This book considers how the real life figure of Malcolm X is dealt with in different genres–the painting, the poem, the stage play, the opera, the adult novel, the young adult novel and the children’s novel. It is A MUST READ. It gets the reader to think about which exact form suits the purpose of their unique study of the life of Malcolm X. If one wants to teach an actor how to portray Malcolm on stage, like Denzel Washington did in Laurence Holder’s stage play, When the Chickens Come Home to Roost, they should read Derek Handley’s article in this collection about Jeff Stetson’s stage play The Meeting.
Nicole Hodges Persley’s article “Malcolm X’s Echo: Shaping the 21st Century Black Artscape” was probably the most vague and unfocused of all the reflections in this book collection because it used the most vague descriptors such as “empowerment” without making clear to the reader the relationship between the current artists mentioned and Malcolm X’s actual philosophy: this article needed to quote directly from Malcolm’s speeches and writings. For example, Persley writes “the works of [Kendrick] Lamar, [Ava] Duvernay, [Kehinde] Wiley, and [Suzan-Lori] Parks engage with his [Malcolm’s] later, more inclusive philosophy that speaks to a broader humanistic perspective.” This reviewer was not clear as to how exactly each of these articles did this, and wanted to know where in Malcolm’s speeches and writings he encourages a “humanistic” perspective. Persley did not make this clear.
Conversely, Sarah RudeWalker’s article “Poems For Malcolm as Aesthetic Activism in the Black Arts Movement” makes clear exactly the goal of poetry that emerged from the Black Arts movement: “to bring readers to Black consciousness by distinguishing real revolutionary thinking and actions from apathy, complicity, conservatism and performativity” (32). RudeWalker focuses on the 1969 poetry book For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X published by Broadside Press and the poets that contributed to this collection including Amiri Baraka and Margaret Danner.
In her article “The X-Factor in the Poetry of Haki R. Madhubuti,” Regina Jennings uses an African centered theory, influenced by C. Tsehloane Keto and Mariamu Welsh-Asante to analyze Haki Madhubuti’s poetry about Malcolm X. She writes that Madhubuti urges the Negro to evaluate reasons why Blacks would run from identification with Africa; she writes that both Malcolm X and Madhubuti helped make fertile ground for the coming and the new people who discarded a racist name (55).
Derek Handley provides a comprehensive analysis of a 2023 Milwaukee production of Jeff Stetson’s 1987 stage play The Meeting based on Stetson’s imagined meeting between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. For Handley, “both men resume their friendly dialogue and have one last arm wrestling which…ends with both men declaring a draw” (61). However Handley writes that Stetson used Malcolm, more than King, “as a symbol to represent the larger struggles of Black people” (65).
Howard Rambsy’s article “The Malcolm X Crime Scene Investigator” takes a comprehensive look at studies of the scene of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination in the Audubon Ballroom. He privileges the work of Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a citizen journalist, or who Rambsy calls an “amateur investigator” whose due diligence pieces together a narrative that includes culprits of the murder of Malcolm X. Although the mainstream media’s 2011 interest in the assassins of Malcolm X might have shed light on Manning Marable, Rambsy makes clear that Abdur-Rahman Muhammad’s contribution to exposing the identity of the assassins was downplayed: “amateur investigators persisted in continuously disentangling the Malcolm X crime scene long after NYC court officials considered the case solved” (90). Evaluating this case from a Black Studies perspective, the work of Muhammad is that of a “citizen journalist” which in many cases is more professional and less amateur than the work of a mainstream academic whose work generally promotes a social agenda made to silence those of citizen journalists. In Malcolm X: A Lie of Reinvention, Jared Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs made the case that Marable’s biography of Malcolm aimed to turn Malcolm X into a liberal. Rambsy could have made his case that his agenda was not to do the same by avoiding the word “amateur” as it only seems to reinforce those distinctions made by the U.S. academy to unnecessarily separate degreed from the non-degreed.
In her analysis of the 2023 Metropolitan Opera production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X composed originally by 1986 by Anthony Davis with a libretto by Thulani Davis, Allison Michele Lewis writes that the Davises “work to destabilize white supremacist categories of genre, sound, and race, exemplifying the Black cultural nationalist politics embedded in the foundations of Black people” (91). The story of the opera, for Lewis, holds the audience complicit in and responsible for his death. She traces the history of Black operas in the twentieth century from works by Shirley Graham Du Bois, and makes the point that “most opera companies fail to truly repair the damage they have done over the last century whether when they explicitly excluded Black companies and in turn Black audiences from operatic performance” (100). However this assumes an obligation by the mainstream to include Black composers, when they absolutely have no obligation to do, especially in a twenty first century world where a global internet and a global economy opens the door for the opera genre to not require the requirements that mainstream opera houses require. Lewis’s mention of Garvey assumed he would use his shipping line to “transport Black people to a Black nation/planet” when Garvey made clear that creating a nation is not for all Black people, only those conscious Blacks aware of its importance.
Mudiwa Pettis provides an awesome review of Kemp Pettus’s screenplay of the 2023 film One Night in Miami based on an actual 1964 meeting of Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. Most climactic in her review was Malcolm’s ugly argument with Sam Cooke that gets reconciled when Sam reenters the scene, and when Malcolm expresses appreciation for Sam Cooke’s musical brilliance and “its distinctive ability to inspire Black people to mass action” (128). Like Stetson’s play, both Handley and Pettis show that the storylines depend on the thought and actions of Malcolm X. This play and film each show Malcolm X as a pivotal figure who represents the interests of the masses of Black people.
In his article “Malcolm X and the Novel,” Keith Gilyard analyzes Kevin Baker’s 2006 novel about Malcolm X called Striver’s Row and Ilyasah Shabazz’s 2015 work X: A Novel. He details Baker’s creative liberties and writes of his “compression” of “events that unfolded over years…into a two month period…allows for a dramatic intensity because Malcolm’s obsession with Miranda [an employee of West Indian Archie], his self destructive descent, his acute paranoia, and the hauntings of his mother are unyielding” (134). This seems to culminate on his reported jump into “Buzzard’s Bay” on his way back to Harlem. For Gilyard, Shabazz’s novel adheres more to the contours of Haley’s autobiography with some “revisionist aspects.” He calls her 2021 sequel The Awakening of Malcolm X, a “stirring story of her father’s intellectual, emotional, psychological and rhetorical growth” that while it “misses some opportunities to explore her protagonist’s psyche in greater depth,” is still an account “superior” to any other published account of Malcolm’s prison time (143).
Lindsay Burton’s article “The Symbolic Malcolm X in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction” looks specifically at Angie Thomas’s 2017 novel The Hate You Give, Nnedi Okorafor’s Nisibidi Scripts series (2011, 2017, 2022), and Brittney Morris’s 2019 novel Slay. She could have improved her analyses of these novels’ relationships to Malcolm X by quoting his speeches or writings as her analyses reveals an incomplete understanding of what Malcolm X stood for. She writes that Thomas’s protagonist Starr’s choice “to fight police action primarily with her voice, rather than by gun violence…indicates her ability to grasp the complexities of X’s ideologies” when in reality this indicates Starr’s inability to grasp the simplicity of Malcolm’s fundamental belief in self-defense in his 1963 Message to the Grassroots. Burton writes that Okorafor “acknowledges the impact that [Malcolm] had on..generations of Black children and their negotiations of their…Pan-African, Black identities,” but does not make clear how Okorafor does this (154). Her mention of Okorafor’s use of the “Lamb” and “Leopard” groups in Nigeria begged a comparison to Malcolm’s 1964 speech to the UN entitled “An Appeal to African Heads of State.” Her attempt to relate Malcolm X or his philosophy to Morris’s novel is by far the biggest reach of this collection, as nowhere in her plot discussion is Malcolm’s philosophy. What is in the plot is a character named Malcolm, but he espouses Malcolm’s philosophy in name and rhetoric only, not in action. Burton writes that Morris’s protagonist Kiera is the mastermind behind a video game that gets a user killed and Kiera’s boyfriend Malcolm consequently threatens Kiera’s own life. This novel ends with Kiera moving to Europe where she is paid to continue the kind of Western role play conceptions that actually counteract the goals that Malcolm X promoted in his lifetime. What Burton calls the “cosmopolitan version” of Black identity is more in line with what Malcolm X has called the “house nigger” in his 1965 “Message to the Grassroots” speech. Like Persley, Burton’s article could have benefited with a more exhaustive look at Malcolm’s philosophy which actually pushes Morris’s novel as a cautionary tale about how not to develop healthy adult relationships.
In her article “Ideologies and Evolution in Representing Malcolm X For Young Readers,” Mursalata Muhammad rightfully critiques the deficit model in books about Malcolm X for young readers. Muhammad makes clear that this deficit model is one where Malcolm’s family and its members are portrayed as tragic victims who left their son at a deficit. Muhammad writes that Ilyasah Shabazz disrupts the deficit narrative by showing how Malcolm X grew up in a close knit family where his parents nurtured his natural curiosity and instilled “discipline, fortitude, and self-determination;” it was not an environment “defined solely by oppression” (170). Her examples include “the scenes of Louise [Malcolm’s mother] and Malcolm’s siblings working together in the garden” where they “reflect a sense of unity and collaboration, showcasing the family’s shared efforts and love for the land” (171). -RF.