The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

12. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Stretching the Dialogue of African American Poetry

12 The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be stretching the d ialogue of a frican a merican poetry in Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (1997), a ldon n ielsen makes a significant contribution to discussions of a frican a merican literary production by supplying a literary history for alternate traditions of a frican a merican poetry. if both the recently diversified contemporary mainstream canon and the recently established a frican a merican canon tend to include poets who are selected as representatives of blackness, n ielsen focuses his critical study on “poets whose works interrogate what literary society conceives to be blackness, what languages and what forms are critically associated with constructions of cultural blackness”(168). The aesthetic and intellectual practices of these writers and their readers enable them to explore the possibilities and limits of prevailing discourses and arm them with the flexibility to be interrogative as well as declarative. in taking up the term that n ielsen uses, “interrogate,” i want to apply it in its original sense of “standing between and asking questions.” i would suggest that poets whose work is interrogative in this way have located their poetry in a space between declarative representations of blackness and a critical engagement with the cultural and discursive practices by which evolving identities are recognized, articulated, and defined. The works of these poets have contributed to a dialogue—a discourse on black alterity—that was initiated on the margins of both the mainstream culture and the traditional or popular culture of a frican a mericans. This discourse of “other blackness” (rather than “black otherness”) has recently begun to move into a larger discussion of the multiplicity and dissonance—the flipside of unity or homogeneity—of a frican a merican cultures and identities. The exploratory interrogation of black identity as a social, cultural, and discursive formation raises critical questions about conventional representations of black identity. These questions not only allow the meanings of stretching the d ialogue of a frican a merican poetry 69 blackness to proliferate and expand, thus stretching black identity and making it more inclusive, but also allow instability in the definition of blackness. if the Black a rts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s was primarily concerned with defining and empowering blackness while helping to reverse the cultural “whitewashing” of a frican a mericans, several poets associated with this movement defined blackness specifically in ways that celebrated young militant black male heterosexuals and their supportive female comrades, partners, and admirers but at the same time frequently alienated other elements of the a frican a merican communities they ostensibly hoped to organize and empower. perhaps this orientation of the movement sought to recruit an army of cultural warriors by framing black art as a safely masculine arena for young men who might otherwise have avoided what was regarded in some quarters as an eἀeminate activity. in their attempt to purge a frican a mericans of cultural whiteness, some proponents of black power vilified middle-class and homosexual lifestyles, seeing both as examples of blackness tainted and emasculated by decadent whiteness. t wo primary sources for the most galvanizing rhetoric and influential styles of the Black power and Black a rts movements, Malcolm X and a miri Baraka, regarded themselves as having been corrupted by their earlier association with whiteness, queer sexualities, and a square middle-class background. Both men renamed themselves, creating new identities that inverted previously held values: Malcolm Little fled the middle-class pretensions of Boston’s black strivers, first transforming himself into a conked, reefer-smoking, lindy-hopping zoot suiter, and later converting and becoming a minister of the n ation of islam, accepting elijah Muhammad’s demonization of the white race; Ler oi Jones repudiated the black bourgeoisie and white bohemia, as allegorized in his 1964 play Dutchman. a lthough both eventually modified their radical positions, they contributed to the extreme rhetoric of radical black movements of the 1960s, as seen in the revolutionary style and swagger of militant leaders of the Black panther political party. These charismatic leaders oἀered themselves as case studies for the project of purifying black identity and black culture of the contaminating eἀects of white domination, with which they often conflated bourgeois culture, homosexuality , and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. My remarks will focus not primarily on formally innovative work but on recent black poetry that has been enabled by theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices. Black...