Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialouge on Soucouyant

This dialogue was conducted via e-mail in September, 2007.

KIT DOBSON: I'd like to open by saying that having the opportunity to do this interview with you is a great pleasure; thank you for agreeing to do it.

DAVID CHARIANDY: Thank you for agreeing to interview me, Kit. I'm very pleased to be able to discuss my work with one of Canada's most promising new critics.

DOBSON: Carrying out this interview for Callaloo is, moreover, a great pleasure. Soucouyant, I think, is a brilliant novel, one that I hope we will be discussing for some time to come. I'm happy to see the attention that it's getting from this journal.

CHARIANDY: I'm also very pleased to be in Callaloo, a journal that I've admired for many years. Callaloo was of great, indeed crucial, importance to my early development as a writer and critic in Canada during the nineties. I say this not at all to undercut the energy and impact of Canadian-based black writing and culture. Writers such as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, and George Elliott Clarke have also inspired my work in profound ways (as have writers from other backgrounds or positions). However, Callaloo represented to me a wide world of black writing, as well as conclusive evidence that there were forums where people with an interest in black writing could encounter new work and engage in lively debate. I know enough not to romanticize the histories or procedures of even the most successful institutions and journals, and I can only imagine just how much energy and creative vision Charles Rowell needed to muster in order to run Callaloo at such high standards for so very long a time. Nevertheless, Callaloo was to me a beacon of possibility in a Canada that didn't, at the time, have a well-supported and disseminated black journal. (Although I should here mention that I'm most pleased by the very recent emergence of New Dawn, an online journal of Black Canadian Studies.)

DOBSON: Can you think of other Canadian-based writers and critics who have been influenced by Callaloo? What kind of reach does the journal have north of the 49th parallel?

CHARIANDY: Born and educated in Toronto, I assumed that my experience with Callaloo was, to some degree, geographically specific. Toronto is one of the global capitals of African-Caribbean expressive culture writ large, as well as a major switching point for black writing from all parts of the globe; and so it's not especially surprising that I encountered Callaloo as a young critic and writer in that particular milieu. However, I'll confess that I didn't quite appreciate the reach of Callaloo across Canada until five years ago, when I moved to Vancouver, and began dialoguing with black writers based throughout Canada's West—spaces not always recognized for their oftentimes rich black cultural histories. Only a few days ago, I was having a conversation with Wayde Compton, an extraordinarily talented and accomplished young black writer who was born and raised in Vancouver. Wayde mentioned that during his own early years as a writer (in Vancouver), he too could walk into a very good bookstore or magazine shop and purchase Callaloo. Wayde also mentioned that simply knowing that there was a major and readily available periodical for black writing had a deep and positive impact upon him. I, of course, immediately chimed in about the influence of Callaloo upon my own early writing, and I considered our exchange extraordinary not only because it forced me to re-evaluate the extent to which critical forms of black international culture could be found throughout Canada, but also because it revealed to me what Wayde and I were yearning for, and what we had taken very small but real steps towards achieving. Recently, Wayde and I, along with the poet and cultural critic Karina Vernon, founded a press entitled Commodore Books, which is devoted to publishing black writers in Canada. Sadly, it happens to be the only active black-focused press in...