African American Haiku: Cultural Visions by John Zheng

Abstract

238 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Zheng, John, ed. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 192pp. ISBN: 978-1496803030. $65.00 Hardcover. In the canon of African American literature, perhaps no form other than the novel is more studied and revered than African American poetry. The dynamic and varied poetry of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton are frequently anthologized, however, the haiku is one particular poetic form that is relatively understudied. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, edited by John Zheng, brings together a diverse collection of previously-published essays on several African American writers who were most prolific and enamored with this form: Richard Wright, James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore. In his introduction, Zheng acknowledges that this collection is not comprehensive in its scope, but is one of the first volumes devoted to an exploration of the unique contributions these poets have made to reimagining the Japanese poetic form. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions organizes each article in groups based on the author, and Zheng smartly places the more historical articles on each author first, allowing a reader who is unfamiliar with the authors to gain important cultural and literary context. Though the organization aims to introduce the reader to each author’s larger literary legacies and their reasons for embracing and reinventing the haiku form, some of the articles tread similar ground, especially in terms of biographical information.However,the efficacy of the authors’arguments and explorations is not diminished by these redundancies. For example, in the opening section on Richard Wright, both John Zheng’s “The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright’s Haiku” and Sachi Nakachi’s “Richard Wright’s Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice” spend the first several pages noting similar biographical information. While Zheng argues for an understanding of Wright’s haikus as “a universal search for an expression of oneness with nature,” Nakachi takes an entirely different approach, instead arguing that Wright’s fascination with haiku is “steeped in emotion and thought” and that Wright “encod[es] his social criticism between the lines,” providing a particularly illuminative discussion of the imagery of lynching in Wright’s haikus (18, 25, 33). As the collection progresses, the articles move from an exploration of each individual author’s fascination with haiku to an understanding of how all of these authors have created their own unique forms inspired by and borrowing from Japanese literature and Eastern philosophy. Yoshinobu Hakutani’s “James Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku and African American Individualism” lays the groundwork for a discussion of the confluence of haiku with African American jazz and blues—a theme revisited throughout the collection—arguing that James Emanuel, as a foundational figure in the creation of the jazz haiku form, translates both the haiku’s and jazz’s emphasis on the “effac[ing] of identity” into an exploration CLA JOURNAL 239 Book Reviews of human desire, a nontraditional subject for haiku (36). Following Hakutani’s article is Virginia Whatley Smith’s “Afro-Asian Syncretism in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku”; and, though her article in its opening paragraphs seems to be a reiteration of Hakutani’s, in her recognition of Emanuel as creator of the jazz haiku, she broadens her argument, asking her readers to understand Emanuel’s influence in a larger context of “Afro-Orientalism,” a confluence of cultural literary influences that create an elevated, cross-cultural art form (85). A particularly compelling argument presented in the volume is Claude Wilkinson’s “‘No Square Poet’s Job’: Improvisation in Etheridge Knight’s Haiku,” in which he continues the thematic exploration of jazz and blues influences in Etheridge Knight’s prison haikus and argues that Knight, through a reimagining of his incarcerated environment with natural imagery and metaphors, reinvents the haiku form’s emphasis on an understanding of oneness with nature and thus develops a“populist aesthetic”that made the haiku accessible to a broader audience (92). Wilkinson’s discussion of Knight’s work is so engaging that it does leave the reader questioning why Knight is the only author included in the volume who has only one article examining his work, especially considering the...