We both / Were skid-marks, ink-spots, or coal-black / You should know I would have my lover / No other way, writes Jada Renée Allen in her poem “Nocturne.” In “Interior,” she writes: In the watchtower that is my body/ there is a door that leads to a legion / of ungone femmes. When I read these lines, I inhabit the lush and alive space Allen is willing into existence for me, for dark-skin queer and trans femmes who know registers of antiblackness that others refuse to contend with—a refusal that limits possibilities of actual liberation. Allen knows this intimately and conjures our freedom on and off the page. Something she knows is worth everything.
In her article “Haitian Rhythms Under Scrutiny: Guantánamo Bay Bio-surveillance and Blackness at the Border” for Logic(s) 19, Shamira Ibrahim asks: “Which technologies—digital and otherwise—recognize dark-skinned people, and to what end?” Jada Reneé Allen’s work and our conversation attends to that question, offering a response centering a dark-skinned Black femme abolitionist poetics.
Thank you, Jada.
—Rezina Habtemariam, Logic(s) Managing Editor
Rezina Habtemariam: I can’t believe we met seven years ago at VONA,1 where the luminary Patricia Smith was our instructor! I remember that even then your pen was something serious, the way you could play with language and form in a voice that was distinctly yours. I’m interested in starting here as a marker of time—can you talk to me about the evolution of your writing practice since then?
Jada Renée Allen: Mercy, seven years. So much has shifted since then. What a mighty, coruscating group we were. Our cohort was a force, girl. Patricia as our workshop instructor, too? Baby, folks couldn’t tell us shit!
It’s interesting because I’ve started to unmask a lot and become way more vulnerable in my work than I thought I was being, which I didn’t even consider possible. I’m contending with a new set of conditions: what it means to forgo masculinity—and masculinity as a means of survival and protection—while being vigilant of the fact that I’ve wanted to transition ever since I was four years old. Having that knowledge within me and knowing—looking around and seeing how my sisters have been treated throughout history and actively in the present. Just last month, two Black trans women were murdered in the same week: one in Houston, Texas, by the name of Chanel Vanity Williams—sambula—and another in Abuja, Nigeria, by the name of Abuja Area Mama—ìsé.
I’m contending with a new set of conditions: what it means to forgo masculinity—and masculinity as a means of survival and protection—while being vigilant of the fact that I’ve wanted to transition ever since I was four years old.
So, in thinking about the evolution of my writing practice, I’ve allowed myself to grieve more in my work, leaning more into elegy as a form of ancestor reverence and also anger. That is the space I am writing from at this moment, whereas before I was writing more pristine, ordered, lyric poems that had a lot to do with the self. Now I’ve finally come into a space where I am wrestling with the self in relation to society and community while occupying multiple intersections: Black, trans, woman, queer, in a lesbian relationship with another Black trans woman. I’m thinking through what that means and has always meant for women like me.
Rezina: May Chanel Vanity Williams and Area Mama rest easy. I appreciate this reflection. There’s an assumed vulnerability in writing a poem—which is precisely what I struggled with during VONA [laughs]. Like, there’s a performance of vulnerability that happens often in poetry, or a vulnerability that doesn’t translate beyond the poem into a politics of care (tea). Anyway, I really love hearing about the unfolding of vulnerability for you and the process of showing up as yourself, when that self is still becoming, in your poems.
Jada: Informing this is also the fact that the subjects of my poems from back then are somewhat related to but extremely different from the subjects I write about now. The way I experienced homoerotic desire in 2017 when I was being read as a man versus how I experience it now as a woman has changed me and, therefore, the material. There is something far more radical and intimate about lesbian desire compared to the desire between men. This is something I’ve been leaning into lately, along with literature by Black queer women like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke. This canon has been much more instructive for me. And now, having fallen in love with another Black trans woman has taught me so much about myself. Unmasking before her and her unmasking before me has been so sweet. So, I’ve been writing more towards that type of love, which needs to be seen more—it challenges the dominant cis understanding of what lesbianism can mean and look like.
Rezina: That’s so beautiful.
Jada: It is. And being in this lesbian relationship, I’m also like, I need to edit these poems! [Laughs]
Rezina: How do you feel about publishing these unpublished poems about desire between people who identified as men at the time?
Jada: Since I was writing this particular poem [“Nocturne”] for a long time, I also want to honor the history of my gender and sexuality. The desire to edit probably derives from a place of dysphoria and wanting to be seen as this pristine bitch who always had it figured out. But I want my poems to be a map of my ever-changing and conflicting desires. The speaker in my poems is from a space and time where I was once, and I did love a dark-skin Black man deeply. And now as a trans woman, my desires and my life center Black trans women. And this is all another poem unfolding.
The desire to edit probably derives from a place of dysphoria and wanting to be seen as this pristine bitch who always had it figured out.
Rezina: Period. I really love your articulation of wanting your poems to be an archive or a mapping of self. Whether you make edits or not, this reflection on the expansiveness of desire in a way that honors your journey takes such a deep knowing and loving of yourself.
I’m thinking about how healing that love (between women) can be and is. And how being able to unmask and commune with the self and another, specifically as a dark-skin femme is—I avoid using this word usually but—radical. I would love for it to be ordinary; we know it is everything but. The self-work, the self-love, the imagining of in the constant absence—that is praxis, it don’t come easy in a world that positions us at the very Black bottom.
Jada: Yes, come on wit it! We’re mammified, feminized into caretaking and simultaneously masculinized because of our dark skin.
Rezina: Right! It took me a minute to understand just how deeply being dark skin informs our material lives. Like, beyond desirability—which colorism is always reduced to and overdetermined by—it translates to access, and opportunities and money and work (and yourself) being seen and taken seriously. Over time and as you’ve settled into yourself, I’ve seen you take up this structural and interpersonal antagonism in your work. I’d love to hear more about that.
Jada: Thank you so much for bringing this up; because that has been part of unmasking in my poems. My journey with poetry is symptomatic of my journey as a living Black person discovering things about myself, and checking myself on what I view poetry and poetics as being for, and the utility of it all. For a while, I didn’t believe that poetry could be a container to talk about things like colorism. I was preoccupied with thinking about how I could talk about this without being hackneyed or cliché or falling into stale tropes. I’d ask if the poem had been written before, and if the answer was yes, then I just wouldn’t write it. I’d turn away from it.
Now I ask: Does the work lend itself to certain tropes that have been explored before, and if so, what is it that I have to say about these tropes? If the poem has been written before, how might I add something distinct to this conversation? Because literature is a conversation. I’ve been thinking about Susan Sontag saying, “Literature needs lots of people.” I firmly believe that. I don’t know where I’d be without Greg Pardlo, who reminds me, “Just say the fucking thing,” and Patricia Smith, who always said brilliant things during our workshop, like “we all have a second throat,” which will forever remain with me.
When I was writing in the voice of my speaker, a queer poet who was socialized and read as a man, I didn’t announce certain things within my poems, because I felt like it would be too much of a gesture within the work and also probably speak to the aesthetic argument of the poem. Whereas now, I am actually saying the thing, and there’s liberation in saying that thing—especially in the realm of poetry, where those declarations of loving dark-skin folk and of being loved as a dark-skin femme are powerful to name. Because poems are also spells, right?
Rezina: Come on! You are willing it, which we are in need of always. You’re conjuring the lovely love.2
Jada: Yes, a lovely love, Gwendolyn Brooks. Let it be alleys.
Rezina: Let it be stairways, okay! I think of the conjuring in your poems as a technology. I’m thinking about Audre Lorde writing that poetry makes something happen, it makes our living happen.3 You’ve named your poems as repositories of hauntings, but simultaneously they’re also repositories of what you’ve willed. The tenderness amidst the terror, the actualizing of a self, the love your poems make possible. How are you thinking about the capabilities of this technology in a climate of catastrophe—amid transmisogynoir, multiple genocides, premature Black death, the US presidential election, and so on? In other words, if poems are spells, can you say more about what can they do for us?
Jada: I love thinking of poetry as a technology—it reminds me of Dionne Brand saying poetry is “a kind of metallurgy.” There’s a heat and fire to poetry that makes meaning and language—I think many writers haven’t fully tapped into this. Is the sugar pine truly luminous, or have these terrorist regimes burned down our forests? The latter may not sound as glamorous, but it’s the truth. I want poems to feel like truth again. While poems unquestionably involve plenty of aesthetic concerns, crafting them is also a form of artisanship. For me, it’s an artisanship like blacksmithing. It’s spiritual work, yes, and also scientific, and there’s a physicality to it. As writers, our words are the weapons of our warfare. And there must be war.
Is the sugar pine truly luminous, or have these terrorist regimes burned down our forests?
Rezina: Your turn towards the spiritual has not only informed this blossoming of self; it’s also instructed your writing. Blending ritual practices with your craft has become critical for your work. Can you talk to me about that?
Jada: I feel as though it’s something I’ve always done, but I only began to place language around it in early 2019. Then, during the lockdown era of the pandemic, I spoke to a diviner—Negarra Kudumu—who helped me identify and name my connection to the spirit world. The realm of spirit is this vast place; I think I feared and turned away from the dead for a long time. But now, turning towards the dead has been the most liberating experience of my life. Honoring and venerating my ancestors and acknowledging the gifts they’ve passed on to me has also helped me turn towards and know myself specifically as a Black trans woman. This knowing is also shaped by the understanding of what it means to be a go-between—to start off as one thing and to transform into something different. To quite literally have one foot in another world and the other foot in this world, how this very positionality is queer.
This shows up in my poems in many ways—I realize, for example, that I’m really drawn to music within my work because my ancestors were musicians. They were blues singers, griots, storytellers, and historians. There’s a legacy of singing on my paternal side, so those are qualities of my writing that I find to also be ancestral, and I lean towards this more than ever. Before, I think it was just coming from a place of being garish or showy, but now it’s from a place of survival.
Rezina: And a place of study. You’ve engaged in the slow time and work of cultivating these connections across time, place, and plane.
Jada: Yes, I’m clearer on what my spiritual frame looks like now, as opposed to when I was younger. And I’m grateful to my ancestors for taking time with me; because I know if I would’ve known certain things before it was time for me to know, we would’ve ended up in a very different place than I am now.
Rezina: That’s a word. I’m thinking about how part of this unfolding has been carving out space not only for yourself but for others—how this is part of a Black feminist lineage of creation and invention. I’m thinking about Octavia Butler saying, “You got to make your own worlds, you got to write yourself in,” and how committed you are to this very practice. You show us this in your poems and also off the page by creating critical sites of gathering and study. You developed JuJu Poetics and the Frances Thompson Writers Studio for Black Trans Study. Tell me about these world-making interventions.
Jada: In response to multiple crises—wildfires, police violence, the pandemic, and the ongoing loss of Black trans lives—I began questioning what and how someone of a multiplicity of targeted identities, and therefore someone with layered traumas, could possibly write in such times. Juju Poetics is a course that emerged from those questions, and it is rooted in spirit as a source of guidance when everything around us seems to fail. Through studying Black women writers like Lucille Clifton, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Toni Morrison, and performing self-guided or communal divination, we engage in the ancient art of listening and invite the revelatory into our writing. It’s like this beautiful intuitive lab where we just are and be. Against overthinking, mistake, and correction—it is a lab for what Morrison calls rememory. Thinking, rethinking, and recalling.
Rezina: I’m thinking about all the links between ancestral connection, rememory, and your creation of the Frances Thompson Writers Studio for Black Trans Study. Tell me about this.
Jada: Frances Thompson was an enslaved Black trans woman who later lived as a free person in Memphis in the 1800s. She became an anti-rape activist after the Memphis Riots of 1866, in which white mobs terrorized and raped Black people for gathering in public. Thompson ended up testifying before the US Congress, and it’s believed that she was the first trans woman to do so. Learning this history of her survival and advocacy against rape (which she experienced during the riots) and feeling connected to her spirit was a watershed moment for me. It was an opening to think more about what it means to be Black and trans in a traumatized and violated body, resisting oppressive systems that provide no protection and allow us to be harmed.
It was an opening to think more about what it means to be Black and trans in a traumatized and violated body, resisting oppressive systems that provide no protection and allow us to be harmed.
At the same time, I was also feeling invisible as a deep dark-skin, Black trans writer. After I won the 2022 Discovery Award from 92NY (which we know clearly is a Zionist organization, yuck),4 I still felt immensely invisible. During conversations with Jari Bradley, a best friend who serves as faculty with me, I realized that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. This feeling of erasure, antiblackness, transmisogynoir, transphobia in the era of book bans and the targeting of trans people in the politics of the election felt depraved and terrifying for many of us. So, the Writers Studio was my call to action—it was a call to create space for Black trans voices globally, across diasporas. There were folks who applied to the workshop from the UK, Jamaica, and Nigeria. That type of reach demonstrated a sense of urgency beyond representation, because fuck representational politics. There is deep desire to be seen and have your work be shared, examined, and analyzed with rigor and care. The Writers Studio is a response to erasure; it is to create and take space within the landscape of literature in order to have our writing taken seriously.
There’s a chasm within poetry and poetics wherein Black trans and gender-variant folks are often erased from conversations about poetics and about what it means to have a liberatory and abolitionist poetics. We are having these conversations in the workshop. There are people who’ve participated and are really creating dangerously in the most beautiful ways. I want to see more books, essays, poems, and plays from us and not just about us—this is what the Writers Studio is invested in. I’m excited to see where it’s going; we still haven’t had the funding required to be fully functional, but the hope, by the power of the transcestors, is that we will have everything up and running within the next two to three years so that we can continue to open up a global conversation about what it means to be Black, and trans, and a writer.
Rezina: You’ve named the limitations of contemporary poetry and its institutions—and by limitations, I mean intentional, structural negation and gatekeeping. I know that the historic events of October 7, 2023, in Gaza—the Al-Aqsa Flood operation—and the aftermath woke this up for many and led to boycotts of various literary institutions and organizations like 92NY. I wanted to trace your interventions during this conversation; because you’re modeling such a necessary action that I hope we see more of. You are dreaming and creating the very alternatives needed to support and sustain the most marginalized—what incredible work. This is no small thing. And you’re also doing this while working on your first collection of poems. Tell me about your debut manuscript, Drill.
Jada: Thank you. I’m thinking through so much with this manuscript. I’m thinking through drill as a rap genre that is an offshoot of juke music, which is a form of house—all of which originated in Chicago, which is where I’m from and where I’m always writing towards. Drill music was never meant to leave Chicago and has now made it to Palestine, Sudan, the Congo—places being terrorized and places whose people are practicing resistance. I’m fascinated by that. I’m also thinking about drill in the militarized sense and about the language of the US military and the Chicago Police Department, their practices of terrorism. I’m thinking about Richard Zuley, a CPD detective who tortured Black people, whose strategies served as instruction for Guantanamo Bay. This is what helped me realize how the violence of empire(s), of settler-colonial regimes, are connected—which is how I know now that the violence happening in Palestine is linked to the violence happening in Chicago, Atlanta, and the Congo. It helps me understand what June Jordan means when she wrote, “I am become a Palestinian.”5
I’m excited to thread these pieces together and make my city, my people, proud.
Rezina: You’re already doing that, you hear me? The title poem was just published as the featured poem on poets.org for their Poem-a-Day series—shout out to Danez Smith for their curation. Congratulations! I’m so, so excited for Drill to come into the world and for all that you’re doing to be nourished and to nourish you.
Jada: Ah, don’t make me cry. Thank you. I love you.
Rezina: I love you.
1. Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation is the only multi-genre writing workshop for writers of color.
2. Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, “A Lovely Love,” The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (New York: Library of America, 2006).
3. Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen,” in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4. 92NY is a nonprofit cultural institution that has had a long history of Zionism. Though the literary community had come to consider them a neutral, secular venue for public scholarship, 92NY’s cancellation on October 21, 2023, of an event with Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen—after Nguyen signed an open letter condemning Israel’s genocidal actions—resurfaced the organization’s Zionist politics.
5. June Jordan, “Moving towards Home,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2007).