power and possibility that mocks claims to authoritativeness and authority of any kind – including those of high culture. Kesey was to go on to chart that transgressive space in other fiction and essays (Sometimes a Great Notion [1964], Kesey’s Garage Sale [1973], Demon Box [1986], The Further Enquiry [1990] ). He was also to attempt to create it for himself and others: travelling in his ‘Magic Bus’ around America with his companions, whom he called ‘the Merry Pranksters’, organizing psychedelic events and light shows – all of which Tom Wolfe wryly recorded in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). But One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains his most powerful mapping of transgression, his most memorable expression of the belief that lost freedom can and must be recovered. ‘I been away a long time’ are the last words of Bromden as he lights out for a past that is also his future. It stands not only as a supremely serious comic book but also as a major document in the American literature of resistance and rebellion.

The Art and Politics of Race

Defining a new black aesthetic

Nobody has had to resist more in American society, and rebel more as far as the institutional structures of the nation are concerned, than African Americans. On the level of what Norman Mailer would call the ‘visible’ river of public events, there has been the trauma of the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the ‘Second American Revolution’ of the civil rights movement and its aftermath, the emergence within the framework of party politics of leaders like Jesse Jackson and, outside of it, of the followers of Elijah Muhammed and the Black Muslim movement, the controversies and crises surrounding the cases of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson. And much more. On the level of the ‘subterranean’ river, there has been the slow, painful, but triumphant growth of black pride. Black pride and the black aesthetic were promoted, in the first instance after the Second World War, by the Black Arts movement. Following that movement, there has been an exponential increase in significant writing by African American women. African American women suffered, many of them felt, from the double jeopardy of racism in the women’s liberation movement and sexism in black liberation movements. That sexism led Eldridge Cleaver (1935–98), for instance, to equate black pride with sexual manhood and, in his best-known book, Soul on Ice (1968), to describe the rape of white women as ‘an insurrectionary act’. The remedy, as Toni Cade (1939–95) argued in her Preface to The Black Woman (1970), a seminal anthology of short stories and essays, was for black women to start ‘turning toward each other’. This is what African American women writers proceeded to do. Toni Cade turned to her own ancestors first, adding her grandmother’s name, Bambara, to her own. That name was to appear on her short story collection Gorilla, My Love (1972), about a young black woman who is trying to survive in the city – and whose sassy straight talk expresses what Bambara herself called ‘a certain way of

being in the world’. ‘I say’, the young woman declares, ‘just like the hussy my daughter always say I am.’ Her words, catching the rhythms of African American folk speech and the ‘games, chants, jingles’ of the streets, are her way of improvising and affirming herself; they speak resistance, and her sense of relation to other black women, into life.

Audre Lorde was to pursue a similar path to Bambara, in her accounts of what she called the ‘strong triad of grandmother mother daughter’, the ‘mattering core’ of strong black females who gave her her sense of presence. So, as we shall see later, have many other African American women novelists. So, too, has a writer whose work is part autobiography, part picaresque fiction and part social history, Maya Angelou (1928– ). In the first volume of her series of autobiographical fictions, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Angelou confers an exemplary status upon the experiences of the narrator, whose childhood is spent shuttling between rural and urban America, smalltown America, San Francisco and St Louis. Exemplary, too, is what she learned: the two major strands of the African American tradition, both of them inherited from women. From her grandmother, the narrator tells us, she absorbed the religious influences, the gospel tradition of African Americans. From her mother, in turn, she received ‘the blues tradition’. Both elements of the black vernacular inform the account of this exceptional yet exemplary woman, and her meetings with other remarkable black women: among them, a friend who teaches her to speak again, to rediscover the beauty of the ‘human voice’, after the shock of rape has left her temporarily dumb. They also inform the later, extraordinary volumes in this series, Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1987).

‘The black man is the future of the world,’ wrote the man who has been described as the father of the Black Arts movement, Imamu Amiri Baraka (1934– ). ‘Let Black people understand that / they are the lovers and the sons of lovers’, Baraka has declared, ‘/ and warriors and sons of warriors. Are poems / poets & all the loveliness here in the world.’ ‘We are unfair, and unfair,’ he says elsewhere, in a poem titled ‘Black Art’, ‘/ we are black magicians, black art / & we make in black labs of the heart / . . . / . . . we own / the night.’ Appropriating the mythic power that Western symbolism habitually imputes to blackness, black writers have been in the vanguard of those aiming to turn those symbols inside out, so as to make them a source of pride for black people and a source of fear and wonder for whites. Absorbing black cultural influences as ancient as Islam and as modern as the music of John Coltrane, they have pushed Langston Hughes’s commitment to cultural separateness to a fresh extreme. As far as forms and performances are concerned, this has involved the frequent adoption of the ‘preacher style’ of public speaking, endemic to the African and African American traditions, where the poet/leader recites at a rapt, rapid pace and the audience/chorus dance, shout and sing in response to the nervous fire of his words and the contagious nature of his rhythms. And as far as concerns content, this has had as one consequence a new assertiveness of tone and aggression of gesture: a renewed eagerness to see poetry as, to use

the words of one black poet, D. L. Graham (1944– ), ‘survival motion set to music’

– or, to borrow a phrase from another, Carl Wendell Himes, Jr (1946– ), ‘magic . . . spells, to raise up / return, destroy, and create’.

‘The black artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.’ The author of this remark is Imamu Amiri Baraka and it powerfully summarizes a presiding aim that he has shared with many other black writers of this period: another one, Ron Karenga (1945– ), for example, has put it this way: ‘all our art must contribute to revolutionary change and if it does not, it is invalid.’ To such remarks, however, it is worth adding a gloss. Not all black poets feel this way. Some even seem content to follow the path of Countee Cullen, by producing work that is virtually indistinguishable from the white tradition. David Henderson (1950– ), for instance, writes poems like ‘Sketches of Harlem’ (1967) that resemble those of the white street poets of New York; while, in a different key, the woman poet G. C. Oden (1951– ) chooses to be closer in much of her writing to Louise Bogan (‘The Carousel’ [1967] ) or Elizabeth Bishop (‘A Private Letter to Brazil’ [1967] ) than to other black writers, male or female. Even the poets who have committed themselves to a specifically black revolutionary art cannot be entirely separated from the white tradition. Rebellion is hardly a black monopoly, after all; and much of the most trenchant white American writing has also been preoccupied with the gap between performance and promise: America as the writer ‘knows it’ – which invites destruction – and America as he or she dreams of it – which begs to be realized, first in words and then in deeds. A gloss of this kind may be necessary, then, but it should not take away from the vital fact: at its best, recent black poetry is different. The difference can even be measured in terms of Baraka’s own progress, as he moved from imitation of white forms, however innovative or subversive, to the formulation of a purely black aesthetic.

Baraka established his reputation under his given name of Leroi Jones. His first published work was a play, A Good Girl is Hard to Find (1958). Two other plays soon followed, The Baptism (1964) and The Toilet (1964), mostly concerned with issues of personal identity. Before them, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) appeared, a collection of personal and often domestic poems. In the earlier stages of his career, while he was still known as Leroi Jones, Baraka was clearly influenced by those white American poets who, like him, saw themselves as alienated from the cultural mainstream. There are several poems that recall the work of Frank O’Hara: in ‘Epistróphe’, for instance, Baraka uses the random, chancey rhythms of casual speech and imagery assembled by a mobile vision to capture the oddity of a familiar vista, ‘what you see (here in New York)’. The figure of Charles Olson, in turn, hovers behind ‘How You Sound??’, Baraka’s announcement of his aesthetic published in 1959. ‘ “How You SOUND??” is what we recent fellows are up to,’ he declared: ‘There must not be any preconceived design for what the poem ought to be.’ ‘The only “recognisable tradition” a poet need follow is himself,’ he added, ‘& with that, say, all those things out of tradition he can use . . . to broaden his own voice with.’ Baraka’s principal involvement at this time, however, was not with the Black Mountain poets (although some of his earlier poems, such as ‘In

Memory of Radio’, do resemble projectivist poetry) but with the beats. There have been a number of black writers associated with the beat generation. Among them is Bob Kaufman (1925–86), who used the long, sweeping line favoured by Ginsberg to announce that ‘no man is our master’ and address the possibility of universal brotherhood ‘On this shore’. There is also Ted Joans (1928–2003), whose claim, ‘Jazz is my religion’, is catchily illustrated by poems like ‘Voice in the Crowd’ that imitate the abrupt, syncopated movement and startling dissonances of Ornette Coleman. But Baraka was, at least for a while, the most innovative and accomplished of the black beat poets, blending influences as disparate as European Surrealism and Dadaism, the jazz poetry of Vachel Lindsay and Langston Hughes, the African American oral tradition and the music of Charlie Parker. With these he fashioned poetry that, in marked contrast to his later work, was determinedly autobiographical, preoccupied with sex and death and shaped by existential despair.

An alteration in Baraka’s voice and vision came in the 1960s, when, like many black nationalists, he dispensed with his white ‘slave name’ Leroi Jones and adopted a title more in keeping with his new self and his new mission. His work became correspondingly more radical and more involved with issues of racial and national identity. The plays Dutchman (1964), The Slave (1964) and Slave Ship: a Historical Pageant (1967) all deal with relations between black and white people. As works of ‘revolutionary theatre’, they demonstrate Baraka’s awareness of himself as a leader of a black arts movement that seeks to use drama as a weapon against American racism. The episodic novel The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) equates the black slums of Newark, New Jersey, with the Inferno. The various essays of Home: Social Essays (1966), originally published in a number of liberal and leftist journals, trace his artistic transformation from black beat poet to father of the Black Arts movement. And the poems in The Dead Lecturer (1964) represent Baraka’s poetic farewell to the beats. Marked by an ever-increasing preoccupation with racial issues, these lyrics crystallize his commitment to revolutionary action and his disavowal of what he saw as the political decadence of his former compatriots. Other volumes of poetry followed: Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961–1967 (1969), It’s Nation Time (1970) and In Our Terribleness (1970). Other work, such as Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), showed his growing involvement in the African American tradition, or, like the work published in Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969), showed him reaching out to, and trying to teach, a largely unlettered audience. Around 1974, Baraka announced a further development in his political ideology and aesthetic, with a formal commitment to a Marxist-Leninist perspective, anticipating the overthrow, by blacks and whites alike, of oppressive capitalist systems. Plays such as S-1 (1974) and The Motion of History (1977) testify to the change. And works like Hard Facts (1975), Poetry for the Advanced (1979) and Daggers and Javelins (1984) demonstrate his efforts to reconcile the more positive and useful aspects of black nationalism with what he saw as the scientific accuracy of Marxism. Later publications show that effort continuing, among them, Eulogies

(1996), Funk Love: New Poems, 1984–1995 (1996) and The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1997). As an organizer and activist, he has continued, ever

since the 1960s, to influence immeasurably the direction of African American thought and writing.

As a writer, in particular, though, Baraka’s main contribution has been to encourage a generation to be unapologetic, even proud and aggressive, about their African American heritage. Particularly in the writing of the 1960s and early 1970s, he introduced a prophetic, apocalyptic dimension into black writing, a sense of mission, the violent redemption of the sins of the past in the revolutionary future. ‘We want poems that kill,’ he announced in ‘Black Art’, ‘Assassin poems. Poems that shoot / guns.’ ‘Let there be no love poems written /’, he added, ‘until love can exist freely and / clearly.’ What Baraka anticipated was nothing less than a ‘jihad’ or holy war of believers against unbelievers, black against white (‘Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls / Rape the fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats’). From this holocaust, this ritual bloodletting of all that is false and dead – that is, specifically, white Christian civilization – little would survive. But creation would nevertheless follow destruction. Primal innocence and energy would be restored; and a new nation would emerge out of the union between black power in America and anti-colonialist movements in Africa. ‘It’s nation time eye ime,’ Baraka sang triumphantly in the poem of that title: ‘it’s nation ti eye ime / chant with bells and drum / its nation time.’ In a way, this was the American dream in bright new pan-African robes: liberation from the present tyranny, the poet hoped, would be accompanied by a recovery of the perfection of the past and its restitution for an imagined future. There was no place for whites here, certainly: ‘white people’, we are told, ‘. . . are full of, and made of / shit’. But, ironically, Baraka still reflected the millennial tendencies of a culture he was determined to reject.

As for that determination itself, Baraka’s conscious need to reject Western culture: that was all real enough. Apart from certain crucial aspects of that culture, notably Marxism and socialism, it still remains one of his dominating motives. He could not entirely unlearn his American education, or excise those portions of himself that had been shaped by traditional or apolitical white culture, but he tried hard to do so. ‘When I die, / the consciousness I carry I will to / black people,’ he wrote in ‘Leroy’. ‘May they pick me apart and take the / useful parts . . . And leave / the bitter bullshit rotten white parts / alone.’ The process of excision was, in effect, to be continued after his death: the few, lingering traces of white identity were to be left to decay while the rest, ‘the sweet meat’ of the black self, was to achieve a strictly carnal resurrection, growing in and through the bodies of others. As far as active practice was concerned, this insistence on ‘Black feeling, Black mind, Black judgement’ led Baraka not only to political involvement but also to the promotion of black community theatre. With his help, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School was opened in Harlem in 1965, to become of critical importance in the development of the Black Arts movement. And, following its demise, Baraka set up the Spirit House in Newark, with its troupe of actors called the Spirit House Movers. On the level of theory, in turn, it was Baraka above all who formulated, and gave definitive expression to, the idea of a Black Aesthetic. ‘I think of the artist as a moralist,’ Baraka declared, in his Preface to Black Magic, ‘demanding a

cleaner vision of the world.’ ‘We are spiritual,’ he went on, ‘. . . we must see ourselves again, as black men, as the strength of the planet, and rise to rebuild . . . what is actually good.’ Even the rage that has characterized so much of his work has been defended by him in terms of his moralist/nationalist aesthetics. ‘What I’m after is a sense of clarity,’ he claimed in Black Music (1967), ‘if it sounds like anger, maybe that’s good in a sense.’

Anger has not, of course, been Baraka’s only mode, even in the more purely nationalist writing of the 1960s and 1970s. His work is also punctuated by cries for help (‘calling all black people come in, black people, come on / in’), friendly persuasion (‘I want you to understand the world / as I have come to understand it’); above all, by respect for the energy of black people – something that he has identified with the ultimate agent of creativity (‘God . . . is energy’) and as an instrument of change, to be mobilized by force if necessary. ‘We are beautiful people with african imaginations / full of masks and dances and swelling chants,’ Baraka declares in ‘Ka’ Ba’, ‘/ with african eyes, and noses, and arms / though we sprawl in grey chains in a place / full of winters, when what we want is sun.’ There is pride here and faith in collective identity, the belief that black people ‘are all beautiful’. Seeking to harness the ‘ancient images’ and ‘magic’ of the African inheritance to his cause, Baraka couples this with the verve he finds in all black cultural forms, from the speeches of Malcolm X to the music of Muddy Waters. ‘What will be / the sacred words?’ he asks. His aim, which he still sees himself as sharing with other black writers, is to unravel a new language and rhythm, ‘sacred words’ that will liberate him, his work and, in the process, the hearts and minds of all his ‘black family’. ‘We have been captured, / brothers,’ he proclaims, ‘And we labour / to make our getaway.’ A new song that will generate a new self and, eventually, a new society: it is an ambition at least as old as Leaves of Grass, but it has been rendered almost unrecognizable. For this is a song in the service of, if necessary, violent revolution: the revolt not only of Baraka’s ‘black family’ – although they matter to him, especially – but of all those similarly oppressed.

The Black Arts movement was, in particular, a movement that inspired poets, and among those poets who received inspiration from it, and sometimes also from Amiri Baraka, were Mari Evans (1927– ), Sonia Sanchez (1934– ), Nikki Giovanni (1943– ), Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti (1942– ) and David Nelson (1944– ). These writers have shared with Baraka the belief that, as Sonia Sanchez puts it, in some lines from ‘Right on: white america’ (1969) quoted earlier, ‘this country might have / been a pion / eer land once, / and it still is’. By way of explanation, Sanchez then adds pointedly: ‘check out / the falling gun / shells / on our blk / tomorrow.’ In other words, they have rejected the white American dream: ‘The white man’s heaven is the Black man’s hell,’ we are told in The Black Bird (1969), a play by the poet and playwright Marvin X (1944– ). But they are also trying to restore the pioneer values of liberation and mobility, once so fundamental to that dream, in and for their own people. This has necessarily involved them in a commitment to revolutionary struggle. ‘change up,’ Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti commands, ‘let’s go for ourselves / . . . / change-up and yr children will look at u

differently / than we looked at our parents.’ The aim is to achieve an irreversible shift of power: ‘I’m / gonna make it a crime to be anything BUT black,’ Mari Evans has announced in ‘Vive Noir!’ (1968), ‘gonna make white / a twenty-four hour / lifetime / J.O.B.’ Formally, this has aligned them with all those trying to ‘write black’, to realize a verbal approximation of the frantic energy, the hip rhythms, of black speech and music: ‘to be black’, as Lee/Madhubuti puts it in one poem (‘But He Was Cool’ [1970] ), ‘is / to be / very – hot.’ This is a literature of exhortation, primarily, which, rather than dwell on personal suffering, insists on the abolition of communal suffering. ‘Don’t Cry, Scream’, Lee/Madhubuti tells his audience in the poem of that name (1971), and then obeys his own instructions, in a wild typographical imitation of modern jazz:

The need to scream, to shout and fight rather than lament, has led some of these poets at least to jettison those aspects of black culture which, they believe, might impede the revolutionary momentum. Among those aspects, the most notable are the music and spirit of the blues which, as the black scholar and theorist Moulana Karenga (1941– ) explains in ‘Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function’ (1968), are ‘not functional . . . because they do not commit us to the struggle of today and tomorrow’. Blues are ‘a very beautiful, musical, and psychological achievement of our people’, Karenga admits, but ‘they keep us in the past’ and ‘whatever we do we cannot remain in the past’. So no more blues, Sonia Sanchez insists in ‘Liberation Poem’ (1970), ‘blues ain’t culture / they sounds of oppression / against the white man’s shit’. ‘We ain’t blue, we are black’, Lee/Madhubuti argues in ‘Don’t Cry, Scream’, and clearly David Nelson would agree with him: ‘Blues was for making and enduring and suffering / We need a new BLACK thing,’ he declares in ‘No Time for Blues Now’ (1970). This ‘new BLACK thing’ will be the opposite of the old, a ‘music for the senses’ that is ‘fast an’ happy an’ mad!!!!!’ Reversing the vicious cycle of oppression, it will be what Baraka in Black Music has called a ‘song above horror’, alive with ‘black rhythm energy’ and alert above all to the necessity to ‘change-up’. It will also be, though, like the blues a song for performance. Along with the beats, as well as the poets of the San Francisco and Black Mountain groups, many of the more recent black poets have relied as much on the spoken word as the written. Writing also to be immediately accessible and to nurture feelings of community, they have moved towards a poetry of and for the street that is determinedly populist, rejecting conventional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. So the four-man group known as The Last Poets (both the originals and the subsequent groups of that name) have exploited ghetto culture, rapping and hip-hop to get the message across to their Harlem neighbours. And some of the recordings of David Nelson, Nikki Giovanni and, more recently,

Gil Scott-Heron (1949– ) have become popular hits on a national scale. The 1970 recorded poem of Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, for instance, shows just how much black poetry of the last thirty-five years or so stands at the crossroads between different African American musical and rhetorical forms. Using percussive rhythm, repetition, a driving beat and an urgent streetwise idiom to make its point that ‘The revolution will be no re-run, brothers. / The revolution will be LIVE’, it recollects and reinvents such otherwise different African American forms as jump-rope rhymes and game chants, sermons and scat singing, rhythm and blues and gospel.

Although not rap music as such, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ vitally influenced the themes and forms of rap: a form that is characterized by deft rhymes and an insistently percussive verse performed against a background of sounds ‘sampled’ from snatches of previously recorded music. The sampling, together with the element of performance, even self-mockery often to be found in rap, gives it a distinctly postmodernist edge. Then, again, that element of wry self-mockery, verbal strutting, is as old as the trickster toasts and badman boasts of folk heroes like Stackolee and Brer Rabbit. And in its verbal fire and ice, its thundering drumlines and rapid firings of chanted sound, it takes up a black heritage of sound and song that goes back to before the day Africans saw the first slave ship. Some rap preaches the same revolutionary message as the poetry and prose of Baraka. Some, less open in its message of revolt, rehearses with grim humour the moral and social hell of the ghetto: ‘It’s like a jungle sometimes,’ ‘The Message’ (1982) begins, ‘it makes me wonder / How I keep from going under.’ And then there is ‘gangsta rap’, which simply offers raw and raucous testimony to the life of the streets: a life, it seems, with no exits, grim, violent, even vicious. Like the badmen boasting and tricksters toasting in early black folktales, the gangsta rappers use sharp talk and shock, making no apologies for their obsession with what they see as the basic necessities of life – money and sex – as they struggle to survive in the black underclass. From the poetry of the Black Arts movement through the recorded work of Giovanni and Scott-Heron to rap and gangsta rap, there is a sustained emphasis on dance, voice and fight. Moving, strutting your stuff to keep from falling over the edge, speaking, chanting, singing to make your presence known, squaring up to the common enemy and making the folks around you square up too. Some of this work, especially gangsta rap, is not only subversive but offensive too: but it always throws up the same serious issues about black disempowerment and drift, and the urgent, booming need for change.

The women among more recent African American poets have also urged the need for another kind of change: the need to combat not just the racism of white culture but the latent sexism of the black. Even revolutionary poets like Baraka have tended to talk in generic terms about ‘the black man’ and to identify black women with the sexual and reproductive functions. And sometimes, as in some gangsta rap, the sexism is nowhere near being latent. ‘i wish I knew how it would feel / to be free,’ says Nikki Giovanni in ‘Woman Poem’ (1983), and then goes on to link her historical imprisonment as a black with her cultural imprisonment as a

woman. ‘its a sex object if you’re pretty / and no love / or love and no sex if you’re fat,’ she observes; ‘get back fat black woman be a mother / grandmother strong thing but not a woman.’ This sense of the redoubled oppression of black women, on the grounds of gender as well as race, has led Sonia Sanchez to celebrate her attachment to others like herself. ‘I cried’, Sanchez declares in ‘Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love’ (1984), ‘For myself . . . For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.’ It has encouraged Mari Evans, in turn, to celebrate the simple fact of her own black womanhood. ‘I am a black woman /’, she announces in the poem with that title (1970), ‘tall as a cypress / strong / beyond all definition’; ‘look on me and be / screwed.’ For Jone Jordan (1936– ), the edge to her experience as a woman is more devastating and traumatic. A victim of rape, she has seen in the violence she has suffered a connection with other forms of violence, more general and historical, perpetrated in Africa and America. ‘It all violates self-determination’: all forms of racial oppression rupture personhood, personal and political space. And in ‘Poem About My Rights’ (1989), she explores and insists upon the ineluctable link between her own past and, say, ‘South Africa / penetrating into Namibia penetrating into / Angola’. ‘I am the history of rape,’ she confides, ‘/ I am the history of the rejection of who I am / I am the history of the terrorised incarceration of / my self.’ The connection between herself and history does not stop there, however, with the simple, sad acknowledgement of the evil done to her as a black woman and the evil done to black people in many parts of the world. ‘I am not wrong. Wrong is not my name,’ she insists, ‘My name is my own my own.’ She will fight back, so setting an example to others similarly violated. ‘From now on,’ she tells all her oppressors, past and present, ‘my resistance / my simple and daily and nightly self-determination / may very well cost you your life.’

The violence which seeps into Jordan’s work is, unsurprisingly, there in the work of many other African American poets. It is part of the suppressed history of the race that Lucille Clifton invokes in her poem ‘at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989’ (1991). It makes Audre Lorde insist, in ‘Power’ (1978), that, pace W. B. Yeats, the difference between poetry and rhetoric is not the difference between the argument with oneself and others but ‘being / ready to kill /yourself / instead of your children’. That violence is also the determining feature, perhaps, in the work of two other remarkable African American poets of this period, Etheridge Knight (1931–91) and Michael Harper (1938– ). Both Knight and Harper, like so many other black writers, allow the rhythms of African American musical traditions to pulse through their work. So, in ‘A Poem for Myself (Or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)’ (1980), Knight exploits blues forms to tell a story of black wandering from Mississippi to Detroit, Chicago, New York, then back to Mississippi. And in ‘Ilu, the Talking Drum’ (1980), he takes the black American life experience in a full circle from Africa to the South then back to an Africa of the spirit using an African rhythmic structure to imitate the voice of an African drum. The titles of several of Harper’s collections betray his own very similar allegiances: Dear John Coltrane (1970), Song: I Want a Witness (1972),

Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985). Exploring his connection to jazz artists like Coltrane and Charlie Parker, insisting on human and cultural continuity (‘A man is another man’s face,’ he has written), his work is oriented to performance: ‘blacks have to testify,’ he proclaims in ‘Song: I Want a Witness’, ‘/ and testify and testify.’ For Harper, however, the violence he records is a matter of family loss and racial history: the death of an infant son (‘Nightmare Begins Responsibility’ [1975] ) or of a brother (‘Camp Story’ [1985] ), the suffering inflicted upon Native Americans by ‘mad Puritans’ (‘History as Apple Tree’ [1977] ), the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (‘Here Where Coltrane Is’ [1977] ). For Knight, the violence was closer to the bone. ‘I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me,’ he once confessed. ‘I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.’ Many of Knight’s poems were written in prison – his first collection was, in fact, simply called Poems from Prison (1968) – and they detail the loneliness, the bitter frustration of prison life. They work through a violence of language and verve of movement learned from the black oral tradition: ‘the brown / hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric / messages, galvanizing my genes,’ he declares, characteristically, in ‘The Idea of Ancestry’ (1968). But they also work through the way Knight links himself, in his isolation and pain, to others in his family, his race and the American underclass, to a communality of suffering. And they work, not least, through their resilience, their refusal to let any violence cow or corrupt the spirit. ‘Going back to Mississippi,’ ‘A Poem for Myself ’ concludes, ‘/ This time for good – / Gonna be free in Mississippi / Or dead in the Mississippi mud.’

Violence, though, is no more the single defining feature of recent African American poetry than any specific definition of race – of what it means to be an African American – is. What is remarkable about so much of this work, in fact, is the multiple forms in which African Americanism can enter into this poetry. With Rita Dove (1952– ), for instance, there is a marked inclination towards multiculturalism. The settings of her spare, enigmatic poems range from Ohio to Germany to Israel; and in just one volume slaves, mythological and Biblical characters, and the ancestors and immediate family of the poet all jostle side by side. ‘I am profoundly fascinated by the ways in which language can change our perceptions,’ she has said. Some of her work addresses that subject head on, by exploring how a single word or image can permit a voyage into strange seas of thought (‘Ö’ [1980] ), or how a poem can provide ‘a little room for thinking’, a chance and space to dream (‘Daystar’ [1986] ). Some of it approaches the liberating potential of language in a sidewise fashion, as it were, by considering, perhaps, how earlier generations of African Americans nurtured the ‘crazy feeling’ that they could change their lives in the words they spoke, the songs they sang (‘Kentucky, 1833’ [1980] ). Dove is continually trying to speak the unspoken, to give voice to the voiceless. That includes those dimensions of experience and history that have been suppressed, or sidelined, most often for reasons of gender or of race. So, in a poem called ‘Arrow’ (1989), she quietly subverts those literary positions that reduce black people to marginal caricatures and women to convenient symbols of the

elusive, the ineffable. And in her long poem sequence Thomas and Beulah (1987), she resurrects the rarely acknowledged contribution of working-class blacks to American life by telling the story of the courtship, marriage and subsequent life of her own grandparents.

The perspective of Wanda Coleman (1946– ) is very different, but just as racially inflected in its own way. So, in turn, is that of Nathaniel Mackey (1947– ). An electrifying reader and performer of her own work, Coleman has said that her ‘one desire’ is ‘through writing’ to ‘control, destroy, and create social institutions’. ‘I want to wield the power that belongs to the pen,’ she has declared. Using nervy rhythms, a stark idiom and an elliptical line, she has done just that, in poems that recall racial violence (‘Emmett Till’ [1990] ), the violence done to women, black women in particular (‘American Sonnet (10)’ [1993] ), and the constant threat, the fear that eats away at the soul in the urban ghetto (‘Today I Am a Homicide in the North of the City’ [1990] ). Mackey has other priorities, although many of them are also marked by his African Americanism. ‘Music includes so much,’ he has suggested, ‘it’s social, it’s religious, it’s metaphysical, it’s aesthetic, it’s expressive, it’s creative, it’s destructive.’ The music that specifically ‘just covers so much’ for him is modern jazz. Combined in poems like ‘Falso Brilliante’ (1985) and ‘Song of the Andoumboulou’ (1994) are the influence, the idiom of jazz pioneers like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and the experiments in breath and line of such projectivist poets as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Jazz is important, too, to Yusef Komunyakaa, as a poem like ‘February in Sydney’ (1989) indicates, since it uses memories of the jazz musician Dexter Gordon as the source, the base line, for a sort of free-form meditation. But with Komunyakaa there are other, racially tinged experiences at work in the poetry, too: his boyhood in rural Louisiana (‘Sunday Afternoons’ [1992] ), his years as a soldier and war correspondent in Vietnam (‘Facing It’ [1988] ) and, sometimes, a strange, surreal mixture of the two (‘Banking Potatoes’ [1993] ).

With Ntozake Shange (1948– ), African Americanism has led to a studied rejection of literary convention. Born Paulette Williams, in 1971 she assumed an African name that announced her new priorities: Ntozake translates as ‘she who comes with her own things’, and Shange as ‘who walks like a lion’. Living up to that name, six years later she produced a choreopoem, a mesh of poetry, music and drama, called for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange has explained that for colored girls is about ‘our struggle to become all that is forbidden, all that is forfeited by our gender, all that we have forgotten’. In it, seven women wearing the colours of the rainbow plus brown, the colour of the earth, perform twenty poems that trace their development from youth to maturity. The poems focus on the lack of understanding between men and women, the misrecognition of women and the pain of unfulfilment, unrequited love. Marked by the idioms and inflections of the African American oral tradition, they reject conventional grammar and spelling, the standard English that Shange sees as reflective of the hierarchies inherent in mainstream society. So do her later poems, collected in Nappy Edges (1978) and Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings

(1987) and plays like Spell #7 (1980). For Essex Hemphill (1957–95), on the other hand, it was not so much literary as social convention that was rejected. Certainly, the style he favoured was far from conventional. Using an edgy, rapping line, he could be blunt in confronting the reader with what he called ‘the ass-splitting truth’. But it was resistance to the myths of black masculinity that supplied his driving motive. In wanting to assert his identity as both an African and a homosexual, he renounced the silence that, he felt, had been imposed on black gays. ‘I speak for thousands,’ Hemphill declared. ‘Their ordinary kisses . . . are scrubbed away by the propaganda makers of the race,’ he went on, ‘the “Talented Tenth”, who would just as soon have us believe Black people can fly, rather than that Black men have been longing to kiss one another, and have done so for centuries.’ So in Ceremonies (1992), a collection of poetry and prose, Hemphill constructed an alternative to what he called ‘watered-down versions of Black life’ and the stereotypes of the sad, doomed gay. He anticipated a new erotic dispensation, in which men transformed institutions to fit their needs: where, as he put it, ‘Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming’. Like so many other more recent African American writers, Hemphill gave a fresh spin to the literature of protest and resistance, as well as to the myth of the promised land. And he did it as they have done, by insisting on internal resistances, differences within the African American community as well as differences from white America.

Defining a new black identity in prose

As far as prose is concerned, a seminal event in the history of African American writing since the Second World War was the publication, in 1952, of Invisible Man. The author was Ralph Ellison (1914–94). Born in Oklahoma and the grandson of slaves, Ellison was named Ralph Waldo after Emerson. Educated in a segregated school system, he then went south to Alabama to attend the black college of Tuskegee. In the South, in particular, Ellison recollected in his second collection of essays, Going to the Territory (1986), he found all ‘the signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of segregation’. But he also found time to read modern poetry. ‘Somehow in my uninstructed reading of Eliot and Pound,’ he remembered, ‘I had recognized a relationship between modern poetry and jazz music.’ ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘such reading and wondering prepared me not simply to meet Richard Wright but to seek him out.’ It was in New York City that Ellison met Wright, who was then editor of the New Challenge. And it was while he was there that he wrote his first short story, and also worked in the black community gathering and recording folk material that was to become an integral part of his fiction. The early work Ellison produced reflected the influence of Wright and naturalism. But Ellison slowly developed his own style, a cunning mix of realism, surrealism, symbolism, folklore and myth. ‘I was to dream of a prose which was flexible and swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthright,’ Ellison explained in his first book of essays, Shadow and Act (1964), ‘but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity and individual self-realisation.’ ‘It would

use the riches of our speech,’ he added, ‘the idiomatic expression and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us.’ That dream, of a language as diverse as American culture and African American life, was realized in Invisible Man, arguably the most profound and compelling novel about identity to be published during this period.

Set in the 1930s, Invisible Man describes the experiences of its anonymous black protagonist and narrator as he wanders through America, struggling to come to terms with the dilemma Ellison summed up in one of his essays: ‘the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are’. He is ‘invisible’, he discovers, his black skin renders him nameless and anonymous in white society. And, like so many heroes in American fiction, black and white, he is torn between unsatisfactory alternatives, corresponding, in their own distinctly Modernist, racially inflected way, to the mythic opposition of the clearing and the wilderness. He can either, he learns, surrender to the various demeaning and degrading roles prescribed for him by society, or he can escape into a fluid, formless territory, a subterranean world that seems to exist outside history, where, instead of a repressed, constricted self, he seems to have no self, no coherent identity at all. Each stage in the journey of the invisible man, usually marked by a site and a speech, sees him trying on a new role, a fresh change of clothes and identity. He begins as a ‘darky’, subjected to ritual humiliations and the level of a beast: forms of subjection that Ellison pointedly compares to those suffered by women. This is in the South, and still in the Southern states he is then offered the chance to become the ‘college boy’, following the Booker T. Washington road to success in a segregated institution. Journeying to New York City, he takes on the role of worker at a factory called the Liberty Paint Company, whose principal product is a kind of whitewash. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Ellison moves smoothly between a variety of very different stylistic modes as he describes a workplace that is, quite clearly, a paradigm and parody of American society. Following his factory experience, the invisible man takes on a new role, by joining a group called the Brotherhood in New York. The Brotherhood is a thinly described version of the Communist Party, and the protagonist has now become an activist. This role is no more satisfactory than the others, though, as the continued imagery of games, blueprint, plans, repression and castration suggest. The invisible man is still required to deny a crucial part of himself as an individual, a man, and, above all, a black man. And, at the climax of the narrative, following a race riot in Harlem, he retreats to an underground sewer, which he furnishes and lives in while, he tells us, he writes this book. He is now in a ‘border area’ where he can understand his invisibility and ask us, the readers, the question that ends the book: ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’

What Invisible Man offers as a solution to the unsatisfactory alternatives of the clearing and the wilderness, a restrictive system and pure chaos, is what the protagonist realizes. He lives on the edge, a borderland where he can negotiate his way between the contingencies of history and the compulsions of himself, the fixities and definites of society and the formless desires of the individual. So,

stylistically, does Ellison. Just as the hero manages to extricate himself from a series of fixed environments, so the author shows a comparable suppleness by avoiding getting trapped in one idiom, one language. The style of Invisible Man mixes several verbal forms and influences into one multicultural whole. The structure, in turn, offers a crafty variation on a number of narrative forms. This is a picaresque novel, to an extent, its wanderings allowing both author and hero to explore the pluralities of American culture and identity. It is also a novel in the great tradition of American monologue: a tradition of anecdote and tall tale, sermon and autobiography, journals and songs of the self. It is the novel as epic and the novel as myth; it follows Ellison’s own succinct definition of myth, ‘a narrative linked with a rite’ that ‘celebrates a god’s death, travels through the underworld, and eventual rebirth’. It also, in its spellbinding mixture of naturalism and nightmare, recollects other great novels that have explored American society and, in particular, the American racial divide: Absalom, Absalom!, say, or Native Son. Speaking of himself and his fellow novelists, Ellison observed once that their task was ‘always to challenge the apparent forms of reality’ and ‘to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth’. It is a task that Ellison took on boldly and amply fulfilled in Invisible Man; the result is that, ‘on the lower frequencies’, the book has spoken and still speaks for more people, of any race, than its author could ever have imagined.

Ellison died without completing another novel. Apart from Invisible Man, two collections of his essays were published in his lifetime. When he died, he left behind six unpublished short stories and an uncompleted novel. These appeared in, respectively, 1996 and 1999: Flying Home and Other Stories and Juneteenth. By contrast, the productivity of a comparable figure in African American prose writing, James Baldwin (1924–87), was immense. Principally known as a novelist and essayist, he was also a playwright, scriptwriter, poet, director and film-maker. His novels and essays, and his play The Amen Corner (1955), revolve in particular around the themes of racial and sexual identity. ‘The question of colour, especially in this country,’ Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name: Notes of a Native Son

(1961), ‘operates to hide the great question of the self. That is precisely why what we like to call “the Negro problem” is so tenacious in American life.’ And to the question of colour, as a determinant of identity, he added the question of sexuality, since most of his intimate relationships were homosexual – and at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized. To these questions, in turn, he added the questions of family and religion. Born in Harlem when his mother was single, Baldwin suffered at the hands of his stepfather as he grew up. The stepfather, David Baldwin, an itinerant preacher, insisted that James was ugly and bore the mark of the Devil: the writer was later to use this, and the shame such abuse of religious and parental power engendered, as the material for his first novel. Isolated and alienated, Baldwin joined the church of a black woman evangelist he encountered. ‘Whose little boy are you?’ he remembered her asking in The Fire Next Time (1962). The question so evoked a sense of belonging in the fourteen-year-old youth that he simply replied, ‘Why yours’. For a while, Baldwin served as a ‘young

minister’ in the Pentecostal church. His earliest stories even reflect a religious influence. But in 1944 he moved to Greenwich Village, then began to shuffle off his church associations and to work on a novel, provisionally titled ‘Crying Holy’ and then ‘In My Father’s House’. It was published in 1953 as Go Tell It on the Mountain; it immediately established Baldwin’s reputation and is probably his most accomplished novel.

Essentially, Go Tell It on the Mountain is an initiation novel. Its protagonist, John Grimes, whom we first meet on ‘the morning of his fourteenth birthday’, is modelled in part on the young James Baldwin. Other members of the fictional family recall other members of the Baldwin family. In particular, John’s stepfather Gabriel is a recollection of David Baldwin. The book is divided into three sections. Told from John Grimes’s perspective, the first section, ‘The Seventh Day’, establishes John’s marginal position in the family. Denied by his stepfather, dismissed for his unmanliness, ugliness and intellect, his situation is at once intensely personal and profoundly symbolic. As the rejected son, he embodies what Baldwin sees as the historical experience of the African American. Dispossessed of his birthright, despised not least for his nascent homosexuality, he is like the ‘darker brother’ in the poem by Langston Hughes, ‘I, Too’: the generic racial figure who is excluded from the American family, the table of communion. ‘What shall I do?’ John asks himself. The possible answers to that question are two: and they are investigated both in his own story and in that of his family. He can either see himself as others see him and lapse into hatred and rejection of himself. The consequences of that are shame, guilt, fear or, perhaps, compensatory fantasy, all of which John succumbs to for a while. Or he can struggle to accept and realize himself: to pursue the kind of self-realization that Baldwin was thinking of, on a larger, historical scale, when he wrote, ‘the American Negro can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by the white American image of him’.

The second section of Go Tell It on the Mountain concentrates on John’s aunt, stepfather and mother, and offers variations on the theme of self-denial. Images of dirt, darkness, grime (the pun on the family name is clearly intentional) evoke what is to be denied, cleared away, got rid of; the dominant emotional pattern here is one of retreat, repression, since all three older people choose to suppress and evade their true feelings, to hide their true selves behind masks. What is additionally remarkable about this second section is how Baldwin links the story of individuals to history. Informing what we hear about the three characters is the substance of the African American experience, from slavery to the Great Migration. Enlivening every word we hear are the rhythms of African American speech and song. That sense of another, racial dimension, deepening and enriching the personal fate, then feeds into the final section, ‘The Threshing-Floor’, which recounts the struggle of John for his own self, his own soul. In a complex religious experience, John moves from a sense of damnation to one of salvation: a process that is coextensive with a movement from rejection to acceptance of himself, from disgust to delight. What he accepts is not only himself, the core of his being, but also his community: ‘the multitude’ of other African Americans who have suffered,

encountered denial and shame, just as he has done. The acceptance is expressed through speech and sound: sound that, we are told, ‘had filled John’s life . . . from the moment he had first drawn breath’. It is the sound of the blues, the sound of sermons, the sound of all the rhythms of African American life, through which an entire race has found a way to express itself, to face and transform its pain. The achievement of Go Tell It on the Mountain is that, as an initiation novel, it works on so many levels. It records the initiation of a boy into knowledge of his own sexuality, the initiation of a black boy into realization of his own racial inheritance and identity, and the initiation of a young person into a recognition of his own humanity and presence in the community. Not only that, it registers another, parallel initiation: that of the author, Baldwin himself, into an understanding that would subsequently shape his career, that only in accepting himself could he express himself, only in embracing the cultural forms, the ‘sound’ available to him as an African American, could he encounter and possibly transcend his own suffering and that of his race.

While he was still working on Go Tell It on the Mountain, in 1948, Baldwin moved to France. He was to spend the rest of his life travelling between Europe and the United States, living in France and Switzerland but never leaving the United States imaginatively. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), openly explores homosexuality, in the story of a young white American expatriate in Paris. Another Country (1962), his third novel, uses New York, Paris and elsewhere as settings for several characters trying to explore issues of racial and sexual identity. Other, later novels similarly pursue problems of race and sexuality: among them,

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) and Just Above My Head (1979). His first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son

(1955), was followed by several others: notably, The Fire Next Time, in which Baldwin insisted that America could never truly be a nation until it had solved the colour problem. If it did not solve it, he warned, America would not only never become a nation, it would face apocalypse, ‘the fire next time’. His play The Amen Corner was, in turn, followed by another three: Blues for Mr Charlie (1964), One Day, When I was Lost (1973) and A Deed from the King of Spain (1974). Right up until his final book of essays, The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin continued to be committed to what he called ‘the necessity of Americans to achieve an identity’ and the questions of systematic racism and injustice – the active denial of black identity by white America – that this necessarily raised. ‘There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead,’ he once wrote. Baldwin made the gap between the illusory and the real, on a personal, racial and national level, his subject: insisting always, as he did so, that the only way for individuals, races or nations to survive was to face the truth.

For many years, and especially during the 1950s and early 1960s, Baldwin was a political activist. He marched, talked and worked with a number of civil rights leaders, including the two most famous, whose speeches and other writings give them a place in American literary history, Malcolm X (1925–65) and Martin Luther

King (1929–68). Born Malcolm Little, and later also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm spent his earliest years in Michigan. After his father died, probably at the hands of a white racist group, and his mother was placed in a mental institution, Malcolm moved to Boston to live with his half-sister. He became involved in the nightlife and underworld of Boston, then later Harlem; and in 1946 he was arrested and imprisoned for armed robbery. During his prison years, he experienced a conversion to the Nation of Islam. Upon his release, he changed his name to Malcolm X, the X signifying the unknown name of his African ancestors and their culture that had been erased during slavery. Becoming a minister for the Nation of Islam, which preached the idea that whites are devils, he helped build it into a significant force in urban black life. However, in 1963, he split from the leader of the Nation of Islam, the Honorable Elijah Muhammed, and he began to move from the mainly spiritual philosophy of the Nation to a more political black nationalism. About this time, too, he began to collaborate with the author Alex Haley (1921–92), whose later main claim to fame was a chronicle of his own ancestry, Roots (1976), on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The Autobiography was published in 1965, the same year that Malcolm X was assassinated.

As an orator, especially in his last few years, Malcolm X was renowned for his quick wit, fast talk, nervy syncopated rhythms, and for his erudition. ‘I don’t see any American dream,’ he declared in his speech ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ (1964), ‘I see an American nightmare.’ ‘I see America through the eyes of the victim,’ he added. And he enforced that vision, insisting that what he wanted was not so much ‘civil rights’ as ‘human rights’, using a punchy combination of argument and assertion, sharp, memorable images and phrases, street language and rhythmic repetition. ‘When you’re under someone else’s control,’ he insisted, ‘you’re segregated’; ‘it’s time for Negroes to defend themselves.’ What he was after was power for the black community, by any means necessary including violence. ‘This is the day of the guerrilla,’ he argued; and, craftily recalling a famous slogan of the War of Independence, prophesied that ‘It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death’. The Autobiography has the same oracular, oral power as the speeches. Here, in a way typical of both American and African American autobiography, Malcolm X presents his own experience as exemplary. He shows, for instance, how the demeaning label of ‘nigger’ applied to him, when he was young, even by white liberals, betrayed a general tendency to erase the humanity of African Americans. ‘What I am trying to say’, he explains, is that ‘it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them.’ ‘Thus,’ he concludes, ‘they never really did see me.’ In opposition to this erasure, Malcolm X asserts his own presence, the reality of the many identities he realized during his life: the hustler, the criminal, the spiritual leader, the political activist and so on. He also uses the autobiographical models of the spiritual narrative, the record of a conversion experience and the success story of a self-made man to inform, enliven and generalize this personal account. What he achieved in his relatively short life was considerable, making him a charismatic figure and a catalyst for political activity. And what he achieved in this, his account

of that life, is just as remarkable: whatever else it is, and that is much, it is one of the great American autobiographies.

Unlike Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr embraced a gospel of non-violence in the quest for racial equality. Like Malcolm X, he was the son of a minister. King grew up immersed in the doctrine of Christian love and in the music and rhetoric of the Baptist church. Both were to affect him profoundly, as was his extensive reading of theological and literary texts as a college student and afterwards. King became a minister of a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. Soon after that, in 1955, he gave his first civil rights address. Between then and his assassination in 1968, he travelled the nation giving approximately two thousand speeches and sermons: among them ‘I Have a Dream’ (1963), the climactic speech at a massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, and ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’, the speech he gave in Memphis the night before he was killed. ‘I Have a Dream’ illustrates King’s characteristic rhetorical strategy, learned from the many sermons he had both heard and given, of using memorable images, verbal play, literary allusions and Biblical borrowings to communicate his message. As the insistent use of the phrase which gives that speech its title shows, it also indicates his love of incremental repetition: using a repeated phrase (‘I have a dream’) to build one statement, one sentence, on another. It is a device at least as old as the King James Version of the Bible, as American as the poems of Langston Hughes and Whitman, and it gives to many of his speeches and sermons the irresistible force of a tidal wave. ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’, in turn, reviving the old slave identification of themselves with the Biblical Hebrews, trapped in Egyptian bondage, shows how skilfully, and passionately, King could update the religion and world view of slavery, making all this relevant to a new struggle for freedom. At the close of the speech, King boldly compares himself to Moses. ‘I’ve seen the promised land,’ he told his audience, ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.’ King was hardly to know that his death, a few hours after delivering this speech, was to give his words an additional resonance, an eerily prophetic ring. But, as the speech indicates, he did know exactly how to weave different traditions of thought and language, many of them black and some of them white, into a series of intricate, intense variations on the theme, the message that concludes ‘I Have a Dream’: ‘Let freedom ring’.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised in Buffalo, New York, Ishmael Reed (1938– ) interviewed Malcolm X for a local Buffalo radio programme, as a result of which the programme series was cancelled. Moving to New York City in 1962, he helped found the East Village Other, one of the first and best-known alternative newspapers. He also became involved in the formation of the Black Arts movement. However, his participation in that movement was always both participatory and adversarial. A complex, combative thinker, Reed acknowledges that the black element reveals the permeable nature of American experience and identity. But he also insists on the permeable nature of blackness. He has made it his aim, as a poet, playwright, essayist and, above all, a novelist, to live between cultures and dramatize

the exchanges between them. And he has done so not only in his own writing but also in editing works like MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997) and in founding the Before Columbus Foundation in 1976, a multiethnic organization dedicated to promoting a pan-cultural view of America. Reed is not afraid of controversy. The first of his major novels, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), for instance, represents a subversive departure from the autobiographical style of earlier African American narratives. It also offers a parody of Invisible Man, for many critics the masterwork of African American fiction. Nor is he frightened of going against the grain of any prevailing critical or creative fashion. The sheer slipperiness of his works has, in fact, led to him being given many wildly different labels. He has been called a revolutionary and a reactionary (a judgement of his position that he satirized in his poem ‘The Reactionary Poet’ [1978] ), a satirist and a postmodernist. Perhaps it would be more accurate to see him as someone who uses tradition to illuminate and reinvigorate tradition, combining continuity and the spontaneous, the impromptu, in a cultural dynamic that Amiri Baraka described as ‘the changing room’.

In some of his best work, for example, Reed has taken up a common theme of African American writing, the return to the past, to origins and the revolt against the present, and given it a new, multicultural twist. Reed has insisted, often, that his abiding interest lies in the connection between then and now, the dead and the living. ‘Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future,’ he said once; ‘that is prophecy.’ And, he added, ‘the black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future’. With Reed, what he tries to resurrect goes back to what he calls ‘the genius of Afro satire’. This he excavates, and then explores, in his fiction, so as to catch a sense of reality that is protean, spontaneous and at odds with any definition of culture in singular terms. ‘Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing,’ he tells the reader in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. ‘Like the Marxists who secularised his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard.’ In order to restore the laughter, and with it a sense of risk, the tricky, tricksy complexity of things, Reed has elaborated what he describes as his ‘Voodoo aesthetic’, the determining feature of which is its roots in plurality, a mutually reflective, uncoercive ‘crisscross’ of cultural forms. Monoculturalism, or what Reed has termed ‘Atomism’, lies at the heart of Western thought: politically, people may be ‘left’, ‘right’ or ‘middle’, but, he argues, ‘they are all together on the sacredness of Western civilisation and its mission’. His task, simply and radically, is to ‘humble JudeoChristian culture’, with its presumptions to a monopoly on the truth, and to affirm instead not African American culture as such (that would simply mean substituting one monolith with another) but the multiplicity of cultures: to replace the cultural subordination of ‘Western civilisation’ with the idea of a multiculture.

What all this means, for novels as otherwise diverse as Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada (1976), The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), is serious fun and a teasing, passionate waywardness. Voodoo, Reed has said, ‘teaches that past is present’; and each of these novels, and others, offers that lesson in a sly,

subversive, jokily – and sometimes horrifically – disjunctive way. The resistance here is to the narrow functional forms favoured by what one of Reed’s characters in Mumbo Jumbo dismisses as the ‘neo-social realist gang’. More particularly, it is to any traditional kind of African American narrative that, as Reed himself has put it, ‘limits and enslaves us’ by confining black experience to a singular, linear model. The writer metamorphoses into the voodoo-man or magician, the trickster god weaving backwards and forwards in time and between different levels of narration. And the writing turns on a syncretic, densely textured and multilayered vision of reality – with the clear enemy, the target, being the idea of a master narrative, the overdetermined. In Flight to Canada, for instance, Reed picks up the old form of the slave narrative and then, through a transformation of style, changes a remembrance of servitude into an act of liberation. A flight from slavery is enacted twice in the book: the first time in a poem called ‘Flight to Canada’ written by a character called Quicksill, and the second time in Quicksill’s escape to Canada. But a flight from slavery also is the book. ‘For him, freedom was the writing,’ it is said of Quicksill. And freedom is the writing of Flight to Canada the novel as well as ‘Flight to Canada’ the poem, as Reed deploys self-reflexiveness, parody, deliberate anachronism and constant crisscrossing between different histories and cultures to manoeuvre himself out of the straightjacket of social realism. According to some critics, at least, the traditional slave narrative was constrained by its moral earnestness, its patient accumulation of detail. It was a clear illustration of what some black commentators in particular have seen as the political uses to which the abolitionists put black literacy: with a prescriptive and painstaking verisimilitude denying blacks the possession of their own story, or the possibility of breaking out of monocultural forms. Flight to Canada, on the other hand, with its punning title, its mixing of an antebellum setting with casual references to the dreck of contemporary culture, and its irreverent humour (‘Go to the theatre,’ a slaveowner advises Abraham Lincoln; ‘Get some culture’) slips off all these shackles. The Civil War is spliced with the civil rights wars of the 1960s, with the image of Lincoln’s assassination, for example, being constantly replayed in slow motion on the late night news. Edgar Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade and Captain Kidd mingle with such props of the modern age as television, jumbo jets and Time magazine. And a slaveowner declares himself doubly outraged at his runaway slaves because, as he puts it, ‘they furtively pilfered themselves’. Through meaningful mischief such as this (slaves are property but also, for the purposes of moral censure, people), through shrewd mixings and the sudden splicing of stories, Reed slips the reader the message that freedom springs from confluence not control, an easygoing commerce between cultures. Reed refuses to be slave to his narrative, Flight to Canada or elsewhere. In the process, he resites the act of connection between living and dead in an altered demography. This a return to origin, a flight into and out of the past that occurs within a fictional version of the uncertainty principle: an America that seems to follow no set rules, other than those of diversity, chance and change.

Two African American writers whose return to origins is less slippery are Ernest Gaines (1933– ) and Albert Murray (1916– ). ‘I go to San Francisco but I cannot

stay away from here,’ Gaines has observed. ‘Here’ is Louisiana, where Gaines spent his childhood and most of his youth. Born to a black sharecropping family in the Point Coupe parish, Gaines was working in the fields by the time he was nine and, after his parents separated and his father disappeared, he was brought up by a crippled but indomitable great aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson, who, Gaines was to say later, ‘did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing’. Then, in his fifteenth year, he joined his mother in northern California, which has been his main residence ever since. He returns regularly to Louisiana, however. More to the point, his collection of stories, Bloodline (1968), and all his novels are set in the fictional parish of St Raphael, based on the parish in which he was born. Return to the homeplace is a shaping impulse in Gaines’s fiction, from his first novel Catherine Carmier (1964) through In My Father’s House (1978) to A Lesson Before Dying (1993). So is Gaines’s desire to resurrect what he sees as a missing history. Covering a period as far back as the 1860s, but concentrating as Gaines himself has said on the era ‘between the thirties and the late seventies’, his works tell the story of cultural confluence and social conflict between whites, Cajuns and blacks, but they focus on the group whose past has, the author feels, been ignored or actively suppressed, the ‘peasants’, ‘the blacks of the fields’. Certain themes recur throughout – manhood and, in particular, what is called in In My Father’s House ‘the gap’ between black fathers and their sons, womanhood as the arbiter of value and guarantee of continuity in the Southern black community, the moment of trial, testing, when a person has the ‘chance to stand’ (to borrow a phrase from Gaines’s 1983 novel A Gathering of Old Men) and so assert his courage and define himself. But the determining factor in all of Gaines’s fiction is not so much this theme or that but voice. ‘I come from a long line of storytellers,’ Gaines has said. His fiction, he has admitted, works best when he ‘can get into the person of some other character and let him carry the story’. So in The Autobiography of Miss Jean Pittman (1971), the title character, based on Gaines’s great aunt, recovers her past and that of her people in a heroic act of tale telling. In A Gathering of Old Men, the old men testify to past weakness and announce their newly found courage in a series of overlapping monologues. And in A Lesson Before Dying, a young black man condemned to death seizes the chance to be in touch with his own humanity by bearing witness to it in his diary. In each case, and others, voice becomes a means to empowerment for Gaines’s characters – and, by implication, for the black community to which they belong. The silence is broken, the suppressed history released, in an act that involves both a recovery of folk idioms, the rhythms of the past, and resistance to the present; talking here has a clear social dimension – in terms of the speech author, narrator and character employ, the personal is the political.

With Albert Murray, what has been returned to is not so much voice, the oral tradition, as the blues idiom. Like Gaines, Murray has drawn on a number of European and white American influences, but the most powerful shaping factor has been his African Americanism: in this case, the general, nurturing aspects of the African American community described in his essay collection South to a Very

Old Place (1971), and the specific cultural forms celebrated in such books as The Hero and the Blues (1973) and Stomping the Blues (1976). For Murray, the blues idiom works like classical tragedy. It supplies a stylistic code for dramatizing the most terrible, painful situations; and it offers a strategy for living with, even triumphing over, them, surviving with dignity and grace. As with any developed aesthetic form, the blues idiom enables the artist to transform the grit of raw experience into significant art, to celebrate human possibility, ‘in spite of the fact that human existence is so often mostly a low-down dirty shame’. Murray has realized his belief in the formal and moral potential of the blues in his fictional trilogy, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991) and The Seven League Boots (1996). The three novels trace the growth of their protagonist and narrator, Scooter, from his childhood in smalltown Alabama to his maturity as a bass player in a touring jazz band. Along the way, he learns lessons about living and testifying from his family, friends and neighbours: from the man, for instance, who plays guitar ‘as if he were also an engineer telling tall tales on a train whistle’. Above all, he learns individual worth and communal responsibility; he discovers that the best life is in an instinctive, rhythmic exchange between self and others – something like the relationship between musicians, the jazz soloist and the supporting band.

Two African American male writers of an earlier generation who have had a significant impact in the period since the Second World War are John O. Killens (1916–87) and John A. Williams (1925– ). Killens published his first novel, Youngblood (1954), during the early years of the civil rights struggle. Bearing the stamp of its times, it describes the lives of four characters in the segregationist South who fight against oppression. His 1967 novel ’Sippi also addresses the struggle for racial equality. In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull is Worth Half the Herd (1971), however, he moved away from racial protest to satire, exploring the conflicting claims of Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism specifically within the black community. A more prolific writer than Killens, John A. Williams has produced eleven novels, six non-fiction books, one play and many essays. His main claim to fame, however, is The Man Who Cried I Am (1967). Structurally complex, The Man has a double chronology. On one level, it recounts one day in the life of its protagonist, a writer called Max Reddick. Terminally ill, Reddick discovers an international agenda for annihilating all people of African origin; the day ends with his murder. On another level, the novel moves through the entire experience of Reddick, with special reference to his encounters with American racism. The net effect of this chronology and the structural complexity is to problematize the notion of history. History is written out not in linear terms, as a monolith, but as myriad – changing, contingent, related to states of being, habits of narration. It is seen, in short, as inextricable from power, its truth dependent on whose story manages to get told. This was a perception to be taken up, structurally and theoretically, by a number of other African American writers, some of whom have acknowledged Williams’s influence; among them Charles R. Johnson, John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison.

John Edgar Wideman (1941– ) began as a self-conscious Modernist. It was only after a long writing hiatus, in the late 1970s, that he learned, as he put it, ‘a new language to talk about my experience’. The result of this was his ‘Homewood Trilogy’ (Damballah [1981], Hiding Place [1981], Sent for You Yesterday [1983] ), set in his birthplace, Pennsylvania’s Homewood community, reconstructing the family history and reclaiming and recording the central role played by his great- great-great grandmother, a runaway slave, in founding an African American version of the city upon a hill. Aware now of what he has called the ‘pervasive process of the paradigm of race’, Wideman sees himself as a ‘seer/writer’ who uses his narrative powers to access racial memories, to struggle against forgetting, to ‘break out, to knock down the walls’ that separate African Americans from their past. And that project has led him into non-fiction, notably meditations on grave family tragedies involving his brother and son (Brothers and Keepers [1981], Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons [1994] ), as well as into documentary fiction in Philadelphia Fire (1990), his novel concerning the bombing by the city of Philadelphia of a house occupied by a militant African American organization in 1985. For Charles R. Johnson (1948– ), by contrast, the racial paradigm has always been there in his complex, allusive work. In each of his novels, an educated African American male comes to the discovery of himself through an understanding of the nature and definition of freedom. In each novel, also, Johnson explores and subverts traditional genres as he investigates the relationship between meaning and being, history and knowledge. So, in Middle Passage (1990), Johnson draws on such diverse sources as the sea story and the slave narrative, Moby-Dick, Arthur Gordon Pym and Invisible Man, to tell the story of a newly freed slave, Rutherford Calhoun. To escape debts and an impending marriage, Rutherford jumps aboard the first ship leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary tribe. What follows, told in the form of a ship’s log, fluctuates between historical naturalism, magic and myth as Rutherford tells how he came to mediate between the tribe and his shipmates, and to learn a new paradigm – a new prism through which to look at himself and his relation to the world.

The determining influence of race on a writer like Johnson is suggested by the fact that his first novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), draws on the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, while his third, Dreamer (1999), draws on the life of Martin Luther King. For James Alan McPherson (1943– ), race is less of a determinant, however: or, at least, race in exclusive, oppositional terms. In his short story collections Hue and Cry (1969) and Elbow Room (1977), McPherson has explored his vision of an America whose citizens would be, as he has put it, ‘a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal’. Racially inflected though the stories are – dealing, that is, with specific problems of racial prejudice and injustice – their bias is towards more general issues of diversity and identity: how the complex character of any community or identity can be denied by any failure of the imagination. With Leon Forrest (1937–97) and David Bradley (1950– ), the canvas is wider in a formal sense and more targeted thematically.

Forrest, for instance, created his own sprawling fictional world of Forest County, based on his homeplace of Cook County, Illinois, in his trilogy There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (1977) and Two Wings Veil My Face (1984). Stylistically dense and innovative, the three novels are linked not just by their shared location but by interlocking genealogies and the developing consciousness of a protagonist who grows to maturity during the course of them. Not only that, they are connected by their common concern with orphanhood. Like Hughes, Ellison, Baldwin and so many other African American writers, Forrest sees his race as the orphans of the nation, seeking the place, the parentage they have been consistently denied. A sense of orphanhood leads inevitably into the search for a past, which is the subject of The Chaneysville Incident (1981), the second and major novel of David Bradley. The incident the title refers to is a collective suicide. According to local legend, the protagonist John Washington learns, his forebear and thirteen slaves killed themselves at Chaneysville, Pennsylvania, on the Underground Railroad route. Determined to discover the truth about this, John, a history professor, undertakes assiduous research. The research remains abortive, at first. It is only when John’s wife, white and the descendant of slaveholders, joins him and questions his motives that the gaps in the story begin to be imaginatively bridged. The slaves evidently chose death in preference to threatened recapture and a return to bondage. Out of respect, a white miller then buried them: an act of empathy between the races that is repeated in the restored relationship between John and his wife. Complexly mixing black and white narrative forms, The Chaneysville Incident bears witness to the chance of racial reconciliation in both the past and the present; and it does so through the use of a familiar trope in African American texts, the speaking of a silenced history. By forging the link between history and storytelling, too, it inscribes the belief that finding a past and a voice are indissolubly linked enterprises. And to this it adds a rider: to find a voice is to find oneself, as an individual, a race and a nation.

Defining a new black identity in drama

An African American dramatist who believed equally in possibility, the chance to be and express oneself, was Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65). Accused by some critics of confining herself to the conventions of the well-made play, and verisimilitude, Hansberry replied by insisting that what she was after was ‘genuine realism’. This she carefully distinguished from naturalism. ‘Naturalism tends to take the world as it is,’ she explained; ‘but . . . I think that the artist who is creating the realistic work imposes on it not only what is but what is possible . . . because that is part of reality too.’ Hansberry believed firmly that people could, as she put it, ‘impose the reasons for life on life’; and she was profoundly sceptical about any intellectual or artistic tendency that seemed to her to deny hope or the opportunity for social change. When she died, for instance, one of the unpublished plays she left satirized Waiting for Godot (1956) by Samuel Beckett and what she felt was the spiritual bankruptcy of absurdism. Born and brought up in Chicago, the child of middle-class parents

who dared to move into a white neighbourhood and faced the threat of violence as a result, Hansberry decided to become a writer after seeing a performance of Juno and the Paycock (1925) by Sean O’Casey. She wanted to capture the authentic voice of the African American working class. After associating with various prominent figures in the cultural life of Harlem and working on Freedom, a newspaper founded by the singer and activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976), she began working on a play set in the South Side of Chicago. Originally titled ‘The Crystal Stair’, after a line from a poem by Langston Hughes, it was eventually named after another line from a Hughes poem called ‘Harlem’. ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ Hughes had asked. ‘Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun? . . . / Or does it explode?’ Hansberry called her play, a dramatization of dreams deferred that threaten to explode, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

A Raisin in the Sun has been compared to Native Son. Set in a black Chicagoan working-class environment, it explores, as Richard Wright’s novel does, frustrations and struggles that are determined by the primary fact of race. It even opens in the same explosive way, with the sound of an alarm clock that seems to herald crisis and to call on the audience to pay attention. While Hansberry investigates many of the same issues as Wright, though – the relation of material wealth to human dignity, the crippling consequences of poverty and racial prejudice, the conflict between separation and assimilation – she does so in a different key, a more hopeful register. The dramatic premise is simple. An insurance benefit of ten thousand dollars paid on the death of the father of the household becomes the source of conflict within the Younger family, as Mama Lena Younger, the widow, beneficiary and matriarch, argues with her son, Walter Younger Jr, over its use. Not only does the premise allow Hansberry to unravel the tensions within the family, tensions that are clearly symptomatic of differences within the African American community as a whole, it enables her to suggest the intimacy of their shared experience – and their ultimate solidarity in the face of white prejudice and oppression. In the end, resisting white threats and attempts at bribery, Walter Younger Jr goes along with his mother’s desire to move from their cramped apartment into a white neighbourhood. ‘We come from people who had a lot of pride,’ Walter tells a white man who tries to dissuade the Younger family from becoming his neighbours. ‘We have decided to move into our house because my father – my father – he earned it.’ ‘He finally come into his manhood today, didn’t he?’ Mama Lena proudly observes of her son. ‘Kind of like a rainbow after the rain.’ Working together, despite their disputes and differences, they end the play preparing for the move that will change their lives, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill, probably both. The dream is no longer deferred.

Hansberry never wrote a play to equal A Raisin in the Sun. Another work, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), about the vacillation of a Jewish intellectual between disenchantment and commitment, was produced with only moderate success. Other work, which showed her edging towards feminist issues and the discovery of her own lesbianism, was never produced or published during her lifetime. By contrast, another African American woman playwright, Adrienne

Kennedy (1931– ), has been enormously prolific and has seen her work produced by numerous different companies in the United States and Europe. More than a dozen plays have been published, together with several autobiographical works of non-fiction and a novella. A number of pieces have been commissioned by drama companies, ranging from the Juilliard School in New York to the Royal Court in London. She even worked with John Lennon on a dramatic version of his writing. ‘I see my writing as a growth of images. I think all my plays come out of dreams I had two or three years before,’ Kennedy has said. Her dramatic style is, in fact, a vivid mix of expressionism, surrealism and African ritual. She uses non-linear plots, dream imagery, split characters who exist in trancelike states, and fragmented formats. Characters may be played by more than one actor, one character may mutate into another, masks and music may be used. What she creates is a mosaic woven around figures whose sense of identity seems to be floating, fluid, permeable. In her first professionally produced play, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), for instance, she deployed her experience as an African American female, her travels in Europe and her knowledge of the classics to dramatize the ambiguities of a people, like her own, created out of the clash between European and American cultures. In The Owl Answers (1965), her personal favourite among her plays, she touches on the quest for identity of a black woman in a world dominated by whites, using composite characters who transform back and forth into different parts of themselves. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), she maps out overlapping dramatic spaces, of family scene and movie scene, as she describes the dilemma of her central character, caught between daylight and dream, her role as a wife and mother and her being as a writer. Kennedy’s many other plays include

Son: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder (1968), An Evening With Dead Essex (1973) and The Alexander Plays (1992). Mixing influences as different as Wagner, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin, characters out of myth and movies, fantasy and history, autobiography and theology, all of them are marked by an intense concern with issues of identification and attachment. ‘There was always great confusion in my own mind where I belonged, if anywhere,’ Kennedy has admitted; and she has turned that confusion into complex drama.

Both Ed Bullins (1935– ) and August Wilson (1945– ) are also seminal figures in the story of African American drama since the war. Bullins was brought up in a tough Philadelphia neighbourhood and knows the violence of the ghetto at firsthand: he was nearly stabbed to death as a youth. The gritty existence his characters lead, in a street world that Bullins describes as ‘natural’ rather than naturalistic, reflects the influence of that environment. After a spell in the navy, and travelling around America, he settled in San Francisco. There he joined other African American writers to form Black Arts West, a militant cultural and political organization, and to direct the Black House Theatre. Other writers committed, like him, to drama as an agent of cultural and political change included Ben Caldwell (1937– ) and Ron Milner (1938– ). The writer who influenced him most, however, was Amiri Baraka. In his play Dutchman in particular, Baraka had used elements of myth, mixing absurdist conventions and realistic strategies with a brittle colloquialism to tell a

fast-paced tale of a fatal encounter between a provocative white woman and a naive, middle-class black man. The woman, called Lula, turns from flirtation to taunts as she attacks the black man, Clay, for playing the role which the dominant white society has handed him. Clay finally replies with all the force of racial hatred that he has repressed in order to survive, claiming that for a black man repression and conformity are necessary because murder is the only alternative. Furious at losing control of the situation, Lula fatally stabs Clay. She then orders the other riders on the subway train where she and Clay have met and where all the action occurs to remove his body. As they are doing so, the play ends with another black man entering the subway car and Lula begins her act all over again. The claustrophobic physical setting, the sense of irresistible force and motion, and, not least, the constant references to Adam and Eve, fairytales and the Flying Dutchman all suggest the synthesis of styles and approaches at work in this powerful tale of racial tension and sexual repression. Clearly affected by this, and other plays by Baraka, Bullins has created his own special mix of streetwise dialogue and sophisticated dramatology, the vernacular and the mythic, in the more than fifty plays he has written, starting with Clara’s Old Man (1965) and Goin’ a Buffalo (1968).

Goin’ a Buffalo, for instance, is about a group of characters, prostitutes and pimps, living on the edge in Los Angeles. ‘This play is about some black people,’ Bullins tells us in the initial stage directions. For these people, money, drugs and sex circumscribe their lives. They are caught, it seems, in enclosed spaces that reflect their captive, constrained status in society; and they are bewildered by the gap, or rather chasm, that opens out between the promise of America and the realities, the sheer violence of their everyday existence. For them, Buffalo, on the other side of the American continent, beckons as an escape, a chance to realize the unrealizable dream of freedom and a fresh start. The dream, however, dissolves in conflict, manipulation and deception. Bullins later chose to include Goin’ a Buffalo in his Twentieth-Century Cycle, a proposed series of twenty plays on the African American experience, that deals not so much with race relations as with the everyday lives of African Americans. Other, subsequent plays in the series include In the Wine Time (1968), Home Boy (1976) and Boy x Man (1995). All the plays in the series so far, together with those outside it, carry his familiar trademarks. ‘Each individual in the crowd’, Bullins has written, ‘should have his sense of reality confronted, his consciousness assaulted.’ So, his plays consistently startle in their immediacy, their raw power of language and action, their concentration on the psychosocial anger of African American culture. The ‘natural’ style Bullins says he follows is a product of craft, calculation. Music, particularly rhythm and blues and jazz, is used to frame the actions and focus feeling. Symbolism, such as the symbols of boxes, enclosures, that run through Goin’ a Buffalo, establishes meaning. Language, a stripped, rhythmic vernacular, discloses only what the characters want to disclose: there is no obvious attempt made to impose a meaning, impart a message. This is an art that resists overt ideology – Bullins left the Black House Theatre when he felt that there was too much pressure on him to produce simply agitprop plays – but that nevertheless explores the many avenues by which

drama can issue out of and return to black life, carrying with it in the process a series of potentially revolutionary ideas. As such, it represents, perhaps, the finest realization of the black aesthetic on the stage.

While Bullins has been central to the story of alternative theatre, success on the mainstream stage has tended to elude him. By contrast, August Wilson has enjoyed considerable mainstream success. His Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982),

Fences (1983), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984), The Piano Lesson (1986), Two Trains Running (1992) and Seven Guitars (1995) were all produced on Broadway, for the most part to critical and commercial acclaim. Born on ‘The Hill’, a racially mixed area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a black mother and a white father he seldom saw, Wilson encountered racial prejudice early. He also encountered two formative cultural influences: black talk and black music. In a cigar store in Pittsburgh, he has recalled, he would stand around when he was young listening to old men telling tales and swapping stories. Later, listening to the records of the blues singer Bessie Smith, he became determined to capture black cultural and historical experience in his writing. One of his first publications was, in fact, a poem called ‘Bessie’. Beginning to write plays in the 1970s, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom established his reputation. Set in 1920s Chicago, it describes the economic exploitation of black musicians by white record companies and the ways in which victims of racism are compelled to direct their rage at each other rather than at those who caused their oppression. It is also a memorable combination of the vernacular, violence and humour. So is Fences, which concerns the struggles of a working-class family in the 1950s to find security. Here, Wilson also uses myth to tell the story of Troy Maxson, a garbageman, ex-convict and former Negro Baseball League player, who cannot believe that his son will be allowed to benefit from the football scholarship he has been offered.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set some forty years earlier than Fences, in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Focusing on the personal and cultural aftermath of both slavery and the Great Migration, it explores the lives of characters who are in danger of being cut off from their roots. The Piano Lesson, in turn, is placed in 1937, in Pittsburgh: concentrating on a conflict between a brother and a sister, over who has the right to own a family heirloom, the piano of the title, it dramatizes the debate between African American and mainstream cultural values. Two Trains Running moves forward several decades, to the late 1960s – to a coffee shop where regulars discuss their troubled relation to the times – and Seven Guitars then moves back to the 1940s. Wilson has declared that, as a playwright, he wants to ‘tell a history that has never been told’. His major plays reflect this. For him, they are all part of a major project: a cycle of ten plays, each of them intended to investigate a central issue facing African Americans in a different decade of the twentieth century. He is aiming at nothing less than raising the collective awareness, rewriting the history of every decade so that black life becomes a more acknowledged part of the theatrical history – and, for that matter, the general history – of America. In 1991, Wilson recalled that his plan, to bring a silenced past into dramatic speech, began with ‘a typewritten yellow-labelled record titled “Nobody

in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine” by someone called Bessie Smith’. ‘It was the beginning’, he explained, ‘of my consciousness that I was a representative of a culture and the carrier of some very valuable antecedents.’ He has continued to pursue that plan ever since, in plays that work precisely as the ‘yellow-labelled record’ did: by bringing a whole culture, and its past, to life, with rhythmic flair and passion.

Telling impossible stories: Recent African American fiction

If any novelist can be said to have a project similar to that of August Wilson in drama, it is surely Toni Morrison (1931– ). ‘For me, in doing novels about African Americans,’ she has declared, ‘I was trying to move away from the unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that was white history and to move it into another one.’ Her work can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric histories of the American experience from a distinctively African American perspective. A series of fictional interventions in American historiography, her novels draw what she has called, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), ‘the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States’ from the margins of the imagination to the centre of American literature and history. What has been distinctive about the history of the United States, Morrison has argued, is ‘its claim to freedom’ and ‘the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment’. This was, and remains, ‘a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression’. As such, it ‘presents a singular landscape for a writer’. And her aim in mapping that landscape has been twofold. On the one hand, she has charted a specifically black history, giving voice to the silence: pointing to the culpability for it of white America’s ‘failure’ to apportion human rights equally, while simultaneously celebrating that history’s achievements and identifying its own failings. On the other, she maps out a general history of America from the readjusted perspective, the angle of black experience. As Morrison has noted in Playing in the Dark, ‘Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness – from its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating twentieth-century self ’. The history of black America, over the last two hundred years and perhaps more, is the history of America, as she sees it. So what she is pursuing, reclaiming in imaginative terms, is a history of the whole American experience.

‘The crucial difference for me is not the difference between fact and fiction,’ Morrison once admitted, ‘but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.’ That search for truth began with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). It has a simple premise. A narrator, Claudia McTeer, tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl whose hunger for love is manifested in a desire for blue eyes that eventually drives her to insanity. What complicates things is both structural and social. Morrison has said that one of her goals as a writer is ‘to have the reader work with the writer in the

construction of the book’. And here she uses a number of narrative devices to realize that goal. The novel opens, for example, with a parodic passage from a Dick and Jane school primer that presents an ideal, inevitably white family: the kind of cultural intervention that seems calculated to create false consciousness. Working with the writer here, and elsewhere in the novel, the reader gradually unravels a tale of personal and social disintegration. Pecola, it seems, is driven inward, by the norms of white society (the bluest eye, the ideal family), to shame, the destruction and division of the self. Claudia, the narrator, finds herself directed outward, to anger against white society: finding a convenient scapegoat, a focus for anger, for instance, in the ‘white baby dolls’ she cuts up and destroys. The Bluest Eye deconstructs the image of the white community as the site of normality and perfection. It also exposes the realities of life in an impoverished African American community, whose abject socioeconomic status is exacerbated by the politics of race. Those politics point, in particular, to internalized racism, manacles that are mind-forged as well as devastatingly material. As Morrison has put it in an Afterword to a recent, reprinted edition of the novel, ‘the trauma of racism is, for the racist and victim, the severe fragmentation of the self ’.

Co-extensive with Morrison’s concern with the psychosocial consequences of racism is her interest in what she calls ‘silence and evasion’: the shadows and absences, the gaps and omissions in American history. In her second novel, Sula (1973), for example, she shows how a black community evolves and shapes itself, with its own cultural resources and elaborate social structure. She rescues it from a kind of historical anonymity. Through the lives of the two main characters, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, in turn, she opens up the area of intimate friendship between African American women. Also, through a poignant account of the rifts and disputes between Sula and Nel, she charts differences, the diverse paths and possibilities available to females as part of or apart from communal tradition. Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), sustains her commitment to what is called here ‘names that had a meaning’: the evolution of a distinctive black identity and community through the habit of language. A complex tapestry of memory and myth, Song of Solomon tells the story of a young man, Milkman Dead, who comes to know himself through a return to origins. He is captivated by the legends surrounding his family, from slave times. He learns, in particular, from the stories of men who flew to freedom and the realities of women who remained to foster and to nurture. Just as the novel does, he returns to the past and, through that, discovers how to live in the present. Tar Baby (1981) also pursues themes of ancestry and identity, how African Americans come to name and know themselves. It does this primarily through the contrast between two characters, Jadine Childs, a model, and William (Son) Green, an outcast and wanderer. Jadine, brought up with the help of white patrons, has been assimilated into white culture; Son remains outside it, in resistance to it. Drawn to each other, they seem to be trying to ‘rescue’ each other, the one from assimilation, the other from separation. ‘One had a past, the other a future and each bore the culture to save the race in his hands,’ the reader is told. ‘Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me?

Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?’ The love affair between them is aborted. Neither fundamentally changes. And although the perspective on Jadine is less than sympathetic (‘she has forgotten her ancient properties,’ one oracular black character observes of her), the identity crisis posed by the conflict between her and Son is never really resolved. Morrison adopts her usual strategy, of leaving the narrative debate open.

With her fifth and most important novel so far, Beloved (1987), Morrison took the core of a real story she had encountered while working as a senior editor at Random House. It was recorded in The Black Book (1974), an eclectic collection of material relating to more than three hundred years of African American history. And it concerned a fugitive slave called Margaret Garner who killed her daughter, then tried to kill her other children and herself rather than be returned to slavery. Morrison took this as the nucleus, the germ of her story about Sethe Suggs, who killed her own young daughter, Beloved, when faced with the same threat. Circling backwards and forwards in time, before and after the Civil War, the novel discloses how Sethe and other characters – especially her daughter Denver and her lover Paul D – struggle with a past that cannot yet must be remembered, that cannot yet must be named. In other words, it pivots around the central contradiction in African American, and for that matter American, history: living with impossible memories. There is the need to remember and tell and the desire to forget; there are memories here with an inexhaustible, monstrous power to erupt and overwhelm the mind that must somehow be commemorated yet laid aside if life is to continue. It is a contradiction caught in a phrase repeated in the concluding section of the narrative: ‘it was not a story to pass on’ (where ‘pass on’ could mean either ‘pass over’ or ‘pass on to others’). It is one caught, too, in the scandalous nature of the act, the killing that haunts Sethe. In that sense, the mother/daughter relationship that Morrison characteristically focuses on here is at once a denial of the institution of slavery and a measure of its power.

Beloved is an extraordinary mix of narrative genres. It has elements of realism, the Gothic and African American folklore. It is a slave narrative that internalizes slavery and its consequences. It is a historical novel that insists on history as story, active rehearsal and reinvention of the past. It weaves its way between the vernacular and a charged lyricism, the material and the magical, as it emphasizes the centrality of the black, and in particular black female, experience. It also forces the reader to collaborate with the author, narrator and characters in the construction of meaning: the energetic refiguring of a past that is seen as a necessary precondition of the present – determining (and so to be resurrected) yet different (and so to be laid to rest). This involvement of the reader in the exhumation of a secret that is also the narrative’s secret – the unspeakable heart of the story that remains intimated rather than spoken – is the main grounds for the emotional intensity of Beloved. This is a novel that reorients history, American history in particular, to the lived experience of black people. It is also a passionate novel that sets up a vital, unbreakable circuit between historical events and emotional consequences, and then connects up that circuit to any one, black or white, or whatever, who reads it. We the readers are

caught as the main characters of Beloved are in the ‘look’, the gaze that seeks to reduce the black subject to the position of otherness. We share with these characters the rigours of the disciplined body – the denial of the ownership of one’s own flesh. We also participate in the strenuous, successful effort to resist all this: the right to one’s own body and consciousness, the responsibility for them in the past, present and future. Above all, we share in the project of naming. ‘Did a whiteman saying make it so?’ Paul D asks himself at one point. The immediate answer turns out to be ‘yes’; the ultimate answer is ‘no’. The novel and its characters turn out, after all, to offer another form of ‘saying’, a more authentic way of seeing and telling the personal and historical past. That is why the last word of Beloved is, precisely, ‘Beloved’; because the whole aim of the story, and its protagonist, has been to name the unnameable. That way, we know by now, African Americans, and all Americans, can come to terms with a past that should be told, that will not be told (the paradox is irresolvable) – and then, perhaps, be able to continue.

After Beloved, Morrison published two books that, with it, form part of a loosely connected trilogy, Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). Morrison has said that the three novels are about ‘various kinds of love’: the love of a mother for her child, romantic love and ‘the love of God and love for fellow human beings’. The three might equally be described as charting the history of African Americans. Jazz, set in Harlem in 1926, was inspired by Morrison reading in a book she was editing, The Harlem Book of the Dead, about a young woman who, as she lay dying, refused to identify her lover as the person who has shot her. What distinguishes the novel more than its plot, however, is Morrison’s innovative way of telling it. Imitating the improvisational techniques of jazz music, she presents us with a narrative that constantly revisits events and a narrator who frankly confesses her fallibility. ‘I have been careless and stupid,’ the narrator declares at one point, ‘and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.’ History is consequently presented as a process of constant telling and retelling, with the openings for chance, the impromptu and mistake that that implies. And, at the end, the responsibility for that process is passed on to us, the readers. ‘Make me, remake me,’ the narrator tells us. ‘You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.’ Paradise is set in 1976. In describing the intimate contact between two communities, though, one a black township and the other a refuge for women, it circles as far back as 1755. It also supplies another example of Morrison’s characteristic strategy of giving voice to the silence while initiating its own forms of silence. That is, it brings those traditionally exiled to the margins, for reasons of race, gender or both, to the centre of the stage; it allows them to name themselves and narrate their history. But it quietly intimates its own lack of authority, the blanks and absences detectable in its own account, and the responsibility that this imposes on the reader.

In Beloved, for example, the reader never knows who the young girl who returns to Sethe during the course of the story is. Is she the ghost of the two-year-old daughter Sethe killed twenty years earlier? Does she recall Sethe’s nameless mother, since some of her dreams and narrations seem to recall the horrors of the Middle

Passage? Is she a myriad figure, a composite of all the women ever dragged into slavery? Or is she a very singular young woman who has been driven mad by her enslavement? We cannot know, for sure: all we can do is allow these possibilities to feed into our own retelling of an intolerable, impossible past, our own project of naming the unnameable. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain what happens at the end of Paradise. The pivotal act of this novel is the shooting, and apparent killing, of the women at the refuge by nine men from the township. Paradise closes, however, with the ‘marvellous’ disappearance of the bodies of the women and the reappearance, then, of four of them. One of the several, unresolved puzzles of this story is, therefore, what they return as, ghosts or human beings who somehow survived the attack. But just as Beloved, for all its push beyond realism, leaves no doubt as to the monstrous fact of slavery and its central place in the story of America (indeed, using magic, mystery, as a measure of that monstrosity), so Paradise leaves no doubt about the necessity for the reappearance of women like these, in some form or another, for the survival of the republic. Paradise is a book about the failures of American democracy (hence its setting in the bicentennial). It is about the strengths and fatal flaws in the black community (hence its complicity in the shootings). It is about the core meaning of the African American story to American history (hence the narrative connections forged with key events since 1776). And it is also a book about the failure of patriarchy. Morrison has resisted the description of herself as a feminist. She is right to do so because Paradise, like all her novels, is so much more than a polemical statement of a position. But, in its own way, it registers a fundamentally optimistic belief in the recovery of the American republic – a belief that all her work tends to share – and, in this case, at the hands of women. The beguiling mystery at the end of Paradise is centred, just as the mystery at the heart of Beloved is, by a powerful analysis of history, past disasters and possible future directions. Any doubts about that surely dissolve in the meditations of one female character as she considers the possibility of reappearance, the return of the women shot by the men of the township. ‘When will they return?’ she asks herself. ‘When will they reappear . . . to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?’ ‘She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there,’ the meditation concludes, ‘darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors – but out there. Which is to say she hoped for a miracle.’

Apart from the occasional excursion into drama (Dreaming Emmett [1986] ) and critical and social theory (Playing in the Dark, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality [1992] ), Morrison has focused on the writing of novels. By contrast, Alice Walker (1944– ) has written six novels, on which her reputation rests, but she has also produced five volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, three volumes of essays and four children’s books. All her work, in different genres, is dedicated to what she has come to call ‘womanism’. This she defines in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1987) as a form of black feminism that ‘appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s flexibility . . . and women’s strength’. Womanism, according to Walker, is not

narrowly exclusive. On the contrary, it is ‘committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female’. Still, she tends to concentrate on the evolution of female wholeness: the development of identity and community among black women ‘in the face’, as she puts it, ‘of the Great White Western Commercial of white and male supremacy’. In her non-fiction, this has led her to search out and celebrate her connection with other African American women, particularly writers. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, for instance, is at once a memoir and a series of observations on African American women’s culture. It establishes a specifically womanist tradition, a series of role models from the silent and unheralded (mothers whose gardens or hand-crafted quilts are their art) to the writer who has been the ‘queen bee’ for Walker, Zora Neale Hurston. Searching for foremothers, Walker has helped to establish the pivotal importance of works by African American women. She has also helped to promote that work: for instance, by co-founding a publishing outlet, the Wild Tree Press, and by editing I Love Myself When I Am Laughing (1979), a seminal selection of Hurston’s prose.

In fiction, Walker inaugurated her career with The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a realistic novel describing three generations of a family whose history is marred by racial oppression and sexual violence. It is notable, in particular, for its stark account of a repetitive cycle of abuse, wife beating and sexual exploitation, within the black family and community. Meridian (1976), Walker’s second novel, concentrates on the civil rights movement and the fight for social change. It is, however, centred on the experience of women. Its central character, Meridian Hill, lives in the North but returns to the South to help in a voter registration drive. Meridian, the reader learns, is ‘held by something in the past’, a ‘something’ that includes, above all, her mother and a church that is both her mother’s church and – whether she likes it or not – her mother church. ‘Her mother’s life was sacrifice,’ Meridian reflects. And her main feeling, when she thinks about her, is guilt: guilt over abandoning her own child and so betraying ‘maternal history’, and guilt over involving herself in politics. Meridian never comes to personal terms with her mother but, by returning to her mother’s history and ancestry, she does experience a symbolic rapprochement. ‘Mama, I love you. Let me go,’ Meridian is able to whisper to the figure of her mother she sees in a dream. She has made peace with her, and can move on. Meridian is also able to make her peace and come to terms with the church, and in a less purely symbolic way. For the church she encounters in the South is one transformed by the civil rights revolution. From it, she learns a new song: ‘it is the song of the people, transformed by the experience of each generation, that holds them together’. It offers a new form of personal and sociopolitical revolution; and it enables Meridian to connect her present to her past. Her return to origins has initiated change, but change that is contiguous with the earlier experiences of her community. In that way, she has come back to her own history only to transcend it, and become a whole woman.

Change, a purely secular salvation involving the discovery of identity and community, is also at the heart of The Color Purple (1983). At the centre of this novel is Celie, the victim of racial and sexual oppression. Raped by the man she believes

to be her father, she is battered and abused in a loveless marriage. Nevertheless, she gradually learns ‘how to do it’, how to grow into being and companionship. Her mentors here are three women. One, called Sofia, teaches her by example the lesson of resistance to white and male oppression. Another, her sister Nettie, offers her a more complex lesson, primarily through her letters. A missionary, who goes to work in Africa, Nettie discloses to Celie the ancient, cultural and spiritual dimensions of the African American tradition: the proud inheritance they share. Through her encounters with white colonists and developers, she also quietly links the story of racial oppression in America to a larger history of imperial adventure and conquest. The third mentor Celie encounters is a blues singer, Shug Avery. The first person for whom Celie feels a definite physical attraction, Shug teaches Celie about her body, she offers her the possibility of sexual pleasure. She also unpacks the cultural forms, specific to America, that she and Celie share as African Americans: the sensual promise of jazz, the tragic melancholy of blues. And, like Sofia and Nettie, she leads by example. She is a powerful illustration of selfhood, a person who positively fills the space she occupies. More than anyone, Shug encourages Celie to believe in herself. Everything, Shug suggests, is holy. Everything is worthy of respect and wonder. The divine is to be found not in ‘the old white man’ worshipped in church, in this place or that, but in everything. Even the color purple. Even, and especially, Celie. It is a profoundly American sentiment, this belief in a democracy of being, a divinity that informs every individual. And it allows Celie to flower from absence into presence: to become herself.

That process of becoming herself is co-extensive with learning a language; Celie learns ‘how to do it’ by learning how to say it. The Color Purple is an epistolary novel. Most of the letters are written by Celie. And they measure her growth, not just as a person but into being a person. Language, finding the right words, and being, finding a real self, are inseparable here. At first, the words written by Celie seem to come, as it were, from nowhere. They are a series of shapes to fill a lack; they seem existentially sourceless, because Celie has never been allowed properly to exist – never been given the opportunity to be and know herself. Gradually, though, Celie learns the right words. She develops a language, vibrant and vital, that is a medium of selfhood. As she does so, her letters cease being letters to ‘God’ – sent from nobody to nowhere – and become letters to her sister Nettie. By implication, they are letters to all her sisters, as she edges towards that discovery of communality, the divine in everything, on which her own belief in herself depends. Since writing The Color Purple, Walker has written several books that push at the formal boundaries of fiction while developing themes and revisiting characters first encountered in this seminal 1983 novel. The Temple of My Familiar (1989), for instance, explores a wide variety of subjects from a womanist perspective. It reintroduces Shug Avery; it introduces us to the granddaughter of Celie; and it is, perhaps, not so much a novel as a collection of loosely related tales, a sermon, and a stream of dreams and memories, bound together by the belief that ‘all daily stories are in fact ancient and ancient ones current . . . There is nothing new under the sun.’ In turn, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) picks up the issue of female circumcision, touched

on in The Color Purple as a symptom of male cultural violence; and By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) explores the thin, permeable boundaries between different ethnic traditions, and between life and death. No subsequent book, however, has matched either The Color Purple or Meridian as an account of human wholeness, the discovery of being. And none has matched The Color Purple, in particular, in its revelatory use of form. The Color Purple is not just a story of personal growth that happens to be written as a series of letters. It achieves its meaning precisely by being an epistolary novel: by returning to one of the oldest forms of prose fiction and using that as the source, the key to the opening up of the self. Celie writes herself into existence, into contact with herself and communion with others. And those others include the readers, since the letters are ultimately addressed to us.

Like Toni Morrison, whom she has acknowledged as an influence, Gloria Naylor (1950– ) achieved critical success with her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Consisting of the interrelated tales of seven African American women, all of whom end up in a dead-end street in a northern ghetto, it focuses in particular on male insensitivity and violence. The women range in age from their twenties to their fifties but, like so many of the characters of Alice Walker, they all suffer at the hands of men from their own families and community. With her second novel, Linden Hills (1985), Naylor moved from the ghetto to a middle-class community. Set in the 1980s, the novel traces the journey of a young African American poet, in the company of a fellow poet, through an exclusive black neighbourhood, looking for odd jobs. The resemblance of the two to Virgil and Dante, and of Linden Hills itself to the Dantean Inferno, becomes inescapable. This is a place, it seems, that lost souls inhabit; it is full of those who have sold out, to the dream of success. It is also a place that shares its general geography with Brewster Place: Naylor shares, not only with Morrison but also with Faulkner, an interest in the determining impact of setting and the intention of creating her own fictional map. Her third and fourth novels, Mama Day (1988) and Bailey’s Cafe (1992), extend that map. In Mama Day, Naylor superimposes the two settings of Willow Springs – an island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia – and New York City. In Bailey’s Cafe, she centres the action on a New York City restaurant of that name. These two novels also substantially enlarge her formal range. With Mama Day, for instance, Naylor has said that her aim was to analyse the nature of belief. Reiterating the existence of an ancient African American folk tradition here, she allows the consciousness of the island to narrate some of the novel; she dramatizes exchanges between the living and the dead; and, in effect, she invites the reader to participate in that willing suspension of disbelief that magic, religion and fiction all share. Bailey’s Cafe is different to the extent that it is written in the form of a jazz suite. But it also combines the grimly material and the strangely mythic. The all-night café is a kind of way station for the lost souls who wander in there, and lurking behind it is a realm of fantasy: a dock on the water that is evidently capable of meeting the desperate hopes, the dreams of these lost souls by miraculously transforming reality. In 1998, Naylor published The Men of Brewster Place, which returns to the

men whose violence and indifference made the lives of the women of her first novel miserable. It also grants them a voice. The novel is, perhaps, less formally daring than some of her earlier work but it shows the same imaginative compulsion to map out the mundane facts, the magical dreams and monstrous nightmares that belong to one particular place.

Friendship between women is a common theme in the fiction of Naylor, Walker and Morrison, and also in the novels of Terry McMillan (1951– ) and Sherley Anne Williams (1944–99). McMillan has been called the Frank Yerby (1916–91) of her generation. This seems to miss the point. Like Yerby, McMillan has achieved crossover appeal, in the sense that novels like Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) have attracted a large popular audience. But Yerby made a conscious decision to move from protest writing to popular novels like The Foxes of Harrow (1946). True, he never gave up protest fiction completely; and his romances set in the South offer a revisionist view of its history and a harsh critique of its racism. But he remained, above all, a genre writer; and it was not until 1969, in Speak Now, that he introduced his first black protagonist. McMillan, on the other hand, has concentrated on serious fictive treatments of contemporary issues, notably race and gender, and on the experiences of African American women. Waiting to Exhale, for example, chronicles the lives of four intelligent, unattached females; while How Stella Got Her Groove Back tells the story of a middle-aged mother and divorcee struggling to make her way in the world. Without being programmatic, both novels address the various roles and possibilities open to women of colour in a system still dominated by white males; and they are remarkably resistant to pat solutions. Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams also concentrates on the experience of women. A neo-slave narrative, it recounts the experiences of a woman born into slavery, her struggle for freedom and, in particular, her friendship with a white woman, Ruth Rufel, on whose plantation she stays and works when she becomes a runaway. Williams said that she based the novel on ‘two historical incidents’. One involved an uprising on a coffle, a group of slaves chained together, led by a black woman; the other, occurring a year after this, in 1834, involved a white woman who gave sanctuary to runaway slaves on her isolated farm. ‘How sad, I thought then, that these two women never met,’ she recalled, and she allowed them to do so in her novel. Gradually, Dessa and Ruth form a bond, an intimate friendship that is nevertheless hedged around by inevitable differences of experience and race. And, eventually, they part: one goes east, the other west. Williams also confessed that she had been appalled by The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, which she saw as a travesty, a distortion of the story of slave revolt, and wrote Dessa Rose as a corrective, a critical response. What she produced, as a result, was remarkable. This is a novel that allows the silenced voice of the female slave to speak, not only through its imaginative reclamation of history but also through its musical form. For, in its fundamental narrative rhythm, the telling of a solitary woman’s experience of love denied, bondage, revolt, wandering, freedom and love restored, Dessa Rose imitates the structure of blues: repeating and varying a few central, soulful themes.

Paule Marshall (1929– ) and Jamaica Kincaid (1949– ) approach the experiences of people of colour, especially women, from a different perspective, because of their West Indian background. Kincaid was, in fact, born in Antigua, leaving there for the United States when she was sixteen. Marshall was born in the United States, in Brooklyn; the influence on her of her West Indian background, however, has been profound. The daughter of second-generation Barbadian immigrants, Marshall grew up listening to the tales and talking of her mother and her female West Indian friends, whom she has described in her non-fiction as the ‘poets in the kitchen’. Her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, was also a first in several different ways when it appeared in 1959. It was one of the first novels, since the time of Claude McKay, to explore the link between African American people and their West Indian counterparts. It was one of the first to delve into the inner life of a young black female protagonist. It was also one of the first to explore in detail the relationship between a black mother and daughter. Selina Boyce, the protagonist in Brown Girl, Brownstones, is the daughter of first-generation Barbadian immigrants. She is brought up in the brownstone buildings of Brooklyn, in an area that, as the novel opens in 1939, is experiencing a sea change in terms of its inhabitants. The whites are moving out or ‘discreetly dying’, and West Indian immigrants are moving in. The brownstones constitute an anchor in this sea of racial change; and, as Selina grows up there, listening to the kitchen talk of her mother Silla and her friends, and witnessing the reveries of her father Deighton in his upstairs sun room, she finds herself torn. Her mother, a powerful figure, longs to assimilate, to ‘buy house’ as she puts it and buy into the American dream. Her father, a feckless romantic whom Selina adores, dreams of returning to Barbados. ‘He’s always half-studying some foolishness,’ Silla complains. Doting on her father, wrestling with the overwhelming force and influence of her mother, Selina also has to contend with the prejudice of the white people she encounters: in whose eyes, like ‘a well-lighted mirror’, she sees ‘with a sharp and shattering clarity – the full meaning of her black skin’. Marshall pointedly refuses to resolve the process of cultural and national adaptation Selina engages in as she grows up. At the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones, Selina is still faced with the task of coming to terms with her equivocal feelings about her mother and (now dead) father and the mixed, polyglot character of her inheritance. She plans, however, to leave Brooklyn for the ‘islands’: not, it seems, to imitate the return to origins dreamed of by her father but to retrace the diasporic wanderings of her mother. Silla had arrived by ship from the Caribbean to the New World, ‘watching the city rise glittering with promise from the sea’. ‘I’m truly your child,’ Selina now tells Silla; and she takes up the burden, not of abandoning her American identity – that would be impossible – but of discovering the other cultural fragments required for self-definition.

The wandering quest Selina takes up at the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones has become a hallmark of Marshall’s fiction. It characterizes the four novellas collected in Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961) and her later novels The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1987) and Daughters (1991). Involving, very often, a reverse Middle Passage, it dramatizes a search for and