The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this interview, Sarah Ghazal Ali spoke with Kashmiri poet Sanna Wani about her debut collection, My Grief, the Sun, out now from House of Anansi. We invited Toronto-based visual artist Harmeet Rehal to respond to Sanna’s debut. We hope the interview paired with art offers a fruitful, meditative experience as you read.
“Any assertion of meaning is strange and striking.” —Sanna Wani
My Grief, the Sun by Sanna Wani: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
SA: I’m curious about your relationship to epigraphs and “after” poems, which are particularly present in the first section of the book. I wonder if we could begin with a question of lineage or relationality—are there larger contexts or conversations that you’d say your book emerges from, or joins, or responds to?
Wani: So many. First and foremost, the conversations and books of my life, written in the air. I’ve had to transcribe a lot of interviews and what I’m always struck by is the sheer volume of words we leave behind daily…Is there a more powerful vehicle for verse than a mouth? Every poem starts there for me. Then in text—I am drawn to thinking in terms of the word kinship. I do this thing with friends that I also do with books: I imprint. I fall in love and then circle back endlessly. I did this with Heather Christle’s THE TREES THE TREES, Billy Ray Belcourt’s THIS WOUND IS A WORLD, Yanyi’s THE YEAR OF BLUE WATER, my friend Roha. I like to write in a feeling of nearness. I like the texture of lingering. When I read a good poem, I usually want to write. Many of those after poems were made in feelings like that.
SA: Who is in the bibliography of My Grief, the Sun?
Wani: This is such a lovely question which—forgive me!—I’m going to answer with a plug! But later this spring, maybe in May, I’m doing a feature with the Syllabus project to literally create a syllabus aka bibliography for the book, especially around the themes of the title poem. The restorative properties of grief, the kaleidoscope of love. A sneak peak of that looks like: Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and Han Kang’s White Book. Some paintings by Remedios Varo. Arooj Aftab’s discography. My mama’s recipe for razma dal.
SA: In section IV, you write, “In the oldest language we know, intention means to stretch. /I am looking for a map. Something to mould touch.” I’m thinking now about how putting together a book can be an act of intention, or a stretching toward.This book is also full of beloveds— friends, contemporaries, and ancestors—and I’m interested in this choice to bring in and name others. Could you speak to this?
Wani: Totally! Thank you for seeing that so clearly. The line, that entire poem really, came out of a phone call and walk I took with my friend Francis early in the pandemic. Most poetry is born in community so it feels natural to me, to want the beloved present and named. There is also a question of privacy and ethics, which comes with naming, which I thought a lot about. I also have a background in anthropology and ethnography which maybe slips through here but I felt the need to share those poems in section four with everyone they named before the book came out. Some writers might think I’m compromising my art there—the Cat Person debate, right—but I just think that, even if the poem is mine first, it is not mine alone. Like any act of love, there needs to be consent. Consent, which is its own kind of intention. Intention, which can be a kind of love.
SA: The four distinct sections (some with subsections within them) are so carefully, thoughtfully rendered—I wonder how you arrived at the right structure, the right order for these poems. How did the book in its current form take shape? How did you bring the poems together?
Wani: I took the advice of a mentor, Canisia Lubrin, and printed everything then laid it out on the floor of our hamam in Kashmir, a room with no sofas, and just stared at everything together until it felt right. It took a few days. My parents were very confused. I would crouch over poems, I would throw poems away, I would decide entire sections needed to go then put them back in. A very physical process. Internally in sections, I paid a lot of attention to the beginnings and endings of poems. I wanted there to feel like there was a thread running through them even as it was unraveling. It became pretty clear pretty quickly which structure felt best because it felt fun. It was playful. I chose the order that got me excited and I’m a nerd so I get excited by patterns, by consistency and loose symmetry. I also only had four visual poems I really loved and so I let those be anchors. Pillars. The broader structure fell into place pretty easily after that. Well, easily might be a stretch. Editing a book can feel a bit like an exorcism, or birth. My friends think I’m unhinged for this but I actually (safely and with supervision) set the entire manuscript on fire after I was done. Great catharsis. I’m an Aries! I love ritual, and drama.
SA: Can you share your journey to publication? How did it all come to be through House of Anansi Press? How long did it take to find a home (or perhaps, the right home) for your book?
Wani: In 2018, I attended the Anansi poetry bash in Toronto because one of my professors was there. I ended up really loving another poet’s work there, Mikko Harvey, and stayed aware of Anansi afterwards. Then in 2019, I applied and received one of the Ontario Arts Council’s Recommender grants via Anansi. I emailed them once the project was done to ask if they’d like to consider it and they did! That was “Forming Glory.” Kevin, my editor, got back to me about six months later and said he loved it but wanted more. We built the book together in the summer of 2021. It was originally something like three different manuscripts. Some of them had been floating around—and been rejected—for years. Some of them were unfinished and kind of remain so. Now they’ve found a life together, in the hodgepodge home of this book.
SA: Before I even began to read any of the poems, I flipped through and marveled at how formally diverse your book is. There are visual poems, ekphrastic poems, prose poems, maps, and an entire section of erasure poems that I wouldn’t have recognized as erasures had I not read the note about them in the back of the book. Can you talk about some of the formal choices you implement throughout My Grief, the Sun?
Wani: I’m always really happy when I hear people are keen on the diversity of my work. It makes me feel free to keep wandering. That’s my formal choice, if I’m going to be completely honest: to wander. I don’t plan to try new genres or styles of poems. I usually read or witness something in the genre that interests me, then carry that thought around in my back pocket for a couple of weeks. Then something sparks and I run to a computer or a blank sheet of paper and try it. The third visual poem in the collection, “Reaching”, is a great example of that. I was driving home from my friend’s house at midnight and I could see the shape of my hand in the poem already. The loop of the questions. I took the photo against the wall–all the visual poems are edited photos of my body–and edited it until like 4 am. There are at least sixty versions of that poem. It felt like being possessed. It felt like being alive.
SA: I’d love to hear your thoughts on erasure as practice in general.
Wani: I think a lot about erasure. Like everyone, I’ve read and reread Solmaz Sharif’s essay on it and spent time with Chase Berggrun, Robin Coste Lewis and Srikanth Reddy’s work as well. I have, buried somewhere in my computer, notes for a draft of an essay I wanted to write once. I had a line in the original acknowledgements of the draft I sent Kevin—back when the book was just section two—something about how there was a white man’s voice in that text and how I ate it. Sharif’s idea of erasure is a critical political intervention on the methodology of poetry. But when I think about Forming Glory, and what I was trying to say in that unfinished essay, I think about erasure not as obliteration but decomposition. hiI let van Ess’s text ferment in my voice for, like, two years. What is that term in kombucha making? A scoby? My mind, the bacteria. His voice, the tea. I poured myself into that text. By the end, it wasn’t that my voice had replaced his. His text still exists. It was that I had entered his voice looking for my own. In that kind of synthesis, we had become an entirely new thing, together.
Erasure is connected to after poems too. It was a process of salvage. I like mushrooms a lot and mushroom foraging. In the class I originally wrote these poems as the final assignment for, we learned a lot about histories of mystical Sufism, Muslim scientists and alchemy: people who had fantastic, magical and curious ideas about spirit, body and God. Scholars who were brave and strange and worth remembering and thinking with, buried behind this weird German professor who kept comparing Prophet Muhammed to Dante. My professor, Amira Mittermaier, said something like, “Even as they erased those histories, there’s something rich the Orientalist texts about Islam preserved.” I wanted to take that richness back. I wanted to make it mine.
SA: Yours is a book that holds close the natural world while simultaneously collapsing the less tangible borders between space, time, distance, and the divine. I’m deeply moved by the way these poems center astonishment and inquiry. Every poem beseeches, and I can’t uncouple these poems from prayer. Has faith or devotional / ritual practices of any kind influenced your writing?
Wani: Faith is always what I go back to. Poetry and faith are like twins in me. Usually I can tell them apart—sometimes I am struck by just how similar they are. Have you read that Frank O’Hara poem? “I wear work shirts to the opera”? “The better part of [my heart], my poetry”? That’s how I feel about them, the better parts of my heart. It doesn’t matter how far I feel from my community or my culture. Whenever the world wounds me, I pray. Whenever grace visits me, I pray. And whenever I pray, I feel like I’m inside God’s poems. “Every poem beseeches.” That’s such a precious and astute observation. To be seeking. That’s for sure what I’m doing. On my walks, sitting on my favorite bench, or on my jainimaaz, head bent in sajda. I am waiting to be astonished. It usually doesn’t take long—and even when it does, the slowness is the point. To sit inside a feeling and sink back into the world, like water in water. That’s George Bataille from Theory of Religion: “[The animal] moves [with the world] like water in water.” I am always trying to become the animal. I think God is another name for the world, the water.
Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri settler living near the Missinnihe river (Eastern Ojibwa: trusting waters), on land stewarded since time immemorial by the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudnosaunee among many other diverse First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. Sanna completed her MA in literary and environmental anthropology from the University of Toronto. She loves daisies.
In If These Covers Could Talk, poets interview the visual artists whose works grace their book covers. The result is an engaging discussion of process, vision, and projects. This series is a celebration of collaboration—here, we champion the fruitful conversations taking place both on and behind the cover.
This month, poet Dorothy Chan talked to designer Zoë S. Donald about the cover of BABE (Diode Editions, 2021).
A Conversation Between Dorothy Chan and Zoë S. Donald
Unedited audio included above. The interview below has been condensed for clarity. Access the unedited transcript here.
Dorothy Chan (she/they): Zoë, I’m so happy to be having this conversation with you today about BABE. I love her so much. I always say all my books are she/her pronouns. I love the cover, like, a million times infinity. I remember when I saw it, especially with the honey dripping and the candy, it just made me want to cry. And I feel like this cover really encapsulates the meaning behind the book, the ethos of the book, the forms, and the content, and the joy, and sex of the book. What’s beautiful, too, is that it also captures the essence of Honey Literary Inc., which is one of my many editorial passions in life.
[Note: They ended up talking about the full trajectory from Dorothy’s books going from she/her to she/they. That was a very special moment.]
I wanted to start out with a general question. I’m wondering if we could talk about the inspiration behind the cover. I know, that’s really general, but I think that’s a fun place to start.
Zoë S. Donald (they/them): Okay, well, you were the inspiration for the cover. The book was, I mean, and also, I was looking at your cover ideas, and the honey bear was one of them—number 2.
I focused on this honey bear because it has this really iconic shape and really rich material. All of BABE itself and your other work has a lot to do with different types of tastes and auras. It’s really imbued with what a lot of Americans might say is a brand. It’s associations and feelings and experiences that we’ve had when we’re ingesting pop culture.
You mention a lot in the poems about eating burgers and shakes and I have a lot of experiences that are in Fuddruckers. That was where I had romantic experiences in Qatar, where I lived before—in Fuddruckers of all places. These burgers and shakes connect us, right?
[In BABE] I really enjoyed these really big metaphors for tastes and experiences. And so, I worked with the honey bear image for a long time. And actually, I should probably back up, sorry. I’m looking at my images and I’m like, where do I need to start? Okay, so I grabbed some image references.
DC: I’m excited.
ZD: I started looking at and working with references.
DC: Yeah. Yeah, that’s so cool. That’s a Valentine. It’s such coincidental timing. [The interview took place a day before Valentine’s Day.]
ZD: Yeah, it was from this really kitsch advertisement for General Motors’ Motorama. I had this image and another with a woman floating around, trying out all these cars and stuff like that, but it took place in Las Vegas. So I was trying to connect, first of all, to a place in BABE. There are a lot of places in BABE, but one of the main iconic places like this honey bear—I’m thinking of other icons and things like that—is Las Vegas. And so, I was thinking also of your fascination with Liberace…
Photo by Allan Warren, creative commons license
ZD: So… you’ve got this, like, “over-the-top” showmanship. But I do believe in Liberace’s sincerity…A lot of people take it like, you know—they laugh at this queerness, right? That’s what it is, like—
DC: Yeah.
Zoë: And I adore it. This is the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. It was designed by the Las Vegas signmaker Betty Willis.
She died a couple of years ago. I think that her inspiration must have been Liberace. I mean, how could it not have been? I was looking at his sequins—their reflections in the limelight—and it looks like a North Star.
DC: Oh my god, I think that this is just so smart. You’re completely right. So many people who don’t get it laugh at this queerness or they try to fetishize it. But there was a reason why he was such a big showman. You think about all the outfits he had. This one [in the picture] is so signature. He also had these coats that were all fur and over the top with sequins and rhinestones, and he’d bring a candelabra on stage. So absolutely… I find that even today, with all the amazing contemporary architecture in Vegas, there’s this interesting mix of that plus kitschy-ness. In many odd ways, you know, Liberace is kind of in all of that, I think…
I remember taking a pop culture class back in my undergrad days at Cornell, which was when this fascination [with Liberace] started and, oddly enough, that was also when I was starting to develop my own queerness without being fully aware, right, of my identity or sexuality—but that’s what college is for. And I remember my professor, Glenn Altschuler—a brilliant scholar of American pop culture and history—told us that every single week, Liberace would get love notes and marriage proposals from all these women. And that’s the funny part. I subconsciously feel like he did that to also just kind of rub in in people’s faces like Oh, hey, I’m queer.
ZD: Yeah, right? Whew. Anyway . . . I also wanted to match your excesses and the maximalisms of BABE and I had really high aims with that. [laughs] I realized that I had to set the stage. I tend to fixate on really small details. And I mean, you can even see that in the reflections in BABE:
That’s a window, reflecting in the honey. I zoomed in really closely to change the lines and make them a bit straighter in places. And then I realized, that is so much detail in and of itself that it needed space to just breathe. And then that’s where I finished. But before that, I also traveled through all these other maximal ideas…
DC:[laughs] Oh, this makes me so happy. Oh, dang, there’s that many. I didn’t realize it was that many.
ZD:I loved it. The food aspect, the taste, the colors of BABE were something that I really wanted to highlight. Now, I want to show you all the bears.
DC:The bear is also so queer, so this is so fitting.
ZD:Yeah, actually, I didn’t consider that until now because they’re like, so cute. They’re not big at all.
DC:So pretty. Oh my god. That’s so pretty.
ZD:So there’s this bear shape, right… I wanted to showcase it that way. But then I started to realize, you know, it’s very, maybe too iconic, too linear. It would have to sit in the middle of the composition, right? So when I was trying to work out a cover, I cropped it. I kept fiddling with it. I felt like, well, I need to get into the actual honey of it, the actual medium… [I went through] two font iterations.
So this one is a serif font, and it obviously doesn’t work. The ligatures are too thin, and it didn’t really hold the medium very well. So I needed something fat, and I found this typeface called Intro. It’s versatile. For this, it worked out perfectly because the medium could expand beyond the limits of the character and still be somewhat legible.
DC: Oh, wow.
ZD:So honey has this really orange look in the bottle. It’s got this really rich color, but then when you spread it out it just loses it. I needed something to reinforce that. So I figured I’d have to photograph it on a colored background…
I went through iterations. I ended up using this orange.
DC:I think it’s also neat because I know after the cover reveal, a lot of people online said that it looks like a lollipop, or candy, and the whole process reminds me of candy-making. I love hearing how sensory your process was. I think the color combination, too, exudes the ethos and the spirit of the book.
ZD:Right? I wanted it to be tart, something surprising. Because honey has this really, like deep and sometimes subtle sweetness and I felt like BABE often gives a one-two punch, and then it comes back for round two or three… I didn’t know if honey could carry that much energy. So, I wanted to play that up with color.
DC:Yeah, it was really funny because I was thinking about the pinks of the book, you know, because I kind of love an aesthetic that’s also super feminine or femme, I guess in my case, but, after going on the Pantone website I’ve been like figuring out which exact magenta or magentas is it gonna like, lie between, I looked back and I was like, Wait, the one that you just pulled up is actually very, very similar to Barbie’s magenta, and I didn’t even like realize that.
Then I Googled it, because I’m always interested to see what colors other brands or products use, and one of the Google matches that came up was Barbie’s magenta, and then like, oh, wait, that actually makes sense.
ZD: I remember that I played around with Barbie, too, especially with this D:
DC: These cherries remind me a lot of a dress that Barbie wore but then they also remind me a lot about the wardrobe from Sex and the City back in its heyday. These cherries remind me of some of what Patricia Field—who was the stylist or designer for that show—would gravitate towards.
It’s something that’s very unabashedly feminine but in this very kitschy type of way… so, yeah, it was really funny seeing these cherries, because I’m just like, Oh, I feel all these references. Something that I think about a lot is the meaning of American pop culture to kids of immigrants, and a lot of BABE is kind of this ‘child of immigrants’ story. That always runs through my work. But I think that there’s this deep understanding that a lot of kids of immigrants have with how they grasp American popular culture. And oftentimes, I feel like these kids, especially as they get older, point to problematic things within this culture. Yet there is still this kind of interesting sentimentality and memory that they hold on to because it’s basically this idea of Oh, my parents worked really hard so I could have access to all these things. So let me rewrite the story.
ZD:Definitely.
DC:Something that was really important to me when we were talking about the creation of BABE was accessibility. Early on, I remember you telling me Oh, this font is accessible. Could talk a bit more about that? Accessibility is something that I’m continuously learning, especially with heading a lit mag.
ZD: So, there are fonts that are more readable or legible in the body of a text and others are more suitable for titles or signage. Then there are fonts that are easier for people with Dyslexia to read. There’s another aspect of accessibility where you can listen to an audiobook. That, for some people, is way more accessible than holding a book in your hands. I have a couple of people with Dyslexia in my family and they’re into e-books and audiobooks. We’ve talked about how many books we’ve read and, you know, they’ve been listening to them, and I wonder if I even need to change the way I talk about reading…if we can think about reading in terms of listening. I have a lot of gripes with accessibility in terms of material culture. People say e-books are the cure as if they alone can solve a lot of issues. But e-books often use proprietary software, and you’re designing for a system that’s mostly owned by Jeff Bezos. They don’t break down as many barriers as people think they do.
Another aspect of accessibility within literature concerns zines and DIY culture. Chapbooks are awesome. Within chaps, within zines, I’ve seen a lot of people explore things that they haven’t or maybe wouldn’t really be able to think about or share in mainstream venues, in mainstream publishing, especially.
I have some good examples. I don’t know if this exactly answers your question, but when you were talking about accessibility I thought, well, that’s definitely zines, right?
DC: Right. I’d love to see what you have.
ZD: I have a small pamphlet of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It begins with a quote that says, “when asked about what she wanted to see happen to the books after death, I want them available. I want cheap paper editions of them. I want them to be continuously downloaded in forty different languages. I want them to be read. I want them to be argued about. I want people to cry over them. I want unreadable dissertations written about them. I want people to get angry with them. I want people to love them.” I thought that was this really great anti-capitalist sentiment.
DC: I love that so much. I think that talking about accessibility, creating texts, and selecting the right font is just another reason why I just love working with the entire Diode family, and why it’s been such a pleasure working with you, Zoë. And I think that’s something else that’s really important within this conversation. It’s about accessibility, but it’s also about readership, and bringing in more readers, and making sure that everything that’s created is accessible to those readers on multiple levels.
I also think that this goes back to these questions of community and I thought that within this interview it would be nice to celebrate all the great work that Diode is doing and all the amazing Diode authors and of course, all the work that you do, Zoë, along with Patty and Law, who are wonderful. Maybe we could talk a little about some fun upcoming projects that Diode is up to or what you’re excited about with the press.
ZD: Oh, definitely. Well, Patty is always first and foremost on my mind. Everything that I’ve been able to do, that the press is doing and has done, has begun with her energy and the love that she has for all of these books, and the vision she has for Diode. Her editorial example is one that I try to live by every day. Diode—and my experience of poetry—would not be the same without Patty. And, you know, all the authors are so awesome.
There are so many authors with different backgrounds and, to touch back on your question about accessibility, I also was thinking of people who come to Diode with a multilingual background as well. There are poems that are multilingual. And it’s really awesome to be able to find a typeface that caters to both languages. It’s really important for a voice to come through as one author’s voice. So, I think, in a couple of books, whether it’s Arabic and English or Korean and English, the typefaces should mirror each other in some way. Like, the Hangul shouldn’t assimilate into an English style or, you know, the Roman aesthetic. We can find a typeface that works for both. There aren’t a lot of typefaces out there that can accomplish that.
DC:Yeah, that’s such a major challenge. It’s why I really value the work that you do because something that irritates me is this old standard that some people unfortunately still have that, if, in a poem/short story/essay, you have words or phrases in a language other than English people are like, Oh, those should be italicized. No. You’re basically othering a language. It’s one thing if the word not in English is italicized because the character, let’s say, is emphasizing that word or shouting that word, you know. But if it’s plain-spoken, it should be in the same style or within the same realm. I think one of the many reasons why Diode is so great is because we have these certain design challenges but we work around them and create something that is authentic and respectful, and honors all the cultures and identities that are set forth, as well as the readers.
ZD: You’ve really touched on a huge design conversation, or series of conversations. One of my design texts talks about how footnotes have sort-of become a thing of the past. Footnotes themselves call back to this time when white people divided foot traffic between classes and between races in architecture. Part of the challenge in eliminating these barriers also falls on the writer. Why include a footnote as opposed to just putting everything in the text itself? Why create a hierarchy?
DC: Wow, that metaphor. I never knew that. That is an extremely strong metaphor of the hierarchy between the main text and the footnote. Wow.
ZD: Yeah. Margins. Marginalia. All of that, yeah. People think categories can be a good way to, I don’t know—instruct? That’s kind of what it comes down to. Like when you’re reading a book that’s really heavy on the glossary or a notes section and you have to keep flipping around, it can feel like an indoctrination at times.
DC: It’s almost too encyclopedic in a way, and then for the reader, having to go back and forth like, I’m absorbing this part of the text but then I have to go back or I have to look down, or you know, next to it, to be like ok here—but then you think, why isn’t all of that within the main text? I guess you’re right, it also doesn’t make for the most pleasurable—or in many cases, like accessible—experience for the reader.
I am learning so much today, and I always treasure our time together. I’d love to ask you—what is one of your favorite fonts?
ZD: Oh my gosh. So, it is Baskerville, well—that is my favorite font for BABE, as you know, because I had to have—I had to see—the word “Queer” written with the Baskerville “Q”. I took this graphic design class for illustrators a really long time ago. My professor, Robert Meganck, he really changed my mind about design. He said that the most beautiful typeface is Baskerville and that always stuck with me because he said, it’s because of the Q. And I kept thinking about that “Q” literally for the rest of my life.
DC: [laughs] I’m so in love with this “Q” — this Queer Q!!
ZD: I agree, ever since he said that in class—and that’s also the time, as you said before, that you’re having these queer experiences, in college. Or, you’re becoming you in a way where you’re starting to see yourself, to mirror yourself, you know, and I didn’t become the Q, but I could see the Q.
DC: I have one final question for you! I want to talk a bit more about unity and I know that we’ve seen so many instances of unity here from being able to see the process of creating the honey words of BABE, thinking about the placement of the honey bears on the cover, and selecting fonts. I’m wondering, as a designer, how would you succinctly describe the ways in which the cover enhances the story of the book?
ZD: I think it relates a lot to tone. It’s strange—my thoughts come with a question: When you’re writing poetry, do you see an image, or do the words roll off your tongue? Like, how do these images—how do these words—get there? I’m more visual, so at least in my approach, I tend to summarize things visually. And so, that’s where the visual metaphor comes from, for me. I want to convey something that reminds me of the word, as a shorthand.
When I see covers out there, the ones that stick out to me, that I associate a lot of myself or a narrative with—it’s associative, it‘s in dialogue with something in my subconscious. And I’m aware that’s also a very biased read, right? I don’t want to exclude stories from my experience. I’m also thinking about what covers recently that I’ve seen that gave me that. Off the top of my head, I’m remembering Randall Mann’s A BETTER LIFE. It’s really well-designed.
These portraits on the front are from Blueboy magazine. The cover artist is Pacifico Silano and the graphic designer is Rita Lascaro. So when you see something like this, organized in this grid structure, you’re calling out newspapers and tabloids and these structures that already exist. And, before I saw the book, I was like, these images on the cover are kinda like centerfolds, like in a magazine, in their shared gaze and composition. In the design structure, inside the book, every poem is centered on the page, just as a classified ad would be if you excerpted it from the publication—it would be framed in that way. The design carries forward this visual metaphor of solicitation in order to play with the text.
I have also seen that in the covers for Ocean Vuong’s ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS and Garth Greenwell’s CLEANNESS. Those cover images—by Sam Contis and Jack Davison, respectively—remind me of Dorothea Lange and her survey of hardship, and feelings, and grief. All of those feelings are carried through those images and also throughout those works. And so, when I see a cover like that, I feel like I’m already connected to the story. That’s what I was trying to do with BABE.
DC: That makes sense since we’re talking about the unity of it all. The design elements, these visuals, these snippets of images that we see, they kind of bring forth, in the case of poetry—more. I always argue that the strongest poetry always goes back to the image. And the image doesn’t have to be this literal thing, though many times beautiful poetry has these literal images that can read like billboards or classifieds or something that’s just simply very sharp in our minds.
ZD: Definitely. I felt honored to be able to see these parts of BABE. The textures, the colors, it’s all really eye-opening and filled with wonder. It was a pleasure to design. It was a pleasure to work on the layout, specifically for the poems. They look really nice on the page. I thought I’d have more trouble getting everything to work, but it just—in the way that you or I would read through it—the words flow with such ease. So thank you for that opportunity, too.
DC: I can’t thank you enough. It’s just been such a wonderful time so far with you, Zoë, and with Patty and Law, and with Diode. I remember one of my favorite memories was when we got to meet at AWP in Portland. It was nice to get to see a good number of Diode authors—I think that we have such a beautiful, vibrant, and diverse poetry community. I can’t thank you enough. I’m just so touched that I was able to see your process today.
ZD: Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to talk about all this.
Zoë S Donald is a project manager and artist who lives and works in Richmond, VA, where they studied painting at Virginia Commonwealth University. They are managing editor of Diode Editions.
The Legacy Suite is a three-part interview series in which poets delve into the tumultuous journey of publishing a debut full-length collection: before publication, during, and after. For this first interview, I.S. Jones speaks with Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti about the governing principles of her debut, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)—the process of putting together the manuscript, how faith and shame operated in her book, and how Chatti had to transform her thinking to view Mary, the book’s central figure, as a fully formed woman, not unlike Chatti herself.
Deluge by Leila Chatti: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
Jones: Prior to Deluge, you had two chapbooks Ebb & Tunsiya/Amrikiya. I am interested in how these chapbooks prepared you to take on a larger body of work. Was the drive to create Ebb different from the drive to create Tunsiya / Amrikiya?
Chatti: Yes, very! At the beginning of 2016, I set a resolution to put together a chapbook by the end of the year. I didn’t know then what that year would look like—violence across the world and in the United States (Nice, Brussels, Orlando), massive numbers of refugees displaced and endangered, and intensifying rage and despair during the presidential election, which of course culminated in Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States. I spent much of 2016 deeply unsettled and distracted, overwhelmed with the chaos and devastation I was witnessing. I had come to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in October to begin a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, but spent those first two months unable to focus, caught up in the news and my feelings about the news. When December came around, I remembered my promise to myself and decided I would try to meet that goal, to try and pivot in the direction of something good to dedicate my energy and attention to. I spent a week at my kitchen table in Provincetown putting Tunsiya/Amrikiya together. I had written most of the poems for it already that year and the year prior, and only had to write a few more, to balance the manuscript. I had originally thought of Tunsiya/Amrikiya as being two sister chapbooks—one titled Tunsiya, and the other Amrikiya, and actually still have the original files named that way—but when I sat down to look at my poems, I realized I couldn’t easily categorize them as being Tunisian or American, and that separating them that way would be impossible. The point was, of course, I was both; trying to separate what of me was Tunisian and what was American would be like trying to split myself in half.
Ebb, on the other hand, came about completely—ah, unwillingly? What I mean is, unlike the poems in Tunsiya/Amrikiya, which I had been publishing steadily before putting them together as a manuscript, the poems in Ebb were private, secret poems, and I had not intended to ever share them. I had also written those poems in 2015 and 2016, but they had been what I consider “diary poems,” poems to make sense of things for myself (because poems are the form in which I process the events of my life, primarily). Ebb came about because a week after Tunsiya/Amrikiya was accepted for publication by Bull City Press, I received an e-mail from Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani inviting me to submit a chapbook for the New-Generation African Poets series.
Both projects, looking back on them now, prepared me for the much larger project of Deluge. I actually also wrote a substantial chunk of the poems in Deluge during 2015 and 2016 as well—it was a period of both great difficulty and great creativity for me. Looping back to the first story, my resolution in 2016—that spring, I was living with Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar, and things were still mostly calm in the world at that point, and I was happily getting ready to think about a chapbook. I looked at my poems and grouped them, as is my way. I realized I had all these Mary and health poems that were clearly in conversation—the illness at the center of Deluge had only just resolved, more or less, in the spring of the year earlier, 2015, and I had been writing poems during and following that experience—so many that I was right up against the page count for a chapbook. I brought them to Dorianne, who knew of my goal, and said I had enough poems for a chapbook but felt I had only just gotten started saying what I wanted to say, so what should I do—should I cut and condense? She took one look at it and said, “Leila, this isn’t a chapbook, this is your book.” And I was very, very afraid of that answer, because I didn’t feel I was ready to be writing my capital B book, and I certainly didn’t want it to be about that.
Jones: Can you tell me when you realized you were in the middle of a book project? Sometimes a poet will be swept up by an obsession that they don’t understand they are in the middle of until they have drafted multiple poems speaking to each other. You were plagued by a severe chronic illness and dealt with chronic pain. I appreciate how you confront the complicated history of medicine when it comes to women’s bodies. When did you see Deluge begin to form into a full body of poems?
Chatti: Another pivotal moment for me in thinking about the book came when I was on a flight with Ross White, who would become my editor for Tunsiya/Amrikiya at Bull City Press but was not yet. We sat next to each other—I had gone to graduate school in Raleigh, and Bull City Press is in Durham, so we had met briefly before—and he asked if I was working on anything, and I showed him the first 20 or so poems of what would become Deluge. He read through it and then said I had two threads—faith and medicine—but he felt there was one more thread, one I hadn’t figured out yet. I was very interested in that thought and mulled it over for the next year in Provincetown, where I continued writing poems engaging with faith and illness. It wasn’t until right at the end of writing the book, when I was in Wisconsin, that I realized the final thread—shame. It had been there the whole time by not being there—like the white space that makes possible the trees. I had been avoiding talking about it directly without being consciously aware I was writing around something.
But, suddenly, it was so clear to me—what was conspicuously unsaid. Truthfully, it was very hard for me to write about shame once I understood shame was what I had to write about. I was afraid of looking at it, afraid of engaging with it for fear that it might overwhelm me if I let down my guard (if we’re using a flood as a metaphor, it was the enormous wall of water behind a dam I could not imagine opening without losing control). I was also very aware of audience now, both people from my background and not, and was afraid of how both would react. A Muslim woman talking openly about her body and sexuality, her anger and hunger for God? No matter who looked at me, I was wrong—neither secular nor devout enough, not fully free nor obedient, the wrong kind of Muslim, the wrong kind of woman. I was afraid of being seen clearly. I was ashamed of my shame. But I knew if I wanted to write the real book, not the easy book or the book I “wanted,” which is the book I felt I could control, I had to address shame. Once I began to do that, that’s when Deluge opened up beyond my plans for it, became what it wanted—needed—to be.
Jones: I am fascinated with how shame functions in the book as it relates to the body and faith. I am not Muslim, but many of the teachings in the Celestial Church of Christ mirror those of the Islamic faith: women are not to sit next to men in church, women must cover their heads in God’s house, women who menstruate cannot touch the Bible or enter the church until they have been sanctified by a man in the church. In this way, Deluge is a deeply personal book for me, as it is a book for and about women, especially women whose lives are deeply intertwined with the Divine. I didn’t know this until Deluge, but Mary is the only woman in the Qur’an mentioned by name. The way your work makes parallels between the speaker and Mary—to humanize her—is incredibly powerful. I think it is critical to note that what is so powerful about Deluge is its commitment to reposition women (specifically Mary) in a way where they are human, more than a mere vessel to usher in the Savior of Man.
Chatti: There’s something interesting about shame—no one seems to want to bring it up, but when we start talking about it, it’s hard to stop. I’ve had so many conversations—whispery, deeply intimate, trusting conversations—the past few years with women sparked from these poems, women who seem, like me, relieved to finally be talking about it, to know we’re not alone in this. It’s easier, now, for me to talk about it—shame doesn’t like being revealed to the light, and loses much of its power once it is. That revelation shows up in “Questions Directed Toward the Idea of Mary”—once we see our shame, understand it, we gain power over it, and that power can be made useful to us.
I think if you’re raised in a faith, deeply, you never really shake it off; it becomes part of your DNA, a lens through which you see the world. Whether or not I want it, my experiences with religion, its values and stories, remain with me, are central to who I am. When I became sick, I turned to faith because that is what I had been raised to do, and when I had questions, my questions were directed toward God—what else could be expected? In the Abrahamic traditions, women are not the central players; the female experience is a secondary one, a narrative subsidiary to the masculine default. Nearly all other women are referred to by their relationships to men—wives, mothers. While I was not necessarily explicitly told I was less important, the ways the stories of my youth were told to me led me to believe this. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) emphasizes the importance of names: “You will be called on the Day of Resurrection by your names and the names of your fathers, so have good names.” So what does it mean, not to be named? Who calls for us? It’s an erasure, a silence.
For a long time, Mary was an idea more than a woman to me. I think it’s often like this for children—it’s hard for children to imagine those above them, those with power and respect, to be fully-fleshed out human beings. When I became sick, I was twenty-two years old, only just beginning to think of myself as not a child, primarily because I was in a context that forced me to view myself that way—I was a high school teacher, and the presence of actual children made it clear that I was no longer one. Once I felt that shift, once I was transformed into an idea by my students and knew, of course, that I was more than that, I had this realization that kept unfolding: first that the adults I knew must be more complex than I, as a child, had imagined them, and then that everyone was. This eventually led me to consider more deeply Mary. If I were to believe in my faith, I needed to believe that Mary had once existed, was a real woman—and a real girl—and that opened all sorts of questions for me. Could I imagine, for example, Mary’s menarche? Mary playing, Mary experiencing desire, Mary afraid? When I became sick, I felt stripped of my agency, and I wondered about how Mary felt, “blessed” with a child she hadn’t asked for. How would it feel to be chosen by God, to be faced with an angel, in adolescence? What choices would someone realistically have in that context? It all really broke open for me when I returned to the Qur’an and read the passage I quote in the epigraph of the first poem of Deluge, “Confession:” while Mary was giving birth, she cried out, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” Mary’s pain made her human. I was struck by Mary’s vulnerability, her fierce refusal—that there was a moment, at the very least one, where she would have rejected God’s plan for her, where she would have chosen a different story.
Jones: I am curious about the decisions made while ordering your manuscript, which seems to follow an ordering by word association. For example, in “Mother,” the final lines are “And I’d tell you the shame of it: / the feminine failure / its ache a reminder—at the center the tumor / ballooning like hope.” This then brings us to the poem “Tumor.” Can you speak more to the choices and the logic behind the structure, the arc you wanted readers to follow? How did you bring together poems that may have been written years apart from each other?
Chatti: A great question! The ordering was a significant challenge for me. I did write the poems over a period of time—the first one came about in 2013, the last in 2018—and had not, in the beginning, imagined I was writing a book. I didn’t have a plan laid out. I actually reached out to some mentors and friends about how I might think about ordering; I say “actually” because I’m very, very private about my work while I’m working on it, and rarely reveal anything unless I’m certain it’s done. Gregory Pardlo was someone who helped talk me through different ways of thinking about the arc and order. I knew the obvious answer was to order it chronologically—first I became sick, then I got sicker, then it was fixed, and at the end, I was better—but this didn’t feel right, and Greg agreed. He said something that really stuck with me. He said, “You know, that you’re okay in the end isn’t a mystery you have to hold out from the reader—of course you survived! You wrote the book!” It clicked for me. The turning point toward wellness wasn’t the climax, the great reveal—once I was freed of that idea, I could think about what I was actually working toward, outside of the linear structure of time.
Originally, the first draft of Deluge did not have sections. That version existed for maybe six months after I finished its final poem. It felt thick, swollen, without room to breathe, and I knew it wasn’t right but I didn’t have a sense of how to correct it. I was in Ireland for a residency that summer when I began to think about sections, and the version I organized it into there is the one that is now the book. I had this extremely complicated system of notes and categories—a number of charts in my notebook, in addition to the entirety of the book on notecards, with a poem on one side and a complex series of symbols and color-coding on the back—and this system helped me to have a really clear view of what was happening in the book both on the poem level and overall. I was very deliberate about my choices; I appreciate that you noted how “Mother” leads into “Tumor,” which was part of this thinking. It was a daunting task, to pull together all these poems with different registers and shapes and concerns. I thought about images as links from one poem to another, but also tone. I didn’t want a series of poems that were all left-aligned blocks, or a number of traditional forms or prose poems in a row. It was important for me to think about breath in the manuscript, moments for silence or pause. In my first version, it was too intense for too long—the book, I think, is pretty intense overall, and even I who created it felt I couldn’t keep reading at that heightened level for more than a handful of pages—so I wanted to fold in moments of quiet, if not relief; tension and release, tension and release. The sections allowed for that, both within them and at their breaks. Having sections also allowed me to pivot—the second major section, for example, kind of does a circling back to pre-sickness, to adolescence. It interrupts the chronological narrative.
One last note about my thoughts and intentions in regard to structure: the massive poem, “Awrah,” was an interesting one to place. I’d received some suggestions to put it in the middle of the book. I chose to put it near the end, because I wanted there to be this energy near the end, that the end is never really the end—while one might expect relief following the surgery and recovery, I wanted to disrupt that expectation for a comfortable, complete resolution. The truth is, it (what I experienced, what I learned, what I felt) isn’t over—it’s just different, at a further point in a story still revealing itself to me. And “Deluge,” the final poem, the hefty cento—that poem was the only poem that could have been there. The ending had to be messy, to be uncertain, overwhelming. The cento goes in many directions, the speaker(s) within often contradicting what is said earlier in the same poem or even in the line prior, and this is intentional, it’s how I felt—yes, God, I need you, and yes, God, I turn my back, and yes, God, where are you, and yes, God, you are here, oh God, my God, no, yes, O! Everything at once.
Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, Best New Poets (2015 & 2017), and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is the Mendota Lecturer in Poetry.
In Knee Length, poet and journalist Khalisa Rae navigates the nuances of an inherited conservative legacy. Pulling from memories of her religious upbringing and education, family history, and matrilineal teachings, Knee Length is a history reimagined and excavated—a rebellious relearning of desire and respectability, family and faith.
Being Beautiful Versus Being the Object of Desire
My mom says I had curves and a sashay “that could stop traffic” at eleven or twelve. Puberty hit, my hips started to bulge, and my breasts grew in tandem with my awkwardness. Back then, I would have put Beyonce’s hourglass figure to shame. I was tall and curvy, fair-skinned with long, honey-colored braids. I was Destiny’s Child before Destiny’s Child and honey, could I work it. I’d throw together cute outfits: a red top and flared dark denim jeans, paired with an over-the-chest purse and matching shoes. A blue jean jacket with patches and pins, graphic tee, and matching backpack— a true ten fashionista. I had all the pieces of a confident girl. The recipe for self-esteem was there, but something was missing. Most of the time, I just felt like a giraffe in a sea of graceful swans.
Part of it was that I didn’t look much like my sister or my mom. Back then, we were practically opposites. I was tall, fair, and slim-thick, while my mom and sister were brown and short, full-figured with matching round faces. I wanted so badly to feel connected to the legacy of our family matriarchs, but instead, my appearance made me feel distant. My mother begot her mother’s nose, lips, and body type, and my sister begot hers. I would look in the mirror, hoping to see the matriarchs alive in my face, too, but I couldn’t find them—only paternal features that muddied my reflection.
At home, hiding was impossible; the investigation to discover where my hips and ever-expanding chest originated from made me feel more like a science experiment, and less like a beautiful girl. I’d smile and laugh, laying on the “operating table” being poked and prodded by older siblings, but inside, I’d recoil, uncomfortable with any and all scrutiny of my body. I was the oddball out, struggling to find my place and mine the beauty within.
I was hypervisible at home, but invisible at school. You would think being one of the only curvy Black girls at a private, Christian middle school would make me stick out like a sore thumb, but instead, I faded into the backdrop among the swath of thin, white, blue-eyed classmates. I was no match for Ally, Ashley, or Alisa, the pampered, privileged, populars. And of course, the boy I had a crush on, Spencer, was into Ally, not me. At parties, I’d get dressed up in my cutest dress, sure that I would turn heads, and yet I remained invisible. Despite my efforts, I was still the awkward Black girl that ruined their perfect white atmosphere.
Once, I was asked out on a date by a white boy. I showed up at the movies early, dressed in the cutest outfit I could put together. When Jessie finally showed up thirty minutes late, he told me he couldn’t date me because his parents disapproved. And we both knew what that meant— they disliked me because I was Black. I was devastated. 90’s fashion magazines and music videos already did enough damage to Black girls’ self-worth and conception of beauty, but being rejected for being Black further reinforced the belief I held that I’d never be beautiful enough to be wanted.
When I arrived at high school a year later, I finally got my chance to sit with the popular crew. I looked around and measured my beauty against theirs—was my hair pressed out enough? Were my clothes fashionable enough, my makeup and accessories in line with the latest trends? I’d strut my stuff in maxi floral dresses and wedge heels and get invited to all the football and basketball parties. I was the epitome of every pretty Black girl you’d see on your favorite teen dramedy. Tia Mowry, Raven Simone, Lisa Bonet. I finally had it all— the popularity, the wardrobe, the look—but I still didn’t feel beautiful unless the most popular guy or beautiful friend was validating me. The guys I would get entangled with were always jerks, but I would buy into every empty compliment they threw my way. I would try to fill myself up with superficial praise, but I felt nothing on the inside. Much of high school passed struggling to unlearn the damage I had internalized during puberty.
I’d go out with my mother and catch the stares of men my mother’s age; this quickly became a repeat occurrence. We couldn’t shop in peace anywhere without their toothy grins and wandering eyes running over my body. At one point, the unwanted attention grew so uncomfortable that my mother and I would leave restaurants or move seats to flee.
“What are you looking at?” my mother would sometimes demand, angrily confronting them while they stood, dumbfounded. Men twice my age would hit on me and tell my mother she and I “looked like sisters” as a cringe-worthy pick-up line. At times, we’d smile and walk away. Other times, we’d fuss them out and send them packing. To cope, I’d wrap sweaters around my waist to keep them from looking and wear baggier clothes to hide my curves. I was swimming in shame and awkwardness. The only option was to try and hide.
My hair was too coiled, my skin too brown. Speech too cultured. Taste too flashy and flamboyant. I never fit in. It began to feel as if I lived in two worlds— one where my body was the object of unwanted desire, the other where I was painfully invisible. Both soured any chance at confidence I might have developed as a teen.
At church and school, we’d learn of women whose modesty was their armor—those who refrained from drawing attention to their hips and breasts. We learned of the two opposites: the Jezebel figure and the Virgin. Where did I fit in? When married men would stop and stare at me against my will, it was hard to stop myself from feeling ashamed, and harder still to not internalize their attention as my fault. When were men going to be held accountable for their leering? In spaces where I wanted to be seen, I wasn’t. In spaces I tried to hide, everyone could see me. When would I be given the space to feel beautiful without being ashamed of my body or rendered invisible?
I grew tired. I had done enough hiding and covering up. I couldn’t go on like this. I had to own my sexuality and stop hiding in the shadows. Sunday School lessons never included the Song of Solomon’s praise of the female form. When I asked about it, my mother would evade the details. “That is a celebration of marriage. A letter from a husband to his wife,” she would explain. While that was partially true, Song of Solomon is also about celebrating a woman’s body. It helped me understand that my body is nothing to be ashamed of, but to be celebrated—that our bodies can and should be praised on our terms. I thought about the Garden of Eden and how Eve and Adam hid because they were ashamed of their nakedness. I began to long to be naked, but unabashedly so. To walk in the fullness of my inner and outer beauty. To affirm that my body did not exist for the male gaze.
When I arrived at college, I began to feel more emboldened to exert autonomy over my body, beauty, and sexuality. As I grew older, I also grew more confident calling the objectification I received out. I spoke up and refused to allow what I was learning to cherish to be disparaged any longer. As I launched into adulthood, I learned that what I experienced as a child was a type of trauma and sadly, was not uncommon. As I began to expand my reading beyond the Bible, I learned by studying Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Maya Angelou that my stride and step were for me and me only. What I wore and how I displayed my body would never be an excuse to harass, assault, or abuse me. In college, women writers became my teachers, my spiritual guides as I worked to find and protect my beauty: Eve Insler, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Alice Walker. They were my champions, my beacons as I embraced my unique voice and my self-worth.
But perhaps most importantly, they guided me to the realization that there was no dichotomy—that my sexuality and beauty were not separate or distant from my spirituality. That intersection was at the heart of my healing. On my lifelong journey to heal and unlearn shame, I could be a beautiful, sexually empowered, and spiritual being, all at once. My conservative upbringing had led me to believe that beauty, sexuality, and spirituality were mutually exclusive when in fact, they were kin, constellating parts that made up who I was. I didn’t have to be separated from my spiritual self in order to feel beautiful and empowered. My connection to a higher power, my faith and my belief in goodness—that’s what made me beautiful most of all.
In If These Covers Could Talk, poets interview the visual artists whose works grace their book covers. The result is an engaging discussion of process, vision, and projects. If These Covers Could Talk is a celebration of collaboration—here, we champion the fruitful conversations taking place both on and behind the cover.
A Conversation Between Poet Alan Chazaro and Painter Francisco Palomares
AC: I love connecting with other creators and learning about their processes. What are your thoughts about building relationships with artists from different mediums?
FP: It’s always good to diversify mediums. I love watching rappers and hip-hop artists specifically. I watch a lot of interviews and videos from artists like that and it informs my art. The other day, I was watching this old-school video of Outkast just creating music in a basement, working on their stuff, and collab-ing with all sorts of producers and music engineers. It made me realize how hip-hop lends itself so perfectly to collaboration. The visual arts kind of lack that ability to branch out to different genres sometimes. It’s a very solitary thing. But that’s why it’s good to work with writers and expand in new directions with others.
AC: Outkast is a great example of collaborative artistry. Can you tell us about what you do and who you are in one sentence?
FP: I’m an East LA visual artist, a sort of cultural anthropologist and documentarian who uses visual language, primarily through drawing and painting, to communicate myself with others.
AC: That’s the best one-sentence intro I’ve ever heard! I want to ask you about Piñata Theory. When I wrote it, Iwas thinking about fragility, socioeconomic and racial violences, breakages, regathering, and the brutal tension of it all. But what does Piñata Theory, as a concept, mean to you as a Mexican American?
FP: I feel like it’s exposure to a history and contemporary life of being Mexican American coming from immigrant families. It’s like viewing the life of people like us and those who are around us, what made us. Some things can seem stereotypical about our culture. There are certain trends. The uncles who drink too much, or the aunt who laughs too loud. To me, a piñata theory could be a look into that life, because it’s true. In my case, particularly as a man coming up as Mexican American, it’s about looking at what made us, entering that world, relating to it, and finding words you didn’t have before hidden inside.
Piñata Theory by Alan Chazaro (Black Lawrence Press)
AC: Even though we hadn’t met before this book, I intentionally selected you and your artwork with the support of my press (Black Lawrence) because your style personally resonated with me. I’m glad our visions aligned! Are there any other collabs or projects that you have completed recently or are working on at the moment?
FP:My first collabs were live painting events. I would kind of be promoting a brand, especially beer companies at their events. That was cool (laughs). But to be honest, collaborations have kind of escaped me. As a visual artist, it can be very solitary. During the process of painting, for me in particular, I’m in my own mind, my own thoughts. I work alone in my studio.
The book cover had actually been my main collaboration up to that date. After that, I’ve actually done a few more. The biggest one was a grant I received through the city to bring attention to COVID in El Monte. I would make artwork in the area to create conversations about safety and health. I got to collaborate with an entire city and not just a person. It wasn’t always as good as it sounds, though. There was lots of paperwork and logistics to manage (laugh). It’s daunting in a way. But it was a good entry into another world and an opportunity to share my work with a new, public audience.
AC:That’s baller. Often, Latinx authors and artists don’t get a say about how we’re being represented in media and culture, and our identities can be misconstrued, culturally exploited, or turned one-dimensional. How does that inform your art?
FP:There’s a disconnect within who gets to explain the narrative of a culture to an audience. Nowadays, there is more inclusion, but overall it’s overwhelmingly still white people documenting the history of another group. I’m one individual in a room of different creatives and professionals. Even though that isn’t the only solution, our presence matters [in those situations]. Getting a chance to tell our stories, straight from the source, is important.
AC: Speaking of the source, you grew up in East LA, one of the most recognized hubs of Mexican American cultura. What was that like? Who influenced you? How does your upbringing and community get reflected in your visual artwork?
FP: Growing up in East Los Angeles has played a huge part in who I am. My dad passed away when I was four, so it was basically me and my mom for most of my childhood. Being in East LA, it sounds stereotypical, looking for older male figures. I was looking for that and kind of found it through baseball, actually. I lived near a park where my school was. I connected with my community there. Since my immediate family was very small, it gave me something to do and allowed me to learn more about being Mexican American, the culture, and our traditions.
As I got older, the park became a hub for social movements. I found mentors that were active in the Chicano Movement. For me it was like going to college or something like that. I got to know the history, politics and media of being Chicano. That’s how I discovered – how I keep discovering – what it means to be Chicano from East LA. It’s been organic but I’ve also had to research at times, even though the resources were always there in different aspects of the community. In high school, for example, I heard about this retreat for Chicano students and I wasn’t even invited to it, but I went and spoke to the teacher organizing it and they brought me along. It was called CYLC, Chicano Youth Leadership Conference. We had public speakers, artists, and other professionals connect with us. It was an early example of the possibilities and pride about coming from where we do. Sal Castro was there, too, and he led some walkouts in the 70s. I got to personally chat with him. To me, this is East LA. Being able to discover. My narrative about this neighborhood is not traditional. People think of it as low income, impoverished, gang-infested, or the wild west. I didn’t grow up seeing that. Mine is a community of acceptance. It was positive for me. I like to show that and how it built my identity. My artwork is a way of showing that. That’s why I say I’m a part-time cultural anthropologist and documentarian.
East LA can become so common and traditional to those of us from here and we can forget how unique it actually is for people from all over the world. I try to capture that. It comes out in the colors and the palettes I use. It’s vibrant and eccentric. The buildings are all related to what I saw, what I grew up around. Liquor stores, night clubs, restaurants. They just remind me of the area. It all might be gone some day. But if that happens, hopefully the artwork I made will become an image of that history.
AC: That’s deep. I know you do a lot for the community and are constantly engaging with others. Tell us about your fruit cart. I remember seeing it mentioned in the LA Times, by the way, congrats! For those who’ve never seen it, can you explain what it is and how that idea became a reality for you?
FP: My fruit cart is a mobile vending art gallery, installation, performance piece. I live paint, and that’s the performance aspect, being in front of a street audience. The idea is that I’m just like a street vendor slicing up fresh fruit; I’m doing the same, but with oil painting. In half an hour or less, I’ll paint you something to take home on the spot. That’s the idea behind it.
But before that, it happened because I was just struggling to make a profit from art and needed to create revenue and methods of survival for myself as an artist in California. It came from just going to work every day at MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and getting off [Highway] 101. I would see people selling oranges off the exit of that freeway. It was such a unique hustle. Like, who just thought “I’ll grab produce and sell it on the street?” You might not see that everywhere, but in LA, that’s common. It then occurred to me that it would be kind of wild for me to stand on one of those corners and make fresh paintings of oranges and sell them for like $20. I could make the same amount of money from doing that all day as I would working at the museum. It was also near downtown, so it felt like a performance and commentary. It felt natural to me because I was always used to seeing street hustlers in my community, but for others, it must have not seemed normal. You never know how people will react to you in public. I had to think about presentation and how it fits into my artist portfolio, too. Was it just me trying to make a buck, something long-term, a day job, or more of an expression of my art in a new form?
Francisco’s Fresh Paintings, a public art installation piece
It all happened at a time when I wanted to make a change, and I left the country for a month. When I got back, a friend helped me find a cart. At first, the fruit carts were quoted at $500 to $1,000. It was expensive, but I saw it as an investment in my art career, so I went looking for one and ended up finding a much cheaper one and just touched it up. It was actually very inexpensive. I just started building it up and taking it out. When I first told my mom about it she was very supportive. She told me to turn it into my own art gallery. It was my own space to share my work with the public. Now people love it, and I’m the guy that people recognize as someone who was willing to do that. I’m currently taking a pause on it and working on other things. Maybe I’ll take it back out in the summer, who knows? It’s very laborious. That’s the performance aspect. It’s an insight into immigrant labor. Doing it day in and day out, no breaks. No regular access to restrooms. Things like that.
At some point, I’ll outgrow it and it will just be an installation about an East LA kid who wanted to make it.
AC: You paint images of queer folks, LA’s street scene, Mexico, and other social landscapes. You definitely represent many identities in your work and that’s dope. But you also have the piñata series, which appealed to me for obvious reasons. Describe one of your piñata paintings for us. What’s the process like to create one and why did you start painting them?
FP: Originally, I went to the piñata district and started searching for that one that stuck out. I wanted a burro or a caballo. One that stuck out to me with its colors and patterns. That was an interesting process. Going to the piñata district, searching through the piñata, and asking someone there to help me search. They were like, “a piñata is a piñata, what are you looking for?” Explaining what I was doing was very new to them (laughs). The piñata can all look identical in some ways. The French painter Marcel Duchamp actually used to say that any product was art once the artist touched it and declared it as a piece of artwork. He got a urinal once and put one in a museum installation as something he chose in order to make art. He went to a convention of ceramic toilets for that. There were hundreds and hundreds and he just picked that one. Then it became art. He had the vision and whatnot. It felt similar finding a piñata. Going to a warehouse of piñata and choosing the one that fits right, that says what I want it to say.
My paintings are like a flash, a vision. I just had the image of the piñata in different forms. The understanding happens after I’ve done the painting. It’s just an eagerness to produce that image in my mind. I’ve painted a few piñata as pastel drawings, early on, and also in natural landscapes. I first tried using pages from an encyclopedia about Chicano history and painting on those but it just didn’t work. My studio was in Boyle Heights at the time, and I grew up around there, and there are just tons of murals around there. I was thinking about all of that, of negative space and floating air. That’s when I did the floating piñata. In reality, it’s just tissue paper, cardboard, glue. But when put together, it holds a lot of culture, significance to a whole community of people. Putting it on canvas, floating above me, it’s supposed to be a tribute to that.
AC: You also have the pinatas painted in rural, European landscapes. What’s that about?
FP: The landscapes are countrysides from Germany and Holland, and I just painted pinatas in that setting. I was thinking of paintings from the 1800s. They felt like something that could come alive, those traditional and classical oil paintings. I had received this education throughout my schooling— about European traditions—and here I was painting in Boyle Heights. I was curious if I could paint like a classical landscape painter would. So I envisioned the piñata in that space. It took about two years until it all made sense for me, just having conversations with other artists and letting it happen organically. It became a hybrid of my upbringing as a Mexican and my studies—it was always about European-based history. In college, at Long Beach, I always felt out of place, like one Latino amongst white people. The paintings were sort of a presentation of all those feelings.
Also, there was lots of gentrification around that time. Some of them were brand new galleries, but other locals were very territorial about it. They would graffiti the new places. But I felt conflicted because I wanted to also be a part of the art scene and it felt closer. So painting piñatas in unusual settings kind of became how everything around me was changing. It suddenly becomes an elephant in the room. There was a Latino population already here. I became more proud of being a Chicano artist. At first, that felt negative in some ways, like cornering yourself into the Latino market which supposedly won’t pay artists. But when you think about Chicano politics, the messaging, it has changed. My generation actually got to go out of the neighborhood and access college. Chicano pride looks different now, and I think we can use humor and irony now to address it. I also tried to show that in some of my pinata paintings [by giving them cartoon character eyes]. There’s a lot to explore.
AC: There is. We could talk all day. Do you have any advice for other young, Latinx, POC, queer, or otherwise underrepresented folks out there who are curious about making a career as a visual artist?
FP: Get your education, go to college, and get involved with things outside of your medium. Things outside of your interests. Explore various aspects that call to you. That’s key for me, as a Latino. All of us should go to college, not as the exception. Even if you feel like you don’t need it, it’s a transformative experience. Then after that, it’s just about doing the work. It involves sacrifices, focusing on the craft, and sometimes it gets lonely as an artist—just being in front of the easel and making art, not worrying what others think. I have to continuously restate my goals and trust my gut when it comes to this. If I don’t do that, things don’t go as I had planned. Think about what specific things you need to do to accomplish all that. Then make it happen.
AC: What’s your next project?
FP: I’m going to Mexico to do open-air painting. I’m gonna check out the butterfly migration in rural areas. I like that slower pace. I’ll do some fun work, but no pressure to make sales or do anything specific with the artwork. It’ll be for ten days, just for myself. I found a spot and did some research since you need to hike into the mountains. I’m gonna go on my own and figure it out on the edge of Michoacán. There are a few spots, actually. I’m going to one that’s more distant from the main place, about a week before the tourist season really starts. It was just a coincidence of extra time I had and the timing of the migration season.
Homage to My Mothers, Francisco Palomares
Francisco Javier Palomares is an emerging contemporary artist based in East Los Angeles. Palomares draws upon his lived experiences combining elements of historical narratives and present-day social challenges. He is currently an associate artist educator at LA Commons where he directs a team of youth artists in the collection of community stories to create and prepare designs for printed banners.
“The Gallery of America” by Katie Hale is the winning poem for the 2021 Palette Poetry Prize, selected by guest judge Jericho Brown. We’re honored to share this thought-provoking poem as well as an interview with Katie about her work and process.
“This poem is amazing in its ability to speak to and through itself given its own history. But there is much more than just syntactic technique going on in these lines of definite desperation.” —Jericho Brown
The Gallery of America
The streets were paved with gum and flung cigarettes
and I needed to get out of the rain.
The promised rains were not falling. The heat in the city
was velvet, and the gallery pale and kept conditioned.
The gallery was warm, and the westerlies whetted
and cut to the quick. I presented my ticket at the desk
and the unsmiling man let me in. The bulbs were old-school
and golden, wistful as honey in winter; the walls
were cluttered with the burnished and the gilt.
There was ugliness, too, in the gallery, though the audioguide
steered me meticulously away. The stairwell flickered
and was difficult to climb. From the thresholds,
invigilators orbited like drones. Still, I was told
I belonged in the gallery,
though I was a curiosity and uncurated.
I trod mud on the marble but nobody asked me to leave. Later,
I was reading Rankine in the gallery café
where all the servers were black and the white punters
pretended not to notice, where none of us
paid our tabs, or offered to take our receipts,
where our mounting waste subsumed the bussing station.
This may have been part of the exhibition.
Interview with Katie Hale
by AT Hincapie
AH: What was your initial motivation to write this poem? Might a visit to an actual art gallery have helped to inspire your “Gallery of America”?
KH: In 2019, I received a grant from Arts Council England to travel to the US, to research my poetry collection-in-progress. The collection tracks four hundred years of my family’s female history, from migration to the US, to return to the UK several centuries later – so I’d already been thinking a lot about heritage, and particularly about museums and galleries: about how they allow us to curate history, about how they’re often the result of philanthropic gestures derived from problematic wealth, and about what the role of the poet might be in responding to these spaces. All of this had been churning around my head for some time, but I didn’t yet know how to write about it, which I think is often the way with poems, at least for me – they sit somewhere below the surface for weeks, sometimes months or even years, till the right fishing hook comes along to bait them to the surface. For this poem, the right fishing hook was this grant-funded trip to New York, researching my family’s history using the collections at the New York Public Library.
I’ve always loved libraries – they’re possibly some of the most democratic indoor spaces we have, with their availability of free resources, of so much accessible knowledge. Each morning, I would read in Bryant Park before the library opened, then head inside to begin the day’s research. At lunchtime, I would venture into one of the cafés across the street, and this was where the spark for the poem struck: in this chain café, within view of the library’s self-proclaimed beacon of democratic knowledge, here were so many of the US’s racial disparities and privileges being played out in a microcosm. This became the café at the end of the poem, lifted almost verbatim from my experience. From there, it was the disjuncture between what was deliberately on display, and what was simply ‘not hidden’, which provided the crack down which I pursued the rest of the poem.
AH: Though the speaker in the poem claims that “I was told I belong in the gallery,” they also admit that the audio guide leads them away from the ugliness in the gallery. What does this ugliness look like, and why would the guide try to steer patrons elsewhere?
KH: Over the past few years, the phrase ‘post-truth’ has entered common parlance. We live in a society where governments and companies and news channels work increasingly hard to present their own narratives, in which all ugliness (or at least, all of their own ugliness) is swept under the carpet (perhaps this has always been the case, but to me, it feels increasingly divisive). I’m speaking with the UK in mind here, but I also noticed it while flicking through news channels during that New York research trip: how language can be manipulated to present a particular narrative.
In both the UK and the US, it’s easy to find narratives claiming that the country no longer has institutional racism, or gender inequality, or discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people – or, if these problems exist, it’s only because progress is slow, or because these things ‘take time,’ rather than taking real structural change.
I think this is a measure of privilege: who has the option of turning away from ugly truths. I noticed this during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I’ve noticed it with responses to climate collapse during the recent COP26 summit, and I noticed it with the #MeToo movement, when people started leaving social media, giving themselves space away from these movements and conversations, as an act of self-care. Of course, the people who are most affected by these issues – by these uglinesses and the fights to overturn them – can’t just step away from them by taking a break from Twitter.
AH: You are also an accomplished novelist, and “My Name is Monster” has been translated into multiple languages. How might your narrative fiction contribute to your lyric poetry, or how do you see these different styles and genres overlapping in your writing?
KH: For years, I put off writing fiction. I had this naïve idea that writing in another genre would somehow make me less of a poet, as though poetry were this religious idealism that wouldn’t mix with other art forms. This sounds ridiculous to me now, but I think it was a form of imposter syndrome: a fear that my poetry would never be ‘good enough’ (good enough for what? I wasn’t sure) unless I shunned all other forms.
Writing fiction has changed the landscape of my poetry. It’s helped me to think about all those fiction buzz-words, and to reapply them: setting, character, plot, ‘show don’t tell’, how information is withheld and then presented to a reader. At some point, I started to think of poems (or at least some poems) as illustrative scenes – like a tableau through which the reader is directed, or like one of those rides you used to get in museums, taking you through a replica Viking village with piped sounds and smells, its waxwork figures displayed in just the right positions to give you a glimpse into their lives. The poem becomes a journey, and so the poet’s job is to drag or coax or trick the reader along it.
AH: You have won many honors and awards for your writing, including a residency as a MacDowell Fellow. For our readers and other emerging writers who may be thinking about this kind of thing in the future – how has this fellowship provided the dedicated time and space to focus on your work?
KH: There’s a great blog post by Amber Massie-Blomfield, written in her capacity as Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in Wales, about how to read 22,000 books. The answer, she concludes, is by freeing up as much time as possible for reading, by getting other people to do the other life-work for you. In the blog post, she’s using this to talk about privilege, but it’s the same with residencies. One of the most wonderful things about the MacDowell Fellowship (and numerous other residencies, too), is how time seems to expand. Without the pressure of cooking or cleaning or dusting or doing the washing up, the days grow and grow, till you’ve swum so far into your creative work, you can no longer see all those emails and reminders and to-do lists lining up along the shore.
I arrived at MacDowell off the back of those ten days researching in New York Public Library. With all that thought and research buzzing around my head, I holed up in my little cabin in the woods and wrote in a kind of frenzy, drafting perhaps a quarter of the collection in the space of three weeks. The residency was the perfect opportunity to tell myself (and everyone else through the much-needed form of the out-of-office reply) that I was available, briefly, for nothing but poetry. For those three weeks, I ate, slept, breathed, and swam in it. It was at MacDowell that I wrote the first draft of ‘The Gallery of America.’
AH: As a writer based in the UK, your work has reached an international audience of readers from different countries and cultures. How does this multicultural voice influence your writing – in your winning poem, “The Gallery of America”, or even in your pamphlets Breaking the Surface and Assembly Instructions?
KH: So much of the past five years has been spent researching my own family’s migration: from England and France to Virginia, and then across the US as far as Kansas, with other branches joining from Ireland, via India, before returning to the UK.
I myself am from Cumbria, in the northwest of England, close to the Scottish border. From here, in that I was born here, I grew up here, and I still live here (in a house two doors from the one I grew up in). In Cumbria, we have a dialect word, ‘offcomer,’ which is used to describe someone who has moved to the county from elsewhere. But, because Cumbria is farm country, and because there are families who can trace their family’s connection to specific areas of field and fell over perhaps a thousand years, ‘offcomer’ status is something that is carried down at least two generations, sometimes more. Because my parents moved here from further south, I’m still classed as an offcomer.
As a child, I hated this – it set me apart from my friends in the village – but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to love my offcomer status. I’m both local and not local, on the inside and the outside, a part of the stream while also able to stand on the bank and watch it flow. The more I’ve uncovered of my family’s own migratory heritage, the more I’ve felt at home in this dualism: in the ability to belong, while also, as in the poem, to be ‘a curiosity, and uncurated.’ This sense of belonging, of course, is a privilege not extended to everyone, and something I’m highly conscious of in my poetry: how this dual heritage can shape my poetic voice and narrative interests, while also not shying away from the privileges granted to it (and to me) because of my whiteness, because of the history whiteness carries in the blood.
Perhaps this was what I was asking all those years ago when I questioned whether my poetry would be ‘good enough’ – and if so, good enough for what? How (and whether) I can use my own multiculturalism, those feet on either side of the Atlantic, to disrupt the inherent whiteness in my own lyric voice. Whether or not my writing succeeds at this isn’t for me to judge – but I would like to say a huge thank you to Palette Poetry for the support of this poem, and particularly to Jericho Brown, for selecting it as the winner. May the words continue to disrupt their own narrative.
In Knee Length, poet and journalist Khalisa Rae navigates the nuances of an inherited conservative legacy. Pulling from memories of her religious upbringing and education, family history, and matrilineal teachings, Knee Length is a history reimagined and excavated—a rebellious relearning of desire and respectability, family and faith.
“Oh, God” is a Testimony
At twelve years old, I am sitting in church with my mother when suddenly, the wail of the pastor reaches a deep, gut-level, and a woman, overcome with emotion, throws her baby in the air like a wad of dollar bills at a strip club. Yes—she lobs her baby in the air as her arms fling open; we all stop and stare in awe. She is taken with the Spirit, and there’s nothing we can do but watch.
This particular Sunday the Spirit is higher, thicker than usual. The organ knows all the notes to sing to get us deep into our feelings. Each note is a punch in the stomach. All the pastor’s words about David and Goliath and overcoming insurmountable obstacles hit and tug on heartstrings that are barely held together with duct tape. The mothers and deaconesses sway and rock, fans in hand, arm raised to the heavens, crying a sorrowful hymnal. Moans, groans, and wails can be heard from every corner like surround sound, and all I can do is look around and soak all this worship and reverence in. The pastor says, “Now, now, you see. When he got ready to craft that slingshot and fight the giant, don’t you think he had doubt in his heart? Don’t you think his hands were shaking? His feet a little wobbly, saints?” Just then the organ hits a call and response note to play up the powerful part of the sermon—the part where the pastor knows he’s talking that shit and “going in.” He steps away from the pulpit to get closer to the crowd and grabs his mic to start screaming. Jerry curl juice dripping like the sweat flying from his forehead. The crowd shouts back, “Yeah!” “Amen!” “Go, ahead.” “Say that!”
The organ speeds up and just then, the woman—one-year-old baby on her hip—starts to jolt and jerk her body, like she’s convulsing. As the organ gets higher in pitch and faster in tempo, her back buckles and feet stomp. With baby in tow, her hands are moving so quickly now that the rest of her body can’t keep up. My eyes dart to her, mesmerized by her breasts that jostle and move carelessly as if they are dancing with her. They are adornments to the rhythm of her praise. I turn my head away from her for just a moment and turn back to see the baby flying mid-air, still swaddled in a blanket like a football baby Jesus. That’s right—her baby catapults through the air now like the pastor’s sweat or a wad of spit, and all our eyes follow his soar. The woman next to the baby’s mother watches dumbstruck but reacts just before the baby hits the ground, catching him in her arms like a wide receiver. But the dancing woman is unphased and utterly entranced by the Holy Ghost—by the feeling of deep overwhelm from a spiritual appearance.
I believe our ancestors danced like this. Shook their bottoms and hips and jolted like they were possessed by some otherworldly, magical sensation. But the root wasn’t anything of rituals and sacrifice; it was a dance of celebration. Being overcome with emotion like David. The Bible says David danced out of his clothes, and I know now that this is meant literally. When the Spirit moves through your body, and the chord of the keyboard hits a note that stirs your soul, your shoulders have no choice but to Harlem shake. Your knees can do nothing else but drop low, your butt has to twerk; it’s innate in you. It’s innate to praise the heavens in a full-body dance.
This Sunday, we are all transfixed watching her celebratory burst of energy and wailing cry. Her legs hopping like she is walking across a bed of hot coals. Her feet stepping on each note the organ played. And the pastor, her father, egging her on. Slow and methodical, he screeches each word. “Welllllll, when the Lord moves, so does the Spirit. So move, my sistah.” he urges. With each phrase, she lets out a moan that makes my skin flush pink. Goosebumps coat my forearms and shoulders and I fix my eyes on her hips. Her breast and full legs jiggle to the rhythm of Gloryyyyy. Glorrry to God. Yes, yes, yes, God.Praising God with guttural glory. A full body outburst where arms fling open and the head drops back, eyes close, and feet jump.
This is what I imagine sex to be.
Later, in the car, I ask my mother to explain what happened. I was still a bit mortified by the sight of a baby flying mid-air like a football.
“Why would she do that?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” my mother begins, “you become so overcome with the Spirit that your mind and body get disconnected, ya know?”
“Like you’re in a trance…” I nod slowly.
“Yeah. Think about a time when the pastor has said something that resonated with you on a spiritual level. You lose all thought or control. Your spirit just feels everything, and wants to cry or move.”
“But the baby…”
“She didn’t know what she was doing, sweetheart. The baby is fine.”
“But what if the woman hadn’t—”
“Trust, baby girl. The Spirit was high in that place. The baby was covered with holy protection.”
I nodded, knowing my mother was right, but I still couldn’t imagine feeling so out of control that your mind doesn’t know what your body is doing.
“There’s a special warmth and fullness that overtakes you sometimes,” my mother added.
So much of what my mother said reminded me of women in the movies. The woman’s moans mimicked the love scenes my mom always made me close my eyes for. Two bodies pressed together, with only the warmth of their breath filling the silent spaces. Every time, I would peek through my hands to see what it was my mother was hiding, and every time, a couple was lip-locked on the screen, overcome with emotion. Their cheeks grew flush. Their bodies convulsed and squirmed as if they were possessed. But it was always the woman who would cry out, “Oh God.” And I wondered, are these the same things? Was the woman in the movie taken by the Spirit just like the woman in church?
Was she yelling out in that passionate moment to thank God for all He had done? Was this pleasure or spirituality, or both? What’s the difference between her connection to a man and her connection to God? I just didn’t understand. What were these men doing on screen that made women sweat the way I watched the woman in church sweat and pass out after? I remember how limp her body became, how she could no longer move her limbs. People fanned her and brought water and towels.
Maybe this was how a good orgasm felt: a spiritual experience that made your mind and body disconnect. Honestly, it sounded pretty nice to lose control and blame it on the Spirit. To be wrapped in a funk-filled perfume with no fear of consequences. Those strange noises I heard in church sounded just like a woman having a good orgasm, so maybe that too was a way of talking to God, of thanking him for the out-of-body experience she had as she climaxed. Despite all the scenes my mother tried to shield me from, I was beginning to understand that there were countless ways women could feel the Spirit: being overcome with passion. Praising, dancing, grinding, worshipping. Lovemaking. It was all the same freedom, the same head-back connection to something greater. Maybe that’s what my mother was afraid of me seeing— what happens when you relinquish control and just get free.
In Knee Length, poet and journalist Khalisa Rae navigates the nuances of an inherited conservative legacy. Pulling from memories of her religious upbringing and education, family history, and matrilineal teachings, Knee Length is a history reimagined and excavated—a rebellious relearning of desire and respectability, family and faith.
Howling at the Moon
I’m not going to say I hate hair, I just didn’t like the way it looked on me. When I turned twelve, I would stare at my bushy underarms and legs for days on end and seethe. Then I’d turn on Sister, Sister, The Cosby Show, Boy Meets World, A Different World, and grow green with envy. I was certain that Denise, Whitley, Tia, Tamara, and Topanga had smooth, sensual legs. Hair made me feel wild and untamed like I was morphing into a werewolf. And at twelve, I had no interest in howling at the moon. Plus, it was itchy and made me feel utterly unsexy, underneath my clothes or otherwise.
A part of me also wanted to be like Ella Fitzgerald in “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” smoking a cigarette in long gloves, a petticoat, side-tilted hat, and pin curls, with some man in a three-piece suit, bow-tie, and slicked-back hair eyeing me from across the smoky club. There was no way Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Portier, or Nat King Cole would sneak a hairy-legged broad like me into the back seat of his Model T Ford.
But these are things you can’t tell your mother at twelve, so you stick to the script. For me, it was the prickly pine feeling and itchy stubble coming through the porous holes of my nylon stockings that were so irritating. Plus, I was sure the boys in school could see my hair poking through and talked about me in the locker rooms. I’m certain “wolf girl” was my colloquial nickname. My mom would have to care about me being called “wolf,” right? That I was the laughing stock? Don’t even get me started on gym class. The sheer mortification of wearing shorts during kickball when my legs looked like Carl Winslow’s chest hair.No one would ever ask me to a school dance with taco meat saying, “hello, stranger” through my tanks tops and shorts. I was like the pretty-faced girl that seems attractive until she reveals she’s got a black, feral squirrel living under her arms and on her bean-pole legs.
Most of my life was spent wearing plaid button-up uniforms and church dresses in stockings, so hairy arms and legs in tights were embarrassing. If I had to be stuck in knee-length uniforms and long church dresses, the least I could do was have smooth underarms and legs. Smooth legs were the sure-fire way to still be somewhat alluring like Britney Spears in “Oops, I Did It Again.” She definitely wasn’t hairy anywhere.
Honestly, I really just loved the idea of freshly shaven legs—rubbing their sleekness against the sheets, running my hands up and down to feel the stumble-free, buttery surface. At night in the bathroom, I’d prop myself up on the toilet, one leg on the tub basin edge, and imagine shaving with Skintimate shaving cream in one hand and a pink Daisy razor in the other. I’d close my eyes, smile ear to ear, and feel sexy and grown-up like a pin-up model. It might have had something to do with all the black and white films and shows I used to watch—I Love Lucy and Casablanca— or maybe the fashion magazines that cluttered my room. Elle, Vogue, Seventeen, Marie Claire. Each cover featuring different smooth-bodied beauties whose legs had us religiously buying issues, millions of copies sold off those luscious limbs alone. Case in point, the 1996 swimsuit issue of Vogue featuring Cindy Crawford: though her perfectly perky breasts and devilish smirk allured me, what captivated me most were her legs that seemed to be a mile-long of silkiness. Her shaved legs seemed to be running off the page and I wanted to run with them.
But being the 90’s kid I was, that defense would not hold up in the Christian court of my house. Parents at the time were all convinced that media and MTV were corrupting their kids, so the fashion magazine story had to stay a secret. So I stuck to more practical reasons to plead my case. Shaving was synonymous with puberty: get your period, wear a training bra, shave your legs. I watched boys shaving peach fuzz with their fathers on TV, and I yearned for the sacred experience of the “first shave.” That’s it, I thought, I’d tug on my mom’s heartstrings and maybe say something about gender inequality.
I begged my mother every day for a year to be a part of this hair removal ritual.
“Please, momma. What if I just shaved a little patch?” I whined, trying to bargain with her.
“You’ll have to deal with itchy prickles while you’re under my roof,” she said.
“Why not, ma?” I pleaded.
“Because you’re not ready for that. Let’s wait until you’re sixteen.”
My Bible-toting momma wasn’t having it. She was worried my silky sleekness would lead to desire, convinced that I wanted to be smooth for someone else’s touch. But truthfully, the sexiness I so longed for wasn’t for any boy, it was for me. To pluck and de-fluff every follicle would make me feel more like I was becoming a woman, and maybe that’s what she was afraid of. So I started to resent her. I’d mumble during movie nights, “See, she gets to shave. It’s not hurting anyone,” crossing my arms in frustration.
My anger would fizzle out, and then spark up all over again when it was time to put my stockings back on during fall and winter. I blamed her for making me sit through judgmental gym class glances. Eventually, I became the only girl with hairy armpits and legs. “Does your mom let you shave?” I’d ask each of my classmates. And they’d always say yes. Most girls in class were shaving when they started their period.
“Ugh. Mine won’t let me. I’m stuck being Tarzan until I’m sixteen,” I’d say. When I walked out onto the soccer field in shorts, the other girls would point and laugh. “Eww, she’s a fur baby.” Mortified, I would run home, hoping my mother would be sympathetic.
“Mom! The girls in class are making fun of me. C’mon,” I begged at thirteen. “Can’t I shave my underarms at least?”
“That’s their problem. We don’t concern ourselves with what other people think.”
We? I thought. I didn’t know about we, but I most certainly did.
Eventually, my mom caved, and we compromised around fifteen, the only caveat being that I’d have to foot the bill. Though she’d conceded, you know how they say be careful what you wish for? Keeping up the smooth appearance was exhausting. My mom didn’t warn me how quickly my hair would grow back. With my wonky, soon-to-be sixteen hormones, a shave only lasted a week tops. The shaving life was for the birds— razor bumps and itchy armpits. Spending my allowance money on shaving cream and disposable razors. My first time shaving, she took me to the drug store to get the coveted Nair wax kit. I’d been dying to do the hot wax and rip method I’d seen on Teen Vogue, and while she conceded, I could have sworn I saw a smirk.
When we got home to the bathroom, I tore open the package, glossed the caramel-colored goop on my legs giving them a good slather, and waited. Then, I stuck the sticky strips to the hair, pressing down hard to make sure it got all of it. I would never be called “fur baby” or “wolf girl” again. 5-4-3-2-1, I counted down, staring at my mother with a crazed look, eyes wide, all but salivating at the anticipation that I was seconds away from becoming a hairless beauty. My mother stared back smiling, slowly backing up like she knew where the chips were going to fall. On ONE, I yanked the sticky strip, and let out noise so high-pitched it could only be heard by dogs and wild animals.
“OUUUUCH!,” I yelped. “Owwww. Ahhhhhhhhh. Mom! Why did you let me get this?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” she laughed. “You begged and begged, whined and cried. This is what YOU wanted. Now live with the consequences,” she said, grabbing a cold rag to ease the pain.
“So I have to do this again?”
“Yeah, unless you want to walk around with mismatched legs.” She chuckled.
Needless to say, my first waxing experience had such an impact on me that when I turned sixteen I decided to only shave when I had to. I’d get excited on shaving day, but the smooth bliss wore off with the appeal of being a “lady.” And what did that even mean? To sit properly with legs crossed at the ankles in Mary Jane shoes and ruffly socks? That was me. My life was plaid skirts and white button-ups. Lace and tea parties. Somewhere between rinsing our mouths out with soap after saying dirty words and getting paddled for hiking our skirts up above the knee, I grew bored with the daydream I once had of being the good little girl that followed the rules or was liked by all my classmates. The less I wanted to be the male-gaze version of Britney Spears or Dorothy Dandridge, the less I wanted to stay slippery and glossed.
And what was wrong with the rough edges? When I left private school, something cracked open. I saw girls in torn shirts and ripped jeans, expressing their individuality, and I wanted that. Who was I when I wasn’t in uniform? When I wasn’t performing what I thought femininity meant? To this day, I wonder if that had been my mom’s plan all along. To show me maturing is nothing like the movies and magazines make it out to be. To teach me how to howl at the moon. To embrace not just my wild lady bush, but who I was at my rawest—uninhibited and free. In the movies, they don’t show you the nicks, razor burn, and bumps after. They always leave out how actually, howling at the moon isn’t half bad. Plus, I kind of liked how my raspy howl sounded when I let her out. Nowadays, I go to my proverbial mountain and let her roam free. Life would later teach me that embracing my wild, untamed side would lead to sexual freedom, but how I arrived at that realization is a story for another day.
Some people say in order to do things in the future you have to have a father in the future. Not only do I shriek and scratch at my cheeks in the future, I also inherit nothing but deeds to lands pronounced dead. Some people say fear comes from the devil. Some say the sky is another desert. If you can build cities in one you can build cities in the other. Well our fathers tried. Couldn’t scratch the face of the desert. So they took tea as sweet as honey to the Valley of Dreams. Fed smoke to their fibrotic livers. I once dreamed a circle of men around a fire. I named each man after my father. I saw them clapping and dancing, and later realized they were puppets. For the fathers I built castles in the arid sky I am calling heaven. A large-scale construction project. They say a woman can do some things but not others. They say in the past women wailed, and men drew courage from the configuration of the stars. I envy the geese, the macaques, the yellow baboons and the finches—their livid beating of the chest. I hold my breasts like dandelion bulbs. Some say women can walk the dead only with loaves of dust in their mouths. From the future, I erase the syntax of my scream. I practice singing the one with no end and no beginning. On the tips of my toes in the house that was heaven, I begged the peephole, and begged and begged. Heard the keys rattle clairvoyant leaves. And I thanked the back of his neck for not dying. People say when he dies he is not your father. Different man. Someone else will need to wash him. Today I rinsed my body with sidr and camphor. Wrapped lengths of linen over my eyes to see the future. Some say on the night of its flowering, a corpse flower will smell like it’s dying. It’s a good thing I’m good, and not flowering. It will make the noise of 600 daughters wailing. If in their graves the dead are tortured for the wailing of the living, are the living tortured by the reticence of their fathers? Angels pounce with red iron rods. My dreams, which come with trees, come with trains, come with my love’s back fitted with bright blue wings, never dared to kill my father. But day and night he died and dies and will die again. And the light is always golden, and my breasts are always, despite my caution, breaking, and this morning I will see a girl, small, and she will scream the sound of what bird? I cannot say.
