I had the honor of sharing my voice and perspective with other Black women and femmes in the most recent issue of Spoken Black Girl Magazine’s newest issue on Motherhood.
This issue is particularly special for me because it’s an open space for Black folks to share their experience with the Black Maternal Health Crisis and what it means to be a mother who is targeted by a government saturated with white domestic terrorism.
I decided to write a poem on the life of Louise Little, the mother of Malcolm X. She was a brilliant polyglot, dedicated Garveyite, survivalist, and a woman who knew how to endure for the sake of her family. Sharing her story was important to me because I felt like it conveyed the reality of postpartum depression when confronted with white domestic terrorism. After Louise’s husband was brutally murdered by white domestic terrorists, this state criminalized her mental health and incarcerated her in a mental health facility for over two decades. It was clear that the state chose do enact this violence in order to disband her family and separate her children from each other by scattering them through the foster care system. The poem I wrote was a biographical piece that takes the historical record of misogynoir rooted “mental health professionals” and implants truth-filled reactions towards this historical event.
I decided that I was going to create a poem that is in opposition to the found poem formats. Found poems uses words, phrases, and quotations from a text to create something new. This poetry format is also called erasure or blackout poems. I felt that using erasure to tell Louise’s story would hide the horrific details of her detainment. Instead, I chose to take the letter from Dr. E. F. Hoffman, the “mental health professional” who “diagnosed” Louise and had her institutionalized. I added cap locks to add emotions of outrage that scream in opposition to Dr. E. F. Hoffman’s farce. The goal of the poem was to make the truths of yesterday be known to influence what happens now. Even though I don’t have the power to rewrite history, I can use my art to reroute the white domestic terrorist patterns and plans that have harmed our mothers for generations.
And now for the poem…
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