Each Hour Redeem: Time and Justice in African American Literature

Chapter 4: “Seize the Time!” Strategic Presentism in the Black Arts Movement

  “Seize theTime!” Strategic Presentism in the Black Arts Movement I am in the sound The sound is in me. I am the sound. —Walter DeLegall,“Psalm for Sonny Rollins” That many black thinkers from the late s through the early s were preoccupied by time and philosophies of time is highlighted by the formation of the Dasein Literary Society, a circle of black writers originally based at Howard University. The group started forming as early as ; they published a literary journal, also called Dasein, from  through .1 The name of both group and journal testifies to the writers’ engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger (–), who understood human subjectivity to be a condition of individuality in and over time and coined the term “Dasein,” being in time, or being there, to describe that condition; in Heidegger’s words (in translation), “being-in-the-world.”2 Winston Napier, along with Eugene Redmond and Aldon Nielsen, is among the very few scholars ever to write about the Dasein group, and Napier confirms that Oswald Govan, a Dasein Literary Society founding member and a Howard math major who later became a philosophermathematician , “selected the title for the journal, abstracting it from his readings in German Phenomenology.”3 In , the Dasein group published a collection of their poetry titled Burning Spear: An Anthology of Afro-Saxon Poetry. “Burning Spear” was the nickname of Jomo Kenyatta, the first prime minister of an independent Kenya in , and then its first president from  until his death in . This anthology title and the group’s name situate these writers and their work not only firmly in the s–s but also in a doubly international context, as they identify themselves with both an ongoing Western/European philosophical tradition and an ongoing postcolonial/black diasporic one.   “SEIZE THE TIME!” The Dasein writers thus mark a distinct shift in African American arts and letters. Unlike Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt , the antilynching dramatists, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ernest Gaines, the Dasein poets constitute an artistic community “imagined” on the grounds of what Benedict Anderson terms “temporal coincidence,” or, more precisely, as the group’s name suggests, on Heideggerian being there.4 The Dasein Literary Society supplants strategic anachronism, a sense of being out of step with one’s own times, with an equally strategic presentism derived from their active participation in and contribution to the philosophies, aesthetics, and politics of their period: being in the world. This is not to say that earlier African American writers had failed to participate in the philosophies and politics of their day. To give just one example , Richard Wright’s membership in the Communist Party in the s and his existentialist writings of the s and s identify him very strongly with his era. Still, Wright’s characters—not to mention his novels—were generally “outsiders” temporally, racially, or politically. Figures like Bigger Thomas or Cross Damon, the protagonist of Wright’s  novel The Outsider, do not fit comfortably in their times in much the same way the naturalist novel Native Son is formally out-of-synch, drawing at midcentury on a naturalist literary mode characteristic of the works of the white American novelists Norris, Dreiser, and others at the turn of the twentieth century. Even Ellison’s formally innovative Invisible Man, while it offers us the concluding possibility that the novel’s narrator may be speaking for all of us, nonetheless emphasizes an alternative black temporality theorized from a marginal underground: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.”5 By contrast, Dasein poetry’s form and content are deeply invested in the present and even in optimism about that present. While not denying the power of history, the Dasein poets claim and foreground contemporaneity through writings that represent the imminence of (at the least) justice and equality and (at the most) thoroughgoing social and political change or revolution. For instance, Oswald Govan’s Burning Spear poem “The Lynching” offers thirteen past-tense free verse stanzas detailing the horrifying historical trauma of lynching, stanzas that are then resolved by a concluding quatrain that speaks to the elemental power of present-day black solutions: “SEIZE THE TIME!”   A spear burns in the cool dark earth. A spear burns and a tide descends.6 In their present-tense understanding and representation of blackness, the Dasein poets stand as neglected predecessors...