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.
Read more about this topic: Henry Dumas
Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
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“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on human life is traduced and neglected.”
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“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)