Act and Shadow


ACT  AND  SHADOW

I am in 75th birthday mode and predisposed to write dangerously.

A novel scheduled to be published on January 29, 2019 by PenguinRandom House may be an omen about what some of us may feel obligated to do in remembering 1919 and the race riots that bloodied that year.  I refer, of course, to We Cast A Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin, a book for which I have great expectations.  My expectations exceed those of the in-house promoters who guessed Ruffin's novel will appeal to "fans of Get Out and Paul Beatty's The Sellout."  I would have been more pleased had the promoters said the debut novel will appeal to serious readers of fiction who have not allowed  George Schuyler's Black No More (1931) and Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) to hibernate in the dustbin of oblivion.  That would indeed have been a smart gesture of advertising and contemporary American literary politics, a foil for the claim that Ruffin is "writing in the tradition of Ralph Ellison and Franz Kafka."  I believe that Ruffin is in the black-on-black-on-black tradition of transforming low satire into praiseworthy art, a tradition commodious enough to embrace Ellison the myth-maker and Kafka the parable-blacksmith and the fabulous trickery of unnamed West African tellers of tales from back in the night.

I am in 75th birthday mode and predisposed to champion a novel I have not yet read. 

Unlike an award-whipped critic who will wait for We Cast A Shadow to earn a major or minor prize before she or he will offer a generous appreciation, I am secure if I gamble in the casino of the unknown.  As I mentioned some weeks ago to a friend, I believe Ruffin like the poet Clint Smith, the photographer L. Kasimu Harris,  and the playwright Harold E. Clark belongs to a new wave of writers and artists  from New Orleans who have class, who have mastered craft, and who just naturally address our now-future society (not a near-future one) of, to quote from the PenguinRandom House promotion, "resurgent racism, segregation, and expanding private prisons."  In the Age of Trump, they are less surreal than "forreal," and they know how the "tragic magic" of actuality manifests itself.  Read Ruffin's novel to discover how long the shadows of chaos might be.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 30, 2018

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