BIANCA LYNNE SPRIGGS & JEREMY PADEN

Introduction

Affrilachia is both a geographic and a cultural space. And, as Shauna M. Morgan in her preface and Paul C. Taylor in the opening essay of this anthology note, it is also an ongoing literary and political concept shaped by the intent to lend voice to the voiceless.

There is a temptation when thinking in regionalist, aesthetic, and even political terms to go narrow, to say that this but not that may be admitted into the canon. Literary scholars are quite in love with drawing boundaries, as erecting finite borders fuels our modes of thinking. It is in our nature to classify and qualify genre to establish order and make sense of the abstract, but also to exert a kind of control. And, while it is true that the Affrilachian Poets, founded by a small group of students and professors, were born at the University of Kentucky, early on, they recognized the expansive nature of this new venture. They could imagine a prehistoric world where perhaps, before the drifting away of tectonic plates, the Appalachian Region and the West Coast of Africa were once merged. Thus, the term Affrilachia as both theory and practice might be viewed as a way of reuniting two disparate sides of one family tree.

It is in the spirit of creating inclusive cultural and spiritual spaces that the founding members of the Affrilachian Poets opened up the term to include all thirteen states touched by the mountain chain that gives us our name, whether in the south or the north. Furthermore, they opened up the term to include all portions of those states, whether in the coastal plains, riparian zones, plateaus and foothills, or the mountains proper, as a way to continue the conversation that region may operate as a cultural space and blur borders. While this widening of the lens corresponds directly to the political project of Affrilachia, this does not mean the collective ignores the importance of place as a wellspring for community and the imagination, to cite some positive benefits of regionalism. Or, how regions get bound to national myths and stereotypes, to cite some of the possible negative pressures that being from a place might give.

Along with deciding to open up the term Affrilachian to include poets from Louisville, Danville and Conway, South Carolina, the collective also decided that aesthetic freedom was preferable to a group centered around formal restrictions. The early leaders decided that along with experiments in shaping language, there should be a commitment to telling the overlooked stories of this place called Affrilachia.

Likewise, and as the name unequivocally signals, Affrilachia is rooted in the African diaspora and is largely a collective of writers whose roots trace back to the forced migrations of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Yet, and this is part of the inclusive nature of this collective, over the years, the group has brought in writers of Hispanic, Arab, Filipino, Hindu, and Chinese descent. At times, the geographical, aesthetic, and racial diversity of the group, have caused critics to wonder whether the Affrilachian Poets are a true collective of writers working toward a recognizable goal. But, the fuzzy geographical boundaries, the importance placed on story and witness over stylistic homogenity, and the occasional welcoming in of writers whose history of migration to these mountains is different than the majority of group, are not from an intellectual or aesthetic sloppiness, but from the political and ethical call at the heart of the group to name and tell the stories not attended to when Appalachia is understood only as white.

The impulse to be geographically inclusive allows our spectrum of members to identify with the challenges and mysteries of the region no matter where we are in the world. No matter where we hail from originally or where we move towards next, to be Affrilachian is to carry the pulse of the mountains within us. We are their allies. We are their kin. Affrilachia’s expansiveness comes from paying attention to the margins and noting how, like with the top and bottom edges of a book’s page, margins are always folded into the heart.

Our 25th anniversary anthology is divided into Root, Limb, and Tongue. The metaphors are corporeal and botanical. They are grounded in the soil of Affrilachia. They sprout from that earth and grow large and strong and the limbs leaf out and the canopy casts shade and provides harbor for many. And from that rootedness and that harbor these metaphors speak out. Another way to think about this is that home and history pull up nutrients into the trunk and limb of story and identity and unfurl into the tongue of prophet and witness.

But, as can be seen in the poems of the founding members collected in Root (those of Finney, Walker, Wilkinson, Ricardo Nazario y Colón, Norman Ellis, and Coleman), to tell stories grounded in the life and experience of poets born and raised in Affrilachia is to also write a poetry of witness, to engage in the prophetic act of naming and claiming identity and place. Thus, prophecy creates room for spaces that challenge exclusionary narratives, welcomes and provides shelter for all those forced to wander through space, time, and cultures. From the Root, grows the Limb. And these poems, like those of Quintos, Hagan, Priest, Wilson still explore and address Affrilachia’s multiple identities. The question of who we are and how we move through the spaces where we find ourselves is perennial. The poems in Limb branch out into stories of family, into history, and into how identity and politics are always bound up together.

Limbs, in turn grow up and out, they split and divide and unfurl into leaves, and leaves, like tongues rustle and whisper. The poems collected in Tongue, are deeply rooted to place and identity, like the poems before, but they are explicitly aware that poetry is by nature political. They are poems that contest and speak back to power. But they also affirm and speak consolation. And, lest readers fall into the trap of thinking that all politics have to do with Black/White relations, oppression, resistance, etc. the poems in Tongue have multiple audiences. Indeed, some are to and for each other and are happily unconcerned about speaking to a larger public.

There is so much about this family of writers and artists, activists and educators, that we cannot show you through this collection. We cannot show you how we’ve watched one another’s children grow up—call them niece and nephew. How we smack-talk, laugh hard, turn up the music, clink mason jars, and love one another the hardest through every trial and triumph. How we mourn each other’s tragedies. Crow over one another’s successes. How somebody will have a hand outstretched to welcome you home, no matter how long you’ve been gone. How we won’t ever quit you. We can’t recreate the last twenty-five years of family in a literal sense, but it is our hope that you get a feel for it anyway. This anthology is the closest thing we can offer to what it’s like being along for the ride on an Affrilachian road-trip, or at a reading, or in someone’s living room late at night. It’s the closest thing we can offer to welcoming you into the fold. It is our way of saying, you, like we, are travelers, pull up a chair, raise a glass, tell us your story.