The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Can we imagine the will to spontaneity, and what anthropologist Melville Herskovits termed the “deification of Accidence,” that threads through American music without the artistry of Armstrong, Coltrane, and Ellington? And can we think intelligently about the American essay, that venerable form of address that splits the difference between opinion and art with felicitous abandon, without the elegiac anger of Baldwin and the knowing sophistication of Ellison?

  These few examples point up the resolute dismissiveness that mark knee-jerk responses to multiculturalism at its best. Opponents to the opening of the American mind would have us believe that multiculturalism is the graffiti of inferior black art scrawled against the pure white walls of the American canon. This claim reveals how black cultural purists have nothing on the defenders of an equally mythic American literary tradition.

  Among other influences, the American voice carries a British accent, even as it rallies to sublime expression the coarser popular elements of the times it both inhabits and transcends. It must be remembered that Moby-Dick, claimed by critics to be a work of Shakespearean magnitude by a writer of Shakespearean talent, gained such stature because Melville hitched the bard’s cosmic grandeur to the motifs and genres of mid-nineteenth-century popular literature. Imagine Hemingway doing a number on Jacqueline Susann, or Doctorow remaking Sidney Sheldon. The hybrid textures of the American grain are the most powerful argument for relinquishing beliefs in American orthodoxies and for celebrating the edifying impurity behind democratic experiments with culture and identity.

  In this strict sense, multiculturalism doesn’t argue for a future state of affairs to come into being. It simply seeks to bring to light the unacknowledged history of the trading back and forth along racial, and by extension, gender, class, and sexual lines. Multiculturalism is a request by minorities for this nation to come out of the closet, to own up to its rich and creolized practice in every corner of American life. In such an environment, it makes sense to ask, as Shelly Fisher Fishkin’s poignant book about Twain’s character does, “Was Huck Black?”

  In a broader sense, though, multiculturalism cannot proceed painlessly. It must topple conventions precisely because they are erected on myths that exclude traditions and distort histories. The struggle over language and identity—over which work is legitimate and which is not, and over who gets to decide—is unmistakably a struggle of power. Plus, all the naysaying and hem-hawing that goes on around debates about multiculturalism neglect the manner in which African-American artists have often investigated both sides of the hyphen.

  Ellison owed the habit of a critical style of reading, and the title of his first book of essays, to T. S. Eliot. Baldwin’s essays draw equally from the gospel sensibilities and moral trajectory of the black sermon and the elegant expression of the King James Bible. And so on.

  The fear of radical anti-multiculturalists that a democratized canon will trash Western tradition is mostly unfounded. At their best, multiculturalists expose the shifting contours of literary taste and the changing ways in which literacy is judged. (For instance, Homer could neither read nor write, but he is hardly frowned upon in our culture.) Multiculturalists also embrace the superior achievements of talented, towering figures. Such an operation bears little resemblance to hyperventilated protests that an ethic of racial compensation guides the selection of worthy work, and that its bad consequences will, in the words of Harold Bloom, “ruin the canon.” I think of my own early education as an illustration of the possibility of black and white books together shaping a course of wide learning.

  In the fifth grade I experienced a profound introduction to the life and literature of black people. Mrs. James was my teacher, a full-cheeked, honey brown skinned woman whose commitment to her students was remarkable. Mrs. James’s sole mission was to bathe her students in the vast ocean of black intellectual and cultural life. She taught us to drink in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. In fact, I won my first contest of any sort when I received a prized blue ribbon for reciting Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby.” I still get pleasure from reading Dunbar’s vernacular vision:

  Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,

  Who’s pappy’s darlin’ an’ who’s pappy’s chile?

  Who is it all de day nevah once tires

  Fu’ to be cross, er once loses dat smile?

  Whad did you get dem teef? My, you’s a scamp!

  Whah did dat dimple come f ’om in yo’ chin?

  Pappy do’ know you- I b’lieves you’s a tramp;

  Mammy, dis hyeah’s some ol’ straggler got in!

  Mrs. James also taught us to read Margaret Walker Alexander. I can still remember the thrill of listening to a chorus of fifth-grade black girls reciting, first in turn and then in unison, the verses to Alexander’s “For My People.”

  For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood.

  The girls’ rhetorical staccatos and crescendos, their clear articulation and emotional expressiveness, were taught and encouraged by Mrs. James.

  Mrs. James also opened to us the lore and legend of the black West long before it became stylish to do so. We read about the exploits of black cowboys like Deadwood Dick and Bill Pickett. We studied about great inventors like Jan Matzeliger, Garrett Morgan, and Granville T. Woods. The artists and inventors we learned about became for us more than mere names, more than dusty figures entombed in historical memory. Mrs. James helped bring the people we studied off the page and into our lives. She instructed us to paint their pictures, and to try our own hands at writing poetry and sharpening our own rhetorical skills. Mrs. James instilled in her students a pride of heritage and history that remains with me to this day.

  Before it became popular, Mrs. James accented the multicultural nature of American culture by emphasizing the contributions of black folk who loved excellence and who passionately and intelligently celebrated the genius of black culture. She told us of the debates between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and made us understand the crucial differences in their philosophical approaches to educating black people. There was never a hint that we could skate through school without studying hard. There was never a suggestion that the artistic and intellectual work we investigated was not open to criticism and interpretation. There was never even a whisper that the work we were doing was second-rate. There was no talk of easing standards or lowering our sights.

  On the contrary, Mrs. James taught us that to really be black we would have to uphold the empowering intellectual and artistic traditions that we were being taught to understand and explore. Mrs. James was extraordinarily demanding, and insisted that our oral and written work aspire to a consistently high level of expression. And neither did she reproduce some of the old class biases that shaped black curricula around “high culture.” She taught us the importance of Roland Hayes and Bessie Smith. She taught us to appreciate Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson. She encouraged us to revel in Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong.

  This last element of Mrs. James’s pedagogy was particularly important since so many of her students lived in Detroit’s inner city. She provided us a means of appreciating the popular culture that shaped our lives, as well as extending the quest for literacy by more traditional means. Thus, we never viewed The Temptations or Smokey Robinson as the raw antithesis to cultured life. We were taught to believe that the same musical genius that animated Scott Joplin lighted as well on Stevie Wonder. We saw no essential division between “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and “I Can’t Get Next to You.” Thus the postmodern came crashing in on me before I gained sight of it in Derrida and Foucault.

  But Mrs. James’s approach to teaching her students about black folk did not go over well with many of her black colleagues. Sti
ll bound to a radically traditionalist conception of elementary school curricula, many of Mrs. James’s colleagues blasted her for wasting our time in learning ideas we could never apply, in grasping realities that would never give us skills to get good jobs. (This was still the late 1960s, and the full impact of the civil rights revolution had not yet trickled down to the classrooms, nor the psyches, of many black teachers.) But Mrs. James’s outstanding example of intellectual industry and imagination has shaped my approach to education to this day.

  Another event in my adolescence also shaped my quest for knowledge. I can vividly remember receiving a gift of The Harvard Classics by a generous neighbor, Mrs. Bennett, when I was in my early teens. Her husband, a staunch Republican (a fact which, despite my own politics, cautions against my wholesale reproach of the right), had recently died, and while first inclined to donate his collection to a local library, Mrs. Bennett gave them instead to a poor black boy who couldn’t otherwise afford to own them. I was certainly the only boy on my block, and undoubtedly in my entire ghetto neighborhood, who simultaneously devoured Motown’s music and Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.

  I can barely describe my joy in owning Charles Eliot’s monumental assembly of the “world’s great literature” as I waded, and often, drowned, in the knowledge it offered. I memorized Tennyson’s immortal closing lines from “Ulysses:”

  Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heave, that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  I cherished as well the sad beauty of Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy (Written in a Country Churchyard),” reading into one of its stanzas the expression of unrealized promise for black children in my native Detroit:

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene

  The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

  I pored over Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and exulted in Marcus Aurelius; I drank in Milton’s prose and followed Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I read John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy and read enthusiastically Carlyle’s essays (in part, I confess, because his quote, “No lie can live forever” had become branded on my brain from repeated listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s recorded speeches). I read Lincoln, Hobbes, and Plutarch; the metaphysical poets; and Elizabethan drama. (This last indulgence led a reviewer of my first book to chide me for resorting to Victorian phrases—which in his view was patently inauthentic—to describe a painful incident of racism in my life; I was tempted to write him and explain the origin of my faulty adaptation, but, alas, I concluded that “that way lies tears.”)

  The Harvard Classics whetted my appetite for more learning, and I was delighted to discover that it opened an exciting world to me, a world beyond the buzz of bullets and the whiplash of urban violence. One day, however, that learning led me right to the den of danger. Inspired by reading the English translation of Sartre’s autobiography Les mots (The Words), I rushed to the corner store to buy a cigar, thinking that its exotic odor would provide a whiff of the Parisian cafe life where the aging master had hammered out his existential creed on the Left Bank.

  My fourteen-year-old mind was reeling with anticipation as I approached the counter to confidently ask for a stogie. Just then, I felt a jolt in my back; it was the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun, and its owner ordered me and the other customers to find the floor as he and his partners robbed the store. Luckily, we survived the six guns brandished that day to take our money. Long before Marx and Gramsci would remind me, I understood that consciousness is shaped by the material realm, that learning takes place in a world of trouble.

  I was later thrilled to know that the new pastor of my church, Frederick Sampson, a Shakespearean figure if there ever was one, shared my love of learning. An erudite man trained to speak the King’s English to the Queen’s taste, he would, at a moment’s notice, embellish his sermons and conversation with long stretches of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. Even at funerals, as he led the procession out of the church, he would recite Longfellow;

  Life is real! Life is earnest!

  And the grave is not its goal;

  Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

  Was not spoken of the soul . . .

  Let us, then, be up and doing,

  With a heart for any fate;

  Still achieving, still pursuing

  Learn to labor and to wait.

  But like Mrs. James, Dr. Sampson read widely in black letters. Time and again, his eloquent pulpit art indexed the joys and frustrations of black and religious identity. He ranged between unlikely sources to make his points. He called on Bertrand Russell (“the center of me is a wild curious pain . . . [the search for God] is like passionate love for a ghost”) and W.E.B. Du Bois:

  It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  Mrs. James, Dr. Sampson, and my early habits of reading are to me models of how the American canon can be made broad and deep enough to accommodate the complex meanings of American identity. To embrace Shakespeare, we need not malign Du Bois. To explore black identity, we need not forsake the learning of the majority culture. And even if Dostoyevsky never appears among the pygmies, great culture may nonetheless be produced in unexpected spots.

  The difficulties of gaining clarity about cultural and racial identity are only increased with the introduction of theory into the mix, a move bitterly debated among black intellectuals. The application of theory to black culture has provoked resistance from the right and left alike, mimicking patterns of response to theory in larger literate culture. Now what is meant by theory is literary theory, not a theory of progressive politics, say, or a theory of quantum mechanics, though both have come under attack for sharply different reasons.

  The notion of theory itself, however, is not suspect. How could it be? Even its opponents have theories about the problems with theory. Some Marxists and feminists have theories about why deconstructionists need to be more realistically grounded in the world and politically engaged. Defenders of the Great Books have ideas about why theorists romp in pedantry and obfuscation, their jargon a sign of poor writing, or worse yet, muddled thinking. African-Americanists have theories of why black intellectuals should spurn European theories and stick to more traditional ways of criticizing books and culture. In their opposition to theory, at least, usual opponents find full agreement. With some adjustments, I think theory may help to explain black culture. We must have at least two skills to make it a go.

  The first skill is translation. What’s said meaningfully in one place must often be restated to make sense in another setting. Among initiates, subtleties of theory will be transparent, while those outside the theoretical loop will inevitably miss out. But if theory is to serve or undermine traditions of interpreting books and culture, the moral of the story (even if the point is that there isn’t one) must at crucial points become clear. Admittedly, that is sometimes communicated by writers whose politics of expression lash out at simple, given meaning. In order to be successful, though, such an act should not be hindered by sloppy execution. As with all writing, there are good and bad ways to do theory.

  The second skill is baptism. I know the phrase evokes volatile responses because of its religious association, but then I’ve got a theory or two about that. For Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault to be useful to me, they can’t be dragged whole-hog into black intellectual d
ebates without getting dipped in the waters of AfricanAmerican culture. Strategies of play, notions of “difference,” and ideas about the relation of knowledge to power can illumine aspects of black culture when applied judiciously.

  But theory must be reborn in the particular cultural forms that shape its use; it must reflect the cultural figures fixed in its gaze. Jazz and science fiction, hip-hop culture and collagist painting, and broad intellectual imagination—embodied in folk like Betty Carter and Octavia Butler, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Romare Bearden, C. L. R. James and Zora Neale Hurston—all have something to gain from, and to give to, theory. Bertrand Russell believed that the goal of education is to help us resist the seductions of eloquence. At its best—in translation and baptized—theory can do just that.

  The controversies surrounding hip-hop bring us full circle in grappling with how race, language, and identity are joined, and how their contradictory meanings sometimes collide. Because of its extraordinary visibility, indeed, vilification in the larger society—and because of the strong veto it has aroused in many black quarters as well—rap perfectly symbolizes the failure of neat, pure analysis to illumine the complex workings of black culture. The debates about hip-hop culture strike the deepest nerves in black culture—how we name ourselves; how the white world views us; how we shape images and identities that are tied to commerce and exploitation; how black culture preserves itself while continually evolving; and finally, and perhaps, most important, how survival is linked to the way words are used for and against us. Like the black culture that produces it, rap is both a new thing, and the same ol’ same ol’. That is the crux of black culture’s gift and burden.

  As debates about the canon continue, and as currents of suspicion about the wisdom of multiculturalism endlessly swirl, the example of black culture’s constant evolution and relentless self-re-creation is heartening. At its best, African American culture provides an empowering model of education that combines the impetus to broad learning and experimentation with new forms of cultural expression. The ongoing controversies generated by identity politics, hip-hop culture, and racial politics, and the insurgence of a host of other minority voices, insures that African-American intellectual and cultural life remains an important resource in addressing not only marginal traditions, but in reconceiving and expanding the very framework of American literature and democracy.