"Speaking from a Creolized Environment": An Interview with Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Photo by Peter Bailley.

This interview was conducted by telephone on June 1, 2004, between College Station, Texas, and Talladega, Alabama, where Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was visiting with her family.

ROWELL: Your generation lives in the shadow of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was a wing of the Black Power Movement. In fact, few of the writers of your generation are direct descendants of the poets of that movement. I don't think that any of us who are culture workers—be we poets, scholars, visual artists, critics, or whatever—can truthfully deny that we are in the shadows of that movement or that we were—and still are being—influenced by that urban phenomenon and by the Civil Rights Movement as well. Some of the architects of the Black Arts Movement are still alive and producing work that grows out of the aesthetic dicta of the movement. I immediately think of Amiri Baraka. Your father, Lance Jeffers, wrote poetry during that movement. What does the Black Arts Movement mean for you as poet and intellectual, cultural worker?

JEFFERS: I definitely stand on the shoulders of the Black Arts poets. Right now, we are experiencing a surge of publications by young African-American poets; the poets of the Black Arts Movement made that possible. When I first entered a creative writing program, I was the only black poet in that program, and the kind of racial polemic established by Black Arts Movement poets was very important for me at that time. Their example gave me so much courage.

I still define myself as someone with very radical racial politics, something I inherited from my mother and my father who were cultural activists. I've inherited that political sensibility, and I'm very afraid every time I put a poem down on the page. Am I repaying that debt to my literary forebears? Am I being true to myself as an individual artist as well as true to my community? It's daunting sometimes.

However, I hope that my work interrogates a bit more of the emotional life of blackness as well as the political stance of that identity. There's complexity in blackness, it's not just one thing.

ROWELL: In spite of your saying that you owe the Black Arts Movement a debt, I see your work as closer to contemporary African-American poetry created since and outside the dicta of that movement.

JEFFERS: Well, my work has changed. When I entered graduate school, I needed the Black Arts Movement poets because of their anger. As I said, I was the only black poet in the program and my program wasn't very diverse. So I found my friends on the page, so to speak. As I started feeling less defensive about my blackness, I started moving away from obvious racial anger in my work and toward nuance. That's why my work seems contemporary because after a certain point, I started reading poets like Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ai, and Cornelius Eady. And I gave myself permission to start reading modern and contemporary white poets.

Also, as a feminist, I was, and continue to be, confused by a real lapse in Black Arts Movement rhetoric regarding gender equity. As someone who is sympathetic to the gay community and who has, I hope, very radical politics concerning gay rights, I don't find a real acceptance of homosexuality in the Black Arts Movement. There's a lot that's missing and for that reason, I tried to find my own balance.

If you were [to] read the first poems I wrote at the University of Alabama, like "Poem for Me and Mine," which was published in The Gospel of Barbecue, or "That's Proof She Wanted It" which appears in NO! [a documentary about rape in the black community written and...