“I’m a bluesman moving through a
blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and
celebration… sit side by side. … Like my fellow musicians, I’ve got to forge a
unique style and voice that expresses my own quest for truth and love. … I must
unapologetically reveal my broken life as a thing of beauty.”
—West, Cornel. Brother
West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir. New York: Smiley Books,
2009, pp. 4-5.
“A formulation was taking shape in my
mind and heart: that the centrality of vocation is predicated on finding one’s
voice and putting forth a vision. All three are intertwined: vocation, voice,
and vision.”
—Ibid. p. 87.
“On the operating table, I was thinking
once more of all the unbelievable blessings that I’d been given throughout my
life. I didn’t know whether I was going to die or not. I had to wait and see.
But I refused to let death come in like a thief in the night and steal the joy
and love I had already given and received. I was so grateful that God had
allowed me to pursue my spiritual vocation of promoting unarmed truth and
unconditional love.”
—Ibid. p. 225.
He is peerless and matchless. One of a
kind. Once if a lifetime. If I stopped this short into my review of the
incomparable Cornel West, I’m well convinced justice would have been served in
honoring this grand intellectual icon who has changed so many lives and saved
many more—including this humble writer’s.
Three years to the date, I still hadn’t
quite grasped what my life’s purpose was to amount to. I still lacked any
coherent explanation of what shape and direction my movement through space and
time would or should take. I was still engaging in the most frivolous of
activities, burning up the last left of my chance at redemption. That was until
I heard Dr. West speak. And everything—literally everything—changed. My life
hasn’t been the same since; and I stand confident today, unashamed to declare
that if I missed that opportunity, if it somehow passed me by, not only would I
not be where—intellectually, spiritually, socially—I am today, it’s also likely
I wouldn’t be where—physically—I am today.
For this reason and many more, I was
filled with illimitable joy upon hearing, earlier this year, that Dr. Cornel
West, born June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was preparing a memoir which would
go into specific detail about the many adventurous twists and turns his life
journey has made—and continues to make. From Professor, to Philosopher, to
Poet, this man does it all.
But before emerged on the national scene
a Harvard and Princeton graduate whose remarkable insight won him several visits
to the White House in the ‘90s and an American Book Award, “Little Ronnie,” the
much younger, less amiable Cornel West was threatening to s#### out that
budding genius from breaking out the shell.
Little Ronnie was ruthless; he beat up
bullies badly, refused to stand up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at age 9,
assaulted teachers, shook-down classmates to share their lunch with the poorer
kids (democratic socialist in training?), smacked-up oversized jocks, got
expelled, and brought his parents much grief and agony.
“Most of my fights had to do with
bullies beating up on younger kids,” Dr. West writes, recounting some of those
experiences. “Maybe I saw myself in some Robin Hood role. I’d notice that poor
kids came to our school without money. Others had money to spare. So I forced
the haves into giving to the have-nots.”
Little Ronnie’s adolescent hostility
might have been a cheap imitation of his maternal granddad, Big Daddy—“one bad
brother.” Big Daddy was rare—a Negro with the courage enough to tell white folks
why intimidation was a sense he couldn’t feel, a flavor he couldn’t taste. Like
Nina Simone’s “Peaches” who’ll “kill the first m#### I see,” Big Daddy, West
warns, “carried a piece and would lovingly crush a motherhucker for unduly
messing with him or his family.”
Little Ronnie’s antics carried on for
months and years until his loving parents had had enough. The next step was to
find a way through which the rage could be channeled constructively. No, not
boot camps, not military drills, not abandonment, not disownment, not a
thousand lashes of the strap; rather, an avenue that would affirm his dignity
while still making it known violent outbursts were unacceptable:
“Give this child
more books,” they said. “Give him more trained teachers. Give him tougher
lessons. Challenge his little mind. Keep him busy learning new things. Keep him
intellectually stimulated and all that violent business will soon fall by the
wayside.”
And it did.
Clifton and Irene West didn’t have to be
neuropsychologists or psychoanalysts to know the right solution wasn’t a
full-fledged disciplinary crackdown on the young, exuberant, misguided mind.
They simply saw the potential for greatness in their child, realized how
unfortunately he was masking it with unscrupulous ways, and set his soul on
fire with the matchstick of love and the gasoline of patience.
His Christian faith, Brother West tells us, also provided the
amazing grace this wretched soul longed for. West is unabashed about his love
for Jesus Christ—as he should be. But, in the prophetic tradition of Socratic
questioning and inclusion, theological supremacy is a grammar he lacks the
tongue to speak: “I’m the kind of Negro who can worship in a lot of settings
and still feel the presence of God.”
If anyone wonders why this man on the move can often be found in
more prisons than palaces and classrooms than castles, it might be because as a
child a voodoo specialist helped cure an asthmatic ailment that threatened to
stop his beating heart. This experience forever moved him “in a more ecumenical
direction. I began to understand that answers to problems—physical, emotional,
and spiritual—often require enquiries that go beyond the confines of narrow
dogma.”
Narrow dogma has trapped many a Black
man and woman, many a White man and woman, from transcending the slavish
mental, psychological, and racial confines of existence White Supremacy needs
to survive. If anyone deserved to
cultivate narrow dogma early in life, it was Cornel West, who, at 14, moved
with his family to a bigger house on the better—Whiter—side of town. His
neighbors, strangely enough, failed
to share in the joy this forward step the West family was taking brought forth.
As though reenacting a bitter scene from Lorraine Hansberry’s timeless 1959
Broadway breakthrough, A Raisin in the
Sun, some of the white neighbors tried to buy back the house. The offers
were turned down. Then it got nasty—threats, intimidation, coercion, etc. The
power of love and politeness, however, calmed the raging storm. This would be
one of the many “teachable moments” in Dr. West’s young life.
No one knows exactly when his
intellectual awakening truly began, but it may be safe to credit the late, distinguished
sociology great, St. Clair Drake for inspiring the young Cornel enough to start
thinking critically about “a major or, beyond that, a vocation.” Through word
of mouth, West was told the wonders of Dr. Drake, and, at that moment, that
time-freezing moment, his elation morphed into “miraculous passion.”
Miraculous
passion
is the kind of intellectual pursuit that makes a 17-year-old Harvard freshman graduate
a year earlier Magna C## Laude; the kind that could make one miss an Al Green
concert, having stumbled, last minute, upon the classic philosophical tome, Wittgenstein’s Vienna.
Other works of great art would influence
him—a not-so-unlikely source among them being Hip-Hop (“story telling… spoken
in a metric bark”). Yes, that most savage of our creations! Unlike many others
peers, as early as 1982, Dr. West, pioneer-style, had begun putting some
serious academic examination into this emerging cultural phenomenon. Hip-Hop,
he described that year in Le Monde
Diplomatique as an “[Africanization] of Afro-American popular music” which
“recuperates and revises elements of black rhetorical style.”
He would go on to explore Hip-Hop’s
“syncopated polyrhythms, kinetic orality, and sensual energy” in the three
Hip-Hop/Spoken Word albums he’s released thus far (Sketches of My Culture, Street
Knowledge, and Never Forget: A
Journey of Revelations)—which, in solidarity
with other reasons
, raised the ire of former Harvard President, feministwarrior, and current Director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence
Summers, who failed to realize, until it was too late, that, much like the
Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. West “ain’t nuthin’ to f**k with.”
Brother
West
unravels the life of this gifted thinker who, even at the younger stages of his
life, wasn’t satisfied with a unilateral existence: “I was looking to challenge
and be challenged, looking to teach and be taught, looking to be a good
student, an honest thinker, and a decent human being. I was trying to balance
the personal with the professional.”
His scholarship, like his “change,” came
early: At twelve, he wrote a 250-page history of Canada, and at thirteen a
180-page history of Mexico City. Perhaps this was around the time it was
becoming increasingly clear to those around him he was destined to be a problem—once that final leap to maturity
took place.
Still, his many accomplishments didn’t
come without obstacles. Three failed marriages are a grim reminder. An emotional
battle with cancer almost a decade ago also does the job of reasserting the
fragility and vulnerability of human life. But no one, in spite of these travails,
could be more focused than Dr. West.
In fact, the great doctor has remarkably
found a way to make sense of the world through his personal sufferings and
shortcomings. His cancer-stricken body dovetailed with the introductory years
of the second Bush presidency. Democracy
Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, his powerful text
released in 2004, follow-up to the groundbreaking Race
Matters, grew out of that experience. Much like his cancer, the
neo-liberal cancer was “eating at the body politic.” It was “fueled by greed,
and indifference to the poor and disinherited. As it spread, it would corrode
the nation’s spirit and weaken our economic immune system.”
The deficient cells of morality conceded
as the tumor of racism spread wide across this body politic. Xenophobia and
Negrophobia were early symptoms. Dr. West knows this. And Race Matters was meant, in many ways, to begin the healing process—even
if certain folks (like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who wondered to him
once during a visit to the White House “why blacks don’t take advantage of all
these opportunities they have”) didn’t/don’t get it. So, whether dining with arch-White nationalist Pat Buchanan
or dialoging with supreme racist Rush Limbaugh, Dr. West is comfortable
speaking the “unarmed truth” with enough love to neuter even the most reactionary
of extremists.
But Brother
West also reserves ample space for light-heartedness, wrapped in the
garment of memory and recollection.
So, whether lighting Jazz divine Sarah
Vaughan’s cigarettes in between sets, or carrying bags for soprano singer
Kathleen Battle (with whom he was, at a time, romantically involved), Dr. West
hid nothing about his past—and I can only imagine present—pursuits of love and
passion. He loved the ladies and the ladies loved him. Bigger brother Clifton
L. West III provides much needed validation.
And though he swears his distinguished
fashion sense is “deep and operates on lots of levels at once,” it’s hard to
read deepness in: “I like the
three-piece black suit and tie because I think it looks cool. It makes me feel
cool and ready to face the world.” In his defense, Dr. West can lay claim to a mural
in New Jersey painted in his honor (The Cornel West Wall), countless
name-checks on Hip-Hop songs, a Hip-Hop Christian band bearing his name (The
Cornel West Theory), and a popular 2007 album titled after one of his lectures
(Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool). That’s
pretty cool.
All this, though, would mean nothing without
a legacy to continue the work begun and extended through his ministry. That
legacy is almost incomplete without his two kids, whom he advises ardently:
“The first step toward wisdom and maturity are to gain self-respect and
self-confidence.”
Dr. West, in the finest tradition of
Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Ralph Ellison, Robert Johnson, and Buddy Guy is a
bluesman.
Brother
West,
as he would like to be called, has only just begun. You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! One half-century down; at least one
more to go.
The “shudder” of death has failed to
stop him. The claws of defeat haven’t been successful either.
The “raw blues” of his life is what
saved me, and the least I can do is ask that you go pick yourself up a copy—or two,
or three—of this brilliant memoir of a man who is still a mystery to some but a
miracle to others—like myself.
Tolu
Olorunda is a cultural critic and a columnist for BlackCommentator.com. He can be reached