Preface
25 Years of Revolutionary Art: Cultural Cartography and the Expanding Landscape of Affrilachian Poetics
“Any portrait of land worth its salt must also include a landscape of its people worth its weight in blood, sweat, and tears” opens Nikky Finney’s review of Affrilachia, Frank X Walker’s first book of poems (213). Indeed, Walker’s debut collection named and helped to define a region and its people. Appearing in the Journal of Appalachian Studies alongside Chad Berry’s essay “Upon What Will I Hang My Hat in the Future? Appalachia and Awaiting Postmodernity,” Finney’s review marked a propitious entry into the critical terrain of Appalachian Studies. Berry’s piece, which asks important, existential questions such as “What is Appalachia?” does so with little consideration for a non-white Appalachia. Rather, it laments the postmodern thrust which attends to representation, and argues that “it is time to begin examining what Appalachia is and move beyond what it is not” (Berry 126). Finney’s review ironically notes what Berry fails to fully consider: Appalachia is, in fact, a map of racial and ethno-cultural heterogeneity. She declares that Walker’s Affrilachia carves out a twenty-first-century almanac of human geography that illuminates where the waterways of human hearts and blades of bluegrass meet to form a new/old sacred ground. It is an essential collection of poetry that must be included in the rich literary tradition of Appalachia, else half the story be told” (Finney 215).
Certainly, the corpora of Frank X Walker’s and Nikky Finney’s work formed the bedrock of what stands as Affrilachian Cultural Cartography. As the progenitors who collectively make up the fountainhead of the Affrilachian Poets, Walker and Finney exemplified the map-making and fostered the kinship of which bell hooks speaks in her text Belonging: A Place of Culture. The space of their community made “connections between geographical location and psychological states of being” and remained committed to “strategies of resistance that were life enhancing” and rooted in strong family values and an unbreakable connection to the ancestor (19). Walker’s designation, Affrilachia, clearly emerged from a keen understanding of the multiple rootedness of the folks he located in that reality. The founding members of the Affrilachian Poets were all engaged in mapping Blackness both as race and culture, but even more importantly as an idea or consciousness emerging in and shaped by the region and its connection to a global awareness of liberation. These artists, who number almost forty today, continue to shape the literary landscape within and beyond the region. Frank X Walker’s effort to “[challenge] the notion of a homogeneous all-white literary landscape” in Appalachia can be described as a form of what Evie Shockley describes as “Renegade Poetics” when moments of “race-related wrangling has led the poet beyond what experience has shown will do the job and into a space of formal risk-taking” (Shockley 9). Walker’s innovation does not stand alone, however, as the entire collective has taken on the malevolence of a region and nation still mired in its legacy of heinous misdeeds, and has crafted linguistically daring poetry which journeys from the page into lived experiences and back again. In some instances, as with the work of Ricardo Nazario y Colón, the text marks an internal poetic revolution (a veces sólo en Español) that is deeply intimate and restraining in content and form.
The Affrilachian Poets have spent two and half decades not only producing work with a distinctive poetics of liberation, they also continue to mount a formidable movement against the myth of an all-white region while also documenting those nuanced realities of an ever-changing U. S. American South. Critic Kathryn Trauth Taylor argues that Affrilachian writing works as “performative rhetorical ecologies as a way of recognizing, conceiving, and valuing groups who live within the liminal, or “in-between” spaces of culture” (par 3). I contend, however, that this is not an interposal peculiarity; Affrilachia is, in fact, central to the Appalachian experience. To speak of the emergence of Appalachia without Africans and African-descended people would not only be naïve, but also inaccurate; this has been true in every aspect of production—cultural, social, economic, and otherwise. Especially among the Affrilachian Poets there exists a broad cultural reach which extends beyond genre and discipline. Theirs is an aesthetic of liberation that should never be mistaken for a kind of singular protest literature with “an appeal to white morality” (Neal 185). Rather, we must acknowledge the Affrilachian Poets’ liberatory practice of producing work for an audience of people about whom they write. Like the community formed by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas and others who came together to launch Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, or the mid-twentieth century Black Arts Movement writers, who, in their quest to rediscover “the revolutionary potential in Blackness itself,” the Affrilachian Poets’ purposeful work stands in a tradition of the most dynamic and impactful writing of our time (Henderson 183). One need only look at Walker’s historical poetry or his most recent collection, Affrilachian Sonnets, which at once covers the vast cultural and natural landscape, even as it deals with intimate familial relationships. The tradition of storytelling, linked to the lineages of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, flower in the fiction of Crystal Wilkinson. The timbre and rhythms of Appalachia resound in her short stories and new novel The Birds of Opulence, and the worlds of her narratives present an undeniable Affrilachia which lives in the soil, the rivers, the trees—even in the very air we breathe. Just as with its emergence, the future of Appalachia is inextricable from Affrilachia and its cultural producers. Bianca Lynne Spriggs’ brilliance in visual art, poetry, and film (and, quite frankly, in any medium she sees fit), pushes the boundaries of our imaginations deep into realms still unknown.
The fans and followers of Affrilachian Poets, much like the faces who comprise the worlds of their texts, are scattered throughout the region and globally, and they bear witness to an art that is coupled with abounding activist work buttressed by bold political stances. Even though many APs have found homes in the academy, they persist in their resistance to it and other neoliberal forces, and move to create dissent in the face of evolving injustice. In their quarter of a century, the Affrilachian Poets’ art, life, and activist work, have marked the region and the country in indelible and extraordinary ways. What of this art, then—these words—as Jeremy Paden has written—which are “sweet to the tongue / but bitter to the belly” of many (lines 8–9)? This art thrives. It grows. It moves beyond the region, out into our troubled nation, and even beyond the continent to forge a new world, to stand up for justice, and to call truth’s name in ink and song.
Berry, Chad. “Upon What Will I Hang My Hat in the Future? Appalachia and Awaiting Post-Postmodernity.” Journal of Appalachian Studies. 6 (2000): 121–130. Print.
Finney, Nikky. “Book Review: Affrilachia.” Journal of Appalachian Studies. 6 (2000): 213–215. Print.
Henderson, Stephen E. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music As Poetic References. New York: Morrow, 1973. Print.
hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Angelyn Mitchell, Ed.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Print.
Paden, Jeremy. “Honey and Wormwood.” Broken Tulips: Poems. Lexington, KY: Accents Publishing, 2013. p. 10. Print.
Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. Print.
Taylor, Kathryn Trauth. “Naming Affrilachia: Toward Rhetorical Ecologies of Identity Performance in Appalachia.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 21 June 2011. Web.