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Promise unfulfilled
Touré’s pomo minstrel show
BY SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS

The Portable Promised Land
By Touré. Little, Brown; 266 pages; $23.95.


Touré has made his name writing about hip-hop and pop music in venerated publications like Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. As a critic and celebrity profiler, he is intimate with those alternative rap universes that teem with mysteries, aggrandizement, and deft verbal gymnastics. Surely it is from these that he draws his inspiration for the fantasy realm of The Portable Promised Land, whose stories take place in a town called Soul City that’s populated by the likes of Sugar Lips Shinehot, Right Revren [sic] Daddy Love, Huggy Bear Jackson, Crash Jinkins, and others whose names might have been swiped from the graduation program of a finishing school for pimps.

But the names aren’t the most curious things about Soul City. Although it’s sometimes transposed onto real locations like Harlem and Brooklyn, Touré’s reality isn’t a black utopia where all’s well because black people are in charge. Quite the contrary: everything in Soul City embodies the most patently dysfunctional aspects of " African-America. " A storefront church finds its location in a former two-story KFC and later burns to the ground in a fire fueled by leftover chicken grease. Basketball players can’t function without supernatural shoes. A Cadillac is rigged to play all-Stevie-Wonder-all-the-time while creeping through Soul City’s main boulevards. Each madcap gag is pushed to the hilt; soon you just assume that everything in the book will be distorted, like the images in a funhouse mirror.

But after your initial laughter, the jig is up, like a Def Comedy routine that’s gone too far. One of the three epigraphs is from Richard Pryor, and Touré has taken lessons from that comic, for whom nothing is sacred. Perhaps he’s also trying to emulate his hip-hop peers who never saw a stereotype they couldn’t appropriate. But this subversive, irreverent musical and comedic ethos deflates in the course of a book that seems unsure of its task. Touré drifts between " high literary " aspirations (the burnt cork applied with a postmodern wink) and the compulsion to have uncritical, knee-slapping fun. After pages that hurtle toward a punch line (or pages that are nothing but), you remember that the sidesplitting laughter evoked by the best black comics always leaves gaping wounds. Here all you get is a self-satisfied smirk. Although the work is entertaining, it almost never delivers that unmistakable chill of parody.

Perhaps that’s because parody — and satire — draw their strength from their unambiguous point of view. What exactly is on offer here? At once a love letter to the absurdity and genius of black culture, romanticizing and sentimental, The Portable Promised Land also wants to lodge some sort of critique. Touré’s sojourn through Soul City includes, along with chicken and Cadillacs, a few cautionary tales meant to educate the masses. The three parts of " The Black Widow Story " profile the rise and fall of a militant female rapper whose crusade to exterminate " MCs " ( " Melanin Challengeds " ) goes bust when her true identity as a prep-school princess is revealed. " The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé " is a journey through a celebrity-obsessed New York underground where beautiful aspirant waiters sell their souls to a devil who looks like George Burns. Most ambitious is " The Sambomorphosis, " which does Kafka with a black-power twist, the infant son of righteous Black Panthers waking up transformed into Little Black Sambo. Each of these stories is tied to a saccharine moral: the dangers of masquerade, the dangers of trendy McNally Brothers’ restaurants, the dangers of everyone’s inner pickaninny. But beyond that, they mostly aim to please, so the satire just fizzles out.

The best parts of this collection are four pieces in that very forgiving mode, the list. Each compiles essential elements of black language and culture: " Afrolexicology Today’s Biannual List of the Top Fifty Words in African-America " ; " My History " (a hopeful rewriting of key moments in African-American history); " The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame, or 101 Elements of Blackness (Things That’ll Make You Say: Yes! That There’s Some Really Black Shit!) " ; and " We Words. " Here Touré steps aside, letting black English speak for itself as he catalogues a linguistic power more assured and convincing than his own.

Funny if grotesque, The Portable Promised Land is ultimately unfocused. This sort of humor in the proper hands can be compelling. Otherwise it’s just another shtick.

Issue Date: August 1 - 8, 2002
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