If you pass the amiable looking Arthur Flowers in the street, with his ornate dreadlocks, his gleaming ebony skin and the general air of a dreamer, you would be forgiven for thinking he would be more at home in a smoky New Orleans bar, playing the saxophone as the air fills with smoke and camaraderie of weekend revelry.

Arthur Flowers does play the Kalimba, a thumb piano and loves music in all forms – blues, jazz, country but, he has made his mark as a distinguished writer. He is one of America’s well known contemporary African-American writers. He is the author of two novels, De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues, non-fiction Mojo Rising! Confessions of a 21st Century Conjure Man and a children’s book Cleveland Lee’s Beale Street Band. He currently teaches MFA fiction at Syracuse University and is a director of New Renaissance Writers Guild and the Pan African Literary Forum. He is a performance poet in the griotic tradition, a native of Memphis and a long term resident of New York city.

His novels celebrate the culture of African-Americans, according to a critic, and show the influence of the blues, hoodoo and the oral tradition. Flowers calls himself a literary hoodo. During an interview, he said, “I do the blues but I do it through literature. I use blues characters, sensibility, narratology and the blues metaphysics of redemption and the transformation of adversity into art. I believe the blues are a sacred text. There are those of us in Afro-American literature, who feel that we are heirs to two literary traditions, the western written and the African literary tradition, and hopefully, the fusion and contribute a bit to the evolution of both. The delta is my literary turf and blues and hoodoo are my tropes, my vehicles.”

So, first things first. What was his reaction to Obama’s election as president. He says enthusiastically, “It gave me a moment of intense pleasure and euphoria. But believe me, it did not last. I feel now there is real work to be done. There are his enemies, the Republicans, who will work against him. But he is wise and efficient and we have full faith in him.”

So, did the fact that he was an African-American writer stereotype him and did he carry any excess baggage due to it? Was he expected to behave and conform in a certain way?

He laughs. “I don’t quite see it like that. I like being an African-American writer. It is a liberating feeling and a great honour. I am proud of being the voice of my culture. Having said that, I also want to be part of the global narrative.”

Who were the writers who influenced him and shaped his sensibilities? “It is John O Killens, my mentor. He had a genuine love for African-American people. The others were James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but John was the only one to train young writers. A group of us followed him everywhere and became his acolytes. We got a lot of unwritten wisdom from him. He taught us how to be writers. He taught us that writers had a higher calling and should be able to speak to generations. In those years, I wanted power, John told me that I needed compassion to be profound. He left behind a warm and loving legacy.

“I grew up living in Memphis, right next to the Mississippi. I loved my home, but was zapped when somebody asked me about what it felt to be in the midst of the mytho-poetic tradition of the delta. I hadn’t thought of it till then that I was in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn country. My father was a doctor. My mother loved words. I am a hoodo spirit doctor, a healer who also has a way with words. The spirit world has always been seen as a part of folk magic. But there is a century old tradition of writers using it as a literary medium. We use the power of words to enhance the human condition. People also come to me for consultation, to ease their suffering.”

Regarding his first book De Mojo Blues, Flowers says, “I was in the Vietnam War as an eighteen year old soldier. There was death and destruction everywhere. Till then, I had thought that history was something that only happened to other people. America was in the middle of Black Power and Flower Power. We got increasingly radicalised. On reaching home, I got into a writing workshop with John Killens. When the book got published, Time magazine described me as “one of the voices of the era.” But you can’t rest as a writer. You have to go on. Next, I wrote Another Good Loving Blues. That was the time I got my little heart broken. At that time, relationships between the sexes were going into a tailspin because of women’s liberation. A fellow Afro-American writer – Zora Neale Huston, wrote books like The Eyes are Watching God. But my story was a fine old delta tale about a mad blues piano player and an Arkansas conjure woman. I gave the story a happy ending, because unlike in real life, in literature I could play God.

“My third book was Mojo Rising, Confessions of a 21st Century Conjure Man. This traces my evolution as a literary hoodoo. I tried to use the sacred text technique but I failed because I wasn’t ready. I have also studied Biblical and Koranic formats. I will be working on the Divination structure.”

Today, Flowers continues to celebrate his roots and reach out to a wider readership. He takes his calling very seriously and believes that words can truly heal the world of its wounds. Amen.

– indrani_raimedhi@reddiffmail.com

website: www.iraimedhi.com

Indrani Raimedhi