Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

lishment. Drum and Spear Press is a
real alternative to the sell-out offers
of the white companies . All Black
people must applaud such an effort
and support this, the first African
publishing house in North America to
be founded within this current period
of political revolt . Our cultural publishing
is well established (Broadside
Press, Third World Press, Journal
of Black Poetry Press (Atomic
Books, etc .), but Drum and Spear
Press is the first all-African Press to
address itself to political considerations
of analysis .
92
And this is what time it is now .
We have proceeded through art to
sciences, from identity to analysis .
We must have a clear understanding
of the historical process if we are to
mount our forces to change this process
from one of oppression to one of
liberation, from slavery to freedom .
We must become so scientific that we
move from science back to art again,
the artistic action of creating a new
history. James said it when he wrote :
"The analysis is the science and the
demonstration the art which is
history."
-Abd-al Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat
Black Arts
Black Arts (Black Arts, an anthology of black creations, edited by
Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara, $3 .00) is a fairly slim
volume, but gives a fairly comprehensive view of the direction and
contour of the black revolutionary art and literature of today . Many
people are represented here who have become familiar to us largely
through non-Establishment, non-commercial media (Keoraptse Kgositsile,
Ed Bullins, Askia Muhammed Toure, Joe Goncalves, Don L.
Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Bobb Hamilton, Marvin X, Ed Spriggs, Larry Neal,
Nikka Giovanni, Carolyn Rodgers, Eldridge Knight, Ameer Baraka) .
Many other less widely-known black artists and writers are represented
as well . If this partial listing of names is not enough to give an idea of
the tone of the book, some excerpts from Kgositsile's Introductionsuccinct,
beautifully written (in a style which he might call "manifesto
poetry," which he has practiced elsewhere, and which is in evidence
in other writers such as Ameer Baraka, Joe Goncalves, Ed Spriggs, and
seems more and more to be evolving as a typical genre in the Black
Awareness school of writers)-will at once plunge you into the mood
and the spirit of these artists :
This anthology is one of our many attempts at self-examination
(a process of building up) and self-assertion (an aspect of support)
. These creations attempt to capture the mood, the spirit of
a people engaged in liberatioy struggle . Some of these Brothers
and Sisters can also shoot a gun or fix a righteaus cocktail . Our
Time, Our Survival Reality, demands that of us and no respect for
any `artist' who will not put his creative talent and ability to work
in the street along with the people .
These are transitional men and women moving to the `elemental
rhythms of Our Time .' Transitional, because they are trying in
our time, through their rhythms, to deniggerfy us, to bathe our
pulse in revolutionary passions ; . .
The editors-one primarily an artist and poet, the other primarily a
scholar-are not outside observers of this process . Rather, both can
March 1970 NEGRO DIGEST