CHaun Webster

5 Questions for Chaun Webster on His New Book
​GeNtry!fication: or the Scene of the Crime

Chaun Webster is a poet, graphic designer, native Minnesotan, and member of The Black Midwest Initiative’s organizing committee. Here, he discusses his recent book project and his experiences growing up in North Minneapolis.

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​How have your personal experiences in North Minneapolis helped shape your work?

My experiences as a child of the Pentecostal church, growing up in a deeply Pentecostal family over North shapes my work in very big ways. The church and faith tradition I was raised into believed in the practice of speaking in tongues, among other things. Now, that practice is one where some believe they are speaking a language they were not taught, while others believe that they are using heavenly tongues not among our earthly banter. In popular theology and culture, it is dismissed as gibberish or likened to something of the occult. Even as kids we would mimic and tease those who caught the Holy Ghost and spoke in other tongues. I grew up around a number of working-class women who worked hard in and out of their homes and who in their hum, scream, shout, sweat, and unutterable groans put their worries on the altar and offered a critique of this present world. I’m agnostic now, but thinking on this tradition, years removed, especially reading work like Ashon Crawley’s Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, has me considering and reconsidering how there is something important that I need to recover from my upbringing, namely a kind of disruption to and refusal of “the theology-philosophy that produces a world, a set of protocols, wherein black flesh cannot easily breathe” (Crawley, 3). My mother and the women in her prayer circles taught me something about refusing the present world, about something that superseded the strictly rationale, and that in the hum and groan and indecipherable tongues that there was something of maroonage, of fugitivity. 

I really dig how artist Kameelah Rasheed discusses what they call “strategic opaqueness”—cuz visibility/inclusion ain’t everything—and even though Fred Moten and other scholars taught me a vast number of things about maroonage, Crawley’s work has helped me to understand that those first lessons on blackness, mysticism, and fugitivity took place in my home and church. 

What would you say is your writing practice?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately actually. A couple of things that I’ll share on it. I’m really digging Margo Natalie Crawford’s text, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. Crawford is doing a lot in the text but one thing that struck me right away is her assessment of how Amiri Baraka uses the phrase “post-literary” in his introduction to Larry Neal’s, Black Boogaloo, as a way to describe the emphasis on sound by writers of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford elaborates saying, “Many of the current ‘post-black’ assessments of Bam poetry do not understand the post-literary. These critiques often focus on the supposed lack of ‘literary’ worth and ignore the innovations with sound.” Now, the distinction Crawford is referencing, and perhaps, reinforcing, between how a text lives as sound(s) and how it operates as a piece of literature makes me uneasy, but, I dig the point around what they say on the innovations poet’s like Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and others were making with sound. That’s maybe too long a way of me to say my writing practice is a sound practice, is a practice in attempting to better translate sound, black noise, din—to cite/nod Tricia Rose and Édouard Glissant—to the spatial temporal limitations of the page. Douglas Kearney is useful here, he is like a Jedi Master of this visual/sound work that at one point I’ve heard him refer to as “performance-typography.” Kearney’s work doesn’t sit still, it moves, it pulsates, and the visuality of the work—whether the size of the text, position of the text, or its superimposition—is not a gimmick, it is a score, there is a way it is written to be read which becomes clear hearing him perform a piece. To go back to the din though, I suppose, I am clawing, and pushing, and pulling at the visual and sonic abstractions of my work to better understand blackness and fugitivity, and maybe that there was redundant.

Why poetry? That is, what is it about poetry specifically that helps us to grapple with the concerns you are interested in addressing?

​I’m suspicious of genre, so there’s that, but I came to poetry because I found in it a kind of cognitive interdisciplinary space that allowed me to explore ideas openly. In Mess And Mess And, Douglas Kearney discusses in a section called “Mess Studies,” that, “I make poems to make a way through what I often perceive as mess. This is not the only reason to make a poem, but it’s what I’m usually doing. That ‘way through’ I hope worries certain Orders I find odious—sometimes even versions of my own.” That’s among the best ways I’ve heard what I’m attempting to do with poetry explained. Poetry is, for me, both the wreckage and the “way through” it.

You engage with the question of “how to archive what is missing from the landscape” in your new book. What benefits do you see in archiving what is rapidly being lost to gentrification and redevelopment?

Great question. I suppose what I am trying to do is to create a repository, one that my kids and their peers can draw on that aids in the assessment of what was present, that takes a position of understanding absent as distinct from nothingness, that can be drawn on for inspiration and instruction. And I say that openly acknowledging the limitations of my own work, both due to capacity and undoubtedly my own errors. But the hope is that those can be reckoned with and that hopefully my kids don’t have to have the same point of departure as I did. I want them to understand that when a co-op goes up on the corner of Golden Valley and Penn, years before that Sam Reuben was picking vegetables from local farms every week and selling them from his folding tables at that corner without asking permission. That that service was needed, and that we fulfilled it for ourselves locally. And that there are lessons of organization and scale and economy in there somewhere that we might need to tease out. 

I keep going back to Alice Walker, the way she went searching for Zora, the importance of finding and marking the burial site. And how many other histories lay buried in unmarked graves? It’s a phenomenon that capital keeps reproducing and, when I am most honest, I say I’m not hopeful that this kind of archival work is near enough to contend with capital. It is one thing though, among many others that need to be employed at multiple levels/scales of struggle.

How do the themes you write about play out differently in the Midwest as opposed to other regions of the United States? 

I think Minnesota, even when speaking of the “Midwest” is different. We are not Chicago, or Detroit, or Milwaukee, not in terms of size or industry, and yet we draw black populations from all those places and more. So I try not to compare even in those respects of what folks might understand as Midwest. Minnesota’s black migration history is unique, as is our urban native populations and immigrant communities. I think we have to take seriously the project of investigating how industries and institutions developed here. You can’t talk about police, and the development of that institution here, in the same way as you do in the South. You can’t speak to the industries capturing black labor and the formation of unions here in the same way as you might elsewhere. In some ways I think that history has yet to be written, though I am excited that folks like Brittany Lewis and others are on the case. That was a lot of can’t and aren’t language earlier. It’s gonna take me a minute, and a few projects, to articulate in any worthy manner what we, black folks, are—both here in Minnesota specifically and in the Midwest more broadly.