Countee Cullen (1903-1946), American poet and novelist who played a prominent part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, wrote these famous lines: "One three centuries removed/From the scenes his fathers loved,/Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,/What is Africa to me?"
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Rita Dove quoted them April 19. The occasion was a gathering of a dozen distinguished poets, writers and educators she had invited to the Library to spend two days considering Cullen's question at a symposium on "Oil on the Waters: The Black Diaspora," described further as "panel discussions and readings exploring the African Diaspora through the eyes of its artists."
A diaspora is any group that has been dispersed outside its original homeland, according to the fifth definition in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language , second edition, unabridged, 1987. According to the &Encyclopedia Americana , diaspora originally referred to the dispersion of the Jews outside Palestine during the Greek and Roman period.
"Eventually, the Diaspora extended to Spain, France, England, the Rhineland and later to Poland, Russia, parts of India and China, as well as to the Western Hemisphere," states the Americana article. "All the areas of dispersion created by forced captivity and exile, whose people were often subject to persecution and discrimination, were held together by a common religion, customs and the hope of a 'return to Zion,' the homeland of the Jewish people."
Does a commonality of inherited experience exist for writers and artists of African descent? And if it does, how does this experience influence their work? These were the topics addressed during the two-day event. Among the guest participants from England, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States, there was little unanimity.
In what Rita Dove called a "conversation, a dialogue, or at least an opportunity to rub off on one another," writers voiced their views on the existence of a black diaspora and its qualities.
Gerald Early, professor of African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis and a celebrated essayist, declared that he does not see "Africa as a source book for American life today," although he does recognize the idea of "exile and homesickness producing a need for political unity, the need for creation of a common mind, creation of a consciousness of people who might be seen to look alike and, much worse, to think alike."
And Walter Mosley, whose books about private detective Easy Rawlins are bringing him worldwide fame, tended to agree, in particular in regard to art.
"The novel is an exploration," he suggested, "dealing not with the author's truth, but with your truth as a reader. Some things we don't know and can't know, and we are the subjects of those things. The wholly diasporic personality doesn't know who it is or where it is. It's like forgetting and then forgetting that you forgot. He never recognizes that he's lost. He thinks he's something but knows there's an emptiness. "Black people cannot go back to Africa the way a Swede from Minnesota can go home to Scandinavia. Home isn't there."
The question of "home" also remains a question for black Britons, according to Hazel Carby, professor of American studies and African American studies at Yale University, who was born in the United Kingdom of Welsh and Jamaican parents.
"When we [she and other black Britons] were asked, 'Where are you from?' and replied, 'I was born in Liverpool or Cardiff or Glasgow,' the next question would be, 'Yes, I know, but before that?'" said Ms. Carby, who moderated the Wednesday afternoon discussion. "We lived, in other words, under the shadow of the imminent possibility of removal."
The separateness is still there, Ms. Carby said, explaining that "it is impossible for my 9-year-old son to attend an integrated school in Connecticut, where city schools are 97 percent-plus black and Latino and schools outside cities are 94 percent-plus white."
She and other panelists of Caribbean descent seemed more influenced by their heritage than some of the others. They described the artistic cultures of the islands, particularly dance, with enthusiasm. Paule Marshall, a teacher at Yale since 1970 and author of Brown Girl, Brownstones and other books, described carnivals of the Caribbean that have been exported to the United States, England and Canada and how they have changed.
"Carnival gave people the opportunity to comment about their lives, protest the establishment," said Ms. Marshall. "Then the establishment took over and the hill people no longer flooded the streets but had to dance contained within a stadium. There was a loss."
No matter its origins, the art represented by the group assembled by Ms. Dove demonstrated its appeal in the two evenings of readings that were part of the symposium. Mr. Early and Astrid Roemer, a native of Suriname now writing and working as a family therapist in the Hague, both read touching family portraits.
Mr. Early read from the original ending to his Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (changed by an editor), and Ms. Roemer, from a work in progress called A Name for Love.
Wilson Harris, who lives in England and has published more than 25 books, read from his novel &Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, and Ms. Marshall read her description of an island drum festival. Mr. Mosley read Chapter 11 from R.L.'s Dream , his novel about a dying bluesman who once played with Robert Johnson, to be published in August.
Verse was the choice of Claire Harris, who was born in Trinidad and taught English in Canada from 1966 until she retired last year. She read a poem about her mother.
Yusef Komunyakaa, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994 and associate professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington, made few comments during the discussion periods, instead offering his poems, including:
"You'll always be my friend./Is that clear, Robert Lee?/We go beyond the weighing/of each other's words,/hand on a shoulder,/go beyond the color of hair./Playing Down the Man on the Field/we embraced each other before I discovered girls./You taught me a heavy love/for jazz, how words can hurt more than a quick jab./Something there's no word for saved us from the streets."
Members of the afternoon discussion panels also included Errol Hill, Trinidad-born playwright; Dolores Kendrick, Washington playwright, poet and teacher; E. Ethelbert Miller, poet and director of the Afro-American Resource Center at Howard University; and Charles Rowell, professor of English at the University of Virginia and founder of Callaloo, a quarterly journal focusing on the literature and culture of the African diaspora.
Dr. Billington welcomed participants to the opening session and praised Ms. Dove for her contributions to the literary life of the nation during what he termed "a distinguished laureateship."
