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Arthur Flowers: Making music with literature
Content with his adjustments to the two microphones, performance storyteller Arthur Flowers quietly sits back in his chair on the outdoor stage at the Ubud Readers and Writer’s Festival
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ontent with his adjustments to the two microphones, performance storyteller Arthur Flowers quietly sits back in his chair on the outdoor stage at the Ubud Readers and Writer’s Festival.
Courtesy of Tara Khandro
Sparkling beads of sweat dance on his half- bald pate. Bone, bead and precious stone amulets drape from his neck. In his right hand a harmonica; in his left, an African kalimba.
Arthur calls himself a hoodoo man, a shaman of the spirit with words. Inhaling deeply and closing his eyes, he softly, sweetly summons legba, the gatekeeper of the portal between the spirit world and the material world.
Arthur Richard Flowers, Jr., a professor in the MFA creative writing program at Syracuse University, is a contemporary griot. The griotic school of African American literature draws its influences from African oral traditions and conventional Western literature.
Arthur’s novels and performance stories merge both literary streams. He was trained by Babajohns Killens, a griot master, to be a literary visionary; to write with a long view. “I call it the ‘Long Game’. I want my words to be transformational.” For Arthur, “literature is a sacred language” and has the power to shape the consciousness of humanity for future generations.
The governing force in Arthur’s life and writing is the concept of FA. “FA means fate, and fate is illusive,” Arthur says.
On his experience at his first Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, he says, “The lotus pond stage is magical. If I bring students over, I want to take them to sacred spaces off the beaten path. And you know, sometimes at these things you meet people you’re supposed to meet … It’s your FA. FA is a jolt of grace.”
Arthur also feels that each of us is in charge of our FA with our choices. “In any given moment we have many choices. I want to choose a choice that leads to illumination and empowerment for myself and in turn will enhance the human condition.” In this conscious choice-making, Arthur is aware of his hoodoo power – his spiritual force – to shape destiny.
Hoodoo is an ancient African healing art integrating magic (the manipulation of energy) esoteric science and plant medicine. Arthur says there is “no ritual, no hierarchy and no dogma in hoodoo. You basically are given permission to use anything that works to help the person.”
Richard is Arthur’s middle name. Arthur’s father was a prominent Memphis physician and as a child friends and family would refer to Arthur as “rickydoc”, hence the origin of his hoodoo name. “It wasn’t until after my dad died that folks began to tell me that he was a ‘full service doctor’. Meaning, his father used hoodoo if it was the right prescription for his patients.
Arthur followed his father’s doctoring legacy, using language as medicine. “I always knew that I would be a writer,” he says.
He was 20 years old when he returned to Memphis from his tour of duty as a clerk in Vietnam and took a job as a photographer for PUSH magazine. “I was taking photos of [poet and activist] Nikki Giovanni and asked her if she knew of any writing workshops in New York City. She said she knew of two and one was being given by John Oliver Killens. Well, I read one of his books as a child and I said ‘Is he still alive?’”
He was, and was teaching at Columbia University. Killens, now deceased, was an African American novelist who received two Pulitzer Prize nominations.
“I told my mom and dad I was leaving for NYC to become a writer, that I would write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and I would see them in the autumn. My dad gave me US$100 and off I went.”
“During those years in NYC I was hanging out with performance poets. Some were from the Caribbean and would put reggae music into their performance. Well, I wanted a shtick for my performance stories. I’m from Memphis, the home of the blues. I decided to work blues into my act.”
His novels – Another Good Loving Blues and the Mojo Blues – lyrically flow like a multi-movement blues composition. “When I write, I hear the words in my novels as music,” he says.
After a storytelling performance at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, Gita Wolf of Tara books approached Arthur with an invitation to collaborate with Manu Chitrakar, a traditional Patua artist from Bengal on a graphic book about the life of Martin Luther King Jr. for an Indian audience.
Patua art is a form of narrative storytelling through scroll painting. The result of the collaboration was I See the Promised Land — a magical fusion of two storytelling traditions.
But Arthur tells the tale with not only an Indian audience but a global audience in mind.
The multifaceted life of Martin Luther King, Jr. is brilliantly told in luminous poetic prose that reveals not only the struggle for human dignity that is King’s legacy to all human beings, but also King’s personal doubts and fears.
Arthur Flowers sings his soul’s song through the voice of one of his characters in Another Good Loving Blues: “Literature and hoodoo, both are tools for shaping the soul.”
