Mirrors of Deception: Visualizing Blackness in the Poetry of Chicago Black Artist Johari Amini

Abstract

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) has become an increasingly popular subject of critique in recent years. Despite participation of some of most prolific women writers, artists, and activists of this period, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Mari Evans, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan (some of whom did not define themselves as artists), male artists and intellectuals are given credit for shaping and codifying aesthetic and political ideologies of BAM. Cherise Pollard reminds us that: As they articulated black manhood through pen, gun, penis, and microphone, male poets in Black Arts Movement defined and reified revolutionary black male identity.... [M]any [black women poets] worked both within and against men's assumptions about relationships between race and gender and art and politics. (Pollard 173) The work produced by women writers and artists characterized ideological and propagandistic relationships between race, sex, and art in ways that deserve careful examination. In his extensive project, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African-American Poetry and Culture, Tony Bolden provides an overview of this subject as it relates to women poets, stating that much of black vernacular culture, like American generally, is male-centered, and [i]s a product of that culture. An acknowledgement of ways in which male writers and intellectuals of BAM, such as Haki Madhubuti, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal not yet learned to question narrow framework in which gender is theorized in black culture is integral to an exploration of ideals of this period (25). Indeed, scholars are now beginning to recognize complexities of aesthetics of this historical period in ways that move beyond popular critiques of its masculinist ideological foundations. Such interests privilege other aspects of BAM that recognize its artists' varied approaches to executing its ideals. Black American writers of preceding generations had debated, discarded, and negotiated questions of cultural representation, nationhood, and role of black writer in articulation of such concepts, and BAM writers of 1960s and '70s would continue to do same. Looking at goals of BAM through context of local initiatives, in such cities as Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Chicago, is useful for engaging ways in which BAM principles were experimented with and sustained by black artists in particular communities. Although New York is often understood to be at center of most of artistic productivity of BAM, due in part to a migration of innovative black writers there during 1950s and '60s (Nielsen 79), Movement would be shaped in other regions of U. S. as well. In Chicago, for instance, black artists were affiliated with Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC), a multi-media initiative that would continue to thrive well into decade of eighties. As James Smethurst suggests in a valuable historical survey of BAM, the numerous direct exchanges and interconnections between African American cultural and political activists in Chicago and Detroit made Black Arts movement in those cities exceptionally vital (180). For members of OBAC, both writing and production of other media of expression was germane to communication of organization's specific objectives. For example, under direction of such members as artist Jeff Donaldson, one of captains of AFRICOBRA, visual arts branch of OBAC, efforts of local artists to translate its ideals into visual media would be realized in construction of in/famous Wall of Respect on Chicago's South Side. As Margo Natalie Crawford writes, The OBAC visual arts workshop decided to shape mural around following categories: rhythm and blues, jazz, theater, statesmen, religion, literature, sports, and dance. …