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Our conversation began in early October 2003, when I telephoned Forrest Hamer and asked if we might have a conversation about his work as a poet and psychologist. My call was timely. Forrest told me that he had just completed a new manuscript that wove together and took distance from themes he had been preoccupied with in his two previous books of poetry, Call and Responsei and Middle Ear.ii This new manuscript was influenced in part by his attendance at the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban and transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. We agreed to meet and continue our conversation, which you will be joining as it unfolds in Dr. Hamer's consulting room.
JH Forrest, when we spoke on the telephone, you told me that you had just completed a third manuscript. Having read your first two books of poetry, Call and Response and Middle Ear, I'm eager to hear about this new work.
FH Well, each of the first two books started with a particular preoccupation. The first book [Call and Response] was, in a way, a book about finding voice, about identity, and it started with an image of the graveyard in which my maternal grandparents were buried. That graveyard also contained an area where many slaves had been buried some years before, so the whole location in my voice of generations and of slavery in the South was important in terms of that book. In the second book [Middle Ear], I was preoccupied with the blues legend wherein Robert Johnson becomes transformed into a creative being at a Mississippi crossroads through a nighttime encounter with the devil.
This third book started with a review of some transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as well as some public accounts of the Rwandan tribunal trials, and my trying to make
sense of hatred and violence in relation to human connections in families, ethnic groups, and through identities. I became interested in how various aspects of self and