Tag: literature

Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada is many things: a slave narrative of escape (though it includes buses and planes), a satire, a comedy.

This is what the publisher says:

Brilliantly portrayed by a novelist with “a talent for hyperbole and downright yarning unequaled since Mark Twain”, (Saturday Review), this slave’s-eye view of the Civil War exposes America’s racial foibles of the past and present with uninhibited humor and panache.

Mixing history, fantasy, political reality, and comedy, Ishmael Reed spins the tale of three runaway slaves and the master determined to catch them. His on-target parody of fugitive slave narratives and other literary forms includes a hero who boards a jet bound for Canada; Abraham Lincoln waltzing through slave quarters to the tune of “Hello, Dolly”; and a plantation mistress entranced by TV’s “Beecher Hour”. Filled with insights into the political consciences (or lack thereof) of both blacks and whites, Flight to Canada confirms Reed’s status as “a great writer” (James Baldwin).

“A demonized Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with comic rage”. — The New York Times Book Review

“Wears the mantle of Baldwin and Ellison like a high-powered Flip Wilson in drag…a terrifically funny book”. — Baltimore Sun

Here’s an excerpt from an interview:

RM: Addison Gayle, Jr., speaks critically about your perception of the relations between black men and women when he reviews “Flight to Canada” in relation to “Eva’s Man” by Gayl Jones. He writes: “Reed, of course, is an anomaly, and if much of his fiction, “Louisiana Red” and “Flight to Canada”, proves anything, it is that black women have no monopoly on demons, real or imaginative. These two novels demonstrate that, like the ‘buyer’ in “Caracas,” like blacks in general, male and female, the web of folklore which has circumscribed much of our relations with each other from the days of slavery to the present time, have been impervious to the best efforts of conscientious men and women to tear it down. Thus, Reed’s central argument, as developed in both “Louisiana Red” and “Flight to Canada,” may be summed up thusly: since the days of slavery, collusion between black women and white men has existed in America. The major objective of this collusion has been the castrating of black males and the thwarting of manful rebellion.”

IR: Well, I think that anybody who reads that ought to go and read his autobiography, “The Wayward Child,” and pick up on some of his notions on black women and white women. As I said in a letter to “Nation” magazine recently, women in general make out better in my books than black men do in the works of black women and white women, feminist writers. And I gave the example of Gayl Jones’s “Eva’s Man”–not to mention “Corregidora”–in which black men are portrayed as brutes, apes, but also Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” in which the character Jude is burned alive by his mother, something I had heard of in black culture. And Alice Walker’s fascination with incest–which can always get you over, if you have the hint of incest. I mean, it got Ellison over; there are a lot of male critics who are interested in that, who are interested in black male sexual behavior–they’re fascinated. There was recently a review on Louis Harlan’s book on Booker T. Washington, by Malcolm Boyd–he used to be a hippie preacher or something; I don’t know what he’s doing now. And he spent a whole lot of the book–he spent the whole article on this story about Booker T. Washington being caned for knocking on a white woman’s door or something like that. Of all the things Booker T. Washington had done! This man was just fascinated with this. He spent three or four paragraphs talking just about that! So there’s an obvious fascination with incest and rape, and Alice Walker picks up on things like this. I tried to get my letter published in “Nation” magazine. I finally had to go to the American Civil Liberties Union here in northern California to get my reply published to what I considered to be a hatchet job done by Stanley Crouch. He had all the facts about my career and publishing activities wrong. They see Al Young and myself as leaders of some multicultural revolt threatening the things they’re doing–against their interests. But in “Nation” I wrote that the same charges that Alice Walker makes against black men were made about the Jews in Germany. I guess we don’t have a large organization like the Anti-Defamation League or a large pressure group or lobby–

RM: And remember it is a black criticizing another black, so others may not be interested.

IR: Well, when Hannah Arendt criticized the Jewish people for collaborating with the Nazis, saying that American Jews could have saved two-thirds of the victims if they had cared about them, there was a controversy. But when you look at the Pulitzer Prize committee, there’s a president from Dow Jones on it, and mostly white males–and on the American Book Awards, which we began out here, there’s still a dispute; we began the American Book Awards out here, and our American Book Awards are really more representative of what’s happening in American literature than theirs–but knowing these things, you can see the motivation behind some people making the black male into a pariah. I think that Addison Gayle hasn’t read my books carefully because he doesn’t consider that there are all kinds of women in my books; and although I may exaggerate, I mean use hyperbole, those people are real, they exist. And if you go out to the grass roots where I stay, I think those people will tell you that those characters exist.

The full interview is here.

Here’s a list of Reed links from the University at Buffalo.

Reed’s Poets.org page.

Here’s a link to Reed’s online literary magazine Konch.

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
Sonia Sanchez
“Black Girl in the Ring” by Nola Hopkinson
June Jordan

Here’s a poem from the poet, essayist, author and educator June Jordan, who lived from 1936 to 2002 and was influential in the Black Arts movement and beyond. The poem is taken from the Web site Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American themes:

I Must Become A Menace to My Enemies

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of

The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

I will no longer lightly walk behind

a one of you who fear me:

Be afraid.

I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

and this is dedicated in particular

to those who hear my footsteps

or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

cart

then turn around

see me

and hurry on

away from this impressive terror I must be:

I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

surrounded by my comrades singing

terrible revenge in merciless

accelerating

rhythms

But

I have watched a blind man studying his face.

I have set the table in the evening and sat down

to eat the news.

Regularly

I have gone to sleep.

There is no one to forgive me.

The dead do not give a damn.

I live like a lover

who drops her dime into the phone

just as the subway shakes into the station

wasting her message

cancelling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late

and always after the fact that could save or

condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

II

How many of my brothers and my sisters

will they kill

before I teach myself

retaliation?

Shall we pick a number?

South Africa for instance:

do we agree that more than ten thousand

in less than a year but that less than

five thousand slaughtered in more than six

months will

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

III

And if I

if I ever let you slide

who should be extirpated from my universe

who should be cauterized from earth

completely

(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the

terrorist degree)

then let my body fail my soul

in its bedevilled lecheries

And if I

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I o-

bey in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.

Source: Trouble the Water (325-327)

Click here to hear her read the poem: A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters, from 1992.

Her official Web site is here.

Here is a biography from the Voices from the Gap Web site.

From an obituary in the Guardian:

June Jordan, who has died aged 65, after suffering from breast cancer for several years, defied all pigeonholes. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, cultural and political activist – she was all these things, by turn and simultaneously, but above all, she was an inspirational teacher, through words and actions, and a supremely principled person.

Among African-American writers, she was undoubtedly one of the most widely published, the author of well over two dozen books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, drama and children’s writing. She emerged onto the political and literary scene in the late 1960s, when the movements demanding attention were for civil rights and women’s liberation, and anti-war.

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She engaged with all of these and more, for her battles were for freedom, whether that involved planning a new architecture for Harlem with her mentor Buckminster Fuller, or speaking out on the Palestinian cause. She spoke out against, or did something about, oppression wherever it was to be found.

It was as a political essayist that Jordan stood head and shoulders above most of her contemporaries. Her collection Civil Wars (1981) was the first such work to be published by a black woman, dealing with battles both external and internal. In subsequent volumes, including On Call (1985) and Technical Difficulties (1992), she wrote about South Africa, Nicaragua and Lebanon, as well as myriad aspects of race and class in the US. She championed the use of black English in the education system 30 years before the emergence of the debate about “Ebonics” (a term she hated).

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
Sonia Sanchez
“Black Girl in the Ring” by Nola Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson’s “Brown Girl in the Ring” was first published in 1998. Here’s a summary of the story written by Eleanor at Flights of Fantasy bookstore in Loudonville:

Brown Girl in the Ring was Nalo Hopkinson’s first novel, and still my favourite. It’s set in a future Canada where the cities have decayed into chaos, and only the granddaughter of a voudou priestess can save her family and maybe the entire city. Hopkinson’s latest novel, The New Moon’s Arms, is just about to come out.

Hopkinson defines herself as a writer of speculative fiction, saying:

I’ve lived in Toronto, Canada since 1977, but spent most of my first 16 years in the Caribbean, where I was born. My writing reflects my hybrid reality.

I write speculative fiction. For anyone who doesn’t know the term, it’s fiction in which impossible things happen. It includes magic realism, fantasy, science fiction and horror.

Of note is an essay on Hopkinson’s Web site that responds to the question: “Why don’t people of color write speculative fiction?” (see the connection being made to “The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois“>W.E.B. DuBois by the use of the term “double-consciousness”)

We do, but it’s unlikely that you’ll find it on the sf shelves in your bookstores. Novels such as Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day or Devorah Major’s An Open Weave end up on the shelves for black authors, not in the sf section.

Although magic realist writing contains fantastical elements, many do not think of it when they think of speculative fiction, and it’s easier to find magic realism by authors of colour than it is to find “hard” science fiction or genre fantasy. For ideas on why that may be so, read Uppinder Mehan’s essay “The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories” in Foundation, Fall 1998.

Mehan’s essay is specifically about science fiction by writers from India, but a lot of what he says is applicable generally to sf by authors of colour, or authors from non-Western cultures. For instance:

“A significant factor is the lack of cultural intimacy between reader and writer. The reader of sf from another culture has to thoroughly understand the culture of the story because he/she now has to understand not only the culture but also the sometimes subtle deformations introduced into the culture through extrapolation.”

I run into that problem myself. My history and background combine Canadian, Trinidadian, Jamaican and Guyanese cultures. “Culture” is no one monolithic thing for me, and I draw on that varied heritage when I write. But if I introduce a “soucouyant” into a story, perhaps only readers from the Eastern Caribbean will know what that is. If instead I say “succubus,” I’d lose some readers’ comprehension and gain others’; and if I write “vampire,” chances are that pretty much everyone would have some idea of the kind of creature I mean. Through the weight of books and films generated by the sf industry, vampires have a greater intercultural penetration than either soucouyants or succubi. (Yes, I am smiling as I write this.) But because I want to write about a soucouyant, which is neither a succubus nor a vampire, but has characteristics common to both, I have to spend time describing the being, its appearance, its habits, the mythology that spawned it. I risk boring a small segment of informed readers who are–hopefully–impatient to have me get on with the story. Or I can leave out the explanation and frustrate a larger group of readers who haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.

If I make my soucouyant male, or an infant, only informed readers will know how that departs from the myth. They will understand that I’m generating an extrapolation that is one more remove from the existing lore. But to everyone else, a baby soucouyant is just as remarkable as a grown one. They won’t know that I’ve just made the impossible even more so.

It’s a series of choices I have to make every time I write, weighing speculation against information. So I know what Mehan means when he speaks about Indian sf writers battling

“the difficulty of living with a double consciousness and, conversely, the impossibility of living without hybridity.”

Thanks to Eleanor at Flights of Fantasy for suggesting this book.

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog for Black History Month:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez is one of the most influential poets of the Black Arts Movement.

Read more about her from the Voices from the Gap Web site.

She will be speaking tonight at Skidmore College’s Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, Saratoga Springs at 7 p.m. The playwright, scholar and American Book Award-winning author (“Homegirls and Handgrenades”) gives the Black History Month keynote speech.

Hear and see her read her poem “Peace” in this YouTube video (which was uploaded in August of 2006):

From Poets.org:

Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Homegirls and Handgrenades (White Pine Press, 2007), Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does your house have lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995); Under a Soprano Sky (1987); Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973); Love Poems (1973); Liberation Poem (1970); We a BaddDDD People (1970); and Homecoming (1969).

Her published plays are Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995), I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982), Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’ (1979), Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1974), Dirty Hearts ’72 (1973), The Bronx Is Next (1970),and Sister Son/ji (1969). Her books for children include A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979), The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973), and It’s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971). She has also edited two anthologies: We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973) and Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin”at You (1971).

Among the many honors she has received are the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man” has been called a classic of American literature.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt from Irving Howe’s review:

This novel is a soaring and exalted record of a Negro’s journey through contemporary America in search of success, companionship, and, finally, himself; like all our fictions devoted to the idea of experience, it moves from province to city, from naive faith to disenchantment; and despite its structural incoherence and occasional pretentiousness of manner, it is one of the few remarkable first novels we have had in some years.

You can read Saul Bellow’s review of the book here.

And here’s a PBS page dedicated to him, here.

From a NYTimes book review of Ellison’s essays, written by Richard Bernstein for the Dec. 20, 1995 issue:

If truth be told, Ralph Ellison, whose novel “Invisible Man” is one of the indisputable classics of American literature, has faded from the public mind, occupying what might be called a highly respected position on the sidelines of the general consciousness. This is a shame, as any reader of this new and elegant collection of his nonfiction articles will immediately see. And yet, paradoxically, the collection serves contradictory purposes. It reminds us just how subtle, deeply cultivated and searching Mr. Ellison’s mind was. At the same time, it suggests why that mind seems, sadly, to be underappreciated these days.

Mr. Ellison, who was born in Oklahoma City in 1914 and died in New York in 1994, always identified himself as an “American Negro writer.” The essays in this collection represent a sustained, lifelong reflection on issues that are still so much with us: race, racism and African-American identity. But while Mr. Ellison clearly took the oppression of blacks as an essential and irreducible fact of American life, he also waged an untiring intellectual war against those “who regard blackness as an absolute, and who see in it a release from the complications of the real world.”

And this is from a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece comparing the character of the Invisible Man with Barak Obama:

The invisible man rises again

By Stephen Smith – Stephen Smith is a lawyer and businessman who has taught at Harvard University.

ALTHOUGH SEPARATED by more than 50 years, and the success of the civil rights movement, politician Barak Obama and Ralph Ellison’s existential hero of the “Invisible Man” have something in common.

Ellison’s classic novel was a profound exploration of how the struggle for black identity in America embodies the human struggle for authenticity and transcendence. When it was published in 1952, critic Irving Howe described it as “a searing and exalted record of a Negro’s journey though contemporary America in search of success, companionship, and finally himself.” Its protagonist begins his story by emerging from his hideout in his basement apartment – driven by the desire for recognition and meaning – to confront an often hostile and alien world. In the last chapter, he falls into the darkness of an uncovered manhole. He is guided by the light that emanates from the burning contents of his briefcase, which contains many remnants of his past.

Ellison’s unnamed hero is forced, like all who seek an authentic and committed life, to confront the many hazards and challenges of living and to light his way to the meaning of the present by letting go of and making good use of his past. In coming to terms with his blackness, he finds a set of values to live by and a way of connecting his own struggle to the human struggle and the American dream.

Like Ellison’s hero and Ellison himself, Obama is a black man on his own searing journey, in his case a presidential campaign. He, too, journeys in many different worlds and finds himself fully accepted in none of them. To whites he is still a black man, albeit one who is exciting and potentially electable. In the words of Senator Joseph Biden he is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

To blacks like Stanley Crouch and others he is not quite black enough to be real: “When black Americans refer to Obama as one of us, I do not know what they mean.” In fact, nobody seems to fully get a handle on him other than to say he is talented and they like him. Like Ellison’s hero, he is attempting to realize success while navigating the shoals of America’s many polarities, and he is attempting to use his diverse experience to articulate a narrative that will illuminate the universal shared struggle that is symbolized by the American dream.

Perhaps Obama has fired the public imagination because in a world that is multicultural, and in an America in which the 300-millionth American baby was born to Chinese immigrants, who better than a good-looking, articulate, black Hawaiian with a Kenyan father and a white mother to represent the American ideal.

Maybe Obama is proof that we are all in it together and that anyone can make it. And who better to speak to a divided nation than a man who has spent his life reconciling himself with divided worlds; someone who, like Ellison’s Invisible Man, does not fall fully into any category, and who, in a time rife with conflict, can mobilize the language of hope to activate dreams of a harmonious future.

Ralph Ellison’s hero was an outsider, not a politician. Ellison himself was a black intellectual and loner who read Dostoyevsky and the existentialists, dressed in a coat and tie, and was somewhat reclusive. Black intellectuals disavowed him as too white at the time his book was published. For Ellison, the great hazard was trying to be what other people thought he should be. At the end of the book he writes: “After years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am the invisible man.”

It is easier to be authentic as an existential intellectual outsider than as a politician. Giving people the answers they wish to hear, and needing to be liked, are often necessities and occupational hazards of politics. The trick of a great person or a great leader is striking the balance between conflict and consensus, between compromise and principle, between bringing people together and standing up, even when it is unpopular, for the ideals that gave birth to the country. This is the trick that transformational leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and to a certain extent Ronald Reagan managed, but they didn’t do it without some nasty confrontations and struggles along the way.

The irony of the Invisible Man is that in order to stand for everyone he had to choose where he stood first. He needed to stand apart and risk disapproval to affirm the principle that we are all in it together.

The challenge for Obama or any politician who aspires to greatness in these divided days is the same as the challenge of the “invisible man”: to take a stand as an individual with an authentic moral voice, and to conjure a vision of America where the thousand flowers of democracy can bloom without choking each other at their roots.

February 14, 2007

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison
“The Known World” by Edward P. Jones
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead
“Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington