past & future

 

REVIEW THE PAST TO SURVIVE THE FUTURE

 

Lewis, Thabiti. Black People Are My Business: Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020.

 

October 1 ----First, I watched and listened to a conversation between Eugene Redmond and Thabit Lewis,  a teach-in sponsored by The Town Hall.org to introduce Black People Are My Business. Second, I watched Ousmane Sembene's 1966 film La noire de… [Black Girl].  Both viewings were lessons in time.

 

Time is not strange or magic.  Time is.  What’s strange is yearning to review one's past in a vain effort to satisfy nostalgia.  What's magic is the futility of the effort.  One learns something that has already been the future and acts accordingly.  I suspect there's more to self-conscious memory than we know.  To be sure, Redmond's pointed  remarks during the teach-in about Bambara provided a context for recalling what needs to be recalled ---the quality and breadth of Bambara's cultural work.  As usual, Redmond generously shared his 82 years of wit and wisdom.  Lewis was very clear, very focused in explaining  his objective of revealing "an author who embraces an Afrocentric and feminist-leaning agenda that deconstructs limited Afrocentric or rigid feminist views in favor of truth" (201).  The teach-in was a valuable guide about how to read Black People Are My Business and how to navigate the yestermorrow when one engages Bambara's novels, short fiction, and essays.

 

What has Sembene's film to do with Lewis' book?  Nothing direct.  It has more to do with the current hegemony of cinematic imagination which influences what and how we read and interpret writing that is directly connected with our living from one day to the next.  The film is a remarkable illustration of what some women suffered as a result of French colonialism and the untamed assumptions of racist capitalism.  The film reminds me of what circulates in world cultures and that watching the film immediately after the teach-in was no accident.  It was an act of fate.  Some aspects of the film remind me of Richard Wright's story "Man, God Ain't Like That…"; other aspects  force me to recall, as Lewis puts it that "[t]hroughout her career, Bambara refused to separate the struggle for civil rights from a commitment to women's struggle for freedom, and she pragmatically infused her writing with the best o Black aesthetic theorizing and feminism" (33).  Linking Sembene and Bambara reminds me of the extreme fragmentation we suffer (mentally and physically) in 2020.  It reminds me also that the pre-future gestures of my writing may do some good in helping a few people to embrace ideas broadcast by Bambara and other writers and artists of her generation about the quintessential work of cultural healing.  One of those other writers was June Jordan.

 

"Way back when I was born, Richard Wright had just published Native Son and, thereby, introduced white America to the monstrous product of its racist hatred."

June Jordan, "Requiem for the Champ"

 

Native Son     ---Gary Younge's afterword for the 80th anniversary edition of the novel comments on the book's resonance, its continuing to a monstrous product. The monstrous product is America's systemic racism.  Bigger Thomas is merely  the symbol of what flesh and blood Americans have made of their experiment in democracy since 1940/ We live with and inside the monstrous product, and Lewis' study of Bambara does much to help us refine our perspectives on what is at stake in time now. But it is Bambara's works which give us clues about what past-future healing practices should be.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            October 3, 2020