Blessed Be #9 with Mariama Lockington
Mariama J. Lockington is a writer, nonprofit educator, and transracial adoptee who calls many places home. She is the founder of the womanist project the Black Unicorn Book Club and is published in a number of journals and magazines including the Washington Square Review, Prelude Magazine, Bodega Magazine, and The Comstock Review. Her poetry chapbook The Lucky Daughter is now available for pre-order from Damaged Goods Press, and she is currently working on a middle grade novel in verse about a transracially adopted girl. Her essay “What A Black Woman Wishes her Adoptive White Parents Knew” trended on Buzzfeed News Reader in August 2016. Mariama lives in Michigan with her partner and their dapple-haired dachshund, Henry. When she is not writing or teaching, you’ll find Mariama singing karaoke, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or re-reading her favorite book, Sula by Toni Morrison.
BBF: Can you speak a bit on your origin story as a writer?
ML: This year my mom gifted me a box of mementos she’d saved of mine since I was in preschool. Inside were a number of DIY books I’d made, with cardboard covers and duct tape binding, crayon illustrations, and pages and pages of stories written in what I can now only describe as word-salad.
In 5th grade, I thought I was Harriet the Spy. I wore a raincoat and carried around composition notebooks everywhere I went. I wrote down EVERYTHING I SAW for a few months and then these notebooks turned into reflective journals where I wrote poems, musings, rants, and stories. These journals sort of saved my life, because I was a lonely, private kid. I was often angry and anxious about things I could not as a child control. I had a lot going on in my head, and I was trying to figure out what it meant to be black, to have white adoptive parents, to love myself and be loved. I was shy and isolated and so putting my thoughts down on paper helped.
I guess I have been determined from the jump to be a storyteller. To write things down. To witness, observe, and combat invisibility and marginalization by putting pen to page. I come from a family of talented classical musicians and while I did have to play musical instruments growing up, my true love has always been poetry. I think music influences me greatly and I deeply value the musical education I received but for me, there has never been any doubt that my path would be this one.
BBF: What else are you passionate about?
ML: Giving young people a platform to share their stories. As long as I’ve known I wanted to write, I’ve also known that I wanted to teach. I earned my Masters in Education alongside my MFA in Poetry. I have worked in the nonprofit education sector for the past 10 years. I think young people have a lot to teach the rest of the world and providing space for youth to explore the power of words is one of the greatest honors and joys of my life. In my career so far I have been privileged to work for literacy and youth-development nonprofits like Youth Speaks, 826 National, Citizen Schools and more.
I am also passionate about complicating the often one dimensional narrative of adoption, to make room for grief and loss, to live alongside joy and belonging. A lot of my writing examines my experiences growing up as a black adoptee, with white adoptive parents and my relationship to a birth mother who is not present in my life.
Lastly, I am a total bookworm and I love reading. I even started a virtual book club for women and genderqueer folks that meets quarterly to discuss brave and important texts. If I could just read all day, life would be so good.
BBF: What does the work magic mean to you?
ML: It’s funny, I used to think of magic as something that just happens effortlessly. A magician gets on stage and pulls a rabbit out of a hat and it looks so easy. But magic is illusion. The magician has spent hours, days, years, practicing and failing and practicing some more. I guess when I really think about it, magic means work. It’s practice and quiet ritual performed every day in hopes of being able to build a connection with someone or something. Sometimes you fail. Sometimes you get it right. There is mysterious power embedded in this process.
BBF: Is magic significant to your daily life, artistic process, identity and/or politics?
ML: Yes. I think as I said previously, the ritual of writing for me is embedded with magic. Because writing is work — it’s hard, emotional, and I fail and fail throughout the process, but then every now and then I write something that connects with someone. The illusion is that this connection is “easy” when in reality, it is the result of having to reckon with the page over and over again, to get to the feelings, lines, or metaphors that create bridges.
I also very much identify with the phrase and hashtag #blackgirlmagic. I think Black Women are powerful beyond measure and at the same time highly underestimated. I think there is a certain alchemy that happens when Black women and girls claim this power. When we share our stories, lives, and songs against all odds, and insert ourselves into spaces we’ve historically been excluded from.
BBF: Who/what are some of your inspirations? Why?
ML: The most straightforward answer is that my writing is inspired by the confessional style of Sylvia Plath, the sexually charged and fiercely intimate poetry of Sharon Olds, the resilient and loud heart of Audre Lorde, as well as the form-bending and linguistic magic of Anne Carson and Toni Morrison.
The messy answer has everything to do with failure. The failure and inability of white society to imagine, see, or hear the stories of black writers, especially black female writers. For example, the summer between 8th and 9th grade, I attended an arts camp where I took a 4-week creative writing class. My teacher was a white woman, a well-known poet I admired, and our first assignment was to memorize a poem we loved and recite it for the class. I memorized Naomi Long Madgett’s “Her Story” about a young black girl who has all these big dreams but at every turn is told “no” because of her gender and skin color. This poem really spoke to me. I recited it with pride and confidence for the class. When I was done, the teacher just looked at me, and said: “Well that was depressing,” and then she moved on. I felt totally invisible in that moment and so, so angry that my choice in poem was not considered in the way that the other white student’s poems were considered. In some cases, this moment could have completely ruined a young writer but for me it was a motivator. That teacher failed me and made clear that her classroom was not a space where all stories were considered. I in turned learned that I had to fight harder to be heard, to be seen and that the world needed more stories from black women. This put a fire under my ass. Reclaiming space with my words is a big inspiration.
BBF: I am so excited to have spent time with your wonderful chapbook, The Lucky Daughter available for preorder from Damaged Goods Press. Can you talk a little bit about this collection?
ML: Thank you! This is the culmination of almost seven years of writing. At its core this is a collection about what it means to belong and how love — romantic, familial, and self — is both difficult and essential. I feel really honored to have found a home for this book at Damaged Goods Press. DGP is highlighting some amazing writers and has a wonderful masthead of folks committed to centering queer and trans voices.
BBF: I am interested in how this book opens. It begins with “Lucy” the famously fossilized human remains thought to be one of human’s earliest ancestors. I am curious about why you began, well at the beginning?
ML: I am interested in Lucy’s uncovering. Her excavation. What can be discovered or re-learned when one is unearthed? The poems in this collection are about unearthing and re-discovering beginnings. What is a mother? What is a home? What is belonging? What have I been buried under? How do I dig myself out of this dirt and build something new? I think that’s why I started with her. Instead of going back just to my own murky beginning, what happens if I go even further? What can I learn from this ancestor? This wound. This woman. This mother.
BBF: Can you speak to the role of ancestory in this text?
ML: It’s funny you ask this, because my first thought was: can I claim ancestry in this work? But of course I can! I think that for me, being adopted and not having contact with my family of origin creates a hesitancy to claim ancestry in a concrete way. I don’t really know my history beyond some paperwork with non-identifying medical information about my birth parents. But I do often re-imagine a connection to ancestors through my poems (like Lucy) and I guess that this chapbook does that. The ancestor’s in my work are ghosts, spirit-guides, and re-memories. I don’t know, maybe I should do Ancestry.com and see what happens.
BBF: As I move from poem to poem something unlocks. The reader travels into space, into nothingness, something before time, we are transported to 1804, 1984, across the table from a grandmother, between lovers. Can you talk a bit about the significance of the time travel that takes place in your work?
ML: You know I’ve never really thought about my work in relation to time travel. I think about my work a lot in terms of maps, spaces and places where I belong or do not belong. But you’re right, these poems do travel in time. In general, l like fragmentation and non-linear stories. My experience as a black adoptee mimics these forms. My own story is fragmented and there is a whole period of time before I was adopted when I was in foster care that is sort of missing from my story. I think traveling in time allows me the freedom to explore these empty or blank spaces in my own timeline and history.
BBF: These poems hold such multiplicity, I wonder if you can speak to the intersectional parts of this work and the narrative they work to tell/to undo? I wonder if you can speak to the relationship between the personal and the political?
ML: For me the personal is political. I am a black woman, I am a queer woman, and I am a transracially adopted woman. All of these identities deeply inform my work. I cannot attend to one, without attending to the others. This is how I move through space and how my stories take shape in the world.
BBF: Can you talk a bit about how you might think about a queer poetics?
ML: For me, queer poetics is an unwavering attentiveness to one’s body and spirit. To the stories and strength, we hold inside ourselves. It’s making noise where there is joy, where there is pain, where there is pleasure and never shutting up. It’s being fucking brave and dangerous in one’s unconfined truth. It’s not settling for language that is stifling and narrow, but language that creates visibility and resistance.
BBF: Any final thoughts? Anything you wish I would have asked but did not?
ML: I want to mention that I just signed with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux to publish my middle-grade novel-in-verse. This book is the culmination of 10 years of work and I am so excited to see it come into the world. It’s a coming of age story about a young black girl who has white adoptive parents. The book will be out in 2018 so stay tuned.
