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Reflection on the Artistry of Sekou Sundiata


One of the great riddles for me is the absence of the publication of Sekou Sundiata's work. There are the two CDs and his small chapbook, Free, which is somewhere in my personal collection, that I cannot seem to find. In fact, I only saw one of his poems ever published in a journal. If someone knows about other work, maybe they will contact me and share.

Folks know Sekou and respect him. In many ways he is legendary for the role he plays in weaving a Post Black Arts moment into an aesthetic that refined and led his work for decades after. When I spent time with him in the late eighties at the New School for Social Research, his poem "Blink Your Eyes" functioned as a signature poem of sorts. The content of the piece gets at the heart of the Black Lives Matter moment though written decades before. The poem is political, musical, and the best of poetry.

I saw him perform that poem in many different shades and forms like an old jazz standard in a range of performance venues throughout New York. A few times with Craig Harris on trombone, other times with his full band Dadadoodada, and then solo. Each time much of it was the same, but like great black music it always seemed to adjust itself to the moment and the particulars of that day and the audience. In fact, not too long ago, I heard him perform the poem on a youtube recording and noticed a mistake or at least a way in which the performance ventured away from the script I had known after listening to it many times. It was to be expected. Sekou's work is like jazz and caught up in the center of the moment. It comes from a philosophical position that contrasts with the pages desire to be etched in stone.

Sekou was a former Black Panther and a fascinating human being. It was he who told me almost three decades ago that if I were to take writing seriously, I needed to study the craft of writing. He introduced me to the work of Walcott and other poets and even put me on a for a reading at a club that featured Amiri Baraka. Needless to say, I was done. He mentored me in a Free Black Space way.

The absence of his publications clarifies for me the way the Post Black Arts moment has worked. In the late eighties it was much more connected to the movement towards spoken word. I saw Sekou read a couple of times at the Newyorican Poet's Cafe and there learned about the poetry of Paul Beatty, who at the time was legendary for his slam poetry. It also seems that Beatty's movement from spoken word to winner of the Man Booker Prize also reflects something about the Post Black Arts trajectory.

Beatty moved from the stage to the page.

Post Black Arts is about music, hip-hop, and the positioning of the page in the community of African American letters over the stage. The absence of Sekou's publication has something to do with that. He made a choice to live out the type of art that reflected his path. I imagine at some time he stopped submitting, but I also remember him once commenting that folks didn't want to publish his work. It seems common for most artists involved in the poetry game, which forces everyone to deal with rejection; but there is also another consideration. Part of his rejection was the integration of black music, black speech, and the band into the posture of his work. His first CD, the Blue Ones of Dreams is classical in its sound and arc. Indeed, Sekou refined those songs and works for many years. He always kept a band. He was always working on poetry and music as some integrated vision. He was a performer who performed poems. How he said things, how he read them, was as important as the element of crafts we assign to the page.

There are two mentions of his work after his death that strike me as important. The first spoken by Amiri Baraka, who is in some ways is the embodiment of Black Arts in the flesh now spirit, who mentioned in his response to Charles Rowell's Angels of Ascent, that one of his most important omissions was Sekou Sundiata. Leave it to Amiri to state such a profound thought as plain and everyday. He had that type of agency. Indeed, I know Dr. Rowell, and cannot imagine even if he smoked cracked in the morning followed by a fifth of whiskey that he would ever publish something by Sekou Sundiata. Those who know Dr. Rowell will confirm this. For Callaloo, considered by most to be the most prestigious and successful African American journal of the Post Black Arts period is in many ways the opposite of Sekou. The binary here is not used to declare opposition, but as reference for the range.

Sekou and other poets who chose a similar path ended up more aligned with Hip-Hop or spoken word than the page movements of the last two decades. Black Arts was on that. The search for Black Arts sought a dialogue with black audiences, which mirrored the dialogue black musicians and performers had. Poetry was an extension of a similar connection. In fact, poetry, music, and singing, are all in the same tradition in Africa. This seems rather common knowledge, though a fair portion of the African American community of poets seem to deny or not be interested in it.

The second reference to Sekou came in a Thomas Sayers Ellis poem published in Poetry magazine. In addition to Sekou not being published in Angles of Ascent, he was not published in Poetry during his lifetime. Ellis' reference named Sekou as a great performer. No doubt there was word play and honor in the designation; but here's the complication-Ellis as one of the founders of the Dark Room Collective, which in many ways birthed enough Pulitzer Prize and award winners to represent one of the most significant literary movements of the past three decades, again represents the opposite of Sekou. They too, to my knowledge did not invite Sekou to Harvard as they founded the movement-or perhaps they did and he could not come. It is possible, but seems unlikely. The point is Sekou's pedigree is a Sun-Ra associated, black panther, black arts, pedigree doused in the music and speech of black folks. The content of him is inherently political. For a music and posture that black folks respond to is as powerful now as it was, when artists untrained in the arts and crafts of master put it up for us, from the first field.

The African American artist seems to struggle with the division between art and politics as though they are involved in a Greek tragedy. The reference is wrong from the beginning, and we imagine that the artist represents the highest ideals of beauty and truth that somehow transcends the petty concerns of politics. Following this logic, the Black Artist who bends towards the political or is perceived that way represents a bastardization of the true essence of art. However, negroes in reality have historically not been allowed this luxury of positioning, because when we show up shit automatically turns political. This is what integration really means. Your presence in a previously white institution or designation as black first is inherently political, and it seems the way to soften the politics of your being is to express how you are a perfect hybrid of the best of the empire and the best of the black(according to what the empire thinks of the black).

I confess, some of it seems rather shameless. Now, I am thinking about an Award Winning Poet talking about how he writes for the reader who is smarter than him. His statement seems inherently political and a bit shady at best. I could write a book of such statements that seem to capture a respect and reverence for aesthetics that express a unity in artistic communities that almost always comes in some integrated atmosphere where integration is fewer blacks. How a white audience takes such statements seem easy to decipher. Read-you are a smart nigger. Some of us are smarter than you. There are few niggers smarter than you, cuz you a smart nigger. This is mostly about us.

Yet, black music, speech, and the black audience represents the most refined intellectual production African Americans have created in this country. It is the reservoir of our intelligence. Without it, there is no black survival, but it must also be said, that everything we brought has to be negated and re-refined like coffee grown in another country and then shipped back to it after being processed in the mother land. Unfortunately, a significant portion of our art operates like this. Black speech, black music, and by extension black intelligence are still significant sample in the white mind to suggest the unrefined.

You find the art sprinkled with references to Greece, Europe, Italy, France, and the conversation white literature has been having with itself for years. Indeed, these elements often outweigh simple references to the black. Of course there are exceptions, but Sekou was grounded in us, in a way that was undeniably us.

Phyllis Wheatly, who is defended by Rowell and others, as not being an Uncle Tom, occupies and inherently political position in the empire, though her work is far from the Negro spirituals of the time. Presenting her as the first black poet, while blacks of the field were composing the great texts of our time with their mouths, is again an inherently political expression.

We imagine politics is what we consciously do in a way that is too simplistically American. The Black artist is a very powerful tool who can be endorsed, funded or accepted to show an institution's acceptance of the black as a concept within the empire. In present times, this seems to be the essence of the Black artists' leverage and too easily confused with the notion of "great work". The white needs the Black to testify to its culture and civilization, though an artist trained in a white institution who makes decisions to integrate and find similarities-imagines themselves transcending race through studies, while whites imagine themselves transcending race through accepting them. It is an imbalanced equation. Whites are still not required to study us seriously, and there is nothing like a dose of black music and black speech to clarify the divide. Black history suggests that the black is almost always political, precisely because it is mis-understood and close to unfathomable for those who do not know our code.

The situation doesn't seem to get more complex in the age of Trump. In fact, Callaloo, mentioned earlier has been located at a conservative institution in Texas for quite some time. The statement seems clear, niggers writing about the interiority of their lives, get along with racist white folks just fine. It is in fact part of their survival strategy. One way of reading inferiority is yin strategy that avoids open conflict as it builds up internal energy. In truth I am down with such, as I also believe most African Americans are. We are tactical in our existence. Nigger gotta do what a nigger gotta do. We know when to push and to pull. We know when to sit down and shutup. We can learn from the Black Award winning artists of today important lessons about surviving and even thriving in difficult times.

But the final point seems to transcend that. Recently, I sent a letter to a literary journal run by an African author I respect and admire. I asked to be removed from his list. Indeed, I often will write letters to folks in the poetry world in an every nigger voice. I am careful to not complain without some form of agency, which in this case was my tapping out of that poetry community via e-mail. My communication with most of the magazines is based on the amount of submissions I have done. It seems like most of them are getting their marketing game together because each time they reject me, they send me request for future submissions or advertisements for what the journal is doing.

Reading through those advertisements gives one insight into how the world of poetry really works. Few black faces show up and the range of themes show the important role they play as regulators of American and European culture. I am cool with that, and if anything, have perhaps overestimated my compatibility with that portion of the world. I can be sampled in, but in the end, am somewhat an outsider. I am not a Black Panther like Sekou, and have not run a band for decades; but my relationship with a black bookstore and the importance of Free Black Space reflects an alternative approach to Black intellectual production.

At this point, maybe in a way similar to Sekou, I do not expect much from folks in response to my work. I get published here and there, but also understand I am often operating from a different aesthetic. I will not proclaim what that aesthetic is, but it is different. The presence of Sekou in my life is one of the determining factors of this.

The larger questions are about a public naiveté many of the current Black Artist put forth. Indeed, we imagine we can produce art and become successful without complex networks and industry regulated by people who think like us. I find such success almost impossible. The great American freedom of expression contrasts with the opinion of those in positions of power. Indeed, if you do not believe what editors believe, or view the tradition of poetry and writing through a different lens you can easily be censored, negated, under the banner of "they won't publish my work." The trick here is that it seems to be part of the landscape, though it produces results similar to more hostile regimes. In the face of Trump, I think most Black Artists I know will be alright. It probably won't get better; but we are compatible with this.

And though the final statement may hurt some, Sekou taught well the lesson of keep doing what you doing, rooted to the true and human character of our people, our intelligence, our music, and our speech. It is not really a response, but a rootedness-in our tradition.


This post first appeared on Free Black Space, please read the originial post: here

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Reflection on the Artistry of Sekou Sundiata

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