Excerpt from The Black Interior

Preface

“ Today as the news from Selma and Saigon / poisons the air like fallout,” wrote the poet Robert Hayden in the late 1960s, “I come again to see / the serene great picture that I love.” In Hayden’s poem, culture consoles and the artifact stands as a record of the human trace, a history of the individual voice and collective living spirit. Art is where and how we speak to each other in tongues audible when “official language” fails. It is not where we escape the world’s ills but rather on place where we go to make sense of them.

Each day’s news brings word of human atrocity and violation, as too many of us linger in pernicious and calcified ideas of who “the other” is. In desperate times when a citizen’s raised voice seems to make no difference at all, it feels useful to turn again to the art and popular culture with which we speak across difference, from each to each, to say, This is who I am, and thus, this is who we, collectively, are. What might we hope for and work toward?

Culture is one way I take in the world and venture beyond my boundaries, where I often find politics as well as aesthetic joy so deep I experience it in my body, where I shift and have sometimes shifted others through my own writing and teaching. The work I do is culture work, and culture is what calls many of us in to the conundrums of the public sphere. Culture and politics need not present an either/or proposition if politics is restored to its original meaning – “of the polis,” the village, the community. Sometimes we encounter truths in culture not necessarily verifiable against census records or voting rolls. Sometimes in culture we find what we are hoping for before we have been able to articulate or enact it.

African American people are seen, imagined, and “known” through sociological and fantasy discourses, but the troves of our culture offer enlightening angles of vision. The historian laments caesuras in the historical record; the artist can offer deeply informed imagining that, while not empirically verifiable, offers one of the only routes we may have to imagine a past whose records have not been kept precious. The artist may, in fact, jog the historian to think in new ways about the data he or she might gather.

What unites these essays is an idea, a metaphor, of what I call “the black interior,” that is, black life and creativity behind the public face of stereotype and limited imagination. The black interior is a metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power and wild imagination that black people ourselves know we possess but need to be reminded of. It is a space that black people ourselves have policed at various historical moments. Tapping into this black imaginary helps us envision what we are not meant to envision: complex black selves, real and enactable black power, rampant and unfetishized black beauty. What do we learn when we pause at sites of contradiction where black creativity complicates and resists what blackness is “supposed” to be? What in our culture speaks, sustains, and survives, post-nationalism, post-racial romance, into the unwritten black future we must imagine?

The cover image that this book is fortunate to bear is of Elizabeth Catlett’s 1970 sculpture, The Black Woman Speaks, and it exemplifies my thoughts herein. Catlett has made potent, relevant art from the 1930s to this day, and her career has remained vital through dramatically changing times. She created this sculpture when her career was fully mature – at a complex, turbulent moment in this country’s history – and like the mature Gwendolyn Brooks in 1970, Catlett’s art managed to speak straightforwardly “to the people” at the same time that it evinced artistic power and mystery. The black woman’s mouth and eyes in Catlett’s sculpture are wide open. What is she seeing? What is she saying? What is inside? On the side of the sculpture, just behind the woman’s temple, Catlett has inscribed a spiral-like symbol. The spiral is a symbol of infinity; this infiniteness of “The Black Woman’s” inner life and imagination is the unyielding premise of these essays.

Copyright © 2004 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.