The recent ‘impossible’ election of Barack Hussein Obama, an African American, to the most powerful political office on the planet is symbolic of a ‘possible’ dramatic reversal of race relations in America. More importantly it insinuates, as many commentators have noted, the beginning of a post-racial world – hopefully. The genealogy of that event apparently lies somewhere else historically, irrespective of the immediate political dynamics of its architecture. Analysis of the event has focused so much on the rough road to this historical moment – slavery, emancipation, civil rights, black enfranchisement and so on. So overwhelming was the event that, like Jesus, Jesse jackson wept. What has been elided in all of that is the instrumentality of writing, of literature, to that transformative election.
Writing was indeed an instrument, even if a silent one in all post-election analyses. But this does not merely refer to the physical “technology” itself, but also to a process of “distancing” and “backward scanning” which accompanies it and allows for internal self-dialogue, reflection and ultimately for a representation, in permanent form, of changes in the slave’s consciousness and self-apprehension. To forestall all that the slave-owning south in the early 1800s forbade, as a matter of fact, modern education for slaves:
That self-affirming consciousness, which the criminalisation of writing was meant to curb, flourished in the literary effervescence of the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York. A confluence of historical and socio-political events like the first world war – its socially liberating aftermath for black veterans and black civilians – combined with a cultural social awakening through the critical writings of educated African American intellectual elite such as W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Carter Woodson or Marcus Garvey to unleash a creative ferment. This coalesced in the aforementioned empowering cultural/literary movement. But the beginning of that black counter-modernity goes back to the first slave writings in America.
Henry Louis Gates, in “Race, Writing and the Difference it Makes” (1985) recounts the negation of the slave’ humanity based on the assumption that he or she could not write. And when the slave began indeed to write, his or her work was met with disbelief at first and then was grudgingly ‘approved’ through attestations by their ‘owners’. He recounts the case of Phyllis Wheatley, who, in 1772, was summoned before a panel of white male ‘judges’ in Boston and questioned before it gave a seal of approval.
The first corpus of writings by black slaves in America ‘confirmed’ their humanity – if any confirmation was needed – and paved the way for gradual but sweeping political and cultural upheavals and changes, which resulted – even if indirectly – in Emancipation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, Enfranchisement, the Black Arts Movement, and after what seems and eternity, in the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in America. Literature’s recuperative, self-affirming, transformative moral force has been all along at work in the project that is modern American democracy.
The necessity of literature in nation building and social transformation has been recognised from time immemorial in literary criticism going as far back as Aristotle. Even in the absence of writing “primary orality”, which preceded writing, had its oral literary forms: poems, stories, proverbs, morality tales, incantations and anecdotes. The point is that the moral imperatives of literature are necessary for transformations in the social body.
Ben Okri insists: “writers are dangerous when they tell the truth. Writers are also dangerous when they tell lies” (A Way of Being Free, 1997). Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, their precursors like Phyllis Wheatley in the heyday of slavery, told the truth in their writings. That allowed for America’s necessary soul-searching – where equality and human dignity was concerned – across the centuries, and led to the political miracle that is Obama. Okri’s thesis merely reformulates what different writer-critics have expressed in different ways across generations. The long and short of it is that Writers fail when they stop acting as the conscience of society. Alain Locke knew this.
In a biblical allusive mood, Locke spoke of a “talented tenth” amongst African Americans who would lift up the ‘race’ through writing, that is writing that was engaged, truthful and conscientious; writing that came to energise the foot-soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement and other socio-political projects across a young America. Writers became primary reformers; their work led to that of secondary reformers like Martin Luther King Jr. The talented tenth were the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and subsequently, of the Black Arts Movement. Their work became a permanent self-reflection, a hope for a different reality, a truth telling to power, and a ground upon which to contest official formulations on race. Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement were a counter-discourse to official narratives of what it meant to be human. History stood before the court of literature. In the face of the literary hard questions were asked of American Euro-modernity. Judgement has been slow but swift in execution when the time was right. This has led to the instalment of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United State of America. The long trek towards a human race – rather than a black, white, green red, yellow one or any other such silly inanities – continues apace.
Amatoritsero Ede is a peripatetic, internationally award-winning poet and ex-Hindu monk born in Nigeria. He has been a Book Editor, was Editor-in-Chief of Sentinel Online Poetry Journal from 2005-2007, and Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University’s English Department from 2005-2006, where he is now a Doctoral Candidate.
In spring the willows’ black bark is oiled stone
Its color soaked by the snowflakes’ whiteness –
“Barry? Barry, is this you?” The telephone call was from Nairobi, Kenya, the caller his Aunt Jane, and she had bad news.
March 12, 2009
That Tune Clutches my Heart shortlisted for The Ethel Wilson
Fiction Prize
January 22, 2009
Robert Bringhurst wins American Printing history Association Award
February 10, 2009
New From Gaspereau Press
