Black Art Matters
Five Works by Black Writers, Musicians, and Artists that Changed the Way I See the World
As I join my colleagues in book publishing today in solidarity with the quest for racial justice, and in a call for better representation in the shamefully homogenous industry, I have been thinking about how I might best participate in the conversation. Since I am also a writer and a critic, I thought the most appropriate thing would be briefly to center, and celebrate, the work of some Black artists and creators. Here are five works that feel especially pertinent to the moment:
Blueschild Baby, George Cain (1970). Cain’s novel, recently re-issued by New York Review of Books, is a stunning roman a clef about a young heroin addict on the move in Harlem — a stark, dazzling tale bursting with despair and violence, but saturated with jolting neon energy. One of the great New York City novels.
“The Art of Romare Bearden,” Ralph Ellison (1968). First written for a catalogue for a Bearden exhibit at SUNY Albany, this characteristically eloquent essay transcends its consideration of the great Bearden to become something approaching a manifesto. Ellison begins by speaking of the
imbalance in American society which leads to a distorted perception of social reality, to a stubborn blindness to the creative possibilities of cultural diversity, to the prevalence of negative myths, racial stereotype, and dangerous illusions about art, humanity, and society, arising from an initial failure of social justice.
In Ellison’s formulation, Bearden’s majestic collages and streetscapes serve “as signs and symbols of a humanity that has struggled to survive the decimating and fragmentizing effects of American social processes.” The “true artist,” Ellison concludes, “destroys the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen.”
Calamities, Renee Gladman (2016). I have revisited this spare and cerebral meditation on writing from a San Francisco poet and artist many times, in thrall to its uncanny grace and its internal dream-logic. “I was a body and it was a page,” Gladman writes of writer’s block; “we both had our proverbial blankness.” Mixing the abstract with the concrete (“one of my favorite words was in my mouth, and I was torn between chewing and swallowing it”), the universal with the quotidian, Gladman produces an unclassifiable work of endless mystery.
Since I Laid My Burden Down, Brontez Purnell (2017). Rude, ribald, hilarious, this jaunty novel about growing up queer and black in Alabama — and the ties that bind us to home — is the mark of an inventive and gifted master of the vernacular voice, and the mark of a writer, truly, to watch.
5. There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sly and the Family Stone (1971). One of the greatest records in the history of American music, Sly Stone’s cry of anguish takes the form of fractured poetry shouted and sung over the blurry grind of bone-hard funk, slowed down to a funeral pace. Voices slide in and out of focus, snippets of jazzy guitar circle ominous bass lines; the sound seems to collapse in on itself. “Frightened faces to the wall,” Sly sings. “Can’t you hear your mama call?” As this past week has demonstrated, they are calling still.
