Ujima for 2019


UJIMA for 2019

"Great writing is a dogged confrontation with the human hell without and the human hell within oneself;  great writing is the courage to draw prophetic conclusions from the existence of hell.

…..

To face hell means not to collapse because of man's present reality but to face up to man's ability to conquer himself, to face up to man's infinite potentialities for health and goodness, for godliness, for creativity, for beauty, for the construction of boundaryless human harmony."



Lance Jeffers, "The Death of the Defensive Posture: Toward Grandeur in Afro-American Letters" (1970)





The definition Lance Jeffers created for great writing is daunting, but it provides descriptive boundaries  for work during 2019 and beyond.  Wikipedia estimates that slightly more than two million books are published annually throughout the world.  China publishes 440,000; the United States, 304,912. If 1% of that number is significantly  "great," the world must consider itself fortunate.  99% of what is published annually exists in a spectrum from "very good" to "trashy."  The number of people capable of producing "great writing" as defined by Jeffers is miniscule.  The reason is not far to seek.



Writers, especially American writers,  tend to face either  the hell within or the hell without.  The limits of being human minimize their probability of facing within and without simultaneously.



Jeffers was more optimistic about potential than the practice of everyday life allows me to be.  I find scant evidence that writers in any discipline or occupation (including the jobs of making war and dispensing terror) have transcendent courage to satisfy the terms Jeffers set for greatness.  My own writing is purposeful rather than great, an effort to murder the defensive posture which disables people.



 I find unsettling evidence in much contemporary  American writing of the defensive posture, a surplus of mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  Mea culpa is all the rage, and the rage is marketed by publishers (including self-publishers) with sinister fidelity.  If we do not try to reduce, arrest, or incarcerate the ethical criminality of self-deprecating production (an unexamined trendiness)  in 2019 among the writers we claim to love  ---we express love by  anointing  with praise and prize, we will be complicit in systemic destruction.  We who write in any genre need to be offensively  critical not defensively promiscuous. We need to love ourselves enough to create pragmatic grandeur for postlapsarian Americans, to honor the prophecy of Lance Jeffers and the efforts of Amiri Baraka to map the mindscape of hell without apology.



I'd like to write on December 28, 2019 that we have made progress in exorcising the demons within and without.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            December 28, 2018

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