Credit: Kameelah Rasheed
You could probably call Photographer and Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed the bohemian Black Barbara Walters. In Rasheed’s conversations with creatives, especially Black creatives, her incisive questions often result in incredibly generative dialogues.
Rasheed’s conversations with Black artists are rich texts that capture something critical and vital about this current moment in Black artistic history. Her interviews are often creative acts in and of themselves, where she and the interviewee co-create new frameworks by which to understand the modern Black experience and the 21st century Black self.
Here are excerpts from five of Rasheed’s interviews with writers of color whose insights taught me about the race politics of contemporary journalism, Black feminist poetry and how the central fearlessness has been to Black creative expression.
Credit: Roxane Gay Twitter
Rasheed: You mentioned in other interviews that grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, visited Haiti, the home of your parents, and moved around a lot. You now live in rural Illinois. How does moving affect how you make sense of home and belonging?
Roxane Gay: In Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, he writes about how writers, like cartographers, lead readers through terrains and means to mapping blank space and the blank page.
Rasheed: In what way do you see yourself as a cartographer and what are you mapping? If you see yourself as a cartographer of sorts, where are you leading the reader or even what space are you creating for your readers to explore?
Roxane Gay: Moving so much has always made me long to truly find home and I certainly hope that happens for me someday. For now, as cheesy as it may be, I feel a sense of home when I am with my family and/or closest friends and in that regard, I am lucky to have a home not bound strictly to place. I tend to believe all writers are cartographers and we are mapping human experiences. I tend to focus on mapping women’s experiences as well as mapping trauma and its effects. In doing so, I hope I am leading the reader, and myself, into places of greater empathy.
Credit: Courtesy of Kiese Laymon
Rasheed: Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid M.A.A.D City approaches some of these themes. I am thinking about “Black Boy Fly” and how it connects to your work. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s Los Angeles Review of Books article on Kendrick Lamar, she thinks about the album as literary — a memoir of sorts. Curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Kiese Laymon: I’m teaching Good Kid M.A.A.D City right now. I taught it after showing my students Menace II Society, Boyz N’ the Hood, Set it Off, Poetic Justice, Friday and Baby Boy. I think it’s literary inasmuch as it’s firmly rooted in what [Richard] Wright calls the Blues. He wrote “the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.” So if the blues is literary, Good Kid M.A.A.D City is literary. /// Before I heard the entire album, I had “Black Boy Fly.” I listened to that song only for a week and a half straight. I don’t think I’d hear a song, read a piece that so wonderfully explored the fear of another black boy being the last one to have options. That’s what flying is to us, you know? It’s the option for mobility, for community, for alone time. It’s still my favorite song of the last 3 years.
Credit: Warsan Shire
Rasheed: Family always seems like a different and more intimate audience. How has your family responded to your poetry?
Warsan Shire: They are proud and supportive and beautiful and lovely. My father is a writer. My mother fell in love with and married a writer and secretly wrote poems everywhere. I think they kind of knew what they were doing. My father made sure I read everything I could get my hands on.
Rasheed: In rereading a lot of your of your poems speak of loss, trauma, and loneliness. How often does your poetry draw from your direct experiences? How often is your work a collage of women you know and women you’ve imagined?
Warsan Shire: None have been imagined. I either know, or I am every person I have written about, for or as. But I do imagine them in their most intimate settings. I meet someone and pick up on something they have said, or I am taken by the way they laugh and a poem drags itself from that moment. I have seen couples argue in the street and written as if I have followed them home. Imagination is important, but the people are real people. Also, I suppose, anyone you can imagine already exists.
Credit: Safia Elhillo
“Somewhere between forced iambics, obligatory revolutionary regalia, exaggerated movements, and strangely timed inflection, I decided that spoken word was the unfortunate anachronism that all responsible citizens had the responsibility to contain and neutralize. I’d much prefer to sit with a stack of Harryette Mullen or Yusef Komunyakaa than subject myself to another smoke-filled back room with a dreaded man, lathered in shea butter, yelling at the audience about African queendom or performing a not so cleverly disguised poem about his girl’s multiple orgasms.”
Credit: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah/ Gawker
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: That said, growing up watching a band [The Roots] that wasn’t sitting around accepting anybody else’s definition of their blackness helped me see that I could invent these ideas for myself and I did not have to take anyone’s ready-mades. There is this quiet as kept sense in America that all of Black life is about performance and servitude and those guys taught me the lesson that it doesn’t have to be that way. It remains a formative lesson for me.
Rasheed: What do you mean by ready-mades?
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: Anything that was invented for you but not by you. I realize that is not really the “real” definition but still. Watching Rich and them as a young person helped me see that I could invent and not rely on other people’s inventions.
Rasheed: You can create worlds.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah: Exactly.
The post Kameelah Janan Rasheed: 5 Must-Read Interviews With Young Black Writers appeared first on Clutch Magazine.