Pick Your Family

According to an email I got while I was in Barbados leading the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, I have an ancestor who landed in Barbados in 1740. The email was from my cousin, the family historian. We are African American. “Philadelphia Negroes,” to be precise. I’ve heard it said, too, we have “Indian in our family,” but I hadn’t before considered the possibility it might be West Indian. This was my joke of the day—it takes so little to humor me—which I shared as a few of us sat around a classroom table shivering gratefully in the arctic air conditioning.

The Cave Hill campus at the University of the West Indies sits high on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean coast of Barbados. Some of the workshop participants were still making their way either up the winding main road to campus or down the hill from the dormitories while we early arrivals chatted and checked email and social media before stowing our devices for the next three hours of our scheduled workshop. I also joked that because of my newfound heritage I could now claim an island identity until someone pointed out that the only records of people arriving in 1740 document folks I might not care to claim. How messy, I thought, these inventories of ancestry. Can we claim some ancestors, invent some, and forget others—is it that easy—to frame a self-respecting narrative? How elastic are the bonds of kinship? How adjustable is that frame?

I held on to these questions and others for the duration of each of the weeklong workshops we held in 2014: Barbados in May and then London, hosted by the Black Cultural Archives, in October. I held on to these questions because they reminded me that the workshop served a greater purpose than merely suggesting edits to poems. Neither were we interested in literary tourism. But then why travel thousands of miles to convene a workshop that is neither exclusively to instruct nor examine? Were we hoping to reconnect with something, to revel in some racial nostalgia? Or were we establishing an international network of poets? Can the answer be both and neither? I think of the truism that you don’t attend a fancy school necessarily because that’s where the most quality teaching is being done, but because of the quality of the cohort the school can attract. This in mind, it strikes me there are few institutions other than Callaloo that are recognized globally, are concerned with the creative expressions of people of color, and can unite an exceedingly talented cohort beneath its banner.

These workshops gave me and the workshop participants a rare chance to explore our work and the cultural values it contains in a context that is sensitive to that form of coerced conformity to (typically) American values we call cultural hegemony. Whenever someone pointed out how an aspect of another poet’s work could resonate unexpectedly in a particular cultural context, we confirmed what a gift it was to draw on the diverse critical perspectives of accomplished poets from throughout the African Diaspora and beyond. This engagement helped us extend our sense of participation in a literary community beyond the regional and national frames we came with.

Diverse, yet grounded in a similar ethos, one that acknowledges the Transatlantic Trade as the big bang of modernity, we nonetheless found cultural gaps and dissonances often enough it seemed sometimes our only stable points of mutual agreement might be good will and the English language. Each poem we discussed demanded of everyone in the group a hermeneutic trust fall, the faith that we would keep our culturally determined values provisional as they were constantly being overwritten and revised. It’s tough to maintain that kind of flexibility without the workshop collapsing into meaningless relativism: What do you think? I don’t know, what do you think?

As workshop leader, my role was to provide a framework sturdy enough to give our discussions a sense of cohesion and momentum without predetermining the...