The Rumpus Visits Brionne Janae

For the Rumpus, Olivia Kate Cerrone visits Cave Canem Fellow Brionne Janae to talk about her debut poetry collection, After Jubilee. Janae explores her African-American heritage in her work and the "intergenerational trauma left in the wake of racism and violence," Cerrone writes. Let's pick up with their discussion there:

The Rumpus: I think of the poet Natasha Trethewey, whom you preface in After Jubilee’s opening poem “Postcard” with the epilogue “always the dark body hewn asunder; always.” This poem is a powerful depiction of the violence and injustice that has (and continues) to shape black lives and families. Of her collection Thrall, Trethewey remarked in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books:

…the book is also about other kinds of knowledge, like emotional knowledge, what gets inherited and passed down through families. It seemed like the right intersection of a larger public knowledge and the intimate, more personal knowledge that gets manifested in families. Exploring this history of ideas of race across time and space with ideas of race in my own family, about difference, about otherness, is where I started

Where did you start in terms of exploring familial history, particularly that “emotional knowledge” that Trethewey speaks of, along with the racism embedded in our society, while writing these poems? How does a poem speak to trauma and grief for you?

Brionne Janae: I definitely identify with what Trethewey wrote about personal and emotional knowledge being manifested in families. I think a lot about the way that emotional knowledge is passed down. There is actual research that suggests we pass trauma down through our DNA. And I have always been interested in emotional history. I want to know what people were thinking and feeling in historical moments more than I want to know what law was passed or the battlefield statistics or positions. I’ve spent a lot of time just listening to my family, to the things that they tell me and the things that they won’t say. What becomes the thinly veiled secret. I think that the fact that I was privileged enough to grow up with all four of my grandparents is something that has shaped me because I could hear all of their experiences. And though there aren’t many of their specific stories in this book, their emotional influence is all over these poems.

“Yellow Girl” is one of my first and only attempts at talking about skin color in my family. The poem itself is a fiction involving rape and a child born with very fair skin. It speaks to the holes in my grandfather’s side of the family. There are holes in the family tree where you could insert random white men. You would never claim a specific person. I was in Mississippi last summer for the first time and some of my grandfather’s relatives are “like white,” as they say in the South. But at no point would anyone ever say that’s his father, that white man over here. My mother once told me how certain relatives would point out a white woman who lived nearby and say “that’s your aunt’s sister,” but of course it was never something openly acknowledged. A lot of “Yellow Girl” reflects on the legacy of the skin I wear around. It’s very much about the history of non-consent and rape in this country, and how that trauma manifests through families.

The last section of the book is set in a real town called Slocum, Texas. In the summer of 1910, the white residents of the neighboring town of Palestine came over to black Slocum and began shooting and killing anyone they could find. The official number of people murdered was about nine but the Sherriff at the town remarked that “most of the bodies would be found by the buzzards.” According to an article I found on NPR recently, the number of black folks murdered could be as high as two hundred. Many of the poems from the “Slocum” section are invention except for the last three poems, where you see a lot of the violence from the neighboring town. The poem “Rent” is based off of a specific conjecture over what started the violence. The other two poems are me imagining what it must’ve been like when people were coming and hunting and killing people.

Read on at the Rumpus.