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Last Updated: Apr 3rd, 2008 - 13:42:45 |
Ralph Ellison probably would have never admitted it, but he was a better thinker and writer (a prolific and brilliant essayist even after the novel) because of the letters he exchanged with Albert Murray. For all of his prodding and poking Albert Murray might have been a tad jealous of his friend, but probably understood that Ellison's work represented the level to which he aspired. The relationship between Black women scholars like historian Nell Irvin Painter and the late literary scholar Nellie McKay was less competitive, as they helped each other and many other Black women of their generation navigate the difficulties of an Academy not quite ready for women and Black folk, let alone Black women folk. In both cases, these relationships furthered the genius of Black writers, thinkers and artists, in part, because all involved, were generous with their time and their opinions--a generosity that is at times missing among the generation of hip-hop and post-Hip-hop (not anti) thinkers.
The full possibilities of such generosity were recently displayed at the Nasher Museum in Durham, NC as critic Greg Tate and cinematographer Arthur Jafa sat down (armed with laptops and I-Tunes ) to continue a "conversation" that apparently began one day nearly 30 years ago when the two confronted each other on the Howard University campus. Tate, a longtime contributor to The Village Voice and shaman behind the Burnt Sugar collective, has for decades been the poster child for a "PomoAfroNigeratti". Although his writing these days is more refined, though no less wily, Tate remains one of the best examples of a non-fiction writer whose conceptual brilliance is buttressed by an equally brilliant prose--what some might think of as an aesthetics of black criticism--perhaps only matched in the past few decades by the examples the late June Jordan, Ernest Hardy and Fred Moten.
Jafa is a well respected, if somewhat obscure (by mainstream standards) director and cinematographer, who helped enhance the visions of Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Spike Lee (Crooklyn) and even Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut). Jafa's brilliance though, transcends his devotion to cinema. There's an argument that suggest that the genius of Black expressive culture in the "West" centers on the ability of its purveyors to tell stories, regardless of the genre, physical medium or abstractions that said stories animate; And Arthur Jafa above all is a storyteller. Writing about his school-days growing up in the Mississippi Delta in the Tate edited Everything But the Burden, Jafa observes the cathartic effect of the Delta as offering "An exposure to the transfixing, and for me unprecedented, Blackness of its inhabitants, their arresting beauty and dense corporeal being, the inescapable duality of absence and presence, the inevitable embrace, as a nascent Black man of temperamental cool, simply put, the dark matter of being." And while many others might argue (including myself) the political potency of those field hollers that might have served as our first response to the violence of our experience in the Delta, Jafa ultimately offers a story as to why those field hollers should matter to us centuries later.
What was apparent as Tate and Jafa exchanged fragments of "feedback loops" long cultivated in the midnight hours of their friendship, is that they love and respect each other enough to challenge each other's thinking, but are secure enough in their own intellects to not feel threatened when one of them might get the cerebral upper hand--because even in those cases it raises the bar. Tate and Jafa's relationship highlights that genius for genius's sake matters little if not enveloped in a committed generosity. Understandably such generosity is difficult in an era where there is a marketplace for smart negroes--and certainly for those whose prose (if not ideas) play to certain mainstream notions of accessibility (i.e. Can an oblivious so-called White literate NPR listening public understand it?). Far too many of us I think, are unwilling to publically acknowledge when one of our peers produces something that really forces us to go back to the lab. All too often our measure of what matters is connected to cover story bylines and $2.00 a word gigs and our desire to protect our individual proximities to that kind of marketplace prestige. And this is not to suggest that Ellison, Murray, Painter, McKay, Tate, Jafa, and so many others did not have to create to live--but that ultimately the it was the quality of the exchange of ideas that mattered more than a "mess of pottage."
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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