Review of Manning Marable's

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

By Adeyinka Makinde

Malcolm X. The name is forever redolent of an era of tumult and

struggle of Americans of African descent seeking to obtain basic
legal rights as well as to affirm a pride in their collective heritage.

His name conjures images of a bespectacled, alternatively clean-

shaven and later goateed orator extraordinaire whose incisive
diatribes on the ills of America and its treatment of its black
inhabitants brought to prominence a religious sect known as the
Nation of Islam.

He developed and perfected a rhythmically calibrated style of

delivery which was clear and direct, and which he interspersed
with a frequently coruscating wit. The arrow-straight finger which
jabbed accusingly over a lectern or at a camera toward the
oppressor, also served as a stern call-to-arms to the ‘deaf dumb
and blind’ oppressed masses who he sought to educate and to
emancipate.

Phrases which he coined like ‘By any means necessary’, parables

he recounted like that of the ‘house Negro and the field Negro’

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and speeches which he delivered such as the ‘Message to the
Grassroots”, are memorable expositions of his spirited and
uncompromising quest for the liberation of his people.

The potted outlines of his story from birth to death are fairly well-
known; this aided pre-eminently by the best-selling Autobiography
of Malcolm X, which was released some months after his
assassination in 1965, and the 1992 film Malcolm X. His
metamorphosis from street criminal to religious zealot culminated
in a final state of transition during which he was cut down.

It was during this period that the man decried by his detractors as
an apostle of hate and a promoter of racial separation altered
significantly his approach and attitude to the struggle for rights,
and with his break from the Nation of Islam, made a substantive
amendment to his religious faith.

And though he continued to profess his adherence to the creed of

Black Nationalism, his apparent moderation on racial matters
together with shifts in his framework of social analysis, gave much
scope to those from disparate schools of thought who wished to
project him as having been allied to their ideas.

Claimed variously by black nationalists, pan-Africanists, socialists,

Trotskyites and even by the American establishment via the
issuing of a stamp in his honour, it sealed a seemingly improbable
evolution in the perception of a man who when alive had been
cast as a pariah by large swathes of American public opinion. By
the 1990s he had become apotheosised, his image reaching iconic
proportions.

But the idolisation, the hagiography and the crass

commercialisation appeared to cheapen his legacy. High up on this
pedestal, the man eulogised by the actor Ossie Davis as “our black
manhood” and “our shining black prince”, seemed to be shorn of
nuance and complexity.

Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention seeks to

redress this, and his primary focus in terms of deconstructing the
life of Malcolm was to scrutinise many of the key features

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undergirding Alex Haley’s autobiography including certain events,
characters and chronologies.

Haley, it should be mentioned, was a talented storyteller given to

embellishment and even plagiarism, a charge which was proven in
devastating fashion by Harold Courlander, from whose novel, The
African, he had appropriated substantive plots and
characterisations in order to create his international
bestseller Roots.

Marable, himself a left-leaning professor, charged that Haley, in

his words a ‘liberal Republican’, had an agenda in shaping
Malcolm’s legacy to suit a moderate and broadly integrationist
philosophy which was the prevailing mood of the times.

In the years leading up to the release of his book, Marable spoke

of the chapters missing from Haley’s work including a whole
chapter dedicated to the aims of the Organisation of Afro-
American Unity (O.A.A.U.), the secular body Malcolm formed in the
last segment of his life.

There was the promise of further revelations relating to the

circumstances surrounding Malcolm’s assassination, including the
role played by government and police agencies and the
identification of the assassins.

The book would also present, in a spirit of objectivity, perspectives

of the Nation of Islam including interviews with its present leader,
Louis Farrakhan.

Breaking from what he construed as the largely hagiographic

formula in the works produced on the subject, Marable’s professed
aim was to construct a more human Malcolm, to write a truly
critical biography which would assess the competing narratives
and record the public and the private aspects of Malcolm
encompassing his brilliance as well as his shortcomings.

The results are decidedly mixed.

In an almost 600-page work filled with copious end-of-book notes

and bibliography, Marable’s avowed aim of making this the

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‘definitive’ biography on his subject is clearly manifested by the
sheer scope and detail of his research.

Contemporary academics who write about serious issues and

personalities whose life stories are expected to find an audience
outside of the ivory towers of academia can no longer produce
manuscripts which are styled in an atypically desiccated drone, but
instead are obliged to write consistently in engaging and vibrant
prose.

On this count Marable largely succeeds. For instance, he is rather

good at conveying the style and rhythm of Malcolm’s oratory by
analogising his speech patterns to the jazz cadences of be-bop
around which Malcolm had lived, worked and hustled during his
sojourn in Harlem.

He contextualises Malcolm’s life within the prevailing social,

cultural and political circumstances in which he lived, and delves
into Malcolm’s childhood experiences with due note being made
of his antecedents within the Garveyite movement.

A key thread of Marable’s narration, which is reflected in the

book’s sub-title, is his portrayal of Malcolm’s life as an evolving
drama of a character who adopts and projects identities which are
rooted in the African American folk traditions of the trickster and
the preacher.

The theme relating to Malcolm’s changing persona and capacity

for self-reinvention is particularly apt as it has been a device
employed through the ages by African Americans to serve as a
survival mechanism, and indeed, is also a reflection of the
American penchant for self-invention, an idea which professes that
a person can be whoever they want to be and whoever they say
they are.

In his deconstruction of Haley’s autobiography, Marable is

particularly successful in discovering a number of exaggerations in
terms of the extent of the criminality of Malcolm during his ‘Detroit
Red’ phase. And his argument that Malcolm’s purpose in doing so
was to empathise with the sort of audiences who he was trying to
raise out of the cesspit of moral degeneration rings true.

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In contrast to the last major biographical attempt by Bruce Perry
in Malcolm: The Life of a Man who Changed Black America, which
was steeped in references to the supposedly psychological traits of
its protagonist, Marable casts his net further by persistently
analysing Malcolm’s actions in the context of history and the
future. For instance, his reference to the fact that Malcolm was
one of the few prominent African Americans including Paul
Robeson who had sought to internationalise the plight of the black
citizens of America.

Some of Malcolm’s analysis, he claims, anticipated the works of

Frantz Fanon, a contemporary, whose works like The Wretched
Earth and Black Skin, White Masks were not yet available in the
English language. He even credits Malcolm with an almost
unerring prescience in his predicting that it was conceivable in a
multicultural future that “the black culture will be the dominant
culture”.

But Marable’s research and presentation in other critical respects

are less praiseworthy and, indeed, have led to accusations of
shoddy fact-finding, an indulgence in unwarranted speculation and
succumbing to the level of tabloid-like sensationalism.

The references to alleged homosexual encounters are based on his

inferences of a story recounted in Malcolm’s autobiography and an
uncorroborated statement by a relative of Malcolm’s half-sister,
Ella Collins.

Another bone of contention relates to a letter purportedly written

by Malcolm to Elijah Muhammad, setting out in intimate detail his
marital problems with his wife Betty. This particular item was
apparently rejected by author Karl Evanzz when researching his
book on Malcolm in the 1980s. Also contentious are the references
he makes to two possible extra-marital affairs and one instance of
a presumed adulterous encounter while abroad.

Other issues which leave Marable’s work vulnerable to devastating

criticism include his implying that both Alex Haley and an
investigative journalist named Alfred Balk were FBI agents. He

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may also have erred in absolving one of the alleged assassins of
Malcolm.

A Life of Reinvention, the product of years of painstaking research

into a quite remarkable man, is an absorbing read and does give a
range of fresh perspectives and analysis into the life and influence
of Malcolm X. But in his attempt to deconstruct the history and
personality of his subject matter, Manning Marable may have
succeeded in perpetuating a few myths of his own.

Adeyinka Makinde (2011)