In a telephonic interview from his home in Los Angeles, he tells of how while “listening to some new music, I got so despondent thinking ‘What is happening to the music?’ I do not think that any artist is at a level where they want to be.”
You see, Williams believes that “in the Age of Aquarius, we have reached a new day”. From what the Financial Times euphemistically refers to as corporate credibility concerns to Aids in South Africa, “There are so many phenomena occurring that we need to start questioning who and what we have been brought up to believe we are,” he says.
Williams’s process of self-interrogation started in his days as the son of a preacher in Newburgh, New York, where he was born 30 years ago. The process deepened when he completed a degree in philosophy and then moved to the Big Apple. The turning point in his creative metamorphosis occurred when he read Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.
In 1995 he performed at the Brooklyn Moon Café and then moved on to the Nuyorican Poet Café, winning the 1996 Grand Slam. He began to feel the need to extend his repertoire. Departing from the premise Nada Brama — the Hindu concept that “the world is sound” — Williams started to “add instrument to his prayer”.
This led to the 1998 release of Williams’s debut album, The Amethyst Rock Star. It is a conscious effort to move away from the current trend of flashy commercial sound. Like Wyclef Jean, he makes a good snack from leftovers, mixing bits that include a home-made violin and, of course, a rock guitar. His poetry straddles religious themes with sometimes discomfiting forcefulness. From an off-the-wall interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer in Our Father, to a grim and macabre scene from a dream in Fearless, he is unrelenting in challenging conventional thought.
“I think it is because I believe in the power of the imagination and trust it,” he says. His musical career has developed alongside his acting and writing — all fed by poetry. “That is the way it should be,” he maintains. “Of all the stuff that I do, poetry remains the most important.”
Poetry won Williams a role in the 1998 film Slam, and poetry has seen him feature in anthologies and publish the books Seventh Octave and She. Yet he has outgrown the mode on both fronts.
His acting takes a different turn with two upcoming roles. In K-Pax, he starred alongside Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges and fellow poet Alfre Woodard as a man with chronic paranoia. In King of LA, he stars as a homeless schizophrenic who believes he is in a movie. He believes he is still sane.
A mumbling vagabond also happens to be the central character in his latest book, Kaliflower. The vagrant is an incarnation of John the Baptist and tells, in one long poem, of the coming of the Female Messiah. With this, he alludes to the notion that we have already entered the matriarchal age. Kali is the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, sadly renowned for (and portrayed in the book as) being more of the latter.
Williams’s work is his life: his first child, a girl, is named after the planet Saturn. His son is called Xuly, which means “keep an open mind” in the West African language Wolof. Ben Okri is probably familiar with that.
The details:
The International Spoken World Poetry Festival takes place in Johannesburg on July 26 and 27 at Mega Music, Newtown at 8.30pm. Tickets cost R60. In Cape Town, the festival will take place on July 29 at the Concert Hall, Baxter Theatre, Rondebosch at 8.15pm. Tickets cost R45.