My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 71

Askia Toure, co-founder of The Black
Arts Repertory Theater also chimed
in. Unlike the Norton Black Arts
denouncers, Toure views the Black Arts
movement as part of the Golden Era:

70

Most of the pioneering writers
of this Golden Era are mature,
and still among us, making
continuous contributions to Art
and Literature in the United
States. Several have won major
awards, and have traveled and
greatly inspired the International
Community’s appreciation for
Multi-ethnic Culture in the u.s.a.
Now, if I were an executive editor
of a major eastern Establishment
newspaper, knowing the exact
oppressive historical relations
between the Black national
Community and White America,
why maybe I might venture to
manipulate the naïve, talented
younger writers of an emerging
generation… especially, if they
might’ve swallowed the hypocritical
lies of a so-called “Post-Racial”
U.S. Society. This, of course, after
my academic scholars and experts
had fed them on the abstract
shallowness of Post-Modern
American literature… but, I’d
also prove unable to disguise my
scornful contempt by assigning
the “snow-job” to a writer whose
specialty and expertise was articles
on “fruit” and culinary arts, rather
than the competent, scholarly
expertise expected of a literary don
and critic. But then, maybe I’m
being too cynical… I’m sure that
the NY Times has a reasonable
explanation and will enlighten us
in due time.

Incidentally, Toure’s great poem
DawnSong, which heralded the arrival
of the Black Arts Movement, is absent
from Norton 3, Vol.2, which, for me,
makes the whole section worthless.
Indeed black writers have written
thousands of poems that could have
been written by a “white” person,
not Italian American, Irish American,
or Jewish American writers but a
“white” person which the ‘Times Book
Review’ offers “universal” status.
As poet laureate of the SF Jazz center,
I arranged a festival which not only
included black, Latino, Asian American,
but Jewish American, Italian American
and Irish American poets. Italian
was spoken from the stage. As Irish
American poet Sean Casey said —
“It’s great to step out of the melting pot
from time to time.”
Moreover, If the absence of race in
poetry means that black poetry has
“evolved,” and found a new day and
a great moment, does this mean that
white authors who write racist stuff
have devolved? I cited some of these
authors in a symposium called “Politics
and the Novel” conducted by the
Los Angeles Times in August 13, 2000.

Though novels about relationships
dominate “mainstream” fiction — prose
versions of “Sex and the City” — some
“major” novelists still write political
novels. I don’t particularly care for the
politics. John Updike, Philip Roth,
Saul Bellow and Tom Wolfe have all
penned novels recently which, in
my opinion, are political and racist
in nature and have been given a free
pass by the “critical” good old boy
network. In The Human Stain (2000),
Mr. Roth has his black women
characters do his dirty work, or shall
we say, ‘literary housekeeping.’ One
denounces Howard University, an
institution which has been producing
scholars, writers, artists and professionals
since 1867. The other compares Black
History Month to “sour milk,” an
image I’m still trying to sort out. John
Updike seemed delighted by a another
novelist’s reference to Black Studies
as “Coon Studies.” Mr. Updike could
have used some Black Studies before
writing his ugly work Brazil (1994). In
Ravelstein, (2000) Saul Bellow chastises
the anti-Semitism of John Maynard
Keynes and Lloyd George; the pot
calling the kettle black. Mr. Bellow’s
racism is just as bad. The blacks in
Ravelstein include an elderly housekeeper
who doesn’t like to work. Her children,
predictably, are engaged in “pathological”
behavior. The black characters in
Bellow’s recent novels are no different
from the ones you find on tabloid
shows like “Cops.” Mr. Wolfe is perhaps
the most offensive and the friendly
reception his book has received shows
how backward race relations have
become in this country. A Man in Full
(1998) is the kind of novel that Thomas
Dixon — The Clansman (1905) — and
other Confederate novelists used to
write, obligatory rapist and all. (Roth’s
black rapist is named Dominique)
The idea of black men raping white
women has been packaged as a
commodity since Reconstruction.