Amy Abugo Ongiri
Larry Neal, one of the major architects of the Black Arts Movement, argued that the movement was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister to the Black Power concept” (Gayle 1971: 257). The movement was at its height when Neal wrote the essay “The Black Arts Movement” for the influential volume The Black Aesthetic (1971). In the analysis, Neal echoed a need for the unmasking of the political imperatives of aesthetics that was enjoying widespread popularity not only in the realm of the arts but also in political culture. He wrote: “We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole new system of ideas” (Gayle 1971: 258). The Black Arts Movement was a direct outgrowth of anti‐colonial political movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and the struggle for black liberation gaining traction in the United States and Europe throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. It attempted to match the spirit of global revolution with a growing cultural imperative that put the experience and aesthetics of people of African descent at its center.
Arguing that a black aesthetic was “already in existence,” Neal and other proponents of the Black Arts Movement participated in a cultural program that was as much about excavating and valuing a devalued African past as it was about cutting‐edge and avant‐garde cultural creation. Neal wrote of the black aesthetic:
It encompasses most of the usable elements of Third World culture. The motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world. The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white oppressors’? What is truth? Or more precisely, whose truth shall we express, that of the oppressed or of the oppressors?
(Gayle 1971: 259)
In excavating the past and offering new forms and formats for the present and future, the Black Arts Movement offered an innovative vision of the world that would help create the seeds for future movements as far reaching as Afrofuturism and as specific as the post‐black movement in visual arts.
In 1961 at the United Nations (UN) building in New York City, a movement began to coalesce in relationship to the protests around the Central Intelligence Agency‐orchestrated assassination of revolutionary Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba. The protests resulted in the temporary closing of a UN building for the first time in its history, the interruption of a UN Security Council meeting, the closure of streets around the building, and many injuries and arrests. According to scholars such as Komozi Woodard, Peniel Joseph, and Benjamin J. Woods, it also resulted in the birth of the Black Power movement. Among those present at the UN protests were African American cultural leaders such as activist and vocalist Paul Robeson, playwright and theorist Amiri Baraka, jazz vocalist Abby Lincoln, and novelist Maya Angelou. The future editor of the influential Black Arts Movement journal The Liberator, Daniel H. Watts, became a major spokesperson for demonstrators and Amiri Baraka was severely beaten during his arrest. Similar demonstrations occurred in major cities around the world including London, Accra, Paris, Cairo, Warsaw, and Moscow. In Belgrade and Rome, protestors broke through security and did significant damage to the Belgian embassy buildings (Woodard 1999: 57). The protests at the United Nations in New York over Lumumba’s political assassination resulted in the birth of new political coalitions but also in the birth of a new cultural vocabulary around race and belonging.
The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 provided another pivotal moment for an assessment of cultural and political progress toward black liberation. Neal, who was selling a radical black nationalist newspaper at the Audubon Ballroom on the night that Malcolm X was assassinated during a speaking engagement, wrote about the moment as one that “emotionally fractured young Black radicals” (Schwartz 1989: 128). However, he also characterizes it as a moment of growth and clarity for African Americans, writing: “After Malcolm’s death, thousands of heretofore unorganized black students and activists became more radically politicized” (Schwartz 1989: 129). The assassination’s implications were profoundly cultural as well as political. In response to the assassination, political activists organized the Black Panther Party on the west coast while black cultural activists around New York City and New Jersey organized the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, one of the most impactful, albeit short‐lived, experiments of the Black Arts Movement. The assassination of Malcolm X resulted in poetry from almost every notable African American poet including Robert Hayden, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Margaret Walker, Mari Evans, and Ted Joans. Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Malcolm X” (1967) was dedicated to Dudley Randall, the founder of Broadside Press, which would become one the most influential institutions of the movement.
Malcolm X provided a blueprint for change that was contingent on a personal transformation that was as deeply perceptual as it was political. In a 1960 debate with Bayard Rustin, a key civil rights organizer and an architect of the March on Washington, Malcolm X explained, “Instead of changing the mind of the white man we change the mind of the black man and make him accept himself and as soon as he accepts himself he’ll solve his own problem” (Mossberg 1960).
Though a national and even international movement, the Black Arts Movement’s specific iterations were highly regionally determined. In Detroit, poet Dudley Randall established Broadside Press to publish some of the most impactful and cutting‐edge poetry of the period. Completely independent with an emphasis on publishing new and innovative voices, Broadside provided the prototype for Black Arts Movement cultural institutions and its mission of institution building. The press was the first to publish the work of now canonical authors such as Audre Lorde and Etheridge Knight, among others. In Chicago, poets Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and Johari Amini founded Third World Press that pushed established poet Gwendolyn Brooks toward new definitions and forms as she became a major voice for Chicago’s Black Arts Movement. Madhubuti would also work in Chicago with movement scholar and theorist Hoyt Fuller and a coalition of other writers, artists, and intellectuals to form the Organization of Black American Culture. New York City is often seen as the epicenter of the movement because of Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal’s impactful presence there. However, important Black Arts Movement work was happening all across the country including in the South and on the west coast.
Black Arts Movement practitioners often worked beyond what they saw as the unnecessarily narrow confines of genre categories, but the movement had a particular investment in theater and music because of the perception that those forms could most easily reach large and non‐elite audiences. Neal begins his essay “The Black Arts Movement” by arguing, “The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community” (Neal 1971: 257). The Black Arts Repertory Theater founded by Neal and Amiri Baraka was one of the first important institutions of the movement that saw institution building as one of its key prerogatives. Though it was short lived, it helped to institute a wave of urban theater companies dedicated to producing African American theater for African American audiences. Black Arts Movement theaters sprang up in many communities across the United States. Woodie King, Jr. founded the New Federal Theater in New York City and Barbara Ann Teer created Harlem’s National Black Theater while in Chicago activists associated with the Organization of Black American Culture created Kuumba Theater, Chicago’s first black theater. The Free Southern Theater emerged first at Tugaloo College in Mississippi, later relocating to New Orleans and morphing into BLACKARTSOUTH under the direction of Kalamu ya Salaam and Tom Dent. In Philadelphia, John E. Allen, Jr. founded the New Freedom Theater.
In his discussion of the formation of the Free Southern Theater, John O’Neal would argue, “The most profound poetry is the poetry of action and movement. When the problem becomes unspeakable then there is simply nothing to say – something must be done” (O’Neal 1968: 70). Thus, the action of cultural change making became a political action through theatrical performance. While Black Arts theaters were created throughout the country, others reconceptualized the idea of theatrical space and created community‐based spaces for performance culture. Baraka’s Newark‐based Spirit House served as a cultural center that housed a repertory group that toured nationally as well as youth performance groups. In San Francisco, Black House similarly housed playwrights Ed Bullins and Marvin X as well as Eldridge Cleaver and would become important politically as well as culturally as Cleaver rose to national prominence as a leader in the Black Panther Party (Smethurst 2005: 282).
In “Black Cultural Nationalism” (1968), Ron Karenga would write, “all African art has at least three characteristics: that is, it is functional, collective, and committing or committed” (Gayle 1971: 32). Black Arts Movement theaters, with their base in the community, their politically constructed aesthetics, and their inherently collective nature, fulfilled all of these characteristics. Some of these theatrical spaces, such as the Black Arts Repertory Theater and Black House, lasted less than a year while others, such as the New Federal Theater and the New Freedom Theater, are still in existence. Rather than represent success or failure, the creation, evolution, and transformation of these venues reflected an ongoing attempt to grapple with the question of the continuing relevance of the theatrical arts as a community‐based art form. Significantly, this was happening within communities that were undergoing the radical political and cultural transformation brought on by the end of the civil rights era and the beginning of black post‐racist possibility and also brutal segregationist re‐entrenchment.
Black Arts theater didn’t restrict itself to traditional theatrical venues or even to reconceptualized ones. Instead, they chose to explore new ways of bringing the literary to the masses of black people who might not have access to or interest in attending a traditional theatrical performance. In some cases, this included the use of “mobile theaters” on flatbed trucks to bring theater directly to impromptu audiences on urban streets. However, they also innovated by bringing the language, stylistic culture, and vernacular knowledge of black urbanity directly into the theater. Baraka’s work, while celebrated for its boundary‐breaking qualities, also struggled against censorship in relationship to obscenity at least partly due to its use of vernacular language and ideas. In his sweeping history of African Americans in entertainment, Langston Hughes labeled 1964 “The Jones Year” because Baraka, who was then writing as LeRoi Jones, had five plays performed in four different theaters. He notes that two of these five plays were closed by the police for obscenity (Hughes and Meltzer 1967: 251). Black Arts playwrights such as Marvin X, Ed Bullins, and Ron Milner experimented as much in form as they did with language, creating plays that challenged the theatrical traditions constructed by a Euro‐American theater tradition. Ron Milner defined the “new black theater” as “the ritualized reflection and projection of a unique and particular conditioning of black people leasing time on this planet controlled by white‐men; and having something to do with the breaking of that ‘leasing syndrome’” (Gayle 1971: 288).
Gil Scott‐Heron, The Last Poets, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni recorded albums that were aimed at a popular audience and tied popular musical performance with a poetic practice firmly rooted in vernacular language and culture. The Last Poets’ performance piece “Jibaro, My Pretty Nigger” is an example of the complexity of the movement’s engagement in vernacular culture. The poem uses complicated wordplay as well as complex rhythmic accompaniment of congo drums to create a character portrayal that is at once profoundly local and time bound. Its vernacular language speaks to its particular history in relationship to diasporic and urban Afro‐Caribbean populations of the 1970s while it also constructs diasporic identities that timelessly span geographies and histories in its notions of brotherhood. “Jibaro” is a Puerto Rican vernacular term that refers to an uneducated, salt‐of‐the‐earth Puerto Rican who is strongly tied to his culture and the agrarian roots of his country. The poem is an imagined reconciliation between this figure and the speaker, who is urban and presumably US based. The reconciliation is made while “swaying slowly to the softly strummed strains of a five string guitar / Remembering ancient empires / Of sun gods and black spirits and things that were once / So simple” (Last Poets 1971). Memory, history, affinity, and African heritage were preoccupations of the Black Arts Movement that came out of the political culture of the Black Power movement. Malcolm X asserted: “the American Negro is a Frankenstein, a monster who has been stripped of his culture and doesn’t even know his name” (Malcolm X 1988: 33). Malcolm X’s prophetic call to reexamine oppression as manifested in every aspect of black life led to the radical desire discover new ways of seeing the world. Among poets and intellectuals, this desire included the aspiration to define and assert a uniquely black aesthetic that involved a reconstruction and recovery of an African past with an avant‐garde approach to form. The work of the Black Arts Movement in performance and theater are the roots of hip‐hop and the spoken word poetry movement.
One of the primary modes of engagement for Black Arts Movement practitioners was musical forms and idioms. In this period, African American jazz musicians such as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach pushed wildly against the boundaries and conventions of what constituted musical performance and composition. In 1960, Ornette Coleman recorded an album, Free Jazz, giving name to a radical new sound in music culture. Variously known as either Free Jazz, the New Thing, or simply playing “out,” the new jazz idiom pushed for an extreme break from existing musical conventions and models. Poet Ted Joans famously described saxophonist Albert Ayler’s sound as “like screaming the word ‘FUCK’ in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on crowded Easter Sunday” (Ayler 2004). Free jazz was so jarring that it seemed to defy standard musical practices. In an early review of Ayler’s music for the leading jazz journal Down Beat, Amiri Baraka declared that Ayler had moved beyond the confines of music itself. Baraka wrote: “Albert Ayler is the dynamite sound of the time. He says he’s not interested in notes; he wants to play past note and get, then, purely into sound” (Jones 1967). Jazz luminary John Coltrane died in 1967 before the height of the Black Arts Movement but not before seeding the future free jazz experiments of musicians such as Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, Archie Shepp, and Alice Coltrane. These musicians along with Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman among others continued the avant‐garde experimentation with the sonic that would provide the inspiration for Black Arts practitioners working in a variety of genres.
Jazz had always articulated itself in relationship to other forms of African American culture expressions, but since the late 1950s it had increasingly articulated itself directly in relationship to the political struggles of the civil rights movement. In 1960, Max Roach released We Insist!: Freedom Now Suite, an album that featured Roach and members of the band posed to replicate an iconic picture of a sit‐in at a department store lunch counter on its cover. The album’s release at the Village Vanguard, the premier jazz club in New York City, was held as a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), one of the key civil rights organizations (Monson 2007). Freedom Now Suite consciously celebrated the history of the civil rights movement and jazz’s investment in that struggle but it also foreshadowed the music’s turn away from the civil rights movement toward the new forms of resistance found in the Black Power movement. A controversial section of the album was called “Protest” and was seen as a direct rejection of non‐violent forms of protest which were the signature organizing method of the civil rights movement (Saul 2005). The album’s use of Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji and Cuban drummers Tomas Du Vall and Ray Mantilla as well as its section titled “Tears for Johannesburg” and “All Africa” also signaled the increasing interest in Africa specifically and internationalism in general that would flower during the Black Arts Movement period.
An interest in Africa was by no means a new phenomenon in African American music or in jazz. Bebop‐era musicians of the 1950s explored African rhythms and worldviews. The collaboration between African American and Afro‐Cuban musicians along these lines was particularly musically fruitful and led to the creation of Afro Latin jazz. However, during the Black Arts Movement, jazz musicians’ interest in Africa was coupled with a deep investment in the liberatory politics of emerging African nations. Colonial struggles for independence in Africa fueled the creative imaginations of musicians such as Archie Sheep, Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, Charlie Haden, Milford Graves, and Randy Weston.
Africa as an imagined location, a heritage space, and a temporal, geographic, and spatial reality became a major influence on the development of the Black Arts Movement’s aesthetic and ideology. From its earliest iterations, the Black Arts Movement had an interest in defining a relationship to Africa that went beyond a simple celebration of heritage. The project of adopting African languages or names was never as simple as locating oneself in a lost or forgotten past. Instead, it involved a complete ideological and aesthetic breakdown and remaking of self and the present moment. Though the overwhelming focus of Black Arts Movement practitioners was on local concerns, Africa served as a creative location for new imaginings of the local and the current. Whether it is Henry Dumas’s imagining of an ancient African ark of bones on the Mississippi River or jazz musician Horace Tapscott leading the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in “Niger’s Theme” in Los Angeles, the Black Arts Movement used Africa as a location to stretch existing form and meaning. Ted Joans’s “A Few Fact Filled Fiction of African Reality,” which appeared in We Be Word Sorcerers, a 1973 collection of short stories edited by Sonia Sanchez, characteristically mixes African American vernacular language and storytelling technique with a complex parable about neocolonialism in which he recreates it as an ongoing legacy of slavery. In the story, the speaker warns: “Casablanca, the city of commerce of Morroco, Dar‐el‐Beida, the White House, is its name. But in spite of all, I am not recommending the tourists, black and white, to visit Casablanca. It is a drag. It should have been named Casa‐blank, a place of nothingness” (Sanchez 1973: 125). The speaker recounts his passage with African immigrants to France in the hull of a commercial vessel that he likens to a slave ship.
As early as 1961, African American artists and intellectuals such as Randy Weston, Hale Woodruff, Nina Simone, and Langston Hughes traveled to Africa to exchange ideas and explore African influences across the continents. Weston, Simone, and Hughes would travel to Nigeria to celebrate its independence a year after its formation as a delegation on a journey of exchange that was supported by the US government (Simone 2003; Weston 2010). Weston would record Uhuru, Afrika out of the endeavor and the liner notes of the album declare “contemporary Africans did not really have to learn to play jazz because their own tribal music from time immemorial has contained the major elements that distinguish jazz from other forms” (Weston 1961). However, unlike previous generations, the Black Arts Movement’s practitioners looked to Africa not so much as a sort of recovery project with the hopes of discovering something old that was already there but rather to explore new ways of being and seeing in the hopes of creating something entirely new.
In “He Sees Through Stone,” Etheridge Knight writes of the mystical, transcendent nature of blackness through the figure of a mysterious elder “who under prison skies / sits pressed by the sun” (Knight 1986: 10). Knight himself was one of many prisoners who began writing as a result of the Black Arts Movement’s outreach to African American inmates. The Black Power movement saw incarcerated African Americans not just as victims of an unjust system but also as potential revolutionaries. The speaker of “He Sees Through Stone” understands that he is in the presence of new possibilities when he sees the man and realizes “his time is not my time / but I have known him / in a time gone” (Knight 1986: 10). While this is a time past of “jungles” and “spears,” the continuum of time that Knight gestures toward is not a past that is knowable in the usual way because the elder “has the secret eyes / he sees through stone” (Knight 1986: 10). Black Arts Movement literature was as much about a play with form as it was about exploring the thematics of new possibilities that liberation would potentially enable.
Africa and Africanity became a rich resource as writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Carolyn Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, and Haki Madhubuti created radical experiments with vernacular language that reflected a conscious acknowledgment of racial difference as potentially constructive of new language and aesthetic possibilities. Jayne Cortez’s “For the Poets (Christopher Okigbo & Henry Dumas)” (1977) reflects the careful marriage of Africanity and experimentalism in the language avant‐garde. The poem seamlessly moves through a catalogue of African and African American iconography as it stretches and recreates the written language to reflect the sonic marriage of the two:
I need kai kai ah
a glass of akpetesie ah
torn arm of Bessie Smith ah
the smell of Nsukka ah
body sweat of a durbar ah
five tap dancers ah
those fleshy blue kingdoms from deep south ah
to belly‐roll forward praise
for Christopher Okigbo ah
(Cortez 1977: 6)
Christopher Okigbo and Henry Dumas represent poets whose early deaths were the result of political crisis on two different continents. Cortez brings them together not only to mourn their loss, but also to use the moment of that loss as the creative impetus for a bridging of literal and imaginative geographies across time and space.
Jazz in all its iterations, but especially free jazz, became a major preoccupation of the Black Arts Movement theorists and writers. Some, such as experimental fiction writer Henry Dumas who collaborated with Sun Ra and his Arkestra, worked directly with musicians, while others used the work of musicians to better understand and articulate the black aesthetic. Baraka would perform his poem “Black Art,” an anthem for the Black Arts Movement, on Sonny Murray’s 1965 album Sonny’s Time Now with free jazz musicians Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, and Murray accompanying him. Sun Ra contributed poetry to the seminal Black Arts Movement collection Black Fire (1968). Poet A.B. Spellman wrote Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966), a history of jazz that profiled musicians Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean as an entry into talking about the impact of African American music culture on wider society and the questions that it raised. The premature death of John Coltrane provoked almost as much poetry as the assassination of Malcolm X. Jayne Cortez, Robert Hayden, and Sonia Sanchez all wrote poems dedicated to Coltrane and his music. In 1968, Spellman, Neal, and Baraka created The Cricket, a small magazine to explore African American music and to create a forum to develop African American voices in music criticism. Though it ran only four issues, it had a tremendous reach and influence, publishing the work of Ishmael Reed, Stanley Crouch, Albert Ayler, and Sun Ra, among others.
Music was central to the Black Arts Movement from its onset. One of the early attempts to articulate the need to define a black aesthetic as a mode for theorizing and creating black culture was in an essay that Neal wrote for The Liberator, discussing the controversial rejection by the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board of a music jury citation for Duke Ellington. In it, Neal established the parameters for the Black Arts Movement in his demands that black art be for and by black people:
I am proposing that what we understand is the necessity of establishing our own norms, our own values; and if there must be standards, let them be our own. Recognition of Duke Ellington’s genius lies not with white society that has exploited him and his fellow musicians. It lies with us, the Black public, Black musicians and artists. Essentially, recognition of that sort, from a society that hates us and has no real way of evaluating our artistic accomplishments, is the meanest kind of intrusion upon the territory of Black people.
(Neal 1965: 27)
Neal and the Black Arts Movement’s valorization of musicians and their interest in musical forms would implicitly make an argument for the value of non‐literary texts as literature. Though it valorized musical forms, the movement ultimately championed a multidisciplinary approach to creative culture that defied easy categorizations in genre, mode, and form.
In 1963, Baraka, who was then writing as Leroi Jones, wrote Blues People: Negro Music in White America as an attempt to account for African American subjectivity through the creative object of black music. Neal’s poetry collection Hoodoo Hollerin’: Bebop Ghosts (1968) also represents the ways in which the musical avant‐garde provided central metaphors and operational modes for other kinds of Black Arts Movement culture creation. The title captures the three central metaphors of the collection and also the movement: folkloric and vernacular culture, jazz and blues culture, and the ghosting of the past on the present moment. In “Poppa Stoppa Speaks from His Grave,” Neal ties all three themes together in an elegy that is spoken ironically by the recently deceased, who asks:
Remember me baby in my best light,
lovely hip style and all;
all laid out in my green velour
stashing on corners
in my boxcar coat –
so sure of myself, too cool for words,
and running down a beautiful game.
(Neal 1968: 12)
The ode is not only a celebration of the deceased but also a celebration of the street style and language that makes him, in his own words, “super righteous” (Neal 1968: 12). But it is in the speaker’s delicate wish to be remembered, if only in passing, that is the heart of the poem’s expression and speaks to the ephemeral nature of all things, even, or especially, the speaker’s “too cool for words” style. He asks: “think of me / that way sometimes. / But don’t make it no big thing though / don’t jump jive and blow your real romance” (Neal 1968: 12).
The ephemeral nature of time and the nature of mourning is also the subject of Neal’s “Don’t say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat.” The poem draws its title from Charles Mingus’s elegy for Lester Young, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” which appeared on his album Mingus Ah Um (1959) shortly after Young’s premature death at the age of 49 from alcoholism. However, while Mingus was consciously crafting an elegy for one of jazz’s elder statesman, Neal uses the porkpie hat, which was a signature piece of Young’s self‐consciously constructed, fiercely modern style aesthetic, as a visionary tool to travel the galaxy of African American sound, feeling, and memory:
Musicians heavy with memories
Move in and out of this gloom;
the Porkpie Hat reigns supreme
smell of collard greens
and cotton madness commingled in the nigger elegance of style.
The Porkpie Hat sees tonal memories
of salt peanuts and hot house birds
(Neal 1968: 20)
Similarly, Neal’s “Garvey’s Ghost,” which draws its title from a song by the same name on Max Roach’s album Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961), rotates around themes of loss, memory, and heritage as a mix potent with political possibility. A series of “Ghost Poems” that appear throughout the book connect its disparate works together. In tying themes of mourning, loss, memory, and heritage together, Neal and other Black Arts Movement participants were doing more than creating a requiem for a lost culture. They were suggesting a way forward from the trauma of the past with new forms and styles that turned that past on its head.
The embrace of ancient Egypt as a source for contemporary cultural creation – by artists as varied in their practice as musicians Sun Ra, Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders – the embrace of African languages, and the wide embrace of African cosmology, aesthetics, and style was not simply a way of recovering or reinventing an African past but also a way of propelling a vital legacy forward as a new legacy. Mari Evans’s poem “I Am a Black Woman” (1970) is typical in that it charts black female subjectivity as “some sweet arpeggio of tears […] written in a minor key” by taking the reader on a geo‐historical journey that moves from the slave ship to “Nat’s swinging body in a rain of tears” to the contemporaneous battlefields of Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill in Vietnam (Evans 1970).
The best Black Arts Movement writing combined a cutting‐edge interest in language and form with a desire for an art that spoke to what the Black Panther Party labeled “the average brother on the block” (Newton 1995: 73). Cultural historian James Smethurst has labeled this a “popular avant‐garde” and has said that the creation of an avant‐garde that was both cutting edge in its attention to form and theme but also interested in popular culture was one of the Black Arts Movement’s most lasting contributions to American culture (Smethurst 2003). Henry Dumas’s experimental short story “The Ark of Bones,” published posthumously in 1974, uses vernacular language to explore a surrealist landscape based in the naturalist landscape of the rural South and the fantastical historical past of American slavery. At the center of “The Ark of Bones” is the powerful visual metaphor for which the story is named. The Ark of Bones is a mysterious ship – “a soulboat,” as one of the characters labels it – that trawls the Mississippi River collecting the bones of people of African descent that have been deposited there as a result of acts of anti‐black violence. The ship is discovered by two boys, one of whom joins the ship to act as a member of its crew at the end of the story.
Death saturates the life and the work of Henry Dumas, who was murdered by a New York City transit officer while waiting for a subway just a few months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dumas, who was only 33 at the time of his murder, was coming home from a rehearsal of experimental jazz musician Sun Ra’s Arkestra. The main character of “Ark of Bones” is named HEADEYE, a naming that replicates the visionary role that he plays in the story.
Headeye, who is also called Eagle‐Eye, is, according to the narrator, “’bout the smartest nigger in that raggedy school” and is called that because “on Headeye, everything is stunted ’cept his eyes and head” (Dumas 2003: 9). One important aspect of Dumas’s story is its attempt to use for poetic purposes the everyday, ordinary language rooted in his childhood in Sweethome, Arkansas. But there is nothing ordinary about the story that the language tells. Throughout the story, which has been labeled “Afro‐surrealism” by Scott Saul, we (like the narrator) are repeatedly made witness to things that we never quite understand. The narrator is told repeatedly by the main character, “You my witness.” However, Headeye’s visionary and perceptive capabilities outstrip those of both the narrator and the reader so much that even when we are shown the Ark in its entirety we are not sure what to make of it. But we are sure that we are supposed to be looking at it. When Headeye attempts to explain the presence of the Ark by referencing the biblical prophet Ezekiel, things get more complicated rather than clearer. The character of Headeye seems to suggest that we people of African descent in the Americas have not fully explored or made use of our perceptual powers, our vision, and our sight, and that we will not find resolution until we learn to both see and think in new ways.
The murder of Malcolm X led to a flowering of Black Art dedicated to memorializing his vision and existed as a kind of elegy not only to the man but also to the lost potential of the moment. This work embodies a desire to witness and to catalogue trauma in an attempt to restore sight – the power of seeing – in the process of continuing Malcolm’s vision. In another set of provocative rhetorical questions, Malcolm X asked:
One hundred million Africans were uprooted from the African continent. Where are they today? One hundred million Africans were uprooted, one hundred million […] Excuse me for raising my voice – were uprooted from the continent of Africa. At the end of slavery you didn’t have 25 million Africans in the western hemisphere. What happened to those 75 million Africans? Their bodies are at the bottom of the sea, or their blood and bones have fertilized the soil of this country.
(Malcolm X 1964)
The work of the Black Arts Movement allowed us to the expand perception to see the dead that history tried to erase or bury and to use that witnessing to envision a liberated future.
The Black Arts Movement began to decline in the mid‐1970s as the United States government successfully undermined Black Power political organizations beginning in the late 1960s. Programs such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (known as COINTELPRO) actively destroyed the cultural as well as political infrastructure of the movement. In addition, mainstream culture was in a process of adaptation to a post‐segregation reality and somewhat sought to address those changes by opening, in a limited way, spaces for inclusion of African American artists, intellectuals, and images from which they had previously been absent. This resulted in a mainstreaming of many of the movement’s key ideas, albeit in a less challenging form. However, the cultural terrain had been permanently altered by both movements.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 19 (POETRY AT THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM).