Violence and American Male Life Histories

VIOLENCE

AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES

Our constructions of “reality” convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as “natural” as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation. The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men. We are socialized in the United States to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies. This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit .

We can imagine relatively violence-free male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so. The American majority has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire and the lurid patterns of blood leaking like water. News sources nurture our penchant for violence daily , supported by non-racial ideas pertaining to “social death”; cleansed of race, ethnic, and gender qualifications, Abdul R. JanMohamed’s theory of “the death-bound subject” explains the practices of American thought and life as capital we can’t quantify. That is to say, that of course violence can be measured in terms of number of casualties and estimated value of property loss. We do not have , I suspect, reliable instruments and methodologies to measure psychological damage for an entire national population. We merely dream the 21st century will donate them to us.

We need not have excessive anxiety because mankind has practiced violence for many centuries. Reserve anxiety for the fact that mankind has so long valorized the three Vs: violence, violation, and victimization. Nor need we bother to deconstruct the fact; the fact deconstructs itself. The Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics and Greek tragedies, Chinese and Indian stories religious and secular, African oral literatures, European drama and narratives ----the bulk of world literature has glorified and transmitted the necessity of violence. Blame is inherent in human histories.

A body of literature which epitomizes humanity, African American male life histories ----narratives of the enslaved, the post-1865 true stories, autobiographies and memoirs

of the 20th and 21st centuries --enable our acts of reading to sweat. Such recent books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Kevin Powell’s The Education of Kevin Powell, and Gregory Pardlo’s Air Traffic satisfy our prejudiced expectations with what Pardlo calls “a transformative moment, a moment in which we experience not just the characters or speaker in the poem, but the poet herself in crisis……If nothing is risked, if nothing is offered in sacrifice, then there is nothing to draw poet and reader together” (211). The narratives are transforming magnets, and they draw us to the invisible mirror wherein we male readers behold the violence that shapes our faces as well as our fates

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

pg. 92

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Volume 5.9 March 27, 2019