Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (review)

Biography is a genre primed for controversy. Its subject is the life of an individual, not the documentarily rich archives and histories of nations. The life of any person represents an immensely complicated terrain. For example, what individual psychological map is so unequivocally graphed and documented that one can make a responsible claim to know what the individual is, or was, thinking? How do myriad large and small encounters of the individual life cohere as a generally endorsed portrait? If Boswell's Life of Johnson serves as example, we know that modern biography partakes more of the carnivalesque and heteroglossic than of a calm and linear weave of accessible documents. Boswell's narrative of the Life of Johnson is a gamboling, ironic, inventive, and epic interpretive enterprise. It is a product of close companionship, astute observation, meticulous recording, outrageous fabrication, and marked intuition. Boswell's reverential familiarity with his subject reinforces the generic canard that the biographical project is always a tale of two lives: the biographer and his subject. This dual relationship is comparable to a portraitist and his finished canvas. Biography, then, is not so much an impeccably verifiable representation, like a photograph; its final draft is far more akin to a motivated and often improvisational attempt to blend fragments and intuitions into a credible whole. Biographers' motives are legion. They include: a consuming historical interest, a worshipful devotion like that of Boswell, or a purely financial inclination to line one's literary pockets. Add the catalogue of "biographical motives" to a propensity of human communities—sacred or secular—to claim to know something about everybody and everything, and the prospects of any single biography gaining universal approval are virtually nil. And, alas, as Dr. Johnson once quipped: "Almost every man has some real or imaginary connection with a celebrated character."

Professor Marable's biography—as one might critically have predicted—stands, one year after its publication, in the heavenly award zones of a National Book Award for nonfiction and a Pulitzer Prize in the category "history." However, his biography also finds itself under excoriating siege from a legion of detractors who count themselves admirers and disciples "connected" with Malcolm X and his "celebrity." From the chorus of kudos and prizes, we infer that Marable and his intertwined subject, Malcolm X, came at the end of their work to a universalist multiculturalism. Marable writes: "For many whites . . . his appeal was located in his conversion from militant black separatism to what might be described as multicultural universalism" (9-10). This universalism is held by Marable to be contra a separatist and dead-end project of black nationalism grounded in the offices of race.

As Malcolm sought to process this extraordinary recognition of status,

he reflected on how he had changed in the past few months: "My mind seems to be more at peace, since I left Mecca in September. [1964] My thoughts come strong and clear and it is easier to express myself." Paradoxically, he then added, "My mind has been almost incapable of producing words and phrases lately and it has worried me." What he appears to be saying is that the Middle East and Africa experiences had greatly broadened his mind, yet his limited vocabulary of black nationalism was insufficient to address the challenges he so clearly saw confronting Africa. Malcolm sensed that he needed to create new theoretical tools and a different frame of reference beyond race.

(384)

What the foregoing citation illustrates is, I think, the bold width of Marable's biographical brush, as well as his assumed privilege of ventriloquizing the "unspoken." The assumptive phrase "What he appears to be saying" is a perfect example of the risk involved in biographical hermeneutics, and such wide interpretive latitude is calculated to stir the ire of dedicated Malcolmites. One thinks back to the energetic 1960s when black studies made its robust contemporary entrance into the academy. There was another Pulitzer Prize-awarded book claiming biographical interpretive privilege, namely William Styron's The Confessions of...