West Coast kinfolk: in Los Angeles, Chris Abani and Kamau Daaood stand out as strong limbs on the family tree of literature

Black Issues Book Review, May-June, 2005 by Michael Datcher

Some in the creative family would have you think Los Angeles writers are not serious because we craft in the shadow of a neon sign that backlights caricatures for the world to see. Others dismiss us for our casual evening wear: our sandals at the literary salon. These critics aren't around to hear our alarm clocks calling us to the desk at 4:45 A.M. Others mock our quick smile, our open hand and hemorrhaging heart. We just lean back and say, "Love is a verb."

In the spirit of love and reconciliation, let us consider this piece as a sort of family reunion of letters. Allow me to update for some and introduce to others two of your Left Coast kinfolk. A young lion and an elder. Both old souls, they help you get to know the writers in your family tree.

Chris Abani, Demon Hunter

2004 was a good year for Chris Abani. Graceland, his critically acclaimed second novel, published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. About his third collection of poetry, Dog Woman (also published in 2004, by Red Hen Press), poet Maurya Simon said, "Dog Woman is a mesmerizing, haunting and sometimes subversive exploration of the personal and cultural politics of power and disempowerment ... it's a daring, trailblazing and important book; it's a vital addition to the poetry of our times."

This all came atop of 2003 when Abani won the prestigious Lannan Literary Fellowship and saw the publication of his second poetry collection, Daphne's Lot (Red Hen Press). In 2001, all he did was receive the Netherland's Prince Claus Award for Literature and Culture; the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award, and the Middleton Fellowship, which granted him a full ride to the University of Southern California's (USC) doctoral program in creative writing and literature. Chris Abani has paid the cost to be the boss.

Abani wrote his first novel, Masters of the Board, at 16. When it was published in his native Nigeria in 1985, he was arrested for treason by the Nigerian regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. Abani was accused of masterminding the coup led by General Mamman Vatsa because the plot of Masters of the Board mirrored Vatsa's coup plot. He served six months in prison.

"I didn't let my family know about the particulars of my arrest, I didn't want to endanger them," he says, sitting in the food court of USC. Abani is a heavyset man with a crooner's manner and soft voice. Wearing blue jeans and red shirt, he could be a sensitive defensive tackle for the USC-defending national-cochampion Trojan football team.

Writing about the prison experience in his first collection of poetry, Kalakuta Republic (Saqi Books, January 2001), he says, "This initial brush with the government was not deliberate on my part, but having once been brushed by the wings of the demon, I became the demon hunter."

Two years later Abani was arrested again for his writing, and he was held for a year in Kiri-Kiri Maximum Prison (also known as Kalakuta Republic) where he was tortured extensively then released.

"I'm not sure what they were thinking when they released me," he smiles. "That I would stop making art?"

Two years later, his anticorruption play Song of the Broken Flute landed him on death row at Kiri-Kiri, with six months spent in solitary confinement. This was his punishment for leading a riot when his young cellmate, John James, was tortured to death at age 14. International pressure from human rights groups eventually secured Abani's Get Out of Jail Card--but it wasn't free:

   Sergeant Adam Barkin Zawa
   Rammed the barrel
   Of a rifle-Lee Enfield-up my rectum
   Maintaining casual banter'
   'How is your mother? How is she finding
   our lovely country?' interrupted
   only / by the blood spraying from my
   backside, / baptizing his heavily scarified
   face, / empty ancient mask.
   Breath heavy with local gin--ogogoro--used
   / To scare demons,
   guilt, into lonely/Dark corners.
   --From Kalakuta Republic

Art has served as both weapon and savior for Abani. Art helped him survive the horrors of the Kalakuta Republic. Telling those stories in verse helped him to document full, rich humanity under the most inhumane conditions.

"Art is essential," he says. "It's what is human in us. People have always tried to create narratives. Through stories, rock painting, sons. Trying to make sense of what it means to exist in this often-painful life, what it means to be human. Art becomes a way to meditate the terror. It connects us. Like James Baldwin said, 'Your pain has no meaning unless you can connect it with someone else's pain.'"

Kamau Daaood: World Stage

Kamau Daaood knows a little something about pain. You don't live 50 years in a black body and not know your way around deep heartache. When describing his chosen profession, he calls the poetic vocation, "Being wounded with a blessing." Like Abani, Daaood uses art to ease the pain.

Sitting in his Leimert Park living room, you get a sense of the six-foot-four, bass-voiced man. "There's a lot of West Coast bashing," Daaood says plainly. "I think that's when a lot of the brothers and sisters from the East can't find home. They end up in some Hollywood scene and that begins to represent L.A. for them. But there's always been a pulse rooted in community that's a very serious and very progressive scene. Oftentimes, the visitors don't plug into that pulse."