Callaloo, Everyone?

I wish that I could remember the first time that I dipped into the pages of Callaloo. But I cannot. I remember seeing a reference to the name "callaloo" and pronouncing it aloud to myself as a graduate student, still encased by the parochialisms of the English lit. canon that had nursed my larger ignorance of the "written" literature of the African Diaspora. Discovering that the journal Callaloo had something to do with writing the black experience, and thus had something to do with my own experience, I was distractingly puzzled by the name itself. As someone who had barely traveled beyond the high barriers that constitute the borders of Texas, and having boarded frigates of books to take me lands away with only the most dutiful of hungers for standard texts, I had no idea what callaloo meant. Was callaloo the name for some crucial thing or experience in African American culture that I had somehow missed out on? Did it have something to do with voodoo, that sphere of the spiritual strictly forbidden in my staunch Baptist home, but seeping through the crevices from "superstitious" aunts and cousins who were said to dabble in it when Baptist prayers and shouts had failed? Voodoo. Callaloo. Possibly.

On the one hand, not knowing what callaloo meant spawned in me a sort of anxiety, a prospective shame, that the measure of my professional knowledge might turn out to be the deficit of my cultural self-knowledge. On the other hand, the name callaloo re-ignited in me the sensuous pleasure of sounding words, the discipline of recitation, a belief in the almighty power of The Word fostered by years of nourishment in Sunday School, Summer Bible School, and an all-black elementary school. It was this curiosity about the spelling of words, the mysterious meanings of words, the hauntings of worlds in words, that had driven me into the rigidities of graduate school in English in the first place. The name set in motion a nest of imaginings. Was callaloo a songbird's call, like the whippoorwill, the cawing of the crow, or the mockery of the mocking bird? Was callaloo a chant? Was it an alarm? Was it an echo calling me home? Learning from the dictionary that callaloo is a type of food served in the West Indies was not much help. What was its taste? What did it smell like? How did it feel against the tongue? Smooth or grainy, bland or sharp, sweet or bitter, or bittersweet?

What a comfort to discover recently that Charles Rowell was also unfamiliar with the word when it was first suggested to him by Lelia Taylor. "When she first uttered the word callaloo," he writes, "I was immediately attracted to its sound; and when I later came to its English spelling, I fell in love with the unique appearance it makes on a page. Without knowing all of its cultural and spiritual implications, I knew that I would make callaloo the name of the journal. Actually all I knew about the word for more than ten years was just what Lelia Taylor told me" (Introduction to Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, 1976–2000). Charles's intellectual instinct in naming a journal devoted to black southern writing with a word that would be unfamiliar to many black southerners was uncanny and propitious. Each time I taste from the pages of Callaloo, I get this same sense of disorientation that I experienced on first hearing the word. It tastes so familiar but looks so unfamiliar, both homey and estranging, both rooted and floating. Reading Callaloo often generates this identity disturbance, as though temporarily inhabiting an obscure crevice nestled within the skin of blackness, shielded from the screen of an all too intimate black identity. The journal balances and imbalances that small place between the region of identity's encrusted epidermis of racial assumptions and the unchartered layers of common experience binding Diasporan people of African descent to one another beyond the mastery of the enslaving past. For the journal Callaloo, the cultural historical affinity with an African and enslaved heritage is ironically...