Charles H. Rowell

An Interview With Chinua Achebe

ROWELL: Mr. Achebe, here in the United States, those of us who read twentieth century world literature think of you as one of the most important writers in this era. We view you as an artist-and for us the word artist has a certain kind of meaning. In the African world, does artist have the same meaning as that conceptualized in the Western world? Or, more specifically, what do Nigerians conceive the writer to be? Is he or she thought of as an artist, a creator of the kind that we think of here in the United States when we speak about writers?

Government and Law

ANTONIO: The position of Municipal Agent is filled by Urbano, the brother of Nachito. He’s the Municipal Agent of the village and he’s in charge of the police. I served for many years, way back. I served fifteen years at the service of my government; I served as a commander, as a second commander, and as a police officer—all until I couldn’t take it any more and told them that I was nothing more than man from Coyolillo, that somebody else had to do it. That was enough.

Talking Howard University, DC-MD, and Visual Art: A Conversation with Floyd Coleman

ROWELL: I want to begin our conversation by interrogating the very purpose of its central concern: the history and significance of the black visual art scene in Washington, DC, from the beginnings of the twentieth century to the late-1950s. As far as I know (and I hope you will correct me if I am misreading the current intellectual or academic scene), no one has written and published a thorough or detailed book-length history focusing exclusively on DC-MD (or just Washington alone) and, especially, on Howard University as sites that have made an indelible impact on the development of American visual art—especially its African American component. This absence is a major problem. Will you comment on the need and importance of such a history? What would you argue are some of the subjects and issues such a book-length history must address?

A Conversation with Olympia Vernon

ROWELL: I am aware that you were encouraged by some of your English professors to write creatively when you were an undergraduate student majoring in Criminal Justice at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. What motivated you to enter Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to study for the MFA degree in Creative Writing? In other words, how did you move from criminal justice to creative writing? Were you writing before you went to study in Hammond? How did you come to this art form—the writing of prose fiction? Do you also create in other art forms? VERNON: There is the sperm, the egg, the embryo. And I have pictured myself in it. And in it is the Word. And thus it was there, before my conception, lying upon some grand tune. Yes, some thing must have been lurking then—the mercurial harvest of the violin, perhaps—wailing upon my birth that this, this woman, this Word, this Word and woman are, alas, thus and coming. I would lie, for hours, upon the earth, during my childhood, imagining my Birth as an atom, something atomic, some particle whose first Birth was a motion; an angle—the response that I had come from my mama’s belly was not enough—I had seen pictures in encyclopedias of the umbilical cord; of Birth happening; of that elongated canal that tugs at its subject. In that human space was I captured by Birth, itself, as first an idea that had come from the angle of two people. I found it fascinating that two people could lie together, could angle themselves incredibly in the throes of diction, of language, the vocabulary of some inaudible predicament, and with this, their lives, the atlas of their lives, of the words unspoken give Birth to another human being who possessed these words, these traits, these fascinations. Thus, the Word came. And I was mesmerized by it. By the sound it made in my throat, the nature of its unapologetic innocence. My mother will tell you, if you asked her now, who she thought I was and who she thinks I am now; but the Word came first, before her, before my father, before each of them were merely ideas passing through the spatial diction of a moment between them. And because of this angular motion, the angular entrapment of two people, did I come. My mother will also tell you that I have been in love with the Word since the beginning. I was raised with farmers and hunters. I woke to the scent of blood: the fresh corpse of a cow, gutted and pulleyed, strung upon some machine, the world bloated and cascading atop the surface of its eye. I woke to the sound of a gun, the deer hunter. Have you ever

Excerpts from An Interview with Michael K. Taylor

TAYLOR: Yes, Eluard Remix. Eluard Burt was my uncle, my mother’s brother. The title was his name and using the idea, the euphemism of remixing something, to take samples of different things and put it back together as something new. So a lot of what I do with my artwork is, from my perspective, something that I visually do, which also happens a lot in hip hop where we sample the paths in history and then we bring it back together to represent it. So, this exhibition titled Re:Vision Pro:Cess or “revision process” is looking back to create forward. That first piece represents part of a series, my feelings as far as my family loss in relation to New Orleans and Katrina in particular. I was born in Metairie, right outside New Orleans. My family first lived in New Orleans and then later moved to Houston, but most of what I’ve known about my family has always lived in New Orleans. That’s where my parents met, that’s where my uncle who’s actually in the image actually introduced my mom and my dad. After Katrina, all my family left New Orleans with the exception of maybe one or two. That was difficult to deal with and knowing that I couldn’t go back to where I had grown up a lot and knew my family would be—there would be no more dinners, no more get-togethers, there would be no more of those things in all the houses that I had the memories of. So, with that piece I had begun a series which is further into the exhibition of the Grand Memories Series, which had dealt with my family on both sides—my mom’s and my dad’s side—and this work is an evolution of that. So, in that piece is an image of my uncle Eluard as a young boy and an image of him with his flute. Both of those images would be him as a young man and him briefly, an older age. And then, in the layering of the image are some photographs of a sculpture I made called a corona, which is a spiritual form carved into wood, and also images from our family photo albums, military images as well as photographs in part of some of the architectural structures in New Orleans I photographed when I went there for his funeral. A lot of the texture that is in the image is the wall from the church where the ceremony was held. And so I built up all those images. A lot of times I think in layers as well as sequences.

An Interview with Ricardo Pereira

PEREIRA: The idea to start the library began in 1980, when I came from Bolivia to Peru. I met Susana, I was a sociologist by training, and we began a relationship. The big question was, “Where does Susana come from? What were her grandparents like? What are her origins?” The man from Bolivia knows very little about the subject of blacks. Slavery was experienced in Bolivia on the roads of Potosi in the 1500s, 1600s. There are black populations or Afro-descendants in the warm regions to the north of La Paz, in two or three essentially rural communities. To find blacks in everyday life is quite rare. It is very difficult. In fact, when you’re walking in the city of La Paz and you see a black person, you pinch whoever is at your side and you say, “the black (person) of good luck.”

An Interview with Rocío Muñoz Flores

MUÑOZ FLORES: I think that a lot of things happened by chance. I was very young, about eighteen, nineteen years old, and I approached, in a very timely manner, a group to offer some sort of support. It was an organization that was already working on the issue of the Afro-descendant population. My first impression was that how was it that people rallied to work on behalf of blacks. It seemed a very strange thing that didn’t make a lot of sense. Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me and I kept observing what was happening, what it was about, and by the time I realized it I was already involved in an organization taking on the issue of rights, taking on activities, making a commitment, trying to understand myself again as an Afro-descendant woman who had a whole cultural inheritance, a whole historical experience that was necessary to recover and strengthen. I still don’t understand completely how is it that life placed me in this situation, because maybe if I hadn’t been asked by someone to support the organization, I never would have been in this world. But life placed me in this opportunity, and it was from there on that I integrated myself quite quickly. This process didn’t even take a month. Within days I was already inside this organization working, supporting, facilitating, and I started to understand that, in effect, there was a personal commitment that I had to assume, a necessity to recover the history, to recover the identity, to strengthen ourselves. So from there I began my activism in Afro-descendant causes. My battle flag was always the recovery of identity, the fight against racism, the fight against all forms of discrimination. But along the way I was gathering other types of demands and necessities, and my efforts and my activities were also oriented toward the subject of Afro-descendant women. I started to include in fights, in speeches, the subject of gender, of racism and sexism as key axes on which to begin work. From that point on I’ve been on a path that has taken me on various routes that in particular moments forced me to adhere to a black feminism that questions feminism and that also allows for the tools for a new political structure for the demands of Afro-descendant women. That has been more or less the beginning, and obviously with that process there have been many battles. We have gone through many things that have led me to have certain types of representations, take certain types of actions. These things

An Interview with Luis Muñoz Aliaga

MUÑOZ ALIAGA: In Chincha, I worked in the cotton fields. I didn’t earn much because there, you can’t make what you can here in Lima. I opted to come here. Just as I am working here, there are many people who have left Chincha and are here. I think I’m the first to work for the district of San Borja here in Lima. A cousin who worked here before and who is no longer with us brought me here to work. Without knowing anything, I came. In Chincha, you don’t see any of this. There, you see people in the fields, working the land. I have been working here for five years, and I have done very well.

An Interview with Susana Baca

BACA: From seeing that musicians in our country die starving or end up at the Bravo Chico hospital, the hospital for tuberculosis patients, my mother was terrorized by the affinity I had for music from the time I was young. So she said, “She shall have another profession and she can dedicate herself to music afterwards if she wants.” That helped me get into the Enrique Guzman and Valle University, La Cantuta, and become a teacher. I was working as a teacher in the Cerro del Agustino, with children who leave in an outlying, very poor and high-crime neighborhood. I worked there. Those were my first steps as a teacher. And then I traveled across Peru to work in Tarma, in the mountainous regions of Peru. There was a moment when I felt that my calling for music was much stronger than my calling to teach children.

An Interview with Gregory Michael Carter

ROWELL: It is very difficult for me to begin this interview, because of the extreme difference between your art and your sensibility as a social being. The art of yours that I have seen is very political. It is not fun loving and carefree as you represent yourself in social exchange. The political life you represent on the canvas is often times the violence imposed on others by hegemonic powers. Although you do not represent their faces, you use their symbols—e.g., missiles, big tanks, and slave ships, all instruments of domination and destruction. Then, too, you use the fleur de lis, which one does not immediately think as a symbol of violence. The violence is embedded in that symbol: conquest, enslavement, colonization.