“This Way of Communicating That Is Within, Beyond, and Between Language”: An Interview with Destiny Hemphill https://ift.tt/YArQ9sO
The “Not Abandon, but Abide” interview series is dedicated to Southern poets abiding by hope in the South. Their poetry actively resists the notion that we all co-sign the actions of the monoculture. Poetry shakes what we thought we knew.
This spring, as poets were talking about the imminent arrival of the first full-length poetry collection by Destiny Hemphill, motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books), I clocked how much of the promotional energy surrounding the book came from other poets and not the author. Hemphill admits that she hasn’t focused on updating her website or social accounts. From talking with Mariah M., I knew of Hemphill’s past involvement with SaltWater Sojourn, a project centering Black creativity and healing. Recently, when I asked about her year-long academic appointment as Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, she said that kind of position hasn’t been the norm for her, that for years she’s put together a basic income out of “small jobs.”
Hemphill is a chronically ill ritual worker who lives in Durham. Among her considerable accomplishments, she’s published a poetry chapbook, Oracle: A Cosmology, and co-edited (with Tamiko Beyer and Lisbeth White) Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power. Even before I opened motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life, I appreciated the linguistic insights of its title: from the conceptual, compounded naming of “motherworld” to the etymology and divine inference of “devotional” and “alter” (and the homophone, altar). Modes of resistance and care weave through three sections: “the portal appears, & the portal opens, and & the portal expands,” immersing readers in the deep knowledge of mama-n-em. I agree with the poet Tyree Daye that this book “makes me feel like I am learning a new language.”
In June, I invited Destiny Hemphill to read at Sawmill Poetry in Cookeville, Tennessee, and this interview took place in person afterward.
motherworld: a devotional for the alter-lifebegins with an address to an audience that feels really deliberate. Who is being spoken to and who is speaking?
In the beginning of the collection, I think I hear the voice of mama-n-em summoning the “you,” this unnamed collective of Black wanderers sifting through the ruins of this world’s wreckage, caused by anti-Blackness, colonization, and its attendant crises of climate catastrophe, ableism, and transphobia. What the wanderers are being invited into is really to go to the edge of this current world and be willing to dive over the edge in order to create something else that in some ways feels new but isn’t always in fact. Even though capitalism and colonialism try to be totalizing forces, there are always people who are subverting it day to day, in their own more localized ecosystems. The book’s argument, too, is to reclaim and amplify those practices that are present right now, that are already antithetical to colonial modernity, capitalism’s driving force.
Not everybody is going to be familiar with mama-n-em and that idea of lineage and ancestors. Could you speak to that phrase?
Mama-n-em is a contraction of mama-and-them, and it’s a phrase that I grew up with in the Black South. Passing each other by — a neighbor, a cousin, a friend, somebody you go to church with — you don’t just ask how is that person doing, but how’s their mama, and how’s their mama-n-em doing? Within this text, mama-n-em carries that sort of familial kinship and ancestral power. On top of that, there are moments when “mama-n-em” appears in a poem alongside an invocation “creatrix of ack right,” which is a phrase that was pulled from my chapbook Oracle: A Cosmology. My chapbook feels much more personal and recognizably situated in the present world with speculative moments. While still interspersing personal moments, motherworld extends the speculative quality, where [mama-n-em is] almost like this sacred oracle, this creative force of ack right (or “acting right”). In [Oracle], I was thinking: what if I elevated my own lineage as a type of cosmology, as a type of pantheon? That [elevation] continues in motherworld, as an ancestral presence guiding and co-conspiring alongside the wanderers as they are building this other way to live.
I love that explanation, thank you. Ina review of motherworld, mónica teresa ortizwrote: “Witheach devastating daily reminder of our violent present, Destiny Hemphill offers us not only respite, but a vision that channels a one-of-a-kind space-making specifically attuned to the South.” How would you characterize that “space-making” and how did you hold that when you were writing?
One way the book makes [that] clear is through some of the sensory experiences. Cicada songs travel throughout the book as do images of swamps, magnolia, and clay. Cadence and rhythm of language activate much of that Black Southern space-making. There are also different practices that, for me, I associate with Black Southern space-making, like that moment in “apocalypso song # 33” where the speaker’s like, “and what about my grandpa? / who had chickens but would still trade / grains & the soap he made for your / auntie’s chicken’s eggs.” Those sort of communal, mutual care practices in these small, Black, Southern, rural spaces are evoked throughout.
I think uplifting those practices are important because even though the South is particularized for its reactionary, conservative, death-perpetuating politics, the whole U.S. as a settler colony is not only invested in the South’s perpetuation of those logics but also, of course, very much shaped by those same logics. In order for the “industrial revolution” in the North to happen and to become associated with this idea of progress, they had to manufacture the raw material from the South, which was only available because of the theft of labor, of Black flesh on stolen Native land.
Alongside that, some of the most radical politics are happening right here in the South. Most of the Black folks in the U.S. are in the South, most Black LGBTQ people are in the South. The South also holds one-third of the U.S.’s disabled population. Increasingly, we see more and more immigrant communities in the South. [That’s] on top of the disproportionate distribution of poverty in the South. So there’s a concentration of dispossessed, disenfranchised people who are fighting like hell to make radical change [and who are] making change, and that’s scary to the powers that be. That’s why we’re seeing an intensification of reactionary, fascist backlash here, trying to constrain what’s possible. So the ritualized practices to sift through the ruins of colonial modernity that appear in the manuscript I also think of as inextricable to that Black Southern space-making.
Your book is a rich text in crediting other sources of inspiration, in its notes, in the poem epigraphs, and within the poems themselves, especially in the section, “the portal opens.” You reference Toni Cade Bambara several times. Why was that referentiality important to you?
The book really embodies the value of “you did not get here alone.” I feel that I am writing with a lot of people, that even though motherworld is treated as a “monograph” and only has my name on it, it didn’t only come from me. Instead, I think of it as coming through me. One collaboration was with ancestors, both blood and chosen. Bambara is a literary ancestor for me. I first read Bambara’s work, TheSalt Eaters, as a senior in college for my honors thesis. It was incredible to me because I was in this moment where I was feeling in my own body and the way that my body moved in the world, that politics and spirituality and writing were all intertwined. Yet I was coming up repeatedly against this idea that the needed to be siloed because one could threaten to tarnish the other — this idea that a rigorous materialist politic was threatened by spirituality; the idea that spirituality was muddied by politics; the idea that creative writing could easily be tarnished by either. I really appreciated what Bambara did with her novel because I was seeing all of them intertwined, and both the novel’s form and plot captured the immense grief that I was feeling.
It’s a sacred text for me, and Toni Cade Bambara is a special writer and a thinker and a doer for me, so she’s all throughout this work. Some of the poems started off with titles that referenced The Salt Eaters, and the figure of “the salt eater” later developed into prophet-mothers or mama-n-em. Her work makes motherworld possible in so many ways.
I also listen to a lot of music: Sun Ra, who I mentioned in the epigraph, the Commodores, Patti Labelle, and Tramaine Hawkins, who’s the soloist in “Going Up Yonder,” and her voice that trails up really, really high — these voices are in the marrow of motherworld.
I also am thinking with people like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is epigraphed. The way that she thinks about mothering as this radical practice of taking care of the other and not a motherhood that the state tries to reduce to a bio-essentialist, gender-essentialist function to perpetuate the state. This kind of un-gendered possibility of taking care of each other is also very present.
So as much as I can (and I am not able to do it all), I want to mark who I’m with.
I’m interested in talking about your page arrangement. Your poem, “we ask mama-n-em, ‘why do you study astrology?’” has a cascading line, kind of.
That poem mirrors the Big Dipper, or the Drinking Gourd constellation that enslaved people would use to escape the South and get up North. The shape felt important to the content and the conceptual work that was happening in the poem. There are other examples, like “apocalypso song #33 | a prophecy of care” [which is justified] on the right margin, in the shape of a triangle. [The shape] came to me intuitively, but I felt it worked in terms of pacing. We get a frenzy of alliterative language in the beginning, but there’s also a slowing down that happens as the lines get shorter and more emphasis is placed as the lines get tinier. When we get to the point of the triangle, we land firmly at the words “with you,” and “with you” is also the point of the poem. I know not all people read lines this way, but for me, shorter lines move slower. I also received feedback that the shape of “apocalypso song #33” looks like a wing, which I also felt was fitting in terms of the conceptual work the poem does with care and flight.
Your poem, “hymn in the name of mama-n-em: amy, thank you for many times” reckons with the space that we allow grief: “thank you for not demanding / i translate my grief. / situate it in a larger pattern.” I was thinking about the responsibility of writers to do that, or not.
Yeah, I think that the following stanza is also important: “thank you for not demanding / i translate my grief. /situate it in a larger pattern // make it coherent / manage its excesses / for it to be worth your presence.” In some ways, I think that I write to translate experiences of grief. However, I don’t think it is my responsibility to translate grief as a functional exercise that upholds any illusion of neatness, exactitude, complete legibility, or manageability to make it worth someone’s presence. Though many demand that I hold that burden. But grief shuns the burdens of neatness, exactitude, and manageability. And many literary translators aren’t invested in those as priorities either.
What the poem is exploring is that we need people to adopt a posture of grief with us instead of saying, “Well, I don’t even understand why you’re grieving anyway, and if you can’t translate this into a packageable grievance, I can’t help you.” I was able to find and hold that posture with my friend Amy.
The poem starts where the grief is taking place in an environment where it’s not expected.
The speaker already felt a lot of pressure to have it all together — in part because of her structural position as a “black girl” right? And not be weeping at a party, because who wants to do that? [laughs] I think that “grieving” is one of those practices that under capitalism [takes on] so much urgency. Grief accumulates, and it often feels that if we begin dwelling with one grief — no matter how “big” or “small” — we might soon find ourselves collapsing under the weight of all of our grief. We are constantly reminded that there are real material repercussions if you don’t get over this heart-wrenching devastation that happened to you because of how grief can stop you from being a functional worker under capitalism. Your friends might abandon you, you might lose your job, you might lose your house, you might be evicted, your car might be repossessed, your kids might be taken away — which you’ll also have to grieve by the way. There are all these material structures that are like, you gotta get over it, you gotta get over it, you gotta get over it. You gotta keep it together. But, in the poem, that slowness that Amy offers the speaker, that moment Amy lets the speaker fall apart, lets the speaker be — that practice is something we can offer each other. And it is not a panacea (definitely not a panacea without transformed conditions), but it can be a sort of antidote.
What if we amplified those practices of being with each other and those griefs, small and big? In a way where there’s slowness, and there isn’t this requirement that after fifteen minutes “you need to get it together because you’re embarrassing me.” Or after these fifteen minutes, “you need to get it together because there’s an impending onslaught of violence that you’re trying to survive.” That being with each other in grief is not feared as something that threatens our survival against such an onslaught but supports us in that survival.
I love that aspect to your book, and that you write about chronic pain, which we don’t always acknowledge. The last poem in your book, “how we got our blues-tongue,” is an abecedarian. According to the definition, “abecedarian” can also mean learning the rudiments of something. The book doesn’t begin with an abecedarian, it ends with one.
Thank you for sharing that definition, because I feel like it rhymes with the poem’s title. When I think about the blues-tongue, one sound I think of is this sound that Bobby “Blue” Bland makes. I can’t mimic it, but there’s this very distinctive thing he does with his vocal chords. When he sings the blues, he sometimes makes a wailing sound that almost feels like blowing through a reed. I’m sure a vocal coach could identify technically what is happening, but it sounds like [his vocal chords] both expand and constrict. As a sound, it’s not a word, but it communicates so much. That’s kind of how I think about the blues-tongue: as this way of communicating that is both within language and beyond language and between language. A way that is very attentive to tragedy, to grief as well as to revelry within Black experiences. And it’s not that the tragedy beats out the revelry and the revelry definitely doesn’t beat out the tragedy — it’s not an equation like that. That’s the way that I think of the blues-tongue moving in motherworld.
I chose an abecedarian because the alphabet, as you know, is a tool for people to learn a language by sound and to represent it in text. So the abecedarian felt like it jammed with this concept of acquiring another language, another tongue, another way of reflecting and creating the conditions of our life.
My experience of using the abecedarian here is also an example of when form can feel expansive rather than unnecessarily restrictive. I think the abecedarian also allowed me to activate this gush of alliteration, so that each line is rushing to meet the next line which is also the next letter of the alphabet. I wanted it to feel like speaking in tongues, like a prayer language, like everything is being rearranged in the material and spiritual realms as they are being rearranged in sound. If someone is speaking in tongues, people around them don’t necessarily know what they’re saying unless one of their divine gifts is to translate tongues [laughs]. And the person speaking in tongues doesn’t necessarily know what they’re saying. What they’re trusting, though, is that God — the divine, Spirit, whoever they’re petitioning — understands what they’re saying and can intercede on that basis. So, by the end, there is no end to beginning again. And the wanderers are beginning again with a lineage of blues in terms of grief, but also pleasure, where not everybody necessarily knows what you’re saying because — like a prayer language, like Bobby “Blue” Bland’s sound — you’re communicating within, outside, beyond language but you have faith that who has the power to change things will and can intervene. And in this case, who has the power to change things are the wanderers, the power of the people.
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