![\"Tonya](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/tonya-foster.jpg\")
<\/a>Tonya Foster<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nTonya Foster\u2019s\u00a0A Swarm of Bees in High Court<\/i>\u00a0(Belladonna) uses haiku to present a piercing portrait of contemporary Harlem. In contrast, the fictions in John Keene\u2019s\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>\u00a0(New Directions) traverse geographies and eras, and their attending narrative conventions, to undo history\u2019s racist exclusions. This past July, while participating in Image Text Ithaca, a multidisciplinary symposium and workshop at Ithaca College, the authors discussed their recent books\u2019 far-reaching implications.<\/span><\/p>\nTonya Foster<\/span>\u00a0Your new book, structured in three parts, moves from \u201cCounternarratives\u201d to \u201cEncounternarratives\u201d to \u201cCounternarrative.\u201d I wonder about that move, which might be seen as an extended meditation on meaning through form. All the formal shifts and strategies that you employ articulate, rearticulate, and reimagine subjectivities that aren\u2019t necessarily standard. They don\u2019t operate in only one realm of being. What is it that form articulates?<\/span><\/p>\nJohn Keene<\/span>\u00a0I was aiming at a sense of movement on many levels. Movement in terms of the transition between forms, narratives, geographical and imaginative spaces, and between subjectivities. But there\u2019s an associative movement as well, involving connection and contiguity.<\/span><\/p>\nI wanted the forms, as much as possible, to emerge out of the subject matter. The narratives and their attendant characters, as well as the historical-social-political-economic spaces that are being dramatized, informed the shapes the stories took.<\/span><\/p>\nThe word\u00a0narrative<\/i>\u00a0in the second part is grayed out so that the section title can read as both \u201cEncounternarratives\u201d and \u201cEncounter[ ]s.\u201d The stories in this section are mostly first-person narratives depicting the connections these characters are making with others\u2014and Others\u2014with the speakers telling their stories directly. A shift in person and perspective starts to emerge at the end of the first section, and then the final story in the third section, \u201cThe Lions,\u201d functions as a counterpoint to and culmination of the first twelve.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0These stories are connected thematically and in terms of the investigation of form that holds across the collection. It\u2019s like seeing different poses as possibilities for the shapes subjectivity might take. It\u2019s dynamic. It seems that the organization of the collection moves through a variant of the historical, omniscient third person toward a reconfigured first person. What\u2019s your vision for the movement across time and place in the book?<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0The organization is roughly chronological, but also follows an intellectual-historical trajectory. I had originally placed \u201cAn Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution\u201d before \u201cOn Brazil, or D\u00e9nouement: The Lond\u00f4nias-Figueiras,\u201d and my editor at New Directions, Barbara Epler, suggested I flip them because the Brazilian narrative temporally precedes the US one. But there\u2019s also something imaginatively crucial about having these two stories reversed, since the Brazil story formally starts in our contemporary moment and cycles back, suggesting one way to think about our historical continuum. It charges, so to speak, everything that follows.<\/span><\/p>\nThe first story I wrote was \u201cAn Outtake,\u201d which felt, when I completed it, like a revelation. It was one of the final stories I wrote while in NYU\u2019s MFA program, in a workshop I took with E.L. Doctorow; I published it in 1999. Then I had this idea that I was going to write a story in tribute to the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, which was in 2004. I lost the full drafts of it and four other stories when my computer crashed that year, so I had to reconstruct them. I subsequently filled out the collection, particularly over the last few years. The new stories are, I feel, in conversation with the earlier ones.\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>\u00a0really is a series of conversations amongst the narratives, but also with history, literature, politics, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\nTo shift gears, I\u2019m thinking about your new poetry book,\u00a0A Swarm of Bees in High Court<\/i>: in the notes at the end of the book you describe it as \u201ca biography of life in the day of a particular neighborhood,\u201d and you use the phrase \u201cthe multiple as subject and as swarm of actors.\u201d Based on those descriptions you could have written a nonfiction text or a more literal reflection, but you\u2019re capturing this world in a lyric mode, undertaking compelling things with form. Through condensation and concision you achieve that multiplicity you\u2019re talking about, a surplus of meaning. The book is a model of the certain kinds of work that can only be performed by poetry, particularly lyric poetry.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat really comes through is a play of both the ear\u2014sound, music, and noise, in the positive sense of the term, as distortion\u2014and also the eye. Could you talk about how you decided to go with the haiku-like form, which you stick to at certain points, and you break in others? At the very end we get a little section of prose, almost like a fable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0The first thing that comes to mind is Amiri Baraka saying, \u201cYou know, I would read poems in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0and think, I can\u2019t write poems like that.\u201d (laughter<\/i>) The work of the book began when someone asked me to write about 9\/11, and I thought, What? It just seemed bizarre.<\/span><\/p>\nHow do you write about grief when you\u2019re in the middle of it? How do you imagine or traverse that necessary distance? I had been writing erotic haiku to a man I liked. And someone else said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you write haiku about 9\/11?\u201d I thought, Okay, I could do that and not weep, right? I could write these little condensed pieces about New York at that period. It was a time when there were these condensed, very tense encounters with the images of people who were missing\u2014but not only with them; you were also encountering the people missing them, looking for them.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Their grief, right?<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Yes. I also began thinking about Harlem in a different way. There was this incredible silence. This neighborhood where I have lived for a long time is a very noisy place. One Detroit friend said, \u201cThis is the noisiest place I have ever been.\u201d And on that day there was this hush. Somehow, there was no picking up of the strain of grief evidenced in the silence. So out of the question, What does it feel like in this space? I started writing these haiku (even the book\u2019s long lines are, for the most part, seventeen syllables or fewer) about Harlem, and this particular two-block stretch on St. Nicholas Terrace.<\/span><\/p>\nIndirectly, I\u2019m always writing about my hometown of New Orleans, as NOLA is for me what Venice is to Calvino: \u201ca first city that remains implicit.\u201d New Orleans is implicit in everything that I write. And I\u2019m often wondering how NOLA has trained and tripped up my tongue. I\u2019d been thinking about the language that conjures an experience of a particular place. I think of it necessarily as a body or a group of bodies, this multiplicity of subjectivities narrating place through interactions, through sounds, and through grief. Weirdly, I couldn\u2019t see that\u00a0A Swarm of Bees in High Court<\/i>\u00a0is a book about grief until after it was done. I was stunned and stung by that.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0I started to think, as I read it, about place as hive. The hive of sociality and experience comes through. There is, I wrote in my notes, \u201cin\/action.\u201d At the level of language, you have all these linguistic\u2014morphemic\u2014hinges that give the poems a powerful depth. They convey the silence and the hum, the quiet and the buzz. This brings us back to bees, \u201cbe…es\u201d as you write in the book\u2019s epigraph: \u201cIt be…es that way, sometime.\u201d So perfect! There are so many lines like that, encapsulating the work you\u2019re doing here.<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s also something about the ontology of grief, of living in this space that is both part of that post-9\/11 world but also viewed as not part of it. The ontology of\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0location and\u00a0dis<\/i>location: Harlem. New Orleans. I love how you talk about the origins of your use of haiku, the erotic trigger. You stick with this form for the most part, but ring changes with it. You also have \u201cas always\u201d as a refrain. This pointed me to one of your strategies in the book: repetition. I see it as a rhetorical gesture and a formal strategy, but it also relates to thematic content, right? Things repeat, they continue, and I see that connecting to desire and also emotion, want. Talk about sticking with the haiku-like form and its relation, for you, to desire and grief.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Listening to what you\u2019re saying, I think about\u00a0your<\/i>\u00a0work, and language, about making work and art, and the ways that sometimes being is sufficient. You keep coming back to people who are artists in untenable circumstances. Part of their artistry is asserting that being is sufficient, and the formal shifting becomes a way of continuing to be when everything else attempts to annihilate you.<\/span><\/p>\nSo to try to answer your question, I learned, after I started writing them, that haiku are often about loss. The space of wanting is one of absence, but also of the presence of what one wants. The book had to be landscape rather than portrait view because as I wrote the poems, I realized there was something about that orientation that emphasized the words as central, as these little moments of being, amid an expanse of silence. So what is it to imagine that these little words on the page are sufficient? I don\u2019t know.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0In my book the words are really packed on the page, for the most part.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Well, there are columns, and then little letters, journal entries…<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0The density and expansiveness of prose! What comes through with the expanse of space in\u00a0A Swarm<\/i>\u00a0(I\u2019m not going to call it \u201cwhite space\u201d because I don\u2019t think it\u2019s \u201cwhite\u201d space, but more ground and commons, y\/our commons) is presence and negation. A number of your poems are registering negative emotions or negative responses. Not \u201cnegative\u201d in the sense of \u201cbad,\u201d but because the speaker has desires and needs; the speaker lacks and wants things. This poetic speaker is deeply aware of the gendered and classed space, which is to say, politicized social space, in which she speaks. Or not just \u201cshe,\u201d of course, because there is \u201cyour\u201d and \u201cour,\u201d invoking the apostrophized individual and communal.<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s a negative capability on a formal and rhetorical level, and on the level of language, holding these sometimes opposing ideas together in tension. I guess the technical terms for that are polysemy, as well as homonymy. You have all of these words that can be read in multiple ways. Sounds run together, allowing you to ring these changes. That got me thinking about strategies of survival.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s it. There are these strategies that assert being\u2014not in the face of\u00a0absolute<\/i>\u00a0abjection\u2014that\u2019s too easy. Perhaps there is no absolute abjection when one continues to live.<\/span><\/p>\nMaybe it\u2019s time to retire referencing Frederick Douglass, but there\u2019s that moment in his narrative where Mr. Covey has beaten him, and Douglass has had enough. He says, \u201c[H]owever long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.\u201d He\u2019s choosing something else, perhaps even death, to slavery. So, in our work, there\u2019s always this moment in which the different characters (and readers) are making this other choice, have this other way of asserting being (and understanding), when the white people around them are suggesting to them that in fact they have no other choice. And so they say, \u201cNo, I\u2019m asserting my being in this other way.\u201d Here, I think of Sandra Bland and the costs of that assertion.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0And how do we do that without saying it? There is a profound irony in that we have the capacity to write those silences. There\u2019s this old fiction chestnut: \u201cshowing versus telling.\u201d But there was so much I wanted to\u00a0tell<\/i>in\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>. I was very interested in storytelling as a practice, but I also wanted to show those moments, before a character acts, when there is another kind of nonverbal recognition. It\u2019s not uttered at all. In their physical and emotional responses it\u2019s clear that something is about to change.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Wow. Maybe this is related to the negative capability. There\u2019s this beautiful moment in your story \u201cGloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows,\u201d in which Carmel (the daughter of an artist and a talented resistance fighter) is introduced to the Americans who\u2019ve inherited the plantation. Carmel is silent, and Madame de L\u2019\u00c9cart is freaked out by her when they meet. Why is silence unnerving?<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Because Madame de L\u2019\u00c9cart was expecting verbal acknowledgment of her power and her status. Carmel upends the usual power relationship through her silence. We don\u2019t know why Carmel doesn\u2019t speak. It\u2019s a literalization of the idea that no one cares what Carmel has to say; she is not expected to speak. In fact, there\u2019s an earlier moment where the brother-in-law, who\u2019s the owner of the estate, couldn\u2019t even remember that Carmel, the story\u2019s protagonist, existed!<\/span><\/p>\nI described Carmel as someone who has a powerful inner light, yet she\u2019s virtually invisible, and part of that invisibility is her seeming inability to articulate her selfhood. So, the story starts outside Carmel, and slowly it moves into her consciousness, into her speaking.<\/span><\/p>\nFor Madame de L\u2019\u00c9cart, the hardest thing is to accept that she is not going to be addressed as the subject of this story, or this world. She was ready to take her rightful place in the power structure. (laughter<\/i>) And here you have this black female child who has, on some level, no power, but also tremendous power. To not speak can be incredibly powerful.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I\u2019ve been turning over something of Fanon\u2019s, from\u00a0The Wretched of the Earth<\/i>: \u201c[W]hen I was there, it [Reason] was not; when it was there, I was no longer.\u201d In your book there\u2019s this challenge to the notion that knowledge is only produced, or evident, in identifiable forms of reason. Can you speak to that?<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0The Enlightenment is the backdrop to a number of these stories. One movement throughout is from the dawn of modernity forward into modernism, which is why we have the later stories with W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and M\u00e1rio de Andrade at their center. I think about Paul Gilroy\u2019s famous, eponymous statement on the \u201cBlack Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity.\u201d The science of race is born with\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n(Man walks in and says \u201cOops, sorry!\u201d<\/i>)<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0That was the specter of the past bursting in! (laughter<\/i>) The science of race and the human sciences are born at this powerful moment of un-freedom for millions of people. And also capitalism. Capitalism being the quintessence of reason, in one way, and of unreason, in another. Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, Edward Baptist, and so many others have written about how central slavery and black bodies were to the development of capitalism. So I wanted to try to write into and against a certain understanding of reason in relation to race, which brings us to what Fanon is saying. But I also wanted to play with that, because, for example, in that \u201cGloss, or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows\u201d story, one of the humorous points is that the nuns are trying to escape the depredations of reason in Europe, which is to say the French Revolution, and they come to\u2014<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0\u2014Kentucky.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Right! They think of it as a kind of safe harbor, and they end up finding themselves the victims of unreason! One could view religion as unreason too. I am interested in the idea of competing rationalities, which is also what Fanon is getting at: What is reason? What is rationality? How do certain systems of belief sometimes coexist, or not? This is really interesting to think about today, because we often hear, particularly in a kind of neoliberal world, that reason has triumphed. And yet, you turn on the TV\u2014<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I received an advance copy of your book just as I was watching the news of Freddie Gray\u2019s murder.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0I mentioned struggle earlier, in relation to both of our books. I was very interested in thinking about the kind of fore-life and afterlife of social, political, and economic violence. How does one convey, in fiction, the social and political economy in which we live? I was thinking, for example, of the story of Zion in \u201cAn Outtake.\u201d It\u2019s almost eerie how predictive it is of the murders of Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Michael Brown, these precarious black bodies\u2014<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0\u2014Renisha McBride.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Rekiah Boyd, now Sandra Bland. Exactly, it\u2019s not just black men. There\u2019s a way in which that story, which precedes all of this, but of course obviously was written in the wake of many earlier state murders, like those of Eleanor Bumpurs, Sean Bell\u2014<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0\u2014Emmett Till.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Exactly. There\u2019s this official public discourse about how things have changed, how we\u2019re in a different, \u201cpost-racial\u201d space\u2014but there is this powerful continuity. It struck me, after I\u2019d finished some of these stories, that they couldn\u2019t take place today because of these cultural changes, but, on an emotional level, on a level of historical resonance, they speak to where we are today.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s right, that history is not past. What happened? I mean, on the most basic level. But your texts also ask: How do we activate these alternate possibilities for being? They\u2019re not just about surviving \u2026 I don\u2019t want to go to \u201cthriving.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0I love that. It is surviving, but it\u2019s also living and thriving. Central to that is resistance, you know?<\/span><\/p>\nThe polysemy and homophony in your poems model resistance in action, at the level of language. It\u2019s exciting how the poems are talking to themselves, and talking back to the reader.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0One has to talk back. That\u2019s the impulse in becoming a self, right? If you\u2019re raised in the South, it\u2019s sass, it\u2019s \u201cto give some lip.\u201d If you\u2019re raised in the city, it\u2019s to assert in a way that says, \u201cNo, this is distinct, and part of a tradition you may not know about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0We used to hear that all the time, \u201cDon\u2019t give me no lip.\u201d And, \u201cYou better tuck that lip in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Yet survival depended on being able to give some lip.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Lip, but also lip service, which makes me think of epistemology. I want to talk about the idea of the poem as a vehicle of knowledge. You find fascinating ways to show us different ways of knowing. First of all, you write on cognition as social, \u201cTo know\u2026 is to be \/ thought known.\u201d (Re)cognition is invoked. \u201cFriend A. says, \u2018They see \/ my clothes, think I got cash.\u2019\u201d You\u2019re playing with, bringing in reflexivity. But it\u2019s also the vernacular, right? It\u2019s not some abstract exchange, but everyday speech. Realness.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Philosophy comes in different registers. As someone who\u2019s finishing a PhD program, the language of the academy is amazing (and sometimes aggravating) to me. Necessarily, language conjures audience. I often think, Who\u2019s in that crew? Who is one talking with, and in addition, who is one talking to? In the way that I talk about multiple possibilities for the self, or multiple selves, I\u2019m also interested in multiple audiences. How do those multiple audiences theorize being, theorize to (and next to) one another what it is to be? That\u2019s what I want to get at. There\u2019s a point where [Nathaniel] Mackey explains that to greet someone with \u201cHello\u201d is profoundly different from greeting with \u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d or, \u201cWhere you at?\u201d Is that the phrase he points to? I need to go home to the Mackey wisdom. The greeting and question are meant as acknowledgment, but something very different is called.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s right, because it\u2019s a talking with and to. You\u2019re starting from different premises, even though it\u2019s basically your salutation.<\/span><\/p>\nI want to read a little bit more from your book; as I was saying earlier, you\u2019re showing what only poetry can do. You\u2019re activating those multiple registers: \u201cTo know is to be a spoon in a kitchen drawer, wearing expertise. \/ To know is to be a spoon, bent burnt, crystalline skeins, shining held hollow.\u201d So you bring in the domestic, drugs… \u201cTo know is to believe. \/ To know is to be made infinitive\u2014grammar and psychology.\u201d Psychology, agency. \u201cTo know is to be? This a math of blood, a math of bodies, a (map of the math of bodies). \/\/ To know is to be conqueror\u2026\u201d Power, domination. \u201cTo be light infiltrating, descent. \/ To know is to be boundary, bounded\u2014city\/lover s\/he\u2019ll leave.\u201d You are breaking down what it means to know. A great deal of academic philosophy doesn\u2019t even acknowledge this richness of how we come to know things.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0And how important, at the end of the day, is knowledge from the spaces we\u2019re killing off, the people we\u2019re disappearing. It may ultimately save our asses. What\u2019s mind-blowing in your writing is that the knowing of the world takes different forms, right? That\u2019s ultimately what saves the lives of some of your characters.<\/span><\/p>\nIf we\u2019re going to read each other\u2019s work, how about: \u0007\u201cAn Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution\u201d? I love this story about the criminal Zion, who is resistant. One does say, \u201cZion, what\u2019s your home training?\u201d It makes a lot of sense that a slave who is subjected to slavery\u2019s brutality would act out that home training. Zion is a product of his home, but he\u2019s also this brilliant musician who\u2019s not allowed to play music. I like the simplicity of description of this last section of the story, subtitled \u201cEclipse\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\nOn the morning of April 1, 1775, the authorities did not find the Negro named Zion in his cell. Given the severity of the crimes and the necessity of preserving the ruling order, another Negro, whose particular crimes are not recorded, was hanged in the Worcester Town Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among them the widow Shaftesbone; and the newly-married Sarah Wantone Fleet and her husband George, of Worcester, a Lockean and member of a local militia. Also present was Jubal, now calling himself Mr. John Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a Negro brigade in Boston. Of their response there is no record.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt\u2019s funny how you mark the absence: \u201cThe rest of the town, absent from the proceedings, was preparing, one must suppose, for the swiftly approaching conflagration.\u201d There\u2019s so much going on in just this tiny description. Basically it\u2019s, \u201cAny Negro will do.\u201d Even with all of the awful things that Zion has done, the particular nature of his crimes, he is invisible. There\u2019s also the wonderful mystery… He\u2019s gone! Perhaps he was never there.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0He\u2019s gone, right! (laughter<\/i>) Last night we were talking about humor as a survival strategy and a means of protest. You were listening to Richard Pryor. Humor can be deeply subversive. In that passage you read, there\u2019s something so horrifying about substituting one black body for another, which happens\u2014<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0\u2014all the time. They fit the description.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0They fit the description. Injustice in the execution of justice! This story also has to do with the multiple ironies of the idea of \u201cfreedom.\u201d On the one hand, we\u2019re talking about a country coming into being based on a constellation of ideas around liberty\u2014and yet you have these masses of people who are un-free, like Zion, who keeps trying to live ideas of freedom. He\u2019s also doing many of the same things\u2014think of the thefts, the sexual acts\u2014that his master is doing. Both are actually subject to this larger ruling order, because Britain is trying to assert its domination over these resistant colonies, but Zion has no leeway. He embodies this quandary, eluding their grasp and ours.<\/span><\/p>\nI was trying to think of different ways in which humor might factor into these stories; sometimes it\u2019s obvious and sometimes not. There\u2019s the W.E.B. Du Bois story, \u201cPersons and Places.\u201d He is so serious, I thought, I have to stay serious when I\u2019m talking about Du Bois and George Santayana! (laughter<\/i>) But, in general, humor is another way of conveying the reality of black existence. Where would we be without it?<\/span><\/p>\nSpeaking of humor, you have a lot of it in\u00a0A Swarm of Bees in High Court<\/i>. Would you talk a little bit about this?<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I am interested in humor that is not light\u2026 one, because I didn\u2019t grow up to become a cabaret singer. (laughter<\/i>) I fantasized about growing up to be a comedian. In comedy there\u2019s a refusal to absent oneself from the conditions under which one lives\u2014this interests me. Comedy makes me think, Okay, here\u2019s a space to look at the fact that living is not easy, nor for the faint of heart. A space to grapple with that, and not to avoid it, but also not to be caged by it. I was watching\u00a0Live on the Sunset Strip<\/i>\u2014this is after Pryor\u2019s caught on fire while smoking a crack pipe\u2014thinking, How do you move from that to being that naked on stage?<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0People talk about \u201cblack folk\u2019s comedy.\u201d I\u2019m thinking about people like Redd Foxx, Mo\u2019Nique, Eddie Murphy. Their lives are always in there. Mo\u2019Nique, how she talks about herself and her looks and others\u2019\u2014she goes for the jugular. You\u2019re laughing, but grief\u2019s in there too. Sometimes they have you laughing to the point of crying.<\/span><\/p>\nAt the conference \u201cThinking Its Presence: Race and Creative Writing\u201d in Montana, Jess Row showed us that clip where Dave Chappelle is with the white family called The Niggars. Chappelle at one point says, \u201cThis racism is killing me inside!\u201d And he\u2019s laughing. Every time I watch it, I\u2019m going, that\u2019s\u00a0truth<\/i>, that doubleness. It\u2019s funny, and yet a truth that\u2019s so devastatingly, destructively absurd\u2014it\u2019s the physical embodiment of unreason, an absolutely ridiculous, incredibly powerful system that is shaping our existence in the world.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s the consciousness that shapes black existence. The only way you survive is through knowing that you\u2019re ducking bullets.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Exactly. You have this section in your book called \u201cBullet\/In.\u201d I love the serious play: \u201cbulletin\u201d and \u201cbullet in,\u201d the news of what\u2019s happening and the everyday violence that shapes how people live in Harlem, and all over the country. Your poetry is capturing the realities and unrealities of everyday existence, right?<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I\u2019ll approach it from the autobiographical first. A few years ago a kid was killed across the street from my apartment building; one Mother\u2019s Day, a young man was killed; years ago, a woman was found in a suitcase in a park across the street; on the corner, someone was shot; and in my building, a hairdresser\u2019s roommate was shot. More recently, after the manuscript for the book had been turned in, a bullet came through one of my windows.<\/span><\/p>\nFor a long time, I\u2019d walk around as if these things didn\u2019t have an impact. I\u2019d feel bad, be a little cautious, and then just kind of go on. I can\u2019t imagine that these things don\u2019t impact the community or the body. There\u2019s an accumulation of grief within defined spaces. Whether or not we know the particular people, we experience that loss and violence. I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the blood on the sidewalks and about cleaning it up. If I had kept writing this book, I would write about the global blood spilling that connects the boy in Harlem to the boy in Palestine, to the boy in \u2026<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0This is a kind of news about trauma, which is intimately related to loss.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0It\u2019s not only trauma. When I think of my block, I think of standing outside with people who\u2019ve lived there since 1964 or before; or walking down the street and Mr. Charles stopping me to talk to me; or the woman hanging out of the window, talking to different people. There\u2019s this tremendous life, people smiling, kids on the basketball court. All of that is going on, and simultaneously there\u2019s this current of trauma and danger, and the moments in which it appears. Every summer, at some point, there is an altar set up for someone who\u2019s been killed. These altars are beautiful, but somebody\u2019s dead.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0You\u2019re not aestheticizing trauma, but showing that through poetry and the materiality of language it can be made visible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0That\u2019s my hope. Though I want to acknowledge that there is an aesthetics to American violence that is tied to notions of masculinity, success, and power, which are performed for us (and by us) constantly. It\u2019s the insanity of capitalism\u2019s logic to not acknowledge the violence underwriting beauty and order.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0Speaking of ideas of masculinity and power, I am thinking of my story \u201cAcrobatique,\u201d which hasn\u2019t been discussed very much in reviews. I was fascinated by the sole human figure in the 1879 Edgar Degas painting\u00a0Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando<\/i>. She was one of the most famous and beloved circus performers in late 19th-century Europe. She was born in Germany and was mixed race. In a letter Degas actually calls her \u201cma n\u00e9gresse<\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nMiss La La cannot fully escape Degas\u2014she wants to ascend into the rafters so that his eye and hand cannot capture her. The true story behind the painting is that he did a number of studies, and then had to bring in a structural engineer to help him paint the ceiling of the Cirque Fernando. It\u2019s also his sole painting of a black person, despite the fact that he had relatives who were African American in Louisiana.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Yeah, New Orleans!<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0New Orleans, exactly. We can\u2019t fully see her, she is elusive\u2014and yet this image circulates widely. Miss La La is escaping but not really. In the case of Degas, he wants to possess his \u201cn\u00e9gresse<\/i>\u201d but can\u2019t. It all ties into the logic of capital, because this is one of Degas\u2019s most famous paintings, and when people talk about people like him, they\u2019re talking about technique, but they\u2019re also talking about money. So this takes us back to capital and the violence it wreaks.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I wonder if the breakdown of genre in your stories and their open-endedness is a resistance to a logic of capital marking a clear beginning, middle, and end that one can package. We even mark history as having a clear beginning, middle, and end.<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0The stories in\u00a0Counternarratives<\/i>\u00a0are anti-teleological; they defy \u201cprogressive history\u201d and master narratives, suggesting possible ways that art might respond to capitalism\u2019s effects. I also see these stories doing something deeply queer (or \u201cquare\u201d to use E. Patrick Johnson\u2019s version of the term), by opening up spaces within and across their thematic and formal connections, to suggest other ways of thinking about and assembling the world. In part to disorient; it\u2019s a kind of warping, an attempt to defamiliarize, and thereby reshape, our thinking.<\/span><\/p>\nWe\u2019re running out of time and there are just so many questions I have, but a key aspect of this book is, obviously, gender, and the perspective of a woman who is viewing, seeing, thinking, knowing, writing. A black woman of a certain background. Can you talk about the many possibilities of that perspective?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0I remember making a lunch for my grandma Cardella, my grandma Dorothy, my cousin Butsie, and Miss Annie\u2014they were the oldest women in the family, and they\u2019d known each other for most of their lives. I asked them, \u201cWhat do I need to know about being a woman?\u201d My mom was there too, but she wanted to stay in the background. They talked about love, about self-care, about spirit. They wouldn\u2019t talk about suffering, but focused instead on survival, on thriving despite.<\/span><\/p>\nI think about the basics of being in\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0body. Like, going for a walk in the middle of the night. The men I know can do that; I can\u2019t. Or I could, but I\u2019m in a different kind of danger. I don\u2019t know any other way to be in the world. To my mind, it\u2019s very much about being reduced to flesh. And in my work I\u2019m not mourning that, but saying, \u201cOkay, let me look at that. What is it to be reduced to flesh?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nJK<\/span>\u00a0And yet the poems also convey, \u201cI will not be reduced to flesh. I will not be reduced.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nYou have this stunning Wangechi Mutu painting on the cover, and the title itself riffs off of Max Ernst\u2019s\u00a0A Swarm of Bees in the Palace of Justice<\/i>. Even in the title, you are showing how rewriting, riffing off language, and taking ownership or control of it allows you to tell other stories. You\u2019re putting things in conversation that might not otherwise be in conversation.<\/span><\/p>\nTF<\/span>\u00a0Yes, although they are in ongoing conversations about art. Will you talk about your cover?<\/span><\/p>\n
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