“Love Won’t Come Easy”

Carter Mathes

Callaloo © 2012

In October of 2012, I participated in the Callaloo Conference for the first time. Because I had heard and read much about previous conferences, I felt quite fortunate to be invited into the intellectual community Charles Rowell and the conference committee had created. Just as the journal Callaloo complicates divisions between the creative and critical, so too did the conference challenge these boundaries through a series of panels and performances that focused on the concept of love in its emotive, phenomenological, epistemological, and political manifestations. The conference framework, with its positioning of love as the through line, provided an array of perspectives on the refashioning of black intellectual, geographic, and disciplinary spaces. This idea of refashioning is reflected in my title, which is intended as a reference to Augustus Pablo’s dub remake of the Heptones classic track and the way that the composition sonically pronounces the fractured, transcendent, evocative quality of love. Indeed the capacious Callaloo project in all of its manifestations—the journal, the conferences, and a new book series—is itself a labor of intellectual and transformational love.

Arriving on Friday morning, I first listened to the day’s opening panel, “Sacred Love and Society,” led by presentations from Corey D. B. Walker and Marla Frederick. Then, with the lyrics to the Bad Brains mid-1980s early Afro-Punk, Rastafari, hardcore anthem, “Sacred Love,” resonating between the panel’s title and the convergence of diaspora, faith, and blackness that Walker and Frederick interrogated in their papers, I took my place as a respondent to the next panel, “Writing Love in the African Diaspora.”¹

Keith Leonard and Michael Stone-Richards led the panel with papers that focused on Black Arts Movement poetry and Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel, Junetheenth. Leonard, in his paper, “Love in the Black Arts Movement: The Other American Exceptionalism,” offered an ambitious, thematic reading of Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Nikki-Rosa,” drawing our attention to Giovanni’s formulation within the poem that, “Black love is Black wealth,” and pushing against an interpretation of Giovanni’s claim as a subtle, or not so subtle, underwriting of American idealism. Instead, Leonard argues that Giovanni’s call for black love, and the black nationalist discourse of love within the Black Arts Movement more broadly, is transgressive in its reformulation of citizenship, identity, and difference, avoiding a vision of black nationalist possibility in which authenticity and integration become fixed markers of identification and expression. Leonard suggests that black love, read as radical communality, competes and often outweighs racial difference as a simplistic basis for struggle. This love is based upon an idea of black consciousness that takes seriously the idea of living in a nation within a nation. Arguably our foremost theorist of transformational love, James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, discusses the relationship between love, power, and race, as one in which black Americans are attuned to love in a critical sense of the concept (what Baldwin terms, “the tough and universal sense of quest and growth”) that demystifies whiteness, defining it primarily by the ability to hold power, for, as Baldwin asserts, “white people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.” The challenge and theoretical payoff of Leonard’s argument, then, is that the distinctively communal love posed by black nationalism becomes, as he put it, “an exceptionally radical democratic ideal,” one that critically challenges the foundation of white American democratic citizenship through a deeper critical realization of what that purportedly universal idealism is supposed to represent. Leonard asserts that Giovanni and other Black Arts Movement writers give poetic life to an alternate epistemological and emotional grounding of revolutionary love directly and indirectly represented on the page and recognized by a black nationalist body politic that feels this love as a sensibility emerging from the long historical memory and consciousness of black Americans who reject the “passive spiritual submission” delimited by a strictly Christian version of the concept, instead acknowledging love as an “active pursuit of a morally justified and socially...