14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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The wanderlust gusto of Shirley Graham Du Bois
Race Woman: the Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Gerald Horne, New York: New York University Press, 2000 . pp363
Shirley Graham Du Bois, the African-American playwright, political activist and writer and the wife of W E B Du Bois, spent most of the last ten years of her life in Cairo. She settled in the city in 1968 and fell instantly in love with it. For her, Egypt was "one of the most interesting and lively places on the globe. The longer I stay here the better I like it," she said. She lived in Egypt during a difficult period of the country's history between the 1967 and 1973 wars, but she didn't "intend to run away -- Israeli bombs or no bombs." Instead, with all her characteristic zeal she savaged Israel in her lectures and writings, typically regarding the Zionist entity as a tool of "white supremacy fighting a coloured people." Her worldview reflected the race-conscious cultural baggage of the United States, where she was born and raised, but she also claimed French, Scotch- Irish, English and Native-American ancestry, in addition to African, considering herself African- American. "I am a Negro," she said. "I say that first because here in America that fact is the most determining factor of my being. I cannot escape."
Shirley Graham
Though the prevalent racism and white supremacism of the United States of her youth worked against her, ensuring a steep uphill struggle for recognition, this repressive climate failed to stifle Graham Du Bois's creative energies. At the beginning of her career, the Dramatic Guild of America did not want to accept her because of her race. "Can't you make them believe that you are an Arab?" a friend asked at the time, and years later, in a strange turn of fate, Graham Du Bois lived in Egypt, championing the Arab cause at the twilight of her political career. Her well-researched biography of President Gamal Abdel- Nasser, Son of the Nile, was a ground-breaking first in the English language. Perhaps the most outstanding personality trait of Graham Du Bois to come across in this sensitively written and long-overdue biography of one of the 20th century's most remarkable women is her impulsive and unrestrained defense of what she considered to be worthy and just causes.
Graham Du Bois moved to Cairo after being forced to leave Ghana where she headed the television network -- the first woman in the world to do so -- following the February 1966 coup d'état that overthrew the government of the West-African country's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Her biographer, Gerald Horne, sympathetically treats the wanderlust gusto of a woman whose ancestors had been forcibly taken out of Africa. "There was an intersection of the personal and political in her life," he writes. "Her upbringing meant that abandoning home -- actually or politically -- held little terror for her; thus she was able to leave Brooklyn Heights [New York] for Accra, Ghana, in 1961 and West Africa for Cairo, Egypt, in 1966." Africa, Horne asserts, also allowed Graham Du Bois to indulge the different sides of her personality, her sojourn in Cairo exposing her to the anti-Soviet, pro- Beijing rhetoric of the day. Instinctively, she sided with "coloured" Beijing against "white" Moscow.
Born in 1896 in Indianapolis in the United States and dying in China in 1977, where she was buried in the Paposhan Cemetery for Revolutionaries, Beijing, Graham Du Bois was the daughter of a preacher of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, "the last of the old-fashioned Negro preachers who was really the shepherd of his flock." Her first marriage was "a disaster," but she gave birth to two sons in quick succession, telling the two boys that their father was dead following their parents' divorce. She led a hard life as a single mother and divorcee at a time when both were widely viewed as being markers for loose morals. In her thirties she was a student and struggling artist, and though hard-pressed and therefore obliged to leave her children in the care of her mother for long stretches, it was always with a deep sense of guilt that she did so. She was not an infallible woman, and she had her share of weaknesses, though many of these were little more than endearing idiosyncrasies. According to her biographer, she "shaved as much as ten years from her true age," and she used "to search far and wide" for "Inecto Colour Crème," her favourite skin-lightener, a life-long habit she evidently excused as a "concession to feminine vanity."
In her professional career as a dramatist and director, Graham Du Bois began directing plays with mixed results. Her play Little Black Sambo, which used "puppets with black faces" and "thick red lips" was acceptable to the authorities, but when she put on Theodore Ward's play The Big White Fog in Chicago all hell was let loose, and there were calls for the play to be banned. After its first production in 1929, her opera Tom-Tom did not receive a full-scale production until 1932, but her adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Mikado as Swing Mikado, a jazz version, took her to Yale University Drama Department.
Graham Du Bois began to write extensively to escape the tragedy of her son Robert's death, her biography Dr George Washington Carver, Scientist, being published to critical acclaim. A biography of Paul Robeson was quickly followed by another, this time on Frederick Douglass. She contributed to the Left-wing newspaper The Daily Worker, and she was given a major award for the Best Book Combating Intolerance in a competition involving over 600 manuscripts. In 1947, she was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation; and her books were now being respectfully reviewed in mainstream publications. Nevertheless, her biographer says, the zenith of this "composer, playwright, actress, drummer, biographer, editor, novelist and political activist's" life came in the 1960s, when, after the death of her husband, the African-American intellectual and pan-Africanist W E B Du Bois, she became an advisor and official in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. Perhaps inevitably Graham Du Bois lived in the shadow of her widely revered husband; nevertheless her biographer superbly shows the full range of her talents, making her emerge as a person in her own right.
W E B Du Bois had proposed shortly before his indictment for peace activism, and the couple were married in February 1951 in New York City. When they wed, Du Bois was in his eighties and his bride was at least thirty years his junior. Seven years later, after their application for US passports had been repeatedly turned down, the couple fled the McCarthyist Red Scare then sweeping the United States for an extended tour of Europe, the Soviet Union and China, only to return briefly before renouncing their US nationality and being promptly granted Ghanaian citizenship by Nkrumah.
Unsurprisingly, Graham Du Bois was better received in the anti-imperialist countries she visited than she was in the United States. Indeed, she was often harshly criticised by other African-American intellectuals. The novelist Alice Walker, for example, dismissed Graham Du Bois's memoir of her life with W E B Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On, as "a cloying intrusion into any serious effort to understand Du Bois." And the poet Maya Angelou criticised Graham Du Bois for what she called "her lack of identity with the Black American struggle, her isolation from her people, her pride at sitting in the catbird seat in Ghana."
In this biography, however, Graham Du Bois comes across as a single-minded woman, always aware where her own interests lay, but always equally unbending on ideological issues, telling her friend and fellow Black activist Richard Wright that "Labour organisations are the natural channels through which Negroes with ideas should work." Similarly, in 1963 when Chinese leader Mao Zedong made a widely publicised statement in solidarity with the African- American struggle, Graham Du Bois reciprocated by disseminating Maoist ideas in African-American circles. Her ideological commitments also led her to join Du Bois in 1949 in sending greetings to the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, hailing his "leadership in uprooting racial discrimination."
"When [W E B] Du Bois died," writes her biographer, Graham Du Bois "moved to safeguard his legacy by preserving his papers and manuscripts and writing a memoir about his life. [But] when she died there was no widower to perform a similar task" for her. It was left to her son David, who has lived between Egypt and the US for the past four decades, to pick up the pieces. Indeed, it was a "chance encounter" between David Du Bois and his mother's future biographer in New York in 1993 that led the latter to write Graham Du Bois's biography.
Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
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