Introduction

In honor of Black History Month, the Missouri Review has compiled an anthology of interviews to celebrate some of the most renowned Black voices featured in our print pages over the years. These seven interviews offer a look at the art and thought of Chinua Achebe, Ernest Gaines, Terrance Hayes, Jamaica Kincaid, Zakes Mda, Natasha Trethewey, and Margaret Walker. Their writing spans genres, generations, and continents and addresses, both directly and implicitly, the crimes of colonialism in Africa and American slavery. Their themes are universal and enduring: family; family history; the relationship between self, place, and culture; and, of course, the struggle for justice. From Margaret Walker and Ernest Gaines, with their inextricable links to the Deep South, to Chinua Achebe with his Igbo roots and Natasha Trethewey’s perpetual return to Atlanta, these authors have produced remarkable writing that asserts the authority of Black experience. Ernest Gaines ponders this eloquently in his interview. I did not know I wanted to be a writer as a child in Louisiana. It wasn't until I went to California and ended up in the library and began reading a lot that I knew I wanted to be a writer. I read many great novels and stories and did not see myself or my people in any of them. It was then that I tried to write. There were very few people on the plantation who had any education at all, especially the old people… They had never gone to school, and they didn't have any books. I used to write letters for them. I had to listen very carefully to what they had to say and how they said it. I put their stories down on paper, and they would give me teacakes. If I wanted to play ball or shoot marbles, I had to finish writing fast. So I began to create. I wrote about their gardens, the weather, cooking, preserving, anything. I've been asked many times when I started writing. I used to say it was in the small Andrew Carnegie Library in Vallejo, California, but I realize now that it was on the plantation.