“These blazing forms”: African Art in Margaret Danner’s Poetry

In Margaret Danner’s poem “The Convert,” the lyric speaker awakens to the beauties of an African statue, shaking off her internalized preferences for European forms in “a hurricane of elation.” The poem appears in Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner, published by Dudley Randall’s indispensable Broadside Press in 1961. It was the year that Margaret Burroughs opened her home—populated with African objects she had collected in her travels abroad—as the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, later to become the DuSable Museum on the South Side of Chicago. In the same year, Ebony magazine profiled Etta Moten Barnett’s rich collection of African artworks. The author of “The Convert” wasn’t alone in her elation at the arts of Africa in mid-century American culture.

Cultural historians often associate the revelation of African art and its inspiration for African American artists with the Black Arts Movement of the later sixties, seventies, and beyond. But the artists of that period drew on a longer history of discovery and cultural restoration in the city of Chicago. Earlier generations of Black Chicagoans—notably the indefatigable author, publisher, and curator F. Hammurabi Robb and the actress, vocalist, philanthropist, and activist Moten Barnett, who makes several appearances in Danner’s work—had begun decades earlier, in their own travels to Africa, to collect and foster an understanding of African artistic heritage. Margaret Danner began looking at African art in childhood and continued to look at artifacts from Africa, with ever-deepening intensity, in her poetry of the early 1960s—and beyond. She views African art as enlivened and enlivening, art that “leaps, churning up,/flaming out” from an ancestral legacy “within us, wherever we are flung” (“From Esse to Handy to Hayes”). Her awareness of this legacy resonates with the ideas that would inform the Black Arts Movement, but her ancestral elation is iterative and mediated; Danner’s verse recounts a series of repeated and hard-won reawakenings prompted by contact with African forms.

Danner’s interest in visual art was intense and wide-ranging. Along with African objects, her artistic purview encompasses modern European artists, Chinese porcelain, contemporary African American artists, and the Baroque and Rococo styles she associates with a jaunty elevator operator. Visual motifs recur rhythmically throughout Danner’s descriptions—lace, tangerine, lavender, and Ming blue, cutting across cultures, geographies, temporalities. In a recorded conversation with Langston Hughes (Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner, Writers of the Revolution, Black Forum, Motown Records, 1970), she describes an early encounter with African art while perusing the “Home Forum” page of the Christian Science Monitor as a child. I have not been able to identify any instance of African objects depicted there, but the Monitor’s “Home Forum” page reproduced art every week—if typically European paintings. From time to time, in the twenties and thirties, the page included articles on African artworks and the modern European artists who drew inspiration from African art.

Depending on the artist, such inspiration can also be diagnosed as appropriation—or worse, as the ejection of African people from modernity by the seizure of “the primitive” in their artworks. But it is precisely a desire to be “modern” in their tastes that motivates the aspirational art club members who appear in Danner’s “The Convert,” only to find themselves discomfited by Etta Moten’s gift to the poet of an African statuette, perhaps a Fang reliquary. Moten was a famous singer and actress, best known for her role as Bess in Porgy and Bess, who settled in Chicago, married Claude Barnett (founder of the Associated Negro Press) in 1934, and went on to become one of Black Chicago’s most important philanthropists. Danner generously alludes to Moten Barnett’s status as modern Black royalty in the poem; she is “at tea with the Queen.” Moten Barnett also possessed a varied collection of African art, lovingly photographed for a May 1961 article in Ebony magazine, under the title “Etta Moten Brings Africa to Chicago.” In a poem on “Etta Moten’s Attic,” Danner describes Moten Barnett’s collection as a vivid plenitude of art in motion: splashing, spilling, dripping, splashing (again), moving, splotching, shimmering, sparkling, intriguing, slipping, dyeing, quickening—and finally charming. If this last participle seems like a letdown, we might note that “charm” appears in Danner’s poem “The Small Bells of Benin” as something that has the force of a spell, a bewitching power rather than a fey decorum. “Without ringing,” the bronze bells, housed in an American museum—probably the neocolonialist Art Institute of Chicago—still chime, “bringing their charm.”

“The Convert” is all about time. Time before and time after, the modern time of punch cards and hours and calendars and the mythic—which is not to say false—time of suns and drums and the radiance that lives within a timeless work of art that “ascends the centuries.” Moten Barnett arrives punctually to grace the club with her timely presence: “in nineteen-thirty-seven,” she “kept her promise, as if clocked.” Rhyming with Moten Barnett’s clocked promise, the club operates within the regulated time of bourgeois modernity, setting aside (“placing apart”) a mere hour for aesthetic experience—“this hour to drum for our plunge into modern art.” The line itself beats a drumlike rhythm, its central dactyls (“drum for our,” “plunge into”) framed by two sets of three long beats. But the art lovers don’t yet recognize how exquisitely Moten Barnett melds modernity with the fulfillment of ancient promise: what she brings to the group doesn’t immediately please, “for by every rule we’d learned, we’d been led to discern/this rankling figure as ugly.”

Danner describes the African statuette first from the disfiguring perspective of European aesthetic norms, finding it embarrassingly ugly, recounting how the group ungratefully mocked the gift and even its bearer “for many subsequent suns.” But something changes. “Afterwards, to the turn of calendar pages,” her speaker revisits the statue to view it again—and now the figure reveals itself to be speaking the formalist language of modern abstraction, of curves and symmetries and chains of form:

                                          I could discern

through the sheen that the bulging eyes
were identical twins to the bulging nose.
The same symmetrical form was dispersed again

And again through all the bulges, the thighs
and the hands and lips, in reverse, even the toes
of this fast turning beautiful form were a selfsame chain,

matching the navel. This little figure stretched high
in grace, in its with-the-grain form and from-within-glow,
in its curves in concord.

It is not only the unexpected modernity of abstract forms that echo and chime with one another, but the sense of a life within the object that brings Danner to this epiphanic understanding. “Finally,” she says,

                   I saw on its
ebony face, not a furniture polished, shellacked shine,
but a radiance, gleaming as though a small light
had flashed internally.

Throughout her poetry on African art, Danner adopts the personae of artist, collector, art club member, and museum-goer with the perspectival agility of a method actor. In this theater of the imagination, her poem “The Christmas Soiree and the Missing Object of African Art” may be read as a reversal of “The Convert.” This poem’s speaker aspires to play a role like Moten Barnett’s, as an aesthetic evangelist—only this time the evangelist faces a gathering of whites that finally leaves her feeling defeated socially, professionally, and personally. The Christmas soirée that she hosts is a scene of loss after racially inflected loss: her landlady is evicting her, her boss and his wife snub her, the furniture store has foreclosed on her “influenced-by-Louis-Quinze set.” At this gathering of white art lovers, the speaker had originally hoped “to dazzle/the guests with how much moon, star, unbowed/true ebony art could display.” But the key participant in this effort to win white converts to African art “didn’t come to the party.” Who is this missing guest? Or better, what is absent from the imagined scene? When Danner reproaches “the missing object of African art” for not being at her Christmas party, one cannot be quite sure whether she is speaking to an artwork or a man. This missing object assumes an aspect of embodied longing animated by physical desire:

But you didn’t come to the party.
So, I stranded the guests and walked the floor
and looked out the windows and watched the door
for a glimpse of your panther-like pace, for
a glimpse of your smoother-than-panther
and almost as beautifully dark, face.

In Danner’s frantic movement of walking, looking, and watching, we feel the anxiety of waiting for an absent guest—someone who can slow and calm the poem’s tempo with even an imagined glimpse of his “panther-like pace” and smooth, “beautifully dark” face. It’s hard not to imagine this absent object as a missing person. The question of desire also surfaces in an edit Danner made, equivocating between a narrator who seems single and one who forms part of a couple (“no one couple needs seven rooms” substitutes for “she can get more for her rooms”). In the version of the poem published in Impressions of African Art Forms in the Poetry of Margaret Danner, the objects at the party are just “gadgets,” wind-up ballerinas (as European as Louis Quinze furniture) that produce “tinkling” sounds—lacking the liveness of African art or an African man. In the poem’s equivocation between objects and humans, perhaps we can view these tinkling wind-up gadgets as figures for the white guests themselves.

In Danner’s work, the liveliness of African art forms makes visible the resemblances between artworks and humans, even if the comparison is not always flattering. A “lady executive” sees herself in an empty Mangbetu palm wine jug whose “womb is neither warm nor wet,” and ponders her own childlessness; conversely, Danner imagines a fertility goddess carved on the handle of a letter opener as if this figure were alive and giving birth with the aid of “indigo magic, tangerine witched fire.” Danner observes contemporary African American artists, too, as they create works alive with interior fire, like the Chicago painter William Carter’s Egyptian women at “Sadie’s Playhouse” whose forms flicker and dance before “flotsam, pimps, [and] jadies” after a night’s carousing. Years after the making of the Wall of Respect in Chicago she makes a pilgrimage to see a mural by Jeff Donaldson (one of the Wall’s creators) in Birmingham; the Alabama mural, which features a Senufo Firespitter mask from Danner’s own collection, establishes “truth for future generations” (“Jeff Donaldson’s Wall, Five Years Later”). The kaleidoscopic colors of Danner’s work also bear affinities with Donaldson’s painting Ala Shango (in the collection of the South Side Community Art Center) in which two young Black men deploy a carved wooden axe of the Yoruba god Shango to shatter the glassy surface of the fourth wall into a burst of colorful shards.

More enigmatically, Danner also wrote a series of poems about her encounter with an unnamed artist in Memphis, “the boneman,” who was both a vibraphone player and a maker of bone carvings. The boneman and his work are “an emanation, a materialization from and throwback to Benin” in Danner’s aesthetic imaginary (“Boneman”). Inspired by her Senufo Firespitter mask—the same one Jeff Donaldson had incorporated into his Birmingham mural—this boneman makes a “modern masque” for the poet. Like Danner, this artist senses the life within artworks, carving bones into figures he calls “dudes”:

For his fingers can carve
(from any bones that you have thrown away)
exquisite figures and masques
equaled only by our Benin past.

These “Dudes” he calls them
rattle your heart and shake your mind
and bring your aesthetic senses
around down front and center
—From “And He Carves These ‘Dudes’”

The line “rattle your heart and shake your mind” arrests the poem’s rhythm; and the musical phrases “aesthetic senses” and “around down,” with their assonance and syncopated rhythm, prolong this rattle and shake. The boneman accompanies this music on his vibraphone too: “he curls a carving melody/that vibrates in me from the earthly ground” in the poem “Vibes.” His living sound drowns out the “tinkling” of European gadgets; perhaps it also gives voice to the captive, unringing Benin bells.

At the end of “The Convert,” the art club has disbanded. “Like leaves in autumn,” its members “fall,/scrabble against concrete and scatter.” Nonetheless, Etta Moten Barnett’s African statue still casts its spell on the narrator:

But I find myself still framing word sketches
of how much these blazing forms ascending the centuries
in their muted sheens, matter to me.

With “I” near the beginning and “me” at the end of this sentence, it’s as if Danner were hugging within herself the blazing forms. They animate her, too, with an inner fire where she can find herself. Their forms remained ablaze, working on her and through her, through decades of framing word sketches, of tangerine witched magic, of from-within-glow.