We contain multitudes

This interview is a result of notes sent via Google Docs between Kisumu and Chicago.

Akal: Thank you for agreeing to do this, Cheswayo. I am honoured.

This conversation will be featured in our October issue, which will be published on Zambia’s 61st Independence Day. In the October issue we published last year, Mubanga, our editor-in-chief, in her Editor’s note, described her hope for Ubwali. I quote: “May we continue to thrive through the challenges, to repossess the language imposed on us and wield stories of our own creation and…. ” I know. The subject of language is endless, but as we start, I would like to know how you relate to language. Are you making it Zambian? Are you actively repossessing it (as Mubanga hoped)? Is your language spacious enough to say whatever you want or write?

Cheswayo: Hello, Akal. I’m glad to be doing this for Ubwali. I think about language often, especially since the mode most of us write in is tethered to the Western literary imagination—not to mention writing in English also! That is a constant violence that is happening. I’m thinking of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o here in Decolonising the Mind and NourBese Philip in She Tries Her Tongue…, which posited theories of how we can write refuting, or attempting to, this violence. I’m not of the mind we can repossess the language. We can do interesting things with the language by breaking, altering, and finding apertures to work within the discomfort. Repossession implies we can make this language imposed on us our own, but that ignores the various ontological, epistemological, and biopolitical conditions at play. I think what I can do in my work more than anything is acknowledge these parameters to our condition and engage with the multitudes of our pasts as black people across the diaspora. It’s why I’m not necessarily interested in making “Zambian” work because I frankly don’t know what that means, nor could anyone explain that for me. Through engagement of histories and figures, I find the space to not say anything new, but reiterate everything that has been said. To remind us that we are not beholden to this timeline of events, and we existed, and still do, in multiple capacities of being. I’m constantly reaching back to all my ancestors, and every now and then, something or someone speaks to me. I mean and live that way genuinely. With everything that has whispered to me, I have learned I want my work to help black readers not forget the infinite echoes of our shared pasts. 

Akal: Two months ago, on X, the Nigerian poet and essayist, Adedayo Agarau, tweeted: “Language is a function. And it can take multiple dimensions.” I thought of this tweet as a simplification of what language really is. His tweet was a public rebuttal to another writer who had tweeted his disappointment about writers who had submitted works in a short story contest he was judging. His claim—this other writer’s—was that those who had submitted had no language. My focus is on the definition offered by Adedayo. It, in a way, concurs with what you are saying above. How can we do interesting things with language by breaking, altering, and finding apertures to work with? I guess that the breaking, the altering and the finding of (new) apertures to work with is a small or even big resistance that you practice against the imperial effects that might be passed on if you keep organising your language in a way that is dictated by outsiders. Having rumbled, what's the intersection between the language you use to commune with your ancestors versus the language you ‘invent’ right now to write about the infinite echoes of today for the black readers of the future?

Cheswayo: I don’t think I necessarily “invent” anything per se with the language I use in my work, to the one I commune with Ancestors. It’s all about intentionality for me, so there is no difference. I respect the page as I respect the work I do outside of it in preparation (whether I know I’m preparing or not). My aesthetics and poetics are really about the intersection of histories to engage with the metaphysical aspect of being. For my current project, I have studied native belief systems to understand how my ancestors conceptualised their reality. I’m drawn to their pantheistic worldviews as a rebuttal to the violent imposition of Christianity on us through mission posts/schools that were designed to proselytise us from what was deemed as our savage beliefs and mode of being. That language is particularly interesting to me, for it opens up a possibility to imagine and align oneself with the world in a type of mutuality that has been lost amongst many of us.

Akal: Interesting! I get the appeal of your idea: to rebut the violent imposition of Christianity. It reminds me of an essay by Bessie Head on African Religion. She opens by expressing her repulsion for organised forms of religion. She goes on to cite a professor named Mbiti: “wherever the African is, there is his religion. He carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting crops; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony….” She argues that where the individual is, there is his religion, there is his God. This, to me, is a pantheistic way of life. Do you agree?  Cheswayo, me I am always in awe of the intelligentsia of the African Ancestor. You seem so, too. Like even in your collection, The Rinehart Frames, I could see your commitment to uncover the past. I might be wrong, but access to the past you aim to uncover is mainly stored in academia, especially in America, where you reside. As you talk a bit about this upcoming project, could you kindly also talk about how you are transfusing the academic aspects from your study of native beliefs into poetry?

Cheswayo: I have so much love and gratitude for Bessie Head’s life and work. She definitely deserves a bigger platform when we talk about 20th-century African lit. A Question of Power is one of my favourite texts to reference for experimental African writing that pushes so many conventional boundaries of Western literature, even while writing within that troubling gaze. In my writing, the history I attempt to write in, thinking of Hartman’s concept of “Critical Fabulations,” is not solely stored in Academia or America. I don’t understand what that means. My writing engages across the black diaspora (Africa, the Americas, and Asia to a smaller extent) to figures who weren’t just intellectuals or events tethered to intellectual study, but existed as simply beings who were trying to make sense of their realities with the overwhelming background of imperialism. I’m writing into those marginalia as much as I can to reconfigure our notions of what history, capital “H”, was/is. That is work that can be done anywhere, I’d like to believe. In terms of transfusing, I don’t think in terms of intellectualising certain belief systems into creative formats. Thinking of Fred Moten here, I really believe what I do at the core is simple autodidactic work that we can all do outside of institutions by engaging in that deep study of the undercommons. So much of my writing is really uncovering and pointing readers to vast references of things that they probably would have never thought to engage with or want to engage with. When I write about, let’s say witchcraft in Zambia, I’m not making it a mission to prove certain things about it to prove our humanity (I hope), but I am aiming to show readers, particularly African readers, that there are so many layers in how our ancestors have conceptualised their realities, but we do them and ourselves a disservice by doggedly internalising and anchoring imperial belief systems as the foundations for us. I ultimately want African readers to know there are infinite references to our past(s) that can unlock a wealth of epistemologies and ontologies. To move away from being in awe that this knowledge exists and step into proclamations of “of course this knowledge exists.” 

Akal: Every time you mention ‘ancestors’ and ‘their reality’, I am reminded of what Charles R. Larson implies in his book, The Emergence of African Fiction. He, in a couple of arguments, implies that the study of the realities of our ancestors is significant in making their lives more actual. He goes on to state that these studies help in surrounding our lives with dignity and beauty. I know that for you to uncover these pasts, you constantly have to encounter the residual wounds from the incursion of Europeans into Africa, as said by Kwame Dawes in his introduction to your collection, The Rinehart Frames. Whereas I agree that our deepest, truest stories are etched in the sites of our most uncomfortable wounds, quoting the  Kenyan writer, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor,  how are you as a person, not the writer, dealing with all the overwhelming discoveries? Are you finding anything that gives you beauty and dignity from the ‘uncovering process’?

Cheswayo: Larson is an interesting figure given that he was a white man approaching African literature. There are numerous criticisms as to how his particular approach was Eurocentric and fetishised/exoticised Africans. So when he speaks of “our ancestors” or “surrounding our lives with dignity and beauty,” as you put it, I’d rather not comment on that. We should always raise an eyebrow when we approach African scholarship through the lens of Americans/Europeans.  I prefer a decolonial approach by looking at Es’Kia Mphahlele who in The African Image, writing before Larson, talks about how we as Africans can become hagiographic/romantic of our pasts/ancestors in ways that do more harm than good because we start to internalise and exoticise an African identity of foregone pasts—whether we know it to be true or have conjured it to substantiate ourselves.  I’m not writing to discover beauty/dignity because that would be an endeavour to validate myself. I believe so much good African writing could happen if we weren’t so desperately seeking to prove to white people “hey look, we are human too and had culture and we are smart” ad nauseam. What I’m more interested in, as aforementioned, is the exploration, which is infinite. Multitudes of people and events that existed in pre-colonial/colonial timelines that speak to a greater spectrum of being than we know. I believe that's freedom for me. It reorients me to not be beholden to this timeline of events as the only timeline. We contain wild multitudes.

Akal: Gosh, I have been looking for Mphahlele’s works. I barely know about him except for his involvement with the DRUM magazine and his exile to Nigeria. 

The word ‘identity’ has found its way into your response above. I will not forgive myself if I do not ask you about your thoughts on identity. I have not thought much about it, perhaps because I am always in the majority in my social setting, a privilege I do not take for granted. I, however, lean in to how Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks of identity. That it is not fixed: That it is fluid: That it should be constructed by contexts. Dr. Joyce Nyairo, in this clip, asserts Kwame’s thoughts that identity should be something we can reach for depending on what we need. I am curious to know what your thoughts are on Identity Politics. 

Cheswayo: I think our contemporary understanding of identity politics is tethered to how we are all fragmented by white supremacy. There is a performance we often do with our identities that points to how we have internalised colonialism/imperialism. This goes back to my earlier points about romanticising who we have constructed ourselves to be, rather than who we have been and the potential for who and what we could be. i.e., the nationalism, ethnocentrism, religiocentrism and the dogma that we see existing with the genocides happening in the Congo/Sudan. This is where I am in agreeance that our identities as Africans should be seen fluid, but I don’t think a lot of us tap into that. And what that essentially means for me is that none of this is real/inherent to what we think we are. I truly want that to resonate with people on a visceral level. I am not particularly interested in any African who wants to prove to me the kind of African they think they are or what makes them authentic over others, because I understand the violent implications of what that means historically. Identity Politics are useful when we use them to critically engage one another about what has happened to us, who we were and what can encompass us as a people. I’m interested in the future of African people/works that emphasise a splayed understanding of all our intersections, not as a point of performative pride, but a lived and shared ongoing experience disrupting all that we have internalised. Let’s get free. 

Akal: Freedom is first imagined before being sought— I at least believe so, and so even as we march towards getting free, imagining freedom is very crucial to the ‘march’. There is a line from one of your poems that I cite very often, “ but the imagination holds all my anxieties. “I must admit that until I read this line, I had never thought about how my imaginations could hold my anxieties. Such a deep, profound way you put it! It reminds me of a quote I randomly saw written on a wall in a local library here: “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it” -Ursula Le Guin. As we wrap up, what would you say about your line? What imagination(s) is currently holding your anxieties? Are there new anxieties that we should look out for in your upcoming works?

It has been an honour, Cheswayo!

Cheswayo: With the line, I was trying to get at how the imagination is a storage of all our experiences in the external world and how our mind is processing, or internalising, all this information. At that moment in the poem, “Getting Lost With Hayao Miyazaki & Satoshi Kon,” I was trying to be in conversation more so with Satoshi Kon’s films Perfect Blue, Paprika, and Millennium Actress. An overarching theme across Kon’s work is how haunting memory and the imagination can be to the point of erasing the boundaries of where reality and the dream state begin. As a black person in this context of reality, I am also thinking of the ancestral transference of memories. How what and who we think we are is really a resonant echo from various lifetimes ago. I would say this is where my imagination holds me the most, if not completely. It is where I see all my future projects stemming from. The upcoming works will all have this foundation within the tapestry of my imagination, but I am developing a new needle that can make disparate leaps across the diaspora to ultimately weave all of us together.

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AKAL is a Kenyan short story writer, essayist, and poet. He has previously been shortlisted for the Africa Writers’ Award in poetry. Akal is also a 2023 Idembeka Creative Writing fellow and Ibua Novel Manuscript workshop attendee. In 2022, he was a recipient of two digital residencies organised by the University of East Anglia, one of which resulted in a short story collection that he contributed to. Akal reads in trust and writes in faith.

CHESWAYO was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been featured in the New England Review, the Paris Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Boston Review, Lolwe, and elsewhere. A finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a recipient of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, winner of the 2020 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest, and a Creative Capital 2022 awardee, his debut collection The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press), is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle and 2021 Foreword Indies award for poetry. He earned his MFA from Rutgers-Newark and is currently working on a novel.