"Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization": A Conversation with Reginald McKnight

Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent--or a deep Southern drawl. In an instant he can switch from a precise West African dialect to hip, urban street lingo, and then effortlessly segue back to his normal voice. McKnight says he "hit the ground running" as a mimic, and his talent was broadened as he lived all over the United States as the son of an Air Force sergeant. His time spent on the road--including a year-long visit to Senegal as a young man--brought him into contact with many different voices, and those voices erupt occasionally to illustrate his conversations. While many people are able to imitate orally the voices they hear, McKnight also translates these voices into narrative. He allows these voices to tell their own stories, stories that explore race in the United States as well as race in Africa. In McKnight's fiction, "multicultur alism" is as likely to mean a clash of cultures between black people as it is between black and white people. Moustapha's Eclipse (1988), McKnight's prize-winning collection of short stories, demonstrates his expansive view of black culture; it includes voices that tell stories set in the sixties-era South, the contemporary American west, the Old West...and West Africa. The range of these stories represents McKnight's belief that, as he once wrote, "We are, from the bottom to the top, as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva." His subsequent books, the novel I Get on the Bus (1990), the short stories in The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas (1992), his book of stories White Boys (1998), his new novel He Sleeps (2001), even the collection of quotations and sayings in African American Wisdom (1994), contain a multiplicity of voices--expressing a variety of viewpoints--that nod to McKnight's desire that black-skinned people worldwide consider themselves "a civilization, a collection of cultures, societies, nations, individuals, 'races.' "In large part, McKnight's racialist perspective has to do with his coming of age in t he post-Civil Rights Movement era. He writes fiction that is a part of a growing sub-genre of black literature which often announces itself in book titles: Besides White Boys, by McKnight, there is The White Boy Shuffle, by Paul Beatty; Negrophobia, by Darius James; The Last Integrationist, by Jake Lamar; and Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, just to name a few. Trey Ellis has argued that these texts are indicative of a "New Black Aesthetic"--Greg Tate prefers "post-liberated aesthetic"--that discusses the reality of the "cultural mulatto" (or "cultural chameleon," to use Paul Beatty's term)--that black, post-Civil Rights Movement peculiarity whose existence traverses both black and white worlds. I sat down to talk with McKnight about his contribution to this genre, his fictional body of work that explores race in order to, as he puts it below, "elbow a space" for himself in black culture. We talked twice. After a long session in his small, unassuming apartment in College Park, where he taught creative writing at the University of Maryland (he is currently teaching at the University of Michigan), we finished late in the evening after a reading at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. When McKnight said he didn't truly consider himself a writer until he went to Africa, we began talking about how long it takes for some persons to call themselves "writers." I wondered what happened in Africa that allowed him finally to identify himself as a writer. McKnight: When I went to Africa I wrote every day, eight to sixteen hours a day. You think, "How the hell could you have seen Africa if you wrote that often?" (Laughs.) Well, the sixteen-hour days were...I wrote probably a quarter of a million words or more while I was there. Most of it I knew was just, you know, the crucible; it was the place I went inwardly to make myself write. …