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.