208
Their hammers ring, their forges smoke,–
They stir in honest lab
01'.
PARTISAN REVIEW
Tolson writes:
And now the hyenas whine among the barren bones
Of the seventeen sun sultans of Songhai,
And hooded cobras, hoodless mambas, hiss
In the gold caverns of FaUme and Bambuk,
And puff adders, hook scorpions, whisper
In the weedy corridors of Sankore. Lia! Lia!
Negro writers have ceaselessly attempted to define the emotional
ambivalence of the blues: "grief-gayety," "melancholy-comic,"
"wistfulness-laughter," "making light of what actually is grave," or
the blues line itself, "I'm laughing just to keep from crying." In
his
Libretto,
that treasure-ship of plunder from the world's cultures and
languages, Tolson uses a Yiddish phrase for this ambivalence,
Hlachen
mit yastchekes,"
which he translates in the notes as " 'laughing with
needles being stuck in you'; ghetto laughter." "As for the laughter,"
a character in Redding's
Swanger and Alone
thinks, "unless one had
experienced it, he cannot imagine how it rips and tears you with pain."
In an interview in the
Times,
Baldwin stated what are clearly
his
intentions as a writer: "I have always wondered why there has never,
or almost never, appeared in fiction any of the joy of Louis Armstrong
or the really bottomless, ironic, and mocking sadness of Billie Holiday."
Ellison made the first critical attempt I know to relate the blues
to specific Negro literature in an article on
Black Boy
entitled "Rich–
ard Wright's Blues" in
The Antioch Review,
Summer, 1945. He
be–
gan by defining the form
as
a symbolic action:
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.
and concluded:
Let us close with one final word about the Blues: Their attraction
lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the
p0s–
sibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall
short
of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat
but the self.
