Radical Poetics: Inside The Radiant Mind of Maya Marshall
Poet, writer, and editor, Maya Marshall. Photo courtesy of Marshall. Photo Credit: Ashley Kauschinger.
By Jaimee A. Swift
A poet, writer, and editor, Maya Marshall is an ingenious literary force to be reckoned with.
Maya Marshall is a name that should be seared into the minds of everyone who comes across her powerful work. Creative and intelligent beyond measure, it is Marshall’s immense love for poetry and her profound talent in writing it, her remarkable apt for reading, and her passion for helping others to become better writers and readers are what makes her not only uniquely gifted but remarkably radical.
Based in Chicago, Illinois but raised in Houston, Texas, Marshall works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books, a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher. The author of the chapbook, Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), her debut poetry collection, All the Blood Involved in Love, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books. With Marshall’s poems having been published in Best New Poets 2019 (University of Virginia Press), she received a Pushcart nomination from Pushcart Press, a New York state-based publishing house. Completing her Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of South Carolina, her writing has appeared in RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, and more.
A former senior editor for [PANK], a literary magazine focused on poetry and prose, Marshall is co-founder of underbellymag.com, “the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision.” She has received several prominent fellowships from artist colonies and organizations such as The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and The Watering Hole.
Black Women Radicals spoke with Marshall about her poetry; advice she would give to younger poets; her thoughts on the role and responsibility of the Black writer/creative/poet; her forthcoming poetry book, All the Blood Involved in Love; and more.
Jaimee Swift (JS): Why poetry? What was the catalyst that led you to become a poet?
Maya Marshall (MM): “I was a nerd, a little bookish nerd. I was raised by my mom who was an artist and an arts coordinator. I would go with her on her one-woman show around Texas where she wrote a play––a one-woman play––about Audre Lorde. She worked for the Black Arts Alliance in Austin and I would go to the office with her. One way she could keep me busy was by giving me paper to write and draw and so I sat in the corner and wrote little poems. By middle school I was in a program called Writers in the Schools (WITS) in Houston, which is where I grew up. Because my mom was a grant writer for them, I spent plenty of time in that office. I was pretty much this middle-schooler, suspender-wearing, cafe-dwelling kid. By high school, I was working in a café reading Charles Bukowski, James Baldwin, and June Jordan and because my closest friends were books and albums, it was so second nature. When I was 16, I thought I wanted to be a book person and I thought that meant I had to be a professor. When I got to college, I thought no one could really be a writer because it is too risky––it is like trying to be an actor. Then I thought I should be a high school teacher. And when I was not at the right college and without any real focus, the things that offered solace were poems and practicing writing them. So I did that all the years after college when I wasn’t sure about how to build a career around writing. And then I finally found a community here in Chicago that was built around going to live readings and hosting living room workshops. At this point, I think everyone who is in my adult life is in my life because of poetry or tangentially related to it. It has always been around, you know? When I would skip school, I sat at bookstores and read poems. I sat and read, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, at Bookstop off of South Shepherd in Houston because I don’t know, I was a malcontent teenager as teenagers are. I was also raised in the arts and so that always felt like home.”
“By high school, I was working in a café reading Charles Bukowski, James Baldwin, and June Jordan and because my closest friends were books and albums, it was so second nature.”
JS: It is amazing that the arts have always been with you and are a part of you, even at such an early age.
MM: “Yes. And also, my dad was a city manager or chief operating officer or whatever––he was the dude right behind the mayor in every city he worked in his career. So politics and art were always an intersection for my parents and my upbringing in either of their homes.”
JS: In an interview for Underline Poetry you stated: “Because I am not straight, my life doesn’t look like my parents’ lives or my siblings’ lives and articulating that privately before I then talk to them about it is important.” With this, what was the pathway and journey of and to finding your voice poetically, personally, and politically?
MM: “I think what I was referring to when I made that comment was about needing to clarify what feels like talking about our collective lives privately. For me to choose to put my business into a book is my business. [Laughs] I don’t ever want to misrepresent them or to represent poetry as if it is always and somehow non-fiction because it isn’t. So I have the leeway to use parts of our story as my own and as part of a dramatic sculpture, which is what poems are. In order to develop myself outside of the collective––which is a family––I had to say to them what I am and what I am not. And it required me personally to leave. My family doesn’t really have a center. I have one of those––what do you call them? Fragmented families? Mixed families? My parents have various children with various partners. My siblings, I think, are all in their only marriages in their various cities with their various configurations of children. Because I am not heteronormative, I didn’t go and start a suburban life or a urban life where there are two-and-a-half children and any of that. And love in life hasn’t yet looked like home building and monogamous relationships; though that is what I want for myself but that is not what my twenties looked like. By the beginning of my thirties, I was not sure what I wanted my home life to look like. And it is not so much different from what my siblings have except that it is not hetero[normative] and so gender functions differently for me. In their households or at least in one of them, the expectation is that the final word on any decision goes to the male partner. That’s common in traditional homes but that is not how I function as a person or what I want from a partnership with a man or a woman.”
“I needed to go and be on my own. I needed to be forced to use the language to define my politic and my sense of self. I needed to live through the relationships I’ve had with various loves to get a sense of what it is I am and want.”
“How I found my voice was that I chose to live separately and then I went back and talked to them as an adult. I am the youngest and I think birth order has a pretty profound effect on people. I kind of always felt like a kid. But by having an opportunity to make my own home away from them, it emboldened me to be myself and forced [me] to define what that is by writing various applications for programs or for retreats, artist colonies or explanations of what my manuscript is. [Laughs] I needed to go and be on my own. I needed to be forced to use the language to define my politic and my sense of self. I needed to live through the relationships I’ve had with various loves to get a sense of what it is I am and want. And like any writer, I had to write and continue to write a bunch of bad stuff and use the revision process to get it at what I actually need to say. [Laughs] I have had to listen to myself talk to get a sense of what I actually sound like in a very literal way.”
JS: Everything you said evokes Audre Lorde’s quote, “If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” I think that is radical––being able to establish who you are. What was I saying to my friend? A lack of boundaries invites a lack of respect. Establishing the boundaries of who you are so that other people don’t cross it or you can be difficult. Usually the hardest people to establish such boundaries are with your family, who at times try to cross you as an adult, as a woman, as a person, as a being. But you can’t live for what they want you to be.”
MM: “Well, that can’t be your focus. It can be but it is not helpful. [Laughs] I am going to check off some of the boxes for my parents because in so many ways, I am the best parts of them. I am also my own separate self. If I spend all of my time trying to please anyone, I am not checking off what pleases me or accepting the parts that won’t satisfy their imagination. Part of what my book is about is grounded in that mother-daughter dynamic––that tension and the love. I felt it was my duty or my responsibility to be a positive representation of her and our lives growing up. But it is my responsibility and duty to myself to allow space where there is dissonance, as long as I am being true to myself, which is truly what she wants for me––even if she doesn’t like some parts of who I am. She wants me to be this strong, healthy, happy human being that she wants for me to be, you know? Sometimes that meshes with her values and sometimes it doesn’t.”
JS: I feel you. There is always this push and pull of what family wants from you and their expectations and the expectations for ourselves. For me, it has been this mix of standing up for myself in the world and then when you stand up for yourself when you see an injustice within the family sphere, you get gaslit for addressing it. Then it becomes: who do you think you are?
MM: “Yeah, and then you are told you are disrespectful.”
JS: Yes! [Both laugh]
MM: “It is always ‘do as I say and not as I do!’” [Laughs]
JS: Oh my gosh, yes! Yass! But you know, our parents dealt with the same thing with their parents and so forth and so on. It is generational.
MM: “Absolutely. It is evolution and it is family. We share traits. I feel that is a persisting work. We are of a milieu and separate from it––that is what it means to be both individual and collective. Family is a microcosm of that larger political reality. Yeah, I want to please them and they are often pleased by me. Sometimes, I cannot please them, sometimes they are pleased. Sometimes I am represented and sometimes I am not. [Laughs] I am and I’m not. That is the experience of looking into a grandchild’s face while sitting next to its grandparent. It is and it is not the same being.”
Poet, writer, and editor, Maya Marshall. Photo courtesy of Marshall. Photo Credit: Michael Dantzler Photography.
JS: In your bio you state that “my goal in my poetry, personal essays, and critical writing is to foreground the essential roles that women and our work play in our economy and in defining the mythology of American beauty.” May you please speak more to your goal as a poet/writer and how you weave, incorporate, and interrogate womanhood, women’s productions, and aesthetics in your poetry?
MM: “That paragraph is 100 percent something I wrote during my grad school life––a weird made up construct. [Laughs] My speakers are all women. I write portraits most effectively and so there are a series of portraits in the manuscript of All the Blood Involved in Love. There are some matriarchal figures like a great-grandmother who had 12 children and it was sort of an inquiry around what it is she did for work and an implication that maybe she was a sex worker. That poem is concerned with her pleasure, her shamelessness [and] the controlling metaphors that she is like a songbird, when female songbirds tend to be brown and unadorned but still beautiful in their song and their function. That is a way that I connect the work women do to beauty and strength. There is this close description of an older woman running a Frankfurter cart in front of a hospital and there is a slow meditation description of her processing moving that cart up and down the stairs and as out to be someone who gives sustenance to all of these folks. There is beauty in that quotidianess and also in her hands that is not sexless but is not focused on sex. Women are not just caretakers but also heavy lifters like in agriculture and delivery and those characters are interesting to me so I pay close attention. I would love to say that I am of the class of poets that write about the everyday and ordinary things because it is the everyday and ordinary that gets things done. It is the bulk and beauty of the world. Writers like Gwendolyn Brooks are people that I am inspired by. What we make is what makes us strong and tones our bodies and determines how we interact in our settings and these are things that come up in my poems when I write. Those are things that are lauded in the poems that I write.”
JS: I love that you write about the fullness of a person––the fullness of a woman. In another interview I did, the activist responded that she has lived many lives and has done many things. I think we often silo the women in our lives and even the other women that we don’t know that we have this fictive kinship with. This is the same process I had when seeing the fullness of my mother. My mother is my mother. But she is not just my mother because she is––
MM: “–– so much more than that before you even existed. Not more––just something different. She was other. I am in my thirties now and my family is starting to really believe that I am not going to have children and they are really bummed about it, you know? [Laughs] They really recognize child-rearing as a great gift and it is. One of the lines in my book that I love is ‘child-rearing is a holy war.’ There is a constant battle between parent and child and individuation. The parent still needs to be their whole self without having to be defined by parenthood and the child has to be their self without having to be defined as being the child. They are interdependent, generative, fruitful relationships in this dynamic. The thing that I discovered in writing the book was that I did a lot of interviewing with my mom, my grandmother, and my dad. There were just so many different things that I didn’t know about them. I had so much more of a sense of their characters over time when they weren’t defined by parenthood but when they were trying to individuate from their own parents and their own political moments. When they were trying to be cognizant of what was going on in Africa while they were growing up during the sixties. What it meant for my grandmother to be 14 and taking sandwiches she made at home to the barbershop to sell to folks who were outside playing dominoes, so she could get enough money to get on the train to move to Harlem.”
JS: Wow.
MM: “Yeah, right?! I didn’t know that. It is like, ‘What have I done?’ I am out here like, ‘Oh, I didn’t like college.’ Like woe is I, I guess! Let me write 10 poems!”
[Both laugh]
JS: In your opinion, what is the role and responsibility of the Black poet/artist/writer in interrogating the intersections of art, politics, and resistance?
MM: “I am going to say a couple of things. First of all, the artist’s responsibility is first to themselves. You use your own voice to say what you feel needs to be said. I am going to point to the example of Toni Morrison. When someone said to her why she writes the books she writes, she said it was because she needed them and that they didn’t exist. She wrote the books that she wanted to read. Everybody has a different impulse that drives them to make whatever it is they make. I did it for self-soothing and for clarifying; to say what I saw in the world and then to say what I felt about it. This conversation on what the role of the Black writer is as a political entity or an artist––as if those things are somehow separable––that has been going on for a long time. Elizabeth Alexander writes about it in The Black Interior, a collection of essays she wrote. I am going to go ahead to read a little bit of it, if that is okay with you?”
JS: Of course! That is fine.
MM: “She says a couple of things. She quotes Gwendolyn Brooks who said: ‘‘I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness no. New consciousness and trudge—toward—progress. I have hopes for myself.’
This is a really powerful notion, right? To have hopes for myself. That shows a writer who is open to not only their own growth but the growth of young people who follow them. Brooks was committed to honoring the small details in ordinary lives. Also, Langston Hughes talked about freedom for Black artists. We have the freedom to express our individual selves. Elizabeth Alexander also talks about that. She says, ‘We are also as ever-faced with judgements and injunctions from within our community, that our work should perform a certain service as well as say and not say what is empowering and what is embarrassing to the race.’ As she wrote in the 1970s, Alice Walker’s advice would be to not let other people label you––you label yourself first. The role of any revolutionary Black writer is to turn to the work and her advice is to shut yourself away from all this talk of what we ought to be doing and just go ahead and write the poems, the stories, and the novels and make the artwork at the time we set aside for ourselves. I am also inclined to agree with her when she says, ‘The revolution will be concerned with the little stuff, the less glamorous stuff.’ So my role as a person who is a good writer and an excellent reader is to help other people who are not good writers and who are not excellent readers. These past years, much of my career has been teaching adult education and teaching people how to read and write. I often use creative writing as a way to do that because everyone is an expert on their own story. They can say that in the language they already have and go back and alter that language to make it clear––and clarity often leads to beauty. Those are ways in which being a writer allows me the kind of revolutionary apt, action or tool. Revolutions don’t start big, they start small. Any intervention I can make is always reading or writing or showing up with food for somebody or teaching them to read or write.”
“Poetry is a political act.”
“I am going to say that post-Black Arts Movement, where it was really crucial the Black collective of writers and artists worked in collaboration and were overtly political in language and said this is a politic and wrote manifestos––thank you to Amiri/LeRoi for doing that––but that moment really pushed a lot of folks who have been incredibly influential to the side because those folks were writing about their individual experiences. I am going to include Lucille Clifton in that, who didn’t get her laurels until much too late. The necessary follow-up to the collective Black Arts Movement is the importance of a group of individuals writing their individual experiences about the moments in which they lived. That includes the ‘90s but also writers now like Keith S. Wilson, who writes so tenderly about race and love [while] using acrostic artwork and epigraphs from some of our most highly lauded, white, venerated racist writers so that he can respond to the literature right now. I look to Evie Shockley, a great craftsperson, who has taken the news of the day and put it into her poems in puzzling forms. She wrote the book, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation of African-American Poetry. She includes the scholarship of Ed Roberson, who is a poet for the earth, an eco-poet. He elevates the relationship between Blackness and the pastoral and nature and thinks about the crisis of racism and the crisis of the global epidemic that is climate change. But the news is also in poetry and always has been. Because poets we use rhyme, we have always been the vanguard of any revolutionary political moment. It is the poet whose words get put on posters. Audre Lorde said, ‘Poetry is not a luxury.’ She was talking specifically to Black women that our poetry is not a luxury but a necessity and a political tool just like self-care and self-preservation. Those things are radical acts; in so far as radical means innovative or targeted at the foundation of some existing structure that ought to change fundamentally.”
“In my writing, I say the word ‘Black’ overtly and quite a lot. That is a political choice. It does not, I hope, diminish the quality of the craft involved. But I think in this evolution, in this poetic moment, there is a fusion of the individual love poem with the political acknowledgment and the allusion to massive Black death and the death of the earth as we know it. Those things are not and never have been separable. Poetry is a political act.”
JS: What advice would you give to aspiring Black poets?
MM: “Don’t think about poetry as a job. It is work for sure and it is important soul work and sometimes there are a couple of dollars attached to it but that’s not your job. It is for very few people. Even the poet laureate is only out here making $40,000 a year and they only get the appointment for a year.”
JS: Wow.
MM: “Yeah! It is soul work, it is community work, and essential work to write poems and to recognize the fact of death creates urgency to pay close attention to right now. Thank goodness for poetry. It is the closest thing to faith and church that I have. I feel that there would be a great loneliness and hopelessness without it because I don’t have an alternative faith––despite being raised Christian and having some of those really great values embedded in me––I have a hard time recognizing faith outside of an intellectual exercise. Sometimes that is not enough. But with poetry having truth and beauty and equal measure allows me to have some faith. And that is important but it is not what pays my bills. Like it has paid some of my bills, which I am grateful for. And it will probably pay a couple more. [Laughs] But that is not the reason to do it.”
“The other thing is to read poetry broadly. When I say broadly, I mean reading poetry over many centuries, not just decades. I think it is important to read about and in conjunction with the history around it. I think it is important to read about the people who made it because we are whole people and not just what you said earlier, fictive kin. Reading about who that person was is important because you learn about their politic and that politic informs their writing. So read a lot, read widely, and read over generations, and read various genres because they influence each other. Also, maybe read how the writers wrote what they wrote because there are some similar practices among different practitioners. But write a lot. [Laughs] That means you have to practice and that means you have to develop a practice. Part of the reason I have a practice is because what I wanted from poetry for a long time was just communion. I wanted friends. I participated in a writing workshop that was community based that was run by my friend Marty, who I co-founded Underbelly Magazine with. She ran a workshop where once a month poets of various degrees of obsession with poems, showed up to discuss the things we had written, to write a little bit based on a prompt, and to talk about a poem we all read. I don’t know if this is your experience but it is rare that I meet someone who is reading the same things I am reading. So there is not a lot of opportunity to talk about it. Now that my job is to read for a living, I don’t want anything to do with anyone’s fucking book club! I love you guys but I am not going.” [Laughs]
JS: [Laughs] I was not expecting that!
MM: “I am not doing it!”
JS: [Continues to laugh] What you said reminds me of what Octavia Butler said about writing as a practice.
MM: “Yup! She said, ‘You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.’ I know that because it is right next to my desk!” My advice to young writers, aspiring poets, and writers of any genre is that you have to write a lot. It takes practice. It is a craft. It is a muscle. It is not just an inspired push of great emotion. The point is to communicate with other people. Toi Derricotte said, ‘The job of the artist is not to resolve or to beautify but to hold complexities to see and make clear.’ You can only do that through writing which actually is revision, which has many steps that don’t get talked about.”
“My advice to young writers, aspiring poets, and writers of any genre is that you have to write a lot. It takes practice. It is a craft. It is a muscle. It is not just an inspired push of great emotion. The point is to communicate with other people.”
JS: You are the co-founder of underbellymag.com. May you please share more about the mission and vision of the journal and what led you to co-found it?
MM: “[underbelly] is a magazine I started with my friend Marty two years ago. I had moved to South Carolina and I bet she has yet to forgive me for leaving her here in Chicago! I was finishing my degree and she was like, ‘Do you want to start a magazine?’ I said ‘No, because I am finishing a degree and I don’t have the time to do that.’ [Laughs] She was like, ‘Oh no, don’t worry about it! It will be fine! Let’s do it.’ [Laughs] She suggested we do something once a week and I was like that is a lot. That is a lot of obligation for anyone. I suggested we do something quarterly because 12 weeks is also a lot. I don’t know if you had to wrangle a writer into any sort of deadline but it is a lot. We are both educators. We have worked in non-traditional spaces including living rooms, community centers, and colleges. I worked in adult education like I said before. We have taught people from age eight to age 80. What doesn’t happen in so many rooms, including the professional writing workshops and that Iowa model that was started in 1966––and thank goodness it is starting to be challenged more now. There is another book coming out by Haymarket, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, which is written by Felicia Rose Chavez, who is a co-editor of the anthology, LatiNext.
“Writing is messy, it is hard, and it takes a long time because writing is thinking just slowed down.”
“I am editing Felicia’s Anti-Racist Writing Workshop and she is making an intervention into the typical way the poetry workshop or the fiction workshop or the non-fiction workshop is handled at the university-level. Marty and I wanted to create a tool for people who teach in various environments. The thing that doesn’t really get talked about is revision. I don’t know if you have talked to professors about that process. What Underbelly points out is sometimes the unseen is as important and as beautiful as a final product and the thing that is presented as being beautiful, complete, and whole. So the project of underbelly is to show how the writer made the thing. Time is an important element. Re-ordering information is important. Keith S. Wilson, one of my favorite writers, used a cork-board and cut the poems into fragments and literally shuffled them around. That is a part of the process of writing sometimes and that can be finding a way to remove four syllables from your sentence. Maybe you get rid of a prepositional phrase. Maybe you remove extraneous words. Maybe you find a synonym. That is the writing process. And that is true of every genre, whether it is writing criticism or a poem. Writing is messy, it is hard, and it takes a long time because writing is thinking just slowed down.”
JS: Who are Black women writers/poets who inspire you?
MM: “I am so excited to tell you about these people and these books I love. Shameless plug but Krista Franklin is amazing. She is from Ohio and she just published her second book. Her first book is an artist book that is hand-bound and was published by Candor Arts called Under The Knife. It catapults your experience of coming-of-age but also and more importantly, it details some surgery on her uterus. That kind of discussion of the woman’s body as apparatus and the failures of the medical industrial complex just doesn’t get enough attention. It is so rarely handled so beautifully and multimodality as she has handled it in Under The Knife. She has a book titled, Too Much Midnight, which was just published. It came out from Haymarket and it is her visual art. She is a printmaker and paper type of artist. [Too Much Midnight] is a collection of collages about Blackness. She writes to Black people, for Black people, and is happy to let people overhear. The same is true for her visual art work but the book is both a visual art work and a collection of poems that are heavily influenced by music from people in the Harlem Renaissance to Parliament Funkadelic to KRS-One to Jamila Woods. Going back to that notion of being an educator as a radical intervention, there are poems about working in juvenile detention centers and prisons. Krista Franklin is an inspiration to me. She is a badass. She just had an interview with Poets and Writers and they asked [Krista], ‘Who is your most trusted reader?’ She said ‘I am.’ That brought me so much joy. Krista, she is perfect. I think every writer but especially burgeoning writers need to hear that. You need to trust your gut. You have to develop your own aesthetic by hearing your own voice but you can only hear it if you write it down and repeat what you said out loud. That is part of revising, which is writing.”
“francine j. harris has written three books: Here Is the Sweet Hand, play dead, and allegiance. She teaches at the University of Houston, which is dope because that is the second most highly rated creative writing program in the nation. She is from Detroit public schools, so she studied under Vievee Francis, who is another Black woman poet who I deeply respect and admire. She does zero bullshit at all––at all ever. [Laughs] She is a person who taught at the Callaloo Creative Arts Writing Workshop, alongside Gregory Pardlo, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, Digest. They are demanding teachers who are interested in growing writers past their points of common comfort. I appreciate those people. But harris is invested in writing ugliness beautifully and allowing its commonness a platform. What I admire about play dead is francine’s willingness and investment in writing about love and danger that is present in the domestic space. Her fragmented set of poems have their own forms and sometimes have a banner that comes from Black blues. It is really largely informed I think by Toni Morrison and the girlhood she has written in her Southern gothic novels. This book of poetry is definitely in that line of tradition. I am always awed by francine j. harris.”
JS: What does a Black Woman Radical mean to you?
MM: “I am going to go back to the definition of radical, which means changing the fundamental nature of something or supporting a progressive action or being innovative or unorthodox. Anywhere Black women work and have to work within structures that were built without us in mind, we are forced to be innovative and to create and maintain boundaries that may seem unorthodox––that is radical intervention. We are organizers at various levels. There is a playwright in Chicago whose name is Kristiana Rae Colón, who after Ferguson set up protest points with young Black protestors here in Chicago and made sure they were places to get food and made sure there were places for people to get first aid and made sure there were spaces for people to have communion. That kind of action is a direct descendant of movements like the Black Panther Party movement. That is a radical intervention. To put mental, emotional, and physical care to the foreground to forward a progressive movement. People like Barbara Ransby, who helped organize the action in Chicago that was sponsored by various groups like All of Us or None Chicago, American Friends Service Committee, and Assata’s Daughters, among many others where they drove in cars to call for the release of inmates at the Cook County Jail because how do we disobey civilly––participate in civil disobedience––when we are not allowed to be together for our own health but we still stay in our cars? That is what it means to be Black and radical––it means to be resourceful and it means to be collective even across essential boundaries.”
You can follow Maya Marshall on Twitter.