“Art Is A Commons”

In my conversation with monet, she reminds us that, while socioeconomic factors assign metrics and values to our gifts, art itself is not a luxury — but a commons.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

FATIMA JALLOH: Survival is at the top of everyone’s mind right now. How does a poet survive? How do you maintain the balance between your job as an artistic director, and your work as a poet and organizer?

AJA MONET: We’re at a time where a lot of funding for cultural institutions is being cut. I think it’s waking people up to the fact that the privilege of the society we’ve created and have had to exist in — a kind of NGO model — is not sustainable. And so there’s a lot of questions arising for artists and cultural workers. Who are we beyond the foundation model? What are we creating? What are the material needs and immaterial needs of our people? How are we servicing those needs?

There is the saying: I want my bread and my roses too. I move from the place of knowing that poetry, art and culture are needs, they are a commons, they are something that people should have access to. For me, it’s more about what spaces and organizations we are creating to chronicle and archive our narratives, our objectives and what we want to see in our communities. That doesn’t have to be just the literary journal or the traditional publishing house. There are so many ways that we show up in the world, and a poet is a way of being an artist, is a way of being, of moving through the world.

There’s this narrative that we’re supposed to be making money off of our art and our passions. I think that’s misleading, disingenuous, and makes for poor art and depressed artists. Capitalism has made each of us into tiny enterprises, and by virtue of that, it produces a competitive culture and climate that doesn’t allow for sincere, genuine exchange beyond the transactional-ness of a capitalist system. Capitalism is founded on slavery, exploitation and colonialism, and those things didn’t change. The plantations became the corporations. And so we’re in this place now where artists have to know their value beyond what they can get out of it financially.

FJ: I’m a Floridian myself. I see a lot more people, like Doechii, laying claim to the state, talking about the swamps, the alligators. But also, we have the forces of nature, hurricanes, everything in the water. How did you reach eco-poetics as a subgenre in your book, Florida Water?

AM: I didn’t even know that was a real term, but I continue to exist and co-create, collaborate, organize and show up to the issues that concern me. I don’t know how you can be a living, breathing, existing person at this time and not be concerned with what is happening to the planet. How are we accessing water, clean air and nutrient-rich soil? Politics is completely wrapped up in the distribution of resources. If we don’t have a planet, there’s no politics to fight over. 

Being in Florida, it’s kind of ground zero for a lot of the issues we see washing up on our shores around climate justice — or, rather, climate injustice. You see people by South Beach with water up to their thighs trying to walk to the grocery store. That’s not normal. If you are breathing, this is your cause, this is your concern. But I like that title, ​“eco-poetics.” I’m running with that.

FJ: I didn’t make that up, but it’s a really good term. I wanted to talk about your poem, ​“is love a commons?” It reads like a nontraditional heartbreak poem, but styled for organizing spaces. How do you write about love in a time like this?

AM: If you’re not doing it from love, then what are you doing it from? When I do an action or I’m canvassing or show up to a community organizing meeting, am I acting from a place of love or fear? What is my guiding principle? What is the oil that I’m using to fuel the engine?

We have to be very militant, diligent and strategic about how we prioritize love, how we protect love, how we nurture love, how we cultivate love and harvest our love for each other. I mean, that’s the ultimate crop — the ultimate quench of thirst. There’s no amount of success or liberation without love.

There’s different ways that we inflict harm and pain upon each other — that we do the work of the system, the colonial, capitalist power structure — when we internalize it and become agents of fear, hatred, animosity and greed. Love is abundance. It’s not a thing that moves from lack; it moves from a place of capacity of possibility. If you don’t feel safe enough to love or be loved, then something’s got to give.

Oh, you can be the mightiest of men, but if you don’t love the person that you go home to at night, and you’re not nurturing the community that has to hold you and sustain you, then clearly something will come astray. It will ripple down into the work.

FJ: You’re the granddaughter of a union worker, a family that fled from Cuba, mingled with Jamaican heritage, generations of a dispersed diaspora. Can you speak more on the Maroons that you touch on in Florida Water?

AM: As people who are the great grandchildren of the horrific, genocidal, greedy transatlantic slave trade, it does not mean we did not resist. It does not mean that we did not fight and try to change and shift the conditions. What becomes of the child who learns their origin story is slavery? What kind of imagination is poured into that child, what kind of visions and dreams are expanded or limited because of that origin story?

For me, it was really liberating to live in Florida and learn there were African people who not only were not slaves, but who fought back and had a very different relationship to this land and this country. Because of the dignity of their own humanity, they fled and created ecosystems and communities where there were differing languages, differing values, differing perspectives, and they sustained each other and survived. It was the spirit of resistance, the spirit of rebellion. That narrative is so profound.

We talk about the Underground Railroad and this limited notion that the North is the beacon of freedom, but what Florida means to me is there is a story that must be told about the Southern Star, that there was a place we fled to that was South. We started a poetry festival in Florida called the Maroon Poetry Festival. I wrote about it in the foreword of Freedom Dreams by Robin DG Kelley, and it became reflective of some of the poems in Florida Water. It was a huge beacon of inspiration for me as an organizer, not just the narrative for the sake of telling the narrative, but as a strategy for how we look at Florida and our organizing. We had to see ourselves in this political imagination of maroonage. We are part of this legacy of the Maroons. You know, it is a verb. What does it look like to maroon in this time?

FJ: You describe yourself as a documentarian, a scribe of the time. How do you transform the things you witness into your own art?

AM: It’s the ability to see, the ability to bear witness, to be with people, and to recognize that you can surrender to that witness, that we come from a continuum. If you think the poem is good, imagine what it took to get to the place to write the poem. That’s the joy of being a poet, the person you had to become to get to the poem.

FJ: That’s a beautiful way to put it.

There’s a certain guilt that I feel choosing poetry as something that I want to put a lot of time and effort into. I feel that writing, at least a little bit, can be self-serving and maybe self-preserving. What would you say to the guilty poet who chooses poetry?

AM: Phillis Wheatley could only write so many poems until some chains got liberated. There’s degrees to what role we play, and you show up in the way that you can. Don’t ever just get so carried away in your isolation that you slide into individualism. It’s about knowing that when you’re in solitude, who are your people? Who do you answer to? Who loves you? Who do you check in on? Those are more concerns than you working on a poem when the world is on fire. As long as you’re doing what you need to be doing, I don’t think guilt for doing what you are called to do is serving anybody.