John Oliver Killens

IN  APPRECIATION:  John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)

 

The Minister Primarily. New York: Amistad, 2021.  464 pp.  $27.99

 

As Ishmael Reed, a razor-sharp satirist, attests in his foreword for  The Minister Primarily, Killens  "proved that his satirical pen could cut individuals and institutions to ribbons" (xvi).  The twin targets in this novel are struggles against the deadly corruption that plagues many African nations and the deadlier political corruption in the deeply troubled  United States of America.  Good satire afflicts readers with discomfort, and only readers who are stalwart long-distance runners will appreciate what Killens achieves in prose that is exceptionally baroque or rococo  or a tantalizing mixture of extremes. It is easy to believe that Killens might have had Rabelais somewhere in his imagination as he wrote the novel, because his masterful and cognition-troubling satire is Menippean.  His satire signifies endlessly as it cuts its readers to ribbons.

 

It is comforting to know the novel has come to a point where meaning has no meaning other than the meaning  readers create for themselves as they negotiate the multiple genres that congregate in the text-boundaries we loosely call novels.  Killens anchors  readers in vulnerability. He baits us with an epistolary introduction written by Henry Greenleaf Emerson Longfellow Shakespeare Washington Irving the Second in Lolliloppi, Mississippi on July 10, 1987.  The introduction provides a gateway into astonishing fictions.  It final paragraph serve as a warning ---

 

"For the few moments in this book when it exudes a little humor in the telling of this incredible tale, again I take no credit whatsoever.  All praises, if you think they're due, are due entirely to Himself, a man who always laughed at life, especially at the Black and tragic aspect of it.  He openly proclaims that Black life must be looked upon from the tragic-comic point of view, and not to do so would be to risk every single one f us Black folk going stark raving mad.  Quite obviously we agree." (3)  

 

Thus forewarned, readers can take Himself to be John Oliver Killens and the novel to be a powerful deconstruction of the annoying  and disabling black/white binary that is nothing short of a ruination for African American fictions of the 21st century.  Killens was not a writer who compromised with ruination. He took great pride in being a Black Southern writer (see his introduction for the anthology Black Southern Voices), and he composed The Minister Primarily as a Black Southern book. He gave not a tuppence for playing  games with funk-punk publishers, who were predictably slow to acknowledge  the merit of his writing.  The novel contains "a little humor," because Killens knew laughter is not the best medicine.  In time, the novel will manifest itself as a satire on satire for discerning readers. They will appreciate and salute John Oliver Killens.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            August 16, 2021