Negritude and the Black Arts Movement

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Transcript Negritude and the Black Arts Movement

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement
“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation
Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points
Black Art
1)
Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?
2)
Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?
Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)
2)
To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness
Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music
Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation
Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression that murders blacks in a literal and figurative
sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka, makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman, Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying
underbelly of the city”
Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.
Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.
“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle
Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”
The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic
Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,
The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.
The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics
3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”
Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see.
CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.
Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production
Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of RevoltThe Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard
enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and
get off this train. Looks like we won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined
before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think
we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into
CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry
is the rightest thing you've said. Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and
throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her
things. Getting everything in order. She takes out a notebook and makes a quick
scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the others
get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of
books under his arm. He sits a few seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she
turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and drops the
book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of
restrained soft shoe, and half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the
young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled
song. LULA turns to stare at him and follows his movements down the aisle. The
conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the car]
Curtain
Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery
the mastery of form
The deformation of
mastery
Houston Bakeresque
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Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)
by
James Baldwin
I of I
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James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Novelist, Essayist, Playwright, Civil Rights Activist
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Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Knows My Name, 1961
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (play)
Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon), 1964
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
The Amen Corner (play), 1968
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead), 1971
No Name in the Street, 1972
A Dialogue (with poet Nikki Giovanni), 1973
If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
An Absurd Impulse
“Kazan asked me at the end of 1958 if I would be
interested in working in the Theatre. It was a generous
offer, but I did not react with great enthusiasm because I
did not them, and don’t do now, have much
respect for what goes on in American Theatre.
I am not convinced that it is a Theatre; it seems
to me a series, merely, of commercial
speculations, stale repetitious and timed. I
certainly didn’t see much future for me, and was
profoundly unwilling to
risk my morale and
talent—my life in endeavors which could
only increase a level of frustration
dangerously high.” (James Baldwin)
Baldwin hints, here, as to the other Philosophical and Theatrical
movements informing his play: EXISTENTIALISM, ABSURDISM, and Brecht’s
notions of EPIC THEATRE AND ALIENATION. Here, in essence, Baldwin
insinuates that he will write a Brechtian play about the absurdity of race in
America.
“Plaguetown”: The setting.
Existentialism and the Notion of the Absurd: The
Absurdity of Non-Violent and Violent Protest
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The play then, for me, takes place in Plaguetown U.S.A.,
now, the plague is race, the plague is our concept of
Christianity; and the raging plague has the power to
destroy every human relationship. (James Baldwin)
Camus
Although the notion of the 'absurd' is pervasive in all of the literature of Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus is his
most extensive work on the subject. In it,
Camus considers absurdity as a
confrontation, an opposition, a conflict or a "divorce" between
two ideals. Specifically, he defines the human condition as
absurd, as the confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity on the one
hand – and the silent, cold universe on the other. He continues that there are specific human experiences
evoking notions of absurdity. Such a realization or encounter with the absurd leaves the individual with a
choice: suicide is a leap of faith or recognition. He concludes that recognition is the only defensible option.
A person can choose to embrace his or her own absurd condition.
According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give
life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd
experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid
of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. "To live without appeal”, as he puts it, is a philosophical
move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively.
The freedom of
humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and
opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide
(or think) for him- or herself.
Camus states in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three
consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.
By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of
life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide.”
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who,
in developing the combined theory and practice of his ‘’epic theatre’', to
explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas. and the creation of a
critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.
]
Epic theatre incorporates a mode of acting that utilizes what he calls gestus.
The epic form describes both a type of written drama and a methodological
approach to the production of plays: "Its qualities of clear description and
reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of
commentary earned it the name 'epic'." The audience should always be
aware that it is watching a play: "It is most important that one of the
main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic
theatre]: the engendering of illusion, producing the key (and perhaps
paradoxically named effect of alientation).
In epic theatre requires actors to play characters believably without
convincing either the audience or themselves that they have "become" the
characters. Actors frequently address the audience directly out of character
("breaking the fourth wall") and play multiple roles. Brecht thought it was
important that the choices the characters made were explicit, and tried to
develop a style of acting wherein it was evident that the characters were
choosing one action over another. For example, a character could say, "I
could have stayed at home, but instead I went to the shops."
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Baldwin, Brecht,
and the
Dialectics of Epic
Theater
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"Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails
throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics
(dialectical thought), is only the reflection of the motion
through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in
nature, and which by the continual conflict of the
opposites and their final passage into one another, or
into higher forms, determines the life of
nature."Fredrick Engels
But dialectical materialism insists on the
approximate relative character of every scientific
theory of the structure of matter and its properties;
it insists on the absence of absolute boundaries in
nature, on the transformation of moving matter
from one state into another, that from our point of
view [may be] apparently irreconcilable with it, and so
forth. Vladimir Lenin
"For dialectical philosophy nothing is final,
absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character
of everything and in everything; nothing can endure
before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming
and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the
lower to the higher.” Fredrick Engels
Staging Nationalism and Integration in Epic
Theatre: The Set
Talking Points
1) The use of Brecht’s epic mode to call attention to
call attention to the construction and dimensions of
segregation and a de facto Black Nationalist community.
2) The Use of the Skeleton Courtroom: Putting NonViolent protest, segregation, and the race problem on
trial in the absence of American justice.
3) The Church as a symbol of the black collective and
the importance of its split staging vis-à-vis the issues of
non-violent protest and militant Black nationalism.
4) Staging Plessy vs. Ferguson- Visually representing the
absurdity of “separate but equal”
5) Using the technique of alienation to stage
this aspect of the “Black experience”: that one must
“play Black”
6) Using the Alienation of Epic Theater to Stage Black
Nationalism: Forcing the
Audience to contemplate its role at a distance
The Play’s Political Problematic
Violence, Non-Violence, Justice
Talking Points
1)
2)
Lorenzo as “fed-up.”: a militant black
nationalist
Meridian as Dr. King- Non-Violent Protest
and the Possibility of Justice
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Traumatic Testimony:
Medgar Evers and Emitt Till
What is ghastly and almost hopeless about our racial
situation is that the crimes we have committed are so
great and unspeakable that acceptance of this
knowledge would lead literally to madness. The human
being, in order to protect himself; closes his eyes,
compulsively, repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual
darkness no one can describe. (James Baldwin)
The accident, that is, as it emerges in Freud and is passed on through other
trauma narratives, does not simply represent the violence of the collision but
also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility. What returns to
haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is […] the reality of the way that its
violence has not yet been fully known.
The story of the accident thus refers us, indirectly, to the unexpected
reality—the locus of referentiality—of the traumatic story. (Caruth, Cathy.
Unclaimed Experience: Explorations in Trauma and Memory )
May 28, 1963
The assassination of
Medgar Evers (two white juries
deadlock and do not convict De
la Beckwith)
The murder of Emitt Till
(1958), (the trial results in two
acquittals)
Talking Points
1)
Traumatic Memory: The Mechanics of
Repetitive Atrocity
2)
Religious Testimony
3)
The Call and Response of the Black Church
Aesthetic
4)
RAPIST NEGRO JUNKIES: Epic Theatre and
Cognitive Frames
Existentialism as Heroic Crisis of Faith:
The Inadequacy and Inescapability of Racial Paradigms
Talking Points
1) B.C.- Moving Forward in the
absence of meaning as
embracing Existential heroism
2) The harmful effects of pacifism
on racial uplift and identity
3) The race problem in light of the
human race problem as posited
by the Existentialists
4) Meridians “B.C.” as a new form
of Black Christianity
5) The incompatibility of ideology
and the complexity of lived
experience
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The Everyday Madness and Absurd Quality of the “Race Problem” in
America: Meridian’s Existentialism
Talking Points
1) Meridian’s crisis as exemplary
of man’s “struggle to
overcome the absurd.”
2) Aligning the race problem
with a universal crises of
meaning
3) Meridian’s madness and the
humanly impossible: the
search for justice and the
search for meaning.
4) Non-Violence and Existential
Acceptance
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Differing Ideologies and Overlapping Strivings
Bringing Things to a Cyclical Close
Talking Points
1) The Bible and Bullet and The
Ballot or the Bullet (Malcolm X
and Black Power).
2) Existentialist Acceptance as
the Race Problem
3) The Compatibility of
Incompatible Ideologies and
Racial Uplift
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Signifying
Signifying
p. 60 “One example that demonstrates this clearly, especially if we recall that intertextuality represents a process of repletion and revision, by
definition. A number of shared structural elements are repeated, with differences that suggest familiarity with other texts of the Monkey.” It is as if
a received structure of crucial elements provides a base for poesis, and the narrator’s technique, his or her craft, is to be gauged by the creative
(re)placement of these expected or anticipated formulaic phrases and formulaic events, rendered anew in unexpected ways. Precisely because the
concepts represented in the poem are shared, repeated, familiar to the poet’s audience, meaning is devalued while the signifier is valorized. Value,
in this art of poesis, lies in its foregrounding rather than in the invention of a novel signified. We shall see how the nature of rhyme scheme also
stresses the materiality and the priority of the signifier. Let me add first, however, that all common structural elements are repeated with variations
across the text that, together, comprise the text of the Monkey. In other words, there is no fixed text of these poems, they exist as a play of
differences.” (or as Sussure would have it says, Ryan, as language exists)
pg 85. Mitchell-Kernan’s summary of the defining characteristics of “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art” helps to clarify the most difficult, and
elusive, mode of rhetoric. We can outline these characteristics for convenience. The most important defining features of Signifyin(g) are “inndirect
intent” and “metaphorical reference.” This aspect of indirection is a formal device, and appears to be purely stylistic; moreover, “its art
characteristics remain in the forefront.” Signifyin(g), in other words, turns upon the foregrounding of the Signifier. By “indirection” MitchellKernan means what the correct semantic (referential interpretation) or significance of the utterance cannot be arrive at by a consideration of the
dictionary meaning of the lexical items involved and the syntactic rules for their combination alone. The apparent significance of the message
differs from its real significance. The apparent meaning of the sentence signifies its actual meaning.
The relationship between latent and manifest is a curious one, as determined by the formal properties of the Signifin(g) utterance, In one of several
ways, manifested meaning directs attention away from itself to another, latent level of meaning. We might compare this relationship to that which
obtains between the two parts of metaphor, tenor (the inner meaning) and vehicle (the outer meaning).
Signifin(g), according to Mitchell-Kernan, operates so delightfully because “apparent meaning serves as a key which directs hearers
to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must produced ‘metaphorically,’ The decoding of the figurative,’ she
continues, “depends upon shared knowledge..and this shared knowledge operates on two levels.” One of these two levels is that the speaker and the
audience realize that “the signifying is occurring and that the dictionary-syntactical meaning of the utterance is to be ignored.” In addition, a silent
second text, as it were, which corresponds rightly to what Michell-Kernan is calling “shared knowledge,” must be brought to bear upon the manifest
content of the speech act and employed in the reinterpretation of the utterance. Indeed, this is of the utmost importance in the esthetics of
Signifyin(g), fo it is” the cleverness used in directing the attention of the hearer and the audience to the shared knowledge upon which a speaker’s
artistic talent is judged.” Signifyin(g), in other words, depends upon the success of the signifier at invoking an absent meaning ambiguously
“present” in a carefully wrought statement.
Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.