1969 (as Kingsley B. Bass, Jr.; adaptation of Albert Camus’ play Les Justes); The Duplex, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; The Pig Pen, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; A Ritual to Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future, pr. 1970, pb. 1973; Street Sounds, pr. 1970, pb. 1973; The Devil Catchers, pr. 1971; The Fabulous Miss Marie, pr. 1971, pb. 1974; House Party, pr. 1973 (lyrics; music by Pat Patrick); The Theme Is Blackness, pb. 1973 (collection); The Taking of Miss Janie, pr. 1975, pb. 1981; Home Boy, pr. 1976 (lyrics; music by Aaron Bell); Jo Anne!, pr. 1976, pb. 1993; Daddy, pr. 1977; Sepia Star: Or, Chocolate Comes to the Cotton Club, pr. 1977 (lyrics; music by Mildred Kayden); Storyville, pr. 1977 (revised pr. 1979; music by Kayden); Michael, pr. 1978; Leavings, pr. 1980; Steve and Velma, pr. 1980; A Sunday Afternoon, pr. 1989 (with Marshall Borden); A Teacup Full of Roses, pr. 1989; I Think It’s Going to Turn Out Fine, pr. 1990; American Griot, pr. 1991 (with Idris Ackamoor); Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, pr. 1991 (one act); Boy x Man, pr. 1995; Mtumi X, pr. 2000 long fiction: The Reluctant Rapist, 1973 poetry: To Raise the Dead and Foretell the Future, 1971 screenplays: Night of the Beast, 1971; The Ritual Masters, 1972 edited texts: New Plays from the Black Theatre, 1969 (with introduction); The 151
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New Lafayette Theater Presents: Plays with Aesthetic Comments by Six Black Playwrights, 1974 (with introduction) miscellaneous: The Hungered Ones: Early Writings, 1971 (stories and essays) Intensely protective concerning the details of his private life, Ed Bullins (BUHLlihnz) nevertheless became a highly visible force in the development of African American theater beginning in the mid-1960’s. Reared primarily by his civil servant mother in North Philadelphia, Bullins attended a predominantly white grade school before transferring to an inner-city junior high, where he became involved with the street gang called the Jet Cobras. Like his semiautobiographical character Steve Benson (The Reluctant Rapist, In New England Winter, The Duplex), Bullins suffered a near-fatal knife wound, in the area of his heart, in a street fight. After dropping out of high school, he served in the United States Navy from 1952 to 1955. In 1958, he moved to California, where he passed his high school graduation equivalency examination and attended Los Angeles City College from 1961 to 1963. Bullins’s 1963 move to San Francisco signaled the start of his emergence as an influential figure in African American literary culture. The first national publication of his essays in 1963 initiated a period of tremendous creativity extending into the mid-1970’s. Actively committed to Black Nationalist politics by 1965, he began working with community theater organizations such as Black Arts/West, the Black Student Union at San Francisco State College, and Black House of San Francisco, which he founded along with playwright Marvin X. The first major production of Bullins’s drama, a program including How Do You Do?, Dialect Determinism, and Clara’s Ole Man, premiered at the Firehouse Repertory Theater in San Francisco on August 5, 1965. At about the same time, Bullins assumed the position of minister of culture with the Black Panther Party, then emerging as a major force in national politics. Breaking with the Panthers in 1967, reportedly in disagreement with Eldridge Cleaver’s decision to accept alliances with white radical groups, Bullins moved to Harlem at the urging of Robert MacBeth, director of the New Lafayette Theater. Bullins’s first New York production, The Electronic Nigger, ran for ninety-six performances following its February 21, 1968, debut at the American Place Theatre, where it was moved after the original New Lafayette burned down. Combined with his editorship of the controversial “Black Theatre” issue of The Drama Review (Summer, 1968), the success of The Electronic Nigger consolidated Bullins’s position alongside Baraka as a major presence within and outside the African American theatrical community. Between 1968 and 1976, Bullins’s plays received an average of three major New York productions per year at theaters, including the New Lafayette (where Bullins was playwright-in-residence up to its 1973 closing), the American Place Theatre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Woodie King’s New Federal Theatre at the Henry Street Settlement House, Lincoln Center, and the La Mama Experimental Theater. Bullins wrote A Sunday Afternoon with Marshall Borden and “a pseudo-satiric monster horror play, a take-off on B-movies,” called Dr. Geechie and the Blood Junkies, which he read at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York in the
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Ed Bullins (AP/Wide World Photos)
summer of 1989. The La Mama theater staged I Think It’s Going to Turn Out Fine, based on the Tina Turner story, in 1990, and American Griot (coauthored with Idris Ackamoor, who also acted in the play) in 1991. Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, a one-act play on the aftermath of the black revolution, premiered at the Ensemble Studio Theater in 1991. Bullins has also taught American humanities, black theater, and play making at Contra Costa College, in San Pablo, California. He settled in Emeryville, near Oakland, and started a theater there called the BMT Theatre (Bullins Memorial Theatre, named after his son, who died in an automobile accident). He continued his formal education at Antioch University in San Francisco, where he received his bachelor’s degree in liberal studies (English and playwriting) in 1989. After he completed his master’s degree in playwriting at San Francisco State University in 1994, he was appointed professor of theater at Northeastern University in 1995. In 1996 he was made acting director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Arts, and his Boy x Man, which premiered a year earlier in Greensboro, North Carolina, was staged at the Arts Black Box Theater in Boston. Three years later many of his plays were presented at a retrospective at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. An avid supporter of local drama, he has written two ten-minute plays for the Boston Theater Marathon and works with the ACT Theater Group in Roxbury, where he mentors young playwrights and conducts workshops. In 2000 his play Mtumi X was produced, and his play Goin’ a Buffalo was adapted to film and screened at the New York International Film and Video Festival in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
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A radical playwright in both the simple and the complex senses of the term, Bullins consistently challenges the members of his audience to test their political and aesthetic beliefs against the multifaceted reality of daily life in the United States. Committed to a revolutionary Black Nationalist consciousness, he attacks both liberal and conservative politics as aspects of an oppressive context dominated by a white elite. Equally committed to the development of a radical alternative to European American modernist aesthetics, he incorporates a wide range of cultural materials into specifically black performances. The clearest evidence of Bullins’s radical sensibility, however, is his unwavering refusal to accept any dogma, white or black, traditional or revolutionary, without testing it against a multitude of perspectives and experiences. Throughout a career that has earned for him serious consideration alongside O’Neill and Tennessee Williams as the United States’ greatest dramatist, Bullins has subjected the hypocrisies and corruptions of European and African American culture to rigorous examination and reevaluation. Refusing to accept any distinctions between aesthetics and politics or between the concerns of the artist and those of the mass community, Bullins demands that his audience synthesize abstract perception and concrete experience. Providing a set of terms useful to understanding the development of these concerns in his own work, Bullins defines a constituting dialectic in the black theatrical movement that emerged in the mid-1960’s: This new thrust has two main branches—the dialectic of change and the dialectic of experience. The writers are attempting to answer questions concerning Black survival and future, one group through confronting the Black/white reality of America, the other, by heightening the dreadful white reality of being a modern Black captive and victim.
Essentially, the dialectic of change focuses attention on political problems demanding a specific form of action. The dialectic of experience focuses on a more “realistic” (though Bullins redefines the term to encompass aspects of reality frequently dismissed by programmatic realists) picture of black life in the context in which the problems continue to condition all experience. Reflecting his awareness that by definition each dialectic is in constant tension with the other, Bullins directs his work in the dialectic of change to altering the audience’s actual experience. Similarly, his work in the dialectic of experience, while rarely explicitly didactic, leads inexorably to recognition of the need for change. Bullins’s work in both dialectics repudiates the tradition of the Western theater, which, he says, “shies away from social, political, psychological or any disturbing (revolutionary) reforms.” Asserting the central importance of non-Western references, Bullins catalogs the “elements that make up the alphabet of the secret language used in Black theater,” among them the blues, dance, African religion and mysticism, “familial nationalism,” mythscience, ritual-ceremony, and “nigger street styles.” Despite the commitment to an African American continuum evident in the construction and content of his plays, Bullins by no means repudiates all elements of the European American tradition. Even as he criticizes Brechtian epic theater, Bullins employs aspects of Brecht’s dramatic rhetoric, designed to alienate the
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audience from received modes of perceiving theatrical and, by extension, political events. It is less important to catalog Bullins’s allusions to William Shakespeare, O’Neill, Camus, or Genet than to recognize his use of their devices alongside those of Baraka, Soyinka, and Derek A. Walcott in the service of “Black artistic, political, and cultural consciousness.” Most of Bullins’s work in the dialectic of change, which he calls “protest writing” when addressed to a European American audience and “Black revolutionary writing” when addressed to an African American audience, takes the form of short satiric or agitpropic plays. Frequently intended for street performance, these plays aim to attract a crowd and communicate an incisive message as rapidly as possible. Influential in the ritual theater of Baraka and in Bullins’s own “Black Revolutionary Commercials,” this strategy developed out of association with the Black Nationalist movement in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Newark. Reflecting the need to avoid unplanned confrontations with police, the performances described in Bullins’s influential “Short Statement on Street Theater” concentrate on establishing contact with groups unlikely to enter a theater, especially black working people and individuals living on the margins of society— gang members, junkies, prostitutes, and street people. Recognizing the impact of the media on American consciousness, Bullins frequently parodies media techniques, satirizing political advertising in “The American Flag Ritual” and “selling” positive black revolutionary images in “A Street Play.” Somewhat longer though equally direct, “Death List,” which can be performed by a troupe moving through the neighborhood streets, alerts the community to “enemies of the Black People,” from Vernon Jordan to Whitney Young. Considered out of their performance context, many of these pieces seem simplistic or didactic, but their real intent is to realize Bullins’s desire that “each individual in the crowd should have his sense of reality confronted, his consciousness assaulted.” Because the “accidental” street audience comes into contact with the play while in its “normal” frame of mind, Bullins creates deliberately hyperbolic images to dislocate that mind-set in a very short period of time.
Dialect Determinism Type of work: Drama First produced: 1965, pb. 1973 When writing revolutionary plays for performance in traditional theaters, Bullins tempers his rhetoric considerably. To be sure, Dialect Determinism, a warning against trivializing the revolutionary impulse of Malcolm X, and The Gentleman Caller, a satiric attack on master-slave mentality of black-white economic interaction, both resemble the street plays in their insistence on revolutionary change. Dialect Determinism climaxes with the killing of a black “enemy,” and The Gentleman Caller ends with a formulaic call for the rise of the foretold “Black nation that will survive, conquer and rule.” The difference between these plays and the street the-
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ater lies not in message but in Bullins’s way of involving the audience. Recognizing the different needs of an audience willing to seek out his work in the theater but frequently educated by the dominant culture, Bullins involves it in the analytic process leading to what seem, from a black nationalist perspective, relatively unambiguous political perceptions. Rather than asserting the messages at the start of the plays, therefore, he developed a satiric setting before stripping away the masks and distortions imposed by the audience’s normal frame of reference on its recognition of his revolutionary message. Along with Baraka, Marvin X, Adrienne Kennedy, and others, Bullins helped make the dialectic of change an important cultural force at the height of the Black Nationalist movement, but his most substantial achievements involve the dialectic of experience. Ranging from his impressionistic gallery plays and politically resonant problem plays to the intricately interconnected Twentieth Century Cycle, Bullins’s work in this dialectic reveals a profound skepticism regarding revolutionary ideals that have not been tested against the actual contradictions of African American experience.
The Twentieth Century Cycle Type of work: Drama First produced: 1968-1991 The Twentieth Century Cycle, Bullins’s most far-reaching confrontation with the American experience, brings together most of his theatrical and thematic concerns and seems destined to stand as his major work. Several of the projected twenty plays of the cycle have been performed, including In the Wine Time, In New England Winter, The Duplex, The Fabulous Miss Marie, Home Boy, Daddy, and Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam. Although the underlying structure of the cycle remains a matter of speculation, it clearly focuses on the experience of a group of black people traversing various areas of America’s cultural and physical geography during the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s. Recurring characters, including Cliff Dawson, his nephew Ray Crawford, Michael Brown (who first appeared in a play not part of the cycle, A Son, Come Home), and Steve Benson, a black intellectual whose life story resembles Bullins’s own, serve to unify the cycle’s imaginative landscape. In addition, a core of thematic concerns, viewed from various perspectives, unites the plays. In the Wine Time, the initial play of the cycle, establishes a basic set of thematic concerns, including the incompatibility of Ray’s romantic idealism with the brutality and potential violence of his northern urban environment. Stylistically, the play typifies the cycle in its juxtaposition of introverted lyricism, naturalistic dialogue, technological staging, and African American music and dance. Individual plays combine these elements in different ways. In New England Winter, set in California, draws much of its power from a poetic image of the snow that takes on racial, geographical, and metaphysical meanings in Steve Benson’s consciousness. Each act of The Duplex opens with a jazz, blues, or rhythm-and-blues song that sets a
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framework for the ensuing action. The Fabulous Miss Marie uses televised images of the Civil Rights movement both to highlight its characters’ personal desperation and to emphasize the role of technology in creating and aggravating their problems of perception. Drawing directly on the reflexive rhetoric of European American modernism, In New England Winter revolves around Steve Benson’s construction of a “play,” involving a planned robbery, which he plans to enact in reality but which he also uses as a means of working out his psychological desires. Ultimately, Bullins’s Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam extends Bullins’s vision into an imaginary future to depict the former Black Panther leader down and out in the wake of a black revolution. Bullins suggests that each of these approaches reflects a perspective on experience actually present in contemporary American society and that any vision failing to take all of them into account will inevitably fall victim to the dissociation of ideals and experience that plunges many of Bullins’s characters into despair or violence. While some of his characters, most notably Steve Benson, seem intermittently aware of the source of their alienation and are potentially capable of imaginative responses with political impact, Bullins leaves the resolution of the cycle plays to the members of the audience. Portraying the futility of socially prescribed roles and of any consciousness not directly engaged with its total context, Bullins continues to challenge his audience to attain a perspective from which the dialectic of experience and the dialectic of change can be realized as one and the same.
Street Sounds Type of work: Drama First produced: 1970, pb. 1973 Street Sounds, parts of which were later incorporated into House Party, represents Bullins’s adaptation of the gallery approach pioneered by poets such as Robert Browning, Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1915), Melvin B. Tolson (Harlem Gallery, 1969), Gwendolyn Brooks (A Street in Bronzeville, 1945), and Langston Hughes (Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951). By montaging a series of thirty- to ninety-second monologues, Bullins suggests the tensions common to the experience of seemingly disparate elements of the African American community. Superficially, the characters can be divided into categories such as politicians (Harlem Politician, Black Student), hustlers (Dope Seller, The Thief), artists (Black Revolutionary Artist, Black Writer), street people (Fried Brains, Corner Brother), working people (Errand Boy, Workin’ Man), and women (The Loved One, The Virgin, Harlem Mother). None of the categories, however, survives careful examination; individual women could be placed in every other category; the Black Revolutionary Artist combines politics and art; the Harlem Politician, politics and crime. To a large extent, all types ultimately amount to variations on several social and psychological themes that render the surface distinctions far less important than they initially appear.
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Although their particular responses vary considerably, each character in Street Sounds confronts the decaying community described by The Old-timer: “They changin’ things, you know? Freeways comin’ through tearin’ up the old neighborhood. Buildings goin’ down, and not bein’ put up again. Abandoned houses that are boarded up, the homes of winos, junkies and rats, catchin’ fire and never bein’ fixed up.” As a result, many share the Workin’ Man’s feeling of being “trapped inside of ourselves, inside our experience.” Throughout the play, Bullins portrays a deepseated feeling of racial inferiority that results in black men’s obsession with white women (Slightly Confused Negro, The Explainer) and a casual willingness to exploit or attack other blacks (The Thief, The Doubter, Young West Indian Revolutionary Poet). Attempting to salvage some sense of freedom or self-worth, or simply to find momentary release from the struggle, individuals turn to art, sex, politics, or drugs, but the weight of their context pressures each toward the psychological collapse of Fried Brains, the hypocritical delusions of the Non-Ideological Nigger, or the unfounded self-glorification of The Genius. Even when individuals embrace political causes, Bullins remains skeptical. The Theorist, The Rapper, and The Liar, who ironically echoes Bullins’s aesthetic when he declares, “Even when I lie, I lie truthfully. . . . I’m no stranger to experience,” express ideological positions similar to those Bullins advocates in the dialectic of change. None, however, seems even marginally aware that his grand pronouncements have no impact on the experience of the black community. The Rapper’s revolutionary call—“We are slaves now, this moment in time, brothers, but let this moment end with this breath and let us unite as fearless revolutionaries in the pursuit of world liberation!”—comes between the entirely apolitical monologues of Waiting and Bewildered. Similarly, the Black Revolutionary Artist’s endorsement of “a cosmic revolution that will liberate the highest potential of nationhood in the universe” is followed by the Black Dee Jay’s claim that “BLACK MEANS BUY!” The sales pitch seems to have a great deal more power than the nationalist vision in the lives of the Soul Sister and the Corner Brother, whose monologues frame the Black Revolutionary ArtistBlack Dee Jay sequence. One of Bullins’s characteristic “signatures” is the attribution of his own ideas to characters unwilling or unable to act or inspire others to act on them. Reflecting his belief that, without action, ideals have little value, Bullins structures Street Sounds to insist on the need for connection. The opening monologue, delivered by a white “Pig,” establishes a political context similar to the one that Bullins uses in the dialectic of change, within which the dialectic of experience proceeds. Reducing all blacks to a single type, the nigger, Pig wishes only to “beat his nigger ass good.” Although Bullins clearly perceives the police as a basic oppressive force in the ghetto, he does not concentrate on highlighting the audience’s awareness of that point. Rather, by the end of the play he has made it clear that the African American community in actuality beats its own ass. The absence of any other white character in the play reflects Bullins’s focus on the nature of victimization as experienced within and perpetuated by the black community. The Harlem Mother monologue that closes the play concentrates almost entirely on details of experience. Although she presents no hyperbolic portraits of white oppressors, her memories of the im-
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pact on her family of economic exploitation, hunger, and government indifference carry more politically dramatic power than does any abstraction. This by no means indicates Bullins’s distaste for political analysis or a repudiation of the opening monologues; rather, it reflects his awareness that abstract principles signify little unless they are embedded in the experience first of the audience and, ultimately, of the community as a whole.
The Taking of Miss Janie Type of work: Drama First produced: 1975, pb. 1981 Although Bullins consistently directs his work toward the African American community, his work in the dialectic of experience inevitably involves the interaction of blacks and whites. The Taking of Miss Janie, perhaps his single most powerful play, focuses on a group of California college students, several of whom first appeared in The Pig Pen. In part a meditation on the heritage of the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, The Taking of Miss Janie revolves around the sexual and political tensions between and within racial groups. Although most of the characters are readily identifiable types—the stage directions identify Rick as a cultural nationalist, Janie as a California beach girl, Flossy as a “soul sister”—Bullins explores individual characters in depth, concentrating on their tendency to revert to behavior patterns, especially when they assume rigid ideological or social roles. The central incident of the play—the “rape” of the white Janie by Monty, a black friend of long standing—provides a severely alienating image of this tendency to both black and white audiences. After committing a murder, which may or may not be real, when the half-mythic Jewish beatnik Mort Silberstein taunts Monty for his inability to separate his consciousness from European American influences, Monty undresses Janie, who does not resist or cooperate, in a rape scene devoid of violence, love, anger, or physical desire. Unable to resist the pressures that make their traditional Western claim to individuality seem naïve, both Janie and Monty seem resigned to living out a “fate” that in fact depends on their acquiescence. Monty accepts the role of the “black beast” who rapes and murders white people, while Janie plays the role of plantation mistress. Although these intellectually articulate characters do not genuinely believe in the reality of their roles, their ironic attitude ultimately makes no difference, for the roles govern their actions. Although the rape incident provides the frame for The Taking of Miss Janie, Monty and Janie exist in a gallery of characters whose collective inability to maintain individual integrity testifies to the larger dimensions of the problem. Rick and Len enact the classic argument between nationalism and eclecticism in the black political/intellectual world; Peggy tires of confronting the neuroses of black men and turns to lesbianism; “hip” white boy Lonnie moves from fad to fad, turning his contact with black culture to financial advantage in the music business; several couples drift aimlessly into interracial marriages. Alternating scenes in which char-
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acters interact with monologues in which an individual reflects on his future development, Bullins reveals his characters’ inability to create alternatives to the “fate” within which they feel themselves trapped. Although none demonstrates a fully developed ability to integrate ideals and experiences, several seem substantially less alienated than others. In many ways the least deluded, Peggy accepts both her lesbianism and her responsibility for her past actions. Her comment on the 1960’s articulates a basic aspect of Bullins’s vision: “We all failed. Failed ourselves in that serious time known as the sixties. And by failing ourselves we also failed in the test of the times.” Her honesty and insight also have a positive impact on the black nationalist Rick, who during a conversation with Peggy abandons his grandiose rhetoric on the “devil’s tricknology” (a phrase adopted from the Nation of Islam)—rhetoric that masks a deep hostility toward other blacks. Although he has previously attacked her as a lesbian “freak,” Rick’s final lines to Peggy suggest another aspect of Bullins’s perspective: “Ya know, it be about what you make it anyway.” Any adequate response to The Taking of Miss Janie must take into account not only Peggy’s survival strategy and Rick’s nationalistic idealism but also Janie’s willed naïveté and the accuracy of Mort’s claim that, despite his invocation of Mao Zedong, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, Monty is still on some levels “FREAKY FOR JESUS!” Bullins presents no simple answers nor does he simply contemplate the wasteland. Rather, as in almost all of his work in both the dialectic of change and the dialectic of experience, he challenges his audience to make something out of the fragments and failures he portrays.
Boy x Man Type of work: Drama First produced: 1995
In Boy x Man (the x means “times,” as in multiplication), Bullins constructs a memory play in which a young man’s return to attend his mother’s funeral prompts him to remember his boyhood with his mother and her “friend,” who raised him as a son. The song “Blues in the Night,” his first crib memory, provides the transition to scenes from the 1930’s and 1940’s. Ernie’s mother, Brenda, is a single mom and dancer whose life improves dramatically when she meets Will, who lacks ambition but who nevertheless provides his “family” with much-needed stability. The play includes a series of highly emotional vignettes, including the following: Brenda’s reliving of her discovery of her dead mother; Will’s reliving of his Nazi concentration camp experiences; and, to provide balance, Will’s attending and listening to Negro League baseball games. Bullins provides his audience with a glimpse of the problems, prejudice, and tensions that black American families encounter; but because many of the problems are not confined to the black experience, the play reflects on American life in general.
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Suggested Readings DeGaetani, John L. A Search for a Postmodern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Hay, Samuel A. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Herman, William. Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Contributors: Thomas L. Erskine, Thomas J. Taylor, and Craig Werner
Carlos Bulosan Born: Binalonan, Pangasinan, Luzon, Philippines; November 2, 1911 Died: Seattle, Washington; September 11, 1956 Filipino American
Bulosan provides the best introduction to the lives of Filipino immigrant workers in America. Principal works long fiction: The Power of the People, 1986; All the Conspirators, 1998 poetry: Letter from America, 1942; The Voice of Bataan, 1943; Now You Are Still, and Other Poems, 1990 short fiction: The Laughter of My Father, 1944; The Philippines Is in the Heart: A Collection of Stories, 1978; If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader, 1983 (E. San Juan, Jr., editor); The Power of Money, and Other Stories, 1990; On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan, 1995 (E. San Juan, Jr., editor); The Cry and the Dedication, 1995 (E. San Juan, Jr., editor) nonfiction: America Is in the Heart, 1946; Sound of Falling Light: Letters in Exile, 1960 edited text: Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets, 1942 miscellaneous: Bulosan: An Introduction with Selections, 1983 (compiled by E. San Juan, Jr.) Carlos Bulosan (BOO-loh-sahn) never forgot his background as a Filipino farmer’s son. He expressed the pride he had in this background as well as the severe social situations that small farmers as well as other hired workers faced in their day-to-day attempts to earn a livelihood. A turning point in Bulosan’s life, which fixed in his memory and conscience the small farmers’ and hired workers’ need for a voice, came when Bulosan’s father lost the family’s small farm and entered the world of serfdom—slavery—in his native Philippines. Bulosan learned one important lesson from his father: Bulosan saw his father retain his personal identity by confronting his daily tasks and hardships with laughter and cunning. His father showed how one is able to speak as loudly against injustices through satire and laughter as through political diatribe. Bulosan recounts many stories of his father in the numerous pieces that appeared in leading American publications. In search of a better life, Bulosan worked his way to America, landing in Seattle on July 22, 1930, and found himself on the streets with others looking for work dur162
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ing the Depression. The good life escaped Bulosan because jobs were few and because extreme jingoism was rampant in America at the time. Although Bulosan never intended to lose his identity as a Filipino, those with whom he came into contact constantly berated him for being an outsider and a Filipino. Bulosan began to take whatever job he could find, always being relegated to secondary positions because of his ethnicity. As hard as he tried to fit into the American Dream of a better life, he was denied entrance. Bulosan chronicles his father’s difficult life in America as an unwanted outsider in his autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart. Bulosan’s dream of a life better than that of his father was Carlos Bulosan (Courtesy, APIHDC) never realized. He soon learned that he, too, was a slave to those controlling the jobs. This no doubt contributed to Bulosan’s strong support and activity in the many workers’ movements that arose during his life. Bulosan’s hard life also, no doubt, contributed to his early death.
America Is in the Heart Type of work: Autobiography and novel First published: 1946 In this poignant tale of immigrant dreams and racial discrimination, Bulosan depicts growing up in the Philippines, voyaging to the United States, and enduring years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer and union organizer on the West Coast. Bulosan gives his readers the uncomfortable perspective of harsh discrimination because of racial and economic status. The actual form of the book, however, is difficult to characterize. Unlike a novel, it contains real-life situations, but neither is it autobiography, in the strictest sense. Though narrated in the first person by a character named Carlos Bulosan, the book is neither really nor exclusively an account of his life. For example, unlike the book’s narrator, the real Bulosan was not as impoverished. Bulosan states that the events in the book are a composite: They happened either to him or to someone he knew or heard about. The book, then, is a con-
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glomerate portrait of Filipino American life in the early twentieth century, but Bulosan presents the events as personal history so that the reader is more likely to take what he says to be truth. The use of the first-person narrative voice conveys immediacy and energy, arousing sympathy in a way that a third-person narrative would not. This is an “everyperson” story, an immigrant myth. As such, it is very episodic in nature, depicting brief or extended encounters first with one character who was influential to Bulosan and then moving on to another character. The voice of Bulosan is constant throughout the novel, and two of his brothers emerge periodically throughout, although no other long-term relationships are described. The book shows Bulosan growing up in a small barrio, or village, in the central Philippines, working in the fields with his father, selling salted fish with his mother, and attending school as he was able. At seventeen, he immigrates to the United States, landing in Seattle and being sold for five dollars to a labor contractor. He moves from one manual job to another up and down the Washington and California coasts, depending on which crops are ready to harvest. He becomes a union organizer and experiences abuse and cruelty at the hands of white leaders and townspeople. His hospitalization for two years because of tuberculosis enables him to read an average of a book a day and to write newsletters that promote the union cause. America Is in the Heart is a coming-of-age story from an immigrant’s point of view. The first third of the book shows Bulosan’s youth within the circle of his impoverished but loving family. In the beginning of the second third of the book, Bulosan is optimistic and naïve as he lands on the shores of Seattle at seventeen. Although he is soon duped, sold for hire, and abused, his disillusion never breaks his spiritual faith in the United States or his desire to forge ahead in his own intellectual development and for the welfare of all Filipino workers. He is forced by “oldtimers,” the more seasoned Filipino laborers, into losing his virginity with a Mexican prostitute; his maturity cannot be complete without this sexual awakening. The final third of the book depicts the fruits of his adult labor: the formation of fledgling labor unions and the beginnings of a grassroots network that will begin to hold white owners and managers accountable for humane working and living conditions for their immigrant itinerant laborers.
Suggested Readings Evangelista, Susan, ed. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. San Juan, E., Jr. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. New York: Oriole Editions, 1976. _______, ed. Introduction to Modern Pilipino Literature. New York: Twayne, 1974. Contributors: Tom Frazier and Jill B. Gidmark
Julia de Burgos Born: Carolina, Puerto Rico; February 17, 1914 Died: New York, New York; July 6, 1953 Puerto Rican
Burgos stands out as a early feminist activist at a time when Puerto Rican culture restricted women to the traditional roles of spouse and mother. Principal works poetry: Poema en veinte surcos, 1938; Canción de la verdad sencilla, 1939 (Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems, 1997); El mar y tú: Otros poemas, 1954; Obra poética, 1961; Antología poética, 1975; Roses in the Mirror, 1992 Born into a poor peasant family in rural Puerto Rico, Julia de Burgos (JEW-lee-ah duh BEHR-gohs), a remarkably intelligent girl, received schooling because of money collected among her equally poor neighbors. Eventually she earned a teaching degree. Her experiences as a rural teacher and her agrarian background added to her deep concern for the exploited workers and for the women subjected to malechauvinist cultural patterns. Her contact with common people also ignited her interest in local politics, especially in independence-seeking revolutionary movements. Burgos is best known for her strongly feminist poems. Her poetry is thematically diverse; it includes an inclination to the erotic and to social activism. Burgos’s feminist poems present a philosophical consideration of the role of women in Puerto Rican society. By such questioning, Burgos explores womanhood issues in her efforts to break away from restrictive social patterns. Her definition of womanhood encompasses multiple facets: the woman yearning for motherhood (which she herself never fulfilled), the social nonconformist who openly challenges sexist traditions, and the devoted citizen and political activist. Her political involvement with the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which aggressively promoted the independence of Puerto Rico by means of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, added to her poetry a marked sense of patriotism. Her idea of a pure, lush countryside clashed with the realities of an increasingly urbanized and, therefore, Americanized Puerto Rico. Committed to international activism, Burgos also wrote against fascism in Spain during that country’s civil war. Burgos’s life can be examined as an example of a commitment to fight social injustice. At a time when racial discrimination was rampant, Burgos, a woman of black descent, fought such restrictions. Racism was certainly her major problem 165
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upon arriving in New York City in 1942, where she lived until her death. In New York, although she was a renowned poet and fully bilingual, Burgos was obliged to take menial jobs. She fought back, however, by writing against such oppression. Her alcoholism led to her early death. Burgos stands out as a early feminist activist at a time when Puerto Rican culture restricted women to the traditional roles of spouse and mother. The inclusion of feminism in her poetic production, which she links to political activism, puts Burgos on the cutting edge of an incipient movement in Puerto Rico and in the United States. It may be more significant, however, that her life reflected her cherished beliefs.
“To Julia de Burgos” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1938, in Poema en veinte surcos “To Julia de Burgos” is part of Poema en veinte surcos (poem in twenty furrows), whose poems focus mainly on social hierarchies and on the relationship between the individual and society. Both these elements are combined in “To Julia de Burgos,” which is remarkable both for the clarity and conviction of its voice and for the conflict and tension inherent within that voice. The poem is a critique of Julia de Burgos as the world knows her. The speaker, who is not—and perhaps cannot—be named (and is referred to only as “I”) accuses this “false” Julia de Burgos of being the superficial, transparent embodiment of the “real” Julia de Burgos; that is, the independent, free-thinking, soulful creator (who is, presumably, the author of the poem). The difference between the two, the speaker says, is simple: The real Julia de Burgos is her own creation, while the Julia de Burgos to whom the poem is directed is merely a creation of the outside world, someone who succumbs to societal expectations: You curl your hair and paint your face. Not I: I am curled by the wind, painted by the sun.
Here, the hostility is directed from one female to another; the speaker criticizes Julia de Burgos’s submission to social hierarchies and ideas of where a woman’s “place” should be. The real Julia de Burgos is the only one aware of the other’s inauthenticity; her accusations stem from a unique vantage point. She has deep insight into the mind-set and hierarchies to which her false self belongs, and by placing her voice in the third person she is able to launch a scathing social critique of the author’s own weaknesses, of women’s conformity to perceived perceptions, and of the oppressive nature of Puerto Rico’s upper class.
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Suggested Readings Kattau, C. “The Plural and the Nuclear in ‘A Julia de Burgos.’” Symposium— A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 48, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 285-293. Vásquez, Carmen, et al. La Poésie de Julia de Burgos, 1914-1953. Paris: Indigo, 2005. Vicioso, Sherezada. Julia de Burgos: La Nuestra. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Dirección General Feria del Libro, 2004. Contributors: Rafael Ocasio and Anna A. Moore
Octavia E. Butler Born: Pasadena, California; June 22, 1947 Died: Seattle, Washington; February 24, 2006 African American
Butler’s portrayal of the “loner” of science and adventure fiction is given depth and complexity by the implied treatment of sexual and racial prejudices and the direct treatment of social power structures. Examining love and miscegenation, male-female roles, the responsibilities of power, and the urge to survive, Butler invites readers to reexamine long-standing attitudes. Principal works long fiction: Patternmaster, 1976; Mind of My Mind, 1977; Survivor, 1978; Kindred, 1979; Wild Seed, 1980; Clay’s Ark, 1984; Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rites, 1988; Imago, 1989; Parable of the Sower, 1993; Parable of the Talents, 1998; Fledgling, 2005 short fiction: “Crossover,” 1971; “Near of Kin,” 1979; “Speech Sounds,” 1983; “Bloodchild,” 1984; “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” 1987 nonfiction: “Birth of a Writer,” 1989 (later renamed “Positive Obsession”); “Furor Scribendi,” 1993 miscellaneous: Bloodchild, and Other Stories, 1995 (collected short stories and essays) Octavia E. Butler grew up in a family that reflected some of the hard realities for African Americans. Her father, who died when she was very young, shined shoes; her mother, who had been taken from school at the age of ten, supported herself by working as a maid. Reared by her mother, grandmother, and other relatives, Butler felt most comfortable in the company of her adult relatives, even while she was uncomfortable with a social system that routinely denied their humanity. She was tall for her age, shy, bookish, and further set off from her peer group by strict Baptist prohibitions against dancing and the use of makeup. Her escape from a less-than-satisfactory everyday life was provided by her ability to write. She began writing when she was about ten years old and began to experiment with science fiction one day at age twelve, when she decided that she could write a better story than the one of the poor science-fiction film she was watching on television. Her family did not support her decision to write, and her teachers did not sup168
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port her choice of science fiction as a medium. She attended Pasadena City College and then California State College at Los Angeles, where she was unable to major in creative writing but took a potpourri of other subjects. After attending evening writing classes at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), she met sciencefiction writer Harlan Ellison through the Writers Guild of America, and he brought her to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1970. Butler continued her study of science-fiction writing in classes taught by Ellison at UCLA. Although she had sold some of her science fiction as early as 1970, her breakthrough publication came in 1976 with Patternmaster, with which she began the Patternist series. She went on to fashion a successful career that was cut short by a fatal stroke in 2006. Octavia E. Butler presented a version of humanity as a congenitally flawed species, possibly doomed to destroy itself because it is both intelligent and hierarchical. In this sense, her work does not follow the lead of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (1951-1993), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and similar science fiction in offering an optimistic, rational, and agreeable view of humanity. As Butler herself said, she did not believe that imperfect human beings can create a perfect world. Butler’s diverse societies are controlled by Darwinian realities: competition to survive, struggle for power, domination of the weak by the strong, parasitism, and the like. Within this framework, there is room for both pain and hope, for idealism, love, bravery and compassion, for an outsider to challenge the system, defeat the tyrant, and win power. There is, however, no happy ending but a conclusion in which the lead characters have done their best and the world (wherever it is) remains ethically and morally unchanged. In contemplative but vividly descriptive prose, Butler tells her story from the first- or third-person perspective of someone who is passive or disfranchised and is forced by events or other characters to take significant action. In order to fulfill her destiny, often the protagonist— most often a black woman—must do or experience something not only unprecedented but also alien and even grotesque. What begins as an act of courage usually ends as an act of love, or at least understanding. Through an alien, alienated, or excluded person, a crucial compromise is struck, civilization is preserved in Octavia E. Butler (Beth Gwinn) some form, and life goes on.
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Butler’s fiction reflects and refracts the attempts—and failures—of the twentieth century to deal with ethnic and sexual prejudice. She frequently used standard images of horror, such as snakelike or insectlike beings, to provoke an aversion that the reader is unable to sustain as the humanity of the alien becomes clear. Being human does not mean being faultless—merely familiar. Therefore, each of her human, nonhuman, and quasi-human societies displays its own form of selfishness and, usually, a very clear power structure. The maturity and independence achieved by the protagonists imply not the advent of universal equality and harmony but merely a pragmatic personal obligation to wield power responsibly. Characters unable to alter or escape the order of things are expected to show a sort of noblesse oblige.
Kindred Type of work: Novel First published: 1979 Butler’s most atypical work in terms of genre is Kindred, published in 1979. While the protagonist is shuttled helplessly back and forth between 1824 and 1976 in a kind of time travel, this device is of no intrinsic importance to the message of the story. At one point, the heroine, Edana, asks herself how it can be that she—the as yet unborn black descendant of a nineteenth century slaveholder—can be the instrument of keeping that slaveholder alive until he fulfills his destiny and fathers her ancestor. By asking, she preempts the reader’s own curiosity, and when there is no answer, the story simply moves forward. Kindred uses a black woman of the 1970’s and her white husband to probe beneath the surface stereotypes of “happy slave” on one hand and “Uncle Tom” on the other. When Edana and Kevin are separated by the South of 1824 into slave and master, they each begin unwillingly to imbibe the feelings and attitudes of the time from that perspective. The impact of the novel results from Butler’s ability to evoke the antebellum South from two points of view: the stubborn, desperate attempts of blacks to lead meaningful lives in a society that disregards family ties and disposes of individuals as marketable animals; and the uncomprehending, sometimes oppressively benevolent ruthlessness of a ruling class that defines slaves in terms of what trouble or pleasure they can give.
The Patternist Series Type of work: Novels First published: 1976-1984 Butler began her science-fiction novels with the Patternist series, and in this series the reader can observe the beginning of her development from a writer of wellcrafted science/adventure fiction to a writer who recalls in her own way the reflectiveness of Ray Bradbury.
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First written but third published was Survivor, the tale of an orphaned AfroAsian girl who becomes a “wild human” in order to survive in a harsh environment. She is found and adopted, in an atypical act of reaching out, by two members of the Missionaries—a nouveau-Fundamentalist Christian sect. The Missionaries’ escape from a hostile Earth takes them to a planet inhabited by furred bipeds, whom they regard as less than human. These beings are, in fact, a science-fiction version of the noble savage, but the protagonist is alone in recognizing their nobility. Internally untouched by Missionary dogma, she is truly socialized as a captive of the Tehkohn and, in the end, chooses them as her own people. Her survival and success require an understanding of the color classes of fur among the Tehkohn, where blue is the highest color, suggesting a tongue-in-cheek reference to “blue blood.” She makes her own way by dint of qualities often found in protagonists of adventure novels: physical agility, courage, and adaptability. Patternmaster features an appealing duo, with the younger son of the Patternmaster—the psychic control-central of a society of advanced human beings— confronting and defeating his brutal older brother in an unwanted competition to succeed their father. His helper, mentor, and lover is a bisexual Healer; he trusts her enough to “link” with her in order to pool their psionic power. She teaches him that Healing is, paradoxically, also a deadly knowledge of the body with which he can defeat his brother. Thus, trust and cooperation overcome ambition and brutality. The “mutes” of this novel are nontelepathic human beings whose vulnerability to cruelty or kindness and inability to control their own destinies reflect the earlier status of slaves in America. Mary, in Mind of My Mind, is a “latent” who must undergo a painful transition in order to become a full-fledged telepath. The pain and danger of this passage from adolescence to adulthood are emblematic of the turmoil of coming-of-age everywhere and of the physical or psychological pain that is required as the price of initiation in many, if not all, societies. The deadened, sometimes crazed, helplessness of latents who cannot become telepaths but must continue to live with the intrusive offal of other people’s thoughts is a powerful metaphor for people trapped in poverty, and some of the horrors Butler paints are familiar. Mary has no choice at first. The founder of her “people,” a nontelepathic immortal named Doro, prescribes her actions until she acquires her power. He senses danger only when she reaches out reflexively to control other, powerful telepaths, thus forming the first Pattern. Mary’s destruction of the pitiless Doro, like the death of the older brother in Patternmaster and of the rival alien chief in Survivor, is foreordained and accomplished with a ruthlessness appropriate to the society and to the character of the victim. The incipient change in Butler’s style is evident here in the comparative lack of adventure-action sequences and in the greater concentration on psychological adaptation to and responsible use of social power. The technique of historical reconstruction is seen again in Wild Seed, whose evocation of Ibo West Africa owes something to the work of writers such as Chinua Achebe. Wild Seed traces Doro and Anyanwu from their seventeenth century meeting in West Africa to the establishment of Doro’s settlements in America. Doro is a centuries-old being who lives by “taking” another man’s or woman’s body and leav-
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ing his previous body behind. Anyanwu is a descendant of Doro. She is a “wild seed” because she has unexpectedly developed the power to shape-shift, becoming young or old, an animal, fish, or bird, at will. Their relationship is completely one-sided, since Doro could “take” her any time he chose, although he would not acquire her special abilities. His long life and unremitting efforts to create a special people of his own have left him completely insensitive to the needs and desires of others. Anyanwu finally achieves some balance of power simply by being willing to die and leave Doro without the only companion who could last beyond a mortal lifetime. The last Patternist novel, Clay’s Ark, introduces the reader to those brutish enemies of both Patternist and “mute” humanity, the Clayarks, so named because the disease that created them was brought back to Earth on a spaceship called “Clay’s Ark.” The disease culls its victims, killing some and imbuing others with a will to live that overcomes the horror of their new existence. They become faster and stronger, and their children evolve even further, taking on animal shapes and attributes of speed, power, and heightened senses but retaining human thought and use of their hands. In the guise of a horror story, Clay’s Ark follows the first Clayarks’ attempt to come to terms with their condition and live responsibly, shut off from civilization. Their failed attempt demonstrates that it is not possible to contain cataclysmic natural change, but the story enlists the reader’s sympathy for human beings who suffer even as they afflict others.
The Xenogenesis Series Type of work: Novels First published: 1987-1989 With the exception of Clay’s Ark, in which there is much action, the pace of Butler’s novels slows progressively; action is increasingly internalized and psychological. Moral judgments and the contest of right versus wrong dwindle to insignificance. The next, and quite logical, development is the Xenogenesis series: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. This series confirmed Butler as a science-fiction writer of sufficient depth to be of significance beyond the genre. The change from her originally projected title for the series is informative. “Exogenesis” would have implied merely genesis effected from outside humanity. “Xenogenesis” has both text and subtext. Its meaning is the production of an organism altogether and permanently unlike the parent. The subtext is a function of the best-known English word built on the same root: xenophobia, fear and dislike of that which is foreign or alien. Butler makes the series title a statement of the thesis she will address. Many of the techniques and themes of her earlier, developing style come to fruition here: the alternating use of first- and third-person narrative, the slow pace of a plot laden with psychological development and sensory perceptions, the meticulous foreclosure of value judgments, the concern with hierarchy and responsibility, the objective observation of feelings of revulsion for that which is alien, and those
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feelings’ gradual dissipation as the alien becomes familiar and therefore less threatening. Action in the series is sparse, normally kept to the minimum necessary to maintain the pace of psychological and social observation. In some ways, it is a chilling series of seductions of human beings by an alien, benevolent oppressor. In some ways, it is a demonstration of the infinite capacity of humanity to seek satisfaction in the destruction of itself and others. Words used to describe two of Butler’s shorter works in the 1984 and 1987 issues of The Year’s Best Science Fiction may serve here as a characterization of the Xenogenesis series: “strange, grotesque, disturbing . . . and ultimately moving,” a “tale of despair, resignation, and, most painfully, hope.” It is apparently to examine the capacity of human beings to adapt, to survive, and perhaps stubbornly to pursue a self-destructive course of action that Butler has created the nightmarish situation that the reader encounters in Dawn. In a world devastated by nuclear exchange between East and West, the dying remnants of humanity survive largely in the Southern Hemisphere. The heroine of Dawn is an African, Lilith, whose name suggests the demonic goddess of Hebrew tradition, the famous medieval witch who appears in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808, 1833), and the medieval, alternate “first mother” who was put aside in favor of Eve. Enter the Oankali, a nonviolent race of benevolent parasites and genetic engineers, who exist for the opportunity of combining with other species to acquire new cellular “knowledge” and capabilities. They live for miscegenation. They are trisexual: male, female, and ooloi. The ooloi is the indispensable link between male and female—channeling, altering, or amplifying all genetic material and sexual contact, including transfer of sperm and pleasurable sensations. The ooloi is capable of internal healing; for example, one cures Lilith of a cancer and finds the cancer to be an exciting new biological material with which to work. The Oankali blend with another species by linking a male and female of that species and a male and female Oankali through an ooloi. Thereafter, independent conception is not possible for those members of that species. The progeny are “constructs,” who, at least at first, resemble their direct parents but carry genetic change within them. Lilith’s first husband is killed in Dawn, but she bears his child posthumously because Nikanj, the ooloi that has chosen her, has preserved his seed. The resultant humanoid male child is the protagonist of Adulthood Rites, while a much later child of Lilith with another husband and the same Oankali parents is the protagonist of Imago. Lilith is at first appalled by even the more humanoid Oankali, with their Medusan tentacles and sensory arms. She is gradually acclimated to them, cooperates with them to save humanity, bears children with them, is overwhelmed by the sensory pleasure they can give, and becomes sympathetic to their need to unite with other species, but she is never fully resigned. In Imago, Lilith compares the Oankali’s description of the “flavors” of human beings to physical cannibalism and implies that the spiritual equivalent is no less predatory. Lilith’s conversion from complete repugnance in Dawn, a stylistic tour de force, shapes the following novels, as human beings are ultimately allowed a choice of
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living with the Oankali, staying behind on a doomed and barren Earth, or living in an experimental, all-human world on Mars. The Oankali, who seem to make decisions as a kind of committee-of-the-whole, foresee that the same old combination of intelligence and hierarchical tendencies (in a rather Darwinian sense) will lead this last outpost of humanity to destroy itself. No one convincingly denies it. Butler’s stylistic virtuosity also extended to narrative person. Dawn is a thirdperson account of Lilith’s absorption into the Oankali social structure; Adulthood Rites is the third-person narrative of Akin, a male-human construct, who convinces the more rational human beings left on Earth to trust the Oankali and convinces the Oankali to offer the humans the choice of planetary residences. Imago is a first-person account of Jodahs, a child whose transformation to adulthood reveals it to be an ooloi. Use of the first-person narrative to tell the story of an apparent human who becomes wholly alien in both psychology and physiology is risky but rewarding. Through the eyes of a being routinely referred to as “it” in its own society, the reader observes its benevolent stalking and drug-induced brainwashing of human mates and the final planting of a seed that will grow into an organic town and then an organic spaceship, which will carry Jodahs and his people to new worlds for new genetic blendings. Imago’s conclusion serves as a reminder that Butler’s imaginary worlds are primarily arenas for hard, necessary decisions in the business of survival. There is compassion as well as bitterness, and love as well as prejudice, but there is no triumph or glory. There is only doing what must be done as responsibly as possible.
Parable of the Sower Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Parable of the Sower was published in 1993. It is set in California in 2024. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old African American girl who lives with her family in the fictitious town of Robledo, some twenty miles from Los Angeles. At the time of the story, the social order has nearly disintegrated. Society consists of “haves” and “have-nots.” The haves live in walled and fortified neighborhoods; the have-nots roam outside the walls along with packs of wild dogs and drug addicts called “Paints,” whose addiction imbues them with an orgasmic desire to burn things. Apparently due to the follies of humankind, the climate has been altered, and the entire world is in a state of near-collapse. Disease is rampant, natural disasters are frequent, and though there are stores, some jobs, and even television programming, the social order, at least in California, is almost gone. Against this backdrop, the heroine, Lauren Olamina, founds a new religion named Earthseed. The novel takes the form of a journal Lauren keeps. Entries are dated and each chapter is prefaced with a passage from the new religion, the essence of which is that everything changes, even God. In fact, God is change. Butler said that humankind is not likely to change itself but that humans will go
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elsewhere and be forced to change. When the Paints destroy Lauren’s neighborhood and most of her family, she treks north toward Canada, and new members join her group, one by one. Most survive and reach their destination, a burned farm in Oregon. The ending is a classic Butler resolution: There is no promised land; people who have not changed generally perish. Lauren has changed nothing in society; she has merely adapted and learned to survive. The structure, style, and plot of Parable of the Sower are all deceptively simple. Beneath the surface of the story, the novel deals directly with social power, its use and abuse, and its possible consequences.
Suggested Readings Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Dubey, Madhu. “Folk and Urban Communities in African American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (1999): 103-128. Foster, Frances Smith. “Octavia Butler’s Black Female Future Fiction.” Extrapolation 23 (Spring, 1982): 37-49. Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984): 82-87. Jesser, Nancy. “Blood, Genes, and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Dawn.” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (2002): 36-61. McCaffery, Larry. “Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” In Across the Wounded Galaxies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Mitchell, Angelyn. “Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” MELUS 26, no. 3 (2001): 51-75. Roberts, Robin. A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Shinn, Thelma. “The Wise Witches: Black Woman Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Contributors: James L. Hodge and John T. West III
Abraham Cahan Born: Podberezy, Lithuania; July 6, 1860 Died: New York, New York; August 31, 1951 Jewish
As a novelist and a journalist, Cahan was a voice for his fellow Jewish immigrants. Principal works long fiction: Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, 1896; The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia, 1905; The Rise of David Levinsky, 1917 short fiction: The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, 1898 nonfiction: Historye fun di Fareynigte Shtaaten: Mit Eyntselhayten vegen der Entdekung un Eroberung fun Amerika, 1910; Bleter fun mayn leben, 1926-1931 (5 volumes; The Education of Abraham Cahan, 1969); Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan, 1985 edited text: Hear the Other Side: A Symposium of Democratic Socialist Opinion, 1934 As a young man in Russia, Abraham Cahan (KAY-hahn) experienced many different identities: pious Jew, Russian intellectual, nihilist. By his early twenties, in response to prevalent anti-Semitism and recent pogroms, Cahan had become a fullfledged revolutionary socialist, dedicated to the overthrow of the czar and hunted by the Russian government. Hoping to create in America a prototype communist colony in which Jew and Gentile were equal, Cahan immigrated to New York in 1882. Upon his arrival, Cahan modulated his outspoken socialism and embarked on a distinguished career as a Yiddish-language journalist, English teacher, and novelist. As editor for the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward, Cahan transformed the paper from a dry mouthpiece for socialist propaganda into a vital community voice, still socialist in its leanings but dedicated to improving the lives of its audience. One of the early realists, Cahan is appreciated for his frank portrayals of immigrant life. Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Cahan’s first novel in English, follows the rocky road toward Americanization of Yekl Podkovnik, a Russian Jewish immigrant desperately trying to assimilate. Faced with two choices for a wife, Yekl chooses the more assimilated Mamie over his Old World spouse, Gitl, but for all his efforts to become “a Yankee,” Yekl’s tale ends on a melancholy note, demonstrat176
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ing that he is unable to break out of his immigrant identity simply by changing his clothes, his language, and his wife. Cahan’s sense of the loss and confusion faced by immigrants to America is also evident in The Rise of David Levinsky. This masterful novel tells the rags-to-riches story of a clothier who, despite his wealth and success, is lonely and forlorn, distant from his Russian Jewish beginnings, and alienated from American culture. Following the publication of Yekl, Cahan was ushered into the national spotlight by William Dean Howells, who had encouraged many other regional and ethnic writers. Cahan’s career in mainstream English-language publishing, however, was shortlived. After The Rise of David Levinsky, Cahan wrote no more fiction in English, choosing instead to act as a mentor for other writers and to pour his energies into the Jewish Daily Forward.
The Rise of David Levinsky Type of work: Novel First published: 1917 In 1913, in response to a request from the popular McClure’s magazine for articles describing the success of Eastern European immigrants in the U.S. garment trade, Cahan wrote several short stories instead. Subsequently published as a novel, these pieces of fiction permitted Cahan to explore problematic aspects of the process of Americanization, produce vignettes of immigrant Jewish life, and describe the development of a major American industry. Cahan uses the life of David Levinsky to explore three interrelated themes. From the opening paragraph, in which Levinsky asserts that although he is a millionaire he is not a happy man, Cahan examines the ambiguous meaning of success and the personal and psychological cost of achieving material gains. Success distances Levinsky from his friends—the companions who came to America with him and those who helped him during his early and difficult years in the New World. His great wealth overawes them, making them uncomfortable in his presence. In turn, Levinsky can never be certain whether people associate with him out of friendship or because they hope to get some of his money. His business success is accomplished through methods that are unethical when they are not illegal, in violation of the values he learned as a child. Appealing to the Social Darwinist creed of “survival of the fittest” to justify his actions, Levinsky is too insecure psychologically to be certain he is, in fact, truly one of “the fittest.” A second major theme is the development of the American ready-to-wear clothing industry and the surprisingly rapid rise to prominence within that industry of recent Russian Jewish immigrants. Levinsky’s success illustrates how this occurred, but the contradictions between his methods and his inherited values make the meaning of success ambiguous. The third theme, the process of adaptation to American life by Russian Jewish immigrants of Levinsky’s generation, takes up large segments of the novel. Levin-
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sky experiences the teeming Lower East Side, with its peddlers and markets, its storefront synagogues of recent immigrants, their poverty-stricken homes, and their vigorous intellectual life. As he rises in wealth, Levinsky describes the overfurnished homes of the wealthy, their religious compromises, and the lavish resort hotels that also serve as marriage marts. The novel contains a social history of Jewish immigrants in the years before World War I, as they adapt to a new American reality. In fulfilling the commission from McClure’s, Cahan used his fictional manufacturer to show how, in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s, Russian Jews replaced German Jews at the head of the cloak-and-suit trade. Levinsky, always short of cash during his early years, learned to use unethical subterfuges to postpone payment of his bills. He could undercut major firms on prices because the Orthodox East European Jewish tailors he hired were willing to work longer hours for lower wages in return for not having to work on Saturday. Concentrating his clothing line on a few successful designs, frequently illegally copied from those of established manufacturers, Levinsky achieved an economy of operation that permitted him to sell stylish goods at low prices, a process that made fashionable clothes readily available to the majority of American women. When Cahan turned his McClure’s short stories into a longer work, with far greater depth of characterization and scope of social observation, he created the first major novel portraying the Jewish experience in America. In effect, he also created a new literary genre within which there have been many followers. Such acclaimed writers as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow have continued to explore themes first articulated by Cahan.
Suggested Readings Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne, 1996. Mindra, Mihai. Strategists of Assimilation: Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska. Bucharest: Romanian Academy, 2003. Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Contributors: Anne Fleischmann and Milton Berman
Hortense Calisher Born: New York, New York; December 20, 1911 Jewish
Calisher uses sexuality as a metaphor to explore the convolutions and unpredictable twists of the human psyche. Beyond “feminist,” her work compassionately probes the psychology of human motivations. Principal works long fiction: False Entry, 1961; Textures of Life, 1963; Journal from Ellipsia, 1965; The New Yorkers, 1969; Queenie, 1971; Standard Dreaming, 1972; Eagle Eye, 1973; On Keeping Women, 1977; Mysteries of Motion, 1983; The BobbySoxer, 1986; Age, 1987; The Small Bang, 1992 (as Jack Fenno); In the Palace of the Movie King, 1993; In the Slammer with Carol Smith, 1997; Sunday Jews, 2002 short fiction: In the Absence of Angels: Stories, 1951; Tale for the Mirror: A Novella and Other Stories, 1962; Extreme Magic: A Novella and Other Stories, 1964; “The Railway Police” and “The Last Trolley Ride,” 1966; The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, 1975; Saratoga, Hot, 1985; The Novellas of Hortense Calisher, 1997 nonfiction: Herself, 1972; Kissing Cousins: A Memory, 1988; Tattoo for a Slave, 2004 Hortense Calisher’s (KAL-ih-shur) background was secular-Jewish, with an often emphasized splash of the southern—her father was from Richmond, Virginia. (Both Calisher’s father and paternal grandfather were married and started families late, as do many of her fictional males.) Born and educated in New York City (her B.A. is from Barnard College, where she studied literature and philosophy), she lived there or nearby for most of her life. After graduation from college, she worked as a salesclerk, as a model, and for some years as a social worker. In 1935 she married Heaton Bennett Heffelfinger, an engineer by whom she had a son and a daughter and from whom she was divorced in 1958. In 1959 she married Curtis Harnack, also a writer, who, like her first husband, was a Gentile. In her autobiographical collection Herself, which includes thoughts on writing, on values, and on her contemporaries, she expresses a preference for Christian men. Also in Herself, Calisher obliquely mentions her children, referring once or twice to emotional problems her daughter had when reaching maturity but otherwise saying little about domestic matters. She does indicate that she spent much time traveling for the United States 179
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Information Agency in the 1950’s; on a trip to the Far East she noted that Japanese writers had maintained that their own literature differed from Western literature in that they had no sense of original sin. If that is so, there is a definite Eastern quality to Calisher’s fiction. Calisher was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and 1953 and received many other awards, both literary and academic. She wrote that she does not care for academic life, nor does she believe much in creative writing classes. Nonetheless, she served on the faculties of Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, Brandeis University, Columbia University, Bennington College, Washington University, and Brown University. Although she wrote poetry in the 1930’s, Calisher published none of it. She saw her first story, “A Box of Ginger,” in print in The New Yorker in 1948. Her bestknown and most often anthologized story, “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” is another early effort, and in it much is encapsulated that appears with variations in her other work. In this story Peter, a young heterosexual man who has driven his hysterical and sometimes nymphomaniacal mother to a sanatorium, decides to visit the apartment of an older friend, a homosexual. The middle-aged man is another recurring type, a remittance man whose family pays him to keep his distance; he is in the process of leaving his lover for another, who is in the room when Peter visits. The daughter of the fickle remittance man arrives, and while conversation continues in the front room, the rejected lover jumps to his death, the replacement makes himself scarce, and Peter and the young woman get acquainted. All of this occurs in a very few pages. As Calisher has said, “a story is an apocalypse, served in a very small cup.” Calisher’s characters are sophisticated, and they often seem to resemble the characters in Henry James’s works. They are intellectuals, certainly, but people whose approach to life is primarily aesthetic. Indeed, she often has been compared to James and to Marcel Proust, though in Herself she notes that she read these authors only after she was established. In short, her stories are ones similar to many that appear in The New Yorker, whose editors for a long time enjoyed first-refusal rights on what she wrote. Critics have commented that Calisher’s novels are essentially the same type of fiction as her short stories, only longer. Most often, sexuality is the metaphor Calisher uses to explore the convolutions and unpredictable twists of the human psyche. Her characters have hidden curiosities that are revealed at least in part; these revelations hint at more mysteries yet unexplored, and not necessarily sexual ones. While her characters generally experience some defeat and feelings of hopelessness, Calisher’s work champions selfawareness and the principles of love. She has, especially, been praised for her insight into women’s lives, but her work could not be labeled “feminist.” Indeed, it is much broader, compassionately probing the psychology of human motivations.
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In the Palace of the Movie King Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 In the Palace of the Movie King is a variation on the theme of the transportational journey, which is a common thread among a number of Calisher’s novels and short stories, including Journal from Ellipsia, On Keeping Women, and Age. In this narrative, her protagonist, film director Paul Gonchev, a perpetual “outsider,” is removed from the world he knows and, after a series of dramatic and traumatic dislocations, comes to realize the emptiness of his life, the meaninglessness of political boundaries, and the significance of his relationships to his wife and children. This is a novel of picaresque adventures with a postmodern European twist, as Gonchev deals with shifting political realities as well as fundamental existential questions. Gonchev’s adventures in the “West” include his kidnapping; a period of being unable to speak any language but the Japanese of his boyhood; an affair with his interpreter, which ends unhappily because of the differences in their ethnicities; encounters with professional dissidents and their dissatisfied wives; interactions with faceless government departments; and ultimately, reunion with his beloved wife, who has had her own series of adventures. In this novel, Calisher is at the peak of her powers of observation and description. Readers should not be put off by her prose, which has a tendency to be subtle, elliptical, and complex. This novel is an ambitious, elegant examination of the meanings of place, politics, art, and love in a world defined by isolation and separation.
Suggested Readings Aarons, Victoria. “The Outsider Within: Women in Contemporary Jewish American Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 3 (1987): 378-393. Calisher, Hortense. “The Art of Fiction: Hortense Calisher.” Interview by Allen Gurganus, Pamela McCordick, and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review 29 (Winter, 1987): 157-187. _______. Introduction to The Novellas of Hortense Calisher. New York: The Modern Library, 1997. _______. “Saturday Review Talks to Hortense Calisher.” Saturday Review 11 (July/August, 1985): 77. Hahn, Emily. “In Appreciation of Hortense Calisher.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6 (Summer, 1965): 243-249. Shinn, Thelma J. Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Snodgrass, Kathleen. The Fiction of Hortense Calisher. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. Contributor: J. H. Bowden
Bebe Moore Campbell Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 1950 Died: Los Angeles, California; November 27, 2006 African American
Campbell offers telling portraits of people of many backgrounds. Principal works children’s literature: Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry, 2003 (Earl B. Lewis, illustrator); Stompin’ at the Savoy, 2006 long fiction: Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, 1992; Brothers and Sisters, 1994; Singing in the Comeback Choir, 1998; What You Owe Me, 2001; Seventy-two Hour Hold, 2005 nonfiction: Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage, 1986 (revised 2000); Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and Without My Dad, 1989 As a child, Bebe Moore Campbell spent her school years in Philadelphia with her mother and her summers in North Carolina with her father. She writes of this divided life in Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and Without My Dad, drawing sharp contrasts between the two worlds. She credits both parents with shaping her into a writer. Her mother, an avid storyteller, designated Sundays as church day and library day. Having learned the value of stories and writing, Campbell composed stories for her father, cliff-hangers designed to elicit his immediate response. By the third grade, she knew that she wanted to be a writer; however, not until her mother gave her a book written by an African American did she feel affirmed in that ambition. The knowledge that African Americans wrote books gave her the permission she needed to pursue her dream. Campbell earned a B.S. degree in elementary education at the University of Pittsburgh, later teaching elementary school for ten years in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. An early marriage ended in divorce. Campbell, as her mother had, assumed the responsibilities of a single parent. Her writing career began when the editor of Essence gave a lecture at Howard University. Campbell hurriedly handed her young daughter, Maia, to a friend for care so that she could chase the woman to the ladies room and tell her of her writing aspirations. The woman, impressed, helped Campbell enter the publishing world. Campbell moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980’s. There she married a banker, Ellis Gordon, Jr., who also had a child, a son named Ellis Gordon III. 182
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In the early 2000’s, Campbell turned her efforts to writing for younger readers. Her book Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry addresses a parent’s bipolar disorder from a young daughter’s point of view, and Stompin’ at the Savoy, for elementary schoolchildren, expressed the joy of jazz and dance through a child’s eyes. Diagnosed with brain cancer in her mid-fifties, Campbell died in Los Angeles in 2006.
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine was inspired by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, an African American teenager from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi after speaking to a white woman. Till’s death was widely discussed in the African American community, and Campbell grew up feeling that she had known him. Since his murderers were never brought to justice, she sought in Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine to create a fictional world in which the justice that society withheld exists. The novel showcases her ability to portray many diverse characters. The plot chronicles the aftermath of the murder of Armstrong Todd, an event that reverberates in the lives of two families, one black and one white. The novel opens in 1955 in Hopewell, Mississippi, where Armstrong, a fifteen-year-old African American, has come from Chicago to spend the summer with his grandmother. Unused to the ways of the South, he is not aware of the consequences that await him for speaking to Lily Cox, a white woman. When Armstrong is killed by Lily’s husband Floyd, family members of the murderer and the victim are forced to examine their lives in relation to this act. Over time Lily comes to realize that Armstrong’s death was prompted more by Floyd’s desire to please his father than to protect her. This growing awareness causes her to question her passive allegiance to her husband, a role which she had been taught that women should assume. This shift is furthered by her daughter Doreen, who is not afraid to stand up to her father, a man from whom she feels her mother needed more protection than from Armstrong. In Chicago, Todd’s parents, Delotha and Wydell, must deal with their feelings of guilt and failure that their son’s death produces. Delotha’s identity is bound up in her obsession to produce another male child to take Armstrong’s place, a son whom she must protect from white people. Yet her resolve is pitted against Wydell’s reluctance to be a father again, born of his fear of failing yet another child. Eventually, another son, W. T., is born to them, a boy threatening to be lost not to whites but to the streets of Chicago. When Wydell takes his son to Hopewell, another aspect of the interwoven identities of the two families surfaces. When the novel opens, Lily Cox is listening to the singing of African Americans as they work the cotton fields. She says that the music makes her feel “strong and hopeful,” as if she were being healed. When the novel closes, Wydell shows his son where he and others worked the fields, explaining to him that the workers battled
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the harshness of their lives with song. The songs recalled by Wydell form the backdrop of Lily’s life. Both acknowledge song as a source of healing for broken souls. Campbell has said that the title of her novel reflects some irony. In some ways all blues are the same, since human pain is human pain.
Brothers and Sisters Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 Her second novel, Brothers and Sisters, is set around another event affecting the African American community. Rodney King, an African American motorist, was beaten by police officers in Los Angeles in 1992. The beating was captured on videotape, but the policemen were found not guilty in their first trial, resulting in riots. Delving into the aftermath of this event, Brothers and Sisters explores the way in which race affects the relationship between an African American woman, bank manager Esther Jackson, and a white woman, loan officer Mallory Post. Mallory holds a position coveted by Esther but denied her because of racism. These two women are cautious friends, neither completely comfortable with the other race—one filled with underlying anger, the other always fearful of appearing racially insensitive. Esther is the sort of woman who will not date “down”: She is insistent on running a kind of financial background check on her suitors. Mallory
Bebe Moore Campbell (Courtesy, Gordon/Barash Associates, Inc.)
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urges Esther to relax her demand for upward mobility and to date the mail-truck driver because he is nice and will treat her well. Campbell notes that Mallory, as a middle-class white woman, has “the freedom to exercise these choices because she’s not so clutched about trying to get to the next rung on the ladder and thinking she’s got to be with the proper partner to get there.” Campbell hoped that the novel would “serve as a kind of blueprint, to help people foster racial understanding.” She says that “our strengths lie in saluting our differences and getting along.” While she is aware that many of the problems in the black community have to do with institutionalized racism, she also feels that “African-Americans need to begin to look really closely and make some movement toward changing the problems” and to recognize that some of them are the result of choices they have made. The response to Brothers and Sisters was uncommon, in that hundreds of discussion groups formed to come to terms with its issues. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, an area with a large black population as well as a relatively stable white one, the book became the basis of a community project: People studied the impact of bias and sought ways to deal effectively with communication breakdowns between races. Campbell laments the abandonment of the old neighborhoods, feeling that integration should not entail embracing white communities at the expense of black ones. She urges middle-class blacks to stay in touch with those less fortunate, to mentor the young. She feels that men, in particular, must take steps toward regaining control of their children and of the streets. In an interview with Martha Satz published in the Southwest Review (Spring, 1996), she observed that the Million Man March, with its resultant reawakening of moral, ethical, familial, and racial responsibilities, may have been responsible for the dramatically lower number of arson incidents in Detroit on Halloween of that year.
Singing in the Comeback Choir Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 Singing in the Comeback Choir is the story of Malindy Walker, a once-famous entertainer who has fallen ungracefully into old age, with its sometimes attendant sense of the pointlessness of the battle. Her life consists mainly of stealthily smoking and drinking, despite admonitions from her doctor. Based loosely on Alberta Hunter, jazz legend of the 1940’s and 1950’s, Malindy is a fiercely independent soul who has no intention of bowing to her granddaughter’s wish to have her cared for (and closely supervised) in a senior citizen compound. The old neighborhood in which she lives has fallen into ruin, but Malindy’s friends are there; memories of her great triumphs, of her sequined gowns and the applause, seem to sustain her. Her underlying sadness is over her diminished singing ability. She sees herself as finished, so she partakes of the fleeting pleasures of alcohol and nicotine. Her granddaughter, Maxine Lott McCoy, a highly successful television pro-
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ducer with a relatively good marriage and a child on the way, is a professional who bears some resemblance to Campbell herself. She comes to the rescue of her grandmother, only to find that she herself is the one who needs to be rescued—from the high-powered yet insular and protected world in which she has lost touch with her origins. Therein lies the point of the novel. The old neighborhoods are dying because they have been abandoned by those who could give them life, the ones who are capable of regeneration. Maxine is saddened by what is left of her grandmother’s street and by the dead eyes of the neighborhood boy she once knew; now grown and playing at being a man, he curses her and makes sexually threatening gestures. She confronts him but sees that he is the wave of the future unless others can intervene and help. Part of Campbell’s intent in the novel was “to talk about the work that needs to be done” in order to salvage and rebuild the decaying neighborhoods and despairing lives. She has noted that she wants “black folks to do the hard work that we’ve done in the past that we haven’t been doing as much in the years following the Civil Rights movement.” Bebe Campbell’s early works were primarily nonfiction. Her first book, Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage, delves into the effect of the feminist movement on family structure, most notably the shifting gender roles that result when women, either of necessity or in quest of self-actualization, seek work outside the home, sometimes upsetting the balance within. Her second work, Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and Without My Dad, is her memoir as a child of divorce having to spend the school year with her mother in Philadelphia and the summer with her father in North Carolina. The book was hailed for showing loving relationships in the black community and for stressing the importance of men or male figures in young girls’ lives. Poet Nikki Giovanni praised it for providing “a corrective to some of the destructive images of black men that are prevalent in our society” and doing so with great vitality and clarity. Campbell has produced nonfiction articles for a wide range of publications, including Essence, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Black Enterprise, Working Mother, Adweek, Ms., and Glamour; she was a contributing editor for Essence, Black Enterprise, and Savvy. In the 1990’s, she became a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.
Suggested Readings Campbell, Bebe Moore. “Bebe Moore Campbell: Her Memoir of ‘A Special Childhood’ Celebrates the Different Styles of Her Upbringing in a Divided Black Family.” Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly, June 30, 1989, 82-84. _______. “Interview with Bebe Moore Campbell.” Interview by Jane Campbell. Callaloo 22, no. 4 (1999): 954-973. Chambers, Veronica. “Which Counts More, Gender or Race?” The New York Times Magazine, December 25, 1994, 16-19. Edgerton, Clyde. “Medicine for Broken Souls.” The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, 13.
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Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine: Keeping Issues of Race and Racism on the Multicultural Agenda.” Theory into Practice 35, no. 4 (1996): 248-256. Olendorf, Donna, ed. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 139. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1993. Powers, Retha. “A Tale of Two Women.” Ms., September/October, 1994, 78. Satz, Martha. “I Hope I Can Teach a Little Bit: An Interview with Bebe Moore Campbell.” Southwest Review 81 (Spring, 1996): 195-213. See, Lisa. “Bebe Moore Campbell.” Publishers Weekly, June 30, 1989, 82-83. Winter, Kari J. “Brothers and Sisters, by B. M. Campbell.” African American Review 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 369-372. Contributors: Jacquelyn Benton and Gay Annette Zieger
Lorene Cary Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; November 29, 1956 African American
Whether writing about her own life or writing about women from history or contemporary women, Cary offers varied insights into African American life. Principal works long fiction: The Price of a Child, 1995; Pride, 1998 nonfiction: Black Ice, 1991 (autobiography) Lorene Cary (lohr-REEN KAR-ree), who became a freelance writer in the 1980’s, gained prominence in the 1990’s for her autobiography and novels. Education had always been a dominant factor in her life. The daughter of teachers John and Carole (née Hamilton) Cary, Lorene was raised in Philadelphia and one of its suburbs, Yeadon, where she attended public schools. In the early 1960’s, Cary’s parents decided that their daughter, who was about to enter first grade, should attend the Lea School, where musical instrument lessons, French classes, an individualized reading series, and advanced Saturday morning classes were offered. Although the Carys lived outside the Lea School district, Carole Cary convinced the principal to consider her daughter for admission. After Cary passed an I.Q. test, she was placed in Lea’s top first-grade class. By the time Cary was a teenager, her family had moved to Yeadon. She transferred from the public high school and spent her junior and senior years at the elite Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, after a friend of the family told her that the formerly all-male, segregated boarding school was offering scholarships to African American girls. She was one of only three or four girls in her classes, and during her first year, all the teachers were men. Her years at Saint Paul’s were successful; she wrote articles for a school publication, was elected senior class vice president, and was the recipient of the Rector’s Award. Cary graduated from Saint Paul’s in 1974. Fourteen years later, she wrote about her days as a Saint Paul’s coed in an article for American Visions. Cary then expanded the article into her autobiography, Black Ice, her most critically acclaimed and well-known book. In Black Ice, Cary documents her experiences as a member of the generation of African American students who were the first of their race to attend elite prep schools during the stage of school integration that occurred after the public school desegregation efforts of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The American Library Association selected Black Ice as one of its Notable Books 188
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in 1992. Cary’s autobiography has been compared with Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). Black Ice is a valuable addition to the tradition of African American first-person narrative that extends back to the 1700’s. Cary continued her education at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English in 1978. Cary, as a recipient of a Thouron Fellowship, then studied Victorian literature and religion at England’s Sussex University, where she completed her second M.A. in 1979. One year later, Cary was an apprentice at Time magazine, and in 1981 she became an associate editor of TV Guide. She became a freelance writer in 1983, and her articles appeared in such periodicals as Essence, The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, Obsidian, Mirabella, and American Visions. In 1993 she was a contributing editor for Newsweek. Cary began her career as an educator at Saint Paul’s in 1982, where she taught for one year and was a trustee from 1985 to 1989. She also taught at Antioch University, Philadelphia campus; Philadelphia University of the Arts; and the University of Pennsylvania, where she became a faculty member in the Department of English in 1995. Her novel, The Price of a Child, based on a nineteenth century African American woman who was a fugitive slave as well as an abolitionist, and Pride, her interpretation of the lives of four contemporary black women, were published during her tenure at the University of Pennsylvania. Cary combined her dual careers as an author and educator in 1998 in the form of Art Sanctuary. She founded this nonprofit program, located in North Philadelphia at the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building, as a lecture and performance series presenting African American writers and artists to the community. Cary continued to reside in Philadelphia with her husband, writer and editor Robert C. Smith, with whom she had two daughters.
Black Ice Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1991 Black Ice provides glimpses into the mind and life of a young girl attending a prestigious prep school in New England. In 1971, Lorene Cary, an academically gifted African American teenager from Philadelphia, is invited to attend St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Cary looks forward to the educational challenge and is excited to learn about upper-class and New England living, money, power, and the handsome Mike Russell, a St. Paul’s senior who helps recruit new African American students. Cary unravels and compares her childhood experiences to her adolescent ones at St. Paul’s. She enters the school as an ambitious student with a mission to “turn it out,” both academically and socially. Amid both successes and failures, her first year’s experiences range from romance and sex to the mischief of petty stealing, lying, and smoking marijuana. The older Cary feels a different pressure in her second year, serving as the first female vice president, making decisions that, at times, alienate her from some of her closest friends. She experiences a frustrating self-
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awakening as she realizes that she lacks skills that her upper-class schoolmates take for granted. After graduation, she goes on to earn degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to teach at St. Paul’s, where she later becomes a trustee, she feels that her bittersweet experience changed her into a “crossover artist.” Black Ice, a moderately toned autobiography, captures the contradictions of youth. Cary’s memoir is grounded in vivid particulars: childhood songs and stories, the acute embarrassments and delights of adolescence. She divulges personal secrets while subtly revealing the silent isolation she felt as a student at St. Paul’s.
The Price of a Child Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 Based on an actual story, The Price of a Child is a moving and suspenseful account of a courageous woman’s attempts to obtain freedom for herself and for others. After dreaming of freedom all her life, Virginia (Ginnie) Pryor finally has a chance to escape from the Virginian Jackson Pryor, father of two of her three children. With the help of the Philadelphia Underground Railroad, Ginnie, her daughter, and her older son walk away from Pryor and take refuge with the Quicks, a large, prosperous black family, active in the abolitionist cause. However, even in the North there are problems. Ginnie, now Mercer Gray, cannot forget the baby she left behind. She also worries about Pryor’s efforts to get her back or to avenge himself on her rescuers. Within the Quick family there are the usual conflicts, often between amorous men and their wives, who are too tired from hard work and childbearing to be interested. Ironically, the two characters who seem made for each other, Mercer and the personable Tyree Quick, cannot marry because, to his regret, Tyree already has a wife. In the end, the lovers part, Tyree to take care of his extended family, Mercer to continue speaking out against slavery and for women’s rights, exposing herself to the salacious curiosity of her audience, as well as to threats from mobs of Northern anti-abolitionists. However, at the end of this memorable novel, the heroine’s virtue is rewarded, for as a gift from Tyree, Mercer receives “the price of a child,” that is, enough money to recover the little boy she lost.
Suggested Readings Bigelow, Barbara Carlisle, ed. “Lorene Cary.” In Contemporary Black Biography: Profiles from the International Black Community, vol. 3, edited by Michael L. LeBlanc. Detroit: Gale, 1993. Woodson, Rose. “Lorene Cary.” In Facts On File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America, vol. 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. New York: Facts On File, 1997. Contributor: Linda M. Carter
Carlos Castaneda Born: Cajamarca, Peru(?); December 25, 1925(?) Died: Los Angeles, California; April 27, 1998 Peruvian American
A controversial anthropologist whose novelistic writings attracted a large following beginning in the 1970’s, Castaneda is best known for his novel-like study of Yaqui culture and ritual peyote use, The Teachings of Don Juan. Principal works nonfiction: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, 1968 (fictionalized ethnographic study); A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, 1971; Journey to Ixtlán: The Lessons of Don Juan, 1972; Tales of Power, 1974; The Second Ring of Power, 1977; The Eagle’s Gift, 1981; The Fire from Within, 1984; The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan, 1987; The Art of Dreaming, 1993; The Active Side of Infinity, 1998; Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, 1998; The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death, and the Universe, 1998 Carlos Castaneda (KAR-lohs kahs-tahn-NAY-dah) is a controversial anthropologist whose novelistic writings have attracted a large following. He claims to have been born in São Paulo, Brazil, on December 25, 1935. Some reference works concur with this place of birth but list December 25, 1931, as the date. Castaneda claims that he was born into a prominent Italian family of another name, that his mother died when he was a child, and that his father was a professor of literature. According to his story, he legally took the name Castaneda in 1959. Yet United States immigration records indicate that he was born in Cajamarca, Peru, on December 25, 1925, the son of César Arana Burungaray, a goldsmith, and Susan Castaneda Nova. According to these records, he was using the name Castaneda as early as 1951. When confronted with these discrepancies, Castaneda dismissed them as inconsequential. Castaneda graduated from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and later studied painting and sculpture at the National School of Fine Arts in Lima. In 1951, he immigrated to Los Angeles, California. He initially studied psychology at Los Angeles City College between 1955 and 1959. In the latter year, he became a student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received a B.A. in anthropology in 1962. He studied intermittently at UCLA over 191
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the next nine years, earning an M.A. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1970. While a student, Castaneda spent five years in Mexico, apprenticed to a Yaqui sorcerer. It was his account of this apprenticeship that would bring him literary celebrity. Castaneda’s field of graduate study was ethnomethodology, and as early as 1960 he had set out to study the ritual use of medicinal and psychotropic plants by American Indians in the southwestern United States. In the summer of that year, he met Don Juan Matus, an aged member of the Yaqui tribe, who was reputed to have extraordinary powers. First in Arizona and later in Sonora, Mexico, Don Juan initiated Castaneda into the ritual use of peyote and other hallucinogens. By the autumn of 1965, Castaneda had almost come to regard the visionary states shared with the old Indian as an alternate reality, one totally at odds with the rationalistic Western tradition. Castaneda turned the notes he had taken during his apprenticeship into a master’s thesis. In 1968, the University of California Press published the work under the title The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The modest run of two thousand copies excited great interest. The book was reissued as a paperback and immediately became a best seller. It was taken up by the antiestablishment counterculture, which viewed Don Juan as a folk hero and Castaneda as his amanuensis. Also in 1968, Castaneda returned to Mexico to show Don Juan the book in which he was the central character. There, Castaneda had more experiences that defied his scientific rationalism. The result was A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan. Other books followed in rapid succession: Journey to Ixtlán, an account of nonpsychedelic-related exercises practiced during the author’s apprenticeship, and Tales of Power, which recounts further and even more extravagant experiences with Don Juan, now joined by another sorcerer, Don Genaro. Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation was essentially the text of Journey to Ixtlán. The Second Ring of Power, which tells of Castaneda’s encounter with Don Juan’s female disciples, was received with mixed reviews. Castaneda’s earlier writings are linear in their narrative and temporal structure. In later books, such as The Eagle’s Gift, The Fire from Within, The Power of Silence, and The Art of Dreaming, he presents the reader with the process of remembering the events that occurred in the multilayered and multidimensional time he spent with Don Juan. He also confronts the memory of Don Juan and his party moving beyond death and journeying into infinity with their awareness intact. The system of knowledge that Castaneda learned from Don Juan proposes that, by making a minute account of their lives through a practice called recapitulation, people can acquire the necessary energy to challenge the objective existence of this world. An essential step in the process of gaining energy involves eradicating the ego and self-importance. As a practitioner of this system of knowledge, Castaneda did not defend himself or his works from criticism. Castaneda’s subject matter and personality made him a controversial figure. Despite his defenders within the academic community, when Castaneda received his Ph.D. in anthropology, the more staid members of the profession reacted as if the University of California had granted a doctorate in magic. After becoming famous, Castaneda gave interviews in which his date and place of birth, his parents’ names,
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Carlos Castaneda (AP/Wide World Photos)
and the entire history of his childhood conflicted with the official record. Even the date of his Ph.D. ranges from 1970 to 1973 in contemporary reference works. Castaneda maintained that Don Juan had marked him with the responsibility to succeed him as a guide for others in their quest for knowledge. Some critics implied that, because no one except Castaneda had actually seen Don Juan, the books might be largely works of imagination. (Two of Castaneda’s colleagues and fellow apprentices of Don Juan, Florinda Donner-Grau and Taisha Abelar, later published narratives recounting their apprenticeships with Don Juan from a female viewpoint.) Nevertheless, some critics were of the opinion that Castaneda was essentially a gifted novelist and that the literal truth of his accounts was not a crucial factor. Castaneda attempted to teach at the University of California at Irvine but discovered that he was too much of a celebrity to lecture effectively there. He subsequently led a rather reclusive life, working with a few of his students to present and elucidate the principles of “Tensegrity.” The discipline of Tensegrity, based on specialized physical movements that were discovered by the shamans who founded Don Juan’s system of knowledge, purportedly enable the practitioner to gather sufficient energy or impetus to navigate into other worlds. Castaneda died near UCLA in Westwood (a part of Los Angeles), on April 27, 1998. Castaneda’s books have sold in the millions and have been translated into several languages. Their gripping narrative and descriptive power and the beguiling
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and awesome alternatives that they present to ordinary existence have contributed to their popularity. As F. Scott Fitzgerald became the spokesperson for the Jazz Age, Castaneda caught the spirit (or one major part of the spirit) of the turbulent 1960’s and 1970’s and of the New Age movement that emerged from these years: a radical questioning of the values of American life, even of the American perception of reality.
The Teachings of Don Juan Type of work: Ethnography First published: 1968 The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge introduces the mystical character of Juan Matu, a Yaqui Indian from Sonora, Mexico. Born in the Southwest in 1891, Don Juan lived in Mexico until 1940. He then immigrated to Arizona, where he met Castaneda and, in 1961, accepted him as an apprentice in Yaqui sorcery. Until 1965, he instructed Castaneda in becoming a “man of knowledge” through experience with “nonordinary reality.” The teaching required the use of hallucinogenic drugs, and much of the book chronicles Castaneda’s visions while under their influence. The sorcerer teaches Castaneda the procedures for growing, collecting, and preparing drug-yielding plants. Castaneda’s altered states of consciousness frighten and bewilder him, and he repeatedly calls on Don Juan for rational explanations. The Indian counters with metaphysics and insists that his pupil form his own understandings. Don Juan defines a man of knowledge as one “who has, without rushing or faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power.” Only he who challenges and defeats the four “natural enemies”—fear, clarity, power, and old age—can become such a man. He recommends “a path with heart.” All paths lead nowhere, he says, but those with heart make for a joyful journey. Becoming a man of knowledge requires in-depth learning, unbending intent, strenuous labor, and the possession of an ally. An ally is either “the smoke” (psilocybin from mushrooms) or jimson weed. “The smoke will set you free to see anything you want to see,” Don Juan claims. A third drug, mescaline (peyote), is not an ally but a protector and teacher. Don Juan claims that mescaline has an identity of its own outside the user. In contrast, an ally resides within, bestowing the ability to perform fantastic feats, such as assuming animal form. Although presented as a work of ethnographic research and published as a master’s thesis in anthropology, the book is widely agreed to be fiction. The work is condemned by some as a hoax. Whether truth or fabrication, it has been widely read and served to consolidate the role of hallucinogens in Native American religious rituals with the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
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Suggested Readings De Mille, Richard. Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory. Rev. ed. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978. Keen, Sam. Voices and Visions. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Sánchez, Víctor. The Teachings of Don Carlos: Practical Applications of the Works of Carlos Castaneda. Translated by Robert Nelson. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Bear, 1995. Williams, Donald Lee. Border Crossings: A Psychological Perspective on Carlos Castaneda’s Path of Knowledge. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981. Contributors: Patrick Adcock, Margarita Nieto, and Faith Hickman Brynie
Ana Castillo Born: Chicago, Illinois; June 15, 1953 Mexican American
Castillo’s writing reflects her involvement in Chicano and Latino political and cultural movements, as well as her strong commitment to feminist and environmental concerns. Principal works children’s literature: My Daughter, My Son, the Eagle, the Dove: An Aztec Chant, 2000 long fiction: The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986; Sapogonia, 1990 (revised 1994); So Far from God, 1993; Peel My Love Like an Onion, 1999; The Guardians, 2007 poetry: Otro Canto, 1977; The Invitation, 1979 (second edition 1986); Women Are Not Roses, 1984; My Father Was a Toltec, 1988; My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988, 1995; I Ask the Impossible, 2001; Watercolor Women/ Opaque Men, 2005 short fiction: Ghost Talk, 1984; The Antihero, 1986; Subtitles, 1992; Loverboys: Stories, 1996 translation: Esta Puente, Mi Espalda, 1988 (This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, editors) nonfiction: Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, 1994 edited texts: The Sexuality of Latinas, 1993; Recent Chicano Poetry/Neueste Chicano-Lyrik, 1994; Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas, 1996 One of the most prominent and versatile Chicana writers in the United States, Ana Castillo (AH-nah kahs-TEE-yoh) is the author of poetry, novels, critical essays, translations, and edited texts. The Chicago-born Castillo first became known as a poet. Her writing reflects her involvement in Chicano and Latino political and cultural movements, as well as her strong commitment to feminist and environmental concerns. Among the many grants and awards she has received are the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction in 1993 for So Far from God, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 1987 for The Mixquiahuala Letters, and National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships in 1990 and 1995. She has taught and lectured at several American and European universities. Castillo began publishing poetry while she was still a student at Northeastern Illinois University, from which she graduated with a degree in liberal arts in 1975. She first published in journals such as Revista Chicano-Riqueño, and her first col196
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lection, Otro Canto, appeared in 1977. This was followed by The Invitation in 1979, the same year that she received an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean studies from the University of Chicago. Castillo’s early poems reveal her involvement in El Movimiento (the Chicano/ Latino civil rights movement), as well as her developing feminism and her poetic use of eroticism. The theme of social protest in Otro Canto appears in poems such as “A Christmas Carol: c. 1976,” spoken in the voice of a Chicana facing divorce and poverty amid memories of her childhood dreams. Other frequently noted poems from the volume include “Napa, California” and “1975.” The Invitation displays Castillo’s disillusionment with the persistent sexism of the male-dominated Civil Rights movement. Castillo’s response in The Invitation is to appropriate the erotic, rejecting taboos and clichés through a female speaker who explores and defines her sexuality in her own terms. In 1984, a year after the birth of her son, Marcel Ramón Herrera, selections from Otro Canto and The Invitation were reprinted, along with new pieces, in Women Are Not Roses. Castillo’s rejection of antifeminist stereotypes appears in the volume’s title poem, as well as in “The Antihero,” in which Castillo explores the male need to construct and objectify the feminine. My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems, 1973-1988 is noted for its treatment of Chicana identity in poems such as “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain” and the political resonance of the utopian “In My Country.” Castillo began writing her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, at the age of twenty-three. Published ten years later, in 1986, The Mixquiahuala Letters is an epistolary novel that records the shifting relationship of two Latinas: Teresa, the author of the letters, and the artist Alicia. Their friendship becomes a record of betrayals through which Castillo explores internalized sexism and the negation of lesbian desire. Castillo’s main characters meet in Mexico; through their experiences in Mexico and the United States, Castillo probes race, class, and gender issues from a variety of perspectives. This strategy is enhanced by Castillo’s experimental provision of multiple sequences in which the letters can be read. Although the novel is dedicated to Julio Cortázar, Castillo’s strongest literary influence was the controversial Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972) by the “three Marias” (Maria Barreno, Maria Horta, and Maria Costa), a work that inspired Castillo’s presentation of sexuality and her challenge of Catholicism. In 1990, Castillo moved from California to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In that same year, she published Sapogonia, a novel set in the mythical country of Sapogonia, the home of all mestizos. The novel depicts the obsession of Máximo Madrigal with singer and activist Pastora Aké. Máximo’s need to dominate Pastora is presented both as the legacy of the conquest, with the European-identified Máximo playing out the role of conquistador, and as a function of the cultural position of women who, like Pastora, participate in their own objectification. The 1993 publication of Castillo’s novel So Far from God, along with the republication of Sapogonia, marked her crossover from small presses into the mainstream publishing market. Set in New Mexico, So Far from God illustrates the expansion of Castillo’s political vision to issues such as environmentalism and
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presents a new focus on Latino spirituality and popular culture. Castillo’s main characters, Sofia and her daughters Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca, enact a late twentieth century version of the martyrdom of Saint Sophia. However, while Sofia’s daughters fall victim to war, toxic chemicals, and violence, Sofia becomes a paragon of strength and survival. Although tragic at times, So Far from God, like many of Castillo’s works, also reveals her ironic sense of humor. Many of Castillo’s political concerns are presented in her book of essays, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Castillo develops a Chicana feminism that addresses the history of the colonized woman, taking into account her sexuality and her spirituality, both of which must be freed from institutional oppression. In 1996, Castillo published the short-story collection Loverboys, which was centered on the theme of desire, both homosexual and heterosexual. The novel Peel My Love Like an Onion returned to the subject of flamenco dancing and music explored in Sapogonia and delved into the erotic lives of its main characters. Her varied works have firmly established Castillo as an influential Latina feminist writer and theorist.
So Far from God Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 So Far from God is a tragicomic exploration of the cultural and temporal collisions in the Chicana world. The novel tells the story of two decades in the life of Sofia and her four daughters in a small New Mexico town, blending melodrama, visions, recipes, Catholicism, folklore, and miracles through an intimate, conversational tone that incorporates Latino slang and regional dialect. Parodying the Latin American telenovela, or soap opera, the protagonists are soap opera stereotypes. The plot is filled with ironies, and it contrasts the fantasy of the telenovela genre with the realities of Chicana lives. The novel’s admiration and empathy are for the Chicana—the men in the book are damaged or weak. Fe, ambitious, assimilated into the white culture, and perfectly groomed, is ashamed of her family. To reach her dream of middle-class respectability, she works overtime at a factory, where she contracts cancer and dies. The beautiful Caridad, sexually promiscuous after her annulled marriage, is attacked and mutilated. She uses spirituality to reconnect with the mysticism of her heritage, and she becomes a hermit, healer, and channeler. She falls in love with Esmeralda, a lesbian whose Mexican roots mystically connect them. The two die holding hands, leaping from a mesa, called by a Mexican deity. Unlike Fe, who was “plain dead,” they achieve a mythic status. Esperanza, a television journalist and the only collegeeducated sister, is kidnapped and killed in Saudi Arabia. Emotionally connected to the Native American church, her visionary form converses with Caridad. La Loca, the youngest and most visionary, dies of AIDS even though she has had no physical contact with people other than her mother and sister since the age of three.
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Sofia endures. Abandoned by her gambling husband (who returns twenty years later), she raises her daughters alone, establishes herself as mayor, and organizes cooperatives to improve the economic stability of the impoverished town. The novel ends with her founding of the Society of Mothers of Martyrs and Saints as a tribute to La Loca. This act takes a sardonic twist as the society develops into a purveyor of kitsch. Consistent with the oral tradition, the novel relates cherished Latino traditions. As a scathing commentary of the complexities of the Chicana existence, it also portends cultural decline.
Watercolor Women/Opaque Men Type of work: Novel and poetry First published: 2005 That Watercolor Women/Opaque Men is an epic novel in verse detracts neither from its narrative power nor from the troubling story Ana Castillo tells of what the woman protagonist—referred to only as “Ella” (the Spanish for “she”)—endures as an “American.” Particularizing racism, sexism, and homophobia to the story of this one “nameless” Chicana enables Castillo to make her point more harshly: Life for any outsider but particularly for a lesbian Chicana is not easy, even after She has fully embraced her lesbian self as well as her Mexican heritage. Told in a sequence of vignettes about Ella and her relatives, the novel follows She from her early days as the child of hard-working illegal field hands in California, through the turbulent 1960’s in hippy San Francisco, into and out of a marriage, finally arriving at the point where Ella finally is fully “her self ”: a single mother of a son and a lover of women. The aunts, uncles, and Ella’s immediate family serve to reflect Ella’s own circumstances as someone who has been disenfranchised from her own Mexican heritage by her family’s attempt at a better life in the United States as well as to illustrate how difficult it is to achieve that “better” life once in America. The powerful influences in her life are her female relatives, especially an aunt who teaches her self-reliance while on a trip to Chicago. From there, Ella journeys more or less alone, even when married, through the American caste system and endures. That she is essentially always alone is perhaps the main point of this book: Strong women, especially women on the outside, have no other choice. “She” succeeds, but no one except her one aunt offered any help. Although Watercolor Women/Opaque Men is angry, it is, more important, instructive and enlightening: Anyone wishing to gain insight into what it means to be a minority in America will learn much from reading this novel.
Suggested Readings Alarcón, Norma. “The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by
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Asuncion Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Aldama, Fredereick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Curiel, Barbara Brinson. “Heteroglossia in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters.” Discurso Literario 7, no. 1 (1990). Delgadillo, Theresa. “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (Winter, 1998): 888-889. Lanza, Carmela D. “Hearing the Voices: Women and Home and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God.” MELUS 23 (Spring, 1998): 65-79. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Quintana, Alvina. “Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer.” In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Walter, Roland. “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo.” MELUS 23 (Spring, 1998): 81-97. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo.” American Review 20, no. 1 (Spring, 1992). Contributors: Maura Ives and Susan Chainey
Lorna Dee Cervantes Born: San Francisco, California; August 6, 1954 Mexican American
Acting as a mediator between the Chicano community and a mainstream English-speaking audience, Cervantes uses autobiography to translate the experiences of her ethnic and gender communities to a broader audience. Principal works poetry: Emplumada, 1981; From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, 1991; Drive: The First Quartet, 2006 Although Lorna Dee Cervantes (LOHR-nah dee sur-VAHN-tehs) grew up in an urban, working-class barrio, she was raised to speak English because of her family’s fear of racism. As a result, gender issues and ethnicity and language issues play major roles in her poetry. In keeping with such themes, Cervantes describes herself as a Chicana poet, with all the ethnic, gender, and language markers expressed or implied. Furthermore, she means that description to be subversive. When a group or individual self-defines, it is an exercise of power, which leads to self-determination, an act historically denied to women and members of minority ethnic groups. Cervantes notes that women and Chicanos’ common experiences and challenges are in the first case due to machismo and patriarchy and in the second due to racial prejudice and economic exploitation. This unites either group but alienates it from other groups. While the visionary power of poetry can invoke an idealized, utopian world, the real world is beset by social problems, making social revolution necessary. Poetry serves Cervantes as a form of resistance, another means of subversion. She employs narrative poems to represent the real world of conflicts and lyrical poetry for contemplation and meditation. The former deal most specifically with ethnicity and gender, particularly male-female sexual relationships. The lyrical poems frequently bemoan the necessity of social commitment and responsibility. Language serves Cervantes as a power strategy. For example, she juxtaposes versions of her poems in English and Spanish. She does not translate poems, as one poem is not the same as the other: Each develops independently in its own language. She also employs interlingualism—that is, Spanish within English plus barrio dialect—in order to establish her version of literary style rather than follow canonical traditions and customs. Cervantes’s use of autobiography as a poetic strategy has offended some members of her family, who feel that she discloses too many personal details. Her inten201
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tion, however, is to record and translate the experiences of the historical and collective ethnic and gender communities to larger audiences rather than to emphasize her family’s experiences. Furthermore, she sees herself as a mediator between the Chicano community (a largely oral culture) and the English-speaking audience (a largely print culture). In fact, she portrays herself as a scribe in her poem “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway.” Her grandmother is represented as Queen and her mother as Knight. Cervantes earned an undergraduate degree from San Jose State University in 1984 and a doctorate from University of California, Santa Cruz, in the history of consciousness in 1990. She has taught creative writing at the Universities of Colorado at Denver and at Boulder. Cervantes received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and one from the Fine Arts Works Center. She also won a Pushcart Prize, a Provincetown Fellowship, a London Meadow Fellowship, and a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundation Writers Award (1995). She was named Outstanding Chicana Scholar by the National Association of Chicano Scholars. She has served as a judge for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award and as a panelist for Arizona State Arts Commission.
“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1981, in Emplumada
“Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” is probably Cervantes’s best-known poem. In spite of its title and all its natural imagery, however, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” is really a celebration of the power of women. In language that lifts her thoughts to a mythic level, Cervantes creates a powerful statement of Latina strength and a reminder about those—particularly men—who so often take it away. The poem is broken into six numbered parts; all except the first contain verse stanzas themselves. In the first section, the narrator describes the house she lives in with her mother and her grandmother, who “watered geraniums/ [as] the shadow of the freeway lengthened.” “We were a woman family,” the narrator declares in the next stanza and introduces her main theme. Her mother warns her about men, but the narrator models herself more on her grandmother, who “believes in myths and birds” and “trusts only what she builds/ with her own hands.” A drunken intruder (perhaps the mother’s ex-husband) tries to break into the house in section 5 but is scared away. In the final stanza the mother warns the narrator, “‘Baby, don’t count on nobody,’” but the narrator confesses to the reader that “every night I sleep with a gentle man/ to the hymn of the mockingbirds,” plants geraniums, ties her hair up like her grandmother, “and trust[s] only what I have built with my own hands.” The poem is thus a celebration of three generations of women and contains the promise that women can be independent and still find love.
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Suggested Readings Crawford, John F. “Notes Toward a New Multicultural Criticism: Three Works by Women of Color.” In A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. “Lorna Dee Cervantes.” In After Aztlán: Latino Poets of the Nineties, edited by Ray González. Boston: David R. Godine, 1993. “Lorna Dee Cervantes.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature, edited by Claire Buck. New York: Prentice Hall, 1992. McKenna, Teresa. “‘An Utterance More Pure than Word’: Gender and the Corrido Tradition in Two Contemporary Chicano Poems.” In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristianne Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Poetry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Sánchez, Marta Ester. “The Chicana as Scribe: Harmonizing Gender and Culture in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ ‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway.’” In Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Savin, Ada. “Bilingualism and Dialogism: Another Reading of Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Poetry.” In An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, edited by Alfred Arteaga. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. Seator, Lynette. “Emplumada: Chicana Rites-of-Passage.” MELUS 11 (Summer, 1984): 23-38. Wallace, Patricia. “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove.” MELUS 18 (Fall, 1993): 3-19. Contributors: Debra D. Andrist and David Peck
Barbara Chase-Riboud Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; June 26, 1939 African American
Chase-Riboud’s writing explores power relationships as they are shaped by race, gender, and social and political needs. Principal works long fiction: Sally Hemings, 1979; Valide: A Novel of the Harem, 1986 (revised 1988); Echo of Lions, 1989; The President’s Daughter, 1994; Hottentot Venus, 2003 poetry: From Memphis and Peking, 1974; Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, 1987 Barbara DeWayne Chase-Riboud (chays-rih-BOOD) was born and raised in Philadelphia, the only child of a building contractor and a medical assistant. She won her first art prize at age eight. She received a bachelor’s of fine arts from Temple University in 1957 and a master’s of fine arts from Yale University in 1960. In 1961 she married the French photojournalist Marc Eugène Riboud, with whom she had two sons, David and Alexis. She made her home in Europe, mostly in Paris and Rome. After her divorce in 1981, she married Sergio Tosi, an Italian art historian and expert. She traveled widely in Africa and the Near and Far East and was the first American woman to be admitted to the People’s Republic of China after the revolution in 1949. Asked if she felt like an expatriate, she answered: “It takes me three hours to get from Paris to New York, so I don’t really believe in expatriatism anymore.” Chase-Riboud became a popular writer almost overnight with the publication of Sally Hemings, which sold more than one million copies and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel by an American woman in 1979. Ten years later, Echo of Lions sold 500,000 copies and confirmed Chase-Riboud’s reputation as a solid historical novelist who likes to bring historical figures out of an undeserved obscurity. Her original literary vocation, though, was in poetry. From Memphis and Peking combines a strong sensual appeal with the expression of a desire to travel through time, in the form of a quest for her ancestry, and space, in an exploration of the cultures of Africa, America, and China. In 1988, she won the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize for Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, a tortured unveiling of the Egyptian queen’s public and private lives. Even before becoming a poet, Chase-Riboud was a sculptor with an international reputation. She received many fellowships 204
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and awards for her work, including a John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship in 1957-1958 for study at the American Academy in Rome, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1973, and a Van der Zee Award in 1995. Her several honorary doctorates include one from Temple University in 1981. In 1996 she received a Knighthood for Contributions to Arts and Letters from the French government. Chase-Riboud’s historical novels offer a strongly diversified exploration of power relationships as they are shaped by race, gender, and social and political needs. Slavery figures prominently in each novel, not only in its aberrations and its violence but also in the complex configBarbara Chase-Riboud (Courtesy, Author) urations of relationships it produces. The hairsplitting legal separation of the races is rendered incongruous by the intertwined blood ties exemplified in the extended interracial Jefferson family. More controversially, the notions of slave and master lose their sharp distinction in front of multiple forms of attraction and manipulation. It is the theme of profoundly mixed heritage and history, embodied in miscegenation, that ultimately dominates. The “outing” of hidden or mysterious women, such as Sally Hemings or Valide, bespeaks a desire to shake taboos and renew our understanding of world history. Chase-Riboud’s intellectual inquisitiveness, her multilingual and multicultural experience, and her artistic sensibility successfully collaborate in these re-creations of large portions of world history, whose visual power is attained through precise and often poetic descriptions of places, events, clothes, and physiognomies. Especially engaging are the nuanced renderings of the characters’ psychological and emotional turmoil, whether Catherine the Great or the African Joseph Cinque. These are historical novels in the pure Scottian tradition, which depict a welter of official historical events while bringing them to life with invented but eminently plausible depictions of the private lives that lie in the gaps. The sense of wide-ranging tableau is enhanced by a narrative technique that often jumps between numerous characters’ perspectives in successions of relatively short chapters. One can even hear echoes from one novel to another, as Sally Hemings is discussed by John Quincy Adams in Echo of Lions or Thomas Jefferson figures in Valide’s Tripoli episode, and The President’s Daughter even reproduces scenes from Sally Hemings. In October, 1997, Chase-Riboud filed a plagiarism suit against film director Steven Spielberg, accusing him of stealing “themes, dialogue, characters, relation-
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ships, plots, scenes, and fictional inventions” from Echo of Lions for his 1997 film Amistad. The suit ended with an out-of-court settlement, but during the controversy plagiarism charges were turned against Chase-Riboud, for both Echo of Lions and Valide. Although she admitted that not mentioning her sources was an inexperienced writer’s oversight, she pointed out that she often weaves “real documents and real reference materials” into her novels; The President’s Daughter contains nine pages of author’s notes on historical sources.
Sally Hemings Type of work: Novel First published: 1979 This novel is a fictional biography of Sally Hemings, President Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress (in November, 1998, a Nature magazine article revealed, thanks to deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA] evidence, that Jefferson had at least fathered Hemings’s last child). Primarily inspired by Fawn M. Brodie’s 1974 biography Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and by the Hemings family’s oral testimony, Chase-Riboud re-creates known historical events and characters, filling them out with nuanced and convincing psychological and emotional texture. The official facts are: Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Maria to Paris in June of 1787 to join him there, and they all came back to America in October of 1789. A scandal broke out during Jefferson’s first term as president, when he was accused of having a son with his slave Sally, an allegation Jefferson never publicly denied; all seven of Sally’s children were conceived when Jefferson was present at Monticello, his estate in Virginia, and all her children were either allowed to run away or freed by Jefferson’s will. According to Sally’s son Madison Hemings, whose memoirs appeared in the Pike County (Ohio) Republican in 1873, his mother was pregnant with Jefferson’s child when they came back from Paris, and Jefferson had promised her that he would free their children when they turned twenty-one. The novel, which is told mostly from Sally’s point of view, explores with great subtlety the emotional torture involved in a love story between a slave mistress and her master. Her alternate references to him as “my master” or “my lover” reflect her changing evaluation of herself as someone who gave up her freedom for love. A reminder of her surrender is provided by her brother James, who exhorts her to stay in France, where they are legally free, who keeps reproaching her for choosing a golden prison, and who ultimately dies in mysterious circumstances. The relationship with Jefferson is presented realistically, as Sally occupies the underside of his public life, which echoes back into her life though remains frustratingly out of reach. Her rare excursions into public spaces lead to unpleasant confrontations with future vice president Aaron Burr and future First Lady Dolley Madison, reminding her of the limits imposed on her identity by the outside world. The recurring silences between her and her lover, which become a motif in the book, symbolize the extent of her invisibility and powerlessness. As a consequence she starts wielding
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power indirectly and subversively, as she takes over the keys of the house from her mother and decides to methodically attain freedom for each of her children. Ultimately, though, it is the love that defines her more than her slavehood. Sally’s story is told as a flashback, after the census taker Nathan Langdon visits her in her cabin in 1830 and decides to mark her and her two sons down as white, thereby replaying the white world’s many attempts to erase her identity. The novel thus explicitly defines itself as a response to the silences and taboos of American history, as signified by the burning of letters and the ripping up of portraits. Langdon’s interviews with sixth president John Quincy Adams, Burr, and painter John Trumbull, inserted in the middle of the novel, ensure a definite link between Sally Hemings’s private life and the representatives of public history and lend her story long-overdue weight and legitimacy. Although Jefferson remains an elusive figure throughout the book, some personality traits come out forcefully, such as the strength of his desires and passions under a facade of equanimity and his streak of despotism despite his egalitarian principles. The Jefferson family, and Virginia society more generally, are shown to be shot through with violence and decay, as evidenced by Jefferson’s granddaughter’s death at the hands of an abusive husband and George Wythe’s and his mulatto son’s murders by his nephew. The theme of lying to oneself and to others in order to preserve a semblance of social order would remain a dominant one in Chase-Riboud’s oeuvre.
Valide Type of work: Novel First published: 1986 In Valide, Chase-Riboud transports her exploration of power relationships under slavery to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. The novel starts with the death of the sultana Valide in 1817, then retraces her rise from American slave of sultan Abdülhamid I after her capture by Barbary pirates to Ikbal (favorite) to Kadine (official wife) to Valide, queen mother. The subtle political and psychological analysis uncovers the complex usages of power and powerlessness in a profoundly hierarchical and ritualistic social structure. Under her new name, Naksh-i-dil (“embroidered tongue”), she becomes slowly acquainted with the intrigues, alliances, and corruption that condition survival in the harem and that constitute the only possible form of resistance against engulfment by boredom and lassitude. She learns to use her body to wield power over the sultan and her female companions, and love is shown to be merely “a mixture of need and power, lust and loneliness.” The microcosmos of the harem reflects the wider geopolitical struggles of the empire with France, England, and Russia. As a young woman, Naksh-i-dil realizes that the sultan himself is a slave, whose power oscillates between treasons, alliances, and demonstrations of military prowess. Later, as Valide, she displays more political insight than her son and becomes his mastermind; for example, she forces
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a peace treaty with the Russians as an alliance against French emporer Napoleon I. The parallels and contrasts with Russian empress Catherine the Great, whose triumphant trip through the newly acquired Crimea turns out to be an illusion of grandeur, intensify the theme that “there was no absolute tyranny, just as there was no absolute slavery.” By zeroing in on numerous historical figures, such as Russian statesman Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, the sultan Selim III, and American admirals, the novel skillfully captures the intermingling of public and private lives. Detailed descriptions of settings (including a map of the harem), as well as information on social mores, help place this book in the best tradition of the historical novel.
Echo of Lions Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Echo of Lions recounts the true ordeal of fifty-three kidnapped Mende Africans taken to Havana and sold to two Cuban planters, José Ruiz and Pedro Montez. On their way to the plantation aboard the Amistad, the Africans rebelled and killed the captain and the cook, while two sailors escaped. The Spaniards, kept alive to help steer the ship back to Africa, tricked the mutineers by navigating east by day and northwest by night. After their capture off Long Island, the Africans underwent three trials for murder and piracy, the last one in the Supreme Court in March, 1841, which declared them free. The Amistad story, which fascinated the American public at the time, put forth the view of slaves as mere property to be returned to their owners, according to a treaty with Spain, against their constitutional rights as persons illegally captured from their home country. The novel presents a skillful mixture of public and private history, providing minute descriptions of the slaves’ tribulations, their court trials, their incarceration conditions, the New England abolitionist scene, and political debates, all the while infusing them with the historical characters’ intimate thoughts and perspectives. Joseph Cinque, the Africans’ charismatic leader, who, even though the case did little for the abolition of slavery in America, became a symbol of black pride and the right to freedom, as well as John Quincy Adams, who defended the case before the Supreme Court, receive a splendidly nuanced psychological treatment. In occasionally poetic passages Cinque tries to make sense of his new surroundings, recalls the beauty of his native land, and dreams of his wife; excerpts from Adams’s diary bring to light his anxious but intense commitment. Several fictional characters, such as a wealthy black abolitionist and his beautiful daughter, help provide social and emotional texture to the wide-ranging historical material.
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The President’s Daughter Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 A follow-up to Sally Hemings, The President’s Daughter chronicles the life of Harriet Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s white-skinned, red-haired slave daughter, as she leaves Monticello, travels through Europe, and marries a pharmacist in Philadelphia. After his death and burial in Africa, she marries his twin brother and raises seven children, passing as a white woman until her death. This novel of epic proportions gives Harriet’s life a wide public resonance by associating it closely with a stream of historical events, such as Jefferson’s death, the legal twists and turns of the institution of slavery, the Civil War (the Gettysburg battle, in particular), even the European presence in South Africa. Its descriptions of various social circles, such as Philadelphian high society and abolitionist groups, its renderings of long conversations on issues of the day, and its lengthy time span, give it a nineteenth century novel’s consistency. Its themes, though, are painfully contemporary. Besides the continued exploration of filial love and power relationships, the novel concentrates on the psychological tortures of Harriet as an impostor and betrayer of her two families, the white and the black. The motif of fingerprints as an unmistakable bearer of identity is complicated when Harriet loses hers after burning her hand and sees the signs of her identity thus irrecoverably lost. The local theme of slavery as an institution based on fake premises and dependent on duplicity and lies reaches a philosophical dimension when Jefferson’s Paris lover, Maria Cosway, whom Harriet visits in her Italian convent, teaches her that “nothing is real” and “everything is illusion.” The theme of race relations receives a more bitter treatment in this sequel, as even love cannot seem to rise above gulfs of incomprehension.
Suggested Readings Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “‘I Write in Tongues’: The Supplement of Voice in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings.” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 1 (1994): 100-135. _______. “Representing the Constitution: Embodiments of America in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Echo of Lions.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 4 (Summer, 1995): 258-280. Stout, Candace Jesse. “In the Spirit of Art Criticism: Reading the Writings of Women Artists.” Studies in Art Education 41, no. 4 (2000): 346-361. Contributor: Christine Levecq
Denise Chávez Born: Las Cruces, New Mexico; August 15, 1948 Mexican American
Chávez’s poetry, fiction, and numerous plays show Mexican American women searching for personal identity and space in a complex cultural environment. Principal works long fiction: Face of an Angel, 1994; Loving Pedro Infante, 2001 short fiction: The Last of the Menu Girls, 1986 nonfiction: A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture, 2006 Denise Chávez (CHAH-vehs) was born in the desert Southwest, and she writes about the Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Anglo-Americans, and others who provide the region’s rich cultural tapestry. Her works consistently focus on the strength and endurance of ordinary working-class Latino women. Chávez had twelve years of Catholic schooling and started writing diaries and skits while still in elementary school. She received her bachelor of arts degree in theater from New Mexico State University in 1971, her master of fine arts in theater from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974, and her master of arts in creative writing from the University of New Mexico in 1984. During her school years she worked in a variety of jobs—in a hospital, in an art gallery, and in public relations. She also wrote poetry, fiction, and drama, always with emphasis on the lives of women. She taught at Northern New Mexico Community College, the University of Houston, Artist-in-the-Schools programs, and writers’ workshops. Chávez has written numerous plays and literary pieces, which she often performed or directed, including a national tour with her one-woman performance piece. Her plays have been produced throughout the United States and Europe. Her plays (mostly unpublished), written in English and Spanish, include Novitiates (1971), The Flying Tortilla Man (1975), Rainy Day Waterloo (1976), The Third Door (1978), Sí, hay posada (1980), The Green Madonna (1982), La morenita (1983), El más pequeño de mis hijos (1983), Plague-Time (1984), Novena Narrativas (1986), and Language of Vision (1987). The Last of the Menu Girls, interrelated stories about a young Chicana, and the novel Face of an Angel have established Chávez’s high reputation as a fiction writer. Both works address critical questions of personal and cultural identity with extraordinary wit and compassion. Chávez has a striking ability to create a sense of 210
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individual voice for her characters, and she makes that voice resonate for readers who may or may not be familiar with the places and people about whom she writes.
The Last of the Menu Girls Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1986 Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls is a collection of seven interrelated stories about Rocío Esquibel, a young Mexican American woman in southern New Mexico who seeks to understand herself, her family, and her community. Rocío’s development from girl to woman gives unity to the collage of stories. As Rocío observes those around her, she provides a portrait of a culturally diverse community and a clear insight into the human condition. The title story introduces Rocío at age seventeen beginning her first job as an aide in a hospital in her hometown. It is the summer of 1966. One of her tasks is to take menus to patients and get their requests for meals. Rocío studies the patients with great attention. She sees them as individuals with differing needs, and her heart reaches out to them so fully that she suspects she is too emotional for the job. Her emotional investment, however, helps Rocío understand others and makes her better able to understand herself. By the end of the summer Rocío has been promoted to other duties in the hospital, and the system has changed; she is literally the last of the menu girls. Her compassion for others continues to serve her well as a way of understanding herself and her relationship to the world. In the other stories Rocío increasingly looks to the past, to her personal history, and to that of her Mexican American culture. She also tries to envision the future, to create the woman she hopes to be. By the end of the stories, Rocío has found her mission. As her mother says, it would take a lifetime to write even the story of their home; there are stories all around. Rocío dedicates herself to writing the lives of the ordinary people she knows, people who often cannot speak for themselves. In the process of telling their stories, Rocío will speak for herself and for her culture.
Face of an Angel Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 Face of an Angel specifically addresses the quest for identity of Soveida Dosamantes, a hardworking waitress at El Farol Mexican Restaurant in southern New Mexico. The rich cast of characters around Soveida provides detailed portraits of the lives of Mexican, American, and Mexican American working-class men and women in the Southwest. The work describes these characters’ various struggles to know themselves and to be accepted in a multicultural setting. The novel speaks
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compellingly of the importance of the individual self and the social attitudes that allow the individual freedom to function. Soveida, who narrates most of the novel, has grown up in Agua Oscura, a fictional small town in the desert Southwest. Soveida explores the boundaries of her life through her interactions with her mother Dolores, her grandmother Mama Lupita, her cousin Mara, and a wide cast of other townspeople. As Chávez brings this population of memorable characters to life, their actions and motivations are shown to be reflections of social attitudes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. It is difficult for them to break through these received attitudes to wholeness and acceptance of others. Soveida, for example, seems destined to repeat the same mistakes other women in her family made in their choice of partners, and she becomes involved with a number of lazy and hurtful men, including her two husbands. Soveida eventually writes a handbook for waitresses, called “The Book of Service,” based on her thirty years of work at El Farol. The advice she gives about service reflects her ideas about her life and her connections with other people, and it shows her growing sense of pride in herself as a Chicana. She has learned to question and reject the limited roles assigned to Mexican American women in a maledominated society, and instead she develops a philosophy that encompasses individual strength and endurance combined with a genuine respect for others, as shown through service. Soveida’s philosophy is reinforced by the novel’s unrestrained, irreverent, and hilarious scenes, by the effective use of colloquial bilingual speech, and by the indepth exploration of such universal issues as poverty, personal relationships, illness, and death. Chávez’s characters are all individuals with distinctive voices, and she draws them together in ways that show the possibilities of changing social prejudices. Her major themes focus on the rights and responsibilities of the individual and on the need for an evolving social consciousness.
Suggested Readings Balassi, William, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds. This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Farah, Cynthia. Literature and Landscape: Writers of the Southwest. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1988. Lannan Foundation. Readings and Conversations: Readings by Lucille Clifton; Conversation with Denise Chávez. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Author, 2000. Reed, Ishmael. Hispanic American Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Contributor: Lois A. Marchino
Charles Waddell Chesnutt Born: Cleveland, Ohio; June 20, 1858 Died: Cleveland, Ohio; November 15, 1932 African American
Chesnutt was one of the first African American writers to examine honestly and in detail the racial problems of black people in America after the Civil War. Principal works long fiction: Mandy Oxendine, wr. 1897, pb. 1997; A Business Career, wr. 1898, pb. 2005 (Matthew Wilson and Marjan van Schaik, editors); The House Behind the Cedars, 1900; The Marrow of Tradition, 1901; Evelyn’s Husband, wr. 1903, pb. 2005 (Matthew Wilson and Marjan van Schaik, editors); The Colonel’s Dream, 1905; Paul Marchand, F.M.C., wr. 1921, pb. 1998; The Quarry, wr. 1928, pb. 1999 short fiction: The Conjure Woman, 1899; The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899 nonfiction: The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1899; The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1993; “To Be an Author”: The Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 18891905, 1997; Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, 1999; Selected Writings, 2001 (SallyAnn H. Ferguson, editor); An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932, 2002 When Charles Waddell Chesnutt (CHEHZ-nuht) was nine years old, his family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he spent his youth. Although he was of African American descent, his features barely distinguished him from Caucasians. He learned, however, that family blood was very important in determining a person’s social and economic prospects. Chesnutt’s mother died in 1871, when he was thirteen years old. Two years later, he left school to teach in order to supplement the family income. In 1878, he married Susan Perry, a fellow teacher and daughter of a well-to-do black barber in Fayetteville. He had begun teaching in 1877 at the new State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, and in 1880 he became principal of the school. On a job-hunting trip to Washington, D.C., in 1879, Chesnutt was unable to find work. He had been studying stenography and hoped to obtain a job on a newspaper. In 1883, he was able to begin a new career as a stenographer and reporter in New York City, and shortly afterward he moved to Cleveland, where he was first a clerk and then a legal stenographer. Two years later, he began studying law, and in 1887, 213
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he passed the Ohio bar examination with the highest grade in his group. He opened his own office as a court reporter in 1888. Between 1887 and 1899, beginning with the publication of “The Goophered Grapevine” by The Atlantic Monthly, he achieved some success as a short-story writer. In 1899, when Houghton Mifflin published two collections of his short stories, he gave up his profitable business and began writing novels full time—something he had dreamed of doing for many years. His first published novel, The House Behind the Cedars, had some commercial success, but the next, The Marrow of Tradition, did not. In 1901, two years after he had closed his stenographic firm, he reopened it. Deciding to write short stories Charles Waddell Chesnutt (Cleveland Public Library) once more in 1903 and 1904, he sent them to The Atlantic Monthly, where he had found success earlier, but only one, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” was accepted. His novel The Colonel’s Dream, published in 1905, failed to attract the attention of the public. The public of the early 1900’s was not ready for the controversial subject matter of his novels and later short stories or for the sympathetic treatment of the black characters in them. It did not want to read literature that had African Americans as the main characters, that presented their problems in a predominantly white world, and that were written with a sympathy for blacks rather than whites. Chesnutt retired from creative writing as a profession in 1905, and thereafter he published only nonfiction. During the rest of his life, Chesnutt concentrated on managing his business affairs, on participating in civic affairs, and on working on behalf of black people. He was an active member of the Rowland Club, an exclusive male literary group in Cleveland, although at first he was denied membership in this club because of his race. During the last twenty-seven years of his life, he managed to find time to travel in Europe and to help educate his three children. He was a member of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and the National Arts Club; he also helped establish Playhouse Settlement (now Karamu House). Before 1905, he had been politically and socially active in helping to advance the cause of black people, and he continued to be active throughout his life. In 1901, he worked to have W. H. Thomas’s The American Negro withdrawn from circulation. The same year, he chaired the Committee on Colored Troops for the 35th Na-
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tional Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in Cleveland. In 1904, he became a member of the Committee of Twelve, organized by Booker T. Washington, and in 1905 he was a member of the Cleveland Council of Sociology. He addressed the National Negro Committee, which later became the NAACP, and served as a member of its General Committee. He protested the showing of the film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and, more important, he protested the treatment of black soldiers. He participated in the First Amenia Conference, called by Joel Spingarn in 1916. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1928. Chesnutt dreamed of being a novelist, and he believed that racial issues such as the problems of passing, miscegenation, and racial assimilation had to be the subject of serious fiction. He found, though, that if he tried to write novels that would be commercially successful, publishers would not accept them, and if he tried to write works that examined racial issues honestly and with sympathy for blacks, the public would not accept these topical but controversial novels. Nonetheless, Chesnutt was the first African American fiction writer to present an honest portrayal of the racial problems of black people in America after the Civil War, at a time when many Americans preferred to ignore those problems. Chesnutt may have been a victim, just as his characters sometimes are. The themes that he could present most effectively and that he felt compelled to present were ones that the public would not accept; thus, he did not continue to write novels and may have been prevented from developing as a literary artist. In addition, Chesnutt may have had to compromise to get his views before readers in America. He believed that Americans had an unnatural fear of miscegenation. Because of this fear, the person of mixed blood was an outcast in society and was almost forced by society to pass for white to try to obtain the American Dream. Ironically, those forced into passing and marrying whites began again the miscegenation cycle that was so feared by whites. Anglo-Saxon racial purity was something that should not be preserved, Chesnutt believed. Intermingling and integration would improve humanity biologically, but, more important, blacks would then be able to have the rights they should have as human beings. Only by eliminating laws against intermarriage and social interaction between the races would blacks gain true social, economic, and political equality.
“The Goophered Grapevine” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Conjure Woman The Conjure Woman contains narratives revealed through the accounts of a Northern white person’s rendition of the tales of Uncle Julius, a former slave. This storytelling device lays the foundation for Chesnutt’s sociological commentary. The real and perceived voices represent the perspectives he wishes to expose, those of the white capitalist and the impoverished, disadvantaged African American. The
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primary persona is the capitalist, while the perceived voice is that of the struggling poor. Chesnutt skillfully melds the two perspectives. The preeminent story of the collection is “The Goophered Grapevine.” This story embodies the overriding thematic intent of the narratives in this collection. Chesnutt points out the foibles of the capitalistic quest in the post-Civil War South, a venture pursued at the expense of the newly freed African American slave. He illustrates this point in “The Goophered Grapevine” by skillfully intertwining Aunt Peggy’s gains as a result of her conjurations and Henry’s destruction as a result of man’s inhumanity to man. Chesnutt discloses his ultimate point when the plantation owner, McAdoo, is deceived by a Yankee horticulturist and his grape vineyard becomes totally unproductive. Running episodes, such as Aunt Peggy’s conjurations to keep the field hands from consuming the grape crop and the seasonal benefit McAdoo gains from selling Henry, serve to illustrate the interplay between a monied white capitalist and his less-privileged black human resources. McAdoo used Aunt Peggy to deny his field laborers any benefit from the land they worked, and he sold Henry every spring to increase his cash flow and prepare for the next gardening season. The central metaphor in “The Goophered Grapevine” is the bewitched vineyard. To illustrate and condemn man’s inhumanity to man, Chesnutt contrasts the black conjure woman’s protection of the grape vineyard with the white Yankee’s destruction of it. McAdoo’s exploitation of Henry serves to justify McAdoo’s ultimate ruin. Through allegory, Chesnutt is able to draw attention to the immorality of capitalistic gain through a sacrifice of basic humanity to other people.
“Po’ Sandy” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Conjure Woman Following the theme of inhumanity established in “The Goophered Grapevine,” “Po’ Sandy” highlights the abuse of a former slave laborer. Accordingly, a situation with a folkloric variation is used to convey this message. Sandy, Master Marabo’s field hand, is shifted from relative to relative at various points during the year to perform various duties. During the course of these transactions, he is separated from his second common-law wife, Tenie. (His first wife has been sent to work at a distant plantation.) Tenie is a conjurer. She transforms Sandy into a tree, and she changes him back to his original state periodically so that they can be together. With Sandy’s apparent disappearance, Master Marabo decides to send Tenie away to nurse his ailing daughter-in-law. There is therefore no one left to watch Sandy, the tree. The dehumanizing effects of industrialization creep into the story line at this point. The “tree” is to be used as lumber for a kitchen at the Marabo home. Tenie returns just in time to try to stop this transformation at the lumber mill, but she is deemed “mad.” Sandy’s spirit thereafter haunts the Marabo kitchen, and no one wants to work
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there. The complaints are so extensive that the kitchen is dismantled and the lumber donated toward the building of a school. This structure is then haunted, too. The point is that industrialization and economic gain diminish essential human concerns and can lead to destruction. The destruction of Sandy’s marital relationships in order to increase his usefulness as a field worker justifies this defiant spirit. In his depiction of Sandy as a tree, Chesnutt illustrates an enslaved spirit desperately seeking freedom.
“The Conjurer’s Revenge” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Conjure Woman
“The Conjurer’s Revenge,” also contained in The Conjure Woman, illustrates Chesnutt’s mastery of the exemplum. The allegory in this work conveys a strong message, and Chesnutt’s evolving skill in characterization becomes apparent. The characters’ actions, rather than the situation, contain the didactic message of the story. Some qualities of the fable unfold as the various dimensions of characters are portrayed. Consequently, “The Conjurer’s Revenge” is a good example of Chesnutt’s short imaginative sketch. These qualities are also most characteristic of Chesnutt’s early short fiction. “The Conjurer’s Revenge” begins when Primus, a field hand, discovers the conjure man’s hog alone in a bush one evening. Concerned for the hog and not knowing to whom the animal belongs, Primus carries it to the plantation where he works. Unfortunately, the conjurer identifies Primus as a thief and transforms Primus into a mule. Chesnutt uses this transformation to reveal Primus’s personality. As a mule, Primus displays jealousy when other men show an attraction to his woman, Sally. The mule’s reaction is one of shocking violence in instances when Sally is approached by other men. The mule has a tremendous appetite for food and drink, an apparent compensation for his unhappiness. Laying the foundation for his exemplum, Chesnutt brings these human foibles to the forefront and illustrates the consequences of even the mildest appearance of dishonesty. The conjurer’s character is also developed more fully as the story progresses. After attending a religious revival, he becomes ill, confesses his act of vengeance, and repents. During the conjurer’s metamorphosis, Chesnutt captures the remorse, grief, and forgiveness in this character. He also reveals the benefits of human compassion and concern for other human beings. A hardened heart undergoes reform and develops an ability to demonstrate sensitivity. Nevertheless, the conjurer suffers the consequences of his evil deed: He is mistakenly given poison by a companion and dies before he completely restores Primus’s human features, a deed he undertakes after repenting. The conjurer dies prematurely, and Primus lives with a clubfoot for the rest of his life.
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“The Wife of His Youth” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Wife of His Youth Features of Chesnutt’s more mature writing emerge in the series of narratives which make up The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. The stories in this collection center on the identity crisis experienced by African Americans, portraying their true human qualities in the face of the grotesque distortions wrought by racism. In order to achieve his goal, Chesnutt abandons his earlier imaginative posture and embraces realism as a means to unfold his message. The dimensions of his characters are therefore appropriately self-revealing. The characters respond to the stresses and pressures in their external environment with genuine emotion; Mr. Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth” is no exception. “The Wife of His Youth” follows the structural pattern that appears to typify the narratives in the collection. This pattern evolves in three phases: crisis, character response, and resolution. The crisis in “The Wife of His Youth” is Mr. Ryder’s attempt to reconcile his new and old ways of life. He has moved North from a southern plantation and entered black middle-class society. Adapting to the customs, traditions, and mores of this stratum of society is a stressful challenge for Mr. Ryder. Tensions exist between his old life and his new life. He fears being unable to appear as if he belongs to this “blue vein” society and exposing his lowly background. This probable eventuality is his constant preoccupation. The “blue veins” were primarily lighter-skinned blacks who were better educated and more advantaged than their darker counterparts. Relishing their perceived superiority, they segregated themselves from their brothers and sisters. It is within this web of social clamoring and essential self-denial that Mr. Ryder finds himself. The inherent contradictions of this lifestyle present a crisis for him, although a resolution is attained during the course of the narrative. Mr. Ryder’s efforts to fit into this society are thwarted when his slave wife appears at his doorstep on the day before a major social event that he has planned. He is about to introduce the Blue Vein Society to a widow, Mrs. Dixon, upon whom he has set his affections. The appearance of Liza Jane, his slave wife, forces Mr. Ryder to confront his new life. This situation also allows Chesnutt to assume his typically moralizing tone. Mr. Ryder moves from self-denial to self-pride as he decides to present Liza Jane to his society friends instead of Mrs. Dixon. The narrative ends on a note of personal triumph for Mr. Ryder as he proudly introduces the wife of his youth to society.
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“The Passing of Grandison” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Wife of His Youth Chesnutt does not totally relinquish his allegiance to the use of myth in The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. The myth of the ascent journey, or the quest for freedom, is evident in several stories in the collection, among them “The Passing of Grandison” and “Uncle Wellington’s Wives.” Following the structured pattern of crisis, character response, and resolution, “The Passing of Grandison” is a commentary on the newly emerging moral values of the postbellum South. Colonel Owens, a plantation owner, has a son, Dick, who is in love with a belle named Charity Lomax. Charity’s human values reflect the principles of human equality and freedom, and the challenge that she presents to Dick Owens becomes the crisis of the narrative. Dick is scheduled to take a trip North, and his father insists on his being escorted by one of the servants. Grandison is selected to accompany his young master. Charity Lomax challenges Dick to find a way to entice Grandison to remain in the North and receive his well-deserved liberation. Charity’s request conflicts with the values held by Dick and Grandison. Dick believes that slave/master relationships are essential to the survival of the South. Grandison holds that servants should be unequivocally loyal to their masters. In spite of Dick’s attempts to connect Grandison unobtrusively with the abolitionist movement in the North, the former slave remains loyal to Dick. Grandison’s steadfastness perplexes Dick because his proposed marriage to Charity is at risk if he does not succeed in freeing Grandison. After a series of faulty attempts, Dick succeeds in losing Grandison. Dick then returns home alone and triumphant. Grandison ultimately returns to the plantation. He had previously proven himself so trustworthy that goodwill toward him is restored. To make the characterization of Grandison realistic, however, Chesnutt must have him pursue his freedom. In a surprise ending typical of Chesnutt, Grandison plans the escape of all of his relatives who remain on the plantation. They succeed, and in the last scene of the narrative, Colonel Owens spots them from a distance on a boat journeying to a new destination. “The Passing of Grandison” successfully achieves the social and artistic goals of The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt creates characters with convincing human qualities and captures their responses to the stresses and pressures of their environment. While so doing, he advocates the quest for human freedom.
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“Uncle Wellington’s Wives” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Wife of His Youth “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” contains several of the thematic dimensions mentioned above. The story concerns the self-identity of the African American and the freedom quest. Wellington Braboy, a light-skinned mulatto, is determined to move North and seek his freedom. His crisis is the result of a lack of resources, primarily financial, to achieve his goal. Braboy is portrayed as having a distorted view of loyalty and commitment. He justifies stealing money from his slave wife’s life savings by saying that, as her husband, he is entitled to the money. On the other hand, he denies his responsibility to his slave wife once he reaches the North. In order to marry a white woman he denies the legality of a slave marriage. Chesnutt takes Braboy on a journey of purgation and catharsis as he moves toward resolution. After being subjected to much ridicule and humiliation as a result of his mixed marriage, Braboy must honestly confront himself and come to terms with his true identity. Abandoned by his wife for her former white husband, Braboy returns to the South. This journey is also a symbolic return to himself; his temporary escape from himself has failed. Milly, Braboy’s first wife, does not deny her love for him, in spite of his previous actions. Milly receives and accepts him with a forgiving spirit. Chesnutt capitalizes on the contrast between Braboy’s African and Anglo wives. The African wife loves him unconditionally because she has the capacity to know and understand him, regardless of his foibles. Braboy’s Anglo wife was frustrated by what she considered to be irreparable inadequacies in his character and abandoned him.
“Cicely’s Dream” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1899, in The Wife of His Youth In his character development, Chesnutt repeatedly sought to dispel some of the stereotypical thinking about African Americans. An example of his success in this effort is found in “Cicely’s Dream,” set in the period of Reconstruction. Cicely Green is depicted as a young woman of considerable ambition. Like most African Americans, she has had very little education and is apparently limited in her capacity to achieve. She does have, however, many dreams. Cicely’s crisis begins when she discovers a wounded man on her way home one day. The man is delirious and has no recollection of who he is. Cicely and her grandmother care for the man until his physical health is restored, but he is still mentally distraught. The tenderness and sensitivity displayed by Cicely keep the stranger reasonably content. Over a period of time, they become close and eventually pledge
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their love to each other. Chesnutt portrays a caring, giving relationship between the two lovers, one that is not complicated by any caste system that would destroy love through separation of the lovers. This relationship, therefore, provides a poignant contrast to the relationships among blacks during the days of slavery, and Chesnutt thereby exposes an unexplored dimension of the African American. Typically, however, there is a surprise ending: Martha Chandler, an African American teacher, enters the picture. She teaches Cicely and other black youths for one school term. During the final program of the term, the teacher reveals her story of lost love. Her lover had been killed in the Civil War. Cicely’s lover’s memory is jolted by the teacher’s story, and he proves to be the teacher’s long-lost love. The happy reunion is a celebration of purely committed love. Again, Chesnutt examines qualities in African Americans that had largely been ignored. He emphasizes the innate humanity of the African American in a natural and realistic way, combining great artistic skill with a forceful moral vision.
The House Behind the Cedars Type of work: Novel First published: 1900 Between 1890 and 1899, Chesnutt greatly expanded and revised “Rena Walden,” a short story, until it became The House Behind the Cedars. At first, he focused on how color consciousness can destroy an interracial marriage and then on the predominant issue of whether a mulatto should cross the “color line.” In March, 1899, he wrote journalist and diplomat Walter Hines Page that the Rena Walden story was the strong expression of a writer whose themes dealt primarily with the American color line. When he wrote to his daughters in the fall of 1900, he indicated that he hoped for “a howling success” from The House Behind the Cedars, “a strong race problem novel.” The story of Rena Walden and her brother was the first in which the problems of Americans concealing their African heritage were studied with a detached and compassionate presentation of individuals on the various sides of the issue. The novel can be divided into two parts: Rena in white society, in which her brother is the major focus, and Rena in black society, in which she becomes the focus. The novel is set in Patesville, North Carolina, a few years after the Civil War. John Warwick, who has changed his name from Walden, has left Patesville and gone to South Carolina, where he has become a lawyer and plantation owner, acquiring wealth and position. He and his sister Rena are the children of a quadroon mother Molly and a white man who has died. John has returned to Patesville to help his beautiful sister escape the restrictions of color by teaching her how to pass for white. She is a success at the boarding school in South Carolina to which he takes her. As proof of her success in passing, George Tryon, a good friend of John and a white, wants to marry Rena, but she is not sure she should marry him without telling him of her mixed blood. John and Rena indirectly discuss the pros and cons of pass-
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ing and intermarriage. A series of coincidences leads to an unexpected meeting between George and Rena; he learns of her heritage, and the engagement is broken. Rena returns home to her mother and the house behind the cedars. A chapter interlude that gives the Walden family history separates the first part of the novel from the second. John tries to persuade his sister to return to South Carolina with him or to take money and go North or West, where she can pass for white and marry someone even better than George, but she refuses to leave Patesville. She has decided to accept her destiny and be of service to her people, whom she has rediscovered. After this point, the reader is told little more about John. Rena meets Jeff Wain, an influential and prosperous mulatto from a rural county, who is seeking a schoolteacher. Rena accepts the position, not realizing Jeff has a personal as well as a professional interest in her. Jeff is not as admirable a character as he first appears. As he pays her more and more attention, she is upset and repulsed. Once again, coincidence plays a part in the plot. George Tryon happens to learn of her presence near a place he is visiting. When he sees her, he realizes that he loves her and that his love is stronger than his racial prejudice. The same day that George decides to declare his love, Jeff decides to do so too. Rena fears both of the men and leaves hastily for her mother’s house behind the cedars. After exposure and fatigue have overcome her, Frank Fowler, a childhood friend and a conscientious black workman, finds her and carries her to her home, where she dies. Rena realizes before she dies that Frank loved her the best. Chesnutt seeks to lead his readers to share his perspective rather than lecturing them. He delays revealing that John and Rena are mulattoes. To create sympathy for them first, he presents them simply as persons of humble origins who are attempting to achieve prosperity and happiness. Chesnutt passes John and Rena for white with the reader before he lets the reader know that they are mulattoes who have chosen or will deliberately choose to pass for white. John Walden is the first black character in American fiction to decide to pass for white and, at the same time, to feel that his decision is legally and morally justified. Believing that the color of his skin tells him that he is white, he has no psychological problems concerning his choice to pass. He is not a stereotype. Intelligent and industrious, he patiently trains himself so that he can achieve the American Dream. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that he has become a prosperous lawyer and plantation owner after leaving Patesville; in the second part of the novel, after he has not been successful in helping Rena pass for white, he returns to South Carolina to regain his position. The characters are not fully developed and remain stick figures, although Chesnutt is partially successful in creating human interest for them. While Chesnutt attempts to create pity for her, Rena is simply a victim who accepts her fate, like other antiassimilationist mulattoes of the time. Another character, Dr. Green, is no more than a vehicle to present the traditional southern viewpoint. Two figures, Molly Walden and George Tyron, retain some individuality. Molly, as an unprotected free black woman in the slave South, is a product of her environment. With the circumstances that she faces, she can do little other than be the kept mistress for the white plantation owner, who has died but left her the house behind the cedars.
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Chesnutt does not want the reader to feel contempt for her or to be repulsed by her actions; her position is rendered dispassionately. George Tyron, on the other hand, undergoes great emotional upheaval and has a change of view that is probably meant to be instructive. He is tied to the traditional code of the southern gentleman but is not deluded about his prerogatives as a southern aristocrat. Rather, he is meant to be the best of the new South. His realization that he loves Rena and that her racial heritage is not important comes too late; she dies before he is able to do anything about it. He does not blame her for passing, and Chesnutt expects the reader not to blame her.
The Marrow of Tradition Type of work: Novel First published: 1901 The Marrow of Tradition is the story of two families: The Carterets stand for the New South aristocracy with its pride and prejudice, and the Millers, who are of mixed blood, represent the qualities of the new black. The lives of the families are intertwined because the wives are half sisters. Janet Miller, however, has been cheated of her inheritance by Olivia Carteret, and Olivia constantly struggles with the problem of accepting Janet as her rightful sister. The novel’s message—a study of white supremacist politics in a small southern town after the Civil War—is more relevant to the problems encountered by the husbands than those facing the wives. Dr. Adam Miller is a brilliant young surgeon denied opportunity in his hometown of Wellington (Wilmington, North Carolina). Major Philip Carteret, editor of the town’s newspaper, seeks to seat a white supremacist regime in the local government. If he is successful, Adam Miller’s position will be even more intolerable than it has been. At the end of the novel, Major Carteret stirs up a riot during which Dr. Miller’s son is killed. Immediately after the death of the Millers’ child, the son of the Carterets becomes ill, and Adam Miller is the only person who can perform the surgery necessary to save the child’s life. At first, Miller refuses, but after Olivia Carteret humbles herself before her half sister and pleads with her to help save the Carterets’ son, Janet Miller convinces her husband to change his mind and operate. The child is saved. The Marrow of Tradition was too controversial a novel for the public. Americans were not ready for the subject of white supremacist politics and the political injustice existing in the South. Chesnutt himself was concerned that the novel approached fanaticism. He believed that he should not speak so plainly concerning these matters if he hoped to succeed as a fiction writer.
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Suggested Readings Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz III. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Gleason, William. “Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories.” American Quarterly 51 (March, 1999): 33-77. Heermance, Noel. Charles Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974. Keller, Frances Richardson. An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978. Lehman, Cynthia L. “The Social and Political View of Charles Chesnutt: Reflections on His Major Writings.” Journal of Black Studies 26 (January, 1996). McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., ed. Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. McFatter, Susan. “From Revenge to Resolution: The (R)evolution of Female Characters in Chesnutt’s Fiction.” CLA Journal 42 (December, 1998): 194-211. Pickens, Ernestine Williams. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement. New York: Pace University Press, 1994. Render, Sylvia. Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Wonham, Henry B. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. Contributors: Earl Paulus Murphy, Sherry G. Southard, and Patricia A. R. Williams
Alice Childress Born: Charleston, South Carolina; October 12, 1916 Died: New York, New York; August 14, 1994 African American
Breaking with the tradition of African American drama to her time, Childress wrote plays about the concerns of black women, including the female psychological journey. Principal works children’s literature: A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, 1973; Rainbow Jordan, 1981; Those Other People, 1989 drama: Florence, pr. 1949, pb. 1950; Just a Little Simple, pr. 1950; Gold Through the Trees, pr. 1952; Trouble in Mind, pr. 1955, pb. 1971; Wedding Band: A Love/ Hate Story in Black and White, staged 1966, televised 1973, pb. 1973; The World on a Hill, pb. 1968; The Freedom Drum, pr. 1969 (music by Nathan Woodard; retitled Young Martin Luther King); String, pr. 1969 (staged; pb. 1971, pr. 1979; televised; adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant story); Wine in the Wilderness, pr. 1969 (televised, pb. 1969, pr. 1976 [televised]); Mojo: A Black Love Story, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; The African Garden, pb. 1971 (with Woodard); When the Rattlesnake Sounds, pb. 1975 (for children); Let’s Hear It for the Queen, pb. 1976 (for children); Sea Island Song, pr. 1979 (with Woodard; pr. 1984 as Gullah); Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne, pr. 1987 (with Woodard) long fiction: A Short Walk, 1979 screenplay: A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, 1978 short fiction: Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life, 1956 edited text: Black Scenes: Collection of Scenes from Plays Written by Black People About Black Experience, 1971 Alice Childress (CHIHL-drehs) was five years old when her parents separated and she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, who had seven children of her own. Although Grandmother Eliza was a poverty-stricken former slave with only a fifth-grade education, she was intellectually curious and self-educated. Childress credited her grandmother with teaching her how to observe and encouraging her to write. Her grandmother also took her to Salem Church in Harlem, where Alice learned storytelling from the Wednesday night testimonials. Childress was educated in New York public schools, leaving before she graduated from high school. She encountered racial prejudice at school but recalled several teachers who made a difference, encouraging her to read and introducing her to the library. 225
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Childress revealed little about her private life, but it is known that she married and divorced Alvin Childress, who played Amos on television’s Amos ’n’ Andy Show. The couple had a daughter, Jean, born on November 1, 1935, who was raised by her mother. To support herself and her child while she tried to establish her writing and acting career, Childress held a variety of jobs, including domestic servant, salesperson, and insurance agent. Through these jobs, she became acquainted with numerous working-class people, whose lives became the basis of characters in her later plays and novels. In 1941 Childress joined the American Negro Theatre (ANT), which met in the Schomburg Library in Harlem. Like all ANT members, Childress participated in all aspects of theater, though her main interest was acting. She stayed with ANT for eleven years but was frustrated by the emphasis on issues important to black men and the consequent neglect of black women’s issues and roles. When she tried to act in the theater at large, she ran into problems because she was considered too lightskinned to play black roles but not fair enough to play whites. Although she starred in the Broadway production of Anna Lucasta (1944-1946) and did some work in radio and television, Childress finally concluded that she would be better able to express herself as a writer. Interested in creating complex and realistic black female characters, Childress wrote Florence, a one-act play that she hoped would show that African American drama did not have to be sensational to be significant. This drama, about a workingclass black woman on her way to New York to rescue her daughter from a failed career in the theater, opened new areas to African American theater, eventually influencing Amiri Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater and woman-centered African American dramatists such as Ntozake Shange. Childress’s next plays did not focus on women, however. One was a reworking of Langston Hughes’s serialized articles, Simple Speaks His Mind, published in the Chicago Defender, as a musical review titled Just a Little Simple. In 1955, Childress returned to her controversial subjects and assertive black women characters with Trouble in Mind, a play about a black actress trying to maintain her dignity while playing menial roles. The play was well received OffBroadway, but Broadway options were abandoned because producers considered it too risky for the commercial theater. It was presented twice by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), however. Childress received the Obie Award for Trouble in Mind in 1956, becoming the first woman to receive the award. Also in 1956, Childress published Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life, a series of vignettes or monologues that incorporated sketches from her Baltimore Afro-American column “Here’s Mildred,” which she would write through 1958. The column and book centered on Mildred, a domestic servant modeled on Childress’s aunt. On July 17, 1957, she married a musician named Nathan Woodward. She and Woodward collaborated on a number of projects; he wrote music for her play Sea Island Song, later produced as Gullah. During the 1960’s, Childress focused on writing plays. She chose to ignore white audiences and focused on controversial topics, which made production difficult. During this period, she wrote Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and
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Alice Childress (Ray Grist)
White, which focused on interracial lovers; The Freedom Drum (later retitled Young Martin Luther King); String, an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s story “A Piece of String”; and Wine in the Wilderness, on revolution and black males’ problematic attitudes toward black women. Also during this period, Childress participated in a variety of communities of writers and scholars. In 1965 she was part of a BBC panel discussion, “The Negro in American Theater,” which also included James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Langston Hughes. The writer Tillie Olsen recommended Childress for an appointment at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, where she worked on her writing from 1966 to 1968. During the 1970’s Childress traveled extensively to study drama and other arts: to the Soviet Union in 1971; to Beijing and Shanghai, China, in 1973; and to Ghana, West Africa, in 1974. She also shifted the focus of her own writing at this time, producing a young adult novel, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich and its screenplay; two plays for children, When the Rattlesnake Sounds, about a summer in the life of escaped slave Harriet Tubman, and Let’s Hear It for the Queen; and A Short Walk, a novel. Also in 1979, Childress’s play Sea Island Song, which had been commissioned by the South Carolina Arts Commission, was presented in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, during the observance of Alice Childress Week. In the 1980’s, Childress continued to write and speak out. She wrote her second
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young adult novel, Rainbow Jordan, in 1981. She was artist-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1984. Her final works were Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne, based on the life of comedienne “Moms” Mabley, and a novel, Those Other People. Her daughter Jean died of cancer in May, 1990. Four years later, Childress died of cancer, in Queens. Childress addressed issues of gender and race through her black female characters. She worked against stereotypes prevalent in both black and white American literature to present ordinary women—strong, searching for their identities, and standing up to prejudices based on class, gender, and race. Even when she wrote about controversial topics such as miscegenation, her characters and the situations were realistic and believable. Her explorations laid the groundwork for later African American women playwrights such as Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez. Childress’s unwillingness to compromise her principles or play to white audiences cost her in terms of production and visibility. However, she attracted the attention of feminist scholars in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and she has always had the attention of African American theater people. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory calls her the mother of African American professional theater, and the debt that those who followed her owe to her pioneering work in presenting realistic and complex black women characters supports that title.
Trouble in Mind Type of work: Drama First produced: 1955, pb. 1971 Childress uses two tried-and-true theatrical devices in Trouble in Mind: a playwithin-a-play and metadrama, focusing on an examination of theater itself. Placed in the larger context of the Civil Rights movement, with allusions to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., the play features Wiletta Mayer, a veteran actress who has been cast in an antilynching drama written by a white playwright. Although Wiletta and the other veteran black actors have been conditioned to accept the denigrating conditions of working in white-controlled theater, she cannot justify her character’s advising her son to give himself up to a lynch mob. When she argues against the play and its portrayal of blacks, the cast is dismissed with the clear implication that Wiletta will not be called for the next rehearsal. The play-within-the-play, however, has made clear the problems of stereotypes of African Americans.
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Wedding Band Type of work: Drama First produced: 1966, pb. 1973 This play about the ten-year romantic relationship of a black seamstress, Julia, and a white baker, Herman, was not well received either by blacks, who saw it as integrationist, or whites, who were offended by the topic of miscegenation. In the world of the play, Julia receives little support from her black neighbors, who do not see her relationship with Herman as positive in any way, or from Herman’s mother and sister, who make racist comments and try to sabotage the relationship. When Herman develops influenza, collapsing in Julia’s home, the situation is serious because the same laws that have prevented Julia and Herman’s marriage will result in their prosecution if the relationship is discovered. Julia calls in Herman’s mother, but instead of help, she gets abuse. She does stand up to her, though, claiming her place as her daughter-in-law. The play examines problematic relationships between black and white women and between black women themselves, as well as the interracial love relationship.
Wine in the Wilderness Type of work: Drama First produced: 1969, pb. 1969 Wine in the Wilderness is set in the apartment of a middle-class black artist during a 1960’s Harlem riot. Childress depicts the arrogance and ignorance of the black middle class in the artist’s treatment of a young lower-class black woman, Tommy (Tomorrow Marie). The artist, Bill, has been working on a triptych dedicated to black womanhood—as Bill understands it. He has completed two of the panels, one depicting “innocent” black girlhood, the second a beautiful, regal woman representing an idealized Mother Africa. He has been looking for a model for the third panel—the “lost” black woman of his imagination, rude and vulgar, the antithesis of the African queen. His neighbors find Tommy during the riot, and she, believing that she is to be the model for an ideal woman in the artist’s work, goes with them to his apartment. When she realizes the truth, she confronts the group. Finally Bill understands his shortsightedness and persuades “his” Tomorrow to pose for the new center panel as woman of the future. The middle-class assimilationists learn to value an assertive black woman.
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Suggested Readings Austin, Gayle. “Alice Childress: Black Woman Playwright as Feminist Critic.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 53-62. Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Black Women Playwrights Exorcizing Myths.” Phylon 48 (Fall, 1997): 229-239. _______. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Childress, Alice. Interview by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Dugan, Olga. “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright.” The Journal of Negro History 81 (1996): 123-137. Jennings, LaVinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. Maguire, Roberta S. “Alice Childress.” In Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, Third Series, edited by Christopher Wheatley. Vol. 249 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Contributor: Elsie Galbreath Haley
Frank Chin Born: Berkeley, California; February 25, 1940 Chinese American
Author of the first Asian American play produced on the New York stage, Chin is among the first few writers to present the experiences of Chinese Americans. Principal works drama: The Chickencoop Chinaman, pr. 1972, pb. 1981; The Year of the Dragon, pr. 1974, pb. 1981 long fiction: Donald Duk, 1991; Gunga Din Highway, 1994 short fiction: The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co., 1988 teleplays: The Bel Canto Carols, 1966; S.R.T., Act Two, 1966; And Still Champion . . . , 1967; Ed Sierer’s New Zealand, 1967; A Man and His Music, 1967; The Report, 1967; Searfair Preview, 1967; The Year of the Ram, 1967; Mary, 1969; Rainlight Rainvision, 1969; Chinaman’s Chance, 1971 nonfiction: Bulletproof Buddhists, and Other Essays, 1998 edited texts: Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, 1974 (with others; Asian American writing); The Big Aiiieeeee!, 1991; Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947, 2002 A fifth-generation Chinese American, Frank Chin has been witness to a most dramatic chapter in the history of his people. The chapter started with the 1943 repeal of the racially discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chin has lived in a social and cultural environment that tends to distort the image of his people and to ignore their history. Chin sees it as his mission to restore their image and remember the heroism, the pioneering spirit, and the sufferings of his people by writing about them from a Chinese American perspective. His plays and novels are informed by his knowledge of the history of Chinese Americans, his understanding of their cultural heritage, and his vision of their future. Chin believes that the history of Chinese Americans constitutes a heroic and vital part of the history of the American West. In the 1970’s, his sense of history was accompanied by a pessimistic prediction. Chin was aware that legislative racism had turned the Chinese American community into a bachelor society in the past and that euphemized discrimination was luring many young Chinese Americans toward assimilation. Hence, he declared in an essay, “Yellow Seattle,” that Chinese America was doomed to extinction. This kind of pessimism permeates the two plays that he wrote in the 1970’s: The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the 231
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Dragon. Pervading these works is an atmosphere of gloom, decay, and death, with bitter young people full of self-contempt renouncing their racial identity and with their families and communities falling apart. The apparent revival of Chinatown and the growth of the Chinese community in the 1980’s seem to have helped change Chin’s view. Such a change is discerned in Donald Duk, in which an atmosphere of renewal and jubilant celebration prevails. In the play, a family and a community conscientiously and successfully pass on their heritage from one generation to another in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The Chickencoop Chinaman Type of work: Drama First produced: 1972, pb. 1981 The Chickencoop Chinaman is a subtle depiction of the experiences of a Chinese American writer who loses and then regains his racial identity and cultural heritage. Laced with historical allusions to legislative and euphemized discrimination against Chinese Americans, the play centers on a visit the writer, Tam Lum, makes to Pittsburgh to collect materials for a documentary film about a famous black boxer. The events that take place during his visit make him realize that what he
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should do is pursue the lonely mission of telling stories to the unassimilated children of the Chinese railroad builders and gold miners. The play begins with Tam telling an airline hostess that he was born to be a writer for “the Chinamans sons of Chinamans.” As the ensuing scenes show, he has never had a chance to write about the heroism of his people. When a boy, he used to sit in the kitchen, listening to his grandmother’s stories of the Chinese railroaders, but he heard no such stories on the radio. In his desperate search for a hero of his own race, he imagined that the Lone Ranger with his mask was a Chinese American in disguise. To his dismay, the Ranger turned out to be a decrepit white racist who ordered Tam to go back to Chinatown to preserve his culture. Ironically, there was no Chinatown to which Tam could return to preserve his culture, for the old people there were trying to forget their history in order to survive. They urged him to destroy the past and get assimilated. Thus, he turned his back on his father, eradicated his memory of the railroaders, and married a white woman. A few years later, he found himself incompetent as a writer, deserted by his wife, and forgotten by his children. In order to keep himself busy and give his children a gift, he decided to make a film about a black former boxer and his father, Mr. Popcorn, who lived in Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, Tam discovers that the boxer has invented a father. Mr. Popcorn adamantly refuses to play a fake father in a documentary film and chastises Tam for betraying his real father. Tam’s plan for the film collapses; however, he learns that he must be true to his own identity and fulfill his destiny. The play ends with Tam standing in a kitchen, asking a group of children to turn off the radio and listen to the stories that his grandmother used to tell him about the Chinese railroaders in the Old West.
The Year of the Dragon Type of work: Drama First produced: 1974, pb. 1981 The Year of the Dragon is an anguished depiction of a Chinese American man and his family, in conflict between the younger generation’s urge toward assimilation and the older generation’s obsession with tradition. Set in the late 1960’s in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the play represents Frank Chin’s artistic expression of his view that historically Chinese America is doomed. The play begins with Fred Eng, a tour guide in Chinatown, welcoming a group of tourists and wishing them happiness in the Year of the Dragon. He speaks like Charlie Chan, but he wants to drop his phony accent and just be himself. Fred cannot be just himself; he knows that tourists expect a Chinese American to speak like Charlie Chan. Fred wanted to be a writer and went to college, but his ailing father, Wing Eng, called him back to Chinatown to take over the father’s travel agency and care for Fred’s mother, Hyacinth, and two younger siblings, Mattie and Johnny. The ensuing scenes show that Wing has gathered his family, including his first wife from China, so that he can die as a Chinese would like to, surrounded by a happy family
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and assured that Fred will stay in Chinatown to care for his two mothers. Wing’s family is by no means happy. His first wife, who has just arrived from China and whose expected presence causes resentment from others, seems to feel out of place in her husband’s home. Hyacinth frequently escapes to the bathroom to sing her lullaby. Mattie, who has “married out white” like many other Chinese Americans, cannot stand her father’s home. She urges the family to “forget Chinatown and be just people.” Johnny is a juvenile delinquent still on probation, and Fred is torn between his obligation to his father as a son and his sense of himself as an individual. He plans to stay in Chinatown for a while but have everyone else leave for Boston after his father dies. He urges Johnny to marry a white girl. Wing vehemently rejects Fred’s plan, insisting that Fred and his two mothers should stay in Chinatown. He dies amid a violent argument with his son while the festive sounds are floating into the house. At the end of the play, Fred appears like “a shrunken Charlie Chan,” welcoming tourists to Chinatown.
Donald Duk Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Donald Duk is a psychologically realistic depiction of a fifth-generation Chinese American boy who, by learning his family history and his cultural heritage, frees himself from the trauma caused by the racial stereotyping of his people. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during a New Year’s celebration, the novel delineates the initiation of its protagonist, Donald Duk, in a manner that interweaves history, legend, surrealistic dreams, and psychological realism. Donald is troubled more by his racial identity than by his funny name. Repeatedly he has heard people at school and in the media say that his people are traditionally timid and passive, introverted and nonassertive; therefore, they are alien to American heroism and pioneering spirit. He is thus filled with self-contempt and tormented by everything Chinese. With the Chinese New Year approaching, he becomes more and more depressed and withdrawn, for the New Year will provide another opportunity for his schoolteachers to repeat in class the same thing that everybody else says about his people. The New Year during which Donald completes the first twelve-year cycle of his life (there are twelve years in the Chinese zodiac) is the right time for the elders in his family and in the community to tell him what everybody has chosen not to say about his people. From these elders he learns that his people came from a land that had produced its own Robin Hoods, and that Chinese railroaders, his great-great grandfather among them, blasted their way through Nevada, lived in tunnels carved in deep frozen snow for two winters, set a world record in track-laying, and went on strike for back pay and Chinese foremen for Chinese gangs. He is so fascinated with these railroaders’ heroism and pioneering spirit that scenes of their toil and struggle appear one after another in his dreams.
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Through careful library research, Donald determines that his dreams are actually flashbacks to the real events that have been excluded in history books by the majority culture. With his newly gained understanding of the cultural heritage of his people, he is eager to go back to school to challenge the stereotype of his people with his story about their courage and assertiveness.
Suggested Readings Chua, C. L. “The Year of the Dragon, by Frank Chin.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. Goshert, John Charles. Frank Chin. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2002. Kim, Daniel Y. Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. _______. “Frank Chin: The Chinatown Cowboy and His Backtalk.” Midwest Quarterly 20 (Autumn, 1978): 78-91. Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. McDonald, Dorothy Ritsuko. Introduction to “The Chickencoop Chinaman” and “The Year of the Dragon”: Two Plays by Frank Chin. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Wong, Sau-ling. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Yin, Xiao-huang. Chinese American Literature Since the 1850’s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Contributor: Chenliang Sheng
Louis H. Chu Born: Toishan, Kwangtung Province, China; October 1, 1915 Died: New York, New York; 1970 Chinese American
Chu is acknowledged as the first Chinese American novelist to depict Chinatown life realistically. Principal work long fiction: Eat a Bowl of Tea, 1961 Born in China, Louis Chu immigrated to America when he was nine years old. Thus Asia and America played significant roles in his formative experience. In Eat a Bowl of Tea, Chu’s only published novel, he writes knowledgeably and feelingly about life in a rural community of South China as well as about life in New York’s urban Chinatown. Chu’s life and career in the United States followed a pattern of education and employment that many immigrants would envy. After completing high school in New Jersey, Chu attended Upsala College, earning his degree in 1937. He then attended New York University, obtaining an M.A. in 1940. Two years of graduate study at the New School for Social Research in New York rounded off his formal education. During World War II, Chu served in the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army. In 1940, he married Pong Fay, who had been born and raised in China; they brought up four children in Hollis, New York, a Queens suburb, where they made a Chinese-speaking home. Things Chinese American were very much a part of Chu’s career. From 1951 to 1961, he was a disc jockey for radio station WHOM in New York City (he was the only Chinese American disc jockey in the city). His radio show, called Chinese Festival, could be heard four evenings a week. In 1961, Chu went to work for the city’s Department of Welfare and became the director of a center in New York’s Chinatown. He was also an entrepreneur, being the owner of the Acme Company, and played an active role in the Chinatown community, holding the post of executive secretary of the Soo Yuen Benevolent Association for more than a decade. Chu’s experience and observation provided ample grist for the mill of his novel, Eat a Bowl of Tea, whose protagonist wrestles with issues of traditional Confucian filial duty, marital infidelity, and his identity as a Chinese in America during the 1940’s.
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Eat a Bowl of Tea Type of work: Novel First published: 1961 Widely acclaimed by Asian American writers and critics, Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea is the first Chinese American novel that realistically depicts New York’s Chinatown bachelor society in the United States shortly after World War II. The novel focuses on the struggles of a young Chinese American who attempts to define his identity. As the novel opens, it is revealed that the protagonist, Wang Ben Loy, a bridegroom of two months, has become impotent. Ben Loy is a Chinese American in his twenties, a filial son, obedient to his Confucian father, Wah Gay, who left him in China for twenty-five years while establishing himself in America. Wah Gay, owner of a gambling establishment in Chinatown, sends for Ben Loy, who works as a waiter, joins the U.S. Army, then returns to waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant. Ben Loy alleviates his frustrations by regularly patronizing prostitutes; unfortunately, he contracts several venereal diseases. In 1948, Ben Loy fulfills his filial duty by marrying Mei Oi, a China-born daughter of Wah Gay’s longtime friend. Neglected by her husband, Mei Oi becomes pregnant by Ah Song, a notorious Chinatown philanderer. Chu appears sympathetic with women by implying that husbands must share blame for the infidelity of their wives when sexual and emotional needs are unsatisfied. Mei Oi passes off the expected child as Ben Loy’s, but when Ah Song is sighted sneaking from her apartment, Chinatown buzzes with gossip. Feeling disgraced, Wah Gay ambushes Ah Song after a tryst at Mei Oi’s apartment and slices off his left ear. Justice is served when the unofficial Chinatown judicial system condemns Ah Song to five years’ ostracism. Having lost face, Wah Gay exiles himself. Ben Loy and Mei Oi go west to San Francisco, where Mei Oi has a baby whom Ben Loy accepts. They look forward to having others after Ben Loy’s impotence is cured by a Chinese herbalist, who makes him “eat a bowl of tea” of medicinal herbs. Most important, Ben Loy breaks from the patriarchal control of his traditionalist Confucian father and becomes the arbiter of his Asian American identity.
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Suggested Readings Cheng Lok Chua. “Golden Mountain: Chinese Versions of the American Dream in Lin Yutang, Louis Chu, and Maxine Hong Kingston.” Ethnic Groups 4 (1982). Cheung, King-Kok, and Stan Yogi. Asian American Literature. An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. Gong, Ted. “Approaching Cultural Change Through Literature.” Amerasia Journal 7 (1980). Hsiao, Ruth Y. “Facing the Incurable: Patriarchy in Eat a Bowl of Tea.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Li-Shu-yan. “Otherness and Transformation in Eat a Bowl of Tea and Crossings.” MELUS 18 (1993). Contributors: C. L. Chua and Janet Fujimoto
Sandra Cisneros Born: Chicago, Illinois; December 20, 1954 Mexican American
Cisneros’s work introduced a powerful and zestful Latina voice to American literature. Principal works children’s literature: Hairs = Pelitos, 1984 long fiction: The House on Mango Street, 1984; Caramelo, 2002 poetry: Bad Boys, 1980; The Rodrigo Poems, 1985; My Wicked, Wicked Ways, 1987; Loose Woman, 1994 short fiction: Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories, 1991 miscellaneous: Vintage Cisneros, 2004 Sandra Cisneros (SAHN-drah sihz-NAY-rohs) was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother. She grew up in a working-class family with six brothers; her family expected her to follow the traditional female role. Her lonely childhood growing up with six males and the family’s constant moving contributed to her becoming a writer. The family moved frequently—from house to house and from Chicago to Mexico City—which caused constant upheavals. She felt trapped between the American and the Mexican cultures, not belonging in either one. Understandably, Cisneros withdrew into a world of books. The family finally settled down in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. This setting provided Cisneros with the inspiration for her first novel, The House on Mango Street and the characters who appear in it. Cisneros attended Loyola University in Chicago and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. in English. She was the only Hispanic majoring in English at the time, a unique situation that isolated her from her peers. During her junior year at Loyola, she came in contact with her cultural roots and the Chicago poetry scene, influences to which she would later return in her writings. Cisneros moved to Iowa, where she earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. During her two years there, she felt lonely and displaced. A particularly unsettling experience occurred, one that ultimately helped her find her narrative voice and her writing subjects. During a seminar discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957), Cisneros discovered that his use of “house” as a metaphor differed radically from her understanding. She realized that Bachelard and her classmates shared a communal understanding of “house,” one that she did not possess. Recognizing her otherness, she 239
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decided to write about subjects and memories close to her life but foreign to her classmates: third-floor flats, fear of rats, drunk and abusive husbands, all unpoetic subjects. At the same time, she found her literary voice, one which had been there but she had suppressed. Before developing her career as a writer, Cisneros worked as a teacher, counselor, and arts administrator. She also began writing autobiographical sketches about her life experiences and continues to write about “those ghosts that haunt [her], that will not [let] her sleep.” She is internationally recognized for her poetry and fiction in which she intermingles English and Spanish. Her poetry and short stories, though not copious, have earned for her recognition as an outstanding Latina writer. Although Cisneros has written four volumes of poetry, it is her fiction for which she is best known. The House on Mango Street received the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. This work, which took her five years to complete, provides a feminine perspective on growing up. The collection of forty-four narratives relates the experiences of Esperanza Cordero, the Hispanic adolescent narrator. The sketches describe her experiences as she matures and discovers life in a poor Hispanic urban ghetto. The house on Mango Street symbolizes her search for selfidentity as she yearns for “a house all [her] own.”
The House on Mango Street Type of work: Novella First published: 1984 The House on Mango Street speaks in an adolescent Chicana’s voice of coming-ofage in a poor Chicago neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century. Cisneros’s first book of fiction received immediate acclaim, becoming a widely studied text in schools and universities. The novella consists of sketches, each exploring some aspect of the experiences of the narrator, Esperanza Cordero, after her family moves into a house of their own. These sketches are drawn from Cisneros’s own life; her family moved into a Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side during her twelfth year. Cisneros discovered this voice and subject in resistance against the pressure to conform to what she felt was, at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a “terrible East-coast pretentiousness.” She realized that growing up Chicana in Chicago set her apart from most other writers. Esperanza’s story also is one of resistance, especially against the expectations for women in her culture. She and her family have dreamed of having an even grander home, but she discovers strongly ambivalent feelings about home once they have one. On one hand, it is a place to be and to become. On the other, it is a sort of prison, especially for women. In “The Family of Little Feet,” Esperanza and two girlfriends get high-heeled shoes and wander playfully into the neighborhood, imagining themselves adults. At first, when men notice them and women seem jealous, they enjoy the attention,
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but when a drunk demands a kiss from Esperanza in exchange for a dollar, she and her friends flee and get rid of the shoes. Every other specifically feminine artifact and feature becomes a potential trap: hips, cooking, dresses, physical beauty, and most of all houses. Repeatedly, wives and daughters are locked in houses, where they serve men. Finally, Esperanza dreams of a house of her own, one that is not her husband’s or her father’s but hers. At the end of the novella, Esperanza begins the story again, revealing that her book has become her house on Mango Street, the home in her heart that her best female mentors have told her to find. By writing, she gets hold of it, and in this way she can have a home and still resist becoming a man’s property.
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My Wicked, Wicked Ways Type of work: Poetry First published: 1987 There is little of Cisneros’s signature blend of English and Spanish in this collection, though several pieces tell of growing up Chicana, one rebellious girl among six brothers. The book’s first section captures the guileless sing-song of a schoolgirl. There’s a cold baby in a satin box, “like a valentine,”in the corner of Lucy’s pink living room, and there’s sick, sad Abuelito, “who used to laugh like the letter k.” By the second section, the girl has become a lover, “thenotorious/ one/ leg wrapped/ around/ the door.” Her girlfriend chugs Pabst in redneck bars, and her father warns her that a Sandra Cisneros in Mexico “was arrested for audacious crimes/ that began by disobeying fathers.” The third section is a handful of postcards from exotic places. She walks alone under stars through a field of poppies in the south of France. She muses to lovers, and to lovers who might have been. She drags furniture out of a burning house on the island of Hydra and praises that “paradise of symmetry,” the derriere of Michelangelo’s “David.” The collection closes with a series of love poems that are richly sensual and often
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furious. The affair, with its many good-byes, is angular and adulterous: “you who never admitted a public grace./ We of the half-dark who were unbrave.” Cisneros has written a prefatory poem that is worth the price of the book, a terrific psychic summary of the years that created these poems. “I chucked the life/ my father’d plucked for me,” she explains, “. . . winched the door with poetry and fled.”
Woman Hollering Creek Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1991
Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories is a widely admired collection of short stories. Most of the stories are set in Texas, some in Mexico. Most deal with the pressures upon Chicanas to conform to traditional ideas of femininity. The title story is about Cleo, a naïve Mexican girl who marries a Mexican American. She soon finds herself pregnant with her second child, isolated in a foreign land where she cannot even speak with most people. Her frustrated husband beats her, destroying the dreams of happiness in marriage she learned from Mexican soap operas. When she flees, she gets help from a woman who hollers joyfully as they cross the Woman Hollering Creek bridge, teaching Cleo a new meaning for the creek’s name and another way to be a woman. Two stories explore the problem of being “the other woman”: “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Eyes of Zapata.” This role may seem to be a form of rebellion against conventional women’s roles, but a mistress’s role can be as restrictive as a wife’s, and the price of what freedom it offers proves high. The narrator of “Bien Pretty” more successfully breaks free of traditional forms, living an artist’s life, taking lovers as she is inclined, learning that she can be in control, even after losing lovers. She becomes determined to change the image of women in love she sees in soap operas; she wants to re-create them as people who make things happen. Cisneros described writing this collection as a community project. She met friends at a San Antonio diner on weekends, drew on the unbelievable things they discussed, and then shared her drafts while revising them. This approach accounts in part for the variety of voices and forms. Two especially witty pieces are “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” and “Los Boxers.” The first consists of notes left at saints’ shrines, many requests for divine intervention in amusing problems. The final long note recounts the writer’s discovery that the Virgin Mary is a multifaceted goddess who has helped her begin to escape the restrictive traditional woman’s role. “Los Boxers” is the monologue of a widower who has learned to do his own laundry; he explains to a young mother the economies he has discovered by applying masculine intelligence to “woman’s work.” Using many voices, this collection explores themes of gender and identity in twentieth century Latino and general American culture.
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Loose Woman Type of work: Poetry First published: 1994 In “Night Madness Poem,” Sandra Cisneros identifies her main speaking voice in Loose Woman: “I’m the crazy lady they warned you about./ The she of rumor talked about—/ and worse, who talks.” These are mostly love poems, spoken by a mature woman who loves hard, who takes risks and accepts the consequences. She takes and abandons lovers and is abandoned in turn. She experiences the ecstasy and pain traditionally identified with women in love but embraces these experiences with abandon, swagger, and joy. Sometimes victimized, she refuses to let the victim’s role define her. This attitude is evident in a long title: “I Am So Depressed I Feel Like Jumping in the River Behind My House but Won’t Because I’m Thirty-Eight and Not Eighteen.” In these often witty poems, one especially humorous strategy is role reversal. In “Full Moon and You’re Not Here,” the speaker opens in the traditional male voice, calling the lover who has had to leave to pick up a son at scouts, “Cinderella.” Only in the last few lines does it become clear that the voice complaining of the lover’s inconvenient family ties is female. In “Los Desnudos,” she imagines her lover in the position of Goya’s The Naked Maja. In “Down There,” she opens with a portrait of a male proud of his rebellious enjoyment of filth, then takes her turn to glory in the beauty of her menstrual blood. Although it is sometimes helpful to know Spanish, nearly all of these poems communicate upon first reading. With more familiarity, one sees ever more clearly how they are funny, rich in allusion, and thought-provoking, and how they revel in the power of language to make love and to break things.
Suggested Readings Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories.” American Literature 71 (March, 1999): 117-150. Cisneros, Sandra. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked, and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” Interview by Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda. The Americas Review 18, no. 1 (1990): 64-80. Cruz, Felicia J. “On the ‘Simplicity’ of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (2001): 910-946. Doyle, Jacqueline. “More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” MELUS 19 (Winter, 1994): 5-35. Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. Matchie, Thomas. “Literary Continuity in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” The Midwest Quarterly 37 (Autumn, 1995): 67-79.
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Miriam-Goldberg, Caryn. Sandra Cisneros: Latina Writer and Activist. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 3-20. Olivares, Julian. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and the Poetics of Space.” The Americas Review 15, nos. 3/4 (1987): 160-170. Thompson, Jeff. “‘What Is Called Heaven?’ Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Summer, 1994): 415-424. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall, 1995): 243-271. Contributor: Terry Heller
Eldridge Cleaver Born: Wabbaseka, Arkansas; August 31, 1935 Died: Pomona, California; May 1, 1998 African American
Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, an electrifying mixture of confessional writing and social commentary, is one of the major documents of the 1960’s. Principal works nonfiction: Soul on Ice, 1968; Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Papers, 1969; Post Prison Writings and Speeches, 1969; Soul on Fire, 1978; Target Zero: A Life in Writing, 2006 (Kathleen Cleaver, editor) Eldridge Cleaver (EHL-dridj KLEE-vur) was born in the small village of Wabbaseka, Arkansas, near Little Rock. In 1946, he moved with his family to Rose Hill, a mainly Chicano neighborhood in the Los Angeles area. Cleaver was first arrested, for stealing bicycles, in 1947, and in 1949 he was sent to reform school, where he became a Roman Catholic. He explains in Soul on Ice that he chose the Catholic Church because “all the Negroes and Mexicans went there.” In 1954, Cleaver was sent to prison for selling marijuana. Four years later he was charged with attempted rape and assault with intent to kill and was sent to Folsom Prison, from which he was paroled in November, 1966. Shortly thereafter, he joined the militant Black Panther Party and married Kathleen Neal. The publication of Soul on Ice in February, 1968, marked Cleaver’s appearance as a self-educated intellectual to be reckoned with. In the work he speaks fluently on issues that were sensitive among blacks and whites. He attacks writer James Baldwin for his alleged bowing to whites, condemns homosexuality as a “sickness,” and reviles black women. Soul on Ice began a crucial year for Cleaver. On April 6, Cleaver was wounded in a shoot-out with the Oakland police that resulted in Bobby Hutton’s death. As a result of this incident, Cleaver’s parole was revoked. Faced with return to prison, Cleaver fled to Montreal and on to Havana. Cleaver was kept under guard for seven months in Cuba before being sent in 1969 to Algiers, where his hatred for capitalism intensified. In 1970, he led a group of eleven on a trip to Pyongyang, North Korea, and on to Hanoi and Peking. In 1971, Cleaver was expelled from the Black Panthers by party leader Huey Newton. When two groups of black Americans hijacked planes to Algiers, Algeria forced the Cleavers to move to Paris, where they obtained legal residence in 1974. The two years he spent in Paris proved crucial to Cleaver; his thinking turned 245
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conservative. In late 1975, he returned to the United States as an evangelical Christian. He was arrested but released in 1976 on $100,000 bail. In the 1980’s, he supported Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but his active career as an evangelist began to falter. He and Kathleen were divorced in 1985, and he struggled with drug problems and had to be hospitalized when, in 1994, he was injured during a drug deal gone bad. Upon his release, he worked for San Francisco’s Black Chamber of Commerce and taught at a Miami Bible college, but convictions for burglary and cocaine possession ensued, and he died in Southern California on May 1, 1998, at Pomona Valley Medical Center for reasons his family asked to remain undisclosed.
Soul on Ice Type of work: Essays First published: 1968 The seventeen essays collected in Soul on Ice contribute to the long tradition of prison writing. In the first essay, “On Becoming,” Cleaver recalls his earlier association in Soledad prison with angry young blacks who “cursed everything American.” His reading of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and the writings of Vladimir Ilich Lenin convinced Cleaver of the nearly universal confusion that ruled in the realm of political and social affairs. Cleaver became an iconoclast who took the writings
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of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Russian revolutionary Sergey Nechayev (1847-1882) as his guide to political life. Following his release from Soledad, Cleaver became obsessed with “The Ogre,” or the white woman, cultivated an image of himself as an outlaw, and committed rape as an “insurrectionary act.” Imprisonment at Folsom forced him to look at himself and to write to save himself. “I had to find out who I am and what I want to be, what type of man I should be, and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable.” Soul on Ice, then, among other things, is a discovery of identity. Almost half a century after their writing, most of the essays retain considerable power. “The White Race and Its Heroes,” for example, offers penetrating insights into race relations in “schizophrenic” America, although its vision of a world revolution led by people of color turns out to have lacked prescience. “Lazarus, Come Forth” analyzes the significance of the black celebrity in a clear-eyed account of the Muhammad Ali boxing match with Floyd Patterson. “Notes on a Native Son” attacks James Baldwin for what Cleaver perceives as “the hatred for blacks permeating his writings” and for Baldwin’s “flippant, schoolmarmish dismissal” of Norman Mailer’s The White Negro (1957), which Cleaver found “prophetic and penetrating.” Cleaver’s contempt for Baldwin is complicated by Cleaver’s judgment of homosexuality as a sickness and by Cleaver’s charge that the homosexual Baldwin criticized Richard Wright because Baldwin despised Wright’s masculinity. Two of the more important themes in Soul on Ice are the identification of white oppression of blacks in the United States with white colonial capitalist exploitation of minorities everywhere, especially in Vietnam, and a rather mystical ethic of love and sexuality preached in “The Primeval Mitosis.” “The Primeval Mitosis” analyzes the power relations between the sexes and the black and white races. Soul on Ice resists dismissal as a period piece. The book continues to impress with its energy and powers of intelligent observation.
Suggested Readings Oliver, John. Eldridge Cleaver: Ice and Fire! Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1977. Rajiv, Sudhi. Forms of Black Consciousness. New York: Advent Books, 1992. Rout, Kathleen. Eldridge Cleaver. Boston: Twayne, 1995. Waldrep, Sheldon. “‘Being Bridges’: Cleaver/Baldwin/Lorde and African American Sexism and Sexuality.” Journal of Homosexuality 26, no. 2/3 (1994): 167-181. Contributor: Frank Day
Lucille Clifton Born: Depew, New York; June 27, 1936 African American
Clifton’s unique strength in poetry is her understated complexity in celebrating all life as an African American woman. Principal works children’s literature: The Black BC’s, 1970; Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, 1970; Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming, 1971; All Us Come Cross the Water, 1973; The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring, 1973; Everett Anderson’s Year, 1974; The Times They Used to Be, 1974; My Brother Fine with Me, 1975; Everett Anderson’s Friend, 1976; Three Wishes, 1976; Amifika, 1977; Everett Anderson’s 1-2-3, 1977; Everett Anderson’s Nine Month Long, 1978; The Lucky Stone, 1979; Sonora Beautiful, 1981; Everett Anderson’s Goodbye, 1983; One of the Problems of Everett Anderson, 2001 poetry: Good Times, 1969; Good News About the Earth, 1972; An Ordinary Woman, 1974; Two-Headed Woman, 1980; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980, 1987; Next: New Poems, 1987; Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, 1991; The Book of Light, 1993; The Terrible Stories, 1996; Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, 2000; Mercy, 2004 nonfiction: Generations: A Memoir, 1976 Lucille Clifton’s parents had little education but were avid readers, and she grew to love books. Her father’s stories steeped her in ancestral heritage, going back to Mammy Caroline, who was born in 1822 in Dahomey, Africa, seized as a child, and enslaved in the United States for much of her life. Caroline and other family members appear in Generations: A Memoir and in many of Clifton’s poems. Clifton’s mother wrote and recited poetry. At age ten, Clifton became interested in writing, having learned from her mother that it is a means of self-expression. Being a writer never occurred to Clifton; she simply wrote. The first in her family to attend college, she had intellectual black friends, studied drama, and performed in plays—developing her voice and lyricism, and, in her writing, experimenting with sparse punctuation. In 1958, she married Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor. Continuing to write, Clifton did not attempt to have any poems published until her work was solicited. This happened when she was thirty-three, happily married, and with six children under the age of ten. By then, Clifton had a wealth of education, experiences, and a growing family 248
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from which to draw for her writing. Her first published book of poetry, Good Times, focuses on difficulties in urban life. The book also honors strength and celebration in the face of adversity. In Clifton’s second volume, she turns away from “white ways” to affirm “the Black.” She celebrates her religious heritage and joins many contemporaries in celebrating racial heritage. With succeeding years and poetry volumes, Clifton’s themes, subjects, and style have changed little. Clifton has also achieved acclaim, and has been more prolific, in writing children’s books. Some themes, ideas, and points of view found in her poetry are also found in her children’s literature. In her children’s books, too, Clifton cultivates identity, values, and pride.
Good Times Type of work: Poetry First published: 1969 Hesitant to call herself a poet in spite of wide literary acclaim, Clifton has noted that poetry is her heart. She has unassumingly identified herself as a black woman, a wife, and mother who “makes poems.” Her poems celebrate all of life—its daily realities, its mysteries, and, most significantly, its continuity. She has claimed that celebrating life is what she is about; her poems validate the claim.
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Beginning with Good Times, Clifton has capitalized on what she knows best. Virtually all her poems fall into one or more of three broad areas of focus: family, African American experience, and female sensibility. Clifton is a lyric poet whose work is unpretentious and has little rhyme. She continually achieves her goal of rendering big ideas in simple ways. Through short poems of simple language she relates brief portraits, encounters, or disturbances that are neatly presented in a few lines. Clifton seems more guided by consciousness or heart than form or structure. Her use of precise, evocative images is masterful, as evidenced in “miss rosie,” which describes the title character as “a wet brown bag of a woman.” In that poem, and many others, what Clifton does not say is part of the poem’s power. Always significant are her use of spaces, few capital letters, and vernacular. In “homage to my hair,” the poet changes from standard English to a black dialect with great effect; in “holy night,” Mary speaks in a Caribbean dialect. Clifton’s use of metaphor is frequent, compelling, and nowhere better than in “lucy and her girls,” relating the power of family ties to natural phenomena. The contrast and tension Clifton achieves through frequent juxtaposition of concepts, as in “inner city,” are laudatory. Many of her lines are memorable, as “my mouth is a cave of cries” in “chemotherapy.” Only occasionally didactic, sometimes humorous, typically subtle or understated, Clifton’s poetry has emotion, conviction, moral stance, Christian tenets, and hope. It has changed little through the years, except to sometimes reflect aging and all that that implies. Always, Clifton defines and affirms the African American experience, politically and aesthetically, with originality, voice, dignity, and pride. She has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Clifton’s early work was frequently inspired by her family, especially her children, and was often a celebration of African American ancestry, heritage, and culture. In the title poem of this collection, Clifton reminds all children, “oh children think about the/ good times.” She juxtaposes society’s perceptions and her own in the opening poem of the collection—“in the inner city/ or/ like we call it/ home”— in order to honor the place she lives. Believing in the humanity of all people, she calls on each person, regardless of ancestry, to take control of his or her life. Of Robert, in the poem by the same name, she states he “married a master/ who whipped his mind/ until he died,” suggesting through the image that the union was one of mutual consent. Her impatience with humans of all kinds who do not strive to improve their lot is a theme begun with this collection and continued throughout her more than three decades of publishing. Another theme that arises here is optimism, as in “Flowers”: “Oh/ here we are/ flourishing for the field/ and the name of the place/ is Love.”
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An Ordinary Woman Type of work: Poetry First published: 1974 An Ordinary Woman includes poems divided into two sections, beginning with “Sisters,” a celebration of family and relationships. “The Lesson of the Falling Leaves” includes the following line: the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves.
It is a testimony to hope, a theme that runs throughout her work. Consistently juxtaposing past with present, Clifton provides wisdom to guide the future, as in the example of “Jackie Robinson”: ran against walls without breaking. in night games was not foul but, brave as a hit over whitestone fences entered the conquering dark.
Two-Headed Woman Type of work: Poetry First published: 1980 Two-Headed Woman, which invokes the African American folk belief in a “TwoHeaded Woman,” with its overtones of a voodoo conjurer, begins with a section titled “Homage to Mine,” moves on to “Two-Headed Woman,” and concludes with “The Light That Came to Lucille Clifton.” While Clifton’s works often have allusions to Christianity, as in the “Some Jesus” series in Good News About the Earth, she refers to other faiths as well, including the Hindu goddess Kali, from “An Ordinary Woman,” providing evidence of her openness to multiple ways of knowing. As a “Two-Headed Woman,” in the opening poem of that section, Clifton says she has “one face turned outward/ one face/ swiveling slowly in.” Spirituality and mysticism pervade this collection, as the final poem attests, with its reference to the “shimmering voices” of her ancestors, whom the poet has heard singing in the “populated air.”
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Good Woman Type of work: Poetry First published: 1987 One theme of the poems in this collection involves Clifton’s ethnic pride, as is reflected in “After Kent State”: “white ways are/ the way of death/ come into the/ black/ and live.” This volume also contains a section called “Heroes,” which directly extends this first theme, and ends the book with a section called “Some Jesus”: I have learned some few things like when a man walk manly he don’t stumble even in the lion’s den.
While the gender is male, Clifton would not limit the message to men. Overall, her early work heralds African Americans for their resistance to oppression and their survival of racism.
Quilting Type of work: Poetry First published: 1991 In five parts, each of the first four named for traditional quilt patterns, “Log Cabin,” “Catalpa Flower,” “Eight-Pointed Star,” and “Tree of Life,” Quilting seems pieced together, as a quilt. It ends with a single poem, “Blessing the Boats,” in “prayer,” as if the spiritual life serves as the connecting threads. Clifton honors those whose roles in history have brought about change, like “February 11, 1990” dedicated to “Nelson Mandela and Winnie,” and “Memo” which is dedicated “to Fannie Lou Hamer.” The poem’s “questions and answers” ends with “the surest failure/ is the unattempted walk.”
The Terrible Stories Type of work: Poetry First published: 1996 In The Terrible Stories, Clifton chronicles the terrible stories of her own life, which include her struggle with breast cancer, and the terrible stories of her people, which include slavery and the prejudice that has survived time. The book ends with a ques-
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tion: Referring to the biblical David, the poet asks how this David will be remembered “if he stands in the tents of history/ bloody skull in one hand, harp in the other?” Clifton’s ability to look at history—ancient, contemporary, or personal— and find redemption in it gives humanity a way to face and survive its failures; this perspective shows her consistent faith in grace.
Suggested Readings Anaporte-Easton, Jean. “Healing Our Wounds: The Direction of Difference in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton and Judith Johnson.” Mid-American Review 14, no. 2 (1994). Clifton, Lucille. “I’d Like Not to Be a Stranger in the World: A Conversation/ Interview with Lucille Clifton.” Interview by Michael Glaser. The Antioch Review 58, no. 3 (2000): 310-328. Holladay, Hilary. Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Jordan, Shirley, ed. Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1993. Lannan Foundation. Readings and Conversations: Readings by Lucille Clifton; Conversation with Denise Chávez. [United States]: Author, 2000. Lupton, Mary Jane. Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Madhubuti, Haki. “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984. Mullaney, Janet Palmer, ed. Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Woman Poets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. White, Mark Bernard. “Sharing the Living Light: Rhetorical, Poetic, and Social Identity in Lucille Clifton.” CLA Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 288-305. Whitley, Edward. “‘A Long Missing Part of Itself’: Bringing Lucille Clifton’s Generations into American Literature.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (2001): 47-64. Contributors: Sandra F. Bone and Alexa L. Sandmann
Jesús Colón Born: Cayey, Puerto Rico; January 20, 1901 Puerto Rican
Colón’s sketches document the Puerto Rican immigrant experience, validating the role of average Puerto Rican immigrants and “the deep traditions of striving for freedom and progress that pervade our daily life.” Principal works nonfiction: A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches, 1961; The Way It Was, and Other Writings, 1993 Jesús Colón (heh-ZEWS koh-LOHN) was involved as an activist with the Puerto Rican and Latino communities in New York City. He understood the plight of the poor, working-class immigrant, since he had held a variety of odd jobs, from dishwasher to dockworker. A committed socialist, Colón wrote from New York for a socialist newspaper, Justicia, published in Spanish in Puerto Rico. He also contributed articles in English to the New York-based socialist newspapers The Daily Worker and The Worker. His publications denounced violations against the working class, and they opposed biased attitudes against the Puerto Rican, the Latino, and the African American populations. His 1961 anthology gathers together some of those articles, some of them published for the first time in English. Colón’s background as a newspaper reporter directly influenced his sketches. Born to a humble peasant family, Colón aims to offer a kinder view of the Puerto Rican experience by recapturing key moments of his own life and stressing particular folk traditions as representative of Puerto Rican culture. His struggle to succeed in New York City, where he arrived at sixteen, illustrates the saga of the Puerto Ricans generally, who since the 1920’s have come to that city by the thousands. Colón protests the generally negative attitude toward Puerto Ricans and instead offers his own life as example of the Puerto Rican experience in New York, a life that is a combination of strong, fulfilling, and discouraging emotions. Colón’s sketches place the writer as protagonist in stories that attempt to illustrate specific traits of the Puerto Rican personality. His narrative is highly dependent upon his memories, which go back to his childhood in rural Puerto Rico during the first decade of the twentieth century. Displaying his ability to remember incidents from several decades before, Colón recalls the readers who entertained tobacco wrappers, some of whom were so well read that they could recite long literary passages from memory. Listening to men reading and commenting on literature 254
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made the boy Colón aware of social injustice toward the working class. Colón’s stories bring together a number of colorful characters who inhabit the Puerto Rican barrios of New York. His book, with its commitment to document the Puerto Rican immigrant experience, stands out as a rich sociological treatise. Colón’s major contribution may be his ability to validate the role of average Puerto Rican immigrants as protagonists of their own stories. For Colón, the history of the Puerto Rican community is not to be found in the “sentimental, transient and ephemeral, or bizarre and grotesque in Puerto Rican life” but in “the deep traditions of striving for freedom and progress that pervade our daily life.”
A Puerto Rican in New York Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1961 The sketches in A Puerto Rican in New York place the writer as protagonist in stories that attempt to illustrate specific traits of the Puerto Rican personality. His narrative is highly dependent upon his memories, which go back to his childhood in rural Puerto Rico during the first decade of the twentieth century. Displaying his ability to remember incidents from several decades before, Colón recalls the readers who entertained tobacco wrappers, some of whom were so well read that they could recite long literary passages from memory. Listening to men reading and commenting on literature made the boy Colón aware of social injustice toward the working class. Colón’s stories bring together a number of colorful characters who inhabit the Puerto Rican barrios of New York. His book, with its commitment to document the Puerto Rican immigrant experience, stands out as a rich sociological treatise. Colón’s major contribution may be his ability to validate the role of average Puerto Rican immigrants as protagonists of their own stories. For Colón, the history of the Puerto Rican community is not to be found in the “sentimental, transient and ephemeral, or bizarre and grotesque in Puerto Rican life” but in “the deep traditions of striving for freedom and progress that pervade our daily life.”
Suggested Readings Colón, Jesús. The Jesús Colón Papers. New York: Evelina López Antonetty Puerto Rican Research Collection, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqeños, Hunter College, 1991. _______. The Way It Was, and Other Writings. Edited with an introduction by Edna Acosta-Belen and Virginia Sanchez Korrol. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1993. Contributor: Rafael Ocasio
Lucha Corpi Born: Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico; April 13, 1945 Mexican American
Corpi addresses border issues and three cultures—indigenous Mexican, mixed modern Mexican, and Anglo—and works to sensitize the male literary tradition to women’s issues. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: Where Fireflies Dance, 1997 long fiction: Delia’s Song, 1989; Eulogy for a Brown Angel, 1992; Cactus Blood, 1995; Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 1999 poetry: Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words, 1980; Variaciones sobre una tempestad/ Variations on a Storm, 1990 edited text: Máscaras, 1997 Lucha Corpi (LEW-chah KOR-pee), called Luz, was born and socialized in Mexico. At an early age, she began to give recitals and read poems in public, encouraged by her teachers. Her youthful adventures with her brother included visiting the ruined house of the revolutionary fighter Juan Sebastián. Afterward, the siblings listened to music from the jukebox at the neighborhood cantina but were caught by their mother. Later, as an adult, Corpi sang and told stories to her own son. Corpi immigrated at nineteen, in 1965, to San Francisco with her husband. Their son was born there. Five years later they divorced. It is notable that Corpi did not write until living in the Chicano community after the divorce. Mexican literary traditions are stronger than Anglo ones in her work, which employs the codes and conventions of the Hispanic lyrical and romantic tradition, echoing the works of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, and Federico García Lorca. Corpi’s work presupposes knowledge of Mexican popular expressions and legends such as that of La Llorona, the ghost woman who seeks her children. Because of the author’s emigration and divorce, Corpi’s work explores the boundaries between Anglo and Mexican cultures and life in a society that permits women to express themselves in writing. She writes her fiction in English and her poetry in Spanish (and collaborates with her longtime translator, Catherine NietoRodríguez, on the bilingual versions). Corpi addresses border issues and three cultures (the indigenous Mexican, the mixed modern Mexican, and the Anglo) as she writes about four areas of human experience: the natural world, the cultural overlay, the pagan aspect, and artistic expression. Among her most potent symbols are the bridge (emigration) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the long-suffering woman). 256
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Critics note that while Corpi’s works presuppose an audience of women, she avoids overt textual markers of sex, keeps her literary voice impersonal, and concerns herself with the representation of female consciousness. Corpi examines her own emotions and those of her characters by using images rather than expository prose. In Corpi’s mind, women’s tragedies are caused by men’s insensitivity to women, and she means to sensitize male literary tradition to women’s issues. Corpi holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. She began to teach English as a second language in Oakland, California, in 1973. She has served as coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library at the University of California at Berkeley, as president of the Centro Chicano de Escritores, and as a member of the feminist mystery novel circle Sisters in Crime. Her Eulogy for a Brown Angel won a PEN/Josephine Miles Award and a Multicultural Exchange Award for best book of fiction. The bilingual children’s book Where Fireflies Dance was named to the 2000-2001 Texas Bluebonnet Award master list of the Texas Library Association. In addition, she received the Lila WallaceReader’s Digest Foundation Writers Award in 1995 for outstanding Chicana literature, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Latino Hallmark Book Award.
Delia’s Song Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Delia’s Song recounts a young woman’s maturation amid the student riots and civil rights movements of the late 1960’s. The novel begins with a flashback that suggests the intensity of Delia’s emotional state before switching to the central event, which took place earlier in the novel’s chronology. The novel’s three sections outline the pain and excitement of this turbulent period through Delia’s emergence from naïveté into a new social and sexual maturity. The novel’s events are strongly autobiographical, echoing a Mexican American woman’s quest for literary respect, sexual identity and equality, an academic degree, and a fulfilling love during the political transformations of late-1960’s California. One of the most effective social themes of Delia’s Song is the disturbing reality of sexism as it is experienced in Chicano culture. Delia must struggle against her own family’s limiting attitudes as well as those of her colleagues. Her two brothers, both dead (one shot as a soldier in Vietnam, the other killed by a drug overdose), receive the affections of their mother that Delia desires and deserves. The deepest expression of her struggle for sexual and intellectual identity takes place within, as she moves from an idealistic girl to a fully developed artist, academic, and partner in love. The disjointed plot requires the reader to remain attentive to narrative cues in order to make sense of the events, but the unconventional structure is one of the
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novel’s best features. Dreams, sprinkles of family history, and memories all interrupt the plot. Stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, vignettes of dream imagery, bits of journal entries, family oral histories, and even newspaper clippings are used as narrative elements. The story is presented from the limited-omniscient point of view, filtered principally through the emotions and mind of Delia, but taking liberties by revealing the thoughts of other characters as well. This structure reflects one of the main themes: that life happens all at once, at the level of consciousness, and has meaning to the degree that people have awareness of it. Delia’s life makes sense only when looked at as an entire fabric, not as a series of logically related events.
Suggested Readings Armstrong, Jeanne. Demythologizing the Romance of Conquest. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Brinson-Piñeda, Barbara. “Poets on Poetry: Dialogue with Lucha Corpi.” Prisma 1, no. 1 (1979). Sánchez, Marta Ester. “Prohibition and Sexuality in Lucha Corpi’s Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words.” In Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Contributors: Debra D. Andrist and Joyce Ann Hancock
Victor Hernández Cruz Born: Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico; February 6, 1949 Puerto Rican African American
Cruz incorporates traditional Spanish, New York-Puerto Rican slang, and black English in his writing to explore his multiethnic heritage. Principal works poetry: Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems, 1966; Snaps, 1969; Mainland, 1973; Tropicalization, 1976; By Lingual Wholes, 1982; Rhythm, Content & Flavor, 1989; Red Beans, 1991; Panoramas, 1997; Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2000, 2001; The Mountain in the Sea: Poems, 2006 nonfiction: Doing Poetry, 1970 edited texts: Stuff: A Collection of Poems, Visions and Imaginative Happenings from Young Writers in Schools—Opened and Closed, 1970 (with Herbert Kohl); Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets, 1995 (with Virgil Suarez and Leroy V. Quintana) Victor Hernández Cruz (VEE-tohr hehr-NAN-dehz crewz) was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, a small town about twenty miles from San Juan. The streets were unpaved, but he absorbed the native song and poetry as well as the poetic declamations of his grandfather and uncle. His family migrated to New York in 1954 and settled in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School and began to write verse. At sixteen, he composed his first collection of poetry, Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems. Cruz and his friends duplicated and distributed five hundred copies to local bookstores. In 1967, the Evergreen Review helped launch his career when it featured several of these poems. Thus, while still in high school, he became a published poet. In New York, he edited Umbra magazine from 1967 to 1969 and was cofounder of the East Harlem Gut Theater. In 1969, he released his second collection of poems, Snaps, and gained national attention. In the 1960’s, his neighborhood had become a center of intellectual and social ferment as part of the Civil Rights movement. Beat poetry, protest poetry, and feminist poetry mixed with political activism and music to form the social milieu. Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were major influences, and Cruz was intrigued by the developing Nuyorican (New York/Puerto Rican) poetry movement, which often claims him. In 1969, he moved to Berkeley, California, to become poet in residence at the 259
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University of California. He then served in the ethnic studies department of San Francisco State College from 1971 to 1972. In 1973, he published a third collection of poems, Mainland, which chronicles his migrations from New York to California and back again. In 1974, he received the Creative Arts Public Service Award. He worked with the San Francisco Art Commission (1976) and the Mission Neighborhood Center (1981). In April, 1981, Life magazine featured Cruz in its celebration of twelve North American poets. With novelist Ishmael Reed, he formed the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1989, Cruz earned a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing award. After the publication of Rhythm, Content & Flavor, he moved back to Aguas Buenas, where he was born. He came into close contact with the local oral traditions and was deeply affected by them. In 1991, the year in which he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, he recorded these sensations in Red Beans, and next he began working on a book of poems in Spanish. He served as a visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego (1993) and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1994). Cultural critic Bill Moyers interviewed Cruz for an eight-part Public Broadcasting Service series, The Language of Life, which aired June 23 to July 28, 1995. This program was subsequently released in book and audiocassette formats. Cruz’s legendary ability to give dynamic poetry readings has twice made him World Heavyweight Poetry Champion in Taos, New Mexico. He has also participated in discussions and readings sponsored by La Fundación Federico García Lorca and at the Universidad de Alcalá. He has been short-listed for the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Griffen Poetry Prize.
Snaps Type of work: Poetry First published: 1969 After the early success of Papo Got His Gun! and Other Poems, a chapbook that had gained notice in Evergreen Review, Random House published Snaps. This collection’s hip, barrio voice, its jazzy rhythms, and its snapshot technique of realistically portraying street life bought Cruz immediate recognition. Random House honored his irreverence for grammar and formalities of style and thus helped launch the young poet’s ongoing fascination with the relationship of sound and sense, of language and life. The poems capture the true essence of urban ghetto life. Clacking subways, dance clubs, smoking, girl-watching, and knife fights form the gritty realities of life on the street, and the rapid staccato of half-learned English enriches the poems. Cruz’s language here is the sublanguage used to present Spanish Harlem’s subculture. His speaker in these primarily narrative poems uses street slang as well as surrealistic humor to create a vivid picture of the danger and energy of the culturally diverse Lower East Side. There is constant movement: on subways, uptown, down-
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town, inside, outside, walking, driving. In “Megalopolis,” the speaker presents snapshots from the window of a car moving through the urban sprawl of the East Coast: let those lights & trees & rocks talk/ going by/ go by just sit back/ we/ we go into towns/ sailing the east coast/ westside drive far-off buildings look like castles/ the kind dracula flies out of/ new england of houses
The poem goes on to end with quick vignettes of a poet inciting riot, urban bombs, “laurence welk-reader’s digest ladies” with bouffant hairdos secured with hair spray, billboards “singing lies,” and “the night of the buildings/ . . . singing magic words/ of our ancestors.” This ending points to another aspect of Cruz’s poetry: traveling through time as well as space.
Mainland Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973 Mainland records Cruz’s poetic migration across the United States. The motion/ mobility theme of Snaps here moves from intracity travel to interstate and, finally, to international migrations. The collection begins in New York, traverses the Midwest to California and the Southwest, and ends with a visit to Puerto Rico, followed by the return to New York. These poems show the power of the memory of the Caribbean—its music and dance, its food, language, people, and culture—all working to recenter the poet once he returns to the realities of New York urban life. “The Man Who Came to the Last Floor,” which ends the collection, employs surrealistic humor. A Puerto Rican immigrant with a bag of tropical seeds arrives in New York and rents a sixth-floor apartment. Singing and dancing in his apartment, he accidentally flings the seeds of tropical fruits from his window. A policeman was walking down the avenue and all of a sudden took off his hat A mango seed landed nicely into his curly hair
The policeman does not notice the seed, which then grows into a flourishing fivefoot tree that bears a mango. With this surreal image, Cruz presents the subtle, almost subversive, “tropicalization” accomplished by immigrants as they plant seeds to revitalize the northern urban landscape.
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Tropicalization Type of work: Poetry First published: 1976 In an increasingly lyrical vein, Cruz collects in Tropicalization the images and rhythms of the Caribbean in poetry and prose poems. This collection presents a renewed vision of the United States, tropicalized, surrealistically transformed by the beat of its Hispanic population. Here Cruz uses more experimental structures to capture the spiritual side of barrio life, and he also enlarges upon the blending of Spanish and English (“Spanglish,” or code-switching), always a characteristic of his work. He handles English as an amalgam capable of easily incorporating new words and innovative syntaxes. In “Side 24,” he cheerfully juxtaposes English and Spanish, cement and tropical oranges (chinas): Walk el cement Where las chinas roll Illuminating my path Through old streets
As part of the “ethnic” avant-garde, Cruz does not regard his Puerto Rican home with anger or despair, as Abraham Rodriguez does, nor does he look back with sadness, as does Judith Ortiz Cofer. He cheerfully delights in his ethnic identity, which he sees as tropicalizing the North, as bringing oranges and salsa to the cement and the chill of the United States.
By Lingual Wholes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1982 Continuing his themes of contrasting and merging the sounds of two cultures and languages, Cruz again includes both poetry and prose in his 1982 By Lingual Wholes. This collection is slower paced and more pensive than the earlier works; again, music, dance, and Spanglish coalesce in a dynamic and positive expression of multiculturalism. Cruz removes barriers of culture and language, illustrating the wholeness possible in living in and creating from two cultures and languages. The title suggests the wordplay that will follow as Cruz proves himself a master of pun, whimsy, paradox, and concrete poetry. In addition, these poems explore a deeper heritage of Puerto Rican folklore and myth, as well as a whole range of historical events and characters. Never didactic, Cruz invites the reader to participate in genial handshakes across cultures. In the sixth poem of the collection, “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodri-
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guez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge,” Cruz pays tribute to the blind African Cuban musician and composer. In New York, the Caribbean community enjoyed this music under the label “salsa.” The speaker raves about salsa’s power and gaily ridicules researchers who attempt to study it and “understand” it. They totally miss the dance music’s intrinsic warmth and tropical passion, which is to be experienced and absorbed, not analyzed and understood.
“Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1982, in By Lingual Wholes The central feature of “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge,” from the title to the final line (“Has it rained?”), is its lightheartedness and sense of whimsy. Rodriguez was a blind percussionist, player of the tres (a small nine-stringed guitar), composer, and bandleader. His impact on the mambo style in Cuba in the 1930’s was immeasurable, and he was responsible for the mambo craze that took the northeastern United States by storm in the early 1950’s. The poem salutes Afro-Cuban music and the great musician in its title. At the same time, it ridicules those “researchers” who would attempt to study the results of its impact. The stuff of knowledge is in the music; to study its aftereffects—the “puddles of water” that the listeners have become—is inane. Some things, such as sensuous music, cannot be analyzed; they should simply be experienced. The poem’s vivid irony lies in the comparison of the researchers’ scrutiny of the pools of water with the knowledge the speaker and his friends gain from directly experiencing the music. The poem satirizes the academicians’ preoccupation with the puddles; they are unaware of the water’s essence and intangible qualities. Theirs is the kind of intellect that cannot rise to “dance el son.” The neighbors, represented by Doña Flores, love the music and willingly liquefy under its spell. “Flores” means flowers, and, as Mrs. Flores is affected, so are the flowers in stanza 4 that “dance/—in the wind.” The poem’s organic spontaneity creates a bridge in stanza 3 between Flores and flowers: the people, who are lively and beautiful, and the metaphorical essence and spirit of the people. The water is warm because it is metaphorically equated with those who are alive and, in their exultation, transformed. The poem ends with the researchers seeking answers to their absurd questions. They have missed the beauty and truth of the music of Arsenio Rodriguez: They will never be wise.
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Rhythm, Content & Flavor Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 In his collection, Rhythm, Content & Flavor, Cruz selects poems from his earlier works and adds a new work, “Islandis: The Age of Seashells.” Here he continues to interweave images of the urban and natural worlds. Also the poet reaffirms his Puerto Rican culture as the source of music and knowledge. Like lost Atlantis, with its tropical breezes and its kinship with the ocean, Puerto Rico creates a music reminiscent of the medieval “music of the spheres.” As he also notes elsewhere, poetry for Cruz is “la salsa de Dios”; God is the origin of all poetry and music, and poetry is the music of God.
Red Beans Type of work: Poetry First published: 1991 Red Beans contains poems, prose essays, and a manifesto on poetry. The “red” of the title is the color of beans, shirts, earth, the Red Sea, “Red pepper/ In a stew,” all representing the vitality and urgency Cruz finds in the “red beings,” his Puerto Rican ancestors. He also draws on his earliest memories of hearing English in “Snaps of Immigration”: “At first English was nothing/ but sound/ Like trumpets doing yakity yak.” Later, the sound of poetic language is celebrated in “An Essay on Williams Carlos Williams”: I love the quality of the spoken thought As it happens immediately uttered into the air Not held inside and rolled around for some properly schemed moment
Cruz continues to emphasize the naturalness, the oral spontaneity of true poetry. “Corsica” adds a focus on the joyful interplay of cultures and languages that had always been a theme in Cruz’s poetry. He announces that Puerto Rico and Corsica are “holding hands” underneath the “geologic plates,” that both islands see the same moon. Never narrowly ethnic, Cruz celebrates the creative merger of culture and language. He ends this volume showing his receptivity to other cultures: I wait with a gourd full of inspiration For a chip to fall from
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The festival fireworks To favor me And set me on fire.
Panoramas Type of work: Poetry First published: 1997 The poems and essays of Panoramas present a civilized and gracious tone as they transport the reader to the magic world of the Caribbean, which celebrates its blend of Taino, African, and Spanish legacies. They also illuminate Latin American/Caribbean culture in the United States and beyond. Rather than conflict, Cruz suggests a harmonious merger and a creative synthesis of disparate ideas and people.
The Mountain in the Sea Type of work: Poetry First published: 2006 Victor Hernández Cruz was one of the earliest and most influential voices of the Nuyorican writers, and his poetry has always been marked by a rich blending of English and Spanish and of imagery that calls up both the vibrant and musical life on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side and the tender details of Puerto Rican food, home, agriculture, and climate. With this new volume, Cruz’s poetry is further enriched with language and imagery from a new source: the North African Arabic culture of Morocco, where Cruz and his wife Amina live for part of each year. Now the poetry integrates vocabulary in English, Spanish, and Arabic, and alludes to Christianity and Islam, in an exciting bridge of cultures that is as natural as the ocean connecting Cruz’s three homelands. The poems in The Mountain in the Sea are in three sections. The first, “Other Shores,” explores Cruz’s first sensory impressions of the markets, homes, foods, and music of Morocco. “Portraits,” the second section, contains nineteen of what Cruz calls “tribute poems,” biographical portraits of people who have inspired him. The first two poems, “Rafael Hernández” and “Felipe Rodriguez,” honor Puerto Rican immigrants to New York. Memories preserved in this section include the early television appearance of President Dwight Eisenhower, the music of The Harptones, the mystical apparitions of the Virgin of Monserrate and the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges. In the third section, “Island Waves,” Cruz returns to Puerto Rico, which he has written about throughout his career. With these poems, however, he sees his native land with new eyes, finding echoes of North Africa in the daily rhythms of Puerto Rican life. Cruz’s poetry shows how the same moon, the same rain,
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and the waves on the Mediterranean and the Caribbean wash over the lands and the people of these distant lands.
Suggested Readings Aparicio, Frances R. “‘Salsa,’ ‘Maracas,’ and ‘Baile’: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz.” MELUS 16 (Spring, 1989/1990): 43-58. Cruz, Victor Hernández. “Victor Hernández Cruz.” Interview by Bill Moyers. In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Kanellos, Nicolás. Victor Hernández Cruz and La Salsa de Dios. Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Torrens, James. “U.S. Latino Writers: The Searchers.” America 167 (July 18-25, 1992). Waisman, Sergio Gabriel. “The Body as Migration.” Bilingual Review 19 (May 1, 1944): 188-192. Contributors: Marie J. K. Brenner and Ron Welburn
Countée Cullen Born: New York, New York; May 30, 1903 Died: New York, New York; January 9, 1946 African American
Cullen, one of the most prolific poets of the Harlem Renaissance, combined English poetic styles with racial themes and identities. Principal works children’s literature: The Lost Zoo (A Rhyme for the Young, but Not Too Young), 1940; My Lives and How I Lost Them, 1942 drama: Medea, pr., pb. 1935 (translation of Euripides); One Way to Heaven, pb. 1936 (adaptation of his novel); St. Louis Woman, pr. 1946 (adaptation of Arna Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday); The Third Fourth of July, pr., pb. 1946 (with Owen Dodson; one-act) long fiction: One Way to Heaven, 1932 poetry: Color, 1925; The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold, 1927; Copper Sun, 1927; The Black Christ, and Other Poems, 1929; The Medea, and Some Poems, 1935; On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countée Cullen, 1947 edited text: Caroling Dusk, 1927 Countée Cullen (KOWN-tee KUHL-lehn) recognized early in his life that he wanted to use poetry to express his belief that a poet’s skin color should not dictate style and subject matter in a poem. He began writing poetry while in high school. Cullen, a Phi Beta Kappa honoree from New York University, had already published Color by the time he entered graduate school at Harvard University. With a master’s in English and three additional books of poetry, Cullen was widely known as the unofficial poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. In his introduction to Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, Cullen set forth many of the ideas that shaped his identity as a poet and an African American. He believed that poetry elevated any race and that African American poets could benefit from using the rich traditions of English and American verse. Cullen also chose not to include dialect poetry in his anthology, viewing this style as out of date, restrictive, and best left to the white poets who were still using it. Cullen was not ashamed of his race, nor did he deliberately seek white approval. He did feel that he should be receptive to many ideas to enhance his poetry. Many of his poems, such as “Incident,” “From the Dark Tower,” and “Colors,” pro267
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test racism and bigotry. However, in his collection The Black Christ, and Other Poems, themes of love and death prevail. Such themes show the influence of the British Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Keats especially was Cullen’s artistic mentor. Cullen records his response to having visited Keats’s grave in “Endymion,” a poem celebrating the power of Keats’s lyricism. Cullen’s use of genteel traditions and the black experience caused dilemmas and conflicts throughout his writing career. Critics praised Cullen for his skillful use of the sonnet form, but they castigated him when he did not use racial experiences as the primary source of his themes. However, even as he cautioned Harlem Renaissance poets about excessive use of racial themes, he published a Countée Cullen (Library of Congress) novel about Harlem characters, One Way to Heaven. Cullen wrote nearly as much prose as he did poetry. While serving from 1926 through most of 1928 as literary editor of Opportunity, a magazine vehicle for the National Urban League, Cullen wrote several articles, including book reviews, and a series of topical essays for a column called “The Dark Tower” about figures and events involved in the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote many stories for children, most of which are collected in My Lives and How I Lost Them, the “autobiography” of Cullen’s own pet, Christopher Cat, who had allegedly reached his ninth life. Earlier, in 1932, the poet had tried his hand at a novel, publishing it as One Way to Heaven. In addition to articles, reviews, stories, and a novel, the poet translated or collaborated in the writing of three plays, one of them a musical. From 1934 until his death, Cullen taught French and English at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, guiding students in the traditions that made him a celebrated poet. In 1935, Cullen translated Euripides’ Medea for the volume by the same name; in 1942, Virgil Thomson set to music the seven-verse choruses from Cullen’s translation. With Owen Dodson, Cullen wrote the one-act play The Third Fourth of July, which appeared posthumously in 1946. The musical was produced at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway, where it ran for 113 performances; this production also introduced Pearl Bailey as the character Butterfly.
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The Black Christ Type of work: Poetry First published: 1929 The intense need expressed here, to see God as literally black, predicts the long narrative poem of 1929, The Black Christ. This poem, perhaps more than any other of Cullen’s poems, represents his attempt to portray black heroism, the second tenet of the Black Aesthetic. Briefly the poem tells the tale of Jim, a young black man who comes to believe it is inevitable that he will suffer death at the hands of an angry lynch mob. Miraculously, after the inevitable lynching has indeed occurred, the young man appears to his younger brother and mother, much as Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Gospels, appeared before his disciples. Christ has essentially transformed himself into black Jim. Although the poem contains such faults as a main character who speaks in dialect at one point and waxes eloquent at another and one speech by Jim who, pursued by the mob, speaks so long that he cannot possibly escape (one may argue that he was doomed from the start), it has moments of artistic brilliance. Jim “was handsome in a way/ Night is after a long, hot day.” He could never bend his spirit to the white man’s demands: “my blood’s too hot to knuckle.” Like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, Jim was a man of action whose deeds “let loose/ The pent-up torrent of abuse,” which clamored in his younger brother “for release.” Toward the middle of the poem, Jim’s brother, the narrator, describes Jim, after the older brother has become tipsy with drink, as “Spring’s gayest cavalier”; this occurs “in the dim/ Half-light” of the evening. At the end, “Spring’s gayest cavalier” has become the black Christ, Spring’s radiant sacrifice, suggesting that “Halflight” reveals only selective truths, those one may be inclined to believe are true because of one’s human limitations, whereas God’s total light reveals absolute truth unfettered. Following this suggestion, the image “Spring’s gayest cavalier” becomes even more fecund. The word “cavalier” calls up another poem by Hopkins, “The Windhover,” which is dedicated to Christ. In this poem, the speaker addresses Christ with the exclamation, “O my chevalier!” Both “cavalier” and “chevalier” have their origins in the same Latin word, caballarius. Since Cullen knew both French and Latin and since Hopkins’s poems had been published in 1918, it is reasonable to suggest a more than coincidental connection. At any rate, “Spring’s gayest cavalier” embodies an example of effective foreshadowing. Just before the mob seizes Jim, the narrator maintains that “the air about him shaped a crown/ Of light, or so it seemed to me,” similar to the nimbus so often appearing in medieval paintings of Christ, the holy family, the disciples, and the saints. The narrator describes the seizure itself in an epic simile of nine lines. When Jim has been lynched, the younger brother exclaims, “My Lycidas was dead. There swung/ In all his glory, lusty, young,/ My Jonathan, my Patrocles.” Here Cullen brings together the works of John Milton, the Bible, and Homer into one image that appears to syncretize them all. Clearly, the poet is attempting to construct in Jim a hero of cosmic proportions while at the same time managing to unify, if only for a
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moment, four grand traditions: the English, the biblical, the classical, and the African American. The octave of “From the Dark Tower” states the poem’s problem in an unconventional, perhaps surprising manner by means of a series of threats. The first threat introduces the conceit of planting, to which the poem returns in its last pair of couplets. The poet begins, “We shall not always plant while others reap/ The golden increment of bursting fruit.” The planting conceit suggests almost immediately the image of slaves working the fields of a Southern plantation. Conjuring up this memory of the antebellum South but then asserting by use of the future tense (“We shall not”) that nothing has changed—that is, that the white world has relegated today’s African Americans to their former status as slaves, not even as good as second-class citizens—Cullen strikes a minor chord of deep, poignant bitterness felt by many contemporary blacks. Yet, what these blacks produce with their planting is richly fertile, a “bursting fruit”; the problem is that “others reap” this “golden increment.” The poet’s threat promises that this tide of gross, unjust rapine will soon turn against its perpetrators. The next few lines compound this initial threat with others. These same oppressed people will not forever bow “abject and mute” to such treatment by a people who have shown by their oppression that they are the inferiors of their victims. “Not everlastingly” will these victims “beguile” this evil race “with mellow flute”; the reader can readily picture scenes of supposedly contented, dancing “darkies” and ostensibly happy minstrel men. “We were not made eternally to weep” declares the poet in the last line of the octave. This line constitutes the volta, or turning point, in the poem. All the bitterness and resentment implied in the preceding lines is exposed here. An oppressed people simply will not shed tears forever; sorrow and self-pity inevitably turn to anger and rebellion. The first four lines of the sestet state cases in defense of the octave’s propositions that these oppressed people, now identified by the comparisons made in these lines as the black race, are “no less lovely being dark.” The poet returns subtly to his planting conceit by citing the case of flowers that “cannot bloom at all/ In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall.” Cullen takes his reader from the infinite heavens to finite flowers of earth, grasping universal and particular significance for his people and thereby restoring and bolstering their pride and sense of worth. Then follow the piercing, deep-felt last lines: “So, in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,/ And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.” As with “Yet Do I Marvel,” Cullen has effectively combined the structures of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets by concluding his poem with this trenchant, succinct couplet. The planting conceit, however, has altered dramatically. What has been “golden increment” for white oppressors will yet surely prove the “bursting fruit” of “agonizing seeds.” The poem represents, then, a sort of revolutionary predeclaration of independence. This “document” first states the offenses sustained by the downtrodden, next asserts their worth and significance as human beings, and finally argues that the black people will “wait” until an appropriate time to reveal their agony through rebellion. Cullen has here predicted the anger of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and the rhetoric of the Black Armageddon, a later literary movement
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led by such poets as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni. Whereas these figures of the Black Armageddon movement almost invariably selected unconventional forms in which to express their rebellion, Cullen demonstrated his respect for tradition in voicing his parallel feelings. Although Cullen’s work ably displays his knowledge of the traditions of the Western world, from Homer to Keats (and even Edna St. Vincent Millay), it equally enunciates his empathy with black Americans in its celebration of the Black Aesthetic. At the same time that his poetry incorporates classicism and English Romanticism, it affirms his black heritage and the black American experience.
On These I Stand Type of work: Poetry First published: 1947 On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countée Cullen is a collection of the formerly published poems for which Cullen wanted to be remembered. Written during the 1920’s and 1930’s, these poems are from such works as Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927), The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929), and The Medea, and Some Poems (1935). Cullen also includes six new poems on subjects ranging from a tribute to John Brown (“A Negro Mother’s Lullaby”) to the evolution from birth to death (“Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts”). Cullen maintains the style of classical lyricists such as British poet John Keats in this collection, using rhymed couplets, ballads, or sonnet forms. Color emphasizes racial themes and shows the influence of ideas associated with the Harlem Renaissance. There are religious overtones in some of the poems about the burden of racial oppression. The speaker recognizes a loss of faith but laments the racial prejudice against more religious blacks in “Pagan Prayer.” Cullen’s Simon the Cyrenian transcends his race by helping Christ bear the cross in “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks.” The poem for which Cullen is widely known, “Yet Do I Marvel,” questions the value of God’s decision to give creative talent to a black person, whose talents are ignored. Cullen joined other Harlem Renaissance writers in using African motifs. In “Heritage,” one of the longer poems in Color, the speaker asks the question, What is Africa to me? An exotic and stereotyped image of Africa emerges, and the question is unanswered. The selections from Copper Sun and The Black Christ, and Other Poems show that gradually Cullen moved away from ideas about racial identity to those that preoccupy a Romantic mind influenced by Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, or Edna St. Vincent Millay. There are numerous poems on love, death, and the difficulties of the creative spirit in overcoming the burdens of the physical self. To complete On These I Stand, Cullen chose examples from The Lost Zoo (1940), his book of poems for children. “The Wakeupworld” and “The-Snake-ThatWalked-Upon-His-Tail” instruct and delight. The collection On These I Stand at-
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tests Cullen’s Romantic vision, his attraction to Harlem Renaissance themes, and his depiction of the African American experience.
“Yet Do I Marvel” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1947, in On These I Stand “Yet Do I Marvel,” perhaps Cullen’s most famous single poem, displays the poet during one of his most intensely lyrical, personal moments; yet this poem also illustrates his reverence for tradition. The sonnet, essentially Shakespearean in rhyme scheme, is actually Petrarchan in its internal form. The Petrarchan form is even suggested in the rhyme scheme; the first two quatrains rhyme abab, cdcd in perfect accord with the Shakespearean scheme. The next six lines, however, break the expected pattern of yet another quatrain in the same scheme; instead of efef followed by a couplet gg, the poem adopts the scheme ee ff gg. While retaining the concluding couplet (gg), the other two (eeff) combine with the final couplet, suggesting the Petrarchan structure of the sestet. The poem is essentially divided, then, into the octave, wherein the problem is stated, and the sestet, in which some sort of resolution is attempted. Analysis of the poem’s content shows that Cullen chooses the internal form of the Petrarchan sonnet but retains a measure of the Shakespearean form for dramatic effect. The first eight lines of the poem express by means of antiphrastic statements or ironic declaratives that the poem’s speaker doubts God’s goodness and benevolent intent, especially in his creation of certain limited beings. The poem begins with the assertion that “I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind” and then proceeds to reveal that the speaker actually believes just the opposite to be true; that is, he actually says, “I do doubt God is good.” For God has created the “little buried mole” to continue blind and “flesh that mirrors Him” to “some day die.” Then the persona cites two illustrations of cruel, irremediable predicaments from classical mythology, those of Tantalus and Sisyphus. These mythological figures are traditional examples: Tantalus, the man who suffers eternal denial of that which he seeks, and Sisyphus, the man who suffers the eternal drudgery of being forced to toil endlessly again and again only to lose his objective each time he thinks he has won it. The illustration of the mole and the man who must die rehearses the existential pathos of modern human beings estranged from God and thrust into a hostile universe. What appeared to be naïve affirmations of God’s goodness become penetrating questions that reveal Cullen himself in a moment of intense doubt. This attitude of contention with God closely resembles that expressed by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord.” The probing questions, combined with the apparent resolve to believe, are indeed close; one might suggest that Cullen has adapted Hopkins’s struggle for certainty to the black predicament, the real subject of Cullen’s poem. The predicaments of Tantalus and Sisyphus (antici-
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pating Albert Camus’s later essay) comment on a personal problem, one close to home for Cullen himself. The notion of men struggling eternally toward a goal, thinking they have achieved it but having it torn from them, articulates the plight of black artists in America. In keeping with the form of the Petrarchan sonnet, the ninth line constitutes the volta, referring to a “turn” toward some sort of resolution. From ironic questioning, the persona moves to direct statement, even to a degree of affirmation. “Inscrutable His ways are,” the speaker declares, to a mere human being who is too preoccupied with the vicissitudes of his mundane existence to grasp “What awful brain compels His awful hand,” this last line echoing William Blake’s “The Tyger.” The apparent resolution becomes clouded by the poem’s striking final couplet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” The doubt remains; nothing is finally resolved. The plight of the black poet becomes identical with that of Tantalus and Sisyphus. Like these figures from classical mythology, the black poet is, in the contemporary, nonmythological world, forced to struggle endlessly toward a goal he will never, as the poem suggests, be allowed to reach. Cullen has effectively combined the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet forms; the sestet’s first four lines function as an apparent resolution of the problem advanced by the octave. The concluding couplet, however, recalling the Shakespearean device of concentrating the entire poem’s comment within the final two lines, restates the problem of the octave by maintaining that, in the case of a black poet, God has created the supreme irony. In “Yet Do I Marvel,” Cullen has succeeded in making an intensely personal statement; as James Johnson suggested, this poem “is motivated by race.” Nevertheless, not only race is at work here. Rather than selecting a more modern form, perhaps free verse, the poet employs the sonnet tradition in a surprising and effective way, and he also shows his regard for tradition by citing mythological figures and by summoning up Blake.
“Heritage” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1947, in On These I Stand Beauty and classical mythology were not the only elements of tradition that Cullen revered. Indeed, he forcefully celebrated his own African heritage, exemplifying the first of the tenets of the Black Aesthetic. “Heritage” represents his most concentrated effort to reclaim his African roots. This 128-line lyric opens as the persona longs for the song of “wild barbaric birds/ Goading massive jungle herds” from which through no fault of his own he has been removed for three centuries. He then articulates Johnson’s observation that this poet is ever “seeking to free himself and his art” from the bonds of this heritage. The poem’s speaker remarks that, although he crams his thumbs against his ears and keeps them there, “great drums” always throb “through the air.” This duplicity of mind and action forces upon him a sense of “distress, and joy allied.” Despite this distress, he continues to conjure up in his
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mind’s eye “cats/ Crouching in the river reeds,” “silver snakes,” and “the savage measures of/ Jungle boys and girls in love.” The rain has a particularly dramatic effect on him: “While its primal measures drip,” a distant, resonant voice beckons him to “‘strip!/ Off this new exuberance./ Come and dance the Lover’s Dance!’” Out of this experience of recollection and reclaiming his past comes the urge to “fashion dark gods” and, finally, even to dare “to give You [one God, the]/ Dark despairing features.”
Suggested Readings Baker, Houston A., Jr. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countée Cullen. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. Bronz, Stephen H. “Countée Cullen.” In Roots of Negro Racial Consciousness: The 1920’s, Three Harlem Renaissance Writers. New York: Libra, 1964. Ferguson, Blanche E. Countée Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. Onyeberechi, Sydney. Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola. Hyattsville, Md.: Rising Star, 1999. Perry, Margaret. A Bio-bibliography of Countée Cullen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Tuttleton, James W. “Countée Cullen at ‘The Heights.’” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin. New York: Garland, 1989. Contributors: Australia Tarver and John C. Shields
Nicholas Dante (Conrad Morales) Born: New York, New York; November 22, 1941 Died: New York, New York; May 21, 1991 Puerto Rican
Dante was coauthor of A Chorus Line, the longest-running show in Broadway history, which documented the personal and professional struggles of Broadway dancers. Principal work drama: A Chorus Line, pr. 1975 (libretto, with James Kirkwood; conceived, choreographed, and directed by Michael Bennett; music by Marvin Hamlisch; lyrics by Edward Kleban) Nicholas Dante (NIH-koh-las DAHN-tay), born Conrado Morales, was coauthor of A Chorus Line, the longest-running show in Broadway history. A Chorus Line, which documented the personal and professional struggles of Broadway dancers, was performed at the Shubert Theater 6,137 times between 1975 and 1990. Dante began his career as a dancer and hoped that his work on A Chorus Line would serve as a catalyst to a new career as a writer: “It’s the first thing I ever wrote. . . . I’ve been dancing all my life. Now I hope I can be a writer.” Although Dante planned to major in journalism, he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School at the age of fourteen because of negative reactions to his homosexuality. When he was a boy, writing in the genre of fantasy served as an outlet for his emotions, but after dropping out of school he stopped writing because he believed that a writer had to have an education. He supported himself by working as a drag queen and began studying dance. In 1965, he worked summer stock in St. Louis. The experience in summer stock encouraged him to write again; he believed he could write better material. Dante wrote two unproduced musicals: “The Orphanage” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” In 1968, he performed in his first Broadway show, I’m Soloman, and continued working as a dancer in the choruses of several Broadway musicals. Dante’s work on A Chorus Line began in 1974 during two twelve-hour taping sessions of dancers recounting their life stories. During these sessions, Dante told his life story, which would become the monologue of Paul, the longest monologue in the show. Dante told how he had hidden both his homosexuality and his profession from his parents; they only knew that he worked in theater. When his parents 275
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arrived backstage at the Jewel Box Revue for a surprise visit, they found him dressed as a showgirl. Dante felt relieved when his father told the producer, “Take care of my son.” Although Dante had begun work on A Chorus Line using material from the taped sessions, the script was not completed until after the show was cast and in rehearsal. After the second rehearsal, James Kirkwood, a seasoned writer, was brought in to work with Dante, and the show began taking shape. Kirkwood had written Dante’s favorite book, Good Times/Bad Times (1968), and the two had an amiable working relationship. However, because the writing of the show was a collaboration, Dante felt that he did not get the credit he deserved for his writing, especially from the dancers whose stories were woven into the script. Although he worked on the show for eight months before Kirkwood joined the collaborative team, Kirkwood’s name appeared first in the credits. Furthermore, Dante argues that the idea that the show be in the form of a montage was his own, rather than that of Michael Bennett (the show’s producer), who received credit. Nevertheless, Dante received the Pulitzer Prize for A Chorus Line, as well as the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Dante was unable to repeat the success of A Chorus Line. He wrote the book to an unsuccessful musical, Jolson Tonight, which toured the United States in the early 1980’s. He also wrote an unproduced screenplay, “Fake Lady,” which explores the character Paul San Marco from A Chorus Line. Dante had trouble dealing with the pressure of repeating such a phenomenal early success, and he received no help from Bennett on further writing projects. Kirkwood and others on the creative team had made more money than he had, and Dante’s financial advisers had managed his money poorly. Before Dante died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1991, he had found peace with himself. He attributed his newfound sense of wholeness to participation in an unorthodox therapy using mind-expanding drugs and caring for his senile mother, Maria Guadalupe Morales, who had moved in with him following the death of his father, Conrado Morales. He thought that the therapy allowed him to come to terms with his childhood problems, and taking care of his mother, who did not even know what day it was, allowed him to understand the insignificance of whether or not he was famous. After years of drifting, he became motivated to write again and believed he could find success again. When he died, he was working on a new play titled A Suite Letting Go, about a man caring for his elderly senile mother.
A Chorus Line Type of work: Drama First produced: 1975 Nicholas Dante, Michael Bennett, and James Kirkwood wrote A Chorus Line in 1975. The play is largely based on thirty hours of tape from a meeting of twenty-two
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dancers in New York City in January, 1974, in which the group shared their stories and their reasons for dancing. The result is a musical based heavily on real-life experiences in the cutthroat world of dance; in fact, the character Paul is closely based on Dante’s experiences as a struggling actor and homosexual in New York City. The production was met with immediate critical acclaim and quickly moved to Broadway, where it played for many years and won a Pulitzer Prize. The plot is relatively simple. A director, Zach (based on Bennett), auditions a series of dancers, narrowing the field based on ability to sing, dance, and explain the importance of their art. As the pool gets smaller, the audience becomes more intimately acquainted with each individual and with the themes that carry through many of the dancers’ lives: broken families, ambition, and the sacrifice of personal relationships in pursuit of a career on stage. Perhaps as a result, those few dancers chosen form their own sort of family. They have no guarantee that the show will last longer than its opening night, but the group finds hope under the stage’s lights and joy in the audience’s applause.
Suggested Readings Mandelbaum, Ken. “A Chorus Line” and the Musicals of Michael Bennett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. “Nicholas Dante.” Variety, May 27, 1991, p. 57. Sanchez, Alberto Sandoval. “A Chorus Line: Not Such a ‘One Singular Sensation’ for Puerto Rican Crossovers.” Ollantay 1, no. 1 (January, 1993): 46-60. Viagas, Robert, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh. On the Line: The Creation of “A Chorus Line.” New York: William Morrow, 1990. Contributors: Nettie Farris and Anna A. Moore
Angela Davis Born: Birmingham, Alabama; January 26, 1944 African American
Davis’s autobiographical work explores the development of the African American political consciousness in the late twentieth century. Principal works nonfiction: If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, 1971 (with others); Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 1974; Women, Race, and Class, 1981; Women, Culture, and Politics, 1989; The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 1998; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, 1998; Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003 Primarily known as a political activist, Angela Davis began writing as a result of her activities within the Black Liberation movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Her work consistently explores the destructive influences of racism, sexism, and economic inequality on the development of African Americans, women, and the poor. Davis felt the full impact of racism beginning with her childhood, having been born and raised in segregated Birmingham. The racial inequality that prevailed particularly in the American South did much to shape her consciousness as an African American. In her autobiography, for example, she expresses her determination as a child to “never harbor or express the desire to be white” in spite of the fact that most whites lived what in comparison to hers was a privileged life. Davis attended Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York. She studied philosophy at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Frankfurt, and the University of California at San Diego. In 1968, she officially joined the Communist Party, having concluded that “the emancipation of all oppressed groups” could be achieved through the emancipation of the proletariat. As a result of her membership in the Communist Party, the Board of Regents of the University of California fired Davis from her teaching position at UCLA in 1969; she was reinstated after a trial. Charged with murder and kidnapping in connection with an escape attempt from a California courthouse, Davis was arrested and imprisoned in 1970 after spending several months on the run. She was tried and acquitted in 1972. Davis’s early writings center on the difficulties African Americans face in trying to establish a positive African American identity and political consciousness within a system that is racially oppressive. In If They Come in the Morning: 278
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Voices of Resistance and Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Davis presents a personal account of the ways the legal and penal systems stifle the African American community and political expression. In her autobiography, she touches on what it means to be an African American woman in a racially and sexually divided society. She explores this issue in greater detail in her works on the problems of racial division within the women’s movement, Women, Race, and Class and Women, Culture, and Politics. Many critics claim that in presenting her ideas from a decidedly Marxist perspective, Davis deprives her writAngela Davis (Library of Congress) ing of personal insight. Most contend, however, that in spite of her ideological viewpoint, she gives a unique and passionate voice to the experience of African American women.
Angela Davis Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1974 Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Davis’s most notable literary work, is the personal narrative of her development as an African American and feminist political activist. The autobiography explores how the forces of institutionalized racism shaped her consciousness as an African American and compelled her to seek political solutions. Her personal account also explores how her experiences as a woman in a movement dominated by males affected her awareness of the special challenges African American women face in overcoming sexism and racism. The autobiography opens not with Davis’s birth but with her flight from California legal authorities. She was charged with murder and kidnapping in relation to a failed escape attempt at a California courthouse. Her constant self-awareness as an African American woman attempting to evade discovery within an overwhelmingly white society underscores the problems African Americans have in establishing their identity. From the writer’s perspective, the charges against her stemmed not from a legal system that seeks justice but from a legal system that works to destroy those who fight to change the system. As a child in racially segregated Birmingham, Alabama, Davis’s fight to establish such an identity began at an early age. Growing up on “Dynamite Hill,” a ra-
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cially mixed neighborhood that acquired its name from the frequent bombings of African American residences, she was, as a child, aware of the danger of simply being black and of fighting for the right to have an equal voice in society. In detailing her experiences within the Black Liberation movement, Davis expresses her growing awareness of attempts to stifle the voices of African American women in particular within the movement. Communism, she contends, would eradicate all such oppression. Davis is further convinced of the oppressive nature of the American legal system after she is captured and incarcerated to await trial. She describes continual attempts by the prison authorities to control the minds of her fellow prisoners through humiliating and nonsensical rules. She also gives an account of attempts to deprive her of her basic rights as a prisoner. When she is finally acquitted, Davis sees the verdict not as a vindication of the legal system but as a vindication of the political efforts to fight racial oppression. Many critics contend that Davis’s constant focus on political ideology prevents her from giving an honest and insightful account of her experiences in her autobiography. Most agree, however, that, in spite of such perceived flaws, the autobiography presents a powerful portrait of an African American woman passionately devoted to her battle against oppression.
Suggested Readings Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. 2d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Davis, Angela. “Globalism and the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Angela Davis.” Interview by Avery F. Gordon. Race and Class 40, nos. 2/3 (1998/1999): 145-157. Nadelson, Regina. Who Is Angela Davis? The Biography of a Revolutionary. New York: P. H. Wyden, 1972. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Contributor: Lisa R. Aunkst
Samuel R. Delany Born: New York, New York; April 1, 1942 African American
Delany is an intensely self-analytical explorer of the linguistic and imaginative possibilities of science fiction. Principal works long fiction: The Jewels of Aptor, 1962; Captives of the Flame, 1963 (revised 1968, as Out of the Dead City); The Towers of Toron, 1964; The Ballad of Beta-2, 1965; City of a Thousand Suns, 1965; Babel-17, 1966; Empire Star, 1966; The Einstein Intersection, 1967; Nova, 1968; The Fall of the Towers, 1970 (includes revised versions of Out of the Dead City, The Towers of Toron, and City of a Thousand Suns); The Tides of Lust, 1973 (also known as Equinox); Dhalgren, 1975; Triton, 1976 (also known as Trouble on Triton); Empire, 1978; Tales of Nevèrÿon, 1979; Nevèrÿona: Or, The Tale of Signs and Cities, 1983; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, 1984; Flight from Nevèrÿon, 1985; The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987 (also known as Return to Nevèrÿon); Hogg, 1993; They Fly at Çiron, 1993; The Mad Man, 1994 short fiction: Driftglass: Ten Tales of Speculative Fiction, 1971 (revised and expanded, 2003, as Aye and Gomorrah); Distant Stars, 1981; Atlantis: Three Tales, 1995 nonfiction: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, 1977; The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch, 1978; Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love, 1979; Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, 1984; The Straits of Messina, 1987; The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science-Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965, 1988 (memoir); Silent Interviews, 1994; Longer Views, 1996; Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York City, an Autobiographical Account, 1998; Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, 1999; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 1999; Nineteen Eighty-Four: Selected Letters, 2000; About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews, 2005 edited text: Quark: A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction, 1970-1971 (with Marilyn Hacker) Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., was born April 1, 1942, to Samuel Ray Delany, Sr., a funeral director, and Margaret Carey (née Boyd) Delany, a clerk in a local library. Delany’s early education took place at Dalton, an exclusive, primarily white school 281
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on the East Side. He then attended the Bronx High School of Science, where the average intelligence quotient of the students was 140. Although his scores in most subjects were excellent (particularly in math), Delany’s school career was often made more difficult by what would much later be diagnosed as dyslexia. His parents had forced him to become right-handed, and, partially as a result, Delany had immense difficulty with spelling, with a particular propensity for writing words backward. A broken and jumbled mishmash of misspellings, his writing was opaque even to him once he had forgotten the intended meaning of the words. His parents always encouraged him to write, however, because they had been told by a tutor that if Delany wrote as much as possible his spelling would have to improve. His mother read to him constantly, and his father even read aloud Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), chapter by chapter. Toward the end of his Dalton years, Delany began to write short stories. He also began reading science fiction, including the works of such writers as Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and Robert Heinlein. After being graduated from Dalton in 1956, Delany attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he was encouraged in his writing by some of his teachers and by a fellow student and aspiring poet, Marilyn Hacker. After high school graduation in 1960, Delany received a fellowship to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where he met Robert Frost and other professional writers. He continued to write, supporting himself as a folksinger in Greenwich Village clubs and cafés. On August 24, 1961, he and Marilyn Hacker were married. Although their marriage of more than thirteen years was open and loosely structured (the couple often lived apart), Hacker and Delany were highly influential on each other as he developed his fiction and she her poetry (Hacker’s influence is especially strong in Babel-17). Delany submitted his first published book, The Jewels of Aptor, to Ace Books, where Hacker worked, at her suggestion. Hacker herself is the model for Rydra Wong, the heroine of Babel-17. Delany attended City College in New York City (now City University of New York) in 1960 and again from 1962 to 1963, but dropped out to finish Babel-17 (1966). Delany’s life in New York over the next several years, including his personal relationships and a near nervous breakdown in 1964, figures in a number of his works from Empire Star to Dhalgren. After The Jewels of Aptor, he completed a trilogy, The Fall of the Towers, and in 1964 reenrolled at City College of New York, where he edited the campus poetry magazine, The Promethean. He soon dropped out again and in 1965, after completing The Ballad of Beta-2, went with a friend to work on shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico. At this point, Delany’s writing was beginning to return enough to help support him, and, after completing Babel-17 and Empire Star, he used the advance money to tour Europe and Turkey during 1965 and 1966, an experience that influenced both The Einstein Intersection and Nova. When he returned to the United States, Delany became more involved in the science-fiction community, which was beginning to take notice of his work. He attended conferences and workshops and met both established science-fiction writers and younger authors, including Joanna Russ and Thomas Disch, who would
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both become good friends. In 1967, The Science Fiction Writers of America awarded Babel-17 the Nebula Award for best novel (shared with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes), and in 1968 the award again went to Delany, this time for both The Einstein Intersection and the short story “Aye and Gomorrah.” During the winter of 1967, while Hacker was living in San Francisco, Delany moved in with a New York rock group called The Heavenly Breakfast, who lived communally. This experiment in living, recorded in Heavenly Breakfast, is reflected in Dhalgren. By 1968, Delany was becoming firmly established as an important science-fiction writer. He had won three Nebulas; had a new book, Nova, published; had begun to receive critical acclaim from outside science-fiction circles; and had spoken at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in New York. During the next few years, while working on Dhalgren, he devoted himself to a number of other projects, including reviewing and filmmaking. He received the Hugo Award in 1970 for his short story “Time Considered as a Helix of SemiPrecious Stones,” and in the same year began coediting, with Marilyn Hacker, Quark: A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction. The journal—which published writers such as Russ, Disch, R. A. Lafferty, and others who experimented with both form and content in the genre—ceased publication in 1971 after four issues. In 1972, Delany worked for D. C. Comics, writing the stories for two issues of Wonder Woman and the introduction of an anthology of Green Lantern/ Green Arrow comics. In 1973, he joined Hacker in London, where he continued to work on Dhalgren and sat in at the University of London on classes in language and philosophy, which profoundly influenced his later writing. Completing Dhalgren, Delany began work on his next novel, Triton, which was published in 1976. On January 14, 1974, Hacker gave birth to a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany, in London. Delany, with his family, returned to the United States late in 1974 to take the position of Visiting Butler Chair Professor of English, SUNY-Buffalo, a post offered him by Leslie Fiedler. At this time, Hacker and Delany agreed to a separation and Hacker returned to London (they were divorced in 1980). Delany completed Triton and in September, 1976, accepted a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies. In 1977, he collected some of his critical essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and in 1978 published The American Shore, a book-length study of a Disch short story. During the 1980’s, Delany spent much of his time in New York, writing, looking after Iva, and attending conferences and conventions. His major project in that decade was the creation of the “sword-and-sorcery” fantasy Nevèrÿon series. The impact of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis is seen in the latter two books, especially Flight from Nevèrÿon. In 1984, Delany collected more of his criticism in Starboard Wine and also received the Pilgrim Award for achievement in science-fiction criticism from the Science Fiction Research Association. Delany’s only science-fiction work in that decade was Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first part of a planned “dyptich.” In 1988, he published his autobiographical recollections about his earlier years in The Motion of Light in Water, and he became a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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During the 1990’s Delany produced a great deal of writing and gained the recognition of being, in the words of critic and author James Sallis, “among our finest and most important writers.” The most controversial of Delany’s 1990’s publications are his erotic novels—Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man—and his 1998 comicbook-format erotic autobiography, Bread and Wine. Equinox appeared briefly in 1973, and Hogg’s scheduled publication that same year was canceled. Both went back into print in the mid-1990’s, along with the release of The Mad Man, the only one of the three erotic novels composed in the 1990’s. While these books have disturbed and challenged many readers and scholars of Delany’s work, a number of critics, most notably Norman Mailer, have defended them as examples of Delany’s belief in pushing the boundaries of literature and of dealing with sexual subjects with absolute openness. Delany also published two important nonfiction works in the 1990’s: Silent Interviews, a collection of Delany’s written interviews with subjects ranging from racism to aesthetic theory; and Longer Views, a collection of Delany’s major essays on art, literature, and culture. Finally, there were two new works of fiction: Atlantis, a collection of three mainstream stories set in the 1920’s, and They Fly at Çiron, a fantasy novel which appeared in 1993 but became widely available two years later. Delany also won the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Literature in 1993 and was the guest of honor at the World Science-Fiction Convention at London, England in 1995. That year he was also a visiting writer at the universities of Minnesota and Idaho, and in 1997 he was a visiting professor at Michigan State University. In January of 2000, he joined the faculty in the English department at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Dhalgren Type of work: Novel First published: 1975 Dhalgren begins with an archetypal scenario: A young man, wearing only one sandal and unable to remember his name, wanders into Bellona, a midwestern city which has suffered some nameless catastrophe. In the course of the novel’s 880 pages, he encounters the city’s remaining residents; goes through mental, physical, and sexual adventures; becomes a local legend; and leaves. In its complexity and its ambitious scope, Dhalgren invites comparison with a handful of contemporary novels, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor (1969) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which make Joycean demands of the reader. Unlike many other science-fiction novels set in a post-holocaust society, Dhalgren is not concerned with the causes of the breakdown, nor does it tell of an attempt to create a new society out of the ashes of the old. There is no need for such a reconstruction. Bellona’s catastrophe was unique; the rest of the country and the world are unaffected. Separated from outside electronic communication and simply abandoned by the larger society, Bellona has become a center of attraction for outcasts and
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drifters of all descriptions as well as remaining a home to its own disenfranchised, notably the city’s black population. The city has become a place of absolute freedom, where all can do and be whatever they choose, yet it is not in a state of anarchy. There are rules and laws that govern the city, but they are not recorded or codified. To the newcomer (and to a first reader of the book), these “rules” seem random and unpredictable. Clouds obscure the sky, so that time of day has little meaning, and the days themselves are named arbitrarily. Direction in this city seems constantly to shift, in part because people change the street signs at whim. Fires burn throughout the city, but listlessly and without pattern. When the clouds do part, they might reveal two moons in the night sky or a sun that covers half the sky. The protagonist (who comes to be known simply as The Kid) must define his identity in terms of these shifting relationships, coping with the ever-fluid patterns Bellona offers. The price of failing to work within the web and to accommodate reality—even an unreal reality—is exemplified by the Richards family, white middle-class citizens who try to maintain a semblance of the life they had known and are going mad as a result. The Kid begins his stay in Bellona by working for the Richardses, helping them to move upstairs in their apartment complex, away from a “nest” of “Scorpions,” the mostly black street gangs who wander through the city. (The Scorpions themselves are almost as annoyed and bothered by the Richardses.) The move is futile—the Richardses are no happier or saner in their new apartment, and their son accidentally dies during the move; The Kid is not paid his promised wages (in any case, money is useless in Bellona). Still, the job has helped The Kid to adjust to Bellona’s society, and he has begun to write poetry in a notebook he has found. As he nears the end of his job, he finds himself becoming, almost by accident, a Scorpion and eventually the leader of a “nest.” His poetry is published, and he becomes, within the city, famous. The characters and events of Dhalgren are rich and detailed enough in themselves to make the book notable. It is Delany’s attention to form, though, that makes the book so complex and the act of reading it so disruptive. Not only are the city and its events seemingly random, but the plot and characterization are likewise unpredictable. Questions remain unanswered, few elements are fully resolved, and the answers and resolutions that are given are tentative and possibly misleading. Near the end of the novel, The Kid believes that he has discovered his name, but this is never confirmed. He leaves Bellona at the end of the book, but his fate is left obscure. The Kid is, moreover, an unreliable center of consciousness. He was once in a mental institution, so the reader must doubt his perceptions (he unaccountably loses stretches of time; after his first sexual encounter early in the book, he sees the woman he was with turn into a tree). He is also ambidextrous and possibly dyslexic, so that the random ways in which Bellona seems to rearrange itself may be the result of The Kid’s own confusion. At the same time, though, Delany gives the reader reason to believe The Kid’s perception; others, for example, also witness the impossible double moons and giant sun. Dhalgren is not a book that will explain itself. A palimpsest, it offers new explanations on each reading. The Kid’s notebook contains observations by an unknown
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author which tempt the reader to think that they are notes for the novel Dhalgren; there are minor but significant differences, however, between notes and text. The last phrase of the novel, “. . . I have come to,” runs into the first, “to wound the autumnal city,” recalling the circular construction of Finnegans Wake (1939). Unlike the river of James Joyce’s dream book, though, Dhalgren does not offer the solace of such a unitary construction. The two phrases do not, after all, cohere, but overlap on the word “to.” If anything, the construction of the book echoes the “optical chain” made of mirrors, prisms, and lenses that The Kid and other characters wear. Events and phrases within the book do not exactly repeat, but imprecisely mirror, one another. Certain events and phenomena, such as the giant sun, are magnified as if by a lens; others are fragmented and dispersed, as a prism fragments light into the visible spectrum. Ultimately, Delany’s Bellona is a paradigm of contemporary society. Within this seeming wasteland, though, the author finds not solace and refuge in art and love, as so many modern authors have, but the very source and taproot of art and love. Delany’s epigraph reads, “You have confused the true and the real.” Whatever the “reality” of the city, the book’s events, or The Kid’s ultimate fate, “truth” has been discovered. The Kid no longer needs the city, and his place is taken by a young woman entering Bellona in a scene that mirrors The Kid’s own entrance. Even the “reality” of this scene is not assured, as The Kid’s speech fragments into the unfinished sentences of the notebook. “Truth,” finally, is provisional, whatever is sufficient for one’s needs, and requires to be actively sought and separated from the “real.”
Triton Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Triton has two sections: The first is “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part One,” and the second is “An Ambiguous Heterotopia.” The first section’s title links Triton to a series of Delany’s quasi-allegorical fictions, including the appendix to Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three,” and his remarkable memoir and analysis of the advent of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in New York, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals: Or, Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Five” (in Flight from Nevèrÿon, 1985). A calculatedly convoluted essay on the language of science fiction appears at the end of Triton as “Appendix B.” Triton’s second section’s title refers to the subtitle of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) and stresses the fact that, unlike most Utopian novels, Triton describes a society in which the differences among individuals—especially differences in sexuality—are not merely tolerated but encouraged to flourish, thus lending the anarchy of difference a constructive and creative thrust. The addition of this element of calculated flamboyance to the traditional
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story of the ideal society does not rob Delany’s Utopia of its ambiguity. An ambiguity arising from Utopian fiction is the truth that one person’s Utopia is another person’s hell. The hero of Triton, Bron Helstrom, retains the only sexual trait that can still be called a perversity in the book’s utopia: an inability to exploit in a fully satisfying manner the Utopia’s rich potential for pleasure. This personal perversity is reflected in the plot on a larger scale when the scrupulously nonaggressive society of Triton is horribly maimed by the war fought between the Outer Satellites and the conservative Worlds of the inner solar system. Unlike many of Delany’s protagonists, Helstrom is not a version of the author. Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988) includes an account of the young author’s meeting with a prawn fisherman named Ron Helstrom, who seems to have provided a model for the character’s stubborn masculinity. The fictional Helstrom is a kind of negative image of Delany’s own sexuality and values. The author’s identity is not only mirrored in The Spike—the novel’s writer character—but also is transfigured and magnified into the Tritonian society to which Helstrom cannot adapt. Although it did not have the commercial success of Dhalgren, Triton is tremendously impressive as an exploration of the personal and social possibilities inherent in freedom from traditional gender roles. The book is even more spectacular in its deployment of the narrative strategies of science fiction; it is a landmark work within the genre.
Tales of Nevèrÿon Type of work: Novel First published: 1979 Not all Delany’s stories are science-fiction tales set in the future. For example, the loosely related stories found in the Tales of Nevèrÿon collection are set in a mythical past. These stories owe much to the genre of swashbuckling fantasy fiction called sword-and-sorcery, though they depart as radically from the conventions of that genre as Dhalgren does from science fiction. Sword-and-sorcery is, itself, a marginalized literature. It has received little respect from mainstream critics, even those willing to admit, grudgingly, that science fiction has something to offer. However, in the hands of some writers (Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner) sword-and-sorcery has achieved notable commercial success and generated enough small press scholarship to deserve broader critical consideration. Delany is, according to James Sallis in Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany (1996), “the man who would intellectualize” sword-and-sorcery. Certainly, Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories have contributed two things to the genre. First, while sword-and-sorcery must develop a historical “feel,” most writers achieve this with descriptions of walled cities, ruins, and swordfights. The focus is on largescale, dramatic events—war being a favorite. A common criticism here is that read-
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ers seldom see how armies are fed or how cities survive in the absence of an economy other than trade. Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories, in contrast, develop a sense of history by focusing on exactly those details that other writers neglect. In “The Tale of Gorgik,” the first Nevèrÿon story, the reader learns of docks and warehouses, of sailors and slaves. The main trade item described is not jewels or exotic furs but little rubber balls. “The Tale of Old Venn” shows readers the ship builders and fishing boats. The astrolabe’s invention is part of the story’s background, and the development of an early writing system leads one character, Norema, to thoughts on origins and philosophy. Although sword-and-sorcery is generally set at a time when cultures are moving from barter to monetary economies and from rural to urban societies, most writers use these facts only to force characters into motion. Delany makes the change to a monetary economy a major focus of such stories as “The Tale of Potters and Dragons,” where attempts to control the rubber-ball trade and the change from three-legged to four-legged pots are important plot developments. Is it coincidence that one character is named Madam Keyne (reminiscent of John Maynard Keynes, the economist)? Delany’s second contribution to sword-and-sorcery is his far greater emphasis on character than on the plot and action that drive most work in the genre. In fact, there is little plot at all in the Nevèrÿon stories. There are certainly no larger-thanlife characters. Gorgik, who appears in most of the tales and is the closest Delany comes to a barbarian warrior, is, in fact, a “civilized” man and has the psychological scars to prove it. Only “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” has much fighting, and it is not an imprisoned Gorgik who does it. It is Small Sarg, a youth, who handles the killing. Many characters in the Nevèrÿon stories are women, but not in the usual roles of princess, harlot, or woman warrior (the only woman warrior is named Raven). Instead, women are merchants, inventors, and fishers. There is a part-time prostitute whose story is told in “The Tale of Rumor and Desire”; this is Clodon, a man.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand Type of work: Novel First published: 1984 To open this brilliant and intricate work is to enter a fully realized alternate universe where everything, even language, is disquietingly familiar yet also alien—everything, that is, except the workings of the human heart. On the surface, Delany begins with a story of lost and found love. Korga, a mindaltered laborer called a “rat,” is the only survivor of a planetwide catastrophe; his rescuers not only repair his body but also inbue him with the ancient knowledge of a long-dead master. Marq Dyeth is a galactic diplomat from a planet where humans and the native species, evelmi, live in amicable closeness. To gain access to Rat’s
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newfound knowledge, the galactic rulers determine that he and Marq are each other’s “perfect erotic object” and place him under Marq’s tutelage. The resulting relationship is a brief and intense one, quickly terminated when it is realized that Rat’s knowledge and presence could bring down the entire society. Delany demolishes readers’ most cherished prejudices, including the concept of gender, sexual taboos, the family unit, and the structure of entire societies. Even the formalities of a diplomatic dinner party are exploded in a fantastic scene at once hilarious and subtly disturbing. Over all flow Delany’s lyrical words, rising finally to a moving epilogue on the intensity of human experience. Readers will return to their mundane world forever changed by Delany’s vision of a brave, new universe.
The Motion of Light in Water Type of work: Memoir First published: 1988 The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science-Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 is Delaney’s account of his late adolescence and early adulthood. The memoir stops short of the period when he became a literary pioneer, but it examines in great detail the personal experiences that were later to feed that work. Its primary concern is the awakening of the author’s homosexual identity, augmented—and slightly confused—by his early marriage to Marilyn Hacker, a white poet, and their setting up home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The memoir describes—but not in strictly chronological order—Delany’s unsteady emergence from the educational hothouse of the Bronx High School of Science into the “real world” of work and marriage. It contemplates, with slightly selfdemeaning but sympathetic fascination, his early and precocious adventures in science-fiction writing and the gradual forging of his highly distinctive literary voice. It ends, after an astonishing profusion of erotic encounters, with his setting forth from the city of his birth to cross the Atlantic and explore the Old World, modestly recapitulating the kind of experiential quest pursued by all the heroes of his early novels. The text of The Motion of Light in Water is broken into brief numbered subchapters, some of which have further subchapters presumably introduced as elaborations and afterthoughts, emphasizing that it grew in a mosaic fashion rather than being written in a straightforward, linear manner. The second edition of the book is further augmented, offering additional testimony to the relentless curiosity with which the author has repeatedly worked through the catalog of his experiences. The Motion of Light in Water is remarkable for its frankness and for its scrupulousness. It attains a paradoxical combination of warm intimacy and clinical objectivity that is unique. The analysis of actual experiences is combined with and subtly tempered by an extended reflection on the vagaries of memory. The metaphorical title refers to the essential elusiveness of the process by which the filtration of mem-
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ory converts the raw material of incident and confrontation into the wealth of selfknowledge. There are very few works that capture the elusiveness of memory and celebrate its mercurial quality as well as Delany’s.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Type of work: Social criticism First published: 1999 What are the civic and humane values and benefits of a seedy strip of city street best known for its porn moviehouses, midnight hustlers, and dubious retail stores? If the street in question is New York’s Forty-second, and the strip Times Square, then city authorities and real estate developers have been unanimous in answering: no values or benefits at all. Therefore, theaters must be closed, buildings razed, customers and residents relocated, and a “new” Forty-second Street built which will be a theme-park version of a better, cleaner and above all “safer” New York. Manhattan as a mall. Delany offers a different and more interesting answer in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The importance of this seemingly tawdry piece of real estate, Delany claims, is that the unreclaimed Times Square offered a precious place where people could cross all manner of boundary lines: racial, economic, emotional, and sexual. It was an area that not only permitted but encouraged complex relationships that de-emphasized the artificial barriers and underscored that common humanity which linked those who came there. It was, Delany argues, a place where people could be human beings, in all the messy, sometimes inconvenient but often rewarding ways that they express that humanity. Now, Delany notes, Forty-second Street and the old Times Square are but a memory. They have been made safe for “family values” but at the cost of truly human values. Where once people could come, perhaps in darkness and anonymity to bridge the gaps between them, now there is only the sterile brightness that forbids even fumbling attempts at communication. Times Square may be safer today, Delany concludes, but it is much less human.
Suggested Readings Barbour, Douglas. Worlds Out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany. London: Bran’s Head Books, 1979. Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (Fall, 1993): 735-778. Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
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Kelso, Sylvia. “‘Across Never’: Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon Cycle.” Science-Fiction Studies 24 (July, 1997): 289-301. McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Reid-Pharr, Robert F. “Disseminating Heterotopia.” African American Review 28 (Fall, 1994): 347-357. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16 (Fall, 1996). Sallis, James, ed. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Slusser, George Edgar. The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of Semi-Precious Words. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Weedman, Jane. Samuel R. Delany. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1982. Contributors: Brian Stableford, Donald F. Larsson, Jo-Ellen Lipman Boon, and John Nizalowski
Toi Derricotte Born: Detroit, Michigan; April 12, 1941 African American
Coming of age as a writer during the Black Arts movement of the 1970’s, Derricotte forced the American poetry establishment to rethink its assumptions about African Americans and women. Principal works poetry: The Empress of the Death House, 1978; Natural Birth, 1983; Captivity, 1989; Tender, 1997 nonfiction: Creative Writing: A Manual for Teachers, 1985 (with Madeline Bass); The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, 1997 Born April 12, 1941, into a Detroit family separated from most of the city’s African American community by class and lighter skin, Toinette Derricotte (toy-NEHT DEHR-ree-kawt) wrote as a way to find solace in an existence filled with alienation. “Tender,” the title poem of her fourth major collection, opens: “The tenderest meat comes from the houses where you hear the least squealing.” This insight says much about what it was like to be the daughter of Benjamin Sweeney Webster, a mortician, and Antonia Banquet Webster Cyrus, a systems analyst. The young girl quickly learned to hide her thoughts on the page. Writing is a first passion, but after high school, the shy teen studied psychology at Wayne State University with visions of a doctorate. Plans changed in December, 1961, when she gave birth to son Anthony, and in July, 1962, Derricotte married artist Clarence Reese. The union lasted two years. In 1967, she married banker Bruce Derricotte. They separated in 1991. Parenthood’s realities led Derricotte to major in special education. She started teaching in 1964 with the Manpower Program. She finished a bachelor’s degree in 1965. In 1966, Derricotte became a teacher for mentally and emotionally challenged students at Detroit’s Farand School. In 1969, Derricotte left her hometown to teach remedial reading at Jefferson School in Teaneck, New Jersey. The job lasted a year. She taught for money, but always wrote. In 1973, Derricotte began a four-year stint on the New York Quarterly staff. The following year she started a fifteen-year residency with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Poet-in-the-Schools program. Those years set the direction of her life as author, mentor, and teacher. The Empress of the Death House, her first collection, was published in 1978. The next year she founded a retreat to foster the development of African American poets 292
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in a culturally sensitive atmosphere. That involvement ended in 1982 but was reborn in 1996, when she collaborated with Cornelius Eady to create Cave Canem, a summer workshop in upstate New York. In 1983, Natural Birth was published. Derricotte graduated from New York University with a master’s degree in creative writing the next year. The 1985 publication of Creative Writing: A Manual for Teachers, coauthored with Madeline Bass, followed. In 1988, twenty-one years after she left home for New Jersey, Derricotte moved to Norfolk, Virginia, to teach at Old Dominion. The next year, Captivity was published. In 1990, she spent a year as Commonwealth Professor in the English Department of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In 1991, she moved to the University of Pittsburgh. Throughout her writing career, Derricotte has immersed herself in readings, contributions to various magazines and journals, and teaching at institutions such as the University of South Florida and the College of Charleston. She has won recognition and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won the nomination for the 1998 Pushcart Prize, a Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Book Award, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a United Black Artists’ Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award.
The Empress of the Death House Type of work: Poetry First published: 1978 Derricotte is unique in her confessional treatment of racial identity. “My skin causes certain problems continuously, problems that open the issue of racism over and over like a wound,” she once wrote. That statement hangs over her photograph on the African American Literature Book Club Web site as tribute to the talent she displays in the ability to turn poignant racial episodes into instruments that sometimes strike readers’ consciences with jackhammer force and, at other times, soothe their souls. Derricotte’s early works focused on death and birth. The theme is heavy in her first book, The Empress of the Death House, where “The Grandmother Poems” discuss her childhood experiences in her grandparents’ Detroit funeral home. Her mother’s stepfather owned the business. Although she was sickly, the woman used two thousand dollars of her own money to send Derricotte’s father to mortuary school, so that he might join a more stable line of work. The Empress of the Death House grapples with the plight of women who survive abuse in an effort to sort out her feelings about her grandmother and mother. The understanding was a step on the path to self-awareness and helped her to understand her personal reactions to motherhood. In The American Book Review, reviewer Joe Weixlmann, who wrote about Natural Birth, said The Empress of the Death House
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opens readers’ eyes to the “indifference or contempt” with which the world treats African American women.
Natural Birth Type of work: Poetry First published: 1983 Natural Birth is an extension of Derricotte’s investigation into African American women. The collection candidly probes the birth process as an experience that hurts too much and humiliates. This poem is a “tour de force, at once a book-length experimental poem, an exploration of the extremes of human experience, and an examination of the social construction of identity,” Woodson wrote of the 1983 Crossing Press version. Of the 2000 edition, Eileen Robinson wrote in Black Issues Book Review: Natural Birth is a triumph of one woman’s spirit that will appeal to readers who are looking for depth, emotion, originality and truth. . . . Derricotte has completed a moving testament to teenage mothers, and mothers everywhere, who survive the miracle of birth. It is also a special gift to their children who grow stronger for understanding the very human fears and pains of the women who brought them here.
Natural Birth takes writings about death, birth, and transcendence to another level. Derricotte reaches for the truth that most unwed mothers might like to tell. She reaches inside the experience of childbirth for the thoughts that most mothers might want to share. In Contemporary Authors, Derricotte is quoted as saying that her Catholic school education taught that confession made a person “whole” or “back into a state of grace.” She concludes: As a black woman, I have been consistently confused about my “sins,” unsure of which faults were in me and which faults were the results of others’ projections. . . . [T]ruthtelling in my art is also a way to separate my “self” from what I have been taught to believe about my “self,” the degrading stereotypes about black women.
Captivity Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 Captivity shifted the focus from gender to race, sliding from portraits of general poverty to intricate sketches of urban students. The book places the U.S. slave experience at the root of many issues in today’s black experience. The dehumanization and commercialization of African Americans’ slave ancestors have been cited as root causes of black poverty, fractured family structures, violence, and contin-
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ued oppression. Village Voice reviewer Robyn Selman called the book “a personal exploration yielding truths that apply to all of us.”
Tender Type of work: Poetry First published: 1997 Derricotte’s fourth book of poetry, Tender, does a similar favor. The uncharacteristically short title poem appears to talk about meat and begins: The tenderest meat comes from the houses where you hear the least squealing.
It does not take much reflection to see the metaphor about pain-filled lives. In the collection’s preface, Derricotte urges readers to use the poem as a hub in exploring, as she describes the book’s structure, “a seven-spoked wheel.” The poet continues to wrestle with the meanings of death, birth, and transcendence. She writes, “Violence is central to our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality.” Derricotte’s enduring legacy might be that, as she herself observed of Emily Dickinson, she does not flinch, whether the subject is political or sexual, and that courage is especially well demonstrated in Tender. For example, in “Clitoris,” she discusses oral sex and her emotional response to it graphically and with lush imagery. Like many in her generation, Derricotte never let go of the optimism of the 1960’s about a positive evolution in U.S. attitudes toward and treatment of women and blacks. At the same time, she does not hesitate to display bitter disappointment at where we are along the road. For example, in “After a Reading at a Black College,” also from Tender, she looks forward with both hope and skepticism: Maybe one day we will have written about this color thing until we’ve solved it. Tonight when I read my poems about looking white, the audience strains forward with their whole colored bodies . . . .............. . . . though frightened I don’t stop the spirit. Hold steady, Harriet Tubman whispers Don’t flop around.
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Once again, the best part of Derricotte’s work is that, no matter how scathing, it is unapologetic. “People would like inspiring books that tell them what to do, something like Five Steps Not to Be a Racist,” she told Don Lee in a 1996 interview in Ploughshares, the Emerson College literary journal. “That’s just not the truth. The easy solutions don’t really prepare one for the hard work that needs to be done.” She goes on: I feel the need to represent what’s not spoken. . . . I discover a pocket in myself that hasn’t been articulated, then I have to find a form to carry that. Speaking the unspeakable is not that hard. The difficulty is in finding a way to make it perfect, to make it have light and beauty and truth inside it.
The Black Notebooks Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1997 Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey is an intimate portrait of a black woman who has “passed invisibly into the white world.” Along the way, through these passages, Derricotte has experienced racism from the outside, through the slanted cast of the public eye, as well as from the inside, through her own sense of insecurity and fear. Derricotte documents these encounters with her own blackness through a series of journal entries. These entries offer the reader the rare opportunity to listen into this private dialogue on race relations, as witnessed and recorded by Derricotte the professor, the artist, the woman, the wife, and resident in an all-white neighborhood outside of New York City, where Derricotte lived when she first began writing this book, twenty years before publication, while “in the middle of a severe depression.” She articulates what it is like to be perceived as something and someone she is not. On the surface, Derricotte might “pass” as being white, but on the inside, underneath her skin, she is all black. The most powerful moments in this book, on this interior journey, re-create those instances when Derricotte’s skin color has not been seen as it is: those times when, in other words, others—that is, whites—have seen her to be one of them. Do I tell them the truth? Derricotte asks. Do I tell them who I am: that I am black? These questions form the heart of Derricotte’s story. At an artist’s colony where she is the lone black artist in residence, she confides to the page: “I am afraid to come out as a black person, to bear that solitude, that hatred, that invisibility.” When Derricotte finally does come out and expose who and what she is, the response is, “You’re not really black.” How the world perceives her is a constant and deep-cored source of inner and outer struggle for Derricotte—a struggle not to give in to the illusion of who she is not. Derricotte’s struggle for self-acceptance, for her salvation, proves to be beatable, and the result of that victory is a book that rises up out of that battle, that tightening silence, that journey to an inner place of awakening where Derricotte brings forth and sings beautifully about what it means to be black.
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Suggested Readings Andrews, William, et al., eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Powers, William F. “The Furious Muse: Black Poets Assess the State of Their Art.” The Washington Post, October 1, 1994, p. H1. Robinson, Caudell, M. “Where Poets Explore Their Pain While Others Beware the Dog.” American Visions 14, no. 5 (October, 1999): 30. Contributor: Vincent F. A. Golphin
Owen Dodson Born: Brooklyn, New York; November 28, 1914 Died: New York, New York; June 21, 1983 African American
Hailed as the dean of African American drama, Dodson is a literary forefather of black playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson as well as black directors, including Lloyd Richards. Principal works drama: Deep in Your Heart, pr. 1935; Including Laughter, pr. 1936; The Shining Town, wr. 1937, pb. 1991; Divine Comedy, pr. 1938, pb. 1974 (music by Morris Mamorsky); The Garden of Time, pr. 1939 (music by Shirley Graham); Everybody Join Hands, pb. 1943; New World A-Coming, pr. 1943, pb. 1944; The Third Fourth of July, pb. 1946 (with Countée Cullen); Bayou Legend, pr. 1948, pb. 1971; Till Victory Is Won, pr. 1965 (with Mark Fax; opera); Freedom, the Banner, pb. 1984 long fiction: Boy at the Window, 1951 (also known as When Trees Were Green, 1967); Come Home Early Child, 1977 poetry: Powerful Long Ladder, 1946; Cages, 1953; The Confession Stone, 1968 (revised and enlarged as The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, 1970); The Harlem Book of the Dead, 1978 (with James Van De Zee and Camille Billops) radio plays: Old Ironsides, 1942; Robert Smalls, 1942; The Midwest Mobilizes, 1943; Dorrie Miller, 1944; New World A-Coming, 1945; St. Louis Woman, c. 1945 (adaptation of Countée Cullen and Arna Bontemps’s play); The Dream Awake, 1969 screenplay: They Seek a City, 1945 short fiction: “The Summer Fire,” 1956 nonfiction: “Twice a Year,” 1946-1947; “College Troopers Abroad,” 1950; “Playwrights in Dark Glasses,” 1968; “Who Has Seen the Wind? Playwrights and the Black Experience,” 1977; “Who Has Seen the Wind? Part II,” 1980 Owen Vincent Dodson, the grandson of former slaves and the ninth child of Nathaniel and Sarah Dodson, was born on November 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a syndicated columnist and director of the National Negro Press. Before Owen’s thirteenth birthday, death claimed four siblings and both parents; as a result, Owen and the other Dodson children lived with their older sister Lillian, an elementary schoolteacher. Dodson graduated from Thomas Jefferson 298
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High School in 1932, earned a B.A. from Bates College in 1936 and an M.F.A. degree from the Yale School of Fine Arts’s School of Drama in 1939. At Bates, Dodson’s passion for poetry and drama was evident. In response to his criticism of a sonnet by John Keats, his professor directed him to write sonnets himself, which Dodson did at the rate of four sonnets a week during his undergraduate years. This output enabled him to become a published poet while still an undergraduate. Also at Bates, he wrote and directed plays, and during his senior year he staged The Trojan Women. At Yale, two of Dodson’s best known plays, Divine Comedy and The Garden of Time, were first produced. Dodson, recognized as a promising poet, soon gained attention as an up-and-coming dramatist. Talladega College commissioned him to write a play, Amistad, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the slave-ship mutiny led by Joseph Cinque. After Dodson received his graduate degree from Yale, he began his career as an educator. He was employed by Spelman College and later at Hampton University. Dodson was one of the founders of the Negro Playwright Company in 1940. In 1942, during World War II, he enlisted in the Navy. While stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois, Dodson wrote and directed Heroes on Parade, a series of plays, including Robert Smalls, John P. Jones, Booker T. Washington, Lord Nelson, Dorrie Miller, Everybody Join Hands, Old Ironsides, Don’t Give Up the Ship, Freedom, the Banner, and Tropical Fable. Some of these plays were performed by other military drama groups in the United States and abroad. Dodson received a medical discharge in 1943. On June 26, 1944, twenty-five thousand people saw New World A-Coming at Madison Square Garden. Based on the production’s success, Dodson was appointed executive secretary of the American Film Center’s Committee for Mass Education in Race Relations. Other prominent committee members were Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Dodson was a prolific dramatist. He collaborated with the well-known Harlem Renaissance poet Countée Cullen and wrote The Third Fourth of July and Medea in Africa, an adaptation of Euripides’ MTdeia (431 b.c.e.; Medea, 1781) that was based on Cullen’s play Medea (pr., pb. 1935) and Dodson’s The Garden of Time. Dodson also collaborated with composer Mark Fax and wrote two operas: A Christmas Miracle and Till Victory Is Won. In 1947 Dodson joined the faculty of Howard University, and a decade later he was appointed chair of the drama department. He taught during the day and directed during the night. Indeed, during his long career he directed more than one hundred plays. In the fall of 1949, Dodson, Anne Cooke, and James Butcher led the Howard Players on a three-month tour of northwestern Europe. After the group’s return to Washington, D.C., the United States government presented Howard University with the American Public Relations Award. During the 1954-1955 season, Dodson directed the premier performance of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner nine years before its Broadway debut. He also staged productions of plays by former Howard students, including Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones). In 1970, Dodson retired from Howard. However, his passion for the theater and poetry remained steadfast. He continued to direct plays and write poetry, in-
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cluding The Confession Stone and The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dodson taught at City College of New York and at York College in Queens. He died on June 21, 1983, in New York. Memorial services were held in Washington, D.C., and New York. Although Dodson wrote poetry and two autobiographical novels, his plays remain his most significant theatrical accomplishment. In Dodson’s plays, themes, plot, and characters are upstaged by language. His most widely known theatrical works are verse plays. He was one of the first playwrights, white or black, to effectively use verse drama. The epigraph (“It takes a powerful long ladder to climb to the sky/ An Owen Dodson (Courtesy of the New York Public Library) catch the bird of freedom for the dark”) for Dodson’s first volume of verse, Powerful Long Ladder, has relevance for his plays. The ladder is a metaphor for whatever individuals need, and the bird of freedom represents goals and desires. In The Shining Town, black women need to endure in order to reach financial stability. In Divine Comedy, the churchgoers need to turn away from a con man and empower themselves to obtain life’s basic necessities. In The Garden of Time, the characters must realize that racism affects love. In Bayou Legend, Dodson’s second full-length play, which critics have described as a fantasy and an allegorical poetic legend, Reve Grant fails to learn until it is too late that to compromise one’s life is to compromise one’s soul. He “chose the kingdom of compromise, of nothing, of mediocrity” as he longed for wealth and power.
The Shining Town Type of work: Drama First published: 1991 (wr. 1937) The setting of this one-act play is a subway station in the Bronx during the Depression. New York is no “shining town” for the women who participate in a twentieth century version of a slave auction. African American domestic workers compete with one another for daily jobs offered by white women who pay extremely low wages. As the black women wait for their potential employers to arrive at the station, the atmosphere of gloom increases. The dark station corresponds with the women’s despair. Dodson suggests that Abby, a little girl who accompanies her
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mother on her quest for employment, is doomed to the same fate. Dodson completed this play at Yale, but it was not produced there. One scholar, James V. Hatch, speculates that Dodson’s less than flattering images of white women may be the reason The Shining Town was not produced at Yale.
Divine Comedy Type of work: Drama First produced: 1938, pb. 1974 Divine Comedy is another drama that Dodson completed at Yale. It premiered at Yale, was reviewed favorably in Variety, and remains one of his best-known plays. This verse play in two acts portrays a character based on Father Divine, the selfproclaimed religious leader. Dodson boldly focuses on an infamous black character at a time when a number of African American writers and scholars advocated positive images only. The Shining Town’s Depression-era time period is repeated here, and despair is also prevalent in this play. For example, a mother realizes she is rocking a dead baby. However, unlike The Shining Town, Divine Comedy does not have a pessimistic ending. The characters eventually realize they have to make their own lives better instead of depending on a religious charlatan. At the end, the characters proclaim: “We need no prophets./ This Winter is Autumn./ We need no miracles./ We are the miracle.” Love is also an important factor in this play, as Cyril Jackson demonstrates the extremes to which a son will go to protect his mother.
The Garden of Time Type of work: Drama First produced: 1939 This three-act verse play, completed and produced at Yale, is Dodson’s interpretation of Euripides’ Medea. The Garden of Time, a drama of interracial relationships, begins in ancient Greece, and midway through the play the characters are in Georgia and Haiti. Concurrent with the shift in settings is the transformation of characters. Medea becomes Miranda, a Haitian, and Jason becomes John, a plantation owner’s son. When The Garden of Time was staged at Yale, Shirley Graham was the play’s only black actor. Graham, who was also enrolled in Yale’s School of Drama, wrote the music for the play. The Garden of Time is one of Dodson’s bestknown plays and the winner of the Maxwell Anderson Verse Drama Award (second place) at Stanford University in 1942, yet ironically, it remains unpublished. Dodson’s plays provide insight into African American life, yet they are not limited to the black experience. Achieving universality in his writing was of primary importance to Dodson. His plays transcend cultures and time. The Garden of Time’s choral refrain, which was later titled “Circle One” and published in Dod-
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son’s Powerful Long Ladder, applies to the universality life experiences depicted in his plays: “Nothing happens only once,/ Nothing happens only here,/ . . . All the lands repeat themselves,/ Shore for shore and men for men.”
Suggested Readings Carbado, Devon W., Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, eds. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002. Dodson, Owen. Interview. In Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O’Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Hatch, James V. Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. “Owen Dodson.” In Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Contributor: Linda M. Carter
Michael Dorris Born: Louisville, Kentucky; January 30, 1945 Died: Concord, New Hampshire; April 11, 1997 Native American
Dorris’s works are among the best examples of fiction and nonfiction featuring Native Americans. Principal works children’s literature: Morning Girl, 1992; Guests, 1994; Sees Behind Trees, 1996; The Window, 1997 long fiction: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, 1987; Route Two, 1990 (with Louise Erdrich); The Crown of Columbus, 1991 (with Erdrich); Cloud Chamber, 1997 short fiction: Working Men, 1993 nonfiction: Native Americans: Five Hundred Years After, 1977; A Guide to Research on North American Indians, 1983 (with Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Mary Gloyne Byler); The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1989; Rooms in the House of Stone, 1993; Paper Trail: Essays, 1994 Michael Dorris’s involvement with Native American affairs came quite naturally. The only child of a non-Native American mother and a Modoc father, Dorris spent childhood vacations with relatives who lived on reservations in Montana and Washington. His disdain for being called a Native American writer stemmed from these early experiences; he learned to think of people as human beings rather than as members of particular ethnic groups. After his father’s death, Dorris was raised by his mother, aunts, and grandmothers. The result of this feminine influence is apparent in his novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, a story about three generations of women, narrated in their own voices. In 1981, Dorris married Louise Erdrich, another author of mixed ancestry. Dorris attributed his literary success to Erdrich, making her another of his womenas-mentors. Dorris and Erdrich collaborated as they wrote, producing works that authentically showcase Native Americans. After his adopted son, Reynold Abel, was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, a preventable but debilitating condition caused by alcohol consumption during pregnancy, Dorris began writing The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The book includes a touching autobiographical account provided by Reynold Abel. Its focus on alcohol abuse reflects Dorris’s concern that government policies are plunging Native Americans into a 303
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health and education crisis, and continues his work as a Native American activist. The book won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. While a professor at Dartmouth, Dorris founded the Native American Studies Program and received the Indian Achievement Award. In 1991, his son was hit by a car and died. Dorris’s son with Louise Erdrich, Jeffrey Sava, subsequently accused the couple of child abuse, leading to a prolonged court battle and later to the couple’s divorce. Dorris later faced allegations of having abused a daughter. On April 10, 1997, Dorris took his own life at a motel in Concord, New Hampshire. Dorris’s empathy for Native Americans is apparent in his literary characters, who dramatize the often difficult living conditions of contemporary tribal members. It was the common experiences of humanity, however, that fueled Dorris’s passion for writing. As an anthropologist who valued differences, Dorris used his literary voice to promote acceptance of diversity, touching on the basic elements of life that connect all people.
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Dorris’s first novel, chronicles incidents in the lives of his three women narrators. Readers have embraced the book, finding the story to be a compelling look at mothers and daughters. The novel opens with Rayona, a fifteenyear-old girl who is part Native American and part black. When her mother moves her to Montana to stay with her grandmother on a reservation, Rayona’s mixed heritage makes her the target of prejudiced teens, damaging her already fragile selfesteem. Eventually Rayona leaves the reservation and meets an understanding couple, who invite her to live with them. In Sky and Evelyn’s modest home, Rayona feels accepted and begins to value commitment, self-sacrifice, and honesty as prime ways to define oneself. By the novel’s end, Rayona develops the confidence and self-respect she needs to function in the tribal community and to be accepting of its diverse members. Rayona learns to accept Christine and Ida, the other two main characters. Early in Christine’s story, her sense of identity is complicated by an emotionally distant mother, who insists on being called “Aunt Ida.” Christine’s belief that she started life “in the hole” sends her on a quest for acceptance that leads to promiscuity, alcohol abuse, the fathers of her two children, and, finally, a fatal illness. As her life is ending, she moves toward harmony with herself, finally content simply to be Christine, a woman defined by the love of a good friend and forgiving family members. Ida’s story weaves together the autobiographies of all three women. During her teen years, her identity is negated by a family secret: She is not Christine’s mother but her half sister. Ida’s father and aunt, Christine’s biological parents, persuade
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Ida to pretend the baby is hers, saving the family from embarrassment. Ida’s true sense of self is obscured by the roles she plays and the tales she has been spinning for forty years. As her story closes, she is tentatively considering an honest relationship with Rayona. That Rayona, Christine, and Ida are Native American women struggling with poverty and abandoned by most of the men in their lives motivates their strength and independence. Diverse readers have identified with the three characters’ emotions and experiences.
The Broken Cord Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1989 At first glance, The Broken Cord might appear to be a specialized study with limited appeal to the general reader, but that impression is quickly refuted: Any mother who ingests even moderate amounts of alcohol during pregnancy can produce fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in her child, and Dorris’s treatise is both a practical primer and an eloquent prose poem detailing a poignant and growing problem the ramifications of which are social and legal as well as medical. The solutions to halting the birth of FAS children and to providing for FAS victims’ lifelong care ultimately concern every reader. “My son will forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company,” writes Dorris. “A drowning man is not separated from the lust for air by a bridge of thought, he is one with it, and my son, conceived and grown in an ethanol bath, lives each day in the act of drowning. For him there is no shore.” Indeed, Dorris’s son, Adam, exhibits all the characteristics of the classic FAS child, including “significant growth retardation both before and after birth; measurable mental deficit; altered facial characteristics; other physical abnormalities; and documentation of maternal alcoholism.” Yet because FAS and its companion FAE (fetal alcohol effect) were not recognized conditions until the late twentieth century, the cause of Adam’s learning difficulties remained misdiagnosed for years. Eventually Dorris’s role as an anthropologist and as the head of the Department of Native American Studies at Dartmouth University led him to work with specialists familiar with FAS and its devastating effect on Native American populations. Dorris learned that Adam is not unique; he discovered that Adam is one of thousands of such children born annually to women of every race and nationality who are themselves victims of poverty, ignorance, or low self-esteem. Dorris emphasizes that FAS may develop from an expectant mother’s drinking as little as one cocktail or glass of wine or one can of beer a day, even on an irregular basis; the only insurance against FAS is total abstinence from alcohol consumption during pregnancy. The Broken Cord helped draw national attention to this devastating syndrome and its long-term consequences. The book includes a foreword by Louise Erdrich
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and a final chapter by Adam, a touchingly unedited autobiography offered as a counterpoint and written at the suggestion of Adam’s dad.
Working Men Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1993 The title of this collection suggests something of its thematic concerns. Many of these stories are about men who are more or less defined by the work they do. Yet the work they do is varied. Characters include an anthropologist, a traveling salesman, a designer of artificial lakes, and two railroad workers. The relation of the characters to their work varies as well. For the protagonist of “The Benchmark,” his work is a vocation if not an obsession; characters in “Oui” and “Earnest Money” drift into whatever is available. The men and their work exist within complex emotional relationships, treated by Dorris with a remarkable tonal variety. The almost total absence of humor in “The Benchmark” is unusual in Dorris’s work, yet humor is seldom Dorris’s only aim. The protagonist of “Qiana,” who goes from buying a shirt on impulse, to an impulsive turnaround in his life, and finally to second thoughts about his impulses, makes readers smile; but the pain of his confusion and the pain he inflicts on others are honestly registered. At one level “Jeopardy” may be regarded as an ironic variation on the lore and legend of the traveling salesman, yet it is also a story of compelling emotional power. The stories do not focus exclusively on men. As he established in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Dorris can create memorable female characters and, what is for a male writer even more remarkable, convincing and expressive female narrators, as in “Anything,” “The Dark Snake,” and “Decoration Day.” The authenticity of the narrative voice in these stories suggests Dorris’s mastery of language; he frequently achieves the intensity of poetry without abandoning the rhythms of American vernacular speech. Working Men reaffirms Dorris’s importance as artist and working man.
Cloud Chamber Type of work: Novel First published: 1997 Rayona and her mother are carryovers from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, which dealt with the Native American side of Rayona’s heritage. The brilliantly written Cloud Chamber rounds out and completes the story with finely drawn portrayals of a fascinating line of resilient women. In Cloud Chamber, Rose Mannion McGarry flees from Ireland ahead of British
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authorities who would prosecute her for her role in the uncovering of a British spy among Irish patriots. She takes with her the mild Martin McGarry, whom she married even though she is carrying the unborn child of the spy. The couple settles in a town near Lexington, Kentucky, where she gives birth to two sons. Thereafter, the story of the family covers five generations in which the women show far more strength than the men. Rose, her daughter-in-law Bridie O’Gara McGarry, and Bridie’s daughters Edna and Marcella, survive the weaknesses and early deaths of Rose’s sons Andrew, a priest, and Robert, a consumptive. The women fight among themselves, but both Edna and Marcella conquer the disease that killed their father. Edna, finally the strongest of them all, rejects a belief that she has a vocation to be a nun to stay with the family. Marcella, with the connivance of her sister, defies segregation laws and convention and elopes with a young African American man and has a son, Elgin. He marries a Native American woman and becomes the father of Rayona, whose ceremonial adoption of the name of Rose as her Indian name signals a reconciliation among the women in her ancestry.
Suggested Readings Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Couser, G. Thomas. “Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability, and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord.” Biography 21 (Fall, 1998): 421-444. Farrell, Susan. “Colonizing Columbus: Dorris and Erdrich’s Postmodern Novel.” Critique 40 (Winter, 1999): 121-135. Khader, Jamil. “Postcolonial Nativeness: Nomadism, Cultural Memory, and the Politics of Identity in Louise Erdrich’s and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus.” Ariel 28 (1997): 81-101. Owens, Louis. “Erdrich and Dorris’s Mixedbloods and Multiple Narratives.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Rayson, Ann. “Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3 (Winter, 1991): 27-36. Zabrowsky, Magdalena J., ed. Other Americans, Other Americas. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998. Contributor: Lynne Klyse
Frederick Douglass (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) Born: Tuckahoe, Talbot County, Maryland; February, 1817? Died: Washington, D.C.; February 20, 1895 African American
Douglass wrote one of the most artistic, articulate, and insightful slave narratives and lived a life dedicated to championing black civil rights. Principal works long fiction: The Heroic Slave, 1853 nonfiction: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 1845; What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?, 1852; The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, 1854; The Anti-Slavery Movement: A Lecture, 1855; My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855; Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass, 1857; The Constitution of the United States: Is It ProSlavery or Anti-Slavery? A Speech, 1860; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, 1881 (revised 1892); The Lessons of the Hour, 1894; Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1999 (Philip S. Foner, editor) edited texts: North Star, 1847-1851; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 1851-1860; Douglass’ Monthly, 1859-1863; New National Era, 1870-1874 miscellaneous: The Frederick Douglass Papers, 1979-1992 (5 volumes); The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, 1996 (William L. Andrews, editor) Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, who changed his name to Frederick Douglass after escaping slavery, was the son of a slave mother and a white man, probably his mother’s master, Captain Aaron Anthony. He grew up in a variety of slavery conditions, some very harsh. He nevertheless taught himself to read and write and became a skilled caulker at the Baltimore shipyards. In 1838, he escaped to New York disguised as a free sailor. After marrying Anna Murray, a freewoman who had helped him escape, he moved with her to Massachusetts. He took the name Douglass and began working for the abolitionist cause. For four years he was a popular and eloquent speaker for antislavery societies and in 1845 published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, one of the finest slave narratives. As a precaution against recapture following the publication of his autobiography, Douglass went to England to lecture on racial conditions in the United 308
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States. In late 1846, British friends purchased and manumitted Douglass, and the following year he returned to New York a free man. Moving to Rochester, Douglass began an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star (later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper), became an Underground Railroad agent, wrote in support of women’s rights and temperance, and revised and expanded his autobiography. In 1859, he narrowly escaped arrest following John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Although Douglass had not supported the raid, he was a friend of Brown. He fled to Canada, then England, returning months later when he learned Frederick Douglass (Library of Congress) of his daughter Annie’s death. During the Civil War, Douglass urged the recruitment and equal treatment of blacks in the military (his two sons were early volunteers) and became an unofficial adviser to Abraham Lincoln on matters of race. After Lincoln’s death, he opposed Andrew Johnson’s procolonization stance and worked for black civil rights, especially suffrage. A loyal supporter of the Republican Party, he was appointed to various posts by five presidents. In 1881, Douglass again updated his autobiography. The following year Anna Murray Douglass died. Two years later, Douglass married Helen Pitts, his white secretary, a marriage that shocked many. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Douglass minister to Haiti. Douglass retired in 1891 but remained a powerful voice speaking out for racial equality until his death in 1895. He is remembered as not only the most prominent black American of his era but also a man whose life of commitment to the concept of equality made him an outstanding American for all times.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1845 Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, one of the finest nineteenth century slave narratives, is the autobiography of the most well-known African American of his time. The narrative chronicles Douglass’s early life, ending soon after his escape from slavery when he was approximately twenty. It focuses on formative experiences that stand
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out in his life for their demonstration of the cruelty of slavery and of his ability to endure and transcend such conditions with his humanity intact. Douglass’s work follows the formula of many slave narratives of his day. He structures his story in a linear fashion, beginning with what little information he knew about his origins and progressing episodically through to his escape north. His recurring theme is the brutal nature of slavery, with an emphasis on the persevering humanity of the slaves despite unspeakable trials and the inhumanity of slave owners. Other themes common to Douglass’s and other slave narratives are the hypocrisy of white Christianity, the linkage of literacy to the desire for and attainment of freedom, and the assurance that with liberty the former slave achieved not only a new sense of self-worth but also an economic self-sufficiency. Douglass’s work is characteristic of the nineteenth century in that it is melodramatic and at times didactic. Despite its conventional traits, however, Douglass’s work transcends formulaic writing. The author’s astute analyses of the psychology of slavery, his eloquent assertions of self, and his striking command of rhetoric lift this work above others in its genre. Particularly memorable scenes include young Frederick’s teaching himself to read, the fight with the slave breaker Covey, the author’s apostrophe to freedom as he watches sailboats on Chesapeake Bay, and his interpretation of slave songs as songs of sorrow. When Douglass wrote this work in 1845, he had already earned a reputation as one of the most eloquent speakers for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published with a preface written by William Lloyd Garrison, which was followed by a letter by Wendell Phillips. An immediate success, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass soon went through five American and three European editions. Douglass revised and enlarged the autobiography with later expansions, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892). Although these later versions are of historical value for their extension of Douglass’s life story and for their expansion on matters—such as his method of escape—that Douglass purposefully avoided in his first publication, critics generally agree that the spareness and immediacy of the original Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass renders it the most artistically appealing of the autobiographies. Today Douglass’s book has become canonical as one of the best of the slave narratives, as an eloquent rendering of the American self-made success story, as a finely crafted example of protest literature, and for its influence on two important genres of African American literature—the autobiography and the literary treatment of slavery.
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My Bondage and My Freedom Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1855 Douglass’s second autobiography was published eight years after his British friends purchased his freedom. Of the twenty-five chapters in My Bondage and My Freedom, the first twenty-two include events from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, such as his escape and early days as an abolitionist. My Bondage and My Freedom also includes chapters on Douglass’s introduction to other abolitionists and his twenty-one-month stay in Great Britain, and the final chapter, “Various Incidents,” includes his founding of The North Star and his family’s move to Rochester. The appendix includes excerpts from Douglass’s orations in England and the United States; his speech What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July? is also included. The appendix also contains Douglass’s letter to his former master Thomas Auld; Douglass ends the letter by writing that he is a man and not Auld’s slave.
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1881 Douglass’s third autobiography extends coverage of his life to 1891, four years prior to his death. Thus Life and Times of Frederick Douglass describes a century in which Douglass is born into slavery during the second decade and attains the status of statesman during the seventh and eighth. Part 1 ends with Douglass fleeing slavery in 1838. He provides more details about his escape in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass than in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom. In part 2, Douglass offers more insight into his career as an abolitionist than he revealed in his previous autobiographies. His activities prior to the Civil War, during the war, and after the war are included; two instances are Douglass’s recruitment of African American troops for the Fifty-fourth and Fiftyfifth Colored Regiments for the Civil War and his White House meeting with President Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the African American troops. Highlighted in parts 2 and 3 are Douglass’s presidential appointments and his trip to Europe. As in My Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass provides glimpses into African American middle-class life as the Douglasses reside in New Bedford, Rochester, and Washington, D.C. Critics have stated that Douglass wrote Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published decades after slavery’s end, in order to remind people of slavery’s injustices. As founder and editor of The North Star, Douglass wrote most of the newspaper’s articles and editorials. Among his writings in The North Star/Frederick Douglass’ Paper are “Our Mind Is Made Up” (1847), a request for African American authors, editors, and orators to spearhead the quest for liberty and equality;
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“Colorphobia—A Law of Nature?” (1848), an attack on America’s preoccupation with skin color; “The Rights of Women” (1848), a report on the first United States women’s rights convention; and “Here We Are, and Here We Stay” (1849), an assertion against the deportment of African Americans. Douglass was arguably the most eloquent nineteenth century orator, and during his lifetime his speeches were printed in his publications as well as in other sources such as the National AntiSlavery Standard and Pennsylvania Freeman. Douglass’s best-known speech is What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July? delivered in 1852. The next year, Douglass created The Heroic Slave, a historical novella based on a slave ship mutiny that is recognized as one of the first works of long fiction in African American literature.
Suggested Readings Andrews, William L. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. Martin, Waldo E., Jr. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Preston, Dickson J. Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Stone, Albert E. “Identity and Art in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative.” CLA Journal 17 (1973). Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Contributors: Grace McEntee and Linda M. Carter
Rita Dove Born: Akron, Ohio; August 28, 1952 African American
Dove’s poems give voice to the African American woman whose concerns are wider than region or race. Principal works drama: The Darker Face of the Earth, pb. 1994, revised pb. 2000 long fiction: Through the Ivory Gate, 1992 poetry: The Yellow House on the Corner, 1980; Museum, 1983; Thomas and Beulah, 1986; Grace Notes, 1989; Selected Poems, 1993; Mother Love, 1995; On the Bus with Rosa Parks, 1999; American Smooth, 2004 short fiction: Fifth Sunday, 1985 nonfiction: The Poet’s World, 1995 edited texts: The Best American Poetry, 2000, 2000; Conversations with Rita Dove, 2003 (Earl G. Ingersoll, editor) Rita Dove acknowledges that her writing is influenced by a range of experiences. Consequently, Dove consistently avoids being pigeonholed. As an undergraduate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, she spent a year on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Tübingen, in West Germany, where she realized that a writer cannot have a limited view of the world. Although her earlier work was influenced by African American writers of the 1960’s, she stands apart from African American writers who write primarily of the politics of ethnicity. Well educated, Dove allows her poetry to reflect her wide interests. Many poems allude to the visual arts and music. Poems in Museum discuss Catherine of Alexandria, Catherine of Siena, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Giovanni Boccaccio. The crosscultural thrust of her writing is indicative of the influence that Dove’s European experience had on her. Dove’s poetry uses family history as raw material. In Thomas and Beulah, Dove mixes fact and imagination to describe the lives of her maternal grandparents. A book-length narrative, the story of her family employs two separate points of view, that of her grandfather and that of her grandmother. Race is central to the story, but Dove focuses on the relationship that they had, in spite of the difference between their families. Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the volume shows her concern with the voices of ordinary people. Through these lives she addresses more communal concerns. Dove’s work acknowledges the existence of race problems but allows the human spirit to triumph. 313
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Marriage to Fred Viebahn in 1979 produced one daughter, Aviva Chantal Tamu Dove-Viebahn. Dove’s poetry of the time explores mother-daughter relationships, especially when the child is biracial. Such poems are evident in Grace Notes. Dove experiments with other literary forms. She has produced a verse play, short stories, and a novel. Through the Ivory Gate, her first novel, explores the interplay between autobiography and artifice. Virginia King, a character reflecting Dove’s experiences, returns to Akron to work with young students. Learning the stories of her family confirms Virginia in her desire for a career in the theater. In 1993, Dove became poet laureate of the United States. In that role, she worked with emerging writers, encouraging them to gain the breadth and depth of experience that would fuel their writing.
Grace Notes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 In Grace Notes, Dove explores the implications of being an African American who is prepared to step forward into a world broader than any limiting labels would suggest. Many poems focus on the relationship between her biracial child and herself, revealing how the child discovers and accepts these differences. Others show the daughter learning what it means to become a woman. Still other poems question the effect that the development of identity can have on the artist. Dove sets the stage with the first poem, “Summit Beach, 1921,” which examines the risk of being at the edge of development. A girl watches her friends dance as she rests her broken leg. She had climbed to the top of her father’s shed, then stepped off. Dove shows that the girl wants to date but that her father had discouraged her. This poem suggests that the search for identity does not occur without risks because the search involves making choices. Married to a German man, Dove’s daughter learns to belong in both worlds. “Genetic Expedition” contains images that delve into the physical differences between the black mother and her biracial child. BeginRita Dove (Fred Viebahn) ning with images of her own body,
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Dove mentions that she resembles pictures of natives in the National Geographic more than she does her own daughter. Because of the National Geographic’s sensual, naked women, her father had not allowed the children to read the magazine. While Dove identifies physically with the bodies of these women, she acknowledges that her daughter’s features and hair reflect her biracial heritage. Thus the poem exemplifies Dove’s rootedness in her own culture while being open to other cultures. Other poems that feature Dove’s daughter show the child as she discovers her mother’s body, the source of her life and future. “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed” describes a tender moment between mother and daughter as the daughter compares her budding body with her mother’s mature body. Dove emphasizes the daughter’s innocent curiosity and her delight at realizing what her future holds. Several poems discuss artists searching for ways to express who they have come to be through their art. “Canary” looks at the difficulty of such inquiry. Focusing on Billie Holiday, the poem describes the downward spiral of her life. Whether it was more difficult for her to be black or to be female is the question of identity that Dove explores, suggesting that circumstances conspired to take away Holiday’s power to carve out her own identity. Dove’s poems allow the questions and implications of a search for identity to take shape as an ongoing process.
Through the Ivory Gate Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Through the Ivory Gate is Dove’s first novel. She brings her poetic skills to bear on this subtle and complex story of a bittersweet homecoming. Entertainer and aspiring actress Virginia King has never understood why her childhood was interrupted by a sudden move from Akron, Ohio, to Arizona and an apparently simultaneous change in her parents’ characters. Coming back to Akron to teach puppetry in the public school, she is able to fill in pieces of her family’s past that will help her in her search for self-definition. The family secrets she uncovers do not make her happy, but they do help her toward freedom. The deft use of flashbacks allows Dove to weave into the present action scenes from King’s childhood in Akron, her years in Arizona, her college experience, and her first attempts to use her education as a member of the traveling troupe “Puppets and People.” Through King’s perspective the reader sees the obvious and hidden prejudices of the time and place and the various ways King deals with these barriers to her career as an actress and her basic sense of self. The most compelling presence in this novel, however, may be the puppets. Puppet lore and puppet activities dominate the present action, entrancing even readers who have been indifferent to this subject. The puppets become living beings as well as the various images we create for one another and ourselves. This is a book for rereading.
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Mother Love Type of work: Poetry First published: 1995 Dove surmounts the inherent pitfalls of her overused source material, the myth of Demeter, by transforming it into something deeply personal. Most poets working this myth mistakenly try to enter a nonexistent past. Dove allows herself to be inhabited, and her Demeter emerges in contemporary idiom. The poet’s assured manner allows control: She is both possessed and possessor. Dove’s Demeter consciousness reveals that every time a daughter walks out the door, the abduction by Hades begins again. Time insists on the loss of the daughter. This archetypal mother knows that her daughter must make her way in the world— with all its attendant risks. The Persephone aspect of Dove recalls, at twenty, enjoying the risks of visiting Paris (in “Persephone in Hell”). Although she felt the power of her mother’s worry, she writes, “I was doing what she didn’t need to know.” She was, in fact, tempting fate, testing her ripeness against the world’s (man’s) treachery. She needed to know it and survive it. In her foreword, Dove offers that her irregular sonnets lend themselves to the story of “a world gone awry.” She enjoys “how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders . . . are stultifying.” Perhaps it is the very process of playing with the sonnet’s strictures and gauging the appropriate license that has helped Dove find the voice (or voices) and shapes she needs to infuse life into materials that have so often generated hackneyed performances. In Mother Love, narrative and dramatic elements are strong, yet there is no sacrifice of lyricism or any other poetic element. Constantly setting new challenges for herself and constantly growing, Rita Dove has again more than fulfilled the expectations of those who anointed her at the outset of her career.
The Yellow House on the Corner Type of work: Poetry First published: 1980 Poems in The Yellow House on the Corner often depict the collision of wish with reality, of heart’s desire with the dictates of the world. This collision is made tolerable by the working of the imagination, and the result is, for Dove, “magic,” or the existence of an unexplainable occurrence. It is imagination and the art it produces that allow the speaker in “This Life” to see that “the possibilities/ are golden dresses in a nutshell.” “Possibilities” have the power to transform this life into something distinct and charmed. Even the woman driven mad with grief over the loss of her son (or husband?) in “The Bird Frau” becomes a testament to possibility in her desire to “let everything go wild!” She becomes a bird-woman as a way of reuniting with her lost airman, who died in the war over France. While her condition may be perceived
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as pathetic, Dove refuses to indulge sentimentality, instead seeing her madness as a form of undying hope. The refusal to indulge sentimentality is a mark of Dove’s critical intelligence. It allows her to interpose an objectifying distance between herself and the subject. She knows the absolute value of perspective, so that while she can exult in the freedom that imagination makes possible, she recognizes that such liberty has its costs and dangers too. Two poems in particular reveal this desire and her wariness: “Geometry” and “Sightseeing.” In the former, Dove parallels the study of points, lines, and planes in space with the work of the poet: “I prove a theorem and the house expands:/ the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,/ the ceiling floats away with a sigh.” Barriers and boundaries disappear in the imagination’s manipulation of them, but that manipulation has its methodology or aesthetic: “I prove a theorem. . . .” In “Sightseeing” the speaker, a traveler in Europe after World War II, comes upon what would seem to be a poem waiting to happen. The inner courtyard of a village church has been left just as it was found by the villagers after an Allied bombing raid. It is filled with the shattered cherubim and seraphim that had previously decorated the inner terrace of the building: “What a consort of broken dolls!” Yet the speaker repudiates any temptation to view the sight as the villagers must—“A terrible sign. . . .” Instead she coolly ponders the rubble with the detached air of a detective: “Let’s look/ at the facts.” She “reads” the scene and the observers’ attention to it as a cautionary lesson. The “children of angels” become “childish monsters.” Since she distinguishes herself from the devout villagers, she can also see herself and her companion in the least flattering light: “two drunks” coming all the way across the town “to look at a bunch of smashed statues.” This ability to debunk and subvert expectations is a matter of artistic survival for Dove and a function of her calm intelligence. As an African American poet she is aware of the tradition of letters she steps into. Two other poems imply that this tradition can be problematic. In “Upon Meeting Don L. Lee, in a Dream” Dove encounters Lee (now known as Haki R. Madhubuti), a leading figure in the Black Arts movement, which attempted to generate a populist, specifically black aesthetic. The figure that emerges from Dove’s poem, however, is unable to change except to self-destruct: “I can see caviar/ Imbedded like buckshot between his teeth.” Her dream-portrait of Lee deflates not only his masculinity but his status as cultural icon as well. In “Nigger Song: An Odyssey” Dove seems to hark back further for a literary forebear and finds one in Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Although by 1967 Brooks would have come to embrace the black nationalism that Lee embodied, Dove’s poem echoes the Brooks of an earlier time, the composer of “We Real Cool.” In her evocation of “the nigger night” Dove captures the same vibrant energy that Brooks both celebrates and laments with the realization that the energy of urban African American youth is allowed no purposeful outlet and will turn upon itself. She writes: “Nothing can catch us./ Laughter spills like gin from glasses.” Some of the most compelling poems in Dove’s first book are in a group of vignettes and portraits from the era of American slavery. These poems not only reveal
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her historical awareness but also allow her to engage the issue of race from a distance. Dove wants her poetry to produce anger, perhaps, but not to be produced only by anger. One example of this aesthetic distance from emotion might be “The Abduction,” a brief foray in the voice of Solomon Northrup. Northrup is a free black lured to Washington, D.C., by “new friends” with the promise of good work and then kidnapped and sold into bondage. Dove dwells on the duplicity of these men and Northrup’s susceptibility to them. Yet no pronouncements are made. The poem ends with the end of freedom, but that ending has been foreshadowed by the tightly controlled structure of the poem itself, with each stanza shortening as the scope of the victim’s world constricts to this one-line conclusion: “I woke and found myself alone, in darkness and in chains.” The indignation and disgust that such an episode could call forth are left entirely to the reader.
Museum Type of work: Poetry First published: 1983 Museum is, as the title suggests, a collection of historical and aesthetic artifacts. The shaping impulse of the book seems to be retrospective, a looking back to people and things that have been somehow suspended in time by legend, by historical circumstance, by all-too-human emotional wish. Dove intends to delve beneath the publicly known side of these stories—to excavate, in a sense, and uncover something forgotten but vital. The book is filled with both historical and mythical figures, all sharing the single trait of muted voice. Thus, “Nestor’s Bathtub” begins: “As usual, legend got it all/ wrong.” The private torment of a would-be martyr is made public in “Catherine of Alexandria.” In “The Hill Has Something to Say” the poet speculates on the buried history of Europe, the cryptic messages that a culture sends across time. In one sense, the hill is a metaphor for this book, a repository of signs and images that speak only to that special archaeologist, the reader. In the section titled “In the Bulrush” Dove finds worthy subjects in unlikely places and draws them from hiding. “Banneker” is another example of her flair for evoking the antebellum world of slavery, where even the free man is wrongly regarded because of his race. In the scientist Benjamin Banneker she finds sensitivity, eloquence, and intelligence, all transformed by prejudice into mere eccentricity. Banneker was the first black man to devise an almanac and served on Thomas Jefferson’s commission to lay out the city of Washington, D.C., but the same qualities that lifted him to prominence made him suspect in the eyes of white society. Dove redeems this crabbed conception of the man in an alliterative final passage that focuses attention on his vision: Lowering his eyes to fields sweet with the rot of spring, he could see
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a government’s domed city rising from the morass and spreading in a spiral of lights. . . .
A third section of the book is devoted entirely to poems about the poet’s father, and they represent her efforts to understand him. It is a very personal grouping, made to seem all the more so by the preceding sections in which there is little or nothing directly personal at all. In the final section, “Primer for the Nuclear Age,” Dove includes what is one of her most impressive performances. Although she has not shown herself to be a poet of rage, she is certainly not inured to the social and political injustice she observes. Her work is a way of channeling and controlling such anger; as she says in “Primer for the Nuclear Age”: “if you’ve/ got a heart at all, someday/ it will kill you.” “Parsley,” the final poem of Museum, summons up the rank insanity of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, who, on October 2, 1957, ordered twenty thousand black Haitians killed because they could not pronounce the letter r in perejil, Spanish for parsley. The poem is divided into two sections; the first is a villanelle spoken by the Haitians; the second describes General Trujillo on the day of his decision. The second section echoes many of the lines from the Haitians’ speech, drawing murderer and victim together, suggesting a disturbing complicity among all parties in this episode of unfettered power. Even though Dove certainly wants to draw attention to this event, the real subject here is the lyric poet’s realm—that point at which language intersects with history and actually determines its course.
Thomas and Beulah Type of work: Poetry First published: 1986 Thomas and Beulah garnered the Pulitzer Prize, but it is more important for the stage it represents in Dove’s poetic development. Her first two books reveal a lyric poet generally working within the bounds of her medium. The lyric poem denies time, process, change. It becomes a frozen moment, an emotion reenacted in the reading. In Thomas and Beulah she pushes at the limitations of the form by stringing together, “as beads on a necklace,” a whole series of these lyric moments. As the poems begin to reflect upon one another, the effect is a dramatic unfolding in which the passing of time is represented, even though the sequence never establishes a conventional plot. To accomplish this end Dove creates a two-sided book: Thomas’s side (“Mandolin,” twenty-one poems) followed by Beulah’s (“Canary in Bloom,” twenty-one poems). The narrative moves from Thomas’s riverboat life and the crucial death of his friend Lem to his arrival in Akron and marriage, through the birth of children, jobs, illness, and death. Beulah’s part of the book then begins, moving through her par-
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ents’ stormy relationship, her courtship with Thomas, marriage, pregnancy, work, and death. These two lives transpire against the historical backdrop of the great migration, the Depression, World War II, and the March on Washington; however, these events are practically the only common elements in the two sides of the story. Thomas and Beulah seem to live separate lives. Their communication with each other is implicit in the survival of the marriage itself. Throughout, Dove handles the story through exacting use of imagery and character. Thomas emerges as a haunted man, dogged by the death of his friend Lem, which occurs in the opening poem, “The Event.” Thomas drunkenly challenges Lem to swim from the deck of the riverboat to an island in the Mississippi. Lem drowns in the attempt to reach what is probably a mirage, and Thomas is left with “a stinking circle of rags/ the half-shell mandolin.” In “Courtship” he begins to woo Beulah, but the poem implies that the basis of their relationship will be the misinterpreted gesture and that Thomas’s guilt has left him with a void. He casually takes a yellow silk scarf from around his neck and wraps it around her shoulders; “a gnat flies/ in his eye and she thinks/ he’s crying.” Thomas’s gift, rather than a spontaneous transfer of warmth, is a sign of his security in his relative affluence. The show of vulnerability and emotional warmth is accidental. The lyric poet in Dove allows her to compress this range of possibility in the isolated gesture or image. Beulah’s life is conveyed as a more interior affair, a process of attaining the wisdom to understand her world rather than to resist it openly. In “The Great Palace of Versailles” Beulah’s reading becomes her secret escape from the nastiness of the whites for whom she works in Charlotte’s Dress Shoppe. As she lies dying in the final poem, “The Oriental Ballerina,” the contemplation of the tiny figurine seems a similar invitation to fantasy, but her sensibilities have always been attuned to seeing the world as it is, as it has to be, and the poem ends in a brief flurry of realistic details and an air of acceptance; there is “no cross, just the paper kiss/ of a kleenex above the stink of camphor,/ the walls exploding with shabby tutus. . . .”
Suggested Readings Dove, Rita. “Coming Home.” Interview by Steven Schneider. The Iowa Review 19 (Fall, 1989): 112-123. _______. Interview by Judith Kitchen and others. Black American Literature Forum 20 (Fall, 1986): 227-240. _______. “An Interview with Rita Dove.” Interview by Malin Pereira. Contemporary Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer, 1999): 182-213. Harrington, Walt. “A Narrow World Made Wide.” The Washington Post Magazine, May 7, 1995, 13-19, 28-29. McDowell, Robert. “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove.” Callaloo 9 (Winter, 1986): 61-70. Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
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Rampersad, Arnold. “The Poems of Rita Dove.” Callaloo: A Black South Journal of Arts and Letters 9 (Winter, 1986): 52-60. Steffen, Theresa. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Walters, Jennifer. “Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove: Poets Redefining.” Journal of Negro History 85 (Summer, 2000): 210-217. Contributors: Martha Modena Vertreace, Nelson Hathcock, and Philip K. Jason
W. E. B. Du Bois Born: Great Barrington, Massachusetts; February 23, 1868 Died: Accra, Ghana; August 27, 1963 African American
Du Bois was the foremost African American intellectual of the twentieth century and a leader in civil rights and pan-Africanism. Principal works long fiction: The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 1911; Dark Princess, 1928; The Ordeal of Mansart, 1957; Mansart Builds a School, 1959; Worlds of Color, 1961 nonfiction: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, 1896; The Conservation of Races, 1897; The Philadelphia Negro, 1899; The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 1903; John Brown, 1909; Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920; The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, 1924; Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, 1935; Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race, 1939; Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 1940; Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, 1945; The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History, 1947; In Battle for Peace: The Story of My Eighty-third Birthday, 1952 (with Shirley Graham); The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, 1968 (first pb. in Russian as Vospominaniia, 1962); W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920-1963, 1970 (Philip S. Foner, editor); The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, 1973 (Herbert Aptheker, editor); Du Bois on Religion, 2000 (Phil Zuckerman, editor); Du Bois on Education, 2002 (Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., editor) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (dew-BOYS) was a towering intellectual who created a new language of protest and ideas to understand and guide the African American experience. He wrote fiction and nonfiction, infusing his writings with eloquence and anger. He envisioned a world with equality for all people, emphasizing social justice for Africans and their descendants throughout the New World. Du Bois’s chronicle of his childhood begins with a tale of small-town conventionality in rural Massachusetts, where he experienced a loving home. In 1888, he entered Fisk University and saw firsthand the “color line” dividing the South. After 322
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graduating from Fisk, he returned to Massachusetts, where he earned a doctorate in history at Harvard. His first important academic position was a marginal one at the University of Pennsylvania, but it resulted in his brilliant exposition, The Philadelphia Negro. In that work he outlines the historical background of the black community in Philadelphia and documents its patterns of daily life. In 1897, he accepted a position at the University of Atlanta, where he worked until 1910. He held a yearly conference, resulting in a series of edited books on such topics as African Americans and business, religion, and social life. In 1903, Du Bois published the literary masterW. E. B. Du Bois (Library of Congress) piece The Souls of Black Folk, the first of four autobiographies that connect his personal experience with that of his community. In 1909, Du Bois helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became the first editor of their journal Crisis in 1910. For the next quarter century, Du Bois was a center of debate on pressing social issues, and he was personally responsible for many columns, opinions, and reviews in the journal. By 1935, Du Bois was increasingly at odds with the leadership at the NAACP. He resigned his position there and returned to the University of Atlanta. He helped found the journal Phylon, which continues to provide an important voice for African American scholarship. Beginning in the 1920’s, Du Bois turned his attention to international affairs, organizing pan-African conferences and observing the racist and classist practices of the Western nations. He became a Marxist and was attacked by other intellectuals. Du Bois was indicted by the United States for being an agent of a foreign power; the indictment was the result of his peace activism and leftist politics during the Cold War. Although he was acquitted, the accusation that his government made against him remained a source of bitterness. Du Bois traveled widely around the world—after at first being denied a passport—and eventually settled in Ghana, whose leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was his friend. In Ghana, in his nineties, he began work on an encyclopedia of African culture. Much of Du Bois’s vision of racial equality and African American achievement remained unfulfilled at his death in 1963.
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The Philadelphia Negro Type of work: Sociological study First published: 1899 The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois’s second book, is an impressive sociological study of blacks in Philadelphia resulting from fifteen months of fieldwork the author did in Philadelphia’s seventh ward in 1896 and 1897. Although this book has received less recognition than The Souls of Black Folk and The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, it deserves consideration. This study was proposed by Susan B. Wharton, a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Settlement, who approached the provost of the University of Pennsylvania suggesting a scholarly investigation of the status of Philadelphia’s black population. Du Bois, already well reputed as a black scholar, was an obvious choice to undertake this project. He agreed to leave his chairmanship of the classics department at Wilberforce University to undertake this investigation under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. In August, 1896, Du Bois and his bride, Nina Gomer, moved into a small apartment in one of Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods and remained there for a year conducting door-to-door interviews with area residents (Du Bois estimated that he met with over five thousand people). He distributed and collected hundreds of questionnaires while simultaneously undertaking an in-depth study of the social history of Philadelphia so that his findings would reflect the broader environment in which his subjects lived and worked. Du Bois ran statistical analyses of situations affecting black people. He studied the proportion of black to white inmates in Philadelphia’s Eastern Penitentiary and found that 62 percent of the inmates were black, a shocking disparity given the city’s proportion of blacks to whites. The reasons for this disparity, he concluded, were a lack of education and of vocational opportunities for blacks in Philadelphia. By extension, it could be assumed that similar disparities existed elsewhere in the North. This book was the first thorough, scholarly study of the problems blacks faced at the turn of the century. It made considerable social and political impact and became a model for many future sociological studies based on fieldwork.
The Souls of Black Folk Type of work: Essays First published: 1903 The Souls of Black Folk is the passionate and eloquent story of an individual, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a group, African Americans. Du Bois could not forget that his world was divided by a color line. Du Bois calls the experience generated by the color line the veil and allows his readers to walk with him within the veil. He does this with songs of sorrow that introduce each chapter.
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The second chapter begins with the famous lines: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” These prophetic words tell the story of American slaves and their descendants. One way to address these issues is to work for gradual change, as advocated by Booker T. Washington. Du Bois’s criticism of Washington created a public debate about how to fight discrimination. Du Bois then tells of entering Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He experiences the Jim Crow world of the South and teaches children who must endure its cruelty. Du Bois soon moves from the elementary school to higher education, but before leaving the South, he travels through it. Jim Crow railway cars physically and socially segregate black and white passengers. Plantations dot the landscape, recalling the slavery that maintained them and continuing their legacy through tenant farming. Du Bois reveals how the “faith of our fathers” is a communal heritage. Music and lyrics create a heritage from the past that lives in the present. Du Bois’s faith is tested by the death of his first and only son, Burghardt, who was refused medical care because of the color line. Du Bois’s keening cry against the evil that murdered his baby is heart-wrenching. People are able to survive and triumph behind the veil, nevertheless, and the African American leader is the key to ending the color line. Alexander Crummell, a friend of Du Bois, was such a hero. Ordinary people can be revealed to be extraordinary too. Their paths may be hard, but their triumphs cause joy and celebration. This book is a literary masterpiece that articulates the cost of hatred and the power to resist it. Although it has never been out of print, it was especially important in the 1960’s, when it helped inspire the American civil rights struggle. Du Bois continued to tell his life story and the story of a people during the rest of his long, productive life. The Souls of Black Folk, however, is unique in its passion and eloquence. His inspirational language reaches all people who resist hatred.
Black Reconstruction Type of work: History First published: 1935 The historical study Black Reconstruction is a product of Du Bois’s later years. Published in 1935, it is sometimes referred to as the author’s most important work. In it, as in his doctoral dissertation and its subsequent publication in 1896 as The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 16381870, his chief objective is to correct much that has been written by white scholars about black history. The post-Civil War era was generally depicted as a period during which freed slaves gained power and misused it. Most previous scholars depicted this as a period marked by scandal and corruption. Du Bois, however, writing his revisionist history in the depths of the Great Depression, believed that Reconstruction epitomized what democracy is really about. He chronicles how blacks who gained power
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imposed necessary reforms and worked toward the redistribution of wealth, thereby reflecting Du Bois’s move toward communism in response to the economic crises African Americans faced during the Depression. Du Bois followed this study in 1947 with The World and Africa, which was a further attempt to correct historical inaccuracies that portrayed his race in a less than favorable light. In both of these works, he emphasizes the exploitation of blacks by members of the dominant white society.
The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois Type of work: Autobiography First published: Vospominaniia, 1962 (English edition, 1968) The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century is the inspiring story of a foremost African American intellectual and civil rights leader of the twentieth century. Du Bois discusses his individual struggles and accomplishments, as well as his major ideas dedicated to promoting racial equality for Africans and African Americans. Moving from the reconstruction era after the U.S. Civil War, through World Wars I and II, to the height of the Cold War and the atomic age, Du Bois’s personal reflections provide a critical, panoramic sweep of American social history. Du Bois did not simply observe the American scene; he altered it as a leader of African Americans in the American Civil Rights movement. The chronological structure of the autobiography begins with five chapters on his travels to Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. After these travels, Du Bois announces the crowning ideological decision of his life: his conversion to communism. The remainder of the book answers the question: How did Du Bois arrive at this crucial decision in the last years of his life? Du Bois chronicles his life patterns of childhood, education, work for civil rights, travel, friendships, and writings. This information is written in such a way that it explains his decision to adopt communism as his political worldview. Perhaps the most fascinating section of the book is Du Bois’s account of his trial and subsequent acquittal in 1950 and 1951 for alleged failure to register as an agent of a foreign government, a sobering story of public corruption. His fundamental faith in American institutions, already strained by racism, was destroyed. He moved to Ghana and threw his tremendous energies into that nation as it shed its colonial experience. The autobiography is subtitled as a soliloquy, but this categorization reflects the political realities of 1960 more than the specific literary form of speaking to oneself. At the time, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union made communism an abhorrent choice to many Americans. The autobiography finally appeared in English in 1968, at a publishing house known for its communist writings. The autobiography is the least read of Du Bois’s autobiographies, although it is an engaging exposition in which Du Bois shows his continuing growth and faith in human nature during his tenth decade.
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Suggested Readings Broderick, Francis L. W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959. Byerman, Keith E. Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Horne, Gerald, and Mary Young, eds. W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia. New York: Greenwood Press, 2001. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: H. Holt, 1993. _______. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Rudwick, Elliott M. W. E. B. Du Bois: Voice of the Black Protest Movement. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Contributors: Mary Jo Deegan and R. Baird Shuman
Paul Laurence Dunbar Born: Dayton, Ohio; June 27, 1872 Died: Dayton, Ohio; February 9, 1906 African American
Dunbar was one of the most popular American poets of his time and America’s first professional black writer. Principal works long fiction: The Uncalled, 1898; The Love of Landry, 1900; The Fanatics, 1901; The Sport of the Gods, 1902 poetry: Oak and Ivy, 1893; Majors and Minors, 1895; Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896; Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899; Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 1903; Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 1905; Complete Poems, 1913 short fiction: Folks from Dixie, 1898; The Strength of Gideon, and Other Stories, 1900; In Old Plantation Days, 1903; The Heart of Happy Hollow, 1904; The Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1938; The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 2006 (Gene Andrew Jarrett and Thomas Lewis Morgan, editors) miscellaneous: In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 2002 (Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau, editors) The creative genius and personal and professional tragedies of Paul Laurence Dunbar (DUHN-bahr) have often been misunderstood by readers who neglect to consider the poet in the context of his time, which was not just marked, but defined, by all-encompassing racial politics. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, commonly referred to by scholars of African American history as the nadir, Dunbar was a singular phenomenon, trapped between his audience’s demands that he be the voice of his race and his own creative mandate that he not be restricted to any given subject matter. Dunbar wrote not merely evocative but enduring work, particularly as a poet. In addition to six volumes of verse, he also wrote four collections of short stories and four novels in the twelve prolific years before his untimely death at the age of thirty-three. Best known for his poems and stories about the Southern rural black world from which he came, Dunbar also wrote verse in standard English, often on black themes. His “We Wear the Mask” is a classic revelation of what it means to be black and American, and his “Sympathy” (“I know why the caged bird sings!”) is an ode to freedom with universal appeal. Dunbar was the only surviving child of Joshua and Matilda Glass Burton Mur328
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phy Dunbar, former slaves who had taught themselves to read and write. They nurtured their son with stories of their Kentucky plantation years, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and emancipation. These accounts became an important part of Dunbar’s consciousness of himself as an inheritor of a particular history and a voice for that identity. Ironically, however, white audiences exploited this work, even as they championed it, seeing it as a black confirmation of their stereotypical plantation tradition. Despite Dunbar’s apparent compromise in this regard, black audiences reveled in and memorized his verses, representing as they did the first national exposure of the black experience rendered in high art. Paul Laurence Dunbar (Library of Congress) In 1898, Dunbar married Alice Ruth Moore, a Creole from New Orleans and a writer. The couple separated, however, in 1902, the result of tensions from within the marriage, including her family’s disdain for the dark-skinned Dunbar and the demands of his professional life. These pressures contributed to Dunbar’s failing health from tuberculosis and his general melancholy, from which his late work suffered. He died childless and broken in spirit in the house he shared with his mother in Dayton.
Lyrics of Lowly Life Type of work: Poetry First published: 1896 Reflective lyrics form a large segment of Dunbar’s poetry. Some of his best poems of this type are found in Lyrics of Lowly Life, including the long stanzaic poem “Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes.” This poem utilizes one sensory impression as a focal point for the lyrical evolution in the style of Keats. The sleep motif provides an avenue through which the persona’s imagination enters the realm of reflection. Through sleep’s dream the persona is able to “make the waking world a world of lies—/ of lies palpable, uncouth, forlorn.” In this state of subconscious reflection, past pains are revisited as they “come thronging through the chambers of the brain.”
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As the poem progresses, it becomes apparent that the repetitive echo of “ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes” has some significance. This refrain begins and ends each stanza of the poem except the last. In addition to serving as a moodsetting device, this expression provides the channel of thought for the literary journey, which is compared with the “spirit’s journeying.” Dunbar’s audience is thus constantly reminded of the source of his revelations. Dunbar reveals his poetic thesis in the last stanza. He uses images from the subconscious state of life, sleep, to make a point about death. Prior to making this point, Dunbar takes the reader to the realm of reflective introspection: “So, trembling with the shock of sad surprise,/ The soul doth view its awful self alone.” There is an introspective confrontation of the soul with itself, and it resolves When sleep comes down to seal the weary eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah, then, no more we heed the sad world’s cries Or seek to probe th’ eternal mystery Or fret our souls at long-withheld replies.
The escape from pain and misery is death; there is no intermediary state which will eradicate that fact of life. Dunbar presents this notion with sympathy and sincerity. His metaphorical extensions, particularly those relative to the soul, are filled with compassion. The soul is torn with the world’s deceit; it cries with “pangs of vague inexplicable pain.” The spirit, an embodiment of the soul, forges ahead to seek truth as far as fancy will lead. Questioning begins then, and the inner sense confronts the inner being until truth emerges. Dunbar’s presentation of the resolution is tender and gentle. Dunbar wrote reflective lyrics in the vernacular as well. Espousing the philosophy of divine intention, Dunbar wrote “Accountability,” a poem also found in Lyrics of Lowly Life. In this poem, the beliefs and attitudes of the persona are revealed in familiar language. Folks ain’t got no right to censuah othah folks about dey habits; . . . . . . . . . . We is all constructed diff’ent d’ain’t no two of us de same; . . . . . . But we all fits into places dat no othah ones could fill.
Each stanza in this poem presents a thesis and develops that point. The illustrations from the natural world support a creationist viewpoint. The persona obviously
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accepts the notion that everything has a purpose. The Creator gave the animals their members shaped as they are for a reason and so, “Him dat giv’ de squr’ls de bushtails made de bobtails fu’ de rabbits.” The variations in nature are by design: “Him dat built de gread big mountains hollered out de little valleys”; “Him dat made de streets an’ driveways wasn’t shamed to make de alley.” The poet establishes these notions in three quatrains, concluding in the fourth quatrain: “When you come to think about it, how it’s all planned out it’s splendid./ Nuthin’s done er evah happens, dout hit’s somefin’ dat’s intended.” The persona’s position that divine intention rules the world is thereby sealed. Introspection is a feature of Dunbar’s reflective lyrics. In “The Lesson,” the persona engages in character revelation, interacts with the audience toward establishment of appropriate resolution, and participates in the action of the poem. These qualities are reminiscent of Browning’s dramatic monologues. As the principal speaker sits by a window in his cottage, reflecting, he reports: And I thought of myself so sad and lone And my life’s cold winter that knew no spring; Of my mind so weary and sick and wild Of my heart too sad to sing.
The inner conflict facing the persona is revealed in these lines, and the perspective of self-examination is established. The persona must confront his sadness and move toward resolution. The movement toward resolution presents the dramatic occasion in the poem: “A thought stole into my saddened heart,/ And I said, ‘I can cheer some other soul/ By a carol’s simple art.’” Reflective introspection typically leads to improved character, a fundamental tenet in the Victorian viewpoint. Sustained by his new conviction and outlook, the persona “sang a lay for a brother’s ear/ In a strain to soothe his bleeding heart.” The lyrical quality of “The Lesson” is strengthened by the movement in the poet’s syntactic patterns. Feelings of initial despair and resulting joy and hope are conveyed through the poet’s syntax. The sequential conjoining of ideas as if in a rushing stream of thought is particularly effective. The latter sections of the poem are noteworthy in this regard. This pattern gives the action more force, thereby intensifying the feeling. Dunbar presents an emphatic idea (“and he smiled . . .”) and juxtaposes it to an exception (“Though mine was a feeble art”). He presents a responsive result (“But at his smile I smiled in turn”) connected to a culminating effect (“And into my soul there came a ray”). With this pronouncement, the drama comes full circle from inner conflict through conversion to changed philosophical outlook. Dunbar captures each moment with appropriate vigor. Dunbar’s poetry of the rustic life and nature is pervasive in another poem from this collection, “The Old Apple-Tree.” The primary lyrical quality of the poem is that the poetic message evolves from the poet’s memory and imagination. Image creation is the medium through which Dunbar works here: His predominant image, dancing in flames of ruddy light, is an orchard “wrapped in autumn’s purple haze.” Dunbar proceeds to create a nature scene that provides a setting for the immor-
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talization of the apple tree. Memory takes the persona to the scene, but imagination re-creates events and feelings. The speaker in the poem admits that it probably appears ugly “When you look the tree all over/ Unadorned by memory’s glow.” The tree has become old and crooked, and it bears inferior fruit. Thus, without the nostalgic recall, the tree does not appear special at all. Utilizing the imaginative frame, the speaker designs features of the simple rustic life, features that are typically British Romantic and peculiarly Wordsworthian. The “quiet, sweet seclusion” realized as one hides under the shelter of the tree and the idle dreaming in which one engages dangling in a swing from the tree are primary among these thoughts. Most memorable to the speaker is the solitary contentment he and his sweetheart found as they courted beneath the old apple tree. Now my gray old wife is Hallie An I’m grayer still than she But I’ll not forget our courtin’ ’Neath the old apple-tree.
The poet’s ultimate purpose, to immortalize the apple tree, is fulfilled in the last stanza. The old apple tree will never lose its place in nature or its significance, for the speaker asks: But when death does come a-callin,’ This my last request shall be,— That they’ll bury me an’ Hallie ’Neath the old apple-tree.
The union of man and nature at the culmination of physical life approaches a notion expressed in Wordsworth’s poetry. This tree has symbolized the ultimate in goodness and universal harmony; it symbolizes the peace, contentment, and joy in the speaker’s life. Here Dunbar’s indebtedness to the Romantic traditions that inform his entire oeuvre is most profoundly felt.
Folks from Dixie Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1898 Dunbar’s short fiction is often compared with that of his contemporary, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, who was also black and who wrote some accomplished plantation-based tales of black life. Chesnutt’s stories are often peopled with characters who resist, undermine, and outsmart the white people who think they know them. The majority of Dunbar’s black characters tend instead to manipulate and subvert white opposition and gain white approval by a show of sterling character: honesty,
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integrity, faithfulness, loyalty, love, redemptive suffering, forgiveness. Worse, some Dunbar stories cast uneducated black people as the ignorant, minstrel buffoons his white readers preferred. Yet nestled among this packing were also great stories for which he is well remembered, stories that reveal righteous anger over ignorance and racial injustice and contempt for those who perpetuate them. There is plenty of “packing” in Dunbar’s first story collection, Folks from Dixie. Several stories, such as “Mount Pisgah’s Christmas ’Possum,” represent uneducated black people as ludicrous bumpkins or grateful, indebted servants. “The Colonel’s Awakening” is an extremely sentimental tale, dripping with the sort of pathos Thomas Nelson Page whipped into his plantation tales. In “Anner ’Lizer,” Dunbar pokes fun at religious hypocrisy, while affirming the fact that people’s emotional and spiritual needs are often deeply linked. “Jimsella,” “Aunt Mandy’s Investment,” and “Nelse Hatton’s Revenge” were written primarily for his postReconstruction black readers, who were still figuring out how to live now that the structure and restrictions of slavery no longer dictated their circumstances. Timely issues, which these stories address, were family responsibility, honesty, and integrity in businesses, which should serve the black community, and remembering and living the results of slavery and emancipation in ways that are not selfdestructive. “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” and “At Shaft 11” are satisfying, well-constructed stories. The former is interesting for its autobiographical elements, its social commentary, and its “bootstrap economic” and educational philosophies as advocated by Booker T. Washington. The Reverend Howard Dokesbury steps off the train at Mt. Hope to take up his new post as Methodist preacher. The station house is run-down and filthy, like the rest of the town, and the indolent blacks, whites, and dogs view him with suspicion and malice. Dokesbury, understanding that any reconstruction of this community must happen one individual at a time, befriends ’Lias, one of the defeated young men. They collaborate on a small agricultural venture, and ’Lias gains confidence, feelings of self-reliance and self-esteem, and the financial base to go to the new industrial school to expand his skills. One by one, the townspeople are anxious to follow his example. Possibly Dunbar considered this story to be a blueprint for the betterment of the black masses, though he became increasingly critical of Washington’s ideas, and by 1903 he warned of “educating the hand to the exclusion of the head.” Dunbar gives Dokesbury his own physical characteristics, an occupation that Dunbar himself seriously considered and, even more important, some of his doubts and feelings of estrangement. He had always been such a loyal Negro, so proud of his honest brown . . . but . . . was he, after all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?
Increasingly, Dunbar discovered that education and class standing were great dividers among his people, and color-consciousness made it all much worse. “At Shaft 11” takes place in a mining community in West Virginia where a strike is being broken with a crew of black miners. Violence erupts, and two heroes
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emerge: the Scottish foreman, Jason Andrews, and the black foreman, Sam Bowles, who unite for common cause and mutual benefit. Less believable than the previous story, it is a blueprint for how things might have been in a more perfect world but rarely were. Still, it is revealing as a Dunbar story: The black men fight back here, meeting violence with necessary violence, and winning their share of the American pie.
Lyrics of the Hearthside Type of work: Poetry First published: 1899 Dunbar’s lyricism is substantially displayed in his love poetry, some of the best of which is found in this collection. In “A Bridal Measure,” from Lyrics of the Hearthside, the poet’s persona beckons maidens to the bridal throne. His invitation is spirited and triumphant yet controlled, reminiscent of the tradition in love poetry established by Ben Jonson. The tone, however, more closely approximates the carpe diem attitude of Robert Herrick. Come, essay a sprightly measure Tuned to some light song of pleasure. Maidens, let your brows be crowned As we foot this merry round.
The rhyming couplets carry the mood and punctuate the invitation. The urgency of the moment is extended further in the direct address: “Phyllis, Phyllis, why be waiting?/ In the woods the birds are mating.” The poem continues in this tone, while adopting a pastoral simplicity. When the year, itself renewing All the world with flowers is strewing Then through Youth’s Arcadian land Love and song go hand in hand.
The accentuation in the syntactic flow of these lines underlines the poet’s intentions. Though the meter is irregular, with some iambs and some anapests, the force of the poet’s exhortation remains apparent. Dunbar frequently personifies abstractions. In “Love and Grief,” also from Lyrics of the Hearthside, Dunbar espouses a morbid yet redemptive view of love. While the reflective scenario presented in this poem recalls Tennyson’s meditations on death and loss, the poetic event echoes Wordsworth’s faith in the indestructibility of joy. Utilizing the heroic couplet, Dunbar makes an opening pronouncement:
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Out of my heart, one treach’rous winter’s day I locked young Love and threw the key away. Grief, wandering widely, found the key And hastened with it, straightway, back to me.
The drama of grief-stricken love is thus established. The poet carefully clarifies his position through an emphatic personification of Grief’s behavior: “He unlocked the door/ and bade Love enter with him there and stay.” Being a lyric poet of redemptive sensibility, Dunbar cannot conclude the poem on this note. The “table must turn,” as it does for Wordsworth in such situations. Love then becomes bold and asks of Grief: “What right hast thou/ To part or parcel of this heart?” In order to justify the redemptive quality he presents, Dunbar attributes the human frailty of pride to Love, a failing which invites Grief. In so doing, the poet’s philosophical intuitiveness emerges with a measure of moral decorum. Through the movement in the syntactic patterns, the intensity of the drama is heightened as the poem moves to resolution. Dunbar utilizes a variety of metrical patterns, the most significant of which is the spondee. This poetic foot of two accented syllables allows the poet to proclaim emphatically: “And Love, pride purged, was chastened all his life.” Thus, the principal emotion in the poem is redeemed. The brief, compact lyrical verse, as found in Browning, is among Dunbar’s typical forms. “Love’s Humility,” in Lyrics of the Hearthside, is an example: As some rapt gazer on the lowly earth Looks up to radiant planets, ranging far So I, whose soul doth know thy wondrous worth Look longing up to thee as to a star.
This skillfully concentrated simile elevates love to celestial heights. The descriptive detail enhances the power of the feeling the poet captures and empowers the lyrical qualities of the poem with greater pathos. Lyrics of the Hearthside also contains some of Dunbar’s best nature poetry. “In Summer” captures a mood of merriment stimulated by nature. The common man is used as a model of one who possesses the capacity to experience this natural joy. Summer is a bright, sunny time; it is also a time for ease, as presented in the second stanza. Introducing the character of the farmer boy in stanza 3, Dunbar presents a model embodiment of the ease and merriment of summer. Amid the blades of green grass and as the breezes cool his brow, the farmer boy sings as he plows. He sings “to the dewy morn” and “to the joys of life.” This behavior leads to some moralizing, to which the last three stanzas of the poem are devoted. The poet’s point is made through a contrast: O ye who toil in the town. And ye who moil in the mart Hear the artless song, and your faith made strong Shall renew your joy of heart.
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Dunbar admonishes the reader to examine the behavior of the farm boy. Elevation of the simple, rustic life is prevalent in the writings of early British Romantic poets and postbellum African American writers alike. The admonition to reflect on the rustic life, for example, is the same advice Wordsworth gives in “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” Both groups of writers agree that there are lessons to be learned through an examination of the virtues of the rustic life. In this vein, Dunbar advises: “Oh, poor were the worth of the world/ If never a song were heard.” He goes further by advising all to “taunt old Care with a merry air.”
The Strength of Gideon Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1900 Dunbar’s second collection of short stories, The Strength of Gideon, and Other Stories, reveals a wide spectrum of his thought and style. The title work and “Mammy Peggy’s Pride” typify the plantation stories that champion the virtues of the race, such as honor, loyalty, dignity, faithfulness, selflessness, and a sense of duty and responsibility. Mammy Peggy, still the faithful, postemancipation house servant, so identifies with her owners’ former aristocratic place in southern society that she almost cannot adapt to the alliances and reconciliation necessary for a new day. Gideon’s strength is his sense of duty and responsibility in keeping his word to his old master, even though he loses the woman he loves and who loves him. Dunbar’s intent is to glorify race relations of an earlier day in the interest of race relations of his own day, which were marked by increasing enmity and violence. It is as if he hopes to calm would-be lynchers and segregationists and reassure potential friends of the race, with the admonition to “remember who these people are.” “The Ingrate” is based on Dunbar’s father’s experiences as a slave, a fugitive on the Underground Railroad to Canada, and a Union soldier. The former slaveholder sees his former slave’s name on a Union roster and feels grievously abused that he taught “the ingrate” to read and cipher because he used these accomplishments against him. “The Case of ‘Ca’line,’” subtitled “A Kitchen Monologue,” is a sassy piece, which anticipates Langston Hughes’s Simple and Alberta K. Johnson stories. Though there is enough melodramatic action in “The Tragedy at Three Forks” for a novel, this antilynching story is not entirely unsuccessful. Reflecting the usual circumstances of lynchings, the two victims are innocent, and the reader understands that this evil bloodthirst will continue as long as white people are motivated by guilt, ignorance, immorality, cruelty, base instincts, and mob violence. Other stories point out other kinds of white injustice. In “One Man’s Fortunes,” a worthy black college graduate goes out to get a job and, like Dunbar himself, meets defeat and deception in the white world. Others warn of the folly of migrating to the urban North, where hardship and evil await. The last story in the collection, “Silas Jackson,” could have been a prototype for the beginnings of James Weldon Johnson’s
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Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Here, too, the young, country innocent has a vision of a better life, and, through a series of ever more blinding incidents involving white “benefactors” and black charlatans, he finds himself in New York City, where he thinks he has “made something of himself.” Here Silas’s fortunes take a characteristic Dunbarian turn, and he returns home “spent, broken, hopeless, all contentment and simplicity gone.” Portending death more than reunion with “the old folks at home,” it is an ambiguous, unsettling end to the collection.
The Heart of Happy Hollow Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1904 The stories of this collection take place during and after Reconstruction and are concerned with the strengths and weaknesses of the southern black community in the aftermath of slavery and the strained, even violent circumstances it was forced to endure as it claimed the benefits of freedom. “The Scapegoat” is Dunbar’s most successful story about how African Americans were, and are, used as America’s political pawns. It is also one of the first stories by a black writer to locate an alternate, undermining seat of power in the barbershop/newsstand. “The Lynching of Jube Benson” is Dunbar’s other antilynching story, this one narrated by one of the lynchers, as in James Baldwin’s work. Though its impact is fueled by sentiment, it is unrelenting and unforgiving in its indictment. Other stories, primarily for a black audience, warn of the dangers of boastfulness, vanity, cowardice, self-pity, class and color consciousness, and the reactionary fear of change and difference. Stories such as “The Promoter” and “The Boy and the Bayonet” reveal that Dunbar had discovered how to use humor and pathos without sacrificing his characters’ humanity. At the time of his death, his strongest work was no longer in poetry but in short fiction, a genre that allowed him to be more realistic, relevant, and true to himself and his people.
Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow Type of work: Poetry First published: 1905 The subjects of love and death are treated in Dunbar’s lyrics of melancholy, one of the major moods found in the poet’s lyrical verse. “Yesterday and To-morrow,” in Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, is an example of Dunbar’s lyric of melancholy. The mood of this poem is in the tradition of the British Romantic poets, particularly that of Wordsworth. Dunbar treats the melancholy feelings in this poem with tenderness and simplicity. The persona expresses disappointment with the untimeli-
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ness of life’s events and the uncertainties of love. This scenario intimates a bleak future. “Yesterday and To-morrow” is developed in three compact quatrains. Each quatrain envelops a primary emotion. The first stanza unfolds yesterday’s contentment in love. The lover remembers the tender and blessed emotion of closeness with his lover: “And its gentle yieldingness/ From my soul I blessed it.” The second stanza is reminiscent of the metaphysical questionings and imagery of Donne: “Must our gold forever know/ Flames for the refining?” The lovers’ emotions are compared with precious metal undergoing the fire of refinement: Their feelings of sadness are released in this cynical question. In the third quatrain, Dunbar feeds the sad heart with more cynicism. Returning to the feelings of disappointment and uncertainty, the persona concludes: “Life was all a lyric song/ Set to tricksy meter.” The persona escapes in cynicism, but the poem still ends on a hopeless note.
Suggested Readings Alexander, Eleanor. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore. Albany: New York University Press, 2001. Best, Felton O. Crossing the Color Line: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1996. Gentry, Tony. Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet. Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1993. Hudson, Gossie Harold. A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1999. McKissack, Patricia C. Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Poet to Remember. Chicago: Children’s Press, 1984. Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Turner, Darwin T. “Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Rejected Symbol.” Journal of Negro History (January, 1967): 1-13. Wiggins, Lida Keck. The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Nashville, Tenn.: Winston-Derek, 1992. Contributors: Cynthia Packard Hill and Patricia A. R. Williams
Andrea Dworkin Born: Camden, New Jersey; September 26, 1946 Died: Washington, D.C.; April 9, 2005 Jewish
Dworkin, a radical feminist, presents alternative views of sexuality and gender roles in society. Principal works long fiction: Ice and Fire, 1986; Mercy, 1990 short fiction: The New Woman’s Broken Heart, 1980 nonfiction: Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, 1974; Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976; Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981; Right-Wing Women, 1983; Intercourse, 1987; Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality, 1988 (with Catharine A. MacKinnon); Letters from a War Zone: Writings, 1976-1989, 1989; Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women, 1997; Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, 2000; Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, 2002 edited text: In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, 1997 (with Catharine A. MacKinnon) Andrea Dworkin (DWOHR-kihn) was born to left-wing Jewish parents. Inspired by the peace movement of the 1960’s, she participated in a number of antiwar demonstrations. It was at one of these demonstrations that she had the experience that changed her life. At eighteen she was arrested and taken to the Women’s House of Detention. Her treatment there was brutal: Bullying, harsh internal examinations, and authoritarian contempt left her emotionally and physically scarred. Released after four days, Dworkin hemorrhaged vaginally for two weeks. Dworkin spoke out publicly about her trauma in an attempt to learn why any woman should be humiliated in so sexual a way. Her marriage to a Dutch anarchist awakened her to the reality of sexual violence in relationships; he beat her severely until she escaped from him with the help of feminist friends. She was an intelligent, educated woman who had been graduated from Bennington College, but she could not prevent herself from being hurt. Dworkin describes her childhood as one that taught her to defy convention. As a Jewish child, she refused to sing Christmas carols such as “Silent Night” at school. When her brush with the law and her nightmarish marriage left her horrified by the status of women, she took action. 339
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Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, Dworkin’s first major work, echoes the pain of her personal experiences of misogyny. Later books, such as Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics and Intercourse, go further into the implications of the sexual act itself. Dworkin analyzed the historical perceptions of rape and possession and of the biology of sexual contact. She also studied pornographic magazines in an attempt to understand how women are demeaned by pornography; this work led to her involvement in the feminist antipornography movement and to her testimony before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (the Meese Commission) in January of 1986. Many critics found Dworkin’s lack of makeup, her unflattering clothes, and her heaviness to be unattractive, and Dworkin consequently had to relate to a double standard of beauty that did not apply to male writers, no matter how equally polemical they were. Dworkin’s focus was to enlighten women about gender roles in society. When, in 2000, she published articles in the New Statesman and in The Guardian charging that she had been raped in a Paris hotel room, many did not believe her and dismissed the accusations. She overcame an ensuing bout with depression to write again and left a final book, Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation, unfinished upon her death of complications from acute myocarditis in 2005.
Intercourse Type of work: Essay First published: 1987 Intercourse, one of Andrea Dworkin’s most powerful books on sexuality in a repressive culture, is about self-disgust and self-hatred. Dworkin’s “Amerika” is the modern world or, rather, the world that lives within the modern American. In “Amerika,” sex is good, and liking it is morally right. In “Amerika,” sex is defined solely as vaginal penetration. In “Amerika,” women are happy to be passive and accepting while their men are aggressive and demanding. Intercourse attempts to question the rigid sexual roles that define the male as literally and figuratively on top of the woman and the symbolic implications of sexual contact—entry, penetration, and occupation. Intercourse, documenting a series of literary excerpts and comments by and for women, develops Dworkin’s theory that sexual congress is an act in which, typically, men rape women. The book’s theory is that because the penis of a man goes inside a woman during the sexual act, intercourse is a hostile act of occupation, ready to degenerate into gynocide and cannibalism. Dworkin describes a woman’s individuality as being surrounded by her body and bordered by her skin. The privacy of the inner self is essential to understanding exactly who one is. Thus, having no boundaries between one’s own body and the body of another makes one feel invaded and skinless. The experience of being skinless is the primary force behind “Amerika’s” sexuality, since “Amerikan” sexuality relies so heavily on the man being superior or on top of the woman.
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Strictly speaking, however, it is not only the act of heterosexual penetration that causes one to lose one’s sense of individuality. In Intercourse, even lesbianism seems to be no answer to the repressive society that Dworkin describes. The “real privacy” of the body can be as violated by another woman’s objectification of her lover as it can be by a heterosexual rape. So long as women can stay outside each other’s skins, metaphorically speaking, then and only then will they escape sexual domination of one another. One of Dworkin’s earlier books, Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, described heterosexual contact as acceptable so long as men do not insist on the superiority of an erect penis. In Intercourse, even a flaccid member does not negate female suppression in the sexual act. Dworkin’s preoccupation was the obscenity of the ordinary; she encouraged women to scrutinize what they may have originally thought to be harmless, even trivial.
Suggested Readings Allen, Amy. “Pornography and Power.” Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (Winter, 2001): 512-531. Blakely, Mary Kay. “Is One Woman’s Sexuality Another Woman’s Pornography?” Ms. 13 (April, 1985): 37-38. Dworkin, Andrea. Letter to The New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1992, 15-16. Eberly, Rosa A. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Green, Karen. “De Sade, de Beauvoir, and Dworkin.” Australian Feminist Studies 15 (March, 2000): 69-81. Jenefsky, Cindy. Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin’s Art and Politics. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. O’Driscoll, Sally. “Andrea Dworkin: Guilt Without Sex.” The Village Voice, July 15-21, 1981. Pagnaterro, Marisa Anne. “The Importance of Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy: Mitigating Circumstances and Narrative Jurisprudence.” Frontiers 19, no. 1 (1998): 147-166. Palczewski, Catherine Helen. “Contesting Pornography: Terministic Catharsis and Definitional Argument.” Argumentation and Advocacy 38 (Summer, 2001): 1-16. Contributor: Julia M. Meyers
Cornelius Eady Born: Rochester, New York; January 7, 1954 African American
Emerging from the generation of African American poets after the Black Arts movement, Eady explored his working-class upbringing and his position as a black poet in late twentieth century America. Principal works drama: Running Man, pr. 1999 (libretto) poetry: Kartunes, 1980; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, 1985; BOOM BOOM BOOM, 1988 (limited edition chapbook); The Gathering of My Name, 1991; You Don’t Miss Your Water, 1995; The Autobiography of a Jukebox, 1996; Brutal Imagination, 2001 edited texts: Words for Breakfast, 1998 (with Meg Kearney, Norma Fox Mazer, and Jacqueline Woodson); Vinyl Donuts, 2000 (with Kearney, Mazer, and Woodson) Born in Rochester, New York, Cornelius Eady (EE-dee) began writing poems when he was only twelve. As chronicled in You Don’t Miss Your Water, Eady’s father posed a formidable emotional problem. High-school educated, the father, employed by the city water department, had difficulty accepting literature as a valid vocation. Consequently, Eady would struggle with feelings of estrangement until his father’s death in 1993. After graduating from Empire State College and then earning his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, Eady held teaching appointments at Sweet Briar College, the College of William and Mary, Sarah Lawrence College, Tougaloo College, and City College of New York. He was in the first generation of African American poets to succeed the formidable work of the Black Arts movement of the mid-twentieth century. That literary movement, an extension of the era’s Civil Rights movement, created new interest in black identity. Eady continued that exploration, using his own working-class upbringing and his position as a black poet in late twentieth century America. That compelling honesty, coupled with his experiments in the sheer music of language, garnered Eady nominations for the Pulitzer Prize; he won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985. While at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1990’s, he served as director of its famous poetry center. In 1999, Eady became distinguished writer-in-residence in the M.F.A. program at New York City’s innovative New 342
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School. In 1996, along with poet Toi Derricotte, Eady founded the Cave Canem (literally, “Beware of the Dog”), a popular program of summer workshops for African American poets. Eady’s poetry concerns the construction of identity, the dynamics of memory and reflection as part of the interrogation of the self, and the importance of recording that complex process. Like the blues, Eady’s poetry centers on the struggle to define the isolated self within a chaotic world that harbors little possibility for redemption. Yet, like jazz, Eady’s poetry also responds to a world that, given its essential unpredictability, can sustain authentic ecstasy. That texture, the self sustained between sadness and exuberance, is central to Eady’s work. His poetry explores the roles he himself has played in the construction of his own identity. Not surprisingly, over the time Eady has been writing, this interrogation of the self has become more complex. Initially, Eady explored his role as urban poet; later, he examined more complex relational roles, that of husband, lover, teacher, and, supremely, son; he later began to confront his role as an African American, specifically the struggle to construct a viable black self amid the historical and social pressures of late twentieth century America. The poetic line for such an investigation into the self is appropriately individual and resists conventional expectations of structure and sound. Rhythmic but not metric, Eady’s lines can appear deceptively simple, direct, even conversational. However, it is freedom within a tightly manipulated form. Like improvisational jazz, which can, at first hearing, seem easy and effortless, Eady’s poetry is a complex aural event. His poems consciously manipulate sounds, unexpected syncopations and cadences, enjambment, irregular spacings and emphasis, line length, and sound repetition to create an air of improvisation that is nevertheless a carefully textured sonic weave. Given his willingness to experiment with bringing to the written word the rhythms of both jazz and blues and his belief in poetry as performed (that is, heard) art, it is not surprising that Eady would produced experimental theater pieces as part of a projected trilogy for the New York City-based Music-Theater Group; these involved original scores written by jazz cellist and longtime friend Diedre L. Murray. The first production, in 1997, was a staged recitation based on You Don’t Miss Your Water, Eady’s cycle of prose poems that recounts his father’s death. In 1999 Eady provided the libretto for an experimental jazz opera based on the story of Murray’s brother, a gifted man lost to a life of crime and heroin addiction. That production, Running Man, won two Obie Awards and was short-listed for both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2001, Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. Having taught at a number of prestigious universities, Eady was teaching at the University of Notre Dame in 2007.
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Kartunes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1980 Kartunes is a portrait of the self as young poet, an exercise in testing the reach of the imagination and celebrating the role of a cocksure poet responding originally to the world. “I want to be fresh,” he proclaims, “I want words/ to tumble off my lips/ rich enough/ to fertilize/ the ground.” Giddy with imaginative possibilities, Eady improvises his narrative “I” into outlandish personas (the “cartoons” suggested by the title), many culled from pop culture: He is at turns an inept terrorist, a nerdy librarian, an unhappy woman forced into a witness protection program, a dying philanthropist anxious about the approaching afterlife, a man contemplating torching his own house, the legendary Headless Horseman selecting the appropriate pumpkin to hurtle, Popeye’s nemesis Bluto groomed for a date, even Adolf Hitler posing before a mirror and dreaming of greatness. Given such wild fluctuations in the narrative center, the poetry is given over to irreverent exuberance. Despite often centering on alienated characters existing within a contemporary environment of absurdity and brutality, the poems resist surrendering to emotional heaviness. The poems, themselves innovative in structure and sound (witness the wordplay of the collection’s title), offer as resolutions the sheer animation of the engaged imagination, the possibility of love, and the ability of the world to stun with its unchoreographed wonder. With the confident insouciance of a young man, Eady argues that nothing is nobler than “laughing/ when nothing/ is funny anymore.”
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze Type of work: Poetry First published: 1985 The interest in defining the poet and that confident sense of play animate Eady’s followup collection, thematically centered on the metaphor of the dance. Here the world is in constant motion—the title poem, for example, details a pulsating urban neighborhood. Like William Carlos Williams (whose influence Eady has acknowledged), the poet responds to the seductive suasion of the world that too often goes unnoticed—to a cloud passing overhead, crows battling a strong wind, a waitress’s purple nail polish, the leaden feel of November, the faint stirrings of April: “an entire world,” he trumpets, “on the tip of my tongue.” To respond to that world is to dance, a suggestive metaphor for the body’s irresistible, spontaneous response to being alive, the electric moment of the “hands . . ./ Accidentally brush[ing] against the skirts of the world.” Such animation makes problematic the life of the poet so vital in Kartunes. In the closing poem, “Dance at the Amherst County Public Library,” the poet describes himself as a “dancing fool who couldn’t stay away from words.” He con-
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cedes his jealousy over those who live so effortlessly and of his own poor efforts to capture secondhand that rich experience within his poetry, his “small graffiti dance.” Yet the poetic lines here boldly strive to match the urgent call to respond originally to the world, capturing the improvisational feel of jazz: irregular patterning of lines, multiple stops and starts, a delightful matching of sounds, and wildly unanticipated rhythms.
The Gathering of My Name Type of work: Poetry First published: 1991 In Eady’s ambitious third major collection, the tone considerably darkens as jazz gives way to the slower pull of the blues. In the opening poem, “Gratitude,” Eady audaciously proffers love to those who have not welcomed him nor his poetry and confesses his greatest weakness is his “inability/ to sustain rage.” It is a familiar brashness, and, indeed, the second poem (“Grace”) offers one of those unexpected moments when the world sparkles: the sight of the neighborhood reflected in the waxed hood of a black sedan. Yet quickly the poems concede to a more disturbing world that crushes dreams and sours love. For the first time, Eady addresses race. Poems introduce figures such as the tormented blues singer Leadbelly or jazz great John Coltrane in the aftermath of the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. In others, a waitress in Virginia refuses to serve a black man, a passing motorist hurls racial epithets at a black man’s white wife, a car breaks down in the “wrong” neighborhood. Like the blues, these are poems of pain and bad luck, the curse of awareness, the dilemma of disappointment, and the need to define the self in a harsh world. What is the poet to do? “Get it all out,” Eady demands in “The Sheets of Sounds,” the remarkable closing piece that is a tour de force of metrical audacity. Here, Eady captures in language the technical virtuosity and improvisational sound of Coltrane himself: “What do I have to lose,/ Actually,/ By coming right out/ And saying/ What I mean/ To say?” Honesty then compels the poet/jazz artist to let loose the spirit in all its outrage, to push art if only for a moment into uncompromising expression, the “loud humility” of a man giving himself the right to claim, as a refrain insists with typographical variations: “This is who I am.”
You Don’t Miss Your Water Type of work: Poetry First published: 1995 Appropriately, then, in Eady’s fourth collection readers feel (for the first time in his work) the nearness of the poet himself. Dropping his elaborate personas,
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Eady speaks forthrightly of his own life. The twenty-one prose poems are stark narratives without poetic frills and without clean chronological sequencing. The reader is given an unblinking record of a son’s estrangement from a father in the face of mortality, the honest struggle to come to terms with the difficult wisdom of the blues lines, “You don’t miss your water/ ’til your well runs dry.” Eady refuses to sentimentalize the father (he is at turns miserly, stubborn, distant, even unfaithful) or himself (he cremates the body to save money), or even death (he records the indignities of hospital treatment and the impersonal efficiency of agencies that manage the Cornelius Eady (© Miriam Berkley) paperwork). Titles recall traditional blues songs, and the mood is elegiac, sobering, eloquent: “This is how life, sharpened to a fine point, plunges into what we call hope.” If Eady’s first three volumes speak of how the imagination takes hold of the world and shapes individual identity, here he acknowledges the depth of the inevitable experience of loss and how that experience is as well part of any construction of identity. In the volume’s rich closing poem, “Paradiso,” Eady decides that language itself, disparaged in his earlier work as secondhand graffiti, is the sole conjurer of the afterlife, that the “key to any heaven is language.”
The Autobiography of a Jukebox Type of work: Poetry First published: 1996 The Autobiography of a Jukebox is a kind of summary text. It is divided into four sections, each of which centers on themes drawn from earlier works: the heavy intrusion of loss; the ugly realities of racism; the glorious transcendence of art, specifically jazz, within this environment of oppression; and those small unexpected moments that trigger deep emotional responses and make such a world endurable. The volume begins where You Don’t Miss Your Water ends: dealing with harsh loss—indeed, opening poems linger within recollections of Eady’s father. With bluesy feel, other poems follow characters who discover the wounding of love, the certainty of bad luck, and the humiliations of poverty.
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In the second section, Eady confronts the angry indignation over the 1991 beating of citizen Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, the federal trial in which the white officers were acquitted, and the riots that followed. It is Eady’s first lengthy examination of the social dimension of the self and specifically how black identity must be defined within an oppressive white culture. To maintain dignity and to touch grace within such an environment, Eady offers in the third section portraits of jazz artists (and pioneer rocker Chuck Berry), black musicians who forged from such oppression the stuff of their art: “What/ Hurts is beautiful, the bruise/ Of the lyric.” However, it is not sufficient simply to relish such aesthetic artifacts. In the closing section Eady quietly affirms what his first two volumes trumpeted: the imagination’s ability to be stunned by the accidental encounter with something that triggers a minor epiphany in a flawed world that still permits awe—a woman with dreadlocks crossing a street, a tray of cornbread at a posh reception, the electric flow of an urban mall, the tangy smells of a bakery. Yet, hard on the death of Eady’s father and the anger over the King beating, these slender moments of grace are suddenly significant in ways the earlier volumes could not suggest.
Brutal Imagination Type of work: Poetry First published: 2001 In Brutal Imagination Eady’s career-long interest in defining the self takes on new maturity as he projects himself, within two unrelated poem cycles, out of the matrix of his own experience. In the first section Eady conjures the spirit, and voice, of the black kidnapper that mother Susan Smith invented as an alibi to cover the 1994 murder of her two infant sons. Eady uses that lie to investigate the white culture of anger, bigotry, and anxiety within which all black identity must be fashioned. In a biting middle section, Eady suggests the dimensions of this dilemma by giving voice to the sorry racist stereotypes fashioned by a white imagination unwilling to grant blacks the dignity and complexity of legitimate selfhood: Uncle Tom, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemina, Buckwheat, Stepin Fetchit. The faux-kidnapper—witty, articulate, probing, caring—dominates the cycle and, specifically, the symbiotic relationship between Smith and her invention, Eady suggesting how necessary the black stereotype is for whites. In the closing poem, “Birthing,” which draws excerpts from Smith’s actual confession, the conjured kidnapper extends compassion to the mother, imagining the actual killing and the desperate loneliness of Smith herself driven to do the unimaginable. The second section contains pieces from the libretto of Running Man. Although offered without the haunting jazz score of the original production and without the dramatic interplay of performance, the pieces nevertheless succeed in a conjuring of a sort far different from Susan Smith’s. A southern black family, devastated by the death of its only son, struggles to explain why such a promising young man succumbed to the very life of crime that made credible the vicious lie of Susan Smith.
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Within the interplay of their elegiac recollections, the poetic line tightly clipped for maximum effect, the young man himself is conjured and speaks of his own promise lost to the anger of limited social expectations within the white system and to the easy out of drug addiction and crime. He is the “running man” never sure where he was running from or to: “Where I come from/ A smart black boy/ Is like being a cat/ With a duck’s bill.” Chained to history—the cycle begins in an old slave cemetery—blacks, whatever their talent or aspirations, must withstand the larger predatory white culture that can leave them helpless, like “fish, scooped from a pond.” It is a powerful assessment of black identity at the twentieth century’s close.
Suggested Readings Carroll, Rebecca. Swing Low: Black Men Writing. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1995. Harper, Michael S., and Anthony Walton, eds. Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Hawkins, Shayla. “Cave Canem: A Haven for Black Poets.” Poets & Writers 29, no. 2 (March/April, 2001): 48-53. Quashie, Kevin Everod. “Cornelius Eady.” In New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America, edited by Joyce Lausch, Keith Miller, and Quashie. Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2001. Young, Kevin, ed. Giant Steps: The New Generation of African-American Writers. New York: Perennial, 2000. Contributor: Joseph Dewey
Lonne Elder III Born: Americus, Georgia; December 26, 1931 Died: Woodland Hills, California; June 11, 1996 African American
Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men dissects the love and power relations within a family, revealing the adverse situation of African Americans living in a racially torn nation. Principal works drama: Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, pr. 1965 (revised pr., pb. 1969); Charades on East Fourth Street, pr. 1967, pb. 1971 (one act); Splendid Mummer, pr. 1988 screenplays: Melinda, 1972; Sounder, 1972 (adaptation of William H. Armstrong’s novel); Sounder, Part Two, 1976; Bustin’ Loose, 1981 (with Richard Pryor and Roger L. Simon; adaptation of a story by Pryor) teleplays: Camera Three, 1963 season; The Terrible Veil, 1963; N.Y.P.D., 19671968 season; McCloud, 1970-1971; Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1975 (adaptation of his play); A Woman Called Moses, 1978 (miniseries based on Marcy Heidish’s book); The Negro Ensemble Company, 1987 nonfiction: “Comment: Rambled Thoughts,” in Black Creation, 1973; “Lorraine Hansberry: Social Consciousness and the Will,” in Freedomways, 1979 Lonne Elder III (LAH-nee EHL-dur) was born in Americus, Georgia, on December 26, 1931, to Lonne Elder II and Quincy Elder. While he was still an infant, his family moved to New York and New Jersey. He was orphaned at the age of ten and ended up living with relatives on a New Jersey farm. Rural life, however, was not for him, and, after he ran away a few times, he was sent to live with his uncle, a numbers runner, in Jersey City. In 1949, Elder entered New Jersey State Teachers College, where he stayed less than a year. He then moved to New York City and took courses at the Jefferson School and the New School for Social Research, while becoming involved in the movement for social equality for black people. In 1952, he was drafted into the United States Army. While stationed near Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, he met the poet and playwright Robert Hayden, who encouraged Elder with his writing. Back in New York City in 1953, Elder shared an apartment with the aspiring playwright Douglas Turner Ward and began studying acting. Supporting himself through jobs as a dockworker, waiter, and poker dealer, among other things, he pursued his acting career, appearing on Broadway in 1959 in A Raisin in the Sun and 349
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with the Negro Ensemble Company (cofounded by Ward) in Ward’s play Day of Absence (pr. 1965). During this time, he met such prominent black writers as Lorraine Hansberry and John Oliver Killens, married Betty Gross (in 1963), and wrote his first play. This work, “A Hysterical Turtle in a Rabbit Race,” written in 1961 but never performed or published, broached Elder’s favored topic of how a black family can be pulled apart by prejudice and false standards. In 1965, his masterpiece, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, was performed, earning for him fame and critical success. Along with his other ventures, such as writing television scripts for such shows as N.Y.P.D. and McCloud, it netted for him a number of awards and honors, including a fellowship to the Yale School of Drama in 1966-1967. His next play to be produced was the one-act Charades on East Fourth Street, which did not have the impact of his previous drama. It was performed in 1967. In 1970, sick of New York City, Elder moved with his second wife, Judith Ann Johnson, whom he had married in 1969, to California. He was hoping to improve the depiction of African Americans in Hollywood productions, and he did just that in his screenplay Sounder in 1972. After the critical success of this film, he continued working in the industry, producing more serious work about black life and tradition, such as his follow-up television script Sounder, Part Two (1976) and his television presentation about Harriet Ross Tubman, A Woman Called Moses (1978), as well as writing an occasional comedy, such as the 1981 Richard Pryor film Bustin’ Loose. In 1988, Elder returned briefly to the theater with Splendid Mummer, a historical play about a black expatriate actor who left the United States in the 1820’s to practice his art in Europe. The play was liked by critics but was not a popular success and was not published. Elder continued to be primarily devoted to his goal of working in television and film to provide a positive and realistic view of African American life until his death in 1996.
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men Type of work: Drama First produced: 1965, pb. 1969 Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men deals with the survival of the black family under duress. For Elder, the family is not a collection of autonomous individuals but a dynamic set of relationships. In Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Elder focuses on how each family member’s decisions crucially hinge on the words and actions of each other member. The playwright indicates, moreover, that under stressful conditions the equilibrium of such a black family is a fragile thing, because the family is a working unit in a larger society that is controlled by white people to the disadvantage of black persons. The drama records how, under increasing pressure, the family disintegrates in some ways while it grows in others. Thus, Elder combines social criticism with a subtle look at the inner workings of families.
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In much of post-World War II American theater, including such works as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949) and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944, pb. 1945), the family is portrayed as entrapping and destructive of individualism. The family may stifle a son by forcing him to support it, as in Williams’s play, or it may ruin his life by giving him false views, as happens to Biff in Miller’s work; in either case, however, the family is inimical to self-reliance. By contrast, in Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, each family member has a role that is both constricting and sustaining, while each member either grows or diminishes as a result of the family’s overall adaptation to the outside world. At first sight, the family in Elder’s play is organized in stereotypical “culture of poverty” fashion, with a female, the daughter Adele, being the de facto head of the house, since she supports the other, male family members. The two sons with the father, the nominal ruler of the house, are shiftless characters; the father, Russell, presides over a defunct barbershop, while his elder son, Theo, is a hapless loser, and the younger one, Bobby, a sneak thief. As the story develops, however, the audience learns that the three are not as parasitical as they first appeared. The father, for example, had been the mainstay of the family, earning a living as a professional dancer until his legs failed and he was unceremoniously dropped from his place. When viewers see the father returning from a day of job-hunting humiliation, they also learn that, as an over-the-hill black man, he has little hope of finding work. The thrust of the play, however, is not to exonerate any individual but to show that the current operation of the family is, given the way the odds are stacked against prosperity for minority group members, probably the best possible. This view is shown by the simple, but fundamental, device of ending the first act with the beginning of a basic change in the household arrangements (as Theo sets up a viable, if illegal, business) and then jumping ahead a few months for the second act. In this way, in the second act, the audience can see how Theo’s changed status, as he takes on a more manly role in the family and supports the others by working long hours, affects the personalities and actions of each of the others, often adversely. Adele, for example, no longer having to bear tremendous responsibility, lets herself go, running around with a notorious skirt chaser. Bobby, who never felt threatened by his brother, since Theo was as ambitionless as he was, now begins sullenly competing with him, becoming a big-time hoodlum. This is not to say that, because there is more tension in the family after Theo begins working than previously, the old organization was better. Rather, Elder indicates—especially toward the end of the second act, when the family begins to calm down and Adele gives up her playboy boyfriend—that each set of family relationships is highly interdependent and serves as an essential means to help the members orient themselves to the outside world. Elder also indicates that each transition between different familial “steady states” will involve special periods of stress. In his plays, it is clear that Elder is critical of the position that black persons are forced to occupy in the American economy, and it also may be evident that his anger is more latent than expressed. Rather than have his characters complain about the system, he makes the audience experience the constant feeling of failure that hovers over a family whose members are not fully employed, especially when, to a large
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degree, their unemployment is not their fault. In relation to one character, however, Elder’s social criticism is less oblique. This character, Blue Haven, is a self-styled black activist, who, curiously, is not interested in fighting injustice and oppression through protests and political action; rather, he prefers to steal the clients of white people’s liquor and gambling establishments by setting up bootleg and numbers operations of his own. In this portrayal, Elder reveals a satirical side to his talent and shows that he is as critical of black persons as he is of white ones, insofar as he shows that black residents of Harlem are more interested in supporting Blue Haven’s “enterprises” than the businesses run by more bona fide progressives. Elder’s treatment of this character also reveals another point about his methods. Throughout most of the play, Blue Haven obtains little sympathy from the audience, being not only a sharper but also a hypocrite. Yet in a powerful monologue that he delivers in a confrontation with Theo, who accuses Blue Haven of exploiting him, Blue Haven presents his own tortured dreams, showing that he is capable of much deeper feeling than it would have been thought possible. This emotional monologue lifts him in the audience’s estimation and establishes Elder’s goal of giving every character his or her due. The generosity in Elder’s treatment of his characters, seen not only in the way he allows each to develop a voice but also in his mutualistic conception of the family, does have certain drawbacks. As none of the characters is larger than the others, none, in this tale of wrecked hopes, gains the type of tragic stature obtained by the leading characters in the Williams and Miller plays mentioned above. That is to say, none has the broken splendor of a Willy Loman, because, as each family member’s choices are heavily dependent on others’ situations, no character ever has to face the anxiety of bearing total responsibility for his or her actions. Thus, a character can never rise to the grandeur associated with an acceptance of such responsibility. Furthermore, as a number of critics have noted, Elder’s evenhandedness sometimes hints at a distance between him and his creations, since his equal treatment of each problem reveals that he was not aroused by any of his characters’ tribulations. Such an attitude can lead to the pathos and power of a given dramatic situation not being fully asserted. One compensation for these drawbacks is compassion. Elder refuses to make any of his characterizations, even of such comic figures as Blue Haven, into caricatures. He extends to each a measure of respect and understanding. Further, Elder’s undistorted, accepting view of his characters and their world matches their general realism. His characters are aware of their own and others’ limitations and are largely accustomed to, though hurt by, their social inferiority. The family members tend to treat each new vicissitude with relatively good humor. Thus, near the end of the first act, when everyone is momentarily glum about future prospects, the father, having leeringly accepted Theo’s proposal that he work with Blue Haven but being none too happy about it, engages in a little tap dancing. Although his steps are clumsy, the boys cheer him on, caught up in their infectious attempt to celebrate a dubious alliance. The frequent joking of the father and sons works to this same end, lightening the burdens they must bear.
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Charades on East Fourth Street Type of work: Drama First produced: 1967, pb. 1971 Elder’s ability to create a multisided situation is found in his other published drama, Charades on East Fourth Street. This play belongs to a genre, delved into by black playwrights of the 1960’s, that might be called “ritual drama.” Ritual dramas were a component of the rebellious Black Arts movement that emphasized theater as a social ritual, such as the Catholic Mass, that worked to renew symbolically a society’s cohesion. These works provided a way of going back to the sources of theater, as is evident in such dramas as the medieval mystery plays. Ritual dramas retold the story of Christ’s passion, and, as the centerpiece of a worldview, its reenactment served to rededicate viewers to a common purpose as they reempathized with their binding social myth. Numerous modern authors, such as T. S. Eliot, have turned back to the roots of drama, but African American writers often gave this turn a perverse twist. One of the most brilliant of the black writers’ ritual dramas was Dutchman (pr., pb. 1964) by LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka). In this play, a black college student flirts with an initially willing white woman on a subway, but the game turns ugly, and she stabs him. All the other white passengers join her in disposing of the corpse. The ritual, then, is the sacrifice of a young African American male, portrayed as the glue holding together white society. Thus, Dutchman, pretending to reveal white America’s ideological foundations, actually serves up an indictment of how, it claims, the United States can unite only by scapegoating its minorities. It may be surmised from this plot recapitulation that such plays could easily become shrill. Although this is not the case with Dutchman, because of the author’s use of three-dimensional characters, with the woman becoming a fury only in the last minutes, the same cannot be said for Elder’s Charades on East Fourth Street. At points, his characters grow strident when they lecture one another about police brutality. This short play revolves around the actions of a band of black youths who have kidnapped a white policeman who they believe is guilty of raping a teenage girl. Then, in keeping with the title, Charades on East Fourth Street, the youths force the officer to act out a series of degrading scenes. For example, they strip him and put him in bed with a teenage girl, saying that they will send photographs to his wife. It can be seen that, in this sexual charade, he is acting out the same part that he supposedly plays in his oppression of the African American community. As the play progresses, it grows more complex. It turns out, for example, that the gang has grabbed the wrong police officer. Furthermore, the audience learns that the majority of these black teenagers are not convinced of the utility of this kidnapping and are involved in it only because they have been pressured into acting by their leader. In a short (one-act) play such as this one, however, there is no room for excessive ambiguity. The fact that Elder does not give his black revolutionaries much conviction—the kind of fanaticism that Baraka’s characters often display—
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takes the wind out of the story’s sails. Without the time to develop the gang’s interplay or the anger to make the play an indictment, Elder heroically fails at a genre for which he has no aptitude. It could be said that Elder’s lack of success at agitational drama indicates that, for him, to write well he must follow his bent, which comes from depicting the complexity of characters and the networks they form. His defense of the African American family in his most important play, Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, does not rest on any encomiums of individual family members’ virtues but on an insistence on the value of the family as a mechanism offering support and solidarity in the face of a hostile society. The worth of Elder’s works lies in the evocative power of his affirmation, which itself rests on a sophisticated analysis of how a family functions as one, composed of the relationships of people rather than of people standing alone.
Suggested Readings Eckstein, George. “Softened Voices in the Black Theater.” Dissent 23 (Summer, 1976): 306-308. Elder, Judyann. “Ceremonies Marks Tribute to Black History Month: Judyann Elder Directs Husband’s Classic Play That Offers Sad but Hopeful Statement.” Interview by Janice Arkatov. Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1988, p. 12. Hay, Samuel A. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Jeffers, Lance. “Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama.” CLA Journal 16 (September, 1972): 32-48. Oliver, Myrna. “Lonne Elder III: Award-Winning Writer.” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1996, p. 28. Contributor: James Feast
Stanley Elkin Born: Brooklyn, New York; May 11, 1930 Died: St. Louis, Missouri; May 31, 1995 Jewish
Through dark humor and inventive use of language, Elkin captures a unique Jewish American identity. Principal works long fiction: Boswell: A Modern Comedy, 1964; A Bad Man, 1967; The Dick Gibson Show, 1971; The Franchiser, 1976; George Mills, 1982; Stanley Elkin’s the Magic Kingdom, 1985 (also known as The Magic Kingdom); The Rabbi of Lud, 1987; The MacGuffin, 1991; Mrs. Ted Bliss, 1995 screenplay: The Six-Year-Old Man, 1968 short fiction: Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, 1965; The Making of Ashenden, 1972; Searches and Seizures, 1973; The Living End, 1979; Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits, 1980; Early Elkin, 1985; Van Gogh’s Room at Arles: Three Novellas, 1993 nonfiction: Why I Live Where I Live, 1983; Pieces of Soap: Essays, 1992 Stanley Elkin (EHL-kihn) wrote darkly humorous works. About half of his characters are Jewish, mostly secular Jews. Many of them, however, resist assimilation into mainstream American life. In his short stories and novels, Elkin establishes Jewish identity in two major ways: He captures Jewish humor through the unique intonations of Jewish American speech, and he casts his characters in professions often entered by Jewish men. A consummate stylist, Elkin often presents his characters as caught between their religious heritage, which they consider anachronistic and from which they have distanced themselves, and late twentieth century American society, into which they refuse to integrate. To repair a tattered self-image, the gentile protagonist in Boswell: A Modern Comedy forms a club for famous and successful people; he then cannot sacrifice his individuality by joining. Although Elkin considered himself a novelist, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, which clearly established his identity as a Jewish writer, caused many readers and some critics to consider Elkin essentially as a short-story writer. Elkin clearly established his identity as a novelist, however, by producing more than ten novels. Aside from Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, about half of whose stories treat Jewish subjects, Elkin deals with Jews and Jewish themes in a number of 355
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his other books. A Bad Man focuses on Leo Feldman, a department store owner hemmed in by a crazy father and a tedious son. In “The Condominium,” a novella in Searches and Seizures, Elkin focuses on shiva, the Jewish funeral rite. In The Franchiser, Elkin puts Ben Flesh, adopted by Julius Finsberg during the Depression, into an unbelievable family of eighteen twins and triplets, all afflicted with degenerative diseases. In George Mills, however, in which the protagonists are gentile, Elkin sacrifices ethnic identity for universality.
The Franchiser Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 The protagonist of The Franchiser suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease that deteriorates the nervous system. Between attacks of the disease, Ben Flesh roams the American landscape, “the packed masonry of states,” looking after the massive network of franchises he has built upon an inheritance from his godfather, Julius Finsberg, an industrial kingpin. What Ben inherits from Finsberg, who has cheated Ben’s father out of his share of a successful business, is not a substantial sum of money but the prime interest rate—“Not money but the use of money.” With the low interest rates of the preinflationary 1960’s, Ben is able to build up a financial empire consisting entirely of franchises—Fred Astaire Dance Studios, Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream parlors. In fact, Ben has his hand in literally every franchise in the United States. Along with the interest rate, Ben has inherited a responsibility for Finsberg’s children, eighteen in all. Like Ben, each of the Finsbergs suffers from an incurable disease, which is their physical inheritance from old Julius, bearer of bad genes. As he invests their money in his franchises, Ben becomes a lover to each of the Finsberg daughters and a confidant to each son, so that, between Ben and the children, business and familial relationships are interchangeable. In his ramblings, Flesh might be seen as a reader and interpreter of cultural signs. He observes the minute phenomena of the human world and attempts to make connections between the scattered manifestations of life and death. Ben spends a lot of time with Patty Finsberg, who refers to herself as “The Insight Lady” because she is obsessed with the parallels to be drawn among disparate cultural events. While some of her insights are breathtaking, it is clear that Patty is paranoically concerned with “connections.” From her, Ben learns that there is order in disorder, contradiction in synthesis. Flesh as a character is, then, like a reader of his own novel, who interprets his life and observations as a commentator might discuss the patterns and repetitions of a fiction. Then, too, Flesh is like a writer: As a franchiser, he both organizes and disseminates the separated units of his financial network. Almost continually in physical discomfort and confronting the visible evidence of his own death, Flesh looks outward, on life, for the external order that will confer meaning upon his existence.
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Elkin has always been interested in the exaggerated peculiarities of the individual vision and voice; he is a master of intonation and nuance. Perhaps no other contemporary writer has so successfully captured the varied lifestyles and patois of contemporary Americans as they have been affected by the avid consumerism of their culture.
The MacGuffin Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Set in a large unnamed American city in the Midwest that seems much like St. Louis, The MacGuffin is the story of some two days in the life of Bobbo Druff, commissioner of streets. The novel successfully functions on many levels; it exhibits a multifaceted complexity in that it is the story of a family, a love intrigue of the husband with mistress, a murder mystery, a tale of smuggling, and a political statement. While being all of these, it is mostly about Bobbo Druff and “The MacGuffin,” his psychological other and controlling self. Bobbo Druff, the narrator and main character of the story, is truly the only subject of this complex novel that has so many other threads and aspects. He represents the modern American, and his life embodies, for Elkin at least, life in America in the 1990’s. He is materialistic and corrupt; he is neurotic, psychotic, and schizophrenic (and, importantly, justly so); he is intellectual, witty, and smart; he is hopelessly middle-class; he finds relief in life by incessantly getting high on coca leaves and taking at least four different prescription medicines; he is both humor and pathos—a strangely correct mixture. Elkin’s main purpose is to reveal the hopeless and meaningless entanglements of life in the United States in the 1990’s—for the thinking and thoughtless alike. There is no escape from problems, no solution to them, only an awareness of facts that add up to craziness (a matter blended with humor and bitterness) in a world in which borderline insanity is necessary for survival. Bobbo Druff is not, however, insane; he is victimized by society Stanley Elkin (© Miriam Berkley)
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and politics and legalities—but yet entirely by self. Survival requires some control of the system in which one lives. For Druff and other characters, that system is corrupt, somehow defunct yet going on anyway. The MacGuffin succeeds in making significant and correct statements about modern politics. The global situation is so involved that even such traditional enemies as the Arabs and Jews cannot disentangle themselves from the complexity of the various problems. They depend upon one another to have someone to hate, to have an enemy; just as certainly and more important, however, they depend upon one another to fund and sustain their own problems and hatreds. Local politics, as exemplified by Druff, the mayor, other commissioners, and even the two chauffeurs, parallels the mess and havoc of larger problems. No one can be trusted in a world where friends serve the causes of enemies and, conversely, enemies serve the causes of friends—all knowingly, but never openly. It is internal politics with which Elkin is doubtless most concerned. This is represented in Druff’s family life with both his wife and son, and with his relationship with himself and The MacGuffin. The context of family politics finally makes it impossible for Druff to make sense out of the entanglements around him, even when he has full knowledge of all the facts. In The MacGuffin, Elkin’s goal is to make a statement not merely about problems in the Middle East (he is actually little concerned about relations between Jews and Arabs) but rather about problems in selfdefinition facing all readers.
Suggested Readings Bailey, Peter J. Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Bargen, Doris G. The Fiction of Stanley Elkin. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1980. Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Dougherty, David C. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Gelfant, Blanche H. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen Sixties. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Pinsker, Sanford. “Sickness unto Style.” Gettysburg Review 7 (1994): 437-445. Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1994. Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Summer, 1995). Contributors: R. Baird Shuman, Patrick O’Donnell, and Carl Singleton
Ralph Ellison Born: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; March 1, 1914 Died: New York, New York; April 16, 1994 African American
In his writings, Ellison emphasizes his belief in integration and pluralism in American society. Principal works long fiction: Invisible Man, 1952; Juneteenth, 1999 (John F. Callahan, editor) short fiction: Flying Home, and Other Stories, 1996 nonfiction: Shadow and Act, 1964; The Writer’s Experience, 1964 (with Karl Shapiro); Going to the Territory, 1986; The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 1995 (John F. Callahan, editor); Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 1995 (Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, editors); Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, 2000; Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, 2001 (Robert O’Meally, editor) A native of rural Oklahoma, Ralph Ellison (EHL-lih-suhn) moved to New York City in 1936, where he met fellow black writer Richard Wright. Wright helped Ellison begin his writing career. In 1938, Ellison joined the Federal Writers’ Project, which launched his educational and literary life. In 1945, Ellison, who was then exploring and espousing leftist views, began work on Invisible Man, a novel based on his post-World War II interest in racial identity, ethnic unity, and social justice. Invisible Man won the National Book Award and the Russwarm Award in 1953, catapulting Ellison into national prominence as an important black author. Invisible Man traces the life of a young African American male who is attempting to define his identity in the context of his race and of society as a whole. Ellison received numerous honors, including the 1969 Medal of Freedom Award for his leadership in the black literary community. Starting in 1952, Ellison taught at Bard College, Rutgers University, New York University, and other institutions. In addition, he delivered public lectures, wrote essays, and worked on a second novel. Less inclined to direct political involvement than contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin, Ellison participated in the Civil Rights movement in a relatively quiet manner. He nevertheless attracted political controversy during the rise of the African American nationalist movements in the mid-1960’s. Refusing to endorse any form of cultural or political separatism, Ellison was attacked as an aesthetic European and a political reactionary, especially after accepting appointments to the American Institute of 359
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Arts and Letters (1964) and to the National Council on the Arts and Humanities, acts that were interpreted as support for the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy. During the mid-1970’s, however, these attacks abated as nationalist critics such as Larry Neal rose to Ellison’s defense and a new generation of African American writers turned to him for aesthetic inspiration. Though Ellison would publish two well-received collections of essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, he would never follow up his first novel with a second in his lifetime. He began writing his next novel around 1958, and over the years he was to publish numerous excerpts Ralph Ellison (National Archives) from it as a work-in-progress. A fire at his Plainsfield, Massachusetts, summer home destroyed much of the manuscript in 1967, causing him to have to painstakingly reconstruct it. Though he was to work on this project for the rest of his life, he never found a final form for the novel with which he felt comfortable, and it remained unfinished when he died of a heart attack in 1994.
Invisible Man Type of work: Novel First published: 1952 Frequently discussed as a novel addressing racial identity in modern, urban America, Ellison’s masterpiece, Invisible Man, is also discussed regarding the larger issue of personal identity, especially self-assertion and personal expression in a metaphorically blind world. In the novel, the unnamed young black narrator is invisible within the larger culture because of his race. Race itself, in turn, is a metaphor for the individual’s anonymity in modern life. The novel is scathing, angry, and humorous, incorporating a wide range of African American experiences and using a variety of styles, settings, characters, and images. Ellison uses jazz as a metaphor, especially that of the role of a soloist who is bound within the traditions and forms of a group performance. The novel describes a series of incidents that show how racism has warped the American psyche. As a boy, the nameless narrator hears his grandfather say: “Un-
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dermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction.” Later, the youth sees a social function degenerate into a surrealistic and barbarous paroxysm of racism. Next, the narrator is expelled from a black college and heads north. After a job in a paint factory ends in shock treatment, the narrator heads to the big city and falls in with the Brotherhood, a group of political radicals. After realizing that the Brotherhood is just as power-hungry and manipulative as the other organizations and institutions that have victimized him, the narrator leaves the Brotherhood. He comes to understand that racism denies personal identity: As long as he is seen by others as a sample of a group rather than as an individual, he is invisible. The narrator finally becomes an urban hermit, living anonymously in a cellar and using pirated electricity. The novel’s narrator is typically viewed as representing a generation of intelligent African Americans born and raised in the rural South before World War II who moved to large cities such as New York to widen their opportunities. Such historical context aside, readers also see him as a black Everyman, whose story symbolically recapitulates black history. Attending a Southern black college, the narrator’s idealism is built on black educator Booker T. Washington’s teaching that racial uplift will occur by way of humility, accommodation, and hard work. The narrator’s ideals erode, however, in a series of encounters with white and black leaders. The narrator learns of hypocrisy, blindness, and the need to play roles even when each pose leads to violence. The larger, white culture does not accept the narrator’s independent nature. Accidents, and betrayals by educators, communists, and fellow African Americans, among others, show him that life is largely chaotic, with no clear pattern of order to follow. The narrator’s complexity shatters white culture’s predetermined, stereotyped notions of what role he should play. He finds himself obliged as a result to move from role to role, providing the reader a wide spectrum of personalities that reflect the range of the black community. In the end the narrator rejects cynicism and hatred and advocates a philosophy of hope, a rejection mirroring Ellison’s desire to write a novel that transcended protest novels, emphasizing rage and hopelessness, of the period. The narrator decides to look within himself for self-definition, and the act of telling his story provides meaning to his existence, an affirmation and celebration preceding his return to the world. He has learned first of his invisibility, second of his manhood. In his later years, Ellison realized that his novel expands the meaning of the word “invisible.” He observed that invisibility “touches anyone who lives in a big metropolis.” A winner of numerous awards, including the National Book Award in 1953, Invisible Man has continually been regarded as one of the most important novels in twentieth century American literature.
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Going to the Territory Type of work: Essays First published: 1986 Reasserting the democratic vision of Ellison’s earlier writing, this eloquent collection of sixteen pieces (composed between 1957 and the early 1980’s) incorporates many of Ellison’s public speeches. Pieces written for specific occasions celebrate the achievements of composer Duke Ellington, novelist Richard Wright, artist Romare Bearden, and educator Inman Page. Each testifies to the diversity and style—the words are crucial to Ellison’s sensibility—of Afro-American culture. Similarly, his responses to both white liberalism and black separatism insist that while Afro-American culture is unique, it is not separate from the pluralistic mainstream of the American experience. The core of the book, however, lies in the more fully developed essays on the complexly intertwined aesthetic and moral responsibilities of the novelist in a democratic society. Although he remains curiously insensitive to the voices of women, Ellison is particularly perceptive concerning the ways in which mutually antagonistic cultures incorporate one another’s influence through parody and unconscious imitation. “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” “The Little Man at the Cheehaw Station,” “An Extravagance of Laughter,” and the title essay all rank with the finest prose of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Carlos Williams, James Baldwin, and Adrienne Rich as classic statements of the constantly undervalued pluralistic ideal.
“Flying Home” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1996, in Flying Home Ralph Ellison’s longest short story, “Flying Home,” from the collection of the same name, is also his most richly satisfying accomplishment in the form. At the center of the story is Todd, a young black man whose lifelong dream of becoming a pilot crashes along with his plane when he flies into a buzzard on a training flight. Jefferson, an old black man who comes to Todd’s rescue after the crash, tells him the buzzards are called “Jim Crows” locally, setting up an important level of symbolism about what has really caused Todd’s crash. In fact, Todd has been training with the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black World War II pilots who trained at the famed Tuskegee Institute but were only reluctantly deployed for combat missions. For Todd, this crash landing on a routine flight almost certainly means he will never get another chance to fly and, in his mind, will become the common black man he considers Jefferson to be, the worst fate he can imagine for himself. Despite the younger man’s hostility, Jefferson distracts the injured Todd by telling him a story about dying, going to heaven, and flying around so fast as to cause “a
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storm and a couple of lynchings down here in Macon County.” In his story-withina-story, Jefferson is stripped of his wings for flying too fast and is sent down to earth with a parachute and a map of Alabama. Todd, seeing only that this story has been twisted to mirror his own situation, snaps, “Why are you making fun of me?”— which, in fact, the old man is not doing. A feverish dream into which Todd drifts reveals not only the depth of his lifelong desire to fly but also the power of his grandmother’s admonition: Young man, young man Yo arm’s too short To box with God.
To Todd, becoming a pilot means taking a position higher than the majority white culture wants to allow black men of his time to occupy; it is the equivalent of boxing with God in his mind. To have failed as a pilot means not only to have made a mistake but also to have let down his entire race, something he cannot allow to happen. When Dabney Graves, the racist landowner on whose property Todd has crashed, arrives at the site, Todd snaps at the man and places his own life in danger. Jefferson, though, saves him by intervening and telling Graves that the army told Todd never to abandon his ship. Graves’s temper is assuaged, and Jefferson and a young boy are allowed to take Todd to safety on a stretcher. The final image is of Todd watching a buzzard flying against the sun, glowing like a bird of flaming gold. This image suggests that though Todd will never fly again, his spirit will rise up like a phoenix from the ashes of his defeat, a victory made possible by the current of goodwill he can now allow himself to feel for Jefferson. Todd will begin to learn to love himself for who he is by loving others for who they are.
Juneteenth Type of work: Novel First published: 1999 Forty-seven years after the release of Invisible Man, Ellison’s second novel was published. Ellison began working on Juneteenth in 1954, but his constant revisions delayed its publication. Although it was unfinished at the time of his death, only minor edits and revisions were necessary to publish the book. Juneteenth is about a black minister, Hickman, who takes in and raises a little boy as black, even though the child looks white. The boy soon runs away to New England and later becomes a race-baiting senator. After he is shot on the Senate floor, he sends for Hickman. Their past is revealed through their ensuing conversation. The title of the novel, appropriately, refers to a day of liberation for African Americans. Juneteenth historically represents June 19, 1865, the day Union forces announced emancipation of slaves in Texas; that state considers Juneteenth an offi-
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cial holiday. The title applies to the novel’s themes of evasion and discovery of identity, which Ellison explored so masterfully in Invisible Man.
Suggested Readings Benston, Kimberly, ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Ralph Ellison. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Callahan, John F. Introduction to Flying Home, and Other Stories, by Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1996. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: Wiley, 2001. Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. O’Meally, Robert G. New Essays on “Invisible Man.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. _______. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Schor, Edith. Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Contributors: Wesley Britton, Thomas Cassidy, and Craig Werner
Louise Erdrich Born: Little Falls, Minnesota; June 7, 1954 Native American
Erdrich’s poetry and novels represent some of the most creative and accessible writing by a Native American. Principal works children’s literature: Grandmother’s Pigeon, 1996 (illustrated by Jim LaMarche); The Birchbark House, 1999; The Range Eternal, 2002; The Game of Silence, 2004 long fiction: Love Medicine, 1984 (revised and expanded, 1993); The Beet Queen, 1986; Tracks, 1988; The Crown of Columbus, 1991 (with Michael Dorris); The Bingo Palace, 1994; Tales of Burning Love, 1996; The Antelope Wife, 1998; The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, 2001; The Master Butchers Singing Club, 2003; Four Souls, 2004; The Painted Drum, 2005 poetry: Jacklight, 1984; Baptism of Desire, 1989; Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, 2003 short fiction: “The Red Convertible,” 1981; “Scales,” 1982; “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” 1982; “American Horse,” 1983; “Destiny,” 1985; “Saint Marie,” 1985; “Fleur,” 1987; “Snares,” 1987; “Matchimanito,” 1988; The Best American Short Stories 1993, 1993 nonfiction: The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, 1995; Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 2003 Louise Erdrich (UR-drihch) was born to a Chippewa mother and a German American father, and her “mixed-blood” heritage is at the heart of her writing. The oldest of seven children and the granddaughter of the tribal chair of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, she has stated that her family was typical of Native American families in its telling of stories, and that those stories became a part of her and are reflected in her own work. In her poetry and novels, she explores Native American ideas, ordeals, and delights, with characters representing the European American and Native American sides of her heritage. Erdrich entered Dartmouth College in 1972, the year the Native American Studies Department was formed. The chair of that department was Michael Dorris, who later became her trusted literary collaborator and eventually her husband. Her work at Dartmouth was the beginning of a continuing exploration of her ancestry, the animating influence in her novels. Erdrich frequently weaves stories in nonchronological patterns with multiple narrators. Her characters are multidimensional and entertaining while communi365
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cating the positives and negatives of Native American life in the twentieth century. Family relationships, community relationships, issues of assimilation, and the roles of tradition and religion are primary motifs in her novels. Tracks, The Beet Queen, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace form a quartet that follows four families living in North Dakota between the early 1930’s and the late 1980’s, exploring the relationships among themselves and within the larger cultures. The novel The Crown of Columbus, written with coauthor Michael Dorris, explores many of the same ideas and is a literary adventure story. In these novels about the search for identity, some of her characters are hopelessly caught between worlds, but most of her characters battle the hurt caused by mixed identities with humor, tenacity, and a will to construct their own sense of identity. The result is some of the most accomplished and popular ethnic fiction available. The excellence of her work has earned for her numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, and each of her five novels has achieved The New York Times best-seller list.
Love Medicine Type of work: Novel First published: 1984 A dazzling meld of Native American storytelling and postmodern literary craft, Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, was an immediate success. It quickly made the best-seller lists and gathered an impressive group of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for best first novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the American Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times award for best novel of the year. Sad and funny, realistic and lyrical, mystical and down-to-earth, the novel tells the story of three generations of four Chippewa and mixed-blood families—the Kashpaws, Morriseys, Lamartines, and Lazarres—from the 1930’s to the 1980’s. Seven separate narrators tell their own stories in a discontinuous time line, each a puzzle piece of its own, but by the novel’s end there is one story, one jigsaw puzzle picture of lost identities and the often humorous but always meaningful efforts of a fragmented people to hold on to what is left to them. The characters in Love Medicine experience individual forms of alienation caused by physical and emotional separation from the communal root of their existence. They contend with the United States government and its policies of allotment and commodities; the Catholic Church, which makes no allowances for the Chippewas’ traditional religion; and with the seductive pull of life off the reservation, a life that cuts them off from the community whose traditions keep them centered and give them a sense of their identities. These three factors place the characters under the constant threat of loss of their culture. Erdrich makes this clear, but she presents the lives of her Native American characters as human experiences that
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readers who have no background in Native American cultures can readily understand. The three generations of characters in Love Medicine surface as human beings who deal with an unfair world with strength, frailty, love, anger, and most of all, a sense of humor.
The Beet Queen Type of work: Novel First published: 1986 Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen, is centered in the fictional little town of Argus, somewhere in North Dakota. Unlike her other novels of people living on reservations, the characters in this story are mostly European Americans, and those Native Americans who exist have very tenuous ties to their roots and to the reservation that lies just outside the town. Racism, poverty, and cultural conflict are not in the foreground in this novel, which makes it different from most novels by Native American authors. Instead, European Americans, Native Americans, and mixedbloods are all in the same economic and cultural situation, and each of them is involved in a search for identity. The prose in The Beet Queen is lyrical and finely crafted, as is evident in the description of Mary Adare, the novel’s central character. Abandoned by a mother who literally vanishes in the air, she builds her identity by developing a solid grounding. She is described as heavy and immovable, and she makes a home for herself in a butcher shop that is described as having thick walls and green, watery light coming through glass block windows. She has found an earthy den, which attaches her to the one thing that will never abandon her—the earth. Her brother, Karl, is her opposite. Thin, flighty, always moving, he is a European American who fits perfectly the archetype of the Native American trickster figure. He is the destroyer, lover of men and women, game-player, and cocreator of the character who ties the main characters of the novel together, his daughter, Dot. Dot is a strong, willful girl who is adored by her mother, a strong, mixed-blood Chippewa woman named Celestine, her Aunt Mary, and Walter Pfef, a town leader and her father’s former lover. It is Dot, the Beet Queen in a contest fixed by Pfef, who brings together the web of characters who are otherwise loosely joined in fragile relationships. During the Beet Celebration in which she is to be crowned, her father returns. Pfef, Celestine, and Mary are also there, and Russell, Celestine’s paralyzed war-hero brother, is the centerpiece of a float honoring veterans. Mary’s vain cousin, Sita, is also there, although she is dead. When the day is over, the circle of family is complete. Poetic and graceful, The Beet Queen is widely recognized as one of Erdrich’s finest accomplishments.
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Tracks Type of work: Novel First published: 1988 Tracks is the third in the cycle of novels that began with Love Medicine and continued with The Beet Queen. Tracks is set farther back in time than the first two novels—during the period 1912 to 1924—and a number of characters from the earlier novels reappear. The leading characters are Chippewa Indians, and the story is told through two narrators. First is the shrewd Nanapush, a tribal elder with a biting sense of humor, who survives epidemics of disease and despair and emerges as chief negotiator for the Chippewas in their dealings with the government over land. The second narrator is Pauline, a neurotic woman of mixed blood. She becomes a zealous convert to Catholicism, joins a convent, and shows herself eager for mortification. She still believes, however, in the traditional Indian myths. The third character of importance is the young Fleur Pillager, an alluring, mysterious, and dangerous woman who is thought to have a witch’s power to be revenged on those who wrong her. Erdrich writes with poetic vigor and a deep understanding of human passions. She empathizes with the old Indian ways and folk beliefs, in which dreams and visions are pregnant with meaning, the Earth is a living organism, and there is a spontaneous interflow between the human and the natural world. The austere, intense, magical world that she has created is a fine achievement; its strange force makes a lasting impression.
“Where I Ought to Be” Type of work: Essay First published: 1985, in The New York Times Book Review In the essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place,” Erdrich explores the ways in which a sense of place changes the ways in which people think of themselves. Using examples from American authors of the last hundred and fifty years, she carefully compares and contrasts the approaches of European Americans and of Native Americans to a sense of place. She begins the essay with a description of the Tewa Pueblo people’s creation story. In that narrative, Grandmother Spider shows the people the Sandia Mountains and tells them the mountains are their home. Erdrich explains that the Tewa listening to that story would be living in the place where their ancestors lived, and the story would be a personal story and a collective story, told among lifelong friends and relatives. In contrast with this view of a timeless, stable world, that of pre-invasion Native American cultures, Erdrich suggests that European American writers are invested in establishing a historical narrative for their landscapes. European American writ-
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ers are interested in recording place, even predicting destruction, before their world changes again. Erdrich proposes that the threat of destruction of place, such as in the extreme case of nuclear obliteration, may be one reason that writers catalog and describe landscapes so thoroughly. She takes the reader into a world of complete destruction, where nothing is left, and then she asks the reader to consider that this unthinkable thing has actually happened to the Native American population. “Many Native American cultures were annihilated more thoroughly than even a nuclear disaster might destroy ours, and others live on with the fallout of that destruction, effects as persistent as raLouise Erdrich (Michael Dorris) diation—poverty, fetal alcohol syndrome, chronic despair.” She points out that because of this, Native American writers have a different task. They “must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of catastrophe.” She ends her essay with a description of her own sense of place, the area of North Dakota where she lived as a child. She points out that it is truly knowing a place that provides the link between details and meaning. A sense of place is, then, at the foundation of a sense of identity.
Baptism of Desire Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 Erdrich peoples the fluid, shifting landscape of her poetry in this collection with Catholic saints and figures from classical myth and Native American legend: Saint Clare, the nine-headed Hydra, and the Chippewa trickster Potchikoo appear in these pages. Boundaries dissolve; the dead and the living share the same space, ghosts holy and otherwise. In her notes to the book, Erdrich comments that most of the poems in the collection were written between the hours of two and four o’clock in the morning, during insomnia brought on by pregnancy. A number of voices in the poems painfully draw breath as if for the first time. The perspective may alternate between that of
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mother (“The Fence,” “Birth”) and child (“The Return,” “The Flood”). Such fluidity of identity can be both terrifying and exhilarating, can provoke experiences of doubt and illumination. In “Hydra,” Erdrich draws on the ambivalent imagery of the serpent as seducer and as initiator into the sacred mysteries; in the poem, the creature acts as muse: “you are my poetry . . . Your place/ is at my ear.” As created by the poet’s imagination, the world is a seductive place; one is “lured” into birth. Erdrich notes that the German biochemist August Kekule von Stradonitz derived the ring structure of benzene with the help of a dream in which a snake was swallowing its tail. It is in a dreamlike, suggestible state that the metamorphosis of shapes and identities and the confounding of time and space occur, approximating the ritual of baptism. In the surreal landscape of dreams, the mundane and fantastical coexist: There are “mosquitoes/ dancing on the head of a pin.” This interpenetration of the material and spiritual worlds characterizes both the sacramental and the poetic imagination. Erdrich’s use of religious imagery and the meditative quality of her rhythms contribute to the spiritual force of her poems. The reader struggles with them as if with Proteus, until true shapes are revealed and questions answered.
The Bingo Palace Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 The Bingo Palace adds to the cycle that began with Love Medicine. Unified mainly by the quest of its protagonist, Lipsha, to win Shawnee, The Bingo Palace is a rope drawing together many strands, just as, in Erdrich’s central metaphor, the Kashpaw family is a rope of many strands complexly twisted together. Lipsha has been living away from the tribe in Fargo but is called home mysteriously by his grandmother, Lulu. He feels called to change his life. Is his mission to marry Shawnee, the beautiful and ambitious unwed mother? Or to prevent his half-uncle Lyman, the reputed father of Shawnee’s child, from converting sacred tribal land into a casino and resort? Or to aid his father’s escape from prison? Or to take his destined place as tribal medicine man after the death of his great grandmother, Fleur Pillager? Although Lipsha moves toward all of these goals, he achieves none of them, except perhaps for aiding his father in his escape. In the ten chapters he narrates, Lipsha focuses upon persuading Shawnee to marry him. The other chapters—narrated mainly by a communal voice of the reservation—call attention to the context of history and relationships within which Lipsha acts without full awareness. Though early reviewers expressed skepticism about the novel’s form, The Bingo Palace is Erdrich at her best; the book will reward rereading. Chronologically, this novel follows Love Medicine, which introduced most of the main characters. Like Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace abounds in anecdotes and legends that are at once funny and profound, revealing the rich and magical depth of the tribal life of Erdrich’s Chippewas.
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Tales of Burning Love Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 Tales of Burning Love, like Love Medicine, begins with June Kashpah’s death during a 1981 North Dakota blizzard. The man who married her in a questionable ceremony and then drunkenly let her walk into the blizzard was Jack Mauser. For fourteen years, this incident haunts Jack. He becomes a leading contractor in Fargo, but this success is built upon concealment of growing debt and his Chippewa heritage. When his fifth marriage and his business collapse, Jack and his four living wives are pushed to reorder their lives. The story takes place mainly off the Chippewa reservation in the materialistic white world of Fargo, but this world proves to be much like the Chippewa world of the other novels. It is filled with miracles that point to trickster powers who teach through absurdity and suffering. Most characters seem blind to such forces until pushed to extremes of suffering. Then they experience humorous visions that are healing and painful. Jack’s second wife, Eleanor, visits with the recently dead Sister Leopolda while rolling across drifts in a blizzard wind. Jack finds forgiveness when a statue of Our Lady of the Wheat falls upon him. Tales of Burning Love shares with the other North Dakota novels the conviction that the universe does not reveal how to love but still requires truthful and faithful love; the only alternative to burning love is freezing death. The stories are new, however, rich in character and situation. This novel is a worthy continuation of the series.
The Antelope Wife Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 In The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich’s seventh novel, a U.S. Cavalry private, Scranton Roy, sent to quell a Native American uprising in Minnesota, mistakenly attacks a neutral village instead. He captures an Indian dog with an infant strapped to its back and rears the baby as his own. In this way the white Roy family begins its intricate relationship with the two Ojibwa families of Showano and Whiteheart Beads. Typically, the book is peopled by many complex characters. The baby’s grieving mother marries a man named Showano and bears twins. Her granddaughters Zosie and Mary Showano figure prominently as the twin mothers of Rozina Whiteheart Beads and grandmothers of Rozina’s twin daughters. Meanwhile, Rozina, married to tribal businessman Richard Whiteheart Beads, falls in love with baker Frank Showano. That love triangle echoes the one formed years before by Zosie and Mary Showano and the grandson of Scranton Roy. Finally, Klaus Showano,
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Frank’s brother, is nearly destroyed by his infatuation with a seductive antelope woman, a creature of legend whom he meets at a powwow. Welcome flashes of humor appear in the wisecracking monologues of the Indian dog Almost Soup, a four-legged standup comic who tells dirty dog stories. Black comedy also occurs at the disastrous wedding of Rozina and Frank Showano, where the bride’s first husband menaces the wedding party and is felled by a blow to the head with a frozen turkey. Erdrich is at her finest when she writes through Native American culture and consciousness. Here she returns to the lyricism of her earlier work, introducing a vital new group of characters. Her poetic skill and perceptive insights remain undimmed.
Four Souls Type of work: Novel First published: 2004 In Four Souls, the eighth installment in the series that began with Love Medicine, Fleur Pillager seeks redress from John James Mauser, the tycoon who left a trail of ruined Native American lives in his lust for wealth. Readers familiar with Fleur from the preceding novels in the cycle will delight in the story of this ferocious, taciturn woman. Erdrich’s decision to allow Fleur’s father and the aristocratic Polly Elizabeth Gheen to describe events rather than Fleur herself only serves to enhance the enigmatic nature of her personality. Erdrich enriches Fleur’s quest for revenge by contrasting it with Nanapush’s desire to punish Shesheeb, a neighbor who flirts with Nanapush’s wife, Margaret. While Nanapush’s hilarious failures ultimately bring him closer to his wife, Fleur almost succeeds too well. She marries the man she originally intended to kill and bears him a son. The climax of the novel—a high-stakes poker game in which Fleur tries to win back her land—is one of the best scenes in Erdrich’s oeuvre. While it would be easy to find fault with the shallowness of Mauser’s character, one is more than compensated by the rich inner lives of Erdrich’s Native Americans. Four Souls is a fitting addition to Erdrich’s continuing saga.
Suggested Readings Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Erdrich, Louise. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
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Ferguson, Suzanne. “The Short Stories of Louise Erdrich’s Novels.” Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 541-555. Hafen, Jane P. “Sacramental Language: Ritual in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich.” Great Plains Quarterly 16 (1996): 147-155. Ludlow, Jeannie. “Working (in) the In-Between: Poetry, Criticism, Interrogation, and Interruption.” Studies in American Indian Literature 6 (Spring, 1994): 24-42. Stone, Brad. “Scenes from a Marriage: Louise Erdrich’s New Novel—and Her Life.” Newsweek 131, no. 12 (March 23, 1998): 69. Stookey, Lorena Laura. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Wong, Hertha Dawn. Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine”: A Casebook. London: Oxford University Press, 1999. Contributor: Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
Martín Espada Born: Brooklyn, New York; 1957 Puerto Rican
Espada’s poetic treatment of his immigrant roots led Sandra Cisneros to dub him “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Principal works poetry: The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, 1982; Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, 1987 (expanded 1994); Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands = Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante, 1990; City of Coughing and Dead Radiators: Poems, 1993; Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems, 1996; A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen: Poems, 2000; Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002, 2003; The Republic of Poetry, 2006 translation: The Blood That Keeps Singing: Selected Poems of Clemente Soto Vélez, 1991 (with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo) nonfiction: Zapata’s Disciple: Essays, 1998 edited texts: Poetry like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press, 1994 (expanded 2000); El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry, 1997 Martín Espada (mahr-TEEN ehs-PAH-dah) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father. During the 1950’s his father, Frank Espada, became active in the Civil Rights movement. Born in Puerto Rico, Espada’s father also became one of the leaders of New York City’s Puerto Rican community. Frank Espada taught his son to recognize how difficult it has been for minorities to make a living in the United States. Martín Espada came to appreciate the need for people of color to fight against injustice and poverty. His father took his young son to political rallies. At fifteen, Espada began to write poetry. In interviews, he has stated that he became obsessed with writing and that he would rather work on a poem than even sleep. As a young adult, he held many odd jobs to help make a living, working as groundskeeper for a minor-league baseball park, bouncer in a bar, and bindery worker. Through his own hard work, he witnessed firsthand the many obstacles which people of color must try to overcome. Espada learned to be a “keen observer.” He received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1981 and earned a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law in 1985. He went to work at a legal-aid office, Su Clínica Legal, located in the Boston 374
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area. His wife, Katherine, gave birth to a son in 1991. In 1993, Espada joined the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His first collection of poetry, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, was published in 1982. For his first collection, Espada included some of his father’s photographs. The title poem tells the story of his father coming to the United States. When Frank Espada was merely nine years old, he had to carry blocks of ice up flights of stairs in tenement buildings in his adopted country. Like other Latino immigrants who came to the United States in search of a better life, Espada’s father had to endure injustices in order to make his way. Espada was influenced by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda wrote political poetry that spoke for the downtrodden. Espada wanted to write poems that challenged the reader as well as himself. For him, though, poetry was not to serve as propaganda; poetry should illuminate, engage, and educate. Espada’s second collection, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction, speaks to the relationship that exists between Puerto Rico and the United States, wherein the United States is viewed as a shark and Puerto Rico as its prey. In 1990, he published Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands. Not wishing to limit his audience to merely readers of English, Espada included a Spanish translation for each poem. The short lyric poem “Latin Night at the Pawnshop” details the fate of various musical instruments. These instruments have been abandoned and must face a tragic fate. Espada uses the “golden trumpet,” the “silver trombone,” and the “maracas” as stand-ins for Latin culture. Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize as well as the PEN/Revson Fellowship. His fifth collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread, won the 1997 American Book Award for poetry. In a masterful fashion, Espada combines both the personal and the political in the poems of this collection. For all the injustices of the past, the poet expresses his hope that a better and more just future is possible. He takes pleasure in “the bread of the imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice.” In Espada’s 1998 collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple, he delineates “why poetry must matter,” saying it is possible for suffering to be transformed into something positive, something beautiful. His sixth collection, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen, continues Espada’s quest to speak up for those who do not have a voice. He is unashamedly an “advocate for the cause of freedom.” The noted author Sandra Cisneros has stated that Espada must be considered “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors” and that she would “select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States.” In 2003 his collection Alabanza was published. This collection brings together Espada’s “earliest out-of-print work to seventeen new poems.” The power of his poetry is clearly on display with Alabanza. As the acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver has pointed out, a reader of Espada’s poetry cannot but “come away changed” by the experience.
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“Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1987, in Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction In an interview for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Espada once recalled that being the only Puerto Rican in town while growing up in Long Island was difficult. His response was to compose poetry: “I needed a way to respond. I think poetry is a great way to assert your humanity.” Thus Espada’s poem about Tony reflects not only his own experience as a lawyer-poet but also the struggles of those who find themselves isolated or disenfranchised, seeking to reconcile different cultural, educational, or social realms. Composed of forty-four lines of free verse, this poem is divided into stanzas of varying lengths that describe Tony’s maturation from elementary to law school. Each verse encapsulates some feature of Tony’s development as he seeks his place in the world: As a fatherless Puerto Rican boy, he tries to survive the “Long Island city projects.” He takes a job at a local bodega and learns how to be polite to the abuelas (grandmothers) and how to grin at the customers. He receives a scholarship to law school away from New York but feels out of place. The academic environment of graduate school and the upwardly mobile condominium communities seem inhospitable, so he searches for a sense of belonging and finds it in a Hispanic neighborhood on Tremont Street. Tony finds refuge in a Boston bodega: he sat by the doorway satisfied to watch la gente (people island-brown as him) crowd in and out hablando espanol.
The inclusion of Spanish words and phrases shows the blend of English and Spanish that comprise Tony’s world. The vocabulary of the poem is accessible, while the diction is suggestive and imagistic. The work possesses a contemporary sensibility with its references to New York, Boston, Long Island, and Tremont Street. The irony of the poem is that Tony has the ability and opportunity to escape the Long Island projects, but as an adult he returns to a similar neighborhood because that is where he feels at home. Espada suggests that true success for Tony means returning to his Hispanic roots, where the language and people are familiar—where he finds a sense of belonging that he does not find in academic or professional communities.
Suggested Readings Browning, Sarah. “Give Politics a Human Face: An Interview with Lawyer-PoetProfessor Martín Espada.” Valley Advocate, November 18, 1993. Campo, Rafael. “Why Poetry Matters.” The Progressive 63 (April, 1999): 43-44.
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Espada, Martín. “Poetry and the Burden of History: An Interview with Martín Espada.” Interview by Steven Ratiner. The Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1991, p. 16. _______. “A Poetry of Legacy: An Interview with Martín Espada.” Interview by Ray Gonzalez. The Bloomsbury Review, July/August, 1997, 3. _______. “The Politics of Advocacy: Three Poems.” Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 2 (2001): 128-133. Fink, Thomas. “Visibility and History in the Poetry of Martín Espada.” Americas Review 25 (1999): 202-221. Gonzalez, Ray. “A Poetry of Legacy: An Interview with Martín Espada.” The Bloomsbury Review, July/August, 1997, pp. 3ff. Keene, John R. Review of City of Coughing and Dead Radiators. MELUS 21 (Spring, 1996): 133-135. Ratiner, Steven. “Poetry and the Burden of History: An Interview with Martín Espada.” The Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1991, pp. 16ff. Ullman, Leslie. “To Speak on Behalf.” The Kenyon Review 14 (Summer, 1992): 174-187. Contributors: Jeffry Jensen and Paula M. Miller
Percival L. Everett Born: Fort Gordon, Georgia; December 22, 1956 African American
Refusing to bow to racial stereotypes, Everett transcends issues of racial identity by creating each principal character as a kind of Everyman. Principal works children’s literature: The One That Got Away, 1992; Damned If I Do, 2004 long fiction: Suder, 1983; Walk Me to the Distance, 1985; Cutting Lisa, 1986; For Her Dark Skin, 1990; Zulus, 1990; God’s Country, 1994; Watershed, 1996; Frenzy, 1997; Glyph, 1999; Erasure, 2001; Grand Canyon, Inc., 2001 (novella); American Desert, 2004; Wounded, 2005; The Water Cure, 2007 short fiction: The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair, 1987; Big Picture, 1996; Damned If I Do, 2004 Born on a military base outside Augusta, Georgia, and reared in Columbia, South Carolina, the child of Percival Leonard and Dorothy Stinson Everett, Percival Leonard Everett (EH-vreht) has since led the largely nomadic life of an academician. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Miami in 1977, pursued graduate study at the University of Oregon, and earned an A.M. in writing from Brown University in 1982. Since the publication of his first novel, Suder, Everett has balanced a life of writing with a life of teaching, holding consecutive faculty positions at the Universities of Kentucky, Notre Dame, Wyoming, California (Riverside), and Southern California (USC), where he also became chairperson of the English Department. Despite his southern upbringing, Everett, from the age of twenty, was drawn to the American West, where the open spaces and the sparseness of the population appealed to his need for privacy and autonomy. The climax, for example, of his popular first novel, Suder, is set against the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon, where the protagonist, black baseball player Craig Suder, seeks refuge from a career slump and a failed marriage. Following a series of improvised adventures that read like the riffs of bebop jazz, Suder resists the attempts of others to define him and seeks, instead, to soar above the problems of life by taking self-propelled flight. In sharp contrast to the essentially comic spirit of Suder is the more somber tone of Everett’s second novel, Walk Me to the Distance. Feeling displaced after his return from the Vietnam War, David Larson, the main character, drives west from his native South, eventually to find temporary work on a Wyoming sheep ranch. Passive 378
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participant in an impromptu lynching, and noninterventionist bystander to an imminent suicide, Larson accepts the often harsh demands of western self-sufficiency associated with the code of frontier justice. As is true of the early careers of most writers, Everett draws on personal experience for much of the substance of his first two books. His part-time work as a jazz musician gave him the experiential background that informs the characterization, themes, and structure of Suder; his temporary stint as a hired hand on a sheep ranch provides the primary situation and setting for Walk Me to the Distance. It can be argued, however, that Everett turned to his father’s background as decision maker, first as an army sergeant and then as a dentist, when he created the character of Dr. Livesey, the protagonist of his third novel, Cutting Lisa. Critics have compared Livesey to an Old Testament prophet, since it is the retired medical man’s radical patriarchal choice that provides the focus of the book. While visiting his son’s family on the Oregon coast, Livesey discovers that his daughter-in-law is pregnant with a child not her husband’s and independently decides to perform a kitchen-table abortion in order to preserve what he sees as the integrity of the family unit. People taking unilateral responsibility for the world around them is also a prevailing theme in the fifteen very short stories in The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair. These tales are told in the same laconic style that marks all of Everett’s work. His novelistic reworking of the ancient tale of Jason and Medea, For Her Dark Skin, for example, is plotted in ninety-nine short chapters, each told from the first-person perspective of one of the principal characters. Some chapters are only one sentence in length. While some critics feel that the leanness of Everett’s prose undercuts the potential for emotional resonance in his narratives, others find that his terseness matches the often poetic blankness of his chosen landscapes. Considering the concept of environment as an expression of identity, one is offered additional insight into Everett’s work. Perhaps initially because of the influence of his wife, the artist Shere Coleman, Everett began to paint what he refers to as “abstract expressionist oils.” Expressionism in painting as well as in literature involves an attempt to convey the outer manifestation of some inner state. In this regard, both Everett’s narrative mode and his choice of setting can be said to serve as metaphors of his own fundamental belief about the nature of the world. In addition, perhaps because of his undergraduate study of philosophy, Everett seems concerned with transcending the issue of racial identity by creating each principal character as a kind of Everyman. In fact, Everett, as an African American writer, has been criticized for choosing a white protagonist for Walk Me to the Distance and for devoting equal weight to black and white characters in his other narratives. Zulus, for example, is the story of a three-hundred-pound white woman who is the only fertile female in a post-thermonuclear war world; as such, she stumbles from one false sanctuary to another until she eventually falls into the arms of a black lover intent upon causing the final destruction of the planet. Everett’s Old West tale God’s Country features an interracial, two-person posse: the politically incorrect white rancher Curt Marder, who is seeking to find the men who burned his home, raped his wife, and shot his dog; and a black tracker named Bubba, who is reluc-
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tantly committed to helping the thick-headed Marder in his quest. Percival Everett has stretched the bounds of traditional African American literature to meet the demands of his own imagination. In his highly acclaimed 2001 novel, Erasure, Everett speaks directly to some of his critics, to the publishing industry, and to racial stereotypes. The work is a novel within a novel about a classically trained, black academic writer who is criticized for not being “black” enough in his writing. He then writes an over-the-top, lingoridden “black” novel that becomes a best seller. Erasure was universally praised, and Everett received the inaugural Hurston/Wright Legacy Award from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation and Borders Books for the novel.
American Desert Type of work: Novel First published: 2004 American Desert, Percival Everett’s fifteenth novel, opens with Theodore “Ted” Street on his way to drown himself. Ironically, Ted dies before he can kill himself. A UPS truck dodging a poodle with painted nails collides with Ted’s car; Ted is decapitated. The plot progresses chronologically with startling, unexpected events. This irony produces a dark comedy. Symbolically, on the third day after his death, Ted rises up from his casket at his funeral. Remarks from a preacher who does not know him and unflattering comments from his department chair precede Ted’s revival. Reactions to Ted’s restoration vary. The chair and dean, never Ted’s allies, suffer heart attacks and die. The congregation riots. Ted’s family does not celebrate; they experience embarrassment and fear. Ted’s wife selects her next husband. Society is more concerned with defining death than with Ted. A religious cult shows no compassion, calls Ted a demon, and captures him for execution. Ironically, Ted remains decent in the decadence. He escapes the commune and returns to rescue the children. Everett’s figurative language and stylistic devices enhance the plot. For instance, Ted notes the approaching deadline for meeting requirements for permanent faculty status; Everett uses the metaphor of the “ticking of the giant tenure clock.” At Ted’s funeral, Everett humorously describes how Rachel Ruddy, Ted’s replacement, pepper-sprays herself out of the church. Everett’s characterization includes realistic diction and omniscience. Ted’s explicit messages state (1) silence is as important as words, (2) death is not frightening, and (3) even flawed people can contribute to society. The denouement is abrupt and closed. Ted removes the stitches from his neck, places his head on his lap, closes his eyes, and stays dead.
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Damned If I Do Type of work: Short fiction First published: 2004 Everett once said he does not want to talk about race; he just wants to make art— and, he might have added, make us laugh at ourselves in the process. In the collection Damned If I Do, even stories about racial prejudice are treated with a light satirical touch. In “The Appropriation of Cultures,” a young black man buys a pickup truck with a confederate flag on the back and, by driving it around, gradually undermines a symbol of racial injustice more successfully than conventional protests. In another story that centers on a pickup truck, a romance novelist just trying to earn a living, enjoy his privacy, and protect the environment, finds a way to make Hollywood pay through the nose and, in the process, staves off real estate and commercial encroachment. One is reminded in reading these stories that Everett can write about a man trying to escape an insane asylum without subjecting his audience to a tirade about better treatment of the mentally ill. He can write about a black government official trying to get a signature from a prejudiced old woman and get his point across without ranting about racial injustice. It is hard to resist a writer who makes us laugh and learn without preaching—a writer whose only agenda is to expose the vulnerability and absurdity of the human condition. Even Everett’s messiah story, “The Fix,” centers on a handyman who knows how to repair everything, from broken compressors to broken hearts.
Suggested Readings Hoffman, Alice. “Slumps and Tailspins.” The New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1983, 9, 26. Matuz, Roger, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 57. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. Pear, Nancy. “Percival L. Everett.” In Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, edited by Sharon Malinowski. 2d ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Smith, Wendy. “Walk Me to the Distance.” The New York Times Book Review, March 24, 1985, 24. Woods, Paula L. “Dint, Ax, Fo, Screet: Erasure: A Novel.” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2001, p. 1. Contributor: S. Thomas Mack
Jessie Redmon Fauset Born: Snow Hill, New Jersey; April 27, 1882 Died: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; April 30, 1961 African American
In her novels, Fauset explores the problems of identity through characters who triumph by accepting their race, class, and gender. Principal works long fiction: There Is Confusion, 1924; Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, 1928; The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, 1931; Comedy, American Style, 1933 Jessie Redmon Fauset (JEHS-see FAW-siht), the youngest of seven children born to Redmon Fauset, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Annie Seamon Fauset, was born in New Jersey on April 27, 1882. She attended the public schools in Philadelphia and graduated as an honor student from the Philadelphia School for Girls. When she sought admission to Bryn Mawr College, rather than admit an African American woman, they supported her application to Cornell University. Fauset graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell in 1904. Whether she was the first black woman to attend Cornell or to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa, both of which are often speculated, Fauset has been called “one of the best-educated Americans of her generation.” Denied employment in Philadelphia’s integrated schools, Fauset began teaching high school in New York in 1905. After a year there and a year in Baltimore, she moved to the M Street High School (later named Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., where she taught for fourteen years. In 1921, a few months after receiving her master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Fauset joined the staff of The Crisis as literary editor. In 1924 she published her first novel. Fauset left The Crisis and returned to teaching in 1926. In 1929, she married a businessman, Herbert Harris, and between 1929 and 1933, she completed three other novels. When her husband died in 1958, Fauset returned to Philadelphia, where she died in 1961.
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There Is Confusion Type of work: Novel First published: 1924 Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion—a tale of two families—is structured by three separate but connected plotlines, the first of which focuses on the Marshalls, a well-to-do family. Joanna, the youngest of the four children, encouraged by her father’s thwarted dreams of greatness, wants to become a dancer. The second plotline focuses on Peter Bye, the fourth-generation descendant of a family whose lives are intertwined with their wealthy white former owners. While Peter’s grandfather, Isaiah, refuses to accept his relative’s offer to serve as their coachman and goes on to found a school for black youths in Philadelphia, Peter’s dreams of becoming a surgeon are thwarted because he longs to be recognized by the white Byes and is not. Meriwether, Peter’s father, deciding instead that “the world owes [him] a living,” does nothing. Influenced by his father’s attitude, Peter becomes entangled in the legacy of racial hatred and aspires to nothing. It is only when he becomes attracted to Joanna and is influenced by her goals of greatness that he decides, in order to win her love, to become a doctor. The third plotline, the story of Maggie Ellersley, the daughter of a washerwoman, involves a conventional marriage. Aspiring to the middle class, Maggie begins working for Joanna’s father, where she meets and takes an interest in his son, Philip. The interest appears to be mutual; however, Joanna intervenes and tells Maggie that she should marry someone in her own class. A hurt Maggie does so, then becomes a successful businesswoman when the marriage fails. After a second failed marriage, Maggie goes to France to volunteer during the war and encounters the dying Philip. They marry, and she takes care of him until his death. Within each plotline Fauset heavy-handedly reveals the obstacles to the achievement of each character’s dreams: Joanna’s dream of becoming a professional dancer is thwarted by race, Peter’s dream (or lack thereof) is influenced by family legacy, Maggie’s dream is hindered by class. Yet Fauset also reveals how each character achieves, despite the obstacles. Unable to dance in a white theater troupe, Joanna starts her own dance class but is asked to dance the role of the colored American in “The Dance of the Nations” when the white woman chosen for the part lacks the technique. Joanna attains instant success and is eventually asked to perform three roles. Peter, because of his love for Joanna, becomes a surgeon; however, she has no interest in assuming the conventional roles of wife and mother. Therefore, caught in the web of circumstances characteristic of sentimental novels, and through a series of contrived coincidences, Peter ends up in Europe during the war and meets one of his white relatives. Young Meriwether dies in Peter’s arms, but not before extracting the promise that Peter would visit the senior Meriwether. By moving beyond hate, Peter not only receives the long-awaited recognition from the white Byes but also wins Joanna as his wife. As evidenced by the many hardships that Maggie undergoes, Fauset suggests
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that Maggie’s aspiration—to transcend one’s class through marriage—is the most problematic. Maggie achieves her desired middle-class status not through her marriages but rather through her business acumen. Moreover, by developing a political and racial consciousness and selflessness and traveling to Europe to aid black soldiers, she is reunited with her first love. There Is Confusion ends, as do all sentimental novels, on a happy note. While there are many ideas introduced in the novel, critic Carolyn Sylvander states that the theme that dominates is that “surviving the hardships engendered by discrimination places the black person and the race in a position of superiority.”
Plum Bun Type of work: Novel First published: 1928 Fauset’s second novel, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, is considered by most critics her best. As in There Is Confusion, a middle-class African American family is at the novel’s center, but unlike There Is Confusion, the novel’s plot centers on one protagonist, Angela. In addition, the novel is structured in five parts, using a nursery rhyme as its epigraph and unifying element: To market, to market To buy a plum bun; Home again, home again Market is done.
In the first section, titled “Home,” Fauset’s readers are introduced to the Murray family: Junius and Mattie and their two daughters, Angela and Virginia. This section also provides the background information important to the rest of the novel. Angela and Virginia are exposed early on to their mother’s fairy-tale view of marriage. Just as important, they are exposed to her views on color. Although Junius and Virginia are both brown-skinned, Mattie and Angela are light enough to pass— which they often do “for fun.” Junius is not opposed to this as long as no principle is being compromised. The result, however, is that Angela grows up seeing her mother on occasion publicly ignore her dark husband and daughter. When the parents die within two weeks of each other, Angela decides to move to New York in order to further her personal and professional goals. In “Market,” Angela changes her name, becoming the art student Angèle Mory and is indoctrinated in the worldly ways of courtship. In section 3, entitled “Plum Bun,” Angèle meets Roger Fielding, an affluent white man, whom she dates and eventually hopes to marry. Roger does not propose marriage but rather cohabitation. Angèle does not agree, and he eventually ends the relationship, but not before Angèle has publicly denied Virginia, who has also moved to New York. In “Home Again,” the novel’s fourth section, Angèle, in search of companion-
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ship, admits her love for Anthony Cross, a fellow art student who is also passing. Having resolved never to marry a white woman, Anthony rejects Angèle and becomes engaged unknowingly to her sister. In the final section, “Market Is Done,” Angèle decides to focus on her art. She wins a scholarship to study in Paris but forfeits it by revealing that she, too, is black when fellow student Rachel Powell is denied money for her passage because of her race. Angèle decides to support her own study in Paris. Before she leaves the United States, she returns “home” to Philadelphia and is reunited with a former admirer, Matthew Henson. Knowing that Virginia is really in love with Matthew, and learning that Matthew loves Virginia, Angèle does not interfere. Instead she moves to Paris, seemingly Jessie Redmon Fauset (Courtesy, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University) destined to be alone; however, Anthony appears that Christmas Eve, sent with Matthew and Virginia’s love. Like There Is Confusion, Plum Bun has a happy ending. By including the nursery rhyme and fairy-tale motifs within the marriage plot, Fauset explores the choices and compromises women make regarding marriage. The novel “without a moral” indeed has one: Adhering to the traditional conceptions of marriage is problematic when race, class, and gender are factors.
The Chinaberry Tree Type of work: Novel First published: 1931 The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, Fauset’s third novel, is her attempt to illustrate that “to be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation.” Believing that fate plays an important role in the lives of blacks and whites, Fauset depicts the domestic lives of African Americans who are not struggling with the harsh realities of day-to-day existence. The Chinaberry Tree relates the story of two cousins, Laurentine Strange and Melissa Paul. Because Laurentine is the product of an illicit romantic relationship
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between a former slave and her master, Laurentine accepts the community’s opinion that she has “bad blood.” Rejection from a male suitor reinforces her feelings of inadequacy and propels her to further isolation from the community. The young Melissa, although the daughter of an adulterous relationship between Judy Strange and Sylvester Forten, believes herself superior. Sent to Red Brook to live with her relatives, Melissa meets and falls in love with Malory Forten, who, unknown to her, is her half brother. The “drama” of the novel is the exploration of both women’s responses to being innocent victims of fate. Laurentine overcomes her feelings of inadequacy, and Melissa learns that she, too, is a product of “bad blood.” The Chinaberry Tree is also Fauset’s attempt to prove that African Americans are not so vastly different from any other American. To illustrate this, Fauset creates characters such as Dr. Stephen Denleigh (whom Laurentine eventually marries) and Mrs. Ismay and Mrs. Brown, wives of prominent physicians, who enjoy the leisurely pursuits of bridge and whist and travel to Newark or Atlantic City to view moving pictures or to shop. There are also their offspring, children who attend private schools, enjoy winter sports, and have servants. Fauset’s characters are not very different in their daily lives from financially comfortable whites. Fauset’s characters experience the joys and sorrows of love. Sarah’s and Colonel Halloway’s was a forbidden love; they were denied marriage because of the times in which they lived. He could not marry Sarah, but Colonel Halloway provided a comfortable home for Sarah and Laurentine. Although Laurentine experiences rejection by her first suitor, she attains love and happiness after she learns to accept herself. Melissa, who cannot marry Malory, is loved by Asshur Lane, someone she initially rejects because he aspires to be a farmer. Fauset argues that the African American is “endowed with the stuff of which chronicles may be made.” In this novel Fauset addresses issues of identity in terms of race and social standing amid the disorder of her characters’ daily lives.
Comedy, American Style Type of work: Novel First published: 1933 Fauset structured her final novel, Comedy, American Style, around the elements of drama, with its chapters entitled “The Plot,” “The Characters,” “Teresa’s Act,” “Oliver’s Act,” “Phebe’s Act,” and “Curtain.” In this, Fauset’s darkest work, she returns to the format of the two-parent family. The novel chronicles the life of Olivia Blanchard Cary, a light-skinned African American, who, shaped by two incidents in her childhood, chooses a life of passing. She marries a black doctor, not for love but rather for status, and they have three children. Nonetheless, Olivia’s obsession with color consciousness destroys the family. When the oldest child, Teresa, falls in love with the dark-skinned Henry Bates, Olivia intervenes and forces her to marry a French man.
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The youngest child, Oliver, suffers the most because of his bronze skin color. Rejected by his mother from birth and often made to play the role of servant or denied in public, he commits suicide. Only Christopher survives intact through his marriage to Phebe Grant. When the novel ends, Olivia has finally achieved her objective: Living alone in France—her husband has divorced her, and her children have abandoned her—she passes as white. In this, her only novel that does not have a happy ending, Fauset’s use of satire is quite evident. One critic, pointing to Fauset’s subversion of the Cinderella motif, notes that neither mother nor daughter is happily married, and both are poor. Another critic illustrates the ironic use of the Snow White motif: Olivia pronounces the bitter truth in her pregnancy with Oliver that he would be “the handsomest and most attractive of us all,” and by doing so she unwittingly proclaims that black is beautiful.
Suggested Readings Feeney, Joseph J. “A Sardonic, Unconventional Jessie Fauset: The Double Structure and Double Vision of Her Novels.” CLA Journal 22 (1979). Johnson, Abby Arthur. “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance.” Phylon 39 (1978). McDowell, Deborah. “Jessie Fauset.” In Modern American Women Writers, edited by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Sato, Hiroko. “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.” In The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Sylvander, Carolyn. Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981. Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Contributor: Paula C. Barnes
Rosario Ferré Born: Ponce, Puerto Rico; 1938 Puerto Rican
Considered Puerto Rico’s leading woman of letters, Ferré writes of the struggles of women of her culture between duty and personal needs. Principal works long fiction: Maldito amor, 1986 (Sweet Diamond Dust, 1988); La batalla de las virgenas, 1993; The House on the Lagoon, 1995; Eccentric Neighborhoods, 1998; Flight of the Swan, 2001 poetry: Sonatinas, 1989; Language Duel/Duelo de lenguaje, 2002 short fiction: Papeles de Pandora, 1976 (The Youngest Doll, 1991); Las dos Venecias, 1992 nonfiction: Sitio a Eros: Trece ensayos literarios, 1980; El árbol y sus sombras, 1989; El coloquio de las perras, 1990; Memorias de Ponce: Autobiografia de Luis A. Ferré, 1992; A la sombra de tu nombre, 2001 Rosario Ferré (roh-ZAHR-ee-oh fah-RAY) is considered Puerto Rico’s leading woman of letters. A prolific writer, she has published fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, and biography. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to a family with position in both politics and business, Ferré was educated at Manhattanville College, the University of Puerto Rico, and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature in 1987. Her writing career began in the 1970’s with her position as editor and publisher of Zona de carga y descarga, a studentgenerated journal concentrating on new Puerto Rican literature. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Brown University. In addition, from 1977 to 1980, her column of literary criticism was published in El Mundo, a Puerto Rican newspaper. Ferré also wrote a biography of her father, Luis Ferré, the pro-statehood governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico from 1968 to 1972, but she is best known for her fiction. Her nonfiction essays in Zona de carga y descarga reflected her ideals of social reform and independent politics. This journal was the outcome of an idea generated in a master’s degree class at the University of Puerto Rico. With other students, she founded a journal that offered an opportunity for publication to many young Puerto Rican writers who later became famous. 388
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Ferré’s feminist ideas also formed the basis for her short stories. Her children’s literature, including fables and short stories, contains messages concerning the need for social and political reform. Ferré’s fiction in the form of short stories and novels for adults tells the stories of women in her culture who struggle with issues of class, race, and economic status. In stories like “The Youngest Doll,” she explores the conflicts between cultural expectations for women in a changing Puerto Rican society and the common human need for decency and respect. The use of symbolism and allegory in this story is reflected in many of her longer works. Influenced by her family (her mother was from the landed gentry, and her father was an industrialist before he became a politician), Ferré writes of the struggles of women of this culture between duty and personal needs. Early in her career, she was important primarily to feminist academics, until the publication of The House on the Lagoon in 1995. This is the first of her novels written initially in English. Upon its publication, she received international attention with her nomination for the National Book Award. Ferré’s recent novels are written in English, but her poetry is published only in Spanish. Many of her works, including Sweet Diamond Dust and The House on the Lagoon, illustrate the ties between Puerto Rico and Spain as well as the United States. Through multilevel plots dealing with generational conflict and gender constraints, Ferré explores what life is and has been like for people, both men and women, of Puerto Rican descent. Her use of layered time frames, wide plot scope, and vivid language has been compared to Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. Her stories of the people and the rich culture of her homeland provide an opportunity for readers to learn and appreciate her Caribbean heritage.
The House on the Lagoon Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 The House on the Lagoon tells the story of the Mendizabal family, beginning in the 1880’s and focusing on the period from July 4, 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship, to the day of a hotly contested plebiscite on statehood in 1993, when fictional independentistas staged a takeover. Ferré interweaves the family’s passions and struggles with the history of Puerto Rico and its changing relations with Spain and the United States. The main characters, Quintín Mendizabal and his wife, Isabel Monfort, have conflicting political views. Isabel advocates Puerto Rican independence; Quintín supports close ties with the United States. Quintin believes in traditional women’s roles; Isabel advocates feminism. They also disagree about the novel Isabel is writing, a history that includes stories about her family as well as her husband’s family. One day Quintín discovers his wife’s manuscript hidden in a bookcase. Beginning with marginal notes and condescending comments, Quintín ultimately writes his own interpretation of events and becomes the novel’s second narrator. He cor-
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rects glaring anachronisms, protests scandalous portrayals of his family’s and his own behavior, and rewrites the stories from his own perspective. When Isabel’s manuscript reveals his ruthless business practices, his complicity in the suicide of one of his brothers, and his harsh treatment of his rebellious sons, he feels threatened and decides to suppress her version of the truth. When all else fails, she decides to leave him and he resorts to violence. At the end of the novel, Isabel finds the courage to defend herself and her children; she hits Quintín with an iron bar, killing him. Within this dual version of history, Ferré also maps out a geography of the haves and the have-nots on the island, centering the action on the Mendizabal family’s San Juan mansion. Upstairs are the Mendizabals, with their materially successful fusion of Spanish conquistador and American capitalist methods, their hot tempers, and their self-destructive habits. Downstairs are the servants, the wise and patient Avilés family, brought as slaves from Angola in the eighteenth century. The Mendizabal patriarchs meet their match in elderly Petra Avilés, granddaughter of an African-born rebel slave. Threatened with censorship and control by her husband, Isabel finds natural allies in Petra and her family.
Suggested Readings Castillo, Debra A. “Surfacing: Rosario Ferré and Julieta Campos, with Rosario Castellanos.” In Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Debra Castillo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Erro-Peralta, Nora, and Caridad Silva, eds. Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Fernandez Olmos, Margarite. “From a Woman’s Perspective: The Short Stories of Rosario Ferré and Ana Lydia Vega.” In Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America: Introducing Essays, edited by Doris Meyers and Margarita Fernandez Olmos. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn College, 1983. Ferré, Rosario. “Interview with Rosario Ferré.” Interview by Magdalena García Pinto. Translated by Trudy Balch and Magdalena García Pinto. In Women Writers of Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Hintz, Susanne H. Rosario Ferré: A Search for Identity. New York: Lang, 1995. Contributors: Dolores A. D’Angelo and Genevieve Slomski
Harvey Fierstein Born: Brooklyn, New York; June 6, 1954 Jewish
Fierstein’s work challenges assumptions regarding the lives of gay and bisexual Americans. Principal works children’s literature: The Sissy Duckling, 2002 drama: In Search of the Cobra Jewels, pr. 1972; Freaky Pussy, pr. 1973; Cannibals Just Don’t Know Better, pr. 1974; Flatbush Tosca, pr. 1975; Torch Song Trilogy, pr. 1978-1979, pb. 1979 (includes The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!); Spookhouse, pr. 1982; La Cage aux folles, pr. 1983 (libretto; music and lyrics by Jerry Herman); Safe Sex, pr., pb. 1987 (trilogy; includes Manny and Jake, Safe Sex, and On Tidy Endings); Legs Diamond, pr. 1988 (libretto; music and lyrics by Peter Allen) screenplay: Torch Song Trilogy, 1988 (adaptation of his play) teleplays: Kaddish and Old Men, 1987; Tidy Endings, 1988 (adaptation of his play On Tidy Endings) In the late 1970’s, Harvey Fierstein (FIR-steen) premiered a trio of one-act plays collecitively titled Torch Song Trilogy that introduced gay characters to the American stage without apology. The central character, Arnold Becker, is a drag queen with a desire to live a life consistent with the American Dream. He wants to secure a loving family life and sees no reason why he should be denied the opportunity of creating one simply because of his sexual orientation. The uniqueness of the play’s statement lies in the fact that the work was premiered at the end of the sexual revolution of the 1970’s, when gay life was viewed by many as simply a series of casual encounters. Americans seemed content with a view of gays as emotional children who lived strange, uncommitted lives. Fierstein’s characters challenge this view. The son of a handkerchief manufacturer and a librarian, Fierstein grew up in a tight family unit that accepted his gayness. His first encounters with the lifestyle were through family friends who shared long-term, committed relationships. These were his role models, who helped him develop his somewhat conservative view of gay life. Fierstein’s reworking of the popular French film La Cage aux folles (1978) is another example of the playwright’s ability to present fully developed gay characters for mixed audiences. Fierstein received a Tony Award for the best 391
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book for a musical in 1984. The musical enjoyed a long run in the United States and abroad, including a much anticipated revival in 2004. Like Torch Song Trilogy, the play is an old-fashioned love story espousing the virtues of family and commitment. Fierstein’s writing style is a fusion of his several identities. His work is distinguished by a mixture of Jewish and gay humor interspersed with poignant selfrevelation. It is this combination that has endeared him to straight and gay audiences. Through laughter and dramatic truth, his characters are able to tap the human thread that brings all people together. Although best known as a playwright, Fierstein is also an actor who has played various roles on stage, on national television, and in film, notably as Frank, the gay brother in the film Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Tevye in the 2005 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof (pr. 1964). In addition to his work as an artist, Fierstein is active in various gay rights organizations and devotes considerable time and energy as an activist for causes relating to the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Torch Song Trilogy Type of work: Drama First produced: pr. 1978-1979, pb. 1979 Torch Song Trilogy is Fierstein’s groundbreaking portrait of a gay man’s struggle for respect and love in a homophobic world. The play, comprising three one acts titled The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First, chronicles the journey of the central character, Arnold Becker, from a life of transitory sexual encounters with strangers in the back rooms of New York’s gay bars to his insistence on relationships based on commitment, respect, and love. In the first play, “International Stud,” Arnold meets Ed Reiss in a gay bar. For Arnold, the encounter offers the possibility of an honest relationship that will put an end to his loneliness. Ed, however, sees his meeting with Arnold as simply a one-night stand and returns to his developing relationship with Laurel. He describes himself as bisexHarvey Fierstein (AP/Wide World Photos) ual but chooses to hide his homo-
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sexuality for fear of public opinion. Ed attempts to terminate the relationship but finds himself returning to Arnold and is even able to acknowledge his love for Arnold. Arnold, however, cannot accept an undercover and uncommitted relationship and finally walks away. The International Stud presents the reader with two characters who are at different places regarding their understanding of themselves. Arnold is comfortable with himself as a gay man and is in search of a lover who is also a friend. Ed, however, is in denial as to his sexuality and, therefore, incapable of giving himself to anyone as either friend or lover. Fugue in a Nursery takes place one year after The International Stud. By this time Ed and Arnold have what each wanted; Arnold has Alan, an eighteen-yearold model, and Ed is involved in a relationship with Laurel. The action of the play takes place on an oversized bed. Arnold and Alan have been invited to spend a weekend with Ed and Laurel. In a brilliantly written series of overlapping lines and interwoven actions, the playwright demonstrates the confusion of each character as he or she attempts to resolve the conflict between what one has and what one wants. It becomes clear that none of the characters has found all that he or she was seeking. In Alan, however, Arnold has found someone who loves and respects him. Fugue in a Nursery continues the argument of The International Stud. It clearly demonstrates that one cannot give love until one has learned to love oneself. Alan and Arnold have a better chance of building a solid relationship because each is aware of who he is and can, therefore, be honest with the other. Ed, however, can talk to Laurel about his confusions but cannot confront the truth of his attraction to and preference for Arnold. The final play in the trilogy, Widows and Children First, takes place five years after the preceding play. Arnold has lost Alan to a mob of gay-bashers and is currently in the process of adopting David, a gay teenager. Ed’s marriage to Laurel has failed, and he is temporarily staying with Arnold. The action of the play centers around a visit from Arnold’s recently widowed mother and her inability to accept her son’s need for love and the security of a family. Although she is aware of Arnold’s lifestyle, she does not accept it. She is insulted when he compares his suffering at the death of Alan to her loss of her husband, and she questions the morality of a gay man rearing a child. A series of arguments ensues, and Arnold states that his mother is unwelcome in his life unless she can respect him and the validity of his feelings and desires. She leaves. David affirms his love for his soon-to-be father, and Ed finally confronts the truth of his desire to be with Arnold. Torch Song Trilogy addresses the issue of gay identity and asks its audience to deal with the broader questions of honesty and respect regardless of sexual preference or lifestyle.
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Suggested Readings Connema, Richard. “San Francisco’s Torch Song.” Talkin’ Broadway’s Regional News: San Francisco Reviews, June 27, 2000. Ebert, Roger. “Torch Song Trilogy.” Chicago Sun-Times, December 23, 1988. Fierstein, Harvey. “His Heart Is Young and Gay.” Interview by Jack Kroll. Newsweek, June 20, 1983. _______. Interview by Harry Stein. Playboy 35 (August, 1988). Hungerford, Jason. “My Reaction to Torch Song Trilogy.” Pflag-Talk, January 19, 1997. Contributor: Don Evans
Rudolph Fisher Born: Washington, D.C.; May 9, 1897 Died: New York, New York; December 26, 1934 African American
Fisher depicts the layers of Harlem life during the 1920’s with humor, wit, and satirical grace. Principal works drama: Conjur’ Man Dies, pr. 1936 long fiction: The Walls of Jericho, 1928; The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, 1932 short fiction: The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories, 1987 (John McCluskey, editor); Joy and Pain, 1996 Rudolph Fisher was educated in the arts and sciences. His first short story, “The City of Refuge,” was published while Fisher was in medical school, and throughout his life he maintained careers as a doctor and as a writer of fiction and medical research. For all his medical degrees, Fisher wanted to be known as a writer who could interpret Harlem life. Little seemed to have escaped his vision and analysis. He saw Harlem as a vast canvas upon which he painted characters from several different levels of life. There were the “rats,” a Harlem term for the working class; the “dickties,” which was Harlemese for upper-class aspirants to white values; Pullman porters; gangsters; barbers; pool hall owners; doctors; lawyers; misguided white liberals; and white celebrants and aspirants to Harlem culture. In the novel The Walls of Jericho, Fisher brings all of the economic, racial, and political strata of Harlem together at the annual costume ball. The dickties and the rats mingle with whites who are in search of what they think is black bohemia. The dance hall setting that Fisher enlivens in The Walls of Jericho was modeled after the Harlem cabarets and nightclubs he frequented. Fisher achieved remarkable balance between the medical and artistic worlds. His short stories were published in national magazines in which other Harlem Renaissance writers could not publish. The Walls of Jericho was well received. The detective novel The Conjure-Man Dies was hailed as a first. From 1929 to 1934, Fisher was a hospital superintendent, a roentgenologist, a first lieutenant in the medical division of the 369th Infantry, and a lecturer at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Fisher seemed to know that working-class blacks in Harlem led lives that were 395
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far removed from the artistic renaissance popularized by intellectuals. In such short stories as “The City of Refuge” and “Vestiges, Harlem Sketches,” he sympathetically depicts the struggles of many who have come from the South and who are disappointed or tricked by the fast, indifferent ways of the city. Characters such as Jinx Jenkins, Bubber Brown, and Joshua “Shine” Jones in The Walls of Jericho are subject to the competition and physical dangers of furniture moving. A maid in The Walls of Jericho is viewed by her white employer as slightly better than most blacks because of her light skin. In 1934, Fisher died of cancer caused by X-ray exposure. A retinue of Harlem artists, including Countée Cullen and Noble Sissle, joined Fisher’s wife and son to mourn the loss of one of Harlem’s visionaries.
The Conjure-Man Dies Type of work: Novel First published: 1932 In The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, Fisher combines his talent and comedic wit with his knowledge of medicine to produce the first-known detective novel by an African American. Fisher introduces a variety of Harlem characters, including Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown, unemployed furniture movers who also appear in The Walls of Jericho (1928). Other characters include John Archer, the doctor who helps Harlem police solve the murder. The complex plot highlights characters and settings popularized in Fisher’s works. When Jinx and Bubber discover the murdered conjure man, they become suspects with several others: a numbers-runner, Spider Webb, who works in Harlem’s illegal lottery system; a drug addict named Doty Hicks; a railroad worker; and a church worker. Mr. Crouch, mortician and owner of the building in which the conjure man is a tenant, and Crouch’s wife Martha are quickly dismissed as suspects. When the corpse disappears and reappears as the live conjure man, Archer and Detective Dart know that there has been a murder but are unable to find the corpse. The conjure man is seen burning a body in the furnace. The body is of his servant, who was mistakenly killed instead of the conjure man. The conjure man adamantly insists he is innocent and helps to set a trap for the real murderer, but the conjure man is fatally shot by the railroad worker. Distraught that he has killed her lover, Martha assaults the railroad man, and all discover he is none other than the avenging Mr. Crouch, in disguise. The detective story framework of The Conjure-Man Dies does not overshadow Fisher’s depiction of several issues of Harlem life. Residents of Harlem resort to creative means to survive as the Depression makes their difficult economic situations worse. Bubber becomes a self-appointed detective for spouses who suspect their partners are being unfaithful. The numbers racket provides a living for many, including the conjure man. African Americans who are “firsts” to achieve a specific rank are under pressure to prove themselves worthy. Such is the case for detective
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Dart, who privately thanks Dr. Archer for promising that the city administration will be informed that Dart solved the murder. Although Fisher’s development of the hard-boiled character may have been influenced by the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, his most remarkable character is the conjure man, N’Gana Frimbo, a Harvard-educated West African king who imparts the traditions of his culture to Dr. Archer. Frimbo reflects Fisher’s interest in the connections among blacks in Harlem, the Caribbean, and Africa. In the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, Fisher creates a new path with The Conjure-Man Dies, one that would influence later writers such as Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.
Suggested Readings Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Brown, Sterling A. The Negro in American Fiction. 1937. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. De Jongh, James. Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Fiction. 1948. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1976. Kramer, Victor, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. New York: AMS Press, 1987. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. McCluskey, John, Jr., ed. The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. McGruder, Kevin. “Jane Ryder Fisher.” Black Scholar 23 (Summer, 1993). Perry, Margaret. Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976. Tignor, Eleanor Q. “Rudolph Fisher: Harlem Novelist.” Langston Hughes Review 1 (Fall, 1982). Contributor: Australia Tarver
Maria Irene Fornes Born: Havana, Cuba; May 14, 1930 Cuban American
A force in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater, Fornes has written scores of plays, has directed many of her own and other productions, and has been actively involved in supporting other women and Latino playwrights. Principal works drama: The Widow, pr., pb. 1961; There, You Died!, pr. 1963 (revised pr. 1964, pb. 1971; as Tango Palace); Promenade, pr. 1965, pb. 1971 (music by Al Carmines); The Successful Life of Three, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; The Office, pr. 1966; The Annunciation, pr. 1967; A Vietnamese Wedding, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; Dr. Kheal, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; Molly’s Dream, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; The Red Burning Light: Or, Mission XQ3, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; The Curse of Langston House, pr. 1972; Aurora, pr. 1974; Cap-a-Pie, pr. 1975; Fefu and Her Friends, pr. 1977, pb. 1980; Lolita in the Garden, pr. 1977; In Service, pr. 1978; Eyes on the Harem, pr. 1979; Blood Wedding, pr. 1980 (adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s play); Evelyn Brown: A Diary, pr. 1980; A Visit, pr. 1981; Life Is a Dream, pr. 1981 (adaptation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play); The Danube, pr. 1982; Mud, pr. 1983, pb. 1986; Abingdon Square, pr. 1984, pb. 1988; No Time, pr. 1984; Sarita, pr. 1984, pb. 1986; The Conduct of Life, pr. 1985, pb. 1986; Drowning, pr. 1986, pb. 1987 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story); Lovers and Keepers, pr. 1986, pb. 1987 (music by Tito Puente); And What of the Night?, pr. 1989; Oscar and Bertha, pr. 1991; Enter the Night, pr. 1993, pb. 1996; Balseros, pr. 1996; Summer in Gossensass, pr. 1998; Letters from Cuba, pr. 2000 Maria Irene Fornes (mah-REE-ah i-REEN fohr-NAYS) was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1930. Her father did not believe in formal schooling, so she attended only the third through sixth grades. After her father’s death, she went to New York in 1945 with her widowed mother and became a naturalized American citizen in 1951. She worked at a variety of menial jobs. Her first artistic interest was painting, and in 1954 she began studying with Hans Hofmann. She spent three years in Europe in the mid-1950’s. During this time, she has said, she knew nothing about theater, but she did see the first production of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) in Paris, an experience that she has described as profound. She credits this performance and her reading of Henrik 398
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Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890; English translation, 1891) with inspiring her to become a playwright several years later. Fornes returned to New York in 1957 and worked as a textile designer. She developed a relationship with Susan Sontag, who at that time wanted to become a writer. According to Fornes, she started writing as a kind of game to encourage Sontag; both women found success fairly rapidly. Fornes’s play There, You Died! was produced by the Actors’ Workshop in San Francisco in 1963. That same year, Fornes joined the playwriting unit of the Actors Studio in New York, which produced the same play under the title Tango Palace in 1964. In 1965 she won her first Obie (Off-Broadway award) for Distinguished Plays, for Promenade and The Successful Life of Three. Although she is not as acclaimed in mainstream theater as her fans would like her to be, Fornes has been a force in Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater. She has written more than forty plays, has directed many of her own and other productions, and has been actively involved in supporting other women and Latino playwrights. She cofounded the Women’s Theater Council in 1972, with the purpose of supporting the writing and production of new plays by American women. In 1978 she began teaching Playwrights Workshop at INTAR (International Arts Relations), and in 1981 she became director of INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, a national program to support Hispanic playwrights. She won additional Obies in 1977 (Playwriting, for Fefu and Her Friends), 1979 (Direction, for Eyes on the Harem), 1982 (Sustained Achievement), 1984 (Playwriting and Direction, for The Danube, Sarita, and Mud), 1985 (Playwriting, for The Conduct of Life), and 1988 (Best New American Play, for Abingdon Square). She has also been awarded numerous grants and fellowships (Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and the National Endowment for the Arts among them) and is sought after as a teacher and lecturer, both in the United States and abroad. In 1999 the Signature Theater Company in New York did a season-long retrospective of Fornes’s work. Critics and scholars find it impossible to compartmentalize the works of Fornes. Many regard her as a realistic playwright, but her plays also experiment with avantgarde techniques, expressionist and Cuban and American influences, and the influences of Ibsen, Beckett, and Bertolt Brecht. She eschews political and formal labels and emphasizes writing as a process of inventing, of always remaining on new ground. If the constant is her experimentation, the measure of her success is the number of contemporary playwrights who acknowledge her influence. Fellow dramatist Paula Vogel has noted that for these playwrights, there are only two stages— before and after reading Maria Irene Fornes.
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The Conduct of Life Type of work: Drama First produced: 1985, pb. 1986 Perhaps Fornes’s best-known play, The Conduct of Life partners violence against women with political violence. The play centers on the figure of Orlando, who is the head of his household and also an army officer involved in state-sponsored torture. Orlando mocks his wife, Leticia, and dominates his household, including Olympia, his housekeeper. He also beats and rapes Nena, a twelve-year-old girl whom he keeps in the basement for his sexual pleasures. As the action progresses, Fornes shows how violence breeds more violence: Leticia finally rebels and kills Orlando. She then gives the gun to Nena, and the play ends with her asking Nena to shoot her as well. The Conduct of Life shows Fornes’s continuing concern with the intersection of gender, power, and violence. Olympia survives because she is able to dismiss Orlando despite his threats, and Nena survives her brutal ordeal through a Christ-like acceptance of others’ pain. Orlando is only able to perform sexually if violence is involved. He rapes Nena and forces himself on his wife at the end of the play. Leticia, who tries to endure this world, finally resorts to violence. With these characters, Fornes explores many different ways in which power and gender interact and shows how oppression breeds violence and hatred.
Suggested Readings Delgado, Maria M., and Caridad Svetch, eds. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes. Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1999. Kent, Assunta Bartolomucci. Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Moroff, Diane Lynn. Fornes: Theater in the Present Tense. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Porterfield, Sally. “Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes.” Modern Drama 43 (Summer, 2000): 204-212. Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. _______, ed. The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Contributors: Elsie Galbreath Haley and David Jortner
Charles Fuller Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; March 5, 1939 African American
Fuller has helped break a long tradition of stereotyping blacks, especially black men, in literature. Principal works drama: Sun Flowers, The Rise, pr. 1968 (one acts); The Village: A Party, pr. 1968, pr. 1969 (as The Perfect Party); In My Many Names and Days, pr. 1972; First Love, pr. 1974; In the Deepest Part of Sleep, pr. 1974; The Candidate, pr. 1974; The Lay Out Letter, pr. 1975; The Brownsville Raid, pr. 1976; Sparrow in Flight, pr. 1978; Zooman and the Sign, pr. 1980, pb. 1982; A Soldier’s Play, pr., pb. 1981; Eliot’s Coming, pr. 1988 (pr. as part of the musical revue Urban Blight); Prince, pr. 1988; Sally, pr. 1988; We, pr. 1989 (combined performance of Sally and Prince; parts 1 and 2 of five-part play series); Burner’s Frolic, pr. 1990 (part 4 of We play series); Jonquil, pr. 1990 (part 3 of We play series) screenplays: A Soldier’s Story, 1984 (adaptation of his play); Zooman, 1995 (adaptation of his play) teleplays: Roots, Resistance, and Renaissance, 1967 (series); Mitchell, 1968; Black America, 1970-1971 (series); The Sky Is Gray, 1980 (from the story by Ernest J. Gaines); A Gathering of Old Men, 1987 (adaptation of the novel by Ernest J. Gaines); Love Songs, 1999 Charles Fuller was reared in comfortable circumstances in an extended family of many foster children in North Philadelphia. He attended a Roman Catholic high school with his lifelong friend, Larry Neal, and attended Villanova University from 1956 to 1958. After a four-year hiatus in the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea, he returned to complete his undergraduate studies at LaSalle College from 1965 to 1968. Fuller began writing short stories, poetry, and essays in the 1960’s in Philadelphia mostly at night after working various daytime jobs. His interest in literature, largely a result of assuming the responsibility of proofreading his father’s print jobs, began early and served as the fertile source for a formal writing career, which developed from his short stories long after he began writing. Fuller wrote and produced his first play, The Village: A Party, in 1968. His place as a significant and talented playwright in contemporary African American theater is marked by an impressive number of dramas, among them Zooman and the Sign, for which he received two Obie Awards for best play and best playwright in 1980, and A Soldier’s Play, which received the New York Drama Critics 401
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Circle Award for best American play, the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and a film contract in 1984. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play, a number of his bestknown plays have been produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, notably The Brownsville Raid, Zooman and the Sign, and the We plays. As a social reformer, Fuller is concerned with brushing away deeply rooted stereotypes and uprooting preconceptions in order to explore the complexities of human relationships—particularly black-white relationships in America—and rectify the portrayals that distort African Americans, especially the black male. Critical of black hatred for and treatment of other blacks, Fuller is just as critical of the negative portrayal of the black male by the white media. Convinced that the stage is a powerful medium that can effectively rectify the stereotyped image of blacks shaped by white media, Fuller combined the mystery genre with his knowledge of the military structure of the U.S. Army to expose some of the real conflicts of white and black, and of black and black, in America.
The Brownsville Raid Type of work: Drama First produced: 1976 Engrossed by the history of the Civil War (he dates the African American relation to the United States from the Emancipation Proclamation), Fuller blended politics with history in The Brownsville Raid. While working in New York with the Negro Ensemble Company, which had previously staged his first play for the group (In the Deepest Part of Sleep), Fuller showed the direction that his future plays would take. Using a historical event as its basis, The Brownsville Raid dramatized the story of a company of black soldiers who, in 1906, were wrongfully accused of causing a riot in Texas and shooting a man. In the play, Fuller also explores the relationship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, who asks his black editors to play down the “incident” to preserve the peace. The soldiers are dishonorably discharged, and only sixty years later are they vindicated when the truth is discovered. For all of them, however, it is too late.
Zooman and the Sign Type of work: Drama First produced: 1980, pb. 1982 In Zooman and the Sign, Fuller uses the device of a murder investigation (which he had first tried in The Brownsville Raid) to propel the story. In addition, he began experimenting with the title character’s soliloquies, which alternated with the general action, giving the play an abrupt, stop-start rhythm. The situation in
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Zooman and the Sign is one all too recognizable today: A twelve-year-old girl is accidentally killed in a fight between two street gangs, and the play charts the efforts of her anguished parents to discover the killer. Equally harrowing is the underlying theme: The father, in despair that none of his neighbors will come forward to identify the killer (because they are afraid that as witnesses they will have to deal with the police, though they themselves are innocent), puts up a sign outside his house proclaiming that his daughter’s killers are free because of the community’s indifference. The neighbors, in turn, are so incensed by the accusation that they threaten his life and attempt to tear down the sign. Their rage, in short, is turned against one of their own people; they have lost their sense of responsibility to one another because it has been destroyed by the very institution that should be protecting them: the law. Here, Fuller has touched on a universal theme, for in just such a way were Nazi concentration camp monitors, though prisoners themselves, wont to ally themselves against their fellow captives because of their own brutalization. Meanwhile, the killer, Zooman, has proclaimed himself to the audience and in his soliloquies explains his way of life, noting that if a black man kills a black man and is not caught immediately, the authorities forget about it. In an ironic twist, the dead girl’s uncle, unaware of the murderer’s identity, accidentally shoots him, just as the niece was accidentally killed. When the parents look at the dead face of the “perpetrator,” it is that of a teenage boy who, in his mind, has made virility synonymous with violence.
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A Soldier’s Play Type of work: Drama First produced: 1981 A Soldier’s Play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1982, is a murder mystery in which Fuller examines many social issues and poses provocative questions. The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, with a citation for Best American Play. The screenplay adaptation, A Soldier’s Story (1984), which Fuller wrote, garnered an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay. A play in two acts, A Soldier’s Play examines and evaluates the causes of oppression of African Americans and the obstacles to their advancement. Unlike Fuller’s two other award-winning plays, The Brownsville Raid (1976) and Zooman and the Sign (1980), A Soldier’s Play has no particular, actual historical source. The play very realistically describes, however, the complex social issues that pervade his work: institutional, systemic racism in the U.S. Army during World War II; race relations; black genocide and the search for the meaning and definition of blackness in America; the meaning of democracy and the place of African Americans in it; and what it means to be black in a racially biased society. Outside a segregated U.S. Army camp in Tynin, Louisiana, during World War II, a tyrannical technical sergeant, Vernon Waters, is murdered. The local brass has succeeded in playing down the murder until a Howard-trained attorney, Captain Davenport, is sent by Washington, D.C., to investigate the case. Initially assumed to be racially motivated, the murder’s prime suspects are the white townspeople. The Ku Klux Klan is the first suspect, then two white officers. Davenport’s thorough investigation, conducted in an atmosphere of racial hostility, mistrust on all sides, and condescension, leads to a surprising discovery of the murderer and the motives for the murder. The murderer is Private Peterson, the least likely suspect. Strong, outspoken, and opinionated, Peterson faces off with Waters, whose militant agenda for black destiny causes the innocent, naïve C. J. to commit suicide. Waters’s heinous, sinister, and obsessive master plan to cleanse the black race of “geeches” such as C. J. meets its match in Peterson’s own calculated perspective of how to refashion the black image. Mutual hatred eventually leads to murder, not before, however, Waters realizes the flaw in his inhumane master plan, grieves his obsession with blackness, and challenges the source of his misdirected self-justifying posture. In focusing on the character of Waters rather than on the murder or the murderer, Fuller is able to engage and address the major causes and effects of the race problem, particularly the psychological. The play indicts all of the characters—white and black, except C. J.—for racially motivated violence informed by pervasive prejudice and dangerous stereotypical assumptions.
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We Type of work: Drama First produced: 1989-1990 Once more, Fuller looks to American history for his subject. After watching the classic film One Third of a Nation (1939), with its infamous depiction of blackwhite relationships, Fuller decided to counter with his own perspective and planned his multi-play opus We. Directed by Douglas Turner Ward of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1989, Sally and Prince, the first two plays in Fuller’s projected cycle, provide a panoramic view of the American Civil War and its aftermath from an African American perspective. The mood of both plays is that of trust betrayed. Sally, set in South Carolina in the middle of the war, has a title character who is a recently freed slave and widow with a teenage son; she wishes for her son’s safety, some land, and a man of her own. In one of several episodes dealing with freed slaves at loose ends or serving as Union soldiers, the black soldiers, resentful at being paid less than their white counterparts, bring about a strike and a betrayal. A black sergeant named Prince, who gains Sally’s attention but has no wish to settle down, has the same kinds of ambitions and dreams common to white men. Forced to be an intermediary between the strikers and the sympathetic but firm-minded white general in charge, he is persuaded by the latter—who sees the strike as a rebellion against his authority—to identify the ringleaders, who are then shot. Prince faces a moral dilemma; he must choose whether to betray his fellow black soldiers or the army system of which he approves and in which he flourishes. Recalling some of the same characters and more focused than the first play, Prince deals with the protagonist, a Union prison guard in Virginia, who fatally shoots a ruthlessly taunting Southern captive and runs off. Other characters include former slaves on a farm, who have long waited to be paid for picking cotton for the North. One worker named Burner (the title character of Burner’s Frolic, the fourth play in the cycle) objects to the delay and is imprisoned by the well-meaning but benighted Northerner running the plantation. Burner’s lover is a tough black businesswoman who makes a living selling sweetcakes and wants to have her own store. When Prince, ready to pursue his dream of heading west, refuses her request to free Burner, she stabs him, but he survives and continues on his way. The third play in the cycle, Jonquil, reveals Sally with other freed women slaves being abused and raped by Klu Klux Klan members. Sally’s rapist, she discovers from the blind Jonquil who recognizes him from his voice, is a judge known for his benevolence toward slaves and malignance toward those freed. Sally persuades her reluctant husband to form a black militia to fight against thuggish whites, but the results have sad consequences. The plays received mixed but not largely positive reviews, owing to problems of focus and structure. In Fuller’s plays, the focus is on the injury that blacks do to blacks, which always results ultimately from the racist infrastructure in which they find themselves. Fuller does not focus on problems between blacks and whites but
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rather the experiences of blacks among themselves. “I wanted,” he said, “to put blacks and whites on stage as people. I didn’t want to do the usual black and white confrontation piece.”
Suggested Readings Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun. Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller. New York: Garland, 1997. Carter, Steven R. “The Detective as Solution: Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play.” Clues 12, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1991): 33-42. Fuller, Charles. “Pushing Beyond the Pulitzer.” Interview by Frank White. Ebony 38 (March, 1983): 116. _______. “When Southern Blacks Went North.” Interview by Helen Dudar. The New York Times, December 18, 1988, p. C5. Harriot, Esther. “Charles Fuller: The Quest for Justice.” In American Voices: Five Contemporary Playwrights in Essays and Interviews. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988. Richardson, Riché. “Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter and the Geography of Black Masculinity.” American Literature 77, no. 1 (March, 2005): 7-32. Savran, David. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1988. Contributors: Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, Mildred C. Kuner, Christian H. Moe, and Elsie Galbreath Haley
Ernest J. Gaines Born: Oscar, Louisiana; January 15, 1933 African American
Gaines’s regionalist short stories and novels are distinguished contributions to modern African American fiction. Principal works long fiction: Catherine Carmier, 1964; Of Love and Dust, 1967; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1971; In My Father’s House, 1978; A Gathering of Old Men, 1983; A Lesson Before Dying, 1993 short fiction: Bloodline, 1968; A Long Day in November, 1971 miscellaneous: Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines, 1990; Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays, 2005 Born on a southern Louisiana plantation, Ernest J. Gaines (gaynz) was raised by a disabled aunt who became the model for the strong women in his works, including Miss Jane Pittman. There was no high school for Gaines to attend, so he left Louisiana in 1948 to live with relatives in California, where he suffered from the effects of his displacement. Displacement—caused by racism, by Cajuns’ acquisition of land, or by loss of community ties—is a major theme for Gaines. Young Gaines discovered works by John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Anton Chekhov, who wrote about the land. Not finding acceptable literary depictions of African Americans, Gaines resolved to write stories illuminating the lives and identities of his people. After completing military service, he earned a degree in English, published his first short stories, and received a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. Gaines rejected California as a subject for fiction, chose southern Louisiana as his major setting, and, like the Southern literary giant Faulkner, invented his own county. Catherine Carmier, an uneven apprentice novel, is the first of Gaines’s works revealing Louisiana’s physical beauty and folk speech. Receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Gaines published Of Love and Dust, inspired by a blues song about an African American who escapes prison by doing hard labor on a Louisiana plantation. This and other works by Gaines are not protest fiction, but they are concerned with human rights, justice, and equality. Years of listening to the conversations of plantation folk led Gaines to employ multiple narrators in “Just like a Tree” in Bloodline, a short-story collection. He also employs the technique in A Gathering of Old Men, which gives new form to 407
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another favorite theme, the achievement of manhood. Twelve elderly African American men, after a lifetime of passivity, stand up against ruthless Cajuns and rednecks who have mistreated them, taken over their farmland, and threatened to destroy their past, represented by family homes and graveyards. In Gaines’s somber moral drama, A Lesson Before Dying, an African American teacher who has difficulty being a man in his segregated society learns to love. He helps to humanize an illiterate teenager wrongly condemned for murder and to convince the boy to die courageously. With a firmer personal and racial identity, the teacher becomes dedicated to educating young African Americans. Gaines has served as a teacher in his position as writer-in-residence at a Louisiana university. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the MacArthur Foundation.
Catherine Carmier Type of work: Novel First published: 1964 Gaines’s first novel, Catherine Carmier, based on a work he wrote while an adolescent in Vallejo, has many of the characteristic weaknesses of a first novel and is more interesting for what it anticipates in Gaines’s later career than for its intrinsic merits. Though it caused barely a ripple of interest when it was first published, the novel introduces many of the themes that Gaines treats more effectively in his mature fiction. The book is set in the country, near Bayonne, Louisiana, an area depicted as virtually a wasteland. Ownership of much of this region has devolved to the Cajuns, who appear throughout Gaines’s novels as Snopes-like vermin, interested in owning the land only to exploit it. Like Faulkner, Gaines sees this kind of person as particularly modern, and the growing power of the Cajuns indicates a weakening of values and a loss of determination to live in right relationship to the land. Onto the scene comes Jackson Bradley, a young black man born and reared in the area but (like Gaines himself) educated in California. Bradley is a hollow, rootless man, a man who does not know where he belongs. He has found the North and the West empty, with people living hurried, pointless lives, but he sees the South as equally empty. Feeling no link to a meaningful past and no hope for a productive future, Bradley is a deracinated modern man. He has returned to Louisiana to bid final farewell to his Aunt Charlotte, a representative of the older generation, and to her way of life. While there and while trying to find a meaningful path for himself, Bradley meets and falls in love with Catherine Carmier. She, too, is living a blocked life, and he feels that if they can leave the area, they will be able to make a fulfilling life together. Catherine is the daughter of Raoul Carmier, in many ways the most interesting character in the novel. A Creole, he is caught between the races. Because of his
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black blood, he is not treated as the equal of whites, but because of his white blood, he considers blacks to be beneath him. He has a near incestuous relationship with Catherine, since after her birth his wife was unfaithful to him and he considers none of their subsequent children his. Feeling close only to Catherine, he forbids her to associate with any men, but especially with black men. A man of great pride and love of the land, Raoul is virtually the only man in the region to resist the encroachment of the Cajuns. His attitude isolates him all the more, which in turn makes him fanatically determined to hold on to Catherine. Ernest J. Gaines (© Jerry Bauer) Despite her love for and loyalty to her father, Catherine senses the dead end her life has become and returns Bradley’s love. Though she wants to leave with him, she is paralyzed by her love of her father and by her knowledge of what her leaving would do to him. This conflict climaxes with a brutal fight between Raoul and Bradley over Catherine, a fight that Bradley wins. Catherine, however, returns home to nurse her father. The novel ends ambiguously, with at least a hint that Catherine will return to Bradley, although the thrust of the book militates against that eventuality. Gaines implies that history and caste are a prison, a tomb. No change is possible for the characters because they cannot break out of the cages their lives have become. Love is the final victim. Catherine will continue living her narrow, unhealthy life, and Jackson Bradley will continue wandering the earth, searching for something to fill his inner void.
Of Love and Dust Type of work: Novel First published: 1967 Gaines’s second novel, Of Love and Dust, was received much more enthusiastically than was Catherine Carmier; with it, he began to win the largely positive, respectful reviews that have continued to the present time. Like Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust is a story of frustrated love. The setting is the same: rural Louisiana, where the Cajuns are gradually assuming ownership and control of the land. Of Love and
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Dust is a substantial improvement over Catherine Carmier, however, in part because it is told in the first person by Jim Kelly, an observer of the central story. In this novel, one can see Gaines working toward the folk voice that became such an integral part of the achievement of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The plot of the novel concerns Marcus Payne, a young black man sentenced to prison for murder and then bonded out by a white plantation owner who wants him to work in his fields. Recognizing Marcus’s rebelliousness and pride, the owner and his Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, brutally attempt to break his spirit. This only makes Marcus more determined, and in revenge he decides to seduce Louise, Bonbon’s neglected wife. What begins, however, as simply a selfish and egocentric act of revenge on Marcus’s part grows into a genuine though grotesque love. When he and Louise decide to run away together, Bonbon discovers them and kills Marcus. Even though he dies, Marcus, by resisting brutalizing circumstances, retains his pride and attempts to prove his manhood and dignity. His attempts begin in a selfcentered way, but as his love for Louise increases, he grows in stature in the reader’s eyes until he becomes a figure of heroic dimensions. Through his use of a first-person narrator, Gaines creates a double perspective in the novel, including on one hand the exploits of Marcus and on the other the black community’s reactions to them. The narrator, Jim Kelly, is the straw boss at the plantation, a member of the black community but also accepted and trusted by the whites because of his dependability and his unwillingness to cause any problems. His initial reaction to Marcus—resentment and dislike of him as a troublemaker— represents that of the community at large. The older members of the community never move beyond that attitude because they are committed to the old ways, to submission and accommodation. To his credit, however, Jim’s attitude undergoes a transformation. As he observes Marcus, his resentment changes to sympathy and respect, for he comes to see Marcus as an example of black manhood that others would do well to emulate. Marcus’s death gives evidence of the strain of fate and determinism in this novel as well, yet because he dies with his pride and dignity intact, Of Love and Dust is more hopeful than Catherine Carmier. Gaines indicates that resistance is possible and, through the character of Jim Kelly, that change can occur. Kelly leaves the plantation at the end of the novel, no longer passively accepting what fate brings him but believing that he can act and shape his own life. Though Marcus is an apolitical character, like Jackson Bradley, it is suggested that others will later build on his actions to force social change on the South. Of Love and Dust is a major step forward beyond Catherine Carmier both artistically and thematically. Through his use of the folk voice, Gaines vivifies his story, and the novel suggests the real possibility of free action by his characters.
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Bloodline Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968 Gaines, although popular, is a very serious and methodical writer. He works very hard to fashion a distinct voice richly imbued with its unique traditions. He also spins compelling stories, which are collected in the single volume Bloodline, first published in 1968. Bloodline comprises five long stories, all of which deal with a place and a people Gaines expresses so fully and so vividly that they are recognized as his own exclusive fictional property: the southern black communities living on a stretch of low-lying cotton and sugarcane country between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, west and northwest of Baton Rouge. Setting is a central force in Gaines’s work, and his fiction often focuses on this distinctive Louisiana region. All the stories in Bloodline take place in and around the fictional town of Bayonne, a small country town not too far from the actual city of Baton Rouge. The lives of Gaines’s men and women are shaped by fields, dirt roads, plantation quarters, and the natural elements of dust, heat, and rain. Whatever the differences among his characters—he has a rich diversity of race and culture to work with—the Cajun sharecroppers, the black tenants, and the white plantation owners all consider the soil and the crops part of their daily weather. Bayonne and the surrounding countryside provide local and cultural unity for the stories in Bloodline. Equally important to the unity of Bloodline is the way the stories are presented. All of them are written in the form of oral narratives told by the characters in their own words. The first four stories are told by individual African Americans who participate in or are deeply affected by the stories they tell. The tellers range in age from the six-year-old boy of “A Long Day in November” to a seventy-year-old man in the title story. The final story, “Just like a Tree,” is told by a group of relatives and friends, each in turn, as they attend the leave-taking ceremonies surrounding Aunt Fe, an old black woman who has been invited North to escape white reprisals against the Civil Rights movement. In all these stories the sound of individual voices rings out clearly and convincingly. Gaines has a keen, sure ear for his native speech patterns and recognizes the power of language in a predominantly oral culture to assert, affirm, and keep hold of personal and collective values. His stories deliberately call attention to the special virtues of the spoken word as a rich storehouse capable of keeping alive an otherwise impoverished community. There is, however, a deeper unifying force to the stories than a common setting, race, and dependence on the spoken word. It consists of the movement of the stories through individual lives toward a sort of communal consciousness. There is a hint of this movement in the successive voices of the five stories. The first two are accounts of two young boys, the third of a young man in jail, the fourth of an old man of seventy, and the fifth of a household of friends, relatives, and one stranger. Bloodline begins with the private experience of a little boy and ends with a public event that affects the entire community. The impression of development is strengthened by the recurrence in each story
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of one of Gaines’s major themes, the impact of personal and communal codes of honor colliding with various forms of hostility, especially, in the last four stories, the discrimination, injustice, and violence the African American faced in the segregated South. This is not to imply that polemics or ideologies ever prevail over character in Gaines’s stories. What interests him first and foremost is black experience, and some of his best writing centers on the lives and relationships of southern blacks within their own community, with sometimes little direct reference at all to the world of the whites around them. Inasmuch as discrimination and the crimes of segregation were an inescapable fact of southern black experience, the world Gaines describes is always—overtly or not—conditioned by the tensions of racial claims. In Bloodline, the questions raised by such claims become progressively more insistent, and the stories themselves roughly follow the chronology of the changing mood among blacks in modern times. Specific dates are not mentioned, but the stories obviously stretch back to the 1940’s rural South of “A Long Day in November” up to the 1960’s Civil Rights movement in Louisiana alluded to in the last story, “Just like a Tree.”
“A Long Day in November” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968, in Bloodline In the first story, “A Long Day in November,” there are no direct references to racial struggles. It is a long tale told in the voice of a six-year-old boy, Sonny, whose world is suddenly shattered by the separation of his parents. His mother, Amy, leaves her husband, Eddie, because she feels he has become overenthusiastic about his car to the point of neglecting his family. She takes Sonny to her mother’s house, and the remainder of the story charts Eddie’s unsuccessful attempts to bring his wife home. Finally, on the advice of the local Voodoo woman, Madame Toussaint, Eddie burns his car publicly, and Sonny and Amy return home. For the entire story, Sonny does not act; he observes and suffers. He sees the world in terms of basic feelings—warmth, cold, hope, fear—and desires simply that his disrupted world be restored. The story ends where it began, with Sonny in bed, snug and safe under the blankets, only this time the night is not disturbed by his mother’s calls or crying. Instead, Sonny is rocked to sleep by the sound of the springs in his parents’ bed. Gaines is a master at re-creating the words and sensations of children, and one of his main concerns in “A Long Day in November” is to contrast Sonny’s simple, innocent needs of love and security with the complex world of adult conflicts. Neither his parents nor his grandmother seems to offer him what he needs most. His mother has become hard and bitter, and his father, more gentle, shows a weak streak and tends to use Sonny to win back his wife. The grandmother’s irritability may be comic for the reader, but for Sonny she is the most hateful person in his life, rough spoken, harsh, and complaining. She is the one person Sonny would most like to be free of: “Lord knows I get tired of Gran’mon fussing all the time.” The main character in the story,
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however, is Sonny’s mother. She may be harsh and bitter, but she has forged for herself a code of personal behavior that finally brings her family into a new relationship. She forces the change at a great cost, especially in regards to her son. One important feature of “A Long Day in November” is the presence of a welldefined community—the schoolteacher, the preacher, the schoolchildren, the Voodoo woman, Eddie’s friends, and Amy’s relatives—where conflict and separation may occur, but whose shared assumptions are not questioned. Increasingly, as the stories progress, not only individual codes but also communal values are brought under pressure.
“The Sky Is Gray” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968, in Bloodline The second story in Bloodline, “The Sky Is Gray,” is also narrated by a small boy. One of the most successful stories in the volume, it consists of thirteen episodes spanning the day. James, eight years old, goes with his mother to a dentist in Bayonne. Like Sonny in “A Long Day in November,” James suffers more than he acts, but already, even at eight years old, he is beginning to adopt the code of stoic pride his mother is constantly encouraging. His world is even bleaker than Sonny’s. His father has been called into the army, and his mother is left with three children and great poverty. Throughout the story, her hard words and harsh judgments must be measured against the fact that she has been placed in a situation in which mere survival is not always certain. She feels compelled to teach her oldest son how to take care of his family and to survive with dignity as a man. While waiting in the dentist’s office, James watches a young, educated African American argue with an older man who looks to James like a preacher. The young black has no faith in religion but reacts in such an extreme, self-confident way that he challenges their religious beliefs. Still, when he is hit by the “preacher,” a man who maintains that no questions at all should be asked about God or traditional beliefs, it is the young man who wins the admiration of James: “When I grow up I want to be just like him. I want clothes like that and I want to keep a book with me, too.” The point seems to be that, given the extent of black suffering, most reactions tend to assume extreme, absolute forms that destroy man’s full nature. The preacher is at once too submissive and too aggressive; the young man asserts his right to disbelieve but is unable to make sense out of his contradictory certitudes; and James’s mother so overemphasizes stoic resistance that, in a later episode, she is incapable of compromising her rigid pride even when it means a meal for her son. Fortunately, the white lady who offers the meal knows exactly how to circumvent such pride so that natural help is not construed as demeaning charity. Such generosity has been too rare in the past, however, even among her fellow blacks, and the mother’s attitude remains unchanged. At first, the story as a whole seems to reveal a world where gentleness and love and flexibility have no place: “The sleet’s coming
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down heavy, heavy now, and I turn up my coat collar to keep my neck warm. My mama tells me to turn it right back down. ‘You not a bum,’ she says. ‘You a man.’” James nevertheless knows that his mother loves her children and that they love her.
“Three Men” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968, in Bloodline The third story, “Three Men,” may have been placed at the center of the collection as a sort of hub toward which the first two stories approach and around which the whole book swings to return to the traditional rural society of the final stories, still rural and traditional, but now in the new context of the Civil Rights movement. Certainly it is the only story in which the central character undergoes anything resembling a change of heart or self-discovery. Again, like the other stories, “Three Men” centers on a personal code of honor, this time specifically related to racial domination. A nineteen-year-old youth, Proctor Lewis, turns himself in to the law in Bayonne after stabbing another man in a fight over a girl. The story takes place in jail where his cellmates—an old convict, Munford, and a homosexual, Hattie—argue with each other and talk to Proctor. Munford, full of hate for a society based on racial stereotypes, hates himself for allowing his life to gratify the expectations of those same stereotypes. Recalling the way his own past has swung back and forth between fights and jail, he poses the dilemma of the story: whether Proctor should choose to get out of jail by accepting the bond he initially hopes the white plantation owner will pay or whether he should stay in jail, suffer the certain beating of the guards, and eventually go to the state penitentiary. Munford claims that the latter choice is the only way for Proctor to keep his manhood, something both Munford and Hattie have surrendered. As the story ends, Proctor has almost made up his mind to refuse the bond and to abide by the code Munford has described. Although he is finally not sure if he can stand by his decision, a shift of attitude has been made, and the right questions have been clearly articulated. “Three Men” looks back to the seemingly fatalistic rounds of poverty, frustration, and rigid codes of the first two stories and anticipates the last two stories, in which individual acts of self-affirmation seem to offer something more than mere stoic resistance.
“Bloodline” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968, in Bloodline “Bloodline,” the title story of the collection, raises the old southern problem of mixed blood but in a new context, the “postsegregation” South. The story is told by
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a seventy-year-old African American, Felix, who works for the plantation’s present owner Walter Laurent. Copper, the half-white illegitimate son of Laurent’s dead brother, has returned to the plantation seeking what he considers his birthright, the land on which his “father” raped his mother. He calls himself the General and refuses to go through the back door of the plantation house to meet his uncle. Finally, after Copper has thwarted all attempts by Laurent to force him through the back door, Laurent relents and goes to meet him. Their meeting symbolizes the old order making way for the new. Laurent does not change his mind about the old rules; he simply stops applying them for a time. Copper represents the transformation that will eventually change the caste system of white over black and rewrite the rules Laurent is constantly talking about: “I didn’t write the rules, and I won’t try to change them.” The old men, Walter and Felix, are clearly part of the old order, but Gaines is careful to show how they both, especially Felix, manage to retain their individual dignity even though bound to the established tradition. There is a give-and-take between “master” and “servant” common to men who speak the same language, know the same people, and who have lived near each other all their lives. From this perspective, Copper comes back to his birthplace as an outsider, isolated from the rest of the blacks, whom he considers childlike lackeys. He embodies the same sort of absoluteness and aloofness represented earlier by the young man in the dentist’s office in “The Sky Is Gray,” but he also embodies the necessary wave of change that will eventually sweep through the plantation, a change whose consequences are already being felt in the final story, “Just Like a Tree.”
“Just like a Tree” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1968, in Bloodline “Just like a Tree” revolves around Aunt Fe, an old black woman who is being taken North to escape the violence that has begun on the plantation. A young man, Emmanuel, has begun working for change, and in retaliation a tenant house has been bombed and a woman and her two children killed. More than any other story in the collection, “Just like a Tree” affirms the force of the community. The only outsider, an African American from the North, is clearly alien to the shared assumptions and beliefs of the others. He speaks a different “language”; he sets himself apart by his loud manners, his condescension, and his lack of feeling. The other people gathered in the house, even the white lady who has walked to the house to say good-bye, form a whole, united by shared speech and shared feelings. The ceremony itself of farewell and the narrative mode of the story, told in turn by several of the visitors, affirm the strong communal bonds of rural black society. Unlike the young man in “The Sky Is Gray” or the General in “Bloodline,” Emmanuel belongs to the community even as he acts to change the old ways. He is a type of activist represented best in Gaines’s work by Jimmy in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
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Aunt Fe’s longtime presence in the community, her having touched, in some loving way, every member of the community, and her impending removal to the North provide clues to the tree symbolism of the story’s title: Like a great, old, shade tree, she has protected and sheltered other living creatures, and her departure will leave a spiritual hole in the life of the community, like the hole that the removal, roots and all, of a large tree will leave in a meadow. Aunt Clo predicts that Aunt Fe will die when she is “transplanted” to the North. The personal diaspora being forced upon Aunt Fe also represents the mass diasporas suffered by African Americans through the centuries. The story and the book end with Aunt Fe’s death. She has refused to be moved, and once again the strong vital roots of individual pride show their strength. The difference is that Aunt Fe’s pride affirms its strength within the community, not in aloof isolation from it. In terms of Bloodline as a whole, “Just like a Tree” offers the conclusion that change must involve sacrifice but that change must take place. The farewell ceremony and Aunt Fe’s death also offer the reminder that the traditional community had values that the new order can deny only at its own peril and loss.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Type of work: Novel First published: 1971 In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman the heroine and many African Americans in south Louisiana move from passivity to heroic assertion and achieve a new identity. Gaines’s best-known novel is not an autobiography but a first-person reminiscence of a fictional 110-year-old former slave whose memories extend from the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King, Jr. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells her unschooled but adept version of state and national occurrences and personalities (Huey Long, the flood of 1927, the rise of black athletes such as Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis). Her version of history is given to a taperecording young schoolteacher who wants historical facts; Jane helps him to understand the dynamics of living history, the way she remembers it. Her accounts are loving, sane, and responsible. Her language—speech patterns and pronunciations—is authentic, since Gaines read interviews with former slaves. Renamed Jane Brown by a Union soldier because Ticey (her original name) is “a slave name,” Jane wears her new designation proudly, as a badge of her identity as a free woman, when she and other former slaves attempt to escape from Louisiana. Many of them are brutally murdered by Klansmen. Jane, who is about ten at the time, escapes along with a small orphan, Ned. Jane becomes Ned’s mother, and during Reconstruction she raises him when they settle on another plantation as field hands. Ned receives some schooling and as a teenager is involved in civil rights struggles. His life in danger, Ned escapes to Kansas. Jane chooses to remain in Louisiana.
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Ned represents the first of three African American males in Jane’s life who struggle to define their racial and personal identities. The second is Joe Pittman, with whom Jane lives after Ned leaves. Joe loves Jane and wants her with him even though she is barren as a result of childhood beatings. He finds personal fulfillment in breaking wild horses on a Texas ranch; he accepts danger and the risk of death unflinchingly. Like Ned, who is murdered after he returns to Louisiana and sets up a school for black children, Joe is also killed fulfilling his destiny. Ned describes his identity as that of a black American who cares, and will always struggle. With these men, Jane finds a personal identity as a woman and demonstrates her desire to work with her black men but not to control them. When Jimmy, a young civil rights worker much loved by Jane and others, is murdered, Jane—age 110—goes into the nearby town to drink from the segregated water fountain at the courthouse. She moves from the safety of silence and obscurity to join the ranks of African Americans who assert themselves and who risk losing their homes and lives but gain courage, dignity, and a heroic identity.
In My Father’s House Type of work: Novel First published: 1978 Gaines’s fourth novel, In My Father’s House, was the first he had written in the third person since Catherine Carmier; the effect of its point of view is to distance the reader from the action and characters, creating an ironic perspective. Set during a dreary winter in 1970, in the period of disillusionment following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the novel suggests that the progress which was implicit in the ending of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was temporary at best, if not downright illusory. The atmosphere of the novel is one of frustration and stagnation. Both the setting and the protagonist of In My Father’s House are uncharacteristic for Gaines. Instead of using the rural settings so familiar from his other works, he sets his story in a small town. Rather than focusing on the common people, Gaines chooses as his protagonist Philip Martin, one of the leaders of the black community, a public figure, a minister who is considering running for Congress. A success by practically any measure and pridefully considering himself a man, Martin is brought low in the course of the novel. His illegitimate son, Robert X, a ghostlike man, appears and wordlessly accuses him. Robert is evidence that, by abandoning him, his siblings, and their mother many years previously, Martin in effect destroyed their lives. Having been a drinker, a gambler, and irresponsible, he tries to explain to his son that his earlier weakness was a legacy of slavery. Even though he seems to have surmounted that crippling legacy, his past rises up to haunt him and forces him to face his weakness. Martin wants to effect a reconciliation with his son and thus with his past, but Robert’s suicide precludes that. In My Father’s House makes explicit a concern which was only implicit in Gaines’s earlier novels, the re-
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lationship between fathers and sons. No communication is possible here, and the failure is illustrative of a more general barrier between the generations. While in the earlier novels the young people led in the struggle for change and the older characters held back, here the situation is reversed. Martin and members of his generation are the leaders, while the young are for the most part sunk in cynicism, apathy, and hopelessness, or devoted to anarchic violence. If the hope of a people is in the young, or in a reconciliation of old and young, hope does not exist in this novel.
A Gathering of Old Men Type of work: Novel First published: 1983 Hope does exist in Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, for which Gaines returns to his more characteristic rural setting. Here he returns as well to the optimism with which The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ended. This time, as at the end of that novel and in In My Father’s House, it is up to the old among the black community to lead the struggle for change, this time primarily because there are no young men left to lead. All of them have escaped to towns and cities that promise more of a future than does rural Louisiana. In this small corner of Louisiana, however, as elsewhere in Gaines’s fiction, Cajuns are encroaching on the land, replacing men with machines and even threatening to plow up the old graveyard where generations of blacks have been buried. When Beau Boutan, son of the powerful Cajun Fix Boutan, is shot to death in the quarters of Marshall plantation, where Marshall blacks have worked the land since the days of slavery, the old black men who have lived there all of their lives are faced with one last chance to stand up and be men. They stand up for the sake of Matthu, the only one of them who ever stood up before and thus the most logical suspect in the murder. They also stand up because of all the times in their past when they should have stood up but did not. They prove one last time that free action is possible when eighteen or more of them, all in their seventies and eighties, arm themselves with rifles of the same gauge used in the shooting and face down the white sheriff, Mapes, each in his turn claiming to be the killer. As shut off as the quarters are from the rest of the world, it is easy to forget that the events of the novel take place as recently as the late 1970’s. Beau Boutan’s brother Gil, however, represents the change that has been taking place in the world outside Marshall. He has achieved gridiron fame at Louisiana State University by working side by side with Cal, a young black man. Youth confronts age when Gil returns home and tries to persuade his father not to ride in revenge against Beau’s murderer, as everyone expects him to do. Gil represents the possibility of change from the white perspective. He convinces his father to let the law find and punish Beau’s murderer, but he pays a heavy price when his father disowns him. He cannot stop other young Cajuns, led by Luke Will, who are not willing to change but would rather cling to the vigilantism of the old South.
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In spite of their dignity and pride, the old men at Marshall risk looking rather silly because after all these years they stand ready for a battle that seems destined never to take place once Fix Boutan decides not to ride on Marshall. Sheriff Mapes taunts them with the knowledge that they have waited too late to take a stand. Ironically, they are ultimately able to maintain their dignity and reveal their growth in freedom by standing up to the one person who has been most valiant in her efforts to help them: Candy Marshall, niece of the landowner. In her effort to protect Matthu, who was largely responsible for rearing her after her parents died, Candy has gone so far as to try to take credit for the murder herself. What she fails to realize is that the days are long past when black men need the protection of a white woman. She is stunned to realize that she too has been living in the past and has been guilty of treating grown black men like children. The novel does eventually end with a gunfight, because Luke Will and his men refuse to let the murder of a white man by a black one go unavenged. It is fitting that the two men who fall in the battle are Luke Will, the one who was most resistant to change, and Charlie Biggs, the real murderer, who, at fifty, finally proves his manhood by refusing to be beaten by Beau Boutan and then by returning to take the blame for the murder that he has committed. Charlie’s body is treated like a sacred relic as each member of the black community, from the oldest to the youngest, touches it, hoping that some of the courage that Charlie found late in life will rub off. Apparently it already has. With A Gathering of Old Men, Gaines returns to first-person narration, but this time the history is told one chapter at a time by various characters involved in or witnessing the action. His original plan was to have the narrator be the white newspaperman Lou Dimes, Candy’s boyfriend. He found, however, that there was still much that a black man in Louisiana would not confide to a white man, even a sympathetic one, so he let the people tell their own story, with Dimes narrating an occasional chapter.
A Lesson Before Dying Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 In A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines returns to the south Louisiana setting he has established in his earlier fiction as his own. The year is 1948. Jefferson, a barely literate young black man, sentenced to death for a shooting in which he was innocently involved, has heard his defense attorney say that executing Jefferson would be like putting a hog in the electric chair. Jefferson has suffered so many outrages to his manhood during his short lifetime that he is altogether too ready to accept his attorney’s assessment. But Jefferson’s aged godmother resolves that, if Jefferson must die, he will first come to know that he is a man. She enlists as her reluctant instrument Grant Wiggins, a university graduate who teaches the children in the black quarter during
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the months when they are not working in the fields. At first, Grant and Jefferson seem a study in contrast, but as they slowly move toward mutual trust and respect, it is clear that Grant, as much as Jefferson, has a great deal to learn about what it is to be a man. Grant and Jefferson will finally share equally in the lesson all of us must learn before dying: what it means to be human. What could degenerate into melodrama or didacticism becomes in Gaines’s hands a probing and honestly felt study of human possibilities. Gaines creates a cast of sharply drawn minor characters, all of whom, including those of whose conduct he must disapprove, he treats with sympathy and insight. He is at his best in his nuanced observation of the ironies and intricacies of negotiation between races and between generations. Readers who have waited ten years for a new novel by Gaines will find in A Lesson Before Dying further confirmation of his assured, self-effacing, spiritually generous art.
Suggested Readings Auger, Philip. Native Sons in No Man’s Land: Rewriting Afro-American Manhood in the Novels of Baldwin, Walker, Wideman, and Gaines. New York: Garland, 2000. Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Clark, Keith. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Estes, David E., ed. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Gaines, Ernest J., Marcia G. Gaudet, and Carl Wooton. Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Lowe, John, ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Simpson, Anne K. A Gathering of Gaines: The Man and the Writer. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991. Contributors: Philip A. Tapley, John W. Fiero, Ben Forkner, Frank W. Shelton, and Rebecca G. Smith
Ernesto Galarza Born: Jalcocotán, Mexico; August 15, 1905 Died: San Jose, California; June 22, 1984 Mexican American
Out of his concern for the education of Mexican American children, Galarza produced fiction and poetry for children and young adults, as well as numerous studies of Latin American immigrants and their history. Principal works children’s literature: Zoo-Risa, 1968 (Zoo-Fun, 1971); Aquí y allá en California, 1971; Historia verdadera de una gota de miel, 1971; Poemas párvulos, 1971; Rimas tontas, 1971; La historia verdadera de una botella de leche, 1972; Más poemas párvulos, 1972; Poemas pe-que pe-que peque-ñitos = Very Very Short Nature Poems, 1972; Un poco de México, 1972; Chogorrom, 1973; Todo mundo lee, 1973 poetry: Kodachromes in Rhyme, 1982 nonfiction: The Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, 1928; Argentina’s Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1931; Debts, Dictatorship, and Revolution in Bolivia and Peru, 1931; La industria eléctrica en México, 1941; Labor in Latin America, 1942; Strangers in Our Fields, 1956; Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story, 1964; Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field, 1970; Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation, 1971; Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960, 1977; Tragedy at Chular: El crucero de las treinta y dos cruces, 1977 The writings of Ernesto Galarza (ehr-NAYS-toh gah-LAHR-sah) can be divided into three phases: the Pan-Americanist, the farm-laborer advocate, and the educator. Galarza was born in a tiny mountain village in Mexico. When he was five, he, his mother, and two uncles fled the Mexican Revolution. They traveled for three years until they reached Sacramento, California. At the age of twelve, Galarza lost his mother and one uncle to influenza. He continued his education with the assistance of his other uncle and worked after school and during the summers as a farm laborer and in canneries. His flight northward, his family’s struggles for survival, and the process of acculturation are depicted in his 1971 autobiography, Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation. This book is perhaps Galarza’s most outstanding contribution to Chicano literature for its pioneering spirit in the field of the essay and the fictionlike quality of its prose. 421
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In 1923 Galarza received a scholarship from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In 1927 he received a fellowship from Stanford University, which awarded him a master’s degree in Latin American history and political science in 1929. After marrying Mae Taylor, a teacher from Sacramento, Galarza entered Columbia University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Latin American history in 1932. Galarza’s first publications belong to his Pan-American phase. In his book The Roman Catholic Church as a Factor in the Political and Social History of Mexico, Galarza defends the actions of the Mexican revolutionary governments, which aimed to limit the power of the Catholic Church. He wrote his other Pan-Americanist works, Argentina’s Revolution and Its Aftermath; Debts, Dictatorship, and Revolution in Bolivia and Peru; and Labor in Latin America, while working for the PanAmerican Union in Washington, D.C., which later became the Organization of American States. Galarza worked in Washington, D.C., as a research associate in education and as the chief of the Division of Labor and Social Information at the Pan-American Union. He wrote and edited numerous Inter-American Reports and the Latin America for Young Readers series, published by the Pan-American Union. He became concerned about the living conditions of the braceros, the Mexican contract agricultural laborers who were brought to the United States in 1942 and remained until 1964. His book Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story analyzes the bracero in California agriculture. This book initiates Galarza’s farm labor advocate phase. In 1947 Galarza resigned from the Pan-American Union to serve as the Director of Research and Education in California for the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union, which became the National Farm Labor Union. He became entangled in a union strike against the DiGiorgio Fruit Corporation. The strike gave rise to libel suits and countersuits, which Galarza analyzes in his book Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field. In 1955 he conducted field surveys on the living conditions of Mexican nationals in the United States. This work culminated in his 1956 book Strangers in Our Fields, which produced an uproar among the members of the California State Board of Agriculture, the growers’ associations, and all those who employed Mexican laborers. However, Galarza continued to make public sensitive issues involving agriculture. Farm Workers and Agri-Business in California, 1947-1960 documents the rise of the corporations that precipitated the demise of the small farmer, and Tragedy at Chular examines the safety violations that caused the death of thirty-two laborers. In the mid-1960’s Galarza engaged in the study of learning theories and methodologies for an effective bilingual and bicultural education program. In 1971 he founded the Studio Laboratory for Bilingual Education in San Jose, California, to develop awareness of cultural values, nature, and the creative arts. Out of his concern for the bilingual education of Mexican American children, he produced his Colección Mini-libros, which includes his children’s books. Between 1971 and 1973 he wrote a total of thirteen prose and poetry “mini-libros” (minibooks), each equipped with a bilingual appendix. Galarza’s creativity is also evi-
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dent in his Kodachromes in Rhyme, which contains poetry for adults and young adults. Galarza is regarded as one of the most prominent Mexican American contributors to American culture.
Barrio Boy Type of work: Autobiographical novel First published: 1971 Barrio Boy is an autobiographical novel that divides the author’s life story into five parts, each corresponding roughly to a place in which his family lived. The first part tells of the family’s early history and Galarza’s first five years of life in Jalcocotán, a village high in the Sierra Madre range. The second part details the family’s movements over the next two years, from 1910 to 1912, and the third part describes the family’s travels to the United States. Part 4 brings Galarza’s family to the Mexican American barrio in Sacramento and later to a five-room house on the edge of Sacramento, in the town of Oak Park. With a new bicycle, he delivered newspapers and thought about becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but his middleclass life dissolved when his uncle and mother died from influenza. In the final part, Galarza describes how he and José moved back to the Sacramento barrio. The story ends with the author looking forward to entering high school in the barrio in 1921. The details of each home, village, train car, and street are recorded in the smallest detail. Readers will be fascinated by scenes in which Galarza recounts his escape from Jalcocotán, the fighting around Tepic, the stagecoach and train rides through fighting armies, and life in the besieged city of Mazatlán, with cannon fire landing all around his house. Galarza also offers extensive details of life in Sacramento, his family’s move to the suburbs, what it was like to be one of the few Mexican Americans in the new school, and his adolescent thoughts of becoming a doctor or lawyer. Galarza’s narrative is an outward-looking autobiography, sharing little of the author’s inner feelings. Instead it reads like an encyclopedic description of the various places that he lived during these sixteen years. Galarza maintains the narrative stance of a newspaper report, and even the loss of his mother and uncle in the influenza epidemic—forcing his move back to the barrio and crushing his hopes for a profession—is related without emotion. In a way, however, such traumatic events need no emotional description. The story, told through rich experience and objective detail, records the facts of an immigrant boy’s coming-of-age and overcoming of obstacles. The emotions are self-evident.
Suggested Readings Bustamante, Jorge. Ernesto Galarza’s Legacy to the History of Labor Migration. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1996.
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Galarza, Ernesto. The Burning Light: Action and Organizing in the Mexican Community in California. Interviews by Gabrielle Norris and Timothy Beard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Gomez, Laura E. From Barrio Boys to College Boys: Ethnic Identity, Ethnic Organizations, and the Mexican American Elite. The Cases of Ernesto Galarza and Manuel Ruiz, Jr. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1989. Meister, Dick. “Ernesto Galarza: From Barrio Boy to Labor Leader/Philosopher.” Leabhrach: News from the University of Notre Dame Press, Autumn, 1978. Meister, Dick, and Amme Loftis. A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers. New York: Macmillan, 1977. Revelle, Keith. “A Collection for La Raza.” Library Journal, November 15, 1971. Contributors: Cida S. Chase and Jamie Myers
Cristina García Born: Havana, Cuba; July 4, 1958 Cuban American
Immigrating to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, García grew up to become a bicultural Cuban American writer, drawing on the contradictions of being simultaneously “both” and “neither.” Principal works long fiction: Dreaming in Cuban, 1992; The Agüero Sisters, 1997; Monkey Hunting, 2003; A Handbook to Luck, 2007 nonfiction: Cars of Cuba, 1995 edited texts: Cubanisimo! The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature, 2003; Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicana/o Literature, 2006 Cristina García (krihs-TEE-nah gahr-SEE-ah) is a highly regarded Cuban American writer. Born in Havana, Cuba, she was brought to the United States at the age of two, when her family emigrated after Fidel Castro came to power. She grew up in New York City, studied in Catholic schools, and attended Barnard College, from where she went to the School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1993, after working for Time magazine as a journalist in Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, García was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She then moved to Los Angeles. As a young adult García read American, Russian, and French novelists. Later she discovered her Latin American literary heritage. She cites Wallace Stevens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison as particular literary inspirations for her when writing her novels. Perhaps her greatest inspiration, however, was a trip back to Cuba in 1984, where she learned about her family and, as for so many bicultural writers, regained a sense of her own culture of origin and her part in it from the experience of “going home.” As a bicultural Cuban American writer, García is part of a vibrant group of individuals of various ethnicities who draw on the contradictions of being simultaneously both and neither. Other American writers sharing this multiethnic common ground are Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Diana Abu-Jaber, Oscar Hijuelos, Pablo Medina, and Omar Torres. They too write of the delicate balance, double consciousness, and multiple resonances of living “on the borderlands,” as Anzaldúa phrased it. They share an 425
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ability to “pass,” as well as the knowledge, sometimes painful yet often a source of great pride, of their difference from mainstream American culture. They chronicle intergenerational immigrant experience and displacement, exile and double exile, for even the culture of origin feels like a strange place to the hybrid child who, unlike its parents, has become at least partially identified with the adopted American culture. The formation of identity, in all its complex manifestations, is the overarching theme in this kind of work. The relativity of perception is another powerful theme in the works of these writers, and García is particularly skillful in the way her narrative structure and chronology reflect this relativity. Given the element of the autobiographical in novels that explore identity formation, it is no surprise that García has experienced this relativity personally, not only culturally but also politically. When interviewed by Allan Vorda in 1993 García mentioned that her parents were extremely anticommunist, but that her other relatives, whom she had met on her 1984 trip, were procommunist if not Party members. Dreaming in Cuban is set alternately in Brooklyn and Havana, with multiple narrators tracing their memories, their family lines, and their complex interconnections. Granddaughter Pilar and grandmother Celia communicate wordlessly over the years, and only when the grandchild comes to visit do both feel complete again. In her novel García plays with Magical Realism, politics, the diary and epistolary forms, and the accretion of layers of culture. The locations shift, just as do the barriers of time and space, life and death, and García draws on the puzzle that is memory to show how identity is formed. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992, and in 1994 García received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Agüero Sisters draws upon the pro- and anticommunist allegiances found in García’s own family. The novel contrasts two sisters, Constancia, who fled Cuba when Castro came to power, and Reina, who remained. Each has achieved a different kind of success in her chosen environment. Like Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters is strongly marked by Magical Realism. Monkey Hunting is also about Cuban Americans, but this time Chinese Cuban Americans, tracing the Chen family from 1857 to the present as they emigrate from country to country.
Dreaming in Cuban Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Dreaming in Cuban, García’s first novel, chronicles the lives of three generations of women as they strive for self-fulfillment. This bittersweet novel also illustrates the Cuban American immigrant experience in the United States, focusing on the search for cultural identity in exile. In Cuba, for twenty-five years, the matriarch Celia del Pino writes letters to Gustavo, a long lost lover. She never sends the self-revealing correspondence and stops writing in 1959, at the time of the Cuban Revolution, when the family becomes divided by politics and her granddaughter Pilar is born.
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Celia, who believes that “to survive is an act of hope,” sublimates her unfulfilled romantic desires by imagining herself as a heroine of the revolution. In need of recognition, she supports Fidel Castro devotedly. As her husband Jorge del Pino leaves her to join their daughter Lourdes in the United States, she spends her days scanning the sea for American invaders and daydreaming about a more exciting life. Felicia, Celia’s youngest daughter, abused and abandoned by her first husband, Hugo Villaverde, suffers from fits of madness and violence. A stranger to herself and her children, she seeks refuge in music and the Afro-Cuban cult of Santeria; after becoming a priestess, she finds peace in death. Lourdes, Celia’s eldest daughter, is raped and tortured by the revolutionaries and loses her unborn son. She escapes from Castro’s Cuba with her husband Rufino del Puente and their daughter Pilar. Emotionally unfulfilled, she develops eating disorders; while her family dreams of returning to Cuba, she supports the anti-Castro movement, establishes a chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries, and focuses on achieving the American Dream. Raised in Brooklyn, in conflict with her Americanized mother, Pilar identifies with her grandmother Celia in Cuba. She visits the homeland in search of her true identity and, as she receives Celia’s legacy of letters and family stories, she becomes aware of the magic inner voice that inspires artistic creativity. Pilar returns to America with a positive self-image, accepting her double identity as a bilingual and bicultural Latina. Dreaming in Cuban represents the coming-of-age memoir narrative. Through recollections and nostalgic remembrances, the novel illustrates issues of identity and separation, women’s survival strategies, and cultural dualism.
Suggested Readings Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction.” World Literature Today 68 (Winter, 1994): 43. Davis, Rocio G. “Back to the Future: Mothers, Languages, and Homes in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” World Literature Today 74 (Winter, 2000): 60-68. Firmat, Gustavo Pérez. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Payant, Katherine B. “From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristina García.” MELUS 26 (Fall, 2001): 163-182. Stefanko, Jacqueline. “New Ways of Telling: Latinas’ Narratives of Exile and Return.” Frontiers 17, no. 2 (1996): 50-69. Contributors: Tanya Gardiner-Scott and Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt
Lionel G. García Born: San Diego, Texas; August 20, 1935 Mexican American
García’s works document the experience of Mexican immigrants coming to make lives in the southwestern United States. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: The Elephant and the Ant, 2000 drama: An Acorn on the Moon, pr. 1995 long fiction: Leaving Home, 1985; A Shroud in the Family, 1987; Hardscrub, 1990; To a Widow with Children, 1994 short fiction: I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, 1994; The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories, 2001 Born in 1935 in the remote brush country of Texas near the Mexican border to Gonzalo Guzman and Maria Saenz García, Lionel G. García (LI-nehl gahrSEE-ah) was later to write fiction for nearly three decades before seeing significant publication of and attention to his works. A regional writer, García has lived most of his life in this desolate, dirt-ridden part of the United States. Interested in science and biology, García entered Texas A&M University. He earned a B.S. in 1956; he also took classes in and otherwise pursued creative writing as an undergraduate. García twice served two-year terms in the U.S. Army, the first of which was in 1957-1958. A year after leaving the military, he married Noemi Barrera. He returned to active duty in 1959. Resolved not to pursue a military career, he returned to Texas A&M in the early 1960’s, where he eventually earned the D.V.M. degree, which would provide most of his life’s work outside the literary world. He became a practicing veterinarian in the late 1960’s, after spending three years as an assistant professor of anatomy, again at Texas A&M. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he makes little use of his biology and primary profession in his fiction. While serving in the military and teaching college classes, García’s side interest—perhaps at heart it was always his main one—was writing short stories. He had published his first story in the undergraduate literary magazine during his senior year of college, continuing to write thereafter. It was not until 1983, however, that he would receive recognition for his work; he was awarded the PEN Southwest Discovery Prize for his first novel, Leaving Home, which at the time was unpublished. Like the terrain in South Texas, García’s characters—while colorful—are often bleak and desolate in their attitudes and behavior. Both Leaving Home and A 428
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Shroud in the Family are about family life among first- and second-generation immigrants coming from Mexico to Texas. About this time, he also began to give public readings of his fiction, a mode of performance that well serves his storytelling abilities. His next novel, Hardscrub, is set in the 1950’s and also tells of a family confronting the problems of everyday life in South Texas. It won several honors, all regional in nature, including the Texas Literary Award. In the mid-1990’s García changed his focus to other subgenres of fiction: He published the highly autobiographical collection of personal writings titled I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring, and he tried his luck with a play called An Acorn on the Moon, which was locally produced but never published. He also wrote a children’s book, The Elephant and the Ant, and collected his stories, most of which had been previously published, in The Day They Took My Uncle, and Other Stories. García’s works have generally been well received as popular writings of fiction, regional in scope but more than expansive in their appreciation of the experience of Mexican immigrants coming to make lives in the southwestern United States.
Leaving Home Type of work: Novel First published: 1985 García’s Leaving Home offers an intimate view of one Latino family in the early 1940’s. The novel traces the wanderings of the aging Adolfo, a former baseball pitcher who ruined his career with alcohol, as he moves from the home of his sister Maria to San Diego, hoping to live with his former lover, Isabel. Carmen, Maria’s daughter, goes with Adolfo, hoping to move in with an aunt and find a better job. Turned away by her aunt, Carmen is allowed to stay with Isabel. Adolfo, however, is forced to return to Maria’s house. Maria promises to help him find a job, but his pride prevents him from working in the fields or holding down a gardener’s job. He travels to Los Angeles, meeting a con artist, Antonia, who persuades him to move in with her so she can get his pension checks. She eventually tires of his alcoholism and throws him out, and he moves in with the Professor, another of Antonia’s victims. When the United States enters World War II, the Professor returns to Tijuana to avoid the draft, remembering that during World War I Hispanics were drafted before whites. Adolfo accompanies him and marries a prostitute. He soon leaves her, however, and returns to Maria’s house. In the meantime, Carmen has improved her life, discovering that she wants to be a nurse. She applies for a job at the Navy hospital in San Diego, is hired to wash pots, is promoted to orderly, and shortly thereafter is recommended for nurses’ training in the U.S. Navy. She graduates at the top of her class and becomes an officer. Although Carmen is capable, her promotion is partly based on the fact that she is Latina: The Department of Defense uses her as a symbol. When Carmen
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becomes engaged to a white naval officer in the Philippines, Maria believes that she has lost Carmen. Maria, too, experiences significant changes. She begins to question God’s judgment when Carmen gets sick. When one of her sons is killed in battle, she loses her faith in God. She is alone and lonely. When Adolfo returns, Maria feels happy again. The two agree that Adolfo has wasted his life, but they are happy to have each other.
Suggested Readings Anhalt, Diana. “South Texas Buckshot Stories.” The Texas Observer, November 9, 2001. Golden, Dorothy. Review of To a Widow with Children, by Lionel G. García. Library Journal 119, no. 6 (April 1, 1994): 131. Mutter, John. Review of A Shroud in the Family, by Lionel G. García. Publishers Weekly 232, no. 4 (July 24, 1987): 181. Ray, Karen. Review of Hardscrub, by Lionel G. García. The New York Times Book Review 125, no. 1705 (February 25, 1990): 7, 24. Contributors: Carl Singleton and Wilma Shires
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Born: Keyser, West Virginia; September 16, 1950 African American
The dean of African American literary studies, Gates is considered one of the most prominent black American intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Principal works nonfiction: Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial Self,” 1987; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 1988; Loose Canons: Notes on the Cultural Wars, 1992; The Amistad Chronology of AfricanAmerican History, 1445-1990, 1993; Colored People: A Memoir, 1994; Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, 1994; The Future of the Race, 1996 (with Cornel West); Thirteen Ways to Look at a Black Man, 1997; Wonders of the African World, 1999; The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country, 2000 (with West); The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers, 2003; America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, 2004; Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Yours, 2007 edited texts: Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, 1982 (Charles T. Davis’s essays); Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, 1983 (by Harriet E. Wilson); Black Literature and Literary Theory, 1984, 1990; The Slave’s Narrative, 1985 (with Charles T. Davis); “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 1986; Wole Soyinka: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 1986 (with James Gibbs and Ketutto Katrak); The Classic Slave Narratives, 1987; The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, 1987 (30 volumes); Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, 1990; Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, 1991; Black Biography, 1790-1950: A Cumulative Index, 1991 (3 volumes; with Randall K. Burkett and Nancy Hall Burkett); Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993; Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993; Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993; Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993; Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993; Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives 431
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Past and Present, 1993; Identities, 1995 (with Kwame Anthony Appiah); The Dictionary of Global Culture, 1996 (with Appiah); The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1996 (with Nellie Y. McKay); Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772-1815, 1998 (with William L. Andrews); Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, 1999 (with Maria Diedrich and Carl Pedersen); The Civitas Anthology of African-American Slave Narrative, 1999 (with Andrews); The Souls of Black Folk, 1999 (with Terri Hume Oliver); The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 2002 (by Hannah Crafts); Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, 2002; African American Lives, 2004 (with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham); In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on “The Bondswoman’s Narrative,” 2004 (with Hollis Robbins) West Virginia was racially segregated when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was born in Keyser on September 16, 1950. Keyser’s schools were not integrated until Gates was in secondary school, and integration came to Keyser with less protest than it had elsewhere in the South. In 1968, Gates, named valedictorian of his high school graduating class, gave a militant speech heavily influenced by his study of African history. Gates’s father, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., was a loader in Keyser’s paper mill, the major employer in town. He also moonlighted as a janitor for the telephone company. Given his family’s financial situation, it had not occurred to Gates to attend college outside West Virginia. In September, 1968, he enrolled in Potomac State College of West Virginia University, planning on taking courses that would prepare him for medical school. One of Gates’s Potomac State professors, Duke Anthony Whitmore, recognized Gates’s promise and urged him to transfer to an Ivy League institution. Gates applied for admission to Yale University and was admitted. In 1970-1971, still interested in medicine, Gates worked as general anesthetist at the Anglican Mission Hospital in Kilimatinde, Tanzania, but he returned to Yale to complete his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in 1973. Following his graduation from Yale University, Gates continued his studies at Clare College, Cambridge University, and received a master’s degree in 1974 and a Ph.D. in 1979. He then became a staff correspondent for Time magazine’s London bureau. From 1976 until 1979, he was a lecturer at Yale University, after which he became director of Cornell University’s undergraduate Black Studies Program. Gates advanced from assistant to associate professor and, in 1985, was named W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell. In 1988, he assumed the John Spencer Bassett Professorship in English and Literature at Duke University. He left that position in 1990 to become W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and director of the African American studies program at Harvard University, which had struggled to attract students interested in African American history and culture. Gates immediately enlivened Harvard’s African American studies program by bringing in a variety of exciting lecturers, including Jamaica Kincaid, Wole Soyinka,
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and Spike Lee. Within a short time, Gates’s dynamic efforts resulted in a threefold increase in the number of African American studies majors. Gates made a major contribution to black studies with the publication in 1988 of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. This book offered a new theoretical approach to viewing writing by blacks. A landmark work, it was informed by the critical theories of major theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Levi-Strauss but reconsidered such theories in the light of the uniqueness of literature produced by blacks both in the United States Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Library of Congress) and abroad. Besides his academic achievements, Gates is one of the three most prominent black public intellectuals in the United States, sharing that distinction with Cornel West and Kwame Anthony Appiah.
The Signifying Monkey Type of work: Literary theory First published: 1988 Gates dealt with some of the questions raised in this book in his first major work, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self, published in 1987, one year before The Signifying Monkey. Gates’s use of the term “signifying,” sometimes rendered “signifyin(g)” to suggest the dialect of many blacks, posits the notion that many writers of all races have to deal with the oppressive weight of their literary predecessors and often do so initially by trying to copy them. They then reach a second stage in which they seek to transfigure them, to move beyond them, and to create their own literary worlds. Gates attempts to determine the boundaries of an African American literary tradition by showing how it intentionally misquotes itself. For Gates, past and future are deconstructed into a riverlike strand, a continuous present. “Signifying” generally refers simply to denoting or representing, but Gates suggests a difference that is present in denoting or representing black literature by rendering the term with a capital S and a parenthesized g: Signifyin(g). The final g in words that end with -ing words is often dropped in the black vernacular.
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Gates analyzes some dialogue—actually passages of a rap monologue—by H. Rapp Brown, carefully interpreting all its rhymes, rhythms, and repetitions. The Brown lyrics have a remarkable originality that imparts a calculated exhilaration to those who hear them. These are the lyrics of black street talk, and even though one can legitimately compare them to some of Walt Whitman’s most excessive writing, they are the unique lyrics of the black culture that produced H. Rapp Brown. Although Gates is quite aware that many black writers were directly influenced by their white colleagues, in The Signifying Monkey he limits his literary-historical definition of signifying to the influence of black texts on other black texts, an important limitation that gives his argument the focus it demands.
Loose Canons Type of work: Essays and speeches First published: 1992 Loose Canons is a collection of essays and speeches Gates made between 1986 to 1973. Gates concerns himself with examining the implications of nationalistic upheavals and the politics of identity for various aspects of American culture and education. His book is divided into three sections, “Literature,” “The Profession,” and “Society.” Gates compiled this book with a broad readership in mind. He avoids the professional jargon of his earlier writing, which made it too specialized for many readers. As a result, Loose Canons is great fun to read. Gates takes outrageous jabs at many academics involved in critical theory. With tongue in cheek, he accuses Harvard’s Helen Vendler of doing the dirty work of the literature and cultural mafia. He cites the spurious contention that Harold Bloom, who is credited with doing a great deal of canon formation, killed off a whole list of venerated writers—from Matthew Arnold to Robert Lowell—consigning them to obscurity. In reading Gates’s book, one must remember that he is trying to justify an expansion, long overdue, of the literary canon to include black literature. Many works by African Americans not only were ignored until relatively recently but also had not even been discovered. Gates’s herculean efforts to correct this omission are commendable; his struggle to reexamine, redefine, and renew the canon is both understandable and admirable.
Colored People Type of work: Memoir First published: 1994 Having grown up in the segregated South, Gates might well have viewed his past as a period of repression and unhappiness. Such is certainly not the case in Colored
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People, which is an intimate, mellow account of Gates’s youth and of his relationship to the community where he lived. Many people write memoirs to sort out their experience and come to a better understanding of themselves, and this appears to be the case in this elegantly written and beautifully recollected glimpse into Gates’s past. Keyser, in Piedmont, West Virginia, was a one-industry town. Its paper mill, which cast a malodorous pall over Keyser most of the time, employed blacks only as loaders of its trucks and machines. Gates’s father was employed in this capacity, but he earned so little that he took a second part-time job as a janitor. Gates’s mother was bipolar, and her illness began to surface when Henry (nicknamed Skip) was about twelve. Bewildered by the changes in his mother’s personality and disposition, he turned to religion, joining a Baptist church that he describes as restrictively fundamentalistic. For many years, Gates did not know that his mother had been active in the Civil Rights movement before his birth and that she had led one of the early civil rights protest marches in the United States. A yearly event in Keyser was a picnic hosted by the paper mill for all of its black employees. Gates always looked forward to and greatly enjoyed this event. The fact that it was segregated did not seem important to him. He writes with great nostalgia and warmth about this picnic and also about the sense of community that blacks had in this small town. Members of the black community were protective and were truly kind and generous toward one another. Keyser’s blacks did not want whites at their picnic because their celebration would have been restrained by white attendees. Gates was unaware of the color line in Keyser until he was twelve or thirteen. Until then, he, like many young people brought up under segregation, considered the separation of the races normal. Also, he was probably influenced by his father’s disdain for blacks. Like many black people, the elder Gates had harsh opinions of blacks who brought dishonor upon their race. Gates writes frankly about his religious fanaticism during the mid-1960’s and about his repressed romance with a white girl. He comments on the transition from “colored” society in the 1950’s—note the title of his book—to the “Negro” society of the early 1960’s and then to the “black” society of the later 1960’s. In the choice of terms to describe themselves, African Americans more or less chronicled a significant change in outlook and attitude. Changes came with the civil rights advances of the 1960’s, and most blacks in Keyser learned about them through television and newspaper reports. As a result of new legislation, blacks could eat in restaurants once open only to whites. They could sit where they wished in movie theaters, and schools were now integrated. Gates believes, however, that the introduction of these freedoms also ushered in the disappearance of the sheltering institutions that protected blacks within their own communities. Among the most touching accounts in the book is that of how Gates’s mother, Pauline, who looked down upon whites, dreamed of one day owning a house of her own. When the Gates family tried to buy the house of a white family for whom she had worked, she hesitated. Finally she broke down in tears, saying that this house reminded her of the cruelty and humiliation she had received from the owners as their domestic servant.
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The Future of the Race Type of work: Essays and memoirs First published: 1996 Gates collaborated with Cornel West on this book, which is often read by young adults. The authors take their lead from W. E. B. Du Bois’s brief essay, “The Talented Tenth,” published in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk. In it, Du Bois issued a clarion call to gifted young blacks, “the talented tenth,” who were well educated, to dedicate themselves to working for the betterment of their race. Du Bois’s call to educated blacks fell short of its mark, largely because he overestimated the altruistic motives of educated blacks and underestimated the power of an individual’s desire to gain an education and elevate his or her socioeconomic status. Gates and West question the wisdom of establishing a black elite, as Du Bois initially suggested in his essay (he shrank somewhat from this position in a 1948 revision). Gates describes his experiences as a student at Yale, and he writes about two of his talented black classmates there who did not survive and to whom the book is dedicated. Interestingly, he notes that contemporary blacks may find more antiblack racism within their own black communities than in the white community. At least in the white community, one might anticipate such a sentiment and proceed with caution, but many blacks make the mistake of thinking that they can depend upon the support of their black brothers, which is sometimes unrealistic. Gates knew that his own father harbored a deep antiblack prejudice.
Suggested Readings Adell, Sandra. “A Function at the Junction.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 20 (Winter, 1990). Branam, Harold. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” In Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, edited by Chris Murray. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. Bucknell, Brad. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Theory of ‘Signifyin(g).’” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 21 (January, 1990). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “An Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” Interview by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 14, no. 2 (Spring, 1991). _______. “Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” Interview by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 22 (Autumn, 1991). Olney, James. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” In Modern American Critics Since 1955, edited by Gregory S. Jay. Vol. 67 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1988. Contributor: R. Baird Shuman
Allen Ginsberg Born: Newark, New Jersey; June 3, 1926 Died: New York, New York; April 5, 1997 Jewish
Ginsberg helped inaugurate major literary, social, and cultural changes in the post-World War II United States through his role as one of the members of the Beat generation. Principal works poetry: Howl, and Other Poems, 1956, 1996; Empty Mirror: Early Poems, 1961; Kaddish, and Other Poems, 1958-1960, 1961; The Change, 1963; Reality Sandwiches, 1963; Kral Majales, 1965; Wichita Vortex Sutra, 1966; T.V. Baby Poems, 1967; Airplane Dreams: Compositions from Journals, 1968; Ankor Wat, 1968; Planet News, 1961-1967, 1968; The Moments Return, 1970; Ginsberg’s Improvised Poetics, 1971; Bixby Canyon Ocean Path Word Breeze, 1972; The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971, 1972; The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952, 1972; Iron Horse, 1972; Open Head, 1972; First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs, 1971-1974, 1975; Sad Dust Glories: Poems During Work Summer in Woods, 1975; Mind Breaths: Poems, 1972-1977, 1977; Mostly Sitting Haiku, 1978; Poems All over the Place: Mostly Seventies, 1978; Plutonian Ode: Poems, 1977-1980, 1982; Collected Poems, 1947-1980, 1984; White Shroud: Poems, 1980-1985, 1986; Hydrogen Jukebox, 1990 (music by Philip Glass); Collected Poems, 1992; Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems, 1986-1992, 1994; Making It Up: Poetry Composed at St. Marks Church on May 9, 1979, 1994 (with Kenneth Koch); Selected Poems, 1947-1995, 1996; Death and Fame: Poems, 1993-1997, 1999; Collected Poems, 1947-1997, 2006 nonfiction: Indian Journals, 1963; The Yage Letters, 1963 (with William Burroughs); Indian Journals, March 1962-May 1963: Notebooks, Diary, Blank Pages, Writings, 1970; Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, 1974; Gay Sunshine Interview, 1974; Visions of the Great Rememberer, 1974; To Eberhart from Ginsberg, 1976; As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, 1977; Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, 1977, 1992; Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967-1977, 1980; Allen Ginsberg Photographs, 1990; Snapshot Poetics: A Photographic Memoir of the Beat Era, 1993; Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954-1958, 1995; Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, 2000; Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, 2001 (with Louis Ginsberg); Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996, 2001 437
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edited text: Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, 2000 miscellaneous: Beat Legacy, Connections, Influences: Poems and Letters by Allen Ginsberg, 1994; The Book of Matyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952, 2006 Allen Ginsberg (GIHNZ-burg) is usually associated with the Beat generation, a literary movement popular with the counterculture of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. He was born into a fairly typical middle-class Jewish family. His father, a schoolteacher, was a poet, but the stability of his home life was shattered by his mother’s periods of mental illness. She was finally institutionalized until her death in 1956. Ginsberg himself spent eight months in Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute in 1949, and madness, along with visionary hallucinations, became a central image in his poetry. Ginsberg drew on memories of his mother’s illness, as well as his own experience inside the mental institution, for the raw material in “Kaddish” (1959), an elegy for his mother that many critics consider his best work. While attending Columbia University, Ginsberg met two of the most influential figures of his early years: Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac later wrote On the Road (1957), a central document of the Beat movement. Burroughs, a New York City literary impresario and a homosexual drug addict, later wrote the innovative novel Naked Lunch (1959). Burroughs was then just beginning to experiment with fictional techniques, and his approach of combining spontaneous composition, random associations, and raw confessional autobiographical material appealed to Ginsberg’s need to transform the ecstatic chaos of his life into the controlled substance of art. Their homosexuality was another shared characteristic, and under the influence of Burroughs and the bisexual Kerouac (Ginsberg was temporarily expelled from Columbia when the two were found in bed together), Ginsberg came to regard his homosexuality as an asset rather than a liability, an early example of gay pride. The relationship between the inchoate madness of experience and the organizing principles of poetry is a central theme in Ginsberg’s work. Much of his fascination with the shaping aspect of art is derived from two other notable influences on his style: the eighteenth century English mystic and poet William Blake and the nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman. From Blake, Ginsberg discovered the power of incongruous apocalyptic images, of disjunctive narrative, and of the juxtaposition of mundane events with extraordinary perception. From Whitman, Ginsberg appropriated the effective use of the long line, the catalog technique of accumulating details, and the craft of weaving scraps of autobiography into the whole cloth of historical myth. Ginsberg acknowledged Blake’s influence in the poem “Sunflower Sutra” (1956). Echoing themes from Blake, “Sunflower” contrasts the natural beauty of the world with human beings’ capacity to corrupt it. The poet’s point of view is distinctly dystopian, lamenting the fall from a prelapsarian Eden into the sewer of contemporary America. In his frequently anthologized poem “A Supermarket in California” (1956), Ginsberg addresses Whitman directly, com-
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plaining of the American lack of imagination that converts a vital land of hope and plentitude into a crass commercial wasteland. After being expelled from Columbia University for scrawling pornographic images in the scum of his dormitory window, Ginsberg set off to see the world, traveling on merchant tankers, picking up menial jobs, and living with friends. He eventually did return to graduate from Columbia, and afterward he accepted a job as a market researcher in San Francisco, but the allure of the other side of San Francisco life, the jazzy bohemian arts scene, was too tempting, and Ginsberg soon joined those who congregated around Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, the mecca for the West Coast Beat poets. When Ferlinghetti published the 1956 poem “Howl,” Ginsberg’s career was launched. Along with Kerouac’s On the Road, “Howl” became the most important publication of the Beat movement, a status only underlined when Ferlinghetti was charged with distributing obscene material in publishing it. An extended trial, during which the artistic merits of the poem were thoroughly debated, ended with Ferlinghetti’s acquittal and Ginsberg’s reputation made. In “Howl,” just as Kerouac in his novels attempted to immortalize his circle of friends, Ginsberg portrayed Kerouac and the others as visionary troubadours, “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection.” The poem is at once a history, an account of the exploits of Ginsberg and his friends, and a portrait of a generation Ginsberg idolized as rebels persecuted by a callous society bent on punishing those who refused to conform to rigid standards of behavior. “Howl,” at once vicious and playful, comical and apocalyptic, manages to summarize the philosophic and poetic sensibility of an entire literary movement while simultaneously extending its audience and creating a new subculture in response to it. During the 1960’s and 1970’s Ginsberg became a celebrity of sorts. His earlier involvement with pacifism and Eastern mysticism, and his experiments with drugs, prefigured, defined, and sustained cultural movements as diverse as that of the “hippies,” the radical political Left, and the antiwar movement during the Vietnam conflict. Ginsberg was outspoken in his support for liberal causes, actively working for social and political reforms. In 1994 Stanford University acquired his memorabilia and papers as part of their permanent collection. He died on April 5, 1997, in New York, from complications of liver cancer and hepatitis.
Howl Type of work: Poetry First published: 1956 The protagonists of Howl, Ginsberg’s best-known book, are marginalized because of their rejection of, or failure to measure up to, the social, religious, and sexual values of American capitalism. The poem “Howl,” central to the book, is divided into three sections. Part 1 eulogizes “the best minds of my generation,” whose individual battles with social, religious, and sexual uniformity leave them “de-
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stroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Ginsberg said that his use of the long line in Howl, inspired by Walt Whitman, is an attempt to “free speech for emotional expression.” The poem is structured to give voice to those otherwise silenced by the dominant culture, to produce from their silence a “cry that shivers the cities down to the last radio.” Part 2 focuses on Moloch, the god for whom parents burned their children in sacrifice. Moloch symbolizes the physical and psychological effects of American capitalism. From America’s “mind” of “pure machinery” emerges Moloch’s military-industrial complex, whose bomb threatens to destroy the world. Part 3 is structured as a call-andresponse litany, specifically directed Allen Ginsberg (George Holmes) to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met in 1949 when both were committed to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated, represents the postwar counterculture, all of those whose “madness basically is rebellion against Moloch.” The addendum to the poem, “Footnote to Howl,” celebrates the holy cleansing that follows the apocalyptic confrontation dramatized in the poem. Ginsberg termed crucial those elements of the poem that specifically describe the gay and bisexual practices of his protagonists as “saintly” and “ecstatic.” Drawing from Ginsberg’s experiences as a gay man in the sexually conformist 1940’s and 1950’s, the poem affirms gay eroticism as a natural form of sexual expression, replacing, as he said, “vulgar stereotype with a statement of act.” The sexual explicitness of the poem prompted the San Francisco police to seize Howl and to charge Ginsberg’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, with obscenity. The judge in the case found the book to be “not obscene” because of its “redeeming social importance.” The Howl case remains a landmark victory for freedom of expression in the twentieth century.
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Kaddish Type of work: Poetry First published: 1961 Kaddish is Ginsberg’s elegy for his mother, Naomi. In Kaddish Ginsberg portrays the course of Naomi’s mental illness and its effect on the extended Ginsberg family. The perceptions of Ginsberg, the narrator, are crucial to understanding how sexual and religious themes of identity work in the poem. Naomi’s worsening condition coincides with Ginsberg’s realization as a young boy that he is gay and with his emerging discomfort with traditional American religious institutions. Invoking both “prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem” and “the Buddhist Book of Answers,” section 1 remembers Naomi’s childhood. Naomi passes through major American cultural institutions—school, work, marriage—all of which contribute to her illness. Section 2 details her descent into madness and its harrowing effects on the family. Throughout the poem, Ginsberg seeks rescue from Naomi’s madness yet recognizes that her condition also inspires his own critique of the United States. “Naomi’s mad idealism” frightens him; it also helps him understand the sinister qualities of middle-class American institutions. As he admits that Naomi’s condition caused him sexual confusion, he also confers imaginative inspiration to her. She is the “glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck/ first mystic life”; and it was from her “pained/ head I first took vision.” Unlike Naomi, the truly mad in Kaddish are those incapable of compassion, such as the psychiatric authorities who brutalize Naomi with electroshock treatments, leaving her “tortured and beaten in the skull.” By the end of Kaddish, Ginsberg seeks to redeem Naomi’s life according to the Eastern and Western religious traditions that inform the poem. The final sections of Kaddish seek to transform the trauma of Naomi’s illness into sacred poetry. The key to this transformation is Ginsberg’s revision of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The Kaddish was not said at Naomi’s grave because the required minimum of ten Jewish adults—a minyan, in traditional Judaism—was not present, as required by Jewish law. Therefore, the poem accomplishes what Naomi’s original mourners could not: Ginsberg eulogizes Naomi with his Kaddish, and by doing so he offers his own revision of traditional Judaic law.
Suggested Readings Aronson, Jerry. The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. Video. New York: First Run Icarus Films, 1993. Caveney, Graham. Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Ginsberg, Allen. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996. Preface by Václav Havel. Introduction by Edmund White. Edited by David Carter. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
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Hyde, Lewis, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House, 1969. Landas, John. The Bop Apocalypse. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg. New York: Twayne, 1969. Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 19581963. New York: Grove Press, 2000. _______. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. Morgan, Bill. I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Viking Press, 2006. Portugés, Paul. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978. Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Tonkinson, Carol, ed. Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Contributors: Jeff Johnson and Tony Trigilio
Nikki Giovanni Born: Knoxville, Tennessee; June 7, 1943 African American
Giovanni’s works have earned critical acclaim and have remained in print in an era when poetry typically does not sell. Principal works poetry: Black Feeling, Black Talk, 1968; Black Judgement, 1968; Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, 1970; Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis, 1970; Re: Creation, 1970; Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, 1971 (revised 1987; juvenile); My House, 1972; Ego-Tripping, and Other Poems for Young Readers, 1973 (juvenile); The Women and the Men, 1975; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, 1978; Vacation Time, 1980 (juvenile); Those Who Ride the Night Winds, 1983 (juvenile); Knoxville, Tennessee, 1994 (juvenile); Life: Through Black Eyes, 1995; The Genie in the Jar, 1996 (juvenile); The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, 1996; The Sun Is So Quiet, 1996 (juvenile); Love Poems, 1997; Blues: For All the Changes, 1999; Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, 2002; The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968-1998, 2003; Just for You! The Girls in the Circle, 2004 (juvenile); Acolytes, 2007 nonfiction: Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet, 1971; A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, 1973; A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker, 1974; Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles, 1988; Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, 1992 (Virginia C. Fowler, editor); Racism 101, 1994; The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni, 2003 (includes Gemini, Sacred Cows, and Racism 101) edited texts: Night Comes Softly: Anthology of Black Female Voices, 1970; Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler, 1991 (with Cathee Dennison); Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions, 1994; Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems, 1996; Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes, and Photos of the Keepers of Our Traditions, 1999 When Nikki Giovanni (jee-oh-VAH-nee) began to appear on the literary scene in the late 1960’s, critics praised her work for its themes of militancy, black pride, and revolution. The majority of poems in her volumes, however, address themes such as love, family, and friendship. Her militant poems received more attention, however, and they reflected Giovanni’s own activism. It was not accurate, 443
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therefore, when critics argued that Giovanni abandoned the cause of black militancy in the 1970’s, when her poems became more personal. The change was not as marked as some believed. Giovanni’s work took on a different perspective in 1970, when she became a mother. That year she published Re: Creation, whose themes are black female identity and motherhood. In My House, Giovanni more clearly addresses issues of family, love, and a twofold perspective on life, which is revealed in the two divisions of the book. With poems about the “inside” and “outside,” Giovanni acknowledges the importance of not only the personal but also the world at large. Another dimension of this two-part unity is seen in The Women and the Men. Giovanni’s poetry, over time, also Nikki Giovanni (© Jill Krementz) seems to have undergone another change—an increased awareness of the outside world. After 1978, her poetry reflected her interest in the human condition. The poems became more meditative, more introspective, and eventually more hopeful, focusing on life’s realities. Examined as a whole, Giovanni’s work reveals concerns for identity, self-exploration, and self-realization. These concerns also appear in her works of other genres: recorded poetry, read to music; children’s poetry, which she wrote to present positive images to black children; and essays. Giovanni’s most consistent theme is the continual, evolving exploration of personal identity and individualism amid familial, social, and political realities.
Black Feeling, Black Talk Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968 Although Giovanni’s reputation as a revolutionary poet is based on this work, fewer than half its poems address the theme of revolution. Critics point to oftenquoted incendiary poems in this collection to indicate Giovanni’s revolutionary stance. They also note the poems about political figures and poems addressing
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black identity to illustrate Giovanni’s militancy. These poems are important in this volume, but they are not Giovanni’s sole concern. What has been overlooked are the highly personal poems. In tallying the themes that appear in this work, it becomes apparent that love, loss, and loneliness are important to Giovanni. She also writes personal tributes and reminiscences to those who helped shape her life and ideology. Then there are Giovanni’s personal responses to political events. She mourns the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. She states that the 1960’s were one long funeral day. She also notes atrocities in Germany, Vietnam, and Israel and compares them to 1960’s America. Black Feeling, Black Talk, then, is a compilation of political and personal poetry. Amid calls for revolution and affirmations of blackness is an insistence on maintaining one’s individuality in the face of the political. There is also the importance of acknowledging the contributions of others in one’s development. Thus, what is central to Giovanni’s revolution is helping people to think about new ways of viewing and understanding their lives, personally and politically. Black Feeling, Black Talk is not a call for revolution that will destroy the world. The book is about how people, in the words of its final poem, may “build what we can become when we dream.”
Gemini Type of work: Essays First published: 1971 Nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-five Years of Being a Black Poet offers scenes from Giovanni’s life as a child and mother. However, Gemini is in a sense neither an autobiography nor an extended statement; rather, it is a collection of thirteen essays, about half of which discuss aspects of Giovanni’s life. Readers learn something of Giovanni’s life, but Gemini reveals more of her ideas. All of the essays involve personal observations mingled with political concerns, as the final lines of the essay “400 Mulvaney Street” illustrate: “They had come to say Welcome Home. And I thought Tommy, my son, must know about this. He must know we come from somewhere. That we belong.” These lines are a capsule of Giovanni’s major themes: family and belonging, identity, and one’s relationship to the world. As the people of Knoxville come to hear her, Giovanni realizes her connection to a place and people. Sharing this with her son underscores the importance of family and passing on legacies, a lesson for not only him but also all blacks. To know that they come from somewhere and therefore belong is part of the message in this work. The central message in Gemini is love. Giovanni claims, “If you don’t love your mama and papa then you don’t love yourself.” This includes racial love; Giovanni provides tributes to black writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt and to black musicians
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Lena Horne and Aretha Franklin. Giovanni states that black people “must become the critics and protectors” of black music and literature. Love of oneself leads to a sense of identity: This is Giovanni’s second message. Giovanni cautions blacks against carelessly adopting “white philosophies.” Her advice is to “know who’s playing the music before you dance.” Giovanni discusses respect as an outgrowth of love and identity, particularly for blacks of other nationalities and for the elderly. In Giovanni’s discussion of the black revolution, she emphasizes the need to change the world. She addresses what one should be willing to live for: hope to change the world or some aspect of it. The essays of Gemini combine to give readers a sense of Giovanni, her world, and their world.
My House Type of work: Poetry First published: 1972 In the 1960’s, poetry was to be a witness of the times—“it’s so important to record” (“Records”), but Giovanni’s poetry proved to be her house: My House shows her assimilation and transformation of the world into her castle. In “Poem (For Nina)” from that volume, she begins by asserting that “we are all imprisoned in the castle of our skins”; though her imagination will color her world “Black Gold”: “my castle shall become/ my rendezvous/ my courtyard will bloom with hyacinths and jack-inthe-pulpits/ my moat will not restrict me but will be filled/ with dolphins. . . .” In “A Very Simple Wish” she wants through her poetry to make a patchwork quilt of the world, including all that seems to be left behind by world history: “i’ve a mind to build/ a new world/ want to play.” In My House Giovanni began to exhibit increased sophistication and maturity. Her viewpoint had broadened beyond a rigid black revolutionary consciousness to balance a wide range of social concerns. Her rhymes had also become more pronounced, more lyrical, more gentle. The themes of family love, loneliness, and frustration, which Giovanni had defiantly explored in her earlier works, find much deeper expression in My House. Her change from an incendiary radical to a nurturing poet is traced in the poem “Revolutionary Dreams”: from dreaming “militant dreams/ of taking over america,” she . . . awoke and dug that if i dreamed natural dreams of being a natural woman doing what a woman does when she’s natural i would have a revolution
This changed perspective accords with the conclusion of “When I Die”: “And if ever i touched a life i hope that life knows/ that i know that touching was and still is
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and will/ always be the true/ revolution.” Love and sex form the subject matter of many of her poems. She will “scream and stamp and shout/ for more beautiful beautiful beautiful/ black men with outasight afros” in “Beautiful Black Men” and propose “counterrevolutionary” sex in “Seduction” and “That Day”: “if you’ve got the dough/ then i’ve got the heat/ we can use my oven/ til it’s warm and sweet.” This bold and playful manner, however, is usually modulated by the complications of any long-term relationship between men and women. While she explains in Gemini: “to me sex is an essence. . . . It’s a basic of human relationships. And sex is conflict; it could be considered a miniwar between two people,” marriage is “‘give and take—you give and he takes.’” In “Woman” her acknowledgment of the difficulty of a black man maintaining his self-respect in America has led to her acceptance of his failings: “she decided to become/ a woman/ and though he still refused/ to be a man/ she decided it was all/ right.”
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day Type of work: Poetry First published: 1978 The title poem of this collection hints at the tempering of Giovanni’s vision. When Giovanni published Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, critics viewed it as one of her most somber works. They noted the focus on emotional ups and downs, fear and insecurity, and the weight of everyday responsibilities. The title poem tells of “the gray of my mornings/ Or the blues of every night” in a decade known for “loneliness.” Life is likened to nebulous cotton candy: “The sweet soft essence/ of possibility/ Never quite maturing.” Her attitude tired, her potential stillborn, she is unable to categorize life as easily as before, “To put a three-dimensional picture/ On a one-dimensional surface.” One reason for her growth in vision seems to be her realization of the complexity of a woman’s life. The black woman’s negative self-image depicted in “Adulthood” was not solved by adopting the role of Revolutionary Black Poet. In “Woman Poem,” “Untitled,” “Once a Lady Told Me,” “Each Sunday,” and “The Winter Storm,” the women with compromised lives are other women. In “A Poem Off Center,” however, she includes herself in this condition: “maybe i shouldn’t feel sorry/ for myself/ but the more i understand women/ the more i do.” A comparison of “All I Gotta Do” (“is sit and wait”) to “Choice,” two poems alike in their subject matter and their syncopated beat, shows that a woman’s only choice is to cry.
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Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles Type of work: Essays First published: 1988 A reader of this difficult-to-classify assortment might at first think that the principal topic of the book is humor. In a column in which Giovanni mulls over a race for the Cincinnati City Council, she proposes annexing Northern Kentucky and the Jack Nicklaus Sports Complex. A mock-serious piece warns that handicapped parking spaces may engender a new wave of segregation: Are “white” and “colored” wheelchair zones in the offing? These essays, however, aim at much more than inducing a few chuckles. The author has endured much hardship in her life, and several of her columns portray both her sorrow and her ability to take life as it comes. She describes with moving economy of tone the death of her father from cancer; in the midst of her despair she marvels at the maturity with which her twelve-year-old son responds to his grandfather’s passing. Giovanni’s comments are by no means limited to personal events. She participated actively in the Civil Rights movement, and feminist issues concern her greatly. One can vividly sense the anger she feels over the exploitation of women in pornography. Even on social issues, however, her touch of whimsical humor is rarely absent. Giovanni’s view of the ways in which life and literature relate to each other is yet another of her themes. She strongly opposes a formalist position that regards poetry as a world apart. To her, writing is a way of dealing with life. Although she acknowledges that many of her poems have been occasioned by rage at injustice, her overall outlook is one of accepting life, rather than bemoaning fate. Giovanni is a genuine original; whether she is discussing seat belts or Bob Dylan, she always has some fresh angle to explore.
Racism 101 Type of work: Essays First published: 1994 Many of these essays are autobiographical, and most contain biographical elements. Nikki Giovanni identifies her intellectual origins as like those of Alex Haley, listening to her grandparents talk evenings on their porch in Knoxville, Tennessee. She tells about her family, about growing up in Ohio and Tennessee, raising her son, returning to her family home after her father’s stroke, accepting and then fighting to keep a professorship at Virginia Polytechnic. Only two of the essays speak directly about her practice and aims as a writer: “Meatloaf: A View of Poetry” and “Appalachian Elders: The Warm Hearth Writers’ Workshop.” Ideas about her art appear in many pieces, however, including especially her reviews of Spike Lee’s Malcolm and of the works of Toni Morrison.
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The title, Racism 101, suggests that the book will be a primer on American racism, but this is not quite the case. Giovanni’s observations of American culture often focus on problems of racial justice. In “Remembering Fisk . . . Thinking About Du Bois,” she excoriates black conservatives for adopting a form of individualism that denigrates their cultural roots: “No one chooses misery, and our efforts to make this a choice will be the damnation of our souls.” Her title piece offers practical advice to black students on Virginia Polytechnic’s predominantly white campus. Two other topics that recur in these pieces are the positions of black women and the praise of black achievers. From her “Author’s Note” to the “Postscript,” Giovanni’s collection is unified by her voice, which is intimate, down-home, friendly, eloquent, tough, and—especially when it is a matter of justice—uncompromising. Readers who know her poetry will recognize her voice here.
Blues: For All the Changes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1999 As the twentieth century came to a close, readers found a bit of the younger, more political Giovanni in several of the poems of her collection Blues: For All the Changes. While sociopolitical commentary in poetry often fails because it loses touch with humanity, Giovanni continues to keep focus on people: Here she spars with ills that confront Americans, but every struggle has a human face. There is a real estate developer who is destroying the woodland adjacent to Giovanni’s home in preparation for a new housing development (“Road Rage”). There is a young basketball star (“Iverson”), who, when harassed for his youth and style, finds a compassionate but stern sister in Giovanni. And there is President Bill Clinton, who is subject to Giovanni’s opinions (“The President’s Penis”). Giovanni writes in this collection with an authority informed by experience and shared with heart-stealing candor. Pop culture and pleasure find a place in the collection as well. She writes about tennis player Pete Sampras and her own tennis playing, and she pays tribute to Jackie Robinson, soul singer Regina Belle, the late blues singer Alberta Hunter, and Betty Shabazz, the late widow of Malcolm X. She also writes fondly of her memories of going to the ballpark with her father to see the Cincinnati Reds. Her battle with illness is captured in “Me and Mrs. Robin,” which deals with Giovanni’s convalescence from cancer surgery and the family of robins she observed with delight and sympathy from her window. Yet this gentle poem also revisits the real estate developer, who, the poem notes, has destroyed trees and “confused the birds and murdered the possum and groundhog.” As she identifies with an injured robin, Giovanni’s language invokes a gnostic cosmogony: God takes care of individuals; Mother Nature wreaks havoc left and right. “No one ever says ‘Mother Nature have mercy.’ Mother nature don’t give a damn,” Giovanni says; “that’s why God is so important.”
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Suggested Readings Baldwin, James, and Nikki Giovanni. A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973. Bigsby, C. W. E. The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Fowler, Virginia C. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1992. Giovanni, Nikki. Conversations with Nikki Giovanni. Edited by Virginia C. Fowler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Gould, Jean. “Nikki Giovanni.” In Modern American Women Poets. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984. McDowell, Margaret B. “Groundwork for a More Comprehensive Criticism of Nikki Giovanni.” In Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, edited by Joseph Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1986. Walters, Jennifer. “Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove: Poets Redefining.” The Journal of Negro History 85, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 210-217. White, Evelyn C. “The Poet and the Rapper.” Essence 30, no. 1 (May, 1999): 122124. Contributors: Paula C. Barnes, Sarah Hilbert, and Honora Rankine-Galloway
Joanne Greenberg (Hannah Green) Born: Brooklyn, New York; September 24, 1932 Jewish
Drawing on her Jewish heritage in many of her novels, Greenberg will be best remembered for her sensitive and illuminating portrayal of mental illness in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Principal works long fiction: The King’s Persons, 1963; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, 1964 (as Hannah Green); The Monday Voices, 1965; In This Sign, 1968; Founder’s Praise, 1976; A Season of Delight, 1981; The Far Side of Victory, 1983; Simple Gifts, 1986; Age of Consent, 1987; Of Such Small Differences, 1988; No Reck’ning Made, 1993; Where the Road Goes, 1998; Appearances, 2006 short fiction: Summering, 1966; Rites of Passage, 1972; High Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1979; With the Snow Queen, 1991 Joanne Greenberg’s novels and short stories made her an important voice for those members of American society who have become alienated because of an illness, weakness, or obsession that makes it difficult for them to communicate with the mainstream culture. She was born Joanne Goldenberg to Julius Lester Goldenberg and Rosalie (Bernstein) Goldenberg. Although she came from a Jewish background and has drawn on that background and heritage in some of her writing, she received almost no formal religious training. She earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from American University, and in 1955 she married Albert Greenberg, whom she had met at the university. During her teenage years, she had been treated for schizophrenia and eventually institutionalized. Her therapist was Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, an active proponent of the use of psychoanalysis for schizophrenia patients (in contradiction of Sigmund Freud, who, though he had originated the psychoanalytic method, did not believe that it could be used for such patients). In the course of the therapy, the two women formed a close relationship and planned to collaborate on a book about schizophrenia. When Fromm-Reichmann died in 1957, Greenberg decided to undertake the project herself by writing a fictionalized account of her illness in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. 451
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Her career as a social worker and psychoanalyst brought Greenberg into contact with the subcultures of the handicapped and disadvantaged, whom she represented in several of her works. In her third novel, The Monday Voices, she deals with the frustrations of a social worker as he tries to find help for his clients. In the 1960’s, when Albert Greenberg was working with the deaf community around Denver, they both began to learn sign language. Greenberg’s fourth novel, In This Sign, follows Janice and Abel Ryder, a deaf couple, through nearly fifty years of marriage. Greenberg accurately depicts the communication between the couple: All the words and expressions they use can be said in the limited vocabulary of signing. Greenberg returned to writing about the deaf community in Of Such Small Differences, where she describes the particular difficulties of those who are both deaf and blind. Another cluster of Greenberg’s works focuses on religious themes. Her first novel, The King’s Persons, is a historical account of anti-Semitism in twelfth century England. Founder’s Praise describes the founding of a new religious sect in a small American town, the depth of feeling of the new adherents, and their sense of betrayal as the sect begins to die. A Season of Delight shows a middle-class Jewish housewife trying to understand her children’s rejection of their religious heritage. (This novel also includes vivid descriptions of the workings of a small-town fire department and rescue team.) Through the protagonists of these novels Greenberg shows that feelings about religion can be just as uncontrollable and alienating as the handicapping conditions described in others of Greenberg’s works. Yet whatever struggles she believes adherence to religion may create, Greenberg treats religion seriously and with respect. Greenberg’s later novels usually have contemporary settings and revolve around a central character. These characters face ethical and deep emotional issues in their efforts to survive. Eric Gordon, in The Far Side of Victory, drives drunk, killing several people in another car, and then falls in love with one of the survivors. Reconstructive surgeon Daniel Sanborn of Age of Consent is examined as he tries to repair lives after his displacement from Israel. Greenberg takes a broader look at family dynamics, social issues, and American life in Where the Road Goes, a wellcrafted succession of letters between a traveling grandmother and her family in Colorado. Greenberg’s short stories deal with many of the same themes as do her novels, and they present the same range of characters and settings. The stories in Summering, Rites of Passage, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors deal with good and evil, faith and doubt, and the need for communication. The characters include the deaf, the isolated, the insane, the aged, the self-destructive, and the questioning— in short, the kind of people who are usually ignored. As in the novels, not all the characters find happy endings. In her fourth collection, With the Snow Queen, Greenberg focuses on connections in her usual cast of characters—connections between people and others, and connections between people and themselves. Although Greenberg’s characters often face frightening illness or handicapping conditions, she avoids the trap of excessive sentimentality or predictability. Her protagonists demonstrate the same capacity for selfishness and pride as everyone
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else, but they do have special needs that are not always being met by society, and Greenberg intends her work to be a plea in their behalf. None of Greenberg’s later works was as popular as I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, but all have been greeted with respect and praise from the critics, and they have drawn a modest audience of faithful readers. This is partly a response to the fact that Greenberg has, throughout her writing career, involved herself in her Colorado community. She has been a teacher’s aide in a rural school teaching the history of the English language, a certified medical technician with the rescue team of her local fire department, and an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Colorado School of Mines. She has also served as an interpreter and guide at conventions for the deaf and blind and has delivered lectures on mental health care for the deaf.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Type of work: Novel First published: 1964 In this novel, her most popular and the one that eventually made her famous, Greenberg chronicles her treatment for schizophrenia. The protagonist, Deborah Blau, who suffers from schizophrenia, creates a mythical kingdom called Yr to which she retreats when reality becomes too overwhelming. She attempts suicide, is hospitalized, and undergoes treatment with a Dr. Fried, who is patterned on Fromm-Reichmann. The book was widely praised by critics and psychoanalysts alike for its sensitive and illuminating portrayal of mental illness, but it did not sell well until it was published in paperback, when it attracted a large audience, especially among teenage girls. Millions of copies were sold in more than a dozen languages, and the novel was made into a film in 1977. The title was also used in a popular song, and the expression “I never promised you a rose garden” became a commonplace in American English. Although she had published one novel, The King’s Persons, under her own name, Greenberg chose to publish I Never Promised You a Rose Garden under the pseudonym Hannah Green. Because it was commonly believed in the 1960’s that schizophrenia was incurable, Greenberg wanted to keep her own mental illness a secret to protect her two young sons. It was not until the 1970’s that she acknowledged her authorship.
Of Such Small Differences Type of work: Novel First published: 1988 Greenberg here creates a hauntingly perceptive and poetic tour de force that proves her one of America’s best storytellers. Entering John Moon’s life is to enter a world
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of synesthesia, unexpectedly abrupt accidents, inexplicable abandonments, and ceaseless quests into unknown areas that may be mapped only by stepping carefully through endlessly dark silence. Blind at birth and permanently deafened at age nine by his drunken father, John is twenty-six, lives alone in a Denver apartment, and works at “the workshop” when the story begins. He is also a poet, earning money for his poems that are printed on Handicards and sold to hearing-sighted people. Trapped more by the expectations of those around him than by his own physical limitations, John finds his life “continually being defined and interpreted to him because direct experience was too perilous to dare.” Likewise, his publisher wants only poems which deemphasize human differences and speak of life from the perspective of a hearing-sighted person; thus John derives poems from stories he has read in Braille by such writers as Herman Melville and Charles Dickens. Falling in love with Leda, a hearing-sighted actress, changes John’s life and poetry profoundly. Yet there are complications: John’s deaf-blind friends warn him against the relationship, his family thinks Leda is using him, and Leda’s friends think John is using her. John’s triumphs in overcoming obstacles in the material world are extended here into triumphs of the heart over mental constructs that often darken rather than illuminate human potential.
Suggested Readings Diamond, R. “The Archetype of Death and Renewal in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” Perspectives in Psychiatric Care 8 (January-March, 1975): 21-24. Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda. “Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Discusses the ‘Rose Garden’ Case.” Psychiatry 45, no. 2 (1982): 128-136. Greenberg, Joanne. “Go Where You’re Sent: An Interview with Joanne Greenberg.” Interview by K. L. Gibble. Christian Century 102 (November 20, 1985): 1063-1067. _______. Interview by Susan Koppelman. Belles Lettres 8, no. 4 (Summer, 1993): 32. _______. “Joanne Greenberg.” Interview by Sybil S. Steinberg. Publishers Weekly 234 (September 23, 1988): 50-51. Wisse, Ruth. “Rediscovering Judaism.” Review of A Season of Delight, by Joanne Greenberg. Commentary 73 (May, 1982): 84-87. Wolfe, K. K., and G. K. Wolfe. “Metaphors of Madness: Popular Psychological Narratives.” Journal of Popular Culture 10 (Spring, 1976): 895-907. Contributor: Cynthia A. Bily
Jessica Hagedorn Born: Manila, Philippines; 1949 Filipino American
Hagedorn expresses the “tough and noble” lives of Asian immigrants who feel only partially assimilated. Principal works drama: Chiquita Banana, pb. 1972; Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon, pr. 1977 (with Thulani Davis and Ntozake Shange); Mango Tango, pr. 1978; Tenement Lover: no palm trees/in new york city, pr. 1981, pb. 1990; Holy Food, pr. 1988 (staged; pr. 1989, radio play); Teenytown, pr. 1990 (with Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley); Black: Her Story, pr., pb. 1993; Airport Music, pr. 1994 (with Han Ong); Silent Movie, pr. 1997 (as part of The Square); Dogeaters, pr. 1998, pb. 2003 (adaptation of her novel) long fiction: Dogeaters, 1990; The Gangster of Love, 1997; Dream Jungle, 2003 poetry: The Woman Who Thought She Was More than a Samba, 1978; Visions of a Daughter, Foretold, 1994 screenplay: Fresh Kill, 1994 edited texts: Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 1993; Charlie Chan Is Dead II: At Home in the World, an Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, 2004 miscellaneous: Dangerous Music, 1975; Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, 1981; Danger and Beauty, 1993 Born and raised in the Philippines, Jessica Hagedorn (HA-geh-dohrn) experienced the United States through the eyes of her mother and through images provided by American textbooks and movies. “The colonization of our imagination was relentless,” she has said. Only when she started living in California in 1963 did she begin to appreciate what was precious in the Filipino extended family, a cultural feature partially left behind. In California, she began to feel allied with persons of various national origins who challenged American myths. Kenneth Rexroth, who had been patron of the Beat generation in San Francisco during the 1950’s, introduced her to the poets who gathered at the City Lights Bookstore. In 1973, Rexroth helped her publish her first poems, later collectively titled “The Death of Anna May Wong.” Her principal concern was the exploitation of Filipino workers. Her poetry became more and more influenced by the rhythms of popular street music. In 1975, she gathered together a volume of prose and poetry called Dangerous Music. That same year Hagedorn formed her band, The West Coast Gangster 455
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Choir, and sang lyrics of her own invention with them. In 1978, she left San Francisco without her band and established herself in New York City. There, along with Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis, she performed her poetry at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. In 1981, Hagedorn published her second collection of mixed prose and poetry. During the 1980’s she worked on her first novel, Dogeaters, which exposes corruption in her homeland as a result of Ferdinand Marcos’s years of “constitutional authoritarianism.” Dogeaters is also a novel that she has described as a love letter to her motherland. The characters in her novel for the most part are trapped by consumerism; this plight is caused by the Filipinos’ long history as a colony and by their dreams of success, which too often come from American soap operas. Hagedorn’s work is devoted to substituting for such stereotypes the complexities visible among people in Metro Manila and the urban reaches of the American coasts. Her anthology, Charlie Chan Is Dead, signifies a new image for Asians.
Dangerous Music Type of work: Poetry First published: 1975 The poems in Dangerous Music were composed after Hagedorn began “discovering myself as a Filipino-American writer” in California. Orientalist Kenneth Rexroth had placed five of her early poems in his 1973 anthology, Four Young Women Poets. “The Death of Anna May Wong,” included in that edition, signified the poet’s rejection of Hollywood stereotypes of Asian women as demure or exotically sinister. Dangerous Music continues the author’s search for authentic images of non-Europeans that describe her own situation as well as those of other minorities. The intensity of many of these lyrics, written while she was performing with her West Coast Gangster Choir, became a way of expressing whole dimensions of society largely ignored or misunderstood by generations of European Americans. Although on the page such poems resemble songs without music, their occasional arrangement in ballad quatrains sometimes imitates blues music. The influence of Latino or African music is visible in the more jagged, syncopated lines of such poems as “Latin Music in New York” or “Canto Negro.” The cultural environment that is so much a part of the voices she assumes in Dangerous Music can readily be imagined. “Something About You,” for example, affectionately connects Hagedorn with fellow artists Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis, with whom she performed poems set to music for New York’s Public Theater. Other poems identify her with Puerto Rican or Cuban musicians. More typical poems, however, describe a love-hate relationship with the American Dream. In “Natural Death,” a Cuban refugee seems satisfied with fantasies of cosmetic splendor, though warned about bodies buried in saran wrap on a California beach. Loneliness and anger are conveyed by the mocking refrain: “o the grandeur of it.” Yet the Philippines, which is remembered in “Sometimes” (“life is very cheap”), is equally far from being ideal. “Justifiable Homicide” warns of urban dangers anywhere in
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the world, when differences among people become cause for mutual indifference. The only defense against the insanity that comes from cultural and economic stress is found in singing, according to “Sorcery” and “Easter Sunday,” even if the songs themselves are passionate outcries of pain, not lullabies. The unacceptable alternative to release through song is to surrender one’s memories of better dreams or, as in the case of “The Blossoming of Bongbong,” the one prose fantasy included with these poems, total forgetfulness of one’s personal identity.
Danger and Beauty
Jessica Hagedorn (Nancy Wong)
Type of work: Poetry First published: 1993 Before her novel Dogeaters, Hagedorn had published poetry in anthologies such as Four Young Women Poets, and two books of her short fiction were issued by an underground press. Danger and Beauty reprints some of this material; it also includes some of her more recent works. New or old, the writing is strangely haunting literary experimentation. Music consumed Hagedorn during the 1970’s when she formed her band, the West Coast Gangster Choir, and music pulses here in her language. The unconventional melodies may not suit everyone, but words rise boldly off the pages none the less, demanding to be heard. Music also seems ever-present in the lives of most of Hagedorn’s characters; the persona in “Seeing You Again Makes Me Wanna Wash the Dishes” muses against the background of “martha & the vandellas/ crooning/ come/ and/ get/ these/ memories.” However, music is not always such innocent stuff. In her poem “Sorcery,” Hagedorn looks at the power of words to create illusion. She says, “They most likely/ be saying them,/ breathing poems/ so rhythmic/ you can’t help/ but dance./ and once/ you start dancing/ to words/ you might never stop.” Hagedorn’s second book, Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, is reprinted in its entirety. Here, her voice becomes fierce and hard. In the novella Pet Food, the teenage Filipino narrator, George Sand, is writing a musical about her life on the streets of San Francisco and tells of sex, drugs, and murder as part of daily existence. This work is representative of Danger and Beauty, an amalgam of Filipino roots and urban American experiences that never fully blends. In “Carnal,” one
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of the more recent pieces, Hagedorn returns to San Francisco and says, “I’m home, in spite of myself.” It has been a long journey, and some readers may have a similar experience with this collection. Others, though, may find that the underlying beat of such personal and artistic exploration resonates with them in powerful ways.
The Gangster of Love Type of work: Novel First published: 1997 The protagonist of this novel, Rocky, is a strong, literary-minded, ambitious girl with no idea of what she wants to do with her life. Her older brother, Voltaire, is no better off. They live with their stubborn, beauty-queen mother and help her with her catering business. Voltaire often brings home street artists, and one time brings home Elvis Chang. Rocky and Elvis immediately move in together. Soon after Rocky meets Elvis, she meets Keiko. Keiko is an artist of obscure ethnic origin who swallows fire on the streets for cash. Rocky, Elvis, and Keiko all decide to move to New York and soon after Rocky starts her band, The Gangsters of Love, with Elvis as the guitarist. In New York, Rocky lives a decade of her life with no direction. Her life is a constant rotation of trying to earn enough money to keep the band going, working with the band, and partying with drugs and alcohol. Keiko becomes a famous artist, and eventually Elvis and Rocky break up. Once she reaches her thirties, Rocky begins to realize that this pointless lifestyle is not what she wants, so when she becomes pregnant she decides to keep the baby and make some changes. Throughout the dead-end courses that Rocky always seems to choose, there is threaded the rich heritage of her Filipino upbringing. The decisions she makes are based on the unusual circumstances of her life; the navigation between the clashing cultures of the Philippines and the United States. After she gives birth to her daughter, Venus, and her mother dies, Rocky realizes that she has been running away from her life and her past. The band and partying were only a means of escape. Yet it is not until she is called to her father’s sickbed in the Philippines that she realizes how far she has run trying to escape who she is. It is then that she finds a sense of closure to her extended youth, when she finally grows up.
Suggested Readings Ancheta, Shirley. Review of Danger and Beauty, by Jessica Hagedorn. Amerasia Journal 20, no. 1 (1994). Bloom, Harold. “Jessica Hagedorn.” In Asian American Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997. Casper, Leonard. “Bangugot and the Philippine Dream in Hagedorn.” Pilipinas 15 (1990).
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Doyle, Jacqueline. “‘A Love Letter to My Motherland’: Maternal Discourses in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 4, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 1-25. Evangelista, Susan. “Jessica Hagedorn and Manila Magic.” MELUS 18, no. 4 (1993/1994). Hau, Caroline. “Dogeaters, Postmodernism, and the ‘Worlding’ of the Philippines.” In Philippine Post-Colonial Studies: Essay on Language and Literature. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1993. Jenkins, Joyce. “Jessica Hagedorn: An Interview with a Filipina Novelist.” In The Asian Pacific American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, edited by George J. Leonard. New York: Garland, 1999. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Mendible, Myra. “Desiring Images: Spectacle and Representation in Dogeaters.” Critique 43, no. 3 (2002). Quintana, Alvina E. “Borders Be Damned: Creolizing Literary Traditions.” Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (1999). Contributor: Leonard Casper
Janet Campbell Hale Born: Riverside, California; January 11, 1946 Native American
Hale’s books present the trials and tribulations of life as a Native American both on the reservation and in urban America. Principal works long fiction: The Owl’s Song, 1974; The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, 1985; Women on the Run, 1999 poetry: Custer Lives in Humboldt County, and Other Poems, 1978 nonfiction: Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, 1993 Janet Campbell Hale, a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe of Northern Idaho, was born in Riverside, California, on January 11, 1946, the youngest of four daughters of Nicholas Patrick Campbell, a full-blooded Coeur d’Alene tribal member, and Margaret O’Sullivan Campbell, who was part Kootenay Indian and part Irish. A brother died in infancy a year before Hale’s birth. She lived with her parents on the reservation until the age of ten. All of her sisters were married by that time, and she and her mother and father lived in a rural, isolated area near Tacoma, Washington. Their home was twenty miles removed from their nearest neighbor. It had no electricity or running water, and temperatures in that region sometimes dropped to 40 degrees below zero. As an American Indian who lived both on tribal reservations and in urban American society, Hale experienced life in different cultures and endured the prejudice that exists against people of her heritage. Her books present the trials and tribulations of life under these circumstances and the battles waged to overcome them. Hale suffered verbal and psychological abuse from her mother and, when they lived at home, her siblings. Hale’s father was an alcoholic who abused her mother. After leaving to escape her alcoholic husband, Margaret Campbell and her daughter lived in three states; Janet attended twenty-one schools. Her mother was an intelligent but uneducated woman who denied her Indian roots. Because she was uneducated, she was limited to working at menial jobs. At the age of twelve, Hale lived with her mother in the Yakima tribal reservation town of Wapato, Washington. She remained in poverty throughout her childhood and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. She always knew, though, that she was destined to write. Hale left home and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There she met and married Arthur Dudley III and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts. During this short-lived marriage she had a son, Aaron Nicholas. Hale was abused by her white 460
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husband, and, after one year of marriage, she and Dudley divorced in 1965. She moved to San Francisco. Single, uneducated, and with a child, she struggled to provide for herself and her son. A turning point in her life arrived when, at the age of twenty-one, she learned of an open admissions, tuition-free program at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) that permitted her to attend without having completed high school. She was able to place her son in a government-funded day care program while she attended college. Enrolling in CCSF enabled her to gain confidence and self-esteem. She completed her studies at CCSF in 1968. While attending school, she received a grade of D in one of her writing courses. This discouraged her from writing, and she decided to study law. She enrolled in Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. There she met her second husband, Stephen Dinsmore Hale. In 1970 they married and had a daughter, Jennifer Elizabeth. Hale earned a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from Berkeley in 1974. She later attended the University of California, Davis, where she earned a master of arts degree in English in 1984. Hale’s writing career began in her childhood. At the age of nine she wrote poetry, which she continued throughout her teenage years. In 1978 she published a book of poems titled Custer Lives in Humboldt County, and Other Poems. Her first novel, The Owl’s Song, was published in 1974. In this novel, Hale draws upon her experiences as a young American Indian seeking a better life away from the reservation. The book parallels Hale’s life, and it speaks of the prejudices she has encountered. In 1985 Hale’s second novel, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, was published. This book received literary acclaim and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Imprisoned and trapped between two worlds, Cecelia seeks her identity amid difficult odds. She is an American Indian caught between ties to her past and her culture and a world in which she is not truly accepted. After she is jailed for drunk driving, it is discovered that, in the past, she committed welfare fraud. Cecelia Capture’s life in many ways parallels the life of Janet Campbell Hale in that both had alcoholic fathers and abusive mothers. Hale’s fourth book, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, published in 1993, consists of autobiographical essays. Women on the Run was published in 1999. In addition to being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, Hale received literary distinction in being awarded the New York Poetry Day Award in 1964 and the American Book Award for Bloodlines in 1994. She has worked as an educator, holding numerous teaching positions at colleges and universities, including the University of Oregon, Western Washington University, and the University of California, Davis. Also an artist, she painted what would become the cover of Women on the Run, as well as a mural at the Coeur d’Alene tribal school.
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The Jailing of Cecelia Capture Type of work: Novel First published: 1985 The Jailing of Cecelia Capture was Hale’s first adult novel, and in it she skillfully constructed a poignant tale that provides a keen look into the life of a modern Native American woman. In this absorbing character study, the protagonist, Cecelia Capture Welles, is a thirty-year-old law student, wife, and mother. She is jailed on a drunk-driving charge the night of her birthday and reflects back on her life in an effort to understand how she arrived at this point. Cecelia’s childhood on a reservation in Idaho and in various western slum communities was marked by a father who drank, a nagging mother, and indifferent older sisters. A runaway at sixteen, Cecelia secures a job as a waitress, then meets a young soldier about to depart for Vietnam. She becomes pregnant, the man is killed, and Cecelia becomes an unwed mother on welfare. While struggling to eke out a living for her child as she attends college, she meets and marries one of her former instructors. Cecelia remains dissatisfied and unhappy and decides to enroll in a law school in another state, against her husband’s wishes. After being arrested, Cecelia realizes that she has known many kinds of prison, some worse than the reality of jail. For years, she has tried to live her life by other people’s standards and rules. She realizes that most of her actions have been reactions to those around her, instead of an acting out of her own desires. This realization signifies the beginning of her freedom.
Suggested Readings Bataille, Gretchen M., and Laurie Lisa, eds. Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2001. Charles, Jim. “Contemporary American Indian Life in The Owl’s Song and ‘Smoke Signals.’” English Journal 90, no. 3 (January, 2001): 54-59. Hale, Frederick. Janet Campbell Hale. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Women on the Run, by Janet Campbell Hale. Publishers Weekly 246, no. 39 (September 27, 1999): 71. Contributor: Vivian R. Alexander
Alex Haley Born: Ithaca, New York; August 11, 1921 Died: Seattle, Washington; February 10, 1992 African American
Haley’s Roots, a monumental chronicle of seven generations of Haley’s African American ancestors launched a genealogy craze among Americans of all ethnicities, not just African Americans. Principal works long fiction: Roots: The Saga of an American Family, 1976; A Different Kind of Christmas, 1988; Alex Haley’s Queen: The Story of an American Family, 1993 (with David Stevens); Mama Flora’s Family, 1998 (with Stevens) teleplay: Palmerstown, U.S.A., 1980 nonfiction: The Playboy Interviews, 1993 (Murray Fisher, editor) edited text: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965 Alex Haley (HAY-lee) was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1921 to Bertha George Palmer and Simon Alexander Haley, graduate students at Cornell University. As a young boy, Haley moved with his family back to his parents’ hometown of Henning, Tennessee. Growing up in Henning surrounded by a large extended family, Haley and his younger brothers enjoyed listening to their grandmother and aunts tell stories about their family’s history. One story that particularly fascinated Haley was the tale of a slave ancestor named Kunta Kinte, also referred to as “the African,” who had arrived on a ship that landed in a place called “Naplis”—which Haley much later learned was Annapolis, Maryland—and worked on a plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. After attending teacher’s college in North Carolina for two years, Haley joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. In 1941, he married Nannie Branch, with whom he had two children, Lydia and William. Haley served as a mess boy and later as a cook at the beginning of his Coast Guard career, but he took up writing as a hobby when he found that his writing skills were in demand among coworkers who needed help composing love letters. This experience led Haley to try his hand as a romance writer, and he submitted numerous romance stories to popular magazines, but without success. Undaunted, Haley next tried his hand at history, writing mainly about the history of the Coast Guard, and he published several of these articles in magazines. In 1949, Haley was promoted to the position of Coast Guard journalist, a position that he held until his retirement from service in 1958. After retiring from the Coast Guard, Haley authored a successful series of articles 463
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in Playboy magazine about prominent African Americans, including jazz musician Miles Davis, boxer Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), and Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, among others. His Playboy interview with Malcolm X led Haley to take on a larger project, which became his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965. Haley met with Malcolm X frequently over a twoyear period to conduct the interviews for the book, which sold six million copies and was translated into eight languages. Its critical and popular acclaim helped Haley obtain a contract with the publisher Doubleday to write his next book, Roots. Haley’s first marriage ended in 1964, and he married Juliette Collins, with whom he had one child, Cynthia, before their divorce in 1972. Between the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965 and Roots in 1976, Haley spent most of his time conducting the painstaking historical and genealogical research for Roots. His research ultimately led him to Gambia, West Africa, where he met a griot, or ancestral storyteller, who told Haley the African side of his family’s stories about Kunta Kinte. Haley describes this encounter as the “peak experience” of his life. In 1976, Roots was published and immediately became a best seller. Almost overnight, the book sparked a genealogy fad among Americans of all ethnicities but particularly among African Americans. Read by millions, the story of Roots became even more well known in 1977 when it was adapted for television as a miniseries that was viewed by 130 million people. Not long after the publication of Roots and the airing of the miniseries, several
Alex Haley (AP/Wide World Photos)
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writers brought plagiarism lawsuits against Haley. Although judges dismissed two of the suits, Haley paid $650,000 in an out-of-court settlement to Harold Courlander, author of a 1967 novel called The African. Some people believe that Haley’s settlement payment was an admission of guilt; others believe that Haley agreed to the payment simply to avoid a lengthy trial. A few years later, several historians questioned whether Roots was historically accurate and whether Haley’s genealogical research was reliable. However, despite questions about its authenticity, Roots continues to be important for its influence on popular culture and for its realistic portrayal of slavery and the lives of African Americans. Haley died of cardiac arrest in 1992 in Seattle, Washington. He was seventy years old.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1965 Although the author of this autobiography is the legendary black activist Malcolm X, Haley in many ways is the book’s creator. To conduct the interviews that would become The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley met with Malcolm X almost daily throughout 1963 and 1964. According to Haley, Malcolm insisted that the story be told in his own words, with no “biographical interpretation” on Haley’s part. This limited Haley’s role as a biographer: Because he followed Malcolm’s ban on interpretation, the reader learns only what Malcolm chooses to reveal. However, despite this rather significant limitation, Haley’s work is a success. He managed to take the raw data of hundreds of hours of interviews and weave together a life story that is not only coherent but also powerfully lucid, revealing to a great extent the logical development of Malcolm X’s theories about race and religion. However misguided some of Malcolm X’s racial beliefs seem, Haley’s articulate writing serves to create understanding—understanding of how these beliefs make a great deal of sense in the world inhabited by Malcolm X and millions of other young men like him. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was named by Time magazine as one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Some critics have found it difficult to evaluate Roots because it is unclear whether the book is essentially fact or essentially fiction. Although based on genealogical and historical research, it is not a book of history, because most of its details and dialogue are (by necessity) invented. However, unlike most historical fiction, Roots
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is much more than a fictional story placed against a real historical background, with a few famous historical figures making cameo appearances. Haley himself called the book “faction,” a mix of fact and fiction. Roots opens with the birth of Kunta Kinte in 1750 and tells the story of his childhood in a Muslim family, part of a Mandinka tribe in the small Gambian village of Juffure in West Africa. One day when Kunta is about seventeen, he is captured and endures the horrors of the Middle Passage—the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on a crowded, stinking, disease-ridden slave ship, an experience shared by perhaps 20 million Africans over the four hundred years of the slave trade. Landing at Annapolis and arriving at a plantation in Virginia, Kunta is shocked to find that the other black people there are not Africans—they speak English, practice Christianity, and, worst of all, seem to accept the fact that they are slaves. Kunta vows never to assimilate, and for this he endures unspeakably brutal treatment. His African ways and stubborn individuality become the tales and legends of his descendants: his daughter Kizzy, who is sold away from her parents as a teenager; Kizzy’s son, the colorful character Chicken George, born of rape by Kizzy’s plantation owner; and all the generations down to Alex Haley’s own grandparents, aunts, and parents, who share stories about Kunta, “the African,” with Haley and his brothers. Critics who consider Roots to be a work of history have sometimes faulted it for containing historical inaccuracies. For instance, it is unlikely that Kunta’s village, Juffure, was as peaceful and democratic in the eighteenth century as Haley portrays it, and it is also doubtful whether Kunta’s northern Virginia plantation would have produced cotton in the late 1700’s. These kinds of factual errors bother some critics, but others overlook them and judge the book on its literary merits rather than its historical correctness. The literary merits of Roots are many. Most important is the skill with which Haley portrays the reality of slavery and the slave trade. Haley’s writing shatters the myth of the happy-go-lucky slave who loves his master and has no desire to be freed. Haley was not the first writer to portray slavery realistically, but he was the first to reach a mass audience of Americans of all colors and ethnicities. This feat was partly the result of perfect timing. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s had made some progress in changing mainstream attitudes toward African Americans, so Roots was able to find a wide audience that might not have been ready to hear the book’s message twenty years earlier. However, the book’s success also is a result of its compelling story line and characters. Haley’s skillful writing easily draws readers in, helping them identify with and care about the characters’ triumphs and sorrows. Roots received a 1977 National Book Award, and Haley was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for outstanding achievement by a black American. Roots also succeeds in its resonance with African Americans whose family histories were lost or obscured by the institution of slavery. The book elicited a very personal response among many African Americans, who felt that Roots had returned their identity to them. Beyond the personal scale, however, the novel
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changed American culture by demonstrating that it was possible to do serious historical research into African American history and genealogy. Indeed, the study of African American history in schools and colleges became commonplace only after the publication of Roots. Roots has a universal appeal that accounts for its commercial success. Although it tells the unique story of African Americans, it also tells a story with which all Americans can identify. Most Americans’ ancestors originally were settlers from other continents. Just like Haley’s family, many American families tell stories about their forebears and raise their children to know their roots. Finally, all Americans can sympathize with what many believe to be the worst horror of slavery—not the beatings or the lack of freedom but the forced separation of families. For these reasons, Roots found a receptive audience not only among African Americans but also among Americans of all ethnicities and backgrounds.
Suggested Readings Blayney, Michael Steward. “Roots and the Noble Savage.” North Dakota Quarterly 54 (Winter, 1986): 1-17. Courlander, Harold. “Kunta Kinte’s Struggle to Be African.” Phylon 47 (December, 1986): 294-302. Demarest, David P., Jr. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: Beyond Didacticism.” College Language Association Journal 16 (1972). Gerber, David. “Haley’s Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry into the Nature of Popular Phenomenon.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (Fall, 1977): 87-111. Haley, Alex. Interview by Jeffrey Elliot. Negro History Bulletin 41, no. 1 (January/ February, 1978): 782-785. Miller, R. Baxter. “Kneeling at the Fireplace: Black Vulcan—Roots and the Double Artificer.” MELUS 9 (Spring, 1982): 73-84. Othow, Helen Chavis. “Roots and the Heroic Search for Identity.” College Language Association Journal 26 (March, 1983): 311-324. Pinsker, Sanford. “Magic Realism, Historical Truth, and the Quest for a Liberating Identity: Reflections on Alex Haley’s Roots and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” In Black American Prose Theory, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Vol. 1 in Studies in Black American Literature. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1984. Staples, Robert. “A Symposium on Roots.” The Black Scholar 8, no. 7 (May, 1977): 36-42. Tucker, Lauren R., and Hemant Shah. “Race and the Transformation of Culture: The Making of the Television Miniseries Roots.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (December, 1992). Contributor: Karen Antell
Virginia Hamilton Born: Yellow Springs, Ohio; March 12, 1936 Died: Dayton, Ohio; February 19, 2002 African American
The prolific Hamilton, one of the best writers of children’s fiction in the twentieth century, also wrote biographies of African Americans who set positive examples and fostered black pride. Principal works children’s literature: Zeely, 1967; The House of Dies Drear, 1968; The Planet of Junior Brown, 1971; M. C. Higgins the Great, 1974; Justice and Her Brothers, 1978; Dustland, 1980; Jahdu, 1980; The Gathering, 1981; Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, 1982; Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed, 1983; The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, 1985; The Mystery of Drear House, 1987; A White Romance, 1987; Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave, 1988; In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World, 1988; Bells of Christmas, 1989; Cousins, 1990; The Dark Way: Stories from the Spirit World, 1990; Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom, 1992; Plain City, 1993; Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales, 1995; When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing, 1996; A Ring of Tricksters: Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa, 1997; The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, 1998; Second Cousins, 1998; Bluish, 1999; The Girl Who Spun Gold, 2000; Wee Winnie Witch’s Skinny: An Original Scare Tale for Halloween, 2001; Time Pieces: The Book of Times, 2002 nonfiction: W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, 1972; Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man, 1974 Virginia Esther Hamilton, the youngest of five children, was born and raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a descendant of an African American man who escaped to Ohio from slavery. Her parents were Kenneth James Hamilton, a musician, and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton. She attended school in Yellow Springs, graduating with honors, and went on to Yellow Springs’ Antioch College on a full scholarship. Her writing courses there reinforced her long-standing conviction that becoming an author was her destiny. She completed further study at Ohio State University and The New School for Social Research in New York. In New York, she supported herself through various activities, including work 468
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as a singer in obscure nightclubs. She mingled with other writers, musicians, and artists and ultimately met her future husband, poet Arnold Adoff, whom she married in March, 1960. The two traveled to Spain and North Africa, destinations she had long wanted to visit. It was after this lengthy trip (lasting several months) that she wrote her first book, Zeely. She had tried to write, even at a very early age, and had concentrated her efforts on short stories. However, an editor at Macmillan Publishing Company (with whom she had attended Antioch College) suggested that she try book-length fiction for young adults. Zeely was the result of Hamilton’s efforts to transform a short story she had written in college into a short novel. The success of her award-winning first book was balanced with a few critics’ comments on flaws in the novel’s character development. Still, she was encouraged to continue, knowing that she had begun to establish a reputation for an impressive style and imaginative narratives. Her second book came out in 1968, and she had produced seven more by 1974, interspersing her fiction with biographies of the notable African Americans W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. She chose these biographical subjects because they fit in with her strong belief in the ability of African Americans to survive against unfair odds and in the importance of nurturing African American racial pride. These concepts are prominent themes in many of her fictional works. Though her husband had been a teacher in New York and she had lived there while attending school and working in different capacities (one of her jobs was as a cost accountant for an engineering firm), after fifteen years of off-and-on residence, Hamilton felt the city was so mentally stimulating that it was difficult for her to find the meditative quiet she needed as a writer. Consequently, she moved with her husband and their two children back to Ohio and settled on land that had been owned by her family since the late nineteenth century. Hamilton and Adoff built a large redwood-and-glass home, where they both worked at their craft. She produced scores of books, most of them award winners, before dying of breast cancer in 2002. She was sixty-five years old.
Zeely Type of work: Children’s literature First published: 1967 Virginia Hamilton is known internationally for the major contributions her young adult fiction makes to the fields of children’s literature and African American literature. Her dozens of fiction and nonfiction works portray the African American experience in a unique and honest way that had rarely been attempted by another American writer. Her main characters are solemn children who are faced with situations or conditions that are at least peculiar, and often bizarre or even perilous. These children face their circumstances with purpose and dignity and eventually come to understand what it means to be African American in America and to be worthy human beings.
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Such a figure is Zeely Tayber, the protagonist of Zeely. She is an older girl who lives on a farm and raises hogs. More than six feet tall, she is regal and mysterious, and to the young girl Geeder, visiting a neighboring farm with her brother, Zeely seems as marvelous as a Watutsi queen, like one pictured in a magazine Geeder reads in her uncle’s house. Geeder sees Zeely as a proud and dignified role model and wants to be like her and to become her friend. When the two finally meet, first at a disastrous hog market and later when Zeely summons her to a catalpa forest, Geeder at last learns about Zeely’s mysterious background. Zeely was Hamilton’s first book. It was named one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books and also received a Nancy Block Award. Some critics, however, took exception with her character development and to certain episodes that they felt were anticlimactic. For example, in one scene the hogs are brought to market and Geeder is slightly injured; this scene was critiqued as insufficiently realized. The author was praised, however, for her use of language and her ability to create a story and style that appeals to young female readers.
The House of Dies Drear Type of work: Children’s literature First published: 1968 Written in 1968, The House of Dies Drear tells the story of a family that relocates from North Carolina to a house in an Ohio town that was an Underground Railroad station. The father, a history professor, is fascinated by the house and the legends surrounding it. However, his thirteen-year-old son Thomas and the rest of the family are uneasy living in a house where, as legend has it, the former owner, a Dutch immigrant abolitionist named Drear, and two runaway slaves were murdered. The ghosts of the slaves and Drear are supposed to be haunting the house. Thomas explores the tunnels and secret passageways in and around the house and encounters the old caretaker, Mr. Pluto, who seems evil to Thomas. The youth is convinced the house is dangerous, and the family is warned that they must leave before disaster strikes. However, Thomas and his father join forces, and together they try to unlock the mystery of the house. This book received the Ohioana Book Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery. A sequel, The Mystery of Drear House, was written eighteen years later and revealed the house’s mysteries. A movie based on The House of Dies Drear was made in 1984; Hamilton wrote the screenplay.
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The Planet of Junior Brown Type of work: Children’s literature First published: 1971 Junior Brown is a neurotic, three-hundred-pound eighth-grader with musical talent. His family circumstances are miserable: a sickly, overprotective mother and an often-absent father. Music is the one bright spot in his life, but, despite his talent, his music teacher won’t allow him to practice his lessons on the grand piano in her apartment. The excuses she offers only increase the fantasies that gradually consume the boy. His friends are few: There is only Mr. Pool, the school janitor, and Buddy Clark. Buddy is an orphan who has lived most of his young life on the streets. He and Junior so rarely go to school that on the infrequent occasions when they do show up, some teachers don’t recognize them. Life becomes so complicated for them that Junior begins to lose his grip on reality, and Buddy and Mr. Pool are the only people with the loyalty and affection to support him in his decision to run away from home and in his encounter with his piano teacher’s mysterious “relative.” Some critics consider the characters Junior and Buddy to be as memorable and original as any in modern fiction written for young readers. The story is one of courage in the face of despair and of heroism and survival, and it promotes the notion that human beings must be interdependent. The Planet of Junior Brown, with its themes of the brotherhood of man and the indomitability of the human spirit, won Hamilton’s first Newbery Honor Book award.
M. C. Higgins the Great Type of work: Children’s literature First published: 1974 Mayo Cornelius Higgins, nicknamed M. C., is a youngster living with his family on land that has been in the family since his great-grandmother came there as a runaway slave. When strip-mining on the nearby mountain threatens to ruin their land, M. C. envisions escaping with his family to a better place. However, strangers come to the area, bringing with them the possibility that M. C. can do something to try to save the mountain that is part of their home instead of merely trying to escape the impending ugliness. Called by some reviewers a brilliantly conceived novel, M. C. Higgins the Great has the elements of a rite-of-passage story, showing a youngster coping with conflicts with a difficult father and dealing with the need to grow up and show maturity and the capacity to take responsibility. Though it won a Newbery Medal, a National Book Award, and the Boston Globe Award, it also received some criticism. Its opening passages were said to be “almost impenetrable” because of the “heavy prose.” Still, others commend it as a fine piece of writing, “moving, poetic, and unsentimental,” “warm, humane, and hopeful.”
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Suggested Readings Farrell, Kirby. “Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush and the Case for a Radical Existential Criticism.” Contemporary Literature 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 161-176. Giovanni, Nikki. Review of M. C. Higgins, the Great, by Virginia Hamilton. The New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1974, 8. Hamilton, Virginia. “The Mind of a Novel: The Heart of the Book.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8 (Winter, 1983): 10-14. _______. “Talking with Virginia Hamilton.” Interview by Yolanda Robinson Coles. American Visions 10 (December/January, 1995): 31-32. _______. “Writing the Source: In Other Words.” The Horn Book Magazine 14 (December, 1978): 609-619. Mikkelsen, Nina. Virginia Hamilton. New York: Twayne, 1994. Paterson, Katherine. “Family Visions.” The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1982, 41, 56. Scholl, Kathleen. “Black Traditions in M. C. Higgins, the Great.” Language Arts 17 (April, 1980): 420-424. Townsend, John Rowe. “Virginia Hamilton.” In A Sounding of Storytellers. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1979. Contributor: Jane L. Ball
Lorraine Hansberry Born: Chicago, Illinois; May 19, 1930 Died: New York, New York; January 12, 1965 African American
Hansberry is credited with being the first African American woman playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. Principal works drama: A Raisin in the Sun, pr., pb. 1959; The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; Les Blancs, pr. 1970, pb. 1972; Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, pb. 1972 (Robert Nemiroff, editor; includes Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?); The Drinking Gourd, pb. 1972; What Use Are Flowers?, pb. 1972 nonfiction: The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, 1964 (includes photographs); To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, 1969 (Robert Nemiroff, editor) With the successful Broadway opening in 1959 of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry (HAHNZ-bur-ree) became a major voice in behalf of racial, sexual, economic, and class justice. During Hansberry’s childhood, her father, a successful real estate broker, and her mother, a schoolteacher, were involved in politics and were active supporters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its causes. Hansberry grew up in a Chicago household where racial issues, oppression, African American identity, and the struggle against discrimination were major concerns. Her early intellectual development was influenced by her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, a professor and scholar at Howard University and writer of African history. He put Hansberry in contact with her African roots and introduced her to a world of articulate black artists and thinkers who personified the struggle to overcome discrimination in American society. Hansberry was a student in the segregated Chicago public school system. She proceeded to the University of Wisconsin, where she became the first African American woman to live in her dormitory. At the university she was active in politics and developed an interest in the theater and its power. Dropping out of school, Hansberry moved to New York and became a writer and associate editor for the progressive newspaper Freedom. She championed civil rights causes, writing not only on behalf of blacks but also on behalf of other socially repressed groups, including women and gays. With encouragement and in473
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spiration from such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, her active professional and intellectual life in Harlem soon blossomed into stories, poems, and plays. After marrying Robert Nemiroff in 1953, Hansberry left Freedom to devote all her attention to writing. Drawing upon her Chicago experiences, she completed A Raisin in the Sun, a play that explores the tensions that arise as a black family in Chicago tries to escape the ghetto. The family faces white hostility as it plans to move into a white neighborhood. The play was a phenomenal success. Hansberry’s second Broadway production, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, explores such topics as prostitution, marriage, homosexuality, and antiSemitism. The play’s depictions of the plight of those oppressed and discriminated against and of the nature of society’s reaction to injustice and prejudice are vivid and thoughtful. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of only thirty-four. Her call for justice and human sympathy continues to reverberate in the work she left behind.
A Raisin in the Sun Type of work: Drama First produced: 1959, pb. 1959 A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry’s most celebrated play, is a realistic portrait of a working-class black family struggling to achieve the American Dream of careers and home ownership while gripped by the reality of their lives as African Americans who must survive in a racist society. Hansberry based her play on her knowledge of life in Chicago’s black ghetto and the families to whom her father, a successful real estate broker, rented low-income housing. The action takes place in the cramped, roach-infested apartment of the Youngers, where three generations of the family have resided for years. With the death of her husband, Lena (Mama) becomes the head of the family. She has the right to decide how to use the $10,000 in life insurance money that has come with her husband’s death. Tensions develop quickly. Mama dreams of using the money to move out of the apartment into a new, large home where her family can breathe the free, clean air outside the ghetto. Her son Walter, seeing himself as the new head of the family, envisions the money as a way to free himself and his family from poverty by investing in a liquor store. Walter’s intellectual sister hopes the windfall may be a way for her to break racist and sexist barriers by getting a college education and becoming a doctor. As the play unfolds, Hansberry explores issues of African American identity, pride, male-female relationships within the black family, and the problems of segregation. Mama makes a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood. Fearing that her exercise of authority will diminish her son’s sense of masculine self-worth, and in spite of her opposition to buying a liquor store, she re-
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minds Walter of his sister’s right to some of the money for a college education and entrusts him with what is left of the money after the down payment. When he returns despairingly after losing all of it, he considers that the only way to recoup the loss is to humiliate himself and his family by making a deal with the Clybourne Park Association, a group of white homeowners who want to buy back the new home in order to keep their neighborhood white. In a dramatic conclusion, the disillusioned Walter enacts the dilemma of the modern African American male. Trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder, he must again submit Lorraine Hansberry (Library of Congress) to matriarchal authority. Mama despairs at having to take control and wield the authority she knows is destroying her son’s masculine identity. Walter finally realizes that he cannot accept the degradation he would bring upon himself, his family, and his father’s memory by accepting the association’s offer. Discovering his manhood and his responsibility to his family and his race, he refuses to sell back the house. When the association’s representative appeals to Mama to reverse her son’s decision, she poignantly and pridefully says, “I am afraid you don’t understand. My son said we was going to move and there ain’t nothing left for me to say.” The play closes with the family leaving their cramped apartment for their new home and the challenges that surely await them there.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window Type of work: Drama First produced: 1964, pb. 1965 Hansberry’s second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, never matched the success of her first, but it, too, uses a realistic format and was drawn from her own life. Instead of South Side Chicago, it is set in Greenwich Village, Hansberry’s home during the early years of her marriage with Robert Nemiroff, and the central character is one who must have resembled many of Hansberry’s friends. He is Sidney Brustein, a lapsed liberal, an intellectual, a former insurgent who has lost faith in his ability to bring about constructive change. As the play opens, Sidney moves from one project, a nightclub that failed, to another, the publication of a local newspaper, which Sidney insists will be apolitical. His motto at the opening of the play is
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“Presume no commitment, disavow all engagement, mock all great expectations. And above all else, avoid the impulse to correct.” Sidney’s past efforts have failed, and his lost faith is much the same as Beneatha’s in A Raisin in the Sun. The surrounding environment goes a long way toward explaining Sidney’s cynicism. His wife, Iris, has been in psychoanalysis for two years, and her troubled soul threatens their marriage. Iris’s older sister, Mavis, is anti-Semitic, and her other sister, Gloria, is a high-class call girl who masquerades as a model. Sidney’s upstairs neighbor, David Ragin, is a homosexual playwright whose plays invariably assert “the isolation of the soul of man, the alienation of the human spirit, the desolation of all love, all possible communication.” Organized crime controls politics in the neighborhood, and drug addiction is rampant; one of Sidney’s employees at the defunct nightclub, Sal Peretti, died of addiction at the age of seventeen, despite Sidney’s efforts to help him. Faced with these grim realities, Sidney longs to live in a high, wooded land, far from civilization, in a simpler, easier world. The resultant atmosphere is one of disillusionment as characters lash out in anger while trying to protect themselves from pain. One of the targets of the intellectual barbs of the group is Mavis, an average, settled housewife who fusses over Iris and pretends to no intellectual stature. When the wit gets too pointed, though, Mavis cuts through the verbiage with a telling remark: “I was taught to believe that creativity and great intelligence ought to make one expansive and understanding. That if ordinary people . . . could not expect understanding from artists . . . then where indeed might we look for it at all.” Only Sidney is moved by this remark; he is unable to maintain the pretense of cynicism, admitting, “I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.” Thus, Sidney lets himself be drawn into another cause, the election of Wally O’Hara to public office as an independent, someone who will oppose the drug culture and gangster rule of the neighborhood. As Sidney throws himself into this new cause, he uses his newspaper to further the campaign, and even puts a sign, “Vote for Wally O’Hara,” in his window. Idealism seems to have won out, and indeed Wally wins the election, but Sidney is put to a severe test as Iris seems about to leave him, and it is discovered that Wally is on the payroll of the gangsters. Added to all this is Gloria’s suicide in Sidney’s bathroom. Her death brings Sidney to a moment of crisis, and when Wally O’Hara comes into the room to offer condolences and to warn against any hasty actions, Sidney achieves a clarity of vision that reveals his heroism. Sidney says, This world—this swirling, seething madness—which you ask us to accept, to maintain— has done this . . . maimed my friends . . . emptied these rooms and my very bed. And now it has taken my sister. This world. Therefore, to live, to breathe—I shall have to fight it.
When Wally accuses Sidney of being a fool, he agrees: A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and that men change every day . . . and that people wanna be better than they are . . . and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is energy and energy can move things.
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In this moment, Sidney learns true commitment and his responsibility to make the world what it ought to be. The play closes with Iris and Sidney holding each other on the couch, Iris crying in pain, with Sidney enjoining her: “Yes . . . weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again . . . then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow.” As the curtain closes, the audience can scarcely fail to apply these closing words to themselves. Only if they permit themselves to feel the pain, Hansberry claims, will it be possible to do anything to ease that pain in the future. James Baldwin, referring to the play, said, “it is about nothing less than our responsibility to ourselves and to others,” a consistent theme in Hansberry’s drama. Again and again, she reminds the audience of their responsibility to act in behalf of a better future, and the basis for this message is her affirmative vision. Robert Nemiroff says that she found reason to hope “in the most unlikely place of all: the lives most of us lead today. Precisely, in short, where we cannot find it. It was the mark of her respect for us all.”
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black Type of work: Drama First produced: 1969, pb. 1971 After Hansberry’s untimely death, Robert Nemiroff, her former husband and literary executor, edited versions of her writings and adapted them for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. He also expanded that work into an informal autobiography of the same title. In Nemiroff’s words, the work is “biography and autobiography, part fact, part fiction, an act of re-creation utilizing first person materials as well as, inferentially, autobiographical projections of herself in her characters.” “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” James Baldwin said of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. Characters from Hansberry’s plays, including the character of Lorraine Hansberry herself, portray and relate various strands of African American life in modern America. Walter Lee, for example, embodies the frustrations of black men trying to cope in an economic system that promises advancement but holds them back because of their race. His sister, Beneatha, is an example of the gifted, intelligent black woman (not unlike Hansberry herself) who aspires to participate fully in the American culture. She also, as does Asagai, the Africanist intellectual, strives to remember her African roots. Then there is Sidney Brustein of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), the play most represented in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. Sidney, after leading a life of sleepy noncommitment, grows to care about himself and his society; he takes action, political and otherwise, to improve things. This sort of character growth, in one way or another apparent in all of Hansberry’s work, defines her own belief in the possibility for human goodness to prevail. It is this conviction that allows her to
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anticipate a healing of familial and social ills that comes when people are moved to dedicate themselves to change. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black also addresses the deep connections between black Americans and emerging African nations, black empowerment, sexual relationships, the generation gap, and black art. Woven throughout To Be Young, Gifted, and Black is the character of Lorraine Hansberry herself, who, at the beginning of the work, states perhaps somewhat despairingly: “I was born on the South Side of Chicago. I was born black and female,” but by the end is proclaiming proudly, “My name is Lorraine Hansberry. I am a writer.” She has ceased allowing the ghetto, with its economic, social, and cultural deprivation, to define her. She has overthrown her enslavement by oppressive sexual stereotypes. In this, the character of Lorraine Hansberry and the playwright are one in the embodiment of a hope for the black race and the female sex. Just as they have, through commitment and perseverance, discovered and defined themselves in name and vocation, so, too, must their people insist on partaking of that vital experience and self-definition that lead to a discovery of self-worth, purpose, and genuine human sympathy.
Les Blancs Type of work: Drama First produced: 1970, pb. 1972 Hansberry’s last play of significance, Les Blancs, was not in finished form when she died and did not open onstage until November 15, 1970, at the Longacre Theatre, years after her death. Nemiroff completed and edited the text, though it is to a very large degree Hansberry’s play. It was her least successful play, running for only forty-seven performances, but it did spark considerable controversy, garnering both extravagant praise and passionate denunciation. Some attacked the play as advocating racial warfare, while others claimed it was the best play of the year, incisive and compassionate. The play is set not in a locale drawn from Hansberry’s own experience but in a place that long held her interest: Africa. Les Blancs is Hansberry’s most complex and difficult play. It takes as its subject white colonialism and various possible responses to it. At the center of the play are the members of the Matoseh family: Abioseh Senior, the father, who is not actually part of the play, having died before it opens, but who is important in that his whole life defined the various responses possible (acceptance, attempts at lawful change, rebellion); in addition, there are his sons, Abioseh, Eric, and, most important, Tshembe. Hansberry attempts to shed some light on the movement for African independence by showing the relationships of the Matosehs to the whites living in Africa. The whites of importance are Major Rice, the military commander of the colony; Charlie Morris, a reporter; Madame Neilsen; and her husband, Dr. Neilsen, a character never appearing onstage but one responsible for the presence of all the others. Dr. Neilsen has for many years run a makeshift hospital in the jungle; he is cut in the mold of Albert Schweitzer, for he has dedicated his life to tending the medical
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ills of the natives. It is because of him that all the other doctors are there and because of him, too, that Charlie Morris is in Africa, for Charlie has come to write a story about the famous doctor. Whereas Charlie comes to Africa for the first time, Tshembe and Abioseh are called back to Africa by the death of their father. Abioseh comes back a Catholic priest, having renounced his African heritage and embraced the culture and beliefs of the colonialists. Tshembe, too, has taken much from the colonial culture, including his education and a European bride. He has not, however, rejected his heritage, and he is sensitive to the injustice of the colonial system. Though he sees colonialism as evil, he does not want to commit himself to opposing it. He wants to return to his wife and child and lead a comfortable, secure life. For both Charlie and Tshembe, the visit to Africa brings the unexpected, for they return in the midst of an uprising, called “terror” by the whites and “resistance” by the blacks. Charlie gradually learns the true nature of colonialism, and Tshembe, after great struggle, learns that he cannot avoid his obligation to oppose colonialism actively. While Charlie waits for Dr. Neilsen to return from another village, he learns from Madame Neilsen that the doctor’s efforts seem to be less and less appreciated. When Tshembe comes on the scene, Charlie is immediately interested in him and repeatedly tries to engage the former student of Madame Neilsen and the doctor in conversation, but they fail to understand each other. Tshembe will accept none of the assumptions that Charlie has brought with him to Africa: He rejects the efforts of Dr. Neilsen, however well-intentioned, as representing the guilty conscience of colonialism while perpetrating the system. He also rejects Charlie’s confident assumption that the facilities are so backward because of the superstitions of the natives. Charlie, on the other hand, cannot understand how Tshembe can speak so bitterly against colonialism yet not do anything to oppose it. Tshembe explains that he is one of those “who see too much to take sides,” but his position becomes increasingly untenable. He is approached by members of the resistance and is asked to lead them, at which point he learns that it was his father who conceived the movement when it became clear that the colonialists, including Dr. Neilsen, saw themselves in the position of father rather than brother to the natives and would never give them freedom. Still, Tshembe resists the commitment, but Charlie, as he leaves the scene, convinced now that the resistance is necessary, asks Tshembe, “Where are you running, man? Back to Europe? To watch the action on your telly?” Charlie reminds Tshembe that “we do what we can.” Madame Neilsen herself makes Tshembe face the needs of his people. Tshembe by this time knows what his choice must be, but he is unable to make it. In his despair, he turns to Madame Neilsen, imploring her help. She tells him, “You have forgotten your geometry if you are despairing, Tshembe. I once taught you that a line goes into infinity unless it is bisected. Our country needs warriors, Tshembe Matoseh.” In the final scene of the play, Tshembe takes up arms against the colonialists, and Hansberry makes his decision all the more dramatic by having him kill his brother Abioseh, who has taken the colonial side. Yet, lest anyone misunderstand the agony
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of his choice, Hansberry ends the play with Tshembe on his knees before the bodies of those he has loved, committed but in agony, deeply engulfed by grief that such commitment is necessary. Les Blancs is less an answer to the problem of colonialism than it is another expression of Hansberry’s deep and abiding belief in the need for individual commitment and in the ability of the individual, once committed, to bring about positive change for the future, even if that requires suffering in the present. Surely her commitment to her writing will guarantee her work an audience far into the future.
Suggested Readings Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Twayne, 1994. Domina, Lynn. Understanding “A Raisin in the Sun”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Effiong, Philip U. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Kappel, Lawrence, ed. Readings on “A Raisin in the Sun.” San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2001. Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Leeson, Richard M. Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Scheader, Catherine. Lorraine Hansberry: A Playwright and Voice of Justice. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. Contributors: Richard M. Leeson, Katherine Lederer, and Hugh Short
Joy Harjo Born: Tulsa, Oklahoma; May 9, 1951 Native American
Harjo’s poetry has won acclaim for its substance, style, and themes, combining many elements of Native American and mainstream American experience. Principal works children’s literature: The Good Luck Cat, 2000 poetry: The Last Song, 1975; What Moon Drove Me to This?, 1980; She Had Some Horses, 1983; Secrets from the Center of the World, 1989; In Mad Love and War, 1990; The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, 1996; How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2001, 2002 screenplay: Origin of Apache Crown Dance, 1985 short fiction: “Boston,” 1991; “Northern Lights,” 1991; “The Flood,” 1991; “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky,” 1996; “Warrior Road,” 1997 nonfiction: The Spiral of Memories: Interviews, 1996 (Laura Coltelli, editor) edited text: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, 1997 (with Gloria Bird) miscellaneous: A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales, 2000 In her poetry, Joy Harjo (HAHR-joh) expresses a close relationship to the environment and the particularities of the Native American and white cultures from which she is descended. She is an enrolled member of the Creek tribe, the mother of two children (a son, Phil, and a daughter, Rainy Dawn) and a grandmother. Various forms of art were always a part of her life, even in childhood. Her grandmother and aunt were painters. In high school, she trained as a dancer and toured as a dancer and actress with one of the first Indian dance troupes in the country. When her tour ended, she returned to Oklahoma, where her son was born when she was seventeen years old. She left her son’s father to move to New Mexico, enrolling at the university as a pre-med student. After one semester, she decided that her interest in art was compelling enough to engage in its formal study. Educated at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she later worked as an instructor, she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa. She was a professor of English at both the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico. Harjo has received numerous awards for her writing, including the William 481
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Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, and two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Harjo’s poetry has been increasingly influenced by her interest in music, especially jazz. She plays the saxophone in a band, Poetic Justice, that combines the musical influences of jazz and reggae with her poetry. Many of her poems are tributes to the various musicians who have influenced her work, including saxophonists John Coltrane and Jim Pepper. The history and mythology of her people and the current state of their oppression also are prominent themes in her work. As she states in the explanation of her poem “Witness”: “The Indian wars never ended in this country . . . we were hated for our difference by our enemies.”
In Mad Love and War Type of work: Poetry First published: 1990 In Mad Love and War is composed of two sections of poems expressing the conflicts and joys of Harjo’s experiences as a Native American woman living in contemporary American culture. The poems draw on a wealth of experiences, including those relating to tribal tradition and sacredness of the land. Such positive experiences are compared with the sometimes grim realities inherent in the modern society in which Harjo lives. The first section, titled “The Wars,” offers poetry that imagistically develops themes relating to oppression and to survival in the face of daunting problems of poverty, alcoholism, and deferred dreams. In her notable poem “Deer Dancer,” Harjo retells a traditional myth in the contemporary setting of “a bar of broken survivors, the club of shotgun, knife wound, of poison by culture.” Through the dance, the deer dancer becomes “the myth slipped down through dreamtime. The promise of feast we all knew was coming.” Like many of Harjo’s poems, “The Deer Dancer” ends with beauty being experienced amid lost hope and despair. Joy Harjo
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Many of the other poems in “The Wars” are political in nature, containing stark images of violence and deprivation, most notably her poem dedicated to Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a member of the American Indian Movement whose murdered body was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and the poems “We Must Call a Meeting,” “Autobiography,” “The Real Revolution Is Love,” and “Resurrection.” The poems of the second section, “Mad Love,” are more personal in their treatment of subject, more lyrical in their voice, and quieter in their tone. In a poem titled with the name of Harjo’s daughter, “Rainy Dawn,” Harjo concludes by expressing the joy of Rainy Dawn’s birth. And when you were born I held you wet and unfolding, like a butterfly newly born from the chrysalis of my body. And breathed with you as you breathed your first breath. Then was your promise to take it on like the rest of us, the immense journey, for love, for rain.
In Mad Love and War encompasses a variety of styles, from narrative poems written in expansive lines to tightly chiseled lyrics. Many of the poems in the “Mad Love” section are prose poems, whose unlined stanzas create a notable incongruity with respect to the increasingly personal, softer mood of the pieces. The book offers a journey from the ruins of dislocation to the joys of membership and love. In the final masterful poem of the collection, “The Eagle,” Harjo writes, “That we must take the utmost care/ And kindness in all things. . . . We pray that it will be done/ In beauty/ In beauty.”
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Type of work: Poetry First published: 1996 The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, Harjo’s seventh collection of poetry, consists primarily of prose poems. The collection is divided into two sections, “Tribal Memory” and “The World Ends Here,” which express the lore of Harjo’s Native American ancestry and her observations of contemporary life. These poems show a concern for content over style. The poetry is presented without conventions of patterned rhyme or meter; the imagery is stark and unadorned. Each poem is followed by an explanation that contextualizes the piece by offering a brief history of the genesis of the poem or commenting on themes elucidated by the writing. The majority of the book’s poems are narrative, developing stories that explain the destinies of Native American characters who retain identity despite the onslaught of European culture, which strips away their language, lore, and religion. The poems create a universe of oppositions: darkness and light, violence and peace. Other poems relate stories of ancestry on a more personal level, illuminating a view of many worlds existing at once, interconnected and affecting one another. In “The Naming,” a grandmother “who never had any peace in this life” is “blessed
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with animals and songs”; after the birth of a “daughter-born-of-my-son . . . the earth is wet with happiness.” As Harjo notes in the explanation of this piece, “When my granddaughter Haleigh was born I felt the spirit of this grandmother in the hospital room. Her presence was a blessing.” In the world that Harjo creates, the living and the dead are united and the physical universe is animate, pulsing with feeling of its own. “The World Ends Here” offers shorter and more concrete poems than those in “Tribal Memory.” In addition, the poems are concerned with wounds suffered through a history of genocide inflicted upon Native Americans. “When a people institute a bureaucratic department to serve justice then be suspicious,” Harjo warns in “Wolf Warrior.” “The Indian wars never ended in this country,” she writes in the postscript to “Witness.” The poems do not, however, fall into despair. The beauty of nature, the rich rewards of friendship, the joys of music, and the hope of love are continually evident, emerging with their healing power. As Harjo writes in “Perhaps the World Ends Here:” “The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and so it will go on.”
Suggested Readings Andrews, Jennifer. “In the Belly of a Laughing God: Reading Humor and Irony in the Poetry of Joy Harjo.” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2000): 200-218. Clark, C. B. “Joy Harjo (Creek).” In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter et al. Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Coltelli, Laura, ed. The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, Joy Harjo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Donovan, Kathleen. Feminist Readings of Native American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Lang, Nancy. “‘Twin Gods Bending Over’: Joy Harjo and Poetic Memory.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 41-49. Pettit, Rhonda. Joy Harjo. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writer Series, 1998. Scarry, John. “Joy Harjo.” In Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion, edited by Janet Witalec. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1995. Wilson, Norma C. “The Ground Speaks: The Poetry of Joy Harjo.” In The Nature of Native American Poetry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Witalec, Janet, ed. Native North American Literature: Biographical and Critical Information on Native Writers and Orators from the United States and Canada from Historical Times to the Present. New York: Gale Research, 1994. Womack, Craig S. “Joy Harjo: Creek Writer from the End of the Twentieth Century.” In Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Contributor: Robert Haight
Michael S. Harper Born: Brooklyn, New York; March 18, 1938 African American
Harper’s poetry synthesizes diverse ethnic, racial, and historic components to create an inclusive perspective on American culture. Principal works poetry: Dear John, Dear Coltrane, 1970; History Is Your Own Heartbeat, 1971; Photographs, Negatives: History as Apple Tree, 1972; Song: I Want a Witness, 1972; Debridement, 1973; Nightmare Begins Responsibility, 1974; Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems, 1977; Rhode Island: Eight Poems, 1981; Healing Song for the Inner Ear, 1985; Honorable Amendments, 1995; Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems, 2000 edited texts: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945, 1994 (with Anthony Walton); Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, 1979 (with Robert B. Stepto); The Carleton Miscellany: A Ralph Ellison Festival, 1980 (with John Wright); The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, 1980; The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, 2000 (with Walton); Selected Poems, 2002 (edited and introduced by Ronald A. Sharp) The first son in his middle-class African American family, Michael Steven Harper was encouraged to follow the career path of his grandfather and great-grandfather: medicine. An intense interest in the rhythms of language and in exploring the apparent schisms in American society, however, led Harper to his dual vocations of writer and scholar. In the Harper home, music and poetry were important parts of family life. Poems by Langston Hughes were a familiar presence in Harper’s childhood home. Harper’s parents also owned an extensive collection of contemporary jazz recordings. The poet recalled spending many happy hours listening to, among others, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. As an adolescent, Harper was forced into an awareness of racism in America. The family moved from New York to West Los Angeles, where African Americans were the targets of racial violence. During high school, Harper began experimenting with creative writing. In college, he continued writing in addition to working full-time for the post office. He later attended the famous Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. 485
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As the only African American student in the poetry and fiction workshop classes, Harper endured misunderstanding and prejudice. These experiences motivated him to confront the dualism inherent in being an African American writer. Harper refused exclusive containment in either the African American or in the American category. Rather, he affirmed his identity in both groups. Harper interrupted his studies at Iowa to enter the student teacher program at Pasadena City College in 1962. He became the first African American to complete the program, and after finishing his courses at Iowa, he accepted an instructorship Michael S. Harper (© John Foraste) at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California. This was the beginning of an extensive and distinguished teaching career, including professorships at Colgate University, Brown University, and Harvard University. In addition to eight volumes of poetry, Harper has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies and has edited several anthologies of poetry.
Dear John, Dear Coltrane Type of work: Poetry First published: 1970 In an interview with Abraham Chapman, Michael Harper identifies the poetic technique of much of his work as “modality,” an abstract musical concept that he uses as a metaphor for his ethical vision as well as for his subjective principle of composition. Many of Harper’s poems lend themselves to performance; they are meant to be read aloud. In hearing them, one hears, through a range of idiom, dialect, and individual voices, the past fused with the contemporary, the individual speaking forth from communal experience and the black American’s kinship, simultaneously tragic and heroic, to the whole of American cultural values. Rooted in classic jazz patterns from such musicians as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, modality is “about relationships” and “about energy, energy irreducible and true only unto itself.” As a philosophical, ethical perspective, modality is a “particular frequency” for expressing and articulating “the special nature of the Black man and his condition and his contributions” to the American synthesis of cultural values. As such, modality refutes “the Western orientation of division between deno-
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tative/connotative, body/mind, life/spirit, soul/body, mind/heart” and affirms a unity of being and experience: “modality is always about unity.” Consequently, Harper’s poetry gathers fragments from private and public experience, past and present, and seeks to rejuvenate spiritual forces historically suppressed by bringing them to the surface in a poetry of “tensions resolved through a morality worked out between people.” In the early poems of Dear John, Dear Coltrane, Harper’s modal experiments succeed in a variety of forms that nevertheless remain unified in the power of his particular voice. In “Brother John,” Harper eulogizes Charlie Parker, the “Bird/ baddest nightdreamer/ on sax in the ornithology-world,” Miles Davis, “bug-eyed, unspeakable,/ Miles, sweet Mute,/ sweat Miles, black Miles,” and John Coltrane, who serves as a mythic center for the poem and the volume as well as several later poems. Typical of Harper’s multiple allusions in naming, however, both the poem and the volume also eulogize John O. Stewart, a friend and fiction writer; nor is Coltrane merely a mythic figure, for Harper maintained a personal friendship with him until his death in 1967; in addition, the name “John” also conjures echoes from Harper’s great-grandfather, who spent several years in South Africa, and, further, evokes John Brown, who figures prominently in later poems by Harper. Thus, from early in his work, Harper uses modality to reconcile past and present, myth and history, and private and public; personal mourning becomes part of a universal experience and a communal celebration. Drawing inspiration from both the suffering and the achievement of jazz artists in this poem and in subsequent poems in his career, Harper establishes the modal wordplay that affirms his philosophical stance as an activist of the conscience: “I’m a black man; I am; / black; I am; I’m a black/ man; I am; I am,” and his own cry of being, refusing any limiting universality of humanness that is blind to ethnic heritage and experience: “I am; I’m a black man; / I am.” In other poems from this first volume, Harper links past and present as well as private and public by exploring larger patterns of history. In “American History,” Harper asserts the invisibility of black suffering to mainstream America by juxtaposing “Those four black girls blown up/ in that Alabama church” with “five hundred/ middle passage blacks,/ in a net, under water . . . so redcoats wouldn’t find them.” Concluding in an ironic but colloquial idiom, he asks: “Can’t find what you can’t see/ can you?” In “Reuben, Reuben,” Harper uses the death of his own son to overcome his pain in the transcendence of creative energy, just as blues singers have always done when faced with the horror of loss: “I reach from pain/ to music great enough/ to bring me back . . . we’ve lost a son/ the music, jazz, comes in.”
History Is Your Own Heartbeat Type of work: Poetry First published: 1971 Harper’s early poems test the possibilities of modality, and, in such techniques as concrete imaging, literary allusions, sprung syntax, enjambment, blues refrains, id-
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ioms, variable line lengths, and innovative cadences, he discovers in modality a formalism strong enough to bear diverse experiments in free-verse forms and yet a visionary field large enough to draw from virtually any relationship, however intimate or distant, however painful or joyful, for individual affirmation. In his second collection, History Is Your Own Heartbeat, Harper uses modality to reconstruct personal history, integrating it with a mythic sense of spiritual unity. Divided into three sections, the book begins with a twenty-poem sequence, “Ruth’s Blues,” which employs his white mother-in-law’s physical deterioration as an extended metaphor for the denial of black and white kinship. In tribute to Ruth’s endurance in her quest for physical and psychological health, Harper shows the potential for a unified American sensibility, one that respects cultural differences yet realizes from the pain of division that American experience “is all a well-knit family;/ a love supreme,” if one chooses to affirm multiple origins. The following two sections, “History as Personality” and “High Modes,” pay homage, respectively, to influential personalities such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gwendolyn Brooks and, in the latter, to the painter Oliver Lee Jackson. Throughout these sections, Harper emphasizes the unity of a historical and cultural continuum that reaches back to Africa and comes forward to his own family, claiming his own past and an American history that is freed of its delusions, confronting its origins in the slavery of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans, to whom Harper also unearths literal kinship. In several ways, then, this volume, as the title suggests, builds from literal links of kinship with a diversity of races and cultures to a holistic view of American values, in contrast to the exclusive emphasis on European origins characteristic of traditional American history. By healing himself of narrow stereotypes, Harper offers “a love supreme” to his fellow citizens, asserting kinship even where citizenship has been denied and is diminished by racism.
Song: I Want a Witness Type of work: Poetry First published: 1972 Subsequent books extend Harper’s sense of kinship and develop the aesthetic of modality. In Song: I Want a Witness, he explores the black American religious heritage, using the metaphor of testifying, and conceptualizes the literary process as essentially one of an ethical affirmation of heroic character. Tracing American culture back both to Native America (by a link with a great-great-grandmother who was Chippewa) and to the Puritan legacies of Roger Williams and John Winthrop (by a link to the spirit of place where he lives), Harper, in “History as Appletree,” develops an organic metaphor that embodies history and family while also bringing the negative, through an extended photographic metaphor of those ignored by history, to present light and image. In this vision, the fruit of the tree, American culture itself, blossoms with the fertility of long-forgotten bones whose dust nurtures the root system.
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Debridement Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973 “Debridement” is a medical term for cutting away the dead flesh of a wound so that it will not infect the healthy body and a metaphor for revising stereotyped versions of American history. The title of this collection, therefore, honors the heroic actions of John Brown, Richard Wright, and the fictional John Henry Louis. Together, the three sections, each revolving around its respective persona, correct the myth that Americans who have fought against racism were insane, zealous, hysterical. Instead, Harper argues through the modality of these poems, they were, and are, themselves the victims of racism, surviving because they have pursued a truth that has for the most part been hidden from them.
Nightmare Begins Responsibility Type of work: Poetry First published: 1974 In Nightmare Begins Responsibility, the poet extends a logic that runs through the previous two books. Once one realizes that the pejorative American myth is false, then one must act to overcome the cultural insensitivity of racism and the apathy toward the land, both as physical and cultural environment. Alienation and isolation yield only to courageous, often unpopular action, and the American Dream and manifest destiny are concepts of death riddled with literal exploitation and genocide unless one replaces them with the values of kinship and acts to establish historical knowledge and contemporary intimacy as the basis for defining oneself as an American.
Healing Song for the Inner Ear Type of work: Poetry First published: 1985 Healing Song for the Inner Ear expands the modality of celebrating friends, family, musicians, and poets by bringing them into Harper’s constantly expanding vision of history. Functioning much like his first book, this collection moves both backward and forward, but it also moves toward a more international perspective than that found in any of his earlier collections. From the American perspective of “Goin’ to the Territory,” which salutes the influence of Ralph Ellison and witnesses his aesthetic endurance, and “The Pen,” which gives voice to an oral tradition become literary artifact, embodying values inherent in both black American and Na-
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tive American lives, a modality in which “patterns of the word fling out into destiny/ as a prairie used to when the Indians/ were called Kiowa, Crow, Dakota, Cheyenne,” to a series of poems set in South Africa, Harper explores the complexity of image and story embedded in history and the enduring truth of experience excavated in modal expression. In the poem “The Militance of a Photograph in the Passbook of a Bantu Under Detention,” Harper meditates on the history behind the photograph that identifies a black South African from Soweto, and he asserts: “This is no simple mug shot/ of a runaway boy in a training/ film. . . .” Harper senses his own history here; the runaway might have been a nineteenth century slave, the training film could well serve as a powerful tool for the suppression of historical facts, and the mug shot suggests that color itself (since only blacks must carry passbooks) is the crime. Personally, Harper must also unite his great-grandfather’s experience in South Africa with the strategies of apartheid, and, in uniting the past personal association with the contemporary public policies of racism, Harper affirms the courage of the oppressed: “The Zulu lullaby/ I cannot sing in Bantu/ is this song in the body/ of a passbook/ and the book passes/ into a shirt/ and the back that wears it.” Perhaps the modality of such a link between Americans and South Africans, between forgotten language and forgotten people, serves as the celebration of Harper’s enduring theme, as in the epigraph to the poem: “Peace is the active presence of Justice.”
Songlines in Michaeltree Type of work: Poetry First published: 2000 In this retrospective collection, which culls poetry from eight previous volumes, Harper returns to his characteristic progressive, improvisatory power that respects a variety of traditions in the arts. He celebrates the accomplishments of outstanding figures of the African American community while also tenderly exploring the “Michaeltree,” an emblem of his own life, with deeply felt poems about members of his family. Serving as figurative bookends to the volume is a poem of six stanzas, each line repeated three times, beginning with the triad, “when there is no history,” followed by an image of “a blind nation in a storm,” that is “belted in these ruins.” Here Harper asserts a reclamation from silent and suppression of the manycenturied struggle of African Americans in the United States and sets the tone for the collection. Poems from past collections are balanced by Harper with additional material to assist the reader in understanding his life of teaching and writing. “Notes to the Poem” functions as a teaching text and provides background to Harper’s familiar themes, elucidating his use of historical data that might be obscure to those who don’t share his expertise. “To the Reader” invites the reader on a journey that explores the evolution of his creative consciousness. Here he acknowledges his debt to the “pioneering writers: Robert Hayden, Sterling A. Brown, and Ralph Ellison.”
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He also notes the influences of family members and, through anecdotal notes, that of his experiences with publicly reading his poetry. Finally, “Notes on Form and Fictions” examines his poetic technique and the derivations of his innovations. He notes, “I began to write poems because I could not see those elements of my life that I considered sacred reflected in my courses of study: scientific, literary, and linguistic.” The reader thus better understands his overriding attraction to African American music as a source for shape, language, rhythms, and the near-mythic hero-figures of his poetry.
Suggested Readings Antonucci, Michael. “The Map and the Territory: An Interview with Michael S. Harper.” African American Review 34, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 501-508. Breslin, Paul. “Some Early Returns.” Poetry 134 (May, 1979): 107-114. Brown, Joseph A. “Their Long Scars Touch Ours: A Reflection on the Poetry of Michael Harper.” Callaloo 9, no. 1 (1986): 209-220. Forbes, Calvin. Review of Honorable Amendments, by Michael S. Harper. African American Review 32, no. 3 (Fall, 1998): 508-510. Harper, Michael S. “My Poetic Technique and the Humanization of the American Audience.” In Black American Literature and Humanism, edited by Miller R. Baxter. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Jackson, Richard. Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets. University: University of Alabama Press, 1983. Lehman, David. “Politics.” Poetry 123 (December, 1973): 173-180. Lieberman, Laurence. Unassigned Frequencies: American Poetry in Review, 1964-77. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Stepto, Robert B. “Let’s Call Your Mama and Other Lies About Michael S. Harper.” Callaloo 13, no. 4 (Fall, 1990): 801-804. Turner, Alberta T., ed. Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. New York: David McKay, 1977. Young, Al, Larry Kart, and Michael S. Harper. “Jazz and Letters: A Colloquy.” TriQuarterly 68 (Winter, 1987): 118-158. Contributors: Anne B. Mangum, Michael Loudon, Philip K. Jason, and Sarah Hilbert
Wilson Harris Born: New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana); March 24, 1921 African American, Native American, Caribbean
As philosopher, novelist, and critic, Harris imagines recent world history and colonialism in order to present a vision of a possible human community that celebrates multiple, mixed, and interrelating identities. Principal works long fiction: Palace of the Peacock, 1960; The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961; The Whole Armour, 1962; The Secret Ladder, 1963; Heartland, 1964; The Eye of the Scarecrow, 1965; The Waiting Room, 1967; Tumatumari, 1968; Ascent to Omai, 1970; Black Marsden, 1972; Companions of the Day and Night, 1975; Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns, 1977; The Tree of the Sun, 1978; The Angel at the Gate, 1982; Carnival, 1985; The Guyana Quartet, 1985 (includes Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, and The Secret Ladder); The Infinite Rehearsal, 1987; The Four Banks of the River of Space, 1990; The Carnival Trilogy, 1993 (includes Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, and The Four Banks of the River of Space); Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 1993; Jonestown, 1996; The Dark Jester, 2001; The Mask of the Beggar, 2003; The Ghost of Memory, 2006 poetry: Fetish, 1951 (as Kona Waruk); Eternity to Season, 1954 short fiction: The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970; The Age of the Rainmakers, 1971 nonfiction: Tradition, the Writer, and Society, 1967; History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 1970; Fossil and Psyche, 1974; Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1981; The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, 1983; The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks, 1992; Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, 1999 Born in British Guiana, Wilson Harris studied at Queen’s College in Georgetown and became a government surveyor before becoming a writer. In 1959 he settled in England and married a Scottish writer, Margaret Burns, his second marriage. He published his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in 1960; it was followed by three more novels—The Far Journey of Oudin in 1961, The Whole Armour in 1962, and The Secret Ladder in 1963—which together with his first form The Guyana Quartet. These would be followed by many more novels, including those that form The Carnival Trilogy, as well as nonfiction and criticism. Although he and his wife 492
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made London their home, Harris has traveled widely as a result of fellowships and visiting professorships in Europe, Australia, India, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. These travels have influenced his writing: His trip to Mexico in 1972, for example, led to his use of the Quetzalcoatl legend in The Carnival Trilogy. Harris has won honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001), among other institutions of higher learning. He received the English Arts Council Award twice (1968 and 1970) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972). In 1992 he won Italy’s Mondello Prize for fiction. He was the recipient of the Guyana Prize for Literature in both 1987 and 2002. Harris is an extremely eclectic and expansive writer. In The Womb of Space, he writes that “literature is still constrained by regional and other conventional suffocating categories.” Harris has spent his career attempting to transcend notions of genre, tradition, and discipline, constructing texts founded on philosophical speculation. Harris attempts, in his writing, to promote new models for civilization and for creative art. Influenced by Carl Gustav Jung, Martin Buber, Elizabethan poetry, William Blake, Native American folklore, and nineteenth century expedition literature, Harris investigates the ambiguities of life and death, of history and innovation, of self and other, and of reality and illusion. Harris questions received concepts of origin, history, and reality. It is Harris’s hope that such inquisitions of the self may prove crucial in the development of a radical revision of history, origin, and identity. Opening with a series of nightmare vignettes that awaken into each other, the narrator of Harris’s Palace of the Peacock declares: “I dreamt I awoke with one dead eye seeing and one living eye closed.” The novel hovers between reality and illusion, death and life, insight and blindness. It chronicles an expeditionary party’s journey into the interior of Guyana. In this expedition into the territory of the self, each member of the party embodies a part of Guyanese identity. A European, an African, and a Native American set out together in a quest to retrieve renegade farmworkers but find along the way that they are, perhaps, the ghostly repetitions of a party that perished on the same river in the early days of European conquest. The allegorical and existential significances of the quest give Harris the opportunity to delve into the nature of narration, of time, of space, and of being. He asserts that humanity can alter fate through recognition of connections and by articulating and celebrating commonly held identities. The themes Palace of the Peacock raises are also found in the novels that succeed it. In subsequent novels, Harris returns to elaborate and examine the psychological and existential structures by way of which identity ossifies and resists participation in change. By carefully constructing contradictory narrative puzzles, Harris leads his readers into ambiguous regions of understanding where opposites (life and death, reality and illusion, self and other) meet. It is his hope that such expeditions of the imagination will result in greater understanding of identity and community.
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Fossil and Psyche Type of work: Essay First published: 1974 Fossil and Psyche articulates Wilson Harris’s belief that “the potentiality for dialogue, for change, for the miracle of roots, for new community is real.” Using the metaphor of archery (psychic arrows and fossil targets), he situates his novels and the work of other writers within a realm of attempts to reach architectonic (mythic) realities. He argues against the opposition of the material to the spiritual and critiques the borders by means of which the real is held separate from the imaginary. Harris asserts the potential of the imaginary to illuminate the transcendent possibilities of history and identity. Such possibilities, if realized, would result in a culturally heterogeneous world community and in an alteration of world power hierarchies. The “idolatry of absolutes” holds readers and writers hostage to the temporal, spatial, and cultural limitations of literature when in fact those limitations are illusory. Arrows of language and imagination can reach the fossil targets of architectonic, mythic, eternal, atemporal, renewing experience. Novels by authors such as Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry, Harris claims, are dream-expeditions signaling humanity toward “a third perhaps nameless revolutionary dimension of sensibility” that evades commonly held notions of material and spiritual reality. Such an evasion is the key to enriching and understanding the value of the multiplicity of identities. Accessing these wells of timeless connection will “deepen and heighten the role of imaginative literature to wrestle with categories and to visualize the birth of community as other than the animism of fate.” Traditional oppositions lead to inadequate readings of imaginative literature and to misreadings of the processes that underlie imaginative composition. Literature, like every aspect of human experience, is lodged within a matrix of time and space. The literature Harris addresses in Fossil and Psyche attempts to transcend this matrix, to confound time and space, to mine the architectonic fossils of human community with present psychic projections of imagination. Novels of expedition, then, revise history and reveal the hopeful, transformative energies of life locked away in even the most deadly and deadening acts of history. Writers who embrace such a process of revision renew the creative, psychic act of imagination. Such psychic projections of imagination join past to present and future and European to African and Native American.
The Womb of Space Type of work: Essays First published: 1983 Harris’s The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination is a collection of critical essays that attempt to describe how multiculturalism can inform the reading
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of texts. “Imaginative sensibility,” Harris asserts, “is uniquely equipped by forces of dream and paradox to mirror the inimitable activity of subordinated psyche.” Harris’s cross-cultural rereadings of specific texts in The Womb of Space reveal bridges of myth, imagination, and dream that link culture to culture, despite the appearance of disparity. Harris interprets works by William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Juan Rulfo, Raja Rao, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Edward Brathwaite, and others in order to demonstrate the applicability of a cross-cultural analysis to world literature. For example, Harris rereads Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) as a psychic text in which the unconscious subtext critiques the cultural hierarchy that the surface of the tale intends to uphold. Instead of emphasizing the tale’s narrative focus on the consolidation of Western values, Harris underscores the unconscious “twinships” (pairings) of characters and events that point to an unconsciously scripted psychic, mythic dimension. Such a subversion of the text leads Harris to “perceive the decay of order conditioned by conquest; that order begins to review its daylight deeds . . . in the night-time rebellious dream life of the halfconscious and unconscious psyche.” Despite the conscious intentions of Poe, the text is for Harris a revision of pre-Columbian mythic antecedents that illuminate the psychic, mythic, and communal dimensions of the literary imagination. Harris generalizes that cross-cultural readings reveal, in literature, correlations and unity that spring from the dialectic of explicit statement and implicit subversion of that statement. Stressing the undermining of Western texts by consulting mythic, psychic (often non-Western) roots, Harris hopes to open a cultural dialogue among cultures and identities. Harris suggests that such a dialogue will encourage the growth of broader, multicultural, inclusive communities. The “womb of space” is the generative region where such a community may begin to develop. “The paradox of cultural heterogeneity, or cross-cultural capacity, lies in the evolutionary thrust it restores to orders of the imagination, the ceaseless dialogue it inserts between hardened conventions and eclipsed or half-eclipsed otherness.” By bringing the cross-cultural imagination to bear on a variety of texts in The Womb of Space, Wilson Harris affirms his particular vision of literature and of the role texts play in reconstructing identity, culture, and community.
Suggested Readings Cribb, Tim. “T. W. Harris, Sworn Surveyor.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28, no. 1 (1993): 33-46. Drake, Sandra. Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Gilkes, Michael, ed. The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. London: Macmillan, 1989. Howard, W. J. “Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet: From Personal Myth to National Identity.” Ariel 1 (1970): 46-60.
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Maes-Jelinek, Hena. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (Summer, 1997). Riach, Alan, and Mark Williams. “Reading Wilson Harris.” In Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1991. Sharrad, Paul. “The Art of Memory and the Liberation of History: Wilson Harris’s Witnessing of Time.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27, no. 1 (1992): 110-127. Slemon, Stephen. “Carnival and the Canon.” Ariel 19, no. 3 (1988): 47-56. Contributor: Daniel M. Scott III
Robert Hayden Born: Detroit, Michigan; August 4, 1913 Died: Ann Arbor, Michigan; February 25, 1980 African American
Hayden’s poetry provides a learned, kind observer’s view of major events and figures in American and African American history. Principal works poetry: Heart-Shape in the Dust, 1940; The Lion and the Archer, 1948 (with Myron O’Higgins); Figure of Time: Poems, 1955; A Ballad of Remembrance, 1962; Selected Poems, 1966; Words in the Mourning Time, 1970; The NightBlooming Cereus, 1972; Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems, 1975; American Journal, 1978; The Legend of John Brown, 1978; Collected Poems, 1985 (revised 1996) nonfiction: Collected Prose, 1984 edited texts: Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets, 1967; Afro-American Literature: An Introduction, 1971 (with David J. Burrows and Frederick R. Lapides) Robert Hayden’s childhood independence was instrumental to his becoming a scholar and poet. He was reared in a poor Detroit neighborhood, where such distinctions were rare. Soon after he was born Asa Bundy Sheffey, Hayden was adopted by the Haydens, neighbors of his birth parents. A sufferer of extreme myopia as a child, Hayden was separated from his peers into a “sight conservation” class; although his handicap kept him from participating in most sports, the resulting time alone allowed him to read (especially poetry, which demanded less of his vision), write, and play the violin, thereby developing rhythmical and tonal sensitivities that would well serve his eventual vocation. Several fortuitous events and encounters in Robert Hayden’s life supported his choosing texts in African American history, especially the narratives of rebellious slaves, as fruitful subjects for his verse. After attending Detroit City College (which later became Wayne State University), Hayden, in 1936, began working for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration; he was assigned to research “Negro folklore.” Two major figures encouraged his ensuing interest in African American history. The first, Erma Inez Morris, a pianist and a teacher in Detroit’s public schools, became Hayden’s wife and, for a time, his financial support. She also introduced her new husband to Countée Cullen, the Har497
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lem Renaissance poet who admired Hayden’s first book, Heart-Shape in the Dust, and who motivated Hayden to keep writing. Hayden also found inspiration from the British poet W. H. Auden, also a folklorist, who instructed Hayden at the University of Michigan when the younger poet began graduate work there. In 1946, Hayden began a twenty-three-year tenure as a professor at Fisk College in segregated Nashville. During this time Hayden wrote steadily, despite being hampered by a heavy teaching load. The quality of Hayden’s work was recognized internationally—it was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company, and his 1962 book A Ballad of Remembrance won the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal—before he was discovered in the United States. Eventual recognition included invitations to teach at several universities and to edit anthologies of work by his poetic heroes and contemporaries. In 1975, the year that Angle of Ascent was published, Hayden was elected fellow of the Academy of American Poets and Appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden’s greatest personal successes, however, occurred in the last few months of his life. The poet was publicly celebrated both by President Jimmy Carter, at “A White House Salute to American Poetry,” and by his peers at the University of Michigan with “A Tribute to Robert Hayden,” the latter occurring the day before Hayden died of a respiratory embolism at age sixty-six. Popular appreciation of Hayden’s sensitive lyrics, dramatic monologues, and poignant remembrances has grown since his death.
Poetry Much of Robert Hayden’s poetry reflects one man’s wrestling with the sway of poetic influence. His early verse echoes the themes and styles of many of his immediate forebears: Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen, and American modernists such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Hart Crane. The subjects of Hayden’s later poetry reflect his belief that African American poets need not focus exclusively on sociological study or on protest. Early mentors such as Hughes and Cullen guided Hayden through his years of apprenticeship and obscurity and defended Hayden during his later successful years, when he was often upbraided by some black poets for being insufficiently political. Hayden’s persevering confidence in his poetic voice and learning inured him against such criticism. Throughout most of his career as a poet, from the publication of Heart-Shape in the Dust to that of his breakthrough book, Angle of Ascent, Hayden was sustained by academic work—heavy teaching loads and an occasional funded research project—more than he was by popular acclaim. Working in the 1930’s and 1940’s as a researcher for the Federal Writers’ Project, and in various university libraries, Hayden found the historical material for some of his most celebrated poems. Interested especially in the motivations of rebellious slaves, Hayden in “The Ballad
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of Nat Turner” imagines Turner’s almost sympathetic understanding of his captors, as the educated slave “Beheld the conqueror faces and, lo,/ they were like mine.” In “Runagate Runagate” Hayden celebrates Harriet Tubman as “woman of earth, whipscarred,” who has “a shining/ Mean to be free.” The culmination of Hayden’s study of his political heroes can be found in the perfectly crafted sonnet titled “Frederick Douglass,” a poignant paean to “this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro/ beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world/ where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” Throughout his middle years HayRobert Hayden (Library of Congress) den himself might have felt like an alien, teaching at Fisk University in segregated Nashville. He was composing often formal, often disinterested poetry in a time when confessional poetry was fashionable. As was the case with Frederick Douglass a century earlier, Robert Hayden did not let his dissimilarity from those around him keep him from speaking his mind. An inherently peaceful person, Hayden was most upset by the violence of the 1960’s; the title poem of his 1970 book Words in the Mourning Time mourns “for King for Kennedy . . ./ And for America, self-destructive, self-betrayed.” Himself feeling betrayed by America’s policies in Vietnam, Hayden asks: “Killing people to save, to free them?/ With napalm lighting routes to the future?” Despite this expressed skepticism toward American nationalism, in the 1960’s and 1970’s Hayden was welcomed by the poetic and political establishment. Named poetry consultant at the Library of Congress and invited to read at the Carter White House, Hayden felt particularly gratified regarding his late ascendancy. His successes corroborated Hayden’s belief that literature composed by African Americans should be judged objectively and should meet the same high standards as the best literature written in English.
Suggested Readings Conniff, Brian. “Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence.” African American Review 33, no. 3 (Fall, 1999): 487-506. Davis, Arthur P. “Robert Hayden.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1982. Davis, Charles T. “Robert Hayden’s Use of History.” In Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald B. Gibson. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.
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Fetrow, Fred M. “Portraits and Personae: Characterization in the Poetry of Robert Hayden.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960, edited by R. Baxter Miller. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. _______. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Gikandi, Simon. “Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic.” Michigan Quarterly Review 40, no. 2 (Spring, 2001): 318-350. Glaysher, Frederick, ed. Collected Prose: Robert Hayden. Foreword by William Meredith. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Nicholas, Xavier. “Robert Hayden: Some Introductory Notes.” Michigan Quarterly Review 31, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 8. Su, Adrienne. “The Poetry of Robert Hayden.” Library Cavalcade 52, no. 2 (October, 1999): 8-11. Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Foreword by Blyden Jackson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Contributor: Andrew O. Jones
Le Ly Hayslip (Phung Thi Le Ly) Born: Ly La, Vietnam; December 19, 1949 Vietnamese American
Hayslip’s memoirs chronicle a largely successful merger of her Vietnamese ancestry with her acquired American identity. Principal works nonfiction: When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, 1989 (with Jay Wurts); Child of War, Woman of Peace, 1993 Born Phung Thi Le Ly in 1949 to Buddhist peasants living under Vietnam’s French colonial rule, Le Ly Hayslip (lee li HAY-slihp) ardently supported her nation’s struggle for independence. Years later, when Viet Cong soldiers of the North wrongly accused her of treason, she fled her village in central Vietnam to live in Danang and, later, Saigon. After giving birth to her wealthy employer’s son and witnessing the cruelty of communist rebels against the peasants they purported to defend, she shifted her allegiance to the republican-backed American forces. She supported herself and her child through black marketeering and other illegal activity and entered into a series of unhappy love affairs with United States servicemen before marrying Ed Munro, an American contractor more than forty years her senior. In 1970, without notifying her family, she left Vietnam for the United States as Munro’s bride and the mother of his infant son. The pattern of being caught in the middle—between the North and the South or between allies and enemies—continued in her new home in suburban San Diego, where Hayslip experienced culture shock, homesickness, and racial antagonism. Soon after Munro’s death in 1973, she married Dennis Hayslip, a mentally unstable man by whom she had her third son before he committed suicide. The resilient Hayslip supported herself in the United States as a maid, nurse’s aide, and factory worker; with money from her late husband’s insurance settlement and trust fund, she purchased stock options, real estate, and a share in a successful restaurant. Combining investment revenues with the proceeds from her memoir about her life in Vietnam (When Heaven and Earth Changed Places), Hayslip founded the nonprofit East Meets West Foundation, a humanitarian relief organization that delivers medical and relief supplies to the Vietnamese. Child of War, Woman of Peace, the sequel to her first memoir and the account 501
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of her American acculturation and subsequent return trips to Vietnam, attests Hayslip’s ability to endure and heal, which she attributes to her potential to forgive. That second memoir, cowritten with her eldest son, James Hayslip, reveals her ability to embrace America while reconnecting to her Vietnamese past. She explains that her philanthropy, financing her mission in Vietnam through resources acquired in the United States, is the means to bind her old country to her new one, “to sponsor a healing handshake across time and space.” The two autobiographies form the basis for Oliver Stone’s 1993 film, Heaven and Earth, about Hayslip’s life in Vietnam and America.
When Heaven and Earth Changed Places Type of work: Memoir First published: 1989 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, cowritten with Jay Wurts, recounts Hayslip’s life in war-ravaged Vietnam, her immigration to the United States in 1970, and her dangerous return visit to her homeland in 1986. As a young girl, Phung Thi Le Ly (her name before marriage) promises her father, a devote Buddhist farmer, that she will become a woman warrior. She interprets that charge to mean that she must stay alive in order to nurture other life and preserve her ancestral heritage. The memoir is her means of fulfilling that responsibility. She nevertheless offends her family by her presumed betrayal by marriage to an American civilian contractor and flight from Vietnam to join him in California. The autobiography is her tribute to her ancestral traditions and her testimony that she has not forsaken them. Le Ly’s loyalties shift throughout her autobiography. Like most peasants in her village on the border between North and South Vietnam, she supports the Viet Cong against the republican government and its American backers. She performs many daring acts to advance the communist cause, but the Viet Cong wrongly suspect her of collaborating with the South. She evades their deadly reprisals by fleeing to Danang and, later, Saigon. There she pins her hope for a better life onto the American servicemen she comes to know as she struggles to support her illegitimate son and other family members by working as a nurse’s assistant, a black marketeer, and, briefly, a prostitute. Although Le Ly leaves Vietnam during the war and enters the United States as the wife of one American and marries another when she is widowed, her expatriate status distresses her. She proudly regards her three sons—two born in Vietnam and one in the United States—as Americans but regrets that she is “something else: not quite Vietnamese anymore, but not so American as they.” By returning to Vietnam with a fresh perspective to write the account of her family’s suffering, she aids in their survival and recovery, thus reconciling with them and healing her divided sense of self. The memoir’s dual time frames, which alternate chapters of Le Ly moving toward emigration with ones of her preparing to return, converge near the
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end of the book when her departure and homecoming are complete. The narrative strategy suggests that the difference between leaving home and remaining there is not significant. Rather than forsaking her homeland by emigrating, Le Ly has protected and prepared herself for the mission of telling its story and preserving its culture.
Suggested Readings Abramowitz, Rachel. “The Road to ‘Heaven.’” Premiere 7 (January, 1994): 46-50. Hayslip, Le Ly. “A Vietnam Memoir.” People Weekly 32 (December 18, 1989): 147-150. Hayslip, Le Ly, and James Hayslip. Child of Peace, Woman of War. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurtz. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Klapwald, Thea. “Two Survivors Turn Hell into ‘Heaven and Earth.’” The New York Times 143 (December 19, 1993): H22. Mydans, Seth. “Vietnam: A Different Kind of Veteran and Her Healing Mission.” The New York Times 139 (November 28, 1989): A10. Contributor: Theresa M. Kanoza
Oscar Hijuelos Born: New York, New York; August 24, 1951 Cuban American
Hijuelos, a Latino writer, was awarded the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Principal works long fiction: Our House in the Last World, 1983; The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989; The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, 1993; Mr. Ives’ Christmas, 1995; Empress of the Splendid Season, 1999; A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good, 2002 Oscar Hijuelos (hih-WAY-lohs), whose family came from Oriente Province in Cuba, was reared amid two divergent worlds: that of Columbia University, teeming with scholars, and that of Morningside Park, overflowing with drug addicts and muggers. At age four, Hijuelos and his mother visited Cuba, and upon his return he succumbed to nephritis. Bedridden, Hijuelos lingered in a hospital for two years. The theme of separation and isolation, especially from family, saturates Hijuelos’s novels. After receiving his master’s degree in 1976 from the City University of New York, Hijuelos moved to within a few blocks of his childhood home to begin his author’s life, supported by a menial job in an advertising agency. Our House in the Last World is a portrait of his family’s exodus from Cuba. The work recalls Hijuelos’s family relationships; he both hated and loved his alcoholic father, and he misunderstood and miscommunicated with his mother. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love also recalls Hijuelos’s family life. One of his uncles had been a musician with Xavier Cugat. The elevator operator in Hijuelos’s building played music. Hijuelos jumbled these two characters into Cesar Castillo. Cesar and his brother Nestor reach the highest point in their lives when the Mambo Kings appear on the I Love Lucy television show. Later, the brothers are separated. In The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Hijuelos addresses issues of cross-cultural identity with the connection of Cuban and Irish families in a marriage. In Mr. Ives’ Christmas, Hijuelos examines father-son relationships from the father’s perspective. Mr. Ives seeks penance and peace after the disaster of his son’s murder.
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Hijuelos’s life in an advertising agency had little to do with his passion for writing. When he first began thinking of the story that would become The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, he knew that an uncle and an elevator operator would be his models. The uncle, a musician with Xavier Cugat in the 1930’s, and a building superintendent patterned after an elevator-operator-musician merged to become Cesar Castillo, the Mambo King. Cesar’s brother, Nestor, laconic, retrospective, lamenting the loss of a lover he left behind in Cuba, writes the song in her memory that draws the attention of Ricky Ricardo. He hears “Beautiful María of My Soul” as he catches the Mambo Kings in a seedy nightclub where gigs are cheap but long. Ricky’s interest changes their lives. The book altered Hijuelos’s literary career by winning for him the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1990. As the book opens, Cesar rots with his half-empty whiskey glass tipped at the television beaming reruns. He seeks the I Love Lucy spot featuring Nestor and him as the Mambo Kings. Nestor has died. Cesar pathetically broods on the aging process, cirrhosis, and the loss of flamboyant times. Cesar’s old, scratchy records— brittle and warped—resurrect his music stardom. He laments his brother’s death by leafing through fading pictures. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos presents pre-Castro Cubans, who, after World War II, streamed to New York. All communities may strive for the American Dream, but in Latino quarters, music, the mainstream of a culture, sought to free the oppressed. Hijuelos pursues thematic progression: The Castillo brothers become, for a moment, cultural icons by their appearance on I Love Lucy. Their fame does not last, however; Cesar comforts his ego with debauchery, and Nestor dies suddenly. The ironically named Hotel Splendour is where Cesar commits suicide.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien is presented in the form of an album of continuous memories, verbal photographs, and nostalgic images clustered around the major events in the lives of the family members. It is recounted in associative rather than chronological order, and it deliberately creates the effect of sorting through a century of family photographs, while a variety of voices comment on the images and recall their different versions of how events fitted together. Both Nelson O’Brien and his only son, Emilio Montez O’Brien, are photographers, and emphasis is placed on visual images and the importance of these pictures through
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time. The novel reflects on how these images, like the images of memory, represent and reconfigure past events. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien is a third-person narrative, told primarily from the perspective of Margarita, the book’s central and most fully explored character. Margarita is the first of the fourteen daughters of Nelson O’Brien and Mariela Montez, and it is her life span and her perceptions that define the story. Rather than emphasizing exceptional individuals, the novel recounts the stories of ordinary people who live out their lives as best they can, helping one another through the difficult moments and enjoying their times of earthly happiness. It is a novel that celebrates love, sensual pleasures, and human relationships.
Mr. Ives’ Christmas Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 Hijuelos, born in New York City, grew up in a humble, immigrant Cuban family. At age four, he was exiled from the family by nephritis, a kidney inflammation that crippled his youth with a two-year quarantine from home and loved ones. Perhaps that near-orphan status inspired Hijuelos to develop the Edward Ives of this novel. The title character of the novel sanely goes through his life with no malice toward fellow man or woman. He seeks the rewards of work and patience that he has become accustomed to earning, but one date, Christmas Eve, consistently seems to interfere with his life. A widowed printmaker visits the orphan Edward Ives on
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Christmas Eve and, a few Christmases later, adopts him. His adoptive father idyllically rears the dark-skinned child, inspires him to pursue his love for drawing, and eventually guides him to the Art Students League, where he meets, on Christmas Eve, his future wife. The picture-postcard family image is shattered when, on yet another Christmas Eve, the Iveses’ seventeen-year-old son is gunned down as he leaves church choir practice. A fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican kills the boy for ten dollars. Ives devotes his life to obsessive, unerring attempts to rehabilitate the murderer. Symbolically, Ives’s favorite book is a signed copy of British novelist Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Hijuelos strongly relies on this book to link the two tales. The author emulates Dickens’s populous canvases and uses his love of coincidence and contrivance as a metaphor for God’s mysterious workings. The temperance of Ives allows him a longing for grace, a gift for contemplation, and a steady curiosity. Hijuelos draws heavily on images from his New York neighborhood, his coterie of friends, and the milieu of gangs, muggers, and dope addicts at the end of his street. Differing from his other novels, Mr. Ives’ Christmas leaves no doubt that Hijuelos speaks of faith—a faith that mysteriously probes emotions, tested by death and opportunities for forgiveness.
Suggested Readings Barbato, Joseph. “Latino Writers in the American Market.” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 6 (February, 1991): 17-21. Chávez, Lydia. “Cuban Riffs: Songs of Love.” Los Angeles Times Magazine 112 (April, 1993): 22-28. Patteson, Richard F. “Oscar Hijuelos: ‘Eternal Homesickness’ and the Music of Memory.” Critique 44, no. 1 (2002): 38-48. Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Shirley, Paula W. “Reading Desi Arnaz in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” MELUS 20 (September, 1995): 69-78. Socolovsky, Maya. “The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos’s The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 117, no. 2 (2002): 252-264. Contributor: Craig Gilbert
Chester Himes Born: Jefferson City, Missouri; July 29, 1909 Died: Moraira, Spain; November 12, 1984 African American
Himes’s work evokes the social and psychological burden of being a black man in a white society. Principal works long fiction: If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945; Lonely Crusade, 1947; Cast the First Stone, 1952 (unexpurgated edition pb. as Yesterday Will Make You Cry, 1998); The Third Generation, 1954; The Primitive, 1955 (unexpurgated edition pb. as The End of a Primitive, 1997); For Love of Imabelle, 1957 (revised as A Rage in Harlem, 1965); Il pluet des coups durs, 1958 (The Real Cool Killers, 1959); Couché dans le pain, 1959 (The Crazy Kill, 1959); Dare-dare, 1959 (Run Man Run, 1966); Tout pour plaire, 1959 (The Big Gold Dream, 1960); Imbroglio negro, 1960 (All Shot Up, 1960); Ne nous énervons pas!, 1961 (The Heat’s On, 1966; also pb. as Come Back Charleston Blue, 1974); Pinktoes, 1961; Une affaire de viol, 1963 (A Case of Rape, 1980); Retour en Afrique, 1964 (Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1965); Blind Man with a Pistol, 1969 (also pb. as Hot Day, Hot Night, 1970); Plan B, 1983 short fiction: The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, 1990 nonfiction: The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume I, 1972; My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, Volume II, 1976 miscellaneous: Black on Black: “Baby Sister” and Selected Writings, 1973 Chester Bomar Himes (himz) was born on July 29, 1909, in Jefferson City, Missouri, the youngest of three sons born to Estelle Charlotte Bomar and Joseph Sandy Himes, a professor of blacksmithing and wheelwrighting and head of the Mechanical Arts Department at Lincoln University. In 1921 Himes’s father obtained a position at Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Chester and his brother Joe were enrolled in first-year studies there (with classmates ten years their senior). In the same year, Joe was permanently blinded while conducting a chemistry demonstration he and Chester had prepared. The local hospital’s refusal to admit and treat his brother’s injury (presumably because of racial prejudice)—one of several such incidents experienced in his youth—made a lasting impression upon Chester and contributed to his often-cited “quality of hurt” (the title of the first volume of his autobiography). In the next two years Himes attended high schools in St. Louis, Mis508
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souri, and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing the loneliness, isolation, and violence frequently accorded the outsider in adolescence (in schoolyard battles he received chipped teeth, lacerations to the head, and a broken shoulder that never healed properly). Himes was graduated, nevertheless, from Cleveland’s Glenville High School in January, 1926. Preparing to attend Ohio State University in the fall, he took a job as a busboy in a local hotel. Injured by a fall down an elevator shaft, Himes was awarded a monthly disability pension that allowed him to enter the university directly. Early enthusiasm for collegiate life turned quickly to personal depression and alienation, undermining Himes’s academic fervor and success. This discontent led to his flirtation with illicit lifestyles and his subsequent expulsion from the university. Returning to Cleveland, Himes was swept into the dangers and excitement of underworld activities which, as he noted in his autobiography, exposed him to many of the strange characters who populate his detective series. After two suspended sentences for burglary and fraud (because of the personal appeals of his parents for leniency), Himes was arrested in September, 1928, charged with armed robbery, and sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years of hard labor at Ohio State Penitentiary. His serious writing began in prison. By the time he was paroled to his mother in 1936, Himes’s stories about the frustrations and contradictions of prison life had appeared in Esquire and numerous African American newspapers and magazines. In 1937, Himes married Jean Johnson, his sweetheart before imprisonment. Finding employment first as a laborer, then as a research assistant in the Cleveland Public Library, Himes was finally employed by the Ohio State Writers’ Project to work on a history of Cleveland. With the start of World War II, Himes moved to Los Angeles, California. His first two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, were based on these experiences. Following trips to New York, back to Los Angeles, and then to New York, where his third novel, Cast the First Stone, was published, Himes divorced Jean and left for Europe in 1953, sensing the possibility of a new beginning. The French admired his life, particularly appreciating the satire of Pinktoes, a ribald novel proposing the solution to racial tensions through indiscriminate sexual relationships. It was his French editor who encouraged Himes to write the detective novels set in Harlem, featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Himes wrote these in a hurry, desperate for the money, but they turned out to be the perfect match of form and content. Increasingly pessimistic about the violence of his native country, Himes wrote more and more about the radical solution to the racial problem—violence. The Harlem of his detectives, the detectives themselves, and the people among whom they move are all caught up, trapped in a cycle of violent behavior from which they cannot escape. With so much pain, personal and cultural, experienced from the beginning of his life, Himes did what talented artists do: He confronted it, fashioned it into a personal vision, and, living fully, even found the love and humor in it. Between 1953 and 1957, Himes lived in Paris, London, and Majorca while finishing work on The Third Generation and The Primitive. Following the international success of his Harlem Domestic series, Himes moved permanently to Spain in 1969 and, with the
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exception of brief trips to the United States and other parts of Europe, lived there with his second wife, Lesley Packard, until his death on November 12, 1984.
Short Stories Himes’s short stories, he believed, served as his apprenticeship as a writer. They were the first of his writings to be published, and he continued in the genre intermittently for more than forty years. When an anthology of his short fiction was proposed in 1954, he revealed in his autobiography that he could not feel proud of it. The anthology, finally published in 1973, Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings, was highly selective, concentrating on the stories of the first two decades of his career. A 1990 edition, The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, contains sixty-one pieces, ranging from 1933 to 1978, with nine updated. Many are prison stories, and not all are of even quality, but as a whole they demonstrate Himes’s remarkably versatile range of techniques and the ongoing themes and preoccupations of his longer pieces. Prison life, horrible as it was, gave Himes the subject of several short stories. “His Last Day,” about a condemned man’s last few hours before the electric chair, already shows some of Himes’s trademarks. Spats, a hardened, ruthless criminal who is condemned to death for killing a police officer, reflects wryly that he would not have been identified if the one person left alive during his robbery of a club had not recognized his fawn-colored spats. Even when he manages to hide out for a few days, he is finally trapped—by his past and by a woman. An old sweetheart whom he had abandoned in her pregnancy shoots the man who had provided Spats with refuge, thus attracting the police. Rivetingly grim, this early effort is marred by the dated slang, but even so, Himes’s characteristic grisly humor comes through. James Baldwin wrote of Himes that he was the only black writer to describe male-female relationships in terms other than violence. One of Himes’s earliest love stories, “Her Whole Existence: A Story of True Love,” verges on parody in its clichéd language but also shows Himes’s imaginative skill. Written from the point of view of Mabel Miles, the beautiful daughter of a successful African American politician, the story leaps suddenly from the romanticism of Mabel’s attraction for Richard Riley, an ambitious, successful, and handsome criminal, to an analysis of class conflict. Trapped between the respect for law instilled by her family and her own passion, Mabel first betrays Richard and then helps him to escape. It is the first of Himes’s portrayals of unpredictable but strong women. “A Nigger” suggests, with its shockingly simple denouement, Himes’s bitter observations about the sexual relationship between blacks and whites. Mr. Shelton, a rich old white man, drops in unexpectedly on Fay, a black prostitute who lives with a light-skinned common-law husband and who is currently involved with another black man, Joe Wolf. Taken by surprise, Fay shoves Joe into the closet to receive her white lover. Joe hears her cajole and flatter Mr. Shelton out of two hundred dollars and, crouched in the dark, recalls other tired, unattrac-
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tive white men he has known who have turned to black women not in appreciation but in exhaustion. Such men have convinced themselves, he thinks, that it is only black flesh they touch, animal flesh that has no mind or power to judge. When he is ready to leave, Mr. Shelton opens the door of the closet by mistake, looks in, turns away, and leaves. While Fay is jubilant that Joe was not detected, Joe is so furious that he tries to strangle her. He knows that the white man saw him and simply refused to recognize his existence. Back in his own tiny room, he reflects bitterly that he must count himself a “nigger” for allowing his poverty and dependence Chester Himes (Library of Congress) on a prostitute to rob him of his manhood. Though many of Himes’s stories—and novels—ram home the pain of being black in the United States, there are other works that portray individuals who can carve a dignified niche in the limited ways available to them. “Headwaiter” presents Dick Small, an African American man in charge of an old-fashioned dining room patronized by a regular white clientele. Imperturbable in this familiar atmosphere, Dick watches over everyone in his care, remembering the personal details of individual customers, waiters, and busboys. In his small way, he does what he can for the less fortunate. When the diners are horrified to learn that one of the best waiters is a former convict, Dick stands firmly by his decision to give the man a second chance, and his polite firmness quells the furor. He is unable, however, to save another waiter who acts drunk; when he has to dismiss him, he does so with sympathy and compassion. The complementary story “Lunching at the Ritzmore” differs in tone. A satiric view of the laws that required separate public establishments for blacks and whites, this story suggests, lightheartedly, what Himes was seriously to advocate later: the power that lies in a large crowd to hurl down racist barriers. In “the mecca of the motley” in Pershing Square, Los Angeles, a young college student from Vermont argues that there is no discrimination against Negroes. A drifter in the crowd bets him the price of dinner that a young brown-skinned Negro, an unemployed mechanic, will be refused service if the three eat at a restaurant. As the three set off in search of a suitably challenging place to eat, the crowd around them grows and grows because people think that a free giveaway must be the goal of such a gathering. A policeman follows them, wanting to arrest them but not being able to think of a good reason to do so. Finally, an enormous crowd halts outside the very fancy Ritzmore Hotel; there, the debate shifts slightly from race to class, as none of the
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three is dressed well enough. The diners, the waiters, and the cooks, however, are so stunned by the crowd that the three men are immediately served the only item that they can read on the French menu—ironically enough, it is apple pie. The student wins his bet but has to pay because the drifter is broke. Few other stories exhibit such lighthearted irony in the face of racial discrimination. “All He Needs Is Feet” is ironic, in the horrifying, brutal way that shocks the reader into realizing why Himes later saw violence as the only solution for African Americans, because they are mistreated so violently by a violent society. Ward, a black man, walking down the sidewalk in Rome, Georgia, steps off to let a white woman and two white men pass. One white man bumps into Ward anyway and provokes him to fight. A crowd that gathers, thinking a lynching is too severe, pours gasoline on Ward’s feet and sets him on fire. In jail for assault with a deadly weapon, Ward has his feet amputated. He goes to Chicago with money sent by his family and learns to use crutches and knee pads to work at shining shoes, saving enough money to buy war bonds. In a theater, his crutches tucked out of everyone’s way under the seats, Ward cannot stand up for the national anthem at the end of the film. A big, burly man from Arkansas hits him for disrespect to the flag. The ultimate cruelty of the story comes as a punch line, when a policeman arrests the white man: The man from Arkansas blubbers that he could not stand a “nigger” sitting through the national anthem, even if he did not have feet. The issue of patriotism became very complex for African Americans during World War II, especially for those who fought for democracy against Adolf Hitler and his blatantly racist and fascist goals of a super race and then had to reflect on the racism in their own democracy. Several of Himes’s war stories, such as “Two Soldiers,” reveal a man struggling to remain patriotic and optimistic. The most effective of these, “So Softly Smiling,” springs from the war atmosphere but is really a beautiful love story. Roy Jonny Squires, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, returns to Harlem for thirty days. Exhausted by the warfare in North Africa, he heads for a bar late at night and meets Mona Morrison, a successful poet. Her “tawny skin like an African veld at sunset” exactly fulfills the ache for love that fiery raids at dawn have brought upon him. This delicate love story is punctuated throughout with dramatic reminders that the lovers’ time together is very short, and their courtship and married life proceed at breakneck speed. It is in this story that Himes touches on the race issue during war, lightly, positively; Roy says that he finally enlisted because he heard someone say that the United States belonged to the Negro as much as it did to anyone. More than two decades later, Himes seemed to have lost such patriotic optimism. In “Tang,” a tired, hungry couple sit watching television in their cold-water slum flat in Harlem, when a long cardboard box with a florist’s label is delivered to them. They discover inside it an M-14 army gun and a typewritten sheet warning them to learn how to use their weapon and wait for instructions, for freedom is near. The man, T-bone Smith, who had used such a weapon in the Korean War, is absolutely terrified and wants to report the gun to the police. The woman, Tang, once a beautiful, softly rounded woman who has become hard and angular from her life as a poor prostitute, is ecstatic. She hugs the gun as if it were a lover and cherishes the
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thought that the gun could chop up a white policeman. She is ready to fight for freedom, even pointing the gun at T-bone to stop him from calling the police. Her defiance enrages him; he whips out a spring-blade knife and slashes her to death, crying that he might not be free of whitey, but he is now free of her. Writing twenty years before Himes’s death, the critic Edward Margolies noted that Himes’s characters tend to be reflective, interested in ideas and in intellectualizing the predicaments in which they find themselves. As such, they are quite different from such characters as Bigger Thomas, with whom Richard Wright shocked the United States in his Native Son (1940). Wright’s success trapped other African American writers whom the literary establishment then automatically described as, or expected to be, “protest” writers. Certainly, the range of Himes’s short fiction is so vast that it includes stories of strong protest. He wrote, however, stories of individuals caught up in a web of many circumstances. Race is clearly an issue in his fiction, but so are love, sex, poverty, class, war, prison, violence, success, failure, and humor. His short fiction is not only a prelude to his better known novels but also a rewarding world in itself.
Early Novels Himes wrote nearly twenty novels, the dominant theme of which (like that of his other writing) was often racism: the pain it causes and the hateful legacy it creates. In If He Hollers, Let Him Go, Himes uses a wartime West Coast shipyard to set the central confrontation between an educated Northern black man and his poor Southern white coworkers. The results are violent. In spare, functional prose that highlights the psychological paths the novel charts, Himes describes what has been called the American dilemma, or the contrast between a black man believing in democracy and the realities that bruise his dreams. Critics, while not always enamored with the novel, praised Himes for his relentless honesty. Lonely Crusade, Himes’s second novel, treats the betrayal, dislocation, and terror at the nexus of race and sex in United States society. The book makes a laudable effort to understand the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. The Third Generation, thought by many critics to be a thinly veiled autobiography, dramatizes three generations in a family, from slavery to the middle of the twentieth century. It tellingly captures the fear and hatred that can fester in a troubled family, making it perhaps Himes’s most ambitious and moving novel.
Detective Novels Himes left the United States in 1954 for Europe, where he received greater literary recognition than he had ever achieved at home. In France, Himes published sophisticated, fast-paced crime novels. The protagonists, a pair of cynical street-smart
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black detectives, were hailed by French critics. When, years later, the novels were finally printed in the United States, the series achieved wide success. Among them are The Crazy Kill, The Heat’s On, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Himes also wrote stories that are sometimes painfully funny and often bitterly desolate. In them, cops, robbers, and all-around losers—the people Himes knew well in his youth— trade in the debased currency of lies and secrets. The connection between the image of Harlem and the violence that derives from fear is particularly apparent in The Crazy Kill. The Harlem of this novel is a place, in the words of Coffin Ed, “where anything can happen,” and from the narrative’s bizarre opening incident to the very last, that sense of the incredibly plausible pervades. When the theft of a bag of money from a grocery store attracts the attention of the Reverend Short, Mamie Pullen’s minister and a participant at the wake held across the street for Mamie’s husband, the notorious gambler Big Joe Pullen, the storefront preacher leans too far out of a bedroom window under the influence of his favorite concoction, opium and brandy, and falls out. He lands, miraculously, in a basket of bread outside the bakery beneath. He picks himself up and returns to the wake, where he experiences one of his habitual “visions.” When Mamie later accompanies the Reverend Short to the window as he explains the circumstances of his fall, she looks down and sees the body of Valentine “Val” Haines, a young hood who has been living with Sister Dulcy and her husband Johnny “Fishtail” Perry, Big Joe’s godson. The earlier vision has become reality: a dead man with a hunting knife in his heart. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are summoned to discover who murdered Val and, with Detective Sergeant Brody, an Irishman, begin questioning all possible suspects. Perhaps it was Johnny, whose temper is as infamous as his gambling prowess. Perhaps it was Charlie Chink, whose girlfriend, Doll Baby, appeared to be the recent target of Val’s affections. Still, why the exotic hunting knife? Why the basket of bread? What conspiracy of silence connects the Reverend Short, Johnny’s girl Sister Dulcy, and Mamie Pullen, forcing Johnny to travel to Chicago before returning to Harlem and murdering Charlie Chink? After the initial several hours of questioning, Sergeant Brody, despite his years of experience, is too dumbfounded to explain the web of illogical complications in this case. Grave Digger tells him, in a statement that recurs throughout the novel and the entire series, epitomizing Himes’s vision of the city: “This is Harlem. . . . [A]in’t no other place like it in the world. You’ve got to start from scratch here, because these folks in Harlem do things for reasons nobody else in the world would think of.” The plot unravels through a series of mysterious events, including scenes of rage and violence that are the physical consequences of emotional brutalization. Johnny wakes up to find Charlie Chink wandering around nude in his apartment and shoots him six times, stomps his bloody body until Chink’s teeth are “stuck in his calloused heel,” and then leans over and clubs Chink’s head “into a bloody pulp with his pistol butt.” These explosions, Himes’s work suggests, derive from the most sublimated forms of frustration and hatred; the same forces can be seen in the degree of murderous intent that accompanies Coffin Ed’s frequent loss of equilib-
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rium. The repeated examples of “murderous rage” and the number of characters in the series whose faces are cut or whose bodies are maimed are related to this vision of Harlem as a dehumanizing, prisonlike world. Even the apparently comic purposes of character description tend to underscore this perspective (the Reverend Short, for example, is introduced as having a “mouth shaped like that of a catfish” and eyes that “protrude behind his gold-rimmed spectacles like a bug’s under a microscope”). Himes’s evocation of a sense of place, however, is not limited to bizarre scenes of physical violence and rage. Beyond the scores of defiant men who are reminders of the repressed nature of manhood in the inner cities, the author gives abundant images of Harlem’s social life (rent parties, fish fries, and wakes), its cultural past (Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstein, the Apollo Theatre), its economic and political hierarchies (civil servants, politicians, underworld celebrities), and its peculiar lifestyles and institutions (street gangs, professional gamblers, numbers runners, the homosexual subculture, the heroin trade, evangelists’ churches, and soapbox orators). All of this is done with the aplomb of a tour guide whose knowledge of the terrain is complete and whose understanding of the cultural codes of behavior permits explanation to the uninitiated. A bittersweet, tragicomic tone alternating with an almost Rabelaisian exuberance characterizes Himes’s descriptions of the sights, rhythms, and sounds of life in Harlem. Even the diverse enticements and rich peculiarities of African American cooking are a part of Harlem’s atmosphere, and the smells and tastes are frequently explored as Himes moves his two detectives through the many greasy spoons that line their beat (at one point in The Crazy Kill the author duplicates an entire restaurant menu, from entrées to beverages, from “alligator tail and rice” to “sassafrasroot tea”). Humor (if not parody) is reflected in the many unusual names of Himes’s characters: Sassafras, Susie Q., Charlie Chink Dawson, H. Exodus Clay, Pigmeat, and Fishtail Perry; it is also reflected in the many instances of gullibility motivated by greed which account for the numerous scams, stings, and swindles that occur. Himes accomplishes all of this with a remarkable economy of dialogue and language, an astute manipulation of temporal sequence, and a pattern of plots distinguished by a marvelous blend of fantasy and realism: a sense of the magically real that lurks beneath the surface of the commonplace. “Is he crazy or just acting?” asks Sergeant Brody about the Reverend Short’s vision. “Maybe both,” Grave Digger answers. The next three novels in the series—Cotton Comes to Harlem, The Heat’s On, and Blind Man with a Pistol—continue the character types, stylistic devices, and thematic concerns of the earlier novels. Each one represents a deepening of Himes’s artistic control over his material; each one further enhanced his reputation in the genre and increased his notoriety and popularity among the American public. The first two of these, Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back Charleston Blue, were adapted for the screen; the third, reissued in the United States as Hot Day, Hot Night, was received as the “apotheosis” of Himes’s detective novels. Its author was described (on the jacket cover) as “the best black American novelist writing today.”
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Autobiographies Himes’s two-volume autobiography, The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity, was written in Spain. “I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary,” writes Himes in The Quality of Hurt, a book that is less an organized autobiography than a series of poignant sketches, in which he writes about the many hurts that poisoned his life in the United States. Himes is one of the least known, most prolific African American writers of the twentieth century. Over a fifty-year career, Himes wrote scores of novels, short stories, articles, and poems, all marked by a naked sincerity and raging anger at racism. Himes began writing, drawing on his experiences as a young man in prison. He gained critical attention first with a short story, “To What Red Hell,” a fictionalized account of the 1930 fire that killed more than three hundred inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary. Released during the Depression, Himes became involved with the Federal Writers’ Project, the labor movement, and the Communist Party. He also worked as a journalist in Cleveland. In 1941, Himes moved to California, where he began writing novels of rage and frustration, including If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), and Cast the First Stone (1952). By 1953, disgusted with the racism he encountered and the lukewarm, when not hostile, reception his work received, Himes left for Europe. My Life of Absurdity is not a deep examination of his life so much as a commentary on the meaning of being a black expatriate writer. “No American,” he writes, “has lived a life more absurd than mine.”
Suggested Readings Cochran, David. “So Much Nonsense Must Make Sense: The Black Vision of Chester Himes.” The Midwest Quarterly 38 (Autumn, 1996): 1-30. Crooks, Robert. “From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.” College Literature 22 (October, 1995): 68-90. Himes, Chester. Conversations with Chester Himes. Edited by Michel Fabre and Robert Skinner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Margolies, Edward, and Michel Fabre. The Several Lives of Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Muller, Gilbert. Chester Himes. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Rosen, Steven J. “African American Anti-Semitism and Himes’s Lonely Crusade.” MELUS 20 (Summer, 1995): 47-68. Sallis, James. Chester Himes: A Life. New York: Walker, 2001. Silet, Charles L. P., ed. The Critical Response to Chester Himes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Skinner, Robert E. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Contributors: Roland E. Bush, Shakuntala Jayaswal, and Barbara Day
Rolando Hinojosa Born: Mercedes, Texas; January 21, 1929 Mexican American
Hinojosa’s fiction gives a view of Mexican American life in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the twentieth century. Principal works long fiction: Estampas del valle, y otras obras/Sketches of the Valley, and Other Works, 1973 (English revision, The Valley, 1983); Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976 (Klail City: A Novel, 1987); Mi querido Rafa, 1981 (Dear Rafe, 1985); Rites and Witnesses, 1982; Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery, 1985; Claros varones de Belken, 1986 (Fair Gentlemen of Belken County, 1986); Becky and Her Friends, 1990; The Useless Servants, 1993; Ask a Policeman, 1998 poetry: Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip, 1978 (printed 1980; includes some prose) edited text: Tomás Rivera, 1935-1984: The Man and His Work, 1988 (with Gary D. Keller and Vernon E. Lattin) miscellaneous: Generaciones, Notas, y Brechas/Generations, Notes, and Trails, 1978; Agricultural Workers of the Rio Grande and Rio Bravo Valleys, 1984 Rolando Hinojosa (roh-LAHN-doh hee-noh-HOH-sah) began writing book-length works of fiction in the 1970’s when he was in his forties and after he had established a successful academic career. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, but he left to serve in Korea before returning to complete his degree in Spanish in 1953. In the 1950’s, he taught at Brownsville High School. He next took a master’s degree in Spanish from New Mexico Highlands University (1962) and a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Illinois (1969). He has taught and held administrative posts at various universities in Texas. Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip, which is poetry, and his novels form the Klail City Death Trip series, which deals with ethnic identity, the perils and rewards of cultural assimilation, and the importance of education. Hinojosa’s major characters undergo epic struggles with the issues of identity, moving from a discrete, self-contained Mexican American community of the 1930’s into a world in which young Mexican American men fight and die for the institutions that have relegated them to second-class citizenry. 517
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Hinojosa shows that life in the Rio Grande Valley must change. The Klail City Death Trip series in particular shows the subtle mid-century changes in the social and economic landscape of the small towns of the valley and the ways in which Mexican Americans began to demand equality. Because many of Hinojosa’s characters believe in the American Dream, they become more Americanized and less Chicano as the twentieth century moves forward. By the time of Partners in Crime and Becky and Her Friends, the main characters have achieved status within the Anglo community and appear to thrive within it. Rolando Hinojosa (Courtesy, University of Texas at Austin)
Klail City Type of work: Novel First published: Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976 (English translation, 1987) Klail City is part of the Klail City Death Trip, a chronicle of the Texas Rio Grande Valley. This novel moves between past and present so that the past and the present often appear to be the same. Like most of Hinojosa’s novels, Klail City lacks linear plot development. A series of vignettes create a sense of place and ultimately present a picture of a changing world. Several narrators, including the main characters of the series, Rafe Buenrostro (“Buenrostro” means “good face”) and Jehú Malacara (“Malacara” means “bad face”) tell the stories. P. Galindo, Esteban Echevarría (a kind of wise man throughout the series), Rafe, and Jehú recount a variety of tales ranging from the story of a hastily arranged marriage between the pregnant Jovita de Anda and Joaquín Tamez to tales of the Texas Rangers’ abuse of Mexican Americans to the story of how Alejandro Leguizamón planned the murder of Rafe’s father, Jesús, and the revenge exacted by Jesús’s brother, don Julián. There is also a kind of interior monologue by Jehú as he and Rafe attend their twenty-second high school class reunion. The past is interwoven with the present, particularly in the scenes that occur in the bars, where the old men, the viejitos, sit drinking and talking until don Manuel Guzmán, Klail City’s only Mexican American police officer, comes to take them home.
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The section entitled “The Searchers” tells the stories of migrant workers as they leave their homes in the valley to travel north to pick produce. The narrator P. Galindo is introduced, and he reveals himself to be a kind of surrogate author for Hinojosa as he explains his interest in preserving a history of these people. In addition, Rafe gives a personal account of what it was like in the 1940’s for Mexican American students in the American high school, and Jehú recounts some of his experiences as an orphan, an acolyte, and a traveling evangelist with Brother Imás. Brother Imás’s life story is told, as is Viola Barragán’s (Hinojosa’s prototype of the liberated woman), along with an account of how the whites used “bought” Mexicans to get their hand-picked candidates elected. This eclectic collection of vignettes makes up a book that, in 1976, won Latin America’s most prestigious literary award, the Casa de las Américas prize.
Suggested Readings Calderón, Héctor. “Texas Border Literature: Cultural Transformation and Historical Reflection in the Works of Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, and Gloria Anzaldua.” Disposito 16, no. 41 (1991): 13-27. Hernandez, Guillermo E. Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Lee, Joyce Glover. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. Penzenstadler, Joan. “La frontera, Aztlán, el barrio: Frontiers in Chicano Literature.” In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1989. Saldivar, José David, ed. The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical. Houston: Arte Público, 1985. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Zilles, Klaus. Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader’s Guide. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Contributor: Joyce J. Glover
Garrett Kaoru Hongo Born: Volcano, Hawaii; May 30, 1951 Japanese American
Hongo writes lyrically and evocatively about personal history, place of origin, and ethnicity. Principal works drama: Nisei Bar and Grill, pr. 1976, revised pr. 1992 poetry: The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, 1978 (with Alan Chong Lau and Lawson Fusao Inada); Yellow Light, 1982; The River of Heaven, 1988 nonfiction: Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i, 1995 (memoir) edited texts: The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, 1993; Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir, 1994 (by Wakako Yamauchi); Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America, 1995 Garrett Kaoru Hongo (GAR-reht kay-OH-roo HON-goh) was born in the shadow of the Kilauea volcano but reared near Los Angeles. When he comes to terms with his origins during his first sojourn to Hawaii at middle age, he liberates his spirit with a moving insight that solidifies his sense of self. His poetry and prose are reverent, precise, and evocative, celebrating male ancestors, early Japanese poets, family, birthplace, and home. Estranged from his past, Hongo was sheltered from the bitter truths of the World War II internment by his family. Gardena, California, the town where he grew up, boasted the largest community of Japanese Americans on the mainland United States at the time and was bordered on the north by the predominantly black towns of Watts and Compton and on the southwest by Torrance and Redondo Beach, white towns. Thus, Hongo was sensitized to issues of uneasy race relations and urban street life at an early age. Hongo studied in Japan for a year following graduation from Pomona College, then earned a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of California at Irvine. As a poet-in-residence in Seattle, he founded and directed a local theater group called The Asian Exclusion Act. Hongo identifies largely with the West Coast, a mecca for many Asian American writers, and early became a friend and collaborator with Lawson Fusao Inada, a pioneer Japanese American poet. His marriage to white violinist Cynthia Thiessen and their rearing of two sons, Alexander and Hudson, have given Hongo particular sensitivity to the cultural terrain he calls “the borderlands.” As the only Asian member of the faculty at the University of Oregon, Eugene, 520
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Hongo began directing the creative writing program there in 1989 and received several extended leaves that allowed time in Hawaii to work on his prose memoirs, published in 1995 as Volcano. Among his most important influences is Wakako Yamauchi, a widely anthologized Japanese American short-story writer and playwright, whose works Hongo collected and edited under the title Songs My Mother Taught Me, which was published in 1994.
Volcano Type of work: Memoir First published: 1995 Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i evocatively describes flora, fauna, and geographical features of an exuberantly lush and exotic landscape. The book contains biographical portraits of a handful of Hongo’s flamboyant, melancholy, or mercenary ancestors, intriguing in themselves. In the artful way in which it combines place with personal history, and in which it seeks to reconcile Hongo’s Japanese heritage with his American circumstances, the book explores a larger truth: To achieve true peace of mind, it is necessary to seek, acknowledge, and celebrate one’s own ethnic, geographical, and biological origins. Hongo’s last name means “homeland,” and he conducts a pilgrimage, crossing the Pacific Ocean to immerse himself in the birthplace he left when he was only a few weeks old, Volcano. Growing up near Los Angeles and living as an adult in Missouri and Oregon, Hongo first returns to Volcano when he is thirty years old, his Caucasian violinist wife and their infant son, Alexander, in tow. Having felt a profound sense of estrangement from his past, knowing little about his father or grandfather, Hongo soon makes acquaintances in Volcano with locals and distant relatives, who reveal painful truths about the ravages of the Japanese American internment on his family. His cabin in the rainforest is in the shadow of the Kilauea volcano, which takes on symbolism as his narrative continues. He shops in the general store that his grandfather once owned. He witnesses a volcano erupting in the early morning Garrett Kaoru Hongo (Ellen Foscue Johnson)
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and hikes around lava flows. He eats food such as poi and miso soup, which for him become a wayside of culture and memory. The first visit makes Hongo eager to return, having given him particulars of ancestral memory and having shown him a way to belong in and to make sense of his world. In the poignancy and drama of coming face-to-face with ugly racial and personal secrets and also with the beauties of place that lift him above the pain, Hongo becomes inspired to compose the poetry that had been locked deep inside. The book ends with the wish that the reader achieve similar healing self-knowledge.
Suggested Readings Chock, Eric, and Darrell H. Y. Lum, eds. The Best of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writer’s Quarterly. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1986. Evans, Alice. “A Vicious Kind of Tenderness: An Interview with Garrett Hongo.” Poets & Writers Magazine 20, no. 5 (September/October, 1992): 37-46. Filipelli, Laurie. Garrett Hongo. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1997. Jarman, Mark. “The Volcano Inside.” The Southern Review 32, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 337-343. Slowik, Mary. “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilynn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura.” MELUS 25, no. 3 (2000): 221242. Contributor: Jill B. Gidmark
Bell Hooks (Gloria Watkins) Born: Hopkinsville, Kentucky; September 25, 1952 African American
Beginning with her acclaimed Ain’t I a Woman, Hooks helped black women find their voices within mainstream feminism. Principal works children’s literature: Happy to Be Nappy, 1999; Homemade Love, 2001; Be Boy Buzz, 2002; Skin Again, 2004 poetry: A Woman’s Mourning Song, 1993; When Angels Speak of Love, 2007 nonfiction: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981; Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984, 2000; Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1989; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 1990; Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, 1991 (with Cornel West); Black Looks: Race and Representation, 1992; Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, 1993; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1994; Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, 1995; Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995; Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies, 1996; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, 1997; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, 1997; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, 1999; All About Love: New Visions, 2000; Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000; Where We Stand: Class Matters, 2000; Salvation: Black People and Love, 2001; Communion: The Female Search for Love, 2002; Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 2003; Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003; We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, 2004; The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004; Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, 2006 (with Amalia Mesa-Bains) Bell Hooks (whose name is often styled in all-lowercase letters as “bell hooks”), a prolific feminist writer, is one of America’s leading intellectual figures. The author of more than a dozen books and numerous essays, Hooks has had a distinguished career as she has sought to locate, describe, and define the shared experiences of black women. Hooks has earned her reputation as an impassioned yet analytical theorist by approaching such subjects as racism, classicism, and sexism with an acute sensitivity. Hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, 523
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Kentucky. She is the daughter of Veodis Watkins, a custodian employed by the postal service, and Rosa Bell Watkins, a homemaker. There were seven children, including Gloria, in the Watkins family: one boy and six girls. All the members of the Watkins family shared a love for language, especially poetic language. Hooks remembers that during storms that caused power outages, she would sit with her family in their candlelit living room and stage impromptu talent shows; poetry recitations always figured prominently in these spontaneous family performances. This love for poetry, initiated and sustained by her family, has inspired Hooks throughout her career, and though she chooses to write under the name “Bell Hooks,” she does not do so to distinguish or separate herself from her family. Her choice of her pseudonym is a tribute to the wisdom of her great-grandmother, Bell Hooks. Hooks attended Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville. After graduation she enrolled at Stanford University in Stanford, California; she obtained her B.A. degree in English in 1973. In 1976 she earned her master’s degree, also in English, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She then began teaching English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; she remained there until 1979. In the early 1980’s she taught courses in creative writing, African American literature, and composition at several institutions, including the University of California at Santa Cruz. While teaching, Hooks also pursued her Ph.D. She received her doctoral degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1983. Teaching and earning her Ph.D., however, were not the only activities absorbing Hooks’s energy during this period. In 1981 she published her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. The publication of Ain’t I a Woman, a work Hooks began writing when she was nineteen years old, earned her much critical praise. The book was also the harbinger of Hooks’s future work. The focus of Ain’t I a Woman—black women finding their voices within mainstream feminism—is also the central concern of several of Hooks’s later works, including Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. A different concern surfaced in the works Hooks published in the first half of the 1990’s. In such works as Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics and Black Looks: Race and Representation, Hooks analyzes, from a black and feminist perspective, such popular cultural phenomenon as films, rap songs, and advertisements. Her specific targets include the videos of the pop-music diva Madonna and the advertisements of the clothing manufacturer Benetton. The purpose of her examination of society and its media representations, Hooks suggests in each of these books, is to illustrate the way African Americans are depicted in film, television, advertisements, and literature. Hooks hopes that by pointing out these images she will help others “see” how prevalent racist images still are in America. Although Hooks has delved into American popular culture in her books, she has not abandoned all academic pursuits. Besides writing, Hooks has remained active in the classroom. In 1985 she taught African and Afro-American studies and English at Yale University. She has also served as an associate professor of women’s studies and American literature at Oberlin College. In 1994 she became
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the distinguished professor of English at the City College of New York. Hooks articulated and examined some of her teaching theories in her 1994 work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. This volume, according to Hooks, is her attempt to apply the philosophy of the progressive Brazilian educator Paula Freire to American society. She argues in this book that students should do more than merely receive an education; they should participate throughout the process. Hooks has certainly been an active participant in her own education. Through her meticulous observation of and theorizing about such topics as feminism, racism, popular culture, and pedagogical methods, she has cultivated a broad base of knowledge. Her books and essays are her means of synthesizing and disseminating the material that has enriched her own life. In 1996, Hooks published the first volume of a three-part autobiography, Bone Black. She continued with Wounds of Passion and Remembered Rapture. In 1999, she also began writing children’s books, aimed to encourage self-esteem among African American children. In All About Love, Salvation, and Communion, Hooks ventured into territory that verged on self-help, albeit with her typically engaged political consciousness. In these books, Hooks considers the role of love in human lives and how the contentious relations between the sexes in modern American culture came to be and how they can be redressed.
Ain’t I a Woman Type of work: Social criticism First published: 1981 Ain’t I a Woman analyzes how racist and sexist oppression have prevented a positive valuation of black womanhood. As it does so, it critically engages a variety of authors and assumptions, indicating their racist and sexist blind spots. A major theme of the book is how a preoccupation with black male masculinity has hidden and distorted the experiences of black women, leading to mistaken assumptions regarding “strong black women” whose dignity rests on their capacity to cope with and endure oppression and degradation. These assumptions, Hooks argues, have led to the erasure of black women’s identity. The term “women” tends to refer primarily to white women; the term “black” or “Negro” tends to refer primarily to black men. Hooks develops her argument by confronting the widely held view that the predominant damage caused by slavery was the demasculinization of the black male. She shows how, in fact, white patriarchy enabled African males to maintain a semblance of their societally given masculine role; they performed only “masculine” tasks and were encouraged to adopt traditional sex roles in the slave subculture. In contrast, many African women were assigned heavy labor. They were usually bred like cattle. Furthermore, those who worked as “house slaves” were often raped by their owners and brutalized by the owners’ wives. To this extent, they came to be seen as the “other,” the opposite of the real lady as idealized by the “cult of true
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womanhood.” This patriarchal value system held that women were delicate, chaste, and feminine. Since black women were hardworking, sexually available, and “nonfeminine,” they did not count as women at all. Thus, Hooks points out that far from demasculinizing black men, the experience of slavery masculinized black women. Hooks also shows the continuation of the devaluation of black womanhood after slavery, taking white feminists to task for ignoring the sexist oppression of black women after manumission. For example, she criticizes Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), arguing that Brownmiller fails to acknowledge that the rape of black women has never received the same sort of attention as the rape of white women. Hooks explains that because of the slave system, which led to the designation of black women as sexually depraved, immoral, and loose, black women have been seen by the white public as sexually permissive and eager for sexual assault. Black women have been viewed as incapable of being “raped.” To demonstrate the racist ideology that has made the term “women” synonymous with “white women,” Hooks raises arguments against white feminists who have been unwilling to distinguish among varying types and degrees of oppression and discrimination. She points out that white women in the women’s movement wanted to project an image of themselves as victims in order to gain entry to the job market. This image clashed, however, with black women’s experiences as employees, as the maids and housekeepers of white women’s children. Moreover, it ignored the fact that many lower-class women and women of color had to work, that not working was the privilege of middle-class white women. In this respect, Hooks offers a strong critique of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), showing how it made the white middle-class “housewife” into a victim while ignoring the exploitation of poor black and nonblack women in the American economy. Although much of Hooks’s argument exposing the impact of the slave system on understandings of black womanhood focuses on the racism of white feminists, she does not ignore the way in which many black women have themselves internalized racism and sexism. She explains that when confronted with racism in the women’s movement, a number of black women responded by forming separate black feminist groups. While she perhaps underestimates the positive role of these groups in facilitating exchanges among black women and giving them a sense of community and purpose, she convincingly details many of the negative repercussions of separatism. First, segregated groups perpetuated the very racism that they were designed to attack, leading to the even greater polarization of the women’s movement. Second, they failed to provide a critical assessment of the movement and a notion of feminism untainted by racism. Third, they forfeited the opportunity for coalitionbuilding, enabling white women to continue to think of race and sex as unconnected. Thus, Hooks concludes that separatism serves primarily the interests of white men, pitting women against women and allowing white men to establish the meaning of liberation and freedom, success and opportunity. Hooks teaches that as long as liberation means having the same power that white men have, white and black women will remain at odds with each other. This power
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is inherently divisive, denying the connections among people and creating a world of oppression and opposition. Yet once women cease to accept the idea of divisiveness and break through the myths, stereotypes, and assumptions that deny their commonality, they can grasp the connections between race and sex and begin forging a new sisterhood. This sisterhood will be one of accountability, whereby women take responsibility for ending division and oppression and recognizing the dignity and diversity of all people.
Yearning Type of work: Social criticism First published: 1990 The analysis of sexism in the black community is one of Hooks’s strongest themes. She observes that black male sexism is analyzed differently from white male sexism; popular assumptions in the “liberal” establishment that racism is more oppressive to black men than to black women are based on the acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity. These, she notes again and again, are life-threatening to black men. The continuing argument over sexism versus racism misses the point of the interlocking nature of oppressions: They cannot be ranked. Her stance between various points of view—between black and white, between positions in the black community, between positions in the feminist community— is a foundation of her political belief. This view has characterized her work at least from the time of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. In Yearning, however, she is clearer about the choice to stay on the boundary: “Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people.” The critique of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, provides a practical example of the kind of analysis done by cultural critics. Hooks’s assessment, which focuses on the omission of articles by non-Western or feminist theorists, spotlights the cover as an ironic visual metaphor for the position of the book. The cover reproduces a photograph of a white male fieldworker taking notes on darker-skinned people who watch him from a distance. Although the brown man seems to be watching with admiration, the brown woman’s face is blocked by the graphics of the cover. Although the book itself critiques the traditional exploitative stance of the anthropologist, the cover seems to undercut that critique by reinscribing or reinforcing the colonialist power position. The cover of Yearning also lends itself to analysis, especially considering Hooks’s critique of the cover of Writing Culture. The image on Yearning’s cover appears to be a portion of a nineteenth century etching, in which a barefoot darkerskinned woman, seated on an oriental carpet, tells the fortune of a white woman, lying on a couch above her. The darker-skinned woman is wearing a loose jacket, open to show her cleavage; loose pants with her legs crossed above her bare feet;
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scarf; and earrings. She is holding out a card to the lighter-skinned woman. More cards are spread around her. The lighter-skinned woman, dressed in white, reclines on pillows. In this image, the darker-skinned woman is made to seem a sexual object (on the floor, breasts showing, begging), while the lighter-skinned woman’s position is literally higher (arms and chest covered, eyes downcast, passive). However, to whom is the darker woman a sexual object? To the white woman? Or to the audience of the etching, playing out a stereotyped notion of the exotic Other? The lighter woman is no less stereotyped: The passive lady, on a couch instead of a pedestal, constricted by corsets and clothing, is taking no active role in public life. Although the cover almost certainly shows a colonial scene from Turkey or Egypt, it could just as likely stand for the situation of the Southern United States during slavery—house slave entertaining plantation mistress. Read in a different way, the cover could also be saying that the darker woman is prophesying a different future to the white woman, a more egalitarian one in which the colonial world of which the white woman is a part will be overturned by the “underside of history.” Perhaps both women are “yearning” for a radical change to their very different oppressive situations. In all this discussion of cover images undermining ideas of the book, Hooks has not recognized the market forces that usually preclude the author’s choice or even approval of the cover. Thus, seeing significance in the cover should perhaps be prefaced by a recognition of the prevailing system. In this particular case, according to South End Press’s editorial department, Hooks herself helped to choose the cover.
Suggested Readings Bauer, Michelle. “Implementing a Liberatory Feminist Pedagogy: Bell Hooks’ Strategies for Transforming the Classroom.” MELUS 25, no. 3 (2000): 265-274. Cheng, Cliff. “A Review Essay on the Books of Bell Hooks: Organizational Diversity Lessons from a Thoughtful Race and Gender Heretic.” The Academy of Management Review 22, no. 2 (1997): 553-564. Florence, Namulundah. Bell Hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. Grunnell, Marianne, and Sawitri Saharso. “Bell Hooks and Nira Yuval-Davis on Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Gender.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 6, no. 2 (1999): 203-219. Martin, Joan M. “The Notion of Difference for Emerging Womanist Ethics.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, no. 1/2 (1993): 39-51. Valdivia, Angharad N. “Bell Hooks: Ethics from the Margins.” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 4 (2002): 429-447. Contributors: Traci S. Smrcka, Jodi Dean, and Margaret McFadden
Langston Hughes Born: Joplin, Missouri; February 1, 1902 Died: New York, New York; May 22, 1967 African American
Hughes’s writings reflect on the struggles and triumphs of African American people, in the idiom of black America. Principal works children’s literature: Popo and Fijina: Children of Haiti, 1932 (story; with Arna Bontemps); The First Book of Negroes, 1952; The First Book of Rhythms, 1954; The First Book of Jazz, 1955; The First Book of the West Indies, 1955; The First Book of Africa, 1960 drama: Little Ham, pr. 1935; Mulatto, pb. 1935; Troubled Island, pr. 1935 (opera libretto); Don’t You Want to Be Free?, pb. 1938; Freedom’s Plow, pb. 1943; Street Scene, pr., pb. 1947 (lyrics; music by Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice); Simply Heavenly, pr. 1957 (opera libretto); Black Nativity, pr. 1961; Five Plays, pb. 1963 (Walter Smalley, editor); Tambourines to Glory, pr., pb. 1963; Jerico-Jim Crow, pr. 1964; The Prodigal Son, pr. 1965 long fiction: Not Without Laughter, 1930; Tambourines to Glory, 1958 poetry: The Weary Blues, 1926; Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927; Dear Lovely Death, 1931; The Negro Mother, and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931; The Dream Keeper, and Other Poems, 1932; Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, 1932; A New Song, 1938; Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942; Jim Crow’s Last Stand, 1943; Lament for Dark Peoples, 1944; Fields of Wonder, 1947; One Way Ticket, 1949; Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951; Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1959; Ask Your Mama: Or, Twelve Moods for Jazz, 1961; The Panther and the Lash: Or, Poems of Our Times, 1967; The Poems, 1921-1940, 2001 (volume 1 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Dolan Hubbard, editor); The Poems, 1941-1950, 2001 (volume 2 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Hubbard, editor); The Poems, 1951-1967, 2001 (volume 3 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes; Hubbard, editor) screenplay: Way Down South, 1939 (with Clarence Muse) short fiction: The Ways of White Folks, 1934; Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950; Laughing to Keep from Crying, 1952; Simple Takes a Wife, 1953; Simple Stakes a Claim, 1957; The Best of Simple, 1961; Something in Common, and Other Stories, 1963; Simple’s Uncle Sam, 1965; The Return of Simple, 1994; Short Stories, 1996 translations: Masters of the Dew, 1947 (of Jacques Roumain; with Mercer Cook); 529
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Cuba Libre, 1948 (of Nicolás Guillén; with Ben Carruthers); Gypsy Ballads, 1951 (of Federico García Lorca); Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 1957 nonfiction: The Big Sea: An Autobiography, 1940; Famous American Negroes, 1954; Famous Negro Music Makers, 1955; The Sweet Flypaper of Life, 1955 (photographs by Roy De Carava); I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, 1956; A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, 1956 (with Milton Meltzer); Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958; Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, 1962; Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, 1967 (with Meltzer); Black Misery, 1969 (illustrations by Arouni); Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters: 1925-1967, 1980; Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, 2001 (Emily Bernard, editor) edited texts: The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, 1949 (with Arna Bontemps); The Book of Negro Folklore, 1959 (with Bontemps); New Negro Poets: U.S.A., 1964; The Book of Negro Humor, 1966; The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, 1967 miscellaneous: The Langston Hughes Reader, 1958; The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, 2001-2004 (16 volumes) James Mercer Langston Hughes led an active literary life. His writings extend from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s. Hughes’s father abandoned his wife and infant son in 1903 to seek wealth in Mexico. His mother, unable to find even menial labor in their hometown of Joplin, Missouri, moved frequently to look for work. In his youth, Hughes lived predominantly with his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. Hughes understood poverty, dejection, and loneliness, but from his grandmother he learned the valuable lessons of perseverance and laughter. Her resilience and ingenuity made a lasting impression upon Hughes’s imagination, and she seems the prototype of his self-assured female characters. After his grandmother’s death, Hughes reunited with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois, but for a time was placed with his Auntie Reed and her husband, religious people who pressured Hughes into joining their church. Hughes marked this unsuccessful attempt at conversion as the beginning of his religious disbelief, as illustrated in the story “Salvation.” Hughes later moved to Cleveland, where his intellectual growth began in earnest. His earliest poems were influenced by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg. He read the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche and was introduced to socialist ideas. When Hughes’s father, having become prosperous, asked Hughes to join him in Mexico in 1920, Hughes rode a train across the Mississippi River at St. Louis and penned the famous “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” on the back of an envelope. In Mexico, Hughes became dissatisfied with his father’s materialism and his plans to send him to a European university. Hughes escaped and attended bullfights and studied Mexican culture. He wrote little of these experiences, although a few pieces were published in The Brownies’ Book, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois’s
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staff at Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1921, Hughes enrolled at Columbia University. He was quickly disillusioned with Columbia’s coldness and spent more time in Harlem and at Broadway productions. Consequently, Hughes failed most of his classes and dropped out. He worked odd jobs while devoting his free time to the shaping forces of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes led a nomadic life for two years as a cabin boy on freighters that took him to Europe and Africa. On his initial voyage, he threw away his books because they reminded him of past hardships. He Langston Hughes (Library of Congress) discovered how cities such as Venice had poor people too. These voyages and observations became the genesis of his first autobiography, The Big Sea. Hughes made many influential friends, among them Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, and Arna Bontemps. Van Vechten helped Hughes find a publisher for his work. Bontemps and Hughes later collaborated on numerous children’s books and anthologies. Hughes matriculated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1926, the year that his first book, The Weary Blues, was published. This book was soon followed by many others. During the 1930’s, Hughes made trips to Haiti and to the Soviet Union. In 1937, he was a correspondent in Spain during that country’s civil war. He wrote about these excursions in his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander. During the 1940’s, he wrote columns for the Chicago Defender, formulating the humorous persona Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple,” who would later become the basis of the “Simple” stories. In the 1950’s, his politically edged writings made Hughes a brief target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for communists. In the last years of his life, Hughes continued to produce volumes of edited and creative work. Hughes died following prostate surgery at Polyclinic Hospital in New York City in 1967. Although perhaps best known for his poetry, Langston Hughes explored almost every literary genre. His prose fiction includes novels, humorous books, translations, lyrics, librettos, plays, and scripts. He wrote the libretti for several operas, a screenplay—Way Down South, with Clarence Muse—radio scripts, and song lyrics. His most famous contribution to musical theater was the lyrics he wrote for Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice’s musical adaptation of Rice’s Street Scene. Over the years, Hughes also wrote several nonfiction articles, mainly focused on his role as a poet and his love of black American music—jazz, gospel, and the blues. Perhaps his
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most important article was his first: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in The Nation on June 23, 1926, in defense of the idea of a black American literary style, voice, and subject matter.
The Big Sea Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1940 In the opening of Hughes’s first autobiography, The Big Sea, the author recalls how he heaved his books overboard at the start of his first journey to Africa in 1923. The gesture may be seen as adolescent and anti-intellectual, but it suggests the commencement of Hughes’s role as a Renaissance man in Black American letters. The book chronicles the first twenty-seven years of Hughes’s life, from the 1920’s, when he explored the idiom and jazz rhythms of African Americans in his poetry to the shift to his bitter prose of the 1930’s. The autobiography is written typically as a confession, but it remains comparatively impersonal. Only three guarded personal accounts appear in the text of The Big Sea. The first concerns a religious revival Hughes attended at age thirteen at which he waited in vain for Jesus. The second describes the morning in Mexico when he realized that he hated his father. The third, at the book’s end, details the break with his patron and mentor, Charlotte Mason. He ties the latter experience to the other two: “The light went out with a sudden crash in the dark, and everything became like that night in Kansas when I had failed to see Jesus and had lied about it afterwards. Or that morning in Mexico when I suddenly hated my father.” Other than these specific episodes, controversy rarely enters the book. Instead, Hughes presents himself as a man who loves his race and is optimistic about his people. He nevertheless carries doubts and fears within himself. The book, furthermore, is peopled by Hughes’s many friends, including Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and others involved with the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’s publisher, Blanche Knopf, thought that the references were excessive, but Hughes convinced her to retain them. Consequently, The Big Sea is perhaps the best chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance.
I Wonder as I Wander Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1956 The second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, received less favor than its predecessor, although Hughes thought that his second autobiography was more important to his future as a writer. Knopf rejected the book, claiming it was “pretty weighted . . . and not a book.” Covering his life from 1929 to 1950, it includes his
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travels to Haiti, Spain, and Russia. More than half of the collection explores his 1932 trip to the Soviet Union, and a second long section covers his excursion to Spain during its civil war. The book seems less a literary life than a political commentary on his travels. One of the criticisms directed at I Wonder as I Wander was its detachment from the personal and reflective. The Big Sea contains few enough personal reflections, but those that it contains are balanced between pain and joy. I Wonder as I Wander shows a Hughes who is more secure in his world and who is suffering less, despite his poverty (which fame did little to diminish). I Wonder as I Wander is a mature recollection, written without radicalism or prejudice.
The Ways of White Folks Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1934 During Hughes’s travels to Russia in 1931, he became intensely interested in D. H. Lawrence’s short fiction. As he later described in I Wonder as I Wander, he had never read Lawrence before and remarked that both “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Lovely Lady” had made his “hair stand on end.” “I could not put the book down,” he wrote. Furthermore, he wrote: “If D. H. Lawrence can write such psychologically powerful accounts of folks in England . . . maybe I could write stories like his about folks in America.” This fascination led to The Ways of White Folks, a collection of fourteen stories. The title is derived from the story “Berry,” an account of a young black man who works as a handyman in a home for handicapped children. Berry is exploited and does more than his share of work for a pittance. He cannot understand why this happens and remarks, “The ways of white folks, I mean some white folks, is too much for me. I rekon they must be a few good ones, but most of ’em ain’t good—least wise they don’t treat me good. And Lawd knows, I ain’t never done nothin’ to them, nothin’ a-tall.” Overall, the stories comment on the suffering the black community endures at the hands of white society. “Slave on the Block,” for example, details how a white couple strives to make a young black artist fit into their aesthetic mold. Humorously, the young man, rebelling, runs off with the cook. In “Father and Son,” Bert, a college student, returns home to the South but does not relinquish his independence. Despite warnings to respect white society, Bert ignores them and finds himself and his father hunted by a lynch mob. To save themselves from the disgrace of public hanging, Bert kills his father and himself before the mob overtakes them. In “Home,” Hughes writes of an elderly musician who has returned home; while his career had been successful elsewhere, he is murdered by locals offended by his talking to a white woman. “The Blues I’m Playing” describes how a white patron, a spinster who collects artists, tries to mold a talented black woman into a respectable classical pianist. While the young woman plays exceptional music, she often re-
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verts to her first loves: gospel and blues. Oceola tells her patron, “This is mine. . . . Listen! . . . How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy—laughing and crying. . . . How white like you and black like me.” Her music is rooted in “bass notes [that] throb like tomtoms deep in the earth.” Her patron, who cannot understand this music’s value, prefers looking at the stars, which are unattainable, futile, and distant. Underlying most of this collection is the difficulty of black-white relationships. Hughes illustrates how blacks are never regarded as individuals but rather as members of a group, how they are always treated with mistrust and hate. Hughes makes it clear in The Ways of White Folks that white people do not comprehend their own actions.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1959 The poems of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes were gathered by the poet from several of his earlier collections, including The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew, Dear Lovely Death, Shakespeare in Harlem, Fields of Wonder, One Way Ticket, and Montage of a Dream Deferred. Representative of the body of Hughes’s poetry, the collection includes his best poems: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Song for a Dark Girl,” “Sylvester’s Dying Bed,” “I, Too,” “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” and “Refugee in America.” Hughes’s poetry is an exploration of black identity, not only the sorrows and tribulations faced by black Americans but also the warm joy and humor of Hughes’s people. He writes in “Negro”: “I am a Negro:/ Black as the night is black,/ Black like the depths of my Africa.” This is a resolute proclamation confronting racial adversity: “The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo./ They lynch me still in Mississippi.” Hughes refuses, however, to allow his poetry to become a podium for anger; rather, he offers readers portraits of the black experience and, consequently, draws his readers into a nearer understanding of black identity. One of the strongest of Hughes’s poems is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The poem muses upon what rivers mean to black culture and how the rivers symbolize the strength and longevity of a proud race: I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
The beauty of the poem, which reads like a hymn or spiritual, is unmistakable and permanent.
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Elsewhere, Hughes experiments with blues rhythms and jazz improvisations, as in “The Weary Blues”: In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— “Ain’t got nobody in all this world Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied.”
The blues touch upon black sorrow, but the music of the blues makes its listeners feel better. Some of Hughes’s characters, as found in the “Madam to You” sequence, are not blue, or troubled, or even angry. Rather, they are secure and pleased with themselves. In “Madam’s Calling Cards,” Alberta K. Johnson tells the printer: “There’s nothing foreign/ To my pedigree:/ Alberta K. Johnson—/ American that’s me.” Ultimately, Hughes’s objective seems to be to provide blacks with identities as Americans, living in a democracy that ensures life without prejudice. Thus, in “I, Too,” a poem echoing Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the poet looks to a future when a black man can “be at the table/ When company comes” and that “they’ll see/ How beautiful I am/ And be ashamed.”
Ask Your Mama Type of work: Poetry First published: 1961 Ask Your Mama: Or, Twelve Moods for Jazz is dedicated to “Louis Armstrong—the greatest horn blower of them all.” In an introductory note, Hughes explains that “the traditional folk melody of the ‘Hesitation Blues’ is the leitmotif for this poem.” The collection was designed to be read or sung with jazz accompaniment, “with room for spontaneous jazz improvisation, particularly between verses, when the voice pauses.” Hughes includes suggestions for music to accompany the poetry. Sometimes the instructions are open (“delicate lieder on piano”), and sometimes they are more direct (“suddenly the drums roll like thunder as the music ends sonorously”). There are also suggestions for specific songs to be used, including “Dixie” (“impishly”), “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As a final aid, Hughes includes at the end of his collection “Liner Notes” for, as he says, “the Poetically Unhep.” Throughout, the poems in Ask Your Mama run the current of protest against “the
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shadow” of racism that falls over the lives of the earth’s darker peoples. Shadows frequently occur as images and symbols, suggesting the fear and the sense of vague existence created by living in oppression. “Show Fare, Please” summarizes the essence of the poet’s feeling of being left out because he does not have “show fare,” but it also suggests that “the show” may be all illusion anyway. Not all the poems are so stark; the humor of Hughes’s earlier work is still very much in evidence. In “Is It True,” for example, Hughes notes that “everybody thinks that Negroes have the most fun, but, of course, secretly hopes they do not—although curious to find out if they do.”
The Panther and the Lash Type of work: Poetry First published: 1967 The Panther and the Lash, Hughes’s final collection of poems, published the year he died, contains some of his most direct protest poetry, although he never gives vent to the anger that permeated the work of his younger contemporaries. The collection is dedicated “To Rosa Parks of Montgomery who started it all. . . .” in 1955 by refusing to move to the back of a bus. The panther of the title refers to a “Black Panther” who “in his boldness/ Wears no disguise,/ Motivated by the truest/ Of the oldest/ Lies”; the lash refers to the white backlash of the times (in “The Backlash Blues”). The book has seven sections, each dealing with a particular part of the subject. “Words on Fire” has poems on the coming of the Third World revolution, while “American Heartbreak” deals with the consequences of “the great mistake/ That Jamestown made/ Long ago”; that is, slavery. The final section, “Daybreak in Alabama,” does, however, offer hope. In spite of past and existing conditions, the poet hopes for a time when he can compose a song about “daybreak in Alabama” that will touch everybody “with kind fingers.”
The Return of Simple Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1994 Between 1943 and 1965, Hughes delighted readers of the Chicago Defender and the New York Post with the ideas and opinions voiced by his fictional folk character Jesse B. Semple. Though numerous Simple “stories” (they are actually conversations between Simple and a more educated acquaintance, set in Harlem saloons) were collected in five previous volumes, more than half of the pieces in this collection had not been published in book form. Arranged by the editor under four subject groupings—Women; Race, Riots, Police, Prices, and Politics; Africa and Black
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Pride; and Parting Lines (Miscellaneous)—Simple’s conversations cover a wide range of topics, running the gamut from bedbugs to race riots. His views on the various social and political issues he addresses represent the unique perspective of the lower-class African American male. Yet, as Simple expresses his ideas on life around him, his remarks often transcend the categories of race, class, and gender and enter the realm of the universal. The Simple stories are justly famous for their humor, but Hughes was not aiming to be merely amusing in them. Simple’s conversations with his more educated and refined companion reflect the tensions and conflicts that Hughes struggled to resolve in himself. The mood of one of Simple’s conversations may shift suddenly from the lighthearted to the somber. As Arnold Rampersad (Hughes’s biographer) observes in his introduction, an undercurrent of sadness runs beneath Simple’s narratives, and Simple’s sense of humor is at times all that prevents him from sliding into deep despair.
Suggested Readings Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes: Before and Beyond Harlem. New York: Wings Books, 1995. Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel Books, 1994. Harper, Donna Sullivan. Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Haskins, James. Always Movin’ On: The Life of Langston Hughes. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1993. Hokanson, Robert O’Brien. “Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes.” Mosaic 31 (December, 1998): 61-82. Leach, Laurie F. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Ostrom, Hans. Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986-1988. Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Trotman, C. James, ed. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. Contributors: Mark Sanders, Emma Coburn Norris, Mary Rohrberger, and Edward E. Waldron
Zora Neale Hurston Born: Eatonville, Florida; January 7, 1891 Died: Fort Pierce, Florida; January 28, 1960 African American
Hurston depicts the plight and records the language of her people. Principal works drama: Color Struck, pb. 1926; The First One, pb. 1927; Mule Bone, pb. 1931 (with Langston Hughes); Polk County, pb. 1944, pr. 2002 long fiction: Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948 short fiction: Spunk: The Selected Short Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, 1985; The Complete Stories, 1995 nonfiction: Mules and Men, 1935; Tell My Horse, 1938; Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942; The Sanctified Church, 1981; Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, 1995; Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings, 1999 (Pamela Bordelon, editor); Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States, 2001; Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 2002 (Carla Kaplan, editor) miscellaneous: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 1979 Zora Neale Hurston (HUR-stuhn) was born in the first incorporated all-black town in America; her father was one of its influential citizens. Her identity was formed in Eatonville; her works clearly show her attachments to that community. When Hurston was nine, her mother died. Hurston was moved among relatives, deprived of a stable home. She worked to support herself from an early age; at only fourteen she worked as a maid with a touring Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. She later went to night school in Baltimore to catch up on her schooling, to Howard University, and to Barnard College as a scholarship student. She loved learning. Settled in New York in the early 1920’s, Hurston filled her life with people who encouraged her work and gave her advice. Some of the most important of these were white: novelist Fanny Hurst and anthropologist Franz Boas, for example. Yet her identity comes from her own people: African American folklore was the focus of her research, and black women’s experience informs her best work. Hurston was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and is considered one of its stars, but she was not readily accepted in the movement at the time. 538
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Protest writers such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison found her writing “quaint” and “romantic.” She speaks in a clear feminine voice that, if not full of protest, affirms the black woman’s identity. Hurston was equally at home with upperclass whites and poor blacks, but she never forgot her heritage. Hurston’s most important works were published during the 1930’s: her collection of folklore, Mules and Men, in 1935; her novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine and her masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1934 and 1937, respectively. An autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942. She was married and divorced twice. Throughout her life Hurston was compelled to discover and translate the Southern black, often female, existence. In her collections of folklore, her fiction, her articles, and her life, she presented her people honestly and sympathetically, faithfully recording their language and their beliefs. Not until after her death was the significance of her work fully appreciated. She died in a welfare home in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1973, acclaimed black writer Alice Walker found Hurston’s grave and led a revival of interest in her work.
“John Redding Goes to Sea” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1921, in Stylus In many ways, Hurston’s short stories are apprentice works to her novels. In these stories, she introduced most of the themes, character types, settings, techniques, and concerns upon which she later elaborated during her most productive and artistic period, the 1930’s. This observation, however, does not suggest that her short stories are inferior works. On the contrary, much of the best of Hurston can be found in these early stories. Hurston’s first published short story is entitled “John Redding Goes to Sea.” It was published in the May, 1921, issue of the Stylus, the literary magazine of Howard University, and was reprinted in the January, 1926, issue of Opportunity. While the story is obviously the work of a novice writer, with its highly contrived plot, excessive sentimentality, and shallow characterizations, its strengths are many, strengths upon which Hurston would continue to draw and develop throughout her career. The plot is a simple one: Young John Redding, the titular character, wants to leave his hometown to see and explore parts and things unknown. Several circumstances conspire, however, to keep him from realizing his dream. First, John’s mother, the pitifully possessive, obsessive, and superstitious Matty Redding, is determined not to let John pursue his ambitions; in fact, she pleads illness and threatens to disown him if he leaves. Second, John’s marriage to Stella Kanty seems to tie him permanently to his surroundings, as his new wife joins forces with his mother to discourage John’s desire to travel. Further, his mother’s tantrums keep John from even joining the Navy when that opportunity comes his way. Later, when John is
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killed in a tempest while working with a crew to build a bridge on the St. John’s River, his father forbids his body to be retrieved from the river as it floats toward the ocean. At last, John will get his wish to travel and see the world, although in death. If the plot seems overdone and the sentimentality overwhelming, “John Redding Goes to Sea” does provide the reader with the first of many glimpses of life among black Floridians—their habits, superstitions, strengths, and shortcomings. For example, one of the more telling aspects of the story is that Matty believes that her son was cursed with “travel dust” at his birth; thus, John’s desire to travel is Matty’s punishment for having married his father away from a rival suitor. Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (Library of Congress) suspends judgment on Matty’s beliefs; rather, she shows that these and other beliefs are integral parts of the life of the folk. Another strength that is easily discernible in Hurston’s first short story is her detailed rendering of setting. Hurston has a keen eye for detail, and nowhere is this more evident than in her descriptions of the lushness of Florida. This adeptness is especially present in “John Redding Goes to Sea” and in most of Hurston’s other work as well. By far the most important aspect of “John Redding Goes to Sea” is its theme that people must be free to develop and pursue their own dreams, a recurring theme in the Hurston canon. John Redding is deprived of self-expression and self-determination because the wishes and interpretations of others are imposed upon him. Hurston clearly has no sympathy with those who would deprive another of freedom and independence; indeed, she would adamantly oppose all such restrictive efforts throughout her career as a writer and folklorist.
“Spunk” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1925, in Opportunity Another early short story that treats a variation of this theme is “Spunk,” published in the June, 1925, issue of Opportunity. The central character, Spunk Banks, has the
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spunk to live his life as he chooses, which includes taking another man’s wife and parading openly around town with her. While Hurston passes no moral judgment on Banks, she makes it clear that she appreciates and admires his brassiness and his will to live his life according to his own terms. When the story opens, Spunk Banks and Lena Kanty are openly flaunting their affair in front of the Eatonville townspeople, including Lena’s husband, Joe Kanty. The other town residents make fun of Joe’s weakness, his refusal to confront Spunk Banks. Later, when Joe desperately attacks Spunk with a razor, Spunk shoots and kills him. Spunk is tried and acquitted but is killed in a work-related accident, cut to death by a circular saw. Again, superstition plays an important role here, for Spunk claims that he has been haunted by Joe Kanty’s ghost. In fact, Spunk is convinced that Joe’s ghost pushed him into the circular saw, and at least one other townsman agrees. As is customary in Hurston’s stories, however, she makes no judgment of the rightness or wrongness of such beliefs but points out that these beliefs are very much a part of the cultural milieu of Eatonville.
“Sweat” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1926, in Fire! Another early Eatonville story is “Sweat,” published in 1926 in the only issue of the ill-fated literary magazine Fire!, founded by Hurston, Hughes, and Wallace Thurman. “Sweat” shows Hurston’s power as a fiction writer and as a master of the short-story form. Again, the story line is a simple one. Delia Jones is a hardworking, temperate Christian woman being tormented by her arrogant, mean-spirited, and cruel husband of fifteen years, Sykes Jones, who has become tired of her and desires a new wife. Rather than simply leaving her, though, he wants to drive her away by making her life miserable. At stake is the house for which Delia’s “sweat” has paid: Sykes wants it for his new mistress, but Delia refuses to leave the fruit of her labor. Sykes uses both physical and mental cruelty to antagonize Delia, the most farreaching of which exploits Delia’s intense fear of snakes. When Delia’s fear of the caged rattlesnake that Sykes places outside her back door subsides, Sykes places the rattlesnake in the dirty clothes hamper, hoping that it will bite and kill Delia. In an ironic twist, however, Delia escapes, and the rattlesnake bites Sykes as he fumbles for a match in the dark house. Delia listens and watches as Sykes dies a painful, agonizing death. While “Sweat” makes use of the same superstitious beliefs as Hurston’s other stories, a more complex characterization and an elaborate system of symbols are central to the story’s development. In Delia, for example, readers are presented with an essentially good Christian woman who is capable of great compassion and long suffering and who discovers the capacity to hate as intensely as she loves; in
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Sykes, readers are shown unadulterated evil reduced to one at once pitiful and horrible in his suffering. In addition, the Christian symbolism, including the snake and the beast of burden, adds considerable interest and texture to the story. It is this texture that makes “Sweat” Hurston’s most rewarding work of short fiction, for it shows her at her best as literary artist and cultural articulator.
Jonah’s Gourd Vine Type of work: Novel First published: 1934 Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston’s first novel, portrays the tragic experience of a black preacher caught between black cultural values and the values imposed by his whiteinfluenced church. The novel charts the life of John Pearson—laborer, foreman, and carpenter—who discovers that he has an extraordinary talent for preaching. With his linguistic skills and his wife Lucy’s wise counsel, he becomes pastor of the large church Zion Hope and ultimately moderator of a Florida Baptist convention. His sexual promiscuity, however, eventually destroys his marriage and his career. Though his verbal skills make him a success while his promiscuity ruins him, the novel shows that both his linguistic gifts and his sexual vitality are part of the same cultural heritage. His sexual conduct is pagan and so is his preaching. In praying, according to the narrator, it was as if he “rolled his African drum up to the altar, and called his Congo Gods by Christian names.” Both aspects of his cultural heritage speak through him. Indeed, they speak through all members of the African American community, if most intensely through John. A key moment early in the novel, when John crosses over Big Creek, marks the symbolic beginning of his life and shows the double cultural heritage he brings to it. John heads down to the Creek, “singing a new song and stomping the beats.” He makes up “some words to go with the drums of the Creek,” with the animal noises in the woods, and with the hound dog’s cry. He begins to think about the girls living on the other side of Big Creek: “John almost trumpeted exultantly at the new sun. He breathed lustily. He stripped and carried his clothes across, then recrossed and plunged into the swift water and breasted strongly over.” To understand why two expressions of the same heritage have such different effects on John’s life, one has to turn to the community to which he belongs. Members of his congregation subscribe to differing views of the spiritual life. The view most often endorsed by the novel emerges from the folk culture. As Larry Neal, one of Hurston’s best critics, explains in his introduction to the 1971 reprint of the novel, that view belongs to “a formerly enslaved communal society, non-Christian in background,” which does not strictly dichotomize body and soul. The other view comes out of a white culture. It is “more rigid, being a blend of Puritan concepts and the fire-and-brimstone imagery of the white evangelical tradition.” That view insists that John, as a preacher, exercise self-restraint. The cultural conflict over spirituality pervades his congregation. While the deacons, whom Hurston often por-
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trays satirically, pressure him to stop preaching, he still has some loyal supporters among his parishioners. White America’s cultural styles and perceptions invade Pearson’s community in other ways as well. By means of a kind of preaching competition, the deacons attempt to replace Pearson with the pompous Reverend Felton Cozy, whose preaching style is white. Cozy’s style, however, fails to captivate most members of the congregation. Pearson is a great preacher in the folk tradition, moving his congregation to a frenzy with “barbaric thunder-poems.” By contrast, Cozy, as one of the parishioners complains, does not give a sermon; he lectures. In an essay Hurston wrote on “The Sanctified Church,” she explains this reaction: “The real, singing Negro derides the Negro who adopts the white man’s religious ways. . . . They say of that type of preacher, ‘Why he don’t preach at all. He just lectures.’” If Pearson triumphs over Cozy, he nevertheless ultimately falls. His sexual conduct destroys his marriage and leads to an unhappy remarriage with one of his mistresses, Hattie Tyson. He is finally forced to stop preaching at Zion Hope. Divorced from Hattie, he moves to another town, where he meets and marries Sally Lovelace, a woman much like Lucy. With her support, he returns to preaching. On a visit to a friend, however, he is tempted by a young prostitute and, to his dismay, succumbs. Although he has wanted to be faithful to his new wife, he will always be a pagan preacher, spirit and flesh. Fleeing back to Sally, he is killed when a train strikes his car. In its presentation of folklore and its complex representation of cultural conflict, Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a brilliant first novel, although Hurston does not always make her argument sufficiently clear. The novel lacks a consistent point of view. Though she endorses Pearson’s African heritage and ridicules representatives of white cultural views, she also creates an admirable and very sympathetic character in Lucy Pearson, who is ruined by her husband’s pagan behavior. Nor did Hurston seem to know how to resolve the cultural conflict she portrayed—hence, the deus ex machina ending.
Their Eyes Were Watching God Type of work: Novel First published: 1937 It was not until she wrote her next novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, that Hurston learned to control point of view and presented a solution to the problem of white influences on black culture. Their Eyes Were Watching God is Hurston’s most lauded work. It is the story of Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods, a thricemarried, twice-widowed woman who learns the hard way: through her own experience. Granddaughter of a slave and daughter of a runaway mother, Janie grows up not realizing her color until she sees a picture of herself among white children. Rather than worry about Janie in her adolescence, her grandmother marries her off to Logan Killicks, an old, narrow-minded, and abusive husband. Hoping for more
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to life than she has, Janie ends that marriage herself by walking off with Joe Starks, a passerby with a dream, who becomes the mayor of Eatonville, Florida, a new allblack town. Janie reigns as queen of the town, yet she is still unhappily under the control of a jealous, controlling husband. The town is incensed when, after Starks’s death, Janie runs off with Teacake Woods, a young, charming ne’er-do-well. Living with Teacake “on the muck”— picking and planting beans in the Everglades—Janie finds happiness. Teacake truly loves her and cherishes her company, and Janie and Teacake’s home is the center of a community of lively, happy, hardworking folks. Janie ends up a widow again. In trying to save Janie from a rabid dog during a flood, Teacake is bitten. In his delirium, he threatens Janie’s life, and she must shoot him. Despite the tragedy in her life, Janie comes across as powerful and self-reliant. She moves from being controlled by men to being assertive and independent. She provides a positive image of the black woman who rises above her circumstances and learns to deal with life on her own terms. After Teacake’s death and her trial, she returns to Eatonville with her head high. She is saddened but not defeated; she tells her friend Phoeby that she has “been a delegate to de big ’ssociation of life” and that she has learned that everybody “got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” Although Hurston’s novel received some harsh criticism for being quaint and romantic and was out of print for years, it is now considered an important work for its understanding of the African American folkloric tradition, for its language, and for its female hero, a woman who struggles and successfully finds her own identity.
Moses, Man of the Mountain Type of work: Novel First published: 1939 With her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Hurston turned in a new direction, leaving the Eatonville milieu behind. The novel retells the biblical story of Moses via the folk idiom and traditions of southern rural blacks. Hurston leaves much of the plot of the biblical story intact—Moses does lead the Hebrews out of Egypt—but, for example, she shows Moses to be a great hoodoo doctor as well as a leader and lawgiver. In effect, Hurston simulated the creative processes of folk culture, transforming the story of Moses for modern African Americans just as slaves had adapted biblical stories in spirituals. Hurston may have reenacted an oral and communal process as a solitary writer, but she gave an imaginative rendering of the cultural process all the same.
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Dust Tracks on a Road Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1942 Dust Tracks on a Road was written when Hurston was about fifty years old. The book poignantly describes what it was like to grow up poor, black, and female; it shows an energetic woman who overcomes odds to achieve a liberated, rewarding life. Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, America’s first incorporated black community. Her father was a driving force in the community; her mother died when she was nine. The liberating force for Hurston was her love of knowledge. While at the black grammar school, she won a reading contest, receiving books that ignited her imagination. In turn, she learned about real life at Joe Clarke’s store, the meeting place of the men in town. After her mother’s death, she was moved from place to place. It was her own initiative that released her from her circumstances. When she learned that an actress in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe was looking for a lady’s maid, she approached the woman with “I come to work for you.” When her service ended—a service that had been a marvelous education in humanity and the arts—she went back to night school, then to Howard University and Barnard College. At Barnard, working under anthropologist Franz Boas, she studied the folklore of her people in Polk County, Florida. This began a lifelong interest in the roots of her people. Yet some of Hurston’s greatest friends and confidants were the upper-class whites she met both in school and after. Author Fannie Hurst, singer Ethel Waters, and critic Carl Van Vechten were among the many who encouraged her and introduced her to other writers of her times. Hurston at times bemoans her own people and their plight. She sees their disillusionment and oftentimes ill-suited efforts to break out of a stereotype. She lovingly describes the black race as not a race chosen by God but “a collection of people who overslept our time and got caught in the draft.” Hurston’s descriptions of her own dedication and hard work inspire the reader to see what a poor African American woman could achieve with forwardness and luck. Her sensitive pictures of her race show people who have the power to overcome obstacles and succeed. Her generous view of humanity and lack of prejudice against anyone because of background or color give the reader a hopeful vision for the future in which love, hope, and hard work make the American Dream possible for anyone.
Seraph on the Suwanee Type of work: Novel First published: 1948 Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston’s last novel, marks another dramatic shift in her writing. With this novel, however, she did not create a new context for the represen-
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tation of folk culture. Rather, she turned away from the effort to present black folklore. Seraph on the Suwanee is set in the rural South, but its central characters are white. Hurston apparently wanted to prove that she could write about whites as well as blacks, a desire that surfaced, no doubt, in response to the criticism and disinterest her work increasingly faced in the 1940’s. Yet, even when writing of upwardly mobile southern “crackers,” Hurston could not entirely leave her previous mission behind. Her white characters, perhaps unintentionally, often use the black folk idiom. Although Hurston’s novels, with the exception of the last, create contexts or develop other strategies for the presentation of folklore, they are not simply showcases for folk traditions; black folk culture defines the novels’ themes. The most interesting of these thematic renderings appear in Hurston’s first two novels. Hurston knew that black folk culture was composed of brilliant adaptations of African culture to American life. She admired the ingenuity of these adaptations but worried about their preservation. Would a sterile, materialistic white world ultimately absorb blacks, destroying the folk culture they had developed? Her first two novels demonstrate the disturbing influence of white America on black folkways.
Suggested Readings Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Cronin, Gloria L., ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hill, Lynda Marion. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996. Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Hurston, Lucy Anne. Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Lyons, Mary E. Sorrow’s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Plant, Deborah G. Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007. West, Margaret Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Witcover, Paul. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1991. Yanuzzi, Della. Zora Neale Hurston: Southern Storyteller. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. Contributors: Janine Rider, Warren J. Carson, and Deborah Kaplan
David Henry Hwang Born: Los Angeles, California; August 11, 1957 Chinese American
Hwang is the first playwright to depict the identity, culture, and history of Chinese Americans in mainstream American theater. Principal works drama: F.O.B., pr. 1978, pb. 1983; The Dance and the Railroad, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Family Devotions, pr. 1981, pb. 1983; Broken Promises: Four Plays, pb. 1983 (includes F.O.B., Family Devotions, The Dance and the Railroad, and The House of Sleeping Beauties); Sound and Beauty, pr. 1983 (2 one-acts; The House of Sleeping Beauties, pb. 1983, and The Sound of a Voice, pb. 1984); As the Crow Flies, pr. 1986; Rich Relations, pr. 1986, pb. 1990; Broken Promises, pr. 1987 (includes The Dance and the Railroad and The House of Sleeping Beauties); M. Butterfly, pr., pb. 1988; One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, pr. 1988, pb. 1989 (libretto; music by Philip Glass); F.O.B., and Other Plays, pb. 1990; Bondage, pr. 1992, pb. 1996 (one act); The Voyage, pr. 1992, pb. 2000 (libretto; music by Glass); Face Value, pr. 1993; Golden Child, pr. 1996, pb. 1998; Trying to Find Chinatown, pr., pb. 1996; The Silver River, pr. 1997 (music by Bright Sheng); Peer Gynt, pr. 1998 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); Aida, pr. 2000 (with Linda Wolverton and Robert Falls; music by Elton John; lyrics by Tim Rice; adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera); Flower Drum Song, pr. 2001, pb. 2003 (adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical) screenplays: M. Butterfly, 1993 (adaptation of his play); Golden Gate, 1994; Possession, 2001 (with Neil LaBute and Laura Jones; adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s novel) teleplays: My American Son, 1987; The Lost Empire, 2001 David Henry Hwang (wang) is a second-generation Chinese American. From his earliest plays, Hwang has been concerned with the Chinese American experience. Hwang has identified three developmental phases in his early work. His “assimilationist” phase was motivated by the overwhelming desire to be accepted by white American culture. Hwang’s first play, F.O.B., exemplifies this first period. Dave, a Chinese American, reacts negatively to a “fresh-off-the-boat” Chinese, Steve, because Steve exhibits all the stereotypic mannerisms that Dave has tried to suppress his entire life. In college, Hwang lived in an all-Asian dormitory and was caught up in an “isolationist-nationalist” phase. During this phase, Hwang was primarily con547
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cerned with writing for a Chinese American audience. This resulted in The Dance and the Railroad, which recaptures the history of the Chinese American railroad strike of 1867, and Family Devotions, which encourages Chinese Americans to reject negative Western perceptions and remember their Chinese heritage. After the isolationist phase, Hwang next became interested in the love story. He adapted two classic Japanese love stories and wrote a play without identified Asian characters. Although not successful, this last experiment led directly to Hwang’s masterpiece, M. Butterfly, in which a French diplomat carries on an affair with a Chinese actress for years, only to discover that “she” is really a man. Identity is explored as Hwang shows how the Frenchman Gallimard falls in love with an Asian stereotype. Gallimard commits suicide at the loss of his lover, a role-reversal of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904). Wanting to advocate a broader forum against sexism and racism in literature, Hwang created Bondage, an allegory of love that challenges a variety of prejudices. Bondage takes place in a fantasy bondage parlor where domination is subverted when stereotypes are rejected by masked participants. The historical and cultural identity of Chinese Americans is at the heart of Hwang’s plays, which present a significant exploration of the evolving identity of Asians in a pluralistic society.
The Dance and the Railroad Type of work: Drama First produced: 1981, pb. 1983 The Dance and the Railroad is a history play based on the Chinese railroad workers’ strike of 1867. It reveals a significant event in the Chinese American past, rejecting the stereotype of submissive coolies and depicting assertive men who demanded their rights in spite of great personal risk. Originally intended as a contribution toward the reclaiming of the Chinese American past, it accomplished much broader artistic goals. Ma, a young Chinese emigrant who has been in America only four weeks, comes to warn Lone, a performer, that the other Chinese do not like his superior attitude. Hired to build the railroad across the Sierras, they are now in the fourth day of a strike against the labor practices of the “white devils.” The Chinese have demanded an eight-hour workday and a fourteen-dollar-a-week increase in pay. Lone is estranged from the other Chinese because he refuses to waste time drinking and gambling and instead practices the traditional Chinese opera. Captivated by Lone’s beautiful dance, Ma decides to become a performer when he returns to China a wealthy man. Lone scoffs at Ma’s naïve beliefs that America is a place with a mythical Gold Mountain, that his cheating Chinese coworkers are his friends, and that he will ever be able to portray the great Gwan Gung, god of fighters. Lone tells Ma that if he is to succeed he must face reality and willingly accept being shunned by the “already dead” Chinese men. Undaunted by this challenge, Ma begins to practice
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Chinese opera. Ma is subsequently shocked, however, to learn that if he works hard, he might successfully portray the Second Clown. Lone reveals how he spent eight years in opera school training to play Gwan Gung, only to be “kidnapped” by his parents and sent to the Sierras to work. Ma is determined and practices by spending the night in the “locust” position, a metaphor for the emigrant awakening. Lone returns, reporting that the strike is over. The Chinese have achieved their eight-hour day but only an eight-dollar-a-week raise. Ma finally realizes that, although a few Chinese men in America might achieve their dreams, most become dead to China. Ma and Lone improvise a Chinese opera revealing their voyages to America and experiences on the Gold Mountain. When the mountain fights back, Lone is exhilarated but Ma falls, his spirit broken. Now a realist, Ma returns to work with the “already dead” men, while Lone continues practicing for the Chinese opera. Hwang contrasts two portraits of emigrant Chinese becoming Americans. Ma loses his innocence, discards his traditions, and joins the “already dead” laborers. Lone adapts Chinese mythology and tradition to his American experience. The Asian community has lauded Hwang’s work, praising its depiction of the lives of Chinese Americans.
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Family Devotions Type of work: Drama First produced: 1981, pb. 1983 Family Devotions was written when Hwang was primarily interested in writing for and about the identity of Asian Americans. The play is autobiographical in that Hwang was raised an evangelical Christian; Family Devotions advocates casting off the Western mythology imposed upon Asian cultures. The play is set in an idealized house with an enclosed patio and tennis court, representing a shallow, materialistic American Dream. The extended families of Ama and Popo, first-generation Chinese Americans, are awaiting the arrival of Di-Gou, their brother whom they have not seen for thirty years and who is arriving from Communist China. As they anticipate Di-Gou’s arrival, the women discuss the atrocities of the Communists, whose evil rule they are certain Di-Gou will be grateful to escape. The family descended from the great Chinese Christian evangelist See-goh-poo, and, as a boy, Di-Gou witnessed her miracles, so Ama and Popo anticipate hearing Di-Gou repeat his fervent testimony. When he arrives, however, Di-Gou quietly disavows ever being Christian. Di-Gou confides to Popo’s grandson, Chester, that to establish a true American identity, he must believe the stories “written on his face,” and these stories reflect many generations. In act 2 the sisters organize a family devotional and invite Di-Gou to witness for Christ, but a family squabble erupts. Di-Gou is left with the women, who physically force him to submit before their neon cross. They implore him to remember See-gohpoo’s miracles. Chester rushes in to rescue Di-Gou, and the scene transforms into a kind of Chinese opera. Di-Gou rises up speaking in tongues, the gas grill bursts into flames, and Chester interprets the revelation: Di-Gou witnessed See-goh-poo give birth out of wedlock, claiming evangelicalism to deceive her family. Di-Gou proclaims that because they now know the truth, their stories are meaningless. The old sisters collapse, dead, and Di-Gou realizes that “no one leaves America.” The play ends with Chester standing where Di-Gou first stood, and the “shape of his face begins to change,” a metaphor for the beginning acceptance of his Chinese heritage. Family Devotions is an allegory depicting a cultural awakening of the individual. The world is reversed; “civilized” Christians behave as heathens, and the “heathen” Asian offers wisdom, solace, and love. Hwang calls for Asian Americans to embrace their Asian heritage.
M. Butterfly Type of work: Drama First produced: 1988, pb. 1988 M. Butterfly is Hwang’s fictionalized account of a real French diplomat who carried on an affair with a Chinese opera singer for twenty years, only to discover she was
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actually a man. Hwang’s compelling drama examines themes of sexual and racial stereotyping, Western imperialism, the role illusion plays in perceptions, and the ability of one person truly to know another. M. Butterfly contrasts Rene Gallimard with Pinkerton in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (produced, 1904; published, 1935). Gallimard sees himself as awkward, clumsy at love, but somehow blessed with the utter devotion of Song Liling, a beautiful Oriental woman. Hwang uses the word “Oriental” to convey an exotic, imperialistic view of the East. Gallimard becomes so absorbed with his sexist perception of Asian women that it distorts his thinking. He tests Liling’s devotion by neglecting and humiliating her, ultimately forcing her to admit she is his “Butterfly,” a character she has publicly denounced. Unknown to Gallimard, Liling is a Communist agent, manipulating him to extract information about the Vietnam War. At the embassy Gallimard finds increased status because of his Oriental affair. When his analysis of East-West relations, based entirely on his self-delusions, prove wrong, Gallimard is demoted and returned to France. His usefulness spent, Liling is forced to endure hard labor, an official embarrassment because “there are no homosexuals in China.” Eventually, the Communists send Liling to France to reestablish his affair with Gallimard. When Gallimard is caught and tried for espionage, it is publicly revealed that Liling is a man. Liling now changes to men’s clothing, effecting a complete role-reversal between Liling and Gallimard. Liling becomes the dominant masculine figure while Gallimard becomes the submissive feminine figure. Preferring fantasy to reality, Gallimard becomes “Butterfly,” donning Liling’s wig and kimono, choosing an honorable death over a dishonorable life. M. Butterfly demonstrates the dangers inherent in living a life satisfied with shallow stereotypes and misconceptions. Gallimard’s singular desire for a submissive Oriental woman was fulfilled only in his mind. It blinded him to every truth about his mistress, refusing even to accept the truth about Liling until he stood naked before him. It first cost him his career, then his wife, then his dignity, then his lover, and finally his life. Even when he is confronted by the truth, Gallimard can only respond that he has “known, and been loved by, the perfect woman.”
Bondage Type of work: Drama First produced: 1992, pb. 1996 Bondage, a one-act play set in a fantasy bondage parlor, is an exploration of racial, cultural, and sexual stereotypes. It is presented as an allegory depicting their overwhelming influence in society and offering one alternative for society’s progressing beyond them. The play demonstrates Chinese American playwright Hwang’s development beyond exclusively Asian American themes to encompass the destructiveness of all stereotyping, be it racial, cultural, or sexual. Mark, identifiable only as a male, is the client of dominatrix Terri, identifiable
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only as a female, in a fantasy bondage parlor. Both characters’ identities are fully disguised. They are merely a man and a woman who assume the characteristics required for whatever fantasy is suggested. During this encounter, however, both Mark and Terri refuse to accept the stereotypes associated with their fantasy roles. Terri informs Mark that today he will be a Chinese man and she will be a blond woman. She immediately characterizes Mark as a horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing engineer afraid of her because she is popular with cowboys and jocks. Mark rejects her Asian stereotypes and, in turn, uses blond stereotypes to describe her. A personal confrontation ensues because Mark will not accept her ridicule. This leads to male-female stereotyping, and on to progressive levels of racial stereotyping. As they are unable to resolve this confrontation, they move on to become a white man and a black woman, with underlying stereotyped images of the white liberal. Terri charges that he may try to “play” all races, but she has already “become” all races. Next they assume the roles of a Chinese American man and an Asian American woman, exploring intercultural stereotypes. Finally they explore Mark’s need for penitence as a stereotypical businessman, which drives him to the bondage parlor to be dominated and humiliated in a fantasy world as he dominates and humiliates in the real one. The plight of both men and women, and the roles society forces upon them, dominate the final confrontation. Her resistance having been worn down by Mark’s arguing, Terri begins to remove her disguise. She offers Mark his moment of victory, but instead he, too, removes his mask. When he confesses his real love for Terri, she reveals herself—they are as the original fantasy, an Asian man and a blond woman. Their confrontation has put the stereotypes of their disparate groups behind them. They see each other as individuals and are ready to move beyond their fantasies. Hwang’s optimism that society can move beyond oppressing societal stereotypes pervades Bondage. He presents a balanced attack on all stereotyping, showing that regardless of cultural, political, or sexual identity, society will only move forward when all stereotypes are destroyed and people are regarded as individuals.
Suggested Readings Chen, Tina. “Betrayed into Motion: The Seduction of Narrative Desire in M. Butterfly.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 129-154. Hwang, David Henry. “The Demon in David Henry Hwang.” Interview by Misha Berson. American Theatre 15, no. 4 (April, 1998): 14-18. _______. “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” Interview by John Lewis DiGaetani. The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 33, no. 3 (Fall, 1989): 141-153. Kondo, Dorinne K. About Face. New York: Routledge, 1997. Moy, James S. Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993.
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Shin, Andrew. “Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Golden Child.” MELUS 27, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 177-197. Shinakawa, Karen. “Who’s to Say? Or, Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly.” Theatre Journal 45 (October, 1993): 349-362. Skloot, Robert. “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang.” Modern Drama 33, no. 1 (March, 1990): 59-66. Street, Douglas. David Henry Hwang. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1989. Weinraub, Bernard. “Fleshing Out Chinatown Stereotypes.” New York Times, October 14, 2000, section 2, pp. 7, 27. Contributor: Gerald S. Argetsinger
Gish Jen Born: Yonkers, New York; 1956 Chinese American
Drawing on the tension between the two cultural poles, Jen reflects on the lives of Asian Americans and “typical Americans.” Principal works long fiction: Typical American, 1991; Mona in the Promised Land, 1996; The Love Wife, 2004 short fiction: “In the American Society,” 1987 (in The New Generation: Fiction for Our Time from America’s Writing Programs; Alan Kaufman, editor); “The Water-Faucet Vision,” 1988 (in Best American Short Stories, 1988); “The White Umbrella,” 1990 (in Home to Stay: Asian American Women’s Fiction; Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac, editors); Who’s Irish: Stories, 1999 Gish Jen emerged as a promising new writer in the early 1990’s, when her stories and articles began appearing in such prominent publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe. Jen is a secondgeneration Asian American who grew up in Scarsdale, New York, a privileged suburb of New York City. She was educated at Harvard University, Stanford’s School of Business, and later the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writers’ Workshop. Since completing her education, she has worked in the publishing industry and has been the writer-in-residence at Yale University and Williams College. Her first works, written while she was studying at Iowa, were published under her given name, Lillian. Friends recommended that she change her first name to “Gish,” the nickname that she had gone by ever since her school classmates christened her after the famous silent film star, Lillian Gish. Jen has stated in interviews that she likes the double accented syllables of “Gish Jen,” with its ambiguous gender identity. All of her later work has been published under that name. Jen’s concern over taxonomy is evident in her work, where verbal games and idiom play an important role. One of her distinguishing features as a writer is her acute ear for the way in which people speak. She has a gift for capturing the syntax of nonnative speakers of English in a way that illuminates not only their intended meaning but also the inadequacies of trying to pour the meaning of one language into another. A consistent theme running throughout the body of Jen’s work is the way cultures interact and overlap. The tensions she chronicles are carried out at the mythic level, specifically in the way the expectations and legends about the 554
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United States differ from those of Jen’s Asian forebears. Many critics have pointed out that Jen’s perspective is inevitably that of an outsider: as a daughter of privilege, with an Ivy League education, looking at the East, and as an Asian American woman viewing American society with a cool distance denied a writer who is unalloyed with any other society. The magic of Jen’s work is the ease with which she can move between the two cultures she inhabits. Jen joins a growing list of Asian American women writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, who in the late twentieth century have found a voice. These writers have added the richness of their insights and poetry into a literary and cultural tradition where they had not previously been heard.
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Typical American Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Jen’s reputation was established with Typical American. The novel developed from her short story “In the American Society,” in which the problems of the Chang family were first presented. In Typical American Jen returns to the Chang family to explicate the themes that the story introduced. Jen also interpolated the text of her story “The Water-Faucet Vision” into the book. The novel follows a young Chinese man, Ralph Chang, who comes to the United States to do graduate work in engineering. The novel dramatizes the cultural differences that Ralph Chang, his wife Helen, and his sister Theresa encounter. Ralph’s expectations about America collide with the realities of academic politics, leaking roofs, and the superficiality of American culture. The family learns to navigate through this new and threatening society by distancing themselves from it. They use derogatory expressions, such as “typical American,” to convey their sense of the shallowness and commerciality of American life. China is still very much part of the Changs’ inner lives, a touchstone of comparison for all that they now find threatening. China for them represents all that is unsullied and the purity of the inner self. Much of the novel’s satiric fire derives from this tension between the two
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cultural poles. By the end of the novel, Jen achieves a truly comic resolution, when her characters realize that they, too, have become “typical Americans.” The reader is left with the sense that the Changs’ inner Chinas are just as illusory as their initial impressions of America had been. Questioned about her use of a male protagonist in Typical American, Jen says that she was trying to “figure out what reality was like for her parents.” Jen’s position as a second-generation American, aware of both her parents’ culture and the one in which she grew up, allows her the comic scope for drawing a sharp satiric portrait. Ralph Chang’s America proves not to be the one for which the young engineer hopes, but a more practical, drearier reality in which he manages a pancake restaurant.
Mona in the Promised Land Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 Mona in the Promised Land continues the story of the Changs, this time focusing on their teenage daughter Mona. The story takes place in the 1970’s, and Mona has repudiated her Chinese identity by assimilating into the Jewish culture of the upscale New York suburb where the family has moved. After increasing incomprehension between the generations as the elder Changs try to understand what has happened to their daughter, Jen finishes with a comic paean to multiculturalism as Mona marries, is reconciled with her parents, and considers having her Jewish husband change his name to Changowitz. Mona in the Promised Land has a jacket cover showing a bagel superimposed on a bowl of noodles in a familiar blue-and-white Chinese design. Peering through the hole in the bagel is a face, presumably representing Mona Chang, the young protagonist. The image perfectly captures the crossover of ethnic identities to be explored in this humorous novel. Faced with all the usual uncertainties of adolescents, Mona feels further singled out in the family’s new upscale neighborhood of Scarshill in New York as the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents. Her parents have some traditionally strict notions of how a good Chinese girl should behave, with her older sister Callie already setting the pattern for stereotypical model minority success by getting into Harvard. Yet Jen has set the novel in the 1960’s, a time of adolescent behavior on a massive social scale, when pushing boundaries, testing limits, breaking patterns, in both extremely positive and negative ways, seem natural. So, at first, Mona gets along well with her mainly Jewish classmates as the only Asian student in her eighth-grade class. By tenth grade, Mona and her best friend Barbara Gugelstein have spent so much time at events for Jewish youth that Mona persuades a liberal rabbi to tutor her in Judaism, a religion she feels is right for her because its axiom is to “ask, ask, ask,” not “obey, obey, obey.” This is but one of a few other boundaries she pushes as she grows into adulthood.
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The natural rebelliousness of many adolescents, the social idealism of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the questioning religion of a people known for centuries of displacement from their promised land—Jen weaves these different forces into a comic pattern seemingly effortlessly. At the core of all these movements lies a search for identity, for one’s place in the world. The Chang family members encompass the options for ethnic identity: the immigrant parents will always be Chinese; the college-educated Callie learns to be Asian American; the free-spirited Mona chooses to join another ethnic group altogether. Exhibiting the same creative use of language that she did in her first novel, Typical American, Jen sustains a lighthearted tone through the youthful romps while touching upon some profound and perplexing issues.
The Love Wife Type of work: Novel First published: 2004 Jen’s third novel, The Love Wife, is narrated by a melange of voices which, together and separately, chronicle the story of the Wong family. As a graduate student in the Midwest, tender-hearted Carnegie Wong impulsively adopts Lizzy, an Asian foundling. Then he meets and marries Janie Bailey, whom his mother promptly renames Blondie (with all the negative connotations intact). Before the rehearsal dinner Mama Wong, who longs for a genuine Chinese daughter-in-law, offers each a million dollars not to marry. Predictable generational and ethnic conflicts ensue, but the redoubtable Mama Wong, who once swam from Mainland China to Taiwan with a basketball under each arm, never gives up, even after she develops Alzheimer’s disease and is institutionalized. Further complications arise. Fourteen years later, the Wongs have two adopted daughters, rebellious Lizzy and the younger, more empathetic Wendy, as well as their unexpected biological son Bailey, blond and blue-eyed like his mother. Mama Wong strikes from the grave when Lan, a distant relative from Communist China, is summoned to be the children’s nanny. Blondie fears that Lan is the secondary “love wife” that Carnegie always should have had and begins to feel very much an outsider in this family. Misinformation and misunderstandings abound. The difficulties inherent in an interracial marriage are viewed through both Blondie and Carnegie, two people still in love, while a great gulf emerges between Lan and her American family. Even as Lan feels she is being treated like a servant, Carnegie finds himself surprisingly attracted to her. Author Jen has the rare ability to intuit all sides of a highly emotional issue and render them sympathetically and with humor through the eyes of her characters.
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Suggested Readings “About Gish Jen.” Ploughshares 26, no. 2/3 (2000): 217-222. Gonzalez, Begona Simal. “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (2001): 225-242. Jen, Gish. “The Intimate Outsider.” Interview by Marilyn B. Snell. New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1991): 56-60. _______. “MELUS Interview: Gish Jen.” Interview by Yoko Matsukawa. MELUS 18 (Winter, 1993): 111-120. Samarth, Manini. “Affirmations: Speaking the Self into Being.” Parnassus 17, no. 1 (1991): 88-102. Storace, Patricia. “Seeing Double.” The New York Review of Books 38 (August 15, 1991): 9-12. Contributor: James Barbour
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Born: Cologne, Germany; May 7, 1927 Jewish
Throughout her work, Jhabvala addresses the problem of alienation and the conflicts of individuals who are geographically and spiritually adrift. Principal works long fiction: To Whom She Will, 1955 (pb. in U.S. as Amrita, 1956); The Nature of Passion, 1956; Esmond in India, 1958; The Householder, 1960; Get Ready for Battle, 1962; A Backward Place, 1965; A New Dominion, 1972 (pb. in U.S. as Travelers, 1973); Heat and Dust, 1975; In Search of Love and Beauty, 1983; Three Continents, 1987; Poet and Dancer, 1993; Shards of Memory, 1995; My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, 2004 screenplays: The Householder, 1963; Shakespeare Wallah, 1965 (with James Ivory); The Guru, 1968; Bombay Talkie, 1970; Autobiography of a Princess, 1975 (with Ivory and John Swope); Roseland, 1977; Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, 1978; The Europeans, 1979 (with Ivory); Quartet, 1981 (with Ivory); The Courtesans of Bombay, 1982; Heat and Dust, 1983 (based on her novel); The Bostonians, 1984 (with Ivory; based on Henry James’s novel); A Room with a View, 1986 (based on E. M. Forster’s novel); Maurice, 1987 (based on Forster’s novel); Madame Sousatzka, 1988 (with John Schlesinger); Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 1990 (based on Evan S. Connell, Jr.’s novels); Howards End, 1992 (based on Forster’s novel); The Remains of the Day, 1993 (based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel); Jefferson in Paris, 1995; Surviving Picasso, 1996; A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, 1998 (based on Kaylie Jones’s novel); The Golden Bowl, 2000 (based on James’s novel); Le Divorce, 2003 (with Ivory; based on Diane Johnson’s novel) short fiction: Like Birds, Like Fishes, and Other Stories, 1963; A Stronger Climate: Nine Stories, 1968; An Experience of India, 1971; How I Became a Holy Mother, and Other Stories, 1976; Out of India: Selected Stories, 1986; East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, 1998 teleplays: The Place of Peace, 1975; Jane Austen in Manhattan, 1980; The Wandering Company, 1985 The novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (jahb-VAH-lah) was the daughter of culturally assimilated German-Jewish parents who were forced to flee to England in 1939, when Ruth Prawer was twelve years old. She became a 559
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British subject in 1948 and married C. S. H. Jhabvala, a Parsi architect, in 1951. The couple moved to Delhi, India, where they reared three daughters and Jhabvala became a full-time writer. In “Myself in India,” the introduction to Out of India: Selected Stories, Jhabvala declares that, despite having spent most of her adult life in India and having an Indian family, she remained European. Her early works, set in India, reflect the detached, ironic viewpoint of an alien. After Jhabvala’s first novel, To Whom She Will, critics designated her the Jane Austen of middle-class Delhi urban society; categorized as comedy of manners, her work was praised for its wit and accuracy of observation. The five novels and three volumes of short stories she wrote during the next fifteen years maintained a similar tone, though it darkened considerably as the selfdeceptions of her characters deepened. In the 1960’s Jhabvala entered artistic partnership with the newly founded film production team of Ismael Merchant and James Ivory and started writing screenplays and adapting the works of others, among them Henry James’s The Bostonians and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End; this new genre, in turn, influenced the style and structure of her novels. Thus, when A New Dominion appeared in 1972, critics noticed resemblances not to the work of Austen but to that of Forster. Heat and Dust, which followed three years later and is even more complex and experimental, juxtaposes two stories, that of a colonial wife who left her husband for an Indian prince in the 1920’s and that of her step-granddaughter, who fifty years later, goes to India to solve an old riddle and herself becomes captivated by the land. Often designated Jhabvala’s masterpiece, Heat and Dust won the prestigious Booker Prize. In 1974 Jhabvala moved to New York City; from then on she returned to Delhi only for three months each year. In the novels written since her move to the United States, the international theme expanded. In Search of Love and Beauty, for example, examines the lives of a group of German-Jewish refugees to America over a fortyyear period. Three Continents, based loosely on the exploits of an Asian serial killer, tracks relationships between an American family and visiting Indians and Eurasians; the setting shifts from the United States to England and finally to India. Jhabvala continued to collaborate with Merchant and Ivory on films that include The Remains of the Day, which was an overwhelming critical success, and the less successful Jefferson in Paris. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (© Jerry Bauer) Jhabvala has won numerous awards,
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most of them for her screenwriting; Room with a View and Howards End both won Academy Awards for best screenplay adaptation. Throughout her writings Jhabvala has remained preoccupied with the problem of alienation and the conflicts of individuals who are geographically and spiritually adrift. Even when the locale changes, the themes remain the same. In To Whom She Will, for example, two lovers are separated by the fact that one is an anglicized Hindu, the other a Punjabi Hindu. Heat and Dust features parallel stories of love and betrayal, each involving a Western woman and an Indian man; the young narrator, a British woman, feels more distant from her Western hippie lover than from the Indian man by whom she conceives a child. In the American novels the theme of alienation becomes even more complex. The members of the immigrant family in In Search of Love and Beauty are strangers in New York; the family members in Three Continents, on the other hand, are entrenched in Connecticut yet choose to become aliens in India because they hope to find a spiritual reality there. Poet and Dancer explores the dangerous closeness between two cousins, Angel and Lara. Shards of Memory, placed in Manhattan, traces the history of a family of mixed Indians, British, and Americans who follow a charismatic religious leader called only “The Master” over four generations. Although her writing is rarely autobiographical, it is always generated by the powerful perceptions of a woman born in Germany, reared in England, matrimonially bound to India, and now artistically active in New York City. It is impossible to thrust Jhabvala into any national or ethnic literary category, and few novelists since Henry James have so powerfully explored the international theme.
Poet and Dancer Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Poet and Dancer opens with a prefatory account of how Helena Manarr entices an unnamed professional writer into reconstructing the elusive story of her dead beloved daughter Angel. Angel is the poet of the title, though her collected works amount to a few scrawled pages of literary juvenilia. Lara is its dancer, though she is too capricious to make a career of anything but destruction. Jhabvala’s novel imagines the collision of stasis with motion, of selflessness with self-absorption, of poet with dancer. In her early twenties, Lara seduces Angel’s feckless father Peter, a business executive who, like several other characters, learns “how difficult it was to deny Lara anything she momentarily desired.” He installs her in an apartment and convinces Angel to keep her company. Abandoning Helena, Angel submerges her identity in her willful cousin’s and serves the other’s increasingly irrational whims. Lara’s bizarre shopping sprees and sexual escapades convince her psychotherapist father that she needs professional help. Angel’s own dementia is apparent in her belief that she can save Lara by obliterating herself.
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“She wasn’t mad,” demurs Roland, one of many whom Lara attracts and discards. “Just bad. . . . There are good people trying to do all right, and there are bad ones that pull them down and win.” Poet and Dancer is a morality play that tests the respective strengths of evil and love. Lara is a femme fatale powerless to restrain her own ruinous power. When extrovert Lara links up with introvert Angel, it is a fundamental fusion of elemental forces, and the result is explosive. Years later, the novel’s self-effacing narrator is still contending with the fallout.
Suggested Readings Agarwal, Ramlal G. Ruth Prawer Jhbavala: A Study of Her Fiction. New York: Envoy Press, 1990. Booker, Keith M. Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Chakravarti, Aruna. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study in Empathy and Exile. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1998. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne’s English Authors Series 494. New York: Twayne, 1992. Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1983. Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: The Politics of Passion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Contributors: Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman and Allene Phy-Olsen
Ha Jin (Xuefei Jin) Born: Jinzhou, Liaoning, China; February 21, 1956 Chinese American
Ha Jin presents a complex view of the ambivalences and hypocrisies that flourish in China’s intensely nationalistic culture. Principal works long fiction: In the Pond, 1998; Waiting, 1999; The Crazed, 2002; War Trash, 2004; A Free Life, 2007 poetry: Between Silences: A Voice from China, 1990; Facing Shadows, 1996; Wreckage, 2001 short fiction: Ocean of Words: Army Stories, 1996; Under the Red Flag, 1997; The Bridegroom, 2000; Quiet Desperation, 2000 Born in Jinzhou, Liaoning Province, in northeastern China in 1956, Ha Jin—a pen name that Xuefei Jin adopted for easier pronunciation—was the first Chinese-born American writer to win both the National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. However, Jin became an English-language writer almost by happenstance. His father was an army officer. Therefore, when facing the choices between going to work in the countryside and joining the People’s Liberation Army at age fourteen, he choose the latter, patrolling the border between Northern China and the Soviet Union for six years. After leaving the army, he worked as a railroad telegrapher in Harbin, the capital of Helongjian Province from 1975 to 1977 and taught himself English by listening to the radio. In 1988, he went to Helongjiang University, also in Harbin, a city he loved so much that he used the first character of it, Ha, in his pen name. He graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1982. Then he moved with his father, who had just retired from the army, to their home province of Shangdong. Two years later, Jin received his M.A. in American literature from Shandong University; there he was taught by visiting American Fulbright scholars and was exposed for the first time to the National Book Award-winning novels of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. While Jin enjoyed reading these works, he never imagined he would one day follow in their authors’ footsteps. He wanted to be a scholar and a translator. Shortly after his marriage to a young mathematician, Lisha Bian, Jin was given the opportunity to pursue a scholarship overseas. In 1985 he went to the United 563
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States to begin doctoral work on modern American poetry at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His wife joined him in the United States in 1987. He had planned to return to China after four years, but because of the shootings during the political protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, he decided to stay in the United States. It was difficult for him to find a job in academia. By then he had published a book of poems in English, Between Silences, so he thought if he continued to publish some books in English he might find a job teaching creative writing. Although Jin was determined to write, he had only completed several unpublished short stories back in China. To him, choosing to write in English meant much labor and some despair. When he applied to the creative writing program at Boston University in 1991, Leslie Epstein, the program director, could not accept him because his English was not quite fluent. Epstein was impressed, however, by Jin’s determination to write and allowed him to audit the courses. As a result, all the short stories in Ocean of Words were written during that audit year. When Jin reapplied to the program a year later, he was accepted as a full-time student. In 1992, Jin received his Ph.D. degree from Brandeis. One year later he was accepted by Emory University as an assistant professor of creative writing. In the following years, he published two collections of short fiction: Ocean of Words, which received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award. Jin’s novel In the Pond was selected as a best fiction book of 1998 by the Chicago Tribune, and Waiting, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1999 as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award (2000). His short stories have been included in the anthologies The Best American Short Stories (1997 and 1999), three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and The Norton Introduction to Fiction and The Norton Introduction to Literature, among others. He also became the Young J. Allen Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory. While American literary circles praised his effort to transform the figures, statements, ideas, and plans found in history books about China into universally accessible images of struggle, thus presenting a complex view of the ambivalences and hypocrisies that flourish in an intensely nationalistic culture, Ha Jin’s works have, to date, received little attention in China.
Under the Red Flag Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1997 The twelve short stories collected in Under the Red Flag, which won Jin the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1997, provide the reader with extraordinary insight into the living conditions and mentality of the people of rural Northeast China. This is the area where Jin grew up during the brutal times of the Cultural Revolution, when the Communists tried to disrupt traditional society, often replacing ancient customs of repression with a savagery of their own.
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Jin’s stories show people living without privacy. In addition to private jealousies and gossip, they are beset by Communists who often misuse their power to further private acts of vengeance or aggression. “In Broad Daylight” shows the public humiliation and near-lynching of a sexually frustrated woman turned occasional prostitute. Because she beat one of the juvenile Red Guards for failing to pay her, his comrades descend upon her under the mantle of party authority, leading her husband to kill himself out of shame. While living conditions are often grim and many characters outrightly selfish, Under the Red Flag also shows the common people’s will to endure and survive. The young boys Ha Jin (Kalman Zabarsky) of the stories have to cope with vicious neighborhood bullies or even their own jealous fathers, yet most of them survive with their spirits intact. Jin also reveals the random nature of life under Communist repression. In “Again, the Spring Breeze Blew,” the young widow Lanlan becomes a hero after the rapist she killed turns out to be an escaped criminal instead of the nephew of a party official. Overall, Under the Red Flag is a thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating collection which takes the American reader on an insider’s tour of a harsh place. When Jin left Communist China after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, his craft as a skillful writer quickly earned him the 1997 PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction, and Under the Red Flag continues this fine tradition.
In the Pond Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 In the Pond, Jin’s first novel, has the same appeal as his short stories: His work is crisp, unnerving, dramatic, and dominated by full characters. This is an episodic novel in which the central character, Shao Bin, suffers through humiliation after humiliation in his quest for what he sees as justice. The novel opens with Shao Bin’s name being left off the list of workers at the fertilizer plant who will be given a larger apartment. He feels he has been treated un-
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fairly and that others have been rewarded for political reasons. He responds with his art: Despite his position as a fitter in the plant, he is an accomplished artist, and so he draws a cartoon that lampoons his two supervisors (and archenemies in the novel), secretary Liu and Director Ma. Liu and Ma respond with a pay cut, and Bin creates another art piece that attacks their greed and their anti-revolutionary tendencies. Bin never backs down from the threats launched his way, and occasionally, with his wife’s prodding, he continues to look for justice at the commune level, then with the county hierarchy, and finally in Beijing. Because his case becomes so famous, his supervisors are unable to have him beaten up or simply to fire him. He is finally given a promotion by Liu and Ma’s boss, where he will write and draw propaganda pieces for the party. Meanwhile, his wife is still yearning for something larger than the single room she must share with her husband and their young girl. This is not a novel in which characters are fighting—à la Tiananmen Square— for an end to Communist rule or greater liberalization. The power of the novel comes from the quixotic attempt of the common worker with the uncommon talent and faith in art to find a suitable outlet for his talents. Jin has succeeded admirably in creating a fast-moving, very readable account of one imperfect man’s search for some version of domestic and artistic happiness.
Suggested Readings Basney, Lionel. “Keeping Company.” The Georgia Review 50 (Fall, 1996): 601608. Garner, Dwight. “Ha Jin’s Cultural Revolution.” The New York Times Magazine, February 6, 2000, pp. 38, 40-41. Gilbert, Roger. Review of Between Silences, by Ha Jin. Partisan Review 61 (Winter, 1994): 180-186. “Ha Jin.” Writer 114, no. 1 (January, 2001): 66. Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. Review of Wreckage, by Ha Jin. World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 76, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 109-110. Zhang, Hang. “Bilingual Creativity in Chinese English: Ha Jin’s In the Pond.” World Englishes 21, no. 2 (July, 2002): 305-315. Contributor: Guoqing Li
Charles Johnson Born: Evanston, Illinois; April 23, 1948 African American
Johnson’s philosophical fiction continues an African American literary tradition. Principal works long fiction: Faith and the Good Thing, 1974; Oxherding Tale, 1982; Middle Passage, 1990; Dreamer, 1998 short fiction: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1986; Soulcatcher, and Other Stories: Twelve Powerful Tales About Slavery, 2001; Dr. King’s Refrigerator, and Other Bedtime Stories, 2005 teleplays: Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree, 1978; Booker, 1984; The Green Belt, 1996 nonfiction: Black Humor, 1970 (cartoons and drawings); Half-Past Nation Time, 1972 (cartoons and drawings); Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, 1988; Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, 1998 (with Patricia Smith); I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson, 1999 (Rudolph P. Byrd, editor); King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 2000 (photographs by Bob Adelman); Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing, 2003; Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson, 2004 (Jim McWilliams, editor) edited text: Black Men Speaking, 1997 (with John McCluskey, Jr.) Reared in a tight-knit midwestern black community, Charles Johnson remembers his childhood environment as loving and secure. An only child, he often read to fill up his time. Johnson especially loved comic books and spent hours practicing drawing in hopes of becoming a professional cartoonist. To this end he took a twoyear correspondence course and was publishing cartoons and illustrations by the time he completed high school. At the last minute, Johnson decided to attend Southern Illinois University rather than art school. There he became passionately drawn to the study of philosophy and to writing. During his first summer vacation he began to pursue another lifelong interest, the martial arts. Before his undergraduate college days were over he had published a book of his own cartoons, Black Humor (1970), had hosted a television series on drawing, and had worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1970, he married Joan New, whom he had met two years earlier. After graduation, Johnson began working as a reporter for the Illinoisan; how567
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ever, he had already decided to become a novelist. Over the next two years, with John Gardner as his mentor, he wrote six “apprentice novels.” Finally, in 1974, he published Faith and the Good Thing, which he had extensively researched while completing his master’s degree in philosophy and writing a thesis on Marxism. Johnson continued his studies in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this time concentrating on phenomenology. Oxherding Tale is a work he intended, he wrote, to be a reply to German novelist Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha (1922; English translation, 1951). Johnson fashioned Oxherding into a “neo-slave narrative for the Charles Johnson (Courtesy, Canongate Books) second half of the twentieth century.” A melding of Eastern thought, the American slave experience, and a sharp, witty twentieth century consciousness, Oxherding Tale traces the misadventures of Andrew Hawkins, a privileged slave given the finest education because of his status as the child of the plantation’s black butler and his white mistress. Eventually, Andrew leaves home and begins to experience a variety of identities and to test various philosophical stances toward life. His tale culminates with his marriage, his reconciliation with his past, and his final encounter with Soulcatcher, the fugitive slave hunter long on his trail. By the time Oxherding Tale was published, Johnson had accepted an invitation to teach creative writing at the University of Washington. There, he continued to write; in addition to numerous essays, book reviews, and works for television, his credits include a collection of short stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, and his most acclaimed success, Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award. Another neo-slave narrative in the style of Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage continues Johnson’s quest to produce entertaining yet seriously philosophical black literature. Johnson also continues his commitment to the martial arts and to Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism.
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Faith and the Good Thing Type of work: Novel First published: 1974 Written from the fall of 1972 to the early summer of 1973 under the tutelage of John Gardner, Faith and the Good Thing is the metaphysical journey of eighteen-yearold Faith Cross, who believes that she is following her mother’s deathbed instructions and the werewitch Swamp Woman’s advice by searching the external world for the “Good Thing.” This quest for the key that will release her and everyone else from servitude leads from Hatten County, Georgia, to Chicago, Illinois, and home again. Despite limitations inherent in the narrative form itself, occasional lapses in viewpoint, and infrequent verbal artifice, Johnson has created a magical novel of legendary characters and metaphysical import. The diverse characters who people Faith’s life enrich her explorations on both ordinary and extraordinary levels of existence, yet none can lead her to her Good Thing. Asthmatic, stuttering, alcoholic Isaac Maxwell insists that the real power is in money. Dr. Leon Lynch, who treats her mother, believes that the purpose of human life is death and fulfills his self-prophecy by committing suicide on Christmas Eve. Nervous Arnold Tippis, a former dentist (who lost his license because of malpractice), theater usher, and male nurse, rapes her physically and spiritually. His adaptations, like Faith’s initial search, are external. Richard M. Barrett, former Princeton University professor, husband, and father, is now a homeless robber who dies on a Soldiers’ Field park bench. An existentialist, he believes enough in her search to will her his blank Doomsday Book and to haunt her after his death on Friday nights at midnight until her marriage. Each character shares his path to his Good Thing with Faith, thereby allowing her to choose pieces for her own. Faith’s mystical odyssey, remembered with relish by a third-person narrator addressing his listeners “children,” commits every individual to his own search and, through reflection, to the potential alteration of individual consciousness. Despite identifiable elements of naturalism, romanticism, allegory, the bildungsroman, and black folktales, of far greater importance is that Faith and the Good Thing creates its own genre of philosophical fiction in which the metaphysical and the real are integrated into a healing totality of being. Until her return to Swamp Woman, Faith’s choices for survival thrust her upon a path of intensifying alienation from herself and from her world. Her feelings of estrangement and depersonalization escalate to an existential fragmentation during her rape and subsequent periods of prostitution, chemical abuse, and marriage. With her decision to forsake her quest for the Good Thing, to manipulate the eminently unsuitable Isaac Maxwell into marriage, and to settle for a loveless middleclass existence, Faith cripples her sense of metaphysical purpose and sees herself as one of the “dead living,” an “IT,” her soul severed, “still as stone.” The advent of Alpha Omega Holmes, her hometown first love, enables Faith to recover vitality, but her dependence upon others since childhood for self-definition has been consistently destructive to Faith, who has lived in the past or the future and
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denied her present being. Holmes continues the pattern by deserting her when she announces that she is five months pregnant with his child. Rejected by Holmes and Maxwell, Faith turns to Mrs. Beasley, her former madam, who cares for her, delivers her baby daughter, and leaves the burning candle that is responsible for the fire that kills Faith’s child and critically maims Faith. Repeatedly, psychic abandonment and betrayal have been the consequences of a failure to respect her own and others’ process of becoming. Nevertheless, at the summons of Swamp Woman’s white cat, Faith returns to the werewitch’s holy ground. Now near death, she is finally prepared to devote her total being to the search. Accepting Swamp Woman’s revelations that everyone has a path and a “truth,” Faith understands that all humans are the sum of their experiences and that she, as well as they, has no beginning and no end. Thus, she has the power to exchange existence with the esoteric, iconoclastic, witty magician Swamp Woman or to become anyone she wishes, thereby personifying Barrett’s premise that thinking directs being. The Good Thing is the dynamic, nonpossessive, fluid freedom of the search itself.
Oxherding Tale Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 After Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson began thinking differently about the storyteller voice. He sought a means by which he could more fully and naturally embody philosophical issues within his characters. In Oxherding Tale, he has realized that voice, an intriguing first-person fusion of slave narrative, picaresque, and parable. In the first of two authorial intrusions, chapters 8 and 11, Johnson explains the three existing types of slave narrative. In the second, the author defines his new voice as first-person “universal,” not a “narrator who falteringly interprets the world, but a narrator who is that world.” Yet the eight years that Johnson worked on his second novel, a novel he believes he was born to create, were fraught with frustration as he wrote and discarded draft after draft until, in 1979, he considered never writing again. Nevertheless, his passion for writing conquered the obstructions. Following a period of extended meditation, Johnson experienced a profound catharsis and eliminated the problematic static quality of the earlier drafts by refashioning the narrator-protagonist from black to mulatto and his second master from male to female. Oxherding Tale, inspired by Eastern artist Kakuan-Shien’s “Ten Oxherding Pictures,” describes Andrew Hawkins’s rite of passage, an often-humorous, metaphysical search for self through encounters that culminate in his nondualistic understanding of himself and the world. The narrator, born to the master’s wife and the master’s butler as the fruit of a comic one-night adventure, sees himself as belonging to neither the fields nor the house. Although Andrew lives with his stepmother and his father (recently demoted to herder), George and Mattie Hawkins,
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Master Polkinghorne arranges his classical education with an eccentric Eastern scholar. An excellent student, Andrew nevertheless expresses his recognition of the dualism when he protests that he can speak in Latin more effectively than in his own dialect. As Andrew opens his mind to the learning of the ages, George Hawkins becomes progressively more paranoid and nationalistic. This delicate counterbalance is sustained throughout the novel until, at the end, the assimilated Andrew learns from Soulcatcher that his father was shot to death as an escaped slave. At twenty, Andrew wishes to marry the Cripplegate plantation seamstress, Minty. Instead, he is sold to Flo Hatfield, a lonely woman who considers her eleven former husbands subhuman and who has the reputation of sexually using each male slave until, discarding him to the mines or through his death, she replaces him with another. Believing that he is earning the funds for his own, his family’s, and Minty’s manumission, Andrew cooperates. He finds himself quickly satiated, however, with the orgiastic physical pleasures Flo demands to conceal her psychic lifelessness. Thus, neither his father’s intensifying spiritual separatism nor his mistress’s concupiscence is a path Andrew can accept. Andrew proceeds to seek out Reb, the Allmuseri coffinmaker in whose Buddhist voice he finds comfort, friendship, and enlightenment. Flo’s opposite, Reb (neither detached nor attached) operates not from pleasure but from duty, acting without ulterior motives simply because something needs to be done. Together, the two escape Flo’s sentence to her mines as well as Bannon the Soulcatcher, a bounty hunter, with Andrew posing as William Harris, a white teacher, and Reb posing as his gentleman’s gentleman. When Reb decides to leave Spartanburg for Chicago because of Bannon, Andrew, emotionally attached to the daughter of the town doctor, decides that Reb’s path is not appropriate for him to follow. Instead, his dharma (Eastern soul-sustaining law of conduct) is to be a homemaker married to Peggy. During their wedding ceremony, Andrew surrenders himself to his timeless vision of all that humanity has the potential to become. The final chapter, “Moksha,” like the last of Kakuan-Shien’s ten pictures, reveals the absolute integration between self and universe. “Moksha” is the Hindu concept of ultimate realization, perpetual liberation beyond dualities, of self with the Great Spirit. In an illegal slave auction, the mulatto Andrew discovers and buys his dying first love, Minty. He, Peggy, and Dr. Undercliff unite to ease her transition from this world. Thus, the three move beyond self to arete, “doing beautifully what needs to be done,” and begin the process of healing their world. In Oxherding Tale, Johnson once again offers the experience of affirmation and renewal. Through the first-person universal voice of Andrew Hawkins, he constructs a tightly interwoven, well-honed portrait of actualization. Minute details, vivid visual imagery, and delicate polarities within and among the characters achieve an exacting balance between portrayal of the process and the process itself. Once again, the search does not belong solely to Johnson’s characters; the search belongs to everyone who chooses to be free of “self-inflicted segregation from the Whole.”
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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1986 Each of the stories in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has a specific philosophic concept at the core of the narrative. “The Education of Mingo,” which opens the collection, is informed by the argument that humans are ultimately not responsible for their actions if there is an omniscient deity in control of the universe. The story is grounded in a very down-to-earth situation involving a white man, Moses Green, who has trained an African slave, Mingo, to echo all of his desires, attitudes, preferences, and predilections. As Mingo begins to act beyond the specific instructions of his master, anticipating Green’s subconscious and instinctual urges, the servant/ master relationship is presented as a reciprocal form of entrapment, in which neither is truly free or completely himself. The costs of this arrangement are Green’s permanent connection to his slave and Mingo’s restriction to his status as menial, no matter how skilled or accomplished he becomes. The story is both a commentary on three centuries of slavery and a vivid expression of the inner conflicts of an essentially good man, whose well-meaning attempt to educate someone he regards as completely ignorant must lead to a disastrous, violent conclusion due to his own massive ignorance of Mingo’s mind. The interlocking destiny of Green and Mingo, the secret sharers of each other’s lives, points the story toward an indeterminate future, in which the racial clash of American life remains to be resolved. As the writer Michael Ventura has observed, the stories in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice often “reveal the underside of the last or next,” so that Cooter and Loftis, brothers in the succeeding story, “Exchange Value,” are also trapped in an interlocking relationship that wrecks their ability to think with moral clarity or with any sense of selfpreservation. Located at the center of the collection, “China” is the most energetically affirmative story in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, closer in mood to Johnson’s celebrated novels, Oxherding Tale or Middle Passage, than to his short fiction. Rudolph Lee Jackson, the protagonist, is a middle-aged man whose entire life has been a catastrophe of caution and avoidance. His marriage is devoid of passion or communication, he is physically feeble, psychically terrified, and steadily deteriorating from even this diminished condition. The story is not an open allegory, but Jackson is presented as an emblem of the frightened, semibourgeois, not-quite-middle-class black man, nearly completely emasculated by a retreat from the daily assaults of a racist society and further discouraged by the constant critical sarcasm of his wife Evelyn, whose disappointment and fear are understandable in terms of Jackson’s apparent acceptance of defeat. Johnson has criticized novels in which “portraits of black men . . . are so limited and one-sided” that they seem immoral. The direction of “China” is an opening away from what Johnson calls “an extremely narrow range of human beings”— exemplified by Jackson, who has a “distant, pained expression that asked: “Is this all?”—toward a kind of self-actualization and fulfillment, which Jackson achieves
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through a difficult and painful but energizing course in the philosophy and practice of martial arts. In some of his most engaging, vivid writing, Johnson describes the revitalization and growth that lead to Jackson’s symbolic rebirth as a man, as he becomes more and more involved in the life of the kwoon. Initially, Evelyn resists everything about Jackson’s enthusiastic, disciplined transformation, but at the story’s conclusion, she is, despite her reservations and fears, awakened to the possibility of a life without the artificial, self-imposed limits that African Americans have adopted as a kind of protection from the pain of a three-centuries-long legacy of racial oppression. The story “Kwoon” is a further exploration of the mental condition at the heart of true physical power that martial arts can provide, and it illuminates the genuine humility that the strongest people know when they have moved beyond the ego trap of resistance to enlightenment. “AlTthia” is the most explicitly philosophical of Johnson’s short stories. It is narrated by a book-ruled professor, whose ordered, intellectually contained life is fractured when a student pulls him into a forest of uncontrolled passion, the necessary complement to his mental fortress. The two sides of human existence are expressed in the contrast between the professor’s measured discourse and the raw reality of the netherworld to which his guide takes him. The word alTthia is drawn from the philosopher Max Scheler’s term concerning a process that “calls forth from concealedness,” and it stands for the revelation of an inner essence that has been previously suppressed—the “ugly, lovely black life (so it was to me) I’d fled so long ago in my childhood.” Johnson’s presentation of the professor is a commentary on the retreat that a preoccupation with the purely mental may produce and a statement about the futility of repressing aspects of the true self.
Middle Passage Type of work: Novel First published: 1990 Middle Passage, for which Johnson won the 1990 National Book Award, is the story of Rutherford Calhoun’s life-changing journey aboard the slaver Republic in 1830. Like Johnson’s earlier Oxherding Tale, this book is narrated by a young black man born into slavery but with a superior education, whose story is rooted in nineteenth century history but whose savvy, humorous voice bespeaks a twentieth century intellectual consciousness. Rutherford’s adventures begin when he stows aboard a ship to escape a woman determined to bring him to the altar. The Republic, a slaver, ships out to Africa; there it picks up a special cargo—a hold full of men, women, and children of the mystical Allmuseri tribe. The Republic’s captain also secretly brings on board a crate containing the captured Allmuseri god. Middle Passage blatantly evokes Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851), “Benito Cereno,” and Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e., English translation, 1616) among others. Johnson flaunts, mocks, and turns on end these similarities: His dwarfish
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Captain Falcon is a caricature of the crazed Ahab; the ringleaders of the rebelling Allmuseri are Babo, Fernando, and Atufel; Isadora, Rutherford’s intended, knits by day and unravels her work by night to forestall marriage to her new suitor. The Republic’s voyage is a darkly comic version of the Pequod’s, but one highlighting slavery’s role in American history and economy. Whereas Herman Melville’s Ishmael asks the philosophical question, “Who ain’t a slave?” Johnson’s Falcon educates Rutherford in the fundamentals of capitalism by pointing out, “Who ain’t up for auction when it comes to it?” Fittingly, then, Johnson’s novel does not end when Falcon dies, the Republic sinks, and Rutherford is rescued. Rather, these events deliver Rutherford into the clutches of the Republic’s owners, come to check up on their investment. Also aboard the rescue ship is Isadora and her fiancé, wealthy black New Orleans mobster Papa Zeringue. Once Zeringue is exposed as a part owner of the Republic, Isadora is free to marry Rutherford, who joyfully embraces marriage as an emotional haven in a cannibalistic world. Middle Passage charts Rutherford’s growth from a self-serving opportunist to a responsible man who values the ties that link human beings. His passage from a worldview based on multiplicity, individualism, dualism, and linearity to acceptance of the Allmuseri concept of “unity of being” opens him up to love, compassion, and commitment. Rutherford’s growth into this new identity also seems to comment on Johnson’s identity as a sophisticated black writer navigating his way through African American, American, Western, and Eastern traditions. Johnson calls Middle Passage his attempt to fill a literary void by producing “philosophical black literature.” An admirer of writers such as Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse, Herman Melville, and Ralph Ellison, who “understood instinctively that fiction and philosophy were sister disciplines,” Johnson weds, in this work, his own interests in philosophy, African American history, and fiction. In Middle Passage, Johnson reminds readers that the received American epic (literary and historical) has an African American counterpart, and he adds a new dimension to the slave narrative tradition by creating an African American narrator who speaks in a formidably intellectual voice. Johnson also insists that Rutherford be taken seriously simply as a human being engaged in exploring fundamental underpinnings of the human condition.
Dreamer Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 Beginning in Chicago, in the fateful summer of 1966, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., took his nonviolent branch of the Civil Rights movement north, Dreamer is (to borrow the subtitle of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd) “an inside narrative,” and doubly so. A number of chapters, though told in the third person, deal intimately with the workings of King’s troubled mind. Longer and more numerous are the
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chapters narrated by Matthew Bishop, a college dropout whose job includes “recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity—particularly what took place in the interstices.” Bishop’s narrative focuses on one interstitial event in particular, the arrival of Chaym Smith, the King look-alike who paradoxically is everything that King is not, “the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras.” Smith has the Midas touch in reverse; he is a man whose intelligence and talent have been thwarted and misshapen. Yearning to be of service, to be like King, he is also filled with resentment and constitutes as great a threat to the movement and to King as the virulent racism that manifests itself in Chicago. The story of Smith playing Cain to King’s Abel serves as the foundation for Johnson’s informative and often absorbing examination of dreams and civil wars of several kinds: within the country, the black community, the Civil Rights movement, and individuals. There is enough material here for a meganovel, but Johnson deliberately opts for the smallness that is in keeping with his dominant theme: that everyone has a part to play.
Suggested Readings African American Review 30, no. 4 (Winter, 1996). Byrd, Rudolph P. Charles Johnson’s Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. _______, ed. I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and About Charles Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Coleman, J. W. “Charles Johnson’s Quest for Black Freedom in Oxherding Tale.” African American Review 29, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 631-644. Connor, Marc C., and William R. Nash, eds. Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Johnson, Charles. “An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Interview by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 20 (Summer, 1997): 531-547. Little, Jonathan. Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 20 (Summer, 1997): 531-547. Scott, D. M. “Interrogating Identity: Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage.” African American Review 29, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 645-655. Travis, M. A. “Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critics’ Essentialism.” Narrative 2, no. 3 (October, 1994): 179-200. Contributors: Grace McEntee, Leon Lewis, Joanne McCarthy, and Kathleen Mills
James Weldon Johnson Born: Jacksonville, Florida; June 17, 1871 Died: Wiscasset, Maine; June 26, 1938 African American
One of the first to celebrate African American art forms, Johnson was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Principal works long fiction: The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, 1912 poetry: Fifty Years, and Other Poems, 1917; God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, 1927; Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems, 1935 translation: The English Libretto of “Goyescas,” 1915 nonfiction: Black Manhattan, 1930; Along This Way, 1933 (autobiography); Negro Americans, What Now?, 1934; The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, 1995 (2 volumes; Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor) edited texts: The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922; The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 1925; The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals, 1926 James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, graduated from Atlanta University in 1894, and went on to become one of the most versatile artists of his time. In addition to expressing his artistic talents, he led a successful professional life and was an influential civil rights advocate. After his graduation in 1894, Johnson became principal of Stanton School and edited a newspaper, the Daily American. He advocated civil rights in his articles in a time that saw a dramatic rise in the number of lynchings. He thus assumed a public role in the African American community. Encouraged by his brother Rosamond, Johnson and his brother went to New York in 1899 to work on a musical career. Their most lasting achievement of that period is the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the African American national anthem. After having been appointed consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, Johnson, after publication of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, decided to attempt to support himself through literary work. He returned to New York to begin writing an influential column for the New York Age, commenting on literary matters and encouraging black literary activity. He published The Book of American Negro Poetry three years before Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) officially ushered in the Harlem Renaissance. Beginning in 1916, Johnson was field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organizing new branches and looking into matters of racial injustice nationwide. In 1920, he became the first African 576
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American secretary of the NAACP, a post he would hold until 1930. Johnson saw his civil rights work and his artistic activity as complementary, believing that the production of great works of art would improve African Americans’ position in society. Johnson contributed major work to that effort with the publication of God’s Trombones, bringing the language of the African American church into the realm of literature. Weldon also collected two volumes of African American spirituals, which made clear that this expression of African American folk spirit belonged to the world of art. His death in a car accident in 1938 interrupted Johnson in his wideranging efforts.
The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man Type of work: Novel First published: 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was first published anonymously in 1912, but it did not become a success until it was reissued in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel chronicles the coming-of-age of its unnamed protagonist, who switches back and forth between ethnic identities until he finally decides to pass as a European American. Its most striking feature might well be that it calls the notion of ethnic identity into question. In order to explore ethnic identity, Johnson has his protagonist experience both sides of the “color line,” to use the famous phrase by W. E. B. Du Bois. Growing up believing himself European American, as the white-looking child of a light-skinned African American mother and a European American father, the protagonist discovers in school that he is African American. Having harbored prejudice against African Americans, he now becomes an object of prejudice. Once over this initial shock, he resolves to become famous in the service of African Americans. In order to learn about his mother’s heritage, he leaves for the South, where he often finds himself an outsider to African American society. He knows little of African American folk customs, so at first he reacts to African Americans ambiguously. In this way, Johnson shows that the culture of one’s upJames Weldon Johnson (Library of Congress)
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bringing is a more important factor in determining one’s outlook on other cultures than are ethnic bloodlines. After losing his money in the South, the protagonist eventually embarks on a musical career, which takes him to New York. He discovers ragtime there and is fascinated by it, renewing his resolve to become famous and intending to do so through African American music. After a sojourn in Europe, he returns to the South in order to learn more about the roots of African American music, which he calls “a mine of material” when visiting a religious meeting at which spirituals are sung. The reader discovers that the protagonist’s interest in African American culture is mainly commercial. He nevertheless often comments enthusiastically on African American contributions to American culture. The protagonist gives up his idea of becoming famous through African American music, however, after witnessing a lynching. He returns North, marries a European American woman, and becomes a white businessman. In the end, he wishes he had followed his musical inclinations, which are connected to his African American heritage, instead of achieving material success. Thus, the novel shows that a hostile social climate can bring people to forsake their heritage but also that ethnic identity is partly a matter of choice.
Along This Way Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1933 Johnson claimed that one of the reasons for publishing his autobiography, Along This Way, was to make clear that his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was not a record of his life. A public figure as important as Johnson hardly needed, however, a justification for adding another book to the growing shelf of autobiographies of distinguished African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In a controlled and often ironic narrative tone, Johnson not only provides insights into his life and times but also focuses on African American accomplishments in the hostile social climate that he battled against all of his life. Despite a middle-class upbringing, a university degree, and immediate success first as a school principal, in passing the Florida bar examination—the first African American to do so—and then as songwriter, writer, consul, and civil rights activist, Johnson always committed himself to the cause of African Americans. When on university vacation, he spent three months teaching African American farmers’ children in rural Georgia, realizing “that they were me, and I was they; that a force stronger than blood made us one.” Accordingly, all his artistic work was committed to improving the social situation of African Americans and to exploring African American art forms. When embarking on his composing and songwriting career, he “began to grope toward a realization of the American Negro’s cultural background and his creative folk-art.” In much of his poetry, too, Johnson built on African American folk traditions. He did so because he believed in the uniqueness of the Af-
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rican American heritage, based as it was on a deep spirituality. Thus, he implies that African Americans are a main resource for the United States in matters of artistry and spirituality and that, in turn, the United States will be measured by how it treats African Americans. He pithily summarizes this belief in saying “that in large measure the race question involves the saving of black America’s body and white America’s soul.” A considerable part of the book is devoted to Johnson’s fight for racial justice and his time in the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Johnson reveals explicitly that his program for improving the social status of African Americans, despite his own artistic, legal, and political efforts, is really a moral one: “The only kind of revolution that would have an immediately significant effect on the American Negro’s status would be a moral revolution.” As Along This Way makes clear, Johnson did his best on all fronts.
Saint Peter Relates an Incident Type of work: Poetry First published: 1935 Johnson’s most famous poems appear in Saint Peter Relates an Incident, including the title poem, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” originally published in 1930, was written in response to the visit by mothers of highly decorated World War I soldiers to their sons’ graves in France. The State Department, which sponsored the visit, sent white mothers in one ship and African American mothers in another, second-class ship. The poem imagines Saint Peter telling the assembled angels of Heaven an incident occurring on Judgment Day. The dead are called from their graves, and white war veterans, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan, gather together in order to escort the Unknown Soldier to Heaven. Once they liberate him from his grave, they are shocked to find that he is black and debate whether they should bury him again. Until the white war veterans knew the Unknown Soldier’s color, they intended to honor him; his color alone turns their admiration into hatred. The Unknown Soldier marches triumphantly into Heaven, while, it is implied, the war veterans dismayed by his skin color end up in Hell. Johnson points out the bitter irony and absurdity of drawing a color line even after death, particularly when death was incurred in the service of one’s country. “O Black and Unknown Bards” originally appeared in Fifty Years, and Other Poems (1917). The title refers to the unknown creators of the spirituals, a musical form that Johnson regarded as artistic work of the first rank, a point he makes by comparing it with the creations of classical composers. Incorporating titles of actual spirituals, such as “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Go Down, Moses,” into the poem, Johnson pays homage to African American folk art, admiring its spiritual and artistic accomplishments, and bridges the gap between folk art forms and socalled high art.
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“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” perhaps the work which has done most to keep Johnson’s name alive, was originally composed as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and set to music. It is still known as the African American national anthem. Inspirational in nature, the poem makes no direct reference to ethnicity but refers metaphorically to hardships endured by African Americans while also celebrating liberties won in hard struggle. The third and last stanza reminds the listeners to remain faithful to God and ends on a patriotic note, which claims the United States as African Americans’ “native land.”
Suggested Readings Ahlin, Lena. The “New Negro” in the Old World: Culture and Performance in James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Lund, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006. Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Fleming, Robert E. James Weldon Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Price, Kenneth M., and Lawrence J. Oliver, eds. Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Wilson, Sondra K., ed. In Search of Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins, 1920-1977. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Contributor: Martin Japtok
Gayl Jones Born: Lexington, Kentucky; November 23, 1949 African American
Jones’s conventional gothic novels and short stories are among the most intense psychological portrayals of black female characters in African American literature. Principal works drama: Chile Woman, pr. 1973, pb. 1974 long fiction: Corregidora, 1975; Eva’s Man, 1976; Die Vogelfängerin, 1986 (in German); The Healing, 1998; Mosquito, 1999 poetry: Song for Anninho, 1981; The Hermit-Woman, 1983; Xarque, and Other Poems, 1985 short fiction: White Rat: Short Stories, 1977 nonfiction: Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, 1991 Poet, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and teacher, Gayl Jones is best known for the intensity and probing nature of her gothic tales, which mix the conventions of the gothic with radically unconventional worlds of madness, sexuality, and violence. Jones began writing seriously at age seven under the encouraging and guiding influence of her grandmother, her mother, and her high school Spanish teacher, Anna Dodd. Later, her mentors would be Michael Harper and William Meredith at Brown University, where she earned two degrees in creative writing. She published her first and best-known novel, Corregidora, while still at Brown. No stranger to the art of writing and storytelling, Jones grew up in a household of female creative writers: Her grandmother wrote plays for church production. Jones’s mother, Lucille, started writing in fifth grade and read stories she had written to Jones and her brother. It is therefore not surprising that stories, storytelling, and family history are the sources of most of the material for her fiction. In addition to her distinction as teller of intense stories about insanity and the psychological effects of violence on black women, another characteristic of Jones’s art is her consistent use of the first person for her protagonists. Claiming neither “political compulsions nor moral compulsions,” Jones is first and foremost interested in the “psychology of characters” and therefore seeks to examine their “puzzles,” as she states, by simply letting her characters “tell their stories.” Her interest in the character as storyteller permits her to evoke oral history and engage the Afri581
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can American tradition of storytelling, which she accomplishes in her novels Corregidora and Eva’s Man. Corregidora, a historical novel, is what Jones calls a blues narrative. The novel examines the psychological effects of slavery and sexual abuse on three generations of women, particularly Ursa, a professional blues singer. Eva’s Man, Jones’s more provocative and controversial second novel, explores the psychological effects of violence. Eva Medina Canada, the protagonist-narrator, tells in confusing but gripping detail the story of her violent reaction to her victimization in a maledominated society. Jones continues her thematic concerns with White Rat, a volume of twelve short stories, and Song for Anninho, a long narrative poem. In addition to her fiction and essay writing, Jones teaches full-time, writes poetry, and conducts research.
Eva’s Man Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Eva’s Man, Jones’s provocative second novel, is a psychological tale of repression, manipulation, and suffering. It is a gothic story of madness—Eva’s madness—and the psychological effects of violence on black women. From her prison asylum room, where she has been incarcerated for five years for poisoning, then castrating, her lover, Eva Medina Canada, the psychotic title character, narrates the events that led up to her bizarre and violent act. Although she has maintained a steadfast and defiant silence in response to the grinding interrogation of the male judicial authorities—the police and psychiatrists—Eva readily tells her story to the reader. Through time and space intrusions, many flashbacks, and a combination of dreams, fantasies, memories, interrogation, and exchanges between herself and her cellmate, Elvira, Eva tells everything except her motive. In the unsequential narrative, Eva’s story delineates unequivocally men’s malevolence and women’s natural acceptance of a destiny inevitably circumscribed by this malevolence. Eva’s appropriating of and identification with the story of Queen Bee, the femme fatale whose love, like a deadly sting, kills off every man with whom she falls in love, suggests that women resign themselves to a female destiny. This horrid fatalism blames and punishes women for their sexuality. Paradoxically, since the drone is always at the service of the queen bee, it is women who have power to affirm or deny manhood. Aligning herself with the queen bee, Eva kills Davis, the drone, rather than submit to his excessive domination. For Eva the lessons in the violent consequences of womanhood and female sexuality began early. Prepubescent Freddy, a neighbor boy, initiates her sexually with a dirty Popsicle stick. Her mother’s lover, Tyrone, makes her feel him. She sees her father punish her mother’s infidelity with rape. Cousin Alphonse solicits sex from her, and a thumbless man harasses her sexually. Moses Tribbs propositions her, thereby provoking her attack on him with a pocket knife. Her fifty-five-year-old
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husband James, out of jealousy, disallows a telephone in the house. Finally, Davis, her lover, imprisons and uses her for five days. To each of these men, Eva (like other women characters in the novel, including her mother) exists merely as an object to satisfy insatiable male sexual needs. In response to this objectification and violence by men, Eva remains steadfastly silent, choosing neither to explain her extreme action nor to defend herself. Apart from the bizarreness of Eva’s brutal act, which delineates the level of her madness, it is perhaps the exclusive use of the first-person narrative voice and the lack of authorial intrusion or questioning of Eva’s viewpoint that make Eva’s Man controversial and successful.
Suggested Readings Ashraf, H. A. “‘Relate Sexual to Historical.’” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 273-297. Bell, Bernard. “The Liberating Literary and African American Vernacular Voices of Gayl Jones.” Comparative Literature Studies 36, no. 3 (1999): 247-258. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Wilcox, Janelle. “Resistant Silence, Resistant Subject: (Re)Reading Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” Genders 23 (1996): 72-96. Yukins, Elizabeth. “Bastard Daughters and the Possession of History in Corregidora and Paradise.” Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 221-247. Contributor: Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith
June Jordan Born: Harlem, New York; July 9, 1936 Died: Berkeley, California; June 14, 2002 African American
A self-avowed anarchist who considered all poems political, Jordan’s ambition was an acknowledged “people’s poet.” Principal works children’s literature: Who Look at Me, 1969; Dry Victories, 1972; Fannie Lou Hamer, 1972; New Life: New Room, 1975; Kimako’s Story, 1981 drama: In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, pr. 1979; For the Arrow That Flies by Day, pr. 1981; Bang Bang Über Alles, pr. 1986 (libretto; music by Adrienne Bo Torf); I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, 1995 (libretto and lyrics; music by John Adams) long fiction: His Own Where, 1971 poetry: Some Changes, 1971; New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, 1974; Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, 1977; Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, 1980; Bobo Goetz a Gun, 1985; Living Room: New Poems, 1985; Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, 1989; Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems, 1989; Haruko/Love Poems: New and Selected Love Poems, 1993 (pb. in U.S. as Haruko: Love Poems, 1994); Kissing God Goodbye: Poems, 1991-1997, 1997; Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems, 2005 nonfiction: Civil Wars, 1981; On Call: Political Essays, 1985; Moving Towards Home: Political Essays, 1989; Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, 1992; Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, 1998; Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, 2000 The essence of June Jordan’s life reveals itself in her poetry and in her autobiographical writings, in particular in Civil Wars and her memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood. She was born in Harlem, the daughter of her father Granville, a Panamanian immigrant, and Mildred, her Jamaican mother. When she was five years old, her parents moved to Brooklyn, and Jordan began her education by commuting to an all-white school. She later attended Northfield School for Girls, a preparatory school in Massachusetts. Her introduction to poetry came through her father, who forced her to read, memorize, or recite the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare, the Bible, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Zane Grey. At the age of seven, she began to write po584
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etry herself. Unfortunately, her father’s pedagogical methods also included beatings for unsatisfactory performance, but Jordan never questioned his love for her, affirming that he had the greatest influence on her poetic and personal development, having given her the idea that “to protect yourself, you try to hurt whatever is out there.” Jordan’s mother, who committed suicide in 1966, did not oppose her father’s harsh treatment of her, and Jordan found this passivity harder to forgive than her father’s brutality. Her interest in poetry was developed at Northfield but was limited mainly to white male poets “whose remoteness from my world . . . crippled my trust in my own sensibilities . . . and generally delayed my creative embracing of my own . . . life as the stuff of my art.” In 1953, at Barnard College, Jordan met Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University. They were married in 1955, and Jordan followed her husband to the University of Chicago. The strain of their interracial marriage, at a time when such marriages were frowned upon by the dominant society, began to take its toll, and after a prolonged separation the couple eventually divorced in 1965, leaving Jordan to raise her son Christopher, born in 1958, by herself. Supporting herself at first as a technical writer, journalist, and assistant to Frederick Wiseman (producer of The Cool World, a film about Harlem), she began her academic career at the City College of New York in 1967. In 1969, she published her first book, Who Look at Me, a series of poetic fragments dealing with the problem of black identity in America, in which she tries to imagine what a white person might see when looking at an African American and what effect such a look can have on the person observed. In 1970 Jordan traveled to Italy with funding from the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, which she had won with the support of R. Buckminster Fuller. Her reflections on this journey are contained in her collection New Days: Poems of Exile and Return. A breakthrough in her career as a poet came with the publication in 1977 of her best-known collection, Things That I Do in the Dark, edited by Toni Morrison. She also won the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design (1970-1971), and in 1971 her book His Own Where was nominated for a National Book Award. She won the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award (1995), the National Association of Black Journalists Award (1984), and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991). Jordan published more than twenty books in a variety of genres, including books for children and young adults, political essays, long fiction, plays, and even an opera libretto. She taught at Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, eventually taking up a professorship in African studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There she became the head of the popular outreach program Poetry for the People. She was a regular contributor to the liberal periodical The Progressive, an outspoken critic of American foreign aid policy, and an aggressive proponent of affirmative action. Jordan died in June, 2002, after losing her decade-long fight against breast cancer. Jordan was a self-avowed anarchist activist who considered all poems to be political. Her poetic ambition was to be a “people’s poet” in the fashion of Pablo Neruda, particularly a black people’s poet. Her poetic output was to a large degree a
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running commentary on the social and political life in the United States, with allusions to current events such as the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, the 1991 police beating of Rodney King and subsequent trial, and even the controversial events surrounding boxer Mike Tyson. Although her tone is frequently sarcastic, angry, and strident, in some sense all of her poems are love poems. Her militancy and unwillingness to be conciliatory appear to be guided by her love for the oppressed and marginalized; her denunciation of the oppressors is accompanied by the call to the victims not to capitulate, to gain and to preserve a sense of self-love and self-worth and then put it into action.
Some Changes Type of work: Poetry First published: 1971 Jordan’s first substantial collection of poems is divided into four parts, each dedicated to a particular facet of her life that she felt needed revision and change. These
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poems were written in the years after the suicide of her mother and the dissolution of her own marriage; as such they are an assertion of her new independence as a woman, mother, poet, sexual person, and politically autonomous citizen; therefore she dedicates the volume to “new peoplelife.” This “new peoplelife” involves making peace with her mother and father in the opening poem. For the former, she has a list of promises; her father she would “regenerate.” In “Poem for My Family: Hazel Griffin and Victor Hernando Cruz,” Jordan expands the meaning of “family” beyond the traditional nuclear family to include all suffering people of her race. In several other poems in the first half of the collection, Jordan’s role as a single, working mother translates into concern for children in general and for her own son in particular. The tone of many of these early poems is dark. In “Not a Suicide Poem,” she asserts that no one should feel peculiar living as they do . . . [in] terrific reeking epidermal damage marrow rot . . .
Other poems, such as “The Wedding” and “The Reception,” assert a married woman’s personal autonomy. Most notable of these is “Let Me Live with Marriage,” a clever deconstruction of Shakespeare’s sonnet beginning “Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds.” Jordan’s wish is to be allowed “to live with marriage/ as unruly as alive/ or else alone and longing/ not too long alone.” After declaring her independence from family and marriage in the first half and coming to terms with her losses (“I Live in Subtraction”), she indicates her growing sense of racial pride and political empowerment in the later poems of Some Changes. “What would I do white?” she asks in the opening poem of the third section, in which she declares herself in solidarity with all black people, whom she has incorporated into her extended family. In the final section she expands this family yet more to include all people living in poverty and oppression (“47,000 Windows”) before returning to memories of her father and her family’s former home on Hancock Street in Brooklyn, emphasizing the emptiness of the house and the forlorn wandering of her father after her mother’s suicide (“Clock on Hancock Street”). In the final poem of the collection, pessimistically titled “Last Poem for a Little While,” the speaker is saying grace at a Thanksgiving dinner of 1969, in which she thanks God “for the problems that are mine/ and evidently mine alone” and asks her fellow diners to “Pass the Ham./ And wipe your fingers on the flag.” In Some Changes Jordan found her independent poetic identity, acknowledging the influence of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman but striking out confidently on her own path.
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Naming Our Destiny Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems updates Things That I Do in the Dark to include her poetry up to 1989. It therefore gives the reader a good sense of which poems from her previous collections Jordan considered most worthy of attention. The volume’s first section presents selections from Things That I Do in the Dark (1958-1977); the second contains poems from Passion (1977-1980); the third is a selection from Living Room (1985); the fourth is composed of new poems written between 1984 and 1989. Part 2 includes her most anthologized piece, “A Poem About My Rights.” Jordan claimed that this poem was written in response to having been raped a few months before and that she intended to express her psychological reaction to this event. She emphatically states that victims of violence must resist the temptation to internalize the blame for the violent act and put it squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrators. She then characteristically extrapolates from her personal tragedy to the situation of violated people everywhere: “I am the history of rape/ I am the history of the rejection of who I am.” As the poem indicates and as Jordan stated in interviews, the difference between her rape and the situation in apartheid South Africa was, for her, minimal. Her anger at this violation finds expression in the menacing final lines of the poem: “but I can tell you that from now on my resistance/ my simple and daily and nightly self-determination/ may very well cost you your life.” The new poems in Naming Our Destiny are collected in the fourth section under the title “North Star,” a reference to the abolitionist newspaper founded by Frederick Douglass in 1847 and to the constellation that served as the navigational guide to Africans making their escape from slavery. Consequently, most of these poems are unabashedly political, taking to task most of Jordan’s adversaries: the Israeli occupiers of Palestine; Bernard Goetz, the New York subway vigilante; the white supremacist rulers of South Africa; Ronald Reagan and the Nicaraguan Contras; the Marcos regime in the Philippines; and even Benjamin Franklin for declaring that there could be no lasting peace with Native Americans, “till we have welldrubbed them” (“Poem for Benjamin Franklin”). Other poems pay homage to friends and fellow activists, such as Angela Davis (“Solidarity”).
Technical Difficulties Type of work: Essays First published: 1992 The centerpiece of Jordan’s political ideology was an exalted view of human entitlements and of the capacity of the nation-state to guarantee them. This list of entitlements—found in the seventh of the twenty-four essays in this volume— includes items that would endear her to the staunchest European Social Democrat.
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Citizens have a claim to state-supported education—“and perpetual reeducation”— including graduate study. Both parents must receive paid leaves in the months surrounding a child’s birth and should be offered “universal, state-controlled child care programs.” Youths have a claim on “appropriate, universal sex education in our public schools, and universal teenage access to contraceptive means, including abortion, if necessary.” She asserts that the “nationalization of vital industries” is also an entitlement: “to protect citizen consumers and citizen workers, alike, from the greed-driven vagaries of a free-market.” Unfortunately, many essays contradict the socialist-humanist philosophy upon which this view of entitlements rests. Jordan’s pronouncements on educational policy, the Western literary canon, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, the Constitution, liberalism, and feminism often sound like those of a black nationalist or Afro-centralist. Yet her 1986 University of California commencement address, reprinted here, sounds a note of cultural conservatism, and the first essay is a masterpiece of American patriotism. Jordan’s lack of an introduction strengthens the impression that she was trying to please very different audiences. Nonetheless, this compilation casts light on the variety of views and stands she expressed and is valuable for the high quality of her descriptive essays. The ones that treat Brooklyn, where she grew up, are particularly fine.
Kissing God Goodbye Type of work: Poetry First published: 1997 This slender collection of poems written between 1991 and 1997 restates many of the themes of Jordan’s previous collections, but despite Jordan’s battle with breast cancer, the tone of these poems is more optimistic and conciliatory, compared to the anger and stridency of her earlier work. The volume is dedicated to an anonymous lover and to the “Student Poet Revolutionaries” in her Poetry for the People project at Berkeley. Except for a harsh critique of the American air campaign against Iraq (“The Bombing of Baghdad”) and the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, the poems are more personal, introspective, and accepting, particularly “First Poem after Serious Surgery” and “merry-go-round poetry.” The majority are intimate haikus and other poems to b.b.L., clearly a treasured lover, but even the lyricism of “Poem #7 for b.b.L.,” Baby when you reach out for me I forget everything except I do remember to breathe. . . .
is tempered in the last lines by a claim to breathing room.
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In the title poem, “Kissing God Goodbye,” which brings the collection to an end, the kinder and gentler June Jordan gives way once more to the strident activist, pouring sarcasm on what she considers the bigoted rhetoric of the antiabortion movement Operation Rescue: You mean to tell me on the 12th day or the 13th that the Lord . . . decided who could live and who would die? . . . You mean to tell me that the planet is the brainchild of a single male head of household?
In Kissing God Goodbye, then, Jordan reasserts her position as a fearless critic of American society and public policy, reconfirming her reputation as one of today’s most gifted American poets. The Kosovo poem, “April 10, 1999,” will surely strike a responsive chord in many readers: Nothing is more cruel than the soldiers who command the widow to be grateful that she’s still alive.
Suggested Readings Brogan, Jacqueline V. “From Warrior to Womanist: The Development of June Jordan’s Poetry.” In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Brown, Kimberly N. “June Jordan.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Erickson, Peter. “The Love Poetry of June Jordan.” Callaloo 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1986): 221-234. Kinloch, Valerie. June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. Kinloch, Valerie, and Margret Grebowicz, eds. Still Seeing an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2004. MacPhail, Scott. “June Jordan and the New Black Intellectuals.” African American Review 33, no. 1 (1999): 57-71. Contributor: Franz G. Blaha
Cynthia Kadohata Born: Chicago, Illinois; July 2, 1956 Japanese American
Kadohata is best known for her portrayal of a Japanese American family in her first novel, The Floating World. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: Kira-Kira, 2004; Weedflower, 2006; Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam, 2007 long fiction: The Floating World, 1989; In the Heart of the Valley of Love, 1992; The Glass Mountains, 1995 Cynthia Lynn Kadohata (kah-doh-HA-tah) aspired to be a journalist after she graduated from college, believing that only nonfiction can express the truth. Her parents, as were other Japanese Americans, were uprooted during World War II and traveled extensively across the country in search of work. Kadohata’s keen observation of landscape and people during these long drives prepared her for her later career. Kadohata changed her plans for the future after she was seriously injured in an automobile accident. While recuperating, she read extensively and discovered the power of fiction, its ability to say what could not be said otherwise. She tried her hand at writing short stories, and, after several rejections, one of her stories was accepted by The New Yorker. She felt encouraged to devote her life to writing fiction. Kadohata’s two attempts at obtaining formal instruction in creative writing were of little use to her. She found her own observations and travels to be more useful than any theoretical discussions. In her first novel, The Floating World, Kadohata drew upon her own experiences of moving with her family from various cities on the Pacific coast to Arkansas. The protagonist and narrator, Olivia Osaka, is a thirdgeneration Japanese American whose years of growing up are typical of all adolescents. The novel was well received and commended for its portrayal of a Japanese American migrant family. The success of the novel enabled her to win awards from the Whiting Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the Heart of the Valley of Love, Kadohata’s second novel, depicts Los Angeles in the 1950’s. Her picture of grim and bleak life in the years to come is based on the implications of the changing demographics in California in the 1990’s. Living in a period when a widening chasm between the classes breeds discontent and lawlessness, the protagonist, Francie, a young woman of Asian-African American ancestry, undergoes traumatic experiences. She loses her parents and then her 591
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surrogate parents but eventually finds love, hope, and the possibility of renewal. She expresses Kadohata’s optimism about the survival of a multicultural society in the future. Kadohata is clearly influenced by writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, who draw upon their Chinese heritage. She adds another dimension to the multicultural experience by adding the Japanese American perspective.
The Floating World Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 The Floating World deals with the theme of identity at two levels. The narrator, Olivia Osaka, a girl of twelve at the beginning of this episodic novel, is, like all adolescents, trying to understand the world around her. In her case, the problems normally associated with growing up are further complicated by the fact that her parents are of Japanese origin. Thus Olivia has to find her place not just as an adult but as an American of Japanese descent. The experiences recounted by Olivia take place in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The internment camps for the Japanese Americans had been disbanded soon after World War II, but the effects of their dislocation were still discernible. The title of the novel comes from the Japanese word ukiyo—the floating world—the world of gas station attendants, restaurants, and temporary jobs encountered by the Osaka family. Charles Osaka is constantly on the move with his wife and four children— Olivia and three sons—to seek better opportunities. Olivia discovers that Charlie is not her biological father and that her charming, graceful mother still mourns the loss of her first love. Olivia is baffled by her mother’s unhappiness, for she cannot understand why the love of a decent man like Charlie is not enough for her mother. Like all children in families with marital tensions, Olivia wonders if she and her brothers are responsible for the unhappiness of their parents. Obasan, Olivia’s grandmother, lives with them for some years before her death. For Olivia, she becomes the link with her Japanese heritage. She is fascinated yet repelled by the seventy-three-year-old tyrant. Olivia enjoys her grandmother’s fantastic tales of growing up in Japan, but she abhors her strict, Japanese ways of disciplining the children. She hates Obasan while she is alive, but Olivia realizes later that the memories of her grandmother’s stories and the observations in her diaries are invaluable in helping her understand the lives of her parents and of the Japanese American community. In Gibson, Arkansas, the family stays long enough for Olivia to finish high school. During this period, she experiences her first love and begins to appreciate the hardships endured by the Japanese Americans. By the time she leaves for Los Angeles, she has learned certain truths about herself and her relationship to her community. She recognizes the fears and uncertainties that govern her par-
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ents’ lives but has confidence in her own ability to overcome these uncertainties. Olivia’s narrative comes to an end with her decision to go to college. She has turned twenty-one, and her years in Los Angeles have given her time to learn independence, to make her own mistakes, and to come to terms with the memories of Obasan and her biological father. With the acceptance of her past and her hyphenated identity, Olivia seems ready to take her place in American society.
In the Heart of the Valley of Love Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 In the Heart of the Valley of Love is a futuristic novel depicting life in Los Angeles in the 2050’s. Narrated by Francie, who comes to stay with her aunt in Los Angeles after she loses her African American father and Japanese mother to cancer, the novel portrays the decline of the once-prosperous city. The picture that Francie draws of Los Angeles in the 2050’s is clearly based on the demographical changes in California and the widening chasm between the rich and the poor in the 1990’s. Kadohata envisions a bleak city where the nonwhites and poor whites make up 64 percent of the population and where extreme pollution causes unusual and unheard-of diseases. Shortages of all essential commodities have led to rationing of water and gas; corruption and lawlessness among officials are widespread. The city is clearly divided into the areas of haves and have-nots, and rioting by unhappy citizens is commonplace. It is no surprise, then, that this city of despair is inhabited by “expressionless people.” Young people lead undisciplined lives in the absence of responsible adults in their lives. They tattoo their faces and their bodies—a way of “obliterating themselves,” according to the narrator. Francie, too, is affected by the times. Her adoptive family is disintegrated after Rohn, her aunt’s boyfriend, disappears. It is suspected that he has been arrested by the authorities. As her aunt risks her life and devotes all her time to tracing him, Francie drifts, like her young Cynthia Lynn Kadohata (George Miyamoto) peers. She joins a community col-
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lege where there are several other men and women in their twenties and thirties keeping themselves occupied in aimless activities. Eventually, she overcomes her cynical approach to love and life in general, for amid the ruins she sees signs of renewal of the land. Francie observes at the end of the novel: “I didn’t know whether, a hundred years from now, this would be called The Dark Century or The Century of Light. Though others had already declared it the former, I hoped it would turn out to be the latter.” Her comment does little to diminish the chilling picture of a possible future for Los Angeles.
Suggested Readings Kadohata, Cynthia. “Cynthia Kadohata.” Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly, August 3, 1992, 48-49. Kakutani, Michiko. “Growing Up Rootless in an Immigrant Family.” Review of The Floating World, by Cynthia Kadohata. The New York Times, June 30, 1989, p. C27. _______. “Past Imperfect, and Future Even Worse.” Review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, by Cynthia Kadohata. The New York Times, July 28, 1992, p. C15. O’Hehir, Diana. “On the Road with Grandmother’s Magic.” Review of The Floating World, by Cynthia Kadohata. The New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1989, p. 16. Pearlman, Mickey, ed. Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write. New York: Norton, 1993. Smith, Wendy. “Future Imperfect: Los Angeles 2052.” Review of In the Heart of the Valley of Love, by Cynthia Kadohata. The Washington Post Book World, August 16, 1992, 5. Contributor: Leela Kapai
William Melvin Kelley Born: Bronx, New York; November 1, 1937 African American
Kelley invites readers to consider the difference that race makes in America, as well as the complexity of the individual’s dilemma in response. Principal works long fiction: A Different Drummer, 1962; A Drop of Patience, 1965; dem, 1967; Dunfords Travels Everywheres, 1970 short fiction: Dancers on the Shore, 1964 William Melvin Kelley was the only child of William Melvin Kelley, Sr., and Narcissa Agatha (Garcia) Kelley. His father was a journalist and an editor, for a time, at the Amsterdam News. When William was young, the family lived in an Italian American neighborhood in the North Bronx, but later his parents sent him to the Fieldston School, a small, predominantly white preparatory school in New York, where he became captain of the track team and president of the student council. In 1957, the year of his mother’s death, Kelley entered Harvard, intending to study law. By the following year, however, the year of his father’s death, he was studying fiction writing with author John Hawkes, and later, Archibald MacLeish. For the rest of his career (which he left unfinished) at Harvard, no other academic subject was relevant to him. Consumed by writing, he said, “I hope only to write fiction until I die, exploring until there is no longer anything to explore [about] the plight of Negroes as individual human beings in America.” In 1962, after the publication of his first novel, Kelley married Karen Isabelle Gibson, a designer, and worked as a writer, photographer, and teacher in New York, France, and the West Indies. He is the father of two children, Jessica and Ciratikaiji. Though he continued to work on a book entitled Days of Our Lives and occasionally appeared in print and in public life, Kelley, in large part, would maintain a quiet life. A 1997 New Yorker story, “Carlyle Tries Polygamy: How Many Are Too Many?,” reveals that, despite almost thirty years of nearly complete fiction-publication silence, Kelley maintained interest in creatively pursuing some of the personages and ideas that appeared earlier in his short and long fiction. Anthologized selections of his fiction mostly appeared in late 1960’s and 1970’s anthologies of African American writers. He has been a nonfiction and fiction contributor to periodicals such as Accent, Canto, Esquire, Jazz and Pop, Mademoiselle, Negro Digest, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Par595
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tisan Review, Playboy, Quilt, River Styx, Urbanite, and Works in Progress. Critics often fix on the interrelatedness of Kelley’s four novels (and his short stories), and, indeed, though each novel is different in style, setting, characters, and even language, the ideas that spawned them are related and grow from one another. Critic Jill Weyant sees Kelley’s work as a saga, in that the “purpose of writing a serious saga . . . is to depict impressionistically a large, crowded portrait, each individual novel presenting enlarged details of the whole, each complete in itself, yet evoking a more universal picture than is possible in a single volume.” Kelley admits to the possible influence of other great writers of sagas, telling Roy Newquist in an interview, “Perhaps I’m trying to follow the Faulknerian William Melvin Kelley (Library of Congress) pattern—although I guess it’s really Balzacian when you connect everything. I’d like to be eighty years old and look up at the shelf and see that all of my books are really one big book.”
A Different Drummer Type of work: Novel First published: 1962 A Different Drummer is Kelley’s first and finest work, an enduring classic of African American literature. Kelley took his literary inspiration from American writer Henry David Thoreau’s resounding celebration of individuality: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Kelley then adapted this idea to the plight of African Americans in a fictional narrative built on a foundation of mythic imagination, American history all the way back to the slave trade, and the racial strife of the 1960’s. The black experience of being perceived as different, as a despised people with trenchantly stereotyped racial characteristics, has been anything but positive. It is here, on this ground, that Kelley develops his narrative from two basic questions rooted deeply in the history of
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American race relations: What would whites do without the black people they so abuse and denigrate but to whom they are so tied? Also, who might white people be without the prison of their own prejudice? The novel takes place in the small town of Sutton, in a nameless, imaginary southern state, in June, 1957, when, mysteriously for the white citizens, “all the state’s Negro inhabitants departed.” The exodus is unconsciously led by the childsized Tucker Caliban, who, like Rosa Parks (a black woman who refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in 1955), simply decided one day that he could no longer comply with the way things had always been in the South. The course of history, or at least his own family history, had to be changed. For four generations the Calibans were defined and limited by their service to the Willsons, and Tucker knows that he cannot reach his full human potential living in the template of the southern racial past. Thus he salts his land, kills his farm animals, axes the grandfather clock that symbolizes all the years of his family’s servitude, sets fire to his house, and walks off into the sunset with his pregnant wife and his child. This peaceful, though revolutionary, act of individual initiative and vision is a direct outgrowth of and complement to the rebellion and flight of the massive legendary African whose story begins the novel. This African prince, Tucker’s great-grandfather, refused to be enslaved, and it is perhaps his spirit that propels Tucker’s quiet selfreliance generations later. Ironically, it is old white Mr. Harper who keeps the memory of the African alive for the white men of Sutton, telling the story on the porch of Thomason’s store as often as anyone will listen. Kelley mixes his multiple points of view between first- and third-person narration, using flashbacks to take his readers inside the heads of the southern whites, not the blacks, who occupy the small southern town of Sutton. The whites that interest Kelley are of two classes. Harry Leland and his young son, Mister Leland, represent the poor-white southerners who wish to break with the past, who wish to know black people as individuals and not as a subjugated mass. The Willsons represent the southern aristocracy, bound by the past and the money they made from slavery, but who are also educated and morally conflicted. Tucker’s opposite, a Harvard-educated black religious leader who comes down from the North to investigate the inspiration behind the exodus, becomes the novel’s sacrificial lamb. The ultimately self-seeking Reverend Bennett Bradshaw is superfluous in Sutton; the people have led themselves out of their legacy of bondage and have no need of he who is not one of their own. He becomes flotsam of the most violent of southern white rituals, ironically taking up the cross that the people have left behind. A Different Drummer is, indeed, as critic David Bradley writes, an “elegant” little book, masterful in its balance of scenes of stunning moment, delivered in the language and points of view of the people most in need of understanding them. Within its covers there is much to understand about the nature of freedom as an individual conviction that must be realized; all social change begins with a human being’s belief in his or her own equality, and no lasting social change can happen without it.
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A Drop of Patience Type of work: Novel First published: 1965 With A Drop of Patience, Kelley returns to the South to uncover the life of a blind black boy, Ludlow Washington, who is deposited in an institution and left to exist among the faceless masses that society, and particularly a segregated society, builds institutions to hide. Ludlow cannot walk away from his circumstances, like Tucker Caliban, because he is a child, and blind, so he must transcend in another way. He finds his means of self-expression and his route to finding a place in southern black society in his musical instrument, which is never identified but is clearly some sort of horn with several keys. Extremely talented, Ludlow is released to a black bandleader, who takes him to the small southern city of New Marsails to play with his group in a local bar. Ludlow is better than the other members of the band, however, and he has to hold his creative compulsion for avant-garde improvisation in check until he is old enough to be free of his contract, which is essentially indenture. Eventually he leaves the South and migrates to the North, becoming a leading jazz musician with his own band and enjoying relative freedom. Though this is the framework for “one of the finest novels ever written about a jazz musician,” according to critic Stanley Crouch, A Drop of Patience is not so much a novel about a musician as it is a novel about a blind boy coming to sexual maturity, and a black man who literally cannot see color (and is therefore able to override its coded constraints to discover deeper qualities in people) but who must come to social maturity in a superficial and pervasively race-bound society. It is a society that can drive a sane person mad, and it does this to Ludlow, who must, at bottom, be able to trust his own senses. At novel’s end Ludlow chooses a course that will allow him to be a musician and to be a man among people who can see him.
dem Type of work: Novel First published: 1967 If A Drop of Patience is an enlarged detail of the people who left the imaginary southern state in A Different Drummer, then dem is an enlarged detail of the people who are incapable of seeing Ludlow Washington as a human being beyond his racial categorization. dem is the black perspective on American society’s “us” and “them” dichotomy, and it makes sense that this novel is both a satire and a comedy. Satire typically employs sarcasm and irony to expose human folly or vice, and not only does comedic writing provide an absurd vehicle (lighthearted treatment) to transport an absurd commodity (pervasive race prejudice); it also provides the opportunity to temporarily “solve” this immense social problem with justice and laughter. In short, it provides catharsis.
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Mitchell Pierce and his wife, Tam, are upper-middle-class white New Yorkers who are frank stereotypes. They are shallow, insular, cold, like mannequins or robots—devoid of the redeeming, individual, distinguishing features that human beings possess. Murder cannot move them, and love, to them, is a plot gleaned from soap operas. Tam gets pregnant by both her husband and her maid’s black boyfriend and gives birth to twins, one white and one black. The rest of the novel is about Mitchell’s ludicrous hunt through Harlem for the father of the black twin, whom he does not recognize when he sees him. For Mitchell, black people are simply a faceless race meant to serve him, and it never occurs to him that the money in his pocket cannot buy them.
Dunfords Travels Everywheres Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 Often dismissed by critics as “experimental,” there is no doubt that Dunfords Travels Everywheres is a difficult book to read, but its inspiration is, after all, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Critic Michael Wood notes that, like Joyce, Kelley “as a black American and a writer, is caught in the language and culture of an enemy country,” and Kelley’s two protagonists in this novel, Chig Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow, might be understood to be acting this out. The hallucinatory dream sequences, which connect the separate adventures of these two characters, are their common ground, their realm of unconscious constructions of language with African retentions, characterized by black idiomatic expressions and dialect, phonetic sounds and spellings, puns and exuberant wordplays. The Harvard-educated Chig Dunford, hanging out in an imaginary country in Europe with what amounts to imaginary white friends, blurts out two words that are revelatory. He changes his course and finds himself making a surreal transatlantic journey to America, which is, perhaps, his own “Middle Passage” to a destination of self-realization. By journey’s end, he has encountered the Harriet of Ludlow Washington’s healing in A Drop of Patience as well as his Harlem counterpart, Carlyle Bedlow, who figures prominently in dem and in some of Kelley’s short fiction. Further, it might be argued that Chig’s voyage to Harlem, to a place where he can be known, is an updated version of Tucker Caliban’s journey away from “dem people’s” race-based expectations of him.
Suggested Readings Babb, Valerie M. “William Melvin Kelley.” In Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, edited by Thadious M. Davis. Vol. 33 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. Bradley, David. Foreword to A Different Drummer, by William Melvin Kelley. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
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Early, Gerald. Introduction to A Drop of Patience, by William Melvin Kelley. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1996. Karrer, Wolfgang. “Romance as Epistemological Design: William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: Gainer, 1982. Ro, Sigmund. Rage and Celebration: Essays on Contemporary Afro-American Writing. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Thomas, H. Nigel. “The Bad Nigger Figure in Selected Works of Richard Wright, William Melvin Kelley, and Ernest Gaines.” CLA Journal 39, no. 2 (December, 1995). Weyant, Jill. “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America.” CLA Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 210-220. Contributor: Cynthia Packard Hill
Adrienne Kennedy Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; September 13, 1931 African American
Kennedy’s surrealist plays are leading examples of African American drama. Principal works drama: Funnyhouse of a Negro, pr. 1962, pb. 1969; The Owl Answers, pr. 1963, pb. 1969; A Rat’s Mass, pr. 1966, pb. 1968; The Lennon Play: In His Own Write, pr. 1967, pb. 1968 (with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti); A Lesson in Dead Language, pr., pb. 1968; Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder, pr. 1968, pb. 1971; A Beast’s Story, pr., pb. 1969; Boats, pr. 1969; Cities in Bezique: Two One-Act Plays, pb. 1969; An Evening with Dead Essex, pr. 1973; A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, pr. 1976, pb. 1984; Black Children’s Day, pr. 1980; A Lancashire Lad, pr. 1980; Orestes and Electra, pr. 1980; Adrienne Kennedy in One Act, pb. 1988; The Alexander Plays, pb. 1992; The Ohio State Murders, pr., pb. 1992; June and Jean in Concert, pr. 1995; Sleep Deprivation Chamber, pr., pb. 1996 (with Adam Patrice Kennedy) nonfiction: People Who Led to My Plays, 1986 miscellaneous: Deadly Triplets: A Theatre Mystery and Journal, 1990 (novella and journal); The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, 2001 Adrienne Kennedy’s plays baffle and entice theater critics. In Kennedy, critics recognize a singularly able writer whose surrealism equals that of Tom Stoppard and Amiri Baraka. Edward Albee’s early recognition of Kennedy’s ability encouraged the yet-unpublished playwright to persist in her writing and led to the production of her Funnyhouse of a Negro. Raised in a multiethnic neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father, Cornell Wallace Hawkins, was an executive secretary for the Young Men’s Christian Association and her mother, Etta Haugabook Hawkins, was a teacher, Kennedy was secure in her identity. She grew up associating with her neighbors: blacks, Jews, Italians, eastern Europeans. Where she lived, these people existed harmoniously, so Adrienne was not exposed to a racially motivated identity crisis until she entered Ohio State University in Columbus in 1949. There Kennedy felt isolated and inferior. Columbus’s restaurants were still segregated, and there was little interaction between blacks and whites. By the time she graduated in 1953, her anger and her detestation of prejudice had eaten away at her in ways that would shape her future writing career. 601
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Kennedy married Joseph Kennedy shortly after graduation and followed him to New York City, where they both attended Columbia University. She studied creative writing there from 1954 until 1956. In 1958, she studied at the American Theatre Wing, then at the New School for Social Research, and finally at Edward Albee’s Circle-in-the-Square School in 1962, where she was the only black student. Albee’s encouragement led to Kennedy’s continuing her writing career. Her drama examines the inner struggles people encounter as they cope with their identities in relation to the outside forces that confront them. Kennedy’s plays are essentially without plot. Her leading characters have multiple personalities, reflecting aspects of their identities. She relies heavily on the use of masks, each reflecting the different identities of her characters and suggesting elements of African art and culture as well.
Funnyhouse of a Negro Type of work: Drama First produced: 1962, pb. 1969 The struggle of the individual with internalized social and cultural forces is the focal point of most of Adrienne Kennedy’s plays. In particular, she focuses on the internal conflict of the African American, whose existence is a result of the violent blending of European and African cultures. This conflict in Funnyhouse of a Negro is imaged in the Negro Sarah’s idolatrous love of her fair-skinned mother and rejection of her black father. The mother’s whiteness has driven her insane; the father’s darkness has tied him to revolution and bloodshed. Sarah’s eventual escape is suicide. The play is set in Sarah’s space. The characters in the play are views of herself, or they are inspired by the objects in her room. The space is filled with relics of European civilization: dusty books, pictures of castles and monarchs, the bust of Queen Victoria. Sarah’s occupation is writing, the geometric placement of words on white paper. The space is also a coffin; the white material of the curtain looks as though it has been “gnawed by rats.” Throughout the play the space becomes more confining as the walls drop down. Eventually it becomes the jungle, overgrown and wild. In the context of the play’s imagery of death, the jungle represents the earth’s reclamation of the body. On another level, the play is set within a “funnyhouse,” an “amusement park house of horrors.” Raymond and the Landlady are representations of the two grinning minstrel faces outside the funnyhouse. They are white society mocking the Negro’s confusion. The bald heads and dropping walls are cheap effects designed to create confusion and fear; the mirrors in Raymond’s room conceal true reflections, as distorted funnyhouse mirrors do. Kennedy is also a woman writer, and the play makes a statement about the roles of black women and white women in society. The mother was light-skinned and beautiful by European standards. There was no destiny for her in society except madness: To be a light-skinned woman is to invite the rape of black men. Sarah is
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dating a white man, and this seems to give her some power in the scene with Raymond when she is the Duchess of Hapsburg. It is Raymond, however, who is asking the questions and who has control over the environment. Even the white female characters in the play who represent powerful figures are victims of hair loss; they, too, are unable to escape the dark man who pursues them. In the playwright’s view, the world is a disturbing place. The lure of power is held out to women, when in fact they are powerless. For the Negro, to be assimilated into white society is to go mad or self-destruct. Funnyhouse of a Negro invites the viewer into the mind of a very confused young black woman. The charAdrienne Kennedy (Library of Congress) acters of the play are identified as facets of herself. She sees herself as omnipotent (Jesus), powerful (Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Hapsburg), and revolutionary (Patrice Lumumba). According to the dream logic of the play, these diverse characters all suffer from the conflict between their father, a black man, and their mother, a light-complexioned black woman who was raped and driven to insanity. The characters evoke the era of European colonialism, the zealotry of Christian missionaries, and the subsequent search for liberation by the peoples of Africa.
The Owl Answers Type of work: Drama First produced: 1963, pb. 1969 The same eschewal of linear progression in Funnyhouse of a Negro occurs in The Owl Answers, the first of two one-act plays appearing with A Beast’s Story in the collection titled Cities in Bezique. Clara Passmore, the protagonist in The Owl Answers, like Sarah in Funnyhouse of a Negro, is a sensitive, educated young woman torn between the two cultures of which she is a part. Riveted by her fascination for a culture that seems to want no part of her, Clara, a mulatto English teacher from Savannah, Georgia, learns from her mother that her father, “the richest white man in town,” is of English ancestry. She comes to London to give him a fitting burial at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, among the “lovely English.” Once there, she has a breakdown and is imprisoned in the Tower of London by William Shakespeare, Geoffrey
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Chaucer, and William the Conquerer, who taunt her by denying her English heritage. Clara, who is the daughter of both the deceased William Mattheson and the Reverend Mr. Passmore (who, with his wife, adopted Clara when she was a child), is as firm in her claim to English ancestry as she is in her plans to bury her father in London. Like Sarah in Funnyhouse of a Negro, Clara’s true prison exists in her mind. Ironically, Clara Passmore, whose name suggests racial passing, passes only from human into animal form. In a final, violent scene in which the third movement of Haydn’s Concerto for Horn in D accentuates the mental anguish of Clara and her mother, Clara’s mother stabs herself on an altar of owl feathers. Clara, in the meantime, fends off an attack from a man whom she calls “God,” who has assumed that the love she seeks from him is merely sexual. Clara, who has grown increasingly more owl-like as the play has progressed, utters a final “Ow . . . oww.” In this play, as in Funnyhouse of a Negro, Kennedy leaves the audience with questions about the nature of spiritual faith in a world in which one calls on God, yet in which the only answer heard comes from the owl.
A Rat’s Mass Type of work: Drama First produced: 1966, pb. 1968 A Rat’s Mass is a play about the negative aspects of the black experience, about prejudice and hatred and rejection, about being an outsider with no hope of ever belonging, and about the failure of traditional institutions to offer any solutions to the problem. Brother Rat and Sister Rat represent the black population, Rosemary the white society that subjugates and oppresses, and the Procession of holy figures the uncaring, impersonal church, which offers neither succor nor forgiveness. For Brother and Sister Rat, the pain of living black in a white world is realized in their adoration of Rosemary, the white child who is all that they can never be—“a descendant of the Pope and Julius Caesar and the Virgin Mary.” Rosemary is the source of their feelings of rejection (“Colored people are not Catholics, are they?”), the instigator of their sin (“Rosemary said if I loved her I would do what she said”), the reminder of their guilt (“I will never atone you”). Clad in her white Communion dress, Rosemary is both the unattainable ideal and the avenging angel. Perhaps what is most theatrical—and sometimes most frustrating to audiences about A Rat’s Mass is the surrealistic quality of the play. The set, composed as it is of two black chains, a red aisle runner, and candles, evokes images of a Black Mass and forbidden rituals, creating inevitable unease in the audience. The main characters, who are described as “two pale Negro children,” are part rat, part human, and as their despair mounts and their hope dies, they sound more and more like rats, less and less human. Adrienne Kennedy’s choice of rats as representative of a maligned and mistreated minority is especially apt: Rats—unlike mice—evoke no sympathy, elicit only disgust and the desire to exterminate them, and conjure up images of filth and degradation, which are violently juxtaposed to the Holy Family and their en-
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tourage and Rosemary in her white dress. Most startling of the visual images in the play is the finale, in which the Holy Procession—composed of the familiar biblical figures who grace every Nativity scene ever displayed—guns down the fleeing Brother Rat and Sister Rat. This nightmarish ending provides strong reinforcement for one of the play’s more pervasive ideas: that the organized church is responsible in large part for racism and hatred and indeed can be directly implicated in some of the deaths of oppressed peoples. The biblical characters so long held to be symbols of salvation and redemption become in this play the agents of destruction for a pair of innocent children, whose only fault is their color and their desire to emulate and be accepted by the dominant race and culture. Like most of Adrienne Kennedy’s plays, A Rat’s Mass is a curious blend of monologue and dream vision, informed by highly evocative symbolism and incantatory dialogue, laced with references to mythical and historical figures. Neither her most ambitious nor her most important work, the play nevertheless is a good example of the kind of work that has earned Kennedy the acclaim of theater critics, scholars, and audiences. Like her better-known plays, A Rat’s Mass is concerned with the anguish of not belonging, with the pain of rejection.
A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White Type of work: Drama First produced: 1976, pb. 1984 The animal motif employed in The Owl Answers and A Rat’s Mass is less apparent in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. Clara Passmore of The Owl Answers returns for a “bit role” in which she reads from several of Kennedy’s plays. The English literary tradition highly esteemed by the protagonist in Funnyhouse of a Negro and The Owl Answers is replaced by the American film tradition. Reinforcing the theme of illusion versus reality begun in Funnyhouse of a Negro, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White is actually a series of plays-within-a-play in which scenes from the films Now, Voyager (1942), Viva Zapata (1952), and A Place in the Sun (1961) take place in a hospital lobby, Clara’s brother’s room, and Clara’s old room, respectively. As the title of the play indicates—as well as a stage note directing that all the colors be shades of black and white—Kennedy continues her experimentation with black-and-white color contrasts onstage. As in other plays by Kennedy, linear progression is eschewed, and the illusion of cinema merges with the reality of the life of Clara, a writer and daughter to the Mother and Father, the wife of Eddie, the mother of Eddie, Jr., and the alter ego of the film actresses. Through lines spoken in the first scene by Bette Davis to Paul Henreid, the audience learns of Clara’s parents’ dream of success in the North, which ends in disappointment when they learn that racial oppression is not confined to the South. The scene takes place simultaneously on an ocean liner from Now, Voyager and in a hospital lobby in which Clara and her mother have come to ascertain the condition of Wally, Clara’s brother, who lies in a coma.
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Scene 2 moves to Wally’s room, while Jean Peters and Marlon Brando enact lines from Viva Zapata. History repeats itself when it is revealed that Clara, like her mother before her, is having marital problems with her husband, Eddie. In the meantime, Marlon Brando’s character changes the bedsheets onto which Jean Peters’s character has bled, reminding the audience of Clara’s miscarriage while Eddie was away in the armed services. In the following scene, Shelley Winters and Montgomery Clift appear onstage in a small rowboat from the film A Place in the Sun. In this scene, Clara reveals her frustration as a writer who is black and a woman. She says that her husband thinks that her life is “one of my black and white movies that I love so . . . with me playing a bit part.” The play ends with the news that Wally will live, but with brain damage. In the interim, Shelley Winters’s character drowns as Montgomery Clift’s character looks on, suggesting a connection between Clara’s fantasy life in motion pictures and the real world, from which she struggles to escape.
Suggested Readings Benston, Kimberly W. “Cities in Bezique: Adrienne Kennedy’s Expressionistic Vision.” CLA Journal 20 (1976). Blau, Herbert. “The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy.” Modern Drama 27 (1984): 520-539. Bryant-Jackson, Paul, and Lois More Overbeck, eds. Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Curb, Rosemary. “Fragmented Selves in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and The Owl Answers.” Theater Journal 32 (1980): 180-195. Kennedy, Adrienne. “A Growth of Images.” Tulane Drama Review 21 (1977): 41-47. Kolin, Philip C. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. McDonough, Carla J. “God and the Owls: The Sacred and the Profane in Adrienne Kennedy’s The Owl Answers.” Modern Drama 40 (1997): 385-402. Meigs, Susan. “No Place but the Funnyhouse: The Struggle for Identity in Three Adrienne Kennedy Plays.” In Modern Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Sollors, Werner. “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy’s Drama.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 63 (1991): 507-532. Zinman, Toby Silverman. “‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’: Adrienne Kennedy’s An Evening with Dead Essex.” Studies in American Drama, 1945Present 6 (1991): 3-13. Contributors: R. Baird Shuman, Kathryn Ervin Williams, E. D. Huntley, Sheila McKenna, and P. Jane Splawn
Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter Richardson) Born: Saint Johns, Antigua; May 25, 1949 African American, Caribbean
Kincaid’s short stories and novels are admired for their lyricism and for their insights into feminist and racial issues. Principal works children’s literature: Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip, 1986 (with illustrations by Eric Fischl) long fiction: Annie John, 1985; Lucy, 1990; The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996; Mr. Potter, 2002 short fiction: At the Bottom of the River, 1983 nonfiction: A Small Place, 1988; My Brother, 1997; My Garden (Book), 1999; Talk Stories, 2001; Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, 2005 edited texts: The Best American Essays 1995, 1995; My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, 1998; The Best American Travel Writing 2005, 2005 Jamaica Kincaid (kihn-KAYD) was born Elaine Potter Richardson on the tiny Caribbean island of Antigua. The family was poor, but she recalls her early years as idyllic. As does the protagonist of Annie John, Kincaid felt secure as the focus of her mother’s attention. With the births of three younger brothers, however, Kincaid became increasingly alienated from her mother, and with adolescence, her alienation turned to bitter resentment. In addition to her antipathy toward her mother, there were other reasons for Kincaid to leave her Caribbean home as soon as she was old enough to do so. As she points out in A Small Place, on Antigua blacks were still relegated to the bottom tiers of the social structure, just as they had been in the colonial past. Black women were even more repressed than black men. In her short story “Girl,” which appears in the collection At the Bottom of the River, the mother makes it clear to her daughter that a woman’s sole purpose in life is to wait on a man and to keep him happy. Determined to find her way in the world, in 1966, the seventeen-year-old young woman left Antigua for the United States. Her impressions of the different country are reflected in her second semiautobiographical novel, Lucy. In common with the title character, Kincaid first supported herself by working as a live-in babysitter in New York City. Although Kincaid took high school and college 607
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courses, in the main she educated herself by reading. Eventually she found a job on a magazine, turned out articles, and tried her hand at short stories. She was finding a new identity as a writer; in 1973, she took the name Jamaica Kincaid, in a sense inventing herself as a person. In 1978, “Girl” was published in The New Yorker, the first of many stories to appear there. Shortly thereafter, Kincaid married and moved to Vermont. After an absence of nearly two decades, Kincaid returned to Antigua. Having found herself, Kincaid was now free, and in the years that followed she often took her children to visit her early home. By leaving her native island, Kincaid learned not only Jamaica Kincaid (Sigrid Estrada) to understand herself but also to empathize with women who, like the protagonist in The Autobiography of My Mother and like her own mother, were assigned their identities in a society that permitted them no options.
At the Bottom of the River Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1983 Some critics call At the Bottom of the River a novel; others call it a collection of stories. Certainly the stories’ interconnections lend a sense of continuity to this thin volume. Much of At the Bottom of the River is a recollection of Jamaica Kincaid’s childhood on the Caribbean island of Antigua. The author captures the identity of this region and its people with remarkable accuracy in her sketches. By telling her stories largely from a child’s point of view, Kincaid gracefully intermixes the outside world with her protagonist’s mental world of dreams, images, fantasy, and mysticism. The book’s ten stories dwell upon racial and mother-daughter relationships. The daughter is obsessed by her mother, an overpowering love object for her. Her attempts to break from her maternal dependence are central to many of the sketches. The sketch “My Mother” recounts with great poignancy a girl’s emotional odyssey from early childhood to the point of needing to loose herself from a reliance upon the mother she dearly loves. The narrative is disarmingly simple and direct. The child’s dreamworld intrudes constantly upon the outside world, with which she
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must necessarily merge. She cries a “pond of tears” at separating from her mother. The girl’s exile, expressed in the words “she [the mother] shook me out and stood me under a tree,” is connected to her memory of the childhood punishment of being banished, when she had misbehaved, from her house to take her dinner under the breadloaf trees. This story is about lost innocence and the attempt to recapture it. The sketch “At Last” considers the essence of things. The child asks what becomes of the hen whose feathers are scattered, whose flesh is stripped away, whose bones disappear. Kincaid broaches similar universal questions in “Blackness,” in which she deals with the mystery of the generations, with the child who grows up to become a mother to the succeeding generation. The questions posed in this story are questions that puzzled the ancient Greek philosophers and that still puzzle thinking people everywhere.
Annie John Type of work: Novel First published: 1985 Annie John, Kincaid’s first novel, is a story of a girl’s coming-of-age. On a conscious level the protagonist is contemplating death, friendship, sexual desire, and the developments in her body; she is also experiencing a deeper need to cut herself off from her mother, even if in the process she must hurt them both. The novel is set on the Caribbean island of Antigua. As a young child, Annie John clings to her beautiful and loving mother. She likes to caress her, smell her perfume, take baths with her, and wear dresses made of the same fabric as hers. At school, Annie shows that she has a mind of her own, but at home she takes note of everything her mother says or does. Soon, however, Annie begins to realize that human relationships are fragile. They can be dissolved by death, by infidelity, or by changes in one’s feelings. At a new school, Annie finds herself abandoning her best friend, Gwyneth Joseph, for a dirty, defiant red-haired girl. At home, Annie betrays her mother’s trust and love. She lies to her about unimportant matters, such as whether or not she has any marbles, and she even insults her. To some degree Annie is acting out her feelings about her parents’ lovemaking and about her own sexual development. Annie is also reacting to her mother’s evident embarrassment when Annie assumes a woman’s identity. On a deeper level, Annie’s love for her mother is so strong that only by rejecting her can she establish a space for herself and a personality of her own. At school, Annie gets into trouble by writing under the picture of Christopher Columbus the same words that her mother had said in mockery of her father, Pa Chess. Clearly, Annie senses that there is a similarity between the colonial system, which guaranteed that blacks would remain low in the economic system, and the patriarchal family, which ensured the subordination of females. By the time she is fifteen, Annie is thoroughly miserable, loathing her mother, herself, and her exis-
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tence. She becomes ill, and for almost four months she is bedridden, nursed by her mother, her father, and finally by her grandmother, Ma Chess, who appears mysteriously and evidently effects a cure. At last, when she is seventeen, Annie is sent to England. As the ship prepares to sail, Annie and her mother weep, and Annie relents enough to wave good-bye. Now free to find her own identity, she is free to love her mother, if only at a distance.
Lucy Type of work: Novel First published: 1990 Lucy is a thematic sequel to Annie John. Lucy is seventeen when the novel begins, newly arrived in the United States from Antigua to work as an au pair, watching the four girls of Lewis and Mariah, an upper-middle-class New York couple. Although the novel is set entirely outside Antigua and Lucy’s mother never appears in it, Lucy’s attempt to separate herself from her mother constitutes the main theme of the novel. Mariah is presented as a loving but thoroughly ethnocentric white woman. A recurring example of this is her attempt to make Lucy appreciate the Wordsworthian beauty of daffodils, unaware that it is precisely because Lucy had to study Wordsworth’s poetry about a flower that does not grow in Antigua that this flower represents the world of the colonizer to her. In fact, Mariah’s unselfconscious, patronizing goodwill is exactly what Lucy loves most and yet cannot tolerate about her employer, because it reminds her of her mother. When Lucy learns that Lewis is having an affair with Mariah’s best friend, Dinah, she understands that this idyllic marriage is falling apart. When a letter from home informs her that her father has died, she is unable to explain to Mariah that her anger toward her mother is based on mourning the perfect love she had once felt between them. At the same time, her own sexuality begins to emerge, and she develops interests in young men. Wanting more space, she moves in with her friend Peggy, a young woman who represents a more exciting world to Lucy, cutting short her one-year au pair agreement. The novel ends with Lucy writing her name, Lucy Josephine Potter, in a book and wishing that she could love someone enough to die for that love. This ending clearly signals an act of self-possession (much like the self-naming at the end of Annie John), but it also signifies the loneliness of breaking away from others, even to assert oneself. Though Lucy is a much angrier novel than Annie John, Lucy’s anger is best understood in terms of the writer’s earlier autobiographical surrogate in Annie John; the melancholy that debilitates Annie at the end of her novel is turned into anger by Lucy.
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The Autobiography of My Mother Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 This narrative, in seven episodes, recapitulates and foretells, in starkly poetic language, the events in Xuela Richardson Bailey’s life. The fragmentary photograph of a Caribbean woman that introduces each section is completed in the seventh section. The central fact of the narrator’s life is the death of her mother when Xuela was born, its recital a repeated incantation. Her maternal grandmother was abandoned at birth by an unknown woman. Xuela’s father, of Scottish and African ancestry, gave his daughter—along with his dirty clothes—to be cared for by the woman who did his laundry. From this unpromising beginning, the narrator creates a life for herself in a world from which she expects nothing. A highly sensual woman, she nevertheless withholds herself emotionally from those who might have loved her, refusing to compromise her fierce personal independence. Aborting the children she conceives, she rejects motherhood. Her power comes from herself: “I could sense from the beginning of my life that I would know things when I needed to know them.” Kincaid works against the tradition of black women writers who portray women bonding with one another against the racist, patriarchal oppressor. The women in this narrative distrust or hate one another. Kincaid is fascinated by the politics of power. In her reading of Caribbean history, there are the victors and the vanquished—all failed human beings. The strength of the black woman comes not from her Carib-African heritage or from those whom she loves. She lives in the existential present, creating herself, refusing to mourn her fate or regret her past.
Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Jamaica Kincaid. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994. Emery, Mary Lou. “Refiguring the Postcolonial Imagination: Tropes of Visuality in Writing by Rhys, Kincaid, and Cliff.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16 (Fall, 1997): 259-280. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.
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MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Garland, 2001. Mistron, Deborah. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Paravisini-Gerbert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994. Contributors: R. Baird Shuman, Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Thomas Cassidy, Ann Davison Garbett, and Barbara Wiedemann
Martin Luther King, Jr. Born: Atlanta, Georgia; January 15, 1929 Died: Memphis, Tennessee; April 4, 1968 African American
King’s speeches and essays united, motivated, and mobilized people of all colors during the civil rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Principal works nonfiction: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958; The Measure of a Man, 1959; Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 1963; Strength to Love, 1963; A Martin Luther King Treasury, 1964; Why We Can’t Wait, 1964; The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967; Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967; The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1983, 1987; A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1986, 1991; The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1992-2000 (4 volumes; Clayborne Carson, editor); The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, 1998 (Carson, editor); A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., 1998 (Carson and Peter Halloran, editors); A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 2001 (Carson, editor) Martin Luther King, Jr., was formally ordained at the age of nineteen, in the church over which his father presided, thus officially beginning his public-speaking career. Within ten years, he had secured a position as pastor of a Montgomery, Alabama, church and had established himself as a civil rights leader by leading a boycott against the Montgomery public transportation system. After the successful conclusion of the boycott, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the hope of harnessing the momentum of the movement to further the cause of racial equality. Supported by a network of churches and civil rights organizations, King became the most vocal opponent to segregation and thus became a lightning rod for criticism and accolades. On August 28, 1963, King led a march on Washington, D.C., at which he delivered his best-known speech, “I Have a Dream.” The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Also during 1963 and 1964, King was arrested four times on charges such as parading without a permit, trespassing, and contempt of court. One of King’s most powerful works, Letter from Birmingham City Jail, was composed while he was incarcerated during this time, and several other pieces were occasioned by the arrests and subsequent confinements. 613
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The focus of most of King’s writings was upon the necessity for all citizens to effect necessary social changes by using a system of passive resistance and economic empowerment. The tenets of his strategy were outlined in such speeches as “The Power of Nonviolence” (1957) and “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience” (1961). In addresses such as “A Time to Break Silence” (1967), he spoke of the need for Americans to examine their beliefs about race and culture, with respect not only to conflicts within the United States but also in international relations, such as those with Vietnam. King’s later works, such as Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, show King’s reluctant recognition that the struggle for racial equality would be a long-term battle. Although he believed that civil rights would eventually be equally afforded to all Americans, he warned of the dangers of complacency and backsliding. In his final address (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”), given on April 3, 1968, he urged supporters of civil rights to continue the struggle in his absence. The next day, he was shot to death.
Stride Toward Freedom Type of work: Activist manual First published: 1958 Published in 1958, King’s first major publication grew out of a speech he had made in San Francisco in 1956 about the Rosa Parks incident and its aftermath, which included the bombing of King’s home and frequent death threats directed at him and at members of his family. This book provides a blueprint for the ways in which a repressed populace can resist oppression nonviolently by creating a unified front against their oppressors. In the Montgomery case, this was accomplished through the boycott of public transportation and of white merchants who depended on Montgomery’s black population for much of their income. The tactics King outlines in this book are foolproof. Merchants cannot force people to patronize them, so when an oppressed group shuns them, they must eventually yield to the demands of those staging the boycott. The only rub is that a boycott like that in Montgomery places difficult demands upon those supporting it. Many Montgomery blacks depended on public transportation to get to their jobs. Arrangements had to be made to get them to those jobs by other means. Not patronizing local stores meant obtaining food and other necessities elsewhere. Survival under such conditions demanded planning and coordination. King became an expert in creating the master plans necessary to implement his followers’ actions. Stride Toward Freedom had considerable influence among black leaders associated with such organizations as the SCLC. It outlined the effectiveness of nonviolence. It cast the oppressed as victims of an unjust society rather than as aggressors pitted against the dominant society. When Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire, he and his followers were greatly outnumbered, but through employment of Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics, they appealed to the morality of their oppressors
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and, in the long term, achieved their ends against odds that initially seemed insurmountable. King devoutly believed that American blacks could succeed by employing similar tactics.
Letter from Birmingham City Jail Type of work: Letter and social criticism First published: 1963 Probably the single most memorable piece of writing produced by Martin Luther King, Jr., was written during the few days that he languished in Birmingham’s city jail. This book, published in 1963, includes the full text of King’s letter and outlines in considerable detail how the elaborate plans for the Birmingham protests evolved. King, painfully aware of the injustices visited upon blacks in Birmingham, came to the city because of these injustices. He was publicly denounced as an interloper. Newspaper articles about his interference and an open letter by six local clergymen contended that, since King wasn’t a citizen of Birmingham, he had no right to intervene in what they considered a local matter. King took the high moral ground, asserting his need to seek out injustice where it existed and to regard people in towns in which he did not reside as brothers. He considered it a moral imperative to concern himself with their welfare, particularly when they were clearly the victims of an established policy of racial discrimination imposed upon them by the white society. The changes King demanded in Birmingham were reasonable. He wanted blacks to be served at the city’s lunch counters and to be permitted to use drinking fountains then available to whites only. He sought to desegregate public restrooms and fitting rooms in stores. The crux of this book is its detailed account of how the SCLC’s training committee used simulations to replicate what protesters might expect to experience at the hands of bigoted police officers and enraged white citizens. Rather than fighting back, protesters were advised to be quiet and to let their bodies go limp. They were urged to resist without bitterness, to receive verbal abuse and not reply, and to be beaten without retaliating. Martin Luther King, Jr. (© The Nobel Foundation)
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Arrested for his participation in the Birmingham protest, King wrote Letter from Birmingham City Jail on paper smuggled to him and then smuggled out of the jail. Although he spent only a few days in confinement before being bailed out through Harry Belafonte’s efforts, this incarceration shaped King’s future in many ways.
Why We Can’t Wait Type of work: Social criticism First published: 1964 The hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation occurred in 1963. To commemorate that anniversary, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote Why We Can’t Wait. The book, published the following year, discussed the irony of celebrating this anniversary while blacks in many parts of the United States were still segregated, discriminated against, and oppressed. In most southern states, interracial marriage was still banned by outmoded and clearly unconstitutional miscegenation laws. And, though Lincoln’s pen theoretically freed America’s slaves, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were, in much of the United States, denied the right to vote, to attend the schools of their choice, to eat in restaurants of their choosing, and to stay in hotels that, throughout the South, were designated “White Only.” In 1939, world-acclaimed singer Marian Anderson was denied the right to sing in Constitution Hall in the nation’s capital, and forbidden from staying in any of Washington’s major hotels, simply because of the color of her skin. Blacks were similarly humiliated throughout the South and in much of the North. They were underemployed and underpaid for the work they did. School segregation, although perhaps not specifically mandated as it was in the South, was a fact of life in most northern cities largely because blacks could not rent or buy homes in the parts of town with the best schools. Many secondary schools in the inner cities had black enrollments of 97 percent or more. In Why We Can’t Wait, King deplored segregation, discrimination, and gradualism. Many southern political leaders, realizing that racial integration would inevitably be thrust upon them, devised plans to integrate the schools so gradually that they would in effect remain segregated far into the future. Making his case with impeccable logic and considerable factual evidence, King developed an airtight argument for immediate and decisive action. Before the decade was out, substantial progress had been made, largely because of King’s pioneering and persistent efforts.
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A Testament of Hope Type of work: Essays, interviews, speeches, and sermons First published: 1986, 1991 A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a compendium of King’s writings and of transcripts of some of his better-known interviews, speeches, and sermons, all of which were compiled and published at the request of his widow, Coretta Scott King. The book is divided into subject-matter sections and an appendix. The first section, “Religious: Nonviolence,” explores the theological underpinnings of King’s passive resistance philosophy. Because he was connected at an early age with the church, it is not surprising that many of the works in this section focus on the role of Christian love in the struggle for equal rights. Most of the selections in the second section, “Social: Integration,” are oriented toward the more practical aspects of the Civil Rights movement. Topics include the necessity of passive resistance, the need for eloquent speakers, and the difficulties caused by internal conflicts within the movement. The third section, “Political: Wedged Between Democracy and Black Nationalism,” addresses the difficulties King encountered while campaigning for immediate change; it was difficult to do so and not to lose the support of moderate and conservative sympathizers. This theme echoes through much of the next section, “Famous Sermons and Public Addresses,” as well. The fourth section contains King’s best-known speeches, including the “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 and the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, which was delivered shortly before King’s death in 1968. The fifth section of A Testament of Hope contains some of King’s best-known essays, including the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” (1963). In this and the title essay, King impugns not only the staunch conservatives who resist social change but also the apathetic moderates who, King charges, perpetuate social injustice. The sixth section, “Interviews,” contains transcripts of conversations King had with Kenneth B. Clark, Playboy magazine, Meet the Press, and Face to Face. The sixth and final section contains King’s more formal written works, those that were written as, or developed into, books. James M. Washington, editor of A Testament of Hope, admits that, as a public figure, King sometimes had help with the invention and composition of the works contained in this volume. This collection is valuable, he asserts, not only as a record of what King actually penned but also of the principles he espoused and the ideals for which he stood. Because each section is arranged chronologically, it is possible to chart aspects of King’s philosophical development. He changed in response to the changing political and social climate of America. His focus, however—the necessity of nonviolent civil disobedience in order to accomplish the greater good of racial equality—remains evident throughout.
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Suggested Readings Baldwin, Lewis V., ed. The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. _______. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Free Press, 2000. Fairclough, Adam. Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Frady, Marshall. Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Viking, 2002. Friedly, Michael, and David Gallen. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Personal Portrait. New York: William Morrow, 1986. King, Coretta Scott. My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. Rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reprint. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen-Eighties. New York: P. Lang, 1987. Contributors: T. A. Fishman and R. Baird Shuman
Thomas King Born: Sacramento, California; April 24, 1943 Native American
King’s primary subject is cultural clash: Native Americans, with their traditional culture and communal values, are sneered at by the white invaders, but they triumph through wit, cleverness, and resourcefulness. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: A Coyote Columbus Story, 1992; Coyote Sings to the Moon, 2001 long fiction: Medicine River, 1990; Green Grass, Running Water, 1993; Truth and Bright Water, 1999 short fiction: One Good Story, That One, 1993 nonfiction: The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, 2003 edited text: All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, 1990 Thomas King was born to Robert Elvin King, a Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma, and Katheryn Konsonlas King, a Greek American. His father left the family when Thomas was five, and he and his brother, Christopher, were raised by their mother in Roseville, California. Upon graduation from Roseville High School, King worked at odd jobs, including those of ambulance driver and gambling croupier. He attended Sacramento State College from 1961 to 1962 and Sierra Junior College from 1962 to 1964, after which he worked his way to Australia and New Zealand and was employed there as a photojournalist. He returned to the United States in 1967 and took a job as a draftsman at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. The following year he enrolled at California State College, Chico, because his mother had gone there. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English. That year he married Kristine Adams. They had a son, Christian, in 1971. At that point, King embarked upon a series of academic jobs, beginning as a counselor for American Indian students at the University of Utah and soon moving up to director of the new Native Studies Department. While working at Utah, he obtained an M.A. in English from his undergraduate alma mater in Chico. In 1973 he moved on to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, where he was an associate dean for student services. In 1977 King returned to the University of Utah, to work as coordinator of the History of the Indians of the Americas project. In 1979 he moved to Canada to take 619
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a position as chair of the Native Studies Department and remained there for the next ten years. His marriage ended in 1981. In 1986 he received a doctorate in English and American studies from the University of Utah; his dissertation was titled “Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Traditions, and Contemporary Native Writers.” Also in the 1980’s he and his partner, Helen Hoy, had two children: Benjamin Hoy (born in 1985) and Elizabeth King (1988). In 1987 King began publishing short stories in magazines and anthologies. In 1989 he returned to the United States, taking a position as associate professor of American and Native studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 1990 King published his first novel, Medicine River, set at a Blackfoot reservation in Alberta, Canada, and edited All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. In 1992 King published his first children’s book, A Coyote Columbus Story; it won the Canadian Governor-General’s Award for that year. In 1993-1994 he took a leave of absence for the academic year to work as a story editor for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, where he wrote the teleplay for the adaptation of his novel Medicine River. Also in 1993, King published his bestknown novel, the satirical Green Grass, Running Water, and a short-story collection, One Good Story, That One. In 1995 he returned to Canada with his partner and children. He took an academic appointment at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Thomas King is an important figure in American Indian literature. He once noted with some amusement that, because he lives and teaches in Canada, he is often called a Canadian Native writer, though he was born in the United States and those of his tribe, the Cherokee, are not native to Canada. In his work, his primary subject is cultural clash: The American Indians, with their traditional culture and communal values, are sneered at and ignored, if not simply conquered, by the white invaders, but they triumph through wit, cleverness, and resourcefulness (often represented in King’s fiction by the figure of the trickster in American Indian lore, Coyote).
Green Grass, Running Water Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 In King’s best-known work, Green Grass, Running Water, four old Indians have escaped from a mental hospital and are on their way to fix the world. They call themselves the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye, and their companion is the trickster Coyote. There is some confusion over whether they are men or women. The director of the hospital, Dr. Hovaugh, believes that their disappearances occur with startling regularity relative to natural disasters such as the Yellowstone fire of 1988. He sets out with a coworker to catch them before another disaster occurs. While the old Indians’ revisionist retelling of how the world began makes up one strand of the plot, in the other main line of the story King explores the lives of five
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Indians whose relationships intertwine through either blood or romantic ties. Alberta works as a university professor and enjoys her independence and the attentions of both Lionel and Charlie. Though she has no desire to marry either man, she wants to have a child. Charlie, an attorney whose father was an actor in Western films, works for the company whose dam is blocked by Eli, Lionel’s uncle. Eli has moved into his mother’s cabin, which sits in the path of the dam, and refuses to move. Lionel accidentally fell from grace as a university employee and now sells televisions and thinks he may someday return to his studies. Latisha, Lionel’s sister, runs the Dead Dog Cafe, has three children, and has survived an abusive marriage. As the Blackfoot community prepares to celebrate the annual Sun Dance, these several lives converge, and the old Indians attempt to fix the world in their unreliable way, bringing both salvation and disaster.
Suggested Readings Atwood, Margaret. “A Double-Bladed Knife: Subversive Laughter in Two Stories by Thomas King.” Canadian Literature 124/125 (Summer/Spring, 1990): 243250. Donaldson, Laura. “Noah Meets Old Coyote: Or, Singing in the Rain, Intertextuality in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literature 7 (Summer, 1995): 27-43. Ruppert, James. “Thomas King.” In Native American Writers of the United States. Vol. 175 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1997. The World & I 8 (June, 1993). Contributor: Arthur D. Hlavaty
Barbara Kingsolver Born: Annapolis, Maryland; April 8, 1955 Euro-American
Kingsolver’s works grip the reader long after the details of the individual characters and plots have faded, because they, like Kingsolver’s own life, are grounded in a real world of ecopolitical action. Principal works long fiction: The Bean Trees, 1988; Animal Dreams, 1990; Pigs in Heaven, 1993; The Poisonwood Bible, 1998; Prodigal Summer, 2000 poetry: Another America/Otra America, 1992 short fiction: Homeland, and Other Stories, 1989 nonfiction: Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, 1989; High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, 1995; Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, 2002 (photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt); Small Wonder, 2002; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, 2007 (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver) edited text: The Best American Short Stories, 2001, 2001 Although Barbara Kingsolver (KIHNG-sawl-vur) cannot be called “Native American,” her physician-father prided himself in his one-sixty-fourth Cherokee heritage, and her works often concern themselves with marginalized groups, including Native Americans, Central Americans, and women. She grew up in Kentucky and lived there for much of her early life, with stints in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1963 and later in the Caribbean (1967). Kingsolver was therefore exposed to a variety of different cultures, developing an appreciation of diversity. Studying at DePauw University on a piano scholarship, she received a B.A. in 1977, earned an M.S. in 1981 from the University of Arizona, and eventually became a freelance journalist and science writer. After publishing her first novel in 1988, she turned seriously to writing, and her work began to garner numerous awards, crowned in 2000 by the National Humanities Medal. Leaving Arizona after a quarter century, she and her husband settled on a farm in Virginia. This background subtly invigorates Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven as Kingsolver adeptly coordinates the intricacies of plot lines that move across ecological, ethnobiological, and regional backdrops. Kingsolver links the plots of The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven through the narrative of Taylor Greer and the Cherokee infant she initially befriends and later adopts, Turtle (named for her tenacious 622
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grip on her newfound mother). In these two novels Kingsolver introduces the primary themes that resound through her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry: the importance of children, the necessity for and intricacies of finding respect for different ethnic worldviews, and the overwhelming joy that accompanies seizing a life full of challenge based on one’s dreams. Kingsolver’s characters invariably opt for the challenges of love created amid the tensions of intercultural relationships. This tension of choosing a life amid differing cultural commitments is particularly evident in Animal Dreams. Codi Noline searches for a committed path of her own, even as Barbara Kingsolver (Seth Kantner) she steadfastly denies doing so. Codi discovers this path in her ability to help the residents of her father’s hometown, Grace, confront the consequences of industrial pollution. It is an easy association to see Kingsolver’s own emerging human rights activism in Codi’s process of deciding to help the city of Grace fight the threat of pollution. Kingsolver enables Codi to dream herself beyond the demons of her own outcast childhood by discovering in herself the will to fight this external enemy. From Loyd Peregrina, a Pueblo Native American, Codi learns the following in an answer to the question, “What do . . . animals dream about?”: I think they dream about whatever they do when they’re awake. . . . Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it. . . . If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
Holding the Line Type of work: Social history First published: 1989 Kingsolver’s novels and poems continue to grip the reader long after the details of the individual characters and plots have faded, because they, like Kingsolver’s own life, are grounded in a real world of ecopolitical action. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, and Small Wonder admirably present Kingsolver’s real-world engagement. In Holding the Line, Kingsolver unabashedly offers a biased account of the strike
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against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation in Morenci and Clifton, Arizona, in 1983. At the time, Kingsolver was working as a freelance journalist, and while Holding the Line certainly presents an account of the actual events of a real strike, what comes through even more clearly is Kingsolver’s desire to show the unexpected strength of the women who enabled the strike to continue long after the men of Clifton had lost their determination. In this respect Kingsolver calls into question traditional gender roles in the American Southwest and reinforces a tradition of “machisma” that clearly has echoes in her exclusive use of female leading characters in her fiction.
Homeland, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1989 In her stories, Kingsolver addresses conventional relationships in contemporary situations: single mothers juggling the responsibilities of rearing children and working; married couples considering parenthood or growing old; estranged lovers or families trying to bridge the gaps that they do not understand. The characters in these stories are trying to find themselves; adrift and rootless, they are searching for commitment, either externally or internally. Lack of communication between two or more people apparently stems from an inability to find common ground and creates inarticulate resentment or incomprehension, In “Island on the Moon,” for example, an estranged mother and daughter overcome years of bitterness and the strange circumstances of being pregnant at the same time to be reconciled and to draw strength from each other. The title story describes the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter. Written from the granddaughter’s point of view as a young girl, the story relates a disappointing trip taken by the family to the grandmother’s homeland, which the latter does not even recognize. Through the young girl, Kingsolver seems to say that it is not the place that holds the memories and has significance; it is the people and the history they retain in their memories. In other words, it is not necessary to go home in order to remember where one came from. Other stories deal with various issues, such as homosexuality, strikes and unions, or ethnicity, where the main character is faced with a life-changing decision that she or he must inevitably make alone. In “Rose-Johnny,” Georgeann, a young girl living in a small, rural town, slowly becomes aware of the ostracism against a lesbian named Rose-Johnny, whom she has befriended. The subtle victimization that Rose-Johnny undergoes is poignantly related through Georgeann, who steadfastly remains true to her friendship with the woman, despite town pressure. The oral richness of the stories in this collection will often find the reader looking for a listening audience. Kingsolver displays an unusual gift for storytelling, a gift that she has developed in these stories beyond the considerable talent she demonstrated in The Bean Trees.
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Animal Dreams Type of work: Novel First published: 1990 Animal Dreams is chiefly a novel about coming home. Returning to her small hometown of Grace, Arizona, after a ten-year absence, thirty-two-year-old Cosima (Codi) Noline must come to terms with her tangled personal and family past. Codi has finished medical school, but she has abandoned her career after panicking during a difficult childbirth procedure. She desperately misses Hallie, her beloved younger sister, who has just left their Tucson apartment to dedicate her agricultural expertise to the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Thus Codi reluctantly returns to Grace to work for a year as a high school biology teacher and to care for her father, Doc Homer. A stern and stubbornly independent man, he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and Kingsolver includes several chapters that dramatize his confused perspective on his life and family. Kingsolver presents most of the action, however, through Codi’s first-person point of view; and despite Codi’s sense of failure and alienation, she is an immensely appealing narrator. Codi’s supple voice, both conversational and highly alert, provides many witty observations on herself, the numerous supporting characters, and the rich cultural mix of the Southwest. Chief among those characters who help Codi find herself are Emelina Domingos, her high school friend and the mother of a large family, and Loyd Peregrina, a railroad engineer who courts Codi and helps her to appreciate the beauty and wisdom of the Native American worldview. In addition to providing an entertaining story of personal relations, Kingsolver’s novel also deepens the reader’s concern for social issues through the struggles faced by her characters. Hallie’s letters and Codi’s frequent thoughts of her develop a sympathetic image of the Sandinista revolution and a disturbing indictment of U.S. support for the Contras. Similarly, Kingsolver stirs the reader through the spirited campaign that the women of Grace organize to save the town’s river and orchards from industrial poisoning by the Black Mountain Mining Company. In sum, Animal Dreams is a richly engrossing novel in which people overcome personal and community nightmares through the shared work and joy of everyday life.
Another America Type of work: Poetry First published: 1992 Another America reflects Kingsolver’s central concerns: displaced or marginalized women and minorities. The book’s five sections return over and over to themes of violence, war, incest, rape, and other forms of abuse, drawing sketches of lives poignantly reflecting the hazards of living on the edge in late twentieth century America.
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Using repeated images of war and destruction, Kingsolver recalls childhood fears of a Russian invasion, threatened Titan missile launches, Nagasaki, Central American brutality. The book establishes an equation between a war’s rape of a culture and assaults against women through rape, incest, verbal violence, and other forms of brutal domination. Kingsolver’s vision also encompasses victims of political violence in Central America, in particular those traumatized in Nicaragua and Mexico and in this country after coming here hoping to find a safe haven in the Land of the Free. Such ironies are multiple in this collection of poems; for Kingsolver, the personal is the political, while the political destroys the personal. Adding power to Another America are the Spanish translations accompanying each poem, by Chilean immigrant Rebeca Cartes. This collection of poems is gutwrenchingly frank: The poems’ combined voices emerge as a strong, unflinching female presence, a champion of the prisoners of the margins, whether by virtue of gender, race, or class.
Pigs in Heaven Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Pigs in Heaven is an unusual and provocative sequel that calls into question the moral certainties of its predecessor. In The Bean Trees, as the plucky young protagonist Taylor Greer drives southwest from Kentucky, she has a baby girl thrust upon her during a car repair stop on Cherokee land in Oklahoma. In this earlier novel, Taylor’s act of taking and raising the girl seems unquestionably heroic, since the girl’s mother is dead, Taylor has no desire to become a mother, and particularly since it is revealed later in the novel that the girl had been sexually abused. Pigs in Heaven, on the other hand, suggests that perhaps Turtle (as Taylor has named her) needs to be returned to her Oklahoma tribe. Annawake Fourkiller, a young Cherokee lawyer whose spirit matches Taylor’s own, is on a crusade to test the legality of adoptions that have taken a third of all Indian children out of their tribes and into non-Indian homes. Kingsolver’s achievement in the novel is to develop the conflict between mother love and tribal community on a three-dimensional human level. The reader comes to understand many political and cultural issues as well as to know and sympathize with many individuals on both sides of the conflict. In addition, Kingsolver’s sharp ear for dialogue, her eye for revealing cultural detail, and her keen sense of humor all enliven a novel that is abundantly populated with entertaining characters. These characters include Taylor’s sardonic mother Alice; a young woman named Barbie, who tries to model her life on the popular children’s doll; Taylor’s unconventional boyfriend Jax, who plays in a rock band; and Alice’s childhood friend Sugar, who introduces her to Cherokee life in the fictional town of Heaven, Oklahoma. Though Pigs in Heaven is not as rich an achievement as Animal Dreams, it none-
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theless offers a fully satisfying narrative that dramatizes the plights, the humanity, and the humor of individuals and groups who survive on the margins of American society.
High Tide in Tucson Type of work: Essays First published: 1995 High Tide in Tucson is a collection of essays, stories, and meditations from Kingsolver’s life as she raised her daughter Camille alone. Many of these essays focus on the landscape and culture of the American desert, and most also reflect Kingsolver’s extensive training as a biologist. In “Semper Fi,” for example, Kingsolver addresses the question of fidelity—first to the relatively mundane world of television football but ultimately to the pursuit of truth itself in investigations into the pseudoscience conducted by Samuel Morton, who in the nineteenth century used brain volume as a measure of ethnic superiority, and by his intellectual heirs (according to Kingsolver) Robert Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994). In the title essay, Kingsolver suggests a maxim that easily links her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction: In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace. In other times when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thought tastes as simple as this: let me be a good animal today.
The Poisonwood Bible Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 After Orleanna Price’s opening sortie, which serves as a prologue, readers of The Poisonwood Bible find that the Price family comes from Bethlehem, Georgia, at the beginning of the next section. Combined with the tension inherent in the title, their place of origin signals why Kingsolver calls the book a political allegory. What follows is the story of the Price family’s arrival at, sojourn in, and leave-taking from the Congo as they try to spread God’s Word among the lost. The novel is told in five distinct voices, those of Orleanna Price and her daughters Leah, Ruth, Rachel, and Adah. Nathan Price has no lines in the novel, despite his position as head of the family—mostly as family despot, feared and unresponsive to the pleas and needs expressed by the women in his care. What readers learn of their existence is filtered through the eyes of distinctly different sisters and their mother, but all of it comes freighted with the message that
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Nathan Price will refuse every native custom and way of being in favor of his own. This attitude causes suffering and loss. His refusal to plant his garden in the protected raised hillocks, as is the native practice, results in all of their plants being flooded out. Ironically, his tin-ear pronunciation of bangala, which he shouts out every Sunday, tells the Congolese people over and over that Jesus will make them itch like the poisonwood tree, instead of what he wishes to say, that Jesus is precious. Language and miscommunication are central to the novel, and one daughter, Adah, speaks only in palindromes to herself and no one else for years. Rachel’s perpetual misuse of words and Leah’s dedication to learning French and Kikongo mirror their involvement with the new culture that they face. Leah remains in the struggling world of the Congo after her family returns to the United States, coping and forming a life in the same way that she labored to learn the languages. Rachel relocates and keeps a hotel in Africa, but she keeps to the white minority culture and does not probe for understanding of herself or acceptance with Africans. She is not introspective or critical about American involvement in Africa. When Adah emerges from her voiceless state, she becomes a doctor but decides to devote her life to discovering the “life histories of viruses.” Orleanna lives a solitary life, compromised in health by her Congo years, and the youngest daughter, Ruth, lies in a Congolese grave before the family leaves the country. Nathan Price, deserted by his wife and daughters after Ruth’s death, continues preaching and moves further and further away from a life even remotely related to his former existence. He becomes suspect as a spirit man who can turn himself into a crocodile. Following an accident in which children drown in a river after their boat is overturned by a crocodile, villagers chase and corner Nathan in an old coffee field watchtower and burn the tower, with him in it. The rift in the Price family’s lives, the devastation of the Congo, America’s complicity in that process, and the forward movement of all—the Prices, the United States, the Congo—weave a complex pattern of miscommunication, exploitation, and power. One cannot read this book without thinking about what it means to be human and the responsibility that each person has to contribute to the good of all others on the planet.
Suggested Readings Aay, Henry. “Environmental Themes in Ecofiction: In the Center of the Nation and Animal Dreams.” Journal of Cultural Geography 14 (Spring, 1994). DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Draper, James P. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Yearbook 1993. Vol. 81. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Fleischner, Jennifer, ed. A Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Barbara Kingsolver: “The Bean Trees,” “Homeland, and Other Stories,” “Animal Dreams,” “Pigs in Heaven.” New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Kingsolver, Barbara. Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly 237 (August 31, 1990): 46.
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Pence, Amy. “Barbara Kingsolver.” Poets and Writers 21, no. 4 (July/August, 1993): 14-21. Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Ross, Jean W. “CA Interview.” In Contemporary Authors. Vol. 134, edited by Susan M. Trotsky. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction.” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 77-123. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001. Contributors: Peter D. Olson and Karen L. Arnold
Maxine Hong Kingston (Maxine Ting Ting Hong) Born: Stockton, California; October 27, 1940 Chinese American
Kingston’s autobiographical books and her novel, brilliantly interweaving imagination and fact, convey Chinese American immigrant experience to a wide readership. Principal works long fiction: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, 1989 short fiction: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, 1976; China Men, 1980 nonfiction: Hawai’i One Summer, 1987; Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, 1998 (Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, editors); To Be the Poet, 2002 miscellaneous: The Fifth Book of Peace, 2003 (fiction and nonfiction) Born Maxine Ting Ting Hong, Kingston spoke Say Up, a Cantonese dialect, as her first language. Her immigrant parents made their living in California by running a laundry. They struggled to retain their Chinese identity and values in a new world peopled by ominous aliens: immigration officials, teachers, non-Chinese. Kingston’s mother admonished and inspired her six children, particularly her daughters, with talks of the disasters that befell women who broke men’s rules and of legendary heroines who dared battle for justice. Silent and wordless among “white ghosts,” Kingston was also threatened in childhood and adolescence by the specter of traditional Chinese prejudices against women. “Better to raise geese than girls” was a family motto. Kingston nevertheless became an A student and entered the University of California at Berkeley, where she drank in all the idealism of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960’s. Kingston married classmate and actor Earll Kingston, and for many years she pursued a career as a teacher, first in California and then in Hawaii. Meanwhile, finding her voice and experimenting with the linguistic means by which she could express the rich imagery and rhythms of Chinese American speech in her writing, she began working on two autobiographical books simultaneously. Enthusiastic critical acclaim accompanied the publication of the best-selling The Woman Warrior and China Men. Often called novels, these autobiographies combine imaginative flights and her memories of Chinese myths with the facts of Chinese immigrant 630
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history. In these works, Kingston claims full citizenship for Chinese Americans. “We Chinese belong here. This is our country, this is our history, we are a part of America. If it weren’t for us, America would be a different place.” Kingston says that, in telling the story of the Chinese in America, a major influence was William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925). Besides asserting the justice of the struggle against racism, Kingston also affirms the right of women of all races to full equality. Her writings make important contributions to feminist literature and women’s studies. She stands as the most widely read and influential interpreter of the Chinese American experience.
The Woman Warrior Type of work: Memoir First published: 1976 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is an autobiographical novel of Kingston’s life, illuminated by references to the women whose histories influenced her. In the United States, the meager opportunities available to Chinese immigrants force her parents to earn a living by running a small laundry. Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid, a midwife in China, is a forceful character who admonishes her daughter with ever-changing renditions of Chinese legends and myths as well as tales about women who have been driven to madness or death by a culture that has traditionally viewed girls and women as subordinate to boys and men. In “No Name Woman,” Kingston recalls the haunting story of her aunt, who gave birth to a child years after her husband had gone to America. Driven to madness by the persecution of vengeful neighbors, a disgrace to her kin, she drowns herself and the baby in the family well. “Now that you have started to menstruate what happened to her could happen to you,” Brave Orchid cautions. It is one of many frightening lessons for the young Kingston as she becomes increasingly aware of the different expectations placed upon women by the Chinese traditions that continue to dominate the attitudes of immigrants. The book takes its title, however, from Fa Mu Lan, the legendary woman warrior who, disguised as a man, sword in hand, goes forth to fight for justice. Kingston takes inspiration from this story and imagines herself an avenger of the hurts she experiences as a woman and an Asian American. As she acquires a nontraditional consciousness, her listing of grievances transcends personal and family hurts to embrace broader struggles against racism and war. Kingston loses her job at a real estate firm when she refuses to type invitations to a banquet at a restaurant that discriminates against African Americans. She also struggles to evade the expectations that she sees American girls facing: wearing makeup, becoming cheerleaders, learning to be typists, marrying rich men. In the final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” Kingston testifies to her passage out of the confinements and prejudices that obsess her parents. She discovers that she can speak her mind. She alludes to the story of the Chinese princess,
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Ts’ai Yen, who, carried off by barbarians, finds her voice and sings high and clear like a flute, a song that blends the sounds of China and of the world beyond. The Woman Warrior is distinguished by its rich, poetic language. Chinese oral tradition and classical literature blend with the myriad impressions crowding into the mind of a Chinese American girl striving to make sense of the competing mores of California’s diverse populations.
China Men Type of work: Memoir First published: 1980 In China Men, Kingston tells the stories of her male relatives who came to America. The opening chapter, “Our Fathers,” signals her intention to embrace the community of Chinese immigrants. She challenges readers to reconsider the Eurocentric version of American history by bringing to their attention the contributions of Chinese to the building of America. Kingston weaves her narrative from a poetic association of folklore, fantasy, and fact. In “On Discovery,” she relates a Chinese legend: the arrival in North America of Tang Ao during the reign of the Empress Wu (694-705). Captured and forced to become a transvestite, feet bound, face powdered and rouged, ears studded with jade and gold, Tang Ao was forced to serve meals to the court. The bewildering experience of this precursor is a metaphor for the emasculation of Chinese men in America as racism disempowered them, forcing them to perform women’s tasks: laundering and cooking. In America, Kingston’s forefathers find themselves off center as they are marginalized by U.S. laws. A chapter on laws, in the middle of China Men, documents the legislation and court decisions that, beginning in 1868, systematically excluded Chinese immigrants from normal treatment until 1958. Particularly dehumanizing was the law prohibiting the immigration of the wives and children of Chinese men Maxine Hong Kingston (© Franco Salmoiraghi) working in America.
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Through the portraits of her many forefathers, Kingston describes a multitude of immigration experiences. Great-grandfather Bak Goong sails to Hawaii in the hold of a ship and works for endless years under the whip on a sugar plantation. His dream of saving enough money to reach Gold Mountain is a mirage. The story of grandfather Ah Goong details the courage and skills of the Chinese who built the most difficult and dangerous section of the transcontinental railroad. They worked for lower wages and endured longer hours than white laborers but were denied the right to own property and become citizens. Nevertheless, Ah Goong prophesies: “We’re marking the land now. The tracks are numbered.” Kingston’s father, Baba, a man of scholarly accomplishment in China, enters America full of hope, only to be reduced to washing other people’s clothes. Then, demonstrating the changing status of the Chinese in America after World War II, his son, drafted into the U.S. Navy to serve in the Vietnam War, receives the highest level of security clearance. “The government was certifying that the family was really American, not precariously American but super-American.” Kingston’s brother declines the invitation to attend language school, however, because he fears his improved Chinese will be used by intelligence to “gouge Viet Cong eyes, cattleprod their genitals.” Kingston thus ends her chronicle of Chinese American history on a questioning note. The Chinese American is now a full citizen but must share in all that is questionable in American culture.
Tripmaster Monkey Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Kingston says that Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, her first true novel, was written after she had exhausted all the stories she knew about China. Yet, its title belies that claim for it reflects the novel’s debt to the classic Chinese epic Journey to the West, wherein the king of the monkeys takes a trip to India in search of sacred scrolls. Nonetheless, the cultural amalgam that Kingston relishes is confirmed by her statement that she was thinking of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey (1988) when she wrote the book. A densely packed four hundred pages, it is the story of the pranks and high jinks of twenty-three-year-old Chinese American hippie playwright Wittman Ah Sing, who lives in San Francisco in 1963 under the reign of Governor “Ray Gun” (Reagan). The book covers two months, September and October. Wittman is as free-spirited, independent, and garrulous as Walt Whitman, the nineteenth century American poet who is his namesake, yet he is equally Chinese as Monkey, the mythical trickster-saint who brought Buddhist scripture to China from India. Like Whitman, Wittman sings America and its multifarious facets, and the legacy he celebrates is the hallucinogenic culture of Berkeley in the 1960’s. Wittman’s picaresque bohemian life is part serendipity and part fantastic jour-
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ney, and his goal is to stage his epic dramatic production based on Chinese novels and folktales. Told in nine chapters of roughly equal length, the novel moves in a seamlessly chronological and fantastical story line, using third-person limited omniscient point of view. The reader accompanies Wittman on his adventures and is privy to his thoughts through the commentary of a wise, indulgent, and engagingly intrusive seer-narrator. When the novel opens, Wittman has been out of college for a while and is puzzling about his future. As he walks the streets of San Francisco, he contemplates suicide in such a slapdash way that the reader cannot take him seriously. His observant mind and quick wit are attuned to nuances in the behavior of strangers and microscopic features of inanimate objects. Aboard a city bus, he reads aloud passages from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930), regaling (or at least not annoying) fellow passengers. He enjoys a cappuccino with Nanci Lee, a beautiful Asian acquaintance and aspiring actress to whom he is romantically attracted. When he brings her to his apartment and reads his poetry to her, however, she neither understands nor appreciates his work and walks out. After working on a play all night long and sleeping for a few hours, Wittman goes to his job as toy clerk at a department store. He offends customers and is inept at assembling a bicycle display. He attends a management trainee conference at a fancy hotel (under false colors, as he has been demoted) and embarrasses the three other Chinese Americans present. Back at the job, Wittman maneuvers a toy organ grinder monkey and a Barbie bride doll into an obscene position in full view of shocked customers, an action that gets him fired. For something to do, Wittman sees the film West Side Story (1961), but he is put off by the falsity of Hollywood. He boards a bus for Oakland and endures the selfinterested chatter of the plain, aggressive Chinese American girl next to him. His destination—a party at the home of good friends, recently married—promises a new destiny, for Wittman becomes enchanted by Taña de Weese, a Caucasian with long blond hair and sandals, who recites poetry while looking directly into Wittman’s eyes. Wittman, Taña, and a few other guests stay up all night, then share a breakfast omelet. Wittman reads aloud a long excerpt from his play, and everyone discusses acting in it. Wittman and Taña visit her apartment, which Wittman finds enchanting, and where they declare their love for each other. The next day they do some sightseeing and encounter a hippie claiming to be an ordained minister, who spontaneously marries them. Their next stop is Sacramento, to visit Wittman’s parents. His mother is hosting a game of mah-jongg, so Wittman is able to introduce Taña to family relatives and friends. He searches the house for his grandmother, but his mother is elusive about her whereabouts. His father, playing poker at a friend’s house, also will not give Wittman a straight answer, except to say that they had taken her to Reno and she had not returned with them. Taña and Wittman drive to Reno but fail to find the grandmother. Instead, they enjoy an expensive restaurant dinner that is partially marred by racist jokes they overhear at an adjacent table.
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The next morning Taña goes to work, and Wittman goes through the seemingly interminable application process for unemployment compensation. Later, meandering through the lights of Chinatown, he unexpectedly meets his grandmother. Her abandonment by Wittman’s parents in the Sierra Nevada has worked to her advantage; she was picked up by a wealthy Chinese man who married her. She presses money into Wittman’s grateful hands before they depart. Wittman uses a pay telephone to contact friends and relatives—everyone he knows in the area—to assemble an acting company and an audience for his play, scheduled to open Halloween night. The play turns out to be a complex and fastpaced blend of slapstick and magic, wit and rage, with the actors playing eccentrics, freaks, and mythical heroes. The famous joined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, Chinese-Siamese immigrants who got rich appearing as a Civil War sideshow spectacle, enable Wittman to bring to the stage an embodiment of mixed identity, notes Kingston. The cast and growing audience love it, and critics rave. So frenzied are the events that the audience finds it impossible to take it all in at once. Police are called because of the pandemonium. It becomes a climactic free-for-all, with everyone fighting everyone else, and it culminates in an explosion of fireworks. A book that began with reference to suicide ends in a roaringly good time. After things settle down, Wittman takes center stage and “talks story” about the formative influences in his life and the larger dilemma of all Chinese living in the United States. As his name echoes Walt Whitman’s, so this is his equivalent of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” His extended monologue is touching, bitter, and humorous as he describes his personal experiences of racial prejudice. His narrative reveals the agony, pain, and bafflement of trying to synthesize past Chinese heritage with present American culture, yet his invectives and fevered eloquence end in optimistic determination for the future.
The Fifth Book of Peace Type of work: Autobiography and fiction First published: 2003 To some degree, most of Kingston’s prose mixes fiction and nonfiction, but in The Fifth Book of Peace—instead of blending into each other in some postmodernist mix of novel and history—the two forms are separated. The book has five parts. In the opening section, Kingston tells the story of the horrific October, 1991, Oakland fire, when her house, and all her possessions, including the draft of her novel-inprogress, were consumed. In the second, shorter section, she relates the history of the mythic Chinese “Three Lost Books of Peace.” The third section is the reconstruction of her own, fourth book of peace, the novel that was destroyed in the fire, the story of Wittman Ah Sing (the hero of Kingston’s earlier Tripmaster Monkey) and his wife and young son immigrating to Hawaii during the Vietnam War and getting caught up in the antiwar movement there. In the fourth section, Kingston describes her peace efforts
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in the early 1990’s, when, after the fire, Vietnam veterans started sending her stories of their own losses and she organized workshops for the writer veterans. The epilogue brings those efforts up to date. Kingston’s book is thus an unfinished novel enclosed by personal stories of loss (the Oakland fire) and reclamation (the workshops where Vietnam veterans work out their involvement in the war). The different parts do not perfectly coalesce, but all are finally about peace. “Things that fiction can’t solve must be worked out in life,” Kingston writes here, and The Fifth Book of Peace is her most poignant attempt to do just that.
Suggested Readings Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Gao, Yan. The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Ludwig, Sami. Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” and Ishmael Reed’s “Mumbo Jumbo.” Cross Cultural Communication 2. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Simmons, Diane. Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Twayne, 1999. Skandera-Trombley, Laura, ed. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia, ed. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Contributors: Joseleyne Ashford Slade and Jill B. Gidmark
Etheridge Knight Born: Corinth, Mississippi; April 19, 1931 Died: Indianapolis, Indiana; March 10, 1991 African American
Knight opened the eyes of a nation to the views and experiences of prisoners, unveiling a humanity that most Americans, black or white, never knew existed. Principal works poetry: “For Malcolm, a Year After,” 1967 (a contribution to For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, 1967); Poems from Prison, 1968; Black Voices from Prison, 1970 (with others); A Poem for Brother/Man (After His Recovery from an O.D.), 1972; Belly Song, and Other Poems, 1973; Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1980; The Essential Etheridge Knight, 1986 Etheridge Knight, one of Bushie and Belzora (Cozart) Knight’s seven children, came into the world on April 19, 1931, near Corinth, Mississippi. During this time the United States was gripped by one of history’s most sensational racial battles, the Scottsboro Boys trial. Nine black males, ages twelve to nineteen, were taken off a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, and charged with the rape of two Huntsville, Alabama, white women, Ruby Bates, eighteen, and Victoria Price, twenty-one. The incident seeded a cloud of white fear and rage that shadowed black men throughout the South for more than thirty years. Angered by the racial segregation and disgusted by the backbreaking work of sharecropping, Knight dropped out of school after the eighth grade and left home. He wandered for about five years, then enlisted in the Army in 1947. Knight was a medic, stationed in Guam, Hawaii, and at the battlefront in the Korean War until 1951, when he was wounded by a piece of shrapnel. In 1957, the now drug-addicted soldier was discharged. Drugs dominated his life. In 1960, Knight was sentenced to prison for a robbery in Indianapolis, Indiana, motivated by his need to buy drugs. Doing time at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana, led Knight to self-discovery and an increased desire to be more than an outcast in America. Those yearnings prompted him to write. Poems from Prison, his first collection, was published by Broadside Press in 1968, with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She mentored Knight, who eventually gained support from members of the Black Arts movement, which gave artistic voice to African Americans’ struggles for social rights and political freedom. One of those members, poet Dudley Randall, was 637
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the founder and editor of Broadside Press. Another poet, Sonia Sanchez, married Knight. By year’s end, Knight had gained a career, a wife, and three stepchildren: Morani, Mungu, and Anita Sanchez. His fame peaked between 1968 and 1975, when the movement waned. An anthology of prison writings, Voce negre dal carcere (1968), first published in Laterza, Italy, broadened the popularity of Knight’s work. Two years later, Pathfinder Press released Black Voices from Prison in the United States. Doors opened. The poet was writerin-residence at the University of Pittsburgh (1968-1969), the University of Hartford (1969-1970), and Lincoln University (1972) in Jefferson City, Missouri. He received a 1972 National Endowment for the Arts grant and a 1974 Guggenheim Fellowship. Etheridge Knight (Judy Ray) Knight’s career was going well, but his personal life was in a downward slide. Drugs kept him in and out of Veterans Administration hospitals. The marriage to Sanchez crumbled into a 1972 divorce. On June 11, 1973, Knight married Mary Ann McAnally. The couple had two children: Mary Tandiwe and Etheridge Bambata. That same year, Broadside published the first collection of his poems written outside prison, Belly Song, and Other Poems. In 1978, he married Charlene Blackburn. The relationship is celebrated in Born of a Woman, and with her he had a son, Issac Bushie Knight. Knight continued to write. The Essential Etheridge Knight was released in 1986, but Knight never regained prominence. He died of lung cancer in 1991 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Like many of the writers and painters during the Black Arts movement which surfaced in major urban centers between 1965 and 1975, Knight believed that a black artist’s main duty was to expose the lies of the white-dominated society. In Contemporary Authors, he is quoted as saying that the traditional idea of the aesthetic drawn from Western European history demands that the artist speak only of the beautiful: “His task is to edify the listener, to make him see beauty of the world.” That aesthetic definition was a problem because African Americans were identified in the traditional European mind as not beautiful. In fact, the broader society saw everything in African American life as ugly. Black artists hoped to erase that mindset. They saw art as a force through which they could move people of all races toward understanding and respect. In Contemporary Authors, Knight is quoted as saying that the African American writer has to
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perceive and conceptualize the collective aspirations, the collective vision of black people, and through his art form give back to the people the truth that he has gotten from them. He must sing to them of their own deeds, and misdeeds.
“Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968, in Poems from Prison In “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” Knight turns an uncontrollable prisoner into a new-day folk hero. Hard Rock is a Paul Bunyan without a pretty fate. The author understood that most African American lives, even mythic ones, do not have happy endings. The poem also shows that sometimes heroes are not what most people (meaning whites) see as nice or pretty. In the language of the incarcerated, Knight laid out the heroic stature: “Ol Hard Rock! Man, that’s one crazy nigger.” And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock once bit A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.
To many, those details are as alienating as the description: Hard Rock was “known not to take no shit From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it: Split purple lips, lumped ears, welts above His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut Across his temple and plowed through a thick Canopy of kinky hair.
The prisoner, Knight recognized, is an archetype of all black Americans, only nominally “free” but really imprisoned. In prison, the prisoner stays in a hole, a tiny cell devoid of light. The guards’ intimidation cannot break the man’s spirit, so the prison doctors give him a lobotomy. They take his ability to think. Knight saw that scenario as identical to the experience of the descendants of Africans in America. In Mississippi and other places, he had seen black people who tried to stand tall against the onslaught of racial oppression either killed or, like the fictional Hard Rock, tamed: A screw who knew Hard Rock From before shook him down and barked in his face And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly. His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence.
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The poem captures the disappointment and defeat Knight saw in black men on both sides of the walls: We turned away our eyes to the ground. Crushed. He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do.
“The Idea of Ancestry” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968, in Poems from Prison Knight reflects on those connections in both “A Poem for Myself (Or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)” and “The Idea of Ancestry,” in his Poems from Prison. In the first part of “The Idea of Ancestry,” he wrote: Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand fathers (both dead), brothers sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
After exploring the variety of their individualism, he concludes that differences cannot break family ties: I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He’s discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father’s mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with everybody’s birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for “whereabouts unknown.”
Works written after prison extended Knight’s reflections on connections. When considered to its fullest extent, what binds people is love. Knight’s reflection on ancestry in “The Idea of Ancestry” reveals an understanding of a family, the accidental space where one shares traits and foibles with loved ones. Accidental refers to things outside a person’s control. In the 1980 essay “The Violent Space,” Hill acknowledged that “the form of the poem as well as the idea of ancestry in the poem also represents the problem of ancestral lineage for the Black race as a whole.” The
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power to direct family lines was stripped from African Americans for generations. The practice of selling slaves without regard for emotional ties also made it hard to keep track of the existing linkages.
Suggested Readings Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Fuller, and Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ford, Karen. “These Old Writing Paper Blues: The Blues Stanza and Literary Poetry.” College Literature 24, no. 3 (October, 1997): 84-103. Hill, Patricia Liggins. “The Violent Space: The Function of the New Black Aesthetic in Etheridge Knight’s Prison Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum 14, no. 3 (1980). Randall, Dudley. Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. Vendler, Helen Hennessy, ed. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Contributor: Vincent F. A. Golphin
Joy Kogawa (Joy Nozomi Goichi) Born: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; June 6, 1935 Japanese American
Kogawa’s novel Obasan brings literature of the World War II internment camp experience to a new level of psychological depth and lyrical brilliance. Principal works children’s literature: Naomi’s Road, 1986 long fiction: Obasan, 1981; Itsuka, 1991; The Rain Ascends, 1995 poetry: The Splintered Moon, 1967; A Choice of Dreams, 1974; Jericho Road, 1977; Woman in the Woods, 1985; A Song of Lilith, 2000; A Garden of Anchors, 2003 Joy Kogawa (koh-GAH-wah) grew up in the relatively sheltered environment provided by her minister father in Vancouver. That security was shattered with World War II relocation policies, which sent Japanese Canadians to internment camps in the inhospitable interior lands of Canada. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States also profoundly affected her. As a young woman Kogawa attended the University of Alberta, the Anglican Women’s Training College, and the Conservatory of Music. She married David Kogawa on May 2, 1957; they had two children, Gordon and Deirdre. The years 1967 to 1968 seem to have been a transitional period in Kogawa’s life, since her first book of poems (The Splintered Moon, 1967) was published, she divorced David Kogawa, and she returned to college, attending the University of Saskatchewan, in those two years. The next ten years of Kogawa’s life were increasingly productive. Her second collection of poems, A Choice of Dreams, was published in 1974. Kogawa worked in the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa, Ontario, as a staff writer from 1974 to 1976. A third collection of poetry, Jericho Road, was published in 1977. During this time Kogawa worked primarily as a freelance writer. Kogawa contributed poems to magazines and journals in Canada and the United States. In 1981, Obasan was published. Widely acclaimed as one of the most psychologically complex and lyrically beautiful novels on the topic of Japanese Canadians’ wartime experiences, Obasan continues to intrigue readers and critics alike with its powerful story of a silent, reserved woman, Megumi Naomi Nakane, learn642
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ing of the fate of her family in Japan many years after the fact. Naomi’s experience of dispossession, relocation, and internment, as well as the loss of her parents, has made her ethnicity, her self-image, and her relationships with others deeply problematic. Published in 1986, Naomi’s Road retells the tale of Obasan in a manner intended for child readers. Itsuka is Kogawa’s sequel to Obasan. Itsuka follows Naomi’s political awakening and the healing of her wounds from the past. Joy Kogawa
Obasan Type of work: Novel First published: 1981 Kogawa’s Obasan has forced critics to include Asian Canadians in their study of ethnic literature; it is such a fine work no critic can ignore it. Kogawa has defined political and cultural connections between the Japanese immigrants of Canada and America. Both groups were held in internment camps during World War II. Their property was seized, and their families were often separated. In Canada and the United States the men of the families fought for their new countries while their wives, children, and siblings remained interned. Arguably one of the finest literary renderings of this experience, Obasan investigates what happened as a result of these practices. Naomi Nakane, the protagonist of Obasan, appears emotionally paralyzed at the beginning of the novel. Unable to move beyond her own past in the camps and unable to reconcile the loss of her parents, Naomi has retreated into silence and isolation. Canada has essentially told Japanese Canadians that they are untrustworthy, second-class citizens at best, so Naomi retreats from her ethnic identity as well. Her Aunt Emily, however, is articulate, learned, professional, and politically active. Aunt Emily encourages Naomi to learn about the terrible things done to Japanese Canadians and to act on her anger. Naomi gains the impetus for change. Shortly before the family’s relocation to the internment camps (when Naomi is a child), Mrs. Nakane leaves to visit family in Japan. She never returns, and the family carefully guards the secret of her fate. It is only as a thirty-six-year-old adult that Naomi is given the letters that reveal her mother’s story of disfigurement and subsequent death as a result of the atomic bombing. The mother, herself, has imposed silence on the other family members. Naomi tries to engage her mother’s presence, to heal the rift between them, although her mother is not physically there. In writing
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the novel Kogawa has constructed an elaborate attempt to embrace the absent voice, to contain the mother in some manner useful to Naomi’s own construction of identity. Poetic passages describe this imagined reunion. Dream sequences also punctuate the narrative, providing the touching lyricism that moves the novel beyond most of the literature written around the internment camp experience. Bound with the sociopolitical analysis provided by Aunt Emily and Naomi’s personal history, the novel sets high standards for literature on ethnic identity.
Suggested Readings Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaya Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Davidson, Arnold E. Writing Against the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan.” Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. Goldman, Marlene. “A Dangerous Circuit: Loss and the Boundaries of Racialized Subjectivity in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electric Field.” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 2 (2002): 362-388. Kanefsky, Rachelle. “Debunking a Postmodern Conception of History: A Defense of Humanist Values in the Novels of Joy Kogawa.” Canadian Literature 148 (1996): 11-36. Kruk, Laurie. “Voices of Stone: The Power of Poetry in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Ariel 30, no. 4 (1999): 75-94. Petersen, Nancy. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Contributor: Julie Tharp
Yusef Komunyakaa (James Willie Brown) Born: Bogalusa, Louisiana; April 29, 1947 African American
Komunyakaa’s poems use jazz and blues rhythms, and his focus on the Vietnam War places him among the finest writers who have explored this difficult terrain. Principal works audio recordings: Love Notes from the Madhouse, 1998 (with John Tchicai); Thirteen Kinds of Desire, 2000 (with Pamela Knowles) poetry: Dedications and Other Darkhorses, 1977; Lost in the Bonewheel Factory, 1979; Copacetic, 1984; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, 1986; Toys in the Field, 1986; Dien Cai Dau, 1988; February in Sydney, 1989; Magic City, 1992; Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1993; Thieves of Paradise, 1998; Talking Dirty to the Gods, 2000; Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 2001; Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One, 2004; Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, 2006 (with Chad Gracia) translation: The Insomnia of Fire, 1995 (with Martha Collins; of poetry by Nguyen Quang Thieu) nonfiction: Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, 1999 (Radiclani Clytus, editor) edited texts: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 1991 (with Sascha Feinstein); The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology, Volume 2, 1996 (with Feinstein) The oldest of five children, Yusef Komunyakaa (YEW-sehf koh-muhn-YAH-kah), born James Willie Brown, had a strained relationship with his father, which he vividly chronicled years later in a fourteen-sonnet sequence titled “Songs for My Father,” which appears in Neon Vernacular. The Bogalusa of Komunyakaa’s childhood was a rural community in southern Louisiana that held few opportunities economically or culturally, especially for a young black man. The main industry was the single paper mill, one that turned “workers into pulp,” according to one poem. There was a racially charged atmosphere. The public library admitted only whites; the Ku Klux Klan was still active. In “Fog Galleon,” Komunyakaa writes of these difficulties:
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Yusef Komunyakaa I press against the taxicab Window. I’m black here, interfaced With a dead phosphorescence; The whole town smells Like the world’s oldest anger.
Daydreaming and reading were ways of escaping and coping with a slow life. Daydreaming, which Komunyakaa now sees as an important creative act of his youth, is evident in his early identification with his grandfather’s West Indian heritage. He took the name Komunyakaa from his grandfather, who, according to family legend, came to America as a stowaway from Trinidad. In the poem “Mismatched Shoes,” Komunyakaa writes of this identification: The island swelled in his throat & calypso leapt into the air . . . . . . . . . . I picked up those mismatched shoes & slipped into his skin. Komunyakaa. His blues, African fruit on my tongue.
The Bible and a set of supermarket encyclopedias were his first books. He has noted the influence of the Bible’s “hypnotic cadence,” sensitizing him to the importance of music and metaphor. James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961), discovered in a church library when Komunyakaa was sixteen, inspired him to become a writer. Jazz and blues radio programs from New Orleans, heard on the family radio, formed a third important influence. Komunyakaa speaks fondly of those early days of listening to jazz and acknowledges its importance in his work. After graduation from high school in 1965, Komunyakaa traveled briefly and in 1969 enlisted in the Army. He was sent to Vietnam. He served as a reporter on the front lines and later as editor of The Southern Cross, a military newspaper. The experience of being flown in by helicopter to observe and then report on the war effort laid the groundwork for the powerful fusion of passion and detached observation that is a hallmark of his war poems, written years later. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam. Upon being discharged, Komunyakaa enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he majored in English and sociology, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1975. A creative writing course there inspired him to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at Colorado State University, which he earned in 1978. He received his master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. During this period he published limited editions of his first two short books of poems, Dedications and Other Darkhorses and Lost in the Bonewheel Factory. Komunyakaa taught poetry briefly in public school before joining the creative writing faculty at the University of New Orleans, where he met Mandy Sayer, whom he married in 1985. That year he became an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, where in 1989 he was named Lilly Professor of Poetry.
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He later became a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Because Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry is so rich in imagery, allusion, metaphor, musical rhythms, and ironic twists, it possesses a freshness and a bittersweet bite whether the subject is the raw beauty of nature or the passions and follies of human nature. He has said that poetry does not work for him without “surprises.” His poetry surprises both in its technique—the juxtaposition of disparate images and sudden shifts in perspective—and in its subjects. Generally his poems have a sensual quality even though the subject matter varies greatly: childhood memories, family feuds, race, war, sex, nature, jazz. Scholar Radiclani Clytus commented early in KomunYusef Komunyakaa (AP/Wide World Photos) yakaa’s career that the poet’s interpretation of popular mythology and legend gave readers “alternative access to cultural lore. Epic human imperfections, ancient psychological profiles, and the haunting resonance of the South are now explained by those who slow drag to Little Willie John and rendezvous at MOMA.” Komunyakaa’s comment that “a poem is both confrontation and celebration” aptly captures the essence of his own work.
Copacetic Type of work: Poetry First published: 1984 Copacetic focuses primarily on memories of childhood and the persuasive influence of music. The narrator speaks of “a heavy love for jazz,” and in fact musical motifs run throughout Komunyakaa’s poetry. He has compared poetry to jazz and blues in its emphasis on feeling and tone, its sense of surprise and discovery, and its diversity within a general structure. Poems such as “Copacetic Mingus,” “Elegy for Thelonious,” and “Untitled Blues” convey the power of this kind of music, in which “art & life bleed into each other.” Depending on the poem, music can serve as escape, therapy, or analogy. Often it is combined with richly sensual images, as in “Woman, I Got the Blues.”
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Dien Cai Dau Type of work: Poetry First published: 1988 The past wounds and present scars of the Vietnam War are the subjects of Dien Cai Dau, whose title means “crazy” in Vietnamese. The powerful yet exquisitely sensitive—and sensual—way in which Komunyakaa conveys the pain, loss, and psychic confusion of his experience in Vietnam found a receptive audience. Most present a moment or a reflection in a richly nuanced but undogmatic way. In “We Never Know” he juxtaposes a delicate image of dancing with a woman with the reality of an enemy in the field, whom he kills and whose body he then approaches. The moral ambiguity of the moment is highlighted by the tenderness with which the soldier regards the body: When I got to him a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There’s no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn’t be kissing the ground.
Poems such as “Tu Du Street” and “Thanks” are even more complex in their multiple, often conflicting, images. The former presents the bizarre reality of racial prejudice even in Vietnam, “where only machine gun fire bring us together.” The women with whom the soldiers seek solace provide one common denominator: There’s more than a nation inside us, as black & white soldiers touch the same lovers minutes apart, tasting each other’s breath without knowing these rooms run into each other like tunnels leading to the underworld.
In “Thanks” the narrator gives thanks to an unspecified being for the myriad coincidences that saved him one day in the jungle as he “played some deadly/ game for blind gods.” The poet provides no resolution or closure, just a series of powerful, haunting images:
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Again, thanks for the dud hand grenade tossed at my feet outside Chu Lai. I’m still falling through its silence.
Neon Vernacular Type of work: Poetry First published: 1993 Neon Vernacular won considerable critical acclaim as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to culling the best from earlier books, it adds gems of its own, including the unrhymed sonnet sequence “Songs for My Father,” fourteen powerful poems that chronicle the poet’s complicated relationship with his dad. In “At the Screen Door,” in which a former soldier murders because he cannot separate the past from the present, Komunyakaa returns to the psychological aftermath of Vietnam.
Thieves of Paradise Type of work: Poetry First published: 1998 Thieves of Paradise is an example of Komunyakaa’s ability to experiment with form and ease the reader into accepting poetry that is unfamiliar. Much of the subject matter is familiar—the grim reality of war and its psychological aftermath, the body’s hungers and betrayals, the allure of memory and imagination—but the presentation is fresh and intriguing. “Palimpsest” is a seemingly random, kaleidoscopic series of four-quatrain poems that move from “slavecatchers” to tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to the backwoods to jazz musician Count Basie. By confronting uncomfortable truths, the poet writes, “I am going to teach Mr. Pain/ to sway, to bop.” Several, such as “Nude Interrogation,” “Phantasmagoria,” and “Frontispiece,” are prose poems that force one to rethink the nature of the form, while Komunyakaa’s images work on the emotions. “The Glass Ark” is a five-page dialogue between two paleontologists. This collection includes the libretto “Testimony,” about Charlie Parker, written in twenty-eight fourteen-line stanzas. It captures the reckless allure of the man and the time: Yardbird could blow a woman’s strut across the room . . . pushed moans through brass. . . . High
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Yusef Komunyakaa heels clicking like a high hat. Black-beaded flapper. Blue satin Yardbird, he’d blow pain & glitter.
Talking Dirty to the Gods Type of work: Poetry First published: 2000 Talking Dirty to the Gods stands apart from earlier works in its adherence to a strict, traditional form. Each of its 132 poems consists of sixteen lines, in four unrhymed quatrains. Much of the appeal of this collection stems from the freedom and friction Komunyakaa creates by presenting his unusual images and bizarre juxtapositions in a tightly controlled format. The gods he discusses are taken from the ancient and the modern worlds, the exotic and the commonplace. Whether discussing the maggot (“Little/ Master of earth”), Bellerophon, or Joseph Stalin, he is able to humanize his subject enough to win at least some sympathy from the reader.
Pleasure Dome Type of work: Poetry First published: 2001 The publication of Pleasure Dome led to laudatory reviews not only for its poetic achievement but also for its high purpose: “Nearly every page of these collected poems will pull you from your expectations, tell you something you did not know, and leave you better off than you were,” said the reviewer for Library Journal, while Booklist praised Komunyakaa’s “fluent creative energy, and his passion for living the examined life.” Pleasure Dome is an extraordinarily rich collection of more than 350 poems. All earlier collections except Talking Dirty to the Gods are represented. There is also a section titled “New Poems” and another, “Early Uncollected.” Among the new poems is “Tenebrae,” a moving meditation on Richard Johnson, the black Indiana University music professor who committed suicide. The lines “You try to beat loneliness/ out of a drum” are woven throughout the poem with a cumulative, haunting effect.
Suggested Readings Aubert, Alvin. “Yusef Komunyakaa’s Unified Vision: Canonization and Humanity.” African American Review 27 (Spring, 1993). Conley, Susan. “About Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile.” Ploughshares 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 202-207.
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Gordon, Fran. “Yusef Komunyakaa: Blue Note in a Lyrical Landscape.” Poets & Writers 28, no. 6 (November/December, 2000): 26-33. Gotera, Vincente F. “Depending on the Light: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990. Jones, Kirkland C. “Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.” In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Kelly, Robert. “Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation.” The Georgia Review 46 (Winter, 1992). Ringnalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Weber, Bruce. “A Poet’s Values: It’s the Words over the Man.” The New York Times Biographical Service 25 (May, 1994): 666-667. Contributor: Danny Robinson
Jerzy Kosinski Born: Lodz, Poland; June 14, 1933 Died: Manhattan, New York; May 3, 1991 Jewish
Kosinski is best known for his depiction of the Holocaust in The Painted Bird and for his creation of characters who grapple with the absurdity and cruelty of contemporary life. Principal works long fiction: The Painted Bird, 1965; Steps, 1968; Being There, 1971; The Devil Tree, 1973, revised 1981; Cockpit, 1975; Blind Date, 1977; Passion Play, 1979; Pinball, 1982; The Hermit of 69th Street: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky, 1988 screenplay: Being There, 1979 (adaptation of his novel; with Robert C. Jones) nonfiction: The Future Is Ours, Comrade, 1960 (as Joseph Novak); No Third Path, 1962 (as Joseph Novak); Notes of the Author on “The Painted Bird,” 1965; The Art of the Self: Essays à Propos “Steps,” 1968; Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962-1991, 1992; Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski, 1993 (Tom Teicholz, editor) edited text: Sociologia Amerykánska: Wybór Prae, 1950-1960, 1962 Jerzy Nikodem Kosinski (JUR-zee koh-ZIHN-skee) was born in Lodz, Poland, on June 14, 1933. His life was as incredible as any of his novels, which are, to some degree, autobiographical. In 1939, when he was six, World War II began. He was Jewish, and his parents, believing he would be safer in the remote eastern provinces of Poland, paid a large sum of money to have him taken there. He reached eastern Poland, where he was immediately abandoned; his parents thought he was dead. Instead, at this very young age, he learned to live by his wits in an area where the peasants were hostile and the Nazis were in power. The extreme experiences of that time were given artistic expression in his first novel, The Painted Bird. Kosinski survived the ordeal, and his parents found him in an orphanage at the end of the war. The stress of his experience had rendered him mute, and his irregular, wandering life had left him unfit to live normally with other people. Finally, in the care of his family, Kosinski regained his speech, and, studying with his philologist father, he completed his entire basic formal education in a year and entered the University of Lodz, where he eventually earned advanced degrees in history and political science. By that time, Poland was an Iron Curtain country with a collectivized society. Kosinski, after his youthful years of lone wandering, had developed a fierce inde652
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pendence and could not endure communal life in which the individual was under scrutiny at every step. He knew he could not remain without getting into serious trouble with the government, so he put together an elaborate scheme to escape. Making the cumbersome bureaucracy work in his favor, Kosinski invented a series of sponsors, all highly regarded scientists according to the documents he forged for them, to write him letters of recommendation, which eventually enabled him to get a passport to study in the United States. He arrived in New York on December 20, 1957, twenty-four years old, with $2.80 in his pocket and a good textbook knowledge of English, though little experience in speaking the language. He lived any way he could, stealing food when necessary and constantly studying English. By March, he was fluent in the language, and within three years he had published The Future Is Ours, Comrade, a study of Soviet life that sold extremely well. Suddenly he was moderately wealthy, but that was only the beginning. Mary Hayward Weir, the young widow of steel magnate Ernest Weir and one of the wealthiest women in the United States, read his book and wrote him a letter of praise. They met and were soon married. All at once he was wealthy beyond his own dreams, owning villas in several countries, a vast yacht, a private jet. “I had lived the American nightmare,” he said, “now I was living the American dream.” Five years later, in 1968, Mary Weir died of a brain tumor. The wealth, held by her in trust, went back to the estate. Kosinski had, during his marriage, written his first two novels, The Painted Bird and Steps, and he was a well-known, celebrated author. Needing to earn a living, he taught at Yale, Princeton, and Wesleyan universities. He continued to write novels; they continued to sell well, so that he was able to leave teaching to write full-time. He was remarried, to Katherina von Frauenhofer, in 1987. Kosinski’s life then fell into an active but regular and disciplined pattern. In season, he traveled to Switzerland to ski or to the Caribbean to play polo, and he made extensive American tours, granting innumerable interviews and publicizing his books. He was also internationally active in civil rights cases and served for two terms (the maximum allowed) as president of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN). The rest of the time he spent working in his small apartment in Manhattan. On May 3, 1991, Jerzy Kosinski, suffering from a serious heart disorder and discouraged by a growing inability to work, apparently chose to end his own life. Kosinski often wrote that the world is an arena of violence and pure chance, which was certainly true of his own life. In addition to the numerous violent fluctuations of his early life, on a 1969 trip his baggage was misplaced, by chance, delaying his plane flight. His eventual destination was the home of his friends Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate; had it not been for the delay, he would have been there the fateful night the Charles Manson gang murdered everyone in that house. Always a highly visible figure, Kosinski became in the early 1980’s the subject of unwelcome publicity. In an article in The Village Voice (June 29, 1982), Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith charged that a number of Kosinski’s novels had been written in part by various editorial assistants whose contributions he failed to acknowledge and indeed systematically concealed. Stokes and FremontSmith further charged that Kosinski’s accounts to interviewers of his trau-
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matic childhood experiences, his escape from Poland, and his first years in America have been contradictory and in some cases verifiably untrue. Finally, they suggested that Kosinski’s acclaimed first novel, The Painted Bird, was actually written in Polish and then rendered into English by an unacknowledged translator. Kosinski denied all the charges. In The Hermit of 69th Street, which its protagonist calls a “roman à tease,” he responds indirectly to the controversy by reflecting on the writer’s craft, which, he concludes, is largely a process of borrowing and recasting narrative material. Jerzy Kosinski (National Archives)
The Painted Bird Type of work: Novel First published: 1965 The Painted Bird is one of the most powerful novels about World War II and the Holocaust. Since it only obliquely deals with both events, the novel is a kind of allegory for the senseless cruelty and brutality of any war. Kosinski claimed, falsely, that the novel was based on his own experiences. He was not averse to creating fiction in more than one realm; he was candid about this practice. The point of Kosinski’s claim, it may be argued, is that the book’s unspeakable brutalities are realistic—indeed, they are much less than what happened. Characterization is notably thin in The Painted Bird, and even the narrator is twodimensional. The scenes that he narrates are, however, often overwhelming, and the power of the novel comes in large part from its simple language and imagery. At one level, this short, episodic novel is an allegory. Kosinski has written that the novel is a fairy tale experienced by a child rather than told to him, and this is an apt description. Each incident in The Painted Bird can be considered as a steppingstone in an allegorical bildungsroman, or novel of education. In each encounter, the boy learns another lesson, only to discard it for a new lesson in the following chapter or incident—religion from the priest, politics from Gavrila, vengeance from Mitka and the Silent One, and so on. The final answer with which Kosinski leaves readers is ambiguous. At the end, the boy is losing the muteness into which the horror of the world forced him. There is evil in the world, surely, and, as the boy has seen, neither the religious nor the political solution cancels it—in fact, they often exacerbate it. The only thing that is certain is the individual.
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At another level the novel is about not merely an individual boy but also the Holocaust of World War II. The Painted Bird can be read as one of the most powerful indictments of the madness and terror of the Holocaust in literature. Although the horrors depicted in The Painted Bird are much less brutal than the actuality—no death camps or gas ovens are in the novel—they are horrible for their starkness and immediacy; they are the concrete and individual horrors of one alien child in a world gone mad. The major thematic question the novel raises is the one at the center of the Book of Job and other classic pieces of literature: What is one to make of the evil of the world? Kosinski has no clear answer—except that the novel, with all its horror, is its own answer. The boy begins to speak again; the novel is testimony to what he has witnessed—the powerful communication is that The Painted Bird exists. For all of its realistic detail, the novel also has a symbolic meaning. There are a number of incidents that have this symbolic quality—the story to which the title makes reference, for example. The painted bird is an apt symbol for the boy himself. Lekh captures a bird, paints it, and releases it. The bird’s own flock, not recognizing it, pecks the bird to death. This bird also represents all those who are marked as aliens and who thus are destroyed—including the millions in the death camps of World War II. Kosinski’s novel, in language and theme, forces readers to confront the potential horror of human behavior, without recourse to easy answers.
Steps Type of work: Novel First published: 1968 Winner of the National Book Award in 1969, Steps is experimental fiction belonging to the “new wave” school led by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet. Events dominate, and readers must participate in the action if they are to find meaning. Its unusual, brilliant tone and technique set the work apart from other fiction of its time. In 1967, Kosinski received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write the novel. His purpose, as he explained it, was to discover the self through incidents that were symbolic of the world. He said that the book’s characters and their relationships existed in a fissure of time between past and present. The significance of the title is elusive. Steps should go somewhere, but these steps seem only to travel between experiences. Some readers see the steps as a moral descent into hell, but it is certain that the author hoped that the steps would be his narrator’s progression toward self-discovery. Place-names are not given. Poland may be the setting for some of the incidents, America that for others. The author lived in both places. There is no unifying plot, no order to time. Characters are like stick figures, stripped to their bare bones. They have no personality and are nameless. Only women are allowed admirable traits. The narrator is a man trying to discover who he is in a world he considers hostile.
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Having come from a Communist country where human beings are externally controlled, he is surprised to find that there are collective forces in the new country that prevent the self from being free. Both society and religion exert control over people. Much of Kosinski’s writing is autobiographical. He spews the horrors he encountered in Poland out onto his pages in graphic form, colored dramatically by his vivid imagination. The jobs held by his narrator are jobs that Kosinski, too, held at various times. An outgrowth of his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), in which he was a child, Steps shows the author as a young man. The incidents seem disconnected, like a mirror that has been broken and the fragments scattered. If the protagonist could only find the pieces and put them together again, perhaps he could look into the reflective surface and see himself clearly. His self is shattered like the narrative, and the chaotic society in which he lives seems shattered as well. A former photographer, Kosinski records each event in visual detail as a camera would see it. He uses sight to achieve neutrality. The book is almost totally without emotion. The theme of the book may be that brutality and violence are so destructive that they make life meaningless. Dispassionate acceptance of crude, degrading acts in an uncaring world gives tremendous power to the narrative. Distinguished by a commanding structure, poetic prose, and, despite its portrayal of depravity, an underlying morality, the work has been called existential. Its epigraph from the Bhagavad Gita (c. fifth century b.c.e.) indicates that the author hoped for peace and happiness to be restored to human life. That cannot occur if manipulative sex and brutal violence are the sum total of an individual’s experience. The stark reality of this powerful novel is an admonition to modern society that bizarre relationships and fragmented experiences are capable of destroying the self.
Suggested Readings Bruss, Paul. Victims: Textual Strategies in Recent American Fiction. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Everman, Welch D. Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991. Fein, Richard J. “Jerzy Kosinski.” In Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson. London: St. James Press, 1976. Lavers, Norman. Jerzy Kosinski. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Lilly, Paul R., Jr. Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988. Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Plays of Passion, Games of Chance: Jerzy Kosinski and His Fiction. Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1988. Sloan, James Park. Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography. New York: Dutton, 1996. Tepa Lupack, Barbara, ed. Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Contributors: Norman Lavers, Charles L. P. Silet, David Peck, and Josephine Raburn
Stanley Kunitz Born: Worcester, Massachusetts; July 29, 1905 Died: New York, New York; May 14, 2006 Jewish
Kunitz achieves a complexity and coherence unique in lyric poetry. Principal works poetry: Intellectual Things, 1930; Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, 1944; Selected Poems, 1928-1958, 1958; The Testing-Tree: Poems, 1971; The Coat Without a Seam: Sixty Poems, 1930-1972, 1974; The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems, 1940-1970, 1974; The Lincoln Relics, 1978; The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, 1979; The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, 1983; Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, 1995; The Collected Poems, 2000 translations: Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace, 1967 (with others; of Andrei Voznesensky’s poetry); Stolen Apples, 1971 (with others; of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry); Poems of Akhmatova, 1973 (of Anna Akhmatova; with Max Hayward); Story Under Full Sail, 1974 (of Voznesensky’s poetry); Orchard Lamps, 1978 (of Ivan Drach’s poetry) nonfiction: A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly: Essays and Conversations, 1975; Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, 1993 (Stanley Moss, editor) edited texts: Living Authors: A Book of Biographies, 1931; Authors Today and Yesterday: A Companion Volume to “Living Authors,” 1933 (with Howard Haycraft and Wilbur C. Hadden); The Junior Book of Authors, 1934, 2d edition 1951 (with Haycraft); British Authors of the Nineteenth Century, 1936 (with Haycraft); American Authors, 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature, 1938 (with Haycraft); Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, 1942, 7th edition 1973 (with Haycraft); British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, 1952 (with Haycraft); Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, First Supplement, 1955, 7th edition 1990 (with Vineta Colby); European Authors, 1000-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of European Literature, 1967 (with Colby); Contemporary Poetry in America, 1973; The Essential Blake, 1987; The Wild Card: Selected Poems, Early and Late, 1998 (with David Ignatow); The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, 2005 (with Genine Lentine) miscellaneous: Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, 1985 657
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The son of immigrants, Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (KEW-nihtz) was born July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Kunitz’s father, Solomon, descended from Russian Sephardic Jews, committed suicide shortly before Stanley was born—an event that was to haunt the poet and that stands behind some of his most important and best-known poems. His mother, Yetta Helen, of Lithuanian descent, opened a dry goods store to support herself, her son, and two older daughters and to repay accumulated debts. Reared principally by his sisters and a succession of nurses, Kunitz grew up with his father’s book collection, into which, as he put it, he would “passionately burrow.” Though his mother shortly remarried, his stepfather, of whom he was fond, died before Kunitz reached his teens. Educated in Worcester public schools, Kunitz edited the high school magazine, played tennis, and was graduated valedictorian of his class. Winning a scholarship to Harvard, Kunitz majored in English and began to write poetry, subsequently winning the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for poetry in 1926. He was graduated summa cum laude in the same year, and he took his M.A. degree from Harvard the following year. He worked briefly as a Sunday feature writer for the Worcester Telegram, where he had worked summers during college. He also completed a novel, which he later “heroically destroyed.” In 1927, Kunitz joined the H. W. Wilson Company as an editor. With Wilson’s encouragement, he became editor of the Wilson Bulletin, a library publication (later known as the Wilson Library Bulletin). While at Wilson, he edited a series of reference books, including Authors Today and Yesterday: A Companion Volume to “Living Authors” (1933; with Howard Haycraft and Wilbur C. Hadden), British Authors of the Nineteenth Century (1936; with Haycraft), American Authors, 16001900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature (1938), and Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (1942; with Haycraft). In 1930, Kunitz married Helen Pearse (they were divorced in 1937) and published his first collection of poems, Intellectual Things. The book was enthusiastically received by reviewers. Writing in Saturday Review of Literature, William Rose Benét observed, “Mr. Kunitz has gained the front rank of contemporary verse in a single stride.” In 1939, Kunitz married a former actress, Eleanor Evans (from whom he was divorced in 1958), a union that produced his only child, Gretchen. Kunitz’s tenure with the H. W. Wilson Company was interrupted by World War II, during which he served as a noncommissioned officer in charge of information and education in the Air Transport Command. His second collection, Passport to the War: A Selection of Poems, appeared in 1944. A reviewer of that volume for The New York Times Book Review noted, “Kunitz has now (it seems) every instrument necessary to the poetic analysis of modern experience.” Kunitz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945 and began a second career as an itinerant teacher, first at Bennington College, at the behest of his friend, the poet Theodore Roethke, then at a succession of colleges and universities, including the State University of New York at Potsdam, the New School for Social Research, Queens College, Brandeis University, the University of Washington, Yale University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University’s Camden Campus.
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In 1958, Kunitz married the artist Elise Asher, published Selected Poems, 1928-1958, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1959, and received grants from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Ford Foundation. During the 1960’s, though based in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, Kunitz was a Danforth Visiting Lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States. He also lectured in the Soviet Union, Poland, Senegal, and Ghana. In 1964, he edited a volume of the poems of John Keats and two years later translated selections from Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky’s Antiworlds and the Fifth Ace. He continued to edit for the Wilson Company (with Vineta Colby, European Authors: 1000-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of European LiteraStanley Kunitz (Library of Congress) ture, 1967) and coedited a memorial volume of essays on the poet Randall Jarrell. In 1968, along with artist Robert Motherwell and novelist Norman Mailer, he helped found the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a resident community of young artists and writers, and in 1969 he assumed the general editorship of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The Testing-Tree, a volume of poems and translations, appeared in 1971, prompting Robert Lowell to assert in The New York Times Book Review, “once again, Kunitz tops the crowd, the old iron brought to the white heat of simplicity.” In 1974, Kunitz was awarded one of the nation’s top official literary honors when he was appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. In addition to The Testing-Tree and the collection The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978, a book of essays and conversations titled A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly, as well as three volumes of translations, appeared during the 1970’s. Kunitz published a thematic volume of old and new poems, The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems, in a limited edition in 1983, with the new poems later incorporated in Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays, published in 1985. In recognition of his lifetime achievement, Kunitz was chosen as the first New York State poet, for the term 1987-1989. In 1996, President Bill Clinton presented Kunitz with a National Medal of Arts. Kunitz’s next volume of poems, Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995. In 1998, he received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Two years later, in 2000, Con-
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gress named Kunitz the poet laureate of the United States, a post that carries a oneyear term and provides its incumbent with an office in the Library of Congress and a stipend of $35,000 for the year. His wife died in 2004, and Kunitz followed her two years later, dying at his Manhattan home.
“Father and Son” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1944, in Passport to War: A Selection of Poems “Father and Son” is about the desire for a source of psychological and spiritual certitude. It is also about the acute frustration in the individual prematurely deprived of one who could have provided it. Yet the poem is not for the fatherless or orphaned alone. In the ordinary course of life, everyone loses his or her parents. Later, one may yearn, consciously or not, for a bygone security that they represent. Such feeling does not require that security to have existed in fact. It is fueled by loss and by the alienation and dissolution that often follow from it. Moreover, the one lost may or may not have possessed the love requisite to this need. The two-line stanza that concludes the poem reveals the fruit of the son’s entreaties—a vision of the father’s skull. Nothing remains to be conveyed. The brevity of this climax and denouement is arresting. The son’s yearning and his belief in his father’s love make “the white ignorant hollow of his face” an unexpected and shocking final image. Does the concluding couplet, then, cynically denigrate this yearning? Probably not, because this desire and its gratification are imagined as in a dream, suggesting their unconscious nature. The voice of the poem is not engaged in a realistic social exchange. What the son finally realizes is not the sort of rebuff one gets from an impatient realist. It is more like the half-conscious, desultory insight that follows a dream embodying some personal unhappiness. Such an insight could be as salutary in the long run as it is disquieting for the moment. Maturity finally requires one to acknowledge that a dead source of surety cannot be otherwise. In addition, an absolute and dead guarantor of one’s well-being, by its magical, unconscious empowerment, enslaves one. (The dead father’s “indomitable love” has kept the son in “chains.”) One may esteem that love, real or not, but one wishes the person who seeks it free of bondage as well. Thus, the terrible experience of the “white ignorant hollow” is ultimately liberating. Learning to live independently of perfect guidance is often a painful experience, but it vitalizes one’s autonomy and self-reliance. The son is finally free to be a real moral agent, to act through his own judgment, even ignorance, there being no morally omniscient guide anyway, as the innocently “ignorant . . . face” makes clear.
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“Three Floors” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1971, in The Testing-Tree “Three Floors” is a short formal poem; divided into four rhyming stanzas, it resembles a ballad or hymn. The title suggests the interior of a house and raises the question of what is happening on each floor. The reader is thus led to expect some contrast or tension. “Three Floors” is one of several poems in which Kunitz mentions his father—or rather the felt absence of his father. In the final stanza, the poem itself becomes a vehicle for the imagination, creating a father for the son. The child adds the possessive pronoun and the lowercase (“my father”—he cannot call him “Father”) as he wills him into being. The father is “flying,” though. Even as he is apprehended, he seems to be leaving. In a frenzy, the child perceives an elemental loss where the external world reflects his own amorphous grief. Loss is at the heart of this poem. The mother is hardly real as she hovers on the other side of the door. The sister is soon to be lost, and the child is all too aware of her impending marriage. The father has never been there at all; he becomes a mystery to be solved. The child picks at the metaphorical lock of the family, hoping to discover his own identity. In the trunk, he finds only a hat that suggests a secret adult male society and a walking stick, with its implications of freedom and mobility. These powerful absences add up to a very real (if imagined) presence. The sister has a fiancé—a “doughboy,” or soldier—who has recently asked her to marry him. The boy listens as she plays the piano, one sound over and over, Warum. The word means “why” in German. The sister plays the song, almost absentmindedly, thinking of her soldier and the war. Behind loss is the question “Why?” The question, along with its rhythm, pervades the poem, establishing a fatal sense that some things have no reason. The father’s death, the mother’s anger, the child’s internalized conflict—nothing makes sense. Without an answer, the child is fated to ask this question throughout his life. The imaginative act, then, is seen as a way of discovering meaning—of making a divided house, however briefly, whole. In sixteen lines, “Three Floors” has peopled the house with ghosts: The mother is sensed but not seen, the sister is remembered as a scrap of song, and the few vestiges of the father are locked in a trunk. The small boy is literally caught in the middle between the past (his father’s loss) and the future (his sister’s marriage, his own manhood). The poet re-creates the various claims on his affections as he presents the immediate moment of the poem—the darkness and the visionary sight of his father flying. His private thoughts are depicted as turbulent, guilty, and psychologically necessary. The reader is drawn into the poem’s emotional complex in such a way that childhood itself, with all of its confusions, is awakened in memory.
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Suggested Readings Barber, David. “A Visionary Poet at Ninety.” The Atlantic Monthly 277, no. 6 (June, 1996): 113-120. Braham, Jeanne, ed. The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Kunitz. Engravings by Barry Moser. Boston: David R. Godine, 2007. Campbell, Robert. “God, Man, and Whale: Stanley Kunitz’s Collected Poems Show His Work Is All of a Piece.” The New York Times Book Review 150 (October 1, 2000): 16. Henault, Marie. Stanley Kunitz. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Kunitz, Stanley. Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz. Edited by Stanley Moss. Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 1993. _______. “Translating Anna Akhmatova: A Conversation with Stanley Kunitz.” Interview by Daniel Weissbort. In Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, edited by Weissbort. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Orr, Gregory. Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Plummer, William. “New Beginnings: At Ninety-five, Fledgling Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz Finds Fresh Wood.” People Weekly 54 (October 30, 2000): 159-160. Vinson, James, ed. Contemporary Poets. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Weisberg, Robert. “Stanley Kunitz: The Stubborn Middle Way.” Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring, 1975): 49-57. Contributors: David Rigsbee, David M. Heaton, and Judith Kitchen
Tony Kushner Born: New York, New York; July 16, 1956 Jewish
Kushner’s work brings together issues of national politics, sexuality, and community. Principal works children’s literature: Brundibar, 2002 (illustrated by Maurice Sendak) drama: A Bright Room Called Day, pr. 1985, pb. 1991; Yes Yes No No, pr. 1985, pb. 1987 (children’s play); Hydriotaphia: Or, The Death of Dr. Browne, pr. 1987, pb. 2000; Stella, pr. 1987 (adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play); The Illusion, pr. 1988, pb. 1992 (adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s play L’Illusion comique); Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part One: Millenium Approaches), pr. 1991, pb. 1992; Widows, pr. 1991 (with Ariel Dorfman; adaptation of Dorfman’s novel); Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part Two: Perestroika), pr. 1992, pb. 1993, revised pb. 1996; Slavs! (Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness), pr. 1994, pb. 1995; The Good Person of Setzuan, pr. 1994 (adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play); A Dybbuk: Or, Between Two Worlds, pr. 1997, pb. 1998 (adaptation of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk); Terminating: Or, Lass Meine schmerzen nicht verloren sein, Or, Ambivalence, pr., pb. 1998 (adaptation of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 75); Death and Taxes: Hydriotaphia, and Other Plays, pb. 2000 (includes Reverse Transcription, Hydriotaphia, G. David Schine in Hell, Notes on Akiba, Terminating, and East Code Ode to Howard Jarvis); Homebody/Kabul, pr. 2001, pb. 2002, revised pb. 2004; Caroline, or Change, pr. 2003, pb. 2004 (book and lyrics by Kushner; music by Jeanine Tesori) nonfiction: Tony Kushner in Conversation, 1998 (Robert Vorlicky, editor); The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present, 2003 edited texts: Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 2003 (with Alisa Solomon) miscellaneous: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer, 1995 Tony Kushner (KOOSH-nur) grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His parents, musicians, immersed him in culture, leftist politics, and the arts. He returned to New York City, his birthplace, to attend Columbia University, where he studied medieval history, developed an interest in Marxist thought, and began to come to terms 663
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with his homosexuality. He underwent psychoanalysis during his early years in New York, attempting to “cure” himself of being gay. After graduating from Columbia in 1978, Kushner earned a Master in Fine Arts degree in directing from New York University in 1984. Kushner is best known for Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, a play about life in Ronald Reagan’s America and the pandemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Much of Angels in America—and of Kushner’s other work—focuses on political thought, especially the connections between world history and contemporary politics. Kushner’s first major play, A Bright Room Called Day, uses an arTony Kushner (Columbia University/Courtesy, Jay Thompson) tistic character to draw explicit links between the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930’s and what Kushner saw as the smothering conservatism of the 1980’s. Slavs!, Kushner’s sequel to Angels in America, opens with a character from Perestroika, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Perlapsarianov, the world’s oldest Bolshevik. The play focuses on a postsocialist world in which leftist politics has lost out to its more conservative counterparts. Kushner sees the loss of the Left to be a loss of hope and a foreboding of a dangerous, heartless future. These themes are also developed in Angels in America, but in Slavs! Kushner does not use sexuality as a major symbol, although two main characters of Slavs! are a lesbian couple. Kushner writes what he has referred to as Theater of the Fabulous. His plots examine the close relationship between the public, political world and the private lives of people. An activist who has been arrested more than once at demonstrations against government inaction in the face of the AIDS crisis, Kushner sees himself as an inheritor of Bertolt Brecht’s explicitly political theater. In order for theater to be socially relevant, moving, and artistically successful, Kushner believes that theater must be confrontational, that it must not leave its audience comfortable or satisfied with the status quo. Theater, for Kushner, is an art of engagement, with politics, with issues, and with audiences—and theater is always political.
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Angels in America Type of work: Drama First produced: Millenium Approaches, 1991, pb. 1992 (part 1); Perestroika, 1992, pb. 1993 (part 2) A two-part, seven-hour play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is an epic of life in America in the mid-1980’s. In the play, self-interest has overtaken love and compassion, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is decimating the gay male population, and victory in the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives seems to be going to the conservatives. Kushner’s leftist politics are unmistakably present in his play, but Angels in America is not a polemic. Instead, it is a fantastic journey through the lives of two couples. One couple is Louis, a Jewish word processor, and Prior Walter, a former drag queen who has AIDS. The other is Joe Pitt, a Mormon republican and lawyer, and his wife, Harper. Another key player is the ethically questionable lawyer Roy Cohn, a dramatized version of the real person. (Cohn was counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the “Communist witch-hunts” of the 1950’s.) Cohn is dying of AIDS and is in the process of being disbarred. Angels in America uses AIDS as a metaphor for an investigation of life in the 1980’s. Kushner views the greed of that era as having frightening implications for personal relations. Louis spouts grand ideas in bombastic speeches but flees when faced with a lover who has AIDS. Louis is unable to face the responsibilities associated with caring for a person with AIDS. Joe, who becomes Louis’s lover, abandons his wife, deciding that he can no longer repress his homosexuality. Cohn tries to enlist Joe’s help in stopping the disbarment process by getting Joe a job in the Reagan administration, but Joe refuses. Prior, the protagonist, is the character who suffers most. As AIDS-related complications jeopardize his health, he becomes more panicked. He also becomes a prophet after being visited by an angel at the end of part 1, Millenium Approaches. With the help of Hannah Pitt, Joe’s mother, he learns how to resist the Angel and how to make the Angel bless him. In spite of his failing health, Prior tells the Angel: “We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate. . . . Bless me anyway. I want more life.” This message of hope, near the end of part 2, Perestroika, affirms the movement of the play toward the interconnectedness of people across boundaries of race, religion, sexuality, or ideology. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg say kaddish over the dead body of Cohn. Hannah, a devout Mormon, nurses Prior, a stranger to her. Belize, a black, gay nurse, advises Cohn on his medical treatment. Louis and Prior get back together, as the epilogue reveals.
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Suggested Readings Brask, Per, ed. Essays on Kushner’s Angels. Winnipeg, Man.: Blizzard, 1995. Felman, Jyl Lynn. “Lost Jewish (Male) Souls: A Midrash on Angels in America.” Tikkun 10, no. 3 (May, 1995): 27-30. Fisher, James. The Theater of Tony Kushner. New York: Routledge, 2002. _______, ed. Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Geis, Deborah R., and Stephen F. Kruger. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on “Angels in America.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Kushner, Tony. Interview by David Savran. In Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Osborn, M. Elizabeth, Terrence McNally, and Lanford Wilson. The Way We Live Now: American Plays and the AIDS Crisis. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990. Vorlicky, Robert, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation (Triangulations). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Contributor: Chris Freeman
Jhumpa Lahiri Born: London, England; July 11, 1967 South Asian American
The child of Bengali immigrants, Lahiri writes with a luminous, graceful style that presents the mythic significance of food, ethnic customs, and other details of daily life. Principal works long fiction: The Namesake, 2003 short fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999; Unaccustomed Earth, 2008 nonfiction: Accursed Palace: The Italian Palazzo on the Jacobean Stage, 16031625, 1997 Jhumpa Lahiri (JEWM-pah lah-HIH-ree) was born in London on July 11, 1967, to Bengali parents originally from Calcutta. Her mother, a teacher, and her father, a librarian, immigrated to the United States when she was a child, and Lahiri grew up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. She was a shy child, uncomfortable in groups, who started writing ten-page “novels” during recess with friends, quiet girls like her who enjoyed stories. In one interview, Lahiri said she always hoped for rainy days so she could stay inside and write instead of having to run around the playground. In high school, Lahiri stopped writing fiction, for she had no confidence in her ability in the form, and instead wrote articles for the high school newspaper. In college, she took some creative writing classes but still felt she might never succeed in writing fiction and thus decided to be an academic. After being turned down by a number of graduate schools, she got a job as a research assistant at a nonprofit organization, discovered the ease of writing with a computer, and began writing fiction again. A second-generation immigrant, Lahiri found it difficult having parents who, even after living abroad for thirty years, still considered India home. She said she inherited a sense of exile from her parents, even though she felt more American than they. Lahiri, realizing that loneliness and a sense of alienation are hard for immigrant parents, thought that the problem for their children was that they feel neither one thing nor the other. Having visited India often, Lahiri said she never felt any more at home there than she did in the United States. Much of Lahiri’s time spent in Calcutta as a child was with her grandmother, which she said made it possible for her to experience solitude and which also encouraged her to see things from different points of view. Being a second-generation 667
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American did not make her want to be a writer so much as it made her want to write, to seek solace by recording her observations in a place where she answered only to herself. The act of writing made it possible, she said, to withdraw into herself. Because Lahiri went to Calcutta neither as a tourist nor as a former resident, she learned to observe things as an outsider, even though she felt she belonged there in some fundamental way. She said her first stories were set in Calcutta as a result of this combination of distance and intimacy. However, she claimed never to have thought consciously of trying to deal with questions of cultural identify in her writing as much as simply beginning with a conflict in a character’s life. Lahiri received her B.A. from Barnard College in New York City in 1989 and subsequently enrolled in Boston University’s creative writing program, from which she received her M.A. in 1993. Lahiri also received an M.A. in English and an M.A. in comparative literature and the arts from Boston University. She earned her doctorate in Renaissance studies from Boston University in 1997 but decided she wanted to write fiction. She said that she worked for the Ph.D. out of a sense of duty and practicality, but pursuing it was never something she loved. She wrote stories on the side while doing the research for her dissertation. Lahiri worked in the summer of 1997 at Boston magazine as an intern, doing routine tasks and writing news stories. She received a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she studied in 1997 and 1998. The experience at Provincetown changed everything: In seven months’ time she got an agent, had a story published in The New Yorker, and got a book contract. The title story of Lahiri’s collection of stories Interpreter of Maladies was included in both Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. The New Yorker named her one of the twenty best writers under the age of forty. She won the Transatlantic Review award from the Henfield Foundation, the Louisiana Review Award for Short Fiction, a fiction prize from The Louisville Review, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and ultimately the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies in 2000.
The Namesake Type of work: Novel First published: 2003 The Namesake, Lahiri’s first novel, fulfilled the promise of her short stories. The Namesake portrays both the immigrant experience in America and the complexity of family loyalties that underlies all human experience. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, after an arranged marriage in India, immigrate to America where Ashoke achieves his dream of an engineering degree and a tenured position in a New England college. Their son Gogol, named for the Russian writer, rejects both his unique name and his Bengali heritage. In a scene central to the novel’s theme, Ashoke gives his son a volume of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories for his fourteenth birthday, hoping to explain the book’s sig-
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nificance in his own life. Gogol, a thoroughly Americanized teenager, is indifferent, preoccupied with his favorite Beatles recording. Such quietly revealing moments give the narrative its emotional power. The loneliness of lives lived in exile is most poignantly revealed in the late-night family telephone calls from India, always an announcement of illness or death. Gogol earns his degree in architecture, but happiness in love eludes him. An intense love affair with Maxine draws him into a wealthy American family, revealing the extreme contrasts between American and Indian family values. Gogol’s marriage to Moushumi, who shares his Indian heritage, ends in divorce. Lahiri’s conclusion achieves a fine balance. Ashima, now a widow, sells the family home and will divide her time between America and Calcutta. Gogol, at thirty-two, discovers in his father’s gift of Gogol’s short stories a temporary reconciliation with his name and the heritage he has rejected.
Suggested Readings Bellafante, Ginia. “Windows into Life.” Time 154 (August 2, 1999): 91. Crain, Caleb. “Subcontinental Drift.” The New York Times Book Review, July 11, 1999, 11-12. Curtis, Sarah. “Strangers and Neighbours.” The Times Literary Supplement, October 22, 1999, 25. Flynn, Sean. “Jhumpa Lahiri.” Esquire 134 (October, 2000): 172. “Jhumpa Lahiri.” People 54 (December 25, 2000): 138. Kakutani, Michiko. “Liking America, but Longing for India.” The New York Times, August 6, 1999, p. E48. Keesey, Anna. “Four New Collections Show the Elastic Quality of Short Fiction.” The Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1999, p. 4. O’Grady, Megan. Review of Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Village Voice 104 (April 19, 1999): 59-60. Todd, Tamsin. “At the Corner Delhi.” The Washington Post, October 7, 1999, p. C8. Contributor: Charles E. May
Nella Larsen Born: Chicago, Illinois; April 13, 1891 Died: New York, New York; March 30, 1964 African American
Larsen’s novels are among the first to portray realistically the dilemma of identity for biracial women. Principal works long fiction: Quicksand, 1928; Passing, 1929 short fiction: “Sanctuary,” 1930 miscellaneous: An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen, 1992 (also as The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen, 2001) In common with her protagonists—Helga Crane in Quicksand and Clare Kendry in Passing—Nella Larsen, throughout her life, never thoroughly resolved the crisis of her identity. Larsen often invented details about her life to suit her audience and the effect she wanted to have on it; it may be said that she learned this habit of invention from her parents. Mystery surrounds her identity because she wanted it that way. Even in such matters as her birth certificate, school records, and early childhood whereabouts, it is possible that no absolutely definitive history will arise. Thadious M. Davis, in the biography Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled, makes a thorough summary of the information available on the basics of Larsen’s identity. Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker, child of a Danish woman and a cook designated as “colored.” The baby was designated, therefore, as “colored.” When the girl entered school, she did so under the name Nellie Larson. It is possible that her supposed stepfather, Peter Larson, was in fact the same person as her “colored” father, Peter Walker, and that Peter Walker had begun to pass for white. Nellie Larson also attended school as Nelleye Larson. In 1907, she began to use the surname Larsen. The 1910 census of her household does not include her (her officially white sister, Anna, is mentioned), perhaps because her birth certificate, with the word “colored,” was being disassociated from the family. Later, she adopted the first name Nella; with marriage, she became Nella Larsen Imes. Larsen thus had considerable experience in her life with such issues as passing and identity. After completing a nursing degree at Lincoln Hospital, Larsen worked as a nurse at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. As does her character Helga, Larsen quickly tired of the uplifting philosophy at Tuskegee and headed north. Larsen worked for 670
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the New York City Department of Health and married Elmer S. Imes. Between 1921 and 1926, Larsen worked for the New York City Public Library in Harlem. There, Larsen became involved with Harlem Renaissance writers, capturing her own following with the publication of several critically acclaimed short stories. Shortly afterward, Larsen wrote Quicksand, a novel for which she was awarded a Harmon Award in literature. Following the success of this book and her next novel, Passing, Larsen became the first African American woman to receive the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Her popularity ended, however, with the public embarrassment of being accused in 1930 of plagiarizing one of her short stories, “Sanctuary,” and a messy divorce from Nella Larsen (Department of State) her husband, whose unfaithfulness was the talk of the town. Larsen’s readership abandoned her, and she retreated to nursing at New York City’s Gouverneur Hospital, transferring to Metropolitan Hospital in 1961. In 1963, she endured a period of depression that may have been because her white sister (or perhaps half sister) had shunned Larsen for the last of many times. In 1964, her absence from work being noted, Larsen was found dead in her apartment. Larsen enjoyed literary success only briefly during her lifetime. Her literary talents and achievements went largely unrecognized until reappraisal of women’s literature elevated her works as contributing a distinctive voice to American literature.
Quicksand Type of work: Novel First published: 1928 Quicksand, Larsen’s masterpiece, is the story of Helga Crane’s quest, through a series of excursions in black and white society, for racial identity and acceptance. Her rejection by her black father and by her white stepfather and her mother’s early death leave Helga an orphan subject to the charity of white relatives, who pay for her education.
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Helga’s search begins with her brief tenure at Naxos, a Southern black college, where she fails to assimilate the racial attitudes of middle-class educated blacks there who expound the philosophy of racial uplift. She escapes to Chicago and then New York. Despite associations with middle-class blacks there, she still feels detached from the culture. A monetary gift from her uncle and his advice to visit her mother’s sister in Denmark take Helga abroad. In Denmark, Helga rejects becoming her relatives’ social showpiece of primitivism and a marriage proposal from an artist who sees in Helga “the warm, impulsive nature of the women of Africa” and “the soul of a prostitute.” Hearing a Negro spiritual at a symphony concert, Helga can no longer resist returning to America. When she returns, she finds that Robert Anderson, her only love interest, has married her mentor. Anderson underscores Helga’s alienation when, despite his clandestine sexual advances, he rejects her. Devastated, Helga finds herself at a storefront revival, where she experiences a spiritual conversion. The intensity of emotion and her weak health occasion her meeting the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, a scurrilous “jack-leg” preacher who takes advantage of this opportunity to gain a wife and sexual partner. Transplanted to the South and drowning in the domestic hell of babies and marriage, Helga bids an angry and bitter farewell to her dreams and resigns herself to “the quagmire in which she had engulfed herself.” She resolves to get out of her predicament, but she understands “that this wasn’t new. . . . [S]omething like it she had experienced before.” Life offers no healing balm for Helga, as her journey ends in the squalor of a filthy house, the revulsion she feels for her slovenly, lecherous husband, and her ultimate failure to find any redeeming purpose or value for her life. Larsen’s character is more than the archetypal tragic mulatto. Helga’s restlessness and predictable flights from her cultural surroundings portray a woman uncomfortable with and deeply confused about her identity. Larsen was among the first to render depth and dimension to the emotional and physical motivations for her mixed-race characters’ actions.
Passing Type of work: Novel First published: 1929 Like Quicksand, Passing centers on the marginalization of African American women. Some literary critics have maintained that Larsen’s choice of title—and, indeed, the book’s main theme—only strengthens the effect of the characters’ isolation. However, most scholars consider the novel to be the finest treatment of the concept of hidden racial identity in modern American literature. The novel’s protagonist, Clare Kendry, escaped from cruel, racist aunts by “passing”—that is, by using her light skin color to join the white community and to adopt a white identity. Her childhood friend, Irene Redfield, lives her life in fear and carefully avoids any hint of danger. Seeking a safe lifestyle, she has married,
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but her marriage hangs by a thread. She does, however, take an active role in Harlem’s middle-class black society, and it is through her friendship with Redfield that Kendry begins to rediscover her identity as an African American. The women are able to maintain their friendship despite Kendry’s absorption into white society, and Redfield does not chastise her friend for her decision. In fact, the women are first reunited at a party at which Irene herself has “passed” as white in order to seek refuge from the tumult of Chicago’s rough neighborhoods. Larsen is careful to point out that Kendry’s life as a white woman is far from idyllic. In some ways, any advantage Kendry might have had as a white person is replaced in her mind by the disadvantages created by her lack of money (compared to her relatively prosperous white acquaintances). She seeks comfort in Redfield’s Harlem, but her period of self-exploration comes to an abrupt halt when her husband, John Bellew, discovers Kendry’s real identity and rejects her entirely. Much hinges on the novel’s climax, in which Kendry attends a Christmas party with Redfield and her husband Brian. Redfield has become increasingly jealous of the affection between her husband and her friend and begins to feel that Kendry may be trying to dissolve her marriage. As the party continues, Kendry falls from a sixthfloor window and is killed. Several critics, though, have argued that she was pushed by Redfield. In many ways, the success of this scene (and the novel as a whole) rests on Larsen’s depiction of the relationship between the two women. When Kendry’s husband storms into the party, calling his wife a “damned nigger,” Redfield rushes to her friend’s side in a gesture that seems, on its surface, to be a loving act of defense. However, Larsen reveals Redfield’s thoughts: “One thought possessed her. She couldn’t have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free.” Redfield’s well-being is dependent on her friend’s entrapment; Redfield is unable to draw any kind of distinction between her desire for and her desire to be Kendry, nor is she able to reconcile these desires. The complex web that Larsen constructs around and between these four characters (but most especially between the two women) is further tangled by the novel’s lack of resolution. It never becomes clear whether Kendry was killed or whether she killed herself. The reader is left unsatisfied, unless he or she can be satisfied with ambiguity, as Larsen had to be in her own life.
Suggested Readings Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd Mead, 1984. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Defalco, Amelia. “Jungle Creatures and Dancing Apes: Modern Primitivism and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 38, no. 2 (June, 2005): 19-25. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
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Knadler, Stephen. “Domestic Violence in the Harlem Renaissance: Remaking the Record in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review 38, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 99-118. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Miller, Erika M. The Other Reconstruction. New York: Garland, 2000. Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923-1933. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995. Contributors: Betty L. Hart and Anna A. Moore
Evelyn Lau Born: Vancouver, Canada; July 2, 1971 Chinese American
Lau’s writing features young women, often entangled in prostitution, drug abuse, and bizarre sexual subcultures, who are in search of love and acceptance. Principal works long fiction: Other Women, 1995 poetry: You Are Not Who You Claim, 1990; Oedipal Dreams, 1992; In the House of Slaves, 1994 short fiction: Fresh Girls, and Other Stories, 1993; Choose Me: Stories, 1999 nonfiction: Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, 1989; Inside Out: Reflections on a Life So Far, 2001 Evelyn Lau started to write when she was six years old in 1977; at fourteen, her selfdescribed obsession with writing led her to run away from her Chinese Canadian family, who did not permit her to pursue this passion. Keeping journals and penning poetry kept Lau’s spirit alive while she descended into a nightmare world of juvenile prostitution, rampant drug abuse, and homelessness. Lau left the streets at sixteen, and wrote Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989) about her experience. She also published her first collection of poetry, You Are Not Who You Claim, in which her harrowing ordeals find artistic expression. The persona of Lau’s poetry is often a woman who resembles Lau, and her voice hauntingly evokes the mostly futile search for human warmth and genuine affection in a nightmare adult world. In Lau’s poetry and fiction, lovemaking can end sadly. Thus, “Two Smokers” ends on a note of complete alienation: While the sleeping lover of the persona “gropes at the wall” and “finds flesh in his dreams,” the woman “watches the trail of smoke” from her cigarette “drift towards the ceiling,/ hesitate, fall apart.” The haunting lucidity, freshness of imagination, and stunning power of Lau’s writings have earned for her important literary prizes. Her first poetry collection won the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry award, and her second collection, Oedipal Dreams, which contains many interrelated poems reflecting on a young woman’s relationship with her married psychiatrist and lover, was nominated for the GovernorGeneral’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor. Perhaps most important, Lau’s youth has given her writing a sharp awareness of the startling coexistence of mainstream and alternative lifestyles. Her poems and stories feature many a professional 675
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man who shows pictures of his children to the teenage sex worker whom he has hired to be his dominatrix. Similarly, the persona of In the House of Slaves watches a squirrel as a customer drips hot wax on her body. As has the author, the main character of In the House of Slaves has lived simultaneously in the world of pop culture adolescence and in hell.
Runaway Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1989 Based on the journals that Lau kept, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid chronicles her two-year experience as a young Chinese Canadian woman who left home because she could no longer stand her parents’ oppression of her desires to write poetry. She sought to be anything but an obsessively studious, meekly obedient model pupil. Runaway became Lau’s start in a successful career as a young writer. After telling of her terrible life at home in a prologue, Lau’s autobiography opens on the first day after she ran away from home: March 22, 1988. Staying with friends at first, she attempts suicide on the day she is turned in to the authorities. Recovering at a mental hospital, Lau falls into Canada’s well-developed social safety net designed to rescue troubled teenagers. For months, Lau tries to put distance between her old and new selves as she selfdestructively experiments with drugs and sex. Twice she goes to the United States only to turn herself in to be shipped back home to Vancouver. She frustrates social workers and her two psychiatrists, who are unable to prevent her descent into teenage prostitution and drug abuse. Throughout the chronicle of Lau’s ordeal, the reader becomes aware of her extremely low self-esteem and her self-loathing, which her parents’ perfectionistic behavior has instilled in her. The reader almost cries out in despair at Lau’s inability to value herself, even as her budding career as a writer begins with awards and letters of acceptance for her poetry. Despite her ability to keep up with her writing and her occasionally seeing her position with lucidity, Lau refuses to stop hurting herself. She becomes attached to unsuitable men such as Larry, a drug addict on a government-sponsored recovery program, which he abuses with cunning. To keep Lau, Larry provides her the potent pharmaceuticals without which she could not abide his presence. In the end, Lau frees herself of Larry, lives on her own in a state-provided apartment, and readies herself for college. Her writing has sustained her through dark hours, and, at sixteen, she is only a short time away from turning the journals into a manuscript. Runaway does not have a real closure. The reader leaves Lau as she seems to have overcome the worst of her self-abusive behavior, yet her life is still a puzzle waiting to be sorted out completely. In the epilogue added in a 1995 edition, Lau provides a firm sense that she has found a way out of the crisis of her adolescent life.
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Fresh Girls, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1993 Fresh Girls, and Other Stories, Lau’s collection of short stories, centers on young women who seek love and human affection in a netherworld of prostitution and bizarre, alternative sexual lifestyles. Many of the stories’ protagonists live on two or more levels. They often wear a mask during the sex work they perform but have retained a different identity in which they long for a more conventional life and for loving acceptance. Lau’s stories are told from the perspective of the young women, who chase after a dream that continues to elude them. The reader is made to share, for example, the sadness of the drug-addicted teenage narrator of the title story. Looking around the massage parlor where she works, she suddenly recognizes that, although many of her friends still look nice in regular clothes and outside their work, they have lost that special youthful freshness after which their clients lust with such depravity. The astonishing ease with which men and women cross from an arcane subculture of sadomasochism to a mainstream life that is officially unaware and innocent of the other world is described with brilliant sharpness in “The Session” and “Fetish Night.” Alternate identities are taken on quickly, and discarded just as easily, as young women agree to perform strange sexual acts on men who want to live out their secret fantasies and change from a position of power into that of helpless submission. A core of stories explores the unhappy relationships of young women in love with older, married men who refuse to commit to their new lovers. In these stories, a man’s wedding band takes on the identity of a weapon “branding” the narrator’s skin. Fiercely subjective in her view, the protagonist of “Mercy” feels that “we are victims of each other,” as she sexually tortures her lover on his wife’s birthday. The pain of the experience sometimes proves too much for the young women to bear. Out of a feeling of self-hatred and despair, “Glass” implies, a dejected girl cuts her wrists while she smashes her window, ready to follow the falling glass onto the street below. What gives artistic shape to Lau’s collection is her unflinching, sympathetic look at a world that is alien to most readers. Her young, often nameless narrators are allowed to speak for themselves and scrutinize their tortured identities. In Lau’s stories, the literary perspective is not that of a prurient voyeur who looks in but that of young souls who look out. Lau’s stories challenge readers to examine the abyss of their own lives.
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Suggested Readings Dieckmann, Katherina. Review of In the House of Slaves, by Evelyn Lau. Village Voice Literary Supplement, April, 1994, 32. Halim, Nadia. Review of In the House of Slaves, by Evelyn Lau. The Canadian Forum 73 (October, 1994): 41. James, Darlene. Review of Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, by Evelyn Lau. Maclean’s, November 13, 1989, 81. Contributor: R. C. Lutz
Wendy Law-Yone Born: Mandalay, Burma (now Myanmar); April 1, 1947 Asian American
Law-Yone’s novels describe the alienation caused by harsh upbringings, political turmoil, and immigration. Principal works long fiction: The Coffin Tree, 1983; Irrawaddy Tango, 1993 short fiction: “Ankle,” 1988 (in Grand Street 7.3); “Drought,” 1993 (in Slow Hand: Women Writing Erotica; Michelle Slung, editor) nonfiction: Company Information: A Model Investigation, 1980. The novels of Wendy Law-Yone (law YOH-neh) reflect the events in her turbulent life. In 1962, while a teenager in Burma, she watched her country become a military dictatorship and imprison her father, a newspaper publisher and political activist. In 1967, attempting to leave the country, she was captured and held for two weeks before being released. After living in Southeast Asia, she immigrated to America in 1973. She graduated from college two years later and worked as a writer, publishing in the Washington Post Magazine and researching and writing Company Information: A Model Investigation (1980). Her first novel, The Coffin Tree, portrays an Asian American immigrant in a different situation than that of many other novels. In many books, protagonists need to choose between, or reconcile, their native culture and American culture. LawYone’s heroine, however, lacks connections to both cultures. Growing up with no mother and a distant father, she develops no attachment to Burma and is never nostalgic. When she and her brother immigrate, however, she remains detached from and unenthusiastic about America. Unable to express or follow her own desires, she obeys her tyrannical father and grandmother in Burma and her deranged brother in America. When brother and father die, twisted logic leads her to attempt suicide to fulfill her newly “uncovered . . . identity.” Although she survives, institutional treatment engenders only a mild affirmation of life: “Living things prefer to go on living.” Irrawaddy Tango also describes a woman living more for others than herself: In a fictionalized Burma, a friend inspires her to love dancing. She marries an officer who becomes the country’s dictator; when kidnapped by rebels, she agrees to be their spokeswoman. After her rescue, she helps other refugees before drifting into homelessness in America; she then returns to publicly reconcile with the dictator. Despite her political activities, she evidences no commitment to any cause and 679
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also can express herself only by violence, finally murdering her husband. Law-Yone does not fully account for her heroines’ alienation and lack of selfesteem, though possible factors include unhappy childhoods—with cold fathers and absent mothers. Politics is also corrosive in Law-Yone’s fiction, leading parents and spouses to neglect personal relationships. Finally, fate forces some to lead unrewarding lives. The absence of easy answers in her fiction demonstrates her maturity as a writer.
The Coffin Tree Type of work: Novel First published: 1983 The Coffin Tree explores a young woman’s growth into adulthood from the perspective of two cultures: Burma and the United States. Against the backdrop of large-scale political instability and threat of war in Burma, Law-Yone depicts a subtle kind of brutality at work beneath the veneer of prosperity and efficiency in the United States. The narrator’s matter-of-fact description of the rebuffs and humiliation that she experiences in her attempt to adapt to a foreign culture is a powerful indictment of the United States’ insensitivity to its immigrant population. The narrator and her half brother Shan are educated and speak English, but this does not prevent them from being misunderstood and maligned by Americans who show no understanding that people from other cultures operate according to different codes of behavior. The Coffin Tree suggests that cruelty caused by a failure to empathize with one’s fellow human beings can take many guises. For example, the narrator’s employer in New York does not give her a chance to explain her absence from work because his thinking is controlled by negative stereotypes. He thoughtlessly fires her just when she has spent her last money on a doctor’s house call to the mentally ill Shan, who has malaria. Ultimately, however, the main focus of the novel is not on the narrator’s eventual cultural assimilation, which is glossed over in a few paragraphs, but on her inner emotional state. Her dreams are as important to her as waking reality. While not always as overtly symbolic as in her dream of the threatening half-man, half-horse whose energy, impatience, and violence are suggestive of her father, most of the dreams nevertheless disclose her anxieties and her longings. Yet, though the narrator’s explanation of her feelings and motives constitutes the novel’s reason for being, she never indulges in self-pity or self-justification. As she records events, memories, and emotions, the rapid pace and alternating settings drive the narrative forward without sentimentality. Incorporated stories and legends add a touch of the mythic to the realism of the novel. Law-Yone portrays a broad range of human experience in The Coffin Tree without straying from her central focus on the narrator’s search for meaning. The process of a young person’s developing individuality and the formation of gender roles are pervasive concerns in contemporary American society. Law-Yone
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shows that the narrator has the same basic psychological needs as young American women, even though Burmese culture dictates different practices and standards regarding communication, social interaction, and family ties. Law-Yone also reveals through her depiction of patients in a mental hospital that psychological disorders are not restricted to any one social or ethnic group but tend to be rooted in personal history and family relationships.
Irrawaddy Tango Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Irrawaddy Tango is a worthwhile successor to The Coffin Tree. Although Irrawaddy Tango is set mainly in fictitious “Daya,” the country is recognizably Myanmar, replete with repressive military dictatorship and rebel guerrillas. The novel details the picaresque career of its protagonist-narrator, Irrawaddy Tango, who seems to develop through four phases of popular archetypes of female identity: first, an Evita-like phase during which the small-town girl Tango becomes a dance champion and a dictator’s wife; second, a Patty Hearst phase during which First Lady Tango, now a wealthy socialite, is kidnapped by guerrillas and brainwashed into bonding with, bedding with, and speaking for her abductors; third, a joyless-luckless Asian American woman phase (à la Amy Tan) where she marries her American rescuer and immigrates to America only to discover anomie and alienation; and fourth, a spider woman phase in which Tango returns to Daya, empowers herself sexually, mates with the dictator (her former husband), and destroys him. Through these phases, Tango’s character develops, like the dance itself, with exhilarating dips and lifts of fortune, dizzying reversals of plot, and in movements charged with sinister power and unassuaged sensuality. Irrawaddy Tango is a tale told with brilliant flashes of detail, psychological penetration, and erotic candor. It is not flawless, however, having its longueurs of plot and a self-centered protagonist with whom it is difficult to empathize. Nevertheless, it does perform the signal service of shedding light and focusing attention upon the political plight of an often ignored area of darkness in the heart of Southeast Asia.
Suggested Readings Bow, Nancy. “Interview with Wendy Law-Yone.” MELUS 27, no. 4 (2002). Forbes, Nancy. “Burmese Days.” The Nation, April 30, 1983. Law-Yone, Wendy. “Life in the Hills.” The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1989, 24-36. Ling, Amy. “Wendy Law-Yone.” In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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Milton, Edith. “Newcomers to New York.” The New York Times Book Review, May 15, 1983. Tharoor, Shashi. “The Most Dangerous Dance.” Review of Irrawaddy Tango, by Wendy Law-Yone. The Washington Post Book World, January, 1994. Tsukiyama, Gail. “Long Journey of a Tango Queen.” Review of Irrawaddy Tango, by Wendy Law-Yone. The San Francisco Chronicle, March 20, 1994. Contributors: Gary Westfahl and Patricia L. Watson
Gus Lee Born: San Francisco, California; August 8, 1946 Chinese American
Lee’s novels capture the dilemma of an Asian American youth who tries to please the demands of two opposing cultures. Principal works long fiction: China Boy, 1991; Honor and Duty, 1994; Tiger’s Tail, 1996; No Physical Evidence, 1998 nonfiction: Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood and a Chinese Family’s Fight for Freedom, 2002 Gus Lee came to writing late in life, at age forty-five, after careers in the military and as a lawyer. In 1989, his daughter asked him a question about his mother, and that simple question led to his first book, China Boy, in 1991. Born in San Francisco in a tough black neighborhood, the Panhandle, Lee found his childhood full of danger on the streets. At home he felt divided. His father and mother had come from mainland China in the early 1940’s and were wealthy and educated. His father had a military background and had fought for the Nationalist army. His mother had been educated by Christian missionaries. Lee’s mother died when he was five years old, and his new stepmother had new ideas about the traditional Chinese ways. Lee had to fight in the streets, with the help of boxing courses he took at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). He also had to battle at home with his stepmother, who wanted him to become more American. His first novel, China Boy, uses many autobiographical events to tell the story of a young boy, Kai Ting, who is growing up in San Francisco. Skinny, weak, and timid, Kai Ting finds a friend at the neighborhood YMCA, learns self-defense, and returns to the streets with more confidence. Lee describes the early days as being very stifled by rules at home. Lee rebelled against his controlling stepmother, reading his homework but refusing to concentrate. He got good grades but was not involved. Lee’s father also attempted to direct him, objecting to the Christianity that the stepmother taught her stepson and projecting an atheistic approach that Lee felt was not right. Lee kept his mind focused on one goal: He wanted to become a West Point cadet. When he was appointed, he felt great relief, even though his life away from home as a plebe would be hellish. Lee actually found the harassment as a plebe at West Point to be easier than living at home. His second novel, Honor and Duty, also uses Kai Ting as his fictional hero and 683
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takes this character through many tough days at West Point. Kai Ting must obey the older cadets, he must study mathematics, and he must obey the West Point honor code. Coming upon a group of cadets who are cheating, Kai Ting agonizes about reporting them to the authorities, knowing that they will be removed from West Point if he informs on them. In Lee’s life, after a long tenure as an Army Command Judge Advocate and later as senior Deputy District Attorney in Sacramento, Lee found himself unfulfilled. Then his daughter’s question provoked Lee to write about an Asian American adjusting to life in the United States.
China Boy Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 China Boy is the story of Kai Ting, the American-born son of a Shanghai refugee family. Ending an odyssey across both friendly and unfriendly terrain, the Ting family finally settles in San Francisco. China Boy is a bildungsroman, or rite-of-passage story. Although the novel covers only approximately one and a half years of Kai’s life, it depicts a pivotal point in his growth, a time of great change and uncertainty out of which he will gather strength and survive or to which he will succumb. With the death of his mother, the physical and emotional distance of his father, the cruelty of his stepmother, and the everyday violence that he faces on his neighborhood streets, Kai is plunged into a seemingly inescapable dungeon. To escape, Kai has to draw on the very last dregs of a personal integrity—the somehow unquenchable resilience of a seven-yearold—in order to salvage a childhood gone awry. Facing violence both within and without his home, Kai nevertheless soldiers along and, despite incredible odds, neutralizes a neighborhood bully in the defining battle of his short life. This culminating act signals a breakthrough for Kai, and the novel leaves the reader with the hope that with one battle won, Kai is set to win others and, ultimately, to win the long war of his childhood. The novel is also about displacement, about the suspension between two clearly defined, seemingly irreconcilable cultures. The culture represented by Kai’s mother (Mah-mee) and Uncle Shim seems, with Mah-mee’s death, to slip away with each
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day. Kai, speaking a five-year-old’s broken “Songhai,” is the flotsam from that culture. The reality of a relentlessly alien culture is all around him, but without its language, without recognizable points of reference to help him in his transition, Kai is in danger of becoming both a refugee from one culture and an unwanted stranger in another. Ultimately, though, the novel is about the possibility of reconciliations: between past and present, between ethnicity and nationality, between passivity and action. There is time for Kai to recollect the lost pieces of his past in order to give direction and purpose to his present. Confronted by racism both at home and on the streets, Kai is befriended and aided by individuals who recognize the inherent stranger in themselves and who see in Kai only the human quality of need. Physically and emotionally brutalized by both his stepmother and the neighborhood boys, Kai is unable to retaliate. His understanding of yuing chi, or karma, seems to feed his childish fatalism. With the bodybuilding and mind-building at the YMCA, however, Kai seems finally to be able both to assert himself and to preserve his integrity. In the novel’s epilogue, Kai confronts his stepmother at their doorway. He has just survived his fight with the bully, and his clothes are drenched with blood. Edna is concerned only that he has rung the doorbell too early and that she will once again have to bleach the blood—the Asiatic blood—out of his clothes. As a recognition of his past and present, of his ethnicity, of his action, of his new self, Kai tells her, “You are not my Mah-mee! . . . I ain’t fo’ yo’ pickin-on, no mo’!”
Suggested Readings Shen, Yichin. “The Site of Domestic Violence and the Altar of Phallic Sacrifice in Gus Lee’s China Boy.” College Literature 29, no. 2 (2002): 99-114. Simpson, Janice C., and Iyer Pico. “Fresh Voices Above the Noisy Din.” Time 137 (June 3, 1991): 66-67. So, Christine. “Delivering the Punch Line: Racial Combat as Comedy in Gus Lee’s China Boy.” MELUS 21, no. 4 (1996): 141-155. Stone, Judy. “Gus Lee: A China Boy’s Rites of Passage.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 12 (March 18, 1996): 47-49. Contributors: Larry Rochelle and Pat M. Wong
Li-Young Lee Born: Jakarta, Indonesia; 1957 Chinese American
Lee’s writing is inspired by his relation to his father and his family. Principal works poetry: Rose, 1986; The City in Which I Love You, 1990; Book of My Nights: Poems, 2001 nonfiction: The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, 1995 When Li-Young Lee’s first collection of poetry, Rose, was published, its Chinese American author had lived in America for twenty-two of his twenty-nine years. The poet’s immigrant experience, his strong sense of family life, and his recollections of a boyhood spent in Asia have provided a background to his writing. Lee was born in Jakarta; his Chinese parents were exiles from Communist China. They traveled until their arrival in Pittsburgh in 1964. The sense of being an alien, not a native to the place where one lives, strongly permeates Lee’s poetry and gives an edge to his carefully crafted lines. There is also a touch of sadness to his poetry: The abyss lurks everywhere, and his personae have to be circumspect in their words and actions, since they, unlike a native, can take nothing for granted in their host culture. Looking at his sister, the speaker in “My Sleeping Loved Ones” warns “And don’t mistake my stillness/ for awe./ It’s just that I don’t want to waken her.” Faced with a new language after his arrival in America, Lee became fascinated with the sound of words, an experience related in “Persimmons.” Here, a teacher slaps the boy “for not knowing the difference/ between persimmon and precision.” After college work at three American universities, Lee focused on his writing. Before the publication of his second collection, The City in Which I Love You, he received numerous awards. Lee has always insisted that his writing searches for universal themes, and the close connection of his work to his life cannot be discounted. His father, for example, appears in many poems. Lee offers, in The Winged Seed, a factual yet poetic account of his young life. Lee’s poetry and his prose reveal a writer who appreciates his close family and strives to put into words the grief and the joy of a life always lived in an alien place.
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The Winged Seed Type of work: Memoir First published: 1995 To a large extent, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance is a lyrical and sometimes surrealistic memorializing of Lee’s father and the author’s relationship with him. This memoir is also, as its title indicates, the saga of the Lee family’s participation in the twentieth century diaspora of Asians fleeing from the political upheavals of Asia and seeking to take root in the promise of America. Thus the book is a complex fabric made up, on one hand, of a highly subjective psychological history about the formation of dominant themes and images in a poetic imagination that is woven, on the other hand, with factual history of world events. By the time Lee was born, his father, Kuo Yuan, had already left China, which had been taken over by the Communist regime. He had migrated to Jakarta, Indonesia, and become a vice president at Gamaliel University in the late 1950’s, a time when President Sukarno was blaming his country’s economic woes on its Chinese inhabitants. Swept into the undertow of ethnic cleansing, Kuo Yuan was imprisoned in 1959. Physically abused, he bribed his way into less harsh incarceration in an insane asylum. There Kuo Yuan preached the gospel powerfully, first to inmates and then to their jailers. By bribery and luck, the Lee family escaped to Hong Kong, where Kuo Yuan preached to throngs numbering in the thousands. Thence they immigrated in 1964 to the United States, where, at the age of forty, he attended theological school. A changed and subdued man, he was appointed a minister in a Pennsylvania town whose congregation called him their “heathen minister.” Kuo Yuan emerges as an intelligent, gifted, tenacious survivor with traits of integrity and spiritual power that did not flourish on American soil. Although Lee’s father is the dominant presence in the book, Lee also provides fascinating glimpses of his mother, Jiaying. There are brilliantly recollected vignettes of her life growing up in the privileged class of China. Jiaying was living in the French quarter of Tientsin when Lee’s father joined her destiny with his. In Lee’s memoir, Jiaying emerges as a capable mother and fiercely loyal wife. Li-Young Lee
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One gathers that Lee’s early childhood experiences in Indonesia played a formative role in shaping his imagination, even though there are few overt references to those experiences in his poetry. In Indonesia, Lee was largely cared for by his Javanese nanny, Lammi. Through her, he became aware of family conflicts and love affairs; more important, Lammi took Lee to her village home, where he watched performances of wayang (Indonesian folk theater) and imbibed the mythological tales they dramatized. Through Lammi and her friends, Lee was exposed to stories of spellbinding bomohs, medicine men and women whose power was confirmed by the Lee family’s experience of hailstorms bombarding their house until their mother agreed to sell it. Lee’s early childhood exposure to the folk art and shamanistic tradition of Southeast Asia may have contributed to the qualities of mythic resonance and paraordinary sensation that mark some of his writing. The Winged Seed is a finely wrought memoir affording fascinating insights into the formation of a literary imagination and the origins of the most powerful images and themes that stir it. The book also provides revealing glimpses of some decisive political moments in twentieth century China and Indonesia.
Suggested Readings Hesford, Walter A. “The City in Which I Love You: Li-Young Lee’s Excellent Song.” Christianity and Literature 46, no. 1 (Autumn, 1996): 37-60. Lee, Li-Young. “Li-Young Lee.” Interview by James Kyung-Jin Lee. In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. _______. “Li-Young Lee.” Interview by Bill Moyers. In The Language of Life. New York: Doubleday, 1995. _______. “Poems from God: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee.” Interview by Amy Pence. Poets and Writers 29 (November/December, 2001): 22-27. _______. “To Witness the Invisible: A Talk with Li-Young Lee.” Interview by Tod Marshall. The Kenyon Review, Winter, 2000, 129-147. Lee, Li-Young, and Shawn Wong. Li-Young Lee. Los Angeles: Lannan Literary Videos, 1995. Slowick, Mary. “Beyond Lot’s Wife: The Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura.” MELUS 25, no. 3 (Fall/Winter, 2000): 221-242. Zhou, Xiaojing. “Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young Lee’s Poetry.” MELUS, Spring, 1996, 113-132. Contributors: R. C. Lutz and C. L. Chua
Gerda Lerner (Gerda Hedwig Kronstein) Born: Vienna, Austria; April 30, 1920 Jewish
Lerner’s goal is to bring women’s history back into the light so that women may be educated, encouraged, and emboldened by the struggles and achievements of their predecessors. Principal works long fiction: No Farewell, 1955 nonfiction: The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery, 1967 (biography); The Woman in American History, 1971; Women Are History: A Bibliography in the History of American Women, 1975; A Death of One’s Own, 1978; The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History, 1979; Women and History, Volume 1: The Creation of Patriarchy, 1986; Women and History, Volume 2: The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, from the Middle Ages to 1870, 1993; Why History Matters: Life and Thought, 1997; Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, 2002 edited text: Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, 1972; The Female Experience: An American Documentary, 1976 Born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein, Gerda Lerner is a seminal figure in women’s history. She grew up in a bourgeois household in Vienna in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Lerner’s father, Robert Kronstein, owned a pharmacy, and her mother, Ilona Kronstein, was an amateur painter who occupied herself with cultural pursuits. Lerner became interested in politics at an early age. In her autobiography, Fireweed, she states that her childhood taught her about resistance to authority and the necessity of questioning the values of those in power. Born a Jew, she became an agnostic at the age of fourteen and refused to go through with her bat mitzvah. In 1934, she witnessed the first of what were to be many political upheavals that affected her, a workers’ strike that was violently repressed by the Viennese government. As a student, she embraced various progressive political causes, sometimes secretly, and excelled in her studies. In 1938, after the Nazi occupation of Austria, her father immigrated to Lichtenstein, where he had established a satellite business. Like many Jews, Robert Kronstein was concerned that Austria was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic under the Nazis during this period prior to World War II, and, like others, he made 689
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plans for his family to emigrate. Partly in preparation for such a departure, Lerner became engaged to a young medical student named Bobby Jerusalem, who was in the process of immigrating to the United States. Lerner and her mother were arrested and imprisoned shortly thereafter in an attempt by the government to pressure her father to return. They spent just over a month in prison, during which time Lerner turned eighteen, and they were released, with orders to leave the country. Ironically, although they were under deportation orders, they were at first unable to obtain emigration permits. On September 9, 1938, Lerner, her younger sister Nora, and their mother left Austria to join their father in Lichtenstein. In April of 1939, having secured a visa from the U.S. consul in Switzerland after being sponsored by her fiancé and his family, Gerda Lerner arrived in New York City, while her mother remained in France, her father in Lichtenstein, and her sister in Switzerland. She married Jerusalem, who had changed his name to Jensen, within a week of her arrival in the United States. She and Jensen continued to be involved in progressive political activities, as they had while living in Vienna. The marriage was short-lived, lasting just a year and a half. Shortly after the breakup of her first marriage, she met her second husband, Carl Lerner, in the world of the New York theater business. Carl was a Communist and a director and producer of small theatrical events at the time. He had recently been left by his wife. Gerda and Carl moved to Reno, Nevada, temporarily in order to obtain divorces from their respective spouses, and from there they went to Hollywood, where they both obtained menial employment. They were married on October 6, 1941. Lerner began writing and publishing short stories at this time, and her husband obtained a job as an apprentice film editor at Columbia Pictures. They had two children, Stephanie and Dan. In 1946, Lerner formally joined the Communist Party and continued to engage in progressive political action, supporting such causes as the Civil Rights movement and the antinuclear movement. Her husband, already a Communist, was blacklisted in the Hollywood film industry, and the family moved back to New York in 1949. Lerner’s novel, No Farewell, which she finished in 1951 after working on it for twelve years, was rejected by numerous American publishers but accepted by an Austrian firm. The novel was translated into German and was well received in Austria. Lerner also wrote and published shorter pieces during this period, including performance works and pamphlets for the Civil Rights Congress. In 1954 she, along with five other people, started a short-lived cooperative publishing house. The English version of No Farewell was one of the books that the cooperative published. In 1958 she resumed her formal education as a student at New York’s New School for Social Research. Planning to write a historical novel on the Grimké sisters, Lerner became involved in historical research. This experience made her realize that the work she really wanted to do was to promote the history of women. She refocused her initial idea of a historical novel and instead wrote a biography of the Grimké sisters, which served as her doctoral dissertation and was published in 1967. She was awarded a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1966.
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Lerner has taught at many universities, notably at Sarah Lawrence College, where she founded the first graduate program in women’s history, and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she established a Ph.D. program in women’s history in 1984. Her most influential works are The Creation of Patriarchy and its sequel, The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness. In these books, Lerner argues for the existence of a prehistoric matriarchal culture. She asserts that the subjugation of women was the first form of institutionalized dominance and that other forms of oppression, such as classism and racism, grew out of men’s control over women. In The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, Lerner discusses the rise of feminist responses to patriarchal oppression among women from the Middle Ages to 1870. She argues that women have been deprived of their history and that this deprivation has had a significant negative impact on the status of women in general. Her goal in producing these books is to bring that history back into the light so that women may be educated, encouraged, and emboldened by the struggles and achievements of their predecessors. Among the many distinctions that Lerner has received are election as president of the Organization of American Historians. The Creation of Patriarchy won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize. Lerner has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was also the 2002 recipient of the Bruce Catton Prize for lifetime achievement in historical writing and is a founding member of the National Organization for Women.
The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness Type of work: History First published: 1993 In her two-volume Women and History, Lerner ranges over the whole of Western history from prehistory to the late nineteenth century, examining the origins of patriarchy (in Volume 1: The Creation of Patriarchy) and the long process by which women began to “think their way out” of their systematic subordination (in Volume 2: The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness). In this second volume, Lerner rigorously plumbs her disparate sources to help answer her question of how feminist consciousness developed. Such a consciousness could only emerge once autonomous women’sorganizations and a knowledge of women’s history were established. These were preconditions for a progressive development. Earlier, a perceptive woman might discover important arguments to combat women’s supposed inferiority—and yet she could not have known or used the work of predecessors a generation or even several hundred years before. Lerner’s great insight is that women’s subordination could not be changed as long as their history remained largely inaccessible to each succeeding generation. Lerner analyzes women’s struggle for education; the importance of mysticism, biblical criticism, and religious thought for women’s autonomous development; how
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the concept of motherhood gave women authority; the uses of female creativity; the beginnings of female spaces and networks; and the development of women’s history. Far-reaching and well written, The Creation of a Feminist Consciousness will function as an excellent general text for the nonspecialist in women’s history, but there is plenty of new detail and insight for the professional historian as well. The bibliography is very helpful, arranged topically, chronologically, and by individual.
Suggested Readings “Gerda Lerner.” In Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Lerner, Gerda. “Resistance and Triumph.” Interview by Joan Fischer. Wisconsin Academy Review 48, no. 2 (Spring, 2000). Rutland, Robert Allen, ed. Clio’s Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Contributor: Michele Leavitt
Audre Lorde Born: Harlem, New York; February 18, 1934 Died: Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands; November 17, 1992 African American
Lorde’s poetry, essays, and autobiographical fiction are among the best American black lesbian feminist writings. Principal works poetry: The First Cities, 1968; Cables to Rage, 1970; From a Land Where Other People Live, 1973; New York Head Shop and Museum, 1974; Between Our Selves, 1976; Coal, 1976; The Black Unicorn, 1978; Chosen Poems, Old and New, 1982 (revised as Undersong: Chosen Poems, Old and New, 1992); A Comrade Is as Precious as a Rice Seedling, 1984; Our Dead Behind Us, 1986; Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices, 1990; The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987-1992, 1993; The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, 1997 nonfiction: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978; The Cancer Journals, 1980; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a Biomythography, 1982; Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984; I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities, 1985; Apartheid U.S.A., 1986; A Burst of Light: Essays, 1988; The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches, and Journals, 1996; Conversations with Audre Lorde, 2004 (Joan Wylie Hall, editor) The parents of Audre Lorde (AW-dree lohrd) emigrated from Grenada to New York City in 1924. Lorde, the youngest of three girls, was born in 1934. She recounted many of her childhood memories in Zami, identifying particular incidents that had an influence or effect on her developing sexuality and her later work as a poet. She attended the University of Mexico (1954-1955) and received a B.A. from Hunter College (1959) and an M.L.S. from Columbia University (1961). In 1962, she was married to Edwin Rollins, with whom she had two children before they were divorced in 1970. Prior to 1968, when she gained public recognition for her poetry, Lorde supported herself through a variety of jobs, including low-paying factory work. She also served as a librarian in several institutions. After her first publication, The First Cities, Lorde worked primarily within American colleges and free presses. She was an instructor at City College of New York (1968-1970), an instructor and then lecturer at Lehman College (1969-1971), and a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (1972-1981). From 1981 to 1987, she was a professor of English at Hunter College at CUNY, and she became a Thomas Hunter 693
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Professor for one year there (19871988). She also served as poetry editor of the magazine Chrysalis and was a contributing editor of the journal Black Scholar. In the early 1980’s, she helped start Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a multicultural effort publishing Asian American and Latina as well as African American women writers. In the late 1980’s, Lorde became increasingly concerned over the plight of black women in South Africa under apartheid, creating Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa and remaining an active voice on behalf of these women throughout the remainder of her life. She also served on the board of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. With the companion of her last years, the writer and black feminist scholar Gloria I. Joseph, she Audre Lorde (Ingmar Schullz/Courtesy, W. W. Norton) made a home on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Shortly before her death in 1992 she completed her tenth book of poems, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.
The First Cities and Cables to Rage Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968, 1970 In her early collections of poetry, The First Cities and Cables to Rage, Lorde expressed a keen political disillusionment, noting the failure of American ideals of equality and justice for all. When Lorde used the pronoun “we” in her poetry, she spoke for all who have been dispossessed. In “Anniversary,” for example, she wrote, “Our tears/ water an alien grass,” expressing the separation between those who belong and those who do not. In poems such as “Sowing,” the poet revealed the land’s betrayal of its inhabitants by showing images of destruction juxtaposed to personal rage: “I have been to this place before/ where blood seething commanded/ my fingers fresh from the earth.” She also demonstrated a concern for the children of this earth in “Blood-birth”: Casting about to understand what it is in her that is raging to be born, she wondered
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how an opening will come “to show the true face of me/ lying exposed and together/ my children your children their children/ bent on our conjugating business.” The image of the warrior, the one who must be prepared to go about the business of existing in an unjust world, signifies the need to take care of those not yet aware of unfulfilled promises. If the rage in her early poems appears “unladylike,” Lorde was setting out to explode sexual typecasting. Certainly, there was nothing dainty about her sharp images and powerful assessments of social conditions. As she confronted harsh realities, the portrayals were necessarily clamorous. Yet the poet’s rage did not lead to a blind rampage. In “Conversation in Crisis,” the poet hoped to speak to her friend “for a clear meeting/ of self upon self/ in sight of our hearth/ but without fire.” The poet must speak honestly and not out of false assumptions and pretenses so that real communication can occur. The reader and listener must heed the words as well as the tone in order to receive the meaning of the words. Communication, then, is a kind of contractual relationship between people.
From a Land Where Other People Live and Between Our Selves Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973, 1976 In the collections From a Land Where Other People Live and Between Our Selves, Lorde used a compassionate tone to tell people about the devastation of white racism upon African Americans. She mixes historical fact with political reality, emphasizing the disjunction that sometimes occurs between the two. In “Equinox,” Lorde observed her daughter’s birth by remembering a series of events that also occurred that year: She had “marched into Washington/ to a death knell of dreaming/ which 250,000 others mistook for a hope,” for few at that time understood the victimization of children that was occurring not only in the American South but also in the Vietnam War. After she heard that Malcolm X had been shot, she reread all of his writings: “the dark mangled children/ came streaming out of the atlas/ Hanoi Angola Guinea-Bissau . . ./ merged into Bedford-Stuyvesant and Hazelhurst Mississippi.” From the multiplicity of world horrors, the poet returned to her hometown in New York, exhausted but profoundly moved by the confrontation of history and the facts of her own existence. In “The Day They Eulogized Mahalia,” another event is present in the background as the great singer Mahalia Jackson is memorialized: Six black children died in a fire at a day care center on the South Side; “firemen found their bodies/ like huddled lumps of charcoal/ with silent mouths and eyes wide open.” Even as she mourned the dead in her poems, the poet seems aware of both the power and the powerlessness of words to effect real changes. In the poem, “Power,” Lorde writes,
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Audre Lorde The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Once the event has occurred, one can write about it or one can try to prevent a similar event from occurring; in either case, it is not possible to undo the first event. Therefore, as a society, people must learn from their errors and their failures to care for other people. Lorde even warned herself that she must discern and employ this crucial difference between poetry and rhetoric; if she did not, “my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold/ or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire.”
Coal Type of work: Poetry First published: 1976 Coal explores Audre Lorde’s identities as a black woman, mother, wife, and lover of women. Several of her life issues are examined and refracted in the poems. Lorde’s lifelong journey toward claiming her West Indian, African American heritage is given voice in “Coal”; her motherhood is the subject of “Now That I Am Forever with Child”; and her women-centered existence is described in “On a Night of the Full Moon.” As a black woman of West Indian heritage, Audre Lorde knew the struggles of black Americans to claim their place and voice in American society. Raised in Harlem during the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lorde became aware of racism at an early age. The poem “Coal” claims a positive, strong voice for Lorde—a voice deeply embedded in her black heritage. In “Coal,” Lorde effectively transforms black speech into poetry: “I/ is the total black, being spoken/ from the earth’s inside.” Lorde defines poetic speech as a force that embraces blackness; then, she goes on to question how much a black woman can speak, and in what tone. Yet “Coal” defines Lorde as a black female poet who breaks the boundaries of silence and proclaims the sturdiness of power of her own words: “I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside/ now take my word for jewel in the open light.” Fire imagery suffuses the book. The fire that marks the edges of many poems defines the anger and hostility engendered by a patriarchal and racist society. Lorde learns to empower herself by using the fire of anger and despair to create her own vision of spiritual and sexual identity. Embarked on her own journey toward truth, Lorde proclaims in the poem “Summer Oracle” that fire—which she equates with a warming agent in a country “barren of symbols of love”—can also be a cleansing agent. Fire burns away falsehoods and lets truth arise. Lorde was widely praised by her contemporaries for her determination to see
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truth in everyday life. Coal could be called an uneven book, but her portraits of city life, love, anger, and sorrow make Coal a book of poetic transition from which Lorde would emerge into a life of more radical feminism and richer fulfillment.
The Cancer Journals Type of work: Memoir First published: 1980 The Cancer Journals, Lorde’s documentation and critique of her experience with breast cancer, is a painstaking examination of the journey Lorde takes to integrate this crisis into her identity. The book chronicles Lorde’s anger, pain, and fear about cancer and is as frank in its themes of “the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, and the function of cancer in a profit society,” as it is unflinching in its treatment of Lorde’s confrontation with mortality. Lorde speaks on her identity as a black, lesbian, feminist mother and poet with breast cancer. She illuminates the implications the disease has for her, recording the process of waking up in the recovery room after the biopsy that confirms her cancer, colder than she has ever been in her life. The following days, she prepares for the radical mastectomy through consultation with women friends, family, her lover, and her children. In the days that follow, Lorde attributes part of her healing process to “a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat” as she recovers from her mastectomy. She realizes that after facing death and having lived, she must accept the reality of dying as “a life process”; this hard-won realization baptizes Lorde into a new life. The journal entries for 1979 and 1980, written while Lorde recovered from the radical mastectomy she chose to forestall spread of the disease, show Lorde’s integration of this emergency into her life. She realizes that she must give the process a voice; she wants to be more than one of the “socially sanctioned prosthesis” women with breast cancer, who remain quiet and isolated. Instead, Lorde vows to teach, speak, and fight. At the journal’s end, Lorde chooses to turn down the prosthesis offered her, which she equates with an empty way to forestall a woman’s acceptance of her new body and, thus, her new identity. If, Lorde realizes, a woman claims her full identity as a cancer survivor and then opts to use a prosthesis, she has made the journey toward claiming her altered body, and life. Postmastectomy women, however, have to find their own internal sense of power. The Cancer Journals demonstrates a black, feminist, lesbian poet’s integration of cancer into her identity.
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Zami Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde’s prose masterpiece, examines a young black woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian sexual orientation. An autobiographical novel, Zami has earned a reputation as much for its compelling writing as for its presentation of a coming-of-age story of a black lesbian feminist intent on claiming her identity. At the age of nineteen, Zami flees New York City, where she was raised by her West Indian parents, for Mexico. There, she falls in love with an older expatriate woman named Eudora, who opens up her sensual life to the younger woman. Through her relationship with Eudora, Zami realizes the paralyzing consequences of the “racist, patriarchal and anti-erotic society” that Eudora fled when she left the United States. Zami returns to live in the “gay girl” milieu of Greenwich Village in the 1950’s. She commits herself to a long-term relationship with Muriel, a white woman with whom she builds a home. Muriel completes the sexual awakening that Eudora began. Muriel is threatened, however, when Zami enters therapy and enrolls in college. As Zami forges an identity that integrates her sensual, intellectual, and artistic sides, Muriel moves out of the Greenwich Village apartment. Zami moves forward, even in grief, toward her newfound life. Erotic language and scenes pepper the story. Zami learns to accept her own erotic impulses toward women, and her acceptance leads her into a larger life where love for women is central. Her eroticism is about the acceptance of the stages of a woman’s physical life. Eros is also language that she uses to infuse her poems with life. As Zami goes to college, begins to send out her own poetry, and opens to life while Muriel declines, she meets a female erotic figure of mythic proportions: Afrekete. Years earlier, Zami met a black gay woman whom she named Kitty: a woman of pretty clothes and dainty style. The two women meet again at the novel’s end. Kitty has become a fully erotic woman, who has assumed the mythic name Afrekete. After her liaison with Afrekete, Zami finds that her own life has become a bendable, pliable entity that challenges myths and, in the end, makes a new myth of its own.
Undersong Type of work: Poetry First published: 1992 Three decades of production and the work from Lorde’s first five published collections form her 1992 collection titled Undersong: Chosen Poems, Old and New, a reworking of her 1982 work, Chosen Poems, Old and New. This volume is not a “selected poems” collection in the usual meaning of the term, because it contains no
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work from her centrally important The Black Unicorn, which she considered too complex and too much of a unit to be dismembered by excerpting; Undersong also holds little of Our Dead Behind Us. Thus, a large chunk of Lorde’s strongest work is missing—including most of the poems in which she conjured and confronted “the worlds of Africa.” As Lorde states in an introduction, her revisions of Chosen Poems, Old and New were undertaken to clarify but not to recast the work—necessitating that she “propel [herself] back into the original poem-creating process and the poet who wrote it.” Lorde returned to her work of Chosen Poems, Old and New after Hurricane Hugo wrecked her home in the Virgin Islands and she found “a waterlogged but readable copy of [the book], one of the few salvageable books from [her] library.” The drama of the incident seemed to take an allegorical cast and inspired her to treat the anchoring of her poems in truth with the same fierce honesty she had devoted to confronting her childhood, her blackness, and her sexual identity. She thus seemed determined to keep her poetry under spiritual review with the same intensity that she devoted to the infinite difficulties of being an African American woman and lesbian in late twentieth century America. The changes she made in this collection seem limited to the excising of a handful of early poems, substituting others previously unpublished, and reworking line breaks and punctuation to give more space and deliberate stress to each stanza and image. The themes of the book largely circulate on two central axes: The notion of changeable selves—the broken journey toward self—is a recurrent motif, as is her consuming involvement with issues of survival. In examining changeable selves, she juxtaposes the longing for completion with the awareness of change as a paradoxical condition of identity. In “October,” Lorde appeals to the goddess Seboulisa, elsewhere described as the “Mother of us all”: Carry my heart to some shore my feet will not shatter do not let me pass away before I have a name for this tree under which I am lying Do not let me die still needing to be stranger.
As the final couplet hints, the counterpoint to the search for self is the search for connection, and to that end, dialogue is used as a structuring device, creating a sense of companionship won in the face of a proudly borne singularity. Poems with images of destruction also abound: the dead friend Genevieve; the father who “died in silence”; the “lovers processed/ through the corridors of Bellevue Mattewan/ Brooklyn State the Women’s House of D./ St. Vincent’s and the Tombs”; “a black boy (Emmett Till) hacked into a murderous lesson”; the lost sisters and daughters of Africa and its diaspora, whose “bones whiten/ in secret.” Lorde’s dual themes of the unending search for identity and a struggle for survival
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heighten the impact of the word “nightmare,” which cycles endlessly throughout Lorde’s work. The word represents her expression for history as glimpsed in surreal previsions and “Afterimages” (the title of a poem linking her memories of Emmett Till’s lynching to television pictures of a Mississippi flood). One looks in vain for a “positive” counterweight, before realizing that the nightmare, for Lorde, is not a token of negativity but rather symbolizes the denied and feared aspects of experience that must be recalled and accepted for change to occur.
The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance Type of work: Poetry First published: 1993 In her final collection of poems, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance (published posthumously), Lorde displays a personal, moving, bare, and striking set of work that strives for poignant reckonings with her family. “Legacy—Hers” is about her mother, “bred for endurance/ for battle.” “Inheritance—His” is about her father. She also has farewells to her sister, whom she forgives (“both you and I/ are free to go”), and to her son, whom she challenges (“In what do you believe?”). She has many bouquets for Gloria, her partner. She also visits her characteristic theme of politics in this collection. For example, she writes cinematically about the destruction wrought by U.S. foreign policy in a ferocious “Peace on Earth: Christmas, 1989”: the rockets red glare where all these brown children running scrambling around the globe flames through the rubble bombs bursting in air Panama Nablus Gaza tear gas clouding the Natal sun. THIS IS A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA quick cut the crackling Yule log in an iron grate.
In “Jesse Helms,” which begins “I am a Black woman/ writing my way to the future,” she takes on the bigotry of the senator from North Carolina with intentional crudeness: Your turn now jessehelms come on its time to lick the handwriting off the walls.
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In this sparse and commanding book, perhaps the most arresting lines are those in which she wrestles with the nearness of her own death. In “Today is not the day,” she writes: I am dying but I do not want to do it looking the other way. Audre Lorde never looked the other way.
Suggested Readings Avi-Ram, Amitai F. “Apo Koinou in Lorde and the Moderns: Defining the Differences.” Callaloo 9 (Winter, 1986): 193-208. Bloom, Harold, ed. Black American Women Poets and Dramatists. New York: Chelsea House, 1996. De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Hull, Gloria T. “Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Lorde, Audre. “Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation.” Interview by Susan Leigh Star. In A Burst of Light: Essays, by Lorde. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988. Olson, Lester C. “Liabilities of Language: Audre Lorde Reclaiming Difference.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 4 (November, 1998): 448-470. Opitz, May, Katharine Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out. Translated by Anne V. Adams. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Contributors: Cynthia Wong and Sarah Hilbert
Eduardo Machado Born: Havana, Cuba; June 11, 1953 Cuban American
Machado’s plays explore the conflicts between capitalism and communism, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and Cuban identity and Cuban American identity. Principal works drama: 1979, pr. 1991; Worms, pr. 1981; Rosario and the Gypsies, pr. 1982 (oneact musical; book and lyrics by Machado, music by Rick Vartoreila); The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, pr., pb. 1983; There’s Still Time to Dance in the Streets of Rio, pr. 1983; Broken Eggs, pr., pb. 1984; Fabiola, pr. 1985, pb. 1991; When It’s Over, pr. 1987 (with Geraldine Sherman); Why to Refuse, pr. 1987 (one act); Across a Crowded Room, pr. 1988; A Burning Beach, pr. 1988; Don Juan in New York City, pr. 1988 (two-act musical); Once Removed, pr., pb. 1988, revised pr. 1994; Wishing You Well, pr. 1988 (one-act musical); Cabaret Bambu, pr. 1989 (one-act musical); Related Retreats, pr. 1990; Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, pr. 1990, revised pr. 1998 (two-act musical); The Floating Island Plays, pb. 1991, pr. 1994 (as Floating Islands; cycle of four plays; includes The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane, and Broken Eggs); In the Eye of the Hurricane, pr., pb. 1991; Breathing It In, pr. 1993; Three Ways to Go Blind, pr. 1994; Between the Sheets, pr. 1996 (music by Mike Nolan and Scott Williams); Cuba and the Night, pr. 1997; Crocodile Eyes, pr. 1999; Havana Is Waiting, pr., pb. 2001 (originally pr. 2001 as When the Sea Drowns in Sand) screenplay: Exiles in New York, 1999 translation: The Day You’ll Love Me, pr. 1989 (of José Ignacio Cabrujas’s play El día que me quieras) Eduardo Machado (eh-DWAHR-doh mah-CHAH-doh) arrived from Cuba in 1961, at age eight, with his brother Jesús, five years younger, as a “Peter Pan” child. The Peter Pan Project, a collaboration between a United States-based Roman Catholic bishop and the United States Central Intelligence Agency, brought fourteen thousand Cuban children to the United States without their parents, ostensibly to “save” them from communism and from the governmental policies under Fidel Castro. Arriving with no knowledge of English and undergoing major culture shock, the brothers were sent to an aunt and uncle in Hialeah, Florida, who had their own children as well as other immigrant relatives living with them. Machado’s first memory 702
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of the United States is celebrating Halloween by trick-or-treating, believing that they had been sent out truly begging, as the children had moved from an economically privileged childhood in Cuba to poverty in the United States. His parents came a year later. The house in which Machado had lived in Cuba was taken by the government and transformed into a school. His father, a self-professed “professional rich man’s son,” initially could not find work in United States. Machado finished growing up in Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. By the time Machado was sixteen, his father had succeeded economically as an accountant. Machado’s parents later divorced, reportedly due to his father’s infidelity, which has been an item in his dramatic work. Machado began his acting career in 1978 at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, where he met Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban immigrant playwright who would become a major influence on his work. He became her assistant on her Fefu and Her Friends (1977) at the Ensemble Studio Theater. Machado began writing plays at the suggestion of a therapist, who recommended writing an imaginary letter forgiving his mother for sending him away. By 2002, Machado had written twenty-seven plays, all but seven dealing with his family or Cuba in some way. In New York City, as part of INTAR (International Arts Relations) Hispanic American Arts Center, he wrote The Floating Island Plays (The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, Broken Eggs, In the Eye of the Hurricane) between 1983 and 1991. He has been commissioned to write plays for The Public Theater, the Roundabout Theatre Company, and Wind Dancer Productions. He took his first trip back to Cuba in December, 1999, followed in rapid succession by two more visits to his homeland. Machado says he has always been at the mercy of politics. Critics say his works show his conflicts: capitalism versus communism, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, Cuban identity versus Cuban American identity. Machado has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, the Mark Taper Forum, The Public Theater, and the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. He has headed Columbia University’s graduate playwriting program in the School of Arts since 1997 and has been an artistic associate of the Cherry Lane Alternative, the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre’s nonprofit wing. Machado received a 1995 National Theater Artist Residency to be playwrightin-residence at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles for his works. He received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a one-act play at Ensemble Studio Theatre. He first debuted When the Sea Drowns in Sand at the twenty-fifth annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. It has since been rewritten and performed as the autobiographical Havana Is Waiting.
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Gender-Bending Plays Although Machado’s early works often examine issues of immigrant identity, he leaves his immigrant theme behind with such major works as Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, a musical about a female singer who transforms herself into a man, and Don Juan in New York City, which is chiefly about sexual ambivalence in the age of AIDS. The latter play, a work that is operatic in scope and amplitude, centers on D. J. (Don Juan), an experimental filmmaker, as a retrospective of his work is planned and executed. Apparently bisexual, D. J. is torn between a female singer-celebrity, Flora, and his trashy male lover, Steve. His conflict is enacted against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic: D. J.’s good friend, Paul, a female impersonator, has taken refuge in the guise of Carole Channing and is preparing first for a concert of Channing’s songs and subsequently for a successful suicide, as he eludes the depredations of AIDS. The baroque action is further complicated by actual film clips from D. J.’s creations and by passionate songs performed by two mysterious figures, Abuelo and Mujer, representatives of the world of traditional heterosexual love for which the classic Don Juan was known. Machado has called Stevie Wants to Play the Blues a “gender-bender,” a genre in which he examines premises about sexuality and takes the characters through surprising and unconventional revelations about their gender identifications. Other plays in which he toys with the notion of sexual identity are Related Retreats, about the lives of writers at an arts colony under the tutelage of a female guru, and Breathing It In, about a motley band of lost souls who congregate around a male/female guru couple who espouse the individual’s embracing the woman-nature within. It at once satirizes groups such as Werner Erhard’s individual, social transformation technique (EST) and the women’s movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s and concocts a string of variations on sexual transformation among its characters.
Suggested Readings Armengol Acierno, María. The Children of Peter Pan. Needham, Mass.: Silver Burdett Ginn, 1996. Brand, Ulrika. “A Master Playwright Teaches His Discipline: An Interview with Eduardo Machado.” Columbia News, June 28, 2001. Brantley, Ben. “Eduardo Machado.” New York Times Magazine, October 23, 1994, 38-41. Conde, Yvonne. Operation Peter Pan: The Untold Exodus of Fourteen Thousand Cuban Children. New York: Routledge, 1999. Muñoz, Elias Miguel. “Of Small Conquests and Big Victories: Gender Constructs in The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa.” In The Americas Review 20, no. 2 (Summer, 1992): 105-111.
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Ortiz, Ricardo L. “Culpa and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 63-84. Sterling, Kristin. “The Return to Cuba Helps Eduardo Machado Find Home and Inspiration.” Columbia News, October 29, 2001. Triay, Victor Andrés. Fleeing Castro: Operation Peter Pan and the Cuban Children’s Program. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Contributors: Debra D. Andrist and David Willinger
Claude McKay Born: Sunny Ville, Jamaica; September 15, 1889 Died: Chicago, Illinois; May 22, 1948 African American, Caribbean
McKay’s writings capture the dialect of his native Jamaica, ushered in the Harlem Renaissance, and added a black voice to the early years of Soviet Communism. Principal works long fiction: Home to Harlem, 1928; Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, 1929; Banana Bottom, 1933 poetry: Constab Ballads, 1912; Songs of Jamaica, 1912; Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems, 1920; Harlem Shadows, 1922; Selected Poems of Claude McKay, 1953 short fiction: Gingertown, 1932 nonfiction: A Long Way from Home, 1937 (autobiography); Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 1940 miscellaneous: The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 19121948, 1973 (Wayne F. Cooper, editor; contains social and literary criticism, letters, prose, fiction, and poetry) Claude McKay was the youngest of eleven children in a rural Jamaican family. His parents instilled pride in an African heritage in their children. McKay’s brother Uriah Theophilus and the English folklorist and linguist Walter Jekyll introduced McKay to philosophy and literature, notably to English poetry. When he was nineteen McKay moved to Kingston and worked as a constable for almost a year. Encouraged by Jekyll, McKay published two volumes of poetry in Jamaican dialect in 1912, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. The first collection echoes McKay’s love for the natural beauty of Jamaica while the second reflects his disenchantment with urban life in Kingston. In 1912 McKay left Jamaica for the United States and studied at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and at Kansas State College before moving to Harlem in 1914. His most famous poem, “If We Must Die,” was published in 1919 and proved to be a harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance. The poem depicts violence as a dignified response to racial oppression. Soon thereafter McKay published two other volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems and Harlem Shadows, which portray the homesickness and racism that troubled McKay in the United States. Some of McKay’s poems 706
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were anthologized in Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), the bible of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay also spent time in Europe and North Africa. In the Soviet Union in 1922 and 1923, he was lauded as a champion of the Communist movement and published a poem in Pravda. While in France in the 1920’s, McKay preferred Marseilles over the white expatriate community in Paris. McKay wrote three sociological novels about the attempts of black people to assimilate as outsiders in various places around the world: Home to Harlem is set in Harlem, Banjo in Marseilles, and Banana Bottom in Britain and Jamaica. The seamy realism of black urban life depicted in the first novel did not appeal to African American thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who preferred more uplifting and optimistic black art. McKay continued to examine the place of black people in Western culture in his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, and in some of his posthumously published Selected Poems of Claude McKay. His conversion to Catholicism in his final years was the last step in his search for aesthetic, racial, and spiritual identity.
Home to Harlem Type of work: Novel First published: 1928 This novel is an account of life in Harlem as seen through the experiences of Jake, who has come to regard Harlem as his hometown and is constantly comparing it with other places in his experience. Though the brief sojourn of Jake gives a linear development to the plot, Home to Harlem is actually a cyclical novel, for it is apparent that Jake has opened and closed one episode of his life in Petersburg, Virginia, another in Europe (with the Army), and a third in Harlem, before entering on yet another in Chicago with Felice. Home to Harlem is essentially a story without a plot. Felice is lost for a time and then found by chance. Everything else in the novel is introduced to let the reader know what life is like in Harlem. Life in the Black Belt is depicted as serendipitous, often unfair, and dangerous. The participation of the Haitian immigrant Ray in the life of Jake is short-lived and fundamentally ineffective. In this way, McKay seems to suggest that there is no possibility of amelioration from the outside and from would-be saviors who are transient and not from within the social structure. On the other hand, Jake, who is part of Harlem and who has become accustomed to its harshness and brutality, can see the possibility of finding love, affection, and even self-satisfaction and self-improvement by leaving it all behind. Prostitution, he seems to suggest, is nothing to hold against a woman if society has forced her into it for survival. McKay, a longtime resident of Harlem after migrating from Jamaica, thought of Harlem as dehumanizing in the extreme. His attitude is reflected in Ray’s comment that if he married Agatha he soon “would become one of the contented hogs in the
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pigpen of Harlem, getting ready to litter little black piggies.” It is this image that McKay presents throughout the novel: Where people are overcrowded and treated like animals, they become animals. It is the pervasive contrast between Jake and Ray that gives Home to Harlem its principal thematic development. Jake is forthright, versatile, optimistic, and persevering; he comes in contact with Ray, who is deliberate, cynical, pessimistic, and unpredictable. Jake is impressed by the intellect and interests of Ray, yet he discerns that a person made “impotent by thought” is irrelevant to the lives of Harlem’s masses. Jake is principled: He will be unemployed rather than be a strikebreaker; he will live with a woman, but he will not be a kept man; he sees that the white world is one of materialism and opportunism, but he does not want to participate in it; he sees that the lives of the black folk are difficult, but he does not succumb to the blandishments of purported prophets and saviors. Nevertheless, he feels that he can survive and perhaps even succeed in life. The dialectic permeates the novel. Only occasionally does McKay allow his own political and social views to intrude explicitly. The black-white issue that absorbed him in his journalism is never directly introduced, though it can be discerned by implication. The authorial voice is to be seen in Jake and Ray, for they represent the two sides of McKay himself: the body and the mind.
Banjo Type of work: Novel First published: 1929 Banjo: A Story Without a Plot is an episodic narrative involving a small group of relatively permanent residents of the Vieux Port section of Marseilles, France, and a larger cast of incidental characters who are encountered briefly in the varied but fundamentally routine activities of unemployed black seamen trying to maintain a sense of camaraderie and well-being. It is, therefore, basically a picaresque fiction that offers a measure of social criticism. The novel reiterates McKay’s constant themes: that the folk rather than the black intelligentsia represent the best in the race; that blacks should have a high regard for their heritage and hence a racial self-esteem; that the ideal life is one of vagabondage, of natural gusto and emotional response, allowing one to “laugh and love and jazz and fight.” The breakup of the beachboys at the end of parts 2 and 3 suggests that cohesiveness is less powerful among McKay’s favorite people than individualism—the very characteristic of the materialistic, commercial class that Ray inveighs against in his numerous diatribes and asides. Ironically, this assertion of individuality plays into the arms of those classes and attitudes that Ray sees as inimical to racial betterment. Ray is the mouthpiece for an unrelenting indictment of white civilization. In his eyes, its chief shortcomings are crass commercialism; an unwarranted sense of
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racial superiority; hypocrisy (white Europeans assert that they make the best pornographic films, yet they condemn the uninhibited—even justifiable—sexuality of the blacks); nauseating patriotism, rather than internationalism; standardization; and Calvinist attitudes toward sex, alcohol, music, and entertainment. Yet the behavior of Banjo and the others is far from admirable—if one excepts Ray, who is moderate, literate, and emotional. When he arrives in port, Banjo has 12,525 francs—a considerable sum—but quickly spends it on a girl who leaves him as soon as he is broke. He is wholly improvident and far from admirable. Accordingly, it is difficult to maintain any sympathy for him and to feel that he is anything more than a wastrel, a womanizer, a loafer, and an impractical dreamer. If McKay means Banjo to be a paean to the free life, the life of the spirit and the emotions untrammeled by responsibilities, he seems to be suggesting that his motley sybarites are enviable models. They most certainly are not: They are irresponsible and without any admirable ambition. Their parallels are the Europeans who attend the “blue” cinema, who are rootless, affected, and suffering from ennui. (Their Satanism and sexual aberrations have cut them off from their cultural bearings.) It is hard to believe that the beachboys—and Banjo in particular—are to be admired for their instinctive, spontaneous, sensual behavior. Moreover, at the end most of them express their dissatisfaction with pointless drifting, with unemployment, with poverty, and with temporary liaisons dependent on money alone. It is little wonder, then, that Banjo has been criticized for not having a clearly defined and defensible theme. Similarly, one can see a weakness in Banjo’s saying that his instrument is his “buddy,” that it is more than a “gal, moh than a pal; it’s mahself.” The Jazz Age had not ended, but the banjo was a symbol of a past era, and its owner, who places a thing above persons, seems to be disoriented. Banjo has become an anachronism.
Banana Bottom Type of work: Novel First published: 1933 Banana Bottom is the story of a young Jamaican woman’s discovery of her country, her people, and herself. The novel begins with the return to Jamaica of twenty-twoyear-old Tabitha “Bita” Plant, who has been abroad for seven years. After a flashback in which he explains the reasons for her absence, McKay tells the story of Bita’s life from her homecoming to her marriage, concluding with a brief epilogue that shows her as a contented wife and mother. Banana Bottom is based on a less simplistic view of the black experience than some critics have assumed. A close look at the novel shows how far McKay’s underlying meaning is from the easy dichotomy between a white society of repression, which is evil, and a black culture of expression, which is good, with all the characters lined up on one side or the other. One of McKay’s major themes has little to do with that kind of dichotomy. His Jamaica is almost entirely black, and the social hierarchy that he finds so stultifying
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is maintained by blacks, not by whites. The reason that the highly educated, intelligent, charming Bita can aspire no higher than her seminarian is that, in the view of her own society, no one so dark in skin color can marry a professional man or a government official. Granted, the Jamaican system is based on the old white colonial belief in black inferiority; however, it is not whites who enforce this social stratification. By showing how this system traps people of unquestionable ability at an arbitrary level in society, McKay is arguing for a change of mind within the black community itself. An even more important theme of Banana Bottom is the issue of what lifestyle is most fulfilling for a black person, specifically for an intelligent, well-educated individual such as Bita. Again, it has been easy for critics to see the prudish and repressed Priscilla Craig as the representative of white society and Herald Newton Day as an example of a black man destroyed when he attempts, like his white sponsor, to repress his black sexual vitality. McKay, however, does not make arbitrary classifications of either his whites or his blacks. In Malcolm Craig’s dedication to black freedom and autonomy and in Squire Gensir’s passion for black culture, McKay shows that some whites are capable not only of kindness but also of selflessness. Similarly, he uses two of Bita’s suitors to show that black people are not necessarily noble. Certainly both Hopping Dick Delgado and Tack Tally are unworthy of McKay’s heroine. Unlike both Herald and Tack, the man whom Bita chooses is a truly free one who finds the meaning of life not in the supernatural but in nature itself, in his wife, in his family, in his own sexual vitality, and in the land to which he is devoting his life. Instead of denying Bita the expression of her own identity, Jubban encourages her even in those interests that are not his own. The life that Bita and Jubban build together, then, is not a rejection of one culture or another but a fusion of the best of two worlds.
Poetry McKay has been posthumously proclaimed Jamaica’s national poet, and he has been the subject of an international conference of literary scholars. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countée Cullen, and Langston Hughes also helped in the development of modern African American poetry, but only Hughes could legitimately be proposed as a better and more important poet than McKay. Although there are some true gems of both concept and expression in McKay’s initial two volumes of poetry, it is unlikely that any except Jamaicans and scholars will take any real pleasure in reading them. Even in 1912, McKay’s mentor Walter Jekyll thought it necessary to add extensive footnotes to Songs of Jamaica to explain the poems’ contractions, allusions, and pronunciations, and both a glossary and footnotes were added to Constab Ballads. There is no doubt that McKay’s use of dialect in his poems was an advance on the use of dialect by such predecessors as Dunbar, who used it largely for either comic or role-establishing purposes;
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McKay used dialect for social verisimilitude, to attempt to capture the Jamaican inflections and idiom, to differentiate the speech of the folk from that of the colonial classes. Upon quitting Jamaica for the United States, however, McKay discontinued his use of dialect, even when, in some of his American “protest” poems that make use of African American diction, dialect would be appropriate and even effective. Spring in New Hampshire, and Other Poems, McKay’s first volume of poetry in Standard English, which was published in London, and Harlem Shadows, which appeared two years later in New York, established him as a major poet in the black community and as a potentially important one in English literature. HarClaude McKay (Library of Congress) lem Shadows, with its brilliant evocation of life in the black ghetto of New York City, more than any other book heralded the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, from which developed the great florescence of African American culture in subsequent years. In his post-Jamaican poetry, McKay became attached almost exclusively to the sonnet form, eschewed dialect, and he showed no strong inclination to experiment with rhyme, rhythm, and the other components of the sonnet. Further, he displayed the influence of his early reading of the English Romantics, and in the words of Wayne Cooper, McKay’s biographer, “his forthright expression of the black man’s anger, alienation, and rebellion against white racism introduced into modern American Negro poetry an articulate militancy of theme and tone which grew increasingly important with time.” The sense of being a black man in a white man’s world pervades McKay’s poetry, as does the sense of being a visionary in the land of the sightless—if not also the sense of being an alien (an islander) in the heart of the metropolis. As John Dewey noted, “I feel it decidedly out of place to refer to him as the voice of the Negro people; he is that, but he is so much more than that.” McKay is the voice of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the discriminated against; he is one of the major poetic voices of the Harlem Renaissance; he is one of a select group of poets who have represented the colonized peoples of the world; and he is one of the voices for universal self-respect and brotherhood.
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Suggested Readings Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Gayle, Addison, Jr. Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972. Giles, James R. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Holcomb, Gary E. “Diaspora Cruises: Queer Black Proletarianism in Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home.” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 4 (Winter, 2003): 714-746. James, Winston. “Becoming the People’s Poet: Claude McKay’s Jamaican Years, 1889-1912.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, no. 13 (March, 2003): 17-46. _______. A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion. New York: Verso, 2001. LeSeur, Geta. “Claude McKay’s Marxism.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin. New York: Garland, 1989. Rosenberg, Leah. “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys.” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 2 (April, 2004): 219-239. Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Contributors: Douglas Edward LaPrade, Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, A. L. McLeod, and Richard A. Eichwald
Reginald McKnight Born: Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany; February 26, 1956 African American
Although McKnight refrains from political statement in his fiction and refuses to accept or to promote any singular concept of black identity, he believes art should “get under your skin.” Principal works long fiction: I Get on the Bus, 1990; He Sleeps, 2001 short fiction: Moustapha’s Eclipse, 1988; The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, 1992; White Boys, 1998 edited texts: African American Wisdom, 1994; Wisdom of the African World, 1996 Reginald McKnight was born in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany, to military parents in 1956. His father Frank was a U.S. Air Force noncommissioned officer, and his mother Pearl was a dietitian. Because of his military background, McKnight has lived all over the world, moving a total of forty-three times. After a brief stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, McKnight earned an associate degree in anthropology (1978) from Pikes Peak Community College and a B.A. in African literature (1981) from Colorado College. He received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study folklore and literature in West Africa, so he spent a year teaching and writing in Senegal. In 1987, he earned an M.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Denver. McKnight has taught at Arapahoe Community College, the University of Denver, and the University of Maryland at College Park. He married Michele Davis in 1985 and has two daughters. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an O. Henry Award, the Kenyon Review Award for excellence (which he received twice), a PEN/Hemingway Special Citation, a Pushcart Prize, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Watson Foundation Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Bernice M. Slote Award. McKnight’s work is a refreshing change from much of the black protest literature of the 1970’s and 1980’s. While white people are often presented as unpleasant, annoying, and mean-spirited, they are seldom presented as outrightly diabolical. McKnight deliberately refrains from political statement in his fiction, believing that art has the higher purpose of bringing a sense of joy to the reader, the type of joy that makes one think that “life is deep, limitless, and meaningful.” Yet 713
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he does not believe that art should be harmless. “It should get under your skin,” he says. McKnight refuses to accept or to promote any singular concept of black identity; instead, he respects the diversity of black experience found in the United States and elsewhere. Like many writers, McKnight draws heavily on personal experience to find subject matter for his stories. For example, several stories found in his collections are set in West Africa with an anthropologist as the narrator. Other stories include the painful experience of being one of a handful of black children in a school. His experience in the military is also woven into several stories. His stories, however, are no mere transcription of personal experience. He is equally successful in portraying the experiences of black working-class males. Many of McKnight’s stories are boldly experimental in point of view, tone, style, and concept. His stories set in West Africa are particularly notable for their non-Western philosophical views and the incorporation of the fantastic. For example, in “The Homunculus: A Novel in One Chapter” (found in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas), the protagonist is a young writer in a fairy-tale-like place who becomes so consumed with his writing that it becomes a flesh-and-blood likeness of himself. McKnight’s work is characterized by his successful, convincing use of multiple voices.
“Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1988, in Moustapha’s Eclipse “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse,” the title story of McKnight’s first collection, is narrated in the broken English of a Senegalese interpreter working for an American anthropologist living in Africa. This story has the feel of a folktale; that is, it is clearly meant to teach a lesson. Uncle Moustapha is a successful peanut farmer, who lives in a small African village with his three wives and seven children. His only problem is that he constantly thinks of death; he would not have this problem if he had not adopted the white man’s tradition of celebrating his birthday. On the eve of his sixtieth birthday (or at least what he has designated as his birthday), he goes to bed anticipating an eclipse of the sun, which has been predicted for the next day. On the following morning, a white scientist arrives to set up his viewing equipment on Uncle Moustapha’s land. The scientist warns Moustapha not to view the eclipse directly with naked eyes. At first, Moustapha complies and views the eclipse properly through the scientific equipment. However, he quickly becomes overjoyed with the eclipse, believing that it was sent to him as a gift from Allah and his ancestors. Moustapha runs to fetch his favorite wife, Fatima. They rush together to the baobab tree, which is believed to house the spirits of their ancestors. After a brief prayer, Moustapha experiences a rush of heightened sensory perceptions. He turns to stare at the eclipse with his eyes wide open, so that he can see “it all in supreme detail.” As he returns home, the world seems more beautiful to him
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than ever before, except for a black shape that begins to flicker on and off in his left eye. The ending of the story is ambiguous. It is not clear whether he goes blind or it is death that is finally coming to Uncle Moustapha. However, he has no regrets because he has seen “what no other living soul has seen today.” Clearly, he does not believe that going blind or even dying is too great a price to pay for such a magnificent experience.
The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1992 At first glance, the seven stories collected in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas appear discrete and unrelated, so varied are they in style and form. Yet inherent within this collection is an overriding concern with the black American self—more specifically, with the black American male self: with its formation, its definition, its ruination. Stylistically, McKnight’s stories move from the fablelike opening story, “The Homunculus: A Novel in One Chapter,” through a series of more realistic narratives, to the futuristic concluding tale, “Soul Food.” McKnight frequently places the storytelling responsibility upon a first-person voice, and just as frequently these voices tell their stories in a language that is sharp and colloquial and distinctive. McKnight’s vision in his short fiction focuses upon the nature of the black American male and upon the forces that define black American male selfhood. Most of the central figures in these stories are young black American men—artists, drug dealers, military personnel—whose behavior in the present is inextricably linked to elements of their individual and their racial past: violence, subjugation, maternal dominance. They are men who challenge the stereotypes; they are paradoxical characters who smoke crack and read BRAVE NEW WORLD (“Roscoe in Hell”), who write story-length letters to friends they haven’t seen in years (“Quitting Smoking”), who join the Marines and express their very human fears in the action of very personal wars (“Peacetime”). Two of the most successful stories in this collection (the title story, and “Into Night”), though, deal with the childhood experiences, experiences which McKnight suggests are especially significant in the formation of the black adult character. What finally emerges from these stories is a difficult, troubling notion of what it means to be black and male in an increasingly multicultural America. In the O. Henry Award-winning title story of The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, McKnight explores the ambivalence of friendship, not just between blacks and whites but also between blacks and blacks. Clinton Oates, the narrator, is one of three black children in his sixth-grade class in Waco, Texas. Oates, who is eager to prove himself inoffensive to whites, feels embarrassed by the presence of Marvin Pruitt, a black boy who fulfills most negative black stereotypes. Pruitt “smelled
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bad, was at least two grades behind, was hostile, dark skinned, homely, closemouthed.” Pruitt sleeps away most of the schoolday; the other black child is a large, passive girl who refuses to speak. This class is full of older children, including a sixteen-year-old white bully, Kevin Oakley, who is just looking for a reason to fight with Oates. One day, their coach (who probably wants to see Oates get hurt) singles out the two boys for a game of “murder ball,” using two hard-pumped volleyballs instead of the usual red rubber balls. Completely in fair play, Oates hits Oakley square in the face, causing a nosebleed and the boy’s humiliation. Shortly afterward, in the locker room, Oakley threatens to attack Oates after school. Oates sees Pruitt, an innocent bystander, and asks, “How come you after me and not him?” Oates escapes from Oakley that afternoon by getting on the bus early, but he cannot escape the implications of what he had said in the locker room. Clearly, Oates meant that Pruitt deserved to be picked on or beaten up because he so neatly fit all the negative stereotypes of blacks. The next morning, Oakley predictably picks a fight with Oates. Surprisingly, Pruitt intervenes on Oates’s behalf, with a disdainful “git out of my way, boy.” This action shows that Pruitt is, without a doubt, morally superior to Oates, the nice young black who is only too eager to do his “tom-thing.” The reader is left to believe that Pruitt knows exactly what Oates had meant in the locker room, but he still rises above this black-on-black racial insult. While never exactly friends, the black boys’ relationship proves that blood is, indeed, thicker than water.
“Quitting Smoking” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1992, in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas This story, also found in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, is narrated by a working-class black man, Scott Winters, who lives with his white lover, Anna. Their relationship does not work, partly because Scott cannot stop smoking, partly because race becomes a barrier, and partly because Scott cannot bring himself to share his deepest secret with her. Scott began smoking in his late teens to hide the smell of reefer from his parents. He discovers that he likes the buzz from cigarettes better than any other “high.” When he meets Anna—a vegetarian, health nut, and feminist—he naturally and easily loses his desire to smoke and to eat meat. One night, Anna confides to him an incident of acquaintance rape. This confidence immediately reminds him of a time in his teens that he and three other males witnessed the abduction of a woman into a car. The woman struggled and screamed for help, but none of the young men intervened on her behalf. Nagged by this memory, Scott goes out and buys a pack of cigarettes. What follows is a story of cigarette addiction that anyone who has ever smoked will find familiar. He continues to sneak out for smokes in the middle of the night. He begins to keep an arsenal of cover-up supplies in his truck—gum, toothpaste, mouthwash, deodorant, and air freshener. Cigarettes become his secret infidelity.
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When Anna confronts him with a cigarette she has found, Scott vows to quit but does not. Scott’s deeper problem is that he cannot bring himself to confess to Anna what he had allowed to happen to the woman who had been abducted and perhaps raped or killed. One night, he makes elaborate preparations for this confession; he cleans the house, makes dinner, and buys wine and flowers. Scott tentatively approaches the subject by saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hated men.” Anna, who has grown distant for other reasons, counters, “I’m surprised I don’t hate black men. The guy who raped me was black.” Scott, who feels this racial insult as an almost physical injury, immediately packs his bags and walks out the door. Both partners are guilty of erecting barriers that destroy the relationship, but only Anna chose to use race as a weapon.
“The White Boys” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1998, in White Boys This story opens with yet another move for a black military family. The Oates are, in many ways, a typical black middle-class family. Both parents are strict, even to the point of violence. Two particularly nasty beatings of the young protagonist Derrick are recounted in this narrative. His two siblings Dean and Alva are spared similar beatings, mostly because they are less conspicuous or odd than Derrick. Both parents greatly fear that one of their children will bring shame or trouble to their home. They know, only too well, that white people will conjure up the worst possible racial stereotypes at the slightest provocation. The day after they move in, Derrick provides this type of provocation by innocently scooping snow off of his neighbor’s car. The neighbor, Sergeant Hooker, vehemently hates blacks, following his childhood experience of growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Baltimore. His mother, with whom he no longer communicates, even married a black man. Ironically, Hooker’s best friend from childhood was also black. Furious over the Oates’s moving next door, Hooker sets out to instill racial hatred equal to his own in his three sons. The youngest son Garrett is determined to hate Derrick, but a friendship begins to grow between the two boys. When Hooker discovers this friendship, he devises a diabolical scheme to scare Derrick away permanently. He plans to take Derrick and his three sons on a fishing trip, during which time the four whites will stage a mock lynching of Derrick. Garrett, unable to confront his father or to warn Derrick, comes up with his own scheme to save his friend. On the Friday before this fateful weekend, he calls Derrick a nigger, not just once but repeatedly. His act destroys their friendship (exactly what his father wanted) but saves Derrick from a far more horrific experience. In an interview, McKnight has said that the stories in White Boys should produce this response: “It’s too bad that blacks and whites don’t get along very well today.”
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This response is exactly what this story produces. There is every reason except race that the Hookers and Oateses should have been good friends and neighbors.
Suggested Readings McKnight, Reginald. “An Interview with Reginald McKnight.” Interview by Renée Olander. The Writer’s Chronicle 3 (February, 2000): 5-14. _______. “We Are, in Fact, a Civilization.” Interview by William Walsh. Kenyon Review 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 27-42. Megan, Carolyn. “New Perceptions on Rhythm in Reginald McKnight’s Fiction.” Kenyon Review 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1994): 56-62. Peterson, V. R. “Picks and Pans—The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas.” People 37, no. 15 (April 20, 1992): 39-40. Contributor: Nancy Sherrod
Terry McMillan Born: Port Huron, Michigan; October 18, 1951 African American
McMillan’s novels and short stories explore the complex relationships among urban black women of the late twentieth century, their families, and the men in their lives. Principal works long fiction: Mama, 1987; Disappearing Acts, 1989; Waiting to Exhale, 1992; How Stella Got Her Groove Back, 1996; A Day Late and a Dollar Short, 2001; The Interruption of Everything, 2005 screenplays: Waiting to Exhale, 1995 (adaptation of her novel; with Ronald Bass); How Stella Got Her Groove Back, 1998 (adaptation of her novel; with Bass) nonfiction: The Writer as Publicist, 1993 (with Marcia Biederman and Gary Aspenberg) edited text: Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, 1990 Terry McMillan was reared near Detroit by working-class parents and later moved to Los Angeles, where she attended community college and read widely in the canon of African American literature. In 1979, at the age of twenty-eight, she received her bachelor of science degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1987, she began a three-year instructorship at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and in 1988 received a coveted fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. After teaching in Tucson at the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1992, McMillan pursued writing as her full-time career. The environment in which McMillan’s views were formed prepared her for early marriage and a family, not the life of an intellectual and an artist. Her failure as an adult to meet the expectations of her culture and family created pressures that her work has consistently sought to address. Not surprisingly, her own struggle to adapt to cultural expectations resulted in an emphasis in her work on the tension in relationships between professional and blue-collar blacks, between women and men, and between members of the nuclear family. Mama depicts an acceptance by an intellectual daughter of her flawed mother. Disappearing Acts follows a love affair between a professional, responsible woman and an uneducated tradesman. Waiting to Exhale builds an ambitious collage of images from all three types of relationships. McMillan’s fiction addresses the archetypal dilemma of the disadvantaged— 719
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escaping the limitations imposed by one’s culture and family while trying to preserve the advantages they inevitably offer. This dilemma leads her characters into conflicts of ideology; their struggle is the struggle for truth, their quest the search for meaning. While some reviewers have attacked McMillan for her use of vulgar language, others have defended its realism and immediacy. The same is true of the explicit sexual references throughout her work, and indeed for her character portrayals themselves. Critics observe that MacMillan’s characters all seem at times to have been exaggerated to achieve a calculated effect. McMillan’s popularity, however, suggests that she understands her craft and that her audience approves her purpose.
Mama Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 Mama is set in a town called Point Haven, Michigan, not far from Detroit. The book is dedicated to McMillan’s mother. Like her, the book’s protagonist, Mildred Peacock, is a poor, uneducated black woman who has remained with her abusive husband in the hope that he will help support their five children. As the novel begins, however, Crook Peacock has beaten Mildred one time too many. She kicks him out and divorces him. As the title suggests, Mildred sees motherhood as her primary role in life. McMillan shows her dealing with unscrupulous employers, scheming to outwit rent collectors and welfare workers, and even prostituting herself in order to feed her family. Mildred’s efforts to be a good mother are stymied by her addiction to alcohol and her inability to resist attractive men. Ironically, she gets married a second time to a man she does not love, or even like, simply because she needs his income. Her third marriage is no better. That husband, who is a much younger man, walks out on Mildred when he finds family responsibilities too burdensome. Though education gives most of McMillan’s other heroines many more options than Mildred has, their experiences with men are not very different from hers. Like
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her, they come to depend not on men but on other women, either family members or close friends. In Mildred’s case, it is her eldest daughter, Freda, who both inspires her to keep going and, on occasion, offers the wise counsel that Mildred desperately needs.
Disappearing Acts Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 McMillan’s second novel is a romantic comedy set in New York. The main characters in Disappearing Acts are Zora Banks, a musician and teacher, and Franklin Swift, a construction worker. One of their problems is that Franklin does not seem motivated to better himself. Another is that Zora and Franklin are not honest with each other. When he loses his job, he does not tell Zora; when she terminates a pregnancy, she does not even consult him. The next time she becomes pregnant, she decides to have the baby. Franklin gets furious and Zora puts him out. Franklin takes refuge in alcohol and cocaine. However, he finally returns to her with his addictions conquered and some solid plans for the future. McMillan undoubtedly drew the inspiration for Disappearing Acts from her life in New York, but, like any other artist, she invented her characters and changed details. Nevertheless, in 1990, McMillan’s former boyfriend, Leonard Welch, sued McMillan and her publishers, alleging that the character of Swift presented an unflattering portrait of Welch. Ironically, critics agree that Swift is presented as a basically good person. At any rate, the case was decided in McMillan’s favor. McMillan’s artistic integrity is also illustrated by her insistence on using alternating monologues in Disappearing Acts, telling the story first through Zora’s eyes and then from Franklin’s perspective. When her publisher insisted that she rewrite the book, making Franklin the sole narrator, McMillan changed publishers.
Waiting to Exhale Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Waiting to Exhale, McMillan’s third novel, was an instant popular success when it was first published in 1992. The book found wide acceptance, both critical and public, largely because of the honesty of its character portrayals and the timeliness of its themes. All four main characters in Waiting to Exhale are seeking the acceptance of culture and family but are also determined to escape their limiting influences. The conflicts that arise in the lives of the characters reflect the concerns of black feminist writers in general, and critics generally regard McMillan as having a finger on the pulse of 1990’s educated black women. The novel’s popularity is a re-
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flection of the growing number of middle-class African Americans who wish to participate in black cultural life and preserve its heritage. The title of Waiting to Exhale is a metaphor for the tension in each of the novel’s four protagonists’ lives. All are waiting to find the right man, and each is figuratively holding her breath until he comes along. Each protagonist’s story delineates a different type of coping strategy for the alienation and anxiety each suffers. In the face of criticism from their families, their culture, and themselves, the four women develop a friendship that enables them to stand fast against the many temptations to “settle” for an unhealthy relationship. The novel’s setting, Phoenix, implies the possibility of glorious rebirth, but the symbolic implications are muted and ultimately unfulfilled; still, the characters achieve integration and a new sense of identity through their relationships with one another. Savannah takes a cut in pay to move to Phoenix, where her old roommate from college, Bernadine, is living the perfect life. By the time Savannah completes the move, Bernadine’s marriage is in shambles, her husband and the father of their two children having deserted her with his young blond bookkeeper. Robin, a mutual friend, is frustrated, self-conscious, and anxious, looking for self-esteem through the eyes of the men she meets. Gloria, their hairdresser, is the single mother of a sixteen-year-old son, whose emerging sexuality creates fear in her and hostility in him. Savannah moves, Bernadine spends, Robin casts horoscopes, and Gloria eats; ultimately all their defense mechanisms crumble under one anothers’ affectionate but witheringly, relentlessly honest scrutiny.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 Like Disappearing Acts, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, is a love story. However, this time her novel is unabashedly autobiographical. McMillan’s alter ego, Stella Payne, is a successful forty-two-year-old woman with a wonderful son much like McMillan’s own, Solomon Welch. In a breathless, first-person narrative, Stella explains how she happened to choose Jamaica for a vacation and describes her chance encounter with Winston Shakespeare, a handsome young man half her age. What begins as attraction turns out to be true love. Nevertheless, Stella cannot forget the difference in their ages, though it seems not to trouble Winston. Back in California, Stella discovers that she has lost her job. However, she has invested so wisely over the years that money is not a real problem. She even sees this development as an opportunity to take her life in a new direction. This uncharacteristic optimism, she realizes, is the result of her involvement with Winston. Stella does not waste any time. She makes a second trip to Jamaica, this time taking her son and her niece with her. They get along famously with Winston. As the book ends, Winston is in California with Stella, and they are planning to marry. McMillan dedicated the novel to Jonathan Plummer, her own Jamaican husband.
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Reviewers felt that How Stella Got Her Groove Back lacked both the craftsmanship and the realism of McMillan’s other novels. With its happily-ever-after ending, it was generally dismissed as a romance.
A Day Late and a Dollar Short Type of work: Novel First published: 2001 Of the six major characters in A Day Late and a Dollar Short, Viola Price is the most important. Viola is a matriarch much like McMillan’s own mother. She still feels responsible for her children, her grandchildren, and even her former husband Cecil. Viola knows that her hardworking, well-to-do oldest daughter, Paris, is addicted to pills; that her second daughter, Charlotte, is possessed by her jealous hatred of Paris; and that her youngest child, Janelle, is too afraid of her second husband to admit that he has raped her daughter. Viola’s son, Lewis, is an alcoholic whose hot temper keeps landing him in jail. Viola also has one grandson who is gay and another who was headed for college until his girlfriend got pregnant. Even Cecil is a worry; he has a young girlfriend who Viola believes takes advantage of him. A Day Late and a Dollar Short begins with Viola lying in a hospital bed worrying about her family. It ends with her reaching out to them from beyond the grave in a final attempt to set them straight and to bring the family closer together. Although the use of six narrative voices sometimes leads to confusion, A Day Late and a Dollar Short is considered one of McMillan’s most appealing novels.
The Interruption of Everything Type of work: Novel First published: 2005 McMillan began by writing about young, ambitious women like herself. As she has grown older, however, so have her characters. The Interruption of Everything is about middle age. Marilyn Grimes, the heroine of the novel, is a forty-four-year-old woman whose children have gone off to college, leaving her with a live-in motherin-law, a mother showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, a sister too addicted to drugs to care for her own children, and a husband who seems to be having his own midlife crisis. Fortunately, Marilyn has two girlfriends to provide the support she desperately needs. One reason for McMillan’s broad appeal is that, though she never pretends that life is easy, she assures women that they have the inherent strength to handle whatever comes their way. In The Interruption of Everything, McMillan holds the attention of her readers with one plot complication after another. Marilyn becomes pregnant; her husband goes to Costa Rica to find himself; her son brings a peculiar crew
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home from college; and her former husband reappears, looking better than she remembered. The dialogue is as irreverent and as sparkling as McMillan’s readers expect, and The Interruption of Everything ends on an optimistic note.
Suggested Readings Dandridge, Rita B. “Debunking the Motherhood Myth in Terry McMillan’s Mama.” CLA Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 405-416. Ellerby, Janet Mason. “Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family.” MELUS 22, no. 2 (1997): 105-117. Harris, Tina M., and Patricia S. Hill. “‘Waiting to Exhale’ or ‘Breath(ing) Again’: A Search for Identity, Empowerment, and Love in the 1990’s.” Women and Language 21, no. 2 (1998): 9-20. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Patrick, Diane. Terry McMillan: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Contributors: Andrew B. Preslar and Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman
D’Arcy McNickle Born: St. Ignatius, Montana; January 18, 1904 Died: Albuquerque, New Mexico; October 18, 1977 Native American
In novels, short stories, children’s books, and scholarly works, McNickle focuses on communication problems between Native Americans and the dominant culture. Principal works long fiction: The Surrounded, 1936; Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize, 1954; Wind from an Enemy Sky, 1978 short fiction: The Hawk Is Hungry, and Other Stories, 1993 nonfiction: They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian, 1949; Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet, 1959 (with Harold Fey); The Indian Tribes of the United States: Ethnic and Cultural Survival, 1962 (revised as Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals, 1973); Indian Man: A Biography of Oliver La Farge, 1971 Born to a Scotch-Irish father and a French Canadian mother of Cree heritage, D’Arcy McNickle (DAHR-see muhk-NIHK-ehl) knew from an early age the problems of mixed identity that many Native Americans experience. Reared on a northwestern Montana ranch, McNickle, along with his family, was adopted into the Salish-Kootanai Indian tribe. Attending Oxford University and the University of Grenoble in France after completing his undergraduate education at the University of Montana, McNickle was as firmly grounded in Native American culture as he was in the white world. Completing his formal education when the United States was gripped by the Depression, McNickle was among the writers who joined the Federal Writers’ Project, with which he was associated from 1935 to 1936. His first novel, The Surrounded, was an outgrowth of this association. This book focuses on how an Indian tribe disintegrates as the United States government encroaches upon and ultimately grabs tribal lands and then sets out to educate the Native American children in such a way as to denigrate their culture and integrate them into the dominant society. Like McNickle, the protagonist of this novel, Archilde, has a mixed identity, being the offspring of a Spanish father and a Native American mother. In his children’s book, Runner in the Sun, McNickle deals with similar questions of identity centering on the inevitable conflicts between whites and Native Ameri725
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cans. The Native Americans strive in vain to preserve their culture and retain their grazing lands. Such also is the focus of McNickle’s posthumous novel, Wind from an Enemy Sky, in which tribal lands are condemned for the building of a dam, and the sacred medicine bundle is given to a museum for display. McNickle also produced several works of nonfiction that grew out of his tenure with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and his directorship of the bureau’s division of American Indian development.
The Surrounded Type of work: Novel First published: 1936 The Surrounded has strong autobiographical overtones. The novel focuses on Archilde, through whom the readers see the identity conflicts that trouble the racially mixed hero. Archilde is caught between the white and the Indian cultures, neither of which is unambiguously good or bad, making his position even more difficult. One of the ways that the novel emphasizes this cultural conflict is by describing many characters and events as opposing pairs. Catharine LaLoup Leon and Max Leon, for example, each present to Archilde some of the positive aspects of Indian and white culture, respectively. The Indian dancing on the Fourth of July, full of ancient meaning and beauty, is contrasted with the white people’s meaningless dance in a dark, bare hall. The novel expresses particular concern for the decline of Native American culture. McNickle describes in great detail the transformation of Mike and Narcisse as the older women prepare them for the dance, emphasizing the beauty of traditional culture. McNickle applies his expertise as an anthropologist to the detailed explanation of all the old dances, stressing each dance’s particular meaning. This is contrasted with the scene at the Fourth of July dance, where white people come to laugh disrespectfully at the old men as they move slowly through the only dances that they are still allowed to do. In addition, The Surrounded presents an interesting view of nature. Archilde goes into the wilderness to be alone, and nature is generally seen as an ally to the Indians, who can live in mountain caves and hunt for their food if they so choose. The scene in which Archilde sees the cloud-cross in the sky, and ignores it because the bird ignores it, stresses the preeminence of nature. Archilde remembers this experience and teaches this same lesson to Mike and Narcisse: If the birds are not frightened by signs and demons, they should not be, either. Nature is seen as a better source of encouragement and truth than are the priests. An interesting aspect of the novel is the presence of two especially strong female characters. Elise is reckless and determined to get what she wants. She can ride and hunt as well as any man. She takes the initiative, not only in her relationship with Archilde but also in their escape into the mountains. She, like Catharine, is not
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afraid to kill when Archilde is threatened. Catharine is held in high regard, not only among the Indians but also among the whites (which is one reason that Max married her in the first place). Even in her advanced age, she hunts for herself. Her death is described as a triumphant moment. She dies unafraid, surrounded by her Indian family and friends. The plot structure of The Surrounded demonstrates a certain circularity and reflects the work’s thematic concern for Archilde’s identity. Archilde left the reservation, trying to put some distance between himself and his people. When he returns, it is only for a short and final visit. Yet he continues to stay as he becomes increasingly entangled in events on the reservation. The apparent inaction—staying—is actually the action that helps him determine his identity as an Indian. He does not succeed in going to Portland to be a fiddler or even in running his father’s farm. Archilde succeeds in finding his identity at those times when he feels most connected to his tribal heritage: at the dance and at his mother’s death. His identity comes not from breaking away and succeeding in isolation but from living in his proper context, with his people and his land.
Wind from an Enemy Sky Type of work: Novel First published: 1978 In Wind from an Enemy Sky, McNickle writes of the difficult period in American history during which the United States government attempted to subdue Native Americans peacefully. McNickle, a government employee for most of his life, presents a balanced view of what occurred during this period in one small Native American enclave in the Flathead Lake-St. Ignatius area of Montana. On the surface, McNickle presents the story of a Native American extended family that includes Pock Face, who, carrying his grandfather’s rifle, steals furtively into a canyon where white developers have built a dam on tribal land. The Little Elk Indians equate the damming of their river with its murder. The dam has an immediate negative impact upon fishing and farming on their tribal lands. As Pock Face and Theobald, his cousin, approach the dam, they spy a white man walking across its surface. Pock Face fires one shot. Jim Cooke, ironically on his last day of work before going east to marry, dies instantly. The remainder of the story revolves around the government’s efforts to mete out justice to the murderer. This surface story, however, provides the justification for a compelling subtext that illustrates the difficulties involved when one wellestablished culture attempts to impose itself upon another. Wind from an Enemy Sky, maintaining throughout an objective view of two disparate cultures, proffers a poignant political and social statement about culture and values in multiethnic settings. Wind from an Enemy Sky is concerned largely with the inability of the Native American and dominant societies in the United States to communicate produc-
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tively with each other. As McNickle presents it, Native American society is deeply suspicious of the dominant society that has, through the years, oppressed it. Promises made have seldom been promises kept. The suspicions that keep Indians from interacting productively with government agencies are spawned not by paranoia but rather by extensive bitter experience. The dam the government built has diverted a river on which the Indians depend. The waters that the dam captures will nourish the fields of white homesteaders, to whom the government has sold Indian lands at $1.25 an acre. The Native Americans look upon these land sales as forms of robbery. Added to this justifiable charge is the charge that white officials have kidnapped Indian children and sent them to distant government schools against their will. McNickle suggests the inevitability of tragedy in dealings between Native Americans and representatives of the dominant society. He also demonstrates how some Native Americans—Henry Jim and The Boy, for example—move into the white world or attempt to straddle the two worlds, placing them in impossible positions. For Henry Jim, it is impossible to shake the Native American heritage, which the dying man finally embraces again.
Suggested Readings McNickle, D’Arcy. D’Arcy McNickle’s “The Hungry Generations”: The Evolution of a Novel. Edited by Birgit Hans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Parker, Dorothy R. Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Purdy, John Lloyd, ed. The Legacy of D’Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. _______. Word Ways: The Novels of D’Arcy McNickle. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. Ruppert, James. D’Arcy McNickle. 1962. Reprint. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1988. Contributors: R. Baird Shuman and Kelly C. Walter
James Alan McPherson Born: Savannah, Georgia; September 16, 1943 African American
McPherson’s stories are preoccupied not only with what it means to be a black person in modern America but also with how the individual responds to a culture plagued by racial discrimination. Principal works short fiction: Hue and Cry, 1969; Elbow Room, 1977 nonfiction: Why I Like Country Music, 1982; Crabcakes, 1998; A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, 2000; Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg, 2003 edited texts: Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture, 1976 (with Miller Williams); Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men, 1998 (with DeWitt Henry) James Alan McPherson earned degrees from Morris Brown College (B.A., 1965), Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1968), and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A., 1971). He has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Harvard University, Morgan State University, and the University of Virginia. Besides being a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he held jobs ranging from stock clerk to newspaper reporter. In the early 1980’s, McPherson began teaching fiction writing in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. After writing Elbow Room (which won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was nominated for the National Book Award), McPherson primarily focused on nonfiction essays that center on the need for African Americans to help define the cultural realities of contemporary American life. His first book in twenty years, Crabcakes, focuses on his ultimate understanding of what makes people human. McPherson is one of the writers of fiction who form the second major phase of modern writing about the African American experience. Indebted, like all of his generation, to the groundbreaking and theme-setting work of Richard Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, McPherson shies away from doctrinaire argumentation about racial issues. Rather, he uses these issues to give his work a firmly American aura, which includes a preoccupation not only with what it means to be a black person in modern America but also with how the individual responds to a culture that often is plagued by subtle and not-so-subtle racial discriminations. Hence, there are 729
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times when blackness becomes for McPherson a metaphor for the alienation experienced by the individual in contemporary society. This comprehensive concern with American culture informs all of McPherson’s work, including those pieces that are included in the prose and poetry collection compiled by McPherson and Miller Williams, titled Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture. A celebration, a lament, and a plea, this volume deals with the passing of the great era of passenger railcar service in the United States. To McPherson, the liberating motion integral to the railroad is important, but so is the sense of place and time that builds for his characters much of their sense of self. McPherson’s characters are often confined by the conventions of locale, yet McPherson is not a regional writer in the usual sense of the word; he can bring to life stories set in Tennessee, Virginia, Boston, Chicago, or London. Because of the tension in this body of work between the individual and the community, McPherson’s people often feel alienated, lonely, and unable fully to reach or to maintain contact with acquaintances, friends, families, or lovers. Yet such isolation may lead to a character’s growth to near-tragic stature. The integrity of the individual is thus asserted even while a narrator may worry over the deep inability of any person to penetrate into the heart and mind of another. Such recognitions contribute to the sympathetic portrayal even of unpromising characters. It should be noted that the reader is not given solutions in McPherson’s fiction, only access to degrees of awareness of the mysteries of race, sexuality, identity, and love. Reading McPherson, a reader may be reminded of Baldwin’s presentation of agonizingly complex racial and sexual problems, of Saul Bellow’s portrayal of characters battling absurdity and despair, and of the struggle of characters, both in Baldwin and in Bellow, toward the ameliorating but no less mysterious experience of love.
“Gold Coast” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1969, in Hue and Cry McPherson’s first volume of short fiction, Hue and Cry, is an often-grim affair, containing stories of loneliness, destitution, defeat, sexual alienation, and racial tension. A prime example of this early work is “Gold Coast,” winner of The Atlantic Monthly’s 1968 fiction prize. The narrator of this story is an “apprentice janitor” in a hotel near Harvard Square in Boston, a hotel that has seen better days and is now populated with aging singles or couples who are almost as disengaged from the mainstream of Boston life as is the superintendent of the building, James Sullivan. Listening to Sullivan and observing the people in the apartments, the narrator, Robert, seeks to gather information for the stories and books he hopes to write. For Robert, being a janitor is in some ways a whim; in addition to gleaning experiential details from rubbish bins, he is constructing his life along romantic lines. Hence, Robert notes that, almost nightly,
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I drifted off to sleep lulled by sweet anticipation of that time when my potential would suddenly be realized and there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: “He knew life on many levels. From shoeshine boy, freelance waiter, 3rd cook, janitor, he rose to. . . .”
Naïve but witty, the narrator humors Sullivan, putting up patiently with the Irishman’s redundant reminiscing and opinionated ramblings on society and politics. Sullivan, however, comes to rely on Robert’s company; he turns from the horrors of life in the filthy apartment he shares with his obscene, insane wife to interminable conversations with Robert. Robert’s sympathetic tolerance of Sullivan emanates from his sense of the pathetic isolation of Sullivan from human contact and from Robert’s recognition for the first time of the terrors of aging. Robert is the archetypal youth coming to awareness of old age as a time of foreshortened expectations and straitened lifestyles, of possible despair and near dehumanization. The apprentice janitor can tolerate Sullivan and his new knowledge while his relationship with the rich, lovely Jean goes well, but Jean and he are soon torn apart by social forces. In fact, they play a game called “Social Forces,” in which they try to determine which of them will break first under social disapproval of their interracial relationship. When the game defeats them, Robert first is comforted by and then pulls back from his friendship with the dejected Sullivan, who is especially upset over the loss of his dog. When Robert finally leaves his briefly held janitorial position, he does so with both relief and guilt over his abandonment of Sullivan. He knows, however, that he is “still young” and not yet doomed to the utter loneliness of the old man. McPherson suggests that the young, nevertheless, will inevitably come to such bleak isolation and that even the temporary freedom of youth is sometimes maintained at the expense of sympathy and kindness. There are dangers in being free, not the least of which are the burden of knowledge, the hardening of the self, and the aching realization of basic, but often unmet, human needs. This theme of loss is picked up in the volume’s title story, “Hue and Cry,” which includes this interchange between two characters: “Between my eyes I see three people and they are all unhappy. Why?” “Perhaps it is because they are alive. Perhaps it is because they once were. Perhaps it is because they have to be. I do not know.”
These voices cannot make sense of the losses to which life dooms McPherson’s characters, nor does Robert. He simply moves away from the hotel to enjoy, while he can, youth and his sense of potential.
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“A Solo Song: For Doc” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1969, in Hue and Cry The theme of old age and its defeats is further developed in McPherson’s wellreceived “A Solo Song: For Doc,” a story that displays well the author’s rhythmic and precise control of narration conceived of as speech. McPherson resolves to initiate readers of all races into a facet of their culture that is quickly passing out of sight. The narrator, an aging waiter on a railroad line, tells a young listener about the good old days in the service and about their embodiment, a waiter called Doc Craft. “So do you want to know this business, youngblood?” begins the teller of the tale, and he goes on, “So you want to be a Waiter’s Waiter? The Commissary gives you a book with all the rules and tells you to learn them. And you do, and think that is all there is to it.” This “Waiter’s Waiter” then proceeds to disillusion the “youngblood” by describing the difficult waiter’s craft—the finesse, grace, care, and creativity required to make the job into an art and to make that art pay. The grace and dedication displayed by men of Doc Craft’s generation is shown to be losing ground to the contemporary world of business in which men such as “Jerry Ewald, the Unexpected Inspector,” lie in wait to trap heroes like Doc Craft and to remove them from the service that keeps them alive. The narrator specifies what kept Doc on the road: having power over his car and his customers, hustling tips, enjoying women without being married to them, getting drunk without having to worry about getting home. The shift from passenger to freight service on the railroad, however, begins the company’s attempt to fire Doc and also initiates Doc’s rise to heroic stature. Older ways of work and life yield to new technology, and, like the oldtime railroad, Doc Craft is doomed; Ewald catches Doc on a technicality about iced-tea service, and the waiter is fired. Clearly, McPherson’s thematic preoccupations and love of the railroad have coalesced in this story. He captures the complexity, richness, and hardships of the lives of African American traveling men, as well as the initiative and kinship developed by black workers. Movement, adventure, freedom, self-expression, craftsmanship, commitment, exuberance, and endurance—these qualities mark both Doc Craft and the railroad as valuable American entities. Yet the passing of Doc carries McPherson’s sense of the epic loss suffered by an America that has allowed the railroad, the metaphoric counterpart of imaginative integration of all kinds, to decay.
“Why I Like Country Music” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1977, in Elbow Room Even while remaining faithful to McPherson’s characteristic themes, Elbow Room, his second volume, includes stories that reach a kind of comic perfection. One ex-
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ample is “Why I Like Country Music.” The narrator, a southern-born black, addresses to his northern-born wife an explanation of his love of square-dance music. His wife will not believe or accept this preference, but the narrator quietly insists on it. In one sense, this insistence and the narration that justifies it may be viewed as evidence of the eternal and invincible isolation of the human heart from sympathetic understanding even by loved ones. The forces of memory and of individual development work to isolate human beings from one another. Further, the narrator’s insistence that the South Carolina traditions of his youth have given to him preferences and ideas alien to those of the New York-born tends to strengthen this theme of the coherence but separateness of the self. Such thematic reverberations, however, do not form the main concern of this story. Rather, the narrator tells us of a comic case of childhood puppy love; he explains that he loves country music because it is permanently associated in his mind with a girl in his fourth-grade class whose name was Gweneth Larson. Born in Brooklyn and redolent of lemons, Gweneth is for the narrator an object of first love. The moments when he square-danced with her in a school May Day celebration were etched in his mind as moments of surpassing joy and love. Far from exploring alienation, the story celebrates the endurance of such affection. McPherson’s comedy is never heavy-handed, always a matter of a light tone or a moment of incongruity. An example occurs when the narrator describes the calling of the Maypole teams to the playground for their performance: “Maypole teams up!” called Mr. Henry Lucas, our principal, from his platform by the swings. Beside him stood the white Superintendent of Schools (who said later of the square dance, it was reported to all the classes, “Lord, y’all square dance so good it makes me plumb ashamed us white folks ain’t takin’ better care of our art stuff”).
“A Loaf of Bread” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1977, in Elbow Room A more somber story in Elbow Room, “A Loaf of Bread,” addresses important issues associated with racism and assimilation by depicting the isolation of the African American middle class. As in many of his other stories, McPherson expresses hope for the evolution of a model of American identity toward which all Americans can proudly gravitate. In “A Loaf of Bread,” he explores the difference between exploitation and participation of African Americans in American society. Store owner Harold Green charges higher prices for goods in his store in an African American neighborhood than in the stores he owns in white neighborhoods. Consequently, as an act of restitution for exploiting the black community, Green decides that the best solution is to open his store and give away his merchandise free of charge to members of the exploited black community. The ensuing frenzy leaves Green’s store in complete disarray, totally depleted of merchandise.
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Nelson Reed, the leader of the community protest against Green, returns to the store later in the day to pay Green one dollar for the loaf of bread that his wife had taken from the store that morning. Reed is evidently seeking the status of a participating consumer versus an exploited one. Characteristic of McPherson’s writing, characters in difficult situations struggle for some measure of success. However, Reed’s attempt to receive equitable treatment as an American citizen is nullified by Green’s response. Similar to other fiction written by McPherson, the overall plot of “A Loaf of Bread” appears to argue for an American citizenship that eradicates racial boundaries and produces a coherent, color-blind American society. However, McPherson believes that racial exclusion continues to exist like an undeviated line from decades past and that acts of racial prejudice continue to demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial chauvinism. Furthermore, pointing fingers and using the “we/they” phrase in reference to other races only proliferate prejudice and isolation. In “A Loaf of Bread,” the hope for the black community to achieve unified American citizenship seems to be superseded by the lure of participating as a consumer in the marketplace. McPherson suggests that the African American middle class has abandoned the process of discarding some of the traditions of their fathers and embracing a sense of commonality with the white world. Consequently, the African American middle class becomes further isolated from the mainstream of American society. It is notable that in both his comedy “Why I Like Country Music” and his very somber “A Loaf of Bread,” McPherson remains firmly focused on the human personality, which is for him the incentive for narration and the core of his art.
Suggested Readings Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Cox, Joseph T. “James Alan McPherson.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Laughlin, Rosemary M. “Attention, American Folklore: Doc Craft Comes Marching In.” Studies in American Fiction 1 (1973): 221-227. McPherson, James Alan. “Interview with James Alan McPherson.” Interview by Bob Shacochis. Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1983): 6-33. Reid, Calvin. “James Alan McPherson: A Theater of Memory.” Publishers Weekly 244 (December 15, 1997): 36-37. Wallace, Jon. The Politics of Style: Language as Theme in the Fiction of Berger, McGuane, and McPherson. Durango, Colo.: Hollowbrook, 1992. _______. “The Story Behind the Story in James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room.” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (Fall, 1988): 447-452. Contributors: Alvin K. Benson, Cheryl Herr, and Edward Huffstetler
Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) Born: Little Rock, Arkansas; February 23, 1942 African American
Madhubuti exhibits a total dedication to black pride, unity, power, and, as he puts it, “identity, purpose and direction” focused on black “nationbuilding.” Principal works poetry: Think Black, 1967 (revised 1968 and 1969); Black Pride, 1968; Don’t Cry, Scream, 1969; We Walk the Way of the New World, 1970; Directionscore: Selected and New Poems, 1971; Book of Life, 1973; Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, 1987; GroundWork: New and Selected Poems of Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti from 1966-1996, 1996; Heartlove: Wedding and Love Poems, 1998; Run Toward Fear: New Poems and a Poet’s Handbook, 2002 nonfiction: Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 1960’s, 1971; From Plan to Planet, Life Studies: The Need for Afrikan Minds and Institutions, 1973; Enemies: The Clash of Races, 1978; Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?, 1990; Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption—Blacks Seeking a Culture of Enlightened Empowerment, 1994; Tough Notes: A Healing Call for Creating Exceptional Black Men—Affirmations, Meditations, Readings, and Strategies, 2002 edited texts: To Gwen with Love: An Anthology Dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks, 1971 (with Francis Ward and Patricia L. Brown); Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1987; Confusion by Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of “The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman,” 1990; Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the ’92 Los Angeles Rebellion, 1993; Black Books Bulletin: The Challenge of the Twenty-first Century, 1995; Million Man March, Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology—Speeches, Commentary, Photography, Poetry, Illustrations, Documents, 1996 (with Maulana Karenga); Releasing the Spirit: A Collection of Literary Works from “Gallery Thirty-Seven,” 1998 (with Gwendolyn Mitchell); Describe the Moment: A Collection of Literary Works from “Gallery Thirty-Seven,” 2000 (with Mitchell) miscellaneous: Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973-1983, 1984 735
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Haki R. Madhubuti (HAH-kee mah-dew-BEW-tee)—who changed his name from Don Luther Lee to his Swahili name in 1973—was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and moved to Chicago with his parents Jimmy and Maxine Lee midway through his childhood. After graduating from high school, Madhubuti continued his education at Wilson Junior College, Roosevelt University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. His formal education was tempered, however, by a wide range of jobs that increased his rapport with varied classes and individuals within the black community. After serving in the United States Army from 1960 to 1963, Madhubuti returned to Chicago to begin an apprenticeship as curator of the DuSable Museum of African History, which he continued until 1967. Meanwhile, he worked as a stock department clerk for Montgomery Ward (1963-1964), a post office clerk (1964-1965), and a junior executive for Spiegel’s (1965-1966). By the end of 1967, Madhubuti’s reputation as a poet and as a spokesman for the new black poetry of the 1960’s had grown sufficiently to enable him to support himself through publishing and teaching alone. He was writer-in-residence at Cornell University from 1968 to 1969. Similar positions followed at Northeastern Illinois State College (1969-1970) and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (19691971), where he combined poet-in-residencies with teaching black literature. From 1970 to 1975, Madhubuti taught at Howard University, except for a year at Morgan State College where he was writer-in-residence from 1972 to 1973. The extensive popular reception of his poetry and the increasing frequency of his social essays made him a favorite (if controversial) reader and lecturer with black college students across the country. His influence and popularity also enabled him to found, in Chicago, the Institute of Positive Education in 1971, which became the publisher of Black Books Bulletin, edited by Madhubuti, and for which he served as director from 1971 to 1991. He also became the publisher and editor of Third World Press, one of the largest and most successful independent African American book publishers. In conjunction with his publishing roles, Madhubuti also served as a professor of English and director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University, and he assumed important executive positions with a number of Pan-African organizations such as the Congress of African People.
Think Black Type of work: Poetry First published: 1967 Several poems in Madhubuti’s first book, Think Black, are testimonial as well as vengeful; it is clear in these poems that Madhubuti had been “liberating” himself for several years and only then was testifying to that personal struggle through accommodation. He was to say later, in “Black Sketches” (Don’t Cry, Scream), that he “became black” in 1963 and “everyone thought it unusual;/ even me.” Both the accommodationist period and the reactive phase are seen in Think
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Black, but the point of view is nearly always that of a reaction against accommodation. In “Understanding But Not Forgetting,” Madhubuti speaks of his family life and his “early escape/ period, trying to be white.” Among his images are those of an intellectual accommodationist who “still ain’t hip,” an uneducated grandmother “with wisdom that most philosophers would/ envy,” misery-filled weekends with “no family/ but money,” a twenty-two-year-old sister with “five children,” a mother involved in prostitution but “providing for her family,” and a cheating white newspaper distributor who kept “telling/ me what a good boy I was.” Reexamining his childhood and adolescence in this poem, Madhubuti concludes: “About positive images as a child—NONE,” and further that “About negative images as a child—all black.” In his attempt to understand his social conditioning and view it in the larger context of American culture, he is forced to conclude that education, democracy, religion, and even the “BLACK MIDDLE CLASS” (to which he has aspired) have failed him because of “the American System.” It is, in fact, those very outcasts of the black community itself—the grandmother and the prostitutemother, who “read Richard Wright and Chester Himes/ . . ./ [bad books,” that offer examples of survival against overwhelming oppression.
Black Pride Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968 Madhubuti had not, however, accomplished much more at that time than rejection of the value system that had created his anger and despair: The awareness of how to “think black” is vague. The last poem in the book, “Awareness,” is a chant of only three words: “BLACK PEOPLE THINK.” In the variations of syntactical arrangement of these words, however, one is left with the unmistakable impression that he will struggle to learn from those outcasts of mainstream society just what it means to “THINK BLACK.” These lessons are the heart of his second book, Black Pride, which is still reactive but nevertheless substantial in its discovery of identity. While many of these poems remain confessional, there is an increase in the clarity of Madhubuti’s sociopolitical development. In the brief lead poem, “The New Integrationist,” he announces his intention to join “negroes/ with/ black/ people.” The one-word lines of the poem force the reader to contemplate not only the irony in his use of “integration” but also the implications inherent in the labels “negro” and “black.” It is an appropriate keynote for the fulfillment of that vague awareness with which his first book ended. Perhaps the growth in self-identity that characterizes Black Pride begins, paradoxically, most clearly in “The Self-Hatred of Don L. Lee.” The confessional stance of the poet first acknowledges a love of “my color” because it allowed him to move upward in the accommodationist period; it “opened sMALL/ doors of/ tokenism.” After “struggling” through a reading list of the forerunners of cultural nationalism, Madhubuti then describes a breakthrough from “my blindness” to
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“pitchblack// awareness.” His “all/ black// inner/ self ” is now his strength, the basis for his self-identity, and he rejects with “vehement/ hatred” his “light/ brown/ outer” self, that appearance which he had previously exploited by accepting the benefits of tokenism. While Madhubuti had escaped accommodation by this time, he had not yet ceased to react to it; instead of having skin too dark, he had skin too light. He was, as black oral tradition puts it, “color-struck.” He had, however, moved much deeper into the problem of establishing an identity based on dignity rather than denigration. The growth of identity and black pride still remains, then, a function of what is not blackness instead of what is, or will become, Madhubuti’s new Black Nation. In several poems such as “The Primitive,” Madhubuti describes the loss of black values under American slavery and the subsequent efforts of blacks to imitate their oppressors who “raped our minds” with mainstream images from “T.V. . . ./ Reader’s Digest// tarzan & jungle jim,” who offered “used cars & used homes/ reefers & napalm/ european history & promises” and who fostered “alien concepts/ of whi-teness.” His message here is blunt: “this weapon called/ civilization// [acts] to drive us mad/ (like them).” For all of his vindictive bitterness, however, Madhubuti addresses himself to the black community more than he does to white America—self-reliance for self-preservation emerges as the crucial issue. As he suggests in the final poem “No More Marching Now,” nonviolent protest and civil rights legislation have been undermined by white values; thus, “public/ housing” has become a euphemism for “concentration camps.” His charge is typically blunt: “you better wake up// before it’s too late.” Although the first two volumes of Madhubuti’s poems exist in the tension between accommodation and reaction, they do show growth in the use of language as well as in identity and pride. His work, at times, suffers from clichéd rhetoric and easy catchphrases common to exhortation, but it also possesses a genuine delight in the playfulness of language even while it struggles forward in the midst of serious sociopolitical polemic. In his division of “white,” for example, where the one-syllable word is frequently cut into the two-syllable “whi-te” or the second syllable is dropped completely to the next line, Madhubuti demonstrates more than typographical scoring for the sound of his poem, for he displays the fragmentation between ideals and the imHaki R. Madhubuti (Courtesy, St. Norbert College) plementation of those ideals in Amer-
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ican culture. In contrast, “Black man” appears frequently as one word, “blackman,” sometimes capitalized and sometimes not—to emphasize the gradual dissolution of the individual’s ego, to suggest the necessity for unity in the community for which he strives. Capitalization, in a similar way, sometimes connotes pride in his use of “BLACK.” At other times, he uses derogatory puns, such as when “U.S.” becomes “u ass.” His models are street language, urban speech patterns, jazz improvisation, the narrative form of the toast, and the general inventiveness of an oral tradition that belongs wholly to black culture.
Don’t Cry, Scream Type of work: Poetry First published: 1969 These early poems continue to develop both thematically and technically in Madhubuti’s next two books, Don’t Cry, Scream and We Walk the Way of the New World, in which he began to outline his revolutionary program. Critic Marlene Mosher suggests that these works are consciously much less antiwhite and much more problack in their sociopolitical commitment. Madhubuti’s artistic commitment fused completely with his politics; as he says in the preface to Don’t Cry, Scream, “there is no neutral blackart.” Black poetry is seen as “culture building” rather than as a tool to criticize either white society or blacks who seek assimilation. In this programmatic work, the hate, bitterness, and invective of the earlier two books give way to music, humor, and a gentler insistence on change. The poems are more consciously crafted than previously, but they do not compromise their essentially urgent political fervor. In perhaps the most widely anthologized poem by Madhubuti, “But He Was Cool, or: he even stopped for green lights,” he humorously undermines the stance of black radicals who are far more concerned with the appearance of being a revolutionary than with a real commitment to working for change in the black community. His satire here is more implicit than explicit, for the reader views the “supercool/ ultrablack” radical in “a double-natural” hairstyle and “dashikis [that] were tailor made.” His imported beads are “triple-hip,” and he introduces himself “in swahili” while saying “good-by in yoruba.” Madhubuti then becomes more explicit in his satire by dividing and modifying “intelligent” to read “ill tel li gent,” but he quickly moves back to implication by a rapidly delivered “bop” hyperbole that describes the radical as “cool cool ultracool . . ./ cool so cool cold cool/ . . . him was air conditioned cool” and concludes that he was “so cool him nick-named refrigerator.” The dissonance of the last word with the “ice box cool” earlier in the delivery clashes not only in sound but also in economic and political connotation. This radical is so busy acting the role of a revolutionary that he has been seduced by the very goals of Western culture that Madhubuti is rejecting: money, power, and sex. By his superficial use of gestures, the “radical” has taken himself even further away from an awareness of the real needs in the black community. In the aftermath of riots in “de-
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troit, newark, [and] chicago,” the would-be revolutionary must still be informed that “to be black/ is/ to be/ very-hot.” Despite the humor, music, and wordplay in one of Madhubuti’s most consciously and carefully “aesthetic” poems, the message is still primarily political. Although the poem does react to the shallowness of the radical, it is worth noting that the poem is no longer essentially reactive in its tone; by the very act of informing the radical of his ignorance in the closure of the poem, the implication is established that even this caricature has the possibility of redemption in Madhubuti’s version of Black Nationalism. Throughout Don’t Cry, Scream, Madhubuti begins to embrace a wider range of sensibilities in the black community while continuing to denounce those who would betray the needs of black people. In “Black Sketches,” he describes Republican Senator Ed Brooke from Massachusetts (then a self-proclaimed liberal advocate of civil rights) as “slashing/ his wrist/ because somebody/ called him/ black,” and portrays the conservative (relative to Madhubuti) Roy Wilkins as the token figure on the television show, “the mod squad.” He is relentless in his attack on black leaders who work within mainstream politics. In another poem, however, “Blackrunners/ blackmen or run into blackness,” Madhubuti celebrates the Olympic medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their Black Power salutes in 1968 during the awards ceremony. One could hardly describe their gesture as revolutionary, but Madhubuti accepts and praises their symbolic act as a sign of solidarity with his own sense of revolutionary change. In other poems, he is equally open to the role of black women, intellectuals, and Vietnam veterans. By the final poem of the volume, he is even willing to concede that the “negroes” whom he has denounced in earlier work may also be receptive to his political message. In “A Message All Blackpeople Can Dig (& a few negroes too),” Madhubuti announces that “the realpeople” must “move together/ hands on weapons & families” in order to bring new meanings “to// the blackness,/ to US.” While not exactly greeting antagonists with open arms (the parenthetical shift to the lower case in the title is quite intentional), his emphasis has changed from the coarse invective found in Think Black to a moral, political force that proceeds in “a righteous direction.” Not even whites are specifically attacked here; the enemy is now perceived as “the whi-timind,” attitudes and actions from “unpeople” who perpetuate racism and oppression. The message, in short, is now much closer to black humanism than it ever has been before: “blackpeople/ are moving, moving to return this earth into the hands of/ human beings.”
We Walk the Way of the New World Type of work: Poetry First published: 1970 The seeds for a revolutionary humanism planted at the close of Don’t Cry, Scream blossom in We Walk the Way of the New World. The flowers are armed to be sure, but in signaling this change, the author’s introduction, “Louder but Softer,” pro-
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claims that the “cultural nihilism” of the 1960’s must give way to the “New World of black consciousness” in which education and self-definition (in the context of the community) will create not noisy, pseudorevolutionaries but self-confident leaders who pursue “real” skills—“doctors, lawyers, teachers, historians, writers”—for ensuring the survival and development of African American culture. Madhubuti’s scope and purpose in this book are no less committed than they had been before, but they are far more embracing, compassionate, and visionary. His concern is the establishment of “an ongoing process aimed at an ultimate definition of our being.” The tone of urgency (“We’re talking about our children, a survival of a people”) remains constant and clear, but its directions have moved completely “from negative to positive.” While the ideas are not new in We Walk the Way of the New World, they do form Madhubuti’s most consciously articulated and poetically designed program: Of the three sections that shape the book, “Black Woman Poems,” “African Poems,” and “New World Poems,” he says, “Each part is a part of the other: Blackwoman is African and Africa is Blackwoman and they both represent the New World.” What is new in the fourth volume, then, is the degree of structural unity and, to a certain extent, a greater clarity in describing the specific meaning of Nguzo Saba, a black value system: “design yr own neighborhoods/ . . . teach yr own children/ . . . but/ build yr own loop// feed yr own people// [and] protect yr own communities.” The unifying metaphor for the book is the pilgrimage into the New World. Arming the heroic, everyman figure “blackman” (unnamed because he is potentially any black man in the service of community rather than in pursuit of individual, egotistical goals) with a knowledge of the contrasts between black women who are positive role models (with their love tied inextricably to black consciousness) and black women who aspire to imitate white middle-class, suburban women, Madhubuti then distinguishes the values of precolonial Africa from those that have become “contaminated” by Western industrialization. Here his emphasis is on rural communalism, loving family life, and conserving natural resources. By the final section, “blackman” has ceased to function as a depersonalized hero and is embodied in the individuality (having derived such from the community) of real black men, women, and children. This section largely recapitulates the themes and messages of earlier work, but it does so in an affirmative tone of self-asserted action within kawaida, African reason and tradition. In the long apocalyptic poem “For Black People,” Madhubuti dramatically represents a movement of the entire race from a capitalistic state of self-defeating inactivity to a socialistic economy where mutual love and respect result in an ecologically sound, peacefully shared world of all races (although the “few whi-te communities/ . . . were closely watched”). The movement of the poem, symphonic in its structure, is, in fact, the culmination of Madhubuti’s sociopolitical growth and artistic vision to this point.
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Book of Life Type of work: Poetry First published: 1973 With Book of Life, Madhubuti introduces little new thought, but his ideas are expressed in a much more reserved political tone and poetic structure. His role is that of the visionary prophet, the wise sage offering advice to the young children who must inevitably carry on the struggle to build the New World which he has described. Indeed, the book’s cover shows a photograph of his own son in the center of a star, and the volume is dedicated to him “and his sons, and their sons.” Throughout the book, photographs of Madhubuti sitting or fishing with his son testify to his affirmation of the future. His introduction still affirms “black world unity” and looks to kawaida as the source of this new African frame of reference, but only six new poems speak explicitly to the political dimensions of his vision. The second section, captioned after the title of the book, is composed of ninety-two meditations that echo Laozi’s Dao De Jing (c. third century b.c.e.). The language is simple but profound; the tone is quiet but urgent; the intended audience seems to be his son, but the community overhears him; the poetics are nearly devoid of device from any cultural context, but the force of the didacticism is sincere and genuine. Madhubuti, thinking of black poets who talk “about going to the Bahamas to write the next book,” denounces those “poets [who] have become the traitors.” It may well be that his sense of betrayal by black artists whom he had expected to assist him in his struggle for the New World and his own growing quietism combined to bring an end to his poetry—at least since the 1973 publication of this work. He seems to have followed his own proverb in Book of Life: “best teachers/ seldom teach/ they be and do.” Madhubuti demonstrated an astonishingly rapid growth in his poetry and thought—in only six years. With that sort of energy and commitment, it is not surprising that he should do what he has asked of others, shunning the success of the “traitors”: to be and do whatever is necessary for the building of the New World. For Madhubuti, that necessity has meant a turning away from publishing poetry and a turning toward the education of the future generation. One might quite easily dismiss Madhubuti as a dreamer or a madman, but then one would need to recall such visionaries as William Blake, who was dismissed too much and too soon.
Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors Type of work: Poetry First published: 1984, 1987 In the 1980’s, the growth in Madhubuti’s poetry was clearly evident. A sizable portion of his later poems teach through the impact of artful language, rather than
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sounding merely teacherly. Madhubuti’s two poetry collections of the 1980’s, Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions (which also includes prose essays) and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors, represent some of his strongest writing as he trusts that his keen observation will yield a bold enough political statement. For example, in “The Shape of Things to Come,” written about the earthquake in Naples, Italy, he observes: “quicker than one can pronounce free enterprise/ like well-oiled rumors or elastic lawyers smelling money/ plastic coffins appear and are sold/ at dusk behind the vatican on the white market./ in Italy in the christian month of eighty/ in the bottom of unimaginable catastrophe/ the profit motive endures as children replenish the earth/ in wretched abundance.” Poems from these volumes, such as “Abortion,” “Winterman,” “The Changing Seasons of Life,” “White on Black Crime,” and “Killing Memory” all reflect his increased technical control and subtle political commentary. Poems collected here also show that, ideologically, Madhubuti no longer continues to fight all the old battles. Christianity gets a break now, as do some white individuals. He has not, however, wavered in his fundamental commitment to black liberation and in his belief that cultural awareness can ignite and help sustain progressive political struggle. The love in him and for his mission has not diminished. If anything it has grown.
Heartlove Type of work: Poetry First published: 1998 Ten years after the publication of his previous volume of poetry, Madhubuti produced Heartlove: Wedding and Love Poems, an elegant collection drawn solely from Madhubuti’s poetry and prose and designed to capture and celebrate the essence of love in marriage, family meditations, caring, commitment, and friendships. Acting as a poetic script for the cast of a wedding—minister, bride and groom, the maid of honor, and the best man—Madhubuti counsels, “rise with the wisdom of grandmothers, rise understanding that creation is on-going, immensely appealing and acceptable to fools and geniuses, and those of us in between.” Each poem offers words of encouragement and advice to new couples or words of tribute to the lives that have influenced Madhubuti’s. From “Wedding Poems” to “Quality of Love” to “Extended Families,” Heartlove addresses crucial questions about building partnerships and the struggle to preserve community.
Suggested Readings Hooper, Lita. Art of Work: The Art and Life of Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World Press, 2007. Jennings, Regina. Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006.
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Madhubuti, Haki R. “Hard Words and Clear Songs: The Writing of Black Poetry.” In Tapping Potential: English Language Arts for the Black Learner, edited by Charlotte K. Brooks et al. Urbana, Ill.: Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English, 1985. _______. “Interview with Haki Madhubuti.” In Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews, edited by D. H. Melhem. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Mosher, Marlene. New Directions from Don L. Lee. Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1975. Palmer, R. Roderick. “The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni.” In Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald B. Gibson. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Randall, Dudley. “Broadside Press: A Personal Chronicle.” In The Black Seventies, edited by Floyd B. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970. Thompson, Julius E. “The Public Response to Haki R. Madhubuti, 1968-1988.” The Literary Griot: International Journal of Black Expressive Cultural Studies 4, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Summer, 1992): 16-37. Contributors: Sarah Hilbert and Michael Loudon
Clarence Major Born: Atlanta, Georgia; December 31, 1936 African American
The author of novels, short fiction, poetry, and critical studies, Major writes in a range of styles, from the conventional to the experimental. All his work exhibits lyricism and a fascination with language. Principal works long fiction: All-Night Visitors, 1969; NO, 1973; Reflex and Bone Structure, 1975; Emergency Exit, 1979; My Amputations, 1986; Such Was the Season, 1987; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, 1988; Dirty Bird Blues, 1996; One Flesh, 2003 poetry: The Fires That Burn in Heaven, 1954; Love Poems of a Black Man, 1965; Human Juices, 1966; Swallow the Lake, 1970; Private Line, 1971; Symptoms and Madness, 1971; The Cotton Club, 1972; The Syncopated Cakewalk, 1974; Inside Diameter: The France Poems, 1985; Surfaces and Masks: A Poem, 1988; Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century, 1989; Parking Lots: A Poem, 1992; Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 19581998, 1998; Waiting for Sweet Betty, 2002 short fiction: Fun and Games, 1990 nonfiction: Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, 1970 (also known as Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang, 1994); The Dark and Feeling: Black American Writers and Their Work, 1974; Necessary Distance: Essays and Criticism, 2001; Come by Here: My Mother’s Life, 2002; Conversations with Clarence Major, 2002 (Nancy Bunge, editor) edited texts: Writers Workshop Anthology, 1967; Man Is Like a Child, 1968; The New Black Poetry, 1969; Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories, 1993; The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry, 1996 Clarence Major was born in Atlanta, Georgia, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1955 to 1957. He studied at the Chicago Art Institute, graduated from the State University of New York at Albany, and earned a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimenting Colleges and Universities. Major taught at a number of universities, both in the United States and abroad, and after 1989 at the University of California at Davis. In addition to his fiction and poetry, Major has exhibited and published paintings and photographs. He has also been an editor and col745
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umnist and has lectured widely. He has been married twice and has lived in various parts of the United States and for extended periods in France and Italy. Critic Jerome Klinkowitz has written that the central achievement of Major’s career has been to show just how concretely we live within the imagination—how our lives are shaped by language and how by a simple act of self-awareness we can seize control of the world and reshape it to our liking and benefit.
“An Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1975, in Statements This story, which first appeared in the literary magazine Statements, is the best example of Major’s postmodernist style, fragmentary and barely coherent but with a powerful edge to it. The story centers on a young African American woman, a visit by a friend, and the young woman’s thoughts about her father and her own life. These events are parceled out in a style that dispels meaning: “The friend lit a cigarette and sat on the sounds of her own voice. Motion. And made a blowing sound,” Major writes early in this story, and, a little later on, “And mother’s couch was eaten by what might easily have been taxicabs with hooks on them. Anything can happen. (In any case, swift traffic was known to move through her living room.)” This metaphor of motion runs through the story, but it hardly ties together the various fragmented incidents and scraps of dialogue. What readers are left with is Major’s brilliant and poetic use of language.
Fun and Games Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1990 Clarence Major’s short-story collection Fun and Games was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Critics Award in 1990. While the volume represents Major’s short fiction through the 1980’s, it is a good barometer of his continuing fictional interests and forms. The sixteen stories in the volume are divided into five parts: Section 1 contains three stories (including the realistic “My Mother and Mitch” and “Ten Pecan Pies”), section 2 also has three shorter and more surreal stories, section 3 contains six stories, section 4 has three, and section 5 comprises “Mobile Axis: A Triptych,” three interconnected short fictions. While Major is capable of one form of social realism (as in “Letters”), he more regularly leans toward a staccato, fragmentary prose fiction in which the links are missing among characters and incidents (“The Horror” and the title story).
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“The Exchange,” for example, is a fairly realistic and even comic story about a faculty exchange gone horribly wrong. When the narrator and his wife arrive on the opposite coast to begin the yearlong exchange, they find a dilapidated house. Worse, when they return to their own home at the end of the year, their exchangees have turned the house into a replica of their own—down to the moldy contents of the refrigerator. Likewise, the collection’s title story is a first-person narration about a man’s three or four girlfriends, who keep leaving him and returning. The story is comic and at the same an oblique commentary on transience and commitment in contemporary society. More common in Fun and Games, however, are the themes found in “Mother Visiting,” a short, three-page story that violates most of the conventions of fictional verisimilitude. While the story touches upon a number of contemporary issues (notably sex and violence), its postmodernist style emphasizes the play of language over sense. Likewise in the short story “Virginia,” the dazzling use of language and image has replaced the demands of plot.
“My Mother and Mitch” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1990, in Fun and Games
This story won the Pushcart Prize for fiction in 1989 and leads off the Fun and Games collection. In some ways it does not resemble Major’s other short fiction, being a leaner and less experimental coming-of-age story. “My Mother and Mitch” centers on the date that Tommy Anderson’s mother had with Mitch Kibbs when Tommy was a teenager in Chicago in 1951. Mitch had dialed a wrong number and then kept calling to talk with Tommy’s mother, even after he discovered that she was black. The climax of the story comes when Mitch asks her to meet him in a restaurant, and Tommy watches the white man and his mother talking at the counter of a predominantly black eatery. The story is barely about interracial dating, for the couple never meet again after that night. What is more important is what the young Tommy discovers about his single mother: “I learned for the first time that she did not always know what she was doing. It struck me that she was as helpless as I sometimes felt.” That knowledge makes the adolescent Tommy feel closer to his mother: “there she was, just finding her way, step by step, like me. It was something wonderful anyway.” The story may remind readers of Sherwood Anderson’s “Death in the Woods,” for Tommy is retelling the tale many years later and still trying to get it right and discover its meaning through the retelling. In its lean recreation of the spare events here, the story may also remind readers of Raymond Carver and other minimalist short-story writers of the late twentieth century, who forsake long exposition and elaborate descriptions for the psychological revelations of a single voice.
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“Ten Pecan Pies” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1990, in Fun and Games “Ten Pecan Pies” uses still another fictional style, here a third-person, more traditional narration. The story was first published in Seattle Review, is reprinted in the first section of Fun and Games, and may remind readers of William Faulkner or Truman Capote in its rural southern setting and voices. “Ten Pecan Pies” concerns one Christmas in the Flower household, when the patriarch Grady Flower has kept two bags of pecans to himself and will not let his wife make her annual Christmas pies. The other preparations for Christmas—finding and decorating a tree, for example—go on, but Grady hoards the pecans in his room until Christmas Eve, when Thursday finally shames her husband and then, when he gives in, “suddenly kisse[s] the side of his face. The first time in years.” The story has other tensions— the drunken son Slick John killing the rabbits in front of his niece, Gal, for example—but the overwhelming feeling of the story is lyrical and nostalgic. Thursday douses the fire in the stove, the story concludes, “Yet the warmth stayed.”
“Scat” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1993, in Calling the Wind “Scat” was the only story of his own that Clarence Major selected for Calling the Wind, the collection of twentieth century African American fiction he published in 1993, so readers can assume he thinks the story is important, but it is also representative of a certain comic-surreal style Major mastered. The story covers a nightmare cab ride the narrator and his white girlfriend take into New York City with a cabdriver who subjects them to a monologue about the dangers of Manhattan, where the couple want to go, and the relative safety of Brooklyn, where the cabdriver lives. In his frustration at the cabdriver’s tales of the “superstitious practices” and “voodoo rites” in Manhattan, the narrator counters with his own stories of body snatching in Brooklyn. Readers conclude the story still not knowing who is crazier: the cabdriver, who talks knowingly of the “evil art of capnomancy,” or the narrator, who speaks of “the Plot, I mean the Sacrifice” and seems equally deranged. Perhaps, if one pursues the definition of the tale’s title, the story is the fictional equivalent of jazz singing with nonsense syllables, each voice trying to outdo the other.
Suggested Readings Bell, Bernard W. “Introduction: Clarence Major’s Double Consciousness as a Black Postmodernist Artist.” African American Review 28 (Spring, 1994): 5-10.
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_______, ed. Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Bolling, Doug. “A Reading of Clarence Major’s Short Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 13 (1979): 51-56. Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Clarence Major’s Innovative Fiction.” African American Review 28 (Spring, 1994): 57-63. O’Brien, John. “Clarence Major.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Selzer, Linda Furgerson. “Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major’s ‘The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage.’” African American Review 33 (Summer, 1999): 209-229. Weixlmann, Joe. “Clarence Major: A Checklist of Criticism.” Obsidian 4, no. 2 (1978): 101-113. Contributor: David Peck
Bernard Malamud Born: Brooklyn, New York; April 26, 1914 Died: New York, New York; March 18, 1986 Jewish
Malamud’s works present the outsider, usually a Jew, who epitomizes the individual who must make moral choices. Principal works long fiction: The Natural, 1952; The Assistant, 1957; A New Life, 1961; The Fixer, 1966; The Tenants, 1971; Dubin’s Lives, 1979; God’s Grace, 1982; The People, 1989 short fiction: The Magic Barrel, 1958; Idiots First, 1963; Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition, 1969; Rembrandt’s Hat, 1973; The Stories of Bernard Malamud, 1983; The People, and Uncollected Stories, 1989; The Complete Stories, 1997 (Robert Giroux, editor) nonfiction: Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, 1996 (Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco, editors) Bernard Malamud (MAL-uh-mewd) spent his youth in a setting much like that in The Assistant. His father was the owner of a small, struggling grocery store. His mother died when he was an adolescent. As a youth he had the freedom to wander around Brooklyn becoming intimately acquainted with the neighborhood. It was not a Jewish neighborhood, but Malamud came to understand the Jewish experience through his hardworking parents, immigrants from Russia. Malamud began writing stories in high school, and his writing career reflects the discipline and determination of many of his characters. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York. He then attended Columbia University and earned the master’s degree that enabled him to teach. He taught immigrants in evening school in Brooklyn, then in Harlem, for eight years, while writing short stories, before getting a job at Oregon State College in Cascadia, Oregon. There he wrote four novels and a collection of short stories. Malamud received the National Book Award for the short-story collection, The Magic Barrel, in 1959. He also received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the National Book Award for The Fixer in 1967. He accepted a position at Bennington College in Vermont in 1961, where he spent the rest of his teaching career, except for two years as a visiting lecturer at Harvard. Malamud’s work has an allegorical quality like that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His stories also reflect the Eastern European storytelling tradition. In this he is 750
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like such Yiddish writers as Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Leib Peretz. When Malamud describes, for example, a luckless character (called, in Jewish culture, a schlemiel) living in Brooklyn in the twentieth century, that person seems quite like someone living in the Jewish section of a Polish village. Malamud also captures in his works the sense of irony that pervades the folk stories of a people who recognize themselves as the chosen people and as the outcasts of society. Malamud saw this paradoxical position as being the plight of all humanity, and he found in the Jew the ideal metaphor for the struggling Bernard Malamud (© Jerry Bauer) human being. Acceptance of Jewish identity becomes, for his characters, acceptance of the human condition. Fusing this theme with a style that utilizes irony and parable, realism and symbolism, he presents the flourishing of the human spirit in an everyday reality of pressure and pain.
The Natural Type of work: Novel First published: 1952 The Natural is a modern retelling of the story of Percival, the Grail knight, and his quest to restore plenty to his desolate land. It chronicles the efforts of Roy Hobbs to lead the New York Knights baseball team to the pennant. At the beginning, Roy, nineteen, is on his way to Chicago for a tryout with the Cubs when he meets the mysterious Harriet Bird. When he can explain his purpose in life only in terms of self-interest, Harriet shoots him. Fifteen years later, Roy attempts a comeback with the Knights and quickly establishes himself as the greatest slugger in baseball history—with the help of his magical bat, Wonderboy, suggestive of the tree of fertility, Percival’s lance, and Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword. When he gives in to the temptations of the corrupt Memo Paris, however, Roy goes into a slump. He recovers through the influence of Iris Lemon, representative of fertility, life, and responsibility, but he ultimately rejects her and sells out to Memo’s gambler friends. He has one more chance to redeem himself. The wasteland-Holy Grail legend is combined with baseball history and lore, in-
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cluding the 1949 shooting of Eddie Waitkus, the 1919 Black Sox scandal and the consequent disgrace of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth’s career, and “Casey at the Bat,” to depict the moral complexities of contemporary American life, the opportunities for heroism offered by America, and moral obligations placed on the hero. The sufferings of the Christlike protagonists in Malamud’s novels are the ultimate tests of their humanity. Roy Hobbs fails as a hero because he does not recognize Iris’s goodness or his own selfishness. He fails to grow up morally, a growth necessary to revitalize a decadent society. He fails as a baseball hero, yet his suffering can make him succeed as a man.
The Assistant Type of work: Novel First published: 1957 In The Assistant, Malamud carefully structures his realistic second novel so that the story of the intertwined fates of Frank Alpine and the Bobers grows to symbolize self-discipline and suffering. The hero, Frank Alpine, unlike the hero of Malamud’s The Natural (1952), achieves self-integration and the subsequent identification with a group. Frank enters the life of the Bobers when he comes with Ward Minoque, who represents his worst self, to the struggling neighborhood store of Morris Bober to steal. Unlike Ward, Frank immediately recognizes Morris as a suffering human being. Indeed, Morris is the suffering Jew, an Everyman. Now old, he has achieved none of his dreams and must deprive his daughter, Helen, of her dream of attending college. To expiate his crime and to change his life, Frank returns to the store and, promising to work for nothing, persuades Morris to use him as an assistant. Unaware that Frank is the one who stole from him, Morris helps the hungry and homeless Frank with room and board and a small salary. Morris then becomes the moral guide Frank never had. Frank begins to change, but his progress is fitful, and he steals small sums from the register. His moral growth is accelerated by his falling in love with Helen, an idealistic young woman who will give Frank her love if he earns it. Motivated by this hope and a memory of the beauty of the selfless life of Saint Francis of Assisi, Frank tries to discipline himself. When Frank has nearly won the love of Helen, his hopes slip away when Morris, who suspects that Frank has been stealing, catches him with his hand in the register. Sent away from the store on the day he expects Helen to proclaim her love, Frank gives in to despair and frustration. First saving her from rape by Ward, he then forces himself on her against her will. Alienated from the Bobers, Frank’s redemption comes when he moves beyond himself. The opportunity arises when Morris is hospitalized and then dies. Frank takes over the store when Helen and her mother are too overwhelmed by their misfortunes to protest. To support them all, he works two jobs. Though he sometimes questions the dreary life to which he has submitted himself, he patiently endures,
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replacing Morris, whose example he has internalized. After a year, Frank even sends Helen to college. He then reflects his new attitudes by having himself circumcised, a symbolic act of his transformation.
The Fixer Type of work: Novel First published: 1966 Based on the story of a Russian Jew, Mendel Beiless, who was tried and acquitted in czarist Russia for the ritual murder of a Christian child, The Fixer artistically recreates that history. It also represents, in its theme, persecution in general. Malamud creates in this novel a story like a parable, similar in theme and style to his other works, that recounts the protagonist’s spiritual growth and affirms personal dignity and moral integrity even in a world that seems incomprehensible. Yakov Bok, the hero, a Jew, comes to define himself, value suffering, and feel most free when most confined. Yakov, a fixer or handyman, has had bad luck. With little work in his Jewish village and a wife first disappointing him in being childless then deserting him, he feels himself a prisoner of his circumstances. He sets off for Kiev, a city known for its anti-Semitism, in hopes of changing his life. In Kiev, Yakov, finding no work in the Jewish sector, begins looking outside the ghetto, which is illegal. Coming upon a drunken man who is lying unconscious in the street, Yakov helps the drunk, although Yakov recognizes him as an anti-Semite. To reward Yakov, the man offers him a job, which Yakov accepts with misgivings because it is outside the ghetto. One day Yakov reads in the paper of the ritual murder of a Christian child. The next day he is accused of the murder and put in prison. He is held for thirty months before being brought to trial. The next three-quarters of the novel describes Yakov’s physical agonies and spiritual growth while imprisoned. This growth is presented in his actions, dreams, hallucinations, perceptions, and memories during the daily suffering he undergoes—from deprivation of basic necessities and the torture of poisoning and chaining to the humiliation of the daily physical searches. During this time, he learns. He discovers the strength of hate, political power, and historical events and sees that an individual is, by force, a political being. Secretly reading the Old then the New Testament, he feels connected with his people yet fully appreciates the story of Christ. He develops compassion for the suffering of others. He acknowledges the suffering of the guard, who tells his story. Yakov forgives his wife and acknowledges his own part in their failed relationship. He accepts fatherhood, symbol of adulthood and personal identity, by declaring paternity to her illegitimate child, enabling her to return to life in her village without shame. At the same time, he refuses to sign any documents that will free him by blaming other Jews. He also refuses to admit guilt. He finds, in identifying with his group and in willingly suffering for them that, despite what may happen to him, he is free.
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Suggested Readings Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Avery, Evelyn, ed. The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Bloom, Harold, ed. Bernard Malamud. New York: Chelsea House, 2000. Davis, Philip. Experimental Essays on the Novels of Bernard Malamud: Malamud’s People. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Malamud, Bernard. Introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983. Ochshorn, Kathleen. The Heart’s Essential Landscape: Bernard Malamud’s Hero. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Sío-Castiñeira, Begoña. The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud: In Search of Jewish Post-immigrant Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Watts, Eileen H. “Jewish Self-Hatred in Malamud’s ‘The Jewbird.’” MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 157-163. Contributor: Bernadette Flynn Low
Malcolm X (Malcolm Little) Born: Omaha, Nebraska; May 19, 1925 Died: New York, New York; February 21, 1965 African American
Malcolm X went from being a street hustler to being a black leader and a symbol of fearless resistance against oppression. Principal works nonfiction: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965 (with Alex Haley); Malcolm X Speaks, 1965; The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard, 1968; By Any Means Necessary, 1970; The End of White World Supremacy, 1971 Malcolm X’s (born Malcolm Little) early years were marked by unsettling events: His family, threatened by the Ku Klux Klan in Omaha, moved to Lansing, Michigan, only to have their house burned down by a white hate group. Malcolm’s father died in 1931 under mysterious circumstances, leaving his mother with the task of raising eight children. Malcolm eventually moved to Boston in 1941 and to New York in 1943, where he first experienced the street life of the African American urban poor. After becoming a burglar, he received a six-year prison term for armed robbery. In prison, he converted to the Nation of Islam and read voraciously on philosophy, theology, and history. The Nation of Islam helped him to acquire selfrespect and gave him a new worldview, one that celebrated African American history and culture and in which whites were seen as forces of evil. Two years after his release, Malcolm—who by then had changed his last name to “X” in order to shed any links to a past in which white slave masters gave African American slaves their last names—became minister of the New York Temple Number Seven and the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam. He brought unprecedented attention to the Nation: At a time when much of the United States was still segregated, Malcolm X voiced fearlessly what others only thought and denounced white racist practices. Advocating strong moral codes and behaviors, Malcolm X became disenchanted with the Nation, suspecting the covert immorality of some leaders. After leaving the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where his warm reception by white Muslims (and his earlier contact in America with white students and journalists) led him to reject his earlier declarations that all whites were evil, and he accepted Orthodox Islam as his faith. He adopted the name el-Hajj 755
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Malik el-Shabazz. Malcolm X traveled to Africa, meeting African leaders and recognizing the links between imperialist oppression of Africa and the situation of African Americans. Malcolm X was assassinated in New York after beginning to build Organization of Afro-American Unity, which featured cross-racial alliances and an international outlook.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X was hailed as a literary classic shortly after it appeared. Its description of Malcolm X’s discovery of an African American identity continues to inspire its readers. The two most memorable phases of Malcolm X’s life described in his autobiography, and quite possibly the two phases most formative of his identity, are his self-education and religious conversion while in prison and his last year of life, in which he set out to organize a multiracial coalition to end racism. The first of these phases followed a difficult childhood and life as a criminal. In prison, Malcolm X felt inspired by fellow inmates to improve his knowledge. He started on a rigorous program of reading books on history and philosophy. He also worked on his penmanship and vocabulary by copying an entire dictionary. His readings revealed to him that school had taught him nothing about African and African American history. School had also been silent on the crimes that Europeans and European Americans had committed against people of color. In prison, members of the Nation of Islam urged Malcolm X to reject the negative self-image he had unconsciously adopted and to replace it with black pride. Malcolm X taught the Nation’s doctrine of black self-reliance after his release from prison, and he married Betty Shabazz, eventually becoming the father of six children. Disappointed by the divergence between the practices of some of the leaders of the Nation of Islam and the rules of self-discipline and honor that the Nation taught, he left the Nation and, after traveling to Mecca, became an orthodox Muslim. Islam Malcolm X (Library of Congress) and his experiences in the Middle
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East and Africa also changed his outlook on racial relations. Before, he had seen an unbridgeable gulf between African Americans and European Americans. His positive experiences with white Muslims, white students, and white reporters caused him to reevaluate that position. Deciding that cooperation between whites and blacks was possible, he remained devoted to the liberation of people of African descent to the end of his life. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is important as an account of the life of a charismatic American intellectual. The book is also an important literary work in the African American tradition of the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois and in the American tradition of Benjamin Franklin. Like Douglass and Franklin, Malcolm X can be described as a self-made man.
Suggested Readings Breitman, George. The Assassination of Malcolm X. 3d ed. New York: Pathfinder, 1991. Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991. Clarke, John. Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. 1969. Reprint. Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 1990. DeCaro, Louis A. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gallen, David. Malcolm X as They Knew Him. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Goldman, Peter. Death and Life of Malcolm X. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Jenkins, Robert L., and Mfanya Donald Tryman, eds. The Malcolm X Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991. Sales, William W., Jr. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Contributor: Martin Japtok
Paule Marshall Born: Brooklyn, New York; April 9, 1929 African American, Caribbean
Marshall’s major contribution to literature is her deep understanding of the human psyche, especially that of black women. Her women characters are complex, with deep reservoirs of strength that can be called upon when needed. Principal works long fiction: Brown Girl, Brownstones, 1959; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, 1969; Praisesong for the Widow, 1983; Daughters, 1991; The Fisher King, 2000 short fiction: Soul Clap Hands and Sing, 1961; Reena, and Other Stories, 1983; Merle: A Novella and Other Stories, 1985 Paule Marshall (PAH-lee MAHR-shahl) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Burke and Ada Clement Burke, who immigrated to New York from Barbados shortly after World War I and joined the growing community of West Indian immigrants in Brooklyn. She was born to parents who had brought with them to America a strong sense of pride and tradition that was an integral part of West Indian culture, and she was nourished by a community of people who revered their West Indian heritage, even as they embraced the advantages that America afforded them. Her parents continually returned to their homeland of Barbados, taking their small daughter with them. Being of both African American and Caribbean ancestry helped to shape Paule Marshall as a woman and as a writer. She first traveled to Barbados as a nine-yearold child. When she visited the island as a young woman just starting out on a writing career, she began to develop a deeper appreciation for the West Indian culture—its rituals, its customs, its people and language—and a greater sense of pride in her West Indian heritage. She was most impressed with the strength and character she observed in West Indian women, qualities she saw reflected in the women of the Brooklyn community where she had grown up. The lives of these women, whom she calls her “literary foremothers,” were to become the major focus of her novels. Their use of language and their storytelling skills influenced Marshall’s style, and their strength and deep sense of pride are the essential qualities of the female characters she creates. Marshall wrote poetry as a child and listened to the talk of women, both preparing her for her career as a powerful and poetic writer. In the opening of Reena, and 758
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Other Stories, she describes the influence of her mother, woman relatives, and other female friends on her experience in an essay called “From the Poets in the Kitchen”: They taught me my first lesson in the narrative art. They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the best of my work must be attributed to them; it stands as testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the workshop of the kitchen.
Marshall attended Brooklyn College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1953, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After leaving Brooklyn College, Marshall went to work as a researcher and later as a feature writer for Our World magazine. In 1955, she enrolled as a graduate student at Hunter College (City University of New York) but continued to write for Our World, where her assignments carried her to Brazil and the West Indies. In 1957, she married Kenneth Marshall, with whom she had one son, Evan Keith. Her trips to the Caribbean islands were rewarding in that they provided her an opportunity to return to the land of her ancestors. While there, she immersed herself in the culture, absorbing the nuances of language, customs, and traditions that were to figure so prominently in her novels. In 1960, Marshall received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed her to complete her second work, a collection of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing. Eight years passed, however, before the publication of her second novel. In that interim, she worked for New World, a Caribbean magazine, produced several short stories, and continued work on her novel. So committed was she to her craft that she would often obtain a baby-sitter, over her husband’s objections, and go every day to the home of a friend in order to continue her writing. She divorced Kenneth Marshall in 1963. In 1970, Marshall was married for the second time, to Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman—a man with whom she said she had an “open and innovative marriage,” one that gave her the time and freedom to pursue her work. In the fall of 1970 she took the position of lecturer on creative writing at Yale University. She also lectured on black literature at several colleges and universities, including the University of Oxford, Columbia University, Michigan State University, Lake Forest College, and Cornell University. Marshall combined her writing career with teaching and became a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
Brown Girl, Brownstones Type of work: Novel First published: 1959 In Brown Girl, Brownstones, Marshall begins to develop the self-identity theme through the character of Selina Boyce, a girl moving from childhood into adoles-
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cence in Brooklyn and caught between two cultures, the American culture in which she lives and the Barbadian culture of her ancestors, the customs of which are carefully observed in her household. The novel treats the problems she encounters in trying to reconcile these two disparate parts of herself. She is a “divided self,” feeling little connection with either the “bajan” community or the larger white community. She rejects her Barbadian heritage and its “differentness” and yearns to be a part of the white community, which rejects her. The sense of isolation that she feels is the source of all her problems. At the climax of the novel, the “divided self” is integrated as Selina finally accepts her heritage and discovers that with acceptance comes wholeness. She resolves her conflict with her mother, she makes peace with the Barbadian Association, and she leaves Brooklyn to begin her travels. As she passes through her old neighborhood, she feels psychically connected to all the people who helped create her integrated self. As a final symbolic act, she tosses behind one of her two Barbadian bangle bracelets and retains the other as a reminder of her link with the past. Selina has finally learned that true selfhood begins with the acceptance of one’s own history.
Soul Clap Hands and Sing Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1961 Marshall’s first collection of shorter works, Soul Clap Hands and Sing, contains four longer short stories, almost novellas. They are given the titles of the settings: “Barbados,” “Brooklyn,” “British Guiana,” and “Brazil.” In each, the main character is an older man, and the stories explore how that man has failed to live his life fully, for whatever reasons. This failure is indicated by the title of the collection, taken from the William Butler Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” which includes the lines “An aged man is but a paltry thing/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing.” In each case, the failure of the man to allow his soul to “clap hands” has led to the emptiness or aridity of his life. Thus, he is forced to realize his failure to live truly through the intervention of a woman who, in some way, exposes his inadequacies. In “Barbados,” Mr. Watford, who has returned to his native island after having worked single-mindedly throughout his adult life in the United States just so he can return for this purpose, lives like a white colonizer. He has built a house, bought plantation land, and planted coconut trees, which he tends faithfully, despite years of accumulated fatigue. He has never completely finished his house, however, and he lives in total isolation, proud of the fact that he needs no one and no one needs him. It takes a young native woman, foisted on him as a servant, to reveal the paucity of his life, the emptiness of his days. He recognizes that he has not been able to bear the responsibility for the meaninglessness of his life, but when he goes to con-
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front the young woman with the hope of some renewal, he is capable only of attacking her verbally, to which she responds, “you ain’t people, Mr. Watford, you ain’t people.” It is this that destroys him: He has not been able to be a part of the people who bore him and has not found sustenance living the same way as those who oppressed him. In “Brooklyn,” an aging Jewish professor, who has been banned from teaching by the Red-baiters of the McCarthy era, attempts to coerce a young black woman who is taking his class to spend some time at his summer home. She refuses but in the end returns to his class for the final and takes him up on his invitation, only to express her outrage as well as the freedom that she now feels. She has also felt an outcast from her own people, while unable to trust whites. Now she has the courage to live not as her parents have taught her but as she chooses. Professor Max Berman, on the other hand, is forced to recognize that it is his failure to believe in or stand up for anything that has resulted in his loneliness and misery. Interestingly, in “Barbados” the female protagonist is not given a name, while here she is named only in dialogue as Miss Williams. “British Guiana” explores the present of Gerald Motley, a man who is indeed a motley collection of races; he could have been taken for white, because of the British army officer who was one of his ancestors, or black, for the slave woman that officer had been intimate with, or East Indian, from some Hindu who also had a part in his creation. He has achieved a certain amount of success as the head of a radio station, but he knows that he has failed to live his life fully. Although as a young man
Paule Marshall (AP/Wide World Photos)
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he had shown a great ability and had rejected his middle-class background to organize a strike, he had been bought off by a job in radio, which forces him to copy the whites who have colonized his country. When he attempts to penetrate the jungle, to prove his worth to himself, he is prevented by another motley person, Sybil, an African Chinese woman with whom he is involved. He is forever conscious of his betrayal of himself and also of Sybil’s part in this, which results in a life of cynicism and taking the easy way. At the end of the story, when Sybil, whom he might have married, returns to visit, his last act is to bargain with her for a protégé who despises him but deserves a chance. In the conclusion, he realizes that he is going to die a failure by his own doing. The final story in the book, “Brazil,” reminds the reader of Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) in that it is the story of what appears to be a strange love affair between a white woman of epic proportions and a black dwarf. In this story, the dwarf is a performer who goes by the name of O Grande Caliban and has teamed up with a blond of Germanic appearance to perform a comic and athletic act. He has decided that it is time to retire, but his mistress does not wish to do so. One of the interesting things about the story is the breaking of the traditional white reader’s expectations; it is the undersized black man who is trying to end a relationship with the Aryan-looking female. He has become so famous as Caliban, however, that no one, not even his wife, knows him as he had been. He has been living a lie so long that he cannot convince people of the truth anymore, and so he destroys everything.
The Chosen Place, the Timeless People Type of work: Novel First published: 1969 The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is set in the West Indies, specifically Bournehills, a remote part of one of the Caribbean islands. Here, Marshall expands the identity theme, focusing not on the individual self but rather on the collective self of a community of people in search of a common bond. While Merle Kimbona is the protagonist of the novel and a strong female character—a mulatto who has returned to Bournehills to become mistress of a large estate left to her by her white father after spending many adventuresome years in Europe—she is really not the central figure of the novel. At the center of the novel are the people of Bournehills, who, having been oppressed first by slavery, then by their own people, search for some common thread of unity. They discover this in Carnival, an annual ritual in which the people reenact the story of Cuffee Ned, who led a slave revolt against the slaveholder Percy Byram. The plot turns with a visit by a team from an American philanthropic organization sent to Bournehills to provide aid to this underdeveloped country. The team consists of a Jewish American social scientist, Saul Amron; his wife, Harriet; and two returning natives of Bournehills, Allen Fuso and Vere. During their stay on the
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island, the outsiders interact with the natives, observing their rituals and customs and contrasting them with their American experience. As guests at the estate of Merle Kimbona, now a political activist, they also become involved in the political affairs of Bournehills. The contrasts between the two cultures are apparent throughout the novel. The high-tech white society, represented by the machine—in this case the machines in the sugarcane factory—enslave the people of Bournehills in much the same way they had been enslaved by Percy Byram. Also it is the machine—the American automobile—that takes the life of the Bournehills native Vere. Marshall brings together characters from many backgrounds and classes—black and white; upper, middle, and lower classes; natives and outsiders—in this “chosen place.” The ritual reenactment of their history at Carnival is the common thread that binds all classes of people in Bournehills, and it also connects them to their African ancestry and Western culture.
Praisesong for the Widow Type of work: Novel First published: 1983 In Praisesong for the Widow, Marshall continues the theme of self-discovery through her protagonist, Avey Johnson, a middle-aged, middle-class black woman on a Caribbean cruise with two of her women friends. Avey is haunted by a recurring dream about a story told to her by her great-aunt, with whom she had spent summers in Tatem, South Carolina, of how the African slaves who landed at Tatem had immediately turned back toward the sea, walking across the water back to their home in Africa. Deciding to leave the ship before the cruise is over and return home, Avey misses her flight to New York and is stranded in Grenada just at the time of the annual excursion to the island of Carriocou. Here, again, Marshall uses ritual to reveal to Avey the importance of connecting to her African ancestry. In a scene that is almost surreal she is transported to Carriocou, where this annual ritual is to take place. Reluctant to participate at first, Avey eventually joins in the ritual and discovers the meaning of her recurring dream. The landing of the Ibos in South Carolina and their return to Africa by the mythic walk on water symbolize the link between Africa and all black people of the diaspora. In participating in this ritual, Avey becomes aware that she can achieve wholeness only if she becomes reconnected to her African roots.
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Reena, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1983 Reena, and Other Stories is a collection of previously printed works gathered together for the first time in 1983 by Feminist Press. It begins with Marshall’s autobiographical essay, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” which had originally been published in The New York Times Book Review’s series called “The Making of a Writer.” This essay celebrates the women in Marshall’s life who helped form her thought and shape her voice. The collection includes two of the stories discussed above, “Brooklyn” and “Barbados,” previously published in Soul Clap Hands and Sing. Also included is a novella, Merle, which has been excerpted from her 1969 novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People but was extensively reshaped and rewritten. Marshall wrote autobiographical headnotes to each story, which help to place them in the context of her experience and development as a writer. The first story in the collection, “The Valley Between,” was, as Marshall explained, “my very first published story, written when I could barely crawl, never mind stand up and walk as a writer.” In it, the characters are white, a deliberate decision as Marshall herself was at the time married to Kenneth E. Marshall, a marriage she describes as “an early, unwise first marriage,” and she wished to disguise the autobiographical elements in it. It is the story of a marriage falling apart because the wife (and mother of a small child) continues to grow, while the husband wishes her to remain the same, to be nothing more than a wife and mother. Published in August, 1954, it is a story well before its time in its depiction of the stifling expectations placed upon a woman of talent and energy. The title story, “Reena,” is unusual in that it was commissioned by Harper’s Magazine for a special supplement on “The American Female,” published in October of 1962. Intended by the editors to be an article on the African American woman, the story instead became a thinly disguised fiction concerning the women whom Marshall knew best: “those from an urban, working-class and lower middleclass, West Indian American background who, like [Marshall herself], had attended the free New York City colleges during the late forties and fifties.” A first-person narrator named Paulie recounts her meeting again after twenty years with a friend from her childhood, Reena, formally named Doreen, who— being a child who shapes her own life as best she can in a world that discriminates against women, African Americans, and particularly African Americans from the West Indies—had transformed herself into Reena, “with two ees!” The meeting place is at the funeral of Aunt Vi, Reena’s aunt, a woman who represents the strong, nurturing, enduring women “from the poets in the kitchen” and who will reappear in Marshall’s fiction. Having been out of touch for so long, Reena and Paulie have much to discuss, and much of the story is Reena’s recounting of what has been happening in her life: the struggle for meaningful work; her relationship with her family, particularly her mother; relationships with white men (usually unsuccessful) and with black men, who have to learn how to relate to and
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accept a strong, educated, ambitious black woman; childbearing; radical politics; and loneliness. In almost essayistic form, this story provides an intimate glimpse into the struggle, suffering, and successes of this group of African American women. “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is based on a visit that Marshall made to her maternal grandmother in Barbados when she was nine. Da-duh is another of the ancestor figures who populate Marshall’s fiction, like Aunt Vi in the previous story and Merle in the story of that same name; as Marshall says, “Da-duh turns up everywhere.”
Merle Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1985 Another example of ancestor figures appears in the novella Merle, Marshall’s heroine, Merle, is “part saint, part revolutionary, part obeah woman,” a woman who, wherever she goes, exhorts people to resist oppression, while on a personal level she is “still trying to come to terms with her life and history as a black woman, still seeking to reconcile all the conflicting elements to form a viable self.” Merle is the same woman whom Paule Marshall creates in other guises, calling into being a new character for twentieth century American literature. Merle epitomizes Marshall’s compelling portrayals of women, brining to life for her readers a vision of the direction in which the world should be going by showing readers the people whom the world desperately needs to listen to and emulate.
Daughters Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Like the protagonists of most of Marshall’s other novels, the protagonist of Daughters, Ursa MacKensie, is a woman caught between two cultures: the African American culture of her mother, Estelle, and the Caribbean culture of her father, Primus. The action of the novel is divided almost equally between New York City, where Ursa lives, and Triunion, the West Indian island where her parents reside, her father being a leading politician, known from his boyhood as the PM (prime minister). Although firmly rooted in the urban culture of New York, where she is pursuing a career as a young black professional, Ursa keeps one foot planted in the small Caribbean island through her relationship with her doting father, a relationship strengthened by frequent letters and periodic visits. In this novel, Marshall again explores the themes of identity and the attempt to bridge the gap between two cultures. The novel addresses the integration of the two
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cultures on several levels, the first being the marriage of Ursa’s parents—her African American mother to her West Indian father. The second is the birth of their daughter, Ursa-Mae, who physically integrates the two cultures. Then, the African American and West Indian cultures are geographically and spiritually linked as Ursa’s mother moves to Triunion with her husband and becomes integrated into that community. As in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, much of the novel is devoted to the workings of Triunion politics and their effect upon the Triunion people, the marriage of Primus and Estelle, and Ursa. Its setting and wide array of characters provide Marshall the opportunity to explore the theme of self-discovery from a number of perspectives.
Suggested Readings Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Collier, Eugenia. “The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. McClusky, John, Jr. “And Called Every Generation Blessed: Theme, Setting, and Ritual in the Works of Paule Marshall.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. “Perception of Place: Geopolitical and Cultural Positioning in Paule Marshall’s Novels.” In Caribbean Women Writers, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Dancing out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker.” MELUS 19 (Fall, 1994): 91-106. Contributors: Mary LeDonne Cassidy, Theodore C. Humphrey, and Gladys J. Washington
Ved Mehta Born: Lahore, British India (now Pakistan); March 21, 1934 South Asian American
Mehta vividly describes the cultures in which he has lived and the experience of exile and blindness. Principal works nonfiction: Face to Face, 1957 (autobiogaphy); The Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals, 1963 (essays); The New Theologian, 1966 (essays); Portrait of India, 1970; Daddyji, 1972 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, 1977 (biography); The New India, 1978; Mamaji, 1979 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Vedi, 1982 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); The Ledge Between the Streams, 1984 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Sound-Shadows of the New World, 1985 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); The Stolen Light, 1989 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Up at Oxford, 1993 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Rajiv Gandhi and Rama’s Kingdom, 1994; Remembering Mr. Shawn’s “New Yorker”: The Invisible Art of Editing, 1998 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); A Ved Mehta Reader: The Craft of the Essay, 1998; All for Love, 2001 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island, 2003 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series); The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period, 2004 (autobiography; part of the Continents of Exile series) Ved Mehta (vehd MEH-tah) has been telling the story of his own life for most of his career. This story includes the cultures in which he has lived. Mehta was born into a well-educated Hindu family in Lahore in 1934. At the age of three he lost his eyesight as a result of meningitis. Mehta’s education took him away from his close-knit family and sent him to places that must have seemed like different worlds: Arkansas in the era of segregation, a college campus in suburban Southern California, and Oxford University. As a staff writer for The New Yorker and in his many books, Mehta makes those different worlds, including the world of blindness, come alive to the reader. Mehta published his first book, Face to Face, when he was twenty-two. It is a highly readable account of his childhood, of his family’s sufferings during the partition of India (they had to flee their native city when it became part of the new Mus767
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lim nation of Pakistan), and of his experiences as a student in America. The central subject, however, is Mehta’s blindness and the ways in which he learns to be independent and successful despite his disability. For many years after the appearance of Face to Face, Mehta allowed no hint of his disability to appear in his work, which he filled with visual descriptions. He published a novel and became a master of nonfiction. He wrote books introducing Indian culture and politics to Western readers; Mehta has also written a series of books on the excitement of intellectual life. In books on history and philosophy, theology, and linguistics, Mehta makes clashes of ideas vivid by describing intellectuals not only as thinkers but as people. When Mehta returned to autobiography, beginning with Daddyji, he stopped suppressing the fact of his blindness. Instead, he tried to make the things that had formed his identity—his family, his disability, his experiences at schools for the blind, and the colleges and universities where he studied—as vivid as his other subjects. Beginning with biographies of his mother and father and working ahead through five more books to his graduation from Oxford, Mehta presents the story of his life, always as an exile seeking his place in the world, with eloquence and frankness.
Continents of Exile Type of work: Autobiography First published: Daddyji, 1972; Mamaji, 1979; Vedi, 1982; The Ledge Between the Streams, 1984; Sound-Shadows of the New World, 1985; The Stolen Light, 1989; Up at Oxford, 1993; Remembering Mr. Shawn’s “New Yorker”: The Invisible Art of Editing, 1998; All for Love, 2001; Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island, 2003; The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period, 2004 In the Continents of Exile series, Mehta set himself the task of remembering and interpreting his life. In these volumes, he examines his development from childhood through his career as a writer to his efforts to build a home and family. Mehta’s quest for self-understanding is also an introduction to the several different cultures through which Mehta has passed. From childhood Mehta has been an outsider seeking to understand worlds of which he is not fully a part. The loss of his eyesight at age three made him an exile in the world of the sighted, and his almost heroic struggle to secure an education sent him into exile—to Bombay from his native Punjab, to the United States, and to England. In describing his experiences, Mehta also gives the reader the flavor of different worlds, including India before and after its partition into India and Pakistan in 1947, Arkansas during segregation, suburban California in the tranquil 1950’s, Oxford before the upheavals of the 1960’s, and the world of blindness. Continents of Exile is in some ways a sequel to Mehta’s first book, Face to Face (1957). That book, written while Mehta was still an undergraduate, tells the story of
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his life up to almost the point reached in the seven later volumes. It lacks, however, the breadth, frankness, and detachment of the later volumes. In Continents of Exile, Mehta explores the power of memory. He has discovered that, with the aid of some research, memory yields much more than one might think. He also can analyze his experience with more detachment than his younger self could. The series begins with biographies of Mehta’s father and mother, Daddyji and Mamaji. Mehta’s father’s family embraced Western influences, the English language, and an “unsuperstitious” form of Hinduism. Mehta’s mother’s family was more resistant to Western influences, and Mehta’s mother often sought cures through charms and native treatments. In telling the stories of his very different parents and their nevertheless successful marriage, Mehta recalls the world of a closeknit family. He left the family to seek an education. Vedi and The Ledge Between the Streams describe Mehta’s childhood, including his first experience of exile at a boarding school for the blind in Bombay and his family’s flight from their home during the chaos following partition. The next three volumes chronicle Mehta’s education in America and England. In Sound-Shadows of the New World (1985) Mehta recounts his years at the Arkansas School for the Blind. The Stolen Light takes Mehta to Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he is both a great success and an outsider. Up at Oxford describes Mehta’s years at Balliol College and sketches portraits of some promising minds he met there. The period covered in The Stolen Light was particularly important for Mehta. Most of the book concerns Mehta’s experiences at Pomona College, though there are excursions elsewhere; letters and journal extracts from those years are interspersed in the narrative as well. Occasionally Mehta shifts forward to the 1980’s, tracing the subsequent fates of some of the people whom he knew in college and in a few instances describing recent meetings with them. It was during this time that he wrote—or rather dictated—his first book, a fledgling autobiography; his account of the process of composing that book, and the special part played in it by the young woman who served as his amanuensis, is fascinating. He recounts the romantic dreams that mingled with his intellectual ambitions, and the unromantic reality of his first sexual experience. While much of the interest of the book lies in Mehta’s personal history, The Stolen Light is also absorbing as an account of a particular place and time and as a gallery of memorable portraits. Mehta’s father, profiled earlier in Daddyji, the first book in the sequence, figures prominently here, as does Ethel Clyde, an eccentric millionaire who became Mehta’s patron—a character of truly Dickensian proportions. In Remembering Mr. Shawn’s “New Yorker,” Mehta explains his estrangement as a young man from his native India, but most of his memoir concerns the consequences of his decision to forsake pursuing a Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1960 to become a contributor to The New Yorker. Mehta offers a vivid picture of the New York literary world of the 1960’s and depicts the eccentric behavior of many of his fellow writers for the sophisticated weekly magazine. Mehta describes the famously seedy 43rd Street offices of The New Yorker and the day-to-day operations of the magazine with regular contributors like himself going through a painstaking
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process of writing, rewriting, and waiting before their pieces appeared in print. An attitude of the magazine before anything else was imbued by William Shawn, who joined The New Yorker in 1933 and became its editor in 1952, succeeding the legendary Harold Ross. Shawn lived for his work and expected nothing less of his staff. Mehta offers a loving, perhaps idealized, portrait of the editor he saw as his mentor and father figure. The young writer and his editor became entwined in numerous ways from Mehta’s becoming an honorary member of the Shawn family to Shawn’s writing the jacket copy for Mehta’s books. The next book in the series, All for Love, focuses on Mehta’s struggle to find love by recounting four love affairs he had while a writer for The New Yorker in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His emotions and those of his lovers are presented through their letters, which recount the intimate and at times banal details of their relationships while revealing the wide range of emotions underlying such intimacies. The book’s final section, presenting Mehta’s psychoanalysis, recounts his exchanges with his therapist and was found by some critics to be both disappointingly narcissistic and unnecessary. However, looming over the narrative is Mehta’s blindness—which, though never mentioned during his relationships, to a large degree prompted his psychotherapy. The book is therefore a chronicle of Mehta’s journey toward complete self-acceptance, a necessary precursor to love. All for Love is thus the first volume in the series to address Mehta’s relationship with his blindness. He has refused to accept this part of his identity as a disability—a denial in large part at the root of his success but which does not serve him well in his quest to find a wife. The penultimate book of the series, Dark Harbor is the aptly named story of Mehta’s drive to build a safe haven, a home, in an unlikely place: on a Maine vacation island that would generally be considered inaccessible to a modestly paid writer and a blind man. The psychological and logistical difficulties Mehta must surmount—becoming accustomed to the island’s wild environment, navigating his way there by plane, overcoming the panic he briefly feels when first left alone on the airstrip—are paralleled by the evolution of his marriage and the process of building a house in this unlikely setting. The final volume, The Red Letters (referring to love letters), was prompted by Mehta’s father, who wanted his son to work with him on a novel about a love affair. Mehta soon surmised that the narrative was about his parents—not their own relationship, but its compromise when Mehta’s father went outside the marriage. The book is as much the story of the effect of this news on the son as it is a figurative revision of the original biographies of Mehta’s parents, Daddyji and Mamaji. Mehta realizes that his child’s-eye view of both parents must be rewritten, and he himself must undergo a “belated growing up.” Like the other novels in the Continents of Exile series, The Red Letters weaves this personal story into the framework of history and the contrasting cultures of British India and modern America.
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Suggested Readings Embree, Ainslie. Review of The Ledge Between the Streams, by Ved Mehta. The New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1984. Malcolm, Janet. “School of the Blind.” The New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1986. Mehta, Ved. Interview by Stella Dong. Publishers Weekly, January 3, 1986. Slatin, John M. “Blindness and Self-Perception: The Autobiographies of Ved Mehta.” Mosaic 19, no. 4 (Fall, 1986): 173-193. Sontag, Frederick. “The Self-Centered Author.” New Quest 79 (July/August, 1989): 229-233. Contributors: Brian Abel Ragen and Christina J. Moose
Louise Meriwether Born: Haverstraw, New York; May 8, 1923 African American
Meriwether often uses the first-person point of view and draws on her own experience to make compelling fiction about the black experience. Principal works children’s literature: The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls, 1971; The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, 1972; Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story, 1973 long fiction: Daddy Was a Number Runner, 1970; Fragments of the Ark, 1994; Shadow Dancing, 2000 short fiction: “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” 1967; “A Happening in Barbados,” 1968; “The Thick End Is for Whipping,” 1968; “That Girl from Creektown,” 1972; “Fragments of the Ark,” 1984; “I Loves You Rain,” 1988 nonfiction: “James Baldwin: The Fiery Voice of the Negro Revolt,” 1963; “No Race Pride,” 1964; “The Negro: Half a Man in a White World,” 1965; “The New Face of Negro History,” 1965; “The Black Family in Crisis,” 1984 Louise Jenkins Meriwether was the third of five children and the only daughter. Her parents, Marion Lloyd Jenkins and Julia Jenkins, had migrated from South Carolina to New York in search of work. Meriwether spent her youth in Harlem. She graduated from Central Commercial High School in Manhattan and received a B.A. in English from New York University. She received an M.A. in journalism from the University of California, Los Angeles, after moving there with her first husband, Angelo Meriwether. That marriage ended in divorce, as did her second marriage to Earl Howe. In California Meriwether worked as a legal secretary and real estate salesperson, wrote for both the Los Angeles Sentinel and The Los Angeles Times, and became the first African American story analyst for Universal Studios. She also became a staff member of the Watts Writers’ Workshop, and in 1967 she published her first short story, “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” in the Watts Writers’ Workshop issue of the Antioch Review. A second story, “A Happening in Barbados,” also appeared in the Antioch Review; here she probes the dynamics of interracial relationships between black men and white women, as well as the relationships between African American and white women. The story aroused the attention of a Prentice-Hall editor who asked to see chapters from Meriwether’s novel in progress, Daddy Was a Number Runner. 772
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Meriwether’s first two novels are concerned with the fact that African Americans are missing from the pages of American history. Daddy Was a Number Runner chronicles one year in the life of a twelve-year-old girl in Depression-era Harlem. Although not strictly autobiographical, the novel shows a number of correlations between Meriwether’s life and that of the main character, Francie Coffin. Both spent their adolescence in Harlem, and both have mothers who are domestic workers and fathers who turn to running numbers—a type of illegal street lottery game— because they cannot find work and must support a family. The novel is an insider’s view of an economic racism that ends in the destruction of one family. On her return to New York in 1970 Meriwether began to write biographies of African Americans for elementary school and juvenile readers in an attempt to counteract the absence of African American role models available to children. In 1971 she published The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls, a biography of a man born a slave who won his freedom by commandeering a Confederate ship; he eventually returned to South Carolina, where he was elected to Congress for five terms. In The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams Meriwether traces the life, struggles, and eventual triumph of the first African American heart surgeon. Although he was the first doctor of any race to perform a successful heart operation, he was excluded from white professional societies. Nevertheless, he opened Provident Hospital in Chicago in 1891, the first hospital in the United States to admit both white and black patients. In Don’t Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story Meriwether documents the story of the woman often called the Mother of the Civil Rights Struggle, a modest yet courageous African American woman who in refusing to give up her seat on a bus launched one of the most significant eras in American history. Meriwether was always involved politically. Her work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Bogalusa, Louisiana, led to her short story “That Girl from Creektown,” in which she explores racism and sexism. Along with John Henrik Clarke she wrote and distributed the pamphlet Black Americans Stay out of South Africa, which grew out of her activities in support of the Organization of African Unity and other groups that encouraged African American entertainers’ boycotting South Africa. Meriwether taught fiction workshops in New York and writing courses at Sarah Lawrence College. She received a grant from the Mellon Foundation for research for her second novel, Fragments of the Ark, which incorporates the earlier story “I Loves You Rain.” The slave Peter Mango, the protagonist of the novel, resembles Robert Smalls (like Smalls, Mango hijacks a Confederate ship and turns it over to Union forces), and Meriwether intersperses other actual people and events in the book. As with other works, a narrative in the first person and the use of actuality and her own autobiography lend immediacy, a hallmark of Louise Meriwether’s writing. In Shadow Dancing, Meriwether returned to a contemporary setting, tracing the ups and downs of a marriage between two artistically driven African Americans, a writer and a theater director.
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Fragments of the Ark Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 Fragments of the Ark is an exciting historical novel that describes the adventures of a group of runaway slaves who not only find freedom but also help to liberate the South as heroes in the Civil War. The central figure is Peter Mango, who steals the Confederate gunboat Swanee and delivers it to the Union naval blockade at Charleston, South Carolina. A talented sea captain, Peter pilots various Union ships along the Sea Island coast of South Carolina for the duration of the war. Yet all is not smooth sailing: Several of his Gullah friends who have also sought freedom are killed in various battles, and Peter’s marriage to the troubled Rain is not without its persistent tensions. In the end, however, Peter and his family are living free in Beaufort, where he has been elected as a delegate to the Freedman’s Convention in Charleston. The novel is full of history, as Peter and other characters interact with the historical figures—General William Tecumseh Sherman, Harriet Tubman—of the 1860’s; Peter even gets to meet Abraham Lincoln not long before his assassination. Much of the historical information, however, is awkwardly forced into the narrative through newspaper accounts and letters. In fact, Fragments of the Ark would probably work best as a novel for adolescent readers, who would be captured by the romantic plot and educated by all the historical information, especially by the important role that African Americans played in their own liberation. Adult readers, however, may find the contemporary slang and the authorial editorializing a little too unrealistic for their taste.
Suggested Readings Dandridge, Rita B. “From Economic Insecurity to Disintegration: A Study of Character in Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner.” Negro American Literature Forum 9 (Fall, 1975): 82-85. Duboin, Corinne. “Race, Gender, and Space: Louise Meriwether’s Harlem in Daddy Was a Number Runner.” CLA Journal 45, no. 1 (September, 2001): 26-40. McKay, Nellie. Afterword to Daddy Was a Number Runner, by Louise Meriwether. New York: Feminist Press, 1986. Wade-Gayles, Gloria Jean. No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Gender in Black Women’s Fiction. Rev. ed. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1997. Walker, Melissa. “Harbingers of Change: Harlem.” In Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 19661989. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Contributor: Muriel W. Brailey
Arthur Miller Born: New York, New York; October 17, 1915 Died: Roxbury, Connecticut; February 10, 2005 Jewish
Miller’s plays are widely regarded to be among the best plays ever written by an American. Principal works drama: Honors at Dawn, pr. 1936; No Villain, pr. 1937; The Man Who Had All the Luck, pr. 1944, pb. 1989; All My Sons, pr., pb. 1947; Death of a Salesman, pr., pb. 1949; An Enemy of the People, pr. 1950, pb. 1951 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play); The Crucible, pr., pb. 1953; A Memory of Two Mondays, pr., pb. 1955; A View from the Bridge, pr., pb. 1955 (one-act version); A View from the Bridge, pr. 1956, pb. 1957 (two-act version); Collected Plays, pb. 1957 (includes All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A Memory of Two Mondays, and A View from the Bridge); After the Fall, pr., pb. 1964; Incident at Vichy, pr. 1964, pb. 1965; The Price, pr., pb. 1968; The Creation of the World and Other Business, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; The Archbishop’s Ceiling, pr. 1977, pb. 1984; The American Clock, pr. 1980, pb. 1982; Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volume II, pb. 1981 (includes The Misfits, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Creation of the World and Other Business, and Playing for Time); Two-Way Mirror, pb. 1984; Danger: Memory!, pb. 1986, pr. 1987; Plays, pb. 1988-1995 (5 volumes); The Last Yankee, pb. 1991, pr. 1993; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, pr., pb. 1991; Broken Glass, pr., pb. 1994; Mr. Peter’s Connections, pr. 1998, pb. 1999; Resurrection Blues, pr. 2002; Finishing the Picture, pr. 2004 long fiction: Focus, 1945; The Misfits, 1961 screenplays: The Misfits, 1961; Everybody Wins, 1990; The Crucible, 1996 (adaptation of his play) short fiction: I Don’t Need You Any More, 1967; Homely Girl, a Life: And Other Stories, 1995; Presence, 2007 teleplay: Playing for Time, 1980 nonfiction: Situation Normal, 1944; In Russia, 1969 (photo essay; with Inge Morath); In the Country, 1977 (photo essay; with Morath); The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, 1978 (revised and expanded, 1996; Robert A. Martin, editor); Chinese Encounters, 1979 (photo essay; with Morath); “Salesman” in Beijing, 1984; Conversations with Arthur Miller, 1987 (Matthew C. Roudané, editor); Spain, 1987; Timebends: A Life, 1987; Arthur Miller and Company, 1990 775
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(Christopher Bigsby, editor); The Crucible in History, and Other Essays, 2000; Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1947-2000, 2000; On Politics and the Art of Acting, 2001 miscellaneous: The Portable Arthur Miller, 1995 (Christopher Bigsby, editor) Arthur Miller first achieved success as a dramatist with All My Sons. Death of a Salesman, widely regarded as Miller’s most important play, contains many of the themes of identity that give distinction to Miller’s plays: the tension between father and son, the dangerous material lure of the American Dream, the influence of memory on the formation of personality, and the common man in a tragic situation. Partly in response to the anticommunist hysteria that was led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities that swept the nation in the early 1950’s, Miller wrote The Crucible. In 1955, Miller was denied a passport by the State Department, and in June, 1956, he was accused of left-wing activities and called before the committee. Unlike the girls in The Crucible, Miller refused to name others, and he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1956, only to be fully exonerated by the United States Court of Appeals in 1958. During the turbulent summer of 1956 Miller also divorced his college sweetheart Mary Slattery and quickly married the famous actress Marilyn Monroe. Reflections of those two events recur throughout Miller’s works and give shape to the identity of many of his major characters. After completing the screenplay for The Misfits, which starred Monroe, Miller divorced the actress and married Inge Morath, events that may be reflected in After the Fall. Miller’s later years saw the publication of his influential The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, numerous revivals of his major plays, and his illuminating autobiography Timebends: A Life. Miller lectured at the University of Michigan in the mid-1970’s, thereafter retiring to an estate in Roxbury, Connecticut. There he continued to write and pursue his love of carpentry and gardening. In 1997, he petitioned the Czech government to halt arrests of dissident writers. During the 1980’s, he directed Death of a Salesman in Beijing, China. Throughout the 1990’s, Miller received numerous honors for his achievements. In early 2002, his wife died, and three years later, in early 2005, Miller died at his home in Connecticut. Arthur Miller (Inge Morath/Magnum)
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Death of a Salesman Type of work: Drama First produced: 1949, pb. 1949 Death of a Salesman, widely regarded as Miller’s best and most important play, chronicles the downfall and suicide of Willy Loman, a ceaselessly struggling New England salesman driven by dreams of success far greater than he can achieve. Almost a classical tragedy in its form, Death of a Salesman has provoked much controversy due to the unheroic nature of its protagonist. Although the play, like its Greek forebears, conveys a sense of the inevitability of fate, Willy himself possesses no greatness in either achievement or status. Willy’s sheer commonness, rather, gives the play its power. In Death of a Salesman, Miller shows that tragedy comes not only to the great but also to the small. On its most fundamental level, Death of a Salesman depicts the disintegration of Willy’s personality as he desperately searches for the moment in his memory when his world began to unravel. The play’s action is driven primarily by Willy’s volcanic relationship with grown son Biff, who is every inch the failure that his father is. Willy’s grandiose dreams of happiness and material success conflict with the reality of his failures as a salesman, as a husband to his wife Linda, and as a father to his two boys, Biff and Happy. The alternation between present action and presentations of Willy’s delusional “memories” forms the play’s thematic center. Willy’s memory is populated by figures who idealize success, most notably his brother Ben, who became rich; Dave Singleman, a fabulously successful and well-liked salesman; and the woman in Boston with whom Willy has had an affair. Countering those empty fantasies are the realities of Howard, Willy’s unsympathetic boss; Charley, Willy’s best friend and neighbor (who gives Willy the money he needs to pay his bills); Charley’s successful son Bernard; and of course Biff, who refuses to accept Willy’s delusions. “We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!” Biff says at one point. Willy cannot accept the piercing truth of Biff’s description: “You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Rather, Willy commits suicide by crashing his car. The play’s final tragic irony comes out in the play’s last scene: Although Willy strove all his life to be well-liked and remembered, his funeral is attended only by his close family and friends. Neither he nor they are finally free, but only alone.
Suggested Readings Bigsby, Christopher, ed. Arthur Miller and Company. London: Methuen, 1990. _______. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. Arthur Miller. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. _______. Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
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Brater, Encoh. Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005. _______, ed. Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: His Life and Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003. Koorey, Stefani. Arthur Miller’s Life and Literature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Martine, James. Crucible: Politics, Property, and Pretense. New York: Twayne, 1993. Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Schleuter, June, and James K. Flanagan. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1987. Contributor: Gregory W. Lanier
Henry Miller Born: New York, New York; December 26, 1891 Died: Pacific Palisades, California; June 7, 1980 Jewish
Creator of a first-person style that deftly mixes fact, philosophy, and fantasy, and known for his sexual frankness, Miller correctly predicted that the full value of his work would not be appreciated during his lifetime. Principal works drama: Just Wild About Harry: A Melo-Melo in Seven Scenes, pb. 1963 long fiction: Tropic of Cancer, 1934; Black Spring, 1936; Tropic of Capricorn, 1939; The Rosy Crucifixion, 1949-1960, 1963 (includes Sexus, 1949, 2 volumes; Plexus, 1953, 2 volumes; Nexus, 1960); Quiet Days in Clichy, 1956 nonfiction: Aller Retour New York, 1935; What Are You Going to Do About Alf?, 1935; Max and the White Phagocytes, 1938; Money and How It Gets That Way, 1938; The Cosmological Eye, 1939; Hamlet, 1939, 1941 (2 volumes; with Michael Fraenkel); The World of Sex, 1940, 1957; The Colossus of Maroussi: Or, The Spirit of Greece, 1941; The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941; The Angel Is My Watermark, 1944 (originally pb. in Black Spring); Murder the Murderer, 1944; The Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America, 1944; Semblance of a Devoted Past, 1944; The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945; The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney, 1945; Echolalis: Reproductions of Water Colors by Henry Miller, 1945; Henry Miller Miscellanea, 1945; Maurizius Forever, 1945; Obscenity and the Law of Reflection, 1945; Why Abstract?, 1945 (with Hilaire Hiler and William Saroyan); Patchen: Man of Anger and Light, with a Letter to God by Kenneth Patchen, 1946; Of, by, and About Henry Miller: A Collection of Pieces by Miller, Herbert Read, and Others, 1947; Portrait of General Grant, 1947; Remember to Remember, 1947; Varda: The Master Builder, 1947; The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, 1948; The Waters Reglitterized, 1950; The Books in My Life, 1952; Nights of Love and Laughter, 1955 (Kenneth Rexroth, editor); Argument About Astrology, 1956; A Devil in Paradise: The Story of Conrad Mourand, Born Paris, 7 or 7:15 P.M., January 17, 1887, Died Paris, 10:30 P.M., August 31, 1954, 1956; The Time of the Assassins: A Story of Rimbaud, 1956; Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 1957; The Red Notebook, 1958; The Henry Miller Reader, 1959 (Lawrence Durrell, editor); The Intimate Henry Miller, 1959 (Lawrence Clark Powell, editor); Reunion in Barcelona: A Letter to Alfred Perlès, 1959; To Paint Is to Love Again, 1960; The 779
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Michael Fraenkel-Henry Miller Correspondence, Called Hamlet, 1962 (2 volumes); Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, 1962; Watercolors, Drawings, and His Essay “The Angel Is My Watermark,” 1962; Books Tangent to Circle: Reviews, 1963; Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, 1963 (George Wickes, editor); Greece, 1964; Henry Miller on Writing, 1964 (Thomas H. Moore, editor); Letters to Anaïs Nin, 1965; Selected Prose, 1965 (2 volumes); Order and Chaos chez Hans Reichel, 1966; Collector’s Quest: The Correspondence of Henry Miller and J. Rivers Childs, 1947-1965, 1968; Writer and Critic: A Correspondence, 1968 (with W. A. Gordon); Insomnia: Or, The Devil at Large, 1970; My Life and Times, 1971 (Bradley Smith, editor); Henry Miller in Conversation with Georges Belmont, 1972; Journey to an Unknown Land, 1972; On Turning Eighty, 1972; Reflections on the Death of Mishima, 1972; First Impressions of Greece, 1973; Reflections on the Maurizius Case, 1974; Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie, 1943-1972, 1975; The Nightmare Notebook, 1975; Books of Friends: A Tribute to Friends of Long Ago, 1976; Four Visions of America, 1977 (with others); Gliding into the Everglades, and Other Essays, 1977; Sextet, 1977; Henry Miller: Years of Trial and Triumph, 1978; My Bike and Other Friends, 1978; An Open Letter to Stroker!, 1978 (Irving Stetner, editor); Some Friends, 1978; Joey: A Loving Portrait of Alfred Perlès Together with Some Bizarre Episodes Relating to the Other Sex, 1979; Notes on “Aaron’s Rod” and Other Notes on Lawrence from the Paris Notebooks of Henry Miller, 1980 (Seamus Cooney, editor); The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, 1980 (Evelyn J. Hinz and John J. Teumissen, editors); Reflections, 1981; The Paintings of Henry Miller, 1982; From Your Capricorn Friend: Henry Miller and the “Stroker,” 1978-1980, 1984; Dear, Dear Brenda, 1986; Letters from Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller, 1986 (Joyce Howard, editor); A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1987; The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-1980, 1988; Henry Miller’s Hamlet Letters, 1988; Henry Miller and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, 1996 (George Wickes, editor) Henry Valentine Miller was born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. His father, Heinrich, drank heavily; his mother, Louise, was stern and domineering; his only sibling, Lauretta, was mentally retarded. Miller spent most of his youth in Brooklyn, living in Williamsburg from 1892 to 1900 and Bushwick from 1901 to 1907. An earnest reader, he enjoyed close friendships with neighborhood boys but felt inhibited among his female peers. In 1909 he entered the City College of New York but soon left. After beginning work as a cement company clerk, he embarked on a rigorous physical regimen that included pacing cyclists on their weekend races. In the years that followed Miller moved from job to job, meeting many people, including the anarchist Emma Goldman during a trip west. Upon his return to New York, he worked in his father’s tailor shop. In 1917 Miller married the pianist Beatrice Sylvas Wickens; their child Barbara was born two years later. In 1920 he began a four-year stint as the employment manager of Western Union. Frustrated in an unhappy marriage, Miller became infatuated with June Edith
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Smith, whom he met in a dance hall in 1923; the following year he left Western Union, divorced Beatrice, married June, and tried to develop his literary skills. During the emotionally turbulent years that followed, he and June eked out a bohemian existence, earning money through a variety of schemes. In an outburst of creativity in 1927 Miller sketched the notes that formed the basis of Tropic of Capricorn and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion. In 1930 Miller left June in the United States and embarked on his second visit to Europe, eventually arriving in Paris; he and June were divorced by proxy in 1934. That same year he received world attention as a result of the publication of Tropic of Cancer. BeHenry Miller (Larry Colwell) sides garnering much praise for him, the work gained worldwide notoriety for itself and Miller because of its sexual frankness (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Rosy Crucifixion, and other works by Miller were banned in the United States and Great Britain until the 1960’s). During this period Miller wrote the epistolary Aller Retour New York, a scathing account of a visit to Manhattan, and the wide-ranging correspondence with Michael Fraenkel that comprised the Hamlet books. He also began his close relationship with Anaïs Nin, who provided him with financial and emotional support and sparked his interest in D. H. Lawrence. Tropic of Capricorn, Miller’s most stylistically complex work, appeared in 1939. Many readers in the United States who did not first encounter Miller’s writing via smuggled editions of his books did so through the collection The Cosmological Eye, which included his short story “Max” as well as an essay on director Luis Buñuel’s film L’Âge d’or (1930). Leaving France in 1939, Miller traveled to Greece, where he visited Lawrence Durrell and met raconteur George Katsimbalis, a kindred spirit whom he dubbed “the Colossus of Maroussi.” His book by the same title is often cited as his greatest work. In 1944 Miller moved to Big Sur, California, and married Janina M. Lepska, with whom he had two children before their divorce in 1952. Miller then married Eve McClure in 1953; the two were divorced in 1962. In 1957 Miller was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Sciences; in 1960 he served as a judge at the Cannes International Film Festival. Grove Press first published Tropic of Cancer for distribution in the United States in 1961; subsequent legal action established the company’s right to bring Miller’s banned writings to a receptive public. In 1962, Miller established a home in Pacific Palisades, California, where he lived until his death in 1980. There he reaped the pleasures and
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difficulties of his fame, lending his support to artists, small presses, and literary magazines while pursuing his interests in nonfiction writing and watercolor painting. His unhappy fifth and last marriage, to Hiroki “Hoki” Tokuda, lasted from 1967 to 1978. Miller appeared in Warren Beatty’s film Reds (1981) and served as the focus of several documentaries and recordings. Miller believed that the full value of his work would not be appreciated during his lifetime, since the restricted distribution of many of his writings focused attention on the scandalous aspects of his genius rather than its overall substance. The misleading attribution by Grove Press of the pornographic Opus Pistorum (1983; also known as Under the Roofs of Paris) to Miller, who penned only a small portion of the work, exemplifies the difficulties engendered by his notoriety. In a literary era populated with portraits of paralyzed and pessimistic intellectuals, Miller employed his expressive first-person narrative voice, developed over a lifetime of compulsive letter writing, to celebrate spiritual growth and creativity.
Tropic of Cancer Type of work: Novel First published: 1934 Even in the twenty-first century, Tropic of Cancer still has the power to startle and overwhelm a reader. Its wild, violent language, its immense force, its radiant paeans to the historic beauty of Paris, and its unsettling descriptions of a society in an advanced state of decomposition reflect a bottom dog’s sense of the world that is still relevant and disturbing. Even the fairly explicit sexual passages retain the power to shock and disturb, not because of their pornographic content but because they show the psychotic selfabsorption of people ruined by social stratification and personal egocentricity. Miller wrote the book as a declaration of his own survival after a wrenching psychic experience, and his exuberant embrace of nearly every aspect of existence is a reflection of his discovery that he had found a voice and a form appropriate to the ideas and ambitions he had been harboring for his entire adult life. Before the book was published, Nin read the manuscript and accurately described the protagonist as “the mould-breaker . . . the revolutionist,” and the revolution Miller was proclaiming was part of the modernist enterprise of challenging conventional but no longer viable authority. One aspect of this challenge was the form of the book itself. It was begun originally as a kind of journal called “Paris and Me,” and Miller eventually divided the book into fifteen sections. It has little character development, however, beyond the narrator’s personal journey, a discontinuous sense of chronology, no plot in any familiar sense, no real dramatic events, and no conclusion. Instead, the narrative drifts and drives from “the fall of my second year in Paris” (in 1929) and continues in rhythmic lurches to the spring of 1931, but time is elastic. Days and months have no particular meaning, as the narrator has no regular job or any other specific sched-
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ule. This enables him to roam freely, at random primarily, so that he is able to avoid all the traps that have led his companions to spiritual destruction. Certain motifs recur throughout the book. There are many scenes of male bonding, including men eating, drinking, arguing, complaining, and womanizing together. One of the most striking among these is section 8, in which Miller describes Van Norden, a nonspiritual man, as a mechanical monster who is something of a double for the protagonist. These sections are often bracketed with descriptions of women from the perspective of male lust. In passages such as the one in section 3, where the protagonist celebrates the qualities of Germaine, a whore he finds admirable, Miller is criticizing the narrowness and self-centered posturing of the men in the book. These passages are often also apostrophes to the mythic beauty and mysterious power of Woman, what Norman Mailer calls Miller’s “utter adoration,” reflecting “man’s sense of awe.” A third motif includes an introduction of the comic into almost everything so that mundane difficulties become a source of humor rather than a cause for concern. This capacity for appreciating the comic aspect of a generally frustrating and discouraging pattern of searching for food, love, friendship, and so on is what separates the protagonist from nearly everyone else, and this gives Miller, as his fourth motif, a pure vision of ecstasy generated by the almost delirious contemplation of beauty in many forms, particularly in the city itself. Section 13 offers Miller’s powerful tribute to artist Henri Matisse, constructed in terms of the artist’s use of light—a continuing fascination for Miller, who sets it against the darkness and sterility of the cancerous world. The fact that the protagonist can emerge from a realm of human decomposition with his sense of wonder at the phenomena of the universe intact is what makes the book exhilarating in spite of all the failure it examines. As the book moves toward a conclusion, or at least an ending or stopping, Miller becomes more and more rhapsodic, exclaiming “I love everything that flows,” in a tribute to writer James Joyce. On the last pages of the book, after a bizarre interlude spent teaching at a boys’ school in Dijon (a job Nin helped Miller obtain), the protagonist steps out of a doomed culture and into a landscape of serenity. For a moment, as he regards the River Seine, he is able to imagine himself merging with the great flow of cosmic energy that animates the universe, his own manic energy temporarily spent and his psychic demons relegated to the realm he has left. The culmination of the artist’s development at the end of Tropic of Cancer is, as Jay Martin says, proof that he is now the man who can write the book.
Tropic of Capricorn Type of work: Novel First published: 1939 If Miller’s first novel, Tropic of Cancer, can be seen as a modern version of Dante’s Inferno, then Tropic of Capricorn is clearly Miller’s version of Dante’s Purgatorio.
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The earlier book describes a world of sex and surreal violence without love. This novel opens in a similarly hellish environment, but the central character (a fictional version of the author) recognizes its nature, passes through a series of purgatorial punishments, and emerges possessed of an angelic or paradisiac vision. The book opens with Miller living in New York and working as personnel manager of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. He describes himself as a clown living in an insane world, dominated by his deadly business life, violence at home in a loveless marriage, and crazy random sex. With the lesson of his father’s broken spirit before him, he dreams of the imaginative freedom he finds in books but sinks into a torpor of despair at the life around him. The only force that keeps him from giving in to his despair is the sensuous power he finds in sex. The middle portion of the book is a catalog of sexual encounters, present and remembered, all explicitly described in Miller’s uniquely explosive language. This sexual landscape is purgatorial, filled with suffering and betrayal and loss but ultimately liberating. The book is dedicated to “Her,” a woman like Dante’s Beatrice who opens to him a vision of life beyond the wheel of destiny. He achieves resurrection from the tomb of the telegraph company in a vision of life as love. He calls himself Gottlieb Leberecht Muller, a God-loved and loving, right-living man who has baptized himself anew. In his new angelic identity as a man who has walked out on himself, a happy rock in the divine stream of life, he meets Mona (Her) and begins a new life as an artist with both death and birth behind him.
Suggested Readings Brown, J. D. Henry Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1986. Dearborn, Mary V. The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Ferguson, Robert. Henry Miller: A Life. New York: Norton, 1991. Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Critical Essays on Henry Miller. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Jahshan, Paul. Henry Miller and the Surrealist Discourse of Excess: A Poststructuralist Reading. New York: P. Lang, 2001. Lewis, Leon. Henry Miller: The Major Writings. New York: Schocken Books/ Random House, 1986. Mathieu, Bertrand. Orpheus in Brooklyn: Orphism, Rimbaud, and Henry Miller. Paris: Mouton, 1976. Mitchel, Edward, ed. Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Widmer, Kingsley. Henry Miller. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Contributors: David Marc Fischer and Leon Lewis
Anchee Min Born: Shanghai, China; 1957 Chinese American
Min’s powerful story of the Cultural Revolution is about rebellion against political and sexual repression. Principal works long fiction: Katherine, 1995; Becoming Madame Mao, 2000; Wild Ginger, 2002; Empress Orchid, 2004; The Last Empress, 2007 nonfiction: Red Azalea, 1994 (personal narrative) Born in Shanghai, Anchee Min (ahn-chee mihn) experienced political turmoil from an early age. During her childhood, Min’s family was forced to move into a series of shabby apartments while her parents were demoted from their teaching positions to become factory workers. Min joined the Red Guards in elementary school and underwent a wrenching introduction to political survival when she was forced to denounce her favorite teacher as a Western spy. Min’s major experience with the clash between personal and political needs came at seventeen when she was assigned to an enormous collective farm. Forced to become a peasant in order to become a “true” revolutionary, Min witnessed the destruction of a friend whose relationship with a man led to her madness and his death. Min therefore knew the danger she faced when she fell in love with the leader of her workforce, the charismatic Yan. The two eventually began a sexual relationship that violated the strictures against premarital sex and committed the “counterrevolutionary crime” of lesbianism. Fighting to maintain her relationship with Yan and to survive the brutal life on the farm, Min received an unexpected respite when she was chosen to audition for the lead in a propaganda film, by Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong, the Communist dictator of China. Min’s return to Shanghai thrust her into an even more ruthless environment than the collective farm—the Shanghai film industry. Min was rescued finally through her relationship with the enigmatic “Supervisor,” the film’s producer, who became Min’s lover and protector. Min’s deliverance, however, was short-lived. Qing’s fall from power in 1976 brought about the political destruction of those associated with her. The Supervisor was able to save Min from return to the collective farm, but he was unable to keep her from being demoted to a menial position within the film studio. Faced with an uncertain future and continued repression, Min accepted an offer from the actress Joan Chen, a fellow film student in Shanghai, to immigrate to the 785
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United States, arriving in 1984. While learning English, she worked at a variety of jobs and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990. The great strength of Min’s autobiography, Red Azalea, is its combination of frank narrative and lyrical description. Linking the personal and the political, Min uses sexuality as a metaphor for the individual’s hunger for connection; sexual freedom thus indicates political freedom, and sexual expression becomes a revolutionary act.
Red Azalea Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1994 In strikingly effective prose, Min reveals her determination to retain her individuality against the force of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and its determination to submerge her into the role chosen by China’s Communist Party. Red Azalea is a coming-of-age story. Min writes of her struggles with issues of identity and sexuality within the repressive environment of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). With this focus she differs from other Chinese men and women writing about their lives in the same period in two ways: in the intensely personal journey she relates and in the simple but powerful prose she writes. Min is proud to be identified with the nation as a young Red Guard. Still, in her home life she is a Chinese daughter, until her name is blacked out in her family’s official residence papers as she leaves for Red Fire Farm. At the farm, she and her comrades work in rows, sleep in crowded, sex-segregated dorms, and study and recite Mao’s teachings. This new life is difficult, but in her commander, Yan Sheng Yan, Min finds a role model of heroic response to the Party and its decrees. At the same time Min is newly conscious of sexual yearnings, which she is supposed to repress until the Party allows them. Min and Yan listen to each other’s stories and experience the intimacy of a close friendship. Their joy becomes dangerous when the two women move to sexual intimacy. This great love falters when Min is selected to go to Shanghai and compete for the starring role in Madame Mao’s film/opera Red Azalea. In Shanghai, Min struggles between her need for Yan and her ambition to be a star. Despite her efforts, she loses the competition and is shunted to the lowly job of set-clerk. Finally, when Yan takes a male lover, Min feels as if she does not exist anymore. Min attracts the attention of the powerful Supervisor. He is a mysterious man, womanish in his demeanor and dress, a Party loyalist but attracted to Min’s individuality. She is excited by his attention, not because of any sexual attraction but because he is the key to fulfilling her heretofore thwarted ambitions to be a star. They become lovers, risking their lives by doing so. He arranges for a screen test, ousts Min’s competitor, and gives Min a new chance for the starring role. She cannot say
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the words as he wants, and in a powerful scene he convinces Min not to play the role of Red Azalea, the ultimate Chinese heroine, but to be Red Azalea. At this point, however, China changes: Mao dies, and Madam Mao and her cohorts, including the Supervisor, fall out of favor. Min is once again told to return to Red Fire Farm, but in a final act of generous love the Supervisor arranges for her to be reassigned to her post as set-clerk—probably for the rest of her life. Thus Min’s story ends. She seems a Party-controlled menial laborer, luckily escaping punishment for her antirevolutionary actions. In the epilogue, Min states that after six years, in 1984, she left China for America. In Red Azalea she tells her story, her personal story of love affairs, of romance, the story that in the years of the Cultural Revolution was not to be told, not to be lived. She is Red Azalea, a Chinese heroine, because she narrates in her own voice the intimately human story she lived in China’s recent history. The true revolutionary, one concludes, was Min.
Empress Orchid Type of work: Novel First published: 2004 Empress Orchid is a brilliant re-creation of another tumultuous period in Chinese history, the late 1800’s, when the empire was threatened from without by European imperialists and from within by its own decadence and corruption. Its heroine was a real person, Tsu Hsi, called “Orchid ” because of her beauty. An impoverished girl whose impeccable Manchu lineage took her to court as one of the many wives of the young Emperor Hsien Feng, Orchid eventually became an empress and one of the most powerful people in China. On her arrival in the Forbidden City, Orchid finds herself a virtual slave, her very life threatened both by a spiteful chief eunuch and by her female rivals. However, Orchid makes her way into the emperor’s bed, pleases him as a sexual partner, and then so impresses him with her grasp of public affairs that she remains with him as an unofficial adviser. After Orchid bears him an heir, her power seems assured; however, Hsien Feng gives authority over the child to the unworldly Empress Nuharoo, who turns him into a little tyrant. The ailing Hsien Feng dies when the boy is five. Now Orchid has to get control of her son away from Nuharoo, protect him and herself while she gets rid of her sinister enemy Su Shun, and establish a new regime in which she will be the power behind the throne. Empress Orchid ends with the heroine embarking on her ascent to power.
Suggested Readings Huntley, Kristine. Review of Becoming Madame Mao, by Anchee Min. Booklist, March 15, 2000, 1293.
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Jolly, Margaretta. “Coming out of the Coming out Story: Writing Queer Lives.” Sexualities 4, no. 4 (November, 2000): 474-496. Min, Anchee. “Anchee Min: After the Revolution.” Interview by Roxane Farmanfarmaian. Publishers Weekly 247, 23 (June 5, 2000): 66-67. Quan, Shirley. Review of Becoming Madame Mao, by Anchee Min. Library Journal, March 15, 2000, 128. Scott, A. O. “The Re-education of Anchee Min.” The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2000, 44. Seaman, Donna. Review of Katherine, by Anchee Min. Booklist, April 1, 1995, 1378. Smith, Sarah A. Review of Katherine, by Anchee Min. New Statesman and Society, August 25, 1995, 33. Xu, Wenying. “Agency via Guilt in Anchee Min’s Red Azalea.” MELUS 25, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 2000): 203-219. Contributors: Margaret W. Batschelet and Francine Dempsey
Nicholasa Mohr Born: New York, New York; November 1, 1935 Puerto Rican
Mohr writes of Puerto Ricans in New York, and her work features feminist characters. Principal works long fiction: Nilda, 1973 (juvenile); Felita, 1979 (juvenile); Going Home, 1986 (sequel to Felita) short fiction: El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories, 1975; In Nueva York, 1977; Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio, 1985; The Song of El Coquí, and Other Tales of Puerto Rico, 1995; A Matter of Pride, and Other Stories, 1997 The daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, Nicholasa Mohr (NIH-koh-LAH-sah mohr) documents life in New York City’s barrios. Mohr examines the Puerto Rican experience from the perspective of girls and young women. Her female characters face multiple social problems associated with the restrictions imposed upon women by Latino culture. The struggle for sexual equality makes Mohr’s literature central to Latina feminism. Mohr’s characters are an integral part of her realistic portrayal of life in a barrio. The parallels between her characters and her experience are evident. Nilda Ramírez, for example, is a nine-year-old Puerto Rican girl who comes of age during World War II. She also becomes an orphan and is separated from her immediate family. There are close parallels between these events and those of Mohr’s life. In other stories as well girls must face, alone, social adversity, racism, and chauvinistic attitudes. Gays also frequently appear in her work. Gays and girls or young women (especially those who have little or no family) have often been subjected to mistreatment in the male-dominated Puerto Rican culture. Mohr, a graphic artist and painter, studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1955 to 1959. Her advocacy to the social underclass is visible in her visual art, which includes elements of graffiti. Her use of graffiti in her art attracted the attention of a publisher who had acquired several of her paintings. Believing that Mohr had a story to tell, the publisher convinced her to write a short autobiographical piece on growing up Puerto Rican in New York. Many changes later, that piece became Nilda, her first novel, which has earned several prizes. Mohr has also drawn pictures for some of her literary work. New York City is as important to Mohr’s writing as her Puerto Rican characters. 789
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The city, with its many barrios, provides a lively background to her stories. Her short-story collections El Bronx Remembered and In Nueva York stress the characters’ relationship to New York. Mohr’s work can be described as cross-cultural, being a careful and artistic portrait of Puerto Rican culture in New York City.
El Bronx Remembered Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1975 Mohr’s El Bronx Remembered is a collection of short stories depicting life in a Puerto Rican barrio in New York City during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Well known for her treatment of child, adolescent, and young adult characters, Mohr concentrates on subjects of particular importance to those age groups. Mohr’s narratives do not offer a denunciation of the troubled lives of these immigrants and children of immigrants. Instead, her stories bring forward voices that were often, in literature, considered unimportant. Female characters of several age groups and social backgrounds stand out for analysis. Mohr writes from autobiographical memories; she grew up in a barrio much like the one in her stories. In her hands, the barrio is a strong presence that affects the lives of her characters in myriad ways. City life and traditional Puerto Rican family values are set against one another, producing the so-called Nuyorican culture, or Puerto-Rican-in-New-York culture. The clashes within that hybrid culture are the thematic center of Mohr’s short stories. The introduction to the collection sets a strong historical context for the stories. The 1940’s saw an increase in Puerto Rican migration to New York. The arrival of thousands of immigrants changed the ethnic constitution of the city, especially of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the South Bronx. El Bronx, as it is called by the Puerto Ricans, became home to new generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. The center of Nuyorican culture, El Bronx challenges the Nuyorican characters in their struggle to survive in a world of rapid economic and technological changes. The short stories in El Bronx Remembered speak openly about the struggles of the first immigrants with linguistic and other cultural barriers and with racist attitudes within institutions. Mohr’s stories, however, attempt to go beyond social criticism. Puerto Rican characters challenge such obstacles. Some succeed in their attempts. Others are overwhelmed by city life, facing the barrio’s multiple problems, including drug abuse and gang-related troubles. The message, however, is not pessimistic. Although some characters succumb to tragedy because they are ill prepared to face adversity, others around them survive by learning from the plight of the weak. Mohr’s contribution to ethnic American literature is significant. She has made an important contribution to Latino literature by describing Puerto Rican life in New York City. Her writing has a twofold significance. One, it links the Puerto Rican experience to that of other groups, emphasizing women’s issues and those of
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other marginal characters, such as gays, within the Puerto Rican community. Two, Mohr’s work provides a link between the literature written in English about Puerto Rican life in the United States and the literature in Spanish on Puerto Rican issues.
Suggested Readings Benson, Sonia G., Rob Nagel, and Sharon Rose, eds. UXL Hispanic American Biography. Detroit, Mich.: UXL, 2003. Laezman, Rick. One Hundred Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History. San Mateo, Calif.: Bluewood Books, 2002. Mohr, Nicholasa. “An Interview with Author Nicholasa Mohr.” Interview by Nyra Zarnowski. The Reading Teacher 45, no. 2 (October, 1991): 106. Quintana, Alvina E., ed. Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Contributor: Rafael Ocasio
N. Scott Momaday Born: Lawton, Oklahoma; February 27, 1934 Native American
Momaday’s works are poetically brilliant accounts of the landscape, the sacredness of language, and self-knowledge. Principal works children’s literature: Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, 1994 drama: The Indolent Boys, pr. 1994 long fiction: House Made of Dawn, 1968; The Ancient Child, 1989 poetry: Angle of Geese, and Other Poems, 1974; The Gourd Dancer, 1976 nonfiction: “The Morality of Indian Hating,” 1964; The Journey of Tai-me, 1967 (memoir; revised as The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1969); “The Man Made of Words,” 1970; Colorado: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, 1973 (with David Muench); The Names: A Memoir, 1976; Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, 1989 (with Charles L. Woodard) edited text: The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, 1965 miscellaneous: In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991, 1992; The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, and Passages, 1998; In the Bear’s House, 1999 Among the most widely read and studied Native American authors, N. Scott Momaday (MAWM-ah-day) manifests, in his writings, a keen awareness of the importance of self-definition in literature and life. From 1936 onward, his family moved from place to place in the Southwest, eventually settling in Albuquerque, where Momaday attended high school. He entered the University of New Mexico in 1954 and later studied poetry at Stanford University. In 1963, he received his doctorate in English and since then has held teaching jobs at various Southwestern universities. In a semiautobiographical work, The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes that identity is “the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.” Momaday defines his characters in terms of their use or abuse of language; usually his characters find themselves relearning how to speak while they learn about themselves. Even the title of one of Momaday’s essays, “The Man Made of Words,” indicates his contention that identity is shaped by language. “Only when he is embodied in an idea,” Momaday writes, “and the idea is realized in language, can man take possession of himself.” 792
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The forces that shape language—culture and landscape—are also crucial in Momaday’s works. To Russell Martin, Western writing is concerned with the harsh realities of the frontier that “could carve lives that were as lean and straight as whittled sticks.” This harsh landscape is present in Momaday’s work also, but he has a heartfelt attachment to it. Having a spiritual investment in a place, in Momaday’s writing, helps a person gain self-knowledge. To an extent, issues of identity were important to Momaday as well. Son of a Kiowa father and a Cherokee mother, Momaday belonged fully to neither culture. Furthermore, much of his early childhood was spent on a Navajo reservation, where his father worked, and he grew up consciously alienated from the surrounding culture. To combat rootlessness, the imagination and its expression in language are essential. “What sustains” the artist, he writes in The Ancient Child “is the satisfaction . . . of having created a few incomparable things—landscapes, waters, birds, and beasts.” Writing about the efforts of various people to maintain traditional culture in the face of the modern world, Momaday occupies a central place in the American literary landscape.
House Made of Dawn Type of work: Novel First published: 1968 House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s first novel, is the story of an outcast who learns that his being is bound up in his culture. The novel, which relates the experiences of a mixed-race World War II veteran, was a signal achievement, winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Momaday in 1969 and paving a way for other Native American novelists. It begins with Abel’s return to his ancestral village. Although he is so drunk that he does not recognize his grandfather, Abel’s troubles run much deeper. He feels cut off from the Tanoan tribe yet unwilling to live in white America. Even more disturbing to Abel is his inability to “say the things he wanted” to anyone. His inability to express himself hampers his achieving a true identity. Wrapped up in his own problems, Abel is jealous and violent toward those who do participate in Tanoan culture. While at Walatowa, Abel loses a competition to an albino Indian and murders him. After his release from prison, Abel tries to build a new life in California, where he comes in contact with a small community of Indians, who are also alienated from their cultures. The leader of this exile community is John Tosamah, a selfproclaimed priest of the sun, who sermonizes on the failure of white society to recognize the sacredness of the American landscape and of language. Tosamah victimizes Abel, however. Eventually, Abel is cast out of this group and is savagely beaten by a sadistic police officer, Martinez. After the beating, Abel is physically what he was once only psychologically: an invalid. He returns to Walatowa, where his grandfather is dying. Aware that he
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N. Scott Momaday (© Thomas Victor)
must embrace his Tanoan heritage, if only to perform the burial rites for his grandfather, Abel begins to heal psychologically. At the novel’s end, Abel participates in another ceremony, this time a race between the young men of the tribe, which his grandfather had won years before. Abel finds “a sort of peace of mind” through participation but is certainly not healed by it. Unable to keep pace with the others, Abel keeps stumbling and falls behind. Abel’s position in the tribe likewise remains unsettled. On the threshold between the world of his grandfather and that of modern America, on the threshold between spiritual values and lack of faith, Abel can do little but keep running, which becomes a gesture of hope and healing.
The Ancient Child Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 A complex and richly evocative work, Momaday’s The Ancient Child is the story of two Native Americans—a middle-aged painter and a young woman—who come to a fuller understanding of themselves. Native American folklore and mythology are woven into their story, lending cultural and psychological depth to the two’s quests for, essentially, rebirth. Locke Setman, called “Set” throughout the novel, is in many ways a representative Momaday protagonist because he is cut off from his past and therefore lives an unexamined life. Brought up in an orphanage by an embittered academic, Set’s connection to the Kiowa culture of his ancestors is tenuous. Because Set does not know his past, “it was in Set’s nature to wonder, until the wonder became pain, who he was.” His quest to achieve a more profound sense of self begins when he receives a telegram begging him to attend the funeral of one Kope’ mah. Mystified by a past he has never known, Set goes to the funeral and meets Grey, who is training to become a medicine woman because she “never had . . . to quest after visions.” Like Set, Grey has not achieved her true identity, largely because she rejects the modern world. After being raped by a white farmer, she goes to live in an abandoned sod house in a ghost town. She literally dwells in the past. She speaks
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Kiowan fluently, so she is befriended by Kope’ mah, and becomes the link between Set’s past and his future. When the two meet, Grey gives Set a medicine bag containing “the spirit of the bear.” The bear, Set’s unacknowledged totem animal, is as much a curse as a blessing, however, since the life that Set has lived must be stripped away before his true identity can be recognized. Set suffers a mental breakdown, and his nightmares are dominated by “a dark, impending shape” that draws him into itself, into “the hot contamination of the beast.” Eventually, when he is completely stripped of illusions, Set is drawn back to Kiowan tribal lands, and back to Grey. Set is healed and the two forge a relationship, one tied to an awareness of themselves and their culture. Grey teaches Set to speak the language of her people, and by the novel’s end Set is profoundly aware of his place in their culture: “he knew . . . its definition in his mind’s eye, its awful silence in the current of his blood.” He belongs.
The Man Made of Words Type of work: Essays First published: 1998
Readers may consider The Man Made of Words a collection of random prose, as Momaday notes in his preface, but he sees both unity in the collection and evidence of his development as a writer. Part 1 consists of essays on Native American subjects, part 2 of travel accounts to Europe and Native American sites, and part 3 of anecdotes and observations on Native American and other subjects. How these pieces are unified is indicated by Momaday in the first essay, “The Arrowmaker,” which recounts a Kiowa legend that Momaday interprets as an allegory of existence. In the legend, a Kiowa arrowmaker draws on his sense of identity and shrewd language to dispose of a lurking enemy. The arrowmaker becomes “the man made of words” and Momaday’s prototype. The Man Made of Words is thus the record of an existential act: how Momaday has used writing to define and hold on to his Native American identity. The cultural abyss that Momaday has bridged is suggested by numerous autobiographical glimpses in the collection. He grew up on a Kiowa homestead near Rainy Mountain Creek in Oklahoma and on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. He now travels the world, has numerous friends in artistic and intellectual circles, likes fine food and wine, and has learned to fly. The collection also records Momaday’s views on such topics as language, the oral tradition, and the land. He believes that the Native American oral tradition gives words their true, sacred value, while the print culture brought by European settlers debases language. Similarly, the land and places revered by Native Americans are threatened. A recurrent theme throughout the collection is the decline and loss of the sacred.
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Suggested Readings Charles, Jim. Reading, Learning, Teaching N. Scott Momaday. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Isernhagen, Hartwig. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Mason, Kenneth C. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Interviews by Charles L. Woodard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. _______. “Beautyway: The Poetry of N. Scott Momaday.” South Dakota Review 18, no. 2 (1980): 61-83. Momaday, N. Scott. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Edited by Matthias N. Schubnell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Roemer, Kenneth J. Approaches to Teaching “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” New York: Modern Language Association, 1990. Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Schweninger, Lee. N. Scott Momaday. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Trimble, Martha Scott. N. Scott Momaday. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973. Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Contributor: Michael R. Meyers
Alejandro Morales Born: Montebello, California; October 14, 1944 Mexican American
In Morales’s work, a gritty depiction of the racism, oppression, and violence that afflict the poor and minority cultures of America coexists with fantastic or “magically real” interventions such as ghosts and the mythic powers of culture. Principal works long fiction: Caras viejas y vino nuevo, 1975 (Old Faces and New Wine, 1981; also known as Barrio on the Edge, 1998); La verdad sin voz, 1979 (Death of an Anglo, 1988); Reto en el paraíso, 1983; The Brick People, 1988; The Rag Doll Plagues, 1992 Alejandro Morales (ah-lay-HAHN-droh moh-RAL-ehs) is a leading Chicano writer and professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Born in Montebello, California (locally considered “East L.A.”), Morales grew up in a secure and loving working-class home, though in the midst of a more turbulent barrio. Witnessing the gang fights, drug deals, homelessness, and chaos on the streets of his neighborhood while still in high school, Morales decided to become a writer who would chronicle his community. He recorded his neighborhood experiences in his journals and then set out for college, first to earn a B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, and then an M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in Spanish from Rutgers University. Morales became a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, with an appointment in film studies at UCI, teaching courses on Latin American literature. He married Rohde Teaze on December 16, 1967, and they had two children, Alessandra Pilar and Gregory Stewart. After finishing his Ph.D., Morales pursued publication of his first novel, Old Faces and New Wine, which was based on his youthful journal writings. Offers from American publishing companies proved elusive because of his challenging, experimental prose style and because the journals were initially written in Spanish. His early fiction reflects Morales’s anger at the exploitation of his parents, who worked in manufacturing, his despair over the conditions of the barrio, and his struggles against the racism, subtle and overt, he experienced in the academic world early in his teaching career. The result is an arresting prose style; readers of Morales’s early fiction have to work to make connections between events and their meanings and must also learn to comprehend the peculiar dialect he constructs to describe his subject. Often criticized by reviewers, especially for the way he bends 797
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both Spanish and English, Morales has written substantial literature that, because it is not easily accessible, has received less attention than other Mexican American literature of his generation. Morales wrote two more novels in Spanish, but then, seeking a wider audience in the United States, he wrote The Brick People and The Rag Doll Plagues in English. The critical success of these two works has positioned Morales as a leading Chicano novelist. Since the late 1980’s, he has become a noted spokesman for Chicano writers—and Chicano culture—writing reviews and essays on Mexican American literature and Latino films and conducting interviews with other Chicano writers and poets. Besides his stylistic innovations, Morales’s early publications demonstrate his interest in local history and biography. For example, his most popular novel, The Brick People, is based on the lives of his parents, who immigrated to California from Mexico and lived and worked at the Simmons Brick Plant in Pasadena, California. The Brick People chronicles the immigration to California of an entire generation of Mexican Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and describes how their labor helped build the growing metropolis of Los Angeles in the early 1930’s. It narrates the Mexican laborers’ exploitation by the paternalistic brick manufacturer. In interviews, public conversations, and symposia, Morales is fond of describing the Simmons brick, which graces the landscaping of his Southern California home, remarking that, like the brick, the lives and labors of Mexican Americans are embedded in the history and geography of California. Morales’s later works, such as The Rag Doll Plagues, evince a strong interest in science, medicine, and technology. In these works, plots revolve around technological change and the effects of science on social evolution. This turn toward science and its social implications reflects Morales’s interest in how history is shaped and recorded and how it thus guides the present and future. Furthermore, writing about science and technology gives Morales a metaphorical language for describing the ongoing evolution of Mexican American culture, as Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, increasingly integrate with Anglos, Asian Americans, and African Americans, especially in California. In Morales’s allegorical fiction is a mixture of two compelling literary styles that reflect both his realism and his optimism. A gritty depiction of the racism, oppression, and violence that afflict the poor and minority cultures of America sits side by side on the page with fantastic or “magically real” interventions such as ghosts and the mythic powers of culture. Morales’s continuing experimentation reflects his often stated devotion to developing his mastery of the craft of writing.
The Rag Doll Plagues Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 The Rag Doll Plagues is a collection of stories that offer an absorbing panoramic view of the continuing encounter of European and Native American and of English
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and Spanish-speaking cultures in the Americas. It is divided into three books. In book 1, Gregorio Revueltas, sent by his king to improve health conditions in seventeenth century Mexico, encounters a plague that threatens to depopulate the colony and weaken Spain’s empire. Revolted by the primitive savagery and amorality of the colonials, Revueltas nevertheless grows to care for them and eventually sees himself as a Mexican. Important to this transformation is his vision of two men who often appear to guide his efforts. In book 2 a young California doctor, Gregory Revueltas, falls in love with Sandra Spear, a hemophiliac actress. As a result of a transfusion, she develops AIDS during the first years after its identification. Seeking help, he returns with her to Old Mexico, where he and Sandra rediscover the ancient Mexican/Indian spiritual traditions that help her to think of death as a positive transformation, traditions that seem verified in Gregory’s guiding visions of his ancestor, Gregorio. Book 3 takes place at the end of the twenty-first century in Lamex, an extrapolated administrative region that comprises most of western Mexico and the southwestern United States. Gregory Revueltas, state doctor, deals with frequent plagues that erupt from centers of organic pollution that have become living entities. He discovers that Mexicans from the highly polluted Mexico City area have developed a genetic mutation that makes their blood, given in transfusion, a cure for most lung ailments. He, too, is led by the visionary presence of his ancestor, Gregorio. At the end of this book, Revueltas, as narrator, reflects upon the multiple ironies of Mexicans’ new place in American civilization.
Suggested Readings Gurpegui, José Antonio, ed. Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, Future Perfect. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review/Press, 1996. Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. “Rancho Mexicana: USA Under Siege.” In Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Libretti, Tim. “Forgetting Identity, Recovering Politics: Rethinking Chicano/a Nationalism, Identity Politics, and Resistance to Racism in Alejandro Morales’s Death of an Anglo.” Post Identity 1, no. 1 (Fall, 1997): 66-93. Contributors: Dean Franco, Adrienne Pilon, and Terry Heller
Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford) Born: Lorain, Ohio; February 18, 1931 African American
Morrison is the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Principal works children’s literature: The Big Box, 1999 (with Slade Morrison and Giselle Potter); The Book of Mean People, 2002 (with Morrison); The Ant or the Grasshopper?, 2003 (with Morrison); The Lion or the Mouse?, 2003 (with Morrison); Remember: The Journey to School Integration, 2004 drama: Dreaming Emmett, pr. 1986 long fiction: The Bluest Eye, 1970; Sula, 1973; Song of Solomon, 1977; Tar Baby, 1981; Beloved, 1987; Jazz, 1992; Paradise, 1998; Love, 2003 nonfiction: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992; Conversations with Toni Morrison, 1994 (Danille Taylor-Guthrie, editor); Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, 1997; Remember: The Journey to School Integration, 2004 edited texts: To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton, 1972; The Black Book: Three Hundred Years of African American Life, 1974; Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, 1992; Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, 1996 (of Toni Cade Bambara) Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford; her family was blue-collar midwestern. Her parents had migrated from the South in search of a better life. From her parents and grandparents, Morrison acquired a background in African American folklore; magic and the supernatural appear with frequency in her work. At Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, she changed her name to Toni. After receiving a master’s degree in English from Cornell University, she taught at Texas Southern University and then at Howard, where she met Jamaican architect Harold Morrison. Their marriage ended after seven years. A single mother, Toni Morrison supported herself and two sons as a senior editor at Random House, where she encouraged the publication of African American literature. She has continued to teach at various universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. 800
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Originally, Morrison did not intend to be a writer. She has said she began to write because she could not find herself, a black woman, represented in American fiction. In a conversation with novelist Gloria Naylor, published in Southern Review, Morrison speaks of reclaiming herself as a woman and validating her life through the writing of her first book, The Bluest Eye, in which a young black girl prays for the blue eyes that will bring her acceptance. Morrison celebrates the culture of strong black women that she remembers from her childhood, especially in Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. She believes that being able to recognize the contribution and legacy of one’s ancestors is essential to self-knowledge. Her characters are forced to confront their personal and social histories and are often drawn back to their African heritage. Some black male critics have challenged Morrison on the grounds that her male characters are too negative, but the literary world has honored her. In 1988, Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1989 she was named Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University, a title she held until her retirement in 2006. In 1993, Morrison became the second American woman and the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2005, Oxford University honored her with a doctorate of letters.
The Bluest Eye Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 In The Bluest Eye, Morrison shows how society inflicts on its members an inappropriate standard of beauty and worth, a standard that mandates that to be loved one must meet the absolute “white” standard of blond hair and blue eyes. Morrison’s narrator says that two of the most destructive ideas in history are the idea of romantic love (canceling both lust and caring) and the idea of an absolute, univocal standard of beauty. In the novel, the most extreme victim of these destructive ideas is Pecola, who finds refuge in madness after she has been thoroughly convinced of her own ugliness (confirmed when she is raped by her own father, Cholly). Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, is another victim who gets her idea of an unvarying standard of beauty from romantic motion pictures that glorify white film stars. When she realizes the impassible gap between that ideal and her physical self (she has a deformed foot and two missing teeth), she also gives up any hope of maintaining a relationship with Cholly, her husband, except one of complete antagonism and opposition. Mrs. Breedlove even comes to prefer the little white girl she takes care of at work to her own daughter, Pecola, whom she has always perceived as ugly. The ideal of unattainable physical beauty is reinforced by the sugary, unattainable world of the family depicted in the school readers—of Mother and Father and Dick and Jane and their middle-class, suburban existence. The contrast between
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that false standard of life and the reality lived by the children makes them ashamed of their reality, of the physical intimacy of families in which the children have seen their fathers naked. Although Pecola is thoroughly victimized, Freida and Claudia MacTeer, schoolmates of Pecola, do survive with some integrity and richness. Freida seems to accept Shirley Temple as the ideal of cuteness, but her sister Claudia, a center of consciousness in the novel, responds with anger and defiance, dismembering the hard, cold, smirking baby dolls she receives at Christmas. What Claudia really desires at Christmas is simply an experience of family closeness in the kitchen, an experience of flowers, fruit, and music, of security. Claudia’s anger at the white baby dolls springs from a conviction of her own reality and her own worth. In defense of her own individuality, Claudia rejects Shirley Temple and “Meringue Pie,” the high yellow princess, Maureen Peal. It is that defense of her own reality that makes Claudia sympathize with Pecola and try to defend her, even to the point of sacrificing Freida’s money and her own. Claudia is especially puzzled and regretful that nobody says “poor baby” to the raped Pecola, that nobody wants to welcome her unborn baby into the world. It would be only natural, “human nature,” it seems, for people to sympathize with a victim and rejoice at the creation of a human life. Instead, the springs of human sympathy have been dammed up by social disapproval. Suffering from the selfhatred they have absorbed from the society around them, the black community maintains inflexible social standards and achieves respectability by looking down on Pecola. The two MacTeer sisters appeal to nature to help Pecola and her unborn baby, but nature fails them just as prayer did: No marigolds sprout and grow that year. The earth is unyielding. The baby is stillborn. Eventually, even the two girls become distanced from Pecola, whose only friend is an imaginary one, a part of herself who can see the blue eyes she was promised. Pecola functions as a scapegoat for the society around her, and Claudia’s sympathy later grows into an understanding of how the community used Pecola to protect itself from scorn and insult. What finally flowers in Claudia is insight and a more conscious respect for her own reality.
Sula Type of work: Novel First published: 1973 Sula also explores the oppressive nature of white society, evident in the very name of the “Bottom,” a hillside community which had its origin in the duplicitous white treatment of an emancipated black slave who was promised fertile “bottom land” along with his freedom. In a bitterly ironic twist, the whites take over the hillside again when they want suburban houses that will catch the breeze. In taking back the Bottom, they destroy a place, a community with its own identity. In turn, the black community, corrupted by white society, rejects Sula for her experimenting with her
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life, for trying to live free like a man instead of accepting the restrictions of the traditional female role. Sula provokes the reader to question socially accepted concepts of good and evil. As Sula is dying, she asks her girlhood friend Nel, “How do you know that you were the good one?” Although considered morally loose and a witch by the townspeople, the unconventional Sula cannot believe herself to be an inferior individual. Contrasting the traditional role of mother and church woman that Nel has embraced, Sula’s individuality is refreshing and intriguing. Despite her death, Sula maintains an independence that ultimately stands in proud opposition to the established network of relationships that exist within conventional society. The novel shows that the Bottom society encompasses both good and evil. The people are accustomed to suffering and enduring evil. In varying degrees, they accept Eva’s murder of her drug-addict son, Plum, and Hannah’s seduction of their husbands, one after another. The community, nevertheless, cannot encompass Sula, a woman who thinks for herself without conforming to their sensibilities. They have to turn her into a witch, so that they can mobilize themselves against her “evil” and cherish their goodness. Without the witch, their goodness grows faint again. Like Pecola, Sula is made a scapegoat. Growing up in the Bottom, Sula creates an identity for herself, first from the reality of physical experience. When she sees her mother Hannah burning up in front of her eyes, she feels curiosity. Her curiosity is as honest as Hannah’s admission that she loves her daughter Sula the way any mother would but that she does not like her. Hearing her mother reject her individuality, Sula concludes that there is no one to count on except herself. In forging a self, Sula also draws on sexual experience as a means of joy, as a means of feeling sadness, and as a means of feeling her own power. Sula does not substitute a romantic dream for the reality of that physical experience. She does finally desire a widening of that sexual experience into a continuing relationship with Ajax, but the role of nurturing and possession is fatal to her. Ajax leaves, and Sula sickens and dies. A closeness to the elemental processes of nature gives a depth to the lives of the Bottom-dwellers, although nature does not act with benevolence or even with consistency. Plum and Hannah, two of Eva’s children, die by fire, one sacrificed by Eva and one ignited by capricious accident. Chicken Little and several of those who follow Shadrack on National Suicide Day drown because acts of play go wrong and inexplicably lead to their destruction. Sula’s supposed identity as a witch is connected to the plague of robins that coincides with her return to the Bottom. The people of the Bottom live within Nature and try to make some sense of it, even though their constructions are strained and self-serving. On one level, Sula refuses any connection with history and family continuity. Her grandmother Eva says that Sula should get a man and make babies, but Sula says that she would rather make herself. On the other hand, Sula is a descendant of the independent women Eva and Hannah, both of whom did what they had to do. It is at least rumored that Eva let her leg be cut off by a train so that she could get insurance money to take care of her three children when BoyBoy, her husband,
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abandoned her. When her husband died, Hannah needed “manlove,” and she got it from her neighbors’ husbands, despite community disapproval. In their mold, Sula is independent enough to threaten Eva with fire and to assert her own right to live, even if her grandmother does not like Sula’s way of living. To flourish, Morrison suggests, conventional society needs an opposite pole. A richness comes from the opposition and the balance—from the difference—and an acceptance of that difference would make scapegoats unnecessary. The world of the Bottom is poorer with Sula dead and out of it.
Song of Solomon Type of work: Novel First published: 1977 Song of Solomon, Morrison’s third novel, received the 1978 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In her first work to feature a male protagonist, she established the rich narrative voice for which she has become famous. Macon “Milkman” Dead, grandson of a slave, evolves from a self-centered youth to a man of compassion and understanding. He completes this transition as he searches for his family origins, thus exemplifying Morrison’s belief in the importance of ancestors. Originally, Milkman desires to know as little as possible about his family. Torn by the ongoing conflict between his parents, he sets out to find his inheritance, which he believes to be gold in the possession of his father’s sister, Pilate. Instead, Milkman’s quest leads him out of the Midwest to discover his true heritage, his ancestors. He gains pride in his family when he encounters old men who remember his father and grandfather. Before long he is more interested in locating his people than in the gold. At the town of Shalimar, in Virginia, after the symbolic initiation of a night hunt, Milkman recognizes his own selfishness. He learns that a child’s game, the town itself, and many of the people bear some version of his great-grandfather Solomon’s name. The figure of Solomon is based upon a legend of the Flying African, who escaped slavery by leaping into the air and flying home to Africa. Milkman realizes that his great-grandfather has become a folk hero. Heritage is symbolized by the importance of names. The powerful and eccentric Pilate wears her name, laboriously copied from the Bible by her father, in her mother’s snuffbox, which has been made into an earring. She always carries her parents with her. Pilate, an imposing woman who has no navel, struggled with her identity in her teens, when she determined to live by her own rules. One of Morrison’s strong, independent women, she cuts her hair short like a man’s and becomes a bootlegger for practical reasons. She is also a mythic figure, birthing herself after the death of her mother. Pilate communicates comfortably with her father’s ghost, a friendly presence that appears and tells her what she needs to know. She carries his bones around with her in a tarp. He is her guide to maturity; in turn, she becomes Milkman’s. Through her, Milkman learns what she already accepts: “When you know your name, you should hang on to it.”
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Tar Baby Type of work: Novel First published: 1981 Tar Baby explores three kinds of relationships: the relationship between blacks and whites; the relationships within families, especially between parents and children; and the relationship between the American black man and black woman. In the epigraph to the novel, Saint Paul reproaches the Corinthians for allowing contentions to exist among their ranks; the quote serves to foreshadow the discord that abounds in the novel’s relationships. In Tar Baby, Morrison depicts not a self-contained black society but an Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf) onstage interaction between blacks and whites. The novel juxtaposes two families, a white family of masters and a black family of servants. The white family includes a retired candy-maker, Valerian Street, and his wife Margaret, once the “Principal Beauty of Maine,” who is now in her fifties. The couple’s only son Michael lives abroad; his arrival for Christmas is expected and denied by various characters. The black family consists of the husband, Sydney Childs, who is Valerian’s valet and butler, and the wife, Ondine, who serves as cook and housekeeper. They are childless, but their orphan niece Jadine plays the role of their daughter. (Valerian has acted as Jadine’s patron, paying for her education at the Sorbonne.) The pivotal character, however, who enters and changes the balance of power and the habitual responses of the families, is a black man who rises out of the sea. His true name is Son, although he has gone by other aliases. The veneer of politeness and familiarity between the characters is shaken by Son’s abrupt appearance. Uncomfortable racial and personal assumptions are put into words and cannot be retracted. The Principal Beauty is convinced that Son has come to rape her: What else would a black man want? (Jadine is convinced that if Son wants to rape anyone, it is she, not Margaret.) Sydney finds Son a threat to his respectability as a Philadelphia black because when Son appears, the white people lump all blacks together. Ondine seems less threatened, but most of her energy goes into her running battle with the Principal Beauty. Jadine is apprehensive at Son’s wild appearance, and later she is affronted by his direct sexual approach. Only Valerian welcomes Son. He sees him as a vision of his absent son Michael, and he invites him to sit down at the dining table and be a guest.
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Son’s coming is the catalyst that causes time-worn relationships to explode when Michael does not come for Christmas. His failure to appear leads to the revelation that the Principal Beauty abused her son as a child, pricking him with pins and burning him with cigarettes. Ondine, the black woman, finally hurls this accusation at Margaret, the white woman, and makes explicit what the two women have known mutually since the beginning. Valerian, who has been haunted by the memory of Michael as a lonely child who would hide under the sink and sing to himself, is hit with a reality much harsher than he has known or admitted. Structured as it is in terms of families, the whole novel revolves around family responsibilities, especially between parents and children. Michael Street does not come home for Christmas, but the abuse he suffered as a child seems to justify his absence. Thus, the undutiful mother Margaret has thrown the whole family off balance. In the black family, later in the novel, attention is drawn to the undutiful daughter Jadine, although it seems implied that she has learned this undutifulness, partly at least, from whites, wanting her individual success to be separate from family ties and responsibilities. This undutifulness also springs from a question of identity. In Paris, even before she comes to Valerian’s island, Jadine feels affronted by a beautiful, proud, contemptuous African woman in yellow, who buys three eggs and carries them on her head. She is herself and embodies her tradition consummately, exhibiting balance and physical grace that symbolize spiritual poise. Jadine feels diminished and threatened by the African woman, who spits at her. The scorn sends Jadine back to her family, Sydney and Ondine. Jadine is similarly disturbed by her dream of the women with breasts, the mothers, who reproach her for not joining that chain of mothers and daughters who become mothers with daughters. Although Jadine herself is an orphan, reared by Ondine and Sydney and owing much to their care, she refuses to take the self-sacrificing role of the woman who cares for her family. Jadine wants money and the power it brings in the white world. After a little more modeling, she wants to run her own business, perhaps a boutique. Also, she may choose a white husband, like the man who bought her a seductive sealskin coat. Jadine is the Tar Baby of the novel, and Son is Brer Rabbit from the Uncle Remus stories. As the Tar Baby, Jadine acts as a possible trap for Son set by his enemies, white society. Jadine, who has absorbed many white values, wants money and success. Son wants something purer, something associated with nature (he is associated with the sea and the beauty of the savannas) and with family tradition. Nature, direct physical experience, and family traditions that are integral to personal identity are all important values in Son’s existence. Son has a home—the completely black town of Eloe—and there he abides by the ideas of respectability held by his father and his Aunt Rosa. (He asks Jadine to sleep at Aunt Rosa’s, apart from him, and he comes to her secretly only when she threatens to leave if he does not.) To amuse herself in the traditional town, in which she is uncomfortable, Jadine takes photographs of the people and steals their souls, stealing their individual beauty and grace. In the photographs, they seem graceless, poor, and stupid, even to Son, who usually sees them with loving eyes.
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Individually, Son and Jadine love each other, but they seem unable to find a world in which they can both thrive. Yet Son is an undaunted lover, unwilling to let Jadine go, even when she flees from him. Son tries to return to Isle de Chevaliers, Valerian’s island, to get news of Jadine, but the only way he can get there seems to be through the help of Thérèse, the half-blind, fifty-year-old black woman who says that her breasts still give milk. Thérèse takes him by boat to the island of the horsemen. Son has said that he cannot give up Jadine, but Thérèse tells him to join the fabled black horsemen who see with the mind. At the end of the novel, Son is running toward his destiny, whether that be Jadine and some way to make her part of his world or the black horsemen who ride free through the hills. Readers do not know what Son’s fate is to be; they only know that Son is running toward it, just as Brer Rabbit ran from his enemy Brer Fox and from the Tar Baby. Like Milkman Dead at the end of Song of Solomon, Son leaps into mythic possibility; like Brer Rabbit, Son, the black man, is a figure with the power to survive.
Beloved Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 Beloved’s dedication, “Sixty Million and More,” commemorates the number of slaves who died in the middle passage—from Africa to the New World. Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, is modeled upon the historical figure of a fugitive Kentucky slave, who in 1851 murdered her baby rather than return it to slavery. A pregnant Sethe flees on foot to Cincinnati, Ohio, sending her children ahead by way of the Underground Railroad. Her overwhelming concern is to join her baby daughter, who needs her milk. On the bank of the Ohio River she goes into labor, her delivery aided by a white girl who is herself fleeing mistreatment. The new baby is named Denver. Although Sethe reaches her destination, slave-catchers soon follow to return her to Kentucky. Frantic, she tries to kill her children rather than submit them to slavery, but she succeeds only with the older baby. “Beloved” is carved on the child’s tombstone. Sethe accepts her identity of black woman, escaped slave, wife, mother. Her antagonist is life, which has taken so much from her. She and Paul D, the man who becomes her lover, are the last survivors of Sweet Home, the Kentucky farm that was neither sweet nor home to them. Their charge is to endure memory and accept the unforgivable past. A vengeful spirit, that of the dead baby, invades Sethe’s house. After Paul D drives it away, a strange young woman appears in the yard, and they take her in. Her name is Beloved. She is the ghost of Sethe’s dead child. She is also, less clearly, a ghost from the slave ships and an African river spirit. She alters relationships in the household, exerting control over the two adults and Denver. Denver hovers over Beloved; Beloved dotes on Sethe. Once Sethe recognizes Beloved as her daughter, she struggles to make amends while Beloved grows plump and cruel.
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Denver develops a new identity. At eighteen, she is self-centered, jealous, and lonely. Beloved becomes her dear companion. Gradually, Denver grows aware that Beloved’s presence is destroying Sethe, who loses her job along with her meager income and begins to waste away. Denver, who has rarely ventured past her own yard because of the neighbors’ hostility, realizes that only she can save her mother. Terrified, she walks down the road to seek work from strangers and, by accepting this responsibility, becomes a woman. Morrison expected this painful, fiercely beautiful novel to be controversial. Instead, it was widely praised, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.
Jazz Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller Beloved was a hard act to follow, but her new novel, Jazz, is an adventurous, richly imagined work that extends her range into Afro-American city life. Jazz begins with a terse, anecdotal story that seems closely akin to such blues ballads as “Frankie and Johnny.” Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman in his fifties, has a “deepdown, spooky love” for eighteen-year-old Dorcas, but he shoots her when their three-month-old affair goes awry. Joe’s wife Alice then takes a strange revenge by bursting in on Dorcas’s funeral and trying to slash the dead girl’s face. Playing off this sensational opening story, Morrison’s quirky narrative voice ranges in many directions, much as a jazz musician might improvise on the opening statement of a melody. In a vividly sensuous style, the author brings to life both the excitement of Jazz Age Harlem, to which many African Americans migrated after World War I, and the racism, violence, and unresolved mysteries of the places they left behind. She compels the reader to care for Joe, Alice, Corcas, and many other characters by vividly dramatizing both their individual passions and their discoveries of their own unique identities. Ultimately, it is the power of Morrison’s narrator and characters to renew and reinvent themselves—much as a jazz musician plays upon an old melody.
Paradise Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 Paradise, Morrison’s first novel since she was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, rises easily to the level of her best work. It takes place in Ruby, Oklahoma, the second incarnation of an all-black town originally founded by a group of former slaves. Ruby remains largely isolated from the rest of the world, and its inhabitants
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prefer it that way. The town leaders are men who have inherited a passion for freedom, religion, and respect, but their passion has gradually become distorted into a fanaticism that will brook no contradiction. They resist any challenge to tradition. Ruby’s patriarchy is ignored by the five independent women who come one by one to live in an old mansion known as the Convent, some seventeen miles from town. The women are Consolata, a former servant at the Convent; Mavis, a battered wife; Gigi, the free-spirited activist; Seneca, who slices her skin with razors; and Pallas, a lonely little rich girl. In the course of the novel they find peace through Consolata, who becomes the consoler her name suggests as she intuitively instructs them in the rites of a very old religion. They exemplify a separation from the rigid, authoritarian ways of Ruby. The novel begins at its climax, with an attack by the town vigilantes against the Convent, then winds through past events to return to that same attack. Morrison offers a delightful blend of complex characters and magical language. The novel is elliptical, told in Morrison’s rich, storyteller voice, creating an effect of increasing illumination, introducing people and events as gradually as dawning light clarifies the interior of a room.
Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Conner, Marc C., ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Fultz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. _______, ed. Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Peach, Linden, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Contributors: Joanne McCarthy, Kate Begnal, and Nika Hoffman
Walter Mosley Born: Los Angeles, California; January 12, 1952 African American
Mosley brought a new perspective to the hard-boiled detective genre with an African American detective and settings in Watts and South Central Los Angeles. Principal works children’s literature: Forty-Seven, 2005 long fiction: RL’s Dream, 1995; Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997; Blue Light, 1998; Walkin’ the Dog, 1999; The Man in My Basement, 2004; Fortunate Son, 2006; The Wave, 2006; Killing Johnny Fry, 2007; Diablerie, 2008 long fiction (Easy Rawlins series): Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990; A Red Death, 1991; White Butterfly, 1992; Black Betty, 1994; Gone Fishin’, 1996; A Little Yellow Dog, 1996; Bad Boy Brawly Brown, 2002; Little Scarlet, 2004; Cinnamon Kiss, 2005; Blonde Faith, 2007 long fiction (Fearless Jones series): Fearless Jones, 2001; Fear Itself, 2003; Fear of the Dark, 2006 short fiction: Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World, 2001; Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories, 2003 nonfiction: Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History, 2000; What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace, 2003; Life Out of Context: Which Includes a Proposal for the Non-Violent Takeover of the House of Representatives, 2006; This Year You Write Your Novel, 2007 edited texts: Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems, 1999 (with others); The Best American Short Stories, 2003, 2003 (with Katrina Kenison) With the publication of his first detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley (MOHZ-lee) accomplished the difficult feat of bringing a fresh perspective to that genre, the hard-boiled detective story, in which few writers have equaled— and none has improved—upon the style as it was as originally fashioned by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The terse prose, sarcastic wit, and toughguy action that mark their books have served as the yardstick against which all newcomers are measured and most are found wanting. Mosley, however, succeeded in carving out a place for himself within the genre. Although his books are, like Chandler’s, set in Los Angeles, Mosley’s detective is African American and 810
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his world is the world of Watts and South Central. That setting may be geographically close to Chandler’s “mean streets,” but it is light-years away from them in every other regard. Mosley’s detective, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, moves within the setting of his creator’s own childhood, and his community is the one in which Mosley was raised. Born in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Mosley is the son of an African American father, who worked as a school custodian, and a white, Jewish mother, who was employed as a clerk by the Board of Education. Mosley grew up listening to stories of his father’s youth in the South and of his mother’s Russian Jewish family. After graduating from high school, he enrolled first in Goddard College in Vermont and later graduated from Johnson State College. A brief period in graduate school at the University of Minnesota ended when he moved to Boston to continue his relationship with the dancer/choreographer Joy Kellerman, whom he married in 1987. While living in Boston, Mosley worked as a caterer and a potter. Following his move to New York with Kellerman in 1982, he switched to computer programming. He had always been an avid reader, but it was only after reading Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) that he realized for the first time that there was a place in literature for his own experience. He was inspired to try his hand at writing and completed a novella entitled Gone Fishin’ while attending creative writing classes at New York’s City College. In that work, which remained unpublished until 1996, he first used the character who later became the focus of his detective novels, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Based in part on his father’s experiences as a black man from the South who had immigrated to Los Angeles after World War II, the saga of Easy Rawlins is also the history of that city’s African American community. Although the novels’ structure is that of the traditional detective novel, Mosley’s ultimate intent is to chronicle the community in which he was raised and the changes it had undergone since the late 1940’s. Like the author, Rawlins is a veteran who finds that his military service overseas does not bring him more respect or better treatment back home. The first book in the Easy Rawlins series, Devil in a Blue Dress, opens with Easy’s being laid off from his defense plant job and undertaking some investigative work in an effort to meet his mortgage payments. The plot is set at a time when Los Angeles’s African American community was in its heyday: Stores and jazz clubs lined Central Avenue, and black Americans expected that their contributions to the war effort would bring them a share of the postwar prosperity. Easy’s investigation into a woman’s disappearance, however, reveals just how wide the economic and social gap between the races had remained. Devil in a Blue Dress brought Mosley an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America and firmly established his reputation as a writer. In his second book, A Red Death, Mosley draws on his dual heritage as both an African American and a Jew in his portrayal of the relationship—increasingly frayed in more recent years—between the African American and Jewish communities. The novel is set during the McCarthy era and finds Easy forced to cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in their investigation of a Jewish union organizer, an Eastern European who reawakens Easy’s dark memories
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of the liberation of the concentration camps. Mosley is often identified solely in terms of his African American heritage, but in A Red Death he acknowledges his mother’s legacy. Mosley’s books often focus on racial discrimination and the frustration and rage it can engender. Easy’s dealings with the police are sometimes marked by gross injustice and brutality, which instill in him an anger that he only rarely dares to express. White Butterfly, Mosley’s third novel in the series, deals with discrimination against the entire African American community as the murders of several black women are ignored until a white woman also Walter Mosley (Courtesy, Allen & Unwin) falls victim to the killer. The next book, Black Betty, also explores the tremendous disparity in the way people of different races are treated; here the title character is a once-vibrant and seductive woman who works as a maid in the home of a wealthy and powerful white family. Mosley’s love of blues music led him to venture outside the detective genre for his fifth novel, RL’s Dream, a well-received portrait of a dying blues musician and the culture that shaped his life. With A Little Yellow Dog, Mosley returned to Easy Rawlins, by this time a school janitor in 1963. His efforts to get off the street seem about to come to naught when he becomes involved in a double murder revolving around an attractive white teacher at the school. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned again leaves Easy for another character, Socrates Fortlow, a former convict trying to come to terms with life in Watts in a series of fourteen interconnected short stories. Fortlow reappears in Walkin’ the Dog. Blue Light marked Mosley’s foray into science fiction. The novel concerns mysterious blue lights that flicker in the Northern California skies, causing those they strike to develop a higher understanding of human purpose. Walkin’ the Dog returns to the character of Socrates Fortlow, still facing moral dilemmas in the Los Angeles ghetto. Fearless Jones introduced yet another eponymous protagonist, working the private detective gig in 1950’s Los Angeles. Bad Boy Brawly Brown returns to Easy Rawlins, this time struggling through the racial tensions simmering in Los Angeles in 1964 and the rise of black militancy. For all of Mosley’s forays into other genres and other characters, it is his Easy Rawlins novels that receive the greatest attention, for in them Mosley illuminates a part of Los Angeles history that had been long ignored. In the detective series he created books that are both familiar and startlingly original, taking his readers down a much-traveled road to a new destination.
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A Little Yellow Dog Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 An early morning when Easy Rawlins is seduced by a beautiful young teacher and a dead body is found on the school grounds sets in motion a wild and complex plot involving larceny, drug dealing, and multiple deaths. Easy had arranged for a new job in an attempt to avoid danger and to provide a steady living for his foster children, but Idabell Turner and her problems (the corpse is that of her brother-in-law) trap him in more murder and mayhem. With the support of his friend and a backup muscle, Mouse Alexander, Easy tries to get himself off the hook despite the dark suspicions of Sergeant Sanchez, a homicide detective who is convinced that Easy is a murderer and that he is also responsible for a rash of burglaries of school equipment. Easy makes a variety of deals with menacing criminals to deflect suspicion from himself, to rescue friends from dire situations, and incidentally to try to find who killed Idabell’s brother-in-law, her husband, and Idabell herself. He also has time to fall in love with a beautiful stewardess named Bonnie Shay. A final deal backfires. Mouse is fatally wounded as he and Easy try to deliver a shipment of drugs in exchange for a cessation of violence against Easy’s friends. Easy survives but in the end discovers that Bonnie Shay had killed Idabell’s husband. Turner had tried to force Bonnie into drug running and had raped her. The possibility of further romance between Easy and Bonnie is one of the few bright spots in the grim ending of this gritty and tough novel.
Suggested Readings Coale, Samuel. The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Lock, Helen. “Invisible Detection: The Case of Walter Mosley.” MELUS 26 (Spring, 2001): 77-89. Smith, David L. “Walter Mosley’s Blue Light: (Double Consciousness)2.” Extrapolation 42 (Spring, 2001): 7-26. Wesley, Marilyn C. “Knowledge and Power in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress.” African American Review 35 (Spring, 2001): 103-116. Young, Mary. “Walter Mosley, Detective Fiction, and Black Culture.” Journal of Popular Culture 32 (Summer, 1998): 141-150. Contributor: Janet E. Lorenz
Thylias Moss Born: Cleveland, Ohio; February 27, 1954 African American
In addition to writing about the African American experience, Moss deconstructs the idea of God, liberating it from the controlling religious paradigm. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: I Want to Be, 1993 drama: The Dolls in the Basement, pr. 1984; Talking to Myself, pr. 1984 poetry: Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman, 1983; Pyramid of Bone, 1989; At Redbones, 1990; Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, 1991; Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems, 1993; Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, 1998; Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse, 2004; Tokyo Butter: A Search for Forms of Deirdre, 2006 nonfiction: Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress, 1998 (memoir) Awards earned by Thylias Moss (THIH-lee-ahs mahs) who became an English professor at the University of Michigan in 1992, include a Guggenheim, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. Born Thylias Rebecca Brasier, Moss was the daughter of Calvin Brasier, a tire recapper, and Florida Brasier, a housekeeper. With their adored only child, the Brasiers lived in an attic apartment owned by the Feldmans, a Jewish couple who treated Thylias as though she were their own grandchild. After the Feldmans sold the house, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the new owners, Lytta, baby-sat for the young Thylias and treated her with extreme cruelty, a fact the youngster never told her parents. Lytta victimized her physically, verbally, and sexually, forcing darkness into an otherwise idyllic childhood. It is this relationship that forms the focus of Moss’s memoir, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress. Moss started school at Louis Pasteur Elementary School, a friendly, racially mixed school where her intelligence and gifted violin playing were encouraged. She sometimes led the class, contributed to discussions, wrote plays and poems, and eagerly played the violin. When she was nine, her family moved to a primarily white neighborhood. At the Benjamin Franklin School in her new neighborhood, she was treated indifferently and denied a school-issued violin as well as attendance in the accelerated classes she had been in previously. She grew resentful, withdrawn, and sullen but found solace in writing. Moss attributes her remarkable ear for poetry to regular church attendance, 814
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where she first became aware of the power of the spoken word. Apparently what she learned stayed with her; her poetry readings, which encourage audience participation and use many voices, are popular and widely known. (In 1991 she won the annual Dewar’s Profiles Performance Artist Award in poetry.) It was also in church that she met her husband, John Moss, who was in military service and later became a University of Michigan administrator. They married when she was nineteen and eventually had two sons, Dennis and Ansted. After marrying, she spent two unhappy years at Syracuse University and then worked for several years in a Cleveland business, where she ultimately became a junior executive. She enrolled at Oberlin College and graduated in 1981 with the top academic record in her class. Later, she earned her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of New Hampshire, where the well-known poet Charles Simic inspired her and recognized her talent. She taught at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and won an artist’s fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council in 1987 that enabled her to work on her second book of poetry, Pyramid of Bone.
Pyramid of Bone Type of work: Poetry First published: 1989 This collection was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moss’s poetry is both earnest and comic, embracing both extremes of this apparent dichotomy. In one poem she will move between a polemic tone and an irony that recognizes few boundaries. She is comfortable taking on even the most sacred cows. In “A Form of Deicide,” God plays the part of her father, walking Moss down the aisle to turn her over to her husband: “. . . He will/ always be my Father, but another man will be/ my husband and I will look at him in ways God/ does not want to be seen. . . . Ever the strong, silent type. . . .” Moss deconstructs the idea of God, liberating it from the controlling religious paradigm. Religion is a common theme in Moss’s work, which often reimagines the Christian tradition with its various symbols, including angels, devils, and God. These terms are redefined in new and different ways, rendering them fresher and certainly more personal. Just as Moss is adventurous in her language, she is equally adventurous in her use of form. She juxtaposes instructions and dialogue, uses tercets to frame a poem written in quatrains, inserts italicized refrains as ironic comments on stanzas, and writes remarkable prose poems. Among the latter are “The Warmth of Hot Chocolate,” spoken in the voice of an angel, “Renegade Angels,” and “Dear Charles,” an epistolary poem. “Dear Charles” illustrates another of Moss’s themes: the overwhelming influences that shape people of color. A woman writes to a black man of a tornado, which becomes a metaphor of her experience of him: “Not Charles, though, who, male and all, gives birth to tornadoes; little pieces of him drop off and spin madly. . . . Forgive me, but the way I feel, I can deal with you only in the third person, which is the same
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as dealing with the Third World.” Charles replies in the voice of a black “everyman,” who was turned into a storm by the weight of black history. Many of Moss’s poems deal with the African American experience, bearing titles like “Lunchcounter Freedom,” “The Lynching,” and “Nigger for the First Time.” Still, she is reluctant to be classified as a “black woman poet.” “I am a person,” she has said, “whose ancestors were brought to this country from Africa. But it has not very much of anything to do with how I view the world.” With a distinctive voice and a worldview that overlap the boundaries of race, this work brought her wide recognition as a groundbreaking poet.
Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress Type of work: Memoir First published: 1998 In this memoir, Moss probes her silent submission to several years of physical and sexual abuse by her teenage babysitter, who was supposed to care for her after school. This abuse so destroyed young Thylias’s self-esteem that as a teenager she was sexually exploited by two older men and underwent a traumatic late-term abortion. Even as an adult, she cannot satisfactorily explain why she did not report her torment to her parents, except to believe that they could not have comprehended the nature of such evil. Moss’s salvation, in childhood and now as a wife, mother, and English professor at the University of Michigan, was—and is—her gift for language. Her tortured childhood is, she says, reflected in her poetry, leaving her “with a need to make sense of humanity’s defects and psychologies.” Her love of beauty, expressed in an explosion of images, is elicited by the world of nature, science, and the people she observes with such keen insight. In her journey toward redemption, she describes the cruelty of the public schools, slow to recognize giftedness in a black child, and the anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalist church that suppressed her aspirations. With this work, and through the love of the compassionate man she married, Moss reclaimed her self-identity.
Suggested Readings Hammer, Langdon. “Invisible Things.” The American Scholar 74, no. 2 (Spring, 2005): 49ff. Kitchen, Judith. “Poetry Reviews.” Georgia Review, Winter, 1998, 763-765. Winston, Jay. “The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss.” In Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Contributor: Sheila Golburgh Johnson
Bharati Mukherjee Born: Calcutta, India; July 27, 1940 South Asian American
Mukherjee is perhaps the foremost fiction writer describing the experience of Third World immigrants to North America. Principal works long fiction: The Tiger’s Daughter, 1972; Wife, 1975; Jasmine, 1989; The Holder of the World, 1993; Leave It to Me, 1997; Desirable Daughters, 2002; The Tree Bride, 2004 short fiction: Darkness, 1985; The Middleman, and Other Stories, 1988 nonfiction: Kautilya’s Concept of Diplomacy, 1976; Days and Nights in Calcutta, 1977 (with Clark Blaise); The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, 1987 (with Blaise); Political Culture and Leadership in India: A Study of West Bengal, 1991; Regionalism in Indian Perspective, 1992 Bharati Mukherjee (bah-RAH-tee MEWK-ehr-jee) was born to an upper-caste Bengali family and received an English education. The most important event of her life occurred in her early twenties, when she received a scholarship to attend the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction reflects the experimental techniques fostered at such influential creative writing schools. At the University of Iowa, Mukherjee met Clark Blaise, a Canadian citizen and fellow student. When they moved to Canada she became painfully aware of her status as a nonwhite immigrant in a nation less tolerant of newcomers than the United States. The repeated humiliations she endured made her hypersensitive to the plight of immigrants from the Third World. She realized that immigrants may lose their old identities but not be able to find new identities as often unwelcome strangers. Mukherjee, relying on her experience growing up, sought her salvation in education. She obtained a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature and moved up the career ladder at various colleges and universities in the East and Midwest until she became a professor at Berkeley in 1989. Her first novel, The Tiger’s Daughter, was published in 1972. Like all her fiction, it deals with the feelings of exile and identity confusion that are experienced by immigrants. Being female as well as an immigrant, Mukherjee noted that opportunities for women were so different in America that she was exhilarated and bewildered. Many of her best stories, dealing with women experiencing gender crises, have a strong autobiographical element. Darkness, her first collection of stories, was well reviewed, but not until the pub817
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lication of The Middleman, and Other Stories did she become internationally prominent. She is dealing with perhaps the most important contemporary phenomenon, the population explosion and flood of immigrants from have-not nations. Mukherjee makes these newcomers understandable to themselves and to native citizens, while shedding light on the identity problems of all the anonymous, inarticulate immigrants of America’s past. Her protagonists are not the “huddled masses” of yesteryear; they are talented, multilingual, enterprising, often affluent men and women who are transforming American culture. Mukherjee’s compassion for these newcomers has made her one of the most important writers of her time.
The Middleman, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1988 The Middleman, and Other Stories deals with the clash between Western and Third World cultures as technology and overpopulation join diverse peoples in tragicomic relationships. “A Wife’s Story” is a good example of Mukherjee’s storytelling technique. It is told in the present tense, begins abruptly, and has an interest, characteristic of literary minimalism, in brand names and consumerism. The narrator sees her Indian husband through American eyes when he visits her in New York City, where she is attending college. He is captivated by the meretricious glamour and abundance of consumer goods. The narrator realizes how Americanized she has become and how comically provincial her husband appears. Alfred Judah in “The Middleman” is a man without a country, a Jew living in Central America and hoping to make his way to the United States. Some think he is an Arab and others think he is an Indian; he is despised by everyone. In “Orbiting,” an American woman is living with an Afghan lover who is another man without a country, unable to obtain legal entry into any of the developed countries being flooded with immigrants. In “Buried Lives,” an Indian who is prospering in Sri Lanka abandons his responsibilities for a new life in America. After leading a terrifying underground existence, he finds himself engaged to be married in Germany. “Danny’s Girls” is about immigrants who come to the United States for a better life and who become prostitutes. “Jasmine” has a similar theme.
“The Management of Grief ” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1988, in The Middleman, and Other Stories Based on an actual event—the Sikh terrorist bombing of an Air India plane on June 23, 1985, which killed all 329 passengers and crew—“The Management of
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Grief ” is Mukherjee’s “tribute to all who forget enough of their roots to start over enthusiastically in a new land, but who also remember enough of their roots to survive fate’s knockout punches.” Mukherjee’s story focuses on Shaila Bhave in the hours, days, and months following the deaths of her husband and two young sons. The story focuses on her forms of grief and guilt, which are specific to her culture. As an Indian wife, she never spoke her husband’s name or told him she loved him— simple acts that Westerners take for granted. Her grief reveals who Shaila is, was, and will be. As do many of the characters in Mukherjee’s stories and novels, she finds herself caught between cultures, countries, and existences. “At thirty-six,” she considers, “I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between two worlds.” One of the worlds is Indian, including the highly supportive Hindu community in Toronto, from which she feels strangely detached. The Hindu community in Toronto is itself part of a larger Indian immigrant community that includes Muslims, Parsis, atheists, and even the Sikhs, tied by religion if not necessarily by politics to those responsible for the bombing, which is part of a struggle for autonomy being waged by Sikh extremists in India. Even within Toronto’s Hindu community there are divided allegiances as parents “lose” their children to Western culture no less than to terrorist bombs. The other world, the “West,” or more specifically Canada, is equally problematic, especially for Indian immigrants such as Mrs. Bhave, who are made to feel at best marginalized, at worst excluded altogether. She experiences the insensitivity of police investigators, the inadequacy of news coverage (the implicit message is that the victims and their families are not really Canadian), and finally the wellintentioned but ineffectual efforts of a government social worker’s textbook approach to “grief management.” The social worker enlists Mrs. Bhave’s help in assisting those who have not been “coping so well.” The story’s complex identity theme is reflected in its spatial diversity. It follows Mrs. Bhave from Toronto to Ireland (to identify remains) and then to India, where she believes she hears her husband’s voice telling her: “You must finish alone what we started together.” This seemingly irrational link to tradition, including her thinking that her husband and sons “surround her like creatures in epics,” gives her the strength to leave India Bharati Mukherjee (Tom Victor) and return to Canada. Although she
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does not assume, as some of the older relatives do, that God will provide, she is provided for and in a way that precludes the reader’s seeing her as entirely representative. Thanks to her husband’s savings and the sale of their house, she is financially secure and so can afford to heed her dead husband’s final admonition: “Go, be brave.” Her future, including her future identity, may be uncertain, but in that uncertainty Shaila Bhave finds her freedom, one inextricably rooted in loss.
The Holder of the World Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 The Holder of the World is a complex narrative tour de force. On one level, it is the story of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily (even implausibly) modern young woman from seventeenth century Massachusetts, Hannah Easton, who becomes a Hindu king’s lover in India. On another level, it is an attempt by the narrator— present-day thirtysomething “asset-hunter” Beigh Masters—to reconstruct Hannah’s life. On yet a third level, the book is the author’s—Mukherjee’s—attempt to prove that “everything in history . . . is as tightly woven as a Kashmiri shawl,” that “there are no accidents.” That this attempt is only partly successful is only to be expected; such conceits are a large and honorable part of any novelist’s motivation. Like any very good, complex work of narrative, The Holder of the World is “about” several things at once. It is a feminist and very contemporary rewriting of the story of early British imperialism. It is an audacious rewriting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel The Scarlet Letter. It is an essay on the great literary topic of the present day: the meeting and mixing of peoples. “Of all the qualities I admire in Hannah Easton that make her entirely our contemporary in mood and sensibility, none is more touching to me than the sheer pleasure she took in the world’s variety,” comments Beigh, the narrator. The Holder of the World is an important, engrossing novel that will stimulate much lively discussion.
Suggested Readings Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996. Bowen, Deborah. “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief.’” Ariel 28 (July, 1997): 47-60. Chua, C. L. “Passages from India: Migrating to America in the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee.” In Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Drake, Jennifer. “Looting American Culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s Immigrant Narratives.” Contemporary Literature 40 (Spring, 1999): 60-84. Fakrul, Alam. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996.
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Mukherjee, Bharati. “Interview.” In Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Nazareth, Peter. “Total Vision.” Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 110 (1986): 184-191. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993. Scheer-Schäzler, Brigitte. “‘The Soul at Risk’: Identity and Morality in the Multicultural World of Bharati Mukherjee.” In Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literature in English, edited by Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. Schlosser, Donna. “Autobiography, Identity, and Self-Agency: Narrative Voice in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.” English Language Notes 38 (December, 2000): 75-92. Contributors: Bill Delaney and Robert A. Morace
Albert Murray Born: Nokomis, Alabama; May 12, 1916 African American
“The mainstream is not white but mulatto,” Murray wrote in The Omni-Americans. His novels, poetry, and essays ponder the implications of this statement, exploring the richness of African American culture and its immersion in American cultural life. Principal works long fiction: Train Whistle Guitar, 1974; The Spyglass Tree, 1991; The Seven League Boots, 1996; The Magic Keys, 2005 poetry: Conjugations and Reiterations, 2001 nonfiction: The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture, 1970; South to a Very Old Place, 1971; The Hero and the Blues, 1973; Stomping the Blues, 1976; Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, 1985 (as told to Albert Murray); The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, 1996; Conversations with Albert Murray, 1997 (Roberta S. Maguire, editor); Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, 2000 (Albert Murray and John F. Calhoun, editors); From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity, 2001 After receiving his B.A. from Tuskegee Institute and his M.A. from New York University, Murray taught literature at Tuskegee; for a while he also directed the College Little Theatre. Beginning in 1943 Murray served in the U.S. Air Force, from which he retired in 1962 as major. He lectured at several universities, including Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Colgate University, University of Massachusetts, University of Missouri, and Barnard College; he was also writer-in-residence at Emory University and professor of creative writing at Barnard College and Dupont Visiting Scholar at Washington and Lee universities. Like his friend and fellow Tuskegee alumnus Ralph Ellison, Murray derived much of the content and style of his work from music. In his first book-length work, The Omni-Americans, he explores the complicated relationships among cultures in the United States, asserting that “any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.” Far from being an Africanist, Murray nevertheless argues for recognition of the particular aesthetic that is “a central element in the dynamics of U.S. Negro 822
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life-style.” This aesthetic depends on improvisation and stylization, where improvisation is experimenting with the possibilities and stylization is developing these possibilities into a unique personal statement. The interaction of these largely African solutions within an American context has created an African American expressive culture encompassing music, dance, language, religion, sports, fashions, physical deportment, and food. Yet Murray insists that the “omni-Americans” of his title are also all American people, perhaps even all humanity, who have created the mulatto culture and identity he describes. South to a Very Old Place converts his description of African American identity into an intellectual autobiography composed as a set of improvisational essays. Begun at the request of Willie Morris for a Harper’s magazine series called “Going Home in America,” the book explores not only the geographical South of Murray’s youth but also the South of cultural and intellectual historians, journalists, novelists, storytellers, and musicians of all ethnicities and locations, whom Murray engages in actual or imagined conversation throughout the book. In 1972 Murray gave three public lectures at the University of Missouri. In The Hero and the Blues, the published version of those lectures, Murray continues his meditation on the role of the artist and the function of literature in society. Murray eloquently describes a blues aesthetic in literature from Thomas Mann to Ernest Hemingway and reflects on heroic action and the quest for selfhood in terms of the blues dynamic, which he defines as antagonistic cooperation. Heroes become heroic by overcoming obstacles. The sinister circumstances that inspire heroism also demand that the hero continue to grow in response to their challenge. Murray discusses stylization and improvisation as the means of experimenting within a tradition and developing unique solutions to ongoing problems. Thus in opposition to protest fiction, which fails to offer solutions, hope, or heroes, Murray praises heroic art—the blues—as the victory of art and metaphor over the human situation. In 1973 Murray published the first of two loosely autobiographical novels, Train Whistle Guitar. Through the eyes and ears of the narrator, Scooter, and his best friend Little Buddy Marshall, Murray reveals a concrete and multishaded blues culture, from summer baseball’s blue skies to the steel-blue freight trains whistling through Gasoline Point, Alabama. Scooter begins his narrative sorting through stories about the mysterious bluesman Luzana Cholly and ends by solving a riddle he is late even in coming to recognize, the riddle of his own past. In verbal riffs celebrating the specificity of real life picnics, schoolrooms, barbershops, and music of the twelve-string guitar and the honky-tonk piano, Murray fixes in words the history and texture of Southern rural African American community and vernacular culture. Stomping the Blues is, as the title indicates, an exploration of African American rhythm- and body-centered music in its many guises: religious expression, song, dance, swing, be-bop, and “equipment for living.” Essentially a cultural history, Stomping the Blues combines Murray’s inimitable literary style with the perceptions of a trained musician and the point of view of a cultural analyst. Murray regards blues music as heroic, not sorrowful, and stomping the blues as a cultural purification ritual.
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The Spyglass Tree briefly recapitulates the events of Murray’s earlier novel before launching into Scooter’s experiences during four years on an Alabama college campus. The Seven League Boots continues Scooter’s story; after graduating from college, he becomes a bass player with a Duke Ellington-esque pianist and composer at the height of the Swing era. From the Briarpatch File is a collection of Murray’s essays that offers a good introductory overview of his work and his major themes. In Conjugations and Reiterations, Murray let his fascination with the blues and other musical forms take hold of his words and create poetry. Wordplay and rhythm make his poems as much oral lyrics as they are words printed on a page.
The Spyglass Tree Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 The first section of The Spyglass Tree concerns Scooter’s polymath college roommate, nicknamed “Snake” because his prodigious intellectual accomplishments remind Scooter of a snake doctor. At the same time he is studying literature, drama, poetry, botany, chemistry, geography, electronics, and military history, Snake mentors Scooter in constructing miniature stage sets, greenhouses, and model airplanes, and Scooter reflects on how these things are connected. Friendships, community, family, baseball, and the combination of childhood educators and fairy godmothers that steered him toward a college education weave through his thoughts on the present shape and future trajectory of his life. In the book’s second half Scooter, later in college, negotiates trickier territory. For keeping cool in a crisis that had threatened to turn into a rural race war, Scooter lands a summer job from a local businessman and scores a bass fiddle from the blues singer. This instrument becomes his talisman for the larger world he is about to enter. Central to this novel are Snake’s and Scooter’s efforts to integrate intellectual inquiry with everyday living, a task to which Murray dedicated himself throughout his career.
The Blue Devils of Nada Type of work: Essays First published: 1996 The phrase “the blues aesthetic” suggests origins deep in African American culture, but, as the subtitle of The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement suggests, Murray is concerned to define the place of the blues idiom, which for him means what others call “jazz,” in American culture at large. For Murray, who has been making this point incisively for a quarter of a century, there is no “white” American culture; he describes and praises American
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mainstream culture as mulatto. Nor is there any “black” American culture, if by that is meant a culture of African Americans that does not reflect their interaction with Americans of every ethnic heritage. The blues idiom is itself not “African” but arises out of the confrontation of American and European musical elements in the transforming context of America. Much of this book is devoted to the work and personalities of three giants of the blues idiom: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Murray does not offer technical analysis of the music; he is rather concerned to define its meanings for his vision of American culture. He then, more boldly, extends the blues aesthetic to the African American painter Romare Bearden, and finally, and more boldly still, to the white American writer Ernest Hemingway. One need not agree with every point that Murray makes (few readers will) to realize that Murray’s approach to culture is provocative and often illuminating in itself and a challenge to all versions of separatism and to many versions of multiculturalism. The liveliness of his mind and the range of his interests make Albert Murray an always engaging and stimulating companion to the reader. Not for the first time in his career, he has produced a book for which readers should be grateful.
The Seven League Boots Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 The Seven League Boots, third in the Scooter series after Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree, Scooter, now more often called “Schoolboy” (having finished a stint at Tuskegee), embarks on an exploration of the great world. Divided into three parts, titled “The Apprentice,” “The Journeyman,” and “The Craftsman,” the novel follows Schoolboy across the country as he tours with the great jazz band led by the Bossman, clearly modeled on Duke Ellington. Upon leaving the band, Schoolboy flourishes in Hollywood and enjoys a rewarding sojourn in Europe. When readers last see him, he is on his way home on a visit. Murray’s theme is the possibility embodied in a young man like Scooter/Schoolboy, a possibility that cannot be realized through reductive definition by race, ethnicity, or nationality. Scooter absorbs all the influences, black and white, American and European, to which he is exposed, integrates them within himself, and brings them all back home. Not merely a protagonist, he is a hero, an “adequate man,” to use a formulation Murray has employed elsewhere. As part of an ongoing meditation on Murray’s chief themes, The Seven League Boots is unfailingly interesting. As a novel, it is rather more problematic. The hero’s will encounters too little resistance from the world to generate the tensions that inform a fully realized work of fiction. Nevertheless, Murray’s many admirers will regard this book as a must. Readers curious to make Murray’s acquaintance might do best to begin with one of his nonfiction works, such as The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, or South to a Very Old Place.
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Suggested Readings Carson, Warren. “Albert Murray: Literary Reconstruction of the Vernacular Community.” African-American Review 27, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 287-296. Fairbanks, Carol, and Eugene A. Engeldinger. Black American Fiction: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Karrer, Wolfgang. “The Novel as Blues: Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1982. Wideman, John. “Stomping the Blues: Ritual in Black Music and Speech.” American Poetry Review 7, no. 4 (1978): 42-45. Contributor: Gena Dagel Caponi
Walter Dean Myers Born: Martinsburg, West Virginia; August 12, 1937 African American
Myers writes realistic stories about young African Americans coping with complex social and ethical issues and finding values to live by. Principal works children’s/young adult literature: Where Does the Day Go?, 1969; The Dancers, 1972; The Dragon Takes a Wife, 1972; Fly, Jimmy, Fly!, 1974; Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff, 1975; The World of Work: A Guide to Choosing a Career, 1975; Social Welfare, 1976; Brainstorm, 1977; Mojo and the Russians, 1977; Victory for Jamie, 1977; It Ain’t All for Nothin’, 1978; The Young Landlords, 1979; The Black Pearl and the Ghost: Or, One Mystery After Another, 1980; The Golden Serpent, 1980; Hoops, 1981; The Legend of Tarik, 1981; Won’t Know Till I Get There, 1982; The Nicholas Factor, 1983; Tales of a Dead King, 1983; Motown and Didi: A Love Story, 1984; Mr. Monkey and the Gotcha Bird, 1984; The Outside Shot, 1984; Crystal, 1987; Sweet Illusions, 1987; Fallen Angels, 1988; Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid, 1988; Scorpions, 1988; The Mouse Rap, 1990; Now Is Your Time! The African-American Struggle for Freedom, 1991; Mop, Moondance, and the Nagasaki Knights, 1992; The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner, 1992; Somewhere in the Darkness, 1992; Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse, 1993 (poetry); Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, 1993; A Place Called Heartbreak: A Story of Vietnam, 1993; Young Martin’s Promise, 1993; Darnell Rock Reporting, 1994; The Glory Field, 1994; Glorious Angels: A Celebration of Children, 1995 (poetry); One More River to Cross: An African-American Photograph Album, 1995; Shadow of the Red Moon, 1995; The Story of the Three Kingdoms, 1995; How Mr. Monkey Saw the Whole World, 1996; Slam!, 1996; Smiffy Blue, Ace Crime Detective: The Case of the Missing Ruby, and Other Stories, 1996; Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Fight for Haiti’s Freedom, 1996; Harlem, 1997; Amistad: A Long Road of Freedom, 1998; Angel to Angel: A Mother’s Gift of Love, 1998; At Her Majesty’s Request: An African Princess in Victorian England, 1999; Monster, 1999; The Journal of Joshua Loper, a Black Cowboy, 1999; The Journal of Scott Pendleton Collins, a WWII Soldier, 1999; The Blues of Flat Brown, 2000; 145th Street, 2000 (short stories); Bad Boy: A Memoir, 2001; The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, 2001; The Journal of Biddy Owens: The Negro Leagues, 2001; Three Swords for Granada, 2002; The Beast, 2003; Blues Journey, 2003 (Christopher Myers, il827
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lustrator); The Dream Bearer, 2003; Antarctica: Journeys to the South Pole, 2004; Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices, 2004; I’ve Seen the Promised Land, 2004 (Leonard Jenkins, illustrator); Shooter, 2004; USS Constellation: Pride of the American Navy, 2004; Autobiography of My Dead Brother, 2005 (Myers, illustrator) Walter Dean Myers was born in West Virginia into a large family. When he was three years old, his mother died. Burdened by poverty, his father sent Myers to live with foster parents in New York City. The foster parents, Herbert and Florence Dean, raised the boy in Harlem, which Myers remembers as teeming with life and excitement. Myers changed his original middle name, Milton, to Dean in honor of his foster parents. Myers’s foster mother read to him every day until he could read for himself. Myers was a good student in the sense that he was literate, but he became known as a discipline problem in school. He had a speech impediment that prevented people from understanding what he was saying. His classmates teased him, and Myers responded with anger. He spent many days in the principal’s office or on suspension. He received some guidance from his fifth-grade teacher, who thought that writing words down would help him with his speech problem. He filled notebooks with poems and stories but did not consider writing as a career. When not in school, Myers hung out with the street gangs and played basketball until it was too dark to see. Later in his life, the game of basketball would be a prominent feature in several of his books. At age sixteen, Myers dropped out of school and joined the Army the next year. After his tour of duty, he returned to Harlem and worked in a series of low-paying jobs. At the same time, he began to write for magazines. In 1968, Myers entered a writing contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children and won first place in the picturebook category for Where Does the Day Go? Myers wrote a few more books for preschoolers before directing his efforts toward teenagers. Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff was his first young adult novel. He would go on to win several American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book Awards and Best Books for Young Adults Citations, NewWalter Dean Myers (Courtesy, HarperCollins)
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bery Honors, Parents’ Choice Awards, and Coretta Scott King Awards. He was the first recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature in 2000 for his powerful book Monster. For twenty years, Myers worked as an editor during the day and wrote fiction at night. When he was laid off by the company for which he worked, he became a fulltime writer. As a result, Myers has been prolific, publishing more than sixty books for young people. A father of three children, he and his family made their home in New Jersey.
Hoops Type of work: Children’s/young adult literature First published: 1981 In Hoops, Myers makes the game of basketball symbolize the game of life. Basketball was one of Myers’s loves; it was an escape from the frustrations of school, a time to bond with other kids his age, and just plain fun. He depicts the basketball scenes in his books with astounding clarity and from an insider’s perspective. Hoops seems at first to be an action-packed sports novel, but it is revealed as a moral tale about choices and integrity. The main character in Hoops is seventeen-year-old Lonnie Jackson, who clings to a dream that he will become a professional basketball player. He is a senior in high school and is feeling tense about what his next steps in life will be. Basketball could be a way out of Harlem, a way to accrue status in the world, and a way to gain some self-esteem. Lonnie is one of the best players in Harlem. He believes a real chance exists that his dream could come true. Lonnie rarely stays at home with his mother. He has an arrangement with the manager of a hotel called The Grant where he does some cleaning in exchange for a place to sleep. One of the first incidents in the book is a robbery at a liquor store across the street from the hotel. While the criminals are herding staff and customers into the back, Lonnie grabs a case of Scotch to sell. This incident paints a picture of Lonnie’s environment and of his own cunning adaptation to it. Myers often uses the first-person viewpoint to engage his young adult readers. Lonnie’s thoughts and feelings are skillfully articulated, exposing conflicts and concerns about love, sex, money, family, and honor. Specifically, Lonnie’s conflicts in Hoops revolve around basketball, his mother, his girlfriend, and Cal. Cal, a former pro player who was ousted from the league for gambling, coaches Lonnie’s team. He is now a semi-homeless alcoholic but still possesses enough caring to warn Lonnie about the ugly side of the game. Lonnie starts to look up to Cal, whom he at first considered a useless wino. As Lonnie grows closer to Cal, however, he sees a broken man with a broken past who still manages to instill trust in the team members. The story builds to its climax with the team playing in a tournament, with big gambling money riding on the outcome. Cal is ordered by mob leaders to keep Lonnie out of the game, which would result in the team’s loss. Cal tells Lonnie that
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basketball is like life: “Everybody plays the game with what they got.” At first, Cal does sit Lonnie down, but as the tournament game progresses, he suddenly calls for Lonnie, and the team wins the game. However, this spells doom for Cal, who is viciously stabbed in the team locker room. Hoops takes place in a terrifying world where gangs roam the streets in malicious packs and Lonnie’s girlfriend is injected with heroin because she learns about a mobster’s involvement in the tournament fix. The reader follows Lonnie’s growth from a tough, self-centered kid who cares about nothing except basketball to a more mature young man who sees that even a person as fallen as Cal can overcome his weakness and become a moral force in the midst of corruption.
Fallen Angels Type of work: Children’s/young adult literature First published: 1988
Myers dedicated Fallen Angels to his brother who was killed in the Vietnam War. Myers himself joined the Army at age seventeen because it seemed to him that he had few other options. The protagonist of Fallen Angels, Richie Perry, is also seventeen when he enlists in the Army. The young man believes at first that he will not see any combat because he has injured his knee stateside. However, he soon discovers that the wheels of paperwork processing grind slowly in the Army, and he finds himself in the muggy jungles of Vietnam. The story is one of courage, conflict, and deep numbing confusion about a soldier’s role in the Vietnam War. Myers tells the story from Richie’s point of view and spares the reader no detail of the young man’s terror, the firefights and bombings, the killings, and the deaths of his companions, who are the fallen angels to which the book’s title refers. Realistic language and settings play an important role in helping contemporary readers relate to the environment of brutal fighting in a Southeast Asian jungle. There is racial tension in the novel, but it is overshadowed by the intense fear and confusion generated by the war. The language can be vulgar, yet it fits the raw, rugged life that the characters experience out in the jungle. The environment is overwhelming: Death and injury surround Richie and his comrades, dwarfing the concerns of ordinary life (otherwise known as the World). Initially, Richie yearns to get back to the World, back to his stateside, civilian life. Gradually, he begins to shed his childlike dream of being a hero to his younger brother and focuses on the crucially important issue: staying alive. He realizes that he does not know how to pray and starts to form a spiritual outlook. He begins to love the men that fight alongside him, to think not only of himself but also of his comrades in arms. Myers makes it clear that the war has changed Richie forever and that the World has become the foreign land.
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Monster Type of work: Children’s/young adult literature First published: 1999 Monster is presented in an unusual format: a screenplay interspersed with facsimiles of a handwritten journal. The book is illustrated with photographs, court sketches, even fingerprints. It won for Myers the first Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature. The fictional author of this screenplay/journal is sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon. He has been accused of acting as a lookout during a homicide. If he is convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. The book describes his weeks of incarceration, his trial, and its outcome. Steve writes in the screenplay format because he wants to become a filmmaker and because it is a way to distance or disassociate himself from the unfolding nightmare of his life. He can see himself and others as simply actors in a motion picture. As the book opens, Steve has already learned that the best time to cry in jail is at night. When other prisoners are screaming and yelling, a little sniffle cannot be heard. He realizes that he must not show weakness in jail, just as he could not show weakness on the street. When he looks in the small scratched mirror over the steel sink in his cell, he does not recognize himself. He starts to wonder if he is becoming some kind of evil changeling. Within the first page of the book, Myers characteristically creates a clear picture of Steve and his predicament. Myers grabs the reader’s attention immediately by using the first-person viewpoint to express the character’s emotions and by describing a harsh, disturbing setting in sharp physical detail. The prosecutor calls Steve a monster during opening arguments. Steve begins to wonder obsessively if he is a good person or a monster after all. What constitutes a good person? In Steve’s milieu, drug use, petty crimes, and running the streets are just a part of life. His alleged presence during the robbery/homicide raises questions about his choices. Just as his survival in prison depends on displaying a hardened exterior, so his survival on the streets depended on doing little jobs for gang leaders. Steve insists in his journal that “he didn’t do nothing.” However, his defense lawyer, Ms. O’Brien, has some concerns. She is afraid that the jury will not “see a difference between [him] and all the bad guys taking the stand,” that Steve might be tarred with the same brush as his fellow defendants. Steve intuits that Ms. O’Brien thinks he is guilty and is merely doing her job in the courtroom. Myers does not state the facts of the crime in the book, so the reader is left wondering if Steve was or was not a lookout at the crime scene. This question is literally illustrated by two captioned photographs in the book. They both appear to be stills from a store’s videotape, showing Steve in the store. The captions read: “What was I doing?” and “What was I thinking?” It is not clear if the photographs are anxious figments of Steve’s imagination or telltale hints that he was actually in that store. Finally, Steve is found not guilty. He spontaneously reaches out to hug Ms. O’Brien, who turns away stiffly, indicating that there is something bad about Steve
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despite his acquittal. Monster is thoroughly ambiguous about Steve’s role in the crime. It is ambiguous about Steve’s basic nature, his goodness or badness. The book leaves the reader to ponder about whether guilt equals badness and whether acquittal equals innocence.
Suggested Readings Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Jordan, Denise M. Walter Dean Myers: Writer for Real Teens. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1999. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Walter Dean Myers: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Contributor: Janet M. Ball
Gloria Naylor Born: New York, New York; January 25, 1950 African American
Naylor’s exploration of black communities stresses the relationship between identity and place. Principal works long fiction: The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories, 1982; Linden Hills, 1985; Mama Day, 1988; Bailey’s Café, 1992; The Men of Brewster Place, 1998; 1996, 2004 nonfiction: Conversations with Gloria Naylor, 2004 (Maxine Lavon Montgomery, editor) edited text: Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, 1995 When she gave her introverted daughter a journal from Woolworth’s, Gloria Naylor’s mother opened the door to her child’s writing career. In high school, two experiences shaped Naylor’s emerging identity: Nineteenth century English literature taught her that language can be a powerful tool, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 assassination turned her to missionary work. Instead of going to college, for the next seven years she traveled as a Jehovah’s Witness, abandoning the work in 1975, when she began to feel constrained by the lifestyle. At Brooklyn College, her introduction to black history and the discovery of such literary foremothers as Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison gave her the inspiration to try writing herself. Completing her first novel, the best seller The Women of Brewster Place, signified, she has indicated, her taking hold of herself and attempting to take her destiny into her own hands. After winning a scholarship to Yale University, Naylor discovered that, for her, graduate training was incompatible with writing fiction. She nevertheless completed a master’s degree in 1983, when the Afro-American Studies department allowed her second novel, Linden Hills, to fulfill the thesis requirement. Linden Hills illustrates the effects of materialism on an elite all-black community that lacks a spiritual center. During the 1980’s, demand for Naylor as a lecturer and writer-in-residence grew, and she garnered top-notch honors, receiving a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1985), the Candace Award of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1986, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. She was a scholar-in-residence at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University in 1986-1987, a visiting professor at New York University in 833
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1986 and Boston University in 1987, a Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor at Brandeis University in 1988, and a senior fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities in 1988. Her novel Mama Day won the National Book Award. The central feature of all of Naylor’s novels is an enclosed black community where characters learn to embrace their identities in the context of place. Naylor’s powerful settings combine elements of the ordinary with the otherworldly, allowing for magical events and mythic resolutions. For example, Mama Day takes place on the imaginary island of Willow Springs and weaves the history of the Day family from the point of view of the powerful matriarch Mama Day, a conjure woman. Naylor’s own family history provides her with a rich sense of community, but she paradoxically treasures solitude. Married briefly, she refuses to remarry or have children and teaches writing to keep from being too much of a recluse. Naylor’s strength is portraying convincing multigenerational characters in specific settings.
The Women of Brewster Place Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the American Book Award for First Fiction in 1983 and was made into a film. Actually a novel in seven stories, it presents a series of interconnected tales about seven women who struggle to make peace with their pasts. The allegorical setting is Brewster Place, a dead-end ghetto street whose distinctive feature is the brick wall that bottles economic and racial frustration inside. Two interdependent themes bind the stories together: The violence that men enact on women is counteracted by the healing power of community. The novel’s innovative structure is key to Naylor’s purpose. Exploring the lives of different women on Brewster Place, Naylor attempts to create a microcosm of the black female experience in America. The microcosm consists of seven African American women representing a range of ages, backgrounds, and sexualities. The first character introduced is Mattie Michael, whose fierce love for her son twice costs her the security and pride of a happy home. Her hard-won strength becomes the force that helps other women, such as Mattie’s oldest friend, Etta Mae Johnson, and Lucielia Louise Turner (Ciel), whom Mattie helped raise. One of the most powerful scenes of the novel is the one in which Mattie saves Ciel, who loses her desire to live after the tragic deaths of her two children. Kiswana Browne is a would-be revolutionary who attempts to reclaim her African heritage and to improve Brewster Place by renouncing her parents’ elite Linden Hills lifestyle. Cora Lee, her opposite, is a single mother of seven who wants babies but not children. Last are Lorraine and Theresa, the couple whom Brewster Place cruelly rejects when they seek a haven that will tolerate their love for each other. Women’s dual identity as mother and daughter is a highlighted conflict throughout. The symbolism of Brewster Place’s brick wall contributes to the horrific climax
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when Lorraine is gang-raped in the alley formed by the wall, her blood spattering the bricks. Her effort to fight back, delayed by the trauma, causes her to attack Ben, the janitor who treats her like a daughter. She murders him with a brick. The novel appears to end triumphantly when the women tear down the wall, brick by brick, at a block party that celebrates the power of community. This is a deceptive resolution, however, because the block party has happened only in Mattie’s dream. The ambiguity of the ending gives the story a mythic quality by stressing the continual possibility of dreams and the results of their deferral.
Linden Hills Type of work: Novel First published: 1985
Gloria Naylor (AP/Wide World Photos)
The community feelings of Brewster Place, from which the women gain a positive sense of identity, somehow make the ghetto’s problems seem less awesome, paradoxically, than those of Linden Hills, an affluent suburb. If Brewster Place is a ghetto, Linden Hills is a hell. Naylor underlines this metaphor by deliberately modeling her novel Linden Hills after Dante’s Inferno. Linden Hills is not a group of hills, but only a V-shaped area on a hillside intersected by eight streets. As one travels down the hill, the residents become richer but lower on the moral scale. Lester and Willie, two young unemployed poets who perform odd jobs for Christmas money (they are the modern counterparts of Vergil and Dante), take the reader on a guided tour. Lester’s sister Roxanne deems black Africans in Zimbabwe unready for independence; one young executive, Maxwell Smyth, encourages another, Xavier Donnell, no longer to consider Roxanne as a prospective corporate bride; and Dr. Daniel Braithwaite has written the authorized twelve-volume history of Linden Hills without making a single moral judgment. Other sellouts are more personal: The young lawyer Winston Alcott leaves his homosexual lover to marry respectably, and Chester Parker is eager to bury his dead wife in order to remarry. Significantly, Linden Hills is ruled by men. The archfiend is Luther Nedeed, the local undertaker and real estate tycoon who occupies the lowest point in Linden Hills. Speaking against a low-income housing project planned for an adjacent poor
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black neighborhood, Nedeed urges outraged Linden Hills property owners to make common cause with the racist Wayne County Citizens Alliance. Most damning of all, however, is that Nedeed disowns his own wife and child and imprisons them in an old basement morgue; the child starves, but the wife climbs up to confront the archfiend on Christmas Eve.
Mama Day Type of work: Novel First published: 1988 If Linden Hills strains credulity, then the main setting of Mama Day is even more unbelievable, if not downright mythical: Willow Springs, a southern coastal island relatively unwashed by the tides of racism. The island is populated by the descendants of white slaveholder Bascombe Wade and his black wife Sapphira and of other slaves that he freed and deeded land to back in 1823. Since that time, the island has been plagued mainly by malaria, Union soldiers, sandy soil, two big depressions, and hurricanes. The fictitious barrier island lies off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia but is owned by no state. Willow Springs is a backwater of history where the people have been mostly left to themselves, and they have developed a black American culture strongly connected to the land, to their historical beginnings, and even to their African roots. Willow Springs is a daring concept—an effort to imagine what black life might have been like in America if left free to develop on its own. Naylor acknowledges the concept’s utopian aspects by drawing parallels between Willow Springs and the magical island in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Yet the conjuring that goes on in Willow Springs recalls the conjuring in Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (a translation of the thirteenth century African epic published in 1965) and the good magic and bad magic still practiced in parts of Africa. Also very real are the closeness to the land, the recognized status of individuals within the community, the slow pace of life, and the presence of the past—things that rural southerners, black and white, miss when they move to northern cities. In the novel, such a person is Ophelia “Cocoa” Day, who was born on Willow Springs and raised by her grandmother Abigail and great-aunt Miranda “Mama” Day (descendants of Bascombe and Sapphira Wade). Cocoa left Willow Springs to work in New York City, but she is drawn back to the island for regular August visits. In New York, the novel’s other setting, Cocoa meets George Andrews, a black engineer who was raised in an orphanage, and they eventually get married. The contrasts between the two—George gentle and straightforward, Cocoa spoiled and insecure—suggest the novel’s underlying cultural clash, but this split does not become critical until George visits Willow Springs with Cocoa. While George appreciates black life on Willow Springs, it is way beyond his urbanized, rationalistic range, particularly when a hurricane hits and when he becomes involved in a conjuring match between Mama Day and her nemesis, Ruby.
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Mama Day has a wealth of knowledge about herbs and various natural phenomena that she uses for the purposes of healing and aiding new life. The reader senses that much has been passed down to her from others who no longer live but whose spirits nourish the rich fabric of Willow Springs. In contrast, the evil-spirited Ruby uses the same knowledge, mixed with hoodoo, to kill anyone whom she perceives might take away her man, Junior Lee. Several women have already met terrible fates because they had contact with the philandering Junior Lee. Unfortunately, at a party given in honor of Cocoa and George, Junior Lee follows Cocoa out to the porch and attempts to rape her, and Ruby catches him. The next day, Ruby sees Cocoa walking down the road and asks her to stop; Ruby apologizes for Junior Lee’s behavior and offers to massage and braid Cocoa’s hair the way she did when Cocoa was little. Right before the party, Mama Day had felt a big hurricane coming and death in the air. During the hurricane Cocoa becomes disoriented, and huge welts cover her head and face. Mama Day realizes that Ruby has poisoned Cocoa by rubbing nightshade into her head. Mama Day cuts off Cocoa’s hair and works a counteracting salve into her scalp, but Cocoa is already badly poisoned. Meanwhile, the hurricane has wreaked terrible havoc and taken out the wooden bridge between Willow Springs and the mainland. With all the boats destroyed and no telephones, George exhausts himself working to restore the bridge and get Cocoa off the island to a doctor. His efforts do not succeed, however, and in desperation he is forced to try Mama Day’s solution. She sends him to “the other place,” the island’s original homeplace, to get whatever he finds behind an old brooding hen. Doubting George finds nothing, is attacked by the old hen, and dies of a weak heart. George’s doubts and weak heart represent the limits of his rationalistic outlook, his inability to participate fully in the island’s culture and to comprehend Mama Day’s powers. There is no doubt that those powers are real. Before George undertakes his fatal mission, Mama Day deals with Ruby by calling out three warnings, whacking each side of Ruby’s house with a stick, and sprinkling a circle of silvery dust around the house. The results are two lightning strikes on Ruby’s house, the second one exploding it with Ruby inside.
Bailey’s Café Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Set in 1948, Bailey’s Café, Naylor’s fourth novel, is her self-described “sexual novel.” Similar to The Women of Brewster Place, it tells the tragic histories of female characters who suffer simply because they are sexual. The underlying structure of blues music recasts these feminist rewritings of biblical stories. The characters’ own blues-influenced narrations provide the equivalent of melody, and the male narrator supplies the connecting texts linking one story to another. The proprietor of Bailey’s Café, who is the narrator, sets the pattern by telling
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how he was saved by Bailey’s Café, a magical place. It is a café that does not serve customers, and its magic is not the redemptive kind. The café provides “some space, some place, to take a breather for a while” by suspending time. Not fixed in any one city, it is “real real mobile,” so that anyone can get there. It features a back door that opens onto a void where patrons re-create scenes to help them sustain life or, alternatively, to end it. The street on which Bailey’s Café may be found contains three refuges that form a “relay for broken dreams”: Bailey’s Café, Gabe’s Pawnshop, and Eve’s Boardinghouse and Garden. Eve transforms her suffering into a haven. She aids only those women who know what it means to “walk a thousand years.” Her boarders include Esther, who hates men because of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child bride; Peaches, a woman so beautiful she disfigures herself; Jesse, a spunky heroin addict; and Mariam, a fourteen-year-old Ethiopian Jew who is pregnant but still a virgin. The community also includes men. The unforgettable Miss Maple is a man who forges a strong identity despite the racism that threatens his manhood. The novel explores positive models of masculinity and steadily subverts the idea that sexual women are whores. Such a characterization oppresses all women, who must transcend the personal consequences of this destructive label. The arrival of the outcast and pregnant Mariam threatens to disrupt the characters’ safety because the birth could destroy their world: “For all we knew, when that baby gave its first cry, this whole street could have just faded away.” The women on the street fear they will find themselves back in “those same hopeless crossroads in our lives.” Instead, the baby is born in Mariam’s homeland, magically re-created in the void. All the characters gather to celebrate its arrival. Their participation in the Jewish birth ceremony brings hope for the future and shows the healing power of a diverse community.
The Men of Brewster Place Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 Naylor’s return to Brewster Place gave her readers the opportunity to revisit the male characters introduced in the first book (generally portrayed negatively) and see them in a different light. No longer assuming background roles, they are up front, giving an account of their actions in the first book. In The Women of Brewster Place, Mattie’s son Basil skipped town while awaiting sentencing, causing his mother to lose the property she had put up for his bail. Here Basil does return, check in hand, to repay his mother for her loss; however, she is dead, and his unfulfilled desire to make amends leads him into a detrimental relationship and a prison sentence. Eugene, absent from his daughter’s funeral in the first book, is in fact on site. His grief compels him to undergo a harsh punishment, one that has much to do with the fact that he could never tell Ciel that he is gay. C. C. Baker, responsible for the vicious gang rape of Lorraine, executes another heinous crime in this book but
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gives the reader insight into his tragic character. When he squeezes the trigger to kill his brother, he does so with eyes closed, thanking God “for giving him the courage to do it. The courage to be a man.” In The Men of Brewster Place, Naylor seems to be acknowledging that there is, after all, more than one side to a story and that she is ready to let the whole story be known. Passages from the first book provide continuity between the two works, as does the resurrected voice of Ben, the janitor killed by Lorraine. Reminiscent of the character Bailey in Bailey’s Café, Ben is both character and narrator. However, Naylor brings some new voices to Brewster Place when she introduces Brother Jerome and Greasy. These characters link together the lives of the men living in Brewster Place. Brother Jerome is a retarded child with an ability to play the piano that speaks of genius. The blues that pour from his fingers speak to the lives of each man, rendering their conditions tangible. Greasy makes his brief but memorable appearance in the story called “The Barbershop,” leaving the men to carry the burden of his self-inflicted demise. Naylor’s portrayals of these two characters are perhaps the most moving of the book. These characterizations, along with the complexity of all the male characters, point to a Naylor who is taking a broader view. She had prefaced The Women of Brewster Place with a poem by Langston Hughes that asked the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” In The Men of Brewster Place, she seems ready to acknowledge that deferred dreams are not only the province of women.
Suggested Readings Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Kelley, Margot Anne, ed. Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. “Authority, Multivocality, and the New World Order in Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (Spring, 1995): 27. Naylor, Gloria. “An Interview with Gloria Naylor.” Interview by Charles H. Rowell. Callaloo 20, no. 1 (Winter, 1997): 179-192. Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” The Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 567-593. Puhr, Kathleen M. “Healers in Gloria Naylor’s Fiction.” Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 518. Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with Gloria Naylor.” Callaloo 20, no. 1 (Winter, 1997): 179-192. Stave, Shirley A., ed. Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: Delaware University Press, 2001. Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Gloria Naylor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Contributors: Christine H. King, Jacquelyn Benton, and Harold Branam
Fae Myenne Ng Born: San Francisco, California; 1956 Chinese American
Ng brings the perspective of an Asian American to the American experience of immigration and assimilation. Principal works long fiction: Bone, 1993 short fiction: “A Red Sweater,” 1986; “Backdaire,” 1989 nonfiction: “False Gold: My Father’s American Journey,” 1993 The writing of Fae Myenne Ng (fay myehn ehng) depicts a cultural divide between her assimilated generation and that of her Chinese parents. Reared in San Francisco’s Chinatown by working-class parents who emigrated from China, Ng acquired an excellent education, receiving degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Bone, her first novel, took her ten years to write, during which time she supported herself as a waitress and temporary worker, as well as by a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts. Like Leila, the narrator of the novel, Ng is an educated woman who understood her parents’ working-class world. In the novel, the Chinese mother is a poorly paid, overworked garment worker. The father holds down a series of dead-end jobs that include janitor, dishwasher, houseboy, and laundry worker. The couple have worked their fingers to the bone to provide for their daughters. Bone is a tribute to the family’s father, who represents a generation of Chinese men who sacrificed their personal happiness for the sake of their families. Ng’s inspiration was the old Chinese men living alone and impoverished in single-room occupancy hotels in Chinatown. Chinese America’s bachelor society came to America to work the gold mines, to build the railroads, and to develop California agriculturally. These immigrants became men without roots. The novel also depicts the conflicts of the family’s three daughters with their old-fashioned parents. There is the middle daughter Ona, whose suicide suggests she could not adjust to American society and maintain her identity as a dutiful Chinese daughter. Nina, the youngest daughter, affirms a modern identity and escapes to New York City. Leila, the eldest daughter, is a complicated combination of the old Chinese ways and new American cultural patterns. As does Nina, the rebellious daughter, Ng moved to New York City. Leila, with her ability to assimilate the new while keeping faith with the past, is the daughter who most mirrors Ng’s identity as an Asian American. Ng’s work adds to the tradition of the immigrant novel. 840
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Bone Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Ng’s Bone continues in a tradition of Asian American novels by women that mediate between the demands of addressing issues of gender and ethnicity. As a woman writing from a strongly patriarchal cultural heritage, Ng has had to create new strategies in order to express the paradox of resistance to and affirmation of her cultural heritage. Bone relates the story of the Leong family, which has recently suffered the death by suicide of the Middle Girl, Ona. Ona committed suicide by jumping from one of Chinatown’s housing projects. She left no note, and although the police reported she was “on downers,” or depressants, there was no apparent cause for the suicide. The novel is narrated by the First Girl, Leila Fu Louie, Ona’s half sister and the eldest daughter in the Leong family. Leila’s attempts to come to terms with her sister’s death, and thereby her own life, lead her to muse about incidents from their childhood and the everyday circumstances of the present. The novel unfolds in a series of stories that move from the present into the past. The children of immigrants have often been called upon to translate for their parents. Their ability to switch from the language of their parents to the English of their birthplace makes them the bridge between the customs of the Old World and the expectations and demands of the New. This enormous responsibility can become an overwhelming burden. Although Leila must continually face the chasm between her parents’ expectations and her own reality, her ability to build a bridge of translation is grounded in her strong need and appreciation for the family. Her youngest sister, Nina, the End Girl, refuses to shoulder this burden of translation. Her rebellion has caused her to move to New York, far away from her parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She declares her independence by refusing to lie about her life in order to appease her parents. It is the self-imposed silence of Ona, however, that is at the center of the novel. Ona, the middle child, is caught in the middle; she learned too well how to keep secrets. Ng does not seek to solve the mystery of Ona’s death in this novel. It is a mystery that is unsolvable; rather, through the narrative voice of Leila, Ng explores the languages and silences of love, grief, assimilation, avoidance, anger, guilt, and, finally, acceptance. Ng, who grew up in San Francisco, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and in an interview explained the title of her novel: “Bone is what lasts. And I wanted to honor the quality of endurance in the immigrant spirit.” Bone is a journey into a territory that is the common heritage of all secondgeneration immigrant Americans and the particular traditions of Chinese immigrants. The path to assimilation into American society is fraught with contradictions and ambivalence. Ng provides few answers; she simply reveals one family’s experience.
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Suggested Readings Eder, Richard. “A Gritty Story of Assimilation.” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1993, p. E5. Jones, Louis B. “Dying to Be an American.” The New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1993, 7, 9. Kakutani, Michiko. “Building on the Pain of a Past in China.” The New York Times, January 29, 1993, p. C26. Stetson, Nancy. “Honoring Her Forebears.” Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1993, p. C12. Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. Reading Asian-American Voices: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Contributors: Margaret Boe Birns and Jane Anderson Jones
John Okada Born: Seattle, Washington; September, 1923 Died: Seattle, Washington; February, 1971 Japanese American
Okada introduced Japanese American literature to the United States. Principal work long fiction: No-No Boy, 1957 John Okada was a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and witnessed the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Unlike the character Ichiro in No-No Boy, however, Okada was not a no-no boy (a person who answered no to two critical questions on the loyalty questionnaire—refusing to serve in the American armed forces and refusing to forswear allegiance to Japan and pledge loyalty to the United States). He volunteered for military service and was sent to Japanese-held islands to exhort Japanese soldiers to surrender. The experience helped him shape his perspective on the war. After he was discharged from the military in 1946, Okada went to the University of Washington and Columbia University. He earned two B.A. degrees and an M.A. degree studying, in his own words, “narrative and dramatic writing, history, sociology.” He started working on No-No Boy while he was an assistant in the Business Reference Department of the Seattle Public Library and at the Detroit Public Library. After a stint as a technical writer for Chrysler Missile Operations of Sterling Township, Michigan, he and his wife Dorothy moved back to Seattle. No-No Boy was completed in 1957. Okada had a hard time trying to find publishers who were interested in his work. No-No Boy was first published by Charles Tuttle of Tokyo. After Okada died, his wife offered all of his manuscripts, including the one of his second novel, to the Japanese American Research Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. They were rejected. Dorothy burned them shortly after, when she was preparing to move. Okada was proud to be a Japanese American. He examined the double consciousness of the Japanese American community. No-No Boy portrays the psychological confusion and distress experienced by many Japanese Americans, especially second-generation Japanese Americans (U.S. citizens by birth, culturally Japanese) during and after World War II. No-No Boy portrays the struggle of those who are caught between two worlds at war. 843
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No-No Boy Type of work: Novel First published: 1957 No-No Boy depicts a second-generation Japanese American’s struggle to balance his loyalty to the Japanese culture, to his parents, and to his country, the United States. Ichiro Yamada is interned during World War II. He is put in jail for answering no to the two critical questions on the allegiance questionnaire. His two negative answers are his refusal to serve in the American armed forces and his refusal to forswear allegiance to Japan and pledge loyalty to the United States. After he is released from prison, Ichiro moves back to Seattle and is caught between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. On one side, there are his parents, who are very proud of being Japanese. On the other side, there is the United States, a country to which he still feels he belongs. During his search for his identity, Ichiro meets several people who help shape his perspective on himself and on his relationship with America. One of his close friends, Kenji, joins the military during the war. He loses a leg and has only two years to live. What Kenji physically goes through, Ichiro experiences emotionally. Being a no-no boy, Ichiro is looked down upon by his brother and other Japanese Americans who believe he has betrayed the country. During one of their conversations, Kenji and Ichiro jokingly discuss whether they want to trade places. The fact that both of them are willing to do it comments on the kind of social environment they have to deal with and on the choices they have made. Kenji also introduces Ichiro to Emi, a person who can empathize with Ichiro’s experience. Emi’s husband has left her because he is ashamed of his brother Mike and of Emi’s father, who elect to be repatriated back to Japan. Mike is a World War I veteran. He is incensed by how Japanese Americans are treated by their own government during World War II and eventually decides to go back to a country he does not know or love. Emi saves Ichiro from plunging into an emotional abyss. They find a friend and companion in each other. After witnessing the death of his friend, Freddie, who is also a no-no boy, Ichiro starts to think about his own future. In “the darkness of the alley of the community” that is “a tiny bit of America,” he starts to chase that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continues “to take shape in mind and in heart.”
Suggested Readings Inada, Lawson Fusao. “The Vision of America in John Okada’s No-No Boy.” In Ethnic Literatures Since 1776: The Many Voices of America, edited by Wolodymyr T. Zyla et al. Lubbock: Interdepartmental Committee on Comparative Literature, Texas Tech University, 1978. Ling, Jinqi. “Race, Power, and Cultural Politics in John Okada’s No-No Boy.” American Literature 67, no. 2 (1995).
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Sato, Gaile K. Fujita. “Momotaro’s Exile: John Okada’s No-No Boy.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Sumida, Stephen H. “Japanese American Moral Dilemmas in John Okada’s No-No Boy and Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body.” In Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing, Research, and Commentary, edited by Gail M. Nomura et al. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1989. Contributor: Qun Wang
Simon J. Ortiz Born: Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico; May 27, 1941 Native American
Ortiz’s poetry and other works express both the grief and loss associated with past abuse and the suffering of veterans. His work as a whole, however, expresses optimism and hope. Principal works children’s literature: The People Shall Continue, 1977; Blue and Red, 1982; The Good Rainbow Road, 2004 poetry: Naked in the Wind, 1971; Going for the Rain, 1976; A Good Journey, 1977; Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land, 1980 (poetry and prose); From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America, 1981; A Poem Is a Journey, 1981; Woven Stone, 1992; After and Before the Lightning, 1994; Telling and Showing Her: The Earth, the Land, 1995; Out There Somewhere, 2002 short fiction: Howbah Indians, 1978; Fightin’: New and Collected Stories, 1983; Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories, 1999 nonfiction: Traditional and Hard-to-Find Information Required by Members of American Indian Communities: What to Collect, How to Collect It, and Appropriate Format and Use, 1978 (with Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz); The Importance of Childhood, 1982 edited texts: A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680-1980, 1981 (with others); Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature, 1983; Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, 1998 miscellaneous: Song, Poetry, and Language: Expression and Perception, 1977 Simon Joseph Ortiz (ohr-TEES) is a native of the Acoma Pueblo. He grew up in Deetseyaamah, a rural village of the Acoma Pueblo community, a place also called McCartys, New Mexico. His parents, Joe L. and Mamie Toribio, along with other members of his clan and residents of his birthplace, shaped his values and provided him with an emotional and cultural home that has grounded him in his life and work. His father, a woodcarver and elder of the tribe, worked for the Santa Fe Railroad. He imbued his son with a respect for his culture and a sense of connection with all living things. His mother, a potter and storyteller, passed along legends and myths engendering reverence for everyday activities and stories, ancient and new, that form personal and cultural identity. Ortiz’s first significant contact with the American, or the “Mericano,” culture 846
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came when he and his family relocated to Skull Valley, Arizona, a residential site for railroad workers. There Ortiz first contrasted his life in the minimal housing provided by the railroad company with the lives of suburban Americans as presented in the “Dick and Jane” stories in the elementary school readers. Soon he would leave his family in order to attend the Bureau of Indian Affairs School, St. Catherine’s, in Gallup, New Mexico. Efforts to Americanize native students by punishing them for speaking their own language left the homesick child feeling lonely and estranged. Later he attended high school in Grants, New Mexico, and became in many ways a typical high school student while excelling in academics and leading his peers. His parents prized education and learning and encouraged Ortiz to continue his education. After high school, he began work at Kerr-McGee, a uranium mine in Grants, thinking the job might lead to a career in science. Instead it took him from typing in an office to laboring in the open pits, an experience he would recall in Fight Back. In 1962, he began to study chemistry at Fort Lewis College. He left to enlist in the United States Army, serving from 1963 to 1966. This experience reinforced for him the differences between the Mericano and Indian cultures and the lack of respect for American Indians that prevailed. After military service he enrolled in the University of New Mexico, where he began studying literature and creative writing. He was accepted into the writing program at the University of Iowa, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1969. Soon afterward his poems were being accepted for publication in journals and magazines. In 1976, his first major collection of poems, Going for the Rain, was published to critical acclaim and introduced him as a major American Indian voice. Ortiz became an established poet, teaching writing, lecturing, and gaining an audience. He has taught at San Diego State University; the Institute of American Artists in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Navajo Community College; College of Marin in Kentfield, California; the University of New Mexico; Sinte Gleska College in Rosebud, South Dakota; and Lewis and Clark College, in Portland, Oregon. He has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and the Lannan Foundation. He has received the “Returning the Gift” Lifetime Achievement Award, the WESTAF Lifetime Achievement Award, and the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in Art. He received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry for From Sand Creek and was honored poet in the White House Salute to Poetry and American Poets, 1980. As his career moved forward, Ortiz published other collections of poems, stories, essays, and children’s books and edited anthologies. Both his artistic work and his interviews have been anthologized. He has been the subject of analytical and critical articles. He had three children: Raho Nez, Rainy Dawn, and Sara Marie. Sara Marie was born after he married Marlene Foster in 1981. That marriage ended in divorce in 1984. Despite the positive reception of his work and the satisfactions derived from family and children, Ortiz has suffered the disorientation and alienation that many native people have experienced in assimilating into the Mericano culture. In addition to feelings of anger, rejection, and dislocation, he has suffered bouts of alco-
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holism. His career has been punctuated with periods of struggle to overcome alcohol abuse. Many poems and collections, such as From Sand Creek, express both the grief and loss associated with past abuse and the suffering of veterans. However, Ortiz’s work as a whole expresses optimism and hope. He reiterates his belief in the healing, sustaining value of story. He looks to Coyote of native lore and sees in this clever, scrappy transformer a symbol of native people able to survive and embrace their cultural values. He adopts the voice of Coyote, describing himself as a survivor who can pull himself back together and restore himself through a symbolic fragment that recalls his origins. Reflecting the high value he places on his people and their land, Ortiz took the office of lieutenant governor for the Acoma Pueblo in 1989. Later he moved to Toronto, Canada, where he continued to practice his art.
Woven Stone Type of work: Poetry First published: 1992 Woven Stone gathers three books previously published, collections primarily of poetry but also including stories, essays, and narratives interspersed amid the poems. Like many contemporary Native American writers, Ortiz is concerned with connecting the heritage of Indian thought and practice ranging over more than one thousand years with the difficulties of life in America for Indians today. The first section, “Going for the Rain,” is divided into four parts: “The Preparation,” which covers Ortiz’s earliest memories and his education with his family, as well as his first acquaintance with the myth and lore of his people; “Leaving,” which follows his initiation into the world of strangers beyond his community; “Returning,” which details his confusion as he tries to integrate his experiences in the “Mericano” world with his background and beliefs; and “The Rain Falls,” which presents a fuller understanding of the meaning of the myths he has heard. The second section, “A Good Journey,” traces his experience in American society as he searches for a sense of direction and a sense of self. The final one, “Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land,” is a forceful, eloquent expression of Ortiz’s political convictions. Here he discusses ways in which Native Americans have been exploited from the arrival of Spanish colonialists to the present, alternating poem/song with a very direct narrative description of the uranium mines on his homeground and their effect on the landscape. Utilizing the language and rhythms of his community’s oral tradition and the open forms of contemporary American poets such as Gary Snyder, Ortiz expresses the philosophical perspective—especially the reciprocal relationship between land and people—of a modern man with ties to “an ancient age.” His work is accessible, and this volume offers an excellent way to begin learning about Native American culture as well as the clarity and power of an accomplished American poet.
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Suggested Readings Capulti, Jane. “The Heart of Knowledge: Nuclear Themes in Native American Thought and Literature.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 4 (1992): 1-27. Coltelli, Laura, ed. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Litz, A. Walton. “Simon J. Ortiz.” In The American Writers, supp. 4, part 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996. Rader, Dean. “Luci Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz: Allegory, Symbol, Language, Poetry.” Southwest Review 82, no. 2 (Spring, 1997): 75-92. Smith, Patricia Clark. “Coyote Ortiz: Canis latrans latrans in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz.” In Studies in American Indian Literature, edited by Paula Gunn Allen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. Wiget, Andrew. Simon Ortiz. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1986. Contributor: Bernadette Flynn Low
Judith Ortiz Cofer Born: Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; February 24, 1952 Puerto Rican
Ortiz Cofer’s fiction, poems, and essays describe the strengths and conflicts of Puerto Ricans, especially women, on the island and on the mainland. Principal works children’s literature: Call Me Maria, 2004 drama: Latin Women Pray, pr. 1984 long fiction: The Line of the Sun, 1989; The Meaning of Consuelo, 2003 poetry: Peregrina, 1986; Reaching for the Mainland, 1987; Terms of Survival, 1987; Reaching for the Mainland, and Selected New Poems, 1995 short fiction: Latin Women Pray, 1980; Among the Ancestors, 1981; The Native Dancer, 1981; An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, 1995 nonfiction: Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, 1990; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, 2000 edited texts: Letters from a Caribbean Island, 1989; Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, 1999 (with Marilyn Kallet); Riding Low on the Streets of Gold: Latino Literature for Young Adults, 2003 miscellaneous: The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry, 1993; The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Stories and Poems, 1998 Judith Ortiz Cofer (ohr-TEES KAH-fur) did not begin writing for publication until after she had been in the United States for more than twenty years. During those years, however, she frequently returned to Puerto Rico to visit her extended family. Her writing is informed by her bicultural experiences: one in the urban apartment buildings in English-speaking New Jersey, where her father stressed the importance of learning American language and customs to succeed, and the other in the traditional island community where her mother and other Spanish-speaking relatives taught her not to forget her heritage. Ortiz Cofer is bilingual, but she writes primarily but not exclusively in English. For example, her grandmother’s home, filled with the community of women who nurtured the writer as a child, is warmly referred to as la casa de Mamá, or simply her casa. Neither solely Puerto Rican nor simply American, Ortiz Cofer straddles both cultures and intermingles them in her writing. Although most of her life has been spent in New Jersey—where her father was stationed in the Navy—and later Florida and Georgia, she considers herself a Puerto Rican woman. She identi850
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fies this connection to the island not merely through geographical association but also by invoking and reclaiming her family, their stories, and her memories through her writing. As a Puerto Rican woman, Ortiz Cofer was expected to marry, bear children, and define herself through these relationships. She dreamed, however, of becoming a teacher and later a writer. Although she was married to Charles John Cofer in 1971 and later gave birth to a daughter, she did not follow the traditional Puerto Rican path of the married woman. After completing a bachelor’s degree in 1974 from Augusta College, she earned a master’s degree in English from Florida AtlanJudith Ortiz Cofer (John Cofer) tic University and received a fellowship to do graduate work at Oxford University in 1977. She taught English and creative writing at various schools in Florida before settling at the University of Georgia in 1984. In addition to her academic career, she also became a widely anthologized and acclaimed writer. Ortiz Cofer’s writing pays homage to the strictly defined and highly ritualized lives of Puerto Rican women, but her life and her act of writing break that mold; she redefines what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman.
Silent Dancing Type of work: Autobiographical essays and poetry First published: 1990 Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood is Ortiz Cofer’s collection of fourteen essays and accompanying poems looking back on her childhood and adolescence in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, and Paterson, New Jersey. Her father joined the Navy before she was born, and two years later he moved them to Paterson, where he was stationed. When he went to sea for months at a time, he sent his wife and children back to Puerto Rico until he returned to New Jersey. While her father urged the family to assimilate into the American melting pot and even moved them outside the Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New Jersey, her mother remained loyal to her own mother’s home on the island. Her mother’s quiet sadness emerges throughout the book, such as the voice of the poem “El Olvido” that warns that to forget one’s heritage is to “die/ of loneliness and exposure.”
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The memoir chronicles significant moments, beginning with her birth (“They Say”). “Quinceañera” tells of the custom of a girl’s coming-of-age party (at age fifteen). Her grandmother prepares her for Puerto Rican womanhood. The adult narrator also explores her and her mother’s memories of the yearly trips to Puerto Rico in “Marina” and “The Last Word.” The central theme in the book is the traditional Puerto Rican “script of our lives,” which circumscribes “everyone in their places.” The narrator struggles with her family’s expectations for her to become a traditional Puerto Rican woman: domestic, married, and fertile. This script allows little room for individual identity, so the maturing narrator focuses on those characters who rewrite the script and extemporize their own lives (“Some of the Characters”). The embodiment of Puerto Rican tradition is Mamá, the grandmother who ironically gives Ortiz Cofer the tools that enable her to redefine her own role. In “More Room,” for instance, Ortiz Cofer tells the story about Mamá expelling her husband from her bedroom to avoid giving birth to even more children, thus liberating herself to enjoy her children, her grandchildren, and her own life. Similarly, “Tales Told Under the Mango Tree” portrays Mamá’s queenly role as the matriarchal storyteller surrounded by the young women and girls of the family as she passes on cuentos (stories) about being a Puerto Rican woman, such as the legend of the wise and courageous María Sabida who is not controlled by love and is “never a victim.” Silent Dancing is ultimately a Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s apprenticeship. Ortiz Cofer has revised the script for her life as a Puerto Rican woman by inheriting Mamá’s role as storyteller; she redefines what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman and tells her stories to a wider audience.
The Meaning of Consuelo Type of work: Novel First published: 2003 The novel’s narrator is Consuelo (which means “one who consoles”), the elder daughter in a family that is making its way into the middle class in the suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s largest city. While her father works in a hotel and admires anything modern or American, her mother stays bonded to the old island ways and to her “familia,” primarily the females who are the guardians both of tradition and morals. Milagra, or Mili, is the younger daughter—beautiful, flighty, and increasingly strange. In her early teens and burdened with watching over her little sister, Consuelo develops a sensitive awareness of her parents’ troubled marriage, her cousin Patricio’s imaginative but odd behavior (he is homosexual), and her own need for a selfhood not bound by the family’s sense of “tragedia,” a kind of island doom that she is determined to elude. Ortiz Cofer employs Spanish words in her text, but always in an appropriate and understandable fashion. Language and culture are an inimitable part of the story. Consuelo develops a crush on an attractive boy, initiates sex
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with him, gets shunned by her high school peers when he spreads stories (“cuentos”) about her, panics when she realizes she is an outcast, the “la fulana” of her own life, but does not succumb. Ortiz Cofer has written a tale about a young woman who rises above her fate while her poor sister drowns in her own. If this tale is a little too predictable for some, perhaps too heavy-handed in the telling, it may be the kind of young adult story that impressionable females need to read.
Suggested Readings Acosta-Belén, Edna. “A MELUS Interview: Judith Ortiz Cofer.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 83-97. Bost, Suzanne. “Transgressing Borders: Puerto Rican and Latina Mestizaje.” MELUS 25, no. 2 (Summer, 2000): 187-211. Faymonville, Carment. “New Transnational Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Autobiographical Fiction.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer, 2001): 129-158. Jago, Carol. Judith Ortiz Cofer in the Classroom: A Woman in Front of the Sun. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. Ortiz Cofer, Judith. “Puerto Rican Literature in Georgia? An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Interview by Rafael Ocasio. The Kenyon Review 14, no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 43-50. Contributor: Nancy L. Chick
Louis Owens Born: Lompoc, California; July 18, 1948 Died: Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 26, 2002 Native American
Owens’s scholarship, autobiographical nonfiction, and novels deal with themes of mixed-blood identity, place, social class, family, human relationship to the natural world, and disillusionment. Principal works long fiction: Wolfsong, 1991; The Sharpest Sight, 1992; Bone Game, 1994; Nightland, 1996; Dark River, 1999 nonfiction: American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography, 1985 (with Tom Colonnese); John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America, 1985; The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land, 1989; Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, 1992; Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place, 1998; I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions, 2001 The works of Louis Dean Owens, a novelist and cultural critic of mixed Choctaw, Cherokee, Irish, and French ancestry, express observations from his mixed-blood perspective about contemporary American culture, with a particular focus on ethnicity and class. He was the son of Hoey Louis and Ida Brown Louis, who had nine children. Hoey Louis worked at various jobs, including farm labor, managing a chicken ranch, dowsing for a well-driller, working in a laundry, and driving a truck. Ida Louis sometimes worked as a waitress. The family moved back and forth between Mississippi, where they lived in a two-room cabin on the Yazoo River, and California, where they lived in the Santa Lucia mountains, the Salinas Valley, San Leandro, and, finally, Atascadero. Owens wrote autobiographically of his working-class childhood and his family history in Mixedblood Messages and I Hear the Train. He worked at various places from the age of nine, including in fields, a chicken ranch, a mushroom farm, and a can factory. Gene Owens, Louis’s older brother, was the first member of the extended family to graduate from high school, and Louis Owens became the second. He attended community college for two years, then was admitted to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), under an equal opportunity program. He worked summers fighting fires for the United States Forest Service. While at UCSB he met Kiowa novelist and professor N. Scott Momaday, who influenced Owens to pursue his 854
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study of American Indian literature. Owens received his B.A. in 1971 and an M.A. in English in 1974. In 1975, he married his wife, Polly, whom he had met while a student at UCSB; they would have two daughters, Elizabeth and Alexandra. Owens began and then dropped out of a graduate program at Arizona State University. He then worked as a forest ranger. Eventually he entered graduate school at the University of California, Davis, and received a Ph.D. in 1981. He spent a year at the University of Pisa, Italy, on a Fulbright scholarship in 1980-1981, then became an assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge, in 1982. In 1984 he moved to the University of New Mexico. A brief stint as professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1989-1994), served as the inspiration for the novel Bone Game. He returned to the University of New Mexico in 1994. In 2001 he moved to a professorship at the University of California, Davis. He held a New Mexico Humanities Grant (1987), was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (1987), and won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1989). As a scholar, Owens addressed the failure of the American Dream in the works of John Steinbeck (Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America) and carried out a project of recovery of American Indian writers, both in a coauthored (with Tom Colonnese) reference work, American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, and in his work of criticism of American Indian fiction, Other Destinies. His scholarship, autobiographical nonfiction, and novels are intertwined in that they deal with themes of mixed-blood identity, place, humans’ relationship to the natural world, social class, familial relationships, and disillusionment. His first novel, Wolfsong, focuses on the natural world and the question of American Indian identity. A young American Indian man who has left his home in Washington State to go to college returns for his uncle’s funeral, takes a job as a logger, and discovers a plan to strip-mine in a wilderness area. The Sharpest Sight focuses on family and mixed-blood identity. Owens borrowed many details from his own family for this work, including the names of his father and grandfather and the story of his older brother, a Vietnam War veteran. Bone Game makes a connection between a historical murder in Spanish colonial times and a series of murders of students taking place on a university campus (suggested by, but not based on, serial killings that took place in Santa Cruz in the 1970’s). Nightland continues Owens’s themes of environmentalism, the destructiveness of money and capitalism, family relations, the questionable value of higher education, and mixed-blood identity in a plot set in motion by the discovery of a sack full of (drug) money. It is in Dark River, however, that all of Owens’s themes and his literary theories are brought together, combining humor and tragedy in a postmodern narrative. On July 26, 2002, Owens died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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The Sharpest Sight Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 The setting of The Sharpest Sight shifts between rural Northern California and the dark swamps of Mississippi. Attis McCurtain, a mixed-blood Choctaw and emotionally scarred Vietnam veteran, has been murdered and his body is being carried toward the sea by a muddy, rain-swollen river. Attis’s best friend, mixed-blood Hispanic policeman Mundo Morales, sets out to discover the person responsible for the murder. At the same time, the dead man’s brother, Cole, embarks upon his own primordial search: the search for his brother’s bones. At first glance this book shares some aspects of the mystery thriller, but closer examination proves that it is much more than that. The novel’s best writing derives from its informed focus on cultural collisions and its almost mythical quality. Ghosts and shadows speak aloud: in dreams and in fact. Cole McCurtain is magically summoned—by his full-blood Uncle Luther and the wonderfully drawn Onatima (“Old Lady Blue Wood”)—to the ancestral Choctaw homeland in the swamps of Mississippi. It is in the dark swamp that the frightened and restless spirit of Attis McCurtain awaits the discovery and picking of his bones—the picking of the bones of the dead being a powerful and essential rite in early Choctaw cosmology. In The Sharpest Sight, Owens provides an insider’s look at the search for traditional cultural values in a world gone slightly screwy and for a mainstream America that is largely ignorant and unappreciative of its native cultures. In The Sharpest Sight, a book full of signs and wonders, those who attend can discover truths that are quite wonderful to encounter.
Bone Game Type of work: Novel First published: 1994 In Bone Game, Owens succeeds in blending Native American folklore with the traditional mystery genre to create a unique novel of intrigue, suspense, and wonder. Cole McCurtain is a recently divorced, mixed-blood professor of American Indian studies at the University of Santa Cruz. Trying to build a new life and attempting to come to terms with his mixed heritage, Cole’s turmoil is reflected in a dreamlike encounter with an Indian who is painted half white and half black and who carries small bones resembling dice. Cole is not sure if the Indian is human, the ghost of a long-dead medicine man, or the incarnation of the gambler of American Indian mythology. Not only does this strange apparition foreshadow Cole’s identity crisis as he struggles with his Indian heritage but also seems to be mysteriously connected to a series of vicious murders in Santa Cruz.
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When he meets Alex, a full-blood Navaho colleague and a cross-dressing trickster, Cole begins to reconnect with his Indian background. Although the murders continue, Cole is not really concerned until his daughter Abby becomes a potential target. Finally, Cole’s father Hoey, his great-uncle Luther, and his aunt Onatima, all powerful Choctaw shamans, travel from Mississippi to help Cole and Abby, because as Luther says, “This story’s so big, Cole sees only a little bit of it.” Magical Realism is at work in Bone Game. By combining the enigmatic character of the spiritual world with mundane and often violent human existence, Owens expands the limits of the mystery genre. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable, intriguing, and haunting reading experience.
Suggested Readings Daniel, G. Reginald. Review of Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place, by Louis Owens. Biography 23, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 572-578. Helstern, Linda Lizut. Louis Owens. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 2005. Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn, ed. Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Lalonde, Chris. Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Studies in American Indian Literatures 10, no. 2 (1998). Contributor: Renny Christopher
Cynthia Ozick Born: New York, New York; April 17, 1928 Jewish
Ozick’s fiction describes the difficulty of observing Jewish traditions in America’s secular, assimilationist society. Principal works drama: Blue Light, pr. 1994 (adaptation of her short story “The Shawl”) long fiction: Trust, 1966; The Cannibal Galaxy, 1983; The Messiah of Stockholm, 1987; Heir to the Glimmering World, 2004 (also known as The Bear Boy) poetry: Epodes: First Poems, 1992 short fiction: The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, 1971; Bloodshed and Three Novellas, 1976; Levitation: Five Fictions, 1982; The Shawl, 1989; The Puttermesser Papers, 1997 nonfiction: Art and Ardor, 1983; Metaphor and Memory: Essays, 1989; What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers, 1993; Fame and Folly: Essays, 1996; Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character, and Other Essays on Writing, 1996; Quarrel and Quandry: Essays, 2000; The Din in the Head, 2006 edited text: The Best American Essays, 1998, 1998 miscellaneous: A Cynthia Ozick Reader, 1996 Cynthia Ozick (OH-zihk) recalls her grandmother telling her stories, invariably conveying a lesson, about girlhood in a Russian Jewish village. From her drugstore-owning parents, she overhead “small but stirring adventures” confided by their Bronx neighbors. “Reading-lust” led her to fairy tales, to bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature, and to a self-taught education in Judaism’s textual tradition. From these various influences, Ozick creates fiction noted for its range and inventiveness. Her reputation is based largely on her short fiction. Ozick has more than once won the O. Henry Award. Ozick’s first book, however, was a novel, Trust. It concerns a young woman’s search for identity. A predominant theme in Ozick’s work has been the difficulty of sustaining one’s Jewish identity in America’s secular, assimilationist society. Assimilated, rootless Jews are frequently objects of satire in her fiction. What Ozick proposes, in terms of language, is a New Yiddish, understandable to English speakers yet preserving the tone and inflections of Yiddish, a language that is facing extinction as a result of the Holocaust and assimilation. For Ozick, the Orthodox Jewish moral code remains the standard against which life and art are measured. America’s materialistic culture, she maintains, is essen858
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tially pagan and therefore hostile to Judaism. This conflict is clearly evident in “The Pagan Rabbi,” a story in which attraction to nature drives the title character to suicide. The idea that the artist competes with God as creator also concerns Ozick. Particularly in “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories),” Ozick intimates that writers are congenital plagiarizers and, more seriously, usurpers of God. The hubris of a person attempting godlike creation is approached humorously in “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” in which the female protagonist fashions a female golem, first to help with the housework, then to reform New York City. So convinced is Ozick of the pervasiveness of idolatrous ambition that her heroines display an arrogant singlemindedness that is more often associated with men. In the story “The Shawl” and its sequel, the novella Rosa, Ozick, herself a mother, imagines a woman who idolizes the memory of a daughter murdered by the Nazis. Ozick’s vigilance against idolatry extends to her narrative style. Postmodernist, self-referential techniques—asides, interruptions, and explanations—alert readers to the illusions of fiction. Ironic in effect, they also deflate authorial claims to being like God.
The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971 The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, Ozick’s first collection of short stories, was nominated for the National Book Award. Short fiction would subsequently form the basis of Ozick’s literary reputation. The collection’s seven stories—originally published in various periodicals—explore interrelated themes that mark Ozick’s work: Jewish identity, the lure of secularism, and the vocation of the artist. In Ozick’s view, Western civilization, rooted in Greek paganism, extols nature and physical existence and is therefore hostile to Judaism. The Western artistic tradition, moreover, dares usurp God’s role as creator. A prominent symbol in the title story, “The Pagan Rabbi,” is the tree on which the protagonist eventually hangs himself with his prayer shawl. The tree’s dryad and the heretical rabbi have coupled. In “The Dock-Witch,” the protagonist’s immersion in nature also leads to sexual union with a pagan goddess, yet because he is a Gentile, lacking Judaism’s horror of idolatry, his seduction is guilt-free. Lust for the world’s beauty undoes these characters; lust for the world’s acclaim corrupts others. In “Virility,” an immigrant Jewish poet, who anglicizes his name to Edmond Gates, becomes a literary sensation, until he confesses that an elderly aunt wrote his verses. When poems are published under her name after her poverty-induced death, the same gift that when considered his was declared “seminal and hard” is dismissed as “a spinster’s one-dimensional vision.” Along with satirizing associations between sexuality and artistry, Ozick condemns Gates for rejecting kin and heritage. He lives out the rest of his life in penitential drag and dies a suicide.
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Cynthia Ozick (Julius Ozick)
The aging Yiddish poet Herschel Edelshtein of “Envy: Or, Yiddish in America” is in futile pursuit of a translator who would free him from the obscurity of writing in a dying language; meanwhile, he rails against popular American Jewish novelists, for whom history is a “vacuum.” In “The Suitcase,” a notable German architect and his son’s Jewish mistress engage in a paradigmic struggle, as Jew cannot allow Gentile to forget history, particularly its production of an Adolf Hitler. Some critics have questioned the accessibility of Ozick’s work, with its self-consciously Jewish style and content. Others find that its imaginative reach transcends its specifics of cultural origin.
“The Shawl” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1989, in The Shawl Ozick’s most anthologized work, “The Shawl,” condenses within seven pages the horrors of the infamous Nazi concentration camps. This prize-winning story reverberates with images and themes common in Ozick’s work: the Holocaust, World War II refugees, and secret enmity. Chilling imagery leaves the reader’s senses buzzing like the electrified fence against which Rosa’s fifteen-month-old child, Magda, is thrown. Through Ozick’s powerful, yet uncharacteristically simple language, the reader shares the spiritually elevating love that Rosa, a young mother, has for her infant daughter as well as her forbidden despair over Magda’s barbaric murder. Initially, the shawl provides warmth and protection as it hides the secret child. When Rosa can no longer suckle, the shawl magically nourishes Magda with the “milk of linen.” In its third life-giving role, the shawl provides companionship, as Magda silently laughs with it as if it were the sister she never had. Without the shawl, Magda, separated from her source of life, is completely vulnerable. Her secret existence is instantly discovered, and her brief life brutally extinguished. The central metaphor, the shawl, wraps baby Magda and the story in many layers of interpretation. Ozick has crafted her three characters in the fashion of a fifteenth century morality play. In a morality play, each character represents moral qualities
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or abstractions. Similarly, Ozick’s characters represent three states of existence. Magda, wound in the magical shawl, is Life, full of warmth and imagination. Rosa, who no longer experiences hunger, “a floating angel,” is Spirit. Stella, always so cold that it has seeped into her hardened heart, is Death. Metaphorically, when Spirit looks away, Death, jealous of the warmth of Life, takes the life-source away, thus killing Life. The secret hatred that Stella harbors toward Magda is only surpassed by the disturbing images Rosa has of starving Stella cannibalizing the delicious-looking infant. A powerful story, whether read literally or interpreted metaphorically, “The Shawl” offers a private insight into the chillingly painful world created by World War II Germany. Rosa’s loss is humankind’s loss, and the gut-wrenching pain she experiences as she sucks out what little taste of Magda’s life remains in the shawl is the pain of the modern world, gagged and left speechless by inhumanity.
Suggested Readings Alkana, Joseph. “‘Do We Not Know the Meaning of Aesthetic Gratification?’ Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, the Akedah, and the Ethics of Holocaust Literary Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (Winter, 1997): 963-990. Bloom, Harold, ed. Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Burstein, Janet Handler. “Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 59 (March, 1987): 85-101. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Fargione, Daniela. Cynthia Ozick: Orthodoxy and Irreverence—A Critical Study. Rome: Aracne, 2005. Fisch, Harold. “Introducing Cynthia Ozick.” Response 22 (1974): 27-34. Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Twayne, 1988. Ozick, Cynthia. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall, 1993): 359-394. Pinsker, Sanford. The Uncompromising Fiction of Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Strandberg, Victor. Greek Mind, Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Contributors: Amy Allison and Leslie Pearl
Grace Paley Born: New York, New York; December 11, 1922 Died: Thetford Hill, Vermont; August 22, 2007 Jewish
Paley’s short stories and poems are among the finest contemporary Jewish American and feminist fiction. Principal works poetry: Leaning Forward, 1985; New and Collected Poems, 1992; Begin Again: Collected Poems, 2000 short fiction: The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women in Love, 1959; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1974; Later the Same Day, 1985; The Collected Stories, 1994; Here and Somewhere Else, 2007 (with Robert Nichols) nonfiction: Conversations with Grace Paley, 1997 (Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall, editors); Just as I Thought, 1998 miscellaneous: Long Walks and Intimate Talks: Stories and Poems, 1991 (with paintings by Vera Williams) Grace Paley (PAY-lee) began writing short stories in the mid-1950’s, in her thirties, after having two children. She was born to Russian Jewish immigrants and was educated at Hunter College and New York University. She studied poetry with the famous British poet W. H. Auden. In 1942, she married Jess Paley, a veteran, freelance photographer, and cameraman. After the war, the couple moved to lower Manhattan. Her early interest in poetry and her ability as a storyteller and listener led her to write about her family experiences. Growing up as the Depression waned, Paley was optimistic, and her choice to marry and have children was made with the same liveliness and independence as was her decision to write. One of her first stories, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” shows boldness in protagonist Rosie Lieber’s decision to live with a lover and marry late in life, despite the disapproval of her family. In the fifteen years after the publication of The Little Disturbances of Man, there was little separation between her identity as writer and her identities as mother, teacher at Sarah Lawrence College, and peace activist. Paley’s writings typically have a distinctive personal voice. Published in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, the stories that flowed from her experiences as a mother, family member, New Yorker, activist, and teacher include “A Subject of Childhood” and “Faith in a Tree,” which focus on the attachment between mother and child and 862
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on the lives of women trying to end war and protect the future through peaceful protests. Influenced by the sounds of New York neighborhoods, the identities of her characters also include many cultures and dialects—Yiddish, black, and Puerto Rican, for example. The themes of listening, voice, and telling one’s story occur throughout much of her work. Stories such as “A Conversation with My Father,” “The Story Hearer,” and “Zagrowsky Tells” echo the conversations of her Jewish parents, and feature one or more characters—most often women or Jewish Americans— who must shape narratives as a way of shaping their history and the world. In 1972, Paley and her husband were divorced. Paley married her friend and coactivist Robert Nichols, and the couple settled in Greenwich Village. In 1973, she was a delegate to the World Peace Conference in Moscow. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, she continued her writing and teaching and always her activism. She condemned Soviet repression of human rights, demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against nuclear weapons, campaigned against U.S. government policy in Central America, and visited Nicaragua and El Salvador. Her stories appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, and other well-known magazines. In the 1990’s Paley continued to teach in the New York City area, particularly at Sarah Lawrence College, but by the end of the decade she had retired, dividing her
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time between her Vermont home and her Greenwich Village apartment. She died in Vermont from breast cancer on August 22, 2007.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1974 With the publication of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Paley’s reputation as a writer burgeoned. Her unique blend of poetic concision and concern for women’s contributions to the future made her an important feminist voice in contemporary literature. In this collection, identity is a personal and a social issue in the struggle for a peaceful world. Most of the characters are middle-aged women, such as Faith Darwin, who resembles, but is not intended to be, Paley’s alter ego; others are simply those about whom stories are told—the children who have died or suffered from neglect, poverty, drug abuse, and the Vietnam War. The main characters in these stories act with defiance and hope. In “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” Alexandra is a middle-aged social worker who accidentally becomes pregnant through a liaison with Dennis, a cabdriver, poet, and commune member. Instead of joining the commune, Alexandra invites several of her pregnant clients to come live with her, a “precedent in social work which would not be followed or even mentioned in state journals for about five years.” In the story “Wants,” the woman narrator meets with her ex-husband, who criticizes her, telling her that she’ll “always want nothing.” In answer to herself and the reader, she recites the things she has wanted in her life, including ending the war before her children grew up. In “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith Darwin takes a long run through her old neighborhood and ends up living with the black family who now occupies her childhood apartment. All three of these women examine themselves midway, finding, as Faith does, that a “woman inside the steamy energy of middle age” may learn “as though she was still a child what in the world is coming next.” The collection’s most acclaimed story, “A Conversation with My Father,” features Faith, who, in dialogue with her father (modeled after Paley’s father, I. Goodside, M.D.), invents the story of a middle-aged woman who becomes a junkie trying to identify with her son’s generation. Faith’s father laments the “end of a person” but is more upset when Faith adds her characteristic openness: In the “after-story life,” the junkie becomes a “receptionist in a storefront community clinic.” On one hand, Faith’s response is emblematic of the way in which Paley’s characters will not, as Faith’s father exclaims, look tragedy “in the face.” On the other hand, other stories in the collection—namely, “The Little Girl,” “Gloomy Tune,” and “Samuel”—do precisely that. These stories study the identities of the victimized—the teenage girl who is raped and strangled by a drug addict, the neglected boy branded in violence and delinquency, the black boy dying in a freak subway accident. “Never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known,” states the narrator.
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Later the Same Day Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1985 Paley’s Later the Same Day contains the stories of people speaking in the varied dialects of New York City. In these stories, identity is formed through people’s acts and through their unique stories. As in Paley’s earlier collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Faith Darwin is a recurring character, but here she is the mature woman, looking back at her life. In “The Story Hearer,” for instance, Faith is asked to tell her lover, Jack, the story of her day. Despite her effort to “curb [her] cultivated individualism,” she ends up sidetracking, watering her “brains with time spent in order to grow smart private thoughts.” Jokingly, Faith comments on men’s love of beginnings and thus suggests that women move through stories and time quite differently, tempted by the private rather than the “public accounting” of life. Similarly, in “Zagrowsky Tells,” “Lavinia: An Old Story,” and “In This Country, but in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry the Men Everyone Wants Her To,” identity is a matter of individual stories told in first-person narratives and ethnic dialects. In “The Story Hearer,” Faith wants to rise above her time and name but finds herself “always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language.” In “The Expensive Moment,” Faith’s friends and families respond to the aftereffects of China’s Cultural Revolution, relating their experiences to America’s “revolutions” of the 1960’s. A visiting Chinese woman quickly identifies herself as still a Communist, but later in the story, another Chinese woman asks about children and “how to raise them.” Like Faith and other mothers in Paley’s fiction, these women “don’t know the best way.” In a world and country divided by different voices, different genders, and different politics, there is still possibility for community and for common identities. “Friends” pays tribute to Faith’s dying friend Selena and the circle of women who go to visit her. Dying sets her apart from the others, but Selena is a mother, as are they, of a child in a generation “murdered by cars, lost to war, to drugs, to madness.” Later the Same Day was highly acclaimed by critics for its sensitivity to human and ethnic identity and for its experiments with storytelling. It continues to be significant in light of feminist concern with world peace, relationships among women, theories of women’s language, and the importance of finding one’s own voice.
Suggested Readings Aarons, Victoria. “Talking Lives: Storytelling and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9 (1990): 20-35. Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Bach, Gerhard, and Blaine Hall, eds. Conversations with Grace Paley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
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DeKoven, Marianne. “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s Tears.” Partisan Review 48, no. 2 (1981): 217-223. Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Marchant, Peter, and Earl Ingersoll, eds. “A Conversation with Grace Paley.” The Massachusetts Review 26 (Winter, 1985): 606-614. Meyer, Adam. “Faith and the ‘Black Thing’: Political Action and Self-Questioning in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 31 (Winter, 1994): 79-89. Paley, Grace. Conversations with Grace Paley. Edited by Blaine H. Hall. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997. Schleifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley: Chaste Compactness.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas, 1990. Contributor: Andrea J. Ivanov
Gordon Parks, Sr. Born: Fort Scott, Kansas; November 30, 1912 Died: New York, New York; March 7, 2006 African American
A writer, photographer, musician, composer, and filmmaker, Parks was a highly accomplished African American artist widely regarded as a renaissance man. Principal works long fiction: The Learning Tree, 1964; Shannon, 1981; Sun Stalker, 2003; Eyes with Winged Thoughts, 2005 poetry: Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera, 1968 (poetry and photographs); Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things, 1971 (poetry and photographs); In Love, 1971; Moments Without Proper Names, 1975 (poetry and photographs); Arias in Silence, 1994 (poetry and photographs); Glimpses Toward Infinity, 1996 (poetry and photographs); A Star for Noon: A Homage to Women in Images, Poetry, and Music, 2000 (poetry, music, and photographs) screenplay: The Learning Tree, 1969 (adaptation of his novel) nonfiction: Flash Photography, 1947; Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture, 1948; A Choice of Weapons, 1966; Born Black, 1971; Flavio, 1978; To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir, 1979; Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography, 1990; Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, 1997; A Hungry Heart, 2005 The youngest of fifteen children, Gordon Parks was born on a farm to Sarah Ross Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks. His mother died when he was sixteen, and he was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a married sister and her husband. Parks clashed with his brother-in-law, and, within a few weeks of his arrival, he was forced out of the home. With no money or place to live, Parks was on his own in St. Paul, far from familiar territory in Kansas. He tried to continue with his high school classes, but it was difficult: He could only find refuge during the day in the school building or hanging out in a neighborhood pool hall. He finally found work in various jobs, such as hotel busboy, piano playing in a brothel, playing semiprofessional basketball, and even touring with a jazz band. In 1933, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and married Sally Alvis. This marriage, the first of three, produced three children. He continued to work at various jobs, and it was while working as a railroad porter and bar car waiter that he discovered he had a talent for photography. He 867
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bought a cheap camera and taught himself the basics of photography, practicing by shooting pictures in the poor black neighborhoods of Minneapolis. A series of pictures of ordinary African Americans and their lives in black ghettos that he shot in Chicago received considerable attention and won for him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941. He moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked at the Farm Security Administration. Later he became a correspondent for the Office of War Information but never received an overseas assignment. Between 1944 and 1948, he was part of a team at Standard Oil of New Jersey that made documentaries. In 1948 he became the first African American photographer on staff for Life magazine. Between Gordon Parks, Sr. (AP/Wide World Photos) 1949 and 1951, he lived in Paris, France, enjoying the comparatively racially neutral climate there. The Civil Rights movement, however, was getting under way in the United States, and he returned to the States because he wanted to be a part of the struggle. During the 1950’s he became involved with film and television production. These experiences made it easier for him to become the first black film director of a major motion picture: He directed the commercially successful Shaft in 1971 and Shaft’s Big Score in 1972. He had already published a couple of books by 1966, when his autobiographical work A Choice of Weapons came out. Between 1966 and 1975, other works, including photographic exhibits, poem collections, essay collections, films, and documentaries were produced. In 1975, at age sixty-three, he married his third wife, Genevieve Young, and published a book of photographs, Moments Without Proper Names. His second autobiographical volume, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir, was published in 1979. Over the years, Parks won wide recognition for his work. Some of the most prestigious honors include a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 for his photography, a Notable Book Award from the American Library Association for his autobiographical work A Choice of Weapons, the Spingarn Award in 1972, the National Medal of the Arts in 1988, the 2002 induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, more than forty honorary degrees, and, in 2002, the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1995, after years of productive, creative activity, Parks donated his films, photographs, writings, and
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memorabilia to the United States Library of Congress, where he felt they would be respectfully stored and preserved. In October, 2004, his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, honored him with the first Gordon Parks Celebration of Culture and Diversity, a four-day event celebrating Parks’s amazing contribution to American culture. In the same year, the Art Institute of Boston awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Parks died at age ninety-three from cancer. He was considered a renaissance man, one who truly exemplified his own goal of “not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the imagination and then making the new horizons.” He will above all be remembered for his photographs for Life and other publications, including the iconic “American Gothic,” of a black cleaning woman standing in front of an American flag and flanked by a broom and a mop—an ironic commentary on American ideals. He will also be remembered for the film Shaft, but his accomplishments extend far beyond these to encompass musical compositions, poetry, journalism, and novels, including The Learning Tree, about an adolescent boy from an African American family in a small Kansas town who must deal with racism in the 1920’s, and Shannon, his first attempt at an adult novel, the story of a New York family and its tragic rise to prominence during the World War I era. He wrote several volumes of poetry, often accompanied by photographs; a collection of essays; a commentary accompanying a traveling exhibit of his photographs; and two technical books on photography.
A Choice of Weapons Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1966 A Choice of Weapons is the first of three nonfiction autobiographical works. The other two continue his life through his prominent career as a photographer and filmmaker. This one starts when he is sixteen years old and his mother has died, essentially the point at which his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree ends. In A Choice of Weapons, he details the clash with his brother-in-law that causes the man to throw him out of the house and describes the nearly destitute life he is forced to live for weeks as a homeless, penniless teenager. Parks goes to school or to a pool hall during the day and rides streetcars at night because he has no place else to spend the nights. He finds a job playing jazz piano at a brothel, which in one way is fortunate: After he hones his skill as a piano player, a white bandleader hears him play and offers him a job touring with his band. Before this opportunity comes along, though, he works at other jobs, as a busboy and a flophouse cleaner. Sometimes he has no work and no money. One such time he actually fights a hungry dog for a pigeon. He wins, plucks the bird, cooks it on an open fire, and eats it. Another time, he has no money and has been stranded in New York City by the very bandleader who recruited him for his piano playing. This time he is forced to make ends meet by working for a drug dealer, delivering dope.
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Occasions arise when he is tempted to take the path that is easier and handier, to do something that is immediately profitable but is also either illegal or immoral. Once, when he was still riding the streetcars as a way to spend his homeless nights, he was accosted by a streetcar conductor and he pulled a knife on the man. These tribulations serve to show Parks the limited options available to a young black man in the early 1930’s. He could have gone a violent, criminal route; he chose instead to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, get married, become a father, and seek personal as well as financial fulfillment through a career in photography. His introduction to photography comes about quite implausibly. Working as a railroad porter on a run between St. Paul and Seattle, he becomes fascinated with the photo stories in the Life magazines left behind by departing passengers. The work of the Depression-era photographers leads him to decide he can document in pictures the same kinds of things, and, with that in mind, he buys his first camera at a pawnshop in Seattle, Washington. He leaves his film for developing at Eastman Kodak in Minneapolis, and when he picks them up is complimented for their quality and offered his own show if his work continues to improve. It does, of course, and he soon gets his own exhibit in Chicago and a subsequent chance to work with Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C. His most famous photograph, “American Gothic,” a stark portrait of a black charwoman holding a mop and broom in front of the American flag, is one result of this experience. He goes on to work at Life magazine, becoming the first African American to join the staff of a major American magazine. Some of his most striking photojournalistic work is done during this period in his life. All is not smooth sailing for him, however. He faces prejudice and even violence in the pursuit of his career. Once he is nearly assaulted by three Texans who object to his being kissed on the cheek in public by a white colleague. Then, when Malcolm X is assassinated, the Federal Bureau of Investigation fears Parks and his family might be targeted because of his friendship with Malcolm, and he is persuaded to take his family abroad for safety. The memoir’s title, A Choice of Weapons, suggests he is aware of his options and makes a conscious decision to follow his mother’s teachings to make his life worthwhile. He chooses not to follow the readily expedient route so often taken by those who are disadvantaged. When he chooses a camera instead of a gun as his weapon against poverty and racism, he has already seen and experienced the side of life that drove other African American men to desperate measures. When he uses his camera to document and display those who have not escaped despair and hopelessness, he begins an odyssey of creative achievement unparalleled by any other African American man of his time.
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Voices in the Mirror Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1990 Voices in the Mirror takes up Parks’s story from where he left off in To Smile in Autumn, the second memoir, which opens in 1944, when his career as a photographer blossoms, and ends at the height of his artistry in the late 1970’s. Voices in the Mirror covers Parks’s career from 1978, when he worked as a photographer of the rich and famous and—more significantly for him as an artist—as a photographer of the poor, the downtrodden, and the desperate. The memoir covers several decades of his life as he develops his craft. He works in the world of fashion, taking pictures for Vogue magazine, but he also works as a photojournalist at Life magazine taking pictures of life in black America and in other parts of the world. One of his more memorable stories captured in photographs is of an impoverished Brazilian boy, Flavio. The photo-essay had such an impact that thousands of dollars were donated to help the boy, who was close to dying, enabling Parks to bring the youth to the United States for treatment and eventual cure. Parks’s encounters with famous people are recorded in some of his best-received portraits. He photographs activists such as Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed, music and film legends including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ingrid Bergman, and Roberto Rossellini, prominent athletes such as Muhammad Ali, artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder, and celebrities such as Gloria Vanderbilt. He conveys the glamour of Paris as well as the often-overlooked misery of Rio de Janeiro and the well-known but ignored, downtrodden, and newly militant section of New York’s Harlem. His tales of encounters with the many different segments of national and international society communicate his intent to call attention to their often-undetected or unappreciated significance. This volume not only records Parks’s life during a significant time in his evolution as an artist but also provides insight into an important period of American history. The recounting of the harshness of African American existence during the Civil Rights movement is both informative and fascinating, and it reveals the paradoxes inherent in the oddly distorted African American dream.
Suggested Readings Berry, Skip. Gordon Parks. New York: Chelsea House, 1991. Donloe, Darlene. Gordon Parks. Los Angeles, Calif.: Melrose Square, 1993. Harnan, Terry. Gordon Parks: Black Photographer and Film Maker. Champaign, Ill.: Garrard, 1972. Home Box Office. Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks. Videorecording. New York: Author, 2006. Lamb, Yvonne Shinhoster. “Life Photographer and Shaft Director Broke Color Barriers.” The Washington Post, March 8, 2006.
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Moore, Deedee. “Shooting Straight: The Many Worlds of Gordon Parks.” Smithsonian 20 (April, 1989): 66-77. Parks, Gordon, Sr. “How It Feels to Be Black.” Life, August 16, 1963. Turk, Midge. Gordon Parks. New York: Crowell, 1971. Contributor: Jane L. Ball
Suzan-Lori Parks Born: Fort Knox, Kentucky; May 10, 1963 African American
The first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama, Parks regarded the achievement as more than personal: “And anytime America recognizes a member of a certain group for excellence . . . it’s a great moment for American culture.” Principal works drama: The Sinner’s Place, pr. 1984, pb. 1995; Betting on the Dust Commander, pr. 1987, pb. 1995; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, pr. 1989, pb. 1995; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, pr. 1990, pb. 1995; Devotees in the Garden of Love, pr. 1991, pb. 1995; The America Play, pr. 1993, pb. 1995; The America Play, and Other Works, pb. 1995; Venus, pr. 1996, pb. 1997; In the Blood, pr. 1999, pb. 2000; Fucking A, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; The Red Letter Plays, pb. 2001 (includes In the Blood and Fucking A); Topdog/ Underdog, pr., pb. 2001 long fiction: Getting Mother’s Body, 2003 radio plays: Pickling, 1990; The Third Kingdom, 1990; Locomotive, 1991 screenplays: Anemone Me, 1990; Girl 6, 1996 Suzan-Lori Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1963, the daughter of a career army officer. She spent her early childhood in several cities across the United States and lived in Germany, where she attended high school. She began writing short stories as a third grader and continued to focus on prose writing until her undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. There, she met the distinguished author and essayist James Baldwin, who recognized her gift for dialogue and suggested that she explore drama. Parks wrote her first play, The Sinner’s Place, in 1984 as a student at Mount Holyoke. Though she earned an honors citation for her work, the college’s theater department refused to stage the play. Parks graduated with honors in 1985 and moved to London for a year to study acting. Betting on the Dust Commander, her first play to be produced in New York City, debuted in 1987. Two years later, Parks received an Obie Award for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, and The New York Times named Parks the most promising playwright of 1989. Following the successful production of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at the Brooklyn Arts Council’s BACA Downtown Theatre in 873
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Suzan-Lori Parks (AP/Wide World Photos)
1990, Parks produced her next two plays, Devotees in the Garden of Love and The America Play on smaller stages in Lexington, Kentucky, and Dallas, Texas, respectively. The America Play later opened Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City in 1994. Parks earned a second Obie Award in 1996, for her play Venus, which also debuted at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Also in 1996, Parks wrote the screenplay for director Spike Lee’s film Girl 6. The productions of In the Blood, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2000, and Fucking A, both of which draw on elements in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), continued to earn for Parks wide critical acclaim. She received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Parks’s growing reputation as a brilliant young playwright reached new heights in 2001 with the production of Topdog/Underdog. The play opened on July 22, 2001, at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City to rave reviews and earned for Parks the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2002, garnering her the further distinction of being the first African American woman to win that honor. Topdog/Underdog opened on Broadway in April of 2002, the first Broadway opening for an African American woman since Ntozake Shange, whose for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf opened in 1976. “I think it’s a great moment for all African-American women writers,” Parks has explained about becoming the first African American woman to receive the
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Pulitzer Prize in drama. “And anytime America recognizes a member of a certain group for excellence—one that has not traditionally been recognized—it’s a great moment for American culture.” Parks married Paul Oscher, a blues musician, in 2001, and joined the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, as the director of the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre Projects Writing for Performance program.
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom Type of work: Drama First produced: 1989, pb. 1995 Rather than separating her first major play into traditional acts, Parks created four separate stories to provide a nonlinear and sometimes surreal look at aspects of the African American experience in her Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. “Snails,” the first section of the play, looks at a contemporary group of women who possess two names, one they have chosen and another that has been imposed on them. The second section, “Third Kingdom,” re-creates the tragic Middle Passage, through which enslaved Africans journeyed on their way to America, and the details of which are narrated by characters such as Kin-Seer, Us-Seer, and OverSeer. “Open House,” the third section, depicts the life of Aretha Saxon, a black servant/slave in the household of the white Saxon family. Aretha’s departure from the family is occasioned by the removal with pliers of all of her teeth. The play’s final section, “Greeks,” is a modern interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614), with Mr. Seargant Smith in the role of Odysseus. Hoping to earn “his Distinction” in the army, Seargant Smith spends most of his life away from his family, who await his return and the honor he hopes to bring back with him. The four stories in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom depict characters whose identity and culture are marginalized by others. From the three women in “Snails,” whose identities are studied and inevitably altered by the invasive Lutsky, to Miss Faith’s extraction of Aretha Saxon’s teeth in an act that functions metaphorically as a means of extracting Aretha from the Saxon family history, Parks dramatizes the struggle of African Americans against cultural, historical, and linguistic sabotage. A critical and popular success, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom earned for Parks her first Obie Award for best new American play. The New York Times also named her 1989’s most promising young playwright.
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Venus Type of work: Drama First produced: 1996, pb. 1997 Venus received mixed reviews for its portrayal of an African woman whose unconventional physiognomy becomes the basis for her exhibition in a traveling sideshow in Europe. Parks based her play on a historical character, Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman whose body was displayed publicly in London and Paris in the early nineteenth century. Dubbed the Hottentot Venus, Baartman became a popular spectacle for white audiences who were fascinated and revolted by her appearance. After her death, Baartman’s sexual organs and buttocks were preserved and housed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until the late twentieth century. As the play opens, Venus is a popular attraction in Mother Showman’s traveling show of Nine Human Wonders in London. Because slavery has been outlawed in England, Mother Showman’s captivity of Venus sparks a debate about whether such exhibitions constitute slavery. Venus eventually escapes to Paris, where she falls under the influence of the Baron Docteur, who falls in love with Venus but also assures his colleagues that he intends to make her the object of scientific study. A twisted custody battle ensues as Mother Showman and Baron Docteur fight over who has the right to exhibit Venus. In the character of Venus, Parks explores the objectification of human beings, and particularly African Americans, whose humanity was denied in the nineteenth century (and beyond) on the basis of pseudoscientific theories that reinforced prejudices against physical and cultural difference. Venus, a woman who desires to be treated with love and respect, becomes an oddity in a circus sideshow, reduced to little more in the public consciousness than her “great heathen buttocks.”
In the Blood Type of work: Drama First produced: 1999, pb. 2000 A modern interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, In the Blood depicts a homeless woman’s struggle to care for herself and her family. Hester, La Negrita, and her five children, all from different fathers, live under a bridge, making what little money they have from collecting cans. Hester spends much of her time practicing her writing (she knows only the letter A). As her health declines, Hester appeals for assistance to a street doctor, her welfare caseworker, a former lover and father of her first child, and eventually a local reverend, who is the father of her youngest child. The actors who portray Hester’s five children also double as adult characters. In a series of stage confessions that resemble the chorus of a Greek tragedy, these characters (Amiga Gringa, Chilli, The Doctor, The Welfare Lady, and Reverend D)
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explain the ways in which they have taken advantage of Hester, who has been sexually exploited by almost everyone whom she knows. In the Blood is a hopeless tale of a woman undone by poverty and a social system that cannot meet her needs. Individuals in a position to help Hester can think only of how to use her. The word “slut,” scrawled on the wall of Hester’s makeshift home under the bridge in the play’s opening scene, serves a purpose similar to Hawthorne’s scarlet letter on Hester Prynne’s chest. Both Hesters are defined almost exclusively by what their societies perceive as aberrant sexuality. When every means of salvation is exhausted, Hester is left, in the final scene of the play, with the word “slut,” this time on the lips of her oldest child. Hester’s murder of her son Jabber at the end of the play functions as an attempt to efface the word, and the identification, both of which have followed her throughout the play. A critical and popular success, In the Blood was named a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in drama.
Topdog/Underdog Type of work: Drama First produced: 2001, pb. 2001 Departing from the unorthodox staging and characterization of her previous plays, Parks presented what appears on the surface to be a traditional tale of sibling rivalry in Topdog/Underdog, which opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theater on July 22, 2001, and opened on Broadway at the Ambassador Theater in New York less than a year later. However, Parks links the struggle of her two characters, named Lincoln and Booth, to more complex and historical struggles of race, family, and identity. The two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, share a seedy urban apartment. Lincoln, a former street hustler whose skill at the card game three-card monte is legendary, now works at an arcade where he impersonates Abraham Lincoln for patrons who pay money to reenact his assassination. Booth, who aspires to his brother’s greatness at three-card monte, relies on Lincoln’s paychecks and whatever he can steal to make ends meet. As Lincoln and Booth, so named as a joke by their father, try to plan for their future, they confront the realities of the past: their abandonment by their parents and the buried animosities toward each other. In the play’s final scene, Booth flies into a rage when Lincoln bests him at three-card monte, thereby winning the family legacy (five hundred dollars rolled in a stocking) left to each son when their parents fled. Lincoln’s violent end is foreshadowed by his job at the arcade and by his and Booth’s names. How each brother accepts and realizes the roles imposed by family history, circumstance, and the inherent opposition of their names, however, makes the play a deeply compelling one. In 2002, shortly after its debut on Broadway, Topdog/Underdog earned for Parks the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
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Suggested Readings Brown-Gillory, Elizabeth. “Reconfiguring History: Migration, Memory, and (Re)Membering in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Plays.” In Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism, edited by Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Frieze, James. “Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: Suzan-Lori Parks and the Shared Struggle to Perceive.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 523. Garrett, Shawn-Marie. “The Possession of Suzan-Lori Parks.” American Theatre 17, no. 8 (October, 2000): 22. Parks, Suzan-Lori. “Interview with Suzan-Lori Parks.” Interview by Shelby Jiggetts. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 309-317. Pochoda, Elizabeth. “I See Thuh Black Card . . . ?” Nation 274, no. 20 (May 27, 2002): 36. Wilmer, S. E. “Restaging the Nation: The Work of Suzan-Lori Parks.” Modern Drama 43, no. 3 (Fall, 2000): 442-452. Contributor: Philip Bader
Ann Petry Born: Old Saybrook, Connecticut; October 12, 1908 Died: Old Saybrook, Connecticut; April 28, 1997 African American
Petry was the first African American woman to sell over a million copies of a novel and the first African American woman to publish a collection of short stories. Principal works children’s literature: The Drugstore Cat, 1949; Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, 1955; Tituba of Salem Village, 1964; Legends of the Saints, 1970 long fiction: The Street, 1946; Country Place, 1947; The Narrows, 1953 short fiction: Miss Muriel, and Other Stories, 1971 Ann Lane Petry (PEH-tree) was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to one of the town’s two African American families. Her father owned the village drugstore. A 1931 graduate of the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy, for a time Petry operated the pharmacy in Old Lyme, one of two family-owned pharmacies. Petry grew up listening to stories of the African American experience told by family, visiting friends, and relatives. In 1938 Ann Lane was married to George Petry; they moved to New York City. Petry left the pharmacy to follow a family tradition of storytelling. She worked for two Harlem newspapers, the Amsterdam News and People’s Voice. Petry’s first published work, “Marie of the Cabin Club,” a tale of romance and suspense, appeared under the pseudonym Arnold Petri in a Baltimore weekly newspaper. In 1943, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon,” appeared in Crisis, a magazine founded by W. E. B. Du Bois. This story brought her to the attention of a book editor, who encouraged Petry to apply for the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. In 1945, Petry entered and won the award. Her entry would become the first chapters of the novel The Street. Petry returned to Old Saybrook in 1947, the debut year of her second novel, Country Place. In 1949, Petry launched a career as a children’s and young adults’ writer with The Drugstore Cat. Other works for children and young adults include Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tituba of Salem Village, and Legends of the Saints. Although in the later part of her life Petry left the ivory-tower life of university and publishing centers, she continued to write short stories while she published 879
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novels and juvenile literature. Most of these stories were first published in African American journals. With one previously unpublished story, “Mother Africa,” these stories were collected in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories. The core themes of her writing include racial identity, racism in America, and the experience of the African American woman. She did return to universities occasionally, holding a visiting professorship at the University of Hawaii in 1974-1975, and in 1977 she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Boston’s Suffolk University awarded her a D.Litt. degree in 1983. She died in a convalescent home.
The Street Type of work: Novel First published: 1946 The Street portrays the economic plight of African Americans in northern cities. Themes of the novel include the problem of latchkey children, single parenting, and sexual oppression. This novel is perhaps the first written by an African American woman that probes the triple threat to African American women of race, gender, and class. Much of the action of The Street takes place on 116th Street in Harlem in 1944. The central character, Lutie Johnson, leaves an unemployed womanizing husband and a nice frame house in Jamaica, New York. She moves to Harlem with her eight-year-old son, Bub. Lutie moves to the city to realize a comfortable life. Instead of an independent and prosperous life in New York City, Lutie finds herself living in a tenement. The janitor, William Jones, is a sociopath who lusts after Lutie. A major presence on the street is Mrs. Hedges, who runs a whorehouse. Qualified for clerical or secretarial employment, Lutie can find only menial work in a laundry. Instead of ownership of a piece of the American Dream, Lutie finds herself trapped in a nightmare. Lutie becomes fair game for males. William makes advances and tries to molest Lutie. Junto, the white business partner of Mrs. Hedges, tries to seduce Lutie. Boots Smith, a musician in a bar that Junto owns, charms Lutie with visions of a better life with him. Boots lures her to his apartment, where he attempts to rape her. In an effort to ward off Boots’s rape, Lutie kills him. Vowing revenge on Lutie, William tricks Bub into stealing and gets him in trouble with the law. Disillusioned and defeated, Lutie abandons Bub and runs away to Chicago. Sexual politics drive the novel and rest on a concept that African American women are sexual prey. Negative sexual imagery of Lutie and by extension of all African American women is held by black and white males and by white females. A mixture of race and gender politics pushes Lutie over the edge. Lutie represents all the walking wounded of 116th Street and all of Harlem’s downtrodden residents. The Street is not merely a graphic portrayal of what it means to be female and to be poor; it is also a story of protest and defeat. The Street presents the Afri-
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can American woman as the center of the family and the community. She shoulders the moral responsibilities of the race.
Miss Muriel, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971 While Petry’s reputation rests primarily on her novels, she saw herself quite differently at the start of her career: I set out to be a writer of short stories and somehow ended up as a novelist—possibly because there simply wasn’t room enough within the framework of the short story to do the sort of thing I wanted to do.
Yet the pieces in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories, written over the course of several decades, provide a compact and provocative introduction to her imaginative concerns, chief among them her sensitivity to racism’s psychological as well as material consequences.
“Like a Winding Sheet” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories In the prize-winning story “Like a Winding Sheet,” she depicts the physical and mental toll exacted by the nature of work in an industrial society where laborers are treated as interchangeable machines. The story dramatizes how the corrosive humiliations of prejudice, when added to work stresses, can trigger blind and catastrophic violence. A husband’s inability to challenge the string of racist assaults on his dignity delivered both during and after his exhausting night shift at a World War II defense plant not only make him incapable of imagining benign white behavior (even in the face of apologies) but also cause him to respond to his wife’s affectionate teasing with the beating he is forbidden to direct at his real oppressors. While racism provides the context for his rage, however (her unwitting use of the word “nigger” echoing the hostile epithet regularly used against him by the outside world), his reaction exposes the starkness of the struggle between male and female in Petry’s world and the sobering betrayals it can provoke. The title image begins as the bedsheet in which he has tossed and turned all day in a futile effort to sleep, but his wife jokingly casts it as a burial linen—a reference ironically appropriate to his sense of himself as the walking dead. By story’s end, that reference has assumed sinister dimensions as he feels trapped by the violence he is committing but cannot control, “and he thought it was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet.”
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“In Darkness and Confusion” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories “In Darkness and Confusion” fictionalizes the Harlem riot of 1943, an event sparked by the wounding of a black soldier whose uniform provided scant protection on his own home front. The story’s protagonist, William Jones, a drugstore porter who, despite endless humiliations, has worked hard all of his life to secure a better world for his son Sam, suddenly loses that son to the wartime draft and the dangers of a Jim Crow world at the southern training camp to which he is sent. When Sam, who once aspired to college and his share of the American Dream, protests an order to move to the back of the bus and then shoots the aggressive military police officer who gave it, he is court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. As Jones broods over this news in a Harlem bar, he watches as another uniformed black G.I., this one standing in the supposedly more egalitarian north, tries to help a black woman being beaten by a white policeman, punches the lawman, runs, and is summarily gunned down. Jones erupts into a violence ignited by grief and rage and becomes the leader of a mob. When his churchgoing wife learns of their son’s fate, she, too, turns to retributive action with an explosive passion that kills her: Her religion proves unable to provide her with the strength to resume her burden and go on with her life. Nor is the mob’s looting of local merchants legitimized, for it is produced by the intoxicating siren song of white capitalist materialism, with which the culture regularly deflects attention from matters of real social justice. The riot leaves Jones more completely bereft than he had been before, for it literally costs him his heart and soul, even as it finally allows him to understand the anomie of his disaffected teenage niece, who has baldly scorned his lifetime of exhausting effort for the whites, who in the end allow them “only the nigger end of things.”
“The New Mirror” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories Petry as skillfully evokes the impact of racism on the black bourgeoisie as she does on the proletariat, and in several tales she demonstrates how a lifetime of belittlement and intimidation can erode one’s ability to act ethically in the world. In “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror,” Petry creates a black family much like her own— the Layens are professionals who own the pharmacy in a small New England town. The adolescent girl who narrates these tales speaks of “the training in issues of race” she has received over the years, not only through the casual bigotries she has witnessed but also through the painful self-consciousness of respectable people
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like her parents, whose behavior is a continual exercise in refuting cultural stereotypes while carefully preserving proudly held racial loyalties. In “The New Mirror” the ironies are more overt, cleaner. Mr. Layen’s decision to take a day off to outfit himself with a new pair of false teeth leads his unknowing wife to an excruciating encounter with police, from whom she withholds her fear that the absent Layen may have become another black man who deserts his family as a delayed response to a lifetime of indignities within the white patriarchal social order. Layen’s surprising secrecy leads his daughter to realize that even securing a new set of teeth subjects a black male to humiliation, in this case taking the form of the grinning Ann Petry (AP/Wide World Photos) Sambos and toothless Uncle Toms he fears his dental problems will call to mind. The child learns to use the codes by which the black middle class shields itself from white contempt—just as she shoulders her own share of the burden of always acting with an eye on the reputation of “the Race”: She thus learns why “all of us people with this dark skin must help hold the black island inviolate.”
“The Necessary Knocking on the Door” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories In “The Necessary Knocking on the Door” a similar loss of agency is made bitingly ironic by the context in which Alice Knight’s dilemma unfolds: A participant at a conference about the role of Christianity in the modern world, she finds herself unable to master her dislike for a white woman dying in the hotel room across the hall from hers—a woman who had earlier in the day refused to be seated next to a “nigger” and had thus awakened in Alice the bitterness that a lifetime of such indignities has nurtured. Her hardened heart is jolted the next day by news of the woman’s death during the night—and her own guilty knowledge that she alone had heard the woman’s distress but had let the hated epithet reduce her to that “animal,” “outcast,” “obscene” state it implies—not because it had been leveled at her but be-
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cause she had let it rob her of her Christian commitment to do good to those who harm her. Even her own dreams indict Alice: “The octopus moonlight” pitilessly asserts, “Yours is the greater crime. A crime. A very great crime. It was a crime. And we were the witnesses.” Like other African American writers before and since, Petry warns that prejudice delivers its most sinister harm when it saps its victims’ capacity for decency and compassion and enlists them in the service of a gospel of irreparable division. In these stories Petry vividly captures the spiritual anguish of discovering that one’s own grievances can weaken rather than deepen one’s moral courage.
“The Bones of Louella Brown” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories Her handling of white perspectives on racism is more unyielding. The absurdities into which segregationist practices lead multiracial societies (including the pseudosciences hunting frantically for physical evidence of racial “difference”) are lampooned in “The Bones of Louella Brown.” The most prestigious family in Massachusetts, the Bedfords, find their plans to build a chapel for its deceased members compromised when an undertaker’s assistant confuses the bones of an African American maid with the sole noblewoman in their clan and, because of the “shocking” similarities of hair, teeth, height, and bone mass between the two skeletons, cannot differentiate the two. That alone is newsworthy enough to attract a Boston reporter sniffing for scandal, but the story gets juicier when it becomes clear there is every likelihood that the segregation that has been a hallmark of the cemetery in question will be permanently breached once it can no longer guarantee that “black” bones will not commingle in the same park with “white” bones. After Mrs. Brown makes a series of ghostly visitations to principals in the story, they decide to acknowledge the truth with an epitaph explaining that either woman (or both) may lie in the crypt, along with the admission of their common humanity: “They both wore the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.” Here, too, Petry moves her reader beyond social contexts and into metaphysical ones by reminding readers that this story of dry bones (an unmistakable homage to a favorite trope of black oral tradition) is also a meditation on mortality itself, which exposes such preoccupation with earthly pecking orders for the consummate folly it is.
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“The Migraine Workers” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories “The Migraine Workers” offers another example of white protagonists brought up short in the knowledge of their moral blindness in following the unquestioned attitudes of a lifetime. Pedro Gonzalez, proud owner of a successful truckstop, suddenly finds himself staring into a trailer full of migrant laborers exuding a human misery more palpable than anything he has ever encountered. Outraged by the black driver, who blithely explains how he usually hides such scenes from public scrutiny, Pedro feeds the people with the surplus food left on his premises by other haulers. When he later discovers that an elderly man from the crew has hidden himself in the area and is living off what he can scavenge from the truckstop, his first impulse is to have the man removed by the police. It is only when his longtime assistant challenges his callousness and points to the resources they could easily spare for the man’s upkeep that Pedro realizes how his own fleshy body indicts him of complicity in a system of polarized haves and have-nots: migraine-producing epiphanies indeed in the land of equal opportunity.
“Mother Africa” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1971, in Miss Muriel, and Other Stories Other stories in the collection evoke the mysterious private centers of grief hidden in the human heart: “Olaf and His Girl Friend” and “Solo on the Drums” show Petry’s interest in African American music as an exquisite, untranslatable evocation of that pain. “Mother Africa” introduces Emanuel Turner, another of Petry’s junk men, whose business indicts the acquisitive mandate of American consumer culture. Years earlier, the loss of his wife and baby in childbirth had robbed him of any further desire for self-improvement; as a junk dealer he is free from anxious adherence to other people’s standards of worth or accomplishment, and because he is his own man, he is a welcome figure to those around him. All that changes when a friend blesses him with the huge sculpture of a female nude being discarded by a wealthy white woman. The statue seduces Turner back into a realm of selfconscious striving as he tries to live up to its grandeur; in the process he loses his liberty and the easy rapport he has had with his neighbors. Convinced that she is a mythic evocation of Africa itself, he resents the prudish efforts of others to clothe her as missionaries had once done to his ancestors. Thus he is stunned to learn that this dark madonna is not a black woman at all but a white woman—the oxidized metal had misled him. By parodying the assumed black male obsession with white women in this way, Petry implies that the real hunger at work is for authentic enunciation of the African
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American experience, a hunger left unsatisfied when Turner hurriedly rushes to sell the piece for scrap. In succumbing to the desire to make a world fit for his queenly companion, Turner submits himself for the first time in twenty-five years to the pressures of conformity and material acquisition. Is it love that so compromises him, or are the statue’s racial associations Petry’s warnings against the lure of cultural standards derived from the spiritually bankrupt spheres of white consumer capitalism?
Suggested Readings Bell, Bernard. “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and AfroAmerican Character.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Clark, Keith. “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion.” African-American Review 26 (Fall, 1992): 495-505. Ervin, Hazel Arnett, and Hilary Holladay, eds. Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Gross, Theodore. “Ann Petry: The Novelist as Social Critic.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1980. Hernton, Calvin. “The Significance of Ann Petry.” In The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Washington, Gladys. “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction.” CLA Journal 30 (September, 1986): 14-29. Wilson, Mark. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” MELUS 15 (Summer, 1988): 71-84. Contributors: Muriel W. Brailey and Barbara Kitt Seidman
Marge Piercy Born: Detroit, Michigan; March 31, 1936 Jewish
Piercy is known for her political, feminist novels, which often feature women protagonists and occasionally draw on her Jewish roots. Principal works drama: The Last White Class: A Play About Neighborhood Terror, pr. 1978 (with Ira Wood) long fiction: Going Down Fast, 1969; Dance the Eagle to Sleep, 1970; Small Changes, 1973; Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976; The High Cost of Living, 1978; Vida, 1980; Braided Lives, 1982; Fly Away Home, 1984; Gone to Soldiers, 1987; Summer People, 1989; He, She, and It, 1991 (also known as Body of Glass, 1992); The Longings of Women, 1994; City of Darkness, City of Light, 1996; Storm Tide, 1998 (with Ira Wood); Three Women, 1999; The Third Child, 2003; Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period, 2005 poetry: Breaking Camp, 1968; Hard Loving, 1969; Four-Telling, 1971 (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, and Dick Lourie); To Be of Use, 1973; Living in the Open, 1976; The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, 1978; The Moon Is Always Female, 1980; Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, 1982; Stone, Paper, Knife, 1983; My Mother’s Body, 1985; Available Light, 1988; Mars and Her Children, 1992; Eight Chambers of the Heart, 1995; What Are Big Girls Made Of? Poems, 1997; The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, 1999; Early Grrrl, 1999 (also known as Written in Bone: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy, 1998); Colors Passing Through Us, 2003 nonfiction: Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Poets on Poetry, 1982; The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days, 1990; So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and the Personal Narrative, 2001 (with Ira Wood); Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir, 2002; Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own, 2007 edited text: Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, 1987 Marge Piercy (PEER-see), a daughter of the Jewish millwright Robert Piercy and his wife, Bert Bunnin Piercy, grew up in a primarily African American, workingclass Detroit neighborhood. Coming from a poor white family, she early realized that she was a minority member of her community, and this sense of minority status remained with her, in various forms, throughout her life. As a child Piercy 887
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learned to escape feelings of loneliness through reading. She was the first member of her family to go to college. More important, she broke from the pattern most of her friends followed, that of marrying young and often unwisely, having too many children, being dependent and docile, and living life as housewives who, as Piercy says in some of her poems, are property, like dogs with tags. Piercy was an outstanding student who during her undergraduate career at the University of Michigan won the coveted Hopgood Prize in writing several times. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1957 she continued her studies at Northwestern University, where she received a master’s degree in 1958. Piercy realized early that her future was in writing, but it took a decade before she was able to support herself as a writer. After completing her education Piercy supported herself as well as she could with odd jobs that left time for writing. During this period of great social unrest in the United States, particularly in Detroit, her hometown, she was an organizer for the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and active in the Civil Rights movement that was developing its own strong rhetoric. As the decade advanced, however, Piercy came to realize that SDS and the Civil Rights movement were both based on a paradigm of male supremacy that she could not accept. By the end of the decade she had become a committed feminist. Because of her work in this arena many critics came to view her writing almost exclusively in its political rather than its artistic context. Her first six novels, each with feminist protagonists, were rejected by every publisher to whom she sent them, mostly because of the strident note of feminism. In 1968, however, Breaking Camp, her first collection of poems, appeared, in which she makes statements similar to those in the rejected novels. About the same time the novel Going Down Fast, too, found a publisher, partly because Piercy was beginning to establish a reputation, but partly because this novel has a male protagonist and lacks the earlier “militant” tone. In 1973 two of Piercy’s most significant books were published. In the novel Small Changes, which focuses on Beth, a working-class woman, and Miriam, a middle-class Jewish intellectual, who are both oppressed and exploited by a male-dominated culture, she demonstrates how sexism pervades every social sphere. A pivotal book in Piercy’s development, Marge Piercy (AP/Wide World Photos)
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Small Changes irritated even some feminist critics because it did not contain a single male character with any redeeming qualities. In Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She, and It Piercy’s feminist commitment develops an important ecological dimension. Locked away in a mental institution, Connie Ramos, the protagonist of Woman on the Edge of Time, fantasizes about two potential future worlds, one communal, the other militaristic and death-driven. Set in the year 2059, He, She, and It depicts an Earth ill-suited to sustain human life. Even these utopian novels are skillful examples of what Piercy calls “character-centered fiction,” works whose plot arises out of the development of characters. In To Be of Use, a collection of poems, Piercy expresses what she wants all her work to be: something of use to women, a reference point as their consciousness is raised about their place in society. The poems in Available Light, whose title suggests enlightenment, are less strident and focus mostly on her early life, on her Jewishness, and on her relationship with her father. Available Light seems a book of reconciliation rather than of protest. Her poetry of the 1990’s was continuously well received; What Are Big Girls Made Of? received a Library Association Notable Book Award, and The Art of Blessing the Day received the Paterson Poetry Prize. Piercy has also continued writing novels. The Longings of Women are for a safe, secure place to call home. The three protagonists—Mary, a recently divorced, homeless house cleaner; Leila, an unhappily married professor who is one of Mary’s clients; and Becky, a young woman accused of conspiring to murder her husband—are all dealing with problematic relationships with men. The Three Women of Piercy’s 1999 novel are three generations of independent Jewish women whose bonds become ever closer over the course of the narrative. Piercy’s work has received numerous honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Gone to Soldiers Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 More than sixty years after the conclusion of World War II, the conflict still exert a tremendous hold on the imaginations of many Americans. Its villains remain the ultimate measure of evil, its major battles landmarks of heroism, its consequence the shape of the modern world. Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers is a novel, consciously epic in scope, that follows the linked lives of ten central characters who are designed to reflect the range of human experience during the war. Piercy, an accomplished novelist and poet, intends to retell the honored legends of courage and valor for the generation that lived through the war and to introduce a contemporary audience to the politics, social movements, and fierce battles of the struggle. Effectively intertwining extensive research, personal family experience, and a very powerful imagination, the novel is structured around several Jewish
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families of widely varying social backgrounds whose lives are drawn together by their work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the army’s intelligence organization. Piercy’s poetic skills enable her to produce battlefield scenes of harrowing intensity, but her primary focus is an intelligence agency because she wishes to demonstrate that the mind is the most fascinating weapon of human combat. Although the multicharacter narrative is sometimes distracting when abrupt shifts undercut the momentum of the story, and although not all of the characters are imagined or developed with equal interest or insight, the wide range of the book gives it the panoramic power of the great novels of the nineteenth century. While Piercy is equally capable of rendering male or female perspectives on reality, her special concentration on the sensibility of several especially interesting women offers another view of a war which has generally been covered by male writers such as James Jones or Herman Wouk. The action sequences, an obvious necessity in a work set directly in the tradition of VANITY FAIR and FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, are equal to the descriptions of Piercy’s predecessors, but the novel is also informed by a very strong sense of social justice and human decency. Piercy’s design is to combine the romance and adventure of the commercially popular novel with the sociological realism of the best historical journalism and to thread an argument for progressive democratic values throughout the book. Scenes such as the siege of Guadalcanal, the infamous Detroit race riot, and the horrifying Polish death march are complemented by subtle examinations of the motives and desires of individuals caught in the turmoil of a global cataclysm. The realm of the novel has been made as real as the world to which the reader returns at its conclusion.
Suggested Readings Cooperman, Jeanette. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Michael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Rodden, John. “A Harsh Day’s Light: An Interview with Marge Piercy.” The Kenyon Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 132-143. Shand, Kerstin. The Repair of the World: The Novels of Marge Piercy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Walker, Sue, and Eugenia Hamner, eds. Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability Press, 1992. Contributors: R. Baird Shuman and Trey Strecker
Darryl Pinckney Born: Indianapolis, Indiana; 1953 African American
Known initially as a literary critic, Pinckney in 1992 brought out High Cotton, a humorous yet often painful examination of America’s black middle class. Principal works long fiction: High Cotton, 1992 nonfiction: Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, 2002 Born in Indianapolis, Darryl Pinckney (PIHNK-nee) had a comfortable middleclass childhood. The idealism of the 1950’s flavored his midwestern youth, which he later said he found unspectacular until he traveled from his native Indiana and discovered his blackness. Meanwhile, he attended high school in the suburbs and developed a love for English history and literature, fantasizing about the day he would get to go to England. Pinckney was a member of the fourth generation of his family to be collegeeducated. He attended Columbia University, later commenting on his time there that he found himself surrounded by intellectual “weirdness.” Nevertheless, he developed confidence and style in his writing classes. Pinckney tinkered with radical thoughts and attended a few black militant gatherings, but his interest in militancy was short-lived. He went on to graduate study at Princeton University. After leaving the academic environment, he took a number of jobs, eventually attaching himself to writer Djuna Barnes, performing odd jobs and relishing the experience of living around the reclusive author of Nightwood (1937). Pinckney whimsically submitted a book review of Gayle Jones’s Corrigidora (1975). Published, the review opened doors for further work, and The New York Review of Books began to publish his writing. Eventually his freelance status evolved into a staff position. He lived in Europe for a time, drifting between London, Paris, and Germany, finally settling in Berlin, where he collaborated with an Eastern German playwright, Heiner Müller, writing texts for the theater. Pinckney had grown tired of the commercialism of the United States, and he enjoyed the separation from his homeland. He participated in the culture of students and intellectuals who moderated the pace of Berlin. Pinckney likened his self-imposed European exile to that of James Baldwin. Pinckney’s isolation allowed him, perhaps for the first time, to consider his African American roots. Before the publication of High Cotton in 1992 he had written for such publications as Granta, Vogue, The New Yorker, and The New York 891
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Times Book Review as well as The New York Review of Books, establishing himself as a new, independent voice in African American critical writing. His essays discussed authors including Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. He received Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill grants to pursue his writing, and he was given the Whiting Writers Award in 1986. Pinckney has taught at Columbia and been a visiting lecturer at Harvard. In 1995 The New York Review of Books published three long critical essays by Pinckney on autobiographies by African Americans: “Promissory Notes,” focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of growing up black, “The Professionals,” on black journalists, and “Black Aristocrats,” on works portraying the lives and culture of people in the black middle class. In 2002 he published Out There, based on a series of lectures given at Harvard which assess the literary contributions of three black writers, Vincent O. Carter, J. A. Rogers, and Caryl Phillips.
High Cotton Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 High Cotton contains strongly autobiographical elements, and parts seem as much memoir as novel; Pinckney once hinted that he was born with the subject matter he addresses in the book and had long intended to write about the generational differences in African American life using relatives’ stories and personal histories. The novel is a sometimes humorous and many times painful examination of America’s black middle class. These are the descendants of W. E. B. DuBois’s “Talented Tenth,” fourth-generation college graduates. However, navigation of America’s social and cultural waters proves precarious for Pinckney’s narrator. The novel traces the narrator’s progress from his urban childhood in the 1960’s through his suburban adolescence to college and young adulthood. What Pinckney reveals is that for African Americans, the status and success inherent in the American Dream come at the sacrifice of family, racial identity, and self-knowledge. Among the novel’s characters is Uncle Castor, expatriate jazz musician from Paris, who tells the unnamed narrator tales of adventure while engaging in such idiosyncratic behaviors as drinking coffee sucked through a sugar cube perched on his lips. Grandfather Eustace, a Harvard-educated, strict Congregationalist minister, is one of the central figures; unrelenting and misunderstood, he periodically antagonizes the young narrator by making him question his view of the world. Upon Eustace’s death, the narrator travels down south to take care of the family farm in Georgia. He finds no bucolic homeland but rather shopping malls and business strips—and racism. The youth’s nostalgic dreams and visions of the Deep South fade. The term “high cotton” refers to ease of living: If one is chopping high cotton, life is easier than stooped picking. In this case, it is the black middle class—including the novel’s narrator and Pinckney himself—that flourishes in taller crops. In High Cotton, Pinckney re-creates the America experienced by those who
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benefited from the Civil Rights movement without having to enter the fray directly. As the narrator observes, “someone was seeing to things and had been ever since my great-grandfather’s grandmother stepped on the auction block.” The future had been secured for this generation by those who had gone before, paving the way for homes in the white suburbs of Indianapolis, for college educations at prestigious universities such as Columbia (allowing the narrator to visit Harlem without having to live there), for trips to Europe, and for marginal employment supplemented by parents’ checks from home. The narrator, however, comes to realize that integration into the larger white society comes at a price: a sense of belonging nowhere. Only when he goes South to his grandfather’s Georgia birthplace and reconnects with his personal and racial past can he fill that emotional vacuum.
Suggested Readings Als, Hilton. “Word!” The Nation, May 18, 1992, pp. 667-670. Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 59, no. 2 (1992): 288-291. Carroll, Rebecca, comp. Swing Low: Black Men Writing. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1995. Moore, Lorrie. “The Long Voyage Home.” The New York Review of Books, October 10, 2002, pp. 33-35. White, Edmund, and Nora Kerr. Reviews of High Cotton, by Darryl Pinckney. The New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1992, p. 3. Contributor: Craig Gilbert
Miguel Piñero Born: Gurabo, Puerto Rico; December 19, 1946 Died: New York, New York; June 17, 1988 Puerto Rican
Piñero was a member of the Nuyorican (New York and Puerto Rican) literary and political movement that crystallized in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in New York City. Principal works drama: Short Eyes, pr. 1974; The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, pr. 1976; Eulogy for a Small-Time Thief, pr. 1977; A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon, pr. 1981; Outrageous: One-Act Plays, pb. 1986 drama (screenplay): Short Eyes, 1977 (adaptation of his play) drama (teleplay): “Smuggler’s Blues,” 1984 (episode of Miami Vice) poetry: La Bodega Sold Dreams, 1980 edited text: Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, 1975 Miguel Piñero (mih-GEHL peen-YEHR-oh) is an important member of the Nuyorican (New York and Puerto Rican) literary and political movement that crystallized in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in New York City. Born in Puerto Rico, Piñero moved to New York City with his parents when he was four. His father, Miguel Angel Piñero, abandoned the family four years later, and Piñero subsequently experienced the poverty, marginalization, and crime of New York’s lower East Side. Piñero remained devoted to his mother, Adelina, as his poems and opening dedication to Short Eyes (“El Cumpleaños de Adelina” by Miguel Algarín) reveal. At an early age, Piñero fell victim to his harsh environment: He began “hustling” and taking drugs and soon entered the world of petty crime that was to shape his future. A truant, shoplifter, and drug addict by his teenage years, Piñero never graduated from junior high. He was convicted of armed robbery at age twenty-four and was sent to Sing Sing, the notorious New York prison. Ironically, it was in prison that Piñero experienced his literary awakening, thanks to a theater workshop established at Sing Sing by Clay Stevenson. Like that of most Nuyorican authors, Piñero’s experience as a marginalized Puerto Rican in America was to become the source for much of his literary output. Through Stevenson’s prison workshop, Piñero began his first and most recognized play, Short Eyes. In addition, while still in prison he came into contact with Marvin Felix Camillo, actor and activist, who had formed The Family, an acting 894
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troupe of former inmates, and who encouraged Piñero’s writing and acting. Out of prison, Piñero worked with Camillo and The Family to develop Short Eyes for performance. The play moved from its opening in the Riverside Church to OffBroadway, to the Public Theater with the help of producer Joseph Papp, and finally to the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Piñero received an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play. Piñero’s success in playwriting put him in contact with the thriving Puerto Rican literary and political community. In the mid-1970’s, as a member of the Nuyorican artistic community, Piñero cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café with Miguel Algarín and edited a volume of Nuyorican poetry with Algarín as well. After a return to Puerto Rico, Piñero in his work also reflected the displacement of the Puerto Rican experience in America: He and his fellow artists felt accepted neither in their native land nor in their land of adoption, and such alienation is a major tenet of Nuyorican literature. Like the dialogue of his characters, his poetry—and the poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Café—was characterized by oral performances of it, as poets performed their works in an apparently improvisational style, reflecting the influence of the Beat poets, of Puerto Rican street culture, and of the emerging African American rap and hip-hop styles. Piñero continued to write and see his plays performed, but none were to have the success of Short Eyes. In 1977 Piñero wrote the screenplay and performed in the film version of his play Short Eyes. From the early 1970’s into the 1980’s, he began a long series of gueststarring appearances in television and cinema. Most notably, he played a series of drug smugglers and ne’er-do-wells in such television series as Miami Vice (1984), The Equalizer (1985), and Kojak (1973). On film, he appeared in Breathless (1983), Exposed (1983), and Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981). In addition to working in Hollywood, Piñero also taught writing at Rutgers University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting in 1982. Such activity and influence in his ethnic and literary community could not help in his battle against addiction, however, and Piñero continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol. Never married, Piñero had a series of serious relationships with both women and men, and an intense, although nonsexual, relationship with fellow Nuyorican poet Algarín. Piñero died in 1988 of cirrhosis of the liver. Piñero’s Short Eyes remains his most successful and enduring contribution to American playwriting and reveals his primary concerns with ethnic and racial alienation in the United States, the all-controlling power of violence, and the hope of individual triumph against such terror. In addition, it offers a window onto the language—a mixture of Spanish, English, street language, and profanity—that in many ways embodies the world of New York’s lower East Side, where Nuyorican literature developed and thrived. His later works, although virtually ignored by literary critics, reveal Piñero’s continued focus on the language, alienation, and perseverance of his community. Despite his close dealings with the New York and Hollywood elite, Piñero remained rooted in his lower East Side, Nuyorican experiences. In December, 2001, Piñero, a film of the author’s life directed by Leon Ichaso, opened in limited release and prompted renewed interest in the author and actor,
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particularly in his poetic performances. The film had the support and cooperation of Piñero’s friends and family. Actor Benjamin Bratt’s performance as Piñero, particularly in his “performance” of Piñero’s poems at the Nuyorican Poets Café, suggests the intensity and immediacy of his poetry as performance that mere readings of Piñero’s work cannot impart.
Short Eyes Type of work: Drama First produced: 1974 Short Eyes was Miguel Piñero’s first and most famous play. After its debut, critics hailed the author as the first Puerto Rican playwright to enter theater’s mainstream. The play begins with a group of prisoners—mostly African American and Latino—struggling to maintain a sense of dignity under deplorable conditions. Early action focuses on Clark Davis, one of only two white members of the group, who is from a socioeconomic background different from that of most of the other inmates. Davis has been accused of child molestation, a crime that the other inmates consider especially shameful, and makes his situation worse by refusing to adapt to the prison’s customs. Through the play’s second act he is harassed constantly, and is ultimately murdered. The guilty prisoners are not punished—the guards look the other way—but must come to terms with their guilt and responsibility. Only one of the inmates, an elderly Puerto Rican man named Juan, refused to participate in the murder. Paradoxically, he is the only one who knows that Davis is guilty. Critics have argued whether Juan abstained from the murder because of its immorality or because it was in the interest of his self-preservation to do so; perhaps both are true. Juan does not allow himself to take another’s life, but neither does he make any attempt to relieve Davis’s murderers of their guilt (the other prisoners have been told by a guard that Davis had been mistakenly identified and was innocent). Miguel Piñero wrote Short Eyes after serving a jail sentence (his third) for armed robbery at Sing Sing prison. It draws heavily from his knowledge of life in jail, depicting the violence of prison life from the inmates’ perspectives. In fact, the play’s title comes from a slang term for pornography, “short heist.” Piñero explained many Puerto Ricans had difficulty pronouncing the h in “heist,” so the word sounded more like “eyes.”
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Suggested Readings Camillo, Marvin Felix. Introduction to Short Eyes, by Miguel Piñero. New York: Hill & Wang, 1975. Maffi, Mario. “The Nuyorican Experience in the Plays of Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero.” In Cross-Cultural Studies; American, Canadian and European Literatures: 1945-1985, edited by Mirko Jurak. Bled, Slovenia: Symposium on Contemporary Literatures and Cultures of the United States of America and Canada, 1988. Piñero, Miguel. “An Interview with Miguel Piñero.” Interview by Norma McKesson Alarcon. Revista Chicano-Riqueña 2, no. 4 (1974): 55-57. _______. “Miguel Piñero: ‘I Wanted to Survive.’” Interview by Nat Hentoff. The New York Times, May 5, 1974, pp. 1, 8. Saldivar, José David. “Miguel Piñero.” In Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States: The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Writers, edited by Nicolás Kanellos. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Contributors: Cami D. Agan and Anna A. Moore
Mary Helen Ponce Born: Pacoima, California; January 24, 1938 Mexican American
Ponce’s writing resides in the matrix of identities (Mexican, Mexican American, Anglo-American, Spanish language, English language) and issues (the socialization of men and women, the church, school) that concern many Latinos today. Principal works long fiction: The Wedding, 1989 short fiction: Recuerdo: Short Stories of the Barrio, 1983; Taking Control, 1987 nonfiction: Hoyt Street: An Autobiography, 1993 (reprinted in 1995 in English as Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood and in Spanish as Calle Hoyt: Memorias de una juventud chicana) A prolific author of Chicano prose, Mary Helen Ponce (POHN-say) was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. The youngest of ten children (seven girls and three boys), Ponce grew up in the security of her barrio (neighborhood) community, a blend of Mexicans and Mexican Americans for whom the family, the Catholic church, the school, and the little local grocery store provided stable landmarks for a world moving between languages and cultures. Writing in English and Spanish, or in English with brief shifts to Spanish, Ponce conjures the experiences of her childhood and youth in a bilingual and bicultural context, addressing the female experience in particular. Ponce attended California State University at Northridge, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in Mexican American studies. She earned a second M.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in history, minoring in anthropology and women’s studies. She pursued course work toward a doctorate in American studies at the University of New Mexico, combining her twin interests in history and literature, receiving her Ph.D. in 1995. The mother of four children, Ponce delayed the start of her writing career until she was in her forties, beginning to publish short stories in Spanish in the early 1980’s. She soon wrote stories in English and translated some of her Spanish stories into English. She has published nonfiction essays on Latino topics (“Latinas and Breast Cancer,” for example) and interviews of Latino figures (“Profile of Dr. Shirlene Soto: Vice Provost, CSU Northridge”). She has also given presentations on such topics as Spanish American pioneer women in California, Chicana litera898
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ture, and oral history. She has read her fiction at college campuses and conferences in the United States and El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and has published in the largest Spanish-language newspaper in Southern California, La Opinión. Recuerdo: Short Stories of the Barrio gathers a number of Ponce’s earliest pieces, some of which begin with the Spanish word “Recuerdo,” which may be translated as “I recall,” “I remember,” or simply “memory,” suggesting the autobiographical element typical of Ponce’s writing. Her early narratives are firstperson, allowing Ponce to describe the experiences of Mexican women with an intimate tone. Later some of Ponce’s stories would employ third-person narration. Taking Control contains several short narratives. Though the characters of these stories are often subject to difficult circumstances, Ponce’s title reflects her decision to emphasize the positive outcomes of even the most negative circumstances. Both Recuerdo and Taking Control are firmly anchored in the Mexican American experience, particularly as lived by women. Ponce’s novel The Wedding is set in a fictional small-town neighborhood near Los Angeles. It depicts the San Fernando Valley in the 1940’s and 1950’s while exploring women’s place in Mexican American society of the time. Blanca is planning the wedding of her dreams, although the marriage is not necessarily to the man of her dreams. She has to work Saturdays plucking turkeys in order to pay for the fancy gown she wants, despite its reduced, factory-seconds price. Her fiancé is a pachuco, or zoot-suit-wearing member of a 1950’s gang. Blanca does have her fancy wedding—but she also has a miscarriage and has to leave the party in an ambulance as two rival gangs fight in the background. Like many of Ponce’s other works, The Wedding examines the stereotypes that seem to circumscribe the lives of Mexican American women, who are subject to their husband’s whims, who endure multiple pregnancies, and who must rise to the social expectations inculcated in them by their families and the Catholic church. Nonetheless, Blanca, like other Ponce characters, is strong, tough, and essentially optimistic. A panorama of Mexican American life is presented in the book: the gangs; the hardworking women; the swaggering men; the influences of family, friends, and church; the financial struggle; and the changing culture. Ponce’s 1993 nonfiction work Hoyt Street: An Autobiography returns to the San Fernando Valley of the 1940’s. (The book was reprinted in 1995 simultaneously in Spanish and English editions: Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood and Calle Hoyt: Memorias de una juventud chicana.) Hoyt Street leaves fiction behind to tell Ponce’s own story of growing up Chicana in a bilingual, bicultural neighborhood whose population is gradually acculturating to the dominant Anglo culture. The book begins with Ponce as a preschooler and ends at the beginning of puberty, depicting the neighborhood and introducing friends and family as it goes. Though her memories are mostly happy ones, Ponce comments: “It seems that we MexicanAmericans, as we were called, had so many things wrong with us that I wondered why it was we were happy.” The voice is Ponce’s, but the vision is split between her own childhood recollections and the implied critique by Anglos. It is in this matrix of identities (Mexican, Mexican American, Anglo-American, Spanish language,
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English language) and issues (the socialization of men and women, the church, school) that Ponce positions all of her writing. It has been remarked that minority writers usually begin their careers by writing their autobiography and only then move toward less personalized fictions. Ponce’s fiction, however, has always had autobiographical elements, and she moved through fictional representation to the nonfiction autobiography itself.
The Wedding Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 The Wedding is dedicated to “the chicks and guys from the barrios who remember the big, fun weddings . . . and fights.” The book follows the life of Blanca Munoz, who lives in Taconos, a poor Chicano neighborhood not far from Los Angeles. Like many of her peers, Blanca lives in a single-parent home and drops out of school to look for work. She is young, uneducated, and without skills, and finally has to take a job at a turkey-processing plant, picking the feathers off turkeys while she imagines a better life. She meets Cricket, the twenty-two-year-old leader of the local gang, the Tacones. Although she calls him honey, their relationship seems based more on proximity than on love. Blanca and Cricket focus much more on the impending wedding as a social symbol than as the symbol of their union. Each wants a splendid wedding for different reasons: Cricket wants to raise his status among the gang members with a wedding that “would outclass all others”; Blanca wants to salvage the family’s pride, increase its social status and, consequently, please her mother. Father Ranger, the parish priest, reluctantly agrees to perform the wedding, which will fulfill Blanca’s destiny as yet another woman subject to the double standard. “Married men come and go at will,” says Father Ranger. “They are free to find other women, abandon wives and children at whim, then return to claim their rights.” Blanca constantly acquiesces to Cricket. She hopes for a single night of honeymoon at a hotel, but Cricket refuses, explaining that first he has to take care of the dance. On the way to the dance, as his new bride leans against him, Cricket admonishes her not to wrinkle his clothes. He knows he will be facing the rival gang and must look his best. As the novel closes, Cricket is carried to the hospital in an ambulance after the rumble, and Blanca is taken to the hospital suffering a miscarriage. She still has hopes for a good future with Cricket. Her last words before passing out are “the best wedding, in all of Taconos.”
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Suggested Readings McCracken, Ellen. “Subculture, Parody, and the Carnivalesque: A Bakhtinian Reading of Mary Helen Ponce’s The Wedding.” MELUS 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1998): 117-132. Rochy, John. “A Pacoima Childhood.” Review of Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce. Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1993. Sanchez, Beverly. Review of Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce. Hispanic 8, no. 5 (July, 1995): 1. Veyna, Angelina F. “Mary Helen Ponce.” In Chicano Writers, Second Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomeli. Vol. 122 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Group, 1992. Contributor: Linda Ledford-Miller
Chaim Potok Born: New York, New York; February 17, 1929 Died: Merion, Pennsylvania; July 23, 2002 Jewish
Potok has presented issues and concerns in Jewish (especially Hasidic) identity to a large reading audience. Principal works children’s literature: The Tree of Here, 1993; The Sky of Now, 1995 long fiction: The Chosen, 1967; The Promise, 1969; My Name Is Asher Lev, 1972; In the Beginning, 1975; The Book of Lights, 1981; Davita’s Harp, 1985; The Gift of Asher Lev, 1990; I Am the Clay, 1992; Old Men at Midnight, 2001 (3 novellas) nonfiction: Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, 1978; Tobiasse: Artist in Exile, 1986; The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak Family, 1996; My First Seventy-nine Years, 1999 (with Isaac Stern); Conversations with Chaim Potok, 2001 (Daniel Walden, editor) Chaim Potok (ki-EEM POH-tok) was born and reared in New York City. His writings reveal a wealth of learning, due in part to his impressive academic credentials; he was a rabbi who held a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. His eight novels, various plays, one nonfiction historical text, and two children’s books are concerned with Jewish (often Hasidic) characters who are challenged by the conflicting identities of their cultures as Americans, Jews, Hasids, family members, and post-World War II citizens of the world. Ordained as a Conservative rabbi in 1954, Potok became national director for the Conservative youth organization, the Leaders Training Fellowship. In 1955, as a chaplain in the United States Army, he served in Korea during the Korean War. His overseas experience proved to be formative for his writing career. In Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, his nonfiction account of Jewish history, Potok explains: My early decades had prepared me for everything—except the two encounters I in fact experienced: a meeting with a vast complex of cultures perfectly at ease without Jews and Judaism, and a confrontation with the beautiful and the horrible in the world of oriental human beings. . . . Jewish history began in a world of pagans: my own Judaism was transformed in another such world.
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Though his first novel, based on his Korean experiences, was repeatedly rejected, a second novel, The Chosen (1967), became a popular success. In the intervening years, Potok had married a psychiatric social worker, Adena Mosevitzky (their daughter Rena was born in 1962, Naama in 1965, and son, Akiva, in 1968), and had become managing editor of the New York-based Conservative Judaism. In 1965, Potok received the doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and became associate editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America. A year later, he was named editor in chief and appointed to the society’s Bible Chaim Potok (© Jerry Bauer) Translation Committee. The Promise, a sequel to The Chosen, followed in 1969; My Name Is Asher Lev was published in 1972. After living for some four years in Jerusalem in the mid-1970’s, Potok and his family settled in Pennsylvania, where he taught courses in the philosophy of literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He also taught occasionally at Bryn Mawr College and at the Johns Hopkins University. Diagnosed with cancer in 2000, Potok remained as active as his health permitted. He was coeditor with David Lieber and Harold Kushner of Etz Hayim, a new commentary on the Torah aimed at Conservative Jews that was published in 2001. He finally succumbed to his cancer on July 23, 2002, at the age of seventy-three The Chosen and its sequel, The Promise, confront issues of value and identity. The novels examine the tensions between Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. An injury in a baseball game initiates a friendship between Reuven Malter, pitcher on the Orthodox team whose father is a fervent Zionist, and Danny Saunders, batter on the Hasid team who is heir to the rebbe position of his father. The Chosen has an ironic conclusion; Reuven Malter decides to become an Orthodox rabbi, but Danny Saunders decides, after much family pain, to become a secular psychologist, a “tzaddik for the world,” as his father finally understands. Potok’s most critically acclaimed novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, details the struggle for personal identity of a young Hasidic boy who struggles between his love for family and religion and his obligation as an artist to study and create. The sequel to this novel, The Gift of Asher Lev, did not appear until nearly two decades later. It tells of an adult Asher Lev, married and with children, who must confront again his unresolved status in the Brooklyn Hasidic community when the death of a family member requires his return.
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In the early and mid-1990’s, Potok moved beyond the genre of the novel to write four plays, which were locally produced in Philadelphia, and two works of children’s literature (The Tree of Here and The Sky of Now), which enjoyed critical acclaim.
My Name Is Asher Lev Type of work: Novel First published: 1972 My Name Is Asher Lev, perhaps Potok’s greatest novel, is an excellent example of the Künstlerroman, which is a novel about an artist’s development. It confronts issues of Jewish and family identity in the post-Holocaust world. Asher Lev is a child prodigy artist, the only child of a Hasidic Jewish couple that lives in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Aryeh Lev, Asher’s father, serves as a personal emissary for the rebbe or tzaddik, the “righteous one” or religious leader of the Hasidic community. The Orthodox Hasidic Jewish culture into which Asher is born approves of creativity only in the context of interpretation of Talmudic passages. Asher finds it difficult, and at times embarrassing, to follow his muse; he finds it natural to draw and to create pictures. Rivkeh Lev, Aryeh’s mother, initially supports Asher’s desire to draw, but she soon sides with her husband, who believes that drawing and the fine arts are products of a gentile culture. In the years during and immediately following World War II, Aryeh Lev travels the world to minister to Hasidic Jews who have been displaced by the Nazi Holocaust. Since Hasids believe that the Jewish state will be re-created in Israel only with the coming of the Messiah, who has not yet arrived, Hasidic Jews generally did not support the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Aryeh travels about the world for the tzaddik, defending himself and his spiritual leader from the arguments of Zionist Jews and gentiles and attempting to do good works. He returns to a household in Brooklyn where his son is neglecting study of the Talmud because of his personal obsession with art and aesthetics. The tzaddik, however, is wise enough to allow Asher to follow his destiny and to mediate between his conflicting identities. The tzaddik arranges for Jacob Kahn, an expatriate from the Hasidic community and a world-renowned sculptor, to serve as Asher’s artistic mentor. Asher’s apprenticeship as an artist culminates with a midtown New York showing of his work. Central to the showing is a pair of paintings, Brooklyn Crucifixion I and Brooklyn Crucifixion II, which show his mother, crucified in the venetian blinds of their apartment, her face split into “Picassoid” thirds, looking to the father, the son, and the street. The works assure Asher’s reputation as a great artist but also assure, because of their religious content, that he will have to leave his Hasidic community in Brooklyn, as he does at the end of the novel. With the tzaddik’s blessing, he goes to Paris to board with a Hasidic family and to continue to worship and define himself as a Hasidic Jew artist.
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Davita’s Harp Type of work: Novel First published: 1985
Potok has written several highly acclaimed novels about American-Jewish life, but he enters new territory when he explores the milieu of areligious Jewish radicals in Davita’s Harp. This is also his first novel in which a young girl is the protagonist. Ilana Davita Chandal’s life has been filled with uncertainty as well as with the love of her radically idealistic parents. Her journalist father Michael has been disowned by his patrician family for both his politics and his marriage to a Jewish woman. Her mother Channah bears the scars of a brutal pogrom and the senseless tragedies of World War I. The horrors of the twentieth century become Ilana’s when Michael is killed during the bombing of Guernica while covering the Spanish Civil War. Then Channah’s closest friend, Jacob Daw, because of his previous membership in the Communist Party, is deported to Adolf Hitler’s Europe, where he dies. Although she does not abandon her parents’ idealism, Ilana needs something more. She first finds comfort in her Aunt Sarah’s Christianity. Later, however, she is attracted to the Orthodox Judaism of her mother’s youth. Channah’s remarriage to a religious cousin completes the family’s return to the Jewish world. In focusing on Ilana, Potok was able to explore the role of women in traditional Judaism. He gives no easy answers. Ilana may be the school valedictorian, but because of her sex she is denied her school’s top prize. Nor does Potok allow the shelter of Judaism to eradicate the pain of Ilana’s tragedies. Through Ilana’s struggle to understand the world and make it a better place, Potok affirms his faith in the ultimate decency of human beings in a novel that is moving in its humanity.
Suggested Readings Abramson, Edward A. Chaim Potok. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Bloom, Harold, ed. Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Shaked, Gershon. “Shadows of Identity: A Comparative Study of German Jewish and American Jewish Literature.” In What Is Jewish Literature?, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. Sternlicht, Sanford. Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985). Walden, Daniel, ed. Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Contributors: Richard Sax and Dan Barnett
Dudley Randall Born: Washington, D.C.; January 14, 1914 Died: Southfield, Michigan; August 5, 2000 African American
Beyond his own poetry, it was as an editor and publisher that Dudley Randall’s literary talents were most significant. Principal works poetry: Poem Counterpoem, 1966 (with Margaret Danner); Cities Burning, 1968; Love You, 1970; More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades, 1971; After the Killing, 1973; A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems, 1981, revised 1983 nonfiction: Broadside Memories: Poets I Have Known, 1975 edited texts: For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, 1967 (with Margaret G. Burroughs); Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, 1969; The Black Poets, 1971; Homage to Hoyt Fuller, 1984 Dudley Randall was one of the most influential black publishers of his time: His refusal to place commercial interests ahead of literary education helped to inform a whole generation of the richness and diversity of black poetic traditions. In doing so, he introduced new African American writers, and he fostered an awareness of the reciprocity between black writers in the United States and Africa. Born in 1914 to Arthur and Ada Randall, Dudley Felker Randall spent his childhood in Washington, D.C., his birthplace, and in East St. Louis. His father was responsible for the young Randall’s awareness of political commitment; he frequently campaigned for blacks seeking political office, and he took Randall with him to hear such speakers as James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois (although Randall reports that at the time he “preferred playing baseball”). Randall’s public education continued when his family moved to Detroit. By this time, he was conscious not only of the political process, but also of black literature. Having first begun to write poetry at the early age of thirteen, Randall purchased a copy of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) when he was sixteen; he was so impressed by Toomer’s precise images and powerful symbolism that Toomer became—and remains—his favorite black poet. By 1930, the time of his graduation from the public school system, also at sixteen, Randall was well read in the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. 906
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After graduation in the midst of the Great Depression, Randall eventually found work as a foundry worker for the Ford Motor Company from 1932 to 1937. Sometime in 1933, he met the poet Robert Hayden, also living in Detroit, with whom he shared his poetry and discussed the major poets of the time. Their exchange of poems and ideas was to help him sharpen his skills and was to remain a mutually enriching friendship for many years. By 1938, Randall had taken a job with the U.S. Post Office as a letter carrier, work he was to continue until 1951, except for his service in the United States Army during World War II as a member of the signal corps in the South Pacific (1942-1946). After returning from military duty, Randall attended Wayne State University and graduated in 1949. While still working for the post office, Randall also managed to complete work for a master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan in 1951. Degree in hand, Randall began his career as a librarian by accepting an appointment with Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, where he remained until 1954. He was promoted to associate librarian when he moved to Baltimore to work for Morgan State College for the next two years. In 1956, he returned to Detroit, where he was to work for the Wayne County Federated Library System until 1969, first as a branch librarian and then as head of the reference and interloan department (1963-1969). Randall’s introduction to several relatively unknown black poets from Detroit at a planning meeting for a special issue of Negro History Bulletin in 1962 led to his determination to see more work by new black poets become available; thus, he became the founding editor of the Broadside Press in 1965. His collaboration with Margaret Danner, who had founded Boone House, a Detroit cultural center, produced his first published book of poems, Poem Counterpoem from Broadside Press (its first publication as well). With the publication of Randall’s second book, Cities Burning, his reputation as a poet and publisher grew, and he doubled as poet-in-residence and reference librarian for the University of Detroit from 1969 to 1975. During this time, he also taught courses in black literature at the university, gave a number of readings, and was involved in conferences and seminars throughout the country. In 1966, Randall, with a delegation of black artists, visited Paris, Prague, and the Soviet Union, where he read his translations and his own poems to Russian audiences. In 1970, Randall visited West Africa, touring Ghana, Togo, and Dahomey, and meeting with African writers. In 1969, aware that many current anthologies excluded or gave only limited representation to black poets, Randall edited and published Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, which brought such omissions to the attention of larger publishing houses in the country. By 1971, a number of anthologies of African American poetry were in circulation, but many of them were seriously flawed by too-narrow criteria for selection. Randall’s The Black Poets enjoyed wide distribution in an inexpensive paperback format and corrected many of the deficiencies of previous black poetry anthologies. Presenting a full range of African American poetry from folklore and spirituals to the Black Nationalist poets of the late 1960’s, the anthology offered a substantial selection from each of its contributors and stressed the continuity of a rich oral tradition while delineating various
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periods in the history of black American poetry. It quickly became one of the most widely read and influential anthologies of its kind. In his critical writings, Randall came to be known as a moderating voice, maintaining respect for poets of earlier periods while accepting the new directions of black poetry since the 1960’s. One important article, “The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties” (The Black Aesthetic, 1971), clearly establishes the vital role of such poets as Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among others who wrote in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. In providing an essential chapter in black literary history, Randall, here and in other essays, countered eloquently the tendency for young black poets in the 1960’s to dismiss gifted, significant writers because they seemed too accommodationist. On the other hand, Randall’s productive generosity in publishing and reviewing introduced a great variety of young black poets to literary America and provided an unparalleled availability of black poetry, in general, not only to the black community but also to the mainstream reading public. Two additional literary forms must be mentioned in assessing Randall’s career: interviews and translations. His insights into literary history, political developments, and his own methods of composition can be found in published interviews. While such interviews are frequently useful in understanding his own work, they are also immensely instructional in the field of African American poetry. Randall’s translations from Russian, Latin, and French are also worthy of note. He published translations from major figures influential on his own poetic sensibilities, from Alexander Pushkin to K. M. Simonov. Translating from the Latin, he has mastered the classical lyricism of Catullus. From Paul Verlaine, Randall assimilated the influence of the French Symbolists. Randall’s work garnered a number of honors. Beginning in 1962, he received the Tompkins Award from Wayne State University for both poetry and fiction, and in 1966, he received the same award for poetry. In recognition of his contributions to black literature, he received the Kuumba Liberation Award in 1973. He was awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships in 1981 and 1986, and was named the first poet laureate of the city of Detroit in 1981. In 1996, Randall received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. After his retirement in 1975, Randall continued his involvement in writing conferences and readings, but he devoted the majority of his time to the Broadside Press and his own writing. Melba Boyd’s well-received documentary film on Randall’s life and work, Black Unicorn, was released in 1996. Randall died of congestive heart failure on August 5, 2000.
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Poem Counterpoem Type of work: Poetry First published: 1966 The polarities of tension in Randall’s poetry seem to be the necessity of personal love and social change. These themes underlie most of his poems, which sometimes focus on the one value while faintly suggesting the other but more often than not are characteristic of a tension between the two. In one early poem from his first book, Poem Counterpoem, Randall reflects on his youthful experience as a foundry worker while he visits an ailing coworker many years later in a hospital. In “George,” the speaker recalls “the monstrous, lumpish cylinder blocks” that too often “clotted the line and plunged to the floor/ With force enough to tear your foot in two.” George’s response to the industrial hazards of the assembly line was to step calmly aside; working side by side with the older man in his younger days, the speaker looked to George as an example of quiet endurance, even though George, “goggled, with mask on [his] mouth and shoulders bright with sweat,” was not particularly articulate in his guidance of the young Randall. George’s “highest accolade,” in fact, following the clean-up of “blocks clogged up” which came “thundering down like an avalanche,” was the gnomic folk expression: “‘You’re not afraid of sweat. You’re strong as a mule.’” As the speaker visits George in a “ward where old men wait to die,” he realizes that George “cannot read the books” brought to him while he sits “among the senile wrecks,/ The psychopaths, the incontinent.” In the transition from the first stanza (set in the past) to the second (set in the present), the long lines of the first (which suggest the rhythm of the assembly line) give way to a shorter line that underscores George’s confinement. When George falls from his chair in the course of the visit, his visitor lifts him back into it “like a cylinder block” and assures him: “‘You’ll be here/ A long time yet, because you’re strong as a mule.’” While the poem relates little more than the memory of assembly line comradeship and the subsequent visit many years later, it suggests a great deal more than that. The sheer physical drudgery of the foundry site is apparent in both imagery and rhythm; George’s quiet but resolute determination to survive the toll of accidents is also implicit, but he survives only to find himself relegated to little more than a warehouse for the aged. Juxtaposed, however, with the dismal irony of George’s fate is Randall’s emphasis on the personal bond of mutual respect between the two men. Just as George encouraged him, the younger man now offers the aging George the same encouragement that he once offered the young worker. George’s persistence in overcoming his fear of death, however, is not enough to restore his dignity. The social conditions must change as well, and that will necessitate formal education; this, too, as Randall’s own biography might suggest, has been an inadvertent gift from the older man. In stressing the personal bond between them and yet not losing sight of their common experience in the workplace, Randall celebrates the endurance of friendship while condemning the dehumanizing factors of the assembly line and the hospital. That
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all of this is expressed in one brief mirrored, metaphorical aphorism suggests that the simple eloquence of the poem itself is, like George, rich beneath its surface.
Cities Burning Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968 Randall’s second book, Cities Burning, focuses on the disintegrating cities during the urban riots and civil struggles of the 1960’s. His observations on social change are not, however, solely the result of the 1960’s, for several of these poems were written much earlier. “Roses and Revolution,” for example, was written in 1948 and attests to Randall’s exploration of the dual themes of personal love and social change long before that tumultuous decade. Hauntingly prophetic, Randall’s apocalyptic poem speaks of “the lighted cities” that “were like tapers in the night.” He sees “the Negro lying in the swamp with his face blown off” and “in northern cities with his manhood maligned.” Men work but take “no joy in their work.” As a result of the inner turmoil caused by prejudice and oppression, love becomes severely distorted; they greet “the hard-eyed whore with joyless excitement” and sleep “with wives and virgins in impotence.” While the poem’s speaker searches for meaningful value “in darkness/ and felt the pain of millions,” he sees “dawn upon them like the sun,” a vision of peace and beauty in which weapons are buried “at the bottom of the ocean/ like the bones of dinosaurs buried under the shale of eras.” Here people “create for others the house, the poem, the game of athletic beauty.” Having described the misery in the first stanza and the vision of deliverance in the second stanza, Randall proceeds to analyze its meaning in the third: “Its radiance would grow and be nourished suddenly/ burst into terrible and splendid bloom/ the bloodred flower of revolution.” As it is for many of the poems in this volume, the title of the collection is somewhat misleading with respect to “Roses and Revolution,” for the city in Cities Burning is humankind and the fires are transforming agents. While acknowledging the violence and destruction as literal events, Randall also sees revolution occurring within the heart of man as well. The real revolution is “not for power or the accumulation of paper,” greed for money, but for a blossoming of love that can occur when the black American no longer feels “the writhing/ of his viscera like that of the hare hunted down or the bear at bay.” The symbolic rose no longer holds its power for transformation unless it is “blood-red” in its “terrible and splendid bloom,” for Randall does not sentimentalize love at the expense of the political process. In “Ballad of Birmingham,” for example, Randall dramatically presents a dialogue between a black mother, who fears for her daughter’s safety and forbids her to “march the streets of Birmingham/ to make our country free,” and the girl herself, who is willing to risk the “clubs and hoses, guns and jails” in order to assert her rights. Obeying her mother, the daughter goes “to church instead” to “sing in the
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children’s choir” rather than join the other children in the freedom march. The historical event on which the ballad is based was the bombing of a black church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963, when four teenage girls were murdered in a dynamite explosion while they were attending a Bible class. When the mother hears the explosion, she rushes to the scene of the violence; although she claws “through bits of glass and brick,” she finds only a shoe: “O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,/ but, baby, where are you?” Her protective reluctance to become involved in the Civil Rights struggle, although understandable, has failed to preserve her loving security for her daughter or even her daughter herself. Despite the elegiac ballad form, Randall’s dramatic irony here is politically and personally potent: Love cannot hide from death in the pursuit of freedom; it must risk it. Randall, however, is unwilling to endorse violence for its own sake—in revolution or in literature. In “The Rite” and in “Black Poet, White Critic,” he addresses, respectively, both the young militant black poet who would annihilate the pioneers of the black literary tradition and the white critic who would deny that such a tradition even existed. The young poet in “The Rite” murders an older poet, whom he views as reactionary, but in sacrificing him to the new revolutionary program, the young poet ritually “drank his blood and ate his heart,” thus drawing his revolutionary sustenance from his forebears without conscious knowledge of doing so. That the older writer provides continuing life for the younger one—and is conscious of that fact—not only endorses the persistence of the political struggle, but also establishes a political context for black literature that reaches back to protest elements in the slave songs. The struggle is nothing new to Randall’s generation, or to those generations before him; yet the older poet is quite willing to offer his life in order to broaden the continuity of that protest. On the other hand, Randall challenges—in “Black Poet, White Critic”—the establishment critic who “advises/ not to write on controversial subjects/ like freedom or murder” to reexamine his own critical premises. The critic suggests “universal themes/ and timeless symbols/ like the white unicorn,” to which Randall responds: “A white unicorn?” Refusing to deny his own heritage and experience as a black man, he realizes that the argument is bogus in any context: The timeless drama of Sophocles or William Shakespeare can hardly be said to ignore freedom and murder. Randall, then, implies that the critic who so blatantly misreads his own literary tradition fears not so much a lack of quality on the part of black poets as the fulfillment of that advice on “universal themes” and “timeless symbols” that would indict the critic’s own racism and shoddy intellect as a result of that racism. Black poets might, indeed, write too well.
Suggested Readings Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Melhem, D. H. “Dudley Randall: A Humanist View.” Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983).
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Randall, Dudley. “The Message Is in the Melody: An Interview with Dudley Randall.” Interview by Leana Ampadu. Callaloo 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1999): 438445. Thompson, Julius Eric. Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999. Waters, Mark V. “Dudley Randall and the Liberation Aesthetic: Confronting the Politics of ‘Blackness.’” CLA Journal 44, no. 1 (September, 2000). Contributors: Michael Loudon and Leslie Ellen Jones
John Rechy Born: El Paso, Texas; March 10, 1934 Mexican American
Rechy explores the intersection of Chicano, gay, and Roman Catholic identities in his autobiographical fiction. Principal works drama: Momma as She Became—Not as She Was, pr. 1978; Tigers Wild, pr. 1986 long fiction: City of Night, 1963; Numbers, 1967; This Day’s Death, 1970; The Vampires, 1971; The Fourth Angel, 1972; Rushes, 1979; Bodies and Souls, 1983; Marilyn’s Daughter, 1988; The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, 1991; Our Lady of Babylon, 1996; The Coming of the Night, 1999; The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, 2003 nonfiction: Beneath the Skin: The Collected Essays of John Rechy, 2005; About My Life and the Kept Woman: An Autobiographical Memoir, 2008 miscellaneous: The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, a Non-fiction Account, with Commentaries, of Three Days and Nights in the Sexual Underground, 1977, revised 1985 With the publication of his first novel, City of Night, John Rechy (REH-chee) commenced a lifelong process of self-analysis. “My life,” Rechy stated, “is so intertwined with my writing that I almost live it as if it were a novel.” In particular, Rechy examines the ways in which gay sexuality, Chicano and European American heritages, and the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church struggle and sometimes harmonize with one another despite incompatibilities. Rechy writes what he calls “autobiography as fiction” in order to construct parables of spiritual salvation and damnation. Alternately remote from or near to God, family, and human connection, Rechy’s protagonists struggle against self-absorption and the fear of death. Rechy’s parents immigrated to the southwestern United States during the Mexican Revolution. Rechy grew up torn between his father’s stern sense of defeat in the face of anti-Mexican discrimination and his mother’s intense protection of her son. The combination of his father’s Scottish heritage and his mother’s traditional Mexican background made Rechy intensely aware of his status as a person of mixed ancestry in the El Paso of his youth. Conflicts and pressures at home caused him to move into a narcissistic remoteness that found comfort in the emotional distance of purchased sex. Wandering the country after high school, Rechy worked as a male prostitute in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans. These experiences as a hustler 913
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became the material for City of Night. This first-person narrative of sexual and spiritual salvation combines an unapologetic depiction of the sexual underground. The work features a sympathetic protagonist’s search for ultimate connection and caring. Set against either the urban indifference of Los Angeles or the unforgiving landscape of the desert Southwest, Rechy’s novels explore the thematic connections between sex, soul, and self. In subsequent works—in particular, This Day’s Death and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez—Rechy has extended his explorations of the spirit to the particulars of Chicano family and culture. Rechy’s autobiographical fictions chart the intersections of ethnic, sexual, regional, and religious identities. He journeys across the Southwestern landscape, through sex and spirit, along the night streets of Los Angeles, and through his own memories of growing up in El Paso.
City of Night Type of work: Novel First published: 1963 Based on the author’s experiences, City of Night explores sexuality and spirituality as they develop during the protagonist’s quest for salvation. Combining Chicano heritage, autobiographical material, and a poetic rendering of the restless loneliness of America’s sexual underground, City of Night—Rechy’s first and bestknown novel—investigates difficulties and rewards of an individual’s search to claim the many identities that intersect in a single life. The unnamed protagonist’s “journey through nightcities and nightlives—looking for . . . some substitute for salvation” begins with his childhood in El Paso, Texas. Rechy draws on stark, lonely imagery (the fiercely unforgiving wind, the father’s inexplicable hatred of his son, the mother’s hungry love) to portray a childhood and adolescence denied any sense of connection and certainty. Disconnected and detached from his home, the protagonist stands before the mirror confusing identity with isolation. He asserts a narcissistic removal from the world (“I have only me!”) that his quest at first confirms, then refutes. The first-person narrative chronicles the protagonist’s wanderings through New York City, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans. For Rechy, these various urban settings are “one vast City of Night” fused into the “unmistakable shape of loneliness.” Working as a male prostitute, the protagonist navigates this landscape, portraying the types of sexual and spiritual desperation he encounters along the way. His journey is a pilgrimage first away from home and then back to it, as he accepts the possibility that he might come to terms with his family, his childhood, and himself. City of Night interweaves chapters that describe the geographies of the cities the protagonist passes through with chapters that portray people condemned to these dark cities. Sometimes humorous, sometimes bitter, sometimes indifferent, these
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portraits of people trapped in the loneliness and cruelty of the cities mirror the protagonist’s quest. He is like and unlike the denizens of this world. In New Orleans during Mardi Gras, the protagonist encounters and rejects his first sincere invitation to love: the “undiscovered country which may not even exist and which I was too frightened even to attempt to discover.” This invitation nevertheless triggers the narrator’s search for redemption and salvation. The memory of his rejection of Jeremy’s love haunts him. Caught up in the festivity of the carnival, surrounded by masked revelers and cathedrals, the protagonist affirms the possibility for change. He returns to El Paso. Exposed to the West Texas wind, “an echo of angry childhood,” the protagonist acknowledges uncertainty, the need for hope, and renewal. Rechy leaves the culmination of this search unresolved, a matter of existential selfdefinition. Combining ethnic, sexual, and spiritual identities, City of Night establishes important themes that Rechy explores in greater depth in later works. City of Night represents a pioneering look at the interdependency of multiple identities in an individual’s search for meaning.
This Day’s Death Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 This Day’s Death, Rechy’s third novel, explores Chicano identity and gay sexuality. Unlike other novels by Rechy, however, This Day’s Death does not initially embody the two identities in one complex character. Instead, the novel shuttles— like its protagonist—between two identities (Chicano and gay) in two separate and yet interdependent situations (El Paso and Los Angeles). Known for acknowledging the autobiographical origins of his fiction, Rechy skillfully illustrates how identities develop, sometimes demanding a person’s attention despite that person’s effort of will to ignore or deny a given identity. West Texas and Los Angeles are two poles of identity for Rechy; the one is bound up with his Chicano upbringing and his family, the other with sexual freedom and discovery. As the novel opens, Jim Girard is not gay. He has a fiancée and a promising career in law. His arrest on a lewd conduct charge is a mistake. He keeps his ongoing prosecution on that charge a secret from his mother, who is ill in El Paso. In the course of the novel, Jim recalls his Chicano upbringing. Jim also acknowledges and acts on previously unacknowledged desires for other men. Thus, he gradually becomes gay and Chicano, an embodiment of a complex intersection of identities and an opportunity for Rechy to explore the intertwined roots of self. Bound up with guilt, pretense, and hypochondria, Girard’s “terrible love” for his mother ties him to a childhood and a life that he recognizes as familiar but loathes. He knows that “she will brand each such day with memories he will carry like deep cuts forever.” Like other mother-son relationships in Rechy’s fiction, the relationship between Girard and his mother is an intense, stifling entanglement of need and
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rejection. Rechy utilizes the West Texas landscape (the wind, the sky, the desert) to impart a sense of loneliness and austerity that surrounds and amplifies Girard’s life with his mother. This love-hate relationship becomes the foundation of the novel, ironically suggesting that identity is inextricably connected to relationship rather than to the isolation that Girard maintains at the beginning of the novel. This Day’s Death is an ironic coming-out story in which circumstances collude to reveal a gay man to himself. Found guilty of the crime, and therefore unable to pursue his career, Jim returns to the park where he was arrested and finds himself accepting, even celebrating desires he never before acknowledged. On one level, the novel advocates social reform, depicting an innocent man convicted of a crime that is not really criminal. On another level, This Day’s Death is an analysis of the personal and bittersweet complex of experiences from which identities arise. This Day’s Death acknowledges identities and their complexity. To be Chicano and gay is a burdensome and miraculous combination. Girard’s relationship with his mother and whatever relationships he develops from his newly accepted desires will be tinged with joy and sadness, liberation and obligation. “The terrible love left empty” once his mother dies will be a necessary, affirming fact of having cared for his mother.
The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens Type of work: Novel First published: 2003 There is always more than a touch of the picaresque in Rechy’s novels. City of Night and Numbers are episodic romps through an erotic underworld many readers had never experienced in legitimate fiction before. Certainly the subject matter is arresting (the graphic depictions of homosexual encounters and the dubious terrain of male prostitution); but it really was the pace of if all that created the energy, that driving, obsessive pull of sex reflected in the rush of events, the parade of characters, the breathless narrative. That same energy characterizes Rechy’s The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, another characteristic account of a young man’s journey in search of love and identity. Readers will surely be tempted to compare Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)— an understandable, even irresistible temptation, because The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens consciously harks back to that “rollicking” eighteenth century narrative of a bastard who takes to the road, fighting past the obstacles of a society stacked against him to emerge his own man. It is the perennial story of the outsider, the innocent eye through which the hypocrisy and affectation of contemporary society are registered and exposed. Like Fielding, Rechy embraces this traditional material with gusto and great invention. In this new version there is Lyle Clemens, the beautiful if troubled Texas youth “who would grow up to become the Mystery Cowboy who appeared naked along Hollywood Boulevard.” Before that quintessentially Californian apotheosis, however, he must flee his mother, a bundle
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of mysteries and madness who schemes to turn her son into the cowboy father he never knew. He must flee the rapacious Texas fundamentalists who scheme to turn him into the Lord’s Cowboy, exploiting him to beef up their evangelical network. And he must flee the aging actress, Tara Worth, who schemes to turn him into her own fantasy cowboy and the vehicle of her Hollywood comeback. Lyle escapes them all, though not in a way readers might expect. As was Tom Jones, he has been the instrument for unmasking hypocrisy and unleashing love, and in the process he has found himself. Rechy tells the tale with his patented raw honesty, the tawdry urban landscapes of Las Vegas and Los Angeles neatly skewered in language that is at once powerful and funny. It is this comic touch that seems new; targets are punctured and charlatans exposed with wonderful ferocity, but there is a hilarity to the book that comes down firmly on the side of life in spite of all its deception and double-dealing. It is as if Rechy has resurrected not only Fielding’s elaborate plot but his ebullient good humor as well.
Suggested Readings Bredbeck, Gregory W. “John Rechy.” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Casillo, Charles. Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy. Los Angeles: Advocate Books, 2002. Minority Voices 3 (Fall, 1979). Nelson, E. S. “John Rechy, James Baldwin, and the American Double Minority Literature.” Journal of American Culture 6 (Summer, 1983). Ortiz, Ricardo. “L.A. Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy.” Literature and Psychology 44 (1998). _______. “Sexuality Degree Zero.” Journal of Homosexuality 26 (August/September, 1993). Rechy, John. Interview by Debra Castillo. Diacritics 25 (Spring, 1995). Steuervogel, T. “Contemporary Homosexual Fiction and the Gay Rights Movement.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (Winter, 1986). Contributor: Daniel M. Scott III
Ishmael Reed Born: Chattanooga, Tennessee; February 22, 1938 African American, Native American
Reed has created a rich, unique literary synthesis from such diverse elements as African folktales, Caribbean ritual, and European culture. Principal works long fiction: The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 1967; Yellow Back Radio BrokeDown, 1969; Mumbo Jumbo, 1972; The Last Days of Louisiana Red, 1974; Flight to Canada, 1976; The Terrible Twos, 1982; Reckless Eyeballing, 1986; The Terrible Threes, 1989; Japanese by Spring, 1993 poetry: Catechism of D Neoamerican Hoodoo Church, 1970; Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970, 1972; Chattanooga, 1973; A Secretary to the Spirits, 1977; Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon, 1986; New and Collected Poems, 1988 nonfiction: Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978; God Made Alaska for the Indians, 1982; Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper, 1988; Airing Dirty Laundry, 1993; Conversations with Ishmael Reed, 1995; Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War, 2002 (essays); Blues City: A Walk in Oakland, 2003 edited texts: Nineteen Necromancers from Now, 1970; Yardbird Lives!, 1978 (with Al Young); Calafia: The California Poetry, 1979 (with Young and Shawn Hsu Wong); The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990, 1992 (with Kathryn Trueblood and Wong); MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, 1997; From Totems to Hip-Hop, 2003 miscellaneous: The Reed Reader, 2000 The writing of Ishmael Reed (IHSH-may-ehl reed) can be said to mirror his own multiethnic descent, which includes African American, Native American, and Irish. His stepfather, Bennie Stephen Reed (an autoworker), later adopted him. He married Priscilla Rose in 1960; they were divorced in 1970. Reed has two children—Timothy and Brett—from his first marriage and a daughter, Tennessee Maria, from his second. Early in his life his family moved to Buffalo, New York. He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1956 to 1960 but was not graduated. He has published books of essays and poetry, but he is primarily known as a novelist. He has edited two multicultural anthologies: Nineteen Necromancers from 918
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Now (1970) and Calafia (1979). He moved to Berkeley, California, where he taught at the University of California, and he served as a visiting professor or writer-inresidence at many other schools. Reed’s first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, shows most of the elements for which his writing is known. It is the wildly picaresque and often scatological tale of the adventures of an African American, Bukka Doopeyduk, in Harry Sam, a city that reflects and exaggerates the most repressive aspects of Christian, European culture. Reed’s best-known novel, Mumbo Jumbo, uses the conventions of the detective story. PaPa LaBas—whose name, typically for Reed, refers to the Voodoo god Papa Legba and French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans’s decadent novel Là-Bas (1891; Down There, 1924)—investigates an alleged plague called Jes Grew, which turns out to be spontaneous joy, opposed to the grim power structure of monotheistic European culture. Reed is widely praised for his style, his imaginative story construction, and his masterly use of elements from many cultural backgrounds, but he is often attacked by African American and feminist critics. He has continually satirized other African Americans, especially in The Last Days of Louisiana Red, in which he refers to many of them as “Moochers.” His criticisms of feminism, most notably in Reckless Eyeballing, are widely considered to be misogynistic. Japanese by Spring satirizes the politics of the university.
The Free-Lance Pallbearers Type of work: Novel First published: 1967 Reed’s first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, takes place in a futuristic America called Harry Sam: “a big not-to-be-believed out-of-sight, sometimes referred to as O-BOP-SHE-BANG or KLANG-A-LANG-A-DING-DONG.” This crumbling and corrupt world is tyrannized by Sam himself, a vulgar fat man who lives in Sam’s Motel on Sam’s Island in the middle of the lethally polluted Black Bay that borders Harry Sam. Sam, doomed by some terrifying gastrointestinal disorder, spends all of his time on the toilet, his filth pouring into the bay from several large statues of Rutherford B. Hayes. The bulk of the novel, although framed and periodically informed by a jiving narrative voice, is narrated by Bukka Doopeyduk in a restrained, proper English that identifies his passive faith in the establishment. Doopeyduk is a dedicated adherent to the Nazarene Code, an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, a student at Harry Sam College, and a hapless victim. His comically futile efforts to play by the rules are defeated by the cynics, who manipulate the unjust system to their own advantage. In the end, Doopeyduk is disillusioned: He leads a successful attack on Sam’s Island, uncovers the conspiracy that protects Sam’s cannibalism, briefly dreams of becoming the black Sam, and is finally crucified.
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The Free-Lance Pallbearers is a parody of the African American tradition of first-person, confessional narratives, a book the narrator describes as “growing up in soulsville first of three installments—or what it means to be a backstage darky.” Reed’s novel challenges the viability of this African American version of the bildungsroman, in which a young protagonist undergoes a painful initiation into the darkness of the white world, a formula exemplified by Richard Wright’s Black Boy and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In fact, the novel suggests that African American authors’ use of this European form is as disabling as Doopeyduk’s adherence to the dictates of the Nazarene Code. The novel is an unrestrained attack on U.S. politics in the 1960’s. Ishmael Reed (AP/Wide World Photos) Harry Sam, alternately referred to as “Nowhere” or “Now Here,” is a dualistic vision of a United States that celebrates vacuous contemporaneity. The novel, an inversion of the Horatio Alger myth in the manner of Nathanael West, mercilessly displays American racism, but its focus is the corruptive potential of power. Sam is a grotesque version of President Lyndon B. Johnson, famous for his bathroom interviews, and Sam’s cannibalistic taste for children is an attack on Johnson’s Vietnam War policy. With The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Reed destroys the presumptions of his society, but it is not until his later novels that he attempts to construct an alternative.
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down Type of work: Novel First published: 1969 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is set in a fantastic version of the Wild West of popular literature. Reed’s protagonist, the Loop Garoo Kid, is a proponent of artistic freedom and an accomplished Voodoo houngan who is in marked contrast to the continually victimized Doopeyduk. Armed with supernatural “connaissance” and aided by a white python and the hip, helicopter-flying Chief Showcase, the Kid bat-
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tles the forces of realistic mimesis and political corruption. His villainous opponent is Drag Gibson, a degenerate cattle baron given to murdering his wives, who is called upon by the citizens of Yellow Back Radio to crush their rebellious children’s effort “to create [their] own fictions.” Although Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down satirizes Americans’ eagerness to suspend civil rights in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, its focus is literature, specifically the dialogue between realism and modernism. The Loop Garoo Kid matches Reed’s description of the African American artist in Nineteen Necromancers from Now: “a conjurer who works JuJu upon his oppressors; a witch doctor who frees his fellow victims from the psychic attack launched by demons.” Through the Loop Garoo Kid, Reed takes a stand for imagination, intelligence, and fantasy against rhetoric, violence, and sentimentality. This theme is made explicit in a debate with Bo Shmo, a “neo-social realist” who maintains that “all art must be for the end of liberating the masses,” for the Kid says that a novel “can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” Reed exhibits his antirealist theory of fiction in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down through his free use of time, characters, and language. The novel ranges from the eighteenth century to the 1960’s, combining historical events and cowboy myths with modern technology and cultural detritus. Reed’s primary characters are comically exaggerated racial types: Drag Gibson represents the whites’ depraved materialism, Chief Showcase represents the American Indians’ spirituality, and the Loop Garoo Kid represents the African Americans’ artistic soul. Reed explains the novel’s title by suggesting that his book is the “dismantling of a genre done in an oral way like radio.” “Yellow back” refers to the popular dime novels; “radio” refers to the novel’s oral, discontinuous form; and “broke-down” is a dismantling. Thus, Reed’s first two novels assault America in an attempt to “dismantle” its cultural structure.
Mumbo Jumbo Type of work: Novel First published: 1972 In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed expands on the neo-hoodooism of the Loop Garoo Kid in order to create and define an African American aesthetic based on Voodoo, Egyptian mythology, and improvisational musical forms, an aesthetic to challenge the Judeo-Christian tradition, rationalism, and technology. Set in Harlem during the 1920’s, Mumbo Jumbo is a tragicomical analysis of the Harlem Renaissance’s failure to sustain its artistic promise. Reed’s protagonist is PaPa LaBas, an aging hoodoo detective and cultural diagnostician, and LaBas’s name, meaning “over there” in French, reveals that his purpose is to reconnect African Americans with their cultural heritage by reunifying the Text of Jes Grew, literally the Egyptian Book of Thoth. Reed takes the phrase Jes Grew from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy and
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James Weldon Johnson’s description of African American music’s unascribed development, but in the novel, Jes Grew is a contagion, connected with the improvisational spirit of ragtime and jazz, that begins to spread across America in the 1920’s. Jes Grew is an irrational force that threatens to overwhelm the dominant, repressive traditions of established culture. LaBas’s efforts to unify and direct this unpredictable force are opposed by the Wallflower Order of the Knights Templar, an organization dedicated to neutralizing the power of Jes Grew in order to protect its privileged status. LaBas fails to reunify the text, a parallel to the dissipation of the Harlem Renaissance’s artistic potential, but the failure is seen as temporary; the novel’s indeterminate conclusion looks forward to a time when these artistic energies can be reignited. The novel’s title is double-edged. “Mumbo jumbo” is a racist, colonialist phrase used to describe the misunderstood customs and language of dark-skinned people, an approximation of some critics’ description of Reed’s unorthodox fictional method. Yet “mumbo jumbo” also refers to the power of imagination, the cultural alternative that can free African Americans. A text of and about texts, Mumbo Jumbo combines the formulas of detective fiction with the documentary paraphernalia of scholarship: footnotes, illustrations, and a bibliography. Thus, in the disclosure scene required of any good detective story, LaBas, acting the part of interlocutor, provides a lengthy and erudite explication of the development of Jes Grew that begins with a reinterpretation of the myth of Osiris. The parodic scholarship of Mumbo Jumbo undercuts the assumed primacy of the European tradition and implicitly argues that African American artists should attempt to discover their distinct cultural heritage.
The Last Days of Louisiana Red Type of work: Novel First published: 1974 In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, LaBas returns as Reed’s protagonist, but the novel abandons the parodic scholarship and high stylization of Mumbo Jumbo. Although LaBas again functions as a connection with a non-European tradition of history and myth, The Last Days of Louisiana Red is more traditionally structured than its predecessor. In the novel, LaBas solves the murder of Ed Yellings, the founder of the Solid Gumbo Works. Yellings’s business is dedicated to combating the effects of Louisiana Red, literally a popular hot sauce but figuratively an evil state of mind that divides African Americans. Yelling’s gumbo, like Reed’s fiction, is a mixture of disparate elements, and it has a powerful curative effect. In fact, LaBas discovers that Yellings is murdered when he gets close to developing a gumbo that will cure heroin addiction. In The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Reed is examining the self-destructive forces that divide the African American community so that its members fight one another “while above their heads . . . billionaires flew in custom-made jet planes.”
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Reed shows how individuals’ avarice leads them to conspire with the establishment, and he suggests that some of the most vocal and militant leaders are motivated by their egotistical need for power rather than by true concern for oppressed people. Set in Berkeley, California, The Last Days of Louisiana Red attacks the credibility of the black revolutionary movements that sprang up in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Flight to Canada Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Flight to Canada, Reed’s fifth novel, is set in an imaginatively redrawn Civil War South, and it describes the relationship between Arthur Swille, a tremendously wealthy Virginia planter who practices necrophilia, and an assortment of sociologically stereotyped slaves. The novel is presented as the slave narrative of Uncle Robin, the most loyal of Swille’s possessions. Uncle Robin repeatedly tells Swille that the plantation is his idea of heaven, and he assures his master that he does not believe that Canada exists. Raven Quickskill, “the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write, and the first to run away,” is the author of Uncle Robin’s story. Like much of Reed’s work, Flight to Canada is about the liberating power of art, but in Flight to Canada, Reed concentrates on the question of authorial control. All the characters struggle to maintain control of their stories. After escaping from the plantation, Quickskill writes a poem, “Flight to Canada,” and his comical verse denunciation of Swille completes his liberation. In complaining of Quickskill’s betrayal to Abraham Lincoln, Swille laments that his former bookkeeper uses literacy “like that old Voodoo.” In a final assertion of authorial control and the power of the pen, Uncle Robin refuses to sell his story to Harriet Beecher Stowe, gives the rights to Quickskill, rewrites Swille’s will, and inherits the plantation.
God Made Alaska for the Indians Type of work: Essays First published: 1982 God Made Alaska for the Indians, a collection of essays, manages to pack into its 130 pages many of the widely varied interests of one of the most interesting multicultural figures on the American literary scene. Reed is primarily thought of as an African American writer, but he is also very aware of his Native American ancestry. This dual viewpoint informs the title essay, a lengthy account of political and legal conflicts over the use of Alaskan lands. Reed sympathizes with the Sitka Tlingit Indians, but he realizes that the question is complicated, with other tribes
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opposing them. As always, Reed is critical of the white establishment, and he demonstrates that supposedly benign conservationist forces such as the Sierra Club can be as uncaring of the interests and customs of the indigenous population as any profit-maddened capitalist corporation. An afterword informs the reader that the Sitka Tlingits finally won. “The Fourth Ali” covers the second fight between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks, late in Ali’s career. There is little description of the actual fight, and one learns little more than that Ali won. Reed emphasizes the fight as spectacle, describing the followers, the hangers-on, and Ali’s near-mythic role. In the brief “How Not to Get the Infidel to Talk the King’s Talk,” Reed demolishes the theory that the supposed linguistic flaws of black English keep African Americans from social advancement by pointing to the success of such verbally challenged European Americans as Gerald R. Ford and Nelson A. Rockefeller. “Black Macho, White Macho” attacks some of the male-supremacist views Reed has been accused of holding, pointing out that such views are particularly dangerous in those with access to atomic weapons. “Race War in America?” makes some strong points about racial attitudes in the United States, in the then-pressing context of worry about the minority government in South Africa. In “Black Irishman” Reed, who has always refused to consider himself anything but an African American, looks at his Irish ancestry. Perhaps the most interesting essay in the book is the last, “American Poetry: Is There a Center?” Reed recounts the controversies over a poetry center set up in Colorado by an Asian religious leader. The center’s supporters made claims that it represented a focal point of all that is good in American poetry. Reed replies with his uncompromising view that the genius of American art can be found in the works of all races and cultures.
The Terrible Twos Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 In The Terrible Twos, Reed uses a contemporary setting to attack Ronald Reagan’s administration and the exploitative nature of the American economic system. In the novel, President Dean Clift, a former model, is a mindless figurehead manipulated by an oil cartel that has supplanted the real Santa Claus. Nance Saturday, another of Reed’s African American detectives, sets out to discover Saint Nicholas’s place of exile. The novel’s title suggests that, in its second century, the United States is acting as selfishly and irrationally as the proverbial two-year-old. The central theme is the manner in which a few avaricious people seek vast wealth at the expense of the majority of Americans.
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Reckless Eyeballing Type of work: Novel First published: 1986 Reckless Eyeballing takes place in the 1980’s, and Reed employs a string of comically distorted characters to present the idea that the American literary environment is dominated by New York women and Jews. Although Reckless Eyeballing has been called sexist and anti-Semitic by some, Reed’s target is a cultural establishment that creates and strengthens racial stereotypes, in particular the view of African American men as savage rapists. To make his point, however, he lampoons feminists, using the character Tremonisha Smarts, a female African American author who has written a novel of violence against women. Reed’s satire is probably intended to remind readers of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Because the novel’s central subject is art and the limitations that society places on an artist, it is appropriate that Reed once again employs the technique of a storywithin-a-story. Ian Ball, an unsuccessful African American playwright, is the novel’s protagonist. In the novel, Ball tries to succeed by shamelessly placating the feminists in power. He writes “Reckless Eyeballing,” a play in which a lynched man is posthumously tried for “raping” a woman with lecherous stares, but Ball, who often seems to speak for Reed, maintains his private, chauvinistic views throughout.
New and Collected Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1988 Reed is primarily known as a novelist. Most critical works about him deal with his fiction, and the leading books about contemporary African American poetry mention him only in passing. His poetry, however, repays reading and study—for the light it casts on his novels, for its treatment of the Hoodoo religion, and for the same verbal facility and breadth of reference that is praised in his fiction. New and Collected Poems includes the earlier works Conjure (1972), Chattanooga (1973), and A Secretary to the Spirits (1977). Conjure, Reed’s first and longest book of poems, is a mixed bag. Filled with typographical tricks that Reed later all but abandoned, it also has moments of striking wit, such as the comparison of the poet to a fading city in “Man or Butterfly” or the two views of “history” in “Dualism: In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Conjure largely deals with the Hoodoo religion, Reed’s idiosyncratic combination of ancient Egyptian and contemporary North American elements with the Caribbean religion of vodun, or Voodoo, itself a mix of Yoruba and Christian elements. In “The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” Reed invokes American musicians, from jazz and blues greats to white rock and rollers, as exemplars of a religious approach
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based on creativity and bodily pleasure. Hoodoo is polytheistic, excluding only those gods who claim hegemony over the others. Reed’s main disagreement with vodun springs from its acceptance of the “dangerous paranoid pain in the neck . . . cop-god from the git-go, Jeho-vah.” The history of Hoodoo is outlined in Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Its view of all time as synchronous informs the setting of Flight to Canada (1976), in which airplanes coexist with plantation slavery, but the fullest expression of Hoodoo’s spirit and aesthetic is given in Conjure. Chattanooga is named for Reed’s hometown, and the title poem is a paean to the area where Reed grew up and its multicultural heritage. “Railroad Bill, a Conjure Man” is a charming account of how the hero of an old-fashioned trickster tale deals with Hollywood. A Secretary to the Spirits is a short book with a few impressive works in it, notably, the first poem, “Pocodonia,” expanding what seems to have been a traditional blues song into something far more complex and strange. The work since A Secretary to the Spirits appears in the last section of New and Collected Poems, “Points of View.” The quality is mixed, but the outrage and the wit that characterize so much of Reed’s work can be found in this last section, as in “I’m Running for the Office of Love.”
The Terrible Threes Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 The Terrible Threes, a sequel to The Terrible Twos, continues Reed’s satirical attack on the contemporary capitalist system, which, he argues, puts the greatest economic burden on the least privileged. (Reed was also planning a third book in the series, The Terrible Fours.) In the first book, there appears a character named Black Peter—an assistant to St. Nicholas in European legend. This Black Peter is an imposter, however, a Rastafarian who studied and appropriated the legend for himself. In The Terrible Threes, the true Black Peter emerges to battle the false Peter but is distracted from his mission by the need to do good deeds. Black Peter becomes wildly popular because of these deeds, but a jealous St. Nick and concerned toy companies find a way to put Santa Claus back on top. Capitalism wins again.
Japanese by Spring Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 Japanese by Spring is postmodern satire. Like much of Reed’s imaginative work, the book mixes fictional characters with “fictionalized” ones. Reed himself is a character in the book, with his own name. The protagonist of Japanese by Spring is Benjamin “Chappie” Puttbutt, a teacher of English and literature at Oakland’s Jack London College. Chappie dabbled in activist politics in the mid-1960’s, but his
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only concern in the 1990’s is receiving tenure and the perks that accompany it. He will put up with virtually anything, including racist insults from students, to avoid hurting his chances at tenure. As in many of Reed’s books, Chappie is passive in the face of power at the beginning of his story. He is a middle-class black conservative, but only because the climate at Jack London demands it. Chappie is a chameleon who always matches his behavior to the ideology of his environment. However, when he is denied tenure and is about to be replaced by a feminist poet who is more flash than substance, Chappie’s hidden anger begins to surface. Chappie has also been studying Japanese with a tutor named Dr. Yamato. This proves fortuitous when the Japanese buy Jack London and Dr. Yamato becomes the college president. Chappie suddenly finds himself in a position of power and gloats over those who denied him tenure. He soon finds, however, that his new bosses are the same as the old ones. Dr. Yamato is a tyrant and is eventually arrested by a group that includes Chappie’s father, a two-star Air Force general. Dr. Yamato is released, though, and a surprised Chappie learns that there is an “invisible government” that truly controls the United States. Chappie has pierced some of his illusions, but there are others that he never penetrates, such as his blindness to his own opportunism. The novel’s conclusion moves away from Chappie’s point of view to that of a fictionalized Reed. This Reed skewers political correctness but also shows that the people who complain the most about it are often its greatest purveyors. Reed also lampoons American xenophobia, particularly toward Japan, but he does so in a balanced manner that does not gloss over Japanese faults. Ultimately, though, Reed uses Japanese by Spring as he used other novels before, to explore art and politics and the contradictions of America and race.
Suggested Readings Boyer, Jay. Ishmael Reed. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1993. Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Dick, Bruce, and Pavel Zemliansky, eds. The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-Modern Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delaney. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Reed, Ishmael. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Edited by Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Weisenburger, Steven. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Contributors: Arthur D. Hlavaty, Carl Brucker, and Charles A. Gramlich
Adrienne Rich Born: Baltimore, Maryland; May 16, 1929 Jewish
Rich is an articulate, conscious, and critical explorer of such subjects as feminism and lesbianism. Principal works poetry: A Change of World, 1951; The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems, 1955; Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 1963; Necessities of Life, 1966; Selected Poems, 1967; Leaflets, 1969; The Will to Change, 1971; Diving into the Wreck, 1973; Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974, 1975; Twenty-one Love Poems, 1976; The Dream of a Common Language, 1978; A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981, 1981; Sources, 1983; The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984, 1984; Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986; Time’s Power: Poems, 1985-1988, 1989; An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991, 1991; Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970, 1993; Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995, 1995; Selected Poems, 1950-1995, 1996; Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998, 1999; Fox: Poems, 1998-2000, 2001; The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000-2004, 2004; Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems, 2004-2006, 2007 nonfiction: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 1976; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978, 1979; Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985, 1986; What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993; Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, 2001; Poetry and Commitment: An Essay, 2007 edited texts: The Best American Poetry, 1996, 1996; Selected Poems/Muriel Rukeyser, 2004 miscellaneous: Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, 1993 (Barbara Chartesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, editors) As a child, Adrienne Rich was encouraged to write poetry by her father. At Radcliffe College, she continued to study the formal craft of poetry as practiced and taught by male teachers. In 1951, Rich’s first volume of poetry, A Change of World, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Rich was praised as a fine poet and as a modest young woman who respected her elders. The poems in her first two collections are traditional in form, modeled on the male poets Rich studied. At twenty-four, Rich married a Harvard professor. She had three children by the time she was thirty. The conflict between the traditional roles of mother and 928
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wife and her professional accomplishments left her frustrated. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law begins to express a woman’s point of view. Rich moved to New York City in 1966 and became involved in civil rights and antiwar campaigns. In 1969, she separated from her husband, who committed suicide in 1970. During the 1970’s, Rich became a radical feminist, active in the women’s rights movement. The collections published during these years express these political themes. Rich came out as a lesbian in 1976, and her collection The Dream of a Common Language includes explicitly lesbian poems. In the early 1980’s, she moved to western Massachusetts with her companion, Michelle Cliff. Her essays and poetry with political themes were sometimes criticized as more didactic than artful. Rich continued to evolve politically and artistically. She moved to California, writing and teaching at Stanford University. Her books published in the 1990’s confront the relationship of poetry and politics and issues of contemporary American life. Rich’s life and work have sought to balance the conflicting demands of poetry, which is her vocation, with the ideology of engagement that her life has brought to her art. Most critics have characterized her work as an artistic expression of feminist politics. Some critics feel that the politics overwhelm the lyricism of her art. It is generally accepted, however, that she is an important voice in political and artistic issues, and perhaps the most important poetic voice of twentieth century feminism.
Poetry Rich’s poetry traces the growth of a conscious woman in the second half of the twentieth century. Her first two books, A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters (1955), contain verses of finely crafted, imitative forms, strongly influenced by the modernist poets. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law is a transitional work in which Rich begins to express a woman’s concerns. Her form loosens as well; she begins to experiment with free verse. The collections Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) openly reject patriarchal culture and language. Experiments with form continue as she juxtaposes poetry and prose and uses multiple voices. With Diving into
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the Wreck Rich’s poetry becomes clearly identified with radical feminism and lesbian separatism. A theme of the title poem is the need for women to define themselves in their own terms and create an alternative female language. The Dream of a Common Language was published after Rich came out as a lesbian and includes the explicitly sexual “Twenty-one Love Poems.” By the time of the publication of A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), the influence of Rich’s poetry extended beyond art and into politics. As a woman in a patriarchal society, Rich expresses a fundamental conflict between poetry and politics, which occupies her poetic voice. The collections Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World address new issues while continuing to develop Rich’s feminist concerns. The long poem “Sources” addresses Rich’s Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. “Living Memory” addresses issues of aging. In Dark Fields of the Republic, Rich continues to develop her preoccupations with the relationship of poetry and politics and grapples with issues of contemporary American society.
An Atlas of the Difficult World Type of work: Poetry First published: 1991 In An Atlas of the Difficult World, Rich offers twenty-five poems written between 1988 and 1991. Visionary in content, elegiac in tone, and Whitmanesque in scope, the poems divide into two principal sections. The first consists of the thirteen-part title poem, which maps the physical and spiritual landscape of the United States, crisscrossing the country to capture its divergent elements and forge a link between the author’s personal past and the country’s current social and moral state. Much of the material focuses on the death of innocence and the emergence of violence in American culture. The second section of the book consists of twelve poems, several in multiple parts. It opens with five separate poems portraying women in various manifestations, then moves to a ten-part poem entitled “Eastern War Time,” a powerful piece evoking the experiences of Jews in America and in Europe primarily during World War II. The section concludes with poems on art, friendship, and transformation. Characteristically, Rich uses free forms for most of the poems in this collection. The notable departure is the five-part poem, “Through Corrolitos Under Rolls of Cloud,” where each section consists of twelve lines, often with interlocking end rhymes reminiscent of the formalism of Rich’s poetry prior to Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. Drawing her images from domestic life, the countryside and landscape of California and New England, personal memory, and history, Rich writes about love, sacrifice, friendship, art, violence, and death—much broader themes than the women’s issues that dominate her other collections. Women are still prominent in An Atlas of the Difficult World, for much of the text is written clearly from a female perspective. However, Rich has moved beyond the purely
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feminist to larger concerns facing America. Rejecting the often deliberate obscurity of modernism, she presents a powerful work in accessible language, a book deserving of the National Book Award nomination it garnered.
Suggested Readings Cooper, Jane Roberta, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Review and Re-Visions, 19511981. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Albert Gelpi, eds. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Langdell, Cheri Colby. Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Sickels, Amy. Adrienne Rich. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2005. Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Wadden, Paul. The Rhetoric of Self in Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich: Doubling and the Holotropic Urge. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics, and the Body. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1998. Contributor: Susan Butterworth
Mordecai Richler Born: Montreal, Quebec, Canada; January 27, 1931 Died: Montreal, Quebec, Canada; July 3, 2001 Jewish
Challenging the myths of his culture, Richler exposes the rottenness at the heart of the human condition. Principal works children’s literature: Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, 1975; Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur, 1987; Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case, 1997 long fiction: The Acrobats, 1954 (alsp pb. as Wicked We Love); Son of a Smaller Hero, 1955; A Choice of Enemies, 1957; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1959; The Incomparable Atuk, 1963 (also pb. as Stick Your Neck Out); Cocksure: A Novel, 1968; St. Urbain’s Horseman, 1971; Joshua Then and Now, 1980; Solomon Gursky Was Here, 1989; Barney’s Version, 1997 screenplays: No Love for Johnnie, 1961 (with Nicholas Phipps); Young and Willing, 1964 (with Phipps); Life at the Top, 1965; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1974 (adaptation of his novel); Joshua Then and Now, 1985 (adaptation of his novel) short fiction: The Street: Stories, 1969 nonfiction: Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports, 1968; Shovelling Trouble, 1972; Notes on an Endangered Species and Others, 1974; The Great Comic Book Heroes, and Other Essays, 1978; Home Sweet Home, 1984; Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions, 1990; Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country, 1992; This Year in Jerusalem, 1994; Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports and Opinions, 1998; Dispatches from the Sporting Life, 2001; On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It, 2001 edited texts: Canadian Writing Today, 1970; Writers on World War II: An Anthology, 1991 Mordecai Richler (MOHR-deh-ki RIHK-lur) was born in a Jewish section of Montreal. His education at Jewish parochial schools reinforced his Jewish identity, and the French language that he spoke identified him as French Canadian. Richler would embrace neither identity comfortably. He began writing seriously when he was fourteen. At about the same time, he rejected the family expectation that he become a rabbi and ceased his religious training. After high school, Richler attended Sir George Williams University in Montreal for two years, then grew restive and left for Paris in 1951 to join such other 932
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aspiring writers as Mavis Gallant and Terry Southern. The separation from his beginnings helped to sharpen the perspective on his heritage. He knew that escape from the past is impossible and even undesirable. After two years, an invitation to become writer-in-residence at his alma mater attracted him back to Montreal. The Acrobats introduced concerns that would recur in much of Richler’s later fiction: the place of Jews in contemporary society, the need for values, and the exercise of personal responsibility. Deciding that he would make his living solely by writing, Richler moved to England, where his next six novels were published. Most of these novels revealed their author as a severe, often shocking critic of the Jewish ghetto (Son of a Smaller Hero), of Jewish greed and ruthlessness (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), of Canadian nationalism (The Incomparable Atuk), and of the North American entertainment industry (Cocksure). The writing often reflects a certain degree of ambivalence about the author’s ethnic identity, with the need to reject dominating the inclination to affirm. When Richler returned to Canada—to “the roots of his discontent”—in 1972, his many years of “exile” in Europe had heightened his own sense of self as a Jewish Canadian writer. Richler did not always see himself as others saw him: abrasive, arrogant, and perverse. He has been described as an anti-Canadian Canadian and an anti-Semitic Jew. Richler saw himself, however, as a moralist who wrote out of a sense of “disgust with things as they are,” who debunked the bankrupt values that characterized his culture and his ethnic community. His later works established him as a more evenhanded critic of Jewish and Canadian identity, one who affirmed the need for the bonds of family and community in an unstable, corrupt world. He died in Montreal in 2001 after a long battle with cancer, lionized as one of Canada’s first internationally recognized writers.
Son of a Smaller Hero Type of work: Novel First published: 1955 Son of a Smaller Hero is the story of an angry young man’s confused search for his identity. In what is generally regarded as an apprentice work, Richler presents a fairly realistic story of a rebellious and rather self-centered hero who struggles to escape the restrictive identity that his ethnic community and his society would place on him. Noah Adler is a second-generation Canadian, born and raised in the Montreal Jewish ghetto. His family’s strife and the religious and social strictures of his milieu, which he finds stifling, impel him to leave in search of freedom and selfhood in the gentile world. That world, too, fails to fulfill the hero’s quest. Through a literature class, Noah meets Professor Theo Hall, who befriends him and takes him into his home. Soon, Hall’s wife, Miriam, does more than befriend their boarder and eventually leaves her husband to live with Noah. The romance, so passionately pursued by Noah at first, fades rather quickly when he discovers that the posses-
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sive love of and responsibility for a woman can turn into its own kind of ghetto. In addition, the ghetto of his upbringing still has its hold on him. When his father dies in a fire, Noah abandons Miriam and returns to his family, no longer the adolescent rebel that he was. Neither has he become a quiescent conformist. When the Jewish community attempts to raise his feckless father to sainthood, he demurs. When his rich Uncle Max greedily tries to exploit the dead father’s new status, Noah resists. When Noah discovers his grandfather’s secret, repressed, lifelong love for a gentile woman he met years before in Europe, this clarifies Noah’s own predicament. The ways of his family and of his ghetto Mordecai Richler (Christopher Morris) community cannot be his. When Noah’s ambitious mother becomes increasingly emotionally demanding, Noah knows that he cannot stay. The story ends as it began: Noah leaves home, this time for Europe. He turns his back on his ailing, grasping mother and on his lonely, isolated grandfather. He turns his back on his restrictive ethnic community. The search for self continues, but it is a search permeated with ambivalence. Noah has found that he cannot affirm his identity apart from community, family, and place. His confusion and torment stem from his problem that he can neither embrace nor finally reject community, family, or place. He chooses to escape them for the time being, but his search for an independent identity leads finally to a sense of futility.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Type of work: Novel First published: 1959 There is so much comic energy in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that the reader can easily underestimate the social and moral implications of the work. Richler stated that to a certain extent the reader should sympathize with Duddy, who must rise above the poverty of the St. Urbain ghetto to challenge and defeat powerful manipulators such as Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder. The ambiguity of Duddy’s character creates a problem of moral focus, however, in that some
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of his victories are at the expense of truly kindhearted people, such as Virgil Roseboro and Yvette. There are certainly many reasons for Duddy’s aggressive, almost amoral behavior. His mother died when Duddy was very young, leaving him without the female stability he needed at the time. His father, Max the Hack, who drives a Montreal cab and pimps on the side, lets Duddy fend for himself, as most of his affection and attention went to the older son, Lenny. Duddy remembers that his father wrote many letters to Lenny when he worked at a resort, but Max refuses to write to Duddy. Max also encourages Lenny to go to medical school and is proud of his achievements; he makes it obvious that he expects little from Duddy and does not perceive the extent of Duddy’s ambition nor his loyalty to his family. Duddy is also often humiliated by the affluent university students with whom he works as a waiter at the Hotel Lac des Sables. Irwin Shubert, for instance, considers Duddy a social inferior and, using a rigged roulette wheel, cheats him out of three hundred dollars. Although eliciting sympathy by explaining Duddy’s situation, Richler undercuts a completely sympathetic attitude toward Duddy by detailing the results of his actions. His exploitation of the other students of Fletcher’s Field High School leads even his friend Jake Hersh to believe that he makes everything dirty. Duddy’s schemes to make money are clever enough; he works out a system to steal hockey sticks from the Montreal Canadians, but he does not realize that the blame rests on the stick boy, who is trying to earn money through honest, hard work. More seriously, Duddy, through a cruel practical joke, is responsible for the death of Mrs. Macpherson, the wife of one of his teachers. Later, as he tries to make his dream of owning land come true, Duddy rejects his lover Yvette, causes the paralysis of his friend Virgil, from whom he also steals money, and alienates his grandfather, Simcha, who cares for him more than anyone else. Duddy’s relationship with Simcha provides both the moral tone and the narrative drive of the novel. Simcha, a man trusted but not loved by the elders of the St. Urbain ghetto for his quiet, patient integrity, is loved by his favorite, Duddy. Like many others of his generation, Simcha feels the weight of the immigrant’s fear of failure and instills Duddy with the idea that a man without land is a nobody. For Simcha, this cliché is a more complex concept associated with the traditional struggles of the Jews and presupposes a sense of responsibility. Duddy misinterprets the implications of his grandfather’s advice and perceives it as being a practical imperative to be gained at any cost, involving himself in many schemes—from importing illegal pinball machines to filming bar mitzvahs with a bizarre, alcoholic documentary director—in order to purchase land for commercial development. For a short time, Duddy’s plans misfire; he goes bankrupt and is unable to pay for the land he wants so badly. Upon hearing that the Boy Wonder, the ghetto “miracle” who has escaped his environment by drug peddling and other corrupt means, covets the same land, Duddy forges checks in Virgil’s name to get enough money to make the purchase. In a closing scene, Duddy brings his family to see his property. By coincidence, the Boy Wonder arrives, and Duddy drives him away with verbal abuse. His father is more impressed with this act of defiance than with Duddy’s achievement, and later, among his circle of friends, Max begins to create a legend
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about Duddy in much the same way as he created the legend of the Boy Wonder. Although his victory has been effected by deceit and victimization, Duddy’s behavior seems vindicated; he smiles in triumph, unaware that he continues only under the spell of a shared illusion. The reader is left elated to a certain extent at the defeat of the Boy Wonder, yet sobered by the figure of Simcha, crying in the car, after having been informed by Yvette of Duddy’s method of acquiring the land.
Suggested Readings Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler’s Writings. New York: P. Lang, 1989. Craniford, Ada. Fiction and Fact in Mordecai Richler’s Novels. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen, 1992. Darling, Michael, ed. Perspectives on Mordecai Richler. Toronto: ECW Press, 1986. Ramraj, Victor J. Mordecai Richler. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Richler, Jacob. “My Old Man.” Gentlemen’s Quarterly 65 (May, 1995). Richler, Mordecai. Interview by Sybil S. Steinberg. Publishers Weekly 237 (April 27, 1990): 45-46. Sheps, G. David, ed. Mordecai Richler. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. Woodcock, George. Mordecai Richler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970. Contributors: Henry J. Baron and James C. MacDonald
Alberto Ríos Born: Nogales, Arizona; September 18, 1952 Mexican American
Ríos’s writings have placed increasing importance on such means of bridging the gulfs that divide people. Principal works poetry: Elk Heads on the Wall, 1979; Whispering to Fool the Wind, 1982; Five Indiscretions, 1985; The Lime Orchard Woman, 1988; The Warrington Poems, 1989; Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, 1990; The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, 2002; The Theater of Night, 2005 short fiction: The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart, 1984; Pig Cookies, and Other Stories, 1995; The Curtain of Trees: Stories, 1999 nonfiction: Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, 1999 Both in fact and in spirit, Alberto Ríos (al-BEHR-toh REE-ohs) is a native of the Southwest. He was born to a Mexican father, Alberto Alvaro Ríos, a justice of the peace, and an English mother, Agnes Fogg Ríos, a nurse. Early in his life he was nicknamed Tito, a diminutive of Albertito, that is, “Little Albert.” The nickname referred to his small physical frame and differentiated him from his father. In 1975 the future author earned a bachelor of arts degree, with a major in psychology, from the University of Arizona. He then entered the university’s law school, only to find that poetry rather than the law was to be his calling. After one year of legal training he switched to the graduate program in creative writing, taking a master of fine arts degree in 1979. He joined the faculty of Arizona State University in 1982 and became Regents’ Professor of English there in 1994. Ríos grew up on the Mexican American border, and the work that first brought him widespread attention, Whispering to Fool the Wind, addressed most of all the splay of his roots. This volume won for Ríos the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the National Academy of American Poets in 1981. His first collection of short fiction, The Iguana Killer, winner of the Western States Book Award for fiction some two years later, dealt with similar concerns. Taken together, these works identified Ríos as a first-generation American artist chronicling an ethnic experience that had too long gone unexplored in American letters. After their publication, Ríos was warmly praised and widely anthologized, often embraced for this subject matter. Ríos’s work extended beyond the provincial with the publication of the collection of poems Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses and his second short-fiction collection, 937
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Pig Cookies, and Other Stories. These works still spoke of a culture in transition, but they also displayed an evolving artistic vision, one having as much to do with the human condition as it has to do with an ethnic experience per se. Ríos’s writing began to manifest something beyond the tangible. A man spits on the pavement in order to rid himself of an intolerable thought. A priest’s soul leaves his body, with animal-like instinct. A fat man’s body is proof of a weight within him having nothing to do with scales or the flesh. A number of critics noted Ríos’s ability to make the commonplace seem strange—as well as his capacity to make the familiar seem magical—and aligned him in this regard with the Latin Magical Realists, such as Gabriel García Márquez. Ríos’s vision is important in its own right, however. In an early short story, “The Birthday of Mrs. Pineda,” a character brings a cup of coffee to his face only to discover the aroma pulling his head toward the lip of the cup. A short story published a decade later brings this conceit to fruition. “The Great Gardens of Lamberto Diaz” begins with these words: A person did not come to these gardens . . . to admire them or simply to breathe them in. No. One was breathed in by them, and something more. In this place a person was drawn up as if to the breast of the gardens, as if one were a child again, and being drawn up was all that mattered and meant everything.
Often in his interviews Ríos speaks of “situational physics,” of “emotional science.” Readers are asked in reading Ríos not simply to revise their suppositions about natural law but to relocate themselves, to reconsider their relationship to all that is tangible. People must reconfirm their presence on the planet, and then reconfirm this presence to one another; the process must begin by listening to language. Ríos is bilingual, and from the beginning he has called on the idioms and syntax of both English and Spanish in his work. He has also concerned himself with what he calls “a third language,” a language that people’s bodies speak to one another with or without their conscious knowledge—the wink, the nod, the small and still smaller gesture. The reader encounters this type of language even in such early poems as “Nani,” in which a small boy speaks English, his grandmother, only Spanish. She serves him lunch each week, and the old woman and the boy discover a shared understanding, bringing them closer than words ever could. Ríos has placed increasing importance on such means of bridging the gulfs that divide people. In the title poem of Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, aged Teodoro Luna and his equally aged wife know an intimacy that the young are denied—a glance from one to the other, an eyebrow raised that turns a public event into a private experience between them. Kissing is the single act that most occupies Ríos’s attention. It illustrates both the enormity of human desire and the inability of people to express themselves in commensurate proportions. It stands for all that divides people and all that might bring them together. Ríos is often at his best when he is exploring how people turn public events into private experience and what they must dare in order to show themselves to the world. Certainly this is the case in several of the stories in Pig Cookies. Lazaro, the small boy in the title story, is so consumed with
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love for a neighbor girl that his very being is shaken, his baker’s hands overcome. To put this love of her into words is a much different matter, as the story’s ending reminds the reader: “The most difficult act in the world, he thought with his stomach, was this first saying of hello. This first daring to call, without permission, Desire by its first name.” In 1999 Ríos published a memoir, Capirotada, named for a Mexican bread pudding made (like his life, as Ríos notes) from “a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white bread, raisins, quesadilla cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves . . . and things people will not tell you.” It won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. In 2002 he published The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, in which poems honed from fable, parable, and family legend use the “intense and supple imagination of childhood to find and preserve history beyond facts”; this collection was a finalist for the National Book Award. In addition to winning these honors, Ríos is the recipient of the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. In 2002, he won the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award, the group’s highest distinction for authors whose work has defined and influenced the literature and study of the West.
“The Purpose of Altar Boys” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1982, in Whispering to Fool the Wind In “The Purpose of Altar Boys” the adult Alberto Ríos assumes the voice of a mischievous altar boy who “knew about . . . things.” For example, when he assisted the priest at Communion on Sundays, he believed he had his own mission. On some Sundays, he says, his mission was to remind people of the night before. Holding the metal plate beneath a communicant’s chin, he would drag his feet on the carpet, stirring up static electricity. He would wait for the right moment, then touch the plate to the person’s chin, delivering his “Holy Electric Shock” of retribution. The sense of ease and speed in the poem’s narration is facilitated by the poet’s use of a relatively short poetic line, usually containing six or seven syllables. Although the lines are short, the sentences are long. The combination of short lines and long sentences creates a sense not only of speed but also of breathlessness— these features express the altar boy’s excitement as he tells his story of good and evil, judgment and temptation. His excitement is also conveyed by repetition. For example, the boy’s repeated use of the pronoun “I” reflects his self-assertion and reveals the pride he takes in fulfilling his mission. The altar boy is a comic character, a prankster whose mischief is essentially harmless. What is harmless in a child, however, may be evil in an adult. A voyeur is not an attractive person. Far worse are people who commit murder and claim that God told them to do it. The altar boy is merely flirting with the sin of pride when he
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takes upon himself the authority to judge and punish others. Thus, it is important that the poem is written in the past tense. The adult narrator has experience that he lacked as a boy, and his concepts of good and evil are no longer naïve.
Suggested Readings Logue, Mary. Review of Whispering to Fool the Wind, by Alberto Ríos. Village Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1982. Ríos, Alberto. “Words like the Wind: An Interview with Alberto Ríos.” Interview by William Barillas. Américas Review 24 (Fall/Winter, 1996). Ullman, L. “Solitaries and Storytellers, Magicians and Pagans: Five Poets in the World.” Kenyon Review 13 (Spring, 1991). Wild, Peter. Alberto Ríos. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1998. Contributors: Jay Boyer and James Green
Tomás Rivera Born: Crystal City, Texas; December 22, 1935 Died: Fontana, California; May 16, 1984 Mexican American
Rivera’s writings sparked an explosion of work about the Chicano identity and focused attention on the experiences of migrant workers. Principal works long fiction: . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/ . . . and the earth did not part, 1971 (also pb. as This Migrant Earth, 1985; . . . and the earth did not devour him, 1987) poetry: Always, and Other Poems, 1973; The Searchers: Collected Poetry, 1990 short fiction: The Harvest: Short Stories, 1989 (bilingual) miscellaneous: Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, 1991 Tomás Rivera (toh-MAHS ree-VAY-rah) was the first winner of the Quinto Sol literary prize for the best Chicano work. His death cut short a life full of achievements and promise. Rivera was born to a family of migrant farmworkers in south Texas, and much of his writing is derived from his childhood experiences in a poor, Spanish-speaking, nomadic subculture. Rivera began college in 1954, with concerns for his people motivating him to become a teacher. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1958 and two master’s degrees, in 1964 and 1969, from Southwest Texas State University. He received his doctorate in romance literatures in 1969 from the University of Oklahoma. His career as a college teacher and administrator included appointments in Texas at Sam Houston State University, Trinity University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio and at El Paso. In 1979, Rivera became the youngest person and the first member of a minority group to be appointed chancellor of a campus of the University of California. Rivera spent his last five years at the helm of the University of California, Riverside. He died at the young age of forty-eight, of a heart attack. His devotion to and achievements in education for Latino youth were honored with the naming of the main University of California, Riverside library after him, and the establishment of the Tomás Rivera Center (later the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute) at Claremont, California. Rivera’s poems and short stories are included in many anthologies of Chicano or Latino literature. He is recognized as one of the first to give voice to the silent Latino underclass of the American Southwest. His works explore the difficulties of 941
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growing up, of sorting truth from myth, and of finding one’s identity and selfesteem in the midst of oppressive poverty. The struggle to overcome internal and external difficulties is portrayed vividly in his novel and the earth did not part and in such stories as “Eva and Daniel,” “The Harvest,” and “Zoo Island.”
. . . and the earth did not part Type of work: Novel First published: . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/and the earth did not part, 1971 Rivera’s only published novel exerted a great influence on the blossoming of Chicano literature. The book explores the psychological and external circumstances of a boy who is coming of age in a Mexican American migrant family. The novel is a collection of disjointed narratives, including twelve stories and thirteen vignettes, told with various voices. This unusual structure evokes impressions of a lifestyle in which the continuity of existence is repeatedly broken by forced migration, in which conflicting values tug at the emerging self, and in which poverty creates a deadening sameness that erases time. The story begins with “The Lost Year,” which indicates the boy has lost touch with his identity and with the reality of events. Several sections portray the dismal, oppressed condition of migrant farmworkers. “Hand in His Pocket” tells of a wicked couple—immigrants who prey on their own people. In “A Silvery Night,” the boy first calls the devil, then decides that the devil does not exist. Religious awakening continues in the title chapter, in which the boy curses God and is not punished—the earth remains solid. The nature of sin, the mystery of sex, and the injustices and tragedies visited upon his people are all confusing to the boy. Brief moments of beauty are eclipsed by injuries and horrible deaths. A mother struggles to buy a few Christmas presents for her children and is thwarted by the disturbing confusion and noise of the town. In a swindle, a family loses their only photograph of a son killed in the Korean War. Bouncing from place to place in rickety trucks, the workers lose all sense of continuity. The boy becomes a man, hiding under his house. The final scene offers a glimmer of hope, as he climbs a tree and imagines that someone in another tree can see him. The simple language and humble settings make the book accessible, but the novel’s unique structure and symbolism present challenges to the reader. and the earth did not part has been reprinted several times, and a retelling in English (This Migrant Earth, 1985) was published by Rolando Hinojosa. A film version, and the earth did not swallow him, was released in 1994.
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Suggested Readings Grajeda, Ralph F. “Tomás Rivera’s Appropriation of the Chicano Past.” In Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ibarra-Frausto. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Kanellos, Nicolás, ed. Short Fiction by Hispanic Writers of the United States. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1993. _______. “Tomás Rivera.” The Hispanic Literary Companion. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1996. Saldívar, Ramón. “Tomas Rivera.” In Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1994. Stavans, Ilan. Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Contributor: Laura L. Klure
Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Born: Bronx, New York; 1961 Puerto Rican
Although citizens of the United States, mainland Puerto Ricans are rooted in a culture, race, and class that have been recategorized by the American establishment. These categories often conflict with their family and traditional beliefs. Rodriguez gives voice to that experience. Principal works long fiction: Spidertown, 1993; The Buddha Book, 2001 short fiction: The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx, 1992 Abraham Rodriguez (roh-DREE-gehs), Jr., is a Puerto Rican writer. Having been raised in the Bronx, he writes stories that depict the experiences of “Nuyoricans.” The concept of Nuyorican varies from generation to generation; Puerto Ricans living in New York during the 1950’s experienced life in that city differently than do members of today’s Nuyorican population. However, the struggle of Puerto Ricans, whether on the island of Puerto Rico or on the American mainland, continues to involve issues of culture and identity not easily revealed in the literature of social sciences, fiction, or elsewhere. The issues are generally complex, and work that tells the stories of the Puerto Ricans living in New York is of value both to the community in New York and to the communities of Puerto Rican people on Puerto Rico and throughout the mainland. Colonization of Borinquén (Puerto Rico’s indigenous name) resulted in cultural conflicts for those whose parents migrated to New York in several waves. Puerto Ricans, although citizens of the United States, find their identities in terms of culture, race, and class re-categorized by the establishment in the United States. These categories often conflict with their family and traditional beliefs—hence the conflicts and problems with their sense of self-identification and how to express their identification with two countries. Rodriguez gives voice to that experience. In The Boy Without a Flag, Rodriguez retells the stories he has heard from his father about American imperialism, specifically the conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898. Conscious of this history, the narrator refuses to salute the American flag. In other stories, Rodriguez depicts violence and poverty in barrio life. He uses the language of the streets and the rhythms of the island from which his family comes. Drugs, promiscuity, and other social issues are addressed in his other works. They reveal the intimate knowledge of a man born and raised in New York’s South Bronx. This 944
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area is home to people from various ethnic groups, where they live often in poverty but never in a culturally poor environment. Salsa, guns, and early death are all part of Rodriguez’s milieu, and his writing evokes passion underlying the story lines. In the novel Spidertown, Rodriguez portrays the life of a young man, Miguel, who works as a drug runner for his friend and “mentor,” Spider. He seems satisfied with the world he lives in until he becomes involved with a beautiful, practicalminded young woman. He then he sees the lack of substance to his life and realizes he must make some choices. Comments about this work praise Rodriguez’s use of language, the pacing of the story, and the realism of the lives portrayed. It is a portrait of poor, urban Puerto Rican lives. In 1993 Rodriguez earned The New York Times Notable Book of the Year award for The Boy Without a Flag. He also won the 1995 American Book Award for Spidertown, which was also published in British, Dutch, German, and Spanish editions. In conjunction with Scan/LaGuardia and the National Book Foundation’s donation of copies of The Boy Without a Flag, Rodriguez conducted a workshop for youths and others at Scan/LaGuardia Memorial House in East Harlem, New York, in the spring of 2001. His works have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines including Boricuas, Growing up Puerto Rican, Story, Best Stories from New Writers, The Chattahoochee Review, and Alternative Fiction and Poetry. Rodriguez received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2000, and he served as a literary panel member on the New York State Council of the Arts. His involvement with both the literary foundation and the Scan/LaGuardia Memorial House demonstrates his commitment to his community and to his art. In 2001, he wrote the narration for a film called Chenrezi Vision and started an East Coast small press named Art Bridge.
The Boy Without a Flag Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1992 The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx was the first book of fiction from Rodriguez. These stories, Rodriguez himself has declared, are “about the rancid underbelly of the American Dream. These are the kids no one likes to talk about. I want to show them as they are, not as society wishes them to be.” The narrator of the title story is a precocious eleven-year-old schoolboy who refuses to stand up to salute the American flag during a school assembly, an act of defiance that, he hopes, will impress his father, a frustrated poet and Puerto Rican nationalist who has planted the seeds of rebellion in his young son’s malleable mind. As it turns out, though, the plan backfires, and the boy’s father, when summoned to the school, is nothing but meekly apologetic and self-critical for his son’s “crazy” behavior. The boy is left alone to come to terms with his father’s betrayal, which triggers a preadolescent passage into disillusion. Later, though, he comes to the understanding that his father has, in fact, provided him with a most valuable lesson.
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He has learned that he must break away from his father’s sphere of influence and must find his own means of independence. In the process of assimilating into that cauldron known as the melting pot, ethnicity, the salt-and-pepper seasoning of identity, is lost, washed away into a tasteless, watered-down broth. The narrator works his way up from this epiphany, and it is clear that he has pledged allegiance to no one but himself, “away from the bondage of obedience.” The successes of this book—Rodriguez’s portrayal of the South Bronx, a place that inhabits his characters, brought to life with an affection, a sympathy that is in no way sentimental—cancel out its scattering of stylistic shortcomings. Rodriguez’s depictions of lost childhoods are true and brutal, and he is a writer driven by the impulse to tell the stories belonging to those who are voiceless. Their stories deserve to be heard.
Suggested Readings Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and the Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997. Shreve, Susan Richards, and Porter Shreve, eds. Tales Out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Contributors: Louise Connal Rodriguez and Peter Markus
Richard Rodriguez Born: San Francisco, California; July 31, 1944 Mexican American
Rodriguez’s autobiography explores the identity of one whose roots can be traced to two cultures. Principal works nonfiction: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, 1982; Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, 1992; Brown: The Last Discovery of America, 2002 During the 1980’s, Richard Rodriguez (roh-DREE-gehs) became well known as a broadcast essayist whose work was often aired by the Public Broadcasting Service. His Hunger of Memory is a collection of essays tracing his alienation from his Mexican heritage. The son of Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez was not able to speak English when he began school in Sacramento, California. The Catholic nuns who taught him asked that his parents speak English to him at home so that he could hear English spoken all the time. When his parents complied, Rodriguez experienced his first rupture between his original culture and his newly acquired culture. That initial experience compelled him to see the difference between “public” language— English—and “private” language—Spanish. To succeed in a world controlled by those who spoke English, to succeed in the public arena, Rodriguez learned that he had to choose public language over the private language spoken within his home. Hence he opted for alienation from his Mexican heritage and roots, a choice that he viewed with resignation and regret. His educational journey continued as he proceeded to earn a master’s degree and then to become a Fulbright scholar studying English Renaissance literature in London. At that time, he decided to leave academic life, believing that it provided an advantage to Mexican Americans at the expense of those who did not possess this hyphenated background. Rodriguez proceeded to become an opponent of affirmative action and details his opposition to this policy in Hunger of Memory. Another policy to which he voices his opposition is bilingual education. Believing that “public educators in a public schoolroom have an obligation to teach a public language,” Rodriguez has used various opportunities—interviews, his autobiography, television appearances—to emphasize his view of the relationship between a person’s identity in a majority culture and his or her need to learn the language of that culture. Another component of Rodriguez’s identity that he has explored through vari947
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ous means is his relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. Having been raised in a traditional Catholic home, he was accustomed to the symbols and language of the Catholic Church as they were before the changes that resulted from the Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1962. After this council, the rituals of the Church were dramatically simplified, and the liturgy was changed from Latin to vulgar tongues, such as English. According to Rodriguez, these changes in the Roman Catholic Church challenged the identity of people whose early sense of self was shaped by traditional Catholicism. A thoughtful and articulate writer regarding the tensions experienced by Mexican Americans growing up in America and by a Catholic struggling with the changes in the Catholic Church, Richard Rodriguez has given voice to the frequently unspoken difficulties of possessing a complex identity.
Hunger of Memory Type of work: Memoir First published: 1982 Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez is a memoir that explores Rodriguez’s coming-of-age in an America that challenges him to understand what it is to be a Mexican American and what it is to be a Catholic in America. At the heart of this autobiography is Rodriguez’s recognition that his is a position of alienation, a position that he accepts with resignation and regret. As the title of this collection of autobiographical pieces suggests, he remembers his early childhood with nostalgia, while acknowledging that his coming-of-age has resulted in his displacement from that simple, secure life. The most critical aspect of his education and his development of an adult self is language. He explores his first recollection of language in the opening essay, which describes his hearing his name spoken in English for the first time when he attends a Catholic elementary school in Sacramento, California. He is startled by the recognition that the impersonality and public quality of this announcement herald his own adoption of public language—English—at the expense of his private language— Spanish. Rodriguez has begun to be educated as a public person with a public language. This education, as he recalls it, occurred before the advent of bilingual education, an event that Rodriguez soundly criticizes. In his view bilingual education prevents children from learning the public language that will be their passport to success in the public world, and he uses his own experience—being a bilingual child who was educated without bilingual education as it was introduced into the American school system in the 1960’s—as an example. Rodriguez offers himself as another example in criticizing affirmative action programs. Turning down offers to teach at various postsecondary educational institutions that he believed wanted to hire him simply because he was Latino, Rodriguez began what has been his persistent criticism of affirmative action policies in America.
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Still another object of his criticism in Hunger of Memory is the Roman Catholic Church and its changed liturgy, language, and rituals. Recalling the religious institution that had shaped his identity, he regrets the changes that he believes have simplified and therefore diminished the mystery and majesty that he associates with the traditional Catholic Church. He is nostalgic about what has been lost while accepting the reality of the present. In providing an account of his education, Rodriguez also provides an account of his profession: writing. From his early choice of a public language to his later choice to write about this decision, he paints a self-portrait of a man whose love of words and ideas compels him to explore his past. Rodriguez accepts the adult who writes in English and who writes about the person whose identity is defined by his struggle to find his own voice.
Days of Obligation Type of work: Essays First published: 1992 In Days of Obligation, Richard Rodriguez pushes the poetic style of his much acclaimed Hunger of Memory to even more ambitious literary and cultural limits. In the earlier book, Rodriguez dramatized how his successful academic education as a “scholarship boy” painfully but inevitably alienated him from his Mexican American parents, and he surprisingly argued against affirmative action and bilingual education. In contrast, Days of Obligation presents a much wider range of personal experience and cultural issues: historical, religious, educational, and racial. Though he subtitles the book as an “argument,” Rodriguez pursues neither a single consistent argument nor an unbroken autobiographical line. Rather, he plays numerous variations on the contrasts he derives from an argument he once had with his father: “Life is harder then you think, boy.” “You’re thinking of Mexico, Papa.” “You’ll see.” For Rodriguez, the contrast between Mexican and Californian sensibilities symbolizes the tensions in himself and in American life between Catholicism and Protestantism, communalism and individualism, cynicism and optimism, past and future, age and youth—in his own life and in history—to which he and the reader must attend. Ultimately, however, Rodriguez is more committed to the truth as he discovers it than to any political orthodoxy or agenda. Though deeply conditioned by Mexican and Catholic values, Rodriguez dramatizes how alien he feels when he actually travels in Mexico; and he asserts that “we are all bandits,” for if the United States stole California from Mexicans, the Mexicans had stolen it from Spaniards, who had originally stolen it from the Indians. Written in a boldly mercurial and allusive style, Days of Obligation provides both a brilliant reexamination of multicultural issues and an exhilarating reading experience.
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Brown Type of work: Short fiction First published: 2002 Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation were the first two installments of “a trilogy on American public life and my private life” that Brown completes. Though it is doubtful that Rodriguez has identified “the last discovery of America,” as his book’s subtitle claims, in Brown he musters considerable evidence to support his thesis that brown—not the red, white, and blue of the Stars and Stripes—is the quintessential American color. Rodriguez believes that “America is browning” and that this process is unavoidable; increasingly, Americans are unable to clearly define where they come from, no matter how detailed their family trees may be. This process continues even—often especially—when Americans oppose it, and they may fail to see the passion of “browning” because of their individualism. Overlooking how profoundly “the ‘we’ is a precondition for saying ‘I,’” Americans underplay the very impurity that enriches both the American “I” and “we,” a theme that Rodriguez calls his most important. Thus, making the identification his “mestizo boast,” Rodriguez gladly describes himself as “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation.” Rodriguez makes no mistake in linking the personal to the public and political. The roots of individual American identities, often oppressed and oppressing, are increasingly entangled, so much so that “righteousness should not come easily to any of us.” Rodriguez’s parents emigrated from their native Mexico to California, where Richard, the third of their four children, was born. Although American census classifications have dubbed him “Hispanic,” a category he attacks, Rodriguez sometimes underscores the complexity of American identity by contending that he is “Irish,” because of the formative influence of Irish nuns who taught him English. In its “brown” form, English becomes a language best called “American,” and it is to the multiple expressions of that tongue that Rodriguez owes much of his hardearned optimism.
Suggested Readings Christopher, Renny. “Rags to Riches to Suicide: Unhappy Narratives of Upward Mobility—Martin Eden, Bread Givers, Delia’s Song, and Hunger of Memory.” College Literature 29 (Fall, 2002). Collado, Alfredo Villanueva. “Growing up Hispanic: Discourse and Ideology in Hunger of Memory and Family Installments.” The Americas Review 16, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 1988). Danahay, Martin A. “Richard Rodriguez’s Poetics of Manhood.” In Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
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De Castro, Juan E. “Richard Rodriguez in ‘Borderland’: The Ambiguity of Hybridity.” Aztlan 26 (Spring, 2001). Guajardo, Paul. Chicano Controversy: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Rodriguez, Richard. “A View from the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.” Interview by Scott London. In The Writer’s Presence, edited by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2000. _______. “Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.” Interview by Timothy Sedore. Michigan Quarterly Review 38 (Summer, 1999). Romer, Rolando J. “Spanish and English: The Question of Literacy in Hunger of Memory.” Confluencia 6, no. 2 (Spring, 1991). Contributors: Marjorie Smelstor and John K. Roth
Ninotchka Rosca Born: Manila, Philippines; 1946 Filipino American
Rosca was the first Filipina to publish a serious political novel in the United States. Principal works long fiction: State of War, 1988; Twice Blessed, 1992 short fiction: The Monsoon Collection, 1983 nonfiction: Endgame: The Fall of Marcos, 1987; Jose Maria Sison: At Home in the World, Portrait of a Revolutionary, 2004 Ninotchka Rosca (nih-TAHSH-kah ROH-shah) accepted as her pen name that of the Russian radical played in an American film by Greta Garbo. Rosca thought of herself as a militant liberal among the students at the University of the Philippines. Her columns as associate editor of Graphic magazine after 1968 reinforced her image as a controversial figure. Her first fiction complained about the political passivity of the educated elite, and she remained a friend of those former classmates who joined the New People’s Army against the rule-by-decree of President Ferdinand Marcos. In 1973, shortly after Marcos declared martial law, she was arrested and placed for several months in Camp Crame Detention Center. She used her experience there to provide realistic detail for nine stories about parallels between military detention and a nation run under rules of “constitutional authoritarianism.” The Monsoon Collection was published in Australia in order to safeguard its author. Rosca found her role as a nationalist difficult when loyalty was defined as adhering to Marcos’s rule. By 1977, Rosca had gone into political self-exile among relatives connected with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she taught. Later she moved to New York City to be closer to opportunities within the publishing industry, despite her misgivings that several American presidents had sponsored Marcos’s rise to power on the premise that he was anti-Communist. After his forced flight from the Philippines in February, 1986, she returned briefly to Manila and later, with Endgame, contributed to reportage on Marcos’s final days. Although Rosca remained in the United States, her focus on the Philippines did not falter. She became the U.S. representative of GABRIELA, an organization named after Gabriela Silang, an eighteenth century warrior who continued the revolt against Spain after her husband’s death. GABRIELA in America protects overseas workers from various kinds of abuse. She has also maintained a column of 952
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commentary in Filipinas, a popular magazine on the West Coast. Since the late 1980’s Rosca has written novels describing the militant role of youth organizations in the Philippines.
State of War Type of work: Novel First published: 1988 State of War’s dominant story line portrays a failed attempt by young radicals to assassinate Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos (referred to only as The Commander). The book’s larger concern is with the effect of centuries of colonialism on the Filipino people’s search for national identity. Portions of the novel try to reconstruct the ancestry of the principal characters during centuries of Spanish rule and fifty years of American occupation. Even after independence is achieved in 1946, freedom still is withheld from the people by troops serving The Commander. “Internal colonialism,” controlled by the Filipinos’ own countryman, merely replaces the tyranny that formerly came from outside. Ninotchka Rosca describes a nation forever being betrayed and, therefore, forever just beginning to find itself. The seriousness of the assassination attempt is masked by the resplendent color and the joyful sounds of the festival that surround the attempt. Annually, in the AtiAtihan celebration, Filipinos celebrate the clash between the Spanish and the native islanders. Anna Villaverde, who during martial law once was detained by military authorities because of her closeness to Manolo Montreal, a radical oppositionist who is assumed dead, becomes aware that Colonel Urbano Amor, her original torturer, is securing the area for The Commander’s visit. Anna is protected from exposure by Adrian, a young member of the elite class. Then he is captured, and under the influence of drugs he is forced to reveal parts of the plot. Trying to compensate for this betrayal by warning Anna, he becomes crippled when the bomb intended for The Commander explodes prematurely. As for Manolo Montreal, he is not dead after all but has joined forces with his previous captors. He is prepared to betray the plans of the young conspirators, but Anna manages to kill him. What begins as a festival of song and dance ends in a bloody melee with The Commander still alive and in charge. The only hope for social change, the novel suggests, lies in Anna and Adrian’s son, who will have to become a historian of the people and storyteller of collective memories and democratic ideals. He will be expected to serve as a reminder of the recurring frustration of Filipino hopes for self-definition during centuries of foreign rule. The novel’s story line is filled with intrigue from all sides, continuously defeating the examples of reform and of resistance that, historically, only relatively few rebellious nationalists have courageously provided. A persistent “state of war,” Rosca implies, has long existed, and true independence has yet to be achieved. Anna’s dream of a different future among peasants, who want only a right to the land that they till, is a declaration of faith rather than of hope. Romantic as Anna’s
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expectations of democracy might seem to be under the circumstances, the only alternative is to surrender hope for a free society. It is not in her nature to give up the beliefs that make her life worth living; and in the author, she has found an ally.
Twice Blessed Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Twice Blessed is a comic parable. It shares with Rosca’s more dramatic State of War a lasting concern for “a nation struggling to be born.” Its method is less confrontational than Rosca’s earlier work, but it goes beyond mockery of President Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda Marcos who, on the novel’s publication date, were already in exile in Hawaii. The basic satire exposes a phenomenon in Filipino culture larger than the behavior of a single ruling couple: instincts of the wealthy to preserve their power through arranged marriages. This hoarding of power, Rosca has long argued as a journalist, is the source not only of vast class differences but also of elitist willingness to collaborate with foreign enemies in order to survive. Through comic irony and despite the novel’s farcical features, Rosca suggests that the greed responsible for putting dynastic wealth before the welfare of the people eventually can be self-destructive. The sibling rule of Katerina and Hector Basbas in a tropical Pacific country is reminiscent of what several commentators have called the “conjugal dictatorship” of the Marcoses. Katerina’s attempts to forget her humble beginnings resemble Imelda’s well-publicized delusions of grandeur, and the collapse of a heavy crane on the roof of the inaugural structure seems inspired by the fatal collapse of the Manila International Film Festival building in 1983 because of haste in its construction. In addition, Imelda not only was actually considered Ferdinand’s replacement if his health failed but also ran (unsuccessfully) as a presidential candidate in 1992. These are just a few of the historical parallels borrowed by Rosca to provide realistic dimensions to a tale that otherwise might seem far-fetched. Reality can be much more outlandish than fiction. Rosca’s fictional account portrays what might have resulted had Hector crashed in his airplane, been lost, and been considered dead. His twin sister, Katerina, seems less to grieve his possible loss than suddenly to imagine herself as his replacement. Trying to forget her lowly origins, Katerina’s ambition has only been whetted by her marriage to aristocratic Armand Gloriosa. Once dreams of individual glory have been placed before the nation’s needs, corruption spreads even to such opponents to oppressive government as Teresa Tikloptihod. She is the headstrong daughter of a provincial governor who at first resisted strenuously collaboration with the tyranny of Hector. Her independent thinking washes away like sand when she allies herself with Katerina. The military, in the person of Captain de Naval, also decides to grasp this unforeseen opportunity for its own advancement. Those events recall Marcos’s secretary of defense, Ponce Enrile, who, having
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fallen out with Marcos, tried to ensure Marcos’s defeat in the 1986 election. Enrile backed Corazon Aquino, although with the intent of establishing a government run by a military junta. Even with Hector’s return, coups, countercoups (such as those suffered by Aquino during her rule), and the fortification of the presidential palace follow. If this farce were to be taken at face value, the prospects for the Philippines would be grim. Rosca’s witty, colorful style, however, makes the novel seem closer to light opera. Its “music” is very different from the gongs and drums of her novel about the attempted assassination of Marcos, State of War. The source of Rosca’s implied hope in Twice Blessed seems to be that when greed becomes so deeply embedded in a small class of people, alliances among even the most powerful can turn to bitter rivalry, and the system of social oppression can self-destruct.
Suggested Readings Casper, Leonard. In Burning Ambush: Essays, 1985-1990. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1991. Davis, Rocio G. “Postcolonial Visions and Immigrant Longings: Ninotchka Rosca’s Versions of the Philippines.” World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (Winter, 1999): 62ff. _______. Sunsurfers Seen from Afar: Critical Essays, 1991-1996. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil, 1996. Manuel, Dolores de. “Decolonizing Bodies, Reinscribing Souls in the Fiction of Ninotchka Rosca and Linda Ty-Casper.” MELUS 29, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 99ff. Contributor: Leonard Casper
Henry Roth Born: Tysmenica, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine); February 8, 1906 Died: Albuquerque, New Mexico; October 13, 1995 Jewish
Rediscovered in 1964, thirty years after it was written, Roth’s breakthrough novel Call It Sleep evokes the childhood traumas of a sensitive Jewish immigrant boy in a New York ghetto. Principal works long fiction: Call It Sleep, 1934; Mercy of a Rude Stream, 1994-1996 (includes A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, 1994; A Diving Rock on the Hudson, 1995; From Bondage, 1996; and Requiem for Harlem, 1998) short fiction: “Broker,” 1938; “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” 1940; “Petey and Yorsee and Mario,” 1956; “At Times in Flight,” 1959 (parable); “The Dun Dakotas,” 1960 (parable) miscellaneous: Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925-1987, 1987 (Mario Materassi, editor) Henry Roth, born in Austria-Hungary in 1906, wrote his first novel in the early 1930’s. Published in 1934 and rediscovered in 1964, Call It Sleep vividly evokes the childhood traumas of a sensitive Jewish immigrant boy in the hostile—and sometimes gentle—New York ghetto. Though not strictly autobiographical, the novel derives much from Roth’s own boyhood in turbulent New York City, as do most of his short pieces published in The New Yorker. Roth began writing at City College, where he majored in English and graduated in 1928. His chief mentor was Eda Lou Walton of New York University, whose encouragement and support enabled him to devote almost four years to completing Call It Sleep. Published in 1934, the novel drew reviewers’ praise but made little impact on the public or on most literary scholars. Its subject and style reminded critics of the works of James T. Farrell, James Joyce, and Theodore Dreiser. Psychologically truthful and unified by skillfully handled themes and motifs, the book demonstrated Roth’s considerable skill in the art of fiction. Between the late 1930’s and the mid-1960’s, Roth largely abandoned writing for a variety of other occupations: high school teacher in the Bronx, precision metal grinder, teacher in a one-room school in Maine, orderly and supervisor in a mental hospital, breeder of ducks and geese, tutor in Latin and mathematics. In 1964 Call It Sleep was reissued to considerable critical fanfare. Interviewers 956
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who sought out Roth found him a sensitive and thoughtful man who had gone his own way, living on a Maine farm after the fashion of Henry David Thoreau. Roth expressed his admiration for the poet Robinson Jeffers and discussed his personal rejection of the notion that the world is absurd. In 1965 he was recognized with an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. After Call It Sleep, Roth published memoirs, short stories, autobiographical sketches, and other miscellaneous pieces, many of which were collected in Shifting Landscape. In 1979 he began work on Mercy of a Rude Stream, a multivolume work that in a sense continues Call It Sleep, since it, too, is loosely based on Roth’s life. In 1994, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream and Roth’s second novel, appeared. The second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared in 1995, the same year in which Roth died. Posthumously published volumes were From Bondage, which appeared in 1996, and Requiem for Harlem, in 1998.
Call It Sleep Type of work: Novel First published: 1934 In retrospect, Call It Sleep seems so unequivocally a major artistic achievement that it is difficult to understand why it was neglected for thirty years. However, in 1934 American culture lacked a category for American Jewish literature. By 1964, Roth fulfilled the need to anoint a worthy ancestor to Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, to legitimate a newly canonized tradition. It was only after ethnicity became a crucial issue in American society that Roth’s novel could be appreciated for its pioneering embodiment of multiculturalism and multilingualism. Call It Sleep begins in May, 1907, with the arrival by ship from Europe of twoyear-old David Schearl and his mother, Genya. They are met at Ellis Island by David’s father, Albert, a surly, abusive man who is embittered by disappointment. Albert is forever falling out with fellow workers and forced to seek new employment, as a printer and then as a milkman. The family moves from modest lodgings in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood to a crowded tenement on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Roth’s book focuses on young David’s troubling experiences during the years 1911-1913, as a stranger in a strange land. Call It Sleep is a comingof-age novel about a hypersensitive Jewish boy who is forced to cope alone with the mysteries of sex, religion, and love. After a brief prologue recounting David’s arrival in America, Roth organizes his story into four sections, each defined by a dominant image: “The Cellar,” “The Picture,” “The Coal,” and “The Rail.” What might otherwise seem casual details are magnified by refraction through the mind of an anxious child. Roth’s use of stream of consciousness intensifies the sense of an unformed mind trying to assimilate the varied sensations that assault it. The family apartment is a haven for David, as long
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as his father, who even doubts his paternity of the boy, is not home and his doting mother can lavish her affections on him. When David ventures out into the clamorous streets, he encounters threats, from both rats and humans. At the cheder, the drab religious school where Jewish boys are given rote instruction in a Hebrew Bible they cannot understand, David is confused and inspired by Isaiah’s account of the angel with a burning coal. Eavesdropping on a conversation between his mother and her sister Bertha, he misconstrues an explanation for why Genya, disgraced after being jilted by a Gentile, married Albert. When Leo, an older Polish boy, persuades David to introduce him to his cousin Esther, David is overwhelmed by incredulity and guilt over the sexual liberties that Leo takes. Fleeing his brutal father, David is shocked into unconsciouness after touching the live rail of a street car. Faced, like the reader, with sensory overload, David might as well call it sleep, embracing temporary oblivion as restoration after a long, disorienting day. To explore the tensions among Albert, Genya, and David, a clanging family triangle rife with resentments and recriminations, Roth appropriates the theories of Sigmund Freud, particularly in describing the powerful Oedipal bond between mother and son as well as the almost patricidal strife between Albert and David. The authority of James Joyce asserts itself, not only in the fact that Roth’s account of David Schearl, a surrogate for the author himself, is in effect another portrait of the artist as a young man but also in his lavish use of stream of consciousness and his meticulous deployment of recurrent imagery. During the two decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, massive, unprecedented migration from eastern and southern Europe was radically reshaping American society, and, more effectively than any other novel, Call It Sleep records the traumas experienced when the Old World met the New. Many of Roth’s immigrants are inspired by the American Dream of enlarged opportunity, while others are repulsed by an urban nightmare. Call it, too, sleep. Though the Schearls are Polish Jews, the eclectic slum in which they live also serves as home to immigrants and natives from many other backgrounds. Not the least of Roth’s accomplishments is his success at rendering the diversity of David’s environs. Yiddish is the first language of the Schearls, but English, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish are also spoken, in varying registers, by characters in the story. In a novel designed for an anglophonic reader, it would be misleading and demeaning to put fractured English into the mouths or minds of fluent Yiddish speakers when they are assumed to be using their native language. Instead, Roth fashions English prose supple enough to represent the varying speech and thoughts of those who speak and think in other tongues. Call It Sleep is significant for reflecting a momentous phenomenon that transformed the United States but was ignored by many of Roth’s literary contemporaries. In its vivid rendition of a child’s-eye view, its dramatic exposure of family tensions, and its creation of a rich linguistic texture, Roth’s first novel is an artistic triumph.
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Mercy of a Rude Stream Type of work: Novel First published: A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, 1994; A Diving Rock on the Hudson, 1995; From Bondage, 1996; Requiem for Harlem, 1998 Though they were published separately and can be read independently and autonomously, the four novels that constitute Mercy of a Rude Stream are best understood together, as a single narrative sequence. The entire tetralogy follows the coming of age of Ira Stigman, a Jewish emigrant to New York, from 1914, when he is eight years old, until 1927, when he is twenty-one and a senior at City College. Despite the change in names and the addition of a younger sister, Minnie, Ira seems largely an extension of David Schearl from Call It Sleep. He is also a thinly disguised version of Roth himself. The autobiographical basis of the books is made even more apparent by interpolated sections in which an older Ira, an ailing octogenarian author living in Albuquerque, addresses his word processor, calling it “Ecclesias.” He comments on his own renewed, belated efforts at writing fiction. Ira as author poses the question that most readers will raise about Roth himself—why, approaching death, does he struggle to record such lacerating memories? In narrating his story, Ira forces himself to revisit an unhappy childhood and adolescence, in which he and his mother, Leah, are terrorized by his psychotic father, Chaim. When the family moves from the lower East Side to a largely Irish neighborhood in East Harlem, Ira feels rudely wrenched out of an organic, nurturing Jewish community. He recalls the painful details of broken friendships and of his public disgrace when he was expelled from high school for stealing fountain pens. The most agonizing recollections—and the element that has drawn the most attention to Roth’s final books—concern Ira’s sexual transgressions. The second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, offers the startling revelation that, beginning when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, Ira regularly, furtively committed incest with his sister, Minnie. He also maintained covert sexual relations with his younger cousin Stella. Recollections of incest continue through volumes 3 and 4 and fuel the author’s suicidal self-loathing. The older Ira longs to die but feels compelled to tell his story first, as though narration might bring purgation and even redemption. Unlike the bravura Call It Sleep, much of Mercy of a Rude Stream is written in undistinguished prose that is at best serviceable in evoking working-class, urban life during and after World War I. Ira offers details of jobs he held, including stock boy in an upscale food store, soda peddler at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, and salesman in a candy shop. His sentimental education is very much connected to his intellectual one, and, though his grades are mediocre, Ira thrives in college. Publication of a short story in the student magazine awakens literary ambitions; his friendship with affluent Larry Gordon enlarges Ira’s life beyond his own squalid situation. He begins to acquire social graces and to strike on ideas. Ira becomes inebriated with reading, particularly after Edith Welles, the professor who was Larry’s lover, becomes Ira’s mentor and lover. Edith, who is modeled after Roth’s own Eda Lou Walton, introduces Ira to the most influential books and peo-
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ple of New York’s bohemian culture. In the final pages of the cycle’s final book, Requiem for Harlem, Ira bids farewell to his dysfunctional, debilitating family and his loathsome sexual compulsions by moving down to Greenwich Village to live with Edith. The apprentice artist is finally ready to write a novel very much like Call It Sleep. Finally, after disburdening himself of excruciating secrets, the eighty-nine-year-old Roth finished writing and prepared at last to call it sleep.
Suggested Readings Adams, Stephen J. “‘The Noisiest Novel Ever Written’: The Soundscape of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.” Twentieth Century Literature 35 (Spring, 1989). Buelens, Gert. “The Multi-Voiced Basis of Henry Roth’s Literary Success in Call It Sleep.” In Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, edited by Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. Halkin, Hillel. “Henry Roth’s Secret.” Commentary 97 (May, 1994). Kellman, Steven G. Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Lyons, Bonnie. Henry Roth: The Man and His Work. New York: Cooper Square, 1976. Sokoloff, Naomi B. Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Walden, Daniel, ed. Studies in American Jewish Literature 5, no. 1 (Spring, 1979). Wirth-Nesher, Hana, ed. New Essays on “Call It Sleep.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Contributors: Richard Tuerk and Steven G. Kellman
Philip Roth Born: Newark, New Jersey; March 19, 1933 Jewish Roth’s comic fiction has consistently challenged definitions of Jewish identity in late twentieth century America. Principal works long fiction: Letting Go, 1962; When She Was Good, 1967; Portnoy’s Complaint, 1969; Our Gang (Starring Tricky and His Friends), 1971; The Breast, 1972, revised 1980; The Great American Novel, 1973; My Life as a Man, 1974; The Professor of Desire, 1977; The Ghost Writer, 1979; Zuckerman Unbound, 1981; The Anatomy Lesson, 1983; Zuckerman Bound, 1985 (includes The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and Epilogue: The Prague Orgy); The Counterlife, 1986; Deception, 1990; Operation Shylock: A Confession, 1993; Sabbath’s Theater, 1995; American Pastoral, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000; The Dying Animal, 2001; The Plot Against America, 2004; Everyman, 2006; Exit Ghost, 2007 short fiction: Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories, 1959; “Novotny’s Pain,” 1962, revised 1980; “The Psychoanalytic Special,” 1963; “On the Air,” 1970; “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’: Or, Looking at Kafka,” 1973 nonfiction: Reading Myself and Others, 1975, expanded 1985; The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, 1988; Patrimony: A True Story, 1991; Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 2001 Philip Roth’s youth in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, established his first subject: the ambivalence felt by American Jews on facing assimilation into American culture, which entails the loss of much, possibly all, of their distinctive Jewishness. Roth grew up in a middle-class home where, he writes, “the Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility.” Roth has been unwilling, however, simply to depict the Jewish family as a haven. His inclination to challenge Jewish American propriety and his extravagant comic imagination have won for him a controversial place in American letters. After an education at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago, Roth earned with the publication of Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories the National Book Award and condemnation as an anti-Semite by some Jewish leaders. Roth’s tendency to use details from his life in his fiction has invited misinterpretations of his work as autobiography. An unhappy and short-lived marriage to Margaret Martinson, for example, was translated by Roth into My Life as a Man, in 961
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which Margaret’s fictional surrogate attracts and devastates the protagonist in part because she is not Jewish. Roth’s second wife, the Jewish actress Claire Bloom, may have provided in her English background a context for Roth’s alter ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, to explore his identity as a Jew in The Counterlife, in which Zuckerman becomes involved with a Christian Englishwoman. A suicidal breakdown in 1987, caused by medication prescribed for Roth after minor surgery, appears undisguised in Operation Shylock: A Confession, a probing quest for cultural and personal identity. Roth’s writing can be seen in stages, from the early realist fiction to the discovery of his comic voice in Portnoy’s Complaint to the mid-career novels featuring Jewish writer-protagonists to the works of the late 1980’s and 1990’s that either overtly recount Roth’s past or collapse the distinction between fiction and reality. Throughout, however, the thread that weaves the work together is Roth’s interest in exploring and exposing the Jewish American self.
Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories Type of work: Novella and short fiction First published: 1959 Roth’s first published volume, Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories, won for the young writer not only the National Book Award in 1960 but also accusations, as a result of the book’s comically piercing portraits of middle-class American Jews, of Roth’s harboring self-hatred. The ambivalent exploration of Jewish American life in Goodbye, Columbus, and its mixed reception among Jewish readers who were sensitive to the public image of Jews established two of the central themes of Roth’s fiction: a frank and often ironic look at Jewish American identity, and an intense but playful examination of the relationship between art and life. In the novella Goodbye, Columbus, Neil Klugman’s confrontation with his Jewish American identity is represented by his love affair with Brenda Patimkin. Brenda signifies the American Dream, her parents’ suburban prosperity symbolized by a refrigerator in the basement overflowing with fresh fruit. Neil’s ambivalence toward the Patimkins’ conspicuous consumption and their eager assimilation into American culture is expressed by the guilt he feels when he helps himself to fruit from the refrigerator. Although Neil finally rejects Brenda, the novella closes without offering Neil a clear sense of where he might belong. Roth poses other choices in the book’s subsequent stories. Ozzie Freedman in “The Conversion of the Jews” believes he must choose between Jewish authority and the American notion of personal freedom. In outrage at his rabbi’s denial that an omnipotent God could indeed have caused Mary to conceive without intercourse, Ozzie threatens to leap from the roof of the synagogue, and demands that the rabbi, his mother, and the assembled crowd kneel and affirm belief that God can do anything he wants, with the clear implication that God could have created Jesus in the manner that Christians believe. When Ozzie experiences the power of self-
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definition at this ironic climax, Roth suggests that Judaism, personified by the rabbi, must confront the shaping forces of the American context if it is not to lose its adherents. In “Defender of the Faith,” Sergeant Nathan Marx questions whether Jews are obligated to define themselves in relation to other Jews. After a Jewish recruit repeatedly manipulates Nathan for favors during basic training, he realizes that his greater responsibility to his fellow Jews lies in refusing to let them be different, despite the dangers that assimilation poses. As if Roth is in dialogue with himself, however, the final story in the collection reverses Nathan’s decision. Eli of “Eli, the FaPhilip Roth (© Nancy Crampton) natic” dons, as a challenge to his “progressive suburban community,” the stale black clothes of a recent Jewish immigrant, and, with them, an identity that refuses assimilation into American life. Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories, then, represents Roth’s first and notable attempt to explore the problem of Jewish American identity from a variety of angles and without resolution.
Portnoy’s Complaint Type of work: Novel First published: 1969 Philip Roth’s third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, takes the form of an outrageous, comic rant by Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, whose help Portnoy seeks because he feels that his life has come to be a “Jewish joke.” Portnoy’s impassioned, self-absorbed monologues explore his childhood and his erotic relationships. He wishes to locate the source of his pain, composed of guilt, shame, desire, and emotional paralysis, and to free himself from his past. The best-selling novel shocked readers with its obscenity, graphic sexual descriptions, and exaggerations of Jewish stereotypes. Portnoy’s early memories include his mother’s intense overprotectiveness and warnings against pleasure, his father’s emasculation by the gentile firm for which he works, and his own efforts to loosen the chains that bind him by breaking taboos, especially by frequent, ill-timed sexual escapades. His furious attempts at “selfloving” can be seen as symbolic expressions of self-loathing, intricately related to his position as a Jew in America. The satiric presentation of Portnoy as a figure of
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excess who wants to put the “id back in Yid” and the “oy back in goy,” provided Roth with a way to inquire into the complacency and neuroses of assimilated Jews in gentile America. In the postwar years, the Holocaust—the “saga of the suffering Jews”—defined Jewish American identity and encouraged Jews to assimilate inconspicuously. Portnoy’s ambivalence toward this Jewish response is represented in his adolescence and adulthood by his relationships with a series of gentile women. Portnoy desires simultaneously to flaunt and to reject himself as a Jew. In each case, he uses women to transgress religious and sexual taboos, imagining that his wild and occasionally abusive relationships with them will allow him to “discover America. Conquer America.” Yet each of these relationships results for him in intense guilt. His acknowledgement that his self-hatred makes him unable to love causes him to flail against his guilt with further transgressions, ending in more guilt, trapping him in a vicious circle. The novel ends with Portnoy’s primal scream, expressing his recognition that he cannot spring himself “from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago!” Portnoy, Roth’s Jewish American Everyman, cannot escape his past. He struggles to discover who he is, as a Jew and as a human being.
Suggested Readings Baumgarten, Murray, and Barbara Gottfried. Understanding Philip Roth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Bloom, Harold, ed. Philip Roth. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Halio, Jay L. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Kahn-Paycha, Danièle. Popular Jewish Literature and Its Role in the Making of an Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Milowitz, Steven. Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002. Parrish, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rand, Naomi R. Silko, Morrison, and Roth: Studies in Survival. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Roth, Philip. Conversations with Philip Roth. Edited by George J. Searles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Wade, Stephen. The Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Contributor: Debra Shostak
Muriel Rukeyser Born: New York, New York; December 15, 1913 Died: New York, New York; February 12, 1980 Jewish
Rukeyser’s poems gave voice to social consciousness, embracing all ethnic identities that she saw being treated unjustly. Principal works children’s literature: Come Back, Paul, 1955; I Go Out, 1961; Bubbles, 1967; Mayes, 1970; More Night, 1981 drama: The Colors of the Day: A Celebration for the Vassar Centennial, June 10, 1961, pr. 1961; Houdini, pr. 1973, pb. 2002 long fiction: The Orgy, 1965 poetry: Theory of Flight, 1935; Mediterranean, 1938; U.S. 1, 1938; A Turning Wind: Poems, 1939; The Soul and Body of John Brown, 1940; Wake Island, 1942; Beast in View, 1944; The Green Wave, 1948; Elegies, 1949; Orpheus, 1949; Selected Poems, 1951; Body of Waking, 1958; Waterlily Fire: Poems, 1935-1962, 1962; The Outer Banks, 1967; The Speed of Darkness, 1968; Twenty-nine Poems, 1972; Breaking Open: New Poems, 1973; The Gates: Poems, 1976; The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, 1978; Out of Silence: Selected Poems, 1992; The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, 2005 (Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog, editors) translations: Selected Poems, 1963 (of Octavio Paz’s poems); Sun Stone, 1963 (of Paz’s poems); Selected Poems, 1967 (of Gunnar Ekelöf’s poems; with Leif Sjoberg); Three Poems, 1967 (of Ekelöf’s poems); Early Poems, 1935-1955, 1973 (of Paz’s poems); Uncle Eddie’s Moustache, 1974; A Mölna Elegy, 1984 (of Ekelöf’s poem) nonfiction: Willard Gibbs, 1942; The Life of Poetry, 1949; One Life, 1957; Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact: The Clark Lectures, 1968; The Traces of Thomas Hariot, 1971 miscellaneous: A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, 1994 The literary career of Muriel Rukeyser (REW-ki-zur) began early with the publication of Theory of Flight in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1935. Her poetry reflected her intense personal passion, her call to freedom, and her search for justice. Readers may detect the influence of Walt Whitman in her sense of American identity as something all-embracing. 965
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Rukeyser’s sense of personal responsibility and social protest may have been forged by her political experience. Two years before her first book of poetry was published, while covering the Scottsboro trials for Vassar College’s leftist Student Review, Rukeyser was arrested— and caught typhoid fever while in jail. This event ignited her social awareness as evidenced in her writing and subsequent actions. This particular event is recalled as “The Trial” in Theory of Flight. Wherever Rukeyser saw oppression, she became involved. To an Muriel Rukeyser (Library of Congress) extent, the social and political history of the United States, as distilled through the reactions of a female Jewish intellectual activist, may be read through Rukeyser’s poems. She supported the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. Later, she was jailed while protesting the Vietnam War. She rallied in South Korea against the death sentence of the poet Kim Chi-ha. The event then became the focus of her poem “The Gates.” Bringing the perspective of her Jewish upbringing to her poetry, Rukeyser wrote about the horrors of World War II. Though her concern about the oppression of the Jews may have stemmed personally from her religion, she had already demonstrated her global concern about fascism. Rukeyser’s early marriage did not last; later she became the single parent of a son. Although motherhood became a subject in her poetry and she wrote about women from a feminist perspective, Rukeyser was never as singly feminist in her poetry as others of her generation. Still, her influence as a woman writer on those who followed her was acknowledged by Anne Sexton, who named her “Muriel, mother of everyone,” and who kept Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness on her desk.
“Ajanta” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1944, in Beast in View “Ajanta” is a long poem written in five subtitled parts: “The Journey,” “The Cave,” “Les Tendresses Bestiales,” “Black Blood,” and “The Broken World.” The poem, written in free verse, is given form by the progression of the journey it describes, in which the poet goes into herself in search of a sense of the unity of life. It is an exploration of her spirit, mind, and body.
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“Ajanta” is named for the great painted caves in India, famous for their magnificent religious frescoes painted by Buddhist monks. Rukeyser uses this setting in her poem to suggest the sacredness of her own interior places, her Ajanta, both psychic and physical. The figures of gods, men, and animals in the poem are accurate descriptions of the caves’ artwork. “Ajanta” opens Beast in View, Rukeyser’s fourth book of poems. The “beast” she hunts on her spiritual voyage is not always in view—in “Ajanta” it remains hidden from her until her final reconciliation in the cave to which it has led her. The beast is her innermost self, what makes her who she is, what is vital to her being. The thematic energy of “Ajanta” is devoted to capturing the beast—herself in her own myth of herself—so that she can be a whole person again. Because the poem is about transformation, and adapting to changes in life and the world, the beast in “Ajanta” often appears in disguises. All these masks are part of the poet’s personality and her changes. She seeks to unify them and accept them all. The search for self-identity in “Ajanta,” however, is not an end in itself. Beginning with descriptions of war atrocities, the poem reminds readers that to know oneself is vital also for the sake of the world in which one lives. The poet seeks the strong armor of self-knowledge, rather than the armor of rage, in order to know better how to aid the struggles of those who have been betrayed or who are suffering loss. The “world of the shadowed and alone” is a place in which the conscientious must fight for those in need and confront “the struggles of the moon.” In “Letter to the Front” (also from Beast in View), Rukeyser praises the healing power that women can offer the world, especially in time of war. She envisioned female sensibilities transforming traditional man, or the traditional masculine ideal. This vision laid a path for later women poets, such as Adrienne Rich, who continue to explore similar themes. The cave is a symbol for female sensibility, mystery, and strength. It is a dark interior, a place of hiding or hibernation, a place of meditation, a vault from which one emerges reborn, as did Jesus. It is also a source of life: Its watery, quiet space nurtures, like a womb. Its interior can be mysterious yet comforting, black and frightening, or cool and beckoning. “Ajanta,” said Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), is “an exploration . . . of her own interior—in every sense.” That is, as a poet and a woman, Rukeyser is interested in her mind and in her body’s flesh and form and how they shape her quest for fulfillment. The beauty, complexity, and energy of “Ajanta” has made it one of her most famous and powerful poems.
“Eyes of Night-Time” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1948, in The Green Wave “Eyes of Night-Time” is a full-throated song about the beauty of night and darkness. This short poem in free verse expresses the poet’s awe over nature’s beauty at night. The first stanza describes with passionate wonder the creatures that see in the
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dark. In the second stanza, the poet considers what human beings may see in the darkness, or what the darkness may reveal to them. For Rukeyser, “night-time” has strong metaphorical connections to the human spirit’s darkness or hidden truths. The poem, while offering minute observations on nature at night, also deals with self-examination and attempts to comment on human nature in general. In many of her poems, Rukeyser relies on a fabric woven of imagery and rhythm to provide formal unity. The Green Wave (1948), in which “Eyes of Night-Time” first appeared, contains other poems in which she experimented with her powers of observation and concentrated on new rhythms. Rukeyser preferred not to use traditional forms or patterns of fixed rhyme and meter. She wanted a poetry in which the material would generate its own form. Therefore, rhythm—the cadence, pace, and momentum of the line—was important to her. The music of the poem ought to allow it to echo and suggest—perhaps reproduce—the natural rhythms of the world she was attempting to describe. In the poem, images of light and dark intertwine; points of light continually pierce the darkness. These emerging lights represent, as images of light often do in poetry, possible revelations of truth. The play between dark and light, shadow and eye shine, gives the poem both tension and balance. Dark things bear light: “the illumined shadow sea” and “the light of wood” are two examples. Images of darkness inhabit every corner of “Eyes of Night-Time.” The poet has studied night, and nighttime is this poem’s territory. The earth’s night and the human spirit’s darkness, metaphorical counterparts in the poem, are fertile places the poet considers with full respect. The soul’s darkest, most threatening realizations, she knows, will reveal the light (self-knowledge) that is needed to free the “prisoners in the forest . . . in the almost total dark.” Rukeyser’s poem offers her ecstatic awareness of the healing power of darkness: If one goes deeply enough into one’s own darkness, one finds, paradoxically, the light of truth that heals dark sufferings and misgivings. This light is the “glitter” she recognizes in the last line as “gifts” given, really, by all those people who have gone before her and all those who are alive now. The poem is about examining oneself and one’s spirit. It is also a statement on the need for human unity. “And in our bodies the eyes of the dead and the living” is a powerful way of saying that human beings inhabit not only the earth but also one another. Like the creatures of nighttime—the cat, moth, fly, beetle, and toad— humans are interdependent and must rely on one another to survive.
Suggested Readings Gardinier, Suzanne. “A World That Will Hold All People: On Muriel Rukeyser.” Kenyon Review 14 (Summer, 1992): 88-105. Herzog, Anne F., and Janet E. Kaufman, eds. How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
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Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Rosenthal, M. L. “Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems.” In New Directions in Prose and Poetry 14, edited by James Laughlin. New York: New Directions Books, 1953. Untermeyer, Louis. “The Language of Muriel Rukeyser.” Saturday Review (August 10, 1940): 11-13. Ware, Michele S. “Opening ‘The Gates’: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness.” Women’s Studies 22 (June, 1993): 297-308. Contributors: Holly Dworken Cooley and JoAnn Balingit
Luis Rafael Sánchez Born: Humacao, Puerto Rico; November 17, 1936 Puerto Rican
Sánchez focuses on the new urban Puerto Rico that emerged after World War II and postwar industrialization and Americanization. Principal works drama: “Cuento de cucarachita viudita,” wr. 1959; La espera, pr. 1959; Farsa del amor compradito, pb. 1960; Los ángeles se han fatigado, pb. 1960 (The Angels Are Exhausted, 1964); La hiel nuestra de cada día, pr. 1962, pb. 1976 (Our Daily Bitterness, 1964); Casi el alma: Auto da fe en tres actos, pr. 1964, pb. 1966 (A Miracle for Maggie, 1974); La pasión según Antígona Pérez, pr., pb. 1968 (The Passion According to Antígona Pérez, 1968; also known as The Passion of Antígona Pérez, 1971); Teatro de Luis Rafael Sánchez, pb. 1976 (includes Los ángeles se han fatigado, Farsa del amor compradito, and La hiel nuestra de cada día); Quíntuples, pr. 1984, pb. 1985 (Quintuplets, 1984) long fiction: La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976 (Macho Camacho’s Beat, 1980); La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, 1988 short fiction: En cuerpo de camisa, 1965, revised 1971 nonfiction: Fabulación e ideología en la cuentística de Emilio S. Belaval, 1979; No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico, 1997 The success of his 1976 novel Macho Camacho’s Beat catapulted the Puerto Rican playwright, short-story writer, and essayist Luis Rafael Sánchez (lwees rahFYEHL SAHN-chehz) to international fame. Sánchez was born to a working-class family in a small coastal town in Puerto Rico. He went to San Juan to study theater at the University of Puerto Rico. For a time he moved back and forth between his native land and New York City. Sánchez spent a year at Columbia University, where he studied theater and creative writing. Later he returned to New York to pursue a master’s degree in Spanish literature at New York University. He began but did not complete his doctoral studies at Columbia University; he would receive his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of Madrid. He went on to teach Latin American and Spanish literature at the University of Puerto Rico, occasionally traveling and living abroad. Sánchez began his writing career as a playwright. While there is some low-key experimentalism in his drama, typical of the Latin American scene of the 1960’s, the thrust of his works lies in social criticism, with heavy moralizing, rhetoric, and 970
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transparent allegories. His political stance is that of an independentista (represented by the left-wing intellectual elite proposing independence for his native island), which in the Puerto Rico of the late twentieth century had become inextricably entangled with upholding Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1959 as the model for such independence. The mastery of language and the hyperbolism employed in Farsa del amor compradito recall Ramón María del Valle-Inclán’s farcical esperpentos from the early twentieth century. This quality continues through the short stories En cuerpo de camisa and reaches a high point in Macho Camacho’s Beat. Sánchez turns his back on the romantic icon of Puerto Rican cultural identity, the mainly white, peasant jíbaro. Instead, he focuses on the new Puerto Rico that emerged, after postwar industrialization and Americanization, in the cities. In these early works Sánchez starts learning to “write in this new Puerto Rican,” developing a neobaroque language that celebrates popular urban culture, discourse, music, and humor. The Passion According to Antígona Pérez is generally considered one of the highlights of the first period of Sánchez’s work. However, the tragic moral dilemma of the Sophoclean Antigone is considerably weakened in this version, and the story is transformed into a predictable political allegory that criticizes stale stereotypes and situations in Latin America (such as the mutual support of church and state). Read decades later, the drama does not seem to have withstood the ravages of time, history, and failed master ideologies. Indeed, the dictatorship in Sánchez’s apocryphal Latin American “banana republic” bears a striking, if unintentional and ironic, resemblance to Castro’s regime in Cuba.
Macho Camacho’s Beat Type of work: Drama First published: La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976 (English translation, 1980) Macho Camacho’s Beat, published originally in Argentina, was an instant success. In this novel Sánchez blends the language of an apocryphal popular hit song, reallife commercial hype, and contemporary urban mass-media culture into a masterful stream of radio advertisement babble that unmasks commercialism, superficial journalism, and popular hyperreal lifestyles propagated by commercial radio, all while criticizing some more serious aspects of Puerto Rican political life, such as all-pervasive corruption. The entire plot occurs within the few minutes before, at, and just after five o’clock on a steamy Wednesday afternoon. As an immense traffic jam paralyzes San Juan, the novel’s characters are depicted in the act of waiting. With the accumulative fragments of sounds, images, thoughts, and experience, the reader is able to piece together a composite picture of Puerto Rican culture. Sánchez’s prose is rich with the colorful and often obscene language of the streets, loaded with the language of consumerism, and abundant in references to the
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lifestyles of the rich and famous, fictional and otherwise. The fragmented, baroque surface of Sánchez’s highly allusive prose is a brilliant reflection of the kaleidoscopic confusion caused by the indiscriminate acceptance of the material values espoused by a profit-oriented consumerist society. Language defines thought, and in this novel, language is the product of a largely American-controlled mass media. The resulting inability to communicate on an intimate, personal level creates in the reader a sense of the moral and spiritual poverty of Sánchez’s characters. Macho Camacho’s Beat clearly calls for a radical reformation of Puerto Rican society and of the ways in which individuals perceive themselves. The political push to Americanize Puerto Rico and the corruption of government officials is exemplified in the character of Reinosa. The moral decay of the population is sardonically expressed in the Mother’s prostitution and Benny’s love affair with his Ferrari, which supersedes his affection for any human being. Even the personal physical reality of the people is being transformed, Americanized, foreignized. This is clearly expressed in Graciela’s obsession with makeup, hair, and fashion, in her social life, and in her absurd proposed design for typical Puerto Rican dress: a tailored suit in spotted calfskin. The key metaphor of the monstrous traffic jam symbolizes the stagnation of a Puerto Rican society that constantly denies its own seedy reality as it becomes obsessed with the fleeting distractions offered by a sensationalist media and subscribes to the seductive but clearly false philosophy of the seductive guaracha. No element of Puerto Rican society is immune from Sánchez’s irreverent and biting sense of humor. The sins of elitism, racial discrimination, and denial of self are laid bare before the grotesque feet and obtuse minds of the sinners. Just as the Kid is forced to confront his ugly and deformed reality reflected in the surface of a fragmented mirror, Sánchez compels his fellow Puerto Ricans to confront themselves in the fragmented and glittering surface of Macho Camacho’s Beat.
Quintuplets Type of work: Drama First produced: 1984, pb. 1985 (English translation, 1984) In 1984 Sánchez’s play Quintuplets was staged, to critical acclaim, in San Juan, New York, Buenos Aires, Santo Domingo, and Oporto. The play consists of monologues by the five children of the actor The Great Mandrake; criticizing patriarchy, it also deals with the nature of acting and writing. In 1985 Sánchez received a grant from the German academic exchange board and spent that year in Berlin. In 1988 he published La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos, a fictionalized biography of Daniel Santos, a real-life Puerto Rican singer of boleros from the 1940’s and 1950’s who was both a pop-culture idol and a fervent believer in the island’s independence. The text is a hybrid work, a mosaic of essay, fiction, and (pseudo) documentary narrative spiced with fragments of Santos’s best-known romantic and sentimental bolero songs.
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Quintuplets is written for two performers, each of who plays several roles. Critics have said that it is necessary to consult one’s playbill to make sure that only two performers are involved because each one acts so convincingly in the variety of roles undertaken. Sánchez has called the play a parody of suspense comedy. It is played as a family vaudeville act that, in the course of its unfolding, comments sociopolitically and philosophically on what it means to act and what it means to produce drama. The play is acted out before the delegates at a Conference on Family Affairs. The participants, the Morrison Quintuplets and their father, each occupy one of the play’s six acts, presenting a monologue that details his or her perceptions of what it is to be a member of the Morrison family. Among the Morrisons, Dafne is cast as a bombshell, radiant in a provocative red dress. She rejects traditional femininity but adopts the mask of femininity. In contrast is Bianca, whose sexual identity is not clearly revealed, although it is suggested that she has lesbian tendencies. All three Morrison boys are named Ifigenio, so they adopt names that distinguish them from each other: Baby and Mandrake are particularly telling among these assumed names. The father, Papá Morrison, referred to as El Gran Semental (the great stud), is viewed quite differently by each of the quintuplets. For Dafne, he represents perfection and is to be emulated. For Mandrake, he is the competition as a performer but also in an Oedipal sense. Bianca considers him a controlling, domineering patriarchal archetype. Baby, the least secure of the quintuplets, sees his father as someone whose example he can never live up to no matter how hard he tries. According to Sánchez’s directions, each member of the family improvises his or her part in a vaudevillian style. The play comments stingingly on patriarchy and, indirectly, on the paternalism of the United States toward Puerto Rico, a topic that Sánchez injects into most of his writing. The play’s lengthy stage directions also comment on the meaning of acting and drama; hence, on different levels, Quintuplets is rewarding both to see in performance and to read.
Suggested Readings Flores, Angel, ed. Spanish American Writers: The Twentieth Century. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Guinness, Gerald. “Is Macho Camacho’s Beat a Good Translation of La guaracha del Macho Camacho?” In Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts, edited by Asela Rodriguez de Laguna. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987. Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Melendez, Priscilla. “Towards a Characterization of Latin American Farce.” Siglo XX 11 (1993). Perivolaris, John Dimitri. Puerto Rican Cultural Identity and the Work of Luis Rafael Sánchez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
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Quintana, Hilda E. “Myth and Reality in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La pasión según Antígona Pérez.” Revista/Review interamericana 19, nos. 3/4 (1989). Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Clichés and Defamiliarization in the Fiction of Manuel Puig and Luis Rafael Sánchez.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 41, no. 4 (June, 1983): 421. Contributors: Emil Volek and R. Baird Shuman
Sonia Sanchez (Wilsonia Benita Driver) Born: Birmingham, Alabama; September 9, 1934 African American
Among the black poets who emerged during the 1960’s, Sanchez has stood out for her activism. Principal works children’s literature: It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs, 1971; The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head, 1973; A Sound Investment, and Other Stories, 1979 drama: The Bronx Is Next, pb. 1968, pr. 1971; Sister Son/ji, pb. 1969, pr. 1972; Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us?, pb. 1974, pr. 1975; Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’, pr. 1979; I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t, pr. 1982; Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings, pr. 1995 poetry: Homecoming, 1969; We a BaddDDD People, 1970; A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, 1973; Love Poems, 1973; I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1978; Homegirls and Handgrenades, 1984; Under a Soprano Sky, 1987; Wounded in the House of a Friend, 1995; Does Your House Have Lions?, 1997; Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems, 1998; Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems, 1999 nonfiction: Crisis in Culture: Two Speeches by Sonia Sanchez, 1983; Conversations with Sonia Sanchez, 2007 (Joyce A. Joyce, editor) edited text: We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans, 1973 Sonia Sanchez (SOH-nyah SAHN-chehz) emerged as a writer and political activist in the 1960’s, marking the beginning of her career of a poet, playwright, and cultural worker. She became known as a black activist committed to the belief that the role of the artist is functional. Sanchez’s political interpretation of the situation of African Americans informs the creative forms she produces. The activist spirit would remain a constant in her work. Sonia Sanchez’s mother died when Sanchez was one year old. Her father, Wilson Driver, Jr., a jazz musician, moved the family to New York when Sanchez was nine years old; she was thrust into the jazz world of her father. She entered Hunter College and received her bachelor’s degree in political science in 1955. As a graduate student, Sanchez studied with Louise Bogan at New York University. Bogan, 975
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a poet and literary critic, wrote restrained, concise, and deeply intellectual poetry, often compared to that of the English metaphysical poets. Bogan’s influence upon Sanchez is most evident in the conciseness of her lyrical poetry; Bogan’s encouragement caused Sanchez to pursue the life of a poet. Sanchez formed a writers’ workshop and soon began reading poetry around New York City. Sanchez’s early works were published in little magazines; later they were published in black journals. Homecoming, Sanchez’s first anthology of poetry, placed her among poets who espoused a philosophy of functional art. Functional art is characterized by a sense of social purpose, information, instruction, and inspiration. Sanchez’s improvisational style combines strategies common to black speech. This is particularly evident in her early poetry. Indirection, or signifying, is a key element of this poetic style. Another key element of Sanchez’s style is her oral delivery, reminiscent of improvisation in jazz. Her creative vision is also expressed in her inventive poetic forms. Sanchez’s speechlike, versatile style is evident in all of her poetry. Although Sanchez’s literary reputation rests primarily on her poetry, she sees her plays as an extension of her poetic art, saying that their longer form gives her more room to express her ideas. She has also written short stories, children’s books, essays, literary criticism, and social commentary. She has an impressive record as a university teacher and political activist and as a driving force behind the movement to include writings by African American authors in the college curriculum. She frequently gives public readings, performances that are noted for their dramatic power and include music, drum beats, and chanting. Some of her best-known works were inspired by the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s, and her later writings have continued to focus on African American themes.
The Bronx Is Next Type of work: Drama First published: 1968, pr. 1971 Sanchez’s first brief play, The Bronx Is Next, was, she says, a condemnation of what Harlem was becoming in the 1960’s. Once the site of the great outpouring of creativity called the Harlem Renaissance, the area was being destroyed by drugs and violence. The play’s two major characters are Old Sister, representing the past oppression of African Americans in the Old South, and Black Bitch, a sexually promiscuous woman accused by the black male characters of sleeping with a white police officer and failing to support the revolution. When Black Bitch accuses the black male leader of abusing women, he brutally rapes her. The black male revolutionaries force both women back into the burning buildings to die. Sanchez’s language is explicitly sexual and violent in this play. Although some critics believe the work contains one of the first examples of strong black women characters in drama, others find the message disturbing, with the playwright seeming to blame the women characters for not supporting the revolution.
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Sister Son/ji Type of work: Drama First published: 1969, pr. 1972 The narrator in this one-act play is an African American woman in her fifties recalling important episodes of her history as a revolutionary. By changing her makeup and costumes, she recalls her early college days, her first sexual experience, her black consciousness awakening through the speeches of Malcolm X, an episode of near insanity when she loses control of her life, and the death of her teenage son in the revolution. Sanchez portrays the conflicted relationship between black men and women, with the men exploiting their power and expecting the women to take a subservient role in the movement. Sister Son/ji pleads with black men to admit women as equals and respect love and family life rather than a false idea of manhood. By tracing Sister Son/ji’s experiences, Sanchez explores themes that dominate all her work: the exploitation of black women by black men, the destructive power of drugs and violence, the urgent need for African American men and women to work together to combat racism. The play concludes with a statement of Sister Son/ ji’s strength and survival skills: Death is a five o-clock door forever changing time. And wars end. Sometimes too late. i am here. still in mississippi. Near the graves of my past. We are at peace . . . but I have my memories. . . . i have my sweet/astringent memories becuz we dared to pick up the day and shake its tail until it became evening. A time for us. blk/ness. blk/people.
We a BaddDDD People Type of work: Poetry First published: 1970 In the 1970 collection We a BaddDDD People, Sanchez’s political voice protesting the injustice of growing up in a country that did not “tell me about black history” and “ma[d]e me feel so inferior.” These poems function to answer those questions for herself. The discovery is thematically addressed in the poem “Questions” and in the section titled “Survival.” Depicting the political unrest of the period of the late 1960’s, the collection has been criticized for being unoriginal in its political diatribe. However, the importance of the work in posing the political and personal questions of black existence for the poet and her readers is articulated in the following lines from “Questions”: “we suicidal/ or something/ or are we all bugalooers/ of death:/ our own???” and “why they closing down/ prisons as they close off/ our blk/ minds.” The structure of the poems often represents the urgency of the poetic voice. For example, lines are fractured and split off by slashes and spaces. In “right on: wite america,” the first stanza uses virgules and abbreviations:
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Sonia Sanchez starting july 4th is bring in yr/guns/down/to yr/nearest/po/lice/station
The troubled tone of the collection, reinforcing the structure, is loud and vociferous, as in “words for our children (from their many parents)”: we are the screeeeeamers/ seaaaarcherrrs/ weepeeers
Although the tone is often soul-searching, the thrust of the poetry strives metaphorically to force change. More than featuring poems of political dissent, the collection reaffirms the need for poetry, the desire to chant or even shout out one’s thoughts, as exhibited in “a/ coltrane/poem”: stretchen the mind till it bursts past the con/fines of solo/en melodies
and concluding with the need to listen: showen us life/ liven. a love supreme. for each other if we just lissssssSSSTEN.
Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us? Type of work: Drama First published: 1974, pr. 1975 This play is experimental in form, with three unrelated scenes connected by dance sequences. In the first scene, three characters (Malik, Waleesha, and Nefertia) represent the black male’s need to dominate women to assure his manhood. Both women are pregnant and enemies of each other, rather than sisters, as they try to hold on to Malik’s love. The next scene is a surreal dramatization of male cocaine addicts, four black and one white, riding horses that represent their drug-induced fantasies. Two prostitutes, one white and one black, are whipping them and providing drugs. At the end of this scene, the white man dresses in drag, proclaiming himself the “real queen.” San-
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chez represents black men as superior to white men, but sees women, both black and white, as subordinate to the degenerate needs of men of both races. The final scene portrays a black male revolutionary called Brother in relationships with both a black woman and a white woman. The white woman functions as a symbol of the white man’s property. She supports him financially and makes him feel powerful. Sister, the black woman, is conflicted in her role as angry lover demeaned by Brother’s betrayal with the “devil/woman” and her hopes that he will reform himself and return to his true responsibility as a man committed to his role in the black community. Sanchez stops short of supporting the sisterhood of black women, emphasizing Sister’s individual strength and ability to survive both racism and her oppression by the black male.
I’ve Been a Woman Type of work: Poetry First published: 1978 I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems is a compilation of selections from Sanchez’s major works up to 1978. This collection offers a cross section of the themes that characterize Sonia Sanchez’s poetic vision. Sanchez’s work balances the private and the public. The private, or introspective, poems are intensely personal. The public poems cover a number of concerns. Selections from Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973), and Generations: Selected Poetry 1969-1985 (1986) make up I’ve Been a Woman. Themes include issues of identity among African Americans. Sanchez’s work is characterized by her ability to offer clear-eyed commentary on African American conditions while offering poetry of destiny and self-determination. For example, one of Sanchez’s ongoing concerns is drug addiction among African Americans. In works such as Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), she focuses this concern on the devastating effects of addiction to crack cocaine. This intermingling of themes is found in poems such as “Summary.” This poem represents an example of Sanchez’s technique. She combines personal and public concerns. Within this poem, Sanchez does not allow the narrator to move inward and remain there. She seems to assume an introspective position as a momentary restful pose. In this energizing space, the narrator is renewed and arrives at a political solution to problems noted in the poems. The poems included in these sections are examples of Sanchez’s virtuosity as a poet. Section 5 is devoted exclusively to Sanchez’s “Haikus/Tankas & Other Love Syllables.” Use of forms offers an example of the poet’s technique. This collection offers an excellent example of Sanchez’s range as an artist. In the various sections of I’ve Been a Woman, the speaker of Sanchez’s poetry is revealed as a quester for identity and resolution. Distinguished from male quest epics, Sanchez’s quest focuses on the desire to embark on a quest not only for herself but also for other
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women. The knowledge that the quester seeks is assumed to be available in the person of an Earth Mother who can help the quester understand the relationship between past and present. Such a figure can also help the quester learn to have faith in the future.
Homegirls and Handgrenades Type of work: Poetry First published: 1984 Critically acclaimed, Sanchez’s Homegirls and Handgrenades is divided into four sections: “The Power of Love,” “Blues Is Bullets,” “Beyond the Fallout,” and “Grenades Are Not Free.” The thematic opposites of rage and love, cynicism and compassion, and pain and joy coalesce in this volume. The varying rhythmic style of the poems reflects the forms language takes in articulating diverse, sometimes conflicting, views. For example, the language of the street often labeled by Sanchez as “black English,” spoken by her stepmother and her beloved grandmother, is used to describe “Poems Written After Reading Wright’s ‘American Hunger’”: “such a simple need/ amid yo/easy desire.” In four of the poems she uses haiku, a Japanese lyric form that represents a single, concentrated image in seventeen syllables and arranged in three unrhymed lines of, traditionally, five, seven, and five syllables. Aptly named “Haiku,” each poem conveys a single impression of a scene in motion: “your love was a port/ of call where many ships docked/ until morning came.” In the section “Beyond the Fallout,” the haiku exhibits raw anger: “I see you blackboy/ bent toward destruction watching/ for death with tight eyes.” The visionary quality of Sanchez’s poem is articulated in poetic language that projects versatility because American life cannot be reflected in one homogenous voice. Sanchez uses the English vernacular to apprehend the complexity of human existence, as she states in a 1985 interview with Herbert Leibowitz: “Playing with words, as I used to, was like going outside and running and jumping over walls.” As she explains further in the same interview, “A lot of my poetry expresses what it means to let people taste and feel sweetness and power running together, hate and love running together, beauty and ugliness also running together.”
Does Your House Have Lions? Type of work: Poetry First published: 1997 Does Your House Have Lions? is a book-length poem memorializing the life and death of Sanchez’s brother, a young black man who died of AIDS after a
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brief, furious exploration of the gay subculture in New York City. The title, Does Your House Have Lions?, comes from an interview with jazz great Rahsaan Roland Kirk and in this context speaks of a household’s need to face life with courage. Sanchez’s poem is a record of how one family found the courage of lions. The poem is written in four parts, “sister’s voice,” “brother’s voice,” “father’s voice,” and “family voices/ ancestors’ voices.” The first three sections, and most of the fourth section, use a modified terza rima rhyme scheme; each individual unit poem has a rhyme scheme of ababbcc. This tight structure suggests the emotional confinement her brother is rebelling against. The first section, “sister’s voice,” presents the most detached, assured poetry, as the sister (a persona representing Sanchez herself) Sonia Sanchez (AP/Wide World Photos) describes her brother’s immersion into the New York gay subculture as “a migration unlike/ the 1900s of black men and women/ coming north for jobs.” To repay his father’s desertion, he sold his body as a prostitute, auctioning off “his legs. eyes./ heart. in rooms of specific pain.” By contrast, the second section, “brother’s voice,” is written with the emotional directness of pain. He begins by saying, “father. i despise you for abandoning me,” and tells of trying to make a new life on the New York streets, “a country of men/ where dollars pump their veins.” “Father’s voice” tells poignantly of a father’s neglect and is remarkably alive with the rhythms of the music the father plays professionally; “i come to collapse the past/ while bonfires burn up your orphan’s mask,” the father sings about trying to reconcile with a son approaching death. The last section is the most magisterial. Most of these poems represent the voices of the family, but several represent “the ancestor” and have a distinct African folk quality to them. Together, they chart the family’s attempt to heal even as one of them is dying. The cumulative effect is both wrenching and uplifting. This is poetry that demands performance; a reader almost has to imagine the poetry being staged to fully appreciate it.
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Suggested Readings Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Introduction to Sister Son/ji, by Sonia Sanchez. In Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. New York: Praeger, 1990. De Lancey, Frenzella Elaine. “Refusing to Be Boxed In: Sonia Sanchez’s Transformation of the Haiku Form.” In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Jennings, Regina B. “The Blue/Black Poetics of Sonia Sanchez.” In Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Joyce, Joyce A. Ijala: Sonia Sanchez and the African Poetic Tradition. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996. Sanchez, Sonia. “As Poets, as Activists.” Interview by David Reich. World, May/ June, 1999, 1-11. _______. “Disciple and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.” Interview by Susan Kelly. African American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter, 2000): 679-687. _______. “Exploding Myths: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.” Interview by Herbert Leibowitz. Parnassus, Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter, 1985, 357-368. Contributors: Frenzella Elaine De Lancey, Cynthia S. Becerra, and Marjorie Podolsky
Thomas Sanchez Born: Oakland, California; February 26, 1944 Spanish American
Sanchez’s novels portray the diverse, multiethnic experience of twentieth century American life. Principal works long fiction: Rabbit Boss, 1973; Zoot Suit Murders, 1978; Mile Zero, 1989; Day of the Bees, 2000; King Bongo: A Novel of Havana, 2003 nonfiction: Four Visions of America: Henry Miller, Thomas Sanchez, Erica Jong, Kay Boyle, 1977 (with others); Native Notes from the Land of Earthquake and Fire, 1979 (also known as Angels Burning: Native Notes from the Land of Earthquake and Fire, 1987) Descended from Spanish and Portuguese ancestors and growing up in a poor family, Thomas Sanchez (SAHN-chehz) was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Northern California after his mother became ill. There he developed his interest in Native American subjects, which informs his fiction. An outspoken advocate for human rights, Sanchez was a member of the Congress for Racial Equality, the United Farm Workers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960’s. Sanchez participated in the Sacramento Valley grape strikes and the Vietnam antiwar movement. As a radio correspondent in 1973, he reported on the American Indian Movement’s takeover of the Wounded Knee Reservation in South Dakota—a protest that prompted a Senate investigation into the conditions of Indian life. In 1969, Sanchez left the United States to visit Spain, where he wrote his first novel. Rabbit Boss chronicles four generations of the Washo Indian tribe. The tribe’s leader, the Rabbit Boss, encounters the Donner party, a group of white settlers who became snowbound in the mountains and resorted to cannibalism. A Washo legend that whites are cannibals originates from this 1846 encounter. The cannibalism overturns the civilized white man-savage Indian dichotomy. Cultures clash again in Sanchez’s next novel, Zoot-Suit Murders, a mystery set in a Los Angeles barrio of the 1940’s. The story concerns the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a rioting neighborhood where the local zoot-suiters are regularly terrorized by sailors. A Guggenheim Fellowship and the proceeds from the sale of his house allowed Sanchez to move to Key West, Florida, where he wrote Mile Zero. Rabbit Boss describes the beginning of an American campaign against indigenous people that cul983
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minated in the destructive logic of the Vietnam War. Mile Zero is Sanchez’s attempt to connect with the post-Vietnam generation. For Sanchez, the tide of refugees fleeing Haiti and the increasing cocaine traffic through Florida stem from the same folly that fueled the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The novel’s brilliant evocation of Key West and its political vision elicited favorable comparisons with the work of John Steinbeck and Robert Stone. Sanchez writes novels infused with the richness of America’s cultural heritage, so his work is difficult to categorize. His fiction has received laudatory reviews and other critical accolades, but it has yet to attract the scholarly attention it deserves. Nevertheless, Sanchez is an important critic of the United States’ destructive desire for “progress” at the expense of others.
Mile Zero Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Mile Zero, Sanchez’s sweeping vision of Key West, Florida, brilliantly evokes the rich history and lyrical passion of the island. Key West is the southernmost point of the continental United States, where “Mile Zero,” the last highway sign before the Atlantic Ocean, symbolizes the end of the American road. While Key West represents the end for the downtrodden Americans who gravitate there, the island promises hope for refugees fleeing Haiti’s poverty across shark-ridden waters. Sanchez traces the island’s shifting economy from a hub of the cigar industry to “a marijuana republic,” then to “a mere cocaine principality.” Sanchez laments how the drug trade has corrupted the American Dream. Mile Zero’s main character, St. Cloud, a former antiwar activist, drowns his selfdoubt in Haitian rum and ponders his inability to sacrifice himself for his beliefs. He feels a strange kinship with MK, once a soldier in Vietnam and now a dangerous smuggler who has fled Key West for South America. MK’s mysterious presence and the shadow of Vietnam permeate the book. St. Cloud imagines that his pacificism and MK’s violence are two sides of the same coin. After Vietnam, returning soldiers and protesters both found themselves cast out of society. When a Coast Guard cutter tows a refugee boat from Haiti into the harbor, Justo Tamarindo, a Cuban American police officer, drafts St. Cloud to help him prevent the deportation of the sole survivor, a boy named Voltaire. Voltaire’s sad story reveals how America thrives at the expense of developing nations. Late in the novel, Voltaire escapes from the detention center where he is waiting to be deported. The young, malnourished boy dreams he has reached a heavenly land of plenty at a garish shopping mall before he dies a tragic death. Meanwhile, Justo pursues Zobop, an enigmatic killer, who is roaming the island and leaving Voodoo-inspired clues everywhere. After Zobop is killed, Justo learns that the murderer sought purification by destruction. Like El Finito, a powerful,
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apocalyptic hurricane that threatens to destroy the island, Zobop believes everything must be wiped out before it can be renewed. In Mile Zero, Sanchez signals the necessity of cultural change. Vietnam is over, Justo thinks, but the bodies of the dead refugees augur the arrival of a new devil. America is doomed if it does not change. The novel’s ambiguous ending, in which Justo, who may have contracted AIDS, pulls St. Cloud out of the ocean, brings its readers to mile zero, a place that can be either an ending or a beginning.
Suggested Readings Kirkus Reviews. Review of King Bongo, by Thomas Sanchez. 71, no. 1 (March 15, 2003): 425. Marovitz, Sanford E. “The Entropic World of the Washo: Fatality and Self-Deception in Rabbit Boss.” Western American Literature 19 (Fall, 1984). Rieff, D. “The Affirmative Action Novel.” The New Republic 202, no. 14 (April 2, 1990). Sanchez, Thomas. “An Interview with Thomas Sanchez.” Interview by Kay Bonetti. The Missouri Review 14, no. 2 (1991). _______. “The Visionary Imagination.” MELUS 3, no. 2 (1976). Contributor: Trey Strecker
George S. Schuyler Born: Providence, Rhode Island; February 25, 1895 Died: New York, New York; August 31, 1977 African American
Schuyler, whose specialty was ridiculing bigotry, was one of the leading satirists of the Harlem Renaissance era. Principal works long fiction: Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, 1931 short fiction: Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940, 1931; Ethiopian Stories, 1994 nonfiction: Fifty Years of Progress in Negro Journalism, 1950; Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler, 1966 Born in Rhode Island and raised in Syracuse, New York, George S. Schuyler (SHIlur) dropped out of high school to join the Army. There, as a member of the famous Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry regiment, he served seven years before being discharged as a first lieutenant in 1919. After several odd jobs in New York City, Schuyler returned home and joined the Socialist Party, for which he held several offices. Schuyler was later involved with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association but became disillusioned with Garvey’s plan to return to Africa. Schuyler often spoke publicly on political and cultural issues, and by the 1920’s, he had joined a black socialist group, Friends of Negro Freedom, and had accepted a job on the staff of the organization’s official magazine, The Messenger. He also wrote as the New York correspondent for an African American weekly newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier. He continued to live in New York and write for The Pittsburgh Courier until 1966. Schuyler’s literary identity evolves from his career as a journalist and from his deep respect for his mother’s ideas and values. The product of a middle-class family, Schuyler comments in his autobiography, Black and Conservative, that his mother taught him to consider all sides of a question and to establish and stand by principles of personal conduct whether others agreed or not. True to his mother’s teaching, Schuyler seldom opted for the popular road. His public actions and political views were often regarded as extremely conservative and iconoclastic. His cynical view of race in America led to razor-sharp attacks upon racial patriots (black leaders he perceived as self-interested and bigoted) and upon white 986
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supremacists, who, he believed, exploited racism for economic reasons. In his autobiography he asserts that blacks never thought themselves inferior to whites; rather, blacks “are simply aware that their socio-economic position is inferior, which is a different thing.” In chiding race organizations as perpetuating the problems of racism, Schuyler contended that ridding the United States of racial hatred would absolutely disrupt the national economy. His irreverent attacks on the traditional values and cherished beliefs of black and white society earned him much notoriety during his forty-year career, which spanned from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960’s.
Black No More Type of work: Novel First published: 1931 Schuyler’s Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 offers a bitingly satirical attack upon America’s color phobia. His targets included bigoted whites who see the perpetuation of racism as a matter of economic and political interest, black leaders who waffle between appealing to white financial backers and appeasing their black constituents, and all who cloak their ignorance and hatred in racial rhetoric. The plot of Black No More centers upon Schuyler’s speculation of what might happen if America were to find a means to rid itself of the “Negro problem.” In an effort to uplift his race, Dr. Junius Crookman, a respected black physician, invents a process by which black people can inexpensively turn themselves permanently white. The success of his process leads him to open up numerous Black No More clinics across America to handle the throngs of hopeful clients. His first and most eager customer is Max Disher, who sees “chromatic enhancement” initially as a chance to get a white woman and eventually to run various fund-raising shams under the auspices of the George S. Schuyler (Arkent Archives) Knights of Nordica, led by the Im-
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perial Grand Wizard Reverend Givens. As a white man, Max takes a new name, Matthew Fisher. He soon is proving his talents as a brilliant organizer, political manipulator, and white supremacist working for “the cause.” Ironically, the woman of his Harlem dreams and eventual wife, Helen, turns out to be the daughter of Reverend Givens. Matthew’s schemes initially are simply quick-money ploys that amusingly take advantage of the Knights of Nordica’s ignorance and obsession for racial supremacy. As the plot moves along, however, Matthew begins to sound too sincere in his racist rhetoric and becomes obsessed with earning money and political power. An old friend, Bunny Brown, arrives to keep Matthew in line. With the numbers of blacks steadily dwindling, thanks to Crookman’s clinics, Matthew and Bunny plot to expose and destroy the institution of racism in America, along with its vested leaders. The novel concludes in a calamity as the national presidential race becomes a matter of reciprocated political tricks. The former blacks are whiter than whites, the two most notorious bigots in the book go up in flames, and Matthew’s wife gives birth to a mulatto child. Schuyler, through frequent barbs and sarcastic commentaries, exposes the hypocrisy of both white and black leaders. There are numerous thinly disguised caricatures of the black leaders of the time of the novel: W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, C. J. Walker, James Weldon Johnson, and many others. Schuyler’s satire contends that blacks are motivated by the same economic and political interests as whites and, once given the opportunity, will resort to the same means to preserve those interests.
Suggested Readings Davis, Arthur P. “George Schuyler.” In From the Dark Tower. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Ferguson, Jeffrey B. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Schuyler, George. Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1966. Contributor: Betty L. Hart
Delmore Schwartz Born: Brooklyn, New York; December 8, 1913 Died: New York, New York; July 11, 1966 Jewish
Schwartz’s work affirms the power of the independent mind against materialism. Principal works children’s literature: “I Am Cherry Alive,” the Little Girl Sang, 1958 drama: Shenandoah, pb. 1941 poetry: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, 1938 (includes poetry and prose); Genesis, Book I, 1943; Vaudeville for a Princess, and Other Poems, 1950; Summer Knowledge, 1959; Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, 1979 (Robert Phillips, editor) short fiction: The World Is a Wedding, 1948; Successful Love, and Other Stories, 1961 nonfiction: Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, 1970; Letters of Delmore Schwartz, 1984; The Ego Is Always at the Wheel: Bagatelles, 1986; Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz, 1939-1959, 1986 The life of Delmore Schwartz (DEHL-mohr shwohrts) reflects the Jewish American experience of the 1930’s. Schwartz was the son of Romanian immigrants, and his career unfolded against the backdrop of political and social tensions of the Depression. Thus, much of his writing articulates the drama of alienation; poetic realism and psychological intensity are common characteristics. The shadow of Fyodor Dostoevski looms over Schwartz’s literary figures—human archetypes of internalized chaos and ritualistic narcissism. Schwartz is often associated with the confessional school of his generation; the school includes John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. He fits squarely into the Jewish intellectual milieu of the post-World War I era, which produced many luminaries. Schwartz grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended New York University. In 1935, he entered Harvard University to study philosophy and, despite impressive achievements, left after two years, without receiving an advanced degree. Throughout his life he held numerous university and college teaching positions but was reluctant to commit himself to an academic career. His writings suggest a bohemian strain in his personality that drove him toward self-discovery instead of the regularity of a permanent job. 989
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The publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities galvanized Schwartz’s career. Within several years, he was recognized as a seminal figure. In 1943, he became an editor of the Partisan Review. The publication of The World Is a Wedding, a collection of semiautobiographical stories, and Summer Knowledge led to numerous awards and several distinguished lectureships. Schwartz’s volatile personality is apparent in the disenchanted loneliness of his artistic imagery, vividly depicted by Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), in which Von Humboldt Fleisher’s self-destruction is modeled after Schwartz’s pathetic decline. He often hurt those who loved him best, and this led to the dissolution of two marriages, insomnia, acute paranoia, heavy drinking, drug abuse, and failing health. From 1962 to 1965, he was a visiting professor of English at Syracuse University. He was popular with students, but his poetic talents had clearly deteriorated. Many of his later works seem like old pictures reframed, although he retained the brilliant flashes of a virtuoso. He died isolated and alone.
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities Type of work: Poetry, short fiction, and drama First published: 1938 The short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which lends its title to this collection of prose, poetry, and drama, was apparently written over a weekend in July, 1935. Vladimir Nabokov recognized its merit and recommended it as the lead piece in the Partisan Review. Schwartz’s literary career was launched. The enigmatic title suggests that destiny is located in dreams, what Schwartz would later call in his fictional autobiography Genesis (1943) “a fixed hallucination.” The attempt to realize dreams in poetry and to acknowledge the past as prologue to the future draws its inspiration from the artistic context established by William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot—perhaps the most powerful forces to influence Schwartz’s writing. The narrator witnesses the events leading up to his father’s marriage proposal. The narrator watches a series of six film episodes depicting Sunday afternoon, June 12, 1909, in Coney Island, New York. The climactic moment when his mother accepts proves unbearable to the eventual offspring of this union and, in the darkened, womblike theater, he screams in protest against his future birth. An authoritative usher, representing the narrator’s superego, reminds him that he has no control over his birth, and hence the outburst is futile. The scene closes when a fortune-teller predicts an unhappy marriage, ending in divorce. The theme of the anguished child continues in the five-act-long poem “Coriolanus and His Mother,” in which the protagonist shifts his allegiance from Rome to a barbarian cause. Based on William Shakespeare’s play, the drama unfolds before a boy, the poet’s alter ego, and five ghosts: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig van Beethoven, Aristotle, and a small anonymous presence, perhaps Franz
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Kafka, chronicler of the absurd. This “dream of knowledge” play is a parable about self-destructive tendencies— anger, insolence, pride. The management of identity is a theme carried through many of the thirty-five poems collected under the heading “Experimentation and Imitation.” For example, rebel spirits such as Hart Crane, Robinson Crusoe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Charlie Chaplin inhabit the vaudevillian circus atmosphere of the poetry, captured in the phrases “the octopus in love with God” (“Prothalamion”), “Now I float will-less in despair’s dead sea (“Faust in Old Age”), and “the radiant soda of the seashore Delmore Schwartz (© Jane Lougee) fashions” (“Far Rockaway”). “Dr. Bergen’s Belief,” a short play, is a lamentation on the death by suicide of the doctor’s daughter. After meditating on the promise of an afterlife and God’s providence—“the dream behind the dream, the Santa Claus of the obsessed obscene heart,” the doctor and a second daughter leap to their deaths. Schwartz’s lurid inventiveness and capricious style conjure a world of comic shame and imminent dread. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities represents an attempt to mold commonplace happenings into mystical shapes.
Suggested Readings Ashbery, John. The Heavy Bear: Delmore Schwartz’s Life Versus His Poetry—A Lecture Delivered at the Sixty-seventh General Meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan on 21st May 1995. Tokyo: English Literary Society of Japan, 1996. Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2000. Bawer, Bruce. The Middle Generation: The Lives and Poetry of Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Robert Lowell. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1986. Goldman, Mark. “Reflections in a Mirror: On Two Stories by Delmore Schwartz.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1982): 86-97. Howe, Irving. Foreword to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. New York: New Directions, 1978. McDougall, Richard. Delmore Schwartz. New York: Twayne, 1974.
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Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. New, Elisa. “Reconsidering Delmore Schwartz.” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 5, no. 3 (September, 1985): 245-262. Schwartz, Delmore. Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin: Selected Letters. Edited by Robert Phillips. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Waldhorn, Arthur, and Hilda K. Waldhorn, eds. The Rite of Becoming: Stories and Studies of Adolescence. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1977. Contributor: Robert Frail
Ntozake Shange (Paulette Williams) Born: Trenton, New Jersey; October 18, 1948 African American
Shange’s novels, plays, and poems speak for African American girls and women. Principal works children’s literature: Whitewash, 1997; Muhammad Ali: The Man Who Could Float Like a Butterfly and Sting Like a Bee, 2002; Daddy Says, 2003; Ellington Was Not a Street, 2004 drama: for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, pr., pb. 1975; A Photograph: Still Life with Shadows; A Photograph: A Study in Cruelty, pr. 1977, revised pr. 1979, pb. 1981 (as A Photograph: Lovers in Motion); Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon, pr. 1977 (with Thulani Nkabinde and Jessica Hagedorn); From Okra to Greens: A Different Kinda Love Story, pr. 1978, pb. 1985; Boogie Woogie Landscapes, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Spell # 7: Geechee Jibara Quik Magic Trance Manual for Technologically Stressed Third World People, pr. 1979, pb. 1981; Mother Courage and Her Children, pr. 1980 (adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play); Three Pieces, pb. 1981; Betsey Brown, pr. 1989 (adaptation of her novel); The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga, pb. 1991, pr. 1992; Plays: One, pb. 1992; Three Pieces, pb. 1992 long fiction: Sassafras: A Novella, 1976; Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, 1982; Betsey Brown, 1985; Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter, 1994 poetry: Nappy Edges, 1978; Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions, 1979; A Daughter’s Geography, 1983, 1991; From Okra to Greens: Poems, 1984; Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings, 1987; I Live in Music, 1994; The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African American Family, 2004 (photographs by the Kamoinge Workshop; photos edited by Frank Stewart) nonfiction: See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts, 1976-1983, 1984; If I Can Cook, You Know God Can, 1998 edited texts: The Beacon Best of 1999: Creative Writing by Women and Men of All Colors, 2000
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Ntozake Shange (N-toh-zah-keh SHAHN-geh), born Paulette Williams, was raised in an African American middle-class family in Trenton, New Jersey. Her mother was a social worker, and her father was a surgeon—the same occupations held by the parents in Shange’s novel Betsey Brown. Also like Betsey, young Paulette was encouraged to get an education and was introduced to leading figures of African American music and literature. Unlike Betsey, however, the writer remembers herself as always obedient and “nice.” Not until she was in her thirties did she allow herself to express the anger always lurking beneath her polite surface. Depressed over a failed marriage, and frustrated over the roadblocks of racism and sexism she encountered as she attempted to establish a career, she began to explore anew her own identity as an African American woman. She took the African name Ntozake Shange, which means “she who comes with her own things” and “she who walks like a lion.” Her first major piece of writing remains her most important. The play for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf won international acclaim for its innovative combining of poetry, drama, and dance to tell the stories of seven women. The play was one of the earliest writings in any genre to deal with the anger of black women. The success of the play gave Shange the financial freedom to explore less financially profitable outlets of expression. She began writing and publishing poetry, and collaborating with musicians and choreographers on improvisational pieces performed in bars and small theaters. She also has taught creative writing and women’s studies courses at various colleges across the United States, and has occasionally turned her pen to writing prose fiction, especially for and about adolescent girls. Shange has often spoken of the responsibilities that inform her writing. As an adolescent she could not find fiction about people like her. As a young woman she did not know how to understand her own pain. She writes many of her works to pass on to younger black women the insights she has gained through her experiences.
for colored girls who have considered suicide Type of work: Drama First produced: 1976, pb. 1976 For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem, Shange’s first work, tells the stories of seven women who have suffered oppression in a racist and sexist society. The choreopoem is an innovative combination of poetry, drama, music, and dance. For Shange, the combination is important. She learned about her identity as a woman through words, songs, and literature; she learned about her identity as an African through dance. The seven women are not named; they are meant to stand for the women who make up the rainbow. They are called “lady in brown,” “lady in red,” and so on. Each tells her own story. The stories are interwoven together. As the women tell
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their stories, they reflect on what it means to be a woman of color, what chances and choices they have. These women are in pain; they are angry. They have been abused by their lovers, their rapists, their abortionists, and they have been driven to the brink of despair. What strength they have left they find in music and in one another. Many have criticized the play for being too negative toward black men, but Shange has always attempted to direct the focus of the discussion back on the women. The play is about Ntozake Shange (Jules Allen) the women, about who they are and what they have experienced. To insist on a “balanced” view of the men in their lives is to deny these women’s experiences. These women deserve a voice. The play, she insists, does not accuse all black men of being abusive. These women are not rejecting men or seeking a life without men. The women desire men and love them, and ache for that love to be returned. Although the stories these women tell are tales of struggle, the play is ultimately uplifting. The seven women grieve, but they also celebrate their lives, their vitality, their colorfulness. As the play ends, the women recite, one at a time and then together: “i found god in myself/ & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely.” These women are not entirely powerless; they have the power of their own voices. They find the courage to tell their stories and thus triumph.
A Photograph Type of work: Drama First produced: 1977 In A Photograph, a set of meditations and sketches involving an ideal black woman named Michael and her lover Sean, a failed photographer, Shange explores her idea of art—"the poetry of a moment"—as well as representative stages of the African American experience. Photography, dance, and drama are shown to be art forms that capture meaningful moments and present them to viewers and readers so that they might behold and understand the essence and the value of art and life. The young professionals who reside in or pass through Sean’s San Francisco apartmentstudio are shown to examine the psychological factors that impede and that motivate them and other African Americans. The five figures of this piece are representative of other aspects of black life than those put forward in her first play. Nevada, a lawyer and lover-supporter of Sean,
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the struggling artist, sets herself above other “common” African Americans: Her family, she boasts, “was manumitted in 1843/ [when] yall were still slaves/ carrying things for white folks. . . .” The upwardly mobile Earl, also a lawyer, former lover of Claire and longtime friend of Sean, pleads Nevada’s case to Sean when the latter rejects her. Claire is a dancer who dances seductively for Sean as he photographs and then ravishes her. Michael is a dancer and the woman Sean comes truly to love as she shares herself and her ideas of art and the African experience with him. Early in the drama Sean tells Michael, “i’m a genius for unravelling the mysteries of the darker races/ . . . i know who we are.” After he rejects Nevada and is rejected by her, Sean reveals his insecurities as a son, a man, an African American, and an artist. The self- and race-assured artist Michael challenges her temporarily broken lover. Sean soon responds to this and to a poetic story danced and told by Michael with his own story and assurances: yes. that’s right. me. i’ma be it. the photographer of all time. look out ansel . . . i can bring you the world shining grainy focused or shaking a godlike phenomenon sean david . . . i realize you’re not accustomed to the visions of a man of color who has a gift but fear not I’ll give it to ya a lil at a time. i am only beginning to startle to mesmerize and reverse the reality of all who can see. I gotta thing bout niggahs my folks that just wont stop & we are so correct for the photograph we profile all the time styling giving angle & pattern shadows & still life. if somebody sides me cd see the line in niggahs the texture of our lives they wda done it but since nobody has stepped forward here I am. . . .
Sean seems obviously representative of Shange the artist in his coming-into-hisown response to Michael, who is yet another representative of Shange the artist. This choreopoem seems a particularly significant statement made by Shange, poet and writer: She, like Sean, presents “the contours of life unnoticed” and she, like Michael, speaks “for everybody burdened.”
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Boogie Woogie Landscapes Type of work: Drama First produced: 1979 After examining the identity of isolated young black women in for colored girls who have considered suicide and of couples in A Photograph, Shange concentrated on one woman’s visions, dreams, and memories in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, which was first produced as a one-woman poetry piece in 1978 and then cast as a play in 1979, with music and dance. Layla, a young black woman, entertains in her dreams a series of nightlife companions who exemplify her perceptions of herself and her memories. “Layla” in Arabic means “born at night,” and the entire drama exists in Layla’s nighttime subconscious. Layla’s dreams of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, of primitive cruelties to African women, and of rock and roll and blues interweave with her feelings about growing up, family, brothers and sisters, parents, maids (some of which appear later in Shange’s semiautobiographical novel Betsey Brown).
From Okra to Greens Type of work: Drama First produced: 1978, pb. 1985 Shange’s From Okra to Greens draws together and expands on the themes of her earlier theater pieces. The discovery by the lovers Okra and Greens of the beauty and strength—the god—within the individual is like that of the women who populate for colored girls who have considered suicide. Similarly, the lovers’ discovery of what is sacred—of the fullness and color of life versus the “skinny life” of black and white—is the goal of Layla in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, of the actors in Spell #7, and of the artists of A Photograph. The love between two fully realized human beings, like that experienced by Sean and Michael in A Photograph, is fully expanded on in this two-character drama of Okra and Greens. The theme of the responsibility of the artist touched on by Sean and by Michael is also fully developed by the poets Okra and Greens. In the opening scenes of From Okra to Greens, Greens speaks of Okra’s plight as single black woman as Okra acts/dances the role. This scene is reminiscent of Sean and Michael speaking in unison about Sean’s and then Michael’s art in the final scene of A Photograph and Ross’s talking while Maxine acts out the role that the two are creating together, on the spot, in Spell #7. In From Okra to Greens, as in her other choreopoems, Shange turns her dramatic poetry into staged drama. She presents verbatim much of the poetry of her collection A Daughter’s Geography. Although her feminist protests are dramatized in this play as in for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf and in Boogie Woogie Landscapes, here her feminist protest is given voice by the male character Greens. That
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both Okra and Greens are poets allows them to have an understanding of each other and of the roles forced on too many African American women and men as well as an understanding of the role that human beings should play in the world. Okra first dances as “the crooked woman” as Greens speaks, showing his and society’s distorted view of black women. Okra’s dance reflects both her pain and her potential strength and beauty. As the two come together, Greens admits his own crookedness in telling Okra that before their encounter he had not known “what a stood/up straight man felt like.” Together the two characters create and present portraits of “some men” who degrade women (as they are encouraged to do by the patriarchy). Once married, the two continue their dialogue, which includes their consideration of one another and of the sociopolitical climate in which they and, later, their daughter must reside. Shange’s Okra and Greens celebrates, as do Sean and Michael in A Photograph, the richness of African American life. Her love story extends to the poor of not only her own country but also the world. Okra pleads for the return of Haitian liberators Dessalines, Petion, and L’Ouverture with their visions of “la liberte, l’egalite, la fraternite.” As in her other theater pieces, Shange calls here, too, for the return of American visionaries, among them monologues. As the hope of the world’s visionaries is shown to have dimmed, so the relationship between the lovers Okra and Greens dims momentarily. Abandoned by Greens, Okra says that “the moon cracked in a ugly rupture.” Joined once more, the two encourage each other and others to “rise up” and to “dance with the universe.” This story of the love between two poets is a love song to a universe in sad need of hope. The refrain of Boogie Woogie Landscapes, that “we don’t recognize what’s sacred anymore,” is revealed in From Okra to Greens in the portrait of the “pretty man” whose pretty floors are covered with the kind of rug that “little girls spend whole/ lives tying.” Lack of recognition of the sacred is a theme repeated throughout the work. However, the love between Okra and Greens and their hope for their daughter and for the oppressed peoples of the world shows that recognition of the sacred is possible for aware, thinking, and caring individuals. The memory of other visionaries also shows the poets’ and others’ recognition of the sacred. It is clear here and throughout her writing that Shange would have her audience recognize the sacred in themselves and in others and do their part in telling the story—in spreading the word—and in fighting for liberty, equality, and fraternity for all.
Spell #7 Type of work: Drama First produced: 1979, pb. 1981 Shange’s 1979 play Spell #7, like for colored girls who have considered suicide, is structured like a highly electric poetry reading, but this time the cast is mixed male and female. A huge blackface mask forms the backdrop for actors of an imitation
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old-time minstrel show, where actors did skits, recited, and joked, all under the direction of a Mr. Interlocutor. The actors come offstage, relax at an actors’ bar, and gradually remove their masks, revealing their true selves. Lou, the “practicing magician,” reveals that his father gave up his role as magician when a colored child asked for a spell to make her white. The actors tell each other and the audience tall stories. One of these involves a child who thought blacks were immune to dread diseases and disease-ridden passions such as polio and pedophilia. She is disillusioned when, as an adult, she finds that blacks not only can but also do hurt one another, so she buys South African gold “to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here/ our value/ can be known instinctively/ but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks/ i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance/ their disconnect from history.” Another woman loves her baby, which she names “myself,” while it is in the womb but kills it after it is born. Still another girl vows to brush her “nappy” hair constantly so that she can toss it like white girls. By these contrasts and by wry lists and surprising parallels, Shange shows the pain and difficulty, as well as the hopefulness, of being black. Lou refers to the spell that caused his father to give up magic as he (Lou) casts the final spell of Spell #7: aint no colored magician in his right mind gonna make you white cuz this is blk magic you lookin at & i’m fixin you up good/ fixin you up good & colored & you gonna be colored all yr life & you gonna love it/ bein colored
The others join him in celebration of “bein colored”; but the minstrel mask drops down and Lou’s final words contain anger as well as celebration: crackers are born with the right to be alive/ i’m making ours up right here in yr face/ & we gonna be colored & love it
Betsey Brown Type of work: Novel First published: 1985 Betsey Brown tells the story of its thirteen-year-old title character’s struggles with adolescence, with discovering who she is and who she might become. Shange wrote the novel specifically to provide reading matter for adolescent African American girls. In her own youth, Shange could find no books to help her sort out her life: Books about young women were written by whites for whites, and most books by blacks were by and about men. Betsey Brown is the oldest of five unruly children in a middle-class family. Like most adolescent girls, she feels separated from the rest of her family: They do not
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understand her; they do not appreciate her. Betsey’s father wants her to grow up to lead her people to freedom. He wakes the children every morning with a conga drum and chanting and then leads them through a quiz on black history. All of the children can recite poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countée Cullen; they know the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry, and Duke Ellington. Betsey herself was once rocked to sleep by W. E. B. Du Bois. Betsey’s mother, Jane, fears that this exposure will limit her children instead of expanding them. She would like the children to grow up with nice middle-class manners and tastes. In many ways, she has denied her own heritage, her own identity. Eventually, she leaves the family for a time. The story is firmly rooted in its specific time and place. In 1959, St. Louis took its first steps toward integrating its public schools, and the Brown children are among the first black children bussed to formerly all-white schools. The father has tried to prepare the children by giving them a firm sense of self and heritage. He is eager for them to enter the struggle for civil rights, even as the mother fears that they will be in danger if they become too involved. A central issue of the novel is the importance of passing down one’s cultural heritage. It is not until the mother decisively embraces her heritage that she can again join the family. While she is absent, the housekeeper assumes her role as mother and guide and teaches Betsey and the other children how to follow the dreams of both parents. They learn to stand up for themselves and honor their culture and history and also to be well-mannered and self-sufficient. When Jane returns, it is to a new Betsey, one who has taken the first steps in forging her adult identity.
Suggested Readings Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. New York: University Press of America, 2000. Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. New York: Garland, 1995. Olaniyan, Tejumala. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Russell, Sandi. Render Me My Song: African American Women Writers from Slavery to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Shange, Ntozake. Interview. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Shange, Ntozake, and Emily Mann. “The Birth of an R&B Musical.” Interview by Douglas J. Keating. The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 26, 1989. Sommers, Michael. “Rays of Hope in a Sky of Blues.” Review of The Love Space Demands by Ntozake Shange. Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), March 12, 1992. Contributors: Cynthia A. Bily, Anne Mills King, Judith K. Taylor, and Thomas J. Taylor
Bapsi Sidhwa Born: Karachi, India (now in Pakistan); August 11, 1938 South Asian American
Pakistan was carved from India, and the country had no established literary tradition in English. Urdu was the official language, and many would have preferred that the former colonizers’ language disappear altogether. Sidhwa invented English-language fiction in Pakistan. Principal works long fiction: The Crow-Eaters, 1978; The Bride, 1983; Ice-Candy-Man, 1988 (pb. in U.S. as Cracking India); An American Brat, 1993; Water, 2006 (based on Deepa Mehta’s film) edited text: City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore, 2005 Born into a wealthy family, Bapsi Sidhwa (BAHP-see SIH-dwah) spent her first seven years as an Indian citizen in the plains city of Lahore. In 1945, after India was divided, she became a Pakistani. The tremendous turmoil and bloodshed she observed as a child left its mark on Sidhwa, and later in her fiction she revived those powerful memories of Partition (as the division of India has come to be known). That she was born a Parsee also affected her writing. A Zoroastrian religious group of fewer than 200,000, the Parsees had long exerted enormous influence on the subcontinent through their business and professional standing. They also tended to be more Westernized than other Pakistanis. At age two, Sidhwa contracted polio, and she did not attend school until she was fourteen. Tutored at home in English, she read British literature extensively, a practice that encouraged her to become a writer. Her parents, however, had other ideas, and at nineteen she entered an arranged marriage and soon bore three children. As an upper-class wife and mother, Sidhwa broke tradition by starting to write; she once admitted in an interview that at first she wrote in secret. Otherwise her friends would have thought her “pretentious,” she said: “After all, I was only a businessman’s wife.” Her first novel, The Bride, was initiated by a story she heard during a family vacation in Pakistan’s tribal regions in the Himalayas. A young woman had made an arranged marriage with a tribal man. Unable to cope with the harsh treatment accorded women in that society, she ran away, only to be pursued, then murdered by her husband and his relatives. Sidhwa felt compelled to tell this story, which to her symbolized the plight of many women on the subcontinent. A 1001
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friend helped her to place the manuscript with an agent, who tried for seven years to find a publisher. In the meantime Sidhwa wrote The Crow-Eaters, a boisterous and earthy account of the Parsee community in pre-Partition India. Although warned that Pakistan was too remote for international audiences to consider it interesting, Sidhwa eventually found a British publisher for the book. In 1983, The Bride was published in London, followed by American editions. While both novels were well received overseas and on the subcontinent, the closely knit Parsee community at first objected to The Crow-Eaters, condemning it as an irreverent portrayal of their customs, religious beliefs, and attitudes. Once Sidhwa had established herself internationally as an important writer, the Parsees, proud of one of their own, forgave her for treating them in a comic manner. Divorced and remarried, Sidhwa moved to the United States during the early 1980’s. In 1992 she became an American citizen and settled in Houston, Texas. Although far removed from the world of her childhood, soon after her arrival in America she began writing one of her finest works, Ice-Candy-Man. Sidhwa was seven when Partition came about, and violence erupted once millions of Muslims and Hindus were uprooted to turn Pakistan into an Islamic nation, India into a Hindu nation. The number of deaths has never been determined, but it is estimated that several hundred thousand died. Lahore, which had been assigned to Pakistan, witnessed some of the fiercest battles during this struggle for territory and possessions. In Ice-Candy-Man a seven-year-old female narrator recalls Lahore on the eve of Partition, then reveals the bloody aftermath of the political acts that brought about what she calls the “cracking” of India. Even though many Indian novelists in English have focused on Partition, Sidhwa’s novel carries a greater immediacy— perhaps because she was there and was able four decades later to re-create that tumultuous period through a singular act of memory. In 1991 Sidhwa received the Liberatur Prize for Ice-Candy-Man, a yearly award given by Germany to a distinguished writer from a non-Western country. In her next novel, An American Brat, Sidhwa depicts the Pakistani immigrant in America. Sidhwa received in 1994 the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Award of $105,000 for her fiction. This recognition proves that the Pakistani-Parsee experience, remote and foreign though it may be to the Western reader, carries universal significance when viewed through the eyes of a perceptive writer.
An American Brat Type of work: Novel First published: 1993 An American Brat follows Feroza, a Parsee girl from Lahore, through her uncertain start in the United States and her adjustments as a college student. Partially set in Pakistan, the novel also introduces Feroza’s colorful family—her mother, in particular, who visits Colorado to break up a romance between Feroza and a
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non-Parsee. The novel gets off to a fast and amusing start with Zareen Ginwalla anxiously awaiting the arrival of her husband, Cyrus, owner of a sporting-goods store. The place is Lahore, the year 1978. General Zia has seized power, and the liberal Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is in jail, soon to be executed. Zareen’s problem is related but more immediate: A Bhutto supporter, she sees that her sixteen-year-old daughter Feroza is becoming, like Pakistan under Zia’s military-Islamic fundamentalist rule, increasingly conservative. The solution: to send her daughter to the United States for a few months, where she will stay with her only slightly older Uncle Manek, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Despite his own early difficulties adjusting to life in America, Manek convinces Feroza to stay on as a student majoring in hotel management, a suitably practical field, at a junior college in Idaho. American enough to become Mike and work for NASA in Houston, Manek is traditional enough to return to Pakistan to find a suitable, and suitably submissive, wife. Feroza goes much further when she decides to marry David Press, an American Jew, thus precipitating her mother’s frantic flight to the United States to stop the marriage. Zareen is more than merely a closet conservative, a comic caricature of the “Indian” mother: She is a Parsee, one of only 120,000 in the world. She knows what Feroza’s marrying outside the small Parsee community will mean, both for her daughter (spiritual exile) and for the Parsees (its hold on the world, particularly in Muslim Pakistan under Zia, made still more tenuous). Thus, Sidhwa’s comedy serves serious purposes. The mother-daughter relationship is the perfect disguise, or alibi, for considering a number of related issues, some feminist, others having to do with religious, ethnic, national, and personal identity. An American Brat is more successful in its conception than its execution. The plot is as melodramatic as a Ballywood film, and the prose at times no less improbable. Sidhwa’s work includes passages such as “The wine coursed through Feroza like a mellow happiness” and “while he spoke, David’s eyes, alight with elation, also spoke.” Would that Sidhwa had received the kind of editorial assistance she clearly deserves. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds in honestly presenting the various conflicts and tensions between husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, young and old, conservative and progressive, East and West, India and Pakistan, Parsee and Muslim, the sacred and the profane, haves and have-nots. Sidhwa noted in an interview that she was partially attempting to define her own experiences and reactions as she herself worked to know a new country. At the novel’s conclusion, Feroza realizes there is no going back, and she accepts that even while retaining her roots in the Parsee community she has become the product of two cultures.
Suggested Readings Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. “Women in History.” In International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers, edited by Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland, 1991.
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Daiya, Kavita. “‘Honorable Resolutions’: Gendered Violence, Ethnicity, and the Nation.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27 (April, 2002): 219-247. Dhawan, R. K., and Novy Kapadia, eds. The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1996. Hai, Ambreen. “Border Work, Border Trouble: Postcolonial Feminism and the Ayah in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (Summer, 2000): 379-427. Jussawalla, Feroza, and Reed Way Dasenbrock. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Contributor: Robert L. Ross
Leslie Marmon Silko Born: Albuquerque, New Mexico; March 5, 1948 Native American
Silko’s short stories and novels represent some of the finest writing of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. Principal works drama: Lullaby, pr. 1976 (with Frank Chin) long fiction: Ceremony, 1977; Almanac of the Dead, 1991; Gardens in the Dunes, 1999 poetry: Laguna Woman: Poems, 1974 short fiction: Yellow Woman, 1993 nonfiction: The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, 1986; Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures, 1993; Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, 1996; Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, 2000 (Ellen L. Arnold, editor) miscellaneous: Storyteller, 1981 (includes poetry and prose) Leslie Marmon Silko (SIHL-koh) creates characters that reflect the tensions and cultural conflicts of her experience. Born of mixed European American and Navajo blood, Silko spent her formative years learning the stories of her white ancestors and their relationship with the native population into which they married. Her great-grandfather, Robert Marmon, had come to the Laguna pueblo, New Mexico, in the early 1870’s as a surveyor and eventually married a Laguna woman. Even more important to Silko’s development as a writer was the later generation of Marmons—half European American and half Native American—who continued to transmit the oral traditions of the Laguna pueblo people. One such source was the Aunt Susie of Silko’s autobiographical writings. The wife of Silko’s grandfather’s brother, she was a schoolteacher in the Laguna pueblo during the 1920’s and years afterward passed on to the young Silko the oral heritage of her race. So intimate was Silko’s imagination with the elements of Laguna culture that her father’s family photographs serve as visual commentary on the sketches and stories of Storyteller. Like the Inuit woman in Storyteller, Silko attended the local school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but she remained there only a short time, moving on to Catholic schools in Albuquerque, eventually receiving a B.A. in English from 1005
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the University of New Mexico in 1969. Like her ancestors, she taught school at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, where she wrote Ceremony, her first novel. One of the best-known of her works and one of the best novels written by a Native American, the book tells the story of Tayo, a World War II veteran who tries to cope with the conflicts of his mixed-blood heritage. Her short stories were beginning to appear in the early 1970’s, and she quickly gained a reputation as one of the leading writers in the Native American Renaissance. The term is applied to the literary movement beginning in the 1960’s that features works by Native American writers using tribal customs and traditions Leslie Marmon Silko (Courtesy, University Press of Mississippi) as literary material. Stories such as “Yellow Woman,” in which a mortal is seemingly abducted by spiritual beings, and “Uncle Tony’s Goat,” which retells an old Laguna beast fable, are typical of Silko’s handling of traditional indigenous material. One of her best stories, “Lullaby,” treats the conflict of an elderly Navajo couple as they seek to come to terms with the dominant culture and how that conflict strengthens their traditional values.
Storyteller Type of work: Autobiography, poetry, and short fiction First published: 1981 A collection of autobiographical sketches, poems, family photographs, and short stories, Storyteller fuses literary and extraliterary material into a mosaic portrait of cultural heritage and of conflict between the two ethnic groups composing her heritage, the European American and the Native American. The title story, “Storyteller,” presents that conflict from the point of view of a young Inuit woman who is fascinated with and repulsed by white civilization. Set in Alaska—the only major work of the author not in a southwestern setting—the story follows her thoughts and observations as she spends her days amid these contrasting cultures. The old man with whom she lives and who has used her sexually— “she knew what he wanted”—is the storyteller. Now bedridden with age and the cold, subsisting on dried fish, which he keeps under his pillow, the old man narrates
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a tale, carefully, insistently, about a hunter on the ice facing a challenge from a bear. Between the beginning and end of his own tale, the Inuit woman’s story unfolds. She went to the government school, but largely out of curiosity, and although she remembers being whipped by one of the teachers, her fascination with whites—the “Gussucks,” as she calls them—only deepened when she observed their oil rigs, their large yellow machines, and their metal buildings. Gradually she learns that the Gussucks are not so much to be respected or feared but rather scorned because of their insensitivity and greed. The old man calls them thieves, and she herself laughs at the smug confidence they place in their machines, which are almost useless in the Alaskan cold. Her physical curiosity about the Gussucks leads to her being sexually exploited by one of them, and the turning point of the story occurs when the Inuit woman learns that a Gussuck storekeeper was responsible for the death of her parents by giving them nonpotable alcohol in exchange for their rifles. In revenge, she lures the storekeeper onto the ice, where he falls through and drowns. At the conclusion, the old man, now on his deathbed, finishes his tale of the hunter and the bear. The two stories, the old man’s and the Inuit woman’s, thus comment on each other. The woman’s vengeance bears a double victory, one the triumph of her people, the other a vindication of her sexuality over its abuses by whites. Yet the old man’s story ends menacingly for the hunter, suggesting that the Native American’s fate is—like the hunter—perilous amid the alien culture that both attracts and repels.
Almanac of the Dead Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Part Native American history, part mythic prophecy, part contemporary cultural analysis, Almanac of the Dead is more and less than all of these. Its focus is on the recent present, and on what has happened to people—white, Mexican, and Native American—who have been corrupted by the greed and violence of the contemporary world, but it hops back and forth between the present and the past, to trace the history of this world and to describe the myths that reside below it. If the novel seems a disparate mix of elements, it is. Silko’s map on the inside and back covers of the book lists dozens of major characters in stories that take place in Tucson, San Diego, and points south. However, this “Five Hundred Year Map” also “foretells the future of all the Americas” and the violent prophecy that is yet to be: “the disappearance of all things European.” The novel is divided into six parts, each part comprising one to eight books, and each book containing from four to twenty chapters. There are at least half a dozen major sets of characters who dominate the different parts of the novel, often for hundreds of pages at a time, and readers may lose touch with other characters in some sections. But, by the end, most of the major characters have touched each
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other’s lives (often sexually, usually violently), and many will gather in the final apocalyptic ending. It is a gripping and frightening fictional vision.
Suggested Readings Allen, Paula Gunn. “The Feminine Landscape of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” In Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Design. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. Barnett, Louise K., and James L. Thorson, eds. Leslie Marmon Silko. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Fitz, Brewster E. Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Graulich, Melody, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. _______. “Yellow Woman”: Leslie Marmon Silko. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Krumholz, Linda J. “‘To Understand This World Differently’: Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Storyteller.’” Ariel 25 (January, 1994): 89113. Krupat, Arnold. “The Dialogic of Silko’s Storyteller.” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature, edited by Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Salyer, Gregory. Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Twayne, 1997. Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980. Contributor: Edward A. Fiorelli
Isaac Bashevis Singer Born: Leoncin, Poland; July 14 or November 21, 1904 Died: Surfside, Florida; July 24, 1991 Jewish
Singer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is perhaps the most influential, prolific, and admired Jewish American author of the twentieth century. Principal works children’s literature: Zlateh the Goat, and Other Stories, 1966; The Fearsome Inn, 1967; Mazel and Shlimazel: Or, The Milk of a Lioness, 1967; When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, and Other Stories, 1968; A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw, 1969; Elijah the Slave, 1970; Joseph and Koza: Or, The Sacrifice to the Vistula, 1970; Alone in the Wild Forest, 1971; The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China, 1971; The Wicked City, 1972; The Fools of Chelm and Their History, 1973; Why Noah Chose the Dove, 1974; A Tale of Three Wishes, 1975; Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, and Other Stories, 1976; The Power of Light: Eight Stories, 1980; The Golem, 1982; Stories for Children, 1984 drama: The Mirror, pr. 1973; Shlemiel the First, pr. 1974; Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, pr. 1974 (with Leah Napolin); Teibele and Her Demon, pr. 1978 long fiction: Der Sotn in Gorey, 1935 (Satan in Goray, 1955); Di Familye Mushkat, 1950 (The Family Moskat, 1950); Der Hoyf, 1953-1955 (The Manor, 1967, and The Estate, 1969); Shotns baym Hodson, 1957-1958 (Shadows on the Hudson, 1998); Der Kuntsnmakher fun Lublin, 1958-1959 (The Magician of Lublin, 1960); Der Knekht, 1961 (The Slave, 1962); Sonim, de Geshichte fun a Liebe, 1966 (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972); Der Bal-Tshuve, 1974 (The Penitent, 1983); Neshome Ekspeditsyes, 1974 (Shosha, 1978); Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov, 1980; Der Kenig vun di Felder, 1988 (The King of the Fields, 1988); Scum, 1991; The Certificate, 1992; Meshugah, 1994 short fiction: Gimpel the Fool, and Other Stories, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961; Short Friday, and Other Stories, 1964; The Séance, and Other Stories, 1968; A Friend of Kafka, and Other Stories, 1970; A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories, 1973; Passions, and Other Stories, 1975; Old Love, 1979; The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1982; The Image, and Other Stories, 1985; The Death of Methuselah, and Other Stories, 1988 translations: Romain Rolland, 1927 (of Stefan Zweig); Die Volger, 1928 (of Knut Hamsun); Victoria, 1929 (of Hamsun); All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930 (of Erich Remarque); Pan, 1931 (of Hamsun); The Way Back, 1931 (of Re1009
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marque); The Magic Mountain, 1932 (of Thomas Mann); From Moscow to Jerusalem, 1938 (of Leon Glaser) nonfiction: Mayn Tatn’s Bes-din Shtub, 1956 (In My Father’s Court, 1966); The Hasidim, 1973 (with Ira Moskowitz); A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light, 1976; A Young Man in Search of Love, 1978; Isaac Bashevis Singer on Literature and Life, 1979 (with Paul Rosenblatt and Gene Koppel); Lost in America, 1980; Love and Exile, 1984; Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1985 (with Richard Burgin); More Stories from My Father’s Court, 2000 The son and grandson of rabbis, Isaac Bashevis Singer (I-zak bah-SHEH-vihs SIHN-gur) was born into a pious Hasidic household in Poland, which he would imaginatively portray in his memoir In My Father’s Court. He began his literary career writing for a Hebrew newspaper and proofreading for a journal that his brother, novelist Israel Joshua Singer, coedited. In 1925, Singer made his fiction debut with a prizewinning short story, “In Old Age.” In 1932, he began co-editing Globus, which serialized Satan in Goray, his novel of messianic heresy. In 1935, Singer immigrated to New York, where he wrote for the Jewish Daily Forward. Several years went by before Singer found the full strength of his writer’s voice. He believed that an author needed roots, but he had lost his. Never easily placed within any tradition, Singer wrote first in Yiddish and then translated his work into English. His decision to write in Yiddish, which he knew was a dying language, was linked to his identification with a world that was destroyed by the Nazis. Singer’s first significant recognition in the United States came in 1950, with the English-language publication of The Family Moskat, a family saga modeled on his brother’s work. Saul Bellow’s translation of “Gimpl Tam” as “Gimpel the Fool” in the Partisan Review three years later added to Singer’s growing reputation. Singer went on to win Newbery Awards for his children’s stories (which he did not begin writing until he was sixty-two years old), National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Singer’s work not only recalls that lost world, but his questions about the meaning of life reflect modern existential concerns. In Enemies: A Love Story, Herman Broder protests against suffering and the anguish of abandonment. Harry Bendiner of the story “Old Love” dreams of meditating in a solitary tent with the daughter of a dead love on why people are born and why people must die. Neshome Ekspeditsyes (1974; Shosha, 1978) concludes as two friends, reunited after the Holocaust, sit in a darkening room, waiting, as one says with a laugh, for an answer. It seems that Singer’s characters all await a moment of revelation that will be more than a faint glimmer in a darkened room. Singer’s work achieved popular success in 1983 with the release of the film Yentl, directed by Barbra Streisand and based on one of Singer’s short stories. Again, in 1989, a film, Enemies: A Love Story, brought international attention to Singer’s fiction. During his later life, Singer lived with his wife Alma in New York and then Florida, where he died of a stroke on July 24, 1991, just after turning eighty-seven years old.
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“A Crown of Feathers” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1973, in A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories “A Crown of Feathers” is the title story of a collection, which won the National Book Award for 1973. Like many of Singer’s stories, it depicts an individual pulled between belief and disbelief, between the religious and the secular, and between self and others. The story concerns an orphan, Akhsa, whose own emerging identity becomes entangled with the conflicting values of her wealthy grandparents. Her grandfather is a traditionally religious man, a community leader in the Polish village of Krasnobród, while her grandmother, from the sophisticated city of Prague, is more worldly and possibly, it is learned after her death, a follower of false messiahs. These differences, presented very subtly at first, become more pronounced when, after her grandparents’ deaths, Akhsa internalizes their warring voices. Each voice accuses the other of being a demon, while both battle over Akhsa’s soul. Her grandmother assures her that Jesus is the Messiah and encourages Akhsa to convert. As a sign, she has Akhsa rip open her pillowcase, where she finds an intricate crown of feathers topped by a tiny cross. Akhsa converts, makes an unhappy marriage with an alcoholic Polish squire, and sinks into melancholy. Her despair is not mere unhappiness but a continuing crisis of faith. A demon tells her, “The truth is there is no truth,” but her saintly grandfather appears and tells her to repent. Her grandfather’s advice leads Akhsa to return to Judaism and to seek out and marry the man her grandfather had chosen for her years before. This embittered man, however, humiliates her mercilessly. On her deathbed, Akhsa tears open her pillowcase and finds another crown of feathers, this one with the Hebrew letters for God in place of the cross. “But, she wondered, in what way was this crown more a revelation of truth than the other?” Akhsa never grasps with certainty the truth she has sought, nor is she Isaac Bashevis Singer (© The Nobel Foundation) ever able, like Singer’s Gimpel the
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Fool, to accept the ambiguity of uncertainty. Akhsa’s conversion and subsequent exile, her repentance and journey back to her grandfather’s faith—her entire life— have constituted an agonized quest for truth. Torn between two voices of authority, Akhsa has never been certain of her own voice, has never understood her own wants, needs, or beliefs. While Gimpel, when finding his vocation as wandering storyteller, ultimately finds a faith to which he can firmly adhere, Akhsa finds neither self nor truth. Moving from one pole of certain faith to its opposite, and back again, Akhsa never accepts Singer’s own truth, which is that “if there is such a thing as truth it is as intricate and hidden as a crown of feathers.”
“Gimpel the Fool” Type of work: Short fiction First published: “Gimpel Tam,” 1945 (English translation, 1953) The publication of “Gimpel the Fool,” in a translation from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow, launched Singer’s career. During the 1950’s and thereafter, his work appeared widely in English, and throughout the history of Singer studies, “Gimpel the Fool” has held a place of honor. Gimpel belongs to a brotherhood of literary characters—that of the schlemiels. In this work, Singer explores the nature of belief, which, in the modern, secular world, is often considered foolish. Gimpel believes whatever he is told: that his parents have risen from the dead, that his pregnant fiancé is a virgin, that her children are his children, that the man jumping out of her bed is a figment of his imagination. Gimpel extends his willingness to believe to every aspect of his life, because, he explains: “Everything is possible, as it is written in the Wisdom of the Fathers, I’ve forgotten just how.” When, on her deathbed, his wife of twenty years confesses that none of her six children are his, Gimpel is tempted to disbelieve all that he has been told and to enact revenge against those who have participated in his humiliation. His temptation is a central crisis of faith. His faith in others, who have betrayed him, is challenged, as is his faith in himself and in God, because among the stories he has believed are those pertaining to the existence of God. Gimpel’s belief has always been riddled with doubt; only after he concretizes his spiritual exile by becoming a wanderer does he resolve his faith. In Singer’s fictional worlds, God is the first storyteller who, through words, spoke or wrote the world into being. Belief in God is linked to belief in stories. Thus, when Gimpel is tempted to disbelieve in God, he responds by becoming a wandering storyteller. In so doing Gimpel links himself with the great storyteller and transforms what was once simple gullibility into an act of the greatest faith. As a storyteller, Gimpel opens himself fully to the infinite possibilities of the divine word as it is transformed into the world. At the end, Gimpel still yearns for a world where even he cannot be deceived. He never finds this world. Despite the void he may face, he chooses to believe, and he finds, in his final great act of suspending disbelief, a faith to which he can firmly adhere.
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Suggested Readings Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Allentuck, Marcia, ed. The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Farrell, Grace, ed. Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. _______. Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kresh, Paul. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West Eighty-sixth Street. New York: Dial Press, 1979. Noiville, Florence. Isaac B. Singer: A Life. Translated by Catherine Temerson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Sinclair, Clive. The Brothers Singer. London: Allison and Busby, 1983. Wolitz, Seth L., ed. The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Zamir, Israel. Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Arcade, 1995. Contributor: Grace Farrell
Cathy Song Born: Honolulu, Hawaii; August 20, 1955 Chinese American, Korean American Song, who was the first Asian American writer to win, in 1982, a Yale Younger Poets Award, has established a formidable reputation as a chronicler of personal experience in multiplicity. Principal works poetry: Picture Bride, 1983; Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, 1988; School Figures, 1994; The Land of Bliss, 2001; Cloud Moving Hands, 2007 edited text: Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women, 1991 (with Juliet S. Kono) Having grown up in the culturally and ethnically diverse society of Hawaii in a family that had been there for at least two generations, Cathy Song does not write about racial or ethnic anxieties or the pains of being an outsider in an Anglo world. Her poems reflect a family that has been close and nurturing. The title of her first book, Picture Bride, refers to her Korean grandmother, who immigrated to Hawaii to marry a man who knew her only from a photograph. Song’s paternal grandfather was also Korean; her mother is Chinese. Song’s original title for the book, “From the White Place,” refers to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, which she encountered while at Wellesley College, from which she graduated in 1977. She went on to receive a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University in 1981. Her vivid imagery and interest in the subject of perspective indicate her fascination with visual art. The dominant strain in Picture Bride is the connection between the first-person speaker and her relatives. Song’s poems show little interest in political or social issues per se. Song’s appreciation of her Asian heritage, however, appears powerfully in poems such as “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which concerns a painting by the eighteenth century Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro and ends with a haiku: “Two chrysanthemums/ touch in the middle of the lake/ and drift apart.” Song appears as a somewhat distant narrator in poems such as “Chinatown” and “Magic Island,” which are found in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light. These poems concern the immigrant experience, which she knows only secondhand. The deft beauty of a poem such as “Magic Island” does not compare with the personally felt experience of “Living Near the Water,” in which the poet watches her father give his dying father a drink of water. Her own children appear in these poems: Her blond son in “Heaven,” for example, thinks, “when we die we’ll go to China.” The blended worlds of Cathy Song are celebrated in her third book, School Figures, which opens with a poem on Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline series of children’s books. “Mother on River Street” depicts the poet’s mother and aunts eating 1014
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at a Vietnamese restaurant and recalling Sei Mui, who, as a girl, fell out of Mrs. Chow’s car. In the title poem, Western painters such as Piet Mondrian and Pieter Bruegel merge with Katsushika Hokusai. Song’s poems portray not a simple multiculturalism but rather—as in “Square Mile,” in which she sees her son sitting in the same classroom she once sat in and herself on the same hill her father once was on— a profound and affectionate personal unity.
Picture Bride Type of work: Poetry First published: 1983 The content and form of Picture Bride, Song’s first book of poems, reflect intimately the personal background and interests of its author. Therefore, many of these poems have their locations in Hawaii, where she was born and reared, and the continental United States, where she attended university and married. Song’s poems are valuable repositories of an Asian American woman’s sensibilities as they experience the intricate varieties of familial and personal relationships—as daughter, wife, mother, lover, and friend. Art, too, is an informing interest of Song’s, especially that of the Japanese ukiyo-e master Utamaro and that of the American feminist painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose life and works lend inspiration and shape to this book of poems. Picture Bride is organized into five sections, each deriving its title from a painting by O’Keeffe. The book begins with an initial statement of themes and an imagistic setting of scenes in “Black Iris” (familial relationships and home); continues with the development of these themes and scenes in “Sunflower”; moves into a contemplation of the effort and achievement of art in the central “Orchids”; renders scenes suggesting a darker, perhaps Dionysian, side to art and life in “Red Poppy”; and proceeds to a final affirmation of the validity and variety of human creativity and productivity in “The White Trumpet Flower.” The central section of the book also contains the key poem “Blue and White Lines After O’Keeffe,” whose speaker is Song’s imaginative re-creation of Georgia O’Keeffe and which is itself divided into five subsections with subtitles that replicate the titles of the sections of the book itself. The title poem, “Picture Bride,” is a young Korean American woman’s meditation on the feelings, experience, and thoughts of her immigrant grandmother, who came to Hawaii to be married to a worker in the sugarcane fields. This piece strikes a chord present in many of the book’s poems: a woman’s (and especially an ethnic woman’s) experience of family. Because Song’s feminism is so imbued with ethnicity, some readers may prefer to call her work “womanist,” the term coined by African American author Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). That Song should choose to meditate on her grandmother in “Picture Bride” may seem natural enough to contemporary American readers, but in terms of traditional Confucian and Asian hierarchy, Song should have memorialized and venerated her male ancestor. Instead, the grandfather is devalorized into a mere “stranger.”
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Therefore, Song’s choice of subject in this poem is itself a break from traditional Asian patriarchy and a declaration of allegiance to a feminist hierarchy of family history. Many of Song’s poems elude a rigid thematic categorization that would separate, for example, poems of women’s experience from those about ethnicity or from those about art. In fact, these themes are sometimes organically and inextricably intertwined. For example, one will happen on poems about ethnic women’s experience and about women artists/artisans, such as “The Seamstress,” whose speaker is a Japanese American woman who makes dolls Cathy Song (Courtesy, Smith College) and creates wedding gowns but who seems condemned to remain in the background, a silent spinster (and spinner), or “For A. J.: On Finding That She’s on Her Boat to China,” which addresses an Asian ballerina manqué returning to Asia to become a materfamilias. Women’s experience, ethnicity, and art are therefore the main spheres of interest in Picture Bride, while the works of feminist artist O’Keeffe provide it with an encompassing structure and indwelling spirit.
Suggested Readings Bloyd, Rebekah. “Cultural Convergences in Cathy Song’s Poetry.” Peace Review 10 (September, 1998): 393-400. Fujita-Sato, Gayle K. “‘Third World’ as Place and Paradigm in Cathy Song’s Picture Bride.” MELUS 15, no. 1 (Spring, 1988): 49-72. Kyhan, Lee. “Korean-American Literature: The Next Generation.” Korean Journal 34, no. 1 (Spring, 1994): 20-35. Song, Cathy. “Cathy Song: Secret Spaces of Childhood Part 2: A Symposium on Secret Spaces.” Michigan Quarterly Review 39, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 506-508. Sumida, Stephen H. “Hawaii’s Local Literary Tradition.” In And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. Wallace, Patricia. “Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song, and Rita Dove.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 3-20. Contributors: Ron McFarland, Laura Mitchell, and C. L. Chua
Gary Soto Born: Fresno, California; April 12, 1952 Mexican American
Soto’s poems, short stories, memoirs, young adult novels, and children’s stories bring to life the joys and pains of growing up in the barrio. Principal works children’s literature: Baseball in April, and Other Stories, 1990; Taking Sides, 1991; Neighborhood Odes, 1992 (poetry); Pacific Crossing, 1992; The Skirt, 1992; Local News, 1993; Too Many Tamales, 1993; Crazy Weekend, 1994; Jesse, 1994; Boys at Work, 1995; Canto Familiar, 1995 (poetry); The Cat’s Meow, 1995; Chato’s Kitchen, 1995; Off and Running, 1996; Buried Onions, 1997; Novio Boy, 1997 (play); Big Bushy Mustache, 1998; Petty Crimes, 1998; Chato and the Party Animals, 1999; Chato Throws a Pachanga, 1999; Nerdlania, 1999 (play); Jesse De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker, 2000; My Little Car, 2000; Fearless Fernie: Hanging out with Fernie and Me, 2002 (poetry; also known as Body Parts in Rebellion); If the Shoe Fits, 2002; The Afterlife, 2003; Chato Goes Cruisin’, 2004; Help Wanted, 2005; Worlds Apart: Traveling with Fernie and Me, 2005; Accidental Love, 2006; Mercy on These Teenage Chimps, 2007 long fiction: Nickel and Dime, 2000; Poetry Lover, 2001; Amnesia in a Republican County, 2003 poetry: The Elements of San Joaquin, 1977; The Tale of Sunlight, 1978; Where Sparrows Work Hard, 1981; Black Hair, 1985; A Fire in My Hands, 1990; Who Will Know Us?, 1990; Home Course in Religion, 1991; New and Selected Poems, 1995; A Natural Man, 1999; One Kind of Faith, 2003; A Simple Plan, 2007 nonfiction: Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections, 1985; Small Faces, 1986; Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets, 1988; A Summer Life, 1990 (39 short vignettes based on his life); The Effect of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy, 2000 edited texts: California Childhood: Recollections and Stories of the Golden State, 1988; Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction, 1993 Gary Soto (SOH-toh) was born to American parents of Mexican heritage and grew up in the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in and around Fresno, California. Soto’s father died when Soto was five years old; he and his siblings were reared by his mother and grandparents. After graduating from high school in 1970, Soto attended the University of California, Irvine, where he later earned an M.F.A. 1017
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Soto’s life provides much of the material for his writing. He uses his cultural heritage and neighborhood traditions as the setting for stories and poems about growing up poor and Chicano. In The Elements of San Joaquin, his first book, he focuses on Fresno of the 1950’s. He chronicles the lives of migrant workers, of oppressed people caught in cycles of poverty and violence. In the later poetry collection, Who Will Know Us, Soto draws again on his life. In “That Girl,” for example, he is the young “Catholic boy” at the public library, while in “Another Time,” he is an adult reconsidering the death of his father. Soto turns to prose with Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections, a volume of twenty-one autobiographical stories. His talent in this work is in the minute: Soto is concerned with the small event, with the everyday. In this book he explores racism through vignettes from his own life. Rather than tackle racism in the abstract, he instead offers the concrete: the fight after being called a “dirty Mexican,” the anger after an Anglo child wins a beauty contest. Soto also writes books for children and young adults. His matter-of-fact use of Spanish expressions as well as his references to the sights and sounds of the Latino community provide young readers with a sense of cultural identity. Perhaps Soto’s greatest success is his ability to assert his ethnicity while demonstrating that the experiences of growing up are universal. His bittersweet stories remind his readers of their passages from childhood to adulthood, of their search for identities that began up the street.
A Summer Life Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1990 A Summer Life is a collection of thirty-nine short vignettes based on Soto’s life that chronicle his coming-of-age in California. The book is arranged in three sections covering Soto’s early childhood, preadolescence, and the time prior to adulthood. Soto is the writer of the everyday. In the first section, his world is bounded by his neighborhood, and his eyes see this world in the sharp, concrete images of childhood. In “The Hand Brake,” for example, he writes, “One afternoon in July, I invented a brake for a child’s running legs. It was an old bicycle hand brake. I found it in the alley that ran alongside our house, among the rain-swollen magazines, pencils, a gutted clock and sun-baked rubber bands that cracked when I bunched them around my fingers.” Soto’s Latino heritage forms the background. Soto identifies himself with this community in the descriptions he chooses for the everyday realities: his grandfather’s wallet is “machine tooled with ‘MEXICO’ and a campesino and donkey climbing a hill”; his mother pounds “a round steak into carne asada” and crushes “a heap of beans into refritos.” Soto’s experiences include the sounds of Spanish and the objects of the barrio, but they seem universal. At heart, the book is a child’s movement toward self-
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awareness. Through A Summer Life, Soto paints his growing self-consciousness and increasing awareness of life and of death. “I was four and already at night thinking of the past,” he writes, “The cat with a sliver in his eye came and went. . . . [T]he three sick pups shivered and blinked twilight in their eyes. . . . [T]he next day they rolled over into their leaf-padded graves.” In the last story in A Summer Life, “The River,” Soto is seventeen. He and his friend Scott have traveled to Los Angeles to find themselves amid the “mobs of young people in leather vests, bell-bottoms, beads, Jesus thongs, tied-dyed shirts, and crowns of flowers.” As the two of them bed down that night in an uncle’s house, Soto seems to find that instant between childhood and adulthood, between the past and the present: “I thought of Braley Street and family, some of whom were now dead, and how when Uncle returned from the Korean War, he slept on a cot on the sunporch. . . . We had yet to go and come back from our war and find ourselves a life other than the one we were losing.” In this moment, Soto speaks for all readers who recall that thin edge between yesterday and today.
New and Selected Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1995 In this collection, Soto records the textures and meanings of his life and those of friends and strangers with whom he shares the San Joaquin Valley, Fresno, California, and trips (sometimes) to Mexico as a tourist. He seeks and finds evocations of meaning in the details of those lives, those places, those avatars of the quotidian, exploring themes of childhood awareness; of place—fields, lots, streets, houses, and nature in mostly quite small segments—and its impact on people; of work, particularly the hard physical work of the Mexican field hand of hoeing and picking, often in contrast with the hard mental labor of the poet; of the consequences of that work on the people and the community; of nature expressed in rain, insects, clouds, heat; of the life of poverty; of eating and feeding; of religion and belief, the manifestations of something beyond the physGary Soto (M. L. Martinelle) ical.
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In its close and attentive observation of the details of nature both urban and rural, Soto’s poetry is full of such images as “a windowsill of flies” or “the leaves of cotton plants/Like small hands waving good-bye.” Taken together, it seems clear that the insect images, especially those of ants, suggest the Mexican and Chicano workers themselves and the complex of meanings that they have as a result of society’s particular construction of them and of the workers’ construction of themselves. A strong narrative line characterizes most of his poems; images of impressive clarity and spiritual force evoke ecstatic visions of the Godhead as pure light and the sacrifices of the curious faithful as they seek to understand the “blank eye” of God toward the suffering of the Mexican fieldworker whom the ants know “For what I gave.” Indeed, Soto throughout this collection demonstrates his impressive power to transform gritty, closely observed reality into images that inform one of the sacramental through the power of his poetic vision.
Suggested Readings De La Fuente, Patricia. “Entropy in the Poetry of Gary Soto: The Dialectics of Violence.” Discurso Literario 5, no. 1 (Autumn, 1987): 111-120. Erben, Rudolf, and Ute Erben. “Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Chicano Identity in Gary Soto’s Living up the Street and Small Faces.” MELUS 17, no. 3 (Fall, 1991/1992): 43-52. Lannan Foundation. Gary Soto: With Interview by Alejandro Morales. Videorecording. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: Author, 1995. Mason, Michael Tomasek. “Poetry and Masculinity on the Anglo/Christian Border: Gary Soto, Robert Frost, and Robert Hass.” In The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Olivares, Julian. “The Streets of Gary Soto.” Latin America Literary Review 18, no. 35 (January-June, 1990): 32-49. Soto, Gary. “Interview with Gary Soto.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 47, no. 3 (November, 2003): 266. Wojahn, David. Review of Black Hair, by Gary Soto. Poetry 146 (June, 1985): 171-173. Contributor: Diane Andrews Henningfeld
Shelby Steele Born: Chicago, Illinois; January 1, 1946 African American
Steele’s writings and lectures forced public debate on new ways to view radical discrimination and civil rights matters. Principal works nonfiction: The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, 1990; A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, 1998; White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, 2006; A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama, Why He Can’t Win, 2007 Shelby Steele grew up in Chicago under the guidance of strong parents who provided a stable family relationship for him, his twin brother, and his two sisters. Having interracial parents, Steele was influenced by two races, although he more strongly identified with his black heritage. As a college student, he became involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, following, at different times, the leads of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Steele led civil rights marches at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and protested that African Americans were victimized by white society. After the completion of his education, his marriage to a white woman, and the births of their two children, Steele developed new thoughts about African Americans in America. He came to the conclusion that opportunities are widely available to all citizens if they have personal initiative and a strong work ethic. Upon reaching this conclusion, which ran counter to his earlier ideas, Steele began to publish his ideas in major magazines and journals. His philosophy was often harshly dismissed by leaders in the Civil Rights movement, but it also garnered much praise, especially from African American political conservatives. Steele was one of a few African Americans willing to challenge what was called the civil rights orthodoxy. When his work was published, he quickly became the subject of magazine and journal articles and was interviewed widely on radio and television, all the while drawing fire from numerous civil rights leaders. In 1990, his first book, The Content of Our Character, was published. With this collection of his essays on race relations in America, Steele became recognized as a leading spokesman for political conservatives of all races. The main thesis of his book is that individual initiative, self-sufficiency, and strong families are what 1021
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black America needs. Although labeled conservative by many, Steele refuses the label and calls himself a “classical Jeffersonian liberal.”
The Content of Our Character Type of work: Essays First published: 1990 With The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, Steele created a debate on the merits of affirmative action, the direction of the Civil Rights movement, and the growing ranks of African American political conservatives. Although certainly not the first to challenge views held by African American leaders, Steele pushed his challenge onto center stage more forcefully than others had before. Coming at a time when the United States was awash in conservative radio and television talk shows, the book quickly became a source of contention among political groups of all races and philosophies. Steele, through his television appearances, became a familiar figure throughout America as he explained and defended his ideas on race problems in America. The book, titled after a line in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech, is a collection of essays, most of which appeared earlier in various periodicals. Central to Steele’s book is a call for the African American community to examine itself and look to itself for opportunities. He calls for African Americans to look not to government or white society but to themselves for the solutions to their problems. Steele contends that African Americans enjoy unparalleled freedom; they have only to seize their freedom and make it work for them. He suggests that such programs as affirmative action contribute to the demoralization or demeaning of African Americans because preferential treatment denies them the opportunity to “make it on their own.” Steele, calling for a return to the original purpose of the Civil Rights movement, says that affirmative action should go back to enforcing equal opportunity rather than demanding preferences. The promised land is, he writes, an opportunity, Shelby Steele (Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
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not a deliverance. Steele’s ideas were strongly challenged by African Americans who believe that affirmative action and other civil rights measures are necessary for minority groups to retain the advancements that have been forged and to assure an open path for further progress. Opposition to Steele and other African American conservatives has led to charges that traditional African American civil rights leaders’ intolerance of different voices within the black community is itself a form of racism.
Suggested Readings Cooper, Matthew. “Inside Racism.” The Washington Monthly 23, no. 9 (October, 1990). Loury, Glenn C. “Why Steele Demands More of Blacks than of Whites.” Academic Questions 5 (Fall, 1992): 19-23. Prager, Jeffrey. “Self Reflection(s): Subjectivity and Racial Subordination in the Contemporary African American Writer.” Social Identities 1 (August, 1995): 355-371. Vassallo, Phillip. “Guarantees of a Promised Land: Language and Images of Race Relations in Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 49 (Spring, 1992): 36-42. Contributor: Kay Hively
Virgil Suárez Born: Havana, Cuba; 1962 Cuban American
Suárez voices the experience of Cuban immigrants who, though having spent the majority their lives in the United States, still do not feel completely acclimated and in some sense remain cultural exiles. Principal works long fiction: Latin Jazz, 1989; The Cutter, 1991; Havana Thursdays, 1995; Going Under, 1996 poetry: You Come Singing, 1998; Garabato Poems, 1999; In the Republic of Longing, 1999; Banyan, 2001; Palm Crows, 2001; Guide to the Blue Tongue, 2002; Ninety Miles: Selected and New Poems, 2005 short fiction: Welcome to the Oasis, and Other Stories, 1992 edited texts: Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, 1992 (with Delia Poey); Paper Dance: Fifty-five Latino Poets, 1995 (with Victor Hernández and Leroy V. Quintana); Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology, 1996 (with Poey); American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement, 2001 (with Ryan G. Van Cleave); Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, 2002 (with Van Cleave); Vespers: Contemporary American Poems of Religion and Spirituality, 2003 (with Van Cleave); Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America, 2004 (with Van Cleave) miscellaneous: Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood, 1997 (short stories, poetry, and essays); Infinite Refuge, 2002 (sketches, poetry, memories, and fragments of short stories) Virgil Suárez (VEER-hihl SWAH-rehs), the son of a pattern cutter and a piecemeal seamstress who worked in the sweatshops of Havana, left Cuba in 1970 with his family. After four years in Madrid, Spain, they went to Los Angeles. A man of many interests and prolific literary output, Suárez raised three daughters with his wife in Florida. His multitude of works in numerous genres deal with immigration, exile, and acclimatization to life and culture in the United States as well as the hopes and struggles of Cubans and Cuban Americans who had to abandon their island home under political duress. A self-confessed obsessive, whether about his family, his hobbies, or his writing, Suárez is preoccupied by voice. He cites physical place as paramount in the process of finding and producing his voice, whether in prose or poetry. Initially rec1024
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ognized for his fiction, Suárez has written poetry since 1978, though he did not begin to publish it until the mid-1990’s. He believes that voice is most important in poetry because of poetry’s space limitations. He feels so strongly about maintaining the authenticity of his personal voice that he discards any poem he believes does not respect and represent his voice. That voice is of an immigrant who, although he has spent the majority of his life in his adopted land and does not expect to return to Cuba, still does not feel completely acclimated. Suárez writes about what he knows: the nature and travails of exile. Appropriately, given his mixed feelings, Suárez writes in English and includes a sprinkling of Spanish, reiterated in English. Nonetheless, critics characterize Suárez’s style as unwavering, definitive, and direct. Suárez finished his secondary schooling in Los Angeles and received a B.A. in creative writing from California State University, Long Beach, in 1984. He studied at the University of Arizona and received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Louisiana State University in 1987. In addition to having been a visiting professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 1997, Suárez has taught at the University of Miami, Florida International University, Miami-Dade Community College, and Florida State University in Tallahassee. Suárez’s poems alone have appeared in more than 250 magazines and journals. He has also been a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Tallahassee Democrat. He is a member of PEN, the Academy of American Poets, the Associated Writing Programs, and the Modern Language Association. Nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, Suárez was a featured lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in 1997. He received a Florida State Individual Artist grant in 1998 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2001-2002 to write a poetry work. His volume Garabato Poems was named Generation Ñ magazine’s Best Book of 1999. He served as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship panel judge in 1999 and a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation panelist in 2000.
The Cutter Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 The Cutter is the story of a young man’s desperate attempt to leave Cuba and its Communist regime. The novel is divided into five sections that mark the stages of his journey away from the island. The book begins when the protagonist, Julian Campos, is twenty years old. Julian is a university student who has recently returned to Havana after having completed his years of mandatory military service. He has been waiting to leave Cuba ever since his parents left five years earlier, and he thinks that the time has finally come—until the government tells him he must do additional “voluntary work” if he wants to leave Cuba. The work is slave labor, and Julian and his coworkers are mistreated. Suárez de-
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picts Cuba at its worst, leading the reader to understand why Julian is compelled to leave the country. Julian grows increasingly despondent about his prospects for leaving Cuba, particularly when he receives the belated news of his grandmother’s death. When Julian is finally released from the fields and permitted to go home, he realizes that he will never receive an exit notice. His neighbors plan to escape, and Julian joins them. Their group is infiltrated by a government spy, however, and his neighbors are killed. In the novel’s final section, Julian reaches the United States. In contrast to most of the Cuban characters, those in the United States are kind to him and are eager to help him adjust to his new country. Julian clearly enjoys his newfound freedom, and, though he appears reluctant to search for his parents, the novel ends with a suggestion that ultimately he will find refuge with them. Suarez’s own family left Cuba in 1970, about the time at which this novel is set. The Cutter is his attempt to come to grips with his native Cuba and reflects his bitterness toward the country from which he and his parents were exiles. The novel focuses mainly on the desire for independence, but it is also about the loss of innocence and of the belief that if one does the right thing, good will necessarily be the end result.
Suggested Readings Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. _______. “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban American Fiction.” World Literature Today 68, no. l (1994): 43-49. Cortina, Rodolfo. “A Perfect Hotspot.” In Hispanic American Literature. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC, 1998. Herrera, Andrea O’Reilly, ed. “Song for the Royal Palms of Miami.” In ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Contributors: Debra D. Andrist and Margaret Kent Bass
Amy Tan Born: Oakland, California; February 19, 1952 Chinese American
Tan’s novels are among the first to bring literary accounts of Asian American women to a broad audience. Principal works children’s literature: The Moon Lady, 1992; The Chinese Siamese Cat, 1994 long fiction: The Joy Luck Club, 1989; The Kitchen God’s Wife, 1991; The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995; The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 2001; Saving Fish from Drowning, 2005 nonfiction: “The Language of Discretion,” 1990 (in The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels, editors); The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, 2003 Amy Tan was born to parents who emigrated from China to California two years before she was born, and her work is influenced by the Asian American people and community she knew in her childhood. Each of her novels features characters who have either emigrated from China or who, like Tan, are the children of those immigrants. Like many immigrants to the United States, Tan’s parents had high expectations for their daughter. Tan writes: “I was led to believe from the age of six that I would grow up to be a neurosurgeon by trade and a concert pianist by hobby.” In her first two novels, especially, Tan writes of the pressures her young Chinese American characters feel as they try to meet high parental expectations while also craving a normal carefree childhood. Tan struggled with her Chinese heritage; as a girl, she contemplated cosmetic surgery to make her look less Asian. She was ashamed of her cultural identity until she moved with her mother and brother to Switzerland, where Tan attended high school. There, Asians were a rarity, and Tan was asked out on dates because she was suddenly exotic. Tan did not initially plan to be a writer of fiction. She was working long hours as a technical writer, and sought psychological therapy to help her with her workaholic tendencies. When she became dissatisfied with her therapist, who sometimes fell asleep during her sessions, she decided to use fiction writing as her therapy instead. Experiences from her life thus find their way into her novels, especially The Joy Luck Club. Like the characters Rose Hsu and Waverly Jong, Tan experienced the death of a brother. Waverly, like Tan, is married to a tax attorney of European descent. Tan and her husband, Lou DeMattei, married in 1974. In fact, several of Tan’s Chinese American women characters are married to European American husbands. 1027
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The Joy Luck Club Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, debuted to critical acclaim. It takes its place alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) as a chronicle of a Chinese American woman’s search for and exploration of her ethnic identity. The Joy Luck Club is the best-selling, accessible account of four Chinese-born mothers and their four American-born daughters. One of the women, Suyuan Woo, has died before the story opens, but the other seven women tell their own stories from their individual points of view. Critics have noted that this approach is an unusually ambitious one. Nevertheless, the novel has reached a wide audience, especially since it was made into a feature film in 1992. At the center of the story is Jing-mei “June” Woo, who has been asked to replace her dead mother as a member of the Joy Luck Club, a group of four women who meet for food and mah-jongg. Although Americanized and non-Chinese-speaking June is initially uncertain whether she wishes to join her mother’s friends, she discovers that these women know things about her mother’s past that she had never imagined. Her decision to become part of the Joy Luck Club culminates in a visit to China, where she meets the half sisters whom her mother was forced to abandon before she fled to the United States. The other Chinese-born women have similarly tragic stories, involving abandonment, renunciation, and sorrow in their native country. June says of her mother’s decision to begin the club: “My mother could sense that the women of these families also had unspeakable tragedies they had left behind in China and hopes they couldn’t begin to express in their fragile English.” Each of these women’s hopes includes hopes for her daughter. Each American daughter feels that she has in some way disappointed her mother. Waverly Jong fulfills her mother’s ambitions by becoming a chess prodigy, then quits suddenly, to her mother’s sorrow. June can never live up to her mother’s expectations, and she rebels by refusing to learn the piano. Rose Hsu turns away for a moment, and her youngest brother drowns. Lena St. Clair makes a marriage based on false ideals of equality, and only her mother understands its basic injustice. These American-born daughters insist that they are not Chinese; as June says, she has no “Chinese whatsoever below my skin.” By the end of the novel, they find themselves realizing how truly Chinese they are.
The Kitchen God’s Wife Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 The Kitchen God’s Wife, Tan’s second novel, is concerned with a young, Americanized Chinese American woman’s quest to accept her heritage, and in so do-
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ing accept her family, especially her mother. The first section of the novel, told from the daughter Pearl’s point of view, concerns Pearl’s difficult relationship with her mother, Winnie. Pearl perceives Winnie only as an old, unfashionable woman with trivial concerns. Pearl is troubled by a secret that she believes she cannot tell her mother. Pearl has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but dreads her mother’s reaction, her reproaches, her list of ways Pearl could have prevented her disease. Pearl comes to recognize that her mother has secrets of her own, which Winnie finally decides to share with her daughter. Most of the novel, which is also the part that has received the most critical praise, is Winnie’s firstAmy Tan (AP/Wide World Photos) person account of her childhood. The reader discovers along with Pearl that her mother has not always been the penny-pinching part-owner of a dingy, outdated florist’s shop. Instead, Winnie has had a life of tragedy and adventure before immigrating to the United States. She lived another life in China, complete with another husband and three long-dead children. Winnie’s mother disappeared when Winnie was a child, leaving her with her father and his other wives, who promptly sent her to live with an uncle. That uncle married her to Wen Fu, a sadistic, adulterous pilot, and Winnie soon began the nomadic life of a soldier’s wife during wartime. By the end of the war, Winnie found love with the man Pearl knows as her father, the Chinese American serviceman Jimmie Louie. Wen Fu had Winnie imprisoned for adultery when she tried to divorce him, then raped her upon her release. Pearl learns the secret her mother has been hiding—Jimmie Louie, who died when Pearl was fourteen, is not her biological father after all. When Pearl learns these secrets about her mother’s past, she is finally able to reveal the secret of her illness. The title refers to an altar that Pearl inherits from a woman Winnie had known in China, and it symbolizes the growing closeness that Winnie and Pearl develop after sharing their secrets. The final scene shows Winnie buying her daughter a deity for the altar. This statue, whom Winnie names Lady Sorrowfree, the kitchen god’s wife, represents Winnie and her care for her daughter. By the end of the novel, Pearl achieves a greater understanding of her mother and of their often-trying relationship.
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The Hundred Secret Senses Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 The Hundred Secret Senses, Tan’s third novel, continues her interest in Chinese and Chinese American culture, especially the strife between family members who are traditionally Chinese and those who are more Americanized. Half-Caucasian, halfChinese Olivia meets, at age six, her eighteen-year-old Chinese half sister, Kwan, the daughter of her father’s first marriage. Kwan instigates Olivia’s struggle with her Chinese identity. Olivia is alternately embarrassed, annoyed, and mystified by this sister who claims that she has daily communication with “yin people”—helpful ghosts—many of whom are the spirits of friends from Kwan’s past lives. Despite her ambivalence, however, Olivia gains most of her awareness about her Chinese background from Kwan. The sisters’ Chinese father has died, and Olivia is being raised in the United States by a Caucasian mother and an Italian American stepfather. After Kwan’s arrival from China, the older girl is largely responsible for her sister’s care. Thus, Olivia resentfully learns Chinese and learns about her Chinese heritage, including knowledge about the ghosts who populate her sister’s world. Olivia is understandably skeptical about the presence of these yin people. In Olivia’s culture, such ghosts are the stuff of scary films, while for Kwan, they are a part of everyday life. The title, then, refers to the hundred secret senses that, Kwan asserts, enable one to perceive the yin people. Kwan’s stories about a past life are the fairy tales with which Olivia grows up. Later, Olivia marries a half-Hawaiian, half-Caucasian man, Simon, and as the novel opens, they are beginning divorce proceedings after a long marriage. Olivia begins these proceedings in part because she believes that Simon is still in love with a former girlfriend, who died shortly before Simon and Olivia met. Olivia must develop her own sense of personal and ethnic identity in order to release this ghost from her past. She must begin to believe that she is worthy of Simon’s love, and in order to discover her self-worth, she must travel to the tiny Chinese village where her sister grew up. Although Olivia believes herself to be very American, she begins to feel much closer to her Chinese heritage once she, Simon, and Kwan arrive in China, and in the storytelling tradition of all Tan’s novels, Olivia learns about her family’s past while talking to residents of the village in which Kwan grew up. Olivia also is able to confront her difficulties with Simon as a result of the trip.
Saving Fish from Drowning Type of work: Novel First published: 2005 Told through the narrative voice of murdered tour director, San Francisco antiquarian Bibi Chen, Saving Fish from Drowning explores what happens when a group of Americans take a trip to East Asia, where political unrest can erupt into violence.
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Left to the bumbling direction of Harry Bailey, a man hiding his epilepsy and more concerned about looking “bad” than about working effectively to help his fellow travelers, these twelve Americans soon manage to desecrate a sacred tribal shrine, become separated from one another, and are kidnapped by a small band of Karen tribespeople hiding in the dense Burmese jungle to avoid political persecution and, most likely, extermination at the hands of Myanmar’s dictatorship. This ugly comedy highlights the embarrassing arrogance of these pampered Americans abroad. These people believe they can manipulate their captors, when, in fact, they have misunderstood everything, including that they have been taken prisoner because the Karen people believed one of them to be the reincarnation of their lost savior. They saw him do “magic” (sleight-of-hand card tricks) and he carries what they believe to be their savior’s “sacred” text, in this case, a tattered copy of a Stephen King novel. Things go from bad to worse as the days stretch into weeks and the tourists remain prisoners in the jungle. Out in the “civilized world” plans to find the missing tourists run amok thanks to ineptitude and hatred of Americans. Although Amy Tan’s novel could end as brutally as a reader aware of international incidents like this one might fear, it does not conclude with a bloodbath. The actual ending is far more troubling: Despite the ordeal that these people have managed, through little skill on their part, to survive, once they are back in the “civilized” world it is clear that their experience has not changed them.
Suggested Readings Benanni, Ben, ed. Paintbrush: A Journal of Poetry and Translation 22 (Autumn, 1995). Bloom, Harold, ed. Amy Tan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cooperman, Jeannette Batz. The Broom Closet: Secret Meanings of Domesticity in Postfeminist Novels by Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordan, Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Jane Smiley, and Amy Tan. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American MotherDaughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999. Huh, Joonok. Interconnected Mothers and Daughters in Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.” Tucson, Ariz.: Southwest Institute for Research on Women, 1992. Huntley, E. D. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. “Amy Tan.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Amy Tan: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Tan, Amy. “Amy Tan.” Interview by Barbara Somogyi and David Stanton. Poets and Writers 19, no. 5 (September 1, 1991): 24-32. Contributor: J. Robin Coffelt
Sheila Ortiz Taylor Born: Los Angeles, California; September 25, 1939 Mexican American
Taylor is often considered the first Chicana lesbian novelist. Principal works long fiction: Faultline, 1982; Spring Forward/Fall Back, 1985; Southbound, 1990; Coachella, 1998 poetry: Slow Dancing at Miss Polly’s, 1989 nonfiction: Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography, 1850-1966, 1968; Imaginary Parents, 1996 Sheila Ortiz Taylor (SHEE-lah ohr-TEES TAY-lur) is often considered the first Chicana lesbian novelist. Her first and most acclaimed novel, Faultline, was republished in 1995 because of increased awareness of its importance not only in lesbian and Chicano literature but as a significant work of fiction. The novel has been published in British, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish translations, and in 1995 film rights were bought by Joseph May Productions. The novel also won several awards, although it was often neglected by critics and mainstream reviewers. Ortiz Taylor grew up in a Mexican American family in Southern California, an experience she records in Imaginary Parents. The book, a mixture of fact and fiction, is true to the spirit of her childhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Her older sister’s color prints accompany the text and represent a different version of the shared past. In her preface Ortiz Taylor writes that the book could be called autobiography, memoir, poetry, nonfiction, creative nonfiction, fiction, or codex (a manuscript book); she herself calls it an ofrenda, an offering of small objects with big meanings set out in order. The book reimagines the past and re-creates the parents and extended family who have since died; it also provides an insightful Chicana perspective into what she calls the strange Southern California culture of the war years. It was during the post-World War II years of the early 1950’s that Ortiz Taylor, then twelve or thirteen years old, realized that she wanted to write. She attended California State University at Northridge and graduated magna cum laude. She earned her M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1964, and her Ph.D. in English from the same university in 1973 with a dissertation on form and function in the picaresque novel. Taylor’s own novels often follow the episodic traditions of the picaresque, although they transform the rogue hero into an adventurous lesbian protagonist who challenges boundaries and resists stereotyped categorization. In Faultline the main 1032
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character, Arden Benbow, who was an English major in college, is the mother of six when she falls in love with another woman. A similar sense of hopefulness and triumph in the face of opposition, which some reviewers have referred to as utopian, pervades Spring Forward/Fall Back, and the same spirit informs Taylor’s poetry and other writings. Taylor has a keen eye for detail and is clear about oppression and stagnated prejudicial attitudes. Her writings also show survival techniques in a hostile culture, among them the invocation of humor, love, and goodwill toward others. Her protagonists refuse to be beaten down, and they enjoy and respect life. Taylor’s professional career has been in teaching at several universities, most notably at Florida State University, where she began teaching literature in the early 1970’s. Her courses include many on women writers, and she has served as director of Women’s Studies. She has given many public readings nationally and internationally, and in 1991 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Taylor’s work shows a continuing fascination with the novel form and its many variations. She sees herself as an author who creates convincing forgeries that are intended to illuminate life. Her works show her challenging herself by shifting subject matter, style, and approach. She never repeats simple patterns or formulas from previous works. This approach to writing is also reflected in her central characters, who meet challenges with creativity and vitality and accept risk as a part of life. Many readers have found Taylor’s texts to be engaging. Her work is therefore not restricted to special audiences. Like the literal lesson of the geological faultlines where earthquakes appear, Taylor’s works illustrate that chance and change are inevitable, that for individuals and societies it is important to avoid rigidity, and that challenges must be met actively with love, humor, and imagination.
Faultline Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 Faultline is a comic novel with a serious message conveyed by example and implication rather than by preaching. Sheila Ortiz Taylor creates a shining cast of characters who speak about their relationships to the protagonist, Arden Benbow, as Arden battles her former husband, Malthus, for custody of their six children. Malthus has never considered women equal to men, and his ego is hurt when Arden prefers living with a woman to staying with him in their dull marriage. The theme of acceptance of individual differences runs throughout the novel. It is not until Arden and Alice Wicks fall in love that Arden can see what it means to free oneself to live fully and to develop the creative spirit. Alice too has married because that is what society expected of her, but she learns that she must be herself and follow her own spirit. Together the two women create a loving home life, which includes an African American gay male drag queen as a babysitter, an assortment of pets (as many as three hundred rabbits), and various friends and neighbors who are
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attracted by Arden’s energy and enthusiasm. Although he himself is involved with another woman and does not want to be bothered with the children, Arden’s former husband files a custody suit on the grounds that Arden’s lesbianism makes her an unfit mother. Arden refuses to pretend to be someone she is not, and her life-affirming spirit triumphs. The book ends with a legally nonbinding double wedding between Arden and her lover Alice and between two of their gay male friends. The faultline of the title refers to the geography of the setting in Southern California, but it is also a metaphor for unpredictability and the need for adaptability and acceptance of reality. One chapter is in the words of a professor of geophysics who specializes in plate tectonics, which includes the study of the faultlines where earthquakes occur. Earthquakes, he says, are dynamic reactions to changes in the earth’s crust that remind people of their mortality and the need to live with enthusiasm. People should not waste their time being prejudiced against others. Although he is a scientist, the professor knows—as Malthus does not—that there is more to life than “facts.” In Faultine, characters who are rigid and domineering prove to be unhappy, whatever material wealth they may have. Malthus will not accept Arden’s love for a woman and thus turns his own children against him; they do not want to live with an angry and spiteful father. Faultline emphasizes the need for people to celebrate life rather than to oppress others. Arden Benbow is, after all, not only a fit mother but an outstanding one who brings to her children and to all around her a sense of fairness and decency and, especially, a joy in living and loving.
Suggested Readings Aldama, Frederick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Faultline: A Third Woman Utopia.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 6 (Spring, 1991). Christian, Karen. “Will the ‘Real Chicano’ Please Stand Up? The Challenge of John Rechy and Sheila Ortiz Taylor to Chicano Essentialism.” Americas Review 20 (Summer, 1992). Zimmerman, Bonnie. Safe Sea of Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Contributor: Lois A. Marchino
Piri Thomas Born: New York, New York; September 30, 1928 Puerto Rican
Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets gave many Americans a window into the lives of people in New York’s Puerto Rican ghetto and became an inspiration for the “Nuyorican” literary movement. Principal works short fiction: Stories from El Barrio, 1978 (juvenile) nonfiction: Down These Mean Streets, 1967 (autobiographical novel); Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand, 1972; Seven Long Times, 1974 Piri Thomas (PIH-ree TAH-muhs) was born in 1928, just before the Great Depression struck, the first child of a Puerto Rican couple, Juan (also known as Johnny) and Dolores Montañez Tomás. In 1941, when Piri was thirteen, his father, whom he called “Poppa,” lost his job and went to work with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era government jobs program. The work was hard manual labor, and Poppa became distant and cool toward his son, who desperately wanted paternal affection and approval. At an early age, Thomas became conscious of the problems of having dark skin. His own mother was light-skinned, and his brothers and sisters were light in color, with straight hair. Only the narrator and his father had the hair with tight curls and the dark brown skin that marked them as members of a disadvantaged race. The young narrator’s awareness of race increased when his family moved out of Harlem to an Italian neighborhood, where he was subjected to racial slurs and had to fight the Italian boys. Standing up to the Italians gradually won him acceptance, though, and he learned to make his way in the world by fighting. Thomas’s family returned to Harlem, where the boy became a member of a Puerto Rican youth gang. In 1944, the family moved to Long Island, enjoying the prosperity of Poppa’s wartime job. Thomas’s own stay in the suburbs did not last, though. The snubs of his schoolmates made him even more conscious of his color than he had been in the Italian neighborhood, and he dropped out of school and returned to Harlem. He became friends with Brew, a black man from the South, and Thomas’s puzzlement about his own racial identity led him to ask Brew to take him south. The two men went to Virginia, where they took work on a merchant ship. After his travels, Thomas returned to Harlem, where he fell in love with a young woman from Puerto Rico who was waiting for him. He also, however, began to use 1035
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heroin and developed a serious habit. After kicking his heroin habit with the help of a friend from his boyhood gang days and his friend’s mother, he took up another dangerous pursuit: armed robbery. Another Puerto Rican introduced him to two white men who had been in prison, and the four began robbing small businesses. A daring attempt to rob a nightclub full of patrons ended with Thomas shooting a policeman and being shot himself. Barely escaping death, he was sentenced to five to fifteen years at Sing Sing Prison. Soon transferred from Sing Sing to Comstock State Prison, Thomas remained behind bars from 1950 to 1956. His youth on the mean streets of New York served him well in prison, where only the strong and aggressive could avoid being raped and exploited. In prison, he also began to think seriously about his life and to read widely. For a time, he explored the religious beliefs of the Black Muslims. Thomas finally won parole and found himself back in New York, ready to turn his life around. Down These Mean Streets is Thomas’s own story, and questions of identity and race lie at its core. Psychologically, it is the coming-of-age story of a young man who must struggle with the conflicts in his family and in his own mind in order to make sense of his life. Through gang involvement, drug addiction, a criminal career, and a prison sentence, the protagonist wrestles with his own versions of the problems that confront all people: problems of self-definition, of tension with parents, of sexual relationships, and of religious meaning. As a Puerto Rican, Thomas is a member of a group that has an ambiguous status. Puerto Rico is not a state or a part of any state, yet it is still part of the United States. Puerto Ricans are culturally different from the people of the mainland United States, but they are U.S. citizens. As a blend of national and racial ancestries, Puerto Ricans often do not fit neatly into the racial categories used by North Americans. Both of Thomas’s parents are from Puerto Rico, but Thomas grew up in New York; thus, there is a gap between him and his parents. To make matters even more complicated, Thomas and his father are dark-skinned, while Thomas’s mother and his brothers and sisters are light-skinned. This would not be a problem in Puerto Rico, where racial consciousness is less pronounced than in the mainland United States, but it proved to be a big problem for the young Piri. He continually felt “hung up between two sticks,” in his phrase. In his novel, there are continual hints that his father’s own discomfort about having dark skin is a source of the coldness the son feels from his father. Upon its publication, Down These Mean Streets was both controversial and influential. It was criticized for its violence, explicit sexuality, and expression of strong racial feelings. During the 1970’s, the book was banned from the shelves of school libraries in a number of communities, including Queens in New York; Levittown, Long Island; Darien, Connecticut; and Salinas, California. Responding to these attempts at book banning, Thomas became an opponent of censorship and an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised.
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Down These Mean Streets Type of work: Autobiographical novel First published: 1967
Down These Mean Streets is an autobiographical novel that tells of the author’s experiences growing up as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican in New York, becoming involved in drugs and crime, and going to prison. The book’s thirty-five chapters are divided into eight sections, with each of the sections devoted to an important place and time in the author’s life. The first section, consisting of eight chapters and entitled “Harlem,” deals with Thomas’s childhood in and around New York’s Spanish Harlem. The two chapters of the second section, “Suburbia,” deal with life in the suburbs of Long Island, where the family moves after Thomas’s father gets a wartime job at an airplane factory. The third, fifth, and final chapters all concern Harlem, the site of the “mean streets” of the book’s title and a place that keeps drawing Thomas back. Thomas is the narrator of the book, and the style draws heavily on the speech of New York’s Puerto Rican and black populations, evoking the urban environment. Racism and prejudice, both as sociological forces and as sources of psychological pain, are central themes in the work. Some of Thomas’s difficulties in fitting in with American society are the result of poverty, but he also experiences real discrimination, and opportunities are closed to him because of his skin color. His anger and resentment at being continually rejected, though, are his true reasons for becoming a drug addict and a criminal. His story is ultimately the story of his ability to rise above his anger. Down These Mean Streets was the first work by a Puerto Rican author writing in English to attract a large readership. A best seller when it appeared in 1967, it gave many Americans a window into the lives of people in New York’s Puerto Rican ghetto and became an inspiration for the “Nuyorican” literary movement. The book was criticized for its violence, explicit sexuality, and expression of strong racial feelings, and was banned from the shelves of many school libraries in the 1970’s. In response, Thomas has become an outspoken opponent of all forms of censorship. As he says in the afterword to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets:
In writing Down These Mean Streets, it was my hope that exposure of such conditions in the ghetto would have led to their improvement. But, thirty years later, the sad truth is that people caught in the ghettoes have not made much progress, have moved backwards in many respects—the social safety net is much weaker now. Unfortunately, it’s the same old Mean Streets, only worse. I was taught that justice wears a blindfold, so as not to be able to distinguish between the colors, and thus make everyone equal in the eyes of the law. I propose we remove the blindfold from the eyes of Lady Justice, so for the first time she can really see what’s happening and check out where the truth lies and the lies hide. That would be a start. Viva the children of all the colors! Punto!
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Suggested Readings Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “‘Puerto Rican Negro’: Redefining Race in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets.” MELUS 29, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 205ff. Flores, Juan. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1993. Fox, Geoffrey E. Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Constructing of Identity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. New York: Praeger, 1997. Rivero, Eliana. “Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict.” Revista Chicano-Riqueña 13, nos. 3/4 (1985): 173-192. Rodriguez de Laguna, Asela, ed. Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1987. Santiago, Roberto, ed. Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings—An Anthology. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Thomas, Piri. “Piri Thomas: An Interview.” MELUS 26, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 77ff. Turner, Faythe, ed. Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA: An Anthology. Seattle: Open Hand, 1991. Contributor: Carl L. Bankston III
Jean Toomer Born: Washington, D.C.; December 26, 1894 Died: Doylestown, Pennsylvania; March 30, 1967 African American
Toomer’s goal was to articulate a new identity beyond individual racial identities, a “universal human being” or American “race” beyond the divisions of white and black, East and West, religion, race, class, sex, and occupational classification. Principal works drama: Balo, pb. 1927 poetry: “Banking Coal,” 1922; “Blue Meridian,” 1936; The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, 1988 short fiction: “Mr. Costyve Duditch,” 1928; “York Beach,” 1929 nonfiction: “Race Problems and Modern Society,” 1929; “Winter on Earth,” 1929; Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms, 1931; “The Flavor of Man,” 1949 miscellaneous: Cane, 1923 (prose and poetry); The Wayward and the Seeking, 1980 (prose and poetry; Darwin T. Turner, editor) Nathan Eugene Toomer (TEW-mur) spent most of his life resisting a specific racial label for himself. His childhood and youth were spent in white or racially mixed middle-class neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and his parents were both lightskinned. Jean’s father left shortly after his birth and his mother died after remarrying, so that the most potent adult influences on his life were his maternal grandparents, with whom he lived until his twenties. His grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, had been elected lieutenant-governor in Reconstruction Louisiana and served as acting governor in 1873. Toomer believed that his victory was helped by his announcement that he had black blood, although Toomer denied knowing whether it was true. One thing is clear: Pinchback had indeed served the Union cause in the “Corps d’Afrique.” Later in life Toomer denied that he was a “Negro”—a term he defined as one who identifies solely with the black race. At the same time, despite the fact that he had a great deal of nonblack ancestry, he saw himself as not white, but rather as “American,” a member of a new race that would unify conflicting racial groups through a mixture of racial strains. The attainment of such an “American” race remained his goal throughout most of his life after Cane. Toomer’s education after high school was varied, from agriculture at the Uni1039
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versity of Wisconsin to the American College of Physical Training in Chicago. Rather than completing courses toward a formal degree, however, he pursued his own reading in literature and social issues while working at assorted jobs until he decided to devote all his efforts to writing. He began writing and was published in a few magazines before moving south to become a schoolteacher in rural Georgia, an experience which he uses in Kabnis, a novella that forms the final part of Cane. The real nudge came in the form of a three-month stint as substitute principal of a school in a small Georgia town in the fall of 1921. He returned to Washington in November with material for a whole book. He published several poems and stories in assorted periodicals the following year and then gathered most of them and many new ones into a carefully structured book called Cane, published in 1923 by Boni and Liveright. The book caused a considerable stir among the influential white literati with whom he associated (such as Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane) and among black writers and intellectuals as well. Yet in its two printings (the second in 1927) it sold fewer than a thousand copies. That same year, Toomer met the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and embraced his philosophy of higher consciousness. After studying with him in France, Toomer returned to spread his teachings in America. A ten-month marriage to a white poet, Margery Latimer, ended with her death in childbirth in 1932. Two years later he married another white woman, Marjorie Content; he would spend the rest of his life with her. This period in Toomer’s life was largely devoted to self-improvement and to writing philosophical and spiritually oriented work. He continued to publish some literary works until 1936, when his career came virtually to an end, despite attempts to have other works published. He became a Quaker and maintained no further identity with the black race, dying in 1967 largely forgotten.
Cane Type of work: Short fiction, novella, and poetry First published: 1923 Divided into three parts, Toomer’s Cane consists of short stories, sketches, poems, and a novella. The first section focuses on women; the second on relationships between men and women; and the third on one man. Although capable of being read discretely, these works achieve their full power when read together, coalescing to create a novel, unified by theme and symbol. Like all of Toomer’s work, Cane describes characters who have within a buried life, a dream that seeks expression and fulfillment; Cane is a record of the destruction of those dreams. Sometimes the dreams explode, the fire within manifesting itself violently; more often, however, the world implodes within the dreamer’s mind. These failures have external causes, like the inadequacy or refusal of the society to allow expression, the restrictions by what Toomer calls the herd. They also have internal causes, primarily because of fears and divisions within the dreamer himself as he struggles unsuccessfully to unite will and mind, passion and intellect. In the
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later story “York Beach,” Toomer describes this as the conflict between the wish for brilliant experience and the wish for difficult experience. The one limitation on the otherwise thoroughgoing romanticism of this vision is Toomer’s rigorous separation of humankind into those who dream, who are worth bothering about, and those who do not. While the struggle of Toomer’s characters is for unity, it is to unify themselves or to find union with one other dreamer, never to merge with humankind in general. Like Kabnis, many find their true identity in recognizing their differences, uniqueness, and superiority. At the end of “York Beach,” the protagonist tells his listeners that the best government would be an empire ruled by one who recognized his own greatness. Toomer’s dreamers find themselves in the first and third sections of Cane in a southern society which, although poor in compassion and understanding, is rich in supportive imagery. In the second part, set in the North, that imagery is absent, so the return of the protagonist to the South in part 3 is logical, since the North has not provided a nurturing setting. Although the return may be a plunge back into hell, it is also a journey to an underground where Kabnis attains the vision that sets him free. The imagery is unified by a common theme: ascent. Kabnis says, “But its the soul of me that needs the risin,” and all the imagery portrays the buried life smoldering within, fighting upward, seeking release. The dominant image of the book, the one that supplies the title, is the rising sap of the sugarcane. Cane whispers enigmatic messages to the characters, and it is to cane fields that people seeking escape and release flee. Sap rises, too, in pines, which also whisper and sing; and at the mill of part 1, wood burns, its smoke rising. The moon in “Blood-Burning Moon” is said to “sink upward,” an oxymoronic yoking that implies the difficulty of the rising in this book. A second pattern of imagery is that of flowing blood or water, although generally in the pessimistic Cane, water is not abundant. In “November Cotton Flower,” dead birds are found in the wells, and when water is present, the characters, threatened by the life it represents, often fear it. Rhobert, in a sketch of that name, wears a diver’s helmet to protect him from water, life which is being drawn off. Dreams denied, blood flows more freely than water.
“Esther” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1923, in Cane “Esther,” the most successful story in Cane, comes early and embodies many of the book’s major themes. It opens with a series of four sentences describing Esther as a girl of nine. In each, the first clause compliments her beauty, the second takes the praise away; the first clauses of each are progressively less strong. Esther represents the destruction of potential by a combination of inner and outer forces. On the outside there is her father, “the richest colored man in town,” who reduces Esther to a drab and obsequious life behind a counter in his dry goods store. “Her hair thins. It
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looks like the dull silk on puny corn ears.” Then there is King Barlo, a black giant, who has a vision in the corner of town known as the Spittoon. There, while townspeople gather to watch (and black and white preachers find momentary unity in working out ways to rid themselves of one who threatens their power), Barlo sees a strong black man arise. While the man’s head is in the clouds, however, “little white-ant biddies come and tie his feet to chains.” The herd in Barlo’s vision, as in Toomer’s, may destroy the dreamer. Many, however, are affected by what Barlo has seen, none more so than Esther, who decides that she Jean Toomer (The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, loves him. The fire begins to burn Yale University) within. As she stands dreaming in her store, the sun on the windows across the street reflect her inner fire, and, wanting to make it real, Esther calls the fire department. For the next eighteen years, Esther, the saddest of all Toomer’s women, lives only on dreams, inventing a baby, conceived, she thinks, immaculately. Sometimes, like many of his characters, sensing that life may be too much for her, knowing that “emptiness is a thing that grows by being moved,” she tries not to dream, sets her mind against dreaming, but the dreams continue. At the end of the story, Esther, then twenty-seven, decides to visit Barlo, who has returned to town. She finds the object of her dream in a room full of prostitutes; what rises is only the fumes of liquor. “Conception with a drunken man must be a mighty sin,” she thinks, and, when she attempts to return to reality, she, like many Toomer characters, finds that the world has overwhelmed her. Crushed from without, she has neither life nor dreams. “There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared.”
“Blood-Burning Moon” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1923, in Cane The main character undergoes a similar emotional destruction in “Blood-Burning Moon,” Toomer’s most widely anthologized short story (also found in the womancentered first section). Here, however, the destructive force is primarily internal.
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Among the most conventional of Toomer’s stories, “Blood-Burning Moon” has both a carefully delineated plot and a familiar one at that: a love triangle. What is inventional is the way Toomer manages the reader’s feelings about the woman whom two men love. Both men are stereotypes. Bob Stone is white and repulsively so. Himself divided and content to be, he makes his mind consciously white and approaches Louisa “as a master should.” The black, Tom Burwell, is a stereotype too: Having dreams, he expresses his love sincerely, but inarticulately; denied or threatened, he expresses himself violently. The first two sections open with rhythmic sentences beginning with the word “up”; Louisa sings songs against the omen the rising moon portends, seeking charms and spells but refusing the simple act of choosing between the two men. Because Louisa does not choose, the story comes to its inevitable violent climax and the death of both men. There is more, however: When Louisa is last seen she too has been destroyed, mentally, if not physically. She sings again to the full moon as an omen, hoping that people will join her, hoping that Tom Burwell will come; but her choice is too late. Burwell is dead, and the lateness of her decision marks the end of her dreams. Like Esther, she is separated from even appropriate mental contact with the world that is.
“Cane, Section 2” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1923, in Cane Barlo’s vision (in “Esther”) is accurate but incomplete as a description of what happens to Toomer’s protagonists. While it is true that the herd will often destroy the dreamer, it is just as likely that the dreamer, from inaction, fear, and division, will destroy himself. The four stories of section 2 all focus on pairs of dreamers who can isolate themselves from the rest of society but who cannot get their dreams to merge. In “Avey” it is the man who, focused on his own dreams, refuses to listen to and accept the value of Avey’s dreams. In “Bona and Paul,” Paul takes Bona away from the dance, not, as everyone assumes, to make love to her, but to know her; but knowing a human is denied him because Bona assumes she already knows him, “a priori,” as he has said. Knowing he is black, she “knows” that he will be passionate. When he is interested in knowledge before passion, she discovers that to know a priori is not to know at all and flees him, denying his dream of knowing her. In “Theater” the divided main character, sitting half in light, half in shadow, watches another dreamer, the dancer on stage, Dorris. She is dreaming of him, but, although “mind pulls him upward into dream,” suspicion is stronger than desire, and by the end of the story John has moved wholly into shadow. When Dorris looks at him, “She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream.” Likewise, in “Box Seat” Muriel is torn between the dreamer Dan, who stands with one hand lying on the wall, feeling from below the house the deep underground rumbling of the subway, literal buried life, and Mrs. Pribby, the landlady, rattling her newspaper,
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its thin noise contrasting with the powerful below-ground sound. Muriel chooses respectability. At the theater, to which Dan has followed her, she is repelled by a dwarf who offers her a rose; Dan rises to his feet to proclaim that Jesus was once a leper. This last, insistent image, suggesting the maimed sources of beauty that Muriel is too timid to accept, also indicates the overexplicit inflation of claims that damages some of Toomer’s fiction. Although in Cane most of the stories are under control, some seem rather too sketchy; “Box Seat,” however, foreshadows the fault that mars all of Toomer’s later fiction: the sacrifice of dramatic ideas in favor of often pallid, philosophical ones.
Kabnis Type of work: Novella First published: 1923, in Cane The last and longest story in Cane integrates the themes, making explicit the nature of the destructive forces. The story is Kabnis, a novella, and the force is sin, a word contained backward in Kabnis’s name. It is the story of a black man out of place in the rural South, threatened not so much by whites as by his own people, by his environment, and by his sense of himself. As the story opens, Kabnis is trying to sleep, but he is not allowed this source of dream; instead, chickens and rats, nature itself, keep him awake. He wants to curse it, wants it to be consistent in its ugliness, but he senses too the beauty of nature, and, because that prevents him from hating it entirely, he feels that even beauty is a curse. Intimidated by nature, Kabnis is also attacked by society, by the local black church, from which the shouting acclamations of faith torture Kabnis, and by the black school superintendent who fires him for drinking. As in “Box Seat,” the protagonist is thus caught between expressions of life, which are yet too strong for him, and its repression, which traps him. So positioned, Kabnis, like Rhobert, is a man drowning, trying vainly to avoid the source of life. From this low point, for the only time in the book, Toomer describes the way up, and Kabnis gains enough strength to throw off his oppression. He has three friends: Halsey, an educated black man who has been playing Uncle Tom; Layman, a preacher, whose low voice suggests a canebrake; and Lewis, a doppelgänger who suggests a version of what a stronger Kabnis might have become and who drops out of the story when Kabnis does indeed become stronger. Once fired, Kabnis takes up residence with Halsey, a Vulcan-like blacksmith who gives him work repairing implements, work for which Kabnis is ill-suited. In his basement, however, Halsey has his own buried life, an old man, Father John, and in the climactic scene, the three men descend into the underground for a dark night of the soul, for the Walpurgisnacht on which Kabnis confronts his own demons. Prefiguring the descents in such black fiction as Richard Wright’s “Man Who Lived Underground” and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), this is likewise a descent during which the values of the world above, met on unfamiliar terrain, are
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rethought. It is a night of debauchery, but also the night when the destructive illusions and fears of the men are exposed. Father John represents those fears; when he speaks, his message is sin; but Kabnis knows, and for the first time can say, that because of sin the old man has never seen the beauty of the world. Kabnis has, and as he says, “No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.” Kabnis then proclaims a new role for himself: If he is not a blacksmith, he may be, having known beauty, a wordsmith. “I’ve been shapin words after a design that branded here. Know whats here? M soul.” If sin is what is done against the soul and if the soul of Kabnis is what needs the rising, then, as Kabnis says, the world has conspired against him. Now, however, Kabnis acknowledges and confronts that conspiracy, no longer fearing it or Father John. Exhausted by his effort, Kabnis sinks back, but Halsey’s sister, Carrie K, lifts him up, and together they ascend the stairs into the daylight, as the risen sun sings a “birthsong” down the streets of the town. The end is not unequivocally optimistic: It is too small and too tentative a note in this large catalog of the defeated and destroyed. Cane does, however, suggest finally that as destructive as dreams may be, once one has seen beauty, if he can free himself from repression, from sin, he may re-create himself. “Kabnis is me,” wrote Toomer to Waldo Frank, and he had more in mind than just his use of his experiences. What Toomer has done in Cane is to chart the varieties of damage that society has done to people and, more important, since individuals are always more interesting than society to Toomer, that people have done to themselves. Wholeness is the aim, a wholeness that breaks down barriers between mind and will, man and woman, object and subject, and that allows the potential of dreams to be fulfilled. That the wholeness is so difficult to achieve is the substance of Toomer’s short fiction; that Toomer achieves it, both for a character in Kabnis and more permanently in his only successful work, a book uniting fiction and poetry, songs and narration, images of fire and water, of descent and ascent, is his testimony that wholeness can be achieved by those who dream of it.
“Blue Meridian” Type of work: Poetry First published: 1936 Too often, unfortunately, Toomer’s later poetry drops the effective devices used in Cane and becomes didactic, explicitly philosophical, lacking Cane’s brilliantly realized images of concrete reality or its sharp, often startling metaphors. Toomer was mightily inspired by his few months in Georgia, and his sojourn even affected his interpretations of his own more familiar Washington and New York life; but after he had said what he had to say about the South, and the North in relation to the South, he seems to have exhausted his inspiration, except for his more “universal” themes, with only a little sense of poetry left, to be used in “Blue Meridian” and his stories “Winter on Earth” and “Withered Skin of Berries.” The latter story returned
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Toomer to the lyrical style and poetic sense of structure of the Cane stories, but for the most part, Toomer preferred to ignore stylistic and literary matters and chose to express his spiritual and philosophical beliefs, largely influenced by George Gurdjieff’s teachings, urging a regeneration of humanity that would eliminate the differences imposed by racial and other categories and bring people closer to God, one another, and the natural world. This is the point that Toomer makes explicitly in his last major work, the long poem “Blue Meridian,” first published in full in New American Caravan (1936) after a selection from an earlier version had appeared in Adelphi and Pagany. A further revised version is printed in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949), which places more emphasis on God and more clearly reveals Toomer’s notion of the transformed America. A few of the more minor revisions are for the better. This is the version published in The Wayward and the Seeking, with some incidental changes. “Blue Meridian” follows a structure much like that of Walt Whitman’s longer poems, such as “Passage to India” or “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” with recurring phrases or stanzas, often significantly altered. While it is not divided into individual sections, as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Stephen Crane’s The Bridge (1930) are—nor does it use the range of poetic forms of which Eliot and Crane availed themselves—it nevertheless follows those poems in being an examination and criticism of the twentieth century world, achieving a multifaceted view by varying tone and form. Written largely in a hortatory, exalted style in an effort to invoke Toomer’s higher spiritual goals for a better world and unified humankind, “Blue Meridian” explores the past and current conditions of America. The European, African, and “red” races are presented in appropriate images—even stereotypes—each being shown as incomplete. Toomer’s goal, as in much of his prose, is to achieve a new race beyond individual racial identities, a “universal human being” to be called the “blue meridian,” the highest stage of development beyond white and black, beyond divisions of East and West, of religion, race, class, sex, and occupational classification, and transcending the materialism of a commercial culture and the private concerns of individuals. The message is not so different from that of Whitman, except for greater criticism of modern business and the insistence on the mingling of the races.
Suggested Readings Benson, Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard. Jean Toomer. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Byrd, Rudolph. Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdijieff: Portrait of an Artist, 19231936. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Fabre, Geneviève, and Michel Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Hajek, Friederike. “The Change of Literary Authority in the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer’s Cane.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
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Jones, Robert B. Introduction to The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, edited by Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Kerman, Cynthia. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Moore, Lewis D. “Kabnis and the Reality of Hope: Jean Toomer’s Cane.” North Dakota Quarterly 54 (Spring, 1986): 30-39. Scruggs, Charles, and Lee VanDemarr. Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Taylor, Paul Beekman. Shadows of Heaven. York Beach, Me.: S. Weiser, 1998. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Toomer’s Cane as Narrative Sequence.” In Modern American Short Story Sequences, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Contributors: Howard Faulkner, Scott Giantvalley, and Earl Paulus Murphy
Luis Miguel Valdez Born: Delano, California; June 26, 1940 Mexican American
A political activist, playwright, director, essayist, and founder of El Teatro Campesino, Valdez became the seminal figure in Chicano theater. Principal works drama: The Theft, pr. 1961; Las dos caras del patroncito, pr. 1965, pb. 1971; The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, pr. 1965, pb. 1967; La quinta temporada, pr. 1966, pb. 1971; Dark Root of a Scream, pr. 1967, pb. 1973; Los vendidos, pr. 1967, pb. 1971; La conquista de México, pr. 1968, pb. 1971 (puppet play); The Militants, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; No saco nada de la escuela, pr. 1969, pb. 1971; Bernabé, pr. 1970, pb. 1976; Huelguistas, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Vietnam campesino, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Actos, pb. 1971 (includes Las dos caras del patroncito, La quinta temporada, Los vendidos, La conquista de México, No saco nada de la escuela, The Militants, Vietnam campesino, Huelguistas, and Soldado razo); La Virgen del Tepeyac, pr. 1971 (adaptation of Las cuatro apariciones de la Virgen de Guadalupe); Las pastorelas, pr. 1971 (adaptation of a sixteenth century Mexican shepherd’s play); Soldado razo, pr., pb. 1971; Los endrogados, pr. 1972; Los olivos pits, pr. 1972; El baille de los gigantes, pr. 1973; La gran carpa de los rasquachis, pr. 1973; Mundo, pr. 1973; El fin del mundo, pr. 1975; Zoot Suit, pr. 1978, pb. 1992; Bandido!, pr. 1981, pb. 1992, revised pr. 1994; Corridos, pr. 1983; “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!”, pr., pb. 1986; Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino, pb. 1990; Zoot Suit, and Other Plays, pb. 1992; Mummified Deer, pr. 2000 screenplays: Zoot Suit, 1982 (adaptation of his play); La Bamba, 1987 teleplays: Fort Figueroa, 1988; La Pastorela, 1991; The Cisco Kid, 1994 edited text: Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, 1972 (with Stan Steiner) miscellaneous: Pensamiento Serpentino: A Chicano Approach to the Theatre of Reality, 1973 Luis Miguel Valdez (lwees mih-GEHL VAL-dehz), political activist, playwright, director, essayist, and founder of El Teatro Campesino, is the most prominent figure in modern Chicano theater. Born on June 26, 1940, to migrant farmworker parents, he was second in a family of ten brothers and sisters. In spite of working in the 1048
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fields from the age of six, Valdez completed high school and received a scholarship to San Jose State College, where he developed his early interest in theater. The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa was written while Valdez was a student there. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English and drama in 1964, he joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose work was based on commedia dell’arte and the theater of Bertolt Brecht. These experiences heavily influenced Valdez’s work, especially in terms of style and production. A 1965 meeting with César Chávez, who was organizing migrant farmworkers in Delano, California, led to the formation of El Teatro Campesino, the cultural and propagandistic arm of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. Valdez created short improvisational pieces, called actos, for the troupe. All the actos are characterized by the use of masks, stereotyped characters, farcical exaggeration, and improvisation. Las dos caras del patroncito (the two faces of the boss) and La quinta temporada (the fifth season) are actos from this early period that highlight the plight of the farmworkers and the benefits of unionization. Valdez left the union in 1967, bringing El Teatro Campesino with him to establish El Centro Campesino Cultural. He wanted to broaden the concerns of the troupe by fostering Chicanos’ pride in their cultural heritage and by depicting their problems in the Anglo culture. Los vendidos (the sellouts), for example, satirizes Chicanos who attempt to assimilate into a white, racist society, and La conquista de Mexico (the conquest of Mexico) links the fall of the Aztecs with the internal dissension of Chicano activists. In 1968 El Teatro Campesino moved toward producing full-length plays, starting with Valdez’s The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa. Expressionistic in style, the play explores the conflict between two brothers—an assimilationist and a pachuco, a swaggering street kid—and the impact this extremism has on the tenuous fabric of a Chicano family. Recognition followed, with an Obie Award in New York in 1969 for “creating a workers’ theater to demonstrate the politics of survival” and an invitation to perform at the Theatre des Nations festival in Nancy, France. Later in 1969, Valdez and the troupe moved to Fresno, California, where they founded an annual Chicano theater festival, and Valdez began teaching at Fresno State College. In 1971 Valdez moved his company permanently to the small town of San Juan Bautista in California. There, Teatro Campesino underLuis Miguel Valdez (Courtesy, UCLA Library/ Alice Greenfield McGrath Papers) went a fundamental transformation,
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as the group began increasingly to emphasize the spiritual side of their work, as derived from prevalent Christian as well as newfound Aztec and Mayan roots. This shift from an agitational focus to a search for spiritual solutions was met with anger by formerly admiring audiences in Mexico City at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos in 1974. The company continued to flourish, however, touring campuses and communities yearly and giving financial support and advice to other theater troupes. Fame came with Zoot Suit, the first Chicano play to reach Broadway. Although its run was relatively brief, owing to negative criticism, the play was very popular on the West Coast and was made into a film in 1981, with Valdez both the director and the writer of the screenplay. During the 1980’s, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino continued to tour at home and abroad, presenting works by Valdez and collectively scripted pieces that interpret the Chicano experience. The 1986 comedy “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” is about the political and existential implications of acting, both in theater and in society. In 1987 Valdez wrote the screenplay for the successful film La Bamba, the story of Ritchie Valens, a young Chicano pop singer who died in an airplane crash in the late 1950’s. This work reached a large audience. After a gap in playwriting of almost fifteen years, Valdez wrote Mummified Deer. This play reaffirms his status as the “father of Chicano drama” and continues his exploration of his heritage through the juxtaposition of ritual and realism. The play takes its inspiration from a newspaper article concerning the discovery of a sixty-year-old fetus in the body of an eighty-four-year old woman. According to scholar Jorge Huerta, the mummified fetus serves as a metaphor for “the Chicanos’ Indio heritage, seen through the lens of his own Yaqui blood.” The play’s major dramatic action operates in the historical/fictional past. Valdez’s contributions to contemporary Chicano theater are extensive. Writing individually and with others, he has redefined the cultural forms of the barrio: the acto, a short comic piece intended to move the audience to political action; the mito (myth), which characteristically takes the form of an allegory based on Indian ritual, in an attempt to integrate political activism and religious ritual; and the corrido, a reinvention of the musical based on Mexican American folk ballads. He has placed the Chicano experience onstage in all of its political and cultural complexity, creating what no other American playwright has, a genuine workers’ theater that has made serious drama popular, political drama entertaining, and ethnic drama universal.
Zoot Suit Type of work: Drama First produced: 1978, pb. 1992 The first Chicano play on Broadway, Zoot Suit grew out of California Chicano guerrilla theater, incorporating bilingual dialogue and ultimately alienating Mexi-
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can Americans. In it, Valdez questions the Los Angeles newspaper accounts of the Columbus Day “Zoot Suit” riots and the related Sleepy Lagoon murder trial (1942). The drama uses song, dance, and a unifying narrative based on the traditions of the Mexican corrido (a ballad form that often reflects on social issues). A zoot-suiter “master of ceremonies” called Pachuco narrates the action, dispelling illusion, showing reality, and providing flashbacks that characterize the protagonist, Henry Reyna, who is vilified in the white media, as heroic. This defiant, existential street actor wears the colors of Testatipoka, the Aztec god of education. Reyna, a loyal American about to ship out for the war in the Pacific, becomes a scapegoat for the Los Angeles police. When a minor scuffle with a rival gang interrupts his farewell celebration, he bravely steps in to break up a one-sided attack. Newsboys shouting inflammatory headlines and a lawyer predicting mass trials prepare viewers for legal farce. The prosecution twists testimony proving police misunderstandings and Henry’s heroism to win an unjust conviction. White liberals distort the conviction of the zoot-suiter “gang” for personal ends, and even Pachuco is ultimately overpowered and stripped by servicemen. The play ends as it began: with the war over, the incarcerated scapegoats released, and police persecution renewed. Leaving viewers with the choice of multiple possible endings, Valdez not only reflects the Mayan philosophy of multiple levels of existence but also offers alternate realities dependent on American willingness to accept or deny reality: a calm Henry and supportive family group united against false charges, Henry as victim of racist stereotypes reincarcerated and killed in a prison fight, Henry the born leader dying heroically in Korea and thereby winning a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, Henry a father with several children, Henry merged with El Pachuco, a living myth and symbol of Chicano heritage and Chicano oppression. Thus, Reyna the individual portrays Chicanos in crisis in general. The plays shows Chicanos undermined by a prejudiced press, racist police, and an unjust legal system that distorts facts and denies Chicanos their rights.
Suggested Readings Broyles-Gonzales, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theatre of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Flores, Arturo C. El Teatro Campesino de Luis Valdez. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1990. Huerta, Jorge A. Chicano Theatre: Themes and Forms. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982. _______. “Labor Theatre, Street Theatre, and Community Theatre in the Barrio, 1965-1983.” In Hispanic Theatre in the United States, edited by Nicolás Kanellos. Houston: Arte Público, 1984. Kanellos, Nicolás. Mexican American Theater: Legacy and Reality. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1987.
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Morales, Ed. “Shadowing Valdez.” American Theatre 9 (November, 1992): 14-19. Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theater in the United States and Puerto Rico: A Report to the Ford Foundation. New York: Ford Foundation, 1988. Valdez, Luis Miguel. “Zoot Suit and the Pachuco Phenomenon: An Interview with Luis Valdez.” Interview by Roberta Orona-Cordova. In Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now, edited by Nicolás Kanellos. Houston: Arte Público, 1983. Contributors: Lori Hall Burghardt and Gina Macdonald
José Antonio Villarreal Born: Los Angeles, California; July 30, 1924 Mexican American
Villarreal is recognized as one of the first American writers of Mexican descent to portray the experiences of Mexican families who immigrated to the United States. Principal works long fiction: Pocho, 1959; The Fifth Horseman, 1974; Clemente Chacón, 1984 short fiction: “The Last Minstrel in California” and “The Laughter of My Father” in Iguana Dreams, 1992 The early life of José Antonio Villarreal (hoh-ZAY ahn-TOH-nyoh vee-yah-rayAL) strongly resembles that of Richard Rubio, the hero of his first novel. Both had fathers who fought in the Mexican Revolution; both were born and raised in California. Villarreal also enjoyed, in childhood innocence, the few pleasures of the nomadic life of the migrant farmworker: living in tents, listening to Spanish stories around a campfire, absorbing Mexican lore and culture that was invisible in the white world. Like Richard, Villarreal learned English quickly but retained his fluency in Spanish. Love of language and books led him to early discovery of his desire to become a writer. Circumstances took both into the Navy in World War II. Although Pocho appears autobiographical in many ways, it is sometimes criticized as unrealistic in its portrayal of Richard’s conscious intention to be a writer and as inattentive to the racism and injustice of American society. Villarreal rejects such pronouncements by declaring himself an American writer, not a Chicano writer. To the creator of Pocho, Richard’s ethnic and ideological identities are only part of a greater quest for his identity as a man, an artist, and a human being. Villarreal graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and since 1950 he has continued to write while supporting a family with a variety of jobs, including technical writer, magazine publisher, and teacher at a number of universities in California, Texas, and Mexico. During the Chicano movement of the 1970’s, Villarreal published The Fifth Horseman, a novel that explores the Mexican Revolution sympathetically, suggesting its ideals are worthy of preservation in Mexican identity, although its excesses ought to be condemned. Professional recognition and financial success have come hard to Villarreal, and perhaps as a result, the themes of work, money, and social mobility have become more dominant in his examination of the processes of acculturation. For example, Clemente Chacón, set in 1972, contrasts the life of the young insurance man 1053
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Clemente, who hustles desperately to succeed in American business and society, with the life of the adolescent Mario Carbajal, who hustles desperately simply to survive another day in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Exploitation of the poor and amoral ambition are qualities of both these characters and of their societies. Villarreal’s creative focus on individual lives rather than on social institutions suggests that ultimately each person’s choice is the origin of good or the origin of evil.
Pocho Type of work: Novel First published: 1959
Pocho is generally regarded as the first novel by an American of Mexican descent to represent the experiences of emigration from Mexico and acculturation to the United States. Although this pioneering work went out of print shortly after publication, a second edition appeared in 1970 during the Chicano Renaissance, and it has since become part of many multicultural literature classes. Set in the years between 1923 and 1942, the novel recounts the quest for personal and cultural identity by Richard Rubio, son of a soldier exiled after the Mexican Revolution and now a migrant farmworker in Santa Clara, California. As a pocho, a member of the first generation born in the United States, Richard grows up deeply attached to the traditions of his family and very attracted to the values and lifestyles of his American peers. In addition to trials faced by every young person while growing up, such as the struggle with authority, the search for independence, the thirst for knowledge, and the hunger for sexual experience, Richard faces special challenges in self-definition. He confronts poverty, family instability, a blighted education system, racial prejudice, a society torn by economic crises, and world war. Richard’s passage from childhood into adulthood is given unique shape not only by the circumstances of the Depression but also by the turmoil of life as an itinerant farmworker and the powerful tensions between Mexican and American cultures. Poverty inspires his dreams of success. A life of physical labor belies his intellectual nature. He identifies intensely with his macho father but cannot abide his violence, coldness, and self-destructiveness. Drawn to the beauties of the church, he nonetheless rejects faith. He is deeply attached to his mother but finds her helplessness repugnant. Obliged to become the man of the family as a teenager, he finds that his responsibilities clash with his solitary nature, his love of books, and his emerging personal identity as a writer. His choice to join the Navy is more personal than patriotic. To resolve his conflicts he chooses exile from his shattered family, escapes from his poverty without prospects, and seeks release from the fragments of the two cultures he has not yet pieced together. He leaves to face what he knows will be a struggle for a new identity as a man, as an artist, and as an American.
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Suggested Readings Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Leal, Luis. “The Fifth Horseman and Its Literary Antecedents.” Introduction to The Fifth Horseman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Contributor: Virginia M. Crane
Victor Villaseñor Born: Carlsbad, California; May 11, 1940 Mexican American
Villaseñor is one of the significant chroniclers of the Mexican American experience, his novel Macho! was one of the first Chicano novels issued by a mainstream publisher. Principal works children’s literature: Mother Fox and Mr. Coyote, 2004; The Frog and his Friends Save Humanity, 2005; Little Crow to the Rescue, 2005; Goodnight, Papito Dios, 2007 long fiction: Macho!, 1973 screenplay: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, 1982 short fiction: Walking Stars: Stories of Magic and Power, 1994 nonfiction: Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona, 1977; Rain of Gold, 1991; Wild Steps of Heaven, 1996; Thirteen Senses: A Memoir, 2001; Burro Genius: A Memoir, 2004; Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir, 2006 Victor Edmundo Villaseñor (VEE-tohr ehd-MEWN-doh VEE-yah-sehn-YOHR) is one of the significant chroniclers of the Mexican American experience; his novel Macho! was, along with Richard Vásquez’s 1970 novel Chicano, one of the first Chicano novels issued by a mainstream publisher. Villaseñor was born to Mexican immigrant parents in Carlsbad, California. His parents, Lupe Gomez and Juan Salvador Villaseñor, who had immigrated with their families when young, were middle class, and Victor and his four siblings were brought up on their ranch in Oceanside. Villaseñor struggled with school from his very first day, being dyslexic and having spoken Spanish rather than English at home. He dropped out of high school, feeling that he would “go crazy” if he did not, and went to work on his parents’ ranch. He briefly attended college at the University of San Diego, where he discovered that reading books could be something other than drudgery, but left college after flunking most of his courses. He became a boxer for a brief period, then went to Mexico, where he suddenly became aware of Mexican art, literature, and history. He began to be proud of his heritage, rather than confused and ashamed, meeting Mexican doctors and lawyers—“heroes,” he says—for the first time. He read extensively. Returning to California at his parents’ insistence, Villaseñor worked in construction beginning in 1965 and painstakingly taught himself how to write. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) was particularly inspira1056
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tional. He wrote extensively, producing many novels and short stories. They were steadily rejected until Bantam Books decided to take a chance and publish Macho! in 1973. The novel’s protagonist is a young man named Roberto García, and the novel covers roughly a year in his life, first in his home village in Mexico, then in California, then in Mexico again. Somewhat unwillingly, Roberto journeys northward with a group of norteños from his village to earn money working in the fields of California. Roberto’s personification of—and finally, inability to fully accept— the traditional social code of machismo; his conflicts with others, notably fellow norteño Pedro; and the larger labor struggle between migrant workers and landowners in California provide the central action of the book. Macho! received favorable reviews. The year of its initial publication Villaseñor married Barbara Bloch, the daughter of his editor; they have two sons, David and Joe. Villaseñor built a house on his parents’ property, and as his sons grew older he enjoyed horseback riding with them. Villaseñor’s second major published work was nonfiction. Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona details the trial of a serial killer. Villaseñor had read about the case after Macho! had been accepted for publication, and it captured his interest—Corona had been arrested for murdering twenty-five derelicts. Villaseñor extensively interviewed the members of the jury that convicted Corona and thoroughly examined the complex and controversial trial. (The jury had deliberated for eight grueling days before reaching a verdict.) After the book’s publication, he received some criticism for his interpretations of the events. Villaseñor subsequently wrote the screenplay for The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, based partly on writer Américo Paredes’s account of the adventures of Cortez, a real-life figure, eluding the Texas Rangers around 1900. Villaseñor tells the story using multiple points of view, effectively relating the story of a man driven by circumstances into the life of a bandit while showing the prejudices and racism of the times. Written for television, the film won an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities; it was also released to theaters. Rain of Gold, published in 1991 after more than ten years of research and writing, is the multigenerational story of Villaseñor’s family. The book was almost published two years earlier by G. P. Putnam’s, but Villaseñor became unhappy with the company at the last minute for insisting that the book be called “Rio Grande” (“a John Wayne movie,” he scoffed) and wanting to cut its length and call it fiction in order to boost sales. The company agreed to let him buy back his book, for which Villaseñor remortgaged his home. Published in its original form and with the original title (a translation of La Lluvia de Oro, his mother’s birthplace in Mexico) by Arte Público, it was well received and was widely considered Villaseñor’s masterwork. Wild Steps of Heaven recounts the history of Villaseñor’s father’s family in the highlands of Jalisco, Mexico, before the events covered in Rain of Gold; Villaseñor considered it part two of a “Rain of Gold” trilogy, and he planned to follow it with the story of his mother’s family. He draws on stories told by his father and members of his extended family, relating them in a folkloric style that sometimes verges on Magical Realism. Walking Stars: Stories of Magic and Power, published two years
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before Wild Steps of Heaven, consists of stories for young readers that attempt both to entertain and to inspire; each of the stories, most based on events in the early lives of his parents, concludes with notes in which the author discusses the stories’ meanings, emphasizing the spiritual magic that people’s lives embody.
Macho! Type of work: Novel First published: 1973 The protagonist of Macho! is Roberto, a young Mexican who immigrates illegally into the United States. Victor Villaseñor suggests that Roberto extracts his identity from the soil of the fields that he works. On the first and last pages of the book, Villaseñor describes how volcanic ash has enriched the soil of a Mexican valley. At the end of the novel, Roberto has returned to this valley to work the land, applying what he has learned in the United States. These homages to volcanic ash suggest that soil is not just the earth’s outer covering but also its soul. Likewise, the soil is the soul of the people who work it. The novel refers to the Mexican Revolution, a popular movement to redistribute the ownership of land, to say that land is fundamental to understanding not only the Mexican people but also the country’s politics and history. According to Villaseñor, Mexico’s geography dictates the country’s indigenous law. Mexico is mountainous, so villages are isolated. As a result of their isolation, these villages developed their own systems of justice and never appeal to a higher authority. This law of the land is a violent code of honor, and the novel documents how this code places a premium on a woman’s virginity and on a man’s ability to fight. The definition of “macho” must necessarily emanate from an understanding of this law of the land. The novel makes frequent references to César Chávez’s movement in the 1960’s to unionize agricultural workers in the United States. Villaseñor offers a complex portrait of Chávez, not allowing him to become a cardboard cutout representative of Mexicans who identify themselves with the soil. Chávez’s movement distinguishes between the illegal Mexican immigrants, whom Chávez wanted deported, and the Mexican Americans, whose rights he sought to protect through unionization. Villaseñor concludes that Chávez is a “true-self hero,” one who is not labeled readily as macho, but who trusts his own conscience and is not afraid to have enemies. In this respect, Chávez is like Abraham Lincoln, Benito Juárez, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. On the novel’s final page, Villaseñor qualifies Roberto also as a true-self hero when the protagonist returns to his native valley to work the fields.
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Rain of Gold Type of work: Family history First published: 1991 Villaseñor insists that Rain of Gold is a work of nonfiction. So insistent is he on this point, in fact, that he reportedly bought back the rights to his book from Putnam’s when he determined he could not allow the 550-page work he viewed as memoir to be marketed as a novel. Putnam’s had paid Villaseñor $75,000 for the rights, and the work had been selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate. Regardless of its classification, Rain of Gold reads like a novel. It begins in the days before the turbulence of the Mexican Revolution and continues through life after migration to the United States in the early twentieth century, and it is told with some dramatic fictionalization. It starts with the parallel stories of Lupe and Juan Salvador—the author’s parents—beginning in 1911 when they are children living in separate places in Revolution-torn Mexico, relating their respective families’ journey north to the land of opportunity that is California, and ending with their marriage in 1929. These are chatty family stories of Salvador’s days as a maker and seller of bootleg whiskey and tales of good Mexican people’s struggles to overcome the prejudice and exploitation that they face at every turn. Some of the stories here are fantastic, employing the Magical Realism that is a hallmark of Latin American fiction: In one instance, a steer is knocked unconscious and skinned for its valuable hide before it is forced to its feet and made to run up the side of a mountain. Rain of Gold relates much about Mexican history and about anti-Hispanic prejudice in the American Southwest. These are stories told by a man who is a natural storyteller, one who clearly admires and loves his family and his people and who writes with great passion. It was dubbed the “Chicano Roots” by those who compared it with Alex Haley’s story of his African American family’s history. In an appended author’s note of half a dozen pages, the author sketches the next sixty-one years of the Villaseñor family chronicles. Indeed, Villaseñor saw the book as the second installment in his family chronicle, between Macho! and Wild Steps of Heaven.
Suggested Readings Barbato, Joseph. “Latino Writers in the American Market.” Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1991, pp. 17-21. Guilbault, Rose Del Castillo. “Americanization Is Tough on ‘Macho.’” In American Voices: Multicultural Literacy and Critical Thinking, edited by Dolores Laguardia and Hans P. Guth. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1992. Kelsey, Verlene. “Mining for a Usable Past: Acts of Recovery, Resistence, and Continuity in Victor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold.” Bilingual Review 18 (JanuaryApril, 1993): 79-85. Tatum, Charles M. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Contributors: McCrea Adams and Douglas Edward LaPrade
Helena María Viramontes Born: East Los Angeles, California; February 26, 1954 Mexican American
Viramontes’s feminist portrayals of Latinas struggling against patriarchy and poverty condemn classism, racism, and sexism. Principal works long fiction: Under the Feet of Jesus, 1995; Their Dogs Came with Them, 2000 short fiction: The Moths, and Other Stories, 1985; “Miss Clairol,” 1987; “Tears on My Pillow,” 1992; “The Jumping Bean,” 1993 nonfiction: “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction,” 1989; “Why I Write,” 1995 edited texts: Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, 1987, revised 1996 (with María Herrera-Sobek); Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film, 1995 (with Herrera-Sobek) The work of Helena María Viramontes (HEH-leh-nah mah-REE-ah vee-rahMAWN-tehs) is shaped by her feminist and Chicano identities. Viramontes presents realistic portrayals of the struggles that women, particularly Chicanas, face as they attempt to grow up, raise families, and discover their identities. As a child, Viramontes attended schools in East Los Angeles with Chicano student bodies. Her parents were hardworking people—her father was a construction worker and her mother raised nine children. Viramontes attended Immaculate Heart College with a scholarship for underprivileged girls and graduated in 1975. After graduating she began to send her short stories out for publication, and in 1977 one of her first stories, “Requiem for the Poor,” won first prize for fiction in a literary contest sponsored by Statement magazine of California State University, Los Angeles. Viramontes’s work continued winning awards, and in 1981 she enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine. Her first collection of short stories, The Moths, and Other Stories, was published in 1985. Perhaps one of Viramontes’s greatest achievements was receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1989 to attend a workshop given by Gabriel García Márquez at the Sundance Institute. Viramontes’s work has been highly influenced by García Márquez, by Chicana feminist writers Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, and by such black writers as Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison. In The Moths, and Other Stories, Viramontes offers her reader portrayals of women at various stages in their lives. These women face complex issues such as adolescence, sexuality, politics, family, 1060
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aging, and religion and must attempt to navigate their way through problems that are often caused by the patriarchal constructs of their cultures.
The Moths, and Other Stories Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1985 The Moths, and Other Stories focuses on the lives of Chicana women of various ages and backgrounds. The women in Viramontes’s stories often face identity crises—they struggle with religion, adolescence, sexuality, family, and aging. “The Moths” narrates the growth of a fourteen-year-old girl who cares for her grandmother. The grandmother’s home is a refuge for the young woman, whose home is ruled by her father. When her grandmother dies, the girl laments the loss of a strong female figure who has helped shape her identity. “Growing” also focuses on a young Chicana woman who struggles with adolescence. Fifteen-year-old Naomi looks forward to her first date until her parents make her take along her little sister Lucia as a chaperone. Naomi insists that dating is “different” in America, but her parents insist on their own customs and Naomi wonders about the difficulties of growing up in a new country. In the stories focusing on young women Viramontes raises the issues of religion, reproduction, and marriage. In “Birthday” a young, unmarried woman struggles over her decision to abort a child. “The Broken Web” focuses on a young woman and her struggles with repressed family memories. Martita learns that her father, Tomas, beat and cheated on her mother, and that her mother finally snapped and killed Tomas. “The Broken Web” shows a young woman dealing with the violence of her childhood. In “The Long Reconciliation” Amanda and Chato’s marriage falls apart when Amanda refuses to bring children into their meager existence. After Amanda aborts their first child, Chato refuses all sexual contact with her and their marriage ends. “The Cariboo Cafe” focuses on the struggles of a young mother. Two children are kidnapped by a woman who has lost her own child in the political problems in Central America. Eventually the woman is discovered, and the children are taken away from her. She screams for her own son, Geraldo. The final two stories focus on older women. In “Snapshots” Olga Ruiz, a middleaged divorcé, attempts to come to terms with her past identities. As she sifts through family photographs, she realizes how little she has left of herself—she was too busy being a good wife and mother. “Neighbors” focuses on a lonely, elderly woman. Aura has nothing but her beautiful garden and her neighbor, Fierro. When a strange woman visits Fierro, Aura is upset by the change in their relationship. In her struggles with loneliness, Aura becomes fearful, and “Neighbors” examines the loneliness, isolation, and fear of being an old, solitary woman. Women’s issues are Viramontes’s focus throughout the collection, and her narratives focusing on the struggles of primarily Chicana women are tinged with the complexities of adolescence, sexuality, marriage, poverty, and family.
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Under the Feet of Jesus Type of work: Novel First published: 1995 Under the Feet of Jesus traces the day-to-day lives of a group of Chicano migrant farmworkers, revealing the struggles they must endure as they attempt to survive on low wages and in poor living conditions. Viramontes dedicated her book to her parents, who had endured similar hardships, and to the memory of César Chávez, a man who fought for the rights of farmworkers. The narrative focuses on a large family headed by Perfecto Flores, a man in his seventies, and Petra, a woman who is thirty-seven years younger. Perfecto and Petra travel together with Petra’s children, finding fieldwork wherever they can. Estrella is Petra’s eldest daughter; she is thirteen, and her voice controls much of the narrative. There are two brothers, Ricky and Arnulfo, and twin girls, Perla and Cookie. Estrella works in the fields, as do her brothers and Perfecto. The story becomes complicated by a young man named Alejo. Alejo and his cousin Gumecindo are also migratory workers employed by the same farms as Estrella and her family. The boys earn extra money by stealing fruit from the orchards at night. One night when they are raiding the orchard, biplanes fly overhead, spraying pesticides. Although Alejo and Gumecindo attempt to run from the orchards to avoid the poisoning pesticides, Alejo is sprayed and eventually becomes very sick. Since Alejo has become friends with Estrella and her family, Petra feels obliged to care for him. She tries all her healing methods, but nothing seems to work. Alejo gets sicker each day. As he grows weaker, love between Alejo and Estrella grows. Finally Estrella and her family have no choice but to take Alejo to the clinic. The nurse tells Estrella that Alejo must go to the hospital, and charges them ten dollars for the clinic visit. Unfortunately Perfecto only has eight dollars and some change, and their gas tank is empty. He attempts to barter with the nurse, telling her he can do chores for the clinic, but she insists that she cannot give him work. Perfecto reluctantly hands over their last nine dollars, and they leave the clinic, wondering what they are going to do. Finally Estrella goes to the car, takes out the tire iron, and walks back into the clinic. She smashes the tire iron against the nurse’s desk and demands the nine dollars back. With the last of their money Perfecto fills the gas tank, and they drive to the hospital. Estrella takes Alejo into the emergency room and is forced to leave him there, knowing they cannot pay the bill but that the doctors will help him.
Suggested Readings Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llarona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24 (Summer, 1999): 53-74. Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason. American Women Writers. New York: Continuum, 1994, 463-465.
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Moore, Deborah Owen. “La Llarona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe: Structure and Legend in the Works of Helena María Viramontes.” Studies in Short Fiction 35 (Summer, 1998): 277-286. Richards, Judith. “Chicano Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature.” College Literature 25 (Spring, 1998): 182. Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. “Helena María Viramontes.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Swyt, Wendy. “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena María Viramontes.” MELUS 23 (Summer, 1998): 189-201. Yarbo-Bejarano, Yvonne. Introduction to “The Moths, and Other Stories.” Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1995. Contributor: Angela Athy
Gerald R. Vizenor Born: Minneapolis, Minnesota; October 22, 1934 Native American
Tribal people and tribal identity are the foci of Vizenor’s life and literary work. Principal works long fiction: Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978, revised 1990 (as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles); Griever: An American Monkey King in China, 1987; The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage, 1988; The Heirs of Columbus, 1991; Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World, 1992; Chancers, 2000; Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, 2003 poetry: Matsushima: Pine Islands, 1984 (originally pb. as four separate volumes of haiku during the 1960’s); Almost Ashore: Selected Poems, 2006; Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, 2006 screenplay: Harold of Orange, 1984; short fiction: Anishinabe Adisokan: Stories of the Ojibwa, 1974; Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, 1978; Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent, 1981; Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories, 1991; Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty, 2003 (originally pb. as Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade) nonfiction: Thomas James White Hawk, 1968; The Everlasting Sky: New Voices from the People Named the Chippewa, 1972; Tribal Scenes and Ceremonies, 1976; Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports, 1990; Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, 1990; Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, 1994; Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, 1998; Postindian Conversations, 1999 edited texts: Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories, 1981 (revised as Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories, 1993); Native American Perspectives on Literature and History, 1992 (with Alan R. Velie); Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, 1993; Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology, 1995 miscellaneous: The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories, 1984; Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader, 1994 An original voice in postmodern literature, Native American author Gerald Vizenor (VIHZ-nuhr) is a brilliant novelist, poet, and essayist, as well as an influential 1064
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critic. He has received the Josephine Miles PEN award for Interior Landscapes, 1990, the Illinois State University/Fiction Collective Prize, 1986, and the American Book Award in 1988 for Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Vizenor believes that Native American imagination foreshadows many common postmodern literary strategies regarding identity. He uses the concept of “survivance” to denote the trickster’s playful attitude, which undercuts dominationvictimization oppositions and produces new worldviews. The trickster uses stories and humor to tease out contradictions between good and evil in the world. The Heirs of Columbus uses trickster storytelling to revise the history of relations between whites and tribal peoples. Always on the move, the trickster destabilizes “pure” identities. Tribal identities pass through tribal stories. Vizenor, who claims a mixed Native American and European American heritage, belongs to the first generation of his family born off the reservation. When he was a child, his father was murdered, and his mother left him with foster families. At eighteen, he enlisted in the Army and went to Japan. In Interior Landscapes, Vizenor describes his discovery of Japanese haiku as a liberating, eye-opening experience important to his development as a writer. Besides being a writer, Vizenor worked as a social worker, a mental hospital orderly, a camp counselor, and a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, where he was a staunch advocate for human rights. He established the American Indian Employment Center in Minneapolis and directed the first Native American studies program at Bemidji State University.
Wordarrows Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1978 Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade is Vizenor’s collection of autobiographical short stories. It stems from Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday’s belief that storytelling is a means of situating oneself in a particular context in order to better understand individual and collective experiences. Vizenor’s stories recount cultural “word wars” in which Native Americans cannot afford to be victims in “one-act terminal scenarios,” but must become survivors, relying on their own words to preserve their sacred memories and represent the bitter facts. In Wordarrows, the trickster, a figure from Native American oral traditions, who appears in most of Vizenor’s writing, uses stories and humor to balance the forces of good and evil in the world. Wordarrows describes the reality of urban Indians, who are denied services and shuttled between various government programs. Vizenor’s persona, Clement Beaulieu, directs the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, where he is caught between politicians who want to restrict his radical activities and desperate Indians who need his help. At the center, Beaulieu encounters Marleen American Horse, who has been stereotyped as a drunken Indian. He helps
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her free herself from “the language of white people” so that she can create her own identity. He also meets Laurel Hole In The Day, a woman who struggles to move her family to a white neighborhood in the city. Ultimately, loneliness makes the parents turn to drink, lose their jobs, and return to the reservation. In another story, Beaulieu and a friend visit an Indian boarding school, where the superintendent makes a boy perform a simulated tribal dance to the music of the Lord’s Prayer. Outraged by the administrator’s idiotic attempt to teach the child racial pride, Beaulieu fumes that white corruption of this dance makes the Indian a spectacle and erases his tribal identity. The last section of Wordarrows contains four stories centering on the case of Thomas James White Hawk, a death-row inmate in South Dakota. As a staff writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, Vizenor covered White Hawk’s hearing to commute his death sentence to life in prison. Beaulieu blames society for creating the conditions that drove White Hawk to commit his crime and argues that “a man cannot be condemned by an institution of that dominant culture which has actually led to the problems he has to live with.” The “cultural schizophrenia” experienced by Beaulieu and other characters in Wordarrows represents the dilemma of many contemporary Native Americans.
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Interior Landscapes Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1990 Mixed-blood Native American novelist, poet, essayist, and critic Vizenor’s imaginative autobiography Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors, winner of the 1990 Josephine Miles PEN Award, recounts the author’s triumphs, tragedies, and confrontations with racism. Throughout his autobiography, Vizenor adopts the mythic identity of the Native American trickster, who uses humor and stories to reinvent his world. “My stories are interior landscapes,” Vizenor writes, and, as trickster autobiography, these stories about Vizenor’s life enable him to mold his experience of his own life. Vizenor had a rough childhood by any standard. After his father was stabbed to death, his mother left him with foster families while she vanished for years at a time. Later, she returned and married an alcoholic who beat him. When he was eighteen, Vizenor escaped into the Army. In the Army, Vizenor traveled to Japan, one of the most important experiences of his life. Views of Mount Fuji, a romance with a Japanese woman, and his first visit to a brothel inspired him to write haiku. After his discharge from the Army, Vizenor stayed in Japan. He later returned to the United States to study at New York University and the University of Minnesota, where he discovered writers such as Lafcadio Hearn, Jack London, and Thomas Wolfe. He also studied haiku in translation. Vizenor calls his discovery of Japanese literature his “second liberation.” His haikus won for him his first college teaching job, and his continuing fascination with the haiku form is demonstrated in the collections Two Wings the Butterfly (1962), Raising the Moon Vines (1964), Seventeen Chirps (1964), Empty Swings (1967), and Matsushima: Pine Islands (1984). Vizenor relates his experience as a community activist. As a Minneapolis Tribune reporter Vizenor organized civil rights protests and exposed illegal domestic operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote key articles about the funeral of Dane Michael White and the trial of Thomas James White Hawk. As a founding director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center, he combated the “new urban fur traders” and worked to get services for urban Indians who chose to leave the reservation. Interior Landscapes ends in a haunted house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Vizenor’s dreams are invaded by skinwalkers, lost souls from the world of the dead. This dream begins a meditation on the rights of remains that informs Vizenor’s writing of his autobiography, a “crossblood remembrance,” motivated by a trickster’s desire to weave the myths and metaphors of his own life.
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The Heirs of Columbus Type of work: Novel First published: 1991 Published shortly before the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus proclaims, “I am not a victim of Columbus!” The novel tells of the nine tribal descendants of Christopher Columbus, including Stone Columbus, a late-night talk radio personality, and Felipa Flowers, a “liberator” of cultural artifacts. For the heirs, tribal identity rests in tribal stories, and they are consummate storytellers. “We are created in stories,” the heirs say, and “language is our trick of discovery.” Their trickster storytelling rewrites and renews the history of white and tribal peoples. Stone tells a story, central to the novel, asserting Columbus’s Mayan, not Italian, ancestry. The Mayans brought their civilization to the Old World savages long ago, Stone argues. Columbus escaped Europe’s “culture of death” and brought his “tribal genes” back to his homeland in the New World. Columbus did not discover the New World; he returned to it. For some readers, The Heirs of Columbus might recall African American novelist Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Both works have a fragmented style and are concerned with the theft and repatriation of tribal property. Felipa Flowers undertakes a mission to recapture sacred medicine pouches and the remains of her ancestor Christopher Columbus from the Brotherhood of American Explorers. After Felipa’s successful raid, the heirs are taken to court to tell their story. They win their court case, but Felipa is later kidnapped and murdered in London when she tries to recapture the remains of Pocahontas. After Felipa’s death, the heirs create a sovereign nation at Point Assinika, “the wild estate of tribal memories and the genes of survivance in the New World.” Theirs is a natural nation, where tricksters heal with their stories and where humor rules. Stone plans “to make the world tribal, a universal identity” dedicated to healing, not stealing, tribal cultures. To this end, the heirs gather genetic material from their tribal ancestors. They devise genetic therapies that use these healing genes to combat the destructive war herbs, which have the power to erase people from memory and history. Soon, Point Assinika becomes a place to heal abandoned and abused children with the humor of their ancestors. Stories and genes in The Heirs of Columbus operate according to trickster logic, which subverts the “terminal creeds” of cultural domination and signals the reinvention of the world.
Suggested Readings Barry, Nora Baker. “Postmodern Bears in the Texts of Gerald Vizenor.” MELUS 27 (Fall, 2002): 93-112. Blaeser, Kimberly. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Coltelli, Laura, ed. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
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Isernhagen, Hartwig. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Lee, A. Robert, ed. Loosening the Streams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Monsma, Bradley John. “‘Active Readers . . . Obverse Tricksters’: Trickster-Texts and Cross-Cultural Reading.” Modern Language Studies 26 (Fall, 1996): 83-98. Owens, Louis, ed. Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 9 (Spring, 1997). Vizenor, Gerald. “‘I Defy Analysis’: A Conversation with Gerald Vizenor.” Interview by Rodney Simard, Lavonne Mason, and Ju Abner. Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 5 (Fall, 1993): 42-51. _______. “Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” Interview by Dallas Miller. Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 7 (Spring, 1995): 77-96. _______. “On Thin Ice, You Might as Well Dance: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” Interview by Larry McCaffery and Tom Marshall. Some Other Fluency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Contributor: Trey Strecker
Alice Walker Born: Eatonton, Georgia; February 9, 1944 African American, Native American
Walker’s poetry, short stories, essays, and novels protest racism, sexism, and mistreatment of the earth while offering affirmation and hope. Principal works children’s literature: Langston Hughes: American Poet, 1974; To Hell with Dying, 1988; Finding the Green Stone, 1991; There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me, 2006; Why War Is Never a Good Idea, 2007 long fiction: The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 1970; Meridian, 1976; The Color Purple, 1982; The Temple of My Familiar, 1989; Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992; By the Light of My Father’s Smile, 1998; Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, 2004 poetry: Once: Poems, 1968; Five Poems, 1972; Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems, 1973; Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems, 1979; Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, 1984; Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990, Complete, 1991; Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems, 2003; A Poem Traveled Down My Arm, 2003 short fiction: In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, 1973; You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, 1981; The Complete Stories, 1994; Alice Walker Banned, 1996 (stories and commentary) nonfiction: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1983; Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973-1987, 1988; Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, 1993 (with Pratibha Parmar); The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, 1996; Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, 1997; The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, 2000; Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, 2001; We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness, 2006 edited text: I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 1979 Alice Walker wrote her first book of poetry and published her first short story in her final year at Sarah Lawrence College in 1968. She grew up in poverty, in which seven brothers and sisters and her sharecropping parents occupied impossibly 1070
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cramped quarters and worked for profit that was never their own. She saw the failure of her college, Spelman, to offer courses in African American authors. This experience prompted her to write and to teach courses on black women writers whose works needed to be read by Americans of all ethnicities. Walker, like the character Meridian in her second novel, considered physical violence a solution to the inequities with which she and other Americans were expected to live. She studied the Cuban Revolution and its effects. She, like Meridian, found herself unable, however, to perpetuate the violence she loathed. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland, The Color Purple, and The Temple of My Familiar she dramatizes the conditions that occasion violence and the horrors that result from violence. In Possessing the Secret of Joy she graphically describes the lifecrippling effects of the ritualized and continued violence of female genital mutilation. Meridian chooses, as Walker has chosen, a political activism that is peaceful and positive. Meridian goes to the American South to educate, enlist, and assist prospective but fearful African American voters. Walker returned to the South with a similar purpose in the mid-1960’s. Walker’s writing, her study of world cultures, and her speaking engagements around the world show her continued peaceful political activism.
Once: Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1968 Once, Walker’s first collection of poetry, communicates her youthful impressions of Africa and her state of mind during her early travels there, as well as the melancholy she felt upon her return to a racist United States, when thoughts of death, particularly by suicide, tormented her. Perhaps the epigram from French philosopher Albert Camus, which prefaces the book, expresses its mood best: “Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” The title poem of the collection contains several loosely connected scenes of injustice in the American South, small black children run down by vans, because “they were in the way,” Jewish Civil Rights workers who cannot be cremated according to their requests because their remains cannot be found, and finally a black child waving an American flag, but from “the very/ tips/ of her/ fingers,” an image perhaps of irony or perhaps of hope. There are meditations on white lovers—blond, Teutonic, golden—who dare kiss this poet who is “brown-er/ Than a jew.” There are memories of black churches, where her mother shouts, her father snores, and she feels uncomfortable. The most striking poem is certainly “African Images,” an assortment of vignettes from the ancestral homeland: shy gazelles, the bluish peaks of Mount Kenya, the sound of elephants trumpeting, rain forests with red orchids. Yet even glimpsed in the idealism of youth, Africa is not total paradise. The leg of a slain
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elephant is fashioned into an umbrella holder in a shop; a rhinoceros is killed so that its horn may be made into an aphrodisiac.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 Writing in 1973, Walker observed that her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, “though sometimes humorous and celebrative of life, is a grave book in which the characters see the world as almost entirely menacing.” This dark view of life is common to Grange Copeland, the patriarch of a family farming on shares in rural Georgia, his son Brownfield, and the wives and daughters of both men. For all these characters, the world is menacing because of the socioeconomic position they occupy at the bottom of the scale of the sharecropping system. Father and son menace each other in this novel because they are in turn menaced by rage born out of the frustration of the system. Although the white people of the book are nearly always vague, nameless, and impersonal, they and the system they represent have the ability to render both Grange and Brownfield powerless. It is not accidental that these characters’ names have agricultural connotations. “Grange” suggests a late nineteenth century association of farmers, a feudal farm and grain storage building, and a combination of graze and range, while “Brownfield” and “Copeland” are self-explanatory—for the inability to cope with the land is what leads both male characters along virtually parallel paths. For the father, the mere appearance of the white farm boss’s truck is enough to turn his face “into a unnaturally bland mask, curious and unsettling to see.” The appearance of the truck causes the son to be “filled with terror of this man who could, by his presence alone, turn his father into something that might as well have been a pebble or a post or a piece of dirt.” Although Grange is, in this same image, literally a piece of land, he eventually returns to the South and learns to live self-sufficiently, farming a section of soil he tricked his second wife into giving to him. Brownfield, in contrast, is never able to escape the sharecropping system, although he sees that, like his father, he is “destined to be no more than overseer, on the white man’s plantation, of his own children.” Brownfield is able to live obliviously on a farm in Georgia, content to blame all of his problems on others. The poor rural black workers of this novel are themselves little more than a crop, rotated from farm to farm, producing a harvest of shame and hunger, cruelty and violence. Unlike the men of the novel, the women are menaced by both blacks and whites, by both the agricultural system and the “strange fruit” it produces. Margaret, Grange’s first wife, is both physically and mentally degraded by her husband and then sexually exploited by a white truck driver, resulting in her second pregnancy. Unable to cope with this situation, Grange deserts his family, after which his wife poisons both her child and herself. Following his father’s pattern, Brownfield marries and begins to work the land, but after “a year when endless sunup to sundown
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work on fifty rich bottom acres of cotton land and a good crop brought them two diseased shoats for winter meat,” he too begins to abuse his wife. Although Brownfield’s wife, Mem, is a schoolteacher intelligent enough to try to break the cycle of raising others people’s crops, her brief rebellion against her husband’s malevolent beatings and mental tortures is a failure: He is able to subjugate her through repeated pregnancies that sap her rebellion as they turn her once rich and strong body into a virtual wasteland of emaciation. Because her body, which represents the land of the South, is still able to produce children despite its depleted condition, Brownfield is enraged enough to murder her in retaliation for her physical shape: “he had murdered his wife because she had become skinny and had not, with much irritation to him, reverted, even when well-fed, to her former plumpness. . . . Plumpness and freedom from the land, from cows and skinniness, went all together in his mind.” Despite his irrational abuse of her, Mem is not ashamed “of being black though, no matter what he said. . . . Color was something the ground did to the flowers, and that was an end to it.” What the ground did to these generations of southern black people is the subject of Walker’s novel—the whole lurid history of violence, hatred, and guilt that she chronicles in this story of one family’s griefs. By the book’s end, Brownfield Copeland has murdered his wife and an unnamed albino baby, while Grange Copeland has murdered his son Brownfield—first spiritually, then physically—and indirectly has killed his first wife and her infant. Walker’s characters are allegorical representations of the classic modes of survival historically adopted by black Americans in dealing with their oppression. Brownfield identifies with whites by daydreaming of himself on a southern plantation, sipping mint juleps, and then by bargaining for his freedom with the sexual favors of black women. Both of Grange’s wives attempt to be true to the white stereotype of black women as promiscuous sexual beings, free of any moral restraints. Brownfield’s wife, Mem, attempts the passive resistance advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr., but she is destroyed by what her husband calls “her weakness . . . forgiveness, a stupid belief that kindness can convert the enemy.” Brownfield’s daughter, Daphne, who calls herself the Copeland Family Secret Keeper, tries the strategy of inventing a falsely romantic history of the past, of the good old days when her father was kind, echoing those historical revisionists who try to argue that slavery was not that bad. Brownfield’s other daughters try to stay away from their father altogether, regarding him “as a human devil” of whom they were afraid “in a more distant, impersonal way. He was like bad weather, a toothache, daily bad news.” Each of the title character’s three lives (at home in the South as a sharecropper married to Margaret; in the North as a hustler of alcohol, drugs, and women; and finally back in the South as a farmer married to Josie and rearing his granddaughter Ruth) parallels a traditional survival strategy, which Grange summarizes as follows, “The white folks hated me and I hated myself until I started hating them in return and loving myself. Then I tried just loving me, and then you, and ignoring them much as I could.” To put it another way, Grange tries at first to adapt to the system by believing what whites say about blacks; then he turns to the classic escape of the
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runaway slave—heading North to freedom; finally, he tries the technique of praising black life while ignoring whites altogether. A large part of the novel’s devastation is caused by the repeated use of these techniques, not against whites but against other members of the Copeland family. Only Ruth, the granddaughter through whom Grange seeks redemption, is able to deal with whites in an intelligent, balanced, nondestructive yet independent way. She has learned from her grandfather, and from her family history, that pure hatred becomes self-hatred, and violence begets self-violence; she therefore becomes the novel’s symbol of the new black woman, ready to assume her place in black history as a courageous worker in the Civil Rights movement which the rest of her family has been groping to discover.
Meridian Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Walker’s second novel, Meridian, picks up chronologically and thematically at the point where her first novel ended. Meridian describes the struggles of a young black woman, Meridian Hill, about the same age as Ruth Copeland, who comes to an awareness of power and feminism during the Civil Rights movement, and whose whole life’s meaning is centered in the cycles of guilt, violence, hope, and change characteristic of that dramatic time. Thematically, Meridian picks up the first novel’s theme of self-sacrificial murder as a way out of desperate political oppression in the form of the constant question that drives Meridian Hill—“Will you kill for the Revolution?” Meridian’s lifelong attempt to answer that question affirmatively (as her college friends so easily do), while remaining true to her sense of responsibility to the past, her sense of ethics, and her sense of guilt of having given to her mother the child of her teenage pregnancy, constitutes the section of the novel entitled “Meridian.” The second third of the novel, “Truman Held,” is named for the major male character in the narrative. The third major section of the novel, “Ending,” looks back at the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of the 1970’s. Long after others have given up intellectual arguments about the morality of killing for revolution, Meridian is still debating the question, still actively involved in voter registration, political activism, and civil rights organization, as though the movement had never lost momentum. Worrying that her actions, now seen as eccentric rather than revolutionary, will cause her “to be left, listening to the old music, beside the highway,” Meridian achieves release and atonement through the realization that her role will be to “come forward and sing from memory songs they will need once more to hear. For it is the song of the people, transformed by the experiences of each generation, that holds them together.” In 1978, Walker described Meridian as “a book ‘about’ the Civil Rights movement, feminism, socialism, the shakiness of revolutionaries and the radicalization of saints.” Her word “about” is exact, for all of these topics revolve not chronologically but thematically around a central point—the protagonist, Meridian Hill. In
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some ways, Meridian is a saint; by the book’s end she has sustained her belief in the Civil Rights movement without losing faith in feminism and socialism, despite family pressures, guilt, literally paralyzing self-doubts, the history of the movement, and the sexism of many of its leaders. In contrast, Truman Held represents those males who were reported to have said that “the only position for a woman in the movement is prone.” Although Truman Held is Meridian’s initial teacher in the movement, she eventually leaves him behind because of his inability to sustain his initial revolutionary fervor, and because of his misogyny. Unlike Brownfield Copeland, Truman argues that women are of less value than they should be, not because of skinniness, but because “Black women let themselves go . . . they are so fat.” Later in the novel, Truman marries a white civil rights worker whose rape by another black man produces disgust in him, as much at his wife as at his friend. When Truman seeks out Meridian in a series of small southern hamlets where she continues to persuade black people to register to vote and to struggle for civil rights, he tells her that the movement is ended and that he grieves in a different way than she. Meridian answers, “I know how you grieve by running away. By pretending you were never there.” Like Grange Copeland, Truman Held refuses to take responsibility for his own problems, preferring to run away to the North. Meridian’s sacrificial dedication to the movement becomes a model for atonement and release, words that once formed the working title of the book. Meridian could also have been called “The Third Life of Meridian Hill” because of similarities between Meridian’s life and Grange Copeland’s. Meridian leads three lives: as an uneducated child in rural Georgia who follows the traditional pattern of early pregnancy and aimless marriage, as a college student actively participating in political demonstrations, and as an eccentric agitator—a performer, she calls herself— unaware that the movement is ended. Like Grange Copeland in another sense, Meridian Hill is solid proof of the ability of any human to change dramatically by sheer will and desire. Meridian is always different from her friends, who, filled with angry rhetoric, ask her repeatedly if she is willing to kill for the revolution, the same question that Grange asked himself when he lived in the North. This question haunts Meridian, because she does not know if she can or if she should kill, and because it reminds her of a similar request, posed in a similar way by her mother: “Say it now, Meridian, and be saved. All He asks is that we acknowledge Him as our Master. Say you believe Alice Walker (Jeff Reinking/Picture Group)
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in Him . . . don’t go against your heart.” In neither case is Meridian able to answer yes without going against her heart. Unlike her college friends and Truman Held, who see the movement only in terms of future gains for themselves, Meridian is involved with militancy because of her past: “But what none of them seemed to understand was that she felt herself to be, not holding on to something from the past, but held by something in the past.” Part of the past’s hold on her is the sense of guilt she feels about her relationships with her parents. Although her father taught her the nature of the oppression of minorities through his knowledge of American Indians, her strongest source of guilt comes from her mother, who argues, like Brownfield Copeland, that the responsibility for all problems stems from outside oneself: “The answer to everything,” said Meridian’s mother, “is we live in America and we’re not rich.” Meridian’s strongest sense of past guilt comes from the knowledge she gains when she becomes pregnant: “it was for stealing her mother’s serenity, for shattering her mother’s emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very first, though she was unable to understand how this could possibly be her fault.” Meridian takes the form of a series of nonchronological sections, some consisting of only a paragraph, some four or five pages long, that circle around the events of Meridian’s life. The writing is clear, powerful, violent, lyrical, and often symbolic. Spelman College, for example, is here called Saxon College. The large magnolia tree in the center of the campus, described with specific folkloric detail, is destroyed by angry students during a demonstration: “Though Meridian begged them to dismantle the president’s house instead, in a fury of confusion and frustration they worked all night, and chopped and sawed down, level to the ground, that mighty, ancient, sheltering music tree.” This tree (named The Sojourner, perhaps for Sojourner Truth) expands symbolically to suggest both the senseless destruction of black ghettos by blacks during the turmoil of the 1960’s, and also Meridian Hill herself, who receives a photograph years later of The Sojourner, now “a gigantic tree stump” with “a tiny branch, no larger than a finger, growing out of one side.” That picture, suggesting as it does the rebirth of hope despite despair, also evokes the last vision of Meridian expressed by the now-shamed Truman Held: “He would never see ‘his’ Meridian again. The new part had grown out of the old, though, and that was reassuring. This part of her, new, sure and ready, even eager, for the world, he knew he must meet again and recognize for its true value at some future time.”
Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning Type of work: Poetry First published: 1979 Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning, Walker’s fourth poetry collection, expands on earlier themes and further exploits personal and family ex-
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periences for lessons in living. The title poem is perhaps the most moving and characteristic of the collection. Walker shared it again on May 22, 1995, in a commencement day speech delivered at Spelman College. As a lesson in forgiveness, she recalled the words her mother, who had much to endure and much to forgive, uttered above her father’s casket. Her last words to the man with whom she had lived for so many years, beside whom she had labored in the fields, and with whom she had raised so many children were, “Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you in the morning.” This gentle instinctive act of her mother taught Walker the enduring lesson that “the healing of all our wounds is forgiveness/ that permits a promise/ of our return/ at the end.”
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1981 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down is Walker’s salute to black women who are pushing ahead, those who have crossed some barriers and are in some sense champions. There are black women who are songwriters, artists, writers, students in exclusive eastern schools; they are having abortions, teaching their men the meaning of pornography, coming to terms with the death of a father, on one hand, or with the meaning of black men raping white women, on the other. Always, they are caught up short by the notions of whites. In other words, all the political, sexual, racial, countercultural issues of the 1970’s are in these stories, developed from what Walker calls the “womanist” point of view. This set of stories, then, is explicitly sociological and apparently autobiographical, but in a special sense. Walker herself is a champion, so her life is a natural, even an inescapable, source of material. Walker-the-artist plays with Walker-the-collegestudent and Walker-the-idealistic-teacher, as well as with some of the other roles she sees herself as having occupied during that decade of social upheaval. Once a writer’s experience has become transformed within a fictive world, it becomes next to impossible to think of the story’s events as either simply autobiography or simply invention. The distinction has been deliberately blurred. It is because Walker wants to unite her public and private worlds, her politics and her art, life as lived and life as imagined, that, instead of poetry, these stories are interspersed with autobiographical parallels, journal entries, letters, and other expressions of her personality. Walker writes free verse, employing concrete images. She resorts to few of the conceits, the extended metaphors, the latinate language, and other devices often found in poetry. Readers frequently say that her verses hardly seem like poetry at all; they resemble the conversation of a highly articulate, observant woman. While her poetry often seems like prose, her fiction is highly poetic. The thoughts of Miss Celie, the first-person narrator of The Color Purple, would not have been out of place in a book of poetry. Boundaries between prose and poetry remain thin in the work of Walker. Her verse, like her prose, is always rhythmic; if she rhymes or allit-
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erates, it seems only by accident. The poetry appears so effortless that its precision, its choice of exact image or word to convey the nuance the poet wishes, is not immediately evident. Only close scrutiny reveals the skill with which this highly lettered poet has assimilated her influences, chiefly E. E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Robert Graves, Japanese haiku poems, Li Bo, Ovid, Zen epigrams, and William Carlos Williams. Walker’s poetry is personal and generally didactic, generated by events in her life, causes she has advocated, and injustices over which she has agonized. The reader feels that it is the message that counts, before realizing that the medium is part of the message. Several of her poems echo traumatic events in her own life, such as her abortion. She remembers the words her mother uttered over the casket of her father, and makes a poem of them. Other poems recall ambivalent emotions of childhood: Sunday school lessons which, even then, were filled with discrepancies. Some poems deal with the creative process itself: She calls herself a medium through whom the Old Ones, formerly mute, find their voice at last. Some readers are surprised to discover that Walker’s poems are both mystical and socially revolutionary, one moment exuberant and the next reeking with despair. Her mysticism is tied to reverence for the earth, a sense of unity with all living creatures, a bond of sisterhood with women throughout the world, and a joyous celebration of the female principle in the divine. On the other hand, she may lament that injustice reigns in society: Poor black people toil so that white men may savor the jewels that adorn heads of state.
The Color Purple Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 The Color Purple, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1983 and made into a successful film, is ultimately a novel of celebration. Initially, however, it is the tragic history of an extended African American family in the early and middle years of the twentieth century. Its tragedy is reflective of the country’s and its characters’ illness, and its celebration is of the characters’ and the country’s cure. The story is written as a series of letters by two sisters, Celie and Nettie. The first letters reveal the fourteen-year-old Celie’s miserable existence as caretaker of her parents’ household. She bears two children to the man she believes to be her father (he is her stepfather), who immediately takes the children from her. Celie is subject to the same situation in marriage: She is made caretaker for the children of a deceased woman and a stand-in sexual partner for yet another woman. When Celie and Nettie’s father seeks to make Nettie his next victim, Nettie follows Celie to her new home, only to be victimized there by Celie’s husband. Nettie finds a home with the minister and his wife, who have become parents to Celie’s children, Adam and Olivia. The five move to Africa to bring their Christian message to the Olinka. When Shug, the woman for whom Celie is stand-in partner,
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enters her home, the note of harmony which will swell to the final chorus of celebration is sounded. Celie comes to love and to learn from Shug. She learns that she must enter Creation as loved creature of her Creator, who, neither white nor male, creates out of love and a desire to please “Its” creatures. Reverence for all of Creation—trees, the color purple, humanity—is the cure, finally, to her and the novel’s ills. Nettie’s letters show Celie that she and her minister husband have come independently, in Africa, to know the same loving Creator who loves all and repudiates no part of Creation. Celie leaves her abuser, Albert, who is slow to learn and sing the novel’s song. He finally helps to bring Nettie, Samuel, Adam, Olivia, and Tashi, Adam’s wife, back to Celie. He tells Celie, as they, finally, establish a friendship, that the more he wonders at and about Creation the more he loves. Celie, now lover of self and Creation, is reunited in middle age with her sister and grown children.
The Temple of My Familiar Type of work: Novel First published: 1989 Though written from a “womanist” viewpoint, The Temple of My Familiar follows both women and men through what becomes a history of the evolution of humankind. This evolutionary aspect is especially found in the chapters that tell the tales of Miss Lissie’s various incarnations, including a brief, horrifying stint as a white man in a black tribe. The intertwining of all the separate narratives takes place as people only mentioned in passing in one chapter become the focal character in another chapter. For example, the white woman (Mary Jane) who rescues Carlotta and her mother, Zede, from a prison camp in South America ends up in Africa married to Fanny and Nzingha’s black African father, Ola. Fanny is the granddaughter of Mama Shug and Mama Celie, both characters from The Color Purple. Though Shug and Celie play a background role in the narrative, they are two of the most likable and human characters in the book, palpably real in a way that the novel’s more prominent characters are not. Shug and Celie are warm, down-toearth (especially in expounding “the gospel according to Shug”), and very human. For example, Celie is not very nice to her dog until Shug teaches him to bite the hand that beats him. They are fallible, but not in the strained way that other characters are. When, for example, Carlotta’s husband, Arveyda, leaves her for her mother, Zede, the reader is likely to feel cheated, for no credible motivation has been supplied—a recurring problem throughout the novel. It is hard to feel any deep connection with Walker’s characters, and the resolution of their conflicts is too pat to be satisfying. Nevertheless, readers who are interested in the theories of University of California at Los Angeles archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who posits an Edenic prehistoric era marked by worship of female deities, will find in The Temple of My Familiar a kindred spirit.
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Possessing the Secret of Joy Type of work: Novel First published: 1992 Possessing the Secret of Joy expresses, in fictional and direct statements, its author’s resistance to the practice of female circumcision. According to Walker, in 1991 ninety to a hundred million women and girls living in African, Far Eastern, and Middle Eastern countries were genitally mutilated, and the practice of “female circumcision” in the United States and Europe was growing among immigrants from countries where it was a part of the culture. Three characters from Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and The Temple of My Familiar (1989) assume major roles in Possessing the Secret of Joy. The ritual mutilation of Tashi, childhood African friend to Celie’s children Adam and Olivia and later wife to Adam, is graphically described, and its physical and emotional effects are explored in this novel. Olivia speaks first, as others speak later, of her own, Adam’s, and her missionary parents’ introduction to the six-year-old Tashi. Tashi was inconsolable, having just witnessed the death of her sister Dura, victim of genital mutilation. The novel’s action moves back and forth between Dura’s death and the trial of Tashi for the murder of M’Lissa, Dura’s killer and her own mutilator. It ends with the roar of rifle fire as Tashi is punished for her crime. The aged Carl Jung is introduced to the novel’s list of characters. While he appears only briefly, his psychological and mythological probing of Tashi’s and the world’s problem is carried on by his female and male successors, Raye and Pierre. The recurrent imagery of Tashi’s subconscious is finally interpreted by Pierre (son of Adam, Tashi’s husband) and Lisette, Jung’s niece. Pierre, having grown up with his parents’ accounts of Tashi’s physical and emotional suffering (continual pain, impeded motion, difficult and aborted childbirth; recurrent nightmares, truncated relationships, frequent confinement to mental institutions), studies anthropology and continues his great uncle’s intellectual pursuits. In Pierre’s account, the myth is simple, and it is full of Walker’s condemnation of the mutilation and subjugation of women. It is a story the aging Tashi remembers overhearing in bits from covert conversations among the male African elders. The male god descends from the sky to overcome, enjoy, and rape the female earth. Challenged by the earth’s response to his advance, he cuts down the source (the mound or hill) of her pleasure. “RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!” is the novel’s final statement. Adam, Olivia, Benny (mildly retarded son to Tashi and Adam), Pierre, Raye, and Mbate (servant to M’Lissa and friend to Tashi) hold it up as a banner for Tashi’s viewing as she is killed for the murder of M’Lissa. The novel is Walker’s act of resistance to male domination and the physical and emotional disabling of women.
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By the Light of My Father’s Smile Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 By the Light of My Father’s Smile engenders passionate, often conflicting, opinions. Some praise it as a long-overdue celebration of female sexuality; others are vehemently opposed to its basic tenants. Even some readers predisposed toward Walker’s views acknowledge that the explicit sexual detail in the novel may undermine its own message. Literary merit, too, sparks debate. Lauded by many as brilliant, original writing, By the Light of My Father’s Smile has also been criticized for flat characterization and confusing jumps in perspective. Certainly, the throbbing talents of its Pulitzer Prize-winning author are not being called seriously into question. Yet, the threads of this work, in some ways more a parable than a traditional novel, may not weave together for everyone. Celebrating the absolute usefulness of sexuality “in the accessing of one’s mature spirituality,” Walker focuses on the father’s role “in assuring joy or sorrow in this arena for his female children.” The story begins with an African American family from the United States living in a remote area of Mexico. The father catches one of his two teenage daughters with a local Mundo boy and beats her; his other daughter witnesses the beating. The rest of the novel investigates the repercussions. It is told mostly from the point of view of the deceased father, as he watches his daughters reap the consequences throughout their lives. Ultimately, it is the Mundo way of life—considered “primitive” by Eurocentric standards—that holds out the possibility for reconciliation. By the Light of My Father’s Smile seeks to open doors—between parents and children; between lovers; between cultures; even, perhaps, from one millennium to the next. The subject matter is controversial, but few would probably disagree with Walker’s underlying belief that “it is the triumphant heart, not the conquered heart, that forgives.”
Suggested Readings Bates, Gerri. Alice Walker: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Dieke, Ikenna, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker. New York: Greenwood Press, 1999. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Gentry, Tony. Alice Walker. New York: Chelsea, 1993. Lauret, Maria. Alice Walker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Montelaro, Janet J. Producing a Womanist Text: The Maternal as Signifier in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1996.
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Petry, Alice Hall. “Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction.” In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: Norton, 2004. Winchell, Donna Haisty. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992. Contributors: Judith K. Taylor, Timothy Dow Adams, Mary A. Blackmon, Rebecca R. Butler, and Theodore C. Humphrey
Joseph A. Walker Born: Washington, D.C.; February 23, 1935 Died: Washington, D.C.; January 25, 2003 African American
Walker examined issues of personal identity, relationship strife, and racism of particular importance to black American men. Principal works drama: The Believers, pr., pb. 1968 (with Josephine Jackson); The Harangues, pr. 1969, revised pb. 1971 (as Tribal Harangue Two); Ododo, pr. 1970, pb. 1972; The River Niger, pr. 1972, pb. 1973; Yin Yang, pr. 1972; Antigone Africanus, pr. 1975; The Lion Is a Soul Brother, pr. 1976; District Line, pr. 1984 screenplay: The River Niger, 1976 (adaptation of his play) nonfiction: “Broadway’s Vitality,” 1973; “Black Magnificance,” 1978; “The Hiss,” 1980; “Themes of the Black Struggle,” 1982 Joseph A. Walker was born in Washington, D.C., in 1935. His father, Joseph Walker, was a house painter and his mother, Florine Walker, a housewife. Walker graduated from Howard University in 1956 with a B.A. in philosophy and a minor in drama, having acted in several student productions (he portrayed Luke in James Baldwin’s Amen Corner in May of 1955). Although he had realized that his real love was the theater, his fear of poverty drew him, after graduation, to the United States Air Force, where he enlisted as a second lieutenant and reached the rank of first lieutenant by the time of his discharge in 1960. His desire to become a highranking officer caused Walker to initially pursue navigators’ training, but he later quit when he found himself spending more time writing poetry than studying for his navigator’s exams. This dramatic shift of career was the source for a famous scene in The River Niger, when navigator-school student Jeff Williams is belittled by a white airman for his poetry writing in exactly the same way as Walker himself described being insulted during his military career. Trying to establish a balance between his fear of financial dependence and his inner desire to compose poetry, Walker decided to devote his full attention to the study of drama and poetry rather than to achieving high rank in the military. Further education gave him time to clarify his goals. Walker received an M.F.A. from Catholic University in 1963 and began teaching in a Washington, D.C., high school. Walker followed this teaching position with one at City College of New York. 1083
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He combined the role of instructor and playwright during his year as a playwrightin-residence at Yale University and then returned to Howard University, where he became a full professor of drama. While teaching, Walker continued his study of the stage and film by continuing to act. This personal line of study had a profound effect on the young actor-playwright. In 1969, the Negro Ensemble Company produced The Harangues. This was a personal milestone for the young Walker, who had, at this point, been studying other people’s dramatic work for more than a decade. In 1970, Walker and his second wife, Dorothy Dinroe, started the acting troupe The Demi-Gods, a professional music-dance repertory company with Walker serving as artistic director. Walker’s play Ododo, which The Demi-Gods later presented at Howard University in 1973, opened the Negro Ensemble Company’s 1970 season. This work further examined racial strife and prepared audiences for the African American history that would be so vehemently elucidated in The River Niger and his later writings. After the 1970’s, Walker continued to write, albeit infrequently, about minority issues derived from his own personal experiences. One play, District Line, used his personal experience as a cab driver to demonstrate universal themes of racial strife and harmony. Essays submitted to The New York Times—“Themes of the Black Struggle” (1982) and “Black Magnificence” (1980), for example—and interviews conducted during the 1980’s documented more recent difficulties that minorities faced in the mainstream world of the theater. Walker said that mainstream theaters were not willing to produce works from minority authors and there had not been adequate funding of minority-interest theater companies to make up for the lack of mainstream interest. According to Michele DiGirolamo in AfroAmerican, Walker stated that he had little success in getting his plays produced in the 1980’s and 1990’s because of shrinking budgets and an apathetic public. In 1995, he made an appearance at the National Black Theatre Festival in WinstonSalem, North Carolina, to encourage more young African American authors to write for the stage in the hope that the number of minority-run theater groups would continue to grow and present greater numbers of minority-interest plays. He died in 2003 following a stroke. Like many other African American authors, Joseph A. Walker examined issues close to the black community and, in particular, those dealing with black American men. Issues of personal identity, relationship strife, and racism play dominant roles in influencing both the thinking and the actions of the black male characters portrayed in his dramas. Lacking a homeland and history, repressed by both whites and assimilationist blacks, and dissociated from the comforts of stable male-female relationships, Walker’s black protagonists lead desperate and often destructive lives. Walker’s critical success derived from his realistic portrayals of African American men. Working from his own, personal experiences as a black man in the United States, Walker examined interracial relationships, conflicts between people and society, and the struggle that many blacks have in achieving inner peace and acceptance.
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The Harangues Type of work: Drama First produced: 1969, revised pb. 1971 The Harangues is made up of two closely paired one-act plays, each introduced by an episode designed purely to serve as the medium for the author’s invective. In the first episode, a fifteenth century West African man observes the presence of slave traders’ ships sitting in the nearby harbor and, foreseeing a life of slavery for his newborn son, chooses to drown him rather than have him captured by the traders. The one-act that follows this violent episode presents the story of a young interracial couple. A young black man wishes to marry a young white woman who has fallen deeply in love with him and become pregnant with his child. Because the woman’s wealthy father opposes the match and threatens to disinherit his daughter, the young man decides that he and his fiancé must kill her father. Seemingly lacking any familial feeling, the white woman agrees to assist her lover in the murder of her father. However, the plan backfires while still in the planning stages. A traitorous black “friend” reveals the couple’s intentions to the girlfriend’s father and causes the death of the young black man, bringing an end to his plan to marry his white girlfriend and, with her, inherit her father’s estate. The second episode, echoing the first in theme and purpose, presents a contemporary black American revolutionary who, depressed by his vision of the repression inherent in modern society, decides that he has no future. Knowing that he himself will die, he nevertheless convinces his wife not to die with him but to live on to raise their son as a freedom fighter. The one-act play that follows centers on a deranged black man in a bar who has taken captive three people—a white liberal man, a black conservative man sympathetic to white society, and the black man’s white girlfriend—and has threatened to kill them unless they can justify their existence. After the captives are subjected to numerous humiliations, it becomes apparent that, according to the protagonist’s ideas of “worthiness,” only the white woman may be allowed to live. When the “executions” take place, however, the woman takes a bullet meant for her black lover. In the ensuing struggle, the black conservative gains control of his captor’s gun and kills him. Once again, Walker demonstrates that the black man who resorts to violence to achieve his goals is destroyed by his own violence.
The River Niger Type of work: Drama First produced: 1972, pb. 1973 Walker wrote four major plays before writing The River Niger, but it is this work that brought Walker nationwide recognition (it won many awards, including an Obie and a Tony) and revealed both his strengths and his weaknesses as a play-
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wright. The River Niger, rather than being an entirely original work, is more a reworking and refinement of the ideas and issues developed in his earlier plays for a broader audience. Although the plot and themes of The River Niger deal with African American life and issues, the play has been seen as having a far more universal relevance. Mel Gussow, in Time magazine, said that the play was powerful and compassionate and has an appeal beyond the borders of black experience. Both the play’s realism and this global appeal arise from the fact that it is derived in part from Walker’s own experiences and family—experiences that many outside the black community can also appreciate. As Gussow noted, “The playwright knows his people and we grow to know them, too, to understand their fears, appetites, frustrations, and vulnerabilities.” In The River Niger, Jeff Williams, who has dropped out of U.S. Air Force navigators’ school because of the racist comments of a colleague, returns home to determine what to do with the rest of his life. Everyone has a different opinion on the direction he should take. His friends demand that he join them in defying the established order of white society and take part in the “revolution,” while his family is disappointed that he ended his promising military career (his father’s first question is “Where is your uniform?”) and wants him to continue becoming an officer. Williams, however, is starting to recognize his own, inner desire to become a lawyer. Williams’s hesitation and ambivalence can be readily understood by anyone who has had to make dramatic changes in his or her life.
Yin Yang Type of work: Drama First produced: 1972 Walker’s play Yin Yang, first produced in 1972, was his least traditional. Walker designed the play to represent the age-old struggle between good and evil. In an article published in The New York Times, Walker said that “Good is represented by God, a hip swinging, fast-talking black mama . . . in conflict with Miss Satan, who is also a black female swinger.” Although the play may seem to have been directed for a children’s audience, with its reliance on archetypical figures and simple language, Walker claimed that the play draws on the biblical books of Job and Revelation. Walker had long seen a symbolic parallel between Job and blacks because, he said, both believe in their society and their religion even when such institutions seemingly cause them to suffer. Yin Yang operates on the Chinese philosophy that everything in existence is the result of the combination of two opposing principles: the yin, the feminine, “evil,” passive principle; and the yang, the masculine, “good,” active principle. Thus, the characters of Yin Yang themselves represent the balance of good and evil, masculine and feminine.
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District Line Type of work: Drama First produced: 1984 District Line offers an interesting discussion of how individuals of differing viewpoints and backgrounds can find common ground. A Washington, D.C., taxi stand serves as the setting, which depicts a day in the lives of six cab drivers: two white men, three black men, and one black woman. Each of the drivers comes from a different background, but each has similar hopes for the future and similar reactions to his or her past experiences. The issues and concerns of the black male characters, however, dominate this play, as they had most of Walker’s earlier plays. The scenes concerning two of the black drivers (who are, by far, the most developed characters)—Doc, a moonlighting Howard University professor, another of Walker’s alter egos, and Zilikazi, an exiled South African revolutionary—are the ones that receive the greatest amount of attention. Despite this focus on black men’s issues, in District Line, Walker’s presentation of the white characters—the two white drivers—seems more balanced. These white men, compared with white characters in Walker’s earlier plays, are complex individuals rather than stereotypical white liberals or oppressors.
Suggested Readings Barthelemy, Anthony. “Mother, Sister, Wife: A Dramatic Perspective.” Southern Review 21, no. 3 (Summer, 1985): 770-789. Clurman, Harold. “Theater: The River Niger.” The Nation 215, no. 21 (December 25, 1972): 668. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Theater: The River Niger.” The New Republic 169, no. 12 (September 29, 1973): 22. Lee, Dorothy. “Three Black Plays: Alienation and Paths to Recovery.” Modern Drama 19, no. 4 (December, 1975): 397-404. Contributor: Julia M. Meyers
Booker T. Washington Born: Near Hale’s Ford, Virginia; April 5, 1856 Died: Tuskegee, Alabama; November 14, 1915 African American
Washington’s autobiography brought national attention to the need for education for African Americans at a time when most schools were segregated. Principal works nonfiction: The Future of the American Negro, 1899; The Story of My Life and Work, 1900; Up from Slavery, 1901; Working with the Hands, 1904; The Story of the Negro, 1909; My Larger Education, 1911 Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence early in the twentieth century for promoting mutual interests as the foundation for better race relations. His views were rejected as limited and harmful by African American activists in the 1960’s because he concentrated on economic rather than social equality. His achievements have been given renewed consideration in light of historical perspective. Washington was born on a Virginia plantation, the son of a white plantation owner and a slave woman. At the end of the Civil War, he moved with his mother and his stepfather to Malden, West Virginia, where he worked in the salt mines and grew up in poverty. Determined to get an education, he made a five-hundred-mile journey, mostly by foot, to Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a school set up to educate poor African Americans. These early experiences influenced Washington’s dedication to an ethic of selfhelp and self-discipline as the means of achievement, principles that became the foundation for his educational philosophy. In 1881, he became the first principal of a fledgling school in Tuskegee, Alabama, established to give industrial training to African Americans. At Tuskegee, Washington took a pragmatic approach to education, stressing personal cleanliness, correct behavior, and industrial education to improve students’ economic condition. In a Deep South state where legal restrictions relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship and where injustice and lynching were common, Washington successfully recruited students, promoted education, and raised funds. As Tuskegee prospered, Washington emerged as a national spokesman for race relations. His circle of influence widened after his 1895 address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Later called the Atlanta Compromise by his critics, the speech argued in favor of economic gains, while ignoring the white com1088
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munity’s denial of black political rights. As a man who understood his times, Washington believed that a materialistic society eventually would respond to economic equality, that social equality would follow. After his address, his fame increased; he was invited to the White House, was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University, and won the financial support of leading industrial figures for Tuskegee Institute. In the last years of his career, however, he was sharply criticized by younger, intellectual African Americans who rejected his policies. Washington’s contributions are nevertheless remarkable. His autobiography, Up from Slavery, is an inspiring record of achievements in the face of overwhelming social handicaps, and even his sharpest critics pay tribute to Washington’s singleness of vision.
The Story of My Life and Work Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1900 The Story of My Life and Work is not among Washington’s most notable works. A collaborator presumably did most of the writing, and it has been speculated that the book went to press when Washington was too occupied with other concerns to reread it and revise it for publication. It is of interest, however, for what it reveals about Washington’s career and early use of media, as well as for what it says about the status of African Americans at the time the book was published. Written with a black audience in mind, the book contains episodes designed to establish a rapport between the author and his black audience. For example, Washington includes in this book an account of how he witnessed the beating of his uncle by his white master and of how the uncle cried out for help. Scenes like this are clearly designed to create empathy with the book’s intended audience. The book presents the details of Washington’s early life. Homage is paid to the white people who were most instrumental in helping him receive an education and in aiding him in his rise to becoming the founder and principal of Tuskegee. Among his white patrons were the Ruffners. General Lewis Ruffner owned the salt factory in which Washington’s father worked, as well as the coal mines in which Washington himself was employed before he became the Ruffners’ house servant. Viola Ruffner encouraged Washington to sharpen his literacy skills and to read as widely as possible. Her faith in him provided the youth with an underpinning that enabled him to continue his education against great odds. Because Viola Ruffner had insisted on Washington’s keeping her house immaculate, he developed an appreciation for cleanliness. He also became concerned with personal hygiene and, throughout his early years at Tuskegee, insisted that students pay close attention to washing their bodies. When he arrived at Hampton, the head teacher, Mary F. Mackie, had already admitted as many students as she could, but, when Washington expertly swept her floor, she allowed him to enter and enabled him to pay for his education by doing
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Booker T. Washington (Library of Congress)
janitorial work, which he did with great dedication. Washington returned to Malden to teach after completing his studies at Hampton, but soon went to Washington, D.C., for additional training. When Washington completed these studies, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Hampton Institute’s principal, employed him to teach a group of Native American students at Hampton. So well did he succeed in this endeavor that Armstrong appointed him director of the night school for adults. Therefore, it is not surprising that when a civic group from Tuskegee, Alabama, asked Armstrong to recommend someone to establish an institute in their town, Armstrong recommended Washington, even though the group making the request had not expected that Armstrong would con-
sider a black person suitable for such a job. The Story of My Life and Work emphasizes the need for African Americans, many of whom were former slaves whose formal education had been prohibited, to make themselves indispensable to the dominant white society. Whereas some of the era’s black reformers urged equality for blacks, Washington thought that such demands were unrealistic. He sincerely believed that if blacks could make themselves useful to society, the matter of gaining equality would eventually resolve itself. In this book, Washington expands on a memorable analogy he used in one of his most celebrated speeches, delivered before the Atlanta Cotton Exposition in 1895. In this speech, which many attacked because of its implied support of the concept of separate but equal societies, Washington likened the races to the fingers of the hand. These fingers are separate, but they are all part of the same entity, so that in time of need, they form themselves into a fist. He was convinced that the races could work together in some critical situations, but that they could also remain separate.
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Up from Slavery Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1901 Up from Slavery: An Autobiography is an account of Washington’s life, which began in slavery and ended with his being a renowned educator. It is written in a simple style with an optimistic tone that suggests to African Americans that they can succeed through self-improvement and hard work. Although Up from Slavery has been ranked along with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791) as a classic story of personal achievement, critics disagree about its central theme. Some scholars complain of its conciliatory stance, while others see the work as a justification for black pride. The book opens with Washington’s boyhood hardships, beginning with his life as a slave on a Virginia plantation where the lack of a family name and a history that would give identity to his existence was painful and difficult to understand. He mentions the slaves’ fidelity and loyalty to the master, but he stresses the brutality of the institution: A lack of refinement in living, a poor diet, bad clothing, and ignorance were the slave’s lot. A struggle for literacy is the focus in the intermediate chapters. Leaving the plantation with his mother and stepfather after the Civil War, Washington moved to West Virginia to work in salt and coal mines, where he learned letters while doing manual labor and used trickery to escape work and get to school on time. His situation improved after he was employed as a house servant by a Mrs. Ruffner, who taught him the value of cleanliness and work, lessons he put to good use when he sought admission to Hampton Institute, a Virginia school for poor African Americans. There Washington received an education that led to a teaching job. Throughout these chapters, he gives the impression that his early hardships were a challenge that gave impetus to his later success. He stresses the dignity of labor and the importance of helping others as the means of getting ahead. Beginning with chapter seven, Washington discusses his work at Tuskegee Institute, where classes were first taught in a stable and a hen house, and he takes pride in the growth of the school from an original enrollment of thirty students to a large body of students from twenty-seven states and several foreign countries. His educational theories conform to his belief in manual labor rather than intellectual pursuit, and he stresses economic growth as the important goal. The later portion of the book is primarily a chronicle of fund-raising and an account of grants and gifts. His image as a national leader is firmly established, and he includes newspaper comments on his speeches as well as answers to the critics regarding his Atlanta address. In “Last Words,” Washington expresses his hope for an end to racial prejudice.
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Suggested Readings Baker, Houston A. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 18561901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. _______. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Harlan, Louis R., et al., eds. The Booker T. Washington Papers. 13 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1984. McElroy, Frederick L. “Booker T. Washington as Literary Trickster.” Southern Folklore 49, no. 2 (1992). Mansfield, Stephen. Then Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999. Munslow, Alan. Discourse and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Verney, Kevern. The Art of the Possible: Booker T. Washington and Black Leadership in the United States, 1881-1925. New York: Routledge, 2001. Contributors: Joyce Chandler Davis and R. Baird Shuman
Wendy Wasserstein Born: Brooklyn, New York; October 18, 1950 Died: New York, New York; January 30, 2006 Jewish
Wasserstein’s plays have helped define the feminist experience of the baby boom generation. Principal works children’s literature: Pamela’s First Musical, 1996 drama: Any Woman Can’t, pr. 1973; Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz, pr. 1974; Uncommon Women, and Others, pr. 1975 (one act), pr. 1977 (two acts), pb. 1978; When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, pr. 1975 (with Christopher Durang); Isn’t It Romantic, pr. 1981, revised pr. 1983, pb. 1984; Tender Offer, pr. 1983, pb. 2000 (one act); The Man in a Case, pr., pb. 1986 (one act; adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story); Miami, pr. 1986 (musical); The Heidi Chronicles, pr., pb. 1988; The Heidi Chronicles, and Other Plays, pb. 1990; The Sisters Rosensweig, pr. 1992, pb. 1993; An American Daughter, pr. 1997, pb. 1998; Waiting for Philip Glass, pr., pb. 1998 (inspired by William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94); The Festival of Regrets, pr. 1999 (libretto); Old Money, pr. 2000, pb. 2002; Seven One-Act Plays, pb. 2000; Psyche in Love, 2006 long fiction: Elements of Style, 2006 screenplay: The Object of My Affection, 1998 (adaptation of Stephen McCauley’s novel) teleplays: The Sorrows of Gin, 1979 (from the story by John Cheever); “Drive,” She Said, 1984; The Heidi Chronicles, 1995 (adaptation of her play); An American Daughter, 2000 (adaptation of her play) nonfiction: Bachelor Girls, 1990; Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties, 2001; Sloth, 2005 Wendy Wasserstein (WAH-zur-steen) attended college at Mount Holyoke. Her first play to gain critical attention, Uncommon Women and Others, relates the experiences six alumni from that all-female college have upon graduating from their supportive environment and entering the “real world,” where their abilities and identities as intelligent women were often denigrated or denied. Wasserstein was raised by an extraordinary and flamboyant mother, Lola, and a quieter, though no less supportive, father, Morris. She used them as models for the pushy Jewish parents in Isn’t It Romantic, which is about a woman who chooses to remain single rather than marry the Jewish doctor of her mother’s 1093
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dreams. This play entertainingly dramatizes how liberated women hoped to attain equality and fulfillment. The Heidi Chronicles won not only the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1989 but also a Tony Award and several other prestigious awards. This play explores the life of a feminist art historian from grade school dances, through woman’s consciousnessraising, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, her problems with men, and her eventual decision to adopt a child. Wasserstein, who considered herself a “professional malcontent,” was suddenly inundated with flowers and awards. The play was hailed as a milestone in feminist playwriting, documenting a generation’s sadness after the disappointing outcome of the women’s movement. Along with Wendy, Lola and Morris reared three other children, all of whom became exceptionally successful in the high-pressure fields of business and banking. Wasserstein uses the worlds her siblings inhabit, and the bonds they formed as adults, to good effect in The Sisters Rosensweig. The play shows how Jews still perceive themselves as outsiders in modern society. Wasserstein, having enjoyed the success of The Heidi Chronicles, specifically set out to create a hopeful, romantic ending to this crowd-pleasing work, the most highly structured of her plays. In the 1990’s Wasserstein began working on more innovative theater events. In 1998 she contributed to the production of Love’s Fire, based on Shakespearean sonnets, and in 1999 she and two other playwrights created librettos for Central Park, a New York City Opera production presented at Glimmerglass Opera and Lincoln Center. During this time, at the age of forty-eight, Wasserstein became a single mother after treatment with fertility drugs. Her daughter, Lucy Jane, weighed only one pound, twelve ounces at birth. Wasserstein’s essay about her struggle to conceive and her daughter’s birth is one of the most moving pieces in Shiksa Goddess. Wasserstein died in New York City at the age of fifty-five. Although early critics saw Wasserstein’s plays as period pieces, she established a voice as a feminist pioneer. Her plays dramatize both a unique perspective on the women’s movement and a search for religious identity.
The Heidi Chronicles Type of work: Drama First produced: 1988, pb. 1988 The Heidi Chronicles, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1989, focuses on the women’s movement of the late twentieth century from the point of view of Heidi Holland, feminist art historian. The two acts each open with a prologue about overlooked women painters. The action of the play begins at a dance in 1965 where Heidi meets Peter Patrone, who charms her with his wit. They promise to know each other all their lives. Several years later during a Eugene McCarthy rally, Heidi encounters Scoop
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Rosenbaum. Scoop is obnoxious and extremely arrogant, and he has a tendency to grade everything, yet Heidi leaves the party to go to bed with him. At a consciousness-raising session a lesbian explains to Heidi that in feminism, “you either shave your legs or you don’t.” Heidi considers body hair in the range of the personal, but she participates in the group, detailing her pathetic attachment to Scoop. Distraught, she begs the women to tell her that all their daughters will feel more worthwhile than they do. Next, Heidi attends a rally at the Chicago Art Institute, protesting the opening of a major retrospective containing no women artists. Peter arrives and confesses his homosexuality. Act 1 closes with Scoop’s wedding to another woman. Although he claims to love Heidi, Scoop does not promise her equality. At the wedding he knowingly marries a woman he considers his lesser. By act 2 Heidi has written her book, And the Light Floods in from the Left. She attends a baby shower for Scoop’s wife held on the same day as the memorial service for John Lennon. In 1982, Heidi appears on a talk show with Peter, now a popular pediatrician, and Scoop, owner of Boomer magazine. The men continually interrupt her. Later, when Heidi tries to tell an old friend how unhappy she is, the woman is too involved with her own career to care. In 1986, Heidi gives an address to the alumni of her alma mater, divulging how sad she is. She feels stranded, and she thought the whole point of the feminist movement was that they were all in it together. In 1987, Peter explains that her kind of sadness is a luxury after all the memorial services for those who have died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The play’s final scene occurs in 1989, when Scoop comes to meet Heidi’s adopted child. He has sold Boomer and is planning to run for Congress. Heidi hopes that Scoop’s son and her daughter will someday find a truer equality. The final image of the play is Heidi and child in front of a banner displaying a major Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective. By turns heartwrenching and hilarious, the play captures the angst, admittedly sometimes whiny, of a generation of women who could not understand why the world would not accept them as they were and as they wanted to be.
The Sisters Rosensweig Type of work: Drama First produced: 1992, pb. 1993 The Sisters Rosensweig, a play intended to echo Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s Tri sestry (1901, revised 1904; The Three Sisters, 1920), is set in August of 1991 as the Soviet Union is dissolving. To celebrate Sara Goode’s birthday, her two sisters, Pfeni Rosensweig and “Dr.” Gorgeous Teitelbaum, come to England. Also invited are Sara’s teenage daughter, Tessie; Pfeni’s lover, the bisexual play director Geoffrey Duncan; Sara’s aristocratic lover, Nicholas Pymn; and Tessie’s workingclass Catholic boyfriend, Tom. As the play opens, Tessie is listening to recordings of Sara’s college chorus for a
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school project. Pfeni, a globe-trotting feminist journalist, arrives and embraces Geoffrey, whose friend, Mervyn Kant, “world leader in synthetic animal protective covering”—a fake furrier—meets them at Sara’s house. Mervyn becomes smitten with Sara and invites himself to dinner. Dr. Gorgeous, a radio personality who funded her trip from Newton, Massachusetts, by leading a tour for the Temple Beth El sisterhood, enters, her feet aching from cheap shoes. Before dinner Nicholas baits Mervyn about his Jewishness, and Tom and Tessie, who want to go to the celebration in Lithuania, are entranced by Mervyn’s political views. After dinner Sara and Mervyn discuss their similar American pasts until he charms her into bed. When Mervyn asks for a song, however, Sara refuses. In act 2 Gorgeous arranges for Geoffrey to entertain her sisterhood. Then everyone questions Sara about Mervyn until she gets annoyed, offends Gorgeous, and sends Mervyn away. When Geoffrey returns he tells Pfeni he misses men. Pfeni replies, “So do I” and allows him to depart. Pfeni turns to Sara for comfort. Gorgeous enters wearing new, expensive, accidentally broken, shoes. Pfeni suggests Gorgeous’s husband should buy her replacements, and Gorgeous reveals she now supports her family. The sisters share revelations and finally relax together. Mervyn, responding to a call from Sara, returns. He delivers a designer suit to Gorgeous, a gift from her sisterhood. Gorgeous is ecstatic, but will return it and use the money for her children’s tuition. Pfeni decides to return to work, and leaves. Sara and Mervyn agree to continue their relationship. Tessie avoids the Lithuanian celebration, realizing she would be an outsider, and cajoles her mother into joining her in song. While Wasserstein’s play was a Broadway success, reviews were frequently lukewarm. Although blessed with witty dialogue, the sisters often seem like caricatures. Yet this is less a character drama than an exploration of issues, specifically those relating to identity, the fears common to middle-aged women, and the selfloathing, self-loving attitudes Jews have toward their culture. Not a classic like Chekhov’s masterpiece, Wasserstein’s play is nevertheless a triumph of substance and style over structure.
Suggested Readings Arthur, Helen. “Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles.” Review of The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein. Nation 261, no. 12 (October 16, 1995): 443445. Barnett, Claudia, ed. Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1999. Ciociola, Gail. Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices, and Their Boundaries. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998. Frank, Glenda. “The Struggle to Affirm: The Image of Jewish-Americans on Stage.” In Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort. New York: P. Lang, 1995. Hoban, Phoebe. “The Family Wasserstein.” New York, January 4, 1993.
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Keyssar, Helene. “Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends.” In Feminist Theater and Theory, edited by Keyssar. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Whitfield, Stephen. “Wendy Wasserstein and the Crisis of (Jewish) Identity.” In Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, edited by Jay Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Contributor: Shira Daemon
James Welch Born: Browning, Montana; November 18, 1940 Died: Missoula, Montana; August 4, 2003 Native American
Welch’s poems, novels, films, and nonfiction present the viewpoint of Native Americans. Principal works long fiction: Winter in the Blood, 1974; The Death of Jim Loney, 1979; Fools Crow, 1986; The Indian Lawyer, 1990; The Heartsong of Charging Elk, 2000 (also known as Heartsong, 2001) poetry: Riding the Earthboy Forty, 1971, revised 1975 nonfiction: Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians, 1994 (with Paul Stekler) James Welch received his Indian bloodline from his mother, of the Gros Ventre tribe, and from his father, of the Blackfeet tribe. Although his parents had as much Irish as Indian ancestry, for the most part he grew up near reservations. He attended Indian high schools in Browning and in Fort Belknap, Montana. In 1965, while Welch was a student at the University of Montana, his mother, a stenographer at the reservation agency, brought home copies of annual reports from the Fort Belknap Indian agents for 1880, 1887, and 1897. These documents excited Welch, for they offered statistics on the numerical decline of Indians and showed agents’ purposeful efforts to control Indians. Of greater interest was evidence that an agent had reported communication with Chief Sitting Bull who had been for a time within a few miles of the house where Welch lived. This revelation ignited Welch’s interest in the history of his people. “I wanted to write about that Highline Country in an extended way,” says Welch in describing the impetus for Winter in the Blood. Welch captures the feeling of vast openness of Northeastern Montana’s rolling plains. The novel is about a young Indian who lacks purpose in life until he discovers how Yellow Calf saved and protected an Indian maiden, an intriguing, heroic tale of his Indian grandparents. The novel’s locale is Welch’s parents’ ranch, and it suggests Welch’s own discovery of Indian forebears. Welch married Lois Monk, a professor of comparative literature, in 1968. In 1976, he held the Theodore Roethke Chair in Poetry at the University of Washington. He later served as a visiting professor there and at Cornell University. The year 1979 saw the appearance of The Death of Jim Loney, in which Welch portrays 1098
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a young Indian tied by heritage to his reservation, unable to find opportunity there, endlessly drinking at lonely bars. Then came the historical novel Fools Crow, which would become his most successful book, especially in Western Europe. It also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, the American Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. A fourth novel, The Indian Lawyer, followed in 1990, suggested in part by Welch’s ten-year service on the Montana State Board of Pardons. In 1992 Welch was asked to coauthor the script of the documentary Last Stand at Little Bighorn, for the public television series The American Experience. This film James Welch (Marc Hefty) script, and the tribal research it required, inspired his only nonfiction book, Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians (1994), written with Paul Stekler, which presented an account of the 1876 massacre of General George Custer’s army from an Indian perspective. Author Sherman Alexie praised this as “the first history book written for Indians.” Welch was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for Fools Crow in 1995; in later years, the Welches traveled often in France. His final novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000), based on a historical incident, replaced his customary Montana setting with that of nineteenth century France. At his death from a heart attack (while battling lung cancer), he had been working on a sequel to bring Charging Elk home.
Fools Crow Type of work: Novel First published: 1986 Fools Crow dramatizes Native American life on the plains of eastern Montana toward the end of the era of the free, nonreservation tribe. This novel follows an Indian coming to manhood, his free life, his romantic marriage, his daring attack on an enemy, his struggle with the dilemma of whether to fight the white man and be slain or to submit to humiliating poverty and confinement on a reservation. Welch inherited sympathy for Native Americans from his Gros Ventre mother
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and from his Blackfoot father. His mother showed Welch documents from the Indian agency where she worked. The tales of his paternal grandmother concerning the awful massacre at Marias River, Montana, provided basic material and a viewpoint from which to write. Welch’s grandmother, a girl at the time of the massacre, was wounded but escaped with a few survivors. She spoke only her tribal language. In Fools Crow, White Man’s Dog yearns to find respect. At eighteen he has three puny horses, a musket without powder, and no wife. He joins in a raid, in which he proves himself. He woos beautiful Red Paint. His young wife fears he may be killed yet yearns for his honor as a warrior; in a war raid, he outwits and kills the renowned Crow chief, thereby winning the mature name of Fools Crow. Names such as that of his father, Rides-at-the-door, and of the medicine man, Mik-Api, suggest an Indian culture. The people pray to The Above Ones—the gods—and to Cold Maker, winter personified. These gods sometimes instruct warriors such as Fools Crow in dreams. Fools Crow follows Raven—a sacred messenger—to free his animal helper, a wolverine, from a white man’s steel trap. Later the Raven requires that Fools Crow lure to death a white man who shoots animals and leaves the flesh to rot. Smallpox ravages the teepees. Settlers push into the treaty territory, reducing buffalo, essential for food, shelter, and livelihood. Fools Crow finds a few of his people running in the northern winter away from the Army slaughter of an entire village. In a vision experience, he sees his people living submissively with the powerful whites. Hope for his people resides in such children as his infant son Butterfly.
The Heartsong of Charging Elk Type of work: Novel First published: 2000 The Heartsong of Charging Elk opens when Charging Elk wakes up in a hospital in Marseille in 1889 and slowly realizes where he is. A member of Buffalo Bill’s touring Wild West Show, Charging Elk has fallen off his horse and broken his ribs, and now the show has moved on, and Charging Elk is left to the mercy of the French governmental bureaucracy. What follows is a fascinating account of the adventures of a true stranger in a strange land. Welch alternates this main narrative with long flashbacks, as Charging Elk remembers his earlier life. After Red Cloud and the other Oglalas were defeated by the U.S. Army in 1877, Charging Elk and his friend Strikes Plenty stayed free for another decade, and many of his memories center on that last period of freedom for western American Indians. His earlier life seems tame and peaceful in contrast to the present, however: He has been arrested, tried, imprisoned, and treated as a savage by the provincial French authorities. By staying true to his Indian spirit, however, Charging Elk survives the hardships and suffering, eventually finding love and happiness in France.
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The Heartsong of Charging Elk is based on historical precedent, for both Black Elk and Standing Bear left accounts of the European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. What Welch’s novel does is to render Charging Elk’s experiences in such detailed and different settings that readers view Native American life without the mediation of white America, and the result is a sad but powerful story.
Suggested Readings Beidler, Peter G., ed. American Indian Quarterly 4 (May, 1978). Gish, Robert F. “Word Medicine: Storytelling and Magic Realism in James Welch’s Fools Crow.” American Indian Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Fall, 1990). McFarland, Ronald E. Understanding James Welch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Nelson, Robert M. Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Literature. New York: P. Lang, 1993. Schort, Blanca. Storied Voices in Native American Texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Routledge, 2003. Velie, Alan R. “Blackfeet Surrealism: The Poetry of James Welch.” In Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Wild, Peter. James Welch. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1983. Contributor: Emmett H. Carroll
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Born: Holly Springs, Mississippi; July 16, 1862 Died: Chicago, Illinois; March 25, 1931 African American
Wells-Barnett’s work in civil rights and in feminism was central to the struggle for African Americans’ participation in American life. Principal works nonfiction: Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 1970; The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, 1995; Southern Horrors, and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, 1997 miscellaneous: Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1991 Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a prolific author whose work covered a wide range of subjects: civil rights, suffrage, social justice, feminism, race riots, social settlements, women’s organizations, travel, and voluntary associations. Many of these works were published in newspapers, pamphlets, and journals. From 1889 to 1892 she was the editor of a newspaper, Free Speech, in Memphis, Tennessee. When she wrote an editorial criticizing a white mob who lynched three men who were her friends, her newspaper was destroyed and she had to flee for her life. She continued to protest against lynching for the rest of her life. She documented the horrors of the practice in a series of writings, especially in pamphlets, and three of these pamphlets were reprinted in the book On Lynchings. Wells-Barnett witnessed injustice toward African Americans in a wide range of other settings and institutions, for example, in employment, housing, voting, and politics. Many of her writings on these subjects were published in African American newspapers that have been lost, so the full range of her thought remains to be documented. She was active in founding many civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Equal Rights League, and the Negro Fellowship League. Two important allies on numerous issues were Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams. Wells-Barnett opposed the gradual approach to changing race relations advocated by Booker T. Washington, and this stand was courageous during the height of Washington’s influence. Wells-Barnett was a leader in women’s clubs, although she fought with many white and African American women about the pace and direction of their protests. She was active for several years in the National Association of Colored 1102
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Women’s Clubs and founded the Ida B. Wells Clubs and the Alpha Suffrage Club, among others. Although Wells-Barnett was born into slavery, she conquered racism, sexism, and poverty to become an articulate and forceful leader. Her autobiography documents not only these public struggles but also her personal decisions to help rear her orphaned siblings, marry, and rear five children.
Crusade for Justice Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1970 Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells is the inspiring story of an African American feminist and civil rights leader. Wells-Barnett documents her individual struggles, her accomplishments, and her major activities to promote equality for women and African Americans. Born into slavery in 1862, she lived through the Reconstruction era after the U.S. Civil War, the battle for suffrage, World War I, and its aftermath. Wells-Barnett’s reflections provide a critical review of American racial and sexual relations. She did not simply observe the American scene; she also altered it as a leader in the women’s movement and the African American Civil Rights movement. The autobiography is especially important in documenting the widespread patterns of lynchings of African American men by white mobs. In protests and writings about these horrors, Wells-Barnett fought against any acceptance of these illegal and violent acts. She struggled with many people to have her radical and unflinching stands represented. Her struggles included arguments with other leaders such as the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and the African American leader Booker T. Washington. She presents her side of these differences in the autobiography, which reflects her occasional unwillingness to compromise and her hot temper. Wells-Barnett published in formats such as small-circulation newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, so the autobiography is vital in providing obscure information about her life and ideas. She did not complete the autobiography, however, and her daughter Alfreda Duster helped fill in many missing pieces for the publication of the manuscript almost four decades after her mother’s death. In addition, WellsBarnett lost many of her writings in two different fires, so her daughter did not have access to the full range of her mother’s publications and thoughts. As a result, major areas of Wells-Barnett’s life and ideas are not covered or explained. WellsBarnett’s life is remarkable in its courage and influence. She refused to be limited by her battles with personal poverty, sexism, and racism, and her valiant spirit is apparent in her life story.
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Suggested Readings Apteker, Bettina. Introduction to Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of Views, by Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. San Jose, Calif.: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977. Bedermank, Gail. “ ‘Civilization,’ The Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’s Antilynching Campaign (1892-94).” Radical History Review, no. 52 (1992): 5-30. Broschart, Kay. “Ida B. Wells-Barnett.” In Women in Sociology, edited by Mary Jo Deegan. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Hendricks, Wanda. “Ida Bell Wells-Barnett.” In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993. Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin, eds. Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Sterling, Dorothy. “Ida B. Wells: Voice of a People.” In Black Foremothers: Three Lives. Old Westburg, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1979. Tucker, David M. “Miss Ida B. Wells and Memphis Lynching.” Phylon 32 (Summer, 1971): 112-22. Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Alfreda M. Duster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Contributor: Mary Jo Deegan
Cornel West Born: Tulsa, Oklahoma; June 2, 1953 African American
Best known for his works of political and social philosophy, West is among the most significant intellectuals in the United States. Principal works nonfiction: Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, 1982; Prophetic Fragments, 1988; The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 1989; Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, 1991 (with Bell Hooks); The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, 1991; Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, 1993 (2 volumes); Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, 1993; Race Matters, 1993; Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, 1995 (with Michael Lerner; rev. as Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America, 1996); The Future of the Race, 1996 (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.); Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America, 1997 (Kelvin Shawn Sealey, editor); The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform, 1998 (with Roberto Mangabeira Unger); The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America’s Beleaguered Moms and Dads, 1998 (with Sylvia Ann Hewlett); The Cornel West Reader, 1999; The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country, 2000 (with Gates); Cornel West: A Critical Reader, 2001 (George Yancy, editor); Democracy Matters, 2004 edited texts: Theology in America: Detroit II Conference Papers, 1982 (with Caridad Guidote and Margaret Coakley); Post-Analytic Philosophy, 1985 (with John Rajchman); Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, 1991; White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, 1994 (with James Snead and Colin MacCabe); Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 1996 (with Jack Salzman and David Lionel Smith); Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, 1997 (with Salzman); The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, 1999 (with Quinton Hosford Dixie); Taking Parenting Public: The Case for a New Social Movement, 2002 (with Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Nancy Rankin); Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/ African Contagions, 2003 (by James Sneak; with Kera Keeling and Colin MacCabe) 1105
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Cornel Ronald West was the son of a civilian Air Force administrator Clifton L. West, Jr., and his wife, Irene Bias West, a teacher and school principal after whom an elementary school in Sacramento, California, is named. He was an early achiever: student body president of both his junior and senior high schools and a violinist in his school orchestra. He placed first in the two-mile track contest at the all-city meet and was on his school’s seventh-grade football team. Upon graduation from John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento, he entered Harvard University, where, in 1973, he received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude after three years. Originally he majored in philosophy, but he soon switched to Near Eastern languages so that he could read the biblical languages Hebrew and Aramaic. West studied history extensively and pursued both formal course work and independent reading in social thought. At Harvard, West was surrounded by exciting intellectuals, and he drew fully upon the intellectual resources they offered. He continued his education in philosophy at Princeton University, receiving his master’s degree in 1975 and his doctorate in 1980. In that year he married his first wife, the mother of his only child, Clifton L. West III; he would later remarry, to Elleni Gebre Amlak. Richard Rorty, generally considered the most significant philosophical pragmatist in the United States, became one of West’s mentors at Princeton and taught him a great deal about American pragmatism. West contrived
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his own version of what he termed “prophetic pragmatism,” creating a new pragmatism that avoided Rorty’s ethnocentricity and the conservatism that was inherent in Rorty’s political pessimism. While he was completing his doctoral studies, West was appointed assistant professor of the history of religion at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. At that time, Union was considered by many the most intellectually exciting seminary in the United States. West remained there for six years and spent another year affiliated with the school in 1988. In 1984, he joined the staff of Yale University’s Divinity School, where he remained until 1987. He spent the spring semester of 1988 teaching at the University of Paris. The following year, Princeton University appointed West professor of religion and made him director of its African American studies program. He served in that capacity from 1988 to 1994, when he was appointed professor of African American studies and the philosophy of religion at Harvard. In 2002, after a dispute with Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, West returned to Princeton, this time as Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion. West’s religious stance, which postulates a union between Christianity and Marxism, has been truly ecumenical. Although clinging to his Baptist roots, he has reached out to people of other faiths in his attempts to understand the roots of religious divisions. In 1982, he collaborated with two Roman Catholic nuns in editing Theology in the Americas: Detroit II Conference Papers. He also has been extremely interested in the relationship between Jewish and African Americans, and has collaborated with two Jewish scholars on books that address this issue: Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America, with Michael Lerner, and Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, with Jack Salzman. Much of West’s writing is devoted to the development of a new pragmatism that runs somewhat counter to that of his Princeton mentor, Rorty. West has read the work of the most significant philosophers of Western civilization—Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Blaise Pascal, and Søren Kierkegaard—all of whom have influenced his thinking and led him to original insights. West’s writing is essentially a quest to understand the position and role of African Americans in society and to analyze their roles in relation to the roles of other groups.
Prophesy Deliverance! Type of work: Speeches First published: 1982 West made his publishing debut in 1982 with Prophesy Deliverance!, a collection of addresses he delivered at Brooklyn’s Lord Pentecostal Church. In these addresses, West stresses the inherent value of all humanity regardless of race, class, gender, and other arbitrary distinctions. The prophetic Christianity that West es-
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pouses views knowledge as being communally created, a view that certainly speaks to the unity of all humans despite their obvious individual differences. West outlines the steps prophetic Christianity must take in order to affect society. He recognizes and encourages the significant role that individualism plays, but he tempers it by insisting upon an acceptance of the supremacy of divine grace. He contends that prophetic Christianity must critically examine and seek to redirect the prevailing supremacy of a white society, which he believes is undermining African American society. He calls on blacks to honestly and objectively assess their responses to white domination and oppression. Perhaps the most startling of West’s proposals is his call for “thoughtful engagement” between prophetic Christianity and progressive Marxism. He calls on blacks to construct a model for advancing the progress and liberation of black Americans. His linking of Christianity and Marxism may seem a drastic alliance, but West’s contention here and in much of his later writing is that a redistribution of wealth is essential to reforming society equitably. Certainly nothing could challenge white supremacy more pointedly than a move toward the Marxism that West champions. Perhaps the most challenging insight in this book is West’s understanding of where African Americans stand in relation to other immigrants in American society. During the nineteenth century, waves of immigrants from Europe flooded the United States, but, unlike American blacks, they were free. West asserts that European modernity was in decline from 1871 until 1950 and that this decline resulted in postmodernism. He finds that African Americans were becoming a part of the modern world at precisely the time that European immigrants to America and their progeny were being drawn into the postmodern world. West’s reasoning goes far in explaining and illuminating some of the black-white conflicts that have led to considerable racial strife in the United States, particularly in the decade immediately preceding the publication of this book.
The American Evasion of Philosophy Type of work: Philosophy First published: 1989 Having studied at Princeton with a man reputed to be America’s greatest living pragmatic philosopher, Richard Rorty, and having a profound understanding of the works of such other American pragmatists as C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, it is not surprising that in 1989 West turned his attention to presenting his own take on pragmatism. Although he greatly admires Rorty, he is unable to unquestioningly accept Rorty’s version of pragmatism, which espouses many ideals with which West can agree but some that he cannot. Although Rorty is appalled by human cruelty and argues for a pluralistic society in which racial harmony exists, he argues from a white perspective and is unable to view racism the way West can, having been exposed to racism throughout his life. West’s book is cautionary, arguing, however gently, against the new pragmatism
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that Rorty espouses. He argues that American pragmatism has evaded important aspects of its Cartesian predecessors. West asserts that once one begins to demythologize philosophy, the result is the introduction of the complexities of both politics and culture. He takes Rorty to task for his reading of the pragmatism of John Dewey, who is in many respects the most significant pragmatic philosopher of the twentieth century. He faults Rorty’s Dewey as being much more intellectually playful and politically tame than the Dewey West has gleaned from his extensive reading of Dewey’s work. This book is essentially an argument in favor of West’s prophetic pragmatism, which is a vital concomitant of his Christianity.
Race Matters Type of work: Essays First published: 1993 Race Matters was published in April, 1993, one year following the Los Angeles riots sparked by the trials of four police officers who had participated in the beating of Rodney King. To West, the case and its aftermath demonstrated the pain and distress the public feels in dealing seriously with any matter involving race. People would rather sweep such matters under the carpet than consider them with an eye toward bringing about much-needed change. This collection presents essays with such titles as “Nihilism in Black America,” “The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning,” “The Crisis of Black Leadership,” “Demystifying the New Black Conservatism,” “Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity,” “On Black-Jewish Relations,” and “Malcolm X and Black Rage.” Throughout his text, West urges readers to work toward building a communal spirit. West contends that the way people deal with situations determines their response to these situations, suggestive of Marshall McLuhan’s contention in the mid-1960’s that the medium is the message. Blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives have, according to West, been responsible for the failure of race relations in the United States. The white community appears limited to viewing the black community from a white perspective. West urges the building of black-white coalitions, a more equitable distribution of resources, public intervention to provide for the needs of all citizens (particularly their health and educational needs), and the implementation of a system that prepares people, especially young people, to assume the leadership roles that will make his ideal society a reality. West chides intellectually gifted blacks who choose to attend prestigious, predominantly white institutions of higher learning, suggesting that they do so for their own betterment rather than for the betterment of their race. He questions why they do not attend predominantly black schools and help to elevate the quality of such institutions. Coming from a writer whose degrees are from Harvard and Princeton, this suggestion has struck many readers as disingenuous.
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The Rodney King debacle certainly brought racial tensions in Los Angeles to the boiling point, but West contends, probably quite validly, that race was the obvious and visible cause of the eruption, but not the fundamental cause. Rather, he blames a combination of economic decline, cultural decay, and political lethargy.
Democracy Matters Type of work: Essays First published: 2004 In this sequel to Race Matters, published eleven years after that best-selling collection of essays, Cornel West scrutinizes the democratic tradition in the United States and America’s attempts to impose democracy upon sovereign Middle Eastern countries. His democracy would emphasize justice and love, would foster a worldwide sense of community built on Socratic dialogue and prophetic practices. West decries America’s attempts to impose a political system on the Middle East through military force and authoritarianism on the part of the United States government. As in much of his work, he cringes at the narrow perspectives through which America views the world. He recalls some of the greatest thinkers of the past, citing their historical, religious, and philosophical ideas, and he then compares their ideals with the current leadership of the United States. Nine pages of this book are devoted to West’s account of why he, after locking horns with Harvard president Lawrence Summers, resigned from his tenured professorship and, in 2002, returned to Princeton. His move from Harvard was highly controversial and resulted in other departures among some notable black scholars. In this book, West writes analytically about America’s youth culture and about hip-hop, in which he has a considerable interest. This interest was in part responsible for his rift with Summers and his departure from Harvard. He also analyzes American Christianity and somewhat softens but does not abandon his early contention that Christianity and Marxism must combine for the betterment of society.
Suggested Readings Anderson, Jervis. “The Public Intellectual.” The New Yorker 69 (January 17, 1994): 39-46. Appiah, K. Anthony. “A Prophetic Pragmatism.” The Nation 250 (April 9, 1990): 496-498. Berube, Michael. “Public Academy.” The New Yorker 70 (January 9, 1995): 73-80. Cowan, Rosemary. Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Johnson, Clarence Shole. Cornel West and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Nichols, John. “Cornel West.” The Progressive 61 (January, 1997: 26-29. West, Cornel. “Cornel West.” Interview by John Nichols. The Progressive 61 (January, 1997): 26-29. White, Jack E. “Philosopher with a Mission.” Time 141 (June 7, 1993): 60-62. Wood, Mark David. Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Yancy, George, ed. Cornel West: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Contributor: R. Baird Shuman
Phillis Wheatley Born: West Coast of Africa (possibly the Senegal-Gambia region); 1753(?) Died: Boston, Massachusetts; December 5, 1784 African American
America’s first black poet and only its second published woman poet, Wheatley produced sophisticated, original poems whose creative theories of the imagination and the sublime anticipate the Romantic movement. Principal works poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773; The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 1966, 1989 (Julian D. Mason, Jr., editor) miscellaneous: Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley: A Native African and a Slave, 1833; The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, 1988 (John Shields, editor) From the time of her first published piece to the present day, controversy surrounded the life and work of Phillis Wheatley (WEET-lee), America’s first black poet and only its second published woman poet (after Anne Bradstreet). Few poets of any age have been so scornfully maligned, so passionately defended, so fervently celebrated, and so patronizingly tolerated. The known details of Wheatley’s life are few. A slave, she was, according to her master, John Wheatley of Boston, “brought from Africa to America in the Year 1761, between Seven and Eight Years of Age [sic].” Her parents were apparently sun worshippers, for she is supposed to have recalled to her white captors that she remembered seeing her mother pouring out water to the sun every morning. If such be the case, it would help to explain why the sun is predominant as an image in her poetry. Her life with the Wheatleys, John and Susanna and their two children, the twins Mary and Nathaniel, was probably not too demanding for one whose disposition toward asthma (brought on or no doubt exacerbated by the horrible “middle passage”) greatly weakened her. The Wheatleys’ son attended Harvard, so it is likely that Nathaniel served as the eager young girl’s Latin tutor. At any rate, it is certain that Wheatley knew Latin well; her translation of the Niobe episode from book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses displays a learned knowledge and appreciation of the Latin original. Wheatley’s classical learning is evident throughout her poetry, which is thick with allusions to ancient historical and mythological figures. During the years of her young adulthood, Phillis Wheatley was the toast of 1112
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England and the colonies. For years before she attempted to find a Boston publisher for her poems, she had published numerous elegies celebrating the deaths of many of the city’s most prominent citizens. In 1770, she wrote her most famous and most often-reprinted elegy, on the death of “the voice of the Great Awakening,” George Whitefield, chaplain to the countess of Huntingdon, who was one of the leading benefactors of the Methodist evangelical movement in England and the colonies. Not finding Boston to be in sympathy with her 1772 proposal for a volume, Wheatley found substantial support the following year in the countess of Huntingdon, whose interest had been stirred by the young poet’s noble tribute to her chaplain. Subsequently, Wheatley was sent to London, ostensibly for her health; this trip curiously accords, however, with the very weeks that her book was being printed. The turning point of Wheatley’s career, not only as an author but also as a human being, came when her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. It is likely that she proofread the galleys herself. At any rate, she was much sought after among the intellectual, literary set of London, and Sir Brook Watson, who was to become Lord Mayor of London within a year, presented her with a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) in folio. The earl of Dartmouth, who was at the time secretary of state for the colonies and president of the board of Trade and Foreign Plantations, gave her a copy of Tobias Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote (1755). Benjamin Franklin, to whom she would later inscribe her second book of poetry (never published), has even recorded that, while in London briefly, he called on Wheatley to see whether “there were any service I could do her.” After she returned from England, having been recalled because of Susanna Wheatley’s growing illness, she was manumitted sometime during September, 1773. It is probable that Wheatley was freed because of the severe censure that some English reviewers of her Poems had directed at the owners of a learned author who “still remained a slave.” In the opening pages of her 1773 volume appears a letter of authentication of Wheatley’s authorship which is signed by still another of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock. Added to the list of attesters are other outstanding Bostonians, including Thomas Hutchinson, then governor of Massachusetts, and James Bowdoin, one of the founders of Bowdoin College. Later, during the early months of the revolution, Wheatley wrote a poem in praise of General George Washington titled “To His Excellency General Washington.” As a result, she received an invitation to visit the general at his headquarters, and her poem was published by Tom Paine in The Pennsylvania Magazine. John Paul Jones, who also appreciated Wheatley’s celebration of freedom, even asked one of his officers to secure him a copy of her Poems. Nevertheless, she did not continue to enjoy such fame. A country ravaged by war has little time, finally, for poetry, and Wheatley regrettably, perhaps tragically, faced the rejection of two more proposals for a volume of new poems. In 1778, at the height of the war and after the deaths of both John and Susanna Wheatley, she married John Peters, a black man of some learning who failed to rescue the poet from poverty.
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Wheatley died alone and unattended in a hovel somewhere in the back streets of the Boston slums in 1784, truly an ignominious end for one who had enjoyed such favor. She was preceded in death by two of her children, as well as by the third, to whom she had just given birth. She was only thirty-one years old. Given Wheatley’s vision of the world “Oppress’d with woes, a painful endless train,” it should not be surprising that her most frequently adopted poetic form is the elegy, in which she always celebrates death as the achievement of ultimate freedom—suggesting the thanatos-eros (desire for death) motif of Romanticism. Along with Philip Freneau, she is arguably the most important poet of America’s Revolutionary War era.
The Political Poems Type of work: Poetry Written: 1768-1784 Wheatley’s political poems document major incidents of the American struggle for independence. In 1768, she wrote “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty on His Repealing the American Stamp Act.” When it appeared, much revised, in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the poet diplomatically deleted the last two lines of the original, which read, “When wars came on [against George] the proudest rebel fled/ God thunder’d fury on their guilty head.” By that time, the threat of the king’s retaliation did not seem so forbidding nor the injustice of rebellion against him so grave. “America,” a poem probably written about the same time but published only recently, admonishes Britain to treat “americus,” the British child, with more deference. According to the poem, the child, now a growing seat of “Liberty,” is no mere adorer of an overwhelming “Majesty,” but has acquired strength of his own: “Fearing his strength which she [Britain] undoubted knew/ She laid some taxes on her darling son.” Recognizing her mistake, “great Britannia” promised to lift the burden, but the promise proved only “seeming Sympathy and Love.” Now the Child “weeps afresh to feel this Iron chain.” The urge to draw an analogy here between the poem’s “Iron chain” and Wheatley’s own predicament is irresistible; while America longs for its own independence, Wheatley no doubt yearns for hers. The year 1770 marked the beginning of armed resistance against Britain. Wheatley chronicles such resistance in two poems, the second of which is now lost. The first, “On the Death of Mr. Snider Murder’d by Richardson,” appeared initially along with “America.” The poem tells how Ebenezer Richardson, an informer on American traders involved in circumventing British taxation, found his home surrounded on the evening of February 22, 1770, by an angry mob of colonial sympathizers. Much alarmed, Richardson emerged from his house armed with a musket and fired indiscriminately into the mob, killing the eleven- or twelve-year-old son of Snider, a poor German colonist. Wheatley calls young Christopher Snider, of whose death Richardson was later found guilty in a trial by jury, “the first martyr for the common good,” rather than those men killed less than two weeks later in the
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Boston Massacre. The poem’s fine closing couplet suggests that even those not in sympathy with the quest for freedom can grasp the nobility of that quest and are made indignant by its sacrifice: “With Secret rage fair freedom’s foes beneath/ See in thy corse ev’n Majesty in Death.” Wheatley does not, however, ignore the Boston Massacre. In a proposal for a volume which was to have been published in Boston in 1772, she lists, among twenty-seven titles of poems (the 1773 volume had thirty-nine), “On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March.” This title, naming the time and place of the Massacre, Phillis Wheatley (Library of Congress) suggests that the poet probably celebrated the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks, the first black man to lose his life in the American struggle, along with the deaths of two white men. Regrettably, the poem has not yet been recovered. Even so, the title alone confirms Wheatley’s continued recording of America’s struggle for freedom. This concern shifted in tone from obedient praise for the British regime to supplicatory admonition and then to guarded defiance. Since she finally found a publisher not in Boston but in London, she prudently omitted “America” and the poems about Christopher Snider and the Boston Massacre from her 1773 volume. She chose to include, however, a poem dedicated to the earl of Dartmouth, who was appointed secretary of state for the colonies in August, 1772. In this poem, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America,” she gives the earl extravagant praise as one who will lay to rest “hatred faction.” She knew of the earl’s reputation as a humanitarian through the London contacts of her mistress, Susanna. When the earl proved to support oppressive British policies, the poet’s expectations were not realized; within four years of the poem’s date, America had declared its independence. Since her optimism was undaunted by foreknowledge, Wheatley wrote a poem that was even more laudatory than “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty on His Repealing the American Stamp Act.” Perhaps she was not totally convinced, however; the poem contains some unusually bold passages for a colonist who is also both a woman and a slave. For example, she remarks that, with Dartmouth’s secretaryship, America need no longer “dread the iron chain,/ Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand/ Had made, and with it meant t’enslave the land.” Once again Wheatley uses the slave
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metaphor of the iron chain. Quite clearly she also accuses the Crown of “wanton Tyranny,” which it had wielded illegally and with the basest of motives—to reduce the colonies to the inhuman condition of slave states. Here rebellious defiance, no longer guarded, is unmistakable; the tone matches that of the Declaration of Independence. It is a mystery how these lines could have gone unnoticed in the London reviews, all of them positive, of her 1773 volume. Perhaps the reviewers were too bedazzled by the “improbability” that a black woman could produce such a volume to take the content of her poetry seriously. In this poem, Wheatley also presents a rare autobiographical portrait describing the manner in which she was taken from her native Africa. The manuscript version of this passage is more spontaneous and direct than the more formally correct one printed in the 1773 volume, and thus is closer to the poet’s true feelings. It was “Seeming cruel fate” which snatched her “from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat.” Fate here is only apparently cruel, since her capture has enabled her to become a Christian; the young poet’s piety resounds throughout her poetry and letters. Her days in her native land were, nevertheless, happy ones, and her abduction at the hands of ruthless slavers doubtless left behind inconsolable parents. Such a bitter memory of the circumstances of her abduction fully qualifies her to “deplore the day/ When Britons weep beneath Tyrannic sway”; the later version reads: “And can I then but pray/ Others may never feel tyrannic sway?” Besides toning down the diction, this passage alters her statement to a question and replaces “Britons” with the neutral “others.” The question might suggest uncertainty, but it more probably reflects the author’s polite deportment toward a London audience. Since, in the earlier version, she believed Dartmouth to be sympathetic with her cause, she had no reason to exercise deference toward him; she thought she could be frank. The shift from “Britons” to “others” provokes a more compelling explanation. In the fall of 1772, Wheatley could still think of herself as a British subject. Later, however, after rejoicing that the earl’s administration had given way to restive disillusionment, perhaps the poet was less certain about her citizenship. Three years after the publication of her 1773 volume, Wheatley unabashedly celebrated the opposition to the “tyrannic sway” of Britain in “To His Excellency General Washington,” newly appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army; the war of ideas had become one of arms. In this piece, which is more a paean to freedom than a eulogy to Washington, she describes freedom as “divinely fair,/ Olive and laurel bind her golden hair”; yet “She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.” The poet accents this image of martial glory with an epic simile, comparing the American forces to the power of the fierce king of the winds: As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms, Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms; Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar, The refluent surges beat the sounding shore.
For the young poet, America is now “The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!” While the eyes of the world’s nations are fixed “on the scales,/ For in their
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hopes Columbia’s arm prevails,” the poet records Britain’s regret over her loss: “Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!/ Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.” The temper of this couplet is in keeping with Wheatley’s earlier attitudes toward oppression. The piece closes as the poet urges Washington to pursue his objective with the knowledge that virtue is on his side. If he allows the fair goddess Freedom to be his guide, Washington will surely emerge not only as the leader of a victorious army but also as the head of the newly established state. In Wheatley’s last political poem, “freedom’s heaven-defended race” has won its battle. Written in 1784 within a year after the Treaty of Paris, “Liberty and Peace” is a demonstrative celebration of American independence. British tyranny, the agent of American oppression, has now been taught to fear “americus” her child, “And new-born Rome shall give Britannia Law.” Wheatley concludes this piece with two pleasing couplets in praise of America, whose future is assured by heaven’s approval: Auspicious Heaven shall fill with favoring Gales, Where e’er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails: To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display, And Heavenly Freedom spread her golden Ray.
Personified as Peace and Freedom, Columbia (America) will act as a world emissary, an emanating force like the rays of the sun. In this last couplet, Wheatley has captured, perhaps for the first time in poetry, America’s ideal mission to the rest of the world. The fact that Wheatley so energetically proclaims America’s success in the political arena certainly attests her sympathies—not with the neoclassic obsession never to challenge the established order nor to breach the rules of political and social decorum—but with the Romantic notion that a people who find themselves unable to accept a present, unsatisfactory government have the right to change that government, even if such a change can be accomplished only through armed revolt. The American Revolution against Britain was the first successful such revolt and was one of the sparks of the French Revolution. Wheatley’s steadfast literary participation in the American Revolution clearly aligns her with such politically active English Romantic poets as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
The Elegies Type of work: Poetry Written: 1770’s In her elegies, on the other hand, Wheatley displays her devotion to spiritual freedom. As do her political poems, her elegies exalt specific occasions, the deaths of people usually known to her within the social and religious community of the poet’s Old South Congregational Church of Boston. Also in the manner of her poems on
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political events, her elegies exceed the boundaries of occasional verse. The early, but most famous of her elegies, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770,” both illustrates the general structure in which she cast all seventeen of her extant elegies and indicates her recurring ideological concerns. Wheatley’s elegies conform for the most part to the Puritan funeral elegy. They include two major divisions: First comes the portrait, in which the poet pictures the life of the subject, then follows the exhortation, encouraging the reader to seek the heavenly rewards gained by the subject in death. The portrait usually comprises three biographical steps: vocation or conversion; sanctification, or evidence of good works; and glorification, or joyous treatment of the deceased’s reception into heaven. Wheatley’s elegy on Whitefield surprisingly opens with the glorification of the Great Awakener, already in Heaven and occupying his “immortal throne.” She celebrates the minister’s conversion or vocation in an alliterative line as “The greatest gift that ev’n a God can give.” Of course, she writes many lines describing the good works of a man wholly devoted to the winning of souls during the seven visits which he made to America during and after the period of the Great Awakening. Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on September 30, 1770, having left Boston only a week or so before, where he had apparently lodged with the Wheatley family. Indeed, the young poet of sixteen or seventeen appears to recollect from personal experience when she observes that the minister “long’d to see America excel” and “charg’d its youth that ev’ry grace divine/ Should with full lustre in their conduct shine.” She also seizes this opportunity to proclaim to the world Whitefield’s assertion that even Africans would find Jesus of Nazareth an “Impartial Saviour.” The poem closes with a ten-line exhortation to the living to aspire toward Whitefield’s example: “Let ev’ry heart to this bright vision rise.” As one can see, Wheatley’s elegies are not sad affairs; quite to the contrary, they enact joyful occasions after which deceased believers may hope to unite, as she states in “On the Death of the Rev. Dr. Sewell, 1769,” with “Great God, incomprehensible, unknown/ By sense.” Although one’s senses may limit a firsthand acquaintance with God, these same senses do enable one to learn about God, especially about God’s works in nature. The poem in the extant Wheatley canon that most pointedly addresses God’s works in nature is “Thoughts on the Works of Providence.” This poem of 131 lines opens with a ten-line invocation to the “Celestial muse,” resembling Milton’s heavenly muse of Paradise Lost. Identifying God as the force behind planetary movement, she writes, “Ador’d [is] the God that whirls surrounding spheres” which rotate ceaselessly about “the monarch of the earth and skies.” From this sublime image she moves to yet another: “‘Let there be light,’ he said: from his profound/ Old chaos heard and trembled at the sound.” It should not go unremarked that Wheatley could, indeed, find much in nature to foster her belief, but little in the mundane world of ordinary people to sustain her spiritually. The frequency of nature imagery but the relative lack of scenes drawn from human society (with the exception of her political poems, and even these are occasions for abstract departures into the investigation of political ideologies) probably reflects the poet’s insecurity and uncertainty about a world which
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first made her a slave and then gave her, at best, second-class citizenship. In “An Hymn to the Morning,” one of her most lyrical poems, Wheatley interprets the morn (recall her mother’s morning ritual of pouring out water to the rising sun) as the source of poetic afflatus or inspiration. The speaker of the poem, Wheatley herself, first perceives the light of the rising sun as a reflection in the eye of one of the “feather’d race.” After she hears the song of the bird which welcomes the day, she turns to find the source of melody and sees the bird “Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted plume.” Here the poet captures with great precision the bird’s rapid eye movement. The bird, archetypal symbol of poetic song, has received the dawn’s warm rays which stimulate it to sing. When the poet turns to discover the source of melody, however, what she sees first is not Aurora, the dawning sun, but Aurora the stimulus of song reflected within the “bright eye” of the bird. In the next stanza the poet identifies the dawn as the ultimate source of poetic inspiration when she remarks that the sun has awakened Calliope, here the personification of inspiration, while her sisters, the other Muses, “fan the pleasing fire” of the stimulus to create. Hence both the song of the bird and the light reflected in its eye have instructed her to acknowledge the source of the bird’s melody; for she aspires to sing with the same pleasing fire that animates the song of the bird. Like many of the Romantics who followed her, Wheatley perceives nature both as a means to know ultimate freedom and as an inspiration to create, to make art. It is in her superlative poem, “On Imagination,” however, that Wheatley most forcefully brings both aspirations, to know God and to create fine poetry, into clear focus. To the young black poet, the imagination was sufficiently important to demand from her pen a fifty-three-line poem. The piece opens with this four-line apostrophe: Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck’d with pomp by thee! Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand, And all attest how potent is thine hand.
Clearly, Wheatley’s imagination is a regal presence in full control of her poetic world, a world in which her “wond’rous acts” of creation stand in harmony, capturing a “beauteous order.” These acts themselves testify to the queen’s creative power. Following a four-line invocation to the Muse, however, the poet distinguishes the imagination from its subordinate fancy: Now, here, now there, the roving Fancy flies; Till some lov’d object strikes her wand’ring eyes, Whose silken fetters all the senses bind, And soft captivity involves the mind.
Unlike the controlled, harmonious imagination, the subordinate fancy flies about here and there, searching for some appropriate and desired object worthy of setting into motion the creative powers of her superior.
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Poems of Fancy and Memory Type of work: Poetry Written: 1770’s In “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” the poet describes the psychology of sleep in similar fashion. Having entered the world of dreams, the mind discovers a realm where “ideas range/ Licentious and unbounded o’er the plains/ Where Fancy’s queen in giddy triumph reigns.” Wheatley maintains that in sleep the imagination, once again “Fancy’s queen,” creates worlds which lack the “beauteous order” of the poet sitting before a writing desk; nevertheless, these dream worlds provoke memorable images. In “On Recollection” Wheatley describes the memory as the repository on which the mind draws to create its dreams. What may be “long-forgotten,” the memory “calls from night” and “plays before the fancy’s sight.” By analogy, Wheatley maintains, the memory provides the poet “ample treasure” from her “secret stores” to create poetry: “in her pomp of images display’d,/ To the high-raptur’d poet gives her aid.” “On Recollection” asserts a strong affinity between the poet’s memory, analogous to the world of dreams, and the fancy, the associative faculty subordinate to the imagination. Recollection for Wheatley functions as the poet’s storehouse of images, while the fancy channels the force of the imagination through its associative powers. Both the memory and the fancy, then, serve the imagination. Wheatley’s description of fancy and memory departs markedly from what eighteenth century aestheticians, including John Locke and Joseph Addison, generally understood as the imagination. The faculty of mind which they termed “imagination” Wheatley relegates to recollection (memory) and fancy. Her description of recollection and fancy closely parallels Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s in the famous thirteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria (1817), where he states that fancy “is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” Wheatley’s identification of the fancy as roving “Now here, now there” whose movement is analogous to the dream state, where “ideas range/ Licentious and unbounded,” certainly frees it from the limits of time and space. Coleridge further limits the fancy to the capacity of choice. “But equally with the ordinary memory,” he insists, “the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.” Like Coleridge’s, Wheatley’s fancy exercises choice by association as it finally settles upon “some lov’d object.” If fancy and memory are the imagination’s subordinates, then how does the imagination function in the poet’s creative process? Following her description of fancy in “On Imagination,” Wheatley details the role the imagination plays in her poetry. According to her, the power of the imagination enables her to soar “through air to find the bright abode,/ Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God.” The central focus of her poetry remains contemplation of God. Foreshadowing William Wordsworth’s “winds that will be howling at all hours,” Wheatley exclaims that on the wings of the imagination she “can surpass the wind/ And leave the rolling universe behind.” In the realm of the imagination, the poet can “with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.”
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Immediately following this arresting line, Wheatley illustrates in a ten-line stanza the power of the imagination to create new worlds. Even though winter and the “frozen deeps” prevail in the real world, the imagination can take one out of unpleasant reality and build a pleasant, mythic world of fragrant flowers and verdant groves where “Fair Flora” spreads “her fragrant reign,” where Sylvanus crowns the forest with leaves, and where “Show’rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,/ And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.” Such is the power of imagination to promote poetic creation and to release one from an unsatisfactory world. Unfortunately, like reality’s painful intrusion upon the delicate, unsustainable song of John Keats’s immortal bird, gelid winter and its severe “northern tempests damp the rising fire,” cut short the indulgence of her poetic world, and lamentably force Wheatley to end her short-lived lyric: “Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.” Her lyric must end because no poet can indefinitely sustain a mythic world. In her use of the imagination to create “new worlds,” Wheatley’s departure from eighteenth century theories of this faculty is radical and once again points toward Coleridge. Although she does not distinguish between “primary” and “secondary” imagination as he does, Wheatley nevertheless constructs a theory which approaches his “secondary” imagination. According to Coleridge, the secondary imagination, which attends the creative faculty, intensifies the primary imagination common to all men. Coleridge describes how the secondary imagination operates in this well-known passage: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate;/ or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all/ events it struggles to idealize and to unify.” In spite of the fact that Wheatley’s attempt to dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate is assuredly more modest than Coleridge’s “swift half-intermitted burst” in “Kubla Khan,” she does, nevertheless, like the apocalyptic Romantics, idealize, unify, and shape a mythopoeic world. Proceeding in a systematic fashion, she first constructs a theory of mental faculty which, when assisted by the associative fancy, builds, out of an act of the mind, a new world which does indeed stand in “beauteous order.” This faculty, which she identifies as the imagination, she uses as a tool to achieve freedom, however momentary. Wheatley was, then, an innovator who used the imagination as a means to transcend an unacceptable present and even to construct “new worlds [to] amaze the unbounded soul”; this practice, along with her celebration of death, her loyalty to the American struggle for political independence, and her consistent praise of nature, places her firmly in that flow of thought which culminated in nineteenth century Romanticism. Her diction may strike a modern audience as occasionally “got up” and stiff, and her reliance on the heroic couplet may appear outdated and worn, but the content of her poetry is innovative, refreshing, and even, for her times, revolutionary. She wrote during the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary War eras in America, when little poetry of great merit was produced. Phillis Wheatley, laboring under the disadvantages of being not only a black slave but also a woman, nevertheless did find the time to depict that political struggle for freedom and to trace her personal battle for release. If one looks beyond the limitations of her sincere
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if dogmatic piety and her frequent dependence on what Wordsworth called poetic diction, one is sure to discover in her works a fine mind engaged in creating some of the best early American poetry.
Suggested Readings Barker-Benfield, G. J., and Catherine Clinton, comps. Portraits of American Women: From Settlement to the Present. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Gates, Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2003. Jones, Jacqueline. “Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Sable Veil,’ ‘Length’ned Chain,’ and ‘Knitted Heart.’” In Women in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Richmond, Merle. Phillis Wheatley. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Rinaldi, Ann. Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Harcourt, 1996. Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984. _______, ed. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Contributor: John C. Shields
John Edgar Wideman Born: Washington, D.C.; June 14, 1941 African American
John Edgar Wideman’s range of style, continual formalistic innovation, and powerful prose warrant his consideration as one of the best American writers of his generation. Principal works long fiction: A Glance Away, 1967; Hurry Home, 1970; The Lynchers, 1973; Hiding Place, 1981; Sent for You Yesterday, 1983; The Homewood Trilogy, 1985 (includes Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday); Reuben, 1987; Philadelphia Fire, 1990; The Cattle Killing, 1996; Two Cities, 1998; Fanon, 2007 short fiction: Damballah, 1981; Fever: Twelve Stories, 1989; All Stories Are True, 1992; The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, 1992; God’s Gym, 2005 nonfiction: Brothers and Keepers, 1984; Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, 1994; Conversations with John Edgar Wideman, 1998 (Bonnie TuSmith, editor); Hoop Roots, 2001; The Island: Martinique, 2003 edited texts: My Soul Has Grown Deep: Classics of Early African-American Literature, 2001; Twenty: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, 2001 Growing up in Homewood (the African American section of Pittsburgh) and attending public school, John Edgar Wideman (WID-muhn) was every parent’s dream. Delivering newspapers after school, he learned to manage finances. He was careful to avoid getting in trouble. He cared about school, did his homework, and he was smart, but his first love was basketball. These were all winning characteristics, and Wideman was successful on and off the court. In his senior year of high school, Wideman was the captain of the basketball team and the class valedictorian. He earned a four-year scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania. The university gave Wideman choices that would change his life dramatically. In 1963, Wideman was named a Rhodes Scholar, the second black American to receive that honor. Wideman also became a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Wideman went on to teach at various universities. In 1966, Wideman accepted a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, where he later headed the African American studies program from 1971 to 1973 and rose to the rank of professor of English; he was also assistant basketball 1123
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coach from 1968 to 1972. Academic appointments brought him to Howard University, the University of Wyoming at Laramie, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The National Endowment for the Humanities in 1975 named him a Young Humanist Fellow; in 1976, the U.S. State Department selected him for a lecture tour of Europe and the Near East. That same year, he held a Phi Beta Kappa lectureship. Wideman married Judith Ann Goldman in 1965, and together they had three children: Daniel, Jacob, and Jamila. The family tragedy of his youngest brother, Rob, who was convicted in 1978 of armed robbery and murder, was grimly reiterated in 1988, when Wideman’s son Jacob received a life sentence for the 1986 murder in Arizona of a teenage traveling companion. His daughter Jamila, having inherited her father’s basketball prowess, garnered a position playing in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) professional league. In the 1980’s and 1990’s he frequently contributed articles and review essays to The New York Times Book Review and to popular magazines such as TV Guide, Life, and Esquire. In speaking about the formative influences upon his writing, Wideman asserts that his creative inclinations underwent a transformation upon his arrival as a new faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, where students of color assumed him to be as well versed in the African American literary legacy as he was in the Anglo-American tradition. His responsiveness to their concerns prompted him not only to create the university’s African American studies program but also to recover the cultural identity that he had self-consciously minimized in pursuit of the dominant culture’s standards of academic excellence. His subsequent writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, repeatedly sounds the autobiographical theme of “coming home,” and Wideman not only dissects the obstacles that thwart such return but also espouses the belief that art can at least make possible a temporary reconciliation between past and present. By paralleling his own multigenerational family history and the community history of Homewood, Wideman fuses personal and collective memory to create a mythology of the human condition at once particular and universal.
A Glance Away Type of work: Novel First published: 1967 Dedicated to “Homes,” Wideman’s first novel, A Glance Away, creates thematic excitement with its treatment of two drifting men coming to terms with their pasts. After a year spent at a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, Eddie Lawson, a disillusioned young black man, returns to his listless, decaying urban neighborhood. Rather than celebrating, however, he spends his gloomy homecoming confronting the goblins that drove him to the brink in the first place: his mother Martha Lawson’s idealization of his dead older brother, his girlfriend Alice Smalls’s rejection of him for sleeping with a white woman, and his own self-disgust over abandoning a secure postal job for menial, marginal employment. Dejected and defeated by
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nightfall, he drags himself to grimy Harry’s Place in order to cloak his memories in a narcotic haze. There, he is reconciled by his albino friend Brother Smalls with another outcast named Robert Thurley, a white college professor struggling with his own record of divorce, alcoholism, and homosexuality. Though discrepancies between wealth and power divide the two homeless men, each manages to urge the other to maintain his faith in people despite his guilt-ridden history. A Glance Away generated much favorable critical response in particular for Wideman’s depiction of the alienated Thurley. In trying to disavow his personal past, this connoisseur of food and art embraces a surfeit of creeds and cultures. “In religion an aesthetic Catholic, in politics a passive Communist, in sex a resigned anarchist,” he surrounds himself with treasures from both East and West and indulges in a smorgasbord of the globe’s delicacies. Yet as a real measure of the displacement that these extravagances so futilely conceal, he quotes lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), in which a similarly solitary speaker searches for intimacy in a world bereft of its cultural moorings. Emphasizing his protagonists’ self-absorption and the estrangement of their family members and friends, Wideman abandons strictly chronological plot development in favor of lengthy interior monologues. Conversations tend to be short; more likely than not they are interrupted by unspoken flashbacks and asides. Using speech to measure isolation, the author portrays both Eddie and Thurley as incapable of communicating adequately. Eddie, for example, becomes tongue-tied around a group of southern travelers, shuddering in his bus seat instead of warning them as he wishes for the reality of the Northern mecca that they seek. Similarly, despite the empowering qualities of a gulp of Southern Comfort, Thurley delivers a lecture on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 b.c.e.) fraught with “futility and detachment, . . . introspection and blindness.” In one brilliant play on this speechlessness, both men suddenly converse as if they were actors on a stage. This abrupt emphasis on what is spoken—to the exclusion of private thoughts—stresses each person’s imprisonment within him- or herself. Flowing from a weaker artist’s pen, A Glance Away would have become a mere exercise in allusive technique and stream-of-consciousness style. On the contrary, it reads with the effortless ease of a masterfully crafted lyrical poem. Key to its success is Wideman’s careful alliance of form and content, not to mention his insightful treatment of a rootlessness that transcends the barriers of race.
Hurry Home Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 The same compact length as the novel that precedes it, Hurry Home similarly focuses upon the theme of rootlessness. Its ambitious protagonist, the honors graduate Cecil Otis Braithwaite, is in many ways an upscale Eddie Lawson with a wife and an advanced degree. After slaving through law school, supporting himself with
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a meager scholarship and his earnings as a janitor, Cecil has lost his aspirations and his love for his girlfriend, Esther Brown. In search of something more, he escapes from his wedding bed to Europe, where he roams indiscriminately for three years among its brothels as well as its art galleries. In the tradition of Robert Thurley of A Glance Away, two white men as displaced as Cecil attempt to guide him: Charles Webb, belatedly in search of an illegitimate son, and Albert, a mercenary in Webb’s employ who has also abandoned a wife. Too lost to save themselves, however, this pair can offer no enduring words of solace to Cecil. John Edgar Wideman (University of Wyoming) Hurry Home is more sophisticated than A Glance Away in its treatment of the isolation theme. It suggests, for example, that the upwardly mobile Cecil is not merely disturbed by his personal past; he is estranged as well from his African and European cultures of origin. On the other hand, nowhere does Hurry Home convey the hope that pervades its predecessor. Cecil travels more extensively than does Eddie to reclaim his past, yet he gains no meaningful key to it. Confronting his European heritage merely confirms his status as “a stranger in all . . . tongues.” He flees to the African continent by boat, “satisfied to be forever possessed,” only to be forever rebuffed from a past that “melts like . . . wax . . . as I am nearer . . . the flame.” When he returns at last to his Washington, D.C., tenement, the fruitlessness of his journey is underscored. There, he finds all the same as when he first entered following his miserable nuptials. Symbolically limning his rootlessness, he switches vocations, abandoning the tradition-steeped protocol of the bar for the faddish repertoire of a hairdresser. Thus, “hurry home,” the catchphrase for his odyssey, is an ironic one. Cecil really can claim no place where a heritage nurtures and sustains him, no history that he can truly call his own. Hurry Home displays a masterful style commensurate with that of the later Homewood novels. In addition to a more controlled stream-of-consciousness technique, recurring Christian symbols, icons of Renaissance art, and fragments from Moorish legend powerfully indicate Cecil’s fractured lineage. This second novel being a more refined paradigm than the first, Wideman seemed next inclined to break new ground, to address intently the racial polarization that had unsettled American society by the early 1970’s, producing that period’s most influential published works.
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The Homewood Trilogy Type of work: Novels and short fiction First published: Damballah, 1981; Hiding Place, 1981; Sent for You Yesterday, 1983 (pb. as The Homewood Trilogy, 1985) In The Homewood Trilogy, which comprises the short-story collection Damballah and the novels Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday, Wideman re-creates Homewood, the black section of Pittsburgh, and describes the myriad relationships among ancestors and a living African American family in the hundred years since slavery. Damballah is an African Voodoo god, “the good serpent of the sky.” The hero of the trilogy is John French, who specializes in a kind of benevolent fatherhood. Wideman’s return to Homewood through these novels convinces readers of his determination to find and understand his identity through tracing his roots as deep as he can. In Damballah and Hiding Place, Wideman furnishes a family tree. Readers are told of his great-great-great grandmother, who fled through the Underground Railroad with a white man to safety in Pittsburgh. Biological roots traced, the job of understanding begins. One sour apple on the family tree is Tommy. The character Tommy is actually Robby, Wideman’s brother. Tommy and Wideman are complex dimensions in finding the identity that Wideman seeks. The main character in Hiding Place, Tommy, is a fugitive from history as well as the law. He is taken in by Mama Bess, who is family and who represents what family does. Family tries to put together the “scars” and the “stories” that give young people their identities. Essentially, Hiding Place is the story of two lost souls, Mama Bess and Tommy. Mama Bess is lost because she has lost her husband and her son; she becomes a recluse, a fugitive living on a hill overlooking Pittsburgh, away from the family. Tommy is lost because he is too headstrong to listen and finds himself on the run after a scheme to rob a ghetto hoodlum ends in murder. Tommy does not want to hear the stories and learn about the scars; he is too absorbed in preservation. Sent for You Yesterday, through the characters of Doot and Albert Wilkes, the outspoken blues pianist, suggests that creativity and imagination are important means of transcending despair. Creativity also strengthens the common bonds of race, culture, and class. Homewood Trilogy is a monumental work of investigating and understanding the origins of self and identity.
Brothers and Keepers Type of work: Novel First published: 1984 Brothers and Keepers, Wideman’s most popular novel, is a psychologically realistic portrait of two brothers. Although they grow up in the same environment, Homewood, these brothers travel diverse paths. Wideman is a black star pulsing bril-
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liantly in a white universe; his brother, Robby, sinks into a life of crime and drug addiction. Robby’s path leads to his serving a life sentence without parole for taking part in a robbery in which a man was killed. Brothers and Keepers is a novel of tragic dimensions, grave despair, and spiritual survival. This novel had to be written as much for Wideman as for Robby. It is a homecoming for Wideman—a return to the community of brotherhood, concern, and understanding. In part 1, “Visits,” readers learn that although Wideman never sees his color as an obstacle to his own success, he views Robby as a black victim of society’s ills: “A brother behind bars, my own flesh and blood, raised in the same house by the same mother and father; a brother confined in prison has to be a mistake, a malfunctioning of the system.” In the second part of the novel, “Our Time,” Wideman describes his growth and maturation while he spends time with his brother on visits to the prison. Wideman is seen as searching for his own identity while he searches for reasons for Robby’s fall from grace. Learning that he needs as much help as Robby does, Wideman gains respect for Robby’s intelligence. Wideman also learns the truth about the foiled robbery attempt. In the final section, “Doing Time,” a spirituality operates to bring harmony to the two brothers. Especially moving is Robby’s graduation speech as he receives his associate degree, and his promise to Wideman that he will “forever pray.” From a sociological point of view, it is interesting that prison can rehabilitate someone like Robby and motivate him to work on his education. It is an equally moving experience to see Wideman connect with his own identity and return to his roots. Wideman learns that he cannot escape genetics or the ghetto. Until Robby is free, Wideman is not free.
Reuben Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 Traditions preserved and memories presented from black America’s African past form the backbeat of Reuben, Wideman’s next novel of community and interracial struggle. From a rusting trailer that his clients describe as part office, part altar to the gods, the dwarf Reuben serves the poor of Homewood in need of a lawyer, a psychologist, a warrior, or a priest. Like West African griots or oral scribes, who commit to unerring memory genealogies, triumphs, faults, and names, Reuben relies upon a mix of law and bureaucratic legerdemain that he has heard from his own employers and remembered. Like an obliging ancestral spirit shuttling prayers from this world to the next, Reuben negotiates pacts between the ghetto’s bombedout streets and the oak, plush, and marble interiors of City Hall. As he prescribes legal strategies and bestows grandfatherly advice, he also steers his clients to confront and abandon the views that have overturned their lives. When words and contracts alone will not do, Reuben rustles deep within collective memory and knots a
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charm: “A rag, a bone, a hank of hair. Ancient grains of rice. . . .” Reuben transforms garbage into power, excrement into nourishment, gristle into life. He preaches reincarnation and the nature of things dead to rise again, and he catalyzes his clients to seek similar transformations in themselves. Infused with magic and spiritualism, Reuben also is illustrated by the ravaged images of the inner city. Wideman likens ghetto buildings to the rat-infested holds of slave ships and the people in those buildings to roles of both predator and prey. Much of the Homewood population resembles a coffle of freshly branded slaves, slaves who are bound by laws instead of chains, by the welfare system or underworld crime instead of a plantation economy. Others are human versions of rats— snitching, beating, starving, stealing, and otherwise pestering their neighbors with an eat-or-be-eaten mentality. “There were historical precedents, parallels,” Reuben understands. “Indian scouts leading long-hairs to the hiding places of their red brethren. FBI informers, double agents, infiltrators of the sixties. An unsubtle variation of divide and conquer.” In this bleak landscape, the game of divide and conquer has changed little since enslavement.
Fever Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1989 While Damballah draws its cumulative power from its unifying narrative sensibility and its consistent focus upon the citizens past and present of Homewood, Fever: Twelve Stories demonstrates a much looser internal logic grounded in thematic rather than storytelling interlacings. Once again, Wideman uses the short story to escape the constraints of novelistic continuity and reconfigure—this time through unrelated voices—motifs that assume international proportions. His most striking theme correlates the historical catastrophes of American slavery, the Holocaust, and modern international terrorism, thereby suggesting a common pattern of scapegoating and racist antagonism that transcends the experience of any single group of victims. “The Statue of Liberty” and “Valaida,” for example, both demonstrate how episodes of interracial miscommunication and self-indulgent fantasizing about the imaginary “Other” continually compromise the possibility of real human engagement. Moreover, in the latter story, a Jewish Holocaust survivor relates to his black maid a story of the jazz performer, whose actions in a wartime concentration camp saved his life; her droll response resists the empathy he has attempted to build between them: “Always thought it was just you people over there doing those terrible things to each other.” In “Hostages,” an Israeli expatriate and daughter of Auschwitz survivors reflects on her first marriage to an Israeli Arab and her current marriage to a wealthy businessman who offers a prime target for Muslim terrorists; finally she sees herself as a hostage to the comfortable but isolated life she leads and meditates on the Talmudic lesson of the Lamed-Vov, or “God’s hos-
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tages,” predestined “sponges drawing mankind’s suffering into themselves.” “Fever,” the volume’s title story—and one of its most accomplished—depicts the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, a crisis attributed to African slaves brought up north from the Caribbean but in fact resulting from the internally bred corruption of the swamp-ridden city. A metaphor for the pervasive racial contagions of this ironically dubbed “City of Brotherly Love,” the fever levels all distinctions of race, gender, and class even as it triggers responses affirming them. The story’s protagonist, Richard Allen, is a minister exhausting himself in Christian service to dying whites and blacks alike. Eventually confronted by the angry monologue of an infected Jewish merchant unimpressed by his humanity, he too is told of the Lamed-Vov, the implication being that Allen has been arbitrarily selected “to suffer the reality humankind cannot bear,” enduring an unimaginable and unrelieved burden of “earth, grief and misery.” A nihilistic voice in the text, Abraham deconstructs Allen’s faith and further magnifies the din of conflicting perspectives—past and present, conciliatory and confrontational—that make the story the touchstone of the volume’s exploration of compassion as a limited but essential response to incomprehensible suffering, be its origins cosmic or human—or both. Elsewhere, Wideman contrasts vision versus blindness (“Doc’s Story” and “When It’s Time to Go”) to illustrate very different positionings by African Americans within the racially charged dominant culture through which they try to move. Wideman’s attunement to the musical textures of African American culture again asserts itself, as does his interest in the drama of the individual alienated from his root culture by his ambitions. “Surfiction” offers an exercise in postmodern pastiche that is both a self-conscious parody of the imaginative stasis to which contemporary critical and aesthetic practice can lead and a serious study of the ways in which human determination to communicate across the void poignantly subverts even the most sophisticated intellectual distancing devices. Finally, then, the reader of this volume is left musing on the cultural incompatibilities institutionalized by ideologies of difference—racial, gender, ethnic, nationalistic—and the heroic folly of the Richard Allens of the world, who resist them against all odds.
Philadelphia Fire Type of work: Novel First published: 1990 Philadelphia Fire, The Cattle Killing, and Two Cities are framed within a geographic shift from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. In keeping with Wideman’s fluid notion of history and myth as mutually interlocking categories of representation, Philadelphia Fire recasts the 1985 police bombing of the building occupied by the radical MOVE organization. John Africa, MOVE’s leader, is represented as Reverend King, who is described as “a nouveau Rousseau.” King leads a rebellion against the infringement on African American individual and communal rights couched in
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the guises of “urbanization” and “integration” by espousing an ideology that embraces a return to nature and a rejection of modern material values. Elsewhere, Wideman asserts that “the craziness of MOVE is their sanity; they were saying no to the system . . . it makes perfect sense. So the myth of integration is analogous to the prophecy of the cattle killing.”
The Stories of John Edgar Wideman Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1992 The Stories of John Edgar Wideman reprints two earlier collections—Damballah and Fever—and adds ten stories written especially for this volume and collected in it as All Stories Are True. The three collections are published here in reverse order, so that the reader begins with Wideman’s most recent stories and moves back through the two earlier collections. The Stories of John Edgar Wideman in some ways resembles a novel, for many of the stories have the same setting (the black Homewood section of Pittsburgh) and characters (relatives and other residents of Homewood, both now and in the past). Wideman’s best stories render twentieth century urban black life in vivid detail and history. Wideman, as this volume attests, is not always an easy writer. In any one story, he may mix several points of view, and several different narrative voices. Like Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, Wideman focuses on interior life—the thoughts and feelings of characters struggling to get through life. Action and incident are here incidental to the interior experiences of characters caught up in them. Similarly, there are often jumps between incidents and ideas that are not easy to follow, a narrative stream-of-consciousness that readers may find rather difficult. But, as is true of the best short story writers working today—Richard Ford, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates—the difficulties are their own reward, for Wideman renders American life in all its fullness and tragedy.
Fatheralong Type of work: Memoirs First published: 1994 The five essays that make up this short memoir are prefaced by “Common Ground,” which defines the assumptions of the whole collection, and in which Wideman makes his most important statements about race and society in America. Among its many scars, the “paradigm of race” denies black diversity and transforms color into a sign of class, culture, and inferiority. The antidotes to these distortions are the stories Wideman tells here which can help African Americans in their struggle to “reinvent” themselves by giving them “a glimpse of common ground where fathers
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and sons, mothers and daughters can sit down and talk, learn to talk and listen together again.” In essence, the five essays of Fatheralong describe trips Wideman takes with his father; put in socioeconomic terms, the book is about places, and about the history of African Americans getting to them: to America as slaves in the distant past; to the crossroads town of Promised Land, S.C., as survivors during Reconstruction; to Pittsburgh as black migrants in the beginning of the twentieth century looking for better work; and finally back to South Carolina as adults trying to understand something of “the miracle and disgrace” of this complex history. The trips are also psychological, for they describe Wideman’s attempt to understand his father, their common roots, and thus himself, and his relationship to his own sons. In many ways, these memoirs may remind readers of other contemporary African American writers such as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. Yet Fatheralong also reverberates with works by male writers as well, such as Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) and Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1993)—both part of an emergent literary consciousness of male roles and gender history. Like Richard Wright and James Baldwin before him, Wideman is making a wake-up call to America about race and racism. Like Roth and Rodriguez, Wideman is also giving a call about the sons who have been abandoned along the roadbed of American history, a renewed call about the responsibilities of fathers for their children—and the responsibility of the culture for that deteriorating relationship. At a time when politicians talk easily about taking children from welfare parents, Wideman’s book contains an important message.
The Cattle Killing Type of work: Novel First published: 1996 The title for the novel The Cattle Killing refers to the lies told to the African Xhosa people in order to make them believe that to combat European oppression they must kill their cattle. The cattle are their life force, and their destruction leads to the near annihilation of Xhosa culture. The people die as their cattle die, struck down because they believed the lie of the prophecy: “The cattle are the people. The people are the cattle.” Wideman subtly extends this metaphor to consider the problem of intraracial crime ravaging American inner cities and connects contemporary circumstances with the diseased and disintegrating conditions surrounding the yellow fever outbreak of eighteenth century Philadelphia. In all three instances—in Africa, in Philadelphia, in black urbania—there is a potential for annihilation because of an epidemic fueled by hysteria, exacerbated by racist ideology and carried out by those who believe the “lie” and perpetrate their self-destruction. The narrator of The Cattle Killing, Isaiah, called “Eye,” is an obvious recasting of the biblical figure who prophesies the downfall of the nation of Israel. He is a prophet who warns of false prophecies—in this case, the lie of inte-
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gration, which is, intricately entwined with modernization and its attenuating conspicuous consumption, the theme foregrounded in Philadelphia Fire. This text’s distinction from Philadelphia Fire, however, lies in the vision of hope with which readers are left: The Cattle Killing is also a love story.
Two Cities Type of work: Novel First published: 1998 The subtitle of this novel, A Love Story, creates expectations of romance, but instead readers are thrown into a world of violence, death, and loneliness. Kassima has experienced more loss in her thirty-five years than most people experience in their whole lives. Her husband has died of AIDS; her two sons have been killed by deadly gang violence. Robert Jones confronts the daily threat of violence as he lives his life as normally as one can among gangbangers’ turf wars. At age fifty, Robert and his generation can only watch and hold back their anger and despair as young men absurdly kill themselves and others. Old Mr. Mallory, having witnessed death in a world war and the street wars of America’s cities, awaits his own end. Love among such ruins—the ruins of neighborhoods, of families, of lives— saves a young woman from despair, a middle-aged man from loneliness, and an old man from meaninglessness. Wideman’s novel is also a story of two cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, run over and run down by violence. In Philadelphia, police attack the barricaded MOVE compound, killing eleven men, women, and children. OD’s diner becomes a site of burglary and murder. In Pittsburgh, red- and blue-clad boys in oversized parkas carrying oversized guns tear a world apart. In these two cities, death has become a fact of life. However, when Wideman speaks of two cities, he is not simply referring to geographic locations; he treats death and life as two concomitant modes of existence often indistinguishable one from the other. In Wideman’s world, life is shaped by death, by the images of death, and by its constant threat. Memories of times past and people who have died live in those who remain. As the characters in the novel learn, however, they find the strength to live and die through the power of love.
Suggested Readings Auger, Philip. Native Sons in No Man’s Land: Rewriting Afro-American Manhood in the Novels of Baldwin, Walker, Wideman, and Gaines. New York: Garland, 2000. Byerman, Keith Eldon. John Edgar Wideman: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
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Dubey, Madhu. “Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire.” African American Review 32 (Winter, 1998): 579-595. Hume, Kathryn. “Black Urban Utopia in Wideman’s Later Fiction.” Race & Class 45, no. 3 (January-March, 2004): 19-35. Mbalia, Doreatha D. John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. Rushdy, Ashraf. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 3 (Fall, 1991): 312-345. Samuels, Wilfred D. “Going Home: A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 6 (1983): 40-59. TuSmith, Bonnie, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Wilson, Matthew. “The Circles of History in John Edgar Wideman’s The Homewood Trilogy.” CLA Journal 33 (March, 1990): 239-259. Contributors: Barbara Cecelia Rhodes, Heather Russell Andrade, Margaret Boe Birns, Barbara A. McCaskill, and Barbara Kitt Seidman
Elie Wiesel Born: Sighet, Transylvania (now Romania); September 30, 1928 Jewish
Wiesel is the preeminent chronicler of the Holocaust whose fiction, nonfiction, and plays encompass Jewish lore, tradition, and memory, and relate the Jews’ unique human legacy. In recognition of his humanism and activism he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Principal works children’s literature: King Solomon and His Magic Ring, 1999 drama: Zalmen: Ou, La Folie de Dieu, pb. 1968 (Zalmen: Or, The Madness of God, 1974); Le Procès de Shamgorod tel qu’il se déroula le 25 février 1649, pb. 1979 (The Trial of God: As It Was Held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod, 1979) long fiction: L’Aube, 1960 (novella; Dawn, 1961); Le Jour, 1961 (novella; The Accident, 1962); La Ville de la chance, 1962 (The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964); Les Portes de la forêt, 1964 (The Gates of the Forest, 1966); Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, 1968 (A Beggar in Jerusalem, 1970); Le Serment de Kolvillàg, 1973 (The Oath, 1973); Le Testament d’un poète juif assassiné, 1980 (The Testament, 1981); Le Cinquième Fils, 1983 (The Fifth Son, 1985); Le Crépuscule, au loin, 1987 (Twilight, 1988); L’Oublié, 1989 (The Forgotten, 1992); Les Juges, 1999 (The Judges, 2002); Le Temps des déracinés, 2003 (The Time of the Uprooted, 2005) short fiction: Le Chant des morts, 1966 (essays and short stories; Legends of Our Time, 1968); Entre deux soleils, 1970 (essays and short stories; One Generation After, 1970); Un Juif aujourd’hui, 1977 (essays and short stories; A Jew Today, 1978) nonfiction: Un di Velt hot geshvign, 1956 (in Yiddish; 1958, in French as La Nuit; Night, 1960); Les Juifs du silence, 1966 (travel sketch; The Jews of Silence, 1966); Discours d’Oslo, 1987; Le mal et l’exil: Recontre avec Élie Wiesel, 1988 (Evil and Exile, 1990); From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences, 1990; A Journey of Faith, 1990 (with John Cardinal O’Connor); Tous les fleuves vont á la mer, 1994 (memoir; All Rivers Run to the Sea, 1995); Et la mer n’est pas remplie, 1996 (And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1999); Le Mal et l’exil: Dix ans après, 1999; Conversations with Elie Wiesel, 2001 (Thomas J. Vinciguerra, editor); After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust, 2002; Elie Wiesel: Conversations, 2002 (Robert Franciosi, editor); Wise Men and Their Tales: Potraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, 2003 1135
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miscellaneous: Célébration hassidique, 1972-1981 (2 volumes; biographical sketches and stories; volume 1 Souls on Fire, 1972; volume 2 Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends, 1982); Ani Maamin: Un Chant perdu et retrouvé, 1973 (cantata; Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again, 1973); Célébration biblique, 1975 (biographical sketches and stories; Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, 1976); Four Hasidic Masters and Their Struggle Against Melancholy, 1978 (biographical sketches and stories); Images from the Bible, 1980 (biographical sketches and stories); Five Biblical Portraits, 1981 (biographical sketches and stories); Paroles d’étranger, 1982 (biographical sketches and stories); Somewhere a Master, 1982 (biographical sketches and stories); The Six Days of Destruction: Meditations Towards Hope, 1988 (with Albert H. Friedlander); Silences et mémoire d’hommes: Essais, histoires, dialogues, 1989; Célébration talmudique: Portraits et légendes, 1991; Sages and Dreamers: Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Portraits and Legends, 1991; Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, 1998 (Alan Rosen, editor); Célébration prophétique: Portraits et légendes, 1998 As a young teen, Elie Wiesel (EH-lee vee-ZEHL) led a sheltered, bookish adolescence that was forever shattered in 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary and rounded up all its Jews, including the Wiesel family. The fifteen-year-old Elie was deported to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in April, 1945. The horrors he saw there, the despair he felt, the anger he directed at God were later themes in his literary and nonfiction writings. Shortly after the war, Elie went to France, where he learned the language and developed a lifelong passion for philosophy and literature. When, in 1955, French novelist François Mauriac urged him to bear witness to the six million Jews murdered in Europe’s concentration camps, Wiesel wrote the acclaimed Night. First published in Yiddish, then French, then English, the book began as an eighthundred-page manuscript but was cut to about one hundred pages of terrifyingly bald description of what happened to Wiesel. Night is a wrenching account of evil and a terrifying indictment of God. He next published novels presenting the anguished guilt of those who survived the mass slaughter. Central to the protagonists’ conduct and outlook is the belief that every act is ambiguous and implies a loss of innocence. By rejoining the religious community, however, the survivor may finally transform despair into joy. A Beggar in Jerusalem shows how a tormented people came of age. Celebrating Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, the novel is a memorial to the dead and an appeal for the world’s beggars. Although still haunted by the Holocaust, Wiesel could thereafter address other problems confronting the next generation—from madness as an escape from persecution to silence as a means of overcoming horror. In 1969, Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, who was to become his principal translator and with whom he would have one son. In the fall of 1972, he began his tenure at the City College of New York as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies. This endowed chair gave him the opportunity to teach young students (he considered himself an educator first) the celebrations and paradoxes
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of Jewish theology and the meaning of modern Jewishness and to continue writing in diverse genres. He left this position in 1976 to become the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University. In 1982 he was the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University, and from 1997 to 1999 he held the Ingeborg Rennert Visiting Professorship of Judaic Studies at Barnard College. During this period Wiesel also was involved in various social and political activities, from fighting against racism, war, fanaticism, apartheid, and violence to commemorating the Holocaust. In fact, some historians credit him with introducing “Holocaust” as the primary name for the Nazis’ death camps policy. (He was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council until 1986, when he resigned in protest over U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s controversial visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany.) For his humanitarian work and his concern for the oppressed everywhere, as well as for his literary achievements, he received numerous honorary degrees, prizes, and awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal, the rank of Commander in the French Legion d’honneur, and, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize. It was bestowed both for his practical work in the cause of peace and for his message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity.” He used the money from the prize to establish the Elie Wiesel Foundation, which is dedicated to combat indifference and misinformation about the Holocaust through international dialogue and educational programs. Moreover, in 1992 he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996, and in 2006 was awarded an honorary knighthood from the United Kingdom for his efforts in Holocaust education there. Meanwhile, Wiesel continued to publish plays, novels, and nonfiction at a prolific pace, producing more than forty books; in these he again wove post-Holocaust despair and divine cruelty, but above all he denounced the world’s forgetfulness of and indifference to humankind’s inhumanity to humans. In 1995 he published the first volume of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, which describes his childhood in Romania, internment in concentration camps, life in France following World War II, and life in the United States until 1969 and his marriage to Marion. The second volume, And the Sea Is Never Full, appeared in 1999 and takes up the story of his writing and activism into the late 1990’s. In 1999 he also added children’s literature to his accomplishments with the publication of King Solomon and the Magic Ring. Among Wiesel’s late novels is The Judges, a moral fable set in Connecticut, and Time of the Uprooted, which concerns a Czech refugee from World War II who was raised in Hungary and moved to New York, working as a ghost writer and struggling with the lasting effects of the Holocaust on his morality, ability to love, and faith. While writing, Wiesel continued his efforts at peace and reconciliation. He became a member of the Human Rights Foundation, and in 2004 the Romanian government invited him to head what came to be known as the Wiesel Commission to study the history of the Holocaust in Romania. In 2006, with American actor George Clooney, he testified before the United Nations Security Council,
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urging it to confront the humanitarian disaster wrought by Sudan’s civil war. Wiesel also was a popular lecturer, often to the consternation of his critics. In 2007 he was attacked and nearly kidnapped by a Holocaust denier while staying in a hotel in San Francisco, California.
Night Type of work: Memoir First published: Un di Velt hot geshvign, 1956; La Nuit, 1958 (English translation, 1960) Night, Wiesel’s memoir of the Holocaust, tells of his concentration camp experience. Encompassing events from the end of 1941 to 1945, the book ponders a series of questions, whose answers, Moché the Beadle, who was miraculously saved from an early German massacre, reminds the boy, lie “only within yourself.” Moché, who teaches the boy the beauty of biblical studies, is a strange character with a clownish awkwardness, more God’s madman than mentally ill; he is also a recurring figure in later Wiesel works. After Moché returns to town to describe the horrible scenes he has witnessed, no one listens to this apparently insane rambler who, like Cassandra, repeats his warnings in vain. The clown, a moving and tragic fool, is unable to convince the Jewish community of its impending doom. Despite arrests, ghettoizations, and mass deportations, the Jews still cannot believe him, even as they embark for Auschwitz. In 1944, the young narrator is initiated into the horrors of the archipelago of Nazi death camps. There he becomes A-7713, deprived of name, self-esteem, identity. He observes and undergoes hunger, exhaustion, cold, suffering, brutality, executions, cruelty, breakdown in personal relationships, and flames and smoke coming from crematories in the German death factories. In the barracks of terror, where he sees the death of his mother and seven-year-old sister, his religious faith is corroded. The world no longer represents God’s mind. Comparing himself to Job, he bitterly asks God for an explanation of such evil. The boy violently rejects God’s presence and God’s justice, love, and mercy: “I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man.” After a death march and brutally cruel train ride, young Wiesel and his father arrive at Buchenwald, where his father soon dies of malnutrition and dysentery. As in a daze, the son waits to be killed by fleeing German soldiers. Instead, he coolly notes, on April 11, 1945, “at about six o’clock in the evening, the first American tank stood at the gates of Buchenwald.” In addition to wanting to elucidate the unfathomable secret of death and theodicy, the narrator lived a monstrous, stunted, and isolated existence as an adult. He saw himself as victim, executioner, and spectator. By affirming that he was not divided among the three but was in fact all of them at once, he was able to resolve his identity problem. The autobiography’s last image shows Wiesel looking at himself in a mirror: The body and soul are wounded, but the night and its nightmares are finally over.
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A Beggar in Jerusalem Type of work: Novel First published: Le Mendiant de Jérusalem, 1968 (English translation, 1970) A Beggar in Jerusalem is told in the first person by David, heir to a bloody history of anti-Semitic persecutions. It is a novel in which Jewish survivors of destruction must confront their miraculous escape. In the process, although they suffer from guilt and anger, they ultimately forge an identity based on hope. In June, 1967, the forty-year-old David goes to fight against the united Arab armies. He wishes to die in order to finally overcome the despair caused by God’s abandonment of the Jews during World War II and by his own pointless survival. At the front, he meets Katriel, and both soon agree that whoever comes back will tell the other’s story. Israel wins a resounding victory in what comes to be called the Six-Day War, and as the narrative opens, there are celebrations all over the land, especially in Jerusalem. Katriel, however, does not come back. David not only tells his comrade’s story—much as King David told of Absalom— but also wonders whether he ought to live it as well. This he does, at the end, by marrying Katriel’s widow, not out of love, which would imply a total gift of self and of which he does not feel himself capable, but rather out of affection and sympathy, perhaps out of friendship. The hero has realized that, beyond suffering and bitterness, he can arrive at self-discovery. Whereas Albert Camus favored revolt in the face of the absurd, Wiesel advocates laughter. By laughing one succeeds in conquering oneself, and by dominating one’s fear one learns to laugh: “Let our laughter drown all the noises of the earth, all the regrets of mankind.” There is no longer a need to search for an antidote against distress, but simply to abandon oneself to the joy of an event without precedent—the reunion of Israel with Jerusalem, uniting those absent and present, the fighters and mad beggars, in similar euphoria and similar ecstasy: “I want to laugh and it is my laughter I wish to offer to Jerusalem, my laughter and not my tears.” In his tireless attempt to understand the awesome and terrifying mystery of Jewish suffering, the once-tormented David is resolutely optimistic, for the recaptured JeruElie Wiesel (© The Nobel Foundation)
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salem means the end of despair for Jews in Israel and abroad. The victory celebrations are a memorial to the dead, a song to and of life, and an appeal on behalf of history’s wandering outcasts—the allegorical beggars who, after the annihilation of European Jewry, have come to Jerusalem to give God the last chance to save his people.
All Rivers Run to the Sea Type of work: Autobiography First published: Tous les fleuves vont à la mer, 1994 (English translation, 1995) Taking the title of his autobiography from Ecclesiastes, Wiesel presents the important people and events of his life, beginning with his childhood in Sighet, Romania, and culminating in his 1969 marriage in Jerusalem. Wiesel, through stories and remembrances, tells of a family full of piety, moral courage, and selfless devotion to Judaism. From his mother and grandmother, Elie learned goodness and love; from his grandfather, the Jewish legends he would later use in fiction and essays; from his father, rectitude and altruism. His teachers, at various times of his life, inculcated in him a reverence for learning, an exactness in biblical or philosophical discourse, and above all the joy, sadness, and truth of the old masters. World War II and the persecution of the Jews destroyed Wiesel’s idyllic world forever. He and his family were taken to Auschwitz. He later was transferred to Buchenwald. Unable to understand German cruelty, angry at those who did not intervene on the victims’ behalf, angry too at God for letting it happen, Wiesel emerged alive after terrible trials. At age seventeen he was endowed with a special knowledge of life and death. Shortly after his liberation from Buchenwald he went to France, where he eventually enrolled at the university, enduring hardship and contemplating suicide. Saved by Zionist fervor, he worked as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper in Paris. A crucial meeting with novelist François Mauriac in 1955 was to decide his literary career: Mauriac encouraged him to break his self-imposed silence about his experience in concentration camps and found a publisher for Wiesel’s first novel, La Nuit (1958; Night, 1960), to which he contributed the foreword. After Wiesel moved to New York to become his newspaper’s American correspondent, he soon applied for U.S. citizenship. In a series of amusing anecdotes he describes his life in a Jewish American milieu. He also tells of his relations with his French publishers and of his meeting with Marion, his future wife and translator. More moving and bittersweet are his return to his native town, where relatives and friends have disappeared and only the ghosts of his youth remain; his personal and literary campaign for Russian Jewry; the fear caused by the Six-Day War of 1967, since it could have meant the end of Israel and the Jewish dream; and his prayer of thanksgiving at the newly liberated Wailing Wall. Throughout, a celebration of life and of the great Hasidic teachers and thinkers
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as well as a moral and ethical strength permeates Wiesel’s conduct and writings over his first forty years. In memorializing his relatives and friends and in bearing witness to their passing, he leaves his own mark behind.
Suggested Readings Berenbaum, Michael. Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel. West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1994. Bloom, Harold, ed. Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” New York: Chelsea House, 2001. Horowitz, Rosemary, ed. Elie Wiesel and the Art of Storytelling. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Horowitz, Sara. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Kolbert, Jack. The Worlds of Elie Wiesel: An Overview of His Career and His Major Themes. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2001. Mass, Wendy, ed. Readings on “Night.” New York: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Patterson, David. The Shriek of Silence: A Phenomenology of the Holocaust Novel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Rosen, Alan, ed. Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Roth, John K., and Frederick Sontag. The Questions of Philosophy. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1988. Sibelman, Simon P. Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Wiesel, Elie, and Richard D. Heffner. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. Edited by Thomas J. Vinciguerra. New York: Schocken, 2001. Contributor: Pierre L. Horn
John A. Williams Born: Jackson, Mississippi; December 5, 1925 African American
One of the most prolific and influential writers of his era, Williams infused his works with self-exploration, reflecting the collective social experience of African Americans. Principal works drama: Last Flight from Ambo Ber, pr. 1981; Vanqui, pr. 1999 (libretto) long fiction: The Angry Ones, 1960 (also known as One for New York); Night Song, 1961; Sissie, 1963; The Man Who Cried I Am, 1967; Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability, 1969; Captain Blackman, 1972; Mothersill and the Foxes, 1975; The Junior Bachelor Society, 1976; !Click Song, 1982; The Berhama Account, 1985; Jacob’s Ladder, 1987; Clifford’s Blues, 1998 poetry: Safari West, 1998 nonfiction: Africa: Her History, Lands and People, 1962; The Protectors: The Heroic Story of the Narcotics Agents, Citizens, and Officials in Their Unending, Unsuing Battles Against Organized Crime in America and Abroad, 1964 (as J. Dennis Gregory with Harry J. Ansliger); This Is My Country Too, 1965; The King God Didn’t Save: Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1970; The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright, 1970; Flashbacks: A Twenty-Year Diary of Article Writing, 1973; Minorities in the City, 1975; If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor, 1991; Way B(l)ack Then and Now: A Street Guide to African Americans in Paris, 1992 (with Michel Fabre) edited texts: The Angry Black, 1962; Beyond the Angry Black, 1966; Amistad I, 1970 (with Charles F. Harris); Amistad II, 1971 (with Harris); The McGraw-Hill Introduction to Literature, 1985 (with Gilbert H. Muller); Bridges: Literature Across Cultures, 1994 (with Muller) John Alfred Williams was born near Jackson, Mississippi, in Hinds County, to Ola and John Henry Williams. Williams’s mother, whose African name means “Keeper of the Beautiful House” or “He Who Wants to Be Chief,” had been born in Mississippi; his father’s roots were in Syracuse, New York, where the couple met. When Williams was six months old, he returned with his mother to Syracuse. The family resided in the multiethnic Fifteenth Ward, and Williams attended Washington Irving Elementary, Madison Junior High, and Central High School. Joining the 1142
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Navy in 1943, Williams served in the Pacific, and after discharge in 1946 and his return to Syracuse he completed his secondary education, followed by a brief term at Morris Brown College in Atlanta and then enrollment at Syracuse University, where he studied creative writing. In 1947, he married Carolyn Clopton, with whom he had two sons, Gregory and Dennis. In 1950, Williams earned his B.A. and continued at Syracuse to pursue graduate study. During this period, he worked at a variety of jobs—foundry work, social work, public relations, insurance, radio and television—while developing as a journalist. Following the failure of his marriage in 1952 and a brief stay in California in 1954, he was determined to become a professional writer. In 1946, he contributed pieces to the Syracuse newspaper, the Progressive Herald, continuing through 1955 as a reporter for the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Los Angeles Tribune, and the Village Voice. After moving to New York in 1954, he worked for a vanity publisher, Comet Press, in 1955-1956 and at Abelard-Schuman in 1957-1958. In 1958, Williams was director of information for the American Committee on Africa, a reporter for Jet magazine, and a stringer for the Associated Negro Press. Based in Barcelona for a period, he was employed in 1959 by WOV Radio in New York; his first published novel, The Angry Ones, appeared in 1960. Though Williams was nominated in 1962 for the Prix de Rome by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his name was withdrawn for reasons that Williams attributed to his upcoming interracial marriage. In 1963 Williams contributed an article to Ebony magazine and began writing for Holiday. He became an Africa correspondent for Newsweek in 1964, and in 1965 he married Lorrain Isaac, with whom he had a son, Adam. Williams began his career in higher education in 1968, teaching at the College of the Virgin Islands and the City College of New York. He held positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Hawaii, Boston University, New York University, University of Houston, and Bard College. In 1979 he began teaching at Rutgers University; he was named Paul Robeson Professor of English at Rutgers in 1990, and he retired in 1994. Safari West won the 1998 American Book Award. Williams’s novels draw on personal experience, though they are John A. Williams (Library of Congress) not strictly autobiographical; they
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reflect the racial issues facing American society, especially during the Civil Rights movement. Williams writes in the clear, readable prose of the journalist; his plot structures mix linear time with flashback passages to achieve a seamless continuity. His characters have been writers, jazz musicians, black mothers, and military veterans, and his themes have addressed the hardships of the black writer, the expatriate in Europe, black family life, interracial relationships, and political conspiracy. The presentation of jazz is a frequent element, and New York City is a repeated setting, though Williams has also depicted the Caribbean and Africa.
The Angry Ones Type of work: Novel First published: 1960 Williams’s first novel is a first-person narrative drawing on autobiographical elements. Like Williams, Stephen Hill, the African American main character, is a World War II veteran who works for a vanity press in New York. Early in the novel, Williams refers to African and Native American origins and jazz contexts. The novel is principally about Steve’s relationships with his employer, coworkers, and friends. One of Steve’s closest associates is Linton Mason, a white former collegemate and editor at McGraw-Hill. The novel uses Lint’s success in publishing to indicate the racial divide, sexual jealousy, and the benefits of being white in America. Another theme is the search for a meaningful relationship, the choice between interracial and intraracial love. The causes of black “anger” are linked to Steve’s frustrating attempts to rise within the company run by Rollie Culver and, generally, the treatment of black men in New York’s publishing world, symbolized by the suicide of Steve’s black friend Obie Roberts. The novel presents racism through the day-to-day experiences of the main character.
Night Song Type of work: Novel First published: 1961 Set in Greenwich Village, New York, in the 1950’s, Night Song is a “jazz novel” that mirrors the life of famed alto saxophonist Charlie Parker through the portrayal of Eagle (Richie Stokes), a drug-addicted musician who retains the capabilities of jazz performance despite his debilitation. Eagle befriends the alcoholic David Hillary, an out-of-work white college professor employed in the jazz café run by Keel Robinson, a former black preacher and Harvard graduate involved in an interracial relationship with Della. Each of the characters is fractured, most notably Eagle, whose alcoholism and addiction are implicitly the result of the racist treatment of
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the black artist. Williams portrays David as a savior and betrayer of Eagle; David’s “healing” is the ironic result of his association with Eagle, Keel, and Della.
Sissie Type of work: Novel First published: 1963 Named after the mother of two principal characters, Iris and Ralph, Sissie is divided into four parts. Through memories, the novel presents the stories of Iris, Ralph, and Sissie Joplin, with Sissie’s history revealed in parts 3 and 4, resulting in a Joplin family saga. Iris’s story, her failed marriage, her career in Europe, and her relationship with the jazz musician called Time, is the first extended flashback. Ralph’s recollections, his experiences in the military, and his struggle as a writer in New York are presented through psychoanalysis, a device that reveals racial issues from the viewpoint of a white psychologist, a symbol of societal norms. Sissie Joplin, a matriarchal figure, has an affair that threatens the stability of her marriage, which undergoes numerous challenges, such as the difficulty of surviving economic hard times and the struggle to find personal fulfillment through love. Sissie is ultimately the catalyst for Ralph and Iris’s recognition of their family’s conflicted yet sustaining experiences.
The Man Who Cried I Am Type of work: Novel First published: 1967 Williams’s best-received and perhaps most influential work, The Man Who Cried I Am revolves around Max Reddick, an African American writer reunited in Amsterdam with his Dutch former wife, Margrit. Williams presents, within a twenty-fourhour time period, the downward spiral of Reddick, a Chester Himes figure, who is suffering from colon cancer. Through flashbacks, Reddick’s recollections of a thirty-year past present the social experience of black Americans through the civil rights era. The novel portrays Reddick’s association with Harry Ames, a character based on black novelist Richard Wright, who has uncovered the King Alfred Plan, a plot to place America’s black population in concentration camps. Other characters in the novel also resemble actual black writers or political figures, such as Marion Dawes, a James Baldwin type; Paul Durrell, a Martin Luther King, Jr., replica; and Minister Q, a Malcolm X parallel. Furthermore, Williams develops African characters, such as Jaja Enzkwu, who reveals the King Alfred Plan to Harry Ames. The involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Reddick’s death points to an international conspiracy against black people, demonstrating Williams’s tragic vision of global race relations.
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Captain Blackman Type of work: Novel First published: 1972 An exploration of black contributions in American wars, this novel employs a narrative strategy in which time is fluid. At the outset, Captain Blackman, a Vietnam War soldier who teaches his troops the history of black Americans in the military, is wounded and trapped by the Viet Cong. His hallucinations are used to develop scenes in various periods of American wars, from the American Revolution through Vietnam. In these settings, Blackman experiences battle and the racial circumstances affecting black troops. The novel mixes fictional characterizations with historical fact, as in the reference to the Battle of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution. Williams portrays a possible nuclear armageddon, in which black people become the forces of control, though the reversal of power from black to white is itself part of the dream visions of Blackman.
!Click Song Type of work: Novel First published: 1982 Williams !Click Song considered to be the novel in which he achieved the most effective coalescence of his literary intentions, and it won the 1983 American Book Award. Named for a vocal sound found in the Xhosa language of South Africa, !Click Song follows two writers, one black, the other white and Jewish. Using flashbacks, manipulating linear time, the narrative develops the literary careers of Cato Douglass and Paul Cummings in parallel. Divided into three sections, “Beginnings,” “Middle,” and “Endings,” the narrative uses the first-person point of view of Cato as a representation of the journey of the black American writer. Beginning with the funeral of Paul, who committed suicide, the novel returns to the undergraduate experiences of the two veterans as they pursue their creative writing. Parallels to Williams’s life are inescapable, especially in the treatment of Cato’s career. However, Williams goes beyond mere autobiography by using Cato to symbolize the black artist who resists cultural falsehood, as in the closing section in which Cato in the 1960’s offers a countertext to the withholding of information about black culture by major museums.
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Jacob’s Ladder Type of work: Novel First published: 1987 Jacob’s Ladder explores the predicament of an African American military attaché, Jacob Henry (Jake), caught in the turmoil of American destabilizing efforts in Pandemi, a fictitious West African country, where he had spent part of his youth as the son of a black American missionary. Resembling Liberia, Pandemi is ruled by Chuma Fasseke, Jake’s childhood friend. The government of Chuma Fasseke has replaced that of the Franklins, a family descended from nineteenth century repatriated African Americans. The novel also offers a parallel to Nigeria in the portrayal of Taiwo Shaguri, the head of state of Temian. Containing elements of an espionage thriller, Jacob’s Ladder proposes that an African country can attain nuclear capabilities. Williams humanizes Jake and Fasseke, creating a work deeper than clandestine intrigue. The final sections describe the fall of Fasseke and the takeover of the nuclear power plant by his opposition, assisted by the CIA. The epilogue uses the ironic device of the press release to show the perspective of the international press.
Suggested Readings Cash, Earl A. John A. Williams: The Evolution of a Black Writer. New York: Third Press, 1975. Fleming, Robert. “John A. Williams.” Black Issues Book Review 4 (July/August, 2002): 46-49. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Nadel, Alan. “My Country Too: Time, Place, and Afro-American Identity in the Work of John Williams.” Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 2, no. 3 (1987): 25-41. Ramsey, Priscilla R. “John A. Williams: The Black American Narrative and the City.” In The City in African-American Literature, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Reilly, John M. “Thinking History in The Man Who Cried I Am.” Black American Literature Forum 21, nos. 1/2 (1987): 25-42. Ro, Sigmund. “Toward the Post-Protest Novel: The Fiction of John A. Williams.” In Rage and Celebration: Essays on Contemporary Afro-American Writing. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Smith, Virginia W. “Sorcery, Double-Consciousness, and Warring Souls: An Intertextual Reading of Middle Passage and Captain Blackman.” African American Review 30 (Winter, 1996): 659-674. Tal, Kali. “‘That Just Kills Me.’” Social Text 20 (Summer, 2002): 65-92. Contributor: Joseph McLaren
August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel) Born: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; April 27, 1945 Died: Seattle, Washington; October 2, 2005 African American
Wilson made an ambitious effort to create a cycle of ten plays examining African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. Principal works drama: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, pr. 1984, pb. 1985; Fences, pr., pb. 1985; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, pr. 1986, pb. 1988; The Piano Lesson, pr. 1987, pb. 1990; Two Trains Running, pr. 1990, pb. 1992; Three Plays, pb. 1991; Seven Guitars, pr. 1995, pb. 1996; Jitney, pr. 2000, pb. 2001; King Hedley II, pr. 2001, pb. 2005; Gem of the Ocean, pr. 2003, pb. 2006; How I Learned What I Learned, pr. 2003; Radio Golf, pr. 2005, pb. 2007 teleplay: The Piano Lesson, 1995 (adaptation of his play) nonfiction: The Ground on Which I Stand, 2000 August Wilson considered contact with one’s roots to be a crucial source of strength, and his plays explore and celebrate African American culture. Wilson’s plays also acknowledge the white racism that has marked African American history. Black experience in America contains, Wilson has noted, “all the universalities.” His work received wide acclaim, winning Pulitzers and numerous other awards. Wilson’s father was a white baker from Germany, and his mother was a black cleaning woman who had moved to Pittsburgh from rural North Carolina. His father “wasn’t around much,” according to Wilson, and he and his brothers and sisters grew up in a financially strapped single-parent household “in a cultural environment which was black.” At age twelve Wilson discovered and read through the small “Negro section” of the public library. In 1965, Wilson decided to become a writer and adopted his mother’s maiden name, becoming August Wilson (which he legally formalized in the early 1970’s) instead of Frederick August Kittel. He began living on his own in a rooming house in the black area of Pittsburgh known as the Hill, while writing poetry and supporting himself in a series of menial jobs. In 1965, he also discovered the blues, which he acknowledges as “the greatest source of my inspiration.” Wilson identified three 1148
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other B’s as influences: Amiri Baraka, some of whose plays Wilson directed in the 1960’s at the Black Horizons Theater Company that Wilson cofounded; the art of Romare Bearden, noted for his collages of black life; and the stories of Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. In addition, he acknowledged the influence of South African playwright Athol Fugard. In 1978, Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where, surrounded by white voices, he began to create characters who spoke a poeticized version of the black English he had heard on the Hill. Lloyd Richards—then dean of the Yale School of Drama—directed Wilson’s first major dramatic success, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and began a long-term working relationship with Wilson, who sees Richards as a father figure and professional mentor, with insight into Wilson’s plays because of his own roots in black culture. After Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Wilson realized he had written three plays set in different decades and decided to complete a historical cycle, with a play for each decade of the twentieth century. He used Pittsburgh as a setting for his plays after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (which is set in Chicago), causing him to be compared to other artists who cast real locales as near characters in their fiction, such as James Joyce (who used Dublin) and William Faulkner (who used the area around Oxford, Mississippi). This cycle, the Pittsburgh or Century cycle, would eventually include ten plays, each covering a decade, in the following order: • 1900’s: Gem of the Ocean (2003) • 1910’s: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) • 1920’s: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) • 1930’s: The Piano Lesson (1989) • 1940’s: Seven Guitars (1995) • 1950’s: Fences (1985) • 1960’s: Two Trains Running (1990) • 1970’s: Jitney (1983) • 1980’s: King Hedley II (2001) • 1990’s: Radio Golf (2005) Two of these plays—The Piano Lesson and Fences—won the Pulitzer Prize in drama. Divorced in 1990 from his second wife, Wilson moved to Seattle, Washington. There he continued to write his cycle of plays, participated as a dramaturge at the Eugene O’Neill Center, and, with his co-producer, Ben Mordecai, formed a joint venture called Sageworks, which gave Wilson artistic and financial control of his plays. Wilson married a third time, to Constanza Romero, and they had a daughter, Azula. Wilson died in 2005 at the age of sixty after battling liver cancer.
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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Type of work: Drama First produced: 1984, pb. 1985 Set in 1927 in a Chicago recording studio, Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom explores the values and attitudes toward life and music of the classic blues singer Ma Rainey. Their economic exploitation as African American musicians in a white-controlled recording industry, as well as their inferior social status in the majority white culture, become evident in the play’s dialogue and action. As Ma Rainey puts it: “If you colored and can make them some money, then you all right with them. Otherwise, you just a dog in the alley.” For Rainey, the blues is “a way of understanding life” that gives folks a sense they are not alone: “This be an empty world without the blues.” As such, the blues has been a source of strength for African Americans, and performers like Ma Rainey have been bearers of cultural identity. A major theme of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and of other plays by Wilson is the necessity of acknowledging one’s past and connecting with one’s culture. African American identity, however, with its roots in Africa and the rural South, is at times rejected by the members of Ma Rainey’s band. The pianist, Toledo, for example, points out the “ancestral retention” involved in the bass player’s trying to get some marijuana from another band member by naming things they have done together—in effect, an African appeal to a bond of kinship. Toledo’s observation is immediately rejected by the bass player, who replies: “I ain’t no African!” and by Levee, the trumpet player, who remarks: “You don’t see me running around in no jungle with no bone between my nose.” Levee also has a loathing for the South, which he associates with sharecropping and general backwardness. Levee’s disregard for African American heritage extends to Ma Rainey’s style of blues, which he calls “old jug-band street.” He resents her refusal to use his jazzed-up arrangements and, at the tragic end of the play, when his hopes for a recording contract of his own are dashed, his rage is misdirected at Toledo, who happens to step on his shoe, and whom he stabs with his knife.
Fences Type of work: Drama First produced: 1985, pb. 1985 Troy Maxson, the protagonist of Wilson’s Fences, is the son of a frustrated sharecropper whose harshness drove off his wives and Troy. Troy has made his way north to a world where African Americans live in shacks and are unable to find work. Troy takes to stealing, kills a man, and is sent to prison, where he learns how to play baseball, which he loves and at which he excels. Segregation confines Troy, after prison, to the Negro Leagues. He is angry at the racism that frus-
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trates his attempt at achieving the American Dream in the most American of sports, but he remains resilient. Fences celebrates his indomitable spirit, while acknowledging his flaws. The play opens in 1957, when Troy is fifty-three years old. He is appealing in the zest with which he dramatizes his life. A battle with pneumonia becomes a time when he wrestles with a white-robed and hooded Death, and buying furniture on credit from a white man becomes making a deal with the devil. His friend Bono seems to acknowledge the African American tradition of these tall tales when he comments: “You got some Uncle Remus in your blood.” The audiAugust Wilson (AP/Wide World Photos) ence learns of Troy’s admirable defiance at work in questioning the sanitation department’s policy of having all the whites drive while the blacks do the lifting. Troy also has an affectionate teasing relationship with Bono and his wife Rose. As the play continues, however, Troy erects fences between himself and those he loves. He refuses to allow his son to accept a football fellowship to college and then forces him to leave home. Troy loses contact with Bono after being promoted at work. Troy hurts his wife through an extramarital affair, and he commits his brain-damaged brother, Gabe, to a mental institution so he can collect part of Gabe’s government checks. Although Troy has tragic flaws, the ending of Fences is not tragic. A spirit of reconciliation is brought by Gabe, who has been allowed to leave the mental hospital to attend his brother’s funeral. Gabe thinks that, when he blows his trumpet, Saint Peter will open the pearly gates and allow Troy into Heaven. Gabe’s horn lacks a mouthpiece, however, and, distraught, he performs a dance, connected, presumably, to pre-Christian African ancestors. In performance, the stage is then flooded with light, indicating that the gates have opened.
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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Type of work: Drama First produced: 1986, pb. 1988 In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson reaches further back into the historical black experience. As in the old blues song of the same title, the brother of the governor of Tennessee, Joe Turner, found and enslaved groups of black men. Herald Loomis, the mysterious central character in this play, was so enslaved in 1901 and not released for seven years. The play dramatizes his search for his wife, which is actually a search for himself. His arrival at a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911 disrupts and disturbs, creating the tension and significance of the drama. Another boardinghouse resident, Bynum, establishes his identity as a “conjure man” or “rootworker” early in the play. Bynum’s search for his “shiny man” becomes a thematic and structural tie for the play. At the end of the first act, during a joyous African call-and-response dance, Loomis has a sort of ecstatic fit, ending with his being unable to stand and walk. Some kind of dramatic resolution must relate Bynum’s vision and Loomis’s quest. It comes in the final scene when wife Martha returns and Loomis learns that his quest is still unrealized. Wilson describes Loomis’s transformation in actions rather than words. His wife does not restore him, nor does her religion restore him. In desperation, he turns a knife on himself, rubs his hands and face in his own blood, looks down at his hands, and says, “I’m standing. My legs stood up! I’m standing now!” It is at this point that he has found his “song of self-sufficiency.” Wilson’s rather poetic stage directions articulate a redemption that Loomis cannot verbalize, risking audience misinterpretation. Bynum’s final line of the play recognizes Loomis as a shiny man, the shiny man who can tell him the meaning of life. The suggestion of a Christ figure is unmistakable, and yet Loomis’s soul is not cleansed through religious belief. He has denied the Christ of the white man, despite Martha’s pleading. His epiphany is in finding himself. Joe Turner has come but he has also gone. Herald Loomis finds his identity in his own African roots, not in the slave identity that the white Joe Turner had given him.
The Piano Lesson Type of work: Drama First produced: 1987, pb. 1990 With his fourth major play, Wilson crafted a more tightly structured plot. In fact, The Piano Lesson is stronger thematically and structurally than it is in character development. The characters serve to dramatize the conflict between the practical use of a family heritage to create a future, and a symbolic treasuring of that heritage to honor the past. The piano, which bears the blood of their slave ancestors, is the focus of the conflict between Boy Willie and his sister, Berniece. Its exotic carvings,
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made by their great-grandfather, tell the story of their slave ancestors who were sold in exchange for the piano. Its presence in the northern home of Berniece and her Uncle Doaker represents the life of their father who died stealing it back from Sutter. Berniece is embittered and troubled not only by the piano and her father’s death but also by her mother’s blood and tears that followed that death and by the loss of her own husband. In contrast, Boy Willie is upbeat and funny, an optimistic, ambitious, and boyish man who is sure he is right in wanting to sell the piano to buy Sutter’s land. He has the warrior spirit. Throughout the play, the presence of Sutter’s ghost is seen or felt. Sutter’s ghost seems to represent the control that the white man still exerts over this family in 1937. Boy Willie chooses to ignore the ghost, to accuse his sister of imagining it, but ultimately it is Boy Willie who must wrestle with the ghost. Wilson said that this play had five endings because Berniece and Boy Willie are both right. The conflict is indeed unresolved as Boy Willie leaves, telling Berniece that she had better keep playing that piano or he and Sutter could both come back. The lesson of the piano is twofold: Berniece has learned that she should use her heritage, rather than let it fester in bitterness, and Boy Willie has learned that he cannot ignore the significance of this piano, which symbolizes the pain and suffering of all of his ancestors. There is little in the play that deviates from the central conflict. The skill of Wilson’s writing is seen in the interplay of characters bantering and arguing, in the indirect quality of questions that are not answered, and in the storytelling. While characters may serve primarily as symbols and plot devices, they are nevertheless vivid and credible.
Two Trains Running Type of work: Drama First produced: 1990, pb. 1992 Memphis Lee’s small restaurant is the setting of Wilson’s Two Trains Running. Risa, a young woman who has scarred her legs with a razor to deflect the sexual interest of men, is the restaurant’s cook and waitress. The rest of the African American cast are male and include, among others, Sterling, an unemployed young man recently released from prison; Holloway, a retired house painter; and Hambone, who is mentally retarded. The gossip, debates, philosophizing, and storytelling that take place in Memphis’s restaurant reflect the oral tradition of African American culture. Some critics note that the characters engaged in the talk seem detached from the racial riots, assassinations, and antiwar protests that marked the late 1960s, when the play takes place. Wilson responds by saying that he was not interested in writing “what white folks think of as American history for the 1960’s.” He was interested in making the point that “by 1969 nothing has changed for the black man.” One thing not changed by 1969 was economic injustice. Holloway notes that for
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centuries blacks worked hard for free, enriching white slaveholders. Once blacks have to be paid whites deny them work and call them lazy. The characters in Two Trains Running are directly affected by the whites’ ability to make and interpret rules, to the disadvantage of blacks. When Hambone painted a fence, the white butcher who hired him offered a chicken in payment instead of the promised ham. When Sterling wins at the numbers, the whites who run the game cut his winnings in half. When Memphis’s restaurant is scheduled to be taken over by the city, the whites in charge invoke a clause saying they do not have to pay his price. Hambone dies without getting his ham, but his persistence in demanding it for more than nine years moves Memphis to donate fifty dollars for flowers for his funeral and moves Sterling to break into the butcher shop and steal a ham for his casket. By the end of the play Sterling has been transformed from a man unwilling to pay the price for love (he is reluctant to accept responsibility for others) to one who is willing to make a commitment to Risa, who seems willing to have a relationship with him. In this he has the blessing of Aunt Ester, reputedly 322 years old and an important offstage character. She symbolizes the wisdom of black experience in America, the wisdom of a people who survived against the odds. Memphis, too, has been transformed. He was run off his land in Mississippi years before, and he vowed one day to return seeking justice. “They got two trains running every day.” By the play’s end he wins his fight with the city, which agrees to pay more than his price for his restaurant, and he declares he will now follow through on his vow because, as he understands Aunt Ester to have told him: “If you drop the ball, you got to go back and pick it up.”
Seven Guitars Type of work: Drama First produced: 1995, pb. 1996 Two Trains Running was followed in 1995 by Seven Guitars. Set in the 1940’s, it tells the tragic story of blues guitarist Floyd Barton, whose funeral opens the play. The action flashes back to re-create the events of Floyd’s last week of life. Floyd had arrived in Pittsburgh to try to get his guitar out of the pawnshop and to convince his former lover, Vera, to return with him to Chicago. A record he made years earlier has suddenly gained popularity, and he has been offered the opportunity to record more songs at a studio in Chicago. The play’s central conflicts are Floyd’s struggle to move forward in his musical career and his personal strife with Vera and his bandmates. A subplot centers on Floyd’s friend Hedley and his deteriorating physical and mental health as his friends attempt to place him in a tuberculosis sanatorium. The play contains some of Wilson’s familiar character types, including the mentally aberrant Hedley; the troubled-by-the-law young black male protagonist, Floyd; the capable and independent woman, Louise; and the more needy, younger woman, Ruby. It also contains elements of music, dance, storytelling, violence, and food.
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Jitney Type of work: Drama First produced: 2000, pb. 2001
In a reworked version of Wilson’s earlier, short play Jitney, Becker, a retired steelmill worker, runs a jitney station, serving the unofficial taxi needs of the black community of Pittsburgh’s Hill district during early autumn of 1977. The jitney drivers are a rich collection of troubled but hardworking men. The station offers the men a living and a sense of independence that is threatened by the city’s plans to tear down the neighborhood in the name of urban renewal. Becker also faces a personal crisis. His son, Booster, is about to leave prison after serving twenty years for murdering his well-to-do white girlfriend. Father and son have not spoken for two decades. Becker is bitter that his son threw away a promising career, and Booster sees his father’s lifetime of hard work and submissiveness to white landlords and bosses as demeaning. Father and son never reconcile, but they indirectly attempt to redeem themselves to each other. Becker decides to organize the jitney drivers and fight the urban renewal. Yet, just as Becker begins the move to resistance, he falls victim to his rigorous work ethic and dies unexpectedly. As the dispirited drivers praise his father, Booster begins to respect his father’s accomplishments and prepares to carry on Becker’s mission to save the jitney station.
King Hedley II Type of work: Drama First produced: 2001, pb. 2005
King Hedley II takes place in the backyard of a few ramshackle houses in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1985. Its protagonist, King Hedley II, is a petty thief and a former convict engaged in selling stolen refrigerators. Believing that he is being held back while everybody else is moving forward, Hedley dreams of a better life. His partner in crime is a shady character named Mister. Hedley’s wife, Tonya, is pregnant with a child she does not want to raise in the rough life she knows. Hedley’s mother, Ruby, is a former jazz singer who is reunited with an old lover, the con man Elmore. The next-door neighbor, Stool Pigeon, is a crazy old man who stacks old newspapers in his hovel. He is the play’s mystic messenger who buries a dead cat in the backyard and brings to its grave various tokens that he believes will bring the animal back to one of its nine lives. The yard, barren except for weeds and garbage, is a major symbol. Hedley tries to raise plants in it, even fencing off a small patch with barbed wire. However, like Hedley’s efforts to better himself, the attempt to grow something is doomed.
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Suggested Readings Bigsby, C. W. E. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Birdwell, Christine. “Death as a Fastball on the Outside Corner: Fences’ Troy Maxson and the American Dream.” Aethlon 8 (1990). Bogumil, Mary L. Understanding August Wilson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Brustein, Robert. Reimagining American Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1991. Elkins, Marilyn, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1994. Herrington, Joan. I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done: August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. Hill, Holly. “Black Theatre into the Mainstream.” In Contemporary American Theatre, edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Nadel, Alan, ed. May All Your Fences Have Gates. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Rocha, Mark William. “August Wilson and the Four B’s: Influences.” In August Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Marilyn Elkins. New York: Garland, 1994. Shannon, Sandra G. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1995. Wolfe, Peter. August Wilson. New York: Twayne, 1999. Contributors: Jack Vincent Barbera, Rhona Justice-Malloy, and Sally Osborne Norton
Jade Snow Wong Born: San Francisco, California; January 21, 1922 Died: San Francisco, California; March 16, 2006 Chinese American
Wong’s accounts of Chinese life in America break down prejudice and create understanding among cultures. Principal works nonfiction: Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1950; No Chinese Stranger, 1975 Jade Snow Wong was introduced to writing by her father, who gave her a diary when she was young and encouraged her to record the important events of her life. She continued this habit into her adult life. She also received formal training at Mills College, where she wrote many papers about her life in Chinatown. Wong began work on her first book, Fifth Chinese Daughter, in 1946, at the age of twenty-four. Her goal was to create a “better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans.” She wanted to show non-Chinese Americans the beauty and traditions of her culture and dispel prevalent stereotypes. Although Wong produced two other major works, writing was not her primary occupation. Instead, she saw it as a method for exposing other Americans to her cultural heritage. As a result of her first book, the U.S. State Department sent her on a four-month tour to speak to various audiences and to relate her experiences of breaking through race and gender barriers in America. Wong and her husband also acted as tour guides and escorted many Americans to China before her husband’s death in 1985. Wong’s third book, No Chinese Stranger, was written in reaction to her first visit to China, in 1972, only one month after Richard M. Nixon’s trip. During that trip, she learned what it is like to be part of a homogeneous society, and not a minority. Influenced by this trip, Wong soon published a second autobiography, No Chinese Stranger, which described her life in the 1950’s and 1960’s before focusing on her trip to China. Again she enjoyed a high public profile, and she returned to Mills College in 1976 to receive an honorary doctorate in humane letters. From 1975 to 1981, she was a member of the California Council for the Humanities, and from 1978 to 1981 she was director of the Chinese Culture Center. After the death of her husband in 1985, Snow lowered her profile although she continued to lead annual tours to China. She died at the age of eighty-four in San Francisco on March 16, 2006. Wong’s works also show that each person must establish an identity regardless 1157
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of race. Her wish was to share her struggles in order to encourage others who may face similar obstacles. Wong’s sense of identity and self-expression was not limited to her writing, however—she was an accomplished potter, and she sold her pottery in her own shop. She also cared for her children—the most important work in her life, according to Snow: “Our basic and greatest value is family cohesiveness.”
Fifth Chinese Daughter Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1950 Fifth Chinese Daughter, Wong’s autobiography, directly and honestly relates the struggles and accomplishments of an American-born Chinese girl. Although it is an autobiography, it is written in the third person, which reflects the Chinese custom of humility. This use of the third person also reminds the reader of how difficult it is for the author to express her individual identity. The book explains Wong’s desire to prove to her parents that she was “a person, besides being a female.” Even as a toddler, she was taught to obey her parents and her older brother and sisters without question. She was not allowed to express her opinions; rather, she was forced to comply with the demands of the rest of her family. When she began school, her parents expected her to earn good grades, yet they refused to praise or even encourage her when she was recognized for her school achievements. In fact, they refused to fund her college education, although they paid her brothers’ expenses, because it was not considered wise to educate a girl, who would leave the family when she married. As a result, Wong was forced to work full time throughout her teenage years in order to save the money to go to college. During this time, she was exposed to the “foreign” culture of the whites living in San Francisco, and she was surprised to learn that parents in many Anglo families listened to children and respected their opinions. Further, she learned in a college sociology class that in many families, children were afforded the right to discuss with their parents what they saw as unfair. Learning about the practices of other families caused Wong to question her parents’ practices for the first time. As a result, Wong began a slow and painful struggle to earn her parents’ respect while developing her own identity. Unfortunately, her parents were not the only people who would discourage her. She also had to face prejudice and stereotyping in the white world. She refused to be discouraged by this and accepted the challenges that it brought. Eventually, Jade Snow was able to win her parents’ respect. She established her own identity and her independence by beginning a business selling handmade pottery. Although her Chinatown shop was patronized only by white customers, her ability to attract many customers was recognized by her family and by members of Wong’s community. The pottery shop venture finally allowed her to find “that niche which would be hers alone.”
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Suggested Readings Blinde, Patricia Lin. “The Icicle in the Desert: Perspective and Form in the Works of Two Chinese-American Women Writers.” The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 6, no. 3 (1979). Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian-American Masters of the Real and the Fake.” In The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, edited by Jeffery Paul Chan et al. New York: Meridian, 1991. Hong, Maria, ed. Growing Up Asian American: An Anthology. New York: W. Morrow, 1993. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Twelve Asian American Writers: In Search of Self-Definition.” In Redefining American Literary History. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. Contributor: Amy Beth Shollenberger
Jay Wright Born: Albuquerque, New Mexico; May 25, 1935 African American
Wright’s intellectually demanding poetry illuminates the African American experience by exploring the philosophies and religious cosmologies that underlie historical events and personal spiritual development. Principal works drama: Balloons, 1968; The Death and Return of Paul Batuata, 1984; Death as History, 1989 poetry: Death as History, 1967; The Homecoming Singer, 1971; Dimensions of History, 1976; Soothsayers and Omens, 1976; The Double Invention of Komo, 1980; Explications/Interpretations, 1984; Elaine’s Book, 1986; Selected Poems of Jay Wright, 1987; Boleros, 1991; Transfigurations: Collected Poems, 2000; Music’s Mask and Measure, 2007 Jay Wright was reared in New Mexico and Southern California. Wright became fluent in English and Spanish and knowledgeable regarding African American, Latino, and Native American ways of looking at the world. Extended travels in Mexico and Europe in later years also expanded his cultural literacy and empathy. His poetry expresses his interest in understanding all of the many different cultures that have contributed to modern global identity. After high school in San Pedro, California, Wright played minor league baseball and served in the U.S. Army. He earned a degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961, studied briefly at Union Theological Seminary, and received a master’s degree from Rutgers University in 1966. Though he taught at Tougaloo College, Talladega College, and Yale University in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Wright did not pursue a regular academic career. Married in 1971 to Lois Silber, Wright settled in New Hampshire to continue his research and writing. Wright’s serious devotion to poetry and his prolific production brought him numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1968, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, and the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1986. These awards allowed Wright time to study and to write. The study of comparative religion, philosophy, and anthropology is central to Wright’s poetic work, which explores the history of slavery in the New World by investigating the mythologies and cosmologies of the African, European, and Native American peoples. 1160
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The Homecoming Singer Type of work: Poetry First published: 1971 Semantic density and formal extravagance are particularly characteristic of the book-length poems that have followed Wright’s first collection, The Homecoming Singer, which was preceded in 1967 by a chapbook, Death as History. These early poems, most of which are reprinted in Selected Poems of Jay Wright, tend to be more manageable from both a thematic and a linguistic point of view. The Homecoming Singer is important to Wright’s canon not only as a record of his early artistic, spiritual, and intellectual development but also because it contains all the seeds of his later writing. The two opening poems, “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting” and “The Baptism,” inspired by the religious zeal of Daisy Faucett, lament the failure of institutionalized African American religions to provide spiritual resources for what Wright, with Harris, calls “the redefinition of the person.” The tragic lack of “myths to scale your life upon” results in “the senseless, weightless,/ timedenying feeling of not being there” with which the poet is left at the end of “Reflections Before the Charity Hospital.” Yet rather than leading to the despair and violence of LeRoi Jones’s “A Poem for Willie Best,” a text on which Wright brilliantly meditates in “The Player at the Crossroads” and “Variations on a Theme by LeRoi Jones,” this alienation and dispossession heighten the poet’s awareness, as in “First Principles,” of “the tongues of the exiled dead/ who live in the tongues of the living.” In “Destination: Accomplished,” this new awareness grows into an abiding emotional and intellectual desire for “something to put in place.” It is the deathchallenging search for “new categories for the soul/ of those I want to keep” that finally directs Wright toward traditional African societies, their rituals and mythologies, in “A Nuer Sacrifice” and “Death as History.” Like all of Wright’s poetry, though more explicitly so, The Homecoming Singer draws on autobiographical experience as a catalyst for the persona’s introspective inquiries into the possible nature of an African American cultural and literary tradition. Memories of his two fathers, in “A Non-Birthday Poem for My Father,” “Origins,” “First Principles,” and “The Hunting-Trip Cook,” become occasions for acknowledging and examining the responsibilities the dead confer upon the living. This is what connects these presences from Wright’s personal past, which also include his alcoholic stepmother in “Billie’s Blues,” to “the intense communal daring” of Crispus Attucks and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Homecoming Singer also acquaints the reader with geographies to which Wright returns throughout his poetic career. In “An Invitation to Madison County,” one of the best poems in this collection, the black American South offers unexpected memories and visions of community to the displaced poet, whose journey in this instance follows that of so many other African American writers in search of their cultural origins. The Southwest, which, along with California, provides the setting for Wright’s family remembrances, is another place of origin; its history also connects the persona with the Mexico of “Morning, Leaving Calle Gigantes,”
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“Chapultepec Castle,” “Jalapeña Gypsies,” and “Bosques de Chapultepec.” “A Month in the Country” offers a fleeting glimpse of the “New England reticence” of New Hampshire, to which the persona escapes after “The End of an Ethnic Dream” to soothe his “blistered” brain. In later poems, all these places evolve into fullfledged symbolic geographies. “Sketch for an Aesthetic Project” and “Beginning Again,” the two poems that close The Homecoming Singer, are the initial attempts of the “aching prodigal” at weaving his memories and his discontent into a poetic design that transcends individual experience. These poems are preludes to Soothsayers and Omens, the first volume of a poetic cycle that continues with Explications/Interpretations, Dimensions of History, and The Double Invention of Komo. Each of these book-length poems is part of a carefully constructed pattern or dramatic movement, and this is the order in which Wright places them.
Soothsayers and Omens Type of work: Poetry First published: 1976 The poem that opens the first of Soothsayers and Omens’s four parts is significantly titled “The Charge.” Reminiscent of Wright’s homages to paternal figures in The Homecoming Singer, this poem focuses on fathers and sons “gathered in the miracle/ of our own memories.” With “The Appearance of a Lost Goddess” and the rise of a female principle to complement and balance the male presences, the poet identifies himself as an initiate who has accepted the charge to reconstruct neglected and severed ties. This reconstruction takes the initial shape of six short poems titled “Sources” with which Wright inaugurates his systematic exploration of African cosmologies. “Sources” draws heavily on West African precolonial mythologies, both of which become part of a collective memory. The two longer poems that follow and change the pace of the first part, “Benjamin Banneker Helps to Build a City” and “Benjamin Banneker Sends His ‘Almanac’ to Thomas Jefferson,” weave elements of Dogon theology around quotations from the letters of the African American astronomer, an “uneasy” stranger in his own land who bemoans “the lost harmony” and the injustices of slavery. Dogon ritual becomes even more significant in Part IV, whose title, “Second Conversations with Ogotemmêli,” refers directly to Griaule’s anthropological exploits. These are poems of apprenticeship that invoke different components and stages of the creation of the universe, represented by the water spirit Nommo, creator of the First Word (that is, language) and his twin Amma, Lébé, guardian of the dead, and the Pale Fox, agent of chaos. Wright’s “Conversations” are characterized by exchanges and relationships very different from those that prevail between anthropologist and informer. For Wright’s persona, Ogotemmêli is a spiritual guide or “nani” who “will lead me into the darkness” and whose silences promise the speech of redemption with which to mend “the crack in the universe.” The terms and trajectory of Wright’s journey into darkness, a sort of Middle Passage in re-
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verse that leads back to Africa, are also indebted to Dante’s search, even if the spiritual map (the “God”) Wright’s initiate “designs” is different. It is no coincidence, then, that “Homecoming,” the poem that announces “a plan of transformations,” is laced with quotations from La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy). At the same time that Soothsayers and Omens initiates the reader into African mythologies, it also revisits Mexico and New Mexico, geographies already implicit in the pre-Columbian references of the opening poems. The most remarkable of the transitional poems in parts 2 and 3 is “The Albuquerque Graveyard,” a place to which Wright’s persona returns to worry the dead, the “small heroes,” with a quest for patterns that is as “uneasy” as Benjamin Banneker’s. The poet’s announcement that
I am going back to the Black limbo, an unwritten history of our own tensions,
is a precise summary of his desire and purpose throughout Soothsayers and Omens: both to articulate a history that has not been written and to un-write a history that has neglected, even forgotten—the participation of Africans and African Americans in founding what is deceptively called “Western” civilization. If Soothsayers and Omens is the “first design,” the first step toward the articulation of a spiritual order, Explications/Interpretations marks the next logical stage in what Wright calls his “African-Hellenic-Judaic discourse.” Dedicated to poet Robert Hayden and critic Harold Bloom, this volume generates somewhat different patterns and principles of order and also introduces a set of new players on a new stage in “MacIntyre, The Captain, and the Saints.” This central dramatic poem enacts Wright’s personal and intellectual ties with Scotland. MacIntyre, the Irish-Scottish clan to which the names Murphy and Wright can be traced, is Wright’s autobiographical persona who, instead of conversing with Ogotemmêli, now turns to astronomer David Hume, poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and anthropologist Robert Sutherland Rattray. A new element in this poem is the use of ideograms, a strategy indebted to Ezra Pound’s works, which Wright explores more fully in Dimensions of History and The Double Invention of Komo. Yet dramatic poetry, a form for which Wright has an undoubted preference, is not the only important formal aspect of this volume. Explications/Interpretations is also energized by the vital rhythms of African American music. The poem is divided into three parts, “Polarity’s Trio,” “Harmony’s Trio,” and “Love’s Dozen,” titles that already indicate Wright’s concern with music and number. “Tensions and Resolutions” introduces dualism or twinning and balance as concepts that inform the poem’s thematic and structural organization: “Each act caresses/ the moment it remembers,/ and the moment it desires.” This double “act” is of course the act of writing, which makes Wright’s poem a “field of action” along the lines of Charles Olson’s “projective verse.”
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Explications/Interpretations Type of work: Poetry First published: 1984 Although published after Dimensions of History, Explications/Interpretations is really the second volume in the poetic cycle that began with Soothsayers and Omens. That the rhythms of writing and speaking are formal articulations of the poet’s being is crucial to understanding the dynamics of Explications/Interpretations and indeed of all of Wright’s poems. The arrangement of the poems in groups of three, six, and twelve (plus one) already creates a sense of rhythm, which is rendered most explicit in “The Twenty-two Tremblings of the Postulant,” subtitled “Improvisations Surrounding the Body.” This poem is a good example of Wright’s kind of blues poetry, in which the compositional principle is derived not from the call-and-response structure of the blues lyrics, as is the case, for instance, in the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, but from the arrangement of the twenty-two short poems across a sequence of chords. Each poem corresponds not only to a different part of the human body but also to a musical bar that belongs to a specific chord, I, IV, or V. The last two bars, one is told at the end of the poem, are “tacit,” which makes for a total of twenty-four bars, whose musical equivalent is a (doubled) blues line. Explications/Interpretations as a whole is a poetic improvisation on this basic blues line, one of the most distinctive rhythms of African American culture. These are the sounds of flesh and bone that constitute the poem’s and the poet’s “grammar of being.” For Wright, who insists on poetry’s social and historical responsibilities, these schemes, “the god’s elemental bones,” are “a launchpad/ into the actual” (“Inscrutability”). Wright’s emphasis in Explications/Interpretations on the body as a site of knowledge and action is indicative of his rejection of dualisms. The spiritual does not exist in separation from the material any more than male exists without female. They are what Wright conceives of as “twins,” and the desired relationship between them is one of balance. This is most clearly articulated in “The Continuing City: Spirit and Body” and “The Body,” two poems that lay out aesthetic and philosophical principles indebted to Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God. In his notes, Wright identifies Explications/Interpretations as an attempt “to claim this knowledge as part of the continuing creative life of the Americas”; the Americas are what comes into full view in Dimensions of History.
Dimensions of History Type of work: Poetry First published: 1976 Though Dimensions of History is dedicated to the late Francis Ferguson, with whom Wright studied at Rutgers, the book owes perhaps its most significant debt to
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Harris’s notion of “vision as historical dimension.” This third volume of Wright’s poetic cycle maintains the tripartite structure of Explications/Interpretations, a scheme now more explicitly associated with the three stages of an initiation ritual: separation, transition, (re)incorporation. Part 1, “The Second Eye of the World. The Dimension of Rites and Acts,” announces this link not only by being itself divided into three poems but also by offering the reader a Dogon ideogram that, according to Griaule and Dieterlen, represents the separation of the twins, male and female, at the moment of circumcision. The historical dimension of separation within an African American context is (enforced) exile. This historical condition becomes the “special kinship” the poet’s persona shares with his other selves, the dead to whose realm he descends and whose claims he seeks to understand in a spiritually barren land from which the god has retreated. Among them are once again Du Bois and Attucks, who are joined by the voices of and allusions to Frederick Douglass, St. Augustine, Toussaint Louverture and many others who congregate in a text brimming with references to Aztec, Mayan, Incaic, Egyptian, Arabic, Christian, Yoruba, Akan, and, of course, Dogon and Bambara mythologies. Ogotemmêli’s return in the figure of the blind sage at the beginning of the second poem commences the process of healing: “Anochecí enfermo amanecí bueno” (I went to bed sick, I woke up well) are the words that open the third poem, at the end of which the persona names himself “a dark and dutiful dy4li,/ searching for the understanding of his deeds.” Part 2, titled “Modulations. The Aesthetic Dimension,” consists of an assortment of poetic forms, many of them linked to Caribbean and Latin American musical forms and instruments such as the Cuban son, the areito, and the bandola, a fifteen-string Colombian guitar. The shorter poems in “Rhythms, Charts, and Changes,” “The Body Adorned and Bare,” a section reminiscent of the meditations on the body in Explications/Interpretations, and “Retablos” (votive paintings) lead up to Wright’s “Log Book of Judgments,” a series of ethical and aesthetic formulations distilled from the persona’s historical and ritualistic experiences. They culminate in the following lines from “Meta-A and the A of Absolutes”: “I am good when I know the darkness of all light,/ and accept the darkness, not as a sing, but as my body.” Dimensions of History closes with “Landscapes. The Physical Dimension,” whose themes and poetic architecture return to the history of the conquest of the Americas and to Náhua (Aztec) mythology and poetry. The most notable formal aspects of this final part are the encyclopedic monoliths, block passages that list the vital statistics of five American nations: Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and the United States. The spaces between these building blocks or “stones” are filled with Wright’s own enchanted mortar, a possible translation of the Náhuatlinfused Spanish idiom cal y canto (literally, mortar and song) that joins Wright’s compositional principles with his cross-cultural concerns. This syncretic idiom, which also conjures up such Latin American poets as Pablo Neruda and José María Arguedas, is a miniature representation of the rhizomes Wright’s poem uncovers. It is one of his “emblems of the ecstatic connection.” His poet’s Middle Passages temporarily end with an image of the Great Gate of the ancient Mayan city Labná, a sole
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triumphal arc in a city without fortifications that is both “a gateway to the beautiful” and “the image of our lives among ourselves.”
The Double Invention of Komo Type of work: Poetry First published: 1980 The Double Invention of Komo, which is dedicated to the memory of Griaule, may well be called the most African of Wright’s poems. Wright’s most sustained and ambitious effort in the genre of dramatic poetry, The Double Invention of Komo is a poetic reenactment of the initiation ceremonies performed by the all-male Komo society among the Bambara. The object of these highly formalized ceremonies is to maintain the Bambara’s traditional intellectual, religious, and social values. The Double Invention of Komo “risks ritual’s arrogance” to the extent that the logic and the specifics of this ritualistic process inform the poem’s conceptual and formal structures. Of special importance to Wright are the 266 great signs, a system of ideograms that organizes Bambara cosmology. Each sign inscribes a different “name” or aspect of the god and binds him to the material objects and substances associated with Komo’s altars, as in “Dyibi—obscurity—gold.” As is evident from “The Initiate Takes His First Six Signs, the Design of His Name,” such naming is an exceedingly complex process. What Wright is after is the sacred “grammar” of names that, ultimately, evolve into a secular “alphabet” of creation. The Double Invention of Komo is quite explicitly and self-consciously a poem about the metaphysics of writing, and this accounts for much of its difficulty. The central preoccupation of The Double Invention of Komo is how to achieve self-knowledge through writing, how to fashion a language that would redress loss and dispossession. Writing, for Wright, is a process of simultaneous dismemberment and reassembly of meaning and community: It is both “scalpel” and “suture,” both excision and circumcision. Like the ritual scars on the body of the initiate, poetic writing confers not only knowledge of traditional values but also kinship. It is as if the poet’s pen were a ritual knife “cutting” the initiates (and the readers) into kinship, marking them as members of a special community. As the persona’s status changes from that of an initiate to that of a “delegate,” the statements made in Dimensions of History’s “Meta-A and the A of Absolutes” are reformulated: “What is true is the incision./ What is true is the desire for the incision,/ and the signs’ flaming in the wound.” It is in this sense that the Middle Passage, which all of the persona’s journeys reenact, becomes a rite of passage that compensates for the violent psychic dismemberment and the geographical dispersal of the members of Africa’s traditional cultures. Wright’s key metaphor, the limbo, refers to Harris, who regards this dance, created on the crowded slave ships, as a form of silent collective resistance. Harris’s sense of the limbo as a “structure of freedom” has been an inspiration for Wright since “The Albuquerque Graveyard.” It also encapsulates the main concerns that have motivated Wright’s explorations of the poetic potential of music and dance.
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Elaine’s Book Type of work: Poetry First published: 1986 Given the usually all-male composition of Wright’s imaginary communities and especially the emphasis on male initiation rituals in The Double Invention of Komo, the foregrounding of female voices in Elaine’s Book is almost startling. While women are never entirely absent from his poetry, which frequently identifies creativity as a female principle, this is the first book in which they assume historical, rather than exclusively mythological, stature. They are an integral part of the poetic geographies Wright’s persona traverses in his fascinating explorations of female otherness. The female voices in Elaine’s Book assume many different identities: that of Yemanjá, the Yoruba/Afro-Cuban goddess of the waters; that of Hathor or Aphrodite; that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whom Wright connects with the Aztec goddess Tonantzin; that of the African American poet Phillis Wheatley; and those of many others who take their places right next to Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, and Friedrich Hölderlin, who now merely provide epigraphs. Wright’s poetic language is as rich as his symbolic geography is varied and extensive. His journey into the night, which begins with the sunset of “Veil, I,” not only leads the reader to pre-Columbian Mexico, Spain, Scotland, and back to the United States but also guides the reader across an ever-changing linguistic surface in which even historical documents, such as letters by Wheatley, the former slave Judith Cocks, Louisa Alexander, and the Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne Yaposchkin take on poetic qualities of their own. Elaine’s Book can be said to achieve resonance as well as consonance: Each fragment sounds new depths as it becomes part of a “nation,” which, like the “city,” is also a figure for the poem itself. That a poet who lives in uncertain multiplicities, who knows neither his actual birth date nor his real name, should be fascinated by names and dates is hardly surprising.
Boleros Type of work: Poetry First published: 1991 In Boleros, a book dedicated to his wife, Lois, Wright’s preoccupation is with imagining the fictions that, like his own father’s stories, lead to names—in this case, names of Greek muses, of saint’s days adorned with “graces and the seasons,” and of places. “All names,” he writes, “are invocations, or curses.” Reinventing these stories and histories of origins is the poetic project of Boleros and the point of departure for further journeys across far-flung geographies of the spirit. As in Elaine’s Book, the poet’s guides are mostly female: Erato, Calliope, Euterpe, Thalia, Polyhymnia, Clio, Terpsichore, Urania. Yet the familiar Greek identities of
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these muses are complicated by the association of each of their personalities with concepts taken from another of Wright’s favorite archives, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (first published in English in 1894). The resulting Africanization of the muses recalls Martin Bernal’s compelling speculations in Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987). Many of the sites the poet’s persona revisits in Boleros are familiar ones: Edinburgh, Guadalajara, Jalapa, New Hampshire, and always West Africa. The poet also takes up a number of new residences, however, most significant among them the city of Benares in Uttar Pradesh, one of the intellectual and cultural centers of traditional India. “Black spirits such as mine will always come/ to a crossroads such as this,” the persona explains at the shores of the Ganges. As always, these geographic journeys become explorations of poetic form. Most striking in this regard are the six poems in “Sources and Roots” and “Coda,” which are the title’s most concrete reference points. The relatively brief poems in these final sections, many of which open with lines from popular Latin American songs, are daring in their use of Spanish meter and rhyme in an English-language environment. The results of such unexpected contact are wondrous formal hybrids, whose breaks with English accentuation are infused with Wright’s wit and humor: Esta tierra da de todo. Oh, perhaps, you will see no sloe plum, or no white-tailed, ginger doe, break-dancing at sunset when snow shows us its blackberry wine skin.
Poems such as this are testimony to the transformations of vision and language at the many crossroads to which Wright’s ceaseless poetic journeys lead. These transformations truly are Wright’s “gift,” for few poets have dared to bridge the troubled waters of cultural difference. Even fewer have succeeded so splendidly.
Transfigurations Type of work: Poetry First published: 2000 Transfigurations collects Wright’s work produced over the course of more than twenty-five years of poetic exploration. The volume is hefty, providing more than six hundred pages of densely textured verse, including sixty pages of new poetry. Detailed references to West African, Haitian, Mexican, and European and American Christian religious rituals abound, as well as to the various political and poetic genealogies in which Wright situates himself. Geographic journeys expose the earth itself to the questioning soul of the poet. In a single poem, Wright travels from North Africa to Jamaica to Boston and then on to Spain, dropping historical allusions at every step. The esoteric network of obscure signs and allusions he uses
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serves to trace his own development in which, for nearly three decades, he has determinedly initiated himself into the mysteries of language, history, and sense. Transformation and transfiguration act as the axes of this collection. A bulk of the poems in the volume speak to initiation, the human ceremonial act that marks transformation: the Mexican boy to whom a god says, “You must prepare for my eruption/ and the guarded way I have of guarding you,” or the West African Dogon boy who undergoes the trials and tribulations of coming into adulthood, “If I were the light’s sacred buffoon,/ I could read this meaning and mount/ my own awakening” in the spectacular poem “The Double Invention of Komo.” A transfiguration, similarly, is a change of appearance, one that is accompanied with a sense of revelation. A refinement of vision, put to the service of metamorphosis, is one of Wright’s most potent forces. For example, in “The Abstract of Knowledge/the First Test,” Wright transfigures the scene of the Dogon boy encountering the first phase of his initiation, in which he must undergo a hallucinatory vision of the universe in the light of the knowledge that he will obtain from his vision. That vision changes knowledge, transfiguring it and transforming it. In these lines, a number of the features of Wright’s poetry are apparent: the tightly rhythmical free verse—which lacks enjambment for the most part, the voice of the dramatic persona, the physical details, and a cosmological reach.
Suggested Readings Callaloo 6 (Fall, 1983). Kutzinski, Vera M. Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Okpewho, Isidore. “Prodigal’s Progress: Jay Wright’s Focal Center.” MELUS 23, no. 3 (Fall, 1998): 187-209. Stepto, Robert B. “After Modernism, After Hibernation: Michael Harper, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright.” In Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Arts, and Scholarship, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Welburn, Ron. “Jay Wright’s Poetics: An Appreciation.” MELUS 18, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 51. Contributors: Lorenzo Thomas, Vera M. Kutzinski, and Sarah Hilbert
Richard Wright Born: Natchez, Mississippi; September 4, 1908 Died: Paris, France; November 28, 1960 African American
Wright portrays African Americans entrapped in forms of neo-slavery; he earned national and international acclaim. Principal works drama: Native Son: The Biography of a Young American, pr. 1941 (with Paul Green) long fiction: Native Son, 1940; The Outsider, 1953; Savage Holiday, 1954; The Long Dream, 1958; Lawd Today, 1963; A Father’s Law, 2008 poetry: Haiku: This Other World, 1998 (Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, editors) short fiction: Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas, 1938 (expanded as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories, 1938); Eight Men, 1961 nonfiction: Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941 (photographs by Edwin Rosskam); Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, 1945; Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, 1954; The Color Curtain, 1956; Pagan Spain, 1957; White Man, Listen!, 1957; American Hunger, 1977; Richard Wright Reader, 1978 (Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, editors); Conversations with Richard Wright, 1993 (Keneth Kinnamon and Fabre, editors) miscellaneous: Works, 1991 (2 volumes) Richard Wright rose from abject poverty to become one of America’s foremost writers. His topics consistently focus on the freedom and self-governance of African Americans in texts before 1950. He chronicled his southern experiences to 1927 in Black Boy, and his northern experiences from 1927 to 1937 in American Hunger. Wright met with success once he moved to New York City in 1937. He won a literary prize in 1938 that earned him a contract with a major publisher, which published Uncle Tom’s Children. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 enabled Wright to complete Native Son; with that work alone, he earned acclaim as the leading African American writer of his time. The novel is Wright’s moral indictment of America for perpetrating neo-slavery among African Americans. In Native Son, the ghetto produces Bigger Thomas, who dies as a result of his accidentally killing a white woman. The 1940’s brought personal crises to Wright. He faced America’s continuous 1170
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racial discrimination toward him and toward interracial couples once he married Ellen Poplar in 1941. Ongoing rifts with the Communist Party also added to Wright’s tensions. In 1946, he renounced America for France, as did other expatriates who sought freedom abroad. The 1950’s marked the emergence of Wright’s global consciousness and his writings concerning Western imperialism. His immersion in French existentialism provided the means to assess the effects of Western imperialism on Asian, African, and Spanish cultures. The Outsider became the seminal existentialist novel in African American letters. Wright became an existentialist humanist, transformed from what he identified as an “American Negro” to a “Western man of color” and freedom activist. Wright was prolific as well as a writer of high quality; his writings continued to be published after his death in 1960.
“Fire and Cloud” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1938 “Fire and Cloud” in Uncle Tom’s Children is perhaps the best representative of Richard Wright’s early short fiction. It won first prize in the 1938 Story magazine contest which had more than four hundred entries, marking Wright’s first triumph with American publishers. Charles K. O’Neill made a radio adaptation of the story after it appeared in American Scenes. Unlike the later works concerning black ghetto experience, “Fire and Cloud” has a pastoral quality, recognizing the strong bond of the southern black to the soil and the support he has drawn from religion. Wright reproduces faithfully the southern black dialect in both conversation and internal meditations. This use of dialect emphasizes the relative lack of sophistication of rural blacks. His protagonist, Reverend Taylor, is representative of the “old Negro,” who has withstood centuries of oppression, sustained by hard work on the land and humble faith in a merciful God. Wright’s attitude toward religion, however, is ambivalent. Although he recognizes it as contributing to the quiet nobility of the hero, it also prevents Taylor from taking effective social action when his people are literally starving. The final triumph of Reverend Taylor is that he puts aside the conciliatory attitude which was part of his religious training and becomes a social activist. Instead of turning the other cheek after being humiliated and beaten by white men, he embraces the methods of his Marxist supporters, meeting oppression with mass demonstration. Strength of numbers proves more effective and appropriate for getting relief from the bigoted white establishment than all his piety and loving kindness. Early in the story Taylor exclaims “The good Lawds gonna clean up this ol worl some day! Hes gonna make a new Heaven n a new Earth!” His last words, however, are “Freedom belongs t the strong!” The situation of the story no doubt reflects Wright’s early experience when his sharecropper father was driven off the plantation. Taylor’s people are starving because the white people, who own all the land, have prohibited the blacks from rais-
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ing food on it. No matter how Taylor pleads for relief, the local white officials tell him to wait and see if federal aid may be forthcoming. When two communist agitators begin pushing Taylor to lead a mass demonstration against the local government, white officials have Taylor kidnapped and beaten, along with several deacons of his church. Instead of intimidating them, this suffering converts them to open confrontation. As the communists promised, the poor whites join the blacks in the march, which forces the white authorities to release food to those facing starvation. The story’s strength lies in revealing through three dialogues the psychological dilemma of the protagonist as opposing groups demand his support. He resists the communists initially because their methods employ threat of open war on the whites—“N tha ain Gawds way!” The agitators say he will be responsible if their demonstration fails through lack of numbers and participants are slaughtered. On the other hand, the mayor and chief of police threaten Taylor that they will hold him personally responsible if any of his church members join the march. After a humiliating and futile exchange with these men, Taylor faces his own church deacons, who are themselves divided and look to him for leadership. He knows that one of their number, who is just waiting for a chance to oust him from his church, will run to the mayor and police with any evidence of Taylor’s insubordination. In a pathetic attempt to shift the burden of responsibility that threatens to destroy him no matter what he does, he reiterates the stubborn stand he has maintained with all three groups: He will not order the demonstration, but he will march with his people if they choose to demonstrate. The brutal horse-whipping that Taylor endures as a result of this moderate stand convinces him of the futility of trying to placate everybody. The Uncle Tom becomes a rebel. Critics sometimes deplore the episodes of raw brutality described in graphic detail in Wright’s fiction, but violence is the clue here to his message. Behind the white man’s paternalistic talk is the persuasion of whip and gun. Only superior force can cope with such an antagonist.
Native Son Type of work: Novel First published: 1940 Native Son parallels Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925): Both are three-part novels in which there is a murder, in part accidental, in part willed; an attempted flight; and a long concluding trial, in both cases somewhat anticlimactic. Both novels are concerned with the interplay of environment and heredity, of fate and accident, and both have protagonists who rebel against the world which would hold them back. In the first part of Native Son, Bigger Thomas is a black man cut off from family and peers. Superficially like his friends, he is in fact possessed of a different consciousness. To think about that consciousness is for him to risk insanity or violence,
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so Bigger endeavors to keep his fears and uncertainty at a preconscious level. On the day of the first section, however, he is required by the welfare agency to apply for a job as a menial at the home of the rich Dalton family. Mr. Dalton is a ghetto landlord who soothes his conscience by donating sums of money for recreational purposes. That it is a minuscule part of the money he is deriving from blacks is an irony he overlooks. Mrs. Dalton is blind, a fact that is necessary to the plot as well as being symbolic. Their daughter, Mary, is a member of the Communist Party, and from the moment she sees Bigger, who wants nothing more than to be left alone, she begins to enlist his support. The first evening, Bigger is to drive Mary to a university class. In reality, she is going with Jan Erlone, her communist boyfriend, to a party meeting. Afterward, they insist that Bigger take them to a bar in the black part of town. Jan and Mary are at this point satirized, for their attitudes toward blacks are as limited and stereotyped as any in the novel. Bigger does not want to be seen by his friends with whites, but that fact does not occur to Mary. After much drinking, Bigger must carry the drunken Mary to her bedroom. He puts her to bed, stands over her, attracted to the woman he sees. The door opens and Mrs. Dalton enters. When Mary makes drunken noises, Bigger becomes frightened that Mrs. Dalton will come close enough to discover him, so he puts a pillow over Mary’s face to quiet her. By the time Mrs. Dalton leaves, Mary is dead. Wright wanted to make Bigger a character it would be impossible to pity, and what follows is extremely grisly. Bigger tries to put Mary’s body in the furnace and saws off her head to make her fit. However accidental Mary’s death may appear to the reader, Bigger himself does not regard it as such. He has, he thinks, many times wanted to kill whites without ever having the opportunity to do so. This time there was the act without the desire, but rather than seeing himself as the victim of a chance occurrence, Bigger prefers to unite the earlier desire with the present act, to make himself whole by accepting responsibility for the killing. Indeed, he not only accepts the act but also determines to capitalize on it by sending a ransom note. Later, accused of raping Mary as well, an act he considered but did not commit, he reverses the process, accepting responsibility for this, too, even though here there was desire but no act. His only sign of conscience is that he cannot bring himself to shake the ashes in the furnace; this guilt is not redemptive, but his undoing, for, in an implausible scene in the Dalton basement, the room fills with smoke, the murder is revealed to newspaper reporters gathered there, and Bigger is forced to flee. He runs with his girlfriend, Bessie Mears. She, like Bigger, has a hunger for sensation, which has initially attracted him to her. Now, however, as they flee together, she becomes a threat and a burden; huddled with her in an abandoned tenement, Bigger wants only to be rid of her. He picks up a brick and smashes her face, dumping her body down an airshaft. His only regret is not that he has killed her but that he has forgotten to remove their money from her body. The rest of the plot moves quickly: Bigger is soon arrested, the trial is turned into a political farce, and Bigger is convicted and sentenced to death. In the last part of the novel, after Bigger’s arrest, the implications of the action are developed, largely through Bigger’s relations to other characters. Some of the characters are worthy
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only of contempt, particularly the district attorney, who, in an attempt at reelection, is turning the trial into political capital. Bigger’s mother relies on religion. In a scene in the jail cell, she falls on her knees in apology before Mrs. Dalton and urges Bigger to pray, but toughness is Bigger’s code. He is embarrassed by his mother’s self-abasement, and although he agrees to pray simply to end his discomfort, his attitude toward religion is shown when he throws away a cross a minister has given him and throws a cup of coffee in a priest’s face. In his view, they want only to avoid the world and to force him to accept guilt without responsibility. Bigger learns from two characters. The first is Boris Max, the lawRichard Wright (Library of Congress) yer the Communist Party provides. Max listens to Bigger, and for the first time in his life, Bigger exposes his ideas and feelings to another human. Max’s plea to the court is that, just as Bigger must accept responsibility for what he has done, so must the society around him understand its responsibility for what Bigger has become and, if the court chooses to execute Bigger, understand the consequences that must flow from that action. He does not argue—nor does Wright believe—that Bigger is a victim of injustice. There is no injustice, because that would presume a world in which Bigger could hope for justice, and such a world does not exist; more important, Bigger is not a victim, for he has chosen his own fate. Max argues rather that all men are entitled to happiness. Like all of Wright’s protagonists, Bigger has earlier been torn between the poles of dread and ecstasy. His ecstasy, his happiness, comes from the meaningfulness he creates in his existence, a product of self-realization. Unhappily for Bigger, he realizes himself through murder: It was, he feels, his highest creative act. If Max articulates the intellectual presentation of Wright’s beliefs about Bigger, it is Jan, Mary’s lover, who is its dramatic representation. He visits Bigger in his cell and, having at last understood the futility and paucity of his own stereotypes, admits to Bigger that he too shares in the responsibility for what has happened. He, too, addresses Bigger as a human being, but from the unique position of being the one who is alive to remind Bigger of the consequences of his actions, for Bigger learns that Jan has suffered loss through what he has done and that, while Bigger has created himself, he has also destroyed another.
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Native Son ends with the failure of Max’s appeals on Bigger’s behalf. He comes to the cell to confront Bigger before his execution, and the novel closes with Bigger Thomas smiling at Max as the prison door clangs shut. He will die happy because he will die fulfilled, having, however terribly, created a self. Native Son is Wright’s most powerful work, because his theme, universal in nature, is given its fullest and most evocative embodiment. In the characterization of Bigger, alienated man at his least abstract and most genuine, of Bigger’s exactly rendered mind and milieu, and of Bigger’s working out of his destiny, Native Son is Wright’s masterpiece.
“The Man Who Lived Underground” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1942, in Accent Wright’s best piece of short fiction is “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Although undoubtedly influenced by Fyodor Dostoevski’s underground man and by Franz Kafka’s “K,” the situation was based on a prisoner’s story from True Detective magazine. The first version appeared in 1942 in Accent magazine under the subtitle “Two Excerpts from a Novel.” This version began with a description of the life of a black servant, but Wright later discarded this opening in favor of the dramatic scene in which an unnamed fugitive hides from the police by descending into a sewer. This approach allowed the story to assume a more universal, symbolic quality. Although racist issues are still significant, the protagonist represents that larger class of all those alienated from their society. Eventually the fugitive’s name is revealed as Fred Daniels, but so completely is he absorbed into his Everyman role that he cannot remember his name when he returns to the upper world. His progress through sewers and basements becomes a quest for the meaning of life, parodying classic descents into the underworld and ironically reversing Plato’s allegory of the cave. Although Plato’s philosopher attains wisdom by climbing out of the cave where men respond to shadows on the cave wall, Wright’s protagonist gains enlightenment because of his underground perspective. What he sees there speaks not to his rational understanding, however, but to his emotions. He moves among symbolic visions which arouse terror and pity—a dead baby floating on the slimy water whose “mouth gaped black in a soundless cry.” In a black church service spied on through a crevice in the wall, the devout are singing “Jesus, take me to your home above.” He is overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and intuits that there is something obscene about their “singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them.” In a meat locker with carcasses hanging from the ceiling, a butcher is hacking off a piece of meat with a bloody cleaver. When the store proprietor goes home, Fred emerges from the locker and gorges on fresh fruit, but he takes back with him into the sewer the bloody cleaver—why he does not know. When Fred breaks through a wall into the basement of a movie house, the analogy to Plato’s myth of the cave becomes explicit. He comes up a back stair and sees
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jerking shadows of a silver screen. The Platonic urge to enlighten the people in the theater, who are bound to a shadow world, merges with messianic images. In a dream he walks on water and saves a baby held up by a drowning woman, but the dream ends in terror and doubt as he loses the baby and his ability to emulate Christ. All is lost and he himself begins to drown. Terror and pity are not the only emotions that enlarge his sensibilities in this underground odyssey. As he learns the peculiar advantages of his invisibility, he realizes that he can help himself to all kinds of gadgets valued by that shadow world above ground. He collects them like toys or symbols of an absurd world. He acquires a radio, a light bulb with an extension cord, a typewriter, a gun, and finally, through a chance observation of a safe being opened by combination, rolls of hundred dollar bills, containers of diamonds, watches, and rings. His motivation for stealing these articles is not greed but sheer hilarious fun at acquiring objects so long denied to persons of his class. In one of the most striking, surrealist scenes in modern literature, Fred delightedly decorates his cave walls and floor with these tokens of a society which has rejected him. “They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.” He glues hundred dollar bills on his walls. He winds up all the watches but disdains to set them (for he is beyond time, freed from its tyranny). The watches hang on nails along with the diamond rings. He hangs up the bloody cleaver, too, and the gun. The loose diamonds he dumps in a glittering pile on the muddy floor. Then as he gaily tramps around, he accidentally/on purpose, stomps on the pile, scattering the pretty baubles over the floor. Here, indeed, is society’s cave of shadows, and only he realizes how absurd it all is. When the euphoria of these games begins to pall, Fred becomes more philosophical, perceiving the nihilistic implications of his experience. “Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture.” In his unlettered, blundering way, he is groping toward Ivan Karamazov’s dark meditation: “If there is no God, then all things are permissible.” Fred becomes convinced of the reality of human guilt, however, when he witnesses the suicide of the jewelry store’s night watchman, who has been blamed for the theft he himself committed. At first, the scene in which police torture the bewildered man to force a confession strikes Fred as hilariously funny, duplicating his own experience. When the wretched man shoots himself before Fred can offer him a means of escape, however, Fred is shocked into a realization of his own guilt. The protagonist ultimately transcends his nihilism, and like Platonic realism’s philosopher who returns to the cave out of compassion for those trapped there, Fred returns to the “dead world of sunshine and rain” to bear witness to the Truth. Like the philosopher who is blinded coming out of the light into cave darkness, Fred seems confused and stupid in the social world above ground. When he is thrown out of the black church, he tries inarticulately to explain his revelation at the police station where he had been tortured and condemned. The police think he is crazy, but because they now know they accused him unjustly, they find his return embarrass-
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ing. Fred euphorically insists that they accompany him into the sewer so that they too can experience the visions that enlightened him. When he shows them his entrance to the world underground, one of the policemen calmly shoots him, and the murky waters of the sewer sweep him away. This ironic story of symbolic death and resurrection is unparalleled in its unique treatment of existential themes. Guilt and alienation lead paradoxically to a tragic sense of human brotherhood, which seems unintelligible to “normal” people. The man who kills Fred Daniels is perhaps the only person who perceives even dimly what Daniels wants to do. “You’ve got to shoot this kind,” he says. “They’d wreck things.”
Black Boy Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1945 Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth is one of Wright’s finest achievements: a classic of African American autobiography and a brilliant portrayal of, as Wright put it, the way the environment provides the instrumentalities through which one expresses oneself and the way that self becomes whole despite the environment’s conspiring to keep it divided. The book tells of Wright’s escape from figurative slavery in the South to freedom in the North. The text opens in 1912 on Wright’s earliest memory at age four. Richard is living in Jackson, Mississippi, in the crowded home of his grandparents. The household includes Richard, his mother, father, brother, and his uncle, and it replicates the subhuman living conditions of slaves. Richard’s father is illiterate and an unskilled laborer; in search of work, he moves his family to another state, which initiates Richard’s life of emotional and physical instability. These disruptions occur in three cycles. From age four to age twelve, Richard moves frequently from Mississippi to Tennessee to Arkansas and back again. From age twelve to age seventeen, he remains in Jackson. From age seventeen to age nineteen, he escapes, first to Tennessee and then to Illinois. Before age twelve, Richard suffers abandonment by his father, life in an orphanage, street life, heavy drinking, and the illness of his mother. Wright employs the literary technique of naturalism to portray the racial and environmental factors that create a hostile world for Richard. Whites consider African Americans to be inferior because of their skin color, and Richard hears of violent acts against African Americans in the form of murders, lynchings, and beatings. He personally experiences verbal threats, physical assaults, and animal attacks. Whites pay African Americans low wages to keep them economically enslaved and unable to escape the mandated segregated housing, which is substandard. Richard consistently suffers from hunger, poor housing, insufficient clothing, and erratic schooling. Richard grows up an isolated figure because he does not fit the servile demeanor required of African Americans to live in the South. He rejects religion since he can-
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not understand how a white God allows his mother, family, and community to suffer. In turn, they assail his reading and writing of fiction, which his grandmother charges is “Devil’s work.” The school principal even denounces Richard when he refuses to deliver the stock valedictory speech of humility at his graduation ceremony from ninth grade. Whites, too, attack Richard for being a “smart Negro” when he undertakes menial jobs in private homes or at businesses during his stay in the South. Richard resists these oppressive forces in his quest for knowledge and for freedom. At nineteen, he discovers the writer H. L. Mencken, and decides that he, too, wants to become a writer to “wage war with words.” Black Boy concludes in 1927, with Richard’s flight to the North in the tradition of former slaves before him.
The Outsider Type of work: Novel First published: 1953 Wright’s novel The Outsider, written in France and published thirteen years after Native Son, suffers from a surfeit of internal explanation and a failure to provide a setting as rich as that of Native Son. Still, its portrayal of Cross Damon and his struggle to define himself, while too self-conscious, adds new dimensions to Wright’s myth. As the novel opens, Damon is trapped by his life. His post-office job is unfulfilling, his wife is threatening, and his underage mistress is pregnant. He “desires desire,” but there is no way for that desire to be completed. “A man creates himself,” he has told his wife, but the self Damon has created is a nightmare. He broods, his brooding as close as he comes to religion. Damon gets his chance for new life on the subway. Thought dead after his identification papers are found near the mangled body of another, Damon gets a chance to create himself anew. He must invent, he thinks, not only his future, but also a past to fit with his present; this new opportunity brings with it a different and more potent sense of dread. From the beginning of this new life, Damon is remarkably successful at the mechanics of creating a past. He easily obtains a birth certificate and a draft card. At a deeper level, however, he traps himself as surely as he has been trapped in his old life, so that his new one becomes a continuous act of bad faith. Even before he leaves Chicago, he hides in a brothel where he encounters a coworker who recognizes him. Damon murders the man and throws his body out a window. The pattern of violence, so typical of Wright’s characters, begins in earnest for Damon. Taking a train to New York, Damon meets two people who will influence his new life, a black waiter who introduces him to the world of communist politics in New York City, and Ely Houston, the district attorney, who is the most articulate person in the novel and the only one to understand Damon fully. Houston asks Damon why, when all blacks are outsiders, so few seem conscious of this fact. Wright suggests that being human is too much to be borne by people, that the struggle to define oneself is too difficult; the novel is a testament to that suggestion.
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The Communist Party members, too, are outsiders, and there is nothing unified about their company. Each one that Damon meets is playing god, hoping to protect and extend his personal power. Their awareness of their motives varies, but they are a threat to Damon, and the action of the book is propelled by a series of murders: Damon himself wants to act like a god. Near the end of the book, Houston comes to understand that Damon is the killer, but—rather than indicting and punishing him legally—Houston allows him to go free, alone with his knowledge of what he is. Damon is horrified by his fate, but he is robbed of even that when he is killed by two Communist Party members who fear him. The Outsider is both an extension and a modification of Wright’s earlier views; it is far more pessimistic than Native Son, and the influence of the French existentialists is more pervasive. Like earlier Wright heroes, Damon is engaged in defining the world and himself. “The moment we act ‘as if’ it’s true, then it’s true,” he thinks, because each person, in the absence of a god, is able to create the world and its truth. From Dostoevski, Wright borrows the notion of underground man and the idea that without a god, all is permitted. Yet as each man plays god, as each becomes criminal, policeman, judge, and executioner, there are no longer limits. People desire everything, and desire is described as a floating demon. People are jealous gods here—the worlds they create are petty, their jealousy destructive. Damon is loved in the novel, but that love, unlike the love in Native Son, which is held up as potentially meaningful, is here without promise. Although he creates himself and his world in The Outsider, all that is made is violent and brutal, a world without redemption even in the act of self-realization. At the end of the novel, Cross Damon dies, not with Bigger Thomas’s smile, but with the knowledge that alone, people are nothing. Searching in his last moments of freedom for a clean, well-lighted place in which to rest before he confronts the world again, Cross finds only death. Before he dies, he admits his final act of bad faith: He has thought that he could create a world and be different from other men, that he could remain innocent. Like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902), Damon dies realizing the futility of that hope; having looked into his own heart of darkness, he dies with the word horror on his lips. It is Wright’s bleakest conclusion, the book his most relentless examination of the consequences of his own philosophy. If The Outsider lacks the narrative drive of Native Son, it remains a strongly conceived and troubling piece of fiction.
Lawd Today Type of work: Novel First published: 1963 Lawd Today, written before Native Son but not published until after Wright’s death, tells the story of Jake Jackson from his awakening on the morning of February 12, 1936, to that day’s violent conclusion. Jackson is Wright’s most inarticulate protagonist: He has a banal life, undefined dreams, and a vague sense of discontent
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which he is unable to explain. Violent and prejudiced, he speaks in clichés, a language as meaningless as his life. Technically, the book incorporates a montage of radio broadcasts, newspaper articles, and religious and political pamphlets into the narration of Jake’s day. Divided into three sections, Lawd Today opens with Jake’s dream of running up an endless staircase after a disappearing voice. That dream gives way to the reality of his life: hunger, anger, and recrimination. Tricked by Jake into an abortion for which Jake still owes five hundred dollars and now claiming to have a tumor which will cost another five hundred dollars to remove, Jake’s wife represents his entrapment. In the first section, “Commonplace,” Jake reveals his brutish and trivial character: his anger at his wife, a jealousy and resentment that lead him to bait her so he can hit her, a mock battle straightening his hair, and a meeting with friends who work with him at the post office. As they play bridge to pass the time until work, Wright presents without comment their stupid, cliché-ridden conversation. Section 2, “Squirrel Cage,” shows the men at work. They are all alienated in meaningless, routine jobs, but Jake’s position is the most desperate, for his wife has been to see his boss, and he is now threatened with the loss of his job. Falling deeper into debt by borrowing more money and making mistakes on the job, Jake is trapped by his work—despite his own protestations, as a self-proclaimed Republican and capitalist, that work is liberating. This section, too, ends with a long, rambling, and banal conversation among the men at work. In the concluding section, “Rat’s Alley,” the men go to a brothel for a good time on some of Jake’s borrowed money. There, Jake is robbed and then beaten for his threats of revenge. Finally, Jake stumbles homeward, his day nearing an end. The February weather, pleasant when the book began, has turned bad. All of Jake’s frustration and anger finally erupt; he beats his wife, whom he finds kneeling asleep by the bed in an attitude of prayer. As they struggle, he throws objects through the window. She grabs a shard of broken glass and slashes him three times. The book ends with Jake lying in a drunken stupor, bleeding, while his wife is on her knees, also bleeding, praying for death. Outside, the wind blows mercilessly. Although some of the experimentalism of Lawd Today seems artificial, and although the protagonist is too limited to sustain the reader’s interest, this early work is powerful and economical. The situation, if not the character, is typical of Wright’s work, and the reader understands Jake’s violent frustration. Lawd Today has its flaws, but it foreshadows the strengths of Wright’s best work and in its own right is a daring and fascinating novel.
American Hunger Type of work: Autobiography First published: 1977 American Hunger, the second part of Wright’s autobiography, published posthumously, focuses on his life in Chicago, Illinois, from 1927 to 1937. The book was
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written in 1944. The northern experience recurs as a new slave narrative. It demonstrates how modern African Americans were deceived. Wright opens the text in 1927, when nineteen-year-old Richard, his alter ego, arrives in Chicago with his Aunt Maggie. Wright juxtaposes the terms “strange” and “familiar” to express Richard’s dismay at seeing African Americans openly consort with whites in public facilities. He learns quickly that appearances are deceptive. Wright employs literary naturalism to illustrate racial and environmental barriers erected by whites to imprison African Americans in modern slavery. Richard discovers that migrants have traded southern plantations for urban ghettos. They live in the black belt of Chicago and remain racially and economically disfranchised. Richard’s economic status soon imitates that of his impoverished southern experience. Richard earns low wages at menial jobs during the following six years. The intermittent checks from his postal service job or the relief agency barely sustain Richard’s family. Consistent with Black Boy, Richard becomes the outsider, in conflict with his family, community, and professional affiliations. A major source of conflict is his independent thinking. His attempts at writing cause alarm to his Aunt Maggie, who believes that fiction writing and book reading serve no value unless Richard is studying law. Richard’s white employer cannot understand why an African American dishwasher would read newspapers. Once Richard joins professional writing groups, between 1933 and 1935, he discovers that his intelligence poses a threat to members of the John Reed Club of the Communist Party, the Southside Writers’ Group, and the Federal Theatre Project. They attack him for being an “intellectual” just as southerners attacked the “smart Negro.” The Communists even label Richard a Trotskyite or traitor, and physically assault him at the May Day parade of 1936. His freedom from slavery culminates with Richard’s resignation from the Communist Party. He takes physical flight to New York in 1937. In his ongoing quest for freedom, his psychological emancipation is the real moral to his narrative. It coincides with the successful publication of fiction, which frees Richard to write “art for art’s sake,” not propaganda, and to accelerate his “war with words.”
Suggested Readings Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Butler, Robert. “Native Son”: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. _______. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
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Kinnamon, Kenneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Twayne, 1997. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968. Contributors: Virginia Whatley Smith, Thomas Cassidy, Howard Faulkner, and Katherine Snipes
Mitsuye Yamada Born: Kyushu, Japan; July 5, 1923 Japanese American
Serving with Amnesty International, Yamada has dedicated her writing to the cause of human rights. Principal works poetry: Camp Notes, and Other Poems, 1976 edited texts: The Webs We Weave: Orange County Poetry Anthology, 1986 (with others); Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women, 1990 (with Sarie Sachie Hylkema) miscellaneous: Desert Run: Poems and Stories, 1988; Camp Notes, and Other Writings, 1998 (includes Camp Notes, and Other Poems and Desert Run) Mitsuye Yasutake Yamada (miht-sew-yeh yah-sew-tah-keh yah-mah-dah) spent most of her formative years in Seattle, Washington, until a few months after the outbreak of World War II, when her family was removed to a concentration camp at Minidoka, Idaho. Her poems in Camp Notes, and Other Poems recount this experience. Her need to integrate her art, her beliefs, and her commitment to human rights stems largely from the impact this event had on her. Yamada earned a bachelor’s degree in English and art at New York University and a master’s degree in literature at the University of Chicago. She had a distinguished career as a teacher, working for many years at a community college in Cypress, California, and serving as writer-in-residence at Pitzer College and San Diego State University. In her writings, Yamada has characteristically focused on her bicultural heritage, women, and human rights. During the early 1960’s she began working as a volunteer with Amnesty International, and her continuing commitment to human rights through that organization eventually led to her service on the national board of Amnesty International USA and participation in international committees seeking increased Asian involvement in human rights work. She made several trips to South Korea, Japan, and other countries in Asia on behalf of Amnesty International. Commitment to diversity in all areas of life has led Yamada to multidisciplinary as well as multicultural commitments. While a community college professor she team-taught an interdisciplinary course in biology and poetry which involved field trips to research and experience the wilderness areas of California. Out of this experience came many of the poems in Yamada’s second collection, Desert Run. This 1183
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book returns to the themes of alienation, human rights, and protest against injustice that reverberate through the earlier collection. In Desert Run, seeing the desert from a new perspective enables a healing process to take place. The title poem, “Desert Run,” makes the comparison explicitly as the speaker returns in memory to an earlier, enforced encampment on the desert, where armed guards stood watch over American men, women, and children, and contrasts it with the silence, agelessness, and demanding beauty of the desert as seen on a class camping trip. Other poems celebrate the beauty of seemingly insignificant flowers and, especially, the strength and endurance of desert plants such as cacti and lichens. Another avenue of Yamada’s activism is her formation of a writers’ group, MultiCultural Women Writers, dedicated to raising support for and awareness of diversity in the arts. This group published an anthology, Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women (1992), coedited by Yamada, which has gone through several editions.
Camp Notes, and Other Poems Type of work: Poetry First published: 1976 The poems in Camp Notes, and Other Poems originated in the experience of a concentration camp. Yamada and her family were interned with other Japanese Americans from the West Coast during World War II. Yamada spent April, 1942, through September, 1943, at the internment camp near Minidoka, Idaho. Inmates could have few possessions; Yamada brought a tablet of paper on which she recorded her reflections on life in the camp. To the poems from this period she later added others concerning the time preceding and the time following the camp experience. At the beginning of the book are poems about ancestors and parents: greatgrandmother’s box of treasured souvenirs, a young bride in a new and precarious environment, a folktale related by a sophisticated father. Following the poems about internment are poems related to the poet’s later life. These poems frequently have themes that are a feature of the center section about the internment: justice, equity, and generosity. These themes are continuing threads in these poems, which occasionally have a feminist perspective. The middle, or “Camp Notes,” section contains the angriest poems. With irony, the speaker in the poems expresses and conquers the rage, humiliation, and despair of unjust captivity. A photographer’s instruction to “smile” as internees are collected at staging points, the bus ride to the camps, a guard tower seen through the eyes of a child, makeshift furniture of packing crates and straw mattresses, stuffing rags into cracks in the shacklike barracks during a dust storm—each of these moments is crystallized. The poem titled “Curfew” ends in a particularly vivid commentary: After quoting the “block head” giving orders for lights out, the speaker simply remarks, “There must be no light.” One of the briefest poems, “In the Outhouse,” is also one of the most powerful. The stench of the outhouse becomes a met-
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aphor for the entire camp and the mentality that created it; fear and racism relegate a whole group of people to the domain of “refuse” and “outsider.” Many of the poems focus on the absurdity and duplicity of the language and thinking used to justify the camps. In “Desert Storm” the speaker notes the euphemisms that attempted to disguise injustice, noting how the reality of imprisonment was “sanitized” by the term “relocation.” The speaker notes in “The Trick Was” that the “mind was not fooled.” Camp Notes, and Other Poems is actually a cooperative and family project. Yamada’s husband, Yoshikazu Yamada, contributed the calligraphs that translate titles and text for some of the poems. Her daughters, Jeni and Hedi, produced illustrations for some pages. Yamada also includes a translation of one of her father’s poems, written while he was interned apart from his family in a different camp.
Suggested Readings Cheng, Scarlet. “Foreign All Your Life.” Belles Lettres 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1989). Patterson, Anita Haya. “Resistance to Images of the Internment: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes.” MELUS 23, no. 3 (Fall, 1998). Schweik, Susan. “A Needle with Mama’s Voice: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry.” In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslande Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Woolley, Lisa. “Racial and Ethnic Semiosis in Mitsuye Yamada’s ‘Mrs. Higashi Is Dead.’” MELUS 24, no. 4 (Winter, 1999). Yamada, Mitsuye. “A MELUS Interview: Mitsuye Yamada.” Interview by Helen Jaskoski. MELUS 15, no. 1 (Spring, 1988). Yamada, Mitsuye, and Sarie Sachie Hylkema, eds. Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multi-Cultural Women. Irvine, Calif.: MultiCultural Women Writers, 1991. Contributor: Helen Jaskoski
Hisaye Yamamoto Born: Redondo Beach, California; 1921 Japanese American
Yamamoto, an accomplished short-story writer, was one of the first Japanese American writers to gain recognition after World War II. Principal works short fiction: Seventeen Syllables, and Other Stories, 1988 Born of Japanese immigrant parents, Hisaye Yamamoto (hih-say-yeh yah-mahmoh-toh) began writing in her teens. As a second-generation Japanese American, she was especially interested in the interaction between the Japanese traditions passed on to her and the American experience she encountered. She once cited that her main reason for writing was a desire “to reaffirm certain basic truths which seem to get lost in the shuffle from generation to generation, so that we seem destined to go on making the same mistakes over and over again.” Interest in literary subjects was strong among the generation born in Japan, many of whom wrote traditional Japanese poetry, which appeared in Japaneselanguage periodicals. The second generation tended to express its literary leanings in English. Yamamoto contributed regularly to Kashu Mainichi in Los Angeles and associated herself with the League of Nisei Writers and Artists. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that all people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast be evacuated to internment camps. Interned at Poston, Arizona, until 1945, Yamamoto became a columnist and sometime editor for the camp newsletter. She published her first mystery, “Death Rides the Rails to Poston.” The experience of internment looms large in postwar Japanese American writing. In “I Still Carry It Around,” Yamamoto describes internment as a painful collective wound. From 1945 to 1948, she worked for the Los Angeles Tribune, a black weekly, thus extending her experience of multiculturalism, before deciding to turn to writing full time. In 1950, she received a John Hay Whitney Foundation Opportunity Fellowship. Three of her short stories received critical attention: “High-Heeled Shoes,” dealing with sexual harassment; “The Brown House,” dealing with interethnic and interracial encounters; and “Epithalamium,” dealing with romance. Yamamoto’s themes are multiple, but she is especially sensitive to the life allotted to Japanese American women. Marriage in 1955 and four subsequent children (added to one she had already adopted) curtailed her literary output, but she did not 1186
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cease to write and to influence other writers. In 1988, the publication of Seventeen Syllables, and Other Stories, a collection of fifteen of her short stories, made work easily available.
“Seventeen Syllables” Type of work: Short fiction First published: 1949 “Seventeen Syllables,” Yamamoto’s most acclaimed short story, combines a number of themes that appear frequently in her fiction. These themes include the difficulties faced by Japanese immigrants to the United States, the cultural separation between these immigrants and their children, and the restrictions experienced by Japanese American women within traditional Japanese culture. Important for an understanding of the story are some facts about the Japanese immigrant experience in America. Although the United States welcomed Japanese immigrants after 1885, immigration was stopped with the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. Many of the first Japanese immigrants were unmarried men, who saved their earnings and sent back to Japan for brides they knew only through letters and photographs. Many of these married couples proved incompatible and were forced to make the best of an unsuitable marriage, keeping their problems concealed from the children. The Alien Land Act of 1913 prohibited Japanese immigrants from buying or leasing land for a period of more than three years. Since one-half of the immigrants lived in rural areas, the law forced families to move constantly and dispersed them often. A Japanese woman frequently had no other woman in whom to confide. In spite of these hardships, literature flourished and many immigrants wrote traditional Japanese poetry. Yamamoto’s story deals with these concerns through a device used often by Yamamoto, the double plot. On one level the plot concerns the adolescent Rosie Hayashi and her secret plan to meet Jesus Carrasco, a member of a Mexican family hired for the harvest. Rosie’s inability to speak much Japanese and her failure to understand the interest her mother, Tome, takes in writing haiku, which she submits weekly to a Japanese-language paper in San Francisco, highlight the cultural and intergenerational differences between them. In the midst of the tomato harvest, when all workers are desperately needed, the editor arrives with a prize for Tome’s poetry, a print by Hiroshige. Angry, her husband burns the picture. Tome reveals to Rosie that she has married her husband as an alternative to suicide. Rejected by a well-to-do lover, she had given birth to a stillborn son. An aunt in the United States arranged the marriage. Disappointed and disillusioned, Tome asks Rosie to promise never to marry at a time Rosie is experiencing the blissful promise of young romance. The story is a carefully nuanced and technically sophisticated combination of ethnic, feminist, and intergenerational concerns.
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Suggested Readings Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Higashida, Cheryl. “Women, Work, and World in the Fiction of Carlos Bulosan and Hisaye Yamamoto.” In Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim et al. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2006. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Asian American Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography 312. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Whitson, Kathy J., ed. Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Contributor: Christine R. Catron
Frank Yerby Born: Augusta, Georgia; September 5, 1916 Died: Madrid, Spain; November 29, 1991 African American
Yerby excelled at creating complicated, fast-moving plots that give vivid impressions of historical eras and periods. Often the novels contradict myths and stereotypes, and suggest the futility of finding real truth in the universal confusion of the human condition. Principal works long fiction: The Foxes of Harrow, 1946; The Vixens, 1947; The Golden Hawk, 1948; Pride’s Castle, 1949; Floodtide, 1950; A Woman Called Fancy, 1951; The Saracen Blade, 1952; The Devil’s Laughter, 1953; Benton’s Row, 1954; Bride of Liberty, 1954; The Treasure of Pleasant Valley, 1955; Captain Rebel, 1956; Fairoaks, 1957; The Serpent and the Staff, 1958; Jarrett’s Jade, 1959; Gillian, 1960; The Garfield Honor, 1961; Griffin’s Way, 1962; The Old Gods Laugh: A Modern Romance, 1964; An Odor of Sanctity, 1965; Goat Song, 1968; Judas, My Brother, 1968; Speak Now: A Modern Novel, 1969; The Dahomean: An Historical Novel, 1971; The Girl from Storyville, 1972; The Voyage Unplanned, 1974; Tobias and the Angel, 1975; A Rose for Ana Maria, 1976; Hail the Conquering Hero, 1978; A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest, 1979; Western, 1982; Devilseed, 1984; McKenzie’s Hundred, 1985 short fiction: “Health Card,” 1944 Frank Garvin Yerby (YEHR-bee) was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916. He received a B.A. at Paine College in 1937 and an M.A. at Fisk College in 1938. Subsequently, he did graduate work in education at the University of Chicago. From 1939 to 1941, Yerby taught English, first at Florida A&M and then at Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. Married in 1941, he worked from 1941 to 1944 at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, as a technician and then as an inspector at Fairchild Aircraft from 1944 to 1945. In 1944, he won an O. Henry Memorial Award for the short story “Health Card,” a story that dealt sensitively with black issues. In 1945, he started work on a novel, The Foxes of Harrow, which he aimed to make a commercial success. Thereafter, Yerby wrote many similar melodramatic best sellers. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into at least fourteen languages. Divorced in the 1950’s, Yerby moved to France and then to Spain, where he died 1189
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in 1991. He had four children from his first marriage. His second wife was his researcher and general manager; some of his later novels give evidence of their considerable research. He traveled widely, and sometimes his travels involved investigating locales of works in progress. His plots are intricate and involved, although in many of his novels the characterizations are basically flat. His most common setting is the nineteenth century South, yet he wrote about many other places and times in his more than thirty novels. Occasionally, he set a novel in modern times. The superficial reader of best sellers will find in Yerby’s novels fast-paced narrative with appropriate amounts of violence and sex. Yerby was more, however, than a mere best-selling novelist. His early short stories show promise and develop radically different themes from those of his costume novels. In the 1960’s, secure after many commercial successes, Yerby began to do his best work, dealing with larger issues of race and religion, which figure less prominently in his earlier novels. The characters in these later novels are no longer cardboard figures, while the backgrounds are as richly detailed and vividly recreated as ever. Moreover, Yerby’s historical novels must be evaluated within the context of that often unappreciated genre. His novels almost always show the conflict between two worlds or orders, as great historical novels do. Yerby rarely deals with actual historical figures but rather creates characters who have to deal with the essential conflicts of their eras. Often his novels, even the early ones, destroy widely held myths and stereotypes; critic Darwin Turner suggests that this revisionism might be Yerby’s most significant contribution as a novelist. While extensive research is not evident in his early work, many of Yerby’s later novels were thoroughly researched. Yerby was at his best in creating the color and movement of a particular era. Yerby’s typical protagonist is, in the words of his main character in The Serpent and the Staff, an auslander, or outsider, excluded from the ruling social order. The protagonist experientially develops a philosophy that often approaches modern existentialism, an attitude that life has no answer but that people still must cope with the bleakness of human existence with both dignity and humanity. This pattern emerges in Yerby’s first novel, The Foxes of Harrow, and is developed in three of his best novels: Griffin’s Way, An Odor of Sanctity, and The Dahomean.
The Foxes of Harrow Type of work: Novel First published: 1946 The Foxes of Harrow is set in the South and covers the years from 1825 to just after the end of the Civil War. Superficially, it is a novel about a clever schemer who rises to own a plantation with a neoclassical mansion, Harrow, and who has marriages to beautiful white women and a liaison with a stunning mulatto. Much of the novel is composed of stock devices of pulp fiction, and Yerby himself said of The Foxes of
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Harrow that he set out to write a popular novel that would make him a lot of money, regardless of literary merit. Yerby added, however, that he became strangely involved with the writing of the novel and, despite himself, exceeded the ambitions of the pulp genre. Stephen Fox, the protagonist, is an outsider, originally shanty Irish. He is not merely the rogue that early reviewers took him for, whose success and eventual fall conform to a predictable pulp outline. Fox sees all values and ideals slip from him, so that at the end, he is a failure despite his humanity and perception. He is superior to the Southerners with whom he sympathetically deals. More than merely a novel of stock devices, The Foxes of Harrow is a story about the failure of a culture. At the opening of the novel, Yerby’s authorial voice establishes a pensive tone as he describes a visit to Harrow, now in ruins, in the twentieth century. Harrow is the symbol of a lost cause. Thus, for symbolic purposes, Harrow is cut off from the modern world. Bathed in moonlight, the ruins of Harrow have a decadent grandeur. The visitor feels driven from room to room and finally away from the house, never wanting to look back. The shortness of the opening, six brief paragraphs, makes the tone all the more striking, and the mood shifts quickly into the dialogue and description of the arrival of Stephen Fox in New Orleans in 1825. Yerby was at his best in the novel in creating vivid images and scenes of the region during the forty or so years the novel spans. New Orleans appears as a lush feudalistic world where color is measured by degrees, given the novel’s constant references to mulattos, quadroons, and octaroons, references which are historically true to the setting. New Orleans emerges as a backward society that refuses to drain the marshes where the mosquitoes carrying yellow fever breed and instead fires cannon to disperse the plague. The society also destroys the creativity of freed blacks. In one case, a thoroughly educated black returns from France and is killed for acting as if he were equal to whites. The most poignant scene occurs at the end of the novel, when the young heir to Harrow returns after the war to New Orleans to be confronted by a former slave of Harrow now in control. This former slave presents the heir’s unknown half brother (by a beautiful mulatto) to his former master, who sees the image of his father as a young man—but the half brother is mentally retarded. As the scene concludes, Yerby deftly shows the social history of the next one hundred Frank Yerby (Library of Congress)
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years of the South. The former slave, now the ruler, knows that power will again return to the whites but suggests that blacks and whites can live together and respect one another. The heir, a combination of the worst of his father’s roguish tendencies and the excesses of New Orleans, emphatically denies that such equality and reconciliation between the races are possible. Yerby was weakest in his creation of character in The Foxes of Harrow, for the characters are one-dimensional and move woodenly through a convoluted, overheated plot. Stephen Fox is the fox, the rogue set off from Southern society by his birth, whose goals are riches and the most beautiful woman in New Orleans, Odalie Arceneaux, a cold, haughty belle. Her sister Aurore is a foil to her, for she is warm and beautiful and in love with Stephen, who is too blind at first to see her love. As is common in pulp fiction, Odalie dies in childbirth, and Stephen then marries gentle Aurore, but only after having fathered a child by a beautiful mulatto when Odalie had spurned his strong sexual drives. Beneath this claptrap, though, is an author working with social issues not to be found in the typical 1946 pulp novel. In one scene, a black woman recently inducted into slavery throws herself into the Mississippi River rather than live in bondage. Old Calleen, a trusted slave at Harrow, later tells her grandson Inch (the son of the drowned slave) that someday, the rightness of their freedom will be made apparent. More significantly, in understated dialogue Stephen talks to his son Étienne about freeing slaves and says that the country must treat all people equally, including the blacks and the poorest whites. When his son dismisses the poor, white or black, Stephen uses history as a defense, mentioning the French Revolution, Haiti, and insurrectionist Nat Turner. It is in his sympathy and balance in treating social matters that Yerby’s “moral mobility” appears, a phrase that a London Times writer used in reviewing a later Yerby novel.
Griffin’s Way Type of work: Novel First published: 1962 Griffin’s Way was published in 1962, sixteen years after The Foxes of Harrow, and is a departure in some respects from Yerby’s work up to that time. It treats the Mississippi of the 1870’s unglamorously, highlighting squalor, inbreeding among whites, and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan in a manner more characteristic of William Faulkner than of the standard best-selling author. The novel shows the paralysis of humane white society after the Civil War, a paralysis symbolized by the central hero’s amnesia and invalid status. Much of the novel debunks the grandeur and opulence of the old South, which Yerby himself had occasionally exploited in earlier novels. The ruined South appears first through the eyes of a Northerner, Candace Trevor, a New England minister’s daughter married to a paralyzed Southerner and hired as a nurse for Paris Griffin as the novel opens. She despises the Southern “courtesy” to which women are
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subjected, dismisses the neoclassical architecture in the poorly constructed homes, and comments on how most planters lived in squalor even before the war. Unlike her father, she believes in a Darwinian theory of evolution and sees the darker forces in herself as part of the ape still remaining in people. Candace knows that to cure Paris of his amnesia she must find the key to it from Paris’s oversexed wife Laurel. Ferreting out answers with the right leading questions, she discovers the tawdry, twisted story that led to Paris’s amnesia and emotional paralysis. It is only her austere moral upbringing that allows her to control her love for Paris to use her knowledge to help him. When Candace does cure him, Paris tries to return to his home, Griffin’s Way, and to his wife Laurel, but while his cure is a rebirth, it does not allow a return. To begin with, he has returned to a world changed by the war, a world of political corruption and violence, a world that has regressed, so that even a sixty-mile trip, once possible in three hours, now involves an arduous three-day journey because the railroads remain unrepaired even five years after the war. Three years later, with the railroad rebuilt, Paris and Laurel visit Vicksburg, where Paris, despite his humanity, appears troubled by the apparent ascendancy of blacks. Yerby balances the situation by having Paris also see the obvious corruption of the black superintendent of schools, who lives in the grand style of the Old South on money intended for the schools. Paris is thus caught between two worlds: He rejects the Klan as apes but resents a black man wearing a suit as if he is accustomed to it. Even renewed, Paris still represents the paralysis of the humane white during the Reconstruction. Yerby titled the last third of the novel “Apocalypse,” and this part has unresolved elements, unresolved on account of Yerby’s honesty in dealing with his material. Paris watches the new world tumble around him, powerless to do anything. Black militants and white Klansmen fight all over the South, but Paris can only catalog the battles; he cannot change events. His moment of action does allow him to rescue Samson, a former slave, and Samson’s wife by helping them escape to the North. He can do nothing to help his brother, his mulatto wife, and their children, who are burned in their house except for one daughter, who dies after being repeatedly raped, all of them victims of the Klan. He also helps a black minister escape, but only after the dynamiting of the minister’s house, which killed a daughter. At his daughter’s funeral, the minister delivers a stern sermon to the Klan members, who then threaten his life so that Paris must again help him. The Klan members finally back off from Paris’s house when one accidentally shoots Laurel, still very much a symbol of Southern womanhood. The novel ends with dawn imagery, the night having been endured and the humane whites now waiting for the light of morning. Whether the whites threatened by the Klan can start anew is unclear. Given the implied parallel to modern events, Yerby seems to be saying that it is too soon to tell whether the twentieth century can rise above racial violence; nevertheless, the concluding imagery does suggest hope.
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An Odor of Sanctity Type of work: Novel First published: 1965 In An Odor of Sanctity, Yerby is at his best as a historical novelist. It is a long, deftly paced novel which, while using many of the stock elements of Yerby’s novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, also deals intelligently with a religious theme. Once again, Yerby creates an outsider, Alaric Teudisson, as hero; he is set off by his odor of sanctity, a saintly force in him of which he is not fully aware for most of his life. Teudisson must deal with the complex culture of medieval Spain, a battleground for Christians, Moors, and numerous bands of marauding barbarians. Like earlier Yerby protagonists, Teudisson is involved in many liaisons and several marriages. Teudisson is a striking blond of Visigoth extraction who, before the male hormones take effect, is so “beautiful” that at one point he is almost made a catamite. Thereafter, Teudisson has numerous sexual encounters, one unconsummated marriage, and finally a marriage to a woman who has been repeatedly raped by bandits, a marriage which shows Teudisson’s magnanimity and one which also brings Teudisson genuine happiness and a family. The religious motif of An Odor of Sanctity adds depth to what would otherwise be an entertaining but rather shallow melodrama. Despite himself, Teudisson becomes a saint by the end of the novel. As a man, Teudisson is handsome but scarred by battle, but as a boy, his beauty, so unlike the usual rough Goth face, led his mother and others to think he was marked for the priesthood. He turns from his religious impulses to lead a secular life, however, and while doing so, he finds his saintliness. In dealing with women, he shows a compassion and love that are the basis of his profound sexual appeal; at one point of seeming dissolution, he has numerous prostitutes loving him because he has talked to them and treated them as human beings and not merely as sex objects. Misused by a woman, he always responds with kindness. By the end of the novel, Teudisson becomes the arbiter between Moor and Christian factions when a certain group of fanatic Christians wants to destroy all tolerance for the predominant Moors. Throughout the novel, Teudisson has been a genuine ecumenist. At the end, Teudisson, doubting his saintly powers because he is unable to save his wife, willingly seeks crucifixion and thus enters sainthood and legend. In losing himself, he gains sainthood. As in most of his novels, Yerby’s greatest strength in An Odor of Sanctity is his re-creation of a time, invoked through color and action. Again, a humane authorial voice speaks throughout the novel. The book shows that the diversity of medieval Spain is indeed its glory. While the Moorish culture encourages learning and recognizes Christ as a prophet, the contrasting Christian culture (except for Teudisson and a few Church fathers) is dark and intolerant. In showing the clash between these cultures, An Odor of Sanctity is first-rate historical fiction.
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The Dahomean Type of work: Novel First published: 1971 If one of Yerby’s novels is destined to last, it is The Dahomean, a novel unlike any of his others. It is a simple, moving tale of the life of a black man in his African culture before he was sold into slavery. Yerby neither idealizes nor sensationalizes his material but presents a story composed of love, envy, and hatred that reads as a legend, a story of characters and events drawn larger than life. The protagonist, Nyasanu, is like other Yerby protagonists because he is an alien or outsider: He is far less violent and far more handsome than most men of his society. Caught in the ugliness of the American slave system, he has the tragic quality of some of the great existentialist heroes. Yerby begins the chronological narrative of Nyasanu as he is about to enter manhood, a passage marked by the painful ritual of circumcision. The early parts of the novel present such rituals in convincing detail. Yerby moves the reader from Nyasanu’s initiation to an enemy’s attempt to destroy his guardian tree to his wedding and the deflowering of his bride. In “A Note to the Reader,” Yerby explains that the novel is based on research into the customs of the Dahomeans of the nineteenth century, but Yerby adds to his research his own respect of this African culture. As Nyasanu moves through his period of manhood, Yerby depicts the society of the Dahomeans as a stage for the great primal emotions and forces of life. Nyasanu has encounters with numerous women, but his sexual experiences are never merely sensational, the stuff of popular fiction: Nyasanu has a reality which sets him apart from Yerby’s typical protagonists. In addition to his sexual encounters, Nyasanu has the experience of real brotherhood, for his society expects each male to have his three closest friends identified in order. Battles with warring tribes give Nyasanu the chance to show bravery and also to distinguish himself as more sensitive to violence than the average Dahomean. In addition, Yerby shows the diversity of Dahomean society, which includes both male homosexuals and Amazonian warriors. In a moving discussion with his number-one friend, Kpadunu, Nyasanu learns that the generations are all of one fabric. Each generation faces the same problems of love, the family, and death. The old priests, therefore, give answers based on the past to the young and the unsure, and—given the coherence of their society—the answers generally hold. Facing the problem of belief in the gods which these old priests try to inculcate in the young, Nyasanu realizes that their wisdom is not divine but experiential, that the past of his society answers the present needs. Ironically, his friend Kpadunu is trying to help Nyasanu rise above the control of priests by showing where their wisdom resides, yet he actually makes the skeptical Nyasanu believe more than he did, so that he must face the priestly prediction that his life will end in Dahomey but will begin again in another place. Nyasanu does learn that he can count on the inexorability of fate and not the pro-
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tection of the gods. In quick succession, he loses his friend Kpadunu, his wife in childbirth, and his father. He comes to see his heroism as mere foolishness in taking risks. Rather than listening to the gods, he simply faces life as chieftain and husband of Kpadunu’s widow. Far more than the ritual of circumcision, his acceptance of life and his rejection of the illusion of divine protection mark Nyasanu’s adulthood. When Nyasanu next appears in the novel, he is chieftain and has four wives. His life is successful until he is sold into slavery with the aid of his homosexual brother and rival. The betrayal of Nyasanu has the archetypal pattern of tragedy, the hero fallen from great heights, undone by his own blindness in not facing the evil of his brother and his incestuous brother-in-law and by his pride in not following the past and living with his extended family in the same compound. He faces the guns of his attackers with his sword, only to be told to put his sword down, for in the modern era, swords are powerless against guns. First, he must watch the murder of his mother (the slavers see that she is too old to have children), the subsequent murder of all his children (the slavers know that they would die on the voyage across the Atlantic), and the subjugation of his wives, the rape of some and the suicide of one. His response is disassociation, a silence which lasts the rest of his life. Like a classical tragedy, The Dahomean treats terrible despair in its conclusion but leads to an illumination, Nyasanu’s enlightenment. He recognizes the evil of blacks selling blacks into American slavery, although they have no conception of the degradation of this foreign slavery, their domestic slavery being gentle and indulgent. Philosophically, Nyasanu faces the bleakness of life with the realization that there are no answers. Truth is only that there is no truth. Nyasanu acquits himself with honor; like a great tragic hero, he has his dignity, the dignity of silence in the face of the emptiness of the human condition.
Suggested Readings Glasrud, Bruce. “‘The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands’: Frank Yerby, a Black Author in White America.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23 (Winter, 2000): 15-21. Jarreet, Gene Andrew. “‘For Endless Generations’: Myth, Dynasty, and Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow.” Southern Literary Journal 29, no. 1 (Fall, 2006): 54ff. Klotman, Phyllis. “A Harrowing Experience: Frank Yerby’s First Novel to Film.” College Language Association Journal 31 (December, 1987): 210-222. Smiles, Robin V. “Uncovering Frank Yerby.” Black Issues in Higher Education 21, no. 19 (November 4, 2004): 28ff. Contributor: Dennis Goldsberry
José Yglesias Born: Tampa, Florida; November 29, 1919 Died: New York, New York; November 7, 1995 Cuban American
Yglesias is best known for writing about individual lives and hardship in Cuba and in Latin American countries affected by revolutions. Principal works drama: Chattahoochee, pr. 1989; The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pr. 1989; You Don’t Remember?, pr. 1989; New York 1937, pr. 1990 long fiction: A Wake in Ybor City, 1963; An Orderly Life, 1967; The Truth About Them, 1971; Double Double, 1974; The Kill Price, 1976; Home Again, 1985; Tristan and the Hispanics, 1989; Break-in, 1996; The Old Gents, 1996 (novella) short fiction: The Guns in the Closet, 1996 translations: Island of Women, 1962 (pb. in England as Sands of Torremolinos); Villa Milo, 1962; The Party’s Over, 1966 nonfiction: The Goodbye Land, 1967; In the Fist of the Revolution, 1968; Down There, 1970; The Franco Years, 1977 Of Cuban and Spanish descent, José Yglesias (hoh-SAY ee-GLAY-see-ahs) was born to José and Georgia Milian Yglesias in Tampa, Florida. He worked as a stock clerk and a dishwasher when he moved to New York City at age seventeen. Yglesias then served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945 during World War II; he received a naval citation of merit. After the war, he attended Black Mountain College in 1946. He married Helen Basine, a novelist, on August 19, 1950. Yglesias held numerous jobs during his lifetime, from assembly line worker to film critic, from assistant to a vice president of a pharmaceutical company to Regents Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1973. Yglesias’s birthplace greatly influenced his literary concern and career. He was born in the section of Tampa called Ybor City. Until Ybor City, a cigar-making town, was founded by V. Martinez Ybor in 1885, there were not many Latinos in Tampa. As Ybor City and its economy grew, Cubans and other Latinos arrived and brought their own cultural activities and vibrant traditions. These aspects of life in Ybor City served as inspiration and material for Yglesias’s plays and books. According to him, these events must be documented so that the history and cultural richness of that part of America will not be forgotten. Descriptions of Ybor City and its history can be found in the pages of Yglesias’s 1197
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first novel, A Wake in Ybor City. The novel is a colorful depiction of Cuban immigrants in the Latin section of Tampa on the eve of the Cuban Revolution in 1958. The story deals with family dynamics, class envy, sexual intrigues, and cultural assimilation, along with machismo and matriarchal powers in conflict. This novel started his prolific writing career, in which he would move back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. Being of Cuban and Spanish ancestry also greatly influenced Yglesias’s second book, The Goodbye Land. The laborious energy required—as well as personal desire—to travel to the mountainside village of Galacia, Spain, in 1964 in order to trace his father’s birth and death there proved to be worthwhile; the book was a great success and was praised by many critics for its authenticity as a travel narrative. Many of Yglesias’s books after The Goodbye Land deal with personal statements and individuality amid the revolutionary experience. His nonfiction work In the Fist of the Revolution addresses individual lives and hopes amid political and social problems in the town of Miyari, Cuba. The Franco Years depicts the living conditions of the author’s Spanish acquaintances under the Fascist regime of dictator Francisco Franco, who died in Spain in 1976. (Yglesias was in Spain at the time.) Again, many critics agreed that these two books demonstrate authentic social reporting because the author, while in Cuba and Spain interviewing people, experienced their hardships and turmoil. That authenticity reflects the critical talent and genuine objectivity of Yglesias, who went against the mainstream literary fashion of political and social analysis and moralizing. Yglesias’s talent and honesty in his literary desire to present emotions, aspirations, and disappointments unique to Latino émigrés in the United States led to success and critical acclaim in his novels as well as nonfiction works. His persistent interest in individual lives, the immigrant experience, and cultural assimilation can be seen in novels such as The Kill Price, Home Again, and Tristan and the Hispanics. Mainly known for writing novels, nonfiction, and translation, Yglesias was also a talented dramatist. He wrote only four plays, three of which—Chattahoochee, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and You Don’t Remember?—form a trilogy set in Ybor City in 1912, 1920, and 1989, respectively. The fourth play, New York 1937, is an autobiographical comedy involving cigar making and the Great Depression, set in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. In his plays, Yglesias’s creative drive and imagination brings his characters to life upon the stage. In addition to his efforts as novelist and dramatist, Yglesias contributed major articles for prestigious literary magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals. He was the patriarch of a literary family, which included his former wife and his son Rafael, also a novelist and screenwriter. Yglesias died of cancer in 1995. His body of work places him as one of the pioneers of modern American and Latino literature.
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The Truth About Them Type of work: Novel First published: 1971 Yglesias’s third novel, The Truth About Them, focuses on the family history of a Cuban American clan, whose American experience dates from 1890, when the narrator’s aristocratic grandmother first arrived in Tampa, Florida. Although much of their life in America is associated with the up-and-down fortunes of Florida’s cigar industry, this working-class family displays a pride and cohesiveness that defy all obstacles. During the lean years of the 1930’s, some members of the clan are forced to go north to New York City in search of jobs. Before long, however, they find themselves drifting back to Ybor City, owned and controlled by the cigar company. The narrator, much like Roberto of A Wake in Ybor City, is truly a Cuban American. Brought up in the very Latin atmosphere of Ybor City, he eventually becomes a left-wing journalist and learns to swim freely in America’s traditionless mainstream. Eager to learn more about his Latin roots, however, he visits postrevolutionary Cuba, an experience that engenders a newfound pride in his Cuban background. The Truth About Them covers a greater time span than that of A Wake in Ybor City, filling in the historical background lacking in Yglesias’s first novel. Written in an episodic style (several adventures were first published separately in The New Yorker), this fictionalized family portrait, with its rich and varied characters, its fast-moving plot, and its free-flowing style, offers a panoramic vision of a part of America generally unknown to non-Cuban Americans. Its detailed and loving depiction of a specific ethnic group suggests that America is greater for having accepted as its own such resolute and distinctive communities.
Suggested Readings Baskin, Leonard. “José Yglesias.” Tampa Review 13 (1996). Booklist. Review of The Kill Price. 72 (May 1, 1976): 1244. Ivory, Ann, ed. “José Yglesias.” In Contemporary Authors. Vols. 41-44, first revision series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1974. “José Yglesias.” In Contemporary Novelists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Laezman, Rick. One Hundred Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History. San Mateo, Calif.: Bluewood Books, 2002. Nelson, Milo G. Review of Double Double. Library Journal 99 (May 15, 1974): 1410. Contributors: H. N. Nguyen and Richard Keenan
Al Young Born: Ocean Springs, Mississippi; May 31, 1939 African American
Young’s poetry is inspired by rhythm-and-blues and jazz, and he makes effective use of various American dialects. He also writes about family relationships, his characters and personas often centering their identities in family life, which enables them to cope with the meanness and injustice of contemporary urban American society. Principal works long fiction: Snakes, 1970; Who Is Angelina?, 1975; Sitting Pretty, 1976; Ask Me Now, 1980; Seduction by Light, 1988 poetry: Dancing, 1969; The Song Turning Back Into Itself, 1971; Geography of the Near Past, 1976; The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems, 1982; Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956-1990, 1992; Conjugal Visits, and Other Poems in Verse and Prose, 1996; The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 19902000, 2001; Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems, 2001-2006, 2006 nonfiction: Bodies and Soul: Musical Memoirs, 1981; Kinds of Blue: Musical Memoirs, 1984; Things Ain’t What They Used to Be: Musical Memoirs, 1987; Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs, 1989 (with Janet Coleman); Drowning in the Sea of Love: Musical Memoirs, 1995 edited texts: Changing All Those Changes, 1976 (of James P. Girard); Zeppelin Coming Down, 1976 (of William Lawson); Yardbird Lives!, 1978 (with Ishmael Reed); Calafia: An Anthology of California Poets, 1979 (with Reed and Shawn Hsu Wong); Quilt, 1981-1986 (with Reed; 5 volumes); African American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology, 1996 Albert James Young, the son of Mary (Campbell) and Albert James Young, was born in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, near Biloxi, on the Gulf of Mexico. His childhood, which he characterizes as happy, was divided between rural Mississippi and urban Detroit. Though he moved through several communities and schools, he values the flexibility that he gained by adapting to different subcultures. His father was an auto worker (in part, the model for Durwood Knight’s father in Ask Me Now), and also a professional musician, like his son. For five years, Young sang and played the flute and guitar professionally, at first while attending the University of Michigan, then while working as a disc jockey at radio station KJAZ-FM in Alameda, California. The character M. C. in Snakes reflects some of Young’s aspira1200
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tions as a young jazz musician, and the poem “A Little More Traveling Music” reflects his divided roots in rural and urban music. American blues and jazz and their origins in African music have influenced the themes and the formal structures of Young’s fiction and poetry. Young has credited his interest in writing narratives to his early exposure to the art of southern storytelling, and his fictional and poetic use of regional and ethnic vernacular draws upon his memories of southern speech as well as his wide reading in American literature (especially the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, and Jesse Stuart) and British and European literature. Young attended the University of Michigan from 1957 to 1961 before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1961. There he received his A.B. degree in Spanish from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. He and his wife, Arline June (Belch), were married in 1963 and have a son, Michael James Young. From 1966 to 1967, Young was a fellow in Advanced Fiction Writing at Stanford University; in 1969, he received his bachelor of arts degree in Spanish at Berkeley. Young taught writing at the San Francisco Museum of Art during the late 1960’s and was linguistic consultant for the Berkeley Neighborhood Youth Corps. From 1969 to 1973, he held Stanford University’s Edward H. Jones Lectureship in Creative Writing, and he served as consultant to the New York writers’ organization Poets and Writers in 1974 and 1975. He was the 1979 director of Associated Writing Programs, an organization of graduate university administrators, teachers, and students of creative writing, was writer-in-residence at the University of Washington from 1981 to 1982. Young also spent many years in the 1970’s and 1980’s working as a film screenwriter for various Los Angeles-area studios. He was a writer-in-residence at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1981 to 1982, and served as the vice president of Yardbird Publishing Cooperative, which he had cofounded. He became a familiar face on the lecture circuit at universities throughout the United States. In the 1980’s, Young turned increasingly to writing nonfiction, often having to do with music and film. He earned an Outstanding Book of the Year citation from The New York Times in 1980 for Ask Me Now, a Pushcart Prize in 1980, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1982 for Bodies and Soul, and a Fulbright Fellowship in 1984. In the 1990’s, he continued writing, contributing to anthologies, and creating “musical memoirs.” Though he has traveled widely—in Spain, France, Mexico, and the United States—he has made his home in Northern California. Young’s concern for language, a concern that embraces both mistrust and love, is clearly evinced in his prose. His second novel, Who Is Angelina?, and his fourth, Ask Me Now, have third-person narrative personas who stand distractingly close to their author; they appear hesitant to act freely for want of purpose. Readers of the first and third novels, however, will quickly recognize Young’s ability to render in his first-person narrative personas a vibrant male voice of new adulthood (Snakes), or sagacious middle age (Sitting Pretty). The author’s background as a professional musician enables him to use music descriptively as well as metaphorically; the reader shares the experience of making
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music and feeling music make life known. The music of language also affects Young’s style. He makes careful alterations to standard syntax and diction, sometimes punctuation, in order to set the speech closer to its natural human tone. His objective is not merely to create contemporary dialect but also to create an enduring contemporaneity, to offer rhythmically, as the poet-musician should, the nonverbal meanings that language can carry in its sounds. Young creates this quality of speech through narrative personae who speak softly or stridently, sometimes too literally, yet with voices constant and sincere. Love, like a curse or a whimper, extends most intensely from the individual to those nearby. The contemporary American social dilemma is thereby represented in Young’s prose just as it appears in his poetry: Each person must somehow maintain the unity, fidelity, and consistency love requires while grappling for the freedom and oneness that American mythology promises. Although Snakes and Sitting Pretty are more successful, all Young’s novels contain graphic portrayals of mainstream urban America—middle-class people who try to be good at being themselves. They emote, they dream, and they reason. At worst, they stand too large on the page; at best, they find purpose to complement the dignity they feel. Whether he narrates with commentary from a third-person point of view, or with the immediacy of first-person sensory experience, Young confronts the problems of individuals growing into their individuality, and the qualities of life central to the congregate American family.
Dancing Type of work: Poetry First published: 1969 Young’s poetry originates in visual and aural memories and in musical forms which are then developed through suitable language and prosody. The music that inspires his poetry includes rhythm and blues and jazz, and he makes effective use of various American dialects. The metaphor of dancing unites the visual images and musical forms, and suggests both the formality and the spontaneity of design in his poetry. Young also writes about family relationships and does so with insight, humor, and affection. His fictional characters and poetic personas often center their identities in their family life, which enables them, somehow, to cope with the meanness and injustice of contemporary urban American society. The family relationships are hardly idyllic, and characters habitually annoy and occasionally hurt one another; nevertheless, the love they feel for one another transforms their lives. Although his work offers no simplistic ideological solutions, his poems and novels clearly reflect his belief in the writer’s function: to change society by expanding the reader’s perception of reality. Dancing, Young’s first collection of poems, won the National Arts Council Award for poetry, as well as a Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco
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Foundation. These poems explore many forms of dance, including “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes,” “Dancing Day to Day,” “The John Coltrane Dance,” “Reading Nijinsky’s Diary,” “Dancing Pierrot,” “A Little More Traveling Music,” and “Dancing.” Young’s rejection of “monocultural values, of whatever hue,” is reflected in the diverse cultural backgrounds of the poems in Dancing. At the beginning of his collection, Young places an uncharacteristic poem, perhaps written after the manuscript of Snakes had been refused by a series of publishers interested only in black voices that were violently angry and bitter. “A Dance for Militant Dilettantes” implicitly rejects the advice of a friend who urges him to play the stereotypic role of a honky-hating African American activist, writing about bloodying “those fabled wine & urine-/ stained hallways.” While modifying the Homeric cliché of wine-dark seas, Young’s brilliant epithet exposes the contemporary racism of the publisher who wants to market “a furious nigrah” and of the militant dilettantes willing to sell out. The poet in “Dancing Day to Day” lives in and writes about a multicultural world, in which people are fearful of violence and yet live, fairly contentedly, one day at a time. In the first four lines of this poem, Young echoes T. S. Eliot, in the “come and go” of his monotonous, trivial, habitual Prufrockian world, but, significantly, without Eliot’s contempt: In my street the people mostly go. Very few come to what I’d call home.
The walking iambic meter of lines 2 and 4 alternates with the emphatic trochees of lines 1 and 3, and his quatrain establishes the dominant metric pattern of the verse paragraphs that follow. This open design, built on no regular line length, perfectly expresses the speaker’s relaxed attitude toward his neighbors, as well as the freedom of their daily natural movements. “The John Coltrane Dance,” a tribute to the music of John Coltrane, uses repetition, subtle assonance, and alliteration to suggest the emotional power of Coltrane’s musical compositions and performances. The word “sound” occurs seven times, is echoed in “astound” and “surround,” and introduces a pattern of sibilants. The line “Mr Love Trane” occurs only twice (lines 2 and 24), but its distinctive concluding spondee, lengthened by the long vowels, sets a metrical pattern that also occurs in lines 8 (“tree dance”), 14 (“smoothed stones”), 16 (“hurt songs”), and 18 (“sound cures”). Against the implied hesitation of this duple meter, Young syncopates rapidly moving feet of triple meter, such as the dactyl (“hovering,” line 6), the anapest (“where that sound,” line 14) and the tribrach, or three unaccented syllables (“& cleansed the,” line 15, and “on all the,” line 23). Traditional prosody offers these terms to describe lines of verse, but readers familiar with open forms in American poetry and listeners familiar with Coltrane’s extended and complex rhythmic patterns may not need this abstract analysis to hear the musical phrases of Young’s poem. The poem first invokes Coltrane as muse (“Fly on into my poem”), imitating
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both the sounds and the impact of one of his solo performances, then places his music within the social and political history of Black America (the migrations from Alabama, the confrontation over segregated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the urban ghettos in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Citing the function of the blues, expressing pain to soothe and heal it, Young identifies Coltrane’s music as creating and keeping alive both collective and individual history. In a temporal metaphor moving from day to night, Young suggests that Coltrane’s music also forecasts the future, as the “sunrise” of line 9 is transformed into the “stars” of Al Young (© Miriam Berkley) the final line. It is an optimistic poem, celebrating the growth of the spirit, through a history and an artistic form that recall dark nights of the soul. In the playful “Dancing Pierrot,” the speaking poet claims to have known the moons of China, Egypt, Mexico, Tokyo, Bahia, San Francisco, Tanzania, and the Moors; further, he claims to have known not merely fat and skinny moons (the lunar phases) but moons that shone “lifetimes ago.” Clearly, he claims the international and timeless realm of the poet who speaks to all cultures, to all races, and to all ages. Like Jules Laforgue, whose Pierrot of L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886; “Imitation of Our Lady the Moon”) appears in the title, Young imagines the poet as a kind of noble lunatic, drunk on moonlight. His dancing seems that of the marionette, jerkily bobbing at the end of his strings, an image reinforced by several short two- and three-syllable lines, and by the many one-syllable words; the lyrical fifth stanza, however, echoing “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” breaks the confining strings and creates the feeling of freedom. The poet’s function appears in the third of the poem’s five stanzas, as he observes the effects of moonlight (imagination) on ordinary working people, whose aspirations the poet powerfully images as “armed to the eyes/ with star guns” (lines 28 and 29). The workers, who might seem imprisoned by repetitive movements, have a vision of self-liberating power, which is articulated by the poet. “Reading Nijinsky’s Diary” also considers the madness of the artist, whose dance plays between the extremes of confinement (“bodily concern/ vinetangled nerve”) and freedom (“—cut loose, freed/ to know ever for all”). The visual images that Young employs suggest the surviving photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky in costume for his roles as the faun in Afternoon of a Faun and as the rose in Specter of the Rose. The identification of the dancer with the dance, like that of the poet with the
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poem, carries the threat of insanity. For Young, unlike Nijinsky, the descent into madness is only temporary, and he is released by the incantation: “‘My madness is my love/ for mankind.’” “A Little More Traveling Music” is the autobiographical sketch of a poet and singer born in Mississippi, reared on the “Colored music, rhythmic & electrifying” broadcast over the radio, and on the music of a mother’s recited family history. His move “up north” introduced him to the external, daily sounds of urban traffic and the internal music of moonlit dreams, and educated him in the sounds of written poetry. The third stanza narrates the return to “motherly music” and the poet’s synthesis of that oral tradition with his formal education. The cycle of personal history culminates in his choice of vocation: “I turned to poetry & to singing.” Performing and creating are made possible by listening to his “own background music.” The long poem “Dancing,” which gives its title to the collection, responds personally and politically to the crises that Americans endured in the late 1960’s. Admonitory rhetoric and judgmental images establish the poet as a cultural historian. The four sections of “Dancing,” however, do not trace a chronology, since the work begins and ends in the night before a dawn, with the poet in the dark about his life, but hopeful. There are none of the theological issues that Eliot explores in The Waste Land (1922), and yet Young claims the same correlation between personal and cultural crises and records a spiritual descent followed by a mystical elevation. Writing in the oracular tradition of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and the Old Testament prophets, Young envisions a decade of personal experience in the context of his jeremiad on contemporary American culture. “Dancing” begins as the writer, struggling with his muse in the early evening, thinks of the world outside and of the roads he might have taken (heroin dealer, drunken bum, drifter). Sobered by his thought that he “is capable of being assassinated/ at any moment” (as were Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968), and saddened that people continue to live trivial, habitual lives, that the younger generation seeks violent solutions, and that America’s commercialism assigns little value to his grandfather’s work on a farm, the poet laments the corruption of “Ahhhhhmerica!/ you old happy whore.” Sections 1 and 2 present the poet’s confusion and the decline of America, culminating in a descent “to these dark places/ to these waters”—but, significantly, the drowning is only apparent. The moon is associated with the heart pumping blood, “washing the way clear for new origins,” and the blood that is ritually spattered is, symbolically, that of fish. At the end of section 2, the speaker recognizes that attempting to bring “the promiseland” to a chosen few by violent means has only polluted his mind: “the knife doubles back.” After this self-inflicted death, section 3 offers a new beginning: “Be the mystic/ & wage ultimate revolution.” All stereotypic revolutionary roles are rejected, and the short homily concludes with the admonition to “Be yourself.” Section 4 makes the connection between the speaker’s own past dreams and his projected life. The steps to this new life he learns from a stranger met in April (in Young’s calendar, not the cruellest month but the time of resurrection). The poem concludes where it began, at the writer’s desk in early evening, but with a new optimism. As he works, he envisions a people newly energized by the night, he hopes
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for the dawn, and he pronounces a blessing of peace. The final hortatory line—“Let the revolutions proceed!”—rejects the tyranny of any one ideological movement and advocates the proliferation of individual struggles.
Snakes Type of work: Novel First published: 1970 The narrative persona of Young’s first novel, Snakes, is M. C. Moore, who recollects his youth and adolescence in the mature, seasoned voice of the novel’s master of ceremonies. A novel of formation, Snakes is in the bildungsroman tradition and is rendered in a tone of voice at once nostalgic and fatherly. Although he has only snapshots of his true parents by which to remember them, M. C. gradually finds their love implanted in his own initialed name, “so it sound[s] like you had some status,” his first lover explains, “whether you did or not.” For M. C., the process of learning who he is becomes the composition of his own music. M. C. discovers music in his soul, and he makes music the core of his world. He finds music everywhere, “in the streets, in the country, in people’s voices,” and “in the way they lead their lives.” Providing counterpoint, M. C.’s grandmother Claude offers guidance and family history, and M. C. is her captive audience: “I could listen to Claude talk all day long, and did, many a time. Her voice was like music.” The association expands as his views of love and music merge, and women ultimately become “lovable fields of musical energy.” While living with relatives in the South, M. C. learns at the age of ten that music will be his life. His Uncle Donald, a “night rambler” with a “talent for getting hold of a dollar,” turns their impoverished household into a “blind pig,” or a Meridian, Mississippi, version of a speakeasy. During his first exposure to the amoral world of adults, M. C. meets Tull, an itinerant jazz pianist who in effect provides the novel’s premise: “You’ll get it if you keep at it. Listen, just take your time, one note a time over here with your right hand. Just take your time, that’s all it is to playin’ the piano or anything else. Take your time and work it on out.” The impression lasts; M. C. goes on to structure his life around his love of music and his faith that music will help him grow. Literature also has a formative effect on him. It is not literature as found in the classroom or in books—M. C. attends high school in body only, and barely earns his diploma—rather, literature personified in Shakes, his closest friend, whose name is short for Shakespeare. Shakes has a “greedy memory and a razor tongue.” He is bright, musical, and funny: “You hip to Cyrano de Bergerac? Talk about a joker could talk some trash! Cyrano got everybody told! Didn’t nobody be messin with Cyrano, ugly as he was.” Yet there is more to know about life than its music and its literature; such knowledge appears in the person of Champ, who exposes M. C. to contemporary jazz and the business hemisphere of that musical world. In his bemusing, self-sacrificial
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way, Champ also demonstrates his worsening drug addiction and the consequential brutalization of his sensibilities. “Poor Champ,” M. C. soon observes while he learns to jam, to feel his music come alive inside himself and issue forth, “who wanted to play an instrument so badly, would stand around working his arms and fingers for hours sometimes, shaping the smoky air in the room into some imaginary saxophone. . . . We all wanted to get good.” The evil to which Champ submits himself opposes the good that he gives M. C.— music as growth and expression. M. C.’s band, “The Masters of Ceremony,” discover in their art a meaning that transcends the music they produce, and although the group separates after one demo and some local gigs, M. C.’s early success provides him with a clearer view of the possibilities of his life and a deep sense of wonder. He emerges from his plain, ordinary background complete, communicative, and capable of more, having also achieved his own narrative voice, that husky, now masculine voice the reader has heard maturing since the story’s outset. He boards the New York bus a musician, grown: “I don’t feel free . . . but I don’t feel trapped.” Awkwardly, painfully, naturally, M. C. has learned to look for the subtle ironies that enrich both life and art. Ready at last for the rest of what he will be, the young adult takes with him his guitar, his music, and precious recordings of his song “Snakes,” which throughout the novel parallels his experience of youth: “The tune sounded simple the first time you heard it, but it wasn’t all that simple to play.”
The Song Turning Back into Itself Type of work: Poetry First published: 1971 The Song Turning Back into Itself, a collection taking its name from a long poem in seven parts, includes forty-four poems grouped under the five headings “Loneliness,” “The Song Turning Back into Itself,” “The Prestidigitator,” “Everywhere,” and “The Move Continuing.” In an interview published in New Orleans Review, Young explained that The Song Turning Back into Itself has three levels of meaning: that history moves in cycles; that American popular music is returning to its roots in folk, African, and other ethnic music; and that the individual, going through changes, nevertheless returns to an original, unique self. These three returns are all explored in “The Old Fashioned Cincinnati Blues,” which appears in the first group of poems. Dedicated to Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller, and taking its form and its train-ride setting from the blues, the poem is a nostalgic return to the poet’s past—to a trip made by rail from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Meridian, Mississippi, by two young brothers, for a summer visit with grandparents and relatives left behind in the South. Vivid sensual images are fixed in his memory: “RC Cola coolers” and “tin tub baths” and “swapping ghost stories.” The adult sees himself as essentially the same as the boy he was in 1949. The poet experiences his journey not just as a personal reminiscence but as part of the American tradition, for the voice of
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Walt Whitman can be heard in Young’s lines: “O Americana!/ United Statesiana!” The seven numbered poems titled “The Song Turning Back into Itself ” are a spiritual autobiography of the poet, from the baby’s first breath through the adult shouting joyfully: “SING/ one sweet long song to undo/ all sickness & suffering.” This persona draws on many sources for inspiration, including Billie Holiday (who sings “variations on the theme/ of human love &/ its shadow/ loneliness”) and Rainer Maria Rilke (whose eighteenth “Sonnet to Orpheus” may be heard in “Feel today/ vibrating/ in the throat”). Singing the blues becomes, in these poems, an exploration of the singer’s identity and roots. Images from his personal memories merge with historical events to suggest recurring cycles, as in the speculation: “Consider Nazis & crackers/ on the same stage/ splitting the bill.”
Who Is Angelina? Type of work: Novel First published: 1975 While the narrative voice of Snakes provides contrast and consistency—a gradual merging of the maturing young man with his adult consciousness—the narrative voice of Who Is Angelina? accomplishes neither. Angelina is already grown, but her adult life has entered a phase of meaningless triviality. This she blames on the shifting cultural milieu of Berkeley, California. Life in Berkeley seems different now—dangerous—and the people’s sense of freedom and fun, that community spirit of festivity, is gone. She uses the burglary of her apartment as the justification, and a friend’s convenient cash as the means, to skip town—an act she considers the prerequisite for introspection. She flees not only her fictional problems but also her reader as well; a character with both brains and beauty who struggles with mere communal ennui is less than sympathetic. Moreover, even the reader who can overlook her escapist behavior needs to know more about her, and most of her background is provided through recollection and reminiscence. The novel’s principal events—travel in Mexico, some romantic sex, an emergency trip home to Detroit, an encounter with a street thief—facilitate reflection by the viewpoint character, and the reader must simply accept her gradual appraisals. Dramatically, little takes place. Most of this novel is exposition; what little action there is consists of Angelina’s consideration of an adaptation to what goes on around her. The unifying thematic metaphor of Who Is Angelina? is the act of taking away: Angelina is robbed (her reaction is passive); her lover’s mysterious occupation suggests more of the same; her father is robbed and nearly killed; a friend’s purse is stolen (her reaction this time is spontaneous and violent). Eventually, Angelina’s searching appears to reach some sort of resolution that makes her worthy of new self-esteem. Yet the reader can only observe, not participate in this search, because—unlike Snakes’s composer-narrator—Angelina does not experience within the narrative a process of growth.
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Plainly, Angelina is a woman experiencing a crisis of self-identity during a series of events that propel her toward introspection. What she ultimately discovers within herself is a typical American complex of contradictions, such as the one she describes to a fellow traveler early in her journey, the contradiction Americans create by equating individuality with isolation: “Angelina explained that in America it’s the individual who matters most and that she and her family, such as it was, lived at separate ends of what’s called reality. She too was lonely and fed up with a kind of life she’d been leading.” Whether the narrator addresses the reader directly or through the medium of a letter to a former lover, the exposition continues: “Everyone nowadays is busy digging for roots. Well, I know them well and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference when it comes to making sense of who I am and why I make the kinds of mistakes I do. In the end, I’ve discovered, it all comes down to being in competition with yourself.” At moments, Angelina’s concern waxes angry and the culturally contemplative author intrudes: “I’m not so sure that all those chitlins, hamhocks, hog maws, pigsfeet, spareribs and cooking with lard—soulfood so-called—isn’t contributing more toward bringing about black genocide, as the phrasemongers would have it, than Sickle Cell Anemia.” An important discovery about herself does take place, however, and this is what her wandering is all about. The exploration has been a contemporary one that many young, single Americans never complete: “The truth was that, most of all, she loved open-hearted vulnerable strangers for whom she wasn’t strictly obliged to feel anything.” In the end, Angelina also learns that she has been changing at the same time that her surroundings have been changing. Because she has confused one process with another, separation followed by a reassertion of self followed by a return to her point of departure appears to be cathartic. If so, the reader hopes that she also learns that life is and continues to be a process of change, some small part of which is subject to each individual’s conscious control. Angelina’s recognition of this consciousness is both the special story and the ordinariness of Young’s second novel.
Sitting Pretty Type of work: Novel First published: 1976 Sidney J. Prettymon, the narrative persona of Sitting Pretty, is streetwise, sardonic, and ironically self-conscious. He establishes early a mock superstitious mentality—astronauts may mess up the moon so that it can no longer be full—and verbalizes “the integral aspects of [his] personal philosophy to be cool.” Prettymon is dangerously learned: “I cut this article out of the National Inquirer that maintain how you can succeed and develop yourself and transformate your whole personality by the buildin’ up your vocabulary.” His inborn sense of linguistic sound combines comically with his interest in discovering associative meanings (radical chic con-
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notes to him the concubine of a politically motivated Arab husband of many wives), but the best humor to be found in Sitting Pretty is derived from Prettymon’s command of the text. The reader is at all times close to Prettymon, and he exploits the closeness. Having pondered his plot-situation at the story’s outset, he describes himself to himself as being “on the threshold of destiny, temptation, and fate.” Turning aside, he speaks directly to the reader: “Now, that’s bad! [good] Let me run through that one again so y’all can savor it.” The narrative opens below the closing sentence of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); in many ways, Sidney J. Prettymon is a modern, selfpossessed Jim. As Twain’s narrative control allowed him to elevate linguistic puns through burlesque to high satirical levels, Young’s narrative is successful here by virtue of its consistently controlled authorial distance: “All I mean by imagination,” Prettymon says, “is the way stuff look when you pull back from it and give it some reflection room.” Prettymon as first-person narrative persona allows the author to work most effectively; because his imagination provides Prettymon with overview, it allows him to construct connotative ironies. The incongruous coexistence of common insight and aesthetic misinterpretation (Huck does not misinterpret aesthetic qualities; he misses them entirely) works through sarcastic understatement: “Carpe Diem, like they say in Latin. Save the day.” The author’s hand moves subtly, characterizing by misquotation. Like M. C.’s unknown parents, Prettymon has given his son an inspirational name with which to command respect—Aristotle: “He is a lawyer.” Professionally successful, Aristotle is a son ungrateful for his name, and working-class Prettymon must struggle to disguise his pride as resentment: “He go around callin hisself A. Winfred Prettymon. I’m the one give him his first name and that’s his way of gettin back at me. I wanted him to stand out and be distinguished and be the bearer of a name that smack of dignity.” Telephoning his daughter, Prettymon again creates linguistic pandemonium, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson in order to reinforce some fatherly advice, then addressing the reader as the individualistic, pro-consumer Henry David Thoreau: “I hung up fast, then taken the receiver back off the hook again so the operator couldn’t ring me back for that extra ten cent. I ain’t got nothing but the vastest contempt for the Phone Company. Leeches and rascals! Need to be investigated.” Sitting Pretty is Young’s best novel in three ways: consistency of viewpoint, ingenuity of the narrative-persona, and control of the language. The last must be perfect for an author to choose suggestive, convincing variations consistent with popular speech. Young’s rendering of black dialect for artistic purpose is found throughout his fiction, and it works effectively here. The novel’s language is an unconcealed treasure: What with all that racket and commotion and the drink I’d just taken, I was startin to feel randy—a term the Professor use, British word for horney—randy for my own private bottle of sweet wine. Got a job lines up and just know Aristotle gon spring my Plymouth loose. Celebratin time! Time to do that quiet furlough down to Adamo’s again.
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Surprised, uniquely joyful, Sidney J. Prettymon rediscovers his treasure again and again.
The Blues Don’t Change Type of work: Poetry First published: 1982 Young’s unique blending of whimsy and social satire appears in one of the twentyseven new poems published in The Blues Don’t Change. It is a poem written in memory of two men who died on the same day in 1973: “W. H. Auden and Mantan Moreland.” Not only does Young violate snobbish propriety by considering a poet of high culture, W. H. Auden, in the same text with a popular comic motion-picture actor, Mantan Moreland, but he also overturns his readers’ expectations about their speech patterns. The poem consists of a dialogue between these two, in paradise, with Moreland praising Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (1947) for “doubtless” engaging “our/ innermost emotions & informed imagination,” and Auden responding, “No shit!” One can imagine the curiosity of a fellow poet as Young arranges for Moreland to ask Auden why he cut the line “We must all love one another or die” from his poem “September 1, 1939.” The line was superfluous, as Auden’s reply declares, “We gon die anyway no matter/ how much we love.” Having justified Auden’s technique, Young also defends Moreland, whose role-playing was harshly judged by militant activists. Auden praises Moreland’s technique, “the way you buck them eyes/ & make out like you running sked all the time.” That fear, Auden notes, is the essence of “the black/ experience where you be in charge of the scene.” Moreland did stop “shufflin’,” and Young’s poem reclaims with pride this actor’s achievements. Several of the poems in The Blues Don’t Change are tributes to black American musicians; most notable are “Billie,” “The James Cotton Band at Keystone,” “My Spanish Heart,” and “Lester Leaps In.” Each poem re-creates the impact of their performances on a rapt listener. Listening to Holiday while drinking, he seems to take in her song through his mouth. The sexuality that Holiday projected in her singing is expressed metaphorically in the listener’s fantasy of swallowing her delightful body. The song and his drink intoxicate, “whirling/ me through her throaty world and higher.” The listener recognizes the seductress that Holiday enacted in his tribute to her “Cleopatric breath.” In contrast to the dreamily slow movement of lines in “Billie,” “The James Cotton Band at Keystone” plays with a livelier rhythm, demonstrating “Believe me, the blues can be volatile too,/ but the blues don’t bruise; they only renew.” The return to cultural roots revitalizes both the individual and society. In “The Blues Don’t Change,” his apostrophe to the relentless rhythm and brilliant images of the blues, Young again pays tribute to the uniquely American expression of life’s pain and sadness, and to the performers whose artistry lifts the spirit. Working
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within American forms of speech and music, this poet soars, defining his own voice and enriching America’s cultural heritage.
Seduction by Light Type of work: Novel First published: 1988 For his fifth novel, Young again employs a first-person narrative persona, female and clairvoyant. Mamie Franklin is a woman in her forties, rich in impressions and experience. She grew up in Mississippi an admirer of her namesake and imaginary tutor/yogi Benjamin Franklin, made those feelings real through writing, left home early to perform in the style of Dinah Washington with her husband’s group, the Inklings, and married and had her son Benjie out of wedlock. She lives now in Santa Monica with Burley, the man she loves and whose love is returned until, cataclysmically, Mamie’s past and future upheave into the narrative present. As in Snakes and the adventures of Sidney J. Prettymon, there is a running commentary on situation and circumstance along with a steady stream of verbal ironies and satiric asides. Mamie works part-time in Beverly Hills as a domestic for Mr. Chrysler and his French wife, Danielle, who live in “a big stockbroker Tudor” graced with eucalyptus, or “Noxema trees.” Mamie has the confidence of her employers, in fact their favor, as she drives her Honda Civic (nicknamed Sweepea) up the front driveway and strolls into the house. There she discovers a strange, unclothed woman with toenails and fingernails painted black who looks like “a bleached-out, fuzzy-headed raccoon,” and a Monopoly board, which compromises Mr. Chrysler (“that man loves to play Monopoly . . . with real money”). This kind of fun—the world according to Mamie Franklin—enlivens the novel’s complication. Regarding the 1970’s, that too-short period when black consciousness merged with African American professional development and economic opportunity, Mamie says, “[I]t mighta looked to the public like anything black was gonna make money . . . but that wasn’t nothin but an illusion.” More than witty, these quips come from a woman who made her living as a performer during the 1950’s, when the business of entertainment reinstituted racial segregation, and who now sees further deterioration in the filmmaking business: “This old brotherhood junk, funny stuff and jive everybody use to be talkin—all that went out the minute the money started gettin shaky.” With a tonal admonition for more education, she observes that the film industry is being run by young white men who “started readin Variety and Billboard when they were nine.” For Mamie, age enables one to “ripen into know-how, or better yet, know-when.” After all, she says, “The smarter you are, the harder you smart when you fall.” Throughout the novel, light and light imagery brighten the reader’s way like the sunlit flowers of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) or the moonlit landscapes of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales. Mamie’s vision captures both the brilliance and the business of the California landscape while nuances of Eastern philosophy ener-
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gize her sensibility and evoke a mood of resolution. Such evocations occur in dreams or dreamlike experiences, such as the surreal state of shock following the reality of an earthquake or the emotional upheaval of sexual renewal. “It was all done with light,” Mamie says of cinematic production and marketing. Like the girl she “use to be” watching a film at the Grand Lux Theatre, Mamie learns that “pretty much every last one of us out here [in California] gettin seduced.” As girl and as mother, as woman and as lover, Mamie looks over her shoulder to see “nothin but light, not a thing but light quiverin and makin patterns on a screen.” Throughout her life, Mamie has had enlightening experiences. She recalls a vision of sunlight playing over a leaf, how the light “shimmered all around it; then the leaf sends out this invisible feeler [and] suck up the light around it, drink it up, sip on it like you would a glassa buttermilk.” Similarly, when Mamie’s housemate Burley returns in spirit, he describes his passage from life: “It was like this hole opened up in the middle of my forehead and the light started pourin into it.” Moreover, Mamie contemplates the textuality of her life by the light of her contemplations, suggesting that this affects the storyteller, too: Where do you begin when you start tellin your story and rememberin as you go along? Do you start with the source of light itself, the sun? Or do you start with what the sun touches, the moon? Or do you only deal with what the moonlight touches?
One must consider the light by which one lives one’s life, Mamie suggests, as one rewrites the texts of one’s life: It’s actually possible in one lifetime to do so much and to get caught up in so many of your own illusions and lies and half lies until it can finally come down to sun versus moon versus moonlight.
Celebratory and down-to-earth, Young’s novels glow with human warmth. In the mode of vernacular speech, Seduction by Light rings true with contemporary experience while transmuting everyday life into the light of love.
The Sound of Dreams Remembered Type of work: Poetry First published: 2001 Almost a decade passed between Young’s 1992 collection titled Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956-1990 and his 2001 volume The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000. Heaven filled nearly three hundred pages, displayed an abundant affection for the ordinary world, and showcased several influences (noted in the collection’s introduction) that included Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Federico García Lorca. The work of Langston Hughes and Charles Bukowski makes its influential mark
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on The Sound of Dreams Remembered. Disjointed thoughts, full of mystique and sentiment, like those of Bukowski, are apparent here. The collection is a readable and topical history of the decade, providing meditations on love, travel, politics, and misbehavior. Casual blank verse gives way to fluid, rhyming iambic pentameter in poems like “The Old Country”: What is it want, or need to haul or lug like Motorolas of the blood? Beep! The mileage we squander on these jumps from mayonnaise Minnesotas to curry Calcuttas, from Tokyos you could wander.
Suggested Readings Coleman, Janet, and Al Young. Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1989. Draper, James P. Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past Two Hundred Years. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writers Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Lee, Don. “About Al Young.” Ploughshares 19, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 219. Schultz, Elizabeth. “Search for ‘Soul Space’: A Study of Al Young’s Who Is Angelina? and the Dimensions of Freedom.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982. Shockley, Ann Allen, and Sue P. Chandler. Living Black American Authors: A Bibliographical Directory. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1973. Contributors: Joseph F. Battaglia, Sarah Hilbert, Judith L. Johnston, and Daryl F. Mallett
Appendixes
General Bibliography General Studies and Reference Armstrong, Jeanne. Demythologizing the Romance of Conquest. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Bercovitch, Sacvan, and Cyrus R. K. Patell, eds. The Cambridge History of American Literature. 8 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994-1996. Berken, Carol, Lisa Paddock, and Carl Rollyson. Encyclopedia of American Literature. Rev. ed. 4 vols. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Birkle, Carmen. Migration-Miscegenation-Transculturation: Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter, 2004. Birnbaum, Michele. Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Boelhower, William, ed. The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writing Between the Wars. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990. Bona, Mary Jo, and Irma Maini, eds. Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Brown, Linda Joyce. The Literature of Immigration and Racial Formation: Becoming White, Becoming Other, Becoming American in the Late Progressive Era. New York: Routledge, 2004. Brown Ruoff, A. LaVonne, and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Crane, Gregg D. Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cullum, Linda. Contemporary American Ethnic Poets. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Cutter, Martha J. Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Cyclopedia of World Authors. 4th rev. ed. 5 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2005. Cyclopedia of Young Adult Authors. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2005. Deena, Seodial F. H. Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works by Minority Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Elam, Harry J., Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theatre of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Literature. 5 vols. New York: Facts On File, 2008. 1217
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Erkkila, Betsy. Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Evans, Brad. Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea, and Heike Raphael-Hernandez, eds. Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 2000. Franco, Dean J. Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Gelfant, Blanche H. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Gilton, Donna L. Multicultural and Ethnic Children’s Literature in the United States. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007. Goldstein, David S., and Audrey B. Thacker, eds. Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in American Texts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Grobman, Laurie. Teaching at the Crossroads: Cultures and Critical Perspectives in Literature by Women of Color. San Francisco, Calif.: Aunt Lute Books, 2001. Hogue, W. Lawrence. Race, Modernity, Postmodernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Jason, Philip K., ed. Critical Survey of Poetry. 2d rev. ed. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2002. Karem, Jeff. The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Kellman, Steven G., ed. Magill’s Survey of American Literature. 6 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2006. Keresztesi, Rita. Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism Between the World Wars. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Kerkering, John D. The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in NineteenthCentury American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Knadler, Stephen P. The Fugitive Race Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Lape, Noreen Groover. West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Lee, A. Robert. Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Manzanas, Ana Ma., ed. Border Transits: Literature and Culture Across the Line. New York: Rodopi, 2007. May, Charles E., ed. Critical Survey of Short Fiction. 2d rev. ed. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2001.
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Michael, Magali Cornier. New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Minter, David L. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Murphet, Julian. Literature and Race in Los Angeles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nelson, Emmanuel S. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. 5 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Newton, Pauline T. Transcultural Women of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature: First-Generation Migrants from Islands and Peninsulas. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Norton, Donna E. Multicultural Children’s Literature: Through the Eyes of Many Children. 2d ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2005. Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Parini, Jay, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Patterson, Anita. Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Paul, Heike. Mapping Migration: Women’s Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1999. Payant, Katherine B., and Toby Rose, eds. The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Peck, David, ed. Identities and Issues in Literature. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1997. Perkins, George, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger. HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: HarperResource, 2002. Pernal, Mary. Explorations in Contemporary Feminist Literature: The Battle Against Oppression for Writers of Color, Lesbian, and Transgender Communities. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Powell, Timothy B. Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Rollyson, Carl, ed. Critical Survey of Drama. 2d rev. ed. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2003. _______, ed. Critical Survey of Long Fiction. 2d rev. ed. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000. Salzman, Jack, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Schedler, Christopher. Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Sesnic, Jelena. From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Siemerling, Winfried, and Katrin Schwenk. Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, eds. Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. _______, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. TuSmith, Bonnie. All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Verhoeven, W. M., ed. Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1992. Vogel, Todd. Rewriting White Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in NineteenthCentury America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Winter, Molly Crumpton. American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Wonham, Henry B. Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
African American Auger, Philip. Native Sons in No Man’s Land: Rewriting Afro-American Manhood in the Novels of Baldwin, Walker, Wideman, and Gaines. New York: Garland, 2000. Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, ed. Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and About Women of Color. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006. Brown, Lois. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York: Facts On File, 2006. Carbado, Devon W., Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, eds. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002. Carroll, Anne Elizabeth. Word, Image, and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Clark, Keith. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Davis, Thadious M., and Trudier Harris, eds. Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography 38. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1985.
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Decker, Jeffrey Louis, ed. The Black Aesthetic Movement. Dictionary of Literary Biography 8. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1991. Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. New York: University Press of America, 2000. Fisch, Audrey, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Gates, Henry Louis, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. The African American National Biography. 8 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Harris, Trudier, and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance. Dictionary of Literary Biography 50. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1986. _______, eds. Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Dictionary of Literary Biography 51. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1987. _______, eds. Afro-American Writers, 1940-1955. Dictionary of Literary Biography 76. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1988. Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hill, Errol G., and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hutchinson, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Japtok, Martin. Growing up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Kim, Daniel Y. Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Notable African American Writers. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2006. Ostrom, Hans, and J. David Macey, Jr., eds. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Riss, Arthur. Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Samuels, Wilfred D., ed. Encyclopedia of African-American Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Sanchez, Marta Ester. “Shakin’ up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture, 19651995. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
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Schwarz, A. B. Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Williams, Tyrone, ed. Masterplots II: African American Literature. Rev. ed. 4 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2009. Young, Kevin, ed. Giant Steps: The New Generation of African-American Writers. New York: Perennial, 2000.
Asian American Alam, Fakrul, ed. South Asian Writers in English. Dictionary of Literary Biography 323. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 2006. Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hillstrom, Kevin, and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Kim, Daniel Y. Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Lee, Esther Kim. A History of Asian American Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Asian American Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography 312. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 2005. Oh, Seiwoong. Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Ty, Eleanor, and Donald C. Goellnicht, eds. Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Yasmin Hussain. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture, and Ethnicity. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Yin, Xiao-huang. Chinese American Literature Since the 1850’s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Caribbean and West Indian Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Balderston, Daniel, and Mike Gonzalez, eds. Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003. New York: Routledge, 2004. Irele, F. Abiola, and Simon Gikandi. The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lindfors, Bernth, and Reinhard Sander, eds. Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography 157. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1996.
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MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Garland, 2001. Turner, Joyce Moore. Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Jewish Aarons, Victoria. A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Bloom, Harold, ed. Jewish Women Fiction Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Brauner, David. Post-war Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation, and Transatlantic Connections. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Budick, Emily Miller. Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature. Albany: State University of New York, 2001. Cappell, Ezra. American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Codde, Philippe. The Jewish American Novel. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007. Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Japtok, Martin. Growing up Ethnic: Nationalism and the Bildungsroman in African American and Jewish American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Kahn-Paycha, Danièle. Popular Jewish Literature and Its Role in the Making of an Identity. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 19581963. New York: Grove Press, 2000. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2002. Sherman, Joseph, ed. Writers in Yiddish. Dictionary of Literary Biography 333. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 2007. Sicher, Efraim, ed. Holocaust Novelists. Dictionary of Literary Biography 299. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 2004. Walden, Daniel, ed. Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography 28. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1984. Weber, Donald. Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to the Goldbergs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Wirth-Nesher, Hana, and Michael P. Kramer, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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Latino/Hispanic Aldama, Frederick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Benson, Sonia G., Rob Nagel, and Sharon Rose, eds. UXL Hispanic American Biography. Detroit, Mich.: UXL, 2003. Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Erro-Peralta, Nora, and Caridad Silva, eds. Beyond the Border: A New Age in Latin American Women’s Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and the Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Guajardo, Paul. Chicano Controversy: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Huerta, Jorge. Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Laezman, Rick. One Hundred Hispanic-Americans Who Shaped American History. San Mateo, Calif.: Bluewood Books, 2002. Lomelí, Francisco A., and Carl R. Shirley, eds. Chicano Writers: First Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography 2. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1992. _______, eds. Chicano Writers: Third Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography 209. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1999. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Poetry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Notable Latino Writers. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2005. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Perivolaris, John Dimitri. Puerto Rican Cultural Identity and the Work of Luis Rafael Sánchez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Quintana, Alvina E., ed. Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ramirez, Luz Elena. Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography, and Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sanchez, Marta Ester. “Shakin’ up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture, 19651995. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Sandin, Lyn Di Iorio. Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Shirley, Carl R., and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds. Chicano Writers: Second Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography 122. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1992.
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Native American Bataille, Gretchen M., and Laurie Lisa, eds. Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2001. Brown, Harry J. Injun Joe’s Ghost: The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Fast, Robin Riley. The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Lincoln, Kenneth. Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry, 1890-1999. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. McClinton-Temple, Jennifer, and Alan Velie. Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Porter, Joy, and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Roemer, Kenneth M., ed. Native American Writers of the United States. Dictionary of Literary Biography 175. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1997. Schort, Blanca. Storied Voices in Native American Texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Routledge, 2003. Temple, Alan Velie. Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature. New York: Facts On File, 2007.
Electronic Resources The online resources listed below offer students, librarians, and general readers some of the best resources for ethnic studies, both multicultural and focused on the five major ethnic populations of the United States: African American, Asian American, Jewish, Latino/Hispanic, and Native American. These consist of two basic types. First, electronic databases are integrated electronic sources to which public, college, and university libraries subscribe, installing links on their Web sites, where they are generally available only to library card holders or specified patrons. Readers can check library Web sites to see if these databases are installed or can ask reference librarians if these databases are available. The second type of resource is accessible through a Web site, sometimes free of charge but increasingly by subscription as well. We have provided URLs for these sites, but because addresses of Web pages frequently change or are moved, we also suggest accessing them through an Internet search engine.
General and Multiethnic Resources Academic Search Premier Available on the Ebscohost platform, this full-text database includes more than 4,500 periodicals, newspapers, and books, both text with graphic and PDF files, back to the beginning of the twentieth century and even earlier. Academic Search Premier has indexed and created abstracts for thousands of peerreviewed journals, some of which, such as the Latin American Literary Review, will be of interest to students of both literature and American ethnic studies. An advanced search on two subjects, “literature” and “Asian American,” for example, yields ninety hits. American Family Immigration History Center http://www.ellisislandrecords.org Provides facts about the 22 million people who entered the United States through Ellis Island. American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library http://memory.loc.gov Sponsored by the Library of Congress, this site gathers digital and print collections of ethnic scenes and groups. Examples include a photo of an Asian American baseball coach with his school team c. 1910-1920 and a recording of a Lebanese lullaby c. 1940. 1226
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Arts and Humanities Citation Index This database allows users to search across disciplines to find bibliographic and reference material in more than 1,000 scholarly journals. The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry Columbia University Press compiles thousands of works by hundreds of poets in this database, which also includes a comprehensive glossary of poetry-related terms. Biographies and critical essays are available for some writers, and users can search for anthologies by title, category, and editor. Diversity and Ethnic Studies http://www.public.iastate.edu/~savega/divweb2.htm Susan A. Vega García of Iowa State University founded this site in 1995 as a gateway to Internet resources related to African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, U.S. Latinos, and multicultural resources (“those dealing with more than one ethnic minority or cultural group”). Electronic Text Center http://etext.virginia.edu/subjects/Native-American.html Collects texts by and about African Americans, Native Americans, women, and other groups. Some texts are restricted to University of Virginia students and faculty. Ethnic News Watch This full-text database on the Proquest platform functions in both English and other languages, combing through half a million articles that have appeared in more than 240 minority and indigenous periodicals since 1990. Archived material from mid-1980’s is also available. Categories include African American/ Caribbean/African, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian/Pacific Islander, European/ Eastern European, Hispanic, Jewish, Multi-Ethnic, and Native People. First Search Commonly found in academic libraries, this system covers dozens of databases, some of which have links to full-text articles. Students of ethnic literature will find helpful information in the Contemporary Women’s Issues, Dissertation Abstracts, MLA Bibliography, Wilson Select, and WorldCat databases. History Reference Center A product of EBSCO Information Services, the History Reference Center is a comprehensive world history database offering more than 2,000 reference books, encyclopedias, and nonfiction works, full text for more than 130 leading history periodicals, nearly 60,000 historical documents, 50,000 biographies of historical figures, well over 100,000 historical photos and maps, and more than 80 hours of historical video.
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J-STOR J-STOR has organized hundreds of journals in both single and multidisciplinary categories in order to streamline the search process. The collection includes several journals on American ethnic studies, such as African American Review, Journal of Black Studies, and Hispanic Review. LexisNexis Academic This full-text database indexes documents from more than 5,900 news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications, including more than 350 U.S. and world newspapers, broadcast transcripts from major television and radio networks, state and federal case law, corporate and industry information, and scholarly journal articles. Literature Resource Center Produced by Gale/Cenage Learning, this full-text database includes biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of more than 100,000 authors and works from a wide range of literary disciplines, countries, and eras. The database also features plot summaries, articles from literary journals, critical essays, and links to Web sites. Users can search by author’s nationality, theme, literary movement, and genre. MagillOnLiteraturePlus Salem Press has created the industry standard for literary full-text integrated databases, updated continuously. MagillOnLiteraturePlus includes all the literary works, reviewed critical analyses, and brief plot summaries that are included in Salem’s many title-driven and biographical reference volumes: thousands of plot summaries, analyses, biographical overviews, and literary reviews. A key feature for study of ethnic literatures is the “author’s cultural identity” set of limiters, which included African American, Asian American, Asian Canadian, Chinese American, Cuban American, Filipino/Filipina American, Gay and Lesbian, Indian American, Japanese American Jewish, Korean American, Latino or Latina, Mexican American, Native American, Pakistani American, and Puerto Rican American at last count. MasterFILE Premier For public libraries, this multidisciplinary database, updated daily, provides full text for more than 1,750 general reference publications dating as far back as 1975. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, MasterFILE Premier includes nearly 500 full-text reference books and more than 85,000 biographies, 105,000 primary source documents, and 285,000 photos, maps, and flags. MLA International Bibliography Thousands of journals and book citations dating back to the 1920’s can be found in the Modern Language Association’s electronic bibliography, which is a par-
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ticularly valuable source of literary theory and history articles. Includes links to much of J-STOR’s language and literature collection and to full text. National Association for Ethnic Studies http://www.ethnicstudies.org/ Founded in 1972, this nonprofit organization offers scholars and activists an interdisciplinary forum concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity, including ethnic groups, intergroup relations, and the cultural life of ethnic minorities. Publishes Ethnic Studies Review and sponsors the Annual Conference on Ethnic Studies as well as student paper competitions. NetLibrary This e-content provider offers a subscription-based full-text, searchable collection of more than 7,000 electronic books (text and audio) in all subject areas, searchable by keyword, title, subject, or combinations of these. Oxford Reference Online A virtual reference library of more than 100 dictionaries and reference books published by Oxford University Press. Oxford Reference Online contains information about a broad range of subjects, including art, architecture, military history, science, religion, philosophy, political and social science, and literature. The site also features English-language and bilingual dictionaries, as well as collections of quotations and proverbs. Project MUSE A collaboration between libraries and publishers, Project MUSE offers full-text, user-friendly online access to about 400 humanities and social sciences journals from more than 60 scholarly publishers. Among these journals are American Jewish History, Studies in American Indian Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Hispanic American Historical Review, and many on American literatures. Salem History A fully integrated history database containing thousands of in-depth essays on commonly studied topics from Salem’s Milestone Documents, Decades, Great Lives from History, and Great Events from History series. Many of these concern cornerstone issues, people, and events in ethnic and postcolonial history. Purchase of the print versions of these multivolume, cross-searchable reference works entitles libraries to free three-year access to the online database. Voice of the Shuttle: Minority Literatures http://vos.ucsb.edu/ The section titled “Literatures (Other than English)” contains some useful links to biographies, time lines, and excerpts from works by prominent authors.
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Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers and Artists of Color http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg An especially useful source for teachers, this site (maintained by the University of Minnesota’s English department) contains teaching and planning tips and profiles authors and their works, provides discussion boards for viewers, and lists links to related material. Wilson Biographies Illustrated Produced by H. W. Wilson Co., this database offers more than 95,000 biographies and obituaries, and more than 26,000 photographs, of prominent people throughout history. World History FullText A joint product of EBSCO Information Services and ABC-CLIO, this database provides a global view of history with information on a wide range of topics, including anthropology, art, culture, economics, government, heritage, military history, politics, regional issues, and sociology. World History Online Facts On File, Inc., has created this reference database of world history, featuring biographies, time lines, maps, charts, and other information.
African American Resources African American Biographical Database This collection bills itself as “a resource of first resort” for images and information about more than 30,000 African Americans. Gathering material from periodicals, encyclopedias, biographical texts, and other sources, it allows researchers to search by city, state, country, religion, and occupation, among other fields. Though updated every two months, results are limited to the years between 1790 and 1950. African American Literature Book Club http://aalbc.com A popular site that offers book reviews and recommendations, author biographies, and tips for aspiring writers. Those interested can post their thoughts and read others’ opinions on several discussion boards. Also includes a useful source of information about upcoming literary events. African American Literature Online http://www.geocities.com/afam_literature A good source for brief summaries of the state of African American literature in the twentieth century. Pages are divided by the decades they discuss, and each includes a summary of that period’s more notable works.
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The African American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Research Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/intro.html This site accompanies an exhibit that took place between February and August, 1994. Rather than focusing on slavery, its first section summarizes the efforts of the American Colonization Society, which offered nineteenth century African Americans the chance to return to Africa rather than be emancipated in the United States. Later sections discuss the roles of abolitionists and the Works Progress Administration and African Americans’ migration to Kansas, Chicago, and other western and midwestern cities. African American Newspapers: The Nineteenth Century For those looking for articles published between 1827 and 1902, this will prove an extremely useful tool. It presents complete articles from significant African American publications like The Christian Recorder, The Colored American, Frederick Douglass Paper, Freedom’s Journal, The National Era, The North Star, and Provincial Freeman. African American Review Available only to those with access through the journals database J-STOR, this is a digital collection of this important journal’s back issues from 1967 to 1996, including literary reviews, poetry, and essays. African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/ Part of the New York Public Library’s digital Schomburg collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection of full texts provides access to the “thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.” Keyword-searchable and browsable by title, author, or genre, this digital library is a rare and valuable Web-accessible resource. African American Writers: Online E-texts http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/afroonline.htm Forty-six African American authors are listed here, and each author’s entry has several links to sites with further biographical information and samples of text (sometimes available in their entirety) in electronic format. Africans in America http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html This site was built as a companion to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series of the same name. It is divided into four sections: The Terrible Transformation (1450-1750), Revolution (1750-1805), Brotherly Love (17901-1831), and Judgment Day (1831-1865). Each page’s concise, logical format presents
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information unavailable anywhere else. Each section contains a Resource Bank with extraordinary images and stories and comprehensive teacher’s guides. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html An amazing collection of audio files and texts excerpted from the Works Progress Administration’s interviews with former slaves in the 1930’s. Some of the interviews are difficult to understand, but all are worth the effort. Other sites of interest are also listed. The Black Renaissance in Washington http://www.dclibrary.org/blkren/index2.html This project, sponsored by the District of Columbia’s public library, includes biographies of dozens of important Renaissance writers, a list of the Harlem Renaissance’s major works, a time line, and links to additional resources. Black Studies on Disc One of the most comprehensive bibliographic resources available to those studying the history and culture of people of African ancestry, this database lists sources from the eighth century a.d. to the present. It provides citations for many types of resources, culled from the catalog of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Index to Black Periodicals. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html Created by the Library of Congress, this collection of more than 2,300 accounts by former slaves and 500 black-and-white photographs, collected under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration, is searchable by keyword, narrator, or state; photographs can be searched by subject. Callaloo Available only to those with access through Project MUSE, this is a searchable digital collection of this important journal’s current articles from 1995 and back issues from 1976 to 1989 and from 1990 to 2004. Facts on the Black or African American Population http://www.census.gov/pubinfo/www/NEWafamM11.html The U.S. Census Bureau’s page on African Americans in the United States offers statistics on a broad range of characteristics, both social and economic, as well as links to data sets and maps. Journal of Black Studies Available through J-STOR, this collection of digital back issues from 1970 through 2001 is key for African studies and is searchable.
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The Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project http://www.stanford.edu/group/King Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project contains summaries of King’s published works, his most popular speeches, sermons, and audio clips, biographies and chronologies, and lesson plans for teachers. Our Shared History: African American Heritage http://www.cr.nps.gov/aahistory The National Parks Service sponsors this site, which contains a wealth of information about notable places in African American history (such as Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis), and major figures (such as Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Booker T. Washington). This is a particularly helpful place for those interested in the Underground Railroad. Resources in Black Studies http://www.library.ucsb.edu/subjects/blackstudies/black.html The University of California, Santa Barbara, maintains a fairly comprehensive list of direct links to institutions, publications, and projects throughout the field of African American studies. Section titles include “Slavery and the Slave Trade,” “Radio, TV, and Film,” and “Historical Texts and Documents.” San Antonio College LitWeb: African American Literature Index http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/aframlit.htm Presents a detailed time line of major contributions to African American literature. Many entries include links to biographies, images, lists of works created, and bibliographies, though the site is limited to works produced between 1746 and 1999. Schomburg Center for Black Culture http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center regularly sponsors exhibits on important African American issues, and their Web site holds a considerable amount of information about exhibitions past and present, as well as summaries of their important collections (which include rare manuscripts, recordings, and photographs).
Asian American Resources Asian American Drama http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/AADRLive/ Searchable online edition of Asian American Drama offers 252 plays by 42 playwrights (about half not previously published), together with information on productions, theaters, selected playbills, photographs, and related ephemera. Access by subscription only.
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Asian American Literature http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/asialit.htm Compiled by school library media specialist Brenda Hoffman, offers text that addresses the following topics: Rationale for Multiethnic Literature in the Classroom, Characteristics of Good Multiethnic Literature, History of Asian American Literature, Booktalk: Amy Tan and Her Works, Other Asian American Young Adult Fiction Reviews, Laurence Yep; Book Reviews, ERIC /Periodical Resources, General Reference Resources, Anthologies, Traditional Literature, Fiction, Biography, Nonfiction, and Movies. Asian American Net http://www.asianamerican.net/ A gateway to news and other online resources covering a broad range of topics and issues, including Asian American organizations, general information on Asia, Asian studies, business in Asia, U.S. government and politics, and immigration resources—for all parts of Asia, from the Middle East to East Asia. Asian American Poetry http://asianamericanpoetry.blogspot.com/ An important personal blog on Asian American poetry started in 2004 by Roger Pao. Asian American Writers’ Workshop http://www.aaww.org/ Established in 1991, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a national notfor-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans. Sponsors events such as readings, workshops, and awards. Designed primarily for budding Asian American writers. Asian-Nation http://www.asian-nation.org/index.shtml Billing itself as “your one-stop information resource and overview of the historical, demographic, political, and cultural issues that make up today’s diverse Asian American community,” this site is run by C. N. Le, a sociologist who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Addresses issues in history and culture and offers a blog and links to other sites of interest. AsianWeek.com http://www.asianweek.com/ This Web site, “the voice of Asian America,” is devoted to all things Asian American, including arts and entertainment.
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Chinese American Librarians Association http://www.cala-web.org/ Affiliated with the American Library Association, CALA disseminates information on Chinese American cultural observances and festivals. Ethnic Heritage: Asian American http://www.nps.gov/history/history/categrs/etnc5.htm A National Park Service site with links to national historic sites related to Asian Americans, including World War II internment camps. Also offers AsianPacific lesson plans. Facts on the Asian Population http://www.census.gov/pubinfo/www/NEWapiM11.html The U.S. Census Bureau’s page on Asian Americans in the United States offers statistics on a broad range of characteristics, both social and economic, as well as links to data sets and maps. University of California, Irvine: Asian American Studies http://www.lib.uci.edu/online/subject/subpage.php?subject=asiamer The university’s Web page contains a long and well-organized list of links to sources for Asian American studies, arranged by topic and subpopulations.
Jewish Resources Anne Frank Center USA www.annefrank.com The Anne Frank Center USA is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes educational programs aimed at promoting the message of tolerance. The organization’s Web site features excerpts from Frank’s diary, photographs of Frank and her family, and time lines chronicling Frank’s life and the rise of Nazism. Holocaust Denial Literature: An Additional Bibliography http://york.cuny.edu/~drobnick/holbib2.html#general John A. Drobnicki, a professor and head of reference and electronic resources at York College of the City University of New York, has compiled this online bibliography of Holocaust denial literature. It is organized by categories, including general works denying the Holocaust; Holocaust revisionism in the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world; Web sites and videocassettes devoted to denial of the Holocaust; and reviews, critiques, and refutations of Holocaust revisionist books. Holocaust Memoir Digest http://www.holocaustmemoirdigest.org The Holocaust Memoir Digest is a three-volume set containing detailed summa-
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ries of published Holocaust memoirs by Elie Wiesel, Nechama Tec, Gerda Weissman Klein, and others. The project was created under the auspices of the Holocaust Resource Center of the Jewish Foundation in London, Ontario, Canada. The project’s Web site provides three search engines that enable users to retrieve descriptions of the memoirs contained in the digests, information regarding twenty-six Holocaust-related topics, and information about specific places. It also features a study guide, maps of major concentration camps, and a bibliography. Holocaust Pages http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/holocaust_pages.html This collection of resources for the study of Holocaust literature has been compiled by D. G. Myers, associate professor of English and religious studies at Texas A&M University. It includes a chronology, a lexicon, bibliographies, Web links, primary documents, and English-language texts of Holocaustrelated poetry and early Holocaust fiction. Index to Jewish Periodicals Mounted on the Ebsco platform, this cross-searchable database provides a listing of English-language articles, book reviews, and feature stories in more than 160 journals devoted to Jewish affairs, dating back to 1988, including Jewish Culture and History and Studies in American Jewish Literature. The Jewish Virtual Library http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org Sponsored by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, the Jewish Virtual Library, offers brief essays on Jewish history, Israel, U.S.-Israel relations, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and Judaism, including some entries on literature. Includes essays on such topics as the political structure of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, Jewish ghettos, concentration camps, the Nazis’ euthanasia program, Nazi book burnings, and Holocaust denial. JewishEncyclopedia.com http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ An invaluable resource, this site contains the complete contents of the twelvevolume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published 1901-1906 and now is in the public domain. Includes more than 15,000 articles and illustrations. Literature of the Holocaust http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/holhome.html Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has compiled this collection of articles, book reviews, survivor memoirs, Web links, and other materials about the Holocaust and other instances of genocide.
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MyJewishLearning.com http://www.myjewishlearning.com/index.htm In addition to many pages on Jewish history and culture, this site offers dozens of essays on Jewish American, Israeli, modern Hebrew, and other literatures identified with the Jewish people. The essays on Jewish American literature fall into the following categories: “Immigrant Literature,” “Into the Literary Mainstream,” “1970-2000,” “The Twenty-First Century,” “Jewish American Poetry,” and “Children’s Literature.” Ozuna Learning Resources Center Library: Jewish-American Literature http://www.accd.edu/pac/lrc/lit-jewisham.htm Sponsored by Palo Alto College, this site offers links to pages about more than 100 Jewish American authors as well as links to general essays. Spartacus Educational: Holocaust http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERholocaust.htm This is one of the excellent Web sites created by Spartacus Educational, a British organization that aims to provide Internet-based lessons for teachers. The site consists of five major sections, each with several pages of information that contain links to other pages within the site. The section titled “Nazi Germany and the Holocaust” features numerous articles that provide a history of the Holocaust, including articles about the Jews in Germany, anti-Semitism, the Nuremberg Laws, and Jewish ghettos. “Concentration and Extermination Camps” offers general information about the camps as well as several pages of information about specific camps. The “Guilty” section provides profiles of prominent Nazis and others who were responsible for the so-called final solution, “Victims” features profiles of ten people who were killed or survived the Holocaust, and “The Resistance” offers profiles of individuals who defied the Nazis. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.ushmm.org The museum, located in Washington, D.C., maintains a Web site that provides an exceptional range of materials about the Holocaust. One of the site’s most informative features is the Holocaust Encyclopedia, which can be found in the “History” section. The encyclopedia includes more than 500 articles about a wide range of Holocaust-related topics. In addition, the “Research” section provides a list of frequently asked questions, an authoritative biography, Web links, and a survivors’ registry. Yad Vashem http://www.yadvashem.org Yad Vashem, the memorial to Holocaust martyrs and heroes in Jerusalem, Israel, maintains one of the world’s largest repositories of materials about the Holocaust and provides access to these materials on its Web site. Among the site’s
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contents are photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, information about other camps, and resources for studying Elie Wiesel’s Night. The site’s Holocaust Resource Center enables users to retrieve photographs, diaries, letters, documents, testimonies, maps, and other material about antiSemitism, the Nazis’ rise to power, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and other aspects of the Holocaust.
Latino/Hispanic Resources AfroCubaWeb http://www.afrocubaweb.com/ Contains valuable links to both English-language and Spanish-language sites about the culture and heritage of the many Cuban subpopulations in various African traditions. Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, Inc. http://www.trinity.edu/org/comedia/index.html This site contains texts for a number of plays, most of which were written during the Golden Age of Spanish Theater (1580-1680). Some of the plays have been translated into English, and a few critical essays are also included. Brazilian Literature http://www.unm.edu/~osterloh/BrazLit/BrazLit.htm This pages contains a number of links and information on print-based sources that students of Brazilian, African Brazilian, and Luso Brazilian literatures may find helpful. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños http://www.centropr.org Based at Hunter College, City University of New York, this is the major research institute for Puerto Rican studies on the U.S. mainland. Chicano Database The Chicano Database is produced by the University of California, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Department. Its creators have broadened the definition of Chicano to include anyone of Mexican descent living in the United States. As a result, the information available in the database ranges from literature and women’s studies to social work. It is particularly useful for information about Teatro Campesino, as well as for Chicano poetry and fiction. Chicano Literature Index http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/mexamlit.htm A Web site that gives general references, short biographies, lists of major works, and links to other sites about major contemporary Mexican American writers.
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Chicano Studies Research Center http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/ The CSRC is based at the University of California, Los Angeles and is home to significant amounts of important material related to the Chicano movement (online access to the collection is pending). The prestigious journal Aztlán is also based at the CSRC, and its contents are listed on the site. ClasePeriodica This system enables users to find documents published in 2,600 Latin American journals. CLASE is devoted to research in the social sciences and humanities; PERIODICAS specializes in the sciences and technology. Results include conference proceedings, interviews, essays, articles, and books. Cultures of the Andes http://www.andes.org/ Visitors to this site will find original poetry in Quechua, a direct descendant of the language spoken by the Incas that is still common in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Poems are translated into Spanish and English. Also available are short stories (in Spanish and English) about life in this isolated region. Dominican Studies Institute http://www1.ccny.cuny.edu/ci/dsi/ The site of the main U.S. research institute for Dominican studies, located at the City College of New York in upper Manhattan. El Andar http://elandar.com El Andar bills itself as “a national magazine for Latino discourse,” a claim supported by the intelligent and accessible essays and wide array of fiction, poetry, and essays published each month. Highlights of the online edition include readings by prominent Latin American poets of their own work. Facts on the Hispanic or Latino Population http://www.census.gov/pubinfo/www/NEWhispM11.html The U.S. Census Bureau’s page on Latinos in the United States offers statistics on a broad range of characteristics, both social and economic, as well as links to data sets and maps. Fuente Académica This Spanish-language database provides full-text links to more than 150 academic journals. Gay and Lesbian Themes in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/sw25/case9.html Part of the Columbia University exhibition “Stonewall and Beyond: Lesbian
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and Gay Culture,” this page features an essay that locates homosexuality’s meaning within Latin American tradition and points out some of the most important differences between North and Latin American perceptions of sexuality. A list of notable literary works is also included. Handbook of Latin American Studies http://lcweb2.loc.gov/hlas/ The HLAS is an annotated bibliography maintained and updated by the Library of Congress. It includes abstracts for entries, and is useful for locating books, articles, chapters, and papers on almost any topic related to Latin America, covering more than sixty years of scholarly research in the field. An essential starting point for serious research. Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) This valuable resource from the University of California, Los Angeles indexes the books, articles, essays, reviews, many other printed materials that have been produced in and about Latin America since the 1970’s. Increasingly, the citations are linked to the full text. More than 400 periodicals are searched regularly for information about Latinos in the United States, the U.S.-Mexican border, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Hispanic Culture Review http://www.gmu.edu/org/hcr/ The online version of this journal, published by students at George Mason University, includes the both recent and present contents (poetry, short narrative, essays, and book reviews) and has a number of useful (mostly Spanish-language) links, including George Mason’s “The Spanish Page.” Las Culturas http://www.lasculturas.com An annotated list of links to various Web pages about specific Latino, Hispanic, and Latin American authors, sorted alphabetically. Information available varies by author, but several pages contain interviews, images, criticism, and official Web sites. Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) http://www1.lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/literature/ LANIC is one of the most comprehensive resources available for information about and direct links to institutions, publications, and projects throughout Latin America. The site has devoted a section to every topic imaginable, and their literature pages—a few of which are in English—are categorized by country, theme, and author. Links to dozens of magazines, journals, and awards as well as regionwide sites are also listed.
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Latin American Women Writers Alexander Street Press has assembled a system organizing the memoirs, letters, essays, and works (most are in Spanish only) of Latin American women since the 1600’s. Students can combine a number of parameters, including: subject (independence, slavery, love, etc.), word, time period, literary movement, birth and death dates, and country of origin. Latino Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Fiction Alexander Street Press’s highly regarded database focuses on Latino literature in English (although some major works are in Spanish), and places most of its emphasis on writers in the United States after 1850. It includes several hundred novels and plays, and several thousand pages of poetry. Users can narrow their search fields according to a work’s major themes, the author’s gender, heritage, frequency of word use, and other criteria. Libros en Venta This system chronicles all Spanish-language books—both in and out of print— published since 1964. In addition to basic bibliographic information, researchers can also find contact information for publishers and sales distributors. Literature of South America http://gosouthamerica.about.com/od/literature1/ This site, created by About.com, consists largely of book reviews, short stories, biographies of prominent novelists, and other information, sorted by country. Only South American countries are featured. Proyecto Sherezade http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Efernand4/ This Spanish-language site has devoted itself to the preservation and presentation of Latin America’s strong tradition of fiction. Many of its stories have been chosen as aids for Spanish-language teachers. Each piece is introduced by the Webmaster, and a number of author interviews are posted. Puerto Rico and the American Dream http://prdream.com/ Award-winning site about the history, culture, and politics of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora. Offers a film section, an online gallery, discussion boards, historical time lines, oral histories, and current events postings. Sur Database This is the online edition of the prominent Latin American literary magazine (1931-1992). It includes images, advertisements, and a searchable index of more than 6,000 articles.
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Native American Resources American Indian Heritage Foundation (AIHF) http://www.indians.org/ This national foundation, dedicated to assisting underprivileged Native Americans, maintains a resource page with links to federally recognized tribes, Native American literature and art essays and links, and a broad array of other links organized topically. American Indian History and Related Issues http://www.csulb.edu/projects/ais/ A wide-ranging list of links to sites dealing with mostly modern American Indian history. Contains links to tribal home pages, federal departments, image banks, cultural resources, and much more. American Indian History as Told by American Indians http://www.manataka.org/page10.html Links to more than 100 U.S. and Canadian Native American sites with information on American Indian history from a native perspective. American Indian Library Association (AILA) http://www.nativeculture.com/lisamitten/aila.html The affiliate of the American Library Association devoted to Native American libraries, librarians, and collections, offering access to the AILA newsletter and listservs. American Indian Resource Directory http://www.indians.org/Resource/natlit/natlit.html An index page from the Indians.org Web site (sponsored by the American Indian Heritage Foundation) that offers links to summaries on topics from “Abenaki Literature” to Tse-tsehese-staestse (Cheyenne) literature. American Indian Resources http://jupiter.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~krkvls/naindex.html A collection of links for academic research in Native American studies. Includes links to oral and written tribal histories, primary source documents, maps, and bibliographies. American Indian Tribal Directory http://www.indians.org/tribes/tribes.html The site of the American Indian Heritage Foundation, with a useful directory to all federally recognized tribes and resource library.
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Black-Indian History Resources http://anpa.ualr.edu/f_black_indian.htm A fascinating site on the intermixing of African Americans and the Five Civilized Tribes. CodeTalk http://www.codetalk.fed.us/ Hosted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Native American Programs, a federal Web site designed as a central electronic resource for all government offices and programs affecting Native Americans. Links to most federal government offices dealing with Indian affairs. Doe & Moffitt Libraries, Native American Collections http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/doemoff/gov_ntvam.html The University of California, Berkeley maintains this site, which offers comprehensive links for researching Native American history and culture, including bibliographies and directories, guides and handbooks, law and civil rights, treaties and federal programs, congressional publications, statistical indexes and guides, basic statistics, census data, declassified federal documents and federal surveillance files, special collections, California documents, and Internet resources. Edward S. Curtis’s THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html Allows search on the text and images of this controversial yet highly influential publication, issued 1907-1930. Curtis’s monumental twenty-volume work contains more than 2,000 photogravure images and narrative, representing traditional customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. Organized by tribes and culture areas. The site features more than 1,500 illustrations and more than 700 plates, browsable or searchable by subject, tribe, or geographic locale. Facts on the American Indian and Alaskan Native Population http://www.census.gov/pubinfo/www/NEWamindM11.html The U.S. Census Bureau’s page on Native Americans in the United States offers statistics on a broad range of characteristics, both social and economic, as well as links to data sets and maps. First Nation Information Project http://www.johnco.com/firstnat/index.html A thorough resource for information on all aspects of life among the Canadian First Nations. First Nations Histories http://www.tolatsga.org/Compacts.html Provides short histories of all Canadian First Nations, along with bibliographies and maps.
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Electronic Resources
Harvard University Pluralism Project http://www.pluralism.org A search page offers access to a list and links to Native American spiritual centers nationwide. Index of Native American Resources on the Internet http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/ A comprehensive index to Internet resources, frequently updated. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/index.htm A digitized edition of Charles J. Keppler’s 1904 work on the relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. Indian Peoples of the Northern Great Plains http://libmuse.msu.montana.edu:4000/NAD/nad.home A searchable photographic database. Indian Trusts Assets Management http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust/index.html The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Web site covering issues regarding Indian Trusts, with updates on the ongoing legal disputes. Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) http://www.iaiancad.org/ Established in 1962 by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the IAIA is now an independent two-year college, contemporary Indian art musuem, and member of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Its site offers information about programs and exhibitions, a tour of the collection, and access to the virtual library by tribe, subject, or geographical locale. Internet Law Library: Indian Nations and Tribes http://www.nsulaw.nova.edu/library/ushouse/31.htm Links to numerous sites with information on legal relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. Includes a number of links dealing with treaties. Internet Public Library: Native American Authors http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/ Provides information on Native North American authors: bibliographies of their published works; biographies; and links to interviews, texts, and tribal Web sites.
Electronic Resources
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National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) http://www.indiangaming.org The main advocacy group for Indian gambling enterprises, offering access to government officials, a virtual library and other resources aimed at advancing Indian gaming. National Museum of the American Indian http://www.nmai.si.edu/ The Web site for this, one of the Smithsonian museums, lists a calendar of events, exhibitions, and links to the New York, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., facilities. Native American Authors http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/ Maintained by the University of Michigan’s School of Information, this is an interactive search engine by authors, book titles, and tribes, including biographical information and bibliographical information and links to news stories and other sources for hundreds of Native American authors. Native American Authors: Teacher Resources http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/natauth.htm Part of the Internet School Library Media Center Web site, this page offers biography, bibliography, lesson plans, e-texts, and critical reviews of selected authors whose works are taught at the high school and undergraduate levels. Literature includes both adult and juvenile. Native American Documents Project http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/ Provides primary source documentation of the allotment system, published reports of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1870’s, and information on the Rogue River War and the Silitz reservation. Native American History and Studies http://www.tntech.edu/www/acad/hist/nativam.html A collection of historical links hosted by the history department at Tennessee Technological University. Native American Music Awards (Nammys) http://www.nativeamericanmusic.com/ Supports and promotes contemporary Native American artists through the Nammys (which began in 1998) as well as the Native American Music Hall of Fame.
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Electronic Resources
Native American Research Page http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~bucko/indian.html A collection of links to resources on all aspects of Native American culture and life. Native American Rights Fund (NARF) http://www.narf.org/ Legal activist group dedicated to advancing and defending Native American civil rights and liberties. Maintains pages listing current cases, calls to action, and the National Indian Law Library. NativeCulture.com http://www.nativeculture.com An organized set of links to indigenous culture sites by tribe, arts, and teaching tools. Arts are further categorized under arts, dance, media, music, literature, and “hand arts.” NativeWeb http://www.nativeweb.org/ Maintained by academicians and Web technicians, NativeWeb describes itself as “an international, nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to using telecommunications including computer technology and the Internet to disseminate information from and about indigenous nations, peoples, and organizations around the world; to foster communication between native and non-native peoples; to conduct research involving indigenous peoples’ usage of technology and the Internet; and to provide resources, mentoring, and services to facilitate indigenous peoples’ use of this technology.” Hosts sub-sites such as NativeTech, links to resources, news stories, and other resources related to Native American culture. Accepts donations. The Newberry Library http://www.newberry.org Located in Chicago, the Newberry maintains one of the world’s finest collections of books on American Indian culture and history, the Edward E. Ayer Collection. The site offers a searchable catalog. Office of Tribal Justice http://www.usdoj.gov/otj/ The Web site of the division of the U.S. Department of Justice that deals with Native American issues. Includes a statement of the Department of Justice’s sovereignty policy. On This Date in North American Indian History http://americanindian.net/ A site dedicated to time lines of Native American historical events.
Electronic Resources
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Smithsonian Institution: Native American History and Culture http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmai/start.htm Links to Native American resources at the Smithsonian, including a number of online museum exhibits. The “Native American Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery” exhibit features many historically important Native Americans. Treaty Negotiations Office of the Attorney General of British Columbia http://www.gov.bc.ca/tno/ Contains information about treaties between Canada and First Nations, with updates on current legislation and negotiations. Tribal Law and Policy Institute http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/tlpi.htm The site of a Native American nonprofit institute dedicated to increasing resources for tribal judicial systems and operations.
Indexes
Author Index Ai, 1-4 Alexander, Meena, 5-7 Alexie, Sherman, 8-14 Allen, Paula Gunn, 15-20 Allende, Isabel, 21-26 Alvarez, Julia, 27-34 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 35-39 Angelou, Maya, 40-45 Anthony, Florence. See Ai Antin, Mary, 46-48 Arenas, Reinaldo, 49-53 Asante, Molefi K., 54-57 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 58-62 Bailey, Frederick Augustus Washington. See Douglass, Frederick Baldwin, James, 63-77 Bambara, Toni Cade, 78-84 Baraka, Amiri, 85-94 Barrio, Raymond, 95-96 Bass, Kingsley B., Jr. See Bullins, Ed Bellow, Saul, 97-102 Bontemps, Arna, 103-110 Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra, 111-113 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 114-122 Brito, Aristeo, 123-125 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 126-134 Brown, Claude, 135-137 Brown, James Willie. See Komunyakaa, Yusef Brown, Rosellen, 138-140 Brown, Sterling A., 141-146 Brown, William Wells, 147-150 Bullins, Ed, 151-161 Bulosan, Carlos, 162-164 Burgos, Julia de, 165-167 Butler, Octavia E., 168-175 Cade, Miltona Mirkin. See Bambara, Toni Cade Cahan, Abraham, 176-178 Calisher, Hortense, 179-181 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 182-187
Cary, Lorene, 188-190 Castaneda, Carlos, 191-195 Castillo, Ana, 196-200 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 201-203 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 204-209 Chávez, Denise, 210-212 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 213-224 Childress, Alice, 225-230 Chin, Frank, 231-235 Chu, Louis H., 236-238 Cisneros, Sandra, 239-244 Cleaver, Eldridge, 245-247 Clifton, Lucille, 248-253 Colón, Jesús, 254-255 Corpi, Lucha, 256-258 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 259-266 Cullen, Countée, 267-274 Dante, Nicholas, 275-277 Davis, Angela, 278-280 Delany, Samuel R., 281-291 Derricotte, Toi, 292-297 Dodson, Owen, 298-302 Dorris, Michael, 303-307 Douglass, Frederick, 308-312 Dove, Rita, 313-321 Driver, Wilsonia Benita. See Sanchez, Sonia Du Bois, W. E. B., 322-327 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 328-338 Dworkin, Andrea, 339-341 Eady, Cornelius, 342-348 Elder, Lonne, III, 349-354 Elkin, Stanley, 355-358 Ellison, Ralph, 359-364 Erdrich, Louise, 365-373 Espada, Martín, 374-377 Everett, Percival L., 378-381 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 382-387 Ferré, Rosario, 388-390 Fierstein, Harvey, 391-394 Fisher, Rudolph, 395-397 1251
American Ethnic Writers Fornes, Maria Irene, 398-400 Fuller, Charles, 401-406 Gaines, Ernest J., 407-420 Galarza, Ernesto, 421-424 García, Cristina, 425-427 García, Lionel G., 428-430 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 431-436 Ginsberg, Allen, 437-442 Giovanni, Nikki, 443-450 Goichi, Joy Nozomi. See Kogawa, Joy Green, Hannah. See Greenberg, Joanne Greenberg, Joanne, 451-454 Hagedorn, Jessica, 455-459 Hale, Janet Campbell, 460-462 Haley, Alex, 463-467 Hamilton, Virginia, 468-472 Hansberry, Lorraine, 473-480 Harjo, Joy, 481-484 Harper, Michael S., 485-491 Harris, Wilson, 492-496 Hayden, Robert, 497-500 Hayslip, Le Ly, 501-503 Hijuelos, Oscar, 504-507 Himes, Chester, 508-516 Hinojosa, Rolando, 517-519 Hong, Maxine Ting Ting. See Kingston, Maxine Hong Hongo, Garrett Kaoru, 520-522 Hooks, Bell, 523-528 Hughes, Langston, 529-537 Hurston, Zora Neale, 538-546 Hwang, David Henry, 547-553 Jen, Gish, 554-558 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 559-562 Jin, Ha, 563-566 Jin Xufei. See Jin, Ha Johnson, Charles, 567-575 Johnson, James Weldon, 576-580 Johnson, Marguerite. See Angelou, Maya Jones, Gayl, 581-583 Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri Jordan, June, 584-590 Kadohata, Cynthia, 591-594 Kelley, William Melvin, 595-600 Kennedy, Adrienne, 601-606
Kincaid, Jamaica, 607-612 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 613-618 King, Thomas, 619-621 Kingsolver, Barbara, 622-629 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 630-636 Kittel, Frederick August. See Wilson, August Knight, Etheridge, 637-641 Kogawa, Joy, 642-644 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 645-651 Kosinski, Jerzy, 652-656 Kronstein, Gerda Hedwig. See Lerner, Gerda Kunitz, Stanley, 657-662 Kushner, Tony, 663-666 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 667-669 Larsen, Nella, 670-674 Lau, Evelyn, 675-678 Law-Yone, Wendy, 679-682 Lee, Don L. See Madhubuti, Haki R. Lee, Gus, 683-685 Lee, Li-Young, 686-688 Lerner, Gerda, 689-692 Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X Lorde, Audre, 693-701 Machado, Eduardo, 702-705 McKay, Claude, 706-712 McKnight, Reginald, 713-718 McMillan, Terry, 719-724 McNickle, D’Arcy, 725-728 McPherson, James Alan, 729-734 Madhubuti, Haki R., 735-744 Major, Clarence, 745-749 Malamud, Bernard, 750-754 Malcolm X, 755-757 Marshall, Paule, 758-766 Mehta, Ved, 767-771 Meriwether, Louise, 772-774 Miller, Arthur, 775-778 Miller, Henry, 779-784 Min, Anchee, 785-788 Mohr, Nicholasa, 789-791 Momaday, N. Scott, 792-796 Morales, Alejandro, 797-799 Morales, Conrad. See Dante, Nicholas Morrison, Toni, 800-809 Mosley, Walter, 810-813 1252
Author Index Moss, Thylias, 814-816 Mukherjee, Bharati, 817-821 Murray, Albert, 822-826 Myers, Walter Dean, 827-832 Naylor, Gloria, 833-839 Ng, Fae Myenne, 840-842 Okada, John, 843-845 Ortiz, Simon J., 846-849 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 850-853 Owens, Louis, 854-857 Ozick, Cynthia, 858-861 Paley, Grace, 862-866 Parks, Gordon, Sr., 867-872 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 873-878 Petry, Ann, 879-886 Phung Thi Le Ly. See Hayslip, Le Ly Piercy, Marge, 887-890 Pinckney, Darryl, 891-893 Piñero, Miguel, 894-897 Ponce, Mary Helen, 898-901 Potok, Chaim, 902-905 Randall, Dudley, 906-912 Rechy, John, 913-917 Reed, Ishmael, 918-927 Rich, Adrienne, 928-931 Richardson, Elaine Potter. See Kincaid, Jamaica Richler, Mordecai, 932-936 Ríos, Alberto, 937-940 Rivera, Tomás, 941-943 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 944-946 Rodriguez, Richard, 947-951 Rosca, Ninotchka, 952-955 Roth, Henry, 956-960 Roth, Philip, 961-964 Rukeyser, Muriel, 965-969 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 970-974 Sanchez, Sonia, 975-982 Sanchez, Thomas, 983-985 Schuyler, George S., 986-988
Schwartz, Delmore, 989-992 Shange, Ntozake, 993-1000 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 1001-1004 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 1005-1008 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1009-1013 Smith, Arthur Lee, Jr. See Asante, Molefi K. Song, Cathy, 1014-1016 Soto, Gary, 1017-1020 Steele, Shelby, 1021-1023 Suárez, Virgil, 1024-1026 Tan, Amy, 1027-1031 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 1032-1034 Thomas, Piri, 1035-1038 Toomer, Jean, 1039-1047 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 1048-1052 Villarreal, José Antonio, 1053-1055 Villaseñor, Victor, 1056-1059 Viramontes, Helena María, 1060-1063 Vizenor, Gerald R., 1064-1069 Walker, Alice, 1070-1082 Walker, Joseph A., 1083-1087 Washington, Booker T., 1088-1092 Wasserstein, Wendy, 1093-1097 Watkins, Gloria. See Hooks, Bell Welch, James, 1098-1101 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1102-1104 West, Cornel, 1105-1111 Wheatley, Phillis, 1112-1122 Wideman, John Edgar, 1123-1134 Wiesel, Elie, 1135-1141 Williams, John A., 1142-1147 Williams, Paulette. See Shange, Ntozake Wilson, August, 1148-1156 Wong, Jade Snow, 1157-1159 Wright, Jay, 1160-1169 Wright, Richard, 1170-1182 Yamada, Mitsuye, 1183-1185 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 1186-1188 Yerby, Frank, 1189-1196 Yglesias, José, 1197-1199 Young, Al, 1200-1214
1253
Authors by Ethnic Identity AFRICAN AMERICANS Ai, 1 Angelou, Maya, 40 Asante, Molefi K., 54 Baldwin, James, 63 Bambara, Toni Cade, 78 Baraka, Amiri, 85 Bontemps, Arna, 103 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 114 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 126 Brown, Claude, 135 Brown, Sterling A., 141 Brown, William Wells, 147 Bullins, Ed, 151 Butler, Octavia E., 168 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 182 Cary, Lorene, 188 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 204 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 213 Childress, Alice, 225 Cleaver, Eldridge, 245 Clifton, Lucille, 248 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 259 Cullen, Countée, 267 Davis, Angela, 278 Delany, Samuel R., 281 Derricotte, Toi, 292 Dodson, Owen, 298 Douglass, Frederick, 308 Dove, Rita, 313 Du Bois, W. E. B., 322 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 328 Eady, Cornelius, 342 Elder, Lonne, III, 349 Ellison, Ralph, 359 Everett, Percival L., 378 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 382 Fisher, Rudolph, 395 Fuller, Charles, 401 Gaines, Ernest J., 407 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 431
Giovanni, Nikki, 443 Haley, Alex, 463 Hamilton, Virginia, 468 Hansberry, Lorraine, 473 Harper, Michael S., 485 Harris, Wilson, 492 Hayden, Robert, 497 Himes, Chester, 508 Hooks, Bell, 523 Hughes, Langston, 529 Hurston, Zora Neale, 538 Johnson, Charles, 567 Johnson, James Weldon, 576 Jones, Gayl, 581 Jordan, June, 584 Kelley, William Melvin, 595 Kennedy, Adrienne, 601 Kincaid, Jamaica, 607 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 613 Knight, Etheridge, 637 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 645 Larsen, Nella, 670 Lorde, Audre, 693 McKay, Claude, 706 McKnight, Reginald, 713 McMillan, Terry, 719 McPherson, James Alan, 729 Madhubuti, Haki R., 735 Major, Clarence, 745 Malcolm X, 755 Marshall, Paule, 758 Meriwether, Louise, 772 Morrison, Toni, 800 Mosley, Walter, 810 Moss, Thylias, 814 Murray, Albert, 822 Myers, Walter Dean, 827 Naylor, Gloria, 833 Parks, Gordon, Sr., 867 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 873 Petry, Ann, 879 1254
Authors by Ethnic Identity Pinckney, Darryl, 891 Randall, Dudley, 906 Reed, Ishmael, 918 Sanchez, Sonia, 975 Schuyler, George S., 986 Shange, Ntozake, 993 Steele, Shelby, 1021 Toomer, Jean, 1039 Walker, Alice, 1070 Walker, Joseph A., 1083 Washington, Booker T., 1088 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1102 West, Cornel, 1105 Wheatley, Phillis, 1112 Wideman, John Edgar, 1123 Williams, John A., 1142 Wilson, August, 1148 Wright, Jay, 1160 Wright, Richard, 1170 Yerby, Frank, 1189 Young, Al, 1200 ASIAN AMERICANS. See CHINESE AMERICANS, FILIPINO AMERICANS, JAPANESE AMERICANS, KOREAN AMERICANS, SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICANS, VIETNAMESE AMERICANS CARIBBEANS. See also CUBAN AMERICANS, DOMINICAN AMERICANS, PUERTO RICANS Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 114 Harris, Wilson, 492 Kincaid, Jamaica, 607 McKay, Claude, 706 Marshall, Paule, 758 CHILEAN AMERICANS Allende, Isabel, 21 CHINESE AMERICANS Chin, Frank, 231 Chu, Louis H., 236 Hwang, David Henry, 547 Jen, Gish, 554 Jin, Ha, 563
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 630 Lau, Evelyn, 675 Lee, Gus, 683 Lee, Li-Young, 686 Min, Anchee, 785 Ng, Fae Myenne, 840 Song, Cathy, 1014 Tan, Amy, 1027 Wong, Jade Snow, 1157 CUBAN AMERICANS Arenas, Reinaldo, 49 Fornes, Maria Irene, 398 García, Cristina, 425 Hijuelos, Oscar, 504 Machado, Eduardo, 702 Suárez, Virgil, 1024 Yglesias, José, 1197 DOMINICAN AMERICANS Alvarez, Julia, 27 FILIPINO AMERICANS Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra, 111 Bulosan, Carlos, 162 Hagedorn, Jessica, 455 Rosca, Ninotchka, 952 JAPANESE AMERICANS Ai, 1 Hongo, Garrett Kaoru, 520 Kadohata, Cynthia, 591 Kogawa, Joy, 642 Okada, John, 843 Yamada, Mitsuye, 1183 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 1186 JEWISH AMERICANS Antin, Mary, 46 Bellow, Saul, 97 Brown, Rosellen, 138 Cahan, Abraham, 176 Calisher, Hortense, 179 Dworkin, Andrea, 339 Elkin, Stanley, 355 Fierstein, Harvey, 391 Ginsberg, Allen, 437 1255
American Ethnic Writers Greenberg, Joanne, 451 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 559 Kosinski, Jerzy, 652 Kunitz, Stanley, 657 Kushner, Tony, 663 Lerner, Gerda, 689 Malamud, Bernard, 750 Miller, Arthur, 775 Miller, Henry, 779 Ozick, Cynthia, 858 Paley, Grace, 862 Piercy, Marge, 887 Potok, Chaim, 902 Rich, Adrienne, 928 Richler, Mordecai, 932 Roth, Henry, 956 Roth, Philip, 961 Rukeyser, Muriel, 965 Schwartz, Delmore, 989 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1009 Wasserstein, Wendy, 1093 Wiesel, Elie, 1135 KOREAN AMERICANS Song, Cathy, 1014 LATIN AMERICANS. See CHILEAN AMERICANS, CUBAN AMERICANS, MEXICAN AMERICANS, PERUVIAN AMERICANS MEXICAN AMERICANS Anaya, Rudolfo A., 35 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 58 Barrio, Raymond, 95 Brito, Aristeo, 123 Castillo, Ana, 196 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 201 Chávez, Denise, 210 Cisneros, Sandra, 239 Corpi, Lucha, 256 Galarza, Ernesto, 421 García, Lionel G., 428 Hinojosa, Rolando, 517 Morales, Alejandro, 797 Ponce, Mary Helen, 898 Rechy, John, 913 Ríos, Alberto, 937
Rivera, Tomás, 941 Rodriguez, Richard, 947 Soto, Gary, 1017 Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, 1032 Valdez, Luis Miguel, 1048 Villarreal, José Antonio, 1053 Villaseñor, Victor, 1056 Viramontes, Helena María, 1060 NATIVE AMERICANS Ai, 1 Alexie, Sherman, 8 Allen, Paula Gunn, 15 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 58 Dorris, Michael, 303 Erdrich, Louise, 365 Hale, Janet Campbell, 460 Harjo, Joy, 481 Harris, Wilson, 492 King, Thomas, 619 Kingsolver, Barbara, 622 McNickle, D’Arcy, 725 Momaday, N. Scott, 792 Ortiz, Simon J., 846 Owens, Louis, 854 Reed, Ishmael, 918 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 1005 Vizenor, Gerald R., 1064 Walker, Alice, 1070 Welch, James, 1098 PERUVIAN AMERICANS Allende, Isabel, 21 Castaneda, Carlos, 191 PUERTO RICANS Burgos, Julia de, 165 Colón, Jesús, 254 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 259 Dante, Nicholas, 275 Espada, Martín, 374 Ferré, Rosario, 388 Mohr, Nicholasa, 789 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 850 Piñero, Miguel, 894 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr., 944 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 970 Thomas, Piri, 1035 1256
Authors by Ethnic Identity SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICANS Alexander, Meena, 5 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 667 Law-Yone, Wendy, 679 Mehta, Ved, 767 Mukherjee, Bharati, 817 Sidhwa, Bapsi, 1001
SPANISH AMERICANS Sanchez, Thomas, 983 VIETNAMESE AMERICANS Hayslip, Le Ly, 501
1257
Titles by Ethnic Identity AFRICAN AMERICAN Ain’t I a Woman (Hooks, Bell), 525 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou, Maya), 43 Along This Way (Johnson, James Weldon), 578 Amen Corner, The (Baldwin, James), 66 American Desert (Everett, Percival L.), 380 American Evasion of Philosophy, The (West, Cornel), 1108 American Fugitive in Europe, The (Brown, William Wells), 150 American Hunger (Wright, Richard), 1180 Angela Davis (Davis, Angela), 279 Angry Ones, The (Williams, John A.), 1144 Annie John (Kincaid, Jamaica), 609 Another Country (Baldwin, James), 70 “Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere, An” (Major, Clarence), 746 Arrivants, The (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 116 Ask Your Mama (Hughes, Langston), 535 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid, Jamaica), 608 Autobiography of a Jukebox, The (Eady, Cornelius), 346 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, The (Johnson, James Weldon), 577 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Malcolm X and Haley, Alex), 465, 756 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Gaines, Ernest J.), 416 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid, Jamaica), 611 Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 326 Bailey’s Café (Naylor, Gloria), 837 Banana Bottom (McKay, Claude), 709 Banjo (McKay, Claude), 708 1258
Baptism, The (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Beloved (Morrison, Toni), 807 Betsey Brown (Shange, Ntozake), 999 Between Our Selves (Lorde, Audre), 695 Big Sea, The (Hughes, Langston), 532 Black Boy (Wright, Richard), 1177 Black Christ, The (Cullen, Countée), 269 Black Feeling, Black Talk (Giovanni, Nikki), 444 Black Ice (Cary, Lorene), 189 Black No More (Schuyler, George S.), 987 Black Notebooks, The (Derricotte, Toi), 296 Black Pride (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 737 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 325 Black Thunder (Bontemps, Arna), 107 “Blackstone Rangers, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 132 “Blood-Burning Moon” (Toomer, Jean), 1042 “Bloodline” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 Bloodline (Gaines, Ernest J.), 411 Blue Devils of Nada, The (Murray, Albert), 824 “Blue Meridian” (Toomer, Jean), 1045 Blues Don’t Change, The (Young, Al), 1211 Blues: For All the Changes (Giovanni, Nikki), 449 Blues People (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison, Toni), 801 Boleros (Wright, Jay), 1167 “Bones of Louella Brown, The” (Petry, Ann), 884 Boogie Woogie Landscapes (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Book of Life (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Boy x Man (Bullins, Ed), 160 Bronx Is Next, The (Sanchez, Sonia), 976 Brothers and Keepers (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127
Titles by Ethnic Identity Brothers and Sisters (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 184 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall, Paule), 759 Brownsville Raid, The (Fuller, Charles), 402 Brutal Imagination (Eady, Cornelius), 347 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker, Alice), 1081 Cables to Rage (Lorde, Audre), 694 Cancer Journals, The (Lorde, Audre), 697 Cane (Toomer, Jean), 1040 “Cane, Section 2” (Toomer, Jean), 1043 Captain Blackman (Williams, John A.), 1146 Captivity (Derricotte, Toi), 294 Catherine Carmier (Gaines, Ernest J.), 408 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1132 Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (Elder, Lonne, III), 350 Charades on East Fourth Street (Elder, Lonne, III), 353 Chinaberry Tree, The (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 385 Choice of Weapons, A (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 869 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall, Paule), 762 “Cicely’s Dream” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 Cities Burning (Randall, Dudley), 910 !Click Song (Williams, John A.), 1146 Coal (Lorde, Audre), 696 Color Purple, The (Walker, Alice), 1078 Colored People (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Comedy, American Style (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 386 Conjure-Man Dies, The (Fisher, Rudolph), 396 “Conjurer’s Revenge, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 217 1259
Content of Our Character, The (Steele, Shelby), 1022 Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Baraka, Amiri), 93 Copacetic (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 647 Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (Giovanni, Nikki), 447 Cruelty (Ai), 2 Crusade for Justice (Wells-Barnett, Ida B.), 1103 Daggers and Javelins (Baraka, Amiri), 92 Dahomean, The (Yerby, Frank), 1195 Damned If I Do (Everett, Percival L.), 381 Dancing (Young, Al), 1202 Daughters (Marshall, Paule), 765 Day Late and a Dollar Short, A (McMillan, Terry), 723 Dear John, Dear Coltrane (Harper, Michael S.), 486 Debridement (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (Bambara, Toni Cade), 83 dem (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Democracy Matters (West, Cornel), 1110 Dhalgren (Delany, Samuel R.), 284 Dialect Determinism (Bullins, Ed), 155 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 648 Different Drummer, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 596 Dimensions of History (Wright, Jay), 1164 Disappearing Acts (McMillan, Terry), 721 District Line (Walker, Joseph A.), 1087 Divine Comedy (Dodson, Owen), 301 Does Your House Have Lions? (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 Don’t Cry, Scream (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 739 Double Invention of Komo, The (Wright, Jay), 1166 Dreamer (Johnson, Charles), 574 Drop of Patience, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Drums at Dusk (Bontemps, Arna), 107 Dunfords Travels Everywheres (Kelley, William Melvin), 599
American Ethnic Writers Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Dutchman (Baraka, Amiri), 90 Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Echo of Lions (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 208 Elaine’s Book (Wright, Jay), 1167 Elegies, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1117 Empress of the Death House, The (Derricotte, Toi), 293 Erasing Racism (Asante, Molefi K.), 56 “Esther” (Toomer, Jean), 1041 Eva’s Man (Jones, Gayl), 582 Evidence of Things Not Seen, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Explications/Interpretations (Wright, Jay), 1164 Faith and the Good Thing (Johnson, Charles), 569 Fallen Angels (Myers, Walter Dean), 830 Fatheralong (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Fences (Wilson, August), 1150 Fever (Wideman, John Edgar), 1129 “Fire and Cloud” (Wright, Richard), 1171 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin, James), 71 First Cities, The (Lorde, Audre), 694 Flight to Canada (Reed, Ishmael), 923 “Flying Home” (Ellison, Ralph), 362 Folks from Dixie (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 332 for colored girls who have considered suicide (Shange, Ntozake), 994 Fossil and Psyche (Harris, Wilson), 494 Foxes of Harrow, The (Yerby, Frank), 1190 Fragments of the Ark (Meriwether, Louise), 774 Free-Lance Pallbearers, The (Reed, Ishmael), 919 From a Land Where Other People Live (Lorde, Audre), 695 From Okra to Greens (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Fun and Games (Major, Clarence), 746 Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy, Adrienne), 602 1260
Future of the Race, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 436 Garden of Time, The (Dodson, Owen), 301 Gathering of My Name, The (Eady, Cornelius), 345 Gathering of Old Men, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 418 Gemini (Giovanni, Nikki), 445 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin, James), 69 Glance Away, A (Wideman, John Edgar), 1124 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin, James), 65 God Made Alaska for the Indians (Reed, Ishmael), 923 God Sends Sunday (Bontemps, Arna), 105 “Going to Meet the Man” (Baldwin, James), 73 Going to the Territory (Ellison, Ralph), 362 “Gold Coast” (McPherson, James Alan), 730 Good Times (Clifton, Lucille), 249 Good Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (Walker, Alice), 1076 “Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 215 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara, Toni Cade), 79 Grace Notes (Dove, Rita), 314 Great Slave Narratives (Bontemps, Arna), 108 Greed (Ai), 3 Griffin’s Way (Yerby, Frank), 1192 Harangues, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” (Knight, Etheridge), 639 Healing Song for the Inner Ear (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Heart of Happy Hollow, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Heartlove (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 743 “Heritage” (Cullen, Countée), 273 High Cotton (Pinckney, Darryl), 892
Titles by Ethnic Identity History Is Your Own Heartbeat (Harper, Michael S.), 487 Home to Harlem (McKay, Claude), 707 Homecoming Singer, The (Wright, Jay), 1161 Homegirls and Handgrenades (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 Homewood Trilogy, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 Hoops (Myers, Walter Dean), 829 House Behind the Cedars, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 221 House of Dies Drear, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 470 How Stella Got Her Groove Back (McMillan, Terry), 722 Hurry Home (Wideman, John Edgar), 1125 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou, Maya), 42 I Shall Not Be Moved (Angelou, Maya), 44 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes, Langston), 532 “Idea of Ancestry, The” (Knight, Etheridge), 640 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 875 “In Darkness and Confusion” (Petry, Ann), 882 In My Father’s House (Gaines, Ernest J.), 417 In the Blood (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876 Interruption of Everything, The (McMillan, Terry), 723 Invisible Man (Ellison, Ralph), 360 I’ve Been a Woman (Sanchez, Sonia), 979 Jacob’s Ladder (Williams, John A.), 1147 Japanese by Spring (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Jazz (Morrison, Toni), 808 Jitney (Wilson, August), 1155 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Wilson, August), 1152 “John Redding Goes to Sea” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 539 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston, Zora Neale), 542 Juneteenth (Ellison, Ralph), 363 1261
“Just like a Tree” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 415 Kabnis (Toomer, Jean), 1044 Kartunes (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, The (McKnight, Reginald), 715 Kindred (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 King Hedley II (Wilson, August), 1155 Kissing God Goodbye (Jordan, June), 589 Last Days of Louisiana Red, The (Reed, Ishmael), 922 “Last Ride of Wild Bill, The” (Brown, Sterling A.), 145 Lawd Today (Wright, Richard), 1179 Les Blancs (Hansberry, Lorraine), 478 Lesson Before Dying, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 419 Letter from Birmingham City Jail (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 615 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 311 “Like a Winding Sheet” (Petry, Ann), 881 Linden Hills (Naylor, Gloria), 835 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 263 Little Yellow Dog, A (Mosley, Walter), 813 “Loaf of Bread, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 733 “Long Day in November, A” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 412 Loose Canons (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Lucy (Kincaid, Jamaica), 610 Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 329 Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 334 M. C. Higgins the Great (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson, August), 1150 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 261
American Ethnic Writers Mama (McMillan, Terry), 720 Mama Day (Naylor, Gloria), 836 “Man Child, The” (Baldwin, James), 71 Man Who Cried I Am, The (Williams, John A.), 1145 “Man Who Lived Underground, The” (Wright, Richard), 1175 Manchild in the Promised Land (Brown, Claude), 136 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 223 Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, The (Lorde, Audre), 700 “Medley” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 80 Men of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 838 Meridian (Walker, Alice), 1074 Merle (Marshall, Paule), 765 Middle Passage (Johnson, Charles), 573 Middle Passages (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 121 “Migraine Workers, The” (Petry, Ann), 885 Miss Muriel, and Other Stories (Petry, Ann), 881 Monster (Myers, Walter Dean), 831 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston, Zora Neale), 544 “Mother, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 129 “Mother Africa” (Petry, Ann), 885 Mother Love (Dove, Rita), 316 Mother Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 119 Motion of Light in Water, The (Delany, Samuel R.), 289 Mountain in the Sea, The (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 605 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed, Ishmael), 921 Museum (Dove, Rita), 318 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass, Frederick), 311 My House (Giovanni, Nikki), 446 “My Mother and Mitch” (Major, Clarence), 747 Naming Our Destiny (Jordan, June), 588 1262
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 309 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, The (Brown, William Wells), 149 Native Son (Wright, Richard), 1172 Natural Birth (Derricotte, Toi), 294 “Necessary Knocking on the Door, The” (Petry, Ann), 883 Neon Vernacular (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 New and Collected Poems (Reed, Ishmael), 925 “New Mirror, The” (Petry, Ann), 882 Night Song (Williams, John A.), 1144 Nightmare Begins Responsibility (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin, James), 68 Odor of Sanctity, An (Yerby, Frank), 1194 Of Love and Dust (Gaines, Ernest J.), 409 Old South, The (Bontemps, Arna), 109 On These I Stand (Cullen, Countée), 271 Once: Poems (Walker, Alice), 1071 Ordinary Woman, An (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Outsider, The (Wright, Richard), 1178 Owl Answers, The (Kennedy, Adrienne), 603 Oxherding Tale (Johnson, Charles), 570 Panoramas (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Panther and the Lash, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 Parable of the Sower (Butler, Octavia E.), 174 Paradise (Morrison, Toni), 808 Passing (Larsen, Nella), 672 “Passing of Grandison, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 219 Patternist series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 Philadelphia Fire (Wideman, John Edgar), 1130 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Photograph, A (Shange, Ntozake), 995 Piano Lesson, The (Wilson, August), 1152
Titles by Ethnic Identity Planet of Junior Brown, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Pleasure Dome (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Plum Bun (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 384 “Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 216 Poem Counterpoem (Randall, Dudley), 909 Poems of Fancy and Memory (Wheatley, Phillis), 1120 Political Poems, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1114 Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker, Alice), 1080 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall, Paule), 763 President’s Daughter, The (ChaseRiboud, Barbara), 209 Price of a Child, The (Cary, Lorene), 190 Price of the Ticket, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Prophesy Deliverance! (West, Cornel), 1107 Pyramid of Bone (Moss, Thylias), 815 Quicksand (Larsen, Nella), 671 Quilting (Clifton, Lucille), 252 “Quitting Smoking” (McKnight, Reginald), 716 Race Matters (West, Cornel), 1109 Racism 101 (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry, Lorraine), 474 Rat’s Mass, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 604 “Raymond’s Run” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 82 Reckless Eyeballing (Reed, Ishmael), 925 Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 Reena, and Other Stories (Marshall, Paule), 764 “Remembering Nat Turner” (Brown, Sterling A.), 146 Return of Simple, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 Reuben (Wideman, John Edgar), 1128 Rhythm, Content & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 River Niger, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 1263
Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Haley, Alex), 465 Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Saint Peter Relates an Incident (Johnson, James Weldon), 579 Sally Hemings (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 206 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara, Toni Cade), 81 “Scat” (Major, Clarence), 748 “Screamers, The” (Baraka, Amiri), 91 Seduction by Light (Young, Al), 1212 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Hughes, Langston), 534 Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (Baraka, Amiri), 91 Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Seven Guitars (Wilson, August), 1154 Seven League Boots, The (Murray, Albert), 825 Shining Town, The (Dodson, Owen), 300 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry, Lorraine), 475 Signifying Monkey, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 433 Singing in the Comeback Choir (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 185 Sissie (Williams, John A.), 1145 Sister Son/ji (Sanchez, Sonia), 977 Sitting Pretty (Young, Al), 1209 “Sky Is Gray, The” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 413 Slim Greer Poems (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Snakes (Young, Al), 1206 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 260 Soldier’s Play, A (Fuller, Charles), 404 “Solo Song: For Doc, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 Some Changes (Jordan, June), 586 Song: I Want a Witness (Harper, Michael S.), 488 Song of Solomon (Morrison, Toni), 804 Song Turning Back into Itself, The (Young, Al), 1207 Songlines in Michaeltree (Harper, Michael S.), 490
American Ethnic Writers “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin, James), 75 Soothsayers and Omens (Wright, Jay), 1162 Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Johnson, Charles), 572 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall, Paule), 760 Soul on Ice (Cleaver, Eldridge), 246 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Sound of Dreams Remembered, The (Young, Al), 1213 Southern Road (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Spell #7 (Shange, Ntozake), 998 “Spunk” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 540 Spyglass Tree, The (Murray, Albert), 824 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany, Samuel R.), 288 Stories of John Edgar Wideman, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Story of My Life and Work, The (Washington, Booker T.), 1089 Street, The (Petry, Ann), 880 Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 128 Street Sounds (Bullins, Ed), 157 Strength of Gideon, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 336 Stride Toward Freedom (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 614 Sula (Morrison, Toni), 802 “Summer Tragedy, A” (Bontemps, Arna), 105 Sun Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 120 “Sweat” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 541 Taking of Miss Janie, The (Bullins, Ed), 159 Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (Moss, Thylias), 816 Tales of Nevèrÿon (Delany, Samuel R.), 287 Talking Dirty to the Gods (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Tar Baby (Morrison, Toni), 805 Technical Difficulties (Jordan, June), 588 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker, Alice), 1079 “Ten Pecan Pies” (Major, Clarence), 748 1264
Tender (Derricotte, Toi), 295 Terrible Stories, The (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Terrible Threes, The (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Terrible Twos, The (Reed, Ishmael), 924 Testament of Hope, A (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 617 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston, Zora Neale), 543 There Is Confusion (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 383 Thieves of Paradise (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 Think Black (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 736 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker, Alice), 1072 Thomas and Beulah (Dove, Rita), 319 “Three Men” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 Through the Ivory Gate (Dove, Rita), 315 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany, Samuel R.), 290 To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (Hansberry, Lorraine), 477 Topdog/Underdog (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 877 Transfigurations (Wright, Jay), 1168 Triton (Delany, Samuel R.), 286 Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 Trouble in Mind (Childress, Alice), 228 Twentieth Century Cycle, The (Bullins, Ed), 156 Two Cities (Wideman, John Edgar), 1133 Two-Headed Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Two Trains Running (Wilson, August), 1153 Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us? (Sanchez, Sonia), 978 “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” (McKnight, Reginald), 714 “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 Undersong (Lorde, Audre), 698 Up from Slavery (Washington, Booker T.), 1091 Valide (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 207 Venus (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876
Titles by Ethnic Identity Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Voices in the Mirror (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 871 Waiting to Exhale (McMillan, Terry), 721 Warpland Poems, The (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 131 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes, Langston), 533 We (Fuller, Charles), 405 We a BaddDDD People (Sanchez, Sonia), 977 “We Real Cool” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 130 We Walk the Way of the New World (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 740 Wedding Band (Childress, Alice), 229 “White Boys, The” (McKnight, Reginald), 717 Who Is Angelina? (Young, Al), 1208 “Why I Like Country Music” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 Why We Can’t Wait (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 616 “Wife of His Youth, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 218 Wine in the Wilderness (Childress, Alice), 229 Womb of Space, The (Harris, Wilson), 494 Women of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 834 Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (Angelou, Maya), 44 Xenogenesis series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 172 Yearning (Hooks, Bell), 527 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed, Ishmael), 920 Yellow House on the Corner, The (Dove, Rita), 316 “Yet Do I Marvel” (Cullen, Countée), 272 Yin Yang (Walker, Joseph A.), 1086 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker, Alice), 1077 You Don’t Miss Your Water (Eady, Cornelius), 345
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 183 Zami (Lorde, Audre), 698 Zeely (Hamilton, Virginia), 469 Zooman and the Sign (Fuller, Charles), 402 ASIAN AMERICAN. See CHINESE AMERICAN, FILIPINO AMERICAN, JAPANESE AMERICAN, KOREAN AMERICAN, SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICAN, VIETNAMESE AMERICAN CARIBBEAN. See also CUBAN AMERICAN, DOMINICAN AMERICAN, PUERTO RICANS Annie John (Kincaid, Jamaica), 609 Arrivants, The (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 116 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid, Jamaica), 608 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid, Jamaica), 611 Banana Bottom (McKay, Claude), 709 Banjo (McKay, Claude), 708 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall, Paule), 759 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall, Paule), 762 Daughters (Marshall, Paule), 765 Fossil and Psyche (Harris, Wilson), 494 Home to Harlem (McKay, Claude), 707 Lucy (Kincaid, Jamaica), 610 Merle (Marshall, Paule), 765 Middle Passages (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 121 Mother Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 119 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall, Paule), 763 Reena, and Other Stories (Marshall, Paule), 764 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall, Paule), 760 Sun Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 120 Womb of Space, The (Harris, Wilson), 494
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American Ethnic Writers CHILEAN AMERICAN Eva Luna (Allende, Isabel), 24 House of the Spirits, The (Allende, Isabel), 22 Infinite Plan, The (Allende, Isabel), 25 Of Love and Shadows (Allende, Isabel), 23 CHINESE AMERICAN Bondage (Hwang, David Henry), 551 Bone (Ng, Fae Myenne), 841 Chickencoop Chinaman, The (Chin, Frank), 232 China Boy (Lee, Gus), 684 China Men (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 632 Dance and the Railroad, The (Hwang, David Henry), 548 Donald Duk (Chin, Frank), 234 Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu, Louis H.), 237 Empress Orchid (Min, Anchee), 787 Family Devotions (Hwang, David Henry), 550 Fifth Book of Peace, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 635 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong, Jade Snow), 1158 Fresh Girls, and Other Stories (Lau, Evelyn), 677 Hundred Secret Senses, The (Tan, Amy), 1030 In the Pond (Jin, Ha), 565 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Kitchen God’s Wife, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Love Wife, The (Jen, Gish), 557 M. Butterfly (Hwang, David Henry), 550 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen, Gish), 556 Picture Bride (Song, Cathy), 1015 Red Azalea (Min, Anchee), 786 Runaway (Lau, Evelyn), 676 Saving Fish from Drowning (Tan, Amy), 1030 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 633 Typical American (Jen, Gish), 555 Under the Red Flag (Jin, Ha), 564 Winged Seed, The (Lee, Li-Young), 687
Woman Warrior, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 631 Year of the Dragon, The (Chin, Frank), 233 CUBAN AMERICAN Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (Arenas, Reinaldo), 51 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes, Maria Irene), 400 Cutter, The (Suárez, Virgil), 1025 Dreaming in Cuban (García, Cristina), 426 Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos, Oscar), 506 Pentagonía, The (Arenas, Reinaldo), 52 Truth About Them, The (Yglesias, José), 1199 DOMINICAN AMERICAN How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez, Julia), 28 In the Name of Salomé (Alvarez, Julia), 33 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez, Julia), 29 ¡Yo! (Alvarez, Julia), 30 FILIPINO AMERICAN America Is in the Heart (Bulosan, Carlos), 163 Danger and Beauty (Hagedorn, Jessica), 457 Dangerous Music (Hagedorn, Jessica), 456 Gangster of Love, The (Hagedorn, Jessica), 458 State of War (Rosca, Ninotchka), 953 Twice Blessed (Rosca, Ninotchka), 954 Woman with Horns, and Other Stories (Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra), 112 JAPANESE AMERICAN Camp Notes, and Other Poems (Yamada, Mitsuye), 1184 1266
Titles by Ethnic Identity Cruelty (Ai), 2 Floating World, The (Kadohata, Cynthia), 592 Greed (Ai), 3 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata, Cynthia), 593 No-No Boy (Okada, John), 844 Obasan (Kogawa, Joy), 643 “Seventeen Syllables” (Yamamoto, Hisaye), 1187 Volcano (Hongo, Garrett Kaoru), 521 JEWISH Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow, Saul), 98 “Ajanta” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 966 All Rivers Run to the Sea (Wiesel, Elie), 1140 Angels in America (Kushner, Tony), 665 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (Richler, Mordecai), 934 Assistant, The (Malamud, Bernard), 752 Atlas of the Difficult World, An (Rich, Adrienne), 930 Before and After (Brown, Rosellen), 140 Beggar in Jerusalem, A (Wiesel, Elie), 1139 Call It Sleep (Roth, Henry), 957 Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, The (Lerner, Gerda), 691 “Crown of Feathers, A” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1011 Davita’s Harp (Potok, Chaim), 905 Death of a Salesman (Miller, Arthur), 777 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Paley, Grace), 864 “Eyes of Night-Time” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 967 “Father and Son” (Kunitz, Stanley), 660 Fixer, The (Malamud, Bernard), 753 Franchiser, The (Elkin, Stanley), 356 “Gimpel the Fool” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1012 Gone to Soldiers (Piercy, Marge), 889 Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (Roth, Philip), 962 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1094
Howl (Ginsberg, Allen), 439 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow, Saul), 100 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz, Delmore), 990 In the Palace of the Movie King (Calisher, Hortense), 181 Intercourse (Dworkin, Andrea), 340 Kaddish (Ginsberg, Allen), 441 Later the Same Day (Paley, Grace), 865 MacGuffin, The (Elkin, Stanley), 357 Mercy of a Rude Stream (Roth, Henry), 959 More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow, Saul), 101 My Name Is Asher Lev (Potok, Chaim), 904 Natural, The (Malamud, Bernard), 751 Night (Wiesel, Elie), 1138 Of Such Small Differences (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, The (Ozick, Cynthia), 859 Painted Bird, The (Kosinski, Jerzy), 654 Poet and Dancer (Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer), 561 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth, Philip), 963 Promised Land, The (Antin, Mary), 47 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan, Abraham), 177 Seize the Day (Bellow, Saul), 99 “Shawl, The” (Ozick, Cynthia), 860 Sisters Rosensweig, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1095 Son of a Smaller Hero (Richler, Mordecai), 933 Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy), 655 “Three Floors” (Kunitz, Stanley), 661 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein, Harvey), 392 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, Henry), 782 Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry), 783 KOREAN AMERICAN Picture Bride (Song, Cathy), 1015
1267
American Ethnic Writers LATIN AMERICAN. See CHILEAN AMERICAN, CUBAN AMERICAN, MEXICAN AMERICAN, PERUVIAN AMERICAN MEXICAN AMERICAN . . . and the earth did not part (Rivera, Tomás), 942 Barrio Boy (Galarza, Ernesto), 423 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (Cervantes, Lorna Dee), 202 Black Mesa Poems (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 60 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 36 Brown (Rodriguez, Richard), 950 City of Night (Rechy, John), 914 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez, Richard), 949 Delia’s Song (Corpi, Lucha), 257 Devil in Texas, The (Brito, Aristeo), 124 Face of an Angel (Chávez, Denise), 211 Faultline (Taylor, Sheila Ortiz), 1033 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 37 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros, Sandra), 240 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez, Richard), 948 Klail City (Hinojosa, Rolando), 518 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez, Denise), 211 Leaving Home (García, Lionel G.), 429 Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, The (Rechy, John), 916 Loose Woman (Cisneros, Sandra), 243 Macho! (Villaseñor, Victor), 1058 Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 59 Moths, and Other Stories, The (Viramontes, Helena María), 1061 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cisneros, Sandra), 241 New and Selected Poems (Soto, Gary), 1019 Plum Plum Pickers, The (Barrio, Raymond), 96 Pocho (Villarreal, José Antonio), 1054 “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” (Ríos, Alberto), 939
Rag Doll Plagues, The (Morales, Alejandro), 798 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor, Victor), 1059 So Far from God (Castillo, Ana), 198 Summer Life, A (Soto, Gary), 1018 This Day’s Death (Rechy, John), 915 Tortuga (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 38 Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes, Helena María), 1062 Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (Castillo, Ana), 199 Wedding, The (Ponce, Mary Helen), 900 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros, Sandra), 242 Working in the Dark (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 61 Zoot Suit (Valdez, Luis Miguel), 1050 NATIVE AMERICAN Almanac of the Dead (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1007 Ancient Child, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 794 Animal Dreams (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Another America (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Antelope Wife, The (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Baptism of Desire (Erdrich, Louise), 369 Beet Queen, The (Erdrich, Louise), 367 Bingo Palace, The (Erdrich, Louise), 370 Black Mesa Poems (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 60 Bone Game (Owens, Louis), 856 Broken Cord, The (Dorris, Michael), 305 By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker, Alice), 1081 Cloud Chamber (Dorris, Michael), 306 Color Purple, The (Walker, Alice), 1078 Cruelty (Ai), 2 Flight to Canada (Reed, Ishmael), 923 Fools Crow (Welch, James), 1099 Fossil and Psyche (Harris, Wilson), 494 Four Souls (Erdrich, Louise), 372 Free-Lance Pallbearers, The (Reed, Ishmael), 919 God Made Alaska for the Indians (Reed, Ishmael), 923
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Titles by Ethnic Identity Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (Walker, Alice), 1076 Grandmothers of the Light (Allen, Paula Gunn), 18 Greed (Ai), 3 Green Grass, Running Water (King, Thomas), 620 Heartsong of Charging Elk, The (Welch, James), 1100 Heirs of Columbus, The (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1068 High Tide in Tucson (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 Holding the Line (Kingsolver, Barbara), 623 Homeland, and Other Stories (Kingsolver, Barbara), 624 House Made of Dawn (Momaday, N. Scott), 793 In Mad Love and War (Harjo, Joy), 482 Indian Killer (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Interior Landscapes (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1067 Jailing of Cecelia Capture, The (Hale, Janet Campbell), 462 Japanese by Spring (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Last Days of Louisiana Red, The (Reed, Ishmael), 922 Life Is a Fatal Disease (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The (Alexie, Sherman), 10 Love Medicine (Erdrich, Louise), 366 Man Made of Words, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 795 Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 59 Meridian (Walker, Alice), 1074 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed, Ishmael), 921 New and Collected Poems (Reed, Ishmael), 925 Off the Reservation (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 Once: Poems (Walker, Alice), 1071 One Stick Song (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Pigs in Heaven (Kingsolver, Barbara), 626
Poisonwood Bible, The (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker, Alice), 1080 Reckless Eyeballing (Reed, Ishmael), 925 Reservation Blues (Alexie, Sherman), 11 Sacred Hoop, The (Allen, Paula Gunn), 16 Sharpest Sight, The (Owens, Louis), 856 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (Allen, Paula Gunn), 17 Storyteller (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1006 Surrounded, The (McNickle, D’Arcy), 726 Tales of Burning Love (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker, Alice), 1079 Ten Little Indians (Alexie, Sherman), 13 Terrible Threes, The (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Terrible Twos, The (Reed, Ishmael), 924 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker, Alice), 1072 Tracks (Erdrich, Louise), 368 “Where I Ought to Be” (Erdrich, Louise), 368 Wind from an Enemy Sky (McNickle, D’Arcy), 727 Woman Who Fell from the Sky, The (Harjo, Joy), 483 Womb of Space, The (Harris, Wilson), 494 Wordarrows (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1065 Working in the Dark (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 61 Working Men (Dorris, Michael), 306 Woven Stone (Ortiz, Simon J.), 848 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed, Ishmael), 920 Yellow Raft in Blue Water, A (Dorris, Michael), 304 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker, Alice), 1077 PERUVIAN AMERICAN Eva Luna (Allende, Isabel), 24 House of the Spirits, The (Allende, Isabel), 22
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American Ethnic Writers Infinite Plan, The (Allende, Isabel), 25 Of Love and Shadows (Allende, Isabel), 23 Teachings of Don Juan, The (Castaneda, Carlos), 194 PUERTO RICAN Boy Without a Flag, The (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 945 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 Chorus Line, A (Dante, Nicholas), 276 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas, Piri), 1037 El Bronx Remembered (Mohr, Nicholasa), 790 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré, Rosario), 389 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 263 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 971 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 261 Meaning of Consuelo, The (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 852 Mountain in the Sea, The (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Panoramas (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Puerto Rican in New York, A (Colón, Jesús), 255 Quintuplets (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 972 Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264
Rhythm, Content & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 Short Eyes (Piñero, Miguel), 896 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 851 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 260 “To Julia de Burgos” (Burgos, Julia de), 166 “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” (Espada, Martín), 376 Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICAN American Brat, An (Sidhwa, Bapsi), 1002 Coffin Tree, The (Law-Yone, Wendy), 680 Continents of Exile series (Mehta, Ved), 768 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 820 House of a Thousand Doors (Alexander, Meena), 6 Irrawaddy Tango (Law-Yone, Wendy), 681 “Management of Grief, The” (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818 Middleman, and Other Stories, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818 Namesake, The (Lahiri, Jhumpa), 668 SPANISH AMERICAN Mile Zero (Sanchez, Thomas), 984 VIETNAMESE AMERICAN When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip, Le Ly), 502
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Titles by Genre AUTOBIOGRAPHIES. See also BIOGRAPHIES, FAMILY HISTORIES, LETTERS, MEMOIRS All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou, Maya), 43 All Rivers Run to the Sea (Wiesel, Elie), 1140 Along This Way (Johnson, James Weldon), 578 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan, Carlos), 163 American Fugitive in Europe, The (Brown, William Wells), 150 American Hunger (Wright, Richard), 1180 Angela Davis (Davis, Angela), 279 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Malcolm X and Haley, Alex), 465, 756 Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 326 Barrio Boy (Galarza, Ernesto), 423 Big Sea, The (Hughes, Langston), 532 Black Boy (Wright, Richard), 1177 Black Ice (Cary, Lorene), 189 Black Notebooks, The (Derricotte, Toi), 296 Broken Cord, The (Dorris, Michael), 305 Choice of Weapons, A (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 869 Continents of Exile series (Mehta, Ved), 768 Crusade for Justice (Wells-Barnett, Ida B.), 1103 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas, Piri), 1037 Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Fifth Book of Peace, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 635 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong, Jade Snow), 1158 Himes, Chester, autobiographies of, 516
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou, Maya), 42 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes, Langston), 532 Interior Landscapes (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1067 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 311 Manchild in the Promised Land (Brown, Claude), 136 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass, Frederick), 311 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 309 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, The (Brown, William Wells), 149 Promised Land, The (Antin, Mary), 47 Puerto Rican in New York, A (Colón, Jesús), 255 Red Azalea (Min, Anchee), 786 Runaway (Lau, Evelyn), 676 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 851 Story of My Life and Work, The (Washington, Booker T.), 1089 Storyteller (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1006 Up from Slavery (Washington, Booker T.), 1091 Voices in the Mirror (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 871 BIOGRAPHIES. See also AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (Allen, Paula Gunn), 17 CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE Fallen Angels (Myers, Walter Dean), 830 Hoops (Myers, Walter Dean), 829 House of Dies Drear, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 470
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American Ethnic Writers M. C. Higgins the Great (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Monster (Myers, Walter Dean), 831 Planet of Junior Brown, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Zeely (Hamilton, Virginia), 469 DRAMA Amen Corner, The (Baldwin, James), 66 Angels in America (Kushner, Tony), 665 Baptism, The (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Bondage (Hwang, David Henry), 551 Boogie Woogie Landscapes (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Boy x Man (Bullins, Ed), 160 Bronx Is Next, The (Sanchez, Sonia), 976 Brownsville Raid, The (Fuller, Charles), 402 Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (Elder, Lonne, III), 350 Charades on East Fourth Street (Elder, Lonne, III), 353 Chickencoop Chinaman, The (Chin, Frank), 232 Chorus Line, A (Dante, Nicholas), 276 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes, Maria Irene), 400 Dance and the Railroad, The (Hwang, David Henry), 548 Death of a Salesman (Miller, Arthur), 777 Dialect Determinism (Bullins, Ed), 155 District Line (Walker, Joseph A.), 1087 Divine Comedy (Dodson, Owen), 301 Dutchman (Baraka, Amiri), 90 Family Devotions (Hwang, David Henry), 550 Fences (Wilson, August), 1150 for colored girls who have considered suicide (Shange, Ntozake), 994 From Okra to Greens (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy, Adrienne), 602 Garden of Time, The (Dodson, Owen), 301 Harangues, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1094 1272
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 875 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz, Delmore), 990 In the Blood (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876 Jitney (Wilson, August), 1155 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Wilson, August), 1152 King Hedley II (Wilson, August), 1155 Les Blancs (Hansberry, Lorraine), 478 M. Butterfly (Hwang, David Henry), 550 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson, August), 1150 Machado, Eduardo, plays of, 704 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 971 Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 605 Owl Answers, The (Kennedy, Adrienne), 603 Photograph, A (Shange, Ntozake), 995 Piano Lesson, The (Wilson, August), 1152 Quintuplets (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 972 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry, Lorraine), 474 Rat’s Mass, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 604 River Niger, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 Seven Guitars (Wilson, August), 1154 Shining Town, The (Dodson, Owen), 300 Short Eyes (Piñero, Miguel), 896 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry, Lorraine), 475 Sister Son/ji (Sanchez, Sonia), 977 Sisters Rosensweig, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1095 Soldier’s Play, A (Fuller, Charles), 404 Spell #7 (Shange, Ntozake), 998 Street Sounds (Bullins, Ed), 157 Taking of Miss Janie, The (Bullins, Ed), 159 To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (Hansberry, Lorraine), 477 Topdog/Underdog (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 877 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein, Harvey), 392 Trouble in Mind (Childress, Alice), 228
Titles by Genre Twentieth Century Cycle, The (Bullins, Ed), 156 Two Trains Running (Wilson, August), 1153 Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us? (Sanchez, Sonia), 978 Venus (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876 We (Fuller, Charles), 405 Wedding Band (Childress, Alice), 229 Wine in the Wilderness (Childress, Alice), 229 Year of the Dragon, The (Chin, Frank), 233 Yin Yang (Walker, Joseph A.), 1086 Zooman and the Sign (Fuller, Charles), 402 Zoot Suit (Valdez, Luis Miguel), 1050
High Tide in Tucson (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 Intercourse (Dworkin, Andrea), 340 Loose Canons (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Man Made of Words, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 795 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin, James), 68 Off the Reservation (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 Price of the Ticket, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Race Matters (West, Cornel), 1109 Racism 101 (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Sacred Hoop, The (Allen, Paula Gunn), 16 Signifying Monkey, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 433 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 851 Soul on Ice (Cleaver, Eldridge), 246 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Technical Difficulties (Jordan, June), 588 Testament of Hope, A (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 617 “Where I Ought to Be” (Erdrich, Louise), 368 Womb of Space, The (Harris, Wilson), 494 Working in the Dark (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 61 Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (Angelou, Maya), 44
EDITED TEXT Great Slave Narratives (Bontemps, Arna), 108 ESSAYS. See also HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM Blue Devils of Nada, The (Murray, Albert), 824 Blues People (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Content of Our Character, The (Steele, Shelby), 1022 Daggers and Javelins (Baraka, Amiri), 92 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez, Richard), 949 Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (Bambara, Toni Cade), 83 Democracy Matters (West, Cornel), 1110 Evidence of Things Not Seen, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Fossil and Psyche (Harris, Wilson), 494 Future of the Race, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 436 Gemini (Giovanni, Nikki), 445 God Made Alaska for the Indians (Reed, Ishmael), 923 Going to the Territory (Ellison, Ralph), 362 Grandmothers of the Light (Allen, Paula Gunn), 18
ETHNOGRAPHY Teachings of Don Juan, The (Castaneda, Carlos), 194 FAMILY HISTORIES. See also AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Rain of Gold (Villaseñor, Victor), 1059 Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Haley, Alex), 465
1273
American Ethnic Writers HISTORY. See also ETHNOGRAPHY Black Reconstruction (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 325 Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, The (Lerner, Gerda), 691 Holding the Line (Kingsolver, Barbara), 623
Kabnis (Toomer, Jean), 1044 Seize the Day (Bellow, Saul), 99
LETTERS. See also AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, MEMOIRS Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Baraka, Amiri), 93 Letter from Birmingham City Jail (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 615 MEMOIRS. See also AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Cancer Journals, The (Lorde, Audre), 697 China Men (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 632 Colored People (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Fatheralong (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Future of the Race, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 436 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez, Richard), 948 Motion of Light in Water, The (Delany, Samuel R.), 289 Night (Wiesel, Elie), 1138 Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (Moss, Thylias), 816 Volcano (Hongo, Garrett Kaoru), 521 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip, Le Ly), 502 Winged Seed, The (Lee, Li-Young), 687 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 631 NOVELLAS. See also NOVELS, SHORT FICTION Cane (Toomer, Jean), 1040 Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (Roth, Philip), 962 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros, Sandra), 240
NOVELS. See also NOVELLAS Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow, Saul), 98 Almanac of the Dead (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1007 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan, Carlos), 163 American Brat, An (Sidhwa, Bapsi), 1002 American Desert (Everett, Percival L.), 380 Ancient Child, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 794 . . . and the earth did not part (Rivera, Tomás), 942 Angry Ones, The (Williams, John A.), 1144 Animal Dreams (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Annie John (Kincaid, Jamaica), 609 Another Country (Baldwin, James), 70 Antelope Wife, The (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (Richler, Mordecai), 934 Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (Arenas, Reinaldo), 51 Assistant, The (Malamud, Bernard), 752 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, The (Johnson, James Weldon), 577 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Gaines, Ernest J.), 416 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid, Jamaica), 611 Bailey’s Café (Naylor, Gloria), 837 Banana Bottom (McKay, Claude), 709 Banjo (McKay, Claude), 708 Barrio Boy (Galarza, Ernesto), 423 Beet Queen, The (Erdrich, Louise), 367 Before and After (Brown, Rosellen), 140 Beggar in Jerusalem, A (Wiesel, Elie), 1139 Beloved (Morrison, Toni), 807 Betsey Brown (Shange, Ntozake), 999 Bingo Palace, The (Erdrich, Louise), 370 Black No More (Schuyler, George S.), 987 Black Thunder (Bontemps, Arna), 107
1274
Titles by Genre Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 36 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison, Toni), 801 Bone (Ng, Fae Myenne), 841 Bone Game (Owens, Louis), 856 Brothers and Keepers (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 Brothers and Sisters (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 184 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall, Paule), 759 By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker, Alice), 1081 Call It Sleep (Roth, Henry), 957 Captain Blackman (Williams, John A.), 1146 Catherine Carmier (Gaines, Ernest J.), 408 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1132 China Boy (Lee, Gus), 684 Chinaberry Tree, The (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 385 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall, Paule), 762 City of Night (Rechy, John), 914 !Click Song (Williams, John A.), 1146 Cloud Chamber (Dorris, Michael), 306 Coffin Tree, The (Law-Yone, Wendy), 680 Color Purple, The (Walker, Alice), 1078 Comedy, American Style (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 386 Conjure-Man Dies, The (Fisher, Rudolph), 396 Cutter, The (Suárez, Virgil), 1025 Dahomean, The (Yerby, Frank), 1195 Daughters (Marshall, Paule), 765 Davita’s Harp (Potok, Chaim), 905 Day Late and a Dollar Short, A (McMillan, Terry), 723 Delia’s Song (Corpi, Lucha), 257 dem (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Devil in Texas, The (Brito, Aristeo), 124 Dhalgren (Delany, Samuel R.), 284 Different Drummer, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 596 Disappearing Acts (McMillan, Terry), 721 Donald Duk (Chin, Frank), 234 1275
Down These Mean Streets (Thomas, Piri), 1037 Dreamer (Johnson, Charles), 574 Dreaming in Cuban (García, Cristina), 426 Drop of Patience, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Drums at Dusk (Bontemps, Arna), 107 Dunfords Travels Everywheres (Kelley, William Melvin), 599 Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu, Louis H.), 237 Echo of Lions (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 208 Empress Orchid (Min, Anchee), 787 Eva Luna (Allende, Isabel), 24 Eva’s Man (Jones, Gayl), 582 Face of an Angel (Chávez, Denise), 211 Faith and the Good Thing (Johnson, Charles), 569 Faultline (Taylor, Sheila Ortiz), 1033 Fixer, The (Malamud, Bernard), 753 Flight to Canada (Reed, Ishmael), 923 Floating World, The (Kadohata, Cynthia), 592 Fools Crow (Welch, James), 1099 Four Souls (Erdrich, Louise), 372 Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 Foxes of Harrow, The (Yerby, Frank), 1190 Fragments of the Ark (Meriwether, Louise), 774 Franchiser, The (Elkin, Stanley), 356 Free-Lance Pallbearers, The (Reed, Ishmael), 919 Gangster of Love, The (Hagedorn, Jessica), 458 Gathering of Old Men, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 418 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin, James), 69 Glance Away, A (Wideman, John Edgar), 1124 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin, James), 65 God Sends Sunday (Bontemps, Arna), 105 Gone to Soldiers (Piercy, Marge), 889 Green Grass, Running Water (King, Thomas), 620
American Ethnic Writers Griffin’s Way (Yerby, Frank), 1192 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 37 Heartsong of Charging Elk, The (Welch, James), 1100 Heirs of Columbus, The (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1068 High Cotton (Pinckney, Darryl), 892 Himes, Chester, novels of, 513 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 820 Home to Harlem (McKay, Claude), 707 Homewood Trilogy, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 House Behind the Cedars, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 221 House Made of Dawn (Momaday, N. Scott), 793 House of the Spirits, The (Allende, Isabel), 22 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré, Rosario), 389 How Stella Got Her Groove Back (McMillan, Terry), 722 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez, Julia), 28 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow, Saul), 100 Hundred Secret Senses, The (Tan, Amy), 1030 Hurry Home (Wideman, John Edgar), 1125 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 In My Father’s House (Gaines, Ernest J.), 417 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata, Cynthia), 593 In the Name of Salomé (Alvarez, Julia), 33 In the Palace of the Movie King (Calisher, Hortense), 181 In the Pond (Jin, Ha), 565 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez, Julia), 29 Indian Killer (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Infinite Plan, The (Allende, Isabel), 25 Interruption of Everything, The (McMillan, Terry), 723 Invisible Man (Ellison, Ralph), 360 Irrawaddy Tango (Law-Yone, Wendy), 681 1276
Jacob’s Ladder (Williams, John A.), 1147 Jailing of Cecelia Capture, The (Hale, Janet Campbell), 462 Japanese by Spring (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Jazz (Morrison, Toni), 808 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston, Zora Neale), 542 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Juneteenth (Ellison, Ralph), 363 Kindred (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 Kitchen God’s Wife, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Klail City (Hinojosa, Rolando), 518 Last Days of Louisiana Red, The (Reed, Ishmael), 922 Lawd Today (Wright, Richard), 1179 Leaving Home (García, Lionel G.), 429 Lesson Before Dying, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 419 Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, The (Rechy, John), 916 Linden Hills (Naylor, Gloria), 835 Little Yellow Dog, A (Mosley, Walter), 813 Love Medicine (Erdrich, Louise), 366 Love Wife, The (Jen, Gish), 557 Lucy (Kincaid, Jamaica), 610 MacGuffin, The (Elkin, Stanley), 357 Macho! (Villaseñor, Victor), 1058 Mama (McMillan, Terry), 720 Mama Day (Naylor, Gloria), 836 Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 Man Who Cried I Am, The (Williams, John A.), 1145 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 223 Meaning of Consuelo, The (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 852 Men of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 838 Mercy of a Rude Stream (Roth, Henry), 959 Meridian (Walker, Alice), 1074 Middle Passage (Johnson, Charles), 573 Mile Zero (Sanchez, Thomas), 984 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen, Gish), 556
Titles by Genre More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow, Saul), 101 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston, Zora Neale), 544 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos, Oscar), 506 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed, Ishmael), 921 My Name Is Asher Lev (Potok, Chaim), 904 Namesake, The (Lahiri, Jhumpa), 668 Native Son (Wright, Richard), 1172 Natural, The (Malamud, Bernard), 751 Night Song (Williams, John A.), 1144 No-No Boy (Okada, John), 844 Obasan (Kogawa, Joy), 643 Odor of Sanctity, An (Yerby, Frank), 1194 Of Love and Dust (Gaines, Ernest J.), 409 Of Love and Shadows (Allende, Isabel), 23 Of Such Small Differences (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 Outsider, The (Wright, Richard), 1178 Oxherding Tale (Johnson, Charles), 570 Painted Bird, The (Kosinski, Jerzy), 654 Parable of the Sower (Butler, Octavia E.), 174 Paradise (Morrison, Toni), 808 Passing (Larsen, Nella), 672 Patternist series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 Pentagonía, The (Arenas, Reinaldo), 52 Philadelphia Fire (Wideman, John Edgar), 1130 Pigs in Heaven (Kingsolver, Barbara), 626 Plum Bun (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 384 Plum Plum Pickers, The (Barrio, Raymond), 96 Pocho (Villarreal, José Antonio), 1054 Poet and Dancer (Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer), 561 Poisonwood Bible, The (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth, Philip), 963 Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker, Alice), 1080 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall, Paule), 763 1277
President’s Daughter, The (ChaseRiboud, Barbara), 209 Price of a Child, The (Cary, Lorene), 190 Quicksand (Larsen, Nella), 671 Rag Doll Plagues, The (Morales, Alejandro), 798 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor, Victor), 1059 Reckless Eyeballing (Reed, Ishmael), 925 Reservation Blues (Alexie, Sherman), 11 Reuben (Wideman, John Edgar), 1128 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan, Abraham), 177 Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Haley, Alex), 465 Sally Hemings (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 206 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara, Toni Cade), 81 Saving Fish from Drowning (Tan, Amy), 1030 Seduction by Light (Young, Al), 1212 Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Seven League Boots, The (Murray, Albert), 825 Sharpest Sight, The (Owens, Louis), 856 Singing in the Comeback Choir (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 185 Sissie (Williams, John A.), 1145 Sitting Pretty (Young, Al), 1209 Snakes (Young, Al), 1206 So Far from God (Castillo, Ana), 198 Son of a Smaller Hero (Richler, Mordecai), 933 Song of Solomon (Morrison, Toni), 804 Spyglass Tree, The (Murray, Albert), 824 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany, Samuel R.), 288 State of War (Rosca, Ninotchka), 953 Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy), 655 Street, The (Petry, Ann), 880 Sula (Morrison, Toni), 802 Surrounded, The (McNickle, D’Arcy), 726 Tales of Burning Love (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Tales of Nevèrÿon (Delany, Samuel R.), 287
American Ethnic Writers Tar Baby (Morrison, Toni), 805 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker, Alice), 1079 Terrible Threes, The (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Terrible Twos, The (Reed, Ishmael), 924 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston, Zora Neale), 543 There Is Confusion (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 383 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker, Alice), 1072 This Day’s Death (Rechy, John), 915 Through the Ivory Gate (Dove, Rita), 315 Tortuga (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 38 Tracks (Erdrich, Louise), 368 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 633 Triton (Delany, Samuel R.), 286 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, Henry), 782 Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry), 783 Truth About Them, The (Yglesias, José), 1199 Twice Blessed (Rosca, Ninotchka), 954 Two Cities (Wideman, John Edgar), 1133 Typical American (Jen, Gish), 555 Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes, Helena María), 1062 Valide (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 207 Waiting to Exhale (McMillan, Terry), 721 Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (Castillo, Ana), 199 Wedding, The (Ponce, Mary Helen), 900 Who Is Angelina? (Young, Al), 1208 Wind from an Enemy Sky (McNickle, D’Arcy), 727 Women of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 834 Xenogenesis series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 172 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed, Ishmael), 920 Yellow Raft in Blue Water, A (Dorris, Michael), 304 ¡Yo! (Alvarez, Julia), 30
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 183 Zami (Lorde, Audre), 698 PHILOSOPHY. See also SOCIAL CRITICISM American Evasion of Philosophy, The (West, Cornel), 1108 PLAYS. See DRAMA POETRY “Ajanta” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 966 Another America (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Arrivants, The (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 116 Ask Your Mama (Hughes, Langston), 535 Atlas of the Difficult World, An (Rich, Adrienne), 930 Autobiography of a Jukebox, The (Eady, Cornelius), 346 Baptism of Desire (Erdrich, Louise), 369 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (Cervantes, Lorna Dee), 202 Between Our Selves (Lorde, Audre), 695 Black Christ, The (Cullen, Countée), 269 Black Feeling, Black Talk (Giovanni, Nikki), 444 Black Mesa Poems (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 60 Black Pride (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 737 “Blackstone Rangers, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 132 “Blue Meridian” (Toomer, Jean), 1045 Blues Don’t Change, The (Young, Al), 1211 Blues: For All the Changes (Giovanni, Nikki), 449 Boleros (Wright, Jay), 1167 Book of Life (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Brutal Imagination (Eady, Cornelius), 347 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 Cables to Rage (Lorde, Audre), 694
1278
Titles by Genre Camp Notes, and Other Poems (Yamada, Mitsuye), 1184 Cane (Toomer, Jean), 1040 Captivity (Derricotte, Toi), 294 Cities Burning (Randall, Dudley), 910 Coal (Lorde, Audre), 696 Copacetic (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 647 Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (Giovanni, Nikki), 447 Cruelty (Ai), 2 Dancing (Young, Al), 1202 Danger and Beauty (Hagedorn, Jessica), 457 Dangerous Music (Hagedorn, Jessica), 456 Dear John, Dear Coltrane (Harper, Michael S.), 486 Debridement (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 648 Dimensions of History (Wright, Jay), 1164 Does Your House Have Lions? (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 Don’t Cry, Scream (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 739 Double Invention of Komo, The (Wright, Jay), 1166 Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Elaine’s Book (Wright, Jay), 1167 Elegies, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1117 Empress of the Death House, The (Derricotte, Toi), 293 Explications/Interpretations (Wright, Jay), 1164 “Eyes of Night-Time” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 967 “Father and Son” (Kunitz, Stanley), 660 First Cities, The (Lorde, Audre), 694 From a Land Where Other People Live (Lorde, Audre), 695 Gathering of My Name, The (Eady, Cornelius), 345 Good Times (Clifton, Lucille), 249 Good Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (Walker, Alice), 1076 Grace Notes (Dove, Rita), 314 1279
Greed (Ai), 3 “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” (Knight, Etheridge), 639 Hayden, Robert, poetry of, 498 Healing Song for the Inner Ear (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Heartlove (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 743 “Heritage” (Cullen, Countée), 273 History Is Your Own Heartbeat (Harper, Michael S.), 487 Homecoming Singer, The (Wright, Jay), 1161 Homegirls and Handgrenades (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 House of a Thousand Doors (Alexander, Meena), 6 Howl (Ginsberg, Allen), 439 I Shall Not Be Moved (Angelou, Maya), 44 I’ve Been a Woman (Sanchez, Sonia), 979 “Idea of Ancestry, The” (Knight, Etheridge), 640 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz, Delmore), 990 In Mad Love and War (Harjo, Joy), 482 Kaddish (Ginsberg, Allen), 441 Kartunes (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Kissing God Goodbye (Jordan, June), 589 “Last Ride of Wild Bill, The” (Brown, Sterling A.), 145 Life Is a Fatal Disease (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 263 Loose Woman (Cisneros, Sandra), 243 Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 329 Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 334 McKay, Claude, poetry of, 710 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 261
American Ethnic Writers Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 59 Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, The (Lorde, Audre), 700 Middle Passages (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 121 “Mother, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 129 Mother Love (Dove, Rita), 316 Mother Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 119 Mountain in the Sea, The (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Museum (Dove, Rita), 318 My House (Giovanni, Nikki), 446 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cisneros, Sandra), 241 Naming Our Destiny (Jordan, June), 588 Natural Birth (Derricotte, Toi), 294 Neon Vernacular (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 New and Collected Poems (Reed, Ishmael), 925 New and Selected Poems (Soto, Gary), 1019 Nightmare Begins Responsibility (Harper, Michael S.), 489 On These I Stand (Cullen, Countée), 271 Once: Poems (Walker, Alice), 1071 One Stick Song (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Ordinary Woman, An (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Panoramas (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Panther and the Lash, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 Picture Bride (Song, Cathy), 1015 Pleasure Dome (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Poem Counterpoem (Randall, Dudley), 909 Poems of Fancy and Memory (Wheatley, Phillis), 1120 Political Poems, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1114 “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” (Ríos, Alberto), 939 Pyramid of Bone (Moss, Thylias), 815 Quilting (Clifton, Lucille), 252 1280
Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 “Remembering Nat Turner” (Brown, Sterling A.), 146 Rhythm, Content & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 Rich, Adrienne, poetry of, 929 Saint Peter Relates an Incident (Johnson, James Weldon), 579 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Hughes, Langston), 534 Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (Baraka, Amiri), 91 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 851 Slim Greer Poems (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 260 Some Changes (Jordan, June), 586 Song: I Want a Witness (Harper, Michael S.), 488 Song Turning Back into Itself, The (Young, Al), 1207 Songlines in Michaeltree (Harper, Michael S.), 490 Soothsayers and Omens (Wright, Jay), 1162 Sound of Dreams Remembered, The (Young, Al), 1213 Southern Road (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Storyteller (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1006 Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 128 Sun Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 120 Talking Dirty to the Gods (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Tender (Derricotte, Toi), 295 Terrible Stories, The (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Thieves of Paradise (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 Think Black (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 736 Thomas and Beulah (Dove, Rita), 319 “Three Floors” (Kunitz, Stanley), 661 “To Julia de Burgos” (Burgos, Julia de), 166 “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” (Espada, Martín), 376 Transfigurations (Wright, Jay), 1168
Titles by Genre Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262 Two-Headed Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Undersong (Lorde, Audre), 698 Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Warpland Poems, The (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 131 Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (Castillo, Ana), 199 We a BaddDDD People (Sanchez, Sonia), 977 “We Real Cool” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 130 We Walk the Way of the New World (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 740 Woman Who Fell from the Sky, The (Harjo, Joy), 483 Working in the Dark (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 61 Woven Stone (Ortiz, Simon J.), 848 Yellow House on the Corner, The (Dove, Rita), 316 “Yet Do I Marvel” (Cullen, Countée), 272 You Don’t Miss Your Water (Eady, Cornelius), 345 SHORT FICTION. See also NOVELLAS “Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere, An” (Major, Clarence), 746 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid, Jamaica), 608 “Blood-Burning Moon” (Toomer, Jean), 1042 “Bloodline” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 Bloodline (Gaines, Ernest J.), 411 “Bones of Louella Brown, The” (Petry, Ann), 884 Boy Without a Flag, The (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 945 Brown (Rodriguez, Richard), 950 Cane (Toomer, Jean), 1040 “Cane, Section 2” (Toomer, Jean), 1043 “Cicely’s Dream” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 “Conjurer’s Revenge, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 217 1281
“Crown of Feathers, A” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1011 Damned If I Do (Everett, Percival L.), 381 Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (Bambara, Toni Cade), 83 El Bronx Remembered (Mohr, Nicholasa), 790 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Paley, Grace), 864 “Esther” (Toomer, Jean), 1041 Fever (Wideman, John Edgar), 1129 Fifth Book of Peace, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 635 “Fire and Cloud” (Wright, Richard), 1171 “Flying Home” (Ellison, Ralph), 362 Folks from Dixie (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 332 Fresh Girls, and Other Stories (Lau, Evelyn), 677 Fun and Games (Major, Clarence), 746 “Gimpel the Fool” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1012 “Going to Meet the Man” (Baldwin, James), 73 “Gold Coast” (McPherson, James Alan), 730 Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (Roth, Philip), 962 “Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 215 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara, Toni Cade), 79 Grandmothers of the Light (Allen, Paula Gunn), 18 Heart of Happy Hollow, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Himes, Chester, short stories of, 510 Homeland, and Other Stories (Kingsolver, Barbara), 624 Homewood Trilogy, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 “In Darkness and Confusion” (Petry, Ann), 882 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz, Delmore), 990 “John Redding Goes to Sea” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 539
American Ethnic Writers “Just Like a Tree” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 415 Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, The (McKnight, Reginald), 715 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez, Denise), 211 Later the Same Day (Paley, Grace), 865 “Like a Winding Sheet” (Petry, Ann), 881 “Loaf of Bread, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 733 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The (Alexie, Sherman), 10 “Long Day in November, A” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 412 “Man Child, The” (Baldwin, James), 71 “Management of Grief, The” (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818 “Medley” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 80 Merle (Marshall, Paule), 765 Middleman, and Other Stories, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818 “Migraine Workers, The” (Petry, Ann), 885 Miss Muriel, and Other Stories (Petry, Ann), 881 “Mother Africa” (Petry, Ann), 885 Moths, and Other Stories, The (Viramontes, Helena María), 1061 “My Mother and Mitch” (Major, Clarence), 747 “Necessary Knocking on the Door, The” (Petry, Ann), 883 “New Mirror, The” (Petry, Ann), 882 Old South, The (Bontemps, Arna), 109 Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, The (Ozick, Cynthia), 859 “Passing of Grandison, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 219 “Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 216 “Quitting Smoking” (McKnight, Reginald), 716 “Raymond’s Run” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 82 Reena, and Other Stories (Marshall, Paule), 764 Return of Simple, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 1282
“Scat” (Major, Clarence), 748 “Screamers, The” (Baraka, Amiri), 91 “Seventeen Syllables” (Yamamoto, Hisaye), 1187 “Shawl, The” (Ozick, Cynthia), 860 “Sky Is Gray, The” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 413 “Solo Song: For Doc, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin, James), 75 Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Johnson, Charles), 572 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall, Paule), 760 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (Allen, Paula Gunn), 17 “Spunk” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 540 Stories of John Edgar Wideman, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Storyteller (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1006 Strength of Gideon, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 336 Summer Life, A (Soto, Gary), 1018 “Summer Tragedy, A” (Bontemps, Arna), 105 “Sweat” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 541 Ten Little Indians (Alexie, Sherman), 13 “Ten Pecan Pies” (Major, Clarence), 748 “Three Men” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” (McKnight, Reginald), 714 “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 Under the Red Flag (Jin, Ha), 564 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes, Langston), 533 “White Boys, The” (McKnight, Reginald), 717 “Why I Like Country Music” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 “Wife of His Youth, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 218 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros, Sandra), 242 Woman with Horns, and Other Stories (Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra), 112 Wordarrows (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1065 Working Men (Dorris, Michael), 306 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker, Alice), 1077
Titles by Genre SOCIAL CRITICISM. See also SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY Ain’t I a Woman (Hooks, Bell), 525 Erasing Racism (Asante, Molefi K.), 56 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin, James), 71 Holding the Line (Kingsolver, Barbara), 623 Letter from Birmingham City Jail (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 615 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Stride Toward Freedom (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 614 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany, Samuel R.), 290 Why We Can’t Wait (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 616 Yearning (Hooks, Bell), 527
SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. See also SOCIAL CRITICISM Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 SPEECHES. See also ESSAYS, SOCIAL CRITICISM Loose Canons (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Prophesy Deliverance! (West, Cornel), 1107 Testament of Hope, A (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 617 YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE. See CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE
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Title Index Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow, Saul), 98 Ain’t I a Woman (Hooks, Bell), 525 “Ajanta” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 966 All for Love. See Continents of Exile series All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou, Maya), 43 All Rivers Run to the Sea (Wiesel, Elie), 1140 Almanac of the Dead (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1007 Along This Way (Johnson, James Weldon), 578 Amen Corner, The (Baldwin, James), 66 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan, Carlos), 163 American Brat, An (Sidhwa, Bapsi), 1002 American Desert (Everett, Percival L.), 380 American Evasion of Philosophy, The (West, Cornel), 1108 American Fugitive in Europe, The (Brown, William Wells), 150 American Hunger (Wright, Richard), 1180 Ancient Child, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 794 . . . and the earth did not part (Rivera, Tomás), 942 Angela Davis (Davis, Angela), 279 Angels in America (Kushner, Tony), 665 Angry Ones, The (Williams, John A.), 1144 Animal Dreams (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Annie John (Kincaid, Jamaica), 609 Another America (Kingsolver, Barbara), 625 Another Country (Baldwin, James), 70 Antelope Wife, The (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The (Richler, Mordecai), 934 “Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere, An” (Major, Clarence), 746 Arrivants, The (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 116 Arturo, the Most Brilliant Star (Arenas, Reinaldo), 51
Asalto, El. See Pentagonía, The Ask Your Mama (Hughes, Langston), 535 Assault, The. See Pentagonía, The Assistant, The (Malamud, Bernard), 752 At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid, Jamaica), 608 Atlas of the Difficult World, An (Rich, Adrienne), 930 Autobiography of a Jukebox, The (Eady, Cornelius), 346 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, The (Johnson, James Weldon), 577 Autobiography of Malcolm X, The (Malcolm X and Haley, Alex), 465, 756 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Gaines, Ernest J.), 416 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid, Jamaica), 611 Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 326 Bailey’s Café (Naylor, Gloria), 837 Banana Bottom (McKay, Claude), 709 Banjo (McKay, Claude), 708 Baptism, The (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Baptism of Desire (Erdrich, Louise), 369 Barrio Boy (Galarza, Ernesto), 423 Beast in View. See “Ajanta” Beet Queen, The (Erdrich, Louise), 367 Before and After (Brown, Rosellen), 140 Beggar in Jerusalem, A (Wiesel, Elie), 1139 Beloved (Morrison, Toni), 807 “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” (Cervantes, Lorna Dee), 202 Betsey Brown (Shange, Ntozake), 999 Between Our Selves (Lorde, Audre), 695 Big Sea, The (Hughes, Langston), 532 Bingo Palace, The (Erdrich, Louise), 370 Black Boy (Wright, Richard), 1177 Black Christ, The (Cullen, Countée), 269 Black Feeling, Black Talk (Giovanni, Nikki), 444 Black Ice (Cary, Lorene), 189
1284
Title Index Black Mesa Poems (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 60 Black No More (Schuyler, George S.), 987 Black Notebooks, The (Derricotte, Toi), 296 Black Pride (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 737 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 325 Black Thunder (Bontemps, Arna), 107 Blacks. See “Blackstone Rangers, The” “Blackstone Rangers, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 132 Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 36 “Blood-Burning Moon” (Toomer, Jean), 1042 “Bloodline” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 Bloodline (Gaines, Ernest J.), 411. See also “Bloodline”; “Just Like a Tree”; “Long Day in November, A”; “Sky Is Gray, The”; “Three Men” Blue Devils of Nada, The (Murray, Albert), 824 “Blue Meridian” (Toomer, Jean), 1045 Blues Don’t Change, The (Young, Al), 1211 Blues: For All the Changes (Giovanni, Nikki), 449 Blues People (Baraka, Amiri), 88 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison, Toni), 801 Boleros (Wright, Jay), 1167 Bondage (Hwang, David Henry), 551 Bone (Ng, Fae Myenne), 841 Bone Game (Owens, Louis), 856 “Bones of Louella Brown, The” (Petry, Ann), 884 Boogie Woogie Landscapes (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Book of Life (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Boy Without a Flag, The (Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr.), 945 Boy x Man (Bullins, Ed), 160 Broken Cord, The (Dorris, Michael), 305 Bronx Is Next, The (Sanchez, Sonia), 976 Brothers and Keepers (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 Brothers and Sisters (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 184 Brown (Rodriguez, Richard), 950 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall, Paule), 759 Brownsville Raid, The (Fuller, Charles), 402
Brutal Imagination (Eady, Cornelius), 347 By Lingual Wholes (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262. See also “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” By the Light of My Father’s Smile (Walker, Alice), 1081 Cables to Rage (Lorde, Audre), 694 Call It Sleep (Roth, Henry), 957 Calling the Wind. See “Scat” Camp Notes, and Other Poems (Yamada, Mitsuye), 1184 Cancer Journals, The (Lorde, Audre), 697 Cane (Toomer, Jean), 1040. See also “Blood-Burning Moon”; “Cane, Section 2”; “Esther”; Kabnis “Cane, Section 2” (Toomer, Jean), 1043 Captain Blackman (Williams, John A.), 1146 Captivity (Derricotte, Toi), 294 Casa de los espíritus, La. See House of the Spirits, The Catherine Carmier (Gaines, Ernest J.), 408 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1132 Celestino antes del alba. See Pentagonía, The Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (Elder, Lonne, III), 350 Charades on East Fourth Street (Elder, Lonne, III), 353 Chickencoop Chinaman, The (Chin, Frank), 232 China Boy (Lee, Gus), 684 China Men (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 632 Chinaberry Tree, The (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 385 Choice of Weapons, A (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 869 Chorus Line, A (Dante, Nicholas), 276 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall, Paule), 762 “Cicely’s Dream” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 Cities Burning (Randall, Dudley), 910 City of Night (Rechy, John), 914 !Click Song (Williams, John A.), 1146 Cloud Chamber (Dorris, Michael), 306 Coal (Lorde, Audre), 696
1285
American Ethnic Writers Coffin Tree, The (Law-Yone, Wendy), 680 Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, The. See “Remembering Nat Turner” Color del verano, El. See Pentagonía, The Color of Summer, The. See Pentagonía, The Color Purple, The (Walker, Alice), 1078 Colored People (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Comedy, American Style (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 386 Conduct of Life, The (Fornes, Maria Irene), 400 Conjure-Man Dies, The (Fisher, Rudolph), 396 Conjure Woman, The. See “Conjurer’s Revenge, The”; “Goophered Grapevine, The”; “Po’ Sandy” “Conjurer’s Revenge, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 217 Content of Our Character, The (Steele, Shelby), 1022 Continents of Exile series (Mehta, Ved), 768 Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Baraka, Amiri), 93 Copacetic (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 647 Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (Giovanni, Nikki), 447 Creation of a Feminist Consciousness, The (Lerner, Gerda), 691 “Crown of Feathers, A” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1011 Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories, A. See “Crown of Feathers, A” Cruelty (Ai), 2 Crusade for Justice (Wells-Barnett, Ida B.), 1103 Cutter, The (Suárez, Virgil), 1025 Daddyji. See Continents of Exile series Daggers and Javelins (Baraka, Amiri), 92 Dahomean, The (Yerby, Frank), 1195 Damballah. See Homewood Trilogy, The Damned If I Do (Everett, Percival L.), 381 Dance and the Railroad, The (Hwang, David Henry), 548 Dancing (Young, Al), 1202 Danger and Beauty (Hagedorn, Jessica), 457 Dangerous Music (Hagedorn, Jessica), 456 Dark Harbor. See Continents of Exile series
Daughters (Marshall, Paule), 765 Davita’s Harp (Potok, Chaim), 905 Day Late and a Dollar Short, A (McMillan, Terry), 723 Days of Obligation (Rodriguez, Richard), 949 De amor y de sombra. See Of Love and Shadows Dear John, Dear Coltrane (Harper, Michael S.), 486 Death of a Salesman (Miller, Arthur), 777 Debridement (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions (Bambara, Toni Cade), 83 Delia’s Song (Corpi, Lucha), 257 dem (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Democracy Matters (West, Cornel), 1110 Detective Novels (Himes, Chester), 513 Devil in Texas, The (Brito, Aristeo), 124 Dhalgren (Delany, Samuel R.), 284 Diablo en Texas, El. See Devil in Texas, The Dialect Determinism (Bullins, Ed), 155 Dien Cai Dau (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 648 Different Drummer, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 596 Dimensions of History (Wright, Jay), 1164 Disappearing Acts (McMillan, Terry), 721 District Line (Walker, Joseph A.), 1087 Divine Comedy (Dodson, Owen), 301 Diving Rock on the Hudson, A. See Mercy of a Rude Stream Does Your House Have Lions? (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 Donald Duk (Chin, Frank), 234 Don’t Cry, Scream (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 739 Double Invention of Komo, The (Wright, Jay), 1166 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas, Piri), 1037 Dreamer (Johnson, Charles), 574 Dreaming in Cuban (García, Cristina), 426 Drop of Patience, A (Kelley, William Melvin), 598 Drums at Dusk (Bontemps, Arna), 107 Dunfords Travels Everywheres (Kelley, William Melvin), 599 Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Dutchman (Baraka, Amiri), 90
1286
Title Index Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu, Louis H.), 237 Echo of Lions (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 208 El Bronx Remembered (Mohr, Nicholasa), 790 Elaine’s Book (Wright, Jay), 1167 Elbow Room. See “Loaf of Bread, A”; “Why I Like Country Music” Elegies, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1117 Emplumada. See “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” Empress of the Death House, The (Derricotte, Toi), 293 Empress Orchid (Min, Anchee), 787 Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Paley, Grace), 864 Erasing Racism (Asante, Molefi K.), 56 “Esther” (Toomer, Jean), 1041 Eva Luna (Allende, Isabel), 24 Eva’s Man (Jones, Gayl), 582 Evidence of Things Not Seen, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Explications/Interpretations (Wright, Jay), 1164 “Eyes of Night-Time” (Rukeyser, Muriel), 967 Face of an Angel (Chávez, Denise), 211 Faith and the Good Thing (Johnson, Charles), 569 Fallen Angels (Myers, Walter Dean), 830 Family Devotions (Hwang, David Henry), 550 Farewell to the Sea. See Pentagonía, The “Father and Son” (Kunitz, Stanley), 660 Fatheralong (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Faultline (Taylor, Sheila Ortiz), 1033 Fences (Wilson, August), 1150 Fever (Wideman, John Edgar), 1129 Fifth Book of Peace, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 635 Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong, Jade Snow), 1158 Fire!. See “Sweat” “Fire and Cloud” (Wright, Richard), 1171 Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin, James), 71
First Cities, The (Lorde, Audre), 694 Fixer, The (Malamud, Bernard), 753 Flight to Canada (Reed, Ishmael), 923 Floating World, The (Kadohata, Cynthia), 592 “Flying Home” (Ellison, Ralph), 362 Folks from Dixie (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 332 Fools Crow (Welch, James), 1099 for colored girls who have considered suicide (Shange, Ntozake), 994 Fossil and Psyche (Harris, Wilson), 494 Four Souls (Erdrich, Louise), 372 Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 Foxes of Harrow, The (Yerby, Frank), 1190 Fragments of the Ark (Meriwether, Louise), 774 Franchiser, The (Elkin, Stanley), 356 Free-Lance Pallbearers, The (Reed, Ishmael), 919 Fresh Girls, and Other Stories (Lau, Evelyn), 677 From a Land Where Other People Live (Lorde, Audre), 695 From Bondage. See Mercy of a Rude Stream From Okra to Greens (Shange, Ntozake), 997 Fun and Games (Major, Clarence), 746. See also “My Mother and Mitch”; “Ten Pecan Pies” Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy, Adrienne), 602 Future of the Race, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 436 Gangster of Love, The (Hagedorn, Jessica), 458 Garden of Time, The (Dodson, Owen), 301 Gathering of My Name, The (Eady, Cornelius), 345 Gathering of Old Men, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 418 Gemini (Giovanni, Nikki), 445 “Gimpel the Fool” (Singer, Isaac Bashevis), 1012 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin, James), 69 Glance Away, A (Wideman, John Edgar), 1124
1287
American Ethnic Writers Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin, James), 65 God Made Alaska for the Indians (Reed, Ishmael), 923 God Sends Sunday (Bontemps, Arna), 105 “Going to Meet the Man” (Baldwin, James), 73 Going to Meet the Man. See “Going to Meet the Man”; “Man Child, The”; “Sonny’s Blues” Going to the Territory (Ellison, Ralph), 362 “Gold Coast” (McPherson, James Alan), 730 Gone to Soldiers (Piercy, Marge), 889 Good Times (Clifton, Lucille), 249 Good Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (Roth, Philip), 962 Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (Walker, Alice), 1076 “Goophered Grapevine, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 215 Gorilla, My Love (Bambara, Toni Cade), 79 Grace Notes (Dove, Rita), 314 Grandmothers of the Light (Allen, Paula Gunn), 18 Great Slave Narratives (Bontemps, Arna), 108 Greed (Ai), 3 Green Grass, Running Water (King, Thomas), 620 Green Wave, The. See “Eyes of Night-Time” Griffin’s Way (Yerby, Frank), 1192 Guaracha del Macho Camacho, La. See Macho Camacho’s Beat Harangues, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” (Knight, Etheridge), 639 Healing Song for the Inner Ear (Harper, Michael S.), 489 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 37 Heart of Happy Hollow, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Heartlove (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 743 Heartsong of Charging Elk, The (Welch, James), 1100 Heidi Chronicles, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1094
Heirs of Columbus, The (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1068 “Heritage” (Cullen, Countée), 273 Hiding Place. See Homewood Trilogy, The High Cotton (Pinckney, Darryl), 892 High Tide in Tucson (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 History Is Your Own Heartbeat (Harper, Michael S.), 487 Holder of the World, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 820 Holding the Line (Kingsolver, Barbara), 623 Home to Harlem (McKay, Claude), 707 Homecoming Singer, The (Wright, Jay), 1161 Homegirls and Handgrenades (Sanchez, Sonia), 980 Homeland, and Other Stories (Kingsolver, Barbara), 624 Homewood Trilogy, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1127 Hoops (Myers, Walter Dean), 829 House Behind the Cedars, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 221 House Made of Dawn (Momaday, N. Scott), 793 House of a Thousand Doors (Alexander, Meena), 6 House of Dies Drear, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 470 House of the Spirits, The (Allende, Isabel), 22 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros, Sandra), 240 House on the Lagoon, The (Ferré, Rosario), 389 How Stella Got Her Groove Back (McMillan, Terry), 722 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez, Julia), 28 Howl (Ginsberg, Allen), 439 Hue and Cry. See “Gold Coast”; “Solo Song: For Doc, A” Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow, Saul), 100 Hundred Secret Senses, The (Tan, Amy), 1030 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez, Richard), 948 Hurry Home (Wideman, John Edgar), 1125
1288
Title Index I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou, Maya), 42 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 I Shall Not Be Moved (Angelou, Maya), 44 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes, Langston), 532 “Idea of Ancestry, The” (Knight, Etheridge), 640 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 875 “In Darkness and Confusion” (Petry, Ann), 882 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz, Delmore), 990 In Mad Love and War (Harjo, Joy), 482 In My Father’s House (Gaines, Ernest J.), 417 In the Blood (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata, Cynthia), 593 In the Name of Salomé (Alvarez, Julia), 33 In the Palace of the Movie King (Calisher, Hortense), 181 In the Pond (Jin, Ha), 565 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez, Julia), 29 Indian Killer (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Infinite Plan, The (Allende, Isabel), 25 Intercourse (Dworkin, Andrea), 340 Interior Landscapes (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1067 Interruption of Everything, The (McMillan, Terry), 723 Invisible Man (Ellison, Ralph), 360 Irrawaddy Tango (Law-Yone, Wendy), 681 I’ve Been a Woman (Sanchez, Sonia), 979 Jacob’s Ladder (Williams, John A.), 1147 Jailing of Cecelia Capture, The (Hale, Janet Campbell), 462 Japanese by Spring (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Jazz (Morrison, Toni), 808 Jitney (Wilson, August), 1155 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Wilson, August), 1152 “John Redding Goes to Sea” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 539
Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston, Zora Neale), 542 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Juneteenth (Ellison, Ralph), 363 “Just like a Tree” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 415 Kabnis (Toomer, Jean), 1044 Kaddish (Ginsberg, Allen), 441 Kartunes (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 742 Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, The (McKnight, Reginald), 715 Kindred (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 King Hedley II (Wilson, August), 1155 Kissing God Goodbye (Jordan, June), 589 Kitchen God’s Wife, The (Tan, Amy), 1028 Klail City (Hinojosa, Rolando), 518 Last Days of Louisiana Red, The (Reed, Ishmael), 922 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez, Denise), 211 “Last Ride of Wild Bill, The” (Brown, Sterling A.), 145 Later the Same Day (Paley, Grace), 865 Lawd Today (Wright, Richard), 1179 Leaving Home (García, Lionel G.), 429 Ledge Between the Streams, The. See Continents of Exile series Les Blancs (Hansberry, Lorraine), 478 Lesson Before Dying, A (Gaines, Ernest J.), 419 Letter from Birmingham City Jail (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 615 Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, The (Rechy, John), 916 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 311 Life Is a Fatal Disease (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 “Like a Winding Sheet” (Petry, Ann), 881 Linden Hills (Naylor, Gloria), 835 “Listening to the Music of Arsenio Rodriguez Is Moving Closer to Knowledge” (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 263 Little Yellow Dog, A (Mosley, Walter), 813
1289
American Ethnic Writers “Loaf of Bread, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 733 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The (Alexie, Sherman), 10 “Long Day in November, A” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 412 Loose Canons (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 434 Loose Woman (Cisneros, Sandra), 243 Love Medicine (Erdrich, Louise), 366 Love Wife, The (Jen, Gish), 557 Lucy (Kincaid, Jamaica), 610 Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 329 Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 337 Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 334 M. Butterfly (Hwang, David Henry), 550 M. C. Higgins the Great (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson, August), 1150 MacGuffin, The (Elkin, Stanley), 357 Macho! (Villaseñor, Victor), 1058 Macho Camacho’s Beat (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 971 Mainland (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 261 Mama (McMillan, Terry), 720 Mama Day (Naylor, Gloria), 836 Mamaji. See Continents of Exile series Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos, Oscar), 505 “Man Child, The” (Baldwin, James), 71 Man Made of Words, The (Momaday, N. Scott), 795 Man Who Cried I Am, The (Williams, John A.), 1145 “Man Who Lived Underground, The” (Wright, Richard), 1175 “Management of Grief, The” (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818. See also Middleman, and Other Stories, The Manchild in the Promised Land (Brown, Claude), 136 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 223 Martín; &, Meditations on the South Valley (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 59
Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, The (Lorde, Audre), 700 Meaning of Consuelo, The (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 852 “Medley” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 80 Men of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 838 Mendiant de Jérusalem, Le. See Beggar in Jerusalem, A Mercy of a Rude Stream (Roth, Henry), 959 Meridian (Walker, Alice), 1074 Merle (Marshall, Paule), 765 Middle Passage (Johnson, Charles), 573 Middle Passages (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 121 Middleman, and Other Stories, The (Mukherjee, Bharati), 818 “Migraine Workers, The” (Petry, Ann), 885 Mile Zero (Sanchez, Thomas), 984 Millennium Approaches. See Angels in America Miss Muriel, and Other Stories (Petry, Ann), 881. See also “Bones of Louella Brown, The”; “In Darkness and Confusion”; “Like a Winding Sheet”; “Migraine Workers, The”; “Mother Africa”; “Necessary Knocking on the Door, The”; “New Mirror, The” Mona in the Promised Land (Jen, Gish), 556 Monster (Myers, Walter Dean), 831 More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow, Saul), 101 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston, Zora Neale), 544 “Mother, The” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 129 “Mother Africa” (Petry, Ann), 885 Mother Love (Dove, Rita), 316 Mother Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 119 Moths, and Other Stories, The (Viramontes, Helena María), 1061 Motion of Light in Water, The (Delany, Samuel R.), 289 Mountain in the Sea, The (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Moustapha’s Eclipse. See “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 605 Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Hijuelos, Oscar), 506
1290
Title Index Ordinary Woman, An (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Otra vez el mar. See Pentagonía, The Outsider, The (Wright, Richard), 1178 Owl Answers, The (Kennedy, Adrienne), 603 Oxherding Tale (Johnson, Charles), 570
Mumbo Jumbo (Reed, Ishmael), 921 Museum (Dove, Rita), 318 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass, Frederick), 311 My House (Giovanni, Nikki), 446 “My Mother and Mitch” (Major, Clarence), 747 My Name Is Asher Lev (Potok, Chaim), 904 My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cisneros, Sandra), 241 Namesake, The (Lahiri, Jhumpa), 668 Naming Our Destiny (Jordan, June), 588 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass, Frederick), 309 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, The (Brown, William Wells), 149 Native Son (Wright, Richard), 1172 Natural, The (Malamud, Bernard), 751 Natural Birth (Derricotte, Toi), 294 “Necessary Knocking on the Door, The” (Petry, Ann), 883 Neon Vernacular (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 New and Collected Poems (Reed, Ishmael), 925 New and Selected Poems (Soto, Gary), 1019 “New Mirror, The” (Petry, Ann), 882 Night (Wiesel, Elie), 1138 Night Song (Williams, John A.), 1144 Nightmare Begins Responsibility (Harper, Michael S.), 489 No-No Boy (Okada, John), 844 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin, James), 68 Nuit, La. See Night Obasan (Kogawa, Joy), 643 Odor of Sanctity, An (Yerby, Frank), 1194 Of Love and Dust (Gaines, Ernest J.), 409 Of Love and Shadows (Allende, Isabel), 23 Of Such Small Differences (Greenberg, Joanne), 453 Off the Reservation (Allen, Paula Gunn), 19 Old South, The (Bontemps, Arna), 109 On These I Stand (Cullen, Countée), 271. See also “Yet Do I Marvel” Once: Poems (Walker, Alice), 1071 One Stick Song (Alexie, Sherman), 12 Opportunity. See “Spunk”; “Summer Tragedy, A”
Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories, The (Ozick, Cynthia), 859 Painted Bird, The (Kosinski, Jerzy), 654 Palace of the White Skunks, The. See Pentagonía, The Palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, El. See Pentagonía, The Panoramas (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 265 Panther and the Lash, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 Parable of the Sower (Butler, Octavia E.), 174 Paradise (Morrison, Toni), 808 Passing (Larsen, Nella), 672 “Passing of Grandison, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 219 Passport to War. See “Father and Son” Patternist series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 170 Pentagonía, The (Arenas, Reinaldo), 52 Perestroika. See Angels in America Philadelphia Fire (Wideman, John Edgar), 1130 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Photograph, A (Shange, Ntozake), 995 Piano Lesson, The (Wilson, August), 1152 Picture Bride (Song, Cathy), 1015 Pigs in Heaven (Kingsolver, Barbara), 626 Plan infinito, El. See Infinite Plan, The Planet of Junior Brown, The (Hamilton, Virginia), 471 Pleasure Dome (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Plum Bun (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 384 Plum Plum Pickers, The (Barrio, Raymond), 96 “Po’ Sandy” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 216 Pocho (Villarreal, José Antonio), 1054 Poem Counterpoem (Randall, Dudley), 909 Poema en veinte surcos. See “To Julia de Burgos”
1291
American Ethnic Writers Poems from Prison. See “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane”; “Idea of Ancestry, The” Poems of Fancy and Memory (Wheatley, Phillis), 1120 Poet and Dancer (Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer), 561 Poisonwood Bible, The (Kingsolver, Barbara), 627 Political Poems, The (Wheatley, Phillis), 1114 Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth, Philip), 963 Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker, Alice), 1080 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall, Paule), 763 President’s Daughter, The (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 209 Price of a Child, The (Cary, Lorene), 190 Price of the Ticket, The (Baldwin, James), 76 Promised Land, The (Antin, Mary), 47 Prophesy Deliverance! (West, Cornel), 1107 Puerto Rican in New York, A (Colón, Jesús), 255 “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” (Ríos, Alberto), 939 Pyramid of Bone (Moss, Thylias), 815 Quicksand (Larsen, Nella), 671 Quilting (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Quintuplets (Sánchez, Luis Rafael), 972 “Quitting Smoking” (McKnight, Reginald), 716 Race Matters (West, Cornel), 1109 Racism 101 (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Rag Doll Plagues, The (Morales, Alejandro), 798 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor, Victor), 1059 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry, Lorraine), 474 Rat’s Mass, A (Kennedy, Adrienne), 604 “Raymond’s Run” (Bambara, Toni Cade), 82 Reckless Eyeballing (Reed, Ishmael), 925 Red Azalea (Min, Anchee), 786 Red Beans (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264
Red Letters, The. See Continents of Exile series Reena, and Other Stories (Marshall, Paule), 764 Remembering Mr. Shawn’s “New Yorker.” See Continents of Exile series “Remembering Nat Turner” (Brown, Sterling A.), 146 Requiem for Harlem. See Mercy of a Rude Stream Reservation Blues (Alexie, Sherman), 11 Return of Simple, The (Hughes, Langston), 536 Reuben (Wideman, John Edgar), 1128 Rhythm, Content & Flavor (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 264 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan, Abraham), 177 River Niger, The (Walker, Joseph A.), 1085 Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Haley, Alex), 465 Runaway (Lau, Evelyn), 676 Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (Giovanni, Nikki), 448 Sacred Hoop, The (Allen, Paula Gunn), 16 Saint Peter Relates an Incident (Johnson, James Weldon), 579 Sally Hemings (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 206 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara, Toni Cade), 81 Saving Fish from Drowning (Tan, Amy), 1030 “Scat” (Major, Clarence), 748 “Screamers, The” (Baraka, Amiri), 91 Sea Birds Are Still Alive, The. See “Medley” Seduction by Light (Young, Al), 1212 Seize the Day (Bellow, Saul), 99 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Hughes, Langston), 534 Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (Baraka, Amiri), 91 Sent for You Yesterday. See Homewood Trilogy, The Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston, Zora Neale), 545 Seven Guitars (Wilson, August), 1154 Seven League Boots, The (Murray, Albert), 825
1292
Title Index “Seventeen Syllables” (Yamamoto, Hisaye), 1187 Sharpest Sight, The (Owens, Louis), 856 “Shawl, The” (Ozick, Cynthia), 860 Shining Town, The (Dodson, Owen), 300 Short Eyes (Piñero, Miguel), 896 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The (Hansberry, Lorraine), 475 Signifying Monkey, The (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.), 433 Silent Dancing (Ortiz Cofer, Judith), 851 Singing from the Well. See Pentagonía, The Singing in the Comeback Choir (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 185 Sissie (Williams, John A.), 1145 Sister Son/ji (Sanchez, Sonia), 977 Sisters Rosensweig, The (Wasserstein, Wendy), 1095 Sitting Pretty (Young, Al), 1209 “Sky Is Gray, The” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 413 Slim Greer Poems (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Snakes (Young, Al), 1206 Snaps (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 260 So Far from God (Castillo, Ana), 198 Soldier’s Play, A (Fuller, Charles), 404 “Solo Song: For Doc, A” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 Some Changes (Jordan, June), 586 Son of a Smaller Hero (Richler, Mordecai), 933 Song: I Want a Witness (Harper, Michael S.), 488 Song of Solomon (Morrison, Toni), 804 Song Turning Back into Itself, The (Young, Al), 1207 Songlines in Michaeltree (Harper, Michael S.), 490 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin, James), 75 Soothsayers and Omens (Wright, Jay), 1162 Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Johnson, Charles), 572 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall, Paule), 760 Soul on Ice (Cleaver, Eldridge), 246 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 324 Sound of Dreams Remembered, The (Young, Al), 1213
Sound-Shadows of the New World. See Continents of Exile series Southern Road (Brown, Sterling A.), 143 Spell #7 (Shange, Ntozake), 998 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (Allen, Paula Gunn), 17 “Spunk” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 540 Spyglass Tree, The (Murray, Albert), 824 Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, A. See Mercy of a Rude Stream Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany, Samuel R.), 288 State of War (Rosca, Ninotchka), 953 Statements. See “Area in the Cerebral Hemisphere, An” Steps (Kosinski, Jerzy), 655 Stolen Light, The. See Continents of Exile series Stories of John Edgar Wideman, The (Wideman, John Edgar), 1131 Story of My Life and Work, The (Washington, Booker T.), 1089 Storyteller (Silko, Leslie Marmon), 1006 Street, The (Petry, Ann), 880 Street in Bronzeville, A (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 128 Street Sounds (Bullins, Ed), 157 Strength of Gideon, The (Dunbar, Paul Laurence), 336 Stride Toward Freedom (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 614 Stylus. See “John Redding Goes to Sea” Sula (Morrison, Toni), 802 Summer Life, A (Soto, Gary), 1018 “Summer Tragedy, A” (Bontemps, Arna), 105 Sun Poem (Brathwaite, Edward Kamau), 120 Surrounded, The (McNickle, D’Arcy), 726 “Sweat” (Hurston, Zora Neale), 541 Taking of Miss Janie, The (Bullins, Ed), 159 Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (Moss, Thylias), 816 Tales. See “Screamers, The” Tales of Burning Love (Erdrich, Louise), 371 Tales of Nevèrÿon (Delany, Samuel R.), 287 Talking Dirty to the Gods (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 650 Tar Baby (Morrison, Toni), 805
1293
American Ethnic Writers Teachings of Don Juan, The (Castaneda, Carlos), 194 Technical Difficulties (Jordan, June), 588 Temple of My Familiar, The (Walker, Alice), 1079 Ten Little Indians (Alexie, Sherman), 13 “Ten Pecan Pies” (Major, Clarence), 748 Tender (Derricotte, Toi), 295 Terrible Stories, The (Clifton, Lucille), 252 Terrible Threes, The (Reed, Ishmael), 926 Terrible Twos, The (Reed, Ishmael), 924 Testament of Hope, A (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 617 Testing-Tree, The. See “Three Floors” Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston, Zora Neale), 543 There Is Confusion (Fauset, Jessie Redmon), 383 Thieves of Paradise (Komunyakaa, Yusef), 649 Think Black (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 736 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (Walker, Alice), 1072 This Day’s Death (Rechy, John), 915 Thomas and Beulah (Dove, Rita), 319 “Three Floors” (Kunitz, Stanley), 661 “Three Men” (Gaines, Ernest J.), 414 Through the Ivory Gate (Dove, Rita), 315 Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Delany, Samuel R.), 290 To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (Hansberry, Lorraine), 477 “To Julia de Burgos” (Burgos, Julia de), 166 “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” (Espada, Martín), 376 Topdog/Underdog (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 877 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein, Harvey), 392 Tortuga (Anaya, Rudolfo A.), 38 Tous les fleuves vont à la mer. See All Rivers Run to the Sea Tracks (Erdrich, Louise), 368 Transfigurations (Wright, Jay), 1168 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 633 Triton (Delany, Samuel R.), 286 Tropic of Cancer (Miller, Henry), 782 Tropic of Capricorn (Miller, Henry), 783 Tropicalization (Cruz, Victor Hernández), 262
Trouble in Mind (Childress, Alice), 228 Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction. See “Tony Went to the Bodega but He Didn’t Buy Anything” Truth About Them, The (Yglesias, José), 1199 Twentieth Century Cycle, The (Bullins, Ed), 156 Twice Blessed (Rosca, Ninotchka), 954 Two Cities (Wideman, John Edgar), 1133 Two-Headed Woman (Clifton, Lucille), 251 Two Trains Running (Wilson, August), 1153 Typical American (Jen, Gish), 555 Uh, Huh; But How Do It Free Us? (Sanchez, Sonia), 978 Un di Velt hot geshvign. See Night “Uncle Moustapha’s Eclipse” (McKnight, Reginald), 714 “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 220 Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes, Helena María), 1062 Under the Red Flag (Jin, Ha), 564 Undersong (Lorde, Audre), 698 Up at Oxford. See Continents of Exile series Up from Slavery (Washington, Booker T.), 1091 Valide (Chase-Riboud, Barbara), 207 Vedi. See Continents of Exile series Venus (Parks, Suzan-Lori), 876 Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Eady, Cornelius), 344 Voices in the Mirror (Parks, Gordon, Sr.), 871 Volcano (Hongo, Garrett Kaoru), 521 Vospominaniia. See Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Waiting to Exhale (McMillan, Terry), 721 Warpland Poems, The (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 131 Watercolor Women/Opaque Men (Castillo, Ana), 199 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes, Langston), 533 We (Fuller, Charles), 405 We a BaddDDD People (Sanchez, Sonia), 977
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Title Index “We Real Cool” (Brooks, Gwendolyn), 130 We Walk the Way of the New World (Madhubuti, Haki R.), 740 Wedding, The (Ponce, Mary Helen), 900 Wedding Band (Childress, Alice), 229 When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Hayslip, Le Ly), 502 “Where I Ought to Be” (Erdrich, Louise), 368 Whispering to Fool the Wind. See “Purpose of Altar Boys, The” White Boys. See “White Boys, The” “White Boys, The” (McKnight, Reginald), 717 Who Is Angelina? (Young, Al), 1208 “Why I Like Country Music” (McPherson, James Alan), 732 Why We Can’t Wait (King, Martin Luther, Jr.), 616 “Wife of His Youth, The” (Chesnutt, Charles Waddell), 218 Wife of His Youth, The. See “Cicely’s Dream”; “Passing of Grandison, The”; “Uncle Wellington’s Wives”; “Wife of His Youth, The” Wind from an Enemy Sky (McNickle, D’Arcy), 727 Wine in the Wilderness (Childress, Alice), 229 Winged Seed, The (Lee, Li-Young), 687 Woman Hollering Creek (Cisneros, Sandra), 242 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston, Maxine Hong), 631 Woman Who Fell from the Sky, The (Harjo, Joy), 483 Woman with Horns, and Other Stories (Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra), 112
Womb of Space, The (Harris, Wilson), 494 Women of Brewster Place, The (Naylor, Gloria), 834 Wordarrows (Vizenor, Gerald R.), 1065 Working in the Dark (Baca, Jimmy Santiago), 61 Working Men (Dorris, Michael), 306 Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (Angelou, Maya), 44 Woven Stone (Ortiz, Simon J.), 848 Xenogenesis series, the (Butler, Octavia E.), 172 . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra/and the earth did not part. See . . . and the earth did not part Year of the Dragon, The (Chin, Frank), 233 Yearning (Hooks, Bell), 527 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed, Ishmael), 920 Yellow House on the Corner, The (Dove, Rita), 316 Yellow Raft in Blue Water, A (Dorris, Michael), 304 “Yet Do I Marvel” (Cullen, Countée), 272 Yin Yang (Walker, Joseph A.), 1086 ¡Yo! (Alvarez, Julia), 30 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (Walker, Alice), 1077 You Don’t Miss Your Water (Eady, Cornelius), 345 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (Campbell, Bebe Moore), 183 Zami (Lorde, Audre), 698 Zeely (Hamilton, Virginia), 469 Zooman and the Sign (Fuller, Charles), 402 Zoot Suit (Valdez, Luis Miguel), 1050
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