I have known Afaa Michael Weaver since the late ’90s, from the early days of the Cave Canem Writer’s retreat. But it wasn’t until I moved north of Boston before we became friends.
Afaa is the author of 14 collections, including the Plum Flower trilogy (The Plum Flower Dance, The Government of Nature, and City of Eternal Spring), and a chapbook, A Hard Summation. At Simmons College, he is the Alumnae Professor of English and director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. Also, he teaches in the MFA program at Drew University. And, in case you hadn’t heard, Afaa is the 2014 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, among many other honors and accolades. A true renaissance man, he’s an award-winning playwright, fluent in Chinese, a devout practitioner of Tai Chi, and one of the kindest people I know. We meet every few months for lunch at Legal Seafood in Boston (the only place that makes crab cakes almost as good as me). Afaa graciously agreed to answer a few questions.
JGO: I am asked about my name, January, quite frequently. Why did you take Afaa as your name?
AMW: It was to mark the end of a long period of mourning for my first child, whom my wife and I lost in my first marriage. He was Michael Schan Weaver, Jr. We called him Schan, so I released his spirit by releasing that part of my name and made Michael the middle of my name. The “Afaa” means oracle or priest, and family members said it is fitting. However, my father never recognized the new name, and my mother had passed away fifteen years earlier. I took the name in 1997, when it was given to me by Tess Onwueme. The name is Ibo, and my gesture in taking it is one that I was inspired to do after the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, where the spirit who takes children, the abiku, has to be appeased. The name is Ibo, but genetic research I’ve had done shows that my African heritage is Yoruba. I am mostly West African ancestrally, and that part of me is Yoruba, as the research indicates at this point. It’s all good.
JGO: Why do you write poetry?
AMW: I believe we are all given gifts at birth. My central gift is poetry. I can cook, but as a cook I won’t win any chef contests.
JGO: Your latest poetry collection, City of Eternal Spring, is part of the Plum Flower Trilogy, which consists of The Government of Nature and The Plum Flower Dance. When did you conceive of these poems as sequence of three books?
AMW: As I was working on The Government of Nature, I realized it was a trilogy. At the Brattleboro Literary Festival this weekend I read from all three books in the way of a trilogy, to show the links, and I was told it worked nicely. It felt good as I read. Each time I publish a book I get to know it in deeper, more intimate ways when I give readings from it. I am seeing the connections and contours in my work in new ways as I begin to read the trilogy. The first book, The Plum Flower Dance, is a U Pitt “reader” or “best of" covering 20 years of my book publishing, from 1985 to 2005, so the trilogy is representative of my body of work in ways that I am proud of now. Anyone interested in it should go to plumflowertriogy.org and see the plum blossoms floating down the page. As I finished The Government of Nature, I knew I would have to write more about my actual experience in Chinese culture in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China.
JGO: You also write nonfiction and are a playwright. How does poetry inform the other genres and vice versa?
AMW: My plays are a poet’s plays, and my nonfiction is a poet’s nonfiction. People who have a central base in prose and fiction have more of an inclination to a narrative line, a forward, linear motion. That’s hard for me. My celestial muse software is written in metaphor and language as sound such that I compose out of a fascination with words as opposed to sentences. Now plays are part of theater. The other big part is acting. Actors and poets have things in common, especially the lyric articulation of emotion. For me there is that natural move into playwriting and theater. It brings energy back into the poetry that makes me focus more on finer articulation of feeling. Nonfiction for me, as for many poets, is about exploring what I do as a poet and why. I try not to do too much of it because it can lead to embarrassing self-justification. Everyone does it, however. “The unacknowledged legislators of the universe…” etc.
JGO: While you live in Somerville, MA, you go back home to Baltimore quite frequently. I sense that Baltimore grounds you in a way. Why does Baltimore have such a pull on you?
AMW: I’m one of those people who sees the Boston area as a work base. Sometimes I feel like that is changing, but I am not sure. On a beautiful day in the fall when the colors are changing, there is nothing quite like the sun spilling through the trees in Boston or most any other place in Massachusetts. It is a beautiful state, as is Maryland, but I like the cool weather up here. My son lives up here now, and that helps a lot. It’s so good to have him near me. I go and watch the Ravens with him, and we keep our divided loyalties to ourselves. I made a public pledge to the Patriots on Facebook. Facebook is what “publicare” was in ancient Rome. My recovery community is also up here, and that is very important. I know lots of folks in the area, but I also feel like a member of a very small club, southern born black folk from pre-Civil War African American families. Most black folk in the Boston area are from Africa and the Caribbean. I lived and worked in Baltimore until I was thirty-three plus years old, more than half of my life to date. No other place where I have lived and worked is as much carved into the space of my spirit and consciousness. It’s the lens by which I navigate all my other experiences in life.
As a child I grew up in a black working class world, and that is the core of myself. Not everyone has such an experience, and I am reminded of that when I meet people who grew up in many places. But Baltimore is “home" for me, and it is not limiting. I have traveled quite a bit in Europe, Jamaica, and Asia. It’s not that everything is Baltimore, but rather Baltimore allows me to more fully experience the places where I visit. Somerville is a pretty good place to live, but being in Somerville as a black man is a singular experience. I turned around on the sidewalk one day to see a white woman trying to smell me. She stopped and eased back, as I knew her just a little. But to smell me? I was so upset and bewildered. Having said that, I mostly get along here, but “sometimes" when I put my thoughts, feelings, and opinions on the table, things do change. Liberalism up here is something some folks use to avoid more intimate confrontations with themselves. But that’s liable to happen in many places in the country.
As a black man with my particular experience in life there is a certain loneliness. I left fifteen years of factory work and went into the wide, wide world, like a science fiction movie, going where no black factory worker has dared go before. So in Baltimore I am in the Headquarters of the Star Trek Federation where no one tries to sneak up behind me to smell me or follows me out of a building trying to touch me. That has happened, too. In Baltimore weird things happen, too, but I go home and feel good things I can’t feel in other places, things that amount to the summation of an experiential love. It is where I was born with a gift that has required my exploration of other worlds in order to cultivate it. So maybe I am buying into Boston a little at a time, as my friend Reggie Gibson says in a poem of his I like very much and which is all about him moving here from Chicago, or Chitown. That’s a tough adjustment, too. I know Chicago enough to say that.
JGO: Thanks, Afaa, for taking the time to answer my questions.
(Lunch soon?)
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