CHARLES JOHNSON ON CRITICS, THEMES AND THINGS

There are a couple of different but related questions on the table to answer today. Things that need to be tidied up.

Between 1969 and 1972, I did several book-length cartoon manuscripts. Johnson Publications in Chicago (the Ebony, Jet, Black World people) published the first one, Black Humor (1970), which I drew in one intense week after hearing a campus lecture by Amiri Baraka; and a fly-by-night west coast publisher, Aware Press, did the second, Half-Past-Nation Time (1972), but after that book came out, its publisher disappeared into thin air with a third book-length manuscript of drawings I did devoted entirely to the subject of slavery. (This second book from 1972 is extremely hard to find and I only have one copy of it myself.) Yet another book-length manuscript (unpublished) was on meditation and Eastern philosophy---some of those appear in a little book called Buddha Laughing (Bell Tower, 1999), which the editors at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review put together. (These drawings were published in that volume shortly before I started writing essays for Tricycle and later was selected to be one of their contributing editors by publisher Helen Tworkov just before she stepped down from running that magazine.)

The two published cartoon volumes deal a lot with black cultural nationalism, which was very much with us (tyrannical so, in my opinion) in the late 1960s and early '70s. Critics are right to point out that emphasis in the drawings, and to note the absence of that now dated subject in my fiction and non-fiction.

In addition to asking for the above clarifications, Ethelbert asks, "What themes do you feel critics overlook in your work? What order would you suggest your work be taught? Is it important to study the cartoons, too?"

I suspect one underlying, general theme critics often overlook in my work is the question raised in my story about Plato and Diogenes, called "The Cynic": How does one live a life of moral and spiritual integrity in a broken, corrupt society? That is a question that drives Faith Cross, Andrew Hawkins, Rutherford Calhoun, and Matthew Bishop.

From my days as an undergraduate forward, my work has always been very inter-disciplinary. One form of artistic and intellectual expression nurtures and feeds the others. Whatever it is we call creativity and the imagination--those two great mysteries---can be for some creators experienced as "global" in their lives, not localized in a single form of expression, but rather spreading or spilling from one genre to another, one artistic or intellectual discipline to another, for all the humanities (along with the sciences) are related, interconnected. When some people wake up each day they're as liable to pick up a drawing pen as begin a new story on their word processor, as likely to grapple with a philosophical essay about the mind/body problem as they are with the first stanza of a poem. (Frankly, for a Buddhist, one's daily life itself can be seen as a  canvas, a work-in-progress shaped by each and every one of our creative and rational deeds until the day of our death.) Or see creative imagination as the roots and trunk of a tree that shoots forth many branches of expression that arise from the same mysterious, inexhaustible source. (And isn't there something very quintessentially American, even Emersonian and Ellisonian, about an individual artist---or any person---who embodies the Many in the One, who is creatively free in a democratic republic to do this and this and, naturally, that, too?)

 However, for the sake of convenience people in general---and not just critics---always feel they need to label and categorize an artist.(This is especially true for artists of color.) We like to put things in neat, little boxes. After his or her name, they'll say "novelist," and ignore the others fields in which that individual works. 


Or they'll say,"poet." Or "screenwriter." All of this speaks to the natural, inevitable and annoying human tendency to oversimplify people and things (or any phenomenon) to make them manageable. But a polymorphous creator doesn't want, of course, to see any of his children slighted or ignored. (However, that's a situation he or she may simply have to learn to live with.) A sort of ars poetica statement I was asked to write for the Academy of Arts and Letters when I received their Academy Award in Literature in 2002 best expresses, metaphorically, how I see this situation in respect to my own body of work. Here is a slightly abbreviated version of that statement:

 "I see my body of work as being like a mansion with many rooms.  The foundation for the mansion is the novel Oxherding Tale.  Inside this imaginative “house” are rooms you can wander through or dwell in for awhile.  One has novels.  Another has short fiction. A third has 295 interviews from radio and television, in newspapers, and scholarly journals.  In the fourth you’ll find screen-and-teleplays. A fifth has philosophical essays such as “Reading the Eightfold Path.”  A sub-room of that has essays on many subjects---on Indonesia, how to draw political cartoons,the craft of storytelling, a pedagogy for writing workshops, the history of black cartoonists, an overview of black literature since the Harlem Renaissance, film critiques, and critical appreciations of many writers. Yet another room is devoted to book reviews. Other rooms have editorial and panel cartoons, comic strips, texts for studio photo books, and many public addresses and lectures. On and on through this house, from the basement to the attic, you’ll find prose and visual art in numerous aesthetic forms (the slave narrative, the sea adventure story, the folktale, the animal fable, the fabliau, and political novel).  There is fiction and non-fiction on the martial arts, affirmative-action, “exchange value,” Dr. Martin Luther King’s refrigerator, and a future in which the government taxes people’s dreams as well as traditional fables and parables in a sub-room of the bigger room devoted to short stories.  This is my conception of what a total body of work should be, one that is evolved over a lifetime, is generous in form and content, and offers a variety of different aesthetic experiences."

THE FIRST TRIBE OF CHARLES JOHNSON

At the peak of the intense and thoroughly enjoyable seven years I spent as a professional cartoonist and illustrator (starting when I was 17-years-old), and before I became a "writer," I would produce five finished drawings a day, Monday through Friday, for a total of 25 by week's end. I was in early graduate school then (1971), and I would usually sell 5 of the 25, and that was enough for my wife and I to buy groceries every week. More even than the comic idea, I prided myself on my draftsmanship, which was at its best between 1970-73. 

But sadly (for me), this is an important side of my life and work that literary scholars and other writers usually ignore because their training is in English (words), not art. They don't know how to talk about the work of cartoonists and illustrators, though so many Americans have been both writers and visual artists, for example, James Thurber and John Updike. If you want to blow your mind and see just how many writers have been excellent artists, look at The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers, edited by Donald Friedman with essays by William Gass and John Updike (Mid-List Press, 2007). I was very pleased that work from that book was on exhibit in two galleries on the east coast shortly after its publication, and that my humble offerings were included. To be honest, I often talk about writing and aesthetics in terms of the grammar of the visual arts, because that was the first professional Tribe I belonged to.

These days when I have a drawing assignment, I prefer to spend eight hours on  just one composition. Since my childhood I've immersed my mind in the visual arts of the world, comic art especially, everything from Zen drawings to Honoré Daumier,  Thomas Rolandson, Thomas Nast, George Cruikshank, the late great black editorial cartoonist Ollie Harrington (a friend of Richard Wright) who I had the pleasure of meeting at a cafe in Berlin in 1989, everything. This wide-ranging interest in visual art is, I suspect, the basis for my similar interest in world literature, and in the possibilities of formal variations, for a journeyman artist must learn to work in many styles and have many approaches for solving a particular creative problem.

My first published article was on this subject, "Creating the Political Cartoon" in Scholastic Editor/Communications and Graphics (1973), and for that I did both the text and illustrations. The hope for any artist is to create something worthy of being reprinted over the years. But I also love writing about cartoonists. See my introductions for Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, by Fredrik Strömberg (Fantagraphics Books, 2003), and Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans, by Roland Owen Laird, Jr (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).

 

First comes the idea. Then I do some research on the costuming and the setting I want to use. After that, I play with sketches to arrive at a composition that I feel is balanced. The pencil work takes the most time, but since I was a kid I've loved the ekagratha (Sk. for "one-pointedness") of focused attention to detail (every line, every stroke), and the total absorption I experience at this stage.

Then comes the fun part, the inking. As when doing calligraphy, you must feel free and flexible when the ink pen is in your hand. I prefer bold strokes and strong outlines. (You can identify every cartoonist by his style; and that was the premise of one of my teacher Lawrence Lariar's detective novels.) Your whole body is involved, not just the mind. Indeed, drawing is a right-brained activity, and I relax into this final stage like a man easing into a warm bath, with music from a Seattle soft jazz station playing in the background on my radio. After that comes shading by using wash, half-tone screens, or Photoshop (which I'm still learning how to use). In other words, I'm in heaven. Truth to tell, like John Updike, I'd rather draw than write on most days. I love the feel of the paper, the ink sometimes staining my fingertips, the wholeness that comes from the experience of drawing. (Words are symbols, so abstract and cerebral  by comparison.)

If readers would care to see a portfolio of what I think is some of my best work, please go to my author's website at oxherdingtale.com. Look toward the left and you'll see "Cartoons 1970-2004." Click on that. It also has a publicity photo from my 1970 PBS how-to-draw series, "Charlie's Pad." (To this day---even just two weeks ago---I hear from people who tell me they learned how to draw from watching that show when they were kids.) 

For one of the best articles written on my work in this area, check out cartoonist Tim Kreider's essay on my first published book, "Brighter in Hindsight: Black Humor by Charles Johnson," posted in The Comics Journal, Jan. 18, 2010. The link for this is Brighter in Hindsight: Black Humor by Charles R. Johnson « The Comics Journal.

 

"POPPER'S DISEASE" BY CHARLES JOHNSON

As I compose these words, writer Tom Williams, an associate editor of the American Book Review, is working to finish by the end of May a commentary on the philosophical, science fiction story "Popper's Disease." That commentary will be published in the online literary magazine The Collagist, which Williams tells me reprints "a classic story with commentary by an admirer of that story." I haven't seen Tom's commentary yet. Since I don't want to influence or interfere in any way with his interpretation of that tale (which I am very thankful for), I think it's best for me to keep this statement about the story, originally published in Callaloo and reprinted in my first collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice, brief.

If memory serves, I wrote that story during the summer of 1978 and, believe it or not, it was the first story I composed on an electric typewriter, everything prior to that having been written on a manual. (And I didn't start writing on a word processor until 1989.) Partly inspired by Kafka's "A Country Doctor" (which inspired John Gardner's sci-fi story about clones, "The Ravages of Spring"), "Popper's Disease" is about a black physician in southern Illinois who witnesses the crash of an alien spacecraft. The doctor is a man who has "integrated" into the white world in the post-Civil Rights period, but with a certain social uneasiness due to the fact that blacks and whites so often misunderstand each other---indeed, they are often opaque and mysterious to one another. He enters the wreckage to help its occupant and discovers that this alien, called the Creature, is suffering from a fatal affliction and has been exiled by its species to the Earth where that disease is common. The hope is that perhaps earthlings, who are familiar with this sickness, can find a cure.

I hope readers find this story to be as funny as I intended it to be. When the telepathic Creature describes the symptoms of his illness to Dr. Popper (whimsically named after philosopher Karl Popper), it's clear that what he is suffering from is a severe case of Sartrean existentialism as it is presented in Being and Nothingness. The alien senses that he is pour soi or "being for itself," an individual and separate consciousness, but everything else is en soi or Being-in-itself, which is intrinsically opaque and massive. As philosopher Herbert Spiegelberg explains in The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (Vol. Two), "Consciousness as such, beginning with its questioning behavior...proves to be the opening wedge for the 'nothing'; without it there would be no place for the 'nothing' in the universe of Being...Consciousness sets itself off against Being by a fundamental act of negation..." 

      

        And so our poor suffering space traveler says: 

"Well," he said, touching the tips of his tentacles, looking away, "for no apparent reason, and without the slightest warning, I experience feelings of first a tightness in the cerebral area, a tremor or unpleasant quiver, then a shock of dislocation, cold sweat, followed by vomiting, vertigo---the sense of falling, the inability to ascertain precisely what things mean, and the peculiar sense that I am somehow dependent upon everything in my perceptual field: xlanthia, hbeds, or sploks, which have a curious opacity, a marvelous beauty"---here he burst into tears---yet threaten to absorb me, engulf me, annihilate me complete, because I am, in a word, deeply and inexorably different from them." His anguish exploded in my mind. "It's nauseating, do you see?"

(Remember Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée?)

Ah, but those are just the annoying, surface symptoms of his disease. As the tale progresses, Dr. Popper sees to his shock that he is being cuckolded by his white wife (that vision appears on a surveillance screen/computer called the Telecipher in the creature's ship). Like the alien from beyond the stars, he feels all at once that he, as a black man, exists as an alien in his own social world in America. He also realizes that he is now trapped in the wreckage of the downed space craft, and his extra-terrestrial patient is dying.

The story eases away from Sartrean existentialism to Buddhist metaphysics. On the Creature's home world, ontological dualism does not exist. There is only the appearance of "difference" and a separate identity, which are illusions. Everything is interdependent. The Aristotelian logical rules of identity are overturned, as they are in quantum physics where a quanta of energy can be either a particle (A=A) or a wave (A=not-A), depending upon where and when you glimpse it.  Trapped inside the ship, frantically working with the Telecipher to unlock the mystery of the disease, Dr. Popper is startled when the machine suddenly and surprisingly diagnoses the sickness: It's the Self and There is no cure.

Do I believe in the existence of aliens? Well, I'd love to see an extra-terrestrial spacecraft land on the White House lawn at noon with all the world's cameras recording that event. But we don't have, I'm afraid, a single shred of empirical evidence so far to support the existence of life anywhere except on Earth. We may be alone in the universe, an accident of evolution on our little, blue-green planet in its Goldilocks orbit around the sun. (A huge amount of evidence supports that thesis.) On the other hand, the probability of something similar to that "accident" happening elsewhere in a universe with stars as numerous as grains of sand on a beach should not be dismissed.

I've longed believed that aliens in our popular imagination serve much the same purpose that angels did during the Middle Ages. Like angels, they descend from the heavens, usually shrouded in light. Their science and technology border on resembling the supernatural. Aliens, then, are a metaphor---and that is how so many science-fiction writers have depicted them. (We really can't imagine an alien precisely because it is alien to everything we know.) In a sense, then, they are our projections of an apparently deep-seated human need for an encounter with mystery and wonder.

         And what could be wrong with that?

         P.S. I guess I didn't keep this "brief" after all.

WORDS FOR OUR FATHERS

 E. Ethelbert Miller asks if Buddhism, Christianity, Islam or any spiritual tradition can help black men overcome the difficulty they have being good fathers. I don't need to recite the dire statistics. You know what he's talking about.

I'd like to angle in on this question by introducing E-Channel readers to the work of a man I have long admired and learned from, the late, great meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran. After a career as an English teacher in India, Eknath Easwaran came to America in 1959 on the Fulbright exchange program, and once he established himself in California he founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley in 1960. He was a remarkably prolific writer, one very literary and with a delicious sense of humor, as you might expect from a retired English professor. Like his hero Gandhi, Easwaran embraced and taught those things that are positive and valuable in all spiritual traditions. 

EKNATH EASWARAN

I began reading Easwaran's works in 1981, all his books and translations of Hindu classics, and every issue of his journal The Little Lamp (that was the pet name given to him in Kerala by his grandmother, Eknath Chippu Kunchi Ammal, whom Easwaran saw as his most important spiritual teacher). And I have long been in the habit of giving to friends and former students either interested in meditation or experiencing suffering his concise, compressed, 16-page pamphlet Instructions in Meditation (1972), available through a press he founded, Nilgiri Press. 

That little instruction manual summarizes the eight-point program for meditation and leading a spiritual life that we find in Easwaran's other books. I trust it completely. The first thing I came to realize when I became a father at 27-years-old in 1975, is that when you have a child you must cease being a child yourself. You must put aside childish things and childish ways, and this can be especially hard for some people in America's infantile, narcissistic "youth culture" that seems to trap so many people in prolonged adolescence. You must become a practicing grown-up because you have brought into the world a helpless, completely vulnerable life that depends on your care and unselfish devotion 24/7 for at least 18 years (but usually longer) until you empower him or her to become self-reliant. Parenting is the most important job any human being can have. And as someone once said, it does involve a" life-time sentence." Easwaran's Instructions in Meditation is an infallible guide for being such a parent and a grown-up.

           The eight points of his program are as follows:

1). Meditation. "Most of us have grasshopper minds dispersing our attention, energy, and desires in multitudinous directions, and depriving us of the power to draw deeper and richer resources for creative living," Easwaran writes. Meditation is the antidote for those characteristics of what Vivekananda famously called the ever agitated and out of control "monkey mind."

2). Japam. This is "repetition of the mantram or holy name." In Sanskrit, mantram  literally means "mind refuge," or "mind protection." Think of this in terms of how you've seen elephants swinging their trunks wildly until a mahout gives the elephant a stick to curl its trunk around. This always calms the elephant. The mind is like that and during times of emotional turmoil simply needs something to hold onto in order to steady itself. Japam is that stick and serves that purpose. (Just before I have to give a reading or a lecture, I always find myself silently doing japam as I sit listening to someone introduce me to an audience.)

3). Slow down. Easwaran quotes British poet John Donne when he says, "Be your own home and therein dwell. Let us find our center of gravity within ourselves by simplifying and slowing down our life."

4. Ekagratha. Or one-pointedness. "Everywhere in the modern world we see people splitting their attention in many ways." In Sanskrit, ekagratha is translated as eka which means "one" and gratha, meaning "to hold or grasp." Thus, concentration is a single-grasping by consciousness of an activity or object.

5. Sense Restraint. Easwaran writes, "Sense stimulation is the slogan of the network of mass media all around us. A Western historian goes to the extent of calling modern civilization a sensate one. Therefore we have to be extremely vigilant to ensure that we do not come under its tyranny...In order to train our senses we have to exercise discriminating restraint over the food we eat, the books we read, the movies we see, the music we listen to, and the places we frequent. Gandhiji was fond of pointing out that control of the palate helps in controlling the mind."

6. Putting Others First. To answer the question put to me today, I would like to quote at length what Easwaran says about putting others first:

"Our emphasis on the family context is because it gives us countless opportunities every day for expanding our consciousness by reducing our self-will or separateness. When we are dwelling on ourselves we are constricting our consciousness. To the extent that we put the welfare of others first, we are able to break out of the prison of our own separateness.

"This need not mean following the wishes of the other person always, but when it seems necessary to differ, it must be done tenderly and without the slightest trace of resentment or retaliation."

7. Reading the Scriptures. "We need to benefit from all the sources of inspiration we can find and the sacred scriptures of all religions should come first on our list."

8. Satsang. "Association with spiritually oriented people. We need companionship and support when we are changing the very basis of our life by changing our old ways."

      

Most of us are house-holders, not monks. We are the laity and have not renounced the world by entering the monastery (yet). By following Easwaran's Instructions in Meditation, we all can be better fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, students and teachers, employees and employers. The context of the family, and fatherhood (or motherhood), are fertile ground for daily spiritual practice and refining our ability to give generously and unselfishly.

DRAGON SLAYERS

JERALD WALKER

I told him that black literature is often approached as records of oppression, but that my students don't focus on white cruelty but rather its flip side: black courage. Jerald Walker, "Dragon Slayers."

In the future, whenever we talk about the black American narrative or story, I  hope that my 2008 essay in American Scholar entitled "The End of the Black American Narrative" will be part of that discussion (It has been reprinted often, used in classes and by one think tank, and I did interviews for this with radio programs from Los Angeles to Australia). But what I really want to talk about, and have other people talk about, is Jerald Walker's brilliant essay "Dragon Slayers," originally published in Iowa Review.

Walker says that in his courses on black American literature, he betrays "the belief that blacks are primarily victims...a common view held by both races. I, too, held it for many years. When I was in my early twenties and making my first crude attempts at writing fiction, I'd sit at my word processor and pound out stories brimming with blacks who understood only anger and pain. My settings were always ghettos, because that was what I knew, and the plots centered on hardship and suffering, because I knew that, too."

It was one of his distinguished teachers in the Iowa Writers Workshop, Pulitzer-prize author James Alan McPherson, who helped Walker see that what he was doing was easy art, as I've often called it since 1988 when I published Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970: a form of writing that is as false as gangster rap written by rappers who live in wealthy white suburbs and send their children to private schools. McPherson said, "What some gangster rappers are doing is using black stereotypes because white people eat that stuff up. But these images are false, they're dishonest. Some rappers are selling out their race for personal gain...That's what this writer is doing with his work." Later, McPherson added, "Less time needs to be spent on the dragons, and more on our ability to forge swords for battle, and the skill with which we've used them."

Initially, says Walker, he was crushed by this brutally honest critique in a creative writing workshop. But then he realized this was a long overdue awakening.

"I had become my own stereotype," writes Walker, "a character in one of my short stories who insisted on seeing himself primarily as a repository of pain and defeat, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The very people with whom I had been raised and whom I had dedicated myself to rendering in prose had become victims of my myopia. My stories showed people being affected by drug addiction, racism, poverty, murder, crime, violence, but they said nothing about the spirit that, despite being confronted with what often amounted to certain defeat, would continue to struggle and aspire for something better. That old slave song 'We Shall Overcome' pretty much says it all."

Jerald Walker, in my view, has published an essay that provides for a younger generation of writers (and some older writers, I would add) an aesthetic statement as important as Richard Wright's 1938 manifesto "A Blueprint for Negro Writing" or Ralph Ellison's "The World and the Jug." It is reprinted in The Best American Essays, 2007. Please read it.

And let it be a touchstone for all your future conversations about the black American narrative or story.

CHARLES JOHNSON IN TRANSLATION

According to my records, my work has been translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, South Korean, and Russian (with U.K. editions, too, of course). And I was recently contacted by someone who wants to translate them into Chinese. Predictably, the book most often translated is Middle Passage.

 

I've seldom had the opportunity to work with foreign translators of my books. A couple of times, but not many. That fact led to some foreign editions that are, to put this politely, problematic. For example, in 1986 the French publisher Flammarion did a translation of my novel Oxherding Tale as Le Conte du bouvier. They brought me to Paris for a week of book promotion, and at that time I had the pleasure of speaking with the delightful young woman, Hélène Devaux-Minié, who did the translation. She explained to me that the novel's final chapter, entitled Moksha, had given her much trouble. (In Sanskrit, it means "liberation from the cycle of birth and death, complete freedom, salvation.") She couldn't find, she said, that Hindu word in any of the French dictionaries she consulted. So instead for that chapter title she substituted the word Mokry, which means "mockery." That word-choice, sad to say, is entirely wrong and misleading.

 

And I have one other translation "war story" I can share.

 

 

Before I retired, I lined up on the bookshelves on one wall in my office at the University of Washington all the American and foreign editions of my books (Just in case we ever had a fire at our house and my other copies were destroyed). One was an Italian edition of Oxherding Tale entitled Il Racconto del Mandriano, published by Edizioni E/O in 1990. One day a student came into my office for a conference, sat down in a chair, and looked at that edition's cover. Then he asked, "Why is Langston Hughes on the cover of your book?"

 

  

Yes, that's right: Edizioni E/O had used as the novel's cover art an illustration based on a well-known photo of a young Langston Hughes. What were they thinking? Your guess is as good as mine. If only that publisher so far away had contacted me about their plans for the cover! But such was not the case. Moral of the story? If you can work with a foreign publisher and translator for one of your titles, I highly recommend that you do so.