Episode Transcript
Tami Navarro 00:00:07 You're listening to Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean, with Kaiama Glover and Tami Navarro.
Staceyann Chin 00:00:19 (yelling) Yet, Black women continue to survive, to thrive, to arrive into adulthood with the ability to laugh and love and wear hoop earrings and tight skirts to found, social movements, deliberate other motherfuckers from bondage. If this sounds like I am speaking your story, this motherfucking poem be for you, my love. If you have ever had to argue that you are no less deserving than your white counterpart. I am talking to you, my love. If you have ever been inspired by the magic of Black women with thighs and asses that move mountains in their stride, if you have ever been told you speak too fiercely from the thick lip of your own truth. If you have ever been called girl, like it was a fucking insult. If you've ever been called bitch, you step forward, now. If you are itching to light a fucking bonfire in the house of the white patriarchy, come stand with Black women, now.
If you want to be free, like Harriet Tubman, weapon in hand, wading through unfriendly waters, her power compelling, even the freedom of those who did not want to be motherfucking free. If you desire to be confrontational like Sojourner, if you wish to be audacious like Audre, antagonistic like Angela, gangsta like Winnie Mandela, angry like Assata Shakur, you come roll with us at these rallies. Sit beside us in school, sing with us in church, stand with us where it matters. Vote with us and vote for us at these motherfucking polls, travel with us in the virtual, in the flesh, over these waters, they have used against us as weapons across the lands of this rock, we all call home. Let us use this fire to crack open this fucking ground wide open, with an uprising that will never again die down. No more water, fire next time. No more water, we say, fire next time. No more water, we say, fire next time.
Kaiama Glover 00:02:26 The words you just heard were fire breathed into the room at one of our recent Critical Caribbean Feminisms event by none other than Staceyann Chin who were deeply delighted to have in the studio with us today. Staceyann is the author of The Other Side of Paradise and recently Crossfire: Litany for Survival. And she's a co-writer and original performance in the Tony-award-winning Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, as well as the author of four one-woman shows: Hands of Fire, Unspeakable Things, Border Clash, and Mother Struck. Her career is a whirlwind of genre-crossing self-expression and we are thrilled and more than a little bit daunted to try and contain her here in this space for a few minutes. So welcome, Staceyann
SC 00:03:07 Thank you. I'm thinking we should, um, I should scrap the bio that's currently going out and just use that one! Cause I maybe sound sexy and like, fierce, and border-crossing. It's nice. I think I'm going to sleep with it tonight.
TN 00:03:30 Thank you for making time to be here with us today. Staceyann.
SC 00:03:32 My pleasure.
KG 00:03:34 So we are going to jump in and have some talk. I want to talk about Crossfire. Obviously, a lot of what's in there has been in the world for some years now, but this is the first time it's kind of in bound and contained as opposed to spoken and brought into the room. Um, so I wanna, I want to know what it took for you to decide to do that, how it feels to have these words that you usually accompany into space now kind of contained in a space with no take backs and away from you.
SC 00:04:02 And away from me. People can just be reading them and like messing up or however they want. I know, excerpting them.
KG 00:04:11 However, they're hearing the voice. in their head. I wanna know if you're glad you did it and if you'll do it again.
SC 00:04:17 I definitely will do it again. I mean, I've, you know, initially I thought that there was going to be about 80% old poems and then I would be writing about 20% new ones. It's turned out to be about 50-50. So it's about 50% new work. Work that's not kind of like out there in the world, not read out loud anywhere. It's a, a remarkable amalgamation of a life of poetry. I think I read some of the poems. Um, and I, I, I think about that 25 year old and I think, oh my God, she's cute. [laughter]
So fierce, and so cute. Um, and then, you know, I, I think I see some of the truths have held true for, you know, going on three decades now. And some of the poems I wrote, you know, I think, I think I have a poem in there called "Letter to the Media" where it talks about, uh, the media's responsibility. And their absconding from that responsibility of telling the truth and presenting, um, ideas in a way that is, is uplifting for the public and, um, allowing them to see what is actually happening in the world. But they are more concerned with the business of selling advertisement and presenting the story so that it keeps you glued to your seat. So, um, the news is no longer the news, but it's the show that if you sit right there, we're going to tell you exactly what Trump said.
KG 00:05:54 But that's an old poem or that's a new one.
SC 00:05:56 That's an old, I think that was written, that poem was written when, when we're kind of like doing the weird stuff in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh, um, I think Bush was the president then. And we were talking about how they were presenting Iraqi lives, how they were presenting these bullets, ripping through the hearts of like mothers and children and how we were seeing all of these pictures of these dying brown people that were, you know, it kept us glued to our seat and kept the ads rolling on the news networks.
TN 00:06:27 But that theater of that media in an earlier moment, you also work through media in Crossfire. Social media in particular, you have a poem entitled "Tweet This," right. When you're speaking direct, well that's not the full title of that SC 00:06:37 "Tweet This, Motherfucker."
00:06:39 Yeah. I left that out. But you also, you work through media, the sort of newer emerging media that's happened in the last couple of decades to speak direct, to engage directly with [inaudible].
SC 00:06:52 Yeah. I mean, you know, and I, you know, uh, I I've, I don't know if that's to my detriment, but I certainly have very little accountability relationship with institutions. I have a remarkably direct relationship with my public largely, uh I'm, they see me on stage or they see me online and they see what I wrote and, you know, it remains, I think that is both freeing and limiting in that these institutions like the one under whose umbrella, we are taping the show, they are a largely white institution, a largely old institution that is rooted in a lot of the ideologies that we are trying to upend. We are trying to turn over. We are trying to re-imagine for people of color, for immigrants, for women, for LGBT people, for trans people, for children, for girls, for survivors, these institutions were not created to serve us.
And they were not created to an engender our survival, largely they were created to uphold a feudal system at which there was the rich white man at the very top. And I mean, it's evolved to include, you know, middle-class white men and rich white women. There has been some amount of progress, but those of us who are most vulnerable are still very much closer to the fire at the bottom than we are to the comfortable temperature near the top.
Um, so you know, all that to say that I'm not quite sure what the answer is. I just know that for as long as I can speak, for as long as I can talk to an audience that I wouldn't be present in the conversation and the way that I can be present right now is being on social media and being inside of rooms like the one we created a couple of nights ago, which was amazing and wonderful. And it made me remember that there are Black people in Brooklyn and that there are Black people living in Manhattan and that there are Black people living in the Bronx [crosstalk].
You know, you know, because I live in Crown Heights at the epicenter of gentrification just now. And, um, I'm beginning to f-no, I'm not beginning. I, I feel like an outsider in my neighborhood now because when I approached the building that I have been living in for 22 years, the new white residents look at me with suspicion and a raised eyebrow, kind of a tilted head saying, uh, "yes?"
KG 00:09:29 "Still here."
SC 00:09:33 Not, not even "still here" because "still here" acknowledges that I'm there and that I have a legitimacy there it's really like, uh, "can I help you? Are you lost? Are you, can I, you know, are you, are you here for someone?"
Uh, you know, the kind of querying pause and silence that has me say, I live here, motherfucker. I never lived there long before you did. And I lived here when the woman who you displaced right next door to me, used to be here for 40 years with her five children and her two grandchildren. Like, you know, that's the apartment you live in. So I, I belong here, but anyways, I don't know if I'm going off-topic. I mean, you might go.
KG 00:10:11 That's cool. I still, if we do want to know about, about Crossfire though, in terms of how now that you are a published poet right now published, what feels different, if anything, and if this is a track that's still moving in that direction for you, new phase, in a sense?
SC 00:10:27 This work, this Crossfire has put the poems in the hands of an entirely new generation because my peers and my early fans are now professors. They are working for these institutions and are making decisions about what is taught in those classes. And they, now these poems end up in classes where, you know, I'm not the same young person speaking those poems, but those poems are now, you know, in the hands, the minds, the politics of young readers, young activists, and that is astoundingly beautiful. You know, people who have never heard me read a poem out loud, they're now studying my work. And, um, I've got some feedback from some of my friends who are professors and it's been largely positive. I mean, of course there have been arguments about my ideologies, but that's what we intend to do with work. That's what the work is supposed to do.
It's supposed to engender conversation and crosstalk and perhaps an evolution of something new. I don't know. I mean, it's, it's, it's wonderful. And it was a very difficult process to put the poems together because I wanted to edit them the 47-year-old me wanted to edit the poems. And I couldn't allow that poet to edit the 25-year-old's poems. So I had to find a way to see this 25-year-old. I have to find a way to respect her and to, to, to hold what she experienced as true, even as it was no longer presently true for myself, because now I'm a mom with a kid, she's eight years old. I'm not as concerned about the, um, the ruminations of my vagina these days mean, you know that yet, you know, I'm, I, you know, I'm, I'm still in conversation with it, but you know, I, I'm not, you know, it's not the thing that is across the table from me every morning.
KG 00:12:24 That would be your child, product thereof.
SC 00:12:28 Who is, you know, maybe in conversation about her own body and her own purpose. Yeah. So it's, it's a different thing. And then the concerns are different. Like when I was 25 years old, when I was 27 years old, when I was on Broadway, when I was on HBO, when I was earning bookoo money, I could've bought a house in Crown Heights easily, but I didn't because, you know, I don't come from a tradition again, this is another place where where, um, where whiteness and, you know, being an outsider and not necessarily being schooled in the tradition of property, of property, of real estate. Like, you know, I didn't know that I should just buy a house. And now that I know that I should buy a house, it's costing me like an arm and a leg and my vagina.
KG 00:13:11 Want to say real quickly, how impressed, at how interesting it is. You saying that now, given that you don't date the poems, that's incredibly vulnerable then, right? So we don't know as readers. Who's 25, who's 45. Who's 30. I mean, that's so you're owning all of it now without any disclaimer.
SC 00:13:29 I know. There's a poem called "In Those Years," it begins "If only out of vanity, I have wondered 'what kind of woman will I be when I'm well, past the summer of my raging youth.'" And it goes, "will I still be lesbian?" Then it has all this, you know, it was my, my, my 25 year old attempt at paying homage to, um, T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock."
So where it's talking about, you know, and where he goes, "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled and in the room, the woman come and go talking of Michelangelo." And it's very sexy, like beginning, you know, "let us go. Then you and I, on the evening of spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table, let us go through certain half deserted streets, the muttering retreats of sawdust restaurants, and one night cheap hotels."
And it goes on. And my own poem, you know, I was, I was doing the young Black immigrant lesbian version and I go, "will I still be lesbian then? Or will the church or family finally convinced me to marry some man with a smaller dick than the woman than the one my woman uses to afford me violent and multiple orgasms." And it goes on at the end, it says, "I want to be fort-I don't know what I'll be like then, but I know what I want to be. Now. I want to be the girl who likes to die. I want to, oh, what do I want to be 40 years old and weigh 300 pounds and ride a motorcycle in the winter time." And I wonder, and I kind of like my goodness, like I'm 47. I'm well past that point of wandering that that kid had about who she would be. And I wonder how I measure up to her. I wonder how she would, what she would think of me now, quieter in places latent in my power. I now look for the moment to strike. I just, you know, I don't necessarily strike out at everything. I very, very carefully assess, you know, I'm more guerrilla, I think, these days,
KG 00:15:24 But this is the quiet version of Staceyann Chin. Wow. Wow. Damn.
TN 00:15:29 The other night was not particularly quiet with that standing ovation. That was amazing. Okay. So talking about-
SC 00:15:37 The audience is always very kind, um, not necessarily because the work is good, but because the work is honest.
KG 00:15:42 and resonates.
TN 00:15:46 Those things pair.
SC 00:15:49 You know what I mean? I'm a Jamaican and I'm Caribbean. You can, I can't be like everything. I have to find the thing that must be improved because that's how it is. You know, Zuri goes to this school with mostly white kids. And so she has all this, you know, she'll draw this circle. You know, I talk about this, you know, the story on almost every parenting podcast we, I do. And I talk about, um, you know, all these other white parents, you know, like all the kids would be around and one kid, one white kid books show up and say, look, mommy, I drew a rabbit and it's a circle. And the mom will be like, oh my goodness, that's such a nice rabbit. He's so cute. Blah, blah, blah, Zuri will try that shit with me. And she would come and be like, oh, "Hey mommy, look I drew a rabbit." I'm like, "where are the ears? Rabbits have ears. They have like this teeth. This not a fucking like rabbits. Don't be going out to the world, telling anybody that I affirmed this rabbit of yours. This is not a rabbit. You are Caribbean. Find out what the rabbit is, try and make it the likeness of a rabbit though. You're not white. Don't walk around telling people that a circle is a rabbit. You don't [inaudible] them. Can't get over that shit. You know?" We cannot. [laughter]
TN 00:16:56 Alternate depictions. Talking of Crossfire, the poem that appears first in that collection, you have a line and it speaks to me so deeply. So I'm going to read it. It says, "and while we're on the subject of diversity, Asia is not one big race and there is no such country called 'The Islands.' Thank you for that line. We need that.
KG 00:17:11 I am not from there.
TN 00:17:14 I wonder if you'd talk about that, that lack of knowledge of the U.S. or it's in the U.S. that lack of knowledge of the Caribbean, like thinking of it as a sort of amorphous place of "The Islands." And also there's a tension because you like so many Caribbean people in diaspora are based in Brooklyn, in New York, right? So there's something you get from being here, but there's also maybe something you experienced as a loss that lack of basic awareness of the complexity of the region.
SC 00:17:41 My, my, the, the, the, the only time I was on Oprah Winfrey's couch, we talked about why I chose to live in Crown Heights. And I live in Crown- I chose Crown Heights at the time of the, I would say the financial acme of my career, because, and at a time when the poorest of Caribbean people lived there, largely because it was Caribbean. And because it sounded Caribbean and it smelled Caribbean and it tasted Caribbean. And there were Caribbean men on the corner and Caribbean, old ladies going shopping during the daytime, and the children still spoke with Caribbean accents, even though they had never been to the Caribbean, there was an enclave that was decisively Caribbean. And you have to say Caribbean because it was all over the Caribbean. And I would be able to get Jamaican food on the corner. And I was so proud. I'm in the interview, so young and pointing out, like, "look, look, that's a breadfruit!"
SC 00:18:36 I was, you know, they took me to the, you know, the, the, to walk, Nostrand Avenue and to look at the foods because they wanted that in the shot, because they wanted me being home. Like, you know, because I was talking about being driven, being in exile from Jamaica because I was a lesbian and I was so loud and I had to leave because it was unsafe for me to be there. And I talked about how Brooklyn, particularly Crown Heights was a place called home. It felt like home. It gave me that home that I missed, you know, because I, I, you know, I, wasn't an immigrant who was a willing migrant. I didn't come here because I wanted to. I didn't arrive in the arms of family, certainly. And I didn't, I didn't come here. And I, I can't say that in my, my life outside of my queerness was better.
All of my peers in Jamaica now live in large homes. They do very well. They are very established in their careers and their lives in Jamaica. They experience a kind of pride. I mean, many of them are running the country in government. Um, they occupy spaces of power in Jamaica, and I would have come up with them and been one of those voices, whether as a university professor on campus, writing for the newspaper, being on TV, you know, being, uh, you know, you know, consulted for all kinds of ideas, you know, my mind would have been a very alive and visible thing in Jamaica because I was on my way there as a student. And as evidenced by all my peers, I mean, they're very successful. I mean, there CEOs, or, you know, vice presidents of the largest companies there, you know, whether it's the company that makes beer or the company that I don't know, lends money to people or whatever, but there, and-
KG 00:20:34 You're talking about your peers from UWI (University of the West Indies), not Paradise?
SC 00:20:37 From UWI, definitely. I mean, like having jumped out of the social, um, having jumped off a couple of, uh, rungs on the social ladder when I, to school and being light-skinned and learning how to speak the Queen's English and all of that, that kind of pulled me out of the abject poverty into which I was born. So I had made the leap. Okay. So as a young 20 year old in Jamaica, I was well on my way to becoming a member of society that had some space, some power, and definitely peer respect and, and, and, and room to kind of be all of who I wanted to be, but my queerness compromised that. And so when I came here, when I got, when I was attacked on campus by about a dozen boys who sexually assaulted me, and I came here, a part of the trajectory of life here was that I was talking about that.
And that's how I ended up on Oprah's show the Oprah Winfrey show that's. Um, but my, my, my, my social climb was arrested because I was immigrant and I was Black and I was an oddity. And I wasn't immediately able to wear the clothes that were valuable to people with power in this country. So I shopped at Conway when I just came here, where I bought my shirts for $2 and $3 and $4. And I didn't quite know how to dress in the sleek way that is valuable for the valuable people in New York. Um, and that's kind of how I discovered my style. Like, you know, just kind of wore, you know, I couldn't necessarily afford the things that you were supposed to wear in 1997. And so I just decided I was just going to wear whatever the hell I wanted to. And three years later, people started to say, oh my goodness, that's her style. Oh my God, she's rocking it. It's great. It's, you know, that's kind of how my fashion choices evolved. And I realized that I could put on anything I want. And if, as long as you're walking upright and looking like you ought to be able to wear this without anybody saying anything, nobody says anything in New York City.
TN 00:22:45 Just this conversation makes me think about the importance of asking you your relationship, your professional relationship, now, to Jamaica. You talk about some of your peers or former peers coming up out of university, but now your book, your first collection of poetry is out. What is your relation, your professional relationship in Jamaica, and here, I mean, here, you're incredibly well-known. And I just wonder how that is for you?
SC 00:23:08 I would say that for here, I, I feel valuable and we can talk about how we can talk about how that value is now mitigated by like age and race and sex as you age and those kinds of things. Um, and in some ways, buoyed by the fact that I'm a mother, because there's a way that people value motherhood. Um, there's a kind of legitimacy to your womanhood that is affirmed when you have a child, when you, oh my God, you carry the pregnancy to fruition. So there's that. But in Jamaica, it's, I'm on stage the other night, I think I was listening to Alexis's biography, her bio, someone who was reading her bio. Tami was reading her bio somewhat. And, um, I remember it clearly because I was filled with such envy because someone called her the Pearl,
Is it? The Pride of Anguilla. And I was so jealous.
I coveted so deeply because I would never be called The Pride of Jamaica. And for all of them, my successes in the rest of the world, I would say Jamaica has never opened its arms and said, we love you. And we value you. And it remains a sore spot for me. Indeed. It remains a place that, um, certainly silences me, and reminds me of being small and unimportant, and no matter how bright I was as a kid, and no matter how articulate and no matter how well I did in school, that no one would be there to collect my report or stand, you know, I went to my high school graduation and I never went to any other graduation after that, because I didn't quite like the feeling of everyone else having family there. And I'm there by myself. So I never went, I went away to college, finished university, and I just never went back to any, any graduation I just finished. And they sent me my degrees and I never went back. Because, you know, it's the only way I have from like my high school graduation or pictures that other people took. And I was in it. And over the years, I've cobbled the photographs of other people's families together. And there are a few now of me.
So I'm used to being alone and used to being, so it's this juxtaposition of America's acceptance of who I am. And even, I mean, without America, I wouldn't have known that in Jamaica, I was like a skinny girl so I wasn't attractive. You needed some curves to be attractive in Jamaica. I grew up in, um, you know, I remember this song. They have like, you know, there's like, [inaudible] nickname for them. It's the sound of bones, right? Knocking. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm familiar, you know, I just never thought it was good looking. And then I landed in America, 105 pounds with 34D boobs, you know, all of a sudden I was attractive.
And then I was writing these poems that were a value in New York on the Lower East Side in Nuyorican Poets Cafe. All over the country in Denmark, in South Africa, in Sweden, in, in, in, in, so I've, I've experienced certainly the parallel and the more, you know, I mean, I was on Oprah's show and, um, everybody in America was like, "oh my God, you're amazing. That's so great career is doing well. Congratulations."
And then Oprah's people called from the show to say, "do we need to move you? Because we're getting so many death threats about you. Do we need to like, figure out a way to get you out of your house? Um, how's your family in Jamaica, are they safe?"
And then I actually went down. I remember. Do you remember when, before the white people came in Atlantic Mall wasn't so fantastic? And, um, it just had like, um, you know, I don't know, Jimmy jazz? Yes. Jimmy jazz. It has, uh, it had, uh, you know, that animal it's like the cheeseburger place or like the kids go there and it's cheese and cheese, it had Chuck E Cheese in there, you know, and then it had like, you know, but now it's got Victoria Secrets and it's got like, you know, Uniqlo and everything. Yes. All the fanciness.
KG 00:27:54 And so we just did a lot of advertising for a bunch of folks.
TN 00:27:57 [bleeping noises imitating a sensor bleep] I think it's cool, but you were down there,
SC 00:28:02 But there, and, you know, and I was kind of like high from everyone talking about the Oprah show. I mean, even my, my aunt who is like crazy Christian, and she's the one who kicked me out of the house because I was gay at 11 o'clock at night up in Poughkeepsie. And I had to find my way down to Brooklyn and figure out somewhere to stay that night. She called up her whole church to talk about, to watch me on Oprah, talking about being gay in Jamaica, which is something that she was like ideologically opposed to, because Oprah was such a big deal. So I was feeling kind of high. And then I went downtown and then this guy, he just like, said, excuse me, "are you that girl from Oprah?" And I said, "yeah." And he just shoved me in the chest and I fell on the ground. And he said, "if this was Jamaica, I would kill you right here. And nobody would care."
And then, so I've always had to deal with those two things happening at the same time. I've also performed in Jamaica where they had to kind of like smuggle me out of the building because people were coming to get me because of what I said, but also like there's, um, a festival called Calabash Literary Festival. And they've had me back so many times and I am going back this year, um, with Crossfire. So the very first time I performed in Jamaica, Calabash had me. So I went down and I was so scared and I thought everybody was going to kill me because this was before Oprah. This is before everything. And I knew that I was going to die. I was going to die right there, but my own principled idea of how I should be said that you cannot be on HBO. You cannot be in America talking about this stuff and you do not take the opportunity to go home and make a statement in a place where they're offering you the space to do it. So I was trembling and I did it and I got a standing ovation. So I've, my relationship with Jamaica professionally remains a thing that is, you know, untenable and changeable. And I'm never quite sure what it will happen, you know, with Jamaica. But then, you know, in Jamaica, in America, I'm always Black. I'm always an immigrant! [crosstalk]
KG 00:30:12 What do you, what, what does, how does all this fit in your mothering Zuri and her relationship to your home?
SC 00:30:18 Um, she, she loves Jamaica. She's had nothing but great experiences. I mean, her thing is like, "I love Jamaica except for the mosquitoes." Uh, but you know, she, she, she, she loves Jamaica and all my friends with children who are around her age, she has like relationships with them and she's friends with them. She knows she's Jamaica and she claims it.
KG 00:30:39 So she's mitigated that relation. [crosstalk]
SC 00:30:43 For many years, when, when, just when Zuri was born, I started dating a person who lived in Jamaica. And for two years I went all the time. Like I went to every opportunity, I went. And so that kind of rekindled my relationship with Jamaica in this very decisive way with my child at a time when she was so tiny that everyone wanted to help and to hold her and to celebrate her. And no one cared that, you know, I'd mixed her up in a test tube and like poured her up my vagina, you know, like, you know, they were all very like happy with the kid because Jamaicans are like that, you know, culturally, Caribbean people are like that. "Gimme, the baby!" you know, everybody wanted to do something with the baby. "Let me change the baby. Let me hold the baby." Give me the-"
"No, ma'am no, no. I'm like, can I please have my child?"
"But no, no. Oh, no. I'm not finished with her yet."
SC 00:31:28 That's when they come back and they're going around the corner with the baby. I mean, that's, that, that, that was wonderful to have for the first two years of her life, you know, consistently. And, you know, I rekindled friendships that I hadn't really been close with those people for a long time. It was, it was good. It was good. And it remains a really good time in our life, you know, because Jamaica is just really good for having children.
KG 00:31:57 She also made you a mom in that space. Right. She identified you in a way. She made you, digestible....
SC 00:32:00 Yes, yes. She's definitely changed. Like I was no longer the lesbian who, I mean, the, the, the, the, the conversation was that I was actually performing cunnilingus onstage. That was the rumor that was floating around in Jamaica to the people who are not at the show.
"She was she doing all kinds of things?"
"Yeah. I think they even doing that onstage!"
I mean, like, you know, truth is not readily available to people that make it up, but then the narrative changes when, when there's a child and that is so cute. And then she was so articulate and then she, you know, she kind of like rolled into the world, articulate and smart and kind and compassionate. You know, I had the worst pregnancy in the world. I mean, it was terrible from, from the, from three days after insemination or for putting it back from three days when they put it back in the eggs in implantation from three days from after that, until they cut me open and pulled her out of me, I was in physical duress. I went to the hospital, 26 times. I was bleeding the entire pregnancy. I was throwing up the entire pregnancy. I was spitting and on bedrest, the entire pregnancy, I had to have strangers care for me. It was, it was agonizing, you know, I mean, you know, and yet another reason to support women's, uh, right to deciding what happens or doesn't happen with their bodies. Can you imagine if I didn't want to be pregnant? Oh my God. If I didn't want the child, Lord have mercy, Lord help us. Jesus. And when I say, Lord, help us. I mean, Audre Lorde. [laughter]
TN 00:33:47 Staceyann, you're so open about your family dynamics, your poetry that you perform often involves family members. You write about your family history and your memoir, and then you have your living room protest videos that you've been doing with your daughter. And I just wonder if I could hear you talk a little bit about that, that decision, or maybe it's not a decision for you to be so open with the world about your family dynamics.
SC 00:34:12 You know, in the other side of paradise, I write about when I was a kid, my life at home was so horrible and I had no one in my corner and I was so ashamed of the reality of my life that I started lying about it. So as far back as I can remember being conscious as a small child, I was making up stories. I was telling people, my mother was going to come and get me. I was telling people, my mother was sending me clothes from America. Um, although she was in Canada, I was telling people in America, I, I, you know, after the summer, or sometimes I would come back to school and be like, oh yeah, I was in America. And I would fake an American accent going like, "oh yes, I was in America. So that's why I'm speaking with an American accent because, you know, when you're over there, you just have to speak in this American accent."
So there are many ways. And I used to, I remember as a teenager, when my friend would gives me when, when my friend's dad would give me a ride home, I would have, you know, I don't know if this happens in other places, but in, certainly in Jamaica, the poverty is right next door to, you know, the, the, the affluent. And so my friend, I would make them drop me at the rich person's gate and say, oh yeah, this is my house. And then I would wait until the drive away. And then I would walk to the wrong side of the tracks to, to, to walk down the path and up the rocky hill path to get home. So I, I, I really lived that reality. And even, yeah, I remember I used to go down to the telephone booth with my friend and I would call my mother collect.
And then my mother would pick up the phone. Remember those days when you could hear the other person refusing your calls. So she would get on the phone. And she would say, "Je parle pas anglais," "I don't speak English" to the operator. And I would hear her say she doesn't speak English. Or she would say, no, I can't. Um, I can't speak on the phone now. I'm not accepting the call. And then I would have, I would, I remember steeling myself and the operator would say, I'm sorry, but they're not accepting the call. And I, the operator would hang up, but I would continue holding the phone in front of the 10 minutes because my friend is with me. I don't want to admit that my mother didn't accept the phone call from me. So, you know, I had all that going on. I, I spent years constructing this reality, this alternate reality of my life.
And by the time I got to 15 and it was just so, such a burden, like, you know, lies take a lot of work. You know, I mean, I don't know if people, you know, if people are out in the world are truth tellers and therefore they're not aware of how much work lying takes, but it takes an enormous amount of work to keep track of who you've told when and the emotional toll! And then you have to always kind of try to separate the truth from the, the lies so that you are not being like going crazy in your head about what is true and what is not. And so I, I, I get a, I get a scholarship to the Shorewood Teacher's College, and I moved from Montego Bay to Kingston. And I'm sitting in my room and my roommate says, "so where are you from?" My roommate's name was Cynthia. And she's from like another country section of Jamaica, maybe from, I dunno, some somewhere in Manchester or something. And she says to me, just making conversation, she goes, "so where are you from? What part? So, so which parish are you from?" or something.
And I remember holding for a very long time inside of myself, because here I was in a new place and no one knew me and I could continue to make the lies that I had been doing, or I could chuck the whole thing and speak truth. And I had no idea what the truth would bring me, but I knew I didn't want the weight of the lies anymore.
And so I said to her, "I was born in Montego Bay and then my mother ran away and left me and then my father didn't claim me. And none of them have anything to do with me now. And I'm here on a scholarship and I don't know what's going to happen. And I don't know how I'm going to make it through the four years here because I don't have the money."
And then I became this person who would rather tell you than wait for you to find out.
SC 00:39:21 There's a word I want to talk about with you, resilience. It's a word that is used to describe Black women. They're very often, and I know it's meant as compliment and I understand that. But obviously if you really think about it, it just truly means someone who's both someone who's both superhuman, but also subhuman, right? Someone who's just won't have the decency to die or drown in their own tears, or what have you. Right. That's really what resilience is. You don't stay down. And so, so that word, but also bringing this back to the fact that you are a mother, you know, what are you going to, what do you think, or what have you told your daughter about the resilience that will be expected for her in this world and how much she should be willing to bear?
SC 00:40:08 Funny you should say that this morning she came home yesterday. "Oh, I learned about Frederick Douglas. I watched a movie about him. Do you know that he was enslaved? And then he, um, ran away from, uh, slavery and, you know, follow the north star to, uh, New York. And then he, he started a newspaper that he called The North Star, because that's what he followed when he came to New York."
And, um, just kind of like, just going on about like details of him and stuff. And we have these finger puppets on the fridge that are like, you know, uh, Frederick Douglas, you know, Harriet Tubman, Frida Kahlo, like all of these people. And so she's like she, and she goes, "I have to take this to school tomorrow. Is it okay if I take it to school, I'll be very careful with it. And I'll just put it on my inside pocket when I'm finished sharing."
And it comes with a little card that you can get to read. And then we, you know, in the car this morning, she's like "Frederick Douglas, he's got white hair." And I was like, yeah. And you know, we talked about what he might have been like when he was younger and blah, blah, blah. And then there was silence. And then she goes, "does it ever make you feel good when you talk about slavery?"
And I said, "I don't think it makes me feel good when I talk about slavery. But tell me more about what you mean when you ask that." And she says, "it just makes me feel sad and it makes me just worry about everything. And it makes me feel scared that they're going to come and take me away and make me a slave or take you as slave. And then they'll sell me."
And then she starts crying in the car. And you know, she's a crier, this child of mine. I am not a crier. Generally. I am what you call resilience. Yes, indeed. I am. Yeah. Her name means vulnerable, Sally. It's the <inaudible> spoken by the Fiji people. And it means the frangipani flower, which they say is that once strong and vulnerable, and I wanted to give her a name that meant she could bend, but would not break. Because I think I have been broken so many places because it is so hard for me to bend. And so I wanted her to be able to bend because sometimes bending saves your life, you know? So she's a crier and she always, she's always crying about some shit, always like, you know, he's crying about somebody else's sorrow crying about, you know, her own sorrow, you know, and then I'm like, "why are you crying?" And she's, like, "I feel like crying!" I should be able to cry if I want to cry."
We have these big shouting matches and she's crying. And I'm like, "you have to save your things for something that's important."
"How do you get to decide what's important to me?"
And she goes on and she's cries and she cries and she cries all the time. So I've been like forced to make a way for the crying to be present, but also to urge her to a place of not allowing other people's sorrow to be swallowed up by your own tears. So then, you know, like, so, so we have this pushy conversation this morning where I was like, well, let's see. "Why, why are you crying about slavery when you thinking about it now, what exactly about it?" And then she says, well, she's sad about slavery, of course, as it happened before. And she knows that it's still happening in places now. And, but she's essentially afraid that it will happen to her. And we talked about why it wouldn't be likely that it would happen. And so to think about it, wouldn't be, you know, the best use of one's mental resources.
And then we began to talk about why it is important, even when it is difficult to talk about difficult stories and to share difficult stories and to have your life be out in the world. And then she, you know, we talked about, you know, one of our favorite movies is the last Harriet movie. Not because it was like the best movie ever made, but it was a Black woman kicking ass and freeing people. And she was not, she was not a victim. She was largely a woman wielding her power and, you know, moving through the world with such autonomy and such, you know, force that it was beautiful. And it was a Black woman with Black skin, with a Black body, uh, Black face, Black nose, Black mouth. We actually did a review of the movie and Cynthia Erivo said she liked it. So that was like a little geek-out moment for both of us, but, and she, she know she went and we, we began to talk about how it is that when these stories are told how those stories inspire other people to, to, to, to act, um, cause you know, she, she said that when she saw Harriet doing all of her amazing feats in the movie that she herself felt like as a Black girl, that she could be strong and she could walk fierce and she could be magical and that she could be a superhero as well.
And you know, it made us, so we have to have these conversations that talk about why it is important to be a voice in the world. I mean, and when you ask the Zuri, who are you and what are you, she will say, my name is Zuri Chin, and I am an activist and I'm a Black girl and I'm very proud of my hair and my body. And she will say one of the favorite things about her is that she's an up-stander and not a bystander. And I think that's something that we've worked on her whole life and whether she goes on to that life or not, I know that she will always be the girl for whom it won't be so easy to stand by and allow someone else to be hurt because she's find such a value in being an up-stander and being an ally.
And our own lives, you know, our own lives aren't terrible. You know, her life is pretty good. People are very impressed with her. They like her a lot. She's very easy to make friends, not as lucky, emotionally, like, you know, uh, twisted as, as those of us who were raised in different spaces are, you know, she, she can hear somebody say, I don't want to play with you and not be like twisted about it. She's a pretty happy kid, pretty well-liked kid. But then she has to know that that is privilege and that she has to wield that on behalf of those without that privilege. And that it is her duty. And every time she doesn't do it, barring being safe for herself and being safe in herself, that she is absconding from a duty that is necessary and a necessary part of being a citizen of the world to make it better.
And there are moments when I see her shaking and she's trembling and she is a little afraid of like doing what she knows is the right thing, but she's very convicted in herself that she must do the right thing, even though it's difficult. And as I said, I've seen her stress about it and I've wanted to tell her, no, you don't have to do it, but I want her to be able to do it and choose that for herself and not necessarily, you know, fall back on, on wanting to be saved. You know, like she can be a savior, you know, she can be the Lord that people say, Lord help us. And she can be that person and not just asking, you know, for someone else to come and save you, you can save yourself, you can save others. And if you take that as a way of looking at the world, then my God, what an army we would create to make the world better, to change the world, to address all of the things that are wrong with the world.
KG 00:48:24 I love that. She can be a savior. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all this wisdom today, before, and with what you'll continue to do. I'm sure. Thank you.
SC 00:48:31 Well, thank you for making space for, um, for, for people like me, because the institution doesn't always make space for us and for you to like have us over and feed us and give us a room full of like smart, amazing Black women to listen to us and allies and to be so held. So beautifully held is in itself tells magic. And it is credit that we use as we move on and we go into spaces that don't feel like that. And sometimes we can remember that night at Barnard college that makes us able to go to Wenatchee, Washington or, you know, Cincinnati, Ohio to deal with people who don't want to hear us, but they have to look like they want to hear us so that they can look like they're doing the right thing. So thank you for having us.
TN 00:49:32 Thank you, Staceyann.
Writing Home is produced by Kaiama Glover, Tami Navarro, Rachel James and Miriam Neptune. Support for this podcast comes from the Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Research on Women, the Media Center and the library at Barnard College. Our music is by Ayizan from their album Dilijans and the track is Tribilasyon.
