Pittsburgh literary festival explores 'Affrilachia,' the ocean and more

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It’s been more than three decades since Kentucky-born poet Frank X Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” to highlight the culture and accomplishments of Black folks born or living in Appalachia.

The term spread widely, at least in the worlds of visual and literary art. The Affrilachian Artist Project’s Facebook page has 4,000 followers. Last year, Walker published “A is for Affrilachia,” a children’s abecedarium.

How big a dent the concept has made in the broader American consciousness might be one topic of discussion when Walker visits City of Asylum’s weekend-long Litfest 2024. He’ll be talking about “Load in Nine Times” (Liveright Publishing), his new poetry collection evoking the lives of Black soldiers who fought for the Union in his home state during the Civil War.

The book was born of Walker’s research into his own family, including an ancestor who fought in the war. What he learned about slavery – and about the Bluegrass State in general — made it clear that what school had taught him was, well, whitewashed.

“They just always suggested that Kentucky was a great place to be enslaved,” says Walker in a phone interview. And neither teachers nor schoolbooks mentioned the thousands of Black soldiers who enlisted, in large part to earn freedom for themselves and their families.

“Load in” is meant as a corrective. In “Blue Summer,” Walker writes, “If every single blade a grass in a field / stood in line and put on a new cap and boots / it might come close to helping you picture / how many of us showed up that summer.”

Appalachia encompasses parts of 13 states from New York to Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, including most of Pennsylvania. It comprises not just farms and small towns but also cities from Pittsburgh to Birmingham, and its offspring include August Wilson, Nina Simone, Jesse Owens and Bill Withers, to name a few. It’s also inhabited by Native Americans and immigrants from many nations.

Yet to many Americans, Appalachian still means “white.”

Walker notes the false claims that Haitian immigrants were eating house pets in Springfield, an Ohio town near Appalachia’s western border. Spreaders of the lie included Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, author of the Appalachia-themed memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Trump also repeated false claims that Haitian immigrants are making life worse in the Appalachian town of Charleroi, Pa. — when in fact there’s stronger evidence they’re making it better.

As Walker says, questioning who belongs in Appalachia has become “a way to resurrect these very old ideas that I think are still connected to pre-Civil War attitudes, or the whole idea of the need to invent whiteness to separate Black people from poor white people, because the forces in power recognize that if those two groups ever got together, they might overthrow the powers that be.”

The University of Kentucky professor visits Alphabet City on Sun., Sept. 29

If “Load in Nine Times” recalls battles from history, the new novel by another Litfest speaker looks to forge a fresh path to the future.

Richard Powers, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2019 novel “The Overstory,” is back with “Playground” (W.W. Norton). This one follows characters whose lives revolve around not trees but the ocean. Powers says it’s the latest of his works “that try to challenge human exceptionalism” and point the culture in a new direction.

In a phone interview, Powers says starting in the mid-1800s, American fiction became overwhelmingly concerned with human interactions taking place in built environments.

“We were basically telling stories as if we were the only agent on the planet,” Powers says.

But amidst rapidly worsening ecological crises like global warming and a mass extinction, Powers observes fellow novelists returning to stories “where we understand ourselves through this larger framework of interrelations. That we’re actually living on a living planet, and we need to bring in that place, and all the human and nonhuman characters, as part of the story.”

The protagonists in “Playground” include a legendary, aging woman oceanographer and a native of French Polynesia and her American husband, on whose island a wealthy AI entrepreneur with a terminal illness wants to build the components for floating cities.

Most fiction exploring environmental crises comes down to a critique of humankind’s reluctance to sacrifice short-term personal desires (for consumer goods, let’s say) for long-term global benefits. But Powers says perhaps that’s the wrong way to think about it.

“Maybe the problem is our culture is asking us to look for meaning in the wrong place,” he says.

He contends that for most of history, most stories have in fact been about our place in nature.

“If we had stories that were like older stories, that basically said, ‘No, meaning is not in accumulation or acquisition, it’s in attention, and in being present, and being connected,’ that those processes are actually in the long run more deeply satisfying, more sustainably satisfying, than the ones that are being handed to us by our current cultural formation.”

Powers add, “Those stories are what we’re gonna need if we’re going to stick around here much longer.”

LitFest runs Sat., Sept. 28, and Sun., Sept. 29. The full schedule is here.