NONFICTION - Dec. 25, 1994

RELOCATIONS OF THE SPIRIT: Essays by Leon Forrest (Asphodel Press/Moyer Bell: $24.95; 397 pp.). Charles Barkley was roundly condemned not long ago for declaring he wasn’t a role model. Leon Forrest, novelist and chair of African-American Studies at Chicago’s Northwestern University, wouldn’t go along with such censure; in one essay in this collection he objects to “so-called picture-perfect role models” because they create “a blissful prescription about human nature and diminish the jagged-edge complexity of African-American character.” A major theme in “Relocations of the Spirit” is the potential of African Americans to reinvent themselves according to their own needs, desires, and resources--a talent he finds everywhere, in Toni Morrison and Michael Jordan, in James Baldwin and Billie Holiday, in himself and even in seemingly prescriptive gospel preachers. Forrest’s self-conscious, elliptical style sometimes works well, as in the essays on Faulkner and Melville, but too often he’s professorially long-winded, taking 20 pages to communicate what could be said in ten. The best sections of the book are autobiographical, and the single best essay is “Elijah,” in which Forrest writes of being employed during the early 1970s at the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Though Forrest, a Catholic, was skeptical about much of Elijah Muhammad’s mission, he knew the organization did good work; many Nation members had criminal pasts, as one policeman told him, but “now, my man, they are Number One model American citizens, who just happen to be black.” One can only speculate, but the role models Forrest deprecates may, in some cases, be a necessary intermediary step to the personal transcendence he advocates.