Reading Callaloo /Eating Callaloo: A Reflection, Lionel Trouillot

DORCELY: As you know, the topic for this issue of Callaloo is callaloo, the idea of a mixture that produces a knowledge about itself that is consumable, usable, and surprising and familiar in its shape—that at least is my understanding/notion of a callaloo and its possible role in creative and intellectual life? What is yours?

TROUILLOT: I am not sure that the word callaloo has the same meaning everywhere. In my mind, it stands for an aspect of popular and traditional Haitian culture. A thing that has been forever, that you feel a need to go back to and, in this case, to taste from time to time.

DORCELY: Has Callaloo had any sort of role in black cultural production that you consider important? Has Callaloo had any impact on the dissemination of your work?

TROUILLOT: No doubt the journal Callaloo has a very important role in the promotion of Black cultural production, at least in the academic community. Works of very important intellectuals, artists, and writers as much as those of new, and emerging, generations are published and discussed in every issue. In the simple terms, the more attention you bring to something, as Callaloo has done with its charge, the more alive and unmissable you make it. If it had only done that Callaloo would deserve our respect and our support. I look at Callaloo more as a permanent anthology and an intellectual forum, enabling me to keep in touch with Black cultural production: ideas, positions, theory, personal aesthetics. I go to it to meet new people and works.

DORCELY: Do you have any insights to offer on the particular relation between visual image and text and creative text and theory?

TROUILLOT: The relation between a creative text and theory is to me very important, very urgent. It is both a cage in which a writer might become trapped and a necessity of modernity. Personally, I am not at ease with a writer who seems "not to know what s/he is doing." I think that it is a very egotistical, almost reactionary, approach to go to the text as if it were the transcript of what I feel, of what is inside me. As a reader, I care about the text, the product of writing. The writer is only necessary so that the text can be. And theory/Theory, then, is an instrument, one could even say a weapon, in analyzing the ideological dimension of the text. Literarity is also the territory of an ideological war. Theory helps us decide how to jump into the fight. On the other hand, creative writing can easily lose all its weight and aura of creativity if it becomes a domain to simply apply theoretical positions that precede the work.

It is the [predicament and the] dilemma of the modern writer to hold this discussion between creativity and theory within literary works. Which becomes an element of a necessary but dangerous conversation.

DORCELY: Of course, Haiti has experienced apparent changes in its political condition and process in recent years. How might you characterize these and their impact on cultural expression generally? What is the value of cultural expression in a context of heightened political conflict? In Haiti generally, broadly, and elsewhere? What is the elsewhere that you conceive of in the relation of culture to history to politics most closely approximates that of Haiti?

TROUILLOT: I am not sure that many things have changed in Haiti. I think the only real conquest that came out of the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986 is the right to speak freely. I dare say that Haitians living in Haiti have more opportunities and even more will to say what is on their minds than the citizens of the United States since September 11, 2001. The new freedom of speech has helped artists and writers to explore and expose a variety of themes—themes one would not have found there or found acknowledged before: homosexuality, urban violence, feminist issues, among others. There is also more fantasy in contemporary writing. Haitian literature...