Sankofa review of Trouble the Water

A Sankofa Review of Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry (1997)

NCBS Conference, March 7, 2019

If the objective is to create a new book that complements the 21st century mission of African American poetry, the enterprise might begin with a critical, Sankofa review of the 1997 anthology Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry and with a blueprint of what a pragmatic, appropriately rooted new anthology should be. It can be taken for granted the work will be encompassed by impassioned debates, skepticism, and academic dismissal, because there is no consensus (general agreement  I know about )

(1)that  African American poetry has a mission, a  redemptive  purpose

 (2) that  a significant non-academic population has a need and appetite for a "representative" anthology of poems

(3) that use of periodicity from 1619 (oral and aural)/1746 (print) to 2019 is adequate in discriminating among traditions and  individual talent, choices of style and poetic forms, and shifting habits of reading and interpretation

and

(4 that innovations compared to what can be accounted for with certitude.

 In such a blurred and multi-layered  context,  making a new anthology would be a gift for one's people for which no gratitude should be anticipated ( or even desired).

The original intent of Trouble the Water was description of transformative moments in a history of poetic production as those moments were "inflected with resistance, the trauma of loss, adaptation, cross fertilizing [linguistic and rhetorical], and synthesis" (xix).  The primary models for structuring the book were The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps and Dudley Randall's The Black Poets (1971). "To encourage richer creative and critical responses to the making of the African-American poetic tradition," the  editor "organized the works to emphasize fruitful tensions between poets and history or between individual talents and a narrative always awaiting revision" (xxii). Mindful that poets ought not be imprisoned in arbitrary divisions, the editor chose to organize the poems according to the birth dates of poets rather than the publication dates of the poems. The editor intended that the anthology would be "a sampling of poems (texts) that can be examined for what they reveal about the multiple, necessary, and highly valued functions of African-American art in cultural histories" (xxiv).

Trouble the Water has been out-of-print for more than ten years.  It is an archival document, among many others, of what was worth doing in the later years of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic period of African American literary histories. I argue, nevertheless, that the archival document can serve as a springboard  for thinking about what an anthology covering 270 years of black poetic tradition might be.

Black Studies scholars  might agree that a new anthology should be a PDF rather than a printed book.  They might agree that it should incorporate digital technologies  and interpretive gestures of digital humanities (DH) in order to facilitate a democratic sampling of subject matters, the refraction of class and gender battles in poetry, the Black performative dimensions of music (lyrics) and visual artifacts and diverse  critical attitudes in what we can't assume in 2019  to be a unified African American community and mindscape. The notion of collectivity is fraught.  It is a matter of theory not of actuality. A new and genuinely Sankofa anthology should  ultimately reinforce the responsible " accounting for" things which  Eugene Redmond urged us to have in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry/A Critical History (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books,  1976 ).  A print form/ book  that enabled digital interaction ---- [i.e., referencing of Internet materials; accessing  Howard Rambsy II's Cultural Front, a "venue for extended conversations about African American literature, intellectual history, artistic culture, and digital humanities ---www.culturalfront.org ----; YouTube videos of readings and discussions; poetry  webinars archived by the Project on the History of Black Writing (University of Kansas), the Furious Flower video anthologies of 20th century poets (James Madison University)  and digital modes of analysis/ cultural analytics/ experimentation with methodologies ] ---- might best serve the 21st century needs of students, teachers, and general readers.  The relative stasis of Trouble the Water is defunct, and so too is passive dealing with poetry.

 One primary assumption is this: a new anthology should invite readers to engage a pedagogy of enlightenment as opposed to being complicit in an academic pedagogy of hegemony.  In this sense, readers should be encouraged to avoid the trap of canonization and to undertake robust, radical practice in making an aesthetic history of African American poetic tradition.  In plainer words, without minimizing the verifiable history of African American poetry, all readers should establish pragmatic terms of engagement for dealing with change and continuity.  Poets, makers of anthologies, and readers should be co-creators in  a process of accounting for the always changing ontology of African American poetry as writing, situational intervention, and variegated cognition or consciousness.

A 21st century iteration of Trouble the Water should above all pose a most difficult and  uncomfortable question:  is poetry necessary?

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            March 2, 2019