Cheswayo Mphanza
THE RINEHART FRAMES
University of Nebraska Press
(Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets)
How do I reach a home aside from the imagination? An image insists.
—from “Frame Eleven”
HOW IT BEGAN: Two films triggered a concrete idea of how the book was to be a conversation between art, history, and politics: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2000).
INSPIRATION: I went through a lot of the imagist/objectivist writings of Ezra Pound and Lorine Niedecker. It was easy for me to understand the description of a scene in cinema with how the imagist/objectivists framed spaces and people. In these moments that this description happens, what becomes erased or left in the margins? With that in mind, I was led back to the Oulipo, a collective Cathy Park Hong introduced me to. I was enamored by how the Oulipo writers are interested in restraints as a praxis for writing—living. I was beginning to understand how imposed limitations in language—and it being conveyed through writing—mirrored some of my own failures of synchronizing cinema and poetry and the complexity of displaying my Blackness on the page. Hence the book is framed around centos as points of demarcation. Hence I referenced the character of Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And the goal from there became even clearer: to construct a protagonist who was an amalgamation of others as the ultimate restraint.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I love the labor of research and writing. I am obsessed with the process and revel in going through its many stages to reach the iteration that, after careful and tedious deliberations, I have settled on calling the finished product.
ADVICE: Take your time with the craft aspect of it. Develop a language for your project that isn’t entirely composed of your affective responses to the world, but a combination of affect, intellect, and being in the world–ness.
AGE: 28. RESIDENCE: Chicago. JOB: I teach workshops here and there. TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About a year, and another year for editing and publishing. TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Five months.