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19 “The Solo Mysterioso Blues” a n interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient ἀ is interview with Harryette Mullen about her collection of poems Muse & d rudge took place on April 14, 1996. ἀ e interviewer is her colleague in the English Department at UCLA. Ca LVin Bed ient : What do you think growing up in Fort Worth, t exas, has meant for your poetry? Harr ye t te MULLen : it means partly that my notion of who i was had to do with being in a southern state—but in another way, t exas isn’t southern: it’s southwestern or western. so it’s being in and actually on the edge of a southern black culture. t exas, when i was young, was a segregated state. i remember the colored and white signs on the rest rooms and water fountains, and i remember the first time we tested integration by going to a drive-in restaurant where they refused to serve us, and we left after waiting there for about thirty minutes for our hamburgers that never arrived. We were the first black family in our neighborhood, and our neighbors moved out; the next door neighbors packed overnight bags and went to a motel so that they would not have to spend a single night next to us. a nother neighbor used to let his German shepherd dog out to chase my sister and me while we rode our bicycles to the Book Mobile, and it took us about three trips before we realized that he was doing it deliberately when we saw him actually get up from his porch and open the gate and let the dog out. so that’s part of what growing up in t exas meant to me. a nd the black community was a part of it, but we had a diἀerent perspective on it because my family had come from pennsylvania and we spoke english somewhat differently . My mother was a schoolteacher, my grandfather was a Baptist minister , and we were considered to be very proper speakers of english compared 186 Chapter 19 to most of the people we lived around, who spoke definite black english and felt that our english was seditty or dicty or proper. Living in Fort Worth also meant hearing spanish spoken whenever i was outside of my neighborhood, say downtown or on buses, and wanting to know what people were saying in that language. a ctually, where i heard spanish spoken frequently was in my grandmother’s neighborhood, a black community with one Mexican-a merican family. We used to practice our few words of spanish with them. We always exchanged greetings in spanish with the Cisneros family, her next door neighbors. Bed ient : you use some spanish in Muse & Drudge. d id you have any particular purpose in mind? MULLen : i always thought spanish was a beautiful language, and whenever i had the opportunity to study it, i did. o ne of my elementary school teachers when i was still in a little segregated black school was a man from panama, who was a native spanish speaker, bilingual, so i identified spanish also with black people as well as with Mexican a mericans. The spanish is there partly because i think it’s a beautiful language and partly because i associate it with people who were a part of my life. i use it in a p olitical way, because i think we should all have more than one language. i think it’s crazy that in this country it’s considered better to be monolingual than to be bilingual or multilingual. people in a frica routinely speak three or more languages. it’s not unusual at all for people to speak three, four, or five languages . even not very well-educated people speak several languages. Bed ient : The language in your poem has, of course, a mongrel aspect. There are diἀerent registers of english. d o you think of it as a white/black text in some ways? MULLen : a lot has been said of how a merican culture is a miscegenated culture, how it is a product of a mixing and mingling of diverse races and cultures and languages, and i would agree with that. i would say that, yes, my text is deliberately a multi-voiced text, a text that tries to express the actual diversity of my own experience living here, exposed to diἀerent cultures . Mongrel comes from “among.” a...

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