美国黑人艺术运动以外：娜奥米·龙·马吉特访谈录

美国黑人艺术运动以外
——娜奥米·龙·马吉特访谈录

娜奥米·龙·马吉特罗良功

([美国]东密歇根大学,伊普西兰蒂市;华中师范大学,武汉,430079)

摘要:娜奥米·龙·马吉特是美国底特律桂冠诗人、出版家、教育家、东密歇根大学荣休教授,出版十部诗集、一部自传、两部编著,曾获美国图书奖、密歇根艺术家奖、美国大学语言协会创作奖,并入选全国非裔作家名人堂。作为美国非裔诗人和出版家,马吉特教授不属于美国黑人艺术运动阵营,却为20世纪60～70年代的黑人艺术运动美国非裔文学做出了重要贡献。罗良功教授在美国亚特兰大参加美国大学语言协会第72届年会期间对马吉特教授进行了专访。本次访谈谈及马吉特教授的文学创作、诗学观念、所受影响、对同时代作家的评价,以及她作为出版家对美国非裔文学的贡献。本访谈为了解20世纪60～70年代美国非裔文学和黑人艺术运动提供了一个独特的视角。

关键词:娜奥米·龙·马吉特,美国非裔诗歌,黑人艺术运动

[中图分类号]I106.9

doi[编码] 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2015.07.012

Luo: Dr. Madgett, it is a great honor for me to have a chance to interview you. I know you from many books and anthologies of African American poetry.

Madgett:Unfortunately, these anthologists keep printing the same poems over and over, and some of them are forty years old, instead of using new poems as much better. So my best poems are usually not anthologized, although some have been translated into foreign languages, European languages—Norwegian, Denmark, the Netherlanders.

Luo: So far you have authored ten books of poems during your literary career lasting for about 70 years. Would you like Chinese scholars and students to know a little about them?

Madgett: The early ones are out of print. But the first one wasSongstoaPhantomNightingalethat was published in 1941, just a few days after I graduated from high school. And the next one wasOneandtheManythat was published in 1956. Both of them are out of print. Then I think the third one wasStarbyStarand that was 1965. But that was reprinted many times. And then slightly different, well, some additional poems were put into the 1970

摘要作者简介:娜奥米·龙·马吉特,见。

罗良功,华中师范大学外国语学院教授、博士生导师。主要研究美国文学和英语诗歌。电子邮箱:luolianggong@163.com

edition. So you want to see 1965 and 1970. And thenPinkLadiesintheAfternoon. It was published in 1972. That was how Lotus Press got started, because I couldn’t find a publisher for it, because in 1972 everything was rage and hate-whitey, and my poems were not like that. So they didn’t follow the trend, and I had so much difficulty that I ended it up founding Lotus Press. And that was the first book published by Lotus Press. And thenPhantomNightingale:Juvenilia. It’s not the same thing as the first book even though the titles were similar. And thenExitsandEntrances. That was 1978. AndPinkLadies. Michigan State University Press publishedRemembrancesofSpring:CollectedEarlyPoems. And that includes some of the out-of-printed materials. AndOctaviaandOtherPoems—that was the winner of the CLA Award and Third World Press published that. And after that went out of print, I removed the other poems and reprinted it. Well, it’s not reprinted. It’s a different book because I have an introduction that I couldn’t have in the first one. And it’sOctavia:GuthrieandBeyond. And then the last book isCollectedIslands. I also published my autobiography,PilgrimJourney, and edited two anthologies: one of them is, I think, the most important book I’ve published at Lotus Press as calledAdamofIfé:BlackWomeninPraiseofBlackMen. And I think that book needed to be done—55 black women poets contributed positive poems about not famous black men, but just ordinary.

Luo:Ordinary men. And how about the 55 women poets? Who are they?

Madgett:I thought the women needed to contribute to that because part of the problems was that there were so many black men in our day the women had not helped. They write novels that show black men and their very negative life. I am not saying that it is true, but it’s all out of proportion. And I think somebody needed to say, and I thought it needed to be women: “We don’t see your names in the newspapers for committing crimes. We know you are here, we want to recognize you, and we want to know we’re happy and too happy in our lives.” And I wrote a very thoughtful introduction, tracing black men in America and how they have been emasculated by the society. They didn’t get where they arrived at, at this point, by themselves; society did that to them. And it’s hard to get out of the pattern once you are stuck in it. And when I was growing up, a black man could go to college and graduated. And the only jobs open to him were menial jobs. They worked as railroad porters, and things like that, whereas a black woman who was no threat could get a job as a teacher, a secretary or a nurse. Unfortunately so many black men in a married situation we would say, “Well, you can’t tell me what to do to make more money than you do.” And that helps to emasculate them. So what they do is to try to make themselves feel better. So I think that’s the most important book that Lotus Press has published.

Luo: Just now you said you got problems to get your poems published by other publishers justbecause your poems did not follow the trend. You mean the trend is the Black Art Movement?

Madgett: The hatred and, you know, rage. And I am angry sometimes about the racial situation, but it’s stated in a more subtle manner. It’s not in your face, you know. When I was in fourth grade, I went through that period of rage myself because I grew up in the city that was extremely prejudiced. There was not a single black employee in the whole school system.

Luo: I understand that you have suffered some racial prejudice and discrimination and so on, but at the same time you didn’t tend to write the so-called hatred.

Madgett: Oh, definitely right. When I was in the fourth grade. I refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I wouldn’t salute the flag, and that was when I went through my period of rage. But that doesn’t do any good, and then I finally find that there are other ways to handle this.

Luo: So you choose to turn to something...

Madgett:More subtle. But I have very few racial poems. And when they are racial, they are not about protest. Some are. But they are about racial characters, such as Phillis Wheatley. I wrote a poem about her imagining about what the middle passage must be like.

Luo: Why you refused to write some hatred poems.

Madgett: When you hate, you are not damaging the person that you hate. It’s eating you up inside.

Luo: This reminds me of Sonia Sanchez’s poems. Almost in the same year, or one year earlier before you published that book in 1972, she published her book—LovePoems.

Madgett: I didn’t love love poems when I was young. I don’t follow love all the time.

Luo: She also said: I was radical, but not as radical as other poets did in that period, I did not write poems with so much hatred.

Madgett: I think it was Nikki Giovanni who wrote a poem during that period, “Nikki, Can You Kill, Can You Kill.” I must have an end of that. I wasn’t raised that way. In spite of all these situations, I had a number of white friends. Sometimes they were in my classes. Some came from very wealthy white families, and one student’s family moved out of the city. He invited all the students in the class with him, in the fifth or sixth grade, to his birthday party. And I said: “Does that mean me?”—I always had to wonder. And for my name was called off, I went. One of the same mothers that wouldn’t let me in her house was assigned to give me a ride. But when I got there, the fellow student’s mother just hugged me when I got out of the car. So I know there are good white people and bad black people. It’s not a matter of face. I mean I don’t assume that the white person hates me because I am black, if I find out that’s the case I had nothing more to do with them. But I just assume that they would accept me as a person.

Luo: Do you think this idea finds its way in your poems?

Madgett: But I write about individuals and some poems I write in what I call black language because the characters speak that way. And because I grow up in the church, the words of hymns have influenced some of my poems.

Luo: What hymns influenced you?

Madgett:Various, various hymns. I wrote seven poems that I grouped together asACallofHymnsonMyPrayers. The reason I called that was because every time I wanted to pray, I would realize that there was a hymn that said what I wanted to say. So an influence was Charles A. Tindley, who was an early black hymns writer. I had pleasure to meet him when I was a child. He’s started out as a janitor of a white church and ended up in being a pastor. He wrote about 150 hymns. He preceded Thomas A. Dorsey, who was the father of Gospel music. But we used to sing hymns in the church. And some of these seven poems I had the epigraph from a part of one of those hymns. And then it was taken off from that. In another word, it was the African American experience from the urban black point of view. And those were in Black English, you know, the under-class or poor and uneducated black people might talk.

Luo: And in more poems you use Standard English.

Madgett:Oh, yes. Because my father and mother were particular of correct grammar; that’s all I have heard at home. And if I said something wrong, my father would correct me. So I wanted to be an honest poet as I can be, and to write in another way would be dishonest. And that’s from the characters’ point of view.

Luo: With a literary career of about 70 years, you went through different periods, and you met many different writers and poets of different periods. How do you think your creation was influenced by the African American tradition?

Madgett: I am not sure I know what the African American tradition is. One thing I still tell my students in creating writing is—and I also read it in a textbook,AStudents’GuidetoCreativeWriting, which was on the college level, that “Poetry does not tell everything; it leaves a lot between the lines; and you have to bring your own experiences to the poems. If you tell too much it limits the meaning of the poem.” I say, “It implies, it doesn’t explain.” So when I write a poem I have reached half way out to you, and you have to bring your experiences to meet mine. And we mean something different from what I meant because your experience or your identity is not the same as mine. For instance, I have a poem called “Tree of Heaven.” The tree of heaven is certainly misnomer because the leaves have a bad smell, and nobody ever would plant one. But they just crop up from nowhere, and they grow very fast. And we had an apple tree with disease in our backyard and at the same time a tree of heaven had started growing, already pushing a new fence out of line, so when we had the apple tree and the tree of heaven cut down. The apple tree died a decent death, but the tree of heaven refused to die, little sprays coming out. I pulled and as I pulled, I realized that I was not getting them at the root. And I was very frustrated until the thought came to me that the spirit of this tree reminded me of something or somebody, but I don’t say who that somebody is. Or you can say from the poem that the tree is speaking in the poem and it is growing in the hustle atmosphere where nobody wants it, but it is determined to strive. And I read that poem some years ago at a high school in Detroit that was predominated by Jewish: “I will live./The ax’s angry edge against my trunk /cannot deny me./Though I thunder down/to lie prostrate..../I would live.”—I can’t remember the whole poem. I asked a student, “Who do you think the tree is in this poem?” He said, “You are obviously talking about Jews.” I said, “I could have been.” You could consider the persecution the Jews have been through. And in another class I ask the same question, and someone said, “You could be talking about truth itself.” And someone else said, “You could have been talking about the persecution of the early Christian.” Well, I was talking about black people, and if you read the poem and didn’t know I was black, but you see everybody brings his/her own experience.

Luo: So can I understand that sometimes you wrote out of your personal experiences or your experience as an African American or beyond African American experience?

Madgett: Not necessarily as I write, because I am an African American, but I am also a mother, a daughter, a sister. I have other relationships; I am not going to spend my life only concentrating on being black. (I have written) All the relationships. I have written poems about my father, and one poem, a more recent poem called “Reluctant Light” that took me 70 years to write about my mother. So, you know, all of these relationships, and relationships with friends.

Luo: I know many of your friends are poets and writers. Then how do you think you reacted to the writers and poets like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks...?

Madgett: Gwendolyn Brooks is a true friend.

Luo: ...And the younger generation poets like Amiri Baraka?

Madgett: I have met him, but I don’t know him (Amiri Baraka) as well as I knew Langston Hughes, Gwen Brooks or Robert Hayden, but I knew Margaret Walker quite well, Mari Evans, we are good friends. I admire a great deal their works, especially the people who have gotten past their hatred. And when I was young I found myself imitating the style of, I remember, one poem of “Refugees” that I was in the style of Langston Hughes and another poem with the style of Sterling Brown whom I also knew. But I think that’s the period that you go through to find your own voice. And then I know some wonderful white poets also. I have some very good friends who write poems. But there is some contemporary poetry that I don’tget a clue of what they are talking about. Lucille Clifton, I love her poetry. I didn’t have the same experiences that she had, but she opened up a world that I live her experiences very carefully, and I was just devastated when she died. But I still like the older poets: Robert Browning—he’s always been one of my favorite poets, and Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. I don’t discard them because they’re for another time. I still like them.

Luo: Robert Browning and Walt Whitman are quite different, not only in content but also in style. Why do you think you love them both?

Madgett: I like his [Browning’s] philosophy first of all. He’s been called most Christian of poets. And I read his poems over and over again. I discovered him in high school. The idea of success in failure, the gospel of the Second chance. There are so many things in his philosophy. I love this poem, “Prospice,” looking forward, fear death. And he had a very fortunate life so he felt at the time of death that he should have to pay the pain that he did not have in his life, “Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat/The mist in my face,/When the snows begin, and the blasts denote/I am nearing the place.../For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave./The black minute’s at end,/And the elements’ rage, the fiend voices that rave,/Shall dwindle, shall blend,/Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain./Then a light, then thy breast,/O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,/And with God be the rest! ”

Luo: Do you think his philosophical idea find its way in your poems?

Madgett:No, I’ve really never written anything like Browning.

Luo: How about Whitman?

Madgett: I haven’t written anything like that, either, but hisLeavesofGrass, especially “Song of Myself,” “looks for me under your boot-soles....”—I just love his works, and, of course, Emily Dickinson.

Luo: As a Langston Hughes scholar, I am also interested in your idea and your reaction toward Langston Hughes’ legacy. So would you like to talk about this?

Madgett: Well, I think I imagined yesterday that he’s changed with the time. And I discovered him when I was really a small child, because of the book my father had. And I just thought he was immortal. Even as he’s grown older, he was still so useful. And I just thought there would never be a time when he wouldn’t be around. His works have still tested the time because people still quote and recite Langston Hughes’ poems. So he changed with the time. And he was a people’s poet. He did not write his poetry technically. Some of it was not technically as good as some of the other poets, but he could write better when he wanted to. But I think he wanted to reach the masses of people, and he certainly succeeded in doing that.

Luo:Just now you also mentioned Robert Hayden. Robert Hayden wrote poems that are hard to read, but he also kept a close eye on everyday life. How do you think you are related to and different from him?

Madgett: Well, I don’t think there are any similarities. He came from a very poor background at black bottom in Detroit. He did not know until he was well into adulthood that that was not even his name and that the family that he thought had adopted him never legally adopted him. But he writes about.... Some black people used to criticize him because he wasn’t black enough. They haven’t read his poetry if they can say that, because he wrote about historical figures: Frederick Douglass and a number of people like that. But he came from poor circumstances, and he knew what it was like to be poor and black. So I don’t know what the criticism was all about, but there was a period when we—Dudley Randall and Robert and I—read together once on the campus of—I think it was Oakland Community College. His eyesight was very very poor, so Dudley drove him back to Ann Arbor and I just went for the ride so Bob and I sat and talked. And we both resented that idea that a lot of black poets had that we owed it to our race to fight the battle. And we agreed that nobody has the right to tell somebody else what to do with their art. That is just not acceptable. You write what you feel. You have to have that freedom.

Luo: You talked about Gwendolyn Brooks. How do you think of her poems?

Madgett: I think her earlier poems were better than her later ones. When she started writing sonnets, I think Haki R. Madhubuti got to her and convinced her that she should write more black. And I think her poems suffered from that. When she became convinced that the black was beautiful, then her poems changed. But like Langston Hughes she was a very very given person. And we had her read in my church, and people aligned in the hall to get her to sign the books. She would take a lot of time with each one and just talk as long as she wanted to talk. And Langston Hughes never forgot anybody. But neither did Sterling Brown—he was such a great story teller. Oh, my Goodness. Gwendolyn was a very given person. She offered awards to students and she encouraged so many students. She, even if their poems were bad, said something very encouraging to them. So that is the kind of person I want to be.

Luo: Gwendolyn Brooks was based in Chicago, and you are based in Detroit. And there are also many other poets and publishers by African American people, like the Broadside, the Third World, and so on. So it seems that the Midwest contributed greatly to the Renaissance.

Madgett: Third World Press that publishedOctaviaandOtherPoems, and, Don (Haki)—all of us are friends. And I published one of Dudley Randall’s book, his last book, but Broadside and Lotus Press are the only two black presses in the country that publish poetry only. We always have good relationship, we’ve been great supporters to each other. I am looking forward toward future now. I am 80 years old and I’m not going to live forever. So we are in the process of making plans to merge, and then that will be called Broadside-Lotus Press.

Luo: Broadside-Lotus Press. That is a great plan. Sometimes people should put all the strength together, to make it stronger. And how do you think the presses and the people there in Detroit and Chicago contributed to the African American renaissance in 1960s, 1970s and 80s?

Madgett: In the 1960s we had a great group of poets. That is often referred to as Boone House Poets. I think you know about that, or do you? When my second book came out in 1956, it was a very dry period all over the country. Very little poetry, especially by black offices was being published. I didn’t know any other black poets in Detroit. And when my book came out, it was such an oddity that all the newspapers took and carried stories about it. And I got an invitation to read from far away as Philadelphia. And then eventually I met Oliver LaGrone who was also a sculptor. We were the only two black poets, we thought. When in the year my book came out, Dudley Randall returned to Detroit after being away for long time, so we didn’t know him yet. Rosie Poole was a Dutch scholar who was a scholar of African American poetry. She’s done several anthologies in Dutch and in English. She came to Detroit as a writer and a resident in Wayne State University, and she was a catalyst. She had a radio program called “Black Alone Bars.” She was a catalyst and drew other poets in Detroit. So we didn’t even know the rest of them existed, and once we did find each other, we started meeting each other’s houses once a month, and critiquing each other’s poetry. And then Margaret Danner came to the town from Chicago and she’s got a grant to Africa, but instead of going to Africa she asked the minister of a church that owned a vacant house next door to the church if she could live there and start some art activities. And his name was Theodore Boone. So that’s how we got to call it the Boone House Poets. So we would meet there. The house was beautiful but very poorly repaired. And almost nobody was there except the poets. There were about 5 people who came to our readings, but there was all. That whole period had been mis-characterized because we never had big audiences, and I didn’t see evidence of any other art activities there when Margaret Danner was there. But we started meeting there once a month and we would take turns reading poetry to each other. Then suddenly she dropped outside, and James Thompson moved to New York, and Harold Lawrence changed his name to Kofi Orenga moved to Africa. The group just fell apart, and then a bi-racial group formed. And we did pretty much the same things, meeting in eachother’s house. But eventually it was revealed that Margaret had spent the money that she was supposed to Africa with. And she was now not going to African. But that was a period for about 2 to 3 years that the Boone House Poets met.

Luo: When you established Lotus Press, did you know the Third World or Randall?

Madgett: Yes. I already knew Dudley Randall. The first time I met Haki R. Madhubuti, he was in my living room, taking my daughter out on a date. He was Don Lee then.

Luo: Even though you are good friends, you do not necessarily agree with each other’s ideas.

Madgett:No. In fact, there was a workshop that lay in the public library. The poets broke up with their groups, and then we all came together for general discussion. I was on the stage with Haki and Gwen. And I made the statement that I didn’t think anybody had the right to tell a poet what his/her duties were. Both of them jumped over me, because both of them thought we did have a duty to fight the battle. We had to use our pens for the battle against racism. But I held my ground and I have never wavered from that. I think everything I write, even though it doesn’t appear too racial, there is something in the back of my mind reminds me that I am a black, but it doesn’t necessarily come out in the poems. So when you talk about black poetry, any poetry written by a black person to me is black poetry.

Luo: How do you think of the change of African American poetry in the recent two decades?

Madgett:I think it’s gotten away from the poetry of ’60s and ’70s, and the subject matter is what you would want to be, of variety of things. I’m gladwe’vegot away from that. The poets of the ’60s and ’70s—like Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni—those of them survived; they have moved past that. That couldn’t last and shouldn’t last. Dudley Randall published all of those poets, but he never wrote like that.

Luo: So that is an interesting phenomenon. By the way, are you creating poems these years? And how would you like to see your literary career.

Madgett: I don’t write as many as I used to, and I’ve changed my method of writing somewhat. But I want to do a book of essays that is still in my mind, or anything else. I’ve gone through some dry periods, but now when I come back the poetry is somewhat different. I think I leave all to the critics.

(责任编辑林玉珍)