April 8, 2025 • 35 mins
George is joined by the legendary author Sapphire. Her 1996 novel Push was adapted into the 2009 movie Precious, which won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Sapphire talks about what it's like to have her book banned, the authors who inspired her, and how art can heal trauma.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Rewriting your life story. Rewriting your life is a way
of healing from trauma. In some ways, I think art
is the only way you really heal from trauma.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Sapphire is the author of the acclaimed Nobel Push. She
wrote it in nineteen ninety six and it was adapted
into the movie called Precious in two thousand and nine.
The book tells the story of a young African American
girl in Harlem who discovers the power of reading and
writing after having gone through tremendous hardship. Sapphire's belief that
language can heal has real scientific evidence behind it.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
They had two traumatized groups. The one group was in
therapy and one group wrote a journal just about the
traumaticy them. Both groups felt better. You feel good when
you come out of therapy, and you feel good when
you write in your journal. But the group that wrote
in the journal had elevated t cells. Wow, so you
can't fucking fake that. You can. Yeah, that's not about
(01:00):
what you feel good or not. That needs your body
and started to heal.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Singing in them heavy handed, to plet the world, take
a sip of brandy, spoke the guy. You know what
the plan is to understand me.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
My name is George M.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Johnson. I am the New York Times best selling author
of the book All Boys on Blue, which is also
the second most banned book in the United States.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
This is Fighting Words, a show where we take you
to the front lines of the culture wars with the
people who.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Are using their words to make change and who refuse
to be silent. Today my conversation with Sapphire. I am
here today with the brilliant mind and author, writer, activists,
and so many things.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Sapphire, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
I'm good, I'm really good, and I'm happy to be
here talking with you.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
I'm super excited.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
As an author myself who has written a memoir that
had to go to a lot of vulnerable places. Your
work has definitely been a guiding tool, even allowing me
the courage to go to those places. I always like
to start with people introducing themselves. Who is Sapphire?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, I am Sapphire. I am a author and a
former educator and an activist, and I have used my
words as a form of activism, and I've used my
life as a form of expression of the deepest and
darkest things that I've experienced and I've used my writing
(02:44):
in many ways as a roadmap of how to come
out on the other side of darkness. And I've published
two novels and two books of poetry, and I'm currently
working on a third novel, really three novels, a trilogy
called do You Harlem? Yeah, it's gonna be hot, George.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The Harlem Trilogy. So that's all I was going about that.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I just wrote a book on the Harlem Renaissance called Flamboyance.
But you yourself, what was the thing that was like
the catalyst for you to even become a writer.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Some of the things that influenced me very early on
were some of the nonfiction that I read. I can
remember it being a child and reading the diary of
Anne Frank And if you read any of my work,
you can see all throughout it their diaries, their journals
and stuff. So that whole idea of personal writing, the
writing that one does for oneself. All of this writing,
(03:43):
along with some of the early slave narratives, falls kind
of under the radar of fign literature, you know what
I mean. These were writing there mfing lights. And then
in my early twenties, I read the prison letters of
George Jackson, and so that really really threw me for him.
(04:03):
This was a fine, fine mind who was murdered by
the state. And this was basically a young man who
was brilliant, but who hadn't had a lot of formal
education and found himself confined, and he started writing these letters,
and he was reading all these philosophers and everything. It
wasn't just the reading, it was writing those letters. These
(04:25):
letters now are still a roadmap to revolution. So I
was always more of a of a reader, you know,
I was young. I liked to read. And my mother
was a reader, you know, a frustrated housewife and all
that alcoholism, just a lot there, but she was definitely
a reader. She read in a way that was comforting
(04:45):
to me as a young girl and child. She read
for escapism and excitement, you know, but she was serious
and someone for reading. She was a devotee of James Baldwin,
and our favorite novel by him was just above my head.
So all of those things I remember while I was
locked out by class and skin shade and all that
(05:07):
of any type of black bourgeois. And that's not what
we were. Army people, and we were not part of
the black middle class in that way. So I never
went to Hb's and all that kind of stuff. But
I never felt locked out of actual literature. You know,
even when I was at my lowest, I had a
book in my jean's pocket, you know what I mean.
(05:29):
But I never felt comfortable being around the black literati,
or the white literacy for that matter. But I knew
from I knew from George Jackson. I knew from the
slave narratives. I knew from the diarct and Frank that
that literature was about the person who picked up a
pen and opened a notebook and wrote that's it. Of course,
(05:52):
there's going to be the Shakespeare and the christiansuff, but
literature writing belongs to all of us. And some people,
of course, will be genius at it, and some people
will only write the newspaper article of Margaret Granger. But
this would be the article that inspires Tony Morrison, the
great one. You're right, Belove, Yeah, So there would be
(06:12):
no Beloved had there not been those news clippings of
Margaret Granger. So every bit of writing we do adds
to this great table, this great banquet of literature that
can move us forward out of the seems like the
change we keep she pretty Yeah, I don't know what
that's all about.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Sapphire is talking about the enslaved woman, Margaret Garner. Tony
Morrison found an article about Garner and an eighteen fifty
six edition of The American Baptist titled A Visit to
the slave.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Mother who killed her child.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
It eventually inspired Morrison's novel Beloved, which won the Post
Serprize in nineteen eighty eight. Yeah, when you just said that,
I got chills because it made me think about Alice
Walker writing about Zorno Hurston, and I think it was
a Miss magazine. It's like Jordans had this whole life
and career passes away and then this one article comes
(07:06):
out and it changes the trajectory of.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
The cannon exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
She had been forgotten, you know what I mean. She
had been forgotten, and I think the tragedy of it.
You know, sometimes we sign our own death certificate. She
just slipped into obscurity, you know, on her out in
a certain kind of way. I don't think we had
a greater writer than her, And it's incumbent upon us
(07:31):
to call out our people based on our own standards,
not the standards of the New York Times or the
Saturday Reviews whatever, right, who's rocking you? They were interviewing
and to Zaki Shangi talking about her influences, and she
talked about Judy Groan, this was a lesbian poet in
San Francisco, and all of these fabulous poems that this
(07:54):
white lesbian wrote in the nineteen seventies. And it would
have been very easy for Antazaki to just forget about
what she had gotten from the white lesbian community. Very
easy because they forget about us all the time, all
the time, music, everything, and then the next thing, you know,
(08:15):
they were the originators. But I love what Antazaki said,
you know, stealing don't make it yours, It just makes
it stolen. So she was a great tribute her sources
and where she got things from. And it's something we
can all do. That's one of the things I tried
to do in Push is Alice Walker doesn't need me
to talk her up, but I made sure she got
in that book. You know I made right. You know
(08:38):
that Pressures is reading her. I made sure that Pressures
is reading Lucille Clifton, because those are the people who
influenced me, and I knew that I would have a
younger audience and an audience who had perhaps never heard
of Lucille Clifton, you know what I mean. So once
you include a hero in a book, then the people
(09:00):
who love your book start to look at your sources.
You know. I think some of my reading of Virginia
wolf came from finding out that Tony Morrison had written
some of her graduate papers on Virginia Wolfe. So I said, well,
I better check that bitch out, because, oh love.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
If the main girl loves it, right, then we all
need to.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Well, it's putting down, you know what I mean. And
the tragedy and crime of it is that so much
of what African Americans have shared has been stolen, has
been unacknowledged. So one of the ways we can do
that is not to repeat the crime. You know, to
attribute your influence and to talk about your teachers. It
(09:42):
doesn't make you look less or smaller. It makes you
look bigger, and it puts you in community as opposed
to recreating the white hierarchy of who's great and who isn't.
Because the hierarchy left George Jackson out to the hierarchy
George Jackson was a convicted criminal with sentence to prison
(10:03):
right and anybody who reads him knows he's a theoretical poet.
But what I mean, but he did that? Yeah, he
doesn't count. And you know, for a lot of people,
and Frank's just propaganda to you know. Yeah, the political
ideologies that came after her, they weren't looking at the
heart and soul of a little girl. So it's on us.
(10:24):
It's on us. I think we have a great responsibility
as writers to really not just be truthful, but to
be to be good. Why not?
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, almost like radical transparency with where it comes from.
And because I think about like when I was working
on the book on the Hall and Renaissance, like finding
out that like Count Coloring was James Baldwin's tenth grade
English teacher. You know, it's like and I love Lucille Clifton.
I love Lucill Clifton too. I think because my favorite quote,
which at some point I'm going to get tattooed on me,
(10:56):
I think it goes like drink with me, my friends
to a world that has tried to kill us as
of yet has not succeeded.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Exactly about that one, Yes, like walks away from the Grade.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yes, And now back to my conversation with Sapphire. Now,
of course you brought up your your novel Push, which
I guess most people in my generation would know as
(11:27):
the movie Precious And so what was that like to
have your work be adapted? What was that I guess
like for a work that had come out in the
nineties to then, it.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Was magical for me? Okay, for me, Push was a
very political text. I was in the middle of the
age epidemic. I was a dancer. Now, I was out there.
I was on the street and everything. And so I
remember the first person we knew who died of age
was a Hispanic woman. And so you hear about, you know,
female skying of age, all the energy went to that
(12:01):
this was a white male phenomena. And of course the
numbers the grand death pole has been black. Yes, but
still when you think of December one, World Age Day,
you think of white downtown. So that was on my
back and I just will never forget. A girl in
my class std up and said, look, I'm having trouble
(12:21):
getting my AZT and agent. It was a bad anti
viral drug that has been replaced in miracle drugs, but
it was all that we had at the time. Yeah,
and it was it was being rationed out and being withheld.
And these young black girls were having trouble getting the
(12:43):
drug so they would have to go down and worry
a social work or whatever. But this was happening in
front of me, you know what I mean. And then
my friends the dance community, they weren't writing poems about
their fate. They were just dying where so and so,
Oh he's dead, where so and so? Oh she's you know,
she's got the thing, you know, all that type of thing.
(13:03):
So I was in New York and also I was
seeing the horrible, horrible homophobia. You know. I was living
in Harlem on Lenox Avenue, and I remember one wall
had some graffiti on it and it was on the
top was stop AIDS written in big yellow chalk, and
then you had a man bent over and then another man,
(13:25):
you know, penetrating him in the butt and a big X.
So stop homosexuality, that's how you stop AIDS. So all
of that, that type of homophobia was just right, and
the demonization of people who had it. People didn't want
to touch people. We didn't really understand how it was
being transmitted. We didn't know how to stop it. We
(13:45):
did not get adequate education above fifty ninth Street. All
the money was being set down to the gay men's
health crisis, which was almost ninety nine percent white at
that time, because they had the resource and they knew
how to grant right. They had institutions already set up,
and where the education was needed was uptown, the Bronx,
(14:07):
all of that, and that was not where the money
was going, you know. So all of that was just
had just blown my mind. And I was over worked
because I was poverty stricken. So I would teach from
like nine in the morning to twelve. I would take
a break and I would come back and I would
teach night school. So I didn't have a lot of time.
And then I wrote a poem for one of these
(14:29):
downtown magazines and I won a thousand dollars prize. Wow,
and that was like that was like big. You know,
I gesa for inflation cause that pick that that pave
my rent that won't bydy groceries. Now, that pave my
rent for the summer. So instead of teaching summer school,
(14:50):
I started to work on push. So that little bit
of money and a little bit of heart allowed me
to start writing the book and the rest this history.
And I started out with a much more kind of academic,
third person type of thing. Then the voice came, you
know this one child, And I remember wonderful editor she
(15:13):
read the manuscript at one point and she said, you know,
you've got all these other characters here. You need to
focus on the one. And that's when I began to
let precious arise. And I knew that for me, the
early childhood sexual abuse is always going to be in
my writing because it's in my life and I just
feel like it needs to be there. And then the
(15:35):
hid came in, and then just wanting to have an
empathic character, someone who could not be blamed for her condition.
You couldn't say that she was out ho and day
and night, and you know it's her fault. She was
shooting up, you know all of that, so you create
this this character.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
At one point in our conversation, Sapphire got up to
step over to her bookshelf and grab a book.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
She wanted to tell me this, I.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Think is the most important book in Black women's history,
and it's the Incidents in the Life of a slave
girl Harriet Jacobs. It's written by herself. So this would
be the first slave narrative that a white woman didn't write.
You know, the women were usually illiterate. They could couldn't
write from Harriet Tubman to Sojourner Truth all these and
(16:22):
the white women would would write the narriative's form, and
the white women would leave out all aspects of sexuality,
rape and all of that. And so in this book,
the first book written by a black woman, she talks
about being sexually harassed day and night, night day by
the master, do you know what I mean? And that's
(16:43):
not in the other narratives. And she talks about her
ascension in life through literacy. So I give that the precious,
Prescious gets the words, she gets the word, and that
way I identified with my character. I may have not
been all that, but I learned to read and write,
and I learned to take it to the max. And
I made something of it. And Precious make something of
(17:04):
herself too. And that's why all the black bourgeoisie in
the world can't he raise that book?
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Right?
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I had one librarian, seous, she came up to day.
She said, that book just will not die. You know,
the kids keep coming in year after year that book
will not die. And you know, to myself, what I'm saying, well,
did you want it to die? What's what is so
setting in this book that you wanted to die? But
(17:33):
that was my intent was to really to write something
that could literacy early childhood, sexual abuse and HIV. When
it came out, it was the only mainstream novel written
by a black woman that dealt with ades. Wow.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I uh, I am doing my best not to cry
right now.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Being honest, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Maybe I needed to hear all of this today. I
I mean, I live with HIV myself. I've done a
lot of HIV work, but just everything you just stated,
because I hear a lot of people excuse me when
they talk about my book, which talks about my life,
(18:23):
and like the notion of why won't this book die
no matter how many times we try to ban it,
no matter how many times we try to get rid
of it, like why won't it die? And it's like,
I have a spirit in me that you know, tells
me like, I'm supposed to write these stories that are
very truthful, very like transparent. So I guess typically I
(18:44):
would say like if you could give advice to another writer,
But I guess it's I'm a writer and I'm on
the phone with you. So if you could give advice
to someone like me who was about to go through
another journey where I tell my adult story, which will
also deal with many of the things that pressures dealt
with and many of the things that.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
We've dealt with. How do you reconcilid to just push
to push, just.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Go forward with it, and you find your tribe. Sometimes
you lose a tribe in the telling. You know, I
lost people with Push. They felt betrayed. I guess because
of the way incests has been portrayed as something of
working class and lower class people, et cetera. Center whatever,
(19:32):
you know. I lost those people, but I gained a
whole community of early childhood sexual abuse survivors. I attended conferences,
There were people, doctors and stuff saying this is the
cause of half of the mental illness in our culture.
This was before the internet. Now we see what these
motherfuckers are up to, excuse my language. We stare up
(19:54):
their brag, raping their children, just selling videos themselves raping
two year olds and all that. But when I was
saying that it was like I was nuts and it
was like I was talking only about black people. So
I knew I was going to lose some people. And
(20:14):
you just keep writing, You just keep writing. I mean,
James Baldwin didn't leave America because of racism. He left
because of homophobia. He didn't live you know, I hate
the way that some of the straight people have adopted
him and used him. You know, you know, believe me,
(20:34):
he left to find a freer environment that he could
live in and be himself in and do his work.
And still with all of that, he still suffered, I believe,
from externalized and internalized homophobia. You know, remember when he's
coming up, no one is questioning Christianity, and when you
believe it, you have nothing else. Now we have something else.
(20:56):
We have revolutionary Christianity. That is being homophobia, that is
elevating gay priests and bishops and stuff like that. He
didn't have that. So when he left Christianity, he didn't
have a certain type of spiritual foundation anymore. So what
does he have? Alcohol? And that would be really really
(21:20):
documental to him. It didn't stop them from writing, obviously,
but it was hard. It was hard. So all of
that this is what we go through. This is what
we go through as artists. I remember dealing at one
point was my own frustration with my own abuse in therapy,
and I said, am I ever going to get through this?
(21:41):
And my therapist told me most people who have been
through what you've been through end up dead or in prison.
So rejoice.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, some of us have so many experiences that no
one else can imagine. Is that we have actually unlocked
more parts of our brain, which also allows us to
have the words to put feelings to people who can't
figure out the words to express the feeling.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
In a sense, I totally believe that. Yeah, and some
people will never be able to figure it out, and
we exist, you know. For them, we chose to remember
what happened to us. Most people chose to go into amnesia,
and that's suppressive, and that took a toll on them.
It caused depression and certain physical ailments and stuff. As
(22:28):
you say, it locked down part of their brain. So
we kept part of ourselves alive. And I held to
the truths, which allows me to at least see some
of the truths. Now, when we went through the AIDS epidemic,
I was able to see They're essentially passively killing us.
(22:49):
If we do not take this on, if we do
not create vehicles to survive, they're only too happy to
put us as they did during COVID unmarked green unmarked grains.
You know, they scrape the COVID people out of the
homeless shelters and put them in unmarked grades. So if
(23:11):
we don't stand up and speak, we will never be heard.
We will be erased from the face of the earth.
One of the things you see in the genocide in
Gaza is an insistence with the Palestinian health authorities is
writing down the names of all the babies and all
the children, little Mohammed, Joaquin three months old, a little
(23:35):
for God, five months old. If they don't name them,
who will You think the Israelis are going to come
out and name them. So if we don't honor ourselves
and then our dead, who will do that? You know
who will do that for us? We will just be erased.
It will be as though we never existed. Because the
(23:57):
world in literature and prizes and all that is is
based a lot on economics and what will sell and
what is in vogue. The premiere book that I was
just talking about incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
That book had disappeared. People were paying no attention to
what people were talking about. It was a fraudulent text.
(24:17):
It could never happen. And it took one woman scholar,
Jeene Yelling, to get in there and do the research
and find the attic that she was in and substantiate
the text and stuff. If she had not done that work,
that book would have been in an unmarked grave, just
as sure as Zora Neil Hurston was. And so if
(24:37):
we don't do that work, you know, we let ourselves
be falsely divided or buy into the elitism and who's
a genius and who late We deprive ourselves of the
nourishment that each other's writing can give us. You know,
I got so much when I was younger, down at
the new Eureakan Cafe, you know what I mean. I
(24:59):
couldn't really wrapping style and all that kind of stuff.
So I was listening to people who could, people who
had different experiences than me. I saw Pedro pietric I
saw those people. I saw Anti Zanki, Sean Gay, I
saw can hag it on? You know, I listened and
I took it in and I had a friend speaking
of County Color and this I didn't know this. This
(25:21):
book has been out since twenty twelve, but she just
sent me and did him saying a biography of County Color.
I'm holding it in my hand, and I loved it.
I loved him, and I knew about him, and I
knew about his teacher student relationship. To to Baldwin, we
just come from something really big, and we are in
a place right now where there's more acceptance of gay
(25:44):
un lesbian literature. Hopefully there'll be more acceptance of trans literature.
And just yes, things are really opening up. We have
no guarantee that the Christian right will not rise again
and try to erase us. Yeah, so if we don't,
just like Frederick Douglass say, freedom is not guaranteed, we
must be vigilant. So what I feel at this age
(26:07):
in time, as part of my mission too, is really
not letting that happen, not letting that happen again, not
letting people be driven underground. And I had friends who died, unpublished,
committed suicide, all of that. You weren't gonna get a
grant if you were writing about, you know, certain things.
So these women never got grants, They never got the opportunity,
(26:31):
never got the opportunity. As the cliche goes, their music
died with them. That's the big thing that we can get.
That's why you know your book is important for a
lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is is
that young people are reading it and don't even worry
about banning, and they will steal its and nobles stealing it.
(26:53):
And that's important because the stories that we read when
we're twelve and thirteen and six, even eighteen, they become
part of our DNA. The banning is taking it out
of schools, but it's putting it in kids pockets. Got it.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
And now back to my conversation with Sapphire, I think
it's amazing that your work is still the same way
as like Tony Morrison's work is on the band book list.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Your work is on the band book list. My work
is on the band book list.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But that's multiple generations of work, so we know that
it's still getting two people. Is that something that motivates
you to can I know you said you have a
trilogy coming soon, but is that like a big motivating factor.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Really really affected me because what was first blowing my
mind was when I was When I would go to
readings in the nineties and stuff, the girls would come
up with the book, Oh, we love your book. And
then I would go out later and then the women
would come up and say, I bought your book for
my dog. Now I'm getting my grandmother gave me your book.
(28:08):
Oh my god. You know what I mean. What really
keeps work alive is reading it, and so that is
I feel so blessed that people are still reading the text.
And I don't even get whatever it is about gay identity.
These people can't handle it. I don't know whether it's
(28:30):
the Bible. I don't know what is wrong, but it
really upsets them, and I feel that it needs to
upset them. Christianity needs to be broken open because it's
the force that it's part of the force that enslaved
does it's part of the force that allowed for a
certain type of capitalism to happen. That it's just throwing
(28:53):
the world now as Christian nationalism has these fools running
around over at Israel beating up, spitting on people and
jettisfying people and everything, and there's really no message in
that Bible for me except love that brother, love that
sister as myself and if you can't do that, then
just get a good therapist and find out why.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, I don't know, because I've often tried to like
understand where does all of individual come from?
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Like what is it?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
At first I thought it was complex and nuanced, and
now it'sis like, no, it's simple. It's like we we
have made the choice to listen to ourselves first, whereas
they have made the choice to listen to someone else's
word that God's them first.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
You know, Bible people are closeted and everything, and they're disasters.
You know, they end up doing disasters sittings. Yes, yes,
So here we are able to live our truth and
that that has allowed me to stay alive. It's given
me the courage to be different, so that ability to
(29:56):
be oneself and to realize we're living our truth. We're
upholding our truth and so therefore I don't really have
to uphold the capitalism. I don't have to uphold the
nuclear family. The nuclear family almost destroyed me. We're one
of many subcultures that values the tribe, especially young lesbian
(30:19):
and gay people. That's the tribe that is saying that
something can supplant the God, almighty mother, father and two
and a half kids. That would bring capitalism down, that
would rock all the boats.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
So I always like to close out with a phrase.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
I always chose a phrase every year, like to try
and try and live by. For twenty twenty five, I
chose scorch the earth and remind myself, like, whatever you do,
just be unapologetic in it and just scorch it. At
this point, you have nothing to gain by being silent,
and you have nothing to lose by burning it all down.
Would there be any like words of wisdom?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Time was very clear. You know, I'm older, I'm dealing
with people who are even without COVID would be would
be maybe leaving the planet. And so I'm really telling
my peers and stuff, thrive in twenty twenty five. Yes,
thrive in twenty twenty five. This is the year you
(31:21):
write your memoirs. This is the year you do everything
that you what did you do? You will not ever
have a chance to do it again. This ugine that
is coming down on us. So that's my thing. And
I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive.
I want to be generous. I want to reach out
to my friends. I want to get the work out there.
(31:41):
You know. Yeah, I'm very very adamant about that because
I have been a survival. It's a grunge queen, you
know what I mean. I'm over that now I got resources.
Many people have not survived a fascist takeover. So we're
with the authoritarian takeover the government. And when that happened
(32:04):
in Chile and other other places, people like us ended
up machine gunned and thrown into ditches. So we must
use the freedom that we have. And it's not guaranteed.
It's not guaranteed banning, you know what about burning when
you come to burn the libraries like they burnt all
(32:24):
the libraries and gods, So we must assure that that
does not happen to us, and especially that it doesn't
happen to young writers like yourself. It's a mission. It's
a mission, you know, it's a mission. So that's that's
what I'm enjoying. I'm trying to thrive in twenty twenty five,
live fully, and also calling on my more activist sisters
(32:47):
to and Jordan the spirit of her Alice Marker, she's
still here, Bill looks. They were masters of resistance because
of education, and because of positioning, especially Alice Barker coming
out of Organized South and civil rights movement. So I'm
really calling on that spirit because I'm here now and
I need to do my own thing, but i also
(33:07):
need to model resistance, you know, because they have come
for us. As Pat Parker said, if they come for
you in the morning, you know the books are there. Yeah.
So it was wonderful talking to you.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Yes, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for
reminding me that because I choose to remember, I have
to write it down and you have no choice. I
have no choice, but I needed to hear this. So
thank you.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
You're very welcome, and thank you too for your wonderful work. Okay,
have a great life, Love you, Love you too.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried
to kill me and has failed. These lines are from
the poem Won't You Celebrate with Me? By the Great
Lustill Clifton. Clifton grew up in Buffalo and remembers watching
her father burning her mother's secret poems because he believed
women had no business writing. Clifton's poems were always both
deeply personal and political, compact and powerful. She was the
(34:09):
first author to have two books of poetry chosen as
finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
She passed away in twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Asked once what she wanted to leave behind after her death,
she just said, my poems and some peace. Thanks for
listening to Fighting Words, and I hope you'll join us
for another round next week. Fighting Words is a production
(34:41):
of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Beth's Case Studios.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
I'm Georgian Johnson.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
This episode was produced by Charlotte Morley. Executive producers are
Myself and Twiggy Puggar Song with Adam Pinks and Brick
Cats for Best Case Studios. The theme song was written
and composed by ko Vas Banbianna and myself.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
Original music by kob Os.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
This episode was edited and scored by Michelle Macklin. Our
iHeart team is Ali Perry and Karl Ketel. Following Rap
Fightings Wherever you get your podcast
Rewriting your life story. Rewriting your life is a way
of healing from trauma. In some ways, I think art
is the only way you really heal from trauma.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Sapphire is the author of the acclaimed Nobel Push. She
wrote it in nineteen ninety six and it was adapted
into the movie called Precious in two thousand and nine.
The book tells the story of a young African American
girl in Harlem who discovers the power of reading and
writing after having gone through tremendous hardship. Sapphire's belief that
language can heal has real scientific evidence behind it.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
They had two traumatized groups. The one group was in
therapy and one group wrote a journal just about the
traumaticy them. Both groups felt better. You feel good when
you come out of therapy, and you feel good when
you write in your journal. But the group that wrote
in the journal had elevated t cells. Wow, so you
can't fucking fake that. You can. Yeah, that's not about
(01:00):
what you feel good or not. That needs your body
and started to heal.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Singing in them heavy handed, to plet the world, take
a sip of brandy, spoke the guy. You know what
the plan is to understand me.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
My name is George M.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Johnson. I am the New York Times best selling author
of the book All Boys on Blue, which is also
the second most banned book in the United States.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
This is Fighting Words, a show where we take you
to the front lines of the culture wars with the
people who.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Are using their words to make change and who refuse
to be silent. Today my conversation with Sapphire. I am
here today with the brilliant mind and author, writer, activists,
and so many things.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Sapphire, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
I'm good, I'm really good, and I'm happy to be
here talking with you.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
I'm super excited.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
As an author myself who has written a memoir that
had to go to a lot of vulnerable places. Your
work has definitely been a guiding tool, even allowing me
the courage to go to those places. I always like
to start with people introducing themselves. Who is Sapphire?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, I am Sapphire. I am a author and a
former educator and an activist, and I have used my
words as a form of activism, and I've used my
life as a form of expression of the deepest and
darkest things that I've experienced and I've used my writing
(02:44):
in many ways as a roadmap of how to come
out on the other side of darkness. And I've published
two novels and two books of poetry, and I'm currently
working on a third novel, really three novels, a trilogy
called do You Harlem? Yeah, it's gonna be hot, George.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
I'm ready.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
The Harlem Trilogy. So that's all I was going about that.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
I just wrote a book on the Harlem Renaissance called Flamboyance.
But you yourself, what was the thing that was like
the catalyst for you to even become a writer.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Some of the things that influenced me very early on
were some of the nonfiction that I read. I can
remember it being a child and reading the diary of
Anne Frank And if you read any of my work,
you can see all throughout it their diaries, their journals
and stuff. So that whole idea of personal writing, the
writing that one does for oneself. All of this writing,
(03:43):
along with some of the early slave narratives, falls kind
of under the radar of fign literature, you know what
I mean. These were writing there mfing lights. And then
in my early twenties, I read the prison letters of
George Jackson, and so that really really threw me for him.
(04:03):
This was a fine, fine mind who was murdered by
the state. And this was basically a young man who
was brilliant, but who hadn't had a lot of formal
education and found himself confined, and he started writing these letters,
and he was reading all these philosophers and everything. It
wasn't just the reading, it was writing those letters. These
(04:25):
letters now are still a roadmap to revolution. So I
was always more of a of a reader, you know,
I was young. I liked to read. And my mother
was a reader, you know, a frustrated housewife and all
that alcoholism, just a lot there, but she was definitely
a reader. She read in a way that was comforting
(04:45):
to me as a young girl and child. She read
for escapism and excitement, you know, but she was serious
and someone for reading. She was a devotee of James Baldwin,
and our favorite novel by him was just above my head.
So all of those things I remember while I was
locked out by class and skin shade and all that
(05:07):
of any type of black bourgeois. And that's not what
we were. Army people, and we were not part of
the black middle class in that way. So I never
went to Hb's and all that kind of stuff. But
I never felt locked out of actual literature. You know,
even when I was at my lowest, I had a
book in my jean's pocket, you know what I mean.
(05:29):
But I never felt comfortable being around the black literati,
or the white literacy for that matter. But I knew
from I knew from George Jackson. I knew from the
slave narratives. I knew from the diarct and Frank that
that literature was about the person who picked up a
pen and opened a notebook and wrote that's it. Of course,
(05:52):
there's going to be the Shakespeare and the christiansuff, but
literature writing belongs to all of us. And some people,
of course, will be genius at it, and some people
will only write the newspaper article of Margaret Granger. But
this would be the article that inspires Tony Morrison, the
great one. You're right, Belove, Yeah, So there would be
(06:12):
no Beloved had there not been those news clippings of
Margaret Granger. So every bit of writing we do adds
to this great table, this great banquet of literature that
can move us forward out of the seems like the
change we keep she pretty Yeah, I don't know what
that's all about.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Sapphire is talking about the enslaved woman, Margaret Garner. Tony
Morrison found an article about Garner and an eighteen fifty
six edition of The American Baptist titled A Visit to
the slave.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Mother who killed her child.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
It eventually inspired Morrison's novel Beloved, which won the Post
Serprize in nineteen eighty eight. Yeah, when you just said that,
I got chills because it made me think about Alice
Walker writing about Zorno Hurston, and I think it was
a Miss magazine. It's like Jordans had this whole life
and career passes away and then this one article comes
(07:06):
out and it changes the trajectory of.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
The cannon exactly.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
She had been forgotten, you know what I mean. She
had been forgotten, and I think the tragedy of it.
You know, sometimes we sign our own death certificate. She
just slipped into obscurity, you know, on her out in
a certain kind of way. I don't think we had
a greater writer than her, And it's incumbent upon us
(07:31):
to call out our people based on our own standards,
not the standards of the New York Times or the
Saturday Reviews whatever, right, who's rocking you? They were interviewing
and to Zaki Shangi talking about her influences, and she
talked about Judy Groan, this was a lesbian poet in
San Francisco, and all of these fabulous poems that this
(07:54):
white lesbian wrote in the nineteen seventies. And it would
have been very easy for Antazaki to just forget about
what she had gotten from the white lesbian community. Very
easy because they forget about us all the time, all
the time, music, everything, and then the next thing, you know,
(08:15):
they were the originators. But I love what Antazaki said,
you know, stealing don't make it yours, It just makes
it stolen. So she was a great tribute her sources
and where she got things from. And it's something we
can all do. That's one of the things I tried
to do in Push is Alice Walker doesn't need me
to talk her up, but I made sure she got
in that book. You know I made right. You know
(08:38):
that Pressures is reading her. I made sure that Pressures
is reading Lucille Clifton, because those are the people who
influenced me, and I knew that I would have a
younger audience and an audience who had perhaps never heard
of Lucille Clifton, you know what I mean. So once
you include a hero in a book, then the people
(09:00):
who love your book start to look at your sources.
You know. I think some of my reading of Virginia
wolf came from finding out that Tony Morrison had written
some of her graduate papers on Virginia Wolfe. So I said, well,
I better check that bitch out, because, oh love.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
If the main girl loves it, right, then we all
need to.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Well, it's putting down, you know what I mean. And
the tragedy and crime of it is that so much
of what African Americans have shared has been stolen, has
been unacknowledged. So one of the ways we can do
that is not to repeat the crime. You know, to
attribute your influence and to talk about your teachers. It
(09:42):
doesn't make you look less or smaller. It makes you
look bigger, and it puts you in community as opposed
to recreating the white hierarchy of who's great and who isn't.
Because the hierarchy left George Jackson out to the hierarchy
George Jackson was a convicted criminal with sentence to prison
(10:03):
right and anybody who reads him knows he's a theoretical poet.
But what I mean, but he did that? Yeah, he
doesn't count. And you know, for a lot of people,
and Frank's just propaganda to you know. Yeah, the political
ideologies that came after her, they weren't looking at the
heart and soul of a little girl. So it's on us.
(10:24):
It's on us. I think we have a great responsibility
as writers to really not just be truthful, but to
be to be good. Why not?
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah, almost like radical transparency with where it comes from.
And because I think about like when I was working
on the book on the Hall and Renaissance, like finding
out that like Count Coloring was James Baldwin's tenth grade
English teacher. You know, it's like and I love Lucille Clifton.
I love Lucill Clifton too. I think because my favorite quote,
which at some point I'm going to get tattooed on me,
(10:56):
I think it goes like drink with me, my friends
to a world that has tried to kill us as
of yet has not succeeded.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Exactly about that one, Yes, like walks away from the Grade.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yes, And now back to my conversation with Sapphire. Now,
of course you brought up your your novel Push, which
I guess most people in my generation would know as
(11:27):
the movie Precious And so what was that like to
have your work be adapted? What was that I guess
like for a work that had come out in the
nineties to then, it.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Was magical for me? Okay, for me, Push was a
very political text. I was in the middle of the
age epidemic. I was a dancer. Now, I was out there.
I was on the street and everything. And so I
remember the first person we knew who died of age
was a Hispanic woman. And so you hear about, you know,
female skying of age, all the energy went to that
(12:01):
this was a white male phenomena. And of course the
numbers the grand death pole has been black. Yes, but
still when you think of December one, World Age Day,
you think of white downtown. So that was on my
back and I just will never forget. A girl in
my class std up and said, look, I'm having trouble
(12:21):
getting my AZT and agent. It was a bad anti
viral drug that has been replaced in miracle drugs, but
it was all that we had at the time. Yeah,
and it was it was being rationed out and being withheld.
And these young black girls were having trouble getting the
(12:43):
drug so they would have to go down and worry
a social work or whatever. But this was happening in
front of me, you know what I mean. And then
my friends the dance community, they weren't writing poems about
their fate. They were just dying where so and so,
Oh he's dead, where so and so? Oh she's you know,
she's got the thing, you know, all that type of thing.
(13:03):
So I was in New York and also I was
seeing the horrible, horrible homophobia. You know. I was living
in Harlem on Lenox Avenue, and I remember one wall
had some graffiti on it and it was on the
top was stop AIDS written in big yellow chalk, and
then you had a man bent over and then another man,
(13:25):
you know, penetrating him in the butt and a big X.
So stop homosexuality, that's how you stop AIDS. So all
of that, that type of homophobia was just right, and
the demonization of people who had it. People didn't want
to touch people. We didn't really understand how it was
being transmitted. We didn't know how to stop it. We
(13:45):
did not get adequate education above fifty ninth Street. All
the money was being set down to the gay men's
health crisis, which was almost ninety nine percent white at
that time, because they had the resource and they knew
how to grant right. They had institutions already set up,
and where the education was needed was uptown, the Bronx,
(14:07):
all of that, and that was not where the money
was going, you know. So all of that was just
had just blown my mind. And I was over worked
because I was poverty stricken. So I would teach from
like nine in the morning to twelve. I would take
a break and I would come back and I would
teach night school. So I didn't have a lot of time.
And then I wrote a poem for one of these
(14:29):
downtown magazines and I won a thousand dollars prize. Wow,
and that was like that was like big. You know,
I gesa for inflation cause that pick that that pave
my rent that won't bydy groceries. Now, that pave my
rent for the summer. So instead of teaching summer school,
(14:50):
I started to work on push. So that little bit
of money and a little bit of heart allowed me
to start writing the book and the rest this history.
And I started out with a much more kind of academic,
third person type of thing. Then the voice came, you
know this one child, And I remember wonderful editor she
(15:13):
read the manuscript at one point and she said, you know,
you've got all these other characters here. You need to
focus on the one. And that's when I began to
let precious arise. And I knew that for me, the
early childhood sexual abuse is always going to be in
my writing because it's in my life and I just
feel like it needs to be there. And then the
(15:35):
hid came in, and then just wanting to have an
empathic character, someone who could not be blamed for her condition.
You couldn't say that she was out ho and day
and night, and you know it's her fault. She was
shooting up, you know all of that, so you create
this this character.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
At one point in our conversation, Sapphire got up to
step over to her bookshelf and grab a book.
Speaker 4 (15:59):
She wanted to tell me this, I.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Think is the most important book in Black women's history,
and it's the Incidents in the Life of a slave
girl Harriet Jacobs. It's written by herself. So this would
be the first slave narrative that a white woman didn't write.
You know, the women were usually illiterate. They could couldn't
write from Harriet Tubman to Sojourner Truth all these and
(16:22):
the white women would would write the narriative's form, and
the white women would leave out all aspects of sexuality,
rape and all of that. And so in this book,
the first book written by a black woman, she talks
about being sexually harassed day and night, night day by
the master, do you know what I mean? And that's
(16:43):
not in the other narratives. And she talks about her
ascension in life through literacy. So I give that the precious,
Prescious gets the words, she gets the word, and that
way I identified with my character. I may have not
been all that, but I learned to read and write,
and I learned to take it to the max. And
I made something of it. And Precious make something of
(17:04):
herself too. And that's why all the black bourgeoisie in
the world can't he raise that book?
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Right?
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I had one librarian, seous, she came up to day.
She said, that book just will not die. You know,
the kids keep coming in year after year that book
will not die. And you know, to myself, what I'm saying, well,
did you want it to die? What's what is so
setting in this book that you wanted to die? But
(17:33):
that was my intent was to really to write something
that could literacy early childhood, sexual abuse and HIV. When
it came out, it was the only mainstream novel written
by a black woman that dealt with ades. Wow.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
I uh, I am doing my best not to cry
right now.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Being honest, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Maybe I needed to hear all of this today. I
I mean, I live with HIV myself. I've done a
lot of HIV work, but just everything you just stated,
because I hear a lot of people excuse me when
they talk about my book, which talks about my life,
(18:23):
and like the notion of why won't this book die
no matter how many times we try to ban it,
no matter how many times we try to get rid
of it, like why won't it die? And it's like,
I have a spirit in me that you know, tells
me like, I'm supposed to write these stories that are
very truthful, very like transparent. So I guess typically I
(18:44):
would say like if you could give advice to another writer,
But I guess it's I'm a writer and I'm on
the phone with you. So if you could give advice
to someone like me who was about to go through
another journey where I tell my adult story, which will
also deal with many of the things that pressures dealt
with and many of the things that.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
We've dealt with. How do you reconcilid to just push
to push, just.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Go forward with it, and you find your tribe. Sometimes
you lose a tribe in the telling. You know, I
lost people with Push. They felt betrayed. I guess because
of the way incests has been portrayed as something of
working class and lower class people, et cetera. Center whatever,
(19:32):
you know. I lost those people, but I gained a
whole community of early childhood sexual abuse survivors. I attended conferences,
There were people, doctors and stuff saying this is the
cause of half of the mental illness in our culture.
This was before the internet. Now we see what these
motherfuckers are up to, excuse my language. We stare up
(19:54):
their brag, raping their children, just selling videos themselves raping
two year olds and all that. But when I was
saying that it was like I was nuts and it
was like I was talking only about black people. So
I knew I was going to lose some people. And
(20:14):
you just keep writing, You just keep writing. I mean,
James Baldwin didn't leave America because of racism. He left
because of homophobia. He didn't live you know, I hate
the way that some of the straight people have adopted
him and used him. You know, you know, believe me,
(20:34):
he left to find a freer environment that he could
live in and be himself in and do his work.
And still with all of that, he still suffered, I believe,
from externalized and internalized homophobia. You know, remember when he's
coming up, no one is questioning Christianity, and when you
believe it, you have nothing else. Now we have something else.
(20:56):
We have revolutionary Christianity. That is being homophobia, that is
elevating gay priests and bishops and stuff like that. He
didn't have that. So when he left Christianity, he didn't
have a certain type of spiritual foundation anymore. So what
does he have? Alcohol? And that would be really really
(21:20):
documental to him. It didn't stop them from writing, obviously,
but it was hard. It was hard. So all of
that this is what we go through. This is what
we go through as artists. I remember dealing at one
point was my own frustration with my own abuse in therapy,
and I said, am I ever going to get through this?
(21:41):
And my therapist told me most people who have been
through what you've been through end up dead or in prison.
So rejoice.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, some of us have so many experiences that no
one else can imagine. Is that we have actually unlocked
more parts of our brain, which also allows us to
have the words to put feelings to people who can't
figure out the words to express the feeling.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
In a sense, I totally believe that. Yeah, and some
people will never be able to figure it out, and
we exist, you know. For them, we chose to remember
what happened to us. Most people chose to go into amnesia,
and that's suppressive, and that took a toll on them.
It caused depression and certain physical ailments and stuff. As
(22:28):
you say, it locked down part of their brain. So
we kept part of ourselves alive. And I held to
the truths, which allows me to at least see some
of the truths. Now, when we went through the AIDS epidemic,
I was able to see They're essentially passively killing us.
(22:49):
If we do not take this on, if we do
not create vehicles to survive, they're only too happy to
put us as they did during COVID unmarked green unmarked grains.
You know, they scrape the COVID people out of the
homeless shelters and put them in unmarked grades. So if
(23:11):
we don't stand up and speak, we will never be heard.
We will be erased from the face of the earth.
One of the things you see in the genocide in
Gaza is an insistence with the Palestinian health authorities is
writing down the names of all the babies and all
the children, little Mohammed, Joaquin three months old, a little
(23:35):
for God, five months old. If they don't name them,
who will You think the Israelis are going to come
out and name them. So if we don't honor ourselves
and then our dead, who will do that? You know
who will do that for us? We will just be erased.
It will be as though we never existed. Because the
(23:57):
world in literature and prizes and all that is is
based a lot on economics and what will sell and
what is in vogue. The premiere book that I was
just talking about incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
That book had disappeared. People were paying no attention to
what people were talking about. It was a fraudulent text.
(24:17):
It could never happen. And it took one woman scholar,
Jeene Yelling, to get in there and do the research
and find the attic that she was in and substantiate
the text and stuff. If she had not done that work,
that book would have been in an unmarked grave, just
as sure as Zora Neil Hurston was. And so if
(24:37):
we don't do that work, you know, we let ourselves
be falsely divided or buy into the elitism and who's
a genius and who late We deprive ourselves of the
nourishment that each other's writing can give us. You know,
I got so much when I was younger, down at
the new Eureakan Cafe, you know what I mean. I
(24:59):
couldn't really wrapping style and all that kind of stuff.
So I was listening to people who could, people who
had different experiences than me. I saw Pedro pietric I
saw those people. I saw Anti Zanki, Sean Gay, I
saw can hag it on? You know, I listened and
I took it in and I had a friend speaking
of County Color and this I didn't know this. This
(25:21):
book has been out since twenty twelve, but she just
sent me and did him saying a biography of County Color.
I'm holding it in my hand, and I loved it.
I loved him, and I knew about him, and I
knew about his teacher student relationship. To to Baldwin, we
just come from something really big, and we are in
a place right now where there's more acceptance of gay
(25:44):
un lesbian literature. Hopefully there'll be more acceptance of trans literature.
And just yes, things are really opening up. We have
no guarantee that the Christian right will not rise again
and try to erase us. Yeah, so if we don't,
just like Frederick Douglass say, freedom is not guaranteed, we
must be vigilant. So what I feel at this age
(26:07):
in time, as part of my mission too, is really
not letting that happen, not letting that happen again, not
letting people be driven underground. And I had friends who died, unpublished,
committed suicide, all of that. You weren't gonna get a
grant if you were writing about, you know, certain things.
So these women never got grants, They never got the opportunity,
(26:31):
never got the opportunity. As the cliche goes, their music
died with them. That's the big thing that we can get.
That's why you know your book is important for a
lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is is
that young people are reading it and don't even worry
about banning, and they will steal its and nobles stealing it.
(26:53):
And that's important because the stories that we read when
we're twelve and thirteen and six, even eighteen, they become
part of our DNA. The banning is taking it out
of schools, but it's putting it in kids pockets. Got it.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
And now back to my conversation with Sapphire, I think
it's amazing that your work is still the same way
as like Tony Morrison's work is on the band book list.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Your work is on the band book list. My work
is on the band book list.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But that's multiple generations of work, so we know that
it's still getting two people. Is that something that motivates
you to can I know you said you have a
trilogy coming soon, but is that like a big motivating factor.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Really really affected me because what was first blowing my
mind was when I was When I would go to
readings in the nineties and stuff, the girls would come
up with the book, Oh, we love your book. And
then I would go out later and then the women
would come up and say, I bought your book for
my dog. Now I'm getting my grandmother gave me your book.
(28:08):
Oh my god. You know what I mean. What really
keeps work alive is reading it, and so that is
I feel so blessed that people are still reading the text.
And I don't even get whatever it is about gay identity.
These people can't handle it. I don't know whether it's
(28:30):
the Bible. I don't know what is wrong, but it
really upsets them, and I feel that it needs to
upset them. Christianity needs to be broken open because it's
the force that it's part of the force that enslaved
does it's part of the force that allowed for a
certain type of capitalism to happen. That it's just throwing
(28:53):
the world now as Christian nationalism has these fools running
around over at Israel beating up, spitting on people and
jettisfying people and everything, and there's really no message in
that Bible for me except love that brother, love that
sister as myself and if you can't do that, then
just get a good therapist and find out why.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Yeah, I don't know, because I've often tried to like
understand where does all of individual come from?
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Like what is it?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
At first I thought it was complex and nuanced, and
now it'sis like, no, it's simple. It's like we we
have made the choice to listen to ourselves first, whereas
they have made the choice to listen to someone else's
word that God's them first.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
You know, Bible people are closeted and everything, and they're disasters.
You know, they end up doing disasters sittings. Yes, yes,
So here we are able to live our truth and
that that has allowed me to stay alive. It's given
me the courage to be different, so that ability to
(29:56):
be oneself and to realize we're living our truth. We're
upholding our truth and so therefore I don't really have
to uphold the capitalism. I don't have to uphold the
nuclear family. The nuclear family almost destroyed me. We're one
of many subcultures that values the tribe, especially young lesbian
(30:19):
and gay people. That's the tribe that is saying that
something can supplant the God, almighty mother, father and two
and a half kids. That would bring capitalism down, that
would rock all the boats.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
So I always like to close out with a phrase.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
I always chose a phrase every year, like to try
and try and live by. For twenty twenty five, I
chose scorch the earth and remind myself, like, whatever you do,
just be unapologetic in it and just scorch it. At
this point, you have nothing to gain by being silent,
and you have nothing to lose by burning it all down.
Would there be any like words of wisdom?
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Time was very clear. You know, I'm older, I'm dealing
with people who are even without COVID would be would
be maybe leaving the planet. And so I'm really telling
my peers and stuff, thrive in twenty twenty five. Yes,
thrive in twenty twenty five. This is the year you
(31:21):
write your memoirs. This is the year you do everything
that you what did you do? You will not ever
have a chance to do it again. This ugine that
is coming down on us. So that's my thing. And
I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive.
I want to be generous. I want to reach out
to my friends. I want to get the work out there.
(31:41):
You know. Yeah, I'm very very adamant about that because
I have been a survival. It's a grunge queen, you
know what I mean. I'm over that now I got resources.
Many people have not survived a fascist takeover. So we're
with the authoritarian takeover the government. And when that happened
(32:04):
in Chile and other other places, people like us ended
up machine gunned and thrown into ditches. So we must
use the freedom that we have. And it's not guaranteed.
It's not guaranteed banning, you know what about burning when
you come to burn the libraries like they burnt all
(32:24):
the libraries and gods, So we must assure that that
does not happen to us, and especially that it doesn't
happen to young writers like yourself. It's a mission. It's
a mission, you know, it's a mission. So that's that's
what I'm enjoying. I'm trying to thrive in twenty twenty five,
live fully, and also calling on my more activist sisters
(32:47):
to and Jordan the spirit of her Alice Marker, she's
still here, Bill looks. They were masters of resistance because
of education, and because of positioning, especially Alice Barker coming
out of Organized South and civil rights movement. So I'm
really calling on that spirit because I'm here now and
I need to do my own thing, but i also
(33:07):
need to model resistance, you know, because they have come
for us. As Pat Parker said, if they come for
you in the morning, you know the books are there. Yeah.
So it was wonderful talking to you.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Yes, thank you so much for everything. Thank you for
reminding me that because I choose to remember, I have
to write it down and you have no choice. I
have no choice, but I needed to hear this. So
thank you.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
You're very welcome, and thank you too for your wonderful work. Okay,
have a great life, Love you, Love you too.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried
to kill me and has failed. These lines are from
the poem Won't You Celebrate with Me? By the Great
Lustill Clifton. Clifton grew up in Buffalo and remembers watching
her father burning her mother's secret poems because he believed
women had no business writing. Clifton's poems were always both
deeply personal and political, compact and powerful. She was the
(34:09):
first author to have two books of poetry chosen as
finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
She passed away in twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Asked once what she wanted to leave behind after her death,
she just said, my poems and some peace. Thanks for
listening to Fighting Words, and I hope you'll join us
for another round next week. Fighting Words is a production
(34:41):
of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Beth's Case Studios.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
I'm Georgian Johnson.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
This episode was produced by Charlotte Morley. Executive producers are
Myself and Twiggy Puggar Song with Adam Pinks and Brick
Cats for Best Case Studios. The theme song was written
and composed by ko Vas Banbianna and myself.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
Original music by kob Os.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
This episode was edited and scored by Michelle Macklin. Our
iHeart team is Ali Perry and Karl Ketel. Following Rap
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