"Total Life Is What We Want": The Progressive Stages of the Black Aesthetic in Literature

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

"Total Life Is What We Want": The Progressive Stages of the Black Aesthetic in LiteratureAuthor(s): Reginald MartinSource: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Nov., 1986), pp. 49-67Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199756 .

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"Total Life is What We Want". The Progressive Stages of the Black Aesthetic in Literature

REGINALD MARTIN

With the poem, we must erect a spiritual black nation we can all be proud of. And at the same time we must try to do the

impossible- always the impossible-by bringing the poem back into the network of man's social and political life.

Total life is what we want. Clarence Major, "A Black Criteria" (1967)

THE TERM BLACK AESTHETIC is one that needs a new and detailed definition to delineate its stages, shapers, adherents, and adversaries. Elucidation of the term black aesthetic will only come with the acquisition of a clear understanding of what it meant to its originators, its progressive stages, and where the term uncomfortably rests in the world of literary thought today.

Essential to understanding the planks in the original black aesthetic platform is an explanation as to how slave narratives came to be called literature. To the academic, the term literature usually applies to fiction, drama, poetry, and some polemical or instructional works (De Copia or The Book of the Courtier). The term is sometimes attached to non-fiction works such as confessions (St. Augustine), and seldom, if ever, attached to position papers or technical field papers. In the history of Afro-American literature, however, the original black aesthetic's very beginnings are pulled from experiences that are non- fictional in origin but result in fervent confessions. Critics agree that slave narratives start a literary tradition, and it is my contention that these non-fiction narratives are transformed into literature by the power of their emotive language as well as the power of their emotive situations; that is, the pathos of the position of the narrator. For example, even though many of the slave narratives were oral histories dictated by their authors and transcribed by others, it is the complex and emotional structure of the language that makes the narratives



50 Reginald Martin

literary and that gives them their force. Whether the narrative is transcribed (Josiah Henson) or written by the narrator (Frederick Douglass), the language is strikingly similar in structure, content, and theme.

Further, the boundaries of the term aesthetic require concrete delin- eation. The works to be discussed clearly show, as I hope to demon- strate, that their writers semantically ratify aesthetic beyond standard denotative and commonly used connotative perameters. Thus these writers, who are as single-mindedly opposed to social and racial injustice in their fiction and prose as they are in their poetry and drama, invent and refer to an aesthetic that means far more than an appreciation of and conformity to a particular set of artistic principles or practices. Hence, the term black aesthetic is used interchangeably by black aesthetic writers as well as critics to mean: 1) a corpus of non-fiction and fiction, oral and written, that asserts in often overtly emotional fashion the equality, differentness-and sometimes supe- riority-of blacks and black American ways of doing and perceiving things; 2) a set of political principles, primarily consistent in their outrage against inequality; 3) a brace of ethical and artistic criteria that sets guidelines for what will be considered valid or invalid writing by black Americans; and, 4) a human code for translating the mute matter of a world in which certain races and inhumane systems combine to destroy other races and more humane systems. The successful translation of this code means survival on material, racial, and spiritual levels. A failure to translate the code means death in this life.

Josiah Henson (1789-1883) probably did not have in mind a black aesthetic when he dictated Truth Stranger Than Fiction (1858), but his diction, method of delivery, and subject matter parallel symbiotically the written prose of Clarence Major in "A Black Criteria" (1967) that concluded the last phase of the original black aesthetic begun by slave narrators such as Henson. Major's piece signals the beginning of the new black aesthetic that currently continues in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. When Henson tells of his decision not to choose freedom for himself and his compatriots when it is effortlessly within reach, there one finds the sort of pathos that is carried by emotive language. That same pathos and irony reappear in Major's work when he asserts that it is the black American, long held in less-than- human status, who must be looked to for human sanity in an inhuman society ("Criteria" 15). So, it is the nature of the language of Henson's slave narrative, language that is consistent throughout the progressive stages of the black aesthetic, that moves it from the



South Atlantic Review

narrational plane of mere telling in a linear sequence to the higher narrational plane of emotive writing.

Attempting to save his own estate, Henson's master has instructed him to abscond with all of the other slaves to the master's brother's plantation in Kentucky. Upon reaching Ohio after journeying from their home state of Maryland, Henson and his party are beseeched by free blacks to stay in Ohio and be their own masters. Here is Henson's tortured response to the situation:

Freedom had ever been the object of my ambition, though no other means of obtaining it had occurred to me but purchasing myself. I had never dreamed of running away. I had a sentiment of honor on the subject.... En- trancing as the idea was, that the coast was clear for a run for freedom, that I might liberate my companions, might carry off my wife and children, and some day own a house and land, and be no longer despised and abused - still my notions of right were against it.... (166-67)

After he has made his decision, Henson writes: "Often since that day has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery so many of my fellow beings...." (166-67).

In the slave narrative, there are generally three types of emotive language used: prejudicial, prepossessive, and euphemistic. Each of these "grounds" (C. S. Peirce) or bases of connotative semantic genesis is manifested in a particular way in the course of the narrative. Prejudicial words carry with them negative connotations; prepossessive words carry with them positive connotations; and euphemistic words often appear as expressions of understatement or grim humor.

For example, the words slave or master, regardless of their syntactic correspondence and their intended meaning, are words that always carry a prejudicial connotation. Conversely, freedom in the context of Henson's passage denotes a prepossessive, positive sentiment. Euphe- misms appear as understatement or grim humor because of the utter hopelessness of the slaves' situation; that is, the slave narrator may understate or laugh at certain aspects of slavery because the misery of his real state is too awful to face without humorous perspective. For example, when Henson finally escapes to Canada, he describes that country as more than just a mass of land across the Northern border of the United States. Owing to the fact that men with black skins

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may be free there, Canada becomes a state of mind; Henson euphe- mistically asserts for himself what Ishmael Reed says over 118 years later: "Everyone to his own Canada" (Flight 128).

These three grounds of emotive language-the prejudicial, the prepossessive, and the euphemistic-form the bases for the most

powerful slave narratives. Emotive language becomes a key in the

development of the original black aesthetic, or black way of express- ing humanistic concerns. The emotive language is always coupled with the situationally emotive, that is, the exponential horrors of slavery. In David Walker's (1785-1830) Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829), the depiction of the institution of slavery is so clear and abhorrent that the simple denotative description of the basis and conditions of slavery is cathartic. Walker's appeal utilizes a simple dichotomy consisting of the cause and effects of slavery. The conclusion as to what to do about the situation is left to the reader, but Walker emotively structures his text in such a way that the reader can only decide in favor of abolishing slavery. The narrative's structure serves to further another stipulative end of Walker's tactic of persuasion: that blacks are hated not because

they cannot or will not learn the white man's methods, but are hated

simply because they are black. Walker's persuasion is always emotive-not only in language, but also in its rhetorical use of the situation of slavery as a constant backdrop to refute its defenders:

I will ask one question here. -Can our condition be any worse? - Can it be more mean and abject? If there are any changes, will they not be for the better, though they may appear for the worse at first? Can they get us any lower? Where can they get us? They are afraid to treat us any worse, for they know well, the day they do it they are gone. (126-27)

The situationally emotive has been essential to the development of the black literary aesthetic, because the socially pathetic is an insepa- rable part of the Afro-American social experience.

One can follow the situationally emotive part of the original black aesthetic chronologically and thematically into the work of Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1881) in his "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America," originally appended to a text of Walker's Appeal that Garnet had edited (Miller 129). Garnet also adds to the emotive language and emotive situation the appeal for direct -and if

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need be-physical action on the part of the bondsmen themselves. Garnet's appeal, too, which arose out of the continual frustrations of the slaves, betrayals of them by whites, and the complacency of those to whom the slaves turned for aid, became an integral part of the black aesthetic, to be echoed countless times in the literature of the

following years. After David Walker, for every capitulationist and

pacifist, there was a Henry Highland Garnet. The peroration of Garnet's address reads:

Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves. It is an old and true saying that, "if heredity bondsmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow...." They buy and sell you as though you were brute beasts.... You had far better die -die immediately, than live slaves and entail your wretchedness upon posterity. (133)

Beginning with Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895), one begins to see an enumeration, not only of injustices, but also an enumeration of demands, a listing of "What the Negro Wants." Douglass's best- known work, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (3rd edition), appeared in 1881; this edition was enlarged in 1892 (Brawley, Early 179). Contained in the 1892 edition was the additional section entitled "American Slavery." In this supplement, one finds what critics have called a list of grievances, but the material is really a list of demands. By this stage in Douglass's life and career, he had given up on simply hinting at what he intended in hopes of moving an unresponsive audience.

In "American Slavery," written before the end of the Civil War, Douglass denigrates the celebration of the Fourth of July as a day of "Independence" for all Americans. How could there be a celebration of Independence when one-twelfth of the nation remained fettered? The obvious answer is that there could not be, and Douglass demanded that such a pretense be dropped and labeled for what it really was: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice. I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony" (202-203). And in the powerful essay, "What the Negro Wants," Douglass states his demand for "immediate, unconditional, and universal enfranchisement of the black man, ..." and then subdivides that demand into its logical and far-reaching components. After Douglass, except for the notable exception of Booker T. Washington, such demands become common-

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Reginald Martin

place. Blacks are no longer content to plead and expect nothing in return; instead, in their literature, there is a constant asserting of what they believe to be the inherent right of each individual in the United States. Douglass, in "What the Negro Wants" (209-11; 214- 15), presents his argument thus:

I am for the "immediate, unconditional, and universal" enfranchisement of the black man, in every state in the Union.... I will tell you why we want it. We want it because it is our right, first of all. No class of men can, without insulting their own nature, be content with any deprivations of their rights.... What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simple jus- tice.... Let him fall if he cannot stand alone!

Booker T. Washington has always presented himself as a complex anomaly to historians. On the one hand, he may be seen as a "great emancipator," one who opened the doors of education for the poor and who provided access for the poor to escape their misery. On the other hand, he may at best be called a capitulationist, and at worst a traitor to the strivings of black people toward social equality. W. E. B. Dubois called Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Address" (1895) "The Atlanta Compromise" (Miller 255), wherein all of the white man's fears about demands of blacks for social equality are laid to rest, as Washington advocated a sort of separate, skilled guild of black blue-collar workers who would be content with their stations. Washington writes:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing.... The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house. (Washington, "Atlanta" 207)

Here, one can see that Washington is at least as interested in putting to rest white insecurities about racial mixing as he is interested in the advancement of a dispossessed people. What did Washington's stance add to what I am calling the original black aesthetic?

First, and most importantly, it generated (in Dubois's reaction) a

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disagreement between two noted black social and educational leaders. Dubois's reaction meant that, if Washington were merely a prop for the white status quo, then certainly such props would no longer go unquestioned simply because the initiator were black. Before, there had been little conflict in print among major black spokesmen. But Washington's time is a pivotal one in the history of the black American's development. It is not by coincidence that nearly all of the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were made moot or circumscribed by "states' rights" at the same time that Washington ascended to the level of national black spokesman. Dubois saw what was taking place in the country and correctly surmised that even though Washington may have been working only out of the sincerest desire to see black people advance, he was being propped up as a "cure-all" for black Americans to emulate so that the serious business of their total disenfranchisement could take place behind a public-relations smoke- screen.

Second, and more cearly positive, Washington brings to the fore- front the element that all future black aestheticians were to insist was an organic part of black self-realization: education. There could be no calculated aesthetic or political course of action unless the major- ity of the black populace were able to understand and implement these calculations. Education would be the catalyst for such imple- mentation. The necessity of education and the fight to insure that blacks could receive an adequate education became a rallying point for all who laid platforms for what the black American and his artistic, social, and political style would be. Washington, regardless of his other perceived faults, was instrumental in making quality education for blacks important in the public concern.

To the aesthetic construct that had thus far been developed came W E. B. Dubois. Dubois's expansion of and influence on the black aesthetic extends from the end of the nineteenth century, through the Harlem Renaissance, and into the 1960s-Dubois died, expatriated in Ghana, in 1963 on the eve of the Civil Rights March on Washington (Miller 272). Of greatest importance was that Dubois's works brought the scholarly method to the study of black problems in America, as reflected in black literature, and applied this method to form a schema for operation within an oppressive system. The importance of Dubois's scholarly work (he is often called the father of sociology in the United States) cannot be overemphasized. The usage of the scholarly method on the race problem in America opened the literature to new, white audiences: since the United States is often

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regarded as a literate, print-sensitive culture, as opposed to a preliter- ate, oral, and aural-sensitive culture, Dubois's printed work gave validity to the ideas of egalitarianism advanced earlier by such black writers as Henson, Douglass, and Walker who had not had the advantages of a formal, secondary, Western education; moreover, it gave validity to Dubois's original ideas. Principal among his scholarly works are The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Black Reconstruction in America, (1860-1880) (1935), and Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). Despite these impressive scholarly achieve- ments, Dubois's most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is a collection of essays, fiction, sketches, and songs, all tied together by the threads of genius and color. It is also in The Souls of Black Folk that Dubois explains, in concrete terms, the complex racial and national- ity components of being black and American. The oft-quoted and famous passage reads:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of

others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two

thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (45)

Consequently, implicit in the original black aesthetic is a kind of social and intellectual schizophrenia: the black American hates the

society that loathes him or her, while at the same time he or she does

everything possible to become a symbiotic part of that society. For

example, the black aesthetic says that there is a black way of doing things, but it expresses those things in English, not Yoruba or

Dahomey. It says that the oral tradition is at least as important as the written tradition, but it says so in Gutenberg's type. Dubois's passage, then, imparts to the black aesthetic its dual nature, its American- ness, while insisting on its difference.

What are some of the ways in which this difference manifests itself? For one thing, the language of the black aesthetic is blunt. Realizing that obfuscation is just another way of avoiding any action on a social

issue, writers in the black aesthetic mode have made a point of

speaking directly to the interested reader, using words that are emotive and quickly understood. Generally, the writer lists names, dates, places, and occurrences, and then condemns the negative act or

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person in frank terms. This was especially true of writers during the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hur- ston, and Countee Cullen. Dubois helped to initiate this sort of directness in scholarly works that maintained an informal level of diction, such as The Philadelphia Negro, a sociological work that is free of professional jargon.

Alain Locke in his The New Negro (1925) proposed that in the years between the setbacks of the 1880s and the jazz era of the 1920s a "new

Negro" had emerged, one who was educated and both fully cognizant of the past and able to plan for the future. Locke's language level is

formal, but his imagery is concrete, non-abstract:

In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American

Negro and the three nors who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. For the younger is vibrant with a new psycho- logy; ... (145; 148)

In similar terms, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), founder of the Uni- versal Negro Improvement Association, speaks bluntly about the

dangers of black people trusting black intellectuals, bought and sold

by white, capitalist puppeteers; and he frankly tells black people of the efficacy of facing their blackness and loving as well as depending upon it. Needless to say, Garvey's polemics were appalling to white and black intellectuals alike -because his words preached total isola- tion from the white West. Unlike Locke's Renaissance black man, who had the power to embrace all, Garvey advocated voluntary self- removal to Africa as the only way to salvation. Under the heading of "The Passing Negro 'Intellectual,'" Garvey puts forth in no uncertain terms his opinion of "chosen" black leaders. His term "passing" has a

tripartite and emotive meaning in referring to: 1) blacks who pass themselves off as progressive intellectuals when they are really only self-serving lackeys of white power brokers; 2) black intellectuals who are attempting, through miscegenation, to be white; 3) black intellectuals who will soon pass from acceptance to make way for true black leaders who are not filled with self-hatred:

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It is astonishing how disloyal and selfish is the average Negro "intellectual" of the passing generation to his race. The Negro who has had the benefit of an education of

forty, thirty, and twenty years ago, is the greatest fraud and stumbling block to the real progress of the race. He

indulged the belief, and carried out the practice, that to be a man, and to be great, is to exploit the less fortunate members of his race, barter their rights economically and

politically, and then with the attendant personal success, seek to escape the race through an underground current of

miscegenation. Their late effort to protest their desire for "social equality," meaning intermingling with whites as their highest ambition, is a lie, and they know it. Their

everyday deeds are the greatest evidence against them.

They hate their black blood and God and man know it. This old school of Negro "intellectuals" is crafty, unpa- triotic and vicious. They cannot be trusted. I would rather

give a dime to a dead hog, than to save the skins of all of them. ("Passing" 325)

Elsewhere in his address, speaking of the black man's future, Garvey says: "It takes the slave to interpret the feelings of the slave; it takes the unfortunate man to interpret the spirit of his unfortunate brother; and it takes the suffering Negro to interpret the spirit of his comrade"

(320). Garvey's rhetoric provided two mainstays to the black aesthetic movement: first, the idea of complete separation from whites and the West would in the future always crop up in some of the literature. This would be especially true in the literature of the Nation of Islam, labeled by the white and the black press of the United States as the "Black Muslims," and in some of the work of the black nationalists of the 1960s. Second, the love of blackness, itself, was elaborated into

something metaphysical, something beyond merely an appreciation of the melanin content of the skin. "Blackness" became the alternative to evil, a synonym of which became "whiteness"; the words "white" or "whiteness" evolved into connotative rather than denotative terms.

Poet Claude McKay (1890-1948) encompasses Garnet's black aesthetic theme of violent resistance to oppression, and, like Garvey, portrays the whites in question not as back-sliding Christians worthy of forgiveness, but rather as "mad and hungry dogs," and a "cowardly pack."' McKay tries to put his anguish into an established verse form; the presence of rhyming here in "If We Must Die" is more

important than the absence of constant meter:

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O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! (Poems 37)

Countee Cullen (1903-1946) re-echoes Walker and Garnet in their belief that the fate of blacks rested in their own hands, hands that had to become weapons if necessary. Again a black American poet avails himself of established artistic patterns to voice his dissent:

We shall not always plant while others reap The golden increment of bursting fruit, Not always contenance, abject and, mute, That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap; Not everlastingly while others sleep Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute, Not always bend to some more subtle brute; We were not made eternally to weep.

("From the Dark Tower," 74)

With poems such as this and "Yet Do I Marvel" Cullen laid the poetic groundwork for a new type of black writer and thinker who would not

appear on the literary or social horizon for another forty years. Richard Wright would later add to the foundation in fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, Ralph Ellison in the 1950s, and James Baldwin in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, at the onset of the 1960s sturdy, black, new bases had been established on which new paradigms could be built.

The new group of writers in the 1960s maintained all of the aforementioned precepts of the black aesthetic, but took Garnet's call to violence seriously. From this new generation of writers came the opinion that action--whether violent and nonviolent--against in- equity had to be taken; thereafter, the call to action became the standard grid through which the writings of the 1960s were to be viewed; and the 1960s' writings of black Americans became a part of the new black aesthetic at this point.

Spokesmen such as Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure) and Eldridge Cleaver became two members of the writing vanguard of the 1960s Black Power struggle. Although they cannot be said to have been particularly interested in literature as art, their thoughts and

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style influenced more avowed and self-conscious literary critics such as Addison Gayle, editor of The Black Aesthetic in 1971, and Clarence Major. Carmichael, for his part, demanded an immediate change in the intolerable racial situation. At first, such demands did not in- clude any sort of "call to arms," as Carmichael was, himself, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In the course of subsequent events, the organization was not to be true to its name. When Carmichael saw change impeded and slowed by what he deemed racist conspirators and racist policies, he joined the Black Panther Party, a party that responded to violence in kind to further its beliefs.

Aside from his call to violence, Carmichael adds to the new black aesthetic a fusion of the scholarly method (in this case manifested in extensive research) with the folk sermon. His recitation of facts about poverty statistics, the United States' involvement in Vietnam, FBI harrassment of him, and so on, is delivered with measured cadences, rhetorical repetitions, and song-like phrasing. This method had also worked well for Martin Luther King, Jr., who in his "I Have a Dream" speech (1963) and his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1964) had achieved a perfect fusion of scholarly research and informal delivery: a seemingly endless and effortless recitation of shocking racial inequities balanced by monosyllabic words, simple sentences, and the use of evocative repetition; King's principal rhetorical devices were asyndeton, chiasmus, tmesis, paralepsis, anaphora, gradatio, catachresis, epistrophe, epizeuxis, and isocolonic balance. Carmi- chael surely must have been influenced by King's famous texts, whose structures emulated the common rhetorical structures of black

preachers' sermons. Another change effected by Carmichael in the original black

aesthetic is the disavowal of the use of euphemisms as emotive

language. At this point in the development of black awareness in 1966, Carmichael eschews any rhetorical figures but plain speech and a hard line against oppression and racism: "Let it be known that we don't need threats. This is 1966. It's time out for beautiful words. It's time out for euphemistic statements. And it's time out for singing 'We Shall Overcome.' It's time to get some Black Power. It's time to get some Black Power" ("Carmichael" 690). To follow his own tenets, Carmichael further says:

Now, these guys-those guys over there. They're called the press. I got up one morning and read a story. They were talking about a cat named Stokely Carmichael. I say




he must be a ba-a-a-a-d nigger (laughter). For he's raising a whole lot of sand. I had to get up and look in the mirror

(laughter). Because all I said is that it's time black people stop begging and take what belongs to them (shouts and

applause). And take what belongs to them (continued applause).

And I said that because I learned that from America.

They take what belongs to them. And what don't belong to them, if they don't get it, they destroy it (applause). So I am not even trying to destroy what don't belong to us. Because it's been taken away from us (applause). (691)

This excerpt also illustrates another aspect of the black aesthetic that is integral to its composition, that is, the use of humor for cathartic effect; even in the midst of a serious text a joke will be told or

phrasing will be arranged in such a way that it attempts to evoke

laughter from the audience. As usual, humor is used as a tension- release valve. In this case, Carmichael pokes fun at both the press and his own press-rendered reputation.

In Soul on Ice (1968), one of the most popular prose works of the 1960s, Cleaver inserts humor in the midst of a text that is extremely serious about the problems of blacks trying to achieve positive self- hood in the United States. Speaking of his observations of white American society ("Ofay" society), Cleaver writes:

Right from the go, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a white man. Nor, I hasten to add, am I now a Black Muslim-- although I used to be. But I am an Ofay Watcher, a member of that unchartered, amorphous league which has members on all continents and the islands of the seas. Ofay Watchers Anonymous, we might be called, because we exist concealed in the shadows wherever colored people have known oppression by whites, white enslavers, colo- nizers, imperialists, and neo-colonialists. (Soul 17)

Note here the attempt at a humorous construction immediately preceding a clause with phrases that in no way contain humorous material (oppression, colonization). Cleaver also adds to his prose an approach to reach a multi-ethnic audience; he asserts that "we are all in this together," all those who have grievances against the way things are. Cleaver writes, "It is among the white youth of the world that the

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greatest change is taking place. It is they who are experiencing the great psychic pain of waking into consciousness to find their inherited heroes turned by events into villains" (23). The notion that the issue of undoing oppression appeals to a variety of ethnic groups and forms a key part of the black aesthetic originated as early as Douglass who asserted Indian and women's rights in his Narrative. The notion has persisted to our day in various forms; it is especially relevant to the Rainbow Coalition of Reverend Jesse Jackson. Chancellor Williams makes the point in The Destruction of Black Civilization (1976) that, even in the times of their worst persecution, it has always been the blacks, aware of the awful existential anguish of humans made into things, who reach out to embrace other ethnic groups. The black aesthetic is, then, not static but in constant flux, dropping those philosophical appendanges that become outdated, adding new and helpful append- ages without strain, and transforming the new additions to its construct

through the infusion of emotion. Cleaver alludes to the idea that blackness is more than color, or

social position, or philosophical stance. His belief is that blackness

encompasses anyone of a like mind; that it is a metaphysical essence that works through its agents to influence everyone toward what it considers a better and fairer course. This metaphysical concept of blackness states that in the pursuit of equality and less-stressful lives for blacks, all injustices against all people are fought. Ishmael Reed later used this notion effectively with his multi-racial band of mu'ta- fikah (art-nappers) in Mumbo Jumbo (1972). Charles T. Davis in Blackness is the Color of the Cosmos (1981) asserts that, since blackness is

metaphysical, it has no boundaries, is unstoppable and all-encom-

passing, and cannot be ontologically examined but only manifested in positive deed and thought.

The belief in the metaphysical nature of blackness also comes up in Clarence Major's "A Black Criteria," originally published in 1967 in

Journal of Black Poetry. Major's brief polemic is really the highest literary mark of the new black aesthetic in the 1960s. From this work, later black aestheticians were able to expand into areas suggested by the long, organic line of notions of the black aesthetic that are so well-

encapsulated and so well expressed in Major's list of "criteria." Speak- ing of the ability and the necessity of blackness drawing in everyone, Major writes:

We must shake up not only our own black brothers but the superficial and shoddy people stumbling in the brain- lessness of the western decline. We must use our black




poetic energy to overthrow the western ritual and passion, the curse, the dark ages of this death, the original sin's

impact on a people and their unjust projection of it upon us black people; we must lead ourselves out of this mad- ness and if our journey brings out others--perhaps even white people-then it will be good for us all. We must use our magic.... (15)

Major suggests that because of their ceaseless oppression, black leaders (read "poets"; in traditional African community governance, every individual is a leader and every leader is a poet) would always remember what it meant to be despised and always do what is

intrinsically "right" for people. This assumption becomes bound

inextricably into the black aesthetic. It welcomes all, but it always insists that everyone remember all the components of blackness in order to ensure that he or she does not forget how to be empathetic, compassionate, human. Major writes, "If we black poets see ourselves and our relationships with the deeper elements of life and with all mankind perhaps we can break thru the tangled ugly white energy of western fear and crime" (15).

Finally, Major ends with a point that had always been obvious in the beliefs of the original shapers of the black aesthetic but had not been so precisely stated before: art exists both for its own sake and for the sake of the people. It hopes to entertain, illuminate, or help. Art is not purely the art of the state, directed by state notions on what art should do or be; nor is it merely fluff-"landlord art" as Ishmael Reed calls the ballet (Martin 179). According to Major (see the epigraph), art should serve some useful, human, edifying function but, at the same time, it may provide entertainment and be profitable for its creators.

With the statement, "Total life is what we want," Major solidifies once and for all the black aesthetic on the side of a different and better way of life, heretofore not known, as yet not fully defined, and

encompassing everyone. Major's statement is the final brace in the last phase of the original

black aesthetic that began in the United States with writers/narrators such as Henson. In the early 1970s, the new black aesthetic was appropriated and expanded by black academics. In 1971, Addison Gayle, Jr., published The Black Aesthetic. Also in 1971, Houston Baker, Jr., published Black Literature in America, containing detailed introduc- tions and analyses of some of the most famous black literary texts. The importance of 1971 cannot be overestimated; this year laid the

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strongest base for the furthering of the formation of the new black aesthetic.2 Finally, there were no longer only sketchy allusions to an "aesthetic"; now there was a veritable mountain of material devoted to the subject, much of it scholarly and concerning every mode of literature.

Everything was set, then, for the arrival of the major aestheticians, Major, Gayle, Baker, and Amiri Barak (formerly Leroi Jones), who were to expand the concept of a black aesthetic.3 The original philosophical planks of the "black aesthetic" may be said to be encompassed by Josiah Henson and Henry Highland Garnet. If put in the form of a time line, this original core of the black aesthetic would run from the original 1829 publication date of Walker's "Ap- peal" to the publication of Douglass's Life in 1881. This, the first of three phases, contains, as I have illustrated, these formative principles: a) all of the works are written from the viewpoints of slaves or former slaves; the language is emotive (situationally emotive) both in diction and delivery; b) there is an initial call to physical resistance of white oppression; c) there is a specific enumeration of demands, but at the same time, a patience that believes that either God or white men will positively respond to such demands.

The second phase builds paradigmatically and symbiotically upon the first. It may be said to start with the publication of Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Exposition Address" in 1895, and to end with the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. Many of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement saw Kennedy's assassination as the end of the negotiation period of blacks with whites; in the perception of blacks the period for passive complaining was over. As a result, there was a very brief period from 1963 to 1969 of action-filled rhetoric on the literary front that helped form the core of the new black aesthetic platform and had its literal emanation in the streets of Birmingham, Detroit, and Watts. The second phase contained: a) the insistence on education as a component essential to the gain- ing of social equality; b) a long period of negotiation for better social conditions; c) divergent black intellectual views on issues central to blacks; d) black artistic expression pushed into the realm of scholarship; e) avowal of the multi-ethnic (American) experience in the formation of the original black aesthetic; f) colloquial level or blunt language.

The third and final phase begins with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 and ends with Clarence Major's introduction to The New Black Poetry in 1969, that not only restates the "Total Life is What We Want" premise, but is also the best expression




of archetypal 1960s rhetoric, black or white: long series of adjectives preceding long series of nouns in periodic sentences, as though to indicate that the subject in question had to be newly constructed and extensively defined, and then renamed.4 The final phase is character- ized by the notions of: a) blackness transfigured into an all-encompassing metaphysical concept; b) prevailing folk-sermon structures in narrative prose; c) the insertion of cathartic humor; d) the call for more concreteness in social criticism; e) art as an important factor in the social progress of the community; f) black self-reliance and self- love as an expression of being different and as not indicative of inferiority (Clarence Major).

The further development of the black aesthetic after 1971 and the solidification of the preceding three phases both clarified and expanded or obfuscated and clouded its meaning-depending upon the respective perspective. But the intensity with which the notion of a black way of doing things continued to be pursued after Major's introduction to The New Black Poetry, and the concreteness of the scholarly grids imposed by the black academics after 1971, suggests that subsequent writings be considered as pertaining to the new black aesthetic.

Memphis State University

NOTES

'This was the problem of nomenclature that had bogged down some of Douglass's thoughts toward the correction of racism. He was torn, as were many black leaders, between a violent response to white violence and arrogance and his own Christian principles. Yet, this dissonance did not lead to inaction. Cf. the commentary preceding "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass" in Brawley.

2The year 1971 also saw the publication of an important triad of essays on art by Amiri Baraka: "What the Arts Need Now," "Nationalism vs. PimpArt," and "7 Principles of US: Maulana Karenga & The Need for a Black Value System" (Raise). The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall, was published in 1971; this was the continuation of the work started in the famous The New Black Poetry (1969), edited by Major. The Black Poets contains the work of more artists than Major's text; some of the poets included were receiving their first national exposure under the auspices of Mentor Books. Immediately following these important works was New Black Voices (1972), edited by Abraham Chapman, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and criticism that also contributed to the foundation of the new black aesthetic. New Black Voices, an expanded edition of the original Black Voices (1968), also edited by Chapman, includes the important essays: "Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function," by Maulana Ron Karenga; "Hemlock for the Artist: Karenga Style," by James Cunningham; "The Teaching of Afro-American Literature," by

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Darwin Turner; "Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic," by Adam David Miller; "An Interview with Clarence Major and Victor Hernandez Cruz," by Walt Shepperd; "Statement on Aesthetics, Poetics, and Kinetics," by Al Young; and the introduction to 19 Necromancers from Now (1970) by Ishamael Reed. This set of essays was the final component in the initial stage of the new black aesthetic.

3Although I have primarily noted in my discussion Major, Baker, Gayle, and Baraka because of the quantity and quality of their comments, it is still an

arbitrary choice that excludes many other critics who were important to the formation of the new black aesthetic. Certainly, Hoyt Fuller, the former editor of Black World, deserves his place among the leading black aestheticians, as does Larry Neal. An excellent reference for a fuller discussion of other personalities in the new black aesthetic is Johnson and Johnson.

'This method of delivery was one of the mainstays of effective communication for those obsessed with the power of the word in the 1960s: Baraka, Cleaver, Sonia Sanchez, even Jane Fonda. Ntozake Shange wrote in 1980 that blacks had so claimed "the word" that it hardly mattered who spoke or what was said; the listener was immediately comfortable with simply the grace and rhythm of the words

issuing forth (Nappy Edges, [1st Ed.], New York: Bantam, 1980).

WORKS CITED

Baraka, Amiri. Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965. New York: Random, 1971.

Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Toire). "Stokely Carmichael Explains Black Power to a Black Audience in Detroit." Black American Literature. Ed. Ruth Miller.

Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe, 1971. 690-91.

Chapman, Abraham, ed. New Black Voices. New York: Mentor, 1972.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw, 1968.

Cullen, Countee. "From the Dark Tower." On These I Stand. New York: Harper, 1953. 74.

Douglass, Frederick. "American Slavery." Early Negro American Writers. Ed. Ben-

jamin Brawley. New York: Dover, 1970. 203. . "What the Negro Wants." Early Negro American Writers. Ed. Benjamin

Brawley. New York: Dover, 1970. 175-215. Dubois, W E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American, 1969.

Garvey, Marcus. "The Passing Negro 'Intellectual.'" Black American Literature. Ed. Ruth Miller. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe, 1971. 320-26.

Henson, Josiah. "Truth Stranger than Fiction." Early Negro American Writers. Ed.

Benjamin Brawley. New York: Dover, 1970. 162-67.

Johnson, Abby A. and Ronald Mayberry Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The

Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979.

Locke, Alain. "From The New Negro." Black Literature in America. Ed. Houston Baker, Jr. New York: McGraw, 1971. 141-53.

Major, Clarence. "A Black Criteria."Journal of Black Poetry. 7: 2. Spring 1967: 23- 25.

Martin, Reginald. "An Interview with Ishmael Reed." Review of Contemporary Fiction 4.2 (Summer 1985): 176-87.

McKay, Claude. "If We Must Die." The Selected Poems of Claude McKay. New York:

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Twayne, 1953. 37. Miller, Ruth, ed. Black American Literature. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe, 1971. Peirce, C. S. "Thirdness and the Nature of Signs." The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931. 5: 191. Reed, Ishmael. MumboJumbo. New York: Avon, 1972.

.Flight to Canada. New York: Avon, 1976. Walker, David. Walker's Appeal in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured

Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829). Early Negro American Writers. Ed. Benjamin Brawley. New York: Dover, 1970. 125-46.

Washington, Booker T. "The Atlanta Exposition Address." Black American Literature. Ed. Ruth Miller. Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe, 1971. 267-71.



Documents

"Total Life Is What We Want": The Progressive Stages of the Black Aesthetic in Literature