Kiese Laymon's Blog, page 3

– Excerpt from Black Regions of the Imagination –

After making the nearly eight-hour flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle International Airport, I was plagued by the sneaking suspicion that everyone in Paris spoke English, but none of them would do so with me.  My suspicions were fueled by the myth that French people will speak English only once an American stumbles over a few French phrases: “Bon-jore. Como tah-lay vu? Par-lay vu inglays? I don’t speak French” (said with sheepish grin).  This myth casts the French as a perverse group of people who measure their national superiority by the yardstick of American linguistic ineptitude.

Walking through Charles de Gaulle, there were moments when I was convinced it was true. Every sign in the airport had subscript in English directing one toward various methods for travel away from Charles de Gaulle: they wanted to give me just enough English to hang myself because once I made it out of the airport, only God knew how I would navigate Paris proper.

Signs or no signs, for me, as I’m sure it is for many Americans of a particular class background, there was something entirely overwhelming and frightening about leaving the United States and finding myself in a country where I did not speak the language.  I know that admitting this is tantamount to admitting one is illiterate in a room full of literature teachers.  I suppose my identity as an American academic is supposed to lift me above the masses of provincial Americans and deliver me into the bosom of the cosmopolitan elite.  But for better or worse, I became generic American in France.  This is not a profound observation, I know.  But on this particular trip to Paris, the relationship between internationalism and nationalism was at the forefront of my thoughts.

I was in Paris to deliver a paper at the International Richard Wright Centennial Conference, which was hosted by the American University of Paris.  This conference was one of many centennial events held during 2008 to commemorate the fact that in 1908 Richard Wright had been born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi.  Richard Wright was born less than half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification ended U.S. slavery, and in some ways his life stands as testament to the United States’ ability to reinvent itself.  In less than fifty years, the former prison house of black human chattel counted among its citizens one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century.  This writer also happened to be the grandson of black American slaves.  American exceptionalism encourages us to look upon the facts of Wright’s life and stand astounded that it took only two generations to “turn” a slave into a great American writer.

Yet buying into the narrative of American exceptionalism requires that we blind ourselves to harsh realities of black life in the United States from post-emancipation and into the twentieth century: Jim Crow, urban poverty, racism, underemployment, high infant mortality, and so on. Richard Wright, unable to reconcile his sense of his own humanity with the historical reality of state-sanctioned inequality under which most blacks lived during the early twentieth century, spent his life critiquing the myth of American racial progress and arguing that it was the very notion of American exceptionalism that retarded such progress.

Wright honed an artistic vision of America as a nation imperiled by its refusal to admit black humanity.  His responsibility, he felt as an artist, was to represent the negative realities that were generated by such a national incapacity.  In his critically acclaimed novel Native Son (1940), Wright centralized his protagonist’s social retaliation upon the realization that Bigger Thomas’s human potential would be forever denied by white power structures.  Native Son is his graphically violent imagining of how black inhumanity is created by U.S. racism and racial inequity.  Bigger’s fear, flight, and fate are dictated by the destructive American racial landscape of which he is a product.  In responding to one critic’s negative review of the violence in Native Son, Wright retorted:

            If there had been one person in the Dalton household who viewed Bigger Thomas as a human being, the crime would have been solved in half an hour. Did not Bigger himself know that it was the denial of his personality that enabled him to escape detection so long? The one piece of incriminating evidence which would have solved the “murder mystery” was Bigger’s humanity, and the Daltons, Britten, and the newspaper men could not see or admit the living clue of Bigger’s humanity under their very eyes![i]

For Wright, more destructive than Bigger’s murders is the racist nation that makes such deeds inevitable.  Bigger murders because he is black and poor; and he nearly gets away with it because he is black, poor, and not human in the eyes of white people.

As James Baldwin would point out on numerous occasions, Wright’s literary rendering of black inhumanity was disingenuous due to Wright own unwillingness to accept the reality of black humanity. Trapped within the framework of protesting the beliefs and actions of the nation’s racial majority, Wright found little solace in representing the African American capacity to manage, live, and even flourish within the confines of a racist America.  And why would he?  From the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which codified slaves into a human-property hybrid worth three-fifths of a human life, to the Jim Crow laws, America had historically neither fostered nor accepted black humanity.  As Wright stated in his posthumously published autobiographical novel, American Hunger, as the grandson of slaves, he was never able to be human in the United States: “What had I got of out living in the south,” he writes. “What had I got out of living in America? I paced the floor, knowing that all I possessed were words and dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.”[ii]  It was this quest for humanity, to live a life in which he felt fully human, that drove Wright first from the American South, then from Chicago, and then from New York to Paris.

It is rather common knowledge that Paris was the space in which Wright felt most free to explore and embrace his humanity.  Still, he never fully learned French during the time he lived in France.  If language is tied to national belonging, as many of the American ideological Right would have us believe, then Wright’s failure to fully embrace the language of the country that “freed” him speaks to his deep failure to take root there.  From 1947 to his untimely death in 1960, Richard Wright lived outside the confines of the United States and wrote fiction, essays, travel narratives, and thousands of haiku.  His years of self-exile were years of experimentation in literary form and an opening up of the content of his literary production to the world.  Confined neither by the geography of the United States nor narratives of the American racial landscape, throughout the 1950s Wright produced texts with topics as far-ranging as the decolonization of the Third World, Spanish fascism, and middle-class black life in Mississippi and Chicago; he produced this array of writings in order to expand his world beyond the family plantation in Natchez.

And one hundred years after his birth, on a train heading into Paris to attend a conference meant to celebrate the international turn in his work, I was haunted by Wright’s birthplace: Mississippi, U.S.A.  And even though Wright wrote—screamed to the world—“I am a rootless man!,” it was always hard for him to shake the United States.

The United States, both the concept and the place, was hard for me to shake, as well.  Because even in France, especially in France, I kept sight of the self that was created when my grandmother gave me my family’s story, one of the few keepsakes that has been passed down over generations: I must always remember that I am the great-great-great granddaughter of a black woman who was owned, who toiled on a South Carolina farm for the man who fathered but never recognized her children.  The mundane trauma of that keepsake stays with me, and was reflected back at me through the windows of every Parisian storefront I passed.  That keepsake is partially what motivates me to read, analyze, and write about the works of other American descendants of slaves who walked, thought, and wrote abroad.

So while I was officially in Paris to consider the significance of America, Paris, and elsewhere in the writing of one America’s most important native sons and daughters, Wright’s writing is just one of many things that compels me to examine African Americans in the world.  These two concepts, “African American” and “the world,” are at odds sometimes, but examining how various writers have lived and written works of art that bridge this spatial and imaginative chasm prompt me to ask and attempt to answer a variety of questions in this book.  How have African Americans written about their travels around the world or their relationships with other blacks around the world, their nation, and, most important, themselves?  How do African American writers attempt to tell the stories of their travels in a way that fortifies their souls?  Is self-fortification possible in the face of a predominantly white readership that expects to “know” something about black people from reading black-authored texts?  These are some of the questions that motivate this study, questions that I imagine haunted the African American traveler-writers who populate this book.

[i] Richard Wright, “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” Atlantic Monthly [vol.] (June 1940), 828.

[ii] Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 452–453.

Buy Black Regions of the Imagination here.

Eve Dunbar is the author of Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World (Temple University Press 2012), which explores the aesthetic and political ties that bind literary genre, American nationalism, and black cultural nationalism in the literary works of mid-20th century African American writers.

[image error]Less than an hour ago, I was in the middle of the Poughkeepsie Galleria Finish Line, determined to pay $340.20 for the new LeBron “Kang” James X sneakers. My decision to pay $50.20 more for a pair of sneakers than the minimum wage employee in Mississippi makes in a week wasn’t at all impulsive. Skip Bayless, the hating members of my family and hate-ish friends on Facebook made my decision to buy the Kang X’s less of a trek in excess and more of a quest fueled by the hate that hate produced.

 “These the LeBrons?” I asked the tiny saleswoman helping me at Finish Line and held up a $150.00, blood red size 13 with a black swoosh and a glowing green bottom.

I learned that the X’s hadn’t come out yet, that I was holding a special Liverpool edition IX. “The X’s won’t be nearly as expensive as people think,” the saleswoman told me. “The most expensive pair will probably be around $290.” She looked down at my ashy ankles and my dusty green suede Pumas. “You’re buying these IX’s for someone else, huh?”

“Yep,” I lied and paid $169.75 for the shoes and two pairs of green and black shoelaces. “My little cousin loves him some Bron-Bron.” I fake laughed and walked out of Finish Line having paid $170.45 less than I had hoped to.

By the time I made it to the parking lot of the Galleria, I was bubbling in guilt. I made the wrong decision. I figured that paying $169.75 for sneakers that probably cost less than $15.67 to make in China should be shameful. I also wondered what special outhouse in hell awaited those of us who made it possible for Nike to make more of its popular “Lazy But Talented” t-shirts. As I drove into the parking lot of my building, I actually pondered organizing a boycott of overpriced Nikes on Facebook called “Living Beyond the Swoosh.”

Organizing a boycott felt like the right thing to do, but how could I “live beyond the swoosh” and still rock these dope red, black and green customized Dunks I got a while ago?

The boycott ain’t happening.

***

I’m home now and the IX’s are so much more beautiful under the soft light of my apartment than they were at Finish Line. Plus, the soles literally smell like bleeding birch trees. When I put the shoes on my sockless feet, not only do I feel like a certified member of the Kangdom; but I feel, even just for a second, like I’m capable of occupying that space beyond greatness, too. Instead of organizing a boycott of Nike, I decide to take a picture or video of myself rocking the red Nike IX’s, baggy black shorts and a black hoodie from Wal-Mart. I’m determined to place the photo or video on Facebook with a caption that reads, “I’ma let all y’all hating-ass Kang-haters finish hating, but the LeBron ‘Kang’ James shoe, like LeBron ‘Kang’ James, has a chance to be the greatest of all time. All time!”

I’m rehearsing what else I’m going to write to the haters on Facebook. I convince myself that it doesn’t make any sense to pinpoint the ways that LeBron James or his Nikes might be complicit in urban decay when the net worth of black families in the U.S. is only $5000.00. If we really wanted to find ways to stop young brothers from hitting other young brothers upside the head for Jordans and LeBrons, we would find a way to increase black familial net worth to more than 15 pairs of LeBron X’s, wouldn’t we? Plus, when the best players in the world design and brand $100.00, $200.00 and $300.00 shoes, why wouldn’t a kid who comes from a similarly maligned place, who listens to similarly maligned music and speaks a similarly maligned language, want to literally walk to and from in those similarly maligned shoes? Hell, there’s very little maligned about the typical hipster’s life or style, and even they’ve made the $69.99 Nike Dunk a veritable part of their uniform.

“Don’t hate the player,” I say for the first time in my life, looking down at my blood red LeBron James Nikes. “Hate the game.”

I’m so 2002.

I walk in front of the long mirror next to the bathroom with clunky self-righteousness swinging from my neck like cubic zirconia. I’m bouncing in front of the mirror trying to do the dance LeBron did near the end of Game 5 against the Thunder.

We have a problem.

I want the slimming mirror to emphatically state that, “Fuck them haters! Fuck them h—!” Instead, it contorts and whispers, “Uncle Roscoe, you need to sit yo down somewhere.”

Somehow, some way, I have eaten and aged my way out of looking like a baller and now I resemble a baller’s overweight Uncle Roscoe. Uncle Roscoe does not bounce. Uncle Roscoe quakes. A quaking Uncle Roscoe in new blood red LeBron James IX’s is not a good look at all.

Now I have another problem. How does Uncle Roscoe responsibly get rid of a pair of brand new, blood red LeBron James sneakers in a city with mounds of violence and a bruising fascination with the color red?

I’m thinking about throwing my new shoes in the dumpster, but I respect the Kang and my $169.75 too much to do that. I could take the shoes back to Finish Line, but that would feel like a victory for Skip Bayless and the millions of Kang haters. I start to wonder for the first time if LeBron James feels any anxiety at all, not simply about branding shoes that could lead to even slightly more violence in American cities that resemble Akron, but also about not branding dope t-shirts and Armstrong-style bracelets that read “Our people over your profits” or “National Defense = Championships, but Public Education = Saved Lives.”

Seems like the right thing to do, the right decision to make, but would anything change?

I think about all the work LeBron has done with the Boys and Girls Club of America and how he’s made a number of his friends from Akron millionaires. I think about the way he rocked the hoodie after Trayvon Martin was murdered. Those decisions, like his decision to take a pay-cut while moving his talents to South Beach, seem like the right thing to do. It’s only a matter of time, I tell myself, before every LeBron Nike is less than $99.99 and comes with a note saying, “Thanks for wanting to walk in my shoes. Do something great to help people in them. Be imaginative. Be careful. Kang.”

***

After an hour of going through my phone, I narrow the possible recipients of my new red LeBron IX’s to Prescott Saunders, a 48 year-old He-Man who can still shoot 30 foot 3’s and catch 360’s with ease or my boy, “Air Dave,” a Baron Davis lookalike with audacious defense and equally audacious experiences in the penitentiary.

Before calling Prescott or Air, I write on Facebook, “Anybody in the Poughkeepsie area want a brand new pair of size 13 Lebron James sneakers? Not sure I can be held responsible if u get hit upside the head for them though.”

Six comments in, Kang-hater extraordinaire, Maurice “Mo” Elrod, my smooth, college teammate and creator of highschoolhopeful.com, writes, “Send them to a real hooper.” I’m reading Mo’s comment and thinking about how he spent the last two years refusing to admit that the Kang did more with less in Cleveland than even Jordan could have.

Three comments later, I write “… It would be poetic justice for me to offer you the Kang’s sneakers, given your hate … uh, I mean, potent criticism of his game.”

Seven comments later, Mo writes, “Never hate. Just the truth! I’ll send you my address. Good looking, homie!”

Mo and the rest of the Kang-haters haven’t said much about LeBron’s overpriced X’s this Summer and Fall, but I’m sure they’ll continue to critique LeBron James this season as a decidedly “talented” freak with a teeny clutch gene. And of course, they’ll create opportunities to tell the world that the Kang has no chance at catching Jordan, that KD is on his heels, that the Kang is the most mentally fragile superstar in history, and that rings are the only measure of greatness. And of course they’ll neglect the fact that no other player in the modern NBA era has led an undersized team with an injured third option, a gimpy second option and a 41 year-old coach to an NBA title.

But deep in the darkness of their homes, after Skip and them have tossed their powder in the air and hopped into their LBJ pajama sets, they’ll readily admit to their partners or the LBJ bobblehead under their pillow that LeBron James worked himself into becoming the only basketball player in the world for whom the word “greatness” is too small. They might even admit that Skip Bayless telling LeBron James that, “Now you can call yourself King,” is as loony as someone thirty cents away from a quarter telling Oprah Winfrey, “Now you can call yourself the queen of a media empire.”

Uncle Roscoe’s quest for the $340.20 LeBron James X reveals that we Americans will do any and everything with our money, our hate, our bodies and our adulation to form a relationship with that space beyond greatness. Shamefully, it also reveals that we have more in common with the few human beings occupying those spaces than I thought.

Far more extraordinaire than a 6’8, 260 pound point guard/small forward/power forward, defensive center, who eviscerated a healthy Thunder team while only making seven shots outside the paint, is the American who routinely puts a passionate concern for the future of young people over profit. I have met a few of those Americans, too, in Mississippi, Ohio and New York, and no one was asking for their autograph.

Right now, I am not one of those Americans. Are you? Seriously. If Nike offered you between $93,000,000 to sell shiny overpriced shoes to young black and brown kids, what would you do? How right would you make your decision?

It’s complicated, right? It always is.

The truth is that most of the young brothers who acquire the new LeBron X’s will get them the same way I acquired my red IX’s; some how, some way, they will buy them. This doesn’t stop me from neatly placing a scribbled note inside the Nike box I send to Maurice Elrod. “I’m glad you’re becoming a member of the Kangdom,” I write. “Seriously though, be careful, homie. Folks are doing anything to walk in these shoes. Be careful.”

It won’t make much of a difference at all, for reasons far bigger than the NBA or this essay, but it feels like the right thing to do.

I am 29 years old, a visual artist, and this month I started medical school. Over the last few weeks I’ve felt alienated from many things about the process that I’ve studied my way into. The social ignorance of my classmates is hard at times. The political landscape change that comes with moving from a life in New York City to Atlanta is disorienting. Things that are obvious to me are not as clear here. Prisoners should be given organ transplants as though they were regular patients on waiting lists, not second-class citizens. Apparently there are those who disagree with this. I find that unbelievable, and it makes me want to go revolutionary on them.

An older doctor came to speak with us this week. He’s a short Jewish man from Virginia, wearing a seersucker blazer and walking on a cane. He was talking about the HIV epidemic, of which he was the first person in Atlanta to take seriously. He remembers seeing an unexplained case in the late 70’s in a medical student that he later realized was likely HIV. In the early years, as a new disease became apparent, he was one of the few if only people working on it in Atlanta. People were dying and they had no idea how to help. He said that his colleagues shunned him in the hallways because he worked with those patients; what if infection came from contact? Or the air? The local university told him to keep those patients outside of their hospital system, both because they were dangerous and at that time mostly gay white men. He said that if he had a gun there are a number of people he would shoot for what they did, for the human beings that they abandoned on his doorstep. He said that in retrospect he was ashamed that he wasn’t more of an activist, and even more ashamed that he didn’t realize at the time how the disease was quietly beginning to devastate the black community. This wasn’t false humility; he wore that shame like a raw wound.

We’re being taught to preserve our own health, to be careful of burnout, and to not give so much of ourselves that we get lost. He said he did none of those things, and each day he went in and gave his soul to his patients, and each day he left with less of it. For 7 years throughout the 80′s he worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week, trying to understand and apply new treatments to his people. He said that when he was a kid he called people sissies and queers, not thinking about them as sexual beings, but simply as people who were different in the wrong way. And when the disease exploded in that community he had to change himself and learn to care for them in ways that made him grow, but also made him realize how awful he had been.

He had a patient who had likely contracted HIV from her husband, her only sexual partner. She knew she was HIV positive, and they tried earlier AZT drugs on her that in retrospect likely made her worse, but it was all he knew to do. She wasted to 70 pounds, and was wearing a diaper toward the end because of her overwhelming diarrhea. He could barely bring himself to see her, but during his rounds he would always go, sometimes pushing her back to last patient just to avoid having to face her. She had never been angry; at her husband, at the world, or at him for failing. One day she asked him to sit down, and he thought to himself that this was it, she was going to let it out. He sat, and she said, You don’t look so good. My disease is killing you too. I’m not afraid, I know I’m dying. It’s okay.

He said he wasn’t a hero. That he made too many mistakes and missed too many opportunities. I went up to him after and said, All people carry fear, all people carry guilt. Heroes are the ones who continue anyway.

New York and San Francisco have been so successful at their public health efforts against HIV that Bellevue recently closed its AIDS ward where patients used to go to be treated and often die. It’s not necessary there anymore. Atlanta on the other hand qualifies as an epidemic region under WHO guidelines. The disease is spreading like wildfire here. 60% of gay black men will contract it before the age of 40. Over 200 people die every year in Grady Hospital alone from HIV/AIDS related complications even though a full drug treatment course is available because of unaddressed social and mental health problems. Even with drug availability, the profession has failed to reach out and effectively communicate with poor people and minorities. Gay white men, while still being infected, will be cared for. There’s work to be done with everyone else. Patients who don’t follow their drug regimens can’t be blamed; we are the professionals. It is our job to help them, not to dismiss them if they don’t meet us half way.

I’ve been questioning why I was here. Wondering why I upended my life to spend time with people who are not like me, who will never understand me and who I can’t open up to or be myself around. He reminded me. The world is a beautiful place, and it’s unbearable that there are those who’s suffering is so naked that they can no longer see it. Not everyone can be healed, but everyone can be helped. I am tired of being more ignorant than is necessary in the face of that pain.

“Maximo Granzotti”