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ALH Online Review, Series XXII 1 Derik Smith, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black

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ALH Online Review, Series XXII 1 Derik Smith, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black ALH Online Review, Series XXII 1 Derik Smith, Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 328 pp. Reviewed by Astrid Franke, University of Tüebingen All too often, African American cultural history seems to be understood through oppositional figures: Booker T. Washington vs. W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke vs. Marcus Garvey, Martin L. King Jr. vs. Malcom X, Ralph Ellison vs. Richard Wright, or Robert Hayden vs. Haki Madhubuti. Yet, on closer inspection, none of these supposed oppositions is as rigid and clear-cut as they are made out to be—partly, because these men developed ideas over time and thus changed and modified them, partly because their ideas were more nuanced than they are made out to be, and partly because the opposition conceals the fact that they were all engaged in an emancipatory struggle, often facing the same dilemmas. Indeed, one begins to suspect that their representations as oppositional are intellectual remnants of strategic divisions originally made by slave-owners; by dividing the oppressed, it becomes easier to reign over them because they are made to compete for positions of relative power. This, I believe, is the broadest and most obvious political significance of Derik Smith’s study of Robert Hayden. By showing how Hayden is not outside but part of intellectual debates on the role of art, religion, and history in and with the Black Arts Movement (BAM), the African American intellectual life in the 1960s and 1970s appears more diverse and complex, while Hayden’s struggles are seen as one with those of many other African American artists. He could thus be recognized as an important precursor to current African American poets working in academia, such as Rita Dove or Natasha Trethewey, who are complemented by rap as the rightful heirs to another strand of the BAM. Smith makes this argument by transforming supposed oppositions concerning four major aspects of Hayden and his work: his relation to the BAM; his adherence to Bahá’í faith; his struggle in making sense of history, and his commitment to aesthetic distance (sometimes called “Appollonian” as opposed to “Dionysian” and writerly as opposed to vernacular poetry). The first argumentative movement is easy enough to follow and is best captured in two moments happening at the 1966 Fisk writers’ conference. One is often quoted and provides the basis for placing Hayden in opposition to and outside the BAM, namely his request to “quit saying we’re black writers writing to black folks—it has been given an importance it should not have” (25). This position was sharply attacked by Melvin Tolson, a poet who, like Hayden, wrote in a difficult, high modernist style on African American subject matter but, in contrast to Hayden, emphatically identified himself as a “black,” “African American,” and “Negro” poet. The second moment at this conference was Hayden’s poetry reading that received standing ovations; together with his inclusion in the 1969 volume For Malcolm, these two episodes suggest that Hayden was engaged in debates within the movement in which people may quarrel with his position, even © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 2 ALH Online Review, Series XXII as they embraced him and acknowledged the power and importance of his poetry. As in all of his rejections of too-easy oppositions, Smith offers a sustained reading of at least one poem to support his point, Hayden’s tribute to Malcom X “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.” The very choice of the name and the insistence on metamorphosis in the poem’s subtitle emphasize the idea of change and highlight, in turn, how many of the other poems in the volume arrest Malcolm X at a stage most useful for a separatist black nationalism. Hayden’s poem not only critiques this stance but simultaneously claims to pay a fuller tribute to a life as lived in time. “Hayden’s Histories” as part three of Smith’s book does not immediately follow even as it also rests on an analysis of early poems that celebrate important figures in African American history. It too emphasizes change: against the notion that Hayden abandons an earlier vision of redemptive history because of the turbulent, disillusioning period of the Civil Rights movement, Smith argues that it is “the immediacy and ubiquity of death in the 1940s” that actually leads to Hayden’s greater skepticism about a direction in history (148). Adopting a transnational perspective, Hayden is especially responsive to the Holocaust and the experience of Jews. Bringing this closer to the experience of African Americans, he sheds light on the darker side of modernity at work on both sides of the Atlantic: the theories of Manifest Destiny, slave labor, ethnic extermination, and a utopian vision “that not only tolerated the suffering of dehumanized peoples but required it” (163). When Hayden in his late poetry returns to an idea of divine order, it is as a religiously founded belief, often forced upon the stubborn historical events he recorded and tried to refract through his poetry. This tendency leads to what I consider Smith’s most challenging and fascinating section, called “Faith and the Folk.” It is a complex argument about Hayden’s orthodox adherence to a particular faith and an aesthetic distance to his subject matter, primarily created through his complex, highly artificial language. Both distinguished him from the turn to vernacular language and simulation of oral performance used by key figures of the BAM like Amiri Baraka and their critique of organized religion. By embedding this opposition in a discussion about the role of religion in African American history, Smith points to an experience familiar to all major participants in the quarrel over art and politics in the 1960s. Indeed, it is a dilemma also shared by figures like Du Bois and already portrayed in Frederick Douglass’s description of the “sorrow songs”: a full understanding of the empowering yet deluding functions of African American folk religion and the “Negro Church” comes only to those not immersed in them. Through the distance provided by sociology, ethnography, Marxism, or by social ascent through education, African American intellectuals had come to recognize the “Negro Church” among the key institutions of African American communities. The Church, they saw, afforded a source of resilience and resistance under slavery that was also undoubtedly crucial for the organizational network supporting the Civil Rights © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] ALH Online Review, Series XXII 3 movement. But they could also recognize it as being built around powerful charismatic patriarchal figures who might use their power to questionable political and personal ends. If the “folk” is revered for its resilience and resistance, one can hardly avoid its key institution which, however, most African American intellectuals in the BAM no longer participated in. If one critiques the church and the style of its influential protagonists, what other stylistic choices may equally resonate with the folk? Baraka’s poem “Dope” and Hayden’s “Witch Doctor” both critique the powerful figure of the preacher and demonstrate how they no longer felt involved in the church. Hayden, however, portrays the preacher as performer, framed by a poetry decidedly different from the preacher’s style. The portrayal is not entirely unsympathetic insofar as the preacher is essentially lonely and apparently spiritually unfulfilled. Baraka and others, in contrast, “sought to usurp the preacher’s mantle while mimicking his vernacular style” (97). Baraka and others may reject the Christian belief and the institution, but in their desire to speak to and even from the folk, they are also drawn to its most important model of oratory, the preacher. Therefore music and the Jazzman as the best-known tropes for the BAM’s desired mode of communication might be red herrings, Smith suggests. It conceals the didacticism especially of the male protagonists of the BAM, as well as their uneasy relation to the church-going folk. Hayden’s refusal to sound like a preacher, and his deliberate artifice in rendering and refracting black subject matter, should be read as openly confronting the distance of the educated artist to the folk rather than pretending it does not exist, Smith persuasively argues. Acknowledging the distance may well be a prerequisite to engage with it and to work through it. Herein lies Hayden’s importance for today’s black poets, many of whom find themselves working in MFA programs at colleges and universities. The attention paid to religion in this book might have started as a necessary engagement with Hayden’s faith, but in a way that is uncannily mimicking Hayden’s poetry, Smith sharpens not only our view of Hayden but also that of the BAM by working through seeming opposites. His book is thus in conversation with Timo Müller’s The African American Sonnet, which also appeared in 2018, so it’s improbable that the authors knew of each other’s study. Here, too, the originally “white” form as used by African Americans provides a vehicle through which we may not only rediscover poets but can also reappraise literary periods like that of the BAM. Ultimately, both books seem to hover just before another step in daring to place African American poets in a dialogue with white poets, too. © The Author 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected].
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