my mother
was a
freedom fighter
my mother
was a
freedom fighter
aja monet
Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
© 2017 Aja Monet
Cover photograph, “In the Mountains of Santiago de Cuba” © Carrie Mae Weems
Published in 2017 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
info@haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-60846-768-6
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,
intlsales@perseusbooks.com
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
for the daughters
Contents
foreword
author’s note
the labor movement
I. inner (city) chants
the ghosts of women once girls
language frontiers
if speaking is belonging
what my grandmother meant to say was
if ever you find yourself on the j train
wit
for the mothers who did the best they could
when the poor sing
jungle gym
564 park avenue
on asking my grandmother about santeria
an offering
limbo
ree ree ree
tardiness
my parents used to do the hustle
birth, mark
shell shock
reflection
legacy
district two
inner healing
footnote
give my regards to brooklyn
II. witnessing
the young
irreplaceable
the first time
the whistleblower
71st and collins
#sayhername
cook county
i’m just doing my job
dark matter
black joy
it is what it was
survival of the richest
starkville city jail
mobile technology
america
when in french country
every drop counts
a voice from azadi square
the giving tree
we are
a storm in a teacup
solidarity
sentiments of the colored women
Nehanda taught me
my mother was a freedom fighter
III. (un)dressing a wound
when in doubt
billie’s flower
album credits should include all the bed maidens
niggas in paris
nobody’s fault but hers
the body remembers
logan square
is that all you got
let’s don’t
the emerging woman after aborting a girl
a small luxury
dream deferred
each poem i take my pedestals and bury them
you make holy war
unhurt
slow season in titusville
i say i love you
selah
mi vida
la riad hammam
the ways of the many
daphne
a portrait
tomorrow
she sweats
daughters of a new day
acknowledgements
foreword
(Awesome) Aja,
What would one say to the daughter-sister of a freedom fighter? The witness to her own freedom fighting? To those who read your words disembodied from the fullness of you?
Your poetry reminds of the death-defying anti-gravity miracle work the feminine spirit does. She rises not only in survival, but a thriving grace: that thrival magick. We spent Sunday nights at Abiodun’s, poetry from the block competing with NBA lay-ups and the mmmm’s of salmon croquettes and grits comingling in our mouths. “Come listen to the word,” he said. You in Black Panther shirt, hair pulled back, puff of tight curls forming crown, reciting fresh poem from paper, but ingrained on soul, disorienting listeners:
there are some things that will bring even the strongest woman down for colored girls, it is the moment you hear the spirit break
Our poetry met before we did. We shared a habibti-sisterhood kindred language spoken with a soulful Global South twang. May we be our vibrantly crazy, hysterical, and moon-sick selves. We are not perfectly packaged productions. These poems are the flashes of your journey, chants at the protest against domination. They are not the totality of triumph, or the totality of you. They won’t know the zeal in your voice when you first read Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed. What it meant for you to retrace Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men ethnographic journey from Eatonville to New Orleans. How many times your heart revolved when a toddler in occupied Hebron kissed your hand. They will never know what you meant by “the politics of the urge to ejaculate” because they didn’t hear the two-hour red-wine-inspired argument outline that preceded it in East Jerusalem. They might never hear the conversations we had linking Santeria, Sufism, the influence Afrofuturists like Sun Ra’s and Octavia Butler’s intergalactic hybridity had on your artistry. They won’t know the despair you felt holding a gun for the first time: instrument of war. They won’t know what sipping on cafés au lait, daily trips to the boulangerie for pain, shrinking US-centrism, and what living undocumented in Paris looks and feels like when the glamor subsides. They can’t imagine the wideness of your smile when you warmed hands over chestnuts roasting on an open fire when it snowed in Bethlehem and every time you caught your twin flame’s eye that day. They won’t know how the Haitian earthquake in 2010 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 weighed on you or your organized response to them.
They won’t know how closeness and distance from the freedom fighter who birthed you continues to weigh on you. They won’t know how often you wrestle with the praxis of solidarity and sisterhood. You survive in the telling and you are reborn in the testimony.
Poetry helps to make sense of not only what happened but what continues to live in you. It reveals the dynamism of process, of transforming in front of us. This poetry is the unfolding of where you’ve been. You will continue to unfold. It is the totality of the process of your thoughts, the messy, the unrestrained, the too loud, the too much space, unformatted, the oscillating between “we” and “i,” the not enough punctuation.
Your poetry doesn’t need to come from your mouth for people to hear you. And yet there are those who will still not hear you. You can’t control other people’s reactions to you; at best, you can manage your response.
in loving always,
(marvelous) maytha (alhassen)
author’s note
my mother was a freedom fighter and so were her mother and her mother’s mother. i witness their movements in this world and it informs my own, their labor to love and live freely, their joy and their pain, their magic and madness. our cycles. i inherited their strength to survive in my struggle to be tender. i’ve learned, all violence is a violence toward women. there are wars waged on our bo
dies but no body is here except through the portal of a womb that carried the body. to hurt one is to hurt each person who labored to create us. the womb is a specific site of violence and yet it is not solely defined by the brutality it endures but also the creativity it nurtures. the yoni is not a battlefield of knowledge and theory but a source of mysticism. women of the diaspora, whom i love, who do not rely on physical strength alone but spiritual and emotional strength as well; they taught me that these poems are a way one posits the importance of feeling deeply in order for substantial social change to take place. this is a way of exploring the unknown. actions without a confrontation of repressed feelings become movements without meaning. gestures in good faith do not end oppression; it is risk and ruthless radical love that will see us through.
there are many contradictions in the pursuit of liberation. i live in the contradiction. i live in the mystical nuance. i use poems to access some strange sort of freedom and yet still i am bound to the circumstances that brought them to be written. wool spirit and silk skin, i shine. i am haunted and hunted. i imagine, forgive, and i am inspired. fierce and full of fury, i am drama, giddy with gossip. beyond human, i am at baptisms and funerals, churches and courtrooms, gardens and beaches. i am the prostitute and the saint. sweat, sore nipples, and a bloody inner thigh, i predate gender. i love every face wet and blinking out of a cosmos. i am where people crawl into breathe. i am born again each month and crying cause i know the cleansing power of tears and hiccups. i am best in the arms of a lover who won’t kill me. i dream of a world where no mother regrets, no mother resents, no mother buries her child. as i mature and become more fully the person i wish to be, my writing deepens, and i learn to face these poems and let them go. i have held onto some of them for far too long. they were written, selected, and ordered by my intuition, honoring what words could never know.
i dedicate this book of poems to the children and the women, like myself, who struggled to reason bringing them into this world. perhaps, they’d say, too, “my mother was a freedom fighter.” i dedicate this to a life of tenderness.
the labor movement
i never met a woman who wasn’t
fighting for freedom
an entire life
to trust
what truth
reveals
I. inner (city) chants
we are the stories
we tell
ourselves
the ghosts of women once girls
somewhere a little girl is reading aloud
in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles
at the sound of her own voice escaping
the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger
to know herself. she has not yet been taught
to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet,
a constellation of things to come.
as if a swallowed moon, she glimmers.
her head wrap rolls out in a gutter, bare feet
scat the earth, the ghosts of women once girls
make bridge of the dust dancing behind her,
she stomps suffering out the spirit
hooves drumming the earth in circles
she holds gladness in her mouth
like a secret teased out of a giggle
joy like her sadness overflows
she is not the opinions of others
she is of visions and imagination
somewhere a little girl is reading aloud in the middle of a dirt road.
she smiles at the sound of her own voice escaping the spine of a book.
she is a room full
of listening, lending herself
to her own words
somewhere
a deep remembering of what was, she survives all.
language frontiers
of timbres,
tones,
and convictions
nuance of noise every
sound
has a song,
a means of travel.
the great listening
begins
a poetic life,
an art of attending
self,
a word
has no destination,
panting
in what
the eyes
swallow,
the ear holds
thunder,
the mouth
is blown away.
what is said
when we speak?
in the gut,
mapping breaths,
clairvoyant as a cry
a metaphor
is
embodied practice.
we lose
our meaning
in its search.
saying as seeing,
seduced by memory,
surrender
stretch
a voice
into strength
sparring in the pulse
of another,
of what aches, what heals,
what longs to be understood,
all that is
lost in translation.
what is surrealism
but ancestral memory?
recurring images,
chants, and feelings,
untouched.
our ancestors
look at us
from the borders
of a lettered city,
across consonances,
we speak.
if speaking is belonging
is a truth i know to heart
if speaking means you have to listen
if listening means i exist
if existing is breath uttered in a story
what of my speaking is not poetry
if i make this language sing,
if you have to hear me when you read me
because my rage is in these words
and so is my calm and so is the voice i listen to
these words are something other than you
reading them, i speak like i got a right to say
something like my life depends on it
if it can’t be spoken, it ain’t worth writing
i read, i listen
if i listen more than i speak
don’t mean i speak any less.
what my grandmother meant to say was
i glow. i am luminous. i flare in the sky, a light
gleaming in the Sierra Maestra at night. i am
the mountains. i sway the sun to rise, yearning. i dance.
i taste of salt. my fingers cannot sit still. i smuggled
tears. from smile to smile, i ran. when i was too tired
to run, i swam. love reached beyond borders. i swam.
i rose. i flew. i dreamed. i fell in love with little to no
belonging. i belonged to nowhere and no one. i was in
love with everywhere and everyone. i was hungry, cold.
i hated hunger and cold. i hated everywhere with no
food. i hated everyone with everything. it was different
then. i was stupid. i was a woman. i was waiting to
become more than what happened, more than a bird
fleeing my country, to bathe in being afar, more than
a landscape or an image to cast a shadow on, a clip
in a newspaper, more than a seductress or a magician
of visions to foretell. my children, riding on the wings
of my sacrifice, i left them. i turned back many times.
i almost became the devil they wanted, but i left
a devil—nonetheless. i was a woman ahead of her time
i shimmer in scars, mapped by our bloodlines
of living. i imagined more than broken families,
i come from the laughter of aspiring lovers, the lure
of trembling in another’s arms. what about what
i wanted? who listens for what goes untold? i could not
protect my
children from everywhere. i made offerings
to the spirits who attend. i am their mother. i am not God.
i was a candela. i was a witch they could not burn,
la fuega. i was their mother. i was not God. i made choices.
i made peace. i was a woman ahead of her time.
i am the road you took
here. i am la camina.
i was the way.
if ever you find yourself on the j train
get off at Cleveland Street
you will discover a neighborhood of noise
the music will make your hips laugh
the concrete is a pasture of broken nerves
more importantly
head toward the house shrouded
under a ragged shawl of some amused sky
this is 61 Ashford Street
an old woman called my grandmother
spends most summers on the front porch
if you visit when i am a little girl
you will see me sitting next to her
in a beach chair
agitated by humid spirits and smoke
she blows ghosts from her lips
fashioning cigarettes between her fingers
like magic wands, her arms ripple
like the branches of willows
her hands are ancient
i have watched them soften the necks of chickens
how the blood drips from her wrists like syrup
the stick and moist before falling
she is a conjured woman
and Cuba