The Future of Callaloo

WOUBSHET:

Welcome to the last session of this conference and celebration of Callaloo’s 40th anniversary. The panel is called “The Future of Callaloo: A Round Table.” If you are looking at the program, I am not Fred D’Aguiar. Fred D’Aguiar couldn’t be here today, unfortunately. My name is Dagmawi Woubshet, and I will be your moderator. Also, Stephen Tuck asked me to apologize on his behalf. He had to administer an exam this morning, so he couldn’t join us. But what a privilege to moderate this last session with such distinguished panelists. I’m almost tempted to break into song to say happy birthday to Callaloo. [Laughter] But my pitch is so bad. I don’t want to damage your ears. [Laughter] But Robert Reid-Pharr has an exquisite voice.

REID-PHARR:

[Singing] Happy birthday to ya, happy birthday to ya, happy birthday, happy birthday to ya, happy birthday [Applause]

WOUBSHET:

Allow me to say just a few words before I turn it to my colleagues. Because this is a panel called “The Future of Callaloo,” it is worth thinking about what has come in the past, and I want to recall the first issue of Callaloo, published in December 1976. Now, I’m glad for both personal and symbolic reasons that it was published that year. I was born in 1976, so I have two birthdays to mark, but more importantly and symbolically, it was published in the year that marks the bicentennial of the American Republic. I’m not sure if it was by accident or by design that the first issue, in fact, appeared in 1976, but I’d like to think of the fact that it was published that year as a necessary and urgent corrective to the founding principles and narratives of the American nation. We all recall that one of its founding figures, Thomas Jefferson, ridiculed Phillis Wheatley, claimed that she and by extension black people had no faculty for poetry. For narration. For love. He said our grief was fleeting. Two centuries later, Callaloo arrives and has produced, in addition to all of the extraordinary writers, two of the country’s poet laureates: Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey. And as Howard Dodson reminded us in New York, over 2,500 writers have been published in Callaloo. Think about that. So, to Mr. Jefferson, I want to say payback is something. [Laughter] Also, it’s one thing to be published once you’ve been feted, and it’s another when nobody knows your name. And Callaloo has been publishing folk when nobody knew their name, and now they’re national and international figures. For me personally, I want to reflect on what Callaloo has done to the language itself, to the English language. This is immediate to me as someone who is not a native speaker of the language, who came late to the English language—for a generation like mine and what’s called “the new African diaspora,” some of us from the continent who came post-1965. The earlier generation felt unease inhabiting the English language. African writers felt unease inhabiting the English language. A generation like mine, I can occupy the English language, feel at home in it precisely because of what black writers have done to the language itself. So when I speak English, I don’t have a complex about it because of the writers who have appeared on the pages of Callaloo and how they have made a space for someone like me. And I thought it might be apt, if you allow me, to quote. Morrison has a great line reflecting on what James Baldwin did to the English language. And I think we could extend that claim to what Callaloo has done to the English language itself. She says, “You made American English honest—genuinely international.” She’s talking to Baldwin, but we could say to Callaloo,

You exposed its...