— by Jabari Asim

Is Spill poetry, criticism or both?
Yes. And yes. And other yeses.  Spill is poetry and criticism, oracle and spell book.  It is one micro-story per page. t is an index and a meditation.   

Hortense Spillers inspired the work. Can you tell our readers a bit about her?
Hortense Spillers is one of the founders of Black feminist intellectual practice. Along with Barbara Smith and several others, she participated in the Black Feminist Salons that took place in Boston around the time that the first-ever university courses on Black Women Writers were being taught.  Her work (especially her book Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture) intervened at a crucial moment and said you cannot theorize America, its literature, or any aspect of its culture without taking into account how the existence of Black women at the matrix of oppression shifts every narrative that we use to understand what America is and does.

I’ve heard about public readings of your work during which you create an “oracle” for the audience. What is its purpose and what does it involve?
When I bring the work into a public space I model the way I want people to read it at home. They can read it in order or they can use it as an oracle. Ask the book a question. Open to a page. Let the specific scene on that page teach you something about what you need to know. People at readings have asked questions about job decisions, relationships, politics, their ancestors and the answers in the book have resonated with them powerfully.
  

Think of a question that is on your heart. Something that you would ask the collective of all the grandmothers ever if you could ask them.  Now choose a number between 1 and 184.  The number could be your birthday, your lucky number, a number that has something to do with your question. Any number in that range.  Got it? Great. Guidance for your question is on that page of Spill.

What is fugitivity?
Fugitivity is a term that has been used by Black theorists to describe the process of seeking and creating freedom within completely enslaving circumstances past and present.  I think of fugitivity as Harriet Tubman-ness, the process of seeking and prioritizing collective freedom. The shapeshifting evasion of capture by slave catchers, norms and institutions. The ways we find each other and free each other again and again.  

You describe yourself as a Black feminist love evangelist. Can you elaborate?
I decided to call myself a Black feminist love evangelist when I had a public access TV show as part of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind community school I founded and I realized that most of the other people passionate to have public access TV shows in my community in Durham were Christian evangelists. I realized that I am an evangelist for Black feminism. I truly believe that it saves. I go tell it on the mountain. I have a by every means approach to sharing the good news of Black feminism.  

You’re involved with a lot of projects beside Spill, including serving as co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming project. Can you tell us about it?
The Mobile Homecoming project is an experiential archive project amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance. My partner Julia Roxanne Wallace and I drove across the United States in an RV listening to, honoring, praise-poeming, video and audio recording, and dancing with Black LGBTQ elders. We created events in 25 cities called “Where Have You Been All My Life” to connect people across generations and hosted 7 immersive retreats in the Southeastern U.S.

What’s next for you?
Now the Mobile Homecoming project is building a retreat center and the capacity for homefulness in our community one living room and one tiny house at a time.  For the past 6 years of this project we have heard our community members speak again and again of the need for space to gather and literal housing space. We hope to make both more possible with this project.

And of course for me, books are also places to live. I think of Spill as a space for Black women and everyone transformed by the existence of Black women (everyone!) to be free together, if only for a moment. My next book is inspired by another crucial Black feminist theorist, M. Jacqui Alexander, and it is is called M: Archive After the End of the World.  It is criticism, or sci-fi?  Yes.

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Jabari Asim’s new book is Preaching To The Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis.