Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Bacquie, Aja Monet
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1987
WEBSITE: http://www.ajamonet.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja_Monet * http://blueflowerarts.com/artist/aja-monet/ * http://www.warscapes.com/reviews/i-got-right-say-aja-monets-my-mother-was-freedom-fighter
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2012027986
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012027986
HEADING: Monet, Aja, 1987-
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370 __ |e Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) |2 naf
374 __ |a Poets |a Authors |2 lcsh
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667 __ |a Changed authorized access point from Bacquie, Aja Monet; that form has never appeared in her publications’ statements of responsibility)
670 __ |a Chorus, 2012: |b ECIP t.p. (assistant editor, Aja Monet Bacquie) t.p. (Aja Monet)
670 __ |a The black unicorn sings, 2010: |b t.p. (Aja Monet)
670 __ |a Wikipedia, viewed July 24, 2015: |b Aja Monet (full name: Aja Monet Bacquie; born August 21, 1987; American poet, writer, lyricist and activist of Cuban-Jamaican descent from Brooklyn)
670 __ |a Her website: |b (Aja Monet) |u http://www.ajamonet.com/
670 __ |a OCLC search, July 24, 2015 |b (usage: Aja Monet)
953 __ |a rg14
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1987.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and activist. Smoke Signals Studio, cofounder.
AWARDS:Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion, 2007; Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry; New York City YWCA “One to Watch Award.”
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Poet Aja Monet won the prestigious Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion title when she was only nineteen years old, and she has since gone on to win the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry and the New York City YWCA “One to Watch Award.” Monet’s first collection, The Black Unicorn Sings, was released in 2010, and she next teamed with Saul Williams and Dufflyn Lammers to edit the poetry collection Chorus: A Literary Mixtape in 2012. Monet’s second poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, followed in 2017.
With My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, Monet mixes poems of coming-of-age with poems about female power. Several poems celebrate black womanhood, the power of resistance, and the violence of racism. From her childhood in Brooklyn to her schooldays in Chicago, Monet covers the many metamorphoses that take place on the journey from childhood to adulthood. In this manner, Monet seeks to explore the nature of womanhood, both in herself and in her role models. This rocky journey veers from ululation to desperation, and all of the girls and women portrayed strive to maintain their grace and power in the face of dehumanizing obstacles. In this manner, the poems’ speakers and subjects become warriors, formed in the fires of white supremacy and patriarchy.
Reviews of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter were largely positive, and a Publishers Weekly critic declared: “In stunning and evocative language, Monet reveals the many ways that ‘we exist between/ a self for self and a self for others.'” Anna Ziering, writing on the Warscapes Website, was also impressed, and she commented: “Situated firmly in the ongoing chaos of the present moment, she [Monet] offers an extended meditation on what it means to be human in a brutal world. She asks this timeless question with urgency and a striking new voice.” Ziering went on to note that “Monet carries readers on a journey from brittle rage to rooted resistance, using her poems to connect with her readers by sharing humanity and love, building a bridge that is also a well. Refreshed and with an army of readers united behind her, she closes the collection with a battle hymn for these ‘daughters of a new day,’ back on ‘the streets, picket signs in our blood, our ancestors/marching through a nightmare, we rise toward freedom.'”
In the words of online Los Angeles Review correspondent John W.W. Zeiser, “Monet’s poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored.” Frontier Poetry Website reviewer Josh Roark offered both pros and cons, asserting that “Monet could have likely left out a few pieces without sacrificing the overall effect. . . . However, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter‘s music trumps any hesitations, and these issues are minor in comparison to the overwhelmingly generous scope of what Monet gifts to the reader.” Roark then concluded: “Hers is a voice pressing against injustice wherever it can, singing out accusations, threats—laying bare the realities of the oppressed and declaring their existences unjust. She’s not afraid of any one or any system, and this book is a torch in the dark, a raucous and defiant singing on the horizon.” Offering further praise in her online Booked for Review assessment, Claudia Rojas stated: “The zest in this book feels like debut instead of Monet’s second poetry book. . . . My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter reminds us that women matter. These poems come to us from an activist’s core, her ache to be.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
This magazine, November-December, 2012. Ryan B. Patrick, review of Chorus: A Literary Mixtape.
ONLINE
Booked for Review, http://bookedforreview.com/ (November 29, 2017), Claudia Rojas, review of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
Frontier Poetry, https://www.frontierpoetry.com/ (May 24, 2017), Josh Roark, review of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
Los Angeles Review, http://losangelesreview.org/ (February 1, 2018), John W.W. Zeiser, review of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
Warscapes, http://www.warscapes.com/ (September 29, 2017), Anna Ziering, review of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter.
Aja Monet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aja Monet
Born Aja Monet Bacquie
August 21, 1987 (age 30)
Brooklyn, New York, United States
Website www.ajamonet.com
Aja Monet Bacquie (born August 21, 1987) is an American contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist of Cuban-Jamaican descent from Brooklyn, New York. She is known to be the youngest poet to have ever become the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion at the age of 19 in 2007 and is the last woman to have won this title since.[1][2][3] Monet is also known for her activist work, and has been an active participant of the Say Her Name campaign, which has highlighted police brutality against black women.[4]
Aja Monet is a Caribbean-American poet, performer, and educator from Brooklyn. She has been awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry and the Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, as well as the New York City YWCA’s “One to Watch Award.” She is the author of The Black Unicorn Sings and the co-editor, with Saul Williams, of Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. She lives in Little Haiti, Miami, where she is a co-founder of Smoke Signals Studio and dedicates her time merging arts and culture in community organizing with the Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project.
ARTS & CULTURE
05/21/2015 03:32 pm ET Updated Dec 06, 2017
Poet Aja Monet Confronts Police Brutality Against Black Women With #SayHerName
By Maddie Crum and Irina Dvalidze
X
4k
“Melissa Williams,” Aja Monet reads, “Darnisha Harris.” Her voice is strong; it marches along, but it shakes a little, although not from nerves. She’s performing a poem that includes the forgotten names of girls and women who’ve been injured or killed by the police. She finishes forcefully, then pauses, exhales. “Can I do that again?” she asks. “It’s my first time reading it out loud, and ... ” she trails off.
Monet had written the poem — a contribution to the #SayHerName campaign, a necessary continuation of the Black Lives Matter movement focusing on overlooked police violence against women — earlier that morning. That evening, she’d read it at a vigil. Now, she was practicing on camera, surprised by the power of her own words.
As a poet, Monet is prolific. She’s been performing both music and readings for some time — at 19, she was the youngest ever winner of New York City’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam — and her work has brought her to France, Bermuda and Cuba, from where her grandmother fled, and where she recently learned she still has extended family. Next month, she’ll return to visit them. But first, she wants to contribute to a campaign she believes in.
Though she’s disheartened that a hashtag is necessary to capture people’s attention — “I think #SayHerName is the surface level of the issues but beneath that there is the real question of, ‘Why?’” she says — Monet wields her art to achieve social and political justice. While discussing political poetry with a fellow artist in Palestine, he observed, “Art is more political than politics.” “I feel him,” she says. “I think he’s right.”
Can you explain #SayHerName in your own words?
It is us calling out the lack of attention on women of color also affected by state violence. We recognize the power of our voices and so we raise the spirits of our sisters by daring to utter their names.
A recent Washington Post write-up said it’s difficult to even quantify police brutality against black women. How will #SayHerName honor those whose stories are lost?
I can’t speak for what a hashtag will do in the actual hearts of people but I know that anything worth paying attention to these days in America has to be sold and marketed as if worth buying into. We recognize that the attention span of our generation is so short: How else do we make the issues we care about accessible and also relevant? This is what activism has come to. This is where we are at in the age of the Internet. We must be honest with ourselves about how human interaction is now only affirmed or confronted based on the projected world we live in through screens.
I think #SayHerName is the surface level of the issues, but beneath that there is the real question of “Why?” Why do I need to make saying her name a hashtag for you to pay attention? The goal is to use this as an opportunity to redirect the attention of people, to hopefully get folks researching the names and stories of all the women we’ve lost. To educate themselves so we are all more informed on how policing works. Black women’s bodies are the most policed bodies in this country.
Also, I didn’t read the Washington Post write-up, but it seems silly to me. Like, of course it’s difficult to quantify any brutality against human beings. It’s not more difficult when it comes to black women, I think it’s just easier for us to ignore them because if we acknowledge them then we must acknowledge all of the women affected by violence and brutality, not just by police but by an entire patriarchal, racist system. We keep scratching the surface of these issues and neglecting the root, which is this country never loved black people, and of course that meant black women. We who birth the men they also hate. We are an extension of each other.
aja monet
What inspired this poem, and what inspires your poetry in general?
I was at an event where I read a poem in solidarity with my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and Eve Ensler was in the audience. We spoke briefly after and she admired the poem I read. I was honored and she gave me her email. I followed up immediately the next day and informed her that if she ever needed a poet at any point, I’d be there, no questions asked.
She responded with this vigil for #SayHerName and asked if I’d be willing to read a poem. I have been meditating on this issue of women of color affected by police brutality, but the poem hadn’t quite come to me yet. I started writing a piece for Rekia Boyd but it just isn’t ready to be done yet. So I woke early the morning of the vigil and forced myself to write this poem. I sat with all the names of the women and I asked them that I may find the words to do justice. They came to me hours before I had to meet with you all to record.
And maybe they’ll change, but the process of inspiration is a strange thing. For the most part I call on my ancestors. Not to be all, “I call on my ancestors,” but it’s true. I know I’m not the only one writing when I write. I also know that more times than not inspiration is subjective. You can find inspiration in anything if you pay attention. If you’re careful enough to notice how divine this world is and we are, to be here together, creating.
aja monet 2
Obviously you appreciate overtly political art — why do you think political art can be powerful?
I met an artist in Palestine who said “art is more political than politics.” I feel him. I think he’s right.
I think being an artist, you are in the business of telling it like it is. You create of the world you live in, unapologetically. What that means is you aren’t catering to an eye or group or specific niche so much as your own truth as you see fit. Politicians, on the other hand, are constantly determining their worth and issue relevance based on approval ratings and polls. They are always campaigning, which becomes less about the issues we need to be dealing with and more about who can be bought to speak about what you want them to speak about. It’s an ugly game I want no business in.
Art that addresses the business of politics recognizes its power and influence. It unveils the mask of “politics” and gets to the people we are fighting for. It does the difficult work of reaching people’s hearts and minds. No great change takes place without art. It’s necessary.
Who are some fellow poets you currently admire?
Since we are in the spirit of saying her name, here’s a few names: Jayne Cortez, Wanda Coleman, Carolyn Rodgers, June Jordan, Audre Lorde and, of course, my sister, Phillis Wheatley.
aja monet
Monet’s two books of poetry, Inner City Chants and Cyborg Ciphers and The Black Unicorn Sings are available online.
1/14/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Aja Monet. Haymarket, $16 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-60-846767-9
Monet (The Black Unicorn Sings), winner of the 2007 Nuyorican Poet's Cafe Grand Slam title, explores
and celebrates the myriad experiences of black womanhood in this fierce and revolutionary "ode/ to her
revolt." She draws upon rich memories of her Brooklyn childhood in the 1990s, school days passed on
Chicago's South Side, and an inner awakening in Palestine. Monet strikingly illustrates the passage from
girlhood to womanhood, recording the tumultuous shifts between despair and joy that can occur along the
way. Womanhood becomes both "the way we wound and heal." The girls who develop into women in these
poems exude strength and self-assurance, unafraid of the conflicting demands of a world that too often
devalues them. Monet seems to suggest that women become fighters and warriors in response to the
violence of racism and patriarchy. In the opening poem, Monet describes a young girl's budding selfhood:
"a deep remembering of what was, she survives all." That self connects to the women who have come
before and will come after: "my mother does not know/ we are sisters." Monet also writes of poverty,
violence, the bonds of solidarity, and much more. In stunning and evocative language, Monet reveals the
many ways that "we exist between/ a self for self and a self for others." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 36. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435606/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d4ac76c5.
Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435606
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Chorus: A Literary Mixtape
Ryan B. Patrick
This Magazine.
46.3 (November-December 2012): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Red Maple Foundation
http://www.thismagazine.ca/
Full Text:
CHORUS: A LITERARY MIXTAPE
by Saul Williams
MTV Books, $16
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
From the outset, the concept for Saul Williams' latest collection Chorus: A Literary
Mixtape seems fresh yet familiar The accomplished multidisciplinary artist Williams--beat poet, musician
and actor--bypasses a traditional approach for his fifth book of poetry, instead enlisting via social media
more than 8,000 poems from which he (along with editor Aja Monet and fellow actor/poet Dufflyn
Lammers) distilled into 100 diverse pieces. Taking a "crowdsourcing" approach to poetry seems foreign to
the medium but Williams makes it work--more potpourri than patchwork. The unified mob of ideas,
declarations, and emotions within Chorus travel a fluid trajectory of post-millennium musings on love, sex,
politics, and identity. Moving past the collaborative conceit, Chorus sings.--RYAN B. PATRICK
Patrick, Ryan B.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Patrick, Ryan B. "Chorus: A Literary Mixtape." This Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2012, p. 41. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A311718658/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=70dd555d.
Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A311718658
like i got a right to say: Aja Monet's My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Reviews
Anna Ziering
September 29, 2017
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Every morning on my walk to work, I lift my eyes at the top of a long, sloping hill, and check the flagpole. Since I got back to work this fall, the flag has never risen above half-mast. Charlottesville, Harvey, Irma. These are the official reasons. But we could all add our own. DACA. Carbon levels. A President who may have taken office through treason. New troops being dispatched for the longest official war in U.S. history—and this for a nation at war for two hundred twenty-four of its two hundred forty-one years. Even that number avoids the longest unofficial U.S. war: the war of white supremacy. The flag has never taken account of that war’s casualties. It does not ask us to speak their names.
With My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, Aja Monet takes up the project that the flag refuses. Situated firmly in the ongoing chaos of the present moment, she offers an extended meditation on what it means to be human in a brutal world. She asks this timeless question with urgency and a striking new voice.
Monet’s first written collection opens with an image, familiar to all those who count ourselves readers, of “a little girl...reading aloud/in the middle of a dirt road...a room full of listening.” Then, immediately, she fractures this easy identification. The second poem, “language frontiers,” confuses us with its alternative grammar and chaotic visual arrangement. We are forced, quickly, to make choices: to read up or across, to choose lines or columns, to rely on old standards or open ourselves to alternatives. Monet tells us, “these words are something other than you/reading them, i speak like i got a right to say/something like my life depends on it/if it can’t be spoken it ain’t worth writing.” This life-or-death articulation requires more of its readers than the easy pleasure of beautiful art. It is not enough to be aware, not enough to watch. These poems require activity. They insist that we engage. Through the rest of the collection, Monet extends this lesson to the politics of war and resistance: it is not enough to know, she argues, or to write. We must also speak. We must also act.
Monet’s battles lines are entangled and intersectional, indebted to the early Black feminist tradition. We meet her as a young Cuban-Jamaican girl in East New York, an urban space where cops and an abusive mother form a united front of violence. As she grows, she reckons with racist, institutionalized brutality, and confronts America in its blunt failures. Watched over and interpellated by an older self, she raises questions of motherhood, daughterhood, women’s divinity, and place, cataloguing the survival strategies of the women around her: her grandmother’s Santeria, chicken blood dripping “from her wrists like syrup”; Aunt Maddy’s cigarettes and crucifix; her parents’ “disco and latin freestyle...the cool jazz of their joy”; Tanya Kaufman’s “way around the system,/just ask the right questions/never take no for an answer.” The heart of this section, buried between explorations of feminine mysticism, is “limbo”:
i saw a young boy die once
like an ant, he disappeared
beneath my finger
behind the window
on the 17th floor
i watched his circulating tissue
soak the pavement…
i hope the boy knew
this wasn’t heaven...
in heaven there is no need for blood
From this experience, as much as from her foremothers’ different wisdoms, she establishes an understanding that grounds the rest of the book: “i used to think we were human/beings that had spiritual experiences/there was something about watching a boy die/i realized we are spiritual beings/with human experiences.” After this moment, the book illuminates the divinity of everything, glowing behind the grimy details of human cruelty—a photo-negative of brutality covered by a flag.
But Monet’s struggle is not bounded by national boundaries; it is not provincial. She begins to move, taking us away from New York to France, to Tehran, to Palestine. As we travel, Monet, a Black Lives Matter activist, builds upon the #sayhername campaign with a poem and a series of dedications. Facing off with the flag, she lists people to mourn: Fahd, Neda Agha-Solatan, Hamid Panahi, Umm Yasin, Mahmoud Darwish, Nehanda Abiodun, Assata Shakur. Monet’s genealogy is global, dark-skinned, and (sometimes fatally) wounded; including these debts here is partly gratitude and partly activism. You will learn these names, Monet insists, if you want to understand anything. You will add them to your litany.
At the same time, Money balances targeted clarity with intentional obscurity. Speaking once on the concept of solidarity, she said, “If I have to get you to see me as you in order for you to affirm my right to exist and my humanity—this is not solidarity...to honor one life does not negate another.” Hewing to this moral code, our vision as readers in Palestine is strictly curtailed. We are not taken as tourists, not treated to the battered vistas of other lives. Nor are we taken for any easy moral outrage, any facile identification that could at once rouse and slake liberal guilt.
There are just two poems of violence in Palestine. In one, Neda Agha-Solatan dies from a gunshot while the poet’s voice sings her through death; in the next, Umm Yasim, the mother of a poet, feeds the “displaced, black, and american” poet while recounting the story of her miscarriage at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Both poems are devastating.
And then Monet pivots. She turns her focus from external violence to self-interrogation, rigorously asking why she is in Palestine and what she can do there. She is as unsparing with herself as she is with her readers:
privilege is a mask no one wants to take off…
privilege is knowing
there are parts of this earth occupied for your leisure
your convenience, your entitlement, your tourism…
becoming a gaze…
privilege is writing a poem
a bulldozer of bodies crowds through
empty streets in Ramallah, a mother holds a weeping
mutilated daughter
In this analysis, Monet performs a reckoning rather than an evaluation. She does not rank injustices or root her own outrage in empathy. She is American and privileged; she is black and endangered; she is, like everyone she introduces us to, shockingly and starkly human: “i am the sort of animal that needs to be held,/ruins the hold.”
She is also a poet who, in an overwhelming historical moment, both respects and doubts her tools. The midpoint of the book wavers between hope and despair. Monet admits “i got all the ways of talking about the problem/but no way to make solutions." She cries that
how we see ourselves
is determined by five western countries
five of which determine
value by how well they kill
others.
and we out here screaming
black lives
matter…
i am starting to believe
that this is all we value
is each other’s death
more than life
At the same time, she finds and speaks hope. “black joy,” one of the most moving poems in the collection, is a celebratory, haunted, catechismic ode that ends in a promise: joy “is together, unified on the frontlines/our joy will astonish the world cuz joy/true joy/is justice.” It is a vow made willfully, against all odds.
In its third and final section, the book re-centers itself, halting international travel to consider the overwhelming human need for love: self-love, divine love, mother love, and finally romantic love. Like “a small luxury,” a starkly honest poem about the unusual indulgence of a massage, Monet’s poems to Umi Sellah serve as retreat without withdrawal. These careful, quiet, twilight poems are still and safe, but they don’t negate the realities of power or the battle requirements of the outside world. Love, Monet calls it, “what a word. how do you define/a word that is so often laughed out/of a room? without it, i’ve seen/the strongest weep, bend, break.”
The love Monet allows us to witness embodies nothing so much as Audre Lorde’s erotic, offering “a well of replenishing and provocative force.” From these quiet rooms, beaches, and car trips, Monet soon bursts back, reinvigorated and with new depths of connection. She has found, in this love, some sort of answer to her questions of tool and purpose: “solidarity is a witnessing, the risk, the power to act/it is in the radical fight to care/to nurture what in you endures…we protest to empower personhood/more than mourning, we roar/be not discouraged, be not dismayed/be defiant and deliberate/always, be.”
Earlier in the collection, Monet witnessed even as she questioned its purpose: “the world/i used to think i could save it/but i grew up on a block/where it was easy to fall/through the cracks in the pavement/i earned my poetic license so i could say shit.” She witnesses “black people…on eyeballs/of newsfeeds…the massacre”; she witnesses “a cop…mouthing off his tongue/to my brother…like my brother wasn’t/a skyscraper or something/like he wasn’t/the bridge that led to boroughs/like he wasn’t/my hero”; she witnesses “a soul, sold, lingering on wires/like converses between telephone poles.” But this witnessing gains a new depth when we see the tenderness that veins the anger. Monet carries readers on a journey from brittle rage to rooted resistance, using her poems to connect with her readers by sharing humanity and love, building a bridge that is also a well. Refreshed and with an army of readers united behind her, she closes the collection with a battle hymn for these “daughters of a new day,” back on “the streets, picket signs in our blood, our ancestors/marching through a nightmare, we rise toward freedom.”
Anna Ziering is a PhD student in English at the University of Connecticut. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, The Slag Review, and The Skylark Review, and with Little Lantern Press and Indolent Books. She teaches at the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop.
BOOK REVIEW: MY MOTHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER BY AJA MONET
Reviewed by John W. W. Zeiser
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Poems by Aja Monet
Haymarket Books, May 2017
$16.00; 120 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1608467679
“Gestures in good faith do not change oppression,” writes Aja Monet in the forward to her collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. This ethos pervades the nearly 200 pages of poetry. It is unsurprising that this sentiment and the poems housed in the book should find a home at Haymarket Books, whose roster includes radical Left luminaries like Angela Davis and the late Howard Zinn, as well as up-and-coming voices on the Left like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Monet’s poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored; she gives voices to the marginalized and forgotten and imagines worlds in which those voices can ring out. Take for example Monet’s quiet honoring of a mother doing what she must in “district two:”
she used her work address
to get us into school, she
could have gone to jail for wanting
her kids to have a decent education
Or there is her insistence “i am a woman carrying other women in my mouth” in “#sayhername” that demands we acknowledge the spiritual violence black women endure. Yet her vision is not simply about those who have toiled to make things possible or who are not here to commune with the living. She also aims high, no less than what she writes in “mobile technology” to “mobilize a revolution of the mind.”
John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, critic and journalist in Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. You may follow him @jwwz
BOOK REVIEW: MY MOTHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER BY AJA MONET
BY JOSH ROARK | MAY 24, 2017
Terrance Hayes says her poetry is “indispensable… These poems are fire.” “Stunning,” declares Angela Davis, “[this] volume reminds us that conflict and contradiction can produce hope and that poetry can orient us toward a future we may not yet realize we want.” With My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, Aja Monet has definitively arrived and the literary world is about to take notice.
“i earned my poetic license so i could say shit
haunted by the blood in me” — from “the young”
Monet is best known for her performances and her extensive social activist work, a small self-published collection entitled The Black Unicorn Sings, and the collaborative & musical work, Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. She’s the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work—she is the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title. Through all of this, her focus has been telling the stories of female heroics, female lives, especially women of color, and a blistering defense of progressive social justice ideals. Notably, Monet was a featured speaker at the Women’s March in Washing D.C., reading the title poem of this very collection. My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter dives deeply into these passions, leading its readers on a dance through the lives, the traumas, and the triumphs of the modern woman of color:
“…she feeds on her hunger
to know herself. she has not yet been taught
to dim, she sits with the stars beneath her feet,
a constellation of thing to come.
as if a swallowed moon, she glimmers.” — from “the ghosts of women once girls”
Much like Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, generations of women, fighters all, live and breath in Monet’s poetry. But where Shire carefully lays out her poems in a short chapbook, one piece at a time, crafting tightly her images and lines—Monet has unfolded the lives of sisters and mothers and little girls with a breathless stream of music. Without a doubt, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is for them—both a treasure box, and an armory.
prophet proph·et \ˈprä-fət\
one gifted with more than ordinary spiritual and moral insight;
one who foretells future events;
an effective or leading spokesman for a cause, doctrine, or group;
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is of three parts: “inner (city) chants,” “witnessing,” and “(un)dressing a wound.” There’s a lot of ground covered in the 160 pages of poetry, a lot of Monet sprawled across the pages, nearly all of her in a rapid pace of breath and music and image.
The scope of the book (with its blistering, beating heart in “witnessing”) is in the prophetic mode of literature. The poems reach beyond national traditions of craft, further back in time, to the very heart of spoken language, to its primal roots: dark, musical, confrontational, dangerous. Like her predecessors Patti Smith & Toni Morrison, Monet uses language and poetry to carve out a voice for the oppressed—calling out the limitations and corruptions of current power, the beatings, the economic abuse, the heavy foot of the politically callous, the ugly indifference of society in its vision for marginalized communities:
“it’s not lost on me
that death is part of life
some die so others live
but who is doing all the dying
exactly
at the expense of all this living” — from “dark matter”
This book moves, it breathes with music on every line. This isn’t a professor’s book of linguistic riddles. My Mother is a voice let loose, a long song dashing between rant and sermon and lament and dance. The poetry carries the reader, you don’t want to put it down, every poem a new melody and new beat, new sounds in the ear. Monet’s performative talents are as clear on the page as on the stage:
“we marooned in the projects
hid in the holy hood of our crown
doused our bodies in albahaca water
blessed by sandhog saints
abre el camino
as hellish hipsters sip on Brooklyn brew” — from “an offering”
You want to read these poems quickly, loosely, letting them set the pace. She uses language to carry the reader forward, not to make them pause and puzzle. Everything is delivered with its own musicality, its own pace. Her poetry doesn’t follow technical rhythmic structures, but flows loosely as if they were born first in the ear and second on the page
These strands of prophecy and music come together with great force in the title poem, “my mother was a freedom fighter”. Monet slows down to write in a series of long-lined quatrains, full of daring and beautiful images stacked back to back:
“she testifies a night song on the wooly back of a mammoth,
shadowboxing rivulets, a mother’s cowl falls to her feet,
a fist in the pouch of a honey-hipped negra hill towering
over the country…”
The effect is simply beautiful—the poem is simply beautiful, especially as the previous poems in the section were so burningly specific to our place and cultural moment. Through this ode to her mother, Monet turns us to poetic flight, to the true goal of prophecy: ground yourself in the heroic past to lift yourselves to a heroic future.
“…because the eye of the storm within her,
they called her magic. merely more, she was
a freedom fighter and she taught us how to fight.”
Historically, prophets are not treated well. Only once they’re safely in the grave do we turn back and bestow their proper title—but not so for all the voices rising today, the queer voices, the brown voices, the voices on the frontier of poetry’s future, making camp, preparing the path.
For all it’s beauty and vitality, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is not without flaw, and Monet could have likely left out a few pieces without sacrificing the overall effect. A number of poems call out for some attentive tightening and focus—a reader can see the growth to come in her writing as she matures on the page across the length of the book. However, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter‘s music trumps any hesitations, and these issues are minor in comparison to the overwhelmingly generous scope of what Monet gifts to the reader.
Hers is a voice pressing against injustice wherever it can, singing out accusations, threats—laying bare the realities of the oppressed and declaring their existences unjust. She’s not afraid of any one or any system, and this book is a torch in the dark, a raucous and defiant singing on the horizon.
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet
November 29, 2017 BOOK REVIEWS No comments
by Claudia Rojas
Aja Monet’s My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter came into my life after someone spoke the words “So you like poetry? Read this.” At that point, the collection was in my hands before I could blink away the good fortune. Unknown to me, Monet’s poetry book was highly anticipated before its May 2017 publication date. If poetry, engaging poetry, is what readers want, this poetry book is it.
The collection is 146 pages of poetry divided into three sections: inner (city) chants; witnessing; (un)dressing a wound. Monet’s sentences don’t begin in capitalization. At several places, the sentences are without punctuation or minimal punctuation. This form may throw off some readers, but it should not discourage any reader.
I was personally attached to the shorter poems, though the poems that span two or three pages are equally insightful. The longest poem spans about five pages. In these pages, repetition and alliteration is used to create captivating rhythms.
In poems like “the body remembers,” personification of household objects comes across as natural and the images leave lasting impressions. The reader, as much as the abuser, can’t but imagine women out of their graveyards. Monet’s command of language is refreshing. Young adult readers and beyond will find themselves right at home with this collection.
The collection describes the experiences of mothers, daughters, siblings, and lovers through pain, disappointment, and struggle. What resonated with me is Monet’s readiness to show us what a mother is: not perfect. In poems like “birth, mark” the speaker, a daughter, is violently shaken and verbally abused by her mother. The anger is felt. The anger hurts. The anger is real. If it wasn’t clear to readers before picking up this copy, anger is a part of many women’s everyday life; women are the object of anger’s wrath or women stifle anger as their voices are silenced.
While many of the poems have a first person speaker, this doesn’t prevent a collective narrative. It’s not just Aja the poet speaking; it’s Aja as an observer and community member. We don’t have to pull names from the collection. There’s no need to distinguish autobiography from imagination because it’s all fair game.
In poems like “black joy,” a four page exploration on joy, Monet defines joy in little pieces and scenes. In poems like the title poem, Monet defines a freedom fighter in a similar way. These poems are a testimony to Monet’s engagement and love for her community. She wants to tell things in ways that will stick with us as she herself has been witness.
The zest in this book feels like debut instead of Monet’s second poetry book. Aja Monet is simply talented and was on tour for the collection from October through November 2017. Monet has a strong following through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, so her online audience ranges anywhere from 12,000 to 17,000 fans. Readings of these poems, along with author interviews, are also available on YouTube.
While this large following may be based on Monet’s slam and spoken word background, these poems undo hearts in their unspoken, written form. They come to us in an hour of need when being woman can get you killed in different parts of the world. My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter reminds us that women matter. These poems come to us from an activist’s core, her ache to be.
My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter gets 5 stars.