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“Mattie” Marian Minus
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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“Mattie” Marian MinUs (1913–1973) donyel hobbs Williams “Mattie” Marian Minus was a prolific writer who invested a significant portion of her life in uplifting the African American race. Although Minus was born in South Carolina, her parents, Laura Whitener Minus and Claude Wellington Minus, moved the family to Ohio around 1920. Eventually, Minus left Ohio to attend Fisk University in Tennessee; she graduated magna cum laude in 1935. Between 1935 and 1937 Minus attended graduate school at the University of Chicago where she majored in social anthropology. During her stay in Chicago, Minus met Richard Wright, and in 1936 she became a member of the South Side Writers Group. Members of the group included poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, poet and novelist Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, poet Robert Davis, social worker and activist Fern Gayden, and others. The group’s prime directive involved the responsibility of Black writers to a literary heritage that embraced European and white American influences as well as the social and political components of Black American life. After the South Side Writers Group disbanded in mid-1937, Minus returned to New York. In addition to strengthening her personal relationship with Harlem Renaissance alumna Dorothy West, Minus also worked with West on the Challenge journal. Contributors to the journal included Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, Alain Locke, Bruce Nugent, Ralph Ellison, Arna Bontemps, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright. The journal was an important bridge between writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance and those who followed in its wake and sought to establish a new spirit in African American writing, including a number of writers associated with the Chicago Renaissance. Minus’s writing career began with “Present Trends in Negro Literature,” which was published in Challenge in the Spring 1937 issue. In “Present Trends in Negro Literature” Marian Minus argued for an African American literature that reflects human nature, i.e., characterization and social situations, via an immortalized universal appeal. In other words, Minus imagined an African “Mattie” Marian MinUs • 243 American literature in which characters and social situations are universally identifiable and due to an invariable human nature, these self-same characters and social situations achieve immortality. In order to achieve this universality, Minus examines the evolution of African American writing as well as the role or task of the African American writer. Minus likens the African American writer’s development to the stages of human development. Whereas in infancy, the writer’s creation may reflect symbolic “puppet-figures” who lack “the vitality of distinct characters,” during the transition from “adolescence” to “adulthood” the writer’s creations progress and the nondistinct characters morph into fully “embodied fellow-men and then the objects who reflect the social scene in terms of its operation upon them and their reaction to these forces.” As she explains the task of the African American writer, Minus emphasizes the dichotomy of an African American heritage and perceptively acknowledges that the African American writer embraces a double-consciousness where the writer attempts to “holds close to him . . . his exclusive cultural heritage.” Minus entreats the African American writer to “return to the earthy, burning, vital forces which typify the greater proportion of Negro existence” as this becomes a necessary “phase” toward universality and moralization. Furthermore, Minus suggests that the African American writer “look carefully to the legends, myths and ballads” because the “immortalized . . . culture heroes . . . will last for ages . . . [and] because they are people . . . who reflect the aspirations and failures of all humanity,” these people embody “elements of universality.” The second consciousness, according to Minus, must be cognizant of the inherent likenesses of human nature—“human emotions, ideals and struggles.” That being the case, Minus cautions the African American writer that even though “centuries of oppression are still to be exhausted” in African American literature, the “continued creation of [racialized] symbols” mar the likelihood of universality and immortalization due to perceptions of exclusion by some, while others may perceive “colorless mediums, . . . shibboleths, detached clichés, and . . . routine . . . stereotyped expressions.” In addition to overshadowing the intent of African American literature, the danger in mass perceptions of the stereotypicality of literature lies in an ensuing restrictiveness, which threatens other “greater creative possibilities” and “the end of literary attainment for the Negro.” In other words, Minus expresses apprehension at saturating the literary arena with the conventional, racialized protest literature that already prevailed. Minus believed that, eventually, the “consistent creation of poetry and prose out of prejudice” would result in a mass disregard for African...