Remembering Trey Ellis
When rasx() was in his twenties, living in a small apartment behind a garage in the family compound in Inglewood, there was the idea of becoming a struggling freelance writer. Every personal tale of the life of a freelance writer presented to me revealed subsistence-level bohemian themes. But I was not afraid because I knew Trey Ellis. And I really, really liked his satirical novel, Platitudes. Through some kind of connections at the time I got his home phone number and left a message on his machine. When I called, what I imagined I heard was the voice of a Black woman on the machine. Being the imaginative type I immediately assumed that she and Trey were some kind of New York literary power couple—you know a cross between my idealized Alice and John Coltrane and Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes (with a little Dubois high class sprinkled on top). He never returned my phone calls. In the mean time, my personal computer lifestyle took over—and with the Internet revolution—I found that writing code for machines was just as interesting as writing prose for humans.
The famous Ellis essay, “The New Black Aesthetic” introduced me to the term “cultural mulatto.” The opinion here is that this essay marked the beginning of yet another formal excuse for people of African descent to disrespect their ancestors. Kara Walker is my poster child of this movement. She had such an impact on me that I wrote a poem about my perception of her. This same essay, in the rasx() context, also makes Ellis the godfather of Afrofuturism—even though Ellis is not a science fiction writer. It follows that Ellis provided a foundation of sorts for DJ Spooky and all who wanna be DJ Spooky. First of all, the word mulatto written next to the word cultural*,* while referring to Black culture, implies that something relating to Black culture is mule-like. Mules, I am told, cannot reproduce. They are a hybrid of two different species. What Trey permits by the use of this word is the indulgence in the fantasy that European intellectual achievements are of a completely different species than African achievements. The new, young, cultural-mulatto Negroes, then, are very special people because they can achieve the near supernatural by mixing with Europe stuff in an “unfortunate” African context to manufacture plush toys to be sold at the local mall.
Now that the previous paragraph is written, let me address the ever-present cynical observer. First I suggest that you handle this comparison: look toward the place Toni Morrison took the same genre that a young Trey Ellis lampooned. Look at the exquisite, refined work of Beloved compared to the vaudeville humor of Trey Ellis. Toni Morrison showed remarkable respect to the ancestors and got a Pulitzer Prize—it’s hard to get more “mulatto” than that. Additionally, one can successfully argue that this same sort of joke making was obtained and exceeded by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man. Remember the tongue in cheek for Ras the Destroyer? In the rasx() context, Trey Ellis is the hip hop sampler of literary classics, which in turn produced an even more mule-like Afro-future filled with Kara Spooky hipsters looking at urban/suburban Viacom loneliness and trying to call it freedom. You’ve come along, baby. Welcome to European angst and the dry cleaning bill of the sophisticated Sophist toga.
It should be no surprise that Trey’s cultural mulatto is still going strong. It is, by definition and American tradition, an accessible device with “universal appeal.” At my alma mater we have Drew Holland addressing you know, like, multicultural issues in “Scholar Speaks on ‘New Black Aesthetic’.” So, dude, the three or ten Black students on campus can feel like, you know, included when some person named Dr. Raja Labadi Boussedra takes the issues “head on,” referring to an essay written almost twenty years ago called “new.” In the rasx() context, at least three layers of rhetorical abstraction are identified before you get to any real Blackness. We have Drew Holland, Dr. Raja Labadi Boussedra, “cultural mulatto” and Trey Ellis. Let’s get what is really holding the universe together here…
Instead of writing racial code words for the propaganda machine used to program humans, a more lucrative and successful career was available to me, writing code words for programming machines. The cynical observer would readily suggest that I am a jealous, bitter, “frustrated writer.” This observation becomes silly when you see a home-grown Palestinian author being “frustrated” with not receiving any awards from the Israeli literary establishment. The suggestion here is to look at the official Trey Ellis Blog and get back to me with a list of details from his “single parent” life that we should envy. Here is a sample for the cause:
I had scored a dream job teaching screenwriting in France and cashed in the business class ticket they offered for four coach ones so Lucia and the kids could come too. After the week-long course was over we flew from Normandy to St. Tropez to visit her godparents. I bought her a little cake but in France you can buy almost roman candles for birthdays and I stuck this cigar-sized thing on the cake and lit it and sparks flew everywhere and we all sang and the look on her face let me know that we were going to be all right, at least one day.
No. My “dream” would include traveling to interview and document in person the same personalities met here in the kinté space through the Internet. As for the screenwriting stuff, the priority for me is to have time to work on original material because I have learned from those that come before me. Too many of their ‘mainstream collaborations’ start out as filet mignon and end up as corn beef hash—and the irony for me is that there was never the intention to prepare filet mignon. The thought of Akira Kurasawa spending almost ten years working on the storyboards for Ran comes to mind… The “frustrated” writer is in the particular confusion of being the virgin rainforest and the lumberjack trying to cut it down and sell furniture in Wal-Mart. The multiple personality disorders look so heroin chic on film but the real day to day grind can be deadly… Anyway, Trey Ellis is on my Blog-roll. In spite all of these international liaisons with bling bling and the existential sexual individual (with “kids” and a heart of gold), he’s still kinda cool to me under the mufukkin circumstances.