Dare to dream: From factory worker to best-selling author
Afaa Michael Weaver
Poet, playwright Afaa Michael Weaver is a marvelous wonder. His presence commands respect and dignity, and he exudes grace and serenity as he writes his way into history, detailing his remarkable journey out of poverty. I met him when he rolled into the Out of the Blue Art Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts like a docile cyclone to feature his poetry at the Open Bark series that host performance artists every Saturday at 8pm. His down to earth approach was an instant winner with the audience. His voice boomed around the room like rolling thunder and caressed the ears like the fingers of warm honey, such sweet melody. Having grown –up in Baltimore, poetry from one of his best selling books “Talisman” (i.e. “The Bra”) is infused with deceptively simple verses and are at times both poignant and funny as he tells his story from the point of view of a young vulnerable black boy becoming a successful Black man in the midst of racial disharmony that to this day, continues to divide this country. He has authored and edited numerous books and has received countless honors and was considered for the Pulitzer Prize, which is the highest honor to bestow upon an author. He is currently a Professor at Simmons College and gives readings in and outside of the U.S. He is a towering talent with a FABULOUS life philosophy and after months of trying, I was finally able to get his attention long enough to conduct the following interview.
The Alewife: Tell me about your background, where you grew up, where you schooled and how your environment helped shape your present identity?
Afaa: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, grew up there, and lived there until I was thirty-three years old. My parents bought a row house in East Baltimore, and I lived on that side of town until I left. Historically, the West Side was the home of the older and more middle class black families. There is a kind of rivalry. East Baltimore was the home of newer southerners from Virginia and the Carolinas. I am used to a mixture of urban and rural. So I would say that I live in Somerville because it is closer to an urban/rural feel in life. Now as to my identity, I would not identify myself as a Somerville resident. Identity is shaped by many things, as I see it, most principally the experience of the “I” or ego as we travel in life. So I would have to move into the realm of my environment as the fuller range of experience in my life. I worked in factories in Baltimore as a laborer for fifteen years. I am the descendant of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans. I do Taijiquan (Cosmos Kungfu). I speak, read, and write Chinese on an intermediate level and am always studying. I have traveled behind the Iron Curtain. I am a Bagel Bard (a gathering of poets who meet in the Cambridge/Somerville area). Making the connections between those things and a little black boy in East Baltimore is something I leave you to ponder.
TA: how did issues of Race and Class growing up affect you?
Afaa: The Baltimore of my childhood was the segregated South. I had no intimate contact with white people until I was shipped out to a white junior high school in 1963 as part of Civil Rights and integration. It was a trauma I am only now beginning to name and have yet to fully gauge. Children like me were little soldiers in the Civil Rights movement. Some of us have done well but at significant cost to our health. We were marched out into a space that was new to everyone. My parents never finished high school, and my dad’s family was sharecroppers, which was the culture that replaced slavery. They wanted the best for us, and I was the oldest child. I had to get out there and kill this lion that was living in the midst of America’s social reality. Instead of killing it, I have had to convince it that it is really a big kitty cat.
TA: Who are your influences?
Afaa: My first anthology was The Poetry of the Negro, edited by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, and so those poets, many of them from the Harlem Renaissance were among my early models. I was very fascinated with T.S. Eliot, especially “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” His melodic way with language impressed and moved me. I met Lucille Clifton in 1978, and she encouraged me in a big way. She told me to buy X.J. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Poetry. That was when it was in its 2nd edition. I still use that book for teaching. John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean is another book I bought and studied at Lucille’s recommendation.
TA: I heard that you are a Pulitzer Prize nominee? Is that true? And for what piece of writing were you nominated and when were you nominated?
Afaa: Several of my books were nominated for the Pulitzer. Tons of books are nominated each year. The significant news is that Timber and Prayer, my fifth book, was seriously considered for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. There were less than a handful of books on the table in the final round, and Timber and Prayer was one of them.
TA: Is there anything else you wish to address?
Afaa: Address? Well, I would like to tell some of these fame hungry poets that the literary life is not about counting points and running around the country and the world giving readings and having name recognition. That’s a somewhat vulgar way of approaching the literary life. Take time to live and explore your life in deep ways, integrate your art with your life and stop looking at things the way traders do on Wall Street at the end of the day. My wish in life is to realize life as a drop in the ocean, to come to understand and realize life so I can experience it with the rest of humanity in the harmonic of the way an ocean is, calm at time, cresting to waves and tsunamis at other times, warming itself under the sun or cooling under the moon, tickling the life of all that is and beyond it, living on the earth like a slap or a warm caress…all in love. Thank you so much for this opportunity!
For more information, please visit Afaa’s blog at: http://eastbaltimoremuse.blogspot.com/
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