Step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks But what stands out to me now is Cleaver’s earnestness in the book, his bluesy-wounded tenderness, that neither he nor the world around him had any idea what to do with it.įor the record I recognize that I’m easily prey In some ways, she was right: even though I cannot dismiss his past so easily, even to this day, Soul on Ice is a persuading and profound book it is the bildungsroman of a young criminal who reinvents himself as a Black Panther and revolutionary. But my classmate insisted, “No, you don’t understand, it is much more complicated than that, he is more complicated than that, just read it.” I was hesitant to read it because, for starters, I was deep into my 20th read of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but also because I simply could not reconcile Cleaver’s past with his reform, his literacy with his criminality. And if Soul on Ice wasn’t so extraordinarily powerful and so honest about his violent misogyny, it would be easy to dismiss the praise he received from established literary forces like Norman Mailer as the result of the strange, congratulatory bond men can share over the violated bodies of women.Ī classmate introduced me to Soul on Ice in my last year of middle school. There can be no rationalizing of that, and we can’t go further without acknowledging that fact.
#Kendrick lamar good kid maad city narrative full#
Cleaver was a man full of the almost embarrassing desire to express all of the makings of himself despite the costs, open to all mediums and seemingly unconcerned about how much ridicule or scorn that self-expression might bring him.Įldridge Cleaver was also a rapist. They were merely another leitmotif in his homophobic, sometimes rambling obsession with his own masculinity. You’ll be cock of the walk with the new collection from Eldridge de Paris,” he advertised.Īlthough it is difficult to understand Cleaver’s intentions in designing the pants, it is easier to configure them into the strange blues that was Cleaver’s life. He made pants with a codpiece, calling the cloth prosthesis that fell from their fly the “Cleaver Sleeve.” “Walking tall … walking proud … walking softly but carrying it big. But first, Cleaver, on the lam from a shoot-out with the Oakland police, moved to Paris and became a fashion designer. Twenty years later - still long before he converted to Mormonism, or ran as a Republican candidate, or invented Christlam, his own religion with its branch of military forces called The Guardians of the Sperm - came Eldridge Cleaver’s first book, Soul on Ice. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” Ellison would explain that, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. In Ellison’s piece he suggested that Black Boy is shaped more by the blues tradition born from the same hard countryside as Wright than it is by any literary genre or narrative model. In the summer of 1945, Ralph Ellison wrote a review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Wright’s semiautobiographical novel about his tough boyhood in Mississippi. IN A MOMENT I will tell you why Kendrick Lamar, a young rapper from Compton, deserves much of the acclaim, and, even more so, the analysis he has received, but first let us deal with the vanguard of black memoirists who came before him and in whose well-forged path he follows. If guys like that were ballsy enough to put that out, how can you deny it? That was the foundation to be able to say whatever the fuck you want. He sang that and had people dancing to it. Jimmy Reed sang “Big Boss Man,” and, as a black man, he sang that because he couldn’t say it in the workplace. But I said, how can you abandon what we come from? All the stuff that you’re jamming to came from this foundation. In high school I had a friend who asked me why I played the blues, that black people don’t play blues. The sound of the blues is pre–Civil Rights.
0 kommentar(er)
