A Perversion of Dreams, and Other Truths

Truth-telling brands you:

Intolerant or confrontational?

Brave and singular?

Angry?

Part of the problem? Or part of the solution?

Or is it all of the above?

Wanda Coleman knows.

She’ll give you some time to think about it . . . but not too much.

Since her first collection of poetry, “Mad Dog, Black Lady” (Black Sparrow Press, 1979), Coleman, the author of more than a dozen books--poetry, short fiction, notes and essays--is best known for what has often been termed her “warrior voice,” her inclination to impatiently peel away small talk’s polite veneer, to scissor through to the heart of the matter.

But assigning her just that slim role wouldn’t be seeing the entirety, the whorls and workings of complexity.

Coleman’s poet’s voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood’s neighborhoods--her South L.A.’s wild-frond palms, the smog smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday’s tours of sorrow’s more desolate stretches. But it also can land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up.

For a woman who has held it all together variously as a medical secretary, bookkeeper, soap opera writer, transcriptionist, waitress and bartender (“The things you do when . . . your main focus is humanity, and not making money,” says Coleman), the century’s last breath has finally coughed up the goods.

She is the 1999 recipient of the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of $10,000, awarded by the Academy of American Poets for the previous year’s most outstanding book of poetry in the United States, “Bathwater Wine” (Black Sparrow Press). Coleman’s “ . . . extravagant music . . . has been making itself heard across the divide between the West Coast and East, establishment and margins . . . across the too-American rift among races and genders . . . for two decades,” writes Prize jury chair and poet Marilyn Hacker. “Staying firmly on her subject . . . a black woman’s transformations by and through passion and rage--displays verbal virtuosity and stylistic range. . . .

With her new book, and her first novel, “Mambo Hips and Make Believe” (Black Sparrow Press, 1999), she is further testing her lyric range. At 400 pages, even the seemingly unflappable Coleman, 53, admits she was being ambitious.

“I had it conceptually in my mind, but I didn’t know that I could get it onto the paper. I’m writing on three levels. Two narrative levels and a poetic level. So I know that I’m taking a lot of risks.”

She settles behind her neat desk in a book-filled and award-studded home office on a quiet tree-lined street in the heart of sleepy Westchester, where she lives with her husband, the poet Austin Straus, and her 20-year-old son (from a previous marriage), Ian Grant. She sits upright, her back a plane. Her cascade of dreadlocks contained in a black hairnet, piled high, the effect mantilla-like. She is ringed by the ever-evolving tools of her trade--legal pads, a black IBM Selectric, a transcription machine, a spanking-new turquoise iMac humming in a corner.

A Teller of Unvarnished Truths

“I wanted to do a Hollywood novel that was how I saw Hollywood--as a perversion of dreams--the tradition of Nathanael West and Joan Didion. I wanted to reveal how celebrity and how this constant reinforcement of surface as substance perverts even the best intent.”

Coleman, in poetry as well as prose, is master of telling unvarnished truths--about self, about the world, about personal past and our collective future. In “Things No One Knows,” from “Bathwater Wine,” Coleman’s revelations inspire a too-close-to-the-nerve wince:

My mentors have exiled me to the

outskirts of nappy literacy . . .

The light excludes me and there

is no degree for what is learned

in the dark.

And from “Dreamwalk”:

There are certain names that are

better than others. . . .

Ours is not the climate for

awkward Annabelles, unruly

Arlettas or weird Wandas.

They belong at the back of the

class among the badniks who

destroy the future.

The novel concerns itself with other things revealed in the dark--dreams, and as well, their attending nightmares. And Coleman knows a bit about both.

In the case of “Mambo Hips,” its dreaming protagonist, Tamala, is a hard-scrabble woman of mixed heritage--Irish, French, Mexican--who, when the whim hits, “passes” for white. Her self-image a distorted wash as if glimpsed through a fun-house mirror, Tamala’s trials are endless. And she spares no details from her best friend, a black woman and fellow writer named Erlene. Fame becomes aspiring writer-actress Tamala’s sole object of worship. But in her pursuit, she finds herself sucked down in a psychic undertow.

“I think that that is truer to the American experience,” Coleman explains, “the perversion of the American Dream in the contemporary world than the other thing, the successes.”

This Coleman would file under the tab marked “realism.” “What troubles me with some of the negative responses [to the book] that I’ve gotten is that no one makes the leap. Tamala is sort of blamed for everything that happened to her. But there’s a system in place here. She is not an island.”

The novel allowed her more internal latitude, and at the same time, she knew, it would broaden her literary base: “I’ve been under pressure to produce a novel for a long time, because poetry has been so denigrated in our society. And I have a tendency to be a poetry bigot. So I had to work through a lot of resentment--that my work hasn’t gotten the serious reviews that I feel it has merited. That I haven’t gotten the weight I think I’ve deserved because it’s poetry and it’s complex.”

That, as well as regionalism, says Richard Yarborough, associate professor of English at UCLA, are important factors that no doubt marginalize a writer such as Coleman.

“L.A. gets overlooked in terms of literary production on the national scene,” Yarborough says. “For African Americans, it didn’t have the critical mass like Detroit, Chicago and New York. . . . The West Coast style . . . is very idiosyncratic. Multicultural . . . with roots in the Beat movement, [and] isn’t known for hewing one particular line still has not been fully appreciated. And the L.A. cluster has very, very much been ignored.”

For Coleman, the creative act was all about being seen.

For the little girl growing up in Watts, who early on gave up picture books to fast-forward through science fiction and sea-faring tales and adult literature, she learned early to trust her own perceptions.

“When I started school, it was just before the years white flight had gotten up any steam,” she recalls. “So I was only one of a few kids of color. When I went to school, I lived in a white world. I didn’t grow up in a black world.” It toughened her skin, but more important it steeled her resolve. “If you were creative, you were even more of an anathema. For me, there were very few loving teachers who recognized my gifts.”

She found an articulate voice in music. Studying two instruments, she planned to become a concert violinist, “but what made me stay with writing was that I felt that I had nothing original to offer the world of music, but I did have something to offer the world of writing. I wanted to put the world as I saw it on the page. That was absolutely a burning imperative. I had to learn how to write. And I had to find those who would give me that information.”

After graduating from Fremont High in 1964, Coleman tried on a few workshops for a fit--a Teen Post workshop for starters, and next the soon-to-be-legendary Watts Writers Workshop. “There was all this effusive energy that came out of the Watts Riots in ’65. . . . The lid of oppression was off for the first time in the black community.”

Then she took her vision across town--Venice’s Beyond Baroque, Writers West and the Open Door Program of the Writer’s Guild of America.

Her Work Noted for ‘Upfrontness’

Poet Kamau Daaood, co-founder of Leimert Park’s the World Stage and Watts Writers Workshop, remembers the figure she cut along the blooming ‘60s poetry scene.

“There was a real strength and upfrontness of her work. She was dealing with a lot of feminist themes before it was popular,” he recalls. “She had an unapologetic voice and was good at taking that voice outside of the so-called ‘community.’ A lot of us at the time were bound by the perimeter of the black community. She’s been over the years very, very supportive of black writers. It wasn’t like she left us.”

But where he sees Coleman get too-often hemmed in is in the public’s perception.

“There’s this image of her as a ‘sharp-tongued sistah with her hand on her hip.’ But if you pick up any of her books now, what stands out is her grasp of story and imagery.”

It took eight years (and 100 published poems)--from 1971 to 1977--before Black Sparrow Press published a chapbook of 14 of Coleman’s poems, “Art in the Court of the Blue Fag.” “I figured that if they would publish [Charles] Bukowski’s work, they probably would publish me,” she says. “Mad Dog, Black Lady” followed. And now, more than 20 years later, she is the first Black Sparrow author to win a prize so large.

In her winding, uphill career she’s reached breathtaking clearings--fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the California Arts Council, sharing stages with such disparate voices as Allen Ginsberg and Exene Cervenka. (And her voice will be part of a Rhino Records compilation of black poetry, “Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers,” due this month.)

“Wanda Coleman has been one of the most dominant poetic voices rooted in black Los Angeles,” says UCLA’s Yarborough. “She’s labored for a long time here writing about Los Angeles--the freeways, the neighborhoods, riding the bus--a very particular Los Angeles. She’s been maintaining this vision for a long time and has a certain kind of creative voice that finally, slowly has gotten attention.”

Over the years, the fires at her back haven’t shifted much.

“I’m able to articulate them better, I’ve become more clear about them, I’ve become more focused, but at root they haven’t changed,” she says.

Race, disparity and the increasing complexity of race politics in this country are the knots she works through on the page.

“For me, racism only exists in America. It’s a perversion of tribalism and . . . nothing will satisfy me short of an open society and social parity.”

So for Coleman, as a writer who chooses to unyieldingly raise the specter of racism, and raise it in a voice and tone that brand her, she knows, forever angry, “I have nothing to lose from the truth, and those I love have everything to gain. I’m not an inspirational writer, not in the usual sense. I don’t use bromides or platitudes. And uplift is not in my vocabulary,” she explains. “In our culture, the ‘angry young man’ is viewed as the heroic rebel. But we, as black writers, don’t get that. We’re just complainers and whiners.”

This is why “Mambo Hips” as a document is so important for Coleman. It was a way to deal with a social condition that is too often racialized.

“We live in a society where the poor are still blamed for being poor,” Coleman says. “When you factor in race, what you’ve got is blind compartmentalization. So I wanted to address these issues, but I wanted to put a little distance between them and race. There is a false American myth of individualism. The all-powerful individual who can overcome all of these dire circumstances. But no one wants to look at the damage that has been done to us as individuals. I look for cultural moments like this to illuminate.”

Coleman will continue to examine the cracks in the facade; what lurks behind the scrim of make-believe from all sides of the racial spectrum.

“I think that black writers, like myself, aren’t given much credit. Because everyone wants to put us in that category that we are roarin’ out of the ghetto and blacker-than-black and holier than black. . . . I’ve always lived in a multicultural world. . . . It’s always existed here in Southern California. But I still have to go through the ritual of giving people my cultural reference points, the context, so that they can see me.”

Life is far more complicated, more muddy, than black and white, or one side and the other side.

“I don’t make it easy.” In other words, truth is, “I ain’t Oprah.”

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Lynell George can be reached at lynell.george@latimes.com.