Influences
Dumas was influenced by jazz, studying with Sun Ra during the mid-1960s, and in turn influenced jazz musicians. For example, his poem "Black Paladins" became the title track for a recording by Joseph Jarman and Famoudou Don Moye.
Dumas claimed some of his earliest influences to be Moms Mabley and gospel music. His experiences as a black child growing up in the south during the 1930s and '40s were frequent themes in his writings. His time spent on the Arabian Peninsula influenced him as well, and he eventually drew not only on black Christianity and Islam, but on Sufi mysticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American and African myths and religions. In the 1960s Dumas became increasingly involved with both the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement, immersing himself in music: gospel, spirituals, jazz, and blues. Writer Margaret Walker and musicians James Brown and John Coltrane proved to be major influences on his writing at this time.
Both his fiction and his poetry developed themes of the Black Aesthetic movement, in addition to themes of nature and the natural world.
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Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“Do not seek anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate . . . until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)