WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

haiku #38

 

woven haired women

walk gorgeous as fireflies

glow decoring dusk

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

haiku #135

 

my butterfly breaths

flutter caress the female

flesh of your dark door

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

haiku #139

 

my thick lips soft press

prayer breaths on the damp depths

of your dark altar

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

Haiku #74

 

death's chilly eyes stare

at us, we jazz dance our lives

& shout back "so what!"

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

haiku #46

 

you pause on the edge

of me, testing my water

with your toe, please swim

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

 

Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam

[Rudolph Lewis, publisher of Chicken Bones, interviews Kalamu ya Salaam circa 2003. The entire interview plus most of Kalamu's writings referenced in the interview are available on Chicken Bones > http://www.nathanielturner.com/kalamuinterview.htm]

 

10

Yusef Komunyakaa & What Is Life?

 

Rudy: Who are your favorite contemporary poets? Could you tell us a bit about Kysha Brown?

Kalamu: Favorite contemporary poets. Answering that is a recipe for misunderstanding. I have friends. There are also people I would dig if I knew their work. There is so much going on that I dig, If I say four, I’ve got to say ten more, and then that is a hopeless question for me to answer. I could answer about my influences because I have gone back and examined my work and my influences. But there is so much happening today. I can’t possibly do justice to that question. I read a lot. A lot. I hear a lot. Travel a lot. Attend conferences, slams, open mics, lectures, readings, book signings. etc. Everything. I’m always digging the scene.

Kysha Brown. I met her in 1993--if I remember correctly. She is a founding member of NOMMO Literary Society (September 1995). She is my business partner in Runagate Press.

Rudy: There’s the contemporary poet Yusef Komunyakaa, the Pulitzer Prize winner who can be likened to a kind of black Ezra Pound. His poems have become more and more abstruse so that one needs an encyclopedia to understand his allusions. He’s teaching, I believe, at Princeton now, where Cornell took his retreat.

Yusef and I used to be close acquaintances back in the mid-80s. I learned a lot about poetry from him, for which I am thankful. Of course, we had our disagreements. He has a more conservative view of the social world than I. He was a military man; I was a draft resister and part of the black consciousness and labor movements. Have you ever included him in any of your anthologies? Have you reviewed his work? If not, why not? What do you think is the relevance of his work?

Kalamu: He is included in a new anthology I am working on. Yes, I have reviewed his work. I am particularly fond of Dien Cai Dau, his book of poetry about his Viet Nam experiences. As for the relevance of his work, what difference does it make what I think? I think he ought to do what he wants to do—if folk find something useful in what he does, good, if not, let it pass.

My philosophical view is embracement. You don’t try to put somebody out the family just cause you don’t like them. You don’t exclude some people just cause their work is not to your taste. If you don’t dig it, leave it on the table and move on. Yes, there are positions that Yusef takes that I disagree with, but there are positions that Kalamu took in the past that I disagree with today.

This goes back to the dualism and competitiveness question we talked about earlier. I think it’s beautiful that our people can produce both a Yusef and a Kalamu. And I think they are obviously different and that there are many points of divergence between them. Again to go to the music, it’s like we have Errol Garner on one hand and John Lewis on the other. Two pianists: Garner self taught and Lewis formally trained. The strength of jazz is that they could be contemporaries and both be respected for what they do even though their approaches to the music are literally worlds apart and seemingly antagonistic.

Please remember, the acceptance of, indeed, the promotion of diversity is an African trait. In New Orleans we have a song—"Do What You Wanna!" Diversity first. This does not mean that we pretend there are no differences, or that we do not argue for our point of view. Everybody knows that Kalamu got opinions and is not afraid to speak his mind. You don’t have to read much of my work before you see some hard lines drawn, but those are my lines, what I believe. Other people don’t have to agree with me in order for me to dig them or for them to dig me.

If you have a specific position that Yusef takes that you want me to comment on, I will do that. But even when I might strongly disagree with his position, I still embrace him as my brother and salute him as fellow poet and, to be clear, this is not about Yusef per se. Embracement, diversity, those are my philosophical positions in general with everyone. Of course, this is not a blind embracement nor a valueless espousal of diversity. My embracement of my enemies is struggle. My acceptance of diversity does not mean giving way to evil, to that which is anti-life. I will speak out against whatever I consider wrong.

On a national level my first publication was in Negro Digest as a critic. I was reviewing books. Over the years I have have published literally hundreds of reviews of books, records, concerts, events published. I won the first Black World’s first Richard Wright award for literary criticism. My critical work spans over thirty years of publishing. I have come to this position about criticism: I will only review what I like or think is valuable, what I think adds something to our culture. The only exception to that rule is if I think something is dangerous are particularly harmful, I will attack it. Otherwise, it’s live and let live. And I will specifically refrain from dissing something, just because I don’t like it. Within a workshop setting, I will offer my comments on what I perceive as the strengths and weaknesses of a given work, but I will not do so in general.

Without a communal setting the critical comments are often perceived solely as an attack, and often do more harm than any good. Again, we are dealing with African approach. The stronger the communal base, the sharper the criticism can be without doing harm. A strong community enables healthy criticism. But when there is no community, than the criticism usually does not come from a position of trying to help develop whatever is being criticized but rather comes from the position of putting it down. So if you are not in a position to help develop and you don’t perceive a real need to stop or oppose something, than there is no reason to criticize it. From my perspective the purpose of criticism is either to improve that which is being criticized or to defend the community from attack.

Rudy: Do you think that black women writers, especially those who are prose writers, have a greater audience than black male writers? If that is indeed the case, what is the cause of such a phenomenon?

Kalamu: I wrote about the public perception of black women writers in What Is Life? two important essays in that regard "If the Hat Don’t Fit, How Come We Wearing It" and Impotence Need Not Be Permanent. I stand by those statements.

Rudy: I am not familiar with either one of these pieces. Where can they be found? That raises another essential question. So much that is vital is now out of publication? Hasn’t that affected your own influence? Libraries seem to be only interested in the latest. You can imagine some of the black titled that libraries are weeding from their catalogs. I have a book of James Van DerZee that our local library sold for fifty cents. How do we deal with this problem of the control of information?

Kalamu: It is not a problem of control of information. It’s a problem of self-determination. As long as we are content to let others define our culture, our lives, well. As for where those pieces are found, it just so happens they are in one of my few books still in print, the collection of essays published by Third World Press, What Is Life?In fact, I think my responses to a lot of the questions you raise are spelled out in some detail in What Is Life? Maybe forty or fifty years after I’m gone, that book will stand as a statement on the tail end of the 20th century.  

          

 

 

Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam

[Rudolph Lewis, publisher of Chicken Bones, interviews Kalamu ya Salaam circa 2003. The entire interview plus most of Kalamu's writings referenced in the interview are available on Chicken Bones > http://www.nathanielturner.com/kalamuinterview.htm]

 

 

7

More on Music Influences

Rudy: Blues, jazz, gospel seem to inform your poetry performances? In those genres, what artists do you consider influences—Muddy Waters, Archie Shepp, Mahalia Jackson?

Kalamu: Well, because I listen to so much music, I would say everyone has influenced me. If you ask me who are my favorites, I will respond with "some" of them. 1st.John Coltrane. John Coltrane. Coltrane. I am a Coltrane freak. 2nd. Duke Ellington, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Miles Davis, P-Funk, and New Orleans Street Music. 3rd. Mississippi Fred McDowell, Taj Mahall, Nina Simone, and a catalogue too long to mention of black musicians, mainly, but far from exclusively, jazz artists.

In terms of directly influencing my writing style, I would have to go with Coltrane, solo Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington, Taj Mahal, Baptist preachers (especially my maternal grandfather), Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. Hughes, Baldwin and Baraka are all important. from a musical standpoint, all three of them emphasized the importance of black music and black working class cultural expressions.

For example all three of them have recordings of them reading their poetry with jazz musicians. Have you heard Baldwin’s cd? Show you how what goes around comes around. I wrote a short appreciation of James Baldwin, oh, maybe about seven or eight years ago and it was published in Mosaic magazine, if I remember correctly, or maybe it was online at aalbc.com, it was one or the other.

Anyway, the producers of a re-issue of the Baldwin cd saw my little essay and used that essay as part of the liner notes for the re-issue. A lot of people were not aware that Baldwin wrote poetry, and even fewer people are aware of Baldwin’s recording jazz poetry. But if we are going to do significant work, we really have to study ourselves, study broadly, study deeply and study with both respect and love for our people and our cultural history.

Rudy: I know absolutely nothing about music from a technical sense. I read this long paper (maybe thirty pages) you published on black music. Do you know the piece I am talking about? I was not able to judge whether you were right or wrong in what you were saying. Yet it all seemed very convincing like Baraka’s books on black music.

Again, let me return to Malcolm My Son. This piece of writing is truly informative. There is this poetic tribute by Amina, the mother of Malcolm, to bluesmen and jazzmen, black music and musicians. She concludes reverently that these cats were able to express their manhood beyond their genitalia. Does she speak for you, I mean, does she speak your sentiments?

Kalamu: Yeah, but Malcolm also speaks my sentiments. My confusions about understanding who I am. It’s hard work figuring it out. I am in my second marriage. I have made some major mistakes, fuck-ups in terms of relationships. And a major part of my mistakes have been because I did not fully understand myself.

Although the play is overtly about dealing with homosexuality and homophobia in the Black community, and within the Black self, the play is also about our struggles to understand ourselves, understand who we really are and what to do with ourselves once we achieve some kind of understanding, especially we men and all the issues we have around masculinity. I guess it’s just that I’m not afraid of myself. Not afraid to confront, to look at me as I am. Not as I want to be or as I hope others see me, but as I actually am. We all have all kinds of wild ass thoughts floating around our craniums from time to time.

Let me put it another way. You can show people eating all the time and never show them shitting, but it wouldn’t be natural. Now, maybe you don’t want to be graphic about the shitting part, so you develop some euphemisms. You have people excuse themselves and go behind closed doors to take a shit, and then come back to the table. But, if you are going to deal with the complexity of life, at some point you have to deal with the question of shit disposal. How do we deal with shit, literally? That is a major question. Philosophically too, how do we deal with shit is a major question? I’m interested in knowing the answer to that question, both literally and philosophically.

Rudy: Let me go back for a moment before I go forward to another topic. I am always surprised when you speak about your influences. Let’s go back to the connection of writing and music.

In your list of artists, you didn’t mention Mahalia Jackson and even more surprisingly you didn’t mention Louis Armstrong. As you know Wynton speaks of Satchmo almost reverently, as if he were a god.. Growing up I am sure I was more influenced by Mahalia’s vocal power than Langston Hughes reading his poetry. I knew Louie from TV. I was impressed, except for the grinning and the other antics.

It has been only within the last five years that I have grown to love him. I found by accident a book he wrote, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). That floored me. Are you familiar with his autobiography? And maybe it has been Wynton’s commentary on Louis that has been influential in my rethinking Louie. But I have grown to appreciate him more thoroughly, especially his vocal and horn phrasings and even his antics have become more philosophical. Have you heard his version of "In My Solitude."

Was Louie an oversight in your list of musicians and influences? Isn’t it quite amazing what he does with Tin Pan Alley songs, turning them inside out and making them into something altogether fresh?

Kalamu: Well, Pops is a friend of mine (that’s a play on a musical riff from WAR), I mean yes, I dig Louis Armstrong a whole lot, but that doesn’t make him a conscious influence. You asked specifically about influences. I read Pops autobiography a long, long time ago. In fact back in the early sixties, I did voter registration canvassing in the part of town where Pops was born. I think Pops is the fountainhead for the singing of popular American music. I could go on and on about Pops, but the truth is he is not an artist whose work has directly influenced me as a writer, even though he was one of the most prolific writers of all jazz musicians. He carried a portal typewriter around the world and banged out letters and notes. He was a writer.

I could talk about Pops all day, but again, to be honest, he is not an influence on my approach to writing. To cite another great musician, you could have said the same thing about Charlie Parker. I certainly acknowledge his contributions and his greatness, but he is not a direct influence on what I’m trying to do. If I were rating jazz musicians in terms of their importance in the world of jazz, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker would be among the top five (along with Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis), but if I am naming influences on me as a writer, then Pops and Bird don’t make the cut. Ditto for Mahalia Jackson, who is an icon of gospel music but not an influence on my writing.

Rudy: I think there’s something very special about New Orleans. I am not quite sure what it is. It’s magical. I recall one day sitting at a table with another woman. I was estranged then from my former wife. It was in the early 70s. I was discovering the blues then. And maybe it was Muddy’s piece on New Orleans. Any way I sold or gave away everything I had, including my Porsche and caught the bus to New Orleans.

There was something in the air—more salty, more spicy than anything I had experienced. Just walking down the streets, I got excited by the women there. It seem that their bodies exuded that special something—also the way people talked, like nothing from where I came, it seemed. I was mesmerized. I was staying in a flop house then, $4 or $5 a night near the Robert E. Lee statue. After I had blown all my money, I came back to Baltimore. That experience was incomplete.

I came back to New Orleans in the early 80s when I was offered a job in Monroe. That was close to New Orleans and I wanted to be in New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that I began to learn to write poetry. It seems that all New Orleans natives are born with an artistic impulse. Almost everyone I ran into could sing, dance, write, play an instrument, could do something artistic.

What influence has this place had on you? I know there are some ugly things here, like the Zulus of Mardi Gras and Mammy dolls. There’s something about the late-19th century that still exists, still vital here. Yet I still love New Orleans. This last sojourn was more than two weeks, it was two years, four if you count my time in Monroe and Baton Rouge.

Kalamu: I think the main thing is that New Orleans is not American and it’s not white. New Orleans is more a Caribbean city than an American city in it’s history and culture. New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French, developed under the Spanish—a note of trivia, it was the Spanish, and not the French, who built the "French Quarter" and instituted the first formal city government. The Americans didn’t take over until 1804 in actuality and then it took them forty years before they could establish English as the major language. Even in the 1820s and 30s much of the official business of the city was being done in French or bi-lingually in French and English.

Anyone coming from the rest of the United States is coming from a place where the historical establishment is English. That’s one major difference, and, by the way, that difference shows up in everything from architecture to zoology (I mean except for Florida, I don’t think you have alligators running around the place, not to mention crawfish, cowan turtles, and other animals that are regarded as culinary fare). That difference also shows up in the fact that we do so much activity outdoors, nearly year round.

The other major difference is that New Orleans is not white. New Orleans is the most African city on the North American continent. I don’t mean just in terms of numbers or population per se, I mean in terms of cultural expressions—the way the food is cooked, the language, the music, the emphasis on color, ah, man, the list is endless. But anyway, being Caribbean and being African are the major differences between New Orleans and any other major city in the United States. And, of course, this difference has a sexuality component, which is a big part of what you were responding to.

Rudy: According to the Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who must be viewed as an academic poet, the rap/hip-hop approach to poetry grew out of BAM. Do you agree? Has the rap and the hip-hip culture been an influence on your writing?

Kalamu: If by rap/hip-hop approach one means an emphasis on performance, BAM did indeed influence rap and hip-hop. However, I think it is a mistake to ascribe that quality to BAM rather than to understand that performance is a hallmark of black cultural expression in general rather than an attribute of BAM exclusively. I’m sure that there have been some influences [on my writing]. However, I think the hip-hop influences are minimal mainly because I have been so consciously opposed to the commercialization of my work. In fact, rap itself, as we know it today, is nothing but a commercialization of hip-hop. Also, because I am so firmly embedded in a blues aesthetic and a jazz aesthetic. I listen to hip hop, I can hear it, but, hey, Shaq can dribble a ball but he’s not trying to be a point guard.

Rudy: Does poetry outside of the rap and hip-hop cultural movements, which on the whole seem to be apolitical and materialistic, have any dramatic impact similar to that which was happening during the Black Power and cultural nationalist movement of the 60s and seventies? Or has prose gained the ascendancy? If so why has that happened?

Kalamu: Rap is economically driven. BAM was politically driven. Moreover, the economics driving rap is global capitalism. In that regard there is a definitive difference between rap and BAM. On the other hand, rap is responsible for the current resurgence of poetry. Period. Worldwide. Rap is a form of poetry. Rap is the strongest commercial current in music. Prose is no where near as influential as rap. In fact, after rap, comes cinema/video.

Rudy: There is indeed this economic aspect about rap and hip hop. But isn’t there something more essential about this activity than the external forces that drive it? Don’t we live in what your Amina calls "a more sophisticated slavery"? Isn’t rap at heart a means of resurrecting community? We may be indeed, as she says, "experts at slavery." But it seems that our expertise has to be constantly updated. For as fast as we learn it, it adapts and transforms itself. We constantly find ourselves behind the curve. Maybe our young people, maybe a few of us, have learned this lesson about oppression. Commercialism may not be the problem indeed, but how we approach it. May it not be that our ideas of hierarchy and individual competitiveness that leads to selfish ends, each seeking his own comfort, be the problem that confronts all of us?

Kalamu: Well, maybe we need to clarify terms. I do not equate rap and hip hop. Rap is part of hip-hop, the part that has been commercialized and commodified. Those ideas, e.g. "each seeking his own comfort," where do those ideas come from? We need to ask those questions. As for the "something more essential than the external forces that drive it" I think that would be "African aesthetic expressiveness," that would be how rap/hip hop are part of a cultural continuum. And quiet as it’s kept, that is something external to rap/hip hop in the sense that rap/hip hop are only a particular form of black expressive culture, a culture that existed prior to rap/hip hop and a culture that will exist after rap/hip hop are gone.

Rudy: Let me take a stab at clarifying terms. Rap is the rhyming performance, which often seems to be of a competitive, negative nature—like the dozens or the Signifying Monkey. Neither of which I relate to very well. I am from the rural UpSouth and we don’t usually go for that kind of ethic. Raps sells records to middle-class white kids, soft drinks, all kind of commodities, including sex and drugs.

Hip-hop is the larger cultural context for rap. It’s a talk, a walk, clothes, the wearing of clothes, a way of looking at the world, of being in the world. That too seems to have been commodified and commercialized. Some are making billions off of clothes; the stylistic aspects of hip hop can be found on the stage and in sit-coms, for instance Will Smith and Martin Lawrence and other comics and rappers have become superstars and made millions. FUBU and other clothes manufacturers have done the same. Michael Jordan too has made a fortune off the shoes.

Yes, the African expressiveness is there, but hip-hop is not as pristine as you seem to suggest. I think Lauryn Hill is hip hop, but she’s in an entirely different world, likeBob Marley. Have you heard her CD? It’s a religious thing, a Bible thing, a God thing, a far-out spiritual thing of growth with her. A lot of black women are into her kind of spirituality.

Kalamu: Yeah, ok. If that’s how you want to define it. But there are other views. First of all, most of us don’t know anything specific about traditional African cultures. Competition, especially what we now call "trash talking." is a component of African cultures. The big difference is that African culture is wholistic rather than dualistic. The difference is not the absence of competition in African cultures but rather the absence of community in American cultures, an absence that has been engendered over the years by capitalism.

Plus, there is the presence of white supremacy, a virulent form of anti-Black racism. Don’t romanticize Blackness, we are very, very competitive but we are also communal. Let me use the music as an example. There is nothing more famous than the jazz cutting contests, two musicians dueling to see who is the best. Yet, even as they duel, they do so in collective context playing with their bandmates, or, in the case of piano cutting contests, drawing on a common repertoire. Now, to go one step further. There are recordings of traditional African praise songs in which the singers are boasting about who is the best, and of course, African languages are tonal.

The roots of rap are in Africa via Jamaica, which is the direct influence for the dj-ing that is the hallmark of rap music. Hear me now. Go back and listen to Big Youth, and cats like that. What you are objecting to is the commodification and commercialization of the culture, even though you may think that there is an antagonism between competitiveness and communalism, there actually is not. African communalism embraces competitiveness, in fact, the communal essence defuses the antagonisms of competitiveness. 

 

8

Travel & Travel Writing

Rudy: You have visited a number of countries in the Caribbean, Europe, Africa. How have these places influenced your poetry and social vision? Could you point out some significant experiences?

Kalamu: Also Asia--China, Korea and Japan; and South America--Surinam and Brasil. I have written about this before. But to sum up, I think the major benefit of travel has been to keep me from becoming an ethnocentric essentialist. I have maintained a focus on being a human being, a particular expression of humanity, but a human being first. Thus, I was able to escape the torture of defining the world in black and white, that is, defining the world in racial terms. 

I am much more interested in culture and consciousness than in any emphasis on color (race). As for specific experiences, well, two of the most profound early experiences were attending the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1974 as a delegate and a long visit to Haiti out of which I produced a book of poetry, Iron Flowers. Both of those visits influenced me to expand my understanding of the meaning and dynamics of being black in the world.

Rudy: Yes, I think travel is indeed important for rounding a person. That’s a cliché. But such experiences are indeed profound and enlightening. I spent ten weeks in the old Zaire, mostly, in Bukavu and Goma, the region which received the refugees from Rwanda. I haven’t been able to write about that experience, however. For me, it was a troubling experience. I didn’t have the money and so I went as a Peace Corps volunteer. And so I didn’t feel free to speak and associate as I desired. The reason for my trip was to confront head on the issue of our romance with Africa. Have you written about your African experience?

Kalamu: But, of course. I did a cover story on the sixth Pan African Conference for Black World magazine back in 1974. I have a manuscript on my trip to Ghana in 1994 for the First Panafest Festival. The book is called "Tarzan Can Not Return To Africa, But I Can." It is far from a romantic, son-come-home story. The structure is 26 parts, one for each letter of the English alphabet. There are three different elements going on simultaneously. One part is straight travelogue, descriptions of what we did, what we experienced.

Another part consists of mini-essays about various topics that interested me with relation to Ghana and/or Africa. The final part is an imaginary encounter with Tarzan who came walking through the wall of my hotel room early one morning around 3 a.m. while I was up reading and writing. Excerpts of the manuscript have been published inThe Journal of African Travel Writing, published out of Duke University, and in Black Renaissance, published out of New York University (NYU).

Rudy: Are you familiar with the travel writings of Richard Wright? What characterizes a good travelogue?

Kalamu: Yes, I am familiar with the travel writings of Richard Wright; however, my first orientation towards travel writing came from reading Langston Hughes' two autobiographies, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander. Just from their titles one can appreciate their strong emphasis on travel. My second major influence for travel writing came from working at the Black Collegian magazine and traveling to do interviews and stories. Actually, as I think about it, the Black Collegian was the third influence.

My second major influence was working with the Free Southern Theater, from the summer of 1968 to around 1973, under the tutelage of Tom Dent. Tom introduced me to numerous people and places, taught me the value of doing oral histories and inculcated in me a deep appreciation of studying our people and our culture. There is a big, big difference between simply experiencing a culture and actually studying the culture. Tom was also responsible for personalizing Caribbean culture.

Tom introduced me to the works of Kamau Brathwaite and then introduced me to Kamau Brathwaite the man, with whom I have continued to have contact. When I was with the Black Collegian I started traveling throughout the Caribbean, including a couple of trips to Jamaica, where I interviewed then president Michael Manley, and a trip to Haiti, which resulted in the poetry chapbook, Iron Flowers. Later, in the eighties, Tom introduced me to travel writers.

Tom's last book was  Southern Journey, a travelogue of traveling through the deep South, revisiting the sites of major civil rights struggles, doing a then and now comparison. Tom liked to drive around the South from Texas to Florida, and he had friends in all those places. I remember meeting Ralph Featherstone in West Point, Mississippi. Feather was organizing and building catfish farming cooperatives. You know, I saw Feather driving a tractor in a field, digging a catfish pond. Also, within New Orleans, Tom would take me deep into the culture, show me out of the way, off-the-beaten-path places. For a couple of years we used to hang out at the Glass House, uptown on Saratoga Street, enthralled with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in the early years of their development.

Well, the experiences I had with Tom changed me forever. Tom's example sparked a fire within me. I wanted to document our people and do it in such a way that the reader felt the flame of Black culture. Towards that end, I did a book of linked essays with photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. The book is called "Banana Republic, Black Street Life and Culture in New Orleans." "Banana Republic" is one of the best manuscripts I ever put together, but, for a variety of reasons will probably never be published. I consider that travel writing. I didn't have to travel very far in terms of miles. I was reporting on the sights, sounds, feelings and meanings of under-recorded, seldom documented aspects of our culture.

A fourth thing that affected my travel writing was that I can type very, very quickly. My mother sent me to touch typing classes the summer after sixth grade. The classes were in the front room of a school teacher who was a friend of my mother. I remember practicing my keystrokes with a recording of Lionel Hampton playing in the background. This particular teacher played jazz recordings to help us build up our speed. And my daddy had an old Royal manual portable. That was my first typewriter. As a result of the classes and my father giving me his typewriter, I was never ever under the impression that typing was a "White" or a "sissy" thing to do. The result was that I could type faster than I could write by hand.

To this day, other than writing haiku, I do 99% of my writing on a computer, and before computers, I did it on a typewriter. I write haiku by hand because of a method I have developed to write haiku. I use little marks to keep track of the syllable count and I write phrase and line variations, play with word choice, etc. all on one sheet of paper. But other than haiku, everything is written on a keyboard.

Ok, now here is the interesting part. Because that's the way I write and because I don't keep journals or diaries, nor do I do detailed notes. When I travel somewhere, I collect books, brochures, tape record interviews, take photographs (well, actually, I used to take photographs; I don't do that any longer), and would assemble the story when I got back. As a result, I was always dealing with impressions--what struck me, what I remembered.

And like most people, my memory is dramatic and specific but fragmented. I recall a specific sound, a specific color, an action, the way someone danced or talked, the look of a car passing in front of a building. So, ok, because I don't have a photographic memory, I write in detailed, highly sensual bursts. I write like a human recording of the moment. And I write with intensity. I want the reader to understand what I am writing about, but also, and equally important, I want the reader to feel it.

This is a long answer to a short question, but anyway, I dug the way Langston Hughes could do those quick sketches and you would get it. Wright's style, which is much more analytical is not for me. Even though I have done a lot of analytical writing, I really don't use an analytical approach to what some would call "travel writing."

Finally, I would add that I am always, always reading. For a couple of years I subscribed to Granta, a literary magazine out of England. They publish a lot of travel writing. The two travel writers whose work I have read extensively are Ryszard Kapuscinski and Alex Shoumatoff. K. is Polish and has done a lot of work in Africa. Tom turned me on to Shoumatoff. Of course, I have read a lot of others. But none of them has influenced me stylistically as much as has Langston Hughes.

As to what I think characterizes a good travelogue--I don't know. I know how to do what I do. I know I like K. and Shoumatoff. I know Langston Hughes and Tom Dent are my major literary influences for travel writing. That's what I know. In thinking about this a bit more, I also realize that I am an autodidact. I taught myself.

I didn't learn anything about writing in school. I never took a writing course. Dropped out of college early, so never even got much in terms of English composition or what have you. I have an associate arts degree in Business Administration from Delgado Junior College in New Orleans. I graduated from high school in 1964 and didn't get my AA degree until 1975. That's the extent of my formal education.

So, as far as being able to say much about what is good travel writing, I really don't know. I can describe in detail what I am trying to do and how I do it, and why I use certain techniques. I can tell you about my influences. I can tell you about my jazz aesthetic and blues aesthetic philosophies in terms of how I write. No doubt, it is interesting to note that I don't pay any attention to genre separation, I mix it all up.

But other than telling you about what I do, I really can't say what the standard ought to be or what the standard is for a given genre. I mean I study and understand what is happening in a given literary field, but as for me making any pronouncements from my own perspective, later for that. I follow Langston Hughes, simply "dig and be dug in return." I believe, dig what you can dig, and leave alone what you can't. Don't fake the funk. If you dig it, do it. If you don't, regardless of what others might say or what experts say you are supposed to dig, if you don't dig it, leave it be. Move on and do something you do dig. Life is too short to spend time following the dictates of others.

At the same time, however, I am very, very curious about diverse forms of human expression, human culture. You know, the nothing human is foreign to me syndrome. Plus, because I am deeply into jazz, I also know that just because I don't understand something when I first hear it, that doesn't mean I shouldn't check it out. For example, I am an unadulterated Coltrane freak. I have over 100 cds by Coltrane. I've got Coltrane books, discographies, magazine clippings, you name it. But, I wasn't always into Trane.

Check this, I can remember listening to a popular jazz show that used to come on the radio in New Orleans on Saturday afternoons, 3 pm to 7 pm, Larry McKinley's "This Is Jazz." This is back in the mid-sixties, '62 to '64 primarily. Larry played all the hip artists--Miles, Ellington, Blakey, Horace Silver, but he also played the avant garde. I heard Ornette [Coleman], Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy and Trane from the early Impulse days. I can remember being on the picket line with a portable radio in my pocket.

Walking the picket line in a civil rights demonstration and listening to Cecil Taylor and Sunny Murray play from that live album, Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come, a trio session with Jimmy Lyons on alto, Cecil on piano and Sunny on drums recorded at Cafe Monmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 23, 1962 and probably not released until 1963, and McKinley had it on his radio show in the summer of 1963. This was some of the freshest stuff on the music scene. That was challenging and difficult music. Music that was at odds with the finger-snapping swinging shit.

(As I talk about this, I guess I have to list Larry McKinley as a major influence on me.) Anyway, the point is, I used to get up and go to the bathroom or go get a snack if I was home in the den listening whenever Larry played "Chasing the Trane." I couldn't understand it. I didn't like it. But something inside me knew I needed to keep listening to the program. I rarely missed my music appreciation class, which is how I viewed those four hours every Saturday. McKinley played stuff that I really, really liked, likeMiles at the Philharmonic, My Funny Valentine, and Max Roach and Mingus. Oh, man, I really, really dug Mingus. Peggy's Blue Skylight with Roland Kirk. Those Mingus recordings with John Handy.

And of course Art Blakey, who would be my major influence when I started playing drums for the short period I was a musician (and that is another story that I won't go into at this time). McKinley's mix of music was so broad, so challenging and at the same time so satisfying that he kept me listening, and while listening, he challenged me and kept introducing me to new sounds. I'm walking the picket line, in the sun and the rain, and hearing Cecil Taylor. It was hard being out there. Hard convincing folk to change old habits, convincing our people to try a new way, to stop being Colored and be Black!

I remember how hard it was to convince our people to embrace our Blackness. And through the music I am learning that Blackness swings but some of Blackness also challenges us to grow and expand, to learn to appreciate aspects of our lives that initially turn us off. You know the genre of music called jazz is so broad, so very far reaching. I used to say that there is some kind of jazz that everybody can dig. I mean you can like classical music, or country and western, or Broadway show tunes, whatever, regardless of what your tastes are, there is some jazz style or artist whom you will like.

And, by the same token, it's almost a guarantee there is a lot of jazz you won't like, probably never will dig. That's Blackness. That's our culture. So, I used to walk out on Trane, but I kept listening and eventually I became a Trane freak. I dig all of Trane's music, including what some people think of as the difficult late period Trane. Well, jazz became my model. And if you look at my writing, you see the same breath. I have stuff that swings and I have way out shit. I've got quiet refined pieces and I got noisy, hollering screaming pieces.

Jazz is my stylistic template. I learned how to type hearing Lionel Hampton. Started off slowly with something like "Midnight Sun" and picked up speed and proficiency with something like "Flying Home"; walked the picket line hearing Cecil Taylor and hearing Mingus and Max Roach--especially that Freedom Now Suite LP with Abbey Lincoln; eventually got deep, deep into Coltrane. Would listen religiously every Saturday. Would absorb all this music. And the stylistic breath of the music became the model for me as a writer. So, when it comes to what I believe is the right thing, well, I don't have "a" thing I believe is the right way to write. There is so much out there.

I believe the thing is to embrace as much of what's out there as you can. Keep growing. Keep stretching. I believe you should learn as much as you can and develop your voice, do your thing. Practice and play, woodshed and bandstand. Listen to as much as you can hear. Always put new sounds into your mix--and by new, I mean whatever is new to you. Or as I say in one of my haiku--"what we know limits/us. wisdom loves everything/not yet understood." And tell the truth. Be sincere. Write like a jazz player solos--always reaching for something new, something different, but at the same time something sincerely felt in the heart and soul, something you truly believe reflects the best of what you are at any given moment.

And finally, to answer that last question: a good travelogue is what takes you there. The writer's goal should be to be like Mavis Staples when she sings, "I'll take you there."

Another little trivia thing I just thought of: from those early days in the mid-sixties listening to Cecil Taylor with drummer Sunny Murray, fast forward to some time in the early nineties. I'm working with Kidd Jordan, a New Orleans saxophonist, music teacher at Southern University in New Orleans, and staunch avant gardist. I do totally improvised poetry with his groups. We do a set one night at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

I'm on the stage improvising poetry with the band, and you know who the guest drummer was--Sunny Murray! The show was great, but as good as the music and stuff was, there was something more that until now, I've never even talked about. There was this spiritual affirmation that if you live right, if you follow the music, make the music, love the music, there will be opportunities for your own development that are totally beyond anything you can think of. I never once, ever thought of myself sharing the stage with Sunny Murray, of Sunny Murray playing drums while I am reciting poetry. Never thought about that. And then it happened.

I have recordings of Amiri Baraka reciting with Sunny, but I never thought about doing it. And I was so humbled by the experience. I realized how much I have been blessed and I realized how important it is to keep on the path I'm on. I never saw Coltrane live, passed up the one chance I did get to see him because I didn't dig him at the time. That was in 1963, I believe. But I have shared music with Sunny Murray. And since we are talking about travel writing. It took me a minute to realize it, but this is important. Jazz musicians are my other major influence in terms of travel writing. They traveled all over the world.

As far as travel among African Americans, in the 20th century, jazz musicians were the first out of the box in any appreciable numbers, and they would weave influences from all over the world into their music. And they would come back and talk about those places and what they had seen. They used world experiences in their work. So, I just did like the jazz musicians. Yeah, I would say, even more than any particular writer per se, including Hughes, I saw how the jazz musicians worked it and twerked it.

And that's what I wanted to do. You know like Pharoah Sanders on the great LP Karma and don't mention Sun Ra, whom I saw numerous times in New York, and in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and in New Orleans at least four or five times. Kidd would always have Sun Ra come over to SUNO when Ra was in town. Talk about traveling, well you couldn't do much more spiritual traveling than traveling the spaceways with Sun Ra.

In fact, guitarist Carl LeBlanc, who was formerly a student of Kidd Jordan at SUNO, well Carl eventually joined Sun Ra's band and is featured on those recordings Sun Ra did on A&M records. Carl is the guitarist in my poetry performance ensemble, The WordBand. But that's a whole other discussion. Right now we're just talking about writing, but I do want to make mention of the immense influence jazz has had on my travel writing--and that influence shows up in fiction, in poetry, in prose, on recordings, in performances, everywhere.

Jazz teaches you to be yourself, but it also teaches you to get outside the limits of the self you are and become a larger and more spiritual self who embraces the whole of the human experience and beyond into the cosmos. I mean if you just check out the titles of some of the jazz compositions. Space is the Place. The night before we left for the 6th Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in August of 1974, we went up to Columbia College to check out a Sun Ra concert with dancers and light show, and slides and that great band and them strolling through the audience chanting "Space is the Place."

Rudy: Maybe it was last year, I read some of the writings you sent back on your listserv from England. I quite enjoyed this vicarious experience. You gave a number of presentations. Could you recount briefly some highlights of that trip and some Afro-British writers we should check out?

Kalamu: Hey, man, no I can't recount briefly. I already recounted. That's what the report was. If people want to dig it up, they can go to the e-drum archives and read it. They can go get that record. Why should I try to recreate something that already exists, and exists in it's most sincere form? The e-drum archives are atwww.topica.com/lists/e-drum and anyone and everyone can access them.

On another note, a number of folk keep telling me I need to publish those reports. I'm not opposed to the travel reports getting published in book form, but I'm also not going to stop my daily activities to spend a bunch of time trying to get a book deal for them. I wrote them, they are out there. If somebody wants to publish them, fine. But I've got other things to do. Besides, when I wrote them, I wrote them with an eye toward the future. I believe we have three audiences.

Our contemporary audience who reads our work as we write the work and get the pieces out there. Then there is the audience of our ancestors--I believe I have a responsibility to make them proud, to tell their stories, to create work that provides a sanctuary for their souls; work in which they live. And then there is the audience of the future--fifty years from now, a hundred, two hundred years from now, hopefully, some of our future progeny will read our work to find out about their ancestors, to find out what we were doing and thinking and feeling. These reports, of course, have a contemporary audience, but they were really written so that fifty years from now those who want to know will be able to check out my reports and get a good picture of, a hip recording so to speak, of our literary scene at the turn of the 21st century.

I am very, very aware that I am creating historical documents. That's one reason I call so many people by name, who was on what panel, who read at what performance, what they said, etc. I guess you could say, for me, travel writing is history writing.

As for writers to look for in England--I don't know. I can tell you some of the writers I like. I like Kadija Sesay (aka Kadija George) as a publisher and friend. I mean she is very, very important in terms of keeping the scene going. I believe her contributions as a publisher are seminal and much more significant than her contributions as a writer per se. And you know, as someone who has spend the last ten years or so putting together anthologies rather than trying to publish my own individual books of poetry, I really, really respect those of us who are committed to making sure a diversity of Black writers get published.

In a similar vein, up in Manchester, England, there is my good friend SuAndi, who is doing excellent work with the Black Arts Alliance, in addition to doing her own work in poetry and writing lyrics. In fiction there is Roger Robinson and Courttia Newland. In performance work there is Jean Binta Breeze and my good friend Malika Booker. I also like poet Dorethea Smartt. Those are the names that come immediately to mind, although there are others. But, I would say, folk should get a couple of anthologies and check out what's happening. Oh, yeah, there's also Vanessa Richards and Khefri with Mannafest. Naming names out of context is hard. Invariably you forget somebody, forget to point to certain scenes and important people.

Also, we need to keep in mind that the producers are often just as, if not more important, than any particular artist. By producers, I mean the people who do all the hard grunt work of creating shows, finding funding, finding venues, fighting to ensure that there are stages and creative spaces for our work to be launched, people who find and/or create publishing opportunities for others. People like Melanie with Renaissance One and Jacob Sam-LaRose, and Segun up in Manchester. People like that, who may not get much play if you just talk about writers per se, but without whom, the whole literary scene would not be as vital as it is. Those folk are in England but it's the same pattern everywhere. We should check out who the producers and editors are in addition to who the writers are.

 

 

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photo by Alex Lear

 

Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam

[Rudolph Lewis, publisher of Chicken Bones, interviews Kalamu ya Salaam circa 2003. The entire interview plus most of Kalamu's writings referenced in the interview are available on Chicken Bones > http://www.nathanielturner.com/kalamuinterview.htm]

 

4

Langston as Literary Influence

Rudy: You have attended a few writing workshops or retreats. How has those events influenced your writing in any significant way?

Kalamu: I have not attended any workshops or retreats as a student in over twenty years. Attending as a teacher or presenter is just an extension of what I do with NOMMO. I like to get around to hear and see what other writers are doing, both my peers and younger writers. I very much want to know what is going on. In that regard, the greatest influence is that being aware of what is happening helps me keep my work fresh.

Rudy: By retreat, I mean do you ever go to a "writer’s colony," a place you can get away from the usual hustle bustle, to think, to meditate, to write, to be among other writers, your peers? I thought the last time I saw you, you said you had won some fellowship award that allowed you to do just this? I must have misunderstood what you meant.

Kalamu: Oh, yeah, I won a senior fellowship from the Arts Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I spent three weeks there with nothing to do but read, write and think. But that was the only time in my life and although it was productive, that’s not something I want to do again. I thrive on what some people call hustle and bustle. I have a short attention span. Plus, I write very quickly. And I love the work I do, so I’m not trying to get away to anywhere.

Rudy: I understand that Langston Hughes is your major poetic influence? Is your appeal similar to his? Do you believe his audience was liberal whites and the black intellegentsia? Langston was a professional writer; that is, he made his living off his work. Can that still be done? What do you think was Langston’s vision of America?

Kalamu: In poetry, Langston was my first and most lasting influence, but my major influence has been the music and culture of black folk. Techniques I have developed, approaches I have decided to explore, all come out of contact with black folk and the cultural expressions we have developed. This necessarily means that I am drawn to and most responsive to working class black folk, those who labor (whether "legally or illegally") to earn a living. [See poetic autobiography section "two: what Langston did."]

Hughes’ prime audience was working class black folk, but that was not his sole audience. Indeed, Hughes wrote for different audiences although the bulk of his work seems to me to be addressed to working class black folk and those who understand or empathize with that orientation. Hughes’ appeal to the intellegentsia was, and remains, limited to those intellegentsia who are appreciative of black culture and its working class roots.

Today, it is much more possible to make a living as a black writer than during Hughes’ time.

Hughes was a clear advocate of diversity. Respect for different peoples, different ways of doing things and at the same time he had profound faith in political democracy. So I guess you could say: cultural diversity and political democracy. His views on economic matters seems to have shifted over the years and I am not sure what economic views he held in his latter years.

Rudy: I don’t want to really press the point. But do you really think that most of Hughes’ work was working-class directed? Were members of the working class buying his books or attending his readings? Were they the ones who were even reading Crisis and Opportunity where some of his poems could be found? I would probably agree theSimple tales had a working class orientation. Though possessing an element of folk humor, don’t you think they had an air of minstrelsy about them? Don’t you think that given a blues poem by Hughes and a blues lyric by  Muddy Waters, that Hughes wouldn’t have had a chance among Mississippi cotton pickers?

Kalamu: There is a misunderstanding about both Hughes and Muddy. It’s interesting that you mention Muddy. Muddy Waters didn’t become big until he hit Chicago and hooked up with Chess Records. Hughes was already big when he hooked up with the Chicago Defender and did the Simple  series. Simple was published in a Black newspaper at a time when Black folk read the paper. Crisis and Opportunity was stuff of the 20s, by the 30s through the 50s Hughes was in another space.

Certainly he had more Black readers than any other writer until Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Native Son . Furthermore, the big three of Black poets who were taught in the segregated public schools of the South were Paul Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones and Langston Hughes. Hughes was available in the schools, Hughes was in the newspaper and Hughes had books. No other writer came close to that reach into the hearts and minds of the Black community at the working class level.

Rudy: I have heard you read, perform your poems and I have heard about Baraka’s performances. Both of you use humor. I heard Sonia Sanchez speak of Malcolm’s humor and how he used it as a technique to draw people in. Could you speak further how you make use of humor in your poems?

Kalamu: Well, I’m not as funny as Baraka. But you know, humor is only an exaggeration of a commonly recognized reality, and exaggeration as an aesthetic is at the core of African-heritage expressiveness. I mean if you look at the statues of traditional Africa, if you look at our dance movements, if you listen to how we worry notes. All of that is expressive exaggeration. Humor is just putting a little ironic twist on it.

Rudy: You have written and spoken about the importance of the  Black Arts Movement. Is there a philosophical or ideological relationship between BAM and the "neo-griot" movement? Is it just a matter of a technological updating?

Kalamu: Well, I would not equate neo-griot with BAM. BAM was a nationwide movement that involved literally thousands of people. Neo-griot is my particular approach. Certainly my approach grows directly out of my involvement in BAM, but unlike BAM, and this is a major distinction, neo-griot is not associated with a particular political movement.

The creative use of communications technology in cultural work is constant in black culture in America. It is just that many of us are not aware of how closely aligned the use of technology and the expressions of our culture are. Perhaps because we seldom do anything just for the sake of technology, and thus technology is always used to facilitate our expression rather than to be the focus or subject of our expression.

As a people we focus on human relationships even as we use various technical developments to effectuate our cultural expressions. A prime example of this would be Stevie Wonder’s InnerVisions, which is widely praised but seldom looked at primarily as a technological marvel, even though it broke new ground for the use of electronics in popular music. I think the ability to humanize the use of technology has always been a hallmark of black culture, and in that regard, hopefully, neo-griot is a continuation of that trend.

 

5

Malcolm, My Son

Rudy: I have just finished reading Malcolm My Son. At first, my impression was that it was a parody. And then after the first two or three exchanges of dialogue I thought it was Shakespearean. How did you come to write such a play? You completed it sometime in the early 1990s?

Kalamu: Oh, I really don’t remember exactly when I wrote it. It’s just some outside jazz kind of stuff. Take the form and stretch. I have always experimented with theatre. I wrote straight stuff, but I also always wrote some out shit. We performed that play once. The brother who played Malcolm literally could not stop crying backstage after the performance. He had that much of himself invested in that piece.

I’m not sure what you mean by Shakespearean. I was just enjoying language with that one. That’s why it’s written in verse. I think that was the second or third verse play that I have written. I know the language has some of that Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, two tenors, wild-ass soloing in it. The play is full, not just of musical references, but also structured using musical motifs. But, I think my playwrighting days are over. I’m much more interested in dealing with video. It’s going to take me another three or four years to really develop my chops in that arena. We’ll see. I’m good now, but I’ve got a lot to learn in terms of producing video.

Rudy: I have read a few of your poems in which you deal with the question of gender oppression, the repression of women in a male-dominated society. My immediate impression was that you were a bit soft and sentimental when it came to women and women issues. That there was not enough of a critical edge.Malcolm My Son, in a manner, demolished that illusion. I see now that part of your approach as a writer is to get inside your subject, like an actor. Is that the case? That is, part of your poetic aesthetic, if we can call it that, is to show the complexity of life?

Kalamu: Well, you know, there are a couple of issues. First of all, few people have seen the range of what I do. In terms of women-oriented work, you have not seen or read the script "Memories." I don’t know if you are aware of my book, Our Women Keep Our Skies From Falling, the collection of essays I did in the early-eighties whose subtitle was "Six Essays in Support of the Struggle to Smash Sexism." Then there is a bunch of fiction, much of which has yet to be published. Also, by the time people see some of this stuff, I have already moved on to other stuff. So there is just the situation that much of what I have to say is not widely published.

But, the other, and more important problem is that I am not proposing a specific political line, so therefore there is no preordained point of view or conclusion I have to suggest overtly or covertly. Sometimes I am interested in what some people call deviant shit. sometimes I want to explore the typical, the normal. Who knows. as one of my characters says: what day is this? what am I feeling? To answer specifically about the complexity issue. My goal is to reveal and critique the lives we live, have lived and aspire to live. Some of our stuff is complex and some of it is straightforward and simple. Ditto, my creative work.

Rudy: In Malcolm My Son, how did you come up with the technique of cuts? What’s the idea behind that. It is as if the play never gets started, or as if it is continually restarting itself. Is that symbolic of something, something you’re saying about the world we live in?

Kalamu: Symbolic? No, it’s quite literal. We’ll just keep doing this shit, over and over, until we get it right.

Rudy: Do you view poetry as a weapon for social change? Would you agree with Karenga’s view that art that does not contribute to revolutionary change is invalid? Do you consider your writings "inherently or overtly political?"

Kalamu: I consider all writing "inherently" political, although not all writing is overtly political. As for my own writing, much of it is overtly political but not all of it. By overtly political I mean consciously advocating social change or offering social critique.

One important point of clarification: Karenga did not say "art" as a general category was invalid if it wasn’t political. In that particular essay Karenga was specifically talking about the category of revolutionary art. He understood that not all art aspired to be revolutionary, just as not all politically active people aspire to revolutionary change. I believe that over the years there has been a major misconception that we in BAM were trying to say that all art had to be a certain way. When actually we (or at least in this particular case, Karenga and those who shared Karenga’s outlook, which I did and do), we were clear in that we were addressing the question: what is the nature of revolutionary art.

Today we live in an era when nearly all art has taken or been forced to take a commercial direction. This direction means that we start from the premise that everything is, or ought to be, for sale. Thus, folk have a hard time conceiving of work that does not have a commercial purpose or is not of commercial use. But, I believe, the revolutionary artist has other ideas and approaches.

My commitment to revolutionary work is no less today than it was during the seventies. But my focus today is not solely on political specifics. Today I also focus on creating alternatives to economic capitalism, alternatives to commercial use value. And I usually don’t argue this point intellectually, rather I exemplify an alternative through the work I do and through how I use my artwork and offer my artwork to our community.

This question of the nature of revolutionary art is a very, very important question and also a very multifaceted question. Additionally, as I have learned from Black women writers, the nature and quality of interpersonal relationships should be a profound and critical part of our creative work as writers.

Not only does much of my post-BAM work investigate interpersonal relationships, but because I investigate the interpersonal, diversity is inevitable. I came to my positions on gender and sexuality through political struggle, but now dealing with and exploring the nature of gender and sexuality within our community informs and shapes my politics. This struggle, like all struggles, is dialectical.

When I first started delving into issues of gender and sexuality I, like many people, was clueless and ill-informed, my consciousness had been shaped by being an American, by spending my early years in the Baptist church, by public school, and by the norms of the status quo. I was fortunate to be born during interesting times, so that as I hit my high school years, the civil rights movement jumped off in full force.

I graduated from high school in 1964, a major year for civil rights activity. I spent beaucoup (that means plenty in New Orleans vernacular) days and months involved in picketing, sitting-in, voter registration canvassing, etc. I received the active support of my parents. As a young adult I was active in the Black Power movement. As a result of my Civil Rights work, I read James Baldwin.

In fact, I got kicked off the high school paper for writing a very enthusiastic review of Baldwin’s play "Blues For Mr. Charlie." I had a lot of respect for Baldwin as a writer, and for Baldwin as a crusader for and witness on behalf of Black people. I could not and would not dismiss Baldwin because he was a homosexual.

Rather than simply ignore that or reluctantly tolerate the fact that he was homosexual, I ended up investigating the whole issue and over a period of years and after much struggle and study around those issues, I arrived at what I would consider a reasonably progressive, although others might call it "radical," position on the question of homosexuality.

You know, the more you open your eyes, the more you see. So once I dug Baldwin and tried to understand where he was coming from, then I began to see homosexuality throughout our community. Also, by then I was into the blues aesthetic (see my essay on that in What Is Life?), and homosexuality was generally accepted as part of life in those circles.

Moreover, I had personal and close friends and comrades who were gay or who were bisexual. I remember a brother who was editing our movement newspaper during my year of student rebellion at Southern University in New Orleans. He was in the movement heart and soul. He was a comrade. I had to stand by him, with him, defend him from homophobia and heterosexism whether that homophobia and heterosexism came from others or whether it came from my own pre-revolutionary consciousness.

I was committed to struggle, and that commitment necessarily included struggle with my own biases, prejudices and weaknesses. I did not just wake up one morning and write Malcolm My Son because I didn’t have anything else to do. I wrote it because it reflected my own attempts to understand the breadth, depth and nature of Black humanity. And ditto for my participation in the struggle to smash sexism and develop women.

 

 

haiku #45 black people believe in god, and i believe in black people, amen

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

Interview with Award Winning Neo-Griot

Kalamu ya Salaam

[Rudolph Lewis, publisher of Chicken Bones, interviews Kalamu ya Salaam circa 2003. The entire interview plus most of Kalamu's writings referenced in the interview are available on Chicken Bones > http://www.nathanielturner.com/kalamuinterview.htm]

 

1

NOMMO Literary Society

Rudy: Kalamu, I'd like to begin our talk with  a discussion of your work with the NOMMO Literary Society. How do you keep the Society together? How do you keep the poets coming, working seriously on their writing skills?

Kalamu: I don’t. Folk either want to come and do so or they don’t. What I do is be very consistent. Except when I am out of town, every Tuesday I am there. I have a magnificent library of both books and music as a reference to help writers develop. I also assist in pointing people toward publishing opportunities.

Rudy: In your direction of NOMMO, what approach do you use? I mean how do you get a young writer to reconsider their topics or techniques? Do you sometimes shoot from the hip and say that’s crap, that’s not fully baked, or say go back to the woodshed with that one?

Kalamu: My approach is to offer a wide array of examples and influences. As to how effective I am, I think some of the members can answer that far more accurately than I can. There is no formal membership. Folks come and go. It’s wide open.

Our three-part format is 1. collective study, 2. announcements (which we call housekeeping), and 3. reading of original work and receiving of feedback. Generally, I am responsible for selecting what will be the subject of the collective study. Whatever it is, we take turns reading aloud and then discuss what we have read. This way we ensure a minimum common level of information.

The pieces range from formal studies of writing to creative work to essays about various topics. Less than 25% of what we study is specifically black-oriented. Announcements usually take only a few minutes. Reading original work and receiving feedback varies based on what folk bring to the table. In general, we are brutal with ourselves in giving criticism to regular members and very, very considerate of new members. We generally have more prose writers than poets per se. I think that is because NOMMO emphasizes "writing" rather than "reciting." Performance is seldom the focus of any of what we do. As a result, the young poets who pass by from time to time don’t usually stay for any extended time.

As for telling folk what to do, or what to write, or how to write, I freely give comments, but I am not the only one and I am careful to make sure that the comments of others are valued. Plus, our associate workshop director, Paulette Richards, is a Ph.D. who teaches English and creative writing at Loyola University. Other dynamics of our workshop are covered in an introduction I have done for the next collection of workshop writings, "Speak the Truth to the People."

Rudy: Is your work with the Society related to your teaching radio production and digital video to high school students? Do you find recruits for the Society among these students?

Kalamu: So far, there has been no overlap between the students I teach at the high school level and the NOMMO workshop. I have been teaching in the "students at the center" program for four years now. It is a learning process for me, a major learning process. Learning to teach what I know. Teaching has forced me to conceptualize and organize my information so that I can share it. I do very little recruiting for NOMMO.

Actually, I am not trying to increase the size of the workshop. We have a steady, core group of five to six writers and that seems to work well in terms of development. And from year to year there is always a turnover. Some folk moving on, new folk joining. Oh, one other thing. There are a couple of folk I mentor long distance via the internet, telephone and occasional in-person get togethers. Those are exceptions. And I certainly don’t want to take on any more. But that is another aspect of what I do.

Rudy: I still do not have a clear picture of the writers who are members of NOMMO. I assume they are all black. When you took me to a poetry set one night in New Orleans, I assumed some of those young people were in your group. Were they? How would you characterize those who are in NOMMO? Who are some of the writers who are now in NOMMO, who have passed through NOMMO?

Kalamu: If I remember correctly, only one of the writers you heard that night was a NOMMO member. Yes, NOMMO is a workshop for Black writers. At least 75% of our writers are female, and the majority are in late twenties to mid-thirties. Our youngest member is Sukari Ua, she is a 16-year-old high school student. I am currently the oldest at 55. We have a couple of folk in their early 40s. Some of our writers are self-taught, as I am, and others are formally trained.

We don’t have any writers who have made a big splash nationally, although a number of our writers are included in recent anthologies such as Role Call, Step Into A World, the Def Poetry Jam anthology, and E. Ethelbert Miller’s new anthologyBeyond the Frontier, as well as Afaa Weaver’s new anthology about African American families (due out in August 2002) [These Hands I Know]. Freddi Evans, one of our older members, both in terms of age and in terms of how long she has been in the workshop, recently published a children’s book [A Bus of Our Own] that won a major award. We plan to publish a second book by Freddi, the History of Congo Square.

Rudy: NOMMO is more than just a group of people. You have a place, a building in the middle of the community that is emblematic of a poetic, writing activity that goes on. Can NOMMO be duplicated in other cities? Does it need someone like Kalamu ya Salaam to make it work, long-lived? Do you think NOMMO will exist beyond you? Has NOMMO been duplicated in other cities?

Kalamu: Can NOMMO be duplicated as a writing workshop in general, yes; in particular the way we do it, probably not. Yes, our approach needs someone to take the responsibility of setting up a literary liberated zone, collecting and maintaining a library of books and music, and having the patience to work at the same project for five or ten years without getting tired. I have not even considered trying to duplicate NOMMO in another place. On the other hand, I hope that we can serve as an example to others and, in fact, be surpassed by what other folk are doing. 

 

[NOMMO ended when Katrina hit New Orleans. We were set to celebrate our 10th anniversary in September 2005. Katrina happened August 29, 2005. —kalamu]

 

 

 

Haiku  #30   Swabbed in sweat drenched bliss we answer gregg’s cornet with butt shaking footnotes

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

the butterfly of love emerges from the cocoon of desire

            (for anyone & everyone who has experienced how love

            unpredictably comes when and wherever it does)

 

the husky electric dark of your tender laughter thrills

like the incendiary potency of lightening shards sharply,

silently illuminating the distant tops of far off mountains

 

the slight chill of rain aroma soft hangs hopefully within

the intimacy of our speeding car as your charcoal shaded irises dart

between desert road and the open emotions of my expressive face

 

outside's swift night wind sings elegantly against the taunt drumskin

of my inner ears and as your slender brown hand, never quite landing,

briefly dances across the surprise of my thigh, i turn to face you

and even through seriously blurred eyes i can see the intensity

 

of your radiant glow, a heavy trembling indigo night flower heaving

petals fully open beneath the quiet undress of moonlight -- thoroughly

moved i do not speak except to reveal the shiny of two happy tears

slow weaving sweetly through the salty tangle of my masculine beard

 

—kalamu ya salaam