Sarah Fabio lecture on contemporary black verse at the University of Iowa, May 4, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the university presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the university's course, Afro-American Literature. The lecture for this week is Sarah Fabio, from the University of California at Berkeley, speaking on contemporary Black verse. Sarah Fabio: Instead of starting with Afro-American poetry today, today I'll start with modern African poetry, Adventures Toward Rediscovery. And of course, African-American poetry will have some parallels in development and certainly, in many ways, will probably be the basis on which some modern African poetry is built. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at Black language because, of course, poetry is experience compressed and translated through language. Sarah Fabio: Let me start off this Adventures Toward Rediscovery in Modern African Poetry with a poem from Rediscovery by Kofi Annan. "The weaver bird built in our house and laid its eggs on our only tree. We did not want to send it away. We watched the building of the nest and supervised the egg laying. And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner preaching salvation to us that owned the house. They say it came from the West, where the storms at sea had felled the gulls and the fishers dried their nets by lantern light. Its sermon is the divination of our selves and our new horizons limit at its nest, but we cannot join the prayers and answers of communicants. We look for new houses every day, for new altars to strive to rebuild the old shrines defiled from the weaver's excrement." Sarah Fabio: Rediscovery and structuring of a personal and national synthesis, social, spiritual, aesthetic, as well as economical and political, is the awesome but welcome task of the modern African poet. He is the concerned, engaged artist. He is the whole man, the man of contemplation, reflection, action, and he lends his talents and energies willingly and wholeheartedly to the task of Black nation building. His age is one in constant search for indigenous weaver birds, ones who will not defile the old shrines and mistake themselves for the owners of the house. The weaver bird begins in a carefully structured traditional, if irregular way, essentially as a fourth stress line. The myth is uttered almost as an incantation, or exhortation, almost without a breath pause. The end is labored, but measured, and the tempo broken with pauses. Sarah Fabio: At the literal level this poem is about a bird with over 200 species in Africa. Also found in tropical Asia, Philippines, and Australia. One of the best known species is yellow. Some are coral red. The name refers to the elaborate structuring of the nests; pouches elongated into tubes entered from below or kidney shaped and entered from the side. They're often suspended from the extremities of branches, preferably those near water as a safe guard against enemies. Sarah Fabio: The social weaver bird of South Africa construct communities of as many as 300 bird homes beneath an umbrella shaped roof. It works at this level with the midsection of the poem being the result of personification. The bird is given voice and motive. The two levels of awareness that is readily observed here is not foreign to Africans who mask their lore under animal guise. The spatter [inaudible] is the every man. Rendered orally, I feel that this poem for preliterate and literate Africans on both levels of awareness. Sarah Fabio: Symbolism is not a new phenomenon in the traditional African culture. As written literature, the poem becomes inaccessible to all but those Africans who have been educated in the English speaking schools. And unless translated into native tongues all communication is ineffective in areas where English is not the official language, of course. Literacy becomes a cleaver, separating oral and written traditions of literature. Western civilization so often looked upon as a weaver is but another cleaver between rural and urban, the haves and have nots, the English speaking, and the non English speaking. Sarah Fabio: At this time decolonization and civil strife, choice of a single native language becomes a divisive topic. Therefore, English has been chosen as the official language of commerce. One of the speakers at a symposium on the emergency of African literature held at the University of California in May of 1969. John Povey reminds us that, "Language is the vehicle by which you make your deal." I'll quote that again, by John Povey, who is at UCLA, said, "Language is the vehicle by which you make your deal." And that it is practical and logical for the language, which is woven within the fabric of educational and political life to be the official one. And from the viewpoint of an Africanist, and by "Africanist" I mean someone usually outside the culture who speaks for those within the culture and through misguided paternalism, very often, these are not Black Africans. Sarah Fabio: This might appear to be a glib truism, but for the Nigerian it is the cold reality, as an interim necessity, during early stages of decolonization. The advisability of being saddled with the Western white value oriented language as a vehicle for liberated non-white self expression is constantly being questioned. Later, we will view some of the advantages and disadvantages of this. Sarah Fabio: In addition to discussing modern African poets, their task and influence, in this paper, we will examine traditional functions of poetry in African society. Negritude and revolutionary poetry and Africanisms in modern poetry. Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanaian poet, spoke on the subject of, "traditional literature in Africa," reminding the audience of the flexibility of the lore, which becomes a different thing in the retelling as the personalities of not only the teller but the told entered into the organic whole of the work of literature are any other art form. He emphasizes that in the re-carving of a piece of sculpture or the retelling of a story or re-writing of a song or poem the possibilities of rejuvenation of the god within increases. This is probably why I say much of the music is improvisational. Whether it's done by an African brother or one here in the country. Because each time a man takes a melody and takes it unto himself to impress this melody with his own sense of personality then he has invoked the god within himself in that retelling and redoing. Sarah Fabio: Awoonor sees the battle for synthesis still raging within Africa. Three distinct cultural trends must co-exist. That of the traditional, a family clan, tribe, nation, and that of the Islamic origin as a result of Arab penetration, which attempted not to disrupt the existing culture, but to offer a compromise, which could be readily absorbed and internalized by the existing culture. And the Euro-Christian, which he sees as a convenient distraction of colonization. The Christian missionaries brought their doctrine of monotheism of God and interfered with the myths, the customs, and violated the old taboos. Ultimately this religion became the harbinger of exploitation. Sarah Fabio: Poetry had an important place in traditional ritual and culture. A work was often created extemporaneously whereby the sense came as a result of words and feelings through the music of the words set to the tempo of drums, which were used to emphasize words to assist in communication. Dirges, songs of longing for homeland, songs of grief, songs of occupational groups, that is such as fisherman singing songs of the bad seas, ancient warrior poetry recited to instill a sense of defiance, bravery, spirit of daring in soldiers and the young of the land. Poetry of abuse between family members, you know, we call that playing the dozens here. Ranking people. Abuse between family members, clans, villages, chronicled accumulated insults were recited and sung before mutual judges. This could become humorous or violent, according to the presentation and accompaniment followed in drums and other instruments the tones of the words. Sarah Fabio: Modern poetry, especially that of the English speaking poets, follow closely this traditional function. Their poetry, according to [Audrey McQuart] is concerned with tradition, customs, beliefs, feelings of uneasiness and despair with outside institutions, often it ridicules an impossible situation. Oftentimes it's concerned not with the human predicament, but with value conflicts which follow in the wake of the initial stages of decolonization. Sarah Fabio: Black poetry from Africa, which is called modern, had its beginning over a decade ago around 1958. It begins in Black consciousness, bitter memories, burning issues gnawing at Black consciousness. It's a poetry of defiance, a call to arms. Kofi Awoonor sees the poet as a weaver of symbols through word images, which strengthen cultural ties and help a society to glean meaning from the rituals of life. He would have people in nations self actualizing forces. A philosophic stance, which works for him, is the perceiving of life itself as a wilderness. The only safe place is in the middle of it. It is not safe on the edge of life. Sarah Fabio: After death, a person's spirit is stronger, more powerful. A home is the abode of the spirits of ancestors. And here they are free to help their offspring or descendants. This note is expressed in his song of sorrow, but it is not for him to be safe. "I am on the world's extreme corner. I am not sitting in the row with the eminent, but those who are lucky sit in the middle and forget. I am on the world's extreme corner. I can only go beyond and forget." Sarah Fabio: Awoonor's Rediscovery is a very sophisticated general poem that is not noisy with its negritude and militancy. Yet is no less African by this. The images are African in particular and yet the message is a universal one. All of the first four lines speak of lively action, but the telling is in the motion away rather than towards action. Beginning with the fifth line, "still" is a word, a sensory perception, a telling symbol. It's repeated three times before the final unrhymed couplet. "It is the new chorus of our forgotten comrades, and the hallelujahs of our second selves." Sarah Fabio: The notion of second selves is a common one in Africa. And we shall see this theme repeated in several poems. Life may be in addition to a wilderness a marketplace. Awoonor speaks of life beginning right around the corner from the marketplace. And ending at the far corner on the other side. All of life's contracts take place at the marketplace, which is of course a center of hustle and bustle and strife and all of the kinds of motions that one would go through. Sarah Fabio: Two other poets, Nigerians used the theme of the second selves here referred to as abiku. This is a Yoruba word, meaning spirit children dying young only to be reborn in the same mother. One is marked as an abiku and recognized the next time will force the spirit child to leave out his existence. John Pepper Clark uses the second person in his abiku. "No longer then bestride the threshold, but step in and stay for good." Details which aide the reader in believing the poet's revelation are the detailed markings which are believed to be relics of the first coming, such as notched ears and other scars. The speaker realistically notes physical details, such as a leaky thatch and bats and owls in the eaves and bamboo walls, which are ready tender. The tone of voice for the poet, although imperative, is well modulated and not noisily poetic or too heavily symbolic. But is imagistically realized. Sarah Fabio: In Wole Soyinka's abiku there is a direct confrontation which begs no quarters written in the first person. The third and fourth lines are, "I am abiku, calling for the first and the repeated time." Soyinka's poem is filled with indigenous nature images and ritualistic folk images; shell burning snails, goats for sacrifice, cowries, palm oil, sprinkled ash and yams. But often these have a metaphysical quality in their presentation. For instance, "I am the squirrel teeth cracked, the riddle of the palm." Here abiku symbolizes the individualist who begs to be recognized, although understanding that organized society loves order and uniformity. And that individuals are looked upon as plagues who are in needs of the restraints of conformity. Sarah Fabio: Certainly Soyinka can empathize with abiku as can other revolutionary nationalistic writers in Nigeria and on the African continent. Soyinka has been jailed more than once by successive governments, primarily for his drama which does not shy away from the task of the writer as social critic. He protests corrupt politics in Black and white alike and a religion which alienates man from himself and from his own. I'm very happy to say that recently Soyinka has been released from prison and is a free agent again. Or relatively free. Let's say he's at least available. I hear that he's in Washington, probably at Howard University for a conference this weekend on Afro-American and African culture. Sarah Fabio: In John Pepper Clark's "Streamside exchange" a child questions the return of the mother only to be answered thusly by the bird. "You cannot know and should not bother. Tide and market come and go. And so shall your mother." Certainly market carries a much more heavy weight here than generally supposed. And the short poem Ibadan there's almost a haiku-like imagistic rendering. "Ibadan, running splash of rust and gold flung and scattered among seven heals like broken china in the sun." Sarah Fabio: Who, then, are some of the major west African poets? Kofi Awoonor, George Awoonor Williams, born in 1935 in Ghana, completed education at the University of Ghana, graduating in English language and literature. He's taught at the university's Institute of African Studies, specializing in vernacular poetry. He's also the editor of a Ghanaian literary journal and is a film maker. He's currently in America as a guest faculty member in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He also studied at the University of London. Sarah Fabio: Wole Soyinka, born in 1934, western Nigeria, educated at University College, Ibadan and Leeds University England. He was graduated in English language and literature in 1958. He's a versatile artist, he sings, acts, is a playwright and has done prose writings, including a novel. Sarah Fabio: John Pepper Clark, born 1935, Nigeria, educated at Ibadan University studying English literature, researched certain legends under the Institute of African Studies, he's the lecturer in African literature at the University of Lagos. In Ibadan, he founded a popular poetry magazine, "The Harn." Since 1960 he's worked as journalist in Ibadan and Lagos. He studied at Princeton on a fellowship. Has published a play, "Song of a Goat." Sarah Fabio: Then there's Frank Parks, born 1932, in Ghana. A poet who lives both in the home of his birth and his father's home, Sierra Leone. He's worked as a clerk, newspaper reported, editor, radio producer. He now lives in London. Sarah Fabio: Gabriel Okara, born 1921, Nigerian. He received a secondary education in Government College in Nigeria. Since then, he has self developed through private reading and thinking. He's now an information officer in the Eastern Nigeria Government Service. He's written short stories and a novel, "The Voice," in 1964. This book reveals his deep concern with the problem of the development of an English language capable of fully expressing the African's view of life. Sarah Fabio: Bernard Dadié, born 1916 on the Ivory Coast. He has received his education in the Ivory Coast and from the William Ponty College at Gorée. During his employment for 12 years at a museum he became interested in African folklore and traditions. He returned from Dakar Senegal to the Ivory Coast in 1947. Since then, he's active in dramatic and literary activities. He's published two novels. A collection of African legends, folktales, and a volume of poetry. Sarah Fabio: The last two poets are milestones in African poetry. They're both from Senegal. David Diop, leader of young revolutionary poets, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet president of Senegal, reputed to be the father of the much disputed school and philosophy and politic called "Negritude." David Diop was born in Bordeaux, France. His father was a doctor. And he was an invalid most of his short life. Born in 1927, he died in an air crash near Dakar in 1960. Présence Africaine published a collection of his work titled, "Poundings." Taiwo in his book, "An Introduction to West African Literature," says of Diop in a chapter on the poetry of revolution, "We know for certain that he was bitterly opposed to Europe and all it stood for. He was opposed to colonialism, the idea of white supremacy, and to the humiliation that is the inevitable lot of colonial peoples. He thought it was unfortunate that Europeans ever came to Africa, and that no good had resulted from the content. Unlike Senghor, he believed Africans had nothing to thank Europeans for. Africa's contact with Europe had brought nothing but great calamity and it was necessary for all Africans, especially African writers, to say so in unmistakable terms." Sarah Fabio: Now, Léopold Senghor, born 1906 in Senegal, educated in Senegal and Paris, was the first west African to graduate from the Sorbonne in Paris. He was a leading spokesman for Negritude and an expert on African culture. In 1960, he became the first president of independent Senegal. Taiwo compares the views of Diop and Senghor on Negritude's fathers. Diop agrees with Senghor that the philosophy of Negritude is two sided. There's the Negritude concerning origins, which deals with the recovery of lost culture. And there is Negritude used as a method of liberation. Diop deals with both aspects as should now be obvious from the consideration of a few of his works. He's primarily concerned with the latter. Diop believed that political independence should come first. Then the African state could strive to achieve an economic and cultural revival. It is only possible to give the people their cultural heritage if they can exercise political freedom of action. Sarah Fabio: Now this concept of Negritude was established between 1933 and '35. In 1934, it appeared as a word in the Negro Student, a newspaper for Negro students in Paris. Césaire is said to have coined the word while Senghor championed the philosophy. Senghor spoke of awakening the national conscious, but also the independence of peoples and continents in the 20th century. Présence Africaine in 1947, described it thusly, according to Taiwo "Negritude was not meant to be a racialist philosophy, but an anti racist racism." New Speaker: Ezekiel Mphahlele, in his remarks on Negritude read at the Conference on African Literature in French, and the university curriculum faculties des lettres, University of Descartes, March 1963, said, "Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of Negritude as both a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values? I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person. And proud of it. Because it is often a healthy state of mind. Sheer romanticism that fails to see the large landscape of African, makes bad poetry. I say, then, that Negritude can go on as a socio political slogan, but that it has no right to set itself up as a standard of literary performance. There I refuse to go along. I refuse to be put in a Negro file for sociologist to come and examine me. Art unifies even while it distinguishes men." Sarah Fabio: Now what Mphahlele seems to be disagreeing with is the notion that a work of art must be committed to the cause of African liberation both political and social and judge not on intrinsic value, but on its contribution toward the restoration of African dignity. Yet, in speaking of culture he says that culture is not a performance for the wealthy to watch, "culture is part of the very process of living, of a stream of consciousness in which a whole community takes part." A poem should be, it seems to me, of the community. And should relate to the people in their reality in order to be a valid work of art by African standards. Not by, of course, Western standards of aesthetic and art. Sarah Fabio: In a poem called, "Black Women," by Senghor, which is of the school of Negritude. He likens a Black woman's color to life, her form to beauty. She's naked as he comes upon her at noon. She is sensual, gazelle limbed, a savanna of pure horizons, a sculptured tom-tom, which probably alludes to the buttocks. In the end he sings her passing beauty before fate reduces her to ashes to, "nourish the roots of life." In the Chaka poem, again, he praises the beauty of Noliwe, a Black woman. In the end, he must kill her for his great love. He excuses himself with the saying, the weakness of the heart is holy, and he assures his reader, "I would not have killed her if I had loved her less." He pleads he had to escape from doubt, from "love of Noliwe from the love of my Black skinned people." Sarah Fabio: Today, this would be called a cop out. Then it would be regarded as a matter of fashion, this intellectualizing action, but because of the simulationist nature of the French culture, French west Africans are exposed to more of the outside concerns, which affect Africa. However, I think history will bear out the fact that either these west Africans were naïve or of a more accommodationist bent. Or were more crafty and knew the dictates of political expediency and followed these. Chaka speaks of this predicament, "I became a mind, an un-trembling arm, neither a warrior nor a butcher. As you said, a politician. The poet I killed, a man of emotion alone. A man alone, dead already before the others. Those you pity. Who will understand my passion?" Sarah Fabio: It is appropriate that she should be answered by a white voice who says, "An intelligent man whose memory has remarkable lapses." The role of the pioneer poet was defined differently according to [inaudible] in West African verse. Pioneers felt they were sages. Their role was to continue the tradition of the vernacular literature, which entertained and advised, corrected, helped form proper social attitudes for the good of society. They were involved in gaining recognition for the Black man and achieving the political independence of their countries from colonial rule, and informing the minds of their countrymen for a new Africa. Sarah Fabio: Dadié extols the beauty of Blackness, even in a poem such as, "In Your Eyes." It's a Black child's transparent eyes that holds all the eyes of the universe while, "in your babble I hear vibrations. In the slapping of cherub hands, tombed tom-toms." There's the sound of Marcus Garvey in, "I Give You Thanks, My God." "I give you thanks, my god, for having created me black. I am happy with the shape of my head. Satisfied with the shape of my nose. Happy with the form of my legs." And near the end of the poem he exclaims, "White is a color improvised for an occasion. Black, the color of all days. And I carry the world, since the first night." Sarah Fabio: David Diop echoes the mean days, "Hope was preserved in us as a fortress." It is, "In those days when civilization kicked us in the face when holy water slapped our cringing brows, the vultures built in the shadow of their talons the blood stained monument of tutelage." This was from The Vultures. He taunts the brother for flashing teeth, those who are "screaming and whispering and pleading in the parlors of condescension." And who are blushing with faces bleached by years of humiliation and bad conscious. These features form a portrait of the renegade. Sarah Fabio: Frank Parks' voice is that of experience in his Three Phases of Africa. Every valley shall be exalted, "every valley shall upright stand. Earth's lowly ones shall rise in black renaissance. Let us burn bibles for incense. They that ride white asses shall roll in the debris of destruction their minded fashion. Their banquet halls are doomed and ghosts awake. Their tabernacles of gold shall find their joyless grave." Taiwo remarks that African poems now spring from the life of the people and has traditional and cultural significance for them. This poetry describes its own form as an organic counterpart of the important content. In all respects, other than content, it resembles modern poetry in other English speaking countries. Content statement, a rendered experience that has meaning is a necessary ingredient in the African poem. Sarah Fabio: Poetry has always occupied a place as the soul of festivities in Africa, while dramatic action was the body. Let me say that again. Poetry has occupied a place as the soul of festivities in Africa, while drama was the body. Spontaneity and lack of a labored feel are also essentials and the rhythm approximates common speech with a distinct melody of its own. There are some characteristics of poetry of the revolution. And those may be listed, and I think Taiwo mentions these. Number one, a passion for Africa. Two, a narration of history of Africa with a bias in favor of Africans. A.), It recounts and declaims sufferings and B.) It gives detailed atrocities perpetrated on Africans by Western imperialism and calls for a united front against a common foe. Three, the ultimate aim of struggle is total liberation of the African continent. Four, it's committed to the freedom and independence of all African or Negro peoples. Five, after political freedom comes emancipation in the economic, cultural, and social spheres. Sarah Fabio: Now, modern African poets, under the influence of other English poets, especially Afro-American poets dating back to the 1920s, which is known as our Harlem Renaissance period, exhibit today great freedom with syntax, with the word meanings, and symbolism. There is less regularity in line lengths and fewer rhymes. Ezekiel Mphahleleis is quoted in Ann [Tribble's] African British Literature from an unpublished paper on the African Writer. "The African, for whom English is a second language, is always translating thoughts that originally operate in his mother tongue and because he is writing in a rich medium like English, he can even do violence to it when he records dialogue. He can hear only in the language spoken by his characters." Sarah Fabio: Tribble calls African English vividly alive and very expressive with the capacity to confront the new that makes it scarcely ever less than fresh and clear. Or as Gabriel Okara in his poem, "you laughed and laughed, put it in your ears, my song, is a motor car misfiring, stopping with a choke and cough, and you laughed and laughed and laughed." The matter of the best suited language for self expression of an African remains a serious question, because former audiences and publishing houses for literature were European. And then it was necessary to use English or French as the case may be. Sarah Fabio: Taiwo feels that even though African literature can be written in this native language it's necessary to use English or French as the case may be. Taiwo feels strongly that even though African literature can and should be written in the popular medium available, which is English or French, that "the ultimate aim should be to build up a body of literature which permeates the marketplace and village arena." In other words, the African should be writing in his own native tongues and his audience should be his own people who come to this ever important marketplace, because if it is true that the poet must stand at the marketplace it is an irony that he would stand there and not address himself to the people who would come and go in the marketplace. Sarah Fabio: But even more emphatic about the possibility of the African breaking through the boundaries of the English language is [Inwoga inaudible]. He believes that modern poets are indeed liberated from traditions of English. This is readily seen in regard to material for content coming from the native culture. That is, like the African is apt to use an image such as a thing is as white as casaba pulp. Rather than snow. If he does not live in an area where there is snow. You see? The images are taken from home. In addition to the poet's reading, gods, sacrifices, traditional literature, all these touch the new poetry. And a search is made for a combination of language that fits the African's way of seeing life, even though he is translating that life through a foreign language. Sarah Fabio: I think any concerns that we have in the African having to be a bilingual person, having to express a literature that reflects himself, and at the same time so that it can be, say, published for wide readership, having to do this in a language that is alien, hostile, to him. That this in effect can create a great amount of discord, great struggle on the part of the poet to try to come up with any kind of synthesis of self, of course that does violence to a person to have to use the very words, very often, that operate against him. That ends the formal part of my run down on modern African poetry. Sarah Fabio: In flying out from Berkeley to Iowa City, I picked up a book that I never read, and that is Reader's Digest. And, I mean, you can say that's a judgment, but I don't ever read it. Jesse Owens had an article in there where he was running down his experience as a world champion runner, including that bit about going to Germany and Adolf Hitler getting incensed because he was there. And walking out on his race and all and how he kept going, supposedly, without any ... what he calls, "Black think." You dig that. Black think. And Black think is a terminology that he reserved for those militants or so which is supposed to be a sort of ipso facto anti-white. Sarah Fabio: And of course, intrusively, very intrusively in this article this would come up and he would damn this Black think orientation. And he'd say, "Well, even though, Adolf Hitler left my race and all and I was treated pretty rudely in Nazi Germany, that didn't really make me think Black." And then he would say, further along, when he came to New York and as a world champion runner, he could get no bread except someone came to him with the proposition that what he ought to do, was for promotional stunt, run against a horse. That experience. And he laid ahead to take it, since there was no opportunity to earn his bread. That didn't create in him what these militants called "Black think." The article, and some of you ought to read it, an article that simply does not hold itself. Someone has told him to run down a memoir and at the same time blow the whistle on Black think. Sarah Fabio: And so in ending today, I'd like to just get off into that thing of what is Black? Because as we talk during the rest of the week, you will hear me say, "black" an awful lot. And I don't necessarily presume that you, here at the University of Iowa, will know what I am speaking of. And every time I say "black" you may think a lot of different kinds of things. When I say "black," black to me is biology, geography, like Africa, West Indies, UGA, the United Ghettos of America, the wrong side of the tracks of freeways, black belts, black is psychology, theology, philosophy, athletic, aesthetic, politic, is Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, Harry Edwards, Aaron Douglas, Charles White, Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Adam Clayton Powell. Sarah Fabio: When we say "black language," that's going to be a direct creative intelligent communication between Black people, based on a shared reality; an awareness, an understanding, which generates into action. It's going to be a rhetoric, which places premium on imagistic renderings and concretizations of abstractions, poetic usages of language, idiosyncrasies. Those individualized stylistic nuances, such as violation of structured syntax, which nevertheless hit home and evoke truth. It's an idiom of integrated insight, a knowledge emanating from a juxtaposition of feeling and fact, which form a perspective of now, causing perpetual changes in meaning. Sarah Fabio: And finally, Black is pigmentation, a mirror image of black on black. A preference that leans away from fading colors and imitation whites. Posture. It's an on your toes approach to the maze way of the real world. A shoulder squared against what's happening. The man, the hawk, bad luck, blues. It's a motion. A dance. A gesture. A cool stance. A walking that walk. A talking that talk. That is, "No, man." Position. It's apartness, uniqueness, a separatism. Permitting, cutting through white irrelevancies, to confront basic issues. A revolutionary zeal to overthrow oppressive might. A moral obligation to change a wrong to a right. Perspective, it's a clear black eye that peers through the midnight muck of man. A deniggerized aspect and value. A defiant thrust to wipe out white wash. Positives of assertive acts. Affirmations of strong yeahs, not negatives, non entity, invisibility. Pride, people power, people magic, soul, and exuberance of existence, an escalation of self awareness, and appreciation. A gut knowing, buried deep in the womb of oppression, turning stone to bone, to flesh and blood, to tears and smiles, to love, to life. Pulling, pulling, a magnet pulling you all the way back home into a thing that is Black. Sarah Fabio: Thank you. Speaker 1: That was Sarah Fabio of the University of California at Berkeley, speaking on contemporary Black verse. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the university as material for the course, Afro-American Literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, May 4th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.