Fire-casting an eternal de-fascination with death: writing about the South, and the responsible necessity of reading and knowing black South writing in the quest for Afrikan world salvation and restitution - Black South Fiction, Art, Culture

African American Review, Summer, 1993 by Kiarri T.-H. Cheatwood

Now lend an ear to the Afrikan who was then based in Berkeley:

As T. S. Eliot admitted, "These are but fragments to shore up our ruins." For such disillusioned artists of the self-destroying West, the possibility of speaking to a whole, unalienated, undehumanized reader becomes a lost memory. The loss is just as great when the Black poet speaks to an intermediated, isolated "Black consciousness" instead of to Black people. (Taylor 7)

In an intellectually felt attempt to deshackle an essential area of our reality, the Afrikan from Mississippi asserts: "I want to go a step further to say that one of the institutions within which we work is culture itself, a matrix wherein the political, the economic, the moral and the literary are distinguishable but not essentially distinct" (Ward 228). Indeed, Ward admits to holding an "unfashionable belief in the moral responsibility of literary study" (226), and that belief is bound organically to the powerful and pertinent ideas he shares with us from the work of Donald Gibson. "|I would hope,'" Ward quotes Gibson as saying," |that we would carry forward the tradition of black writing that has seen it as functional, as having more to do with our social and political well-being than with our need for enjoyment or entertainment'" (228-29).

I do not find that Ward is re-routing an old, tired misleadership notion of morality. He, like Gibson, seems to know that there is an intimate relationship between the moral, properly and sincerely understood, and the political. Without political-economic control and capability (power), a people, any people, will eventually, steadily lose possession of themselves, lose possession of their very souls. Therefore when Ward quotes Gibson as saying that" |creative literature, in its expression of social value, is a political instrument,'" both are expressing not just correctness but sanity.

The rocks along Afrika's ocean:/ What needs the Mama's children? My Brother - the brilliant one known as Armah - my Brother and I moved through the beautiful sands, speaking in voices turned into a whispering as the ocean drummed the rocks and sprayed our feet with its cymbal fire, wet and sweet. We moved through sands that are nothing - for all intents and purposes - to the black government, but which DuPont and other white scourges have their scouts scouring daily in order to determine how much zircon, lutetium, and other precious elements essential to Western "hi-technology" there are to be refined from these sands. We moved into a cove formed by rocks that looked like coal cinders inflatted by god. And as we climbed over these rocks, he asked me what I thought Afrikan people needed and needed to do. It was not a trick question; it was not meant to be cute. Still I was almost embarrassed at the simple answer that came into my head. In a place where fatalism is confused with religious faith, where poverty rides roughshod, where birth defects are apparent all over, where people are good, where the women have no superiors anywhere on the planet for sheer physical beauty, and where the women's faces are shades lighter than their feet - and recognizing that, worldwide, Afrikan people are not really different from those in this place of the beautiful sands - I said," A cultural revolution."