The lines from Audre Lorde’s poem “New Year’s Day” serve as an inspiration for a Poetry Coalition collaboration
March 11, 2020
“I am deliberate / and afraid / of nothing.” Audre Lorde’s lines from her poem “New Year’s Day” serve as a charge and an inspiration to a month of national poetry programming titled “Poetry and Protest,” which Mizna and AAWW are a part of as members of the Poetry Coalition. Mizna is holding a reading in Minneapolis (March 12), and the two orgs have joyfully co-planned a reading that will be live-streamed as a digital event on our Facebook page on March 26. In both cases, we have invited a rich slate of writers to contend with Lorde’s lines and, here, the readers from the Minneapolis event answer a few related questions.
George Abraham
@IntifadaBatata / gabrahampoet.com
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
When I think of these lines, I can’t help but think of what it means to be (vocally) pro-Palestinian in the current police + surveillance states established by the colonial machine. Palestinians are constantly doxxed, harassed, and targeted by supremacist groups in the american context, and these systems are amplified much further for Palestinians in Palestine. Being in diaspora poses a different experience and set of obligations for us, especially as americans; how are we to use our position within empire to contribute to on-ground resistance in Palestine? Furthermore, how are we to exist in this empire without fighting just as loudly for reparations for Black and Indigenous people? The vast majority of our language of liberation could not have been built without non-Palestinian BIPOC revolutionaries, and so, the essence of our movement and its language *must* be to speak among and not “for” or “over,” even and especially when it comes to our own community. And if this is to be our goal, I ask: what greater form of fearlessness & deliberateness is there than this? Than Us?
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
I’ve been thinking a lot about a post a friend of mine shared on facebook about how, sometimes, self-care doesn’t look like bath bombs or scented candles, but is actually the hardest thing in the world – the thing I don’t want to do but need to do for my own long-term well-being. To have that emotionally troubling conversation I don’t wanna have so that it doesn’t make me anxious any more, to remove myself from a space despite the presence of loved ones when I need alone time, to step away from a writing project for a time if it’s putting me in a consistently bad head space. I guess the type of self-care I’ve been striving for as of late requires a radical honesty and Trust in myself, which has a lot of downstream effects I think.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
Right now, I’m making my way through several recent poetry collections: Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs, Monica Sok’s A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Bradley Trumpfheller’s Reconstructions, Moira J’s Bury Me in Thunder. But there are also several poetry collections I’ve been returning to over the past few months that are just chronically on my nightstand: Bidart and Gluck’s collected works, as well as Jorie Graham’s Dream of the Unified Field. I’m also in the midst of a few fiction books: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, The Other Americans by Laila Lalami, Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah—as well as The Crying Book by Heather Christle for nonfiction. It highly depends on my mood, but when I’m writing, I tend to listen to either purely instrumental tracks (either Rachmaninoff or Debussy) or if I am to listen to music with lyrics, I’ll play my punk or emo playlist.
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Tarik Dobbs
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
Lorde’s line reminds me of how I’m most concerned with how a poem demonstrates its stakes. I’m caught up in poems that are braver than I can be; poems that are radical and name names. I want my poems to be more unafraid than I am.
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
I think much of my joy and resilience comes from my living and writing in community. I love having roommates. To brag, living and creating with torrin a. greathouse has affirmed my experiences and made space for the work I am working towards.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
On my nightstand: Hala Alyan’s poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year
In my earbuds: This Is How You Smile by Helado Negro
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Roy G. Guzmán
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
One word I often employ in my vocabulary that’s similar to deliberate is intentional. What I appreciate about the word deliberate is how much space it lends to words like resolve, care, balance, and liberation. I especially lean on care and liberation when it comes to discussing fear. Fear is the unknown as much as there can be a fear of the unknown. In the face of that fear, to be deliberate means to have a strategy that considers care, self-care perhaps, and the drive to never lose sight of one’s liberation. The nothing Lorde alludes to here is, paradoxically, everything. That is, to be deliberate is to have considered everything before one arrives at the idea of nothingness. I plan. I consider fear within my plan. Fear becomes an elastic element within that plan. Insofar as I am deliberate with my fear, fear cannot control me.
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
Resistance and resilience share the same prefix re, calling to mind the notion of repetition, an againness, a return. In order to resist, in order to stand firm against that which tries to overwhelm me, sometimes I must return to basics, to the people and the memories and the places that have set me in my current path. But sometimes we can’t exactly return from where we’ve left. When I think about resistance, I think about kinship, homeland, loss, and transformation. What must I return to in order to remain resilient? By virtue of being an immigrant, is my immigrant body in a state of ever-returns, ever-dispatches? Joy and self-care must be invested in renewal. One cannot imagine a future without also having to contend with the past. My blood, my cells, whatever light exudes from me, whatever particles I inhale—they cannot point towards an infinite horizon if they cannot also consider the explosions that brought all of them to this endless chain of moments.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
My nightstand holds books on poetry, magical realism, testimonios, and Indigenous practices. I also have a plush figure of Dante Alebrije from the animated film Coco, an empty glass because the spirits must have drunk all the water, and my engagement ring. From my earbuds the mellifluous voice of Argentine-Mexican singer Amanda Miguel helps pump blood and restlessness into my heart.
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Marlin M. Jenkins
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
I love the phrase “I am deliberate”: the word deliberate feels to me like the word intentional but with its work boots on. My gut reaction to the second half of the quote is always “but I’m afraid of so much!” Fearlessness is something I aspire toward but also am dubious of. I think fear has its uses. I am afraid of the potential futures white supremacy aims to create/perpetuate and afraid of the pain that may happen, is happening, to people I love. I am afraid of the monstrous parts of myself that I aim to resist.
Ideally, I wouldn’t be afraid—and I realize something’s ability to cause fear means it holds power, and I’m all about resisting and dismantling that power—but I’d be lying if I said those fears aren’t motivating. I think, too, of fear as it relates to faith: fear as something that can also be connected to awe and wonder. What I want, for myself, is to be more fearless, but not to be fearless. (And maybe I’ll disagree with myself about this tomorrow—my relationship to fear is messy, to say the least!)
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
When I was in grad school, my therapist often reminded me to check in with how I felt in my body. I’ve always been good at figuring out what I think about things—how I feel has been much more difficult. So that’s step 1 for me for self-care: How does my body feel? What is it responding to? What does it need? And then the care comes from attending to the needs presented in the answers to those questions. As for joy, I do my best to make time for and rejoice in the things I love: my friends, video games, poems, dancing, music.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
Nightstand: Aria Aber’s Hard Damage; Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium; Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon; Danez Smith’s Homie; Night Colors (an anthology of work from the writers in the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop)
Ears: Anderson .Paak’s Malibu; Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool; Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings’s Soul of a Woman; Nina’s Simone’s version of “Cotton Eyed Joe”
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Yara Omer
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
“This is not me! I am afraid!” Then, I remember how, every day, I cruise through life dodging forces from within, from fellow inhabitants of this Earth, and from Mother Nature. And the next day, I start over. “I am deliberate and afraid of many things, but I will keep going.”
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
I call my family. I connect with friends and loved ones. I write. I play with my kids. I learn about the night sky. I teach. I read. I learn horseback riding. I binge-watch my favorite TV shows.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
English: The Map of Salt and Stars (Zeyn Joukhadar), Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan), and Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year (edited by Mcmorland Hunter), Salt Houses (Hala Alyan).
Arabic: (١٩١٩ (أحمد مراد) ، زمن الخيول البيضاء ( إبراهيم نصر الله
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Maitreyi Ray
Q: What is your reaction to Audre Lorde’s lines, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
I can hear this quote when I think about feeling like a part of a collective creative resistance, cooking large meals with my queer and trans friends, art-making, rituals that ground me, communal experiences of grief, and the friendships in my life that have acted like salves for my restless heart. It makes me reflect on all the ways that I can be deliberate in the details of my life to fearlessly imagine the future.
Q: Resistance requires resilience. What are some ways you make space for joy and self-care?
I make time to eat well. Cooking and eating are real ways that I get into my body and experience real pleasure. Sometimes this means relishing some really greasy pizza and sometimes I want to spend four hours making some elaborate handmade pasta. Also I’m trying to make time to sleep more! And have non-productive leisure time: time when I’m watching a movie or even just petting my cat for forty-five minutes. I think it is important to dwell in the moment.
Q: What’s on your nightstand? In your earbuds?
I am reading The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich. It is so good and really richly detailed. I feel like I am swimming in it.
I’ve been listening to D’Angelo’s 2000 album Voodoo, which has been helping ease these last gasps of winter. Somehow, the snowbanks don’t seem as grey and joyless when I’m listening to Voodoo. And somehow it’s at least 5 degrees warmer.
These events are supported by the Academy of American Poets with funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is also supported by a National Endowment for the Arts grant to Mizna.