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  • An Interview with Brent Hayes Edwards
  • Charles H. Rowell

This interview was conducted on June 29, 1999, by telephone between Charlottesville, Virginia, and New York, New York.

ROWELL

I want to begin by asking you about beginnings. We were talking about this some time ago: the way you came to your decision to study language and literature, the particular writers and writings that pushed you in that direction. Can you narrate in a bit more detail your formative period in coming to intellectual work?

EDWARDS

I can’t say I’m comfortable talking in terms of a “formative period,” partly because it’s such an inherently fictional exercise, and partly because one wants to conserve the openness and freedom of starting out—which I feel I’ve only just begun to do!

I think we were talking about what it means to recall certain moments, certain crossroads, certain parcours, as you say in French (basically

the ground you’ve covered)—what it means to reconstruct, however fictively, those tales of origin. And I was remembering when I began to read Callaloo, in fact, as one of those origin tales. I came across an issue in the winter of 1987 that featured two essays that became very important to me: Nathaniel Mackey’s “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” and Jay Wright’s “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance.” I was especially struck with Mackey’s piece, about figurations of black music in literature, and its concern with the ways literature invokes stammering, stuttering, obliquity—what Mackey calls “telling inarticulacy”—in trying to capture the elusiveness of the music on the page.

I actually went back to that volume of the journal recently, volume 10 I think, and was surprised to notice how many of the names featured in those issues are writers I read closely now

there’s a story from Samuel Delany’s The Bridge of Lost Desire, a section of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Wilson Harris, Maryse Condé, poets like Ed Roberson, Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nicolás Guillén . . .

Still, as Delany points out at the beginning of The Motion of Light in Water, memory is a tricky instrument—we keep having to ask ourselves why we turn to particular origin tales, why we need to stand on particular ground. And so I can push myself to think that same winter from other directions, to focus on other layers: it was around the same time that I started studying modern dance seriously, for example. It was just before I started playing in a Balinese gamelan orchestra, which was very important to me for a while. I came across Mackey’s piece around the same time as Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, too, which for a couple of years I read over and over as a bible of jazz [End Page 784] criticism and a listening guide—not coincidentally, this was the moment I discovered much of the music that’s stayed with me: Betty Carter, Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor. (But even there, there are layers: it was the music professor who ran the Balinese gamelan, Michael Tenzer, who first lent me his Betty Carter albums.) There’s a fragment where Walter Benjamin writes that memory isn’t at all a tool: it’s a medium, and maybe that’s a better way to think about it—you get into the past, you swim in it, but you don’t simply use it or rediscover it. You don’t control the currents.

ROWELL

How do such a variety of influences come together for you, though? What do they represent, as a whole?

EDWARDS

Well, again, I can’t totalize them. But part of it certainly is what one might call a critical orientation towards issues of diaspora, which is something that attracted me in Callaloo—towards multiple languages, cross-fertilizations, voyages (geographic or imagined), the complexities of intellectual connections and influence, what Wilson Harris calls “cross-cultural poetics.” I’ve always been more concerned with those kinds of issues than with taking up the myths of any singular or hermetic tradition. I suppose that along with that goes an interest in work...

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