Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Fall, 2002 by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

E. Ethelbert Miller. Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. 178 pp. $21.95.

E. Ethelbert Miller's memoir, as its title suggests, directs attention to the creation of the African American writer and to some of the internal and external considerations that obtain as we read histories of human creation--autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, autobiomythographies, or whatever label we paste on writing about a subject matter which is always several steps removed from its textual location. The idea of "fathering words" reverberates with notions of procreation, possible relationships of creators with what is made, and even a peculiar anxiety that emerges when patriarchal matters become the subject of womanist or feminist scrutiny. Just how much is the "making of an African American writer," regardless of gender, a matter of intelligence, psychological need, talent, and determination or a matter of accidental proximity or a matter of will and historical location? Miller's book begets such questions. Answers are the reader's responsibility.

Miller set for himself a task many male writers find unsettling: to write about their relationship to their fathers and about their own adequacy or short-comings as fathers. To his credit, Miller avoids some of the psychological messiness implicit in such an undertaking. He focuses much more on the structure of his making himself a writer than on the biological continuity we have with parents. Interdependence is emphasized by juxtaposing the narrator's memories and insights with the perspectives of siblings and the carefully selected sayings or actions of the father and mother. Interdependence minimizes the ego's penchant for dominance. Such angling puts the chronology we conventionally presume autobiographical writing should have in the background. Miller is obviously more interested in the "fathering" function of language and in giving a new spin to those famous Romantic lines regarding the child being father to the man. In trying to voice the place his father had in his becoming a writer, Miller makes the daring move of incorporating comments from his sister Marie into the narrative fabric. Whether authentic or recreated, her observations on his father, his brother Richard, his mother, and Ethelbert himself add a corrective witnessing dimension to the discourse. The unexpected shared authority in remembering father and the fathering process makes Miller's memoir refreshing and provocative.

Our first impulse might be to associate Miller's book with the large body of African American autobiography. We would be in the right ballpark, but the game would have quite a few surprises. The book, according to Miller, "consists of only fragments glued together. This is memory. My biography can be found in the many files I've collected over the years." Unlike classic examples of black autobiography--Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road or Wright's Black Boy--Miller's experimental delineation of subjectivity is not anchored in historical links to drylongso black cultures or to a species of cultural nationalism. We do not find the Baldwinian elaboration that makes Kevin Powell's autobiographical confessions in Keepin' It Real so attractive, or the ideological intensity of Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler. Miller deliberately aims for the unexpected. When he asserts, "My father had no father. Instead he had an English name on a Spanish birth certificate," we are jolted into realizing why his story is atypical . The marker of origin is not in the language associated with the majority of African Americans. His parentage makes Miller an outsider-becoming-an-insider. In short, his story is related culturally to those of immigrants, not to tales native daughters and sons might tell. The meaning of fathering as an act of cosponsoring and nurturing a being-in-the-world becomes profound.

One fact that makes Miller's becoming a poet and essayist quite African American pertains to his education. He is a graduate of Howard University, a fathering site in the history of black higher education, and has been director of its African American Resource Center since 1974. Although Miller is a New Yorker by birth, his baptism and growth as a writer occurred in Washington, D.C., at Howard. Thus location helps us to understand the fierce love and profound bitterness so clearly articulated in Fathering Words. Like the proverbial prophet, Miller finds himself very much respected as a writer and cultural broker outside the beltway of the nation's capital. Fathering Words is worth reading in order to discover, among many other things, how "love and bitterness" echo like an A1 Green recording in a writer's memory.

This is a book from which emerging writers who are seeking to "mother" and "father" themselves can learn some secrets of craft. Miller is very attentive to subtle distinctions between a memoir and an autobiography. He is also attentive to how spaces, other voices, and information gaps constitute a genuine rendering of one's psychological experiences. A detailed prose narrative would not convey the sense of process as well as does a prose collage. Miller is very clear about what he wanted to accomplish. His choice of rhetorical structures or gestures is effective. We must consider the art of the narration, especially Miller's probable designs upon his readers.