Chet’la Sebree is the author of Mistress, forthcoming from New Issues Press in fall 2019. She was the 2014–16 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry and has received fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and the Richard H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. Her poem “Dispatch from the Dark Continent” can be found here. It appears along with two other poems in the Sept/Oct 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Dispatch from the Dark Continent”?
I wanted to explore this constant negotiation between the self and the world and how someone might resist being her full self in fear of becoming a stereotype, especially as it pertains to sex and sexuality. This poem actually responds to another in my forthcoming collection Mistress called “A La Negresse,” which was the term for rear-entry intercourse (or doggy-style) in Alex Comfort’s 1972 version of Joy of Sex. That poem looks at how the position is framed by black womanhood and the problematic nature of that.
“Dispatch from the Dark Continent” shows the demand on women of color to be at once immensely tolerant and adaptable while also fulfilling singular stereotypes or desires. The tension here places the speaker in a space of impossibility where they are asked to “be twice” as they are advised by their mother. Could you tell us a little more about this doubling of self, both in the speech and content of this poem?
President Barack Obama perhaps put it best in a Morehouse College convocation speech when he said “every one of you have a grandma or an uncle or a parent who’s told you that at some point in life, as an African American, you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.” This poem looks at how the intersectionality of black womanhood amplifies that. The mother repeats “you have to be twice” to underscore how, as a black woman, it can feel as though you have to be more than twice as “good”—whatever that means, by whoever is defining it—to get anywhere in life and how this can apply to one’s own sexuality. In this way, embracing one’s full sexuality runs the risk of oversexualization, which can then lead to a denial of self. I often think of what Annette Gordon-Reed wrote in The Hemingses of Monticello, when I think about this space of impossibility: “The portrayal of black female sexuality as inherently degraded is a product of slavery and white supremacy, and it lives on as one of slavery’s chief legacies and as one of white supremacy’s continuing projects.”
You end this piece: “I’m damned if I do, / damned if I don’t, / and am always asked / to speak for a whole race.” Could you talk about that more?
The ending is two-fold. It speaks to that space of impossibility but it also speaks to my anxieties about writing a collection that explores black female identities and representation. I’ve always felt deep anxieties about anyone approaching my work and walking away from it thinking any version of “oh, now I understand what it means to be a black woman.” I’ve often heard that sort of language in conversation with books written by people of color. In no way can most books even begin to explain just one person’s lifetime, so how can one book be responsible for representing a whole group of people? I worry that this is the pressure we put on many artists of color (or, quite frankly, any writer who belongs to a marginalized or underrepresented group), as though one book, or one poem, could or should do all of that work. So, instead of letting the anxiety of what responsibility people think my book had to fully explain what it means to be a cisgender woman of color in the twenty-first century, I figured would give myself an out by calling out how ridiculous those expectations are.
Could you talk about the “Dark Continent” in the title?
The title is also two-fold. It is a nod to two white men’s categorizations of women’s sexuality and the continent of Africa as “dark,” mysterious, unknown entities. Sigmund Freud called “the sexual life of adult women . . . a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” in The Question of Lay Analysis. This term, however, was coined in the nineteenth century by Henry Morton Stanton as a term for Africa in Through the Dark Continent. As a poem about black female sexuality, the dispatch acts as a responsive report from the “mysterious” interiority of one black woman. I’ve framed it as a singular dispatch as a way of resisting any monolithic notions of black female sexuality; it is one speaker speaking of her own experiences.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
I would definitely say food, wine, and fellowship, in no specific order. My interpersonal relationships are constantly fueling my work. My friends inspire me, challenge me to see the world in new ways, and make me desire to create a more welcoming and inclusive space where each of them is invited to be whole. I use the word fellowship to describe spending time with them in part because it reminds me of my Christian upbringing and in part because of residual, or not so residual, Lord of the Rings nerdom. Communing with them feels holy, like its own form of church. And you can’t have communion without food and wine, right? OK—I’ve probably stretched this somewhat sacrilegious metaphor long enough, but seriously, food and wine play a big role. As a writer, I find I need new creative outlets to keep me inspired. I find cooking to be just that. And learning about grapes and wine production over the past few years has been a fun adventure. To be clear, I am no chef, winemaker, or sommelier-in-training, but I love to bring people together for a night of meaningful conversation over food and wine where our souls and stomachs are fed. I find this to be the yang to the yin of solitude also required for my writing.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Best advice: You are a writer because you write. For a long time, I tied being a writer to being published; however, until two years ago, I’d only published one poem. This meant I felt like an imposter. When a nonwriter friend offered up this advice, I brushed it off as reductive and oversimplified. But now I hold onto the words like a mantra. They are a welcomed reminder during a flood of rejections. I think so many of us get caught up in the writing life of publishing, giving readings, and having an outward-facing presence—necessarily so, as many of us do this work in order to share it with others—that it’s nice to remind myself that no matter what I always have the page, that that’s all I need to be a writer.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
With my first collection coming out next fall, I was worried that I’d be a little stalled in my writing. Luckily for me, inspiration has kept flowing. I am currently working on a—admittedly somewhat amorphous—lyric. It tackles some of the same topics of race, sexuality, representation, identity, but through a broader lens. We’re talking bringing ancient Greek philosophy in conversation with Disney’s Pocahontas, the historical Pocahontas in conversation with the biblical Rebecca, and the biblical Hagar in conversation with the 2017 Women’s March. Needless to say, there are a lot of moving puzzle pieces, but it’s a pleasurable exercise to try to weave complex and varied histories and conversations together.