Callaloo Contributor: Marlon Ross
Callaloo Contributor: Marlon Ross
"An Interview with the Editors of Love Is A Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems Of Essex Hemphill" by Marlon B. Ross appears in CallalooIssue 43.4.
What themes or messages do you hope readers take away from this interview?
My interview with the two editors, Robert F. Reid-Pharr and John Keene, of Essex Hemphill's "Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems" epitomizes Callaloo's ongoing commitment to the recovery of important creative work by artists of the African Diaspora. I want through the interview to emphasize not only the importance of this kind of editorial labor but also the personal, intellectual stake that helps to shape how these two brilliant scholars approach Hemphill and his work. Having passed away from HIV/AIDS at an early age, Hemphill represents a generation of Black queer authors whose impact we cannot afford to forget, and this volume plays a vital role in helping to consolidate the poet's legacy. I was especially interested in the editors' views on Hemphill's influence on his generation as well as his influence on current work, including on the editors, both of whom knew Hemphill personally. Topics of the interview include Hemphill as a poet of queer desire, its inhibitions and impediments, as his poetry vividly captures the brokenheartedness of gay male cruising, as well as the visceral, material joys of queer sex. How does Hemphill address the HIV/AIDS crisis, as an early activist as well as someone deeply aware of his own impending death from the virus. In the interview, the editors confirm the ways in which Hemphill was a "local" poet who gives us a complex, compelling portrait of Washington, D.C. at a time when "Chocolate City" is being maligned by the powers-that-be as the nation's crime capital. Beyond the local, the volume helps us to place Hemphill within the long tradition of African American poetics, and as such brings attention to the poet's craft as an experimenter with form, structure, narrative, and voice. I was especially curious to hear from Reid-Pharr and Keene about their own pedagogy as teachers of Hemphill's work, as the volume will certainly bring greater attention to what Hemphill continues to teach us within our classrooms.
Can you share about how your academic journey led you to Callaloo?
I became involved in Callaloo almost by accident when I gave a paper entitled “Callaloo, Everyone?”, delivered at a special session, “Callaloo and 25 Years of Writing in the African Diaspora,” of the Modern Language Association Annual Convention in New Orleans in 2001. I believe that this became my first publication in the journal, when it was printed in “Reading Callaloo/Eating Callaloo” (volume 30.1 [Winter 2007]), the first of four 30th anniversary special Issues, guest-edited by Shona N. Jackson and Karina L. Céspedes. After 2001, I became an Associate Editor of the journal. When Charles Rowell asked me to serve as the section editor for criticism and theory, I took on that role for more than a decade. One simply could not refuse a request from the great editor. I was also heavily involved over this period with the annual Callaloo conferences, and, along with Dagmawi Woubshet, played a key role in organizing the first Oxford conference.
What does being a part of
Callaloo mean to you ?
I feel that I gained so much more from my involvement with Callaloo than I have given to it. It became, indeed, a center of my intellectual life. Adjudicating the criticism and theory submissions, helping to organize the conferences and participating in them, occasionally publishing in the journal, particularly papers delivered at the conferences, conversing deeply with Callaloo colleagues, including poets and fiction writers -- all these activities have had an indelible influence on how I think, write, and teach. I was trained as a specialist in British Romanticism, with my publications, research, and teaching in the early part of my career devoted to this field. Of course, I had long read deeply in African American literature, but I made a shift to teaching and publishing in this field after being asked to submit an essay on black masculinity in a volume on that subject. Becoming a member of the Callaloo collective, so to speak, facilitated this field shift, as it shaped, exemplified, and affirmed my ongoing commitment to African American and African Diaspora studies.
How does this interview connect to the larger body of your work?
One cannot browse issues of the journal without gaining a deep sense of the longer tradition and future of work in this field, its import, its reach, and its intellectual and artistic power. It would be a challenge to try to quantify how working on and reading the journal has helped to feed my own work, but that is no doubt the case. The journal is the published proof of a much larger collection of activities and projects. To be in dialogue with these is to be sustained creatively. For example, I had the privilege of being on a panel at the "Love" conference at Princeton in 2012. I delivered a paper entitled “‘What’s Love but a Secondhand Emotion?” Man-on-Man Passion in the Contemporary Black Gay Romance Novel." Sharon Holland was a co-presenter, Koritha Mitchell the moderator, and the respondents included Jafari Allen, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Francesca Royster, Salamishah Tillet, and Dag Woubshet. It was not so much delivering the paper as the conversation that ensued with my co-panelists that was so inspiring. Participating in that panel helped to motivate and shape the completion of my third book, Sissy Insurgencies. The conversation on that panel is, to my knowledge, not recorded. The paper itself was published in Callaloo 36.3 (Summer 2013), but the paper is not the sum-total of the spirited dialogue that ensued on the panel. Although that conversation seems ephemeral, its intellectual impact still reverberates in the thinking and feeling not only that informed "Sissy Insurgencies" but also that continues to inform other book projects, and I would guess, also the ongoing work of my co-panelists.
What inspired you to start writing in the first place?
When I was a young boy, I had so many contributing influences. I had older sisters who taught me to read before I started school. I had a mother who was an avid reader and artist, although, as Alice Walker observes, the creativity of Black women of that generation often got funneled into gardening, and this was the case with my mom. My mother's mother was a great storyteller. When she visited us in South Texas from her home in North Carolina, she would not only regale us with stories about our family history and with folktales but also she would visit our segregated school to tell stories to the students there. The elder sister closest to me kept a poetry journal, which I emulated, and we would memorize and recite to each other all sorts of poems, such as those by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At home, church, and school, literacy was prized. I loved reading and writing as far back as I have a memory. I went to college with the intent of becoming a journalist as a political science major but got waylaid by literature and philosophy. In "Sissy Insurgencies" I write about how a passion for reading seems to make a boy into a sissy. Although I played sports, loved the piano (which I played badly), and could be found doing every available extracurricular school activity, sitting by myself in my room reading occupied a large part of my sissy childhood. Readers frequently desire to emulate what they read. I guess you could say that becoming a writer was an extension of being a reader.
Are there any upcoming projects or pieces you're working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Is there anything else you would like readers to know about your work or about you?
I am proud that the most recent publication in the Callaloo Book Series will be a multi-disciplinary volume that I've co-composed and co-edited with K. Ian Grandison. Race, Space, and Culture: Essays on Cultural Theory and the Built Environment is scheduled for publication later this year from Johns Hopkins University Press. We are excited through this volume to broaden the Callaloo imprint to include landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and space theory.
It was not in my plan to spend so much of my career working on the history, culture, theory, and literature related to Black gender politics. Once I get into publication a second volume devoted to this subject, a follow-up to my second book entitled "Manning the Race," I'd love to move on to other interests. I think, however, that sometimes we are called to do work beyond our self-conscious intentions.
How do you hope to support and uplift your students?
So much of my time has been spent in mentoring future generations of undergraduates and, within and beyond the institutions where I've taught, so many graduate students and emerging scholars. This labor, too, seems so ephemeral, but I hope that I've provided some guidance -- if in no other way, by being a close reader and respondent for their work. Upon entering graduate school, I had no idea that this would be so consuming an obligation, or that it would be a source of inspiration for my own work. Although I never had the privilege of an African American professor/mentor in college or graduate school, as I embarked on my own academic career, I quickly grasped the importance of becoming exactly that for my own students.
MARLON ROSS is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era, and The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry.
