Tip-toeing on the tightrope: a personal essay on Black writer ambivalence.

A drum roll roared, a crowd hissed, cymbals clashed, and a muscular young African woman finessed her way up the ladder to the landing, then to the wire. Fans around the world marveled at this glamorous Black woman with sparkly make-up and neon tights who danced on the high wire at the UniverSoul Circus, the world's first all-Black circus held recently on Chicago's South Side. I thought it was the first time I witnessed a Black person walking the tightrope, until my genetic memory reminded me of the many times Black folks have had to, and will continue to, walk the tightrope.

Welcome to my Big Top. Step right up as I walk you through the death-defying feats performed by and performed on Black writers who could be ringmasters in the literary circus we call "The Academy" if their greatness were not judged by the lions.

Black writers - meaning those of African ancestry from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean - have been prolific and profound, writing volumes on the subject of Black writer ambivalence, the duality of attempting to amplify their writer's voice within the Black aesthetic while maintaining reverence to the Eurocentric aesthetic; projecting through one's words a moral and political awakening while playing out the stereotypes some Whites still have for Black writers and other Negroes; continuing to treat this affliction with a prescription of value-laden verbs while fighting disillusionment and constant explanations about duality to people who wake up every morning never feeling the pangs of race and its relationship to class, gender, and sexual orientation.

Black writers' ambivalence is aggravated by the need to be twice as good as White writers while receiving only a third of the money and an eighth of the recognition. The tension between the two selves we battle as Black writers in a White literary world is our exigence, our source of triumph as well as defeat - our source of immense satisfaction yet also the reservoir of our angst. From Du Bois to Danticat, scores of important Black writers have dissected the double-vision of the children of the ancient African diaspora. For example, author-lawyer Derrick Bell, in his essay "The Last Black Hero," details the schizophrenia afflicting his hero, writer-singer Paul Robeson (Faces 66), who was accepted for his art but not for his race - though my psychiatrist-wife frowns upon my apparent misuse of the precise clinical term schizophrenia, which she defines as "a psychotic illness involving hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre behavior."

Bell explains in "The Rules of Racial Standing" that Blacks are denied "legitimacy when they discuss their negative experiences with racism or even when they give a positive evaluation of another Black person or his or her work" (Faces 111). Saul Bellow detailed his feelings on this subject in 1952 when he praised Ralph Ellison for finding a "way," as a Black novelist, to "go at their problems, just as there are Jewish and Italian 'ways.' "According to Bellow, had Ellison adopted a more strident tone - one typical of many of today's minority writers - "he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone" (qtd. in Crouch 89).

Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid says that she had to flee from her Black island home to New York's White literati to begin her career, simply because she "could not have become a writer living among the people" she knew best (162). Is this double-talk or double-vision? Author-curmudgeon Stanley Crouch illuminates the double-vision concept in his book The All-American Skin Game when he explains: "Conceived and laid out by W. E. B. Du Bois in the first chapter of his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, the condition somehow disallows consciousness of self and creates an aching split - 'this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder'" (47). Crouch praises his mentor, author Ralph Ellison, for expanding on Du Bois's "dubiousness": Ellison's perspective on the dilemma of race consciousness presumes that a "stripe negates the question of the individual and imposes some sort of 'authenticity' that can trap the single human life inside a set of limited expectations (often bestowed on Blacks by Whites)" (49).

I find Crouch fascinating. He's a conservative Black intellectual and a provocateur. And while he and I are on opposite sides of most tightropes, we find common ground on at least some complexities of Black writer schizophrenia. Says Crouch, "As an American, I am heir to a heritage far more intricate and compelling than most of what is said about it, regardless of the sayers' tone or class. As a writer, I am often asked to serve in an army whose purposes I consider dubious and whose leadership I look upon with great reservation. Therefore, like most of us, I am always working to avoid being pinned down in the human game" (45). Perhaps that's why I feel complete when I jump on a plane leaving America and seem to gather the parts of the collective me the founding fathers forgot to add up when they claimed that I, and other Blacks, were only 3/5ths of men, to be counted like cattle because we were chattel slaves. Whiteness as Property is the foundation of judicial thinking and some might also say literary criteria for "universality," if one were to extend the metaphor to Eurocentric standards of merit and value. Crouch and I do not buy into this mythology, but society (and a segment of the Black community) seems obsessed with perpetuating inferiority myths.

No wonder I feel more at home in post-apartheid South Africa than in my post-modern birthplace on the South Side of Chicago. At least in the new South Africa remedies to today's twoness are on the table; dialogue as well as action to rectify the wrongs of yesteryear are moving forward. Here, in the belly of the beast, things are, as they say on the street, "ass backwards." In this progressive African nation, there at least appears to be a safety net under the tightrope.

Not every Black writer shares this seemingly African-centered view of reality. Washington Post writer and Out of Africa author Keith Richburg feels the opposite. "I thank God my ancestors survived," Richburg writes in his introduction (xii). He jumps for joy that the White man (with plenty of African and Arab help) shipped his slave relatives west so he could evolve as a New Age Negro poster boy for White conservatives who applaud his self-loathing as "courage," and use it as an excuse to limit foreign aid and investment to African countries so they can instead send it to Europe or Asia, where they think their corporate profits are more likely to boom. Is it not a ritual, a blood ritual, an initiation that White America, White privilege worldwide makes Black writers anywhere and everywhere go through? Is it written in stone or in the critical essays of the East Coast literati, who rubber-stamp taste and culture in America, or even the world, that what we write as Black writers is ethnocentric and always inferior to the more "universal," superior work Whites write? Can we not boldly and bravely address the human condition as well, if not better, given our exigence?

These are questions Black writers for centuries have continually asked themselves. The answers, unfortunately, don't come easily, if they come at all. Take Black lawyer-essayist Patricia Williams, for example, who in "Mirrors and Windows" wrote: "I feel my Blackness as an eddy of conflicted meanings - and meaninglessness - in which my self can get lost, in which agency and consent are tumbled in constant motion" (168). This is duality.

Critic Rebecca Blevins Faery agrees that "Williams' essays are filled with images of psychic and physical fragmentation" (58). Another critic, Alisa Solomon, picked up on the significance of this schizophrenia translating another Black writer's work, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Solomon reports that African Americans are "in a perpetual state of Middle Passage, their identity hidden somewhere in the ocean-sized, centuries-old hyphen separating African from American" (1375).

Literary life in America for Black writers makes you ask, with critic Bernard Bell, "Is 'the Negro only an American and nothing else' with 'no values and culture to guard and protect?'" (3). Bell continues on this theme of alienation, double-consciousness, double-vision, socialized ambivalence, and schizophrenia when he assumes that there has always been a cultural and social boundary in America beyond which the African American could not go: "As a major contemporary black writer and social critic has stated: 'At some point always, he could not participate in the dominant tenor of the white man's culture, yet he came to understand that culture as well as the white man. It was at this juncture that he had to make use of other resources, whether African, sub-cultural or hermetic. And it was this boundary, this no-man's land, that provided the logic and beauty of his music'" (xii).

One could say that maybe I have made good use of "African resources." As a former foreign correspondent who covered Southern Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Europe for the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, I have had the opportunity to see and report on Africans and others in all of these places. I've also been able to commune and connect with them by obvious and not-so-obvious means. Chicago-based poet-healer M. Eliza Hamilton insists that I and other Black writers draw upon our collective unconscious, our genetic memory, that we draw upon the knowledge of the ancestors, connect with those Africans and Black Americans who traveled before us and that we use their strengths and weaknesses to guide us through this post-colonial, post-modern, post-Malcolm existence we call life.

This is not to say that African American writers do not suffer from the same double-vision that afflicts other Black Americans. We do. Even on a good day I have the protean blues. Any conflicted individual will tell you of the interminable pain and misery that ambivalence ignites. It's a fire in your brain you can't put out. It's smoke that clouds your vision, puts a haze on your soul. It hurts like hell! But when the African aspirins kick in, it's the sweetest pain, giving character, backbone, commitment, and vision. Like most Black writers, I'm inspired by a host of other writers, ranging from Seneca, Turgenev, Hazlitt, and Gordimer, who are White, to Forrest, Morrison, Garcia Marquez, and Two Rivers (Shinob), who are not. They help me see. Even without bifocals, I'd like to think I deal with double-vision better than most, something that might disturb mainstream arbiters of journalism, literature, and other kinds of letters. The pain of being told by editors that my stories need White sources "to validate" the several Black sources quoted was one thing I challenged as a cub reporter with a variety of news organizations. I also challenged commonly held notions that foreign correspondence and arts criticism were the turf of well-heeled, well-educated White males.

"Since the 1960s, African-American literature and criticism have incorporated the artistic criteria established by European and American White hegemony; intellectual and cultural forces demanded this concession," writes Dr. Joyce Ann Joyce (3). Dr. Joyce, an American Book Award-winning critic who contributed with me to Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the '92 Rebellion and Profiles of Great African Americans believes that "the African-American writer/critic must look within, to self and community, for the inspiration to need to shape a characteristically Black art and to mold healthy African-American minds. The writer/critic's antidote to the serpent's bite is to stay centered in the best American traditions, not to become anesthetized by [the] dazzling performances of somebody else's aesthetic" (3).

Many of the best American traditions include the African-American aesthetic, which is one reason that I fought the cultural imperialism of Hollywood and became an L.A.-based arts critic in the late '70s and early '80s. It was my first professional high-wire walk. While much of my work centered on music and helping to define the African and Caribbean influence and its dominance in mainstream musical art forms, after a while I got tired of reporting on the next new beat in town and wanted to explore global issues and how they intersected with local ones. When I could not get my editor to pay for my trip to the Middle East to cover both the Iraq-Iran War and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the mid-'80s, I raised the money myself with friends, fellowships, and neighbors' credit cards. I did the same thing to get to South Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and anywhere else White folks told me I could not go and could not report because it was not "appropriate."

When I decided to write Prism: An African-American Reporter's Multicultural View of the New South Africa, a few South African Whites and American Whites told me I could not chronicle (although a few told me I could) White South Africans', Black South Africans', Indians', Coloureds', and Black Americans' respective histories in the same volume because it had never been done before. I was also told that Whites were "more qualified" to do such a study. I published the book myself under my Soweto West Press imprint; went to London, Paris, and Montreal with the book; and sent copies to Cape Town and Johannesburg, where the book was better received than it was in this rag-tag town I called home. The London Times called the book a classic; Le Figaro hailed it; Montreal's Le Devoir called it an important historical work; and then the book review editor at the Chicago Tribune told me that Prism, along with my newer coffee table book chronicling famous African Americans, Profiles of Great African Americans, was not "appropriate for review." The following week she reviewed four books on dogs.

Why is it that Black writers (and other Black artists) do better in foreign countries than in the country where we were enslaved, then freed to be oppressed, repressed, then depressed? Why are we treated worse than dogs? Is a "nigga with a pen" just another tightrope walker with a pole?

The late, great James Baldwin was one of our better tightrope walkers. He first found a sense of balance by writing with liberal White publications in the mid-'40s about both Black and White subjects, and he did so better than most of the Whites who were writing arts criticism at that time. In a sense, you can say he beat them at their own game. But who are Whites to proclaim arts criticism or foreign correspondence or anything else, for that matter, as their domain? Walking the tightrope, while a skillful act, is a dangerous one, one fraught with the psychic tension of having one foot on greatness and another on self-destruction. Walking the tightrope for Baldwin proved early in his career to be too much for this young, brilliant writer, so he packed his pens and with 40 bucks in his pocket flew off to Europe to make a name for himself. Says biographer-friend-former secretary David Leeming in his book James Baldwin, Baldwin "had already written his Harlem childhood novel, he wanted to write a Harlem play, and . . . then there would be other novels, but not necessarily Harlem novels; he was not a protest writer or a 'Negro writer,' he was a writer" (90). Or at least that's what he thought. "Rightly or wrongly, at this juncture in his career Baldwin felt that he must reveal his experience not in the form of protest literature, not as a 'Negro writer,' but as a writer. In order to achieve this goal he had to reach out beyond the ghetto for his audience. The 'liberal' journals were the logical place and the uninvolved objective point of view followed just logically" (102). Yet when Baldwin died in December 1987 no White luminaries eulogized him. Toni Morrison did. Thank God he had made peace with his family and his extended family of Blacks worldwide at that time, or even this great man - perhaps the best American essayist of the twentieth century - might have gone unnoticed and ignored in death as he and so many others had during their schizophrenic lives. Is something wrong with this picture?

Retrieving history and telling one's story for conflicted individuals is not easy. The search for clarity, truth, and justice is the motivation for Black writers and critics to create an "oversight body" to police the cultural imperialists who would, like Draculas in the night, rob us of our souls. In defense of our people and our own tortured souls, we form two pencils in the image of the cross. We are empowered by our people, and we stand on the shoulders of ancestors lost; so even in the face of imminent danger, warrior-wordsmiths of color who use "writin' as fightin'" have no time for self-doubt, given our power to right wrongs, decompress and as well as deconstruct, rebuild the repressed, and enrich our people and others with our words, which are letters from our soul.

Our rewards are few, yet our sacrifices are many. Look at me. I have to work three jobs, maintain membership on six boards, feed three kids and a wife - all the while going to school full-time to learn how to teach people of color how to write more effectively - while perfecting my craft. How many White writers do you know who have to work like a slave? Is this what I have to do in order to "level the playing field" so that my words can have an equal opportunity to fly? For me, the answer is Y-E-S!

My story mirrors that of many Black writers. It's essentially a story of fear and faith; it's a story of how conflicted individuals, suffering and blessed with bicultural, bilingual abilities, attempt to find balance on a tightrope. Consider former Chicago Tribune editorial writer Leanita McClain, who killed herself in the mid-'80s when Whites and Blacks rejected her after she projected that a Black man named Harold Washington would become mayor of the country's most segregated city, received a ton of negative reaction, wrote a piece for Newsweek called "How Chicago Taught Me How To Hate," and was castigated by newsroom peers and the public at large. She ended it all one night with an overdose of sleeping pills. I refuse to go out like that, without taking a few misplaced participles with me. As my former teacher Ishmael Reed reports in Writin' Is Fightin', I put on my boxing gloves as I pick up my pencil. Armed with an eraser and the collective unconscious of a people like me who consider themselves African first and American second, I walk the tightrope of art for art's sake versus socially conscious art; I use the balance bar on the literary tightrope to be both a communicator for the masses and a chronicler of a people; and I try not to lose any sleep over my own tortured nightmares about whether or not White folks accept me as a writer (or Black folks, for that matter).

With South Africa's Dennis Brutus and Mandla Langa in my heart, and Nigeria's Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe in my head, and Americans like Baldwin, Reed, Parker-Rhodes, and Walker in my writing hand, I refuse to see Blacks as just "faces at the bottom of the well," as author-lawyer Derrick Bell suggests in his poignant book about the permanence of racism and America's preoccupation of Blacks being seen as pathological models who are inferior to Whites. I don't buy into that kind mythology, nor should you. This is one point I believe many Black writers would argue. I continue to seek new forms of re-engagement with people of African descent in particular and cultural community in general. Tragic optimism and the need to inform and improve the human condition guides me as I, like those before me, and those after me, are forced to traverse this tightrope called the African-American writer's dilemma. With sparkle on my face and tights made from the skin of Angolan lions, I face the spotlight's glare without a safety net other than the one the spirit guides of my African and American ancestors provide.

I accept my narrative task. I am an acroblack. My art is my epiphany. History is my own heartbeat. I find true balance on the high wire. On one hand I affirm my Black writer's voice, and on the other hand I engage the dominant cultural community in a vigorous dialogue. I rise to the occasion "because," as Maya Angelou says, "I rise!" My high wire act is far from over; the clowns have yet to enter the ring. May I now take a bow and prepare for an encore?

Works Cited

Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic, 1992.

Crouch, Stanley. The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

Faery, Rebecca Blevins. "Text and Context: The Essay and the Politics of Disjunctive Form." What Do I Know: Reading, Writing and Teaching the Essay. Ed. Janis Forman. New York: Boynton/Cook, 1996.

Joyce, Joyce Ann. Warriors, Conjurers and Priests: Defining African-Centered Literary Criticism. Chicago: Third World P, 1994.

Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother. New York: Farrar, 1997.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Madhubuti, Haki, ed. Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the '92 Los Angeles Rebellion. Chicago: Third World P, 1992.

Richburg, Keith. Out of America. New York: New Republic, 1997.

Solomon, Alisa. "Language in The Last Black Man." The Bedford Introduction to Drama. 2nd ed. Ed. Lee A. Jacobs. Boston: St. Martin's, 1993. 1375-77.

West, Stan. Prism: An African-American Reporter's Multicultural View of the New South Africa. Oak Park: Soweto West P, 1995.

West, Stan, David Smallwood, and Allison Keyes. Profiles of Great African Americans. Lincolnwood: Publications International, 1996.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Start West is the author of several books, a producer, and a talk show host at WNUA-FM in Chicago.