Stranger in the Quarter

I’m waiting for my baggage at night in the New Orleans airport when I hear French spoken over the intercom. I’m tired and slightly disoriented, and for a moment I startle and wonder how it’s possible that I’m still in my homeland of Canada after a long day of flying. I listen a bit more carefully and realize that the words in French are pronounced in ways that are slightly unfamiliar to me. I look around, my attention sharpening, and I see that there are many black people working in the airport. There’s a night crew, all black, cleaning and buffing the floors while the airport remains relatively empty. There are other workers on night shifts, again all black, performing with great care the manual work that is essential in order to keep an airport running efficiently. I observe this with mixed feelings, having immigrant parents who are themselves working class, a black mother who was a domestic worker, and a South Asian father who was a factory laborer—loving parents who performed hard work all of their lives with great dignity and ethical conviction, and who contributed to their adopted country in ways that more privileged people don’t always care to acknowledge. So I’m torn when observing this scene in the New Orleans airport tonight. I don’t quite know how to feel about the fact that there are only black people doing manual work here, and I don’t quite know how to feel of the circumstances of my own arrival here, not as an immigrant laborer, as my mother and father were when they came to North America, but as a university professor and a writer who has somehow been invited to participate in a retreat that will bring together some of the most talented and accomplished black critics and writers today. I guess this is how I’d begin to describe my experiences arriving in New Orleans for the Callaloo retreat. I hear French, one of the official languages of my homeland, and for a moment I’m confused. But then I see. Given the stark racialization of labour, and the promise of participating in a discussion of profound sophistication on the topic of black writing, I’m very obviously in America.

The Callaloo retreat has been designed to bring together poets, fiction writers, and critics from a variety of regions and countries for an intense four-day workshop on the present state of African Diasporic arts and culture. The retreat will feature readings, presentations, and panel discussions, and, judging from the carefully planned and ambitious program, it will be a most demanding intellectual experience. But the retreat will also include trips to local restaurants and music venues, as well as a guided tour of the devastation that afflicted New Orleans during the late summer of 2005, when people around the globe, including in Canada, saw images of a natural disaster but also plain evidence of the racial hierarchies that are still, for so many, a brutal fact in an America (and Canada) that has increasingly come to imagine itself as “post-racial.” The retreat is the brainchild of Charles Rowell, the esteemed founder and editor of Callaloo, and it will kick off with an evening reading, during which I (to my great honour) will be allowed to present some of my own fiction. I don’t normally get nervous before a reading, but I do experience a moment of panic when I look at the program and observe that I will be sharing the stage with Ed Roberson and Carl Phillips, poets whose craft and high accomplishments are bound to make any new writer discomfortingly self-conscious. I experience similar feelings of self-consciousness during other moments in the conference: when reuniting with Suzette Spencer and hearing about her latest and most admirable work; when meeting Michelle Wright in person for the first time, and getting an exciting glimpse of her upcoming project aimed polemically and excitingly at the Black Atlantic paradigm; when seeing Fred D’Aguiar again, a fiction writer and poet that I have respected enormously...