In Memory of Aimé Césaire

On Thursday, 17 April, the Martinique poet, activist, politician, and post-colonial theorist Aimé Fernand David Césaire died.

Césaire was a central figure in what can be considered the French version of the Harlem Renaissance. While in school at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand , he helped found L’Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), a literary journal dedicated to the cultivation of black pride and which also birthed the Négritude movement, a literary and political movement that sought the “affirmation that one is black and proud of it”. His most famous works are his book-length poem, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (Notes From a Return to the Native Land), and the essay, “Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain.” Thanks to Professor Black Woman, I also found excerpts from his play, Une Tempête (adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest), which you should most definitely go and read.

Truth be told, I had meant to post this on Thursday, but it slipped my mind until I read this,

I believe that there should be canonical works. I believe that those works should be just that, CANONS. Open salvos in ” battles”designed to literally grapple and destroy and rebuild them . Text that lives an breathes and is on it’s feet, on it’s back, on it’s toes. How we take theory and make art. And how that is CONNECTED eternally through performance and history.

Most importantly how that performance is SPECIFICALLY and practically located in POC bodies and there interactions with personalizing and culturing various artforms , both intentionally and SIMPLY BY THEIR PRESENCE.

which, by coincidence, I feel perfectly sums up the life that Césaire led.

And so, I take the sad passing of a great artist and activist and choose to make the most positive I can out of it. I choose to renew my commitment to art, activism, and the life of the mind (not that it ever went anywhere, it’s more like renewing one’s wedding vows). I encourage those so inclined to do the same.

From Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal

ma negritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdite ruee contre
la clameur du jour
ma negritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’il
mort de la terre
ma negritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathedrale
elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol
elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel
elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.

my Negritude is not a stone, its deafness dashed against
the clamor of the day
my Negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water
on the dead eye of the earth
my Negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it plunges into the red flesh of the soil
it plunges into the ardent flesh of the sky
it pierces opaque prostration with its upright patience

[cross-posted at The Unapologetic Mexican]

Melvin B. Tolson – The Great Poet

Reading the various blogger reviews of The Great Debaters has me even more pumped to go check it out. Now y’all know that I can’t let all this talk of Melvin B. Tolson go on without reminding folks that, in addition to being an inspirational teacher, he was a great Modernist poet, whose epic poem, The Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, is a milestone of literary modernism¹. Perhaps overshadowed by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, The Libretto is as adventurous, intricate, complex, and learned as Eliot’s masterpiece. In fact, like The Waste Land, without extensive annotation, much of the poem will be lost on the reader. That may be a turn off for some folks, but if it’s not and you haven’t read The Libretto yet, I encourage you to do so.

The following is a section from another of Tolson’s great pieces, “Dark Symphony,” which was published in The Atlantic Monthly and won first place in a poetry contest sponsored by the American Negro Exposition in Chicago a year after the events of The Great Debaters.

II

Lento Grave²

The centuries-old pathos in our voices
Saddens the great white world
And the wizardry of our dusky rhythms
Conjures up shadow-shapes of ante-bellum years:

Black slaves singing One More River to Cross
In the torture tombs of slave-ships,
Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus
In jungle swamps
Black slaves singing The Crucifixion
In slave-pens at midnight,
Black slaves singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In cabins of death,
Black slaves singing Go Down, Moses
In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs.

III

Andante Sostenuto³

They tell us to forget
The Golgotha we tread…
We who are scourged with hate,
A price upon our head.
They who have shackled us
Require of us a song,
They who have wasted us
Bid us condone the wrong.

They tell us to forget
Democracy is spurned.
They tell us to forget
The Bill of Rights is burned.
Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet:
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

Oh, how can we forget
Our human rights denied?
Oh, how can we forget
Our manhood crucified?
When Justice is profaned
And plea with curse is met,
When Freedom’s gates are barred,
Oh, how can we forget?

1. Tolson was named Poet Laureate of Liberia in 1947 [↩]
2. From the Italian, “slow and solemn tempo.” [↩]
3. From the Italian, “moderately slow and sustained tempo.” [↩]

Poetry for a Friday Evening

Being Exit in the World

Being exit in the world
Is all over my hands
In my mouth, hair
Like syrup
Being absurd in the world sticks between
My fingers, and webs them.

Man cycled and ethos lorned
Exit in the hole alone I defend it,
I make it come alive, I come alive, explode.
I fill it with my substance, my finger, tongue,
Tears, anything.

Void in the world I exist.
All the crevices of life are meat tight
With the heat of my sweat,
I abandon none; yet abandoned am I
Alienated as at first sea eye keys unlocked
Fish hook from earth worm.
I am every project I fill, every mouth of food
Is my being in every body;
And being exits me, rots root and tree top,
My essence visits a million dark rooms

Pulsing, I lie naked with sleepers;
I chose them into being–
It is my ecstasy,
I am the leper who suffers to be.

–Calvin Hernton¹

When I first discovered Calvin Hernton back in the day, I felt an instant connection to both his poetic and scholarly work. In his poetry, I loved his experimental nature, coupled with a rhythmic sensibility that wonderfully expresses his examinations of black cultural life. In his scholarly work, such as The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life, I recognized an intellectual kinship with his desire to explore the intersections of gender and race. I later learned that he was also an exceptional and influential teacher at Oberlin College. Ajuan Mance, of Black on Campus describes his influence:

My high regard for Hernton’s legacy, however, is more deeply influenced by my encounters with Black men who knew him as a teacher and mentor. Hernton touched the hearts and minds of many students during his 28-year career as an African American Studies professor at Oberlin College, but he holds a special place in the hearts of his former Black male students, many of whom experienced him as the only Black man to ever teach them at the college level.

As a Black woman professor, I am especially touched by how deeply his views on Black women writers influenced some of the young Black men in his classes. A Black attorney I know spoke reverently of the influence Herton’s own story of transformation from a male-centered view of Black politics and anti-racist activism to a broader more inclusive vision that recognized the value of Black women writers’ critiques of sexism in novels like The Color Purple, The Women of Brewster Place, and The Bluest Eye.

…

I repeat that I never met Calvin Hernton; and for years I actually knew little of his work beyond his writings in my scholarly field. As my knowledge of his impact as a teacher has grown, however, I find myself feeling closer and closer to him, aligning myself with his legacy, aspiring to use the relationship between teacher and student in much the same way that he did, to create, challenge, and transform myself and my students, always with integrity, and always for the better.

To create, challenge, and transform–the essence of Hernton’s life and work. I hope to replicate, in whatever small ways I can.

1. Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey, eds., Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 98. [↩]

The Poetics of Naming

“I want to feel passion, I want to feel pain. I want to weep at the sound of your name. Come make me laugh, come make me cry… just make me feel alive.” — Joey Lauren Adams

EOAGH Issue 4

Ok, so I’m late to this one, but EOAGH Issue 4 is now online and ready for your poetry-loving perusal. Go read now.