Interrobang and Myth

One of my favorite questions to ask potential coworkers during job interviews is based on a ratio I heard at a career workshop a decade ago. According to the facilitator, people spend a third of their time on the clock doing things they like, a third doing things they wouldn’t do if they didn’t have to, and a third doing things that excite them. My question is always: if you could place at least one of your job duties into each category, what would those duties be? In a job interview in 2018, I posed this to a room full of white people working in the “research arm” of a university provost’s office. They were responsible for helping faculty members get medical research grants and then sell the research results to corporations that would, in turn, create products for the general public ranging from topical medications to prosthetic limbs. When it was time for the only man in the room to answer, he smirked and announced that he wasn’t going to dignify the question at all. Instead, he launched into praise about how proud he was to help put life-changing merchandise on the market. Neither he nor anyone else was brave enough to talk about the fact that not all people benefit from “the market,” especially not those without good health insurance or tens of thousands of dollars to spend on cutting-edge devices they might need. Also, he refused to answer a question I had been asked to ask, and, while that kind of mid-game rule change has happened to me throughout my life, on that day—and in the middle of the realization that maybe I wasn’t meant to work at this place at all—I was tired of feigning interest. I stopped listening.
 

Here’s the truth. I am a Black woman, and sometimes when I ask questions, people get silent, dismissive, or offended. For that chosen majority, everything I say is hyper-punctuated by my Blackness, my womanhood, my audacity to want to know. For others, as soon as my inquiry leaves my mouth, it is retroactively laced with menace. I am accused of being irrational for challenging people’s assumptions. I am punished because my assertion of my own right to know threatens an already-uneven balance of power. In “Interrobang,” the first poem in TJ Jarrett’s Ain’t No Grave, Jarrett alludes to the perceived danger and susceptibility of a Black woman’s voice: “Interrogate the mixing bowl/of my throat,” she writes, “Claim what is left in it.” Then later: “You could be made sick. There could be/a swift, sweet poison in my words.” When I question, my words become hazardous materials, and I violate the social contract I never signed, the one that demands my acquiescence to being “claimed” for the sake of public safety. I become both the voiceless and the villain. I am my own myth: an incapacitated monster.

This phantom transformation can happen anywhere, even in my safest spaces. I’ve asked boyfriends why they don’t do what they said they would, and they’ve bristled, accusing me of being controlling, as if a request for fidelity is somehow an act of manipulation. I recently asked an editor about payment for a publication, and he spoke to me like I owed him money. I ask my doctor—repeatedly, because I don’t trust her—why she prescribes me medications whose side effects mimic the disease they are supposed to keep in remission, or worse, give me new and frightening symptoms. These are questions she responds to like Prissy in the movie Gone with the Wind: she declares she don’t know nothing about skin, hair, hormones—you know, things about which doctors are supposed to have a general working knowledge even if such things aren’t their specialty. It would be hilarious if she didn’t hold my health in her hands and if she didn’t see my desire to combat my disease and live a full life as an affront to her expertise.
 

Months after the job interview, in November 2018, when I read that President Trump called April Ryan a “loser” for inquiring about voter suppression during the midterm elections and berated another journalist, Abby Phillip, for asking “stupid questions” about a campaign probe, I was saddened, but far from surprised. Is such language dangerous? Of course it is. Does it further sanction the mistreatment and silencing of Black women in this country? Of course it does. Several weeks later, I watched a man reach over a counter to grab a McDonald’s employee, a twenty-year-old Black woman named Yasmine James, because there were no plastic straws at the condiment station. He kicked her coworker, Tateona Bell, in the stomach as he was being escorted out of the restaurant. Bell had delivered her second child by cesarean only two months before.

I also watched the docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, which features the accounts of Black and Brown women who were sexually assaulted by the R&B singer, most of them while still in their teens. This is the same docuseries whose screening was canceled after someone called in a bomb threat to the venue where many of the survivors and their families had gathered. In the weeks after its airing, I witnessed several of the Black women who were instrumental in the documentary’s production get accused of destroying Black men. Ironically, behind every attempt to dismiss, demean, or silence those women lurks the truly dangerous questions, perhaps the same ones blaring through the man’s brain during my interview: how dare Black women do their jobs effectively? How dare they try to get down to the truth?

To be interrogated this way on a daily basis wears on my body like the drugs my doctor is always trying to offer me on the sly. And to be dismissed for my own questioning makes me wonder whether I should bother asking for anything at all. But not asking means I cannot make a living, I am not getting paid for my art, and I am not emotionally (or physically) safe with the people who claim to love me. In short, I am not getting what I need. “You know hunger and/you will hunger as long as you live,” writes Jarrett in “Interrobang.” And this may be true, but in spite of what people are often trying to show me, I was never meant to wither away in my silence, unanswered, uncompensated, and worse, unfulfilled. As a Black woman, I may indeed always know want because I am statistically paid less, medically undertreated, and more vulnerable to violence of all kinds. So yes, I might spend many a night hungry, but that will never stop me from trying to get fed.
 

Here’s another truth: my life and my livelihood depend on Black women asking questions. My friends and I have an unspoken rule: whenever something happens to us that we have trouble deciphering, we turn to each other for clarity. “Am I tripping?” we ask about inappropriate expectations from bosses, unkind treatment from loved ones, or unsettling comments from strangers. We do this because, with each other, our questions are never trivialized. I recently presented a paper at a professional conference where I discussed the value of reading some of Gwendolyn Brooks’s earlier poems about problematic white women (e.g., “The Lovers of the Poor” and “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”) in the age of pussy hat feminism.

“I’m scared,” I told one friend. “What if people get angry about what I have to say?”

In response, she paraphrased a line from Aquaman, a movie she’d just seen with her teenage son: “There’s nothing wrong with being afraid. Being afraid means you’re ready.”

At other times, friends ask me questions, and that’s where the real magic begins. There is a wealth of knowledge behind their inquiries, including the fact that they know I already know the answer. One of my friends has the gift of making the rhetorical query that reroutes me completely. As we were tiptoeing around the fragile foundations of our new friendship, which began several years ago at a writer’s retreat, she asked me the same thing that had been asked of her by another Black woman poet: “Who are you loving when you write?” Asking myself that sent shock waves through my work and still does, because I return to it whenever I’m afraid to put something on the page, whenever I make a cultural reference I’m not sure everyone will understand. I can’t say that it makes me less fearful, but remembering who I am loving reminds me to shun the universal for the idiosyncratic, even if the gatekeepers don’t get the reference. It reminds me why it’s important to be brave.

Another time, when I was complaining about an employer whose expectations for my labor far exceeded the number of hours I’d agreed to work, the same friend asked: “Why would you devote your whole life to building someone else’s dream, and leave nothing for yourself?” In that moment, she changed the way I thought about my writing life. I had never given myself permission to treat it like a job, one for which I need to be both fully present and protective when others demand more of my energy than they deserve.

I live through the power of Black women’s questions. I bask in the love of Black women who are willing to hold me accountable for the steps I’m making toward the life I’m chasing. But I also desperately need those questions to remind me how monumental each of my actions is, and of the power of my yeses and nos in a world where everyone around me is telling me I don’t have the right to decide; in a world constantly telling me that, no matter what I do, I am perceived as little more than an irrational thing, making illogical moves and asking for more than I am owed.
 

Smack dab in the middle of “Interrobang,” Jarrett defines the existentiality of Black womanhood with a theory of twoness that rivals Du Bois: “That we are not dead, yet know we will die;/that we are both thought and matter—//the erotic paradox.” Thought and matter. Sometimes, people seem bewildered that I am either. Others seem intent on convincing me that I am none, or that I am no more than the erotics of what they can get away with doing to me, a phenomenon Hortense Spillers calls pornotroping. In response, I’ve taken on a number of countermeasures. When men exhibit harmful behavior, I either call them on it or I bounce—sometimes both. As I’m dressing for my doctor’s appointments, I make a point to look in the mirror and say, “I got you if nobody else does. And I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of.” When I need clarity on the location of my money, I ask. When no one answers, I ask again. When I sit down to write, I try my best to do so without inhibitions, even if I know I’ll be on the phone with my friends again, being reassured that I really am loving the right people. I do all of this because, as Jarrett says, I am not dead, but I know I could die anytime if my doctor prescribes me the wrong medications, or if the right ones make good on their black box warnings. I could die by violence, be it intimate partner or state sanctioned—it happens all the time. One of the questions I am always asking myself is: what do you have to lose? The answer is everything, but I never let myself go there. Instead, I apply for a different job. I work for others and then I work for myself. When I’m tired of being chained to the computer, I put on my headphones and walk my suburban neighborhood, in which I enjoy living, though I am not always welcome. So I carry my pepper spray, and in the event that trouble arises, I’m prepared to ink the air with it to get free. I walk in the middle of the sidewalk and let people cross the street if they want to stay away from me. No matter what I do for a living, it is my job to challenge anything that would prevent me from claiming space, which brings me one step closer to living three-thirds of my life doing what I love. The final words of Jarrett’s poem warn the reader of her “sweet poison”: “Of such sweetness, men have died./I would not have you die of want,” she says. As I circle the block, I take deep breaths. I clear my throat and practice song as well as speech. In my earbuds, Cardi B asks: “Fuck you thought: a bitch was gon be down her whole life?”

I know better than to wait for the world’s answer.