“The metagenesis of Sunra is said to have come about through the intercourse of the sun with the comet X,” Henry Dumas wrote in his mythopoetic legend of the birth and mission of the composer, pianist and mythscientist in “The Metagenesis of Sunra (to Sun Ra and His Arkestra).” Sun Ra (b. 1914) had evolved out of the big band era to create “cosmic swing,” one of the signature sounds of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. Here was a model, initiated by artists of a preceding generation and embodied in Sun Ra, for reimagining the future through the culture and concerns of the African diaspora. Dumas learned at his side, and composed lyrics and chants to accompany some of the music.
On May 23, 1968, Dumas attended a rehearsal in Harlem by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Later that day, the 34-year old Dumas was shot to death by a New York City transit officer inside the 125th Street Station; no witness accounts were recorded. The cop claimed that Dumas had tried to assault him.
Afrosurrealism and science fiction shape parts of Dumas’ work, which also includes poetry and a novel, Jonoah and the Green Stone. “The Metagenesis of Sunra” is included in Echo Tree, Dumas’ collected short fiction, now reissued by Coffee House Press some 18 years after the first edition. In 1970, the preservation of Dumas’ work began with Hale Chatfield, the editor of Hiram Poetry Review, who put together a volume of Dumas’ writings via Southern Illinois University Press. But Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House, and Eugene B. Redmond led the way toward recognizing Dumas’ achievements – and the urgency of his vision.
In Dumas’ hands, the surreal might also be meshed with folktale traditions. In “The University of Man,” a watch repairman named Tyros, adept at his trade but weary of its repetitiveness, announces to his village that he intends to depart and pursue an education. His wife objects, “but the priest, seeing the light in Tyros’ eyes and recalling his own years of training, said, ‘It is the quest for knowledge that is holy, and not the knowledge itself.’” The tale of his travels, strange and luminous, is a spiritual reckoning – but also, a profile of self-determination and the lifelong desire to see more clearly, to act decisively.
Echo Tree also shows Dumas working as a fiction realist. In the collection’s final story, “Riot or Revolt?”, a boy named Harold ducks under a police barricade in front of a jewelry store that had been burned and looted the night before after a black boy had been killed by police in Brooklyn. Harold, carrying his stickball stick, is simply curious – but the police react aggressively and an agitated crowd gathers to observe. Dumas is adept at leveraging the story’s tension – will yet another black boy be murdered? But its more profound feature is the creation of an entire, turbulent world and the black community within it struggling to act with purpose. Next door to the burnt shop is the LeMoor Brothers’ Bookstore, spared in the upheaval, where Harold is protected while the Brothers and their customers debate next steps:
“You think all white are like the few that have made it hard for us? They ain’t all like that,” protested the fellow. “As soon as integration comes, the American dream will be the truth and not a dream …”
“What are you talking about integration? The Negro preachers have been spitting that brainwashing powder out to baptize n—-s’ heads since 1954. What integration? You can’t legislate and regiment this thing. If you want to be swallowed up by the majority in this country, then go ahead with your integration. I wouldn’t want it if it could work. It’s only a trick my friend, a trick. The Man knows he’s on the downgrade and he’s letting everything go into the war now. He’ll even stoop down and let a few n—–s into the melting pot. But it’s all a trick. The whole concept of democracy ain’t integration. It is brotherhood, and the rule of the majority, and the right of each individual to his own. Now where is the Negro got anything to offer the white man but his muscles and his black skin?”
In several stories, Dumas depicts confrontations between whites and blacks. The riveting “Strike and Fade” finds “Our block occupied with cops and National Guard.” Duke says, “I mean, if every black man in this goddamn country would dedicate one half of a day next week to a boycott. Just don’t go to work! Not a black pushin a thing for Charley. Hell, man, we tie it up. We still the backbone, man. We still got this white mf on our backs. What the hell we totin him around for?” Finally, we meet Tyro, a Vietnam war vet who observed the hit-and-run ambushing tactics of the Viet Cong: “If you don’t organize you ain’t nothing but a rioter, a looter. These jigs won’t hesitate to shoot you.”
In “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” three white musicians are permitted to enter a black jazz club, claiming to be experts in the genre. But there may be trouble: “lethal vibrations” from one of the instruments, an “afro horn … forged from a rare metal found only in Africa and South America.” The black musicians intended to play those instruments only for a black audience; the whites seem to get a rise out of this “reverse discrimination.” We wait to see what will happen. But this story, like everything else in Echo Tree, isn’t a black artistic product performing for whites who traditionally value such performative cultural output while disregarding the lives that produce it. Dumas freed himself to experiment with an exuberant hyper-candor that can still strike untruths dead with a lethal vibration.
[Published by Coffee House Press on May 4, 2021, 382 pages, $19.95 paperback]
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In his essay, “My Babylonish Brain” (1996), the German poet Durs Grünbein makes one of his many claims for poetry: “Irreducible, it is a picture puzzle of physiological origin, similar to nervous system, anatomy, and bone structure. Within it, speech is taken to its limits. Anecdotal moments from the life of the species as well as the individual are made palpably visible … Its ideal today – of which it must not know – is a memory machine, exact as an insect’s eye, a machine for regaining time lived.”
In another essay, “Why Live Without Writing?” (1999), he describes the poet as “the observer, who would finally convert his collected silence into the one and only commentary that survived the wreckage, some unforgettable line of song, some key scene of an epic or heartbreaking elegy.”
Speech taken to its limits, regaining time lived, commentary surviving the wreckage – all of these features are prominent in Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City, a series of 50 poems probing the varied attitudes toward the firebombing of Dresden by English and American air forces in February 1945. Grünbein was born 17 years after the event, but the GDR was pocked for decades by its traces, the vacant spaces and scrap heaps. For some Germans, Dresden’s devastation is their great passion play, the ruthless targeting of defenseless civilians (local officials reported 25,000 had died, the Nazis claimed 200,000). Although 40,000 civilians died in the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden with its baroque beauty – all now mainly restored – became the crucified icon on the River Elbe.
1
Why moan about it, Johnny-come-lately? Dresden was long gone
when your little light first appeared on the scene.
Moist eyes are not the same as grey hair, my son
And, as your name suggests, you’re too quick for it, too green.
Seventeen years, barely a childhood, was all it took
to erase what had been there before. The somber grey
of uniformity had closed the wounds and magic ceded to –
bureaucracy. No need for them to slay the Saxon peacock.
Lichen blossomed on the sandstone flowers, implacably.
Why brood? It comes back like hiccups: elegy.
There, at the outset, is Grünbein, the “Johnny-come-lately,” whose last name translates as “green leg” (thus “too green” in the poem). Here also in the final line is one of his references to Paul Celan, a major influence and the sequence’s dedicatee. Celan had written of an “Aschen-Schluckauf,” an ash-hiccup, the result of the macabre attempt to ingest the ashes of the dead.
Each of the 49 poems (plus one more, composed as a coda) is a rhymed 10-line strophe. Every year, between 1992 and 2005, on the February 13th anniversary of the bombing, Grünbein wrote one poem – a gesture suggesting the stubborn presence of something stuck in the German psyche– and his own. With those 13 poems in hand, he then churned out 36 more, and Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt was published in 2005.
Historians generally agree that the bombing did nothing to shorten the war. Germany had bombed Coventry and launched its V-2 rockets against London; the attacks on Dresden and other civilian centers were acts of revenge, especially savory to Churchill and his high command. “So it goes,” wrote Vonnegut. But as Géraldine Schwarz, the granddaughter of a man who acquired a petroleum business on the cheap from desperate Jews on the run, writes in Those Who Forget, “Yet even if the allies committed crimes whose gravity they still struggle to recognize, the Reich must still take primary responsibility for this spiral of violence, since if it had never unleashed the war in Europe, Germany never would have been disfigured by what followed.”
In Porcelain, Grünbein takes on “the legitimacy of German mourning – a discussion that continues to this day, sharpened by the political propaganda of the new right,” as his adept translator, Karen Leeder, notes in her introduction. He incorporates the city’s history and amassing of wealth, and its pedigree as a city of the arts and literature. “Grünbein’s is also a political intervention,” she says, “allowing Dresden’s fate to be reinserted into the narrative which gave rise to it, placing it within different historical trajectories and perspectives.”
24
Go down again, go down and look inside the air-raid shelter.
Your townsfolk pressed together in their dirty clothes,
Fellow Germans, hostage to a mass hysteria,
Cursing, sobbing, and beside themselves a moment ago
When the Führer passed by, a messiah in his Merc,
A national rally for the soul, high day for the Volk.
One great Sieg Heil and then a thousand years of shame.
‘Davon geht die Welt nicht unter,’ sang Zarah Leander,
and Radio Satan kept on transmitting just the same.
Just office studs and typing totty still believed in wonders.
Grünbein’s attitude here is hardly subtle. His intention, it seems, is not to create a provocative new vision of the past but to directly castigate complacency. Leeder’s helpful notes will tell you that the Swedish actress Zarah Leander was the highest paid female movie star of the Nazi movie business – and many German readers also know that her most famous song was “This Is Not the End of the World.” The irony drips.
But the further one goes into the sequence, the more prismatic Porcelain looks and the more complex it sounds. Grünbein’s poems don’t comprise a screed. It is so various in stretches, and the tone suddenly so wavering, that every sort of grievance with the poet finds its fodder. Withholding emotion, the work has been accused of ignoring the traumatic effects of terror and devastation. Other critics have indicted the “too green” Grünbein for expropriating others’ stories of suffering. As Leeder writes, “For whatever reason, critics have too often missed the fact that the poem as a whole rehearses precisely these dilemmas as a way of questioning the very premise of who can write about such things and how.”
[Published by Seagull Books on December 11, 2020, 96 pages, $17.00 hardcover]