The Seventh Octave : The Early Writings of Saul Stacy Williams
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The Seventh Octave : The Early Writings of Saul Stacy Williams
Danny Simmons employs both his skills as an artist and a writer to present this attractive book entitled “ I DREAMED MY PEOPLE Were Calling But I Couldn’t FIND MY WAY Home.The bright colors of his collages provide a contrast to the relentlessly grim portrayals of a society where people are jailed at birth. He is able to create beauty from rubbish.This is no dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard.â€Cold ramble down abandoned/…stray dogs howling in bitter/winter huddled six deep and hungry,or I/am a gaping wound waiting for its/daily does of salt. No French Impressionist picnic scenes . While European Museums are packed with paintings overburdened with Christian themes, Simmons knows that the religions that Africans brought to this hemisphere, thought to have been crushed, survive. But there’s a tendency when examining the work of a black artist to confine their reach to the basic and polemical,even though the work under examination might express a wide range of human emotions. The mainstream asks of the black artist, “What are you going to do to us? Do you like us? What do those drums mean?â€Simmons work can be political, but it can also be very private. “I return/ to empty/street corners/to rail at the/ scourge who/gnaws at the bones of/my past. Though African-American culture is Simmons’ home base, one can detect variety of influences upon his work. Simmons writes:â€â€¦I swagger/in front of the/Easel trying to capture/the spirit of the divine.†He has done that. The paintings are eye grabbing, beautiful. The texts provide a striking compliment to them. -from the foreword by Ishmael Reed