Sarah Webster Fabio

  Sarah Webster Fabio: (Re)Covering the Rainbow[1]

                Sarah Webster Fabio (1928-1979 ) was highly esteemed by some(but not all)  readers  for her contributions to Black Arts/Black Aesthetic discourses in the 1960s and early years of the 1970s. Although neither her prose nor her poetry was included in the groundbreaking  anthology Black Fire (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal,  her essay "Tripping with Black Writing" in the foundational anthology The Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle,  did position her among those Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones) deemed "the founding Fathers and Mothers, of our nation."  In "Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction" (Black Fire, pp. 57-77), Darwin T. Turner listed her as one of the new critics who were "explaining theory rather than merely commenting on practice" (75).  Turner might have been thinking of her essay "Who Speaks Negro?," which first appeared in Negro Digest, December  1966.  Fabio responded with vigorous polemic, as Hazel Arnett Ervin reminds us in her introduction for African American Literary Criticism 1773 to 2000 (1999),  to John Oliver Killens's call to explain (i.e., to theorize) linguistic features of African American aesthetic commerce.  

                 Hers was at once an act of re(discovering) and re (covering), an act that resonates for our benefit  in the literary work we might or ought to do in 2018.   We can find genuine illumination regarding comment on practice in her "Author's Note about the Two Versions of the Poem 'Of Puddles, Worms, Slimy Things ( A Hoodoo Nature Poem)' " in Yardbird Review 1 (1972): 115-116. Fabio's note, particularly as it is reproduced in volume one of the Rainbow Series, is a prelude to the kind of work Brent Hayes Edwards does with the poetics of transcription and translation in Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017) as he looks back to the vernacular theorizing of James Weldon Johnson. [2] Fabio was not ahead of her time.  She was on and in time.

                The distinction Turner made between theory and praxis  was echoed in a different guise in the evaluative paragraph Eugene B. Redmond wrote on her poetry in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976).  Redmond noted the poems she published in the volumes A Mirror: A Soul (1969) and Black is a Panther Caged (1972) were "formal, reflecting her vast reading-thinking range; but the later work [the seven volumes she published as the rainbow series in 1973] shows that she had joined the new poetry movement completely." His summary judgment of her poetry in the series is telling: "Her recent voluminous efforts deal with experimental blues poems, rap styles, folk narratives, and attempts to reconstruct black oral history.  These things she does quite well on her albums and in live readings; but much of the work in the new books is excessively conversational and burdened with contrived hipness" (412). 

                  Forty-two years of distance from Redmond's critical opinion allows us to read Fabio's conversational strategies and hip articulations in a very different context or set of circumstances. From the perspectives of 2018, Fabio's (re)covering of the rainbow in her series  can be read as a strong instance of rejecting a defensive posture, as a prophetic model for contemporary poetry in the arena of what is designated  break-beat! [3] Indeed, what is refreshingly conversational  and  very hip in her rainbow series is enthralling.

                In short, Fabio's status in the history of black writing and African American poetry warrants a revisionist assessment.  In the shorthand of academic talk,  such reconsideration or focused meditation ought to be aware of its own historicity.  To say the same thing in plain language, the reader/theorist/critic  tries to account for the time, uncertain signification,  and complexity of his reading.  " Thus, for a theorist to acknowledge autobiography as a driving force," according to Houston A. Baker, Jr., "is for him or her to do no more than tell the truth" (Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, 49).  In terms of everyday talk, the truth to which Baker refers is a matter of reasonable correspondence between a proposition and what in reality is the case. On the other hand, the truth of how Fabio recovered the rainbow in her poetics forces me to deal with a broader spectrum of what corresponded to what between 1973 and 2018 in my own writing and reading of poetry. Fabio assigned me a heavy task when she wrote in my copy of Volume 7: Jujus and Jubilees ---"For Jerry Ward/ who will be able to/ get to the essence of this."  Telling the truth, nothing but the truth, and  the whole truth about essence is a gamble. 

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                 What differentiates Fabio's  Rainbow Sign project from many we think are typical of the Black Arts Movement is exactness or clarity of purpose.   Other projects were not vague.  They had purpose, but the organizers did not keep their eyes on the prize as assiduously as did Fabio.  Her exactness in organizing  her poetry  matches the theoretical exactness of Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References (1973), a book she referenced in Volume 7.  Perhaps Fabio knew her time on this earth would not be long. She died six years after completing the project, knowing that she had specified how scholars and readers should understand her poetry in a future.

                 Consider the project as a poetic speech act of some magnitude, or as an absolute covenant that possesses affirmative, disjunctive, implied and specific properties.  Reassessing her work in the frames of legal concepts exposes grounds for continual, historical interpretation.  The fact that Fabio used the poem "Rainbow Signs" as an epigraph for each of the seven volumes is indicative of purpose; the project was legacy and promise.  The first stanza of the poem uses visual imagery to secure an aesthetic response to a natural phenomenon; the second stanza yokes description of location with petition ----

Yeah,

they're almost

anywhere you look

spreading prisms

Of light

around the moon

at night,

arching the sun

in the afternoon,

eclipsing dark clouds

at daybreak.

Look for them and

they are there

about you everywhere.

We who are on the ark

our beings singed by fire

ask for the cooling waters,

ask for the calming rain.

And the third, concluding stanza is imperative ---

Take away the fire-lust,

take away the fire,

send down the cooling waters,

send down the cooling rain,

give us, again, the rainbow sign,

give us, again, the rain.

Whether a reader engages a single volume or all seven volumes, the poem emphasizes purpose and yearning.  In contrast to some of her contemporaries who took black poetry to be a given, Fabio  recognized the poetry was imminent ; we had to ask for it repeatedly.

                Fabio dedicated the series Rainbow Signs in seven volumes generally to the spirit forces which had guided her in the endeavor, but volumes 1, 2, 3 and 7 contain special dedications to individuals or groups.  Volume 1 "is dedicated to the Neo-hoodoo writers, especially Ishmael Reed and Calvin Hernton.  It is for all of those who worked jujus and alchemy of the blues."  Remembering that "black music/musicians more than any other single force in the American experience formed a band holding a shackled people more together than iron chains whether in worship, play, love, sorrow, mortal combat for our freedom,"  Fabio created  Volume 2  "for all those musicians/magicians who are named/unnamed; known/unknown who through love translated their lives into improvisation, harmony, jazz, blues, rock and roll, and all of those down home soul beats which ever reminded us we were a folk of SOUL."  She stresses the centrality of music and sound in the unfolding of African American history.  That the word "soul" is rendered in capital letters reminds us that W. E. B. DuBois's classic collection of essays as sorrow songs was entitled The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that in 1973 "soul" was in vogue. Aware the poetry and other expressive forms of the Black Arts Movement were at once individual and collective, Fabio dedicated Volume 3 "to the Black youth who motivated the artists to search out the essences of our Black Experience and for all of those who applauded our first effort," including her five children in the family band "Don't Fight the Feeling."  The dedications for Volumes 4, 5, and 6 are general, almost formulaic;   Volume 7 honors Margaret Walker, John Killens, Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes as if the end of the rainbow should circle back to its beginnings.

                In examining Fabio's theory and practice, one must not overlook the importance of paratextual material in Volume 6, the aptly named Black Back: Back Black.  It contains an introduction by Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), an introductory interview on "Black Poetry and the Black Experience, and the author's note which informs us that the volume "is about self discovery and a race's rediscovery of its meaning and beauty."  This note reminds us to return to the one "about the two versions of the poem 'Of Puddles, Worms, Slimy Things (A Hoodoo Nature Poem)' " in Volume 1: Juju/Alchemy of the Blues. Fabio's idea that "how what is said connotes attitudinal characteristics that are almost as important as the simple denotative and/or connotative meaning of what is said" (vi).  Fabio was as serious  then about poetry, orality, and African American language usage as would be Geneva Smitherman in Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) or Gayl Jones in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Her "Introductory Notes" for Volume 7: Jujus and Jubilees stress that vernacular classifications of poems --- socio-anthropological mini lecture; biography; critique; Jazz Vocals; multi-media performance; Rap; Monologue ---might be aids for reading, understanding, and appreciation.  These classifications can be aligned with those Carolyn Rodgers had specified in "Black Poetry--Where It's At," Negro Digest 18.11 (1969): 7-16.

As we study the legacy of Sarah Webster Fabio from the vantage (or, perhaps we should say the advantage) of 2018, it becomes apparent many things it is crucial for us to know about poetic theory and poetic practice during the Black Arts Movement will come to us as the assertion and question in stanza one of the poem "Rainbow Signs" ---

They will appear

in the moist air

after the earth

has been primed

with rain,

these gossamer

rainbow signs…..

water, water everywhere

but where is the cup to drink?

Water, water everywhere

sky turning from blue, mauve, to pink.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Coval, Kevin, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall, eds. The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.

Edwards, Brent Hayes. Epistrophies:  Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Fabio, Sarah Webster. Volume 1: Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues.  Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

_________________. Volume 2: Together/ To The Tune of Coltrane's Equinox. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

________________. Volume 3: Boss Soul. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

________________. Volume 4: Soul Ain't: Soul Is. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

________________. Volume 5: My Own Thing. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

________________. Volume 6: Black Back: Back Black. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

________________. Volume 7: Jujus and Jubilees. Oberlin, OH: Phase II Publications, 1973.

Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry/A Critical History. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.

               

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[1] I am indebted to Professor Michael New (Saint Anselm College) for sharing with me  a draft of his forthcoming article "Panther Teacher: Sarah Webster Fabio's Black Power," which "recovers…Fabio's life story and literary art in order to resituated women at the center of revolutionary black art and activism."  New's effort to exercise due diligence about Fabio's niche in American and African American  literary histories, especially from the angles of poetry, music, and pedagogy, is a superb blueprint for pre-future work..

[2] Edwards's discussion of how Johnson argued about the "swing inherent in black musical forms as providing a model for black communal production that goes beyond call-and-response" (85) is germane for exploring Fabio's intentions.

[3]The editors of The BreakBeat Poets note that contributors to their anthology "blow up bullshit distinctions between high and low, academic an popular, rap and poetry, page and stage. A break from the wack.  A break from the hidden and precious, the elite and esteemed.  A break from pejorative notions about what constitutes art, who it's for and by and why. A break from the past" (xvii). Fabio's work is permeated with just this kind of constructive destruction.