Introduction

Although it has so far only been touched upon, the question of how African-American writers have used ekphrastic techniques to negotiate images of slavery is a large one that deserves to be addressed not only at greater length but also and more specifically with regard to the ‘peculiar institution’ of American slavery itself. The exploration of this issue begins in this chapter, which brings together and considers a suite of texts from four authors – John Edgar Wideman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey and Terrance Hayes. Even as these figures are all well-known and indeed preeminent within the field of African-American letters, the texts themselves (like much of the material covered earlier) have been almost entirely overlooked.

1. From Sights to Sounds: John Edgar Wideman's ‘Listening’

The first text in this ekphrastic mini-gallery is Wideman's ‘Listening’, a two-page prose sketch described by Jeffrey Renard Allen as a ‘brilliant riff’ (93) on William Sidney Mount's Bar-Room Scene (1835) (Fig. 5.1). Wideman's text was originally published in 1994 in Edward Hirsch's Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, a multigeneric assemblage of writings based on the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago, which include paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and photographs. It takes its place within Hirsch's collection as one of just four African-American pieces out of forty-six contributions overall, with the others being from Robert Hayden, Rita Dove and Charles Johnson.

As Wideman explains, at the time of working on this commission he is in Maine rather than Chicago itself and so obliged to compose his text at one remove, simulating the experience of a museum visit by perusing a copy of Master Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it is in this glossy and expensively produced volume that he encounters Mount's painting, a work which, as he remarks, he had not seen previously. This sense of dislocation from and externality to the museum is as much symbolic as geographical, since, apart from in Mount's picture itself, the tome Wideman inspects contains, as he points out, virtually no other images of African-descended people with whom he can identify. This being so, it is no surprise that he should be attracted to Bar-Room Scene, as it provides an intriguing study in the seemingly intransigent realities of racial inclusion and exclusion.