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How did it come about that all of a sudden Africans became Negroes?
- Keorapetse Kgositsile, "With Bloodstains to Testify: An Interview With Keorapetse Kgositsile" (26)
The 1960s and early 70s Black Arts Movement is the pivotal period, in the African-American literary tradition, when "Africa" explodes as a prime metaphor. In Black Arts poetry, "Africa" often signifies the psychological space in which AfricanAmericans can decolonize their minds. Likewise, in the larger 1960s and 70s cultural enactments of the Black Power Movement, African names and clothing became the means through which many African-Americans attempted to forge a connection with the pre-middle passage "home". As "Africa" became a sign of the "motherland" in the Black Arts imagination, there was often a venting of motherless angst in the very celebration of the return to the motherland; the spiritual "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" haunts many of the writers who fetishize Africa. The central question for many of the Black Arts poets, as they tried to gain new "Black is Beautiful" body images, becomes, "who is your mother?" In a mirror often called "Africa", they found a unified body image that seemed to heal the traumatized legacy of kinship haunting the post-slavery landscape: enslaved Africans relegated to the status of the mother when white men raped black women.1
As A.B. Spellman recalls the Black Arts Movement in "Big Bushy Afros" (1998), he muses, "Some called it a new mimesis because it made a mirror that affirmed us. But I thought it was an anti-mimetic art, for it was art beyond the probable [...] Not to say it was all figures and forms. Abstraction didn't cost consciousness."11 The desire for black mirrors-for mimesiswithin the 1960s and 70s Black Arts Movement, coexisted with a desire for "art beyond the probable", the art that would shatter any mirror aiming to "fix" blackness. At the end of this manifesto, Spellman confesses, "I do regret the culture cops who tried to legislate a single vision" (53). The policing of blackness during this movement, somehow, did not cancel out images of blackness as sheer fluidity, that which Spellman describes as a, "Negritudinous surreal dream of universal Africa" (53). The Black Arts mirror stage was overdetermined by ideas tied to a surreal space named...