by Hope Kelham

Thulani Davis is an acoustic poet, journalist, librettist, historian, and professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has taught literature and history for over a decade. She is the author of the libretto for the opera Malcolm X, with music by Anthony Davis, and is currently at work on a book of arias, a history of musicians and artists who migrated up the Mississippi, and a film script. She is a graduate of Barnard College, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. This conversation, in which I ask Dr. Davis about her art practice, her legacy as an educator, and hopes for the future of Black studies, took place in her Helen C. White office ahead of her retirement; it has been edited for length and clarity.

What advice do you have for students right now who are following an interdisciplinary path like yours—especially with so much public doubt, mixed with some anxiety on an individual level, about the value of a humanities education?

I think it’s helpful, whatever it is you want to do, to also take some courses in the arts, and to look at other ways in which human beings solve problems and tell us about ourselves. It’s helpful because you get coached to focus on one thing and get a degree in that. Often, it’s the courses outside your focus that help you to innovate in the areas you’re concentrating on.

People who have come up with new inventions in medicine and science sometimes tell these stories about small incidents. They saw somebody playing with a yo-yo and they went, oh, wait a minute—that makes me think about this thing I’m doing. The arts help to stimulate your emotional life, enrich your emotional life, and your appreciation of what human life is like. And that’s helpful to whatever endeavor you’re taking up. If you want to be a doctor, it’s going to teach you more about the human beings who are going to come in for help from you. It broadens your universe at a time when you’re told to specialize.

When you’re an undergraduate, it’s just good to take courses in things you were never taught anything about that seem like they could be interesting. I did that with taking a writing class. I wasn’t writing poetry in high school. I still remember what my first writing teacher said about my first poems: they’re not poems, but keep writing. She didn’t try to explain to me what a poem is, because that’s difficult. The encouragement was all I needed.

I’m called an acoustic poet now, which means I pay a lot of attention to the sounds in words. And that’s probably because I read Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas when I was in ninth grade, and because I got to see Shakespeare productions in-person around that time. The sound of the plays was so beautiful. I thought reading Shakespeare was one thing…it was difficult, because it’s in old English, but these actors were brilliant. I just thought: that was thrilling. And I went and signed up for an acting class, which is not something I should have been doing! I discovered I was not an actor. Or I didn’t have the nerve for it. But I wanted to dig deeper, and that’s what I’m suggesting. 

I don’t just say no automatically to opportunities. When my cousin asked me to write an opera, I knew he had never written one. I said: that’s a little scary…I looked at some librettos and thought, that’s fifty pages of poetry, and some of it’s going to be bad. That was the main thing I was scared about: that some of it would be bad. I thought I could probably get the characters straight, but I was worried it would sound terrible.

When I finished the first draft, I gave it to two people and asked them to read it. One was my former copy chief at the newspaper. The other was a poet. They both called me up and said they didn’t know what to think because they’d never read one before. And I said: okay. I’m just going to have to work on it myself and do my best. So that’s what I did. And it’s thrilling to hear somebody sing something you wrote.

I thought that was just sort of an accidental detour…write one opera and go back to work. I didn’t expect that to turn into decades of work.

You’re referring to the Malcolm X opera?

Yes. It was of interest to audiences because they’d never seen anything like it: there’s hipster talk from the 1940s in the language. Bringing Americans doing things about American culture brought a lot of changes into the waters, so to speak, which are now blossoming all over the country. People are writing operas about Mexican-American experiences, Asian-American experiences, all kinds of realities other than the European stories from centuries ago.

And you still write poetry.

I write the poetry for me. When I’m not teaching, when I get up in the morning, poetry is the place I go to. I get up and see what’s on my mind. If something’s on my mind I want to write about, I’ll start a poem. But most days I don’t have a specific idea, so I have a notebook of things I’m working on and I look at those before I get to worrying about what I have to do today. I set aside time as early as possible in the day to figure out what I’m thinking before I start dealing with what I already know I have to do.

When did you start that practice?

Since I’ve been in Madison, because I have such a set schedule here, with gaps between teaching days. As a journalist working on a newspaper, not only are you there every day, but you have no idea how long you’ll be there…if something happens in the middle of the day, you’ll be there really late. So I just wrote when I could. But now I try to figure out what’s on my mind every day.

Tell me about the arc of your teaching here: what did you build? What can we think of as your legacy?

When they hired me, because I could teach literature and history, I think they were honoring what the department is about: interdisciplinary studies. I was still writing The Emancipation Circuit then. At the time, there were only two of us in the whole university teaching courses you could name as being “about Reconstruction”. 

I could bridge from what a colleague was doing, such as teaching slavery, into Reconstruction, and then bridge to the early twentieth century for whoever might be teaching migration. It made me feel like I was helping the continuum that this department can actually create in terms of topics we cover.

In teaching literature, I tend to do it chronologically, because Black writers only start getting published at a certain particular moment. I usually start with Frederick Douglass. I have these experiences all the time now where the history and the literature overlap. Today, I’m teaching the World War I era: the return of Black soldiers, the attacks on them, the formation of the NAACP. And by coincidence, the literature class was reading a novel about a World War II Black veteran. In both classes, I’m talking about people who thought America would take a better look at them after they had gone and served the country, just to be met with violence and continued hard times at home. And it took a long time for the literature to come out that tells the stories of the history I’m teaching in the other class. But it is there. By sometimes bringing one into the other class, I feel like I’m helping students understand how people felt about things in their own words.

What other courses feel momentous?

I did a course on women of color in literature—Latin American, Black, and Asian American writers mostly from the seventies: Puerto Ricans, Ntozake Shange, other Black female writers, writers from the Philippines, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans. The room was packed. And the reason I did it was because these writers all knew each other: they were in the same artistic community. We have different departments or programs for each of those things, and a lot of places might not want to encourage one class about everybody together, but that’s not how those writers lived. 

I also started a class on Black masculinities in literature. I feel, particularly for freshmen and sophomores, it was a real new experience for them to just be reading what Black men were writing to describe their existence in different time periods. There’s almost nothing in any of those books that would be totally unrecognizable to a young man now. The day-to-day of what it is to be a man in this country echoes through every generation as similar pressures.

So, to some extent, my legacy thinks about what it means to be interdisciplinary as a department.

You were part of the generation that demanded and created Black studies departments at universities. What do you hope for the future of Black studies?

I’m in the generation that asked for Black studies. The people who started this department (at UW-Madison) did the same thing we did at Columbia and Barnard. It took a long time…we started in ‘68. All of us who were there in 1968 have been continually dealing with it all this time. We’re all still in touch with each other. We feel adamant about trying to save what was hard to build. Black studies covers things that are never mentioned in public schools. When I start teaching the Civil War, I ask everybody on the first day of class to write down whatever they had learned in high school about it. Everybody writes more or less the same thing: dates, leaders, names of famous battles, maybe the invention of medical care on battlefields. As one student put it in class last year: it was technology, war technology, that they learned in their public educations. But there’s a whole generation of people who were on the ground…who saw battles, helped the Union Army, escaped from plantations, who invented the forms of activism that we still use today in order to stay alive, to get freedom, to live in real freedom after they got it, to vote and be full citizens…which we’re still doing. There was a huge change in the entire culture of the country that students haven’t learned much about, even coming in with very fine educations. So, it’s important that we keep making that knowledge available.

I think what’s going on now, the ties being built with other departments that teach specific ethnicities and their cultures, is important. People in real life are more apt to run into each other in communities. Life is not taught the way history is taught.

We must hold our ground as best we can. That may entail getting support from not just students, but the community as well. Those schools that gave up their DEI programs right away? I think people regarded them very poorly for that, as though they didn’t even make a good inquiry into what the government’s actual issue was with those things. It immediately made things more difficult for students applying to those schools who don’t yet know they want to apply. You must thread a lot of needles in the first place: it’s always been awkward trying to seek your own future in an environment that responds, mostly, to people with very fine educations, money, and previous ties to the university. People of color have fewer of those options. 

So, we must hold the line, because otherwise it becomes education only for elites. And the country will be a lot worse off without the impact of different communities collaborating and working on the general good for all.

Why did you choose Wisconsin? What did you learn here? 

I love the freedom I’ve had as an instructor. In a lot of departments where I went to school, every professor’s area was their turf, and you could not go near it. There were a lot of barriers around what it was they did. Even though they were very collegial with each other, if you were a young professor, it would be hard to make your space. I felt like people here just work well together. And it was good for me to be in a place where I didn’t know a hundred people already. I had to learn a new culture. I’ve never been in grocery stores like they have here. I sent pictures to friends of mine of just the bakery section at Hy-Vee. For a New Yorker, you can’t imagine seeing that much bread at once. Things I thought were going to be a problem, like getting used to the cold, weren’t.

And the writing group I was a part of with folks in this department. That, and the freedom to experiment. I’m very happy with that.