“Can't seem to live without it somehow”: an interview with Eddy L. Harris

Abstract

In his books about Paris and Harlem and his travelogues about journeys in Africa and the American South, African-American author Eddy L. Harris explores what it means to be Black in the present moment in history. In this interview, he talks to Nicklas Hållén about his need to travel, the craft of travel writing and his plans for a movie project about a journey down the Mississippi River. The conversation revolves particularly around his travelogue Native Stranger: A Blackamerican's Journey into the Heart of Africa (1992) and the way in which identity conditions (and does not condition) travel and travel writing, and the functions that travel writing may have for the author as well as reader. The interview was conducted in the summer of 2013 at a café in the village of Pranzac in the Charente department of France, where Harris currently lives and works.