The Writer Is Asked Why She Calls Herself Affrilachian

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• The Writer Is Asked Why She Calls Herself Affrilachian
• Asha L. French (bio)

The Writer Is Asked Why She Calls Herself Affrilachian

A young woman is trying to get an elder poet to say she is Affrilachian but the elder has already said she is Appalachian and not Affrilachian because she is from Appalachian people who do not play the separatist racial politics of the rest of the country. The young woman is hoping to write something scholarly about Affrilachians and is trying to commission the curmudgeonly poet to that end.

"I'm an Affrilachian Poet," I say, not to brag but to help, "and I can put you in touch with some Affrilachian Poets from the region."

"Some" is my word for two. I know two Affrilachian Poets from the region. The two Crystals: Crystal Wilkinson and Crystal Goode. The others of us have been riding under the moniker to put some color into the place because the books say it was never there, but our family pictures tell us otherwise. In so doing, we have done two wrong things that some Real Scholar of Appalachian history will continue to point out for years: 1) We have projected the identity of a multi-state region onto one whole state; and 2) we have bastardized the name of said region, kidnapping the rhythm of an Indigenous word, Appalachia, to use it toward some Black Arts Movement-inspired, separatist end.

The young woman must have read this Real Scholar. She sneers. Looks away from the esteemed poet. Says to me, "Why do you call yourself that?"

The Writer is Asked Why She Calls Herself a Womanist

Another time I was asked why I called myself something was during a job interview for a Black feminist professorship. I was calling myself a womanist at the time. bell hooks had not yet passed away, and feminist was something I wasn't comfortable being as long as I knew that she and her followers talked bad about the ways of my dead brother under that moniker. I had been one of those followers saying slick things about him and his fraternity brothers¹ because they had some funny ways. [End Page 87]

Just hours before the interview, I'd been crying over the gone men in my family. I was a postdoctoral fellow at an Ivy League school, and I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere in that cold city. Not the campus with its plantation houses still intact. Not the apartment I was renting from a family that did not speak my language. Not the public school my daughter attended. Not even in my skin. I wanted to be with my father and my brother. I wasn't allowed to feel that way because I was a mother, after all, and a scholar who had managed to complete a doctoral degree. I wasn't supposed to pack my bags and go to heaven at the peak of this academic success but that's just what I wanted to do unless I was spending time with Layli Maparyan's The Womanist Idea and musing on ideas of interconnection and higher callings. I'd read her chapter about her daughter's suicide and decided to take the name of any woman who could make me feel the way she made me feel about death—like it wasn't final but was rather just one chapter in the ongoing story of a connective tissue stronger than my father's cartilage, which cancer crumbled before he died. I'd decided to let that woman name me—the one who wrote about interconnectedness and differential consciousness² and the inevitable victory of Light with a capital "L."

On the other side of the Zoom screen, Real Scholars wanted to know why I called myself that name when I was applying for a Black Feminist position. My awareness of the beef between some Real Scholars under the Black Feminist banner and some Real Scholars under the (more than likely Africana) Womanist banner was buried under yearnings for heaven and the men who'd gone before me to prepare my apartment there. My mind was somewhere else.

I didn...