If you want to be among the luminaries of contemporary Black writing and thinking, then you attend the National Black Writers Conference. Yesterday, powerful ideas, encouragement, and joy in the celebration of Black writing predominated. I sat on a panel with Martha Southgate, Honoree Jeffers, and moderator Farah Jasmine Griffith entitled, “Resistance and Reconciliation: Transforming Our Lives Through Narrative.” Tayari Jones was scheduled to appear but was unfortunately unable to get to Brooklyn.
Griffith read not just our bios but also the first line of Southgate’s Third Girl From the Left and my Crystelle Mourning as well as one stanza from a poem by Jeffers. What a beautiful way to share who we are as Black writers with everyone in the packed auditorium.
Southgate quoted from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and celebrated her freedom from having to grapple with “The Negro Problem” in her writing. We are the beneficiaries of generations of struggle, she suggested, and explicitly stated that she is free to focus on character and craft – not social issues – when she writes. While she lamented certain trends in books publishing, she expressed optimism in her presentation.
Jeffers had notes but did not deliver a prepared presentation. True to the blues tradition she infuses in her poetry, she innovated and riffed on writing, the struggles confronting Black writers, and her personal life as a writer. We laughed with nearly every line she delivered, as her bold honesty worked the way the best comedians, like Richard Pryor, work: She drew us into her life to help enable us to examine our own. She is a powerful speaker.
Please see my full presentation in the comments section below.
In the next session, Cornel West spoke on Barack Obama, the persistence of hegemony, and Hip Hop. He praised Obama and his historic speech on race, but reminded us that the presidential candidate offered a different race narrative than an activist would. For example, West insisted that Obama’s line that his mixed race background and personal experiences with diverse cultures could only happen in this country was false. Similar experiences with difference happen elsewhere all over the world, but, Dr. West said, America’s “immature culture obsessed with innocence” demanded he make statements like that in his speech. He stated that lines like that carry with them the danger of “reinforcing America as being so exceptional.”
West also spoke on Black writers. He identified himself as a reader and not a writer, for, as he said, writers write every day, and he reads every day. One of his purposes in this life, he said, was to tell the truth. He said “Black writers start with the funk,” the issues and problems facing humanity, when we write our truths. “It’s not,” he said, “a crossing over” that compels the Black writer. Instead, he said, “it’s a digging deeper.”
During the Q&A, Haki Madhubuti stepped to the mic and confronted West on Tavis Smiley’s Covenant with Black America. He first chastised Dr. West for not mentioning any Black publishing companies in response to an earlier question that a woman in the audience had asked, and he said that folk like him, who have been working in the trenches for decades, do not often receive the acknowledgment they deserve. He said he had tried to contact Dr. West for four years, and then went on to describe the breakdown in the process of publishing Smiley’s book. Madhubuti said that Smiley had come to him with an idea, not a manuscript, that he wanted turned around for publication in 6 months. He said Third World Press went into debt to publish The Covenant, and all proceeds were supposed to go back to the company. As Dr. West responded, he first dealt with the issue of when they had last spoken and seen each other. There was some simultaneous talking, and the audience began to enter the conversation, too, as some folk whispered and murmured that this wasn’t the time or place for such a confrontation, and others whispered and murmured that the two should be allowed to speak.
The moderator of Dr. West’s discussion and MC of the day, Gloria Browne Marshall, interrupted to calm the energy in the room. While Dr. West and Madhubuti wanted to continue and engage in heated but civil dialogue, Marshall noted time limitations and the increased noise level in the auditorium as indications that their discourse should continue elsewhere.
It did.
Later that evening, at the VIP Reception and Awards Program, where Dr. West received the WEB DuBois Award and Madhubuti introduced Sonia Sanchez, who received the John Oliver Killens Lifetime Literary Award, the two men reconciled. Both mentioned the other when at the microphone with genuine love. The two embraced, and many stood to applaud. Jeffers, with whom I sat at a table, even teared up. Sanchez expressed her love for both men in her acceptance speech. I was left with the sense that West and Madhubuti will work together on a specific project in the future. I think everyone left with the sense that they had witnessed something historic at the 2008 National Black Writers Conference.
Comment(s)
Farah Jasmine Griffith asked us specific questions about Black literature and our own writing for our panel, “Resistance and Reconciliation: Transforming Our Lives Through Narrative.” This was my response:
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Obviously writing is an act of resistance for descendants of slaves who were not allowed to write or to read, but this history of exclusion is only one part of our narrative of triumph, one part of our narrative of resistance and reconciliation and transformation. For Black women writers in particular, the act of writing, of bearing witness to our lives, is revolutionary.
The condition of Muledom, the double burden of femaleness in a sexist society and Blackness in a racist society, is expressed with articulate precision by Nanny in Zora Neale Hurston?s Their Eyes Were Watching God. When Nanny tells Janie that the Black woman is ?the mule of the world,? she lays the theoretical foundation for 20th century Womanism, or Black Feminisms. But Nanny wanted to do more. She wanted to ?preach a great sermon? about Black women ?sitting on high,? but there was no ?pulpit? for her. Nanny lacked space in the public realm where she could give full voiced expression to her particular experience. Denied access to the public realm, Nanny remains relegated to the domestic sphere, where she holds Janie in her lap and testifies. Nanny remembers and tells. He bears witness to truth, the truth that is her experience as a slave woman, as a Black woman. The triumph of Hurston?s Eyes, of course, is that Janie also remembers and tells, in the private realm of her Eatonville home, when she passes the story to Phoeby, and then Phoeby, her ?kissin? friend? and active listener to Janie?s personal narrative, also remembers and tells. She carries Janie?s story and Nanny?s to the community because Janie tells her to, because, as Janie tells Phoeby in the final chapter of the novel, ?my words are in my friend?s mouth.? Thank God for the legacy of Black women storytellers. Because of our dynamic and empowering oral tradition, Zora could give us one of the finest works of the 20th century, a novel rooted in the oral tradition, the African-centered tradition of call and response, and perform the sacred act of writing, of remember and tell, to gift us Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Generations of Black women storytellers enabled Zora?s triumph. We Black women who write must honor that tradition as we remember our history and bear witness to the contemporary realities that affect Black women?s lives. I think the women on this panel are doing that. Tayari Jones bears witness to the Atlanta child murders from the point of view of a Black schoolgirl in Leaving Atlanta. In Third Girl From the Left, Martha Southgate remembers and tells the story of one Black woman who loses her mother to the mob violence of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. Honoree Jeffers examines the complexities of our matrilineal heritage and internalized racism, providing a counter-narrative to the archetypal Black mother, in her poem, ?Only the Yellow.? Farah Jasmine Griffin places the private courtship of two 19th century Black women in the public realm, giving voice to silenced Black women who love other women, in Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends.
Together, this work liberates Black women from the forced silence and marginalization that informs much of our history in the West. Black women writers who work in our literary tradition resist that silencing and place our diverse experiences in the center of the public discourse. This is a radical, transformative act. It enables us to shift beyond mere survival, so that Black women can, finally, begin to thrive.
In my novel, Crystelle Mourning, I center the experience of the female protagonist, Crystelle Brown. Crystelle faces the contemporary reality of Black on Black violence in our community in a uniquely Black female way. Living in New York and haunted by the ghost of her first love, a young man shot and killed their senior year in high school, Crystelle returns to her West Philadelphia neighborhood to release the pain, guilt, and overwhelming sadness that have also haunted her, and to release the young man?s soul from her own heart. She is able to do this only in community, our community, surrounded by women ? and one man, her grandfather ? who recognize her paralyzing grief and help her reclaim her mobility so she can cross back over to joy. Through the efforts of her mother, her friend, the mother of the boy shot and killed, and even a homeless woman in her neighborhood park, Crystelle is restored. And liberated.
I like to think that writing Crystelle Mourning enabled me to resist the internalized self-hatred and Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder that I believe are two psychological realities that fed the sharp violence in our community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I also hope that Crystelle?s triumph will help readers claim their personal liberation. It was difficult to remember and tell the story of tragic loss over the years it took to craft my novel, but ultimately I do think writing and reading can set the spirit free. Certainly Crystelle actively listens to her loved ones to liberate her own soul.
As difficult as our struggles still are, we know our literary foremothers struggled to give us that pulpit. We can now claim the space in the public realm that was denied Nanny. We now have the voiced expression Nanny craved. We have it in part because storytellers like her gave us the gift of remember and tell. Our African-centered tradition of call and response, the interdependency of the active speaker and active listener, our powerful oral tradition, which has sustained us over the generations, can begin, in this new century, to liberate us all.
Comment(s)
As usual your are right on the cutting edge of history.
Holla atcha boy!!!
Ralph Richardson
Comment(s)
If I knew that the conference would off had such a conversation, I would of come down. I really enjoy the National Black Writer’s conference but I feel it’s very static, archaic, and are unwilling to embrace new forms of ideas into the conference (Ex. Digital media).
As a young black writer, I attend these events to 1. Network 2. Connect with older much experience black writers 3. To be inspired, but none of these things have ever happened. I just feel the “older much experience” black writers never lend themselves as an outlet for us and many of them are trying to keep the pot of goal for themselves. I remember when I attend the National Black Writer’s event 5 years ago and Woodie King verbally pulverized my friend when he asked a simply question about “how to get started in the business.” Also, that same year the egos from the black writers were out of control, I am still offended by many of their statements.
I think Brenda Greene, is amazing and she really works hard to organize this conference but we really need to start engaging young black writers like me into the conference. We just want to be a part of something, to feel like older experience black writers are looking out for us, to engage without being told, “we ain’t there yet.”
I am really upset I missed seeing you and Martha Southgate speak. I was only coming to conference for that because I think you guys bring a different energy and perspective.
Comment(s)
This comment arrives from the Paris laptop of journalist Audrey Edwards:
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Wow! It sounds like things got heated up indeed with these two fiery brothers. I’ve interviewed them both, love them madly, but wouldn’t want to get into a pissed-off match with etiher. Also love the NBW conference. Still going strong after all these years. Still fulfilling a need. Your presentation was brilliant!
–AE