Reflections on Callaloo
Apparently literature's demise was still being mourned in 1995. William F. Powers, in a Washington Post magazine watch column entitled "Literature's Death is Pure Fiction," prescribed Callaloo as a sure antidote to the ills brought on by reading the many "visionless hacks" published in the mainstream.* The fretful diagnoses against which Powers was writing have a somewhat quaint ring today, though his physic remains sound for what has a decade hence proven to be a chronic rather than fatal malady. Now, while still occasionally mourned, literature seems not so much dead as perhaps unevenly alive, a kind of Frankenstein's monster stitched of living and dead flesh, or a comatose patient whose many organs thrum with vigor while the long-doddering brain awaits some far-off resuscitation. In this undead corpus Callaloo is a muscular joint or, better, an indefatigable lymphatic system, dispensing its vibrant properties throughout the body.
I was first introduced to the journal as an M.A. student in Afro-American Studies at Yale. Having come to that program of study while also a law student, and after earning an undergraduate degree in human biology, with only a smattering of classes in (almost entirely white-authored) English and American literature under my belt, I encountered the Callaloo issue toward which my thesis director, Vera Kutzinski, directed me, from a vantage of deeply benighted ignorance; and, as is frequently the case when ignorance opens to the new, I mistook as standard what was actually wondrous. It was possible to imagine that all journals of literary and cultural criticism were like Callaloo, and that its erudite viewpoint on the rich universe of literary works of the African diaspora in the Americas, and on the fiercely political traditions in which the literature is rooted (though ever more tenuously, as the years go on), was just the flagship of a fleet rather than the singular vessel that it was and remains. Though it was five or six years after this initial introduction when I saw Powers' piece in The Post, and I was by that time more aware of the very motivated imposition of marginality on black cultural production—and beginning to get an inkling of the great quantity of sweat and tears that keep such a creation of quality alive and afloat, the foundational impression of the journal—the sense that this is how the work of criticism and cultural production is done and how it reads, was so strong that I could still then respond with a shrugging "of course" to Powers' endorsement. And in reflecting on the journal's thirtieth anniversary now I feel much the same; that if, as it sometimes seems, literature, especially black literature, is a weakened and withered body [End Page 285] aggressively ignored by its many brassy neighbors, then Callaloo, thirty years young, provides all the vim necessary for a more robust constitution.
Darieck Scott is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including GLQ, The Americas Review, Flesh and the Word, Giant Steps, Christopher Street, Shade, Ancestral House, Callaloo, and others.
Footnote
* William F. Powers, "The Magazine Reader: Literature's Death is Pure Fiction," The Washington Post 28 Feb. 1995 [page reference missing]. The article also favorably mentioned a story of mine, "This City of Men," first published in Callaloo and reprinted in several anthologies thereafter—which brought Powers' assessments of literary health to my attention.
