Old Fields, New Orchards: Surviving Poetics with Ra/Malika Imhotep

AbolitionISH

CW: This episode contains mentions of sexual violence.

“I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz. That's a hard task. But that's what I want to do." — Toni Morrison

"What are the methods... of holding this soft, adaptive, Black feminine flesh thing, this surviving thing. How do you write about it?" — Ra/Malika Imhotep

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How does capitalism live in our bodies? How did an interest in Ghanaian hip-hop and Pan-Africanism lead Ra/Malika Imhotep to New Orleans, to study and write about Black femininity, queer embodiment, & the performance of labor?

This month, Jon Jon welcomes Ra/Malika Imhotep, Ph.D, a Black feminist writer, performance artist, and cultural worker from Atlanta, Georgia. Ra/Malika's debut collection of poetry, gossypiin, was published by Red Hen Press in April 2022. Ra/Malika's intellectual and creative work tends to the relationships between queer embodiment, Black femininity, vernacular culture, & the performance of labor.

In this conversation, Jon Jon asks them to share their ongoing journey through academic, artistic, and ancestral spaces, and how these spaces have informed their being and creation. And Ra/Malika gives us so much—on self-importance, refusing the demand to translate interiority, what Atlanta taught them about slavery, and why they "want the language to be felt," no matter what they're writing.

Keywords: gossip, peaches, dysfunction, cotton root bark, imposition, atlanta, barbara christian, reproductive labor, 1987

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AbolitionISH: a podcast at the end of the world is a black politics and culture podcast made possible by Producer WyLee (NYC/JHB, @whoswylee) Host Jon Jon Moore (CDMX @incivilitea) and Social Media Director Bug (PHL, @hoetentiial).

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