The Rumpus Contends With the Lives of POC Writers in Connection to the Complicated South

The Rumpus is all about conversations. And now, The Conversation. Founded by Aziza Barnes and Nabila Lovelace, The Conversation is an interview-and-poetry series "rooted in carving out space for Black Americans to contend with their Blackness [and] its infinite permutations in the South. Central to The Conversation is documenting contemporary POC relationships to the American South, reformatting the literary conference model, engaging with Southern communities of young writers and the reclamation of land." With that in mind, Barnes and Lovelace have already published two conversations: Cortney Lamar Charleston and Danez Smith, and Desiree Bailey and Sean DesVignes. Their question: "Could you envision a life for yourself in the South?" An answer, from Charleston and Smith:

Smith: As the Black Midwestern folks that you (Chicago) and I (Minneapolis) both are, I’m wondering how you grew up viewing the South? Does the South influence who you are as a Chicagoan? Also, maybe my favorite black question, where yo people from?

Charleston: The South was my distant home in the sense that it inspired in me some internal conflict but also a deep, deep love. With my grandparents coming from the South (Mississippi, namely Jackson and Louisville with some roots in Louisiana as well), so many things that I grew understanding as family tradition are merely regional, cultural traditions that were carried to Chicago. That’s not a unique story, especially not on Chicago’s South and West Sides; damn near everybody’s kin came from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or a small representation of some other southern states during the Great Migration—this, in so many ways, establishes the foundation for what black life in Chicago is like, informing everything from how we use space to how we speak to what and how we cook and eat. The Migration was inspired by the racial conflict in the South and the black economic servitude it underscored; the act of migration and its inspirations, in some ways, were mirrored later as blacks sought out of inner-cities, which laid the foundation for the life I lived personally. I think about that parallel often.

Smith: Your work unpacks and explodes many ideas about blackness and race in America, and I think you do a great job at creating a wide landscape. Where does the South figure into your work? How does the South figure into your personal relationship to blackness? If and when do you find yourself writing with the South in mind?

Charleston: It’s difficult for me to sum up, but I’d say that The South is the Holy Spirit that guides my hand as I write as it pertains to race, certainly. I don’t use it as a backdrop, but use the specter of it to deconstruct racism by playing to (and subverting) people’s stereotyping of the South as the epicenter of racial antipathy, but then localizing that same antipathy in the actions (or opportunistic inactions) of whites from all places and in all stations who might think themselves more evolved than the Southerners they, historically, have looked down upon for their presupposed rabid intolerance.

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