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LE ROI JONES AND NEW WRITERS    JACKSON

civilization, it is all men who are being destroyed and who are losing and/or denying the acknowledgment of their true yearnings and desires as human beings. And it is both white and Black men who are finding their selves destroyed in the brutal game of reality. And one cannot escape this truism by heeding Elijah Muhammad and LeRoi Jones' pathetic plea to cut-out of the madness by acquiring a strip of land from white America. For by the very act of asking the white man for land, they fall into the same trap of subjugation as some of our Black forefathers.

Of the majority of writings I have read by the younger Black poets: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Eugene Perkins, James Danner and Welton Smith, to name but a few, I have been struck by their using poetry as a weapon to destroy all those Black people who are making murky the path to absolute Black liberation. From Don L. Lee's poem "Contradiction in Essence" to Smith's put-down on these Negroes who aren't black enough:

you are the lice
of the lower eastside
you are the deranged imitators
of white boys acting out a
fucked-up notion of the mystique
of black suffering.25

And Fred Bradford who writes in the same vein as Lee in his poem "Black all Day":

My leader,
I know you are my leader,
All day long
But at night, her
White legs, they
cover your ears and
knock out the day
and your people cry,
My leader
Black all day
And white at night.26

In attempting to prove that "Black is more beautiful," many of the young writers fall into a precarious position of Black chauvinism as in Sonia Sanchez's "To All Sisters":

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:23:26