An Interview with Kevin Young
- An Interview with Kevin Young
This interview was conducted by telephone in 1997, between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Athens, Georgia.
I want to begin with the title of your first book, Most Way Home. For my ear that title is an echo of rural Southern speech. How do you want us, your readers, to receive this title? I almost called this book a Southern book. I will say it. It is a Southern book.
I definitely think it comes out of the Southern tradition, both literary and folk based. And I definitely want the title to evoke that. As you probably know, both my parents are from Louisiana. And that’s where a lot of the impetus of the book comes. I really felt like when I was writing it that I was transcribing ghost stories or telling ghost stories or trying to get down the ways in which people talked. But also the ways in which family history held silence, things that are unsaid. In reading the book, especially the first section, you learn what happens only elliptically—whether a father dies or how the family loses their land or whatever. It’s not narrative in the straightforward linear sense. For me that indirection was very Southern. I guess the title too is elliptical; you know, it’s clipped. And that to me is symbolic of the language of the book and of the language of those stories.
Something very exciting has happened in African-American poetry. Actually we see it in earlier poems by Jay Wright, Audre Lorde, Michael Harper, and Etheridge Knight, for example. That is, the personal voice and the private life entered African-American poetry. It rises full force with Rita Dove and her generation of poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson Waniek, Toi Derricotte, Thylias Moss, and others. Your generation follows them. Coming not so long after prescriptions of the Black Arts, this use of self—and even what was once the unspeakable, like gay and lesbian experiences, for example—in African-American poetry is a wonderful freedom.
Right. Well there’s two things going on for me. I’d be very interested to hear what you thought of the Black Arts Movement and what it was trying to do in terms of the personal; it seems to have said the political is an important part of feeling, that celebration and Afrocentricity are valid forms of expression. This of course opened up the field for all of us and, unfortunately, for a lot of stale imitators. But, for me, people [End Page 43] like Komunyakaa and Dove who are very influential, especially on my first book, were able to write about something personal but make it part of history and recognize history as a personal process—whether the Vietnam War or the March on Washington or the Great Migration. That for me proved very important. Whether slavery or runaway slaves, the Great Depression or the Great Migration, Most Way Home moves through history. And all those events come through a personal sense of history rather than merely the broad political “this is what we should do now” sense. Yet many reviewers and readers see my book as political, or even harsh, in depicting an unromanticized Southern lifestyle.
So the personal is one frame of reference that has been freed for black writers in general—by Black Arts and after. I remember vividly reading Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah a long time ago now, and just realizing I could write about my family. Before then I felt like I had to do something grander in a more shallow sense, that surface sense of the sea or some large theme which blocked—and I thought determined—what I was trying to say. Through Dove’s book about her grandparents, I realized my family had a unique past, one I rarely saw in even black letters. That’s what Dove and Komunyakaa and that generation after Black Arts also opened up—the freedom of family, and importantly, craft—of saying it in a certain way. Not just saying what happened, but how.
People often ask me about the first...
