Irobi’s acknowledgement of the role of race in the story of Harlem invites the inevitable backcloth of the Ellison intertext. But Irobi is too cosmopolitan a poet, too comfortably ensconced in the overlapping strands of postmodern identity narratives to be satisfied with the loss of race and memory as the only consequence of the defeat of the Black soul in the battle of Harlem. Other layers of exclusion are grafted onto the persona of the poem’s addressee and dedicatee: John-Martin Green:
Irobi displays his sophisticated grasp of the double entendre technique with the narrativization of John-Martin Green. The name and the personality signify at multiple levels. The tragedy of John–Martin Green does not devolve singularly from the clearing operations of the army of Donald Trump. It does not devolve solely from the erasure of such symbologies of black history and socialization as “the ring shout”, “cotton balls”, and the “barber’s shop”. The “white sharks” moving in on this potential “Black sushi” are, in the officially sanctioned narratives of their identity, crusading, evangelical, Christian fundamentalists whose capitalism is powered by soporific invocations of heterosexual family values, “our way of life” in US-speak. Trouble is that the real life John-Martin Green is one of the leaders of the New York Black Men’s Xchange, an Afrocentric, activist, Black gay men’s group, who reject the label “queer” as an imposition of white, hegemonic gay discourse and prefer the designation SGL – Same Gender Loving. In essence, when the capitalists invade Harlem with their heterosexual Christianity, John-Martin Green’s marginalised sexuality – disguised by the poem’s double entendre - will also have to move along with his history, race, and culture.
“The Battle of Harlem” is, in my opinion, a major event in the context of Black countermodernist textualities. An event whose status as “dissident epistemology” (Benita Parry) derives from its deconstruction of the dominant American narrative of History cannot escape the bogey of American identity mythmaking: patriotism. Irobi puts irony and sarcasm to judicious use in his exploration of the instrumentalization of American minorities by the master narrative of patriotism:
A successful combination of climax and dénouement in the same stanza is not a frequent occurrence and this is further testimony to Irobi’s craft. In this powerful moment of the resolution of poetic tension, John-Martin Green, Houston Baker, and the poet-persona are interpellated into the ironic space of patriotism from where they contemplate their defeat and the tragedy of their history. The image of “bald eagles” and “talons” is especially apposite in delivering the potential coup de grace and is reminiscent of David Diop’s deployment of similar imagery of “vultures” and “talons” in his poem, “The Vultures”. However, unlike the situation in Diop’s poem where the captured Africans were so completely routed by “foreigners who did not seem human”, Irobi enters a crucial caveat which denies the invaders of Harlem the last word: total defeat will happen only “if we are willing."
Apart from the occasional lapse into prosaic literalness in stanzas two and four, which takes nothing away from the overall accomplishment of the poem, some comments on how this complex poem further rejects familiarity by problematizing questions of identity and nation-ness are in order. The speaking “I” in the poem resists any simplistic classification as it constantly defies a stable frame of reference. Its oscillation between adjectives and pronouns of self-inclusion and distantiation in relation to the “souls of black folk” imposes a weighty double consciousness on the poem. But this is not W.E.B Du Bois’s double consciousness. Irobi’s problem – if the dilemma of the poet-persona is anything to go by – is not how to be negro and American at the same time but how to be a Nigerian/Biafran speaking as “us”, “we”, and “our” within the signifying range of the African American narrative. For instance, the “I” who places itself symbolically and proprietorally “on top of Mount Morris Park”, appropriates Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and talks about OUR (my emphasis) history in the first stanza runs into trouble in stanza six with the plunge into the history of the American south. At this point, the history of John-Martin Green becomes difficult for a non-African American to articulate; hence the “I” distances itself and begins to speak of “your ancestors”. The problem is easily identifiable: an African may appropriate Invisible Man and its textual ideology; it is much more difficult to appropriate the experience of the “cotton balls” of South Carolina and the barber’s shop as a site of socialization. The monkey and the gorilla may claim oneness, goes the African proverb, but monkey is monkey and gorilla, gorilla. But Irobi already anticipates this problem; hence the poet-persona’s self-fashioning as a “migrant heart” trained by Houston Baker. In essence, Irobi resolves the problem of double consciousness here through what one may call the phatic communion of ideology – an expressed subscription to the ideology of a shared history, shared experiences, shared emotions. The phatic communion of ideology is what enabled Frantz Fanon to speak as “nous, Algériens” (We, Algerians) even before renouncing his French citizenship. It is the same ideology that resolves the tensions of bifurcated subjectivity in Esiaba Irobi’s masterpiece.
Pius Adesanmi is a a poet and Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, where he is also Director of the Project on New African Literatures, PONAL.
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