"A Collective Force of Burning Ink": Will Alexander's Asia & Haiti

Will Alexander, Poet and Essayist: A Special Section

A homegrown if not “organic” intellectual, Will Alexander is an African-American writer from South Central Los Angeles, whose surrealist poetry is global, even cosmic, in scope, encyclopedic in its display of esoteric knowledge and arcane vocabularies, visionary in its apocalyptic intensity. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, of which a fraction has been published, Alexander 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 Nathaniel Mackey. Beyond convenient labels such as “African-American surrealist” or “North America’s Aimé Césaire,” Alexander is difficult to categorize aesthetically as well as ideologically. However, the political landscapes of Asia & Haiti, published by Douglas Messerli’s Sun & Moon Press, could bring Alexander to the attention of a wider audience, including more black readers.

Born into the early cohort of the post-war “baby boom” generation, Alexander is a child of the Cold War era, which in part defined the aspiring revolutions and liberation struggles of so-called Third World nations, that in turn inspired the Civil Rights movement and black nationalist struggles in the United States. Alexander’s father, a World War II veteran who was born in New Orleans, married a Texan 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 Alexander 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 culture 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—which also represent the changing role of the Third World in the latter half of the 20th century. Not only do Cold War ideologies provide subjects for Alexander’s poetry in Asia & Haiti, the era also supplies metaphors for his poetics, as seen in his essay, “Poetry: Alchemical Anguish and Fire”: “Poetics which reduce, which didactically inform, take on the infected measures of the gulag. During 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 Aragon 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 “Asia” 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 the current situation of oppressed peoples globally in the post-Cold War climate of a world no longer divided into Soviet versus United States allies sustaining a balance or stalemate between two super powers. Pairing these poems together allows the poet to explore correspondences between the political weakness and spiritual strength of the inhabitants of two countries, Tibet and Haiti, the one overwhelmed by communists and the other by capitalists. Crucial to the perspective of this work (and perhaps to Alexander’s marginalization as a black writer) is the absence of any “white oppressor” in “Asia” or “Haiti.” Alexander is careful to point out, in response to this observation, that the majority of the world’s population is not white, and that this global majority is governed by people who are not white. 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 framework of politics. The political messages of poetry written about recent or ongoing events are interpreted differently 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...