Writers of color: You have until May 31 to apply for the Center for Black Literature‘s North Country Institute for Writers of Color retreat.
The retreat takes place from July 6 to 10 at the Valcour Educational Conference Center in Plattsburgh, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain. This year’s workshop leaders are Ernesto Quiñonez (fiction) and Marita Golden (memoir).
On Saturday I walked to Medgar Evers College by way of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and sat in on two panels at this year’s National Black Writers’ Conference.
This was the tenth anniversary for the conference, and it seems to have gotten more press than usual this year: an article in the New York Times (though Tayari Jones, one of the participants, noted that several comments on the article were “disturbing’—not to say racist) and a mention on NPR.
I picked two panels to attend because they included writers I already knew and liked: Meena Alexander and M.G. Vassanji speaking on “Literary Encounters: East Meets West” and Chris Abani and Maaza Mengiste on “The Impact of War and Natural Disasters in Literature by Black Writers.” I got to meet each of them afterwards, and came away with signed copies of Quickly Changing River, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Hands Washing Water, and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
(Meena Alexander had disappeared in the time it took me to buy her book, so I had to be satisfied with exchanging it for a presigned copy. I was pleased, though, to find that it included two poems she read during the panel: “Four Friends” and “Nomadic Tutelage,” an homage to Audre Lorde.)
James McBride was also on the war panel. I hadn’t seen him before, or read his work, and was fascinated to hear his description of how the movie of his novel Miracle at St. Anna got filmed. Spike Lee called him up one day to propose the idea, they made a handshake agreement—two black men from Brooklyn, of about the same age—and for the next year McBride wrote the script and discussed it with Spike Lee in various restaurants. No money changed hands. As usual, Spike Lee had great difficulty raising money for the movie, and in the end it came mostly from Italy. (McBride was scathing on the subject of how pathology is the only kind of black story that sells—using Push and the movie Precious as his main examples.)
Chris Abani made more startling statements than anyone else I heard. Every time he publishes a book, he says, someone tells him it will end his career. When he told his publisher the idea for his next book, he said, the man visibly flinched. “My career is entirely about rewriting James Baldwin,” he said at one point, and a little later, “For Baldwin, all love is light. The only aberration is the absence of love.”
Abani once spoke to a Hutu man involved in the massacres in Rwanda. What was the hardest thing about killing your Tutsi victims? he asked him.
“After a while the machete gets dull and you start to get blisters,” the man said, and laughed.
Was it the literal truth? Was it a joke meant to shock? Or was there was an element of both? Abani didn’t try to explain.
In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.
About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”
Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.
For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:
Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.
Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.
While I was on the USPS website, I discovered to my surprise that a stamp honoring Richard Wright came out last year.
It looks nice, but it’s a 61-cent stamp. Who uses 61-cent stamps? If you really want to honor a major American writer, wouldn’t you put him (or her) on a first-class stamp? Instead we have Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, and the Simpsons.
When I think of Dennis Brutus, I remember a photo I once saw of him standing in front of a portrait of Frederick Douglass. His graying mane and stoic expression gave him a certain resemblance to Douglass, which I’m sure he was well aware of. I met him several times when I was doing anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, and I was sorry to read of his death.
I once helped organize a fundraising event at Harvard where Brutus spoke about his efforts to have South Africa banned from the Olympics, and about his attempt to escape after his arrest in 1963. Finding himself with his guards on the streets of Johannesburg, he broke free and ran, thinking that they would never be reckless enough to shoot him on a crowded street.
He was wrong. A bullet passed through his body, and before long he was serving an 18-month sentence on Robben Island.
I was carrying a copy of his book A Simple Lust, and before the event I mentioned to him that I liked his poem “The companionship of bluegum trees.”
To my surprise, he stopped what he was doing, sat down, looked up the poem, and read it to me: the only time that I have been privileged enough to be an audience of one for a poet.
The companionship of bluegum trees
their sheen and spangle against the midday
winter sun
and the companionable nudge of my heart
knocking against my mind and memory
with evocation of my student hazy days
condemns me once again
labels me poet dreamer troubadour
unreal unworldly muddle-headed fool
while the trees nod and swagger
and the level sunlight flows.
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