Poured Over: Hafizah Augustus Geter on The Black Period

By Miwa Messer / September 24, 2022 at 6:00 am

“I did nothing but read the entire time I was writing this….literally every waking moment, I was doing some type of research and a lot of research I did for this book was on joy and celebration and on community. Because, yes, we’re going through all of these things, but there’s a reason the cover is bright and celebratory, because that’s also where the book goes, where the journey goes.” Hafizah Augustus Geter covers an incredible amount of ground in her memoir The Black Period: past and present, able-bodied and disabled, home and away, grief and love. She joins us on the show to talk about her family’s story and her father’s art, which appears in full color throughout the book, who gets to make history and why, her literary influences and so much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books (Episode):

The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter
A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Yellow House by Sarah Broom (winner of the National Book Award)
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Year of The Tiger by Alice Wong
Border and Rule by Harsha Walia

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Complete transcript of this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and it is my great good fortune to be hanging out with a pal, who also happens to be an acclaimed poet, and now has a memoir called The Black Period, Hafizah Augustus Geter. Oh my god, I’ve missed you. How are you? How are things? Can we talk about your book?

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. It’s so good to see you. I’m so excited to be here.

I want to see if we can get through the show without swearing.

I’m going to follow your lead the first time you slip up, I’m going. I’m taking it down.

Oh, no. You know what your dad, we got to keep your dad in mind. It’s just when I see you, we swear a lot, because we’re very colorful in our language.

There’s a lot to swear about.

Yeah, there is except for your very beautiful book. I knew you were working on this. I mean, we’ve talked about it as you’ve been sort of working on it. Your poetry collection came out two years ago?

Yeah. We started talking about it before I’d really written a word of it.

Yeah, okay. So The Black Period, tell us about your dad’s art, and we’re going to come back to your dad’s art, but I want to start with the title because I think you have a great, great explanation for this title. But I think there might be some people who are looking at this going, huh? Who is this woman? What is this book? And what does the title mean?

Yeah. So you know, the title has several meanings. One of the things, my father is a visual artist, and he loves Goya and he loves Goya’s Black Paintings. They’re essentially the dark heart of man, you know, it looks like someone’s interior demons come to life. And it’s mainly done in blacks. See, my father loved this. I could never quite figure out why he loved it so much. But for him, his thing as a painter, he looked at gorgeous black paintings, and he saw all the skill to be able to render in blacks. And the book has a little over 60 images, there are two color inserts, and the rest of them are black and white. And I think for my father, he’s very much both a painter and someone who uses charcoal and pencil. And written does both color and black and white. And so, you know, I love all the things that Black could do, right? Because, I always joke around with my friends just like, there’s that scene from Malcolm X with Denzel Washington, where he’s reading the dictionary and he’s just like, black means me. You know, how language transfers that blackness is always used describe such darkness, there’s usually not anything positive associated with it. And so for my father to look at this, what is arguably a very difficult set of paintings and see beauty I thought that’s, you know, really seeing that. And learning to draw alongside my father, one of the things we’d do when I was a kid, he would literally just make me shade from lightest to the darkest to see how gradual I could do it. And this idea that light needs the shadows, and it’s all part of it. I thought it was just, like, always a beautiful idea.

And then also attached to it, this book has a preoccupation with time. And I think that, you know, people of color have a preoccupation of time, because we live in and around generations. So we literally have our grandparents living with us. And they’re always talking about history, you know, because slavery really wasn’t that long ago, right? This idea of, essentially, how could I explore the political aspects of time, but also just the way time operates in both our memories, our grief, and also for this idea of how we understand history. I think The 1619 Project has been a perfect example of time as a political notion of where one starts a beginning. And so, really start to think about what has been marked by my adulthood. I think one of the parts I talked about in the introduction is it’s no longer the Age of Innocence or the Age of Aquarius, you know? It’s like the Age of Oppressions, it’s the Age of Climate Change it’s the Age of Wars, you know? And looking at what else has there been? And what else have we been doing inside of all that? And looking at what are all the ways it’s possible to measure time?

The way you move around in time and the way you move around in place, and the way you move around from idea to idea is really profound. I mean, you’re talking about disability, you’re talking about trauma, you’re talking about family history, you’re talking about your own personal history. There is so much happening in this book, but the way it flows is really excellent. So I know you and I were talking about this before it became the book that it is now. But when you sat down— Un-American was done, Wesleyan University Press has put it out. It is very cool. Everyone should read it. But this book, The Black Period, how did we get here?

I mean that’s exactly what the book is trying to figure out, though, is how did we get here? And who gets to declare where here is, right? But in terms of like, the actual physically, how did we get here? I think, you know, I also work in publishing. When I was writing this book, I was an editor and literary agent. One of the things you see writing from like, digests, the black experience, but also the queer experience in writing from, like multiple identities. Like, which one are you going to pick to write about? Because there’s no way that the world has the attention span to understand how it makes us live. Which is something that I can’t agree with, right? And because that also leaves the only options for marginalized writers to be alienation in the world, which is not a thing, right? It’s not actually the only options like, you know, it’s a false option. And the idea that if we’re able to live in it, like navigate through all these multiple planes, like this is what QM Claire do all the time on so many levels. Even me, think about on a language level, that’s code switching, right? And we do like in rooms as well. And so I wanted to think how could I also make something that was mimetic to the experience of life? When you’re standing in line at the checkout store, so many things can…like time goes in and out. We don’t live on a straight line. And so I wanted to create the experience of just how do we connect all these dots, you know?

And also, I think one of the reasons that it’s often said that like, okay, we have to pick one thing to write about, we can write about blackness, we can write about queerness, sometimes we’re allowed to interweave those things together. But then you can’t add ableism and disability on that, and you can’t have Islamophobia on that, you can’t add grief on that. And it’s just like, but why not? For me, it’s just like, I trust my reader. I wanted to try to get as much of it on the page as possible. How much of the human experience, when it’s beyond just whiteness, like, you know, capstone experience. And so I really try to do that. And because at the end of the day, the world is just narrative and the stories we tell, and I think, so few of us actually get the stories we deserve. And so, you know, as I think like part of the craft aspect and just like the storytelling aspect is this idea of literally revising, of having to revise one’s life, one’s origin story. My mom was a Nigerian woman. My father is black man who was born in Alabama during Jim Crow and George Wallace. They willed their stories together to raise us. And, you know, my mother didn’t move to the US until after she had us. We moved here when I was three, my sister was six. And, you know, we settled in Akron, Ohio, and we spent like most of our childhood celebrating Kwanzaa and Kwanzaa is in the book as this idea of looking at it as just this Pan African way to write a new origin story. Like the 90s when the people who were kind of like the adults leading us and in the stories and trying to revise the stories, thinking about where they came from. We’re thirty years outside of civil rights, you know. My father’s coming from a time when he wasn’t legally allowed to go to integrated schools until high school. He was, I think, I did the math, the last enslaved person died when he was in his preteens or teenage years. He was alive at the same time someone who was born into slavery was alive. I think all of that kind of wove into this idea of what it means to revise a story to get to something truer.

And it’s not just the story of revision though, because you talk about being in Europe when you were in college, and there’s this line that I love. And just for setup, I mean, you’re looking at a lot of art, you’re connecting with this art, your dad has shown you a whole way to look at the architecture and art of cathedrals. And you’re standing there and I’m quoting you, a world where art was more than just art, it was memory and it was documentation. And that, so much of that memory and documentation gets taken away if you’re an immigrant. It gets taken away if you’re living in exile within a country. I mean, there are exile you don’t have to physically leave a place to be living in exile. And I really want to talk about that because so many different pieces of this book pull from that very idea. That memory and documentation are the basis of the creative piece of us, whether that’s the visual arts or words, whether that’s poetry or narrative, writing. So I want to sit with that for a second, because here you are and you’re talking about your mom coming to the States. She’s Nigerian, she’s Muslim. Your dad from Alabama raised Christian, Catholic, actually. You went to Catholic school, right?

Yeah. I went to Catholic school. My father was raised Southern Baptists.

Okay. All right. So, you’ve got all of these different traditions whirling around. And obviously, your mother is not really open about her practice. I mean, she’s not hiding it from you guys but she’s also not open about it. And it’s a very different point in American history. And your parents are of a generation where they’re not telling the kids everything. It’s not like they’re sitting you down at the dinner table and saying, let’s talk about all things.

Yeah, when you’re an adult you try to file all those stories in every time.

See, you’ve got to dig around. And you’ve got to figure out how to tell these stories, and you’ve got to find them in order to tell them. So we’re standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon when this book opens, which was not what I was expecting, okay, straight up, like, why the Grand Canyon?

It happened right before the pandemic, we were literally like me and my wife, imagine Camille and her husband. We’re literally about to go on a road trip across the Southwest. My wife’s parents live in Phoenix, and we’ve just landed there. We’re driving to the Grand Canyon. COVID was just really starting, it’s been on the news, but like, things were just starting to close. And we’re staying in the Grand Canyon. And people, you know, it’s a tourist attraction, but to the extreme in which literally, the whole world is also there. Someone coughs and we’re just like, we’re done, we need to leave and go back home. The Navajo Nation was closed, which is like, also an interesting moment to be standing at what is for geological purposes, like a place where you’re going see the beginning of time, as time is stopping all around us and in ways that we would only really begin to understand.

This is where you start to weave in this narrative of disability. This is where you start to weave in ideas about what is stolen versus what is lost. I mean, this is I can see the poet’s brain turning, but also this is you as cultural critic, and sitting down and really doing the research. I mean, there are some court cases in here that I honestly didn’t know had happened, until I’d read the book. So you’re starting, obviously, you’re starting with the image, you’re starting with family, you’re starting with all of the things that you have relative access to, besides your parents being very silent about stuff in the past. But now you’ve got to layer in the stuff that goes beyond the personal. And I want to know, sort of what that process was like for you. Because I mean, here you are excavating stuff, and we’re going to get to some tricky stuff. But you’re excavating your own life. Your parents lives. And your mother died when you were 19 but she wasn’t telling you everything prior to that. So now you’re chasing other people’s stories on top of it. So what’s happening here?

I think it really tied to the idea of where does the history start? And this idea that while we each have our own individual histories, all our histories are shared, right? And at the end of the day, how do we work together as people in order to achieve shared liberation, right? And while I’m acknowledging and living directly in the legacy of what of transAtlantic slavery and what has happened to black people, that is also a part of the legacy of indigenous genocide, right? And what indigenous and native people are dealing with in the very current time. And the idea that okay, this country is essentially a history told by leaving out most history. Like that is what the fight about CRT is. It’s about where history gets to start, and who gets to tell it. And as a black person, as a queer person, like, it’s so easy to understand, you look at all these histories that are told as though we don’t exist and like haven’t created half of them. And you see how untrustworthy it is. The last thing I wanted to do was create another untrustworthy history. I know that we were kidnapped to this country, we’re not the first people here.

This idea that we’re standing at the Grand Canyon, which is like this immensely beautiful place. And it wasn’t until… you can just go there, you go there, you pay your money and you just get to look at something that is like, actually, physically, just incomprehensible, just like how beautiful it is. And like what you’re actually looking at in terms of science, but then, later when I was just looking at stuff about the Grand Canyon, I come across Havasupai Elementary School, they live in supine village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, it’s where the tribe lives. And since they’ve come, like their origins in this country, they have occupied the Grand Canyon, that base as well as like the plateaus. But of course, they’ve lost so much of their home. But they are literally the first people documented in North America. Also the school down there, it’s also one of the most under resourced. And children are being arrested for things like pulling a computer cord out of the back of a monitor. I mean, it’s just like completely outrageous stuff. And it’s a product of their ADHD or other coping, or other issues around, like complex trauma. And so really looking at, like, what is it? What does it actually look like to survive this country? And just looking at the amount of work the Havasupai tribe does in combination with the Native American Disability Law Center, to put together a landmark case, which they sued the federal government on behalf of students with disability, which includes complex trauma. Because complex trauma, it impacts the way a child learns, and students with disabilities were being limited to like three hours of instruction a week, sometimes they just had the janitor come teach because they are not getting the resources that they need. And it’s absolutely atrocious. So this is happening at the base of the Grand Canyon and at the top of it, what we see is a gorgeous view. The incongruity of that is just like trying to, you know, I think that as a black person, we are taught by our families and our parents to deal with the contradictions of this country. But that is one of those contradictions I was really trying to just get my head around. They won their case, using precedent that I talk about from a school in Compton. But looking at this idea of, it’s easy to think the world is doomed, we’re never going to win, because that’s also with the algorithm shows us. But with the Havasupai elementary case and this school in Compton that sued for students with disabilities, it has the possibility of changing education for every child in the nation, right? And that in that is done by… if you want to talk about a Goliath tale, right? Like, we have the poorest school district in the country, and Compton, which we know is portrayed as a site of pure violence, who take on the federal government. And when? You know, and thinking of like, the power that is actually in community. The Compton students did not know that the Havasupai students would need their fight that they started. But they did, like that is how in community we can actually create change. And so I think it’s trying to see, like looking at the Grand Canyon, there’s just so much to see both just the beauty of the landscape, the foliage, the layers of time, but then there is all of that happening around us as well. And so really, the thing is, there’s one thing that I’ve paid to see, and there’s one thing I’m conditioned to see and that is the actual National Park of it. Which even that is a theft, you know? And so trying to be like, okay, like, what if I just let a little more into my vision? What else do I see?

Yeah, and I think it’s really important to focus on the hope piece too. I mean, these are communities fighting on behalf of their children. You know, I realized we’re probably giving people an idea that this is a very intense book. But there’s a lot of joy in this book, part of that comes from your dad’s art, I love your dad’s work, and I’m desperate to meet your dad. I’m so desperate. And I want to talk though, about balancing the art, because some of your dad’s stuff is light and you can see sort of an instant joy to it. And some of it is very intense, and very specific. I mean, the man has a range, he’s very cool. But I want to talk about balancing your words with your dad’s images. I mean, obviously, he’s taught you how to draw, he’s raised you into an adult, like, he’s your dad, but you do both share a very specific artistic vision. And yet, you also bring what you bring.

I think that in terms of balancing it, it was kind of just intuitive. I mean, like growing up, there was just art everywhere. Art stacked against the walls, like rooms we weren’t using that turned into more storage for his art. I can literally track years of my life by what he was making. I can literally track years of my life by the way his styles have changed. I know which house we lived in by looking at a painting. I know who was there, and so much of the people that he painted were, you know, family, friends, or just people’s kids, it was the community. You know, it was such an obvious part of my life that when I started writing the book, there was ever an iteration of it that existed without his images. Because it didn’t feel like it was possible to tell that true story. And for people who haven’t read it yet, he also did the cover images. You can see a little signature which is my favorite part. The fun part about being together just being like, okay, well, I really am my father’s daughter. And the way it works, and how so much or of our arts are in conversation. But yeah, I think that one of the things I love about my dad’s work is that it covers serious topics like climate change, politics, violence against black people. It’s also full of joy. My father… the black church, right? There’s this thing about growing up seeing people catch the spirit, seeing people like lose themselves into a feeling. But in having that losing beat be only possible in a community setting. I think my father’s from a time when, I think this is still true, but even more so, that you could not survive as a black person without community. And so, his work is really, I think, like tied to that. And you know, his favorite, one of his favorite, stories to tell me about when he went to go get his MFA from Ohio University. He came back and he’d drawn some bottles or something, so, to my grandmother, she was just like, okay, it was like a still life. And she’s just like, why are you doing it if it’s not helping anybody? And he said that after that he never looked at the work as the same. That what he needed, what he was doing, had to be helping somebody. And I think he’s really instilled that in me. And I think that one of the things this book is really trying to do is the same thing that my father tries to do with his art, is understand. It’s to be able to be like, what am I looking at? Because so much of this book is just me trying to figure out like, what am I looking at.

We have to look at what is in front of us, we need the context. And that’s the beauty of books. And that’s the thing I’ve always appreciated about books is the fact that they give us context. And we’re not just grabbing an idea that sort of floating around, I mean, we need to figure out and I love the idea that your dad creates art specifically to help and then it’s not just a still life. Because art to me, whether it’s visual art or film or writing or poetry or whatever. Art to me is an act of connection. And it’s meant to be an act of connection, whether or not you’re building a community as a result of that. I mean, community is great if you can get that. But even if you connect with just one person. Because honestly, what’s the point of it? We all need to connect and that, to me, is something that we can’t ever lose sight of. But that honesty, that piece where it’s like, we have to look at the ugly stuff in order to understand how great the good stuff is. I mean, it’s complicated. It’s really complicated. And you talk about your own shame, and I’m quoting you for a second because I really liked to do this apparently, you talk about your shame being a ghost story.

You know, this book is also trying to unpack shame, like, what is it? You know, and I think one of the lines I have in the book is, in many ways, in my experience, as a black person who has been, though not born, but raised most of her life, in America. Shame is America testing how long its history can last inside certain people, right? And so this idea of any shame that we might have around queerness, that is part of a patriot, heterosexual, patriarchal type of like a system of oppression. Or this idea of even trying to understand shame around ableism, right, and disability. And shame around understanding myself, as someone with a disability. You start to read, and then the moment you just take one step back, and then you take another and you take another, then you end up in a place where you’re learning that so much of ableism is tied to this idea of who has the body to produce in capitalism? And that, like ableism is part of, you know, what helped contribute to the enslavement of black people. And then the genocide of indigenous people, because black people were seen to have bodies made to work. And indigenous people were seen as not. You know, so they were expendable in capitalism, right? Who is the master all of this is serving? In terms of actually freeing yourself, that is how you actually free yourself from these systems. The book talks about how shame is a tool of patriarchy because so often, shame produces paralysis. You can’t act. You can’t defend yourself, you can’t defend others, right? And so this idea of like, where does shame come from? And how does one get rid of it? Also, who is the shame in service of? And then I kept coming back to one culprit, America.

You have a line from the New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal that I really, I’ve been dying to ask you this question. Because you asked it in the book and I’m not sure either you or I have a specific answer yet. But I really love this question. What would it look like to emerge from erasure? And what is the verb, the answer demands? So I mean, this is one of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation. How do you put yourself back in the narrative? How do you put yourself into the history? So, if you’re taking yourself out of erasure, what is that verb?

The way that book resolves it is, you know, in this work of revision, right? To emerge from erasure, you have to have something to write in. So whose story are you going to write in? Because the dominant story is this one given to us by white supremacy. And is that the story you’re going to write? Because white supremacy tries to convince you that that is the only story that exists. But you know, as a black person, just the existence of black people shows me that it’s not and because this mania over CRT is just like…The things I know about black people I did not learn about in school. We’ve always had to educate ourselves. And so, when I was investigating Parul’s question of what does it look like to emerge from erasure? You know, I was very lucky in the fact that my parents had given me a different story that I could go back for, and I think the thing that I liked so much about Parul’s question is the verb, right? Like, look, it demands that you do something. How do you find the paths that you can use? Because there is no like one story of the past. There are many narratives of the past. It always depends on who is telling, who has the power to declare what a fact is. This was back when facts meant more than they do now. Who has the power to architect the story you will wear in your life?

Yeah, I mean, for me I kept coming back to connecting as a verb for everything you were trying to do in this book and everything that writers in general are trying to do. I don’t need my exact details showing up. I mean, if I need my exact details, well, John Cheever and John Updike have written quite a lot of that stuff and I can go back to it at any moment and relive my childhood. I use them for handbooks to understand my dad and his friends. Seriously, I did. But I mean, at the same time, I don’t need the details to align perfectly with my own. I need the idea that I can… you should see what I did to your galley my friend…that I can find the truth of my own life, in your childhood in Ohio, or your trips back to Nigeria, or you went to Gambia at one point, right? Your brother in law’s is from Gambia. And I’ve never met your parents, and I’m just like, oh, I understand these parents. I mean, if you have an immigrant parent, right, so my mother came here to go to college and never left, but, I mean, yeah, there’s certain stuff we’re like, yep. Yep. Yep. I mean, America will raise an eyebrow at many of us and we’re kind of like, hi. Yeah, you and I can laugh about it to certain extent because there’s a lot of shared experience, but at the same time we need to acknowledge the stuff that isn’t right. And we need to acknowledge the stuff that’s busted. Because if we don’t acknowledge that stuff, then we’re not going to be able to make any progress. But we’re also not necessarily going to connect in a really true and honest way. And I just think you have to look at what’s in front of you. And sometimes, it’s messy. And sometimes it’s, I mean, climate change. It’s all of this kind of stuff. And that does also bring me to the two brothers that you’ve dedicated the book to. And I do want to bring this up, because again, they are not necessarily members of your family and yet, it makes so much sense that these are the brothers you dedicated The Black Period to. So, can we just bring that up? Because it goes back to 2012. And it involves climate change and involves the city and a lot of what you’re talking about.

We’re on the cusp of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Sandy. And so, in the book I’ve got a chapter called This Could Still Happen Anywhere. And it’s about Glenda Moore, who she and her husband lived in Staten Island during Hurricane Sandy. And her husband is Irish immigrant and sanitation worker. Glenda Moore, is a black woman, and he’s at work, he was called into work by the government. And Glenda Moore was trying to evacuate with her two and four year old sons, Brandon and Connor Moore. And their car gets overtaken by the by the flood, and she is trying to get her neighbors to let her and her sons in, and no one will let her in. And she and her sons cling to a tree for hours. And her sons, both of her sons get washed away in the storm, and they die. And they’re found a few yards apart from each other a few days later, but one of the things that really struck me is there’s this news clip where they’re talking to one of her neighbors, it’s a white guy, and they’re insisting that they all thought it was a black man at the door. Like it sounded like a much bigger, blacker man, you know, and that’s so complex, you know, this idea that like in a hurricane, who’s allowed to be afraid? Who’s allowed to need help? Even in a hurricane, people were thinking that black people were out there to loot. Like thinking about that she’s out there for 12 hours, thinking about how long that is to be out there and like having her children just be, you know, just be like this state sanction murder, essentially. Because you think, that action doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All of history had to happen this way for her neighbors to refuse to open the door for this woman who’s like five foot three. And like not that that even matters, you know, and to let these two children be washed away. And the neighbor that they’re interviewing, he’s been interviewed by a white newscaster, and he then and like, there’s this little argument back and forth from the newscasters just like, no, it was a mother. And then, and then the guy is just like, well, that’s too bad, she shouldn’t have been out there and he absolves himself. What do you do with that grief? What do you do with that rage? And how do you make sense of that?

It’s connected to so much. The epigraph of that chapter comes from Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, the book, which is about Susan Smith, who drowned her children and made up a mythical black man who had done it. And it’s just like, you know, in this in Hurricane Sandy, none of her neighbors would open the door for a black man, but in the aftermath, they all reach for that black, this imaginary black man to justify their actions. You know? And that contradiction, it’s just like, the idea that black people don’t walk around this country and just like… how we can manage to do things, in addition to our rage is, you know, is incredible when you think about all the things that are happening. And this idea that all the things that have to happen to black people for this cruelty. And all of this is happening by people who would declare themselves good people and good neighbors, but she doesn’t get to be, Glenda Moore doesn’t get to be a neighbor, you know, she’s a black woman who could be a dangerous black man. And there’s like, the politics of, you know, just, of the misgendering. And the masculineness of all that. It’s just so complicated. But this idea of looking, when you’re talking about earlier documentation, like she lost her two sons. And like loss isn’t even the right verb, because this mysteriously happened. But it’s like, what do I, what do we, owe Glenda? And it’s easy to be like the neighbor who was like, well that’s a shame, she shouldn’t have been out there.

But this idea of I would rather not look away… black people, you know, we were raised in the tradition of witness and testimony. And at the very least we owe her our witness, and I owe her my testimony. And even if there is a way to absolve myself of that, I wouldn’t. Because there’s something that black people especially know, what it is to grieve together. And the importance of just like having a community to help hold your grief. And I remember when I read about it, shortly after Hurricane Sandy, this thing that barely affected me at all, in the same city as her even though she’s a stranger, I don’t feel it as a stranger. And a lot of that has to do with the way black people are. Like the way oppression connects us. But that’s also what I’m trying to do, especially with that chapter that we don’t all know what it is to have each other’s experiences, but one thing that is for sure is America is killing us all. You know, it is literally killing us all. Whether it be it’s just killing some of us faster and in a far more direct ways. Black people, beyond police shooting and thinking about like, what’s happening in Jackson, Mississippi, with water. You know, black communities of color and black communities don’t have water, right? And think about what’s happening with climate change. You see, especially young people, they are protesting because their futures are being stolen from them. America is killing us. Also, even if we don’t have the experiences in common. One of the things that the book is trying to do by weaving all these things together is that we do have our traumatizer in common, right? Because most people aren’t Jeff Bezos, right? America only loves billionaires. It really does. For my poetry book on Un-American, the title poem, I kind of end like something about this country belongs to no one I love. And someone was trying to be like, I don’t agree with that. And it’s like, but I don’t know any billionaires. But some people are convinced this country cares about them. But I’m just like, no. This, like everything, is in service of capitalism. And the people who protect the system of power, they’re as expendable as the rest of us.

You are wrestling with big ideas and unpleasant moments and unpleasant shared moments, climate change hits all of us. It really does. But I want to talk about the art of the sentences because if you’re not focusing on the art, as you’re wrestling with all of these big ideas, you’re going to get lost as the writer you are going to get lost. So we need to talk about you as a poet. We need to talk about you as a memoirist, what you’re willing to put on the page. You’ve talked about revision throughout this conversation, but I want to talk about the art. I want to talk about some of the writers who helped make you Hafizah Augustus Geter.

I did nothing but read the entire time I was writing this. Like, when I wasn’t reading books, I spent an enormous amount of time on JSTOR. JSTOR. I love JSTOR. And I just had an app that would read aloud PDFs to me. And so I literally every waking moment, I was doing some type of research and a lot of research I did for this book was on joy and celebration and on community. Because, yes, we’re going through all of these things, but there’s a reason the cover is bright and celebratory, because that’s also where we’re the book goes. Where the journey goes. I have a chapter that’s talking about some of the protests that have happened over the last few years, around Black Lives Matter and just around black people protesting whether it is, you know, for voting access or just like safety from the police. And so someone put together I think, a Google Doc, where they had clips of dancing from all the protests that have occurred all over the country, which is just, like, just so amazing. And the thing I loved about that, is just how much it just reminds me of childhood when my parents would have friends over and everyone would be like, talking louder. Are they fighting? Are they organizing? Or are they laughing? You know, even though the work of survival is difficult, there’s joy that comes from doing it together. And I love that you go to a protest, you see a black marching band, you see someone twerking, and it’s like a cross between like Freaknik and Afro punk and like a Kwanzaa celebration. But I think, to your question of some of the writers… I read widely. Also like podcasts. I listened a whole bunch of Still Processing.

Oh, I love that show.

I listened to it a few times. The whoopee episode is my favorite. I also use that, I use everything from text to podcasts for ideas of structure. Because the way Still Processing weaves together through politics, culture, all of the things, it’s a craft lesson. I spent a lot of time with Angela Davis. I spent a lot of time Marin Kava, because also this book is about the personal work of abolition too. How do we dismantle our carceral systems? Because shame is a carceral system. Like preventing yourself from grieving in the ways you need to, that’s the carceral system. And so like how does one abolish those within yourself because a carceral system is trying to make you hungry for punishment, right? So, it creates a violent world. So I spent a whole lot of time with that. A lot of it was just pure research about like the indigenous tribes and the people that I was writing about. I like let’s see, are the n di N by N Boyer. Hanif’s…

Little Devil in America.

Little Devil in America. Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is brilliant. Just like both on a historical level, on a personal level, on a craft level. The book that I have kind of like… the acknowledgments section, I can’t remember how many are in there, maybe I distilled it down to a few 100? But there are also my primary sources, I was literally just a cookie monster. It just eating as much as I could. Oh, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Amazing. I read Jeff Chang. Like, with its history of music, rap music. I read like Mia Mingus, I think she’s an incredible writer and disability activist. Alice Wong, whose memoir just came out, Year of The Tiger.

In other words, you covered the world.

I covered the world!

This is what I appreciate about your brain. And while I was reading, I mean, obviously I know you and I’m reading this book though and every single month moment that I’m in this is a complete delight. Because between the language, or the ideas that you’re putting in front of me and I can’t sort of turn away from because I don’t want to, but again, it’s the context, we can’t make different decisions if we don’t know what is sitting in front of us. And that’s the thing that I just really want to keep stressing with this book is there is your dad’s art, which is fantastic. You do throw in some very funny stories about you as a tiny person, and maybe some choices you could have made differently. But as a fellow tiny person who could have made different choices, I mean, yeah, this is partially why you and I get along so well. It’s like, hey, we survived some bad choices. And more importantly, what you and I just made it through, a podcast taping and neither of us swore. How did that happen?!

I feel like there could be a swear in there.

No, no, no.

But Border and Rule by Harsha Walia is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. And I think that she is essentially, she’s showing how borders are manufactured and how the border crisis is the manufacture of capitalism, and how it all mixes with climate change. But I think that what really was influential to me about writing this book, you know, she talks about, I’m pretty sure it’s in this book, where she’s talking about, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, right? Because there are, like, when you think about the tentacles of oppression, it’s just like an octopus with a million million arms. But her point is that because they’re all connected to this one head that they’re all in the service of, Harsha Walia points out that because all those tentacles are connected, that if you do your thing, I do my thing, it all goes towards the head of that monster, right? And so, you don’t have to solve it all. Because it all gets connected. And that is actually pretty liberating. I think that’s why people hate Twitter. I’m just like, Twitter is an algorithm, and you control who you follow. And like, I follow thinkers and I follow activists because as much as the world is falling apart, there are so many people who are fighting for freedom, fighting for justice, and doing it in a community. Doing this book, and doing the research, it made me a hardcore optimist, in terms of like the world.

Yeah, because here’s the thing. I mean, you’re giving us a blueprint for showing up. That is pretty cool. And that’s not something that every book can do. And more books than not can do that. But you’ve done a pretty cool thing. And I’m slightly biased because you’re a pal, but also the book is really, it is terrific. The Black Period is out now. I really hope that people understand that there is a lot of joy and a lot of just genuine love in this book. But yeah, it’s two sides of the same coin.

I cover Lauryn Hill, I cover Kwanzaa, I covered, Dolly the sheep gets a mention. The 90s were wild, we cloned a sheep.

We were barbarians. But that’s another conversation to have, you understand? That’s a totally different conversation.

Totally different conversation.

I adore you. We’ll figure out when the next one. Oh, and actually, before I let you go, what is next?

I’m working on nonfiction, our next nonfiction book. It’s literally called Being Around and it’s about being around like, you know, there’s a subset of hanging out. Yeah. And it’s about essentially those like little moments that make us who we are. And then I am slogging my way through learning to write fiction and I’m writing a novel about borders and Pangea, kanji comes back.

Okay. I will read both of those things. I can be patient. I waited for this one. I waited for this one! I’ll wait for the next two. It’s so good to see you. But you know, I suppose I should let you get back to your life.

Thank you so much for this.