An Interview with Aurielle Marie: On Gumbo Ya Ya and the Cultivation of Other Worlds for Black Gxrls
By emerald faith
Aurielle Marie’s poetry collection, Gumbo Ya Ya, is a demand for and insistence on the cultivation of other worlds where Black gxrls are free from constant violence, terror, regulation, and judgement – where joy, pleasure, and peace are not only possible but abundant.
“Location grounds us to time, to memory, and for me, the South is both the home of my political analysis and the inertia that moves my pen.”
Award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie (she/they) is a Black queer storyteller, a political organizer, and child of the Deep South by way of Atlanta. Co-founder of the grassroots community-led political coalition It’s Bigger Than You, and noted cultural strategist for organizations on the frontlines of abolition, demilitarization, and anti-racism/anti-policing efforts, she is also a powerful public speaker, facilitator, and multi-modal performance artist.
Aurielle has received many awards for her political activism, including being named one of Creative Loafing Atlanta’s 20 People to Watch (2015), being a Kopkind Colony Journalism/Activism awardee, a 2016 Roddenberry Fellowship Finalist, and a current fellow of the Freedomways Reporting Project. She’s been featured as a political pundit on many notable news broadcasts, including CNN’s Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin. In 2018, Aurielle was the creator of #ElleofTwoCities, an online web series produced by Blossom Television that brought a social justice perspective to pop-cultural trending topics. The series became a multimedia teaching tool for students pursuing secondary education
Aurielle’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in the TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Black Warrior, BOAAT Journal, Sycamore Review, Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Palette Poetry, and Ploughshares. She's received invitations to fellowships from Lambda Literary, VONA Voices, and Tin House. Aurielle is a 2017 winner of the Blue Mesa Review poetry award, and earned a Write Bloody Book prize. She’s the Lambda Literary 2019 Poetry Emerging Writer-in-Residence. She won the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Award for Poetry. Aurielle’s poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya is the 2020 winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press. As an essayist, Aurielle explores subjects of justice, Blackness, bodies, sex and pop culture in an urgent and lyrical voice, from a Black feminist lens. She has bylines in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Allure Magazine, Essence, Wear Your Voice, NBC, and Teen Vogue.
In October, I talked with Aurielle about their new poetry collection, their history as an organizer and movement builder, the impact of the South -- specifically Atlanta -- on their collection, and what a soundtrack to Gumbo Ya Ya might sound like. As someone who has been witness to Aurielle’s artistry since we were 8th graders, it is so beautiful to see this collection enter the world.
emerald faith (ef): One of the themes that is consistent throughout Gumbo Ya Ya is your demand for and insistence on laboring towards the cultivation of other worlds where Black gxrls are free from constant violence, terror, regulation, judgment, etc. – where joy, pleasure, and peace are not only possible but abundant. Gumbo Ya Yailluminates, for me, how poetry itself is one of many ways that you are laboring towards these other worlds within a constellation and lineage of other Black queer feminist world-builders, even as you reiterate the failures of language in other ways. With this, who do you consider to be your Black queer feminist literary elders and ancestors? What lineage do you see Gumbo Ya Ya situated in?
“I think of Dionne Brand and June Jordan as foremothers for what Gumbo Ya Ya is searching for in theme and theory.”
Aurielle Marie (AM): I have been thinking a lot about the idea of fugitive poetics. If there is a canon of fugitive writers, what does that mean and is there a way to map their work and to place my own inside their particular tradition. Theorist and poet Fred Moten says that fugitivity is a desire for and a spirit of escape, a transgression of what is considered “proper” by oppressive society. It’s a desire for the outside, being ourselves outside, being outlaw and running from the places we consider ourselves enchained. I think of Dionne Brand and June Jordan as foremothers for what Gumbo Ya Ya is searching for in theme and theory. Sonia Snachez, Ntozake Shange, Amiri Baraka, and contemporaries like Douglas Kearney explore the sound and shape of fugitivity on the page in ways that guide me.
Image of poet Aurielle Marie. Photo courtesy of Aurielle Marie.
ef: I want to ask you about love because it is something you elaborate on both implicitly and explicitly throughout the collection. How did writing Gumbo Ya Ya clarify or help you (re)define what love means and is to you?
AM: I had to be intimate with the state of my own self-image. Otherwise, there wouldn’t really have been a way to write a book in which Black gxrls are seen and loved fiercely. There are so many voices telling us (Black femmes) that we aren’t worthy of adoration and admiration, that we don’t deserve tenderness, that we should be satisfied with loveless lives. I call bullshit. It doesn’t escape my attention that selling the lie, gaslighting Black femmes into lovelessness, encourages structural and interpersonal violence against us.
“It doesn’t escape my attention that selling the lie, gaslighting Black femmes into lovelessness, encourages structural and interpersonal violence against us. Designating Black femmes unworthy of honor and dignity then designates our bodies as appropriate canvases for harm. So, love binds the collection to its mission: to ensure safety and ferocity and yes, adoration for Black femmes.”
Designating Black femmes unworthy of honor and dignity then designates our bodies as appropriate canvases for harm. So, love binds the collection to its mission: to ensure safety and ferocity and yes, adoration for Black femmes. Because for a Black femme, the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s violence. It is the invisibilization, the dehumanization, the reduction and the flattening of us. So, love must be the war song, the ancestral map, the memory, the act of witness. To protect us.
ef: Gumbo Ya Ya is also about grief and mourning, how you were failed by people in different ways and all that’s been stolen and lost. Can you talk a bit about the impact of the south in general and the westside of Atlanta (as you know it) on who you are now, your history as an organizer and movement builder, and on the collection itself?
Front cover image of Gumbo Ya Ya. Photo courtesy of Aurielle Marie.
AM: I’m still the young organizer in the back of a police wagon (whispering Paul Lawrence Dunbar) and singing southern church hymns because I thought I wouldn’t survive the 13 hours I was kidnapped. I write these poems from a hometown that is deeply, profoundly Black, and so has maybe been even less safe of a place for Black bodies. Fathers feel more protective of what Black masculinity can mean-- must mean-- in the Black mecca. The Black policemen are trying to prove their Blackness doesn’t betray their police identity, so they brutalize with a sinister ease. But the joy, too. The joy is concentrated. It lasts. This city truly is a wild place to be raised.
Somehow my relationship to here gave me enough room to look at the macro-ness of “place” (as a concept, as an idea) as it related to gender, sex, violence, etc. And then, I zoomed in: the corner of Lowery and MLK where I was cat-called for the first time, the clubs we snuck into at 16 and 17 years old, the bar I fought with my father in, the intersection where I was kicked in the ribs by an officer. Location grounds us to time, to memory, and for me, the South is both the home of my political analysis and the inertia that moves my pen.
ef: If Gumbo Ya Ya had an accompanying soundtrack or Spotify playlist, who/what would be featured on it?
AM: I’m actually curating one! Of course, so many southern greats would HAVE to be there. Atlanta’s very own Yani Mo, Spillage Village, and Outkast. Bbymutha, Leikeli47, Rico Nasty and Noname too. Nubya Garcia and Ibeyi would be on there to ground us in spirit and the legacy of jazz. Basically, just a playlist of badass, loud ass, dope ass Black non-men.
ef: What does a Black Woman Radical mean to you?
“The times I feel most comfortable with gender are when I think about the corrosive properties of identity and audacity.”
AM: The times I feel most comfortable with gender are when I think about the corrosive properties of identity and audacity. Sure, woman. Woman, as in the destruction or weakening of the patriarchy. Not softness but indignance, defiance. Not feminine but feral, fertile as in the ability to multiply. Black, meaning fugitive of course.
On the run. Leaving these institutions in our wake, on our way to build the freest thing in a field somewhere. We build the new, free thing, and watch it multiply. Whew. I wanna be there.
For more information about Aurielle Marie and Gumbo Ya Ya, please visit here and here.