INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

(1) What diasporas do you write into, and what diasporas do you write to create?

In my performance and poetry practice, I write queerly and deliberately into the African diaspora rooted in the South on Turtle Island, exploring what it means to be Nahiłií and descended from Indigenous people forcibly displaced by the Maafa (the Great Disaster) and the spiritualities that couldn't be pulled from the Black soil of their bodies during enslavement. In doing so, I also expand what it means to write into the Irish diaspora as someone who has Scots-Irish ancestry through my family's history of being enslaved as well as much more recent Irish immigrant family who came to Turtle Island during the Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger). When I write, I'm also co-creating the growing written archive of the diaspora that is genderqueer people who had girlhoods but are not women, as that experience of being raised in girlhood as the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter’s eldest daughter roots and transforms my transness.

(2) Where does this piece land within the greater history, body, and/or evolution of your work?

I started writing when I was in my tweens.The first poems I ever wrote were about the spiritual, psychological, and physical violence of growing up on former plantation land as someone with enslaved, enslaver, and Indigenous ancestry and dreaming about “going home to” the land that my Indigenous African ancestors were removed from. As I’ve grown older and have begun to write more about my family’s mixed heritage and history as Freedmen, Great Migrationers, and mixed Irish and Black folks who passed as white, I’ve learned that to transition is to keep your eyes on the most divine love that this universe has to offer like your life depends on it. “The Greatest Gay Heart of All Time: A Haibun” feels like a small window into my current embodied experience of learning through my trans and sapphic body that my queerness is a sacred act of Sankofa (go back and fetch it) that honors my ancestral homelands and is the “going home to” I wanted so badly as a child.

(3) How do "xenolithic edges” show up in your piece?

My mom’s mom, my Nana, was a gardener and possessed a kind of ancestral corniness that she expressed through riddles and jokes with me on the phone. I Inherited my sense of humor and green thumb from her, so I feel in my body every day the xenolithic edges where our intergenerational silliness, our coming from Black girlhood, and our conversation with the earth are constantly at odds with and chipping away at the kind of violent culture that is constantly surrounding us, attempting to physically and spiritually terrorize us in ways that are deeply interconnected with what colonizers have done and continue to do to the earth. The refusal to completely merge with the logics of violence around us lives in this poem when I write about resisting a legality that attempts to control love and reproduction, refusing to lose faith in the divine love I mentioned earlier, and refusing to let go of the tools (nicknames, humor, self defense weapons, and rage) that have kept people who look like me alive.