In Black & White

This series of conversations with six African-American writers focuses on the relationship between creative writing and ethnicity. We watched three of the titles: Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Recent winner of a National Book Award (for Middle Passage), Charles Johnson is a true Renaissance man that divides his time between being a family man, a writer, a teacher, and a student of both Eastern philosophy and the martial arts. His last two novels, Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, both begin as slave narratives which branch out into wondrously picaresque fables Sometimes criticized for being too "intellectual" a writer (a charge not entirely without merit), Johnson talks about his literary background, first as a cartoonist, and later as a student of philosophy. Although he works within the framework of African-American literature, Johnson finds writing from an ethnic standpoint as too constricting a base to work from. On video, the usually laid back Johnson (laid back, at least, when he was my creative writing instructor in college) comes across a bit stiff. Still, as a model for an aspiring writer, Charles Johnson's work and philosophical bent offer a prominent literary beacon that any writer--regardless of color--would benefit from discovering. Toni Morrison, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved and more recent Jazz, speaking from her teaching base at Princeton, talks about the lack of an African-American literature when she was growing up. Morrison went looking for works by Black writers which celebrated the Black experience. Instead, she found works, many of them nevertheless outstanding, with a social or political agenda. As scenes, often brutal, from African-American life in the past appear superimposed on the blackboard behind her, Morrison talks about the legacy of slavery. Unfortunately, Morrison's comments about "whiteness" (as in, if we remove the concept of whiteness, we remove the problem) are a little confusing and could be easily misunderstood as an oversimplification of the multi-faceted problem of racism, a problem which occurs worldwide across all shades of skin. What cannot be misconstrued, however, are novelist Alice Walker's (The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy) remarks about race. Once a believer that "all" Blacks were fundamentally "better" than Whites, she has modified her extreme position to just "many" Blacks are better than "most" Whites. It's a surprising, disconcerting, and somewhat disheartening comment from one of our country's most gifted and poetic novelists. Additionally discouraging are her insights about gender. A self-proclaimed "womanist" (which Walker defines as "Black feminist," since to Walker the word "feminist" connotes--rather strangely--European white woman), she sees "male power" as the offensive weapon that divides women from each other--a position that is both philosophically boring and biologically naive. At the same time, Walker is the least "academic" of the speakers, and much of her commentary on growing up and working towards becoming a writer is quite interesting. Although the emphasis on writing or the Black experience shifts from tape to tape, these programs are all thought-provoking and would serve as an introduction to the works of the authors. The other three tapes in the series are: Gloria Naylor, August Wilson, and John Wideman. Recommended. (Available from: California Newsreel, 149 Ninth St/420, San Francisco, CA 94103; (415) 621-6196.)