Penning the Revolution

The Afro-Mississippi literary movement.

by C. Liegh McInnis


In Jackson, Mississippi, the African-American poetry scene is both isolated from and influenced by broader trends in pop culture. Fueled by music, movies (Slam and Love Jones), and television (Lyric Café and HBO’s Def Poetry Jam), the genre also draws from a long and distinguished tradition of African-American writers who are as proficient on the stage as on the page—including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Reginald Martin, and Kalamu ya Salaam, to name just a few.
    The problem is that today’s spoken-word stars—and the young writers they influence—tend to pattern themselves more after rappers than writers. They yearn for fame, feedback, and financial rewards, understandable motivations that do little to inspire serious literary ambitions. (Almost every aspiring Afro-Mississippi poet I meet is more eager to record a spoken-word CD than to appear in print.) Thus far, the enthusiasm for spoken-word poetry has not created an audience of readers who actually purchase and read books by African-American poets.
    There is the potential for a thriving African-American literary scene in Mississippi—a selection of poetry (texts and MP3 recordings) by some of the region’s brightest talents appears here. But, more importantly, there is the need for one: The widespread illiteracy in areas with a large Afro-Mississippian population, such as Jackson, and the lack of a positive artistic voice are two elements that directly contribute to high crime rates and dismal economic development.

For Afro-Mississippi writers and artists to survive and flourish in their own state, they need first to overcome the chasm between the classes. The most productive artists tend to come from the lower class—perhaps because the young people who can afford college are preparing themselves for jobs that are more lucrative than those in the arts. To succeed, however, the artistic lower classes need the middle-class folks to buy their books, paintings, and CDs. The twist is that many upwardly mobile Afro-Mississippians often feel threatened by the local art. Whether it is too sexually explicit or too politically radical, much of it is perceived as degrading, embarrassing, or politically/economically dangerous. At best, an open-mic event is seen as a fad—something to try while in college but not a serious career option, unless, of course, you transition into rapping or land a spot on Def Poetry Jam.
    Because the middle class does not frequent open-mic venues, there remains a disconnect and a missed opportunity for dialogue. One exception is Dr. Carl Reddix, a successful Afro-Mississippi medical doctor who became a supporter and patron of the arts when his cousin, the poet David Brian Williams, died. Dr. Reddix had never patronized literary events or venues, but he decided to attend a celebration in his cousin’s honor that was sponsored and coordinated by local artists. He was overwhelmed and impressed by the love that the community had for his cousin and by the abundance of literary skill. “I had no idea that so much quality talent existed here,” he told me. Since that night in December 2006, Dr. Reddix has become a frequent attendee at the weekly open-mic-poetry events at Seven*Studioz (now Cultural Expressions). He is also a board member of the Cultural Expressions Foundation, which uses art to educate and redirect at-risk youths. On several occasions, he has spent his own money and planned fundraisers to save Cultural Expressions from shutting its doors.
    “What most impressed me about the poetry presentations,” he told me, “was that these young men and women are really nerds. I know that a lot of the city’s middle-class folk have some concerns or hesitations about the location as well as the subject matter of some of the pieces, but once you hear these young men and women, it becomes evident how intelligent, creative, and bookish they must be to create this work.”
    Dr. Reddix’s awakening to the Jackson literary scene clearly shows that connections can be created if more of the Afro-Mississippi middle class chose to open themselves to the local writers. In turn, the young artists have been inspired by Dr. Reddix to try to communicate more effectively so that they can reach a wider, more economically diverse audience.

There are two venues in Jackson that regularly feature open-mic nights: Gospoetry at Koinonia Coffee House, which, as the name indicates, caters to Christian-themed poetry. This series, which is held on the the first and third Saturdays of every month, was founded about three year ago by James Powell, a Jackson State University student, and is currently hosted by the Christian comic and musician Big V.
    On Sunday nights, the comic Cocky McFly hosts open-mic night at Cultural Expressions.
    There are other poetry nights sponsored by students or graduates of Millsaps and Belhaven (both are private Christian colleges), but many Afro-Mississippi poets are uneasy sharing their work with their more conservative white counterparts. Cornel West’s concept of “the white normative gaze” applies to these young artists, who are sensitive to judgment. Whether we admit it or not, most African Americans are raised with a DuBoisian sense of obligation to present their best selves to white folks. And for many of these kids, poetry night is a time to vent, release some steam, and be appreciated by folks who experience similar trials in life. The political content in Afro-Mississippian poetry varies, but there can be hints of liberation theology, which would not be as well received by the Millsaps and Belhaven crowds.

The lack of creative-writing programs at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) makes it difficult to develop professionally minded writers. As Kalamu ya Salaam asserts in What Is Life?, there may be plenty of great African-American poets, but they are not finding their way to book publication.
    Only ten percent of the American population purchases books on a regular basis. And only ten percent of that niche audience purchases poetry on a regular basis. Thus poetry (the selling and reading of it) is a niche of a niche. What aids white creative writers is that all of the creative-writing programs are housed at traditionally white institutions, which limits African-American access. Furthermore, the typical BFA or MFA program does not exactly encourage political—or socially minded—writing. This is important because creative-writing programs can serve as the feeders (or the minor leagues) from which the major journals and publishers harvest writers. (There are very few literary journals, besides African American Review and Callaloo, that specialize in the publishing of African-American writers or subject matter.) Cave Canem is an important national poetry organization, but it is not well-known to Afro-Mississippi writers, most of whom couldn’t afford to attend its annual summer workshop in Pennsylvania.
    In Mississippi, the MFA in creative writing at the University of Mississippi and the MA and Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi are the only games around. At Mississippi State, a student can at least get a concentration in creative writing. In contrast, without a program or even a concentration in creative writing, Jackson State, Alcorn, Mississippi Valley State, Tougaloo, and Rust have very limited power to affect—or inspire—the production of Afro-Mississippi writers.
    The failure to develop creative-writing programs at HBCUs is not so much a symptom of institutional ineptitude as it is the result of state funding. If a so-called specialty program exists at a white institution, then the HBCU is denied the funding to develop the same program. (The term used is “duplication.”) This was the case at Jackson State, although it’s about a three-hour drive to the nearest state university, which means the capital city lacks a creative-writing program. (For the past thirty years, the state of Mississippi has been attempting to transition Jackson State into the University of Mississippi at Jackson.) Additionally, HBCUs are so strapped for cash that they tend to invest in the kinds of programs that will help garner more funds.
These same issues apply to high schools in Mississippi’s African-American districts. There is barely enough funding to hire teachers to cover the basic courses, much less creative-writing classes. The schools do not encourage their college-bound students to apply to creative-writing programs. For an Afro-Mississippi high-school student, a career or a life in creative writing—outside of rap music—is seldom seen as a possibility.
    Of course, the HBCUs themselves are in danger. The special academic programs—IB (International Baccalaureate Program), APAC (Academic and Performing Arts Complex), and the Davis Magnet School, which are basically charter schools within the public-school system—are often led by teachers and administrators who have little connection to HBCUs and foster the notion that HBCUs are inferior. When my sister, Elizabeth, was in the IB program in high school, she told one of her white teachers that she was planning to go to Jackson State. Her teacher asked, “Why, with your grades, would you go there when you could attend Ole Miss?” Elizabeth had a good answer: “Because my father, mother, aunts, uncles, and brother all attended JSU and seem to be doing just fine.”

To develop a Mississippi readership, however, the local poet faces an additional challenge. Many older Afro-Mississippians are conservative in nature (they live in the Bible Belt, after all) and want poems and stories with a Christian sensibility and without profanity and explicit sexuality. The generation gap became clear to me when the noted cultural critic and author Mark Anthony Neal gave a lecture at Jackson State on the use of the N-word in hip-hop music. Every time Neal said the N-word, I feared one of the older faculty members would faint. I am not a fan of the word either, but some older scholars cannot even bear mention of it during an academic discussion.
    Even when young artists, especially young Afro-Mississippi artists, have something important to say, it gets lost when the older generation is unable to truly listen and help them find more effective ways to communicate. So after the young poet Keno Davis reads two poems entitled “My Favorite Cuss Word Is B****” and “Ready Set Dump,” the ears of his older listeners are closed to his next poem, “Hea’m (Heaven),” about his grandmother. The poet needs one of those elders to engage him in a firm but loving discussion in which the goal is not to embarrass or scold him but to encourage—and enlighten—him.

The younger crop of talented poets can be tricky to categorize. The two-time Jackson Music Awards Poet of the Year Kanika Welch, aka Poet of Truth, now coordinates her own creative-writing workshops for elementary- and middle-school children while submitting her work to an array of journals and lecturing on writing as a tool of activism. Her work won’t fit under a single label, such as feminist, black nationalist, or Christian. Another example is Nathan Harper, aka Urban Raw, once considered the most profane and sexually explicit writer in Jackson—he came with his own PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker—who is busy finishing two epic poems, including “New Canaan,” which describes New Orleans residents dislocated to Jackson’s Holiday Motel, a haven for drugs and prostitution. Harper uses sexual imagery as a metaphor for human neurosis while incorporating rich layers of history. The young poet Tori Thompson, aka Scarlette, can be hip, funky, and funny in one poem, such as “Memo #13: There Are No Thugs in College,” and scholarly and melancholy in another, such as “Be Not Our Love: Sonnet #15.”
    Even though some of the poets may be difficult to categorize, they fall squarely in the tradition of African-American writing. In the African tradition (and in most pre-Renaissance traditions), poetry was an integral aspect of a multidimensional art form that included storytelling, dance, music, history, and the visual arts. The “griot” in ancient African culture was a multilayered figure, a combination of artist, historian, and scholar. Yet while African Americans continue to explore multilayered forms of poetic presentation, the pop-culture critics tend to focus on their performance style and subject matter, not their use of language.
    My goal is to champion the inclusionary aspects of African-American poetry in such a way that mastery of language is not reduced to rhythm and rhyme.
    To paraphrase the African griots and Horace, poetry is as much concerned about “how” one communicates as it is with “what” one communicates.
    In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston could have merely said that Janie was attractive or fine, but she chose to say that “men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grape fruits in her hip pockets.”
    In his poem “Don’t Be Fourteen (in Mississippi),” Jerry Ward could have said that African-American boys must learn to defeat racism with diplomacy and intellect, but he chose to say, “When white boys ask you why you don’t like them / spit on them with your mouth closed.”
    In “A Moment in a Mississippi Juke Joint,” Kalamu ya Salaam could have said that Wilma Mae was attracted to John L., but he chose to say, “‘god,’ she thought, ‘that man / look like a tractor, & i feels like / a field what ain’t never been plowed.’”
    With each image, the writers are attempting to navigate language and metaphor in a way that allows them to write themselves, their culture, into a lexicon of ideas that has either marginalized or erased their value by marginalizing and erasing the worth of their cultural artifacts. The beauty of the play, as Aristotle asserts, is man’s recognition of himself.

With poetry, there seems to be two opposing traditions. At one end of the spectrum is the poetry of the white university and the major literary journals, which is laden with imagery and an esoteric, minimalist technique that is more challenging (for the average non-English major) to crack than a CIA code. At the other end of the spectrum is the poetry presented at open-mic/spoken-word houses across the country, which is often devoid of imagery, rings like limericks, and is celebrated more for the poet’s performance style or the subject matter than for the quality of language. Most poetry falls somewhere between these two poles, but the poetry in the literary journals is not read by very many people, and the poetry in the coffee houses is not published in many journals.
    Dr. Jerry Ward, author of The Katrina Papers and editor of Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry and The Richard Wright Encyclopedia, warns me not to be too myopic or sweeping:

The one area that you give too little notice is the existence of a middle ground between the extremes of poetry. Some of the non-black poets with whom I interact at the Gold Mine Saloon’s 17 Poets! Reading Series in New Orleans sound more like Baraka than the contemporary equivalent of Elizabeth Bishop. There is cross-fertilization and shared non-publication among these poets, if publication means acceptance in high-brow magazines that appeal to elite, non-black readers. It is in such multicultural arenas—the middle grounds as I would call them—that the range of contemporary poetry is heard and then read in “little magazines.” You ought not ignore this category of analysis.

    For Dr. Ward, the writers who compose the “middle ground” realize that their opportunities lie with the regional and local publications. Of course, there is still the problem of getting the regional and local folk to purchase and read these publications, which means that there must be a strategy to market these journals to the community.
    One way to nurture Mississippi writers is to establish a major publishing house here, because most Afro-Mississippi writers know that to be published it helps to flee the state. Local publishing ventures would help many young artists see writing as a feasible endeavor.

My goal in publishing Black Magnolias Literary Journal has been to present poetry and fiction of high literary quality that is at the same time accessible to middle- and lower-class sensibilities. I founded the journal in 2001 because I wanted to help younger writers in the same way that older writers have helped and nurtured me. I also wanted to create a forum that would inspire Afro-Mississippians to be as innovative and energetic on the page as they are elsewhere while emphasizing the notion that written expression can be as fulfilling and entertaining for Afro-Mississippians as our rich musical legacy. Ultimately, Black Magnolias strives to publish essays, poetry, and fiction that engage issues rarely addressed by writers. As an artist and an editor, I have a responsibility to educate and instruct, which means exposing my readership to new ideas and styles of writing, but I also have a duty to inspire people, especially Afro-Mississippians, which means cultivating literature that reflects their lives in an honest, critical, and clear manner—without “dumbing down” to any particular audience. The idea is to connect to readers by offering windows on diverse worlds with the ultimate goal of sparking dialogue and changing perceptions. We actually require our nonfiction writers to provide introductory notes explaining how their essays can benefit the reader. I am not interested in printing essays merely to prove that African-Americans are just as smart as anyone else.
    I agree with W.E.B. DuBois that in the final analysis, all art is propaganda. Most literary criticism is cultural warfare, and the praise or denouncement of a particular poem, short story, or novel is code for praising or denouncing a particular culture or ideology. Many essays that aim to enlighten readers on particular themes in an author’s work will digress into intellectual acrobatics that cause the average non-English major to flee like Bigger Thomas from the corpse of a white woman. And no, I am not suggesting that intellectual literary criticism devolve into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down seventh-grade style of report, but artists and literary critics, especially Afro-Mississippians, must realize that one of the roles of literary criticism is to decode the aesthetics and creative elements in the work so that more readers gain access to it.
    Yes, the publishing industry is fighting an uphill battle to win the attention of new readers from the crass worlds of film, television, radio, and video games, all of which offer quick and easy gratification. But it is also hypocritical for those with education to separate themselves from the masses, creating an elite class that both limits accessibility and condemns those who are unable to understand and connect with their so-called “high art.” To paraphrase Booker T. Washington, those millions of hands that are excluded from effective education and understanding of art

will aid…in pulling the load [of America, particularly Mississippi,] upward, or they will pull the load downward. [They] shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; [they] shall contribute one-third of the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or [they] shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.

    We all know that literacy is directly related to crime and economic development. If we as artists are not concerned about the consequences of alienating middle- and lower-class Afro-Mississippians, we should consider that people who do not or cannot read also tend not to solve their problems, such as unemployment and hunger, in civilized and nonviolent manners.

Thus, I return to where I started. How do we bridge the gap between the Afro-Mississippi middle class and the Afro-Mississippi artist to create a sustainable Black Arts Movement? Or, as Dr. Ward asked me: Why does black art perpetually find itself at this place, dealing with this conundrum? His question is rhetorical, but it forces me to examine myself as both a writer and a publisher. Can I reach an economically diverse Afro-Mississippi audience? I am also thinking about a young poet, Nathan Harper, and his marvelous epic poetry. Will his readers see past his explicit language and themes and grasp the metaphorical implications? Who will read him?
    From Phyllis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, African Americans have sought to balance three distinct spaces: the church, the academy, and the club. Nowadays, an abyss separates the young and the old, the churches and the juke joints, the ivory tower and the mainstream culture. One of my mentors, Dr. Reginald Martin, always an advocate of bridging the gap between theory and community service, invites writers to at least partially consider the needs of their audience when he poses the question: “When do we artists learn to embrace new formats and, fifty percent of the time, give the readership what it wants?” The notion that art exists as anything more than a vehicle to make money is foreign to most emerging, commercially ambitious artists. Meanwhile, many of our politically minded young guns are busy shouting down the old guard or representing history in one-dimensional symbols. If Afro-Mississippians do not embrace Afro-Mississippi artists, we will continue to be a voiceless culture speaking to a deaf wind.

Poetry groups like Mississippi Vibes offer possible solutions. Founded in Jackson in 1997, Mississippi Vibes first held readings at Frank’s World Famous Biscuits and then moved to a permanent home at Highlites Fine Food and Drinks. Our members included David Brian Williams, Jolivette Anderson, Ken Stiggers, myself, and Derrick Johnson, who is now the President of the Mississippi NAACP. We did not see ourselves as spoken-word artists but as writers who were using the open-mic medium to get people interested in reading. But the Saturday-night open mic was not our priority. During the week, we sponsored book clubs, creative-writing workshops, and collaborated with grassroots organizations, such as Southern Echo and the Algebra Project, that put us in direct contact with the community. We sponsored online literary contests so folks could win tickets to, or a free meal at, an open-mic venue. (Some of the questions: What is considered Etheridge Knight’s seminal book? What is the definition of a sonnet or a haiku or a tanka or a ballad or iambic pentameter? Can you name the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry or Fiction?) We scheduled monthly readings and panel discussions in the community libraries so that our audience, especially the high-school and college students, would become comfortable with serious discussions about literature. We were not cultivating a spoken-word audience but rather readers who also liked spoken-word events. Our biggest mistake was in not encouraging the college-age writers to take control so that they could continue these literary events and activities without us.
    We also need more writing workshops like Cave Canem. Each state should have an annual workshop that enhances the skills of African Americans while also teaching them how to increase their chances of gaining admittance to a creative-writing program, and how to submit to journals, and how to approach and connect with agents, and how to secure book deals. Earlier this year, I partnered with two friends, Carlton Turner and Maurice Turner, of the hip hop/jazz duo M.U.G.A.B.E.E, and we coordinated a workshop designed to teach local artists how to gain municipal, county, state, and federal funding for their arts projects. Maurice is a trumpeter, playwright, and serves on the board of several arts organizations. Carlton is a poet/rapper/playwright and the director of Alternate Roots, an organization that helps individual artists and artistic organizations secure funding for arts activism.

Those of us who have one foot in the publishing world and one foot in the academy must continue to fight to bridge those worlds, finding ways to bring the two camps closer. Each semester, I introduce my students to one published African-American author who is either under thirty or who has been published by a small press. As the co-sponsor of the JSU Pierian Literary Society and the JSU Poetry Club Outspoken, I am constantly devising literary events both on and off campus—people who would not typically venture onto a college campus can still gain access. And I endeavor to maintain a dialogue with the young spoken-word artists, inviting them to participate in academic conferences and festivals. It is quite tiring to grade papers, edit a journal, and try to get my own work published while keeping my wife happy, but when I read an e-mail full of joy from a young African American, especially an Afro-Mississippian, who has just received his or her first publication, I forget, even if just for a moment, that I am overworked. Just one acceptance from a small journal will transform the path of an African-American writer.

To read a selection of poems by some of the region’s brightest talents, please click here.

ABOVE: ART BY C. LIEGH MCINNIS.