American Book Award Research Articles

Black Hellas? A Footnote to the Black Athena Debate

Since the publication of the first of his three-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987, within Classics and the disciplines concerned with the history of the ancient Near East, Martin Gardiner Bernal (1937–2013) has been an object of much ridicule and a little curiosity. A sociology of knowledge of Classics, volume 1, subtitled The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, claimed that the fount of Western civilization, ancient Greece, in its remote past was conquered and civilized by its »superior« neighbours from Egypt and Phoenicia. This view of history, which Bernal labels the »Ancient Model« and which he claims is referred to in the writings of Classical and Hellenistic Greeks, was the accepted view on Greek cultural origins, until it was overthrown in the nineteenth century by an »Aryan Model«. Bernal attributes the overthrow of the Ancient Model – the victorious Aryan Model denied Egypto-Phoenician settlements in Bronze Age Greece and postulated an Indo-European speaking Hellenes’ conquest of mainland Greece around 2300 BCE – not to contemporary scholarly developments within Classics, but to the cultural milieu of the age, which, in addition to being charged with notions of Romanticism, racism, and Progress, was beset, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, by fear of revolution. The controversial nature of the book’s claims and its author’s status as an outsider to Classics notwithstanding, volume 1 went onto win the Socialist Review Prize (1987) and an American Book Award (1990); was the subject of a Presidential Panel in the annual meeting of the American Philological Association (in 1989); and was translated into Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Arctic Circle

Arctic Circle Arthur Sze (bio) If the strings of a 3/4 violinare at rest, if the two horse-hairbows repose in their case—the case holds the blue of lakesand the whites of snow;she posts on a horse inside a barn;rain splatters on the skylightduring the night; she inhalesthe smell of newly born chickensin a stall—if the intervalbetween lightning and thunderis a blue dagger, if she hearsGavotte in D Major as he drivesin silence past Camel Rock—she stirs then drifts into featheredwaves of sleep; a healer rebuildsher inner moon and connectionto the earth, while she playsHangman with her mother;she stops running out into the coldwhirlpool dark; behind his eyelids,green curtains of light shimmeracross the polar sky; she has difficultyposting with one foot in the stirrup—if he stands, at minus fifteen degrees,a black dot in the snow—she ridesbareback to regain her balance;he prays that diverging raysemanate from a single quartz crystal;he prays that her laughter beJune grass, that the jagged floatingchunks of ice ease and dissolve; [End Page 14] he prays when she lights a tinycandle on a shelf; reindeer eatlichens and browse among marshesat the height of summer—if she bows and hears applausethen puts her bow to the string,if she decides, "This is nothing,"let the spark ignite horse becomebarn become valley become world. [End Page 15] Arthur Sze Arthur Sze (1950-) was born in New York City and educated at the University of California-Berkeley. His books of poetry include River River (1987), Archipelago (1995), The Redshifting Web (1998), Quipu (2005), and The Gingko Light (2009). His books as a translator of Chinese poetry include The Willow Wind (1972), Two Ravens (1976), and The Silk Dragon (2001). In 2010, he edited the collection Chinese Writers on Writing. Sze's honors include a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, and a Western States Book Award for Translation. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Copyright © 2012 University of Hawai'i Press

Poetic License

Poetic License Houston A. Baker (bio) After All That Happened (for Charlotte, who survived rape) You have come back to meThrough legends, rumors, wars of the self, analysis, tears,And real blood, the agony of operations incalculable,The severing of heads and tearing of flesh.The enormity of your suffering is beyond questionOr doubt.When they pushed you beyond what mind could bearYou hid outside skin, voyeured their sick violence. I was bound hand and foot beneathAshes of despair. I heard your tears but could not move.The sun next day rose without effort.But your blood was a screen across it.My eyes were the color of milk.You touched my forehead, but cringed when I reachedTo caress your face.You knew it was no longer there. Now you have come back to me through caverns of despair,Unafraid of man monsters whoProwl midnight streets, waving flags, killing womenAnd children across the old city's moons. You have come back through deserts of loneliness and depressionsSet in stone. Now you move across gleaming mirrors,Your image rejoined to solid flesh.Your mind is a flowering garden.And I love you more than ever, I love you more, more,More than ever beforeAll that happened. [End Page 285] Conjuring Hyssop and Moving Once More (After Exodus XII; Deuteronomy XVI) We gathered the full bunch and dipped it in the blood of basins.Midnight rituals painted doorframes and hidden corners crimson.We were always greatly alarmed at motion, sounds of terror. (Our son slept—unaware of our walking home-earth in the darkness.)We were not accustomed to going out until morn. We knew the Word by heart:When you enter the land the Lord will give you , observe this ceremony.And when your children ask: "What does this ceremony mean?" then tell them:"It is the Passover sacrifice" to all that has passed over spared homes,Where we have not been abandoned forever. On anniversaries of violence, we sing:Observe this month of Abib and celebrate the Passover of the Lord your God,Because in the month of Abib he brought you out of Egypt by night! These are secret holy thoughtsBy which we move,Even, yes, in the darkest of times. [End Page 286] Houston A. Baker Houston A. Baker is university distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University and past president of the Modern Language Association of America. Baker began his career as a scholar of British Victorian literature, but shifted to the study of Afro-American literature and culture. He has served as editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American literary studies. He has published or edited more than twenty books. His most recent books include: Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T, and I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family and the South. His critique of black public intellectuals, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, won a 2009 American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation. Copyright © 2012 State University of New York Press

RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS

RED, WHITE & BLACK: CINEMA AND THE STRUCTURE OF U.S. ANTAGONISMS Frank B. Wilderson III. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 341 pp. In Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Frank B. Wilderson III challenges readers to rethink current ideas on race, representation, and socially engaged cinema. Wilderson, associate professor of African American Studies and Drama at the University of California, Irvine, won the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award and the American Book Award for his last book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, and this followup provides important discourse on the ontology of blackness in the United States and how it relates to film. Wilderson's central tenet is the impossibility of analogizing the suffering of black people with that of any other race or group of people since the continued gratuitous violence that characterizes black existence is found nowhere else in history. The structural, noncontingent violence on the black body and psyche has continued from the Middle Passage through slavery and the Jim Crow era and continuing on to today's ghettos and prison-industrial complex. So although the meaning of suffering for whites (or non-blacks), with few exceptions, is based on issues of exploitation and alienation, the ontology of suffering for blacks is based on issues of "accumulation and fungibility" (14, original quote Saidiya Hartman). In Wilderson's theory, this condition of being owned and traded is not simply an experience, like, for example, the experience of wage exploitation, but it is the essence and ontology of blackness. For Wilderson, this contrast in white and black essential positioning, and the white creation of and parasitism on the situation, is so polarizing that the relationship between whites and blacks, or "Masters and Slaves" (10), can only be considered an antagonism, as opposed to a negotiable, solvable conflict. Afro-pessimist theory is difficult and taxing for those who would like to imagine the relations between whites, blacks, and Native Americans as better-off, improving, or even fixable. Wilderson is neither simple nor soothing, with dense academic style and an unapologetic disinclination to posit solutions, as his conclusion addresses. "To say we must be free of air, while admitting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to do here" (338). But Wilderson seems clear in his writing and in interviews that his book is intended as a way of opening up new avenues of dialogue on race in America, and readers will certainly find his work thought-provoking and worth the time it may take to process. Wilderson addresses the inability of most film and political theory to adequately portray the reality of the structures of these relations. He asserts that a new wave of theorists (bell hooks, James Snead, Manthia Diawara) improved Black film theory by taking the discussion beyond the realm of "positive/negative" (60) representations, working more importantly on interrogating film "as an apparatus or institution in relation to the derelict institutional status of Black people" (64). But Wilderson asserts that these theorists fail to address or recognize the utter impossibility of black agency in civil society's institutions. Wilderson aligns himself with Afro-pessimists such as Hortense Spillers, Ronald Judy, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, and Jared Sexton, whom he references throughout the book. In the lengthy and dense chapter "The Narcissistic Slave," Wilderson builds heavily on the work of Franz Fanon to argue against the possibility of Lacan and Lacanian film theory to apply to black people. "Whereas Lacan was aware of how language 'precedes and exceeds us,' he did not have Fanon's awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks" (76). Wilderson sees Lacan's process of full speech for whites as contingent on the black Other as a frame of reference, "which remonumentalizes the (White) ego" and "is an accomplice to social stability, despite its claims to the contrary" (75). …

Inside the story: a conversation with Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco (born in Malta in 1960) is one of the most respected comic book artists in the world. Sacco is critically acclaimed for his graphic reportage from various conflicts. His best known work is probably still Palestine, which was serialized in the mid-nineties and for which the author received the American Book Award in 1996. Palestine was published in book form in 2001. Other books include Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995 (2000), and most recently Footnotes in Gaza (2009).

Understanding Gerald Vizenor

This book offers an introduction to the radical Native American writer's complex vocabulary and vision. Winner of the 1988 American Book Award for his novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Gerald Vizenor is a radical, even revolutionary, voice among contemporary Native American writers. Deborah L. Madsen offers a comprehensive overview of Vizenor's work in all literary genres as she explores the themes, images, and stylistic devices that define Vizenor's challenging and significant body of work. Madsen begins by addressing the key contexts in which Vizenor's work may be interpreted: his biography, the Anishinabe tribal context of his thought, and the contemporary postmodern intellectual environment within which he writes. Madsen also explores her subject's neologisms, the complex lexicon he invents to convey his view of Native America. From there she highlights Vizenor's achievements in each of the major literary genres in which he writes - journlaism, tribal history, cultural criticism, poetry, drama, and fiction - focusing on representative texts in each instance to provide detailed readings of Vizenor's distinctive style and language.

The Eyes of the Animals

Linda Hogan Linda Hogan (1947), a successful poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist whose tribal affiliation is Chickasaw, spent most of her childhood in Oklahoma and Colorado. She taught at the University of Minnesota, and has been an associate professor in the English Dept. at the University of Colorado in Boulder (where she obtained her MA in 1978), since 1989. She has served on the National Endowment for the Arts poetry panel for two years and has been involved in wildlife rehabilitation as a volunteer. The main focus and movement of Linda's work concerns the traditional indigenous view of and relationship to the land, animals and plants. She has won numerous awards, such as the 2002 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year (Creative Prose: Memoir), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (1998), the prestigious Lannan Award, which may not be applied for, for outstanding achievement in poetry (1994), the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1991, and the American Book Award (1986). She was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer in 1990.

Not So Very Long Ago

Linda Hogan Linda Hogan (1947), a successful poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist whose tribal affiliation is Chickasaw, spent most of her childhood in Oklahoma and Colorado. She taught at the University of Minnesota, and has been an associate professor in the English Dept. at the University of Colorado in Boulder (where she obtained her MA in 1978), since 1989. She has served on the National Endowment for the Arts poetry panel for two years and has been involved in wildlife rehabilitation as a volunteer. The main focus and movement of Linda's work concerns the traditional indigenous view of and relationship to the land, animals and plants. She has won numerous awards, such as the 2002 Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year (Creative Prose: Memoir), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (1998), the prestigious Lannan Award, which may not be applied for, for outstanding achievement in poetry (1994), the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1991, and the American Book Award (1986). She was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer in 1990.

"To Democratize the Elements of the Historical Record": An Interview with John Edgar Wideman About History in His Work

"To Democratize the Elements of the Historical Record"An Interview with John Edgar Wideman About History in His Work Ulrich Eschborn John Edgar Wideman's literary work, already spanning more than four decades, comprises ten novels, three collections of stories, one collection of microstories, four nonfiction books including his bestselling autobiographical work Brothers and Keepers (1984), and many essays, articles, and reviews. In the course of his career, Wideman, professor at Brown University where he teaches creative writing, has been awarded the Pen/Faulkner Award (1984, 1991), the American Book Award, a MacArthur Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize of the Society of American Historians for the novel The Cattle Killing (1996), and, for his short stories, the O. Henry and the Rea Awards. He self-published his latest book, a collection of microstories entitled Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind (2010). Professor Wideman kindly gave me the opportunity to interview him in Brittany on August 12, 2008. This conversation differs from other interviews with Wideman because it focuses on one specific, crucial aspect of his work: history. After Wideman's first two novels, history became a central issue in the third novel The Lynchers (1973), the Homewood trilogy (1981–83), Philadelphia Fire (1990), and the historical novel The Cattle Killing (1996) as well as in the nonfiction books Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (1994), Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love (2001), and The Island: Martinique (2003). His complex approach to history engages concepts like mind and imagination, Great Time (a notion derived from African thought), survival, storytelling and oral history, family, and community. The interview addresses these aspects and reveals that Wideman's concept of history runs counter to the Western idea of linear time and the idea of history as the sum of historiographic texts describing "great leaders" and "great events." In accordance with the notion of Great Time, Wideman represents time and history as nonlinear. He believes that stories about African American families and communities such as Homewood, the African American Pittsburgh neighborhood in which he lived until the age of twelve, are as important as the so-called great events such as the Second World War. As Wideman puts it in the interview, he tries to "democratize [the elements of the historical record] in the sense of reshuffling the hierarchies or getting rid of hierarchy." At the end of the conversation before the 2008 United States presidential election, Wideman answers a question about history-in-the-making, namely his hopes with regard to a possible presidency of Barack Obama. His closing words are: "We'll meet again after the election and have another talk [Laughter]—if we're allowed." In fact, I was fortunate [End Page 982] enough to have another meeting with John Edgar Wideman in New York City three days after Obama's election victory on November 4, 2008. The author was glad about the election result, which he had predicted early on. Eschborn: I would like to start with three definitions of history that you give in your writing. The first one is from your memoir Fatheralong in which you define history as a "collective enterprise of the mind" (102). Could you read this passage? Wideman: (Reads) History is not something given, a fixed, chronological, linear outline with blank spots waiting to be filled with newly unearthed facts. It's the activity over time of all the minds comprising it, the sum of these parts that produces a greater ecological whole. History, the past, is what you're thinking, what you've thought. You, the individual, you the enabler and product of the collective enterprise of the mind. History is mind, is driven by mind.… (101–2) Eschborn: Thank you. In an interview with John O'Brien in 1972, you give a definition of history which goes in the same direction: "To go back into one's past is in fact dreaming. What is history except people's imaginary recreation?" (10). These statements about history underline that each person is involved in a mental process of creating history. One could call this a democratic concept of history. However, you also claim: "History...

A Conversation with Lorna Dee Cervantes

INTERVIEW .: . . .. .... zl i4. k . ... ..... fj? WO k-Aj, 1-w i%. - . . - . . I -fie 2r A Conversation with Lorna Dee Cervantes Jeanetta Colhoun Mish Lorna Dee Cervantes is an award-winning Chicana and Native American poet who has been described by Alurista as "one of the major Chicana poets of the past forty years." Her published works include three books of poetry Emplumada (1981), which won the American Book Award, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991), and Drive (2006). She has been the recipient of two NEA Fellowships for Poetry. Cervantes's poetry is known for its empha sis on social justice and for its compelling imagery. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish: Because you've given inter views over the years that have covered your early work, I'm going to concentrate in this interview on what you're doing and writing currently. So, first, let's talk about your most recent book, Drive, which was published by Wings Press in 2006. It's actually five books in one, containing new poems from 1980 to 2005. Why did you choose to publish a large collection like this rather than a series of individual books? Lorna Dee Cervantes: Yes, Drive is five books in one, one of which is a book-length poem. I have always been more interested in the book and concepts of the book of poetry, rather than seeing a collection of poetry just as "here is everything I've written and I'll put it in some kind of order, all the bird poems or all the love poems, or what ever," right? Instead, I've always been struck by individual books like Pablo Neruda's The Heights ofMacchu Picchu, how that is a whole conception, or Howl or Sylvia Plath's Ariel, and certainly Eliot's books of poetry. One of the first poets I really got a sense of the book from is Walt Whitman, who worked on the same book all his life. I first dis covered Whitman when I was eight or nine years old. So the idea of the book of poetry, of creating the book of poetry, is why it took so long for me to finish Emplumada, which many people were interested in publishing, but it just wasn't ready; it took me about seven years. One of the things I started working on right after I finished Emplumada was this book, which I thought at that point was four books in one but which later become five. I think of it as a literary pentych, like in visual art. For instance, think of the triptychs of Hieronymus Bosch: you have three different canvasses and each of them cre ate their own composition, then you put them together and you notice, oh, this shadow here isn't a mountain, it's the edge of this castle, and you wouldn't see it unless you hang them together. I envision this book as a literary pentych so that each individual book stands on its own. It's not a pentalogy, but instead I see them as having five different literary strategies with interwoven, inter changeable imagery. JCM: I'd like to talk to you about poetry as activ ism. You are involved in many forms of what I call poetry activism. For instance, you have written and sold poems on demand to help a San Fran cisco schoolteacher get a new place to live after his apartment burned down. Would you share a few more examples of how you put your poetry and your public presence to work in the world? LDC: First of all, thank you for recognizing that. When I first went to Mexico in 1974 and was involved in Chicano teatro?Mexican American guerilla theater?I realized that my politics and my poetry could merge; suddenly it wasn't just for me. Before then, I didn't share this poetry; I kept it in notebooks. My friends only knew I wrote poetry because we took a three-day train ride to Mexico, and I was always constantly writing. "What are Jeanetta Caihoun Mish is a poet and editor of Mongrel Empire Press. Her most recent book...

Choctawan Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Gender Relations: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

To begin sifting through the melange of humor, resistance, and intellectualism that shoots through the work of Choctaw poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and scholar LeAnne Howe, it is helpful to examine the author's photograph on the back cover of her collection Evidence of Red (2005), winner of the 2006 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. Playfully smiling, Howe salutes the camera, emulating a similar move by the giant wooden Indian behind her. The wooden Indian is adorned in what appears to be a loincloth of stars and stripes and a sign that reads Cigars Cubains. Howe's choice to pose in front of the cigar store Indian, a symbol of the original trading relationship between Natives and Europeans that ultimately led to colonization, genocide, and the commodification of the American Indian image, is a joke on anyone who thinks that Native peoples are conquered, vanished, or frozen in time. Indeed, a number of Howe's Choctaw characters literally time travel in her books, creating opportunities to overcome oppressive histories with returns to homelands or reversals of defeats. Shell Shaker, Howe's first novel, was published in 2001 to critical acclaim. It received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (2002), was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award (2003), and its French translation, Equinoxes Rouges, was a finalist for France's Prix Medicis Etranger (2004). The novel moves between the eighteenth century and the present, linking eras through the actions of Shakbatina, a ceremonial shell shaker whose self-sacrifice on behalf of her daughter becomes an act that resonates across centuries to unite the Choctaw tribe, split by the 1830 removal from the Mississippi homelands to what is now Oklahoma. Poet and literary critic Ken McCullough claims, Although there has been significant scholarship on this historical in the southeast, between the arrival of DeSoto and Removal, no one has written a work of the imagination (of this magnitude) set in this period (61). Howe's work is meticulously researched, revealing the complexity of ancient trade relationships between southeastern Native peoples, the complications that ensued when European colonial powers arrived in the Americas, and the manifestation of these historical moments in the lives of contemporary Choctaw characters. Howe's second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), also shifts between past and present, unraveling a family mystery set against the backdrop of all-Indian baseball leagues and detailing the love affair between Choctaw pitcher Hope Little Leader and Justina Maurepas, his Black Indian lover. This relationship suggests an intersection between Native American and African American histories of oppression and displacement: the characters meet at Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians (present-day Hampton University), and their affair ends after terrorization by the Ku Klux Klan. As Shell Shaker works to heal the wounds of Choctaw colonization and dispersal, Miko Kings recenters the ball game known as America's pastime, illuminating its roots in Choctawan spiritual and political traditions. In addition to her fiction, poetry, and scholarly work, Howe wrote the screenplay for and narrated the ninety-minute PBS documentary Indian Country Diaries: Spiral of Fire (2006); her play, The Mascot Opera: A Minuet, was commissioned for the 2008 production at the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, although it was not used. Howe has been the recipient of numerous artistic awards and residencies, including the Louis D. Rubins, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University; an Artist-in-Residence grant for theatre from the Iowa Arts Council; a Regents' Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California, Riverside; and in 2006-07 she was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Howe is currently a professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. …

Joy Kogawa's Obasan : An Essential Asian American Text?

Joy Kogawa's ObasanAn Essential Asian American Text? Donald C. Goellnicht (bio) I first taught an Asian North American text in the mid-1980s in an "English for Engineers" course where the students were predominantly white and almost exclusively male. That text was Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), and I selected it for three reasons that I still remember distinctly: 1) it uncovers a part of Canadian history—the Internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War—that has been well documented by academic historians but that had been silenced in the Canadian public sphere and in school histories, so that Canadians are often ignorant of this significant manifestation of racism, intolerance, and human rights violations in the nation's history; 2) it tackles a number of feminist issues, including mother-daughter relationships and the theme of silence and speech, and I wanted this overwhelmingly male class to engage with issues of gender as well as race; 3) aesthetically, it's a powerful novel that blends genres—from documentary reportage, letters, and newspaper clippings to lyric poetry and adapted folklore—and employs complex narrative techniques that I wanted the students to grasp and appreciate. That an appreciation of these postmodern narrative techniques would clash with the humanist approach to history that underlay my first objective didn't register with me at the time; only later did I take up the challenging issues of the relationship between history and fiction in Kogawa's novel. A quarter century later, I recognize that Obasan is the Asian North American text that I have taught most frequently—and that it does all the work I demanded of it in the mid-1980s and more. It has grown in richness and complexity over the years of teaching and learning (for I am constantly learning from the texts I teach) to the point where it resonates with many of the major issues and themes I consider necessary to explore in a course on Asian American literature. To that extent, it is an "essential" text. In the brief exploration that follows here, I will try to give a sense of the range of themes and issues it introduces, although I acknowledge from the outset that I cannot do justice to them in this limited space. The internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians is one of the foundational narratives of Asian American studies, and Kogawa's was the first full-scale novel published in either the US or Canada to deal directly with the Internment by an author who had experienced those events. John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) had dealt with the traumatic aftermath of the Internment in the US but had not treated the historical events directly; Hisaye Yamamoto's short story "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara" (1950), set in an internment camp, explores the devastating physical and psychological effects of the Internment, but the story was not made widely available until King-Kok Cheung collected it in 1988; while memoirs like Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953) and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1972) did not employ fictional techniques in their treatment of past events. Novels about the Internment by the post-Internment generation, like Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field (1998) and Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), come much later. Sakamoto acknowledges the impact of Obasan on the writing of her own novel, stating: "I really didn't want to tell the story of internment…because I think it's been done before, very beautifully, in Joy Kogawa's book, Obasan, which is just seminal." Kogawa's is a groundbreaking novel for Asian North American studies; given its uniqueness and power, it is no surprise that this Asian Canadian text was quickly adopted by Asian Americanists as, in the words of Guy Beauregard in"Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Questions," "a canonical Japanese American text of internment." Obasan won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award (1982) and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award (1982) and quickly appeared on Asian American course lists. It is the only Canadian novel to be included in the MLA's A Resource Guide to...

Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer's Life

I have met Edwidge Danticat several times, and always I come away thinking of her as a sweet, innocent, talented writer, who seems to be removed from it all. Since the appearance of her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) at the tender age of twenty-five, the word was out that she was someone to watch, and indeed that prediction has proven true. Danticat has been prolific, producing a book or two yearly: Krik? Krak! (1996); The Farming of Bones (1998); Behind the Mountains (2002); After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel (2002); The Dew Breaker (2004); Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); and her most recent rifle, a memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (2007). She has also edited two important collections, The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures (2000) and The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001). Edwidge Danticat is perhaps the most popular Caribbean writer. Her books are taught, both nationally and internationally, across many different disciplines: African American, ethnic and women's studies, and comparative literature. Countless papers and dissertations have been presented on her work, and at almost every conference within the last ten years, scholars have presented a wide array of critiques on one or more of her works. Haitian by birth and affinity, Edwidge Danticat has received many awards including the Fiction Award from The Caribbean Writer, 1994; the National Book Award nominafon for Krik? Krak!, 1995; Best Young American Novelists for Breath, Eyes, Memory by GRANTA, 1996; the American Book Award for The Farming of the Bones, 1999; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I'm Dying, 2008. The idea for this interview was hatched in 2006 when Danticat and I both participated in the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars Conference (ACWWS) in Miami. We began a conversation there, but were too distracted by all the events to make it meaningful. I decided to put it off until we met up again, but Danticat and I each became consumed by our own projects. We decided that the Internet would be the most expedient way to get this done. My approach to this interview was personal, as one Caribbean woman to another, whose works revolve around our love and commitment to the region. In this setting, I sought to discover the intersection of this woman and her writing. Opal Palmer Adisa: You came to the U. S. A. when you were quite young, but still, I suspect, you were raised with Haitian cultural sensibilities even in the U. S. A. Although this might be redundant or even obvious, what is your relationship to Haiti, not simply in the political realm, but on a more visceral, navel-string level? What does Haiti mean to you? Edwidge Danticat: Haiti is and will always be one of the two places, the United States being the other, that I call home. Haiti is where I was born and Haiti was my first home. I am like most Haitians living with my feet in both worlds. I go to Haiti as much as I can. I still have a lot of family there. I have always lived in Haitian communities in the United States, so while I have left Haiti, it's never left me. OPA: What are your hopes for Haiti, given its historical precedent, being the first country in the New World to earn its freedom, and now being considered one of the poorest nations in the world? ED: Recently there was an article in all the world's papers about people eating cookies made of clay in Haiti to quash hunger. Then Haiti was one of many places where people had demonstrations against hunger. This was quickly followed by a story about a group of Haitian sea migrants, so-called boat people, drowning off the coast of the Bahamas. You can't be Haitian, human, and not feel sad for all that. But you can't be human and not also hope, so we go on hoping. Haiti is sometimes the canary in the mine. The U. S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934 can tell us a lot about what's going to happen in Iraq in a few years. …

Carolyne Wright as "Scholar Gipsy"

Carolyne Wright's latest poetry collection, A Change of Maps, may remind those with keen memories of Matthew Arnold's poem Scholar Gipsy, in which a mysterious male figure abandons the safety of Oxford's dreaming spires to wander the world in search of truth. Poet and scholar Wright has also wandered the world, both in her life and in this new book. The collection reveals a ship's log of discovery and loss that will resonate especially with women of intel lect who navigate the shoals of career and love at home or abroad. Wright has worked her way across the United States, Latin America, and Asia with an astonishing list of earned scholarships, awards, fellowships, grants and visiting writer posts. With a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, she spent years in India, Bangladesh, and Chile on Fulbright projects and other grants that led to publication of three volumes of translations from Bengali and Spanish poetry. Forthcoming in 2008 from White Pine Press is an anthology of translations, Majestic Nights: Love Poems by Bengali Women. Prior to the current book, a collection of her own poetry with Latin American background called Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire won the Blue Lynx prize from Eastern Washington University Press, as well as the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Wright reveals the strength of her intelligence, energy, and ambition in this present book. The opening poem, a tour de force abecedarium called Studies with Miss paints a humorous but devastating picture of an aging, financially pressed poet-in-residence, Elizabeth Bishop, who reluctantly presides over a dazed / clutch of undergraduates. Adopting the formalism Bishop imperiously demanded of her young students, Wright crafts twenty-six couplets that not only begin with the requisite abcs and end with subtle slant rhymes, but also entertain the reader with colorful vignettes and playful language. By

Morna

Morna Brenda Marie Osbey (bio) they sayis the song of the slaves of portugaland carries only one meaning: africa of the soul ground down like coffee, cocoa, millet, beans.where is my africa of the soul? morna, morna, morna. brown woman walking the narrowed streets of incidental countries.who is she?and why do we care?we don't. we don't care.we only sing the songs we are given to sing.all is mornaspiritsdust. [End Page 1] Brenda Marie Osbey Brenda Marie Osbey is the author of All Saints: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 1997), which received the 1998 American Book Award. She is the author also of Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman (Story Line, 1991), In These Houses (Wesleyan UP, 1988), and Ceremony for Minneconjoux (Callaloo Poetry Series, 1983; UP of Virginia, 1985). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and collections, including Callaloo, Obsidian, Essence, Renaissance Noire, Southern Review, Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, 2PLUS2: A Collection of International Writing, Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, Epoch, The American Voice, and The American Poetry Review. Her essays on New Orleans appear in The American Voice, Georgia Review, BrightLeaf, and Creative Nonfiction. In Spring 2005, she was appointed the first peer-selected Poet Laureate of the State of Louisiana. Brenda Marie Osbey is a native of New Orleans. Copyright © 2008 Southern Literary Journal and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature

Rise, Do Not Be Afraid by Aaron A. Abeyta

3 2 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0 8 Rise, Do Not Be Afraid. By Aaron A. Abeyta. Denver, CO: Ghost Road Press, 2007. 172 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Alex Hunt West Texas A&M University, Canyon It is a pleasure to read a novel that engages us in the narrative ligaments of a place, a novel that trusts us to work at meaning and rewards us with an emotionally and intellectually powerful experience. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a novel by Aaron Abeyta, the Colorado poet whose earlier books won the American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid relates the death of a community, specifically, Santa Rita, a town located in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. It is a place with an agro-pastoral economy and its own regional Spanish dialect. The com­ munity and its demise are rooted in colonial history. The origin of Santa Rita is associated with the Spanish reconquest and the development of a mestizo culture. The place is also shaped by US colonization, particularly the expro­ priation of lands once understood to be communally held. These historical forces take the latter-day form of evil and sin—human weaknesses like pride and greed that fracture the community along historical fault lines. On a more human level, the novel traces the love between Ramon and Nonnatusia and the wrenching miscarriages that tear them apart. It tells the story of Aresando, the veteran who loves Malinche Santistevan-Matthews, and Malinche’s husband, Karl Varshant, whose business is the drug trade. We meet Samuel and Elle, who hear gossip from crickets, and Cassiano, the world’s worst fisherman. In all, we meet about twenty-five characters in more than thirty short, complexly interwoven chapters that relate some eighty years of the community’s history. If Abeyta’s novel is of the death of a community, it is nevertheless also about the persistence of a place and a people, enduring through memory and story. Some of Abeyta’s narrative strategies, particularly as they relate to sense of place, seem Faulknerian, including a nonlinear construction through a vari­ ety of points of view to describe a landscape, a history, and a community. While Abeyta provides a cast of characters at the outset, I still found myself reaching for a pencil to draw maps and genealogies as one does when reading Faulkner and— another apt comparison— Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. When it comes to his treatment of Chicano folk culture and community, however, the best comparison might be to Sabine Ulibarri’s fiction of northern New Mexico, what Juan Bruce-Novoa once dubbed “Magical Regionalism.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Abeyta’s San Luis Valley setting of southern Colo­ rado is very near Ulibarri’s Tierra Amarilla country. Abeyta’s writing is beautiful, at once simple, highly figurative, and unpre­ tentious. His words are easy to read and good to read aloud. At the same time, his language is rich with metaphor and allusion—in particular to the Gospel B o o k R e v ie w s 321 of Luke— strong with the feeling that, as in poetry, every word has weight and significance. Readers of western American literature ought to take serious note of Aaron Abeyta. Willa Cather as Cultural Icon. Vol. 7 of Cather Studies. Edited by Guy Reynolds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 354 pages, $35.00. Reviewed by Ann Romines George Washington University, Washington, DC The 2003 International Willa Cather Seminar, which generated this collec­ tion of essays, was the last such seminar to be conceived and directed by the late Susan Rosowski, a moving force in Cather studies for two decades and the founding editor of Cather Studies. Rosowski’s chosen topic, Cather as cultural icon, once more demonstrates how astutely she evaluated the emerging cli­ mate of Cather scholarship. This rich collection of essays, ably edited by Guy Reynolds, starts from the premise that Cather is now undeniably a central figure in “the twentieth-century U.S. literary canon.” As...

From Suite: Ida

from Suite:Ida Angela Jackson (bio) Two Trains The countryside slides away, elides trees, sunlight rolls down like a savior. The train shudders and hisses to a stop. Which train? Who is in the wrong spot? A seat on a train is the site of a war. Ask Gandhi, East Indian in South Africa: Ask me, a colored schoolmarm, in skirts, hat, and gloves. We lost the battle, and won a war. Equally colored. There is something about insult that burns bodily as one is seized and dispatched like an angry letter full of inkblots of significance. Gandhi led his story. I wrote mine, in my way led my match-light. Hand Writing I do not have soft hands. My hands have been in too much hot water, water elbows deep, sleeves rolled up as if for a fight, washing, scrubbing, rinsing dirt loose from my siblings’ clothing. [End Page 1206] My hands have calluses from writing what hits the nervous system like nails on chalk board of a one room school house where I teach. The screech echoing the screams. My Business I have important business, too vital to be concerned with dross. I have to be my pen, dipped in blood and fire, illuminating the shadows, vanquishing the shadows. I have posted a “Do Not Disturb” sign over my heart. Only Ferdinand, my children, my people, Truth may enter in. Ida Rewrites “I, as usual, lost what favor I had by becoming furiously angry.” I agitate to a fault. If I were vulgar enough to sing the Blues I would be the Blues [End Page 1207] and shake hands with the Devil and bring him to his knees. I look Fear in the eye. I show no Fear. I look Hate eyeball to eyeball. I do not blink. I must, however, admit difficulty with rivals. Indeed so less than me can they be called rivals? Women! Fellow workers for the Good! History Tellers who omit me! Yet I cannot hold my peace when holding would benefit my cause and circumstance. Now I must rewrite. I must not admit my breach. Moving Day, 1925 A life is still a life. It is a process of elimination --- moving day. Giving away what will not fit in an apartment. Five rooms. Once filled a house. Fourteen. Fourteen into five. Division and cast asides. The boulevard is wide. Trees abound. Tall and generous. People picnic, sleep in the lush grass. A big front yard. Bodies stretch out like flags Of peace. I am a housewife. A life is still a life. [End Page 1208] Angela Jackson Angela Jackson is author of a number of volumes of poems, including Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners (1994 winner of the Carl Sandburg Award and the Friends of Literature Book of the Year Award/Chicago Sun-Times), Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E (winner of the 1985 American Book Award), and And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1998. In 2002, she was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America. This Chicago resident, who is also a published playwright and a fiction writer, was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Copyright © 2008 Charles H. Rowell

Wanting to know everything in a complex world: An interview with Allison Blakely

In the fall semester of 2007 Professor Allison Blakely visited the Netherlands, a country that he studied extensively for his acclaimed book on racial imagery, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Indiana University Press, 1994). His other work on the black experience in Europe, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Howard University Press, 1986), won the American Book Award in 1988. Professor Blakely published numerous articles in a myriad of national and international journals. Blakely is currently Professor of European and Comparative History and George and Joyce Wein Professor of African-American Studies at Boston University. In 2006 he was elected president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and in the spring of 2008 he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.

Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes

Chicana poet and activist Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in the Mission District in San Francisco, California, on August 6, 1954, to a working-class Mexican American couple. Her mother was a homemaker and her father was an artist. In 1959, after her divorce, Cervantes's mother, Rose, moved with her two young children to San Jose, California, to live with her mother. Cervantes grew up in East San Jose in a barrio called Horseshoe, where poverty, gangs, and street violence were ubiquitous. Although the poet experienced a tough childhood and adolescence, as she writes in some of her autobiographical poems (i.e., Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway), she survived and thrived, thanks to the love and support of her maternal grandmother. Poetry also played an important role in her life; at the age of eight, when she penned her first poem, Cervantes discovered that writing poetry enabled her to make sense of her experience as a poor urban Chicana. Later in her teen years, when she joined several civil rights movements (the National Organization for Women, the Native American Movement, and the Chicano Movement), poetry became her weapon to denounce racism, sexism, violence against women, and the oppression of the disempowered. Indeed, these concerns inform all of Cervantes's works. Since the publication of Emplumada (Pittsburgh Press, 1981), her coming-of-age debut collection, Cervantes has garnered critical acclaim by scholars and writers alike. Fittingly, Chicana dramatist Cherrie Moraga has called her our Chicano poet laureate (qtd. in Kevane and Heredia 104). Emplumada received an American Book Award and is a fundamental text in Chicana/Latino studies. In comparison to Emplumada, Cervantes's second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Publico Press, 1991), is more lyrical and abstract. It centers on the poet's experiences with loss brought on by divorce, her mother's death, and historical discontinuity. Although From the Cables of Genocide has not enjoyed a wide readership because of its hermetic nature, it has received several accolades, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Latino Literature Prize. In Drive: The First Quartet (Wings Press, 2006), a fifteen-year project, Cervantes continues her commitment to justice by denouncing political violence (i.e., the 1997 massacre in Acteal in the Mexican state of Chiapas) and genocide--particularly that of her Chumash ancestors, whose bones are still entombed in the adobe walls of the Santa Barbara Mission. Cervantes is one of the best read and more anthologized Chicana writers; her work appears in major anthologies such as the Heath Anthology of American Literature, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and the Hispanic Literary Companion. She has been honored with several awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant for Poetry in 1978 and 1993, Outstanding Chicana Scholar by the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Scholars (NACCS) in 1993, and the Wallace/Reader's Digest Writer's Award from 1995 to 1998. This interview took place on May 31, 1999, in Davis, California, in the home of Chicano poet and educator Francisco X. Alarcon. For over two hours, Cervantes spoke about poets who have influenced her work, such as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Mexican poet Jose Gorostiza, and American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Bob Hass. She also provided insights into the themes and symbolism found in her poetry and offered her perspective on the future of Chicana and Chicano poetry. Sonia V. Gonzalez: Who were the poets that influenced you at each stage, when you were writing Emplumada, From the Cables of Genocide, and Drive? Lorna Dee Cervantes: I started writing when I was eight years old, and there were a couple of influences right around the same time. Pablo Neruda has been a sustaining influence since I first discovered him when I was fifteen years old and my brother brought home The Heights of Machu Picchu. …

Rain without Rain

Rain without Rain:Isla Negra, Chile, July 2004 Martín Espada (bio) The celebration of a century since Neruda's birth brings pilgrims by the thousands to his house, fingering the rust off the locomotive in his garden, shouting Whitman in Spanish over the sea, loading their shoes with Isla Negra sand amid the red banners along the beach, men on horseback, a chorus of schoolgirls, bamboo flutes from the south. Yet there is rain without rain in the air. In the horseshoe path of the poet's tomb they walk, lips sewn up by the seamstress grief, faces of the disappeared on signs strung around their necks: Name. Date. Political Execution. The faces of the missing in snapshots are pins brilliant in the sky, long after their bodies float away to another cosmos. Some wore jackets and ties for the journey; one blinked with the camera's flash, shutting his eyes forever. Thirty years ago the dictator flicked a white-gloved hand and the disappeared were gone: Tape across the eyes, wires clamped to toes and genitals, rats in the anus, a human ear in the soup. Executioners hid the bones away like dogs pawing at the soil. Now the circle speaks at the poet's tomb: my brother, my sister, my uncle, my cousin. Give us the bones for the coffin, give us the coffin for the grave, give us the grave for the gravestone, give us the gravestone so we can sleep. [End Page 196] Fingertips tilt the faces of the dead, the family nose like three cloves of garlic, mouth bent in a grin mysterious as a magician's spoon. A girl, ten years old, wears the picture of a boy, also ten, wandered off long ago into the dictator's carnival. This is my uncle, she says. I never met him. Then she recites Neruda, too softly, too quickly, because her uncle should be there to steer her shoulder and whisper: Louder. Slower. How the desaparecidos on this day burst from the sand at Isla Negra, how they are born from the black petals of the rocks, how they wade from a sea far away where their bones glow with the light of blind fish. At the tomb, a woman silent all along steps from the circle and says: I want to sing. Neruda. Poem Twenty. Then she climbs atop the tomb and sings: Tonight I can write the saddest verses. Martín Espada Martín Espada, who teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), is author of eight books of poems, including The Republic of Poetry and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002). He has won a number of awards and fellowships for his poetry, including the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary achievement, the Robert Creeley Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Copyright © 2007 Charles H. Rowell