“Were you there?” It is the refrain of avery r. young’s “Emmett Till, The Remix” song/poem hybrid that speaks directly to the challenge of telling the story of a Black past for a Black present and future.
young performed his poem at the launch of Reading the Black Library on January 26th. In collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation and Illinois Humanities, Reading the Black Library seeks to activate the archives of the Johnson Library through public research opportunities, workshops, readings, and discussion groups. Currently housed at the Stony Island Arts Bank, the Johnson Publishing Company Collection is made up of approximately 11,000 volumes arranged on floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls of the library.
The event began with readings by scholar and author Jonathan Holloway and young, both of which spoke to the way the space and its contents influenced their writings of the black experience throughout history, and about their particular experience of Blackness. In his book Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940, Holloway drew on old archives of Johnson’s Negro Digest, which sought to uproot the narratives of criminality that were often used to define black people, by publishing stories about the black middle class. Johnson, Holloway discloses, was “a capitalist through and through,” who specifically marketed the magazine to white readers, offering them a column entitled “If I Were a Negro” of which the responses were, as Holloway lightly puts it, “deeply unimpressive.” However, one of the most well-received columns, the 1944 “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” garnered attention for contributions by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. This memoir-style series offered narratives that brought attention to daily racial injustices and the shortcomings of white people. Holloway cited it as inspiration for thinking about the memory and identity in his own book: How were these memories transferred through generations to shape the identities of black people today?
While conducting his research, Holloway began mapping his memories on to others’ experiences, identifying himself with the people he read about. “Recalling memory is recording the past of others and myself,” he told the audience. He said his book acted as its own “archive of the imagination”; in opting for an atypical form of academic writing that mixed the first and third person, Holloway illustrates how his particular truths resemble those of the past.
young continued exploring themes of history, identity, and memory in his impassioned performance of “Emmett Till, The Remix.” His poetry moves beyond sound and image: “I have always thought that poetry had to be more than writing. I thought it was using language, narrative, and space to document an important moment.”[1]
young’s poetry illustrates the way performance can be used to reconcile Holloway’s questions of identity and memory. In his poem, young asks us to inhabit a time and space that are decidedly unfamiliar to us, while also foregrounding us in the present moment by repeatedly asking: “Were you there?” It is this disconnect between what happened and what is happening as the poem is performed that creates the overlapping sense of temporality Holloway alluded to in his earlier reading. young shows us the way Till’s past lives in his writing, his present, and his conception of Blackness. Holloway articulates the difficulties of history, identity, and memory; young personifies it.
During the Q&A moderated by Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Executive Director of the Black Metropolitan Research Consortium, young emphasized that art is less suited to change the past than it is to influence what is yet to come. He spoke about the Johnson archives as incomplete narratives, a preservation of certain narratives over others. Absences in the archives include works on black feminism and black queerness, both of which are essential to young’s intersectional understanding of race in his poetry collection, neckbone. He told the audience that he wrote neckbone with the intention of continuing the black canon, recognizing it as an opportunity for the present to address missing narratives from the past.
In terms of future engagement with the archives, young announced his plan to work with other artists to make ekphrastic pieces that speak to these missing narratives. Julie Yost, Director of Public Programming, said other initiatives such as youth workshops with young and collaborations between chamber music group D-composed and local spoken word poets are in development.
The Johnson Library is open every Sunday for the public to engage with materials from its shelves. See here for more events related to Reading the Black Library.
[1]avery r. young, neckbone: visual verses (Evanston: TriQuarterly Books, 2019).