A Conversation with Harryette Mullen

BY HABIBA MBUGUA

I sat down with Harryette Mullen—award-winning writer, poet, professor and National Book award finalist. We discussed her beginnings as a writer, the role of the artist in global crises, celebrations of Black sexuality in her poetry collection Muse and Drudge, monolithic perceptions of Black art and more. 

What role has writing, whether it was poetry or otherwise played in your life when you first started? Has that role changed at all?

I have had a lot of beginnings for my writing. One time when my mother was going through old papers she said, “Oh, here's where you were writing your name when you were three.” Obviously, I did not remember that, but my mother had me practicing the alphabet and writing at that age. We always had books in the house. My mother was a teacher. She's retired now. My maternal grandfather that I grew up having around in my childhood was a pastor of a church. I can picture his bookshelf. He had one of those bookshelves with the glass windows to protect his books from dust. There was a lot of emphasis on education and literacy in my family. My sister and I went to the public library every week and checked out the maximum number of books and so writing was just something that we kind of did naturally, both of us. We wrote. We drew. We painted. We made our own puppets and put on puppet shows. My mother was going to school and then eventually became a teacher, so she was studying how to stimulate children's literacy, writing and speaking, so we did church recitals, school recitals. It was always a part of the environment: poetry, literature, the Bible, of course, a lot of music. There's the playground, that's poetry of a sort. I don't know if kids still play these old-fashioned games, jump rope, circle games, you know, “Little Sally Walker” and handclap games like “Miss Mary Mack.” We did all that stuff and all of that was verbal, so I was writing poetry before I even knew what poetry was. I was just writing rhymes, you know, rhyming chiming verses, just because it was in the air. Of course, much of the Bible is also poetry. In school, we had to recite Paul Laurence Dunbar, Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks. We grew up with that as part of our heritage. 

My parents divorced when I was quite young. I've talked about this with other people in interviews, but my father lived in another state. We did not have visits back then. We didn't even have phone calls because long distance was too expensive. So, my mother would say, “Here's your father’s address, you can write to him.” It's just natural for me to put my thoughts into writing. My mother also gave us diaries, and I found out eventually that she gave us these diaries so she could snoop on our thoughts, but she encouraged us, all the time, to express ourselves in constructive ways. When I really started to consciously write poetry was in high school. A teacher assigned everyone in the class to write a poem, and then, unbeknownst to us, she entered our poems in a local city contest, and my poem won the contest. My poem was published in the newspaper. I recited it before an audience. That was the first time I really thought, “oh, this is poetry, what I've been doing.”

Then, I was an English major in college as an undergrad. I did not take a creative writing workshop because back then it was really too scary to take creative writing. Those were the bad old days when professors just considered undergraduates a perk of the job, you know? I don't know exactly who was doing what, but I heard rumors, or else it was psychodrama, people being driven to tears in a workshop, that kind of thing. I never took a creative writing workshop, but I was an English major. I read a lot of poetry, fiction, plays, autobiographies, everything I could. I became very seriously devoted to writing poetry right around the time I was about to graduate, and I just kept writing after I graduated. I had a job that paid for my meals and my rent, but I was writing poetry, and I was going to local readings. Also, I had been attending the poetry readings at my university. Back then, the last of the Black Arts Movement came to our campus, even though in our English department, almost no Black authors were taught. I think maybe you could get a class that might include Invisible Man, but I took American novels, and I don't think Ellison’s novel was included in that course. Toni Morrison was barely acknowledged in the academic mainstream when I was an undergrad, but I recall reading The Bluest Eye and Sula. For me, my contemporary African American literature was either the poets who were invited to come to our campus, or it was those novelists that I was reading about, like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major. Those were people that I was reading outside of the classroom. It was a point of pride for me to scour all the, back then we had such things as independent bookstores. I would just make the rounds and look for anything by a Black author. That was when I got a little more serious about writing because I was seeing living writers. It was not just this canon of dead authors who seemed so untouchable.  

It's interesting to me the idea of a canon in that way—who's included in the canon and who is taught, and your experiences encountering a lot of Black artists outside of the classroom. I'm wondering, now that there's more of a push now to include more Black artists in what is taught in school, how that would work if you had encountered the Black Arts Movement in a classroom rather than finding it for yourself?

I think about that all the time, because books that excite me now are books that definitely excited me when I was a student. When I teach them, it is really not the same thing and often, I've had to get used to it. First, my feelings were hurt when my students didn't get as excited as I was. Sometimes I had my loyal few who were with me on the same page. But, it's just that they don't feel it the same way. I do understand that because, for me, they were almost forbidden knowledge. They were things that I discovered on my own, so they had that cachet of discovery, of almost transgression, of being on the margin, on the cutting edge, a little edgy. To me, it was edgy. To them, it's just the curriculum. So, on the one hand, I'm glad we have these courses: African American, Asian American, Native American, Latinx, all of these things. It's good because you got to find it some time. Not everyone's motivated as strongly as I was to find these books. I remember when I taught at Cornell, and I taught a course called “Ethnic Literature” because, at that time, there was no such thing as an ethnic literature course in our English department there. I was teaching African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latinx, all in one course. The students would ask, where did you find these books? We never heard of these books. We never heard of these authors. I said I looked for them. I searched for them. I know they're out there. I just got to find them. So, sometimes you have to discover it in the classroom because you're really too busy living your life. Living my life included scouring the bookstores. That's not true for everybody. I do understand that.

I think that's absolutely true. Even if it has to take the form of an assignment or a Gen Ed requirement, it's good to have that exposure at all. I want to talk a little bit about your process. We've talked about the different ways that poetry can exist outside of just something written on a page and the other kinds of poetry that just flow through life. When you sit down to write a poem, what are you trying to accomplish?  Are you trying to get all these other kinds of poetry of life and kind of trapped them in a page or something else entirely?

Well, I think it probably changes depending on what's going on in the world, what's going on in my life, what's going on in this brain of mine, and what I'm reading, what I'm hearing, what I'm thinking about because sometimes I would like to write a poem about a certain subject, and it just doesn't happen. I'm trying to force it, and it just won't come, that often happens. I have these abandoned drafts of things that just never really gelled, and I don't even know why. I can't always explain. Sometimes I'll say well if I just keep coming back, it will fall into place. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. I think what I'm trying to do is write a poem that I would like to read and read again. Then I hope, another person who's not me would also like to read and read again. I'm trying to write a poem that lots of different people can read, and they might not all get the same message, but they all will get something interesting. If they come back to it, they may see things they didn't see before. I try to write a poem—this is almost impossible—but I'm trying to write a poem that's inexhaustible. 

When we say that we're writing for posterity, meaning that we're writing as long as human beings are alive on this earth, if the earth will still have us, and people are able to read and are interested in reading, and they can read the language or translation, that they will still find some piece of their own humanity, in what has been written. That's how I feel when I read a poem that's 1000 years old, and I can relate to the humanity of that person whose life was so different from mine, and yet, they're still human. There are certain fundamental things so far, until some future time when human beings might be grown in a lab, like laboratory meat. You recognize something familiar, even in a poem that's far away, in time and space. A human being wrote it, and you feel their humanity in the poem. You feel the emotion. You feel that attitude. You feel love, pain, joy, despair, sympathy, loss, mourning all of those feelings, and when we feel those things deeply, that's when we're most motivated to go to poetry. That's even why we buy greeting cards. We're standing in the drugstore, or wherever, searching for a card that expresses what we feel that we have not bothered to put into our own words. Poetry often has that function.  I don't want to demean poetry and say it's just a greeting card. But, I'm actually saying that the greeting cards, which often are a form of verse, are striving to find words for people who maybe don't have time, or don't have the patience, the skill, the inclination, to put it into words for themselves. When you find a poem that tells you not only how that other person felt, but it tells you how you feel or have felt, that's what I'm striving for. Other times, I'm writing a poem just to entertain my brain, and also, I hope, entertain the brains of other people. I'm not always thinking, “Oh, this poem will last forever.” Some poems are really for now, but also a lot of poems that were written just for a moment have a historical interest because we want to know what was happening at that moment. What were people thinking and feeling at that moment? So, I feel history and readers have to sort it out for themselves because how will I know what other people need in the future, or even what other people, far from me, need right now.

I'm writing to fulfill some deep and persistent need that I have, as a writer, to create or express something. I'm not even always expressing myself. Sometimes I'm expressing what I think is the mood of the time. Often, I'm trying to pick up on the mood of the time, even though I'm probably just fooling myself, but I try. It helps me to pay attention to what's going on in the world because I'm trying in a way to communicate with the world, to listen to the world, to listen to what the world is telling me and then, have something to say back to the world.

What do you find yourself paying attention to now? What do you think other people should be paying attention to?

Well, there are some obvious things that I think most of us are already paying attention to—unless we think science doesn't exist, and there's no reason to worry about the climate, and there's no reason to worry about a virus. Those people, I don't know what's going on with them. We have widespread global inequality. We have a lot of tension in the world right now which could lead to war. We have a lot of instability. It’s a powder keg we're sitting on. I mean, 800,000 people have died in the United States from this virus, and we're on, what is it, round four with no end in sight? People have been writing about, well what did people do during the plagues in Europe? People are reading the Bible, what about when people were dying in the Old Testament? My mother keeps saying, "We're in the end times. We're in the end times. You better get your soul ready. You better get it together. Get ready to meet your maker, because we’ve all got to go.” I don't want to give up like that, and just say, well, it's the end times, so be it. We all have to try to do something. Even if it's just to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive in the face of great adversity.

It is sometimes helpful to see that human beings have been through great adversity before and not everyone survives, but somebody usually does or else we wouldn't be here. And how did they do it? Sometimes it was just good fortune. They just happen to be lucky, or they had good genes, or they had natural immunity. Some people had a natural immunity to the plague, or they were living in a remote place. Some people were flexible enough to move with the times. There are so many things that we need to be paying attention to that it can be overwhelming and exhausting. I think sometimes it may be helpful to focus on one or two priorities and say, these are the two or the one that I'm going to really put my energy into. I'm aware of other issues, but this is what I'm going to dedicate most of my attention to, my time, my effort, and actually, they're usually connected. If you feed people, if you educate people, if you give people opportunity, then you have more people working on the problems. Those things really are connected, I think.

In times when we have these, these crises, these large amounts of global inequality, like you mentioned, a lot of the times the instinct is to say, okay, we need to prioritize certain things. It seems like in those priorities, art, and artistic creation don’t seem to rank that high. I'm wondering what you think the role of art is, in times of a global pandemic, or during war times or conflict. What do you see your role to be?

Oh, boy, well, clearly, we see in some ways, in these times artists, if they didn't die, they're flourishing. We've lost quite a few elder artists and some not so elder in this period. We've had major, major losses of people that are very precious to me—not my family, thank goodness so far—but artists, musicians, painters, singers, writers. Other people are, at least artistically flourishing, those who were able to continue to create, and some who created out of their fear, their loneliness, and their desire to connect with other people. Some have used their art in that way. Artists have had to find other ways of communicating among themselves and with other people. Meanwhile, I'm talking to you on Zoom right now. I have attended many Zoom poetry readings. I've read in some Zoom poetry readings. I was a facilitator for a Zoom discussion of a poem, and I've been teaching on Zoom. I think if we can keep ourselves alive, keep ourselves at least somewhat hopeful and continue to reach out, we do, just what other people do. We try to just keep doing our job, whatever it is, in spite of all these obstacles. Just keep doing your job as best you can. That's how I see myself. I'll try not to become utterly silent just because I'm afraid or disturbed. I have moments of feeling, just what on earth is going to happen to us human beings, but it is useful to write that, to write through that, or to make music through that. I listen to a lot of radio. I don't have a television, and I was listening to Yo-Yo Ma. He's done this album, I think it's called Songs of Consolation, something like that [Songs of Comfort and Hope].  He reached out to other musicians, and they used their technology to collaborate. I think he collaborated with a pianist and an arranger. They took a lot of very familiar songs, and the arranger created new arrangements. Then somehow, technologically, they perform these duets that they recorded. It challenges our resourcefulness, but it's the same for everybody. Everybody's job has been to figure out, how do we go on in spite of it all? So, we're no different from the plumber, the electrician, the teacher, the baker. I was just listening to one of these food programs, and an Ethiopian restaurant had to figure out a whole new way of serving their food because nobody wanted to sit around a table and eat with their hands, take up the injera bread, and grab their food. They created the “Ethiopian bowl.” You have your own bowl. It's different. It's not traditional, but they said, we have to rethink how we're going to preserve our food and some aspect of our culture and still be in business. It's the same thing for the artist, or the musician, the writer, the dancer. We all have to do the same thing, basically. We notice what's happening, and figure out how to go on.

Poetry—and art in general—feels like a good place to explore these questions, these issues, this need for adaptation. Art feels like a good place to unpack those issues and think through those issues. I want to pivot to talk a little bit more about your work specifically. I wanted to highlight in Muse and Drudge, there are similar issues that are coming up in the sense that it's an exploration of these difficult topics. I felt like it was sad at times. It was celebratory at times in the realm of femininity, of sexuality, in all sorts of realms. I want to ask you, do you think that there are features of sexuality, of Black sexuality that need to be mourned but also need to be celebrated? Can these things coexist?

That's a big question because sexuality is a large topic. When we think about Black sexuality, and maybe how it's different when you put the word Black next to the word sexuality, how is that specific to the experiences of Black people? I think with Muse and Drudge, I was probably most interested in the ways that Black women are represented. When it comes to sexuality, there's a long history of Black women being represented as less than human, not quite women or ladies, when that was the term for a respectable woman—when a white woman was called a lady and a Black woman was called a wench or a breeder or some other even worse word, perhaps, those labels and those representations of debased humanity or inhumanity.

Black sexuality should be more celebrated. And I almost don’t even want to say sexuality, I would want to say eroticism. I'd want to say love. I'd want to say romance. I'd want to say caring. Yeah, sexuality, sure, why not? That's part of the package, but also when you say sexuality, that could be misunderstood as "You're just a body." It depends on what people mean by sexuality because when some people say sexuality, they mean a full panoply, a full expression of a full spectrum of human emotion, physicality, and connection. When other people say sexuality, they're just talking about another commodity that's for sale in the marketplace. We've had our experience of that. I'm always searching for how our humanity can be recognized. How can our gifts to the world be recognized and celebrated? Sexuality is a part of that, but it has also been a part of how Black women, men and children have been dehumanized through sexuality and continue to be.

Also, I'm of a certain generation. It's not that I'm totally Victorian or anything, but I went to Catholic schools. I have preachers in my family. We had a certain, you can say, politics of respectability. We had a certain way that we were supposed to carry ourselves, a certain way we were supposed to dress and behave, and certain things we were definitely not supposed to do. I've had to kind of train myself to be a little more open about other people's expression of their sexuality because I was taught that that's private, that's between you and your loved one, and that you don't flaunt it all over the place. That was just how I was raised. We could participate in sports. We could wear a bathing suit. We could dance with a certain modesty. I think I'm showing my age, and I'm showing my background. There are a lot of things that I have had to get more comfortable with. My students have helped me with that because they are freer than I am when it comes to certain habits of self-expression. What I'm saying is, if you have people of different ages, and different backgrounds, all interacting, there's going to be some misunderstanding around everything, including sexuality. I'm always worried about certain misunderstandings that can lead to harm. We want to celebrate the multi-dimensional, full expression of our humanity, including things that other people don't necessarily want to know about us. It's up to us to decide how we want to be known and how we want to represent ourselves in the world. That's collective, and it's also individual. Sometimes there is friction between the individual expression and the collective expression.

I'm glad that you mentioned the friction between the individual and the collective because when I'm thinking about Black art, the Black canon, the Black Arts Movement, I know that you have spoken in the past about artists who kind of take up the challenge to write Black or to extend the orality of the Black Arts Movement into their own writing. I was curious if you think having these generalized ideas as to what Black art is, or who Black artists are are harmful to Black art, if they're limiting, or if they provide more opportunities to promote Black culture?

Well, I think it's part of human nature to try to define everything and to try to separate things into categories so that we can try to think more clearly about them. A lot of times, we do tend to think it's either this or that, but we ought to remember that our way of thinking is just a construct. We know that those are just concepts that human beings have created, and that's not actual reality. The map is not the territory. Reality is much more complex and complicated and difficult than any kind of simple model that we carry around in our heads, but we do it anyway because sometimes it helps us to think through things. We have to be taught, or we have to learn how to do both, how to separate things into different categories, and then, how to put them back together again, into a more complicated approximation of the really unfathomable complexity of actual reality. Whatever we think we know is inadequate, so at the beginning, that's the caveat. Whatever we know is not enough, and there can always be more knowledge. So, for me, having actually experienced, in my youth, the Black Arts Movement, a lot of those poets of the Black Arts Movement, I have heard them read in person. Some of them I've read with on stage, so they are real people to me. I've taught their work. I was reading their works back in the day. They did not agree among themselves, and even sometimes one actual human being did not agree with himself, thinking about LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. He denounces his former self. Or Haki Madhubuti, Don L. Lee, he denounces his former self. So, they don't even agree with themselves throughout their lifetime, and they disagree with other people. Baraka famously disagreed with Ishmael Reed. Ishmael Reed left the east coast, went to the west coast, and became a multiculturalist. That was his reaction to the Black Arts Movement. It was not static. It was not monolithic. There were people who were critical of Audre Lorde because she was a lesbian. There were people in the younger Black Arts Movement who were critical of Robert Hayden because he said he wanted to be an American writer, and he just happened to be Black. Even at the time, there was disagreement. There was a certain diversity of opinion. We tend to encapsulate it in this bubble and think they all had the same  prescriptive view, that they were all homophobic, which is not true, or they were all heterosexist, which is not true. They argued among themselves, and their ideas changed over the years. 

At the time, it was a revelation to even say that Black people had culture, that Black people had literature, that Black people had a certain way of looking at the world, and that we wanted to explore that. What does it mean to be a Black person looking at the world, the Black person making art? What does it mean a Black person living in America and a Black person looking at the rest of the world and saying, how do we relate to not just America, but the rest of the world? All of that was part of the Black Arts Movement. There were all these discourses that were circulating. I think the discussion itself was helpful because people could write manifestos all they wanted, that didn't mean everybody else was gonna agree with them, and they didn't. 

Another movement that I have been part of is Cave Canem. Cave Canem specifically reacted to the Black Arts Movement by saying we will not have an aesthetic prescription for how you should write as a Black person. If you identify as a person of African descent, you are welcome in Cave Canem and that's self-identification. Every time I have been to a Cave Canem meeting, I think, what is that person doing in here? Then they'll say, my grandma's Black. So, welcome to Cave Canem! If they want to identify, they're identifying with this culture. If that's how they want to think of themselves, who am I to argue, right? It's really quite different to have lived through both, from the Black Arts Movement to what we're witnessing now. It’s an explosion of creativity and an expansion of visibility. It partly has to do with all these people who went to MFA programs, who are much more embedded in mainstream literary culture. Cave Canem has changed the whole landscape of who gets awards and prizes. Prizes that had never gone to a Black person became routinely given to Black writers. I won't say Cave Canem did that on its own, but if you look at those names, a lot of them are Cave Canem people. Partly, it's being embedded in the mainstream because these people are also on the awards committees. These people are also the judges. These people are also themselves teaching now in creative writing programs. They have some clout that people in the Black Arts Movement wished they had. They felt marginal because they were, most of them, many of them, not all. It's a different kind of cry when you really are on the outside, and you have to say, there is such a thing as Black. There is such a thing as a Black culture. There is such a thing as a Black literature. We don't have to make that case. We can go on to other things. They had to establish the ground that we are standing on. I feel that, yeah, they made mistakes, and we're making mistakes right now. I know I am.

Interview conducted by Habiba Mbugua.