Review of Olio by Tyehimba Jess
In his Democratic Vistas, white poet and intellectual Walt Whitman looks forward to the coming of the literatus, a class of poet, scholar, and performer who will set to rights the abuses of society and religion: “the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes.” Literature, and the literatus who authors it, is Whitman’s response to the societal upheaval and disorientation brought on by modernity. Whitman has lost faith in church and government, but not in art. What is needed is an “archetypal poem,” a new song to become “the justification and reliance of American democracy.”
After an election that revealed America to be more fractured than ever, Whitman’s prophetic voice is compelling. Yet, while compelling, Whitman’s call is also triumphalist, heavily inflected with assumptions of Western superiority and American exceptionalism. Whitman writes that “great literature penetrates all, gives hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and, after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, demolishes at will.” The role of literature that Whitman describes is not dissimilar to the role of the American pioneer; creating art, the author takes what he wants, shapes the land and the people according to his whims, creates and destroys with unimpeachable judgment. In giving this account, Whitman echoes his literary relative, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who understood the literatus as one who comes in power: “The poet is the sayer, the namer... He is sovereign, and stands on the centre.”
Tyehimba Jess, in his encyclopedic new collection, Olio, describes a different form of the literatus, one that went largely unnoticed in Whitman’s time. Rather than describing the centrifugal—white and male—literatus of Whitman and Emerson, Olio recounts the largely undocumented lives of African American performers from the turn of the 20th Century. Olio offers the testaments of the hidden literatuses that America never knew, and transforms Whitman’s expectations for poetry into something far more complex and subversive. These are not the archetypal poems that Whitman tried to foresee, and yet they are the broken and hidden backbone of the American democratic story.
Whitman’s literatus is a triumphant figure, powerful and outspoken. Jess’s poems are not simply poems of triumph, although they are triumphant: “Every time we split our mouths to song / we’ll bind the air with hallelujah’s bond” declares the chorus in Jubilee Blues. The triumph of Olio is of a different kind, one that constitutes a re-capturing of the black voice. Black artists and performers such as Tom Joplin—ragtime pianist—and Millie-Christine McKoy—conjoined twins and singers—were patronized by their masters. Their songs were sung for white ears, and ensnared within a nexus of white power. And yet the genius of these voices, inhabited by Jess, is that they do manage to escape, to move from being bound to “binding the air,” expressing power over matter that white hands cannot touch. It is this triumph that shatters Whitman’s—and our own— expectations.
This re-capturing is crystalized in the title of Jess’s collection. The olio was the middle part of the blackface minstrel shows that were common between the 1880s and 1920s. Similar to vaudeville, an olio was a kind of variety show, featuring song, dance, comics, and parodies of theater. The main event of any olio was an absurd stump speech by a blackface comedian, who would speak in an exaggerated caricature of Black Vernacular English. Malapropisms, puns, and nonsense sentences were commonplace. This speech was a defilement of language, a dramaturgical butchering of the black voice. In naming his new collection Olio, Jess is reclaiming the black voice from those who had debased it, reestablishing the black literatus and repudiating historic—and contemporary— attempts to minstrelsize black artists. Jess asserts the voice of the black literatus over the pioneering impulse of Whitman’s original vision, and offers renewed hope in reclaiming—and celebrating—the genius that sprung from black America’s excruciating past.
Olio’s subversive collage blends drawings, the American canon, unique verse, and even prose to remove the white chains from the black tongue, and praise the true literatus behind the veil. Scott Joplin, known as the archetypical ragtime pianist and composer is the recurring emblem of this struggle. Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer in 1976, nearly 60 years after his death, but in his own time received no compensation for his genius; his work was stolen from him, and he died alone of syphilis. Joplin’s story is interspersed throughout Olio in the form of small vignettes, snippets of an imagined interview with friends of the great composer.
Similar to Joplin, many of the artists within Jess’s pantheon were forgotten by history. Jess revives these literatuses as personae; not in the flesh, but flesh made into words. Language becomes a vehicle for liberation. If bodies were bound, pens and tongues are free, and both articulate a picture of the literatus as America never imagined him, or her, to be. Jess remembers the pianist Blind Tom Wiggins, described as “autistic slave savant.” Though he was trotted out by his master to play, when his fingers touched the keys, “the Wonder overtook him”:
His song
swallowed up sunlight, spat up hurricanes,
was a rainwater baptism under
a slave’s psychic hands. Was it a sound past pain,
or a hurting that knew no surrender?
This is the triumph Whitman hoped for, but never saw; or rather, which his prejudices prevented him from seeing. The question which society and religion had no answer for found its thunderous response at the fingertips of a slave. Blind Tom becomes poet, priest, and prophet, bearing witness to a defiant pain that will not be forgotten. In Olio, it is as Emerson imagined, if not who he imagined: “poets are thus liberating gods.”
Max Heidelberger is a religious person of the Christian variety who tends to engage texts with an eye towards the numinous. He holds a BA in Anthropology and Literature from Wheaton College (IL), and a M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied modern religious history and language ethics. Max spends his free time reading novels and writing essays from his apartment in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. He has published reviews with Curator Magazine, the Anglican Theological Review, and Maudlin House.