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Chester Himes, Frantz Fanon and the Literary Decolonization of Harlem

2012; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2012.649682

1545-5866

Christopher Raczkowski,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes While this essay has benefitted from the help of numerous colleagues in my department, I particularly wish to thank Natalie Cochran for her rigorous and intelligent work as a graduate assistant and Robert Doggett for his encouragement as a friend and pragmatism as a scholarly reader. In her essay on Himes, “Limited Options,” Wendy Walters argues that Himes tended to provide conflicting accounts of his commitment to revolutionary violence in interviews depending upon the perceived racial politics of his audience (627). Greg Thomas's “On Psycho-Sexual Racism and Pan-African Revolt: Frantz Fanon and Chester Himes” provides an in-depth study of this relationship. While his essay provides a useful outline of some of the connections between Himes and Fanon—to which I am indebted for the reference to Fanon's lectures on Himes in Tunisia—I footnote his essay here because it focuses primarily on the psycho-sexual and psychoanalytic parallels in their work, while my essay attempts to understand their relationship in a cultural materialist vein as a way of reading the larger narrative arch of Himes's Harlem novels. As a theorist of African liberation, Fanon had significant influence on the black American activists and intellectuals of the 1960s. The English translation of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth sold 750,000 copies in the United States within five years of its first publication (Van Deburg 61). Eldridge Cleaver called it the “bible” of the black liberation movement and Stokely Carmichael venerated Fanon as a “Patron Saint” (Van Deberg 60). The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) identified Fanon—with Malcolm X—as a major theorist of its transition to militant nationalism (Robinson 63). Indeed, Fanon's influence was so widespread that in 1967 Fanon , Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks . Trans. Charles Lam Markmann . New York : Grove P , 1967 . Print. [Google Scholar], Dan Watts, the editor of the Liberator magazine reported that “Every brother on a rooftop can quote from Fanon” (Van Deburg 61). Although Himes refers to the series as his “Harlem Domestic Novels,” I adopt the term “Harlem Cycle” used by many previous critics. It has the advantage of brevity and avoids any confusion produced by the adjective, “domestic.” See Michael Denning's “Topographies of Violence” for a discussion of the “confusing and erratic publishing history” of Himes's detective fiction in France and the United States (17–18). Although a study of Himes's reciprocal influence on Fanon is beyond the scope of the present essay, Himes's aesthetics of the absurd, his novel's unrelenting black humor and his connection to French Surrealism through his editor, Marcel Duhamel, are all highly suggestive of the way that Himes's writing might have informed Fanon's thought and writing, as well as Fanon's critique of Sartrean existentialism. For more on Himes's relation to the French Surrealist tradition and literary Surrealism's conflict with Existentialism as it gets played out in the literature of Chester Himes and Richard Wright, see Jonathan P. Eburne's “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série Noire.” While crime was a consistent, pervasive element of African American narrative from its roots in slave narrative, detective fiction—one of the most continuously popular and profitable forms of fiction from the end of the 19th Century to the present—was not. Pauline Hopkins's novel, Hagar's Daughter (1901), John E. Bruce's The Black Sleuth (1907–1909), Rudolph Fisher's Conjure Man Dies (1932) and George Schuyler's The Ethiopian Murder Mystery (1935–36) all preceded Himes's engagement with the detective narrative, but theirs were somewhat limited and isolated engagements with a form largely avoided by black writers. In its most basic generic form, the detective novel narrates the detection of crime. In doing so, it structures the reader's perspective as coherent with that of state authority and the law, encouraging readers to participate (and take pleasure in) the police investigation of crime and its solution through the identification of a criminal body. In The Blues Detective, Stephen Soitos provides a detailed account of the history and evolution of the African American detective novel. Himes's FBI file runs 97 pages long and covers a period from 1944 to 1964. It was initiated upon Himes's publication of “Negro Martyrs are Needed” in the May 1944 edition of The Crisis. Other than providing an interesting glimpse into the culture of the FBI, it provides little new information about Himes. I use the 1965 title, “A Rage in Harlem,” instead of its original 1959 English title, For Love of Immabelle, because it is more generally known under this title. In France, it was originally published as La Reine des Pommes and has also been published as The Five Cornered Square. Again, see Denning for a discussion of Himes's confusing publishing history. In “Harlem is Burning,” Thomas Heise provides an excellent analysis of Himes's novel as a literary response to the liberal discourse of the ghetto and the explosion of sociological studies of black life in the slums during 1950s and 1960 Himes , Chester. The Big Gold Dream . New York : Berkley Publishing Corporation , 1960 . Print. [Google Scholar]s. For Himes, this aesthetic is raised to the level of a narrative philosophy. African Americans, Himes explained in a 1970 interview, “resent books that claim to show the interior of their minds” (Conversations 105). This is the largely extra-literary context that informs the novel: the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombings in 1963; the murder of non-violent civil rights activists like Medgar Evers in 1963, Jimmy Lee Jackson in 1965 and Sam Younge in 1966; the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 and 1968, respectively; widespread FBI surveillance and intimidation of black political and cultural leaders; the high-profile police killings of Black Panther members Bobby Hutton in 1967, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969 and twenty-one other members of the organization. More generally, the Kerner Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders lists over three hundred riots in the nation's urban centers between 1964 and 1968 Kerner Commission . Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders . New York : Bantam Books , 1968 . Print. [Google Scholar]. In the unfinished, posthumously published Plan B (1983), Himes revises critical elements of Blind Man, amplifying the intensity of the conflict that erupts between Digger and Coffin to the point that Digger slays his partner in defense of a revolutionary plan, “Plan B,” for armed insurrection against White America. Michaux was evicted from his original location on the corner of Seventh Avenue to a site further along 125th Street in 1968. In 1974 he was evicted again to make way for the completion of the state office building project. See “Eviction of Harlem Bookstore Owner is Protested by Leaders,” Jet Magazine, Feb. 7, 1974, 28–29. See Jonathan P. Eburne's “The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris: Chester Himes, Surrealism, and the Série Noire.” Lewis Michaux had a massive collection of Oscar Micheaux film reels scattered in boxes throughout his bookstore (Giovanni 51). Published by Gallimard, La Série Noire “were and still are read by both the [French] cultured middle-class and the less educated” (Gorrara 597). This white readership, presumed by most critics to be drawn to the hardboiled novel's critique of post-war American culture and/or the lurid violence of its content (graphically displayed on the cover), was Himes's primary audience until the mid-1960 Himes , Chester. The Big Gold Dream . New York : Berkley Publishing Corporation , 1960 . Print. [Google Scholar]s when the Harlem Cycle began to garner acclaim in the United States. In “Aggravating the Reader,” Gary Storhoff develops a nuanced account of Himes's hostile textual stance to his white, middle-class French reader and an inspired reading of A Rage in Harlem. On this point, it is worth noting that Blind Man was published by Gallimard's premiere Du Monde Entier series. See Justus Nieland's “Enough to Make a Body Riot” for a remarkably insightful reading of affect, sexuality and politics in Blind Man. Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher RaczkowskiChristopher Raczkowski is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Alabama. He is currently at work on a book-length study of the intersections of modernism and crime titled, sensibly enough, “Criminal Modernism.”