{"id":152106,"date":"2021-04-19T14:52:34","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T18:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152106"},"modified":"2021-04-19T19:01:48","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T23:01:48","slug":"the-novel-as-a-long-alto-saxophone-solo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/04\/19\/the-novel-as-a-long-alto-saxophone-solo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Novel as a Long Alto Saxophone Solo"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Lucy Scholes.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Flagellants<\/em>, the American writer Carlene Hatcher Polite\u2019s debut novel, is one of those out-of-print books that\u2019s been lurking in the corner of my eye for the past few years. First published by Christian Bourgois \u00e9diteur as Les Flagellants<\/em> in Pierre Alien\u2019s 1966 French translation, and then in its original English the following year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the book details the stormy relationship between Ideal and Jimson, a Black couple in New York City. The narrative is largely made up of a series of stream of consciousness orations. Polite\u2019s prose is frenetic and loquacious, and her characters fling both physical and verbal violence back and forth across the page. The French edition received much praise. Polite was deemed \u201ca poet of the weird, an angel of the bizarre,\u201d and the novel was described as \u201cso haunting, so rich in thoughts, sensations, so well located in a poetic chiaroscuro that one [could] savor its ineffaceable harshness.\u201d And while certain American critics weren\u2019t so impressed\u2014\u201cMiss Polite\u2019s narrative creaks with the stresses of literary uncertainty,\u201d wrote Frederic Raphael in the New York Times<\/em>, summing the novel up as a \u201cdialectical diatribe\u201d\u2014others recognized this young Black woman\u2019s singular, if still rather raw and emergent, talent. Malcolm Boyd, for example, declared the novel \u201ca work of lush imagery and exciting semantic exploration.\u201d It won Polite\u2014then in her midthirties and living in Paris with the youngest of her two daughters\u2014fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities (1967) and the Rockefeller Foundation (1968).<\/p>\n

Why, then, am I writing about Polite only now? Well, although the vitality and inventiveness of her prose is undeniable, there\u2019s something about her characters\u2019 long, drawn-out pontificating that wavers on the overwrought. For all the passion of their outpourings, Jimson and Ideal often feel one-dimensional. These reservations stood in my way, combined with the fact that Polite never really felt like my discovery. Compared, for example, to another subject of this column, Mojo Hand <\/em>(1966)\u2014J. J. Phillips\u2019s woefully neglected Black Beat novel<\/a>\u2014The Flagellants <\/em>is a book that appears regularly on lists of African American literature from the sixties. Yet, finally deciding to dig a little deeper, I realized that although Polite is widely acknowledged as one of the most important female artists to emerge from the Black Arts Movement, there\u2019s been surprisingly little written about her or her work, especially her second novel, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Published in 1975, Sister X <\/em>takes a similar shape to its predecessor in that, again, the majority of the story is told by means of a conversation between a man and a woman, though this time they\u2019re not a couple, and the violence\u2014or \u201cfoul play\u201d\u2014that\u2019s being done to them (and the other members of their race, past and present) is an assemblage of racism as filtered through conditions that, as one character theorizes, all begin with the letter c<\/em>:<\/p>\n

First they blamed it on the lack of vitamin C, scurvy on the slave ships. Cooking, cleaning, child-raising, cotton fields, chain gangs, colonial correctional facilities \u2026 consumption \u2026 Black spots from the absence of decent clothing, and from all the scum and chilliness of coal-less cold stoves, miss-meal cramps, CCC cramps, continuous bread lines \u2026 CCC KKK (same difference).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet again, the New York Times<\/em> wasn\u2019t convinced. Their reviewer, Frederick Busch, decried what he termed the novel\u2019s \u201csledge-hammer social protest.\u201d And while I\u2019ll admit that it\u2019s not without flaws, I still found more to admire here than in Polite\u2019s debut. The earnestness of Ideal and Jimson\u2019s soliloquies has been replaced by something altogether more playful and sardonic. Put simply, it feels smoother, as if Polite were getting into her stride. Or, as Ishmael Reed pronounced of the novel\u2014positioning Polite alongside the likes of Ted Joans and Babs Gonzales, practitioners of what he describes as \u201cjazz writing\u201d\u2014\u201cSister X and the Victims of Foul Play<\/em> is a long alto saxophone solo. Ms. Polite wails!!\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Sister X <\/em>focuses on three characters, the first of whom, the titular Sister X, a.k.a. Arista Prolo, has recently died. A Black American transplant in Paris, she was working as an exotic dancer\u2014\u201ca tiptop tappin\u2019 past master of the art of \u2018interpretive\u2019 terpsichore, the darling of the beau-hawg grind, a rubber sole, the chic of snake, Princess Yasmina, Lottie the Body, La Bombie, Broadway Rose, the China Doll, Little Egypt, Alberta, New Caledonia, Alabama Mama (shake it up, shake it down, shake it all over town), all rolled into one\u201d\u2014at the Jack of Diamonds Supper Club. Until she fell out with management, that is, when she refused to perform naked. She used to be the star of the show, but then her audience started to dwindle: \u201cBut\u2019s that show biz. So knockers up, girls!\u201d The club takes out a classified ad\u2014dancer wanted, no experience needed, \u201cAfro-American Type\u201d\u2014and then, in the novel\u2019s roaring, soaring final section, which transports us back to Sister X\u2019s last few hours on this earth, we witness her turning up at the club to collect her final paycheck only to be confronted by her replacement\u2014Miss Ann White, from Birmingham, Alabama\u2014blacking up in the dressing room, a \u201ccaricature in burnt sienna.\u201d<\/p>\n

But back to the book\u2019s opening half. With Sister X dead, her story lies in the hands of her two friends: Abyssinia, a seamstress who acted as Sister X\u2019s costume designer; and Willis B. Black (Black Will)\u2014\u201cone of the most beautiful Black Men whom a Black Woman and a Black Man ever brought into this World\u201d\u2014a \u201cTravelin\u2019 Man\u201d originally from Detroit, Michigan (as was Sister X). The novel opens with this bravura introduction:<\/p>\n

His beautiful black body he rubbed down with an oil and citrus cologne an ex-girlfriend had turned him on to back in 1956, down in Oriente Province. Santiago de Cuba, to tell the truth about the place.<\/p>\n

Next, the beautiful Black Man put on some fine black pants, tailored for him by Kalik Shabazz, a Temple #1 Brother from Black Bottom, and former proprietor, during his so-called-negro-days, of an all-nite barbecue and shrimp shack on Detroit\u2019s Twelfth Street (a few doors down from the old Klein\u2019s Show Bar\u2014long before the fire). Nowadays, in Brother Kalik\u2019s \u2018free\u2019 time, he saves every dime that he can lay his hands on to make it to Mecca, plays conga drums, and recites \u2018Al F\u00e2tiha\u2019 with so much Soul that you finally have to stop and ask yourself if, perhaps, the Good Brother hasn\u2019t missed his true calling. Surely, Coleman, if he were still back over there somewhere in those Bottoms, would have become, during all this Time by Now, a natural-born Muezzin. Salaam Aleikum!<\/p>\n

After getting through all of \u2018that,\u2019 the beautiful Black Man then put on: a black shirt bought in either Palermo or Port-au-Prince (or maybe it was Rio de Janeiro); some black sox picked up during those no-seconds-flat days of the Mexico \u201968 Olympics, an unusual black belt with Chinese silver buckle found in a practically Peopleless village right outside of Samarkand; some awful-bad black suede boots that were guaranteed (to need no breakin\u2019 in) by a half-blind Moorish-descent bootmaker, trying his best to make himself a living down in present-day Cordova; a black vest knitted somewhere up in aurora borealis Scandinavia; a blood-red foulard playfully gotten together by an admiring and astonishingly beautiful Ife Sister from Nigeria (before poor Biafra \u2026)<\/p>\n

PEACE MOMMA\u2019FRICA<\/p>\n

PEACE \u2019N PAN (Africanization) ON!<\/p>\n

\u2026 and a black virgin-wool sports jacket sold to him by a Black Irish London junkie who hustled shoplifted clothes, too fast-movin\u2019 trips to Ibiza, and went under the name of Belfast X.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Newly arrived in Paris\u2014by way of an Illinois maximum-security prison (in which he was incarcerated for armed robbery and narcotics) and, most recently, Zambia\u2014Black Will calls up his old friend Abyssinia and hotfoots it over to her apartment building, \u201cContemporary Catacombs\u201d that Polite describes with raucous, rhythmical delight: \u201csince you could easily get yourself buried by endless floors of identical doors, peepholes, coconut-straw doormats, paupers\u2019 pine-lined elevators, plein-air terraces, dank sub-basements, and wind up resigning yourself to never seeing the likes of seedy-sleazy survival, living life, or daylight again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Sister X <\/em>was written in a New York City hotel room, arranged for Polite by her American publisher\u2014the final page is dated August 12\u201313, 1974, which, if it\u2019s to be believed, is a truly incredible achievement\u2014the book is undoubtedly the product of the eight years Polite spent living in France. \u201cDear Reader,\u201d she writes toward the end of the novel, \u201cif I\u2019m lyin\u2019, I\u2019m flyin\u2019. If you have been to Paris, you know that I\u2019m not.\u201d Not that Sister X <\/em>is supposed to be steeped in realism. As Michel Fabre points out in From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840\u20131980<\/em>, the novel \u201cwas in no way directed at a French audience but made constant cartoon-like use of American stereotypes about the French.\u201d Polite\u2019s portrait of the city therein is a concoction of the various fantasies\u2014both the positive and the pernicious\u2014that are wrapped up in it.<\/p>\n

One of the more problematic of these is the exploitation of Black women in performance spaces. From the figure of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called \u201cHottentot Venus,\u201d through Josephine Baker\u2014whose biography Polite was apparently fascinated by\u2014Polite\u2019s depiction of Sister X draws on a long and murky history of the objectification and othering, commodification and sexualization of Black females. Her performances, including the exotic, alluring costumes that Abyssinia makes for Sister X to wear on stage, all fuel the racially charged sexual fantasies of her white French audience.<\/p>\n

The novel also rails against capitalist culture more broadly\u2014\u201cbe it intangible or nail-downable, everything on Earth has been rendered dead, a quantitative piece of merchandise,\u201d states Abyssinia sagely\u2014and Polite even plays with the idea of the commercial break. An \u201cIn Between Act\u201d in the middle of the book takes the form of an extended ad for \u201cWinning Smile brand toothpaste\u201d that culminates thus:<\/p>\n

Winning Smile brand toothpaste\u2019s active ingredients are:<\/em><\/p>\n

M to the 1st power \u2026\u2026.. Masters
\nM to the 2nd power \u2026\u2026.. Money
\nM to the 3rd power \u2026\u2026.. Merchandise
\nS to the 1st power \u2026\u2026\u2026 Slaves
\nS to the 2nd power \u2026\u2026\u2026 Spectacles<\/p>\n

M3<\/sup><\/strong> S\u00b2 \u2026\u2026\u2026 The Way the Game is Played, folks\u2014fair or foul!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of central importance, though, is how this \u201ckind of \u2018merchandise and spectacle\u2019 society\u201d uses and abuses Black people:<\/p>\n

In this, our \u201ccivilised\u201d society, our entire psychological makeup is founded on violence, death, hoggish self-fulfillment, ambition, exploitation, combative chauvinism, competition, binding contracts, promises, hatred. Through snatching, grabbing, pulling, yanking, conning, slicking, gaming, piercing, enslaving, penetrating, invading, intervening, robbing, stealing, lying, po-licing, cheating, raping, attacking, bombing, gassing, burning, assassinating, kidnapping, violating, fooling, deceiving, numbing, hurting, insulting, nailing, crucifying, injuring, wounding, defaming, proselytizing, cutting, shooting, scraping, coercing, blackmailing, crusading, choking, beating, drowning, maiming, flagellating, exterminating, annihilating, aborting, rationalizing, discriminating, justifying, castrating, repressing, oppressing, suppressing, wringing (and any and all other \u201cings\u201d) each other to death, into submission, or half to death, mankind has, thus far, learned to live. Pitiful\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Polite employs language in such an energetic, exciting way\u2014which is not without risk, of course. Sometimes it\u2019s successful, and other times it doesn\u2019t quite work, but there\u2019s never a dull moment along the way. And as Margo Natalie Crawford argues in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty First-Century Aesthetics<\/em>, it\u2019s here, in the writing itself, that another element of fantasy comes into play. Crawford hails the novel as a \u201cstunning depiction of black satire\u2019s ability to show how the more radical forms of black nationalism were a push away from known blackness to the unimaginable and fantastic.\u201d Polite was ripping up all the rule books, writing Blackness anew by means of employing and empowering language itself in radical, innovative ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe narrative comes close to poetry,\u201d wrote one French critic of The Flagellants<\/em>, and the same can be said here. \u201cA free form jazz text\u201d is how A. Robert Lee described Sister X<\/em>, reiterating Reed\u2019s thoughts. Even more intriguingly, and as Crawford goes on to point out, Polite\u2019s \u201cinterest in sound extends to what cannot be heard.\u201d From ampersands to exclamation marks to slashes, dollar signs, hashes, and the regular use of ellipsis, she employs a variety of signs and symbols in a way that defies their pronunciation. So, too, sound interrupts language. The ringing of a telephone leaves an all-but-empty page looking like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is this supposed to be?\u201d
\n\u201cA piece of paper, I would imagine.\u201d
\n\u201cDo you see a watermark?\u201d
\n\u201cNaw.\u201d
\n(Me, neither.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A French telephone can ring so loud
\nthat it blasts not only the watermark
\noff the page but all the print too.
\nMy word! aqwsxedcrftvgbyhnujimklo<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Now how does that sound in the light of day?)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIn this quasi-detective novel,\u201d Crawford continues, \u201cPolite retains mystery by not clarifying these parts.\u201d The question of how exactly Sister X meets her death steadily worms its way to the surface of the narrative; we know that she fell off the stage at the Jack of Diamonds, but did she take an accidental tumble, or did Miss Ann White push her?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, Polite apparently didn\u2019t regard her writing as a form of social protest, nor did she pander to what white audiences expected of Black creatives during this period. \u201cI\u2019m of that generation which thought that because we were Negroes we had to write or paint or dance as Negroes. To be accepted by white publishers or producers we had to be \u2018Negroes\u2019 in quotation marks,\u201d she reportedly said. \u201cBut I\u2019d rather divide up my writing to do creative literature and editorial protests at separate times.\u201d She certainly dedicated much of her life to the latter. Her parents\u2019 active participation in the civil rights and labor movements\u2014both in Detroit, where the family lived, and further afield; her mother\u2019s work often took her to Washington, D.C.\u2014clearly inculcated a sense of civic duty and activism in Polite. In the early sixties, she was elected to the Michigan State Central Committee of the Democratic Party, participating in the June 1963 Walk for Freedom and the November 1963 Freedom Now Rally to protest the Birmingham church bombings. She was also active in the NAACP and organized the 1963 Northern Negro Leadership Conference. Yet at the same time, when Polite moved to New York City at age nineteen\u2014with her first husband and their daughter, with whom she\u2019d fallen pregnant at only seventeen\u2014she wasn\u2019t drawn to Harlem, as we might expect her to have been. Instead, it was Greenwich Village, the birthplace of the Beat movement, that became her home. After her marriage broke down, she lived with Allen Polite, a young Black poet who was the father of her second daughter. As she apparently told her friend and colleague Craig Centrie, she\u2019d moved to the city \u201cto experience all of its culture and humanity,\u201d not just that pertaining to the Black community.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the story behind the lack of critical engagement with her work? Although, after returning to America from Europe, Polite taught creative writing at the University at Buffalo for nearly three decades\u2014she died, in 2009, age seventy-seven\u2014she published no other novels after Sister X<\/em>, something that has surely abetted her neglect. Remember the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Carolyn Kizer\u2019s summation of Mojo Hand <\/em>as simply \u201ctoo rich a mix for the time in which it appeared\u201d? Well, the same can be said of Polite\u2019s novels. They\u2019ve been \u201clargely overlooked,\u201d Devona Mallory argues in Writing African American Women<\/em>, \u201cbecause of their experimental and unique nature.\u201d Drawing on French existentialism and satire, music, dance choreography\u2014Polite trained at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance and worked as both a professional dancer and instructor from the mid-\u201950s through to the early sixties\u2014and African American oral storytelling traditions, Polite\u2019s novels defy easy categorization. But also worth mentioning is that much of what her novels explore was still terra incognita in literature then.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to remember that the literary landscape in which these works first appeared was one still very much dominated by men. Polite\u2019s novels paved the way for the likes of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor, who all take up themes in their fiction that she wrestled with first\u2014most significantly, the often fraught sexual politics involved in romantic and sexual relationships between Black men and Black women. And if it\u2019s even only for this, Polite deserves more widespread attention than she\u2019s been awarded thus far. As I\u2019ve said, neither The Flagellants <\/em>nor Sister X<\/em> is a masterpiece\u2014they\u2019re the work of a young and talented writer who\u2019s still feeling her way\u2014but they are bursting with promise and peppered with more moments of genius than most.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications. Read earlier installments of\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carlene Hatcher Polite\u2019s novels paved the way for the likes of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Novel as a Long Alto Saxophone Solo by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Carlene Hatcher Polite\u2019s novels paved the way for the likes of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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