| Popis: |
The first time I saw Michael Harper he was on the back of a Coltrane album, looking fierce amidst a page of passages from Dear John. The next time I saw him was at Brown. I had driven up from Bridgeport to introduce myself the Spring before I was to report there as a student in the Graduate Writing Program. For about fifteen minutes I stood in the hall outside his office, listening to his thunderous rage on the other side of the door. When at last he opened the door, it wasn't so much a man in a room I saw, as a man wearing a room. He was big; he was mad; I started thinking about Iowa. I also started thinking, "Why is this man so angry?" I saw a lot of him during the next two years, mostly in his office during the late afternoon. I was his research assistant. He'd save up that rage all day and then, generously, pour it out for me. That rage could take you places. It could take you away from whatever you had had the temerity to think you knew about poetry, literature, or life. But more than that, it could take you to America; not just the corner of America you had glimpsed growing up, but the transcendent America that few of us are fortunate enough to see and still fewer of us are gifted enough to describe. The transcendent America was the America he insisted you see and then come to terms with through what he described as its sacred literature-the sum of our best visions about ourselves. He taught the America of Jefferson, Tubman, Lincoln, and King; the America of first and second and third chances; the America of public schools and private courage. He would have you absorb its courage in a poem about his grandfather defending his house from rioters, let you hear its music in a sonnet by Hayden, make you reason with it in an essay by Ellison. It was a hard place sometimes, but a shining place, too. In the end, he made you know that you belonged in it and, more importantly, that you owed it your allegiance so long as you remained on its shores. For me these afternoon sessions were classes in citizenship. He was talking about the America that had lured my grandparents from Europe, and yet had intimidated them so much once they arrived that they never gave up their mother tongue-just in case. They willed to me my physical presence in America, but died without telling me or showing me how to live here outside the boundaries of class and race. No one had showed them, either. No one had explained to them, as he had to me, that America both as a concept and a nation was not finished yet, that the work to invent or discover what this place and its people might yet be was still going on, although at times it might seem that the work had stopped and the creativity had been stanched in blood and rage. Thus, they had died without understanding that in nightmares such as they sometimes witnessed and sometimes lived lay the responsibility to learn, to absorb, and ultimately to contribute. |
