Etheridge Knight:
Poeting, Hustling
& the Black Aesthetic
Black Aesthetic
I think the Black Aesthetic differs from the
European Aesthetic mainly . . . because it does not separate art
or aesthetics from the other levels of life. It does not
separate art from politics, art from economics, art from ethics,
or art from religion. Art is a functional and a commercial
endeavor. The artist is not separate from the people. If you
were to trace the separation of art from life historically, you
would trace it back to the Greeks when Plato and others made the
“head thing” the ideal—reasoning being the ideal—there
was a separation between reason and emotion. There was a
separation.
It is like people trying to separate church
and state. How in the hell can you separate church and state? A
man’s politics is determined by how he views the world, how he
sees God. Aesthetics, to me, means how one sees beauty, truth and
love as they relate to all levels of life—not just watching
the sunset, but how one’s politics are dealt with and how
one’s economics are dealt with. All art stems basically from
economics. All the Western dances and all the songs, that people
call classical music grew out of formulas—European formulas.
All of our blues and things that we
considered cultural grew out of our economics. People sing about
the river rising because their crops are going to be fucked up.
It’s economics. I don’t make the distinction between
aesthetics and ethics and politics or whatever other aspect of a
man’s existence. One might say this is political, and this is
not political. As Gwendolyn Brooks says, “just being Black in
this country and walking down the street is a political act.”
Anytime you walk into a place where there is a whole bunch of
“peckerwoods,” you are making a political act.
When you are wearing bell bottom pants and a
beard and a big Afro, you are making a political statement by
merely walking in there. Everything is political, everything is
aesthetical, and everything is ethical.
Politics, Religion &
Economics
A group of people controlled by another group
of people—every level of existence is political. There is no
black preacher that ever preached that wasn’t making a
political statement. If I had to lump it together, I would lump
it closer to religion and economics. It is no accident that most
of our leaders, even before Nat Turner, were religiously
inclined. They have all been preachers. From Nat Turner to
Malcolm X, they have been heavy into religion. I see religion as
a total view of life. Religion includes economics, politics,
ethics, aesthetics, and all that. That’s how I view religion.
Historically, artists were connected with the church first. The
priest and the artist were one and the same.
Politics & Art
In the first place, I would say such critics
are coming from European definitions. Even though Imamu Baraka
and I differ on a lot of things, I would say he has evolved
honestly and naturally. Art would necessarily lead to his
position. If you are a black artist in this country at this
time, you cannot help but be a politician, a wheeler-dealer.
That’s what’s necessary—to deal. One of the statements
that he made is that it is all theater. In a lot of ways it is
theater. What’s happening with him and that Dago in Newark is
theater. He calls Baraka “the slick nigger” and Baraka calls
him “Moby Dick, the big white whale.”
What I am saying is that the idea that poetry
or the other arts do not involve all the other levels of life is
a European concept. Baraka is a total person, not only an
artist; he is not an artist separated from the community. In my
opinion, the greatest artist alive in this country today is
Elijah Mohammad. A lot of people ain’t got onto the Messenger.
I can’t accept his theology because I have been schooled in
the European thing, too. That brother has survived, and all us
are dealing with the psychological fallout of his
teaching—black education, black economics, etc., which he
talked about in the 1930s, when they put him in jail. Remember,
he wouldn’t go to fight the Japanese in the 1940s.
We have all of these war protesters now. This
was a brother who wouldn’t go way back then, and the put him
in jail and he spent his time and kept on doing what he was
doing. That’s just a little old “nigger man” with a
fourth-grade education. He didn’t have a formal education. To
me, he is the greatest artist. Imamu Baraka, as a poet, as an
artist, as a person, has evolved logically.
I disagree with some of his methods, because
in a lot of ways he is still playing out the European
temperamentalist bag, which I don’t think we can afford. In
some ways, I am a realist. Things hurt me, and I know they hurt
me, and I say that. I don’t fool myself, give you the “snow
job,” of what’s going on. It hurts to be aware in this
country. They are killing us.
The brother, Kalamu ya Salaam, who was talking about
the Delta and the flooding, you still got Nebraska, Montana,
Idaho, Nevada, Ohio, Indiana. These “peckerwoods” can still
raise enough food to feed half the world. He [Kalamu] has a
small view of that flooding. If you are in the immediate
vicinity of the flooding areas, you are, of course, concerned,
but in three hours’ time you can be in Montana where honky
farmers are still plowing hundreds and thousands of acres. . .
Poeting & Hustling
Let me tell you something. I have no
secrets, no private life. There have been magazines, like the North West Review, that have asked me for poems. They’d pay me $50
or $100. I would sit down and write a poem. I am not like you; I
don’t have academic credentials. I did not finish high school.
I live by poeting. I live from the people. I don’t do anything
but poet. Sometimes people attach me to universities. If I
don’t poet, then I am a thief because that’s what I was
doing before I was poeting.
I don’t know anything else to do but hustle
or poet. I write poems for publications. They look good and I
can use them when I list my credentials—I have been published
here and there. But my real poems are for people. What happens
at a reading is very important to me. This has been verified for
people who doubted, and by other poets who have all the
credentials—the University of Cambridge, the whole thing.
For example, a white poet, Donald Hall, who
is a good friend of mine, has the aristocratic New England
thing—he went to Harvard and Cambridge. I asked him if he had
a choice between publishing and reading which he would prefer?
He wrote back and said, “Why did you ask me such a silly-ass
question? Publishing, I would throw it away—where it’s at it's
what’s happening with me and the audience.” I had placed him
in a different bag, to tell you the truth. Coming from my
background, I had taken a kind of anti-intellectual position.
Before I met him, I thought he would say, “He ain’t a
college graduate; what the fuck he knows?”
When I met him, I found out he was just
another guy who might have reflected more than I did. As soon as
something happened to me, I just acted right off. He stopped and
reflected a minute. That was the main difference. He is a
helluva poet. A lot of black poets say, “Well, he is white.”
Just as we are sitting here drinking a bear and liquor, I was in
his living room, and he said, “Imamu Baraka thinks that I
can’t get to him. I can get to him.” He did. So, it ain’t
just racial.
Sure, black poetry is ideological. There are
other characteristics that distinguish it. To say that other
people can’t get to it is crazy. Then we would have to admit
that you can’t get to William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.
But I know well you can.
Black Audience First?
Yes. Who else? That argument has come up, and
to me it is a racist’s reaction. Nobody says anything about
the Irish playwrights or Shakespeare, or the German or French
writing to German or French people. There is always an audience
in mind. Jean Paul Sartre made it clear—I always use him
because people accept him as an authority. In his essay, “For
Whom Does One Write,” he pointed out clearly that to the
people in the French underground during the Nazi occupation the
word boche meant
something completely different from what it meant to anybody
else.
Just like the word motherfucker
means something different to us—nobody else can understand it.
What I am saying is that through extension we are humanists in
the beginning, but how are you going to love or speak to
somebody else if you can’t speak to your own brothers and
sisters? What business do I have speaking to the Chinese,
Japanese, French, Italians, the English, if I can’t speak to a
brother? No Chinese can tell me anything speaking to me, because
I am going to ask. It is important that (a Japanese, a Chinese,
an Italian or a Frenchman) knows what he is saying to his people
first.
You definitely have to speak to people of your own
experiences or your own history. By extensions of history, all
human beings are the same. We have our Sampsons and our
Jezebels. Instead of Sampson, we have John Henry. Instead of
Jezebel, we have Frankie and Johnnie. All people have the same
history, the same men, the same heroes. They are just played on
differently. We have some pretty good ones. You talk about John
Henry and Staggerlee. Just means niggers. . . .
Gwendolyn Brooks said, once when she came to the
prison where I was to read, “Everybody defines poetry.” Her
definition was that poetry is a telescope turned upside down.
You are looking at life from one little specific thing. All art
is specific, really. Now, from this specific comes the general.
If I get into me, if I am true to me, I assume I can bet that
just about have where you are also. I know damn well if
three-headed man in a flying saucer landed right there, I would
get scared and so would you. Just by my own feelings, I bet you
that you got scared.
recognized my [art] stems from the
specific. If he is honest, a black artist can’t help directing
his art to a black audience. The same way a French artist
can’t help but direct his art to a French audience. It
doesn’t mean that the other people can’t understand it,
can’t get into it, on a lot of levels. I cannot get into
Rudyard Kipling. He is an imperialist, an English colonist
motherfucker. I have gotten into “If,” but where he was
coming from does not enlighten me.
First Influences—Toasts
I came to poetry not through any academic
channels. The first poet I was introduced to was a village poet,
“Hound Mouth.” I never knew any other name but “Hound
Mouth.” He never wrote anything, but he would sit in the park
and tell toasts. They were really narrative poems, although we
called them toasts. For example, he would tell us about the
flood of 1937. The fire burning down a dance hall in Tupelo,
Mississippi—he would tell us about that. The sinking of the Titanic,
the signifying monkey, the pool;-shooting monkey—he’d tell
them all for hours. He had them all in his head. If somebody
said something about publishing some of it, he would not know
how to write to a magazine.
Family
Origins—Mississippi & Kentucky
Paducah, Kentucky. My daddy was a common
laborer. He didn’t make it as a farmer. He did not like to
work hard enough to be a farmer, so he moved into town. At that
time, the Kentucky Dam was being built. There was a great need
for black labor, strong black backs. So he moved up—he caught
a freight train up in 1939, right after the big flood, worked
two or three months and sent money back. At that time, there
were my mother, my two oldest brothers, my oldest sister, and
me.
Later on, there were four other sisters,
younger children, who were born. Anyway, we moved up to Paducah,
Kentucky. That’s a helluva town. Its claim to fame is Alben
Barkley, who was Truman’s Vice President, and Irving Cobb, the
home spun humorist. The town was named after Chief Paducah, a
helluva Indian, who killed a lot of [whites].
My teenage life was spent in Kentucky. Actually,
Kentucky is no different from Mississippi. When I was 11, 12, 13
and 14, I came back to Mississippi to spend the summers. My
mother and father would send us back to my uncle in the country
to spend the summers to keep us out of trouble in big cities.
All that time, I started running away from home—I started
noticing things and people. I didn’t like my old man too much.
I grew up, and at 17 went to the Army.
I said I am not going to wind up in this town and
accept the same kind of destiny that my father accepted. I am
going to break out here, so I went to the Army. In the Army I
went to Korea, saw people and some things, and, also, got hooked
on drugs. I got out of the Army in 1950. All of the 1950s were
the whole drug scene—skag—I mean for the heavy drug scene.
Pimps, whores, etc. Then I fell and went to prison in 1960 for
armed robbery to get some money to get some drugs. I stayed in
prison eight years, until 1968, and I have been poeting ever
since.
Dying
& Resurrection
I began to define myself as a poet in prison.
Before then, I had been writing toast about incidents, about
things in the neighborhood. I would make them up. When I would
go to jail, guys would come around and say, “Hey,
Knight”—this was especially after supper like a social hour
in jail—“Hey, Knight, tell us a tale.” I would start
telling about somebody who OD-ed or somebody who is fucking
somebody else’s old lady. I started creating. Then I got in
what is called legitimate poetry in prison and started
submitting to a wider audience.
Gwendolyn Brooks and Dudley Randall are
mainly responsible for that. Two beautiful people, man. They
would come down the “joint” and see me. They would give me
advice, and I would give them advice. I started writing in the
sense you mean it in prison. In Korea I was awfully
confused—you have to remember that I was only seventeen and I
dug some things that were too heavy for a seventeen year old to
handle, so I quit.
I said to myself I am not going to be
involved in this shit anymore. I ain’t going to fight—you
take your guns; I ain’t going to kill and they said, “You
are crazy.” I said, you call me whatever you want to call me,
and I gave my gun to my Company Commander. He couldn’t
understand it. I said, “I refuse to be involved in this kind
of shit anymore. You got me over here about to be killed, about
to have me kill someone, and it has nothing to do with me.
Chanting
Poetry
You see, that’s true because I understand
poetry and the poet as a song—as a chant; the poem and the
poet are like songs. They are mystical. When you say things in
chant, they take on a different meaning from what you say—and
you may be saying the same words—in everyday speech. What’s
involved is music—a kind of arrangement of the sounds that
create in you a certain feeling. When you go to church, for
example, certain things happen in church.
The preacher’s preaching and the choir’s
singing create in you a certain receptiveness—the feeling that
you are in church. If everybody starts bowing their heads, you
bow your head. In music, a certain beat is set up and you find
yourself patting your foot. These are the same rituals in
poetry. That’s the reason for the devices in poetry—rhyme
and rhythm. They set up a oneness. If anyone is patting their
feet at the same time, a ritual is being played out. Basically,
I see the poet as singing in a sense that his sounds are put
together in harmony or in a structure which differs from just
plain talking.
I see poets basically as singers, as
preachers, as prophets. The poems that I look at, the poems that
I see, the things that I call poetry—you know—speak about
big things in human life—death, war, freedom, and birth. These
kinds of things can only be spoken about in a way that you can
feel them. They can only be spoken about in symbols, in myths.
You deal with these big things, not in terms of how much a
product costs—e.g., the price of bread—but whether you are a
slave or whether you are not a slave, or whether you are a good
man or a bad man, etc.
When you are speaking of feelings, you can’t present
them in prose, in everyday English; they must be present through
symbols or myths. That’s why religion has been so effective in
speaking to people. The big questions concern economics,
politics, medicine, etc. All of these things answer the
question: Where did I come from and where am I going? Religion
and poetry speak in symbols and myths and try to answer big
questions.
Part
2
Poetry,
Conception & Musicality
It does not come with the conception. The conception
comes with an awareness of life, and the music comes with trying
to express that certain awareness—that certain feeling. You
have a preacher, a politician, an economist seeing the same
situation—let’s say, the energy crisis. The economist would
tell you all about the production of oil and supply and demand,
but the politician would tell you which country has got the
oil—like the Jews or the Arabs. The preacher would put it in
that same context. The economist would write a paper, the
politician would make a speech, and the preacher would preach a
sermon about the same thing, but they are coming from different
places. The poet would write a poem.
Writing
in and Out of Prison
Actually it [Belly
Songs and Other Poems] was not easier, because in all the
real senses I am still in prison. If I can articulate a minute.
To make a poem or to preach a sermon or to create in any sense,
you become extremely aware. I think it is what the Greeks meant
when you are caught up in the Muses. For the Nigerians, among
the Yoruba people, there is a word which refers to the power
taking over you. In other words, you become extremely aware.
It’s that you are able to relate to the whole world what you
see and hear.
Prison is very painful reality. If you walk into a
meadow and see flowers, while the sun is shining brightly, and
you are in love with a young girl, you are extremely aware then,
too. Those things you are aware of are pleasant. You are just as
aware when you are caught up in prison, but there ain’t no
flowers. That’s painful. All of us are going to try to avoid
pain. That’s why it’s harder. You can sit and write about
the sunset and love; or sit, watch the sun go down on the sea,
and that does not hurt—that ain’t painful. That’s why it
is hard. It’s difficult.
Collective Vision of Black
People
Sometimes you do things in poems that you
don’t consciously do, and you find out that you want to do
them later if you think about it. What hangs me up is being
aware, being aware of what is wrong with what is happening. Then
you know or you feel that common feeling with all people. If you
know yourself—your own feelings well enough—you can’t be
pretty certain that they are the feeling among people in the
same situation. Being aware means that you are one with the
feelings of other people—their dreams and fears, everything
else.
If you can articulate or express those
feelings in your art honestly, then you are expressing the
general feelings of other people. It is like in prison. In
prison, maybe only two percent of the people participate in a
riot, but if that riot is honest—is based on honest
feelings—you can bet ninety-nine percent of the prisoners felt
the same way while only two percent took action. They are
reflecting the feelings of ninety-nine percent of the people in
prison.
It is the same way with the artist in
society. If he is honest with his feelings and expresses them
honestly, then he is expressing the feelings of most of the
people. … One man is afraid to say to another, “Hey, I am
scared. I don’t think that this is right. I don’t want to do
it.” In the Watergate affair, if one of those guys had said,
“Hey, naw, I ain’t going to do this; this is wrong,” it
wouldn’t have happened. You get caught up in your own images.
I think an artist is obligated like a priest.
A preacher is obligated to tell the truth no matter what
happens. People look to priests, poets, an artists to tell the
truth, and by identification they somehow change their own
feelings. People know if an artist is full of bullshit. They
know if a preacher is “bullshitting” them. Everybody in this
country knows that black people are being fucked over.
The dumbest, most illiterate hillbilly
sharecropper knows that black people are being fucked over. And
if an artist stands up and says that black people are being
fucked over, the people know he is not telling the truth. He
loses their respect. Black artists should tell the truth about
reality. The only thing you can be aware of is your reality.
Any black artist whose main theme is not enslavement
has to be lying or crazy, because the most real thing to a human
being is whether he is free or not. And we are not free.
Everything else takes second place to that.
Oral
Narrative Form of Black Folk
I didn’t have it in mind. It came about
naturally to me out of my experience. I grew up in Kentucky.
When I was seven or eight years old, I would hang around in
poolrooms and listen to toasts, and later I started telling
them. So, you see, I grew up telling tales such as “Shine”
and the “Signifying Monkey.” I grew up listening to Baptist
preachers—the form, for example of Martin Luther King and the
rhythm of the folk sermon. So I grew up with that. Long before I
published, I was telling toasts—all the time I was in the
Army, in prison and on the streets. Therefore, it was not a
conscious thing; it just naturally developed.
Genesis
of “For Freckled-Faced Gerald”
I was lying in my cell reading one night,
when all the guys came in. I had been working on the prison
newspaper and had gotten off work early. When they came in, the
word came that a young brother had been raped in the prison
laundry by some older cons.
At the time I was reading James Baldwin’s Another
Country. You remember that in the novel Rufus commits
suicide. I got a little angry. Here was this young
brother—only sixteen and in prison. Also, at the same time he
came into the joint, there were about five or six youngsters in
there. But he was the youngest. There was also a young white boy
from Indianapolis who had burglarized some home and shot some
people. He had gotten life, too. When he came to prison, the
warden made him houseboy and kept him outside the
walls—protected him.
But the warden put Gerald back inside the
wall because he was just a nigger. I was thinking of all of
that. And I was thinking about Baldwin’s character, Rufus, who
committed suicide. And here was Gerald struggling to survive.
(Suicide is such an uncommon thing among black people. We kill
ourselves through alcohol or drugs, or we kill each other. But
direct suicide is uncommon.) I wrote that poem that night.
All of those things led up to it. I was
trying to express what I saw happening around me and to talk
about the subject of oppression. Here we are—black people,
oppressed. In this country, we are oppressed racially and
sexually. Women are oppressed. Homosexuals in prison and in the
larger society are oppressed. If you are black, a woman, a
lesbian and you’re in prison, you are oppressed four times.
Black men will talk about being free, yet
they’ll have a woman walking four paces behind them and go
“fag hunting.” We cannot win our freedom at the expense of
anybody. Many blacks—artists, educators, politicians, and
other leaders—will say there’s nothing to women’s
liberation or gay liberation. Or they will argue that if we have
to become fascists to win our freedom, it’s better for us to
have the oppressors in jail than for them to have us. But I
don’t feel that way; I don’t think we can be free that way.
I don’t think that conditions of the world
would allow us to be free at the expense of anybody else. The
Europeans were the last people to dominate the world racially. I
don’t think we can dominate the world racially. If you’re
going to come from a point of view of race, then the Chinese
will win since there are more of them than anyone else. We
cannot say that naturals are the best things in the world.
If we argue that way, the Chinese can say slanted eyes
are the best. Since there are more of them, they would have to
be right. I don’t think we can come from that. Everybody has
to be free. I was feeling those things and thinking about Gerald
when I wrote the poem. Why did Rufus kill himself? Was it
because he was black, or was it because he was a homosexual?
That’s how the poem came about.
“The
Idea of Ancestry”
: It has to do with identity—being one with
other people. That poem came when I was in prison also. I had
just gone through a thing of being in the hole for days. The
first two or three days in the hole, you sing songs, recite
Shakespeare, masturbate, and think about the streets. After
about ten days in there, you stop singing songs and start
remembering your early life. You deal with those kinds of thing
when you go into prison. When you first go there, they take away
your name—the name given you at birth. If you’re black, you
don’t accept that name anyway. You know somewhere names means
more than that. It’s the whole thing of identity. You’re not
called Etheridge Knight, but 35652. When they bring your mail,
they say 35652. The letter could be from your mother. If anybody
knows your name, she does. But they yell 35652. It’s the
question of identity. To keep your sanity, you have to place
yourself in the context of the world somehow. I had just been in
the hole some thirty or forty days and that poem came.
Writing Haiku
I write haiku for two reasons. After I began to define myself as a poet, I understood
that you should master your art form. John Coltrane mastered the
tenor saxophone and two or three other instruments. In order for
him to communicate well what he felt, he had to master his art
form. To me writing haiku is good exercise. I dig and respect
them because they create an image—paint a picture—so
precisely. They draw pictures in very clean lines. You say what
you want to say symbolically. I work with haiku a lot in my
attempt to handle the language—the word. I don’t see haiku
as a black form, but, then, you utilize whatever modes or
vehicles are available to you.
The Lyricism of “Ilu
the Talking Drum”
I have begun to understand in the past five or
six years what black art—really all art—is about. And
as I developed and defined myself more in the first year of my
poeting, I accepted a European definition of what is good, what
is bad, what is art and what is not, what is red, what is white.
I accepted European definitions, and they caused a big conflict
in me. I was trying to be one thing and I felt another. During
the first years of my poeting, I didn’t define myself as a
poet, and therefore, I did not get into the responsibility and
the directions.
As I developed more, I began to define myself and
the responsibilities of being who I am and what I am. No matter
who you are, with that come certain responsibilities. As I began
to define myself, I began to thin more about it—I developed, I
took more interest, I did more work in trying to say what I
wanted to say as exactly as possible. Imamu Baraka says that is
the duty of the artist to say what is real as exactly as
possible.
For instance, I used to refuse to sell my books
myself. I was hung up in that European artistic thing, until I
found out that Langston Hughes used to pay his way from campus
to campus by selling his books. When I discovered what Hughes
did, I did not have that kind of art-for-art’s-sake hangup
anymore, because the duty of the artist is to communicate with
his people. However that’s done, you do it; you work at it.
Who’s going to write a musical composition and play it and
nobody is going to hear it? He is an irresponsible artist. I
studies more and tried to develop more exactly what I wanted to
say.
“Genesis”—The
Nature & Effect of Poetry
Poetry is one of the art forms that has had
very little influence, until recently, on black people. Music
has, however, influenced black people. All art to me is based on
love. Poetry is one art form. But in the past black people did
not relate to poetry. I guess in “Genesis” I was protesting
that artists are people who come to poetry out of love. I guess
it hurts to offer love and have it rejected. Poetry is low on
the totem pole as far as black people are concerned—that is,
poetry that is acknowledged and generally considered legitimate.
We have always had real poetry, but it was not always recognized
as poetry as defined as poetry. The musician, the preacher, and
the dancer are the true artists in the black community that have
been respected and admired and have always been influential. But
the poet is not. I think that is what I was screaming and
protesting about or trying to say.
“After
Watching B.B. King on T.V.”-- An
Attitude Toward the Blues
We talked about that a whole lot, trying to define
what is culture or what is not. I don’t want to get into a
lot of definitions. To me culture generally is the way people
live, how that is recorded, in what form—that’s the culture.
The communication of the feelings and the aspirations of a
people—how they are communicated are cultural forms, what we
call fine arts.
To me, religion is an art form because
religion just expresses the same thing: the feelings of the
people. They deal with these feelings through myths, symbols,
and rituals. Blues to me do certain things: they validate a
people’s existence; they essentially tell people they are
good, that their life is good; they tell them that they are bad;
and they tell them that they are good people. When you study
religion, you find that almost all religion traces the origin of
these people back to God. If you are in Africa, God is black. If
you are China, God looks Chinese. If you are in Europe, God has
blue eyes.
What I am saying that all art deals with the
feelings and history of the people. Music is a cultural form.
People have had to exist. Art validates whatever is necessary
for people to exist at that time. If there is a period in the
history of the people to fight a long time, then all that art
will be about war; the poems, the music, the painting, the
sculpture and everything will have to do with whatever traits
are needed for war—strength, marathons, relays, whatever.
If it is an agricultural people, all art will
have to do with farming. There will be all kinds of dances that
will have to do with economics. If people are enslaved, and if
it is necessary for them to survive—to quote Booker T.
Washington or somebody—“We have to take two steps while it
looks like we are slipping back one in order to advance.” If
it is a period of accommodation to the slave master, then the
art of that period will reflect that.
What I am saying is that the blues to me
represents an era of accommodation. It is a music or song of
protest, not that it is not valid. You have to understand that a
protest art is different from a revolutionary art. A protest art
tells you to accommodate; a revolutionary tells you not to
accommodate but to create—to build something new. In the blues
we screamed about our pain—it was an outlet, it allowed us to
live, it allowed us to survive, but it did not teach us, it did
not move us to any kind of change.
When I see culture and when Sonia [Sanchez]
sees culture, she, I think, is speaking of revolutionary
culture—a culture that is dynamic, that moves and brings about
change in a culture that validates an old system. I grew up on
B.B. King. I came out of the 1940s—B.B. King and “Bird,”
the whole era. I listen to B.B. and feel good.
It is like most of the sermons that I hear
that allow me to get it out—all the shit I got into my belly
that I had to swallow, by just living. It allows me to get it
out; it allows me to live. It does not move me to get up and do
anything about it. It moves me to accept a kick in the ass and
still make it. The music of B.B. King says that to me.
The music of Pharoh Sanders moves me to change—to
stop talking the kicking in the ass, to stop it some kind of
way. To me, that’s where the most valid culture is right now.
Culture, ultimately, to me, is not the vehicle that teaches a
people to accommodate; it is a vehicle that teaches people to
move for some kind of change toward their freedom. No longer do
you just stand pat, but rather you take some kind of action.
That is what I think is happening in that poem.
____________
TPB's notes: Source:
Charles H. Rowell. An Interview with Etheridge Knight.
Callaloo.
19.4
(Fall 1996): 940–46. This
interview was conducted in the poet’s home in Indianapolis,
Indiana, between mid–1975 and late 1978, after Dudley Randall
issued Belly Song and Other Poems from Broadside Press.
