EYES & EARS
by Danny duncan Collum
WHEN U.S. poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey visited my day job at historically black Kentucky State University, she cleared up a couple of things about the honors and duties of her position. First she noted that, unlike her British counterpart, she does not receive a free cask of wine as part of her payment. But that’s okay, she says, because, unlike laureates of old, she also does not have to compose made-to-order poems to the glory of The State. The State should also be relieved at that, because Trethewey’s poetry, while obsessed with history and written in a plain-spoken and accessible style, also habitually exposes profoundly unsettling truths about us and our past, especially regarding race. From her first book, Domestic Work, focused on the lives of working-class African Americans in the South, to her most recent, Thrall, which deals with images of interracial relationships from the 17th century to the present, Trethewey has focused her keen verbal gifts on
Associated Press
Love, Race, and History
U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey
for our entire campus community, Trethewey related the story her mother told about the blooming of an interracial romance. It was 1965, and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by The Righteous Brothers had just hit the charts. The young women in the Kentucky State College dormitory assumed that the soulful singers on that record must have been black men, and they eagerly gathered in the dorm lobby to see them on a TV variety show. Of course, the college girls were shocked when they saw the singers, but, the story goes, just at the moment that the white Brothers appeared on the screen and started to sing, Gwendolyn saw Eric Trethewey jog past the dormitory window. In the poet’s telling, it was love at first sight. That story led to Trethewey’s reading of the poem “Miscegenation” (from her book Native Guard), which begins, “In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi; / they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.” While the couple and their small child were living with Turnbough’s family in
Trethewey focuses her keen verbal gifts on the most sensitive nerve in American life. the most sensitive nerve in American life. Trethewey comes by these obsessions naturally. She is the daughter of a white man, Eric Trethewey, himself a poet of some renown, and a black woman, Gwendolyn Turnbough, who was murdered when Trethewey was in college. Trethewey was born and grew up as a mixed-race child on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the late 1960s and ’70s. Natasha Trethewey’s parents met as students at what was then Kentucky State College; hence her recent visit. Eric Trethewey had come from rural Canada seeking a track scholarship, not knowing that it was a black college. At her reading
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Gulfport, Miss., Klansmen burned a cross on their yard. Trethewey says they never knew if the cross was a warning to their interracial family or to the church next door, which was registering black voters. This act of terror takes on an eerily mythic aura in her poem “Incident” (also from Native Guard). “At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,” she writes, “a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns. / We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, / the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.” Trethewey’s parentage, and the circumstances of her upbringing, gave her a passion for language and a bone-deep connection to the core of the American story—the ongoing political and cultural tension over the status of the nation’s Africandescended people. Like our current president, her very DNA embodies our deepest national contradiction, which may make her the ideal national laureate for this moment. Maybe not the most comforting one, but the one we need. n Danny Duncan Collum teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He is the author of the novel White Boy. www.sojo.net
EYES & EARS
by Danny duncan Collum
Cultivating a Better America
could be sustained over generations. Our problem, Berry contended, is that in America the boomers, backed by the power of money, have for too long set the agenda and won most of the fights. In 1978, there were signs that the boomers’ path was reaching a dead end. In the prior few years, Americans had glimpsed the finitude of the earth’s resources during the OPE C oi l e mb argo, the limits of economic growth in the accompanying recession, and the limits of American military power through the defeat in Vietnam. In agriculture, we had begun pursuing a chemical-addicted, export-driven strategy of industrial farming that would simultaneously destroy both the land and the communities that depended upon it. In short, the time seemed ripe for reconsidering the national mission statement. In those days, Berry was already a noted poet and fiction writer, but The Unsettling of America made him one of the nation’s most important prophetic voices, too. As we all know now, America did not heed
According to Wendell Berry, all you need to have hope is one good example. America. The interview with Moyers was part of the conference program. Drastically oversimplified, the thesis of The Unsettling of America held that two types of Europeans came to America. Elsewhere, citing his teacher Wallace Stegner, Berry has called them the “boomers” and the “stickers.” The boomers were the unsettlers. They moved into the New World, cut down the trees, extracted the minerals, used up the land, and then moved on in search of new places to despoil. The stickers, however, settled into a place and made it their own. They cooperated with the land and the local resources to make a life and a livelihood that
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the voice crying out from Port Royal, Ky. Instead, we bought a recycled fantasy of American exceptionalism from a retired movie star and proceeded to waste the next three decades trying to recapture a glory that never was. As a result, we now face a truly apocalyptic climate crisis, and our food system has given us a popuWendell Berry lation so unhealthy and obese that, in the lower economic classes, average life expectancy is actually beginning to decline. All this and more was on the minds of the people who came to St. Catharine to hear Bill McKibben, Wes Jackson, and others join Berry in searching for a way back to the future. One direction, promoted by both Berry and Jackson, was for “A 50-Year Farm Bill” that would return vast acreages of U.S. cropland to grass and refocus American agriculture on diversified food production that would require millions of new farmers. A pretty dream, one might say, but, as Berry told Moyers that day, all you need to have hope is one good example. Fittingly the conference ended with Berry’s reading of his poem, “A Vision,” which concludes:
Ryan Rodrick Beiler
WENDELL BERRY was on stage being interviewed by Bill Moyers when the old Baptist minister (Moyers) asked the unchurched Christian (Berry) about his faith. “The world is maintained every day by the force that created it,” Berry intoned solemnly. In the Old Testament, he noted, “Elihu says to Job, if God gathers his breath, all creatures fail. All creatures live,” Berry emphasized, “by breathing God’s breath, breathing his spirit. It’s all holy—the whole shooting match.” At 78, Wendell Berry shows no sign of failing, either in his breath or his spirit. But the Kentucky writeractivist-farmer is already enjoying a sort of immortality as the namesake of a degree program in ecological agrarianism at St. Catharine College. In April, that small Catholic institution in Springfield, Ky., hosted a conference titled “From Unsettling to Resettling: What Will It Take to Resettle America?” in honor of the 35th anniversary of Berry’s landmark book, The Unsettling of
... The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling / light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility. n Danny Duncan Collum teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. He is the author of the novel White Boy. www.sojo.net
EYES & EARS
by Danny duncan Collum
Too Happy? IN THE PAST 150 years, the songs historically known as “Negro spirituals” have worn many costumes. They emerged, of course, from the Deep South during the days of slavery, when songs such as “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” or “Wade in the Water” were first sung by anonymous psalmists wielding hoes or pulling cotton sacks. Since that time they’ve been dressed in the style of the European art song, sung as grand opera, or even faithfully mimicked by well-meaning white folk singers. The spirituals entered the mainstream of American culture through the performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Fisk University in Nashville who, fresh out of slavery themselves, toured the North in the 1870s. In the 1950s and ’60s, the old standards were resurrected, and slightly rewritten, as marching songs for the African-American freedom movement and then echoed across the world as anthems for
Singer Bobby McFerrin
as theme music by the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign. McFerrin’s been doing penance ever since. He really is a talented guy with a wide-ranging and versatile voice and an old-time scat singer’s gift for improvisation. But he wasn’t faking the feel-good optimism of his signature song. That unrelentingly positive spirit of “Don’t Worry” floats through everything he sings and, to my ears, sets up some serious cognitive dissonance with the spirituals. The spirituals are tragedy. That’s what makes them great art. They unblinkingly confront the abyss of suffering that is the universal human fate. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” It doesn’t get any starker than that. The horror in the songs comes from digging deep into the very specific pain of the slave experience, in which separation of mother and child, for instance, was an everyday thing. And that depth is what makes the music’s appeal universal and cathartic. Of course, the spirituals are Christian art, so tragedy can’t have the last word. The genre can really be summed up with two lines from a song: “Nobody knows the
Bobby McFerrin’s “don’t worry” optimism sets up some serious cognitive dissonance with the spirituals. human rights from South Africa to Northern Ireland to Eastern Europe. After all that, the spirituals can probably even survive being remade into “smooth jazz,” which is more or less what happens to them on Bobby McFerrin’s new album Spirityouall. Readers of a certain age might remember McFerrin as the guy who, in 1988, conquered the known pop music universe with an airheaded ditty called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The tune was so infectious that it should have had a warning label from the Centers for Disease Control, but instead it dominated radio, won some Grammys, and, to McFerrin’s eternal horror, was used
42 sojourners august 2013
trouble I’ve seen, glory hallelujah ... Nobody knows but Jesus.” It’s precisely because the singer is so submerged in the pain of crucifixion, and able to join that pain to the suffering of Christ, that the music can make a convincing case for the resurrection. That “affirmation in the negative” is what makes the spirituals great theology. You could almost call them a body of apologetics with a backbeat. To his credit, McFerrin seems to realize that he may not have the chops to carry the full weight of the tradition, and he does avoid the bleakest songs, like “Motherless Child” and “Nobody Knows.” But even on his “Wade,” the waters are remarkably untroubled. One of McFerrin’s own compositions on the album, “25:15,” a gutbucket take on Psalm 25:15, actually gets closer to the ethos and aesthetic of the spirituals than do his renditions of the traditional songs. However, all quibbles aside, McFerrin at least deserves our gratitude for giving new audiences a chance to hear and think about this great tradition. n Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. www.sojo.net