Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers

The Black Psychic Hotline, or the Future of African American Writing

Dial Now

The future can be hard to predict—yet I am here, like a weatherman or a late night television psychic, to tell you what you already know. No, not that the man you think is no good is indeed no good, nor that you should follow your passion, nor that money will follow you (though it might if you bought this book in your hands). Rather, as you already suspect and know, the future is now—and is made up, in part, of the writers contained here.

For Giant Steps features a cross section of cutting—edge black writers. Much like the famous New Negro anthology of the 1920s, Giant Steps highlights the present—day directions in and diversity of what many call the current renaissance in African American letters. By including in one volume some of the best poetry, fiction, and nonfiction of our time, Giant Steps seeks to take a great leap forward while recognizing the formidable footsteps we are following in—both adding to and honoring our rich literary tradition.

The title also of course pays homage to John Coltrane's groundbreaking Giant Steps—which, with its "sheets of sound," its tender ballads, and bursts of saxophone, changed the way we hear and see. It is in the spirit of this landmark artistic endeavor, an event that marked a bold new direction for Coltrane's powerful voice and style, that this anthology was conceived. The title seems all the more fitting given that it was 1960 when Trane released Giant Steps—the same year, it turns out, that the oldest of the writersrepresented here were born.

Eighteen or Over to Call

It may seem odd to think of 1960—the debut of Coltrane's album—as a cutoff point for Giant Steps contributors, since decades and eras and generations are not as neat as a New Year's Eve (or even a millennium, I suspect). Yet generally speaking, 1960 is the cutoff for the birth of Generation X, that hazy rubric that these writers also may be considered under, or alongside. Regardless of the labels, there is a wide gap between the baby boomers who popularized both protest and popular culture and too often fail to see the co-option of each by the other—and the generation represented here, who take both pop and protest for granted. And unlike so many boomers, our generation has not renounced either POP or protest, ironically becoming yuppies or buppies or advocates against the popular—in a word, their parents.

Our generation seeks to understand the ironies of both pop and protest—figuring out, as Terrance Hayes's poems do, how Marvin Gaye can write about violence but be taken by it; how, as Ruth Forman writes, "blaxploitation" icons like Cleopatra Jones can be personally liberating; how, in the end, we take and make our heroes where we can. How, even if, as Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem relates, we love Betty Shabazz at first for superficial reasons—her superheroic name (SHABAZZ!)—we come to love her entire being, her sense of what Alexander calls "expectation." Indeed, such expectation characterizes the Giant Steps generation and its writing.

Of course, it is perhaps a symptom of the times that what was originally written as a celebration of Shabazz now resonates as an elegy. Our elegies, such as Terrance Hayes's powerful "Some Luminous Distress," come from public mourning for a lost leader, as did Robert Hayden's "In the Mourning Time," written for Shabazz's husband, El-Hajj Malik Shabazz, for Malcolm X; they may also come from a personal relationship, as Alexander's does, as were the elegies for Malcolm X by Sanchez and Baraka. Regardless, we are far from the notion, largely false, of X as merely an image on a hat—just look at how Giant Steps contributor Joe Wood's anthology Malcolm X. In Our Own Image, makes claims on history, both personal and public. In fact, the writers in Giant Steps seem profoundly engaged in and with history in a way the Harlem Renaissance was engaged with origins (both folk and African) and Black Arts with politics and identity (and "identity politics"). Of course, these are generalizations, and all generations have engaged with history in some way—yet there is a clear sense in which history and attendant myth apply to these writers (such as Edwidge Danticat, Darieck Scott, and Colson Whitehead) that a glance through past anthologies does not reveal.

I hope by now it is clear that despite the age bonds, the writers here are bound not merely by age-either their years on this earth or the era around them. Rather, the writers of Giant Steps hang together as a generation because they address several shifting yet recurring themes in their writing: next to history, music; a willingness to use popular culture and/or experimental narratives; a focus on ancestry, especially slavery; a fluid yet frank manner in discussing sexuality, race, or biracialness; a freedom of form and technique, even ranging across genres; the travelogue; and a combination of popular culture, folkways, and wisdom beyond their years. There is also concern with violence, not as the transformative metaphor of the 1960s (think Dutchman, think revolution) but as a reality (as in Carolyn Ferrell), as a state of mind (Scott), or both (Hayes).

While there is not enough space here to address all these common themes, those of music and pop culture seem to demand further inquiry. We are, among other things, the hip-hop generation, having grown up alongside that art form; what this means is not simply that the writers here are rappers or even urban. Rather, they use, quite comfortably, hiphop's aesthetic and sense of history—that is, that history is ever-present, the past easily taken from ("sampled"), repeated ("looped"), collaged together, unified often only by voice and by the rhythm of day-to-day life ("flow" and "beat"). These last elements' focus on language as a means of holding together the work of art cannot be overstated—certainly it informs the writing found in Giant Steps. These writers flow and then are willing to interrupt that flow, to challenge the aesthetic of quiet storm "smoothness" or sitcom solutions that are hallmarks of a public need for "positive images" or easy uplift. In other words, what previously was seen as fragmentation, these writers see as unity; what once was heard as siren, we hear as song.

Ultimately, what folk culture was to the Harlem Renaissance, popular culture is to the post-soul writer: a common language, a structure that can be referred to, a destination that some want to vilify but which we grew up with. Do not forget that it took our New Negro writers to make the blues visible as literature (and not as sinful backwardness); it has taken the writers here to make Jet magazine and blaxploitation and disco vinyl acceptable themes for literature (and not just "negative images"). We see no problem breakfasting with the Black Panther Political Party while reading a Black Panther comic book. And as is often the case in soul music, questions of suffering are implicit and subtle (take Danticat or Scott); our voices, like that of any street singer, from doo-wopper to rapper, presume their public stance and private pain. No need to state over and over "This is a protest" when declaring "We're a Winner," even though the protest is clear. Here, as with the best of hip-hop or in Ellison's Invisible Man, there are lower frequencies that it is the listener's job—as dancer, DJ, conductor—to discern.

To this end, Giant Steps hopes to counter our expectations of what black writing should be with what it be. Likewise, with the Discography at the back of the book, we hope to honor those who go before (with the best albums since 1960), just as we explore the notion of what hip-hop is. Hip-hop is more than just rap: It is an aesthetic approach, a flexible form, which, at its best, is unafraid to take from any source, then turn the beat around and let us hear it new. It is hip-hop's premise—"hear it new"—that matches modernism's urging the writer to "make it new," recognizing that much of this work is up to you, who hear the music and these words, to hear these writers' unique combination of originality and influence.