Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 You're listening to writing Home American Voices from the Caribbean with Kiama Glover and Tammy Navarro.
Speaker 2 00:00:25 All right, so, um, I'm reading an excerpt from my, my new novel, which is on the edges of being completed. It's called Injured Stone, and it's a novel written in epic form. And this is an excerpt from the character Sima, who is, she is a guardian who has been living in a maroon community. So this is after there has been a massacre in the community, and she and the other survivor are getting ready to head home. Imagine stumbling upon a middle aged woman and a 10 year old girl in a forest in the middle of the night with the half moon quickly setting. Imagine the little girl's dark skin reflecting the light of the moon, so that all you could see are the movements of her tiny limbs as she conjures up superhuman strength and stands over those, she has all those she has ever known and loved.
Speaker 2 00:01:23 Imagine seeing her small legs scurrying about in the darkness as she touches each person's chest calling their name. Hoping one of them will call her name back to her. What could this be? But horror beyond horror? It was enough to watch those beast killer people, and it was too much to see their desecrated bodies strewn among the ruins of our mane. There was no way for soul to know the bur the burial rights. She was too young, and she was right. Of course, we had to check and make sure there were no survivors. Though I did not share her child's sense of magic or the illusion that somehow in fact, despite what we had seen, that there were anyone left behind breathing as the morning dove sang their songs, and the sky went from indigo to the color of eggplant flowers. I moved and wrote silence, separating wood from bodies, the bodies of children, from those of adults.
Speaker 2 00:02:16 The broken pots from broken flesh Solo was unafraid. Could you blame her? The dead are not so frightful. They're generally peaceful. It is the living who bring us terror. Our dad's bodies were set into place, their limbs shocked, but I could feel their souls in the trees. They were watching us Soul must have felt them too. They want us to bury them the right way. Sima Soul said to me in her voice, the voice that just yesterday sang the songs of children's games. I nodded my head as I moved yet another body across the pools of blood that had stained the soil. This was too much work for an old lady and a child, but I knew she was right, and I also knew that as the sun rose, this would become unbearable. I did not want to see my beloved dead eyes. My dear Gaal, We will do what we can.
Speaker 2 00:03:09 I responded. The pit had gotten too deep, or rather, we could not pull anyone else out from it. The rest remained. Let's bury these who are inside already. I said, But their feet are in the wrong direction. How will they make it home? My heart pounded in my chest. I had taught her that. I had taught her that our dead walk to be in, in the East. She had helped me countless times to bury our dead. It was one of the most important lessons. Feet had to point in the right direction. Otherwise, how would they make it home?
Speaker 3 00:03:54 Hi, everyone. I'm Tami Navarro. Uh, we'd like to welcome you to season three of writing Home American Voices from the Caribbean.
Speaker 4 00:04:03 We are so excited to be back here again. I'm Kaiama Glover, and this is gearing up to be another exciting season. The voice you heard just before ours was our guest today, Anna Maureen Lara, reading from her nearly completed novel Injured Stone. Anna is a celebrated novelist, anthropologist performance artists and poet. She's written numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, including El uti, Skirt, Conjure Woman, and Queer Freedom, Black Sovereignty among else. She's a recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Black Lives Matter Grant, the Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Association of Queer Anthropologists and the Oregon Literary Arts Foundation, Laurel Swes and Donald Monroe Memorial Fellowship. Currently, she's an assistant professor in the Women Gender and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Oregon. And I think she's gonna tell us a little bit about what that, uh, that space means to her and, and how it's been for her moving to that new world. Um, I'm gonna start by saying as a, not exactly a disclaimer, but a frame that some of our questions today are going to enthusiastically channel, um, some queries that were generated by one of our producers and collaborators, the Haitian documentary filmmaker activists and librarian Miriam Neptune. So, uh, Anna, you've been warned that, uh, Tammy and I will be ourselves and also an iteration of ourselves, um, bringing Miriam back from behind the scenes into the space of our conversation. So we've got a lot in store for you.
Speaker 2 00:05:30 I'm excited.
Speaker 3 00:05:31 Thank you. So we're just gonna get started. Thank you so much for joining us, Anna. Uh, I'm thrilled that you're here. Uh, and I wanted to say in going through your work, I was really struck by your engagement with various forms of writing. So, as Kama just mentioned, you've written poetry Pros and your ethnographic work. Of course, I'm an anthropologist myself, so I just wonder how you go about deciding how particular stories need to be be told. So that's a question about form. Um, but also more broadly when you think about how a story needs to be told, how you engage with, with language, um, so your characters can move fluidly between Creole and Spanish, for example. So I'm wondering how you make those decisions and what kind of work you're doing as you make those choices in your writing.
Speaker 2 00:06:14 Thank you, Tami. That's a wonderful question. So the choice about which genre to engage when I'm telling a story, you know, in my, in my fiction, I'm character driven, right? So in my fictional work, I'm really beholden or attempting to honor the work of my characters. And in my ethnographic work, I am working with communities to tell the story they want me to tell, right? So the work of ethnography and fiction, these are two separate kinds of knowledge production. I think, you know, and, and I feel like I, I've inherited, like all of us have inherited the rich legacy of black scholar artists, and I feel so privileged to have inherited that in the sense that I, you know, knew before I was even an anthropologist, I knew that Zorian Hurston was both anthropologist and fiction writer. You know, Catherine Dunham was both dancer and anthropologist that Amy Suze wrote Poetry and Critique and all kinds of work.
Speaker 2 00:07:23 And I, in some ways, I almost feel like, you know, black and Caribbean and black Caribbean and Creole Caribbean writers and thinkers have always moved fluidly between the genres. And so I feel like very privileged, I feel very privileged to have inherited that and to have had access to that when I started my own journey into writing and into scholarship, which was almost 25 years ago. And so that's the first thing is, is just knowing that the imaginative landscape for me already felt expansive, but I wasn't seeing the stories I wanted to see, and I wasn't reading the stories that I wanted to read. You know, then Dion Brand came into my world and, you know,
Speaker 3 00:08:06 Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. <laugh> who
Speaker 2 00:08:09 We've had, who
Speaker 3 00:08:11 We've had, we've had on this, in this series. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:08:13 That's right. I mean, yeah, her work came into my world and I was just blown away and, you know, and now Hopkins as well. And, you know, and then just starting to see like the full potential of what writing could be and how it could, how language could transform to create other worlds. Um, this is relevant because, you know, Nala Hopkins and the way she plays with language and her science fiction and speculative fiction work is what first had me thinking about the ways in which the literary fictional world could also be cultivated and corrupted by language. Uh, in other words, like I, I think I've always had a politics of refusal because I sometimes get frustrated that I write in English, given that Spanish is the world of my characters for the most part. And Spanish and Crayola, you know, like is the world of my characters.
Speaker 2 00:09:08 And there's a way in which that tension that lives inside of me ends up playing out on the page. But also the inspiration that Nala Hopkins gave me through her work also taught me to think about how language can be this space of, of disruption. And also like a radical reimagining of the world. I I was doing ethnography in the nineties, late nineties on the sugar cane plantations in the Dominican Republic. And, you know, the, the with ethnography, the ethical, the ethical imperatives to is to create no harm. To do no harm, right? And to stay true to what has been said, what has been observed. And for me, applying a decolonial and black feminist model of ethnographic research, it's also about being led by the community's needs and by the imperative to deconstruct western imperial knowledge. So my work has, al has been informed by that, and more so over the years as I've been practicing ethnographic research and also engaging with decolonial scholarship more fully and black feminist scholarship has become even more central to my work than it was before.
Speaker 2 00:10:21 So I would see things on the plantation that I was able to record in my ethnographic work, but because of the ways in which ethnography is imperatively constructed to create no harm, right? I was led by my interlocutors to tell the story, right? Like, I could only go so far as they wanted me to go mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so, you know, one of the first ethnographic pieces I wrote was in 2004 from my research in the late nineties and early two thousands on the Gaga, right? Which are, uh, the Dominican Haitian ceremonies around Easter. And my interlocutors had asked me to talk about their work as healing work, right? And so I was able to talk about that. But in that same period that I'm conducting ethnographic research, I'm in the Dominican Republic for a gathering, the Latin American and feminist gathering, and I'm with a group of black women, and we're all black Latinas, you know, black Latinx, like just black Caribbean women from Haiti, Brazil, Guadalupe, And we're all in the beach, and, you know, we're all in white and we're dancing and we're singing in the water, and we're just being free in the water.
Speaker 2 00:11:41 And as that's happening, one night under the light of the full moon, the story of Micella came to me. And that was in 1999. And so, you know, I guess on a personal level, as I'm attempting to sort out the kinds of information I'm receiving through my imagination, through what I call eal mediumship, I'm also sorting out what it means to engage real living, breathing communities and their imperatives. And so I realize that some kinds of stories can only be told in the realm of fiction, and some stories need to be told in the realm of fact, right? Of ethnographic interpretation, in fact. And so, um, over the years, um, I've been, I've been attempting to do that, right? And then some stories need to be told in poetry too. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> or in the body through performance, right? So I've been sorting that out for 25 years,
Speaker 3 00:12:42 <laugh>. But it's beautiful how you sort of talk about the way that the, you're sort of anthropological and literary ancestors have made those worlds feel possible for you, right? That you feel like the, the full array of, of creative expression, um, is sort of at your disposal. That's, that's a lovely way to sort of approach it.
Speaker 4 00:13:00 I mean, you've a vote for a corpus and a tradition actually, um, self-created and clearly resonant. I think in ways it'll be useful for thinking knowledge production more broadly.
Speaker 2 00:13:12 Yeah. Thank you. No, I, I feel like we're, I feel very lucky to be alive at this time because it is after Alice Walker encountered, encountered Zora's grave, you know, or like, you know, it is when we can have Katherine Dunham's work accessible to us. Um, I just feel very lucky that we have that.
Speaker 4 00:13:30 So, Anna, you have opened the door, I think in, in what you've just said for us to think about. Um, you know, I think something that's a little bit maybe sticky when it comes to, again, knowledge production by especially, um, marginalized populations, meaning black or women or, um, you know, so-called non-normative in other ways. And so I'm, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, on positioning the self in relation to community as an ethical practice, asking you specifically, what does it mean to produce situated know knowledge, right? As a queer black feminist diasphoric contributor, and, and to do so in an ethical way that, that, um, that makes claims for knowledge that doesn't come from like a traditional text, let's say, but actually from experiences of dancing in white on the beach with other people. Um, you know, and, and, and just kind of thinking about that as an intervention, I'm hoping you can say a bit more.
Speaker 2 00:14:35 I think one of the most beautiful and powerful contributions of black feminist scholarship is the reclaiming of our bodies as sites of knowledge, as sites of knowing, as sites of movement and freedom and joy and imagination. Um, and I think that for me, uh, I absolutely aim to disrupt the idea that intellectual thought only comes from the neck up and only comes from books, right? Um, I absolutely seek to disrupt that, especially, um, considering that. So I am the second generation in my father's family that is literate, and I still have living members of my family who are not literate. In other words, they can't read. And I grew up with them, and I grew up not thinking of them as any less than me or any less intelligent or any less, uh, theoretically sound. I grew up with them having really powerful conversations about, you know, surviving dictatorships.
Speaker 2 00:15:46 There's, uh, migration, having conversations about labor, having conversations about healing, and having conversations about family. Um, and they're not literate, right? So they don't, they can't read the book that I wrote. Um, they can't read any of the books that I wrote. That is the, the kind of, it doesn't mean that they don't know the worlds I'm talking about, right? It doesn't mean that when, when we are talk, when I share with them an excerpt from my writing in my, you know, in my choppy translation, because there's also an English Spanish language thing, you know, that there isn't, there isn't an understanding or a comprehension or a critique of the world I've created mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So know, given that I grew up with family, a lot of family that is not literate, who I love and value deeply, I, I think that embodied knowledge is a really important site, right?
Speaker 2 00:16:47 So they carry their knowledge in their bodies. You know, the way my aunt leads my great-aunt who's 95 as of two weeks ago, you know, the ways that she carries herself and the way that she carries, uh, her, her approach to family and to community, it's all in her body. And so when I sit with her, you know, she's talking to me, you know, there are ways in which her body was disciplined through Catholicism that restrict her movement and that restrict what she shares with me. And then there are moments where she splits open and like, I see this person and I see her at 95 as when she was, when she was 25, you know, and I can see her across time. And, and that tells me something. It teaches me something. And so I absolutely think we have so much to know and to learn from what we carry in our bodies.
Speaker 4 00:17:43 This goes back to this question of your formulation of a corpus that speaks to the kind of work that you wanna do, be it as an artist or as a scholar. Because, you know, just looking at, at your writings, both creative and nonfiction, you know, I've taken note of the names of the people you site and, you know, I'm thinking about Mayad D and, and Viv Clark and Karen Richman and La Grace Benson and, uh, Rashelle Bal Dominique, right? So these are very much, um, this kind of chorus of folks who are producing knowledge and thinking the world along the lines you've just outlined, and you've made them the sign of the support edifice for the work that you're doing without having to find legitimacy, um, in other spaces. And, and I find that incredibly powerful. So, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:31 Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I, one of my biggest regrets is never having met Rash wado Monique in person, because her work is also so influential to my thinking. I really appreciate you saying that. Um, pay, because it makes me think about a conversation I had. I was a graduate student at Yale, and it was a senior scholar, and we were walking one day and she was lamenting that a scholar who had come to visit had not cited one European or American scholar in their work. And I was just like, I was floored one at her dismay. Um, and two, I was like, but you know, there, there are entire bodies of knowledge outside of the United States and Europe, and, and it doesn't mean someone's work is any less because we're not citing Fuco or we're not citing Philip Roth or whatever, you know, So <laugh>,
Speaker 4 00:19:23 Fuco and Roth Yeah. Those guys, you
Speaker 2 00:19:25 Know, those guys, I mean, all, all power to, all power to engaging with them as well. Sure. Why not? They're part of the, you know, great well of knowledge, but like, at the same time, like, Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think I've been very intentional about cultivating a world where I'm in conversation with other black women and black and queer and, you know, and, and just people of color and Caribbean people and, and just I'm, yeah. I am trying to be intentional about that. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4 00:19:54 And doing so at Yale <laugh> when needed, right? Like in the bastion of those spaces that tend to be dismayed by the fact that knowledge is produced other than in, you know, white American and North Atlantic University contexts, right? So mm-hmm. <affirmative>, Yeah. On that walk at Yale
Speaker 3 00:20:11 <laugh>. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the sum of parts cuz I was really interested in your use of, and your engagement with mathematics. Um, so this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've been reworking my way through Audrey Lord's collection, The marvelous Arithmetic of Distance, and we've had a broader with us in a critical Caribbean conversation, and she talked about working through fractal theory. Um, and so I'm really taken with how people make use of, um, mathematical modeling in their creative writing. And I wonder what led you to the sum of parts and kind of what work that did for you in that book.
Speaker 2 00:20:48 That book is deeply personal. And, um, it's, uh, you know, I have like the lesbian tragedy series that I self-publish, that's one of them. Um, lesbian, romantic tragedy. Um, well,
Speaker 3 00:21:01 Infidelity figures prominently in that, in that,
Speaker 2 00:21:04 Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:21:05 Romantic
Speaker 2 00:21:05 Tragedy. Yeah, exactly. Lesbian, romantic tragedy, a genre.
Speaker 4 00:21:09 Nice.
Speaker 2 00:21:10 Yeah. <laugh>. Um, you know, so watermarks and tree rings is part of that genre, and some of parts is part of that. And I have another one I'm working on right now called The Anatomy of Cake. The mathematics in that piece began because my brother is a mathematician and he, you know, he and I were having all of these conversations about mathematics and I, you know, we were nerding out and having a really fun time, you know, just talking about topology and geometry and calculus and I mean, I don't understand calculus at all, but, you know, that's his favorite, um, area in any case. So we were having those conversations at the same time that I was thinking about the story of that piece, which is like, how do we, how do we manage as queer people of color to hold relationships together ever? Like, how does that even happen?
Speaker 2 00:22:03 You know, in a world where we are just under the forces of so much, so much violence and we have, there are a lot of forces pulling us apart, Right? And I always just think it's magical and miraculous when we're able to have any sort of relationships, but that, that story is, you know, it's about friends and me and, and just all kinds of things that were going on during a particular period of my life where there were questions about mental health and there were questions about toxic masculinities, and there were questions about, you know, how families do or do not support queer relationships. And all of that kind of came together alongside conversations with my brother without mathematics. And, and so I started putting that piece together in that way, and just thinking about the ways we build each other up and take each other down, and really the mathematics of that, right? Like what's left at the end of the day when you've divided and multiplied and attracted pieces of ourselves to just be able to stay standing. Um, so yeah, it's a really, just a really personal reflection on that. And mathematics became the, the metaphor for that reflection for me.
Speaker 3 00:23:25 Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's really helpful. Thank you for sharing that experience.
Speaker 4 00:23:29 So yeah, that's, that is particularly helpful because, you know, it's another instance of, of you offering a sort of like a theoretical toolkit almost that enables you and their, you know, by extension for us scholar people, of which you are also a part, but to, to, to have the language to talk about the stories that we're generating our own language, our own epistemologies, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so, I mean, you just gave us, what was it now? I've forgotten it. I should have written it down. Lesbian tragic romance genre, <laugh>, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:23:58 Lesbian, lesbian, romantic tragedies, <laugh> lesbian
Speaker 4 00:24:02 Tragedies, which I hope you are writing an article about and which is marvelous. But I, you know, I've also just, your work, you've given, you know, black queer aesthetics, strategic universalisms, and these are all terms that are both generative in, in reading your work and the work of others. But they're also sort of the seeds of, you know, what are arguably kind of political practices or political interventions mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And sometimes Tammy, you know, got to a particular text that moved her, I as a Haitian elderly skirt is where it's at, um, and is the foundation for my thinking through all of your work. And this is a, an instance of me channeling Miriam, who would love to hear you talk about the ways you center Vodou and Haitian ancestral connection connections that are generally erased or suppressed or fetishized in the dr in particular because of persistent anti-blackness. Um, and so in this, to the extent to which you are, are kind of transgressing, for lack of a better term here, uh, borders, are there ways in which you actively consciously imagine the formulation of these, the theoretical categories? Is there a way in which you are, you're thinking about the politics of your own literary and intellectual production?
Speaker 2 00:25:14 Yes. Um, <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:25:17 Okay. Next question. The end,
Speaker 2 00:25:20 <laugh>. No. Um, well, I mean, yes and no, uh, <laugh> yes, in the sense that I am actively working to heal through my work. Some of the byproducts of anti-black racism and anti Haitian is right, the hemispheric anti Haitian that is all of our inheritances mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and that I am looking to heal the homo, you know, the impacts of homophobia and transphobia, and I mean, yes, like the political work is in the healing, I guess, right? And in the reclamation, I refuse, uh, and if you read my my scholarship, you'll see that I refuse the category of the state as a legitimate category for thinking through our freedom. And so I really believe that with, when I'm sitting with my characters, they are showing me the world as I have lived it, but also the world I hope to live where their relationships between people, even when it's disrupted by the violences of the state and society, that the relationships between people are where our past and future freedom lie. And I say it, you know, like that, like almost like a question question because I think that it's, it's the question that drives me in everything I do. What does it mean for us to be free? What does it mean for us to be free? What does it mean for us to be free? And I think that inherently that is a political question in a context in which we are still dying.
Speaker 4 00:27:02 All right. Well, in the, in the time that we have left, um, we're gonna move back out of time and back into space, if that's all right. I wanted to, um, you know, our podcast is writing home, and so I wanted to ask you, Anna, about the various and multiple geo spaces that constitute home for you. So right, like the Caribbean, Latin America, Espanola, Dr. The Diaspora you're from where? I'm from Westchester. You're from Mount Vernon. Well, you went to school in Mount Vernon. I was in my plains right next door.
Speaker 2 00:27:31 Okay. Yeah. <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:27:33 So I wanted you to talk about home Sure. Generally, but even more particularly, um, maybe some of the friction involved in those multiple and overlapping identities. And I say this pointedly because you are our first guest who represents the space of the so-called Hispanic phone Caribbean. And I've been thinking about why that is. I mean, it's, some of the obviousness is that Tammy's kinda intellectual orientation is the Anglophone Caribbean. Mine is, is Haiti and the Francophone Caribbean. So, Okay. Um, but beyond that, I think there is some friction between what's understood as a Latinx or Latin American cultural identity and a Caribbean identity category in the Americas. And I wonder in as much as your home is so clearly and rooted multiple, if you have any thoughts on, on that friction, um, or whether you think it's nonsense or something in between.
Speaker 2 00:28:27 Oh, yes. Um, <laugh>, So I, I I live in the, and both, and that is my place of joy. Um, <laugh>, my place of joy is the, and both anytime I'm subjected to the either or, it's horribly painful for me, um, on multiple levels. So the idea that, um, you know, the divisions between Caribbean and Latin American or between the Hispanic phone Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, you know, the, the different diasporas when, when there's an either or, it's just so painful. Um, because I, I, it's just anathema to my person. It, I can't exist in the either or I have to exist in the, and both. And so, and I exist in the, and both by default. And so I am both Caribbean and Latina, Latinx, you know, I am both black and Dominican. Imagine that, um, <laugh>, uh, I am, I am both of the Dominican diaspora and the African black diaspora, right?
Speaker 2 00:29:36 Uh, you know, African diaspora, the black diaspora. I am both of those. And, um, I actually find more strength and sense of groundedness being part of the black diaspora. And there are many reasons for that. Um, you know, a again, when national frameworks feel very limiting to me. So, uh, nationalist frameworks feel very limiting. And, uh, there I have gone throughout my life in and out of Dominican identity, and there are many reasons for that, in part because of how Dominicans on the island respond to Dominicans on the diaspora, which is a unlike many other places. It's a disclaimer, right? So, um, the experience for me is Dominican and diaspora, and I've, I've had this conversation with other Dominicans and diaspora is that when we go back to the Dominican Republic, people in the Dominican Republic are very quick to tell us we're not Dominican. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 2 00:30:32 Right? And, and that's not the case for many people from other places, right? Like a trend person going back home may experience like some critique about having been away, but they'll be claimed as Trini a Haitian person who's in the US won't be less Haitian because they live in the us. And that aspect of Dominican, Dominican cultural performance on the island is just so bitter for me. Um, and so I find a place of strength when I, I, you know, root myself and have been rooted in black diaspora. And I find that to be a very generative space that helps me connect and relate to many, many people, including other Dominicans, both at home and in the diaspora, in ways that are precluded by a Dominican diasporic identity. So yeah, let's, let's add some complexity to that, right? Like <laugh> mm-hmm.
Speaker 4 00:31:29 <affirmative> and generosity Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:31:30 Of like Yeah,
Speaker 4 00:31:31 Yeah. To the self, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that thing, again, of healing the self by acknowledging categories of coherence that escape some of the limits that are imposed from the outside. I mean, that's what you're suggesting by saying No, not either or All
Speaker 2 00:31:46 <laugh>. All all, yeah. And then, you know, to live in Oregon, I'm, and to be making home in Oregon. I've been here since 2013. Okay. And I, um, you know, I came here with my partner who was a professor at the University of Oregon, is still a professor, although she's leaving the academy. Um, but, you know, came here, uh, in, in a very intentional way, uh, not thinking I was going to be doing work in the academy at all, um, but finishing my PhD and, uh, you know, and I got here and <laugh>, I had never lived in a place that is so homogenously Anglo and <laugh> white and Right. And, and, uh, and you survived. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's God's work out here, but like <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:32:44 She did not.
Speaker 2 00:32:45 I did. I did. Yes,
Speaker 3 00:32:47 I did. Oh my goodness. Cause even the way you said I did, even the way you said, I've been here since 2013, it seemed like there's an intervention that you're making with your work and your presence.
Speaker 2 00:32:57 You know, There is, And, and here's the thing is like, you know, I moved out here and it's taken me a long time to understand what life is like out here. Um, the first thing is that Oregon is a libertarian state culturally. And so, you know, it's a lot of gun holders who like to smoke weed. And I did say that, um, <laugh>, you know, in other words, like marijuana is legalized here, here, Sila sy mushrooms are legalized here, and it's like a gun carrying state, right? And so, you know, you have this weird tension, you know, libertarianism is a weird thing. And so when that's the cultural norm, it's, it's a very, it's a very strange thing. I I've never known it before, and I've lived in Texas, right? New York, Connecticut, I've never known libertarianism in the way that I live it here in Oregon with, you know, with the like simultaneous like support of like, right, of the decriminalization of drugs at the same time that people are, you know, people have gun racks on the back of their trucks, like at, in Fineum.
Speaker 2 00:34:00 And so, um, that contradiction for me as a person of color, as you can imagine, uh, creates a space that doesn't necessarily feel very safe most of the time. And so, um, you know, uh, the Trump years here were very dangerous and continue to be, uh, I'm not gonna lie, it's dangerous to be a person of color here. And, uh, you know, for that reason, I know that many, many black people continue to leave the state and to go back to where their families were from three generations ago in the south, you know, um, black people, you know? Yeah. The, I mean, the sundown laws were officially struck from the Constitution in 2000, and it wasn't until 2018 that the, that the state struck laws prohibited. Uh, there were laws on the books that, uh, supported, you know, community, neighborhood segregation. So, you know, legally people could refuse to sell you a house if you were black until 2018.
Speaker 2 00:34:57 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and so, you know, the state is kind of still catching up with itself. Um, and yet there have been black people here since the beginning of, of the US Colonial Project in the 1840s, you know, and with Lewis and Clark, like, there have been black people here, and the tensions are that black pe you know, black people here have been subjected to the clan and sundown laws, you know, the first person born within the city boundaries of Eugene is still alive. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, you could not legally be born or live in the city, the boundaries of the city of Eugene until the, the sixties, 1960s. So yes, we have not
Speaker 4 00:35:42 Been paying enough attention to Oregon if there people take away from
Speaker 2 00:35:46 This accident, you know? Yes.
Speaker 4 00:35:48 What the hell is going on over there?
Speaker 2 00:35:50 Well, what the hell, what the hell is going on over here is that it was founded as a utopian white supremacist state. Right. Okay. So this is Well, that's fair. It was founded, it was founded as a white utopia, and yet at every turn that has been disrupted. Right. So, you know, I mean, there's a very intense history, right? Like the Chinese exclusion laws, like prohibited Chinese people from living in the boundaries of Portland, Japanese people were removed. Most of the orchards in Oregon were founded by Japanese families during World War ii. They were removed from their orchards, and those orchards were gifted to white families. And they were sent, you know, the Japanese families were sent to camps in California. You know, and African Americans here, like have a long history. They, there's even like a black pioneer's project, you know, they have a long history, but they weren't allowed to like buy land or purchase land or purchase houses.
Speaker 2 00:36:39 And so there were all these kind of workarounds that happened for generations. And so, you know what, I've come to learn living in a place that was built as the white utopia, which in the 1920s had the highest number of plan members in the country. What I've come to learn living here is how my black kin here are still very devastated people. You know, my students learn in Oregon schools that if they like socialize with other black kids, they're somehow being segregationist, Right? So they come to the university and we have to like, we have to help them like see, like, and learn, like, you know, to be friends with other black people is not a bad thing. Like, Right. Um, and so that's like, it's generations of anti-black violence. And uh, and that's why I kind of joke that is God's word, but, you know, um, but it's real.
Speaker 2 00:37:32 And you know, and I think that it makes sense to me that all of those protests happening, the protests were so intensely Yeah. In Portland, you know, we're so, we're so really acrimonious and very tension filled. And it's because there is a new generation of, uh, young white Oregonians who are refusing the inheritance of the white supremacist state. And that is something that we haven't necessarily seen before in civil rights activism to this degree. And then you have the libertarians, right? And you have that tension between, like, nobody tells us how, you know, to wear a mask. Nobody tells us if we can or can't have a gun. Nobody tells us what to do at any time. You know, everything is, is rooted in our civil liberties and in the Bill of Rights alongside people say, Have you? No. No. <laugh>, no, no. I, I still have to
Speaker 4 00:38:30 Things, I've been thinking about this in really deep ways, both pedagogically and, and intellectually. I, I just, Are you gonna write about this
Speaker 2 00:38:38 <laugh>? No, I still have to survive living here, so, no. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, my, my, my partner does have a column in, um, in the local paper. And, you know, and she writes in that local paper, and I mean, she wrote a column in December. She wrote a piece in December basically pointing out, you know, that difference is not a bad thing. And the amount of hate mail that she received was very intense. So, you know, and she is doing this work actively, right? So she's doing all this incredible work around water justice and like equity and social justice, and she's doing that work, and I support her from behind the scenes. But, but I, um, I have, I made a decision years ago not to do work that engages whiteness, but rather that builds and nourishes my, me and myself as, you know, as a black person that nourishes relationship with native people, that nourishes relationship within communities of color. And that's where I spend my energy and my purpose and, um,
Speaker 4 00:39:35 Actively healing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:39:37 Actively healing. And, uh, I don't have the gumption to deal with hate mail in the way that she does. So, you know,
Speaker 3 00:39:43 <laugh>, but the work that you're doing, even the healing, I mean, it brings us back to the earlier portion of the conversation, but in your pedagogical practice, the kinds of work that are necessary before you can even get into sort of the instruction of the day, right? So before you can turn to the syllabus, right? What are the kinds of pain, um, that people are enduring and encountering on a daily, um, basis that lead them to your classes or to the university?
Speaker 2 00:40:10 Yeah, that's right. Um, I mean, you know, it's, it's a lot. It's a lot. I'm teaching. I taught a black feminist theories class in the winter quarter, and I'm teaching a, a transnational indigenous feminisms class this term. And yeah, I mean, I, part of, part of the practice in the classroom is acknowledging what it took for us to get to that space. And I have, you know, I have young people whose parents are Trump supporters, Trump loyalists, and they're in these classrooms where we're talking about black feminist theory and, you know, and, and thinking about actively thinking about police violence mm-hmm. <affirmative>, right? And their parents are in the background as we're having this conversation. And so, um, Right. Cuz you're
Speaker 4 00:40:57 In there homes now,
Speaker 2 00:40:58 Right? We're in their homes. Yeah. You know, That's
Speaker 4 00:41:01 Crazy. I'd
Speaker 2 00:41:01 Never thought of that. Yeah. It's so, it's so intense for them, you know? And so we're in a really, I feel that we are in a very powerful moment of transformation. And so what I have to offer, what I have to offer is story. And what I have to offer is just holding space, creating space for us to, to find and tell our stories. And, you know, I'm doing a performance ethnography class this term, and I'm having a performance on May 19th called Sanctuary, and I've been collaborating with Rosamond as King and Courtney, Desiree Morris. Oh,
Speaker 4 00:41:39 Rosamond. Okay.
Speaker 2 00:41:40 Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and Akiko had took a yama and, you know, the four of us came together and these past two years thinking about what sanctuary means in the context of ongoing colonial violence and pandemics. And, and so, um, you know, having the chance to think that through with these other women of color artists like, has been really incredible. And I'll kind of culminate in this multimedia performance on the 19th of May. And, you know, the, just the, just to think about what it means for my body to disrupt the space of the university mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, and that's gonna be some of the work of the performance. It's taking place in front of the Jordan Schnitter Museum of Art, um, on campus. And it's me and, uh, you know, people of color and we're just taking up space and it's almost like I'm gonna be doing a protection spell, but it's a performance, um, <laugh>. And you know, what it means to imagine that, what it means to create sanctuary on this land, in this place that was imagined as a white utopia. And that has been happening in relationship, you know, that creation of sanctuary has been happening in relationship with the native peoples here. Being very intentional about building relationship with native tribal communities and being very intentional about building relationship with all the black farmers and the black folks who are just doing their best to have our self-determination and our sovereignty intact at the end of the day.
Speaker 4 00:43:12 Excellent. Anna, we have been really generous. This has gone longer than, than we told you it would, but it was kind of hard to stop. I feel like we could have three more episodes with you, so you're forewarned, um, maybe when we can be back in person, we can have you here at Barnard to share in approximate space, um, you know, when the world readjusts. But thank you so much for being here. This was,
Speaker 2 00:43:36 Thank you for
Speaker 1 00:43:37 Starting season three for
Speaker 2 00:43:38 Us. Yes, thank you so much. Um, this has been so generous and so beautiful and so lovely, and I'm just so glad to know you're doing this and gifting us these stories.
Speaker 1 00:43:54 Riding Home is produced by Kaiama Glover, Tami Navarro, Rachel James, and Miriam Neptune. Support for this podcast comes from the Digital Humanity Center, The Center for Research on Women, the media Center, and the Library at Barard College. Our music is by Iza from their album Dili janz, and the track is to Bela.
