Black male writers for our time
From the invitation, this event sounded like most Christmas musicals, intriguing. How wrong I was. It turned out to be my best experience this Christmas.
It was December 26, Boxing Day, the day set aside for sharing of gifts. So, capping it up at the Redeem Christian Church of God’s (RCCG) Throne Room Parish in the Transcorp Hilton was ideal.
The moment I stepped foot into the premises of the Hilton, I smelt the Christmas spirit in the air. Then I entered the hotel’s Congress Hall. People posed on a red carpet and a little girl of about two years of age took the spotlight. She was such a beauty to behold. There was music pouring out of the auditorium and the crowd was ecstatic. Both the upper and lower rooms were jampacked. There were guests from abroad, from the Philippines, Japan, and Jamaica.
RCCG is pastored by Tunde Benjamin, whose wife Dayo Benjamin played host to the jazz evening. When it’s jazz, it means cultural cache garnered during these many moments, our literary ancestors carved pathways to success. Harlem Renaissance writers parlayed white patronage to create inroads to the apparatus of publishing. The Black Arts Movement brought about radical changes in university curriculums. New institutions were founded, including New York City’s Medgar Evers College, providing black writers with access to the support and stability of academia. The poet Gregory Pardlo points to the rise of the New York and Chicago slam poetry scenes in the ’80s as a conduit for many writers, including the novelist Paul Beatty. Jacobs-Jenkins discusses ’90s-era evolutions in black writing that produced “an incredible sea change of influence,” when writers like August Wilson and Toni Morrison “achieved black arts excellence and major status in the same breath.”
When I was 15, in 1988, a friend’s father gave me a copy of Sonia Sanchez’s ‘Under a Soprano Sky.’ I didn’t know living black people wrote poetry. After, I read books by Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall and Toni Cade Bambara as if my life depended on it. Here, I must confess to an unease with any gendered division of contemporary literature: When I was asked to consider the particularities of the current landscape, I wondered if a focus on male achievement might obscure the equally unprecedented successes of African-American women. And does that question undermine this extraordinary moment for black male writers? I have not found an answer that is entirely sufficient, but I do know that the work of black women writers presents a ferocious challenge to old sexist perceptions; as Griffin says, “the difference between this moment and others is that, in the past, to be a black writer was to be a man.” Robin Coste Lewis, Tracy K. Smith, Lynn Nottage, Jacqueline Woodson, Patricia Smith and Jesmyn Ward, to name just a few, disprove those old gendered ideas.
contemporary African-American literature is formally sophisticated, irreducibly nuanced and highly individualized. The writers in these pages may be a cohort of sorts, yet their work is distinguished by a great variety of voices and aesthetics. And certainly our conversations about the current literature by black men ought to include as much consideration of how writers say things as what they’re saying.
The poet Claudia Rankine said of her 2016 MacArthur Fellowship that the prize was being awarded “to the subject of race.” Race may indeed be having “a moment,” and I can’t help but wonder if some gatekeepers expect black authors to focus primarily on racism and oppression. Pardlo has similar reservations about writing that might “pander to white fears and assumptions and resentments.” It’s an old, and valid, concern. Among his eight novels, Whitehead’s well-received ‘The Colossus of New York’ (2003) is an ode to that city, and ‘Zone One’ (2011) is a post-apocalyptic zombie novel that was nicely reviewed - yet it’s his book about slavery, ‘The Underground Railroad’ (2016), that received such clamorous acclaim.