Ryan Coogler, C. Liegh McInnis, and Black Convergences

In the rich tradition of taking our loved ones home, C. Liegh McInnis often feels compelled to reflect on a range of topics when a notable Black figure passes. He’s not satisfied to simply inform readers of his newsletter that so-and-so died and lived a good life. No, he has to show you how this comedian, literary artist, or especially this or that musician emerged from a long line of other figures, and how they, in turn, influenced a whole group of subsequent artists or entertainers.  

It’s the eulogy as Black history lesson. And more than that, it’s a convergence of concepts, people, and ideas. Down at the crossroads over here is where all these things meet, he seems to say, again and again. 

McInnis is from Clarksdale, so naturally I thought of him while watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The key moment for me is the scene where a blues musician begins to play, and suddenly, the entire history of Black music, past and present, floods the screen. African music and dance. Jazz. Funk. Hip hop. It’s, well, it's a convergence of concepts. 

As I was blogging recently, that Coogler scene had me thinking about Amiri Baraka and his writings on Black music. Coogler managed to do, cinematically, what Baraka, McInnis, and others have long been doing on the page. Blending. Mixing and matching.

Back in 2022, McInnis sent out this post, which was mostly about three comedians. But to make the point about influences and comparisons, he needed to check to discussing Prince and Jimi Hendrix and then Deion Sanders (as a player) and Jim Brown and Gayle Sayers and Walter Payton. Then it was back to more comedians, then over to music and eventually to some literature. 

What he was doing was displaying what I've been calling cultural cataloging. But doing that also represents convergences. 

In film, Coogler doesn't have to list things out, he can show and project sounds, so the experience is different.

Anyway, this is just more of me trying to wrap my mind around that scene in the film and also making sure I chart how it connects to some of my ongoing conversations here. 

 

Related

• A Notebook on the Work of C. Liegh McInnis

Ryan Coogler, Amiri Baraka, and Black Music

More than two decades ago, when I first began reading Amiri Baraka seriously, I was fascinated by the way he spoke about "Black music," often refusing to separate blues, jazz, spirituals, gospel, R&B, and more. To him, it was simply Black music, or the music.

I thought of Baraka while watching Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners. In one scene, a young blues musician plays at a jook joint, and layered over the performance are echoes of musical histories reaching back to Africa and forward through hip hop. The moment lasts just a few minutes, but we’re treated to a spectrum of Black sound and dancing. The suggestion is clear: these styles and histories all flow to and from the blues.

What Coogler put on screen, Baraka had already put on the page. So it’s no surprise that when Coogler wrote a letter naming his influences, Baraka was one of the people he acknowledged.

Related:

• A Notebook on Amiri Baraka

• Ryan Coogler, C. Liegh McInnis, and Black Convergences

Amiri Baraka, Eugene B. Redmond, and the Art of Cultural Cataloging

Eugene B. Redmond, Amiri Baraka, October 23, 2005

On October 23, 2005, I was at Eugene B. Redmond's home with him and Amiri Baraka. Redmond had a reception at his place for Baraka, and late into the night, after everyone else had left, the three of us remained talking. 

Well, my input was minimal. I was mostly listening and learning. 

Redmond and Baraka were going back and forth about a million and one thises and thats. Then Baraka spotted a photograph that Redmond had on his wall. 

"Who's that?" Baraka wanted to know. 

"Who do you think?" Redmond said. 

Baraka looked at the image, and said "Hmmm, he's relative of Miles." 

Redmond snapped his finger and pointed at Baraka, as if to say, that's it; you got it. The photograph was indeed one of Miles Davis's relatives.

That photograph launched Redmond and Baraka into a couple hours conversation. We were just standing in that one place in front of the image discussing jazz, Black music, Black musicians, albums, the friends and relatively of the musicians, places where Baraka and Redmond had listened to music,  cities they traveled to to listen, people who died, and various things that happened.

By the way, those two never used the words "jazz," "Black music," or "Black musicians." Why would that need to within the context of their conversation? So much was understood. 

Throughout the conversation, one of them would momentarily forget a name and then ask the other one. Baraka would go, "who's the one who [did this or that]?" Redmond would respond by listing names, and when he got the right person, Baraka would snap and point his finger, signaling: that's it; you got it. 

Then later, Redmond would ask a similar question trying to remember someone. Baraka would list names, eventually landing on one, and Redmond would snap, point his finger: that's it; you got it. 

Every now and then, Redmond would turn to me and ask about an obscure writer associated with the 1960s and 1970s, as I was deep into my research on what would become my first book, which focused on the Black Arts Movement. Somehow, I managed to fill in the blanks for everyone Redmond alluded to. 

A few years back, I started developing a term for this idea of Black writers making dozens of references to people, places, and historical events in a single setting. I called it concentrated cultural cataloging, or simply cultural cataloging. 

Looking back on that October 2005 conversation between Redmond and Baraka, they were providing me with an early extraordinary blueprint for what I had in mind. These two Black men -- Baraka, who had recently turned 71 and Redmond, who was 68 -- were producing this fantastic cultural catalog right before my eyes. 

 

They weren't just listing names for the sake of listing. No, every person or group of people mentioned were characters in a large, wide-ranging story or series of stories. 

Aspects of the discussion was an act of remembering. They were telling each other stories so he (the teller) would remember. It was like they needed to say things out loud that they had been thinking about just so it would be real for them in a way. When Baraka would tell a story about a person, it reminded Redmond about that person and one other person, who he'd then speak on. Next, Baraka would pick up from there and mention a few other people. 

What's fascinating is that the conversation was probably not a big deal for Baraka and Redmond. That is, they likely had those type exchanges with each other and others all the time. But it was a memorable moment for me. I had followed Baraka for years, but I had never had this level of access to him as he was talking freely about music.

Let's be clear, we're talking about Baraka, arguably our most important poets, who's at the same time one of our top cultural critics of all time. Oh, and he's the author of possibly one of the foundational texts in ethnomusicology. And he's just here talking extensively about the music and musicians.

And then there's Redmond. Poet, editor, photographer, and author of our greatest single history of Black poetry. 

 

That conversation was a living archive -- a deeply, layered memory in-motion cultural catalog. 

Related:

• A Notebook on the work of Amiri Baraka

Jazz St. Louis

I've been a jazz fan for many years, and I occasionally attended concerts. I sometimes even went to shows at Jazz St. Louis. 

It's only been the last couple of years, though, when I've been a regular. One of the greatest recent shows I've seen in the place was saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin. She was outstanding, as I noted here.

But I've caught all kinds of good shows there over the years. 

Related:

• Writing St. Louis

Margalit Fox's Black Poet Obituaries for the New York Times

By the time she retired from The New York Times in 2018, Margalit Fox wrote more than 1,400 news obituaries. Not all of her obits had been published, as the newspaper often writes the pieces years before many of its subjects die. 

Among her many compositions, Fox wrote obituaries for prominent Black poets, including Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Jayne Cortez. Fox's obituaries for those figures were among the most thorough treatments amid several tributes that flowed forth after they died. 

That's not surprising because Fox had so much experience writing "advances" as the obit news department calls their writings about people they refer to as "pre-dead." Fox didn't need to come out of in 2019 when Toni Morrison died to memorialize the renowned novelist. Editors just needed to add the date of death to the advance that Fox had produced in previous years. 

The Times covered Angelou and Baraka for decades prior to their deaths. The obituaries on Clifton, Cortez, and Ai, though, are perhaps the most extensive pieces on those poets to appear in the paper. 

Fox’s writing assisted in ensuring that Black poets received important tributes. Her work stands as a reminder for how obituary writing can serve as both literary criticism and historical record.

Blogging about Poetry in March

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• March 13: The Fierce Verbal Artistry of Stacey Patton

• March 1: Blogging about Poetry in February

The Fierce Verbal Artistry of Stacey Patton

Online, racist trolls frequently out themselves as anti-Christian by revealing their refusal to heed a sacred  Biblical commandment: "Thou should never, ever, under any circumstance engage in a verbal battle with one Stacey Patton." 

Remember when Michelle Obama said, "when they go low, we go high"? Well, what you didn't know is that Patton misheard and thought that Obama said, "when they go low, you go and get a bulldozer and dig deeper than the hole they're in, and then bury them with the dirt." 

Whatever the case, the trolls will periodically send racist messages to Patton on Facebook or Twitter and then...on those days she has the time, well, then the hilarious, creative, deeply historical, fantastical, piercing, ferocious verbal onslaught that flows forth from her is a work of art and buckshot.   

 

Exhibit #435
This racist once sent Patton a message saying she should write about Black women loving to kill their unborn children. What a terrible thing to say. Ok. Then, Patton responded, revealing her supreme abilities absorbing history, crafting narratives, critiquing racists, and playing the dozens.

 
First, she opened by noting "I've got a good story for you, you sunken-eyed, meth-faced, possum-fondling degenerate. Sit yo’ dented, crusty ass down" and listen. Next, she proceeded to offer three brief stories from the 1830s about the "great-great granddaddy" of the racist. In story one, Obadiah, as he was named in Patton's tale, raped an enslaved Black woman, who resisted by aborting the child, which meant for the modern-day racist, "your bloodline--THWARTED."

Next, in the second "chapter" from 1831, Patton presents a tale of a woman who leans into self-immolation rather than have a child by Obadiah.

Finally, in Chapter 3, "The Last Mistake," a child is born from Obadiah's raping ways. The mother considers that the child must die: "A quiet exit for a baby who would have grown up twisted by the hate of his white kin, filled with the festering, rotting disease of supremacy." But the baby lives. The child "survived, against all odds and lived to birth a whole line of disappointment and decay. And that’s how YOU got here today—a genetic poo stain smeared across history’s boot."

The racist troll, we learn, is "a roach that skittered past the stomp of justice."

What's the Origin Story for Patton's verbal skills?I was reading that piece and thinking about some of Patton's other comical, biting responses. I wonder if there's a way to situate her within histories of literary art. Maybe Black poetry? The phrasings, the creativity, the wordplay. Ok, yes, yes. But only Amiri Baraka put so many direct searing, comical insults on the page.

Much love to all the poets I've read, but overall, the field cares more about belles-lettres than the verbal fire flaming from Patton.

How about novels, certainly we can place Patton in the history of neo-slave narratives? That's what her story about those enslaved women was. Yes, it has the historical setting of a neo-slave narrative. It's inventive in the way of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016), and many other works within that realm. But Patton stretches out with the audience and delivery in ways that the novel ain't at for real.

Patton is no doubt over there in the world of the dozens, but her storytelling resides out there in ways that the back-and-forth of dozens don't. She also reconfigures hers to really go historical and then jump contemporary to critique a racist troll.

All of this is to say, I have more work to do to really fully situate Patton's work and workings.

Taking note of the Black Artists of Oklahoma Project

Oklahoma artist Shyanne Dickey's Tried and True

During a recent, short visit to the University of Oklahoma, I got a chance to meet with Kalenda Eaton, Olivia von Gries, and Robert Bailey, a few collaborators on the Black Artists of Oklahoma Project.

As Gries and Bailey explain in an article, the project is "a multiplatform collaborative effort based in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma (OU) that celebrates the history of African American and other African diaspora art in Oklahoma through research, exhibitions, publications, and related programming."

I was pleased and inspired by learning more about the project. As a literature scholar, I have primarily thought about Oklahoma in relation to the birthplace of the great Ralph Ellison. This arts project prompted me to turn my attention to visual artists from the state. 

The approach and ideas behind the project are inspiring and something to replicate in other places.  

Their project promotes what they call "art-historical infrastructure," which constitutes "systems that sustain things that communities of future scholars and teachers need." For their project that means developing a directory of artists, images, and exhibitions. It also entails producing publications and conducting interviews and oral history and preparing materials for K - 12 educators focusing on the artists. 

You can see how this notion of art-historical infrastructure can and should be applied to various arts projects across the country. Imagine a Black Artists of [Insert your city or state or region]. So many possibilities. For now, I'm excited to see the ongoing and next steps of Black Artists of Oklahoma.