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Report: BAM Conference
at Howard University March 23-24, 2006
By
Marvin X
A funny thing happened when I got to
Howard University for the Black Arts Movement conference
but I won't reveal the dramatic event until the end of
this article, just to be sequential and chronological. I
came to Washington DC after some hesitation, especially
when I read the internet
conversation on ChickenBones suggesting a boycott of the
conf was in order. But I decided to attend after
receiving generous sponsorship from the Oakland Post
Newspaper Group and San Francisco Recovery Theatre.
I arrived in DC a day early and
settled in at my longtime friend's gallery on Bunker
Hill Road. Baba Lumumba (Don Freeman, brother of Kenny
Freeman) was co-founder of Soulbook magazine, one
of the most radical 60s publication, associated with RAM
or the Revolutionary Action Movement, headed by Robert
Williams (Negroes with Guns) and Max Stanford or
Muhammad Ahmed. Like myself, Baba is an angry old man
but still doing revolutionary things. His Umoja House
Gallery is a safe house and free thought zone for
revolutionary black nationalism and pan-Africanism.
Although Baba was not scheduled to participate and for
various reasons didn't want to attend, on the second day
of the conf I dragged him to Howard and he was
immediately drafted to be on the Revolutionary
Nationalism panel. But let me describe day one.
I missed the first session on the
Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron. I had talked with Omar
Ben Hasan of the Last Poets who didn't know about the
conference, nor was he invited. At least he was the
subject of a paper. I had talked with Sonia Sanchez who
was invited but couldn't attend due to a schedule
conflict.
When I arrived, a scholar was reading
a paper on Amiri Baraka's poem
Black Dada Nihilismus
written on the eve of his departure from Greenwich
Village and coming to Harlem. It tells of his despair
and budding political consciousness. There was also a
paper on legendary writer
Henry Dumas who was
killed by a New York policeman on the subway. The
magical and supernatural writings of Dumas is the
primary source of Toni Morrison's fiction, including
Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Beloved.
Indeed, while at Random House, Tony
edited a collection of his work. The audience asked why
was such an important writer largely unknown, which is
true for many BAM writers who didn't achieve the
commercial success of say Baraka, Giovanni, Sanchez and
Haki. But BAM was a national movement, so there are many
writers who remain underground, many unpublished,
certainly by the commercial press. It is for BAM
scholars to discover them and make them known to the
public. This was one purpose of the conference. In my
own case, I am confronted by people who never heard of
me after forty years on the case.
I failed to mention upon entering the
conference room I saw playwright Ed Bullins who
co-founded Black Arts West Theatre, San Francisco, 1966,
along with Duncan Barber, Hillery Broadus, Ethna Wyatt
and Myself. Later Ed joined me at Black House, along
with Eldridge Cleaver who
funded it. Ethna Wyatt was there as well. Before I got
to Ed, I shook hands with Roy Lewis, the photographer
who chronicled the 60s, including the Civil Rights
movement, BAM and the Black Liberation Movement (BLM).
He later showed me his classic photos
of John Coltrane, Martin Luther King, Elijah Muhammad,
Muhammad Ali, Baraka, Sonia, Haki and others. Roy Lewis
was mainly posted in the Chicago area. Photographers
Doug Harris and St. Clair Borne covered the New York
area.
A few seats down from Ed was another
gentleman I recognized, James Spady, our most radical
literary critic. Spady is so informed he would later
fill in any and all gaps in the knowledge of the
presenters with a very factual and balanced response, no
matter if the topic was feminism or whatever. Spady is a
jewel in our community. Have you ever heard of him? Like
BAM heavyweights Ed Bullins, Larry Neal and Charles
Fuller (A Soldiers Story), Spady is a
Philadelphia Negro.
When I sat down next to Philly Negro
Ed Bullins, my esteemed but sometimes estranged comrade
from BAM (he brought me to Harlem to join him at the New
Lafayette Theatre), he whispered, "I want to do
Salaam, Huey, Salaam," his play about my last
meeting with Huey P. Newton in an Oakland Crack house. I
replied, "Hell, Ed, just give me some money." He said,
"Let's step into the hall," which we did.
Ed and I have had a nasty
relationship since he made a one-act play out of my
material, but I told him out in the hall, "Man, we too
old to be tripping." Indeed, Ed is 72 and I will be 62
in May.
Conference papers can be boring, so I
slept through a paper on women writers in BAM. Sisters
forgive me, although I did hear the paper by Carmen
Phelps on Chicago women writers Carolyn Rogers and
Johari Amini, and of course
Gwen Brooks was part of the discussion. These women
are critical to any discussion of BAM, especially a
regional dialogue. Again, BAM was national with outposts
in the midwest, east, west and south. And each region
had nuances on the general theme of liberation,
nationhood, radical esthetics and consciousness.
Rod Hernandez gave a talk on the
connection between BAM and Latino writers, such as
Victor Hernandez Cruz, Felipe Lucdiano of the Last
Poets, Avotcha and others.
I say this multi-racial connection
happened toward the end of BAM, circa 1975, because we
must understand BAM was black nationalist and any
attempt to paint it otherwise is incorrect and
revisionist. Now early on, Felipe did join the Last
Poets, but when Avotcha came to the Black House in 1967,
she came as an African American rather than a Puerto
Rican, as if there is a great difference. My point is
that we cannot make a black movement into a
multi-cultural movement. We can't say the Asia Arts
movement was a black movement, even though it was
inspired by BAM. Asian poet Janice Mirikitani (Mrs.
Cecil Williams) tells everyone, "It was the poetry of
Marvin X that awakened me to my ethnicity."
One of the major achievements of BAM
was that it forced recognition of ethnic literature in
the field of American literature. After all, what or who
is more American than African American. As James Baldwin
put it, "We're the only thing that happened here." And
Baraka notes English literature happened in England. To
understand the American experience through literature,
one must begin with slave narratives along with the folk
literature of Native Americans, Latinos and Asians. We
don't hear the American language in the general or white
American narrative until Huck Finn.
Amy Abugo Ongiri discussed the BAM
classic anthology Black Fire, 1968, edited by
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and
Larry Neal, the iconic philosopher of BAM, who
clarified BAM was the sister of the Black Power or Black
Liberation Movement, although I maintain BAM was like
the mother because activists gained consciousness in BAM
then joined the BLM. For example, Bobby Seale performed
in my plays before he created the BPP. Before joining
the BPP, Eldridge Cleaver was in Black House with Ed
Bullins and myself.
And Black House was the BAM cultural
center, and no matter how much Eldridge disdained us
cultural workers, he was there among us: Baraka,
Sanchez, Chicago Arts Ensemble, Avotcha, Sara Webster
Fabio, Reginald Lockett. The Black Panther Minister of
Culture Emory Douglass came to Black House looking for
something to do, as did Samuel Napier, who became the
Black Panther minister of distribution for their
newspaper.
George Murray performed in Baraka's
communication project at San Francisco State College
(now University) before becoming the BPP minister of
education. Again, BAM was the mother who gave
consciousness to the political activists.
Part 2
On Friday, I arrived with Baba
Lumumba in tow, kicking and screaming as angry old men
are known to do. We had agreed to arrive in time for the
session on Revolutionary Nationalism. When we arrived,
Dr. Dana Williams requested my presence on the panel
since scheduled speakers were absent. Initially, she
asked me, but I referred her to Baba as the authority on
Revolutionary Nationalism. When Baba agreed, I thought I
was home free, but Dana said she wanted me as well, so I
submitted, since she was a BAM scholar, tall, fine,
Chocolate City sister. Point of information: I was
informed the ratio of women to men at Howard is 14 to 1.
Lord, let me die in DC.
Well, let's be real, DC has the
highest HIV/AIDS rate in the US, so one must be
careful. Furthermore, see Sunday's Washington Post
article, "Marriage is for White People."
Our panel began with a paper by Amy
Washburn on
Assata Shakur, a feminist approach to BAM/BLM,
saying we often dehumanized women, degendered them,
although Assata was indomitable in the tradition of
Harriet Tubman who said, "I could have freed more slaves
if they had known they were slaves."
Baba followed her by attempting to
correct some of the distortions and revisions in BAM/BLM
history, since he was there, and as per the BPP, he was
a part of the rival Northern California Chapter of the
Black Panther Party. In his back pocket, he had a letter
from the BPP to their rivals. In fact, he said, the BPP
was initiated by Robert Williams (Negroes With Guns)
and Max Stanford (Muhammad Ahmed) of the Revolutionary
Action Movement who wanted an over-ground group to work
with their underground movement. Kwame Toure took the
black panther symbol from Clarke College for the symbol
of the Lowndes County Freedom Democratic Party, and it
was later adopted by the BPP.
Baba claimed the BPP legacy was no
different from the Crips and Bloods: they romanticized
the gun, turning it against the community (see the
article Murder, Inc. by David Horowitz on the internet)
rather than the enemy whom they had no hope of
defeating. The BPP became the cult of the field negro or
the Lumpen and they were directed against the
intellectuals and artists, considered bourgeois
nationalists. The BPP sold drugs, used drugs and
functioned as gangstas. Huey was a drug dealer/user
before, during and after the BPP. He died as he lived.
BAM/BLM people were not holy, as
English department chair and conference host, Dr.
Eleanor Traynor warned her young scholars as they
research BAM/BLM (let's be clear, BAM and BLM are
essentially indistinguishable—it was a merging of the
artist/activist. Often the pen was mightier than the
sword, i.e. gun. Even today, Fidel Castro recently said,
"The weapon of today is not guns—it is consciousness."
But in response to my comrade Baba, I
say we needed crazy nigguhs bold enough to confront
American terrorism in the form of police, FBI, KKK and
the military/industrial complex in general. One brother
says BAM/BLM gave our people breathing space from
oppression, if only for a moment—the artists/activists
absorbed the pain of the oppressors so our people could
see a better day.
And they did until opportunists
seized the time, enough to derail our work and destruct
the movement for decades, just as hip hop has been
destroyed by unconscious rap and bling bling, i.e., get
rich or die trying, as if our ancestors arrived here for
crass materialism, gangsterism and pimpism. We were
brought here to do a job and if a job is still our
ultimate mission in America, then we are an insult to
our ancestors who came from independent nations, enjoyed
freedom, self-determination and sovereignty.
Baba called the feminist ideology
divisive and setting the movement back by openly
declaring that women suffered more from their gender
than black men. He said black feminists believe they can
create a movement around their gender while denying
black men the privilege to be masculinists (well, they
do allow men to be masculine feminists, mx), thus they
refuse to face the contradictions of a gender-based
movement within the black liberation movement.
Indeed, if the ratio of women to men
is 14 to 1 at Howard, imagine what the message is about
the societal destruction of men. Finally, I say slavery
and colonialism are about the suppression of manhood and
womanhood, thus they are of equal importance—essentially
oppression is about the destruction of a people—men,
women and children. So what does gender have to do with
it? Clearly though, the first objective of the enemy is
to destroy the men—look at the daily news from Iraq to
see what gender is the object of mass murder by the US
military, insurgents, and militias.
I began my remarks on Revolutionary
Nationalism by suggesting how Islam was a driving force
in BAM/BLM, not only from the influence of Malik Shabazz,
Malcolm X, but also through the teachings of the
Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Master Fard Muhammad, Noble
Drew Ali, even Marcus Garvey (One God, One Aim, One
Destiny).
There was a Sunni influenced through
musicians too numerable to name: Coltrane, McCoy Tyner,
Yusef Latif, Rashid Ali, Dakota Statan, Ahmad Jamal and
a host of others. There was a Sufi connection through
the writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan that many BAM writers
studied.
As Sonia Sanchez said to me recently,
"Marvin we were all Muslims in BAM, or Muslim
influenced. Islam altered the mythology and ritual of
black America. In BAM it was expressed in the writings
of Sanchez (Laila Mannan), Baraka, Henry Dumas (see his
story Fon), Askia Muhammad Toure, Marvin X and others.
Islam replaced Christian ritual,
although BAM sought to recreate the energy of the black
Christian ritual in our attempt to formulate a ritual
theatre as expounded by Robert Macbeth at the New
Lafayette theatre, Barbara Ann Teer's National Black
Theatre and my own Black Educational Theatre
(Resurrection of the Dead, a myth-ritual dance drama. On
Friday, I added that not only did Islam influence BAM,
but BAM is now being acknowledged as the beginning of
Muslim American literature.
There is a forthcoming anthology by
Dr. Mohja Khaf of the University of Arkansas, Muslim
American Literature, that advances this thesis. Indeed,
she claims "Marvin X is the father of Muslim American
literature."
posted 27 March 2006
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update 30 July 2008 |
