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17 A Collective Force of Burning Ink Will a lexander’s Asia & Haiti a homegrown if not “organic” intellectual, Will a lexander is an a frican a merican writer from south Central Los a ngeles whose surrealist poetry is global, even cosmic, in scope, encyclopedic in its display of esoteric knowledge and arcane vocabularies, and visionary in its apocalyptic intensity. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, of which only a fraction has been published, a lexander has been largely ignored by black as well as mainstream readers, scholars, and critics, despite regular appearances of his poetry and prose in Sulfur and Hambone, literary journals friendly to avant-garde poetics, edited respectively by Clayton eshleman and n athaniel Mackey. Beyond convenient labels such as “a frican a merican surrealist” or “n orth a merica’s a imé Césaire,” a lexander is difficult to categorize aesthetically as well as ideologically. However, the political landscapes of Asia & Haiti, published by d ouglas Messerli’s sun & Moon press, could bring a lexander to the attention of a wider audience, including more black readers. Born into the early cohort of the post-war “baby boom” generation, a lexander is a child of the Cold War era, which in part defined the aspiring revolutions and liberation struggles of so-called Third World nations, which in turn inspired the civil rights movement and black nationalist struggles in the United states. a lexander’s father, born in n ew o rleans and a World War ii veteran, married a t exan and left the south for California following a military tour that took him, among other places, on a brief visit to the Caribbean. There, the elder a lexander was impressed to see black people in positions of power, and his story of that experience left a distinct impression on his son, who counts among his cultural heroes Césaire of Martinique and Wifredo Lam of Cuba. Asia & Haiti deals with relatively recent historical events— shifts in power that began during the poet’s childhood—that also represent Will a lexander’s Asia & Haiti 163 the changing role of the Third World in the latter half of the twentieth century . n ot only do Cold War ideologies provide subjects for a lexander’s poetry in Asia & Haiti, the era also supplies metaphors for his poetics, as seen in his essay, “poetry: a lchemical a nguish and Fire”: poetics which reduce, which didactically inform, take on the infected measures of the gulag. d uring the earlier part of the 1950’s we see the poet Césaire in sustained resistance against this gulag. He takes on the “Communist” party boss a ragon and the latter’s demand for plain spoken diacritics, for abject poverty of description. (16) published together as a book titled Asia & Haiti, the two poems “a sia” and “Haiti” exist in a kind of dialogic or interactive relationship to each other, so that together they imply a more comprehensive statement about Third World politics and global oppression in a post-Cold War world no longer divided into two superpowers. pairing these poems together allows the poet to explore correspondences between the political weakness and spiritual strength of the inhabitants of two countries, t ibet and Haiti, the one overwhelmed by communists and the other by capitalists. Crucial to the perspective of this work (and perhaps to a lexander’s marginalization as a black writer) is the absence of any “white oppressor” in “a sia” or “Haiti.” a lexander is careful to point out, in response to this observation, that the majority of the world’s population is not white and that people who are not white govern this global majority. The power of so-called Third World people, and not only their oppression , should be a topic for serious discussion and analysis by black intellectuals . Asia & Haiti brings to mind some of the difficulties of writing and evaluating poetry within a political framework. The political messages of poetry written about recent or ongoing events are interpreted diἀerently than those concerning events that for the reader have receded into distant history. in the former case, the political message tends to be foregrounded; in the latter case, the literary and historical value of the work becomes the more important concern for most readers. t o the extent that these poems articulate a political position, it could be said that Asia & Haiti seems crude and inadequate at one level and complexly sophisticated at another level. a s political analysis, Asia & Haiti might...

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