‘The Grey Album,’ by Kevin Young - NYTimes.com: From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn’t fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. Slave bodies lied to their masters. Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. The trickster was born. In his new work of literary and cultural criticism, “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” the accomplished poet Kevin Young unearths, orchestrates, improvises and imagines lies and more lies — in short, American history.Young places the trickster near the axis of black American culture. “A tradition of counterfeit and fiction, of storying,” he writes, “has just as much place in African-American letters as our rituals of church or prayer or music.” Separated from their families, blacks created a communal story from fragments. Condescended to, suppressed, effaced, ripped off and covered, black artists have resorted throughout American history to subversive styles of artistic expression largely revolving around the “trickster” as mask and music. How much of Young the Author is in the trickster tradition? He’s escaping even as he’s explaining. “The desire to escape America is as American as you can get,” a friend warns him.
