Patrimony

Five years ago an enterprising poet named Kevin Young edited an anthology called Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, which he packed with impressive work by writers such as Hilton Als, Edwidge Danticat and Joe Wood. Young wanted to update The New Negro anthology, that touchstone of the Harlem Renaissance, for the hip-hop generation, and he undertook the project in a spirit of reverence. "I see it as the writer's job, especially the African-American writer's job, not to 'kill the literary father' but rather to celebrate our ancestry," he explained in the book's introduction. It's understandable that Young would not want to look back to the past in anger since, for African-American writers, killing the literary father has often meant getting tangled up in fights over the proper way to "represent the race" (think of James Baldwin's attacks on Richard Wright in "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone"). Young's decision to avoid the zero-sum game of patricide, then, is as much political as aesthetic. In a "post-soul society," Young explains in Giant Steps, "the essentialist and often easy answers to questions of race--which have never been easy; just ask Bert Williams or Paul Robeson or Josephine Baker or Muhammad (Ali, that is)--are as complicated as ever. In recognizing the diversity of 'the black experience,' the poets here ask: Where do Shaft and Langston Hughes meet?"

That's a good question, and it raises another: Can Shaft and Langston Hughes be made to meet? In other words, how can Young talk about celebrating one's entire ancestry--let alone knowing it--without resorting to empty provocation? That's not an unreasonable question, especially since Young knows better. His first book of poems, Most Way Home, is an unsentimental portrait of postwar life in the Deep South. A key poem is "The Preserving," and while it concerns the seasonal ritual of canning, it also delicately evokes the complex chemistry involved in any act of preservation:

One Thanksgiving, while saying grace
we heard what sounded like a gunshot
ran to the back porch to see
peach glass everywhere. Reckon
someone didn't give the jar enough
room to breathe.

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