Changing Color of American Literature @ Teton County Library

I have just returned from an amazing three-day trip to Jackson, Wyoming, where I participated in a several events sponsored by and held at the Teton County Library and the Teton County Library Foundation. Poet and exceptional host Leah Shlachter was the organizer, and brilliant poet Tyehimba Jess (whose masterpiece Olio drops from Wave Books very soon!) invited fellow brilliant poet and thinker Tonya Foster, author of Swarm of Bees In High Court (Belladonna*, 2015), and me to join him in exploring the topic "The Changing Color of American Literature," through a group reading and lively panel discussion at the Teton County Library. It was a pleasure to join Tyehimba and Tonya in conversation over several days, which also included a visit to and writing workshop with Matt Daly's creative writing class(es) at the Journeys School of Teton Science Schools.

A huge hug and thanks to Leah, who was an incomparable host and showed us (around) Jackson Hole, which included encounters with real wildlife (see below), though no skiing, and spent much quality time with us, even introducing us to "pig candy," which I brought a box back for C; to Katherine Gulotta Ward, who brought me to Journeys School and joined us for the workshop (documenting it with some of the photos below); to poet and University of Wyoming MFA student Randall Tyrone, who moderated our panel and spun off quite a few good lines in the process; to the Library Foundation; to KHOL 89.1 radio's Cassandra Lee, who interviewed us; and to everyone who came to the events, including a number of people who attended both nights, and asked though-provoking questions at each event. (It was a special delight to see Lost Roads Press's Susan Scarlata, for whose press's poetry award I'd served as a judge a few years ago.) A huge thanks goes to Tyehimba, who made the event possible, and to Tonya, who together keep me thinking hard!

My interview with KHOL is here.  Some photos below!

Moose in a field on the way from the airport to Jackson

A closer view of the moose

National Museum of Wildlife Art, on the way
from the airport to Jackson

A view of a butte

Me, under one of the antler's arches
on the Jackson town square

The Journeys School

During our workshop (I
was writing with them too!)
(photo by Katherine Gulotta Ward)

With the Journeys School student writers
(photo by Katherine Gulotta Ward)

A marvelous origami bird that Ci-Ci,
one of the talented poets and students at Journeys
School made for me as a gift

One of the buttes

Leah pointing out an exhibit at
the Teton County Library

Tyehimba discussing and reading from
one of the syncopated sonnets
in Olio

A ski slope looming above town

Bighorn sheep

Several bighorn sheep, including a ram
resting and keeping an eye on us

Panoramic view

The Grand Tetons in the distance

The snowy landscape (no buffaloes, though)

More buttes and cloud-shrouded mountains

The landscape around Jackson Hole

Randall, Tyehimba and Tonya
before our conversation

The Grand Tetons the day I flew back
(the clouds had dispersed to reveal
the  mountains in their full majesty)

A closer look at Grand Tetons

PATH's New World Trade Center Station

WTC PATH station, with 1
World Trade Center in the background 

Fifteen years in (re-)construction (and it's still not finished), at a cost of $4 billion dollars (and it's still not finished), the main hall of the PATH's new World Trade Center station main's building, designed by starchitect Santiago Calatrava, is on the cusp of opening. But the entire hub is, unaccountably, still not finished. Incomplete or not, it is worth an ogle, and I did so on Tuesday on my way back from an appointment in the city.

The external form of the main hall, or Oculus, retains some aspects of Calatrava's original design, though his plan for a retractable roof, much like bird's wings, gave way to a rigid white steel exoskeleton, with additional security features. Its interior consists of a vast, marble-floored hall surrounded by ribbed arches, as if it were the evacuated belly of some immense white alien. I immediately thought of the movie Prometheus, which seems like a belated influence. 

The Oculus mirrors the futuristic ossuary-like maze of corridors, which I have featured in the past in some random photos, that connect the station to other buildings like Brookfield Place and West Street. As I walked around the atrium space and snapped photos, I did not see many people (as the photos make clear), but I suppose they will start arriving once the shops open and the exits at Vesey Street and Church Street open up.

The headline of critic Michael Kimmelman's New York Times critique of the building, linked above, refers to it as a boondoggle. Yet he does initially praise the Oculus's eye-catching space.  But he concludes that, given its cost, lack of functionality, and insignificance in the New York-New Jersey public transportation system, this glorified vanity sculpture project represents a failure of multiple kinds, as well as a waste of public funds. (Where did all that money go?) 

I know I may sound churlish, but I actually liked the PATH's rough hewn temporary station, which opened not long after the 9/11 attacks. It eventually closed and instead, the site turned into a cardboard-lined warren whose navigability seemed geared to train rats. Given the number of New Yorkers who may find themselves displaced in coming years and undertaking a move to New Jersey, the transit officials probably should do everything they can to ensure that the hub will be able to accommodate as many travelers as possible.

When it will be completed remains a question; the original 5-year-estimate has been exceeded by an order of 3, so perhaps by 2020 or 2025, barring Manhattan being inundated by rising sea water, it will be done. Also, when the connections with the MTA's lines will be open also isn't clear. As confusing as the old WTC station (pre-9/11) was, you could exit the PATH and head directly to the 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., with an array of shops dotting the way. Not today, though. All of that is apparently coming soon. 

The station is worth seeing, though, especially before all that white turns gray and then black (which might have been more appropriate given the graveyard and memorial next door), especially if you don't have to travel through the station during rush hour, and it isn't raining or snowing outside. I can say from experience that all that marble flooring is extremely slippery, like a mid-winter lake rink, making it a major hazard, which I imagine someone must have considered before laying down so much of it, but perhaps they didn't. It looks pretty, though, and that appears to be all that matters, whatever the costs.

Part of the soaring white spine 

The path past the PATH station to the
9/11 Memorial 

Approaching the Oculus, from inside the station

The Oculus, with the skylight visible

The skylight

Another view 

Towards the WTC PATH trains

Again with Feeling: BOMB Magazine at MoMA PS1

On February 28, I had the pleasure of participating in Again With Feeling, a public conversation with poet and friend Tonya Foster that BOMB Magazine organized in conjunction with MoMA PS1's Sunday Series. We were one of 10 pairs who reprised our artist-to-artist conversation from BOMB, though instead of the long free-wheeling conversation we originally had up in Ithaca during Image Text Ithaca last summer, we received 10 minutes to chat. I think it went well; it was a joy to return to some of the themes of our discussion, and to be able to do so in a public venue.

Other conversing pairs, some of which unfolded more as interviews, included BOMB editor Betsy Sussler (subbing for Eric Bogosian) and the hilariously cantankerous former director and now filmmaker Richard Foreman; authors Christopher Sorrentino and Sam Lipsyte, who talked about newish work; visual artist duos Yuri Masnyj and Hope Gangloff, Alan Ruiz and Tom Burr, and David Humphrey and Nicole Eisenman; author Linda Yablonsky and Wooster Group director and performer Elizabeth LeCompte, who was reluctant to talk about herself and mainly talked about Foreman, who went first and then left; dancer Ralph Lemon and writer/performer James Hannaham; and musicians Justin Vivian Bond and Joy Episalla. 

Capping things off, Ishmael Houston–Jones, whom I'd always hoped to see dance, engaged in an enthrallingly strange, ghostly duet with Miguel Gutierrez, who made the performance interactive, though with permission. There was also a lively acoustic music performance by Alan Licht. Many thanks to Ryan Chapman, Mónica de la Torre, and everyone else at BOMB and MoMA for inviting us to participate and making the event possible.

David Humphrey and Nicole Eisenman

Linda Yablonsky and Elizabeth LeCompte

Ishmael Houston-Jones, entering the dome

Christopher Sorrentino and Sam Lipsyte

Yuri Masnyj (also in the Klimtian portrait above)
and Hope Gangloff (painter of Yuri, above)

Ralph Lemon and James Hannaham

Lemon and Hannaham

Sophia Nguyen on the Dark Room Writers Collective in Harvard Magazine

A few years ago, The New Yorker published an article, "The Dark Room Collective: Where Black Poetry Took Wing," about the Dark Room Collective that left a lot to be desired. Not only did it erase a good number of the members and participants, but it offered a sketchy overview of what the Dark Room was and achieved, in part because its ideological agenda was quite off-target. To put it another way, the ideological agenda it attempt to affix to the Dark Room was incorrect. Even the title was incorrect; "black poetry" had taken wing many times before the Dark Room's appearance, as the Dark Room's readings, awards and tributes more than made clear.

Other pieces about the organization--which I belonged to for many years-- are much better; in 1996, two years after the Dark Room's final reading series occurred in Boston, one of the Dark Room's most honored poets, Cornelius Eady, penned a brief piece with Kwaku Alston, "Reading Ahead," for The New Yorker that was much more on the mark, and in 2013, co-founder and poet Sharan Strange wrote an entry, "Total Life Is What We Want’: A Brief History of The Dark Room Collective," for Mosaic magazine that not only shared aspects of the organization's history but her vision of what its aims were and her sense of its place in the firmament of African American and American letters.

There have been other pieces, but one of the most recent entries, Sophia Nguyen's thoughtful, capacious, beautifully written article in the March-April 2016 issue of Harvard Magazine, "Elbow Room: How the Dark Room Collective made space for a generation of African-American writers," ranks among the best. Not only does Nguyen get the history and names correct and quickly dispel the fact that all the members went to or met at Harvard, but she also offers an overview of what the Dark Room's activities meant in their contemporary moment and might signify today, while not trying to use the writers and their works as a way of bashing particular traditions in the Black literary tradition (the Black Arts Movement, Umbra, etc.), or misreading the literature or cultural effects that have emerged from it.

The impact on the Boston literary scene were visible to anyone who was paying attention. As she notes:

“The Dark Room Collective was one of the more influential movements in the city of Boston,” says fiction writer Don Lee, an associate of the group. Lee, who first moved to the area to pursue his M.F.A. at Emerson College, and then became editor of the journal Ploughshares, observed how they shook up the “lily white” literary scene. “There was terrific energy, and it was contagious.” He helped write a grant application that secured the Dark Room $12,500 from the Lannan Foundation—“not a huge amount, but at the time fairly significant”—which helped cover the travel expenses of writers they were beginning to invite from farther afield.

Nguyen, however, goes further and talks about the "Drive By" readings, and much more, showing that the Collective, more than anything else, helped to create and expand a conversation which involved paying attention not just to what was happening in Boston, to the literary past and to peers around the country.

She also broaches critiques of Dark Room writers' work as "depoliticized" and "conservative," but as she goes on to suggest, as I would underline, works as diverse as Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts or Natasha Trethewey's Thrall or Thomas Sayers Ellis's Skin, Inc. or Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence? These are all deeply political, and formally playful to challenging works, and they're only a small portion of what Dark Room writers have produced. Playwrights, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, and scholars who were affiliated with the group have gone on to produce work that is both politically engaged and aesthetically challenging as well, and without question, all the various strands of black cultural production, from the past up through the Dark Room's moment, on through today, are visible in the art that has emerged from it.

Here's one more quoted paragraph that gives a glimpse of what the Dark Room was really like:

What the Dark Room gave to its members makes their output difficult to corral. It’s something Ellis has called “elbow room”—a jostling freedom of movement that made Bryant, all those years ago, feel unexpected exhilaration during her 40-minute phone interview with the Collective. Though she at first tried to fake a love of jazz and the blues—at the time, these genres were to her parents’ taste, not hers—she then admitted to being a fan of the Cure, the Smiths, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. “And it was the most miraculous thing, because suddenly we were doing these bizarre medleys of Smith songs and P-Funk and Run DMC and Billy Bragg and Psychadelic Furs and Joan Armatrading. It was outrageous,” she told her interviewer. In “Dark Room: An Invocation,” Elizabeth Alexander declares “the house/came down because/we knew how to read/each other, could code-switch/with the same fast dazzle.” Now it’s a critical commonplace to hear that some Dark Room writer can reference Homer and Tupac in the same space, making virtuoso maneuvers between different expressive registers. At the time, Bryant said to herself with relief, “Okay, I’m not the freak I thought I was.”

Do check the article, and the poems Nguyen quotes. They're a great place in the Dark Room literary corpus to start.

Black Literary Avant-Garde Syllabus At ND Site

From Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston

A month or so ago on Facebook, I casually mentioned that I'd taught an undergraduate course in Black Literary Avant-gardism at Northwestern, most recently in 2010, and figured that that would be the end of it. The response, however, was enthusiastic, with a number of people asking me to share the syllabus. Northwestern never required us to post syllabi publicly, as Rutgers-Newark does, and I was amenable to sharing it, though I wasn't sure where I might do so. Here was the most likely spot.

Then Mieke Chew of New Directions asked me if I would be interested in presenting it there, and I was. After she distilled it a bit, removing dates and so forth, it went live. I intended it to be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, and if I were to teach the course today, in addition to a longer calendar, I'd add more and new scholarly texts and draw from the rich store of contemporary innovative black writing, including digital work.

So here is "Temples for the Future": 20th and 21st Century Black Literary Avant-Gardes." 

I should note that I do not have an electronic course pack, but a number of the articles and shorter materials can be found in the special issue of Tripwire featuring giovanni singleton's and Renee Gladman's famous conference black innovative writing, as well as The Harlem Renaissance Reader.

New York Times' "Unpublished Black History"

A young Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr., high school
basketball star at Power Memorial Catholic during
the Catholic High School Athletic Association Championship, in 1965, 6 years before he became
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Don Hogan Charles)

I have been checking the New York Times every day to see what photographs and stories will be featured as part of its "Unpublished Black History" series, which it debuted this year for Black History Month. In essence, it is a catalogue of material, often newsworthy in some way, that nevertheless failed to make it into the paper. In some cases, the Times editors approach candor about why they did not publish the images or stories, but in other cases, some quite fascinating, they do not.

It's hard to know, lacking documentation of some sort (notes, audiotaped material, etc.) or the direct comments of the editors, writers and photographers themselves, why some of these key moments were passed over, but it also underlines the fact that even today, and not just with Black History, editorial choices of various kinds shape what makes it into the mainstream news and what gets complete passed over. As I view the photographs and read the brief entries, I keep wondering, what led to this story being skipped and others receiving coverage? This would be a great subject for the Times to devote one of its roundtables to.

A few images from the series, which you can find here (in reserve chronological order, going back to February 1):

Run-DMC performing at Madison Square Garden
in 1986 for an anti-crack benefit (Chester Higgins, Jr.)

Several photos (one by Allyn Baum at left) from the
unpublished Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. trove

Scholar Kenneth B. Clark at home in 1969, with his wife
and family, in Hastings-on-Hudson (Eddie Hauser)

Martina Arroyo, in 1965, during her run
in Verdi's Don Carlo (Sam Falk)

Some of the many photos, taken in 1972 by
Jack Manning, of James Baldwin;
only one of which ended up in the New York Times 

Protesters confronting police during
a 1964 march in Jackson, Mississippi, in
response to the assassination of civil rights
leader Medgar Evers (Claude Sitton)

Safia Elhillo Winner of 2016 Sillerman Prize + Poem

Safia Elhillo (Busboys & Poetry)

The African Poetry Book Fund, in conjunction with the journal Prairie Schooner, has named poet Safia Elhillo the winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, for her manuscript Asmarani! As a winner, Elhillo will receive $1,000 and the University of Nebraska Press will publish her manuscript in 2017. As a member of the judging panel, which also includes the stellar writers Bernardine Evaristo, Matthew Shenoda, Gabeba Baderoon, and Kwame Dawes, who edits Prairie Schooner and directs the APBF, I can say that it was stunning read, and wholeheartedly congratulate Safia Elhillo!

Safia Elhillo, a Sudanese writer "by way of Washington, DC," received her MFA from New School University, and was a joint winner of the 2015 Brunel Poetry Prize. She also is a Fellow of Cave Canem and poetry editor at the journal Kinfolks, and will have a chapbook, also titled Asmarani, appearing as part of the New Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tatu), from the African Poetry Book Fund with Akashic Books.

Congratulations also go to this year's five 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize finalists: Nick Makoha (Uganda), a London resident, for his manuscript Kingdom of Gravity; D. M. Aderibigbe (Nigeria), for his manuscript Becoming My Mother’s Son; Viola Allo, (Cameroon), living in California, for her manuscript Schoolgirl from Cameroon; Shittu Fowora (Nigeria), for his manuscript Touch Machines; and Nebeolisa Okwudili (Nigeria), for his manuscript country!

Here is one of Safia Elhillo's poems, from Big Lucks, Issue 11, December 2015. It gives a sense of her work as a whole, but do check out both the forthcoming chapbook and the entire collection, which will be out next year!

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH YELLOW DRESS

i believe that sometimes              we do not die

i will not believe that to be housed in a body
that is black       is to be dressed always
in black for the funeral                 we live forever

our mouths open & a song falls out           thick
with a saxophone’s syrup               & all our dead
in the ground make this land ours             & all
our missing fathers make us everything’s child

today i did not dress for a funeral       today i wear
the yellow dress        & laugh with all my teeth
today my lost ones are not lost to me     they live
in the wind that gathers my skirt

today this is my country        today i say their names
& the all holes left behind            shaped like blackgirls
& blackboys        are lit up by hundreds of faraway stars

today i woke up & was not dead         & tomorrow
might be different but tomorrow       does not yet exist
so i hold my mother’s hand & kiss          the brown valley
between each knuckle        my brother opens his mouth
to laugh & the light pours in          through the gap in his teeth
& no one will ever again say my eyes are too serious

i press my body to a man that i find beautiful      & sway
to a song that knows us                i live forever
with my feet in my grandmother’s lap
&                                      i live forever by the water
with the sun spilled over me       remember me this way
& when they come for me            play the song i love
into the space i leave behind

Copyright © Safia Elhillo, and Big Lucks, 2016. All rights reserved.

GRIND Now Published!

Earlier this week I learned that the little art book project, GRIND, that I collaborated on with photographer Nicholas Muellner this past summer at the unforgettable Image Text Ithaca at Ithaca College, is now a book, edited by Nicholas and Catherine Taylor, designed by Elana Schlenker, and published by ITI Press! It makes its debut at this weekend's Los Angeles Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and will be available at ITI Press's booth.

If you're interested you should be able to order it directly from the press very soon, and please also check out their other books,  Tessex!, by Earl Gravy (Emma Kemp and Daniel Wroe), Bobby Schiedemann, Analicia Sotelo and Thomas Whittle, with contributions from the Best Friends Learning Gang and Jodie Herbage, and Andre A. Bradley's Dark Archives.

Below are a few photos of the book (all from designer Elana Schlenker's website), which I cannot wait to hold in my hands!

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

(Courtesy © Elana Schlenker)

Here's the official announcement that appeared on Facebook!

Happy Black History Month & Langston Hughes Day

Langston Hughes by
Carl Van Vechten, 1936

Happy Black History Month!

February 1 is also the birthday of Langston Hughes (1902-1967), who needs no introduction. As in past years, in honor of his birthday and of Black History Month, I'm posting a Langston Hughes poem. (One of the joys of my life these days is that I always was able to memorialize and celebrate him for posterity in my story "Blues," in Counternarratives.)

Below is Langston Hughes's tribute to the late Jacques Roumain (1907-1944), one of Haiti's greatest poets, whose work, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew) Hughes translated. The friendship, dialogue and political affinities between the two poets was significant, in part because of the links Roumain had made with African American writers during his period of exile from Haiti. Hughes, like many of his peers, mourned the death of the brilliant, anti-imperialist, Communist-affiliated ethnographer, poet and fiction writer Roumain, at age 37, in 1944.

In fact Hughes published the memorial elegy to Roumain, a Communist, in the October 2, 1945 issue of New Masses. I don't think it's Hughes' best work, but am fascinated by its tenderness and the ways in which Hughes invokes the Diaspora and links black--and Haitian vodoun specifically--culture to politics ("Erzulie to the Pope, / Damballa to Lenin / Haiti to the universe) throughout. The dialogue, Hughes suggests, continues even after death.

Bomb Magazine 2016 Recommendation: Clarence Major

Recently BOMB Magazine offered me and other writers and creative types the opportunity to share my thoughts some of the many books we're looking forward to this upcoming year, so I selected poet, novelist and visual artist Clarence Major's forthcoming collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories (Green Writers' Press, 2016).

Major (b.1936 -) is the author of 8 novels, 14 collections of poetry (including the 1999 National Book Award finalist collection Configurations), 2 collections of short fiction (including this one), 8 works of nonfiction, and 4 anthologies, among them 1969's landmark The New Black Poetry. His essay "Necessary Distance," the title of an eponymous collection of nonfiction that Tisa B. turned me onto, is one of many compasses I periodically return to.

Despite his prodigiousness and originality--this is a man who wrote a novel based on the premise that a Connecticut law required husbands to carry their wives across thresholds at home!)--his work remains far too little known, and should be much more heralded, read and discussed, so I am particularly looking forward to this new book. For Bomb I wrote:

One book I’m eager to get my hands on is acclaimed novelist, poet, and visual artist Clarence Major’s forthcoming collection of short fiction Chicago Heat and Other Stories. Though far less known than he should be, Major, as original as anyone writing today, has been successfully experimenting with the formal possibilities of fiction for over four decades, and has developed a distinctive, accessible, and unforgettable style. I’m enthusiastic to read and learn from what he accomplishes in this new gathering of stories.

About the new book Major's publisher writes:

Chicago Heat and Other Stories by Clarence Major, employs a gorgeous purity and simplicity of language in a series of masterful analyses examining human interaction. Each narrative voice comes forward all at once, individual and complete, without obstacle or complication, enabling the reader to see the characters and feel their emotions. Major does not shy away from the bitter or the harsh; we get to hear it all. Like paint on an easel he blends lyricality with moxie and the blunt with the beautiful. The characters come together as easily as they part; people leaving, coming back, going, staying—it all sticks and fades like heat on your skin. The imagery is completely accessible and generously given. Toni Morrison comes to mind. His work is like jewels.

Based on what I know of Clarence Major's work, this description barely touches the surface. Check it out this year.

More book 2016 recommendations by Dawn Lundy Martin, Albert Mobilio, Alan Gilbert, Chelsea Hodson, Justin Taylor, Ander Monson, Ken Chen, and Lawrence Giffin at the BOMB Magazine site!

Who Runs the Publishing Industry?

UPDATE: Jonathon Sturgeon has just posted a piece on Flavorwire comparing the publishing industry to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, and gives Counternarratives a shout-out in the process.

The semester has begun, Blizzard Jonas and all, and I can already see my blogging pace dwindling, so I am going to try to follow a plan I set out a few years ago but have never followed, which is to maintain my blogging activity by posting micro introductions to interesting things I find on the web, and just let the articles speak for themselves. (I also hope to do this with the stubs of pieces I've begun but not finished in the recent past.)

Marlon James at the Man Booker Prize ceremony

So here goes. Last year Marlon James, author of several novels, including the 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead, 2014), stated at a Guardian-sponsored event in London that the publishing industry "panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, 'older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life'."

He went on to say:

[B]ecause white women readers dominate the market, “the male editors will only accept one type of story. Everyone knows what a New Yorker story will look like. I could have been published 10 times over – I knew that there was a certain kind of prose I could have written; intense scenes that hinted, rather than explored.”

In its report on James's remarks, linked above, the Guardian noted that "Women, particularly white women, make up the vast majority of regular fiction readers, purchasing two thirds of all books sold in the UK. Almost 50% of women classify themselves as avid readers, compared to 26% of men." He expanded a bit on these assertions in a highly entertaining and informative Guardian Books podcast.

James was responding, in fact, to a Tin House essay, "On Pandering," by Claire Vaye Watkins, who received multiple prizes for her 2010 collection Battleborn. Watkins' is a rich, exploratory attempt to make sense of her experiences as a white woman writing in a tradition that usually valorizes white men, abets sexism and racism, and consciously and unconsciously urges women, including white women, to write against their perspectives and themselves.

Claire Vaye Watkins

To quote her:

The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.

I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.

I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!

In The New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy took issue with James's assessment, penning a response, "Don't Let Men Attack Pumpkins Spice Literature,"filled with links to others responding to Watkins' essay. In it she asserted that James was half-right, and was focusing on literary sexism. She contrasted his take with freelance writer Nicole Perkins' reading of "On Pandering" in the Los Angeles Times, and stressed the need for a more intersectional understanding of the literary marketplace, and for the voices of women of color to be heard (yes!). (NYRB critic, author, translator and blogger Tim Parks offered thoughts about conformity in literature that sidestepped any discussion of race or gender, but which I thought connected at certain points with what all these critics were saying.)

There have been many other essays and articles on the lack of diversity and need for equity in publishing, including in children's literature. There are even organizations, like We Need Diverse Books, dedicated to highlighting and transforming this situation. A few years ago, a former student and I attended a great workshop in Brooklyn on diversifying children's literature, especially in the speculative fiction and fantasy genres. Shortly before he passed away the late, highly acclaimed writer Walter Dean Myers and his son Christopher--who used the term "apartheid"--published essays in the New York Times calling for diversity in children's literature. But the need across all genres remains, and not just in the US, but in other plural Western societies, like the UK.

Yesterday, Electronic Literature posted an article based on a new publishing diversity baseline survey by children's book publisher Lee and Low showing that the US and Canadian publishing industries are overwhelmingly white and dominated by cis-gender, abled heterosexual women. Moreover, executive level publishing jobs US and Canadian publishing executives are even more concentrated in the hands of straight, cis-gender, abled white women. Shades of Hollywood, though with a gender reversal. These are the decision-makers in the book biz.

These facts suggest that real diversity, beyond lip service, is necessary if the publishing even wants to begin to reflect the reality of the society around them; James' critique has a basis in the sheer facts of who runs the industry; and that Watkins' understanding of the internalization of male-centered values extends beyond writers, to the people and institutions that put books into readers' hands.

I'll conclude by saying that my own experience as an author has tended more towards what Marlon James says, though I have never let that stop me. In fact, I even encountered pushback from industry people--though not, thankfully, my publisher, New Directions, whose chairperson is the legendary editor Barbara Epler--concerning Counternarratives. In other ways, however, I have been fortunate to encounter people from all backgrounds--all races and ethnicities, genders and sexualities, national origins, class, religious affiliation, physical abledness--who have been supportive of my work, and whose work I could enthusiastically support.

Art & Context Interview with Mendi + Keith Obadike

In addition to being friends Mendi + Keith Obadike are among my favorite contemporary artists. At one of their online sites, BlackArtNet, has been part of my blogroll for a decade now, and I have had the pleasure of writing about them critically in a paper set to appear later this spring. Collaborators and partners in life and art, and true multidisciplinary visionaries, Mendi+Keith have created a series of iconic artworks and performances across a range of platforms for over a decade and a half.

Recently, at Art & Context, Erin Sickler interviewed them about their work and lives, and the interview is full of insights on their practice, their aesthetics, and their goals.

Here are some quotes:

We moved through many zones to arrive at this sound centered practice that we have today. When we began we wanted to find our own way for music, language, and media to work together. We thought we might make a new kind of opera. We started talking about this around 1993, but we were already heavily involved in separate practices. Informed by a lot of experimental music and video work from the 60s & 70s and our experience with computers, we started seriously working online in the mid 90s. Working online was a simple way for us to combine our work in music, art and literature in one accessible frame. We were not living in New York at the time, so it was also a way for us present our projects to a large audience little or no institutional support. As we learned the language and nuances of the early world wide web, we began to explore all of the ways one might perform in this new space. We did live streams, animated gifs, text-based email projects, and sound pieces. All of those lessons (about communicating scale, giving a sense of register/tone, and projecting your energy in media) informed and enabled the work we would later do in brick and mortar spaces.

And:

In the 1990s we began calling the technologies of race (among other things) “social filters,” to think through the ways that technological and social dynamics on Internet and in digital culture were grounded in older cultural patterns. While racial discourse is of course implicated in our projects about social filters, we have always been interested to think about who gets to belong and who does not and what the barriers are to belonging. Race is one of the many technologies that delimit this belonging, but because our work is sometimes allegorical, there are also other issues explored in the work. That said, we’re often using the resources offered by African diasporic thinkers -- Igbo, African-American and other African writers.

And finally:

We think in times like these it becomes even more important to choose your media and limit your intake carefully. The flow of bad news can be overwhelming if you forget to step out of the stream. We stay focused because we know we are here to do this work. We know what art can do, and we are empowered by the lasting energy of the folks who came before us.

Do read the entire interview too, and don't miss them if they are speaking, performing or part of an exhibition near you.

Here are three videos featuring their work, including 2015's "Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]," at the New School for Social Research.

Mendi + Keith Obadike's "4 Electric Ghosts" (2009)

Mendi + Keith Obadike's "The Earth (for Audre Lorde and Marlon Riggs)," Obadike Studio (Side A: "If the Heavens Don't Hear (A Roller Skating Jam for Marian Anderson)" + remix by Gordon Voidwell, and Side B: "The Earth Will Hear (for Audre Lorde and Marlon Riggs)"

Kobus Moolman Wins 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize + Poems

Kobus Moolman (b. 1964), a South African poet, playwright, and author of five individual collections of poems and two collections of plays, has received the 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for his collection A Book of Rooms (Deep South, 2014). The judge was the award-winning poet and scholar Gabeba Baderoon, and the honor was bestowed by African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) based at the University of Nebraska. The recipient of numerous awards in South Africa, Moolman teaches at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

Judge Baderoon says about the book: "“In this close reading of spaces, we trace walls, windows, curtains, corners, our attention caught by the cut beneath the door, illumination flaring from glints of memory…. Yet if his flesh is betrayed, and his heart breaks into silence and shame, the hole in his heart also opens into speech."

African Poetry Book Fund Director Kwame Dawes writes about Moolman, "Every time we bring attention to the wonderful poetry being written by African poets today, we are enacting something quite important for African literary arts, and Moolman, whose poetry I have followed for a number of years, is a poet that more people should know. Our hope is that in some small way, this prize will aid in that larger effort." Lastly, Moolman describes this volume as "a brave/foolhardy attempt to shake up the distinction between truth (fact) and fiction, between autobiography and invention."

Though I am affiliated with the APBF, I wasn't familiar with Moolman's work before this award, but having read it I can without question that it certain merits this distinction and high praise. And now, here are two of Moolman's poems, from Poetry International. Enjoy!

[The sheep move off]

The sheep move off.
The sky gets heavier.
The birds grow lighter.
The wind stands up and stretches.
The trees bend over to pick up the old leaves.
The horizon folds in half, then half again.
The sound of a train drags rough words across the hills.
The hills slowly empty of colour.
He sits down on a stone.
He moves his left hand in circles,
circles that narrow in upon themselves.
His skin crawls with flies.
He makes no attempt to drive the end
of the day away from his bare chest.
He throws his left hand against the wind.
He throws the earth far away from beneath his feet.
There is a tightness in his side again.
A tightness where his faith should be.

© 2013, Kobus Moolman

From: Left Over
Publisher: Dye Hard Press, Johannesburg, 2013, 978-0-9869982-2-5

***

IN BED WITHOUT

So most nights.

So every other night.

So every other night when not with.

So when usual and without surprise.

So together and far apart and beyond all at the same.

So at night time when leaving and standing, watching go

away.

So more or less, this way and that.

So opening, closing, in, out, attached and loose as

a nozzle.

So switched on.

So off.

So when the sky rolls over and on top and big is too
full and the wind is grey as cotton, hand-washed,
hanging up, dripping over the bath, and the plug is
breathless and blocked up with his hair that does
not stop, that does not stop falling, out.

That does not.

© 2013, Kobus Moolman
First published on Poetry International, 2013

Both poems © Kobus Moolman, 2013, 2016. From Poetry International, all rights reserved.

Oscars Whiteout (Again)

Who really cares about the Oscars? Clearly some of us care about the Oscars. Should we care about the Oscars? Should we care about the fact that the #Oscars(Are)SoWhite--again?

For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards out the annual gold-plated Oscar statuettes, considered the pinnacle of the multibillion-dollar American film industry's honors, have nominated an all-white slate of actors in the Best and Supporting categories. Ten slots, ten white women and men, and even in two films, Creed and Straight Outta Compton, with black leading actors, only a white supporting actor and the white scriptwriters respectively received nominations. No leading actors of other races or ethnicities were nominated, nor were any films in which they played the leading roles.

While this might not have drawn much notice fifty years ago in 1966 (which in fact did have an all white roster of nominees) or, in 1936 (unsurprisingly), closer to the Oscars' establishment in 1929, it does stick out in 2016, at a time when the United States is growing increasingly more diverse in racial, ethnic, religious, and other ways, and when industry figures themselves note that 46% of Hollywood movie ticket buyers in 2013 alone were people of color (designated as black, Latinx and "other" in the marketing study linked above), and Latinxs in particular are the most enthusiastic moviegoers. And the Academy has a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, as its president.

2013 in fact was supposed to be "turning-point year" for black filmmakers. In his The Dissolve article "New study puts numbers to the lack of minority representation in film," Vadim Rizov quotes producer Harvey Weinstein uttering a quintessentially post-racial (and deeply deluded) paean to America's changing political and thus social terrain, noting that the micro-burst of black directed and starred films "signals, with President Obama, a renaissance. He’s erasing racial lines. It is the Obama effect." How wrong he was and is. Hollywood cinematic representations lag behind those on TV, which has certainly improved since the heyday of the 1970s, and those "racial lines" Weinstein spoke of are as present today as they were in 2013 or before.

As it turns out, 2013 was more of a mirage than anything else. The USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism study that Rizov cites makes clear, diverse racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood cinema is still a problem:

Examining 500 top-grossing films released in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, the study considers some 20,000 characters and finds diversity is sorely lacking. “Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities,” the paper notes at the outset. “Just over three-quarters of all speaking characters are White (76.3 percent). These trends are relatively stable, as little deviation is observed across the five-year sample.”

I observe this not only when I catch previews during my increasingly rare visits to see movies in theatrical release but on TV, where film after film appears to reflect a very narrow, usually white, upper-middle-class, coastal perspective. Innumerable stories not just from the present but the past remain offscreen, at least those screens commandeered by Hollywood studios. Non-traditional casting has improved somewhat, but people of color are still relegated to secondary or subsidiary, and often stereotypical roles, and even though blackface performance thankfully is rare to nonexistent in Hollywood these days, whitewashing source characters happens regularly, and yellowface characterizations crop up. Far more frequent, though, are stereotypes.  Quoting Rizov again:

Among the other conclusions reached: “Hispanic females are more likely to be depicted in sexy attire and partially naked than Black or White females. Asian females are far less likely to be sexualized.” While women got assigned the same kind of domestic status regardless of their race or ethnicity, “Hispanic males are more likely to be depicted as fathers and relational partners than males in all other racial/ethnic groups. Black males, on the other hand, are the least likely to be depicted in these roles.”

Some actors of color, like Kevin Hart--who has become the current go-to black sidekick-enabler in comedies--continue to make careers out of this situation. What exacerbates the problem is the lack of diversity behind the camera, with the ratio of white directors dwarfing directors from any other racial background. Thinking intersectionally, given the sexist and ageist challenges women in Hollywood still face (articulated without intersectionality last year by Patricia Arquette and again this year by media darling Jennifer Lawrence), things are even worse for women of color.

Meanwhile certain plotlines, including "white men battling adversity"; an older white man paired with a younger white woman; younger upper-middle-class white people facing relationships hurdles; and all or mostly white historical scenarios characterize a great many of the plots of Hollywood films. Yes, pace Vladimir Propp, there are a limited number of plots out there, but still a far greater array of narrative configurations, inflected by cultural difference, which is to say stories and experiences, in the US and across the globe, that rarely if ever make it through Hollywood's system.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan
in Creed (moviepilot.com)

This imaginative narrowness, which I would only partially chalk up to racism, only magnifies the inequities the Academy members' racial and gender makeup (94% white and 77% male) and voting patterns produce. Fewer and less culturally and narratively diverse film opportunities mean fewer roles in which actors of color appear on screen, whatever their acting skill level. I should also note that most of the black actors who have won Oscars in recent years have usually been honored for performances involving strong elements of abjection and spectacle, which also points to Academy voting biases.

Ultimately it comes back to gatekeepers at all levels of the movie industry who fail to approve and advance scripts and films that might offer a richer portrait of the society, or who tend to view issue of race and ethnicity, religious difference, and so on, through a narrow lens, are one major source of the problem. The revelations emerging from the Sony hack made this very clear. Moviegoers who support the status quo are another, but while it is conceivable that Americans could boycott Hollywood standard offerings (and excuses), films are a global business, circulating from Canada to Argentina, the UK to South Africa, Russia to New Zealand--and China is the largest single market of all. Hollywood's representations are not just a domestic problem.

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, supported by her husband actor and musician Will Smith, who starred in the film Concussion (which I did not see) and did not garner a nomination this year, has called for a boycott of the Oscars ceremony, as has director Spike Lee. Actor and comedian Chris Rock, the event MC, may be considering boycotting the proceedings as well, though it appears he will show up and, I hope, skewer the debacle. Other actors, including 2013 Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o and actor Idris Elba have called out the movie and TV industry's failings, and in the Briton Elba's case, the UK's parallel problems with cinematic and TV racial representations.

April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, has challenged one of the default excuses behind the film industry's ongoing whiteout, male domination and this and the previous year's nominations: "Don't tell me that people of color, women can't fill seats." But Hollywood, which pays attention to the bottom line, apparently isn't as concerned about who fills those seats as it is with endlessly replicating its tiny store of self-regarding visual narratives. It's not about the money, but rather systemic and structural problems that need to be dismantled completely. Perhaps beginning with a boycott of the Oscars this year, and from now on all movies with retrograde casting approaches and stories.

As important, filmmakers, actors and movie audiences must proactively devise ways to build systems to enable domestic filmmakers of color to create, distribute and screen not just more, but better films, and perhaps if people desire an awards system, as in the case in the literary world and other artistic areas, create that as well. The technology is increasingly there, as are the rival film bases Bollywood and Nollywood (whose films I increasingly watch). Given that Hollywood's earnings have taken a dip in recent years, the studios will change--or they'll realize too late that they could have but did not.