Flarf???

I was going to write this blog entry on the mundane topic of hip hop lit as the urban fairytale. I was. It was going to be a literate conversation about the elements of fairytale and make believe that characterize the literature of hip hop and why we should be paying attention. I was going to talk about girls and how fairytales inform their lives. It was going to be all pink frilly dresses and tea parties. Really. Now, I’ll have to get to that in my next entry because as I sat here eating my cereal this Wednesday before Memorial day (a completely irrelevant factoid) and perusing my husband’s Wall Street Journal something caught my eye. Mind you I hadn’t opened it yet, I was just flipping around the front page! There, right under the lead article about the U.S turning up the heat on BP (re: the oil spill in the gulf) and the ongoing saga of North and South Korea, was a little article about Flarf poetry. Yep, you heard me. On the front page of the Wall Street Journal was an article about Flarf poetry.

Some of you, no doubt, are wondering just what in all God’s green goodness is Flarf
poetry and even more importantly, what in the world does it have to do with Hip Hop Literature. First questions first. Flarf poetry is a kind of “found” poetry that gets its feet from the internet. According to the Wall Street Journal what happens is people use words from random search strings to create poetry… Okay. ..

If you say so.

As for the second question, the answer is simple: everything…and nothing.
It just made me angry that Stanford University professors could chime in on Flarf poetry which by definition is a kind “rubbish verse”, meaningless gibberish and the poetry can be featured at readings at the Whitney Museum and in credible literary magazines but if somebody brings up Hip Hop Literature we have to hear all about ignorance and illiteracy. Flarf poetry is about people looking for a new way to imagine poetry and language. The African American literary community could take a cue from this conversation.

I can already hear the arguments forming in the mouths of detractors. I know them all, save your breath. The point is, the academy decides what gets credibiity and what doesn’t. What this article confirmed for me is that Flarf poetry, poetry made up of random google-searched concepts that on their own mean nothing, can attain street cred because the peope who decide such things have decided that it deserves credibility. They want it to have credibiity because they need it to have credibility because they like it. Period.

As a writing teacher, if a student brought me Flarf poetry, I’d have to ask the hard questions. I wouldn’t argue that it’s not poetry. That would be counter productive to any conversation about creativity. I can even see its appeal (okay, that’s a bit of a stretch but whatever. The point is I’m open). And that’s my point. I can even see its value even though Flarf poetry as far as I’m concerned is merely a fun exercise in language, something you do when you’re trying to unravel the brain to get to the juicy stuff.

So why is everybody having such trouble with hip hop literature, which has a defined value and meaning in our literate society? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not being produced by what we deem literate people and its focus is that part of ourselves and our society we don’t want to discuss. We don’t like what we think it says about the progress of black thought and black upward mobility in general.
What is even more distressing is that as a community we have the power to give hip hop lit the same kind of credibility as flarf poetry. Some guy is rewriting the Shakespeare sonnets flarf-style. No comment.

Flarf poetry. An idea that started as a joke and takes its name from a police blotter where a kid described marijuana as “flarfy”. ‘Nuf said.

Literary Genealogy Part II

If Paul Laurence Dunbar is the essential great grandfather of hip hop literature with his novel The Sport of the Gods, then Chester Himes and his gritty street and detective fiction is the Grandfather. His novels are often categorized as crime or detective fiction but a closer look reveals a very close bloodline to the very fiction many of us are rolling our eyes and sucking our teeth about today.

If we look at Himes’ body of work it is clear that he had an affinity for the street. He understood the people as more than just hoodlums and criminals and undesirables, primarily because for a time he was one of them. They were real to him. They had voices and stories and it was obvious he felt the desire to tell those stories. Most people familiar with Himes know that he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio for robber and, in fact, began his writing career there. Prior to his turn in prison, he was known as Little Katzi (after the Katzenjammer kids comic strip) and could often be found in gambling joints and whorehouses throughout the Cleveland area.

Himes’ biography reads like well written street lit. And his fiction is no different. Drawing from his personal experiences in Cleveland and New York, Himes crafts a lifetime of stories about characters who are the victims of racism and capitalism and how those concepts shaped their opportunities.

He was highly intelligent. According to his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he was informed after his entrance exams to Ohio State University that he had the fourth highest IQ of freshmen entering that fall. He stayed there two quarters but was so distraught at the overt racism both on and off campus that he dreaded the idea of going back. Drawn by the street life since a crippling accident left his family in a shambles and him unable to work in order to collect his disability, he thought it would be fun to take a group of coeds to a Columbus whorehouse he’d discovered. When word got back to the Dean, his already failing grades and poor attitude made the decision to dismiss him easy.

From there his descent into the dark world of the gambler and overall thug is rather quick. To avoid his bickering parents he takes to the streets and is quickly “adopted” by the local gangsters. They give him responsibilities around their clubs and he takes to the life rather nicely. The violence and immediacy of the streets suits his quick temper and need to respond to the racism both toward and among African Americans he sees daily.

His gangster journey culminates with a seven year stint at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio. He is arrested in Chicago as he tried to fence jewelry stolen from a house in Cleveland. When the Chicago police can’t pin a local robbery on him they handcuff him, hang him upside down and beat him until he confesses to the crime he did commit. In prison he finds that he is unique among his colleagues in that he can read and write and here he begins to tell stories.
Himes’ novels take us through the streets of Harlem, through bus stations, whore houses, and down back alleys and through respectable neighborhoods to show the irony and contradictions of black life in America. For his trouble Himes received little to no acclaim in the United States. He had to move to Paris for that. His most famous characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two black Harlem detectives, were vastly complex characters often overlooked because of their inclusion in a pulp style novel.

Like Dunbar, Himes understood his characters’ disenfranchisment and the elements of society which caused it. Dunbar believed that the Hamilton’s were at the mercy of the gods, that elements of their fate were out of their control. Himes portrayed the same lack of control in his characters, only what Dunbar called the gods, Himes called American society.

From Himes comes many other writers like Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, to name the most popular. The W.W. Norton company has published what they call “old school” books/authors which include many more street novels than a lot people probably even knew existed.

The point of this entry is to reiterate the fact that the literature is not new. It’s not even unique. It has a history because the people who write it have a history in this country. The only real claim that this genre can make for itself in terms of groundbreaking achievement is its current public popularity. Himes and his colleagues never got the attention they felt they deserved for telling the stories of people whose voices generally go unheeded.

A Literary Genealogy (part 1)

Street literature is not new, so why are people acting like this stuff just appeared out of nowhere for the sole purpose of derailing the black community?

It is not hard to understand, why, as a community we are concerned about the proliferation of the street novel on the bookstore shelves and in the book bags of our children. But there is a dimension of this literature that begs for discussion in the academic arena.

As a community we are concerned with the fact that the African American readership is connecting to these novels in a way that they don’t connect to the writings of the academy. Cora Daniels, in her book GhettoNation: dispatches from America’s culture war, registers her disgust at the momentum these novels have gained in the last ten years. “When did our standards get so low that we are now satisfied with simply reading? It s like being satisfied that our children are eating vegetables because they pour ketchup on their fries” (84). Her concern, and rightly so, is that these novels will become the reading standard for young black readers, that rather than a bridge to other, more interesting and thought provoking literature , that the books will become an end unto themselves. That would be unfortunate. What she missed, however, was the opportunity the literate community has to harness the energy and details of this writing and turn it into something useful, to open a dialogue between generations about life in general. This literature has a historical context and knowing that context can make this overtly sexual and violent literature relevant.

The street novels of today are the same thing they’ve always been, merely an undiluted portrayal of the life of the disenfranchised. That being the case, slave narratives can be considered street literature. But let’s start with something simpler, easier to wrap the mind around. In 1902 Paul Laurence Dunbar published a novel called "The Sport of the Gods". Dunbar is most noted for his poetry and not a lot of people are aware that he ever even published any novels but it’s there. And it’s as close to the street literature of today as you’re probably going to get in 1902. And it gets quite close.

The story follows the Hamiltons from their position as a well to do black family in the south to a struggling shell of their former selves in the north.

If the writers of the slave narratives are the literary ancestors of the writers of urban street fiction, then Berry and Fannie Hamilton are the ancestors of the fictional characters these authors now create. Berry is unjustly accused of stealing money from his employers, the Oakleys, and goes to jail for a crime he did not commit but for which he is powerless to defend himself. The real culprit, Mr. Oakley’s younger brother, has actually lost the money and is ashamed to admit it. When the senior Oakley discovers the truth some years later, he chooses to ignore it and allow Berry to waste away in prison rather than soil his brother’s good name and that of their family. Neither Berry’s good name or the reputation of his family is of any consequence to this man.

The Hamiltons, who consider themselves above most of the black people in their small southern town are devastated by the accusation and subsequent conviction. Berry’s conviction costs the family its position among quality blacks and the blacks they rejected at one time are unforgiving. The Hamilton’s are no longer welcome in their hometown. They are the object of ridicule by the blacks and outright scorn by the whites.

Unable to find suitable employment Fannie, Berry’s wife, packs up her family and moves them north to Harlem and is sorry almost from the moment she steps off the train. Once in Harlem the family undergoes a terrible transformation. The son takes immediately to the seamier side of life, loving the ostentatious style of and becoming fascinated with the underground culture of gambling and dance halls and the men and women who inhabit them.

The family operates constantly under the fear of being “discovered”. The black community, being small and insular, has a powerful grapevine and once it is understood who they are their position in polite society is jeopardized. When a former rival, Minty Brown, comes to town she blabs the sordid story, out of spite, to everyone she thinks might know the Hamiltons. Their worst fears are realized and they lose their home and their employment. Out of work and with no place to live the Hamilton’s have some tough choices to make. Kitty Hamilton, the beautiful and obedient daughter, is drawn into the chorus line of a stage show by her brother’s girlfriend. It is the only employment available to someone of her family’s reputation. Fannie must marry Mr. Gibson who we discover is physically abusive. Joe, the son, falls deeper into the underground life of which he has become so fond.

When Minty Brown brings her story into the bar where Joe spends most of his time the crowd of gamblers and show girls rallies around him and literally chase Minty Brown from the place when she attempts to humiliate him there. This crowd, unlike the polite society from which they have been ousted, has accepted Joe as one of their own and behaves accordingly against any threat to him. Here, they show more moral fortitude than any of the polite society which has turned its back on an unjustly accused man and his family.

When Berry Hamilton’s injustice is revealed and he is released from prison he finds that his wife is married to another man, his daughter has taken to the stage and his son is in jail for murder. Feeling he has nothing left to lose, even he plans to commit murder by killing his wife’s new husband. Dunbar is suggesting through this series of events that even a God-fearing, well meaning family can be corrupted if the stars align correctly and that once that corruption has taken place it is difficult if not impossible to go back, not because the pull of the life is so great but because polite society is so unforgiving.

We see the same themes play out in the novels of Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. These authors all existed in the literary equivalent of the shadows, both personally and professionally. Of the three, only Himes receives any real critical attention, and rarely for his crime fiction. Of all the stories Chester Himes wrote the only two which are regularly anthologized are “Head Waiter” a story about the perceptions of blacks and power within the larger society as well as within our own professional experiences, and “To What Red Hell” which comments on the humanity of the prison inmate. Neither of those stories exemplify of the type of story Himes wrote regularly.

The same can be said for both Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, only to a lesser degree. Neither of them is ever anthologized in an academic literary anthology. Still, their stories are remarkably similar to Dunbar’s Hamiltons. None of the characters are responsible for their particular situation, though not so indirectly as the Hamiltons. What makes the characters in street fiction so difficult to absorb is that unlike the Hamiltons they often embrace the life they are suppose to be trying to avoid. The Hamiltons were not permitted a life in “legitimate” society and were unjustly denied it. Circumstances beyond their control may be why the contemporary street lit characters have to start in their shadowy position, but pure desire is presumably what keeps them there.

Still, if we can imagine the offspring of Joe and Kitty, can they be far from the literary characters of contemporary street fiction? Their opportunities to succeed hampered by their parents choices and experiences. Joe and Kitty did not choose the lives they were relegated to; however, once there the life made them welcome and comfortable, provided for them the things they could not achieve through inaccessible legitimate means.

Barbarians at the Gates

Lately, I’ve been searching blogs and literary magazines for discussions of street literature (or hip hop or ghetto or urban literature, whatever you want to call it) and coming up short. There are no real literary conversations being published in reputable magazines that I was able to find and only a handful of relevant blogs, all of which blast the literature in favor of more aesthetic writing by and about African Americans. And I get that. I’m for that. Anybody who walks into a bookstore and isn’t disheartened immediately by the type of literature taking up most of the space on the shelves in the African American section of bookstores should be ashamed of him/herself. But…we should also be encouraged and excited by the opportunity to create a new conversation around black literature.

The culture of African American literature being so rich in so many areas there is no one single definition of what it means to be or to write black in America; so, by default there can be no one single definition of what is black literature, except to say that in general the term applies to literature written by black people about black people and their peculiar experiences. Even that definition is broad and debatable. Looking at the canon reveals an eclectic mix of writers, formally educated and not, slaves to Ph.D-educated scholars. All of them wrote eloquently about the black experience, arguing for and asserting the humanity of black people in general and black men specifically. Much of the writing is homogenous in that respect.

The problem writers and critics are having with street literature seems to be in the motive. In an interview by Taylor Nix, for urbanbooksource.com, noted author Nick Chiles argues that the writers are not writing for the sake and beauty of the written word; instead, they are writing as a means to an end, for the same reason it seems anybody in the hip hop industry does anything, money, cheddar, lettuce, whatever they’re calling it these days. No argument there either. But the fact remains that capitalism rules the roost here in the good old U.S. of A. It isn’t going anywhere, which means that as long as street lit is selling, publishers are going to sell it. The question is not why are publishing houses selling the literature. In my estimation they are doing what any good company driven by profit margins does, making a profit. However, they can’t make a profit unless someone is buying the product. We shouldn’t be mad at the writers or the publishers. We should be concerned about the consumer. They are the ones making the literature profitable for the writers and publishers. Whatever those stories are selling, young people are buying by the busload. Rather than demonize the literature and chalk it up to one more thing hip hop has tainted, we should be trying to figure out what it’s saying to our young people that nobody else seems to be saying.

Most critical discussion on the hip hop culture either ignores the street literature, misrepresents it or demeans it. Rarely, if ever, does the discussion lean toward what it is and how we are going to deal with its presence in our actual and literary community. However, most of black academia have no desire to discuss it, let alone attack it. Its rude presentation, poor editing and underdeveloped plot lines leave it open for attack as reputable literature worthy of the academy’s attention. The writers themselves exist in the margins of an already marginalized society. Cora Daniels mentions street literature and its writers briefly in her study of hip hop culture, "Ghetto Nation" but her attitude clearly suggests that she would rather not have to deal with it or its writers at all. The basis of her disdain seems to rest in the “ghetto” nature of their public behavior and the street level quality of their narratives. Daniels and Chiles,while not the only dissenters in the crowd, exemplify the elitist attitude rampant in the literary circles regarding this literature and its writers. The attitude in black academia in particular is that if we ignore it it will just go away. So far, that hasn’t been the case. To hear librarians and bookstore managers tell it, this stuff is more popular than ever and getting more popular by the moment.

Recently, I pulled up my suburban Cleveland library’s internet home page to find a large, multi color announcement that the library had purchased a great deal of new urban literature. The announcement was rather apologetic that titles had been hard to find and that the library staff hoped that this new influx of titles would make things easier for people looking for such titles. The included authors were the likes of Nikki Turner, Vickie Stringer and Omar Tyree. In researching this article I went to our city’s main library where in the catalog they listed a myriad of street lit titles. I thought I had gone to heaven in terms of my research bounty. However, not a single one of the titles I needed was on the shelf. The librarian confessed with a wan smile and a nearly invisible shrug that they can’t keep the books on the shelves. I had this same experience in urban and suburban libraries all over Cleveland.

Whatever our response to it, we cannot deny that the phenomenon of hip hop or street lit is taking over the imagination of young African American readers and while it is not the kind of literature we would like to encourage our children to read, it is what they are choosing for themselves. One argument suggests that we are lowering our standards by being “happy” that at least our young people are reading, that what they read is as important as the act itself. And I agree. But that argument has an inverse hypothesis with which I also agree, that by looking at what our young people are choosing for themselves we can get an insider’s view of how they interpret their world. As rap music is making moguls out of men who might otherwise be selling drugs or joining gangs it is important to know what world view they bring to a table they have heretofore been denied access. The books in the library are often dog-eared and tattered from overuse if they even come back once they’ve been checked out. Their popularity is undeniable. The question is why? And the answer is simple. This literature speaks to an experience and from the looks of its popularity it speaks to a very popular experience. Most of the people reading black street lit are black people. In an informal and random “poll” I stood inside the African American literature section of my local bookstore and asked different women why they read the literature (the readers I met were overwhelmingly female). I even had my 19 year old daughter poll her friends around the country. The response was universal, paraphrased here for easier digestion, they said, “ It’s like reading about people I know.” There are a lot of women who, good or bad, right or wrong, see themselves and their friends in these texts. What are we doing about that?

The argument about what literature is suppose to do has waged throughout history. In black academic circles it has been taken up by such theorists as DuBois and Hughes and Wright and Baldwin and many others. Black literature has always had the lugubrious task of speaking for the people, whether or not that was the author’s intent. It chronicles the struggle, records the history and defines the people. In the black literary canon there is no room for art for art’s sake. It must be revolutionary because it will always be read as revolutionary.

Historically, the revolution and the canon have been in sync. This synchronicity has occurred primarily because the revolution is comprised of the counter culture (black culture) vs. mainstream culture (European). Black literature fought its way to acceptance by the mainstream thereby validating the peculiar institutions and experience associated with blackness in America. As the canon was forming, the black literati and the black community were a single entity fighting a common enemy. That no longer seems to be the case.

Black critics of black literature, relatively speaking, are a new phenomenon. The first real black critical expression didn’t occur until the early part of the twentieth century, literally a century after the first black writing appeared. Those critics had the hearty task of reaching back and thinking on everything that had been written and viewed through the dominant Eurocentric perspective and re-viewing it with a black consciousness, the consciousness with which it had been written. All literature was useful and relevant because all of it was necessary to create a complete pastiche of experiences that make up black life in America.

DuBois and his colleagues as the original gatekeepers of the African American literary canon had the daunting task of slaying the great white dragon which was keeping the gates of the American literary canon closed to us and our experiences. Someone needed to acknowledge the black experience. Someone needed to decode the messages hidden in plain sight in the writings of our ancestors. We were in the middle of shaping a culture which had to fight tooth and nail for what in other cultures was the obvious. The stereotypes and public perceptions of black people and their intelligence were such that anything that evolved into a public conversation needed to be guarded carefully as everything was used to define the whole. We have all been the victim of that experience. So yeah, the gatekeepers were justifiably concerned about what we let pass for literature. We were still fighting for legitimacy and that legitimacy would be measured against the standard which had been created in part to foil black America’s attempts to assimilate. The black literary canon at that time was all about proving that the standard was achievable.

It is fair to say that all the literature by black people which made its way into the hands of black people had been given a certified stamp of approval, even in periphery ways. It was literature because the critics took time with it and shaped it so that it was understood as black literature even in the face of mainstream opposition.

That is not to say that we should begin classifying this literature among the greats. It is not. But it has captured the attention of our youth and it has an literary ancestral history which can help us open the door to the kind of literature that will enhance their understanding of themselves. It is simply to say that the investigation process is hampered by academic opinion. Black academics don’t want to deal with the fact that street lit is outselling their strongly edited, well written canonical fiction because it says something unseemly about the direction of black progress. It undermines the struggle. It exposes our readership and therefore our community as “common”. We feel threatened. After all, as a literate community we have worked very hard to establish our right to be taken seriously in the greater literate community.

The gatekeepers now are those who compile anthologies and who teach African American literature and African American studies, courses that validate our arrival on the American literary landscape and announce our value as a culture to the world. It is understandable, then, why street lit is so problematic. While many of them are focusing on hip hop as a viable discussion of the evolution of African American culture, just as many are locking arms at the gates.