Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Toure.

Askia M. Toure. Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Toure. Chicago: Third World P, 2000. 105 pp. $12.95.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly marked culture in the United States. It changed how basic notions of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, politics, and art were (and are) understood. However, one of the most important literary legacies of the Movement is the continuing productivity of key Black Arts writers, such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Haki Madhubuti, and Askia Toure. Toure's Dawnsong!, a particularly ambitious example of that productivity, seeks to create a new sort of African American epic, fusing Black Arts mythmaking with a radical post-Black Arts historicism.

Toure, as has been noted by such scholar/artist/activists as Lorenzo Thomas, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Amid Baraka, was a major architect of the Black Arts Movement, serving as a sort of "flying delegate" of the Movement. He participated in such crucial cultural/political institutions as Umbra, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, The Liberator, The Journal of Black Poetry, and Black Dialogue. His poetry (and his performance of this poetry) during the Black Arts era was notable for its combination of a mythic African sensibility, an epic voice, a tonality and phrasing rooted in African American popular song (especially r & b and gospel), and a jazz rhythm derived significantly from John Coltrane and the "free jazz" artists of the 1960s. Toure's postBlack Arts poetry, including the work collected in the American Book Awardwinning From the Pyramids to the Projects (1989), merged this mythic African/African American landscape with the sort of concern for history and historical detail that he had always shown in his essays.

Dawnsong! extends this mythic historicism, creating the first book of a polyvocal epic, much in the vein of Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred, Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery, and Amiri Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's. It is literally a fusion of Toure's Black Arts and post-Black Arts work in that it recontextualizes such Black Arts poetry as 'Juju," first collected in the 1970 chapbook Juju (Magic Songs for the Black Nation), with later poetry, including several poems from From the Pyramids to the Projects. In this Toure recalls Hughes, who frequently mixed new work with older pieces (e.g., in the 1937 "poetryplay" Don't You Want to Be Free and the 1967 collection The Panther and the Lash) as a sort of polemic about the basic continuity of African American culture. Dawnsong!'s sweep also resembles the epic history of Pablo Neruda's Canto General.

In addition to Toure's literary forbears, Dawnsong!, with its huge range of Egyptian (Kemetic), sub-Saharan African, and diasporic religious, historical, and musical references, resembles the work of composer and band leader Sun Ra, whose performances were a sort of multimedia pageant that ranged in material from Afrocentric myth through blues, New Orleans jazz, swing, bop, doo wop, and soul to interstellar avant garde futuristic jazz. Not surprisingly, music is (and has always been) a particular touchstone for Toure's work, which invokes traditional African music and dance, spirituals, ring shouts, gospel, r & b, bebop, and free jazz (including a tribute poem to Sun Ra).

Like Tolson's Harlem Gallery and Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's, Dawnsong! has a heavily elegiac cast. The first seven poems of the collection engage Egyptian (Kemetic) myths of birth, death, and rebirth, particularly the myths of Isis and Osiris. This opening serves both as a sort of epic invocation of the gods and as a model for the African diasporic project of memory, elegy, and potential liberation that Toure had previously sketched out in From the Pyramids to the Projects. One of the primary tasks that the opening sets for itself is to place or replace African women at the center of this mythic vision. In some respects, such a placement is a return to older African American nationalist notions of Mother Africa. However, Toure's text differs from some earlier literary uses of this figure in that he does not cast Mother Africa and the African woman as a nuturing, but relatively static and unconscious, force. Instead, Toure goes on to link Kemetic goddesses and queens to a continuum of such African American wome n artists and activists as Bessie Smith, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gladys Knight, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Audley Moore, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Kemetic mythology suffuses the entire collection, but the remainder of the book is primarily focused on the experience and destiny of black people in the United States and is basically a series of elegies dedicated to African American artists and activists, particularly jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, including John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. However, to say that these poems are elegies to individuals does not fully capture their substance, since the artists and their music are seen as having a metonymic relationship to the larger political and cultural landscape of Africa and its diaspora so that the names of Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Elijah Muhammad, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin (to list a relative handful of those mentioned) mix with those of Coltrane, Sun Ra, Davis, and Monk.

In general, Toure's work is successful in realizing its ambitious project. At times there does seem to be a contradiction between the arrangement of the poems on the page and what seem to be the rhythmic intentions of the poems--unlike, say, the early poems of Sonia Sanchez, where lineation and use of space serve as guides to performance. This not only muffles the voice of the poems, but on occasion makes the diction of the poems seem a bit abstract or even slack in ways that are not the case when one hears Toure perform them. Nonetheless, even with these reservations, Dawrzsong! is an important contribution by a central Black Arts activist and promises to be the beginning of a major African American epic.

[c] 2002 James Smethurst