The Signifying Griot: Oscar Brown, Jr.

My introduction to the great Oscar Brown, Jr., who died on Sunday morning at the age 78, came as a teen watching his PBS series From JumpStreet. What I appreciated about the series was that it gave me a historical context for the gospel quintets and hard bop jazz that my father spent his Sunday afternoons with.

The next time I confronted Oscar Brown, Jr. was while sitting in a graduate seminar on literary theory—STRUGGLING with Skip Gate’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Theory (1988). It was literally Brown’s recording of “Signifying Monkey” from his 1960 recording Sin and Soul, that help me find real world implications for Gates’ post-structuralist theory. Brown helped me better understand the mantra: “make it plain”, something that Brown did throughout his career often providing great jazz instrumentals with lyrics that resonated more powerfully outside of hard-core jazz realms. His lyrics to Miles Davis’s “All Blues” and Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue”—the latter of which I first heard Abbey Lincoln sing on her brilliant Abbey is Blue recording—are perhaps the most well known. Lincoln’s rendition of Brown’s “Strong Man” from That’s Him remains my favorite Lincoln song.

Oscar Brown, Jr., like Amiri Baraka, the late Eileen Southern, and Katherine Dunham were/are vitals connections to the culture we made—the genius of our everyday realities writ large on the screen, the dance floor and the written and spoken word. With the passing of Oscar Brown, Jr. yet another in a generation of griots have passed and that legacy will have to be maintained by the likes of Portia Maultsby, Guthrie Ramsey, Jr, and all those who love and take THIS culture seriously.

Also check out Professor Kim's tribute to the great Oscar Brown, Jr.

Knees of a Natural Man: Thinking About Henry Dumas

Knees of a Natural Man: Thinking About Henry Dumas
by Mark Anthony Neal

It’s been a long while since I’ve thought about Henry Dumas, though Dumas, or rather his legacy has a great deal to do with my commitment to living a “life of the mind” as some would call it. I was a budding poet and student activist during the mid-1980s when I came across a copy of Dumas’ poem “If I Were Earth” in an issue of Essence Magazine—

Each tear that fell
from the crushed
moons of your face,
stabbed me,
broke and split
into a thousand pains.
But I held out my arms
and no not one did I miss,
No, not one pain.
And if I don’t let
you soak into me
and bring me up,
if I don’t let you seep
deep into me
and teach me,
then you can cry in
the morning to the sun,
and tell him to rise up
and burn me away.
—copyright by Loretta Dumas and Eugene B. Redmond

Damn. It was after reading “If I Were Earth” that I decided that I was never really going to be a poet, because I could never write anything as haunting and beautiful as Dumas’ poem. These were the days when I lived in the E185 section of the campus library, catching up on the Black Arts Revolution that I missed two decades earlier. But who was this Henry Dumas and why hadn’t I heard more about him? And then I came across the answer: Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City cop on May 23, 1968 in a case of mistaken identity at the age of 33. For some time now I’ve thought about Dumas’ murder (and that of Fred Hampton) as a metaphor for the “death of black genius”.

My interest in Dumas only deepened and I can still remember the day I walked into the St. Marks Bookstore in the East Village to pick up a copy of Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas . By that time I was putting in time as a high school instructor at Walton High School in the Bronx (still my most memorable teaching experience) and I can recall vividly reading the book’s intro during one of my breaks. Eugene Redmond’s tribute to Dumas has lived with me for the last 14 years:

***

“He came from the vast somewhere—like the music…he was tuned in. Turned on. Cultural stabilizer. Cultural modulator. Funkadelic verb-gymnast…He was a ‘natural’ man—in the fullest, lightest, brightest, blackest, yet most complex, sense of that word—and by turns playful, brooding-moody, contemplative, histrionic, introspective, gregarious, handsome, solemn, proud, scornful, impatient with a sluggish consciousness, weird, way out, outlandish, meditative, loving, in love, lofty…unkempt, meticulous, studied, paranoid, potent, impotent, deep, indulgent…and high, always, high on language.”

***

Yes, that is the kind of intellectual I want to be—the kind of man I want to be.

The spirit of Henry Dumas must have reached out to me earlier today as I decided to finally shelve some of the books that have been unpacked in my office for 9 months. It’s been some time since I’ve thought about Henry Dumas, but on the 38th anniversary of his death (give on take three days), I’m glad to remember him.

Rap City, The Washington Post and Black Male Intellectuals

So my boy Michael Eric Dyson showed up on Rap City talking about his new book on Bill Cosby and the Black Middle Class. Say what you want about Dyson, bruh is circulating in a way that’s really unprecedented among black intellectuals. The Today Show, The Bill O’Reilly Show, NPR’s Talk of the Nation & News and Notes with Ed Gordon and Rap City? Few of us could roll comfortably in those spaces.

I was talking with Dyson by phone from the green room at BET when he told me that The Washington Post had reviewed New Black Man along with Charles Barkley’s Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man? Here’s some choice nuggets from Adam Bradley’s review:

***
For all its straight talk on race, however, [Who’s Afraid of a Large Black Man] ends at a familiar impasse. As Martin Luther King Jr. asked almost 40 years ago, where do we go from here? That's where Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man comes in. Neal, a professor of African-American studies at Duke University, is the author of several books and numerous articles on black popular culture. A self-described "thug nigga intellectual," he is not likely to be on Barkley's celebrity guest list. But in asserting his identity as a black male feminist, Neal challenges many of the assumptions behind Barkley's book.

Barkley's conversations are almost entirely between a black heterosexual, privileged man and other heterosexual privileged men. Even if their collective dreams of ending racism were realized, fundamental inequalities would be sustained through heterosexism, classism and misogyny. Neal addresses those inequalities by calling for a radical reframing of the way we talk about black and white, privilege and victimization. He imagines a New Black Manhood as "a metaphor for an imagined life -- a way to be 'strong' as a black man in new ways: strong commitment to diversity in our communities, strong support for women and feminism, and strong faith in love and the value of listening."

Part academic treatise, part soul-baring memoir, New Black Man is the unlikely offspring of hip-hop and feminism…With New Black Man , Neal offers a call to action by challenging not only the conventional white powers that be, but also the black men who sanction inequality by upholding patriarchy and heterosexism. In many ways, Neal's work responds better to the title of Barkley's book than does Barkley's own. Who's afraid of a large black man? Neal's New Black Man might just be the most feared man of all, for it is he who may finally realize that the path to racial justice runs through equal justice for all.
***

Nice, though homie did take me to task for being a tad too personal and for paying too much tribute to the feminist “womens” who make me the new black man I am, though it’s not like the readers of the WP are all that familiar with Jewell Gomez, Patricia Hill Collins or Audre Lorde for that matter.

And while we are on the subject of large black men—check out The Notorious Ph.D.'s (Todd Boyd) commentary on News and Notes yesterday.

So You Wanna Be a Stay at Home Dad? On the Season Finale of Desperate Housewives

Though I’ve yet to write about it, I’ve been addicted to Desperate Housewives for much of the past year. Call it the guilty pleasure—not nearly as smart as The Wire or as compelling as Six Feet Under (my other Sunday Night addictions)—but the combo of sex, domestic drama, and betrayal, all from a women’s point of view is welcome relief from trying to keep up with the whurl-a-gurls. Of course Terri Hatcher, Eva Longoria and Nicollette Sheridan have gotten much of the play in the press this year—quite frankly cause they’re like sex on ice—and their story lines have played up that reality. Marcia Cross’s charter Bree is like crazy, though not nearly as much as her character from Melrose Place—still haunted by the episode where she showed up at the beach house.

The least sexy character (and story line) belonged to Felicity Huffman (Lynette), who I’ve been a fan of since Sports Night. While her cohorts on Wisteria Lane were dealing with S&M, gay-bashing, undercover sex with teenagers, tax fraud, and murder, Lynette was dealing with the everyday realities of daycare, parent teacher conferences, diapers and all the other stuff that come with being the stay at home parent. While her husband Tom (Melrose alumni Doug Savant) wasn’t a total goof, his commitment to “the grind” often left him indifferent and uninformed about what was going on with his wife and their four children—all boys. Ironically Lynnette was probably more committed to “the grind” before she gave it up to stay at home with the kids and it was those tools of the trade that she employed as she helped undermine Tom’s attempts to come up in the game. When Tom quits his job after being passed over for a major promotion—twice—his former boss lets him know that it was Lynette who requested that he be passed over (she feared his ambitions were out of sync with the stability needed for the family). After brooding for a bit, Tom announces that he would become the stay at home parent and Lynette was going back to work.

Now I fully understand the appeal of “the grind” (it’s like crack) and like so many folk I’ve had the damndest time trying to balance the work, the parenting and being a husband. As the sole income earner, “the Grind” becomes religion, so I can’t fault Tom and others who fall into this trap, especially since my passion for the work (like I said, it’s like crack) often blinds me to the importance of the small moments that the whurl-a-girls get with their daddy. (Hell, the two-year-old whurl-a-gurl came downstairs to “play” just as the season finale of Desperate Housewives was going off the air.) What struck me about last night’s episode was how cavalierly Tom felt that he could be the stay at home parent. Now I ain’t one of those cats who believe that there’s some biologically defined division of labor among genders, but I also know that most men—including us feminist types—are clueless about the amount of time that women put in as mothers, husband, home-makers, whether they are stay at home parents or working as full-time professionals (my wife just recently gave up “the grind”). As the folk at Salary.com recently explored the average “housewife” not only puts in a 40-hour week, but about 60 hours in overtime—now that a “grind”. Hopefully writers of Desperate Housewives won’t simply exploit Tom’s stay-at-home status for easy laughs (like Daddy Daycare), but willingly embrace the opportunity to help men more fully understand their roles in the domestic lives of the children and partners.

Rethinking Black Masculinity