Thomas Glave |
by Alexis Deveaux |
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A passionate writer and political activist, Thomas Glave is the author of the highly acclaimed collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights, 2000). His work has garnered numerous awards and honors, including an O. Henry Fiction Award; and he is recognized as a dynamic, emerging voice in contemporary literature. Assistant Professor of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at SUNY Binghamton, Glave describes himself as someone who travels between cultural and geograhic spaces. He visits CEPA Gallery this Tuesday, October 11 (National Coming Out Day) to share his perspectives on democracy, imperialism, gay rights, and human rights struggles in the United States and abroad.
You’ve been compared to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. How do these comparisons sit with you? Have either of these writers influenced you? If so, in what way?
The comparisons are certainly flattering and very honoring, but I would be both foolish and naive to take them too seriously. People—critics and others—often seem to feel the need to say that one is “like” this writer or that writer, but they’ll say something else, or nothing at all, next week, as soon as the next interesting preoccupation comes along. I do like the idea of being considered part of a particular black/African diasporic literary tradition, but, pragmatically speaking, being compared with Wright or Baldwin isn’t going to help me write the next sentence. At least it hasn’t done so up to now. I would like to think that I’ve learned a great deal from both writers, and from many others as well. I especially love Baldwin’s elegant, precisely crafted prose, in which one can, incidentally, hear many echoes of Henry James, another writer whose work I have long loved. I also really admire Baldwin’s powerful use of African American sermonic language in his work, a language that clearly inhabited his blood as a preacher’s son. That particular language isn’t the tradition out of which I come, as someone raised closer to the Anglican Church more common in Jamaica, but I’m fascinated by the rhetorical similarities.
Can you talk about how your identities as “Caribbean” (Jamaican, specifically), “gay,” and “black male,” shape your world view?
That’s an extremely complex question! I think I can most succinctly respond to it by saying that I recognize more than ever that I am what I call an “in-between” person”: Someone who walks and travels constantly between cultures, geographical regions, types of blacknesses, and political/historical realities. In Jamaica, where the word “black” usually means, these days, “dark skinned,” I am considered “brown,” not “black,” but still of African descent. In the United States I think of myself very much as a Jamaican American—that is, a person who claims the “American” because I was born and partly raised in the U.S. as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, but who maintains powerful emotional, political, and cultural ties with the “old” country of ancestry and slave history: Jamaica. In my Jamaican American self identification the “Jamaican” is much more significant to me than the “American”, but the “American” is also important to me because I know that my parents migrated to the U.S. partly in order to provide their children with opportunities that would have been largely unavailable to us in Jamaica.
With your first collection, Whose Song? and Other Stories, what were you trying to achieve thematically?
I actually didn’t work on that book with a thematically cohesive project in mind. Along the way, I found that each story formed—required—its own distinctive path, technically speaking; I tried my best to follow that path, intuitively, but also with some awareness of technical considerations. When I began working on the stories that would ultimately make up Whose Song?, and even quite near the time I completed all of them, I didn’t look on the book quite as a whole book, but rather as the end result of a number of fictions I’d spent some years working on. I was always very interested in the particular themes that each story presented, and which I engaged with more deeply through consistent revisions of each story, but in most of the stories’ cases I wasn’t always aware of a specific story’s “theme” until I’d actually completed it—usually because I was very preoccupied with the technical writerly challenges havingto do with characters’ voices, the particular narrative language that each story required, who the characters were or turned out to be, why they did the things they did and said what they said, and so on.
As someone who is deeply involved with words and expressive ideas, what do you think about the power or lack of power of words like “revolutionary” and “radical?”
I think that the words are less important than the actions of those who claim to be one or the other, or both. I’ve known some people who would like to think that they are “radicals,” but who in fact turned out to be as capitalistic and narrow-minded as the very people they claimed were the “enemy.” I also think that some people, especially those who haven’t done political work themselves, attach romantic notions to those words. After all, it is somewhat “sexy” to be considered a bona fide “revolutionary” or “radical,” isn’t it? This “sexy”-ness and romanticizing might be two reasons why so many people adore Che Guevara’s photographic, iconic image, but know little about his actual life and work. I remain more interested in what people, myself included, are actually willing to do: are we prepared to put everything we believe on the line in order to achieve something in which we passionately believe? Are we prepared to assay a radical assessment of our prejudices in order to move toward a radical improvement of ourselves and the lives of others? I think it’s also important to remember that in a society like the U.S. today—one filled with notoriously short attention spans, a lack of commitment to scrupulous, conscientious language, and the reality that almost everything, especially language, can quickly be co-opted, appropriated, and commodified by those who exert power and influence —words like “revolutionary” and “radical,” in the wrong mouth, can quickly become both cheap and suspect.
Can you talk about the impetus behind the essays collected in your latest book, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent?
There are 17 essays in the collection, all of which emerged from very different places. Two of them were “commissioned,” I guess, as keynote addresses; several others came out of my political activism, especially in Jamaica, which was especially draining and painful at times, given the local population’s general hostility to homosexuality; one sprang up out of grief at the 2004 murder, in Jamaica, of a friend and fellow Jamaican activist, Brian Williamson; several others developed out of a sense of fury over the too-frequent elusiveness of this thing we call human rights. All that said, I also was very interested, as this book developed, in the ways in which, it seemed to me, nonfiction prose differed, structurally and stylistically, from fiction. I was curious about the possibilities of what I could achieve with nonfiction with the craft I had so far developed, as I wondered what I might learn, as someone who had previously written mostly fiction, about writing in general. I was curious, once again, about “breaking” some of the writer’s “rules” I had learned while learning new ones that might also be stretched, played with, experimented with, and, in pursuit of a new, yet unknown language and mode of expression, finally “broken” or discarded altogether.
Alexis DeVeaux is a poet, short fiction writer, essayist, educator, and biographer. She teaches at the University at Buffalo.
Thomas Glave at CEPA’s Flux Gallery (617 Main Street, 856-2717), Tuesday (Oct. 11) at 7pm. Free.
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