The Genuine Negro Hero. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Melba Joyce Boyd

Thomas Sayers Ellis. The Genuine Negro Hero. Kent: Kent State UP, 2000. 32 pp. $4.75.

Thomas Sayers Ellis lays out his aesthetic treatise in "The Genuine Negro Hero": "Of style," he states, "I can honestly write that I am only interested in mixed congregations--although I began my publishing career with narrative poems. That choice seemed most natural at the time, and allowed me to focus on some basic techniques like making imagery, making metaphor, punning, and irony. My day-one days in narrative also taught me to tell a story coherently, something all poets need regardless of their chosen style." Ellis's poetry imprints a literary territory that contains stories and sensibilities that linger beyond the reader's initial contact with the page. His poetry tells stories, not in predictable narrative forms, but in unique, ecliptic configurations imbued with fresh creative properties and realizable perceptual insights. The thematic range of the collection is directly and indirectly related to aspects of human vision and film.

"The Eye," an excerpt from The Body by Anthony Smith, is the preface, or perhaps the epigraph, for all the poems in this collection, as it provides the parameters of the poetry. The last line identifies the poet and his signature: "The patterns on an iris, of rays, rings, and spots, are highly individual and have been suggested as an alternative for fingerprint identification." The same could be said about poetry and style. In this first collection, Ellis marks his style in impressive and commendable ways.

Vision as perspective and perception merge in poems that reflect how history and meaning have been transformed by cinema, and how American thought and culture has been altered in ways that have often gone unnoticed. In "Zapuder" Ellis reveals:

Clicking the power on added something
above & below human to autumn. Now comes history,
that moment when everything begins to wave:
arms, flags, lens, minutes, seconds, silence,
dressmaker, souvenir, evidence

It is the subtlety of Ellis's mise-en-scene that effectively converges with a melange of reflective imagery. He pulls language from cinematic icons and scenes and melds them with everyday existence and into meanings that make sense. This stanza from "A Kiss in the Dark" demonstrates the strategy:

A naked bulb on the dresser next to where
They made me make them celebrities, giants, myth.
I watched their black shadows on the wall,
Half expecting fade-out and something romantic
As the final scene of Love Crazy, my father
A suave William Powell, my mother's slender body
A backwards C in the tight focus of his arms--
Close-shot, oneiric dissolve, jump cut to years
Before their separation and the arrival of hot water.

In "Slow Fade to Black," Ellis combines allusions to blaxploitation films and film stars Pam Greer and Richard Roundtree. He illuminates the desire of black consciousness in imagery of memory that captures the larger picture, including the history of an audience enraptured by the "The Shadow World":

A silhouette behind a flashlight
led us down an aisle
into The Shadow World,
rows & rows of runaways
awaiting emancipation.
theater, belly, cave,
ate what got in.
We half dreamt weightlessness,
salvation, freedom, escape.
A resurrection if arms
we wished were wings,
reached in & out of greasy buckets
picking something the precise
color & weight of cotton.

"Glory," as in the title of the film, provides insight behind the camera as it focuses on the making of the film and a personal identification of the poet within it. Ellis's deft editing weaves seamless connections behind and in front of the camera, "stitching cloth to celluloid." Although these poems are about the eye and the eye of the camera, the elements of sound ground the imagery and the fluidity of his sensibility:

My friend Noland was next to Morgan Freeman,
but the cinematographer knew how to frame a shot,

how to exclude a man with a camera.
Francine Jamsion-Tanchuck was there,
stitching cloth to celluloid. A natural-born seer,
her hands hid matrimony & promise in hoop dresses & bonnets
so that each soldier witnessed a flash of cross
& ring, a small church, heaven on earth,
things thought worth fighting for.

W. C. Handy, Earth a Kitt, Pearl Bailey, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, and Lena Home appear as starlets and/or songsters in the poet's recreations of film scenes that Lorenzo Thomas says are "more interesting than the movies." After reading these poems, the audience should awaken to a depth of perception deeper than a blind receptivity of illusions--Hollywood contrivances that confuse more than they illuminate. But the imagery that emanates alongside the film scenes contains fascinating characters from real life who have adapted a Hollywood sense of style and desire into a glamor of their own, like "The Man of Numbers":

places everyone's request
ona thin strip
in the back pocket
of his miracle slacks
right next to Lena Horne
in a wicker chair. Every scribbled digit
in the butt of his double knits
has slept with a woman.