Black Writing: The Other Side
Anderson, Jervis
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 keeps it from being torn asunder....
...We believe that within black culture there is black life, folk culture, myth, and values that can be assumed by the writer and given back to the people to broaden their consciousness—and our own consciousness because we need them as much as they need us...
...My work is about that...
...Thus some of the themes that most stir them are the continued existence of racism in America, the emergence of Africa, the revolutionary politics of the Third World, the life and death of Malcolm X, and the war in Vietnam...
...Or can we be absorbed by it...
...I don't see myself as an individual, per se, I see myself as part of a collective—my people—here in America and I see myself as an expression of this collective desire...
...the Spanish Civil War...
...My mother has all the books Wright wrote...
...The ideas of Fanon are fantastically important...
...If black people read it, they can understand what America is and why it is doing what it is doing to them...
...with one or two exceptions, their work and their ideas are not widely publicized...
...Especially poetry...
...Some people can do a number of other things...
...What shall I make of the life around me, what celebrate, what reject, how to confront the snarl of good and evil which is inevitable...
...This is not a plea for either a segregated theater, or a separatist one...
...She knew that black people were moving in the direction of race consciousness...
...He doesn't reconcile it...
...Neal's poems and essays have appeared in Liberator, Freedomways, Soul Book, and Negro Digest...
...I think he transmits black culture in a profound way...
...whether, while rooting itself in what Isaac Rosenfeld once called "an obsession with the personal," it also manages to affirm commitments in behalf of a common humanity...
...I think that the mythic, and supernatural, tradition is much more the way we think...
...For instance, no other Negro writer, young or old, has made more serious use of the myths, symbols, and styles of Negro life than Ralph Ellison...
...You identify with James Brown, he identifies with you...
...Even those Negro writers who remain fixed in their commitment to a plural Negro American cultural identity would repudiate the claim that they have nothing to guard or protect...
...His first three books—the collection of stories called Dancers on the Shore and the novels A Different Drummer and A Drop of Patience—had been written from a broader perspective...
...At this time, let me say for the record that I am not a sociologist or a politician or a spokesman...
...Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...I don't see any point in talking to the white man about what he has done to us, since I really believe that he knows...
...Proust did not talk to the Russians but to the French...
...As Malcolm says, "we don't say our government, we say the government...
...Can we make peace with it...
...The thing I fear is being invisible to black America, or to myself...
...As a matter of fact, you can divide writers into categories based on how they have been able to deal with this tension...
...There is precedence for this...
...And it is not only black separatists that the majority of Negroes have to resist, for on some of the fundamental questions of Negro American life today there is a remarkable correspondence between the outlook of black separatists and that of white bigots...
...More important and inseparable from this effort was the necessity of determining my true relationship to that body of American literature to which I was most attracted and through which, aided by what I could learn of the literatures of Europe, I would find my own voice...
...He changed it to bear the weight of his ideas...
...no other writer has been as committed as he has been to affirming what William Kelly calls "the things that have formed our traditions, the things that have saved us...
...and to mark it off as a separate and independent enclave of cultural sensibility and social outlook...
...We were linking our ideas to the developing world of the oppressed Africa, Asia, Latin America...
...Such people try to give answers...
...The fundamental questions raised by the young black nationalists concern the wisdom or desirability of cultural and literary separatism, and whether or not all of this can furnish or sustain a viable aesthetic or a viable moral principle for art...
...with forms of labor and with forms of pleasure...
...In either case, it is an insult, and represents one of the white American attitudes that have driven militant black writers into the necessity of affirming, to the exclusion of everything else, the values and the styles of their own community...
...We have poems that are worked into music —rhythm and blues, jazz forms...
...are consistently refusing, in the name of individuality, creativity, and freedom of expression to move toward Fanon's final stage, where the bulk of the black community is waiting...
...In which case, and at which point, criticism as we know it may well have no further work to do...
...We are interested in social change, and any idea we use must be useful to our desire for social change...
...The stance of these young writers is a Third World stance...
...Some of us, the younger ones, want very much to talk to black people...
...with sex and with love, with food and with drink .. . with places of worship and places of entertainment...
...Novels are written for a middle-class literate public and for other writers...
...She wasn't an educated woman but she knew what was going on in the world...
...In itself, there is nothing deplorable or surprising in the fact that a writer's sensibility or outlook changes...
...What the black writer must do is, first of all, analyze for black people what has been done, starting with the facts...
...And here it is necessary to stress what many writers tend to forget: literature is a medium steeped in sensory experience, and does not lend itself to the conceptual forms that the socio-political content of the class struggle takes most easily...
...We would therefore want to reaffirm some of the tests we have always proposed for serious literature: whether the experience in which it deals is sufficiently transformed in the imagination to give it a decent chance of coming alive as art...
...It has been the effort of Negro writers holding this special view of Negro American life to affirm it without, in the attempt, being seduced into making an absolute of blackness or conceding the absolute of whiteness...
...Our people who are struggling don't have time for novels...
...If I find any fault with the older black writers, with the exception of Richard Wright, it is that they have been working too much in the Western literary tradition and not enough in the African tradition...
...The finest or wisest tribute new generations can pay to such a history is not to ape it but go beyond it...
...What they should have been developing was a revolutionary nationalism...
...The humanism that Fanon speaks about...
...W...
...If America has been the most democratic gift to man in modern times, that gift still lies unclaimed...
...We improvise the forms, sing them and chant them...
...two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings...
...He is a very sophisticated man...
...But he breaks down when he starts talking about politics...
...Negroes constitute a numerical minority, but Negro experience, from slavery to civil rights, has always been of crucial importance to America's existence...
...Some of the factors that come most readily to mind are: the tradition of Western literature itself...
...I've been reading quotations from Chairman Mao and one of the things he says is that first we should look at the facts...
...it has to do with a special perspective on the national ideals and the national conduct...
...The allegiance of black separatist writers to only the last of these options indicates clearly enough that whatever may be our interest in preserving the idea of an art that is complex in texture and democratic in concerns, nothing could be further from their interest...
...He was educated at the Fieldston School and at Harvard...
...the great Depression and the New Deal...
...Most people mention Native Son when they talk about Richard Wright...
...But one of the prices the younger writers pay for their indifference to the main tradition of Negro American writing, and the tradition of Western writing generally, is that they make demands which are not original, demands which have been made before and met before...
...I think James Brown is every bit as important an artist as I am...
...It is the same with Negro writing...
...And it is not because black people wouldn't have read it or understood it...
...Neal, who studied literature and anthropology at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania, considers himself primarily a poet ("I see everything as an extension of the poem") though he also writes literary and social criticism...
...I think a hundred years from now if people want to find out what black people were in this country they will be listening to James Brown's records rather than reading Ralph Ellison...
...You identify with the Supremes, they identify with you...
...This is the overall tension that runs through all of Afro-American history...
...In the case of Kelly, his conversion to separatism has been relatively recent, beginning perhaps with his last book of fiction, Dem, of which he says: "I've written it for black people...
...So we must introduce some changes in the form...
...Every now and then I have a strange vision of America: a vast, empty, and silent land, all its factories abandoned, and from which—there being no further practical reason for anyone to remain here—all the tribes have fled to their old ancestral homes...
...He may have been talking to white people, there's no telling what he's doing now...
...A theater of permanence, continuity and consistency, providing the necessary home base for the Negro artist to launch a campaign to win his ignored brothers and sisters as constant witnesses to his endeavors...
...I'd also like to learn Arabic and Swahili...
...Not so in black society...
...a world in which one does not have to be in a particular place at a particular time among a particular people before one can live as a man...
...I don't want to do anything in the psychological tradition...
...Two weeks before he left, he told me: I USED TO FEEL we were totally cut off from Africa but the more I look into it the more I realize how African we are...
...By conceiving itself, both implicitly and directly, in opposition to the idea of any human community beyond the community of blacks, it commits itself, both implicitly and directly, to the celebration and perpetuation of those boundaries which in our time have been used as one of the principal weapons in the denial of justice and dignity to large populations...
...And Twain broke it open by using vernacular narrative in writing...
...whether it proposes, as Trotsky once remarked, a world that is more attractive than any other...
...Most poets are traditionally tied to the text...
...Then when he wrote Native Son he turned away from that spirit...
...That is the sense of being both American and black...
...I find nothing in Ellison that I can use...
...the early politics of Communism at home and abroad...
...To me the poem has to be something the people can identify with immediately and in an immediate situation...
...Yet, so far, at any rate, one of the tragedies of being American is that so few people are equal to the task...
...two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder...
...I think our problems cannot be solved within the framework of America...
...fiction writers C. H. Fuller, Jr., and Charles Russell...
...It's like a dog trying to find its tail, or a man trying to psychoanalyze himself...
...He has no values and culture to guard and protect...
...There's no reason why whites could not participate in a theater dedicated to exploring and illuminating that experience if they found inspiration in the purpose...
...We are trying to tap some new things in a form which is not our form...
...I don't care whether I'm invisible to white America...
...A writer, I think, should ask questions...
...In any event, if the majority of Negroes still tend to resist Jones's injunction, it is not because it does not sound true to them, but because in their moral imaginations it cannot be allowed to become true...
...Last year he edited an anthology of poetry in memoriam of Malcolm X called Poems for Malcolm...
...We have taken Christianity and given it things it never had before...
...I am going to Paris not because I love the French so much but because I want to learn to speak French...
...Black people have an undercurrent of na tionalism in their history...
...Then I can speak to other black people who speak French...
...JERVIS ANDERSON L L AWRENCE NEAL, 29, was also born and raised in New York City...
...We are also interested in what writers like Senghor and Diop have to say...
...We cannot, of course, be indifferent to any trends that can extend the imaginative possibilities of literature, and therefore it is probably true that a still more extensive effort can be made to pump into the bloodstream of American writing some of the rich idioms of Negro speech and some of the muted nuances of the black psyche...
...Some of those who are most admired as black nationalist writers are the poets Lawrence Neal, A. B. Spellman, Ed Spriggs, Youssef Raghman, Willie Kgostitisile, Marvin Jackman, Don Lee, Sonia Sanchez...
...JERVIS ANDERSON T T HERE ARE SEVERAL POINTS raised by these men with which no one can sensibly disagree, and with which the majority of older Negro writers do not in fact disagree...
...We are more interested in the ideas we can get from James Brown or the Supremes than what we can get from T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore...
...It is basically oral and I think black writers must begin to think in some of those terms, to use the fantastic oral language that has developed...
...He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both Negro and American...
...She knew what Paul Robeson was talking about...
...Ellison si too far from them, and I think Baldwin is too far away from them...
...So Wright betrayed his own blueprint because he did not understand how to execute it...
...LeRoi represents probably the most obvious example of this...
...The narrator of Ellison's story finds personal light at the end, but that light was never collectivized...
...Most people mean the term to apply to those writers and works that, while rooted in Negro experience and reflecting a Negro viewpoint, have addressed themselves to a general audience and have affirmed the principle of a Negro American identity within American culture...
...In the third phase, says Fanon, the native writer "turns himself into an awakener of the people...
...We feel the forms given us by Western society have to be destroyed...
...And we do this by using symbols that grow out of black people's collective experience...
...I would like to see more black writers gravitating toward his ideas...
...Aside from LeRoi Jones and, recently, William Melvin Kelly, one is not likely to come upon the work of these writers, most of them poets, unless one reads such publications as The Journal of Black Poetry, published in San Francisco...
...Can we escape from it...
...Seldom, and only recently, are they also thinking of groups and activities dedicated to the achievement of black power, black nationalism, and black separatism...
...And, at that, he's talking only of Western literary craft...
...The whole business of trance and talking tongues are very African things...
...Their history and their experience in America would have no meaning otherwise...
...Noneof the writers I spoke with made any mentionof anti-Semitism...
...or whether it merely submits itself to serving authoritarian or sectional expediences...
...The distinction between art and life should not be clear-cut...
...He is a friend and collaborator of LeRoi Jones...
...Not many people know about the writers who hold to this belief...
...I see myself involved in that particular life style...
...Few people have found a way to be American that does not involve the denial either of the claims or the humanity of somebody else...
...American writing is not the same as European writing...
...it may not be informed by moral vision, but there would seem to be a good deal of social evidence to support it...
...And when the task becomes too difficult, there seem to be too many bridges to too many national and ethnic origins across which too many people are ready to escape...
...to create a literature in its behalf...
...hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature...
...He is the product of a whole lot of social forces...
...I try to make it about that...
...I talk to other colored people from other parts of the world and they feel we are helping to put down their struggle...
...And here I agree with LeRoi...
...DuBois called it "double concsiousness...
...with garments and dreams and idioms of speech...
...There's no basic reason why we should talk to white people...
...indeed, one of the personal uses of fiction or art to those who make it is that it offers them a way to discover and explore the drifts and tendencies in their development...
...This shift in Kelly's outlook, whatever questions of belief or aesthetics it might raise, is also, I think, a sincere effort to resolve or understand certain contradictions in his social background, his education, and the reality of what it means in Ameria to be black...
...But the book I think of when I talk about Wright is The Outsider, the book he wrote after he left the U.S...
...A A LL OF THIS marks not only a disillusionment and an end of communication with the society at large, but also a break with, or a reaction against, that traditional attitude in black writing which has consistently upheld the value of such communication, which has called attention to those grievances in the society that needed to be redressed and those virtues in both black and white life that needed to be affirmed...
...and Soul Book, Liberator, and Freedomways, published in New York...
...People see LeRoi as a kind of isolated phenomenon, which he isn't...
...Perhaps it is a mistake to expect that all Negro writers will take a similar view of their history...
...1 don't think the mass of black people yet trust black writers, because the black writer has yet to tell them anything they can use...
...They are the things that have formed our traditions, the things that have saved us...
...Being Negro American, therefore, has, as Ellison says, to do with the memory of slavery and the hope of emancipation...
...We do not see ourselves as playing a political role, but we realize that what we do has political implications...
...If a writer or a politician is going to affect social change he has got to understand this revolutionary undercurrent...
...It has been a task of enormous difficulty and requiring enormous courage and an enormous willingness to bear the burdens of Negro American history in behalf of achieving a more humane and democratic society...
...The fact of the matter is that many of our writers developed in the Communist party which was inadequate for their needs...
...He wrote an article in Challenge in 1937 called `Blue -print for Negro Writing," in which he was trying to get the black writer to be a revolutionary...
...We decide who is our audience, what is it that audience needs, and how we can best fill that need...
...Ellison, for instance, is fantastic, beautiful...
...Not surprisingly, they find political and aesthetic inspiration in the works of Fanon, particularly his exposition in The Wretched of the Earth of the three phases in the development of native writers...
...The problem with Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, most of our black writers, is how to deal with this nationalism...
...First thing we do is to take the work to the people...
...Both are currently editing an anthology of contemporary black writing to be published next fall...
...In spelling out his commitment to what he calls "revolutionary humanism," Neal says: THERE IS A GREAT MOVEMENT going on among writers who see themselves as a part of revolutionary change, writers who recoenize that their work has to be a part of building the world...
...This may not be the most inappropriate note on which somebody, someday, can end a novel on America...
...In some of the reading I've done I've found that African writers and most nonWestern writers do not make a separation between art and life...
...It just happens to be the thing I do...
...His importance in the tradition of Western writing rests as much on the fact that he made a great and universal art out of Russian experience as on the fact that diverse peoples of diverse life styles were able to find in his work images of their own situation...
...Ellison is particularly interesting when he talks about literature, literary forms, artistic forms, when he talks about craft...
...Wright was the only writer who was seriously attempting to destroy this dichotomy between art and social change...
...We talk about a global kind of humanism...
...Their general outlook is summed up in a remark by LeRoi Jones, himself the most prominent black nationalist literary figure: "Let no one convince any black man he is as American as anybody else...
...We were even talking about these things before we read Fanon...
...to achieve its political freedom...
...life and art were totally integrated...
...An America more attractive means no less...
...make a totally new form...
...He consciously set out to do it...
...the two world wars...
...These are writers between the ages of 18 and 35...
...I think that one of the problems about an integrated person is that he is most at home with white people but feels most inferior to white people...
...His work underwent dramatic changes when he came uptown and confronted the writers in Harlem—people like Roland Snelling, Youssef Raghman, Hal Haines...
...W W ILLIAM MELVIN KELLY AND LAWRENCE NEAL are two of those who speak out strongly in behalf of the necessity for black separatist writing...
...But he is aware, extremely aware of what these tensions are...
...The majority of Negroes will resist this notion on the same basis that they resist Le Roi Jones's notion that JERVIS ANDERSON they are not as American as anybody else, because both views mean essentially the same thing...
...A book like Claude Brown's book may be very interesting as a sociological document, but he's not really telling people of Harlem anything that they don't know already...
...It has to meet some specific kind of life need...
...When all this is said and done, however, one cannot deny either the causes of agitation or some of the cultural tensions that have driven these writers to conceive themselves and their art with ethnocentricity and a degree of hostility.* One of the causes of this attitude is the slowness with which the majority of white Americans have approached the task of conceding dignity and humanity to Negro American life styles and the consequent rejection that this implies of the principle of Negro American equality...
...We don't see ourselves separated from them...
...And because I was one of the most integrated, I was one of the most messed up mentally, one of the most brainwashed...
...Only a handful of people consider as Negro writing that segment which is aimed exclusively at a black audience—at the psychic and political needs of black people—and which is inspired by a belief in racial and cultural separatism...
...How, in other words, should I think of myself and my pluralistic sense of the world, how to express my vision of the human predicament, without reducing it to a point which would render it sterile before that necessary—though enhancing—reduction which must occur before the fictive vision can come alive...
...The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self...
...JERVIS ANDERSON values of their own subculture which, particularly when judged by their own selves, are worth affirming...
...All the private school and Harvard education I've had is something I've had to get over...
...Negro Digest, published in Chicago...
...We are trying to do something that Western art does not do, which is to change people's lives...
...This is not, we must admit, sheer fantasy...
...Things written in books...
...Instead of writing about what American society has done to black people, I've tried JERVIS ANDERSON to write about American society in terms of what it is doing to itself and what it is...
...We have to try and do something quick because the history of this country has been one of violence, especially against the darker skinned people...
...The address he makes in that novel is to white America, not black America...
...THE YOUNG BLACK NATIONALISTS are not so...
...He has taught literature at the New School for Social Research and at Bard College...
...One of the misconceptions about those of us who have a nationalist thinking is that we have a kind of parochial nationalism focusing upon the way we see ourselves here, which isn't true...
...But Ellison sees the black American problem and slips away from it...
...Says John O'Neal, one of the founders of the Free Southern Theater: Our feeling is that black writers must develop in the context of black audiences...
...I am interested in this myself because a lot of people condemn Wright for having left the country...
...We see the world from the viewpoint of the oppressed...
...The reason is simple...
...What does American society mean when regarded out of my own eyes, viewed by my own complex sense of the present...
...White Americans in this country may well react in a very violent and vicious way...
...And this may therefore be as good a time as any for the skeleton of "Marxist" criticism to re-emerge from the American intellectual cabinet in which it has been gathering dust for almost 30 years...
...There is no alienation between me and the people in Harlem...
...I find nothing in Baldwin that I can use...
...Which means that the author puts his character in the same bag, in the same dilemma, as Western man...
...In a short preface to Dancers he had found it necessary to remark: An American writer who happens to have a brown skin faces this unique problem: Solutions and answers to the Negro Problem are very often read into his work...
...Off somewhere imitating Europeans or reflecting on their BLACK WRITING: THE OTHER SIDE own lives and frustrations to no present purpose...
...I tend to feel that basically novels are a BLACK WRITING: THE OTHER SIDE middle-class pastime...
...a world in which dignity and humanity can be discerned beyond the definitions and the limits of tribe...
...He is not, despite what William Kelly says, the most appropriate figure to invoke in support of separatist writing...
...We are not interested in that...
...On the other hand, he feels most superior to black people but most afraid of black people...
...Of course, Granville Hicks has not thought such thoughts for almost three decades now, and in terms of the stillness that has settled for so long over "proletarian literature," it seems, from the vantage point of today, to have been nothing more than a temporary delirium...
...So all the writers are trying to come to grips with this essential relation between themselves as writers and the Afro-American reality which is the reality that includes the desire to become a part of America and the desire to separate from America...
...If there is an ideological position in the spectrum of resurgent black literary thinking that ought to be defended and does not violate the interests to which art and literature are committed, it is the one taken by Douglas Turner Ward of the Negro Ensemble Company when he calls for a theater concentrating primarily on themes of Negro life, but also resilient enough to incorporate and interpret the best of world drama—whatever the source...
...the invasion of Ethiopia...
...A list of the Negro writers who have functioned in this way would be very long indeed, but it would include such significant names as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, John Oliver Killens, Ann Petry, Melvin B. Tol son, Jean Toomer, John A. Williams, and Richard Wright...
...You can see this by the very clear division in white society between art and life...
...I've turned the whole process on its head...
...Of prior importance now is the necessity to celebrate its beauty and its dignity...
...And that life need may vary from being aware of future possibilities to the collective need to move toward social change...
...Thus they have lost interest in the idea that America itself is worth having...
...Responding to Fanon's prescription, C. H. Fuller writes in the July 1967 issue of Liberator: "Many black writers and artists...
...We are not responsible...
...with manners and customs, with religion and art, with life styles and hoping and with the special sense of predicament and fate which gives direction and resonance to the Freedom struggle...
...I'm not even sure whether we'll be still around...
...To carry the weight of our ideas the novel has got to be changed...
...I want to write books that black people can understand, books that really express African experience...
...This is to say, of course, that there is nothing new in some of the intellectual— or is it anti-intellectual—tendencies of black separatist writing...
...Maybe she couldn't articulate it, but she had definite feelings about it...
...What Ellison finds about the sources and motivations of his own writing can apply to many of the traditional Negro writers as well: The point of our struggle was to be both Negro and American and to bring about that condition in American society in which this could be possible...
...Blackness has emerged in their minds as the only absolute worth affirming...
...I think of myself, at least, formerly, as one of the most integrated people that the society has produced...
...The impression one gets is that they do not consider anti-Semitism to be a necessary support for the black nationalist position...
...WELL, THIS, IN DIFFERENT WORDS, has been said before...
...Black nationalists, however, are not only convinced that all of this is true...
...Obviously, black separatist writing has not left itself open to such an accomplishment...
...Once we accept that black people need no longer assimilate the culture or dwell, without hope of solution, on their collective experience in this country, the continued preoccupation of artists in these areas comes into serious question...
...McCarthyism and the Cold War...
...Black Dialogue, a literary quarterly published on the West Coast...
...They insist, in fact, that the Negro is not American except as that implies an integration of cultures and sensibilities, a coexistence of the more desirable values of white American culture with those * While a distinct note of anti-Semitism is to be found in some of LeRoi Jones's recent writing, that may well be his personal aberration...
...Wright was saying in that book that we cannot solve our problems within the Western political spectrum, that we must find our own political philosophies, and that we must renounce both the Right and the Left in America because both of them are racist in their outlook...
...LeRoi Jones and I are about the same age, and I feel that there are some similarities and some differences...
...and playwrights Ed Bullins and Ron Miller...
...What I am trying to get back to and forward to at the same time are the things that have remained the same about us and are the bases of our strength...
...Since "American," in the meaning of that statement, is synonymous with "white American," it can only suggest that Negroes have nothing to affirm in this society but white American cultural values...
...telling black people about the nature of Western society and then trying to formulate some type of philosophy that will help us get free...
...And if there is a Negro writer who has taken upon himself the burden of resolving the tensions of Negro American culture, it is also Ellison...
...I have a feeling he is getting further away...
...Art and life and politics are all tied together...
...Dostoevsky did not talk to the Germans but to the Russians...
...What we have to do is to tell black people of Harlem things they don't know...
...Murray Kempton, in remarking upon one aspect of white bigotry, observed not long ago that anything in this country that is given to Negroes is no longer worth having— a remark which, in fairness to Kempton, should not be read as an account of his own attitude...
...We have to change it too to bear the weight of ours...
...Black people should not spiritually identify with America for that means identifying with all the oppression being carried out by America abroad, for instance in Vietnam...
...I don't think that as a black writer I'm different simply because I'm a writer...
...And we have to talk to our own people...
...We, the black community, seek direction, solutions to our problems and our needs . . There are others whose ideas stop short of political and cultural revolution but who believe no less in the need to develop a separate black culture and literature...
...The narrator in Invisible Man is primarily invisible to white America...
...Fiction became the agency of my efforts to answer the questions: Who am I, what am I, how did I come to be...
...C. H. Fuller, in the article quoted earlier, further states: Where are our writers...
...One of the reasons I think we should try and remain separate is because right now we are not taking part in the exploitation of the rest of the world that America is carrying out...
...But on the whole his sensibility is the one I'm closest to...
...People bear burdens the best way they can, and some bear them best by not bearing them at all...
...He should depict people, not symbols or ideas disguised as people...
...They are indifferent to the history of Western literature, and they find that they are not interested in issues and problems of human experience that do not have an imme BLACK WRITING: THE OTHER SIDE diate bearing upon the life they live as blacks...
...You identify with Stevie Wonder, he identifies with you...
...The older black writers have been talking mainly to the white man...
...I'm not sure if in a hundred years we'll be able to say our government...
...Aside from the special racial experience that determined or influ enced their perspective on American life, their social and moral attitudes were shaped by some of the same forces that shaped the outlook of many other American writers who matured between the early 1920's and the late 1950's...
...He presently lives on Riverside Drive, uptown...
...That's our most important consideration...
...BLACK WRITING: THE OTHER SIDE Our literary tradition is essentially the African literary tradition which is not a written tradition...
...America: a gift that defied taking, the simple mysteries of whose meaning were too terrifying to confront: like some deep, silent and challenging woman's love, in the achievement of which no man was man enough to risk himself...
...However, most of the writers are trying to escape from it...
...He found there was a great deal of creative activity in Harlem, so his work now is related to this kind of undercurrent...
...Only in this way can their work have immediate relevance and avoid the necessity of having to explain to white audiences what blacks already take for granted...
...The humanism of the Third World...
...Kelly, a native New Yorker, is now 30 years old...
...the Eisenhower years in America...
...In the thirties, such Communist literary intellectuals as Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, and Granville Hicks were saying that if writers were to portray what was vital and hopeful in the American spirit they could not avoid allying themselves with the revolutionary class struggle...
...It is this attitude that has made the older writers very Negro and very American at the same time, and that places them in what for want of a better term must be called the serious intellectual mainstream of American writing...
...Or it can mean that whatever there is of Negro life forms is not worth either guarding or protecting...
...Last summer, with his wife and young daughter, he left New York to live in Paris...
...E. B. DuBois W W HEN PEOPLE SAY "the Negro struggle," they usually have in mind those groups and activities that represent the effort to achieve the democratic integration of American institutions, an effort inspired by the belief that the Negro, whatever his differences, is as American as anybody else...
...When I was six years old she had collected everything he had written then...
...They were developing revolutionary ideas without the subsequent understanding of how the nationalist impulse works in black America...
...William Phillips's and Philip Rahv's rejoinder to the proletarian critics of the thirties could well, for what it is worth, be suggested to the black neoproletarians: The writer's success cannot be gauged by immediate agitational significance, but by his recreation of social forces in their entirety...
...I think he embodies more of Negro folk culture than a lot of the more sophisticated people...
...Some of these things have been that we do have an African viewpoint toward the society...
...That's how it was in African life, anyway...
...The poem as it exists today doesn't mean the same to me as it means to Robert Lowell or Stanley Kunitz or any number of white poets...
...Most of the forms in Western culture are for us dead...
...We prefer to read our poetry to a black audience [rather] than to a white audience because we feel that is our first demand...
...This slowness is echoed in a remark by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their Beyond the Melting Pot: "The Negro is only American and nothing else...
...they are certain it represents the terms on which the majority of white Americans are going to finally make up their minds whether or not the principle of equality itself is worth sharing with Negroes...
...A A WORLD MORE ATTRACTIVE in our time, whatever else it means, must also mean a world that has outgrown the pro tective uses of the provincial imagination...
...Which reminds one of Dostoevsky...
...This is one of the things I want to do...
Vol. 15 • May 1968 • No. 3
