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So much about our lives as black people in this country involves this form of creation, the proverbial making of something out of nothing, of finding a way out of no way, and surviving (and hopefully thriving) off remnants, remains, and leftovers.
~~ “Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter,” Evergreen Review
Let’s suppose, for the purposes of this article, that American history is nothing more than a series of structural patterns spawned from an original sin and high idea. Or, as Mark Twain has widely been attributed with saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” And let’s also suppose that those patterns have slight deviations that allow altogether different possibilities, both negative and positive. So where there was the Civil Rights movement, there is now Black Lives Matter. Where there were once mass hippie protests, there is now the Resistance. Where there was Richard Nixon, there is now Donald J. Trump. Where there was Martin Luther King Jr., there is now a realization of Barack Hussein Obama.
Now, if you consider racism a plague, you might recognize these patterns as no es bueno. You might even be a little bored of the spiritual pestilence, rot, and disease. Si si, muy malo. You may be sickened by a system predicated upon incarcerated black bodies and young American men murdered. Who wouldn’t be, right? This requires grit and grind. We remember where we have been. If you have considered slavery and its fascinating twin babies of discrimination and institutional racism to be cancer agents of a toxic and malignant characteristic, you might consider Mr. Jeffery Renard Allen, a Reiki doctor, gripping a satchel of diagnosis and cure in a tightly clenched fist. We know where we are. He is, in fact, a master mystic creating the work of a generation previously unknown. Now, forward to where we have yet to go.
Throughout the nascent twenty-first century, Allen has made work of traveling, learning, educating, reflecting, and creating. In 2006, he traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, working with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie soon after Half of a Yellow Sun came out. He taught at the Kwani? Litfest. In 2008, he traveled to Accra, Ghana, organizing a writers’ conference at the Kokrobitey Institute and working with fellow author Arthur Flowers. In 2012, he again worked with Chimamanda’s Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop in Lagos, Nigeria. That same year in Zanzibar, he served as program director of literature at the Jahazi Literary and Jazz Festival.
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As we prepare for this interview, Allen seems most proud of his recent work appearing in the premiere online version of the celebrated journal, Evergreen Review. His answers to my questions were equally insightful, deliberate and thoughtful, both hands of the American Bard, prepared to do their work:
Patrick A. Howell: Jeff, you’ve been globetrotting in recent months, completing a residency in Bellagio, Italy, at the Rockefeller Center. You worked on completing your book of short stories, Fat Time. Also, you have traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to do a reading at the James Joyce Center and lecture students at the University College Dublin. Did you enjoy your time away from our grand American experiment … I mean, experience? Away from the Black American experience? How have your recent travels informed your work? How do they inform your identity as an American?
Jeffery Renard Allen: I arrived at Bellagio last November only a few days after the election. I truly felt as if I were escaping my country at a time when it was necessary to do so. The good thing is I was able to spend a month there, spend a month on one of the most beautiful places on the earth, and simply focus on my writing. Of course, I was also trying to get my head around the election, so I watched things from afar as it were.
I have always had an itch for travel, and my life has been such that I have had the good fortune to travel quite extensively abroad. As a Black person in this country, we often don’t feel welcome, but when you go overseas and see another American, you have a strange feeling of kinship. Traveling overseas can’t help but change your understanding of what it means to be an American. You notice, for example, that nowhere on the planet do you see scores of people who are obese. You only see obesity in America. What does that tell us about who we are as a country?
Let’s be frank about it. Americans are the most naive people on the planet, which also makes us the most dangerous people on the planet given our nuclear arsenal and given that we have the strongest military in the history of the world. More than sixty million Americans voted for Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter why you voted for him. I traveled to Dublin back in January and arrived there before Trump’s inauguration. I was talking to a taxi driver who had been to America numerous times and to many different parts of the country. He clearly finds much to like about our country because there is much to like, and our country is like no other. So he said to me with great concern, “I hope Donald Trump doesn’t ruin the country.” My question, how is it that a foreigner can recognize Trump for what he is, but tens of millions of Americans could not?
You can travel throughout our country and find monuments that celebrate the conquest of Native Americans, and few stage protests to have these monuments removed. This means one of two things: On the one hand, either most Americans are so ignorant about our history that they are incapable of recognizing why these monuments are an affront, or, on the other, they are perfectly comfortable with celebrating certain forms of conquest and genocide. Thinking about such questions, one thinks about the overall question of the American psyche. Travel, conversation, reading, and observation have led me to understand that we have a type of optimism that exists nowhere else in the world.
We believe that we are entitled to happiness. In fact, that very wording is in our Constitution, the “pursuit of happiness.” In contrast, the rest of the world has a firm and realistic Old World view where they expect nothing, and where they know that they have little chance of improving their lives. They may long for improvement, but the reality is that for most people in the world, life has afforded them few opportunities of improvement. This is not to say that life has not improved for millions of people around the world over, say, the last century. I’m talking about mindset, attitude. Americans are the only people in the world who feel entitled to happiness, a feeling that often comes with other kinds of expectations, as in an expectation to make money and acquire wealth.
How true is that expectation? Statistics from the last census show that the median income in this country is quite low, one where most families are led by a couple, with each person working a job where the annual income is just above the poverty level. And that’s the kind of job most people work in this country, one that keeps them a few thousand dollars above the poverty line as our federal government defines poverty. That is the economic reality.
Couple that with certain forms of historical, political, and emotional denial—this country that has never come to terms with the strange legacies of genocide, slavery, and segregation, to say nothing of our colonial experiment that took half of what used to be Mexico. This country where the majority of white people don’t think that people of color suffer racial discrimination. This country where sixty million people voted for Trump, including the majority of white women. This country where tens of millions time and again vote for a Republican and thereby vote against their own economic interests. Why would they do that? The answer is simple: because they embrace their whiteness, their feelings of privilege and superiority. They embrace white superiority. There’s no other way to explain it.
To be honest, the recent election has caused me to become completely disillusioned with this country, notwithstanding the fact that the Trump presidency is starting to look like the best thing in American politics given that it has given rise to a grassroots movement that we haven’t seen in decades. The election brings home once again the reality that this is a country that can never come to terms with what it is. The resistance to reality is such that it leads to a violent resentment of anyone who speaks the truth about certain forms of systematic injustices and the like, as was made evident in the rise of the fanatical Tea Party and also in the violence that erupted at Trump rallies time and again last year. This is a fanaticism, a hatred, that is steeped in the most blatant forms of ignorance.
Scientific illiteracy is such in our country that millions of people don’t understand why we need environmental protections and certain regulations, and it leads millions of people to deny such factual phenomena as evolution and climate change. Given our refusal to come to terms with who we are, these troubling realities are not surprising. One might simply say that it is all a failure of education. If our government were truly interested in serving its citizens, every American would receive the best possible education, to say nothing of a livable wage, healthcare, childcare, and other essential life necessities.
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PH: It is interesting that with the current unrest, with our civil rights moment in Black Lives Matter, with an authoritarian, unpopular president with Machiavellian tendencies, and with the unprecedented legal muck of the White House, there are a lot of parallels to the 1960s and ’70s, particularly the civil unrest and another authoritarian character at the White House’s helm. It is some sort of acute, unpleasant déjà vu. Your critically well-received Song of the Shank dealt significantly with themes of race, art, class, and religion from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Do you feel more of the new or more of the old in this moment? What world, do you, as an author of historical fiction, an artist, and father, think can emerge from the current challenges?
JRA: I feel both the new and the old in every moment. As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is not dead. The past is not even past.” One reality is that the human animal is morally flawed. Nothing will ever change that. As an American, I feel there is the troubling reality of the many things I talked about earlier. Despite it all, I am an optimist because I know that life offers so much that is joyous and beautiful. And I also know that we will continue as a species. As Faulkner put it at the end of The Sound and the Fury, They endured. We will endure. I will tell you that after the election last November, many of my students at the University of Virginia were devastated, crushed, depressed, distraught, crying. What could I do to comfort them? I knew the answer. I sent them Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
And here’s the thing: I lived in New York when the World Trade Center attacks happened in September 2001, and I taught MFA Writing students at The New School, which was only a few miles from the World Trade Center. The university and much of Manhattan beneath Fourteenth Street was shut down the week after the attack, so during that week, I thought a lot about what I would say to my students once class resumed, thought about what I could say to them to let them know that their writing and art still mattered. I decided to give them Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is a powerful piece of writing. I cry whenever I read it, in the same way that I cry whenever I hear the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” and some of his other speeches. The words transport me, the words are transcendent, they are all “up in my body” as Miles Davis says in his autobiography of what it felt like to hear Bird and Dizzy playing for the first time. “Music all up in my body.” I live for all that is music.
For me, my writing is always about music in one way or another, especially as a way of living in the world, moving about in the world, and as a way of seeing what’s actually there. Of course, words on a page never have the immediacy of music or oration, such that you have to do other things to make the work interesting, which is largely about the paradoxical process of both writing the world as is (what Henry James called the “disappearance of the author”), and, at the same time, getting yourself on paper, telling a story that only you can tell in a way that only you can tell it. That’s why it can take a while to develop stories that compel you, that draw you in and demand to be written.
So, for example, I wrote a novel about Blind Tom because he was a figure from the historical past whom I found tremendously interesting for a number of reasons. That is, I wrote about him because he interests me, not because I write historical fiction. (In fact, I don’t write historical fiction, a particular genre which is fine in and of itself but which I have no aesthetic interest in as a writer.) And in the book of stories I’m presently working on, Fat Time, I’m writing about some other figures from the historical past—including Jimi Hendrix, Jack Johnson, and Miles Davis—because they interest me for one reason or another. But I’m also writing stories set in America now, and in Africa now, even as I write stories set in a speculative future in both America and Africa.
As a father, one has to be hopeful about the future. In fact, I fully believe that my children will live enjoyable and rewarding lives. I’m doing everything I can to make that possible. As a father, one also recognizes that my children will face the same specter of race that I have had to face. It’s impossible for them not to. So the best one can do is prepare them for it, and be sure that they have the “equipment for living” [Kenneth Burke] that they need. One can only hope that they remain emotionally and spiritually whole as they engage with and navigate through the many absurdities of race (or gender or class). I say that because I know what damage this has done to me, and to so many others. The battle is wearying, so much so that when I retire from teaching in ten or twelve years, I will leave the country and live elsewhere, most likely somewhere on the African continent, most likely in South Africa. All of the African continent is a special place to me with many heartbreaking realities, but also with an energy and an impulse for life that I feel nowhere else.
My story “Heads” is in the current issue of Oxford American, their annual music issue. In the piece, I imagine a friendship between Jimi Hendrix and painter Francis Bacon.
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PH: Is “magic” real? From Harbor and Spirits to Stellar Places to Song of the Shank to “Heads,” the reality is there inviting comparisons to the realism of Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, but magic jumps from your pages in language, scenes, and happenings. Is that art, or is it observation?
JRA: Life is rich in myriad ways, far richer in fact than what we often see or feel. I try to capture the thickness of life in my work. I think about narrative in terms of the African sea of time where the past, the present, and the future exist all at once. At the same time, I think in narrative in terms of African cosmology, circles within circles, where life is a swirling continuum of the real and the metaphysical, the supernatural. For these reasons, I reject limiting terms like “magical realism.” The real is always more than real. It is fat time.
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So, there it is, the American Bard wielding his great instrument of cleansing in the one hand. Tearing down old, staid structures and allowing the light to come through the afternoon branches of evergreen pine needles and to bounce off the demure blues and greens of the lakes, allowing humanity to breathe big, puissant breaths unencumbered by the recalcitrant realities of our current America, which is really the old America come up moribund from the ground. American Bard. Do that thing. Do it hard. He’s just beginning. Beginning.
With the work that has taken Allen around the world and the African continent, the future seems clear for those willing to look back on this period from the perch of 2117. The trajectory is clear for those clear-eyed and inviting hope and change in a moment wrought with bitterness, anger, resentments, and a deep depression. In his work with the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, Allen has worked with a number of emerging writers from the African continent, including A. Igoni Barrett, Victor Ehikhamenor, Yewande Omotoso, and Samuel Kolawole. For the 2012 Pan-African Literary Forum, Allen organized a national reading tour for South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile.
And indeed the struggle is beautiful. It is sweet. It is inspired. It is blessed. That seems to be what Jeffery Renard Allen’s body of work would suggest: the metaphysical properties and beauty of light work. The hammering of words, ideas, and visions firm in hand channel the bursts of lights coming from visions previously unseen. The harmonic convergence of his work is beautiful, an incomplete symphonic piece is underlain with rhythms and harmonies, taking inspiration directly from Tom Higgins, Miles Davis, and Jimi Hendrix, American masters. It is a new song for the new day. From here to over there, yonder, where imaginations are fertile, and the land is plenty and willing.
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A version of this post was originally published in Tishman Review, Volume 4, Issue 1, February 2018 and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
