SOURCE: An interview with John Edgar Wideman, in Callaloo, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 47-61.

[Rowell is the editor of Callaloo and chairman of the department of English language and literature at the University of Virginia. In the following interview, which was conducted on October 17, 1989, Wideman discusses his life, his writing, and the issues and experiences that inform his work.]

[Rowell:] John, what brought you to writing and publishing creative texts? When you were a student at the University of Pennsylvania, you were captain of the basketball team. Then later you became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. How did you resist becoming a professional basketball player? In other words, what made you take the risk of becoming a creative writer?

[Wideman:] Well, for me, I guess, it wasn't really a risk. Writing was something I had done as long as I could remember—and I simply wanted to try it seriously, full-time. I was very obviously young and ignorant, and I thought if you wanted to do things and if they were important to you that you could do them. And so I had that kind of optimism and, I guess, in a way arrogance. But story telling and writing have been a part of my life forever, and I have enjoyed them for a long time.

This goes back, Charles, to when I was in grade school in Homewood in Pittsburgh. There was no auditorium in the grade school that I went to, which, by the way, was the same one that my mother attended in the 1920s—the same building, same location, obviously, and probably the same pencils and paper, I think. But this school had no auditorium, and so any time there was an assembly people simply sat on the steps in the center hallway, and I found myself, on more than one occasion, being called out by teachers to talk to the entire school when we had an assembly, when we had a program. Also, during homeroom I would get a chance to get up and tell stories, and that was my thing. I guess I was pretty good at it, because I could hold people's attention. I was fascinated by that. Even as a kid I recognized this as power and attention—the attention that I could get, the sense of control that I could have for a few moments, and just the whole fun of spinning out a story and making something up and, as I was making it up, engaging other people. So storytelling was a very satisfactory, personal kind of experience for me, going way back.

And then there were great storytellers in my family, and family gatherings—picnics and weddings, church socials, funerals, wakes—were occasions for other people to exercise their storytelling abilities and talents. So I had around me a kind of world, a creative world, an imaginative world, which I could draw from and which I very much wanted to participate in.

Let me bring it a little closer to the time we're talking about. By the time I had graduated from college and had gone to graduate school. I was thoroughly interested in the romantic notion of being a writer. What power the writer could have—and now I'm talking about the literate tradition—the sense of the writer as adventurer, the writer as explorer. That part of it was something that appealed to me greatly.

Well, how do you move from the orality of the past—that is to say, story-telling—to the writing of stories? How does one make that transition? What in your studies at the University of Pennsylvania or Oxford University, or in your private reading, helped you to make the transition from the oral to the written?

The written had been there from the beginning. I was very lucky in school. I went to school at a time when there were teachers who encouraged writing. We were required to write, and our writing was corrected, critiqued. So writing was very natural for me. I learned to do it early and, again, I enjoyed it. I also had little stories and poems published at an early age, and this wasn't because I was particularly precocious or had any sort of unusual ability, but because I did it, I worked at it, and I was in a circumstance where people responded and reinforced that kind of activity. In that sense I was quite lucky. The reading part is again something I came to early. I loved to read. I read all the books I could get my hands on. That was a way I spent an awful lot of my time.

I was very active; I played sports. But then there were times when the sports weren't available to me. When I was about 12 years old, we moved from Homewood, which was essentially a black community in Pittsburgh, to another community that was predominantly white, middle class and upper-middle class. That meant that the very lively world of the playground, which was part of my life in Homewood, had really more or less dried up. So I had a lot of time on my hands, and I couldn't always find games. And reading became something I really enjoyed. That literate world was there from adolescence and continued to be there.

Now I think that the kind of experience, the kind of movement into writing that you asked me about, I can identify clearly the moment that it happened. It was after reading, reading, reading lots of books. I guess I was about 16, 17, 18 years old, somewhere in there, the end of high school, early college. I began to feel that this book writing wasn't that complicated, and I had that feeling because a lot of what I read was trash. I mean I read Westerns, I read adolescence fantasy stories, I read the Tarzan and sci-fi stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, things that were heavy on adventure and unusual characters. I began to see the formulas, I began to see how these things worked, what the parts were. And it was pretty easy for me to think at that time, "Well, hell, I can do that too." So I guess I learned to read between the lines and began to become fascinated with how things were made. And I thought I could do it. From that point on, I guess I wrote more and more, but certainly not on the scale of a novel. Yet I had just had a feeling that I possessed the requisite abilities to write a book.

What do you describe as your first significant text—that is, the first following your early practice as a beginning writer? Did one of your high school teachers or college professors tell you, "Well, maybe you ought to try to get this published"? Had you been discouraged you might have gone another route. You might been a basketball coach for the Philadelphia Eagles or the Boston Celtics. [Laughter.]

Well, I guess the reinforcement occurred at the beginning. I took writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania, and I had a teacher named Christopher Davis who was very encouraging. Also, visiting creative writing teachers came to Penn. I remember Richard Eberhart. I remember Archibald MacLeish. They, to me, were people from a distant and very dreamlike world, big names—poets with a capital P, writers with a capital W. And they dropped in for their usual kind of seminars and readings. Both of these people looked at some early writing of mine and were quite encouraging. I sat down with them, and they said this is good, and this makes sense; you seem to have a talent, and you're a smart young man. That kind of symbolic pat on the back and recognition, both from the writing teacher and these visiting dignitaries, was quite important. And then my peers, people I would share the writing with … that always helped. When you are a young writer, what you're looking for is the same thing everybody is looking for—that is, approval, people to like you. You are looking for some sort of acceptance. You wear this writing as a kind of a badge or a way of introducing yourself or a way of trying to share with people what's important and who you are, and if folks respond positively to that, the writing becomes part of your persona, part of who you are, what you are. And I think that happened pretty early for me.

You entered the literary scene in 1967 with the publication of A Glance Away, your first novel. That was during the height of the Black Arts Movement. One critic (I think it was Addison Gayle) has described the Movement as "a Northern urban phenomenon." You are Northern and urban. In fact, you spent a great deal of your life in Pittsburgh, but you were born in Washington, D.C. Why were you never part of the Black Arts Movement? Hurry Home, The Lynchers, and your first novel suggest that you did not at all subscribe to the tenets of the Black Arts Movement. Without provoking any people out there in our age group who were the architects and the advocates of the Movement, will you comment on why you and many Southern writers like Albert Murray, or the younger Ernest Gaines, or the even younger Alice Walker, were not really part of the Black Arts Movement? Then, too, there were also the non-Southern Black writers like Michael Harper and Jay Wright who were never part of the Black Arts Movement.

Well, this is an enormously complex issue and also, at some level, pretty simple. For one thing, I was out of the country. I was away in another country, England. That was between 1963 and 1967, and so at a time when I might have become intimately, physically, literally involved with the Movement I couldn't. I read about it in the newspaper; I was a distant sort of witness. That's part of it. The second part of it might be that I've always been sort of a loner, and very suspicious of groups and organizations and movements, and suspicious and not really at ease in that kind of situation. Maybe because of an ego that's too large or maybe because of some healthy skepticism or whatever. I won't try to figure that out. But, personally, my sense was that I didn't—I still don't have—an affinity for groups. If something is important to me, maybe I'll talk about it to one person, or maybe I'll talk about it to no one. I try to resolve things on a personal level, and I realize that there're some problems there, but I'm just trying to get at, maybe, why I was not attracted to the Black Arts Movement.

But there are many more general issues also that need to be touched on when someone asks why a person is part of the Black Arts Movement and why they're not. First of all, Alice Walker and myself … Albert Murray is really a generation ahead of us … if you look back now and ask what was produced, what came out of the sixties that remains of some significance to Afro-American literature, then I would hope that people would say that we were part of it, the Black Arts Movement. (As long as you don't put capital letters on "black arts movement.") In other words, there were many, many things happening. It was a multifaceted cultural event, this growth, this consciousness that was arising in the sixties, and the artwork that was being produced in the sixties. During the sixties, some of the activity was recognized and anointed—that is, got the publicity, got the attention, and a lot was missed. Just as the writers who are "significant" at this present moment are significant for a lot of reasons, but not necessarily because they're the best writers. So when we look back at the sixties, with the advantage of hindsight, we see a different configuration than we did then. When we're in the middle of something we always see as through a glass darkly. We mistook, during the sixties, a lot of attitudinizing and posturing for the real thing, for the leading edge. We confused dogma with innovation, adopted ideas that really weren't all that significant or that were only of secondary significance. And so, as we've tried with the Harlem Renaissance, we're reevaluating the sixties. That period is 20 years away from us now. We have a different picture of what went on, because we've seen what has lasted. Black Arts theorists—and we must remember there were many points of view—should not be dismissed. They deserve study and reconsideration. What was actually happening was complex, irreducible as life always is. It comes down to the individual, the individual artist, who for one reason or another has that strange combination of gifts and luck and perseverance that has made his/her work endure. The current events, ideological and aesthetic preoccupations of a given time, of the sixties for instance, are always the surface below which the significant activity occurs. Very few people understand at the time where the real action is.

It's not a simple question of repudiating certain figures and certain attitudes of the sixties. For instance, the notion that black people had to tell their own stories, that black people needed to investigate the language, that black people are on the edge of a kind of precipice and that, as a people, we might very well disappear if we didn't start to, number one, demand equality in the political sense, if we didn't begin to investigate our past, if we didn't begin to se ourselves as part of a world, a Third World—all these ideological and philosophical breakthroughs were crucial to reorienting us, and they still provide a basis for much of the thinking and the writing that is significant today. But it's one thing to make lists and programs and then write stories or paint pictures that very baldly reproduce ideas. It's another thing to struggle and refine a medium to embody ideas in an artistic way that will last. And so those of us who are still writing now, I hope, really are beneficiaries of what was going on at all levels in the sixties. I hope we've carried forward the ideas that are most significant, profound, important. I see continuities, rather than simply a break with or repudiation of the Black Arts Movement of the sixties.

In spite of what you say in this interview, some of your readers who know you will probably say. "But John Wideman was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He participated in the instituting of the Black Studies programs in the University during the same period." How do you respond to that? I have been told that you had a great hand in the origination of Black Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sure, I was involved. When I came back to the United States, I was stunned in lots of ways, and swept up in the currents of the time, and needed to reorient myself. I understood very quickly that I was in a unique position. For one thing, I could get a job at an Ivy League university. How many black people were in that position at that time? Given that unique opportunity, I felt the responsibility to try to do something with it.

At that time also I began to sabotage my "classical" education (you can substitute "European" for "classical"). I began to broaden the base of my knowledge and understanding and read black writers, and read Third World writers and became aware of the Caribbean and aware of Africa and aware that there were entirely new ways to look at the history of the West. Reinterpretations of world history and culture provided terms I needed to reinterpret my own individual, personal Afro-American past. And in the midst of all this there were the day-to-day responsibilities of being at a school like the University of Pennsylvania. Of course I felt privileged to have a job there and lucky to be in a position to partake of the bounty, but then again a destructive kind of guilt came along with the goodies. I was a black face in a white sea, so I wanted to help transform the University; I wanted to help try to raise its consciousness as I was raising my own.

To some degree I had success starting Afro-American studies at Penn. I learned that W. E. B. DuBois had attempted the same thing about 60 years earlier, and that was an inspiration. I worked in all areas, from recruitment of black students, graduate and undergraduate, to setting up an Afro-American studies curriculum and recruiting Afro-American faculty. It was a busy time. In fact, it was so busy, demanding, and frustrating that one of the reasons I left Philadelphia and left the University of Pennsylvania was because it became clear to me that there was so much work to be done and I could spend all my time doing, it, and it would be very satisfying and possibly significant, but I also knew that I had a need and desire to write and there just was not time for everything, and so I very consciously made a choice that I would have to withdraw at some point from the front-line work, and try to pursue what I thought might be another way of contributing to the cause with whatever talent I had for writing.

Did any of the activity you engaged in prepare you for, assist you in, your second stage (or could one call it your new stage?) of writing after you moved to Wyoming?

Oh absolutely, there are scenes in novels, scenes in stories, that are drawn directly from that experience. What I was doing on one level, Charles, was reorienting myself to my life up to that moment. Rethinking, reseeing things, becoming conscious, becoming aware how the person I was, partly and maybe in too large a degree, had been molded and structured by the college education I had received. How I had been changed, what price I had paid to become a college professor in an Ivy League institution. I wanted to stand back and measure what all that had meant, what that had cost me, what it meant in terms of this new consciousness of blackness. So therefore I stood back, took the luxury of leaving Penn and going to a totally different place, a quieter place, a place where I could get some perspective. The time at Wyoming was spent going over and over and over my life before and after the University and trying to put those two pieces back together again—the life of the black kid growing up in a predominately black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the life of a middle-class academic in a white world. I was trying to make sense of the conflicts, contradictions and possible resolutions.

My next question relates, in part, to the previous one on the Black Arts Movement, but its focus is what I continue to witness as the audience's demand of or prescription for black writers in the United States. How do you respond—or do you respond at all—to readers, especially black readers in the United States, frequently demanding "critical realism" from black writers? That is to say, readers so frequently desire to have the black writer engage, socially and politically, his or her own fiction. How do you respond to such a demand?

I don't respond well to anybody who tells me what to do. Whether it's in sports or dress, and certainly not in something as personal and intimate as literature. I listen and I try to make sense of criticism, but I listen much better when I'm not commanded to do something, when I don't feel pushed and shoved. So the bullyish tone and one-dimensional demands that characterized certain critics during the sixties, if anything, made me more sure that as a writer I was responsible to something other than somebody else's ideas of what I should write and how I should write. Especially since I was working very hard to escape the strictures, to break out of the mould imposed by my "classic." Europeanized education. I didn't want to be J. Alfred Prufrock, I didn't want to be Hemingway anymore, I wanted to strike out on my own. And so I wasn't looking for anybody to give me another set of parameters or another path that I had to follow or another load or burden or harness on my back. It was important that I exercise independence and find my own voice, my own prerogative, at this time.

I'm fascinated by your expression "intimate as literature." Will you talk about that? How is literature "intimate"? I love that phrase, "intimate as literature."

Writing for me is an expressive activity, so it's as intimate as my handwriting, or the way I dance, or the way I play basketball. And when I do those things they're not simply instrumental; that is, when I write I'm not only writing to give a message; when I play basketball I'm not doing it simply to score points or to win. But in all those activities—and I think this is true of Afro-American art in general—there are ways of being who I am, and so I need to find the space to express what I am, who I am. Writing for me is a way of opening up, a way of sharing, a way of making sense of the world, and writing's very appeal is that it gives me a kind of hands-on way of coping with the very difficult business of living a life. What could be more intimate than that, what has more significance than that? Writing is like breathing, it's like singing, it takes the whole body and mind and experience. It's also anarchistic. I like to write because it allows me to do things my way, to say them my way. So what if everybody else's way is different.

I want to go back to a question I asked earlier about critics' and general readers' demands on black writers. The case of Irving Howe on Richard Wright is one we all know about. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin responded—each in his own way—to Howe. Some years later Albert Murray responded to James Baldwin in The Omni-Americans. Do you think this dialogue, or this discourse, is unfinished? Is the black writer now free to proceed to write? I admit, of course, the way I raise the question loads the case. You can tell where I come from aesthetically.

Number one, Charles, I'm having a hard time hearing you, but for me one of the most important functions for writing—Afro-American writing, Eskimo writing, whatever—is identical with one of the most important functions of any art, and that is to be a medium of expression, a free medium of expression, a way that people can say what they want to say, do what they want to do, play in a way that they want to play. Art should be something that in many senses goes against the grain of the culture. That's one of its values, disruptive as well as integrative. It's the place where there's craziness, where there's unpredictability, where there is freedom of expression. Art should always be something that to some degree shocks and changes people and worries people and contradicts what the king says. Achebe makes the point that the writer or the artist is always the enemy of the king. Writing, art, is subversion, it turns the world on its head, it makes up things. That's its power, that's its joy. Play, illusion. Any constraints on that, any kind of rules or any allegiances that are externally imposed, have to be looked at by the artist with a lot of suspicion, a lot of skepticism. And that's the point of view where I come from. Which is not to say that an artist cannot be socially responsible, but I think the issue here is that the notion of social responsibility is really quite a wide one. The policing of that responsibility will be done or should be done by the audience. If you are on an ego trip, if you are too deeply involved in some kind of idiosyncratic masturbatory activity, well, people will eventually peek your whole card and not care about what you do. Or critics will come down on your case, etc., etc., but we can't police the activity before things are done, we can't direct art, we can't tell people what to write about, we can't ask people to follow rules. Rules are the anathema as well as the bones of art.

Am I correct in assuming that what you have just said is part of what one might describe as your theory of art? And I don't mean to make it so tight as to say that you have given a manifesto for art. That is, are these some of the aesthetic imperatives you have set for yourself as a fiction writer?

Right, in a casual way, I guess I have come to a very distinct set of ideas about writing at this point. But I think I have different ideas at different times in my life, and if you look at one of my books it probably contains an implicit theory of art, a theory of composition. As I grow older and look at the world. I see art as a gift to people, certainly a gift to the artist, though sometimes it's also a curse. Art is an area where the human personality gets to fulfill itself in a way that it doesn't in most other activities. This is not to make the artist a cult hero, or a priest, or anything like that, but simply to say that all human beings have the capacity for wonder, for play, for imagination, and that's the capacity, the faculty that modern civilization, mass civilization, is eroding, crushing, and so the artist has a crucial role. I like to think of everybody, of anybody with a healthy life, as an artist to some extent. What my grandmother did, what my aunts do, what my brothers do when they tell stories, is a form of artistic expression, a form of salvation. Life is tough, and we need the ability to dream, to make things, and that ability is epitomized by the artist. It doesn't mean the artist is sanctified, but the artist is someone with whom we can identify, who causes us to remember that there are sides to the human personality—creative, imaginative sides—that allow us to escape, transcend, remake, transform a life that is too often pretty brutal, nasty and short.

You mention that there might be a shift if you looked back on your texts, specifically Hurry Home and The Lynchers. Do you see a shift between those texts and Damballah and Sent for You Yesterday, for example?

Oh, I hope there are many shifts and changes, because as a writer I want to grow. But I see both continuities and shifts. All my books are about family, family relationships, and reordering and transformation of family. Also I think in all of them, one of the major subjects is writing and imagination. As I grew as a writer, I very consciously decided to change some of what I was trying to do stylistically in the earlier books. What I mean by stylistically is how I connected my books to what I assumed was the Great Tradition, the writers who came before. In my first three books, the ways I tried to assert continuity with tradition and my sense of tradition were quite different than my understanding of these matters in Damballah, Hiding Place, Sent For You Yesterday. It became clearer and clearer to me as I wrote that the tradition in which I wanted to place myself was much richer than I had first imagined. That is, for my first books, the tradition was mainly European, mainly literate. Because I was a black man and had grown up in a black community I sort of divided my books. Blackness provided the local habitation and names; the scenes, people, conversations, were largely drawn from my early experience, because that's what I knew best. But I was trying to hook that world into what I thought was something that would give those situations and people a kind of literary resonance, legitimize that world by infusing echoes of T. S. Eliot, Henry James, Faulkner, English and Continental masters. I was attempting through the use of metaphors, images and allusion, through structural parallels, to connect with what I thought of as the Great Tradition. For me, at the time, that strategy was valid, and I think some of what works in my early books validates that approach. But as I grew and learned more about writing, I found, or rediscovered I guess, that what Bessie Smith did when she sang, what Clyde McFater did, what John Coltrane did, what Ralph Ellison did, what Richard Wright did, what the anonymous slave composer and the people who spoke in the slave narratives did, what they were doing was drawing from a realm of experience, a common human inheritance, that T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Tolstoi, and Austen were also drawing from. As a writer I didn't need to go by way of European tradition to get to what really counted, the common, shared universal core. I could take a direct route and get back to that essential mother lode of pain, love, grief, wonder, the basic human emotions that are the stuff of literature. I could get back to that mother lode through my very own mother's voice. Some people might argue, and I'd partly agree, that understanding and reading The Wasteland, being totally blown away by that poem as a kid, taught me how to get back to my own mother's voice. Nothing's easy, you can't skip stages. My writing is what it is because it did follow a particular circuitous path. I blundered into dead ends, made mistakes, had infatuations at one point or another, models that I imitated without really understanding what I was imitating. But that kind of trial and error and back and forth is what learning to write is all about, and that's how I visualize progress in art, not linear but circular, mysteriously wrapped up in time's mysterious unfolding. Circles. Layers. What seemed complex becomes simple, and what seems simple becomes complex.

There is, in Damballah, a "Letter From Home." Does that title have anything to do with what you've just talked about?

Well, I think very much so. "Letter From Home" is a phrase from Homewood. I first heard my Aunt Geral use it, and she used it in a humorous way to refer to a watermelon. When you examine that little idiomatic phrase, it's enormously complex. It has a kind of immediate, concrete substantiality, but then it goes off in many different directions and works on many levels, and that's not even counting the levels that you can't get into writing very well, the tonal qualities produced by the speaking voice. So much is comprised in that phrase, a sense of history, a sense of play, a metaphorical conceit—you take something written, words, and change them into food, into substance. The phrase depends on in-group knowledge and understanding, it turns on its head a stereotype of black people as water-melon eaters; it asserts that even though my aunt and most of my family were born and raised in urban North, "home" was understood as the South. Then along comes a writer who picks that phrase up and puts it into a book about storytelling and letters, in a story which points out the importance of trying to connect, needing to connect through writing and any means possible to members of the family. That's just stuff that comes off the top of my head right now as giving the phrase resonance. I learned that phrases from the oral tradition could accomplish the same kinds of work as the metaphors, symbols, and allusions of twentieth-century written poetry.

I was going to ask you a question about the use of one's private life in one's own creative writing. I know that one's private life is often important to contemporary poetry. Is it important to the contemporary fiction writer? More specifically, is your private life, your family history, important to you as a fiction writer? How does the fiction writer transform that private life in his or her texts?

Well, my work itself is the answer to the question because I write out of who I am, and my identity and my writing identity, my life as transposed into the art that I practice, are becoming more and more of a piece. I don't make distinctions, I think that's one satisfying development; I don't make distinctions in a way that I once did. I don't think of myself as writer only when I'm sitting down in the morning at my desk in my study, scratching on a piece of paper. I use my imagination, I use what I do when I write all the time, and I feel that anything that happens to me is fair game. And more and more the subjects of the fiction are this strange interpenetration of the imagined life and the actual life and the inextricability of the two. That's what my career, if such a word is appropriate, is all about. Finding a means to live in a world and finding that art is a crucial tool for negotiating that life. This cuts in a lot of different directions; I write about the most intimate, the most personal events in my life, but the fun or the privilege of the artist is that through transformation, through the use of a medium, like language, everything becomes coded, and the reader no matter how astute or how familiar with the writer or the writer's life, can't really decode the real life from the fictional life. So that although I tell all, I can tell it the way I want to tell it. Which doesn't exactly make the private public, because I am the one who's filtering it, I am the one controlling what goes forth. I may have a problem about something, about sleep for instance, but I can transform it into something else, a story about waking, a problem about being awake, and no one would ever know what I was dealing with. Fiction/facts are what the artist creates. Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.

Twice in this interview, you used the expression "a sense of play," in reference to the writing of fiction. What do you mean by "a sense of play"? There is "a sense of play" in Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Train Whistle Guitar. There is "a sense of play" in Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery. What does "a sense of play" mean to you in reference to writing?

Well, it means mostly freedom. It means freedom and it means an outlet for imagination. Maybe a metaphor, maybe a parallel. When I play basketball, it's important to win and score points, but how I score, the personal expression that I can accomplish while scoring the points or while winning the game are, in a way, just as important. No matter what job I'm attempting to accomplish, I need that playful perspective which lets me know that, okay, it's a job, and I'm trying to do it, but hell, who is going to know about this job in a 100 years, and if I get my nose too close too the grindstone doing the job then what's the point of it? It's all pretty arbitrary. Job or not job. I mean from someone's else's point of view it may not even be a job, so don't get totally absorbed, don't get totally task-oriented, don't become the task in a sense that it buries your personality, buries your individuality; let something shine forth, let something come through. That side, that playful side, the side, that says yes, I'm doing this but I'm also a little boy, maybe I'd rather be someplace else and yes I have to cross the t's and dot the i's but maybe every now and again I'll dot a t and cross an i and when I talk to you in the writing I want to remind you that this is not some sort of sacred act, it's also a silly act; if it's sacred, it's also very profane. I'm doing something for you, I'm also trying to take something away from you. Multiple consciousness and energy, the fluid situation of freedom that multiple consciousness creates, that's what I mean by play.

You've commented on your use of private history in the writing of Fever (1989), a collection of stories. In the title story of that collection and in your forthcoming novel [Philadelphia Fire] (1990) on the Philadelphia Fire, you introduce us to "public history" as one of your sources. What does this mean for you as a writer? Is this another shift or stage in your writing career?

It's not exactly new because I took a lynching and made a story about that. And it wasn't based on a specific lynching, but at the beginning of the book there is a litany of actual lynchings and atrocities committed against black people. But there is a difference. I think that certain public events occur and they have lots of significance, they are very important, they define powerful currents, they are events we shouldn't ignore, that we shouldn't forget, that we should try to make sense of. But at the same time because of the speed of the media and because of the activity that goes around us all the time, the accelerated push of contemporary life, we miss these events. Then there is also the very conscious censorship and infantilization and lying and distortion the media perpetrates. And there's the political reality of the social environment that we live in, where an individual life counts for less and less. We are being pushed into a communal anthill, living willy-nilly whether we like it or not. Blackness is being attacked not simply in the old ways because of difference, difference vis-à-vis whiteness, but just because it's different. There's no time for somebody who asks too many questions. No time for people who want to bring up the past, and reconsider the past. There's no time for people whose lives present a different agenda than the agenda that is central—the majority agenda. And so I'm looking at this kind of situation and I see things happening and I see them getting buried. Fever was based on an actual occurrence of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the 1790s. Like Antonin Artaud, I think that societies, in some metaphysical sense, create the diseases they need and that those diseases are metaphors for the basic problems of those societies. It's no coincidence that the yellow fever epidemic, described by many at the time as the end of the world, was allegedly brought to the Americas by slaves from the West Indies. We need to stop the wheel and look at things again, try to understand what they mean.

The events in Philadelphia in 1985, the MOVE massacre, really began in 1978 when a bunch of MOVE people were arrested and put in jail forever for allegedly killing a policeman. The concerted, ruthless campaign of a city government—ironically, a city government under the control of a black mayor—to destroy difference is one of the most important public events that I've observed. It was particularly important because it was buried. A whole city is afflicted by amnesia. In the press it got a little play for awhile, but then it was forgotten. And I think that, maybe in the same sense that you can see the universe in a blade of grass, if we look at certain events long enough and hard enough through the lens of fiction, maybe we can learn more of what we need to know. If we don't try, if we don't fight for the little light there is, then we're going to suffer. In "Fever" and the stories that go with it, and in Philadelphia Fire, I'm trying to make myself stop, look, listen, and think about what's happening to us.

You have referred to Damballah as a novel. I've always thought of it as a coherent collection of interrelated short stories. Fever, of course, is a collection of short stories in the traditional sense of a collection. Is that correct?

I sort of thought that too, Charles, but I'm not so sure now. Because a lot of the stories were reworked and reorganized for the volume, and over half were new. And it doesn't have the kind of organic unity that Damballah had. But I'd like to think that the stories have unity in this sense. There's something really rotten in the state of Denmark. Something's really screwed. And the stories are ways of coping with the malaise which is in the air. "Fever," which is the final story in the book, attempts to render that essence, that unnameable uneasiness, that quality of decay or threat or collective anguish that permeates many of the other stories. Many of the other stories are about trouble, either people who are in trouble or who've fallen, and people who are working very hard to keep themselves from falling. And so the idea of the book, of the collection, is that this fever is amongst us still. This fever is something that we are subject to. Its ravages are still among us. So watch out folks. The final story in the book attempts to bridge, to synthesize past, present, and future sources of this fever, which to me clearly is the unresolved question of slavery, the unresolved question of racism, the unresolved question of majority rule that leads to majority domination and oppression.

You are not only a fiction writer and an essayist. You are also an excellent literary critic. Do you see the literary critic or literary theorist as having specific functions or roles? If so, is that reflected in your own writing of criticism?

I still think in the old-fashioned sense that the best criticism is a kind of handmaiden to the arts. Good critics through precept and example remind people that writing is fun, that writing is enjoyable, that writing has a serious side, a constructive side, that if you put work into it, it rewards that work. I think of critics also as a sort of conscience, as well as tour guides. Criticism can be a creative activity in which the critic dreams, the critic plays, the critic experiences a work of art and comes back changed or thoughtful or angry. Those emotions are a kind of evidence or witness to the power of fiction. And I think the best criticism makes us remember what it's like to have a powerful experience with this made-up stuff, this imaginary stuff. And so there's an organic relationship between good writing and good criticism. Too often that meeting doesn't occur. So we keep trying. We should keep trying.

I shall never forget seeing a photograph of you in an issue of Sports Illustrated, where you were standing before a chalkboard. On that board, you had written statements about Albert Murray. You've also written literary criticism about his work. You've also written about Zora Neale Hurston, about Charles Chestnutt, and about Gayle Jones. These writers are Southerners. Do you find something in them, artistically, in a positive way, that you don't find in other African-American writers? I'm thinking now about your interest in voice, in an article you wrote for the American Poetry Review. Voice, of course, is of primary importance in the elegant writing in Damballah, and in the texts which follow it.

I think there is such a thing as a core to Afro-American culture. There is a core culture. And part of it can be identified. And you can have fun talking about what you think the core is, but there is definitely one there. We'll never be able to define it once and for all, because then we'll probably start slipping into ideology rather than description. But there is a core and it has to do with the South. It has to do with the locus of that "letter from home" phrase you mentioned before. There was an understanding in me of Southern culture although I never ventured further south than Ohio until I was about 20 years old. As a kid I didn't know I was a carrier of Southern culture in Pittsburgh. My parents were not born in the South. You would have to go all the way back to my grandfathers, both of whom were born in the South. But indirect exposure to that core culture generated by the African background is enough to stamp us. It's what we all share. Knowing the deep structures of African-American culture can tell you more about people than knowing the part of the country that they come from.

Your work obviously indicates that you have studied different literary traditions. In fact, you talked about those traditions earlier in this interview. In terms of what you have set for yourself as a writer, as an artist, how do you view yourself in relation to other American writers, specifically African-American and European-American writers?

I like the idea of a writing community. And I'd like to feel myself a part of one. I'd like to feel that we are all in the same ballgame. I like that sense of respect, mutual respect, that you get when you go to the playground. When you go to the playground to play basketball there are no referees. And the game can't be played unless there is a certain degree of mutual respect and understanding about the rules. And I think it would be wonderful if we had that kind of community and that kind of mutual respect and understanding in this country, rather than cutthroat, commercialized competition and competitiveness. If the rewards were more evenly distributed, if we weren't all fighting the blockbuster syndrome, in which a piece of writing either goes to the top or gets no attention at all. If we had more good bookstores. If the literary establishment had a wider sense of what's valuable. If there weren't so many goddamned unexamined assumptions about what's good. If we taught writing and language more rationally, more humanely in schools, maybe this ideal sense of a literary heritage and a literary community would be a reality. Of course it isn't, and I guess I'm simply describing what it might be at its best and what I'd like to relate to and feel myself part of.

Obviously European-American musicians have learned a whole lot from African-American music. You can say that they've been to school in African-American musical traditions. Do you find anything in African-American literary tradition that European-American writers can benefit from? Have you seen evidence of their using the tradition? If I wanted to load the case, I would say that, obviously, Mark Twain learned something from the slave narrative. It is obvious too that Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner were aware of the poetic beauty of African-American speech. Faulkner apparently knew the African-American folk-sermon.

I think your examples are well-chosen. You can't really separate the strands out very easily. And what's incumbent upon critics and writers and all of us is to understand the interpenetration that's always existed from the very beginning. The tension that existed between the literate and oral traditions is epitomized always in the black tradition. And all writers learned from that. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest appearances of Afro-American dialect or vernacular occurred in eighteenth-century American drama, that from the very beginning our fellow Americans, European-Americans, were listening to what we said and how we said it, and it entered into their artistic creations at the very moment those artistic creations began. And that's just a kind of a simplified identifiable influence. You begin there and it just proliferates. You can't scratch very deeply below the surface before you discover evidence of cross-cultural borrowing, revision, etc. All American art has these kinds of multicultural strands, these layered influences that you can identify and point to, and then if you want to go further than that, the unconscious life of the arts which of course is very important, the unconscious life any American has as part of its armature, as part of its furniture, the sense of a captive population, of oppression, of invisible people and people who were forced into a certain caste. The American imagination, in its subconscious and unconscious, is permeated by the facts of our history, the facts of our lives. So you can't talk about Americans and not talk about Afro-Americans.

We—the Callaloo staff and I—are about to sponsor a symposium (November 8-11, 1989) which I'm calling "Economic Censorship and Canon Formation." In that title I'm referring to poverty and, hence, black Americans' lack of autonomy. Will you talk about the implications of this problem for black writers in the United States, and about how economic censorship has played a major role in canon formation in and outside African-American literature?

You will have a lot to talk about in your seminar. And the problem breaks down into many, many different aspects. For instance, in my experience, as a kid, the people around me, the black people, were of crucial importance to my life. These were my folks, these were the people from whom I'd learned to walk, talk, dance, and love, and that was my world. So of course these people weren't marginal in any sense of the word. Nor were they a minority, because they were mostly the majority of people I saw. But from somebody else's point of view they were marginal, and we were a minority. And as I grew up that message was passed along to me: that my people were marginal and that I was a minority, and that we really didn't count for much. Part of the reason why that message penetrated my consciousness was because of economic conditions. It was clear that we didn't have power, we didn't have big houses, we didn't have fancy cars, and those that did were sort of criminal people, sort of outlaws, so this economic marginality reinforced my sense of the fact that we were outside the mainstream, and for the longest time to me that meant that maybe my life was not that important. And that maybe if you wanted to write about something important, surely you wouldn't pick these people off here in this little quadrant, in this little camp over here. You want to write about the big life, Europe, Sartre and all that shit. So at the very beginning there's an invidious effect, a drastic loss of self-worth caused by economic marginalization and class consciousness and all that. That's one answer.

And maybe at the other end is the materialism of this particular American experiment in civilization. It's a society in which, black or white, what you possess, what you can show, what you can pile up, is an index to how important you are and how successful you are, and that materialism pervades every institution and every value, and it's a hell of a rock to get past, it's a hell of a hard nut to crack. It's almost impossible for a writer, and getting more and more difficult for any artist, to have a decent career in this country. And by decent career I mean not making a mint, but being able to support yourself with writing of quality. Once that impossibility happens—and it has happened, it's true today—then art begins to occupy less and less of a significant place in the society. And for the minority writer, the effects of that kind of economic exclusion are exacerbated because if only a few are going to be chosen, you know damn well we are going to be a very few of those few, if any. And if the literary society or the literary culture is going to be made up of people who are featured in Time magazine and featured in USA Today and who are profiled in People and stuff like that, then the chances for us to penetrate these upper levels are very, very small indeed. You get the sense among younger writers that if they don't get up to that level then they've failed, that their ticket to the lottery didn't come up. What's lost is the notion that art has something to do with honesty. It has something to do with self-expression, self-respect and inner satisfaction, it has something to do with fighting for a voice and achieving that voice and sharing it with a group of readers who care about what you do. Those values get lost in the shuffle.