Black Men by Haki R. Madhubuti

First published: 1990

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

As he approached his fiftieth year, Haki R. Madhubuti drew on his experiences as an engaged artist, a practicing poet, a social activist, and an African American to gather into the form of a book a series of interlinked essays directly addressed to the most serious problems afflicting the African American community. Writing partly in response and as a complement to the strong voices of such African American women essayists as June Jordan, Bell Hooks, and Maya Angelou, among others, partly as a speaker for a social group underrepresented and often “voiceless,” and partly as a concerned citizen confronting a national crisis, Madhubuti combined in his essays the powerful language of a poet and the perceptions of an intellectual activist in a campaign for social justice and communal pride. In Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Afrikan American Families in Transition: Essays in Discovery, Solution, and Hope, Madhubuti cast himself in one of the most ancient and most important roles for a poet, that of cultural storehouse of his people. As he put it, “I’m a poet in the Afrikan griot tradition, a keeper of the culture’s secrets, history, short and tall tales, a rememberer.” His essays are a teaching text, a source of wisdom, insight, and inspiration built on the considered experience of the author. The structure of the book is developed through the construction of a foundation of knowledge that is based on the study of a wide variety of writers covering an international perspective; Madhubuti concentrates this material into an individual voice.

To avoid the dangerously narrow viewpoint of an exclusively personal essayist, Madhubuti permits his own singular being to emerge gradually through his language and ideas, with a minimum of specific biographic detail. The only essay that offers information about Madhubuti’s life is entitled “Never Without a Book”; the piece is designed to show how important books have been for him and, by extension, to support his essential argument that the book is the most powerful weapon that a people might utilize in a struggle to preserve its cultural heritage. He recalls that from the age of thirteen, when his mother introduced him to Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), “seldom has there been a day that I’ve been without a book.” He comments that for a poor boy living in Detroit on “unforgiving urban streets,” books “represented revelation and intellectual liberation,” the twin centers of soul and mind. Like many other street kids, he notes, he quickly learned the dubious but necessary skills of “how to pray, rap and lie to white people.” Books offered other possibilities, widening the scope of experience beyond the world he had previously known, and he was struck by the capacity of language to free a person “from the awesome weight of race, gender, class and poverty in America.” He knew how black men fought in the streets; now he was becoming aware of how they were being “annihilated intellectually” by the misuse of language and cultural knowledge as “weapons of power and destruction.” Madhubuti lists the books and authors that were most important to his awakening, and he notes that for him, as for many other intellectually adventurous boys, the public library became a “second home.”

Because he knows both realms—the limiting, numbing world of the street and its temptations, and the infinitely more challenging and rewarding world of the imagination, with the satisfactions it ultimately offers—Madhubuti is prepared to address the problems of what drives people from a place in a family and community to the desperate, temporary gratifications of destructive street life. While the title of the book suggests that its focus is on African American men, the direction of the essays is toward the reconstitution of the African American family. Madhubuti arranges the essays using two patterns of rhythmic organization that are grounded in African American traditions: the concept of a theme and variations that is at the heart of jazz improvisation, and the vocal dialogue of call-and-response popular in black church congregations for centuries. There is an echo of the book’s title query about black men—“Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?” (the theme)—in the subtitle “Essays in Discovery, Solution, and Hope” (the variation), as well as a further tonal extension in the book’s dedications and acknowledgments. This is a part of an aural texture that is also evident in the frequent use of lists (akin to extended variations on a theme) and in the location of poems throughout the text to emphasize or reinforce a particularly important point, a device something like the powerful melody (the theme) recurring after sections of development. The idea of call-and-response is related to the speech-oriented aspect of the essay form, and Madhubuti uses it in anticipation of reactions and questions that might be raised at crucial places in his argument and as a way to state a problem (the call) and then to address the issue (the response).

The overall organization of the book is essentially threefold, paralleling the title and the subtitle. In regard to each significant element in the societal disintegration he identifies, Madhubuti probes for its causes, describes its most damaging effects, and searches for some possibilities of remedy. The cause/effect/search-for-solution form, however, is more a general progression, with frequent returns and reiterations, than a specific sequence. At the pivotal point of the book, the title essay focuses attention on black men as a symbol of the cumulative effects of racist policies, which have resulted in the loss of African American traditions, the erosion of familial relationships, and the black community’s spiral into decline and despair. Individual essays outline the problems in devastating detail; Madhubuti then discusses specific programs, approaches, and philosophical anchors for setting positions of strength against discouragement. Moreover—throughout the book, but especially in the concluding chapters—Madhubuti offers examples of individuals and organizations demonstrating the principles he proposes. The impression that this format is designed to convey is one of resilience, determination, and, ultimately, hope. His mood is somber in the face of the facts he confronts, but the last essay concludes with the word “love,” and the final page contains the poem entitled “Yes” that is an affirmation of the beauty of true human civilization.

Critical Context

Haki R. Madhubuti is a “race man” (to use Langston Hughes’s or Sterling Brown’s term) but not a racist. He is acutely aware of the assault on black cultural values and the destructive impact of national policies on African American life in the United States, but while he is determined to restore and maintain those aspects of the African American tradition and heritage that he considers vital for survival, he has not condemned other racial groups, and his anger is directed at the racist policies of white Americans, not at any other race. His sensible, fair-minded essay “Blacks and Jews: The Continuing Question” is critical of both groups, and he does not avoid admiring comments about the behavior and practices of Jews in America, which he feels might be useful as an example for others.

Madhubuti was born Don L. Lee in a Detroit ghetto and reared by a single mother who was murdered when he was fifteen. He saw young illiterate, directionless black men on the streets, and he regards his discovery of literature as the source of his strength in escaping from a similar destiny. Through the continuous development of his artistic capabilities, he has become Haki R. Madhubuti (the name is drawn from Swahili words meaning “just” and “precise; accurate, dependable”). His philosophy, as expressed in his essays, is meant not only for the black community but also as a critique of American society in the last decade of the twentieth century. He describes his audience as all “serious men and women,” and while his ideas are built on the experiences of the African American world, they are applicable to and designed for the human race. The damage done to the black community, he argues, has harmed the entire nation, and Madhubuti’s personal credo, “To be progressively consistent in my politics and profoundly kind in my manners,” has nothing to do with race or gender. Nevertheless, Gwendolyn Brooks has accurately described him as one of the first “blackeners” of English; his use of the black idiom in poetry in the 1960’s made him relevant then, just as his evolving critique of the entire black community from his Afrocentric perspective has kept him relevant into the 1990’s. The essays, poems, and other writings collected in Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? are a part of his continuing contribution to the cultural heritage he values.

Bibliography

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. An appropriate complement to Madhubuti’s social commentary from a “committedly feminist, hopefully leftist, and unabashedly racialist perspective.” Includes a highly individual response to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy.

Hooks, Bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Essays described as “direct, sometimes angry, and always probing” that connect African American experiences and traditions with evolving conditions in the postmodern era.

Jennings, Regina. Malcolm X and the Poetics of Haki Madhubuti. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Major work evaluating the aesthetics informing Madhubuti’s poetry and arguing that Malcolm X acted as the poet’s “literary muse.”

Madhubuti, Haki R. Don’t Cry, Scream. Chicago: Third World Press, 1969. The first major collection of Madhubuti’s poetry, published by the press he established to give black writers access to adequate publishing and distribution systems. Other important collections include Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal, 1973-1983 (1984), which offers essays and poetic commentary on political and social issues, and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (1987), which contains “cutting verse” on various manifestations of American culture.

Madhubuti, Haki R. YellowBlack: The First Twenty-one Years of a Poet’s Life: A Memoir. Chicago: Third World Press, 2005. Autobiography covering the formative years of Madhubuti’s life and his first forays into poetry.

Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. 1979. Reprint. New York: Verso, 1990. The first section presents a feminist critique of the Black Power movement that argues that, as a result of white racism, “there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between black men and women.” Both a parallel to and another angle on the issues Madhubuti addresses.

Wallace, Michele. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso, 1990. A collection of essays and articles on black artists, including Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ishmael Reed.