Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" as descended from Malcolm X (PDF)

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: A, Northern Arizona University, course: African American Literature, language: English, abstract: Despite its limitations, Soul on Ice is not only the closest and most influential literary descendant of Malcolm X's autobiography, but a significant advancement in both the prison-writing genre and American radical political consciousness. Of 389 pages of text, the adjudication of Malcolm X's crime and subsequent incarceration encompasses 42 pages of his autobiography, compared to 171 pages devoted to his pre-prison life and 176 to his post-prison experiences. The bulk of X's prison narrative concerns his conversion to Islam and goes into extensive detail about his intensive self-education program. Though there are brief appearances by his early Charlestown mentor, Bimbi, visits from his family, and anecdotes like the first time he refused to eat pork in the prison mess hall, there is little in-depth depiction or analysis of the inmates' social economy. Conversely, Cleaver's prison blocks, mess halls, and yards are represented as, "a kind of modern Greek agora" in more vivid detail than X's brief anecdotes of, say, debates at Norfolk penal colony.

The depth of Cleaver's literary and spiritual debt to X is best summed up in his own words: "When I decided to join the Black Panther Party, the only hang-up I had was with its name. I was still clinging to my conviction that we owed it to Malcolm to pick up where he left off" (Harper 398-99).