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INTERVIEW by Wanda Coleman Dear Wanda: I've been meaning to contact you to let you know what became of the BIBR (Black Issues Book Review) article [on Black literary criticism]. As it turned out, you were pretty much the only person who provided me with quotable material--most others responded with monosyllables or not at all. So I decided to refocus the article, to discuss the need for continued critique and assessment throughout our literary careers. My first-person essay will now be a lead feature in the March/April issue. Jacqueline. Coleman and LaMon have met only online, and have spoken briefly by phone; however, there is a connection between them that differs from the usual literary concerns a beginning writer may nervously express to, or boldly ask of, the mature writer--in this case, the award-winning Coleman who has published over sixteen books and eleven-hundred poems in her forty-year career, finds she is still coping with the fallout from her April 2002 negative review of Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven, discussed in her book “The Riot Inside me: More Trials & Tremors (Godine, 2005). Literary criticism is on the cultural front burner as A Million Little Pieces (James Frey memoir), a major Oprah Books Club selection in 2003 is now found out to be more fiction than fact, and in David Orr's recent slam of poet laureate Billy Collins in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The trouble with book criticism is not confined to race, as Coleman has maintained from the start. Here, she takes on a mentor's voice to openly discuss some of the finer aspects of the literary critique, commenting on the negative responses to her own work. JL: What role does critique play in the crafting of your work? WC: It is very important. I like to consider myself my own harshest critic. After all these years, I have a good grasp on the mistakes I tend to make and constantly monitor my texts for them. I edit and correct my material sometimes as I write. I will occasionally reread a book I've published, and cross out errors and extraneous language, hoping one day to have it reprinted with all the corrections. JL: Do you actively seek critique as a tool during revision or crafting? WC: When in a crunch, those old constructive criticisms I've received from other writers or reviewers come in handy. I am not adverse to having the help of another pair of eyes, or another sensibility. JL: From whom do you seek input? What qualities do those individuals possess that enables them to provide you with the input you desire? WC: When I need immediate feedback on content, or how my form is working with my content, I run it past my book-editor, English-teacher husband. I also have a number of colleagues and friends I can count on when I need yet a greater distance and a deeper critique. I look for bright individuals who are fast readers, broad or eclectic in their tastes, like working with detail, and who are not afraid of me, or afraid to tell me the news whether good or bad. JL: How do you respond to the opinions of others about your work? Does your response differ depending on how public the forum? WC: Since I am a literary writer, in the Bohemian tradition, most of my reviews have appeared outside mainstream literature. Generally, the majority of what reviews I have been lucky enough to receive have been raves, regardless of who wrote them. Some of the articles written on me have said things about my writing so beautifully well, that I wished I had said them myself. I am grateful whenever anyone takes the time to figure me out, and to do the work correctly. I jump up and down physically, dance, whoop and stomp. I remember five troublesome reviews: 1) In the first, a 1977 review of my chapbook, the White reviewer gave me a qualified rave as a fledgling, but unfairly questioned my authenticity as working-class poor, a Divorced Single Mom, which I certainly was at the time, but in my opinion that should have made no difference in the quality of the work. 2) In the second, the White male reviewer gave me an overall rave for Mad Dog Black Lady, my first full book (1979), but used a profanity to describe me. My so-called loyal publisher did not back me up when I jammed him, and pretended not to know about it. Years later, I found out that the review was a put-up job, and that the reviewer was a crony of one of my publisher's stars, a "feminist" poet, someone he had sent me to as a student in order to save her under-attended poetry class. It was like having some moron vomit on your prom dress as you're entering the ballroom. I'd still like to murder the bitches, except one has already gone to God and the other is killing herself with alcohol. 3)The worst of my bad reviews was posted online in the late 90s. I did not mind that it attacked my work, or the fact that I was considered a poet. But it engaged in cheap shots about my appearance and clothes, and made erroneous assumptions about my personality, doing so in the destructively adolescent and arrogant manner of the White male wastrel, the kind of asshole one wants to bludgeon to death. This was dirty pool and I loathed it. I made the mistake of contacting this person, realizing too late that in so doing I was feeding the beast its favorite poison. This was extremely irritating, but after I saw how he treated others on his website, I realized that discerning readers would dismiss him, as I should have done from the gitgo. 4)The next was a 1999 mixed review of my novel Mambo Hips and Make Believe, in Publisher's Weekly, in which the unknown reviewer unfairly reduced and gutted the plot (actually, there was no plot), as if the reviewer had been made queasy by it, failed to mention that I was Black and that it was my first novel. My feeling was that I was being skewered by the kind of warped mentality that demands eternal "uplift" from Black writers. I dismissed this review easily, but I knew it had ruined any chance of prizes in fiction for me and had trashed book sales. 5)The last was also a review of Mad Dog by a supercilious Black male poet, on his way to being famous, who saw me as competition, who boldly challenged my awareness of influence, and indicted me for not sufficiently honoring my Black forebears. To me he was as retrograde as the street "bruthas" who have criticized me for not making every poem rhyme. JL: What is your definition of a “literary master”? Does that title enable or thwart a writer’s sense of responsibility? WC: A literary master is a great writer (acknowledged in one way or another by writer peers); anyone who has produced a considerable body of work generally recognized for its craft excellence, one extremely lengthy lifetime of work or series of works. The heady title "literary master" may thwart a writer's sense of responsibility to himself and his readers, particularly when, as in our society, one comes repeatedly under pressure to perform and/or to make money. JL: Have some poets and writers earned critical immunity? WC: No, absolutely not. Although the manner in which the much-honored are criticized may be mitigated by their contributions to the larger community or society, so that any criticism occurs within an appropriate or full context. JL: If so, how does one achieve such status? WC: There is no such status. No writer is above criticism, nor should they ever be, particularly in a democratic republic. Where criticism fails, the culture fails, and art becomes flaccid; critics become cowards or hustlers, and a bogus aesthete may seize governance over cultural matters, as ignorance rules, fostering dictatorships of fad and fashion (salability the bottom line); subsequently crippling the careers of genuine artists, obfuscating time-tested criteria, and furthering the decline of those craft values and standards of excellence untainted by bigotry. JL: Why is black-on-black critique received more harshly than white-on-black? WC: I'm not sure this statement is entirely accurate, but it certainly seems true judging from my perspective. Remember: Whites still have the cultural advantages in general, and are granted authority even when they have not earned it. This is a residual of Slavery, accepted in part by native-born Blacks, evidence of the slave mentality at work as it survives into the twenty-first century. The longstanding reality that Blacks are generally regarded as inferior not only by America's founding European immigrant population, its descendents and new arrivals, but by Asians, Latinos and Blacks from other parts of The Diaspora (who had better say amen or get visas punched); therefore, should Black Americans continue to fail in their demand for social parity, what a Black-on-Black critic has to say authoritatively (short of " game") may forever be challenged no matter how deep the resume. This process has been complicated by the silencing of harsh White literary critics in the 1960s, particularly during the Black Power part of the era. To the good, this created demands for Black literary critics (interviewers and reviewers), as Black Arts Movement poets and writers ("Black World"/"Third World") justly fought and schemed for our share of the Western and World literary canon. Refusing to talk to Whites, or to be unjustly skewered by them, became standard operating procedure. But the baby of fair and informative critique was thrown out with the bathwater of bias (there is no such thing as objectivity in cultural warfare). Remember, there were no certified Blacks except Pushkin in the Western canon at that time, and in America no Blacks, if any women (usually one, Pearl Buck). Game was run: "No one criticizes us without a fight or being labeled racist." The problem with such a dictum, is that it gives birth to cliques and cabals. These groups of writers and artists organized only against Whites at first, but as the Civil Rights Movement fizzled (and I do mean fizzle), they began in-fighting and working against other African Americans as well, developing a knee-jerk method of targeting those Black voices they could not control, as well as those who adopted positions harmful to the majority of Blacks. They scrambled to either suppress or control those who evolved independently of their dictates, efforts, and influence, often neglecting to find out if the target was a turncoat or sell-out. Postures and positions lauded in the 1960s were defused of bombast and power by the 1980s. The Neocons and a new class of Black academic began to emerge. By 2000, the post-war Black Boom generation had matured, an overlapping second had graduated from college or was surviving in the streets, still a third and fourth were on their ways to becoming parts of this contentious equation. These new Black American voices were the diverse (multicultural and variegated) beneficiaries of all who had preceded them, Black, White and otherwise, in the history of literature and writing worldwide, not just the Blacks Arts Movement. These younger writers were beholden to the Blacks Arts Movement, to the extent of having a broader freedom of literary choices. But the double-edge is that such a freedom also entitled them to enjoy, study and be influenced by an array of ethnic others: Borges, Celan and Sexton as much as Dunbar, McKay and Langston. If Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison hark back to Faulkner, it is just as valid for a contemporary Black novelist to hark back to Nabokov or Camus. In sum, at root Black-on-Black criticism is received harshly because the problems that have plagued us as a people during Slavery, Reconstruction, and throughout the 20th Century, are basically still very much with us, if in more sophisticated and subtler forms; at root, reflecting this actuality, the literary playing field remains unlevel despite hundreds more Black writers and reviewers, and in spite of some very heady accomplishments by African-American writers across demographics. JL: Why do we take it as such a personal affront? WC: In general, for Blacks, it is. Although I do not think the average Black writer takes criticism as personal unless they can substantiate the personal tie, as I did above. (If one used the same lofty criteria for Blacks as used for Whites, there would be less than a dozen Black writers in the state of California, for example, who can be considered true literary writers.) Being called paranoiac is tiresome. The primary problem for our critics and writers is that the available pool remains relatively small. Many critics are also authors with books awaiting critique. In some regions, the number of available Black reviewers, etc. can still be counted on one hand. Our "peculiar" circumstances (Black History Month, MLK's Birthday, Juneteenth; public forums after every scandal and every riot) bring us into contact more often than our White counterparts. Our frequent organizings (hustle factor) of our finest representatives, and our overall continued push for social equality, causes us to constantly recycle everyone available. [When the primary motive is to fill a politically correct agenda, be it left, right or moderate, a science fiction writer will do as well as a poet, a journalist as well as a novelist; an amateur who has self-published will do was well as a Pulitzer Prize Winner.] In so doing, many of us come into contact, and often conflict. We are as entitled to dislike one another as we are to embrace one another. However, if an editor, regardless of race, wants to be fair, and assign a book for review, the odds are very high that the writer selected has had some form of social conflict, personal encounter or even sexual intercourse with the selected author. Thus, availability, quantity, and the quality of that quantity become serious mitigating factors. Most Whites are blind to the in-fighting and ideological differences between Black writers and critics, or if not blind, indifferent. This makes painful and unfair assessments and assignments inevitable. Too, because of the severe dearth of courageous, independent Black critics, and the dearth of publications and periodicals that will review their books, even online, once a critic has reviewed a given author, the mere fact of HAVING DONE that review automatically makes them an expert on said author, whether the critic wants to claim expertise or not. Not to forget, there is the occasional jealous writer, or user, who deliberately cultivates a personal relationship with a noted author in order to later engage in character assassination, to establish their own career on another's back, as James Baldwin so engaged Richard Wright. JL: Any other thoughts on the subject? WC: The news is so-so for dominant culture writers, but depressingly bad for "ethnic others." The appropriation of book reviews by television and movie personalities, who are basically pedestrian in their literary tastes, if not stunningly ignorant, is one of the great tragedies of our time; as is "the mainstreaming" of book awards; as is the silencing of dissent. Other tragedies include removing the tax shelter for publishers (circa 1979) that allowed books to appreciate in value; the ceding of litigation brought against the book chains in the mid 90s by independent bookstores; the promotion of a "paperless" world; the deaths of independent newspapers and magazines. The ultimate tragedy is that in an America where free speech is more mythic than actual, and where thought control is enforced by the complex erasures and machinations of faith-based bigotry, all writers of quality will suffer, but Black literary writers will most likely never obtain full parity in those parts of the culture where literary criticism and book reviews matter. October 26, 2005 © Wanda Coleman
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