Poet, novelist and playwright, Angela Jackson’s, And All These Roads Be Luminous, one of ther five collections of poetry, was a National Book Award nominee. Her Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners received the 1993 Chicago Sun-Times Book of the Year Award in Poetry and the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry. Her Where I Must Go (Triquarterly Books, 2009) has been called by Reginald Gibbons, “a novel of deep humanity, tenderness and wisdom, a delight to read, and a work of great significance for American literature.” Ms. Jackson’s plays include Witness!, Shango Diaspora: An African- American Myth of Womanhood and Love, and When the Wind Blows.

Interview conducted at Cave Canem Fellows Retreat, June 20, 2012 By Ana-Maurine Lara

You were talking about writing for young people so we don’t have to go through the same things that you went through. Tell us about your novel. You started it when you were 18 years old? Yes, and then I decided it had to be a trilogy and the first part was published in 2009 and that title comes from “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke. My favorite line is, “I learn by going where I have to go.” We learn by going where we have to go. And it’s not just physical places, but also psychological places that we have to go to in order to become adult persons, to become adults; to become our whole selves. The second part of the trilogy that deals with the external forces – as I described it someplace else – and the second installment of the trilogy Maggie finds love, but will she keep it? The outside world intrudes upon our intimate lives. And book three, as I see it, is now and that’s going to be hard to write. Book two is finished, I’m just revising it. I’m cleaning it up and doing what needs to be done. I’ll show it to my editors and they’ll have comments, and I’ll see how it rides. I wanted to ask you about your experience working with different genres, working with poetry, fiction and plays. What happens for you between those different genres? I have found I had my most productive periods when I was teaching four or five classes down in Columbia, Missouri at Stephens College. And Fridays and Saturdays I would write, and mostly I would write my fiction, so poems were happening too. I found I wrote some of my most lively and fleshed out poems at that time. Going back and forth can re-energize each form, so of course being a poet gives you more energy and beauty to our process as a fiction writer. And, of course, I am a poet, so I automatically hide poems inside the fiction and the plays. I got that idea from a friend of mine, Fred Gardaphe. He had a student write a paper on my work and she said, “Angela Jackson hides poems in her fiction.” [Laughter] I love that. It is exactly like that. But it’s hard because in order to stay with the story, you have to keep moving. One of my professors who was a poet, Peter Michelson said, the fictive moment moves and the poetic moment lingers, so you have to strike a balance when you are a poet writing fiction because you want to linger, but not too long because you have to keep the story moving. That’s a beautiful way to speak about it. I was thinking poetry is a distillation and fiction is a flushing out. How do the plays interact with your poetry? The plays help me more with fiction. Well, let’s see: I do get to use poetry in the play because different people speak in different ways so they each speak in their own language and some people are more poetic than other people, just as in normal everyday life: some people speak more poetically than other people. But the plays inform my fiction because they help me with dialogue so much. They help me merge and create scenes that tell the story and keep the story moving and are significant to the story. Not everybody is going to like fiction by a poet. When I was doing Book Club Readings, some women were quite emphatically mad at me about not liking my style and telling me the way I should have written it. That was too real. I had to accept a long time ago that not everybody’s going to like my work. It’s a fact, but I say, write your own book. Write your own book, write your own poem. I don’t get that response with poems, but with fiction I sure did. Because it’s different. Because it is a poet’s voice. People come to expect a certain thing out of fiction. Do you think poetry is more mysterious to people. That could be. I’m just shocked people felt like they could just come right out and say such things to you. Well, I was shocked, too. Let’s turn to the play Shango Diaspora. You know that’s been published in several places. It was published in an anthology by D. Soyini Madison called The Woman That I Am. And a drama text book, called, Types of Drama by Silvan Barnett. And it was in a text book through a Louisiana university called Roots to Branches. Is it like Katherine Dunham’s Shango? No, I knew about that. And I knew I would be contributing to a whole host of plays about Shango, and that’s not really what that story is about. Dunham’s is about Shango’s three wives and the one that cuts off her ear. No, it’s a New World innovation of the Shango mythology. And it’s a feminist mythology, a coming of age story and a romance and it’s about women. A girl traveling through the world as a woman, becoming herself. And, it’s a commentary on African American culture, and it’s a commentary on African-American language. Because there are so many different kinds of language and each character speaks in a different version of high language, low language, vernacular, and some are more poetic than others. The reason I asked about Katherine Dunham is because she appears in your poems. Oh yes, that’s probably because I have a good friend, a poet who was a performance artist, named Reshain Rancin Boykin and for many years he worked for, in effect, Ms. Dunham, recording her work and getting her work preserved. So, it’s the connection with Reishan that connects you to her. Yes, it was so powerful to me. I have a sister named Betty, before she was performance artist, now she’s a documentary maker, but she started off as a dancer, so I would always hear her talking about Dunham technique. And doing Dunham technique. My sister was an exquisite dancer and a powerful dancer. And she was the first choreographer for Shango Diaspora because when it was first produced, it incorporated music and dance as well as the poetic language. And it was just…the first performance, which was the showcase performance for the Midwest Black Theater Alliance, was just exquisite. It was astonishing, it was so good. And one of my deepest regrets was that that performance was not taped. You just had to be there. Yes, you did. You had to be there and only 200 could be there, so, no one else will ever know. It was also done later in New York and in Barbados. I haven’t seen it in Barbados. And it was done at Karamu House in Cleveland. I wanted to ask you to speak about the black aesthetic and your thoughts on how it’s evolved. Small question. [Laughter] The word that comes to me. My mentor Hoyt Fuller – he mentored a lot of people, but I think of him as my mentor because we had a personal relationship. We would talk two to three times a week, even when he moved to Atlanta. And you know he was the editor of Black World. And he was one of the architects of the black aesthetics. His essay on black style is in Henry Louis Gate’s Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. And, it’s in the book Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle. And one of the words he used all the time, when he was the chair of the Black Writer’s workshop – the founding chair – was organic. We used it all the time. It must come out organically. It must be performed organically. All of it must emerge organically out of our experiences. It had to be something that evolved from us and I think that here at Cave Canem, where the poem doesn’t say, or one doesn’t have to do it this way or the way that they do it in the MFA program, but rather that it emerges organically. Because of the Black Aesthetic movement, young African-Americans had the freedom to record their own experiences and see where it leads them. So there are things that I have not imagined and will not imagine that people here [at Cave Canem] will imagine. What you just said really strikes me. It makes me think about the connection between “organic” and “freedom” Mm – hmm. What is for you the drive behind your poetry? I cannot imagine in any other way than as a poet. I could not be without being a poet. One of the things that Hoyt Fuller would say was, “you are or you are not.” And that is a question of integrity. My integrity, my wholeness, rests on my being a poet. Maybe rest is the wrong word. [Laughter] My integrity stands on my being a poet. What are some of the things that you hope women outside of your generation can take away from reading your work? I think of a poem by Mari Evans, you know. Some people call her Mar-ee, but she says it Mary so I call her Mari. “Who can be black and not sing/ the wonder of it/ the joy/ the celebration.” I want us to feel that. I believe we felt that before when I was younger and I want us to feel that and I want all young people to feel that sense of celebration of being themselves and not feel that the world is a dangerous, evil place. Because in Chicago there is so much violence, so much that puts people down. It’s so hard now being young because the circumstances are so difficult. They impact on the way people feel about themselves. So, I want us to feel some joy in our being black. That is a gift. One thing I have learned from scholars, such as Elizabeth Alexander, is that Chicago’s Renaissance was as – if not more so – vibrant than Harlem’s. Yes. It happened in the 30s and 40s with Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright and Margaret Walker was there and Margaret Burroughs and Henry Blakely. And, actually Claude McKay was in Chicago in 1948. He was teaching for a young Catholic program. He actually converted to Catholicism, he was in Chicago, though I don’t think he was attached to that group. The roots for what happened in the 60s in Chicago, was really grown from what had happened in Chicago in the 30s and 40s. OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) came into being in 1966, but the history was there already. How does that history still live on in Chicago? There is the regional library on 95th and Halsted. And the Carter G Woodson Library has the names of black writers up on the outside walls. Richard Wright. Gwendolyn Brooks and all those people, so there’s an attempt to remember. How do you feel that your work is in conversation with their work, as a Chicago based artist? Yes, absolutely. Probably most in conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks. I know my poetry is. I even have a poem about Gwen on her passing. I was thinking about reading it tomorrow [for the Cave Canem faculty reading] and in fiction I’m in conversation with Richard Wright, with his Native Son and Black Boy and I’m also in conversation with Margaret Walker, who was my classroom teacher, my professor Freshman year at Northwestern in African American literature. Yeah – I was that lucky. That’s amazing. Please tell me about your Master’s work on the Caribbean and Latin America. Yes, I did it on African religions in Brazil. That’s what I got my first Master’s in. That would explain Shango [laughter]. I did two theses. I did the play, and I did a paper on the play, a long 20 page paper on the play. And then I did my formal thesis on African religions in Brazil and its evolution and the different kinds of African religion – an overview and how it shaped differently in each region of Brazil. From the most conservative and the most African being candomblé in Salvador da Bahia. Did you have to go to Brazil? I never made it. I want to go to Brazil, but I’ve never been. Maybe I will. You never know. What drew you to those questions? This is what happened. I’m gonna tell you the real deal. First, I wanted to get an MFA in 1978 and I didn’t want to go to Iowa, but there weren’t that many choices. I wanted to go to Columbia University and I applied there and didn’t get in [I did get my MFA – last year at Bennington]. And I had a friend who had been an editor at Triquarterly and she was saying that she argued with them, and they said no. So, I said, “What to do? What to do?” So I opened the newspaper one day and there was this ad for this new program at the University of Chicago for a Master’s Program in Latin American and Caribbean studies and I said, “That’s what I’ll do. A writer should be a cultural historian!” and I believe that. A writer should be a cultural historian. So I entered the program, and I knew I wanted to study Brazil because I knew there was a large number of people of African descent there and I was interested in African religion. I don’t know how, but I did. That wasn’t that easy to find out about at that point in time. No. But I knew it existed. I don’t know how, but I knew that African religion existed. It’s probably something I found out in Black World, or a similar publication, and I knew I wanted to find out more about it then. So that’s when I made it the center of my study and explored it deeply. I was so deeply into it that I was reading in Portuguese – I had to learn Portuguese – I was studying stuff in Portuguese. I was even reading stuff in French and I cannot read French! I was reading it. It took me years to get my thesis finished because at a certain point, I got an National Endowment for the Arts and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. And because I had money to write, I had to write, and so I took off writing and didn’t go back to finish my thesis until years later. And then I just finished it, so that I could move on. That’s what happened with that. Now that fed a continuing interest in cultural history and folklore. So, I was reading Zora Neale Hurston and other books on folklore and the oral tradition. One of my favorite books is Bullwhip Days, which is an oral history of American slavery. One of my other favorite books is There is a River by Vincent Harding. And I love history books. Can you talk about John Wideman’s idea of the eternal now in your work? Has your relationship to history changed over the course of your lifetime? Because I’m older, I see myself more connected to history, more deeply because I’ve lived so much more of it. And taken part in it, and I feel profoundly connected to it. When I think of the fiction I’ve written, they were written over the course of 40 years. I could not have – if I had just started today – been able to tell those stories. I could not have because I would have forgotten so much of it. So I feel really blessed. When I was reading what I had written, and what has evolved – especially in the process of writing and rewriting and re-writing that story, I recognize that I am completely blessed to have those details at my disposal because I had lived them and lived in the time and space that I could. So, I am better able to fulfill my mission and vision in passing it on. The first poem I ever had published in February of 1971 in Black World magazine – a national publication – led me to ask myself the question about my fiction: is this the same buck passing from one generation to another? I didn’t want to have another generation pass through the same lessons. These lessons are valuable and should be passed on, not lived over - unless they are about strength and pride and beauty and truth. Is there anything a young poet needs to know if they’re just getting off on their road? Don’t spend a long time being petty. People will try and make you be petty. Follow the path. Be faithful. Write and read and write and live and love. Thank you.

Spark: Tameka Cage Conley Please contact Ms Jackson directly for her poems.