The Possibility of Good Health and the Broadness of Vision

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of thumbing through old folders from a previous book project. Not electronically, mind you. This “thumbing through” was not the metaphorical movement of a cursor through pixelated thumbnail images on a screen. I’m talking about using my fingers and thumbs to move through the pages within actual, physical folders collected in a binder—a black nylon and fabric accordion binder that contained within it photocopies, manila folders, mailed letters with postage still affixed upon the envelopes, print outs from a time when we were still printing important emails for posterity, a Post-it note with a colleague’s address from three houses and four children ago, etc. The bulk of this binder is composed of the essays collected in A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, which Dwight A. McBride and I released in 2006 as a coedited volume. Each essay has its own folder within the binder, photocopied from the original bound source from whence I located it among the stacks at the University of Illinois at Chicago library. Library photocopies are nestled beside retyped versions of the essays prepared in part by use of early, glitchy Optical Character Recognition scanning software. Most of the time it was easier to retype the damn essay.

The retyped essays within these folders are a testament to Dixon’s depth and erudition; it is clear from even a cursory glance that he was a true “man of letters.” Dixon distinguished himself in several literary genres: as an accomplished poet, novelist, translator, and literary critic. His scholarly contributions span Black Diaspora studies, African American literary criticism and theory, Francophone literature, and folklore. These critical essays, published in an array of journals and edited collections, span his career trajectory as well—from 1974, just before he earned his PhD from Brown, to work he composed toward the end of his life that wasn’t published until after his passing in 1992. His perspective is global in “Toward a World Black Literature & Community” and another key essay, “Rivers Remembering Their Source: Comparative Studies in Black Literary History—Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Négritude.” One of Dixon’s most cited essays, “The Black Writer’s Use of Memory,” explores the importance of geography and memory in the construction of African American culture. Not all of Dixon’s criticism is so broad, though, as he focuses occasionally on one writer’s oeuvre, like in “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl  Jones,” or even on one specific book, like in the essay “The Teller as Folk Trickster in Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman” or his review of The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre.

Of all his works in A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, Dixon’s speech, “I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” given in Boston as part of the closing plenary session of the 1992 OutWrite convention, sticks with many of his readers most fully. OutWrite was a conference of queer writers first convened in San Francisco in 1990 and organized by OUT/LOOK magazine, a self-proclaimed “National Gay & Lesbian Quarterly.” The OutWrite conference continued to be held annually until the final conference in 1999. The Boston conference in 1992 was organized by Gay Community News. Dixon’s speech at the convention, given six months before he passed away, was quite likely one of the last things he wrote. As his words and unique tone in the speech make clear, Dixon was keenly aware that his remaining time would be a matter of months, not years. Indeed, when Elizabeth Alexander edited Love’s Instruments for a posthumous release after Dixon’s death, this speech was included in that poetry collection. The speech is a mixture of tones and pleas—it is as much a call to arms as it is a dying man speaking his own eulogy. It is smart and compelling, like his criticism; poignant and absorbing, like his poetry; like his triumphant final novel, Vanishing Rooms, Dixon’s speech is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful.

Melvin Dixon lived only forty-two years before he was taken by complications from AIDS, one among so many talented men and women who died while the medical system preferred to look away. I write this just on the heels of my forty-sixth birthday, especially aware of both my current good health and the sheer happenstance and precarity of such vitality. In “I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” I’m aware of Dixon’s charge for each of us, “by the possibility of [our] good health, by the broadness of [our] vision, to remember” those who have fallen.

Dixon’s life partner, Richard A. Horovitz, died of complications from AIDS in 1991, just one year before Dixon did; through that trauma, within that grief, Dixon pushed himself to work, to write. That he continued to write through his partner’s illness and death, not to mention his own illness, is a testament to his resolve and an example of the importance of continuing our works as poets, storytellers, authors, and witnesses.

I am grateful to be collaborating with CM Burroughs on a new reissue of Dixon’s poems, collected together in a single volume. The speaker in one of Burroughs’s own poems about grief and belief, “The Unbeliever” from Master Suffering, wisely reminds us, “there are no good answers for trauma.” I’d not quibble with this reasoning, though I’m quick to add that while it may never be reason or answer enough, trauma and grief may best be met, as Dixon’s determined example suggests, by resolve. A resolve to continue the work of witnessing in our lives and our loves the connections we all share, despite the real differences in the lives we lead. What’s more, in this age of snippets, bits, and bytes, we need resolve to carry on long-form works in the world of letters. As Dixon himself bravely noted in the OutWrite speech, “If we don’t buy our books, they won’t get published. If we don’t talk about our books, they won’t get reviewed. If we don’t write our books, they won’t get written.” A resolve to broaden the category of “us,” to expand in ever-inclusive ways what we mean by “our,” is the briefest answer I can give to how and why one should be reading Dixon’s work. Dixon’s broad vision should be all of our responsibility