Spitting Venom: An Interview with Elana Chavez & Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Part 2

I interviewed Elana Chavez and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta on March 28^th in Oakland, California about their new Cantíl Reading Series, which features only poets of color. We met at “Books for Days” bookstore on Telegraph Ave., where the series is held to talk about race, intersectionality, colonialism, and what poetry can and cannot do. This is a transcription of the recorded interview.

Here is Part 1

Tatiana: I think it’s really important that we are providing this as a space for new people. Elana is the optimist of this cooperation, though.

Elana: Why?

Tatiana: I don’t know.

Elana: That doesn’t make you the pessimist, does it?

Tatiana: I think I’m the pessimist.

Elana: Really, just because you’re like we don’t need you?

Tatiana: Pretty much. Like dads and white people. (Laughter)

Elana: But we’re friends with white people.

Tatiana: That’s true, but we don’t need them.

Elana: Or I guess we don’t “need” any of our friends.

Tatiana: But those are consensual, at will relationships with people. I tell my darling, who is White, “I don’t need you, but I love you. I choose to be with you, and I choose to spend time with you.” There is no dependency there.

Elana: Even in just that personal way, that’s a hard thing to break and come into knowing. I had a tough, complicated, conversation with an ex-lover who said, “Even when you come to me you’re kinda bent down...”

Tatiana: Yeah, or subservient…

Elana: That observation was hard to have, and for me to not be able to just tell her, “because that’s how I’ve been walking through the world forever! What do you expect me to do?” To come to this conclusion and witness my behavior in this white supremacist world is a big deal. It's kind of heartbreaking. And now learning to say “I don’t need you.” And I am realizing this feeling now, a certain way for the first time in my life, as we talk about it. The only feeling where I can believe I am a real person is to have someone say “oh thanks, that thing that you gave me, out of you, and your body, thanks.” I see writing and reading as the only real healthy way I have been able to fulfill that tendency. I get to be seen for then.

Tatiana: It kinda reminds me of peonage and assimilation, the mentalities behind slavery in the American South, the Indian boarding schools, and the mission system here in California. That White slaveowners, Spanish Catholic friars, and White Christian missionaries believed they were doing God's work, because the people they were subjugating needed them.

Cassandra: At the beginning of the reading, I felt your request to make space at the front of bookstore for people of color to be a very powerful gesture, which could be palpably felt in the room. When all the white people moved, a charged awareness was created that wasn’t previously there. The experience of being in the space with other friends of mine who are white poets concerned about race—while realizing institutional racism and white supremacy cannot be fixed by adding a few people of color to a reading—summoned in me some troubled feelings. Maybe the latent question I am searching for is how do you see this series functioning in some larger sense of the social? Or, how are you both thinking of pressing against classification? As a pessimist or depressive realist, in the worst-case scenario I could imagine the series being conceptualized as a space where white people go to earn their “ally points,” (whether they consciously realize they are doing it or not), or find more POC poets for their series and events. How do you hope to resist colonizing tendencies?

Tatiana : That’s something that I've been thinking about. One of the things that I try to make myself do at least once week is sit down and read the  essay "Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island.” I almost think of it as a system of four levels of safety for myself, analogous to the one used by Chicago Artists and Feminists that you talked about at the Field Report. Bridge is when you are willing to interact, participate and work in cooperation with White people. Drawbridge is when that is a very tentative mode. I’m still working this out, I don’t really know, I’m still working on things. Sandbar is…

Elana: That is when the water recedes and there is a passage to go, but then if the water comes in then you’re like naw, I’m not going.

Tatiana : Island is when you’re not willing to participate. I feel like this reading series could go through these stages.

Elana: To what? Go from a drawbridge, to a sandbar, to an island?

Tatiana : Yeah, but then it can go back and forth. I’m not necessarily trying to police anyone, but if I feel like we’re becoming some sort of like place for people to come and get their allyship points…I mean I want this to open doors for a lot of our readers, but at the same time, there is something about having a safe space, which means at times you have to say no. Something happened once while I was speaking to my friend Sharmi (who is an incredible musician: they do this incredible project called Beast Nest and run the MARA Performance Collective out of this same space, among other cool things). There we were, two women of color talking, and a White person I didn't know came up and interrupted us because they wanted to speak to me and ask me all sorts of questions about race and allyship, & yet, were disregarding two women of color. To me, that felt like a violent gesture. I don’t think they knew that, or recognized it.

Cassandra: These elements came up during a conversation I was having after the Field Report with a cis male poet from the Bay area, and he was asking similar questions or just wondering what he could do to be more conscious. I am involved in so many situations where I will be talking to a man and another guy will come up and then they will turn their backs to you, or interrupt conversations, or not introduce you to other people who join the conversation, and somehow this doesn’t register as one facet of a larger problem of male superiority and aggression. My advice is well, “maybe if men were able to treat women like they were full human beings deserving of full attention…”

Tatiana: That also happens to me in interactions with White women. I’ll be talking to a White girl and think, cool, I have a new friend, and then other White girls will come over and say hello to her but not greet me, and then, they all turn away; so, then I’m like, OK, nevermind. I actually find I’ll have moments of gender dysphoria—something that, as a gender non-conforming person, I do struggle with—in situations such as those.

Cassandra: In trying to create intersectional spaces, there is a lot of great work being done by folks organizing in anti-colonialist and indigenous communities who are rethinking the framework of allyship. A necessary response, as this practice has been commodified through the “Ally Industrial Complex,” where you can attend allyship workshops and receive a certificate essentially “verifying” your solidarity.

Elana: Really? No…

Tatiana: Yeah, there’s the Catalyst Project in the Bay Area. I’ll have to admit, I’ve kind been on White strike lately on a social level. A lot of that has to do with the behavior fallout I saw from a lot of what happened in November and December.

Cassandra: Since the beginning of Ferguson, people either revealed themselves to be racists or their inability to talk about the ways in which their white privilege was systematically involved in white supremacy, as the fragility of whiteness continues to rear its ugly head.

Tatiana: Well, yes, at a systemic level; but also at an interpersonal level. I was realizing that White people were rushing to listen to any credentialed person of color, while totally disregarding their friends of color. Ferguson was the moment when I realized that White people get the choice to care about this.

Elana: That is a very, very good distinction to make. This is us surviving and thriving, and we have to do this.

Tatiana: Elana and I never got to make the decision to not care.

Cassandra: In this moment of contemporary poetry and the presence of this reading series, what is poetry’s position in building “de-colonized spaces”? (Which you had mentioned as one of your interests for the series.) Including indigenous people who are calling for the practice of de-colonizing de-colonization due to the ways in which it is a term being co-opted as a convenient catch-all for some type of “psychic spring-cleaning” or other revisionist practices that might still be inherently racist or violent. Do you believe poetry has a certain efficacy for making these tendencies possible? Or will it function on the interpersonal level to give people of color a space where they can be recognized and feel that they are in a space where they are safe and can share their work in a non-tokenized situation?

Tatiana: My favorite de-colonizing action is being late to shit. I’m always late. That was my new years resolution for 2015. There is this incredible zine called “Accomplices Not Allies” by the Indigenous Action Network that mentions the tokenization of displaced Indigenous folks (which I consider myself to be) while ignoring and disregarding those on whose land you're actually on.

 Elena: I think that anything that is done with genuine compassion and genuine desire for filling a void where compassion and genuineness should be in poetry wherever it maybe be lacking, and in whatever way we can provide that substance, it’s bound to do all the good shit that we want it to do. If we approach it with our full heart and everything, I have complete faith in it. Logistically, this is a space and making a singular event and bringing people together is going to have power every time.

Cassandra: What does a de-colonized space mean for you?

Tatiana: What we were talking about before with the Bechdel test for race…

Elana: The whole not needing to talk about whiteness, we’re not here to worry if our white friends can achieve what they want in intersectional space. It sounds bad for me to say, but I don’t care. And the question you were asking, if we’re gonna be seen as sentimental since we are talking about race and being of color, blah blah blah. In Cathy Park Hong’s article, where the poetry written by people of color deemed “interesting” by white people is when it’s not “just” about that. I would think that a de-colonized space would be de-colonizing from this system of aesthetic values. This is what “good poetry” looks like. This is art, but what you’re doing didn’t quite make it. I have feelings of anxiety too since I’m not hyper-educated. I’m not in to be in academia in any way. At this point I don’t even care, de-colonizing also means being autonomous from whatever recognition and the value systems in dominant culture, we don’t care about that.

Tatiana: I think what we are striving for is autonomy. It is really important to note in a rapidly gentrifying city, in a rapidly unequal part of the country, it is really important to establish safe spaces for people of color: especially youth, and especially queer and disabled folks. White people have always been able to live wherever they want. Poor Whites have always been used by wealthy Whites to move forward—from the Scotch-Irish into the Northwest Territory, to West Oakland and Highland Park today. White people love to forget about segregation, and love to forget about redlining. White people love to forget about the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) saying, in order to give a mortgage to someone they have to be able to put down a down payment of twenty percent, their monthly mortgage payment can't be more than a third of their income; oh, and if they're Black and trying to move into a White neighborhood, it's illegal to lend them any money. There was a horrible Op-Ed in the New York Times recently about the neighborhood in Northeast L.A. I grew up in, where gentrification was being compared to integration. It’s not integration when a white person moves into a neighborhood. This just feels like manifest destiny on repeat.

Cassandra: Exactly. The project of gentrification is perpetually renewing itself in the vision of manifest destiny. Housing corporations and real estate agents refer to their building projects and marketing campaigns through the language of urban homesteading, colonizing, and being on “the new frontier.”

Elana: I think it’s something that people won’t understand until they experience it. That’s a kind of pain that won’t touch certain people. They will never be touched by the pain that would actually change them to see how truly horrifying it all is. To see that Kenneth Goldsmith reading go viral, he has obviously never had to feel the pain and we’ve constructed these barriers of belief.

Tatiana: I think a lot of my anger comes from this knowledge that there can never be empathy. There can be sympathy and there can be compassion, but there will never be empathy.

Elana: Again the tokenizing idea about the poetry of people of color, “oh your work is going to be about race and family, and your colorful life” and yeah family is really important to me because when my dad left, as the oldest I was the next in line to be dad, provide and protect, or whatever, fix the problem, hustle and make the fucking money, walk into the grocery store with a big jacket so your brother and sisters can eat, maybe there's a bottle of booze in there too because getting fucked up is alluring in this hell, look your mom in tear-filled eyes because the lack of money threatens to destroy us, the lack of money destroys people and we don't care, people dying of it all around us. This is the world and worse for many, many, many people of color and never forget that this hell is brought to you by white supremacy, capitalism, and misogyny.

 

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Elana Chavez is from the Central Valley of California. She graduated from UC Santa Cruz, her first ever chapbook, Of a Substance, was released by Asphodel Press last summer. Her most recent work in progress appears in Materials #4: Economic Ophelia published in the UK.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist and casual historian from California. PDF, a chapbook published by Solar Luxuriance, was released in June of 2014.