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Soul on ice author cleaver5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Despite this, most critics fail to get beyond Cleaver’s description of raping white women as an “insurrectionary act” (which he renounces in the text) and various comments that are homophobic to modern sensibilities, including a blistering screed denouncing author James Baldwin. Cleaver’s efforts at sexual myth-making and analysis of black oppression in prison were far more ambitious than X’s, and merit greater attention than they have heretofore received. (X 400) That Cleaver’s prison tome Soul on Ice was in the tradition of Richard Wright’s Native Son and, especially, Malcolm X’s autobiography was evident to critics from the start, even to Cleaver: “I have, so to speak, washed my hands in the blood of the martyr, Malcolm X, whose retreat from the precipice of madness created new room for others to turn about in, and I am now caught up in that tiny space, attempting a maneuver of my own” (Cleaver 66). “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book,” Malcolm X told Alex Haley as they collaborated on X’s autobiography, surely not realizing that his own memoir would deeply influence millions, including then-California prison inmate Eldridge Cleaver. ![]() Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as descended from Malcolm X ![]()
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