Location and Scope

In his introduction to Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), Charles Rowell highlighted two central elements: location and scope. Both concepts emphasize the range of Callaloo contributors in both geography and style. These ideas also speak to the varying landscapes of the worlds these writers imagine. Ten years since the publication of the anthology, location and scope continue to define the Callaloo experience, on its pages, at the academic conferences, and during the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.

During the 2012 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, our fiction participants extended the spectrum of emerging voices through their abundant talent and energy. Each fiction writer entered the workshop with ideas, narrative styles, and perspectives that included realist fiction, historical narratives, and speculative worlds. Our students committed themselves to creating the architecture of their story spaces and the vantage points of their characters.

That sense of individual craft was conveyed by Maaza Mengiste in “A New ‘Tizita,’” an essay on the 2010 Callaloo Conference, “(Black) Movements: Poetics and Praxis.” “Tizita” is both the Amharic word for memory and the title of one of Ethiopia’s most popular songs, with renditions as varied as the adopted countries of its singers. “It signifies the power of art and literature to adapt to its time, to mold itself out of one moment and insert itself into another, changing each as it goes along.” The creator of each rendition imbues the piece with its individual authenticity. As location and scope change, so does the created memory, real or imagined, central to the narrative. Through our workshop sessions, we honored this approach of rendering new versions.

Both Maaza and I presented the writers with an excerpt from the Albert Murray novel Train Whistle Guitar. The protagonist, a young boy named Scooter, climbed to the top of a chinaberry tree in Magazine Point, Alabama. When he described what he saw, he also told what he could not see, filling those spaces with memory and imagination. The novel showed that both the spyglass and the tree are concepts that the writer must design and build. From what perch does the narrator tell the tale? And once the perch is crafted, what does the narrative show within the circular view of the spyglass? These questions can inform the crafting of fiction no matter the geography or voice.

During the faculty reading, poetry instructor Vievee Francis presented her statement of poetics, outlining her process of imagining the world through a “panoply of eyes,” an approach that considers the wide spectrum of voices. While many of our writers created worlds that mirrored historical and cultural realities, others built new mirrors to reflect their narrative domains. The individual voice and the collective cultural history shared space. The imaginative range of the workshop participants honored Charles Rowell’s desire to create in Callaloo “an index to the infinite variety” of Diasporic writers.

In this section we present two writers whose fiction captures the elements of location and scope: Bsrat Mezghebe and Tommy Mouton. Their names, along with their Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop peers, have been added to the index of writers renewing and inventing traditions in their creative practices.