Black Power Afterlives by Diane Fujino

Author:Diane Fujino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

Poetry and Interdisciplinary Arts: Fred Ho and the Black Arts Movement

Fred Ho’s work is difficult to put into a box: it spans genres, media, subject matters—and sometimes has little to do with music at all. Magdalena Gómez describes it as

Combining elements of “jazz” (a term Ho qualifies by instructing us on its racist origins), Chinese opera, experimental, global working-class and oppressed-class musical traditions, various dance and martial-arts traditions, comic book … aesthetic[s], science fiction and poetry, Fred’s theatrical works cannot be classified; no one box can be checked. This inability to fit in the crayon box and his revolutionary politics (rooted in self-defense, not violence) render Fred’s work a threat to the unimaginative and the purveyors of bottom-line, crowd-pleasing mediocrity.37

Ho’s constant collaboration with radical poets was especially deep. He was not alone in pursuing such collaborations; jazz-poetry syntheses were an important form and aesthetic of the BAM. This was a legacy Fred directly credits to the movement: “[The] generation of [Black Arts Movement] poets could virtually be called ‘jazz poets’ both from their deep and profound appreciation of and usage of ‘the music’ as well as their close collaborations and social connections with the musicians.”38

One such poet was Jayne Cortez, a seminal figure in the BAM who has been described as having revolutionized the distinct poetic invocation known as the “Coltrane Poem.”39 As Ho recalls,

[d]uring the 1970s and 1980s, I made contact with Jayne as a cultural correspondent with the League of Revolutionary Struggle newspaper, Unity/La Unidad, with a full-page feature on her writing and excerpting her magnificent poem “If a Drum Is a Woman, Why Do You Beat Your Drum?” an incendiary indictment of relationship violence against women, employing a sardonic motif from the title of a Duke Ellington composition, “A Drum Is a Woman.”40

Influenced by this eloquent critique of patriarchy, Ho goes on to elaborate the lifelong relationship he developed with Cortez. In fact, Ho composed a percussion suite at her request, and later Cortez would return the favor by writing a libretto for Ho’s opera Every Time I Open My Mouth to Sing (2008), which contains a piece titled “Start with Yourself.” This piece expressed BAM’s philosophy that self-realization was an essential component of decolonization.

Start with yourself

start in the middle of the voyage…

A blue whale is wailing your name my love

you already know who’s in the business of

land grabbing from natives

because you have been mixed in the scorched

earth policy of the land act

& the leaves are smoking on both sides of the

equator

So start with yourself41

If Ho’s gender politics and ideas of self-reliance deepened through his work with Cortez, Sonia Sanchez had a particular influence on his pedagogical approach. Ho began working with Sanchez when he was still a high school student in Massachusetts, initially by sneaking into her classes at nearby Amherst College. In Ho’s retelling,

Another influential figure for me, and a towering figure in her own right in the Black Arts Movement, was Sonia Sanchez. I remember Sonia for her warmth and accessibility to students…. Her

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