Three for One

Hermine D. Pinson and Marlon B. Ross

Jerriod Avant © 2013

I want to tell you a story that takes the scenic route to a report on “The Trans-Atlantic, Africa, and Its Diaspora,” the Callaloo Conference held over the 2013 Thanksgiving holiday at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities. I’m going to elaborate, shortly, on a night-spun thread of monologue that took place at Oxford’s Cotswold Lodge during one of our late-night conversations. Some folks reading this narrative know exactly the place and conversations to which I refer, if not necessarily the shaggy dog story I told one night. Ben Okri would know, but more about him later. Check with Cotswold Bar habitués for errors and omissions.

In the evenings after dinner, we’d migrate from the dining room to sit in comfortably stuffed chintz chairs in the cozy bar that smelled of wool, scented wood, good whiskey, and the faint aroma of pine. We’d sit there and swap stories. I’m sure Charles Rowell, our fearless leader, told Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that I was a singing poet, and from then until the penultimate night of the conference, singing was a part of our ritual gathering. Nothing prepared me for this spirited and gregarious man who laughs easily in the company of his son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, his friends and accomplished colleagues Ben Okri, Nuruddin Farrah, Tyehimba Jess, Hortense Spillers, Fred D’Aguiar, Maaza Mengiste, Robert Reid-Pharr, Corey Walker, Jerriod Avant, writer and photographer Michael Taylor, and, of course, Charles Rowell. I could outline the literary achievements of this illustrious company, but it would take too long to list their novels, scholarly works, plays, poems, and edited works that fathomed the world’s atrocities and joys, the invention, courage, endurance of African peoples in a range of languages from English to Kikuyu to Amharic to French and beyond. During the day we sat on panels and formally considered the discourse of the African diaspora, though not without levity, spontaneity, and unexpected challenges from “outside” the academy. The final panel of the conference nourished our spirits as well as our intellects with poetry from some of the best the world can offer.

The first night of our stay I sang a blues poem by poet Estella Conwill Majozo, “Malcolm Calling Blues,” then Tyehimba Jess played a mean harmonica blues and recited poems from his Leadbelly collection. Here’s a bit of Estella’s poem, which I consider one of my standards, if you will:

A note low and guttural in the hollow of the hornA note low and guttural in the hollow of the hornBreath over brass changes how we mourn.

The song is admittedly an elegiac blues, sung not in the usual first-person singular, but in the communal “we,” first as a tribute to the martyrdom of Malcolm X but in a larger symbolic sense in honor of our cyclical rise and fall, our endurance and transcendence of evil; thus, “Hum of the earth knows that truth don’t lie./Hum of the earth gonna make the devil cry,/ Saying martyred flesh can multiply.”

The song’s prescience, that is, its anticipation of tribulation, comforts, while it also astonishes, because not long after our meeting in Oxford, Nelson Mandela, beloved ANC leader, freedom fighter, and former president of South Africa passed and, not long after that, Amiri Baraka passed. The song, in its own way, compliments a conversation Maaza Mengiste was having with Ngugi about Jean Amery’s At the Mind’s Limits, a profound philosophical meditation on the lessons of Auschwitz.

The night before we travelled to London and on to Goldsmiths, University of London, for a night of poetry, we sat together in the bar before the pungent wood stove fireplace. Although I think Tyehimba was just getting started, I was approaching the end of my blues repertoire, so I resorted to a spiritual that has survived slavery and been rendered by Fred McDowell, Sam Cooke, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Cassandra...