Amy Benson for The Aviary: What are you listening to now?
I’m a radio fanatic. Depending on the mood or what I’m writing or reading I will go from free form radio—a strange conglomeration of underground, strange rock, jazz, old folk or old hip-hop—to a standard jazz or classical station, to WKCR. Right now I’m writing some material that has to do with certain kinds of racial proprieties at the turn of the century, so I am listening to concertized spirituals that Paul Robeson or Marion Anderson sang, and some of the slightly folkloric art songs that certain black composers wrote.
Is there an artist or genre that you know you’re supposed to like but you just can’t get there?
I have a lot of respect—she said dutifully—for Joyce, but I will never, ever go back to Ulysses. There are artists you basically never liked and there’s no justification; it just isn’t for you. It’s nothing to do with him or me, we just don’t mix.
One of the quotes at the beginning of On Michael Jackson is about P.T. Barnum: “People want to believe and know they’ve been conned, as long as they didn’t know when or how.” Are there things you feel you can see through, but want to believe in nonetheless?
We’re all brought up, especially if we’re leftist in some way, to believe in the Great Pronunciations. We know, for example, with Thomas Jefferson, with Democracy, that we’ve been conned, but we still want to feel that we’ve been blessed, that we’re in some way made special by that tradition.
If you love something aren’t you always conned by it? We claim not to believe the word “objective” anymore, we want to believe we can master it somehow. And yet we have to have some element of belief. Belief is surrender, it’s yielding up your capacities even to necessarily be on equal terms with something.
What surprised you in the response to On Michael Jackson?
I was surprised at how many people said to me “Well, you know, Margo, after reading your reviews and essays in the New York Times for so many years, we’re very surprised that you would pick a topic like this.” An academic of a certain age you might expect that from, but I was surprised by the range of people. Some of that I think did have to do with the sexual scandal taint, but also with his aesthetic fall. Popular culture is as canon-obsessed as high culture ever was. At the time that book came out, Michael Jackson had pretty much lost his aesthetic credibility. I thought at the time, Well, he’s probably going to have to die to get it back. And I turned out to be right.
Do the questions that compelled that book still drive you, or do you feel you’ve put any to rest?
No, I think those questions in different proportions and in different guises are still driving me. The dream identity you construct from what your life offers you is very interesting to me. What forms that takes within the fixtures of class, race, gender, but also what forms that takes within the space where you believe you are free. Michael Jackson really broke a lot of rules in that way, a lot of what we think of as the stricter racial and genre rules. He was one of the first rock/pop/soul performers to be so thoroughly in love with a pre-rock and soul culture.
I think of myself as an Americanist, I have to say. I’m obsessed with what this particular nation—its psyche, its imagination, how it crosses over, mingles with and shapes we individuals.
Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?
What I’m working on now is a combination of cultural history, criticism, and memoir. The general subject is the milieu I grew up in, which variously called itself The Talented Tenth, then The Negro Elite, then The Colored Elite, the African-American Elite, The Negro Upper Class, the Black Upper Class, and then it got called the Black Bourgeois, which it doesn’t like as much. This dizzying array of names. It was a world that was—I was born in 1947—very secluded, and yet some of its creation and identity partly depended upon the ways in which it emulated and appropriated white society.
One of my chapters is about an exchange I had with my mother when I was about 9. I was at a mostly, but not all, white, very progressive private school, and we weren’t supposed to talk about social/racial things, certainly not class. We were supposed to be privileged without talking about it. But someone had asked me if my family was upper class. I said, “Mother, are we rich?” And she said, “No one’s supposed to ask that. That’s bad manners. But if anyone asks, you just say ‘We’re comfortable.’” And I said, “Well, are we upper class?” And she said, “We are considered upper class Negroes [this was the 50s], upper-middle class Americans, and many people would like to consider us ‘just more Negroes’.” And I thought, Oooohhh, okay… Let me work with this!” The project is partly about imagining what can’t imagine you. Which is a very great, sometimes painful, sometimes wondrous thing to be able to do. And it can give you a lot of power.
So these are things you’re writing toward, are there things, on the flip side, that you’re writing away from?
As a working critic, I often feel increasingly that I’m writing away from a fixed tradition of critical authority. I wasn’t always, when I was young I was busy establishing myself in some way as the Critical Authorial, “We”. But more and more I’m interested in how something called Authority comes from vulnerability, ambiguity, or coherently, eloquently addressed uncertainty, even confusion.
Do you have background in music or dance? Does that allow you to understand performance from the inside out?
Yes! Fortunately, I had both. My sister and I had that kind of lovely thing about being bourgeois girls in the 50s: you always had to take music lessons and art lessons and dance lessons. I fell in love in my own kind of jumpy way, with music. A little later, I fell in love with theatre and did a little bit of acting with one of those late-60s We are following in the steps of Artaud! groups, We are creating a riot in the theatre! It left me for years with a longing—a sometimes terrible longing—to be back in theatre.
What was your instrument?
The piano.
If you could invent an additional borough for New York City, what would it be like? What's missing?
Everybody who came would have to experiment with some art form that they thought they hated, and play around with it. Definitely. I would have art and culture spaces instead of old people’s homes for seniors. Where groups of people who wanted to bond couldread newspapers or watch the news or perform arts together. I would have those centers for them.
Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic and the author of On Michael Jackson (Vintage). She was a staff writer for The New York Times for 12 years, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Grand Street, The Nation, and MS. She has been anthologized in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death (Norton), Best African American Essays, 2010, Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia). She also wrote and performed a solo theater piece, Sixty Minutes in Negroland at The Cherry Lane and The Culture Project. Currently, she teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.
Amy Benson’s book, The Sparkling-Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin 2004), was chosen by Ted Conover as the 2003 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize winner in creative nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as New England Review, diagram, Seneca Review, Hotel Amerika, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Black Warrior Review. She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University and is the co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series, Harlem.
NOTE: Margo Jefferson will be reading at First Person Plural, a new reading series curated by The Aviary contributors Amy Benson and Wendy S. Walters on March 5, 2012.
