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  • A Poet’s Search for Black HumanismRequiem for Alvin Bernard Aubert
  • Julius B. Fleming Jr (bio)

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Alvin Aubert March 12, 1930–January 7, 2014

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My concept of black humanism is that black people should make every possible attempt to become as human as possible … [I]t is only as a “together” human being, individually and collectively, will the Black man, Black people, be able to move forward progressively.

—Alvin Aubert

On January 7, 2014, black poet, playwright, short story writer, editor, and literary critic Alvin Aubert made his final transition, just two days before the passing of our beloved Amiri Baraka. Both losses dealt a forceful blow to audiences who have absorbed and wrestled with the word art of these two phenomenal writers whose love of blackness cut across any of their obvious differences. While Baraka was a canonized literary giant, a certain critical amnesia has enshrouded Aubert, who is, without a doubt, one of our great cultural workers. But in the wake of the unfortunate proximity of these two artists’ deaths, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to wrest Aubert from the grip of obscurity, and to better incorporate the richness of his life, his thought, and his creative production into the annals of our literary histories.

Alvin Bernard Aubert was born on March 12, 1930, in Lutcher, Louisiana. Within the racist milieu of the Deep South, the confluence of blackness and poverty considerably narrowed his opportunities for formal education. Like scores of blacks who were similarly positioned, Aubert made the tough decision to drop out of school in the ninth grade, searching, out of necessity, for employment. While laboring as a clerk, janitor, and delivery boy, the teenager had a burgeoning desire for something more and, ultimately, resolved to join the Army at the age of seventeen. In Korea, Aubert had the good fortune of taking an extension course in literature, which was facilitated by the University of California. This class not only cultivated the soldier’s love of literature, but influenced his decision to enroll in college upon returning home. He would go on to graduate from Southern University—a historically black University in Baton Rouge, LA—in 1959, earning a bachelor’s degree in English literature, with a minor in French. After graduating, Aubert completed a master’s degree in English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which was funded by a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship.

Upon finishing his graduate studies, Aubert made the trek back to his native South, where he accepted a teaching post as an English Instructor at his undergraduate alma mater. By Aubert’s own admission, teaching at Southern was his foray into Afro-Diasporic literature. In 1970, he accepted a professorship at the State University of New York in Fredonia (1970–1979), and later relocated to Wayne State University (1979–1992) in Detroit, [End Page 196] Michigan, where he taught African American literature and creative writing. In 1975, Aubert founded Obsidian: Black Literature in Review—an influential journal that was devoutly committed to publishing the work of up-and-coming black artists. He served as the journal’s founding editor until the publication of its final issue in 1982.

While working across genres, Alvin Aubert dedicated the majority of his creative energies to writing poetry. His collections include: Against the Blues (1972), Feeling Through: New Poems by Alvin Aubert (1975), A Noisome Music (1979), South Louisiana: New and Selected Poems (1985), If Winter Come: Collected Poems, 1967–1992, and Harlem Wrestler and Other Poems (1995). Interestingly, his poetry is often pigeonholed within the realm of the a- (or insufficiently-) political. According to one critic: “While others writing during the 1960s and 1970s produced political and socially charged poems reflecting the times, his [Aubert’s] poetry remained centered on personal experiences” (Vander 13). To be sure, Aubert’s literary corpus teems with creative representations of the personal, even during an era of black power activism that placed a premium on black racial collectivity. But as feminist activists and scholars have reminded us, the personal is absolutely political. This observation rings especially true for a racialized people whose personhood...

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