The Magic Makers

Marvin K White on Thomas Simpson's Show

2008-12-17T19:44:00.000-08:00

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Interviewed on March 3, 2007

2008-02-27T16:01:00.000-08:00

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, poet/teacher/mother

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, born on December 6, 1950 in Arrima, Trinidad

Interviewed on March 3, 2007 by Ana-Maurine Lara

My name is Cheryl Allison Boyce-Taylor. I don’t often use Allison. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is my performing name and my date of birth is December 6, 1950.

Thank you so much for interviewing this morning.

Well, you’re welcome.

I’m going to start off asking you to speak about some of the defining moments in your younger years before age 20 that have had a major impact on who you are today. I do that for a reason and that’s because we don’t often get to refer to that time period in our work.

Well, I guess the biggest thing in my life, and it still remains that, was when I was 13 years old I left Trinidad, my home and everything I knew, including my mother and father, to travel to New York to live with my mother’s sister. In St. Albans, Queens. Prior to that, I had not really been away from my mother very much. Maybe a couple of days for vacation at her sisters in the south of Trinidad but that was about it. And so here I was, at a very defining time in my life, those teenage years when everything starts to change – from the body to the fantasies – I was leaving my mother to come to New York to live with my aunt, her sister, whom I did not really know very well. I knew her from visits to Trinidad. But later my mother tells me that I wanted to come to visit my aunt and my aunt said, “Well, a visit is not a good idea. It’s better that you stay and go to school.” And that I agreed because this is what I wanted. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure that that’s true. So I came to live with my aunt. I came on November 1^st. So it was winter, that is how it all began. It took my mom 11 months to join me. I did not realize I would miss her so much. I had never been away from her long. But I missed her. I felt like I would die, almost. And it was during that time that I began writing lots of letters asking her for me to come back home to Trinidad. But, the plan was already in place that my brother and she would join me here.

In New York, in Queens.

Yes, in New York, in Queens. And it took my mother 11 months to get here. But it was during that period that I began writing and I began really appreciating the things that I had taken for granted in my life. Like my family, my friends, the calypso, the dialect, the Carnival. All of those things, I believed, although it was so traumatizing, that’s the thing that connects me to my writing now.

Could you say more about that?

I took for granted so many wonderful things about my island: the sunshine, the calypso, walking out in the yard with no shoes on. Walking out in a yard that belonged to you and your family. In New York there are so many apartments. I was fortunate to move to Queens and to move into a house and still have a yard, but it was just different. And I realized all the things I had taken for granted. Cooking outside in the backyard. My grandmother used to cook on her – what we call a coal pot – it’s not exactly a stove, but it’s almost like a fireplace. And they did make fireplaces in the yard to cook on, so I realized that I had not even really paid attention to those things. And now without them, I held onto them for dear life.

For sure! What were your first impressions of New York when you got there?

Cold. [Laughter] Cold. But I’ll tell you another thing. I came the day after Halloween and I had never seen that much candy in my life. I really thought I had died and gone to candy heaven. [Laughter]. So for a couple of days I think that that soothed and satisfied me. All that candy that they had in the house! I ate candy, and began to get adjusted. But I quickly realized that being a Black girl in America was somehow a very invisible life. Because coming from Trinidad – it was a country under Black rule. I never knew anything else but Black teachers, Black doctors, Black nurses. I never knew anything else, and so that was my earliest impression of - I wouldn’t say racism as much as separation of people. People are so separate. I did move to a Black upper middle class neighborhood – St. Albans, Queens. So, I still had Black people around, but it was outside of that that I began to realize that there was prejudice. And separate neighborhoods that everybody lived in and I began to see that and to wonder about it and think about it. Because that was not something that I had to think about when I was in Trinidad at all.

Would that happen when you left the neighborhood or went to school?

Yes, because my family sent me to school in the Bronx. From Queens to the Bronx, which is quite far. I would say at least an hour and fifty minutes of travel one way. And the reason they did that was because I was on a student visa and when you were on a student visa, in those days, you had to attend a private school and pay for your education. And plus they wanted me to be in a religious school, because we were Seventh Day Adventists.

So you were going to Seventh Day Adventist high school?

I was going to a Seventh Day Adventist high school. I was in the 9^th grade, traveling from Queens to the Bronx to go to school.

Can you say a little bit about that journey?

That was a very long journey and what my aunt did was...there was another young lady, a teenager, at my church that went to that school. So she also traveled from Queens. So my aunt arranged for me to travel with her. And I don’t really remember how this happened, but she took the train all the way, and I found out that there was a bus somehow, after awhile. And so I began taking this bus, which was a little bit more comfortable. But it was two buses, and two trains. So, it was rather stressful. To this day I hate the Bronx.

[laughter]

To this day I hate the Bronx.

Because of how far it was?

Because of how far it was. I thought it was very run down. And very different from what I knew. At thirteen you don’t know all that much, but it was very different from what I knew and I really didn’t like it so much. I would be scared some days, you know. There were people all over the streets and rowdy kids. I was a little afraid doing all of that traveling alone. But I did it anyway.

Cause you had to. Are there any other defining moments in your younger years, before age 20 that had an impact?

Oh yes. And I don’t talk about this one very much, but I had an abortion when I was seventeen. I was graduating from high school. That was the year I was graduating, and I had a boyfriend and I became pregnant and my mom was not good with that because she had not gone to college. She hadn’t even finished high school and for her, I was like her dream, the one to be educated. And so my mom decided I would have an abortion. And it was right before...wow, I’m really telling this...it was right before everything was legal. And so a friend of hers who was a nurse took me to someone else who was a nurse midwife who did abortions, so I had this little back room abortion. And that was pretty traumatizing. I think even now I’ve blocked it off somewhere. Because I have not really written about it.

Even abortions today – they’re legal – and they’re still very traumatizing. It’s a big deal. How did you move forward from that point?

My mother was not very sympathetic. I was graduating in June and this happened sometime in March or April and the boy and I broke up. And I would cry and tell my mother that he doesn’t speak to me anymore at school. I don’t know what he was going through. I mean, looking back, maybe he was just scared of whatever. I don’t know. But, he didn’t speak to me at school. And she was like, “Why do you care about that stupid boy?” You know. It was in a very cold way. I don’t think she knew of any other way to handle that because she was then, and she still is now, very scared of emotions and feelings. All of this I picked up after, when I became an adult. But, anyway, I had that abortion and I just went on.

I graduated, which was the most important thing for my mother, and I went to work as a file clerk during the day and went to Hunter College in the evening. But pretty soon I enrolled at City College and went on and continued to get my education. Then the next year, I met the man who was my soul mate and who was to be a very important force in my life. His name is Walt and I married him and he fathered my son. So I met him...well, I knew him in Trinidad. He had moved to my block when I was about 11. And I left Trinidad when I was 13, but we all thought he was the cutest boy to move on that block, and we all said, “Oh my!” But I came to New York and my brother stayed there [in Trinidad] and this boy Walt kept telling my brother over the years that he was going to marry me. We weren’t friends, we didn’t write to each other when I lived in New York, but he kept saying that. The year that I was 18 I went to Trinidad and he still lived on the same street as my family.. And he came over and started chatting with me and everything and he asked me if I wanted to go to a dance, and this was on a Wednesday and that Friday he asked me to marry him.

Oh wow!

And that Friday he asked me to marry him, I was like, “Well, I don’t know. I might marry you, but I can’t stay in Trinidad. My mother would kill me. I have to go back to New York `cause that’s where I live now. So he said, “Well, okay, but maybe I can come there and we could catch back up and begin having a relationship.” And I said, “Okay.” And that was in July and he came in October – to New York – and we got engaged in December and got married the next July, which was July 1970 that we got married. So that was another big point in my life. And they continued to get bigger from there. I was 19 at the time and I became pregnant. We did get married and I had my son two weeks before my 20^th birthday. So we’re up to 20 now. So here I am with a husband and a baby and my own apartment at 20.

That’s amazing. I don’t know many 20 year olds who could have that together at this time in history. That’s incredible.

Well, yes, things cost so much now, but we were both working and we had a lot of family support. My family. Because his family stayed in Trinidad. We did not live very far from my family – from my mother and aunt – so we had a lot of family support in order to be able to do that. When I had my son, I had twins – I had two boys – and they were premature. One baby didn’t make it. And my son, whose name is Malik Taylor has survived and he is 37 years old, as we speak. But there’s one connection...I wanted to tell you why I mentioned the twins. My mother, when she was pregnant with me had twins. She was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. She was in a bus accident and the boy was still born. And so I was born when she was seven months pregnant, so I was two months premature. Twenty years, almost to the day, I would have my two sons and one would not make it and the other one would…we both had twins.

That is so powerful.

I have just begun to write about it. Very little.

That is really so powerful.

So these are all these things leading up to 20.

How did you start writing? I know you mentioned that you started writing letters when you moved to New York. How did that develop over time?

Well, I want to just go back a little bit and say that when I was eight, I had an amazing teacher and I had the same teacher for two years. And when we were going on vacation at the end of the school year, she said, “I want you to travel. And I want you to write before you come back to school in September, about those travels.” Looking back, she did not literally mean get on an airplane and travel. She meant, travel in fantasy. And somehow I knew that. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it. And so I wrote about all these places I visited and traveled. And I wrote a bunch of essays and I think that I loved the fantasy of it. And that was when it got in my blood.

What a gift.

I didn’t really take it that seriously. I didn’t really know I had a gift until that year I was without my mother – that year between 13 and 14. So, I got married and had this baby at 20 and I started realizing, “Wait a minute, this whole marriage and motherhood, this is really hard. I don’t want to wash dishes and cook and all of that responsibility.” I would tell my husband and it would hurt his feelings, so I began writing poetry about how I felt. And it was corny poetry, you know: roses and red violets [laughter] but, I was involved with a church family and they supported it, as did my husband and mother. They supported those corny poems, and so they would say to me, “Oh, we’re having something at church. Write a poem!” or “So and so...there’s a funeral. Write something for that.” This was the support from the church. And from my family and my community, and so I began doing it. But, I really started writing because of my dissatisfaction with motherhood and marriage, which is not to say that I did not love my son and my husband. I loved them dearly, but I wanted the fun and not the work. [laughter]

No one can fault you for that!

I began exploring my feelings, and I would write a poem about it. But then I also began writing about the wonderful things that were happening in my life. So it wasn’t just the angst and the anger, like I had at the beginning. I began writing lovely things looking around my community, what was happening in my world as a Black woman, and I listened to Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni and June Jordan – that was also during the Black Arts Movement – and the Black Panther movement, the women’s movement. All of this came together while I was this young mom raising this brilliant boy, and so I had a lot of things to draw on.

And you were in New York at this time?

I was in New York. I never really left New York. I spent time going to hear Nikki Giovanni...she was the person who most influenced my writing at that time. The others came later, like Sonia Sanchez and Audre Lorde was way down the road, but those were my early inspirations. There was Etheridge Knight, Haki Madhabuti, then Don L. Lee. That’s really how I came to writing. Out of my dissatisfaction... and questions.

And into something extremely powerful.

Yes.

I would love to hear more about your experience of being in New York during the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther movement and everything going on during that time.

And it was also the Vietnam War. I’m not going to say that I was out there marching and doing the sit-ins and all of that. I wasn’t doing that because I had this little boy. And you know, those were dangerous times. I think sometimes people forget about it, but those were dangerous times in America for Black people. Even though we were protesting, and that generation – the Black Panther movement – was a little bit older than I was. But I would go to rallies at the school and things like that, but I wasn’t out at the front lines and in Washington and all those things, but I was concerned about this child and how to raise him right. And I had to work in some way to make this a better place for him and his peers. And so I decided then that I would do it through the poetry. So, I would say I was not on the front lines of that movement, but I became active in my community. Kwanzaa was something that came up around that time. And so I joined with another poet and his wife and we would have Kwanzaa events. Around that same time, when I was maybe 22, 23, I started a little theatre company. It was really poetry. And so we went around – this was in Queens – we went around reading in different places, you know, like Black power- black pride poems.

What was the name of the theatre company?

It was called Boyce Taylor Theatrical Company. And I started working at a place called The African Poetry Theatre. I started reading my poetry at that place. It was in Jamaica, Queens. It still is in Jamaica, Queens. The African Poetry Theatre. And so I read around, and so did other friends. And at that time we started taking that company into Riker’s Island. And now, I’m 24, 25, I started taking the company into Riker’s Island and we would do a fashion show. We would do poetry and I had a dancer and fire eater working with me – his name is Euston James.

He was the fire eater?

He was a fire eater, a limbo dancer – he is Trinidadian – and so I had this fire eater and limbo dancer with me and we began traveling around. We went to New Jersey performing, and my husband was very supportive of it all.

That sounds like an amazing time.

It was an amazing time. And so I felt that I couldn’t be on the front lines. But I could do something and this is what I began to do in my community. My mom, very early, was involved with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and she was one of the youth leaders and so she had my brother and I reciting poetry in the Church or at any events that they would have. This was from a very young age, age seven. And so I always had that little theatre in me.

Absolutely. Do you remember any of the poems you would recite in church?

No, I don’t remember. The only one that’s clear in my mind is this particular Mother’s Day and we presented a Mother’s Day program. I would say that I was maybe around eight. And they took the acronyms from Mother, and we said, “M is for the million things she gave me, O means that she’s growing old, T is for the tears she shed to save me...” You see how much I remember that? And we would each go up to the front of the room with our little letter and say the line that corresponded with our letter. We spoke and sang it as well.

Poetry has been a part of your life...

Poetry has been a part of my life for a long time. Well, you know in the Caribbean poetry is a big part of the school curriculum. As a child my mom won trophies and awards for poetry. She would recite poetry. We had to do that as well, but it was the old English poetry. My mom recited poetry, and she would win awards and everything, she’d read poetry to me at bedtime. Poetry was a very big part of her life. She never wrote any, but it meant everything to her.

So she used to perform it, and she would have you perform it and then you would write it.

Yes, and then my son would turn out to not only write, but also make a whole career and a lot of money from his writing. He’s a recording artist, a hip hop artist, so it’s generational. Each one of us did something more with it than the other. It’s very exciting.

It’s very exciting. That’s amazing. Is there anything else you wanted to say about that time period? The Black Arts Movement time period? How would you find out about events? Was it posted in the paper? Or was it...`cause now we have internet, and one of the things I like to hear about is what did the actual landscape look like, how would you figure things out?

How would I get bookings?

How would you get bookings and how would you find out about events going on around town?

During that period I was in school, in college and so a lot of that information came through the student organizations, and I would be a part of the organizing end, and I still had to take care of my son. I worked as a home attendant to put myself through college, and I would work as a home attendant on weekends because I wanted to have the week to go to school full time and to be with my son in the evenings. To help with his school work and to take him back and forth to his little events and so I figured out somehow – well, my mom worked as a home attendant for awhile – I figured out that I could do that and have my weekends and my time available to spend with my son. I was in some of the clubs at school, but I would have to leave at a certain time to go pick up my son and it was a juggling act. And so the performances that I did, I just called up or stopped in and told people what I was doing. In those days, we didn’t do it for money. I was not getting paid. I just had this burning desire to bring this poetry to my community and to the prison communities. My aunt was a bible worker in the prisons, in Riker’s Island, and she would tell me that they didn’t have very much for the young people – the men and women there. People didn’t do a lot of work in there, and so I decided that I would. And that launched my performing career, and then I was in school for Speech and Theatre. And that’s how I really came to the theatre. I have an undergraduate degree in Theatre. So that became, that was the impetus that got me on stage to perform later.

And then you had those experiences in the community.

And in the church.

I’m going to change the focus of our conversation a little bit and ask you about your coming out story – whatever that means to you.

Well, I would say that I don’t think that I ever came out, because I think that I was always involved with males and females. When I was growing up in Trinidad, I was having experiences with little friends, little girl friends. I hear people say that that’s a normal part of growing up. I had little experiences with girl friends, but it didn’t get to a place where that desire stopped. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Yes, it never became something that felt like, “Now I’ve outgrown this.”

Exactly, it never became, “Okay, you’re fourteen. That was practice, now you’re with boys.” So I guess that’s why I never had to come out. Cause this was always a very natural part of my life. Something I sought out even as early as twelve, I had a girlfriend. We weren’t a couple or anything, but we did have romantic times together. And I remember getting off the bus, going to her house, having some romantic time with her and it felt so natural and wonderful, but I didn’t go home and tell anybody about it.

Right.

[Laughter]

And I was a big talker. Because in my house my mom always said, “Always tell me the truth and you won’t get a beating.” So I always told the truth to her, to my mom. I’m not saying I’ve never lied or anything like that, I’m just saying that was something that left a great impression on me. But I did not go home and run my mouth about those little rendezvous.

[laughter]

But I sought it out. I would visit this girl. Her parents worked, I think, and she would be the only one at home. And there were always people at my house so I could never do anything like that at my house and that really remained a part of my life. There was a period when I didn’t do that at all…the year that I got serious with my husband, all my time was spent caught up in our relationship and in the marriage and everything. And so I didn’t date anyone. But I remember going away on a vacation with a friend of ours – I would say that I was married about a year, maybe even less – anyway, I went away on vacation with this friend and we slept together. And I said to her, “Oh, you know, I have to tell Walt about this when I get home.” And she was like, “No!” cause we were all friends, the three of us. She was like, “I don’t want you to tell him.” And I didn’t know why she was afraid of that. There was a little naïve part of me, too. I will be honest with you. And I was like, “I don’t know why you’re saying that. He’s my best friend and we tell each other everything.” And she was like, “No, if you tell him, I’m not going to come over anymore.” But, I knew I was going to tell him, because at that time I think I was 20 or 21 and I knew “Uh-uh this isn’t anything that’s just passing. I’ve got to tell him this because I can’t keep this secret.” Because I really, really enjoyed being involved with that woman and realized this was something that I wanted in my life.

I did not know that women could live together, and buy homes together and do all of that. Remember that this is 1970, `71. I didn’t know. I thought that there may have been two women that lived together in my community, I heard people saying something about them, but I think the kids told me that they were cousins. So it still didn’t register, and I’m talking 18, 19 and it still didn’t register. That’s why I’m saying that there was something a little naïve about me, but anyway, I told this woman I had to tell my husband. And when I got home, I told him that I had had a relationship while we were on vacation and that I wanted to try it again. And he said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea to go to her house.” And, now, this was maybe...it was sexual more than emotional, or maybe it was emotional and I didn’t realize it then, yet. So when I said I wanted to do this again, I think I was thinking the sex, but in another part of my mind, I wanted to really explore this and have this be part of my life, but I don’t think I had the words for that yet. And so he said, “If you sleep with her, you’d better do it at our house.” This was a Trinidadian guy. That was unheard of for a Trinidadian man, `cause they’re usually macho and he’s not like that. He’s still to this day not all macho and controlling and you know... and so I told him that, and she came over. What we began doing was having threesomes with friends of mine, with women. You know, sometimes it would be one woman for a very long time, and then it would be somebody else. It really began like that. I guess, yeah – maybe there’s a coming out piece in here. Because by the time...this lasted through my 20s with my husband’s consent and approval and even encouragement.

And support.

Very strange for the background we come from. You know, Caribbean background, religious background. It was unheard of, but the part of us that wanted to get married and live on our own was so that we could do what we really wanted to do. So this was just part of that. And by the time I got into my 30s, or before my 30s, I began realizing I wanted to have a serious relationship with a woman by myself, because I began to realize that I might be a lesbian and that was the hardest, most painful thing. To leave a husband that was so loving and supportive and present. It was the hardest time in my life, and it took a few years to evolve so I could come full circle with that idea. We had worked together for all of these things and then, he’s an engineer and we’d both gone to college together and raised our son together and here I was going to change the landscape of everything. (Going with my heart, It is still the thing I love the most and fear the most about myself.) So I felt guilty and I felt bad, but I started to realize it was not just something that I wanted to explore. It was something that I couldn’t help. I wanted to see what that life was like. I knew, somehow, my life depended on it. Realizing that I was a lesbian, and that I had to try and live that and see what would happen. So that was the hardest time for both of us, and our family as well.

How did you maneuver that transition? How did you find community? Did you find community?

Well, I didn’t really find community until after our separation. After we separated, then I began to reach out. I had this friend that was part of the lesbian movement in New York. And she went to Hunter College and she knew Audre Lorde and all of that, this was a very sad time for me because my marriage had ended, but this friend invited me to a reading and so I went with her. And I met a bunch of women, we didn’t become friends or anything, but I began to know “Oh – there are other lesbian women! And they’re writers! Ohmigod.It’s so great!” I didn’t know them personally, but it’s good to be in that company.

And so this friend, invited me to [an event where] they were dedicating a library at Hunter College for Audre Lorde. The Audre Lorde Library. And so she invited me and I went and I met Audre Lorde and then I was telling Audre that I was a writer and she said, “Oh that’s nice. Listen I’m having a class in September, and it’s going to be a very small workshop for women of color and I’m inviting you to come.” So I got so nervous, I said, “Oh well, I don’t go to this school.” Because I immediately felt so insecure because I thought my writing was not good enough to be in any class with Audre Lorde, you know. So I said, “Oh I don’t go to this school.” And she said, “Oh that doesn’t matter.” She said, “Come as my guest.” And I was like, “Oh no.” [Laughter] And, uh god, I was so scared. I think this was in April and the class was not until September. But I was terrorized from that time until I went to her class.

And I went to Audre’s class and that’s where I met all these young lesbian women, including her daughter Elizabeth [Lorde-Rollins]. And, slowly I began to have community. But that class with Audre Lorde was the biggest turning point in my writing, because I knew I wanted to be a poet. But something was holding me back. So when I went to her class, I felt like I was not writing up to the level of my experience, of my life experience. I felt like my work was a little bit immature, and I really wanted that to change.

And with that class, you felt a shift in your work.

Oh god yes, because I was ready. And it wasn’t just in the work, it was in my head. Because by the end of that class, I knew I wanted to be a poet more than anything else. More than I wanted to be a mother, more than I wanted to be a daughter. More than I wanted to be a lover. It was like, I wanted to be a poet and I was going to be a poet.

Yes.

And on the first night of class, she said to the class, “What stops you from writing the kind of work you want to write?” And she says, “If you write that work, what will happen? Who’s holding a gun to your head?” And boy, I began crying because I knew that it was me that was holding that gun to my head.

Look at that.

In so many ways that class opened me up. I began to meet other lesbian writers. From that came a group. We formed a group in New York called the Stations Collective. I want to say that was 1987 – 88. We were called the Stations Collective because we came together to perform some of Audre Lorde’s work. And she has this poem called “Stations” and so we took the name from that poem. I met Dorothy Randall Gray, Sapphire, Pamela Sneed, Stormy Webber, Hadley Mays and a few other writers and we formed this collective, it was an all lesbian women collective and we performed all around the city. And so I was in my element.

That’s wonderful.

We performed for a long time. And you know, then everybody got big. Starting with Sapphire. I don’t mean big in the head, I mean everybody’s careers started mushrooming out and so we all kind of ended up being overloaded with our solo careers and so we stopped the collective.

You all got overloaded by your own success.

Yes, by then everybody was teaching and writing books and it was amazing. It was an amazing, amazing time in New York for me. And we did a lot of things at the Gay and Lesbian Center and then there was this other thing...we began doing an annual show called “Divas and Desire”. And that show was erotic poetry and some of us wore teddies and sexy clothes to perform and this was the 80s. And there was a group of women in New York, white women, who really felt that lesbians don’t dress that way. These were the lesbians with the boots and the army navy surplus clothes and what I must say about the Black lesbians in New York City – they would always dress up. So there was a whole bunch of stuff going on with the two groups, this led me to write a poem called “A Dyke in a Dress” Because I’m from the Caribbean, I love dresses, `cause you know: it’s hot there. One of the refrains from that poem was “A dyke in a dress/allows easy access.” [Laughter]

Absolutely. [Laughter]

But I’m telling you, that poem became a mantra. People loved it. And I have to say that it really switched the tide. Lesbians began wearing lipstick and make up more, sexy clothes…I saw this happen. It switched the tide in women. Because you felt criticized if you wore a skirt and a bustier to perform. You would almost feel criticized by these women. And I was like, “Nah-ah. This is what I want to wear; this is what I’m holding onto.” And so, it kinda switched the tide and people started feeling really comfortable. Also, Joan Nestle who was at the Lesbian Herstory Archive, she always wore this black, sexy slip to perform. I don’t know if you know this.

I didn’t know that about her.

So this was what was happening. Well, I don’t think we had as many names as lipstick lesbian, top, bottom... we were just proudly taking back queer, tranny, dyke, butch ect.

That sounds like such a fun, exciting time. I would love to know – and this is a combination of two questions – and you’re speaking to this, which is how your work is influenced by who you are, and within that, how you’ve come to define success for yourself as a writer, as an artist.

Okay, well, I guess I want to say that my poems are filled with childhood memories. So they’re filled with sounds, aromas, colors, textures of the land, basically. They come from that earthy place. I have a lot of trees, mountains, flowers, water in my work and it’s because of my connection to Trinidad. I feel like sometimes I’m conjuring up that place in my work, the place of my childhood where most of my writing originates.

I have “Convincing the Body” here at home.

That was a photograph [on the front] that was taken in Tobago, it’s a Slippery Elm tree. I just feel so connected to that time in my life, I guess, I felt most free, most protected, most innocent and happy in those years. I am happy now, but there was something organic about that happiness and about that time in my life. And so sometimes, I write in dialect, and I write in dialect to stay connected to my ancestors. I like to use the language that connects me to my culture and my people. What I say is that when I write in dialect, I want the world to hear what Trinidadians sound like in their bedrooms, in their fights, in their lovemaking. That is what I want people to know, how we feel and what we sound like, but I also want to capture my grandmother’s tongue. I want to recreate family stories. And a lot of my work has a big migration theme in it, because that was a time when I felt most fractured. Because migration is fracturing, and so I guess up until my last book, I was still working on that fracturing. That’s the best way that I can put it. Does that answer your question?

Absolutely. Within that how have you come to define success for yourself as a writer and as an artist?

[I am the author of three books of poetry] and I make my living as a full time writer. I do residencies at grammar schools, senior facilities, and colleges. I lecture too, mainly lectures on writing and dialect, and why dialect belongs in the world. Another way I define success, I dedicate quite a bit of time to new writers, I help them to find their voice, and their place in the art world. This is one of the missions of my company Calypso Muse, to introduce new voices to the NYC arts community. Another way I define success is that I have had an opportunity to work with Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Dance Company. They’ve commissioned my work, twice. The first piece I did for them was called “Water” and that was in `99 and we toured that for awhile. And the second piece that was commissioned was three years ago, my piece called, “Redemption”. I travel with them and perform the piece on stage while they dance. And that was a fantasy of mine from the very first time I ever saw that company. Ronald [Brown is an amazing man. And working with him defines being an accomplished poet for me. To have the opportunity to work with people like Ron Brown and to perform in places like BAM in Brooklyn or Lincoln Center and I did all of that work with him. I would say that, outside of my work with Audre Lorde, he influences me the most as an artist with his humility and his obedience to the ancestors, and his obedience to his work. I once asked him, how did he choose the music and the dance for his work and he said to me it was all about obedience. And just letting the work stand on its own. You can’t infuse yourself in the poem. You get a gift to start on that poem, but then you have to let it rip and let it stand on its own.

That is so powerful. I wanted also to give you an opportunity to say anything else you might want to say or ask any questions of me before we wrap up.

Why are you doing these interviews? I heard Gwendolyn Brooks say that she thought of herself as a historian, documenting people in her time and I immediately grabbed that and held it very close to my body and so I wanted to ask you why are you doing the documentation. What leads you in this direction, I’m sure you’re probably writing another book of fiction or poetry, but what leads you to document other peoples' stories.

It’s actually this very visceral sense of survival. I’m 31 and as I grew up as a lesbian and as I grew up as an artist, and as I get older I find more and more people who have gone on this road, but I really feel this gap that was created by cancer and by HIV in our communities and I feel its impact because I look back at history and I see so many people in the 80s - before we had so many people gone - and they’re talking about a certain kind of mentorship happening, a certain kind of closeness and community and interaction happening that’s much harder to find these days. Especially if you’re young, so this is my attempt to fill that gap for people who are younger than me, and people who are my age, who might have something to learn from our courage, and your courage in particular, and your road.

Well, I’m also...I continue to write not just for myself, but for other women who don’t have a voice, or are not able to say the things that they want to say. And I have a very loving partner, who is also my muse. And I write for her, too. And I also write for my grandson and my son, who’s experiencing a very difficult time right now. He’s awaiting a kidney transplant. And we’re going to get there, and I continue to write to get through these problems. I have so many questions for the world, and I’m lucky that as a poet I don’t have to have answers.

You can ask questions.

I write to raise questions in the world. To have other people think and talk and share. And I really do appreciate you calling me. Well, when I saw the interview with Sharon [Bridgforth], I was like, “Ohmigod, her life parallels mine.” with the marriage, and even though she moved from one state to the other, she felt this void that migration leaves. And, I was like, that’s my story, because I felt that void and the writing began from that void. I just wanted to tell you one other story, about why I write, and write in dialect. I was reading at a place in New York, this was about five years ago, and this very old man came up to me and he had tears in his eyes and he said to me, “You know what? You remind me of my mother.” He was Caribbean. He was like, “You remind me of my mother and my sisters and my aunties.” And he was a little fresh, you know, he tried to cop a little feel [laughter], but he said, “If I die tonight, I’m going to be so happy because you have brought back all those stories and all those feelings.” He said, “I’m living my childhood experience tonight just hearing you read.”

Wow.

That gave me chills. That is the other thing I do. I want to tell the Caribbean story because there’re not enough Caribbean writers writing in dialect in New York. There are in London and they’re in Canada, but I want to keep my grandmother tongue alive. So, that’s a really important thing in my life. And I want to dedicate this interview to my long time partner, Ceni, because this last year, with what I’ve been going through with my son, she’s really, really been there at my side.

It’s so special, and people don’t know the gifts they give back to us as poets and as writers when they share things like that.

This last year I’ve become very, very isolated. And my daughter-in-law is this amazing woman who walked into our lives and just embraced everything that I was and that made it so easy to focus on my work and not have to wonder, “oh god, how am I going to get her to like me because I’m a lesbian?” because family means a lot to me and I didn’t want that to interrupt my relationship with my son and so I’ve been very blessed this year, and very lucky, despite all of the challenges. And we writers really need our friends and family and our community to support us. And this is the other reason I decided to be in this interview, because I feel that somewhere someone will see my life in theirs, or will see themselves in my life and will be encouraged.

Absolutely. I realize that I forgot to ask you your place of birth.

Arrima. In Trinidad. That’s my place of birth.

Thank you so much.

I thank you, too.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji, interviewed on February 25, 2006

2008-02-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

Wura-Natasha Ogunji, visual/performance artist

Wura-Natasha Ogunji , born on January 22, 1970 in St. Louis, MO

Interviewed on February 25, 2006 by Ana-Maurine Lara

I’m interviewing Wura-Natasha Alexandra Ogunji on Saturday February 25^th, 2006 beginning at 6.12pm in Austin, Texas.

So Wura if you could state your name and date and place of birth.

Wura-Natasha Alexandra Ogunji. I was born in St Louis Missouri 1970: a very cold place. I was born in the winter.

When is your birthday?

January 22, 1970. Aquarius. For the record.

So this is more like a conversation so you can ask me questions at any time. I wanna start off by asking you to talk about some of the defining moments in your life before the age of 20 that you think have had a major impact on who you are today.

Wow. Before the age of 20. The first thing I thought of – this is so weird, I never thought of it as defining but – when I was in college, so I think I was 19 - I got arrested. I was in a protest and we were fighting to change the curriculum and to have more [professors and] students of color and I think it was defining for me because I saw there were other people who were anti-establishment, anti- the current learning structure and that had a different way of thinking that was indeed valid and that was a perspective that was very powerful. [It was] mostly students of color and I think that affected me a lot be to be part of that. More than I realized at the time.

How did it affect you?

It made me see my reality as valid and my history as valid. And it was important for what I was learning to have a personal relevance to my life. And that made all the difference. And related to being an artist, and for me particularly, I’m figuring out a way of living that’s not really standard and I draw my sources from places that aren’t standard. It validated that way of looking at the world. How many defining moments did you ask for?

As many as you want.

There were some other ones that were – did you just say before the age of 20? - that were defining in a negative sense. One was moving from St Louis [at the age of six], where I was surrounded by a community of African Americans - and I felt really supported and validated - and then leaving that to live in a place where there were mostly white people. That’s when my world completely changed. It became really important to validate my existence myself, in many ways. That first experience made me an outsider and then the other experience in college made me...I was still an outsider but I was connected. One thing disconnected me and the other connected me. And I think those things relate to a way of being in the world that I carry with me now. Which is really about seeing my perspective as valid and following that to its fullest potential…

Could you give more details about that particular moment moving from St Louis. What ways was it so life changing.

Let’s see. Well, I felt really free in St Louis and my life was really, really rich. I had a lot of physical freedom to go around my neighborhood. We knew everyone in the neighborhood. Most of my friends were boys and their parents took care of me `cause I was the only girl but I was also a tomboy. And so I had this physical freedom in the landscape that was incredible and I could go down the back alley to somebody else’s house and it was fine. I could ride my bike in the street. I could walk places alone and there was nothing dangerous. I think the most dangerous thing that happened to me when I was little was that I rode my bike down the street with my eyes closed and I ran into a parked car. That was totally my fault [laughter].

And then I had this world: like climbing trees and I think I was talking to spirits at the time but I didn’t define it as that. I had these messages or stories come to me, I just had these conversations with the air or the trees or the worms or I’d be digging in the earth and making things out of sticks and mud and drawing...making things out of old cardboard boxes and I had a lot of power, too, with my friends. They were all boys of all ages but I had a lot of voice, so it wasn’t that I could tell them what to do, but they listened to me. And the way I approached things was fine. I was accepted. I was free. So leaving all that – we moved to the East Coast, to Maryland – and it just...it’s strange `cause we had a backyard but my movement changed. And I was part of a different hierarchy of kids that I wasn’t the center of and they were white kids, too.

Because you moved into a white neighborhood?

Yes. I mean there were a few other black kids. But it was mostly white kids and there was a hierarchy that I had to fit into and I felt my blackness in many ways and I was made very aware of how I physically moved around. The safety I felt-which I don’t think I would have defined as such before--I just didn’t have that same safety at all. One of my strongest memories [after moving] was of me getting into a fight with a friend of mine – a yelling fight – and this whole group of kids gathering around and this little white boy came up and kicked me in the back. And nobody intervened at all.

Wow. Was your friend white?

Yeah, she was white. It was a totally different atmosphere. And I went to a totally great school. It wasn’t very mixed, it was mostly white but I had a lot of creative freedom at school which balanced my actual home [neighborhood] environment. Whereas when I was younger in St Louis I had a lot of freedom at home and around my neighborhood, but at school I was kind of an outsider. But it didn’t matter that much because I had this very solid neighborhood, outdoor world. God it’s weird to think about these things.

Sure. I think the reason I start there is because...well, you’ll see. Is there anything else you wanted to share about defining moments before age 20 that had a major impact on who you are today?

Well, I think I should also say that when we lived in Maryland I went to this really amazing school, which was a school of mostly white kids, but I learned so many things that I use right now in my own work. I learned creative writing and I felt like a really good writer at a young age and really free with my creative stories. And I learned to make anything and to explore anything. I learned how to make pottery and I was gathering clay from creeks and I learned how to do batik and I learned how to sew. Which was really scary for me - sewing on the sewing machine. I learned how to make dioramas. And I made books. And just all these great things that I use in my own work now and really form the way I look at the world. “Oh you can use aluminum foil to make a canoe.” – I mean that was very much from my mom, as well [laughter].

Or alien antennas.

Yeah, or alien antennas as well [laughter]. Or you can mix - I mean we got in trouble for this [at school] - you can mix a whole cup of glue with red paint and let it dry and it’ll be really cool to play with. There were just so many really amazing things that I learned there [at school] that really nourished the way I looked at the world and are just the way I learn naturally. And so now, as an adult, I think I’ve really had to work to consciously name those learning processes and materials and ways of doing things. Because they’re not obvious. But they’re really natural for me and they’re really nourishing. I think that school was really powerful, coupled with the fact that my mom was very supportive creatively. Yeah. I don’t think I can think of another very, very significant experience.

We can go back to that question at a later point if you think that there’s something you else you want to say.

Yeah.

But my next question is looking at something related. I would love to hear your coming out story.

Wow. My coming out story...

Whatever it is. Whatever that means to you.

This is interesting to think of the public answer. I’ll just give an answer. I think I should start with saying that I never thought there was anything wrong with gayness, from when I was very young. Even when adults around me made comments about “So and so’s a lezzie.” I just never believed that there was anything wrong with being gay. And I didn’t see myself as a gay kid at all, but I did fool around with girls and boys from a very young age. But that’s just to say...

Then in terms of a coming out story, I think after I was 10 years old I didn’t really think about girls. I had good friends who were girls, and I supported people who were gay, but I didn’t think of myself as gay. So it was near the end of college, or maybe even after college - well, during college I fooled around with women, but then after college I guess you would say I came out. In a way I don’t even really feel I came out because I wasn’t in the closet. So officially, I was like, okay I like girls and it’s not a big deal. It’s a non-issue and I always felt that way. If I wanna be with a woman I’ll be with a woman. There’s not a closet for me to come out of about that. So, I fooled around with women and I dated my first girlfriend in my 20s…At the end of college, I was like “This could be cool to be with a woman.” I really dig women and I always have. Women have always been really important in my life and I think they’re gorgeous and I’m attracted to women and so, I guess that’s sort of a coming out story. It’s sort of an un-coming out coming out story in a way. I don’t know if people will always have coming out stories.

Yes, I don’t think they necessarily do, but I ask the question that way because it’s a culturally significant reference point for that discussion. In the sense that we live in a culture that has defined what coming out is. Whether or not that relates to us personally is another question, so to me, I am interested in that process for you, and what that looked like over time and where you are today with that.

Well, I should say that although I didn’t think there was anything wrong with being gay in theory, or liking women, I didn’t want to be “Gay”, because it was another point of difference and that was my perspective when I first got to college, and I think that I had this idea in my head of what it meant to be gay.

Which was?

Which was a butch white dyke and I was like, this is not me. This is not who I’m attracted to. Nothing against butch white dykes, of course [laughter], but then one of the first women I fooled around with in college was this femmie girl who was a good friend of mine. And I was like, oh wow, this is hot, and I realized that gayness could be anything. And I realized that it wasn’t somebody else’s idea. It was my idea. Some people say, it’s supposed to be this way and you’re like, well, actually no. It’s my world and this is what I say. So yeah. That’s that, I guess.

In terms of building a life with a woman, that’s something that I always felt I could do. It just felt right. It just made sense. My connections to women have always been super deep or profound in a way that my connections to men are not, though that changes ‘cause I have a few really amazing gay male friends. There is nothing that says I have to have a home or have intimacy with a man to be a valid soul in a body, or a valid human being or a valid contributor to society or to be beautiful or to be fabulous or to be happy or to be... It’s kind of simple and obvious, but you have to be able to imagine something different from what’s been given to you. And I was like it’s incredibly sexy to be with a woman and I really love that and that’s really the apex, two women, it’s like yeah [laughter].

Now we’re going to move more into some questions around what it means for you to be an artist. I guess we can start there. What does it mean for you to be an artist or a writer or..?

Well, I think first of all it means being. It means deciding to face fears and move through fears whatever those are. To be an artist as a profession and to accept that that’s my calling and that’s my path, it means that I don’t... there aren’t any...how do I say this...it’s like a commitment to myself at a very deep level and looking at and accepting the way I see the world as powerful and magical and important. Not just for me but for other people. That I have this huge responsibility to do this thing that I’m called to do because it’s important for other people. Not just me. And I think that because of that, it’s a revolutionary act for me – Wura-Natasha Ogunji born in 1970 in the U.S. in this hemisphere, this time of the universe - to be an artist is a revolutionary act. It means committing to a kind of truth and beauty and expression and way of looking at the world and connection that doesn’t exist in many other ways of being in the world. It’s a deep, deep commitment and a deep, deep responsibility. And I think it takes also a lot of personal work to accept that, that I think other things don’t necessarily require at all. If you’re doing another kind of job, it’s a job and there’s not a personal decision about “Are you a good person? Is this the right way to do it? Are you stupid because you are not doing x? Did you make a mistake?” It just doesn’t have the weight that I think being an artist does and it’s just the most freeing thing for that reason. What was the question again?

What does it mean for you to be an artist?

Also, for me, personally, it means making beauty, because I believe in beauty and I think that beauty is revolutionary. And the way I define that --it’s a visual aesthetic, it’s a feeling I get from something, it’s an energy, it’s a deepness. How deep is the thing? Did it come from a place? Where? Does it have an experience in the world? So, when I make something, when I first finish it and make it, it doesn’t have the same power that it has six months later, or even a year later. It has a different energy because it’s older. And I think it’s really powerful to birth something in that way, to be a vessel for something, to create something that has that power and beauty and history to it. That has a history of its own. It’s like wow. It’s just really the most amazing thing in the world. To be an artist. I wish that for people. When people tell me they’re artists, younger people, I’m just like uh – it’s amazing.

Yeah. Younger people in particular?

I think that for young people it’s often a difficult decision to be an artist. It’s not an age thing necessarily, but I think it’s really special to be able to see the world in a way that is in a parallel universe to other people and because of that it’s like a gift and a curse. You’re an outsider but you have this incredible vision, this super power vision. And people won’t necessarily see it as that but you have to believe that and know that. And really work to refine and define that vision so that what you create is your vision, solely. Like my drawing teacher said, you don’t want to draw like anybody else. You want to draw like yourself, and it’s like “Good God what does that mean? If I don’t know how to draw, what does drawing like myself mean?” And so it’s accessing that power to manifest and change and move things and bend spoons and etc. It’s incredible.

How did you get to the point where you started to see that was your path?

Well, I think it took awhile. I always knew I was creative because my mom always told us that and I always did some kind of creative work, my entire life. But it took awhile for me to say “I am an artist.”

So it took awhile for you to say, “I am an artist.”

Yeah, and I think there were my own limitations...it was many things. I was really committed to teaching and I thought that was socially important to do. Like I had a responsibility to give back to community and so I saw myself as an artist and as a teacher--split in that way. And I also saw my sister and brother as the real artists and I kind of did art, but I wasn’t an artist as my primary role. And then eventually I decided “I’m an artist. I want to study art.” I went to graduate school. Pretty recently I was like, “I’m an artist primarily and that’s my primary path and I can teach from there and I can do these other things, but as much as I gave teaching, I give as an artist.” To sew something or to write something and to put that out can move people in the same way that teaching in the classroom does. And it doesn’t have to be a separate thing at all. It took awhile. I don’t know why it took so long. Maybe because I didn’t have the kinds of models that I needed to be able to see the possibilities. I think that at a deep level that was it. There weren’t people like me doing what I was doing.

And I think I spent a lot of time, even through graduate school [I studied photography], really fighting with the curriculum, just to defend my right to be there….to say yes, there are women, mixed people, people of color photographers and photographs in the world. I spent a lot of time creating an environment where I could learn so there was a lot of wasted energy, a lot of defensiveness. And it wasn’t until the end of graduate school that I had a mentor who was a woman of color who really could ask me critical questions - and who just got it all...the spiritual, the skill, the everything...she could ask all those questions, and I could really excel as an artist. And really work on my vision instead of defending my right to have a vision or defending my right to speak. And that is a hard lesson and important lesson to learn.

What are we creating? What do we create on our own and of our own unique vision? What do we create that’s not just in opposition to the structure or in opposition to the so-called white man? Or in opposition to this or that, but how do you just focus energy on yourself and on the positivity and on people who really give to your work or expand your work rather than constantly defending yourself. And it’s sad, but it’s such a drain just defending your right to exist. Because you don’t get to make all the expansive work that you need to. So I think I spent a lot of time doing that. Just defending my right to exist and have basic things in a program and then after I did that, I was able to say, “Fuck it. Fuck those people. I have a vision and they are still going to be doing what they’re doing for the next however many years, centuries, generations and I still have to put my vision out there and do the work that I’m here to do. I’m not here to fight their insanity. I’m here to birth my own beauty.” And that was incredibly significant. And that’s how I try to walk through the world.

So how would you say your work is influenced by who you are?

I have a really slow process, which I’m trying to make faster at times. But I think the work I make, I tend to need time for certain things and I think my work is reflective of that. I believe in the spirit world; I believe in my ancestors; I believe in gods and goddesses and the natural world, so when I’m creating... I don’t want to say I believe in the goddesses...I believe in the gods, you know, sort of gender queer – the gods. But when I create I bring all that to my work and I think that I’m a vessel and I’m a physical body and unique in that way and so I influence, I shape the work, but it’s also coming from other places. Sometimes it’s coming from a spirit in the room. Sometimes it’s coming from the river. Sometimes it’s coming from the person I was in another lifetime. And the fact that I believe it allows it to come out the way that it does and it allows things to come out that I can never plan. That’s why it’s important not to plan things and execute them because it’s just not me. I feel like once I go through an idea and I have it all worked out then it doesn’t necessarily need to happen in the world. Maybe that’s Aquarius, too, but I just get into my thoughts and I’m like “Okay, that’s resolved.” So the process is really important for me and the touching, the textures, the natural materials - all that is really reflective of my work and also how I see the world. I have a deep visual experience of the world.

Whereas someone might pick up a book and start reading, I’m like, “Okay, where are the pictures?” I can spend hours looking at the same seven pictures in a book and for years never read a word of the book because there’s so much information in the pictures. And it’s taken me awhile to articulate that and define that but I really am a visual person and I like words for specific things. [Laughter] But I understand things visually and I understand the texture and I understand the smell of clay or what it means to paint the clay on paper. I mean I just really love that. It’s so much a part of my language and my eyes and my understanding of the world. I keep forgetting the questions.

How is your work influenced by who you are?

Because I’m mixed… when people say that there are boundaries and rules and borders, for me, those are always changing and moving and there’s nothing that’s ever black and white. We’re always pulling from many sources and we’re a combination of sources and we speak many languages and we change languages all the time even if we think we only speak English and I think that that’s totally evident in my work and my combination of materials…

It’s also about being Nigerian – that’s a huge influence on my work. We get messages in dreams and through our bodies. We’re connected to our ancestors, we are them, we get messages from them even if we’re not in our so-called homeland, the knowledge of that comes through us. That’s totally in my work. I see the work as sacred in that way, as profound and there are rituals to how I do the work. Now, I give offerings to the paper. I spit rum on the paper or offer tobacco or draw a symbol that represents one of the Orisa, one of the gods, so that the paper becomes a sacred space, a sacred grove or an altar. It’s because I’m Nigerian. That comes through in the work. I grew up in the West, I grew up in the U.S. so I have a particular way of doing things that’s from here, but what else...I think there’s something about gayness...I don’t hesitate to say it. I think that gay people are brilliant, and that we’re special. That’s another thing. When a young person is like, “I’m gay.” it’s like “Ohmigod you’re so lucky.” We’re special. We’re really brilliant and other people may be mediocre compared to us, in general. I don’t know if I can say that publicly but...

Sure you can.

...we look at the world in a different way. And not because we’ve had more struggles, but it’s because we don’t...gender to us is different. It’s fluid, it can change, it can move, it can be one thing when you think it’s another. And it’s like, just when you think you had to deal with lesbians and gay people, now you have youth who are like, “I’m genderqueer. I’m not a man, or a woman, or male or female. I’m something completely different.” Blows my mind. It’s brilliant. And you have the whole trans movement. I think that there’s a queer way of looking at the world. There’s a queer way of writing, there’s a queer way of making art and I really think it has to do with drawing from multiple sources that are seemingly not connected, but are very connected and that make a person whole. That definitely influences the work that I’m making.

We’re onto our final question and it seems like time is flying so fast!

I know it’s so wild.

But this question is, what defines success for you as a writer, artist, artist-writer? What defines success for you?

That’s a good question. I think that ultimately in my heart there’s something about showing people a different way of looking at the world that expands them at a deep level, at a soulful level--that changes the person they were before they had an experience with the work. And that to me, being able to do that, is part of success for me. There are some pieces or stories that when I see them, when I make them I’m like, “Ohmigod, that’s something.” And it’s like - I made it, but I can’t even remember making it because it came through me and I was a vessel and I can’t remember all the single stitches and how did I get that shape? And I know it came through me, but the piece becomes something on its own. And that’s a matter of success.

At the same time I think when you talk about success there’s a kind of public face that that has, and voice. And I think that being successful is about using my voice to affect many people. Which is something I have resisted up until...well, I’m working on that right now [laughter]. So when I think about success in those terms, I’m thinking about connecting with people internationally, showing work as well as having workshops and listening to other artists and seeing other artists’ work and understanding what they’re doing and making those connections at an international level. I think that that’s really important and this is another thing I didn’t realize until really recently.

Documenting everything I do – the materials I use, my process, how I looked in 1995 when I made this particular piece – all that is really important to creating a history of my work and being able to transmit that history to people through books and lectures and writings and films or whatever. All of that is really important, that archive and the sharing of that archive. That happens through small publications to high end publications to publications that are U.S. based or New York based, and then also in other parts of the world. So I think that personally seeing my work affect a lot of people, but also taking a responsibility for that; speaking about it, and speaking about why it’s important. Why are my aesthetics important, and how that relates to my cosmology and also that teaching is an important part of that as well because we have so much to give and we have so much to learn and creating those communities is important.

I should also say that it’s about creating something that speaks to the contemporary. It’s timing. So in that way, it’s like you’re creating a theory, you’re creating a philosophy that deepens over time and at the same time has a relevance in the moment and I think that that is success for me. That is what makes you a master in a way, in terms of being a master artist. Your work really has that kind of depth and breadth and also is something that people are like, “What? What is this language that they’re speaking?” But they want to speak it or they want to hear it, or they want to be around it or they want a translation or... it’s that. It’s like, who is that? In terms of seeing the work. I’d like to be rich and famous too. [Laughter] But for the reasons of using my voice and seeing the work, and knowing that the work has a life beyond me and wanting that to happen. I think that that’s success.

Cool. That’s it for my questions. Is there anything else you wanted to say?

For some reason I’m thinking of the connection between the work I make and performance and choosing a particular genre to work in, because I started as a photographer. I was talking to a friend of mine about how I don’t want to talk about that. You have to put the gap together [for others]. “You’re a sculptor, and you’re a photographer, etc, etc, etc.” And then the whole thing of performance.

But then recently, being here in Austin, I started thinking, well, you know it’s really important and my narrative makes sense. When I was making photographs, I was taking photos of spirits using my body and making costumes for those spirits and telling these stories that came to me that were from another world. And sewing things and sewing on paper. And creating sculptural environments and installations and telling stories. And performance was part of that. I mean a lot of them were private at the time, but then I documented them on film. Or some of them became public and some of them haven’t. And now I’m very interested in that combination of making a private process be performance. Involving people in that and having people be witness to that because other people are the story tellers of that piece. Which is really important, they’re the witnesses, they’re the participants in the masquerade who are just as important as the person in the mask – as the spirit coming down. So, really thinking about the work as a performance in that way, that a festival is a performance and that everyone participates and has to participate otherwise it doesn’t happen.

So I just wanted to add that because it’s a way of thinking about the world and thinking about community and connections with people and of the energy of the work itself. It brings all that together. And it is a manifestation of the spirit world, the physical world, the Wura world, the place I’m in right now: Austin, Texas. But I only got here because I went to New York and then the Dominican Republic and then back and back and back and I was born in St Louis but before that, I was somewhere else. Which I don’t think was in a cold place.

That’s all I guess.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your questions.

Matt Richardson, interviewed on December 18, 2006

2008-02-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

Matt Richardson, writer/scholar

Matt Richardson, born on November 10, 1969 in Brooklyn, NY

Interviewed on December 18, 2006 by Ana-Maurine Lara

Ana: Thank you Matt for meeting today. If you could start off by saying your name, your date of birth and your place of birth

Matt: My name is Matt Richardson, my date of birth is November 10, 1969 and my place of birth is Brooklyn, NY.

Brooklyn!

I tried not to do that! It’s so hard – I was like “Don’t do the Brooklyn!” but

I had to!

[laughter]

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for doing this interview today and I’m going to start off by asking the overarching question that I use to frame this. Where I like to start is by asking artists to think about some defining moments in their younger years before the age of 20 that have had a major impact on who you are today.

Okay. My defining moments. First of all I just also want to say for the tape that I publish under Mattie Richardson, sometimes Mattie U. or sometimes Mattie Udora. I’m named after both of my grandmothers and even though I go by Matt Richardson I give honor to them by making sure that everything that I publish uses my full name or at least my middle initial so that they both are acknowledged as a source. I think that goes to the answer to your question. My younger years are really full of not so much happiness. I didn’t really have the best childhood in the world but what I did have was books and I did have the knowledge that I was named after both of these women in my family and with that I was able to survive somehow. So, a lot of what shapes my current way of thinking, my whole political framework is a history of living in a home full of violence and abuse and I think that that is incredibly important in shaping the politics about anti-violence that can form the basis of who I am. Also those violences are not just physical abuse or sexual abuse, but also the violence of poverty is another part of the consciousness of how I understand myself and also how I understand what is the impetus of my work.

So, growing up I lived in a household where my mother was actively trying to get a bachelor’s degree and there were many impediments to that. One was she was the mother of two children, which is demanding enough in trying to be a student and a parent at the same time, but she also had an incredibly abusive husband who did not want to see her do well and was very jealous of the fact that she was trying to get an education and get a college degree when he barely finished high school. And so he would put every kind of blockage possible between her and that goal. But she managed to do it one class at a time over the span of many years – she just finished her bachelor’s degree in 2000 or 1999 after 40 years of struggle. So that was a tremendous triumph. But when I was a child what she would do is…she was a part of…in Brooklyn in the 1970s there was this large literary movement of all of these various writers that were …people like Sonia Sanchez would give readings. There was a whole movement in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn to revamp the public school system and we lived in East Flatbush which is adjacent to Brownsville and so some of that trickled into East Flatbush. But there were lots of fights in Brownsville around education for Black history in particular and getting Black teachers in the [public ] schools and for community control of the school system [board] and my mother was tangentially a part of that. The struggle [around the Brownsville curriculum] attracted a whole crew of writers and artists that were also in places like Brooklyn college, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College where my mother attended classes.

Those community colleges were actually places where lots of cultural activity happened and people who became incredibly famous writers – people like Toni Cade Bambara – were a part of that. And since my mother was taking classes, she went to poetry readings and gave readings in prison as part of her course assignments. She was a part of a variety of literary events that she had to do for class. Of course, this is also the beginning of Black Studies [around the country]. Black Studies was just becoming a recognized discipline, partly because of the movements of these activists, writers and artists from the Black Arts Movement and students who were fighting for a Black curriculum on their college campuses, including not only these four year schools and universities like Berkeley, but at all of these other smaller institutions, especially in New York. So my mother was involved in all of those pieces, on the very edges of them.

She wasn’t a major player in any of this, nobody would necessarily remember that she was at the meeting, but it’s important to think about who’s…even the person who’s sitting in the back – and this was important for me as a young activist on campus – the people who are just on the edges of things actually are incredibly important to the central working of any movement and for me, because my mother brought all this stuff home, because she brought all these books home in particular from a variety of classes, she brought home stuff like Manchild in the Promise Land it was a tale about New York in the 1950s and [she had an opportunity to meet the author, Claude Brown, because he came to her Black literature class]. I read the novel, I just absorbed it. Or she brought home, Go Tell It on the Mountain which was very different from my life, but it was a Black author and I just read everything. And I read everything that came into the house. So there were books of poetry around – I just read them. Because that was my escape. There was so much ugliness happening all around me that one of the places that I could feel safe was between the pages of somebody else’s story. But it also made it very clear to me that I wanted to write my own stories. So these influences, these larger political influences that I didn’t really understand and didn’t really know about in 1975 [laughter].

When you’re six years old…

Right exactly. When the neighborhood meeting is in the basement of my parents’ house, then I become a part of it. When the books come and she was going to be at a reading…I learned what that was. It was something called a reading and my mother was going to it and I really…

Would you go with her?

No. Well, these readings were so much…she didn’t think they were age appropriate so I didn’t go to them. But I very much knew that they existed, at least. Some of the organizing meetings she dragged me to. Of course, I was little and things seemed incredibly boring and I spent a lot of time taking notes cause I wanted to be grown up and also to keep me occupied cause I was so bored.

You were like okay…another paper…

Exactly [laughter] more paper and all these adults just talking, talking and they laughed at things that I didn’t understand why they thought it was funny, but that was the basis of a lot of things. The basis of my political education, the basis of my cultural education, the basis of my creative education. All of that took place because she was involved in the struggle to have something else in her life [besides being a wife and mother]. And so I owe a tremendous amount to that struggle, to the fact that she did it even though she might come home and get beaten up for it. Even though my sister and I could be pains in the butt always pulling at her and demanding things, “I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” Despite all of that madness she went as long as she could and did it intermittently. Not only that but later on when she was too tired – my mother was a Teacher’s Aide in New York for 25 years, which mean that she didn’t get paid very much at all as opposed to the Teacher … she never made more than maybe $15,000.00 a year, maybe. So, when she came home exhausted from that and she had a paper due and I was around 13 years old or 12 years old, she’d say, “Why don’t you write my paper?” And I was like, “Ooh – college work.” I was so excited to do college work. That was the epitome of things for me was college. And so I would do her paper. She would get like a C on them or something but I would write her papers for her sometimes, or what was left of them or whatever. And my first job was tutoring this woman who was taking an English class at Brooklyn College when I was 12 years old. That was my first job was tutoring.

You were always going to be a teacher and a writer.

Always. Always. Actually my dream at the time was to be a physician. Cause I thought, “My mother’s a teacher, I’m not going to be a teacher.” [Laughter] And I was going to be a doctor and that’s just not what the universe had in store. When I was a kid I wrote my own stories. I wrote stories about what was happening in my life. I wrote stories about what was going on. I have an older sister, so what was happened with her. I’ve always been enamored with condensed fiction, so I would try to write these short stories that were very, very short. My sister had a book of 75 short stories – you know, O’Henry short stories and stuff like that, [John] Cheever – cause my sister’s seven years older than me and so she had books that she would bring home from school as well and I read all of those, too. I still have this book of 75 short stories. I love it. And that’s where I absolutely fell in love with the short story form. I love the form. I love the ability to create an entire world in only a few places. I love how it leaves you wanting to happen to these characters, what’s going on with them. I just enjoy it. I enjoy reading them and I really enjoy creating them. Those are the major, major influences before 20.

That’s really incredibly how books, in a way, saved your life.

Absolutely. They absolutely did. What’s her name? She wrote Bastard out of Carolina?

Dorothy Allison.

Dorothy Allison [in her] introduction to Trash, her collection of short stories, she talks about how books saved her life and I love the way Dorothy Allison is able to succinctly put certain ideas….she very beautifully writes that kind of stuff and I think that introduction spoke to me tremendously. Absolutely they did save my life.

Cool. Well, I’m going to move onto the next question which could be related or not, depends, but I would love to know your coming story – however you define that.

I came out as a lesbian in college and I had a tremendous crush on this woman who lived downstairs from me in the dorm. Her name was Caroline and I was enamored with her in every way, but it took me a long time to figure out what it was cause in my world the only option was to get married and so my mother spent a lot of time desperately, desperately trying to make me a good wife and was very frustrated at my inability to do this right and so she set up – I think I told you this before, but I’ll say it on tape as well – she set up these days for me, these afternoon sessions on Saturdays to help me with my training and that training was in terms of how to walk in heels. I don’t know where she got this idea, maybe from television, she did the whole book on the head, posture straight and kind of heel toe walk in heels and I would just walk up and down the house, over and over again and we’d do this every week. And she’s like “Heel –toe. Heel – toe.” and I would walk and trip and [laughter] she’d have me do it again.

And also the hands were very important. She didn’t like how my hands were always in my pockets or whatever, so we had a very intense training on how to do things…whatever – very lady training: how to sip tea, how to sit with one’s legs crossed. I spent a lot of time with my legs really wide [laughter] and it just drove her nuts. Also how to set a table. She spent a tremendous amount of energy on husband training. She used to say, “How are you going to get a husband if you walk like a guy?” and that sort of that thing or “If you don’t know how to clean a house or make sure your house is well kept?” and all of these “These are what you need to know as a wife.” and how to cook and how to just generally take care of your domestic world, even if you’re working. She’s like, “Yeah – you have your own career, that’s important, but you need to be able to know this, too so that you can keep a husband.” And she didn’t put on a lot of makeup herself, but she got to be very concerned when I got to be 14 or 15 years old and didn’t even want any make up. I didn’t ask for makeup. I wasn’t interested in makeup. I hadn’t even thought about it. I just hadn’t thought about it, but she was panicked. She was like, “How come you’re not thinking about this stuff?” and I was like “I dunno.” And so she had this campaign to make sure that I was wearing makeup. What else? There was a lot of focus on attention on “you go to college and this is where you meet a nice man. “

A nice husband, right?

A nice husband that you’re going to marry and somebody’s who’s professional and you can build a life together. And so her goal was to make sure that I was on my way to middle-classness – a middle classness that she couldn’t quite get to or get at because of a lot of things that were happening in our house and so she wanted that for me. And my sister was pregnant early in her life. She was 19 – not as early as many people. She had already graduated from high school, but it was pretty early and she had this husband who was not a middle class professional guy. He was pretty much a jerk and not somebody was a provider. He was just incredibly abusive and just wasn’t…it was very much a repeat of the pattern of her own marriage. Although my father certainly worked harder than this guy. I mean, my father was an incredibly abusive person and also worked two jobs. And then this guy was just kind of not very interested in doing anything besides hanging out with his friends and getting high and all of this. And so my mother saw what was going on with my sister and was like, “We get you settled in something that’s better than that.” I think. I’m putting words into her mouth. She never really articulated it that way. To me it was always about “I need you to be…how are you going to get a husband…” it wasn’t this….

It was this unspoken pressure to achieve middle-classness?

Right. The pressure was, “You can do this, you’re going to go to an Ivy-league school, you can have this future and you want to be able to get an appropriate partner for that future.” But this actual articulation – “You’re sister’s doing something [I don’t approve of]; I want something better for you”— we didn’t talk about. So all through high school and everything, whatever kinds of desires I had I didn’t understand. It took me a very long time, as a matter of fact, to even understand what arousal meant because it was so muddied by this tremendous pressure to have a husband and to be with men. So I was confused. I had my first boyfriend in college. I didn’t have any boyfriends in high school., which was another panic of my mother’s [laughter]. “How come you don’t have a boyfriend? How come you don’t seem to care about them or want one?” And then when I went to college and was having sex for the first time with a man, I was just like, “Is this it? Is this what…? Wasn’t this supposed to be exciting?” [laughter]

I didn’t understand. What my mother’s understanding of sexual education was the dual thing: “Keep your legs closed and your dress tail down” and at the same time “Why aren’t you dating?” We had this huge fight once when she thought I was kissing some guy on a fence one day and I was the epitome of a good girl, right? I went to school, I had clubs afterschool and then I had a job and then I came home and I did my homework. And that was it, right? And so I came home after my job and I didn’t know what she was talking about “What guy?” I said and so we had this huge fight. “I saw you kissing this guy. I know it was you. I saw you kissing him.” [After a long time of arguing back and forth] she asked, “Why not? How come you weren’t kissing him?” It was really confusing. On the one hand it was, don’t be a slut, don’t you dare kiss this guy and on the other hand it was well, why aren’t you trying at least to kiss guys.

Right.

And so when I had this desire for this woman I didn’t know what to do with it. All of that to say, that’s why I just had nowhere to put it. And I was having sex with this guy and I thought, “I think that I’m supposed to have this orgasm, but…” [laughter]

Nothing’s happening…

Nothing’s happening, quite. It’s only happening during things that would be more like lesbian sex [laughter] and he would say things to me that were quite puzzling to me, that I didn’t understand I’d be having sex with him and he’d say something like, “I don’t have breasts.” and I said, “I know you don’t have breasts.” and said, “well, you’re touching my body as if I do.”, “Oh,” [laughter]

[laughter]

I was so clueless. Just really out of my body, I think, very out of my body and doing stuff…cause I loved him and I really thought he was a great person and I really enjoyed being with him, but I wasn’t really being present. And one day, not Caroline but her sister [Eileen], was getting changed. We were all hanging out in the room and she was changing and suddenly my body responded. [laughter]

[laughter]

Right. Electricity went through me and I was like, “That’s what it means to be turned on.” And I realized, “That’s not what’s happening with my boyfriend…fiancé.” and I slowly started going to the gay and lesbian organization meetings on campus and slowly, slowly, slowly told my boyfriend [that I was a lesbian] and he just said, “Yeah.” [laughter]

[laughter]

I was clueless as I could be and everything was going really slowly. I was trying to figure out what does my body need? What does it mean to be this kind of person who has these desires? What would I do with this person? What would my future look like – right? Because heterosexual sex and heterosexual sexuality is tied into a vision of a future and so, all of those pieces… I was taught to stride with the heels and everything, so then how do I walk? What does that mean? And I hadn’t realized this, but the farther I got from my mother’s house, the more my wardrobe changed, the more I got rid of these certain kinds of clothes, the more women’s clothes dropped out of my wardrobe altogether. And I wasn’t clued in. My boyfriend one time, he bought me this teddy – I think that’s what it’s called.

The little thing?

Yeah, you know the little lacy thing. And this is years before I came out, I looked at this thing and I was like, “What do you want me to do with this?” [laughter] I was unhappy about it. And it didn’t even occur to me that anything was different [with me than other women]. I was like, sigh, “Okay, I’ll put this on.” And so I put it on. I think I put the thing on twice and everything inside of me was screaming. I was so unhappy and so upset about it …I finally got it off me, it was burning my skin or something and then I put on his T-shirt and boxers and I sighed, “Now we can have sex.” [laughter] “Now I’m ready.” I never put the two together.

Gay sex.

[Laughter]

The kind of interaction we wound up having was very much like gay men, but I just wasn’t thinking about it in those terms [then], because we live in a world where your body parts equals what you are. Because we were doomed to be only men and women, that’s the definition of heterosexuality and that’s all there was to it. And so it didn’t occur to me that the kinds of interactions I was having with him or even the ways I would prepare for our erotic encounters was about a butch on butch dynamic. It was about topping him, about controlling our sexual encounter, was about making sure that even though I lived as a woman, and didn’t necessarily have a butch identity yet –that my interactions with him were in men’s clothes and that that’s where I would find my erotics around him. Because that’s not the language of heterosexuality, heterosexuality doesn’t have any place to put those [actions or feelings]. It’s like, there’s a man and a woman and that’s the entire story.

And Caroline’s sister changed all that.

And so these other subtleties, these other conceptions of gender…it was 1987, people weren’t even talking about it academically yet.

Butch wasn’t even being talked about academically.

No. Not so much [transgender either], no.

And so then I came out. And got acculturated, because lesbian is a culture, not necessarily who you sleep with, and I became much more acculturated to lesbian community, which meant that I could ask, “I don’t have to wear these skirts?” I remember the first time somebody called me a butch, my entire body lit up. I just lit up with a sense of self, with an understanding of self and a belonging and a rightness that was so exciting. I remember there was this one woman from Kenya who was stunning, absolutely stunning, and was another student. I was talking in a class about a something and I had this tie, this Black tie that I bought I don’t remember where the hell I bought it, probably at a Pride, cause it had a little pink triangle on it that was really cheesy, but I loved it, and I had this shirt and I wore it – I started cross dressing on campus a lot – I wore it to this presentation I was giving in a class and I saw her and she grabbed me by the tie and she said, “You know you look really, really handsome in that tie.” And I thought I would fall out [laughter] my knees almost gave way, I swooned, swayed with the heat of her pulling on my tie and saying that to me.

That’s hot.

It was so hot. I just lost my balance. And I was trying to pull something together, “Thank you very much.”

That’s good.

I tried. And that’s part of the coming out story right there. Being on a college campus.

A journey out of heterosexuality in many ways.

I have a really short history as a straight woman. Really short. I actually, don’t know anything about dating men. I only had one boyfriend and we were together for three years, but I don’t know anything about dating men.

It’s really intense, though, undoing your whole future and re-inscribing it, re-defining it.

Re-imagining it, absolutely. I had to re-imagine it. What kind of future does this dyke have? This new formed dyke? What kind of world does that mean?

And that actually leads into the next question because I think there’s a connection there but I’m curious to see what you think, what your experience is. The question I have is what does it mean for you to be an artist, a writer, an activist? What does it mean for you to walk in the world the way you do, creatively?

Well, it meant at that moment that I had to come up with another career plan and another vision for my future. Because I’d gotten into medical school early decision and I found that it just wasn’t what I needed to be doing. I also grew up very Christian, right? – and so I didn’t have a language for a spiritual pull or a voice from spirit. I just knew, just like my body was screaming, “Take off the teddy” it was “Do not go to medical school. You cannot do this. Bad idea.” Then I was this errant lesbian in my family and I have decided not to do the one profession I came to college to do and what do I do now? But what I always had was a love of literature, a love of books, a love of reading, a love of writing and there was this lesbian publishing house that was close to campus – New Victoria Publishers which is in Vermont – I went to school at Dartmouth – notice how I didn’t say the name – I hate that place. [laughter]

[laughter] We will not give them credit for shit. But yeah. So New Victoria Publishers?

New Victoria Publishers. They publish LaShonda Barnett’s book Callaloo and other lesbian authors. I had an internship there as an editorial intern. And it’s really funny. I was looking for a job. I was graduating and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and I had organized for this lesbian band to come to campus, called Virginia and the Wolves [laughter]

[laughter] Does not get much more lesbian than that!

Kinda white lesbian from the 70s. Virginia and the Wolves? So Virginia and the Wolves were rocking it out on campus and there were a whole bunch of white women from the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, which is chock full of white dykes – let me tell you – they came to it and two of the people that came were the owners of New Victoria. I was really bold and said, “I need a job” and they were like, “Well, we may be able to do something for you.” And that’s how I got that first job as an intern there. And from there I applied to Kitchen Table Press. What happened? I was arrogant enough to just send them a letter. That’s what happens when you’re 20. Shit I would never do now, right?

[Laughter] Thank god you did it then.

So there I am 20, 21 years old and I was like “I need a job.” And so I just wrote letters to different publishing houses. Benetton magazine, I got that job and when you’re 21, 20 years old, I had no idea how much an amazing thing it was that I could send out just a few cover letters and a resume and get two job offers. At the time, I sent out maybe four, and I just wasn’t worried about it [laughter]. And then I got an interview at Benetton magazine and then an interview at Kitchen Table Press and I got the job at Benetton and the time Benetton clothing stores were everywhere and they had this magazine United Colors of Benetton. They had this fancy office in Manhattan. Later on the magazine moved to Milan. They had a lot more money. They were going to fly me back and forth from New Hampshire for…it was just a whole other world.

And at Kitchen Table Press, part of my interview I was packing boxes in the back with Barbara Smith and I made a decision to go with a Black feminist history. I didn’t quite understand, but I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that the publishing house was part of something much larger than myself, and that the Benetton magazine would be forgotten and anything I did there would be forgotten but being a part of Kitchen Table Press meant that I would be making history in some way and I decided to go with Kitchen Table and I took that job. And I was Associate Publisher there from 1992 to 1995. And that was a part of what it meant to be a writer and something that was enmeshed in this world of literature and creative work. And I met some of the most amazing writers and artists of the 20^th century through that Press.

Any anecdotes.

None that I can say here, really. It was an incredibly eye opening experience as to how these things get done and what peoples’ personalities are actually like. There’s the part, when you see somebody publicly and they are kind and they smile at you and they sign your book or whatever and there’s how they act on the regular.

Behind the scenes.

Which is a whole other thing. But it was in those years, it was me, Barbara Smith, and this woman Lillian Waller, who’s also a poet. And we ran Kitchen Table Press. And there was also part time colleagues Jaya and Catherine and there were several interns and volunteers [of all kinds of sexual orientations and races].

I didn’t realize it was staffed by so many people.

There were three full time staff people and then I worked really hard to have an internship program where we recruited people who would get college credit from different parts of the country to work at the press and also to recruit local volunteers. And that was working in a non-profit so I was working 15, 18 hours a day. But I loved it. I loved doing the work. And because Barbara is who she is, we also did all kinds of political work around the country and we would go to places like the Creating Change conference. I think we went to Cincinnati because Creating Change was there, but then we also went to Cleveland after that because there was going to be an anti-gay initiative there. It was also the time of all the anti-gay initiatives. This is such a[n example] of history repeating itself. Because of a Gulf War, a war in the Middle East, and anti-gay initiatives that came together and so they get clumped.

They sure do. We’re a good distraction.

[Laughter] For the incredible war that is taking place and the aftermath – even after the war has been declared over, even in the aftermath. And so we went around doing all of this political work. And all of that, all of that is part of what it means for me to be a writer and an artist and a performer and a scholar. I can’t separate any of that out to just the lonely moments in the room. We were in Albany, New York, and I did a lot of readings and I started publishing my first pieces of fiction at that time and started publishing essays.

But I was surrounded by such inspiration every day. And Barbara, God bless her, is an incredible essayist and is one of the founding mothers of Black feminist criticism. I mean, the woman wrote “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism.” I couldn’t do what I do now without her. So, all of that was so…much…foundational to my very being. I was also part of a vibrant Black lesbian world, right? For the first time I could have Black queer community – I couldn’t have that before – and I made that in Albany but also networks that took me around the country. It was really great work. I’m glad that I did it.

What were some of the first pieces you published?

The first piece I published was in Sisterfire. The first time I published anything in an anthology, I think it was in Sisterfire, Black Feminist Fiction and Poetry [edited] by Charlotte Watson Sherman and that short story was called “Dues” and it’s dedicated to my sister. And then the next thing that I published was in a journal called Sinister Wisdom and that was a short story called “Spice.” That story was originally a poem in the lesbian, gay newspaper on campus that I made into a short story for an issue on allies, which was then re-published in Does Your Mama Know.

Published by Lisa C. Moore?

Yes, Lisa C. Moore in Does Your Mama Know? and it’s published – cause it’s Black lesbian coming out stories – as a coming out story, but it’s a piece of fiction. It’s not actually my coming out story. And then I published other essays and a couple of other short stories after that. I’ve been publishing pretty steadily in anthologies and journals since 1992.

How would you say your work is influenced by who you are?

In every way because I could have married my ex-boyfriend, who was a very nice guy. He is a very nice guy. His name is Nick. I could have married him and I don’t know, been a therapist somewhere or maybe been a professor of English, but I just…my life would have been different, I don’t think I would have the same way of being able to speak to so many different concepts, ways of being. Different ways of even having a body. My imagination would have been so limited by that heterosexual circumstance.

If I had followed the path that my mother really wanted for me – and that was a path of safety, which was a husband, some kids, a house, a steady job with a steady paycheck – it would have been a nice life, but one that definitely had a ceiling on it in terms of what you can even imagine as like…what the world would look like, what I’d look like, what I could do with my time. I don’t think I could have imagined the same kinds of fictional realms with that future. And so, because I chose one that was about queerness, that’s about going against particular status-quo’s, that’s about re-envisioning the Black body, fundamentally in terms of what is male and female, for example, what is desire…I think that it means that I can take…I feel that I can go a lot further with what I imagine and who I imagine even fictionally. So, for example, a lot of my fiction is about extended versions of my family, many different ways of thinking about the same few people over and over and over again. But the perspective from which I come at that is one from an eye of desire, an eye of thinking about the body that can do something else. That just does something else.

I’m thinking of an example…I have a story that I published called “Sarah” that…oh no no no – it was going to be called “Sarah” but I changed the title. The story is about domestic violence but between a lesbian couple. So one of the things I was able to imagine, of course, is the abuse – through my own background of domestic violence, living in a household of domestic violence – I wanted to know what was going on in the head of the abuser and so that’s the perspective from which I told this story, but it’s from this woman who is the abusive partner and so that’s another limit to how we understand domestic violence that otherwise I wouldn’t be able to connect to if I was in the heterosexual relationship. In that story I try to do a lot of things, like how do Black women treat each other. There’s a lot of stuff about alcoholism. There’s a lot that I was looking at in that short story that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.

I just did an academic essay on compulsory heterosexuality and African-American history. I would never have been able to read history texts for their absences, for where they make critical misjudgments, where they miss the opportunities to even imagine transgendered subjects or a lesbian or a woman who has relationships with women. All these moments that history, Black history, just cannot accommodate other kinds of desires [or genders]. I want to be able to make that kind of contribution. Or a variety. That’s what I do. It infuses all the short stories that I write, all the academic work that I write. The novel that I’m writing, everything is about, comes from that perspective and therefore shapes what I imagine. And also the kinds of characters I create on the stage.

I did this…for Kitchen Table Press we did a fundraiser where Tony Kushner was very gracious and came to Albany. But I performed on the stage at Capital Rep and I did some acting in college and I wrote some performance pieces in college and also put together a performance play that I did with another friend and then when I was in graduate school, decided that I wanted to do some performing and the opportunity to be a drag king came up and I was like, “So, okay. Let’s do it.” and so I did that and I did that in an all white troupe, which was really hard for a lot of reasons, and then I was able to co-found an all Black troupe in Oakland. And I can do a lot of different characters with that. I can do male and female characters, but I can consciously think about Black genders in a really focused way and how they interact with each other and how they interact with whiteness and what kinds of music needs to run through that body or how to comment on contemporary Black culture or history and all kinds of stuff. It’s just a very useful medium for creativity on the stage.

I haven’t had the chance to see one of your performances with your troupe. What’s the name of the troupe?

Nappy Grooves.

Y’all are fly. Well, my last question for you is more around what defines success for you as a writer, artist, performer. And the reason I ask that question is because I think we have limited vocabulary to discuss what that means for us. And so I’m just curious to hear as many people talk about it as possible.

First, success for me is knowing that people are reading what I write. That I think is the most important thing. One of the reasons why I chose to get a PhD, cause I already have an MFA, was so that I would have a steady income. Cause starving artist is not cute, so that I also wouldn’t be tied to how well the book did or did I get out the book, so that I could create in a variety of different ways and even if I was having blockages or not ready, or not ready to get everything that I’m writing together in a publishable manuscript, that I wouldn’t starve trying to do it. But what I’m really just amazed at is when somebody is reading it. I write this stuff in my room, or in the library, kinda alone and I may do a reading or I may give it to some friends to give me some feedback and then it goes into a book somewhere or a journal somewhere and it just kinda goes into the ether and I don’t know what’s going on with it. And then when somebody comes to me and says, “I taught your essay in my class.” Somebody even got permission to reprint “Dues” and teach it in a class at Ohio State and I was like, “Somebody’s teaching my fiction?”

That’s cool.

That was so amazing to me. Or knowing that I did an essay in This is What Lesbian Looks Like: Dykes Take Over the 21^st Century or Dyke Activists Talk About the 21^st Century and I met somebody years after that was published who was just coming out of college when I published that and picked up a copy at Creating Change and used that essay to do activism in Colorado. And I was just like, “Yes!” It was so exciting. Or I was at a conference, I think it was the FTM conference in Seattle and somebody was talking about organizing on college campuses and used one of the essays that I had just published and they were talking about stuff that we wrote about in the article about organizing, and they were talking the different methods that college campuses were doing and so I got a sense that that one little article had this national impact for a variety of different places.

Or somebody, in their graduate seminar or in their undergraduate class, like twice here students had said they had read an article of mine in their classes. That’s success. That whatever ideas I manage to cull together and put on a piece of paper actually reaches some people – especially for somebody that does academic stuff, right, or the stuff about Blackness and gay marriage – the very fact that what I’m writing may have an actual impact on how people do activism is a tremendously satisfying. That means it’s not just for 10 people who might pick up this academic journal, but –

Beyond the scope of your peers.

Yes, my academic peer group. But there’s another group of peers who are activists and people who care about the world, that what I write actually helps or sparks some sort of ideas or something. Something! Or they fight with it or they disagree with it or something! I think that that’s really…that’s success for me and I’m just absolutely blessed every time I get to find out that somebody read something I wrote.

That’s really cool. Well, that’s it for my questions. Is there anything else you want to say or talk about that I didn’t touch upon that you think is relevant? That young people should know? That other people embarking on this path should know?

Get a variety of mentors.

Did you have mentors?

Kind of. But I think that the mentors that you have really shapes who you become. There’s an acculturation, your generational culture that people come from, and usually that acculturation happens from the time you’re a kid, right – the kind of food you eat, the kind of music you listen to, the ways people talk, the ways that they tell stories, how they understand the political climate of the world, how they make sense of it, how they’re impacted by it, how they make family, all of that stuff is an acculturation. And you have your parents and peers and friends and everybody else who are the mentors in that process and teachers and sometimes they’re not always great, but they’re there and they help shape us and I think that for people who are trying to be artists, and especially queer artists, you need to have people to tell you what to expect.

What are the road blocks, what are the places of celebration, how are you being seen? how are you being read by other people in the world? how your work is read, how your body is read. What does it mean to strive for excellence as an artist? Somebody…people who can be honest with you and say this is just not working. You need people to tell you. You don’t want to have just a world full of support where everybody’s support looks like “Yes, yes yes yes that’s great.” You need somebody to be like, this is not working. Somebody to tell you the truth and be like, “Do this over.” and that’s absolutely necessary. For people to push, to push your political consciousness, to push your creative work, to push how you treat other people, just to push you. That’s what I would say.

How do you find those people? How did you find those people?

I haven’t had as many as I would have liked, right. It’s been more happenstance, but be watching. Choose your mentors wisely. Don’t let them choose you all the time. Cause you don’t always want –everyone’s opinion [laughter], I think.

[Laughter]

I have seen people be mentored by some very interesting folk out there. I spent some time, just a little bit of time, volunteering at a youth organization that catered mostly to Black [queer] youth and what I heard from the mentors that were there made my blood run cold. I thought, “My god. You can’t tell this to children! Are you insane?” Stuff that becomes common knowledge and common sense in this very negative way. I witnessed adults say things to young people like, “I’m just trying to keep it real. If I tell somebody that they ugly and that they are worthless, I’m just keeping it real.” How do you tell that to children? Not so much, No. This was a staff person! These are paid staff members saying this to children.

So, having the appropriate mentors that can give somebody a moral sense, a compass , a way of understanding oneself that is accountable to others and responsible to the world and responsible politically and ethically and morally and spiritually, I think is essential. Not everybody that’s out there that’s in a position to help young people have centered themselves [spiritually or politically]. I hadn’t done youth work in some time and so when I was actually kind of involved, talking to these people and seeing some of the ways in which some people have damaged children, and young people by being incredibly abusive mentors – which includes sexually, using kids for their own sexual gratification – paid staff people, now – in queer youth facilities – or giving them a kind of instruction that is wrong headed, incredibly classist, racist, misogynist, I mean everything you can…I was just overwhelmed. So I would say, people need mentors who have integrity and watch. Watch people. Do you have integrity? Do you have kindness? Do you have a spiritual center? Do you have a basis of coming at people with love? And then try to be that mentor for somebody else later on, cause…apparently, it’s kind of rare.

It sure is. Is there anybody you would name who’s had that role with you?

You know my mentors have had their flaws.

Sure, we’re all human.

But the two people who come to my mind most directly as direct mentors have been both Barbara Smith and Barbara Christian and Barbara Christian was not a lesbian at all, or queer in any way, but she was my advisor at Berkeley. And again, these two women were not perfect by any stretch, but they did advise me in ways that I needed to be guided. And they did tell me the truth sometimes when it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. And they did try to act with as much integrity that they had. And those were important things.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for including me in this project. I appreciate it.

It’s cool. It’s nice to hear the stories.

2008-02-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

A link to a brother who thought to get voices on record at the 2008 AWP conference in New York City (his name is Christopher Hennessy). Here's his blog: Outside the Line.

r. Erica Doyle, Interviewed on January 16, 2006

2007-03-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

r. Erica Doyle, poet/teacher/activist

r. Erica Doyle, born on November 9, 1968 in Brooklyn, NY

Interviewed on January 16, 2006 by Ana-Maurine Lara

The defining moments in your younger years that have had a major impact on who you’ve become today.

It’s kinda hard to define who I am. I don’t know about a moment. I think I have these currents of obsessions more, not really moments. Besides the fact that I have a really bad memory, sort of so..I don’t necessarily remember events unless it’s some kind of emotional thing. I can’t think of different defining moments. There’s moments that I remember. Like, almost drowning.

In Brooklyn.

Nah-ah. My family had a, like my mom’s brothers and my grandparents had houses in Emeryville, Long Island and over the summer we’d go there a lot and we’d...there was a community pool, like all the towns in Long Island have community pools, rec centers and when I was at the pool with some of my cousins and I was standing near the deep end and I didn’t know how to swim yet so I must have been six or seven and a bunch of my cousins were around,one of my uncles, maybe my father, and I was standing on a ladder and one of my cousins was saying “come in, come in, come in.” and I was saying, “I can’t go in there.” and he was saying, “well just hold onto the ladder” and I was like, “well I can’t” and then my cousin Raven, who thought she was joking, pushed me. Which she denies to this day. She says that I slipped, but I know she pushed me. And she pushed me and I was so shocked I gasped, which is the thing that makes people drown. And so I breathed in all this water and then I wasn’t afraid anymore and I just started breathing in water and I just started floating down and down and down and down and then one of my cousins came. My cousin Shawn came and pulled me up and out of the water and then... I think maybe I had lost consciousness a little bit so I’m not sure if I was conscious when they took me out of the water, but then I just started throwing up when they took me out and water was just pouring out of my mouth and out my nose and I started throwing up and throwing up and throwing up and what I was throwing up was pink because we had gone to McDonald’s for lunch and I had a pink milkshake (laughter). I guess it was strawberry milkshake, and I threw up my strawberry milkshake and it’s the last time I ever drank a strawberry milkshake.

040 But I never forgot that because there are a lot of things about that moment that’s kind of weird and always poignant for me. Sort of my rescue by my cousin who I always saw as this good person. My cousin Raven pushing me from behind and lying about it later - this day. I think now it became a truth in her mind, cause why would she lie about it now, we’re so old. So I think either she doesn’t remember or remembers “aw but you slipped” so, I don’t know – that’s something that I always remember.

What did it feel like? Do you remember?

047 Umhmm. I remember. I felt very calm and very peaceful. I was just breathing very painlessly and I wasn’t frightened and I was just floating. And I wasn’t cold and I was very relaxed and I kept going down and down and down and down. And when he came to get me, I didn’t want to go because he was pulling me up and I liked what was happening and I didn’t want it to stop. And I remember, I may have even struggled against him. I don’t even remember. But I remember wanting to and not wanting to go back up, so that’s something I remember. And as a defining moment, I could say all these things about it cause it’s so symbolic, right? and so metaphorical, but I would really just be making that up, which I guess is what we do anyway, but I don’t think of it...it’s just something that I remember that I write about and I think about.

But it does show up in your writing and comes back to you?

058 It shows up, yeah, it shows up in my writing as a narrative poem in my writing. It shows up in other poems as in sort of, what does it feel like to like that you’re drowning. And also feeling like the peacefulness of something that’s going to lead to death, of being in a harmful situation and not really realizing that it’s harmful. Thinking of it as something that’s dangerous but feels really good. And I don’t know.

068 I think things that have defined me as a person. The first thing I thought about were obsessions, right. When I was a kid, I was really obsessed with animals and nature. And even though I lived in the city, it was suburbanish for New York City, but we spent a lot of time also in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens where I grew up I was constantly talking to clouds and trees and I had a language with my dog and I slept with my dog. And I was like a little naturalist and I guess a lot of people in my family really love nature, which is a very Trinidadian thing. People very much love the natural world. I was around a lot of people who loved birds, or they loved plants, or they loved the ocean. Or they loved dogs. Lots of people in my family had a lot of dogs, you know if you go to Trinidad, they’re all like botanists. They can tell you what this tree is and what it does and what this bark does and everyone had little gardens and things like that so I was around, in this culture of people who were really felt connected to nature and had a really deep respect for animals, even though they ate them, though you know – that was just part of life. But I guess, I was obsessed with animals and social relationships between animals. And I’d read books about animals. And one of my uncles brought me a book that was the birds of North America and it had a little – this is really crazy – it had a little vinyl record, but kind of a flimsy vinyl record that would fit in a book.

The square ones.

090 So it had a record in it of bird songs and I would actually play this and I remember thinking later, “God, what a nerdy kid.” I was in my room, I had this record of bird songs that I was listening to and to this day I can recognize different bird songs, and I definitely know I can recognize lots of birds. I’m kind of interested. So those are things that are sort of secret obsessions, things that I notice and are connected to. And this is also part of my connection to a fantasy world, to a very deep connection to a fantasy world. Which I still indulge in. That’s my prozac. I have two prozacs. One is chocolate and the other one is fantasy. So, because, and this again is not an event, but these are the cumulative events of my childhood.

100 When I became six or seven, I remember in first grade, my father started becoming really abusive. And I didn’t know why at the time, but he became really mean and we’d get lots of beatings for no reason. He was really mean to my mother. He was really abusive for the rest of his life basically. Until maybe the year or two years before he died he was really abusive and horrible. And that was definitely one of the ways that I would make myself feel better, was fantasizing about stuff. Which is kind of crazy, because he was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Like he could be perfectly fine and friendly and fun, but then he would really be dangerously evil and abusive. And this is somebody who didn’t drink or take drugs or anything. So this is not one of those things like when he drinks and then whatever. No, this was...it would be triggered by things that of course as children we would be completely unaware of. And we would just bear the brunt of it.

115 I think a lot of what I did was make up these stories, a lot of which when I was very young, were connected to the natural world. Stories about a deer and its parent – sort of like Bambi stories – or stories about people who turned into animals. Cause I also read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, of course– cause my mom was a Trekkie – so I watched Star Trek with her and stuff.

Remind me to tell you a story about that later. So you watched a lot of Star Trek with her.

122 Yeah. We watched a lot of Star Trek. And I think all of that filtered into my consciousness, or also my disassociation. Cause basically I was disassociating from all the scary things that were going on in my house. It was a very scary place to grow up. I was afraid all the time. And so the only time I could get out of that was by making up stories or reading other peoples’ stories. So I also read a lot. I wouldn’t say it’s an event kind of thing. But those are things that cumulatively pointed me in this, like who I am today.

It’s amazing cause here you have this connection with nature. And in a way this becomes your safety. And then this whole event around water.

138 I grew up going to the beach all the time, whether it was in Long Island or...cause my mother loved the beach. And she loved to swim so we were always swimming, or at the beach. When we were in Trinidad we were always at the beach, or we’d swim in somebody’s pool. So we were always in water, all the time, or around water, and we’d go to my grandparents in Florida and we’d take these swimming lessons. We’d go to the pool everyday. Plus I’m a water sign, I love the water. So definitely...there’s the safety and the danger. And I think I remember it so much because there’s all this trust stuff that’s there with somebody in your family hurts you, somebody in your family saves you. This thing that you have so much fun in is harmful, but it also feels really good, you could die doing this. So there’s a lot of stuff involved in that particular moment.

What do you remember when you started using writing as a way to create a world for yourself?

153 I guess I can’t remember ever not doing that. As soon as I could write I was writing stories, but I would also tell stories. And one of the things my mother says is that I used to make up songs all the time before I could talk. So, when I was little, when I was babbling – maybe seven, eight, nine months – I was singing. Because she would sing to me a lot, she would tell me stories and read to me, so there was tons of oral language around me as well. Because I come from this family culture where people are constantly telling stories about something, and they’re jumping up or they’re telling a story or they’re acting it out everybody’s laughing and they’re all yelling at each other having an argument but it’s okay. You know. So I think I was always singing, but I can’t remember not imagining something happening. Sort of like a what if, but just doing it. Imagining something happening differently, or something extraordinary happening in an ordinary moment. So as soon as I could write I would write stories, so the earliest writing I have of my own is from first grade. And in first grade notebook are half begun stories about - a lot of them were about deer.

Did you see deer?

174 No, I didn’t see a live deer, maybe in the zoo. I didn’t see a live deer until I was much older, like in high school – wild deer. But I think Bambi – that story – really touched me. And so I would read a lot about deer, and about how they actually do fight and protect their children and do this or the other, whatever, and I knew they were around cause we’re in New York State and there’s tons of deer here, but I never saw them in the wild but I had a lot of stories about... re-writing Bambi in first grade. And I had songs. I would make up songs all the time. I’d write plays. I’d put my cousins and my brother in them. Cause we had a whole gang of kids in our neighborhood. And so I’d write plays and they’d act out the play in the backyard.

And of course they would participate!

187 Of course. And then I’d have to copy over the script like four times. So I’d copy over the scripts and they’d have the scripts and they’d do the play. I don’t remember what they’re about. Any of them. But you know, I’d write these plays for them. I’d also read to my cousins and my little brother. Cause I had cousins who lived across the street. So I’d read to them. So I was a very literate kid. Very literate. Oral, written. I’d read all the time. I’d sing songs, make up musicals. So I was constantly doing that. Oh - I used to write porn.

(Laughter)

Did you? That’s excellent. How did you start writing porn?

201 I don’t remember. I think there was a thing...the kids in my elementary school, in fifth grade they’d tell nasty stories. There was this thing to tell nasty stories, “and he put his dick in her pussy” or whatever and so I became fascinated. But at the time, we didn’t say wifey. It was very crude, block headed stuff. We had never seen any cause this was before cable, so nobody had really seen anything, except for like kind of briefly in those Kentucky Fried Chicken movies. There were all these Richard Pryor movies and all these movies with Bill Cosby like Uptown Saturday Night or Shaft, and so you’d kind of briefly see these things but I don’t know for whatever reason in 1970 whatever in my elementary school people started telling these nasty stories. And so I started writing them. And I became kinda famous for writing these nasty stories, but I wouldn’t show them to too many people because I didn’t want people to know and I didn’t want my parents to find out. So I remember I’d write these little porn things and everyone’d be like “okay, just read us the nasty stories”.

I love that you were the porn queen.

219 For a moment. I had my moment. I had my little moment.

Switching gears a little bit, I would love to hear what you’re coming out story is.

223 This is kinda weird. My coming out story is the same thing. It’s not a moment. I always liked girls like forever ever and ever. So there was never a moment where I suddenly realized that I felt that way. it was more like attaching words to it. So when I was in kindergarten I had this pack of girls I ran with. But then there was also this boy, and I remember his name was Patrick and he was little and he was sort of my first boyfriend. Like when I was little and I would say definitely as a kid I was much more inclined to be bi[sexual], I think I was a lot more open to guys then than I am now, as I got older I got weaned off of guys cause I liked little boys better when they were little, when we were all little they were better. When we reached fifth grade they became quite distasteful and I didn’t like them anymore at all, or so much. It was not as even. Like in kindergarten it was pretty even, I might like a boy, I might like a girl but the older I got the more I was into girls, almost exclusively. And I remember saying things like, “oh I’m never going to get married.” and “I hate boys.” and just being very...and lots of girls do that, it’s very developmental, but I meant it. And it wasn’t going to change. That was my expressing what my sexual preference was gonna to roll out to be.

246 And then I had one boyfriend in seventh grade and that was about social currency because he was the most popular boy in school, and of course he was light-skinned. And of course he had gotten left back. So he was like the James Dean of our school and he liked me, which was completely odd to me. So he wrote me a note “you wanna go with me?” and I said “yeah.” because whoa – I could suddenly triple my popularity. And so I went out with him. But it was middle school going out, which is nothing. It was holding hands; maybe I kissed him once and I was very chaste about the whole thing. So he’s my little middle school boyfriend. Cause then I went to boarding school and that was it. Cause boarding school was all girls. And so I was just like...

Which boarding school did you go to?

Miss Border’s School.

Where is that?

In Farmington, Connecticut.

Okay.

262 And then I was like in heaven. Cause I was like, `girls all the time’. And what was really funny about this school is that it’s very liberal. It’s probably one of the most liberal girls schools, like we don’t have uniforms and it’s very open. It’s kind of like, it’s pretty progressive but in a tight-lipped New England way and it’s very focused on your individual development and the community’s also really important, though and people are constantly thinking about the whole. And whatever. And also we lived together, so we were really, really close. And there were no taboos around holding hands or sleeping together and I mean, celibate, platonic sleeping together. So we’d sleep together, you’d sleep holding your friends just like puppies. So it was great. I had the attention that I wanted and then there were of course, I’d be totally in love with people.

281 What started happening my senior year is I started – well, and I had no idea this entire time cause you have to remember the time period – I had no idea what a lesbian was. I had never heard that word. The only word I had ever heard was lezzie and I had no clue what it was. I thought it was a prostitute. Like a ho. Right. Cause I had this best friend from my neighborhood and she belonged to this church called Christ the King and at Christ the King they would have these youth activities and sometimes I would go with them cause my family didn’t go to church at all. My grandparents did, my parents didn’t believe in church, so I would go cause it was a social thing, even though they were supposed to be all holy, I learned that they were not being that holy. They would just hang out together and do things and be nasty sometimes. So there was this girl and they were like, “She’s a lezzie.” and I was just like, “Oh.” And the only bad thing I knew that girls could be was ho’s, so I assumed it was a synonym for ho. I had no idea. I’d never heard of it. I had no clue.

298 And I vaguely knew about punks or whatever which is what my dad called gay guys cause one of his best friends from childhood was a punk, right. He was...and so my dad would talk about him and he would talk about him the same way he’d talk about Johnny Mathis, who he was also really into. And the thing of it is he would say it, and sometimes it was this derogatory thing, but still this guy was his best friend and they were still really great friends and everybody knew apparently, but they were still friends. But I didn’t really know what that meant, punk. It was not macho. I know what it meant, really, to them. The full implications. And then he would connect it to Johnny Mathis and he would say, “See all those women. They’re screaming at Johnny Mathis, they think he’s singing to them, but he’s not singing to them. He’s singing to the men.” And so I thought, oh that’s interesting, so I guess a punk likes men or something. But it didn’t really stick cause it wasn’t connected to anything. So this whole time I didn’t really know.

314 And so in high school people started telling these stories. And I always thought of it like Tristan and Isolde. There were these great love affairs between girls. And they were legendary. And people would talk about these great love affairs between these two girls and it always happened that one of them, they were friends, and one of them fell in love with the other and she told her friend that she was in love with her and her friend always told her I love you but I don’t feel that way about you. So that was the narrative, but no one ever said the word lesbian in that context either so I still didn’t know what it was. I really don’t know how I learned what it was. Maybe somehow my senior year I knew. Oh because at some point...my friend Olga and I...Olga came to me, and we were really close and I was totally in love with her. She was Mexican and really mean (laughter). She was really mean. She came to me and she said, “Oh well, you know somebody asked me if we were lesbians.” And I was like, “what’s that?” cause I didn’t know. And she was like “It means that we’re two girls that love each other.” And I was like, “But this makes it sound like it’s bad.” And she was like “No, you know, it’s something that’s unnatural and whatever and we’re not doing that.” And I said, “Well what did you say?” cause I started realizing oh okay – and I put it together with the narrative of the friends who love each other and whatever and I was like, okay people think this is really bad. That’s when I started to get the idea. Cause I sort of knew, okay, I never see this, so I think I am the only one who ever feels this and I know it’s different and I wish I could marry Olga and I wish could be her boyfriend. But the way it manifested itself was that I wished that I was a guy. “If only I were a guy then she could be my girlfriend.” But then I’d realize, if I were guy, she’d never let me this close to her and she’d never tell me the things she tells me and we’d never really be this close. So then I had this whole dilemma or whatever. Then, I remember she told me that and I was like, “What did you tell them?” She said, “Well I told them that they should mind their own business and they didn’t know what they were talking about and whatever.” And I felt so relieved because I knew from the narratives from the great love affairs that it could turn. That she could have turned on me in that moment. And she could have said, “well, she’s like that but I’m not.” or she could have not wanted to see me anymore or not wanted to be close. But she didn’t care. She was just like, you know, whatever. So we were really close and kind of girlfriends in everything but we never kissed or anything.

Did you ever tell her you had a crush on her?

362 No. I never did. I never did. And then I ended up going to my college because she went there. And I hated it so much. It was really a sacrifice. Then after, when we were in college, we weren’t even friends anymore. Isn’t that terrible? I guess the first time I had a `real relationship’ or whatever was the summer after my freshman year [of college] I went to Spain and the woman who led the trip, the woman who organized the group from my college, I totally fell in love with her AND she was really a dyke. And, I started doing the regular thing that I do with women I like. I just hang out with them a lot, just be really close and sleep together. And then one night I kissed her.

You’re bold. It’s great!

380 You know what, I think I was so clueless. I didn’t have any words. I had no experience. It’s kind of like that no images song. I had no images. And so I was completely driven by desire. And because I knew nothing, all I had was my desire. I didn’t have anything that said, “oh this is wrong and people won’t be your friend anymore la la la la la.” I felt like I should be secretive about it but I didn’t know the litany of wrongness. And she kind of tolerated it in this funny way and I think she was amused by me and she liked me too, but she realized that I was totally naïve, that I didn’t know anything. And I think I was 17 or something and she was like, “Okay, do you kiss all your friends like that?” And I was like, “No.” And she was like, “Why are you kissing me like that?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Cause I want to.” And she was like, “Okay.” and we just kept carrying on and carrying on and eventually we had sex, but I was totally the pursuing one at this time. Like a little puppy all over her. And I didn’t actually know that she had had three girlfriends before me until much later.

So you weren’t her first, let’s say?

But she was yours?

Yeah.

Aww.

408 And then I came out – And then I told my parents. I ended up having this totally lesbian life or whatever after I graduated from college. I told my mother when I was 22 and I told my dad when I was 26. And my mother’s like “oh!” and I’m crying on the phone because I had all this anxiety. Oh – I told my mother, I told my mother. Of course, she knew. And I call her later, all crying, and I’m like, “Mom...do..you..think..I can..bring..my girlfriend...home...for Thanksgiving?” and she was like, “Yeah. I don’t care who you bring home for Thanksgiving.” and I was like, “But no, she’s like my girlfriend, girlfriend.” and she’s like, “Yeah, that’s fine. It’s not a problem. Why would that be a problem?” I’m like, “Oh, I thought you might not like it cause I’m gay.” And she was like, “No, that’s insane. Why would I never not like you because of that. That’s ridiculous.” She’s like, “That’s just silly. I love you however you are and I just want you to be happy.” And I was like, “Okay, thank you” (fake crying).

That’s so amazing!

429 But she was like, “But don’t tell your father. He’ll kill her.” But she was making that up because he actually ended up being cooler than she was. And he was like, “Oh, I know. I know you’re a homosexual.” And I was like, “Oh. Okay.” And he was like, “You know I don’t have a problem with that. Just as well. You just gotta get your education and don’t let anybody stand in your way. You just get what you need to get and succeed in life.” I was like, “Okay Dad.”

439 So I guess that’s my coming out story. But recently I’ve been coming out to my students, which is very trippy.

[Side B 000] Yes, cause I’ve only taught college. And in college they don’t really care. And then I’ve taught elementary school or middle school and they don’t really even notice that you exist. They’re all about mommy or daddy or whether you love them in elementary school and then in middle school they are occasionally curious about you but they’re so wrapped up in their daily tortures that they don’t ...I mean I barely remember my teachers from middle school. But this is high school and they’re kind of like, “hmm. you’re an adult, I’m an adult.” and so they ask. But the thing is, with any of my students, I’ve never hidden it. I just act like a normal person like tadada, and there’s “oh – you’re vegetarian?” and “No, I’m not vegetarian, but my girlfriend is and we live together which is why I don’t buy meat for the house.” “Oh, your girlfriend...” And so, it’s been really interesting because one of my students actually, we think he’s gay, and so I kind of purposefully, when Naomi was at school, he came by to see me because he always coming by to see me because he’s in my creative writing class and he’s a great writer. And I was like, “Oh – this is my girlfriend, Naomi.” and he was like, “Oh, hi. Nice to meet you.” And then one of my other students was, “Oh, what are you doing for Thanksgiving or Christmas?” And I was like, “Oh – I’m going to my girlfriend’s parents’ house.” And then Robert was there, my gay student, and he was like, “Oh, is she the one that I met the other day?” “Yeah – she was in South Africa, but now she’s back so we’re going to her parents’ house and tadada so it’ll be good. You know – the in-laws.” And then my other student, Melissa, with the vegetarian comment. So I came out to her. And they’ve all been really great. Oh my other student Stephanie. This is part of some longer conversation she was having about either wanting to be a philosopher or else like Carrie Bradshaw. She’s so funny. So, I’ve been coming out to my students and that’s the most anxiety-producing coming out ever.

High school students especially are severe judges.

26 Yeah. Because they’re judges. And they’re volatile. You can’t trust them. You can only trust them to be who they are. Which is: teenagers. And they’re fickle and their allegiances are fickle. They can also be really mean to each other and to the people around them. And so I just didn’t know “what is it going to be like? Ohmigod.” So, you know. But it’s been good.

Sounds it. So, thinking about the fact that you teach, and also that you write, what does it mean for you to be a writer?

35 ANA! I don’t know. It’s hard. Alright. I think because it’s something that I’ve just done, I never thought...once I met someone who started writing when they were 23, an accomplished person mind you, and I was just sort of appalled because I was like, “how can you just pick up one day and decide you’re going to be a writer? Who starts writing when they’re 17? It’s far too late.” So my process has been such that I’ve always written, I’ve always told stories and definitely the older I’ve gotten...well, at different points in time I’ve stuck myself into certain genres and stuck with those for awhile. I started exclusively in fiction, when I was really writing hard, like in high school. And I didn’t write poems at all. And then when I was in college I started writing both poetry and fiction and then by the time college was over I was writing exclusively poetry and did so pretty much for the next eight years, so for me it’s something that I can’t help doing. So I don’t really...it’s really organic. So, it’s hard to say what it means to me or myself as a writer. Like what does that mean? There’ve been times when I felt like I wasn’t the right kind of writer. When I wasn’t writing things that I thought people wanted to read. And when I wasn’t writing in a style that seemed it was popular or acceptable.

But you did it anyway?

58 Yeah, I just did it anyway because again it was part of me. It’s like saying, whatever color I am. I can’t do anything about that. No matter how I behave or how I speak or what I wear I’m still the same color and so for me my writing voice was like that. It’s just something that I can’t change. It grows as I grow, but it can’t really be manipulated. So, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. All I can think about are things like [Pablo] Neruda’s Nobel Prize speech, talking about being a writer. Or is that somebody else?

It sounds like being a writer is part of the grain of who you are. The way you walk through the world.

70 Yeah, I mean it definitely is. It definitely is. I think that there are things about it, part of it is just what I do and then that has implications. There are things that have implications that are often surprising. Like, as I started to go around and read my work to different audiences, I was always surprised at the people who responded. Like I did this reading during a fundraising kind of season for this gallery, that also had performance in it. So they also had their donors there. So there were all of these wealthy white people who were a lot older and all audiences respond differently, so you read to certain audiences and they’re making all kinds of noise and clapping or calling and responding or you read to some audiences and you’re like, “did anyone even hear me?” cause they don’t clap between poems or whatever, but it’s just different ways of listening and showing respect. And I remember after that one, this little old white lady from Birmingham, Alabama was like, “I loved your work so much.” And I was like, “Really?” and she was like, “Yes – could you sign my little program?” And she was one of their donors who had come from, cause they’re affiliated with the Corcoran Gallery/Museum in D.C. so there are all these far flung people. And I was like, well, “do you want what I read tonight? You can have it.” And she was like, “Thank you so much.” And then she wrote me a letter after.

Wow that’s so special.

91 Yeah so it was really kind of like, oh, very interesting to me. That was the first example that I thought, oh people with really different experiences from me can connect with my work and it was really meaningful but it still felt really entirely mysterious. I think that’s the thing about being a writer that I actually feel strongly about is not making assumptions about my audience. That was the big lesson of that is not making assumptions about any audience, audiences that I think are like me or who would like me, or audiences who are unlike me and I think that ties back to it feeling so organic. I just have to do whatever and trust that whoever needs to hear it is going to hear it and whatever work I was supposed to do with this will happen. Because you just don’t know what lives you’re going to touch with your writing and I think that’s the really powerful thing for me and you can’t force that, either. You just have to be...that’s why I try to be really genuine with my ideas and honest to what I’m wanting to say at the moment and I’m not very purposeful. I know people who are and I think that’s fine. But I find that when I’m like that, the clunkier my writing becomes I think because I feel stifled that way.

By focusing on the purpose of a piece?

114 Yeah by saying, “okay, I’m going to write this and it’s going to illuminate xyz.” Some people do that and they do a really good job, but it doesn’t really work for me. So I think who I am as a writer is trying to also let go of outcomes. So I know people who are business-y about it and they shape things in such a way that it’s marketable. They think about markets.

What works for you? What are the driving forces?

124 Well, I’m always having ideas and ideas and ideas and ideas and ideas and ideas. So I’m always thinking about things. I’m thinking about, in general...so I’m working on general ideas from specific stuff. I’m always interested in...my last little big piece that I wrote was this series of poems they’re all connected in this book and they’re not really separated from each other, is Proxy, which is concerned with landscapes of desire and dangerous sexuality and love that’s really destructive but also how when you are having any kind of emotional experience the entire world is converted, becomes a service to that experience. Subways and train tracks and trees and buildings and windows and lampshades. All those things reflect all of that emotional intensity. So it’s concerned with that.

142 And now, I’m interested in thinking about loss. I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact my mother died last year and I have all this writing about it, some of which I wrote when I was in the hospital with her. Some of it that’s after and just how to. How am I going to represent that? How am I going to express that? And it might be working in collaboration with a friend of mine who’s a video artist and another friend of mine who’s a dancer and we’re sort of thinking about these ideas. And I think that might be the concept that’s driving this next piece. What’s work for me, I’m a very intuitive writer. So sometimes...like this book that I’m working on, the way that it started, I was in Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and I was in a workshop with Patricia Powell and one night we had to go write something new and I was just sitting there and the first line came into my mind and then the rest of my book came. The first line, “Two doors down lives fortune.” and I thought, “Fortune?” And then I realized Fortune was a person, not an idea. Not luck. And then I thought, well, who’s saying this? And then I realized it was a person who loved her and it was a woman. And where did it happen? It was happening in Trinidad and so it just kinda came like that and that’s how I tend to write. Even when I sit down and I’m going to write something, stuff just pops up. I don’t say, “Okay, now I’m going to write about...based on a little boy who lived here and then whatever.” I’m the kind of person that stuff just pops into my head, even in the moments when I’m sitting down to write, things just sort of pop in. Of course they’re connected to things I’ve been thinking about and all day I have ideas popping into my head. Like I could spend all day on the internet just chasing down my ideas. And it’s really interesting what they lead to.

173 Like I’m watching this movie, Brother 2 Brother and in it there’s a dialogue between James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver which never really came to pass, but Eldridge Cleaver did say a lots of really critical things about James Baldwin and James Baldwin did in fact reply a lot to Eldridge Cleaver so I’m going through all of that. And then I find some footnote about somebody else and then I chase that down. And then I’m going back to tying it all in, thinking “I wonder what Kathleen Cleaver thought of all that?” Thinking about the context of that, and then Huey Newton’s beliefs on homosexuality were really awesome and so it spirals off into something else. And sometimes there’s a moment that happens or sometimes I have a project in mind. I have a project right now. It’s a secret project, so I’m not going to tell you. But I do have a project where I’m thinking: for a year, I want to write about the same thing and that’s an idea that I got from other writers. One of whom was my teacher David Lehman and recently a woman did that, too – On Kawara – and then I was at Diabeacon in the gallery and there was an artist, I think a Japanese artist, who every time they’re in a different city they write the date in the order just as it would be in that city. So they’re paintings but they’re just dates and each date is.. like in the U.S., it would be “05/01/91” but in Germany, it be “05 may” or whatever. You know what I mean? So I was thinking about freezing these moments in time. So I guess I get ideas from definitely visual art and definitely from popular culture and definitely from film and definitely from books and nonfiction and history and whatever. And then, I kind of have this gestation thing that happens and then it comes up in whatever the work is.

There’s one more question I have for you, but what I’m really appreciating about what you’re saying is, what you’re talking about is not sticking to this one linear genre, this one way of doing things. And in many ways that ties into my last question, which is how is your work influenced by who you are in the world?

206 Well, that’s really interesting. I think it’s influenced by who I am in the world simply because my work is extremely, extremely eclectic which is why I have lots of work but it’s all extremely different from each other. So even in terms of the poems that I write. It’s not just genres cause I have little scenes and plays and I have songs and I have these movie treatments and I have stories and I have a novel that I’m working on which is actually my second novel, my second unfinished novel cause I have a first unfinished novel and certainly lots of poems and even those are very different from each other. Like the two novels are different structurally as well as aesthetically in terms of the story line. And all of my poems are really different from each other so it’s been really hard for me. This is the first time I have a complete poetry manuscript because I’ll have all these different poems and they’re so different from each other they don’t even belong in the same manuscript.

223 I think eclecticism is my manifestation of who I am in the world because I think I never fit anywhere. And I sort of fit some places sometimes now because I just grew up and found people who are more like me, people you can’t say they’re one thing or another but I think I’m a multi-racial person, I’m from a multi-cultural country. I grew up in a multi-cultural family in a multi-cultural city where people perform their gender in all these different ways that are sometimes censored but are rarely totally ostracized. And I’ve grown up in lots of different places. I’ve been with super rich elite New England people and really very poor people in Brooklyn. I’ve lived in different countries. So I feel like I’m very eclectic and I also am blessed to come from an open-minded family. My parents, even though there was a nutso terrifying way to grow up, intellectually my father, as abusive and insane as he was, was really this great intellectual who had all these books like The Black Jacobins and C.L.R. James and Eric Williams and I was surrounded by the history of Pan-Africanism and all these anti-colonial, anti-imperial people and all these black intellectuals, especially Caribbean intellectuals who were part of my intellectual tradition. I had ownership over that and then I also had this really weird education where I was in NYC public schools and then I was in this elite New England boarding school and then I was in this Catholic – Georgetown University. So I always had all these different influences and experiences. Now of course, people can come through all of that and still choose something that’s pretty narrow. But I didn’t. It’s like what Alice Walker says – you take what you can use, you put the rest on the trash heap in In Search of My Mother’s Garden. So I think I do that. There’s lots of great examples of people who do that that I discovered later on.

264 For influences for me...at the beginning I was very, very – this is when I was much younger, like when I was a teenager – I was very influenced by e.e. cummings. I was in love with him, all the openness in the language and the quirkiness and I think that’s something that I never really left behind. Just the fact that you can be so playful. I think when I was in college, I was very influenced by Audre Lorde - just by her language. It’s so pristine. And she was always so...her persona on the page was always so controlled which I think is a really great contrast to apparently how she really was in life. But it was just so very West Indian to me, so Anglo-Caribbean. You’re so controlled and so careful with your words, so deliberate and everything. I can really relate to that and I just loved the fact that she was a dyke and I actually got to see her before she died.

281 She came and spoke at Georgetown University. I don’t know how the woman studies professor got that woman on that campus which was so hostile to anyone like her. But she was there at this huge woman studies conference and I remember her saying. Somebody asked her, “Aren’t you afraid all these things that you say and people find it so provocative.” She said, “Of course I’m afraid. If I waited to speak until I wasn’t afraid I would be talking to y’all through the Ouiji board.” (laughter) And I remember thinking, “She’s afraid of other people? and if she’s afraid and she still does what she does, then I can be afraid and I can do what I do.” And that, THAT was a defining moment. And I wasn’t 20 yet. That was a totally defining moment. That was in 1989 and it totally, totally turned my head around.

297 And then I thought, well, okay, I’m gonna try being afraid, cause apparently you don’t just die or get swallowed up by the earth if you do all these scary things, so I’m gonna try and do that, too. And of course her writings were such an influence, intellectually and also what she said about alliances and not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and critically engaging people and really what she’s talking about is the tradition of having critical friends and critical friendships and things like that. So I was influenced by her ideas about that, not just her writing.

307 And then I think more recently, I’d say the past seven years I’ve been influenced by a lot of black experimental writers. People like Carol Lavere Harren who’s really nuts. I’ve met her extensively, and she’s brilliant in this crazy way. Here After Johnny, have you read it? It’s sort of a crazy book. But it’s a very stream of conscious book written from a black woman. And people like Adrianne Kennedy who I really love. And Harryette Mullen and Lorenzo Thomas, Will Alexander, and Erica Hunt. And then I was in Cave Canem, and through there I met friends who became my influences like Ronaldo Wilson, Duriel E. Harris and Dawn Lundy Martin and Mendi Lewis Obadike who are all my friends and who I deeply respect as artists and who are constantly trying to challenge this ever-traditional narrative or aesthetics that a lot of writers of color or queer writers find themselves bound in. And the sloppiest example of that is based on the black preaching tradition - that black rhetorical tradition of spoken word, and the typical rhythm and typical flow and typical untidiness, that’s probably the sloppiest example of it. But, it also occurs in texts that are a lot more respected or considered canonical. Or even what people are writing now. They don’t want to do things to “alienate the audience” and I think a lot of people underestimate how smart the audiences are and what people want. So, I’m really interested in those people who are saying “I’m gonna try and create a different kind of experience on the page” or even what you’re saying about what’s poetic about fiction. What are the poetic aesthetics of fiction? I think that looking at work in different ways and trying to broaden aesthetically what’s going on, because why are people writing? My students I love them but they’re writing poems as though they lived in the 18^th century. Right? So what is that about? So I think that what’s interesting is to interrogate those questions. What does it mean to be people of color? Who’s representative and what is authentic? and all that kind of stuff. People who are asking all those kinds of questions and also asking how can we make our society or our social structures better places to be human beings. Cause I think that’s the point of it, it’s not just some kind of little exercise. Live by Erica Hunt. What she articulates in her writing is that there are aesthetics and there are aesthetics of power and oppression and we really need to interrogate them and to create new aesthetics that are actually about democracy and about humanism and about respecting other people in the world and trying to live better and live right. To me that’s what’s different than what’s articulated a lot of times in terms of language poets, who I respect. But there’s a point to it and that comes back to who I am as a person. I am who I am. I’m a black dyke in the United States and I think that’s why socially I live with a lot of questions, and I live in a lot of dangerous places, too. So I think I’m constantly trying to solve those questions and not just survive, but really thrive. And so I try to manifest openness towards other peoples’ work because it’s really hard I think. And so that’s also part of how who I am is influenced by who I’m influenced by. I’m influenced by living writers who are humble and who are very down to earth and I don’t like people who are mean. Cause there are people who are great writers but they’re so mean. So, I don’t like that.

Thank you for answering these questions. I actually have a follow up question. How did you get involved with Cave Canem?

404 This is really random.

I swear this is the last question.

406 I don’t mind you asking me questions. I can’t always think of good answers. Okay this is how it happened. I was on sistahnet, which is a black lesbian listserve. And someone from sistahnet was on a African studies listserve and someone on that listserve had gone to Cave Canem and so she forwarded it to her and she forwarded it to sistahnet and I saw it and I said that sounds very interesting, but it’s a little scary that it’s all black people. And so then I brought it to my writers group - cause there were a bunch of women writers in D.C. and we were meeting and we were actually doing rengas together. it was so fun. So I brought it to that group and I said “this looks interesting and I’m going to apply.” One of my friends she was like, “but it’s all black people.” And I was like, “I know.” Because we were in D.C. and we were...all the black dykes in D.C. who were poets and who were reading in black lesbian spaces, we were constantly confronting all sorts of black macho, black nationalism and silliness and I used to read at this Ethiopian place and they loved me there and they called me the nasty girl. And they’d be asking my friends...

The porn tradition continues. (laughter)

440 Yeah yeah. and they’d be asking my friend Ernesto who was the (tape cuts off)

Tape 2, Side A

003 So what was I talking about? So I was the Nasty Girl, so anyway, for all these reasons being in D.C. in the early 90s we had a lot of reasons for great trepidation of thinking what is it going to be like that these people are doing a poetry workshop just for black poets because at the time nobody was doing that. Now there was Hurston-Wright workshops that Marita Golden was doing but I think that was maybe their second year. I think they had just started and so I had applied for those as well. And so my friend was like, okay, you go. And if it’s good, then I’ll go later. (laughter). I was the canary in the coalmine. And then I applied and it turned out to be heaven. It was the antithesis of all of that. It was very...it’s hard to describe. I was ready to be in a sexist and homophobic space and to be the front line for that. But it wasn’t like that at all. And just to clear the air, the first time you get there you have to sit in a circle and everybody introduces themselves and says what brought them here and I came out right away. I was like, “Cause I don’t want any nonsense. Just know that I’m a dyke. So whatever.” And of course after that people going around in the circle, nobody else came out that night. But all these people came up to me afterwards and now...well, they were just like “wow that was really brave of you cause I’m a dyke, too.” So actually it’s been a really great place. It’s just become such a great resource for me in terms of having a community of writers, of people whose work is really wonderful and that I really respect whose work is very diverse, who come from very diverse backgrounds and who are interested in lots of different things in terms of black writing. Some people are writing criticism now. Some people have done anthologies and things. Some people have done journals. Some of them are academics and some people are regular joes and grandmas and things like that. What it has done is it has centralized a place you can go. And I got in in the very early stages; I guess 10 years ago now. Cause our 10^th anniversary anthology is coming out. Cause I went in its very second year. And since then I’ve gotten a lot of stuff out of it. People say, “oh well, I want to go to an MFA program, I wanna make some connections.” I did my MFA and I didn’t make any connections except for one, which was a good one I think because it’s probably what got me my Best American Poetry gig, so that’s pretty good.

That’s not bad.

039 No, not shoddy. Not shoddy at all. But it got me past the screeners I think. But otherwise, they’re not necessarily that great for you unless somebody decides to take you under their wing. However, Cave Canem consistently has been a resource in terms of having readings and having workshops and having a place where you can find out where to submit your work or get advice or someone to give you feedback. Even to have a writers group if you wanna get a bunch of people together to do something. Or jobs even. And readings and gigs and stuff. It’s been really, really great. And I think what’s interesting and kind of weird to us, especially being from the early days, is that now it has this reputation. It’s known. People will be like, “Oh – you’re in Cave Canem.” and they’re impressed. Where as before people’d be like “What is that?” So it’s kind of weird, but it’s been so good. And I’ve made really good friends through it. And what I love is that it’s very open. It’s a very open community. It’s people doing all kinds of things.

Well thank you.

You’re welcome.

Did you have any questions for me?

No.

Tisa Bryant, Interviewed on March 13, 2005

2007-03-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

Tisa Bryant, author/scholar

Tisa Bryant, born in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona.

Interviewed on March 13, 2005 by Ana-Maurine Lara

As you know, this project is really about hearing your story. I would love to start with an earlier part of your life, asking you about some of the defining moments from before the age of 20 that have really influenced who you are.

I’ll work in reverse chronological order. Moving out of my parents’ home, a couple of days after high school graduation to New York for a very, very short stint.

I didn’t know you lived in New York.

Yeah, it wasn’t to the New York that I envisioned `cause we ended up in Long Island, so it was very, very different and very black, actually. I didn’t realize. I hear `island’ in this country and it kind of means something different. But yeah, being 17 in the summer, moving into and ended up in Boston and we were in the second term of Ronald Reagan. It was at that moment of really having to confront the world. I waited to finally be free to make my own decisions about life and it was really bewildering to really try to understand the systems that comprised the world and what they actually meant to me. I always knew that there was a lot of power in the world that I didn’t have, but then the kinds of interactions and being completely broke and really young and working a job and living in an apartment with a whole bunch of crazy kids who were just completely transient, you know. My father would check in on me, meet me in Boston Common every once in a while to make sure that I was not bleeding, [laughter] was fed - you know - and a little cash. But really, being out in the street in this very unstructured way while a lot of the last remaining social structures that would protect the smallest vestige of quality of life for people of color, for working class people and poor people were being dismantled right around me and I didn’t really understand what all of that was about. Just the rise of homeless populations, AIDS, the kind of illusion of AIDS and the illusion of the homeless population where we’re seeing all this stuff happening. I was seeing people on the street, I was hearing about people dying from a mysterious disease, but it wasn’t being talked about in the news. And also at the time when I was living in Boston, I was living in the Fens – the Fenway area – I’m not quite sure if it was a serial killer or what but there were a lot of murders during that time in the mid 80s. I graduated from high school in 1984. So at that time, every spring and summer bodies would be found in the Fens; there were stabbings, there were lots of bashings and also a lot of clubs then, too.

Was this something people were talking about in your groups of friends?

Yeah, and I lived in a rooming house so out on the front steps is where the news happened. And I would just sit, I felt like a little kid again, trying to pretend I was invisible at the big people’s table. As long as I was quiet I’d be allowed to stay. But that’s how I got my information. The Boston Globe was pretty good in reporting on it because there was a burgeoning sense of urgency among white gay men in that area, so there were more community watches that were forming, public meetings and protest. But at that same time, and this isn’t actually a memory that I have and it’s disturbing to me that it’s not a memory that I have and I can’t quite track when it was happening, but in several texts by feminist women of color there was some sort of serial killing of black women going on in Boston during that time that I’ve been unable to find any documentation of. I found two stories in the Globe and one story in the Herald. Again, these seemingly unrelated cases of black women found murdered. I don’t remember how they were murdered, if that was any connection that way. Angela Davis had cited it, Barbara Smith had cited it. Between Home Girls [A Black Feminist Anthology], Women Race and Class, This Bridge [Called My Back], all of these women of a certain generation all kind of recalling this moment. And I don’t know if I was still in high school while all this was happening or if I had just gotten out and moved to Boston. But this kind of atmosphere of being completely unsafe, even though as this...totally full of that adolescent arrogance and sense of freedom. But it was a split consciousness in a way of feeling completely free and able to do whatever I wanted and then again feeling very bound by invisible systems and invisible dangers that were made quite palpable through AIDS and through all of the different kinds of bashing. And that, in terms of coming out, is a very slow and retrograde process for me. But at that moment it was a forward motion right into clubs, right into lesbian clubs when I was 17, 18, 19, 20.

How did you get into all the lesbian clubs in Boston?

With a little 15 year old. A little 15 year old baddie. I met some girls who lived in the Fens, right across the street from me and they took me out to Somewhere Else, and to the 1270 and to The Loft even though it wasn’t always gay, though I knew a lot of gay men did hang out at The Loft. To the Ramrod...We should not have been in there `cause they were just like, “Why are you here?” We would go into ManRay. Campus at ManRay. It’s still there. (NB: it’s gone now!)

It’s still a province of young gay people.

Yup, it is. It was interesting. So many of the older lesbians who were in these clubs, almost all of them were twelve-stepping. And that - you know my parents drink a little, well, much too much for my taste, so that put me on a weird alert. We were talking earlier about role models and how behavior can be modeled - I don’t know how to describe the process - but it just happens. If you’re not paying attention to your behavior you may not know how you may be influencing somebody else. And coming out into clubs where I was watching a lot of kids my age drinking too much, doing all kinds of drugs and there’s this whole generation of women who were substance abusers and they were at various stages of recovery or total damage. And that created this unfortunate narrative that this is what it meant to be a lesbian.

To be in recovery or to be somehow...

Right, because it was so wrong. Everybody I knew, they were people that I mostly saw at night. Not really friends I saw during the daytime. It was all about the twilight; it was all about nights and weekends. I didn’t really see them too much during the day. And there were a lot of other reasons for that, too.

To back up from that...what would I say?

It sounds like this time period in Boston is so critical and in some ways it was informed just by leaving your parents’ house. It served as a sort of break and that had to do with your coming out process.

Yeah, I mean I wasn’t particularly happy living where my parents lived in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And that wasn’t the best time. I went into the cave, and didn’t quite come out of that until I moved out. It was fraught with a lot of problems. Because I hadn’t quite actualized as an adolescent. I was very recessed. I felt very recessed the whole time during high school. I still have a physiological image. It makes me understand how teenagers like to wear hoodies. They’re just really shrouded. And shadowed and you can’t get to them. That’s how I felt. I didn’t wear a hoodie, but I felt like my eyes were way back from the surface of my face.

Wow. You felt that.

Yeah, I really felt it. And it was really wild.

I know my high school experience was shaped by coming out. [But for you] was there any connection there?

To being queer?

Yeah.

Sure. To being queer, to being black. I was surrounded by white girls. I rejected assimilation at that point, which is something that’s really hard and it’s something that trips me out. I don’t feel like I rejected my intellect, but in rejecting a certain mode of assimilation, I didn’t leave myself any choices because I didn’t have a sense of what education could be for me. The educational process was all caught up in a kind of assimilation, period.

That you fully rejected.

Right, because you know I just wasn’t very sophisticated. I didn’t know how to think about it and I didn’t have much help in thinking about “Well, look, don’t worry about anybody who will make you feel...”. There was a small clutch of black kids in the school – education and whiteness went hand in hand – it was just a really crazy thing having moved to Plymouth from Boston, which was an ongoing trauma because I had been bussed in the 70s.

In Boston?

In Boston.

Phew. (A 164)

It was the lesser of two evils. Because my parents put us in the METCO system so we got bussed out to affluent suburbs instead of to Southie, so we got bussed into a really good school system. The irony being, of course, that the system we were bussed to ending up being infinitely better, in some respects, than the school we ended up in Plymouth - and that may be my own bitter view of it because I just hated it so much. It really signaled a complete loss of autonomy. I was in Boston. I was learning how to take the buses and the trains by myself and I could just go to stores. I could see friends. I could go to this all white school and deal and I could come home and re-contextualize myself and my identity and that wasn’t possible in Plymouth.

Where everything has to be done in a car?

Everything has to be done in a car and there was no returning to a black neighborhood. There was returning to my family, which was fine. But there wasn’t a lot of discussion going on about where we had been all day and what that meant. Being queer in that context...it meant going out for the soccer team, the field hockey team, the softball team. And I should have in some ways, I think like “Aww, that would have been great”, but it’s not what I wanted. Cause I’m a nerd. And it’s just like...

Where’s the room for the little nerd crew?

There was the other little nerd girl and I hung out with her sometimes. I was just really sad. And getting bussed definitely had a huge impact on who I am. That whole prolonged experience of assimilation and education and understanding. I’m still trying to figure out how it is I understood what it was that was going on, what was expected of me without anybody explicitly...but they did explicitly spell it out. I was told how I needed to speak. I was told how I needed to walk. I was told how I needed to modulate my voice, not just speak in grammatically correct sentences. Not to swing so much when I walked. All that kind of stuff.

All behaviorial assimilation...how did it impact you in terms of who you are in the world today? What are the specific ways it impacted you? What are the specific stories that come out of you as a result?

I don’t know. There are so many. Do you mean...when you say stories do you mean personal stories that come out of it or creative...

Sure, and the ways you see how you’ve been impacted specifically, how it’s made you who you are?

Yeah – I think I arrested my own educational process for control purposes and so I think that’s why I went through this longer self-education process and directing it myself and paying for it myself and taking my time and making choices and not being told. It was necessary for me to be able to make the choice to change the way I spoke when it was necessary. And it’s interesting, that understanding came out of my taking a book on Linguistics, on Black English, out of the public library on my lunch hour or something like that. When I was 19.

And all of a sudden.

I was like, oh – code switching. Right. There was a way to understand the reality of identity and all these different kinds of perspectives. Yeah. There’s a lot that came out of that. Jobs. Lovers. Ambition. Definitely ambition. And what do you do with it, knowing that the more you strive, the more you learn, and the more you change without trying to change too much, you still end up away. I didn’t want to end up constantly [laughter]- this is so damn ironic - surrounded by white people. I was like, okay, how do I not do that?

I just kind of resisted going to school. That’s the other thing, too. I wasn’t going to move down South, you know “I’m going to go to an all black school...” No. I’m a northern girl with a Caribbean background and unfortunately that wasn’t happening. That’s not how I felt. That’s another whole complication and it’s weird `cause I feel like I internalized a whole lot of stuff about relationships between Caribbean Blacks and Southern American Blacks that I was too young to even really deal with at all, but I’ve held it in a very strange way. It’s not very strange, but it actually has intensified. Less so now, but during my 20s definitely. Because the entire signification system around Black cultural production was completely rooted in the South with no recognition at all for those huge numbers of people who were not from the South at all, ever. Who contributed a great deal to the educational system, to politics and literature and art and everything else.

I’m sitting with you here, and I know you. And the way that I’ve known you is as a writer, but tell me a little bit about that. How have you gotten to that point? What does it mean for you? How do you see yourself in terms of your creative process, your creative work, the way you walk through the world?

Okay, what does everything I just said have to do with how I walk through the world?

Yes.

Everything. I’d say. [pause]

Well, writing became the means for my feeling like I had a sense of agency and again, control over my life, my experiences and how I saw the world. My own world, my own view in my own tongue. And if there’s one thing I can point to is this constant struggle between registers. Between this academic diction and other modes that are much more comfortable, relaxed. I’m prone to academic jargon peppered with swears and shit like that. [Laughter]

When I meet academics and other highly-educated people of color, I notice they do the same thing. And it’s not understood on the page. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been corrected or told that it’s a problem, the switch in register. And I realized that aesthetically and formally that’s something that I really would like to learn how to finesse and make a lot more seamless. Because the way I speak and all of the different registers I have access to, naturally, represent how I move through the world. Where I’ve been, how I see, what things mean, what I understand, that I’ve had an education, that I can use big words and that I don’t have to, but that it’s fun...and shit.

And that it’s conscious.

Sometimes I do feel an enormous need to try to speak to all kinds of people at once. And the way most people approach writing, you need to pick one register for all groups. When [in reality] we don’t speak one language all the time. [NB: Michael Eric Dyson is a great example of the shifts in register and code I’m talking about here.] We don’t speak one kind of English, and if you speak more than one language there are all those other registers besides. And it blends` cause that’s the reality of who you are. If you’ve gone through an assimilation process, if you’ve lived in more than one country or more than one city, or if you’ve moved from one community to another that’s going to affect what you write, how you see, how you speak, how you create characters, how you might string a sentence together, whether or not you use paragraph breaks. All of that stuff. So, I’m still working through all of that actually, `cause it all came up in grad school. A lot of my nonfiction prose kind of floundered because of those questions, with my professors telling me I needed to find a register, and I, in some ways agree, but the register is a blend. And those things don‘t go together. They can be collaged together, they can collide in a sentence or in the body of a paragraph but...

It makes me think of your question about interdisciplinary work.

Yeah. Interdisciplinary work is interesting in that you can still use the same academic diction and be working across disciplines `cause that’s the same language.

You’re still using the same register. Right.

Mmm hmm. [Isn’t it funny how interdisciplinary work that is free from academic language or institution is called “cross-genre”? As if there’s no discipline outside the institution.]

What does it mean for you to be a writer?

It means that I can have conversations that I think matter.

Such as?

Conversations about abortion. About labor. Not labor, because I always feel like it’s not the same when I talk about labor. Because I’ve been a pinkish/whitish/grey collar worker, but in the bottom rungs of that. I was a hand maid, a secretary. I’ve been having difficulty validating those conversations - that they are important to have. And that there is room for me to talk about these things the way I want to, because the ground that I’m treading on has lots and lots of foot prints in it and it’s a challenge for me to make that ground look clear and not hear those footsteps coming after me or any of those mouths who might critique, who might say “You can’t talk about this that way.” or “Don’t you understand the implications of this?” or “This and this...” And it’s like, “Naw, shit man, no. I worked this job, this is what it meant to me. I had this experience, this is what it was. I don’t really care. You know, write your own fiction.” And that’s the thing going between theoretical discourses, sociological, philosophical discourses and fiction. It’s the danger of reading too much nonfiction for me anyway, because a lot of the validation that we get as women writers of color will come through poetry and will come from social action. Right? So then, the fiction, up until a certain point, is in the service of that. And not in the service of it, but in conversation with it.

With poetry and social action?

Umhmm. And then whatever fiction might happen. So, it’s hard. Cause I’m not righteous. My stuff is messy. It’s not neat. It’s not cute. It’s not correct. It’s not always enlightened, it’s messy.

Can you say more about your own work?

Okay. My work. My work has changed a lot over the past two years. When I started writing I was really caught up in the therapeutic aspects of writing. Trying to write about bussing in Boston, which I’m still trying to do. Trying to write about coming out in 80s Boston during the Reagan years. Still trying to do that. Not very hard, I should say. I still feel its important to do that, but my style as a writer has changed so much. Each one of those pieces, each one of those projects is organic to its content. They do what they needed to do in a particular way. Because of what they’re about. So, Zoo Kid is about bussing in Boston, but also about the enormous but elided Caribbean presence in New England, in Boston neighborhoods. And it’s straight ahead fiction. Characters and plot and setting and tone and arc and all of those lovely things that make people happy when they want to read stories. And even though it has its moments that are also quite necessary for some of the characters because some kinds of inventions were necessary to represent subjectivity of children going through a traumatic and giddy and hard to understand experience. Because it was scary, but it was also kind of exhilarating to see these classrooms. To see the library. To see the books. To see that there was no lack whatsoever. But the hard part was to feel that I lacked because I had been rescued from my miserable Black neighborhood school that wasn’t good enough.

That transferred onto the individual?

Yeah. And that’s the thing. You’ve got this massive social experiment that’s taking place on the site of children’s bodies and I just think it’s important to talk about that because for all the people I know that’ve gotten bussed across this country, because it wasn’t just in Boston, it was this enormous simultaneous experience. But [there have been] very few novels about the process. And there are very few nonfiction books about it from a Black perspective, as well. Very few. They’re all about white people defending their schools and their neighborhoods and they’re not about Black people. The fringe is still kind of hot on that one. Cause I’m still kind of touching it. And kinda going “aah!” It’s a hard book. It’s very, very emotionally fraught. But as I’ve gotten older I've developed a bit more facility with language and with narrative and with just saying.

I’ve been very pre-occupied with image production and cultural production and representations of black women in film and in 17^th and 18^th century literature. Yeah. And it’s a lot of fun. But then it also becomes...well, it’s just a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. I like it. Yeah. I think it’s interesting in talking about projects and switching registers `cause I feel I have all these projects that are kind of representative of a particular register. And it’s almost chronological now that I’m starting to think about it. My gosh, no wonder I’m such a nut case with these projects. I’m just like “oh!” It’s like one long bildungsroman in a way.

Zoo Kid is first and it’s very straight ahead. And what I’m working on now in Unexplained Presence and The Curator is very complicated. Very language based. But not impenetrable. It’s certainly not digestible and that’s intentional. I don’t desire writing that can simply be chewed up and swallowed then praised for how it tastes good. And that’s it. You need to be able to be like “This won’t quite go down.” why is that? You might cough up a whole chunk and have to look at it again. And that’s a goal. I learned that from Harryette Mullen. About the indigestibility of writing, of text.

She’s someone that I think of as a tremendous hero in a lot of ways as a Black woman doing innovative writing. Few people paid her any mind, in Black communities anyway. But in the main, not until she wrote Muse and Drudge, which had a Black woman on the cover and is a long blues poem. Right? And so there it is. She signified. She gave you the Black woman on the cover clapping her hands and everyone went “Oh – what’s that?” And all her very Black word play, working on Stein, working on James Joyce, working on the dozens, working on all kinds of stuff just got overlooked. Couldn’t see yourself. Right? People could not see themselves in her earlier work and it was all there. You read it and it’s like “Who talks like that?” I wish I had it in front of me so I could read it right now. The way she’d write about women’s accessories, or about buying certain kinds of food. Her word play, her puns, her rhythm - it was all right there. It was undeniably there. And that’s frightening to me, in terms of the whole whammy of innovative writing, queerness, Blackness, femaleness and accessibility. Being read, having a conversation that’s important to have and having each part of my identity have an impact on the language that I use and the form that I use that may then distance yet another part of the world, my world, that I’m trying to talk to. And I just have to sit with that and let it be. `Cause I can’t do anything about it. If I try to do anything about it then my writing is not real and it’s not mine anymore. You know, it’s a product. That’s really hard.

Now, I’m going to ask you – and this isn’t one of the questions we talked about earlier, but I know from so many conversations we’ve had – about the Dark Room Collective. If that’s something you want to talk about and its influence on you.

Sure. I didn’t bring it up `cause it fell outside of the time frame.

It happened after twenty?

Yeah, it sure did. It happened after 20. I was cleaned up. Wasn’t doing so many drugs. Wasn’t drinking so much. Partying so much. I was 23. A long time. Right “So long after my 20s.” I was 23 or something like that. Yeah. Actually, I was 22. Hilarious. Whatever it was, it was `89.

The Dark Room Collective was an amazing experience. There were always about 10 or 12 of us. Tom Ellis [Thomas Sayers Ellis] and Sharan Strange started it after James Baldwin died. And they went to his funeral in NY and there was this incredible event. I didn’t go. I saw it on the news. I saw the pictures and just the long wide procession of people. And they started the Dark Room Collective in `88 – I think that’s when [James] Baldwin died, in `88 - to, and I quote, “never let our living legacies get away”. Cause at the time Baldwin had been going back and forth between, well for a while, prior to his death, he was teaching at UMass Amherst. It’s two hours away. And Sharan and Tom had been going to Harvard. So that’s how it started.

And I got schooled. I knew very little about Black poetry. A little more about fiction. But not that much more. What I knew came out of Essence - that at the time [Essence]was doing its job in the community by publishing new Black women writers, which they are too lazy to do anymore. Yeah. And to get into the Darkroom Collective, I got a phone call from...I think there were three people on the phone. Sharan, Tom and Trasi Johnson and maybe Janice Lowe, also. And they quizzed me for about 40 minutes or more. Everybody was on the phone. I can’t even remember how many extensions there were in the house, but it seemed like everybody was on the phone. Maybe all those people weren’t on the phone and it’s just grown in my mind but yeah, they asked me who I was reading. And I was reading whoever I was told to read. At my job, somebody would say, “oh, you want to be a writer. You should really read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction” or I was reading the Boston Globe and New York Times Book Reviews and at the time there was a literary brat pack of Jay McInerny and Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz. And I always forget the woman’s name who wrote Far Rockaway [Jill Eisenstadt]. Where we are right now. So I was reading them, but I had also started reading Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and I couldn’t read The Bluest Eye [Toni Morrison]. I still haven’t finished it. I couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to.

So I was still very, very ignorant of just the scope...I mean I had heard of the Harlem Renaissance and I thought more about art than text, and I knew about Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. I had that little book. Small gifts from people. But yeah, they quizzed me about what I was reading. And about the music I listened to. And at the time I was coming out of my Goth period, I think it was a Goth period, or did I still have an 80s new wave asymmetrical haircut? One of the two. I was doing my fringe, my fringy thing. They were asking me what I was listening to. I just didn’t want to say anything. So, I said, “I like some, some, some...jazz.” And the only jazz I knew was what my dad had taught me about jazz, which was impressive for them, because they hadn’t heard of one of the pianists, or maybe they probably did – they were so smart. And I was like, “I like jazz and I like blues.” and they were like, “Blues?! You like blues, what do you like?” and I was like “Bobby Blue Bland” they were like “What – you do?” and I was like “Yeah.” and it was like, “Okay.” I listened to it `cause my dad listened to it. He had this big poster in his listening room. But I finally got up off it, and said “Well, you know, I like the Smiths, and I like the Cure and I like Siouxie and the Banshees and I like this and I like that” and it was the most miraculous thing because suddenly we were doing these bizarre medleys of Smith songs and P-Funk and Run DMC and Billy Bragg and Psychadelic Furs and Joan Armatrading. It was outrageous.

All on one phone call.

Yeah. And I was like, okay, I’m not the freak I thought I was. `Cause again, registers, again influence, again this multiplicity of being made of all of this stuff. And I wonder if people of color get the onus of responsibility of echoing and trying to express all of that stuff because it’s all valued so equally. That we’ve managed somehow to democratize all of those things that have influenced us, if we’re honest. That moment really just validated my life. I was like, Wow. I don’t have to be sheepish and hide the fact that I listen to all this other stuff. Somebody, I think it was Tom said, “Naw man, naw - don’t trip.” Well, not ‘trip’ `cause that’s not what we were saying then, but “Morrissey’s a great poet.” and I was like “Yeah.”

What was it like for you as a young Black queer woman in that experience?

Not the easiest. There was one other queer person who’s still my friend. John Keene. Still queer. I think he always said gay. I wouldn’t say anything. And that was it. There were some bi people. There was a woman who was in the Dark Room Collective for a little bit, who I was told later really liked me. And I didn’t get it. So now she’s totally out and fabulous. She’s got some career and everything. And I was like “Oh - I’m such a dummy.” I always feel like sending out one of those awful messages: “Hi, I understand now. I’m glad you’re happy.”

I guess I needed to be a lot more courageous than I was.

What do you mean?

Well, because it was a struggle. It was a real struggle for me. It was a real struggle for me just to admit and just stand firm in what I knew was true about myself. That I was a lesbian and I am a lesbian and that was it and not keep trying to get around it. Trying to be straight. Keep making a mess of my life. And yeah – it was hard. It was hard because I didn’t know what to do about the reaction that I got if I had a girlfriend, or a trick mostly. Somebody I was with. The way people looked. The way people in the Dark Room Collective responded. There was some homophobia there, definitely. And there was only one kind of desire.

When Alice Walker came to read in the Dark Room Reading Series, I think every Black lesbian in the tri-state area was in our living room. And there was a lot of scuttle afterwards about how homophobic we were. And I didn’t like being included in that, but then it was true, `cause I had a lot of internalized crap. A lot of fine women came to the house, too. That’s a daggone shame. And all the women in the Dark Room were just stunning. It was majority women at that. So, on top of the homophobia charge, there was also, we were a harem. So that was also exceedingly fucked up.

With all that, we’re hosting this incredible reading series, where the bulk of the writers emerging and established at the time are all very well established now. And they came for free. This was in our living room, on Sunday after church, with chairs from the church. We’d get some water and some snacks and some stuff and put some music on, clean the house and everybody would come in and they’d get a reading of two people, a couple of times three, some special events. We’d sell books, take the writer out after if there was time. Either cook in the house or take them someplace for dinner and then make sure they got to the airport or their bus and we paid for it out of our pockets. And that was my job was for. And it’s interesting - that habit’s been very hard to break – that I work to finance my art in that way. But then to be inculcated into a kind of collectivity. They all have their faults and fissures, and so do I, but it was instructive for being an individual artist.

It was interesting figuring out how to really navigate and leverage the Dark Room Collective for my own personal development and growth. And I definitely grew, but slowly everybody started getting published a little bit, and you know they’re about their stuff and I was very much about the service part of it. And I was learning. Service learning, right? A total service learning experience for sure. I was ready for us to open a library and a reading room and all that stuff. And everyone else was really starting to gain a foothold in the literary world, and they were focused. And I resented that, as much as I admired it. And I was definitely like, “what?” jealous – "How come I’m not getting anything?" They were. That was the focus, but it was incredible. I met Toni Cade Bambara and Ntozake Shange and Samuel Delany, Essex Hemphill. Yeah.

So in light of all of your experiences, one final question is what defines success for you as a writer? I ask this not from the perspective of normative perspective of success, but more as people who tend to do more social justice work and have that consciousness in their writing, and my sense is that it comes out of the context of our lives, what does that mean for you?

Surviving. Finishing projects. Connecting. Those moments when it’s clear that someone read or heard something. Of course when you do, that’s always bowled me over. And just getting it. That’s always a success. And to not ever feel closed. That I don’t have anything else to learn. I never feel that way.

You don’t walk that way.

I definitely move through the world like a student, in a lot of ways. There’s always something for me to learn. I’m constantly open to information. I was going to say experiences, but am I? No. Am I always open to experiences? No – cause I’m like “Why would I want to do that?” but definitely to learning experiences. I mean yeah, I’m open. That’s a real plus and a strength and it makes it all an adventure. And really just getting to this point in life has felt really successful to me because it was not looking that great early on. Those years where most people are going to go to college or whatever, it took me awhile to figure it out. Up until I was 23 and actually after. It’s interesting. I understand the educational process and how retro-active learning really is. After five, six years in the Dark Room Collective, I moved to California and then I was like “Whoa- I was in that for all this time.” and then it just started to roll. And grad school’s the same thing. Now I’m starting to really feel some momentum.

Absorbing everything that you lived through in that time?

Yeah. Yeah. Also just coming to some answers for myself. This expectation that you enter into a learning experience and will ask and answer – the big question. And it doesn’t happen. You’ll ask a whole bunch of little questions and get a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated answers. And then put it together later. You know. Yeah. I think I’ve got a lot more success to go.

I think you’re world is opening in ways. We don’t have much time, but I want to know in the time we have if there are any other stories you want to share?

Hmm. No. [Laughter]

Do you have any questions for me?

Whoa – there’s a table turning in the oral history project. Umm. Hmm. I can’t think.

Okay.

I think I’m pretty done right now.

They’re big questions.

Yeah – they are. They’re really big.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It’s been really cool. I always learn a new part of who you are. So thank you.

You’re welcome. Thanks for asking me.

Yoseñio Vicente Lewis, Interviewed January 15, 2005

2007-03-08T22:11:00.000-08:00

Yoseñio Vicente Lewis, writer/activist

Yoseñio V. Lewis, born on October 25, 1959 in Newport, Rhode Island

Interviewed on January 15, 2005 by Ana-Maurine Lara

Can you tell me about where you were born?

I was born October 25, 1959 in Newport, Rhode Island, on an actual island. On Aquidneck Island.

Aquidneck?

The Aquidneck Indians of New England. I was born, actually, I was born in the naval hospital. I thought I was born in Newport Hospital, but I was born in the naval hospital. At the time my mother was not married. But her father or her step-father had rights to be on the military base, so I was able to be born there. I’m the first born in my immediate family and the first born in my whole family to be born in this country. My family’s from Panama.

On your dad and your mom’s side?

016 Um-hmm. Everybody’s from over der, except me and my sister and brothers and subsequent cousins. What do I remember from my childhood? Mmm, mmm, mmm. Well, I remember a lot of evil, nasty, horrible things. But I also remember a few really wonderful things which I choose to dwell on at this particular moment. One of those good things was a friend of mine, bobby, who lived across the street from my grandmother, who just adored me and I adored him. And we played together all the time. And then he had a little brother, Carl, and I was just so jealous of him cause you know, Bobby wanted to spend time with him, and I was like [little noises], ‘What about me? I’m your bestest friend.’ But we had a good time together and I always enjoyed him. And now that I think back, all of my close friends were men, boys. A little hint for the future. Cause after that it was Bruce. And he was…Bobby was white. Well, he was Portuguese. He was dark enough that there was no conflict between his family and mine. But Bruce was white, white, white, white, snow white. And his family did not did not like me, and did not like my family. My family loved him. We used to, when school was over we’d walk from school and we’d get to my grandmother’s house before we’d get to his house. So if we’d get to my grandmothers’ house, my great-grandmother was there. She’d say ‘Come on in’ and she’d make us sandwiches. She’d make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cornmeal. Or chicken soup or something. But it was always a sandwich and something warm. And we’d eat eat eat and we’d watch some of her stories with her. She’d watch the stores on CBS.

The stories?

Guiding Light and…Guiding Light is the one that sticks out in my head. I’m sure there were others that were on CBS. What’s the one that everybody watches on CBS now? Young and Restless? That wasn’t on. That wasn’t in existence yet.

General Hospital?

041 Naw, but that’s ABC. Sacrilege! ABC. But Guiding Light I remember us watching. I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on, I just waited for that to be over, case the next thing on that came on was Dark Shadows and Bruce and I would sit and watch Dark Shadows and then it was time for him to go home. So then I’d walk him to his house and it was a whole different story. I never got invited in. His family just wanted nothing to do with me. And I don’t know why he liked me, but he did. And he made a point of always finding me so that we could walk home together and we could go to my grandmother’s and my great-grandmother would feed us and then we’d watch Guiding Light and Dark Shadows and then go to his place. And I don’t think either of us ever were thinking about, ‘well, we’re not supposed to be hanging out with each other.’ There’s a boy and a girl, there’s black and white. We’re not supposed to have anything to do with each other, and we just did. We enjoyed each other’s company quite a lot.

Cause this is during the Civil Rights era, right?

052 This was in the ‘60’s, yeah. We just…none of that stuff was having an impact on us. All we cared about was, we liked each other and we spent a lot of time together. What other nice things?

Did your family ever talk about what was going on with the Civil Rights struggle?

056 It was never directly discussed with me. Except with one uncle and that was only in between his bipolar rages. When he had a moment when he’d agree to take the lithium and it would balance him out and then we’d have a discussion. But most of the time, he was too sick. And I couldn’t really trust what he was saying cause it was so off the wall. Or he wasn’t saying anything at all cause he was in that depressive phase and he just didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone.

So when was it that you first started coming out? And what does that mean to you?

Oh it means so many tings. The very first thought I had around coming out is 13, when I guess I was working in a, not working, going to an after-school kind of thing ‘teenagers, keep them off the streets, we’re gonna have them go into the community center’

Yeah – like Kiwanis Club or somethin’

069 Yeah – something that allows you to not be on the street and acting up and getting in trouble. And I remember there was a group and I was sitting on the floor and a lot of people were sitting on the couch and we were talking about drugs. And everybody admitted ‘oh you know, I’ve had a beer.’ Or ‘I’ve smoked pot’ or ‘I’ve done this or I’ve done that.’ And when it came to me I said ‘I haven’t done any of that.’ And everyone looked at me like ‘Come on. We’re being honest now. You can go ahead and you can tell us.’ ‘But no, I really haven’t done any of that.’ And it got to the point where people refused to believe me. ‘No, really, I just haven’t done this.’ ‘Yes you have! Everybody does it. Everyone’s done it!’ ‘Well, no, not me.’

They couldn’t believe it.

078 Exactly and I felt well, I’ve always felt a little different. But now, I feel it in a group setting and it’s very clear I am different from everybody in this room. There was something unbelievably different that is setting me so far apart from people. Because from that day on I was treated differently. Like there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t really be trusted and I wasn’t allowed to associate with people as I had been previously, because I revealed this big secret about myself.

I imagine you hadn’t thought of it as a secret.

084 Exactly. Well, okay, I don’t judge you because you have had beer or you still drink beer or whatever. That’s your choice. You’re 13 and you’re not supposed to, but hey, whatever. But for me, being someone who didn’t do that made me an outsider. Even more of an outsider because I was dark. And nine times out of ten I was the darkest one in whatever room I walked into and I was intelligent and I chose to revel in that intelligence. I didn’t play in school. I learned and I enjoyed that learning and I felt it was my way to get out of all the unhappiness I was experiencing with my family.

So that was really a way for you to survive, was to be in school.

095 Exactly and I revered absolutely all of my teachers. It didn’t matter how crazy there were, it didn’t matter the ones who were drinking in class and had their little bottle in the drawer. I didn’t care about any of that stuff, like ‘you’re a teacher? You’re so cool. I love you. You’re perfect.’ That’s how I revered them. So they could o no wrong and I couldn’t wait to go to school. I loved it. It was my refuge from all of my craziness at home. So 13 was my first coming out. And that same year was also the same year I started my activism because I got frustrated, well I moved from frustrated to angry and pissed off seeing how – with what we now call developmental disabilities or mentally delayed, but back then we said people who were mentally retarded – how they were being treated. I was just frustrated and angry and I just couldn’t understand it. And it didn’t occur to me…I don’t even remember what the actual incident was. I just remember the anger that I had and it didn’t occur to me that I needed to speak to someone at the center, the community center that we were at, maybe a case manager or a counselor or the person running the show. No. I wrote a letter to the Governor of the state saying ‘I don’t really understand this. This is wrong. And you need to do something about this. You run this state, so you’re responsible.’ And I actually got a response back saying, ‘Well, okay, we’re going to investigate this.’ And they found there were actual abuses, this wasn’t just some 13 year old making stuff up. There really were abuses and there were some systemic changes made to the way people with developmental conditions were treated. So, then I felt emboldened. You know, ‘I wrote a letter and things happened and I’m gonna do all kinds of stuff now.’ And I got more involved in student government when I got into junior high and high school. Again as a way to think I can affect some kind of change. And I could show people that people who looked like me could do this because there was also growing up on an island, and growing up in New England, it’s not like I had a lot of exposure to people who looked like me.

125 That actually was one positive thing about coming to New York for my summers, coming to Brooklyn, is that I got to see a lot of people who looked like me and I got to see a lot of Panamanians who looked like me. That really helped me. But I decided when I was home there are some things here that need to be changed, some discussions that people have that…I didn’t believe in that moment that people were purposely saying racist things or purposely engaging in racist behavior. I think they just had no other context in which to express themselves. And they used whatever was handy and whatever was taught to them. I have since learned to let go of that Pollyanna way of thinking, but back then it was about ‘oh, they don’t really mean it like this they’re just confused. And it’s my responsibility to help them understand that there’s a different way to experience people.’

I imagine, you couldn’t possibly understand that someone would think that way. That happens for me, I can’t believe someone would actually think that way.

Exactly, when I haven’t done anything wrong or bad or immoral or hurtful to you for you to think it’s ok for you to speak to me that way, or it’s okay for you to treat to me that way. Or treat someone who looks like me that way. Or to speak to them that way. So obviously, it’s just that you just don’t know. It didn’t take too long for me to find out ‘ooh – they do know, and they’re still acting that way.’ But I kept my Pollyanna ways for a little bit.

148 I think that…so I have to go back. I’ve already gone up to high school but now I have to go back. As something else that was significant in my life when I was young, single digits, was the church and the time I spent in Catholic school and the nuns and the priests really influencing me to believe I was worthless and the struggle that I had with going to Church, and then being in Catholic school you go to Mass five times a day cause you have to pray every 15 seconds or you’re going to be doomed [laughter].

You were in Catholic school all throughout elementary?

158 No. I was in Catholic school from third grade to sixth grade. So, going through all of that and constantly questioning helped me not only to recognize, there is a spirituality here that I am very much attracted to, but there is a religiosity that I am very much appalled by and I don’t know how to reconcile the two. So it was a very big struggle for me. Because there’s so much about Catholicism that I truly enjoy. Truly, truly enjoy and I would never give it up. I will never let anyone tell me, ‘well, you can’t call yourself a Catholic because you do this, or you feel this way, and you think this way and you love this person.’ You’re not Jesus, so you can’t tell me how I can be a Catholic and how I can’t be. Until He presents Himself in front of me and says ‘this is what you can do and what you can’t do’ there’s nothing that you can say. I don’t know how I got that strength early on, but I had it. I had it to the point where I would go to Mass and there’s a point right before the Eucharist where you have to say “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” And to this day, I don’t ever remember saying “Lord I am not worthy to receive you.” I just would let that part go.

So you were born in resistance, is that what you’re saying? [laughter]

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Cause here you have all these elements in your Catholic school and all these things happening at home, there was a part of you that was like ‘I deserve to be alive. And I deserve to have a place in the world.’

Yeah, there has to be a reason that I was born. There has to be a reason that I survived all that I survived. But it can’t be so that I can be told ‘you’re worthless. You’re not anything. You won’t amount to anything. There’s really no point in you being here, but since you are here, you must give and suffer and sacrifice.’ All of that giving and suffering and sacrifice, yes – that’s part of life. Everyone has to go through that. But that’s not all and I refused to believe that that was all. I refuse to believe now that’s all I’m here to do. So, I would not say that part. But I would still go up and receive my communion. Cause I’m going to get the blood and body of Christ.

So, come back and tell me. You were talking about coming out and how that coincided with your budding activism.

195 Yes, so now we go forward. We moved back and so I’m doing my student government. President of the Student Council for a couple of years. Wanted to institute some other changes and that really got the resistance. ‘You know, I don’t know where you’re from, but that’s not how we do it here.’ I said ‘I’m from here. So what I learned is what you people taught me. Either directly or indirectly, this is what you taught me.’ I had a lot of great teachers who didn’t always agree with what I was saying, but always agreed that I should say it and encouraged me to say it. And expected me to say it. So I felt that that sense of support, like people had my back – even if they didn’t agree, they had my back – and so I would keep saying things. And then shortly thereafter I was no longer President of the Student Council. But that was okay because it helped me to understand that sometimes you’re going to take a stand that is very unpopular and people are going to try to retaliate in whatever way the can to get you away so that your voice is not heard and that’s why you have to be strong and you have to be willing to scream if you have to get yourself heard, because there are going to be people trying to silence you.

216 Okay, so. I come to college in California for no good reason except I missed my brother and he was already here and I just couldn’t stand it. I had a whole year away from hi m and I couldn’t do anymore. ‘I don’t care where I go to school. I don’t care what I study. I just need to be near him cause I miss him.’ So I go to the University of San Diego and maybe my freshman year, maybe the first semester of my freshman year, I enjoyed it. It was a new environment, there were people who were studying. It was an opportunity to learn so much. I tested out of so many classes because I actually went to a high school that cared about teaching and so you were required to learn things and to do things. So I didn’t…I was already past freshman level when I got to college. So I was proud of myself for that. But I was also feeling ‘Oh, I still want to hang out with these people, cause this is my class, so don’t put me too far ahead.’ Second semester is when it began. I think because it was moving in to the spring and summer time and it was even more the time when people could ditch classes and spend the day at the beach or do whatever they wanted to do.

They’d gotten used to the rules and knew how far they could bend them?

236 Exactly. And it also became more apparent to me how many people never went to class. Or went maybe once a week and were able to get passing grades. And for the life of me I couldn’t understand that. Until I was introduced to this whole concept of the legacy program whereby so and so smith whose parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents went to the school and gave money and every generation since then has gone to the school and given money, so junior at my level, in my class, before you were born you knew you were going to go to this school.

And you were going to pass.

Right. And so there were so many kids who were there under that guise. And they never studied. They never had to and that irritated me to no end. Then they had a strong influence on some people that think I really did want to learn but were influencing them, but they didn’t really have to. ‘Oh, my dad has money. We’ll just get a building on the campus. We’ll be fine.’ And that…that inequity and that sense of entitlement just tanned my hide. I was so upset by that. Likewise…

And you should have been.

Likewise what I thought, what I took to be indifference on the part of the professors. I’d never been in a situation where someone gave me an assignment and didn’t care if I completed it and didn’t pull me up if I didn’t complete it. But here we are in college, and the response I got was ‘well, you’re an adult now. It’s up to you to do your work. And if you don’t then you’ll deal with the consequences, but I’m not going to sit you down and explain to you, you’re cheating yourself. I still get paid whether you do your homework or not. But if you don’t do your homework, you don’t get paid. Emotionally, mentally, intellectually, you lose.’

It was like a wake up call to the world of mediocrity.

270 Right. Exactly. And I just thought, ‘but wait a minute. I’m the same age I was when I graduated high school and even then as I was graduating my teacher were telling me ‘You’d better do this, you’d better do that. I know you got good study habits, but you’d better get better ones cause in college you have a lot more work to do. And you have stronger, tighter deadlines and blaah, blaah, blaah.’ And then just encouraging me and telling me ‘be prepared’ and then I come here and it’s like ‘here’s the assignment but if you choose not to do it, I’m not going to say anything to you. I’m not going to be the substitute parent for you. I’m not going to have that kind of responsibility.’

I’m not going to have expectations.

283 Exactly. If you do it great. If you don’t, oh well. Onto the next person. That really hurt me. I felt like, ‘I’m being abandoned again.’ I hear it as again, somebody in a position of authority that I’ve placed in the position of authority is saying to me ‘I really don’t care what you do.’ And I did not like that at all. I didn’t think that was an appropriate way to treat someone, especially a freshman. I could see that with somebody who’s a junior or a senior in college, if you don’t have it by then – if you don’t have study habits, if you don’t have a sense of yourself and how important you are in the scheme of you learning, well, then, you’re not going to get it. But you’re a freshman who came from all this support and all this care and you’re just being thrown out there and told, just go do it. I don’t think that’s a right way to do it. I don’t think that’s a right way to introduce the real world, if you want to call it that, to someone.

How did you deal with that?

I studied. I called on the habits that I had learned. And I continued to use them. And I got good grades, but I was very unhappy because I didn’t feel supported. And I felt abandoned because I had put all of my desire for acknowledgement and approval and acceptance into these people who were in the teaching professions. And here they were saying to me ‘I don’t really care what you do.’ So I lost my desire.

Your motivation…

And as time went on, I didn’t care what kind of grades I got. Freshman year, if you even thought of giving me anything less than an A, that was the end of it. I’m going to kill myself. If I get a B, oh no – it is totally over. By junior, senior year. B? Please. So? I don’t care. And I felt horrible that I had gone to that level. And I understand that there was a certain amount of not vanity, I can’t think of the word I want to call it right now. There’s a certain amount of vanity in that attitude of ‘oh – it’s a B, I don’t care’ because I know there were a lot of people who struggled to get a B. And I know that I didn’t have to struggle as much.

To get a B?

325 Right. I didn’t have to struggle to get the As because I loved it. I wanted it. Staying up writing a 20 page paper was a joy to me, it was a treat to me. It wasn’t a chore. It wasn’t work. It was what I loved to do. And then to have somebody just dismiss it, or to have somebody else in the class not do it, or do five pages and get the same grade that I would get? No. That’s not fair at all. And it totally drove my motivation away. To the point where I would always go to class but I wouldn’t listen. It actually was kinda good for my writing. Because I would start writing and just all these stories would come out of me, all these things that I wanted to talk about that I felt I couldn’t talk about because I didn’t feel like there’s really anyone that I could trust to share those intricacies, those delicacies with. So I didn’t. I just wrote about them. And then I would go and take classes that were way over my head. I tried to take them. I would audit them if I wasn’t allowed to take them for credit. Because I wanted to be challenged and I just wasn’t feeling challenged. I really wasn’t feeling it and I didn’t have a daddy who could donate a million dollars to the school so that they could name a building after me or a street named after me or a bust of me would be in the atrium of a building. I didn’t have any of that kind of access. So, all I could give them was my mind and my energy and they didn’t want it. Or, it appeared to me that they didn’t want it.

358 I recognize that I’m looking at this all through my own lenses. And there were other things going on that I wasn’t aware of. That I wasn’t clued in about cause I was still a kid, still trying to find my way. Nonetheless I felt very alone. Very without support. And I don’t recall every really talking to any of my classmates about it. So, I just stayed. I had two majors, two minors. I would have had more if I had been allowed to have more. Cause I was so interested in everything. I wanted to know everything.

You’re still that way.

I know. I know I am. I like that I haven’t let go of that quality.

Were there other black and/or latino students there?

374 There were…hmmm…Ray. There was Ray and Eddie and hmmm…I’m seeing people’s faces and not remembering names. And, Alicia and a couple of others. Maybe 10, 12 other students of color in my class. Certainly there were others in other classes. There were sophomores and juniors and seniors and graduate students, so out of a campus total of maybe, maybe 8,000 people – undergraduate and graduate combined – I would say maybe 700 – 1000 were people of color.

396 What I also got introduced to in college was the knowledge that there were people of color who had serious money. I had not experienced that before at all. Most of them were Asian or Middle Eastern. First off, I rarely met Asian people in my time as a kid. I think we had a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island. But I don’t remember actually seeing any Chinese people there. I remember seeing a Chinese restaurant. And that was it. And I never met anyone from the Middle East. And if I did, I can’t recall it.

And if you did, they may not have told you.

True. So, get to California and I’m meeting all these people from places I’d never heard of and they’re talking about foods and cultures and interests I’d never heard of and it was fascinating to me. And I thought, ‘well, this is the cool thing, about California.’ There’re people from everywhere and it’s like New York and it’s great. These people have money. Look at this! Driving around in fancy cars…well, back then a fancy car was a BMW or a Mercedes.

It still is. Well, except we got Hummers.

Yeah. So, they’re driving around in these cars and not going to class and having parties all the time and ‘oh – what are you doing for Thanksgiving?’ ‘Oh, I’m going to Switzerland for skiing.’ ‘What? You’re a student. How could you possibly…?’ Ohh. You have money. Okay. That’s how you do all that.

I heard you say earlier you were doing your own writing. Can you tell me about your own writing?

439 When I was in high school, I wrote a book of poems that I self-published.

B 000 I’m so embarrassed by this book because I thought it wasn’t good enough. And people bought it, but I thought they were just being nice to this little kid who didn’t know what she was doing at the time, so I refused to have a copy. And I’m so upset with myself now that I actually published a book and I don’t even have a copy of it. Someday I’ll find it. Anyway, when I got to college, and I was remembering my English classes in high school and exercises my English teacher had me do, I decided in college, ‘well, you know what, I’m in this class where the teacher doesn’t seem to care – or professor, I should say – the professor doesn’t seem to care and half the time doesn’t even show up, I’m going to make use of this time.’ So I got a little booklet and I just started writing. I’d end up getting those Scantron books a lot of times and just write in them.

The old exam books?

B 13 Yeah, with the blue, the light blue cover. Yeah so I’d get those and start writing in those and just write. I would write plays. When I was in college, I’d write a lot of plays.

About?

B 16 Mostly about how I wanted my life to be as opposed to how it was. So, in the beginning they were plays about me having money. They were plays about me having influence. They were plays about me being a professor and about being able to have this poor child who just wanted someone to acknowledge him or her. Just a lot of grandiose stuff. But it was a way to get all that stuff out of me, so that there was room for other stuff to come in.

B 22 And then I started writing…I started going back to writing poetry. And most of it was angry poetry because I had, I was more aware of the world and more aware of the injustice in the world. So it’d be a lot about what was going on in and what was wrong in the world. Because I was in San Diego, I also learned a lot about the abject poverty in Tijuana and yet how we in San Diego used and abused those people all the time while talking about how horrible they were and how dirty they were and our water would always get messed up by their sewage and then I would think, but then how does their sewage get down there because it’s really our sewage pumped down there, but once it gets there they’ve got an antiquated system which backs up and then it comes back to us. So it’s our own shit that’s coming back to us and polluting our waters and then we want to blame them, instead of helping them fix up their system and then fixing up our system so that we aren’t pumping our shit to them to begin with. So stuff like that.

So you would write poetry about it?

Oh yes, about being that little kid in Tijuana trying to take a bath and trying to drink some water and it was brown. Or trying to walk…What are we talking about?

We’re talking about what you wrote about.

B 48 oh so yeah – I’m sorry, I’m distracted by this painting. I didn’t even see this. How cool is that? Okay, for everybody who’s not here, this is a beautiful painting created by my beautiful friend who has just a beautiful view on life, who can see the spectacular beauty in the midst of the darkness.

Hmm. Well that’s some poetry right there.

Yeah, okay, so it would go from writing about the people in Tijuana and what they had to endure from these crazy ass people in the United States to my jealousy of the people who I went to school with who had money to my family and how they just didn’t treat me right to all the other kids who didn’t have families who treated them right to the [Vietnam] war. Because I could finally start talking about the fact that I came from a military family so there were so few people that I knew who were not in the military and how all of my uncles were impacted by that war because all of them had something to do with it in one way or another.

B 62 Okay, why don’t we stop right there and continue in February, because we spent a great deal of time talking about how you came to your activism and I want to also learn more about your own personal process in getting to the writing.

Okey dokey.

Sharon Bridgforth Interview - March 15, 2006

2007-01-24T18:33:00.000-08:00

Sharon Bridgforth, writer/performance artist/activist

Sharon Bridgforth, born on May 15, 1958 in Chicago, Illinois

Interviewed on March 15, 2006 by Ana-Maurine Lara

What are some defining moments in your younger years that have had a major impact on who you are today?

The first defining moment was when my mother decided to move from Chicago to L.A. I was three (She grew up in Memphis, got pregnant when she was 20 – she says they kicked her out, they say she left. You know how that goes.) We ended up in Chicago where her mother was. My grandmother enjoyed a good party & a good drink and apparently my mother and her roommate thought my grandmother was paying the rent and she wasn’t. So actually we were evicted. And on the day that we got evicted my great aunt & uncle were visiting and we got in the car with them and ended up in L.A. cause that’s where they were living. So that was an incredible set of opportunities/challenges/circumstances. I was born in Cook County hospital; my mother was struggling. To be a single parent in Chicago with an alcoholic mother was probably a lot more difficult than being a single parent in L.A. because of the weather obviously, but also because we had a little more support in terms of other family being there. By then she [my mother] had two sets of aunt’s and uncles in LA and we had family in Fresno. During that time period black Americans had migrated to many places from the South and in LA there were a lot of black people from the South. The Easy Rawlins series – Walter Moseley does an incredible job of documenting that time period. So my mother would have been one of those people in that time period that he writes about in that LA – which is one of the reasons I love that series. So I grew up in South Central LA and even though it was LA it was very much like living in a little southern town because all the black Americans were from the South. So the sensibilities and the protocols, so to speak, had a southern tint to it. I knew one black American person from LA., of course her parents were from the south, all the other black Americans that I knew were from somewhere else. I didn’t know other black kids that were born there. So that says a whole lot. But us moving to LA meant that I grew up in LA – my mother raised me with her having a certain kind of hope for having a better life. The promise and possibilities of sunny Southern California and hopes and dreams, like her peers, all this kind of colored the experience of being there. And it was fun. And LA is a huge city. The LA I grew up in was much more segregated than it is now. When I was growing up, the black American area was one area, the Chicano LA which of course was much older, was one area. You had an afro Caribbean type area, Korea town, China town, like all these very, very, very clear lines – parts of town that were very Jewish. Class-wise, in ethnic neighborhoods the class lines kind of blended over.

Cause everyone’s living together?

Sharon: Yeah basically. There were certain areas where black people with money were more prone to live, but it was inside of a black community. I grew up taking the bus to get to where I needed to be, from a very young age. So as I went through school my bus ride got longer and longer cause I was going to school further and further away. Eventually for high school I went to school in Echo Park. So from South Central to Echo Park was a two hour bus ride. I experienced the world and it was magnificent. I think that had everything to do with how I see myself and how I imagine and hope for the world to be. It was a very good thing in many ways. And you know of course everybody – the Indigenous people, they murdered and maimed and killed them right off the bat – and then you have your Chicano communities and people that have been there forever. Other than that folks were from all over the world and everybody was there hoping for the same thing: for a better life, for financial freedom & security, for education for their children and all of that. So that was the constant in the bus ride, so to speak. The languages, the sensibilities, the protocols, the music, the food, the smells changed drastically from neighborhood to neighborhood & at the same time (I was born in 1958) so I was a little girl when the Watts Riots happened. And we lived not to far from where the riots took place, so you could see the smoke, you could hear the sirens, national guard all of that and the explosion of the black power movement was part of the reality of things, too. The brown berets and all that. It was an exciting time.

It was all part of your reality

Yeah and then Hollywood. Rock and Roll – and when I say that I mean it as a black art form all of that. I think that was a major thing. It was good in a lot of ways. It also created in both my mother and I a sense of mourning for home. A sense of displacement, to some degree. Me sensing through her a feeling that we were...we were not in exile, but that we were very far from the home place. That there was not a sense that this is our home. It was more a sense of “this is where we’re going to make it. We’re here and we’re going to do better because we’re here.” So a sense of longing. A sense of displacement to some degree. A sense of loss, a sense of grief and all of those things later became really important in my writing. That I was able to access those things later became really important for me. So that was a really incredibly important time. And then I think for me the next huge thing that comes to mind at the moment is when I actually...I spent summers in Memphis, so I did get to go to the homeplace. I went to kindergarten and first grade in Memphis and I went back almost every summer until I was a teenager. So being able to go and connect with the big family and to be inside of what was home and to be... I was the youngest of all the kids...to be the spoiled one inside of all that was really important and again later fed my work because I learned how to tell stories from being in the room with them. And my mother and her friends, too because they carried that with them but the sense of family, the sense of blues as a way of life and I mean that in a positive way, in the sense of how to survive, the medicine of laughter and desire and knowing who we were and what our stories were, I was able to be grounded in that because my mother sent me back. Part of the reason she sent me back was that she was trying to do things for herself so that she could get better jobs.

246 And then the next big thing for me is that I went to high school in Echo Park. And I chose that school because they said they had karate and I ain’t never taken no karate class to this day! It was nice in the brochure, but there wasn’t no karate class in there. But it was Catholic school. I went to Catholic school almost the whole time, starting in fourth grade. This school was in Echo Park, it was all girls. Latinas from everywhere – Cuba, Costa Rica, Mexico, LA, Panama, St Lucia. It was so much flavor. There were not very many black Americans and there was one white girl in the whole school for the whole four years I was there – so you know that was a story. Indigenous girls, just everybody. It was so fantastic. So I was able to move in and out of their homes and really just experience how much we are the same, despite what ever language differences might be in the home, or the particulars of culture that might be in the home, we really were just very much the same. It was all about love and everybody was just trying to make it. And I had so much fun, I just had the best time and made deep, deep, deep, deep friendships. Partied hard and played sports and did all that stuff. That was really important because it gave me a sense of belonging. And it was a small school so I was able to, not only really, really truly, truly belong, but I was able to explore the world in this place. And I knew I was loved, and I could just be myself.

You mean in LA in general, or in your school?

In my school. It was a fantastic experience. I don’t think the education was all that great, and that was of course why my mom sent me to Catholic School. Looking back what I realize is that it was a working class school. I was on the volleyball team. We played on concrete, whereas the other schools they had indoor gyms and all this fancy shit. But we didn’t care. We were very happy. It was very important. And then again, later, that is the context that I create my work in. The sense of being part of the world, with the sense of a burning drive for justice, and civil liberty for everybody so that was pretty incredible.

I imagine living in segregated LA and going to school in Echo Park where so many things were different might have led you to question some things as to whether they were true or not.

Not then. Much, much later. Then I was too in it. And I also did not have any political language at all and no context for that. Or sexuality or anything. Now I know that a lot of girls were dykes. I was a big old dyke but I didn’t know it and I had no politicized conversations going on anywhere around me. And at home my mother was very focused on trying to survive. Trying to make sure I had what I needed, trying to work, pay the bills, you know and it was hard and it must have been terrifying cause she was alone. Even though she had some family there she really was a single parent in the true sense of the word. So I think a lot of her focus was on providing and on struggling to just make it. And I don’t think she had any political language or anything. She still kind of doesn’t really move that way but I think her sense was that she didn’t want to be in the confined, contained spaces that she had grown up in. She was supportive of a bigger world. So it was not till much much later that I even noticed some of the boxes around race/ethnicity and class. In terms of sexuality and gender I think I was always out of the box in my house, you know, cause I was more like a little boy than a girl, always.

Are you the oldest of your mom’s children?

I’m her only child, and my father has four kids but I didn’t meet them until I was 16 so I didn’t really grow up with them. If anything I knew that I was not a regular girl and that how I felt was not what I saw around me. And so that was probably a place where I did question. But you know, even in my school - now I know that a lot of the girls were gay, were lesbians – nobody was talking about that stuff. That wasn’t even a word I knew.

What’s your coming out story or stories?

239 I went to a Catholic college for awhile. I went to St Mary’s in Moraga, California and I graduated 10 years later from Cal State LA, but right after high school me and about 10 of my friends from high school went to St Mary’s. Because the recruiter was cute. That was what we based our decision on. His name is Tom Brown. I still remember Tom. He was just really very handsome and very much trying to help the people and there was a Latino Brother (as in man of the cloth) also at the school that was very much about not just recruiting folks of color, but help us stay in. And they would do wonderful things like have retreats for us and stuff like that. But still none of us graduated from there. We couldn’t take the shock. Moraga was too different from LA. And first of all we didn’t have no direction and no goals. Nobody was talking to us about what we wanted to do with our lives, we hadn’t even thought about that. So we were just wild party girls and we went to the school that was in an extremely wealthy little area in northern California, so not only the cultural shock, but the shock of the landscape, cause it was very much in the country and the class shock and then the shock of college and the fact that we weren’t grounded in ourselves – we weren’t really able to take in any direction cause we hadn’t had any up until that point. So none of us graduated from there, that’s long story short.

258 I hung out in northern California for awhile. I was 22 when I got married. I actually got married in LA. My daughter was born in 1982, her father and I met through mutual friends. We really were like best friends but I thought, cause again there was no talk about sexuality, I knew I was different but I couldn’t put it together that I liked women. That wasn’t even...even though I always had crushes on women for as long as I could remember, it did not occur to me that it was something that I could do. So I thought, he’s my best friend, I love him, and yeah - let’s get married. And so we got married, and at that time we were both born-again Christians and the thing was you couldn’t fornicate. So that had a lot to do with it. So, we got married in June and by October one I found out I was pregnant, so then that changed everything. So it was at that moment when I knew that I was pregnant that I really, really had to take a look at myself. And one of the first things that came clear to me was that I liked women. I really wanted to be with a woman. It was a long process to get from that realization to being with a woman. I knew that I needed to divorce and all that. It took a little while, but by the time my daughter was six months old, me and her father were separated and at least going through the divorce. I went back to school, finished school. He and I co-raised her. It was set up in different ways at different times during her life, but after we got over the bumps of divorce, we became really close. And he actually became one of my best friends and his family and my family, we’re all still family. He passed not too long ago, but we really did make family together. I miss him terribly. By the time she [my daughter] was 6 months old I knew I wanted to be with women, but then it was about 2 years before I actually was with a woman.

307 What happened was, I was writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was studying writing in school. But I had a kid and I was on welfare and trying to figure out how I was going to take care of this child. The Urban League was offering computer programming classes so I went through a summer course and in that course there was this woman that later became my first girlfriend. It was two years from the time that I was separated to me getting with a woman. And by the time I got to that I think I had just processed so much that I was just out. I was just ready. She however was not. So that relationship did not last very long, but it was important because it was my first relationship with a woman and it was clear to me that this was who I was and this was what I was going to do. And after I broke up with her, that didn’t last very long, I ended up at Jewel’s Catch One – Jewels is on Pico near Crenshaw in LA. and its in the neighborhood and in fact one of my best friends from high school lived down the street, so in fact, all this time I coulda been going to Jewels but I didn’t know it was there.

324 The first time I went into Jewels - some gay men that I worked with took me in there cause they were like, ooh you know child you need a lover. Cause I didn’t know any gay people, I didn’t know no lesbians, I didn’t know nothin’ and I was working, a single parent and all that - so they took me to Jewels, and when I walked in it was ohmygod. It was another one of those moments when everything changed. It was the first time that I felt that being who I was was right. It was like church. You come in and you go up these stairs and there are all these black people, men and women. And in those days, I don’t know how Jewels is now, but in those days you were there to dance. And it was house music, the old, real house music and so people would be in shorts, you know very casual – in t-shirts or jeans and whatever cause you went there to dance – and it was open all night. So it was men and women and drag queens and everybody, and in the main area, a huge room with house music and lights flashing and all those black bodies and it was really a spiritual experience. So everything changed. And then I met the person who would be my second girlfriend there.

353 By that time my daughter was a little girl, and I don’t know what she said to my mother but she said something to my mother and then my mother calls me at work and says “are you a bulldagger?” So I said yeah, cause I was like, how could she not know. I just didn’t think, so I was like, yeah and then that began a 10 year process of war with my mother. And then after, through the course of fighting with her, I did not care what anybody else thought cause that fight was so hard and so rough and so terrible that it really was a blessing. Because, what other people thought – there was no room for it. It didn’t matter. And my daughter has only known me to be gay, so that has never been a problem. And because I wanted my daughter to grow up with my mother, I stuck in and hung in there and eventually we worked it out.

Ten years later?

372 Yeah ten years later. It was a long fight. Oh ms. mother.

What does it mean for you to be an artist – a writer – in the world?

386 Well for me initially I started doing it just because I had to. It was like breathing. I’ve always been a reader. So when I was a kid and be on the bus I just read voraciously – just everything so I was always a reader. But when I was 15 I started writing. And it was just, you know being hormonally poisoned and just trying to survive my own emotions. It was actually the Bible. I was reading the Songs of Solomon and Psalms and I just thought they were so pretty. And there’s this one thing, I forget from which it’s from, but “for everything there is a season” you know it comes with this whole list of things. And I just thought it was so pretty. So I started writing. I then saw writing as something that could be transformative for me emotionally so I had been doing it for a really long time. Initially I was doing it for myself, and then I studied it in school cause I figured I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have a lot of stuff, but for my daughter, the least I could give her was the opportunity to dream and if I didn’t dream myself, I couldn’t be a good example. I wanted to be a writer, I just didn’t know how to imagine it. Hadn’t been around people that were doing that. Hadn’t been to theatre. I think the first time I saw a play I was 20-something. I was just trying to find my way.

421 And somewhere along the way, probably around the time I was in my early 30s it all clicked together. So everything came together and so now what I can say, is that it’s what I’m here in the world to do. It’s my gift that I have been given. It’s what I can contribute. I see it as a spiritual responsibility; I see it as an Ancestral calling. I see it as a privilege. I see it as a way for me to honor not only the reality of my life and experiences, but my mother’s and all those who came before us. A specific thing I have been given is the opportunity to tell the stories of the Ancestors and to keep their voices alive. I see it as service. It’s what I’m here to offer in service to the Ancestors, to the Universe, to humanity and to my own destiny. So I take it very seriously.

How would you say your work is influenced by who you are?

I spent so much time finding my way and really I was just being guided to get to the right place at the right time.

B 000

Now what I know is that life and art are not separate. As you know, my work lives in a Jazz aesthetic, so it is all about the work being work of spirit and work of spiritual revolution, so the place you work from is from inside your own self, so everything impacts and informs and dictates what I write, how I move through the world with it, how I get to the next moment. And that includes all of the influences, so my Ancestors, my family, my community, my mentors, the people I mentor and my life experiences, each moment contains everything and determines how the next moment unfolds.

How do you define success as a writer and artist?

019 That is a very important question. That is an excellent question. I had to tackle that question some years ago. What I came to is that this is my life, so it is not about the next gig, the next published thing. It is not about money and awards. This is my life. And on top of that it’s part of my ancestral legacy, so I am being given their stories. I have the responsibility of their influence as I move forward. So what I have to do is create a life that nurtures and supports and provides opportunity for me to do what I’m here to do. When I do that in a way that is healthy, that, to me, is success. When I create a life that allows me to have quality time with people and to take care of my health and to have joy in my work and to fully realize my artistic projects and vision, that’s success. So how I’m living is a reflection of my success. And when I am successful money, opportunity, support flows to me organically. I started a touring company in the early-nineties—the root wy’mn theatre company. We were touring and it was wonderful. We had so much fun and we went so many places. We were doing very well. It was quite an amazing thing. It was something that I just started and didn’t know any better. I worked with some incredible performers and just really had a lot of support from around the country and we got to do a lot of things. But I began to realize that I was edgy and irritable and pissy a lot of times and tired and burned out. I just kind of didn’t even like myself. I was exhausted in a way that was really bad. I was exhausted to the bone all the time. I realized that I was always living in the future. If you’re touring, you send stuff out and you start having conversations about things that are going to happen in a year or two, the same with grants and mounting shows. So I realized that I was always in the future. I wasn’t even in the present moment. I didn’t realize how profound an effect this was having on me. I wasn’t really doing my work because I was doing my work--the things we were touring were things that I had written, so it was my vision and it was my words, but I kind of wasn’t really writing. I wasn’t able to do everything I needed to do to keep the tours going and write to my full capacity. So a combination of situations happened. The thing that affected it the most was that the performer I worked most closely with decided to move from Austin to Los Angeles. So that created an almost-impossible situation for me in terms of creating shows because of how we worked. So I had to re-evaluate the whole thing. That’s when I realized I wasn’t in the present moment. I was making myself sick—

from exhaustion?

068 And from being out of alignment with what I’m supposed to do—which is write. So I was doing all this stuff but I was not writing from a place of full power and potential. Once the dust settled and I figured everything out I realized that first I had to create a life based in the present moment and it had to be a life of health and joy and love and abundance and creativity. And it had to be based on the fact that I was writing. So as soon as I did that I got the publishing deal with Lisa [C. Moore] (RedBone Press), which was the thing that I had wanted deeply. I really wanted to be published.

As I’ve been talking to different people one thing that’s become very apparent to me is that all throughout the country there have been these pockets of amazing work happening out of the vision of us, of who we are in the world, so I would like to hear more about “the root wy’mn theatre company” if you want to talk more about it. And if you don’t that’s okay too. I would love to know what your vision was with that and what you were doing. You mentioned that you were producing works that you created. How did you actually get pen to paper and that onto, what did that look like?

087 By that time I had had an experience in theater. And when I had that experience in theater—Word Of Mouth Women’s Theatre Company (Austin, TX) produced one of my pieces. I didn’t even know it was a one-act, but it was a one-act. That experience allowed me to see what I was really doing and then once I knew what I was really doing, then I was able to build on that. So what I knew after that experience of seeing my work performed in theater, I knew that I had a particular vision for my work and that I had to make it happen myself, because I didn’t know who else to turn to at the time. I just didn’t have a model for it at the time. My idea was that visual art, movement, voice, music, dramatic interpretation and words all tell the story. That each medium should be responsible, be a part of the articulation of the story. So the work was text-based, but the other mediums were critical to how the story got told. I was just very fortunate. Austin, Texas is a place where people are accessible. I ended up being able to work with Marsha Ann Gomez who is one of my mentors and we were just like sisters for a while. She passed. Marsha was a sculptor. She was also a human rights activist, one of the founders of the Indigenous Women’s Network, environmental activist and just an incredible visual artist. And Marsha had a lot of language around using art as a medium for social justice. And she was from Louisiana and was crazy. So I could just hang with her and I just learned everything. I asked Marsha to work with me with the theater company and she looked at the script and she said, “Girl, you’re just trying to pray.” So she said, “I’m going to make the set an altar, a living altar and the performers will just perform inside of this living altar because what you’re doing is praying”.

114 Michelle Parkerson, who’s a fantastic filmmaker, performer, writer, Renaissance woman and now a professor at Temple. I asked her to come in and direct the first piece, so Michelle came in to work with us on our first show (“love rituals & rage”). Omi, Dr. Joni Jones was actually the first person we worked with. I asked her to help us, to take us through some kind of creative process, because what I knew was that the actors needed to collaborate in bringing the script to life. I did not want a process where I was telling them what to do. I asked Omi to do some intensive workshops with us so that we could all learn how to do that, so that the actors would be more like collaborators instead of people who are told what the vision is. One of the performers (Anoa Monsho) in the early stage of the theater company was a dancer and so she did a series of dance workshops for us. So you put it all together in the pot and you get gumbo. Michele Parkerson directed the first piece which was called ‘”love rituals & rage” (1993). I produced the first show in Austin (at the Vortex Theatre) and some folks came from other places and we got support from some of the presenters here in town and we got booked in other cities and the next thing I knew we were on the road. That set-up, then became the vision that I worked from. The performers never left the stage. The stage was a living altar. I saw the performers as collaborators. Voice, movement, music, text, ritual, dramatic interpretation and visual art all was part of how the story got told. After the first tour, I was extremely tired from managing people, because that’s what you do. So the first show had I think 4 performers (Arimma Matlock Abdullah, Kaci Fannin, Anoa Monsho and Sonja Parks) and myself and our manager (Lori Wilson), so the next show and the one after that I made one-woman shows. Sonja Parks was the one woman that I worked with. We toured for a few years together. That helped me to really know what I was doing. It also helped me to be in a position to meet people that were the folks that had broken ground in what I was doing. I met Daniel Alexander Jones who had come to Austin to do something and had heard about root wy’mn and we talked. And then through him I met Laurie Carlos and of course, she’s one of the foremothers of this whole thing. And ongoing conversations with Dr. Jones and many other people. Once I started getting mentorship, being able to walk with people, I grew strong and clear. I’m proud of what we did with root wy’mn. I think we were very successful in what we set out to do and in what we did, but I still think that was very much a learning curve for me and it was trial by error and fire. But it was critical and it was also experimental in terms of the discovery of what it was, but it led me to the people that knew. And then eventually I was able to work with Daniel, and I worked with Dr Jones the whole time and eventually Laurie Carlos directed my work and then everything changed. And then, I became the writer that I was really capable of being. So what had happened was,...

I first started working with Laurie in 1998. It was a process for me to learn what I needed to learn; I see it as a mentorship process. In Jazz you are mentored by walking with people, so by just being at her side, by having her direct my shows, by being able to talk with her and hear her and see her work, that’s how I learned. It was really more like 2002 that for me the break happened. That’s what Dr Jones calls it – she calls it the break. She’s writing about the jazz aesthetic and right now she’s talking about the break. It’s a Legba moment. You literally break open and you have a Divine opportunity to make a choice about how you’re going to move forward with your work. And so you can either do what you know or you can go into the unknown which is more scary, more rigorous, and more dangerous in many ways and of course that’s where you get your chops - when you take that road. Luckily I took that road. And ironically it was a piece I was writing about being on the bus in LA that that happened in. The piece is called con flama. Laurie directed that piece. I got a Theatre Communications Group/National Endowment for the Arts grant as a playwright – I got $20,000 and all I had to do was write. It was the first time I didn’t have four jobs and write, tour etc. So I used that TCG grant to write con flama as a playwright in residence at (The old) Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre where the Artistic Director at the time was, Vicky Boone. Frontera produced con flama with Laurie as director; Lourdes Perez & Annette D’Armata composers; Dr Jones as dramaturg; Leilah Stewart set designer and Florinda [Bryant], Sonja Parks, Ana Perea, Zell Miller 111 as performers. It was just incredible. I created a good draft during that process. I completed another draft during the process of a reading that Dr Jones directed (at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, San Antonio, TX) and I was able to finish the script after a full production – an equity show at Penumbra Theatre Company. Laurie was the director (she also was responsible for making sure the piece was produced); Lourdes Perez & Annette D’Armata worked with us again as composers; the performers were Djola Branner, Aimee Bryant, Zell Miller 111, Mankwe Ndosi, Sonja Parks, Ana Perea and Amber Sunshower Smith. Laurie worked with me that whole time and just basically broke my ass down. She worked me, and she worked that piece and she did it with love and respect and fierceness and at the end of that process I had done growed up.

I would love to hear more about your writing process.

237 It’s different now. I don’t know what it is right now. I know that I am driven by feelings, I feel I’m driven by the ancestors. I know that there’s something they want me to write about but I don’t know what it is. I know if I just stay open and look for what’s in my present moment it will eventually become clear. So part of what I try to do is get seated in whatever I’m feeling and then I try to match music to that and photographs and usually I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies. love conjure/blues, I read about the lives of: Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Jimmy Scott, James Brown, so many people. I read a lot of books and in each of those stories, incredible artists, incredible lives, incredible parts of our history – in each I found something that either kept me inspired and determined or became a kernel of something that later became a story.

How’s that different from your process when you first started writing?

Because I know how to facilitate it better now. It used to be that I thought I had to...it was almost like I was a method writer...so I had to live the drama. It was terrible. Yeah – I used to drink. I don’t drink anymore but I would live the drama and I would have all this drama and confusion, craziness going on all the time and I would just be out there and then I would write because I would be heartbroken or in some kinda swirl and I would use that to write. Then once I would get inside of a piece, then I would eventually slow down and then my process would be cleaning the house, being quiet, creating time, you know all that. But to get inside of it, I would create, essentially, drama.

To get to that emotional state.

281 Yeah. Now I don’t do that. Now I try to feed the feeling through music, through reading, through conversation, through looking at photographs. I don’t have to be a method writer anymore.

Do you have any questions for me or anything else you want to share.

I think that I should talk about the fact that I had cancer. I am a recovering alcoholic. I think I should talk about that, too. Both of those things have to do with my creative process. How I was living, and how I had to change. I have what I think is a chemical imbalance and I think that growing up in LA and being wild and fast just knowing how to get around and being free in a way because we were in a large city. I knew how to get around in the city from a very young age and I was just wild and there wasn’t the village to keep an eye on me. My father’s from Louisiana, my mother’s from Memphis. I think the Louisiana in me contributed to the chemical imbalance.

How do you mean that?

Well while it can be something that is magnificent something that it drives you to be highly creative, extremely social and very productive. It can also mean that you tend towards excess. I was living in excess and part of it is that I think for so long I didn’t have any direction or language for where I was or what I felt and then by the time I started writing and became a method writer then that translated into me being in the bars and me being wild and just drinking – self medicating

All of the intensity...

Yeah – it was just a lot of intensity and I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like being nervous all the time and excited all the time and so I just drank. And I had a good time, I wrote a lot of good things. I have great memories but I never need to repeat that. I’m grateful I survived. I haven’t drank for 12 years. It was my desire to not drink that led me to my spiritual self, essentially. Because I wanted to not drink so bad, it had gotten to the point where I ...cause I was functional...knew I could not reach my full potential as a writer if I kept doing that. That became the thing. Cause I knew that the ancestors were talking to me. Cause it used to be that I would literally hear the stories, they would just visit. And I knew that I couldn’t fully receive what they were trying to give to me if I kept doing what I was doing. It also had gotten to the point where I was feeling sick but they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. It took me a few years to actually stop drinking. But the desire to stop just really broke me down and made me very surrendered and that was really important. And then came the cancer. I knew something was wrong with from as early as 1995, but I didn’t get diagnosed till February 2005. As early as 1995 I was going to different doctors, I got all kinds of tests, and every time I got a physical I would say cancer ran in the family, that I was afraid that I had it. But the doctors thought it was allergies, cause you know in Texas allergies can make you feel very sick, and they weren’t finding anything and then I went through a period of not having insurance. In 2002 or so I got a MAP card (in Texas it’s kind of like city assistance for health coverage) and I went in and got a physical and told the doctor what I always tell them, which is cancer runs in the family I don’t feel right, I feel like something was wrong, I afraid it’s cancer. And she was so rude and so mean to me, and the wait in the waiting area and in the cold exam room had been so long, that I didn’t want to go back. I’ve thought about it a lot and I think that one of the things that happened was that it was a city clinic, a lot of people that go there don’t speak English, a lot of people that go there are people who have been manipulated and trained to think that the doctor is god, so people don’t question the doctor. And you’re kind of at the mercy of these people, and they know it. And so I went in there telling her what I needed and she did not like that. And so...

God forbid there be an empowered patient.

405 Okay? That Doctor did a physical which included a PAP smear but to find out the results you have to make an appointment to see the Doctor. Which means that you have to wait hours and you have to see the awful people, again. I didn’t want to see that doctor and I didn’t want to go through all that again so I asked if I could just pick my results up. And they were like, basically, yeah you can pick your results up from the Medical Records office but only if you pay $20 plus something a page and I was like `I don’t have any money. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m at this clinic.’ They were like `sorry, you have to pay.’ So I was like, `well I can’t pay. Can you mail them?’ They were like, `no’. I was like `umph. Later I returned to get allergy medicine. I returned to change my address. I returned back to Medical Records to try again and they said no again. And I have the documentation from that. Long story short, and don’t you know - and those people never wrote me, they never called me, they never said anything to me when I was in there getting my allergy medicine - that that PAP smear showed cancer. So, it just so happened that...2004-2005 I had insurance for the first time since 1998 (I have been self-employed as an artist since 1998). I was Artistic Director at ALLGO (Austin’s Queer People of Color Organization), I had insurance. I said, I’m gonna get checked from the rooter to the tooter baybay. So I got everything checked. And don’t you know my PAP Smear came back abnormal. They sent me to the gynecologist and then within a couple of months I had a radical hysterectomy.

Tape 2, Side A

Makes you wonder if they want people to die.

000 I know. I was Blessed. I had insurance, I had great doctors. I had a magnificent surgeon. I had a partner. I had great spiritual community. My family and community was supportive. So in a way, it probably was really a blessing because had that happened in 2002, I was not supported enough. It was before my partner and I got together. During that time (2002) checks were not coming on a regular basis. When you’re self-employed you’re getting paid and nine times out of ten you’re doing well, but the checks come when they come. So I was in a situation in 2005 where I knew when the checks were coming and I had insurance. It was a divine opportunity for growth, for clarity, for me to know that I’m loved and taken care of, and for me commit to standing fully in my Divine power. I did try to sue, but the [George W.] Bush administration has made it impossible for people to get any righteous help. I checked with many attorneys and essentially nowadays, to do a malpractice suit – even if you have a good case and mine was a good case – if you ain’t dead or maimed or completely fucked up, at the end of it all, you’re not going to win. Or you’re going to take such a financial risk that it just isn’t worth it. So, all the attorneys that I spoke with told me they felt it was a good case, they felt it was something I should’ve of course be compensated for, but what would happen is that for them to do the case, they would have to put out $40,000 or so in expenses, and if we didn’t win, I’d have to pay them back. So, I just...I did file with the Texas Board of Medical Examiners. They wrote back and said I didn’t have any basis to file a complaint. It’s just infuriating. I at least wanted to file a complaint, to follow through, partially because I know that there are people out there that are going to be going there everyday and there’s no telling what they’re going to be treated like.

And that’s the thing. You had this particular situation, with so many blessings. But for every person who has the ability to deal with it, there are 10 people who don’t. And it’s so deep.

It’s so deep, you know? So, here I am. I’m cancer free. I did not have to have chemo. I feel healthier and better than I ever felt. One of the things that I now know is that I was sick. I was sick for a long time. And I was so exhausted and it’s not normal to be tired like that. I thought it was `oh, I have a big work schedule.’, `I have allergies’. `Drink more coffee and push on.’ That ain’t normal. It is not normal. And so now, I feel better than I have felt for as long as I can remember. I mean I have to be very careful. I’m learning how to create a life that is in filled with Abundance, balance, joy, generosity and gratitude. I feel better than I have felt for as long as I can remember and I now know just how sick I was.

Wow.

Yeah, it’s really something.

Did that affect your creative process?

Yeah, part of what’s happened – and I think this is why I don’t quite know what my process is now. I’m still in recovery. And also, because I had such a spiritual shift and alignment and just such a radical transformation, I’m just adjusting to a whole lotta things. I’m not quite sure how to facilitate it right now, the creative process. I know that it’s kinda the same. I can tell that it’s time for me to write. The ancestors are talking to me, kinda giving me a nod here and there. I know that I need to read and look at pictures and listen to music and so I’m doing that and have conversations that might spark something, but I don’t have the same attention span. I can’t focus in the same way right now. I know that it’ll all become clear soon. But it’s not clear right now.

Alright. I had another question, but it has gone. Is there anything else you wanted to share.

No. Just that my daughter’s 23 and she’s a performer. And my partner is wonderful and this is a great opportunity. I’m glad you’re doing this.

Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. That is so exciting that you’re daughter’s a performer.

Yeah. She’s an exquisite singer and an incredible actor. She graduated from NYU – the Tisch School for Performing Arts, The Lee Strasbourg Studio. She’s amazing. I feel very blessed. Her and I’ve been through a lot. And we support each other, we see who we are. We work together from time to time. We’re very, very different in many ways and it’s cool. I learn a lot from her. Yeah. And my partner, her and I, as I was saying, we’ve worked together for 16 years, she has a wonderful talented daughter that is a dancer. I’ve know her since she was little, so it’s all quite special. My partner and I, we’ve been together since `04 but we’ve worked together for 16 years. So that’s pretty special.

The flow’s there, for sure.

Absolutely

Do you want to say anything about the Austin Project at all, what you’re working on right now?

79 Yeah, yeah – that’d be fun. My partner, who’s Dr. Joni Jones, Omi Osun Olomo, is Associate Director at the Center for African & African American Studies at UT [Austin] and is the producer of The Austin Project. It was her idea to bring artists, scholars, and activists together for a creative process. It turned out that it became women. She started this in 2002. Initially it was going to being open to both men and women, but it turned out that it was women, so it is women scholars, artists, and activists. This is the fourth year that we’ve been doing it. I’m the anchor artist, so I facilitate the creative process. She always brings guests artists in. Laurie Carlos has been a guest artist for all four years. Daniel Alexander Jones, Robbie McCauley, Carl Hancock Rux have been guest artists. Local artists like Zell Miller 111 have done work with us as well. It has been a tremendous experience. We come together for four hour sessions, once a week for 10 weeks or more. We just get inside of a jazz aesthetic, which is about being present, walking together and focusing on a creative conversation that includes personal experiences. At the end of it all, the women present work that they’ve created in the Austin Project. And yeah, we’ll do it again next year. This year, at the end of the Austin Project we’re also going to have a training. I’m going to present, I’ve created a method of facilitating creative writing that I call Finding Voice which is the method that I use during the Austin Project. I’m gonna train the women in that method at the end of it all this year.

Also I want to mention that Wura [-Natasha Ogunji], myself and Krissy [Mahan] are in the process of creating a film of love conjure/blues. The piece will live as a film, and also it will be digital environment that I will read inside of. I am calling it a text installation. So, we’re in the early stages of that. Raising money and planning on shooting a few scenes.

That’s exciting.

Yeah, so I guess there’s a lot going on. And I guess somewhere in the back of my mind or in my consciousness, sub-consciousness, there’s a new story brewing and so I’m looking forward to seeing what that is.

And what the ancestors have to say.

Yeah, yeah- very, very excited.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

[End Tape 2, A 127]

Supporting the Project

2006-12-30T14:49:00.000-08:00

If you would like to make a donation, you can do so online using paypal:

Your donations will help purchase audiocassettes and other equipment, as well as with the cost of postage and transcription.

Thank you!!

The Context

2006-12-19T14:46:00.000-08:00

Why am I doing this oral history project?

Well, a couple of years ago, I was painfully struck by the gaps between my generation (folks born in the 1970s) and prior generations and later generations. What I mean is, I was struck by how HIV and cancer had wiped out a whole bunch of LGBTQ artists of color who directly shaped my thinking. And I panicked. I cried and I panicked. So I said, well, what can I do to make sure that my elders are not forgotten? That their voices are not lost?

I decided to go with an oral history project. One, because I love to hear peoples' voices and laughs. Two, I remembered an interview from Barbara Smith's Homegirls and how hearing the way people talked, what they talked about and the kinds of connections they made directly influenced my thinking about how we pass on information. Three, I wanted something that could be used in multiple formats.

All of that said, this oral history project is an attempt to capture some of the worlds made up by LGBTQ artists of color.

As part of that, I think it's also important to set the context. It's 2006 and we are dealing with a full on global war against the poor, migrants (across all nations), women and queers. And in the United States country, the brunt of that is also borne by people of color. So, I was on youtube.com and I found the footage from the Breakthrough's public forum, "Why Can't America Have Human Rights?". This forum was held at The Riverside Church in New York City on September 14, 2006. The event, co-sponsored by 70 organizations, attracted 600 guests, including community members, students, and leaders. The speakers and performers were united in their platform— we must take a stand against abuses and create a much needed human rights movement in the United States.

Joo-Hyun Kang, a significant leader in the U.S. LGBTQ movement, made some important intersectional connections that I wanted to have here as background, not just to this project, but to my political grounding and why I'm doing this work. I believe art and cultural production are fundamental parts of constructing a society's thought, and memory. I also believe that there is a fundamental connection between a country's human rights record and the lives of LGBTQ artists of color survival rates.

Joo-Hyun Kang from Astraea

In addition, in 2007, I learned about tiona m.'s film where she interviews 50 black lesbians across the United States, asking them to talk about numerous questions. I am excited to see her film, and put a link up here in the hopes that she'll get additional support to finalize the film and put it out in the world. Here's a clip, where she interviews filmmaker/artist Michelle Parkerson about the process of making her documentary "A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde"

There's more information about her on her blogspot: http://www.blackwomynconversations.blogspot.com/

Introductions

2006-12-05T11:27:00.000-08:00

We are the Magicians, the Path-breakers, the Dream-makers
LGBTQ POC Oral History Project

The vision for this project is to document the personal and social histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, gender non conforming, queer artists of color, with a specific emphasis on visual,literary and performance artists.

Come back soon to read oral history interviews with:

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Sharon Bridgforth
Tisa Bryant
r.Erica Doyle
Steven G Fullwood
Reginald Harris
Yosenio Lewis
Lisa C. Moore
Matt Richardson
Iya Ta'Shia Asanti
Wura-Natasha Ogunji

If you are a LGBTQ artist of color and would like to participate, please contact me, Ana Lara, at zorashorse@yahoo.com, and in the subject line, write: Oral History interview.

To make a donation in support of the Magic Makers project, go here: