The Critical Importance of Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices
After
approximately two decades of being the scapegoat for those writers and critics
who blamed its participants for all that was wrong with African American
cultural and political nationalism, the Black Arts Movement (BAM) is being recognized
again as a crucial period in the growth of twentieth-century African American
literature. For those of us who participated in BAM and in making assertions
that we did not have to depend on non-blacks to authenticate and legitimize
what we chose to call art, the value of the period has never been in question. Nevertheless, periods of artistic growth seem
always to be linked to specific motives or missions, silent or brashly
articulated agendas for change. Studies
of the Harlem Renaissance, for example, provide evidence of how knotted and
even contradictory those agendas can be, and studies of African American
literature from 1930 to 1960 further reveal patterns of continuity and change
in relation to political and social activities which themselves change slowly
or with dramatic speed. Read through a
windowpane of change, Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices
has invaluable critical importance. For those who know little about African
American poetry, the book provides a generous overview of developments from the
eighteenth century to 1976. For those
who assume they know a great deal about the poetry, it is necessary reminder
that they may have forgot small but crucial details which can lead to the
discovery of new facts.
Blamed for displacing art with propaganda, for
promoting sexism and essentialist discussions of the Black Aesthetic, and for
delaying African American literature’s entry into the Vatican of the American
Canon, the Black Arts Movement has begun now to re-emerge as a “legitimate”
area for academic work. At the risk of
overstating the point, I suggest that critical formations by people who are
simultaneously writers and critics (and not enslaved by the rules of the
academic world) are significantly different from formations by critical
thinkers (who may also be writers) who worry greatly about winning the approval
of their academic peers.[1] Critics
and writers who participated in literary and cultural work from 1960 to 1974
were little bothered by what is currently termed “academic legitimacy,” although they were not
ignorant of the need to provide substantial evidence to be used a general
public and by teachers and students, especially those in what were then
emerging Black Studies programs. They
were aware of a dual focus, of fighting battles on two fronts simultaneously.
On
the other hand, career-oriented scholars
who cared more about their own investments and legitimacy within institutions of American higher education were
much annoyed by literary discussions and interpretations based on” race and
superstructure” which challenged formal, structural, or New Critical approaches to literary study.
They feared that attention to the vexed
matter of race and to the dimensions of cultural production detracted from the
obligation to speak of aesthetic values in literature, values that could be
deemed universal. Their quarrel with the
ideologies of the Black Arts Movement was represented at the beginning of the
1980s in Afro-American Literature: The
Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern Language Association,
1979), edited by Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto. Most recently, one finds the residual traces
of their quarrel in Charles Henry Rowell’s introduction to Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American
Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).
Against the dramatic background of such prevailing contention, Eugene B.
Redmond’s Drumvoices (1976) stands as
a corrective for scholarly aberrations. Simple or deliberate “forgetting” is an
aberration in need of constant monitoring.
Lorenzo Thomas, one of the most brilliant
thinkers who emerged from BAM, paid a generous compliment to James Edward
Smethurst’s study The Black Arts Movement:
Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005). In his blurb for the book, Thomas asserted: “Smethurst
gets it right! His thorough research and astute analysis overcome two decades
of deliberate critical misrepresentation to help us examine a tumultuous era
when visionary leadership and nationwide grassroots participation created a
dynamic, paradigm-changing cultural renaissance” (back cover of The Black Arts Movement….). Howard
Rambsy II’s The Black Arts Enterprise and
the Production of African American
Poetry (2011), which focuses more specifically on issues of cultural
production, received a discerning compliment from Smethurst: “Rambsy’s sharp
analysis of the material production of Black Arts poetry, supported by an
extraordinarily sensitive attention to significant historical and textual detail,
greatly advance our knowledge of the Black Arts Movement “(back cover of The Black Arts Enterprise….). The
books by Smethurst and Rambsy are harbingers of the vast amount of work to be
done in a future on fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction of the BAM period.
So too is Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in
Detroit, 1960-1995 (2005) by Julius E. Thompson, a model for empirical
research and thoughtful documentation. A
great amount of “getting-it-right” work remains to be done. A small part of that work must be examinations
of seminal texts published between 1960 and 1980. We gain a sense of the
complexity of a period through the study of its seminal documents.
Two
of the most seminal texts on poetry are Stephen E. Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973)
and Eugene B. Redmond’s Drumvoices: The
Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History (1976). This lecture
concentrates on Redmond’s book, because I believe it is less well-known than
Henderson’s theoretically informed anthology, and it is a compelling model of
the investigation and documentation that must always serve as a foundation for
African American literary histories. Unlike Henderson’s efforts to provide
theoretical grounding for examinations of new black poetry of the 1960s,
Redmond used his considerable knowledge about the unfolding of poetry in
general to provide a kind of “practical”
grounding for understanding the multiple ingredients that made (and continue to
make) the whole body of black poetry significantly different from other
poetries.
Redmond’s
approach was much dependent on informed curiosity (intuition). He undertook his
work in the spirit of picaresque adventure.
His curiosity involved a substantial amount of field work ----traveling,
meeting poets, doing informal ethnography, writing up his findings with
greater regard for completeness (telling a whole story) than for filtering the good from the bad . It took Redmond approximately eight years to
complete his field work, and it is rather unlikely that any of our young,
contemporary
scholars
have the stamina or funding to do such on-the-scene investigation of poetry
produced after 1976. The physical and financial expenses for such an
undertaking are daunting. In this sense,
his work is an example of dedicated surveying that is still valuable and
necessary for the later work of sorting, classifying, and making canonical
judgments.
The
structure of Drumvoices is what one
might expect: a chronological discussion of poets and poetry over seven
chapters with a bibliographic index that, forty years ago, would have been
considered cutting-edge for its inclusion of items beyond the expected print
materials (general research aids, periodicals, anthologies, literary history
and criticism, works on folklore and language). “Occasionally, chronology is violated,”
Redmond explained, “since any time barrier is, by definition, arbitrary”
(xiii). Of course, thematic aspects of
any poetry lack chronological regularity, and it was only appropriate that
Redmond endeavored to account for thematic recurrence. His bibliographical index also included a
discography and tape subset of relevant materials. That portion of the index is important as
evidence that supplementing the visual (print) with the audible in 1976 was
important for reasons that differ somewhat from the interest in the
twenty-first century in the spoken word and performance poetry and mixed forms
involving music. Today, sound is often
the end in itself. In 1976, sound was more a means to achieve an end.
Interest
in sound is as old as poetry itself. As
a poet and critical thinker who had a special interest in the power of sound in the various ways
poetry was produced and used in African American cultures, Redmond did what any
literary historian would do. He dealt with the obvious historical necessity of
oral forms (orality) for transmitting African poetic traditions in the New
World. His attention to sound , of course, alerted his most astute readers to
the difficulty of representing sound in print, and it served as a reminder that
authentic representation of black folk speech was part of the debate James Weldon
Johnson and others created in the 1920s about Paul Laurence Dunbar’s use of
dialect versus standard English; it was part of what drove Sterling Brown to be
quite exacting in his rendering of dialect and inspired Langston Hughes to
embrace the blues and ordinary speaking as markers for authenticity. [2]
The
title Drumvoices itself gives
privilege to instrumentality, to the voice as drum, song, and dance (gesture).
Thus, the idea of poetry as a tool for creative expression is prominent in
Redmond’s treatment of history. It is a
sharp reminder that the origins of the poetry are located in the oral and in
the written, that the two modes are Siamese twins which cannot be separated
from one another. Reading his book is to some degree a participation in his gestures
of recovering how black poetry came to be what it is.
In
setting for himself the task of exploring the “complex storehouse of folk
materials and themes” and “the chronological development of black poetry ---
from about 1746 to the present [1976],” (2) Redmond undertook a difficult job. As Darwin T. Turner reminded us in 1971,
“although the study of Afro-American literature is not as old as the material
itself, it is not significantly younger than the formal study of American
literature, which has earned academic respectability in this country [the
United States] only within the past eighty years. Two years before the end of the Civil War,
William Wells Brown, a former slave, described the achievement of early
Afro-American writers in The Black Man:
His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, and by 1915, the words
of black writers were being read, memorized, recited, studied, and revered by
black students in the schools into which blacks were segregated…….In short,
long before some of today’s teachers were born, black American literature had
been read, taught, and, too often, forgotten” (4-5) [3]
Redmond’s difficult task was to rectify the forgetting and to improve our
options for remembering.
As I have
previously hinted, participating in Redmond’s gestures of recovery can free us from
the widely broadcast delusion that Black Arts Movement critics were guilty of
crimes against the liberal study of African American literature. They were not. While it is intellectually legitimate to
disagree with their quirks, ideologies, and artistic choices, it is cheap and
mean-spirited to accuse them of being destroyers. Indeed, without the dedicated scholarship of
Eugene Redmond and others of his generation, the smoke of deconstruction would
have us sit in darkness.
In his first
chapter, “Black Poetry: Views, Visions, Conflicts,” Redmond carefully itemized
specific problems:
·
In the study of black poetry, one must deal with
“substantive background materials: the deepest philosophical, religious,
ethical, artistic, and aesthetic tenets of black life and expression.” Thus, one examines “the scope and range of
black poetry via folk origins, methods of delivery, language, phonology,
religiosity, racial character, recurring themes, individual and group identity,
and poetic devices as they are developed indigenously or borrowed from other
traditions” (2)
·
What is named “the black experience is complex
and frustrating,” and it can only be defined through a process of endless
questioning (3)
·
Poets are not in agreement about what black
poetry is. Writers who ask am I a poet
first and then Black, or am I Black and then a poet will find themselves entrapped
“in ideological and political prisons” (6)
·
Students of black poetry should arm themselves
with “the tools of criticism and a knowledge of black culture,” including the
deceptive playfulness of black humor, and knowledge of what black artists,
scholars, and activists are debating (10-11)
·
Literary hustlers do exist. One must not assume “that just because a
statement is ‘relevant,’ it is poetry!” and one must realize “that the black
experience is not monolithic ---although recurring trends and broad implications
do exist in the areas of language, religion, humor, dance, music, and general
life style” (13)
·
Students of black poetry are obligated to give
attention to “the craft of poetry –hows and whys of poetry, and temper overmuch
enthusiasm for the sociological aspects of the poetry (14)
Redmond is not to be accused of
making strident demands that we abandon traditions; he is guilty of asking for
a nuanced balance of tradition with what we might call an ethnic-positive
interest in the cultural productions of one’s people. That is a crime of which
anyone who makes a rigorous study of the history of African American poetry can
be proud to be accused.
In
Chapter II “The Black and Unknown Bards,” Chapter III “African Voice in Eclipse
(?): Imitation and Agitation (1746-1865), Chapter IV “Jubilees, Jujus, and
Justices (1865-1910), Chapter V “A Long Ways from Home” (1910-1960) and Chapter
VI “Festivals and Funerals: Black Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, Redmond
provides the richest kind of historical description. He weaves verifiable facts about the creation
and publication of poetry with his often surprising commentaries on such
well-known poets as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul
Laurence Dunbar, Melvin B. Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden and on
such unknown bards as Albery Allson Whitman, Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., Owen
Dodson, Leslie Pinckney Hill, N. J. Loftis, Sam Cornish, Kalamu ya Salaam, and
Conrad Kent Rivers. These unknown bards
are not completely unknown. They, like
the hundreds of poets Redmond identifies by name and geographical location, are
simply not prime candidates for inclusion in the canon. Despite his being an accomplished poet whose
work is highly valued among non-academic audiences, Redmond himself has not been
chosen for sainthood in either the Norton
Anthology of African American Literature or Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Fortunately, his importance is noted in The Cambridge History of African American
Literature.
Eugene
Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of
Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History is a unique contribution to the
study of African American poetry, a work of inspired scholarship that guides us
into knowing in great detail who spoke or wrote African American poetry from
1746 to 1976.[4]
[1]
In an interview with Howard Rambsy II on March 6, 2010, Eugene Redmond
intimates that his writing of Drumvoices
was not a self-conscious academic enterprise; there were many iterations of Drumvoices before it was published as a
book. Redmond was very curious about discovering what philosophy and aesthetics
might undergird black poetry, and he was convinced that being black did not
guarantee that one would write “black poetry.”
Redmond proudly says that he met all of the people he mentions in the
book who were alive between 1968 and 1976. I am grateful to Rambsy for sharing this
information with me in an email, dated March 2, 2013, with an eleven minute
segment of the interview.
[2]
An enlightening discussion of language, folk art and high (canonized) art is
Bernard W. Bell’s The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry
(Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974). The third volume in the Broadside Critics
Series, Bell’s book argued that the folk ideology of Johann Gottfried von
Herder (1744-1803) was germane for understanding some of the issues Harlem
Renaissance and Black Arts Movement writers and critics were obligated to
engage. What alarmed James Weldon Johnson was the misrepresentation of black
speech by the use of dialect that consisted of “mutilation of English spelling
and pronunciation”; what he championed was a form that would be “freer and
larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form
expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the
distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro, but which will also be capable
of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow of the
widest range of subjects and the widest scope of treatment” (Johnson, “Preface”
The Book of American Negro Poetry.
New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1922. Rtp. 1959. 41-42.)
[3]
Turner, Darwin T. and Barbara Dodds Stanford. Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Literature by Afro-Americans.
Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1971.
[4]
Since 1976, Redmond has continued to document the development of African
American poetry through his publication of works by and interviews with poets
in his magazine Drumvoices Revue. He
has also produced an extensive body of visual documentation, approximately
100,000 photographs. See Howard Rambsy II, “Eugene B. Redmond, The Critical
Cultural Witness,” Journal of Ethnic
American Literature, Issue 1 (2011): 69-89.
