A major part of Facebook’s enduring popularity is the platform’s ability to accommodate group discussions and functions. My own capacity for participating in such groups is limited because my offline creative endeavors. Despite those limitations, I do sometimes, through different groups, weigh in on issues impacting our shared human condition and inspired aspirations. Aside from on my own FB profile, the American Literature Group, Contemporary World Literature, and Notes on the State of Southern Poetry are a few of the places on FB where I’ve been able to expand on core subjects to incorporate different contemporary issues. In the sections below are two recent examples in which I focus on works by two American authors to address matters concerning black women in the publishing industry, antisemitism, college campus protests concerning the Israel-Gaza conflict, and nonviolent conflict resolution. MARGARET WALKER
When reading the above quote, it helps to remember that it comes from a book written in the early 1940s. The author, Margaret Abigail Walker (July 7, 1915 – Nov 30, 198) was addressing the need to end the “Jim Crow” racism commonly practiced in the United States at the time. Her words should not, as some FB commenters seem to have done, be interpreted as necessarily applicable to various modern-day conflicts in different countries. At the same time, there are certainly those in need of self-determination who may find them inspiring. The success of authors like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan did a lot to make the doors to America’s publishing industry open a little wider for African-American women during the 1980s and 1990s. But before of these literary superstars came along, there was author-poet Margaret Walker. She first gained fame for her poetry collection For My People (1942), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Walker’s reputation as an accomplished author was confirmed with the publication of the celebrated novel Jubilee (1966). She was also lauded for several more volumes of poetry, for her controversial study–– Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius : A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (1988), and for her work as an educator at Jackson State University in Mississippi. HAROLD BRODKEY“I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. ... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.” ––Harold Brodkey (AR, American Review 20: The Magazine of New Writing, 1974, U.S. Bantam Books. Quote frequently attributed to composition titled MANIPULATIONS.) Somewhere in a box of books I stashed away to protect them from hurricane scares is a 596-page 1st-edition copy of Jewish-American author Harold Brodkey’s highly-acclaimed book, STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE (1988). I bought it when several copies landed on a bargain table in a bookstore I managed. It didn’t seem possible that Brodkey (1930-1996) would live up to all the reviewer hype comparing him to the likes of Marcel Proust and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not only was I proven wrong, but joined the ranks of those who eagerly awaited his long-rumored masterful novel, THE RUNAWAY SOUL (1991), and who were astonished to read his memoir of dying from AIDS titled THIS WILD DARKNESS (1996). Lately, I’ve been thinking about how Brodkey dealt with the complexities of self-awareness, sociopolitical identity, and intimate relationships in his work and life. His style prompts readers’ to embrace complexity in order to reach practical inclusive understanding. Recent reports on antisemitism, Islamophobia, and disruptive war protests unfolding on college campuses across the globe have made me want to dig through the boxes of books climate change forced me to put away, and to revisit his work. The idea of someone attempting to reduce the significance his Jewish-American bisexual first-gen American literary being, by squeezing their understanding or misunderstanding of it into a disposable demographic box, makes no sense to me. Yet that biased tendency, much more than informed awareness, seems to be driving the actions of so many at this time. By Aberjhani |
AberjhaniContemporary award-winning American author of classically-styled works in history, poetry, creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, and journalism. Archives
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