In the wake of the release of her full-length poetry collection, Nocture in Joy, Tatiana Johnson-Boria spoke with Sundress Publication’s editorial intern K Slade about Black Womexhood, generational trauma, and the beauty of unrestricted Black joy.
K Slade: The speaker recollects their time during childhood, sharing intimate and loaded moments with their close family. Was it hard to transport yourself back in time to a place where the world was so big but you were so small? Or were these moments the speaker reflects on ingrained in you, something you could innately write about?
Tatiana Johnson-Boria: I currently live with PTSD, and I think that I needed to care for myself while also allowing myself to speak the truth of my experience in this book. The process was difficult, and these moments will always be prominent because they are the core of my own survival. I am not thankful for these moments, yet I’m not afraid of them. I am mostly in earnest care for the versions of myself who endured the things I discuss in this book.
KS: How did you navigate the separation between the male characterization in your poems (particularly in “My Brother Outruns a Dog on W. Concord St.” and “My Father Hums in the Kitchen and for the First Time This is Art”) and the characterization of your women?
TJB: I really wanted to center the Black womxnhood/womanhood in this collection. I don’t see the male characters as separate but as in connection with the speaker. Some of these connections are harmful, yet some of them are loving and full of care. I also think there is a moment where tenderness is central to the male figures in this collection. Yet, this isn’t an overarching characterization of males in general. I tried not to make overt generalizations and focus on the humanity of all the people in this collection while also being truthful to my own experiences.
KS: You’ve dedicated your poetry collection to “Black Womxn” of any and all embodiments. How do Black Womxn shape your unfolding narrative? What pieces of Black womxnhood mean the most to you within your collection?
TJB: There’s this famous quote by Toni Morrison that says: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” As a writer, this is something I’m always doing. As a Black woman who comes from Black womxn, of all origins, it felt organic to dedicate this book to them and to the versions of myself that desperately needed to read this book. There are also so many parts of my healing journey that center Black feminist teachings and for me, I would not have survived without the ecosystems created for me by Black womxn.
KS: In “Ars Poetica,” you write “A walk through a field carrying my mother’s wounds // The glorious gap in my grandmother’s teeth // The iron swallowing the wrinkles from my sister’s dress // My stubborn brothers throw their heads back in laughter I marvel the harvest of their uncombed kinks //A phantom of a father the tremor of his voice.” What does it mean to carry all these lives on such tiny shoulders?
TJB: I think a lot about generational trauma, and I find it surreal to know our lives stem from lives lived before us. All of these things are embedded in who we are, from the smallest detail to the most immense memory. I focused on the things from my past that I only saw glimpses of but that tell such a big story about my lineage. I got so much inspiration from Joy Harjo’s poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” and the way she uses a kitchen table to weave through time, memory, and ancestral experiences.
I wanted to emulate the way a poem can do that, and I found an avenue through fragmented mages. These fragments, to me, feel easier to hold onto, and because of this more possible to hold.
KS: Many of your poems center on the weight of generational trauma, such as the opening stanzas of “Ars Poetica” and “Another Death.” How do you think the uniqueness of the Black experience contextualizes generational trauma? How does it impact the speaker in your collection?
TJB: The Black experience is rich and vast, and racism, in the United States, actively violates the depth and beauty of Blackness. I recently visited the Simone Leigh exhibit entitled “Sovereignty.” The art was created in an examination of Black femme identity and the state of being sovereign. Simone Leigh writes: “To be sovereign is to not be subject to another’s authority, another’s desires, or another’s gaze, but rather to be the author of one’s own history.”
I saw this exhibit after writing this book but couldn’t help but see the connection. Simone Leigh is examining Blackness and I’m examining Blackness, and there’s a thread of “being the author of one’s story” that binds us. This is something I see as a unique aspect of Black identity. We are learning to love, care, and be ourselves in a society that actively violates us.
Blackness is infinite and sacred. It’s not only the relationship between Blackness and white supremacy that echoes into the life of the speaker, it’s the relationship between the speaker and their own Blackness that encourages the writing of their own story and existence. This is core to the speaker’s survival.
KS: “Add Half & Half for Sweetness” embodies what it’s like being a Black girl in the South. You write “The woman whose hair is as unruly as mine says there is something wrong when the cake is too dry to always add creamer to please the palate. My hair is burning in her kitchen an iron close hissing my scalp the static of my hair bakes knots smooth.” How do the female relationships within your collection speak to the trauma of growing up as a Black girl?
TJB: There’s a line in the poem “Nocturne in Joy: where the speaker states: “I am old enough to know that no man has ever come to save me//the way a woman has.” This line encompasses much of the core of how crucial Black women, womxn, and femme relationships are. These relationships are crucial not just for survival, but in being seen. In being seen, we can be heard, and being seen in a community of Black people upends what has historically and what is currently occurring (violence, neglect, etc.) for Black women, womxn, and femmes in our society. In archiving these moments of care between Black people, we are tending and caring for Black people to thrive.
Nocturne in Joy is available to order on the Sundress website
Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is a writer, artist, and educator. Her writing explores identity, trauma, especially inherited trauma, and what it means to heal. Her work has been selected as a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest (2020), and others. She is a recipient of the 2021 MacDowell Fellowship and the 2021 Brother Thomas Fellowship. Johnson-Boria completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and is a 2021 Tin House Scholar. Find her work in or forthcoming at Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and others.
K Slade (she/her) is a Black gothic and speculative fiction writer pursuing a BS in Digital Journalism and a Japanese minor at Appalachian State University. She currently serves as Visual Managing Editor for The Appalachian, her collegiate newspaper, and specializes in multimedia journalism. Horror media deeply inspired her love for the craft and in the future, K wants to write a script for a horror game. After undergrad, she hopes to move to New York and pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.
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