Speech Is My Hammer

Book excerpt: With Speech Is My Hammer, Max Hunter draws on memoir and his own biography to call his readers to reimagine the meaning and power in literacy. Defining literacy as a "spectrum of skills, abilities, attainments, and performances," Hunter focuses on dispelling "literacy myths" and discussing how Black male artists, entertainers, professors, and writers have described their own "literacy narratives" in self-conscious, ambivalent terms. Beginning with Frederick Douglass's My Bondage My Freedom, W. E. B. Dubois's Soul of Black Folks, and Langston Hughes's Harlem Renaissance-memoir The Big Sea, Hunter conducts a literary inquiry that unearths their double-consciousness and literacy ambivalence. He moves on to reveal that for many contemporary Black men the arc of ambivalence rises even higher and becomes more complex, following the civil rights and the Black Power movements, and then sweeping sharply upward once again during the War on Drugs. Hunter provides rich illustrations and probing theses that complicate our commonsense reflections on their concealed angst regarding Black authenticity, respectability politics, and masculinity. Speech Is My Hammer moves the reader beyond considering literacy in normative terms to perceive its potential to facilitate transformative conversations among Black males.