From Narrow Complaint to Broad Celebration: A Conversation with Charles Johnson

Abstract

One 0f America's pre-eminent writers and thinkers, Charles Richard Johnson, a PhD in Philosophy and a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of four novels Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (1998); two collections of short stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986) and Soulcatcher and Other Stories (2001); a work of aesthetics, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988); Tunaing the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (2003); two collections of comic art, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972). He co-edited Black Men Speaking (1997) with John McCluskey Jr.; Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (1998), the companion book for the influential PBS Television Series, with Patricia Smith; and King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., (2000), with Bob Adelman. He received the 1990 National Book Award for Middle Passage, becoming the first African American male to win this prize since Ralph Ellison in 1953. Johnson teaches creative writing at the University of Washington, Seattle where he holds the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence in English. Most recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters has honored him with its award in literature. The interview was conducted in Seattle during meetings with Johnson in the academic year 2003-2004. He was extremely generous with his time and shared his thoughts freely. I accompanied him to his various lectures and story-reading sessions and was overwhelmed by the tremendous audience response he generated with his forceful ideas and lucid language and expression. With an intense fellow feeling for all sentient beings, he reflected on America at the dawn of the New Millennium and explicitly foregrounded the imperatives of a completely new outlook toward the racial question by his statement that half of the country is going into the twenty-first century with something of an identity crisis because America is very much a pluralistic society.... In other words, America really is the point where so many cultures are crossing. And so the large questions that will be carried into the 21st century will be questions of who are we as Americans. And who we want to be as Americans. But it won't be a black/white dialogue in that respect anymore. Through the corpus of his fictional and non-fictional writings, Johnson combines philosophy and folklore, martial arts and Buddhism, for his incisive insights into the new frontiers of the African American experience that calls for an amalgamation of multidisciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives. He not only loves to address the symptoms of change in terms of acute identity crisis but also tries to prepare the aesthetic ground for such a change. NG: In a long journey that has seen you excel in diverse roles: cartoonist, novelist, teacher, scholar, orator, philosopher--with awards and accolades standing out as significant landmarks--how does it really feel to end up being so famous? CJ: I don't really think about being famous. I don't think about it at all. I still have an image of myself as a younger writer. I am always surprised, humbled, and shocked when I learn that anyone has read something I've written. An author really never knows who is reading him (or her), or if they're reading one's work at all. If you are an actor on stage, you see the audience, you hear their applause but as a writer you don't. You may get the sales figures but you don't sometimes know who is reading your books until they tell you. And I've never been the kind of artist who is comfortable chasing publicity--I just try to let my creations speak for themselves. NG: The range and versatility of your creative output is almost overwhelming. Do you approach your writing as a kind of mission? CJ: Every true artist's goal is, I believe, to produce so many works in his (or her) lifetime, that one's creations ultimately become inescapable in the culture (or at least for serious readers). …