Ciphers and the Infinite: A Note to the Artists on Malcolm X and Black Aesthetics

I often think about the beautifully intimate photographs that Malcolm X took of Maya Angelou and Shirley Graham Du Bois outside Shirley’s home in Accra, Ghana, in the spring of 1964. I think about how Malcolm must have considered which way the light was shining as he posed his kindred under the sun, capturing this moment on his 35-mm still film camera. Not only was Malcolm stirred by the political fervor and possibility of a newly freed Ghana, but through his camera he was able to capture the essence of this postcolonial project and the central importance that Black women necessarily assumed in the ethical reordering of society.

As I write these words and reflect on Malcolm’s encounter with the continent in all her righteous glory, I watch our world crumble as empire lights this earth ablaze. Many days, I feel as though I am drowning in my dread and yearning for a sort of honesty that feels incompatible with the lies and inhumanity that white supremacy demands from us. Sometimes seeing this truth for what it is feels like a burden too big to bear, and a new type of nihilism sets into my marrow. Other times, I feel this future we are being thrust into is asking that we gather our creative instruments and build our way forward with a vibrancy and artistic precision that extends beyond the dogma of traditional politicking. This is not to say that ideological clarity is not necessary, but revolution also needs the funk. Abstraction is our possibility, and prose our heartbeat. Indeed, our truth is our glory.

It was not until I finished editing my book, Mapping Malcolm, that I began to more fully make sense of the creativity of his vision, imbued within the cadence of his speeches and the visual aesthetics of his world-building project. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Central Harlem, right off of Malcolm X Boulevard, just blocks from the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Mosque No. 7, where they still sell bean pies and copies of the Final Call, and maybe it’s simply the truth—no one has seemed to shape the creative vision of Black America quite like the people’s prophet, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Brother Malcolm X. His revelatory vision has helped propel us toward a new creative consciousness and Black aesthetic.

Malcolm was a(n) (inter)nationalist, a Nation of Islam minister–turned–Sunni convert, and one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. He was also a butterfly collector, a photographer, and a cinematographer. A lover of jazz and a poet too, Malcolm often hid sonnets for his beloved Betty before leaving on long trips overseas. So it comes as no surprise that he employed an artistic and speculative approach to his world-building project, one rooted in the self-determination of Black America and emancipatory politics.

Alongside Malcolm’s keen interest in photography, the expansiveness of his liberatory mediums engendered a creative movement that took hold of Harlem. This movement continues to help generations of Black artists, organizers, and everyday folk get clear on the function of art as an expression of that which is felt, what lives in the deepest part of our interconnected souls. Gordon Parks once reflected that for Malcolm, his camera was a way of “collecting evidence,” of asserting Black humanity in the wake of erasure and racist sensationalism. Malcolm’s photography was a storytelling tool that decentered a capitulatory white gaze and reasserted Black life through the eyes, ears, and hearts of Black people. While much of his photographic archive is not available for public reproduction, the simple provocation of Malcolm, the creator, lends itself to a necessary expansion in our collective consciousness of his personhood. His commitment to asserting Black humanity has helped to bring forth a new articulation of Afro-American aesthetics within the context of the Black Arts Movement.

After Malcolm returned home from the continent later that summer in 1964, he founded the Pan-Africanist coalition in Harlem, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), inspired by the anticolonial movements that had taken hold across Africa. Though brief, the formal existence of the OAAU as a political organization reflected Harlem’s growing radicalism and centrality within Black social movements. In many ways, the emergent organization served as an ideological precursor to the Black Power Movement, which grew in reach following the death of Malcolm X and other Black social movement leaders like Medgar Evers and Fred Hampton. They created an organizational leaflet, the “Organization of Afro-American Unity Inc. Aims and Objectives” that spells out the organization’s goals in block lettering: Black American political education, community development, and human rights. An image of this vintage ephemera, now a faded ivory-colored paper, can be found online and remains one of the few material remnants of Malcolm’s last political project.

The OAAU seal on the worn 1964 leaflet is abstract and concrete, both a piece of art and a diagram of divine mathematics. It is within this constellation of possibility that a creative language emerges—one that helps to situate the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition within a new epistemological context. An Islamic-inspired seal is printed on the front and back and is itself a piece of art, gesturing toward the infinite possibilities that lie within transnational and liberatory religiosity. The overlapping “ciphers” that move “from darkness to light” reflect what Elijah Muhammad, prophet to the Nation of Islam, believed to be Allah’s 360 degrees of knowledge, the sum total of all awareness in this universe and beyond.

We want a black poem. And a Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD.
—Amiri Baraka, “Black Art”

On February 21, 1965, while getting ready to deliver a speech to the OAAU at the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X was gunned down. Though he and his comrades sensed his end, Malcolm walked to the stage undeterred, with his commitment to truth-telling more unabashed and potent. Many of his final speeches reflect this intellectual urgency with resolute defiance, marking his transcendence from a more locally focused commitment to Black nationalism to a global conception of justice and human rights. His last public affirmation was the customary Islamic greeting: as-salamu alaykum, ٱل َّ َس َلاُم َعلَیُ ْكم, peace be upon you. In so many ways, these words affirmed his most fundamental belief about the human condition and mirrored the meaning imbued within the OAAU seal—that moving closer to Allah, and toward the light, was also moving closer to the truth and away from the ills of racism. His unyielding commitment to consciousness raising unified those around him in this sacred kinship, helping to bend the moral arc of the universe toward “freedom, justice, and equality,” the Nation of Islam edict he often referenced.

The cosmos seemed to shift after Malcolm was laid to rest at Ferncliff Cemetery, and a frenetic energy took hold of Harlem. Poems like Amiri Baraka’s revelatory “Black Art,” written after Malcolm’s assassination, spilled out of young Black folk who sought to transmute their grief into a righteousness made material through their art. Baraka’s “Black Art” reflected the very nature of this creative expression, communicating a pointed form of diasporic self-determination. In turn, ethics and aesthetics became entangled in a symbiosis that continues to reflect the particular cultural traditions of Black America and the broader diaspora, for whom religion, selfhood, community, culture, and politics serve as reflections of each other.

From Malcolm’s death a new movement was born. The Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement made clear that art and politics could no longer be separate within popular Black discourse. A deepened understanding seemed to calcify that in order to get free—to be whole and to do Black life and death justice—art must always be at the center. This commitment to diasporic self-determination was expressed through Baraka’s prophetic poetry, in the dramaturgy of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem, as well as in the earlier choreography of Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,” and John Coltrane’s sermonic “A Love Supreme.” These creative forms helped to (re)define visions of Black life as firmly rooted in an African spiritual consciousness and ancestral memory. 

What I have learned from Malcolm, the creative world-builder, is that art is our strategy and it can be a politics too. It is what we need if we are to survive and possibly thrive. It is a way of assembling a world not yet realized and a way of contending with the depravity of neocolonialism, baked into our present material and psycho-spiritual condition. Malcolm gave shape to a particular articulation of Black aesthetics as an ethic—he himself was a jazz note, a constellation of infinite possibility, his spirit the deep, rich burgundy of Muhammad Mosque No. 7’s old awning on 127th Street in Harlem. Malcolm’s life and death, his expansiveness, his failures, his abiding love, and his commitment to a public political and spiritual evolution were a creative practice in and of itself and an affirmation of life as an expansive act.

As we recall Minister Malcolm X–turned–El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and we seek to make sense of his religio-political vision for emancipated life, let us also recall Detroit Red at Roseland-State Ballroom and Small’s Paradise, who danced the Lindy Hop to ease his grief. And let us recall how he played Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln on Lenox Avenue before his stirring speeches while in the Nation of Islam. In getting clear on Malcolm X the internationalist and humanitarian, let us remember these parts too. Sixty years following his death and on the heels of his 100th birthday, I wonder what we might learn from Malcolm’s visionary practice, from the way he captured the profound truth of our shared humanity, and from the cipher that moved toward the light. 

Black people, you are Black art. You are the poem as Amiri Baraka teaches us. You are Dahomey smile. You are slave ship and field holler. You are Blues and Gospel and Bebop and New Music. . . .

Black liberation for the ditty bopping hip ones, for all the righteous sinners and hustlers. . . . Right on.

Black liberation for the sea deaths and chains, for long stretches of desert and pyramids, for drums, for folktales, and for the hot breathing earth.
—Larry Neal