Ramcat Reads #6
Marshall, Nate. Wildhundreds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2015. Marshall, one of the co-editors of
The BreakBeat Poets (2015) and winner
of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, writes ultra-contemporary "love letters"
for Chicago, thereby exposing the paradoxical limits of stereotypes, the
"tertium quid of niggerdom" (16).
One imagines that Marshall would agree with a character from Spike Lee's
Bamboozled that niggers is a
beautiful thing. His poetry is
abrasive. One can read his poem
"Ragtown prayer" (30-31) as a defiant response to the instructions
James Weldon Johnson gave us about writing Negro poetry and as a deconstruction
of the models of excellence to be found in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Marshall truly speaks to his peers.
Rivlin, Gary. Katrina: After the Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Rivlin's interviews with those who stayed
during Hurricane Katrina (2005) and those who returned invites us to measure
the "new" New Orleans as a city of extremes, flash points, and blatant
contradictions. Rivlin sketches how transparent urban pathology can be as well
as how successfully it can conceal its sinister designs. His verbal snapshots of Alden McDonald, Mitch Landrieu,
Pres Kabacoff, Jimmy Reiss, Ray Nagin, Oliver Thomas and Sally Ann Glassman are
priceless.
Robinson, Marilynne. The
Givenness of Things. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2015. One
result of Robinson's conversation with President Obama ( see The New York Review of Books, November 5
and November 19, 2015) may be renewed interest in her brand of Calvinism and her startling audacity of
piety. Robinson is forthright in saying
that Christ "humbled himself and took the form of a slave. He humbled himself not in the fact of being
human, but to show us the meaning of making slaves of human beings" (200).
It is understandable that our embattled President might be charmed by such
sentences in Robinson's essays as the following: "The Bible seldom praises
God without naming among his attributes his continuous, sometimes, epochal,
overturning of the existing order, especially of perceived righteousness, or of
power and wealth. when society seems to
have an intrinsic order, it is an unjust order.
And the justice of God disrupts it" (199). It is tempting to imagine that Robinson and
her President could be persuaded to embrace Toni Morrison's recommendation that
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and
Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015)
is "required reading."
Tipton-Martin, Toni.
The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African
American Cookbooks. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2015. A
survey of cookbooks from Robert Roberts's The
House Servant's Directory (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1827) to America I Am: Pass It Down Cookbook (New
York: Smiley Book, 2011), edited by Jeff Henderson and Ramin Ganeshram. Tipton-Martin provides a glimpse of what is
rarely discussed about the centrality of African American cuisine in American
culture, and it is a special treat to read what she has to say about Bobby
Seals's Barbequen with Bobby
(Berkley: Ten Speed, 1988), to be reminded that Black Panthers knew what to do
in the kitchen.
Vella, Christina. George
Washington Carver: A Life. Baton
Rouge: LSU Press, 2015. Vella's
documentation of Carver's discoveries and inventions is solid, but her strained
interpretation of Carver's personality is a bit annoying.
White, Shane. Prince
of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First
Black Millionaire. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015. It is refreshing to read this biographical
study of Hamilton, a man who used his remarkable intelligence to beat
nineteenth-century New York financiers at the racial games they loved to
play. It is instructive to consider how
White, an Australian professor of history, exposes the architecture of writing
history with the panache so often lacking among American historians who try to
tell a black story.
Williams, Saul. US(a.).
New York: Gallery Books, 2015.
Readers who feel they must be hip about everything and nothing (in the
existential sense of "nothingness") should hop through the pages of
this mixture of poetry and fiction.
Williams is brilliant in witnessing the contemporary game of daily life and giving us some of the best
beat-broken writing on the planet. His
aesthetic and performance of sensibility demonstrate that the practice of
diaspora is a relentless taker of tolls.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 28, 2015
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