17 pages • 34-minute read
Slam, Dunk, & Hook
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Background
Literary Context
The jazz-influenced irregular (sprung) rhythms and vernacular language that power Komuyakaa’s poetry place his work in a modernist tradition that began a style known as “jazz poetry” in the 1920s (Musical Geographies, ‘Lines of Jazz’, 2019). Jazz music has roots in African American culture, but in the years after World War I, it was the music of the younger generation across American and Europe. Band leaders like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captured the frenetic spirit of an age seeking to throw off the chains of the past. Harlem and other inner cities—where Black communities settled following the Great Migration from the South—were the hotbeds of jazz, and poets such as Langston Hughes and T.S. Eliot realized the potential to harness the music’s syncopated rhythms into an irregular, unpredictable, and distinctly urban poetic meter. With this stem in modernism, Komunyakaa can be placed in an international context; this means he finds much common ground with a poet such as the Irishman Paul Muldoon, as well as American poets like Robert Hass.
As a Black poet, deeply conscious of the racial struggle running through American history, Komunyakaa must be understood in the context of other 20th century Black writers. In an interview, he described the formative experience of reading James Baldwin as a teenager growing up in small town Louisiana (Conley, Susan. “Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile.” Ploughshares, 1997). Similar to Baldwin, religion played a major part in Komunyakaa’s childhood, and Baldwin’s intense preoccupation with matters of faith can also be found in Komunyakaa’s work, including “Slam, Dunk, & Hook.” Issues of race are inseparable from religion, showing the influence of Baldwin in essays such as “Letter from a Region in my Mind “(1962): an intense exploration of the forms of resistance Black people should adopt.
In considering the legacy of slavery and segregation as a Black poet, Komunyakaa is in conversation with poets like Toi Derricotte and Rita Dove, as well as prose writers like Toni Morrison. Beyond the US, Komunyakaa has spoken of his admiration for the great Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, and the Chilean Pablo Neruda, both of whom sought to channel the voices of those oppressed by histories of white colonialism. Though “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” has a distinctly American flavor, generally Komunyakaa writes in a global literary context, evidenced by the Vietnamese language he chose for the title of his 1988 collection: Dien Cai Dau, meaning “Crazy in the head.”
Historical Context
“Slam, Dunk, & Hook” was first published in 1991 at a time when, by some measures, the opportunities afforded to Black people in the US seemed greater than ever before. This was especially visible in sports: The 1980s saw the emergence of stars like Larry “Magic” Johnson in basketball and Carl Lewis in track and field athletics. Likewise in the movies, Black actors like Denzel Washington were among Hollywood’s top-earning leads in a way that would have been unimaginable even 10 or 15 years earlier. The money and razzamatazz of the entertainment world mirrored what seemed to be the wider triumph of US capitalism. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was in decline, and Ronald Reagan’s corporate-friendly administration set the conditions for unprecedented Wall Street profits.
Yet at the same time, the decade saw a continued deterioration in the inner cities, where Black and other minority communities became increasingly ghettoized. City administrators failed to address issues of long-term poverty, low-quality housing, and lack of facilities. Street gangs filled the void, offering the temptation of wealth in exchange for the risk of violent death. Tensions grew with mainly white police forces, but also between different minority communities, as portrayed in Spike Lee’s era-defining 1991 movie Do The Right Thing. This was also a time of generational divide, as younger Black people tended to be less religious than their parents. This divide was also expressed in music, where rap and hip hop were taking over from soul and gospel.
In this context, the inner-city basketball court became a vital place: somewhere young people could congregate and express themselves in sport, away from the danger and degradation around them. But the sport itself could be a way of preventing family ties loosening altogether—particularly between fathers and sons—a theme Lee again explored in He Got Game (1998) where Denzel Washington plays a jailed father trying to reconnect with his basketball-prodigy son. Komunyakaa was 44 at the time he wrote “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” but in writing about basketball, there is no doubt he was trying to connect to the MTV generation he saw growing up around him. Society had changed, but basketball was one thread that connected the present largely urban generation to Komunyakaa’s childhood, growing up in the 1950s in a sleepy Louisiana town where, he recalled, “black people sat in the back of the bus,” and the Ku Klux Klan was an active presence (Conley, Susan. “Yusef Komunyakaa: A Profile.” Ploughshares, 1997).
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