For Malcolm and Embodied Collectivity in the Early Black Arts Movement

For Malcolm: Poetry on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X appeared at a politically volatile juncture in history: in Detroit in June of 1967, just a month before the historic 1967 riots, or Great Rebellion. The anthology was the first Broadside Press book planned and the second published. Dudley Randall, a Detroit poet from a middle-class background who studied at Wayne State University and later at the University of Michigan, started Broadside in 1965, initially publishing only broadsides and later expanding to books. At the 1966 Fisk Writers Conference, he heard a number of poems about Malcolm X and conceived the anthology, then later asked the Chicago poet Margaret G. Burroughs to co-edit it with him.1 While Detroit ultimately became a less significant location for the Black Arts Movement as the movement developed,2 Broadside played a crucial and catalyzing role in the early Black Arts Movement. The anthology itself was simultaneously central and peripheral to the movement. It included canonical Black Arts poets LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Mari Evans, and Sonia Sanchez, but also several white poets and a few Black poets who actively resisted Black Arts aesthetics, like Robert Hayden and Conrad Kent Rivers. And despite creating one of the first and most key presses of the Black Arts Movement, Randall was opposed to one of the unifying threads of the movement — the idea that aesthetic concerns flowed from political concerns, rather than the reverse.3

Despite the anthology's idiosyncrasy and non-canonical status, For Malcolm offers us a unique vantage point from which to consider the role that masculinity played within Black Arts Movement work, particularly in relation to a sense of political crisis characteristic of the movement. For Malcolm shows some of the ideas that would later animate both the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power movement as they were being initially articulated and hashed out. In this article, I argue that poets' near-obsessive references to masculinity in For Malcolm do not function primarily to valorize masculinity or patriarchy, as one might expect. Instead, the poets redeploy a series of white supremacist constructions of Black masculinity — Black masculinity as threatening, as contagious, as reproductive, as transferable — as a metaphor for communicability. The poets both depict Black collectivity spreading and, in an extra-diegetic leap, incite the reader to catch the sense of collectivity that Malcolm X sparked. Where we might expect contagiousness to function as a metaphor for sexuality, sexuality functions as a metaphor for contagiousness. Ultimately, the poets in For Malcolm take up Black masculinity metaphorically to project a vision of a Black collectivity based on embodied presence rather than on the rational discourse among abstracted, individuated subjects of the liberal, Habermasian public sphere.

Masculinity

Contributors to the anthology came from a range of backgrounds. A poem by John Sinclair, the founder of the White Panther Party who espoused a sort of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll revolutionary plan, precedes a poem by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones); the biographies in the back of the book identify a large number of new poets, and their poems appear alongside those of well-established poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker. Detroit is heavily represented, but does not dominate; an Afro-Russian poet's work is included in both Russian and English.4 The editors themselves observe in the book's introduction that "the styles vary from the clipped syllables of Gwendolyn Brooks and the glittering phrases of Robert Hayden, from the dense-packed images of Carmin Auld Goulbourne and Oliver LaGrone, to the experimental punctuation and phrasing of LeRoi Jones, John Sinclair, and Le Graham, and the hip dialect of Ted Joans and Etheridge Knight."5 But for all the diversity of the writers, the poems' representations of Malcolm X circle around similar themes and images: Malcolm X's masculinity, blood, abstraction and concreteness, and the idea of communicability or transferability. While the book is not at all homogeneous — each poet treats these themes and images somewhat differently — the repetition is remarkable.

While the book is too large and too varied to fully account for here, I will describe its structure and attempt to represent the book as a whole. For Malcolm feels particularly crafted as an anthology, and it is the repetitions and patterns across For Malcolm that I initially found quite difficult to understand and which I have ultimately found generative for 1) suggesting alternative potentialities of notions of masculinity in the larger Black Arts Movement and 2) as a political intervention into conceptions of the political subject that tracks out ways to resist the abstractive mode of public sphere ideology. The book is broken up into sections: "For Malcolm: The Life," "The Death," "The Rage," and "The Aftermath." The poems are not arranged by author, and even within individual sections, there might be multiple poems by the same author separated by other poems. Christine C. Johnson, Clarence Major, Ted Joans, James Worley, Etheridge Knight, Conrad Kent Rivers, Theodore Horne, Edward S. Spriggs, and Bobb Hamilton each have two or three poems in the anthology, and most of the time these poems do not appear next to one another. Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs clearly pieced the book together with considerable attention to ordering by theme, rather than by author, and the book feels all the more like a collaborative effort — and single work — because of the attention given.

The book's significant emphasis on masculinity begins in its introduction; Burroughs and Randall themselves observe and reinforce the role that masculinity will play in the rest of the book: "The theme which recurs in many of the poems, and which recalls the theme of Ossie Davis's preface, is that Malcolm was a man, in spite of white America's efforts to emasculate the Blackman."6 They go on:

There is no black man, regardless of his agreement or disagreement with Malcolm's politics, goals, or racial theories, whether he's a serf in Mississippi, a cat on the corner in Chicago, or a black bourgeois in Westchester, who didn't feel a stiffening of his spine and pride in his blackness when he saw or heard Malcolm take on all comers, and rout them. There are some who feel threatened by the taking of full manhood rights by the Blackman. Malcolm was a man, and for being a man he was murdered."7

"The taking of full manhood rights by the Blackman" suggests that the anthology will perhaps fall into a problematic strategic essentialism, what Michele Wallace describes in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman: a vision of Black sexuality based on white patriarchy, formed in response to white supremacist ideas about Black sexuality, that views women as objects that Black men and white men fight over. (I rely on Wallace heavily in the pages that follow because her account of masculinity provides uniquely clarifying insights into For Malcolm.) Yet Burroughs and Randall's observation that the anthology appeals to diverse audiences foreshadows a sort of crisis that plays out across the anthology.

Following the introduction is a preface by Ossie Davis, the actor and playwright who famously eulogized Malcolm X, and Davis's eulogy itself is printed in the back of the anthology. The eulogy is entitled: "Eulogy of Malcolm X: 'Our Black Manhood . . . Our Black Shining Prince!"8 Davis expresses love for Malcolm X in a defensive mode:

There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times. Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain — and we will smile. Many will say turn away — away from this man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man — and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate — a fanatic, a racist — who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say unto them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him, or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.9

The eulogy ends emphasizing masculinity as well: ". . . And we shall know him then for what he was and is — a Prince — our own black shining Prince! — who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so."10

The description of Malcolm X as a prince suggests a specifically masculine legacy. The language of "black shining prince" occurs again and again in the book's poems, as do the defensiveness around Malcolm's legacy and the theme of a seed's having been planted. The preface, "Why I Eulogized Malcolm X," reinforces these themes. Davis sets up the preface as a reply to a magazine editor who asked him why he had eulogized Malcolm X and writes:

You may anticipate my defense somewhat by considering the following fact: no Negro has yet asked me that question . . . Every one of the many letters I got from my own people lauded Malcolm as a man, and commended me for having spoken at his funeral.

At the same time — and this is important — most all of them took special pains to disagree with much or all of what Malcolm said and what he stood for. That is, with one singing exception, they all, every last, black, glory-hugging one of them, knew that Malcolm — whatever else he was or was not — Malcolm was a man! White folks do not need anybody to remind them that they are men. We do! This was his one incontrovertible benefit to his people.11

These texts virtually define Malcolm X by his masculinity, with masculinity superseding his political and religious work. One might expect Malcolm to be remembered for his time in the Nation of Islam, or for his leadership of the Organization of Afro-American Unity or Muslim Mosque Incorporated afterward.12 Instead, Davis remembers that Malcolm was a man — and suggests that this masculinity takes the place of any number of more concrete accomplishments.13

Many Black feminist scholars have suggested that admiration and canonization of Malcolm X often plays a reactionary role in allegedly progressive political projects.14 And the sometimes prominent focus on masculinity in the Black Arts Movement would seem to be part of the Black Macho ethos that Michele Wallace describes.15 While I have no interest in defending the homophobia and misogyny in some poems of the movement, I think it is worth thinking through the multiple ways that images of masculinity function, often exemplified in For Malcolm. Davis describes (apparently pervasive) disagreement among Black Americans over Malcolm X's politics. Yet the fact that Malcolm X "[reminded]" them that they were men was Malcolm X's "one incontrovertible benefit to his people." Davis's general overstating of the case, the fact that women seem to be addressed by Malcolm X as well as men (unlike in the ethos that Wallace describes), and the conjunction here of a diversity of political views with masculinity suggests that masculinity here is less about men specifically, and their role in Black liberation, and more about masculinity and its wider, slipperier range of associations.

While Wallace makes a convincing case that many people involved in the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement, and in particular forms of Black nationalism absorbed white ideas about Black gender roles, this essay traces in For Malcolm a Black masculinity that I will argue is distinct from the Black patriarch figure that Malcolm X embodies in other cultural contexts. In Wallace's view, the Black Power movement simply mirrored white stereotypes of Black male sexuality as a threat to white womanhood and Black women as hypersexual. While Wallace writes about white men's "obsess[ion] with black men's genitals" as "a communicable disorder" that Black men catch, in For Malcolm, masculinity comes to stand in for communicability itself.16 That is, Black male sexuality is conceived of as threatening in part because it is conceived of as a means of reproducing Black sociality, and in part because masculinity is generally conceived of as power.17 The collection conceives of Black male sexuality as a threatening and powerful means of reproducing Black sociality. For Malcolm focuses less on the literal reproductive potential of Black male sexuality because For Malcolm is not a meditation on sexuality so much as a meditation on political organization.18 While poem after poem focuses on Malcolm X's masculinity, masculinity is not an end in itself. Instead, the poets of For Malcolm deploy sexuality as a strategic metaphor for the communicability of revolutionary political affect. The For Malcolm authors redeploy Black masculinity's association with contagion within white supremacy to speculate on contagiousness and on how nascent collectivity — or even a group that might not yet be described as a collective — can build power.

For Malcolm both incorporates and reworks highly ideological definitions of masculinity and femininity to suggest an ideal political subject that is feminine, contagious, open to contagion, and ultimately collective. The concept of masculinity that emerges across the anthology is phallocentric, framing the masculine as penetrating and feminine as penetrated. Of course, these are vexed characterizations, and questions about penetrability also run through contemporary critical writing and numerous late twentieth century texts. K. Allison Hammer, in a chapter on HIV/AIDS writing and film in the 1980s and 1990s, writes of impenetrability as "a defining quality of masculine normativity"; "masculinity," they write, "strives to be impenetrable through self-sufficiency, emotional sturdiness, and bodily resilience." They continue: "Impenetrability as a masculine currency, however, is only consistently available for white men. . . ." 19 Amber Jamilla Musser notes succinctly (in a recent reflection on the work of Leo Bersani) that "the prevailing perspective on penetration positions the act as an intrusion into an otherwise inviolable body, marking the vagina and anus as susceptible to corruption on multiple levels." Bodies of women and gay men, viewed as feminine, are seen as susceptible to disease; "the logic that underlies the equation of penetration with danger is the same one that imagines the ideal version of the body as enclosed and autonomous." The modernized body, Musser writes, "is primarily characterized by its maintenance of boundaries."20

However, in addition to sexual normativity, the language in For Malcolm also resonates with a different conception of penetration: the image of occult or spiritual possession, which Carol J. Clover describes as hinging on crises of masculinity in her study of horror films from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. In these films, Clover argues, women or adolescent girls are portals for the supernatural, and a common conceit is images of penetration alongside transmission and contagion. These possession plots, Clover points out, often hinge on the need for male characters to relinquish their rigid loyalties to logic and convert to a belief in the supernatural in order to help save their loved ones from supernatural forces.21 Following Clover's work, my reading demonstrates how For Malcolm reworks femininity as an openness, penetrability, and susceptibility to contagion that all readers might embrace, regardless of gender, while positioning Malcolm X's singular masculinity as strength and autonomy. The poets focus on the specificity of Malcolm X's physical being and masculinity in relation to white oppression, and, rather than imagining this integrity being duplicated in another person, they imagine a dissolution of their own commitments to rationality and an ability to be penetrated by Malcolm X and absorbed into something larger.22

Sexuality here addresses a problem fundamental to social movements: a collective mood such as the one so strongly evoked by Malcolm X does not necessarily correlate to actual political organization.23 By "mood," I mean what Jonathan Flatley describes as "the overall atmosphere or medium in which our thinking, doing, and acting occurs." Flatley suggests that while collective moods may not inevitably lead to any particular political action or organization, shifts in mood affect the conditions of possibility for political collectivity. In other words, mood can enable or foreclose political action by making it feel "impossible, futile, foolish, or obscure" or "obvious, achievable, and vital." 24 Thus art and literature created out of social movements may register these shifts in mood or attempt to create such shifts, and attention to such art can help us understand the affective dimensions of social movements. For Malcolm indicates the mood — an orientation toward Black collectivity — that Malcolm X left when he died. But the book also reveals the extent to which that mood involved an attachment to Malcolm X's physical body. For Malcolm, as a text that gathers numerous writers together, can constitute some version of collectivity. But it cannot constitute actual on-the-ground political organization — and if it could, it is not clear what its political beliefs would be. The book does not suggest a fully formed counter-mood. Instead, it reveals the difference between affective response to Malcolm X as a symbol of Black collectivity and on-the-ground organization. Malcolm X's physical body is invoked across the book as the link between an imagined collectivity and practical organization.

The question of the very possibility of Black collectivity animates the Black Arts Movement more generally, as Phillip Brian Harper and others have noted. Furthermore, any revolutionary movement — and in particular revolutionary movements waged by people of color or other minoritized subjects — is tasked with articulating a vision of collectivity other than the dominant liberal public sphere model. The liberal public sphere model relies on a disembodiment of the subject, with whiteness "[masquerading] as racelessness" and masculinity taken as "the norm."25 This model of the public sphere is not one that foments the formation of Black collectivities. As the visual artist Glenn Ligon puts it, "even if race is just one more costume to wear, when black folks try to change for the next act, the zipper always seems to stick."26 That is, liberal public sphere models tend to make African Americans invisible as a group at the political level at the same time as they encourage discrimination based on race at the level of lived, embodied experience. Because traditional liberal politics work by bracketing Blackness at a formal level (and thereby ignoring racism that is not explicitly codified as such), Black political organization may require a reassertion of embodiment. A politics that refutes liberal public sphere models must be about the bodily in some sense.

For Malcolm provides a model of a Black collective in its exploration of the question of communicability. Additionally, the joint emphasis on communicability and embodiment re-forges the question asked in many Black Arts Movement texts: who can be part of a Black collective, and how do differences, particularly class differences, come into play? The best political subjects, the anthology suggests, are those who are open and receptive to the forms of embodiment and contagion that the book frames in sexual terms. In For Malcolm, then, the idealized political subject is not the patriarch, but the person who is most open to a transferable collective mood, a distinctly feminized figure. The valorization of femininity (as a trait that anyone of any gender might have) would seem to contradict the book's apparently normative valorization of masculinity. But the masculinity that Davis valorizes in his preface and eulogy was, perhaps, the most available metaphor for a revolutionary Black collectivity — a collectivity that must overcome the political, aesthetic, and class differences that For Malcolm also registers. This is not to say that masculinity is only a metaphor for something else. Rather, masculinity sits at the crux of several related threads. White supremacy has historically sought to simultaneously emasculate Black men and tag Black men as hypersexual as a way of dehumanizing Black people; Malcolm X's particular performance of gender — his affective presence and his mix of defiance and skill at traditional public-sphere masculine performance — made him a symbol of unapologetic Blackness. But his masculinity in this book is also bound to the question of communicability. The collection's capacious approach to femininity offers an escape from the demands of perfect logical, thematic, aesthetic, political, and class coherence.

The anthology's first poem is by Gwendolyn Brooks, who had recently allied herself with the Black Arts Movement).27 Here Brooks does not merely emphasize masculinity; masculinity is the poem's main theme:

Original.
Hence ragged-round,
Hence rich-robust.

He had the hawk-man's eyes.
We gasped. We saw the maleness.
The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
And pushing us to walls.

And in a soft and fundamental hour
A sorcery devout and vertical
Beguiled the world.

He opened us —
Who was a key.

Who was a man.28

The second stanza of the poem introduces an odd falconry metaphor: Malcolm X's eyes are like the eyes of a falconer, and his "maleness" takes the place of the predatory bird in flight. The word "maleness" suggests not only masculinity, but, euphemistically, "penis," like the word "manhood." Falconers say that hawks "rake out" when they fly too far away from their handlers. A guttural sound is one that is made in the back of the throat — so "raking out" suggests the breaching of a boundary, and "the guttural" evokes depth in the oral cavity of the throat, as well as an association with harsh sounds.

Malcolm X's maleness pushes the "us" to boundaries and the "vertical" sorcery in a "soft" hour suggests sexual penetration as well. In this image Malcolm X's "maleness" is breaking boundaries, exceeding the reach of the falconer (Malcolm X himself), breaching an opening, altering the nature of the air. The poem closes with an explicitly coital image: "He opened us — Who was a key. // Who was a man." So, the mixed metaphors of the poem simultaneously suggest Malcolm X pushing African Americans to break new, arguably political boundaries through his own breaking of boundaries, with his political charisma and organizing work as the key, and Malcolm X penetrating the larger African American community with a "maleness" that is detached from his being, "opening" the community, disseminating revolutionary affect. Here, it is not Malcolm X's ideas that pushed boundaries, but his embodied masculinity. Furthermore, the penetration is an unlocking, and the more general gloss of the poem — this is a tribute to Malcolm X, who changed the character of Black American culture — suggests that the collective speaker regains a lost masculinity via Malcolm X. And so the act of penetration depends on the femininity of the speaker, and articulates the femininity of the speaker, but also changes it. Brooks's poem presents Malcolm X's masculinity as transferable to others — to the feminine "we" of the poem — through sexuality. Masculine sexuality is the means through which African American culture can become — what? Masculinity seems to be means here rather than end; the goal is to be "opened." The ambiguity of the final lines — does "who was a key // who was a man" refer to "he" or to "us"?—reinforces the idea of bodily incorporation. The slippage places the ultimate focus of the poem on masculinity as dissemination and idealizes the feminized "we."

The reactionary masculinist thread of a certain iteration of Black nationalist politics — described in Black feminist critiques of the Million Man March, for instance, or represented by some of the beliefs of the Nation of Islam — sees properly normative families as an end in themselves. Here and throughout For Malcolm, though, the question is one of opening, communicability, and revolutionary collectivity. In addition, the penis in Brooks's poem seems to be detached from Malcolm X's physical body: it "rakes out," moves away from the body, as it disseminates. This tension between the masculinity associated with the penis and a certain transferability of the penis as phallus recalls Judith Butler's description of the lesbian phallus. The masculine phallus, as a transferable and mobile symbol of the penis, cannot help but indicate its difference from the penis (since a symbol cannot be the same as that which it signifies).29 The detachability of the penis in Brooks's poem similarly destabilizes the masculine metaphors. Because Malcolm X has died, if Malcolm X's ideas are to be disseminated, and this dissemination must occur via Malcolm X's embodied masculinity, we must change our notion of how that embodied masculinity works if it is still to suggest political possibility. The gap between what Malcolm X symbolized (a coherent Black nationalist collectivity) and actual African Americans (not necessarily adherent to any one philosophy, with various experiences and beliefs alongside a shared history of discrimination) reveals Malcolm X's "maleness" here to be a sort of phantasm or potentiality, and thus the gendered metaphors can never really operate in the usual heteronormative way.

Crises in Social Movements

Malcolm X left a confusing and mixed legacy for his supporters, and the question that circulates throughout For Malcolm is "now that Malcolm X is gone, what do we do?" As Manning Marable observes, "from the moment of [Malcolm X's] murder, widely different groups, including Trotskyists, Black cultural nationalists, and Sunni Muslims, claimed him."30 Furthermore, the Nation of Islam was an odd mix of religious organization and political organization (or, in Marable's account, a religious organization thrust into the political because of the time period31). When Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam, he moved away from a conservative religious organization — but in changing his Black nationalist politics to something that (sometimes anyway) included whites, Malcolm X seemed to soften his politics (at least in some framings). His politics after the break with the Nation could be thought of as both less conservative and more conservative at the same time, and so he left a fraught legacy. And the organizations that Malcolm X did leave behind when he died were not well-organized.32 Marable notes: "Neither the OAAU nor the MMI [Muslim Mosque Inc.] had cultivated procedures of collective decision making, and without Malcolm, the weak bonds that had held the groups together came apart . . . collective leadership was the desired goal," but people deferred to Malcolm X.33

So on the one hand, there were crises of leadership in the MMI and the OAAU after Malcolm X died. Even more significantly, though, most people influenced and affected by Malcolm X had nothing to do with either of those organizations. After Malcolm X's break with the Nation, his politics were not consistent, and most of the people who admired Malcolm X had never followed his politics, exactly. Malcolm X projected a vision of a Black collectivity that did not exist in any organizational structure; what he symbolized was a collectivity that did not, in fact, exist. Eldridge Cleaver wrote of Malcolm:

The Black Muslim movement was destroyed the moment Elijah cracked the whip over Malcolm's head, because it was not the Black Muslim movement itself that was so irresistibly appealing to the true believers. It was the awakening of twenty million Negroes which was so compelling. Malcolm X articulated their aspirations better than any other man of our time. When he spoke under the banner of Elijah Muhammad he was irresistible. When he spoke under his own banner he was irresistible. If he had become a Quaker, a Catholic, or a Seventh-Day Adventist, or a Sammy Davis-style Jew, and if he had continued to give voice to the mute ambitions in the black man's soul, his message would still have been triumphant: because what was great was not Malcolm X but the truth he uttered."34

As sexist as some of Cleaver's other writing in Soul On Ice may be, Cleaver gets at something important here about the collective mood Malcolm X generated. What precisely Cleaver means by "the truth he uttered" is not clear — since it would not be the truth of Islam or Catholicism or Judaism. Even Cleaver's diction and syntactic choices here — "mute ambitions in the black man's soul," with "the black man" as both singular and a group — suggest a pulling together of individual, isolated experience into collective, publicly acknowledged experience. And "the truth he uttered" also seems to be about numbers — "the awakening of twenty million Negroes." Cleaver's point here may seem circular. Cleaver is suggesting that what was so compelling, that is, what drew people to Malcolm X, was that Malcolm X drew so many people to him. But Cleaver seems to be in line with many of the poets in For Malcolm here, as well as with many other commentators on Malcolm X. Malcolm X was so compelling because he signified a Black collectivity — a Black collectivity that did not yet exist in any practical, organizational sense. That collectivity, here and in For Malcolm, is attached to Malcolm X as a specific, embodied individual rather than to any particular political ideology.

After Malcolm X died, then, his legacy was an open question. Malcolm's physical body seemed so central to the nascent political collectivity still forming around him that tension bubbled up even in the promotional activities for For Malcolm. In February of 1967, several months before For Malcolm would actually appear, the Detroit branch of the Socialist Workers Party hosted a Friday Night Socialist Forum memorializing Malcolm X.35 Dudley Randall brought a group of poets to read from For Malcolm. The Reverend Albert Cleage, a former Freedom Now Party activist who had worked with Malcolm X and at the time was beginning to form the Black nationalist Christian movement, delivered a talk entitled "Myths About Malcolm X." Cleage's talk essentially argued that in the time since Malcolm X's death, white socialists and others had tried to reinterpret Malcolm X's significance through misconstruing some confused statements he had made toward the end of his life. Cleage argued that Malcolm X's famous "Message to the Grassroots" speech was his "last will and testament" and described the myth of an integrationist Malcolm X as something that Black people should work to debunk.36 Three weeks later, George Breitman, a white member of the Socialist Workers Party who had done extensive work in getting Malcolm X's speeches into print, gave a talk at the Friday Night Socialist Forum. The talk was a response to Cleage, and it too was called "Myths About Malcolm X." Breitman argued that while Malcolm X was by no means an integrationist (since he believed Black people needed to build their own movement before uniting with whites with similar interests), one could not excise the last year of Malcolm X's life from his legacy. Tension and heated debate about Malcolm X's legacy has continued into this century — Manning Marable's much-awaited 2011 biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, occasioned many critical responses, including a volume titled A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X, for instance. Malcolm X's history left his legacy open to a particularly wide range of interpretations.

Malcolm X was a key figure for both Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, beyond just the Broadside Press anthology. Phillip Brian Harper has observed a tendency toward political crisis in the Black Arts Movement more generally. While the canonical poems of the Black Arts Movement make clear that the white establishment is the enemy, they do not generally articulate a political path forward, substituting instead a division between a masculine, and properly Black I and a you that is accused of not being properly masculine or properly Black. That is, Harper suggests that notions of Black masculinity mediate a political crisis inherent to Black nationalism. Since Black nationalism does not necessitate any particular political project — it could refer to the Black capitalism of Marcus Garvey or the Leninism of the Black Panther Party or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers or the cultural nationalism of Maulana Karenga — a sense of anxiety and crisis continually accompanies Black Arts work. Harper argues that many of the canonical poems of the Black Arts Movement crystallize this anxiety in their uses of I and you, and that while the poems explicitly address a Black audience, their enunciation in fact suggests a white audience, plus a Black audience that overhears the poems.

This sense of crisis is particularly acute in For Malcolm. And while Harper describes the canonical Black Arts Movement poems that he reads as indicating social division within the Black Arts Movement — division between a masculine and politically conscious I and a feminized and politically naïve you — the most common division in For Malcolm is between Malcolm X and a feminized, politically naïve we. That is, the book's subject — Malcolm X — forces a shift in Black Arts Movement constructions of masculinity, emphasizing not the femininity of whites or "Negroes" as opposed to "Blacks," but the overwhelming masculinity and political potency of Malcolm X. As Harper observes, many of the canonical poems of the Black Arts Movement strike an accusatory note in their relationship to implicit Black readers. This dynamic is present in specific poems in For Malcolm. Amiri Baraka's "A Poem for Black Hearts" focuses on Malcolm X rather than on a politically conscious I. But the "you" is the one that Harper describes:

For all of him, and all of yourself, look up,
black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up,
black man, quit whining and stooping, for all of him,
For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth, let nothing in us rest
until we avenge ourselves for his death, stupid animals
that killed him, let us never breathe a pure breath if
we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end of
the earth.37

The focus here is not on Malcolm X's body (as it is in many of the other poems in For Malcolm), but on the Black "you," who the speaker accuses of stuttering and shuffling. The "we" here needs to avenge Malcolm X, rather than simply be receptive to Malcolm X's contagious mood.

We can contrast Baraka's poem, which is typical of the Black Arts Movement's way of indexing social division and crisis as described by Harper, with two poems by Theodore Horne and one by Raymond Patterson in For Malcolm. Each of these poems crystallizes the recurrent theme of communicability that circulates throughout the book, and Baraka's poem turns out to be an outlier. Raymond Patterson's "At That Moment" begins:

When they shot Malcolm Little down
On the stage of the Audubon Ballroom,
When his life ran out through bullet holes
(Like the people running out when the murder began)
His blood soaked the floor
One drop found a crack through the stark
Pounding thunder — slipped under the stage and began
Its journey: burrowed through concrete into the cellar,
Dropped down darkness, exploding like quicksilver38

The poem then goes on to describe Malcolm X's blood as "a thousand fiery seeds" (line 16) traveling throughout the city, into the "pipes and powerlines, the mains and cables" (line 15). The poem closes with these lines:

At that moment,
Those who drank water where he entered . . .
Those who cooked food where he passed . . .
Those who burned light while he listened . . .
Those who were talking as he went, knew he was water
Running out of faucets, gas running out of jets, power
Running out of sockets, meaning running along taut wires —
To the hungers of their living. It was said
Whole slums of clotted Harlem plumbing groaned
And sundered free that day, and disconnected gas and light
Went on and on and on . . .
They rushed his riddled body on a stretcher
To the hospital. But the police were too late.
It had already happened.39

A few things are striking here. First, an emphasis on Malcolm X's physicality is completely merged with an emphasis on how something of him spreads. We're not given a picture of people mourning Malcolm X's body, for instance. The poem takes place in the interval between when Malcolm X was shot and when he died. Malcolm X's blood acts as a conduit for potential political wins ("Stop utility shut offs!") or perhaps simply a projection of a world in which African Americans do not experience poverty or ghettoization. Malcolm X is also depicted as satisfying "the hungers of their living," which highlights the incorporation metaphor here. Malcolm X does not simply touch people or improve lives and move on; rather, those he encounters take him into their bodies and incorporate him into themselves.

What is particularly curious, though, is that this effect only seems to work while Malcolm X is still alive. His blood leaves his body and has its effects on people, but the poem's last lines do not imply that this effect continues. Instead, the poem ends on the note of his death. At the same time, though, Malcolm X's death has already happened at the end of the poem: ". . . But the police were too late. / It had already happened." The odd temporal structuring here suggests a sense of crisis about how exactly — through what conduit — Malcolm X will leave a political legacy. And it is the occasion of Malcolm X's death that allows his legacy to spread widely, even as Horne's speaker worries that the legacy may simply end with Malcolm X's death. Not long after Malcolm X's murder in the Audobon, Amiri Baraka wrote: "Malcolm's greatest contribution was to preach Black Consciousness to the Black Man. Now we must find the flesh of our spiritual creation."40 Like Patterson, Baraka makes clear that a sense of revolutionary collectivity can exist where no practical revolutionary ability exists. Maurice Charland has pointed out that the formation of political subjects is not a matter of persuasion so much as interpellation. One is not persuaded to become part of a Black revolutionary collective; rather, one is interpellated into the collective "through a process of identification in rhetorical narratives."41 For Malcolm shows, though, that there are gaps between the rhetorical constitution of collective political subjectivity, the affective constitution of collective political subjectivity, and the ability to politically function as a collective. The affective dimensions may flow from political work — cross-racial solidarity achieved over the course of a strike, for instance — or rhetorical work might hit an affective nerve and prompt political action. Or an acting political collective might form with differing and competing affective dimensions, as was often the case with regional Occupy movements in 2011 (where affect was hinged to individual senses of the national movement). Getting the various dimensions of collectivity to line up is part of political struggle, a challenge to writers like Baraka, Patterson, and Horne as well as to Black Power activists more broadly. Stokely Carmichael, for one, admonished in 1966: "We have to say, 'Don't play jive and start writing poems after Malcolm is shot.' We have to move from the point where the man left off and stop writing poems."42 Carmichael echoes Baraka but also explicitly turns away from artistic and rhetorical gestures. As Carmichael suggests, embodied physical presence cannot sustain a social movement on its own; movements that exist only at the level of rhetoric or affect are not movements at all. Malcolm X's body here is a fetish for multiple things: embodied presence in social movements (presence that can strike, for instance, or wage war); the embodied presence that is affixed to African American bodies and bracketed in the Habermasian public sphere; and, at the same time, the affective and phantasmatic link between a rhetorical Black collectivity and an organized, embodied one.

Possession, the Public Sphere, and Revolutionary Affect

The uncanny quality of that gap between a rhetorical collectivity and an organized, embodied comes to the fore in Theodore Horne's poem "Malcolm Exsiccated," included in the section "The Aftermath. "Malcolm Exsiccated" begins by suggesting that the speaker was previously suspicious of Malcolm X's ideas:

No sooner than I heard them holler out in Harlem,
The well is dry, did I crave a drink from it . . .
I remember I used to spurn it when it brimmed —
pointing out how rife it was with impurities,
choosing the well-distilled — and dearer — libations.
I waited for it to settle, which it seemed to be doing,
gradually becoming much clearer and more enticing.
Frankly impressed that it refreshed so many others,
I often approached a pail that passed before me,
poised a dipper to take a draught, then put it off.43

Horne echoes Ossie Davis's sentiment in the preface. As in Davis's account of a larger public's relationship to Malcolm X, the speaker admires Malcolm X without subscribing to his political views. "I waited for it [the well] to settle, which it seemed to be doing" (line 6) indicates that the speaker was less interested in the Nation of Islam's views than he was in the political views that Malcolm X espoused after his break with Elijah Muhammad and his trip to Mecca. That the text references this break so explicitly is noteworthy, since contributors include at least one member of the Nation as well as whites. That is, part of the tension of the book is precisely the "settl[ing]" that the speaker refers to, and this is one of the few points at which that settling is explicitly mentioned.

Horne chooses to use thirst and a well as the metaphors here. Malcolm X was, in this metaphor, a particularly refreshing well, rumored to be an oasis: "Was it really the oasis they said it was? / Though I thought not, now I will never know" (lines 12-3). What's particularly striking here is the "now I will never know." Up until this point, we may well have been talking about Malcolm X's ideas. The speaker was intrigued but had some disagreements. He was struck that so many people latched onto those ideas and took inspiration from them. Malcolm X was a well of ideas, and now that he is dead, the well is dry — so he will produce no more new ideas. This all makes sense — but if the speaker will never know if "it" was "really the oasis they said it was," then the speaker cannot be referring principally to Malcolm X's ideas. If so, why not go back and read some of the published speeches, talk to people who had been involved in the Organization of Afro-American Unity, read the autobiography, and so on? The fact that the "well" is now dry and completely inaccessible to the speaker means that the speaker is not referring to Malcolm X's ideas, but his physical form. Or, to be more precise, the poem suggests here that Malcolm X's ideas were bound to his physical form: the speaker cannot imagine the life of the ideas apart from the life of Malcolm X. This is odder still when we consider the discussion of distillation and impurities: the speaker must be referring to Malcolm X's thinking here (not his physical presence), but whatever is referenced is now inaccessible. The poem continues:

Perhaps a mere sip might have been something to savor . . .
Now, with fancied unquenchable thirst, afire with the regrets
of an inferno-fated spectre, I creep to the wall of the well
and peer into its pitch-black depth at a desert;
sand stopples my throat, and froth unparts my lips.44

The speaker renders a dire, unquenchable thirst — that apparently cannot be satisfied by taking up Malcolm X's political ideas or affiliating himself with a nationalist group of some sort. What the speaker wants has to do not with Malcolm X's politics, but with his physical being — and the speaker suffers like a person damned to hell for not having access to it.

Here Malcolm X as water should be ingested, incorporated into one's body. Part of the tension in the poem is the speaker's self-castigation for not having ingested Malcolm X as water earlier, or been open to Malcolm X's politics. The ideal political subject in For Malcolm is not one associated with masculine toughness, or one who uses his logic to parse the pure from the impure water, but one who is open to the contagion that is Malcolm X. The ideal subject opens him or herself to a potentially illogical revolutionary mood, and the mood alters the subject, brings her or him fully into a Black collectivity.

Here we might look across media and genre and return to Carol J. Clover's work and its analysis of themes of contagion and incorporation. The possession films that Clover examines took off right around the time of For Malcolm's publication, and comparison with the films offers some unique ways to understand For Malcolm and the way that For Malcolm conceives of contagion and incorporation in gendered and racialized terms. Just as "the drama of [possession films] . . . turns on the process of conversion: the shedding of disbelief, the acceptance of the mystical or irrational," the drama of For Malcolm turns on the process of conversion: the disruption of skepticism about Malcolm X's espoused politics and the acceptance of the instance of Black collectivity that Malcolm X symbolized and spread.45

In possession films, the possessed person is opened up — in a way that is sexually coded — to the possessing spirit.46 Clover describes the gendered logic of possession and occult films: the possessed person, she says, is always a woman, or at least feminized; women are "[ports] of entry for the satanic."47 "Vulva," Clover points out, "is related to valve — gate or entry to the body — and so it regularly serves for all manner of spirits."48 There is also a character, usually a man, who witnesses the possession (Father Karras, the main priest in The Exorcist, for instance), and the film is ultimately more about the man's struggle to accept the possibility of the occult (over hard science) than it is about the possessed woman.49 We can see echoes of the same logics of involuntary possession and reluctant conversion in the poems in For Malcolm. A second poem by Theodore Horne demonstrates. Here is the beginning of "There's Fire (For February 21)":

Wonder why is it I still smell smoke?
I don't mean the odor of cinders
issuing from so many blockheads' tempers,
or that parched and pungent fume of eggheads
and fatheads scrambled together — and neglected.
Nor is it that stench of black and white
passions ignited in a long hot summer —
It is another sort of smoke — but not
that of burning churches in Alabama,
burning blackflesh way out in a wheatfield,
burning whitepine crosses in a frontyard,
or burning midtown mosques; it isn't quite
that kind of smoke which just now smarts
my eyes to tears, and smites my nose.50

At this stage in the poem, the speaker implies that smoke is a metaphor for Malcolm X's legacy and that fire is a metaphor for something else, perhaps for his physical being. The speaker clarifies what kind of smoke, presumably since smoke is a loaded metaphor given the history of white supremacist church bombings and cross-burnings. Smoke generally seems to waft in and out, across space and time, sometimes associated with individuals and other times with events, always with strong affective associations. And smoke, like Malcolm X's blood in Raymond Patterson's poem and like the various pneuma in horror films, is something that is taken into larger bodies — here breathed in — and incorporated.

The speaker is ambivalent about Malcolm X's ideas and echoes the speaker's concern about "impurities" in "Malcolm Exsiccated." "The stench of passions ignited in a long hot summer" suggests smoke associated not with white supremacist oppression (as in the reference to cross-burnings) but with Black rebellion. "Long hot summers" refers to the rebellions that occurred throughout the mid-1960s in cities across the country. Mainstream accounts generally refer to these as race riots. "The stench of black and white / passions ignited in a long hot summer" depicts the riots negatively ("stench," and the fact that the speaker distinguishes the good smoke he smells from their smell). The lines also flatten the rebellions out into a vague, negative violence. The speaker views the rebellions, a crucial motivating moment for the various organizing of the Black Power Movement, as negative, and seems to view the violent acts by oppressed African Americans as morally equivalent to the violent acts of oppressive white supremacists. This skepticism is typical of the poems in For Malcolm. But the speaker goes on to distinguish the smoke he now smells:

. . . it isn't quite
that kind of smoke which just now smarts
my eyes to tears, and smites my nose.
What I smell is not unlike an incense
yet stronger, stranger, and intoxicating
I knew a source of this aroma once,
but that was snuffed out. He is cold . . .
But how is it that I smell that smoke?
I'm hoping where there's smoke — you know the saying.51

A few interesting things happen here. First, the speaker suggests that the smoke that symbolizes Malcolm X's legacy is of a different nature than the smoke mentioned earlier — but the types of smoke the speaker distinguishes it from include both KKK cross-burning smoke and the smoke of Black rebellion against white power structures. This conflation means that whatever the speaker is describing, the sense of justice he articulates stands in contrast with the notion of Black self-defense that Malcolm X helped to popularize. The speaker goes on to describe the smoke that signifies the legacy of Malcolm X in unexpected terms: "not unlike an incense" and "stronger, stranger, and intoxicating." The language is associatively feminizing: the speaker inhales the smoke, is wooed by its intoxicating smell, and is changed by it.

The poem mourns Malcolm X and seeks something left of him after his death — a melancholic, ghostly, and uncanny project. Clover's work clarifies some of the odder aspects of the poem. "Eggheads / and fatheads scrambled together" refers to smart or dimwitted versions of masculinized logic ("White Science" in Clover's terminology), and the smell that is "not unlike an incense / yet stronger, stranger, and intoxicating" a feminine occult, or "Black Magic" in Clover's terminology. The poet's ambivalence and interest in traditional Western logic yields to enthusiasm for Malcolm X and an interest in feminine magic toward the end.

While the anthology does not depict Malcolm X as frightening or horrific, in the sense of possession films — quite the opposite — it does depict the formation of a Black collectivity around him as something that requires a suspension of rational thought. Over and over, writers articulate their disagreement with Malcolm X's politics and simultaneous illogical attraction to him. According to Clover's schema, in horror films, the possessed person is a separate character from the person who must undergo a transformation. There is the possessed woman, and there is the male observer who cannot help her unless he gives up his belief in traditional logic as explanatory. In For Malcolm, and possibly in other texts from the 60s that deal with political fervor and collectivity — these figures collapse into one: a political subject challenged to "be opened to" possession and transformation by the political mood (here embodied in a masculine figure). This connection between horror films and political fervor may even give us a way of understanding that odd early scene in The Exorcist (1973) that shows Regan's mother, Chris MacNeil (played by Ellen Burstyn), acting for the movie that she is in Washington, DC to film. Chris's character in the movie-within-the-movie is in the midst of a large protest for an undisclosed cause, and she leaps up to the front of the crowd to speak, then tells the crowd that you have to work within the system to get what you want. At face value, the scene does not resonate with the themes of the rest of The Exorcist. But perhaps there is a larger discursive context for questions of rationality and protest in this period, with elements of horror appearing in agit-prop and political texts and horror movies themselves commenting on questions of political organization.

Additionally, Clover's "Western rational tradition" aligns with the notion of the Habermasian public sphere.52 The opposite, "Black Magic," is symbolized by

satanism, voodoo, spiritualism . . . crosses, holy water, seances, candles, prayer, exorcism . . . and its inhabitants are blacks, Native Americans, mixed-race people . . . and third-world peoples in general, children, old people, priests, Transylvanians — but first and foremost women."53

Clover gets at the alignment here among diverse groups that fall outside of normative white masculinity and its accordant logics: all are excluded from rational public discourse and associated with a threatening alternative. They are not necessarily themselves the threatening alternative, but they are subject to invasion by it, particularly when they experience rage and pain, often due to inability to cope with a loss.54 Certainly, we can see how horror and social movement literature (particularly by women and people of color) might overlap: here pain and rage at Malcolm X's death (and the daily experience of racism) leaves the speakers of the poems open, valves to a dangerous, irrational affective force that both actively rejects the public sphere model of political activism and poses a real threat to those who adhere to that model. Horror films also offer an available way of talking about post-mortem, haunting, and revenants. Most possession films are open-ended, hinting that the evil lives on and may resurface in the future, just as most of the poems here speculate on whether Malcolm X may live on in some form.55

Many of these poems act almost as incantations. Edward S. Spriggs's "Stillborn Pollen Falling" ends with the lines "The waters are rising / & the ritual begins again."56 The present perfect tense and the word "ritual" each suggest that the poem itself is performing a sort of resurrection of revolutionary affect. Another poem by Spriggs, "Berkeley's Blue Black," references "[waiting] for the second coming / of MALCOLM."57 Etheridge Knight's "The Sun Came" also references the occult or gothic:

The rays of red have pierced the deep, have struck
The core. We cannot sleep.
The shadows sing: Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm.
The darkness ain't like before.
The sun came, Miss Brooks.
And we goofed the whole thing.
I think.
(Though ain't no vision visited my cell.)58

Knight's description of "deep" piercing resonates with smoke and water penetrating the body in Horne's poems and blood's penetration of the piping and utilities in Patterson's poem. Knight's reference to Malcolm X's ghost in the final line further emphasizes the nature of the mistake: Malcolm X, the sun, came, and "our ears were not equipped / For the fierce hammering" (lines 5-6). Knight and other African Americans resisted the penetration, focusing too much on reasoning out and evaluating the arguments that Malcolm X was making, but now ". . . beneath the placid faces a storm rages" (line 10). If the placid face is the previous, rational subject, this new subject that has been touched by Malcolm X is in a rage — out of control, unreasonable. And while the speaker specifies that no vision has visited him, even the mention of a vision seems to do the same work as those shots at the end of horror movies in which some small part or piece of the evil is revealed to still be lurking about.

Kent Foreman's "Sleep Bitter, Brother" even directs Malcolm X not to rest peacefully:

Keep fingers crossed when you give up the ghost,
And strings attached; there's work for ghosts to do.
Sleep bitter, brother, and at last provide
Uneasy dust beneath a restless sod.59

Along similar lines, Ted Joans's "True Blues for a Dues Payer" refers to Malcolm X as "my soothsayer His Hipness Malcolm X / a true dues payer!", with "soothsayer" calling to mind the occult.60 Robert Hayden's poem "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X): O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son" even makes reference to Malcolm X's prison nickname: Satan.61

These brief bursts of horror and ghostly imagery begin to make sense when we consider that the horror story begins when modernity begins, since horror and uncanniness make sense only in the context of Enlightenment ideas.62 The fantasy author and socialist activist China Miéville argues that Marxists generally ought to be materialists — but materialists with "chinks in their armor" that allow in fear, dread, and a sense of the uncanny. A sense of possibility and potentiality necessary for political work resides in those chinks, despite the usual Marxist suspicion of anything unrealistic.63 We can see a rejection of the public sphere model, as well as an invocation of the potentialities of dread, in For Malcolm's turn to the supernatural.

Overall, the collection of poems that Burroughs and Randall assembled suggests that in order to succeed, political organization must not model itself off of the rational public discourse model that is the alleged (and exclusionary) basis for American politics. It also indexes a process of conversion, from keeping one's distance from Malcolm X out of rational disagreements with some of his views to opening oneself up to contagious affect; that is, to the sense of Black collectivity that Malcolm X almost supernaturally inspired. As in horror films, the ideal figure for this opening is female or at least feminine. Possession films deal with "fertility and conception" and, by association, to the birthing of social movements that are horrifying to the current power structure. 64 In horror films, remaining stubbornly rational or too skeptical of the occult will get you killed, since you have no defenses if you continue to operate on the model of Western rationality rather than accepting help from the priest or soothsayer or medium. And the writers in For Malcolm had good reason to undergo a conversion at this moment. While the Civil Rights Movement no doubt included diverse ideas about the public sphere model and rational discourse, in 1967, African Americans across the country were increasingly skeptical of strategies that emphasized nonviolence and reason-based appeals to a white supremacist power structure. Organizing models that assumed a rational, convincible opponent were, perhaps, doomed to failure — and, indeed, might get you killed. Through rage and pain about Malcolm X's murder, the writers here find an openness to collectivity.

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As part-time faculty, Marie Buck teaches first-year writing in the Liberal Studies program at New York University. They previously studied and taught at Wayne State University and the University of Massachusetts, and they are the managing editor of the interdisciplinary journal Social Text. They are the author of several books of poetry, most recently Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020) and, with Matthew Walker, Spoilers (Golias Books, 2024). Their essays about poetry and poetics have appeared in Harriet, Tripwire, Post45 Contemporaries, the Hythe, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. The present essay on For Malcolm is part of a larger scholarly work-in-progress about small-press publishing, 1960s social movements, collectivities, and the gothic.

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I am grateful to Annie McClanahan, Arthur Wang, Nia Judelson, Aaron Obedkoff, the 2024 Post45 Prize Committee, and reviewers of this essay for giving this work a home and for their engagement and thoughtful feedback. I'm also grateful for Post45 Journal's recognition of scholarship by contingent faculty and attentiveness to academic labor of all sorts in the creation of the Post45 Essay Prize for Contingent Scholars. Thank you to Lara Langer Cohen, Sarika Chandra, and Phillip Brian Harper for their critical feedback on earlier iterations of the project that this essay is a part of and especially to Jonathan Flatley for his extensive feedback, mentorship, and solidarity. I am grateful, too, to members of the Social Text Collective for their ongoing intellectual camaraderie and community-making.

References