Worthy Words, Part 2: Albert Murray

Albert Murray (1916-2013), soldier, scholar, teacher, cultural commentator, music critic, and community leader of Harlem, where he lived his later years, came to my attention because of my love of jazz. Murray was a cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, a beautiful multivenue facility where I have seen numerous shows. So how could I not love him too? Arguably, his most famous nonfiction work is his collection of essays The Omni-Americans (1970). In that book , he writes this 73-word sentence:

In all events, it is not only possible but highly probable that the “cultural dislocation trauma” suffered by Africans transported to frontier America was considerably less than European-oriented polemicists imagine, precisely because the African’s native orientation to culture was less static or structured than they assume, precisely, that is to say, because the African may have been geared to improvisation rather than piety, for all the taboos he had lived in terms of. (Library of America's edition of Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, page 158)

This assertion is only one of Murray's many insightful observations in The Omni-Americans, a provocative reflection on Black identity in its many forms as perceived within and outside the race. We see examples of cultural dislocation trauma appearing in the United States whenever refugees land on its shores. But the first Blacks here were not refugees choosing to flee to America for their safety; they were unwilling arrivals subjected to slavery. In casting a spotlight on the Africans' vibrant and organized orientation to culture, Murray forces his reader to imagine not the European's polemicist or the dominant culture 's viewpoint but to reckon with Blacks as equals, human beings who think, create their own culture, and live and die by their own mores. Note the phrase improvisation rather than piety, whose context is better understood by reading the entire essay. As for the taboos Africans had lived in, think first of their past in their native continent, a past over 250 years in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, virtually impossible for any of us to fully comprehend, as well as the interdictions imposed on them in their new continent. Murray fashions a quandary that his readers will contemplate long after they close his book.