BCRW @ 50

Change, But Not Enough: Part IV

Walker and Jordan spoke to similar experiences of being diminished and devalued, having an experience of dissociation in higher education and the literary and artistic worlds. They both posed questions as to the nature and purpose of intellectual and artistic creation, and what the limitations imposed on them or generated in them as activists, thinkers, and writers. Yet it’s worth lingering in the differences in their posture, their preoccupations, and their tone. Their questions (here anyway) suggested different kinds of answers. Jordan was world-oriented, Walker artist-oriented. If there should be any controversy that Walker derived great artistic influence and joy from Hurston, a Black woman who was at times apolitical and at other times, some argue, conservative (although Walker staunchly disagreed with critics’ assessments of her work, with the exception of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road), we should listen to Jordan’s words. And, in fact, it was Walker who introduced Jordan to Hurston, handing her the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.) In an essay called “Notes Toward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred,” originally published in Black World in 1974 and anthologized in And Some of Us Did Not Die, she writes: 

…what seems to me as pressing as the need to honor both Hurston and Wright is the need to abhor and defy definitions of Black heritage and Black experience that suggest we are anything less complicated, less unpredictable, than the whole world...

But, because Zora Neale Hurston was a woman, and because we have been misled into devaluating the functions of Black affirmation, her work has been derogated as romantic, the natural purview of a woman (i. e., unimportant), "personal" (not serious) in its scope, and assessed as sui generis, or idiosyncratic accomplishment of no lasting reverberation, or usefulness. All such derogation derives from ignorance and/or callow thinking we cannot afford to continue. Although few of us have known the happiness of an all-Black town/universe, every single one of us is the torn-away descendant of a completely Black/African world and, today, increasing numbers of us deem an all-Black circumstance/nation as our necessary, overriding goal. Accordingly, this Sister has given us the substance of an exceptional, but imperative vision, since her focus is both an historical truth and a contemporary aim. As for the derision of love as less important than war or violence, that is plain craziness, plain white craziness we do not need even to discuss…

But, rightly, we should not choose between Bigger Thomas and Janie Starks; our lives are as big and as manifold and as pained and as happy as the two of them put together. We should equally value and equally emulate Black Protest and Black Affirmation, for we require both; one without the other is dangerous, and will leave us vulnerable to extinction of the body or the spirit. We owe thanks to both the struggle and the love: to the native sons among us, and to those whose eyes are watching their own gods.

If anything, the distinctions between Jordan and Walker’s Reid lectures offer, in retrospect, some anticipation of the careers they would come to have, the modes of their writing, and the burning necessity of each. 

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