The Scars and Stripes of My Literary Tradition

Black American artists inherit a literary past that is prickly at best.

Last weekend, in the midst of a conversation about Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, I mentioned that there are Morrison references in every book I’ve written. This is true of a number of writers who have been highly influential to me. And it is part of what I mean when I say that I am writing “in the tradition.” But the singular the is a bit deceptive. Like many other writers, I write at the crossroads of literary traditions: English, southern, American, feminist, and Black. But there is a particularity to the African American literary tradition, bearing inheritances from the West and the Continent (as we often refer to Africa), as well as the particularity of being Black and modern people in the West.

The first class I took that elaborated on a concept of “the tradition” was my freshman-year English course in high school. We read T. S. Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which both affirmed his modernist preoccupations and anticipated “new criticism,” which would move literary analysis away from concerns with the author’s personal story, preoccupations, and identity. Art, and poetry specifically, was a kind of objective science in Eliot’s imagination, a sublimation of the self in the service of creative output. The artist does not deny the past, according to Eliot, but rather steps into tradition, making room for himself without becoming derivative.

A Black artist, here in the United States, inherits a literary past that is prickly at best. Eliot’s fixation on the European mind is arguably a far cry from his friend Ezra Pound’s fascist commitments, but both relied upon assumptions of superiority and a belief that domination was warranted. In a nation made by many but established by Europeans, the establishment prevails in most sectors.

In 2016, when John Edgar Wideman published Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, he explored details in the life of Emmett Till’s father, who was also killed. Whereas his son was killed by private citizens who were protected by the state, Louis Till was killed by the state itself. (It’s a distinction without, perhaps, much difference.) Louis Till served in the U.S. Army during the Italian campaign. He was accused, along with another man, of murdering one Italian woman and raping two others. Till pleaded innocent, but he was convicted and executed. Wideman examined his trial record and found holes in the procedure that were characteristic of trumped-up charges against Black people in the early 20th century. He called the case a farce. One witness first described the killer as white, and the rape victims could not see their assailants. It was also 1945—still the lynching era. In retrospect it is all too easy to see that theirs was a trial defined more by racism than anything else.

Louis Till leaves no record of himself. But Ezra Pound, who was incarcerated (for being a Nazi sympathizer) in the same Italian prison as Till, had this to say in poetic verse about the event:

“Till was hung yesterday
for murder and rape with trimmings”

Pound is one among many: We are awash in writings from hateful people that are considered classic. We read them anyway, some because we don’t actually care about the venom of their authors, others because the writing is so good, others still because we are contending with their legacies and in that effort we read them honestly rather than reverently—scars and stripes intact.

There is much I find useful in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For example, when Eliot said that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” I believe he was correct. I bring my bruises to bear on what we understand of the past. And it makes my understanding better. I learned this lesson from Toni Morrison too. In her groundbreaking work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she began with a epigraph from Eliot:  

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.”

But what happens when the suffering speak? One answer is found in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks. When she took up Modernism, the form that Eliot and Pound mastered, she stood in this crossroads tradition, one of a back-talking outsider within. Take these lines in her classic poem “Boy Breaking Glass”:

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”
Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.”

They bend the language of destruction into a truthful testimony coming from a suffering Black child. And a brilliant Black poet. We understand Morrison and Brooks and even Louis Till alongside Eliot and Pound and Emmett. To deny the Black chorus talking back to Eliot and Pound and so many others is to deny what the present has to offer to the past. As a teenager, I skipped school and listened to Toni Morrison deliver the lectures that would become Playing in the Dark. They were beautiful marching orders.

We write ourselves into traditions, and we write a tradition.