TWENTIETH Century black American creative writing — fiction, poetry, drama — achieved international recognition because the entire literate world realised that with democracy and creative freedom, the unique social circumstances of a nation divided by colour and cultural origin would reveal crucially important lessons and insights into race relations for all others world-wide. Indeed, it is safe to say that the diffusion of such specific black American creative literature into the minds of both literate Americans and foreigners naturally led to benevolent influences, and the eventual election of the first black American president, Mr Obama; not omitting as well the influence of Obama’s own beautifully written autobiography.

It can be said, without reservation, that any mentally sound, rational nation with genuine creative freedom and a professionally non-partisan publishing industry which harnesses and disseminates for public consumption its critical and creative writing, will clarify the road to its development.

Creative literature, even more than historical reports (which we know are often riddled with inaccuracies and revisions), can provide a fresh unspoiled road for social and human development, precisely because such material, however indebted to ‘reality’, is not limited by mere factual reports and dogmatic pronouncements.

However surprising it may sound to some, the social speeches and polemical writings of great Afro-American activists, from W E Dubois, to Malcolm X, to Martin Luther King, and many others, offer far less practical everyday living proof of human logic, strength, creativity and inter/personal love than black American creative writing by Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, William Demby, William Melville Kelley, Ralph Ellison, John A. Williams, Al Young, Clarence Major, Bob Kaufman, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Terrence Hayes, and numerous other Afro-American creative writers.

In his essay, ‘In Praise Of The Novel’, the perceptive Mexican novelist, Carlos Fuentes wrote: “Literature makes real what history forgot. And because history has been what was, literature will offer what history has not always been…” This statement becomes immediately valid when we think of Zora Neale Hurston, perhaps the first black American writer to concentrate exclusively on the lives of black Americans in their own communities, whether in Florida where she originated, or Harlem, New York, at the time of its celebrated ‘Renaissance’.

Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston, a fun-loving, unconventional, bold and bright black woman, shocked both blacks and whites by her total disregard for recording obvious prejudicial and oppressive realities of the surrounding dominant white American society.

Was this just a creative tactic, or psychological denial on her part? We do have written evidence from Hurston that she reveled in her own black ethnicity as a writer, mainly in reaction to the humiliating experiences blacks living in the USA often encountered in association with whites.

This issue calls to mind a comment the sensitive Italian novelist, Alberto Moravia once wrote about his formation as a creative writer: “It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.” When Hurston shocked everyone by criticising the United states Supreme Court decision to end segregation in Southern public schools with these written words: “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me, who does not wish me near them?” her reaction implied that her happiness and self-confidence came from being among her own ethnicity. Her reaction also implied, correctly, that true desegregation has to come from the hearts and minds of whites and blacks themselves.

And when we turn to Hurston’s fiction, we see unforgettable moments (similar, indeed, to many real moments in her career when whites encouraged, praised, published, and rewarded her) where such desegregation is alive in ordinary ‘un-historical’ moments. For example, in the beautiful short story, ‘ISIS’, about a saucy little brown-skin girl: “Everybody in the country, white and coloured, knew little Isis Watts, Isis the joyful. The Robinson brothers, white cattlemen, were particularly fond of her and always extended a stirrup for her to climb up behind one of them for a short ride, or let her try to crack the long bullwhips and yee whoo the cows.” Such a description of everyday interracial acceptance in fiction is the flipside of historical social abuse.

Black American relevance
The relevance of black American creative literature to other nations, or the world at large, derives from its unavoidable theme of negative and positive interactions between people of different racial and cultural background.

It is the general example of living in such circumstances that is relevant outside the USA, not every specific case of positive or negative interaction which blacks and whites no doubt experience in the USA.

In Guyana, for example, unlike the USA, non-whites of Amerindian, African, Oriental and other origin were not a minority, but a majority, and their political leaders realised quite early that historically, Guyana had not produced a local white creole rebellious class culture as in the United States, which had revolted against their European colonial origins and power structure.

It is not surprising that one of the chief architects of Guyanese anti-colonial Independence would be Janet Jagan, a white American from a nation that had proclaimed and fought for its Independence from Britain’s colonial Empire in North America.

What specific relevance, then, does the black American experience in literature and film hold for all Guyanese?

In this specific minority cultural aspect of America, it was films more than literature which conveyed the black American experience as the ultimate vehicle to explore and expose all the intricate, real or imagined, expressions of racial prejudice, via a popular creative medium.

A similar topic was perhaps even more explored in some of the best Hollywood Westerns concerning the conquering of the American Indian, and such films are also quite relevant to the social education of all Guyanese. This same helpful social relevance and frankness could not be had from other films from homogeneous ethnic cultures, whether in India, China, Africa, or Europe. Except, of course, the unique interracial films from Italy, England and contemporary France, simply because racially homogeneous cultures do not contain the same obvious visible racial differences and psychological realities of everyday American life.

Constant exposure
Multi-ethnic Guyanese society learned much, and quickly, from its constant exposure to such films in their cinemas, and the lessons from them for both Afro-Guyanese and all others is that such deeply ingrained and ignorant prejudices should never be imported, adopted or mimicked by one Guyanese ethnicity or person towards another ethnicity or person.

The great black-American film stars who explored these issues with their roles are: Juano Hernandez, Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Woody Strode, Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover.

Such films are: ‘Boy, What A Girl!’; ‘Superfly’; ‘In This Our Life’; ‘Intruder In The Dust’; ‘Body And Soul’; ‘Bright Road’; ‘Stormy Weather’; ‘Pinky’; ‘Lydia Bailey’; ‘The Breaking Point’; ‘Blackboard Jungle’; ‘Take A Giant Step’; ‘Band Of Angels’; ‘Carmen Jones’; ‘Porgy And Bess’; ‘Island In The Sun’; ‘The Defiant Ones’; ‘Kings Go Forth’; ‘The World, The Flesh, and The Devil’; ‘One Potato Two Potato’; ‘Night Of The Quarter Moon’; ‘A Raisin In The Sun’; ‘Red Ball Express’; ‘A Taste Of Honey’; ‘The L-Shaped Room’; ‘Two Gentlemen Sharing’; ‘Lilies Of The Field’; ‘A Patch Of Blue’; ‘Shadows’; ‘Putney Swope’; ‘The Pawnbroker’; ‘The Cool World’; ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?’; ‘Lady Sings The Blues’; ‘Mo Better Blues’; ‘Do The Right Thing’; ‘Zebra’; ‘Sounder’; ‘Love Fields’ and others, but not many.

It has been most unfortunate and detrimental for post-1970s Guyanese society that all these films were denied continued public viewing via cinemas that thrived on classic rerun film programmes.

The brilliant literary example of Hurston’s precise descriptive avant-garde linguistic folk style would pass down to the best black American women writers like Lorraine Hansberry, Tony Morrison, and Alice walker.

But Hansberry, who died much too young, would leave one of the greatest American plays ever: ‘A Raisin In The Sun’. The film of the same title, one of Sidney Poitier’s best, opened to crowded public appreciation in 1961 at Georgetown’s recently demolished Plaza cinema.

The other profoundly gifted black American creative writer to emerge after Hurston was Ralph Ellison, who, as a serious writer, was part of the non-academic literary tradition established by leading American novelists like Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Horace McCoy, John O’Hara, and Jim Thompson.

Ellison, apparently once even a shoe-shine man, would write one of the greatest American novels of the period, ‘Invisible Man’, and his collection of essays and interviews, ‘Shadow And Act’, remains one the best critical works by a black intellectual, especially its astonishingly perceptive essay, in which he takes apart the critic, Irving Howe, for using the fatalistic early angry black novelist, Richard Wright, author of ‘Native Son’ and ‘Black Boy’, as a stereotype by which to judge all later black American creative writers.

Ellison’s criticism of Howe was right on target, and after the sensitive distinction of James Baldwin’s novels, we can widen our appreciation of diverse black-American creative writing with the refreshing beatnik poetry of Bob Kaufman and Ed Bullins, the poems, plays, and fiction of Leroi Jones/Baraka, and recent outstanding poets like Rita Dove and Terrence Hayes.

Jiveass Nigger
But most important is the exciting gold-rush of bold, perceptive, and stunningly written novels such as the masterpiece, ‘The Man Who Cried I Am’ by John A Williams; ‘Beetlecreek’, ‘Dem’, and ‘The Catacombs’ by William Demby; ‘All Night Visitors’ by Clarence Major; ‘Snakes’, by Al Young; ‘A Different Drummer’ by William Melville Kelley; ‘Pinktoes’ by Chester Himes; ‘Yellow Back Radio Broke Down’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ by Ishmael Reed; the recent ‘Platitudes’ by Trey Ellis; and especially that brilliantly written novel, ‘The Life And Loves Of Mister Jiveass Nigger’ by Cecil Brown, a hip erudite black professor of Literature.

This is the notorious novel that achieved almost bestseller status in the early 1970s, becoming an underground classic for intelligent black males and intelligent white females who wanted to date, avoiding all the pitfalls of ignorance, ethnic stereotyping, and mere sexual curiosity.

The relationship of fictional structure to the sex act and eroticism has been noted by perceptive literary critics; the buildup of rhythm, delay and climax in the sex act is also intrinsic to narrative’s progression towards culmination.

Because some black writers were also gregarious men-about-town, they encountered many spontaneous, sensual women, and hot steady sex, especially with the traditionally forbidden white female.

Such topics are explored with intellectual depth and insight in novels like ‘The Man Who Cried I Am’; ‘All Night Visitors’; ‘Pinktoes’; ‘Platitudes’, and especially Cecil Brown’s ‘The Life And Loves Of Mister Jiveass Nigger’, which takes place in uninhibited European capitals like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm.

This novel’s witty, black, intellectual drifter becomes weary of his stereotypical attraction as a black male, but discovers also the hilarious, liberating psychological role he can play for others he too has stereotyped.

In one such meaningful scene, he finally goes to bed with a friendly, intelligent European girl, who, during the sex act, says she has something to tell him, but keeps delaying, even as they keep at it; she keeps saying, “I…I,” while he, in vigorous action, asks: “What….what….what is it?” until she finally shouts: “I’m….I’m…I’m a nigger!’ as they achieve an enormous orgasm together, and her invisible miscegenated origin is at last revealed.