The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (86 page)

The black modernists were attempting to breathe freely beyond the claustrophobic boundaries of race, trying to refigure black identity and, by extension, American identity. Yet they’re always seen in these boxed, fixed, localized categories, when indeed they’re trying to help us reimagine the project of America: “I, too, sing America,” as Hughes sang, ringing a change, varying a theme, signifying upon and harkening metaphorically back to Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric.” Hughes and the great black modernists inserted black America into the
mainstream flow and thereby proved that America must bend itself to our tune, song, riff, beat, meter, prose, rhythm, and the like in order to be truly, fully, wholly itself. For instance, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong swung in the mainstream and then swung the mainstream to a black rhythm, and through their music, helped America grasp the self-enlarging principle of subordinating color to culture and craft. Hughes was aggressively insinuating himself, and black folk, into the American stream of consciousness, into the American song—much like King would later do with the American dream—and thus proving that our meters hypnotically swayed the nation to our virtuosic, vernacular voices. Hughes locates the context of the development of his identity in those physical spaces in his American “home” where he is expelled to feed his growing self-awareness on the leftovers of racial exclusion.

But he flips the script. He grows strong on the negative diet of marginality that he turns into a wholesome meal of aesthetic and moral combat against white supremacy, especially its failure to recognize black beauty of every sort. So Hughes in his poem talks about being sent to the kitchen to eat, “When company comes.” But he eats well, grows strong, and pledges that when company comes again, he’ll be at the table and that no one will dare scold him for his presence and send him to the kitchen, because, “They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed—.” And then he ends by declaring, “I, too, am America.” So there’s a significant shift from singing America to being America, from performance to enactment. And the company, to extend my reading of modernism through Hughes’s poem, is Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, and so on, grand figures whose large egos dominate the psychic rooms and intellectual tables of American modernism. At the same time, the black subject, the black ego, the black self, is shunted to the kitchen.

So what Langston Hughes does is articulate the fixed space of his own modernist identity—the kitchen, metaphorically speaking—as the locus classicus of American identity, because when you’re in the kitchen, the smell of the food wafts beyond its borders. When you’re in the kitchen cooking—and Hughes was cooking, really he was smoking, burning, or whatever term one might conjure from the culinary arts as a symbol of black vernacular for achieving broad excellence—the smells will pull people in to ask, “Hmm, where’s that smell coming from? What’s cooking in the kitchen?” If you had to be somewhere away from the dining room or living room, it was crucial to be exiled to the kitchen. This is what black folk knew, especially as they served as domestics, butlers, and cooks. Black moderns turned their limited, localized spaces into rhetorical, musical, aesthetic, political, or spiritual kitchens that emitted pleasing smells and seductive scents, so that people who picked up on them were immediately, irresistibly drawn to them. That’s the language . . .

To pick up on that, even if they don’t come to the kitchen, the kitchen has to come to them. They are sitting at the table waiting for the kitchen to come to them. The kitchen produces that which they consume for nourishment.

There you go, man. Metaphor is power.

I’d like to push a little away from that now and turn to something that seemed to resonate in an earlier comment you made about black rhetoricians and the premodernist Christian tradition as it relates to black resistance. The notion of speaking things that are not as though they were . . . this is not a space of acquiescence, but of resistance.

Oh, exactly right. That’s very important and I’ll just say something briefly about it. Too often, we read the history of black resistance, and the speech or action that supported it, through a distorted lens. Either black folk were for or against oppression, either they cooperated or resisted, and we can tell all of this in dramatically demonstrable fashion. Well, it’s not quite that simple. Life has put black folk in complex, often compromising positions, especially during slavery, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Many folk were not able to outwardly resist, not simply for fear of reprisal but because to do so would have undermined their long-term plans of survival and liberation. Black folk en masse had to survive, even under conditions of harsh oppression, so that they could produce black folk who could liberate us. Their survival tactics had to be hidden, concealed to the larger white world, masked to the oppressor. These networks of hidden meanings and concealed articulations were the predicate of black survival through a signifying, symbolic culture. For instance, many of the sorrow songs of the slaves contained dual meanings. While the white masses found the songs entertaining, the slaves simultaneously signaled each other about plans for emancipation. In effect, they were, as the title of the book aptly summarizes it,
Puttin’ on ol Massa.
The patterned quilts that slaves made contained crucial directions to black slaves seeking to ride the Underground Railroad to freedom. In a sense, they evoked the principle that later underlay Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story, “Purloined Letter,” since the stolen missive was hidden in plain sight.

The very act of imagination was critical to strategies of resistance and proved dangerous to the hegemonic white world order. That’s why the white world was so intent on controlling the black imagination, as far as such a thing was possible, by restricting its enabling mechanisms, particularly those rooted in literacy. Reading and writing were outlawed, and even earlier in slavery, blacks were divided from other blacks from the same tribe during the “seasoning” process so they couldn’t effectively communicate. If blacks learned to read and write, they might grow restless with their degraded status, gaining a false and subversive sense of equality with whites. Of course, Frederick Douglass perhaps confirmed the worst fears of the white overclass when he reported in his autobiography that knowledge “unfits a child” for slavery. And if slaves spoke to each other without strict supervision, they might hatch plans to escape, so their speech and social organization were regularly policed.

But black slaves were able to carve out free spaces of intimate contact and communication that promoted racial solidarity and forms of resistance that eluded the
master’s ear and eye. Still, dominant whites rightly viewed the black imagination as a wedge between slaves and their oppression. The act of imagining a world of liberty was threatening. I think in this regard of a humorous statement that Muhammad Ali made about an opponent when he said, “If Sonny Liston dreams he can beat me, he better wake up and apologize.” That’s a brilliant gloss on the function of imagination and dreaming in black combat, and in the struggle for self-assertion and mastery of one’s opponent. The attempt to regulate the black imagination is the attempt to restrict acts of black self-reinvention through dreaming of a different world where justice and freedom prevailed. That’s why black folk were full of dangerous dreaming, insurrectionist imagining, and resistive revisions. The act of conceiving of an alternative world, a racial utopia, was a gesture of radical resistance that interrupted the totalizing force of white supremacy.

And a question of values, which we’ll return to later. I want to push you in the direction here of talking about black bodies. Black male bodies, black women’s bodies. One of the things that enters my mind here is the notion of the black masculine journey. To my mind, Morrison’s
Song of Solomon
ranks right up there with Ellison’s
Invisible Man
as a benchmark text for black masculinity. It’s the condition our condition is in . . .

Right, it’s rough all over.

To me, this statement has to do with black male bodies in everything from the Million Man March to Dennis Rodman.

Oh, no question. It’s almost a cliché to say by now, but black masculinity is one of the most insightful and complex texts of American identity. For instance, millions want to, as the commercial slogan says, “Be like Mike.” They’re in awe of Michael Jordan, asking themselves what it is like to inhabit that pigment, that physiology, that 6'6" body whose ligaments, whose alignment of muscles determine the semblance of flight that folk around the globe vicariously identity with. Michael Jordan’s head, clean shaven with those two ears poking out, at once conjures E.T.—the extraterrestrial—a sports spectacle, an incredible genius that we can scarcely imagine while also signifying the globe—round and smooth. And what can be written on its surfaces is always something that can be erased and rewritten. At the same time, that black masculine head is a signifier of the power of the black phallus. In an interesting, perhaps even subversive fashion, Michael Jordan’s physical and aesthetic genius can be symbolized as a massive phallus whose seminal meanings explode on American culture, fertilizing a range of barren cultural landscapes with creative expression.

His body is a contradictory text of black masculinity. Jordan is at once embraced and fed upon as a Michael Jordan burger at McDonald’s. He’s being eaten by the masses, consumed, symbolically speaking. So the closest they may be able to get to Mike, besides watching him and emulating his moves on the court in
their neighborhood playgrounds, sports gyms, or health clubs, is to purchase a symbolic portion of his body and consume it in market culture. It’s a kind of secular Eucharist, where, at least in Protestant theology, the sacramental elements of Christ’s body and blood are substituted by wafer and wine, or in Catholic theology, these elements are transubstantiated into the actual body and blood of Christ. Jordan’s body is symbolically transmuted, through the material conditions of the political economy of consumption, into an edible commodity.

Or think of the symbolic and contested body of another prominent and complicated black man, the late rapper Tupac Shakur. Tupac’s dead but still signifying body has the potential to become one of the first black candidates for cultural survival. I don’t mean survival in the sense that he remains a vital cultural influence, like Martin Luther King Jr. I mean cultural presence beyond death through the articulation of a mythological body that defies mortality through urban legend, such as what has happened with James Dean, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. Particularly in the case of Elvis, there’s a literal quality to his mythological persistence, since tabloid magazines claim to spot him, or JFK, on an island somewhere avoiding their fans, the media, and especially their “past” lives. I’ve often wondered why no one ever saw Sam Cooke, for instance, or Otis Redding, Dinah Washington, or Donny Hathaway. Tupac may be the first black figure to ascend to such heights—or depending on how one views this cultural phenomenon, to the depths—of pop memorialization.

I must confess I’m an addict, although I hope a critical one, of tabloids like the
National Enquirer
and
Star Magazine,
although since the same company that owns the
Enquirer
purchased
Star,
they often recycle the same information. Without overinterpreting or rationalizing their appeal, I think, at their best—and I place best in scare quotes—these tabloids offer counterhegemonic narratives to prevailing cultural truths. Besides that, they allow ordinary people to sound as if they’re speaking the King’s English to the Queen’s taste. Instead of presenting an “informant” as saying, “I got afraid when I thought about that stuff later on,” they sound more formal, more literate, and might be quoted as saying, “It startled me as I pondered it later.”

But in the tabloids, Elvis is spotted in California somewhere, Elvis is in some secluded villa in Italy, Marilyn has joined JFK in what only appears to be a posthumous romp on the Riviera, while black icons remain sequestered in their unsexy, earthbound mortality. I think that Tupac may be the first black icon to join the pantheon of the posthumously alive, people who symbolically defeat their own death through episodic appearances in the mythological landscape. Folk are now saying that Tupac is not dead, but alive somewhere in Cuba, perhaps enjoying a stogie with Fidel. There are Web sites and chat rooms all over the Internet dedicated to debating whether Tupac is dead or is hanging out on some Caribbean retreat to escape the cruel demands of fame. His cultural survival says a great deal about how black masculinity can come to signify contested social and political meanings that erupt in popular culture.

When I think about contemporary black masculinity, I can’t help reflecting on another intriguing, contradictory, infuriatingly complex figure: Dennis Rodman. In fact, he’s helping redraw the boundaries of black masculinity in the most archetypically black masculine sport there is, basketball. Basketball has arguably replaced baseball as the paradigmatic expression of the highly mythologized American identity, since sport is a crucial means by which America regenerates its collective soul and reconceives its democratic ideals, to borrow Emersonian language. Basketball also has elements of spontaneity; individual genius articulated against the background of group success; and the coalescence of independent creative gestures in a collective expression of athletic aspiration. In a sense, basketball provides a canvas on which American identity can be constantly redrawn. The cultural frameworks of American identity, especially American masculinity, are being symbolically renegotiated in black masculine achievement in basketball.

Dennis Rodman has the sublime audacity to challenge the codes of masculinity at the heart of black masculine culture in the most visible art form, besides hip-hop culture, available to black men. He transgresses against heterosexist versions of machismo that dominate black sport. For instance, he wears fingernail polish and he occasionally cross-dresses in advertisements and public relations stunts, wearing a wedding gown in its white purity against that 6’9” brown body that “the Worm,” as he’s nicknamed, inhabits. Even his nickname signifies; it suggests the burrowing of an earth-bound insect into the hidden spaces of the soil, deep beneath the surface of things. And it’s not as if Rodman were a marginal figure. He’s acknowledged as the most gifted rebounder in the NBA today, and one of the greatest of all time. His specialty is unavoidably representative. He’s constantly grabbing the ball off the backboard, taking shots that are left over from the failed attempt to score, enhancing the ability of the team to win. His genius on the court is, in précis, a symbolic articulation of black masculine identity; it is a major trope of black masculinity, since black men are constantly “on the rebound,” and “rebounding” from some devastating ordeal. Black men are continually taking missed shots off the glass, off the backboard, and feeding them in outlet or bounce passes to some high-flying teammate who is able to score on the opposition. Ordinary and iconic black men are constantly helping American society to rebound from one catastrophe or another and to successfully overcome the opposition in scoring serious points, serious arguments, serious goals.