CAREER PROFILE : Tsitsi Jaji opens up about her writing

Tsitsi Jaji was born and raised in Zimbabwe. Currently an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Jaji’s work has appeared in Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, Munyori, Runes, and elsewhere. She is also the author of Africa in Stereo:

Modernism, Music and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014), a scholarly monograph on which her lecture is based.

Could you give us a sneak peek of ‘Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity’?

One of the things I most enjoyed discovering as I researched my book Africa in Stereo was the active role that women played in many cultural pan-African initiatives, so I’m planning to talk about some of the heroines of the book. I’ll start with two South African women who were instrumental in building educational resources for black students at the turn of the twentieth century: Charlotte Maxeke and Nokutela Dube. Some of the other figures in the talk include American artists like Katherine Dunham and Roberta Flack, as well as the Senegalese author Ken Bugul, whose mystery novel Rue Félix-Faure pays tribute to a global blues sisterhood. I’m also excited to share work about less prominent figures – women who worked as domestic servants, or appeared anonymously in magazine advertisements and the like. Their voices and labour were essential to the work of building coalitions across black communities in Africa and in the diaspora.

Last year, your poetry collection Carnaval was released as part of APBF’s Seven New Generation African Poets chapbook box set, and you were recently named a finalist for the 2015 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. Your poetry has also appeared in several journals, including Prairie Schooner and The Boston Review. Can you tell us about what inspires you to write poetry? In what ways (if any) do you see it connecting to your critical work, such as Africa in Stereo?

Poetry is often a way for me to express thoughts that I want to disguise in some way but still have my say.

You have written elsewhere about your undergraduate experience studying both comparative literature and classical piano performance, and you continue to focus on music in your scholarly work. How has music influenced or inspired your poetry?

Many of the poems in my first chapbook collection actually started out as programme notes for music I was performing. I love a wide range of styles of music, but the piece that inspired the Carnaval poems was a very challenging composition by Robert Schumann. Over the year or so that it took me to learn that music, I often made up images or scenarios in my mind that were like a movie playing along with the music. Of course, that was just the germ of the poems, and as they sprouted and grew (and went through lots of pruning) many of them changed, but that was the inspiration.

Can you give us any teasers about the two scholarly books you have in the works: Cassava Westerns: Refiguring the American Frontier Myth in Global Black Imaginaries and Classic Black: Art Songs of the Black Atlantic?

Cassava Westerns probably first hatched as an idea from reading the Guinean novelist Tierno Monénémbo’s amazing book Cinema. Set just after independence in a small town in Guinea, the novel revolves around two young boys who spend their days enacting scenes from their favourite Westerners. I was fascinated by how their imaginative lives intersected with this moment of national transition and how Monénémbo uses that context to explore questions about individual agency, generational tensions, and the legitimacy of the law when it hasn’t yet been revised significantly from its colonial codes. Those themes then started to crop up elsewhere – in everything from magazine photo comics and Onitsha to groundbreaking films like Return of an Adventurer by Moustapha Alassane (a Western set in Niger) and The Harder They Come by Michael Thelwell.

The other book, Classic Black, is quite different and returns me to my background in classical music. I’m interested in how composers who have written songs using the poetry of black writers give us a new way to interpret those poems.

Your research focuses on the types of cultural exchange that occur across Africa, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. What do you think the implications are of such cultural exchanges in the global community?

I am often struck by how many of the writers I admire were deeply committed to just such cultural exchanges – Claude McKay of Jamaica, for example, who set many of his works in Harlem and in France and had an amazing ear for the regional accents of characters from Nigeria, Senegal, the US South, and the West Indies. Another example is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who didn’t know his Sierra Leonean father but wrote music inspired by African American spirituals and South East African folk songs as a way to lay claim to a broader heritage. Being from Zimbabwe, I know that during the struggle for independence there were many people in places like Oakland, Harlem, Kingston, Accra and Dar es Salaam who supported the struggle both materially and politically. While I think it is dangerous to over-romanticise such connections, I also think it would be dangerous to forget them. Having a deep knowledge of the history of exchanges, including their tensions and limitations, is an essential resource for building future exchanges.

What is the last creative work you read that you were really connected with?

The last piece of fiction that really shook me was NoViolet Bulawayo’s amazing novel We Need New Names, and the last book of poetry was Nod House by Nate Mackey. They are works that don’t render everything on a first read, and I love discovering books that I can come back to over and over again.

Source: africanpoetrybf.unl.edu