My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 69

revisionism, have been black males.
The most offensive character in
Wright’s Native Son is a black male.
What about the creepy malevolent
corrupt violent black men in Chester
Himes’s novels? What about the black
government that spies in Wright’s
Island of Hallucinations? Or what
about Amiri Baraka’s portrait of black
politicians in his unpublished novel
Negroduction? Maybe the feminist
emphasis of this Norton explains the
absence of William Melvin Kelley,
John O. Killens, Askia Toure, or former
California Poet Laureates Al Young,
Quincy Troupe, Charles Patterson,
William Demby, Charles Wright,
Bill Gunn, Charles Gordone and
Claude Brown? Ted Joans isn’t included
because he wrote a satirical poem
about Gates. Gates awarded Stanley
Crouch a Fletcher Foundation grant
of fifty thousand dollars for his novel
Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome, yet
none of Crouch’s work appears in the
Norton. You mean to tell me that you
give someone fifty thousand dollars
and yet exclude them from your canon?
Clarence Major sent me a note which
had his list of other omissions.

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But then given the feminist line of
the anthology why are Thulani Davis,
Elizabeth Nunez, Jill Nelson, Stacy
Patton and the young women who
write science fiction like Sheree Renée
Thomas excluded? Why no Kristin
Hunter Lattany, one of those whom
he championed in the notorious 1987
Times essay.

The latest hit against black male writers
came again in the New York Times,
where black bogeyman products have a
home and where black males are more
likely to be represented by mug shots
than on the ‘Book Review’ page, which
more and more resembles The Times
of India under the new editor. Just as
anybody off the street can write about
Jazz, like the writer who reviewed a
book by a rather pedestrian author
Roger Rosenblatt and likened him to a
Jazzman, anybody off the streets can
write about Black Liter ature. The Times
didn’t even choose Felicia Lee, who
writes about black women writers
almost exclusively, but instead picked
Jeff Gordinier — the dining critic?
Gordinier corrected Maryemma
Graham who referred to him as the
food critic. He said that he was yet to
make food critic status. Like the white
male critics who hang around the
African American Review, presumably
because they don’t have the literary
chops to tackle the big house canon,
which includes racists like T.S. Eliot
and Saul Bellow and anti-Semites like
Henry James, this reviewer couldn’t
write a story about the very capable
young writers who belong to Cave
Canem without taking a swipe at
previous generations who, according
to him, wrote about “strife” exclusively.
Sharon Strange, one of the young
writers who was featured in Gordinier’s
article, objected to his description of
the black literary tradition. A stereotype
that Harlem Renaissance novelist
Wallace Thurman once cynically called
“Ain’t it hard to be a nigger.”

Well, living as a black man in
contemporary America isn’t exactly like
participating in an Easter egg hunt,
but one can say that the “Ain’t it
hard…” genre in literature or “Bad
luck and trouble” in the Blues, is
probably some of the country’s leading
exports next to Hip Hop, which itself
uses a lot of “Ain’t it hard…” material.
Or is Gordinier saying that the Blues
and Hip Hop lyrics don’t qualify
as poetry? Is he saying that the Blues
ain’t alright? This would make him less
hip than old white guys like Cleanth
Brooks and Robert Penn Warren who
at least included Bessie Smith’s work
in their decades-long best seller
Understanding Poetry (1938). Judging
from the marketplace, Hip Hop,
a lot of which deals with politics and
oppression, outsells all schools of
poetry mentioned in Gordinier’s article
and is of such international influence
that it was one of the factors that
led to the Arab Spring. Now there is
a Bosnian Hip Hop; a Brazilian and
Israeli Hip Hop; there is even an Inuit
Hip Hop at the North Pole. Much
of Hip hop has not been as easy to
co-opt as Be-Bop and other forms that
have been “borrowed.” As the Slate
reviewer of The Anthology of Rap wrote
in frustration, “the lyrics are hard
to transcribe.”