An Interview with Amanda Bennett
By Sunny Jeong-Eimer (PO' 25)
Amanda Bennett is a writer, educator and doctoral candidate at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on developing a “vocabulary of feeling” through Black feminist Literature, particularly the writings of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers and Assata Shakur. Bennett is also the founder of define&empower which aims to reimagine Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consulting through a lens of Black feminist imagination and creative storytelling. You can read her poetry, short fiction and essays on her blog as well as listen to her podcast Black Feminist Hotline on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Content warning: discussion of mental health, suicide, racial trauma
I noticed that across your work, you have a consistent emphasis on storytelling and rewriting dominant narratives through the lens of black feminist imagination. What is the story you see yourself (re)writing throughout your work?
I think it's a story of people who recognize themselves to be outside of the dominant narrative of society, for whatever reason, and really struggling with that outsider status and not recognizing the value inherent to it. And then being able to recognize the power of that outsider perspective by forming community with other people, and then seeing what the fruits of that community can generate.
That's even kind of the structure of my own dissertation work, where I go from Toni Morrison as a tokenized graduate student at Cornell to Hortense Spillers attending the feminist sex work conference and finding people who are similar to her in her ideologies and sexuality. Then, to Nzotake Shange attempting suicide multiple times because she cannot fit in with her white communities due to her black identity, and so she ends up creating this coreopoem called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by working with a community of women of color in California and New York. Then, ending with Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker, thinking of "How do we begin to reconcile the differences between women across generations by understanding what stories the older women have experienced?" And, "How do they begin to respect our own unique experiences as their metaphorical and sometimes even biological daughters?"
You also write about how one can take stories from past literature, for example, and find oneself in those texts. What has the process of teaching storytelling as a way to build empathy looked like for you?
I've done a lot of work with Elon University. I've done round table conversations with their LGBTQIA center. I've done panel discussions about black feminist archival practices.
And I've also come and given guest lectures about my friend who actually passed away to suicide. I read her work alongside some work with Foucault to be able to talk about this concept of being able to be unmade and undone by things like grief, then being able to remake yourself through reflecting upon your life and wanting to change.
But with that work, I really enjoyed being able to encourage people to tell their own stories as individuals who are marginalized and allow that to be the data upon which I make my claims of what needs to change institutionally. If we claim to value the voices and experiences of the marginal life, how do we begin to interpret that as data to actually change the shape of our institutions?
Thank you. Well, first, I'm sorry for the loss of your friend.
I also want to elaborate on the theme of mental health. Mental health is often pictured as if only white people experience it, which is given the intergenerational and everyday trauma that can come with being a marginalized person. How do you see stories interacting with the issue of mental health and trauma in marginalized communities?
By being able to provide a model through which people can begin to articulate their own struggles with mental health. Because, as you said, all of our models of mental health crises are Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—white figures.
Whereas, for example, I wrote a short story called “Lay Your Head On My Pillow” in which a Black woman has a mental health crisis and writes about contemplating suicide, or at least narrates it in that way. And just being able to show that to my students and discuss that this character is from enslaved folks, has generational trauma, and has these particular needs to perform as a Black woman in a very corporatized space—why would that contribute to her behavioral patterns in the story? I think that that is helpful for them because it shows that not only do I have the model through which I can interpret my own experiences, but also that I am able to make something of my experiences by writing about it and helping other people. It's like a chain that's building.
Who are some of your primary influences when it comes to your writing and how have they impacted you?
I can go back to my dissertation in that sense, because the four women I mentioned—Toni Morrison, Nzotake Shange, Hortense Spillers, and Alice Walker—had such a huge influence on the way that I write, and also the way that I develop politics as a Black feminist. So, going back to my friend who passed away and the pandemic, I literally had to go back and look at these women authors through the lens of how do I cope with grief?
How do I cope with isolation? How do I deal with family legacies? How do I deal with my inheritance? And not just as literary objects to take apart with surgical precision. Morrison taught me how to deal with the unique context of my intergenerational trauma as a Black American descended from enslaved people. Hortense Spillers has taught me a lot about how to talk about the language that constructs the reality that we live in; if we only have terms like Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire to talk about angry Black women, then we begin to see Black women only through those three categories. Then someone like Nzotake Shange taught me how to break free from very Western norms around grammar and language, so she'll write in all lower case, or incorporate African-American dialect, or write fictional stories about real-life Black women whom she is in community with as a way of uplifting their experiences. And then Alice Walker…just being able to synthesize your political beliefs so eloquently through the form of fiction and poetry. She founds womanism, she does all of this work against the genital mutilation of women, but she's also able to condense that into novels, like The Color Purple or The Third Life of Grange Copeland.
I love your critique of how a lot of literary analysis within university feels like it has a surgical precision to it. It almost sterilizes the text and, in that way, feels like you're Othering the author of the text and the text itself. And connected to the idea of how the university approaches literature, you discuss how dangerous it is to paraphrase the story of Beloved. As you say, this can lead to oversimplification and misreading, so there's also a part of this which undermines readers' ability to feel pain and build self-knowledge through Morrison's work.
Can you elaborate on what it means to build knowledge of the self and others in literature?
Totally. I mean, this is Morrison's entire philosophy. There's multiple parts to this. She has an essay called “The Dancing Mind” when she's talking about a peace that comes from being able to have an open dance of a vulnerable mind with another vulnerable mind. And she says that typically happens in society through the act of reading.
She has another idea of the invisible ink in a text. And it's basically what is happening between the lines of a text that the right readers are able to put in through their experiences. She has another quote where she talks about how the words in the page are only half the story, and the other half is what you bring to the party.
So through that, she is making herself vulnerable in the sense of trusting a reader enough to want to seek a similar level of self knowledge to read their experiences into her story, to be able to heal themselves, to be vulnerable, and then become like an author in their own right.
In a lot of my fiction, like the short story I wrote, “Lay Your Head On My Pillow,” I cited a lot of Morrison's narrative structure. I used her novels as a way to figure out how I approach certain problems in my own life and in my own family. And then I would tweak it to my own particular experience, because even she was drawing on Greek mythology and different genealogies of literature. For me, becoming an author has been curating my own inheritance and genealogy of literature that helps me figure out how I want to solve certain problems in my own life.
This is a queer kind of model. And I am a queer person as well, in the sense that cishet people can be born into a biological family and just take it for granted and live in a ho-hum quasi misery that's horrible. But with a queer person who is cast out or just cannot assimilate in that way, you have to begin to build a queer community. Otherwise, you will feel like an outsider who does not fit in anywhere. So writing and reading has been a way for me to practice that. I feel like I can live it in my actual life.
How have you related queerness to the way you engage Black feminist imagination?
This is another Toni Morrison quote, where she says that she can imagine being much more elaborately and beautifully than a white man ever could simply because of the complexity of her experience. And Toni was Black and a woman and allegedly straight, but for a queer Black woman—like Audre Lorde, for example, or Barbara Christian, or even June Jordan—it's like, “I'll speak from my experience of being queer and Black and woman,” which means, “I have a way of speaking and viewing the world that is automatically incompatible with the typical regimes of an academic institution, which is designed to prioritize the lowest common denominator of cishet white man.”
It's almost like the closer you are to that ‘ideal’ category, the easier it would be for you to assimilate, but the farther you are away from that category, the more disparate you are from that ideal. I think a lot about the novel Passing by Nella Larsen. Who has the luxury of being able to pass and who doesn't? And for those who don't have the luxury of being able to pass, how do you begin to create a world where you feel like you deserve to exist? Because the alternative otherwise would have to be death.
Absolutely. I think that relates to the idea of beloved community as well, in terms of needing to carve out safe spaces where you're able to exist authentically or at least explore your identity.
What has the process of building ‘beloved community’ looked like for you, coming from the perspective of being a student and now also an educator within the university?
In undergrad, I went to the University of Alabama (the football school) because they gave me a scholarship. The first two years I was there, I was committed to assimilating because the culture on campus at that time was just profoundly racist. Racial slurs, nooses, even pushing Black people off of the walk paths, or not holding the door open for them, and the sororities and fraternities were segregated. Just a very racist culture. I thought that if I could fly under the radar and just go along with things, then maybe I could survive. But my mental health was literally deteriorating rapidly.
As a junior, I became the Campus Editor at Large for the Huffington Post. So I began doing interviews with folks around campus about sexuality, race. I would talk to women in sororities who had been raped by men in fraternities and had their cases dismissed by the university. And as I collected those stories and realized that I wasn't alone in how I felt, I felt the courage to create this activist movement called We Are Done with some of my other student colleagues. We ended up giving a list of 11 demands to the university about diversity, equity, inclusion, and actually ended up getting a lot of those demands met in the long-term. Even though we received a lot of hate and pushback from people on campus and across Alabama, we got to create a space called the Intercultural Diversity Center that didn't exist before, because there was no space for students of color, queer students, et cetera, to gather on campus at the time.
But my failing in that as a student was failing to create a beloved community. I was trying to create a utopia for others, but I wasn't allowing myself the peace of being able to engage in it fully by being able to ask for help or show vulnerability or even be open about my sexuality. I felt that I had to be the hyper-assimilated person who was still an activist in order to present a palatable version of the more radical future I wanted to help create. Now as a graduate student, I have the wisdom—through therapy, quite frankly—to be able to learn how to put myself first and recognize that the quality of the movements I can create are only as good as the quality of the life that I can create for myself.
My friendships, my business opportunities, my relationships—all of that is like a testing ground for utopia. If I'm not happy as a queer Black woman in my life, how could I possibly write and speak and teach about a better future for my students?
How do you sustain your energy and care for yourself?
I would say delegating. I have my students sometimes lead their own workshops or have them edit the audio from my podcast or just help me out in various ways.
The old me would have been like, I've got this, I'm going to do everything for you. I'm in control. But instead there is actually an opportunity to have them engage in Black feminist praxis by allowing them to have a vested role in this dynamic, which is actually more politically valuable than me just doing it all myself.
And then over the pandemic, in grieving my friend, I cut away so many people, mostly white, who were just not able to see me as a dynamic human being. It's almost like they saw me as a cartoon or a painting, a static individual. I realized that I was spending so much of my psychic and emotional energy trying to convince the people who were closest to me, quote unquote, to give me the barest of emotional needs and desires. And I shouldn't have to ask for that.
Now I have a circle of folks who are around me who are queer, women, people of color, et cetera, who are overjoyed to be able to support me in both my professional and my personal endeavors, which is a source of replenishment for me. I don't have to do anything to receive this love. I am allowed to just exist.
Do you see this theme of utopia or even dystopia as well coming up in your work on Black feminist literature as well?
Totally. I think a lot about how Black feminist writers create utopia within dystopia, without it being corny. So for example, in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, it's pretty dystopian in the sense that the women are being sexually abused, emotionally abused, physically abused, and financially abused. They are denied access to education, are discouraged from being in solidarity with each other. And yet over time, the characters are able to tap into their desires and figure out ways to engage with each other, even without the influence of formal academic feminism. Seeing the ways that everyday people in these novels are able to create communities out of essentially the most disturbing and desolate conditions is what is utopia for me.
To come back to the question of how you write fiction, I'm curious if writing has been a practice that you've been doing your entire life. What are some of the rituals that you associate with growing into the identity of being a writer?
I've been a writer pretty much my whole life. I used to write short stories based on my friends in kindergarten. I called it My Story Series. *laughs* And then I would also do that in middle school and high school too. I would give people stories for their birthday and poems for their birthday.
I would publish poems in teen magazines. I used to love writing essays and publishing them. I kept a journal religiously every night as a young child. I still keep a journal pretty regularly now, but then and now writing was always a way for me to process what was happening around me.
So I would write poems about people who I had crushes on, or even things like Hurricane Katrina. It's like having to figure out how to I put words to this image that I have in my head. So now it's a self-soothing measure. If I'm in tumult in my head for weeks at a time, I'm like, oh, I need to write something; my body's telling me I have to purge this from my body. So I'll try and go into a quiet mode in myself and begin to compose a poem. Or I have to figure out, is it time for poetry, is it time for essay, is it time for fiction? Trying to figure out that relationship within myself is my current work right now.
Can you elaborate on how you figure out which medium suits what you're trying to express?
I've been trying to figure out what the current relationship is, but I was thinking that poetry is birth. Then, fiction is like adolescence. And then, essay is adulthood.
Because in the poem, I'm having to break through something and create my own kind of logic of where the line break’s going to happen, what the structure’s going to be like, what images I am going to draw on, what the through line is.
Then fiction is like, how do I place this message that I've gotten from the universe or whatever in a larger social context? How do these ideas, which begin to manifest in the breaking of language, appear in the form of a character’s development or a plot arc?
Then the essay, which is typically a personal essay, also takes into account history and culture and stuff. I am then able to relate it back to my own life and a conscious awareness of why I was obsessed with this topic or idea or problem. But the poem is like, I, I am, I have an innate understanding that what I'm writing about is personal to me, but I haven't figured out how to say it completely. It's almost like having a jingle stuck in your head.
What does your imagination of the future look like and what has informed that through your work?
My pie in the sky dream would be to make define&empower into a Black women's studies department, but not in the traditional academic sense. We would have the consultants who are faculty—who are able to teach classes that they want to and write creatively if they want to—also taking on other DEI consulting projects. And then, being able to bring in students who are able to learn how to practice the application of queer Black feminist knowledges to a variety of industries or across fields. I really think that I've come to that conclusion through working with my students because in my dream, my students will be able to come into work for me, quite frankly, when they're in graduate school to earn extra money or figure out where they can apply these knowledges that they’ve been learning in class for the past few years.
And really being able to value the differences that emerge between us, because it's almost like raising children. When you work with students over multiple years, they come to you. They've got trauma issues and you're caring for them on a very intimate level because they are not helpless, but need a lot of support and guidance and love. And then they begin to find their own interests that differentiate from yours. You figure out how to not hold them back out of your own selfish desire to control them, and instead allow them to flourish and recognize that the bond of trust between you is strong enough that they will always come back to you when they need you and you can always reach out to them when you need them. Then they finally go off on their own, do graduate school or go out in the world and do whatever.
Then I began to have a community built in my world. And my students have their own sphere that is powerful and brilliant, unique to who they are and represents their core values that they’ve had to work on, but we can also be interdependent and be able to work together. I prefer that model much more to the typical idea that you'll have to all stay with me forever and I have to control everything about you and nobody can be more successful than I am. That's what creates monopolies, and also a lack of diversity of ideas.
I can't be responsible for making the future entirely by myself. But by letting go of control while still being nurturing and vulnerable and trustworthy, I'm able to create many more ultimate timelines through my students and their own genius.
I really appreciate you talking about that, and also, the idea of emotional intelligence being built into education, because I think it's true that growing up—at least in K to 12 education, in my experience at Chicago Public Schools—emotional intelligence was not something we learned. So, we often don't have the vocabulary to talk about a lot of the experiences that we have. In particular, people have intersecting identities who aren't even pictured within conversations on mental health to begin with.
Reading Toni Morrison's novels show us how abused people become abusers. So many other problems that we see in academia or industry or across things like Me Too, for example, are actually caused by people who never resolved their childhood trauma and begin to flip it on to other people and then want to acquire power as a way to avoid dealing with that issue.
That wraps up my questions but is there anything else that you'd like to add or plug?
I do love the work that my colleague Tammy Zhao is doing with her organization, Just Gilded Cages, which is phenomenal. I have a dear colleague named Anastasia Kārkliņa who works on cultural intelligence and brand strategy. You can also follow her work.
I think it's a story of people who recognize themselves to be outside of the dominant narrative of society, for whatever reason, and really struggling with that outsider status and not recognizing the value inherent to it. And then being able to recognize the power of that outsider perspective by forming community with other people, and then seeing what the fruits of that community can generate.
That's even kind of the structure of my own dissertation work, where I go from Toni Morrison as a tokenized graduate student at Cornell to Hortense Spillers attending the feminist sex work conference and finding people who are similar to her in her ideologies and sexuality. Then, to Nzotake Shange attempting suicide multiple times because she cannot fit in with her white communities due to her black identity, and so she ends up creating this coreopoem called For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by working with a community of women of color in California and New York. Then, ending with Alice Walker and her daughter, Rebecca Walker, thinking of "How do we begin to reconcile the differences between women across generations by understanding what stories the older women have experienced?" And, "How do they begin to respect our own unique experiences as their metaphorical and sometimes even biological daughters?"
You also write about how one can take stories from past literature, for example, and find oneself in those texts. What has the process of teaching storytelling as a way to build empathy looked like for you?
I've done a lot of work with Elon University. I've done round table conversations with their LGBTQIA center. I've done panel discussions about black feminist archival practices.
And I've also come and given guest lectures about my friend who actually passed away to suicide. I read her work alongside some work with Foucault to be able to talk about this concept of being able to be unmade and undone by things like grief, then being able to remake yourself through reflecting upon your life and wanting to change.
But with that work, I really enjoyed being able to encourage people to tell their own stories as individuals who are marginalized and allow that to be the data upon which I make my claims of what needs to change institutionally. If we claim to value the voices and experiences of the marginal life, how do we begin to interpret that as data to actually change the shape of our institutions?
Thank you. Well, first, I'm sorry for the loss of your friend.
I also want to elaborate on the theme of mental health. Mental health is often pictured as if only white people experience it, which is given the intergenerational and everyday trauma that can come with being a marginalized person. How do you see stories interacting with the issue of mental health and trauma in marginalized communities?
By being able to provide a model through which people can begin to articulate their own struggles with mental health. Because, as you said, all of our models of mental health crises are Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson—white figures.
Whereas, for example, I wrote a short story called “Lay Your Head On My Pillow” in which a Black woman has a mental health crisis and writes about contemplating suicide, or at least narrates it in that way. And just being able to show that to my students and discuss that this character is from enslaved folks, has generational trauma, and has these particular needs to perform as a Black woman in a very corporatized space—why would that contribute to her behavioral patterns in the story? I think that that is helpful for them because it shows that not only do I have the model through which I can interpret my own experiences, but also that I am able to make something of my experiences by writing about it and helping other people. It's like a chain that's building.
Who are some of your primary influences when it comes to your writing and how have they impacted you?
I can go back to my dissertation in that sense, because the four women I mentioned—Toni Morrison, Nzotake Shange, Hortense Spillers, and Alice Walker—had such a huge influence on the way that I write, and also the way that I develop politics as a Black feminist. So, going back to my friend who passed away and the pandemic, I literally had to go back and look at these women authors through the lens of how do I cope with grief?
How do I cope with isolation? How do I deal with family legacies? How do I deal with my inheritance? And not just as literary objects to take apart with surgical precision. Morrison taught me how to deal with the unique context of my intergenerational trauma as a Black American descended from enslaved people. Hortense Spillers has taught me a lot about how to talk about the language that constructs the reality that we live in; if we only have terms like Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire to talk about angry Black women, then we begin to see Black women only through those three categories. Then someone like Nzotake Shange taught me how to break free from very Western norms around grammar and language, so she'll write in all lower case, or incorporate African-American dialect, or write fictional stories about real-life Black women whom she is in community with as a way of uplifting their experiences. And then Alice Walker…just being able to synthesize your political beliefs so eloquently through the form of fiction and poetry. She founds womanism, she does all of this work against the genital mutilation of women, but she's also able to condense that into novels, like The Color Purple or The Third Life of Grange Copeland.
I love your critique of how a lot of literary analysis within university feels like it has a surgical precision to it. It almost sterilizes the text and, in that way, feels like you're Othering the author of the text and the text itself. And connected to the idea of how the university approaches literature, you discuss how dangerous it is to paraphrase the story of Beloved. As you say, this can lead to oversimplification and misreading, so there's also a part of this which undermines readers' ability to feel pain and build self-knowledge through Morrison's work.
Can you elaborate on what it means to build knowledge of the self and others in literature?
Totally. I mean, this is Morrison's entire philosophy. There's multiple parts to this. She has an essay called “The Dancing Mind” when she's talking about a peace that comes from being able to have an open dance of a vulnerable mind with another vulnerable mind. And she says that typically happens in society through the act of reading.
She has another idea of the invisible ink in a text. And it's basically what is happening between the lines of a text that the right readers are able to put in through their experiences. She has another quote where she talks about how the words in the page are only half the story, and the other half is what you bring to the party.
So through that, she is making herself vulnerable in the sense of trusting a reader enough to want to seek a similar level of self knowledge to read their experiences into her story, to be able to heal themselves, to be vulnerable, and then become like an author in their own right.
In a lot of my fiction, like the short story I wrote, “Lay Your Head On My Pillow,” I cited a lot of Morrison's narrative structure. I used her novels as a way to figure out how I approach certain problems in my own life and in my own family. And then I would tweak it to my own particular experience, because even she was drawing on Greek mythology and different genealogies of literature. For me, becoming an author has been curating my own inheritance and genealogy of literature that helps me figure out how I want to solve certain problems in my own life.
This is a queer kind of model. And I am a queer person as well, in the sense that cishet people can be born into a biological family and just take it for granted and live in a ho-hum quasi misery that's horrible. But with a queer person who is cast out or just cannot assimilate in that way, you have to begin to build a queer community. Otherwise, you will feel like an outsider who does not fit in anywhere. So writing and reading has been a way for me to practice that. I feel like I can live it in my actual life.
How have you related queerness to the way you engage Black feminist imagination?
This is another Toni Morrison quote, where she says that she can imagine being much more elaborately and beautifully than a white man ever could simply because of the complexity of her experience. And Toni was Black and a woman and allegedly straight, but for a queer Black woman—like Audre Lorde, for example, or Barbara Christian, or even June Jordan—it's like, “I'll speak from my experience of being queer and Black and woman,” which means, “I have a way of speaking and viewing the world that is automatically incompatible with the typical regimes of an academic institution, which is designed to prioritize the lowest common denominator of cishet white man.”
It's almost like the closer you are to that ‘ideal’ category, the easier it would be for you to assimilate, but the farther you are away from that category, the more disparate you are from that ideal. I think a lot about the novel Passing by Nella Larsen. Who has the luxury of being able to pass and who doesn't? And for those who don't have the luxury of being able to pass, how do you begin to create a world where you feel like you deserve to exist? Because the alternative otherwise would have to be death.
Absolutely. I think that relates to the idea of beloved community as well, in terms of needing to carve out safe spaces where you're able to exist authentically or at least explore your identity.
What has the process of building ‘beloved community’ looked like for you, coming from the perspective of being a student and now also an educator within the university?
In undergrad, I went to the University of Alabama (the football school) because they gave me a scholarship. The first two years I was there, I was committed to assimilating because the culture on campus at that time was just profoundly racist. Racial slurs, nooses, even pushing Black people off of the walk paths, or not holding the door open for them, and the sororities and fraternities were segregated. Just a very racist culture. I thought that if I could fly under the radar and just go along with things, then maybe I could survive. But my mental health was literally deteriorating rapidly.
As a junior, I became the Campus Editor at Large for the Huffington Post. So I began doing interviews with folks around campus about sexuality, race. I would talk to women in sororities who had been raped by men in fraternities and had their cases dismissed by the university. And as I collected those stories and realized that I wasn't alone in how I felt, I felt the courage to create this activist movement called We Are Done with some of my other student colleagues. We ended up giving a list of 11 demands to the university about diversity, equity, inclusion, and actually ended up getting a lot of those demands met in the long-term. Even though we received a lot of hate and pushback from people on campus and across Alabama, we got to create a space called the Intercultural Diversity Center that didn't exist before, because there was no space for students of color, queer students, et cetera, to gather on campus at the time.
But my failing in that as a student was failing to create a beloved community. I was trying to create a utopia for others, but I wasn't allowing myself the peace of being able to engage in it fully by being able to ask for help or show vulnerability or even be open about my sexuality. I felt that I had to be the hyper-assimilated person who was still an activist in order to present a palatable version of the more radical future I wanted to help create. Now as a graduate student, I have the wisdom—through therapy, quite frankly—to be able to learn how to put myself first and recognize that the quality of the movements I can create are only as good as the quality of the life that I can create for myself.
My friendships, my business opportunities, my relationships—all of that is like a testing ground for utopia. If I'm not happy as a queer Black woman in my life, how could I possibly write and speak and teach about a better future for my students?
How do you sustain your energy and care for yourself?
I would say delegating. I have my students sometimes lead their own workshops or have them edit the audio from my podcast or just help me out in various ways.
The old me would have been like, I've got this, I'm going to do everything for you. I'm in control. But instead there is actually an opportunity to have them engage in Black feminist praxis by allowing them to have a vested role in this dynamic, which is actually more politically valuable than me just doing it all myself.
And then over the pandemic, in grieving my friend, I cut away so many people, mostly white, who were just not able to see me as a dynamic human being. It's almost like they saw me as a cartoon or a painting, a static individual. I realized that I was spending so much of my psychic and emotional energy trying to convince the people who were closest to me, quote unquote, to give me the barest of emotional needs and desires. And I shouldn't have to ask for that.
Now I have a circle of folks who are around me who are queer, women, people of color, et cetera, who are overjoyed to be able to support me in both my professional and my personal endeavors, which is a source of replenishment for me. I don't have to do anything to receive this love. I am allowed to just exist.
Do you see this theme of utopia or even dystopia as well coming up in your work on Black feminist literature as well?
Totally. I think a lot about how Black feminist writers create utopia within dystopia, without it being corny. So for example, in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, it's pretty dystopian in the sense that the women are being sexually abused, emotionally abused, physically abused, and financially abused. They are denied access to education, are discouraged from being in solidarity with each other. And yet over time, the characters are able to tap into their desires and figure out ways to engage with each other, even without the influence of formal academic feminism. Seeing the ways that everyday people in these novels are able to create communities out of essentially the most disturbing and desolate conditions is what is utopia for me.
To come back to the question of how you write fiction, I'm curious if writing has been a practice that you've been doing your entire life. What are some of the rituals that you associate with growing into the identity of being a writer?
I've been a writer pretty much my whole life. I used to write short stories based on my friends in kindergarten. I called it My Story Series. *laughs* And then I would also do that in middle school and high school too. I would give people stories for their birthday and poems for their birthday.
I would publish poems in teen magazines. I used to love writing essays and publishing them. I kept a journal religiously every night as a young child. I still keep a journal pretty regularly now, but then and now writing was always a way for me to process what was happening around me.
So I would write poems about people who I had crushes on, or even things like Hurricane Katrina. It's like having to figure out how to I put words to this image that I have in my head. So now it's a self-soothing measure. If I'm in tumult in my head for weeks at a time, I'm like, oh, I need to write something; my body's telling me I have to purge this from my body. So I'll try and go into a quiet mode in myself and begin to compose a poem. Or I have to figure out, is it time for poetry, is it time for essay, is it time for fiction? Trying to figure out that relationship within myself is my current work right now.
Can you elaborate on how you figure out which medium suits what you're trying to express?
I've been trying to figure out what the current relationship is, but I was thinking that poetry is birth. Then, fiction is like adolescence. And then, essay is adulthood.
Because in the poem, I'm having to break through something and create my own kind of logic of where the line break’s going to happen, what the structure’s going to be like, what images I am going to draw on, what the through line is.
Then fiction is like, how do I place this message that I've gotten from the universe or whatever in a larger social context? How do these ideas, which begin to manifest in the breaking of language, appear in the form of a character’s development or a plot arc?
Then the essay, which is typically a personal essay, also takes into account history and culture and stuff. I am then able to relate it back to my own life and a conscious awareness of why I was obsessed with this topic or idea or problem. But the poem is like, I, I am, I have an innate understanding that what I'm writing about is personal to me, but I haven't figured out how to say it completely. It's almost like having a jingle stuck in your head.
What does your imagination of the future look like and what has informed that through your work?
My pie in the sky dream would be to make define&empower into a Black women's studies department, but not in the traditional academic sense. We would have the consultants who are faculty—who are able to teach classes that they want to and write creatively if they want to—also taking on other DEI consulting projects. And then, being able to bring in students who are able to learn how to practice the application of queer Black feminist knowledges to a variety of industries or across fields. I really think that I've come to that conclusion through working with my students because in my dream, my students will be able to come into work for me, quite frankly, when they're in graduate school to earn extra money or figure out where they can apply these knowledges that they’ve been learning in class for the past few years.
And really being able to value the differences that emerge between us, because it's almost like raising children. When you work with students over multiple years, they come to you. They've got trauma issues and you're caring for them on a very intimate level because they are not helpless, but need a lot of support and guidance and love. And then they begin to find their own interests that differentiate from yours. You figure out how to not hold them back out of your own selfish desire to control them, and instead allow them to flourish and recognize that the bond of trust between you is strong enough that they will always come back to you when they need you and you can always reach out to them when you need them. Then they finally go off on their own, do graduate school or go out in the world and do whatever.
Then I began to have a community built in my world. And my students have their own sphere that is powerful and brilliant, unique to who they are and represents their core values that they’ve had to work on, but we can also be interdependent and be able to work together. I prefer that model much more to the typical idea that you'll have to all stay with me forever and I have to control everything about you and nobody can be more successful than I am. That's what creates monopolies, and also a lack of diversity of ideas.
I can't be responsible for making the future entirely by myself. But by letting go of control while still being nurturing and vulnerable and trustworthy, I'm able to create many more ultimate timelines through my students and their own genius.
I really appreciate you talking about that, and also, the idea of emotional intelligence being built into education, because I think it's true that growing up—at least in K to 12 education, in my experience at Chicago Public Schools—emotional intelligence was not something we learned. So, we often don't have the vocabulary to talk about a lot of the experiences that we have. In particular, people have intersecting identities who aren't even pictured within conversations on mental health to begin with.
Reading Toni Morrison's novels show us how abused people become abusers. So many other problems that we see in academia or industry or across things like Me Too, for example, are actually caused by people who never resolved their childhood trauma and begin to flip it on to other people and then want to acquire power as a way to avoid dealing with that issue.
That wraps up my questions but is there anything else that you'd like to add or plug?
I do love the work that my colleague Tammy Zhao is doing with her organization, Just Gilded Cages, which is phenomenal. I have a dear colleague named Anastasia Kārkliņa who works on cultural intelligence and brand strategy. You can also follow her work.