studio-wmuyumba

Beautiful Equations: Insistence

2012-01-24T02:15:00.003-06:00

Percival Everett
Assumption
Graywolf Press, October 2011. 225 pp.

Percival Everett
Swimming Swimmers Swimming
Red Hen Press, April 2011. 72 pp.

Los Angeles Review of Books23 January 2012
After 12 years of deconstructing novelistic forms, Percival Everett seems almost to play it straight with Assumption, a triptych of detective/crime stories framed as a novel about distorted memory, money, and murder. Assumption’s protagonist, Ogden Walker, is a sheriff’s deputy in Plata, a tiny New Mexican burg. Unlike the leads in Everett’s recent novels, Walker is not a genius child (as in Glyph [1999] and I Am Not Sidney Poitier [2009]), not an underappreciated postmodern or vengeful romance novelist (as in Erasure and The Water Cure [2008], respectively), nor is he a suicidal, underachieving professor who, after his beheading, returns from the dead (American Desert [2004]). In fact, as a character, Walker never rises to any distinction. That’s purposeful: Walker is Everett’s central mystery among the unsolved crimes. He’s the classic accidental detective: He lives alone in a trailer; his mother is his main confidant; he doesn’t sleep much or very well; his only solace is in the artisan labor of lure-tying and his frequent fly-fishing excursions; he served in the military police, but couldn’t imagine more for himself than being back in Plata — the only black man in town. Like so many other detectives in novels of this type, Walker is finding himself in the process of his solving mysteries. But readers will say of Walker, as a Plata motel manager suggests to him rhetorically, “you’re not a very good detective, are you?”

Though Everett is an adept and accomplished postmodernist, he hikes over this familiar terrain and repeats its clichés unironically. Everett has also recently published his second collection of poems, Swimming Swimmers Swimming (2010). These new poems backlight the novel’s ideas, helping detail Everett’s narrative and linguistic aesthetic and offering some direction for understanding his choices in Assumption.
Not all the poems in Swimming Swimmers Swimming dazzle. However, the strongest ones artfully demonstrate Everett’s fascination with American English’s refractive qualities — a trait Everett has inherited from Gertrude Stein, whose ideas about repetition in detective novels inform Assumption as well. Once a single trope or, character or narrative trait is iterated again, Stein argues in her lecture, “Portraits and Repetition,” “there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” In Assumption, Everett’s insistent use of standard detective/crime fiction situations disrupts readers’ expectations of the genre while emphasizing new meanings. We ought to see Everett’s recent poems, like “Rows,” for example, as concentrated, sharply crafted exercises on insistence and meaning. “Rows” springs from Stein’s canonical line, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (repeated in many of her poems, including “Sacred Emily”). Here, Everett insists on Stein’s melodic concept, but reconstitutes the line’s contours thus emphasizing a different claim about language and meaning:

the rose

and the book

are the same

color.

the book

and the rose

are the same color.

the book

is open

like a rose

has leaves

like a book

has color

like the rose

has meaning

like the color

has thorns

like the book

has thorns

like the meaning

has thorns

like the rose

is like the

book is

liketheroseislikethebookisliketheroseisthecoloroftherose

As Everett pushes his comparison through all the possible meaningful analogies, notice that he stops punctuating the poem, forcing his idea into a final long compound without closure.

Much of Swimming plays this seemingly repetitious juggling — statement, inversion, extension, and reversion — into a drone that never flowers with thorny meaning. In the poem “Libellule,” he explains that “whatever is repetition,/ is varied,/ modulated,/ is merely alienation of/ some meaning.” He pushes this point further in poems like “The Scope of Description,” where he presents the act of defining a proposition, wholly or partially, as elliptical. And in “A Novel,” a brief lyric that can be read as both a novel’s narrative and an understanding that the form is founded upon the author/reader relationship: “We had no ordinary meeting./ We were no less than two strangers./And no fewer.” In “Beautiful Equations,” he claims: “You can always find symmetry, / Symmetry will not, not always, not ever, find you.” Everett’s “symmetry” is a synonym for “meaning” — it’s something one finds by emphasizing all meanings possible when words, images, narrative frames, or character tics are repeated in a work. This is useful to consider when paging through Assumption because Everett wants, on one hand, to tease our desires, and, on the other hand, to disabuse us of our expectations for symmetry. We have to make the work meaningful. In Assumption Everett uses the New Mexican setting — the forests, the streams, the rivers, the canyons, the hills, the mesas, the snow, the desert — as a recurring motif. Readers first meet Walker in an untitled, prefatory scene. There, Everett establishes the protagonist and the landscape together, offering the work’s possible resolution in its beginning:

[Walker] thought about the desert around him, thought about water and no water, the death that came with too much water … To drown in the desert, that was the way to die, sinus replete with sandy water, dead gaze to dead gaze with rattlers in the flow. Ogden closed his eyes and thanked the desert wind that it was all over.

Everett’s realist/naturalist writing makes Walker a product of this environment. This is a common detective-novel trope, especially for the accidental detective: The protagonist divines his deductive prowess from his environs and yet he’s at the mercy of nature’s inevitably whimsical and deadly powers.

Walker is not philosophical, but Everett is. And he situates his protagonist/detective in a series of dialectical relations with the natural surroundings and with other characters, among them Bucky Paz, the sheriff; Warren Fragua, another deputy and Walker’s fishing buddy; Eva Walker, Ogden’s mother; and the femme fatales, Jenny Bickers and Caitlin Alison. These relationships help develop Walker as character and push the novel forward, but Everett also uses them to misdirect his readers.

When Walker must square off against Mrs. Bickers, the lead antagonist in the novel’s opening section, “A Difficult Likeness,” we imagine her a key figure for the full work. Responding to a call from her neighbors about shots fired from Mrs. Bickers’s house the night before, Walker has a “bad feeling about something but he couldn’t nail it down.” Mrs. Bickers is acting strangely during their early morning interview about the prowler she’d shot at and Walker wonders if it’s his blackness that has her uneasy: “though she had never said as much … he knew.” Whatever her problem with him, Mrs. Bickers reveals nothing, handing over the offending handgun, and Walker leaves. Moments later, however, Walker sneaks back into the house, his suspicions flaring, and finds that Bickers has disappeared. When she’s found dead several pages later, readers won’t be surprised, but they’ll be clueless. Then Jenny Bickers, the daughter, shows up; more dead bodies appear; two FBI agents arrive, investigating militarized white supremacists; and Everett begins turning his multiple screws into place.

Since the late 1990s Everett’s predominant mode has been comic (with potent measures of allegory and satire mixed in). His postmodern novels are best when the sentences swing with post-structuralist verve as they do in Everett’s hilarious and perfect 2001 novel, Erasure. Assumption isn’t humorous, though. Instead, it’s like The Water Cure, Everett’s novel about revenge and torture in Taos, New Mexico. Both narratives are violent — soberly and casually so. Though Assumption and The Water Cure aren’t fueled by the intense aridity or the simple binaries — Good vs. Evil — of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, Everett sprinkles some McCarthian dispassion into both: Though readers don’t witness the acts themselves, the violence is stinging in its matter-of-fact and finite conclusiveness.

The works are also linked through one character, Sheriff Bucky Paz. In one of The Water Cure’s brief fragments, the protagonist, Ishmael Kidder, has an exchange with Paz:

Me [Kidder]: Bucky, it sounds to me as if you’re encouraging me to break a few laws.

Sheriff: There’s the law and there’s the law. There might be a law against, it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. The law is just words after all.

Me: That scares me.

Sheriff: It should. It’s the American way.

Everett’s novels suggest that “there’s narrative and there’s narrative,” that stories are “just words.” He forces readers to interrogate his repetitions, designing, along the way, proofs that might make the iterations meaningful.

In “My American Cousin,” Assumption’s second section, our expectations for the novel’s early mysteries are upended when we note that the novel’s seasons have shifted from winter to summer without explanation. Instead of hemming up the loose ends of “A Difficult Likeness,” Everett has Paz introduce Walker to Caitlin Alison, sending him to aid her search for a missing cousin, Fiona McDonough. When Walker and Alison find a dead person in the cousin’s last known residence, new troubles arise: the body isn’t McDonough’s. Then Alison, who presents herself as an Irish émigré, disappears and more dead bodies stack up. Walker travels from Plata to Denver, negotiating with Craigslist prostitutes, coordinating with a Denver detective named Hailey Barry (!), and getting abducted by a one-handed, drug-dealing pimp. After Walker escapes his kidnappers by impelling himself, hands still bound, out of a moving cargo van, he rushes back to Plata by way of Dallas. All of this so he can learn the true identities of the dead and missing. When this section closes, Walker, befuddled by the new murders and the unrealized plot, announces to his mother, “I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I guess it wasn’t about the money.” But if it isn’t money, then what’s instigating these crimes? Moreover, what’s binding these stories together as a novel, unresolved as they are?

Like the third period in an ellipsis, “The Shift” begins with Walker helping Terry Lowell, a game and fish patrolman, apprehend two poachers, Conrad Hempel and his 11-year-old nephew, Willy Yates. While Lowell arrests Hempel, taking him to jail, Walker escorts Willy to the sheriff’s office in order to find another family adult to pick him up. As soon as Walker steps into Bucky’s office to report his finding, Willy disappears from the station. Strangely, no one else in the office has seen the boy enter the building with Walker. When Hempel doesn’t turn up in jail and Lowell is found dead at the fishing reserve, it’s Walker, the last to see either man alive, who’s suspected of murder. Now, along with Willy, the only other possible eyewitness to his innocence, Walker must also find Lowell’s murderer. There are trips into foothills along dormant mining roads; there are canyon runs; there’s corroborating evidence against Walker; there are run-ins with meth users, meth makers, and meth dealers; and one flashing moment when Walker must “break bad.”

This is as far as I can go without revealing too much. Assumption isn’t an airline read or beach vacation novel; it’s a sturdy literary equation: The novel’s resolution will force you to reread the whole work, scrutinizing Everett’s use of detective novel clichés in order to chart the variations and modulations that alienate the novel’s meaning. Everett’s accidental detective, Walker, makes us realize that making or finding meaning requires elliptical exercises, and readers’ assumptions about the genre give way to new, pleasurable symmetries. What those particular meanings are, readers are left to find. As Everett suggests in the poem “Truth,” “Ontologically speaking,/ verification is a pipe/ dream anyway./ Reality is what it is what it is./ Meaning?/ That’s our job.”

Walton Muyumba

Zombie Hunters: Whitehead's Zone One

2011-10-16T18:51:00.000-05:00

Zone One
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday
272 pages

Dallas Morning News
14 October 2011

Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s fifth novel, is a beautifully written tragi-comic cultural critique about New York, disaster and America’s living dead.

Whitehead imagines that a plague has scrambled the planet’s inhabitants into groups of survivors, “skels” (voracious, flesh-eating zombies) and “stragglers” (also infected, but stalled catatonically, as if their hard-driven neural webs needed reloading). Encamped like pioneers, the uninfected kill off zombies while re-establishing civil order and national governments. America’s recalibration is managed from Buffalo, the new capital, where the nation’s rebirth is marketed as “American Phoenix.” The survivors call themselves “pheenies,” and they struggle with the new order and with post-apocalyptic stress disorder, or PASD.

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Marines have taken lower Manhattan, walling it off from northern neighborhoods and cleansing it of free-range skels. Whitehead’s protagonist, Mark Spitz, is among the warriors enlisted from the camps to patrol the area, taking out any remaining zombies wandering the underground, locked in office buildings, trapped in basements, listless in high-rise apartments or waiting in curio shops.

“Zone One” is the area south of Houston Street. Little Italy, Chinatown, The Lower East Side, TriBeCa, The Bowery, Wall Street: Mark Spitz marches along the zone’s perpendicular and incongruous pathways, all streets curving and running eventually toward Battery Park and original Dutch foothold.

Covering three consecutive days, Whitehead’s novel shuttles between Spitz’s past, before and during the zombies’ rise, and his present among them. Though he’d always been a mediocre every-dude, battling the undead enlivens him, supercharging his survival and killer instincts. His name signals an American Olympian masculine myth. Yet “Mark Spitz” is also a joke about black people and swimming.

Whitehead improvises humorously and poignantly on some favored themes — advertising and marketing language; names and naming; reverence for the city’s machinations — through the protagonist.

Reminding himself of New York’s prowess for re-creating itself, Spitz exclaims, “Inevitability was mayor term after term. … In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn’t anyplace else. It was New York City.”

In an example of Whitehead’s wordplay, it’s the survivors’ yearning for the safe, enabling mythologies of the past, their sentimentalizing the past, that seems to incite their PASD.

Because Zone One is both New York’s birthplace and its original necropolis (from the African Burial Grounds to the World Trade Center Memorial), it’s hard not to read Whitehead’s geography and genre-play allegorically: It’s about border fences, terrorism, war, breached levees, financial collapse and our present zombification, accustomed as we’ve become to consuming the status quo’s poisons.

Zone One is paean and protest.

Walton Muyumba

Minor Slights and Sprains

2011-09-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

Oxford American

The Education Issue #74

If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,

The future might stop emerging out of the past,

Out of what is full of us; yet the search

And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

—Wallace Stevens, “Like Decorations in a Nigger

Cemetery”

Though I’ve had a long career as a student, and then a teacher, I’ve always hated “school”—the morning and afternoon bells; teachers and teaching; lessons and assignments; pop quizzes and problem solving; demerits and detention; PTA and parent/teacher nights; student council and prom committee meetings; report cards and grades; standardized exams: SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT; seminar papers and oral exams; dissertation defenses and faculty meetings; tenure cases and administrative bureaucracies.

If one part of my displeasure stems from the inescapable measurements, requirements, and bureaucracy, the other part comes from being made to feel uncomfortable about my own mind, my own skin.

As a student, I’ve had many friends among my classmates, but often I’ve had no place among them—no set, no camp, no clique. Among the white kids, I was a strange mascot: an African spear-chucking, woolly-headed, correct-English-speaking surprise—the black kid you could invite over, the one whose hair you could touch without invitation or a ﬁght. With the black kids, I was a too-dark African, weirdly named, correct-English-speaking oddity, not from their neighborhoods and not welcome there either, an imposition to some of them because whatever my abilities, I was traitorous—to them I was “white.”

One morning in 1981, on the school bus to Fuqua Elementary School for a summer-school class, a black kid, who I didn’t know, spat in my face and called me nigger for sitting in the seat next to him without permission.

One morning in 1985, on the school bus to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School, a student, a white-trash motherfucker if there ever was one, called me nigger for sitting in the seat across the aisle from him without permission.

One spring afternoon in 1990, South High School, senior year, in college algebra and trigonometry class, as the bell rang to begin the session, the teacher stood in the doorway hollering at some kids to get to whatever classroom they belonged in. Turning back to her own class and pulling the door closed, she asked with consternation, but not rhetorically, “I don’t know why they act like that.” We knew the “they” to whom she referred. Spying me (the only black student in the room) in the second seat of the central row, she quickly added, “Well, we don’t think of you as black.”

When I was a high-school basketball player, my right ankle was sprained perpetually, so I taped and wrapped it tightly, learned to play in pain, learned how to be creative and explosive in spite of the post-game aches and inevitable swelling. I learned then that being a student of other people—black and white kids, black and white teachers, coaches, and administrators, black and white neighbors—could shield or protect my soul from hyperextensions, dislocations, or breaks. As a university student, though I was taped and ready to play, I wasn’t prepared for the college-game’s speed, the various performance styles, and higher stakes, and I found myself careening about.

Remember the late 1980s/early 1990s, when being a black, male, conscious, university-educated player meant keeping copies of Native Son, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Beloved on your shelves; meant developing artful, self-aware, political attitudes; meant philosophizing over illmatic beats, working out low-end theories, and penning deft death certiﬁcates? I was ﬁguring out how to be a young black man during the days of Cosby sweaters and hi-top fades, Afrocentrism and Africa medallions, Air Jordans and X hats. But there was (is) a fear of a black planet, so there was also Yusuf Hawkins and the Central Park Five; the LAPD stompin’ and wildin’ on Rodney King; the ensuing riots; the black-hole vacuum cleansing of a whole generation of black boys into long-term incarceration. You learned to live as if endangered; your books and clothes carried like talismans.

Continued reading here . . .

Ishmael Reed on Orenthal James: Juice!

2011-05-20T11:38:00.009-05:00

Juice!
Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive
344 pages

Dallas Morning News
20 May 2011

A multifaceted craftsman, Ishmael Reed has been an important American literary artist since the 1960s. As a top-flight postmodern novelist and feisty cultural critic, Reed consistently challenges our status quo sociopolitical arrangements. Recently, his targets have been American news outlets like MSNBC , Fox and CNN, and entertainment producers like Oprah Winfrey , Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels, the filmmakers behind Precious.

Reed’s 10th novel, Juice! , is about Paul “Bear” Blessings, a political cartoonist obsessed with O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. Calling himself “the last man to believe in O.J.’s innocence,” Blessings recounts his concentrated analysis of the trial, how it disrupted his home life and nearly ruined his career. Though he lambastes the talking heads who stirred O.J.-mania and profited, readers learn early on that Blessings also turned O.J. into a trick, gaining enough to afford residence at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Juice! is strange: the narrative careens from Blessings’ tales about his online buddies in a chat room called the Rhinosphere (after the rhinos roaming Ted Joans’ poems), to stories about his work for KCAK, a Fox-like New York City television station, to the author’s awkward cartoons, interspersed throughout. Meant to illustrate the impetus for Blessings’ work troubles and to heighten the satire, the drawings distract rather than focus the manic fiction.

Through these story lines, Blessings grouses about misrepresentations of black men in the news media, exclaims the wonders of American Indian and Japanese cultural practices, tosses off misogynistic and homophobic bombs, plants verbal land mines beneath sellout black executives and minstrel rappers, and extols Paul Mooney’s comedic genius.

But Reed doesn’t bind these threads together well and, as a novel, Juice! never achieves its hoped-for comedic insight or add productively to Reed’s catalog.

However, behind the exhortations Reed has scripted a series of essayistic riffs: disquisitioning on American journalism and journalists’ attempts to convict Simpson; outlining Americans’ continued cultural fascination with Simpson’s trials and the structures of American socio-legal desire; examining our desire for racialized identities while continually, paradoxically, denying that racist hierarchies and agendas order American life.

In fact, Reed argues deftly, “O.J.” has become a word signifying various meanings: “sharp, legal defense tactics” or “interracial romance;” or, simply, “a rich black man’s strident (mis)use of the legal system in a way once granted to white Americans alone.” Read for its analytical bits, Juice! can be smart and provocative.

Walton Muyumba

Home to Harlem

2011-02-13T09:40:00.012-06:00

Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History From Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
Jonathan Gill
Grove/Atlantic
448 pages

Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Little, Brown & Co.
304 pages

Dallas Morning News
13 February 2011

In their new books, Jonathan Gill and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts present Harlem stories full of street-corner philosophers and revolutionaries, civic dreams and dream books.

Gill’s narrative history, Harlem , is a strong primer on the neighborhood’s long, exquisite life. In the 17th century, the Dutch established the village as a barrier against attacks on lower Manhattan by renegade native tribes and British imperialists. The Dutch settlers farmed alongside and traded with area indigenous people and allowed free and enslaved Africans to live among them without restrictions. Harlem was the site of key Revolutionary War battles; George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr made their reputations there.

In the 19th century, as New York’s population swelled, Harlem, still mostly farmland, became a transit hub and destination — rail lines, waterways and roads offered easy movement between downtown and uptown Manhattan, and allowed safe passage to Boston and Albany in less than a week.

In 1898, New York consolidated its boroughs and villages into a single municipality. Harlem, charged by African Americans, and German, Jewish and Italian immigrants, working in factories, shops, and on the docks, had economic, political and cultural power that only lower Manhattan could rival. Harlem’s Jewish families gave us, for example, Richard Rodgers , Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II , the Gershwin and Marx brothers, Henry Miller and Henry Roth.

Black American experience in Harlem is much documented, but Gill offers a refresher, examining how African-Americans, West Indians and Puerto Ricans remade Harlem throughout the 20th century. Though there are no new perspectives on the Harlem renaissance, the civil rights movement, the neighborhood’s decline or its 21st-century gentrification, Gill does put Harlem’s shifts within the context of New York’s broader history.

From the Dutch to David Dinkins (Harlem native and New York’s first black mayor), Harlem has been the city’s main political, economic and ethnic laboratory, always a significant measurement in its ranking as a world capital.

•

Rhodes-Pitts opens Harlem Is Nowhere ruminating on the cultural and literary legacies of Harlem’s black renaissance. Ostensibly a “journey to the Mecca of Black America,” Rhodes-Pitts’ subtitle misleads slightly: Though she traverses its past and present sociocultural landscape, her travelogue demystifies notions that Harlem is a petrified relic of lost glory or a dangerous wasteland needing revitalization.

Covering Harlem’s writers, architectural history, gentrification and its teachers, activists, historians, collectors and impresarios, Rhodes-Pitts’ formal mélange — it could be read as essay collection, anthropological study, memoir or nonfiction novel — becomes an expression of Harlem’s wondrous complexities.

Peeling back Harlem’s known elements and worn-out stories, she reveals sheaves of under-documented cultural narrative, fine, onionskin layers of Harlem’s history, displaying the complicated evolution of the neighborhood’s traditions and political organizations. Rhodes-Pitts argues that they’ve maintained their relevance because “many of the conditions that attended their founding persist and because many of the original aims have not been achieved.”

Rhodes-Pitts’ borrows her title from Ralph Ellison’s essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” about African-Americans’ simultaneous presence in and alienation from American democracy. Like Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man, Rhodes-Pitts’ storytelling is finally about her literary, historical and political education. Rhodes-Pitts’ ambivalence — her deeply rooted participation in Harlem life and her distant, reportorial observation and documentation of the Harlem world — is the book’s core. The author-protagonist’s negotiation of these conflicting roles produces the work’s most searing, intelligent passages.

In the final section, “We March Because …”, we find Rhodes-Pitts, dazed in the Harlem maze, grappling as participant and writer. Unlike Ellison’s protagonist, the author refuses to flee or go underground, choosing instead to stay in the fray, fighting and writing for Harlem.

Walton Muyumba

Politics and Prose: Lawrence Jackson's Indignant Generation

2011-01-10T12:00:00.001-06:00

The Indignant Generation:
A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960
by Lawrence P. Jackson
Princeton University Press
579 pages

Dallas Morning News
9 January 2011

Lawrence Jackson's The Indignant Generation is a thoroughly comprehensive and exciting historical narrative about 20th- century African-American intellectuals and literary writers. Focusing on the period between 1934 and 1960, Jackson narrates the great migration of black writers and critics from their segregated artistic sectors into the cultural mainstream.

Though the cadre of writers populating Jackson's thick book includes white and Jewish artists, The Indignant Generation's concentration is on the black writers who were part of the massive black population shift from the rural south to the urban north. Among those many figures, Richard Wright is the most important migrant-insurgent to the cultural center.

With his first three works, Uncle Tom's Children (stories, 1938), Native Son (novel, 1940), and Black Boy (autobiography, 1945), Wright announced that black writers could produce literary art as best-selling social protest. As a paterfamilias, Wright generated or extended several branches of the black literary family tree: He shepherded into print younger writers such as Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison, and his works elongate the lineage of Harlem Renaissance artists such as Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown.

Jackson charts Wright's knifing entrance to the mainstream beginning with his participation in the Communist Party's literary society, the John Reed Club, in the 1930s and his stewardship of Marxist journals such as New Masses in the 1940s. Eventually Wright dropped both leftist and liberal literary theories, developing instead a personal brew of politicized existentialism.

Using Wright's ideological and philosophical changes like a slide rule, Jackson marks the political positions and intellectual shifts of writers such as J. Saunders Redding, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin, charting their self-fashioned, individual aesthetic perspectives against their struggles with radical ideologies, white liberalism and black political agendas.

Studying an array of books and pamphlets, unpublished manuscripts, and personal and publishing correspondence, Jackson converts complex textual research into illustrated geographies of literary Chicago and New York, and color-coded intellectual genealogies of American liberalism and the left-wing political tributaries – Communist, socialist and Marxist included.

Jackson's remarkable critical acumen allows him to marshal thousands of poetic, novelistic, biographical and theoretical shards into a smooth, coherent, accessible history. He articulates clearly, as few American intellectual historians have before, the taut linkages and political divergences among African-American artists, leftist-radical journals, Jewish intellectuals, New York publishers, the Southern Agrarian literary contingent, the American academy and black literary criticism.

Reminiscent of both Louis Menand's exceptional The Metaphysical Club (2001) and Isabel Wilkerson's brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), Jackson's elegantly scribed cultural history deserves the kind of wide critical attention and large audiences those works have received.

Jackson's literary, intellectual and cultural documentary helps readers of our contemporary literature understand how literature's influence on American sociopolitical reform has been muted and realize that central cultural questions about literary art, social change and racial identity are still significant to defining our national identity.

Walton Muyumba

Manhattans or Molotovs: James Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption

2010-08-29T19:51:00.011-05:00

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
by James Baldwin
edited by Randall Kenan
Pantheon
336 pages

Dallas Morning News
29 August 2010

Covering the breadth of James Baldwin's literary career, The Cross of Redemption is a potent dose of previously uncollected essays and miscellany.

Baldwin's civil-rights-era essays make the book's nucleus. His morality is drawn from Scripture, but his diction and concepts are genetic – his literary ancestors are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henry James.

Like Emerson, Baldwin believes the poet is representative man. Baldwin declares that "poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us ... . Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever."

Like Douglass, Baldwin believes that once we free ourselves from racial thinking, specifically the myth of white superiority, our political principles will be realized. In "We Can Change the Country," a 1963 speech, Baldwin sounds both ancestral and immediate in his call for civil rights, imploring: "If we don't now move, literally move, sit down, stand, walk, don't go to work, don't pay rent, if we don't now do everything in our power to change this country, this country will turn out to be ... so immobilized by its interior dissension that it can't do anything else ... . A government and a nation are not synonymous. We can change the government, and we will."

From James, Baldwin inherits the aesthetic ideal, "perception at the pitch of passion." This sensibility permeates pieces such as "The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston," the collection's best essay – a sparkling concoction of sports writing, personal essay and cultural criticism; "A Challenge to Bicentennial Candidates," an acerbic op-ed about Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; and "To Crush a Serpent," a blazing jeremiad deconstructing Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and their false ministries.

In "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes," Baldwin interrogates American culture's blind liberalism and belligerent conservatism. He explains, indignantly: "The American way of life has failed – to make people happier or to make them better. We do not want to admit this, and we do not admit it." In 2010, with liberal strategies working weakly and conservatism retrenched to its blanched roots, Baldwin's proposition reads like a Russian prophecy fulfilled.

Though it isn't laser-focused like his nonfiction masterworks, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin's Cross burns with rage, smoothly, like a cocktail mixed perfectly, Manhattan or Molotov.

Historically, white Americans have rejected black indignation as incredible. This disbelief, Baldwin argues, stems from an inability to "conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself." There are consequences for disbelief and violation: "You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves."

Baldwin's trenchant voice, still contemporary 23 years after his death, reminds us: Our refusal to defend the rights of all citizens diminishes our humanity and degrades our democracy.

Walton Muyumba

St. Paul: The Soul of Dallas' Arts District

2010-08-01T19:41:00.001-05:00

Squatting in its corner of the Arts District, St. Paul United Methodist Church is dwarfed by One Arts Plaza to its immediate south and by the rising concrete pedestals holding up Woodall Rodgers to its north. Even the polished and expanded Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts across Routh Street to the west seems to mock the stocky old church.

Passing St. Paul along the access road or Routh during the years of the Arts District’s expansion, one would be forgiven for not noticing the church. The building seemed like an afterthought left in the corner to accent the gleaming new structures around it with antique heft and gritty charm.

But the church has not been empty or quiet for 137 years. In fact, it’s one of Dallas’ oldest black churches. Though initially overlooked by Arts District developers as they worked on the recent expansion, St. Paul will this month complete a unique $5 million renovation project that will ensure the church remains a vital part of the sector. The project was unique because it began not at St. Paul but at another Methodist church, this one in a distinctly different setting.

In 2005, senior minister Reverend Mark Craig, of Highland Park United Methodist Church, decided that he wanted to protect and preserve Dallas’ inner-city churches. With a seed contribution from one of his flock, developer Harlan Crow, Craig targeted St. Paul.

One small problem with delivering surprising, unsolicited gifts to anyone is the skepticism the gift will likely engender: “Thanks, but why me? And what are your real intentions?” In this case, the small problem was enlarged because the benefactor was a wealthy, conservative, predominantly white church, and the recipient was a small, working-class black church. Even more, given black history in Freedman’s Town, the area we now call Uptown, worries of encroachment, ownership, and even racism would have been understandable.
Continue reading . . .

Walton Muyumba

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra & Wynton Marsalis Take Dallas

2010-03-10T15:30:00.002-06:00

Art&Seek
9 March 2010

Meyerson Symphony Center
Dallas, TX
5-6 March 2010

Displaying the roots and logic for the band’s presence, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra opened its Friday evening show with a set of Basie Orchestra standards. As Wynton Marsalis intimated they would, the band perpetrated the act of swinging through numbers, with the horn sections blowing muscularly over the rhythm unit and lead trumpeter Ryan Kisor hitting home run high notes. Marsalis divided the set between “Old” and “New” testament Basie, including numbers like“Sleep Walker’s Serenade” and “Mutt and Jeff.”

On “Magic,” reedman Sherman Irby offered an inspired, hiccupping alto sax solo that sounded as if he were humming/scat singing through the horn. In taut “call and response” sections, each of the band’s units – trumpets, trombones, reeds and rhythm – urged Irby through the chord changes and gave him buckets of pointed riffs for him to hammer into his ragged, rousing improvisation.

JLCO closed the first half with “Seventh Avenue Express,” a tune arranged for rapid-fire, round robin blues soloing. Marsalis has the unenviable job of choosing pieces and building sets that will allow all his top-shelf band mates the chance to solo. On “Seventh Avenue Express,” Walter Blanding (tenor sax), Sean Jones (trumpet) and Eliot Mason (trombone) each wore the conductor’s hat, urging the group down more intriguing routes with each turn. Ali Jackson kept the song’s engine boiling hot, thumping the bass-pedal and snapping the toms and snare skins with high-speed, locomotive hands.

On Friday and Saturday nights, the show’s second sets were devoted to Portrait in Seven Shades Ted Nash’s musical essay on swing, modern visual art and improvisation. Nash, a reedman and flutist, lead the band through seven intricate, often elegant, movements reflecting the wonders of Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollack.

From movement to movement, an interesting contingency emerged in my listening: the band was playing avant-garde music. During the movements for Picasso, Dali and Pollock, I realized that Basie’s music was context-establishing, preparing the audience for Nash’s composed, acute integration of swing time with bebop changes, Gil Evans-type coloring, hard and harmon muted, Ornette Coleman-like harmonics (or harmolodics), and group play as imagined by both Charles Mingus and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Nash chopped and screwed flamenco and cubism together in “Picasso,” a swinging tune in 4/4 time, based on four-part chords, harmonies and melodic runs. Marsalis’ masterful solo, geometric segmented and angled sharply against the composition, was all blues and bullfighting.

“Dali,” signed in 13/8 time, featured Victor Goins setting the melody, Vincent Gardner bellowing on trombone, Marcus Printup and Nash in duet, melting time with blazing, whining, wheezing notes, and Jackson alarm-tocking an assortment of cowbells. Against Carlos Henriquez’s bass plucking, Dan Nimmer’s cycle of keyboard runs and Jackson’s bass-drum bombs, the band ended the song stomping feet, clapping hands in differing rhythmic pattern, and spinning the audience’s heads.

On Friday evening, the show closed with “Pollock,” Nash’s most abstract, outsider movement. The piece shifted between bright, darting tonalities and moody, mid-century modernism. The arrangement was set for Kisor and the rhythm section to intermittently dive out of the piece into a tuneful, swinging expression of Clifford Brown/Max Roach bebopisms. But Irby punctuated these exits, soloing with purposeful wildness across the band’s rhythmically placed, sonic gestures, razor lining the musical canvas, bleeding it to give it life.

Marsalis is a generous director; he must be with all the talent in his troupe. Besides calling numbers for individual soloists, Marsalis also creates set lists around charts written by the composers in the group. For instance, Saturday’s show opened with Chris Chrenshaw’s lovely, complex piece, “The Block,” his reflection on the paintings of Romare Bearden. The jazz was of the highest order; the musicians soloed with soul, intelligence and a general sense of energy and exuberance.

Coda: As I was preparing my notes into thoughts, I was struck by a stupendous sentence in Preston Jones’ recent profile of Ornette Coleman:

“[Coleman] has not performed in Fort Worth since the 1983 grand opening of now-shuttered jazz club Caravan of Dreams. Coleman says he would love to return and perform in his hometown, but there is nothing scheduled.”

I hope someone with real power in the North Texas arts communities read this profile and made some calls to arrange a date for Coleman’s return to the area, thus blessing him with the birthday gift of return and us with the gift of certified musical genius. Coleman is 80 years old, why wait until he is dead to honor him?

Walton Muyumba

Brief Notes II: Jazz Roots' Season Finale

2010-03-05T17:05:00.006-06:00

Art&Seek
5 March 2010

AT&T Performing Arts Center
Dallas, TX

On 1 March 2010, AT&T Performing Arts Center closed its jazz series, Larry Rosen’s Jazz Roots, with an impressive and exuberant finale, "Latino Piano". Here’s some notes and thoughts about the performance:

One: Alfredo Rodriguez opened the event with a stirring solo set. A young Cuban “discovery” of Quincy Jones’, Rodriguez made his Texas debut at the 2009 SXSW music conference. Rodriguez was impressive if unpolished. Though he’s a manic and mesmerizing musician, Rodriguez has no distinctive personal voice yet. I’m not complaining; the music was a hot, great stew of sounds and ideas. As he worked through the classic “Tres Palabras,” the song dissolved into a jittering, melodic blur. Rodriguez stomped, danced and grunted, establishing, embellishing and coaxing the abstract music into order. His improvisations were stylistic mash-ups, merging voices (Ahmad Jamal and Bebo Valdes) and smashing styles (hard bop, Cuban bolero and classical). Rodriguez is young and brash – he plays his virtuosity loudly, proudly. But he’s a cheeky prodigy too – he closed his set in a quick, tight, two-handed, Tin Pan Alleyed take on Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.”

Two: Michel Camilo is like a great “midlist” author – he produces special, elegant, startling art but doesn’t have the flash of youth or the heft of legend to push his name or his sales. The Dominican pianist has a strong, percussive style, splashing, knocking or banging his hands on the keys like a conga drummer. Camilo accented his improvised solos with third and fourth rhythmic ideas, bouncing them against Chris Armen’s pounding rock-drumming. However, Camilo is an instinctively quiet player, evoking Bill Evans-like licks and progressions from his right hand. During the performance, he had the luxury of working the light, melodic, high end of the keyboard because his astute and exceptional bassist, Charles Flores, maintained a buoyant, tight bottom. Unfortunately, the Winspear is not a favorable space for the jazz trios I’ve seen there; the space favors loud, pyrotechnic drumming, and not the contrabass’ low-end theories to fill its dimensions. Even though his fiddle was miked, I felt as though Flores’ mambo-ostinati and strolling blues lines kept dissipating under his bandmates’ more forceful playing.

Three: The headliner, Eddie Palmieri, a master Salsa and jazz pianist, closed the show, offering with his six-man outfit one useful model for what Rosen’s series ought to produce for Dallas audiences: serious musicianship, danceable rhythms and fun. Opening their set with Thelonious Monks’ “In Walked Bud,” Palmieri’s sextet managed the hall’s acoustics by fusing deftly Latin rhythms and bebop harmonies. Cubop, as Dizzy Gillespie called the mixture, bolsters bebop’s complex, fiery harmonies with equally intricate Afro-Cuban percussive patterns. When Yosvany Terry (alto saxophone), Brian Lynch (trumpet), Ruben Rodriguez (bass), Jose Claussel (timbles), Vincente “Little Johnny” Rivero (congas) and Orlando Venga (bongos) took their solos during the Palmieri-Cal Tjader dish “Picadillo,” Palmieri stood up from the piano bench to direct the audience into the traditional salsa clapped rhythm. No room on the floor to dance, we wiggled in our seats, pop-popping the beat.

Four: Rosen’s series is slated to return for next year’s performing arts season with six sessions. I hope for two things for next year’s shows: 1) Rosen will allow smaller acts, trios and quartets, to appear in the Wyly Theatre’s more accessible and intimate confines and 2) he mixes some avant-garde musicians onto his roster of performers. Imagine daring and danceable small groups like those led by Miguel Zenon or Vijay Iyer in an intimate setting. Part of Rosen’s “educational” ideal could be met by bringing older, boundary-busters like Henry Threadgill or David Murray through Dallas. It’s possible Rosen could bring in a large, brilliant ensemble like Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos to fill up the Winspear’s vast hall.

Luckily, jazz enthusiasts will not have to wait for the next season: Wynton Marsalis and the adventurous, sterling Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) will perform three shows this weekend at the Meyerson Symphony Center. Since the early 1980s. Marsalis has displayed exceptional prowess as a composer and musician in both the jazz and classical idioms. Marsalis’ traditionalist sensibilities are born out in his leadership of JLCO – the organization’s repertoire contains very few avant-garde compositions. But this critique belies the group’s top-shelf musicianship, their ability to swing the blues out of any room, on any piece of music from composers as diverse as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams. Expect tight, ensemble playing and rousing, expert soloing from Marsalis and his crew.

Postscript: There is a strange incongruity at work when the nation’s leading large jazz ensemble makes an appearance in Dallas just as the new jazz series has ended. Marsalis’ appearance offers up a picture of institutional competition between the Meyerson and its new neighbor. Hopefully these arts-siblings can coordinate resources and agendas to bring in the best jazz acts for Dallas audiences. Dallas should be one of the main stops for national and international jazz artists.

Walton Muyumba

Don DeLillo's Point Omega: A Desert Meditation

2010-02-08T12:00:00.000-06:00

Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
Scribner
117 pages

Dallas Morning News
7 February 2010

Don DeLillo's Point Omega is an experimental novel presented as conceptual art. Only 117 pages, the work is overloaded with heavy ideas about war, poetics and consciousness. Though DeLillo's writing displays his patented sharpness, the novel is a shaky proposition.

Set in New York City's Museum of Modern Art and in the California desert, Point Omega's four characters – Jim Finley, Richard Elster, Jessie Elster and one anonymous, nearly spectral, museum visitor – spend much of the book in arid, abstract conversations.

The book's central narrative is capped by a prologue ("Anonymity") and epilogue ("Anonymity 2"). Narrated omnisciently, these describe an anonymous male character's responses to repeated viewings of Douglas Gordon's video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which plays Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at two frames a second over 24 hours. Visually ingesting the piece, the man understands Anthony Perkins' incremental actions as "pure film, pure time," motion deconstructed into an "array of ideas involving science and philosophy." The character is mesmerized as he realizes the depths possible in "the slowing of motion" and "the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing."

Finley narrates the main story in the first person, past tense, describing his quest to make a documentary about Elster's work as the chief intellectual strategist of the Iraq war. After initially rebuffing the concept in New York City, Elster summons Finley to his desert retreat to discuss the project's parameters.

Their patter seems as infinite as the desert floor. Occasionally, it rises into Elster's dusty theses on government, war, poetry and consciousness: "There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight ... The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't." The more efficient strategy, Elster suggests, would have been "war in three lines," a haiku war form that presented Iraq as a "set of ideas linked to transient things ... See what's there and then be prepared to watch it disappear."

Elster argues later that disappearing may offer access to the "omega point": the transcendent "leap out of our biology" into inorganic matter and a higher, stiller, consciousness, a leap ignited, ironically, through introversion.

When Jessie, Elster's awkward, pale daughter, arrives at the house, a strange pas de trois arises. We realize that all four characters either see or meet one another taking in Gordon's piece, but the meaning of their mutual viewing doesn't emerge until the novel's final pages.

Though one could point to DeLillo's formal arrangement, a looping, introverting three-part prose-poem, as answer to the story line's mysteries, the author's intellectual ideas and aesthetic games never achieve a level of urgency. He doesn't shove the characters, 24 Hour Psycho, Iraq and transcendence from theoretical play to compelling literary drama.

Walton Muyumba

Thelonious Monk: Working-Class Artist-Hero

2009-12-20T15:56:00.000-06:00

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
by Robin D. G. Kelley
Free Press
608 pages

Dallas Morning News
20 December 2009

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original adds significantly to our understanding of jazz’s aesthetic complexities and its dynamic emotional force. Author Robin D. G. Kelley’s close attention to Monk’s personal history and music discredits the weak caricatures that color the pianist as an untutored, mystical loon.

Kelley is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Southern California. His previous works include Hammer and Hoe (1990) and Race Rebels (1994), exceptional historical studies of, respectively, American labor politics and African-American working class cultural politics. Kelley’s historical studies influence his presentation of Thelonious Monk as a working-class artist-hero.

Kelley traces the Monk family history from slavery to freedom in North Carolina and maps their northward migration to New York City. Born in Rocky Mount, N.C. on Oct. 10, 1917, Monk spent his life in one of Manhattan’s most culturally fertile neighborhoods, San Juan Hill. Composed of black, Latino, and Afro-Caribbean working-class families, the neighborhood offered young Monk a social life full of running buddies, pool, basketball and girls.

He began studying piano at 11, learning classical technique, but turned quickly to jazz. In the mid-Thirties, Monk toured the country with a female evangelist, playing jazz-infused church music. That tour played Kansas City, Mo., then the capital of swing, where the teenaged Monk befriended Count Basie and Mary Lou Williams and heard the strains of his musical future.

Though Monk and his cohort created bebop in the early 1940s at Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse, for much of the decade he struggled to support himself as a musician. For several chapters Kelley documents how Monk’s early tunes, including the brilliant “‘Round Midnight,” made many musicians money, but not the composer. As the forties ended, Dizzy Gillispie and Charlie Parker had serious media attention and financial opportunities, but Monk was underemployed outside jazz’s mainstream. He revised his style, however, mixing shards of gospel, Basie-swing, stride techniques, and Ellingtonia into an idiosyncratic, personal sound.

Full of off-key trills, weird harmonics and bursts of danceable rhythms, Monk’s mature compositions are joyous, complex, inventive, tough, and intriguing. Playing Monk’s music in his bands challenged and improved many sidemen, including Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. On his records Monk’s solos begin with single notes pinged doubly or triply, but intermittently against the beat. Displacing rhythmically, “rhythm-a-ning” that one note (to riff on a Monk a title), the pianist can stroke individual notes into full, multifarious, melodic ideas.

Kelley suggests that Monk struggled with bi-polar disorder throughout his life. During the sixties, just as he achieved fame finally, as critics recognized his compositions as the mark of bebop’s foundation and the wellspring of avant-garde jazz, Monk’s body began to fail him. Monk stepped off stage in 1974 and remained silent musically during his final eight years. Yet, as Kelley illustrates elegantly and carefully, the silence of Thelonious Monk buzzes at the core of contemporary American music.

Walton Muyumba

Imaginary Notes: Oliver Lake's "Gano"

2009-12-01T15:33:00.000-06:00

[Listen to the All Things Considered interview with Oxford American editor, Marc Smirnoff. Among the songs he discusses is Oliver Lake's "Gano".]

Oxford American
Eleventh Annual Music Issue
1 December 2009

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in a record store where I earned an ad-hoc music-appreciation degree; my coworkers were my professors. Cynthia, Steve, and Darius trained me on anything raging, banging, weird, and angular—Joy Division, Radiohead, Morrissey, Violent Femmes, Built to Spill, Dinosaur Jr., and Pavement; Jim gave me access to his outrageous collection of Congolese music, especially Franco, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Papa Wemba; Bryan dropped nuanced mini-lectures on the parallel wonders of John Coltrane and Buddhism; and Jamie guided me along the cobbled, connected pathways of classic and avant-garde jazz.

Back then, when Jamie started talking about experimental and freely improvised music coming from the jazz tradition, my conversations with him usually ground to a halt. To my unappreciative and untrained ears, listening to a musician like Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy was like hearing composition and melody in the throes of a cacophonous death. I was like those critics in the late 1950s and '60s who heard late Coltrane, or early Coleman, or any Cecil Taylor and denigrated their recordings as anti-music. But Jamie told me to listen again to Thelonious Monk and Coleman Hawkins, coached me through Taylor and Coleman, and hipped me to Don Pullen and Oliver Lake, explaining finally how these bebop, free, and avant-garde musicians were using different formulas for fulfilling the similar musical goal of producing African American art music.

Lake, an acolyte of the alto saxophonists Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy, and one of the avant-garde’s premier musicians, remains a wonderful reminder of the halcyon days of my musical education. Lake can make the alto sound sweet or caustic, tart or sentimental, savory or joyful; his solos are simultaneously and dynamically traditional, avant-garde, and contemporary. Lake points to this last word as an indication of his most urgent musical desires: "I . . .like the term 'contemporary jazz' because it implies that I am today and want to be dealt with today." Over the course of his career, Lake has helped develop and explode the boundaries of the avant-garde (at various points it has also been called "free jazz," "The New Thing," "Black Music," "the new music," and "The music") by drawing upon all facets of jazz’s history in order to make contemporary music.

Born in 1942 in Marianna, Arkansas, Lake grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, listening to r&b and urban blues music—Hank Ballard, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins. In the early 1960s, after graduating from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, Lake returned to St. Louis and began jamming with young professional musicians like Lester Bowie, who’d already been out touring the traditional r&b and blues scene with Oliver Sain and Albert King. Even as Lake and his cohort began experimenting without compositions, or improvising longer and more openly, the blues was still at the core of the music.

During the mid-1960s, along with the saxophonists Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett, Lake founded the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis. BAG founders emulated arts cooperatives like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Chicago, organizing their community around the argument that contemporary jazz’s newer, freer vocabulary could act as the lingua franca for the interdisciplinary teaching, practicing, and merging of experimental music, modern dance, revolutionary theatre, avant-garde literature, and radical politics within St. Louis’s black arts community.

In 1974, following Hemphill and Bluiett, Lake moved to New York City and began performing in Soho and the Lower East Side lofts, the hotbed of the jazz avant-garde. Since the late 1970s the three St. Louis saxophonists have performed with David Murray as the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ), one of the most popular and significant outgrowths of the downtown scene. During this period, in New York, Asia, and Europe, working as a soloist or in various groups, Lake refined his musicianship, creating his cosmopolitan, piquant sound.

Lake opens "Gano" squawking a sharp, four-note figure, birdcall-doubling it. Repeated six times, the melodic fragment is capped alternately by a three-note arpeggio from Lake and a shuffled three-note blues riff from Jared Gold on organ. After the clarion introduction, the pair swings into a chorus of soulful blues, with Lake stating the melody and Gold offering chunky, resonant chords behind the alto. Arranged without percussion, the track records a rare, odd bird: an alto saxophone/Hammond B-3 organ duet.

Lake’s solo begins from a blues and r&b melodic motif—a funky, braying, lick that mixes Charlie Parker with Maceo Parker. But the song clocks in at a mere one minute thirty-four seconds, so there’s no time or space for experimenting with riffs or improvising melodic line out into the open stratosphere. Quickly, though, Lake plays the logical continuities from funk to soul to free jazz. Listen: As he attacks the melodic line, improvising a granite-hard riff, swelling its structure and grinding it down to a tattered, shrill, glissandi, Gold sure-footedly pumps the bass pedals providing rhythmic ballast. Gold’s solo riposte begins with a quarter-note snort that inflates into a gospel trill. After two measures, Gold’s swift additions become a thick, soul jazz stew with marbled meat lumps of John Patton and Jimmy McGriff sizzling in his echoing, humming chords. "Gano" is a bourbon shot: short, potent, and delightful.

Over the last thirty-five years, whether fronting bands under his name, as a sideman, or with the WSQ, Lake’s music has continuously expressed one of the avant-garde’s most powerful themes: Jazz has always been avant-garde. At every turn, master musicians have established jazz’s presence and its future: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Muhal Richard Abrams. These musicians illustrate musically Gary Giddins’s argument that "the jazz avant-garde, like the classical avant-garde, is empowered by the fact that true classicism is impervious to anything but prostration. Imitation, as Emerson pointed out, is suicide." The jazz’s historical past, in other words, keeps educating us about the music’s future. Rather than recreate the past through imitation, however, avant-garde musicians like Lake reinterpret older performance modes, compositions, and techniques in order to name the present and suggest future directions. On "Gano," as he turns his honked melody into a funky flock of wild notes, Lake is addressing the contemporary moment and releasing messages toward an imagined future.
***********************************************
[Listen to the All Things Considered interview with Oxford American editor, Marc Smirnoff. Among the songs he discusses is Oliver Lake's "Gano".]

Walton Muyumba

Negro Folk Music: Giddins and DeVeaux's Jazz

2009-11-15T12:00:00.000-06:00

Jazz
by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux
Norton
704 pages

Dallas Morning News
15 November 2009

Duke Ellington warned against labeling as "jazz" the music he and his musical compatriots mastered. At the beginning of Ellington's 50-year reign in American music, jazz was a term synonymous with "race music," "Saturday night music" or "jungle music," pejorative labels meant to deny the artistry of African-American improvisational music.

Though Ellington often referred to his idiom as "Negro folk music," he wanted his efforts to receive the same critical appraisals and accolades awarded to his classical art music contemporaries. More important, he wanted his compositions, arrangements and recordings to exist "beyond category."

Jazz is an excellent, comprehensive primer for listeners new to America's "classical" music. Beginning with basic tutorials in music vocabulary, composition theory and the techniques of musical improvisation, authors Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux prepare readers for the close analyses they offer of essential folk and jazz tunes in each chapter. The book is paired with a CD compilation of those key songs to guide readers toward becoming listeners. Giddins and DeVeaux use their listening lessons to emphasize and amplify the critiques and profiles filling Jazz's 19 chapters.

As in their previous works, the authors have drawn upon the techniques of music theory and ethnomusicology, American and African-American studies, literary new criticism and new historicism, and cultural studies to delineate jazz's integral, central position in 20th-century Western history.

DeVeaux, one of America's best jazz scholars and educators, teaches music at the University of Virginia and wrote The Birth of Bebop (1997), the most comprehensive historical and musicological study of bebop's invention and development as a singular musical tradition. Writing for Jazz Times and The New Yorker, Giddins is America's most esteemed music critic. His essays, especially those in Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998), display Giddins' abilities to match in quality the eloquent, lyrical and inventive music he critiques, and to make the innovations of Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby or Billie Holiday relevant to contemporary tastes.

It's difficult to suggest which chapters of Jazz are the best because reading Giddins-DeVeaux on Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, or Count Basie and Ellington is to initiate a superb musical education. Yet Jazz is an important departure from other jazz histories whose stories end in the 1960s. The book is strongest in its final chapters when the authors mark spaces on the contemporary field for players such as Wynton Marsalis, a traditionalist; Keith Jarrett, a historical fusionist; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an avant-garde group; and Jason Moran, a younger pianist whose performance catalog runs from traditional to electronica, including pieces by James P. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, Afrika Bambaataa and Bjork.

Jazz is not encyclopedic. The authors' choices emphasize their notion that jazz musicians created America's native-born music while pushing it beyond categorization. Giddins and DeVeaux illustrate that "jazz" is now a powerful, onomatopoeic expression of the music's traditions, joy, urgency, release, sexuality, seriousness, soul, suavity and swing.

Walton Muyumba

Brief Notes on Jazz Roots: A Larry Rosen Jazz Series

2009-11-07T00:25:00.004-06:00

Art & Seek
6 November 2009

Al Jarreau makes “adult contemporary” music. That’s not a problem, except that Jarreau’s set at the Winspear Opera House on Wednesday (November 4, 2009) — which opened the Larry Rosen Jazz Series — offered the opposite of jazz. With his five-man band and a back-up singer, Jarreau interpreted four standards, including “My Funny Valentine” and “Midnight Sun,” as smooth jazz numbers. Though Jarreau’s vocal style and the band’s musicianship were buffed and well polished, the music’s sheen was glaring, saccharine, and annoying. Jarreau was playful and jocular throughout his show, teasing the audience with witty repartee and even serenading Donna Joyner, Tom’s wife, with sweet birthday wishes.

The Ramsey Lewis Trio opened the evening, working through a selection of original pieces from their recent album, Songs from the Heart. Lewis and his rock-solid band mates, Leon Joyce (drums) and Larry Grey (bass), capped the set with a rousing blues and gospel medley. The compositions were pleasant, but the soloing sounded perfunctory, rote. Lewis’ music sits both within and adjacent to mainstream jazz: He’s always been interested in referring to straight-ahead, improvised jazz while letting the music drift into the pop and smooth jazz idioms.

Both acts put on a show, made the opening an event; however, the music felt canned and easy, rather than interesting, risky, dangerous or compelling.

The whole series seems short on invention or challenge. I wondered as the evening proceeded why the planners did not think to bring Roy Hargrove to open the series. An alumnus of Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School and one of contemporary jazz’s premier trumpeters, Hargrove would have been an inspired choice. As well, had the organizers wanted to maintain the Texas flavor, the excellent Houston-bred pianists Jason Moran and Robert Glasper would have been fitting. Even more, given their annual appearances with the DSO, Branford or Wynton Marsalis would have given the series gravitas.

And had no one thought to invite Ornette Coleman back to Dallas-Fort Worth to blow the doors off the building, announcing his return to native grounds?

Though the Winspear Opera House is a beautiful, generous listening room, it seems suitable for almost any art music except for jazz. Jazz performances deserve — even demand — intimate performance spaces where listeners can dance, shout, sing or listen in close proximity to the musicians. Given the need to drum up physical and financial support for the programs at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Rosen’s program is beneficial because of its strong commercial appeal.

Yet the jazz education promised from the evening did not materialize.

Walton Muyumba

Walton Muyumba and The Shadow and the Act on KERA's Think

2009-09-04T21:54:00.019-05:00

Here is a video clip from a recent discussion of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism:

Art&Seek on Think TV: Author Walton Muyumba

Shared via AddThis

Walton Muyumba

Victor LaValle's Big Machine

2009-09-04T19:07:00.019-05:00

Big Machine
by Victor LaValle
Spiegel & Grau
384 pages

Dallas Morning News
30 August 2009

Victor LaValle’s weird and ambitious novel Big Machine is set in 2005 but peopled with junkies, prostitutes, and grifters resplendent in Harlem Renaissance-era fashion — tailored gabardine and calfskin boots. There’s also a secret research society in backwoods New England, murderous religious cults and hazy, yellow angels.

Though mixing elements of spiritual parable, African-American literary history, the detective novel, the graphic novel and speculative fiction, LaValle dresses the work as realism. In fact, the tension between sci-fi/noir material and realist approach makes Big Machine crackle.

We meet the narrator/protagonist, Ricky Rice, a recovering heroin junkie, when he is lured by mysterious invitation from his dead-end janitorial position at a dingy bus terminal in Utica, N.Y., to snowstorm-choked Vermont.

Once there, Rice is installed on the grounds of the Washburn Library, where he finds himself among a crew of recovering addicts and rehabilitated thieves, all African-American. At their welcoming banquet, The Dean, a cryptic, gnomic combination of Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize, offers a menacing initiation of the seven men and women into his secret society, the Unlikely Scholars. Their jobs at the library require the Scholars to scour newspapers for strange, buried, back-page stories, accumulating evidence for an alternative narrative of American life.

In these marginal stories The Scholars read and listen for the inscrutable directions of The Voice, a disembodied spiritual force. We discover that the Unlikely Scholars come to Vermont because The Voice has urged each away from self-immolation toward some version of personal redemption. The Scholars are validating their redemption by illuminating The Voice’s murmuring guidance.

Ricky’s scholarly proficiency improves and his true mission emerges: teamed with field agent, Adele Henry, Ricky is sent to the Bay Area in order to eliminate a rogue Scholar, Solomon Clay, who is set to reveal the Washburn’s agenda.

LaValle’s fiction claims that “…doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.” That is, we rely on compelling, enabling fictions to narrate our loves, joys, and disappointments. Yet doubting the narrative structures we participate in helps us hold our self-righteous deceptions at bay.

LaValle’s work sports hand-me-down finery from Ralph Ellison, Gayl Jones and Ishmael Reed. All three have produced novels that Ellison would call “big ole Negro lies”; their works artistically confront both the material tragedies and comic absurdities of black American life. LaValle settles himself on American literature’s “Liar’s Bench” with Big Machine: His big novel grinds up our delusions about reality, spirituality, and the principles of fiction.

Walton Muyumba

Two Slivers from Coetzee's Summertime

2009-07-29T16:58:00.008-05:00

In the two most recent issues of The New York Review of Books the editors have excerpted elements from J. M. Coetzee's new fiction, Summertime. As usual the work is slyly autobiographical fiction -- mysterious, delicious, and superb. Below, I've dropped two long quotations from the excerpts. Coetzee's experimentation is compelling for he continues to invent ways of thinking about literary aesthetic invention and philosophical inquiry as the same action.

"Notebooks 1972-1975"

16 April 1973

The same Sunday Times which, in among exposés of torrid love affairs between teachers and schoolgirls in country towns, in among pictures of pouting starlets in exiguous bikinis, comes out with revelations of atrocities committed by the security forces, reports that the minister of the interior has granted a visa allowing Breyten Breytenbach to come back to the land of his birth to visit his ailing parents. A compassionate visa, it is called; it covers both Breytenbach and his wife.

Breytenbach left the country years ago to live in Paris, and soon thereafter queered his pitch by marrying a Vietnamese woman, that is to say, a non-white, an Asiatic. He not only married her but, if one is to believe the poems in which she figures, is passionately in love with her. Despite which, says the Sunday Times, the minister in his compassion will permit the couple a thirty-day visit during which the so-called Mrs. Breytenbach will be treated as a white person, a temporary white, an honorary white.

From the moment they arrive in South Africa Breyten and Yolande, he swarthily handsome, she delicately beautiful, are dogged by the press. Zoom lenses capture every intimate moment as they picnic with friends or paddle in a mountain stream.

The Breytenbachs make a public appearance at a literary conference in Cape Town. The hall is packed to the rafters with people come to gape. In his speech Breyten calls Afrikaners a bastard people. It is because they are bastards and ashamed of their bastardy, he says, that they have concocted their cloud-cuckoo scheme of forced separation of the races.

His speech is greeted with huge applause. Soon thereafter he and Yolande fly home to Paris, and the Sunday newspapers return to their menu of naughty nymphets, errant spouses, and state murders.

To be explored: the envy felt by white South Africans (men) for Breytenbach, for his freedom to roam the world and for his unlimited access to a beautiful, exotic sex-companion.

"Undated Fragments"

The next day, on his way to Acme, he is caught in a rain shower. He arrives sodden. The glass of the cubicle is fogged; he enters without knocking. His father is hunched over his desk. There is a second presence in the cubicle, a woman, young, gazelle-eyed, softly curved, in the act of putting on her raincoat.

He halts in his tracks, transfixed.

His father rises from his seat. "Mrs. Noerdien, this is my son John."

Mrs. Noerdien averts her gaze, does not offer a hand. "I'll go now," she says in a low voice, addressing not him but his father.

An hour later the brothers too take their leave. His father boils the kettle and makes them coffee. Page after page, column after column they press on with the work, until ten o'clock, until his father is blinking with exhaustion.

The rain has stopped. Down a deserted Riebeeck Street they head for the station: two men, able-bodied more or less, safer at night than a single man, many times safer than a single woman.

"How long has Mrs. Noerdien been working for you?" he asks.

"She came last February."

He waits for more. There is no more. There is plenty he could ask. For instance: How does it happen that Mrs. Noerdien, who wears a headscarf and is presumably Muslim, comes to be working for a Jewish firm, one where there is no male relative to keep a protective eye on her?

"Is she good at her job? Is she efficient?"

"Very good. Very meticulous."

Again he waits for more. Again, that is the end of it.

The question he cannot ask is: What does it do to the heart of a lonely man like yourself to be sitting side by side, day after day, in a cubicle no larger than many prison cells, with a woman who is not only as good at her job and as meticulous as Mrs. Noerdien, but also as feminine?

For that is the chief impression he carries away from his brush with her. He calls her feminine because he has no better word: the feminine, a higher rarefaction of the female, to the point of becoming spirit. With Mrs. Noerdien, how would a man, how even would Mr. Noerdien, traverse the space from the exalted heights of the feminine to the earthly body of the female? To sleep with a being like that, to embrace such a body, to smell and taste it—what would it do to a man? And to be beside her all day, conscious of her slightest stirring: did his father's sad response to Dr. Schwarz's lifestyle quiz—"Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you?"—"No"—have something to do with coming face to face, in the wintertime of his life, with beauty such as he has not known before and can never hope to possess

Walton Muyumba

Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie: Compression and Dazzle in the Short Form

2009-07-25T13:02:00.006-05:00

The Thing Around Your Neck
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Random House
240 pages

Dallas Morning News
21 June 2009

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie embodies a literary cosmopolitanism as expansive and mellifluous as her name: reared in Nigeria and college-educated in the US, she offers tales that make world literature from American fictions. Adichie sprinkles Igbo into English as if spicing jollof rice, finding her Nigerians in Lagos, Nsukka, Philadelphia, and New Haven.

In The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie’s third book and first story collection, the author maps narrative possibilities for examining postcolonial Nigeria, the haunting ramifications of civil war and government sanctioned terrorism, and the aching process of immigrant acclimation to the United States.

These stories explain the consequences of the era Adichie describes in her Orange Prize-winning novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Yellow Sun is a zaftig, Tolstoyan novel about intellectuals, political idealism, love, and betrayal in the midst of the Nigerian-Biafran War (1967-1970). Adichie’s close character observations, contrapuntal plotlines, and pointillist documentation of war’s ravages make the elegantly polished Yellow Sun intense, staggering reading.

Adichie’s new stories are cooler tonally, while maintaining an intimate focus on political realities and characterization. Thirty-seven years post war, reconciling with phantoms, James Nwoye, the protagonist/narrator of “Ghosts”, recalls that immediately afterwards Biafrans “hardly talked about the war . . . It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra. Even Ebere (my wife) and I, who had debated our first child’s name, Zik, for months, agreed very quickly on Nkiruka (for our second daughter): what is ahead is better.”

However, in stories like “Ghosts” and the outstanding title story, Adichie suggests that what lies ahead or abroad may not offer protections from history’s indignities. In “The Thing Around Your Neck”, Akunna explains her decision to immigrate to the US by describing her disdain for her father’s willingness to degrade himself before rich Nigerians. As she reveals this to her white American lover, he takes her hand in empathetic comprehension. But Akunna retreats: “You shook your hand free, suddenly annoyed, because he thought the world was, or ought to be, full of people like him. You told him there was nothing to understand, it was just the way it was.” Using the second person point of view, the narrator floats away from her own story as if regarding another’s life; thus Adichie lets the reader feel Akunna’s experience of observing and being observed simultaneously.

Throughout, Adichie displays strong control of the short form. However, measuring these stories against her other works (Purple Hibiscus [2003] and Yellow Sun), her passions and powers are better served by the novel’s roominess. The collection’s long closing story, “The Headstrong Historian,” is a perfect representation of the author’s great imagination and sentence-level skills, and the inadequacies of the short story for her narrative concepts. Chronicling a Nigerian family across several generations --nineteenth-century British colonialism to twentieth-century nationalism -- the story seems too short by half even as Adichie’s abilities to compress and drive the narrative dazzle us.

Walton Muyumba

Eisenberg On The Short Story's Special Qualities

2009-05-22T22:47:00.007-05:00

In the middle of her recent review-essay, "The World We Live In," Deborah Eisenberg unfurls a two paragraph thesis on the philosophies girding up short form fiction. Appraising Wells Tower's story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Eisenburg argues:

One can get into a terrible snarl talking about the matter of narrative, but it's hard to avoid the subject entirely when considering a collection of short fiction, partly because the stories are likely to vary in their aims, partly because there's no overarching plot on which to hang the discussion, and partly because good stories suggest questions about what plot, or (to use the words interchangeably here) narrative, is. That is to say, a plot, of course, is an account of a sequence of events, but how are those events related— really—and why do we believe (when we do believe) that they are?

It could be said, as an expedient, that the plot of a given piece of fiction is a phantom organism—an embodiment and enactment of the author's preoccupations and obsessions—and that this organism is what allows us to experience the piece's deep pleasures: its insight, its beauty, its mystery, its power—whatever are the essential properties of the piece; that a plot, like a grammatical structure, is an expression of innate relationships in the mind. Long fiction has room to fill things in whereas short fiction, due to the stringency of selection it imposes, tends to demand a more active role from the reader, who must supply a chargeable receptivity, a medium in which compressed signals can unfold and send an associative web of sparks flying out between them. And it seems to me—to make yet another broad and possibly somewhat rickety generalization—that because a work of short fiction must so quickly and unerringly present evidence of the world that lies under its surface, the plot of a good story is likely to be a stranger, more volatile, and more evanescent sort of thing than the plot of a novel.

A Brief Interview with Colson Whitehead

2009-05-03T12:24:00.008-05:00

Art + Seek
1 May 2009

Walton Muyumba: After using satire and comedy so affectively in your earlier novels, why did you choose to set that approach aside in Sag Harbor?

Colson Whitehead: More important than satire is humor, a sort of cockeyed view of the world. Each book has a different way of allowing me to make jokes about the world. I grew up on Richard Pryor and George Carlin, and their love of veering between the tragic and the comic. When I got to college I started reading writers like [Samuel] Beckett and [Thomas] Pynchon . . . or Ralph Ellison, I found a new way of channeling that impulse. While I am poking fun at the structures of business, racism, the government, and mass media to varying degrees in different books, I’m always trying to capture the horrible and the beautiful at once. In Sag Harbor I’m talking about a teenage boy, I’m talking about the horrible and the beautiful in his day-to-day experience. So it’s pop music, it’s a minimum wage job, hanging out with his friends, so the structure and content of the story is shaping how I’m talking about the culture.

WM:Was it difficult to shift away from the jocularity of John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt to Sag Harbor’s sentimental, un-ironic celebration of 1980s culture?

CW: There’s the sort of easy pop culture reference that makes everybody laugh. And then what I’m trying to do is use ’80s pop culture to illuminate Benji’s character and a certain way of looking about the world. So when I am talking about New Coke and Bill Cosby and The Cosby Show, I’m trying to find the emotional truth in these things as opposed to an easy reference. In terms of being sentimental (it gets a bad rap), but I think that it fits the tone of the book. If you look at The Colossus of New York [Whitehead's book-length essay about New York City] that sort of strain is there in my love of the changing city, what is still here, what is gone, and what remains, and that sort of shifting palimpsest of the city street. I think that accent is brought to the fore because I’m talking about a single character, Benji Cooper, and he becomes the focus for all these things. But I think it is there in the earlier fiction, but it’s maybe not as obvious.

WM:So in Sag Harbor, location (home) and personal identity are beneficially linked?

CW: The change self, the changing home, and the interplay: the dissolving border between yourself and the place in which you live. The city is you and you are the city. Benji’s Sag Harbor and Sag Harbor is he.

WM: Do you imagine that Barak Obama’s election and presidency will affect your discussion of race and African-American culture in the future?

CW: I’m out of sync with what’s going on the world. I started Sag Harbor five years ago, and blackness in the world has changed. In terms of where the country will be in five, six, 10 years . . . who knows what I’ll work on next and how it will fit into some sort of larger conversation about what it is to be black or what it is to be American. I have no idea what I’ll do next, so I have no idea how the changes in the world will feed it, impede it, or transform [my writing]. And it is sort of refreshing not knowing what I’ll do next. I don’t have the perspective and knowledge of what I’m actually going to be doing in the future to answer that.

WM:You’ve been very successful early in your career. What motivates you as a writer? And how will you maintain that focus as you develop your next projects?

CW: I want to make good art and want to help people understand the world more. I hopefully have something to contribute and in my books I can help people see and engage the world in a new way, given my perspective. I think the difficulty in finding a new project comes from learning something so different, like in Sag Harbor. I feel like I’ve done a certain kind of cultural work say in Apex Hides the Hurt or John Henry Days, and I have to find a new way of talking about how I feel about the world. So, that will come in time. If five years go by and I’m stuck, I’ll start to get distressed. But for now, I’m glad Sag Harbor is done and I’m enjoying the fact that people are getting it. You never know what’s going to happen to them once they hit the bookstores. I’m very fortunate that people seem to be responding to Sag Harbor.

Walton Muyumba

Sag Harbor: Colson Whitehead's Summer Dreams

2009-05-03T11:31:00.007-05:00

Sag Harbor
by Colson Whitehead
Doubleday Books
273 pages

Dallas Morning News
26 May 2009

Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel, is a scratched and sampled mixtape, love-letter to the Long Island town and African American summer enclave; to ‘80s culture and The Cosby Show; to hip-hop and upper middle class African American culture; to the revelations of adolescence, black homeboys, and brotherhood.

For Benji Cooper, the fifteen year-old protagonist/narrator, the summer of 1985 is the season of his discontent: childhood is demystified as a neophyte’s understandings of adulthood are ignited. Sampling W. E. B. DuBois’s conception of double consciousness (“an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body”), Whitehead makes Benji’s soul into a wrestling match among his worries about class striving, black identity, sexual desire, and definitions of masculinity.

Benji’s grappling begins with his younger brother, Reggie, and their quiet, painful separation into individual selves. The brothers, close in age and attitude, had once constituted a set: “Benji ’n’ Reggie, Reggie ’n’ Benji.” But in Sag Harbor 1985, Reggie recedes from his brother to assert his “Reggie-ness”. As with any love-letter then, beyond longing and nostalgia, there’s sorrow in Benji’s narrative -- the sadness of sibling de-coupling and emotional distance.

Whitehead has most often been read as a hip, erudite (slightly nerdy), satirist -- an artist whose jaunty, jocular early novels describe our culture’s churnings, capitalism’s manipulating forces, and the machinations of identity with such casual élan, that we’ve taken his literary temperament as an indication of his explaining that nothing’s awry in our American lives. But in all his writing, Whitehead yokes irony with lamentation as if to mark the dispiriting consequences of being hyper-aware of culture, consumption, and personal identity.

Whitehead forgoes plot in favor of Benji’s riffing, digressive narration. When it’s right, Benji’s voice surges and sings, sifting pop-culture debris down to nuggets of realization:

“The Cosby Show . . . forc[ed] us to reconsider our position. That was some version of ourselves on the screen there . . . What did it mean when millionaires said, ‘I’m going for a little bit of that Cosby thang’? Hungering for validation after all they’d accomplished. If the sitcom had this much influence, then there was nothing to make fun of . . . The box contained things of value. Where did that leave us when we looked around our own homes? The reception was terrible.”

In spots Benji reminds me of Yunior, Junot Diaz’s narrator in the exceptional novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. However, Whitehead’s novel isn’t propelled by narrative tension and the rambling style is ultimately an impediment to the kind of formal control that defines Diaz’s novel.

In fact, Sag Harbor is a much weaker work than Whitehead’s manicured and labyrinthine, The Intuitionist (1998); or his muscular tour de force, John Henry Days (2001); or his taut, sardonic disquisition, Apex Hides the Hurt (2006).

And yet, Sag Harbor illustrates the author’s artistic maturation: whereas Whitehead’s wise earlier works often resist service to our sentiments, his clever new novel stokes our emotions and intellects at once.

Walton Muyumba

The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism

2009-04-18T12:51:00.008-05:00

Though often thought of as rivals, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka shared a range of interests, especially a passion for music. Jazz, in particular, was a decisive influence on their thinking, and, as The Shadow and the Act reveals, they drew on their insights into the creative process of improvisation to analyze race and politics in the civil rights era. In this inspired study, Walton M. Muyumba situates them as a jazz trio, demonstrating how Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s individual works form a series of calls and responses with each other.

Muyumba connects their writings on jazz to the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, particularly its support for more freedom for individuals and more democratic societies. He examines the way they responded to and elaborated on that lineage, showing how they significantly broadened it by addressing the African American experience, especially its aesthetics. Ultimately, Muyumba contends, the trio enacted pragmatist principles by effectively communicating the social and political benefits of African Americans fully entering society, thereby compelling America to move closer to its democratic ideals.

“This is an extraordinary book. Walton Muyumba’s pathbreaking account of Ellison, Baraka, and Baldwin’s aesthetic theories and the connection between those theories and African American politics is creative and convincing.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Princeton University

“Walton Muyumba’s compelling book shows how Ellison, Baldwin, and Baraka drew upon ‘the music’ as they rethought the contours of blackness and recast the pragmatist pursuit of democracy in ways that were beholden to African American experiences and aesthetics. By doing so, The Shadow and the Act helps us to better understand the profound ways that jazz, as an intellectual as well as a creative practice, shaped African American letters and its gendered politics during the second half of the twentieth century.”

Eric Porter, University of California, Santa Cruz

This volume will be published on 1 July 2009. Pre-order your copy today from any of these fine booksellers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell's Books

University of Chicago Press

Walton Muyumba

Intellectual Stimulus Package

2009-02-09T18:10:00.007-06:00

Sunday Commentary
Dallas Morning News
8 February 2009

For enthusiasts of American literature, word of John Updike's sudden death was quickly accompanied by the sour news that The Washington Post has decided to shutter its Sunday pullout book section, Book World, in favor of a less-expensive online version.
I'm not nostalgic about some mystical set of "good old days" when all Americans read books and were smarter, nor do I wish to suggest that there are no longer writers devoting time and energy to producing excellent criticism in print. While space for literary criticism is dwindling in newspapers, there are still great outlets for engaging reviews in magazines like The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.

In the current issue of one of these remaining outlets, Book Forum , Walter Benn Michaels argues that American literary novelists must begin writing works that interpret and challenge the economic status quo. Michaels, an American literature scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago, has been suggesting for more than a decade that American literature is rife with artists interested only in affirming identity (be it ethnic, racial or gender) rather than addressing the real American problem, class inequality.

Specifically, because novelists like Philip Roth and Toni Morrison – two contemporaries of Updike – have been concerned with producing works that narrate the rise of their particular groups into the American prosperity game, they've ignored the fact that market economic systems have maintained pernicious, insurmountable socio-political obstacles more significant than articulating Jewish, black or feminine identities.

I would argue, however, that artists like Roth and Morrison are important because they write beautiful sentences and tell powerful stories, while remaining suspicious of both identity politics and American market mythologies. (See Roth's American Pastoral or Morrison's Paradise.) Even Updike – who, to my mind, was the chief novelist-chronicler of 20th-century middle-class mores and upward mobility – seems to link Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death in Rabbit at Rest (the ending of his masterful tetralogy of Rabbit novels) to the artery-clogged, depressed, indulgent, overweight state of American society at the end of the 1980s.

Whether you read Michaels' analysis of the relationship (or lack thereof) between American literature and the American market economy as wise or misleading, it is clear to me that now, more than ever, we need an intellectual stimulus package. That is, we need our best artists, our most agile arts critics and our arts aficionados to initiate the reinvigoration of American imagination. While Michaels' essay has appeared in one of our best literary journals, he's writing to a small, coterie audience compared with those of newspapers.

When run with skill, enthusiasm and panache, newspaper sections like Book World have been the traditional weekly spaces for these discussions. They have acted as communal zones where readers could find intellect-charging arguments about history, art, music, literature and pop culture from critics who introduced new, significant authors, reminded us of the old, masterful minds and modeled for us fine analytical habits.

As the economy rapidly withers and the newspaper industry heaves in declining health, a consequence is that the common, accessible printed pages for initiating discussions that Michaels wants about class inequalities or how to invent alternative systems of commerce have been scuttled.

Perhaps a bailout for artists and critics, and even book reviews, would be best served by funding the development of the percolating but unpolished forums for serious intellectual/literary critique growing online. Through newspaper or magazine portals – or working independent of those structures – editors and writers could use funds to construct challenging yet practical discussion about economics and history, the arts and sciences.

At this point in the decade, it seems high time to refigure our minds with powerful literary narratives; smart, experimental ways of describing our various identities; learning to use elegant, poetic language for describing, prizing and sharing more democratic freedoms. Arts criticism seems one place to get that stuff while holding market-driven gangsterism at bay. Which reminds me: Updike seems important, sitting slightly apart from his literary generation, not because he was a good novelist or a master of the short story form, but because he was a great critic of literature, art and American culture.

The best tribute to Updike is not any obituary, whether his or Book World's, but a discussion of how we can engineer this significant reinvention of our intellectual and literary spaces

The Notorious B.I.G.

2009-01-16T17:45:00.001-06:00

"Big Poppa": You must have been asleep the last 15 years if you don't know all the words.

I'm not scared to say it: Even if we only talk about "Ready to Die," Biggie was a masterful poet (yes, in the Dylan/literary sense of lyrical genius) of late 20th-century American material excess, masculinity (and masculine sexual license), and Brooklyn black experience. "Ready to Die," a Rimbaud-like burst of gunfire prosody, presents more psychological complexity, emotional range, and controlled self-awareness than most albums of the last 20 years. While I'm still gonna see the movie, there's no way the biopic, "Notorious", can actually stand up to the disc's brilliance.

"The Jazz Ear", or How to Grow Big Ears

2008-12-15T16:24:00.004-06:00

The Jazz Ear
by Ben Ratliff
Times Books
256 pgs.

Dallas Morning News
14 December 2008

In the jazz world, the ability to hear, conceptualize, compose or improvise with idiosyncrasy and sophistication requires big ears.

Ben Ratliff is one of America's best and biggest-eared music journalists. For instance, in his excellent Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007), a critique of John Coltrane's algebraic and mythical musical prowess, Mr. Ratliff combines jazz history, cultural analysis and music theory into an elegant narrative.

With The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music, Mr. Ratliff has collected pieces from his New York Times series, "Listening With," refashioning the conversations into 15 contiguous chapters that illustrate the importance of both classical and pop music to modern jazz composition and improvisation. More important, Mr. Ratliff's questions often steer his responders from music theory to emotional response to sentimental remembrance, teaching readers how to open their ears and listen in new ways.

Using predetermined song set lists to focus their conversations, the journalist and the jazz musicians become tutors: speaking in languages that seem derived from their own musical compositions, the saxophone geniuses Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter offer up halting, elliptical and cosmic declarations about how to discern modern concepts at work in Kyrgyzstani folk music and Vaughn Williams symphonies. Listening to the Count Basie Orchestra, a specific Jo Jones high-hat pattern spurs Roy Haynes, legendary bebop drummer, to unfold the history of modern jazz percussion.

And a repeated baritone saxophone figure on a recording of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca" allows the Cuban pianist, Bebo Valdés, to detail exuberantly the genetic lineage between Afro-Cuban rhythms and bebop swing.

Mr. Ratliff quells his voice throughout, amplifying it only to contextualize a musical reference or to briefly critique an artist's career. His quiet presence lets readers "listen" without interference when artists such as Branford Marsalis (riffing excitedly on Igor Stravinsky's use of jazz progressions) or Pat Metheny (enumerating the delights evoked by Glenn Gould's expert touch) begin discussing how the riches of classical music inspire him to create on his instrument the kinds of melodic phrases "that would be believable if somebody were singing them."

Mr. Ratliff's taste for eclectic, dynamic forms of jazz is illustrated in the array of interviewees, a group chosen for both their musical virtues and enjoyable personalities. The set lists overlap and intersect, revealing connections and impressions like interwoven family genealogies: Charlie Parker, for example, exerts an avuncular or brotherly influence on Mr. Coleman, Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, Hank Jones. Subsequently, these musicians and others such as Mr. Shorter, Bob Brookmeyer and Paul Motian, become elder kin to Guillermo Klein, a young, rising composer-arranger, merging bebop with Argentine musical forms, Maria Schneider, the Brookmeyer-trained composer-conductor, and Joshua Redman, the prodigious saxophonist.

For music enthusiasts wishing for bigger, better ears, Mr. Ratliff's interviews trace crossing pathways to new ways of listening to and enjoying jazz.

Walton Muyumba

Chacarrichard

2008-12-15T16:21:00.001-06:00

Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos

Vicious Pink: A Review

2008-12-12T16:13:00.014-06:00

Vicious Pink
Centraltrak, Dallas
29 November 2008 through January 20, 2009

Fluent Collaborative/... might be good
12 December 2008

Vicious Pink, the playfully ostentatious new show curated by Mary Benedicto at Dallas’s CentralTrak Artists Residency, might also have been called Viscose Pink because of its thematically thick, semi-fluid consistency.

Val Curry’s amalgam of melted plastic and stuffed animals illustrates one constant throughout the show: the documentation of states of change or process. Curry’s vertical piece, learning (2008), greets viewers immediately upon entering the gallery space and evokes the fierce softness of the show’s title. The overall shape of learning references the heart muscle, the integrated, pink engine of human motion. Balancing atop a fat tree branch braced by steel pipes, plush animals ride Curry’s frazzled plastic forms, hanging between motion and stasis. The shifting mode of the piece suggests simultaneously the artist’s desire for integration, formally and materially, and an awareness of the effort and complexity inherent in and required by such integration.

Two corollaries to learning are Kirsten Macy’s outdoor installation, A Girl Named Ham & the Sportsman Royal (2008) and LeeAnn Harrington’s video Falling Into the Night (2008). In the boldest, largest work in the show, Macy has painted the interior of a Sportsman Royal van pink and wired it for sound, broadcasting a female voice narrating Ham’s story. The eerily lit, abandoned vehicle, once Ham's home, with a beaten mattress jammed in the back cargo area and clothes, shoes, cups, eating utensils and leafy branches strewn about its insides, offers a record of a life vacated, its remnants decaying. In evocative contrast with Macy’s work, Harrington’s channels four video loops of a young woman’s falling and rising into the quadrants of a large LCD panel. Rather than noting a state of decline, Harrington’s static repetitions give rise to moments of caesura in the clips, when the body is between rest and motion, an acknowledgment of the body in process.

While Curry, Macy and Harrington hesitate in a liminal zone, Jesse Meraz’s Ball in THA Hall (2008), a large, blinking ornament, composed of bubble-wrap, packing tape and construction paper and tagged with dime-sized blue lights, forces interaction between the piece and patrons. In order to venture down the long corridor of the residency, one must negotiate the pink ball, a vicious/viscose obstacle, rolling it from one side to the other, or up and down the hall to create passage. On opening night, this piece caused a circling stir of delight and confusion as folks wondered out loud whether they could touch it.

Lanie Delay’s Network IV (214-824-9302) (2008) also invites viewers to participate in making the piece. Delay has arranged four pinkish/flesh-toned analog telephones at the compass points around a large circle of wrinkled telephone line. Connected to the residency’s communications circuits, the phones ring, their red lights flashing, when calls come through the main line. At the opening reception, patrons were encouraged to field calls, but many resisted, choosing instead to circle and stare as the phones clamored. Staring pensively, an index finger on his lips, a towheaded toddler finally picked up a receiver, spurring others to answer the bells as well.

Benedicto’s smart, well-arranged show highlights brightly a range of talented Texas artists interrogating form, stasis and motion in various mediums. Thus one departs with the ironic sense of having both traveled and loitered, of having participated as both voyeur and tableau. Vicious Pink invites visitors to both appraise and swim within the stream of profuse contingencies between art making and art appreciation.

Walton Muyumba

Ella Fitzgerald S(w)ings "The Lower East Side Blues"

2008-12-05T17:34:00.027-06:00

ELLA FITZGERALD: Making Stories

Oxford American
Southern Music Issue Number 10

“Sunshine of Your Love” (Live) [1968]
Written by: Jack Bruce, Pete Brown, and Eric Clapton

Sunshine of Your Love
(Verve, 1970); reissued in 1996

Musicians: Ella Fitzgerald (vocals),
Tommy Flanagan (piano), Frank de la Rosa (bass),
Ed Thigpen (drums), Allen Smith (lead trumpet),
the Ernie Heckscher Band (horns)

“I’ve had some wonderful love affairs and some that didn’t work out. I don’t want to dwell on that and I don’t want to put people down, but I think all the fabulous places I’ve been, the wonderful things that have happened for me, the great people I’ve met – that ought to make a story.”

This year, as winter was ending, I saw an ex-girlfriend in Manhattan. On a frozen Tuesday night, on a quiet block in the Lower East Side, we met up like old lovers in a ballad. She’d chosen the spot, a late-night lounge with enough brown liquor and candlelight to generate intimacy. Leaning and waiting against a parked car outside the lounge, I spotted her as she stepped up out of the subway, but she didn’t recognize me and walked past. Thinking this to be a sure sign that the meeting was a mistake, I hesitated to call her name.

The last time I had seen her was in a bitter-cold Washington, D.C., winter in 1999. We had gone to Blues Alley to hear Mose Allison. The blues were in order that night, because over the course of the show, all the love between us seeped away, notes in diminuendo. After the set, we parted in near silence at a Metro stop, no hugs or kisses, unwilling, or unable, to explain the sharp wedge forcing us apart.

Breathing in the icy New York night, I felt that heavy silence again, the weighty memory of affection lost. For me, the best memories of our affair will always center around the time we fell in love in the springtime in Central Virginia, which was verdant and awash in honeyed light. Our nights were lush with wine and we lulled ourselves into love with Ella on the front-room stereo. Nostalgia and sentimentality about old romances are clichés, but how else do we understand this thing called love?

Though many listeners point to the genius collection, The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books, as the apex of Fitzgerald’s career, her best individual album is Like Someone in Love, released in 1957. The album is a major aesthetic statement: On such tracks as “There’s a Lull in My Life” and “Midnight Sun” (where she’s buoyed by Stan Getz solos) and the title cut, Ella elaborates her subtle skills of interpretation and rhythmic agility at the height of their powers. On the fourth track of the record, Fitzgerald spins an ethereal version of Irving Berlin’s “I Never Had a Chance,” stretching out over lyrics about painful realization: “I knew we’d have to part / For I could always reach your lips / But I could never reach your heart.” A similar understanding came to me at the Metro stop in D.C.—the lovely cocoon of romance we’d lived in before had broken away; we weren’t kids in love any longer.

On that breezy Lower Manhattan street corner, when I finally spoke her name nervously, she stepped toward me. As I shook her hand, even after years and lives apart, I felt, and could see in the depths of her brown eyes, an awkward sensation of joy and excitement. I wanted a song to narrate the moment, give it some modernist poetic reality. But so many jazz ballads remark on love consummated or love in recession; we needed something about the love of a friendship reborn.

Of all the adjectives attached to Ella Fitzgerald’s quintessential ballads, reticence is not among them. But what fascinates me about Fitzgerald was her ability on some numbers to be the vocal measure of swinging beauty and, simultaneously, emotionally distant. When singing about romance in decline, Ella’s allure is the almost aloof elegance of her style. But when singing about love in ascension, the light-headed feeling of overwhelming desire, Fitzgerald is both joyous and regal. You can hear these elements on her cover of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”

In the late 1960s, trying to stay on the pop charts, many jazz vocalists recorded rock songs. Fitzgerald’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” cut in 1968, was an attempt to answer the challenge of keeping a fifty-one-year-old, black, female jazz singer relevant at a cultural moment when the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Four Tops, the Beatles, the Supremes, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, and Cream were dominating the charts and squeezing high-quality jazz and pop singers like Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Andy Williams off the scene.

On Cream’s classic Disraeli Gears, “Sunshine of Your Love” is the crossroads, a song that prophesizes the sound of 1970s rock while detailing in miniature the powerful influence of the blues and postwar jazz on popular music. Like so many ’60s British rock bands, Cream’s sound was built on the foundational pillars of electrified Chicago blues. And though Ginger Baker has been lauded for his jazz-influenced drumming, it’s Eric Clapton who’s always improvised with true jazz imagination. Listen closely: Slow Hand builds his precise, articulate, beboppish solo on “Sunshine of Your Love” from a slick quotation of “Blue Moon,” slicing the line with smooth Sonny Rollins–like “in the cut” timing.

When Ella Fitzgerald recorded “Sunshine of Your Love,” she couldn’t exactly return the improvisational favor to rock & roll. Instead, she had to remake herself into a scat-singing rock-music earth mother. The band blows the Clapton riff as if it were a James Bond movie theme: shaken, vodka-tipsy, but swaggering and ebullient. You can hear Fitzgerald searching for the edge in the lyric, that place where she can mine whatever is urgent or sexy or essentially bluesy about the song. When she wails over the second chorus of the song, she’s merely straining to be hip. But then a magical thing happens in the bridge—the band, which seems bored, begins its own wailing, answering Ella’s. As she vamps the lyric, whooping and screeching, Tommy Flanagan’s trilling piano fills behind her, and she suddenly seems to be directing the band, charging them to loosen up, to romp, to play with joy.

Sitting in the bar on Ludlow and Rivington with my former girlfriend, I wanted to start humming lines from the ballad “What’s New”: “What’s new?/ How is the world treating you?” But then she said, “You look the same,” and we spent the next hours laughing, exchanging family news, reminiscing. We drank until closing time, moments before dawn took over the city, and stumbled to the wobbly downtown train to Brooklyn and the sleepy-slow uptown run to Harlem. Parting at the subway stop, I couldn’t help recalling our last painful separation at the D.C. Metro in Foggy Bottom, or those even older times in Charlottesville and Bloomington, when, longing to stay together, we had to let go. Watching her descend the steps to the platform, I wanted to call out, say something corny but romantic, like “I’ll always be lost in a fog without you.” But I stopped myself from that. She turned with a smile, waving goodbye one more time, and I stood again, for a moment, in the sunshine of her love.

Walton Muyumba

John Leonard, Farewell

2008-11-09T15:45:00.002-06:00

As much as I enjoy the work of literary journalists like Ruth Franklin, Wyatt Mason, Daryl Pinckney, and James Wood, none of them rival my abiding affection for the late John Leonard. Leonard, who died on Wednesday night after a battle with lung cancer, had a musician's command of the language, American English, a professorial command of the critical idiom, an amateur's ethic of diversity (he produced critiques of books, television, and American culture), and, with writers and their books, he had heart enough to be demanding and generous, damning and forgiving.

Leonard's death is a tough loss personally because he has been a model for the writing/intellectual life that I want to lead and the bad-ass sentences I want to craft, the ideas I want to conceptualize, and the aptitude that I want my essays to display. Many a Sunday I've gotten up at the crack of dawn specifically to watch him disseminate his elegant cultural critiques on CBS's Sunday Morning. It would have been great to hear him wax on about the significance of Barack Obama's impending presidency. But, alas . . . . However, I do love his last critical gesture: Leonard was tough enough, leftist enough, citizen enough that on his last full day of life, Tuesday, 4 November 2008, he got out of his deathbed to go cast his vote.

Below I've dropped a few of my favorite paragraphs from Leonard's reviews.

John Leonard on John Edgar Wideman:

New York Times
27 November 1981

HERE are two new books - a collection of related short stories and a novel about a few of the characters we meet in those short stories - by John Edgar Wideman. They are original paperbacks, and Avon is to be congratulated, and I wish Mr. Wideman the most massive of markets because he is a fine writer.

But his earlier books had hard-cover publishers, back when being a black writer was fashionable. Can it really be that whole chunks of people, black or female or Jewish or Italian or Sapphic, go in and out of style according to a phase of the cultural moon? The black exceptions - a brilliant Toni Morrison, a strong angry Toni Cade Bambara, an Alice Walker and a Paule Marshall, an Ishmael Reed who writes wherever he wants to - are obvious. This, however, is a handful from a multitude. Are we going to spend the next 30 years, as we've spent the last 30 years, waiting for Ralph Ellison to be less invisible? Is each aggrieved sector of our society permitted a single stiff spokesman? Is there in the 1980's a new ''esthetic'' of bad faith?

Mr. Wideman pertains because, like so many gifted moderns, he is ambivalent. He grew up in black Pittsburgh and got out via a Rhodes scholarship. He has been teaching ever since. He says out loud that he is ''too self-conscious'' to like watermelon; he would prefer James Joyce. And yet he has been drawn, in novels like ''Hurry Home,'' back to the ghetto, as if to testify. He has become a black Boccaccio in search of ''a history we could taste and chew.'' He is much more than an adjective. That his two new books will fall apart after a second reading is a scandal. Of Spoons and History

Leonard on Dale Peck

New York Times
Sunday Book Review
18 July 2004

So Western literary culture went off the tracks with J. Joyce, smashed up entirely with D. DeLillo and deserves wholesale junk-heaping, from the modernists who merely twinkle-toed in the theater of war, one blood war after another, to the post-toasties who can't even tell anymore if they're being ironic. In place of the word games, Peck would bring back ''something ineffable, alchemical, mystical: the potent cocktail of writer and reader and language, of intention and interpretation, conscious and unconscious, text, subtext and context, narrative, character, metaphor'' -- novels ''illustrating the tension between society and the self,'' written by the old-fashioned sort of Author-God who ''feels guilty about causing his characters to suffer so much and offers them apologies in the form of epiphanies or the satisfaction of inhabiting a meaningful narrative.''

Scratch a commissar and you get a philistine. But I haven't mentioned Sven Birkerts, have I? Never mind DeLillo, who is smarter than all of us (except maybe Powers). Or Pynchon, whose Mason and Dixon are certainly more memorable than Peck's Martin and John. Or Whitehead, whose ''Intuitionist'' is a levitating marvel. Or Barnes, whose ''Flaubert's Parrot'' has been cunningly ignored. Never even mind Stanley Crouch, who dumped on Toni Morrison and so deserves finding out exactly what it feels like. But Peck devotes more than 30 contemptuous pages to Sven Birkerts, for the street crime and mortal sin of generosity in literary criticism.

Think of it: with a whole world of worthy targets -- Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, Eli Manning, Shell Oil, Clear Channel, Condé Nast -- he mugs a man who has spent the last quarter of a century staying poor by reviewing other people's books, who has read more widely, warmly and deeply than the vampire bat fastened to his carotid, who should be commended rather than ridiculed for a willingness to take on a review of a new translation of Mandelstam's journals, and who, even though he wrote a regrettably mixed review of a book of mine in these pages, deserves far better from the community of letters, if there is one, than Peck's bumptious heehaw: ''With friends like this, literature needs an enema.''

It's the relish on this hotdog that turns the stomach. He promises never to do it again, but the very title ''Hatchet Jobs'' reeks of market niche, an underground service like fumigation or garbage recycling. His alibi for being unfair is that he's a novelist, and they lie a lot. But his reputation would have long since earned him the right at his various pillboxes and lemonade stands to review any book he chose, out of hundreds of good ones needing discovery among tens of thousands cynically published, and yet he almost always seems to pick a punching bag, or draw his own bull's-eye on the passing chump. This is lazy, churlish and even demagogic.

Leonard on Joan Didion:

"The Black Album"
The New York Review of Books
20 October 2005

If Joan Didion went crazy, what are the chances for the rest of us? Not so good, except that we have her example to instruct us and sentences we can almost sing. Look, no one wants to hear about it, your death, mine, or his. What, as they listen, are they supposed to do with their feet, eyes, hands, and tongue, not to mention their panic? If they do want to hear about it—the grief performers, the exhibitionists of bathetic wallow, the prurient ghouls—you don't want to know them. And maybe craziness is the only appropriate behavior in front of a fact to which we can't ascribe a meaning. But since William Blake's Nobodaddy will come after all of us, I can't think of a book we need more than hers—those of us for whom this life is it, these moments all the more precious because they are numbered, after which a blinking out as the black accident rolls on in particles or waves; those of us who have spent our own time in the metropolitan hospital Death Care precincts, wondering why they make it so hard to follow the blue stripe to the PET scan, especially since we would really prefer never to arrive, to remain undisclosed; those of us who sit there with Didion in our laps at the oncologist's cheery office, waiting for our fix of docetaxel, irinotecan, and dexamethasone, wanting more Bach and sunsets.

I can't imagine dying without this book.

Leonard on Toni Morrison:

New Books
Harper's Magazine
November 2008

Rebekkah, who has fled her hateful family and the ferocious Christian sectarianism of seventeenth-century England for marriage to a stranger in the New World wilderness of Mary’s Land, has reason to wonder after so much silence, absence, vacancy, and death: “I don’t think God knows who we are. I think He would like us, if He knew us, but I don’t think He knows about us.” Maybe not. But Toni Morrison most certainly does. Her astonishing new novel, A MERCY (Knopf, $23.95), has both X-ray eyes and telepathic powers, not to mention tree rings, ice caps, pottery clocks, carbon clouds, a long memory, and a short fuse. It dreams its way back to 1682 and a primeval America before racial hierarchies had been chiseled in stone, when “blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes—freedmen, slaves and indentured” still made common cause against the local gentry; when orphans, strays, “waifs and whelps” banded together in makeshift families against crows, wolves, weather, and cruelty; when ordinary men and women hoped that courage alone would prove enough to win dominion over their own rude lives.

The Dutch-born farmer and trader Jacob Vaark, husband to Rebekkah, will take Florens, a little black girl in silly shoes, as partial payment of a debt owed to him by a despicable Portuguese trader in human flesh. He is beseeched to do so by Florens’s enslaved mother, who must see something in Jacob’s face: not mercy but “a mercy”; not grace but decency; not a miracle bestowed by God but a favor or indulgence volunteered by a fellow human being. What happens to “love-disabled” Florens on Jacob’s farm—along with Lina, who caws with birds, chats with plants, sings to cows, and drinks rain; vixen-eyed, black-toothed, slow- witted Sorrow, rescued from opium sleep and the sea by mermaids and whales; the woodsmen Willard and Scully, indentured into servitude forever; the freedman blacksmith who might save the farm from pox if Florens can find him in time; and Rebekkah, a pillar of grief—is not a sentimental education. Nevertheless, illegally literate, Florens will write it down for us to read aloud: “My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done,” she says. But it does. Like Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Consolata, Violet, and so many other women we’ve met in Morrison’s pages, Florens is a siren, pulling brave hearts overboard.

Mother love: always an absolute in Morrison’s fiction, a terrible swift sword. Ancestors: a religion of owls and the African slave trade. The Middle Passage: commodities trading and shark bait. The world of work: caulking and tanneries, milking and manure, squash and chickens. Tables of food: wild plums, pecans, suet pudding, baskets of strawberries, haunches of venison, roast swan. Out-of-doors: “trees taller than a cathedral,” “birds bigger than cows,” “a sky vulgar with stars,” “boneless bears in the valley,” blood on the snow. The whiplash lyricism: widows and raisins, mugwort and periwinkle, pine sap and cornhusk dolls, “the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.” Somehow all add up to a sensuous omniscience that is practically Elizabethan.

Thank you John Leonard for the excellence of your life's work.

Walton Muyumba

We Major!: Obama Celebration Music

2008-11-06T17:25:00.001-06:00

Inspired by Mark Anthony Neal's beautiful post "Obama, Obama! The Just-Past 11:00pm Playlist"

Abide With Me -- Thelonious Monk

Black Man -- Stevie Wonder

Maiden Voyage/Everything In Its Right Place -- Robert Glasper

Rising Up -- The Roots

Out of This World -- Ella Fitzgerald

Master Teacher -- Erykah Badu

Beautiful Brother Of Mine -- Curtis Mayfield

Stand! -- Sly and the Family Stone

Comin' Up -- Vijay Iyer

Rejoicing -- Ornette Coleman

My Petition -- Jill Scott

Say It (Over and Over Again) -- John Coltrane

Black President -- Nas

We Major -- Kanye West

The People -- Common

Pride -- U2

How I Got Over -- Mahalia Jackson

Lift Every Voice -- Jason Moran

Golden Age -- TV on the Radio

Nasty Bonus Tracks

The Day the Niggaz Took Over -- Dr. Dre

Toney Sigel aka The Barrel Brothers -- Ghostface Killah

Short Bursts from Junius #2: 11 Days Before Election Day

2008-10-24T16:31:00.001-05:00

I haven't published any new essays in a few months. I've been finishing some projects that I hope to share here soon. In the meantime, I thought it appropriate to drop some "science" on the very dangerous ideas involved in labeling a group or an individual "terrorist."

While there are definitely assailants or combatants who deserve the term, it seems that in these late days of the 2008 presidential campaign the term "terrorist" is being used as a code word loaded with the silent (unspeakable?) narratives of the American political moment: whiteness, national history, and American citizenship.

Simply put, there are white folks who only understand American citizenship in relation to whiteness itself. They don't think that black Americans, Latinos from the Caribbean or the southern Americas, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, or immigrants can actually be citizens.
Even more, the "threat" of a non-white president’s being elected has forced many into existential crisis about the prospect of answering to a Commander-in-Chief who is a product of "miscegenation": Barack Hussein Obama's blackness suggests to them that being white may no longer mean being superior to all others; whiteness will no longer represent the de facto definition of American identity or citizenship within or without the United States.

A larger complexity arises when one considers that large swaths of Americans believe that Senator Obama is secretly an Arab and a Muslim planning to collude with jihadis in the subversion of the American government once in office. When the McCain/Palin ticket suggests that Obama has been "pallin' around with terrorists" like Bill Ayers (and it is only recently that we've begun talking openly about late Sixties radicals as terrorists), the real insinuation, the notion stoking racist rabidity across the country, is that Obama, a Kenyan-Kansan born and raised in Hawaii, is actually not an American, but a Middle Eastern terrorist.

Though Frank Rich's insightful column, "The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama," suggests that Americans are more concerned with their economic circumstances than with Obama's ethnic background, I suggest that we pay attention to the ways in which the McCain/Palin tactics have given license to racists and their desire to make Obama invisible, if not to make him disappear permanently.

In his 2002 essay “Whose War: The Color of Terror,” John Edgar Wideman explains that the language of terror and terrorism has finally been removed the definitional field for noting specific tyrannical governing practices or specialized wartime tactics, leaving us to understand terrorism as “pure evil.” Wideman argues further that this conceptualization is born from the age-old story of how power works between racial/ethnic groups set in opposition to each other:

To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist's gaze confers upon the native. Dismissing the possibility that the native can look back at you just as you are looking at him is a first step toward blinding him and ultimately rendering him or her invisible. Once a slave or colonized native is imagined as invisible, the business of owning him, occupying and exploiting his land, becomes more efficient, pleasant.

What this has justified finally, is that against all other narrative possibilities, “only one point of view, one vision, one story, is necessary and permissible, since what defines the gaze of power is its absolute, unquestionable authority.” The rabid citizens who oppose Obama's candidacy, because they hate or don't trust Negroes, on the grounds that he's not a true citizen, or because he is actually an undercover agent for Hamas and Hezbollah, are actually interested in maintaining the political (and psychological) power of the gaze. They don't want the narrative of Americanness as whiteness to be disrupted.

What is most fascinating about the spike in the race/ethnic baiting, vitriolic speech is that it is vacant of any political argument. The discourse has been infused with language that resists integrity, thus it resists narrative and argument. That is, rather than telling honest stories about the differences between their policy positions and Obama's, the McCain/Palin ticket has decided to squelch pointed exchange (argument) in favor of stoking the most dangerous, counter-democratic, white supremacist claims against African American citizenship.

James Wood and How Fiction Works (to Make You Feel, See, and Think)

2008-08-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

How Fiction Works
James Wood
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
288 pages

22 July 2008

James Wood’s third book of literary criticism, How Fiction Works, is not a manual for critical theorists; Wood rejects patently theoretical approaches to literary analysis that ignore aesthetic pleasure in favor of philosophical deconstruction in its various forms.

Though Wood esteems critics like Roland Barthés and Gérard Genette, he argues (here and in his previous books, The Broken Estate [1999] and The Irresponsible Self [2004]) that post-structural and postmodern cultural theorists have often pulverized literary texts, plundering their pages, particlizing knowledge and imagination, and excising the author – sweeping the leavings into the dustbins of antiquity. For the most part, literary academics are the only ones still practicing this kind of critical raiding.
However, Wood is theoretical in his fashion. In How Fiction Works Wood practices and promotes “close reading,” defending literature’s structural sanctity. This style of literary analysis, he suggests, best explicates how literary novelists illuminate the processes of lived experience.

Paying close attention to narration, detail, dialogue, and character, Wood discourages us from reading fiction as reality’s representation while teaching us to read realist fiction as the artful distortion of human action. That is, literary novelists want, at bottom, readers to imagine actions and inhabit experiences that force them to interrogate our own. Wood backs up his provocative assertions with his intimidating and encyclopedic knowledge of Western literary history, especially French, British, and Russian fiction.

Wood argues that novelists ask readers to serve as mute interlocutors, silent priests, if you will, listening to the confessional soliloquies of characters like Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. But overhearing the thoughts of novelistic characters eventually shifts readers out of the rectory and into the “heavens.”

Omniscient, outside and above the text, readers are not asked to like or dislike characters, they are asked to follow the novelist’s careful analysis of human consciousness, sympathizing with and accepting the sharp complexities of being.

Given the power to hear Raskolnikov contemplating murder, not as eloquent actor on stage or poetic repentant, but as a regular man thinking, we, readers, have replaced the theatrical spectators and the Biblical God as the judgmental but ultimately, forgiving audience of human experience.

Wood, then, is making a philosophical argument for fiction as the best way to gather understanding about humanity. The book might have also been called, “How Fiction Works to Make You Feel, See, and Think.”

For Wood novelistic realism is the most pleasurable and dexterous form of literary art. Some will grumble, chafing against Wood’s disinterest in science fiction, outré postmodernism, magical realism, or, he recent coinage, hysterical realism. He’s an acolyte of classical modernism; it’s unsurprising that among his exemplars of high realism are novelists like Gustav Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Roth. Their fictions express truths about the intricacies of psychology and the life-invigorating pleasures of art.

Whether he’s noting a blazing metaphoric phrase or parsing a free indirect description of a character’s stream of consciousness, Wood narrates his own enriching verities in this gracefully written, witty, and hyper-intelligent critique.

Walton Muyumba

A truncated version of this review appeared in the Dallas Morning News

Train Whistle Blues: Albert Murray, the South, and Omni-American Genius

2008-07-07T18:00:00.018-05:00

South To A Very Old Place

Oxford American Magazine
"Best of the South"
The Best Book About the South

7 July 2008

Charlottesville, Virginia, fall of 1995: I’m a twenty-three-year-old grad student from Indiana, and Charles Rowell, my professor and the editor of the literary journal Callaloo, sits behind his desk, going over the inadequacies of my semi-passable essay on Ralph Ellison’s use of the blues in Invisible Man. His message is that I know nothing about the South, the blues, or blackness. “How can you write about the blues without absorbing all of Albert Murray?” he asks, incredulously. When I explain that I’ve never heard of Murray, Rowell passes me a look over the rim of his glasses that signals: end of meeting.

In response, I devour both Murray’s fiction (Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree) and his nonfiction (The Omni-Americans, The Hero and the Blues, Stomping the Blues, and The Blue Devils of Nada) and am invigorated by his critical disquisitions on the power of Negro cultural rituals. But for all of Murray’s Armstrong-invented, Basie-orchestrated, Ellington-refined, gutbucket stylistic elegance and brio and his ever-so-thorough theorizing on modernist literature, it’s the alchemical improvisational-sounding vernacular of South to a Very Old Place that constantly revolves on the Charlottesville soundtrack of my memory.

Murray’s theme is that one can’t go home again because “things ain’t what they used to be…[and] things never are (and never were) what they once were.” This is a Thomas Wolfean cliché that Murray effectively pits against a Faulknerian cliché: that the past is always present. In structure, South to a Very Old Place is a travelogue and memoir, wherein Murray charts the physical regions of his youth and the invisible locations of his imagination. But it is really an exuberant amalgam of history, sociology, cultural studies, and fieldwork. In Atlanta, Murray spies Hank Aaron looking “barber-shop-sharp,” walking “that old be-sports-shirted, high-shine morning-before-the-game” gait, writing in a rhythm that evokes Earl Hines’s unfettered piano mastery. At Tuskegee, where street names and campus buildings are “faulknerian as in faulknerian landscape, faulknerian character and situation,” Murray recalls the beginnings of both his lifelong friendship with Ellison and his modernist literary education. In Mobile, what he calls his “briar patch,” Murray renders the brass-section “call and response” repartee of the Negro barbershop with plunger-muted, wha-wha zeal, recording the rejection of Black Power racialism and decoding the various linguistic meanings and uses of “nigger.” At the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Murray delivers a “mood indigo” elegy for the Reverend King and the Movement’s disintegration.

For Murray, the next step after achieving the moral high ground of non-violent politics is to promote individual “existential improvisation.” Reading the South’s historical complexity with intelligence and sensitivity, Murray explains that African-American identity is not fait accompli, but rather the realization that personal identity, like a long Coltrane solo, is always in the process of being improvised from one’s relation to history and cultural context. While some will argue with Murray’s assumptions and conclusions, his thinking is never simpleminded and always compelling.

Rereading Murray’s pages now, I remember cutting across the verdant waves of the Lawn toward the Rotunda, heading to the Corner, that zone of grad-school names that resound like whistle-stops on a daily route: Littlejohn’s, White Spot, the Rising Sun Bakery, The Biltmore Grill, Higher Grounds, Café Europa, and Plan 9. I imagine Jefferson at Monticello, surveying Charlottesville, sketching designs for the University, young Sally Hemings in his thoughts. I recall seeing, through summer’s bourbon haze, Faulkner’s ghost rattling doorknobs along Rugby Road (or was it Poe wandering the Lawn’s West Range?). And among variously hued Charlottesvilleans, I see Negro features cross-faded with Welsh profiles, products of previous generations, of slaves and gentlemen farmers reaping the Commonwealth’s precious fecundity.

If Professor Rowell’s finger-wagging imperative to learn the functions of the blues and the meaning of the South in order to fully comprehend African-American identity makes sense (and it does), then South to a Very Old Place is an essential guide, an all-comprehending handbook for negotiating the South and understanding African-American identity.

Walton Muyumba

The Garden of Last Days: Sex, Terror, and Deadends

2008-06-22T17:00:00.015-05:00

The Garden of Last Days
Andre Dubus III

Dallas Morning News
22 June 2008

The Garden of Last Days is actually, accidentally, two separate novels linked through a potboiler plot about a child abduction in Florida during the weekend before 9/11, starring April, an ambitious stripper; AJ, a down and out CAT operator; and Bassam, an anxious Muslim terrorist.

In one novel, April, due to her baby sitter's illness, must bring to work her daughter, Franny. Hoping that the child will sleep, April puts Franny in an anteroom of the Puma Club during her shift.

Meanwhile, AJ, estranged from his wife and child, has come to the club seeking the solace of sexual illusion. Thrown out early in the evening for touching a dancer aggressively, AJ returns to the Puma in a drunken, angry stupor to seek retribution. Instead he finds Franny wandering the parking lot alone.

Author Andre Dubus III, a National Book Award finalist for House of Sand and Fog, intersperses what ensues with April and Bassam's strange "champagne room" interaction, in which they spend the beginning third of Garden talking about identity and morality.
In the linked novel, Mr. Dubus, pulling from real events – some 9/11 hijackers did visit Florida strip clubs before their attacks – has assembled the elements for a stunning novel about terrorism. Had the author focused specifically on Bassam, he could have developed a forceful work. But the potential power of the narrative about this Florida terrorist cell has been cut by Mr. Dubus' inability to draw Bassam's psychological battle (martyrdom versus the living world) with significant depth.

Creating a full, believable picture of the terrorists' motivations is not Mr. Dubus' problem alone; all American literary novelists who've attempted to illuminate the roots of fundamentalist vengeance have tended toward narrow stereotypes rather than examining the complexities of character psychology.

Mr. Dubus, who studied sociology at the University of Texas, repeats the canard that given access to female sexuality, especially that of American or European women, the terrorists might not have wanted to steal airplanes or blow up buildings. But Mr. Dubus never clarifies what triggers Bassam's zealotry. Islamic martyrdom is worth understanding. Continuing to claim that access to sex weakens the terrorist's resolve depoliticizes Bassam's anger, making his problems those of a "lonely boy."

Unlike most 9/11 novels, Garden is, laudably, not about upper-middle-class characters. Inspired by "dirty realism" and writers such as Raymond Carver and Larry Brown (to whom the book is dedicated), Mr. Dubus' chapters are brief, sometimes two or three pages long, keeping the story's movement brisk. He forgoes linguistic flair, hewing close to the skeletal elements of storytelling. However, it is a big-boned frame: The work comes in at 533 pages.

Mr. Dubus' swift clip also means rapid shifts among the characters' perspectives. Just as the reader is developing a relationship with a key character, another arrives three pages later.

Rather than feeling the intricate weave of consciousnesses the author hopes to portray, Garden's structure directs readers' attentions toward the missing connections among April, AJ and Bassam. In the end, readers will be left feeling as if they've sat with someone switching randomly among three separate television channels.

Walton Muyumba

What is racism?

2008-05-27T16:52:00.001-05:00

Though I have recently posted about racial paranoia, racism, and Barack Obama's candidacy, it is only today that I've been asked to reconsider the definition of racism or to even consider that racism might be "over."

I've probably always been working with a definition like the one developed by the Anti-Defamation League. According to the ADL racism is "the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. Racial separatism is the belief, most of the time based on racism, that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another."

While the sense of one group's superiority over others is crucial to this definition (especially since that sense of superiority is often derived from long-term economic and political oppression of those others), equally important is that once justice and political equality begin cracking the foundations of racism, the supposedly superior group is often unwilling to disabuse itself completely of the stereotypes and cultural narratives that have maintained the benefits of the oppressive social arrangements.

So, even though plenty of American citizens have managed to stop participating in overt racism against Negroes or Latinos or Asians, notions of racial superiority or racial separatism, fueled by stereotypes and negative cultural narratives, still drive our social habits and attitudes.

Both the Obama and Clinton candidacies have revealed that Americans do not know how to generate truthful and nuanced discussions about the sophisticated ways in which we've learned to negotiate or evade the thorny realities of race (including whiteness) and gender (masculinity, femininity, or transgender) in American social life.

In George Packer's recent deconstruction of Republican conservatism, he illustrates that political strategists like Pat Buchanan have been using the codes of racial superiority and racial separatism in extremely sophisticated ways for the last forty-five years. Packer explains,

Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

The Nixon White House didn’t enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. “Positive polarization” helped the Republicans win one election after another—and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.

(An aside: unfortunately, this may also explain the basis for some of Senator Clinton's campaign strategies -- bomb dropping "hardworking white Americans" and "Robert Kennedy's assassination." The first Clinton uses to describe the racially paranoid white Americans whose votes she can count on because they cannot tolerate Obama's blackness; the second, though couched as a historical basis for her continued participation in the race, is also an insinuation that something terrible may happen to Obama or that something scandalous may afflict his campaign. And almost certainly the sort of feminism that her campaign seems to be rallying around on is focused on white womanhood -- not the hybrid feminism championed by June Jordan or Gloria Anzaldua.)

In the following interesting episode of Bloggingheads, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury examine, albeit briefly, whether racial paranoia about Obama is actually racism by definition or Buchananite practice. I've not come to any conclusions about the arguments that McWhorter, a linguist, and Loury, a sociologist, disseminate in this short clip, although I don't believe that racism is "over." In fact, as this presidential race continues I believe that we will need to interrogate our social arrangements and our ways of speaking about them closely -- the requirement to do so rises daily.

Walton Muyumba

American Racism

2008-05-22T15:50:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama may be diving headlong into the Democratic nomination and, possibly, the Presidency of the United States, but he is also diving face first onto the rock-hard foundation of American racism and xenophobia.

Just as I was finishing another blog post earlier today, I came across this NY Times article, "As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have Doubts" . The report suggests that race and family bloodlines will ultimately sway and heavily influence many white voters in Florida when it comes time to consider who to choose as American's next political leader. It is also clear, as a recent post by Ernest Hardy illustrates, that white Americans are willing to speak fearlessly and assertively about their rejection of Obama's candidacy based of his blackness and supposed Muslimness.

Check out the assortment of conspiracy and hearsay floating among South Florida voters about Obama:

"Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

South Florida is “the most concentrated area in the country in terms of misinformation” about Mr. Obama, said Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, the co-chairman of the Obama campaign in the state. His surrogates can put these fears to rest, Mr. Wexler said, by simply repeating the facts about Mr. Obama — his correct biography, his support for Israel, his positions on other important issues."

As South Florida resident Ruth Grossman puts it early in the article, "'They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color.'"

Walton Muyumba

Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia

2008-05-22T14:34:00.009-05:00

Recently the late author, Norman Mailer came to mind as I sat considering the machinations of whiteness and masculinity in American life. In 2003 Mailer, one of America's most famous white men and "white Negroes," predicted our current national condition of manifold social, political and economic decline in his acerbic essay "The White Man Unburdened." Though many of his critiques of African Americans and women foundered as dubious (if not plain wrong), Mailer was always a reliable critic of white American masculinity.

In an effort to analyze our wanton and exuberant Iraq war-lust, Mailer points to our craven desire for manipulated and televised displays of dominance as a major factor for the drive to the military invasion of Baghdad. But behind what Mailer calls the "Advertising Science"'s trumpeting the war was a "minor but significant" effort to charge the enthusiasm of white American men, raising them again to the top of the national social order. Understanding that conservative white men had taken "a daily drubbing" from feminists and the women's movement, while also losing their stake in major professional sports to black male genius, Tiger included, Bush, Mailer argues, played to their addiction to victory by using "sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag" in order to develop "many psychic connections with the military." According to Mailer, what Bush has always counted on is that "if we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology," because, at least, "we knew we were likely to be good at [war]."

I think that this is the same kind of ethos that Mark Anthony Neal described recently as "hypermasculinity." Writing href="http://www.newsone.com/article/the-chicago-shootings"> about the recent rash of gun violence and murder in Chicago , Neal returns to an analytical claim he's been making for a few years now: that the possibility of performing a sensitive, analytical brand of American masculinity, especially African American masculinity, is being oppressed by conceptualizations of wartime hypermasculinity — all power and domination. While public policy has "failed to protect many of these young [black] men," the worst failing has come from "our most representative and influential model of said hypermasculinity: the current President of the United States."

Though we could point without hesitation to Bush's flawed representation, we must also indict black folk for failing their responsibilities to police their communities against gun violence and "to develop more on-the-ground strategies to equip young black men to make life-affirming choices." Yet these actions may not be enough unless "we fundamentally dismantle the way we think of manhood in this country," whether we are reading Bush or 50 Cent as our representative man.

It true that we've become "insensitive" to the violence around us. We've become accustomed to hearing or reading news of young Negroes dropping each other in the street like so much litter. The spiritual vacuity represented by these murders is part and parcel of the emptiness that now pervades American culture from the greed-induced decline in the market to a presidential-political season riven by dishonesty and disingenuous chatter.

I think that those murders in Chicago, and the killing in our streets across the country, have brought the botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq back home to us, and now we must come to terms with blood on the scarecrow, blood on the plow, blood in the streets, and blood on our hands. In his analysis, Neal implies but does not speak of the all-white elephant in the room that Frank Rich essayed about in his Sunday Times column. Namely, that this Bushian hypermasculinity is elemental to our leader's specific brand of white American masculinity.

Ultimately, we can connect the intelligence of Neal and Mailer and see that Bush's stand against intelligent analysis or forthright empathy with others in favor of market and military domination (even while evidence of these failing ideologies lie strewn about), his emptiness is representative of a retrograde and degrading masculinity.

In the wake of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, Mailer, writing with flourish and acuity, explained a rising American vacancy:

Be it said: the motives that lead to a nation's major historical acts can probably rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of its leadership. While George W. may not know as much as he believes he knows about the dispositions of God's blessing, he is driving us at high speed all the same—this man at the wheel whose most legitimate boast might be that he knew how to parlay the part-ownership of a major-league baseball team into a gubernatorial win in Texas. And—shall we ever forget?—was catapulted, by legal finesse and finagling, into a now-tainted but still almighty hymn: Hail to the Chief!

No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of our leadership. And now that the ardor of victory has begun to cool, some will see how it is flawed. For we are victim once again of all those advertising sciences that depend on mendacity and manipulation. We have been gulled about the real reasons for this war, tweaked and poked by some of the best button-pushers around to believe that we won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact, the opponent was a hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were ebbing into old age.

As the social anthropologist John Jackson, Jr. has diagnosed so acutely, we are all under the stranglehold of racial paranoia, a malady that we refuse to discuss and that keeps us from being able to adequately analyze the workings of whiteness, let alone blackness.The problem, however, is that we refuse to face our racial paranoia . This paranoia also infects the way that Bush has attempted to deal (or not) with the intricacies of African American disaffection and Arab/Muslim terrorism. The Bush administration's inability to foment real opportunities for its own at-risk people on the domestic front speaks clearly to its inability to foment real change internationally.

Walton Muyumba

Short Bursts from Junius #1

2008-05-20T01:00:00.017-05:00

In addition to my own studio "instillations," I'll be blogging regularly in "short bursts" for Anne Bothwell's Arts + Culture, the arts website for KERA.

My first post presented a few choice comments by the powerhouse Dallas musician Annie Clark, a k a St. Vincent, about laptops, music making and the Internet. On her great album Marry Me, Clark's musical sensibilities stretch from pop études to jazz arrangements, while her vocals range from knowing ingenue to Seventies-styled female hipster (think Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Carole King, Carly Simon) to Billie Holiday-inflected knockout artist (hear her reference Lady Day on "What Me Worry"). Marry Me also proves Clark to be a sensitive multi-instrumentalist; her masterful guitar work (some strange, lovely turnings of Django Reinhardt, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Liz Phair) enthralls my ears especially. Along with The Reminder, Finding Forever, In Rainbows, and The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, St. Vincent's debut sits as one my favorite albums of 2007.

Find a taste of St. Vincent below:

Walton Muyumba

St Vincent -- Live at Other Music

2008-05-20T00:34:00.001-05:00

A blessing from St. Vincent: "Human Racing"

No Book: Wideman's Fanon

2008-03-25T20:01:00.008-05:00

23 March 2008
Dallas Morning News

Since John Edgar Wideman’s eighteenth book, Fanon, is inspired by the life and writings of Martiniquean psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, readers might expect a closely analyzed, fictionalization of his experiences.

But Wideman’s new work provides only intermittent bursts of narrative about Fanon. Around, through, and below those sections are narrative streams about Wideman’s failed attempt to complete his Fanon project; about Wideman’s imagined conversation with the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; about life in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh; about Wideman’s mother, Elizabeth, and his imprisoned brother, Rob; about Thomas, a writer working on his own flagging Fanon project.

The novel opens with Thomas, Wideman’s amanuensis, at home, daydreaming about the delivery of a severed head as he struggles to complete his manuscript, Fanon. The doorbell rings: Thomas receives an unsolicited package from UPS containing a severed head with an attached quotation from one of Fanon’s texts: “We must immediately take the war to the enemy, leave him no rest, harass him. Cut off his breath.”
Though an icon of the postcolonial era, Fanon, often labeled “an apostle of violence, hater of whites, spawner of terrorists,” is frequently misread and misunderstood by both his acolytes and detractors alike.

Rather than disseminating anti-Western, race-baiting ideologies, works like Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) present Fanon as a learned Western intellectual dedicated to eradicating narrow ideological thinking, racist social arrangements, and First World/Superpower imperialism.
In Fanon, as in his brilliant essay “Whose War” (2001), Wideman makes the case for interrogating our status quo cultural narratives about incarceration, American history, identity, and race.

In fact, Thomas’ mysterious, grotesque gift allows connection between Wideman’s literary-tangle and our current anxieties about terrorists and terrorism. But instead of instilling fear, Fanon’s impression on Wideman charges him to question the status quo definitions of “terror,” the suppression of dissent, and the techniques of literary storytelling.

Wideman populates the work with multiple voices in order to articulate various angles of imagining sparked by Fanon’s ideas. Slyly, Wideman marks his own literary attitude when he describes his mother’s style of oral storytelling –“flattening and fattening” point of view, cramming “everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a [Romare] Bearden painting.”

Bearden’s jazz infused art is an apt analog: Wideman sutures his patches of story together collage-like, threading Fanon’s theories on racism and political oppression into lyrical structures that swing like Ornette Coleman solos. Wideman practices radical, experimental modernism; his artistic forebears include Alberto Giacometti, Thelonious Monk, and Samuel Beckett.

Wideman’s linage makes Fanon a demanding, high-art novel. Though well-written and intelligent, Wideman’s discoveries that Fanon is “not a book” or that writing it is really “about identifying with others, plunging into the vexing mysterious otherness of them,” will frankly, unfortunately, leave some readers confused, others unmoved, cold. But the payoff for those who invest in Fanon, engaging (and analyzing) the promises (and pitfalls) of Wideman’s literary gamesmanship, is intense and liberating.

Walton Muyumba

Considering Baldwin's Genius

2008-03-13T10:57:00.004-05:00

"Human freedom is a complex difficult -- and private -- thing. If we can liken life, for a moment, to a furnace, then freedom is the fire which burns away illusion. Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country to take a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations."

-- James Baldwin "Nobody Knows My Name" (1959)

In an evening of conversation, interrogation, celebration and music, novelists Colm Toibin and John Edgar Wideman along with critics Manthia Diawara, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Michael Thelwell will discuss James Baldwin's works and his attempts to "burn away" the illusions surrounding our status quo definitions of American-ness, blackness, masculinity, and individual identity. This esteemed panel, along with moderator Walton Muyumba, will analyze Baldwin's various cultural roles -- fiction writer, critic, public intellectual, and African American icon -- debating his significance to our continued struggle for human liberation and true American democracy. We will end this provocative session with an audience-generated Q & A with the hope of creating in New York, at least for one evening, Baldwinian community and repartee.

Learn more about this event @LIVE from the NYPL

Understanding Obama

2008-02-23T12:37:00.007-06:00

Barack Obama speaking at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 7 February 2008

While the following essay does not clarify Barack Obama's policy positions, Darryl Pinckney's review "Dreams of Obama" does help to clarify how Obama has constructed himself. It is a critique worth ruminating over because Pinckney puts the lie to the notion, so casually dished out by political pundits, that America has entered a "post-racial" epoch. Pinckney elucidates, smoothly and intelligently, the significant and subtle ways that blackness informs Obama's public identity and our attraction to it.

Dreams from Obama
By Darryl Pinckney

A Review of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
By Shelby Steele
Free Press, 143 pp., $22.00

On a surprisingly mild January afternoon in Harlem, the day of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, my barber predicted that Senator Barack Obama would win by a landslide. He shut off his clippers and took the floor. "We need to pull for him. I'm sick of people saying, 'They'll never elect a black president.'"

A well-groomed man perhaps in his late thirties reminded us from the chair where his thick beard was being seen to that Obama won in Iowa, which was 98 percent white, and that he was about to win in another state that was 98 percent white. He said that he was ashamed of David Patterson and Charles Rangel, "our elected black officials," for not endorsing Obama, because no matter who got the nomination, the Democratic Party couldn't win the presidency without the African-American community, and therefore it didn't matter how angry at them for not supporting Clinton during the primaries anyone might be down the road.

I was going to point out that Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV had come out for Obama when an even younger man with a heavy Jamaican accent said from the chair where his head was being shaved that it all depended on how developed was your racial consciousness. This young man, the black sheet still tied around his neck, got up and preached about Obama's readiness. I thought of the scenes in Richard Wright's fiction that present the black barbershop as a place where black people reveal what they really think, because black barbershops are more private even than black bars. Denny Moe's, at 133rd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, with its polished tiles, pretty receptionist, and flat-screen TV for the play-offs, looked nothing like the small corner shop of my midwestern youth, but it served the same function as a forum.

The Jamaican youth, exhorting the few patrons in the large shop, seemed to represent the increased percentage of the black population who are immigrants. The youngest barber on the premises looked as much Latino, Italian, or Arab as black, one of those newfangled American youths about whom you can't guess anything, what nationality they are or where they're from, until you hear them talk or they tell you. He dapped fists with the dark-skinned Jamaican youth. I felt I was seeing a new youth vote, not just a reinvigorated black vote. There was a woman barber who went about her work and didn't join in. Because she was young, I wanted to assume that the "Obama for President" placard in the window spoke for her as well and that she would be annoyed or defiant if told that she was putting race before gender in supporting him.

In the past two presidential elections, black voters complained that they were taken for granted as the Democrats fought for the center ground only to find in both contests that there was no center, just one side or the other. On the side that black people for the most part were on, all too many of them found not enough polling stations in their neighborhoods, employers unsympathetic to their willingness to miss work in order to stand for hours on line at what polling stations there were, and challenges to their registration, never mind the shame of the Florida and then the Ohio results. However, dread of what the other side is capable of wasn't in evidence in my barbershop the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, not even the mutterings that maybe "they," whoever "they" are, will kill Obama if he goes too far. Instead, there was excitement, the sense that something historic was happening, that an unprecedented national narrative was taking shape.

I was struck by how far the story had moved since the autumn, when many were saying that Obama's campaign had unraveled. Back then, Senator Joe Biden was derided for calling Obama "articulate" and "clean," but George Will was speaking from the same assumptions and in a similar code when on a Sunday morning talk show shortly after Christmas he called Obama "a great getting up in the morning time," because he wasn't Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Obama is the assimilated black, such commentators want to say, as if an assimilated black didn't think about civil rights or, worse, as if civil rights were a narrow, passé issue. Meanwhile, Obama's candidacy is somehow separate from the success of black athletes and independent of the trust Oprah Winfrey's huge audience accords her. He is an expression of a general change, not the product of a star system.

Read more @ The New York Review of Books

The Route Home

2008-01-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

Someone Knows My Name
Lawrence Hill

30 December 2007
Dallas Morning News

In his historical novel Someone Knows My Name, the Canadian writer Lawrence Hill presents Aminata Diallo recalling her life from freedom in Bayo, West Africa to slavery on the Gullah Islands, in colonial Charleston, and New York City, and back to freedom in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and finally, London. Hill draws on literary slave narratives, especially the autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, for both structure and content. Hill uses Equiano’s memoir as a template for the novel and within the novel as Aminata’s inspiration for participation in the British abolitionist movement.

Jonathan Swift once chastised cartographers for making maps of Africa on which “savage-pictures” sufficed as knowledge of African people and images of elephants were placed “for want of towns.” The impulse driving Hill’s storytelling is to replace savagery with actual African experiences and fill gaps with actual geographies.

The novel opens in 1802 at the end of Aminata’s life, as she resides in London and writes, at the behest of the British parliamentarian William Wilberforce, her memoirs. Though the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade requires that Aminata’s story be shaped for proper British audiences, she refuses to relinquish control of her narrative, fearing the excision of her life’s most horrific incidents.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries narratives of former slaves were published under the “authenticating” guidance of white abolitionists. These white mediators vouched for the truth and worth of the works in introductory essays, fearing that black writers would be read as fabulists rather than autobiographers, as mythmakers instead of truth-tellers. In this scenario, whiteness, regardless of abolitionist agendas, was the sign of veracity, while blackness was the mark of deceit. As well, white readers could be protected from learning the dehumanizing machinations of racism and bondage. By giving Aminata “editorial control,” Hill revises the power relation between the black writer and her white sponsors.

Hill’s novel references the works of black poets and novelists who began publishing during the colonial period. Like Phyllis Wheatley, the first published black poet in the United States, Aminata must prove her literacy and literary abilities multiple times. Hill also leans toward contemporary fictional representations of African slave experiences in the Americas. But unlike the characters in Edward P. Jones’ The Known World who are stationed specifically in Virginia, Aminata’s route to freedom follows the geographical and existential contours of the black diaspora.

For all of Hill’s global perspectives and nuanced literary-historical references, Someone Knows My Name falls short of greatness. Aminata recounts slavery’s inhumanities without bitterness, as if human cruelty follows respiration. One suspects that the least of responses might be anger if not hatred, but she eschews both in favor of pride -- an admirable quality to oppose degradation. However, Hill draws Aminata in such bold stripes of nobility that her feelings about her abusers don’t register as complex human reactions: mapping human experiences requires a compass of greater psychological precision.

Walton Muyumba

Edwidge Danticat's "Brother I'm Dying"

2007-09-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Brother I'm Dying
Edwidge Danticat
Knopf

23 September 2007
Dallas Morning News

Edwidge Danticat delivers terrible news garlanded in fine prose. In fictional works such as The Dew Breaker (2004) and The Farming of Bones (1998), Ms. Danticat achieves precision alignments of lyricism and human devastation in her machete-cleaved descriptions of Haitian experiences, carving splintery pictures of contemporary Haiti and its diaspora.

Forgoing fiction, Ms. Danticat's new memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, inlays her family narrative with Haiti's thorny history of families dispersed and democracy deferred. Ms. Danticat juggles stories about her father Mira's slow, gasping death in Brooklyn, her uncle's ministerial devotion to the Bel Air section of Port-au-Prince, and her own transition from daughter and wife into motherhood in Miami.

But instead of writing an airless cliché about death-birth cycles, Ms. Danticat enlivens her father and uncle by gracefully detailing their sagacious attitudes about the nature of parenthood and parental sacrifices, about political commitment and personal responsibility, and about the benefits of fraternity and family. Geographically and psychologically situated between them, Ms. Danticat creates herself in the work by memorializing the lives and deaths of her two fathers.

In 1973 Ms. Danticat's parents migrated to the United States, leaving her and her younger brother, Bob, in the care of Uncle Joseph, their father's older brother. Living for eight years with Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, Edwidge and Bob learn to love their birth parents through long-distance phone calls and terse, hand-scripted letters from Flatbush, Brooklyn. Edwidge reads her father's "dispassionate letters" as ritualized evasions of the emotional minefields sown by his absence.

But Ms. Danticat does not want for fatherly affection and protection: Her Uncle Joseph raises her as his daughter. And when she and Bob finally leave Haiti to join their parents and younger brothers in Brooklyn, Edwidge wishes that her uncle "had cried torrents of tears, had thrown himself on the ground and made a scene, all the while forbidding us to go. He should have blurted out, in his old voice, the sudden revelation that I was really his daughter and that he couldn't live without me."

The book's construction evokes the delicate balancing act of Ms. Danticat's daughterly allegiances as she alternates her focus from father to uncle in the short chapters of the opening section, "He Is My Brother." Though the memoir opens with heart-rending family drama (news of Mira Danticat's terminal lung disease coupled with news of Ms. Danticat's pregnancy), the book's second section, "For Adversity," is bruising.

During political upheaval in Port-au-Prince, in October 2004, gang members destroy Uncle Joseph's church compound, threatening his life. Joseph, 81, flees Bel Air in disguise, seeking amnesty in Miami. However, escape lands Joseph in a deadly detention center. Ms. Danticat's lacerating narration of his rapid demise marks the final pages with anger, disgust and furious frustration.

Ms. Danticat's remorse is dampened by the birth of her daughter, Mira. The two Miras are photographed together once, a symbol of generational continuity. Although the elder Danticat quickly follows his brother in death, their daughter has written a beautiful and devastating testament to their lives.

Walton Muyumba

Passion and Activism: Adam Bucko and Mona Eltahawy

2007-08-14T14:15:00.000-05:00

At the end of July in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York I was lucky to meet two activist-intellectuals, Mona Eltahawy and Adam Bucko. Eltahawy and Bucko are passionate believers in human dignity, spiritual health, and political ingenuity.

Adam is the co-founder, co-director, and spiritual force of The Reciprocity Foundation, a group dedicated to helping homeless teenagers and young adults off the streets into financial stability and sustainable careers in the "Creative Economy." The project is built on the premise that learning about graphic and clothing design, spirituality and philosophy, literary and visual arts, promotion and marketing will enable individuals to use their particular skills to reshape their own lives while reshaping American society.

Bucko, a Polish emigre and former monk, sees the branches of social change rising from the roots of America's most significant resource, its young citizens. Helping young people develop cultural careers, Bucko believes, guides them toward richer existential and spiritual lives and trains them to use market strategies to accomplish political changes while avoiding crass commercialism or consumption. The hope is to plug a significant number of program graduates into the financial and corporate sectors where they can shift the goals of American capitalism toward eco-friendly production and the development of sustainable products. Bucko's students profit from his guidance -- his activism is focused especially on revitalizing the lives of young homeless people and American life in general.

Revitalizing American life is also about teaching American people to readjust the way we think of ourselves in the turbulent, rearranging international reality. In a recent column Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian journalist, argues persuasively that Western impressions of Islamic and Arab womanhood often work to diminish women who wear the chador or practice hijab rather than elevate them out of their perceived oppression in the Arab world. Recalling a performance by the Iranian artist Haleh Anvari about the symbolic power of images of the veil, Eltahawy writes:

The day I saw Anvari's spoken word performance in New York City, she held up a copy of that week's The Economist magazine for proof of her point, as if any were needed. Even intellect-heavy media, it seemed, could not resist illustrating a cover story on Iran with a woman in a black chador.

But it gets worse.

What's worse than one side trying to protect your soul as the other tries to rescue it, you ask?

How about a question from an American woman in the audience, who asked if she should wear a chador out of solidarity with Iranian women? It is difficult to outdo such a killer combo of condescension marinated in a deep-seated desire to liberate and rescue Muslim women - a ‘recipe' seasoned with good old ignorance.

Some might call me unkind for ripping into a well-intentioned inquiry about ways to help. But nine years of wearing a headscarf will do that to you. My years in hijab were great lessons in figuring out the saviours from the liberators. The liberators, to be fair, weren't always from the ‘West'. Sometimes they were fellow Egyptian Muslims who didn't like the hijab.

Just as importantly, the headscarf honed my skills at figuring out the honest from the patronizing and there's nothing like being spoken to IN A SLOW AND VERY LOUD VOICE AS IF ONE WERE DEAF to really get the blood boiling and make one want to yell: "I MIGHT COVER MY HAIR BUT I'M NOT STUPID."

Eltahawy's commentaries are antidotes to stupidity and incoherence. Rather than cheerleading for the West or the Arab/Muslim world, Mona deliberately analyzes the weaknesses of each side's propaganda while proffering proposals for reimagining ourselves as Arabness and Western-ness come closer in their tense co-mingling. Eltahawy strays far from ideology by maintaining her intellectual liminality -- though she knows London, Paris, New York, Jerusalem, and Cairo and speaks Arabic, French, and English, no place is home as such. As an intellectual, Mona maintains an uncomfortable relationship to each metropol (even her hometown, Cairo) and every language (even her mother tongue, Arabic) in order to sustain her "in betweenness." Intellectual liminality does not assume objectivity, some position above the fray. Rather, liminality forces an intellectual like Eltahawy to acknowledge the contingent influences played out in her attitudes and concerns. It strikes me that the liminal position is a spot from which one can spring into action, not a protective fall back zone. Eltahawy performs her activist intellectual role in her recent Washington Post essay about the Fortieth Anniversary of the Six Day War, "What Use Were All The Wars?":

If turning 40 isn't challenging enough, try preparing for this milestone when you're as old as one of the worst defeats Arab armies ever suffered at Israeli hands. Wars mark time and generations in the Middle East, so it's difficult not to take the humiliation personally.

My birth at the end of July 1967 makes me a child of the naksa, or setback, as the Arab defeat during the June 1967 war is euphemistically known in Arabic. There was no Summer of Love for us in 1967. We Children of the Naksa were born not only on the cusp of loss but also of the kind of disillusionment that whets the appetite of religious zealots.

My parents' generation grew up high on the Arab nationalism that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser brandished in the 1950s. By 1967, humiliation was decisively stepping into pride's large, empty shoes.

As the region marks the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israeli war, it's been a relief to be watching from another country, one where the stain of wars and defeat have marked several generations. But no relief or distance can silence this question: Is this what we fought all those wars with Israel for?

My country, Egypt, fought four wars against Israel between 1948, when the Jewish state was created, and 1979, when Egypt became the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Two of my uncles were rocket engineers during the 1973 war, the last conflict between the two countries.

Watching the Palestinians' whiplash descent into civil war in Gaza this summer, it is difficult not to question the past. Israel's occupation of Palestinian land has caused no end of misery, poverty and frustration for the Palestinians. It has even scarred the Israeli people's conscience. But occupation doesn't explain the reckless and often corrupt leadership that seems to be the curse of the Palestinians.

You might think society would have evolved differently in the two countries that have peace treaties with Israel -- Egypt and Jordan -- or that their treaties have rendered conflict out of the question. Think again.

Has Egypt or Jordan logged better records on human rights or political freedoms because of those treaties? Has development or progress taken the place of war? Ask the thousands of political prisoners and the silenced dissidents of both countries.

Egypt has been at peace with Israel for 28 years. For the past 25 years, we have had the same president, who has never visited Israel -- just the tip of the iceberg known as the "cold peace" between the two countries, which Egyptian officials usually blame on negative public opinion of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

We have subsumed so much into the Palestinian cause, channeling efforts that should have gone into development into a near obsession with Palestine, for little apparent good. Egypt boasts that it can talk to both the Israelis and the Palestinians, but even that has done little for its influence in halting intra-Palestinian fighting in Gaza.

I visited Israel for the first time in September 1997. Soon after, I moved to Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters. I wanted to see things for myself and not have to rely on the "official" narrative given by our media.

To this day I remain under the suspicion of my country's security services. When I returned to Egypt after my year in Israel, a state security officer -- whose nom de guerre was Omar Sharif -- held up a thick file that he said was full of orders to have me followed and my phone tapped.

My generation, sadly, might be lost to defeat and humiliation. If so, the best gift we can offer those coming behind us is clear advice: Don't walk in our footsteps, and know that the best way you can help Palestinians is to help your own countries.

The Arab leaders of the 1967 era are gone, replaced in Jordan and Syria by their sons; preparations for a similar handover are underway in Egypt. The Palestinians are led by the dangerously impotent combination of a weak president and a prime minister who is a religious zealot.

And still there is no Palestine.

Why has time stood still for the Arab world? The Syrian town of Quneitra is exactly as it was when it was destroyed after the 1967 war with Israel, untouched so that we never forget. Yet how many German cities, almost leveled during World War II, have been rebuilt and are thriving again?

The 1967 war was one of the many conflicts with Israel that bookend our ages. Looking around the Arab world today, we must ask: What were they all for? It's time to move on.

Interestingly, both Eltahawy and Bucko ask us to move on along routes that require us to re-identify ourselves individually and collectively. Bucko suggests that we can create space for the spirits to breathe and grow by rearranging our relationships to consumption. Our guides on the road to new understandings of commerce and trade are, ironically, formerly homeless young people, the very folks unequally traumatized by the old ideas of American capitalism. This path is linked to the redesigned political landscape, an America (and a West) that fosters legitimate partnerships with those in the world who have been continually traumatized by Western diplomatic policies and economic strictures. It is not a unilateral shift however; Eltahawy argues that the Arab/Muslim world must also reinvent itself, providing spaces for multiple identities to breathe and grow. Adam and Mona give us plans for mutually beneficial reinvention: programs for letting newness enter the world while allowing the integrity of our cultures and identities to prosper and multiply rather than dissolve under the grind of capitalism and war.

Walton Muyumba

Allison V. Smith: A Short Advertisment

2007-07-26T20:00:00.000-05:00

Good Records, Dallas TX
I like to visit the photoblog of my acquaintance and sometime instructor, Allison V. Smith. Her commercial work is eye candy, the popping colors she finds evoke the personalities of her subjects. Smith often shoots musicians because of her knack for capturing images that sing like choruses, rock like the blues, and blare like reverb-ed guitars.

The Polyphonic Spree

While she finds subjects everywhere, my favorite images of Allison's are from her on-going explorations of Marfa, Texas. They are, at turns, measured and exuberant. She loves the play of geometries -- intersecting neon lines, collages of irregular shapes, and rectangular, colored planes of natural or man-made spaces meeting at vanishing points.

Although Allison's efforts need little advertisment (her images speak loudly for themselves!), it is always important to promote and share the work of burgeoning, young artists. Smith is on her way to tremendous success. See her other works here.

Walton Muyumba

"Seeing Serra: MoMA 2007, Nasher 2006"

2007-07-20T15:15:00.000-05:00

MoMA is now running "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years," a stunning exhibition of the artist's new and selected works. While Serra's works are often deemed menacing, as they are situated on two floors inside MoMA and in its outdoor sculpture garden the pieces read rather like a strong poetry collection instead of thudding, intimidating structural force. The three new major works, Band, Sequence, and Torque Torus Inversion , anchor the exhibition with steel -- they are playful yet cerebral long lyrics, arguments about spacial imagination and material texture. The sixth floor galleries provide historical context for the new efforts. The smaller works, done in steel, lead, and rubber, are portraits of Serra as a young man. The older efforts are presented as a narrative of progress so viewers can observe the maturation of concepts and the merger of forms -- rubber's flexibility is vulcanized to mimic steel's turgid enormity with Serra eventually reversing the shift in the larger recent works, making steel appear as limp as silk and as elastic as rubber bands. Outdoors, walking through the sculptures, one notices that the seasonal elements -- sun, rain, heat -- have battered the weatherproof steel, shaving extra-sculptural art off of Intersection II and Torqued Eclipse: the rust stains on the marble piazza, the flaking steel, and the shifting colors of the material (silver to red to brown) are powerful minor chords in these tone poems.

"Seeing Serra: MoMa 2007, Nasher 2006" is a short photo-poem about two Serra sculptures Intersection II, part of the Serra retrospective, and My Curves Are Not Mad, housed in the Nasher Sculpture Center garden.

Walton Muyumba

J. M. Coetzee: On Lust and Democracy

2007-07-19T12:25:00.000-05:00

J. M. Coetzee has published an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year, in The New York Review of Books. One of my favorite writers because of his playfulness and intelligence, Coetzee's new work takes on sexuality and democracy, building the novel by merging a narrative about an old man's lust for a young woman with a philosophical excursis about modern democracies. As usual, Coetzee's philo-political writing is sharp and crackling and his narrative sensibilities are at high pitch: the drama of odd attractions, the old man's subtle but smarmy come-on, and the hint of erotic dangers . . . Ooo, how will it end? The novel will not be on book stands until January 2008 but below I've placed a few nuggets from the excerpt that made me nod, smile, laugh, and crave the arrival of Diary:

"She has black black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word. As for the bright red shift, that is perhaps not the item of attire she would have chosen if she were expecting strange male company in the laundry room at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Red shift and thongs. Thongs of the kind that go on the feet."

"As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things. Which she did not particularly like, did not want to evoke, though it was a tribute to her, to her beauty and freshness as well as to the shortness of her dress. Had it come from someone different, had it had a simpler and blunter meaning, she might have been readier to give it a welcome; but from an old man its meaning was too diffuse and melancholy for a nice day when you are in a hurry to get the chores done."

"'Spreading democracy,' as is now being done by the United States in the Middle East, means spreading the rules of democracy. It means telling people that whereas formerly they had no choice, now they have a choice. Formerly they had A and nothing but A; now they have a choice between A and B. "Spreading freedom" means creating the conditions for people to choose freely between A and B. The spreading of freedom and the spreading of democracy go hand in hand. The people engaged in spreading freedom and democracy see no irony in the description of the process just given."

"Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, suprapolitical discourse about politics is futile."

"Australia is by most standards an advanced democracy. It is also a land where cynicism about politics and contempt for politicians abound. But such cynicism and contempt are quite comfortably accommodated within the system. If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian."

Read the full piece here

Walton Muyumba

Martha Southgate and the Literary Blues -- Part 1

2007-07-04T13:19:00.000-05:00

What follows is a segment from a long essay in response to Martha Southgate's recent essay "Writers Like Me." Though I chide Southgate for not providing solutions for the problems she describes, my solutions aren't present in this fragment -- look for them forthcoming in Part 2 .

Martha Southgate’s essay about the lack of attention that middle-aged African American literary artists receive in the marketplace and on the review pages ran on Sunday, 1 July 2007 in the New York Times Book Review. Southgate argues that black literary artists are not properly pitched in the market, that they do not have the familial support that white writers do, that hyper-educated black folk (J. D.s, M. D.s, Ph. D.s, M. A.s) opt for lucrative careers in the professions rather than the arts, making the literary community diffuse, and finally, that racism still pervades American life, marginalizing black artists.

Southgate’s assessments will most likely be news to white readers and writers who probably never imagine what it’s like to be a black person let alone a black writer. (Let’s be serious though: most white Americans grow up, live around, are educated with, and socialize with other white people in ethnically cleansed enclaves. And even in culturally mixed neighborhoods, interactions between white folk and their non-white neighbors is often stiff, limited, or nonexistent.) Black writers are already quite familiar with Southgate’s lamentations. But Southgate’s piece disappointed me because she squandered an opportunity to place her struggle within a historical context of African American literary fiction writers and their difficulties in the publishing world. She compounds this misstep by failing to propose solutions to the ills of the literary “known world.”

Historically, black literary writers have performed a tense tango with white editors and publishers that illuminates much about the promotion of black literary works to reading audiences, the representations of blackness that publishers are willing to market, and the absences of middle-aged, mid-career African American literary writers. While all writers fall under the sway of editorial stewardship, the relationship between black authors and white editors has often symbolized the social and cultural racial divide in American life.

Literary scholar John K. Young argues that white publishers reinforce racial divisions by representing African American life as a “one-dimensional cultural experience.” Texts concerning “blackness,” Young explains, are

edited, produced, and advertised as representing the ‘particular’ black experience to a universal implicitly white (although ethnically constructed) audience. The American publishing industry, that is, has historically inscribed a mythologized version of the ‘black experience’ onto works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood.

Southgate leaves this historical reality out of her essay though its presence shadows the problem areas she questions. Rather than situate the essay as an investigation of the lack of middle-aged black writers making the literary scene, Southgate could have argued for African American writers who don’t make it into print because their works reject the mythologies of blackness, making them supposedly unsalable in the market. Analyzing the difficulties black writers have seeing third novels into print is a worthy endeavor, but making an argument for the reasons that some black literary writers are refused access to the market is a more important one because it illustrates the ways that race remains a major factor in American economic systems, social life, and cultural practices.

Rather than look unsuccessfully for black literary writers at cocktail parties, conferences, and on review pages, Southgate could have told us where black writers are. Writer Cherryl Floyd-Miller wisely posits that Southgate might find black literary writers in other places:

We are here, plugging away. Many of us are not published, but it doesn't mean we aren't literary writers. It means no one has given us that magical label. We are in classrooms teaching. We are in discussion forums online. We are in coffee shops. We are spouses, lovers and parents. We work as editors at publishing houses . . . we write in our heads on the subway ride home or while we are punching ten-key figures as clerks in accounting and tax offices. We are here!!!

Floyd-Miller’s reading rejects the idealized model of literary life: the big advance, wide-ranging and numerous serious reviews, the book tour, short-listing for the important awards, the Park Slope brownstone, the unfettered narrative-making, cocktail parties, keynote addresses at international conferences. But she could have pushed further, pointing out to Southgate that most American literary writers (playwrights, poets, and essayists included) -- even the white ones -- go unknown and under-regarded by the reading public.

Whatever support white literary authors receive comes from smatterings of readers across the racial spectrum. This is not true for black literary writers – who even have a hard time corralling the attention of black readers. Questions of audience are crucial to grasping the fights that African American writers often battle with white-owned publishing houses. By narrowing the range of black experiences available in the market, white publishers can better control the maintenance of the political and cultural status quo. That is, rather than present works that veer from accepted, salable narratives of blackness, white publishers continue to depolitize black literary fiction by framing it as aesthetically and politically marginal. However, the performance of black-owned publishers and black self-publishers is not better. The estimable poet and critic E. Ethelbert Miller notes that Southgate fails to discuss the relationship between what is marketed and the reading habits of Americans, particularly African Americans. Miller explains pithily that most black readers indulge in pork-chopped commercial works:

I could go into any bookstore in America and I could judge a black book by its cover. Many of the black books look like pork. And you wonder why we suffer from hypertension and problems of the heart? Remember when a "serious" black book had a Jacob Lawrence or Romare Bearden cover? Give me the old Downbeat blindfold test and I bet you I can always find a play by August Wilson. The next time you walk by a vendor in the street selling books - sniff the pork. The good chops are always on sale. Black romance readers are simply eating high on the hog. Those book clubs ain't nothin' but black picnics and family reunions. Will the "black" muslim food critics please step forward.

Funny and indignant, Miller’s appraisal does beg the question: if reading audiences are indulging their tastes for pork or narrow representations of blackness -- ignoring wider reaches of black literary fiction -- then who and where are the readers of black American literary works?

This question came to me on 1 July after I had read Southgate’s essay and was strolling down 125th street. There I was approached by a vendor hawking his testament, a narration of his travails as a high school hoops star, his descent into the crack game, and his rise from the corner to the back rooms of New York city council politics, told through inspirational poems (about 200 of them. The book looked thicker than Omeros and as heavy as a volume of Langston Hughes’ collected poems – although that could be about paper stock, still, shit!) I didn’t buy a book; I already have a huge stack of books to read. But I did wonder immediately who his influences are, whether he had studied with or read the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks or Robert Hayden, Jay Wright or Lucille Clifton, June Jordan or Ishmael Reed, Audrey Lorde or Melvin Dixon, Yusef Komunyakaa or Rita Dove, Natasha Trethway or Kevin Young. Before letting this question into the air, I realized that I was about to name a literary lineage that he probably had not encountered and didn’t really care about. One Two Five is about hustlin’, not about the brio of refined poetics. This realization made me reconsider the end of Carl Phillips’ poem “Crew” where he writes, “What is dread/ but that from which the soul/ will be delivered? // To which O what/ is the soul? the rest of the boys/ sang back.” Indeed, the vendor’s book is probably dreadful but I can’t begrudge him – he’s pitching messages of poetic deliverance. However, can we share soul if his aesthetic is capitalist and mine is highfalutin?

Walton Muyumba

Ralph Ellison and Don DeLillo in the Dallas Morning News

2007-06-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

I double-dipped in the Dallas Morning News (DMN)on Sunday 17 June 2007 --

DMN arts critic Chris Vognar interviewed me for his article on Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007). Responses to Rampersad's biography have been interesting because readers come away from the book with an appreciation for Ellison's intellectual acumen but a distinct dislike for the man. Ellison was a powerful thinker and complicated man argues Daryl Pinckney in his essay "Visible Man" but in Jabari Asim's review of the biography he suggests that Ellison's tangle of psychological complication and literary intellect will help maintain the standing of masterworks like Invisible Man and Shadow and Act while Rampersad's bio may diminish Ellison's reputation as a man.

DMN also ran my appraisal of Falling Man (2007). This piece is a shorter version of my essay "Don DeLillo's Falling Man". At the moment there is no clear critical consensus on Falling Man however, more and more critics have been communicating their dislike of the novel because it has not matched DeLillo's earlier efforts or met their ideas of realism. For examples see Andrew O'Hagan's "Racing Against Reality" and Jennifer Szalai's "After the Fall".

Walton Muyumba

James Baldwin and Sarah M. Broom Write from "Home"

2007-06-20T18:00:00.000-05:00

Where is home? Is it a location; is it a state of mind; or is home both material and metaphysical? In his poems, plays, essays, and fiction James Baldwin mused about home, its meanings and locations. James Campbell, one of Baldwin's biographers, argues that Baldwin may have been most at home as a correspondent. In his essay about the publication of the correspondence between Baldwin and Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, Campbell explains:

"All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed in the letters. He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch and dinner, and between dinner and the last whisky at 4 am."

Campbell's description pays Baldwin the compliment of detailing his complexities rather than diminishing them and thereby essentializing him. But then Baldwin couldn’t be reduced because he was much like his hometown, New York, a “great unfinished” work.

Writing from Paris in the mid-1950s Baldwin explains to Sol Stein, his New York editor and life-long friend, that writing and home are always intertwined:

"It will be nice to see the homestead [New York City, Greenwich Village and Harlem specifically] again. It would be even nicer if I could feel that I'd ever feel at home there. I'll tell you this, though, if you don't feel at home at home, you never really feel at home. Nowhere. I keep trying to remember something Peter Viereck told me, simply that you don't live where you're happy, or for that matter, unhappy: you do your best to live where you work."

For Baldwin, a child preacher who became a secular intellectual, home was where the head was but not the heart. In 1957 upon returning to New York after nine years in Paris, Baldwin was chilled and relieved to be back in the city for it was only there that he would be able to figure out what his time in Europe had meant, what it had made of him. Baldwin’s self-interrogation exposed the intricate relationship between his identity and his hometown:

"If I had ever loved New York, that love had, literally, been beaten out of me; if I had ever loved it, my life could never have depended on so long an absence and so deep a divorce; or if I had ever loved it, I would have been glad, not frightened to be back in my home town. No, I didn’t love it, at least not any more, but I was going to have to survive it. In order to survive it, I would have to watch it."

While he didn’t love New York, he couldn’t be indifferent to it or hate it either. Perhaps hatred didn’t arise because Baldwin knew the ironies of his interminable relation to New York: Baldwin’s family was in the city, his literary education and intellectual attitudes were fostered there, and his best writing is about New York. Campbell’s parsing of Baldwin’s character could be a short narrative of New York’s great unfinishedness.

I receive lovely, stirring, Baldwinesque letters from Sarah Monique Broom. Sarah, a great friend and former neighbor of mine in Harlem, is now living in Bujumbura, Burundi working for the national public radio and writing essays about New Orleans, her hometown. Whether she writes me from New York, New Orleans, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Paris, or Bujumbura, her letters, written in scotch-scented ink, always deliver love and pleasure and wisdom. At the beginning of a recent long letter Sarah wrote, "I danced last night until 5 a.m. It was a so-so night." Only Sarah Broom can have it like that: dancing until dawn on a so-so night -- what are the great nights like!

More importantly, Sarah's writing is concerned with the meaning of "home." Her New Orleans essays "Cry Me a River" and "A Closer Walk with Thee" are like letters from home to home about home. When the water pulled back after the flood, New Orleans was pocked with toxic scars -- an unholy ground, the unburied without rites, their testaments etched on the walls of their homes. Sarah's sentences sit like the black, granular soot lines that mark the levels of receding waters in post-Katrina New Orleans. She shares Baldwin’s impulse to connect her identity to home, though unlike his New York her New Orleans is loved passionately.

Sarah’s last letter, beautifully scribbled, taut with worry and wonder, made me return to her epistle/essay, the lovely second-line blues, “A Closer Walk with Thee.” Here is Broom on New Orleans and home:

Before Aug. 29, my Creole mother, Ivory, six siblings and 13 nieces and nephews lived in my hometown, New Orleans. Today I have two brothers left in all of Louisiana. In New York, where I live, I've been homesick down to my gut and susceptible to every feeling of helplessness. So when I heard about a street parade in New Orleans on the Saturday after Thanksgiving -- a parade to give thanks -- I booked a ticket right then. But I was afraid of what I would find, and of what I might not be able to find anymore.

I'm in my rented S.U.V., coming from the airport on Friday afternoon, when I see the first wrecked house. I am less shocked by the car in someone's living room, or by the abundance of tennis shoes and boats on the tops of bent fences, than I am by the absence of people. I notice that the tires are too damn loud. Why am I driving on pebbles?

I tour the streets -- Marigny, Roman, Burgundy, Mirabeau -- with John Coltrane. He is chanting, ''A love supreme, a love supreme. . .,'' when I see two people in masks and blue bodysuits cleaning out their homes. They wave, and I return the gesture. The only other movement that day is from a pack of scraggly dogs fighting over a plastic-foam to-go plate. When my car approaches, they don't bother to look up. They're hungry.

There's an evening curfew in the city, and with the encouragement of the patrolling National Guard, I head for Saint Rose, La., to my dead grandmother Amelia's house, 24 miles away, where my brother Carl now lives. I have to pass along St. Charles Avenue, where MTV's Real World was filmed and where most of the old-money mansions appear unscathed. I notice that one family is having a tea party on their porch. I feel an abiding sadness at my core.

The next day is the parade. I show up alone at 10 a.m. in front of Sweet Lorraine's, the jazz club, to join the crowds, some dressed to the nines in gold suits with shiny mahogany shoes. I spend an hour talking smack: ''Where y'at?'' ''How's your mom and them?'' ''You gone cut up out here or what?'' But soon the band chants, ''Feet can't fail me now.'' And I don't believe they can. The tuba player is in front of me; I clap hard to match his beat. Then, after we have danced wild, the Hot 8 Brass Band plays ''Just a Closer Walk With Thee'': Daily walking close to Thee/Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

The trumpet wails its slow, sweet and with-plenty rhythm, just as Jelly Roll Morton once directed. It is a funeral dirge, and on the street we're swaying through there is barely a house standing. My heart is breaking into slivers. I fall off beat because I have to navigate piles of belongings: a moldy shoe, a brightly-dressed Barbie doll, a sewing machine.

At 1 p.m. we are three hours into a parade that will leave us at the foot of the Mississippi River. To break up the dancing, and to help the economy, we stop at bars along the parade route. By the time we make it to the river, I have had three rum-and-Cokes, which I drink out of plastic cups. I have also had a bowl of red beans and rice, which someone in a house with electricity has cooked for passers-by. At 3 in the afternoon, for the first time today, we start to feel our tired feet. So we limp. But it is worth it.

And I want more. A native has whispered that the Mardi Gras Indians, who dress regal in hand-sewn Indian costumes during Mardi Gras, are practicing their chants the next day. The location is Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon Avenue, at a bar called Tipitina's. The Indians are mostly African-American working people; there's a Big Chief, and young boys in clean sneakers with drums and tambourines play the beat. Imagine 15 sweating men with hard voices standing in a semi-circle, singing bare-bones songs. I think of the Haitian, the Creole, the Spanish, the voodoo, the Italian, in New Orleans history. It's as if I am at Congo Square in 1865, watching Marie Laveau, voodoo priestess, twirl in a spirit dance.

Near curfew, one man begins to sing. ''Mighty cooty-fiyo,'' he calls. Tambourines rattle out a snake hiss. And then they chant in unison: ''We are Indians/Indians of the nation/The wild, wild creation/We won't kneel down, not on the ground.''

As they sing, they change the words: ''We won't kneel down''becomes ''We won't bow down.'' ''The ground'' becomes ''the dirty ground.''

I call my brother Michael in Texas and leave a taste of drum music on his voice mail. Outside it is pitch black -- because it's night, but also because the electricity is still out. Out there is an awful quiet.

On my flight back to New York, I hum.

New York Times Sunday Magazine
22 January 2006

Home can be where the head is and what the heart longs for -- a place where metaphysical constructions and longings merge with material structures, a place of walkable, personal history. The music of identity hums in the home zone, where we hear the second-line chant imbued with tragedy and comedy, where the melody that spells our private names rings out over the rhythms and harmonies we use to improvise the song of our selves.

Walton Muyumba

Feist, Somi, and Jenny Scheinman: Three Voices

2007-06-11T17:10:00.000-05:00

Jenny Scheinman
Jenny Scheinman is a well-regarded jazz violinist known for her work with guitarists like Nels Cline and Bill Frissell. In mid-April Scheinman joined the Bill Frissell Sextet for a few dates at the Village Vanguard. Frissell’s band included Ron Miles (cornet), the great Don Byron (clarinets and tenor saxophone), Scheinman (violin), Kenny Wollesen (drums), and Tony Scherr (bass). I attended a set that was like sitting in a cloud of glossy starlings: blue-black yet bright and sparkling, moody yet effervescent. Frissell builds song nests by slipping into the crevices of standards and pop tunes, finding the inner harmonies and tonalities and inviting the other musicians to move into the space with their own glistening shards or woody splinters to fill out the melodic structure. The music moves from edifice building atmospherics to pointedly defined solo flights and back.

Scheinman thrives in such settings because she is a thoughtful, exciting improviser. She calls it practiced intuition: an ability to create music that simultaneously touches traditional ideas and veers into new directions away from jazz nomenclature. She is a skilled, patient, lyrical violinist, ever plotting, not sawing the fiddle with her bow, but searching it for dramatic responses. Scheinman’s performances are physical explorations too -- she dances as she plays.

If Frissell’s sextet was a vital, billowing murmuration of starlings, then Scheinman’s trio work with Nasheet Waits and Jason Moran is an exaltation of larks. At the beginning of June Scheinman played a few dates with these other stars of the jazz scene. When they performed recently at Barbés, the Brooklyn bar where Scheinmen plays a set every Tuesday she’s in New York, the audience, packed into the tiny backroom, experienced the pleasures of three larks chirruping in their own styles, rising up to find a musical nexus, young masters delicately refining their aesthetics. Moran and Waits turn Scheinman’s compositions from atmospheric elaborations into compact, sturdier structures – they make her songs swing. On “Little Calypso,” for instance, Waits evoked the rhythms and tones of the steel drum on his snare and kick drum while Moran and Scheinman propelled the melody into a groove, flavoring it with spices from Stuff Smith’s “Calypso” and Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas.”

As if being a fine violinist were not enough, Scheinman sings too, her voice a thorny and compelling instrument. In her late April New York debut as a singer, Scheinman played and crooned country jams, folk ballads, gypsy music, and the blues at Marion’s Marquee Lounge on the Bowery. Though she was backed by a band of good jazz musicians (Scherr [vocals/guitar], Tim Luntzel [bass], and Wollesen [drums]), Scheinman left off jazz. Scheinman claims that she can’t sing jazz to save her life. But her singing is clearly influenced by her improvisational abilities. When she sings in her craggy, smoky voice, especially on songs of woe or quiet desperation, Scheinman shapes sentiment as if she were playing her violin. In fact, her voice sometimes mimics the reedy tone of the instrument, setting up resonant conversations when she answers her singing with some fine soloing. Scherr’s rollicking guitar adds bluster to the sheen of the violin and his vocal harmonies drops in low, hard compliments. Scheinman’s vocal range doesn’t, and may never, match that of her violin but the emotional quality of her singing stretches toward the heights of her play and listening to a lark’s elastic song is always pleasurable.

________________________________________________________________________

Somi
Female jazz singers are often presented as ingénues or seductresses. It’s an old marketing idea cinched by old problems about sexuality, gender, and artistic performance. Their photos, buffed to luster, dress disc covers, drawing listeners into the layers of the musical and vocal performances with come-ons, invitations to gentle, embracing kinds of love. Once inside, the voice guides the audience, teaching us to listen more precisely with each track, educating us about the emotional weight a harmonic leap can carry, but the musicianship only wins its stage after the seduction begins. In keeping with this, the opening track is usually a wistful expression of dream worlds and dreamy love or a hopeful communiqué of desire. But some choose other routes.

On the cover of Somi’s Red Soil in My Eyes (World Village 2007) you will see the glorious beauty refusing the expected come-on, refusing to seduce, her eyes cast downward, her brow pensive.

And the first, deep cut, “Ingele,” rejects a subtle introductory move, disseminating a whole musicological education in four minutes. Blending American jazz sensibilities, Afro-Latino percussion, Afro-pop guitar licks, and Western harmonies, the song tells a melancholic story of a love’s tattered ends, the self-questioning, the wishes for reconciliation, and the final turning away from the once-beloved. Though Somi sings many of the subsequent tracks in English, Red Soil opens in Swahili -- she uses the language’s ingrained melodies and lyricism to press textured East African vocal techniques into the diasporic mix.

While the song begins with Somi’s cooing, lilting scat and Herve Samb’s plucked guitar riffs, Toru Dodo’s chord blocking on the piano, reminiscent of McCoy Tyner, signals both the structure of the melody and the obstacles rising between the lovers. The gorgeous backing vocals (Cole Williams, Chande Rule, Rhian Ayanna, Adrienne Nyamsi) lend Somi dark-edged support. Her natural soprano swings easily into the alto range, allowing her to chart the undulations of her narrative with tonal shifts while the band maintains the song’s structure. The bridge lends the best instance of Somi’s swan diving shifts: Dodo and Samb drop out letting Somi sing over and against the roiling mixture of Vashon Johnson’s thudding bass line, Thierry Arpino's rim knocks and crashing ride cymbal, and Daniel Moreno's talking drum and popping cow bell, a mirror of the singer's conflicted interior – hoping simultaneously for reconnection to and release from her lover.

Introducing Red Soil with a narrative of a love’s demise sung in Swahili is a gamble because it demands that listeners forgo traditional notions of jazz performance and the expected seductions of female jazz singers. But “Ingele” is an imposing, dynamic payoff, steering clear of candied ingratiation while detailing the musical and lyrical plot-points of the remaining tracks, forwarding jazz aesthetics before marketing. "Ingele" impresses though it’s not even the best tune on a fantastic collection of original songs, all penned by Somi.

Seeing Somi perform one notices several things immediately: she is tall, elegant, and finely figured.
Her big, flashy smile, however, disguises her intensity, the key to her stage presence. At Dizzy’s Coca-Cola Club, where she and her band played two sold-out sets in April, Somi celebrated the release of Red Soil by blowing the doors off of the theater. Overcoming a nagging cold, Somi’s voice was huge and round, she sang with joy and humor, and the band, who had no choice but to match her force, augmented her with delicious, inventive accompaniment and pointed improvising.

Somi’s songwriting is about spiritual, intellectual, and personal growth, about the power of the voice to express estrangement, desire, empowerment, and devotion. Listening to her perform live, watching the kinetic links she shares with her audiences, I was reminded of the end of Hank Lewis’ powerful, impressionistic story of jazz and self-consciousness, “Rossonian Days,” in which he writes:

And from there to here came the groove that fills your head. A sound that needs no reason to be, no story, no event, no particular year. Just the knowledge that somebody may be out there, just beyond where you begin to hear your song drift past hearing, out to where there’s a brother or sister in the audience, down the block, in the next state, on the next plantation plot; maybe nobody you love, but somebody who came from where your people came from, and with just an utterance there may be an answer back, like any right-on, praise-the-lord-pass-the peas, I-heard-that, call-and-response, because out there, they know that yes:

This voice comes from somebody, and it tells the story of who I am . . . It is my language. It is the story. It pushes against the hard morning of yet another day, and it is mine. It is mine.

I Got Somebody in Staunton (2005)

______________________________________________________________________

Feist
Feist’s voice is trained for gymnastics – small, muscular, lithe, swift, precise, and sometimes profoundly graceful. She sings of delight and remorse but not of ennui; she refuses angst’s oppressions. On “Let It Die,” the title track from her 2005 disc, Feist pushes past love’s bitter finish without nostalgia:

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn’t the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart

Recognizing a self-inflicted betrayal doesn’t produce anger, it gives rise instead to a shoulder-shrugging, head-shaking awareness of love’s terrible requirement: for affection’s pleasures we deny our better instincts. Singing over a vibraphone and a shuffling funeral dirge rhythm, Feist’s voice is mournful but never pitiful. Yet, the slight quiver in her delivery makes you feel as though she’s convincing herself as much as her lover of the affair’s ending.

Feist’s new disc, The Reminder (2007), is anchored in its middle by another song about self-deception and evaporating love, the sparsely arranged soul song “The Limit to Your Love.” Feist opens the track with a tension-creating string section buzzing like a swarm of slow-moving bees over a high-hat clap-tap combination with the kick drum and bass keeping the bottom beat. She pokes out the edges of the melody on the guitar, dusting it with a murmur: “Clouds part/ Just to give us a little sun.” Nearly a minute into the song Chilly Gonzales’ bursting four-step soul chord progression on piano finally breaks the taut buzz, shoving the song from its ethereal opening into an earthy truth:

There’s a limit to your love
Like a waterfall in slow motion
Like a map with no ocean
There’s a limit to your love

There’s a limit to your care
So carelessly there
Is it truth or dare
There’s a limit to your care

Feist’s strange first verse brings in unnatural images of waters in slow motion and waterless geographies to describe a love that by its limits undefines itself. Feist builds her poetic riffs on top of a Bessie Smith-like motif of careless love as a reminder to her lover that she might seek solace, like a blueswoman, down on the road.

Though not suffused with James Jamerson's bass lines, Marvin Gaye’s huge voice, or his thickly layered arrangements, “The Limit To Your Love” makes loving references to the longing ache of Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, especially songs like “Come Get To This,” “Distant Lover,” and “Just To Keep You Satisfied.” Like Gaye, for instance, Feist stacks her voice on multiple tracks to create harmonizing, Motown-styled, 60s girl-group inspired backing-vocals that call out for her direct, pain-struck responses. Feist’s chorus plays up the conflict between her heart’s desires and her mind’s wariness:

I love I love I love
This dream of going upstream
I love I love I love
The trouble that you give me
I know I know I know
That only I can save me
I’ll go I’ll go I’ll go
Right down the road

Coming out of the chorus Feist eschews the perfunctory guitar solo of pop music for some mysterious vocal warbling and ululation while the vibraphone, flute, mallet-struck tom-tom, and piano rise up in the mix – a break from the heartache, it's the return of the ethereal. But the respite is only momentary – at the bridge, the top of a parabola, before the song rolls downward to its climax, a pair of cellos whittle a chord progression to a single note, a long-strung signal of an urgent, Smokey Robinsonian realization:

I can’t read your smile
It should be written on your face
I’m piecing it together
There’s something out of place
Oh

Instead of asking the lover to “take a good look” at her face, Feist sees his disjointed visage, his smile is out of place. Her “Oh,” at the bridge’s end, is both an explicit recognition of the lover’s limits and a moan of regret. The doubled intelligence is heightened by Feist’s upward-swinging, syllable-emphasizing reading of the fourth line, building momentum for her knowing wail. Her voice rises into a major key before swooping down into the minor for the pick-up with the bass and piano. At the end of the second chorus Feist knows that she has no choice but to leave, to go “out on the road,” fulfilling her earlier teasing threat. Though the song ends in the huff of a spirit broken, the strings simmering now, Feist exits the space spurred by the knowledge that, unlike her beloved, there’s no limit to her love.

Walton Muyumba

Tyler Perry's Brand

2007-06-06T14:15:00.000-05:00

Tyler Perry's films and new television programs do not seem appetizing to me. In fact, they appear to be a little boring, bland. I've actually gone to see Perry's movie, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" -- the film is better when it's a broad comedy rather than a moralizing, uplift-the-race story. Perry's narrative mode is almost always some combination of comedy and moralizing. According to Mark Anthony Neal, Perry's mode is problematic because it cloaks a bourgeois capitalist sensibility rather than communicating narratives to African American audiences that encourage political, intellectual, and communal growth and power. But the NY Times suggests that Perry is spreading a message of hope about African American life for African American audiences.

Here are the two differing readings of the Perry mode:

"Talking the Dream, Growing the Brand" by Felicia R. Lee

"Tyler Perry and the Black Bible Belt" by Mark Anthony Neal

See also: Neal's blog NewBlackMan

Passing Strange

2007-06-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

Passing Strange

Book and Lyrics by Stew
Music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald
Directed by and created in collaboration with Annie Dorsen

With
De’Adre Aziza (Edwina, Marianna, Sudabey)
Daniel Breaker (the Youth)
Eisa Davis (Mother)
Colman Domingo (Mr. Franklin, Joop, Mr. Venus)
Chad Goodridge (Hugo, Christophe, Terry)
Rebecca Naomi Jones (Sherry, Renata, Desi)
Stew (Narrator)

Now showing at The Public Theater. The show's run has recently been extended until 14 June 2007.

About the show (this is the advertising copy):

From Los Angeles to Amsterdam to Berlin and back, Passing Strange takes musical theatre on a whole new trip. From singer-songwriter and performance artist Stew comes Passing Strange, a daring new musical that takes you on a journey across boundaries of place, identity, and theatrical convention. Stew, a popular performer at Joe’s Pub, was commissioned by The Public Theater to develop this moving and hilarious story of a young black bohemian in search of self and home who charts a course for “the real” through sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

On African American Art and Freedom from Convention:

It is no great secret that African American literary artists use fiction, poetry, and drama to explain that African American identity springs from the entanglements of American history, African American cultural history, and individual, personal histories. The contingent relationship between African American identity and these various and variant histories is powerful yet vexing because popular American narratives have consistently promoted the notion that one makes her self up as she goes along, freely improvising without debt to her past or her culture or her others. If you try to improvise this way, free of context, you realize that while the music sounds great to your ears it rarely communicates any meaning to other people; you discover that context is elemental to improvising well. Black artists illustrate continually that one’s personal music must have meaning beyond the maker. Among African diasporic traditions one of the best practices for emphasizing this point is the collaborative meaning-making that arises from “call and response.”

Stew, the playwright, lyricist, and narrator, and Heidi Rodewald, musical director and Stew’s co-composer, make call and response integral to the künstlerroman arc of Passing Strange. At various points in the show the players call out to the audience, inviting them to participate in helping the Youth find his bearings in the process of shaping his identity. The show can go on without participation as I witnessed on 29 May 2007, when the audience was particularly stiff and unwilling to play, even when microphones were shoved in front of their faces. The call from the stage without response from the audience yields a flat, rote show. Just two nights (27 May 2007) earlier, however, with the audience actively responding (with laughter, clapping, nodding, interjecting expletives, Amen-ing, singing, talking back to the stage) the show busted the fourth wall, lifted free of modernist theater conventions, and became a rock n’ soul revival meeting.

Passing Strange is a story of racial and cultural passing – using the traits or attributes of a particular group as performable parts to create a self. In the 19th and 20th centuries light-skinned Negroes often passed for Italian or Mexican or Indian in order to work and live more freely. But these days black people who have invented identities that are free of convention (or stereotype) but not free of historical or cultural context, must often pass as “middle class” or “ghetto” in order to earn their bona fides with both white and black people. The Youth's ultimate goal is to live in and for the Real. But because he passes as middle class and ghetto en route to making to his own identity, he does not notice that what he is calling the Real is an artificial construct. Throughout the play the Youth finds himself battling to be seen by the other characters who only see his masks.

At several rousing, powerful moments in the play the black middle class chorus rebukes the Youth’s consistent rejection of the social conventions and sumptuary laws for striving, upwardly mobile, Negroes. As well, individual characters, Desi in Berlin, for instance, scold the Youth for playing at stereotypes of blackness in order to advance socially. In both situations the Youth is forced to interrogate the conventions of blackness he is both denying or accepting. Because he is investing in some conventions to escape other ones, the Youth is often confused or limited by his shortsightedness.

Throughout the performance the Youth’s realizations about identity draw the viewer’s attention to an equally powerful if muted theme about love in various contexts – of mothers, of lovers, of travel, and of the self. Passing Strange asks if it is possible to love or be loved without bending to conventional notions about love in its various contexts. The moment when our main character confronts the conventions of love, the limits of passing, and the paradoxes of achieving selfhood is the most illuminating in the play. This is an exciting juxtaposition – identity and love -- given that Stew and Rodewald have written a book and songs that develop narrative pivot points, detail the characters’ emotions and sensibilities, and provide a framework for collaborative meaning-making while pushing the show toward its final ambiguities.

Refusing to accept the clichés of musical theater – love or the self realized fully, free of complication -- the players use the conventions of musical theater to create dynamic tension between the audience’s expectation that the plot will follow a recognizable trajectory and the narrative’s rejection of a crystalline resolution. This tension is part of the call and response structure and the audience, who has participated in the Youth's struggle for identity, is enlivened by the artful irresolution rather than feeling defeated by it.

On the Players:

The players are themselves exquisitely talented artists: dancing, singing, and acting in multiple registers of style, characterization, and vocal range and accent. Breaker’s round-eyed handsomeness and lithe athleticism make the Youth’s journey from neophyte to punk to avant-garde troubadour a hilarious pleasure. The accomplished Eisa Davis, who has beauty to spare and looks like a young Lynn Whitfield, plays the mother with bluster and grace and finally, sadness – in a show full of great singers no voice in the show is as strong or emotive as hers.

Domingo and Goodridge dash and jump, chant and stomp, and impress with their delicate adjustments of carriage or gait to enact their shifts in characterization. Domingo, tall, dark, and handsome, emphasizes the bass tones of the play especially as Mr. Franklin, the choir director, and Mr. Venus, the stooping, deranged German performance artist. Meanwhile Goodridge, short, light, and handsome, is a physically deft actor, brightening the harmonies of the action as a rhythmically challenged drummer in L. A. and as a hip-switching sex worker and part-time philosophy professor in Amsterdam.

Aziza plays Marianna in Amsterdam and Jones is Desi in Berlin; both amplify the Youth’s late adolescence by being funny, commanding, intense, alluring, and very sexy. Jones’ face can show humor, pain, and desperation simultaneously -- her pretty eyes widening and shifting in search of places to connect to Breaker’s ever-evasive love. Aziza’s long, electric frame lassos and charges Breaker’s acting -- she energizes the whole stage with each gliding step or whip-like gesture.

Final Words:

Some theatergoers have suggested that this play is meant for black folk only, that African Americans are the only ones who can understand its engineering and themes. This is not true: the play is about love and identity in European and American contexts, as much in the mode of Henry James as that of James Baldwin. Even more, I think that through his actions, mistakes, and realizations, the Youth asks his mixed audience, as Ralph Ellison’s invisible protagonist asks his, “who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

Walton Muyumba

The End of Innocence

2007-06-03T19:14:00.000-05:00

After September 11 2001, wrote Martin Amis, 'all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation'. In fact, many leading American and British novelists felt compelled to confront the implications of that day. Have they succeeded in capturing the new world order?

Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian

by Pankaj Mishra

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that "We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations." On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. "Most novelists I know," Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, "went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center." Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it "wearisome to confront invented characters". "I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn." "The so-called work in progress," Martin Amis confessed, "had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus."

Amis went on to claim that "after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation." This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west's rich, more protected societies.

The shock of the attacks was probably greater for writers who had been ensconced deep in what DeLillo in his new novel Falling Man calls the "narcissistic heart of the west". In December 2001, recalling the extraordinarily complacent mood of the decade after the end of the cold war, DeLillo described in these pages how "the surge of capital markets dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness" and how "the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital."

"Dissent required," Ken Kalfus remembers in A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2005), one of the many recent fictions to deal directly with the attacks on 9/11, "a kind of neurotic, life-denying pessimism". For "unexceptional common sense had demanded that New York slums would be gentrified and that free markets would establish themselves around the world."

A century ago, the first world war, erupting after the earliest phase of globalisation, forced European artists into self-appraisals even more severe than those undertaken by British and American writers after 9/11. Writing to a friend in August 1914 of the "appallingly huge and sudden state of general war" that "has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair", Henry James confessed to asking himself "if this then is what I have grown old for, if this is what all the ostensibly or comparatively serene, all the supposedly bettering past, of our century has meant and led up to".

As with 9/11, the crisis had been in the making for many years. James's stint in London coincided with the most hectic expansion of global capitalism in history, with rival European businessmen and soldiers corralling the remotest nations into commercial, military and diplomatic networks. In the years leading up to 1914, "social and economic life", as John Maynard Keynes wrote, was internationalised to an unprecedented degree. This first attempt at modernising the globe lasted much longer than the post-cold war era, which ended on September 11 2001. Novelists working within secure national contexts could still appeal to 19th-century notions about the absolute autonomy of art; but they could not remain unaware of the challenges posed to them by the dramatic transformations around them. Human relations may not have shifted as radically on or about December 1910 as Virginia Woolf claimed; they were, however, increasingly subject to new, impersonal forces. Cherishing an apparently stable upper-class English life, James may have, as VS Naipaul recently alleged, "travelled always as a gentleman", observing the world from the top of a carriage. But he couldn't fail to see that much was simmering "irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface" of society. In The Princess Casamassima (1888), he ventured into London slums with an unusual cast of anarchist conspirators. His fellow Anglophile novelist Joseph Conrad correctly perceived deracinated revolutionaries as a threat to bourgeois order, and drenched them with irony and scorn in The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911).

It proved much more difficult, however, to reckon, intellectually and artistically, with the first world war, which exposed the bankruptcy of mainstream rather than marginal ideologies in Europe. In the postwar period, the sense of a severe rupture and crisis in civilisation pressed down upon writers as varied as TS Eliot, Thomas Mann, Paul Valèry, Robert Musil, DH Lawrence and Marcel Proust. Writers had to develop new resources - a capacity for abstract thought as well as formal daring - to try to describe how and why human relations had altered in the new conditions of modern life.

Apart from a few expatriates such as Eliot and Gertrude Stein, American writers rarely contributed to this critical reassessment of European modernity - what brought forth the last great flowering of European literature. Success attended - or appeared to attend - their own modern ventures. "Our American world," Saul Bellow once wrote, "is a prodigy" where, "on the material level, the perennial dreams of mankind have been realised." This was - and is - only partly true, as James Baldwin's work would attest. But it is what many Americans believed, which meant that ideas and ideologies of the kind that bloomed in straitened Europe in the 1920s and 30s faded quickly in America, and American novelists remained largely indifferent to the machinery of social and political power. Indeed, America emerged more powerful after each one of the disasters and tragedies suffered by Europe in the first half of the 20th century - part of the country's unique good fortune that continues to make many American writers look to European events, particularly the Holocaust and the gulag, for suitably "serious" themes.

The cold war deepened the isolation of American writers. The decolonisation of Asia and Africa - the central political event of the 20th century - and the erratic progress of postcolonial nations registered faintly in the American literary imagination even as it engaged some of the finest fiction writers in both western Europe (Greene, Burgess, Scott, Camus, Duras) and its former colonies (Achebe, Mahfouz, Naipaul).

Participating in a symposium organised by Partisan Review in 1952, essayist Philip Rahv feared that the growth of American power and wealth would induce among writers the "illusion that our society is in its very nature immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions" and that "the more acute problems of the modern epoch are unreal so far as we are concerned."

America's artificial situation in which, as Reinhold Niebuhr once described it, the "paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity" managed to survive even Vietnam. The cold war's climate of political conformity was pierced repeatedly by novelists such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary McCarthy, EL Doctorow, Russell Banks, Robert Stone, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion. Ultimately, however, the tragedy in Vietnam proved too remote to inspire a sustained literary examination of national values and ideals, of the kind that Musil, Mann and Broch had undertaken after witnessing moral and intellectual collapse in their own societies. The most perceptive novel about the American involvement in Vietnam, The Quiet American, was written in 1955 by an English writer: Graham Greene. And the question "why are we in Vietnam?" was answered most eloquently not by imaginative literature, but by works of narrative journalism - David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie - which placed due weight on the role of ideology and political and social ambition in the lives of men, in this case the businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats, bankers and lawyers of America's ruling elite.

Some of the most interesting young American novelists were alert to the self-indulgent mood of the 90s. Novels such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (published, coincidentally, on September 11) and Richard Powers's Gain explored the perennial American theme of the gap between reality and the American dream against the context of aggressive new ideologies of profit and materialism. Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce Wagner described the weirder and darker mutations in sensibility and manners in this period.

But, on September 11 2001, these preoccupations were broken into by the previously invisible conflicts and traumas of an interdependent world. "Our world, parts of our world," DeLillo wrote in an article in December 2001, "have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage." But the collision between the paradise of domestic security and the hell of global insecurity had happened long before it horrifyingly manifested itself on 9/11. The cold war and then economic globalisation had knitted the world closer together. Yet the western vision of endless prosperity and well-being had proved a deception for the billions of people living outside the west.

The aggressive paternalism and self-righteousness of American business and politics provoked resentment among even the beneficiaries of an American-ordered world, such as the secular middle-class Turks in Istanbul who told Orhan Pamuk on 9/11 that the terrorists had done the "right thing". (The attacks bring a similar gratification to the Princeton-educated Pakistani financial analyst in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, who, watching the twin towers collapse, finds himself smiling - "remarkably pleased".)

In a world rendered deeply unequal, television and the internet stoked many people's aggrieved sense of being "crowded out", as DeLillo writes in Falling Man, "by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies". Reflecting on his compatriots' callous response to 9/11, Pamuk described how an ordinary citizen of the non-western world is today more aware than before "of how insubstantial is his share of the world's wealth; he knows that he lives under conditions that are much harsher and more devastating than those of a 'westerner' and that he is condemned to a much shorter life. At the same time, however, he senses in a corner of his mind that his poverty is to some considerable degree the result of his own folly and inadequacy, or those of his father and grandfather."

"The western world," Pamuk wrote, "is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." This indifference came to be particularly entrenched in the pre-9/11 decade, when the dotcom boom promised to enlist the entire world in the forward march of western capital and technology.

The internet and the faster movement of capital in a free global market may not have deepened general knowledge of other countries and cultures - the Wall Street speculators in McInerney's The Good Life (2006) are not exceptional in viewing "the world beyond Manhattan primarily in terms of investment and vacation opportunities". But history seemed clearly to have ended after the collapse of communist regimes, leaving the rest of the world with the option of embracing or futilely resisting American-style democracy and capitalism.

These notions were not confined to the large majority of Americans who do not hold passports. Recent fictions set in New York by Deborah Eisenberg and Claire Messud swarm with well-off and politically liberal Americans, who have been gliding "through their lives on the assumption that the sheer fact of their existence has in some way made the world a better place".

These comforting self-images could no longer be maintained after 9/11, especially after the Bush administration decided to remake reality through American firepower, provoking anger and hostility even among people previously indifferent to America. Eisenberg uses a reproachful tone in her short story "Twilight of the Superheroes" to evoke the disabusing of bohemian New Yorkers who have moved, just before 9/11, into an expensive downtown apartment with a glittering view of the city's skyline. ("Towers and spires, glowing emerald, topaz, ruby, sapphire, soared below ... Sitting out on the terrace had been like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.")

"It was as if there had been a curtain," Eisenberg writes, "a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien's delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by."

A connoisseur of political conspiracy and historical traumas, DeLillo himself seemed a pioneer among writers staking out territories of danger and rage. However, Falling Man, whose elliptical, fragmented narrative follows closely the shattered lives of a couple in New York, shows DeLillo retreating, like McInerney and Kalfus, to the domestic life.

He had hinted at this in 2001 when he spoke of how, for many people, "the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment": "where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children." Accordingly, Falling Man ignores what a European character in it, a former leftwing terrorist, calls "matters of history, politics and economics - all the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness". DeLillo confines himself to recording the emotional and existential struggles of 9/11 survivors. (In another striking instance of narrowed focus, McEwan, one of the novelists who after 9/11 had resolved to learn about the "great changes" in the world, prefers in Saturday to describe a day in the life of a London-based neurosurgeon, who seems incapable of grappling with these great changes his creator speaks of.) DeLillo's previous preoccupations clearly made it impossible for him to exclude the 9/11 hijackers from his narrative. But he remains strangely incurious about their pasts and their societies, and he makes little attempt to analyse, in the light of the biggest ever terrorist atrocity, the origin and appeal of political violence.

This may disappoint those who see DeLillo as the prophet of contemporary disorder. But then the resonant views on terror, conspiracy, mass society and art he previously articulated through his characters are metaphysical, even religious, rather than political ("In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act"). These ambitiously theoretical formulations, able, perhaps, to explain the lone assassin or other outcast figures of American history, were likely to prove inadequate before foreign terrorists dealing in mass murder. Not surprisingly, DeLillo ends up relying on received notions about Muslim "rage". ("Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.")

Amis and John Updike, too, reach for some widely circulated clichés in their fictional accounts of terrorists. Constipation as well as sexual frustration torments Amis's Mohammed Atta who, though preparing to bring down America, is detained by an arcane point about virgins in paradise: "Ah, yes, the virgins: six dozen of them - half a gross. He had read in a news magazine that 'virgins', in the holy book, was a mistranslation from the Aramaic. It should be 'raisins'. He idly wondered whether the quibble might have something to do with 'sultana', which meant (a) a small seedless raisin, and (b) the wife or a concubine of a sultan. Abdul-aziz, Marwan, Ziad, and the others: they would not be best pleased, on their arrival in the Garden, to find a little red packet of Sun-Maid Sultanas (Average Contents 72)."

In his novel Terrorist, Updike appears as keen as Amis to optimise his research. Indeed, he seems to have visited the same websites of Koranic pseudo-scholarship. Invoking the raisin-virgin controversy, one of Updike's fanatical Muslim characters echoes Amis's little joke that the substitution of virgins with dry fruits "would make Paradise significantly less attractive for many young men".

Trying to evoke the puritanical zeal of his characters, Updike distractingly calls attention to his own fussy prose. Here is his attempt to provide an Islamic perspective on overweight Americans: "Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers."

If inviting terrorists into the democratic realm of fiction was never less than risky, it is now further complicated by the new awareness of the mayhem they cause in actuality. Their novelist-host has to overcome much fear and revulsion in order to take seriously murderous passions aimed at his own society. Sympathy often breaks down, and hasty research reduces individuals as well as movements to stereotypical motivations.

Struggling to define cultural otherness, DeLillo, Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins. Assembled from jihad-mongering journalism and propaganda videos and websites, their identikit terrorists make Conrad's witheringly evoked revolutionaries in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes look multidimensional.

However, DeLillo and Updike do acknowledge that novelists are required to set up, within their narratives, a firm opposition to their own feelings and predispositions - a strong character or event that would make the novels transcend their authors' own prejudices. The post-9/11 fictions of McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer are remarkable in that they strenuously avoid anything too intellectually alien and bewildering. They seem content to enlist the devastation in their city as a backdrop, and both use actual photographs of the event, either on the cover or within the text. But, for all that 9/11 stands for in their sentimental and nostalgic novels about New Yorkers coping with loss, it could be a natural disaster, like the tsunami.

Their mostly affluent characters are too set in their complacent ways - or, as in Safran Foer's novel, simply too young - to stumble into self-knowledge, or to question the assumptions underpinning their previously serene existence. It falls to Kalfus in his novel to train a darkly ironic gaze upon bourgeois self-absorption, of the kind that McEwan leaves unexamined in Saturday. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country describes a couple in the midst of a drawn-out and particularly vicious divorce. (Are we meant to think of domestic discord, also deployed by DeLillo and McInerney, as a metaphor for post-9/11 America?) On the morning of September 11 2001, both husband and wife are incapable of any feeling other than the hope that the planes attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have killed their estranged partner. Their mutual hatred intensifies simultaneously with the Bush administration's rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. By the time the assault on Iraq begins, they are whispering to the television "Let's get it over with."

"How far away," Eisenberg asks in her subtly spacious short story, "does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it." Like Eisenberg, Kalfus has no interest in trying to recreate a pre-9/11 "innocence". Rather, he wishes to explore what it means to be an American in a world shaped by American cultural, financial and military institutions; and he bravely tries to transcend his characters' meagre concerns through authorial broadsides: "You went through your daily life in a haze, knowing that fellow Americans were preparing to race across deserts and jump from planes and kill and die, and elsewhere a man or woman just like you, with kids just like yours, was waiting for this violence to wreck the fabric of a life already as tenuous and complicated as yours."

Kalfus again lapses into over-explicitness when he tries, like DeLillo and Amis, to find the right combination of words that would be worth a thousand images of the atrocity at ground zero. "The writer begins in the towers," DeLillo asserted in December 2001, "trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror." A few months later, Amis was wondering: "What was it like to be a passenger on that plane? What was it like to see it coming towards you?" Evidently fuelled by masculine anxiety (both Eisenberg and Messud deal only glancingly with the destruction of the towers), this kind of voyeuristic urge, easily gratified by a video-game or a disaster movie, erupts often in these 9/11 fictions.

"Men," DeLillo claimed in Mao II, "live in history as never before." Yet faced with this fact in real life, DeLillo and others prefer to describe the violence of 9/11 not so much in terms of its historical origins or its ramifications as in its raw physical essence. Rahv once blamed the "peculiar shallowness of a good deal of American literary expression" on the fact that American writers "tended to make too much of private life, to impose on it, to scour it for meanings that it cannot always legitimately yield". In succumbing to what Rahv termed the "cult of individual experience in American writing" the 9/11 writers couldn't be more different from Mann, Musil and many others in Europe for whom the first world war, though an unprecedented calamity, was the point of departure for an investigation of the ideologies, beliefs, and social and political structures of their societies.

Those readers seeking a capacious moral vision in contemporary American literature may have to move out of the narrow category of "9/11 fiction". They can then read, with reconfigured curiosity, Jennifer Egan's Look At Me (2001), which reveals, with unshowy brilliance, how the obsessions with terror, image, novelty and celebrity work out in ordinary American life, creating its particular structures of feeling. There is much rich fiction - Rattawut Lapcharoensap's Sightseeing, Nell Freudenberger's Lucky Girls (2003), Norman Rush's Mortals (2003) - that describes recent American encounters with foreign peoples and cultures. Writers of narrative non-fiction continue to illuminate how the country's ruling class took the country into a suicidal war in Iraq. Chronicling human folly and deception, George Packer, Thomas Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaran have produced books as psychologically complex and emotionally vivid as the best works of fiction.

As for Muslim disaffection, the urgent subject of the post 9/11 era, Lorraine Adams's Harbor, Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers and Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are among many novels that, untouched by the crude hysteria about jihad and Islam, describe sympathetically the divided selves of Muslims in settings as varied as Boston, the north of England and Casablanca.

There are no simple oppositions in these books between "Muslims" and the "west". They simply assume that for many Muslims the west is inseparable from their deepest sense of their selves, and that most people from societies that western imperialism cracked open long ago cannot afford to see the west as an alien and dangerous "other"; it is implicated in their private as well as public conflicts.

Islam, or the "east", has never exerted the same influence on western self-perceptions; they remain empty abstractions, often filled by self-appointed defenders of the western civilisation in order to identify alien and dangerous "others". But, as Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist shows, globalisation and immigration now plunge identities shaped in the west into a fundamental instability. An ivy-league education exalts Changez, the novel's Pakistani narrator, to the American financial elite. Yet he remains restless within his borrowed identity, increasingly aware of the compromises his affiliation with power and wealth enforce in his inner life.

What makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist and other recent novels by Kiran Desai, David Mitchell and Jeffrey Eugenides so uniquely compelling is their intimation of a new existential incoherence, their suspicion that by abolishing old boundaries and penetrating the remotest societies on earth, capitalism and technology have left no "elsewhere", exposing the human self to unprecedented risks and temptations.

In The Inheritance of Loss Desai powerfully evokes the truth of this new spiritual homelessness: "Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narratives belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it." In such recent films as Syriana, The Constant Gardener and Babel even Hollywood seems alert to the fact that the human self, inescapably plural and open-ended, increasingly finds itself in a bewilderingly enlarged and unforgiving arena.

In comparison, most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency. The "reconsiderations" DeLillo promised after 9/11 don't seem to have led to a renewed historical consciousness. Composed within the narcissistic heart of the west, most 9/11 fictions seem unable to acknowledge political and ideological belief as a social and emotional reality in the world - the kind of fact that cannot be reduced to the individual experience of rage, envy, sexual frustration and constipation.

But then we haven't moved far in time from 9/11; the younger generation of American writers has yet to reckon with it. Recent novels may turn out to be only the first draft of a rich literature. Certainly, the conditions for it are already present. Writing in 1940, Rahv hoped that American literary life, which was largely determined by national forces, would be increasingly shaped by international forces. In ways still obscure to us, this has begun to happen as American power declines, and old collective assumptions of prosperity and security become unavailable. The present conservative stasis in America has its dangers. But it is unlikely to last. And, as happened after the first world war, uncertainty and confusion in the public sphere may quicken the sense of aesthetic possibility - or, at least, release literary novelists from the dominant American mood of 9/11 commemoration.

Don DeLillo's Falling Man

2007-05-26T16:22:00.000-05:00

In his prophetic novel Mao II (1991), Don DeLillo asks if the novelist can compete with the terrorist over the inner life of a society? While the novelist places demands on culture’s intellect and imagination, the terrorist straitjackets thought with the vicious certainties of plastic explosives.

In his fourteenth novel Falling Man (2007) DeLillo accepts his own interrogative, imagining one family’s attempt to rebuild their lives in the dim weeks and months following the September 11th attacks. Instead of creating a documentary styled account, DeLillo charts impressionistically the complex psychological and existential rearrangements wrought by the attacks. His main characters are Keith and Lianne Neudecker, and their son, Justin. Keith, a corporate lawyer, survives the explosion in the north tower, walks out of the building, and travels uptown to the apartment of his estranged wife and son.

In their assessments of Falling Man critics such as Frank Rich, Laura Miller, John Leonard, and Sven Birkerts discuss DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Mao II, and Libra (1988) to note his skillful and convincing explorations of the underworlds of American life and international policies. In Falling Man DeLillo departs from the context of conspiracy and paranoia to study the minute details of recovering from the underworld’s eruption. Most critics have responded well to DeLillo’s turn, arguing that Falling Man is DeLillo’s attempt at book-length lyric poem rather than hyper-realistic, paranoid epic. In Michiko Kakutani’s evaluation of the novel one hears a longing for an Underworld-like sentimental docu-drama. Both Kakutani and Tom Junod worry that Keith and Lianne Neudecker are not sympathetic characters, not heroic victims meant to encourage our sentimentalities. Their critiques parallel previous complaints leveled against DeLillo for creating so-called emotionless narratives and characters. The estimable James Wood even argues that “DeLillo does not sound like anyone else; but often he does not sound like a human being, either.” DeLillo’s unfeeling language, Wood continues, translates into his chief weakness: he doesn’t know when to end a sentence. When the sentences reach excess they take on a “stiffened, unreal, pluming eloquence” rather than the loose, knowing rhythms of meaning.

I think that Kakutani, Junod, and Wood would gather around the claim that the language of feeling or emotion best communicates meaning in the novel. This is a rather Romantic sentimentalist approach to the novel. Wood, for one, has a tendency to tolerate only the most perfect engines of fictional feeling, thus explaining his abiding appreciation for the occluded arteries of the Jamesian or Bellovian novel. But they misread DeLillo, I believe. I accept DeLillo’s “pluming” excesses because they forward the excesses of his beautiful tableaux, uneven as real life. For instance, Falling Man is not written as the memorial to the dead that Kakutani and Junod might have expected because DeLillo deals with imperfect survivors, the flawed living. Thus the Neudeckers might appear self-indulgent, but DeLillo’s approach specifically resists beatifying his characters, rejects the honorific, in order to examine real human complexity lyrically and philosophically.

I argue that DeLillo has never been estranged from feeling or human speech (if those are even accurate appraisals) because his analyses of the intercourse between our individual selves and the menacing narratives of power are always poetic. I read DeLillo as if he were a poet primarily and a novelist accidentally. His novels often begin with philosophical rhapsodies:

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web. The Body Artist (2001)

One forty-ninth, the Puerto Ricans. One twenty-fifth, the Negroes. At Forty-second Street, after a curve that held a scream right out to the edge, came the heaviest push of all, briefcases, shopping bags, school bags, blind people, pickpockets, drunks. It did not seem odd to him that the subway held more compelling things than the famous city above. There was nothing important out there, in the broad afternoon, that he could not find in purer form in these tunnels beneath the streets. Libra (1988)

He also begins by leaning on the clean, sharp sound or image to draw us into his works:

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful. Underworld (1997)

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. Falling Man (2007)

DeLillo’s is an aesthetic of sensibilities rather than emotional states: self-awareness in the arc of a leaf’s descent, psychological comfort in the underground of the metropolis, the halfway linguistics of the American tongue, the world’s living nightmare becoming a city’s reality. Like the American poet Charles Wright, DeLillo turns to language in order to untie himself, “to stand clear, / To extricate an absence, / The ultimate hush of language, / (fricative, verb, and phoneme), / The silence that turns the silence off” (Wright 4). DeLillo’s endeavor is to build language-scapes that readers can tunnel into, thoughtful, silent spaces in steel-grinding railcars, where we can imagine newer worlds absent from the hum and buzz of the metropol.

When Lianne, a freelance book editor and writing teacher to early-stage Alzheimer patients, begins to worry that her own mind is deprogramming itself, she perceives a malfunction arising from her competing desires to forget and remember. Recalling Basho’s longing haiku for Kyoto, Lianne realizes that “even in New York, I long for New York” (DeLillo 34). Her broken haiku contains a broken idyll: a wish for a peaceful, old New York that never really existed -- a place of rich happy everyone, no crack, no homeless people, no Diallo or Louima, and the Knicks and the Yankees win every year.

Keith is catalyzed to turn from corporate law, sanctifying business mergers and acquisitions, to another numbers game: professional poker, a game of intuition, hedging, and luck. DeLillo plays up the metaphysics of the game, seemingly to point to the wobbly wheel of fortune we bump around. In a novel of resonant bell tones, this is a weak strike. DeLillo compounds this problem by splicing in abbreviated meditations on one of the nineteen hijackers, a characterization called Hammad. Imagining a terrorist must be hard, stomach-churning work these days because DeLillo’s writing isn’t compelling and, though framed as a questioning moralist of the Hamburg cell, the character never comes to life. Hammad is a playful reference to DeLillo’s sophisticated and sharply created George Haddad from Mao II. The doubled middle letters are meant to suture the characters together. Haddad is a wise, intimidating, and terrible character because his position is a reasoned, intellectual one. What we remember of Hammad is one scene of masturbation and an image of him alone, near the cockpit, the last moments before the impact with the north tower, thinking of the flaws in the plan. But it’s too late, too late for us all. As a fictional fulfillment and realization of Haddad’s prophecy in the earlier novel, Hammad fails to extend Haddad’s haunting power from the previous novel into Falling Man. Though his five-draw metaphor and referential characterization mean to cleverly illuminate his theories of chance and conspiracy, DeLillo’s illustrations feel incomplete and leave us asking if gambling and terrorism are the only ways we can know that we are each alone, finally?

The theme of solitary awareness is interesting given DeLillo's love for sussing the meanings of crowd scenes and public events. Many people witnessed the attacks collectively – a mass gathering spread across continents with families, neighbors, and co- workers staring into televisions, watching the buildings drop, insides rolling out. Falling Man opens with a now ubiquitous image: a crowd of people dashing out of the hell-borne dust cloud into the late summer morning light. DeLillo introduces the stunned, silent Keith in the midst of the “seismic tides of smoke with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edges, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things” (DeLillo 3). Keith’s silence speaks America’s new collective alienation. Alienation from ourselves is one of the products of witnessing the terrible -- watching the second plane swing into view, we realized, and then, knew, as Keith puts it, that we’d each just become “a little older and wiser” (DeLillo 135).

This is not about the loss of American innocence; we’ve been complacent but never been naïve. We have willfully held the entanglements of global politics at bay even as those machinations have supplanted the economic advantages of American life. DeLillo suggests in Falling Manthat we must examine the connections between our entanglements and our advantages to understand how to recreate ourselves. Luckily, age and wisdom can forge languages and narratives useful for inhabiting America’s new complexity. DeLillo’s metaphorical use of Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings marks one point in the development of that new linguistic order. Natura morta: grinding elements into powders, mixing them to create colors, obsessively interrogating the material world, and detailing the signs of life in shades of gray.

Natura Morta, 1947
Morandi’s aesthetic process also provides clues for understanding the eponymous character, Falling Man. In the months following September 2001 David Janiak, a New York performance artist, launches himself from an array of elevated structures throughout the city, falling and dangling upside down, arms tight to his sides, left leg bent at the knee, right leg extended in the photo-captured pose of one of the unnamed victims who jumped from the towers. Janiak’s performances are unannounced, but Lianne happens upon them twice in the novel. As a character who wishes to remember an idyllic past and forget the present tense, Lianne wants to reject Janiak’s tableau vivant as anachronistic. But Lianne cannot look away because she begs meaning from the performance. And we, readers, imagining Falling Man’s reappearances across the sightlines of the cityscape, take in the jarring vision without the temporal effect. Like DeLillo’s characters we move through Morandi’s process hoping to create the details of our new entanglements. We envision a falling body among buildings set like a still-life arrangement; the scene forces us to interrogate repeatedly, obsessively the multiple meanings of September 11th.

On the fateful morning, Keith spies a shirt sinking from the sky, its “arms waving like nothing in this life” (DeLillo 246). The tumbling shirt is the advent of a shifting paradigm, a silent flailing movement into a new world of connections. That Tuesday will be forever “lit with regret, / No trace of our coming, no trace of our going back” (Wright 5). And yet, because DeLillo concentrates his gaze on the elemental reconfiguration of the Neudeckers’ lives, builds a lyrical, impressionistic structure, and gambles by asking readers to make meaning rather than provide it, Falling Man is a salve after coming through slaughter.

Walton Muyumba

References

DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist, Scribner, 2001.
----. Falling Man, Scribner, 2007.
----. Libra , Viking, 1988.
----. Underworld, Scribner, 1997.
Wright, Charles. “There Is A Balm in Gilead,” Buffalo Yoga, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004.

See Also

Leonard, John. Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures, New Press, 2002.
----. When the Kissing Had to Stop, New Press, 1999.
Wood, James. The Broken Estate, Modern Library, 2000.
----. The Irresponsible Self , Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004.