VS Seson 6 Episode 2

Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity

Transcription by: Akilah Muhammad

[BACKGROUND MUSIC PLAYING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

I am Ajanaé Dawkins, and I am your co-host, and I am binging A Different World and quite agitated that Jasmine Guy does not get her flowers for having the best comedic timing. 

Brittany Rogers

I'm your co-host Brittany Rogers, and currently Telfar’s bag security program is trying to drive me to the poorhouse. And together, we are the hosts of VS, the podcast where poets confront the ideas that move them.

Ajanaé Dawkins

Hey, co-host! 

Brittany Rogers

Hey, co-host (laughing). So I'm not gone lie, right before we logged on this call, I definitely was just replaying and replaying and replaying the blessing that Megan Thee Stallion gave us. Damn near minute long video of her twerking. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

It's been a rough time in this country for our nation. And what Megan Thee Stallion did, it said we need unity.

Brittany Rogers

Listen, we need a reset (laughing)

Ajanaé Dawkins

We need something we can all agree on. 

[BOTH LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

So I just want to know that that brought me some joy today. So I'm having to kind of shift mindsets a little bit. If we're talking about pleasure and things that bring us joy, what’s something that brings you pleasure, best?

Ajanaé Dawkins

Wine, because the first time I had wine, I was like, this is horrible. And then I lived in Spain. And I like went to wine tastings and I was taught like about it, and how to understand all the different notes and the different colors, and like the floral capacities and like how the and I was like, this is beautiful! I was like, this is a work of art! 

Brittany Rogers

I still don't know all of that (laughing).

Ajanaé Dawkins

I was like, the the variations of the notes. I was like this is a poem. That's how I feel about wine.

Brittany Rogers

Got it. Got it. So in thinking about things that I had to learn to enjoy, I think I honestly had to maybe not learn to enjoy, but learn to like openly embrace is comfort and extravagance. You know, if we're just thinking about upbringing, right, I did not come from my upbringing where we had it like that. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Yeah. And so I think there's very much distance that like you kind of preserve everything that you do have, you know, you don't go over. You don't splurge and I like a good splurge. I'm not gonna lie. I like to feel comfortable. I like soft things. I like beautiful things.

Ajanaé Dawkins

You do love a good splurge.

Brittany Rogers

I like to feel beautiful. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

You do be looking beautiful.

Brittany Rogers

Thank you, best!

Ajanaé Dawkins

I just want to put that in the atmosphere. Listeners, you can (inaudible) Brittany, but I just want to confirmthat she is in fact fine as can be. 

Brittany Rogers

Oh my god. 

[BOTH LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Just want to confirm that.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

I'm so excited to talk to our guest today, Kemi Alabi, author of Against Heaven, which is one of the most pleasurable like downright sexiest, active, living, sensuous books I have read in a long time. And so I'm so excited to talk to them and to hear their process behind like how they tapped into their bodies.

Ajanaé Dawkins

It's palpable, it's tactile, it is like, it almost feels like a beat like being in a studio and like somebody being like, let me show you this beat that I've layered!

[BACKGROUND MUSIC PLAYING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Kemi Alabiis the author ofAgainst Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Their poems and essays appear in theAtlantic, Poetry, Boston Review, Catapult, Guernica, Them, the BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere. Kemi believes in the world-shifting power of words and the radical imaginations of Black queer and trans people. As cultural strategy director of Forward Together, they built political power with cultural workers of color through programs like Echoing Ida, and annual art campaigns like Trans Day of Resilience. Kemi now lives in Chicago, IL.

Brittany Rogers

So we're so excited to have you here with us today, Kemi. If you could open us up with a poem, we would love that. 

Kemi Alabi

Gladly. I'd love to start with one that's dear to me near to my heart. This is “A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes”

Beloved, last night I doused us in good bourbon,
struck a match between our teeth, slid the lit head
lip to chest, throat zippered open and spilling.
Our union demands a sacrifice. Take my masks—
my wretched, immaculate children. Sharp smiles
bored with cavities. Braids thick with hair 

slashed off lovers as they slept. The masks grew limbs 

and danced, so last night, to the fire—plank pushed, 

cackling as they bubbled and split. Then dreamless dark. 

Then mercy, somehow, morning reached for me.
Sun found us swaddled in sweat-through sheets—
gauze and salve while night wore off. O body,
always healing despite me. O body, twin spy
tasked against my plot to rush the dying,
guardian of the next world’s sweets, yes,
I’ll lick this salt. Yes, I’ll wait our turn
because today we hold hands, mother
each other, bathe in warm coconut oil.
Our union, our long baptism. O body,
all I forced you to know of thirst. Yes 

body, you are owed a whole lake. Yes 

body, I’ll kiss our wrists, hold them 

to our ears and spend our days

losing to the waves.

Brittany Rogers

That's like the sauciest poem I done ever heard.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

I’m like holding my breath your whole reading. That was gorgeous. 

Kemi Alabi

Oh, thank you. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

The way your images come out is absolutely bananas. You know how like when you read Toni Morrison’s work, and it's like, dang, like the water on the stove and just boil like I had to do all this other stuff like, like the children's like smile with their board cavities, like the cavities gotta be like, you know what I mean. Like who thinks of that? Whose brain works like that?

Kemi Alabi

Here calling in Mother Morrison, and I'm so geeked to be here and thankful for your attention to my work. This is so amazing. 

Brittany Rogers

It is a work that demands attention. I’m like it's so lush. All these actions and these verbs, everything is living, it's doing, it’s doing the things. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

So we were super excited. So why don't we start with Kemi, what is moving you these days?

Kemi Alabi

Grief is moving me. Like it's literally running me, I feel so governed by grief. And not just personally or with my community, but collectively just seems like you can't walk down the street without encountering, stumbling on this grief. So I'm thinking about Rebellious Mourning. That's actually the name of an anthology, where a lot of poets thinkers and movement builders are considering what it means to mobilize around our grief, understanding that so many social movements are catalyzed by collective grief at the injustices that we're experiencing. Grief can be a really powerful force to harness for transformation, if we're allowed the space to be together with it, to honor it, and to actually move through it together, to let it move us, and to not run from it. 

Brittany Rogers

That is such an honest answer. And such a calling and at the same time, because grief is is an emotion I feel very often, but one I have a hard time sitting with because like you said it can really just immobilize you. So I feel grief. And I'm like, “whoo gotta keep it going.” So I think it’s so, like the fact that you name that as the potential for movement and transformation is really powerful to me. 

Kemi Alabi

Yeah, that's a different way to be moved by grief to be like running from it and not have it…

Brittany Rogers

Because I be like “whoo, gotta go!”

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

Understood, right, especially when there's no space given to really honor it, or the thought, you know, like, even there is I was reading about how there's a timeframe that some psychiatrists are giving to people's grief. And beyond that timeframe, it becomes something that's pathologized, as though you can give grief a timeline. And if it lasts too long, then something's wrong with you, instead of it just being something that ends up living with you, especially if your conditions aren't changing. Yeah, I think there's something radical in being able to honor grief for however it lives and shows up. But so I've been trying to just think and hold the power of grief and not see it as an impediment, not see the performance of wellness as what's needed for us to carry on. But actually, you know, even from a political standpoint, I see protests and marches as a type of container for collective grief when I'm thinking about the road decision that was overturned, and what it meant for people to have a place to go to scream, which is what a march, a protest can be. And I felt this way, in all the protests that I've ever attended all the marches, especially when I'm thinking about shared grief around Black death, Black tragedy. 

Brittany Rogers

Something I feel like what you were saying kind of resonates with or settles on is the importance of not only community care, but also the importance of being able to abolish, you know, some of those norms, right of performance, the norms of individualism. And I'm wondering how abolition and community care show up for you either on the page, in your actual writing or in your writing practice?

Kemi Alabi

I appreciate the way that you framed this question. Because yeah, abolition is community care to me when I think about organized abandonment of our communities and how if we're thinking specifically about abolishing police and carceral systems, how, in lieu of giving communities the resources that we need, there's organized abandonment, and then the organized violence that comes comes in, you know, quote, unquote, solve whatever problems arise. Community cares, the antidotes. The Community Care is the cure, Community Care is then requires these systems for organized violence to collapse, and in it's place versus, and interdependence with our communities. So and when I think about like, on the page, essentially, when I think about my collection Against Heaven, there's some many ways that I hope the personal and political are toggling to me the collection is really holding a lot of this grief that I'm already naming. And it's a journey of that grief, moving from an individualized place to understanding how it is existing collectively, and what care and connection can look like to heal those estrangements and get us to a place of imagining how not just we transform our relationships with ourselves, but with one another, and then as the collective. And so I can't even disentangle the two, because you know, Ruth Wilson Gilmore says abolition is not absence. So what does that present? It's interjecting care where the wants was only violence and abandonment. 

Brittany Rogers

I was envisioning the collection all over again, and thinking about the care and the tenderness and just the intention that's put into it and so hearing your answer and picturing the poems was doing something for me.

Kemi Alabi

I'm still getting used to the fact that people are reading and experiencing this collective. So there is a moment when people are like, oh yeah I'm thinking about the collection. And I’m like oh yes because it’s out. 

[ALL LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

That moment actually brings me to a question because it is out and like, I'm wondering, what has been surprising about how the work has like arrived and been received by the world? 

Kemi Alabi

Oh, wow, everything is the surprise. My you know, my friends, mentor, a writer named Cynthia Greenlee, who I co-edited The Echoing Ida Collection with, she has a saying where she goes, like what people think about me is none of my business. And I had to let go of this collection when I was done with it when I turned in my final draft. And I turned it in with no expectations, because my business was writing these poems, living with them, loving them, getting them on the page, getting this collection out. And then I thought, okay, what happens next is kind of none of my business (laughing) like, I have my aspirations, right? Like, my hope is that in freeing me, some of these poems helped free somebody else. My hope is that people are like, experiencing the pleasure of this collection, not just the pain that might be in some of these pages. I feel like it’s so generous when someone reaches out and tells you how they experienced your work. That's to me, that's such an a huge act of generosity from the reader, nobody has to do that. But that's happened where folks have, especially Black, queer people, Black, non-binary people talking about how this is, you know, in their survival pack now how like, someone sent me a three page letter about all of the moments in the collection that resonated with them. And I was reading it thinking this is wel,l one, complete surprise, two, I couldn't even dream of this type of generosity from a reader this type of impact. I'm just so grateful that this collection of poems is getting where I've always wanted it to go into the hands of someone who's needed to read these poems as much as I needed to write them. And but it's all kind of the cherry on top. My biggest success was like, oh, these poems I wrote them, they're out. Okay. And now and again, the rest is none of my business. And I just have to stay with the practice and hope you know, the next poems continue to visit me. And I continue to learn and deepen and find my people. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

It's also really beautiful. That's just such a beautiful way to live life, to do the work and then to release it and to release the expectation of what the work has to give back, or how the work then must function to like release that control. And then to just like be able to sit in the beauty of like a genuine surprise at what it does. So to not tell the work that it has to do a thing. That's like, that's such a beautiful way to navigate. Wow, imagine not having control issues.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

I mean listen. I’m not sayong it’s the easiest thing to do (laughing). I had to have a whole ritual, right,

because I was so attached to making this work, like I love poems, and I loved the opportunity to create the long poem of this book. It was just the thrill of my life. And I experienced so much grief to go back to that work and letting it go. I was like, oh, and now it's like, now it lives apart from me. My friend who’s a filmmaker, Jasmine Leeward, suggested this fire. And I burned my pages and I whisper in my intentions for this manuscript. It was tough because of how much I loved the project of the poems not that it was a project collection, but it was the writing them was the thrill.

Brittany Rogers

That's beautiful, and so wise in so many ways. Andagain, it's making me reconceptualize so many possibilities. So some of the things that I pulled out of the text, and I mean, hopefully they were (laughing) fingers crossed, that they were somewhat intended. ButI think a lot about the relationship between the secular and the body or the secular and the erotic, it's something that I loved that Against Heaven was doing was juxtaposing erotic with like the religious. And I'm wondering if there are ways that your work embodies or like, intentionally mimics spaces of erotica or kink, along with devotion, like in what ways are those things tied for you or not tied for you? 

Kemi Alabi

It was a process, discovering this connection. It was just through the practice of writing that I realized these kinds of twin and connected obsessions. I found a journal from 10 years ago, where I was naming some writing intentions. And I wrote down “you have to stop writing about God and sex.” (laughing) (inaudible) we have to move on. Let's write about something else. But I clearly haven’t, right. I've spent a lot of these years writing poems where the erotic and the spiritual are intersecting, right. And to me, when I think about my first my religious upbringing, it was, you know, the erotic was nowhere to be found. But I definitely grew up in a household where decks, the erotic like those were like shhh, and it was actually the only conversations about sex where like, if you have it before marriage, you're gonna go to hell, like boys are gonna want to have sex, like, tell you, they love you, but they just wanna have sex with you, you know, it was just, it was this thing that you had to like duck and dodge, because folks were coming for you to like, bring you down to the underworld. If you wanted to maintain that relationship with God that relationship with goodness, then you would have to again, duck and dodge until of course, your marriage and then you become your husband's like sex slave.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

It was just such a disembodied orientation to sex that I grew up with. Later in my life, especially when I encountered really liberated queer kink spaces. There was something about the erotic that helped me arrive back into the body that I didn't even realize I was estranged from. And when I think about, collectively, what the systems, all of these systems, these hierarchical systems, these systems of oppression, do to us, it's, they’re systems of estrangement; estranging us from the earth, estranging us from the rest of the natural world, from one another and from ourselves. I used to call myself a brain in a jar and with pride, my body was completely incidental. And it was through the erotic that I arrived that back into my body, and could access my intuition again, could access what I feel to be the different spiritual technologies and knowledges that the body holds. And to me that is, there's so much divinity in being able to access the body's knowledge, access that intuition, because I think it allows you to be able to access a different type of relationship with the divine, a different type of relationship with one another, a different type of relationship with the earth, and a relationship that has the magnitude of what I was desiring from these more religious Christian orientations, to the Divine, to God. So I think that when I, especially in the collection, as I'm writing toward God, and the erotic, it is mirroring this journey that I had to liberate myself personally and to reconstruct what my political orientation was. And my orientation to the collective was because when I was in that disembodied state, I was also deeply depressed. I was deeply lonely I was I had needs that I didn't even understand needed to be met. And I also was subjected to a lot of power over relationships, handing over a lot of my power to external forces. And I think there's something. I began with an epigraph from Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power because I feel like that essay so succinctly says what I've been rambling about the idea that once you are able to access your true desires, and outside of a sexual sense, but once you're able to inhabit your body in a way that helps you identify what it is that actually makes you come alive, anything that interrupts that relationship becomes untenable. And so, in the collection when I'm tussling with that, white patriarch (inaudible), God and positioning the erotic as its opposition, it's in an attempt to have folks locate power elsewhere, recognize who's interrupting that power, and maybe how deep that obedience goes. 

Brittany Rogers

I'm like, I'm sitting with that and also so much appreciate you giving language to everything that you're thinking, I'm like, there was so much I connected with there especially as a person who also grew up in very traditionally religious spaces and as a person who still considers themselves very Christian but also very connected with the erotic, and very connected with my body, and what I feel like brings me pleasure or brings me joy. I just, again really, really feel seen (laughing). 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Shout out to religious (inaudible).

[ALL LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

And also shout out to relearning because I do think there's a way in which if your body is disconnected from pleasure, you also are disconnected from a range of emotions. And as writers, especially that's so harmful, right? As people it's harmful and as writers like how do you connect to your emotional body if you can't connect to the body that brings you joy? 

Kemi Alabi

Absolutely. You can't connect to the truth. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Yes, I'm about to be thinking about this, like for three days from now I'm gonna be like, and then they said that.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

I'm curious now as you're relaying all of these things about the divine, about the body, about God. Against Heaven, right? Which I'm, I really appreciate it. I came to your talk that you had yesterday, it was Danez, your reading and and was it Seminary Co-Op? 

Kemi Alabi

Mhmm.

Ajanaé Dawkins

And I’m hearing you kind of expand on the title. And I was really invested also in you talking about your use of kennings. And so I'm curious how the sound and the aesthetic of the Black church has informed your work. And you talked about last night, this title being both against as in like in rebellion, of like an opposition to but also like, against as in beside like, but its own entity. And I was wondering if like when you're bucking up against the concept of heaven and religion, are you also bucking up against the sound and aesthetic of what we consider, like our religious sound and aesthetic that we have access to like, was that part of your craft decision?

Kemi Alabi 

You know, clarify for listeners Against Heaven, there are five title poems. So I approached Against Heaven from different places, but I began really in opposition. So first Against Heaven was an oppositional poem that I wrote. And I wrote it during the 2020 uprisings. And it was when I was deepening my studies of Appalachia and deepening my work and community around defunding of police. And I'm also a Narrative Strategist, a cultural strategist for movements. And so when I'm thinking about how narratives need to transform, I'm also thinking about what are the narrative lenses people have and they're so, there's such a commitment to law and order. There's such a commitment to guilt and innocence that makes projects like Appalachia sticky because it's, it's so deep and again, it goes all the way down to this you know, religious architecture, whether or not you practice Christianity in this country. It's still a part of the foundational meaning making architecture of our country and so, Tourmaline, phenomenal filmmakertweeted out “when we say abolish police, we also mean the cop in your head and in your heart.” This is also an epigraph in Against Heaven, and other abolitionist have expressed this sentiment, this idea of abolishing the cop in our heads. And there's so many ways that a particular type of God is positioned as a cop in our head.So the first Against Heaven came from, from there really sitting with this idea of our commitment to guilt, innocence, our commitment to punishment, our commitments to a type of disposal.And thinking about that all the way down to the foundational architecture of our deepest beliefs in the Divine. And then after I wrote, that poem wason its own for a while as the only Against Heaven. But I didn't want to stay in an oppositional place. Because there is, well one, it was so rich, that title Against Heaven to me. I was like, oh, this can mean so many different things. And I also wanted to pose instead of, I don't like to stay in a place of purely rejection, even though I think that's a powerful place to be. But there was more that I wanted to unearth about what could be embraced instead. And that's where these ideas of the erotic of the earth and the ways that we need to, and can reclaim our relationship heal our estrangements. So that's where that started to come in with additional against heavens that I wrote. There's one that starts the book, and kind of poses, uses, it's a double golden shovel using lyrics from Saba and Nick Hakeem who in their songs claim, you know, there's heaven all around me what happens right here. And so as I was playing with the idea of Against Heaven, in a few different ways, I wanted to be able to assert that we have access more access to a divinity, that actually could lead us to a type of collective transformation. We don't have to make our world in the image of this power over deity, we can make it in the image of these healed estrangements, the power of reconnecting to one another and the earth through the erotic. And so I'm trying to bring in your, you were talking about the kennings of last night? I'm, I'm missing the rest of your question right now (laughing). 

Ajanaé Dawkins

And part of it is part of it is absolutely my fault. I was so excited. So it's partially the way I phrased it. So last night, you articulated that your use of kennings was partially because of the way the American like English fails us. And you know, what does it mean to construct your own language? So I was thinking of that idea that you posited. And then also, this idea, there are all of these things in faith that have failed us, all of these things in the Black church that have failed us. And I think the Black church is really evident in your work. And I was wondering if in your use of kennings, in your use of the craft decisions, you make you feel like, you're not just bucking up against the religious concept of heaven, or religious concepts in general, but also like these cultural aesthetics in the Black church. Are you using language for both of those? 

Kemi Alabi

Got you. Yes, yes, yes. So I think that is when I think about the kennings and the, some of these language choices I, it's not specifically about the Black church at all. I have an oppositional relationship to the English language, I think English is one of the most dangerous weapons that humans…well, we didn't create it.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

you know, and so, though, kennings have old usages, you know, from Beowulf, earlier, but I love the music, of language. English is the only language I know how to speak. So I just am finding my music in

1. And when I think about the Black church, I think about my uncle who is a Bishop. I grew up going to his church, a tremendous order, right. There's like something about the way that the Black church has harnessed thepower of the Sonic, both insermons and with the choir to create this incredible spiritual technology. There's something aboutthe Black music that comes out of ourspiritual traditions and you know, Christianity just being one, like form that that takes, I feel like there is a spiritual thrust thatexists throughout a lot of different practices that Black folks have that are not necessarily specific tothat organized religion or that or the, like violences of certain religious traditions, but that are specific to how Black folks have survived. I think that we've baked in so many spiritual technologies, and then that includes the sounds that appears in our religious spaces that ignite that type offervor and release. And I even think about how, you know, Beyonce just released “Break My Soul” some house sounds. And we know that house music comes out of Black, queer Chicago, and we know that house music is also like a sibling of gospel like or offspring of gospel, right. There's so much in Black music that is harnessing this energy from the gospel, from our Black church spaces because of its power to facilitate release. And we were talking earlier before we started recording about Ashon Crawley's Blackpentecostal Breath, there are so many amazing Black thinkers who are breaking down the the sonic power, the the movement power of, of these spiritual traditions that we've been practicing. There's something incredibly liberating and profound about the music that has come out of the Black church and, and the derivatives of that music. And I feel really informed by it. That's where I first understood the power of the Sonic, the power of these oral traditions. And poetry, of course, is an oral tradition. And I always experience it. Like even with this book, I always experience poetry primarily in the air and in the ear. Understanding that just like my uncles at church, you know, whether it's the one on the keys, or look behind the pulpit, like they are both harnessing this sonic power on top of the the word that they're spreading, but you know, like, if, let’s be honest, if whoever's on the keys that Sunday stopped playing or the choir wasn't there would anybody catch the spirit all the way?

[ALL LAUGHING] 

Kemi Alabi

You know, the, the content of the sermon is only part of it right like or a visiting pastor comes who does not have the delivery…

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

Of you know the beloved pastor and you’re just nodding like uh-huh, uh-huh. But it's, you know, like, it's, there's something else that's accessed in order to reach the people in order to facilitate that release and surrender. And so I do like to play with language. So that I'm finding the space between music and meaning to like borrow and paraphrase from something I heard, Fred Morton say, and the music that I'm always trying topull from, or the sonic power I'm, I've learned the most from is gospel music, because I've seen the way that it has facilitated so much power and release despite, like lyrical content that I don't agree with, I still listen togospel music all the time, not because I believe in its content, but because there's something about the sonic power of it, that helps meget free. And so I like to play with language to the point where I'm definitely finding the music of it. And which is where things like kennings come in. I just want to be able to break and stretch English enough for it to serve my musical purposes informed by the way that music has saved me, continues to save me. Did that get, did I answer your question? 

Ajanaé Dawkins

You did, yes. You did answer my question and it was incredibly beautiful. I was hoping you were gonna bring up Ashon T. Crawley's aesthetics of penecostal breath [sic]. I know we just talked about that.And it just, yeah, I think it… here's the thing, you always answered my question and then 20 more pop up in it's place and I'm like, we could go in all of these directions (laughing). 

Kemi Alabi

Yeah, I tried to speak in (inaudible) but I come fromlong winded people. I come from pastors.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Listen! 

Brittany Rogers

Like five more minutes (laughing). 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Ay, me and Brittany already at home (laughing).

Kemi Alabi

Y’all better eat before y’all came. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

And did. And did. Me and Brittany are right at home. 

Brittany Rogers

So in the vein of of this bringing up additional questions, right, so now I'm thinking about not just the music in Against Heaven, but thinking about form and the ways that you play with form and flip form. Like when I opened that book to that devil golden shovel, I said, oh okay, this is how, this how they playin’ with me. This is how we’re starting off (laughing). And I'm wondering about like, what, what helps you discern between when it's time to use a traditional form, or when it's time to like break or separate that form?

Kemi Alabi

I,the agency, and the word decision is one that I can't claim. I don't know if it's from uh, it's from a place of play. I'm always playing my practice is always this experimentation, this exploration. And I found so muchexcitement, pleasure, surprise in playing with certain forms. When, you know, it's called a double, double golden shovel. In the book, sometimes they call them across sticks because they want to honor that the golden shovel was a form that Terrance Hayes created to honor Gwendolyn Brooks using Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry, these golden shovels do not. I still call them that because I am connected to the form through that, that lineage and resonates so deeply with Gwendolyn Brooks’s his work, but

when I started to think about Against Heaven as a concept that I wanted to play with in a few title poems, there was a way I wanted to have more inter textual conversations, crossed medium conversations, heaven lives in our popular imagination a lot of different ways. And I wanted to be able to engage with them throughthese double golden shovels and understand what I thought. I don't go to the page understanding all the time, where the poem is going to take me or what it is I want to communicate and explain. A the poem is a little walk for me, the practice of playing helps me understand what it is that I think, and I already had this, I already posed against heaven, and I wanted to flesh out okay, well, what do I mean by that? What could I mean by that? What are other routes to that? So using texts from other places, having a form that I could play within, that gave me a bit of structure to be able to bounce some newthoughts around was was really helpful. Understanding that, you know, I was already pretty committed to being against heaven. Okay, so now what does that mean? And that's where there are fewdouble golden shovels in Against Heaven, that are the title poems, and then one Against Heaven is a blackout of a new story. And so it was me encountering these other texts, songs, speeches, and giving myself a container to think within.

Brittany Rogers

Your brain. 

Kemi Alabi

(Laughing) It is a mess. Poetry is like a discipline that helps me like organize some of these thoughts, so I'm just (laughing)I can be a little bit of everywhere. So, so grateful to poetry for pinning me down. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

I was going to say this is this is the mess?!

Kemi Alabi

(Laughing)

Ajanaé Dawkins

One last question. If you had to name three people, alive, dead, this genre or another, who you feel like in order to understand your work, we should engage with their work, who would those people be? 

Kemi Alabi

I love this. First and foremost, I have to name Patricia Smith.She's the reason I am a poet. I remember seeing her when I was 18 after experiencing some of her work in high school, but seeing her read for the first time, and having all of my molecules rearranged, understanding the power again of the sonic and understanding what poetry can do. Patricia Smith is a bit just masterful and the sonic plays such a huge role in her work, and she plays on the page in ways that make me want to play and experiment more. You know, she has a double golden shovel in incendiary art that I studied as I was creating my own. So absolutely Patricia Smith and then I have to say Audre Lorde. I mean, her ideas are so fundamental to my mind's construction, especially this collection. I'm thinking about the essay that uses the erotic “Poetry is Not a Luxury” all of her essays they live within me, they reanimated me, they returned me to my body at a critical time. And the way that she uses the personal as a route to the political, the way that she's holding a sense of like care and survival in harnessing the power of the word for it. I mean, just foundational. And yeah, you need to read her to maybe understand the place you know, there are things I don't even explain in my texts, because I'm like, y'all read Audre Lorde, right? Like, I don't even have to argue for this. You get it right.

Brittany Rogers

The vibes are vibin’ (laughing).

Kemi Alabi

Right! So definitely her, and Danez Smith, because Danez is just like, I mean, I absolutely adore Danez Smith's work. And, you know, we're all students of Patricia Smith, of course, in different ways. But there's something about the way that Danez plays on the page, like Danez’s lines, like are all poems, right? Like, they and I, I'm just completely in love with their approach to language and how they've shaped their collections. So while there are amazing ins and poets and other writers I could name I think those are the three for for this question. 

Brittany Rogers

That's such a perfect and well rounded answer though. Like I know in theory, there's no wrong answer, but that was the right answer (laughing). 

[ALL LAUGHING]

Kemi Alabi

I needed that affirmation, so thank you (laughing). 

Brittany Rogers

That was the right answer (laughing).

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Welcome back, we are going to play a little game of fast punch. A. So would you like to be an optimist or a pessimist today? 

Kemi Alabi

I really need to practice some optimism. Let me be an optimist. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

I love that for you. All right, let's move through it. Best Gospel song. 

Kemi Alabi

“Bomb in Gilead”

Ajanaé Dawkins

Come on now! Come on now!

[ALL LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be neutral. Go head Brittany. 

Brittany Rogers

Okay, best writing snack. 

Kemi Alabi

Ooh, I love some dry Honey Nut Cheerios.

Brittany Rogers

A classic. So best sexy song?

Kemi Alabi

Are y’all familiar with Sunday service? 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Yes.

Kemi Alabi

They have a track on their album that is a gospel version of “So Anxious”, “Souls Anchored” and I plan in love sometime next year to debut a burlesque routine to that song.

Brittany Rogers

Okaaayyy.

Kemi Alabi

I think there's something of course so submissive about gospel music. There is the pure devotion of that song while also being attached to this Genuine like boom boom, boom boom. Yeah, and so yeah, I want to do this like self bondage routine on stage to that song (laughing).

Brittany Rogers

Listen. Not you talkin’ ‘bout submission and self bondage. Don’t have me sweatin’ on the podcast (laughing).

Kemi Alabi

Listen, I merging erotic with the divine. I think that's just what I'm gonna be up to for the next little while (laughing).

Brittany Rogers

We love to see it. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Listen, love to see it. Also, love that perspective. Because I love that album. It's so good. Best form?

Kemi Alabi

Oh, a best form. You know, I use so many golden shovels and I use them in a remix style. So shout out to the classic golden shovel honoring Gwendolyn Brooks's work and the amazing anthology with all the golden shovel poems that that do just that. I love the intellectual conversation that gets to happen there. But since I have not written a traditional golden shovel, I think I'll say pantoum because I love the repetition and the turns that keep happening. I feel like that's how my brain works (laughs). And there's so much that gets to be recontextualized in the repetition that I think it just a really honors the way that my mind is observing and processing information even though I don't write a lot of pantoums. I love reading them because I love that habit of constantly turning over what you thought you knew and having it in a new context. I think we all need more practice with that, since that's so much of how the world flows anyway, so I'm gonna give you two answers. I cheated. 

Brittany Rogers

That's what you give. You givin’craft talk.

Ajanaé Dawkins

Listen.

Brittany Rogers

Okay, Best Genre?

Kemi Alabi

Oh, like of anything? 

Brittany Rogers

Mhmm.

Kemi Alabi

Oh, I mean, I am gonna say, because it's in my bones right now, house music.I've had to listen to so much house music because that's the season we're in, it’s pride. I'm here in Chicago, all of our like big R&B pop stars are bringing it out. Again, we all have a lot to release a lot of grief to move through. And just like the folks who originated that sounds going through their own epidemic, queer community, losing people, living in a state of grief that was not collectively acknowledged, folks, let it out on the floor. And I think that's what we're going to have to do, safely I hope.

Brittany Rogers

Those were great. I love this game. 

Kemi Alabi

I got to play fast punch! This is so cool!

Brittany Rogers

And killed it and gave us a craft talk again!

Ajanaé Dawkins

Period! It’s the generosity.

[ALL LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

We would love it if you would do us the honor of closing us out on one last poem?

Kemi Alabi

Absolutely. I'm going to leave y’all with the last “Against Heaven” in the book, which is the first “Against Heaven” I completed. It really holds the spirit of that Tourmaline epigraph, when we say abolish police, we also mean the cop in your head and in your heart. “Against Heaven” 

[FAINT SOUNDS OF BIRDS CHIRPING IN BACKGROUND]

I used to pray to a man-faced god. Kept his whip beneath my bed. 

Set alarms for daybreak lashings. Pressed white cotton to the flay. 

Made flags of the bloodsoak.

Raised them from my window. Called this worship. 

Dreamt heaven a jury small as a county where nobody looked like me.

Winged bailiffs plucked my cuffs to trap my cousin in a hot coal cage.

Called this roulette freedom, 

licking my raw wrists. 

Which kill blew my tatters down. Peeled me to the blackest jade. 

Remothered me to the squad car blaze. Loot and shard my siblings now.

Which kill. Forgive me. 

I feared the devil’s prison.

Misfaithed the sheriff

in the sky. Why. 

Which kill. Forgive me

family, I miscountried— 

our swarming, anthem

of my only homeland.

Heaven and hell 

are the same empire 

half-slipped, gasping, 

clutching our hems. 

Ungoverned by the lie, 

with fists and flames, 

we cleave. 

[Ajanaé & Brittany snapping]

Brittany Rogers

I love that collective breath. We all had to be like whoo.

Ajanaé Dawkins

Just to process it at all. 

Brittany Rogers

And I think your poems are like just as generous this conversation with you is.

Ajanaé Dawkins

Yes, yes.

Brittany Rogers

So I found myself like rereading everything like oh my god, all the images, the verbs [background music cues], like the movement, the thought like, almost like you don't know where to focus on. Right? Can we hear a (inaudible) experience? I'm thrilled. Just want to say. I’m thrilled!

Kemi Alabi

I'm so grateful to be in conversation with you. This has been such a treat. 

Brittany Rogers

It's been our pleasure. It's been absolutely our pleasure.

Ajanaé Dawkins

It has. 

[Background music grows louder]

Brittany Rogers

Listening to Kemi talk is first off just a masterclass in so many things, in poetics of the body, in sensuality, in religion and devotion. And what it means to study something so deeply that it almost feels like a worship. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

One of the things that's really beautiful to me is thinking about devotion, and a myriad of spaces beyond just the traditional religious context. So in a book, like Against Heaven that's bucking against traditional religious experience to still be so heavy with devotion and commitment.

Brittany Rogers

For sure for sure. Like when I'm thinking about devotion, there are so many spaces that I'm devoted to that have nothing to do with anybody's institution. I'm devoted to the girls at the beauty shop on Saturday mornings. I'm devoted to everybody on my block whether I know them or not. I'm devoted to everybody from 48205.I don't know I'm deeply devoted to, to Black woman, to fems, to Black folks, to babies, anyone that I feel called to love or to treat with tenderness, I then also view a part of my life as in devotion to maintaining that tenderness and maintaining that connection. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

I think spiritual devotion is incredibly present for me, definitely, in some, in a lot of Orthodox ways. And then I think that devotion spills over into a devotion towards others. Or sometimes it's interchangeable in a way where I can't see the lines blurred like there are some ways in which my devotion to you, my devotion to Mimi, my devotion to these folks in my life is like inextricably, like I can't separate it from my devotion to God. But then I also have a devotion to narratives. I have a devotion towards ​​Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, so much so that I revisit it and I watch it in moments of like, examining my faith or like I returned to it in the way that I returned to “The Lord's Prayer” or in the way I returned to books of the Bible, there are certain things that I reread and re listen to over and over again, that are a part of sacred practice for me even though I'm for the most part Orthodox and it is not a Canon thing. It is still a sacred thing for me. 

Brittany Rogers

Imma have to meditate on all of this y’all.

[BOTH LAUGHING] 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Honestly, yeah, today was too deep for me (laughing).Let's chill.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

Brittany Rogers

Make myself a nice warm cup of tea maybe and just ponder. Ponder under a soft blanket. So let's let's thank some folks and get out of here so we could do that, best. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Who do you want to thank today?

Brittany Rogers

I want to thank my local libraries in Detroit. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Aww.

Brittany Rogers

Because I, if I'm thinking about devotion, I was so dedicated to reading that I would like walk to whatever library was closest to me no matter where I was living in the city, so much so that all of my librarians knew by name, I knew what days new books are coming out. I knew which library to go to for what genre like who had like the latest drops. It was a big it was it was almost like a thing that I did as like a religion or ritual. So there were days that I would pick to go to the libraries and again, shout out public libraries. They're an absolute necessity. So yeah. 

Ajanaé Dawkins

Love that. I want to thank church mothers who cuss and talk crazy.

Brittany Rogers

Shoutout my granny. 

[BOTH LAUGHING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

For I think always showinga multi-layered, a sense of duality, if you will, in the like sacred and the profane and the secular. I love a good church mother who can go from speaking in tongues to cussin’.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ajanaé Dawkins

Do you want to give our thank yous for everyone else, best?

Brittany Rogers

So we want to give a warm warm thank you to our guest Kemi Alabi who gave us so much to think on. We want to thank Poetry Foundation. We want to thank Itzel Blancas, Ydalmi Noriega and Elon Sloan. We want to thank our wonderful producers Cin Pim and Ombie productions. We also would love it if you subscribe to The VS podcast. Wherever you listen to your podcast y’all we're on all of them. Like, rate and subscribe. Bye!