Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Soul on Ice
Book Review: Between Twist and Revolution: Soul Power in the 1960s
Summary: 2 Stars
Using humor, love letters, essays, poetic language, and Marxist/Leftist rhetoric Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" creatively outlines a perspective from which the 1960s might best be approached: "the smell of anger, tear gas, and the sound of skull-cracking billy clubs, helicopters, and revolution is present in its pages". "Soul on Ice" is a classic whose achievements are manifold. Here are three of the strongest:1) In 1992, when Malcolm X was being transformed into a fashion accessory/popular culture icon and the black influence on the cultural politics of the 1960s whitewashed, the reissue of Cleaver's book reminded us that "what was great was not Malcolm X but the truth he uttered" and that the survival of black genius is crucial to the good mental health of white America.
2) Inasmuch as the 1960s of the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement was about closing ranks -among other things- "Soul on Ice" did not support any dysfunctional black unity, which explains its challenge of author James Baldwin's unconstructive and unfair criticisms of writer Richard Wright and Negritude advocate Aimé Césaire.
3) Useful condemnations of slavery's racist (re) presentation of black/American sexual politics (subtle or blatant) can be found in the pages of Cleaver's book; it anticipated much of the contemporary scholarship intervening in part or wholly in this domain: Ed Guerrero's "Framing Blackness", Mike Marqusee's "Redemption Song", and Spike Lee's cultural politics and cinema.
Cleaver had his soul on ice but managed to produce this brilliant collection of essays. As readers we must, in turn, freeze "Soul on Ice" in the 1960s fridge; let us consume it 1960s-frozen for therein lies its Twist(ed)-Hula-Hoop(ed) richness. The author of "Soul on Ice" was no prophet, just an intelligent angry young black man who wrote under duress during an era when it was very difficult for his people to free their psyches from subjugation to the point where they could "say it loud: I am black and I am proud!".
Book Review: Entertaining, thoughtful. . . selling us a load of goods.
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a lively, entertaining work. Cleaver never seems to lose sight of the fact he needs to entertain his audience, or sell books (or his ideas). Near the end Cleaver develops his own sexual philosophy of sorts and fleshes it out with a bit of detail.
In the 1992 preface Ishmael Reed writes, "(although Cleaver criticized writer James Baldwin) it is obvious that Soul on Ice is influenced by Baldwin's flamboyantly eloquent taxidermist's style". It's said Soul on Ice is a classic and influential work. . . When I read this I wondered if what I write has been influenced by Cleaver. That is, I wonder if I've been influenced by those who've read and imitated Cleaver.
At times Cleaver makes a profound statement hidden simply inside half a sentence and then moves on to something else in the wink of an eye without following up or expounding upon the apparent revelation.
In the middle of the book he writes, a bit facetiously, "all red-blooded Americans who love TV and gentle toilet tisue know that the negro revolution was conceived in Moscow (scratch Moscow, insert Peking) and launched by left-wing fanatics, and that the growing mass movement in opposition to Americans war in Vietnam is "communist inspired, manipulated and controlled"'.
When I read that I thought it was one of the best things I've ever read. Looking back over it, I noticed 'toilet tisue' is misspelled. For a moment I thought I discovered a typo but most likely Cleaver misspells the word on purpose for effect.
Overall there's a conciliatory or hopeful tone to the work. He seemed to see the white youth of America as ready and willing to change. Elvis and the Beatles were not going to corrupt white youth but liberate them. On the inside Jacket Cover, Media and Methods, writes, "this book is a black man's spiritual odyssey away from hate and crime towards understanding and 'convalescence'. Best Sellers writes "Cleaver is not simply a zealot or reactionary. . . He moves through Soul on Ice with a hunger to reaffirm his existence, sometimes in anger, sometimes with abundant pride, but the need is there to speak out, to comment, to seek truth". I have to disagree with that very last idea.
Soul on Ice is divided into four parts. In part one, Letters from Prison, Cleaver talks a little bit about prison life and his previous experiences being a member of the Nation of Islam. At the end of part one there's a subchapter titled "initial reactions on the assassination of Malcolm X (Cleaver was ex-nation of islam but not yet a Panther when he wrote this book, I believe)". Of his pre-prison life, He writes, "I became a rapist. . . rape was an insurrectionary act (against white male domination or whatever)". Summing up his fall from grace, he writes, "After I returned to prison, I took a long look at myself and, for the first time in my life, admitted that I was wrong, that I had gone astray -- not so much from the white man's law as from being human, civilized". For the most part, though, he doesn't talk about his past "crimes".
Part two, Blood of the Beast, is about the white race and it's heroes, and the heroes of the black race, Muhammad Ali for one. Cleaver suggests that a previous champ, the black Floyd Patterson, was the white man's hero, "There is no doubt that white America will accept a black champion, applaud and reward him, as long as there is no "white hope" in sight. But what white America demands in her black champions is a brilliant, powerful body and a dull, bestial mind--a tiger in the ring and a pussycat outside the ring".
Part three, the aptly titled? 'Prelude to Love', is simply a short love letter to his Lawyer, and her reply. The love letter was so mushy and flowery even I had to pull back from the passage, thinking, 'come-on now'. Then Cleaver writes, "NOW TURN THE RECORD OVER AND PLAY THE OTHER SIDE" and proceeds to contradict every thing he's just written - a warning perhaps or a reality check? We love it when you keep it real. "I have tried to mislead you. I am not humble at all. I have no humility and I do not fear you in the least. If I pretend to be shy, if I appear to hesitate, it is only a sham to deceive. . . I had planned to run for President of the United States. My slogan? PUT A BLACK FINGER ON THE NUCLEAR TRIGGER. 400 years of docility, of being calm, cool and collected under stress would prove I was the man for the job. . . then came Watts!. . . Most Emphatically Yours, Eldridge Cleaver".
The beginning of part four (titled White Woman, Black Man) is the best part of the book. It's basically a recounting of a speech given by an elderly black prisoner in the mess hall who sits down to eat with him and two brothers from the Nation. They refer to the old man as 'Lazarus' and 'the infidel' and 'the interloper' and 'the accused', as he tells his story, "we had him written down as an Uncle Tom - not that we had ever seen him buck dancing or licking the white man's boots, but we knew that black rebels his age do not walk the streets in America: they were either dead, in prison, or in exile in another country (I should note that the black man they are allegedly talking to is in prison with them)". The old man explains why he thinks black men want white woman. It sounds a bit like the story told in the movie "Jungle Fever". Cleaver expands upon this in the next sub-chapter of White Woman, Black Man, called 'the primeval Mitosis'. He calls black men 'Supermasculine menials' and white men, 'Omnipotent administrators'. Black women, 'self-reliant Amazons' and white women, 'Ultra Feminines' He says we're each striving to achieve a 'unitary sexual image' we're drawn towards each other, basically. It's quite interesting, but I don't think I believe all of it. In fact I only give Soul on Ice 3 stars because I wildly disagree with some of the ideas being sold here.
The final subchapter of White Woman, Black Man, the very end, he dedicates, "to all black women, from all black men".
The blueprint is laid out here in Soul on Ice. . . He calls on black women to remain faithful to black men while black men are being 'oppressed' by their need to sleep with white women. Soul on Ice is not so out of date. . . at Duke University recently the campuses was up in arms (about the patterns of abuse evident in the lacrosse player scandal) reiterating these very issues of oppression.
Book Review: Had Potential For 4 Stars.........
Summary: 4 Stars
Was a very good "read" , until the last 2 can't put into words why I write this , but the rest of the book was excellent , showing a very complex man , troubled while he wrote , in love , in hate , in patriotic tones , in slander , in lust , in life.........in fact I have to look up the rest of Mr. Cleavers life , I HAVE to know how it "ends".........Don "G"Book Review: Half man Half crazy
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed the book, but I'm on the hedge with my opinion of him as a person. I think that he got caught up like so many other hopefull revolutionaries, getting too wrapped up in ones self.Book Review: How Eldridge Cleaver almost invited himself to my wedding
Summary: 3 Stars
Eldridge Cleaver almost had himself invited to my wedding ceremony... Let me explain. I had been asked to look for an inspirational text by the pastor -a Dane, with a hyphenated name- who took care of our premarital counseling. After some soul-searching, I remembered a paragraph from Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice that I had memorized when I was a teenager because it bore some particular meaning for me at that time. I could not recall the exact passage, but it had something to do with love and truthfulness -a somewhat fitting excerpt, I must say. So I went looking for an edition of the book that I had read fifteen years before. I visited several American bookstores in Paris, to no avail: the book had obviously fallen out of print a long time ago. I finally found it -a dog-eared paperback on a dusty shelf in the library of the American University in Paris. After flipping a few pages, I came upon the excerpt I had been looking for. It was taken from a letter that Eldridge Cleaver (a Black Panther activist and one-time candidate for the presidency of the United States on an extreme-left ticket) wrote to his white female lawyer he had fallen in love with while in prison. It read the following:
"Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant really to strip themselves naked in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves one to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other! Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul.
But I do not believe a beautiful relationship had to end always in carnage, or that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious with one another. If we project fraudulent, pretentious images, or if we fantasize each other into distorted caricatures, all will die or be transformed into bitterness and hate. I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order continuously to impress the second party. (...)"
After giving it a second thought, I found the excerpt not so fitting for a wedding. Nobody in the assembly would know the author in the first place -perhaps better so, since the man was a felon and a rapist and a terrorist. Besides, the text I had first thought about was too negative for a wedding and somewhat naive -appealing for a teenager, perhaps, but not so for a man about to enter a life-long commitment. And I was repelled by some aspects that I found in the book, like the author's lack of remorse if not boastfulness for the crimes he had done, his blind reverence for a gallery of outdated revolutionaries, his mythologies of male domination and female submission, or his characterization of everything white as oppressive and deceptive.
So Eldridge Cleaver and I parted ways for the second time, and I had another author invited to my marriage. Since then, I learned that he had led a tumultuous life after Soul on Ice: he spent time in Algeria on a stipend supported by the North Vietnamese Republic, went back to the US where he benefited from an amnesty, experienced a religious revelation and became a born-again Christian, spoke alongside Jerry Falwell at the Dallas Republican convention in 1984, almost died from cocaine addiction in 1994, and finally passed away in 1998. May God have mercy of his soul!