1. 100th Blog Post! Conversation with Dr. Keith Clark  

Last year, I devoured Louisiana native Arna Bontemps’s fiction, reading four of his books and writing six blog posts on them. I did not write one on God Sends Sunday, a migration narrative that would fit perfectly in with the “Migration and African American Literature” syllabus. Our of all of the posts that I did about Bontemps, I would have to say that my favorites deal with Black Thunder, a novel that fictionalized Gabriel Prosser’s thwarted slave rebellion. In these posts, I write about stylistic elements in Bontemps’s novel, specifically his use of multiple points of view in a chapter that leads up to the rebellion and his use of stream of consciousness throughout the novel. For both of these elements, I tie the work together with Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying and Jean Toomer’s Cane. Until last year, I had never read any works by Bontemps, except for some of his work on the Harlem Renaissance. After reading his fiction, I see him as an author that should be studied broadly. Originally published in the 1930s, Black Thunder did not take off until the 1960s due to its representation of strong African American male characters It would be interesting to examine the reception of this novel and what that receptions says about the cultural milieu of the period when it initially appeared and the one where it saw a resurgence. 

Recently, I wrote two posts on Genarao Kỳ Lý Smith’s The Land Baron’s Sun, a book of poems that chronicles the life of Smith’s grandfather, his seven wives, and their descendants both before and after the fall of Saigon. In the first post, I write about the false promise of the American Dream that awaited those who came to American after Saigon’s fall. Rather than experiencing opportunity, immigrants faced oppression and racism that saw them as others, people who could not, no matter how hard they tried, climb the social ladder to make a better life for themselves and their families. The second post contains an interview with Smith. Here, Smith talks about the American Dream, the connection of divinity with nature, the role of food, and other topics that appear in The Land Baron’s Sun. Along with this, the post includes a video of Smith reading poems from the book while images of his grandfather and family play in the background. These images, like the FSA and OWI ones, visually contextualize Ly Loc’s story. 

In this post, I discuss one of my favorite passages from Gaines’s oeuvre, the section where Aunt Clo compares Aunt Fe’s departure with that of an uprooted tree. This passage, placed among the strictly narrative sections of the story, creates an indelible metaphorical image of the tree and Aunt Fe. On a personal level, this section makes me think about how much the past remains, no matter how hard I try to replace it or move on. It reminds me that wherever I am, when I leave that place, a piece of me will stay behind and a piece of that place will lodge itself into my very being. To me, this is the beauty of Aunt Clo’s section; it is a poetic description of remembrance and “progress.” What makes this post special, apart from the discussion, has to be the audio clip that accompanies it. The clip comes from a late 1960s reading of the story by Gaines himself. Gaines’s voice adds depth and lyricism to the Aunt Clo’s section, providing a greater appreciation for Gaines’s imagery and technique. 

There are more posts that I could highlight, but for me these are the ones that maintain a place in my thoughts from the past year. What posts did you like from the previous year? Let me know in the comments below.