on the time it is

 

ON  THE  TIME IT IS

November 11, 2020

The Project on the History of Black Writing's 9th Annual Black Literary Suite---"Black Writing in Reel Time"---was an exceptional conversation on film/streaming time.  Stefon Bristol, Darren Canady, Danyelle Greene, Josalynn Jennings, Kevin Wilmot, and Malcolm Wright talked us through the current state of black cinema, the status quo of what Kalamu ya Salaam has called "writing with light." 

They cast provocative  light on the film wherein we live.  Our mass media frame and photograph how we act daily.  It is quite difficult in the 21st century  our to confront  the future, present, and past of NOW with integrity.  In the midst of  pandemic  (COVID-19 on its way to COVID-20/21),  it is inevitable that we deal with crises that infect the qualities of our lives.  We grow weary of doing so, but we really are condemned by existential choice predicated by government policies, the antics of our fellow citizens, and Kafkaesque  rules of law. Being in the global film of NOW almost seems normal.

  Should we opt to deny what is inconvenient about being normal, we will suffer a cognitive butt-whipping for which we are ill-prepared.  We may hold out against the hegemony of cinematic  "streaming," but streaming will hang us down-side-up on a clothesline. More consequential  images are consumed in the home than the movie house. And our minds project those images not provided by the film industry's power brokers. The panel was forthcoming about the cons and pros and danger zones of black film that is not divorced from white capital, not independent of enslaving American motives.  Those motives are driven by profit not morality.  True to Machiavellian theory, those who demand equity and political morality suffer from the surveillance (filming) that can cause paranoia and/or death.

Thus, it  was a godsend for Richard Wright's grandson Malcolm Wright to speak eloquently about how in the 1950s some critics bad-mouthed his grandfather  for "abandoning"   civil rights struggles in the United States, bad-mouthed him for refusing to be an American puppet.  The critics were myopic. As American intellectuals, they  could not accept that Wright's concerns with African liberation struggles (Black Power), the consequences of the 1955 Bandung Conference  (The Color Curtain), and Roman Catholic complicity with fascism in Europe (Pagan Spain) were indeed related to the global  phenomenon of systemic racism.  Wright invested much of his intellectual energy in advocating human rights. These indignant persons deliberately or accidentally misunderstood Richard Wright. His detractors swallowed the hook, the line, and the sinker of Cold War scenarios and  benign genocide.  Malcolm Wright has no delusions about  the American critical incarceration of his grandfather (the discourses that boxed him in); he understands how crucial it is for us to be architects of personal liberation and the liberation of others.

When Malcolm's mother, Julia Wright announced that her father's  full original text of the novella  "The Man Who Lived Underground" and "Memories of my Grandmother," which explains much about where Wright was coming from in the depiction of underground discoveries is to be published in April 2021, I had a minor epiphany.  What the  panelists  exposed about the psychology of film and Julia Wright's announcement were fitting preludes for a November 12 conversation on Black Boy.  Like "The Man Who Lived Underground," Wright's autobiography is a prose film.

 

November 12, 2020

Julia Wright, C. Liegh McInnis,  Kevin Powell, Kiese Laymon, Charlie Braxton and I explored why it is very timely to revisit Black Boy, Wright's classic autobiography----the partial text published in 1945 and the full , restored text of 1991 (Library of America edition).  It angers me that stupid people insist on calling Wright's autobiography an autobiographical novel, because that is a gesture of denying Wright the entitlement of writing a legitimate autobiography.  Autobiographies come to us in many shapes, and most of them incorporate fictions.  Indeed, I cannot recall any autobiography or memoir which is devoid of what fiction donates to truth-values. It is the mind as video camera that enables us to write autobiography. From my perspective, contemporary readings of Black Boy should incorporate  some measure of empirical aesthetics .  Concern with the psychology of  responses not necessarily linked to philosophy of art (the common, vexed definition of aesthetics) does not erase interest in a writer's artistic accomplishments.

I dare not attempt to  paraphrase what my fellow panelists said so brilliantly during the conversation.  People will need to listen to what was said once the Margaret Walker Center makes the recorded conversation available.  My contributions focused on the following points:

1. When I wrote an introduction for the HarperPerennial edition of  Black Boy (1993), I had a very special interest in the parallels of experience that marked Wright's life and my own.   More recently, I am seeking to discover how Wright's works reveal the special qualities of his mind. Wright studies have not sufficiently dealt with his mind.  I want to know more about his oeuvre as a permanent record of his intellect and imagination.
2. Wright cannot be shoved into a box of representing early 20th-century black males, although the composite character Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Jake Jackson in Lawd Today! and Cross Damon in The Outsider  do represent aspects of masculinity .  In Black Boy, Wright represents Wright and presents a stunning record of America's systemic racism might create. What counts most is Wright's individuality as he dealt with the funky game of "boying the male versus the male's manning of himself."  People who are enthralled with the promises of Afrofuturism  ought to minimize blinding fantasies and listen  to  such  scholars  as Tommy J. Curry, Toni Cade Bambara,  Cedric  Robinson, Audre Lorde, Sterling Stuckey, and Abdul; R  JanMohamed ----thinkers who provoke clearer visions of what was always at stake in Wright's  agon with the world.
3. I urge that close reading of Black Boy be followed in 2021 with close reading of 12 Million Black Voices (1941).  Wright's folk history and his awareness that he was a "fleeting exception" among tragic millions has a place in the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa tragedy. Wright knew that the twelve million targets of systemic racism were neither abjectly pathetic nor pathological beyond redemption. He knew that ten percent of them were rising to somewhere.  The targets were and are heroic and tragic in their "collective humanity."  Wright's lifelong pursuit of what is true did not involve  pandering to being "nice" and complicit in genocide.
4. Finally, Wright was not a prophet, but he was capable imagining  in The Color Curtain how neo-terrorism might come  into being------ "It is not difficult to imagine Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and Shintoists launching vast crusades, armed with modern weapons, to make the world safe for their mystical notions…" (page 218). What we discover on page 219 throws us into an abyss of reflection.  Wright asked himself if the West had a " moral right to interfere sans narrow, selfish political motives" in world affairs.  His answer was yes. "And not only do I believe that that is true, but I feel that such a secular and rational base of thought and feeling, shaky and delicate as yet, exists also in the elite of Asia and Africa!"  Wright's qualification  (shaky and delicate) is stunning, because the turn of world affairs after 1960 is deadly not delicate, and we are flooded and drowning "in irrational ties of racial and religious passions" in 2020.  Wright gave us the words to picture our descent into oblivion.

Sustained conversations regarding what now exists between Wright's works and our world are downright essential in the cyberspace film we inhabit.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 14, 2020