Surrealist Blues Poet and Cultural Worker aja monet on Radical Love, Community, and Activism
Coming at the heels of her debut, My Mother was A Freedom Fighter, and album When The Poems Do What They Do, Florida Water, available via Haymarket Book, dives into the truths we’re often afraid of confronting. With much on her heart, the artist spoke with office on stewardship, community, love, and her writing process.
How did your relationship to poetry start?
It started when I was young, and I think a big part of it was just being impacted and falling in love with other poets and finding a lot of connection to what poetry was and the elevation of language. I think a lot of it starts with early schoolhood, and people like Langston Hughes were a huge part of my introduction to what a poem is and finding a way to use language in a way that's not just empowering, understanding the musicality of language.
How did you get comfortable being vulnerable with your inner thoughts and sharing them with so many people?
I don't know that I've ever been super comfortable, but I think that part of what you learn is to live with the nerves and live with the fear. It's not about escaping it. It's just more about acknowledging it, sitting with that, and recognizing that—that's part of the process. I think for me, it's never been an either-or. It's just like, okay, this is what you're doing. The poets that I loved always brought me to a place of being able to connect deeply, because of their vulnerability and because of their authenticity. I wanted to make people feel the way other poets made me feel. A huge part of that is leaning into your most authentic, vulnerable self. Sometimes that's not always the most presentable. It doesn't feel like it's the coolest thing to do.
I think everything about art, and particularly the poem, is in the process. So one becomes transformed through the process. I think once you share, once you get to the point where you're sharing it with people, or you're sharing it with someone, you're choosing how you want to invite people to commune and deal with this, sort of, collective being. It’s not just me versus the audience, or me versus the reader, or me versus the listener. It's a conversation, and you're hoping that someone else connects, recognizes, feels tapped into what you're doing, and feels like they are a part of it; a part of what the conversation is, a part of the narrative.
You learn to feel less alone. I think poetry can be very isolated and lonely when you're doing it in solitude to yourself, but when you're in community, you're sharing it with others, which is what I love about poetry workshop spaces is that you find yourself among other people that value language and also value the power of story and how we connect through stories.
You were ahead of your time regarding activism for Palestine and #SayHerName. How did you sit with those thoughts and feelings about what you believe in and what you want people to hear and join in on the cause?
I think a lot of my relationship to the work or the way I see the world is not because I have any unique, significant, gifted approach, or anything like that. I think it's like, if you're a human being living in the world, I would hope you care about the world that you're essentially responsible for.
It’s a place that we all have to live and coexist. It's funny and it's frustrating. How can you be a living, breathing human and not just care about the air we breathe, the quality of the water, or whether or not we have access to good food? This is impacting everyone. What’s happening in our country is not sustainable. Not only is it not sustainable, it's just not smart, it's not intelligible, it's not emotionally intelligible, it's not intellectually intelligible, it's not spiritually intelligent, it's not physically intelligent. We will not survive if we continue this way.
People start to call you an activist because they see your frustration and your angst, and then they wrap you up in, sometimes, this limited identity around your frustrations or your angst or your anger or the things you want to change. And it’s really just all deep love. That's a real deep, profound, radical love that motivates one to do something different, to see their role in it, to want to participate. That's all it is. It's just a deep, radical love that's willing us towards participation.
I think, from a very pure, selfish perspective—I want to live. I want to live abundantly. I want to enjoy life. I want to be around other people who are enjoying life. It does not help me to see other people hurt. I do not feel good. I do not get joy out of that. I do not think there's anything about my life that enjoys seeing other people suffer. All of us have some level of accountability we must answer to. That's where I get inspired. When I see people show care and solidarity, when I see a world that reflects a politics and ethics of love
Can you talk a little bit about why you moved to Miami from New York, and what that process looked like as you were writing Florida Water?
Well, Florida Water wasn't an intentional thing. I wasn't like, “I'm going to write a poetry book about Florida, or my time in Florida.” It was just a reflection of the time and the experiences, and the collection of poems that happened in that period. I moved to Florida because I was invited by the Dream Defenders to go on a delegation in 2014 to Palestine. It got delayed because of uprisings across the country. So we ended up having to go at the very end of the beginning of 2015, and I met an organizer there who was one of the co-founders of the organization called Dream Defenders. We fell in love in Palestine and got connected with other organizers in the organization. I went back home, and we made a decision for me to move to Florida together.
I was so excited to meet this organization, to meet people from this organization who weren't just like talking about the changes they wanted to see. They were doing things that reflected that. While in Palestine, I think what we learned about ourselves, we learned about our organizing, and we learned about the world. It uprooted a lot of the things we thought prior, and I think we became way more aware of our international class consciousness, and we became more involved in making connections by what's happening at home in the States and what's happening abroad, and how those things are coordinated.
That sort of connection-making manifested in this way, where it was like, I need to be closer to these individuals. I wanted to be around people who get it, who are working to change these things. The Dream Defenders was one of the first organizations that uprooted our generation. I remember seeing, for the first time, young people taking to the streets when Trayvon Martin was murdered, and they went to the governor's mansion and took over that. That was a huge thing to see as a young person. I was like, “Wow, these kids are standing behind what they believe.”
What was the main lesson or thing, or memory that stuck with you while being in Florida?
I think the biggest lesson is the one I learned from the book, where I explore how writing a poem became a form of organizing, or how organizing is a poetic form, and how the page failed me. “The courage and compass created in the process of the struggle to grow to be transformed poetry is awaiting through or with diving further in the depths the why the door to door blues of organizing in South Florida, the paint brush of canvassing in neighborhoods, the heart is puddle to be shapeless as the swamp we give thanks to the water spirits.”
The biggest thing is that you can't take away from Florida, this deep connection to nature and this humility that one must learn because of the proximity to hurricane season every year, and sea levels rising. It's like the front lines of so many concerns and issues in our country. I think one of the biggest things I learned was that one must bear witness to the land and be receptive to it, and recognize that you must have a sense of humility, because ultimately, the land and the planet, and nature will have the final say. It's no coincidence that Zora Neale Hurston wrote a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God, and in that book, once you live in Florida, you learn exactly why she wrote that title. It's both literal and metaphorical. I know what it's like to watch God, having lived in Florida, and one recognizes one's limitations, as well as the power to help steward the land, to be of service to the land. I think there's a deep reverence for the land that I have, and because of that, I've learned to have a deep love and appreciation for the people who steward the land, and how we take care of each other on the land that we steward. All of that is the most profound poetry one can ever bear witness to or read. It's like the poem is us and how we take care of each other. That is the poem. I think that's a huge lesson I've learned.
