WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 7 (2005)

Mwatabu S. Okantah

Introduction

Nonetheless, one can still find the griot almost in his ancient setting, far from the town, in the old villages of Mali . . . The words of traditionist griots deserve anything but scorn. The Griot who occupies the chair of history of a village and who bears the title of ‘Belen-Tigui’ is a very respectable gentleman and has toured Mali. He has gone from village to village to hear the teaching of great masters; he has learnt the art of historical oratory through long years; he is, moreover, bound by an oath and does not teach anything except what his guild stipulates, for, say the griots, ‘All true learning should be secret.’ - D. T. Niane¹

It will be the aim of this essay to discuss the following: 1) the historical struggle of Black writers to define a Creative Self and the meaning of our work in the American context from the creators of the Slave Narratives to the present; 2) the location of my own place within this struggle for cultural definition; and, 3) the emergence of what I will call a new literary griot tradition in contemporary African world writing. I will attempt to identify the aesthetic connections that spring from the now classical roots of the original forms of cultural expression enslaved Africans forged out of the furnace of American slavery. The folklore, spirituals, ring shouts, folk seculars, the blues, the jazz, and the dances continue to exist as the foundation for our creativity in the present. It is through our forms of cultural expression that we continue to remain connected to the larger Pan-African world.

As a contemporary, I have always conceived my own creative work out of this African-centered cultural frame of reference. I will trace my own artistic development in relation to the seeds planted by the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro breakthroughs of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown and others. Their seeds would bear fruit in the Negritude flowering of Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas and Leopold Senghor who struggled mightily against the ravages of French colonial policy in the Caribbean and Africa. I will look at the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960’s and 1970’s as a product of these same historical forces. Because my work has been considered a possible bridge connecting today’s generation of Hip Hop spoken wordsmiths, rappers, MCs, dancers, graffiti artists and BAM, I also think it is imperative the effort be made to bring the present Hip Hop movement into this same African-centered cultural focus. I am essentially arguing the entire twentith century constituted a true renaissance for peoples of African descent in the Diaspora, who then looked to Africa with a new vision. Moreover, as Americans of African descent, we have played significant roles in this awakening.

Gauntlets

His letter arrived like a torpedo hitting a ship broadside. If I had received such a letter, say, twenty or so years ago, I would have been devastated. It read,

What I attacked was the self-aggrandizing title of griot you attach to yourself. . . I don’t believe you have lived and studied long enough, and remembered thoroughly enough the history of the general community to have such a title. I forgot to ask whose history are you the griot of? (Personal letter)

Over the years, I have been confronted in many of the same ways previous generations of Black writers have been challenged before me. So, on the one hand, I was not fazed, but I had never been subjected to such withering criticism from someone I respected and considered a mentor. I wavered, but recovered to right my ship. The letter served to trigger thoughts I have been pondering and forming into my own Hughes-like manifesto for almost thirty years.

No longer the timid, introverted and painfully shy young student who was always around in the background observing, wide-eyed, taking everything in, I weathered the letter’s storm securely anchored in my own now solid ground. The letter sent me back to my journals, my notes, my ruminations and to the writing I have struggled with over the years in an ongoing quest to define my own approach to my work. Writing in A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing, Haki R. Madhubuti offers this observation under the heading, ‘The Hard Flower,”

Writing is a form of self-definition and communication through which you basically define yourself and your relationship to the world. The writer is essentially always searching for the core of the definition, looking for the gut. The Truth [italics mine]. There are few good writers that lie; there are a lot of liars that try to write and unfortunately they are in the majority. But they come and go, passing through like a European wind penetrating the Afrikan heat only to be eliminated by the warmth of realness.²

The first time I heard the term griot, I was a young wannabe poet studying in what would later become the Department of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University. I was a student of Egyptian composer Halim el-Dabh who had begun calling a group of us, “The Many Tongues of Ptah.” He called us the program’s griots. Little did I know or realize it then, but he was providing me with a cultural roadmap that would guide me on my own journey toward self-definition and a career direction I would choose later. The real irony of my former mentor’s attack was the role he had played introducing me to the very African sources I have come to embrace. Because of his stature, I did not dismiss his point of view. More surprised than hurt, I actually felt invigorated in the knowledge I was fully prepared to chart my own cultural and aesthetic space. Although the proverb says, “The fruit never falls far from the tree that bears it,” I recognized the time had come for me to stand square on my own ground. The time had come for me to be my own Black Poet Tree. The time had come for the son to grow independent from his intellectual father.

I began this paper with the quote from D. T. Niane’s preface to his translation of Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate’s, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali because my teachers taught me to reference traditional African models to define our experiences as African-derived people in the United States. The “attack” contained in the letter forced me to reevaluate what ultimately became my own self-directed initiation into a self-proclaimed New World African griot of the African-American people. I thought about my own sojourns into the Black Belt south, and through West Africa. I thought about the countless conferences I have attended to experience our best and brightest Black minds. The letter forced me to revisit works like Alain Locke’s “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” It forced me to reconsider the lasting influence of the Black Arts Movement on my development as a performance poet and writer who also teaches.

More importantly, the letter forced me to reflect on the very nature of my “Black Studies” education. I returned to what I consider the groundation of my study of “the way of life of peoples of African descent,” and my work with Nigerian musician, folklorist and philosopher Chief Fela Sowande, who taught:

I see the Africanization of Black Studies as requiring the restructuring of Black Studies—a total restructuring if need be—so that it rests on the traditional thought patterns of traditional Africa, which thereby become its reason for being, its life-essence, the actualization of these thought-patterns in the day-to-day lives of common folk being its specific objective, to achieve which nothing will be allowed to be an insurmountable obstacle.³

Rather than question my self-confidence, I felt seasoned to the degree I did not take the surprise attack on a personal level per se. Instead, I accepted this ultimate challenge to finally articulate my own claim to specific creative and cultural roots. I thought about the commission I accepted from historian Dorothy Salem to write what became the historical poem Legacy: for Martin & Malcolm (1987) for her students in the Martin Luther King Youth Leadership Institute at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College. I thought about being asked by editor James G. Spady and the Philadelphia Black History Museum to write the epic poem Cheikh Anta Diop: Poem for the Living (1997) which would be published as a limited, trilingual edition in English, French and Wolof. I took stock of my own hard-earned reputation as an African world poet.

Roots and Branches

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. . . . We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
-- Langston Hughes⁴

Langston Hughes. His words still resonate. When his manifesto, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, was originally published in The Nation in 1926, it was considered scandalous. In that same issue, George S. Schuyler’s acerbic response, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” also appeared. He countered, “Negro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.”⁵ In various ways, the views expressed in the Schuyler article remain with us today. To be sure, I heard echoes of George Schuyler in the aforementioned letter I received. Issues of group identity and cultural origins still confound us as a people of African descent living in America. At the same time, however, the fertile Harlem period set in motion a true cultural awakening that is still vibrant and bearing fruit in the face of today’s current madness.

I think it is now possible to look back on the work of the Harlem period to assess the degree to which those forerunners pointed future generations in the right direction. At the same time, however, they often expressed ideas about African culture that reflected the status quo attitudes of their time. Hughes’ poem, “Afro-American Fragment,” and Cullen’s poem, “Heritage,” come immediately to mind. Alain Lock’s article, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” is also an interesting case in point. Locke correctly saw a relationship between traditional African culture and the “strange new forms” of cultural expression that would come to be identified with African-American culture. However, his pronouncements about slavery uprooting certain “technical elements of his former culture” have since been corrected by more recent scholarship. Fortunately, from the perspective of new research and our own time, we can now appreciate Locke’s attempt to provide aesthetic direction when he wrote:

there is the possibility that the sensitive artistic mind of the American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive from African art a profound and galvanizing influence. The legacy is there at least, with prospects of a rich yield. In the first place, there is in the mere knowledge of the skill and unique mastery of the arts of the ancestors the valuable and stimulating realization that the Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own inheritance. Our timid and apologetic imitativeness and overburdening sense of cultural indebtedness have, let us hope, their natural end in such knowledge and realization.

But what the Negro artist of to-day has most to gain from the arts of the forefathers is perhaps not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery.⁶

Because Locke and so many of his contemporaries viewed “American Negroes” and Africans as somehow different or mutually exclusive due to time and circumstance, they did not see that it was precisely those qualities of cultural inspiration and technical innovation that were producing the new cultural forms flourishing all around them.

Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and Sterling Brown recognized the fundamental connection between African-American folk culture and their art. Writing about Hurston in Zora Neal Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert Hemenway states:

Of them all, however, Zora Hurston was the closest, and her person and her fiction exhibited the knowledge that the black masses had triumphed over their racist environment, not by becoming white and emulating bourgeois values, not by engaging in a sophisticated program of political propaganda, but by turning inward to create the blues, the folktale, the spiritual, the hyperbolic lie, the ironic joke. These forms of expression revealed a uniqueness of race spirit because they were a code of communication—intraracial propaganda—that would protect the race from the psychological encroachments of racism and the physical oppression of society. Hurston knew that black folklore did not arise from a sychologically destroyed people, that in fact it was proof of psychic health. . . . She contributed an authentic folk experience to the aesthetic mix of the Renaissance, a specific knowledge often underestimated when the Renaissance interest in the folk has been assessed.⁷

Sterling Brown, in Negro Poetry and Drama, puts the Harlem phase of the Renaissance in perspective when he points out the New Negro poets operated according to five pillar concerns: 1) a discovery of Africa as a source for race pride; 2) a use of Negro heroes and heroic episodes from American history; 3) propaganda of protest; 4) a treatment of the Negro masses (frequently of the folk, less often of the workers) with more understanding and less apology; and 5) franker and deeper self-revelation.⁸ Brown’s signature book of poetry, Southern Road, remains a classic poetic rendering of these concerns.

As a result, Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” would extend their work. He would further expand the discourse especially in the areas of African American folk culture and the role of the writer. When “Blueprint” appeared in 1937, it signaled a significant philosophical departure and a transition into the next phase in the struggles of Black writers to achieve self-definition in both individual and group cultural terms. Writing about the generations of Black writers who preceded him, he offered this biting observation,

Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. . .

Nor was there any deep concern on the part of white America with the role Negro writing should play in American culture; and the role it did play grew out of accident rather than intent or design.⁹

Wright revisited the critical issue of content and raised the issue of the relationship between Black writers and our sense of audience in a new way. He added, “Rarely was the best of this writing addressed to the Negro himself, his needs, his sufferings, his aspirations. Through misdirection, Negro writers have been far better to others than they have been to themselves. And the mere recognition of this places the whole question of Negro writing in a new light and raises a doubt as to the validity of its present direction.”¹⁰ The appearance of Wright’s novel Native Son in 1940 would make the break complete on at least two levels. He forever changed the nature of the relationship between Black writers and the larger white American society. Additionally, he freed subsequent generations of Black writers to explore even deeper psychological and emotional terrains of the Black experience.

More than any of his other titles, Native Son literally shocked me into a new and heightened awareness of reality. It was my first reading of a book written by a Black author. The novel introduced me to the potential power of words in a way I had never experienced. From Wright I learned that words could be used as powerful weapons; that words possessed the magical power to heal as well as the destructive power to derange. “Blueprint for Negro writing” forced me to consider the very nature of the internal dialogue Black writers have been engaged in for more than a century in this society. He offered future generations this signpost:

It means that Negro writers must have in their consciousness the foreshortened picture of the whole nourishing culture from which they were torn in Africa, and of the long, complex (and for the most part, unconscious) struggle to regain in some form and under alien conditions of life a whole culture again. . . . Theme for Negro writers will emerge when they have begun to feel the meaning of the history of their race as though they in one life time had lived it themselves throughout all the long centuries.¹¹

I was introduced to Wright’s work at a time when I was searching for models; a time when being a student in Black Studies exposed me to African culture, the tradition of the griots, as well as the idea of a Black tradition in literature. Wright’s “Blueprint” essentially provided the impetus for me to attempt to fashion an African-American approach to the African griot tradition.

Western Sunrise

The persistence of the African-based oral tradition is such that blacks tend to place only limited value on the written word, whereas verbal skills expressed orally rank in high esteem. This is not to say that Black Americans never read anything or that the total Black community is functionally illiterate. The influence of White America and the demands of modern, so-called civilized living have been too strong for that. However, it is to say that from a black perspective, written documents are limited in what they can teach about life and survival in the world.¹²
-- Geneva Smitherman

It is crucial to emphasize the importance of my Black Studies foundation in directing the focus of my study of traditional African culture and the importance of the griot in the way of life of African peoples. It meant that my examination of America’s Black tradition in literature never existed in a cultural vacuum. This is to say I was taught to explore the African-American experience within the context of a larger, Pan-African world. The experience of peoples of African descent in the Americas simply became new chapters in a very old book. Under the circumstances, it was only logical that I would look upon both my role and my craft as a performance poet in African cultural terms. The African griot tradition was always my primary classical model.

Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America served to place my approach to writing in perspective. “In any culture, of course, language is a tool for ordering the chaos of human experience. . . . The crucial difference in American culture lies in the contrasting modes in which Black and White America have shaped that language—a written mode for whites, having come from a European, print-oriented culture; a spoken mode for blacks, having come from an African, orally-oriented background. . . . The oral tradition, then, is part of the cultural baggage the African brought to America.”¹³ It goes without saying the Black tradition in literature in the American context has always been shaped by this oral cultural baggage.

The very uniqueness of Black literature lies in this duality. It has the potential to function both as literary and as performance art. In my own work, I would say the performance brings the words written on the page to life. Returning to Smitherman for clarity, she writes:

Even though blacks have embraced English as their native tongue, still the African cultural set persists, that is, a predisposition to imbue the English word with the same sense of value and commitment—“propers,” as we would say—accorded to Nommo in African culture. Hence Afro-America’s emphasis on orality and belief in the power of rap which has produced a style and idiom totally unlike that of whites, while paradoxically employing White English words. We’re talking, then, about a tradition in the Black experience in which verbal performance becomes both a way of establishing “yo rep” as well as a teaching and socializing force.¹⁴

The African-American tradition in literature, accordingly, constitutes the attempt of Black writers to use an alien language to order the chaos of the African experience in the Diaspora. This fact is true whether we are looking at the early slave narratives and the first self-conscious attempts at creative writing in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. It remains true if we are considering the New Negro writers of the 1920s and 30s. And, it is also true if we are discussing the generation of writers that included and followed Richard Wright. In the American context, it is the struggle to literally reshape the English language to suit our needs as a people that continues to define the work of Black writers. It is on this level the Black Arts proponents of the 1960’s and 70’s, as well as today’s generation of Hip Hop spoken word artists, rappers and MCs may in fact be closer to our African cultural origins than too many of our critics care to admit.

A more detailed discussion of the African origins of African-American culture is not permissible here because of space limitations and the focus of this paper. It should be noted that works like Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Leonard Barrett’s Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion and Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry more than adequately sort out the conundrum that so vexed earlier generations of Black scholars including the previously cited Alain Locke. Barrett provides a clearer insight when he writes,

[T]he best of African manhood entered the New World and so thoroughly marked it with African customs that in a short while, the sound of the New World was the sound of Africa. There is no place in which the African influence has not made an inroad. This influence on the language, folklore, medicine, magic and religion, music, dress, dancing and domestic life of the New World, can be called Africanization or indigenization.¹⁵

Levine’s work allowed me to view African-American culture as a New World African culture that did not exist before the 18^th century. This is to say those Africans kidnapped from Africa and sold into New World slavery entered the New World as indigenous Africans—Yoruba, Igbo, Mandinka, Wolof, Akan, Mende, etc. It would take time and circumstance to forge them into new peoples of African descent—Haitian, Jamaican, African-American, Brazilian, etc. He writes:

Scholars must be receptive to the possibility that for Africans, as for other people, the journey to the New World did not [italics mine] inexorably sever all associations with the Old World; that with Africans, as with European and Asian immigrants, aspects of the traditional cultures and world view they came with may have continued to exist not as mere vestiges but as dynamic, living, creative parts of group life in the United States. . . . To insist that only those elements of slave culture were African which remained largely unchanged from the African past is to misinterpret the nature of culture itself. Culture is not a fixed condition but a process: the product of interaction between the past and present. It toughness and resiliency are determined not by a culture’s ability to withstand change, which indeed may be a sign of stagnation not life, but by its ability to react creatively and responsively to the realities of a new situation. The question . . . is not one of survivals but of transformations. We must be sensitive to the ways in which the African world view interacted with that of the Euro-American world into which it was carried and the extent to which an Afro-American perspective was created. There is no better place to search for these transformations than in the numerous folk expressions of nineteenth-century slave cosmology.¹⁶

For my creative purposes, Levine’s argument served to validate the need to define a transformed New World African Griot tradition in American terms. Redmond’s Drumvoices became my cornerstone. His work offered both confirmation, as well as much needed affirmation that I was, indeed, on the right track. He provided vital connections: “before discussing the origins of black expression, we should note the role of griots—or story tellers—in preindustrial African societies. The black poet, as creator and chronicler, evolves from these artisans—human oral recorders of family and national lore. Trained to recite—without flaw—the genealogies, eulogies, victories and calamities of the folk, griots (like lead singers of spirituals) had to spice their narration with drama and excitement. Few Black American youngsters grew up (even in recent times) without guidance from a sort of griot (uncle, grandmother, big brother, sister, mother, hustler, father, preacher, etc.).¹⁷

Drumvoices discussed the African griot tradition in recognizable terms that I could actually see operating in my life. In other words, I was able to recognize the degree to which elements of the griot already existed in the African-American lifestyle. Redmond elaborated even further:

The job of the griot in ancient African societies was so important that an error could cost him his life. The griot began at a very early age to master his technique and information. Like the master drummer, he understudied an elder statesman of the trade. His training demanded a certain psychological adjustment to the significance of his job—which was to contain (and give advice on) the cultural “heirlooms” of the community . . . this “factual” information was ritualized into a lore, mythology, cosmology and legend; it became a part of the vast web of racial consciousness and memory. . . . Clearly, then, the myth- and legend-building black poet has a past into which to dip and a future to project and protect. . . . So it follows that the poet—griot—is not some haphazardly arrived at hipster or slick-talker simply mouthing tired old phrases. To the Black American griot-singer-poet the job of unraveling the complex network of his past and present-future worlds is a painful but rewarding labor of love.¹⁸

Reading Drumvoices gave me specific guidelines to follow. It provided both clarity of vision and singularity of purpose. It allowed me to appreciate the people I was studying under as an undergraduate student engaged in a truly African centered course of study.

It would be my exposure to Black Arts Movement ideas in the work of Hoyt Fuller, Larry Neal and others that would ultimately crystallize my views. In this regard, Addison Gayle, Jr.’s anthology The Black Aesthetic remains seminal. More significantly, I will always remember my first encounter hearing Gwendolyn Brooks ‘read’ her poetry. . . . Miss Brooks was the featured poet at the Tenth Anniversary Celebration of Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press. Her artistry mesmerized me. She leaped beyond the confining boundaries of a mere reading. I can now say she played her “axe” the same way Thelonius Monk played his piano—all herky jerky motion and syncopating, unusual rhymes and rhythms. After hearing Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti and Etheridge Knight, I literally became drunk on Black poets song-chanting their own words. I had been thrown into new space; somewhere in between ordinary speech and talking in tongues.¹⁹ Meeting the poet Lance Jeffers at a Howard Black Writers conference provided me with an elder kindred spirit. Being exposed to the recordings of The Last Poets, Jayne Cortez and Gil Scott-Heron would give me the final pieces to complete my aesthetic puzzle.

It was a former Pan-African literature professor, Hulda Smith-Graham, who reinforced the idea of becoming an African-American griot in my head. Among my early mentors, she had worked the hardest to get me to expand my ability to see. She was the tough minded task master who pushed me to become more than just a poet. She became my cultural midwife. Circumstances, and her tireless insistence, convinced me I had been “called to poet” during a time in my development when I needed both encouragement and convincing. I came to realize that I was one of those young Black writers Fuller referred to in his essay, “Towards A Black Aesthetic,” when he wrote, “The young writers of the black ghetto have set out in search of a black aesthetic, a system of isolating and evaluating the artistic works of black people which reflect the special character and imperatives of black experience.”²⁰

Considering the earlier and groundbreaking work of the New Negro poets, who passed the aesthetic relay baton to Richard Wright, who then passed it on to Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, it is fair to say that Fuller and his Black Arts compatriots did not offer a new vision so much as they expanded upon the vision that was born and refused to die in those first enslaved Africans in America who dreamed about being free. Fuller would go on to write:

It is a serious quest, and the black writers themselves are well aware of the possibility that what they seek is, after all, beyond codifying. They are fully aware of the dual nature of their heritage, and of the subtleties and complexities; but they are even more aware of the terrible reality of their outsideness, of their political and economic powerlessness, and of the desperate racial need for unity. And they have been convinced, over and over again, by the irrefutable facts of history and by the cold intransigence of the privileged white majority that the road to solidarity and strength leads inevitably through the reclamation and indoctrination of black art and culture.²¹

I further recognized that my efforts to become a griot were very much a part of that same “serious quest.” Ultimately, for me, it was Larry Neal who put that quest in a proper working perspective.

Writing in his essay, “New Space: The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,” he argued, “The value system for whatever we will be must…spring from readily available sources. What we need to do . . . with African and other Third World references is to shape them into a cosmological and philosophical framework. We need to shape, on the basis of our own historical imperatives, a life-centered concept of human existence that goes beyond the Western world view.”²² On the one hand, I think Neal’s statement further reiterates the obvious. We do have traditional African cultural models available to guide us. At the same time, however, we must also acknowledge we are no longer the same people whose ancestors were kidnapped so many centuries ago.

We have become, in essence, a new tribe of African people on the planet; one of several New World African tribes. The current generation of young African-American artists must come to know they are the rightful heirs to a rich cultural tradition of singers and storytellers, poets and musicians, artists and scholars who have always existed as Keepers of the Sacred Lore of the Folk. I want to connect with members of this so-called “Generation X” who correspond with me via E-mail; who show up at the countless Open Mike poetry sessions taking place all over this country; who come to my readings and/or performances because they want to taste [as they put it] “some Old School flavor.” I have attempted to write a paper that will help close what can only be described as a gaping generational divide.

It is not enough to simply tell Black youth “they stand on the shoulders of giants.” The Movement did not die after the 1960s, just as The Renaissance did not end with the stock market crash of 1929. I hope this discussion will place New World griots firmly within the context of the traditional cultures enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. We are the products of an aesthetic odyssey that began in the epic poetry performed under the giant Baobabs of West Africa, and that now arises in new song-stories rooted in the Haunted Oaks of the New World. I hope to pass on a cultural road map that will help guide those students who enroll in my “African World Creative Writing” class. I have attempted to write a “shout out” that will enable this next generation of Black creative artists—especially those who look to us as members of a new generation of Elders—to translate their work into terms that will empower them. It is now their turn to find their own way and to continue to uphold and represent the best in that great tradition of African and African derived cultural expression.

The Black Flower

As for the letter from my former mentor, I do not think that even he can understand or appreciate the depth my gratitude. The Ancestors knew it was time for me to set my thoughts down on paper. His “attack” made me know just how hard it is to be truly free. Returning to Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” I am grateful his generation built their “temples for tomorrow.” I realize we are standing on their broad shoulders today, safe in the knowledge that our present is their tomorrow. I can only hope that my own journey up that same mountain of self discovery will allow future generations to see themselves more clearly in their time.

Bibliography

Barrett, Leonard E. Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion. Garden City: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1974.

Brooks, Gwendolyn et al. A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing. Detroit:Broadside Press, 1975.

Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1972.

Gayle, Addison The Black Aesthetic. Garden City: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1971.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Niane, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Essex: Longman Group Ltd., 1993.

Okantah, Mwatabu S. Reconnecting Memories: Dreams No Longer Deferred. Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 2004.

Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry. Garden City: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1976.

Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.

Sowande, Chief Fela. The Africanization of Black Studies. Kent: KSU Department of Pan-African Studies, African American Affairs Monograph Series, 1972.

Notes

Citation Format:

Mwatabu S. Okantah. “From Under the Baobab to the Haunted Oak: The Reemergence of a Distinctly African Derived Griot Tradition in the Americas,” West Africa Review: Issue 7, 2005.

Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.