When it appeared—first as a sequence in Beatitude, the San Francisco mimeo-zine bob kaufman
coedited with Bill Margolis, subsequently as a City
Lights broadside in 1959, and finally included
in Kaufman’s first book, Solitudes Crowded with
Loneliness (1965)—“Abomunist Manifesto” was
as significant to the Beat Generation’s self-formation as allen ginsberg’s “HOWL.” The
(in)famous November 30, 1959, article “The
Only Rebellion Around” by Paul O’Neil in Life
magazine on the Beat phenomenon, which
brought stereotyped images of the Beat Generation into the mainstream, featured a now-iconic
photograph of a white Beat couple and baby in
their “pad”; the young man is lying on the floor
reading “Abomunist Manifesto.”
Characterized by Kaufman’s signature puns,
wild wit, and blend of politically trenchant street
humor and popular culture with high cultural references, “Abomunist Manifesto” is clearly both
a manifesto and a send-up of manifestos, both an
homage to and a parody of communism’s and surrealism’s attempts to encode the “mission statement”
of a disaffected movement in the deathless language of the literary or historical classic. Analogous
to his years-later statement to Raymond Foye, “I
want to be anonymous[;] . . . my ambition is to be
completely forgotten,” Kaufman captures the Beat
investment in disinvestment using pithy, memorable language to describe the ephemeral and elusive.
It is not surprising, given these piquant paradoxes,
that the piece itself plays with many contradictions
in language, in the scene, and even in the project
of writing a manifesto. The title alone references
not only, most famously, Karl Marx’s Communist
Manifesto and André Breton’s surrealist one but
also the popular cultural figure of the abominable
snowman (also known as the yeti, the sasquatch,
bigfoot, etc.), which, as a mythical humanoid or
rarely sighted, undiscovered primate, haunted the
mid–20th-century North American imagination
much as the “specter of communism” haunted mid–
19th-century Europe. This humanoid was such a
novel concept that none of the terms listed above
appears in Webster’s 1966 New World Dictionary.
In a sense “Abomunist Manifesto” resonates with
Kaufman’s own multiraciality and elusiveness; he
plays skillfully on the image of the black person in
the eyes of 1950’s white bohemia as a mystery, a seductive but scary, sort-of human, sort-of not. To be
sure, this element of abomunism was lost on most
of its white readership, who saw the abomunist as
a lovably nonconformist Beat like themselves—
Camus’s stranger crossed with Holden Caulfield,
an existentialist Huck Finn. “Abomunist” also, importantly, references the atom (“A-”)bomb; one of
Kaufman’s heteronyms in the piece is “bomkauf”
(bomb-kopf, or bomb-head; also bomb-cough),
another clear reference to the tragedy that, along
with the death camps, initiated the era we now call
postmodern—that is, the end of the modernist illusion of progress and perfectability, combined with
an intensification of modernism’s disaffection and
hopelessness. An “abomunist” is not only abominable (from the Latin abominare, “to regard as an
ill omen”), a “frinky” (Kaufman’s Afro-American
inflected neologism that combines funky, freaky,
and kinky) outsider, but also a denizen of that generation living under the shadow of potential global
annihilation. Beats were, in a sense, symptoms of
U.S. political and social dysfunction: they were regarded as ill omens by the mainstream, and indeed
they were symptoms of that mainstream’s illness.
“Abomunist Manifesto” itself is divided into
10 sections, each tellingly titled for maximum comedic effect and political edge: “Abomunist Manifesto,” “Notes Dis- and Re- Garding Abomunism,”
“Further Notes (taken from ‘Abomunismus und
Religion,’ by Tom Man),” “$$ Abomunus Craxioms $$,” “Excerpts from the Lexicon Abomunon,”
“Abomunist Election Manifesto,” “Still Further
Notes Dis- and Re- Garding Abomunism,” “Boms,”
“Abomunist Rational Anthem (to be sung before
and after frinking . . . music composed by Schroeder),”
“Abomunist Documents (discovered during ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Draftdodger),” and
“Abomnewscast . . . On the Hour. . . .” Each section
varies in format, from a list of dictionary definitions
or axiomatic definitions of abomunism to newscasts
to a hipster Christ’s diary to sound poetry, providing an antic romp through the Beat/jazz ethos and
more subtly, one might argue, through that of a
black nonconformist. One can see influences such
as Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, and Mort Sahl in
the sardonic commentary on current events and
retellings of the Gospels in hipster lingo; revolutionary patriots and/or traitors Thomas Paine and
Benedict Arnold put in appearances; events like
the then-recent discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
as well as the long-past kidnapping and murder of
the Lindbergh baby become matter for absurdist
wisecracks.
Barbara Christian, in an early (1972) appraisal
of Kaufman’s career, has suggested that the “Manifesto” is a deconstruction of all known “isms,” that
is, contrived attempts to regiment thought into systems, “last words” that claim authority as the only
words and that thus become implicated in such
final solutions as the atomic bomb. “Manifesto” issues behavioral imperatives in descriptive form:
ABOMUNISTS DO NOT FEEL PAIN, NO
MATTER HOW MUCH IT HURTS. . . .
ABOMUNISTS DO NOT WRITE FOR
MONEY; THEY WRITE THE MONEY ITSELF. . . .
ABOMUNIST POETS [ARE] CONFIDENT THAT THE NEW LITERARY
FORM “FOOTPRINTISM” HAS FREED
THE ARTIST OF OUTMODED RESTRICTIONS, SUCH AS: THE ABILITY
TO READ AND WRITE, OR THE DESIRE TO COMMUNICATE. . . .
In the compellingly and defiantly nonsensical “Abomunist Rational Anthem,” republished
in Kaufman’s second book, Golden Sardine, as
“Crootey Songo,” language itself disintegrates into
presymbolic scraps of sound expressed through outbursts of protest and play:
Derrat slegelations, flo goof babereo
Sorash sho dubies, wago, wailo, wailo.
Though it is possible to decode this poem to
some degree (derrat is tarred backward; slegelations
elides sludge, flagellation, and legislations, indicating Kaufman’s assessment of United States justice;
flow, goof, dubies, and wailo evoke jazz/Beat/drug
culture, etc.), the point is not to do so, but to experience the disorientation of babble which at the
same time, like jazz argot, encodes protest. Many
years later, Ishmael Reed chose “Crootey Songo”
as the epigraph for the first volume of the Yardbird
Reader, indicating the ongoing importance of “unmeaning jargon” (Frederick Douglass’s description
of the vocables and proto-scat of slave songs) for
African American poets.
The whole of “Abomunist Manifesto,” in fact,
performs an aggressive if playful “unmeaning,” as a
verb rather than an adjective. “Abomunist Manifesto” unmeans cold war language and ideology, recasting it in a countercultural, minoritarian collage
of American cultural detritus.
Bibliography
Christian, Barbara. “Whatever Happened to Bob
Kaufman?” Black World 21, no. 12: 20–29.
Damon, Maria. “Unmeaning Jargon/Uncanonized Beatitude: Bob Kaufman, Poet.” In The Dark End of the
“Abomunist Manifesto”
Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. Minneapolis: Minn. University Press, 1993, 32–76.
Edwards, Brent, et al., eds. Callaloo 25, no. 1 (Special
Section on Bob Kaufman): 103–231.
Kaufman, Bob. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. New
York: New Directions, 1965.
Maria Damon