Terrance Hayes. Hip Logic

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Ed Pavlic

Terrance Hayes. Hip Logic. New York: Penguin, 2002. 103 pp. $10.40 paper.

Terrance Hayes's poetry moves in many directions simultaneously: confessional exploration of identity; various degrees of dissociated formal innovation and cultural criticism; the ironic tightrope along the blurry, increasingly troublesome and untrustworthy line between US consumer culture and African American vernacular traditions. In his powerful first book of poems Muscular Music (Chicago: Tia Chucha, 1997), Hayes's constantly shifting angle of entry navigated the multi-dimensional home turf of popular African-American aesthetics, the ubiquitous inner-city, to amazing results. In the wink-eyed declaration of identity ("What I am") that announced a new voice in Muscular Music, the persona takes history as a sign of difference and reminds that African Americans (as a group) aren't immigrants to this continent: "My ancestors didn't emigrate" (15). Hayes follows with a longing call to a stable and comfortable homeland and culture. The call, at ironic odds as it is with the collection's restless, self-cauterizing voice, plainly wishes for the option of nostalgia: "Why would anyone leave their native land?" (15). Moot point, really. Any immigrant can give you a laundry list of propulsive reasons for leaving and another for why he or she sends money back to the "old country." But the voice intones the sources of power in Hayes's work: his technique of capturing his personae's naive longings and juxtaposing them with his intellectual's awareness of turbulence eroding the usually wholesome, stable possibilities toward which his characters strive.

As anyone worth his John Hope Franklin tattoos already knows, black people aren't immigrants to North America. But under unique kinds of pressures, many certainly became migrants, some even literal fugitives, within it and forth and back to it and from it as soon and as fast and often as they could. I don't know (though the New Jersey State Patrol probably does) what the median speed of black interstate highway travel is, but I'd bet it's faster than the US mean. As critics from Robert Stepto to Craig Werner and to Farah Griffin have shown, black patterns of movement become veins in the kinetic life of the art. Since the publication of the first collection of poems by an African American (brought about by a trip to England), these patterns have taken shape in relation to the contemporary terrains of experience in every era. Various, regionally specific, eras and incarnations of freedom and slavery followed by reconstruction, the so-called nadir, great migrations, Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, expatriate life after both world wars, the Freedom Movement, Black Power, various kinds of feminisms, and the unprecedented level of commercial visibility of black culture have all etched themselves and erased each other, forcing artists to improvise new kinetic patterns into paint, song, and script. Terrance Hayes's Hip Logic writes its own ever-fluctuating patterns into the palimpsest. Among the many, one form of the Hip Logic explores the ambiguous imperatives stemming from "The law [that] says.... No standing still" (12). Of the many, I'm interested in what can be gained from his poems' ironic, ambivalent relationship to consumer and popular cultures and, most interestingly, his personae's unremitting quest for human connection and vital warmth. As with Muscular Music, in Hip Logic, the poems that move in the most intriguing ways cobble together kin to hold to the bonds of another American mythic quantity, the family.

In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process" (The Price of the Ticket, New York: St. Martin's, 1985), James Baldwin writes that the "entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive" (670). Lies. When necessary, necessary lies. When brutal, brutal lies. Modern and postmodern societies perpetrate these lies with what's called "culture." Right about the time Baldwin wrote that sentence, black publications like Ebony Magazine began to take out advertisements in mainstream US newspapers. Noting the trend in Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), Stewart Ewen cites ads that pictured bright-eyed, white-toothed Mary Dalton- or Doris Day-type visages of "American happiness," a.k.a. whiteness, underneath captions like "IS THIS ANY WAY TO SELL TOOTHPASTE TO A NEGRO?" (89). These ads signal a profound shift in the twin aims of American popular culture: create homogeneous American consumer-citizens, and sell them stuff. From the 1960s onward, selling America has been, increasingly, the job of culturally specific, multicultural tactics. For most black people raised before the 1960s, the distinction between white fantasies of American happiness and cleanliness, on the one hand, and real human life, on the other, was (at least at one level) clear. For subsequent generations, less so. The result is one dimension of the contemporary kinetic field of the tradition: an unprecedented level of ambivalence about black vernacular cultures that for most of the twentieth century provided so much useful material for artists. At the end of Muscular Music's "What I Am," Hayes's persona ironically declares his American inheritance: