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Episode 87—Hope Wabuke on Empowering the Marginalized, Starting from the Present, and Finding Her Experience
125 Plays7 years ago
"I like to start from the present," says Hope Wabuke. "It's vibrant and visceral and has these questions that are lingering throughout time but we can access them."
Let’s talk to Hope Wabuke this week for episode 87… She’s @hopewabuke on Twitter and at hopewabuke.com. Hope is a poet, though she knows it, and her essay “The Animal in the Yard” is one of six 2018 Pushcart nominations for Creative Nonfiction Magazine, no we’re not a couple, but our friends tells us we like each other. I had a real hard time cutting this interview down, something I do to all of them, because she is so wise and illuminating throughout, that I left it largely untouched.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Review
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNF buddies? You know how I'm always getting on your case for honestly writing or rating the show? Check out what I did in 60 seconds for Writing Class Radio hosted by Andrea Askowitz and Allison Langer. Here's my review done on an iPhone 5c. Line green is the C. Titled, go on, be a dick.
00:00:27
Speaker
WCR is where a beginner and a pro can learn the finer things of craft, e.g. being a likable narrator by becoming the most unsavory person in the story. Do yourself a solid and subscribe. If you don't subscribe to Writing Class Radio, I might question your intelligence.
00:00:52
Speaker
Hey, I like shout outs. Okay, let's rock and roll.
Meet Hope Wabuki
00:00:55
Speaker
This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey. Leaders in the world of narrative journalism, memoir, essay, Doc Feldman radio, and I try to share their origins, stories behind the stories, habits, and routines, so you can apply their tools of mastery to your own work.
00:01:21
Speaker
Let's talk to Hope Wabuki this week for episode 87. She's at Hope Wabuki on Twitter and at hopewabuki.com. That's H-O-P-E-W-A-B-U-K-E. Hope is a poet, though she knows it, and her essay, The Animal in the Yard, is one of six
00:01:44
Speaker
pushcart nominations for Creative Nonfiction Magazine. No, we're not a couple, but our friends tell us we like each other. I had a real hard time cutting this interview down, something I do to all of them.
00:01:58
Speaker
but because she is so wise and illuminating throughout, I left this largely untouched.
Research and Family History
00:02:02
Speaker
She talks about the global African diaspora. That's poet language. Starting from the present as a place to explore the past, nonlinear narratives, how our parents escaped genocide in Uganda to start a new life in America, empowering the marginalized and what it means to be a watcher.
00:02:23
Speaker
So much goodness, it's time I get the hell out of the way and introduce you to the great Pope Wabuki. I'd love to do a lot of research for my new poetry collection about
00:02:46
Speaker
exploring blackness and space and time across history. So looking at figures of blackness that people don't expect, like, you know, trumpeters in 15th century Scotland and, you know, or in 8th century Ireland and people don't realize that black people are everywhere at all times. So it's pretty exciting to dig through the research and
00:03:09
Speaker
Oh, that's fascinating. And that's for for a poetry collection or something or something else. Yeah, my poetry collection I just finished, I just started setting out is is very tied with the essay. I guess it's about my family's escape from India means genocide in 1976. So the healing and recovery in America.
Exploring Blackness and Stereotypes
00:03:33
Speaker
And so that was very personal looking at, you know, very specific story of blackness and, you know,
00:03:38
Speaker
the 1970s post-colonial Africa and the kind of genocide, the instability that was the legacy of the European colonialism and looking at, you know, then the refugee experience in America. And then it made me want to, so for my new book, it made me want to broaden that question and look at, because that was just, that was looking at Blackness across space, if you will, these two spaces, but looking at Blackness across
00:04:07
Speaker
multiple species and multiple times, so looking for representations in history and literature and people and looking at cultural events. I have a poem about Charles Darwin's origin of species and how that relates to Blackness and the Venus-Hottentat and just various conversations, whether in America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe. So it's really interesting. It's very sad because you see over and over
00:04:37
Speaker
this common narrative of violence against Blackness. But you also see the tremendous resilience and ability to build and thrive and survive in these terrifying, horrific conditions. It's exciting. It's also the first poetry collection I've done research for. So it's exciting to dig into archives and so forth.
00:04:59
Speaker
It's really cool. As someone who's somewhat of a novice of reading and consuming poetry, I wanted to kind of talk to you about that anyway, but especially what you're doing with this latest project of reported poetry, and I think that's really fascinating.
00:05:17
Speaker
So we can definitely dig into that a bit. But in your current research and into your ancestry and the Black experience across space and time, what has been the most illuminating for you to discover throughout your research? I think what has been most illuminating is to be able to subvert preconceptions. I don't have preconceptions of Blackness because I
Narrative Representation and Personal Story
00:05:46
Speaker
go into it, having had my formative life experience and my research interests, which led me to question and think about these questions and ideas. But as I engaged in my life, whether with students or fellow academics or people in any walk of life, they have a very certain stereotypical understanding of Blackness. And for a long time in America, it was simply that single story, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says,
00:06:15
Speaker
blackness as black people were brought here in the 1619 as slaves, then the 1865 Civil War, then Jim Crow, the 1960 Civil Rights Martin Luther King, Obama, racism is over the end. And that there is a much larger narrative of blackness growing up in America, first in the Midwest and then in Los Angeles as a young girl
00:06:42
Speaker
That was the only narrative I found. And when we studied Blackness for a very short time, probably two days in February, one day at Martin Luther King Day at that point in time, maybe a couple of pages in the history books, that was the narrative. And I was looking for myself. Where is my experience? I'm living in America, but I am immediately from Africa. My family's from Uganda, and we've lived through this genocide, and we've lived through colonialism, and we've lived through having our own
00:07:10
Speaker
independent sovereign nations before that with this rich cultural history. And you didn't find any of that anywhere. And so in a way, one can say that my very early interest in writing was sparked by absence and wanting to find my story. And when I could not find it, trying to discover it and write it, and then later on in life, continuing to look for that. And as I got older, I was able to find those spaces and books
00:07:40
Speaker
myself, I was able to fill in the gaps, you know, the day in fifth grade, but I found Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, you know, I remember, and it changed my life. And then that led to Maya Angelou and Tanya Morrison. And, you know, and so there was still that kind of narrative. But then I remember in, I think it was in 1998, maybe my senior year of high school, that Dave Smith's white teeth came out. And that was revolutionary for me, because here was an element of Blackness that was outside that
00:08:10
Speaker
that stereotypical American narrative. He was a woman talking about being directly from an African country. She was in Britain, so she was writing from that experience of being a British subject.
00:08:24
Speaker
But she was looking at the immigrant experience. She wasn't just looking at Black. She also had, you know, Indian characters in that novel who had come from that kind of colonial experience of the Indian state. And I did not know how to articulate it. It was my first formative experience of reckoning with the global African diaspora and having somebody articulate that in a written form. You know, literary work, you know, work that wasn't just so vibrant in those subjects, but so vibrant in the telling, you know,
00:08:53
Speaker
Zadie Smith is such a wonderful literary talent with her prose and the way it left off the page. And plus, it was the coming-of-age story of a young girl, you know? How lucky could I get? So Zadie Smith really, she was a light. And then I was able to seek out other writers of that, you know? You know, Helen Oyayemi.
00:09:18
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or San Shire later and all the wonderful, my contemporary African and Afro-European and African woman poets, you know, and that led to studying maybe Huatiyongo, Junua Achebe, and Wole Soyinka, and Marianne LaValle, Luchena Shete, and all these, you know, these voices that not one I had experienced in 12 years of education.
00:09:43
Speaker
which is very sad, but that's also, I suppose, why I still have one for an academia as a professor because of that. Toni Morrison says, write the book that if nobody has written the book you want to read, you have to write that book to paraphrase her very loosely.
Literature, Education, and Representation
00:10:02
Speaker
But I think of it as, you know, if nobody is teaching that subject or writing that space, you have to,
00:10:10
Speaker
teach that subject. And so for that little girl who for 12 years of education in public schools was not given any narrative of the global Africanized form or Africanness. And I couldn't not find any of those classes in college as an undergraduate either. I remember that's why I still teach in the academia. Right now I'm teaching African lit and poetry and various writing classes.
00:10:40
Speaker
I make a very concerted effort to ground my class in diversity of form, of background, of representation on every level, whether it be race, class, gender, sexual orientation, regionality, because it's important to have own voices and to have representation and to have that dialogue.
00:11:04
Speaker
So to get back to the very beginning of your question, what did I find surprising? Those preconceptions of Blackness, because that story is not told, people are not taught it, they don't know it, and if you don't seek it out like I did, you don't have any understanding that different narratives of Blackness exist. When I tell my students that of the over 10 million slaves brought from the African continent to the Americas,
00:11:33
Speaker
You know, 11 million of them went to Central and South America, and only a couple hundred thousand came to America. They're stunned. Now it's very compelling to have South American and Central American authors like Linodia or Vanessa Martir reckoning with their blackness, their legacy of blackness, and owning that in a way that Central and South America have not, because there's a very, again, there's that climate of anti-blackness that is on a global scale. If you look at the severe colorism in Brazil, for example, it's just,
00:12:03
Speaker
it's a case in point with the violence towards darker skinned peoples or the formation of Haiti and Dominican Republic is that same conversation of not wanting darker skinned people there and wanting the kind of lighter skinned Spanish speaking people. So that kind of white supremacist racial structure hierarchy you see all over the world internalized and colonialism was a big part of propagating that. And we still have that mentality today
00:12:33
Speaker
For example, I come back to Ngoogie Wathyango's text, Decolonizing the Mind, and how do you get past that? How do you unimprison a mind that's been taught to believe that everything about it is wrong and that only a kind of white Western supremacist structure is right, if you will? How do you deconstruct that, interrogate that, empower and move past that kind of brainwashing in Stockholm syndrome?
00:13:01
Speaker
And so that's part of why this interrogation that I'm doing is to allow those voices to come to light. I remember being very excited by movies like Bell, which shine a light on these narratives that have been hidden, or projects like the Black Victorians, which look at the compendium of photographs of Blacks in the Victorian era, and why that's necessary to
00:13:34
Speaker
reclaim people who have been lost in the shadows. And I see this work being done not just in ethics, I use a blackness, like I am doing, but in gender, for example, as we look and reclaim the work done by women that's been silenced in various social justice movements, like the Black Rights Movement from 1960. There's a really lovely book coming out that underst the work of women in that moment that have been silenced. And
00:14:02
Speaker
So it's very compelling, it's very interesting, and I'm excited that I'm able to do this work, but it's in line with my creative preoccupations of research, and that hopefully it will do something good.
00:14:19
Speaker
in the world. It's fascinating to hear you talk about it like I'm just I'm sort of just loving hearing everything you're saying and it's very illuminating for me to hear all these different different paths you can go down to educate yourself and maybe buck some preconceived notions about what we know about XYZ narratives throughout the in the western hemisphere and even into the eastern hemisphere.
00:14:46
Speaker
Where might you, I mean you rattled off a litany of wonderful writers and I wonder what might be a good starting point for people who want to educate themselves more on this, the experiences you're talking about? I think there's two ways to go about it. You can start in the beginning, if you will, whatever you determine the beginning chronologically and start from the past or you can start from the present.
00:15:16
Speaker
I like to start from where we are now. I was very fortunate to come across Dr. Michelle Wright's work on blackness at the phenomenal time and talking about how the linear narrative is still a kind of convention that privileges Western and whiteness because it starts with colonialism. It starts with the arrival of whites into
00:15:46
Speaker
into Africa, and that's where the narrative starts. For example, a lot of African literature, the way it is taught. And where you start the narrative matters. If you start the narrative using whiteness to validate blackness, you're telling the same story. You're telling the same broken narrative. Before that, if you start with the African oral traditions, you're starting a different place with a different consciousness of Africa
00:16:16
Speaker
and empowered, independent, individual, continent of sovereign nations and dealing with them in that way. Or you can start in the present with, which is where I like to start because it's vibrant and visceral and it has those questions that are lingering throughout time, but we can access them and attach them. And I like to start in the present because it's the most access that any marginalized group has had.
00:16:46
Speaker
in the Western world to articulate their stories and in a way that their stories are not taken from them and made into something they're not. So if you start looking at all the work that's being done now with, you know, Chitlana Ngozi Adichie, of course, is a lovely voice, both for her nonfiction, We Should All Be Feminists, but Danger of a Single Story, and her fiction. I teach Americana in
00:17:16
Speaker
My Women's Lit Class is an African Lit Class is for that reason. It talks about this global question of Blackness as we see Black people in Nigeria, we see Black people in America, we see Black people in France, we see Black people in England. And as they had a conversation, a very uncomfortable conversation about these many spaces of the diaspora and what that means and what we mean to each other. And I think it's important to reckon with that multiplicity, also talking about gender and class
00:17:46
Speaker
if you will. And, you know, Helen Oyoyemi is a great author to start with that
Narrative Techniques and Colonial Impact
00:17:52
Speaker
way. Chinalook Parramta, who I love because, you know, she is a young Nigerian-American author, but she's also, you know, I guess the face of queer African writers because she's an out lesbian. And it's still a punishable crime by death to be homosexual in Nigeria. And so her voice was
00:18:15
Speaker
been a voice that would have been silenced, you know, 50, 100 years ago just because of that triple marginalization. So I really like to start in the present because you have space for all these voices, you know, and you can have these conversations and then take these questions of language, identity, home, representation, marginalization, colonialism, white supremacy, global blackness, the diaspora, what is refugee, what is immigration, what does it mean to be in this liminal space of
00:18:45
Speaker
where you are more than one thing, and travel with those throughout time and see how those questions worked, you know, in the 1960s with the formation of post-colonial African literature, you know, with Rungugi Wathiango and Solink Foyenga, and you can travel, you know,
00:19:08
Speaker
beyond that, and look at the African oral traditions and fables and parables that were told for hundreds and hundreds of years through their griots, and how that cultural tradition both told the stories, the fictional stories, the history and genealogy, and also told the cultural parables and the values, and kept the language alive, and how that's so present, if you will.
00:19:38
Speaker
I like to do it that way. And I think that the concept of epiphenomenal time, where time is circular and you simply pick the most relevant and important moment to start and then travel on the timeline backwards and forwards, is a way to empower Blackness and empower other marginalized voices, again, that have been silenced and would not have had any representation
00:20:07
Speaker
before now. What are some common questions that you find that your students who are maybe looking to knock down some of these walls in their own mind and those preconceptions you talk about, what are some of those common questions that you find your students asking you and then how do you sort of push them in the right directions and educate them thoroughly?
00:20:34
Speaker
Very interesting because my African literature class just finished watching Half of a Yellow Sun yesterday and we were having a group discussion and I had asked them, you know, what are some of the questions you have? What are some of your main ideas? What are some of the fascination that you have? And over and over, many of them said, you know, that we didn't know this happened. They didn't know anything about Nigerian history, that they didn't know that
00:21:03
Speaker
that they didn't know about the Nigerian Biafran War in 1967 to 1970, that they didn't know about the coup before that and the coup before that. And they didn't know about what colonialism was, that they didn't know that colonialism was linked to slavery and why that was very purposeful and specific. And it wasn't just the taking of resources of land and diamonds and oil and coal,
00:21:33
Speaker
and ivory, but it was the imprisonment of the mine because to take somebody's country and resources, you have to make them believe that they're less than you and that there are documents by British prime parliaments in the 19th century thing
00:21:52
Speaker
We traveled through Africa, and it's a wonderful, vibrant, peaceful place. What can we do to break down this continent so that we can take it over? It was a very specific laid out plan of domination and control and destruction, and that therefore the severe and complete and sudden withdrawal in the 1950s and 1960s after granting all these manufactured African states independence
00:22:20
Speaker
was also deliberate because they could have stayed with European colonial powers and make sure that the traditional power would have been more stable and safe. But instead, after coming in and putting these sovereign nations into artificial boundaries where you have tribes that have nothing in common, are then put into these nations,
00:22:47
Speaker
and then ruling them for a century or so and completely disempowering the native peoples and putting them into a state of serfdom and impressing their minds and to believe that they're less than, then completely withdrawing and saying, Sia, you take it over for yourselves. And so of course there would be instability. Of course there would be warring factions. Of course there would be this violence as these
00:23:13
Speaker
leaders who have been trained with the British military than do what they were told. They're not functioning by their traditional African values of communality and respect. They're functioning by these alien Western values of domination and violence they've been taught, if you will. And so it's a complete change, and it's very purposeful. And the link between colonialism
00:23:38
Speaker
slavery, the reason why colonialism heightened in the 19th century because of the industrial revolution in Europe, meaning them to spread outward for resources and land and why it then began to fade out post-World Wars as Europe hunkered down to rebuild and how that 1960s independence movement was tied into the 60s moments in the West. And so making these global conversations
00:24:05
Speaker
as well as deconstructing the very specific destructive agenda of colonialism, the relationship of colonialism and slavery. Because again, most African countries and communities are very communal based. And so when you had the theft of people starting as early as the eighth century AD, but really beginning in 1441 AD, and then as we know reaching its heyday in the 17th century,
00:24:33
Speaker
We have this long history of people disappearing, both through slavery and then through the post-colonial struggle of the emerging nation state in that way. And of course, there is the fundamental preconception that everyone has that Africa is a country. And so breaking down that immediate preconception that Africa is not a country, it is a continent full of diverse countries
00:25:02
Speaker
But those countries were created, as we know them now, as artificial boundaries by the European colonizing powers. And we have to remember that Africa before this looked completely different with its sovereign nation states composed of different tribes and ethnic groups. What was it early on in your life when you were starting to have these questions
00:25:29
Speaker
that you turned towards the arts, towards poetry, towards writing as a way of making sense of it versus maybe taking some other sort of tenure track. But yeah, there are different paths to explore your curiosity. And you know, you went down, you know, your
00:25:48
Speaker
You're a poet and a writer and a beautiful one at that, a beautiful writer. And I wanted to know, like, what was that moment like when you decided to take your talents down that road? My parents always say I was reading before I could walk. I was always reading. I didn't get anything in my head. There were five kids in my family and I was the third, the middle one.
Family's Past and Cultural Identity
00:26:12
Speaker
And so my two sisters, my old sisters, are very loud and very
00:26:17
Speaker
you know, very social people. And maybe it's, you know, that middle child that then you're watching and listening and thinking. And we grew up in a house of silence, I should say, because, and I write about this in The Animal and the Yard, the essay in Creative Nonfiction, because my parents had escaped from media means genocide in 1976. They, my dad was a professor, a Christian, a minister,
00:26:48
Speaker
my mother was a nurse. And so they were Houdian and a Christian. They were Houdian with target. They were, at first he was, he got rid of the British and everybody was saying, yay, you know, that's good. You know, Uganda is for Uganda. That's wonderful. But then he got rid of, you know, anybody who was not Ugandan, the Jews, the Indians, the other Asian groups.
00:27:16
Speaker
That was a lot of the middle-class trade structure. So the economy began to be a little bit unstable. And so, of course, then what do all demagogues and dictators do? They must look for a scapegoat. So then it was anybody who was Ugandan who has Western values. So anybody who was Christian or educated in a Western university or teaching at Macquarie University, which is where my dad was teaching in the capital city of Kampala. And so Amin installed his son,
00:27:46
Speaker
at the university next door to my parents to kind of keep, so you could have a presence to spy on the university to see that they were not teaching anything that he would disapprove of. And he would periodically, you know, storm university and attack it at various times. And I remember one massacre and my parents were supposed to be there and they were not there. And my dad says, you know, God saved them. And then people in my family began to disappear. My dad got,
00:28:16
Speaker
somehow got where they were next on the list. So they just left in the night. They left everything. I have written poems about this, also in the Bonnie family. And they disappeared and went over the border to Kenya, next door, where they were lucky to get a visa to England and then just a temporary one. And then somehow my dad was lucky to get a visa to the United States.
00:28:44
Speaker
a student visa because for some, you know how long it takes to get accepted to university. For some, somehow he got accepted to the University of Minnesota in a matter of weeks may offer him this scholarship and, and his visa went through. And so they, they went to Minnesota and again, he says it was an act of God. And then my, they, they, they did their degrees. My dad has PhD and that elder into working in virology and the sciences. And then we moved to California.
00:29:14
Speaker
You know, but in America, my parents were not prepared for the racism they would experience in America against Black people. You know, I remember them in Minnesota, their neighbors throwing rocks through our windows saying that we don't want those niggas here when I was about two or three years old. Then the police always just parked on the corner watching our house following my dad as he drove through the town, just schooling back. The minister of the church, he went through coming to our house
00:29:42
Speaker
not wanting to sit down, not wanting to touch anything, just saying, don't come back to our church. We don't want you here. And so those were the things my parents experienced as their introduction to the United States. But at the same time, they were just so happy to be alive. But they did not know how to handle American racism. They didn't know how to navigate that because we were not part of that lineage. We did not have that history. And so growing up in America, again, as I said before, there was no narrative at that time of anything else in terms of Blackness. So you're going throughout
00:30:12
Speaker
a world you're Black, maybe she was Black in America, and you're read as that thing. If you're not read as, oh, you're an African immigrant, or you're, again, a refugee with a different Black, there's just that single story. And so I think growing up in America with that duality made me, as I said earlier, look for representations of the global African diaspora, and not finding it was fueled by continual search. And I want to make clear here that
00:30:41
Speaker
I'm not negating that black American experience. I think it is part of the global African bias born a very important narrative, a very important narrative, but it's not the only one is what I'm trying to say with that. So my parents did not talk about any of this. These are all things that I have learned by hook and by crook of pulling teeth over 36 years and mostly from talking to my, my aunts or
00:31:10
Speaker
my sister is also now also pulling teeth with my parents and then we pull our stories of hey I discovered this or hey I discovered this because what I realized now that I didn't realize then is my parents had post-traumatic stress disorder you know living through colonialism that the rape
00:31:26
Speaker
and of your culture and imprisonment of your mind and then living through a genocide of a dictator who's trying to kill you. Living through that fear from 1971 to 1976, five years of never knowing if you're going to be killed, of massacres, of military presence everywhere, of armed forces, of coups, of violence, it's terrifying. So they did not talk about it.
00:31:52
Speaker
I would always ask questions because I was looking, because I wanted to know, and I would always just say, we can't talk about it. No, no, no. And so that, I suppose, fueled my curiosity, because if I was searching, I would search for it everywhere, and then writing, trying to write that narrative, to understand it, to articulate it, to remember it. I think that's why, rather than writing a full-length prose memoir,
00:32:22
Speaker
I ended up writing that story in a collection of poems, The Body Family, because it was, you know, these fragments that I overheard or discovered or unearthed, rather than a sustained, continuous narrative. And so the most sustained prose narrative that I have written about it is the Animal in the Yard, which he published in Creative Nonfiction, which intercuts that story, touches on it. But it's mostly about the presence and the present with
00:32:52
Speaker
my father falling sick from a chronic illness and beginning the process of dying. And how do you deal with a parent dying? And as you look back at this life, this tremendous life that he had, and I'm in awe of my parents, you know, their strength and what they did to survive and to get us here. As I, every day as I get older and as I'm a parent now, you know, I just,
00:33:21
Speaker
think about them in awe. Yeah, you touched upon somebody. I just wanted to ask you, given the experience that they had, having the one, you were talking about all these different narratives. They had one that they were able to escape and then parachute into a completely different one and then have to deal with an entirely different
00:33:46
Speaker
experience that they've landed in the middle of and you can totally understand their unwillingness to want to talk about any of it because it was so traumatic and you were just talking about how you admire their strength and
00:34:02
Speaker
I wonder, like, how do you draw inspiration from them, from their experience, and sort of apply that and overlay it to your own life as you're going forward and educating people, readerships and students? Oh, my goodness. I think this is something that all children of immigrants can reckon with, especially children of refugees, where it's like your parents move the entire world.
00:34:30
Speaker
what are you going to do with your one wildlife, as Mary Oliver says, if your parents, you know, did so much and wondering, I'm older than they were now, you know, and thinking that my dad was in his early 20s. He was the head of the family. He had my, my, my older sister was born already and my mom, he had two dependents, you know, and, and it was on him too. And how do you, raising a child is hard enough, you know, being married and making a relationship work.
00:35:01
Speaker
viably, respectfully honoring both people's humanity is hard enough. And doing both of those things while under fear for your life and your children's life. Now my son is five now and just that immediate moment when he's born and you just realize you will do anything, anything to make sure this child gets and has what they need. And on that basic level, it was doing anything to make sure that his
00:35:29
Speaker
his child, his children would stay alive and you find the strength to do it. And so I look at them and I'm inspired whenever I feel like things are difficult or perhaps impossible when I experience microaggressions or microaggressions or racism or gender or both. I think my parents, you know, they did so much with so little and what they were dealing with
00:35:57
Speaker
not just genocide and escape and starting a brand new life in a brand new country, but they dealt with racism on an entirely different level than I do. And I think it's pretty bad what I do a little bit. And so when I think about whenever I feel overwhelmed by a racist interaction I had with somebody or a sexist interaction I had, I remember the strength of our forebearers, both in this country and not tremendously awful history,
00:36:24
Speaker
and my parents' story, and I think, you know, I can do this. I have to do this. They inspire me to do what I think I cannot do, to be the best version of myself. And at the same time, though, you hear, I have a poem, Judges, where I talk about my father and his
00:36:46
Speaker
when he went to school, he had to wake up at 5 a.m. and work in the farm and then walk two miles to school and then work at school all day and do their homework and they had to write with sticks and the dirt and then walk back and fetch the water and farm and hunt the animals for food because my parents, my dad grew up on a farm in Uganda and that was his life.
Navigating Culture and Academia
00:37:14
Speaker
been working so hard because there's only one chance, you know, only really, the missionaries would only sponsor one student to go to and pay his school fees to go to high school. And then, you know, he would sell chapati on the road to earn money for his school fees and, you know, to pay for college. So at the same time, though, they think we did that. So so you can do it, too. So there's this expectation of greatness and success because
00:37:43
Speaker
in America, the land of opportunity, and they did so much with so little. And I think that, however, with children of immigrants and their parents, there's this disconnect, but it's a completely different culture. And when it took to succeed in Uganda and those lessons he learned to succeed, some of them are applicable, but there are certain lessons that I didn't learn about how to succeed in America because they didn't know them. And it's those lessons that when these succeed, those American cultural capital lessons of, for example,
00:38:13
Speaker
knowing to talk to the dean of your department so that they can see you and get face value with you so that if they have awards, they'll nominate you for them, knowing that you need to do an unpaid internship to then apply for a job at the company. But of course, one cannot do the unpaid internship because one needs to work. So knowing to talk to your professors, knowing what office hours are, knowing the importance of
00:38:39
Speaker
credit score that's more important perhaps than straight A's in America and you know, which is what you know, so these things have cultural capital that are very specific in American society. Those were the things that they couldn't teach us that we bumbled around learning on our own through friends and and mistakes. I was lucky in that I went to an elite primary white institution Northwestern and then NYU. So so I was and because I'm a watcher,
00:39:09
Speaker
as a writer, you're a watcher. And so I was able to watch my peers and model my behavior from them. That's how I learned a lot of these cultural capital things from being in the space with privileged white people who had this cultural capital, who had generations of going through this process, going to college, succeeding and so forth. But at the same time, it was very difficult because I was the only Black student in my major at my university.
00:39:38
Speaker
in 1998, and that was one of two in my grads program. So again, and then you're this heightened visibility and invisibility, and you have these stereotypes pushed on you and so forth, and you deal with a lot of racism and the intersection of racism and sexism. And as a woman, I wrote an essay about that for Salon a while ago, talking about the experience of being a black woman at a primarily white institution,
00:40:06
Speaker
But the corollary to that is I got the education I needed to get to do what I need to do, otherwise I wouldn't be here doing what I am. So it's a trade-off really. I think the thing is, as I look at how to prepare my son for that, is that to provide a safe space for him as he goes through that process because now I know what it's going to be like because I've been through that and so I know how to help him navigate through American culture.
00:40:36
Speaker
in a way that my parents could not help me, but they gave me life, you know. Did you at any point feel a lot of pressure to live up to the expectations of your parents? Well, Alice, Alice, and this is something that, again, I talk with my friends who are children of immigrants a lot. Where we ended up growing up, when I was eight, we moved from Minnesota, which was a primarily white town.
00:41:05
Speaker
As you know, we moved to Arcadia, California, and we moved there in, I want to say the early 90s. It was about 90% white. And about two years later, it had become 90% Asian. We were growing up in a community of other people of color, which was nice. But what I don't think my parents realized
00:41:32
Speaker
was that they may have been people of color, but just as they say, all skin folk ain't kin folk. And a lot of people of color internalized that white supremacist structure of anti-blackness, of believing that whiteness is the best. And then you are your valuolays in how wet you are correspondingly. So this hierarchy of whiteness. And then Asian-Americans as the lightest and most
00:42:01
Speaker
the quote unquote model minority. And then you have Latino, Latinos, and then you have blackness. And that the one commonality again is this global anti-blackness because this kind of white supremacist mentality is global now. And so it people, a lot of people yet don't necessarily.
00:42:27
Speaker
Understand that you understand that if you're a person of color, but a lot of times it's white versus PLC and and what the animal in a large begins to reckon with a little bit is is that is that people of color can and are racist to other people of color.
00:42:44
Speaker
because of internalizing that white supremacist structure and aspiring to whiteness as the ideal and doing whatever you can to throw each other under the bus to be adopted. And you see that today as various political parties try to splinter that power pack of people of color that elected President Obama and say, hey, wait a minute, you Asian Americans, like you're actually kind of white. You come over here and be Republican and you vote against
00:43:10
Speaker
affirmative action that helps black people is hurting you. And hey, you Latinas, you're actually pretty religious
Community and Empowerment
00:43:18
Speaker
or conservative. Come over here and hate other people of color and play into our idea of white supremacy. And so you see it very clearly. You see how people are trying to use it. And as I have always said and realized from the moment
00:43:38
Speaker
I was a very young girl because I was growing up in all this, and reckoning with all these questions. And the thing that was very clear was, I had nobody to help me navigate this, to explain this to me, or to make sense of it, or to provide safety for me, because my parents didn't know and couldn't get it, and were terrified in silence. My sisters were in the same boat as me, and we were just trying to figure it all out. You know, no other Africans, really, except when we went, you know,
00:44:05
Speaker
long drives to present my parents' friends in Canada or various other parts of the country with the deep pockets of other African refugees that they somehow knew. But for the most part, you know, we were in this milieu of absence of representations, violence, and this climate of global anti-Blackness that was very much tied into this single story of American Blackness. And so all these things were working together and really inspired me to
00:44:34
Speaker
seek and write and make sense of this. So, you know, I think I wrote my first story when I was five. It was very bad, but my mom on the earth didn't show me the other day. And I was just like, oh, dear, why do you have this? But it was, you know, so it was trying that. And that was, that was what made me want to be a writer, because I was a young girl. And of course, I didn't have the gender thing, because growing up in Southern California, there's Hollywood and there's this idealization of white, blonde,
00:45:03
Speaker
size zero beauty. And there's also this very severe culture of the male gaze and male entitlement to female bodies. If you will, the violence towards that being catcalls and followed as a girl who was 12. Very early on, I wanted to become a writer to speak about all these things and to work for social change and to give voices to people of color, to immigrants, refugees, to women, to black people.
00:45:33
Speaker
That was what fueled me and fueled my writing and my academic drive all the way to college. I remember I was so excited. Okay, I'm going to major in English and I'm going to write and being really excited in my first class and being told by my white professors for the next four years. You can't write this. Nobody wants to read black stories. These won't sell. You know, nobody wants nigger stories, just all that stuff.
00:45:59
Speaker
and for the next few years. And eventually I began to believe it. And so by the time I got to grad school at NYU, I believed it. But my thesis had nothing to do with blackness. My creative thesis was a retelling of the Greek Persephone myth because I had been silenced. I had, again, gotten in prison, that colonial mentality of,
00:46:27
Speaker
you cannot engage with blackness and be successful. And, you know, as I, so as I, my voice was lost for the next few years as I tried to write and publish, nothing happened with my career. And it wasn't until I came back to LA from New York and began to, you know, talk to my parents and work on the body family and write down these stories and imagine these stories about my family.
00:46:56
Speaker
And that's when my career as a writer took off. And it was very clear that I needed to be in my own voice. And I think one of the revelatory moments was going to VONA, the Warner Voices Workshop that Bruno Diaz and Deanna Jones founded ages ago. And it's only for people of color. And it was so empowering. For the first time when I was creating a writing workshop, I did not have to explain myself. For the first time, I wasn't the only Black person or one of two Black people.
00:47:25
Speaker
And it was just a completely safe space where I found my voice again. I've written about that too. The need for a diverse MFA program, the need for diversity that is safe for the people of color. Because right now, diversity is looked at as, oh, let's support some diversity to provide an eye-opening experience for our 95% white population at this institution.
00:47:54
Speaker
And so it's safe for them, but not safe for the people of color. And so looking at how can it be safe for us is to have more of us. I never had a black teacher until grad school. I hadn't been one black professor in my entire life. And I've probably been in school for about 20 years, 20 years of education. And so that's why I keep one foot in academia, because I know that
00:48:21
Speaker
just my being there means a lot to those students. And I have so many students, my students of color just flock to my office hours and send me emails just going, thank you. Thank you for being here. I thank you for your perspective, which allows us to allows questions to arise and leads discussions and raises viewpoints and the text that you choose. And so
00:48:44
Speaker
you know, it's very important. And looking at that, I really think it's important to look at how do you make diversity safe for the diverse people is it's something that institutions really need to think about, if you will. And so getting back to I want to get back to something else you asked me when you asked me why did I become a writer? And I worked at the Arcadia Public Library for four years in shelving books. And after four years of that, I realized something I realized that
00:49:14
Speaker
who spend the majority of your life doing their job. And I was the kind of person I wanted to have a job that I enjoyed and fulfilled me. And that wasn't something that was a complete disconnect to my life or that was ruining my life. And I felt was something that was not in a line with my values and passions because I would write no matter what, you know, I could, and now I see that I can best serve
00:49:43
Speaker
you know, the interests of advocating for women's rights and gender equality and ending rape culture and rights of people of color and rights for all people through my writing. You know, it can reach a lot more people than other work I could do. I think everybody has their own race to a blend and has their own specific talent they're given. And I am a writer. I'm an anti-social recluse.
00:50:11
Speaker
I am not a lawyer in that way, somebody who wants to get out and be a politician and leave. That's my older sister. I am the one who is very happy to sit in my room for eight hours with my computer and spend it out in the world and have a conversation with people that way. And I feel like when 27 people have shared an article I've written that hopefully, and they're commenting about how this is something, this is what
00:50:39
Speaker
their entire life story or this is something that resonates with them or makes them think or opens them up to an idea that they hadn't thought about that makes them a little bit closer to a world of social justice and equality for all. That's my contribution.
00:51:00
Speaker
And what was that like when you were finally allowed to embrace your own voice as a writer? When you were at that conference or that collective of people of color and you were finally allowed to just be yourself, did you find that when you were writing at that point and from that space that you just couldn't stop? It was like a flood.
00:51:30
Speaker
Yeah. Writing has always been a flood to me, no matter what I'm writing. I get involved in, you know, I think when I was in, when I was in New York, I wrote a novel and two short story collections and some, which we'll never see the light of day, hopefully. You know, I realized that what I really need to be writing was poetry and essays. But, but exactly, it's, it's a, it's a flood. I love what Pablo Picasso says about creativity,
00:52:00
Speaker
It's about you're filling yourself up and emptying yourself. And I started doing that constantly. And as you go through the world, you fill yourself up and emptying yourself. And I had, at that point in time, especially just a lifetime of stories that had been silenced and that the space gave me permission to remember why I wanted to be a writer, remember what my purpose here was, and to do it. And so I've been doing it ever since.
00:52:29
Speaker
Then I think, I don't know how politically correct this is to say, but I think in a strange way, being a woman that made me realize for a brief moment what it's like to be white, specifically a white man in America, because your existence was completely normalized. You were never othered. From the moment you wake up to the moment you want to sleep, the world look like you. I engaged with people who look like me. I was taught by people who look like me.
00:52:59
Speaker
I never saw somebody who didn't look like me. That was my experience I've never had in my entire life. And I think that's the difference between my parents and my sisters and I, is that they grew up with their existence being normalized. They grew up where everybody was Black. And we grew up in spaces where we're the only Black people. And I think that you cannot overemphasize the importance
00:53:28
Speaker
of having your existence is simply validated on an everyday level for your entire life and normalized in that way. In your experience with writing essay and poetry, I always love to dig into how a writer
00:53:47
Speaker
sets up a process by which they're able to get the work done. And I would extend the same question to you, like how do you engineer your days so you are writing and getting words done, whether they get published or not or whatever, but just so you're in that generative flow. So how do you set up your days so that you're creating work that may or may not see the light of day?
00:54:17
Speaker
Well, one thing I will say is that I always have projects in various stages. I have projects I am writing, I have projects I am ideating, thinking about, I have projects I am editing, and of course projects that are done, and projects that are simply perfect on the very, very back of the art, just waiting for time. Before I was a mom, I would wake up around 5 or 6 a.m., do yoga for a couple hours, and that would then lead into my writing
Motherhood and Creativity
00:54:46
Speaker
space and I'll write for eight hours. If I didn't have to teach that day or I'd go teach and then come back and do yoga and write and then see friends. And that was very simple. So I was running from anywhere four to eight hours a day. After I had my son, my life was simply divided into taking care of baby when he's awake and when he's asleep, just writing. And I didn't sleep really for the first three and a half years of his life. I was simply
00:55:14
Speaker
when he was awake, I was with him and would go on play days with his friends and just living life. And then when he went down to nap, I would write. And it was actually, when he went to sleep at night, I was actually, I think, a really great discipline for a writer because if I had two hours to finish an essay to get to my editor, I needed to get that essay done in that two hour nap. So I know that,
00:55:43
Speaker
Everybody has a different experience of motherhood. Some mothers say that motherhood makes their careers perhaps less productive. But for me, as a writer, that creative energy of motherhood was so and is so inspiring to me and the actual logistics of you need to write as fast as you can, as best as you can, that first draft as clear as possible because you will not have the luxury of, you know, weeks of revisions or hours of revisions.
00:56:13
Speaker
Um, made me made my writing career really productive and still makes it really productive. Now he's in your preschool. So I have a little bit more time, you know, during the day to write, you know, so I don't have to write in those two hours smashed blocks or, but I still find, or I might, you know, that five hours rush at night before you would go to sleep at seven, I'll write from probably seven to one in the morning and then go to sleep from one.
00:56:41
Speaker
to six and I had to make up at six. And the day would go, begin all over again. That wasn't my life for until this year when we started preschool or last year when we started preschool. And so, but I still, you know, I still have those moments where you have to follow the inspiration. And so you wake up the little night when you write, you write for a couple of hours. I'm like, oh wow, I woke up at midnight. It's now 6 a.m. and I've been writing for six hours and I can't go nap now because
00:57:09
Speaker
you have a life form to take care of or I have a class to go teach. So sometimes I am a bit delirious. But I think the thing is you still, you still, you have a writing process, which is whenever inspiration comes, you have to listen to write it down. I think the thing now is having a discipline into my writing process is I can write down the notes and then come back to it a day later or two days later and, you know, write for eight hours and finish the project. And I think when I was younger,
00:57:38
Speaker
It would be, I would have to do it right that I'm there, or I felt that anything would be lost. But kind of training your inspiration to work in a different way, because life is a process of change. And our process changes as our stages in our life change. And I think it's important to recognize that life and art are not separate, that they feel each other, and that I want to be present.
00:58:08
Speaker
in my life and it's not, life is not a distraction from the art, but the life and everything about my life, my son, my students, my friends, my family, they don't distract from it and take away from my writing, but they feel my writing and give it energy and inspiration.
00:58:27
Speaker
How would you define your ambitions as an essayist and a poet? And maybe how have those changed over the years from maybe when you were in your 20s and in grad school until where you are now as a more visible writer? How have your ambitions evolved? I think I'm more patient now. And it's left about other people. When I was very young, and I think when we're very young,
00:58:55
Speaker
endless sense of self-confidence and self-rightness and that gets lost as you go throughout the world. And then you find it in a different way as you get older with less arrogance and it's less about you're confident because you don't know anything, but you're confident and secure because you now know things.
Personal Fulfillment and Writing Motivation
00:59:22
Speaker
Can you repeat your question? Oh, yeah. It dealt with just how your ambitions might have changed. Maybe early on, it was, I don't know, just get visible to this degree. And then maybe as you receive more validation, you're like, oh, I can start reaching higher now. I can start maybe going to some higher profile things because I do have the juice to do it and the rigor and the
00:59:49
Speaker
tenacity and work ethic if I just stick to it long enough. Like you said, patience. You're more patient now. So maybe if you're not in the New Yorker this year, you're like, you know what? I might be there in 10 years, and I'm cool with that. So I wonder, that's just kind of like the evolution of your ambition was kind of the crux of the question. I think when you're really young, you know, when you're like five or six, my parents, of course, being the African parents are, if you're going to do something, it has to be the best. You know, you must go to the best school, the best things, you must success.
01:00:18
Speaker
Excellent was expected. You know, it's like expected to get straight A's. If you have an A minus, why is there an A minus on your report card? So of course it's like, I want to be a writer. My dad will, then you must win the Pulitzer. So I think there were these expectations created by other people. And I believe in those expectations. And as I said, and then I think it's just a process of growing up where eventually you begin to listen and understand and listen to your own voice versus other people's voices and defining what, what success looks like for you. I think.
01:00:49
Speaker
For me, as a writer, just realizing that you're always a writer, no matter if you're published or not, no matter to what degree or not, no matter if you win awards or not. And yes, the awards and things, those are always fun and nice. And they, you know, they stroke your ego and they, the money is nice and useful. But that writing is not about the business of writing. And writing is a business that one learns like everything else and continues, but that the writing,
01:01:18
Speaker
is what sustains me, what gives me joy, and I'll always do it no matter what, and to have patience with the evolution of one's career and know that trusting yourself and trusting the work that you're doing, rather than looking for external markers is validation. Audre Lorde tells us that you define yourself for yourself. And I think that, I wish everybody would just read out Audre Lorde when they were really young, because everything she says is what
01:01:48
Speaker
I want to tell my students every day and tell what I've told myself for a long time. And I think it's just that same process of learning to listen to yourself versus other voices and defining for yourself what is important to you and what values do you. And for me, it's not prizes or the reputation of this or that. It's the work that I'm doing. Is it good work? And am I able to get it out in the world? And I'm lucky that
01:02:16
Speaker
I've met editors I love and respect, who gave my work homes and their pages and, you know, people continue to ask for my work and the readership grows because of the work. It's about the work, you know, it's not about me. It's not something I chose. I kind of feel very lucky to have this talent and it was a decision
01:02:45
Speaker
I made to nurture it and train it and create a discipline and rigor and use it for a very specific purpose. For me, I think, I remember at the bottom of, I remember walking, taking a walk with my son. He was about four months old. We were walking, we were living, or it was Hollywood in Hancock Park at that time. I was taking a walk and it was right after the
01:03:14
Speaker
Trayvon Martin, Keller George Zimmerman had not been arrested and the Twitter campaign had just gone full flight with the emergence of Black Lives Matter and he'd finally been arrested but was very clearly going to get off or just gotten off. And this white guy on the corner looked at me and my three-year-old son. I was carrying him in a baby carry on my tummy and he said to us,
01:03:41
Speaker
No, go back to Compton or I'm not going to shoot you like they shot that Trayvon Martin. And I, first of all, I've never been to Compton. I'm ashamed to say I grew up in LA, but I, again, I'm going to have a social recluse. And I was very young when I was growing up there. And so I've never, I've never been to Compton. I should go. I would love to go. But it was the violence, the anger, the rage, the emboldened men, the fact that you felt
01:04:08
Speaker
safe to say these things. And I think even now more so with our cultural climate of emboldening and accepting racism and rape culture and violence are certain to be those voices that have been more emboldened, sadly. But it was at that moment, you know, and I'd also just come from Vona and I was writing, you know, and I had my voice and was fully reveling in my voice as a Black woman writer and not shying away from that. And I thought,
01:04:37
Speaker
Fundamentally, you know, I'm writing to make a world where my son will be alive, you know, where my son will not be killed when he's 12, like Tamir Rice, because he's playing in the park, you know, where he won't be killed when he's seven, like Anna Jones, when the police raid a building looking for somebody else, because they don't value the lives of people who live there, and they're coming with guns, or he won't be Jordan Davis, or Trayvon Martin, or Monisha McBride, or, you know, on a fundamental level, it's not about prizes, or
01:05:08
Speaker
publications or any of that for me. It's about putting these words on paper so that people who look like me won't be killed. And also that my son will grow up and be alive. And with every word I write, every poem I write, it's in service of black lives, of women's lives, of black women's lives, people of color lives, of these children who deserve to be treated as people and not
01:05:33
Speaker
future threats just because of the color of their skin and not being seen as a human being. So it's a different, it's a different conversation for me on a fundamental level. I think an answer to your question as to why that noise doesn't matter.
01:05:46
Speaker
Where does your optimism lie? Because I hear in your voice, like, this is such a great positive energy amidst such a virulent negativity, like a backdrop of it. And I wonder, like, how do you stay so it sounds positive and optimistic? So like, where does that come from? And how do you forge a head and not get beaten down by it?
01:06:14
Speaker
Well, thank you for that. I get tired and discouraged like everyone else, but I don't stay there because I can't. I don't know if that's because of the name my parents gave me. I'm just hearing it all the time. My entire life has embedded something in me. I think a little bit probably comes from my faith. I'm a Christian. And so I have to believe in God's plan and a fundamental
01:06:43
Speaker
love and hope, if you will, and to choose that love rather than to choose hate and violence. It's a choice every day. You can choose you can choose rage that will kill you. And it won't matter a wit to the person who's being racist or sexist or trying to kill you, you know, it just destroys you. Or you can, you can choose life and you can choose love. And, and that's what I make that choice every day to
01:07:13
Speaker
to believe that it matters, that life matters, that the work underway matters. And I think that when I, it also helps to surround, that I've surrounded myself with a community, often a virtual community of writers and editors and other activists and thinkers and just, you know, people, the social conscious people who care, people who want to make the world a better place, who won't be defeated because defeat is to give
01:07:43
Speaker
the people who believe in hate and violence and destruction of us all, win to win. If you don't choose hope, the person who's trying to kill you wins. I choose life, so I choose hope. And I believe that there are enough people who do care enough about the lives of all humanity that
01:08:13
Speaker
we will continue to move in that direction to create a country and world that values all our humanity. And I'll do my part to make that happen.
01:08:36
Speaker
hugs and high fives to all of those who made it to the end. Did you dig the show? I hope you did. Consider leaving an honest rating or for 60 seconds of your time an honest review. Reviews help embolden and widen the community, help with visibility,
01:08:53
Speaker
We're building it here at CNF HQ. We want you to join in. Those reviews help with that visibility, like I said. If you leave a review, I'll offer up a free editing sesh for up to 2,000 words. You usually have to pay double for that in Vegas Cotton.
01:09:10
Speaker
Also, I have a monthly newsletter where I send out my reading, my documentary film, and podcast recommendations, as well as what you might have missed from the world of the creative non-fiction podcast, the one you're listening to right now. Lots are joining, so why don't you, once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Thank you again for listening. Have a CNF and great week, friends. Bye.