by Ellen Hagan
“Is Affrilachia in the house tonight?” The crowd is a rumbling cry in the dark. An electric current. The bass line. A constant. That’s what Affrilachia is to me. On January 31, 2008, the Affrilachian Poets took the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe stage. A co-mingling of cultures and ancestors emerged. Time didn’t stand still. It was a revolving, moving thing.
I was first introduced to the Affrilachian Poets in 1996 when I was a student at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Kentucky. Founders Frank X Walker and Kelly Norman Ellis were my teachers and mentors. They pushed me to write about home, food, and family. Un-earthed the Assyrian, Italian, and Irish ancestry in me, and I started to figure out who I was as a Southern woman browned by the Middle East and the Kentucky sun, with roots spreading in all directions. They taught me that to be Affrilachian is to own who you are, to construct stories that unfold in the truth. Some countrified poems that fill you up with fried cornbread and salty country ham, bourbon and hot sauce. Poems that conjure spells that call up Yemonya or Oshun, the waters of the Mississippi, the backwoods of Lexington and Bardstown. The hills. The snaking, braided rivers of the Ohio, the Kentucky. Baptisms, and holy renewals. Poems that teach young people what it means to say “mamaw,” live in a holler, live on the outside. To be Affrilachian is to represent the un-represented. Dismantle stereotypes. Remind the United States and Webster’s Dictionary that to be from the Appalachian Mountain Region is to be multi-cultural, to embody a multitude of traditions and stories. The word “Affrilachia” was in fact started as a response to the definition of Appalachia, which included only the white residents of that mountain region. Looking for a place within that narrow space, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” to include writers of color, transplanted writers, writers who have gone away and come back, and ones who have never left. The Affrilachian poets of today are an international collective that responds to the past with the muscle of diversity, representing Africa, Puerto Rico, India, China, the Middle-East, the Caribbean, Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, and Kentucky, and on and on. A co-mingling of artists who carry many cities and lives within them. It is with this unique crew of artists that many have found a home, a haven.
The same is true for The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “Nuyorican,” by definition, is a blending of the terms “New York” and “Puerto Rican,” referring to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State. But as with “Affrilachian,” the definition is much broader than that. In 1999 I spent my summer interning at The Nuyorican. For the most part, I looked through old photographs and memorabilia and sorted through the lives and stories that had made their way through the Cafe. Founded by Miguel Algarin in 1973, the Cafe started in his living room and then found its way into the building at 236 East 3rd Street in the heart of the Lower East Side. From the beginning, it was a spot where artists of all genres, ethnic backgrounds, and training could flourish. It was and still is a hotbed of political unrest, and voices rising up in artistic defiance. This is the Cafe that confirmed the lessons the Affrilachian Poets were teaching, like how influential a poem can be. How radical a community of socially active artists can be. I read protest poems and essays on survival. I read zines dedicated to educating people and neighborhoods, rather than tearing them down. I performed my work in community gardens around the café, and in many ways, I was discovering my own political, artistic core. It was the spot where I first heard slam poets, Latin jazz, where I watched plays dissect society, and where I got my first taste of real adult freedom as a writer and performer. And it was in this space that I was reminded of my Affrilachian teachers and mentors. It was this connection that reminded me that I was at all times surrounded and held by this pulsing, alive community, as far reaching as New York City.
And so it was only right to bring both of those communities together. According to the map of the Appalachian Mountains, New York is at the tip of the region, and so we are brothers and sisters truly. Affrilachia and The Nuyorican are joined like those winding rivers. That cold January night felt like a spell. Felt like this powerful connection was finally being made when Kelly Norman Ellis, Parneshia Jones, Amanda Johnston, Hao Wang, Crystal Good, Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Bianca Spriggs, Natasha Marin, Rane Arroyo and myself finally took the stage to pay homage to all the great writers and artists who have been on the outskirts in the past. The ones who have graced the stage anyway. The crowd was a mix of teachers, students, members from the AWP conference that was happening uptown, fellow poets and Cafe regulars. We spoke of rebellion and buttery grits, of classrooms with young voices and what it means to be black, brown, woman, child, young man, survivor, conjurer, and griot of all things. The night was alive with Nuyorican and Affrilachian spirits coming together to share stories, glasses of cheap wine, loud laughter, and linking hands across the mountains, across cities and towns. Our voices sounded like the earth opening up, and changing.
The Affrilachian Poets are still holding down sacred ground in the Appalachian Region. This past summer marked their 17th anniversary with readings and events at the Roots and Heritage Festival in Lexington, Kentucky, and the addition of a new group of Affrilachian Poets added to the collective. In addition, the Affrilachian Poets have a long history at the Governor’s School for the Arts and performed and taught on the Transylvania University campus throughout this past summer. Theirs is a long tradition of nurturing young poets to be radical, as poets have historically been, to hold signs, to make lists for what they would fight for, and then fight. Do battle with language. Dialogue the disaster and dialogue the solution. Raise fists. Start fires. In this transforming world, and this election year, I am reminded that we need artists more than ever. For schools to be stronger and laws to be re-structured and our very political system to be re-imagined, it will take new life, new energy, and the possibility of all voices being heard. It is my hope that new traditions and new stories will unfold as we become a society pushing and struggling towards artistic response and freedom. Join us.
