Renaissance Woman: An Interview with Mari Evans

In May 2012 I returned from overseas to an email from the English Department administrative assistant: “A woman named Mari Evans called looking for you and would like for you to call her back.” My stomach dropped and my heart sped up. I’d recently published an article on Ms. Evan’s work contending that she hasn’t received much attention because she doesn’t fit easily into categories academics have created to understand poetry written during the 1970s. She was part of the Black Power Movement, but she also embraced tenets of women’s liberation. She wrote poetry that conformed to the dictates of the Black Aesthetic, that was anthologized with poetry by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni, and that grouped her on roundtables with Baraka, Haki Madubuti, and other touchstone Movement poets; yet, she also looked to classical, Western, or “white” forms in her work. I argued that these and other seeming contradictions have made Ms. Evans and her work harder to categorize than some of the work of her poetic contemporaries. I strongly advocated we revisit her work because of her importance in and to African American letters. Indeed, Evans has published several poetry collections, children’s books, critical essays, and musical works. Her edited volume Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984) was one of the first not only to treat contemporary black women writers as a field of critical study, but also to combine secondary scholarship with writers’ essays on their aesthetic aims. Her awards and recognitions include a John Hay Whitney Fellowship (1965), a Woodrow Wilson Grant (1968), an award for the most distinguished book of poetry by an Indiana Writer (1970), a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Award (1982), the Black Academy of Arts and Letters’ award for I Am a Black Woman (1971), fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and pan-African recognition in the form of a Uganda postage stamp in 1997.

Understandably, I was surprised and a bit unnerved when the subject of my article called me to discuss it. Ms. Evans was a gracious reader and critic of my piece, offering me compliments, additional insight into her work, and a correction (she rightfully challenged my use of the term “dialect,” noting “idiom” was more appropriate because it forwards Black self-determination and resists the history of white condescension embodied in/by “dialect”). Since that time we have corresponded by phone and mail. In September 2012 I asked Ms. Evans if I could come to Indianapolis to interview her. She politely declined, saying that she wasn’t writing much these days, that she had much else she wanted to, and that she was ready to retire from public life. I thanked her for her work and her willingness to correspond with me. I was surprised once again when Ms. Evans called me in January 2013 and said, “I’ve been trying to become a recluse, but my friends won’t let me. So, if you’re still wanting to come and interview me, I’d be happy to have you.”

In June 2013 I flew to Indianapolis to meet with Ms. Mari Evans a few weeks shy of her ninetieth birthday. I found her home in what she calls Indianapolis’s “‘hood”—a predominantly African American neighborhood that bore signs both of hard times and rebirth. She and I spent the day together—nine hours or so—sharing meals, telling stories, playing the piano, singing, and talking about her life of artistic creation and social activism. The following is taken from that extended conversation’s transcripts. I have edited out small talk and intrusive or repetitive utterances like “ya” and “um,” and I have combined some answers into one, removing my affirmative and/or cajoling interjections so that Ms. Evans’s responses “flow” uninterrupted.

MATTHEWS

In the beginning of your essay collection Clarity as a Concept you say first and foremost “I’m a political writer.” Toni Morrison’s essay “Rootedness” from your collection Black Women Writers too claims, “If anything I do in the way of writing novels...