Duke University Professor Dr. Ellen McLarney paper on Marvin X/Arabic Language,
Islamic Aesthetics, and the Black Arts Movement
Delivered at Columbia University 12/15/21
In his seminal 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement,” published in The Drama Review,
Larry Neal calls for a “radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic” and a
reinvigoration of its “decaying structure,” envisioning “an art that speaks
directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America” (29). In the late 1960s
and early 1970s Black Arts Movement poets, artists, and writers used the Arabic
language and the language of Islam as a means of performing this radical
reordering of western cultural ethics, with the aim of giving expression to
a politics of racial justice and black liberation. These artists leveraged
Islamic knowledge systems, as one among various Afro-Asian intellectual,
cultural, and spiritual traditions, with the aim of radically re-envisioning
not just western cultural aesthetics, but western ethics and epistemologies.
Black Arts Movement poets that converted to Islam—Askia Touré, Marvin X,
Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Iman, Amiri and Amina Baraka—were key to developing
Black Studies as an academic discipline, at San Francisco State College,
UC Berkeley, University of Pittsburgh, and Amherst, among others. They engage
in what Alexander Weheliye calls the “particular decolonizing critique developed
within black studies” that strives to “disassemble the coloniality of being in
Western modernity.” To perform this decolonizing critique, Wehiliye argues in
his essay “Black Studies and Black Life,” we must insist on “the centrality of
blackness to the creation of the occident” and on “just how fundamental black
life is to this terrain” (5).
BAM artists aimed to de-center knowledge from state sponsored systems of
sanctioned knowledge in schools and universities, rooting it in community,
in study groups and alternative institutions like Spirit House in Newark,
Black House in San Francisco, and Black Arts West in Los Angeles and in
community schools like the Afrikan Free School in Newark, Uhuru Sasa
School in Brooklyn, and US School of Afroamerican Culture in Los Angeles
(Moten and Harney 2016; Farmer 2017; Kelley 2018). These institutions
were rooted in a long tradition of developing literacies critical for
escaping white supremacy and its Eurocentric understandings of the
human and the humanities (Wynter 1994; 2004; Givens 2020). [[[In her book
length poem Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, written after her
conversion to Islam, Sonia Sanchez talks about how her
“my brown bamboo/colored/
blk/berry/face
will spread itself over this western hemisphere…
and the world shaken by her blackness
will channnNNGGGEE colors.
& be reborn.
blk.
again.”]]
My paper today will focus on the work and writing of Marvin X Jackmon
who converted to Islam in the midst of the agitation for Black Studies at
San Francisco State College, calling for the cultivation of alternative spaces
for Black study, art, performance, and expression. The fight for Black Studies,
he writes, “would involve blood, sweat, and tears, literally…We were not only
challenging the college, but the society, the state. Challenging the view that we
were deaf, dumb, and blind so-called negroes, tools and fools of the white man,
domestic colonial subjects, servile, to be placated with crumbs from the master’s
table…” Mohja Kahf calls the Muslim authors of the Black Arts Movement
“Prophets of Dissent,” through a “deliberate espousal of an aesthetic that
has Islamic roots.” Through a close reading of his poetry, written just after
Marvin’s conversion, I explore his development of a poetic language and
an Islamic aesthetics, partly through his deployment of Arabic and Islamic words,
expressions, and writing.
Having left the undergrad program in English/Creative Writing at San Francisco
State College to pursue his writing, Marvin X was drafted into the war in Vietnam
in the summer of 1967. He fled to Toronto and renounced his American citizenship
at the U.S. embassy. He fled not only the army and the country, but also the
university, becoming a fugitive. Marvin later took a name that referred to that
fugitivity—al-Muhajir (the emigrant)—framing his journey as a hijra. But he
also describes it as an underground railroad out, paralleling his fugitivity to
Canada with the fugitivity of slave narratives, using literacy as a means of charting
a path to freedom. But in this case, it is the Arabic language that functions, as it did
during slavery, as a kind of cabalistic code between insurgents. But it also
becomes the promise of a different kind of belonging promising a full humanity.
In his autobiography Somethin’ Proper, Marvin talks about his conversion, describing
an interview he was sent to do with Muhammad Ali at Elijah Muhammad’s house in
Chicago. He was sent by the anti-war magazine Ramparts to interview Ali about his
refusal to be drafted into the army during the Vietnam war. The description has
overtones James Baldwin’s description of his visit to Elijah Muhammad’s house in
The Fire Next Time. But in contrast to Baldwin, Marvin does join the Nation of
Islam after this encounter, becoming Marvin X, “X slave, X nigguh, X tool and fool,
X, true name unknown, X, mystery, X, lost/found socalled negro—no longer lost,
now found, finally.” Marvin paraphrases Muhammad Ali’s famous words, saying:
“There was no way in hell I was going to Vietnam or round the corner for America,
the Great Satan!…Ain’t no Vietcong called me a nigguh, raped my mama,
lynched my daddy, brought my foreparents here on slave ships, through the
Middle Passage.”
Marvin’s self-published collection Sudan Rajuli Samia is a broadside, a
collection of poetry but also a political pamphlet, typed by hand for $1 a piece.
It is a poetic rendering of Marvin’s conversion to Islam, flight to Toronto, and
experimentation with his emergent knowledge of Arabic. The Arabic title means
Black Man Listen; Marvin X uses an Arabic name Nazzam Al Sudan that
he translates as “the black organizer/poet”; gives the press Al Kitab Sudan
(“the black book”) an Arabic name, orders the pages with the numbers written
out in transliterated Arabic, and provides a glossary of key Arabic terms, like
those of kinship father, sister, and brother, as well as “white devil.” He describes
the poet as a priest “of the Holy Tribe of Shabazz. Baraka-llah. As-Salaam-Alaikum”
confronting what he calls the “language of the beast.”
In his introduction, Marvin X writes about how “the poet must listen to the music
and language of his people. He must express their collective rhythm. The poet is
their servant. He records the mythology of his people, his brother and sisters,
[ikhwa and akhwat] (akhi wa akatun). He knows their heartbeat.”
He fuses an Islamic idiom with a Blackamerican one, creating alternative
linguistic possibilities that are both old and new, lost and found (in the language of
the Nation of Islam).
The errors in the Arabic (in the title, the translations, and some of the transliterations)
speak of Marvin X’s Arabic study, acquired outside the strictures of formal education,
at the Black Arts West Theater in San Francisco with Alonzo Batin, in Toronto with
friends from Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Iran and the Gulf, and through self-study.
One of his teachers was Hussein Shahristani, the President of the Islamic Students
Association of the US and Canada. While in Toronto, the MSA offered him a scholarship to
the Islamic University of Omdurman in the Sudan, but didn't accept it because
he had no passport. Marvin X teaches Arabic to his friends and his
children—and his son Darrel Patrick Jackmon (Abdul Ibn El Muhajir, deceased)
formally studies Arabic at UC Berkeley, and graduates in Arabic and Near Eastern
Literature; studies at the University of Damascus on a Fulbright, and attends the
Graduate School in Middle East Studies at Harvard.
The Arabic and the Islamic become the “hidden curriculum” of a “fugitive pedagogy”
—“learning that becomes a means of escape,” a kind of learning that Harvard
professor Jarvis Givens describes “as a site of fugitivity, of hope, of escape, and
as a space to imagine an emancipation yet to be realized” in the volume The Future is
Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education. The final poem of
Sudan Rajuli Samia is titled “al-Fitnah Muhajir” using Arabic words to describe
Marvin X emigrating to escape the war (fitna), taking the plane (the tayyarah),
crossing the border, flying to freedom. “Al-Fitnah Muhajir” opens with “Bismillah!”
(In the name of God!) to begin the poem but also his journey. Other Arabic and Islamic
phrases are threaded throughout, greetings of peace and an exclamation of Allahu
Akbar, Marvin X reading the Qur’an on the plane, “Ayat al-kursi/The verse of knowledge”
(2:255). “Fitnah al-Muhajir” is also included in his poetry collection Fly to Allah but
with a different title “The Underground Railroad: Revisited”—explicitly connecting
the fugitive life of slaves to the flight from oppression that was his own hijra. This
Islamic lexicon provided an alternative language for Marvin X’s creative outpouring,
tapping a knowledge system functioning as protest, but also creating a community
bound together by these signs, symbols, words, and language. As Sherman Jackson
observes in Islam and the BlackAmerican, the African, Eastern, non-European language
of Islam became one of the most important elements of the marriage between Black
Religion and Islam, “language being perhaps the most important and deeply missed
of all the casualties of the American slave experience.” The Arabic also functions like
a hidden transcript, a dissident language illegible in the context of the dominant power
structure.
Weaving Islamic and Arabic words and expressions into his writings, Marvin X
performs what Fred Moten calls “idiom(atic) difference,” experimenting with
Black Arts Movement ideas about black vernaculars, idioms, and language. The
transcriptions of Arabic are sounds that can be read, but understood only by the
initiated, creating a kind of speech community. In “Black Arabic: Some Notes on
African American Muslims and the Arabic Language,” Su’ad Abdul Khabeer writes
about how this process of acquiring “religious terminology in ritual speech”
becomes “a means of expressing newer worldviews and rearticulating older
worldviews and forms of sociality.” Fred Moten explores this “old-new language”
as an echo of the unremembered that is like a wound, “confounding the dream
of another universality, conflating that dream with the vision of an old song,
old-new language, homely sound…idiomatic writing.”
Marvin X invokes what Moten calls a metalanguage that he ritualistically performs
in his poetry, a reawakening, a remembering, a reverting, inhabiting another language,
and another name. The old-new language “constitutes its own true metalanguage”
but also “its own truth,” a truth of the brutal suppression of Islam and other
African religions, and of the systematic oppression of African Muslims
through deracination. As Abdul Khabeer observes in her chapter
“Black Arabic” in Hisham Aidi and Manning Marable’s Black Routes to Islam
“the sociolinguistic meanings of Arabic words can be related to both a
religious (Islamic) context and parallel meanings found within the context of
broader African American culture.” These Arabic words actually replace the English,
she writes, more meaningfully describing social realities.
Marvin X intersperses Arabic sounds and speech into his writing, but translates
Black American language into the Arabic. His poetic process reflects the way Islamic
language is coded into black American vernaculars, but also how the black
American experience have become an integral aspect of a global Islam.
He translates phrases like “black power” into Arabic “qadir sudan”creating what
he calls a “black dialectic” with Arabic and Islam as an “old new language.”
Marvin X carefully renders Arabic transcription of central Islamic invocations
like Allahu Akbar and bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim and key Arabic words and phrases
in place of English ones.
In his collection Black Man Listen, a translation of Rajul Sudan Samia, an entire poem
“The Origin of Blackness” is written in transliterated Arabic words with
their English translations, alternating.
Sudan la al lawn
Black is not a color.
Lawn kuli min sudan
All colors come from Black
Sudan al harakat
Black is a rhythm…
Ka umma sudan
Your mother is Black
Ka abu sudan
Your father is Black…
Hurriya
Freedom.
Adil
Justice.
Musawat
Equality.
The poem exemplifies, through the Arabic tradition, what Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
identifies as the repetition and revision of the black tradition to create a parallel
literary universe, what he describes as a “double-voiced text” that talks to other
texts, becoming “a joyous proclamation of antecedent texts.” In Black Chant:
Languages of African-American Postmodernism, Aldon Nielson calls this
“a recollection of the history of fractures. Excavation, restoration,
and rereading must proceed simultaneously.”
Just after Marvin’s conversion to Islam in spring 1967, LeRoi Jones would also
convert, in the midst of the Newark uprisings, taking the name Amiri Baraka
and his wife, the name Amina. Marvin met Baraka when he came to San
Francisco State College to teach a course on Black Studies, joining other
poets like Sonia Sanchez and Askia Touré who became key figures in the
Black Arts Movement but also in the campaign to formalize Black Studies
as a discipline. Although many understand Jones as converting when he moved uptown to Harlem after the assassination of Malcolm X, he actually converted in the aftermath of the Newark
uprisings in 1967. In a climactic scene described in The Autobiography of
LeRoi Jones (1984), police are beating Jones with guns and nightsticks.
Blood runs hot over his head, face, hands, and clothes as he screams
“Allahu Akbar. Al Homdulliah [sic]!” The scream is a cri de coeur at the heart of
the Newark rebellion July 12-17, 1967, making him “feel an absolute kinship
with the suffering roots of African American life… What I had screamed
while they were trying to kill me. ‘Al-Homdulliah!’ All Praise the Power of
Allah, the Power of Blackness. I felt transformed, literally shot into the eye of the
black hurricane of coming revolution. I had been through the fire and had not been consumed,” writes Baraka."
A collection of Baraka’s poetry published in the aftermath of the uprisings,
Spirit Reach, reflects on the uprisings, but in an almost beatific tone, in poems like
“Study Peace” and “Place of Peace.” The collection opens with a tribute to
John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, a reflection on the “Coltrane circle”
that Yusuf Lateef talks about in his 1967 Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns,
writing about the circle as the circle of life. In the poem “All in the Street” Baraka says,
Allah speaks in and thru me now…
The energy The energy the energy the rays
of God roared thru us all…uh
rays of God plunged thru us all-uh
Sanders would similarly pay tribute to Baraka in “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-
Allah” on his Jewels of Thought album recorded in 1969. The song sings about
the “Prince of Peace,” a translation of the name Amiri Baraka. The title
of the song seems to be saying hamdulillah, like the words Jones screams
in the heat of the Newark uprisings. But it is also hummed like in a ritual
chant as Leon Thomas sings: “Peace is a united effort for co-ordinated control.
Peace is the will of the people and the will of the land. With peace we can move
ahead together. We want you to join us this evening in this universal prayer…
Let loving never cease. Hum-Allah, hey, Hum-Allah, yeah, Hum-Allah, hey.”
