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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 635-661



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What Saves Us
An Interview with Wanda Coleman

Priscilla Ann Brown


I first became aware of Wanda Coleman and her work on July 16, 2002. One of my friends and I were talking about writers who were "funky" and "pushing the edges" of several genres. I was fascinated to learn of a writer who had been creating for decades and who had received several accolades but who was not, at that point, a staple in the African-American Literature canon. That night I went on-line and visited many of the websites where Coleman's poetry, interviews, and reviews appear. I became intrigued. The following day I made a trip to the University of Virginia and was ecstatic to find that many of her books were in its collection. I have since read all of her published works and am totally convinced that I have found the perfect subject for a book, for a vacancy, indeed, exists in the body of scholarly criticism addressing significant pieces of African-American literature, namely her work. The breadth of the topics she explores (gender, race, urban society, connectedness and disconnectedness, psychological hurting and healing, and love—in all its many facets); her experimentation with forms; the span of her career, particularly her persistence in the face of frequent slights; and her philosophy of what constitutes art and literature—all deserve deeper, scholarly exploration.

As a part of that deeper exploration, I flew from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles on Halloween night 2002 to interview Wanda Coleman the next day. Because of her gracious hospitality, I actually spent two days with Ms. Coleman, both of which gave me keen insights into her world as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a writer. We spent much of the first day taking "the tour" of Coleman's home city. She showed me the places that are key to her life and to her writing, from Marina del Rey to Hollywood to her childhood home in South Central. After showing me the city through her eyes, Coleman invited me to her house for breakfast the next morning. Over a deliciously deadly feast of real bacon, eggs, toast and leaded coffee, we began to chat. What follows is a series of excerpts from that conversation.

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BROWN: Will you talk about the purpose of art? One of the things that you do in your poetry, in your books, in your short stories, even in the columns that you've written is to foreground these very common, very marginalized, invisible people—incorporate them into poetry, into short stories, into an art form. Is your work art for art's sake, or art for the sake of social change? [End Page 635]

COLEMAN: The Aesthetic Movement? [Chortles] Baudelaire and all those guys?

BROWN: Yes, exactly, all the way back to that. But will you talk about the purpose of your art? You're definitely about creating artistic forms and artistic expression, but that creativity is often coupled with the marginalized or invisible.

COLEMAN: Well, I'm interested in the world—the world the way I've lived it. One of the things that drove me to read so voraciously when I was a child was the fact that the world as I observed it didn't exist in literature. And so, therefore, I wanted to put things that I saw in the world into literature. And because I've seen things here [in the world], they're there [in the literature]. They exist. Others must see them. And I started to ask myself, "Why isn't this in literature?" I would go to the library shelves and start with the "A" sections and just go, just start reading, working my way toward "Z." You know, looking to see who else sees what I see.

BROWN: Right, and where is my experience recorded in this literature?

COLEMAN: Or something that corresponds to it vaguely because I realize that for people who have lived in other times, that's their time and this is my...

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