A wedding is at once a crowded place and a private room, packed with trusts and empty of all but the heart's letters which one other heart may read and decipher.

A wedding is earth and water and a species of irreducible light and the flat belly of a harbor and a mango about to ripen and fall into gravity's caress and the waves subsiding and resuming their concerto in a minor key and the rush hour canceled by the stun of auspicious beginnings.

A wedding is at once a crowded place and a private room, packed with trusts and empty of all but the heart's letters which one other heart may read and decipher.

Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.

All third world literature is about nation, that identity is the fundamental literary problem in the third world. The writer's identity is insecure because the nation's identity is not secure. The nation doesn't provide the third world writer with a secure identity, because the nation is colonized, it's oppressed, it's part of somebody else's empire.

Anyway, culture and nation are partners, inextricable from each other. National culture and nation, they are reciprocities.

My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.