"Permission to Sing. .. That's What Made Me Love It": An Interview with Tim Seibles

Abstract

"Permission to Sing . . . That's What Made Me Love it":An Interview with Tim Seibles Charles Henry Rowell This interview was conducted on December 6, 2005, by telephone, between College Station, Texas, and Norfolk, Virginia. ROWELL: You are too young to have participated in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In a literary sense, however, we are not far removed from that moment in our history. As a poet in the early twenty-first century, do you view the Movement as having something to offer you at this time? SEIBLES: Yes, it does. The Black Arts Movement was, in many ways, a movement to redefine the "black experience" in this country, to express the fundamental worthiness and beauty of black people in an America that had spent centuries trying to degrade people of African descent. The work of the artists of the Black Arts Movement became a significant part of the resistance to the forces that were killing us, both spiritually and physically. The Black Arts Movement was fueled by the courage to challenge the status quo. The Black Arts poets believed that words could change minds and, therefore, change the way people lived. I was a teenager in the 60s; I remember what it meant to hear Nikki Giovanni's "Ego Tripping" on the radio, the fire it put in our hearts. ROWELL: You speak of "resistance." Do your own poems advocate or encourage resistance? SEIBLES: Well, inasmuch as a poem can assert new visions and challenge old ones, I like to think there's some fight-the-power in my work. I think being a poet requires a willingness to be a troublemaker, to say clearly what people often don't want to hear. In Buffalo Head Solos, my latest book, there's a poem called "Welcome Home" in which white people find themselves on the moon. The poem is playful, but it also has some sharp edges—addressing why they had to go, what all the different peoples of color might do in their absence, and under what conditions they might return to Earth. In our present day world, the armies and economic systems of white people dominate life on this planet—and almost everyone acts like this is the "natural order" of things. [End Page 63] "Welcome Home" wants to challenge that assumption and proposes a new way of seeing the racial predicament. ROWELL: You attribute the efforts of resistance and challenge to the Black Arts Movement. I always thought resistance and challenge were main currents, so to speak, in African American literature. It begins as early as the eighteenth century in the written literature. Witness, for example, Phillis Wheatley's "To the University of Cambridge, in New England." What do you make of George Moses Horton's nineteenth-century poem "The Slave's Complaint"? What does Claude McKay mean in his early twentieth-century poem "If We Must Die"? I argue, however, that the efforts of the Black Arts Movement to resist and challenge are different from those in the earlier poetry. SEIBLES: I think it's all on the same continuum. If I had to make a distinction, I would cast it in terms of volume. I'm talking about how loud the voices of the Black Arts Movement were in comparison to those of the Harlem Renaissance, for example. By the time the Black Arts Movement takes shape, black people have largely abandoned what might be called a fear of white people—the fear of not being accepted, the fear of not being "as good as" or "as smart as." The idea that white people set the standard for anything was all but dead, so the Black Arts voices celebrated the humanity of black people and the sentiment that underpinned this love of blackness was, in essence: if white people don't respect us we will have to kill them. I agree that Phyllis Wheatley's writing was a gesture of resistance, but I think the fire was put under the pot during the Harlem Renaissance. That's when things began to simmer, when the rage black folks felt began to find full expression—some of the poems of Langston...