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Rudolph Lewis and Amin Sharif, Editors
I Am New Orleans and Other Poems by Marcus B. Christian
New Orleans: Xavier University Press,
1999, 112p
A Labor
of Genuine Love
A Review by Herbert Rogers
This collection of poetry compiled and edited
by Lewis and Sharif opens with an introductory essay on the life
and works of Marcus Bruce Christian. Spanning four decades,
Christian wrote over two thousand poems and thousands of pages
of historical scholarship on blacks in Louisiana. Between 1922
and 1942, some of Christian’s poetry appeared in Opportunity
and Crisis magazines. But most of his poetry remained
unpublished.
While affiliated with the Federal Writers’
project, Christian no longer wrote in isolation of other African
American writers; he came into contact with his fellow
writers. Among the distinguished group of writers that Christian
met was Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and
Margaret Walker. Unlike these writers, Christian was not
interested in free verse as he wrote in rhymed, metered verse.
The fifty poems selected in this collection
have been thematically grouped to allow the reader to capture
the range of Christian’s talent as a poet. There are poems
that consider the social role of the poet and others that
consider the perverse effects Jim Crow has on the natural
affections of men and women of different races. We, also, see
poems on the role of Africa and blackness in world politics and
humanity. The poem, the longest in the collection, expresses
Christian’s vision of New Orleans as a multiracial society.
Literacy critics and creative writers have
resurrected some of our finest writers. Henry Louis Gates’
research on Harriet Wilson’s
Our Nig comes to mind.
This text was lost to the reading public for over a century,
before Gates discovered its true significance. We cannot forget
Eugene Redmond in seeing that Henry Dumas’ work reached a
larger community, nor can we ignore the role of Alice Walker in
revitalizing interest in the extraordinary life and work of
Zora Neale Hurston.
We can now add the names of Rudolph Lewis and
Amin Sharif to this distinguished list of writers as critics.
And it was obviously for the editors, long before it reached a
stage of completion sufficient for a book, a labor of love.
* * * * *
Books by Henry Dumas
Ark of Bones
(1970) /
Poetry for
My People (1971) /
Play Ebony
Play Ivory (1974)
/
Jonah and the Green Stone
(1976)
Rope of Wind and Other Stories
(1979) /
Goodbye,
Sweetwater (1988) /
Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected
Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)
Echo
Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas
* * *
* *
posted 19 August 2005 / update 29 June 2008 |
