The Black Arts movement sought revolutionary change in the way that African-Americans saw themselves and clearly understood that this new model must originate within the Black community. In his essay “The Development of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” James T. Stewart explains this self-determination is necessary because “the existing white paradigms or models do not correspond to the realities of black existence” (3). He sees Blackness and black artistic forms as “happenings” and a “becoming.” “Perpetuation, as the white culture understands it, simply does not exist in the black culture. We know, all non-whites know, that man cannot create a forever; but he can create forever,” Stewart explains (4). His reasoning is militant and revolutionary and a reaction to white Western culture’s adherence to the “concept of fixity,” which leads to treatment of art as object and commodity, something that he feels is contrary to African-American understandings of art, creation, and performance. He feels the proper model is one that is found in African-American musical forms consistent with a Black style, those based on the community’s “spiritual and moral philosophy” (3). “That spirit is black. That spirit is non-white. That spirit is patois. That spirit is Samba. Voodoo. The black Baptist church in the South” (6) “We want a black poem/And a/Black World/Let the world be a Black Poem/And Let All Black People Speak This Poem/Silently/or Loud,” Amiri Baraka similarly demands this in his poem “Black Art.” Mike Sell explains that BAM sought to “redefine and revive the ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical bases of African American society in regard to the Black artist and his community (Sell). This avoidance of what Larry Neal calls “the white thing” (qtd. in Sell) and the movement toward a new black aesthetic founded on the principles of performance are central ideas found in Charlie Cobb’s multi-genre performance piece, “Ain’t That a Groove.”
Cobb’s work exists outside of the white paradigm in several ways. It clearly responds to the realities of black existence and undeniably positions itself outside of the Western white model by consistently grounding itself within the natural aesthetic styles and rhythms of jazz and blues. It “performs” this Blackness that Stewart and Baraka seek, and in some ways exceeds it by revealing that this moving is not completely gender-neutral by invoking the soulful sounds of Nina Simone and echoing bell hooks’ claim that “feminism is everybody” (qtd. in Kelly 137) by including Lillie Mae’s hopscotch and the repetition of the phrase, “Freedom Now.” Cobb’s work is militant and revolutionary. The oppressed is no longer writing to the oppressor here; it is undeniably rooted in the BAM philosophies of nation-building and self-determination. Cobb positions himself as artist and as activist who seeks to directly challenge existing power structures. Even the form itself defies classification. It is poetry; it is a voice on the radio; it is theatrical performance, the call and response of the African tradition, the improvisation of jazz on the page, and as a result positions Cobb as militant activist, who, in Hoyt Fuller’s words, “has decided that white racism will no longer exercise it’s insidious control over his work” (Fuller).
Like West African drums used for communication1, each of the three sections of Cobb’s work establishes timbres and contrasts that may not be recognizable or accessible to a white audience and perform Blackness through various peformative methods of enactment and positioning. Section I, for instance, clearly establishes boundaries between the narrator and a potential white audience with its “reply to whitey” in the words of the Atlanta DJ, who remarks, “It ain’t the size of the ship/that makes the wave/it’s/the/Just about where we at [my emphasis]/motion of the ocean” (Cobb 519). Clearly the underlying message here is, “It’s a black thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Cobb immediately positions himself as a revolutionary artist and the narrator as a revolutionary spokesperson to demonstrate to the audience, whether white or black, that this isn’t a revolution with two opposing sides.
To his black audience then, since a white one is no longer being addressed after the opening words of the DJ, the narrator spends the remainder of the first section posing questions about the pending revolution and suggesting some possible tools for use. “How to spread the revolution—or need of one? What where, how who to say this to? We know/accept, that we got to struggle. Understand I hope, that our heart, our life—our struggle is of black people” (527). A reader can imagine the narrator addressing his audience in the tone and timbre of the Southern Baptist preacher invoked by Stewart. With this call and the “preacher’s” pause indicated by Cobb’s positioning of the lines and use of blank space on the page, one can visualize the narrator (as preacher) waiting for the audience’s response. Cobb culturally and historically situates this speaker/preacher’s body as Blackness, in a performance of Blackness, as if to say in Stewart’s words, “We [my emphasis] are, in essence, the ingredients that will create the future” (6).
Interestingly, Cobb then invokes the image of “Lou Rawls on the Radio,” who speaks, “I’m in a world of trouble . . . playin double” (527). Perhaps the speaker sees the R&B singer as not representing a true Black aesthetic. In his essay, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” Amiri Baraka explains that although “R&B is straight on and straight back out of traditional Black feeling,” its “expression and spontaneity … can be taken off by… subjection to whitening influences” (202). So in a sense then, Rawls would represent the double consciousness that Stewart warns that the Black community should avoid. “It’s got to stop. Let every black, packed, on every block; bent in every field, get into his thing. But, make it against the man” (519), Cobb’s narrator argues. In order to escape what Stewart sees as the Black position of “misfits estranged from a white cultural present” (6), this narrator urges the black community to no longer co-opt and perform identities that are not their own, but instead to perform and enact their essential black selves, and explains the way to do so is to make use of “natural forms such as the oral tradition, song, dance, play, rhythm” (519). “The effectiveness of whatever we might have to say is always dependent on our link to the active tones of the community,” the narrator argues.
Having established the tools and the means for revolution, the final section of part I then answers the question of who will be involved and how this new activism will be accomplished. Although the tenement houses of Atlanta’s northwest ghettoes are “owned by the white man, and a few Negroes aspiring to ‘white power,’” the streets of the black neighborhood represent fluidity, movement, and a soulful blackness to the narrator while the tenements represent whiteness and fixity. This natural black movement through the fixed spaces of “streets and sidewalks can pose political threats,” he explains. Cobb then positions a game of hopscotch with a little girl as a revolutionary act when he writes “FREEDOM NOW” in the first square of the little girl’s hopscotch blocks. “A simple communication tool: Chalk and playing awhile with some kids,” he relates. “The purpose of writing is to enforce the sense we have of the future. The purpose of writing is to enforce the sense we have of responsibility—the responsibility of understanding our roles in the shaping of the world,” Steward explains. Section II of Cobb’s poem illustrates the writer’s performance as activist urging his people to harness their energies against “objects” like buildings that are representative of whiteness by making them sites of black performance, to use them as spaces to communicate with their people about revolution, Black power, and “FREEDOM.” This section also, however, makes it clear that revolution isn’t just an act of the artist, but one in which the black community, both male and female, should participate as well. “The West denies change, defies change …. resists change,” Stewart points out. Cobb wants his black audience to understand they are change.
Moreover, section II of Cobb’s piece serves to remind one that the way to freedom is to refuse to participate in white Western aesthetics and to embrace the natural rhythms and fluidity of their own blackness, their blackness as becoming. Cobb’s narrator makes reference to James Brown and refers to him as “black motion.” In other words, he is Blackness. Baraka claims that to play Brown’s music in a space is to open it up to “a place where Black people live” (Changing, 191) and argues his screams are “more ‘radical’ than most jazz musicians sound” (Changing, 208). This invocation of Brown then establishes the performative quality of blackness that the white man cannot objectify. It is orderless, cannot be controlled. It lacks the “rigidity of form and craft-practice” that Stewart identifies as the West’s propensity to deny change (9). This elusiveness that continually becoming is Blackness. It is revolution and something that the white Western aesthetic cannot control for “their rhythm is order” (522).
The final section of Cobb’s work can be seen as a call to action, an enactment of one’s blackness, an embracement of black “dance, sing, and swing. Black rhythms” (524). Triumphantly, the narrator warns, “Watch out now (I’m into my thing)”. So, in the space of a few pages, the narrator has moved from questioning how to perform and construct a revolution to enacting it and making it present through Black dance, song, and rhythm and returns to the trope of call and response when Nina Simone in her singing of “Sinnerman” chants, “Power, give me power.” But where’s the response? The narrator argues, “Twenty-two million black people in the United States need to back her up” (524). It’s now time for the audience/reader to enact the revolution against what the narrator calls “the problem of the Local White Motha-fuckers” (524).
Cobb’s story performs the Blackness that many in the BAM like Baraka and Stewart sought. It is militant. It is revolutionary. In Stewart’s terms, Cobb makes it clear that the artist is a “man in [my emphasis] society, and his social attitudes are just as relevant to his art as his aesthetic position” (9). In addition, he clarifies that the value of Black art and Black performance can be found only in the Black community. The point of Cobb’s story then is not to create an art object, but a living, breathing revolution that would emancipate the Black community’s mind from Western values and standards by embracing black “becomings” and “happenings.” These “happenings” found in the spaces and performances of Black life and are modeled on black spirit and style. In other words, Cobb’s performance piece makes it clear that it is time for the Black community to embrace its own sound, its own beat, and do its own thing.
NOTES
- In “African Slaves/American Slaves: Their Music,” Amiri Baraka explains that the rythymic quality of today’s Black music originates with the African drum, which was used for communication, and the use of drums of different timbres could produce harmonic contrasts “not recognizable to the Western ear” (28). The different timbres and harmonic contrasts of the three sections of this piece are figuratively another method used to position it outside of Western models and ensure that this revolution remains one-sided.
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