Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. I've had some interviews lately, so it's been nice bringing some people into our living room. But I'm back, just me and y'all, wherever you are listening. Today I'm going to take you behind the poetry. This is one of my most recent poems that I've finished in the last couple of years, so I'm actually really looking forward to diving into it with you.
Amena Brown:
Usually these poems are older, so I might have live recordings or studio recordings I've done, but this poem is a newer one. So I'm just going to do a reading of this. And then I will take you behind the process of how this poem actually got written. So here is a reading of my poem, A Garden of Me.
Amena Brown:
I found my voice. I found my voice on a page and held its spine as if I was keeping time at my first middle school dance, studied the pages like crystal ball, like tea leaves. I chose my own adventure, knew the song of the caged bird, understood the mute of young Maya, how trauma can make you quiet, how quiet can read to adults as good kid, how when trouble tries to erase you, you never find your thrills in causing trouble again, how rolls of thunder hear the cries of a little Black girl not sure if she has anything to say, or if it matters that she has anything to say, or if there's power in anything she has to say.
Amena Brown:
I found my voice in the blue eyes of Pecola Breedlove, in Celie's letters to God, in the rainbows of for colored girls, how Pilate sang a Song of Solomon and gave birth to herself, how Janie told my eyes to watch God, and they did. I grew. I grew wings. I grew a voice. I planted myself. I grew a garden of me. I came into full bloom. I discovered my season. Winter came and I grew quiet, but I did not die. I only deepened my roots. I found my voice, and once upon a time is now.
Amena Brown:
Being a storyteller is miles better than being the princess in someone else's story, that you can give birth and be reborn. Don't be afraid to be reborn, to find your soul sits in a new type of skin. Don't be afraid to start over, to backspace, to press delete, to control alt delete. Be your own library, your own treasure trove of story and page and song. Check out the book of you with no late fee. Do not put yourself on a waiting list for love and care and gentleness. Find your sanctuary in pages, wire bound, and be unbound.
Amena Brown:
Step softly into your own known, into everything you thought you knew that you now know isn't true. Breathe gently into your uncertainty. Write a love note to yourself, to the world, to the woman you used to be, to the woman you are right now. Secretly and publicly admire her.
Amena Brown:
So I normally start off when I take you all behind the poetry with what made me write this poem, and I want to give a big, big shout out to Mia Willis. Mia Willis is a phenomenal, phenomenal poet that I know from being a part of Atlanta's poetry community. Mia was facilitating a workshop, and they were using Michelle Obama's book, Becoming, as a jumping off place to help us write. The prompt that Mia put out there was for all of us to think about what was something that we could look at in our lives that is really responsible for the person that we've become today.
Amena Brown:
So the beginning of this poem, I actually started writing during Mia's workshop. And then I got home and kind of looked at the piece. When you're in a writing workshop, especially the amount of time that Mia had to facilitate that with us, I mean we were probably there for maybe two hours, and that includes time for us to have some discussion with Mia as they were talking us through the different things that were coming up for each of us and thinking about what helped us become who we are and then time to write and then time to share.
Amena Brown:
So it's really not a lot of time, not for me, enough time to finish something. But I had a pretty good start. I would say a lot of the beginning of what is there and what became the poem in the end showed up in the workshop. I got home and kind of looked at the poem and just thought, "I think I'd like to take some time to finish this piece." It's interesting because I think that we were having this workshop, my mind wants to say, I feel like it was 2018 that we were having this workshop. It may have been early 2019.
Amena Brown:
But we were having this workshop, and I was in an interesting place as a writer at that moment. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast for those of you who are regular listeners, but I've talked a lot about how I was, at that time, in that 2017 to 2019 time, I was really in an interesting, I don't know, crossroads, maybe I would describe it that way, career-wise and creatively as well.
Amena Brown:
Career-wise, I was realizing that I was in a market which, for me, was a Christian, predominantly white market. My work was sort of leaning away from what was going to be really acceptable in that space, and I was processing what does that mean, what to do about that. And then I was starting to realize, too, I think it was around this time that I was also realizing the voice of my poems was becoming very different.
Amena Brown:
When I first started doing spoken word, it was the late '90s and I was really coming out of a very hip hop-inspired space creatively. A lot of how I write and really and truly a lot of who I am is very inspired by and along with a lot of the music and artists that were out in the late '90s, a lot of that OutKast and Lauryn Hill and Black Thought, a lot of the hip hop writers that I was exposed to at that time. So I think that put a lot of bearing on what I became as a poet.
Amena Brown:
In particular when you come across a lot of spoken word poets that were writing around that time, we were all, a lot of us, very inspired by hip hop wordplay and rhythms and things like that. So my rhyme scheme was a lot tighter. I used my rhyming dictionary a lot more when I was writing early on. And then I went into a lot of Christian and church spaces and was writing a lot more what I would say as congregational work, writing a lot of things that I would do in front of a church congregation in what was supposed to be kind of a worshipful moment. Those required a certain kind of rhythm.
Amena Brown:
It had been a while since I had really been writing just because I wanted to, going into this workshop. So I was feeling a lot of trepidation around what is my voice when I'm not writing a thing that I've been commissioned to write? What is my voice when I'm writing just what I want to write? This poem was one of the first newer pieces that I started. So it was interesting to be in a writing workshop.
Amena Brown:
As a writer, you know your voice pretty well. You know yourself, but also being in a discovery process, taking the prompt Mia gave us and then writing and reading it back and going, "Huh, I wouldn't have expected myself to write about that," or, "I wouldn't have expected myself to want to approach that in this particular way." So it was an interesting crossroads to be at, entering the workshop.
Amena Brown:
And then I think I put the poem down for a while because I think my schedule, traveling, kind of picked up. So I don't think I actually finished this poem until shortly before the pandemic started, which was also a wild thing because, before the pandemic, as I've talked about here on the podcast before, I would finish a new piece and just take it in my notebook or my journal or whatever and take it out to the open mic. That's how I would work out the piece and figure out what edits I needed to make and how to get it ready for stage.
Amena Brown:
So there are probably two or three pieces that ended up either being written or getting finished during the pandemic that did not do that process, and this was one of them. So it's interesting to think about me returning back to this poem. Also, I think it's interesting that a lot of my poetry career, as far as what people would have seen me doing onstage or on video, a lot of my poems were big pieces.
Amena Brown:
They were meant to get big belly laughs from people, or they were meant to be these very somber and kind of sobering emotionally moments. There was the light was supposed to come on, and I walk out into the light and I say this very poignant piece, but still creating this big dramatic moment. It was interesting to me that this poem kind of came in quietly.
Amena Brown:
At first, I worried about that. I worried because there's a lot of, I mean if I can use the word, sass, here. There's a lot of sass and attitude that I like to have in my poetry, especially the poetry that I write that I would do not in a church setting. I mean some of my poems, I would still do them in church settings, but I wasn't thinking about church settings when I was writing them.
Amena Brown:
The poems that I would think I could go into any concert or performance event where people actually came there to be entertained, that's what I mean when I'm differentiating that from church settings. People that are in church settings typically aren't arriving there to be entertained. It is a surprise to them if you entertain them. But I feel like a lot of my work was really built for environments where people came there to be entertained, whether they came there to think or feel or be in their emotions or they came to laugh.
Amena Brown:
A lot of the work I have been doing in the last few years really fits into that environment. That's what I think, around the time that this poem was coming out, I was starting to really notice and become aware of that about my work, that my work wanted to be entertaining, and I was in a market that wasn't built on that, really. So I think it's interesting to think about how this poem really arrived quietly.
Amena Brown:
It is not a big loud boisterous poem, and I like that. I like that now, but I think at the time I was like, "What's this poem doing?" And really trying to stick in there and see what did the poem want to say. It felt very tender. I think I've talked about this in another Behind the Poetry episode, too, but I haven't been a very cathartic poet in the sense of being a poet that it is rage or it is sadness. It is large emotions that send me to the page.
Amena Brown:
I'm probably more of a poet that's in my head a lot. It's things I think about and things I wonder that send me to the page. If something very, very emotional happens to me, I actually have to really do a lot of work to write through that. I typically talk through that instead. So it was interesting to sort of let this poem be tender and let it say what it wanted to say without trying to make it anything.
Amena Brown:
In reading it back with you all today and thinking about some of what is here, I was trying to do, like if I could do a historical deep dive into my own reading history and how that reading not only informed the writer that I became, but really informed the woman that I was becoming as well. I remember as a young girl reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Dr. Maya Angelou.
Amena Brown:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, to me, some parts of it are in line with The Color Purple in that you are meeting a young Black girl in the story, but some very harsh things are happening in her life. Of course, The Color Purple is fiction, and I know why the Caged Bird Sings was autobiographical. But there was something about reading about this young Black girl, this young Maya Angelou who's growing up in the South, who has this very traumatic thing happen to her at a very young age.
Amena Brown:
It's so traumatic that it causes her to not speak for a very long time. It's interesting because I remember when Oprah Winfrey talked about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She talked about the part that caught her was the initial scene of the story where I think young Maya's doing an Easter speech in her Black church growing up. It was interesting to me that in this poem, it was that time that Maya Angelou was mute that showed up in this poem.
Amena Brown:
I didn't realize how much I resonated with that until writing this, because I was ... Even though when I think about myself, who I am now as a woman, that I'm very ... You could almost dropped me off in front of any crowd of people in a room full of people I don't know and I'm going to find a way to connect with most folks. That's kind of how my personality is. I feel like my adult personality is a lot more outgoing than my child personality was.
Amena Brown:
My child personality was very withdrawn. There was some experiences of Maya's trauma that I also knew from my own experiences as well. So I do remember being, especially that eight, nine years old, 10 years old, that era of my life, I remember becoming very withdrawn and very quiet. I was never a child that was going to ham it up. People are curious about that now because I do so much stage work, but I was not a performer as a child. I was a withdrawn reader.
Amena Brown:
This line about how, "Quiet can read to adults as a good kid," I was like, "Whoa." I was like, "Whoa," that it was so accurate about how I really felt growing up. I just don't think I'd ever written about it this way until this poem. There's a middle stanza here that I'm really, really proud of because I think this part is now we're getting into the part of the piece that I was writing outside of the workshop.
Amena Brown:
I was trying to think what were the other very specific Black girl or Black woman books that really informed a lot of what I wanted to be as a Black woman or as a Black girl. And then I had this option. There are a lot of authors here. Do I want to shout out the author names? I have a couple of other poems where I do that. I shout out some authors in God Bless Mom. I shout out some authors and writers in Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl.
Amena Brown:
So I was like, "A lot of the names are going to be the same. I don't know that I want to do that again." And then I thought, "Well, almost all of these books, outside of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, were fiction books, were fiction or poetry." I wanted to put more focus on the books and the characters who were there. During the pandemic, I ordered a copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, so that I could have one in my library.
Amena Brown:
I'm at that point in my library. I feel like the past few years I was sort of decolonizing my library. I was removing a lot of the books there that were written by white men, finding corresponding books that were written by Black women and some by women of color on some similar topics. A lot of my Christian spirituality books were written by white folks because that was the environment that I'd been in professionally, but realizing just some of that didn't align with where I was spiritually.
Amena Brown:
And then once I started getting rid of a bunch of books, then I could go, "Okay, now what do I actually want in my library?" So I'm glad to say that I do have a copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. But I think the other thing about this section that was really important to me was to say the characters' names because the characters were, in some ways, equally as important as the author names for me. But I also love in a poem, and I'm just going to call them Easter eggs right now because I don't know another term to use, but I love in a poem to leave Easter eggs for folks.
Amena Brown:
When they hear the poem, there are things there that they know, but I don't have to take time in the poem to explain. This is one of those sections that I knew that there would be young Black girls or Black women that would get to this section and when they see how rolls of thunder hear the cries of a little Black girl, when they hear the blue eyes of Pecola Breedlove, Celie's letters to God, they know the books I'm talking about. They know the authors I'm talking about.
Amena Brown:
I, in particular, love to do that with Black women in mind. I love to have a poem that just throws all these things out there that are visceral memories for Black girls and Black women and that they can find them as I'm onstage or as they're listening to my work. So that stanza, I was really very proud of because I knew if I get to the point where I'm doing this poem onstage again, this part is going to be really nice because there's going to be some Black women nodding in the room.
Amena Brown:
They're going to know the names of some of these books, and they're going to remember the authors here. Another line that really struck me, that sort of came out of me without me being conscious of it at the time was how, "Pilate sang a Song of Solomon and gave birth to herself." I'm referencing Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. There's a woman there named Pilate who is the sister of one of the main characters in the book.
Amena Brown:
I mean it could be argued that maybe Pilate is also a main character in this book. But it's interesting because she sort of, if I'm remembering the story right in the novel and I think I talked about this when I had Cole Arthur Riley on, we were talking a lot about Toni Morrison's work and the spirituality there. I'm just still struck that this character that Toni Morrison writes, that Pilate, there's a Black woman named Pilate and it's spell like the biblical historical figure, Pilate, who was involved in a part of the story we see as Jesus is headed to the crucifixion.
Amena Brown:
He's one of the figures that Jesus has to go to so that they can decide what punishment they're going to give to him. So that a Black woman has that name is fascinating, that Toni Morrison writes this character who has no belly button. In my 40s, I have to say, Pilate, she's become a spiritual figure to me in certain ways because I feel very empowered by this idea that a Black woman can give birth to herself in certain regards. So that's still sitting with me, y'all. I don't know. I may have a whole episode about it some other time.
Amena Brown:
This stanza, this, "I grew a voice. I planted myself. I grew a garden of me." I'm going to tell y'all right now. I'm not a person who's great with titles. I have, in the last three or so years of my work, tried to look at the work itself to see if the title is there. This was probably one of the first poems that happened, that I didn't know what it was going to be called and when I got down this deep into the poem, I was like, "Ugh, A Garden of Me, that's it."
Amena Brown:
As a person who got into having houseplants during the pandemic ... I feel like all of us got into something that we weren't that into. I wasn't that into having plants, partly because we were traveling a lot. So I felt like all they're going to do is sit in our house and die. Why should I be worried about that? But the pandemic has brought me a lot of plants. I have quite a few plants, some that were given to me, some that I bought.
Amena Brown:
I love the idea of a garden metaphor and just all the things that plants teach you and the times of the year that it can kind of seem like your plant is dying. I have a local place I like to go to in Atlanta. It's called The Garden Hood. I have taken quite a few plants there and have been like, "What's wrong with it?" And they'll be like, "Oh, it just needs to be re-potted or it just does this, this time of year. It just does that sometimes if the leaves are old," and all these things that you learn about how the seasons are going to go in a plant's life.
Amena Brown:
This idea that I feel like this poem was, in some ways, the beginning of me going, "I get to grow a voice. I plant myself." I think a lot of my professional career, I felt like was me saying things that people wanted me to say or the things that people wanted to hear, the things they expected. This poem was the beginning of me really growing my own voice in a certain way. I'm going to tell y'all. I've had a lot of just tough times come in my life.
Amena Brown:
This winter came and I grew quiet, but I did not die. I only deepened my roots is something that has come back to me over and over, this idea that you can go through something that either feels like it's going to break you or did break you. My therapist's been getting with me about me saying, "Feels like blah blah blah," because she'll be like, "Sometimes you say that something feels like it hurts you this way." But she was like, "I want you to practice saying it hurt you this way, not just it feels like that. It's real that it hurt you."
Amena Brown:
So I'm trying, y'all. You be trying to do your work. I also loved talking a little bit about the library here because I tried to think about, overall, if reading was such a big thing in my life, if reading is what helped me become, then I've talked now in the poem about the books I've read, but I could not let the poem go by without also talking about the library and its place in my life and all of the things that those of us who are library heads know about going there and checking out the books.
Amena Brown:
I know a lot of libraries may be doing away with this now, but when a lot of us were growing up, you check out your book. You had so many days you could keep it. You had so many times you could possibly renew it. But if you didn't renew it, then you would have a late fee. The idea of how much the library was this place where I got to learn about so many things and places and people, I got to find out about books that maybe I wouldn't have found out about if it weren't for the library. So shout out to our local libraries.
Amena Brown:
This idea that the same sort of attention you would give to a subject that you wanted to know about, if you wanted to learn how to cook more of this type of food, you might buy cookbooks by these certain writers. Or if you wanted to know more about a particular topic, you might read more books about that. If you were traveling to a certain place, you might want to read books about that place.
Amena Brown:
To give yourself that same sort of study, that idea of checking out the book of you with no late fee, that you don't have to put the book back, that you get a chance to learn about yourself, how you're becoming, how you're healing. It is interesting to me that, of course, I couldn't write about all this reading and becoming without talking about writing. But here, I wasn't really talking about writing as a professional.
Amena Brown:
I was talking about the ideas of writing that my mom gave to me initially. It was really important to my mom that I understood that a journal or a notebook that I keep to myself is really important, that that is an important place to put my words and my thoughts. So this idea of being able to sort of write a note to yourself, write those good words to yourself, all those things are really important to me in general and important to how the poem got written.
Amena Brown:
What is the real-life story behind performing this poem for the first time? My memory is getting hazy, y'all. But I think the first time I ever read this to anyone was when I did a virtual event for a Yale Black Seminarians women's gathering. I did quite a few virtual events over this time of the first two years of the pandemic. They all had different things about them that I enjoyed, but this was one of my favorite ones.
Amena Brown:
First of all, it is a privilege and an honor to get to perform poetry in front of an audience of Black women. It's amazing. I mean, obviously, in part, because I'm a Black woman and because a lot of my work is written thoughtful of Black women, thoughtful of our stories, and thoughtful of our healing journeys and different things. So to get to do that, and this is coming from someone who really, for the most part, I don't do a lot of Christian or church or those kind of faith-based type of events for various reasons that probably belongs in another episode here.
Amena Brown:
But when I got this request to not only just talk spiritually with an audience of Black women, but specifically to talk to Black women who were going to seminary at Yale, and it was such a communal experience to get to be a part of it and to get to share this tender poem with them as they are matriculating in an environment that is not easy. It's not easy. There are particular ways that that is not easy for Black women.
Amena Brown:
It was beautiful even virtually to look at all of their faces across Zoom and get to share this poem. So that's very meaningful to me. How do I feel about the poem now? This poem, it's still one of my favorites. It's still going to be interesting to me when I get back to performing sets of poetry because I haven't yet done this poem in front of a live audience in a set, and I'm curious about that.
Amena Brown:
The other poem that I've done here in our Behind the Poetry is Here Breathing. Here Breathing is a very tender piece as well. So I really have to craft the moment that I'm going to bring that poem out there. I'm curious to how Garden of Me will play a role in my poetry sets in the future. But that's one of the things I really love about being a poet is that I can have moments like that in my set, that people are open to it. They expect it, all those things.
Amena Brown:
I am informed a lot by standup comedy and the comedic process. That plays a role in how I write and plays a big role in how I perform my poetry sets. I love to make people laugh, and I love that I'm a poet. So if I want to hold space for grief in the middle of my sets, I can do it. If I want to read a tender poem in the middle of my sets, I can do that. So I still love this poem very much, and I look forward to seeing how to build a story around it and how to put it in there next to my other pieces.
Amena Brown:
So thank y'all so much for going behind the poetry with me on Garden of Me. Thank you for allowing tender feelings here in the living room. If there's any place you can bring your tender feelings, you can bring your tender feelings up in here. Anyways, it's been so great talking with you all. I'll talk to you next week.
Amena Brown:
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.