Ramcat Reads #18

Ramcat Reads #18

Alexander, Patrick Elliot. From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018.  Although Alexander does not reference Abdul R. JanMohamed's The Death-Bound-Subject (2005), his book continues in a new key what JanMohamed addressed regarding  the formation of black subjectivity.  His readings of the carceral aesthetic in works by Baldwin, Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Gaines are path-breaking examinations of what Sheila Smith McKoy calls "a continuum of state-sanctioned control over the black body."  This book may inspire us to take up the challenge Dominique DuBois Gilliard leaves us with in Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores ( Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018) ---the challenge of "setting the captives free, spiritually liberating them and emancipating them from a depraved system that defaces the imago Dei" (199).

George C. Cochran Innocence Project.   Levon and Kennedy: Mississippi Innocence Project.    Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2018. [Photographs by Isabelle Armand; text by Tucker Carrington]

A photographic documentary, reminiscent of WPA books,  based on Tucker Carrington's article "Mississippi Innocence: The Convictions and Exonerations of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer and the Failure of the American Promise," Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 28.12( 2015 )and pictures Armand created of the Brooks and Brewer families because "within rural communities vulnerable  to silence and oblivion, they stand witness to wrongful conviction and mass incarceration" (back matter, n.p.).  The book is a tidbit of visual/textual evidence that much we need to know does not occur in the urban public sphere.

Morrison, Toni.  The Origin of Others.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Morrison's publishing her 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of Civilization as  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was an event, a moment of gravity in discussions of how a considerable amount of "white" literature masked as  American literature dealt with or sought to avoid dealing with Africanist presence in the United States of America.  Her analyses were razor-sharp, surgical.  They modeled qualities of literary critical thinking one wished to absorb and pass on to one's undergraduate and graduate students.  If one could succeed, to some degree, in transmitting Morrison's insights, one helped students ( as well as oneself) to be more securely grounded in what mattered about history and the need to have  more thorough understandings of literature as expressions of ideology and politics.  The book was a positive disruption of American literary arrogance.

By contrast, The Origin of Others (2017), the Spring 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures is an occasion, a mellowed recycling of some main ideas from Playing in the Dark in order to focus on the universal actuality and too often debilitating consequences of cultural, social, and political expressions and uses of difference, the multiple constructions of the vexed Other of which one's Self is inevitably a part. Coming twenty-six years after the Massey lectures, the Norton lectures are less surgical and hefty, less effective in dealing with the vexed actuality of now.  To be fair, we must admit that The Origin of Others provides crucial insights about Morrison's evolution as a writer and the current status of her ability to critique forms of denial in twenty-first century global rule of madness.  The book positions us to assess and re-assess the enormous contribution Morrison has made to world literature, but it leaves us with the frustrating recognition that historical meditations on race and difference may produce limited enlightenment without  any benefit of redress and resolution.  Stress "enormous"  by way of remembering that Morrison was instrumental , before she was acknowledged as a maker of world-class fiction, in assisting a few black writers to be published in the mainstream   The book is informed with self-commentary on Morrison's achievements, and that commentary might be used with profit in courses on literature and culture.

Morrison does succeed, however,  in speaking with the  wry charm  of  the lower frequencies  about  "the destabilizing  pressures and forces of the transglobal  tread of peoples"(109).  In his foreword for The Origin of Others,  Ta-nehisi  Coates commends Morrison for understanding "the hold that history has on us all" and for providing "a welcome aid in grappling with how that grip came to be"( xvii).  I stand in polar opposition to Coates about welcoming such aid, because there is better aid to be had from ice cold discourses on the Others, discourses more akin to the work of Frantz Fanon.

 Playing in the Dark gave us radical dreams of agency; The Origin of Others leaves us with despair, with visions of how amoral gods kill us and all the Others for sport.  We rue the day of passing on this wisdom to future generations.

Perry, Imani.  May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Perry's is a  smart and timely book about how James Weldon Johnson's poem/song has occupied expressive cultural locations for 115 years. "The ways we tell history," Perry asserts, "often make transitions from one period to the next seem permanent and strict.  But in truth every moment and  movement bleeds with the ink of previous eras.  This truth emerged dramatically as I researched the history of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.' It was the epic anthem embraced by black institutions as well as black and multiracial social movements" (xiv).

Roberts, Blain.  Pageants, Parlors and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. A good WORKS CITED item for a future study of the making of "whiteness" and the making of "white women" in the South.  The commentary on black women can be used in new assessments of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

Ruffin, Maurice Carlos. We Cast A Shadow. New York: One World, 2019.

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.

Unlike a career-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 "for- real," 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.

Vargas, Jose Antonio.  Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen. New York: Dey St., 2018.

"After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own," Vargas admits, "this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." A Pulitzer Prize-winning  journalist, Vargas who arrived from the Philippines, reflects on what being homeless might mean for immigrants who defy the American rule of law.  His book is yet another repeating of what we have long known  about the psychological dimensions of liberty and the United States as a democratic experiment.

Walker, Alice.  Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart: Poems. New York: 37INK/Atria, 2018.

When you are past sixty-five, the radicalism of your youth may turn into regret . One advantage of age, however, is being able to remember what were crucial issues in the USA fifty or more years ago. Of course, you can  tell convincing lies about "the good old days."  You can prevaricate with gusto and count at the end of the day how many red herrings you were able to sell.  If those who listen to you are very young and have not developed the skills needed to segregate fact from fiction, they quite likely believe your tales are true.  They may be too preoccupied with the troubles of now to fact-check your statements about a better time in America's history. They are little aware that you are lying with a purpose in a tradition that some writers cherish, a tradition quite easily co-opted and imitated in sinister discourses. When societies and cultures hold literature hostage, more harm than good may be the outcome.

 Does an instructive purpose justify a costumed lie? Perhaps. Fiction is often a free space where emotional truths defy verification for the sake of moral or ethical improvement, but a terrifying danger lurks in the fact of the lie. Fiction can cross the psychological  line of no return and produce more harm than good.  Think of the demonic  fictions which sprawl out of control in the Age of Trump, leaving the fact of the lie amorally  nude in sunlight and moonlight. There is something terrifying in moments when you choose to be severely honest, whether you are old or young : the "what was then" is a replication of the "what is now."  Fiction morphs into the nonfiction of the changing same!  Stop lying to yourself.

 The present is a stage for division and national  trauma --- the cancers of hate and self-hatred thrive daily;  the moral compass is dysfunctional  and incapable of giving proper  directions to anyone or anything; natural and man-made violence negates the smallest dreams of peace everywhere on our planet;  the rule of law is broken;  "hope" is a vulgar word; nostalgia for the past is a terminal illness, and yearning for a future is too often an obscene exercise.  You laugh to keep from dying not from crying.

Rereading The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Bluest Eye, first novels published in 1970, with fellow senior citizens engenders unsettling recognitions about how very bad and prophetic the "good old days" inadvertently were and continue to be.  What you dismissed, condemned, or minimized in the name of racial and ethnic solidarity when you read these novels back in the day now haunts you.  How sublimely  myopic you were. Yes, you were and  are complicit, no matter how much you try to deny the horror of truth, with the production of "now." Time ensures that you can find no sanctuary in dreams, in hopes incarcerated in promises.

 These novels bludgeon you as you attend more passionately in your old age to their narrative strategies;  they are whetstones for cognition. You find yourself not speaking truth to power but speaking the most painful truth about power, articulating the unending warfare of cosmic evil and will power. Unless you are brain-dead, the unsettling recognitions empower you to discard nostalgia, to modify your terms of engagement with this world, to fight, and to send the lies about the better days that never were  to a gas chamber of oblivion. What happens rather slowly in reading  Walker's fiction can happen more quickly in reading her poems which transmit her political aesthetic with great clarity.

One senior citizen reader insisted our group should read Alice Walker's poem "When the President of the United States Calls a Black Woman a Dog" and then follow-up by reading all the poems in Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart (which has Manuel Garcia Verdecia's Spanish translation of each poem). Walker's first novel had opened a window, maybe torn down a whole wall, for her.  She wanted us to have an epiphany similar to Verdecia's as he engaged in "a marvelous adventure of personal growth. Translating her works has turned into a fantastic literary, human, and spiritual experience (xxiii) una maravillosa aventura de crecimiento personal.  Traducir sus obras se ha vuelto una estupenda ecperiencia literaria, humana y espiritual" (xxv), but we have that experience in the complex simplicity of Walker's English. And that experience etches  in our minds that speaking truth about power does not lie.

Yang, Wesley.  The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. "Asian-American success," according to Yang, "is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts" (31).  Yang takes down a few idols of the American tribes, but he does not penetrate or expose the souls of yellow folk as successfully as W. E. B. DuBois anatomized the souls of black ones.  Indeed, Yang gives some unfortunate credibility to an idea circulated in the March 2018 issue of Asian American Journal of Psychology: Asian Americans rarely disclose "their true emotional and social selves" in a public space.  Are the majority of  Asian-Americans  waiting for a magic  green light to cross the street and become thoroughly American ?