We Gather: Reflections on the 2015 CCWW

I

When we get our Brown University ID badges, we are told that we can present them at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum to gain free admission, so I meet my workshop in the museum’s lobby on a hot afternoon during Callaloo’s second week at Brown. “Please find the space that most sparks your imagination,” I tell them, and the participants wander, as do I; some of us settling in front of the smiling, ten-foot-high Buddha on the museum’s Asian Art floor, some of us stumbling on the brilliant collection of vintage fabrics preserved in a stack of sliding drawers in Costumes and Textiles, some of us heading over to the Pendleton House, which has been outfitted with a stunning amount of late 1800s décor and arranged in such a fashion as to make one feel that actual inhabitants slept there the previous night. A couple of participants, just a couple, come to rest with me at Steffani Jemison’s short film Personal. The film is screened on a windowless landing whose darkness is absolute enough to support the projected image: a person who knows they are not going to linger might stand, but we, arrested immediately by the sight of Black men and women moving onscreen, take the bench. In the film a Black man runs across a lawn in Brooklyn and jumps a fence; another man does the same; a third man follows, replicating the action exactly. Young Black men on a basketball court walk backwards, but their movements are such that you suspect the film has been deliberately set in reverse, or perhaps it hasn’t. Pedestrians walk past a full wall mural of Obama and Mandela side by side, but then the pedestrians stand still; the film does not reveal whether it has been stilled, or set in reverse, or left alone to unspool in real time. The commentary on racial progress, or the lack thereof, is unmistakable. We gather in the courtyard at an appointed time to discuss what we have seen, and what found object we might use as a prompt for the day’s writing. It turns out we have, all of us artists of African descent, paused to take in Jemison’s Personal. We all have different interpretations of wonder and marvel, but we were all perfectly enchanted by the museum’s most prominently displayed piece of “for us by us” art. We reflect. We discuss.

II

Our usual workshop meeting space is in Churchill House, the building that houses the Africana Studies department, our host for the summer. Alongside Churchill House is a green space called The Walk, where stands a sculpture called Circle Dance. Eleven life-sized human figures made out of aluminum turkey roasting pans hold hands in a circle to create the effect of Circle Dance: the figures are as tall as we are, and they seem lost in dance, or play, or skipping, their right legs kicked out behind them in various stages of attempted synchrony. One afternoon, towards the end of a long, delicious week of workshopping, one of the participants in my group, Rebekah Kebede, brings her very delicate, professional-looking camera and photographs other participants posing in various stages of seriousness and absurdity and hostility and kinship with the Circle Dance figures. Since the figures have no faces themselves, their emotions are open to artistic interpretation. It is up to the participants of Callaloo to bestow that upon them, and they do it with great aplomb. They enter into a conversation with this seemingly solid, unyielding art and they alter it to make their own meaning.

III

The magic of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop is all of the above and so much more. Some of us come to the CCWW from artistic and geographical spaces populated with adequate diversity and some of us come from spaces where we are the only people of African descent we see for days on end. All of us, however, will gain, over the course of two weeks, the invaluable experience of having...