Target Zero, edited by Kathleen Cleaver
Lorenzo, Darryl
TARGET ZERO A LIFE IN WRITING by Eldridge Cleaver, edited by Kathleen Cleaver Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Afterword by Cecil Brown Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 336 pp $27.95 I T WAS IN THE...
...After waiting a bit, he decided that his chance had come...
...healthy, virile heterosexuality against homosexuality (which Cleaver unabashedly called a perversion...
...It's a fast and furious autobiographical reminiscence of growing up in Los Angeles, when Cleaver sported the titular nickname because all his sidekicks were Mexicans...
...The revolution never happened...
...The history of the movement is a long litany of confrontations with the police, arrests, trials, imprisonments, and exiles...
...At the end of all that I saw an image of Jesus Christ...
...Cleaver's second major book is Soul on Fire: The Autobiography of Eldridge Cleaver, published after his return to the United States and his Christian conversion...
...He has published essays and reviews in the Nation, Dissent, and the Washington Post Book World...
...In somber political pieces, such as "On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party," Cleaver handles himself respectably...
...In the eighties, it was widely reported that he supported Ronald Reagan...
...The violence that surrounded the Black Panther Party has sustained its public profile, but still engenders controversy—even today tensions run high...
...In the seventies, he became a born-again Christian...
...In an over-the-top, Genet-esque fantasy, he imagines America as a freak show in which the main characters are the President, the Cardinal, and the Negro...
...For seven years, Cleaver lived abroad...
...He worked in brotherly kinship with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale...
...Right on...
...Although Cleaver and others initiated the gun battle, the officers also pointlessly assassinated one of Cleaver's cohorts after he was safely in custody...
...The writing lacks the originality that would show the author to be more than a crowd follower...
...Eldridge always had answers when I questioned him about his conversion to Christianity or his embrace of a most conservative approach to solving the problems of the black poor...
...It's unfortunate that Cleaver never completed The Black Moochie...
...But the Panthers also romanticized criminal violence as the apocalyptic revenge of the lumpenproletariat...
...Now Cleaver was God's emissary...
...There was always something off with their hypothesis that the criminal perspective could function as an adequate model for transforming the whole of society...
...CLEAVER'S POST-1975 writings are excessively platitudinous...
...I am perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist [but] the blood of Vietnamese peasants has cancelled all my debts [and] the Vietnamese people, afflicted with a rampant disease called Yankees, through their sufferings have cancelled my IOU's," he wrote...
...The Cardinal silently wanders the President's office, sprinkling holy water and smiling fatuously...
...He resolved to wait there until there was a lull at the main table, rush over, scoop up the slice of cake from the silver tray, and dump it into his stainless steel receptacle...
...black against white...
...Let's organize the brothers and put this together...
...It's with too much braggadocio and too little embarrassment that Cleaver relates the story of the day the Panthers were supposedly founded...
...102 n DISSENT / Spring 2006...
...The movement they founded represented the point of view of the lowest class of society...
...Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson wrote, but Eldridge Cleaver pushed the envelope so far that in the end his public pronouncements provoked laughter...
...The police witnesses against Cleaver also wanted to testify against their fellow officers...
...Above all else, however, Cleaver adds his race-consciousness...
...Both of Cleaver's major books were published in the aftermath of crimes that he first denied, then confessed...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and literary critic...
...Cleaver's most important book remains Soul on Ice...
...Target Zero offers zero explanation...
...Editor Kathleen Cleaver handles Cleaver's post-1975 shenanigans by more or less ignoring them...
...Cleaver might have been a writer with the ability to balance the positives and the negatives, the strength of the movement, which was its unique insight into the plight of the lumpenproletariat, as well as its tragic flaw—its death dance with violence...
...When his name appeared in print, it was usually in a context that reaffirmed him as a has-been or, worse, a clown...
...The anthology is strongest when she has powerful material to pick from...
...Then Cleaver methodically describes the Cardinal's eating process, which is anguish for the Negro to watch, as the Cardinal salivates and swallows...
...What we're talking about is politics...
...His writings brought him prominence, assisted his release from prison, and secured his position as the minister of information of the Black Panther Party...
...He laid down his dustpan and broom and was just preparing to dash over when he saw the Cardinal stop at the table, gently set his holy water and bell down, reach beneath his tunic, pull out a plastic bag, and with a few swift motions scoop up the slice of cake...
...It was difficult not to perceive Cleaver as a pseudo-revolutionary huckster...
...Can Target Zero resuscitate Cleaver's reputation, or were his politics really just erratic and self-serving...
...who can't find a job...
...Cleaver writes "We are Lumpen...
...Rather than convict police officers as well as Cleaver, the state was willing to compromise...
...all those on welfare or receiving state aid...
...they have a perspective that has value and a culture that is generally misunderstood...
...There is substantial evidence that the Black Panthers were the victims of excessive government-sanctioned harassment by the FBI counterintelligence operation, Cointelpro...
...Cleaver was guilty, by his own admission, but, in his own eyes, less guilty than the republic of the United States...
...The Negro] felt he had dibs on it...
...The Negro lives for one purpose only, which is to hide beneath the President's table and snatch scraps...
...Despite this, his case was plea-bargained to a few months of community service...
...The Panthers were forged out of the social and racial tensions of the sixties...
...The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society...
...I had hoped that the fourth section would clarify the reported claim that Cleaver supported Reagan's election in 1980...
...The question underpinning Target Zero is introduced in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s foreword, when Gates writes, "Even when I didn't understand Eldridge's opinions, I still admired him immensely...
...Eldridge's peers from his Black Panther years resented his religious and political conversions...
...The Negro spots a particularly appetizing morsel, a slice of cake that the President offers the Cardinal...
...The writing draws from Hemingway and Mailer—the male romantic tradition of exulting in the pleasures of physical activity—and adds to the mix a touch of the sinister surrealism of Jean Genet...
...This time, the accusation was that, days after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Cleaver and cohorts assaulted a group of Oakland, California, police officers, wounding several in a gun battle...
...Many of the first members were former convicts...
...Cleaver writes on the dangers of toxic waste and in opposition to the Gulf War...
...he founded his own ministry...
...It's as if she feels too embarrassed to delve further...
...The Panthers marked as their enemy the instinctive enemy of the lumpenproletariat—the police...
...In a previously unpublished essay, Cleaver admits he was guilty of attacking the police officers in 1968...
...Prior to organizing the Black Panther party [Bobby Seale] and Huey Newton had been planning a gigantic bank robbery...
...Cleaver pled not guilty, but fled the country before the case came to trial...
...I would see their faces, then one after one each just fell away...
...Cleaver gives thanks to the Lord for sparing him a lengthy prison sentence...
...They aspired to transform society using the tools of the lumpenproletariat: their hands, their fists, guns, to transform society, if necessary, by violent revolution...
...Their interest was in the class beneath the workers, the dispossessed, the perennially unemployed, wastrels, beggars, and people with criminal records—roughly speaking, the class of street people...
...The Black Panther Party ended in disunion...
...This is why, in my opinion, there is still no well-balanced study of the movement...
...Afterword by Cecil Brown Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 336 pp $27.95 I T WAS IN THE mid-eighties that Eldridge Cleaver became a figure of mockery...
...The Eldridge Cleaver of the six100 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 ties wasn't a bad wordsmith...
...Cleaver, still in exile in Paris, reflects over his disappointment with Cuba and the many travails he has suffered trying to keep the faith in liberation movements...
...Let's arm for the defense of the black community...
...The fourth section of the book, covering those years, is by far the shortest...
...Huey jumped up and said "Later for the bank...
...they have their own issues...
...So later for the jive bank...
...Target Zero is, at best, a helpful piece to the puzzle of the Black Panther Party...
...If you come to Target Zero seeking a pointbypoint explanation of Cleaver's conservative conversion, you'll be disappointed...
...Target Zero is edited by his ex-wife, Kathleen Cleaver, today a lawyer and a senior lecturer at Yale and at Emory University...
...So they sat down and started trying to put together a key to open the vault...
...They put their minds to work on that because they recognized that they needed money for the Movement...
...who have never worked and never will...
...I saw all my heroes from communism, from Karl Marx all the way down to Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung...
...He may never have been politically coherent, his prose may have suffered from overwriting, but, like the one writer for whom he expressed admiration in Soul on Ice, Norman Mailer, at its finest his writing had élan, poetry, and power...
...Kathleen Cleaver briefly comments that for her ex-husband the eighties "were years of disappointment, confusion and decline...
...His tranDISSENT / Spring 2006 n 99 BOOKS sient lifestyle ended when he returned to the United States in 1975...
...He commemorated in prose the night he stood on a balcony in Paris, bleakly depressed, when suddenly, "I started seeing the man on the moon changing...
...It's true that in the conservative eighties many icons of the sixties were marginalized, but the former Black Panther seemed to outdo himself as a figure of terror transformed into a sideshow attraction...
...But Black Panthers aspired to more than bringing the perspective of the lumpenproletariat to public attention...
...By the end of 1968, Cleaver was in trouble with the law again...
...Was this true, media hype, or a case of false reporting...
...It is this type of writing, which produces a gut-level emotional response, that is Cleaver's forte...
...A more illuminating study remains to be written...
...He also backhandedly reveals details of the case...
...They aspired to organize the lumpenproletariat, not the working class, which at least in theory had the option of unionizing...
...I T IS EASY TO PARODY SO much about Eldridge Cleaver, but Target Zero also reminds us that he was by far the most eloquent writer produced by the Blank Panther Party...
...Soul on Ice is less an apologia than a book of accusations—young against old...
...What we're talking about is the liberation of our people...
...Or at least BOOKS the voice sounds respectable—but just as Cleaver's literary writings suffer from an adolescent streak, his political manifestos seem skillful imitations of Marxist analyses, almost pastiche...
...He felt it was the perfect plan...
...The lumpenproletariat doubtless deserve a voice...
...In "On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party," published in 1969, Cleaver offers a lengthy exposition of the Black Panther Party's plan for social revolution...
...During that time he grew disillusioned with socialism as practiced in Cuba and Algeria...
...There is definitely something wrong with social movements that begin as schemes to rob banks...
...His last appearance as a serious thinker in Target Zero is in a 1975 interview with Gates...
...She does a good job of selecting from his early works—chapters of Soul on Ice, essays, interviews, and an unfinished novel called The Black Moochie...
...Instead, the fourth section consists of Cleaver's expressions of religious faith alongside a few rather knee-jerk liberal pieces...
...In both he plays the role of the miscreant who has seen the darkness and returned to offer the world prescriptive advice...
...It is also less an apologia than an exhortation...
...who are unskilled and unfit...
...Gates's words are admiring, but they also leave us wondering whether, if Gates can't finally make sense of Eldridge Cleaver's career, can we...
...But as they thought about it, they thought about the implications...
...The Cardinal politely refuses it, but places it atop a silver tray...
...Target Zero offers a retrospective of Cleaver's career, consisting of selections from his works, published and unpublished, dating from Soul on Ice, his 1968 post-prison manifesto, to the mellower writings that characterized the decades preceding his death in 1998...
...Therein lies the rub...
...But he was always firm in his beliefs despite the pain this rift inevitably caused him...
...It has always struck me as unbelievable, given DISSENT / Spring 2006 n I0 BOOKS that Reagan was the governor of California during the years the Panthers suffered their worst harassment by Cointelpro...
...The bulk of it was written while Cleaver was a prison inmate, sentenced for various crimes, including rape...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
