The Conduct of Propaganda
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"All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists," declared W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American philosopher and civil rights leader, in "Criteria for Negro Art" (1926). The trenchant declaration captures a vital truth about the function of literature in directing the sympathies of the reader. Being somewhat priggish and not a little puristical, I confess to feeling uncomfortable with the word "propaganda," feeling as I do the Singaporean state's output of feel-good songs, images, and 'news' as a rash.
Was it the element of 'propaganda' in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin that disappointed my high hopes? The poems are tremendously inventive and musical, but the matter and treatment of the murders of young black men in America is... too obvious? Too easy a play for the sympathies of the readers of poetry, who are, by and large, liberal. Here, someone may object to my use of the word "play" for so tragic an American subject. That person will be as guilty as I am of the charge of purism. Play does not exclude high seriousness.
I concluded it was not so much propaganda as the conduct of it that bothered when I finished reading another recent highly praised volume of African American poetry, Ross Gay's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Gay does not look away from racism, but includes it as one element only in revealing poems about his family and his community garden. A black gardener? That was new to me who had only literary and visual images of the slave plantation and the cotton gin. Only after I moved to Harlem did I meet a black gardener, in the interstitial spaces between residential brownstones, where community gardens, like in the East Village, have a chance to flourish. No, this is not about the universalizable humanity of the black person, who has a family and works in a garden like the rest of us. This is about the limitation, always potentially the racism, of my conception of black experience. Directed to see this new thing, I am grateful to Gay's garden catalog.
I had a similar experience hearing Gina Apostol read from her new novel last Saturday. A perception of the limits of my thinking. In its depiction of the Philippine-American War, Insurrecto impresses on me the idea that not only does the colonizer live in the body of the colonized, but, startlingly, the colonized also lives in the body of the colonizer. The novel expresses this truth in its prose, and, even more significantly, embodies it in its very structure. I don't know if you have to leave the Philippines to live in America to write such a dual-seeing novel. I do know living away from home makes such stereoscopic vision natural.
That is the great hope of the Singapore Unbound Fellowship (see below). Again it brings a promising Singaporean writer to stay in New York City for two weeks without any requirements for goal-setting, performance, or report. The writer is set free to take in whatever aspect of this great, tragic city that fertilizes the growth of an artistic vision, which is synonymous with a social vision. To that writer, Du Bois gives this wise, humbling caution, in the same essay quoted above:
"We have, to be sure, a few recognized and successful Negro artists; but they are not all those fit to survive or even a good minority. They are but the remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance. We black folk are not altogether peculiar in this. After all, in the world at large, it is only the accident, the remnant, that gets the chance to make the most of itself; but if this is true of the white world it is infinitely more true of the colored world. It is not simply the great clear tenor of Roland Hayes that opened the ears of America. We have had many voices of all kinds as fine as his and America was and is as deaf as she was for years to him. Then a foreign land heard Hayes and put its imprint on him and immediately America with all its imitative snobbery woke up. We approved Hayes because London, Paris and Berlin approved him and not simply because he was a great singer."
To the reader, black, brown, or yellow, he says:
"The ultimate judge has got to be you and you have got to build yourselves up into that wide judgment, that catholicity of temper which is going to enable the artist to have his widest chance for freedom.... We must come to the place where the work of art when it appears is reviewed and acclaimed by our own free and unfettered judgment. And we are going to have a real and valuable and eternal judgment only as we make ourselves free of mind, proud of body and just of soul to all men."
And to all of us: "Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless."
Jee Leong Koh
January 17, 2019
"All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists," declared W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American philosopher and civil rights leader, in "Criteria for Negro Art" (1926). The trenchant declaration captures a vital truth about the function of literature in directing the sympathies of the reader. Being somewhat priggish and not a little puristical, I confess to feeling uncomfortable with the word "propaganda," feeling as I do the Singaporean state's output of feel-good songs, images, and 'news' as a rash.
Was it the element of 'propaganda' in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin that disappointed my high hopes? The poems are tremendously inventive and musical, but the matter and treatment of the murders of young black men in America is... too obvious? Too easy a play for the sympathies of the readers of poetry, who are, by and large, liberal. Here, someone may object to my use of the word "play" for so tragic an American subject. That person will be as guilty as I am of the charge of purism. Play does not exclude high seriousness.
I concluded it was not so much propaganda as the conduct of it that bothered when I finished reading another recent highly praised volume of African American poetry, Ross Gay's Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Gay does not look away from racism, but includes it as one element only in revealing poems about his family and his community garden. A black gardener? That was new to me who had only literary and visual images of the slave plantation and the cotton gin. Only after I moved to Harlem did I meet a black gardener, in the interstitial spaces between residential brownstones, where community gardens, like in the East Village, have a chance to flourish. No, this is not about the universalizable humanity of the black person, who has a family and works in a garden like the rest of us. This is about the limitation, always potentially the racism, of my conception of black experience. Directed to see this new thing, I am grateful to Gay's garden catalog.
I had a similar experience hearing Gina Apostol read from her new novel last Saturday. A perception of the limits of my thinking. In its depiction of the Philippine-American War, Insurrecto impresses on me the idea that not only does the colonizer live in the body of the colonized, but, startlingly, the colonized also lives in the body of the colonizer. The novel expresses this truth in its prose, and, even more significantly, embodies it in its very structure. I don't know if you have to leave the Philippines to live in America to write such a dual-seeing novel. I do know living away from home makes such stereoscopic vision natural.
That is the great hope of the Singapore Unbound Fellowship (see below). Again it brings a promising Singaporean writer to stay in New York City for two weeks without any requirements for goal-setting, performance, or report. The writer is set free to take in whatever aspect of this great, tragic city that fertilizes the growth of an artistic vision, which is synonymous with a social vision. To that writer, Du Bois gives this wise, humbling caution, in the same essay quoted above:
"We have, to be sure, a few recognized and successful Negro artists; but they are not all those fit to survive or even a good minority. They are but the remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance. We black folk are not altogether peculiar in this. After all, in the world at large, it is only the accident, the remnant, that gets the chance to make the most of itself; but if this is true of the white world it is infinitely more true of the colored world. It is not simply the great clear tenor of Roland Hayes that opened the ears of America. We have had many voices of all kinds as fine as his and America was and is as deaf as she was for years to him. Then a foreign land heard Hayes and put its imprint on him and immediately America with all its imitative snobbery woke up. We approved Hayes because London, Paris and Berlin approved him and not simply because he was a great singer."
To the reader, black, brown, or yellow, he says:
"The ultimate judge has got to be you and you have got to build yourselves up into that wide judgment, that catholicity of temper which is going to enable the artist to have his widest chance for freedom.... We must come to the place where the work of art when it appears is reviewed and acclaimed by our own free and unfettered judgment. And we are going to have a real and valuable and eternal judgment only as we make ourselves free of mind, proud of body and just of soul to all men."
And to all of us: "Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless."
Jee Leong Koh
January 17, 2019
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