"Our theology must emerge consciously from an investigation of the socioreligious experience of black people, as that experience is reflected in black stories of God's dealigns with black people in the struggle of freedom." —James Cone, God of the Oppressed.
On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto chats with author Danté Stewart on the sacredness of Black stories and experiences. Danté is the author of Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle. Listen in on this rich conversation.
You can follow Danté on Instagram and Twitter @stewartdantec
and find more information about him and his work on his website.
"Our theology must emerge consciously from an investigation of the socioreligious experience of black people, as that experience is reflected in black stories of God's dealigns with black people in the struggle of freedom." —James Cone, God of the Oppressed.
On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto chats with author Danté Stewart on the sacredness of Black stories and experiences. Danté is the author of Shoutin' in the Fire: An American Epistle. Listen in on this rich conversation.
You can follow Danté on Instagram and Twitter @stewartdantec
and find more information about him and his work on his website.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (00:11):
On this week's 20 Minute Takes. We speak with author Dante Stewart. He's the author of Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle. We talked to him about his writing, his inspirations, and the ways that his faith, stories, and the land all informed his journey home. Come join us for this conversation on 20 Minute Takes. Dante Stewart, thank you so much for joining us on 20 Minute Takes.
Dante Stewart (00:43):
Thank you for having me on.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (00:46):
Dante is an author and we wanted to have you on as we're featuring the voices of black authors. Can you tell us a little bit before you became an author, what did life, what did ministry look like for you?
Dante Stewart (00:58):
Oh, good. You know, nobody ever asked me that question. Nobody ever asked me what do you dream of being like after being an author? You know, things like that, but I'm kind of living the dream. I tell people all the time I'm living the dream right now. I am a military spouse. My wife is in the Air Force. Much of life before becoming an author or being on staff at Tabernacle Baptist Church here in Augusta, Georgia, was about me working at Enterprise and I was a barista. I was in seminary and still kind of in seminary; I've been taking a long route. I transferred two times now to where I'm at Emory University. Life was about looking up specialty coffee, reading books, and writing essays and trying to develop my own kind of voice and style as a writer. I've been writing for a little minute now, at least since 2016 publicly. Before the book came out in 2021, I was still writing and reading and making coffee.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (02:10):
Your book, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle - what was it that sparked your writing of the book?
Dante Stewart (02:17):
Much of my story was being rooted in how I was reading black texts. I was now back around us, black people. I was going back home. My trying to make sense of my own failure and the ways in which vulnerability and honesty was really a key to my own liberation and my own self-love (to use the language of June Jordan) and developing of self respect. Much like people who were trying to figure out how to deal with the ongoing nature of police brutality, of this country's addiction to black suffering, the ways in which white vigilante violence was still very fundamentally the law of the land and the practice of the people. So many of us were trying to make sense of that. I was just trying to join the lone tradition of Kiese Layman, Jesmyn Ward, Sarah Broom, Darnell Moore, and others who write in this memoir type way. Also trying to lean on James Cone, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Katie Cannon and the likes of those voices to help me make sense of my story and give me better metaphors to understand my faith and how to practice it.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (03:39):
One of the questions that I want to ask you is I love all of these different historical and some of the greats of literature that have been your conversation partners in this. I think there's a way that you unpack these greats, Tony Morrison, Baldwin, in the way that other Christians unpack scripture. Can you tell us about how that dialogue happens for you?
Dante Stewart (04:13):
It's already happening and in some sense I'm receiving a tradition and ongoing conversation. That's already happening. I was sitting down the other day talking with a family friend. He was my granddaddy’s friend. My granddaddy just passed. We had the funeral the other day on Saturday. Mr. Earl is 81. We were talking and he asked me, you know, have you ever been on a cruise? And so I'm listening to him. He's holding my hand. I said, nah, I've never been on a cruise. He says, well, alright, if you ever go on a cruise, make sure you pay attention to the water. And I said, okay. And he says, every time I've gone on a cruise I stop and I paid attention to the water because somebody either swam or drown, and because they did that I am here today. When I thought about that conversation, particularly about paying attention to the water and paying attention to looking at myself, in that conversation I'm a proud black man. That conversation is a reflection of the ways in which I believe the divine is at work within black stories. Yes, that wherever we find ourselves these stories are stories that are to generate meaning. These stories are not going to be great stories as far as like good stories; to pay attention to the water is to pay attention to death. It is to pay attention to the ways in which white supremacy has murdered us and raped us and pillaged us and plundered us and used us as both chattel and capital. Also what he is trying to get me to think about is paying attention long enough to the people who survive. And it was in the context of this- he says that a lot of people talk about the greatest generation, the greatest generation was the people after the war. And then he says, that's not the greatest generation; the greatest generation are the people who survived the voyage.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (06:23):
Oh, wow.
Dante Stewart (06:24):
That's the greatest generation. When I think about this conversation between those voices and the people who made us, I think it was Thich Nhat Hanh (SP?) who said, when you look at every sail you can see your ancestors marked upon your life. As a reader of the Bible, I think of being invited into this conversation of people who have gone before us. They looked at their ancestors as stories, as metaphors to understand and ground them in the land, ground them in their own collective story of how they live and move and have their being in the world. It grounded them in the rituals that helped sustain them as a people. Those stories were able to look at the hard ways that they have lived, but also what they have made of the world and what they have made of themselves. They chronicled it in books and anthologies. The book of Jeremiah, the book of Hosea, the book of Chronicles, and testaments to tell love, the revelation of the divine, and their stories. When I read the book of Nambara (SP?)... when I read the language of Anna Julia Cooper, or the poetry of Nikki Giovanni, or the lyricism of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, and June Jordan.
For me, these are also names that, in some sense, after speaking the language of Octavia Butler, our Lord in parable of the sower, this is earth seed, the book of the living and the stuff that keeps us alive. I think those of the past, particularly those who stories are chronicled in the Bible or those whose stories are chronicled in our theological and literary tradition, they were always trying to look at themselves and look at their own people to say that there is something here for us to learn and listen to, that would help us embody our faith in the story, achieve freedom and liberation. More than anything achieve life and life to the full.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (08:43):
In the same way that the Bible is this collection of stories that help reflect and unpack and help us understand God, you look at both the art and the writings, as well as the life stories of these other folks.
Dante Stewart (09:01):
Yeah, indeed, when I listen to Mr. Earl speak about the typography of the land and the social and political geography of living in postwar, rural South Carolina, or going through the sixties and the seventies… Here is a man who's sitting down telling me what he's going to miss the most about my grandfather. That was the intimacy of conversation and the ability to be still enough to listen to one another. But then here is another, here is a man who says he carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket every single day. He reads the Constitution every single week, because he wants us to know that there is something beautiful and divine about being black and have survived in the way that we have survived.
This is a man who sits and tells me that I am tired. He's 80 years old. And then my grandmother comes and sits beside him. I see my grandmother as she parts ways with her husband just hours earlier as the casket is being laid down. Here is my grandmother, as Elizabeth Alexander would write in her book The Light of the World, here's my grandmother, laying her hands on the love of her life. And we are gathered together in this space to send my granddaddy to the grave in the most extravagant, beautiful Solomon sacred way possible. I look at these moments and this is where the divine is. How could one not spot that divine in these moments? I mean, people may disagree with that, but at the end of the day I'm not as concerned with what people think about us or convincing them that we have something to offer. In some sense, public conversations on theology, the academy, and even in philosophical language of epistemology, oftentimes people have not taken seriously the way that we name the world, see the world, inherit the world and pass on the world to one another. These black worlds, which have both beauty and burdens and triumph and sorrows and testimonies and love and life and violence. Just the humanity of our stories - people in the academy and theological conversations don't often think that we are a worthy starting point. To sit there, to pay attention, to write, to chronicle these stories is me saying that this is a worthy starting point. And there's something here for me to listen to.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (11:44):
I'm getting goosebumps as you're talking about this worthy starting point. Your memoir, I've heard you mention that it's the experience of it and the memoir itself is something of a journey home. Can you tell me a little bit about that journey home and maybe some of the things that were surprising to you both on that journey or as you find yourself in a place that's home?
Dante Stewart (12:14):
When I think about writing a memoir, my grandma would always tell me, boy, you ain't lived enough. So I think there's something audacious. There's something beautifully audacious about being 29 and journeying to the land of memoir. As my friend, who's a writer, he told me over and over again, you wrote a risky book. It wasn't until months later that I understood the risk of joining into memoir, especially, being young. I'll start with the thing that's been surprising. The thing that's been surprising is that the more that I read, the more that I write, the more that I grow, the more I realize I don't know, and that I must read, and that I must write in order for me to grow into the person that I wanna become.
The surprising thing about this journey home is that oftentimes when I think about going home or traveling back to South Carolina after trying to leave Georgia, Georgia being a metaphor for the ways I was involved in the white church, and me going back home and trying to pay attention to my grandfather and grandmother, my mom and daddy, my cousins. The surprising thing is that so much of this journey of writing has been the healing that I've been looking for. Shoutin’ in the Fire is a story of a young man who runs. There's a story of a young man who continues to run to people, things, places in hopes that this young man will finally find something that he's been looking for all his life.
And that is affirmation. It is this space to be free and to be whole, and not feel as if this young man has to perform for other people in order to simply hear on the other side, I see you and you are loved. If I think about my own journey of journeying home and getting some distance from myself and looking at myself as a character within this own story, this young man travels to so many different places and hurts people along the process and gets hurt along the process. But then all of that hurt at some point when I was able to be still enough to listen and to learn, then I was able to make sense of who I had become.
And in some sense, the monster that I had become in ways in which I was surrounded by people who did not care how they treated other people as long as they felt their theology and religion was right. They used the church, they used the Bible, they used faith, they used books, they used the academy, they use all these things as weapons instead of worlds to be explored. When Philando Castile and Arthur Sterling were murdered and Donald Trump was in office, I'm deeply immersed in white social space and white social life. The journey home was a messy journey home. It was a journey where I had my bags packed and they were full and I had to let some baggage go. I journey home, not running, but limping.
Even if I limped my way through, I made it. At least I made it to where I found myself and made it home to actually where I wanted to go. That's all wrapped up into the surprise of it. Another surprise was my friend. We were doing an event together with Mahogany Books. Shout out to Mahogany Books, a black owned bookstore in D.C. Ramona and Derek, the owners, loved them so much. We were doing an event with them on the book and he asked me a question that he asks everybody that he does events with. He says, if you were to look at your 10 year old self, what would you tell that person?
Immediately my mind goes back to this picture that my mother gave me of me around 9, 10, 11. I am in front of the Pentecost church. I used to air guitar and I'm in front of the church air guitaring. I realized that what I told him in that moment is, I'm so proud of you. You never stopped showing up for yourself and trying. You failed in many ways, but then you did get to a place where you were able to listen. You failed at homophobic. You failed at sexism. You failed at misogyny. You failed at being a black dude in a white space, who is a weapon against black people. But then also, young man, that you learned that even in the failure, even in the running, at some point you're gonna have to stop and face yourself. And you actually did it, even if you still bear the scars and bear the wounds, you still found out a way through the church, through ministry in the public to remind yourself and others again and again, and again that what you learned back then actually allowed you to become who you are right now. And so that indeed is a surprise that I did not give up on myself and trying to show up for myself and for other people in public.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (17:56):
I want to take that question that Derek asked you and actually give you a little bit of a twist on it. As you think about future generations and the ones that you are investing in and the ones that you are raising, what is it that you hope will be true for them? Is there a truth that you hope that they will hold within themselves?
Dante Stewart (18:16):
I hope for my children and for their children and for the children who look like them, or even for the children who don't look like them. I just hope that the world that we give them is a little bit better than the world that we were handed. So much of my theology is not dogmatic anymore. Oftentimes, I really don't even care about doctrine because at the end of the day, the kind of framework, even though they can be life giving at some point, there's a limitation to a framework to actually shape a life. Life is not meant to be shaped by frameworks only; life is about embodiment and the lived experience of faith.
The lived experience of story. When I look at my theology in Jesus, so much in public I'm being known now for this thing of Jesus and James Baldwin. Black theology and black literature. How I think about Baldwin and Jesus. Baldwin says at the end of In Search of the Majority, that we need not leave the world that is before you, and you need not take her to leave it the same way you found it. And Jesus says the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I have come that you may have life and life to the full fullest. My understanding of the theology of life is about the theology of the future and the ways in which life will be constructed for them, the conditions that they live in, the world that they are handed. Will they be handed as the end of the movie of the Book of Eli, where Denzel Washington lays down and from memory he recites this sacred story because he has ingested it so long. He has practiced it over and over and over again, that the only mission he has is in life is to survive just long enough so somebody can hear what story brought him over. I think about that. I think about my children and why do I buy all these books? And why do I buy this artwork? And why am I trying to write, and why am I trying to preach? And why am I being invested in all these things I'm invested in?
I realize that so much of it is yes, for me and for us, but so much of it is for them. My friend would say we're trying to build a canon. I want them to have a canon, not just simply of literature, but a canon of love that they can pull from again and again. As I write in my book in the chapter on my granddaddy, which is called “Flooding”, I say, I think about my granddaddy. He has dementia. Even when he has lost, and he has lost so much, when we hold onto those stories he is still found.
So when our children wake up, 20 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, 200 years from now and we're gone, the stamp of the divine and of the beauty of blackness and a black life will still be something that they hold onto that keeps them living, pressing the world to be what it can be and can become.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (21:54):
Dante Stewart. Thank you so much for sharing your story and showing us that your story is a beginning and an end of itself. I think you have lived out this promise of the cannon that you are wanting to impart to the next generations. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us here on 20 Minute Takes.
Dante Stewart (22:14):
Thank you to those who are tuning in lately over the last few months. Every interview I've done at the end, I want to thank the crowd who's showing up in this medium. We see you, we thank you. It's not easy to show up and tap in and things like that, but you're doing it again and again and again. And we want to thank you. And we want to continue to create things that you feel that sees you, that keeps you inspired, that protects your vulnerability and your honesty, and that loves you in ways that you desire. So thank you to the crowd that pays attention.
Nikki Toyama-Szeto (22:58):
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry and our show is produced by David de Leon. I'm your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website christiansforsocialaction.org