With AiW Guests: Chris Abani, Kwame Dawes, Joanne Hichens, and Hilda Twongyeirwe.
Edited by: Ashawnta Jackson and Jessica Powers for #readingAfrica 2024 (Catalyst Press).
Jackson and Powers: Anthologies offer readers the opportunity to explore multiple writers — their voices, experiences, and styles. And, as Hilda Twongyeirwe points out here, they can operate as communities for writers and readers. But, as all the editors in this interview illustrate, anthologies are a more complex genre than many of us recognize.
Not simply a way to gather the “best of” writing or the “classic” writing of any given demographic, not simply a way to shine light on a theme by providing multiple perspectives from a variety of writers on the same idea — both important and time-honored aspects of the genre — they can also, problematically, be reductive, a way that individual writers can be reduced to a singular poem, essay, or story. Readers may engage with only a select work or two from any given writer in a collection, not going on to explore that writer’s fuller body of work.
Even given this, anthologies are valuable for what they open up and as points of reference, propelling readers to further exploration. For #ReadingAfricaWeek 2024, we — Ashwanta Jackson and Jessica Powers (Catalyst Press) — asked four editors of prominent anthologies of African writing — of fiction and real-life stories, and poetry — for their thoughts about the value of anthologies, how they each operate as editors of collections that include a diverse array of writers, and why we need to read more of them…
Kwame Dawes is the author of multiple books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival.
Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, received a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an MA in English, Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has resided in the United States since 2001. He is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University.
Joanne Hichens reflects on life – the lighter side and the underbelly, with humour and compassion. As a child, books were her refuge, particularly those where good and evil fought it out till justice was served and the world was once more in order. She is constantly aware of this delicate equilibrium. As author, she writes crime, memoir, and is currently working on a collection of short stories. She is the editor of multiple anthologies by African writers.
Hilda Twongyeirwe is an editor and has also published creative and non-fiction works in different anthologies and Journals. She is currently the Executive Director of FEMRITE – Uganda Women Writers Association. She is a recipient of 2018 National Medal and 2018 Uganda Registration Services Bureau (URSB) Award, both for her contribution to Uganda’s Literary Heritage and Women Emancipation. She is a member of The Graca Machel Trust Women in Media Network, Action for Development, and FEMRITE.
Catalyst Press: Can you each talk a bit about the anthologies you publish/have published?
Kwame Dawes: I have been compiling anthologies for many years, so much so that I would have to consult my CV to actually offer a list. But what I can say is that I have a complex relationship to anthologies, especially poetry anthologies. I have always found them to be useful as introductions to whole bodies or movements of work — they offer sometimes a retrospective and an intellectual way of curating some concept that has emerged in the work that writers have been doing. Often, an anthology is a way to ensure the preservation of what has been done over years and that has not had attention or that should not be forgotten. And anthologies can be quite aggressive in asserting an ideology, a thesis or a concept. I remember when I put together Wheel and Come Again, an anthology of reggae poems, the impulse came from my research at the time of proposing a reggae aesthetic as an important way to understand contemporary Jamaican literation. I had written theoretical works on reggae lyrics and poetics, and I wanted to somehow argue that even if they were not aware of it, reggae was in fact shaping Caribbean poetry and poetry from around the world. Hence Wheel and Come Again.
In South Carolina, I sought to fill an absence of attention to poetry from that state by being involved with several anthologies. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the South Carolina Poetry Initiatives was our cottage-industry work of producing modest anthologies of work following workshops, retreats or other moments of poetic expression. It was a way to commemorate the moment, and to give writers tangible evidence of their place as poets and their entry into the publishing world. In the UK, in the early 2000s, I was commissioned to edit an anthology of new Black British poetry. Rather than embark on a standard call for new work, I went on a well-organized tour of the UK to conduct workshops with Black British poets, who then produced work that I suggested they submit for consideration for the anthology which was called Red.
I have also been very much an editor of other, more conventional kinds of anthologies — those that are seeking to create canonical notions of a body of work. These are interventions against silencing and neglect, but they are also seeking to ensure that schools and universities that are seeking to teach work by Black writers, African writers, Caribbean writers, have substantive anthologies that offer a strong and well-curated overview of work from regions, cultures, movements, etc.
I say my disposition to anthologies is complex and it is. While anthologies can be good doorways to engaging the work of poets, they can also create a circumstance in which poets are reduced to a handful of poems — those that are anthologized — leaving a decidedly false sense of who the poets are. I have often asked students if they have read such and such a writer — say, Robert Frost. They say, Sure, they have. Then I ask them what book of Frost have they read. I think you can imagine the answer.
Here is the thing: I am glad they have read the poems in anthologies — it is something. But no one would claim to have read Shakespeare or Hemingway purely on the basis of having read some scenes from Hamlet or a short story by Hemingway. Schools collude with this system of not assigning volumes of poems by poets (with rare exceptions) for courses, but using selections, anthologies. I was fortunate to have been in school in Jamaica where I was assigned the only volume of poems by G.M. Hopkins, Elliot’s The Four Quartets, etc. rather than survey anthologies.
So I consider anthologies to be necessary, but I have made it a mission to keep pushing whole volumes of poems by writers. In many ways, the African Poetry Book Fund Chapbook series emerged in the manner that it did during a conversation between Chris Abani and myself. We knew right away that what we did not want to do was publish another anthology of African poetry. We knew that what poets needed was the chance to enter the publishing world of book publication.
Chris had already started to do this work with his Black Goat series with Akashic Books. I had been doing similar work with a chapbook and book series in South Carolina and the Calabash chapbook series in Jamaica. We agreed to this idea of a chapbook boxset because we felt it offered two critical things — ample space for emerging poets to showcase their work, and the value of their individual ISBN for their title — making this a solid publication credit. It imposed a mechanism to respond to the ambition of the poets in the entire enterprise of African poetry. The boxset, then, is a kind of anthology series, but it is clearly a hybrid. This effort is the balance that interventions, like the ones we are doing, require. I have just made a deal with the University of Nebraska Press and the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust to begin a Caribbean poetry imprint/series modeled on the African Poetry Book Fund, which will be the Calabash Caribbean Poetry Book Series. This will be driven by similar principles of access to poetry and considerations for the publishing careers of authors. Anthologies, single volume books, it’s a necessary dance.
Chris Abani: I’ve published one anthology, Lagos Noir by Akashic Books. I haven’t really been drawn to them — I have mostly been drawn to series. I’ve known Kwame for a long time and we share very similar aesthetic positions, and so I found myself nodding along as I read.
However, when we do diverge, the differences are wide, and I think that’s what makes us a strong pair. Of course, the mutual respect doesn’t hurt. We both share deep reservations about anthologies. For me, it is complicated because it seems to me that anthologies are often reserved for subjects that are seen as niche, but that should still be given attention. For me, poetry is not niche, or to be relegated to the periphery of literature. We’ve often heard booksellers, fellow professors, and librarians refer to literature as separate from poetry, presumably because of the supremacy we have assigned to fiction. The natural consequence of this is that to cover such a wide subject area (because poetry is also so varied in approach, manifesto, aesthetics, and period that entire schools have grown up around each…