646 The American Century: Literature since 1945dream: “The white man’s heaven is the Black man’s hell,” we are told in The Black
Bird (1969), a play by the poet and playwright Marvin X (1944–). But they are also
trying to restore the pioneer values of liberation and mobility, once so fundamental
to that dream, in and for their own people. This has necessarily involved them in a
commitment to revolutionary struggle. “change up,” Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti
commands, in one of the poems included in Ground Work: New and Selected poems
1966–1996 (1996), “let’s go for ourselves / ... / change-up and yr children will look
at u differently / than we looked at our parents.” The aim is to achieve an irreversible
shift of power: “I’m / gonna make it a crime to be anything BUT black,” Mari Evans
has announced in “Vive Noir!” (1968), “gonna make white / a twenty-four hour /
lifetime / J.O.B.” Formally, this has aligned them with all those trying to “write black,”
to realize a verbal approximation of the frantic energy, the hip rhythms, of black
speech and music: “to be black,” as Lee/Madhubuti puts it in one poem (“But He
Was Cool” (1970)), “is / to be / very – hot.” This is primarily a literature of exhortation
that, rather than dwell on personal suffering, insists on the abolition of communal
suffering. “Don’t Cry, Scream,” Lee/Madhubuti tells his audience in the poem of that
name (1971) and then obeys his own instructions, in a wild typographical imitation
of modern jazz:SCREAM – EEEeeeeeeeeeee – ing loud &
SCREAM – EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE – ing long with feelingThe need to scream, to shout and fight rather than lament, has led some of these
poets at least to jettison those aspects of black culture which, they believe, might
impede the revolutionary momentum. Among those aspects, the most notable are
the music and spirit of the blues which, as the black scholar and theorist Maulana
Karenga (1941–) explains in “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function”
(1968), are “not functional ... because they do not commit us to the struggle of today
and tomorrow.” Blues are “a very beautiful, musical, and psychological achievement
of our people,” Karenga admits, but “they keep us in the past” and “whatever we do
we cannot remain in the past.” So no more blues, Sonia Sanchez insists in “Liberation
Poem” (1970), “blues ain’t culture / they sounds of oppression / against the white
man’s shit.” “We ain’t blue, we are black,” Lee/Madhubuti argues in “Don’t Cry,
Scream,” and clearly David Nelson would agree with him: “Blues was for making and
enduring and suffering / We need a new BLACK thing,” he declares in “No Time for
Blues Now” (1970). This “new BLACK thing” will be the opposite of the old, a “music
for the senses” that is “fast an’ happy an’ mad!!!!!” Reversing the vicious cycle of
oppression, it will be what Baraka in Black Music has called a “song above horror,”
alive with “black rhythm energy” and alert above all to the necessity to “change-up.”
It will also be, though, like the blues, a song for performance. Along with the beats,
as well as the poets of the San Francisco and Black Mountain groups, many of the
more recent black poets have relied as much on the spoken word as the written.
Writing also to be immediately accessible and nurture feelings of community, they
have moved toward a poetry of and for the street that is determinedly populist,GGray_c05.indd 646ray_c 05 .indd 646 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM