Amena Brown:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to this week's episode of HER with Amena Brown, and this week's episode is a celebration. This is the 100th episode of HER with Amena Brown. Cue applause, cue applause, cue confetti, cue balloons, cue celebratory things, pyrotechnics. If you're into that, cue pyrotechnics right here. Let me be honest with y'all for a second, I don't know why I said that as if all of these podcasts have not been me telling y'all my business. But let me bring y'all closer, closer into the living room and tell you, one of the hardest things about having this podcast for me as a stage person is that I am here in a room myself and my husband, who is also my producer, he's waving at y'all and we have recorded a lot of episodes like this. And every now and then there'll be another one or two people on a Zoom or something, maybe a few times I think we've had people do in person interviews, but for the most part it has been me and Matt in here just recording these.
And I miss the fact that I can't see you, but I want to say thank you to each of you, those of you that are HER with Amena Brown OGs that were listening to what my assistant Leigh and I referred to as HER 1.0, which was HER before it relaunched as a weekly. And those of you who just joined us in the living room since HER with Amena Brown has joined iHeart and the Seneca Women Podcast Network, just know that I really appreciate you all, every DM from you, those of you that are my friend's friends that text me when you've listened to these episodes, any tweets I receive, all of that is just so wonderful for me because I started the relaunch of this podcast in the middle of the pandemic, really.
So we were all at home and we were all sort of sequestered away from each other and even though there are safer ways to gather, it still didn't work out for this 100th episode to have a very safe way to have pulled off the type of live episode I want to do for y'all. But just know the true way that I want to celebrate that HER with Amena Brown made it to a hundred episodes, is by having a live recording where I get to meet some of you, see some of you for the first time, reconnect with some of you that I may have met at events or in other aspects of life, and have a guest have conversation where we all get to be in the room together. So just know that is on my radar and that is a plan. However, today's episode is a behind the poetry episode that also is befitting as a way to celebrate this podcast making it to a hundred episodes.
So those of you who are new to the podcast or are new to the Behind the Poetry episode form, whenever I do an episode that is behind the poetry here... And you know what I just thought about y'all? I thought about how all of these current Behind the Poetry episodes have been me taking you all behind the poetry that I've written, but you know what I've never done? I have never done an episode where I took y'all behind the poetry with a poem that has been really important to me or was life changing for me in some way. So I got all sorts of ideas when I'm in here talking to y'all. So I'm going to take that back to the team and see what we can work out there. But for today, we're doing what is the usual behind the poetry episode. And that starts out with me either letting y'all listen to a recording of the poem or me doing a reading of the poem, which today will be a reading. So you get to hear the poem. And then I take you through what made me write the poem. What is the real life story behind how the poem was written? What is the real life story behind performing the piece for the first time? And how do I feel about the poem now?
So I'm really excited to share this piece with you all because there's a lot about this poem that really exemplifies what I think of when I think about the living room that I am referring to all the time, the living room that we are in, that no matter where you are listening to this podcast, you are always in the living room with me and with the other people that are in the community of us listening here. So let's start off with a reading of this episode's poem, Our Own Potluck.
Black women, let's gather our love for each other and find a meeting place, the table, the kitchen, the porch, the worn couch in the living room, the flesh underneath our arms, the curls at the nap of our necks.
Let us bring our souls and hips to our own potluck.
I will bring my ability to find humor in just about everything, and you, you will bring your shyness, your softness, and you, you will bring your takes-no-nonsense attitude and you, you will bring your singing voice that pierces through the air, the first morning light of the sun, and you, you will bring greetings and say a prayer of blessing of lament, of love of grace.
We will spend time saying their names, the Black women and Black trans women who were taken from us.
We will hold their names close to our collarbones. We will let their names rest in the silence of our breath and we will fight for them.
We will then speak our own names to each other, to the flowers as they remind us we still bloom to our bellies as they remind us our bodies are worthy.
We will bump hips trying to set the table. We will gather ourselves to heal, to remember we will touch shoulders and find ourselves in each other's smiles.
Pass me a plate, pass the peace.
Okay, let's start with what made me write this poem and what is the real life story behind writing the poem? Okay so, I sort of have to tell you a story in a story in a story to get to what made me write this poem. And I think that story begins with Chef Edna Lewis. And I'm pretty sure that I've spoken about Chef Edna Lewis here on the podcast, but if I haven't, Chef Edna Lewis is one of the fore mothers of what we know as southern food as well as soul food. She was an amazing Black woman chef, and I encountered her work originally when I was recovering from a very intense fibroid surgery many years ago. I said many years ago, I guess it was a few years ago, but a few years ago. It feels like many years ago now though, right?
And during the time of my recovery, I had a very difficult surgery. And so during the time of my recovery, I chose some books that I felt would be healing books for me to read. I read Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes's book, Too Heavy a Yoke. I read Sisters Of The Yam by bell hooks, and I read The Taste of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. And The Taste of Country Cooking is a cookbook, but it's almost like a cookbook and a memoir together. And a friend of mine had come over, shout out to my friend Andy, she had come over to kind of help me get some things prepped at the house before I went into the hospital. And one of the things that I, for some reason cared very much about was having biscuits in the freezer.
It was very, very crucial to me to have fresh made biscuits, but put them in the freezer so that if I wanted a biscuit and I could not stand at the oven and do this whole thing myself, that I could then kind of do what you would normally do with what we would use when we would use Grands Biscuits back in the day, is that the brand? I think it's Grands where it's like the can and it pops open, right? So I really wanted that ease of when you would use Grands biscuits, you didn't have to think too hard about the fact that you wanted some biscuits. So my friend Andy came over and I had started making some biscuits before she got there, and she looked at my little pitiful biscuits and she was like, "Hey, let's use Edna Lewis's recipe." And so she came in and did Edna Lewis's recipe, and I talked to her for a few for what felt like a few minutes anyways, and she just ended up making all the biscuits.
And then we froze just the dough before you make the biscuit, so that way you could sort of take them out of the freezer. I'm just going to give y'all a little game right here, you do these biscuits, you put them on a cookie sheet, and then you put them in the freezer and then they're frozen kind of more individually, so you can put them all in a Ziploc bag or whatever container from there. And that was how we did it. And that was the first time I'd ever heard of Edna Lewis and I decided to get her book. And what's really wonderful to me about her book is that the memoir portions and the recipes are based on the season. So she's taking you through her experience as a little girl growing up in Freetown, Virginia, which was a town of freed Black folks post emancipation.
And she's talking about how these are Black folks in her community, her parents, her family, friends of her family, and these memories she had as a child of how they were eating seasonal foods and the ways that they took these fruits and vegetables from the land, how they canned certain things at certain times of the year to be ready at other times of the year and I got really involved in reading the book. And one of the things that was hardest for me when I was recovering from surgery is I had an eight to 10 week recovery time. So I had a long time before I was physically able to stand up in the kitchen and cook, I would have, so it was kind of great reading her book, but it was also really tempting because you're reading all these amazing recipes of course, I wanted to go and cook right away.
So once I got better and had healed up from surgery, I thought about the movie Julie and Julia, which some of you may be familiar with this film. And it's a blogger who decides to cook her way through all of Julia Child's recipes in a particular book. And it's based on a true story because this blog actually did happen that then was turned into a book that then was turned into this film. And I wanted to do something similar to what she had done with Julia and Julia, but basically make it Amena and Edna.
I didn't see myself being someone that could start a blog. I didn't see myself being that, but I thought maybe if I could sort of do a seasonal capsule in a way. And so before the pandemic, probably, I think in 2019, I approached my friend Lyric Lewin, who is a fantastic photojournalist, and asked her would she be willing to come in and collaborate with me and come to my house while I was making these recipes and could we get some really good photographs of the food and stuff. And so we did this a couple of seasons, and I remember one of the seasons, I feel like the summertime maybe of 2019, my grandmother and my mother, they came over and I told them like, hey, I'm cooking through these recipes. I would kind of look at the different section for that season and choose maybe four or five dishes to make and invited my mom and grandma to come over to kind of help me taste the food, which of course they were very happy to do.
And Lyric and I worked on this together hoping that our goal could be to pitch it to a publication to see if we could get the story behind what I was doing and the photograph that she had been taking published. And it ended up being a much longer journey to actually get this published than we thought. We sent out different pitches and things and talked with different folks, and some of those things would fall through, or sometimes people wouldn't respond back, and we would just keep on trying updating the photos and different things. And finally, in 2020, we're able to get a taker. And I want to give a big shout-out to Whetstone Magazine for being the publication that ended up taking the story. But once I had written kind of the essay portion, it still seemed like it needed something. And I kind of felt like maybe a poem was supposed to go there.
And I was kind of afraid to say that to Lyric because my poems don't come to me quickly. And we had already waited so long trying to get this thing published that I was almost afraid to be like, "Oh, Lyric, I think there's supposed to be a poem here and what if it takes another year for the poem to get done?" And interestingly, by the time I was finishing the article, it was around Juneteenth of 2020, and many of us remember what that time of June of 2020 was like, there were a lot of protests going on. I think Juneteenth, which had been very much a Texas thing, or for some folks, the Louisiana thing, it was very sort of localized and regional, the Black folks that celebrated Juneteenth. Juneteenth became not just in the sense of it becoming a national holiday, even though that is what happened, but I think also it just became a part of more of a national consciousness, especially for a lot of Black folks that may not have been exposed to Juneteenth as a holiday, right?
And I remember that Juneteenth coming up, and I remember it feeling really weird for me because I wanted to gather with other Black folks around that time, and it just wasn't yet really safe to do that. So I kind of thought to myself, what's the gathering I can imagine if there were a figurative gathering in a way of Black women, what does our cookout look like? What does our potluck look like? What would that be? And that was sort of the beginning germination of Our Own Potluck that came to my mind. I was writing, thinking about Juneteenth, I was writing, thinking about, of the ways I have gathered with other Black people, what has felt the most life giving to me? And I thought about my times as a little girl being in the kitchen with the Black women in my family. I thought about the times I have gathered Black women at my house.
I remember one Easter on Good Friday actually, I had a lemonade party, a lemonade themed party. But I'm actually thinking to myself that it was lemonade themed, but I think we watched Homecoming. I don't think we watched Lemonade, actually, the film, I think we watched the Homecoming film from Beyoncé. And then after we finished watching Homecoming, we played music and sang and ugh, it was just wonderful. And so I thought, how can I bring in a poem this way that I would love to be coming together with a lot of Black women I love, how could I put that in a poem? So that's how the poem got written. And interestingly, the poem came together much more quickly than I thought it would, and I was really happy with it. I was happy with the combination of having essay and poetry and Lyric's beautiful photographs as well. So the initial iteration of this poem ended up in Whetstone Magazine's online site, and it ended up going live, I think in August of 2020.
Okay. What is the real life story behind performing this poem for the first time? And here's interesting, the more I think about this. I don't think I have performed this poem anywhere in person that I can think of. I had one or two virtual events that were specifically for Black women. There's one in particular I can remember right now that I read this poem and this poem is always beautiful to me. But having the opportunity to read this poem to an audience of Black women is amazing. Chef's Kiss, chef Edna Kiss like, whew, so great. So I feel like I haven't had a chance to see what this poem would do yet on stage. And I'm sure there are other writers and performance poets like myself who have had some of that experience. You have pieces now that you've written in this very isolated time where we were finding ways to be in community together, but not in the ways we were used to. And now here's this poem that I haven't had a chance to really take it out there and let it get its wings. So I don't know, now that I'm telling y'all that, I'm thinking, hmm I got to find some place to take this poem out there, see what its rhythm is.
And the last question is, how do I feel about the poem now? It's really beautiful and tender feelings that I feel about this poem because I remember what that time in history was like, what it was like in America to be in the middle of an uprising, to be in the middle of a deadly pandemic as well, to be thinking about the ways that we wished we could have gathered together and couldn't, and to be thinking about the ways we have gathered in the past and will gather in the future.
And I love the idea of Black women having our own potluck, and that the things that we bring to the potluck are not necessarily food in this poem, the things that each Black woman is bringing there is not her candy yams or her mac and cheese or her greens or her poundcake, whatever her signature dish is. But for me, when I think of the community of Black women that I have around me, there are things that they bring to the potluck that is life. Some of them bring this great sense of spiritual groundedness. Those are the Black women that you look to, to say a prayer or lead a meditation. And the Black women who are like me that are always there to try to think of something to make people laugh or to say something inappropriate sometimes, depending on who's there, if it's really deemed inappropriate or not, the people who want to help us hold space for those that we've lost in this poem, it was really important to me this idea of we say their names.
And as a Spelman graduate, shout out to all of my Spelmanites listening, as a Spelman graduate we had this exercise, and I believe first year students at Spelman still do this, some of this, I don't know, might be in the lore of Spelman, so I won't tell all the details. But there's a certain kind of ceremony that first year students at Spelman do. And a part of it is, you are in this sacred space with all of the women that are in your class, and each of you have an individual moment to stand up and say your name. And at the time, I don't know that it hit me as powerful as it does now, but that's always been resonating with me ever since. And it was important to me that when we are together as Black women, I believe we are always honoring those people who are no longer with us, those who have passed on, those who were stolen from us as well.
And it was important to me to also make sure that we are saying the names of Black trans women and Black trans women are Black women. But I specifically wanted to make sure the line said Black trans women, because so many of our Black trans women in community with us have been taken away from us far too soon. And I felt that moment was important. And the moment of saying our own names to each other and finding each other in our smiles, bumping hips, all of the physicality that really does happen when you're sharing kitchen and living room and dining room and porch space with other Black women.
So this poem will always have tender feelings for me because it will be very hard for me to forget the era of time in which the poem was written, but also the poem itself still stands to be so true. I want Black women to have our own potluck. I want us to be able to be in spaces that nourish us and be in spaces together and with each other and nourish ourselves and nourish each other. That's just a beautiful, beautiful image to me. So that's the story behind Our Own Potluck, and I hope I get to have my own potluck with some of the Black women in my community really soon. Thanks for joining me in the Living Room. Y'all see you soon.
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRADIO. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.