But the more profound and more personal consequence was the impact Chinua Achebe’s novels had on my own beginnings as a writer. I had read his essay in Transition, on the struggle with definitions of African literature, and knew its ramifications for African American writers. In that essay, Achebe quoted James Baldwin’s comments on the subject of language choice and manipulation in defining national and cultural literatures and its resonance with marginalized writers. “My quarrel,” said Baldwin, “with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience….Perhaps…I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.” But theorizing a definition is one thing. Executing a theory is another. Achebe’s “answer,” so to speak, was in his work. He (along with Camara Laye, Bessie Head, and others) constituted a complete education for me. Learning how to disassemble the gaze that I was wrestling with (the habitual but self-conscious writing toward a nonblack reader that threatened and coated much African American literature); discovering how to eliminate, to manipulate the Eurocentric eye in order to stretch and plumb my own imagination; I attribute these learned lessons to Chinua Achebe. In the pages of Things Fall Apart lay not the argument but the example; in the pages of No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah the assumption of the authenticity, the force, the valleys of beauty were abundant. Achebe’s work liberated my artistic intelligence as nothing else had ever done. I became fit to reenter and reinhabit my own milieu without the services of a native guide.
So in fact that was not a debt in 1965. It was a gift.
Introduction of Peter Sellars
PETER SELLARS WARNED me against any ideas I might be forming about this introduction. He strongly suggested two and only two sentences: “Thank you for coming.” And “Here’s Peter Sellars.”
I defy him at my peril, but I appeal to what Peter might be stunned to learn is “a higher authority.”
I happen to know Peter Sellars’s mother. Have met her several times in several countries. She is, in a word, lovely. And suspecting the difficult joy of rearing sons—whether in Pennsylvania, where Peter was born, or Denver, Colorado, where he directed Beethoven from the podium his father built for him, or Phillips Andover, or Harvard directing Coriolanus, collecting a Phi Beta Kappa key and an invitation to direct at the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb; or studying in Japan, China, and India; or being director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, the American National Theater, the Kennedy Center; or receiving a MacArthur award. I say—suspecting a mother’s difficult joy, I am certain she would take the same pleasure I do in hearing an introduction of one’s son a bit more expansive. So, out of affection for Mrs. Sellars, an English professor, I am going to bow to her authority and I hope her desire and add a few sentences to the two her son seriously recommended to me.
We go to art sometimes for safety, for a haven of order, serenity; for recognizable, even traditional beauty; for anticipation with certainty that the art form will take us past our mundane selves into a deepness where we also reside.
We go, sometimes, to art for danger; to be riveted by experiencing the strange, by understanding suddenly how uncanny the familiar really is. We go to be urged, shaken into reassessing thoughts we have taken for granted; to learn other ways of seeing, hearing. To be excited. Stirred. Disturbed.
Fortunately for us, among contemporary artists, Peter Sellars is rare: he never asks us to make those choices; he does not require us to select the red/green, food/no food buttons of mice in a laboratory, the one of two oppositional kinds of pleasure or power or genius we want. His work has always displayed both safety and danger; both the haven of the recognizable and the unchartered terrain of the disfamiliarized.
His almost pious devotion to the original score, the complete script, the uncommercial length (which pays a public the compliment of assuming its attention span—its memory bank—is longer than that of a housefly). In his fidelity, his respect for the work itself, we find safety, reassurance.
His deeply held conviction that profound art—whatever its date of origin—is always contemporary permits us fresh access to that nostrum when he chips away the encrustations of time and use to expose its truth. Whether it is Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutti; Handel’s Julius Caesar in Egypt; Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins; Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; Wagner’s Ring; Gogol’s Inspector General—whatever. By collapsing these otherwise mutually exclusive approaches to art’s work—fidelity and resuscitation; safety and danger; thorough scholarship with outrageously innovative stagecraft; astonishingly incisive personal interpretation with an almost impertinent trust in actors’ instincts. Because of his ability to embrace both approaches, we are made aware of how irresistible art is. We are made aware of his reverence for its possibilities—to keep us sane or make us so. His absolute love of it. His total faith in it. And in us.
Thank you for coming. Here’s Peter Sellars.
Tribute to Romare Bearden
IN ORDER to get to the crux of my views on the art of Romare Bearden, on the discourse of African American art in general, I have to go back a bit, for my own sake, if not yours, to put my remarks in context.
Extraordinary things were happening in the sixties among African Americans. The realm of political change during that period has received, as it should, minute, even exhaustive attention. Yet in spite of some singular critiques of African American art at the moment of origin and some more expansive ones later on, the exploration of visual art as it relates to other genres in African American culture seems tentative. (I was not able to attend Saturday’s panel on Bearden and other arts and disciplines, so the comments that follow may very well be inoperative.) Where analysis of this cross-genre aspect does exist, it relies on terms like “inspiration,” “similarities,” “spirit,” “vibrancy,” “intensity,” “drama,” “liveliness,” shared cultural values. There are a number of reasons for this rather vague emotional vocabulary: artists are notoriously evasive about their creative process; it takes a certain amount of nerve, if not faith, for a scholar to assert connections, echoes across disciplines if she or he does not feel expert within them; aesthetic ramifications are very difficult to iterate.
More importantly, the early attention of scholars on African American literary and other art was engaged in canon formation—taking its cue from the mainstream’s established format for the ranking of art production. The alternative canon that the new black critics urged had several goals (nationalism, revolutionary success, cultural hegemony), among which was an aesthetic put to the service of a strong political agenda and/or a cohesive cultural flowering. Aesthetics were understood to be a “corrective” to “polluted American mainstream”; a “sister” to the black power movement. Artists were encouraged and judged by the nation-building “uses” to which their work could be put. The groundswell of those who understood this to be the work of their work is legend—as any review of sixties poetry will reveal. And there is no question that matters of “authenticity”—of representing the lived life and concerns of black people—are still the sine qua non of virtually all African American art from rap music to film to novels to visual arts. How successfully, distorted or even triumphantly, this authenticity expresses itself is still much of the drive of criticism.