With the release of her new poetry collection, sp[RED], Jessica Doe spoke with Sundress Publications Intern Corina Yi to discuss the decolonization of the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot deck, the fluidity of identity across roles and generations, and the refusal to be seen as monstrous, reclaimed through body horror.
Corina Yi: The collection opens with the poem “The Fool” and ends with “King of Cups.” What is the significance of titling the poems after tarot cards?
Jessica Doe: The purpose of this entire collection is to decolonize/Indigenize the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot deck, so it’s less of a “significance” and more of the core of the collection (the titles came ready-made). I learned on this deck as a child. Beginning with The Fool is simply because that is the first card in the major arcana. I chose which suit followed (wands, pentacles, swords, or cups) based largely on a tempering of how the suits “speak” to each other. Of course, the cup suit relates to emotions and a more feminine energy. The King cards, of course, are the “close” of any suit, but I thought it important to end with the emotionally-fueled suit that is inherently “fluid” and ever-moving. The poem for King of Cups also inverts the (false) idea many people have of the Santa Maria “landing” on Turtle Island. In this poem, it sinks (same as it did in reality).
CY: Can you speak on the collection’s relationship to Indigenous heritage, family, and decolonization?
JD: This is a very broad question and, in the end, I can really only speak to my experience as an Indigenous person (and to some degree, but much, much lesser, the shared experiences of my community and tribe). The answer to this could be a lengthy article (or more). To keep it short, I will say that I was raised being taught tarot on the Smith-Rider-Waite deck—as many people were. It was the most readily available and popular deck at the time. Even as a child, the white, heteronormative, colonial, racist, fat-phobic-ness of the deck was clear, even when I didn’t have the overt experience and language for it. The purpose of the collection is to reimagine this specific deck through the only lens I have: that of an Indigenous person. Given the biblical elements of the original deck (along with all the issues I listed above), this called for a lot of deeper dives and inversions/subversions of the original images in order to dismantle them and make them more “usable” to an Indigenous audience. Of course, to the deck’s credit, there are also many esoteric and occult-ish elements as well, which is also explored in the collection.
CY: The narratives in this collection are generational, positioning the narrator as sometimes a mother, a daughter, a wife—which speaks to this idea that we are many things all at once, at any given time. For you, how does this translate into your feminist writing praxis?
JD: Well, I’m writing from my own lens as we all do, intentionally or not (which, yes, in part, is that of a mother/daughter/wife), and this also happens to echo the trifecta of achieving what some Eurocentric people often call crone status. Being “many things as once” isn’t, for me, strictly a feminist idea or position. We all are, all the time. Sometimes the speaker is also a male, and it’s also not the same speaker throughout necessarily. The mother/daughter/wife positioning isn’t intended to be “feminist writing” but rather a somewhat common navigation that many of us experience and traverse daily.
CY: Tell me more about your choice of language, syntax, and form, especially in poems such as “2 of Cups” and “9 of Cups,” which appear more structurally experimental.
JD: I often write in hybrid of experimental forms (including a previous collection written in a very restrictive sort of reverse form). The tarot deck itself can be seen as quite structured in some readings (i.e. Celtic Cross) or it can be seemingly feral. I have worked extensively with erasure/blackout poetry (as in 2 of Cups) and previously spent an academic year at Notre Dame working with their archives and the creation of a series of erasure poems. I also have a solid background in concrete poems, such as 9 of cups, and sometimes it just feels like a poem (or any piece of writing) wants to be in a specific visual shape. The two listed here are also both in the cups suit, so perhaps that fluidity and leaning more on the emotional aspect lends itself to a more explorative form.
CY: I’m curious about the recurring image of monsters and body horror throughout this collection, especially in relation to processing violence and grief.
JD: Well, I’m a horror writer (in prose) and tend to lean especially towards body horror in both my writing and preferences. There are probably numerous reasons for that, but I grew up with horror and that’s always been my preferred genre in film (and, as an early reader and then circling back to now, with books). My scholarly background is in eating disorders, and if you look at the history of these disorders, well before they were named, the “monstrous” is quite prevalent (Cronus, for example). Eating disorders are also a colonial import, of course. My story that opens the collection Never Whistle at Night 2: Back for Blood, “Miss Cherokee Princess 1996,” examines this in a prose means. For me, “horror” is not about processing violence or grief, though perhaps that’s a colonial reading of the horror elements I use (particularly Indigenous horror), but rather an act of reclamation and refusal of being named as the grotesque (both as a woman and an Indigenous person). Indigenous people have historically been either the monstrous (other) or the magical saviors in horror with special powers to guide the white hero. However, we have lived horror in a different sense since contact—for us, the monstrous is not often binary, but oftentimes a part of history that has been skewed by outsiders and given a new name and purpose.
CY: What is the significance/function of using “I” and “we” in this collection? How much of the narrator’s first-person perspective is borrowed from your personal perspective? Is it rather supposed to be understood as a collective identity?”
JD: Rather simply, because as a poet I was raised with the works of confessional poets (though of course that term was long ago regretted by its namer/maker). The I/we speaker is what I was most comfortable with for years because we often write similar to what we read. However, I am solidly of the camp that the poet and speaker(s) should always be considered separate unless the poet explicitly states that a work is autobiographical. I have never stated that for any poem in this collection, though of course every writer is fed and informed by their experiences. I do often feel like I should say, because it has long been inferred by others: my father never sexually abused me in any manner (nor did any other father figure type in my life). Poems like Emperor, which is written in first person, tend to make readers think that (and since my father is dead, he would have no means of defending himself). This is just one example of many, but perhaps the most damning. I explore the ugly, I’m drawn to it, and incestual rape is perhaps the most horrific of things that a person can experience (though I do not write of this from my own experience). I say all this to (re)stress the importance of not reading autobiography into any work.
CY: You write: “Yes, but what / about a woman? We are sovereign / bodies, life-making, life-sustaining archipelagos / of history, buoyant keys, riders / of turtle backs and / dethroners of kings.” Can you speak on the insistence of including body politics in feminist poetry?
JD: “Body politic” is a rather new term for what many Indigenous people (especially women who, like me, who come from matrilineal groups) simply thought of as the norm. The I is the we, and to some degree vice versa. Is it “insistent” in my work, or this collection? I don’t particularly think so, it just is.
CY: How does your poetry speak to ongoing conversations about intersectional identities?
JD: I think such discourse is so overabundant and overwhelming that it can probably be tied into any such discussion. The majority of us, I imagine, claim various identities including conflicting identities at any time. That is part of the fallout of colonization, evolution, language, and progress. That being said, there are also quite a few people like me, who claim the same identifies, so my hope is that some readers will find themselves in some of these poems (or, at least, some of their Selves).
sp[RED] is available to order now!
Jessica Doe, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/multi/anti-disciplinary writer, artist, and scholar and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her work explores space, place, Indigenization, decolonization, poetry, and embodiment across scholarship and creative practice. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar, she is currently writing an Indigenous short horror collection grounded in Indigeneity.
Corina Yi (she/her) is a student at Pomona College studying English and Creative Writing. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Agave Review, the literary magazine at the Claremont Colleges consortium. She likes collecting postcards, drinking tea, cafe hopping, and going on spontaneous adventures. Her Instagram is @corinayii, so feel free to say hi!
