Taiyon Coleman, photographed by Sher Stoneman
Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America is a collection that spans Taiyon Coleman’s life, from growing up one of five children raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago, to being a first-generation college and MFA student, to teaching writing at colleges in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. “Writing would become the vehicle for me to make sense of the incongruencies of my experiences and the world,” Coleman says. Her essays cover Catholicism, racism in the academy, infant loss, motherhood, home ownership in a segregated city, poetry, and literature.
Coleman holds a BA in English literature and a MA in English from Iowa State University, an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English literature and culture with a minor in African American and African diaspora studies from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She was the recipient of an Archie Givens Collection of African American Literature Research Fellowship, a 2017 McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship in Creative Prose, and a 2018-2019 Mirrors and Windows Fellowship. Currently, Coleman is a University of Minnesota Libraries’ Mapping Prejudice National Think Tank affiliated scholar and an associate professor of Literature, Language, and Writing and Gender and Women’s Studies at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I spoke with Taiyon on April 19, 2024, over Zoom. The interview has been edited for clarity.
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Deborah Copperud: I listened to you read a poem in an Introduction to Creative Writing class lecture, around the year 2000, when I was an English major at the University of Minnesota. And you read this poem in a huge lecture where they brought in faculty and MFA students every week. You made a big impression on me, so I was thrilled when I saw that your book was coming out, and now I get to talk to you!
I’m hoping to start out by asking about your writing ritual, which you write about in one of the book’s first essays. Do you write daily? Do you write on a computer? Do you write longhand? How do you do it?
Taiyon Coleman: Sometimes I write longhand because I have journals. Like many writers, I have stacks and stacks of journals for ideas or poems. Oftentimes I write on the computer. Being a mom and working full time, I write in between. The thing that is really helpful for me is to have deadlines. You saw me reading poetry because my MFA is in poetry. And I don’t want to create these false boundaries to somehow say that poets are not necessarily essayists, right? Because I don’t know if I believe in those boundaries anymore. But I had this, you know, big idea—i.e. hubris—that I was going to be a poet. And then, thanks to a lot of opportunities provided by people in the Twin Cities community, I started writing essays and mostly writing by deadline. People asked me to write, so it just kind of happened haphazardly. And then I started to become more intentional. But I could never say that I write daily. It’s just that my schedule doesn’t work that way. It’s whenever I can fit it in. And when there’s deadlines, I appreciate it so much more.
I’m already thinking about what I want to write for my second book. You can see that my kids are here. So like, I’ll open up a file and I’ll just type: Oh, there’s a thought and I’ll type that thought and a title. And I already have a tentative title for the book. I just throw it in the folder and then I hope, eventually, I’ll get to it and I’ll see all those threads and pick them back up. It kind of sounds like spaghetti, doesn’t it? And I hope my humor doesn’t offend you. You know, that’s my way. Sometimes you have to laugh, right?
Totally. I have a question about if you still write poetry.
Oh yeah, I do.
I wonder how you would describe yourself, maybe multi-genre?
I write poetry. I write fiction. I’m a teacher right now. It’s been two decades and maybe that’s what being a writer is, in some ways. I think writers are teachers. Is that a little nerdy? Or dramatic. I write it all. And actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted publicly that when I applied to MFA programs, I applied in poetry and fiction. I didn’t get accepted in fiction. So I got in with poetry. I want to respect boundaries, but also, I think there’s no difference. When I write essays, to me, it sounds like poetry. And when I write, it always sounds like music to me.
The best way I can explain it is, Standard English is not my first language. I’m two generations removed from Mississippi and Arkansas. The language that we spoke in our home was a mixture of a lot of things. I only came to Standard English as an undergrad. To me, it’s all music. It all makes sense to me. It’s all poetic. Maybe the line breaks are just stuff that you negotiate or you do because people say you have to do them.
When COVID happened—I’m not complaining, I’m grateful for the privilege I have—but I was teaching and raising three kids. And then I took my kids out of school because I’m high risk. I have asthma and I have high blood pressure. So again, I have to trick myself to find ways to write. Tupelo Press was doing this 30/30 Project. If you were selected, you would write a poem for thirty days, every day. And then you would help them fundraise. And I thought, “Oh wow, that’s brilliant.” So I did it, loving the cause, loving poetry. And it would trick me into generating thirty poems. As writers, we have to find ways to do that. And I guess Tupelo Press understands that, too. And then everything shut down for COVID. So I think I had agreed to it before things shut down. And then it happened. People were supportive and I’m so grateful that people donated.
I was really upset at how people were denying the people who were dying. And of course I was, you know, scared out of my mind again. Maybe as you age, you think more of your own mortality. And just so much fear. So I wrote poems for people of color who died of COVID. And literally, you know, I was teaching online. My kids were to my right going to school online. And I would Google “people of color who died from COVID.” All the pictures would come up and I would look at the pictures and I would try to feel or hear: Who’s talking to me? Who did I feel was begging me to write a poem? Then I would put my finger on that image and I would click on the image to see what article it linked to, and that’s what I would write. So the poetry collection is tentatively titled “Communicating with the Dead: Pandemic Love Poems.” And the poems are about COVID and BIPOC people. But they’re kind of different poems because I didn’t want to objectify them because I’m not them. I didn’t have their lives. You know, race is a construction. Just because we have the same color skin, we’re not the same. So I tried to research them. I would read the obituaries and the articles about them. And you remember when COVID first started happening, they would feature certain people, right? I would try to find something in my personal experience that I felt connected to their humanity or what they were going through.
I have a poem that I wrote for a principal of a public school in New York who died from COVID. I think she was 36. Can you imagine? So young! I wanted to document that she lived and died. What a tragedy. It shouldn’t have happened that way. So I wrote a poem about a teacher who I felt saved my life, but I dedicated it to the principal. And then I would use footnotes. I would footnote The New York Times Obituary page. So I’m writing poems, but I’m also trying to create an artifact. Documentation. So now that when you know people say it wasn’t that bad or people say it didn’t really happen, I have poems that bear witness. This thing happened and there are real human beings who needlessly died. And I don’t believe that COVID killed people. I believe structural and economic inequality killed people. And so those are the poems. You asked me, am I still writing? Yeah. But also to me, though, an essay is a poem.
Some of the poems were published on the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project website. Some of them were published in Humans & Nature. It was intense. And I’m still trying to work my way out of that, but also I’m sure you know, as a writer, you think you have the writing, but the writing has a hold of you, swallowing your head. You think it’s going somewhere, so know that as I say that, take that with a grain of salt because the writing is smarter than I am. The subject is smarter than I am. I do believe that when we write, at least for me, you are collaborating with something bigger than yourself. I feel like I’m just a vehicle for something that’s supposed to come through. So just because I think it’s supposed to end that way, it doesn’t mean that that’s how it’s gonna happen.
That’s a great way of putting it.
When you first saw me, that young woman all those years ago, I was full of that thinking. That my life, my career, and my writing was gonna go a certain way. And I’m not complaining. I’m very grateful. But it didn’t go anything like I thought it was going to.
It never does.
No, but it’s always constant, right? The writing and the words and the love of words. They never leave us.
The poem that you read—I don’t remember if you read one or two poems—but you defined the term “kitchen,” which I was unfamiliar with because I grew up in a really small town in Minnesota with not a lot of Black people. I had never heard that term before. And you also mentioned Chicago’s Mason-Dixon Line, which—I knew what the Mason-Dixon Line was. But I didn’t grow up in Minneapolis, so I didn’t know that cities can also have Mason-Dixon lines.
They can have them, right? I’m an affiliated scholar with the Mapping Prejudice program. So we’re learning so much about that. The poem “Chicago On the Day Brother Increases His Chances of Reaching Age 21,” which is about my brother, did get published in Bum Rush the Page, which was a Random House anthology that accompanied HBO’s Def Jam series. That second poem, “My Kitchen,” which is about when my grandma first permed my hair, was published in Drumvoices Revue, a journal out of Southern Illinois University. Yeah, I remember those poems. That’s deep that I remember that.
Because don’t you write and then feel like you’re not a writer? I feel like that sometimes. Do you feel like that, Deborah? Like, we write, but we don’t get to call ourselves writers. Do you know what I mean?
Oh, I never. I rarely call myself a writer.
Exactly. So when you ask me that and then I can answer that question, I’m thinking, OK, we are writers.
I don’t know if I can ask you this, which University of Minnesota faculty member suggested that you take grammar classes when critiquing a poem in which you used Black vernacular?? You probably can’t reveal that.
No, and I can tell you why. And I want to give you gold stars for asking. To me it’s about structure. Pain is real and people do perpetuate pain. No matter where we stand, we all have the capacity to do it right. And you know, there but for the grace of God go I. But I’ve learned that we have all inherited things we have no control over, right? Like you said, you grew up in a small town and you had never heard of “kitchen” as a term used by Black folks to refer to hair. So, yeah, in that moment, like I was in my feelings, like, so in my feelings. As I have aged and I’ve taught and I’ve traveled. You think you’re going somewhere? You think you know it all, but the act of writing reveals to you stuff that you didn’t even know. And then that essay–I originally wrote it for Sung Yung Shin when she was putting together the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. Many of us in that book had told her, “You’re crazy, and nobody’s gonna pay you money to do this.” And of course, she showed us. She came back with the book contract. And she was like, “Now write it.”
But I realized that, particularly in institutions, things are structural. So although we act as individuals within institutions, we are acting out of the larger structure. When I network—I’m a member of Cave Canem, which is a network for poets of African-American descent—I talk to people of all different shades, or marginalized identities, or even white women. They had all had disparate experiences in graduate programs. They had all had similar things said to them by people in power. And so I realized that my personal experience came from a larger structural experience. So pointing the finger at one person doesn’t do anything to change the structure. It’s really about the larger structure. I wrote that essay back in 2015 or 2016. The sad part is, I’m sure that person was very nice to me, that person was very kind. And I’m sure that when that person said that, they didn’t mean to crush my heart. Which, they did. But they didn’t mean to do that.
That’s the place of tragic irony. If I could be dramatic, but I have to own it, you know. I am that writer. I mean, I love early American literature. The tragic, dark Hawthorne, Faulkner, O’Connor. Walker, Zora Neale Hurston. That’s the rub of American racism. That’s the tragedy that is America. Even in our best intentions, it’s so much in our blood and who we are, that even when we act, we still cause pain. Even though we don’t mean to, right? And it’s horrible because the act itself can be detrimental. It can be devastating. It can have life-changing effects. The only analogy I can think of, and please forgive me, is that it’s kind of like having a tiger that you think you can love and you think you can raise. And the tiger goes to hug you, but rips your throat out. And that’s what structural racism is, because some people don’t survive that.
I don’t like to name names because I’m not interested in hurting people or sensationalizing. I want to draw attention to the structure and maybe somebody will read that and say, “Oh, wow, I had that same experience.” I’ve been honored and privileged that many people have come to me and talked about their experiences. Not just racial. I mean other marginalized or disparate experiences based upon other identities. In my way, I want to bring attention to the structure and institution, not to people. I don’t want to re-inscribe that harm. I know that was not the intent, but I also want to hold space that intent doesn’t change the consequences.
I think that’s why I like talking about John Wayne Gacy. Condolences, and my heart goes out to his victims and their families, right? May they rest in peace and power. What an apropos analogy to talk about structural racism. It’s easy for us to see Gacy as the serial killer putting bodies into walls. But what about institutions that, in some way, are similar to serial killers; they kill people and they put bodies in walls because they’re able to hide, right? He was a clown. He drew people in very innocently.
I think racism works that same way. COVID was the same way. Look at how institutions serially murdered people from COVID racism. There are still poems that I want to write about COVID, but I just can’t sit down and write them because I can’t get my head around them. I still have a clip of somebody, a person of color, who died sitting in a parking lot in St. Louis or in the suburbs. He was an attorney. And he literally sat in his car and died. So, who’s the real serial killer?
That’s why I don’t like to say names. It’s still a hard thing that I’m struggling to get my head around. In the essay I joke that I’m gonna write an essay called “Paula Deen, a Baked Potato, and Compassion.” I remember when she was accused of what she did. I’m not saying that she didn’t do what she did, but to, like, vilify her and crucify her without talking about the larger structure that allows for her to do what she did? What does that serve?
In some kind of strange way, I want to be compassionate and empathetic and leave a legacy of not taking down people who are only a product of the system. Because if we metaphorically shoot bows and arrows at each other, we’ll look up and we’re all gone. It’s much harder and complicated to sit in the reality that we can be really nice, generous, genuine people and, unfortunately, still do harm. Even when we don’t mean to. And if we can figure out how to be in that place and untie that knot, I think we can achieve more forward movement.
I want you to lower your expectations of me. Because as a writer, as an artist, I can attempt to try to write something that works to demonstrate that, but don’t you for one minute think that I myself, as a human being, am capable of achieving that, too. You get it, as a writer, too, that sometimes that’s the rub. We can be a vehicle for things, but we don’t necessarily embody them. Because I got a lot of gifts from them, right? Because that same person, who said that horrible thing to me, also said really great things to me. They also helped me in a lot of ways.
That feels like a very Catholic answer. Like you have a good grasp of forgiveness, which is important in the Catholic faith. You write that you are a recovering Catholic.
A hot mess Catholic. I am Catholic. The person who’s narrating the audio version of the book emailed me and she asked me a brilliant question. I feel so sorry for her because she’s so brilliant and talented, but she doesn’t realize how nerdy I am. I love her questions. She asked me something similar. I think I called myself a recovering Catholic in an essay in the book. She’s like, “How do I deliver that line? Is it sarcastic?” I was like, “Oh yes. It’s totally sarcastic.” And then I had to explain it to her. So yeah, when you say that, you’re right. I’m a Catholic in recovery.
I write about being a fifth-generation Roman Catholic. My maternal great-great-grandmother was from Germany, and she was Catholic. Never converted, always in the maternal line, educated by nuns, K through twelve. I never really thought it had any impact on me. When I came to St. Kate’s, where I teach now, the Sisters of Saint Joseph—just total badasses, founded that school when women were not having the opportunity to be educated—they explained to me that it was called the Catholic intellectual tradition.
When you grow up in the bubble, you don’t see the structure of the bubble. You just grow in. But of course, I’m walking around, you know, doing all these Catholic things. So you’re absolutely right. It probably could be very Catholic and I’m totally unaware of it because I’m totally steeped in it. I do think about forgiveness. I was just laying in bed the other day thinking, as I’m aging, I was like, OK, maybe that’s something in my life path: Like, I gotta learn how to forgive. Maybe that’s why I’m having these experiences. I struggle with my Catholicism. My mother always said to me, Your religion is where you feel comfortable practicing your faith. Your relationship with the higher power has nothing to do with your religion. So, in a way, Catholicism has been so good to me. There’s no way I would have had the education that I have if not for being educated by those nuns and priests. Confirmation name Mary. Confirmed by Cardinal Bernardin. Like, I would think I have street cred as a Catholic, but a Catholic having difficulty with some of the experiences that people have in the institution, which have been extremely violent and painful. Maybe sitting on those lines gives me empathy and it also gives me, I think, a sense of self-deprecating humor. Yes, I do think it’s significant. It’s probably significant in ways that I could tell you now, but probably even more that I’m still learning that I have yet to recognize.
I don’t know if you can see the top of the cross there? [Coleman points her Zoom camera to show a crucifix on her wall.] I have the Palm Sunday palm leaves. My husband goes to church more than I do. But I have my rosaries. I joke that it’s the Pagan in me that loves it, like maybe I was a witch. I’m serious! In the back of my book, I call on my friends, we were practicing witchcraft. It’s like a cult; you can’t let go of it. For me, some of the good in it was the literacy. I came to a love of literature. I was always the person in the class, in fourth and fifth grade, that could read and explain it to the priest, right? I didn’t know that I was being trained as a literature scholar, as a creative writer.
It’s so provocative, right? All of the dead people and ghosts; it’s just endless. So, you know, if writing is witchcraft, if writing is casting spells, then my tools come out of that toolbox. And I have to use them the best way I can, even if they’re broken or if they have cracks. To deny that is to deny who I am. Maybe in the process of writing, because, ultimately, it’s a narcissistic act, right? So much of that has to do with being a Black girl on the South Side of Chicago, having been educated by these nuns and priests, at least for my personal experience, which was not hurtful or negative. When I was lost at the most times in my life, it gave me a guardrail to hold on to, onto which to see the world and not fall off. I’ll hold on either until the Pope excommunicates me or until something happens to the extent where I have to walk away. In my family, some of my siblings have walked away.
I love my mother for that, may she rest in peace and power. I believe that was a freedom that she gave us, you know? She said, “I made you this in order to protect you, to give you a guideline, but if you want to do something different, you can.”
I want to ask you about the book’s title. I found it very evocative. I picture a lady with really heavy suitcases, maybe walking up the down escalator. How did you come up with the title? Did you mull it over? Was it a flash of brilliance?
First, has anybody ever told you that you’re psychic? I was in the airport yesterday coming back from Columbia, Missouri. I was at the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association Spring Roadtrip Convention and we flew through O’Hare. And on the way back, I’m in domestic flights. And then, on the other side of the tarmac, I see an Iberia Airlines plane from Spain. I saw the plane and it really looked like the first time I’d ever gone out of the country, in college. My mother was still alive. This was before 9/11. And at the last minute, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to go. The only other people in my family that had ever gone out of the country were because they were in the military, right? And I remember crying, telling my mother I’m not gonna go. And she said, “You better get your ass on that plane.” She went all the way to the gate with me. And I can remember sitting on that plane and looking at her. And watching her wave, and I didn’t want to go. I thought about that yesterday. Sure enough, when I got to Spain, I did what most typical, ignorant U.S. Americans do. I had, like, five million suitcases. I was dragging them up and down escalators. So embarrassing. Of course, everybody’s looking at this big Black woman. What are you doing, right? And of course I end up, you know, with all those suitcases underneath my bed in student housing and having my three outfits for the semester like everybody else.
In thinking about traveling without moving, it’s hard because my generation is the first generation, post-civil rights movement. I was born in 1969. And my parents never graduated from college. I think my generation represented the hopes and the dreams. In my experience, the message was: Just go to college, go to college. Even if you didn’t know why you were going. It was just stressed so hard. And it was rocky for me. I mean, I dropped out of school for five years. It took me a while to get it together. I always joke that, you know, stuff doesn’t happen in a straight line. Some stuff was recursive. Mine was hella recursive. And I’ve had this career where I thought naively—again about the Mason-Dixon Line, right? So much has happened in these fifty years about what we know about race and what we didn’t know about race. Talk about tragic irony, right? And having experiences of racism, but not knowing that they were necessarily racist because I was taught: You just get that piece of paper. It’s gonna solve everything. Just graduate. It’s gonna be just fine. But then to get the piece of paper and then to get pieces of papers, more papers. And to have these very structural racist experiences for myself, my husband, my children, it was like, yeah, I traveled. But how far did we move?
Writing is a lot of things, but sometimes writing is a response to trauma that you’re having. I write it down to figure it out. Even as I’m writing those essays, I can’t say I fully understand in the moment. When I wrote the essay “Tilted Uterus: When Jesus is Your Baby Daddy”—in my research, I learned that not only do women of color have a high mortality rate and infant mortality rate during pregnancy, but if you’re educated, that rate is likely to be higher. It’s even worse!
And there’s student loan debt. Although, you know, Biden and Kamala have paid off my student loan debt. I’m gonna get a picture of them and put it next to my bed.
The title is also reminiscent of my favorite Jamiroquai song, “Traveling Without Moving.” I love the song because I love the beat. I hear my writing as music because music is my first love. I wanted to be a dancer and I wanted to be a musician. My first year of college, I was a music major, but I changed.
I just think he’s a brilliant artist, but I never understood what it meant. And then as I lived, I understood. The book’s subtitle corresponds to that. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t progress.
In 2024, for Minnesota to have one of the largest racial disparities in the nation, ping-ponging between Wisconsin and Minnesota, particularly around issues of equity and particularly for women of color, it’s devastating. Think of Sandra Bland. She was from Chicago. You think about Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey, the vice president of student affairs at Lincoln University in Missouri, who died by suicide. The president of Harvard, who resigned because she was accused of her research being shoddy. I think there have been more professors now, African-American professors at Harvard, who’ve been accused: women, Black women. On the flip side, Black women have been the bedrock of democracy and sacrifice. Think of all the Black women who have been part of the civil rights movement. Even before that. Harriet Tubman, who escaped. But then she was also a spy during the Civil War. You know, African American women have been systemic to this project called democracy. America. But, yet, in the twenty-first century to still be having these experiences.
When we were locked down in COVID, this collection of essays was a finalist for a contest. There are a lot of poems that I can’t write. One name, Dr. Susan Moore, I’ll send you the link. I’m going to get around to your question. I know it’s long-winded. She’s one of the poems that I can’t write. I would see her face. Every time I would, you know, do my process, I would see her face, but I would ignore it. Here she was, a doctor, right? A medical doctor. And she was telling them what she needed. She said, “I have this condition. You need to give me this. You need to do this. Give me that.” And they were telling her, “Oh, you’re too sensitive. You’re nasty. You’re too this.” And, literally, she died.
You have to look from where I’m standing: What protection do I have as a Black woman? I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, and all of this still happens to me. And it was a matrix moment. It’s one thing to read it in a paragraph. It’s one thing to read it theoretically. It’s one thing to read Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou, or Sonia Sanchez, or Nikky Finney. These great writers, like Toi Derricotte. It’s another thing to pull back and then see it in your life in the matrix. Where have we gone? We have traveled, but have we moved?
That’s when the essay collection started slowly coming together. In some small way, I hope that I have done it justice. I hope that I’ve contributed to the discourse. I could never be comprehensive, right? Because no identity is a monolith. But at least in some small way, I can contribute my story: What has been my experience? That’s why I say a Black woman, not the Black woman, because I can only speak from the “I.” Sometimes I feel like Harriet Tubman; humor is my way. Me and my friends started joking that we started to use plantation and slavery analogies to deal with our contemporary life experiences. That should tell you something. Here you and I are talking and Louisiana lawmakers just voted that child workers don’t have to have lunch breaks, you know? That’s de facto slavery.
Although I’m talking about my experiences as a Black woman, you look at Roe v. Wade being overturned. That’s affecting people of all colors. Nonbinary-identity discrimination, trans bodies, we’ve all, in a way, gone back. Now, I don’t think it’s all gloom and doom. I’m excited; I’m positive. But that was my contribution. And of course, you’ve read the collection and I want to thank you for that. It’s not just about that. I hope, too, it’s about love. It’s about resilience.
Me and my sister joke. She has an MBA and she just happened to move here and she owns her own business. We always say to each other, “Man, if I would have known this or that when I was in my teens, I would have made totally different decisions.” So it wasn’t just enough to have the education. It was like, you know, here we were: poor little, brown Black girls, you know, some proud, strong, wonderful, brilliant, smart people. But because we had been economically and racially disenfranchised, knowing that there was more to the American dream than just getting the paper, it was a combination of all these things. Some you can see, some you can’t. When you can’t see them, you can travel, but you don’t necessarily move. I thought about growing up. Riding the train and riding the bus and understanding that system. Just like John Wayne Gacy, I thought it was a good analogy to think about all of that.
To come full circle, we’re going to tie it in a knot. You started with the suitcases. Landing in Chicago, I remember when I flew in. I’m somebody who believes in symbols, as you can tell again: Pagan, witchy, Catholic, right? Very Catholic. I could see the trains from the plane. And then I could see the Iberia plane. Thinking of Spain, thinking of the last time I was there at O’Hare airport with my mother. She would go on to die in 1997 at the age of forty-nine, a premature death. We talk about the life expectancy for women of color. Particularly in inner cities and places where there is poverty, racism, and pollution. And I saw the trains and downtown Chicago, what used to be the Sears Tower, just kind of nodding my head and just saying, “Thank you.” I felt like the universe was acknowledging those stories. Here I am, in the plane, traveling. And maybe in some way moved, or maybe it was for me to have those experiences.
Your topics are very serious and I would describe your writing as very formal, very polished. You write with rigorous clarity. When you inject colloquialisms or, for example, use the phrase “for real for real,” which is a funny little aside, how do you decide when to be kind of casual versus more academic?
Oh, I’m always at war. I had a vice president at St. Kate’s, where I’m at. She’s become a president of a private college in the Midwest. And one time she said to me, “Tai, I’m too tired to code- switch.” She’s African American. And I just thought that shit was hilarious. And I was like, “Exactly.”
I write about this in many of my essays. You come into an institution to pursue an education because you believe that education is going to give you some type of credibility. You think it’s going to protect you. You’ve been convinced that it’s going to give you a better life. So you kind of sell your soul to the devil, so to speak. Again, biblical reference: Milton. You don’t know it at the time, right? It’s when you look back. Think of now, all the people like myself, we’re just in ridiculous student loan debt. But now it’s being forgiven. We all made that deal.
So you come into the writing class and you make a deal with yourself. If I write a certain way, if I do this a certain way, people will think I’m smart. People will say I’m smart and I’ll pass. But you don’t then realize all the stuff you have to give up and kill to get to the other side. And, of course, we know, linguistically, that all languages are equally complex and sophisticated, right? Equally. But in academia, only the standard one works, right? So where I’m from, we say, “They was going to the store.” A professor might say, “What do you mean, ‘They was going to?’ “They was going to the store.” “Oh, they were going to the store.” But if I changed the way I say it, it means something completely different.
I remember the first time I read, with such shame, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I was a college student, and it was so hard for me to read because Zora Neale Hurston writes all the prose in Standard English, but when the characters speak, they speak the local dialect, right? The Black English of Florida. I had been so socialized, not even to recognize your own voice. Of course now, at fifty-four, teaching it for twenty years, I get it. But when I first encountered the novel I was like, I can’t get through it. Sometimes if you give away your language, you give away yourself. There’s nothing more violent than to do that. I cite an article by Jacqueline Jones Royster, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” Sometimes education may teach you to deny your own voice.
Language can be so violent. I didn’t write for years, because I was writing stuff and people were saying, “Oh, it’s pat, we’re already talking about this.” How hilarious for somebody to say to you, talking about race and racism is pat. But you are totally being oppressed racially. Or it’s not written in a certain way. I can’t speak for other people, but for me—I don’t have it as much anymore—there’s always that fear that I would be found out, that I’m not real. I’ve never considered myself an academic and no shade to them. I’ve always thought it was performative because I’m not supposed to be there, like I don’t belong, right? And then I realized that when you deny that first voice, you deny all of your stress of being a Black woman in America. In the essay “Disparate Impacts: Moving to Minnesota to Live Just Enough for the City,” you have the prose. But then in the footnotes is where I can be me.
I came to Minnesota and no shade, right? Minnesota is Minnesota Nice. It’s a different culture. Where I grew up in Chicago, you said things frank, direct, and plain. You didn’t have a lot of time. If you didn’t say it the right way, you’d get in trouble. And I always joke, when I got here, people from Minnesota walk around the block to say something. In order to go across the street, you’ll walk around the block and then cross the street. In Chicago, you just cross the street. And I never understood that. I would say things just straightforward. I realized that I was offending people. I was getting in trouble, or people were nice to me and I thought that they were really my friends and they weren’t. So yeah, you see that in the essays. The older I get, the less I sit on Standard English. My students sometimes just say things to me that are just so amazing and so free that get at the meaning. My students would say, “Dr. Coleman, do we have to do this?” I’d say, “Oh, yes, it’s due yesterday.” “You mean for real? For real, for real?” And I was like, wow. Not for real, but ‘for real for real.’ Like, they’re teaching me. I love it.
Marshawn Lynch, you know, “I know I’m gonna get got. But I’m gonna get mine more than I get got, though.” The way for his language to embody what it means to be a Black person, to be always on the run, and to know that at the end you’re gonna be taken out by high blood pressure or something that happens to Black people because we live in a racist society. But I’m going to try my best to get what I need. Those things embody, for me, traveling without moving. Those things embody the truth. And sometimes I realize that, in pushing a standardized language and pushing a form, then that also works to mask the reality of what people are experiencing. The language itself becomes a patriarchy. It becomes a form of white supremacy. In order for me to say what I say, I have to break through that language.
In my essays you see me struggling with that. I struggle with that on a political level, on a theoretical level, pedagogically as an instructor. Also, the painful reality is that standardized language is now a part of who I am. So seeing that in myself, that not liking how much I had to change myself in order to get here. Then, when you get here, was it worth it? Then, hopefully going back and trying to retrieve it. Can you go back? Think of Saidiya Hartman’s book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. There’s a sadness, that you can never return. I try to be as honest as I can on the page. I’m very honored and privileged that the book now has life. I continue to pray that people can access it and people can see that. And I’m glad that you can.
As a teacher of writing, I hope we move or we continue to move to spaces where not only do we accept people and how they show up, but we can also accept people and how they write. It’s one thing, theoretically and linguistically, to understand that all types of writing and communication are equally valid and equally sophisticated. Can we also value that in academia, if we’re still going to continue to use academia as a gatekeeper for access to citizenship and to have a better quality of life? I hope that made sense and it wasn’t too convoluted. I really like your question, so I hope you consider my response as affirmation.
Yeah, I hope everybody reads it. I think it’s great for writers and writing teachers, but I think it is great for anybody to read.
As a writer, I think I know myself and I think I see myself. But you never really see yourself.
One question I haven’t asked yet is about your grandmother. I had a mean grandmother too, so I really liked your description of your grandmother. Oftentimes, in literature, grandmothers are portrayed as very saccharine and sentimental. And you were very plain and simple about your grandmother: She was mean because she had a hard life. My grandmother passed away many years ago.
I’m sorry for your loss.
It’s okay, I had to realize where her meanness was coming from. She wasn’t cruel. That was just how she was.
You know, freedom is relative. But I think we’re freer than our grandmothers were. We get to tell their stories and maybe reach in, you know, to find the compassion, right? It’s the same way that I refuse to name the instructors who said those mean things to me. The grandmamas are the same way. How can we go back and excavate them and tell the part of the story that they couldn’t tell? Like, I think of my paternal grandmother, Sarah. May they all rest in peace and power. She wasn’t mean in a way, but she was kind of selfish. But she had things happen to her. In my essay “Grown Folks’ Business,” where, you know, one day when we were sitting and talking, she said that her mother had her at thirteen. Her mother babysat for her biological father’s children. I had to be the one to say to her, you know, “Grandmother, she couldn’t consent to sex at age thirteen or twelve. He, your father, raped her.” My grandmother couldn’t see that. I mean, I think she literally could not.
Alice Walker writes in the essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” that we can tell our grandmothers’ and our mothers’ stories, or our fathers’ stories, to see where we know they meant the best. But where is it? What happened to them? Can we get around that? Maybe, in that way, we get forgiveness for ourselves. We can afford them that forgiveness and peace, too. That’s the goal, that’s the practice. I’m not saying that I’m there, but those are the things I think about when I write. You’re writing and the character of the person is not flat or one-dimensional. You’re engaging with that person and with the larger structure that produced them.
I’ve told my kids: even if you have to say “No” to me, then you do that in order to be who you are and to do what you want to do. I hope that they listen. I also hope that they never have to turn on me.
We’ve talked about a lot. Is there anything that you want to tell me that I haven’t asked?
If you want to ask me what I’m writing next, you can.
Yeah, I am interested in what’s coming up.
In Traveling Without Moving, I write about coming from a family who could see and talk to dead people. I want to explore that a little bit more in a much more frank and explicit way. I joked that I really do come from witches and that’s why we like Catholicism, because it really is paganistic and very ritualistic. Again with humor. I want to write more about that aspect of us, and not in a way that’s preachy or evangelical. No offense to people who see themselves in those categories. I’m one of those people, if you tell me you see Jesus or whoever in a spoon, like, I’m rolling with you, you know? How arrogant of us to think that we’re the only beings that are in the universe. Also, that there’s only one type of higher power. Or if there’s no higher power at all.
I’m interested in the supernatural. Even though I don’t like to call it supernatural because I think it’s super normal, for lack of a better term. I am working on it. Hopefully something more equitable and inclusive. Like, I think all humans have the capacity to do these things. That’s what I kind of want to write about. Full disclaimer: that could be the lure to get me to sit down and write more. Who’s to say that when I come to the end that will be the finished product? But that’s what’s motivating me on my next project.
That sounds really fascinating, and I can’t wait to read it.
The tentative title is Witch Wound. If you look at the High Priestess, in Tarot cards is a healer. I think people who teach are healers, people who have been wounded and who have been hurt. I have a poem that I wrote for Minding Nature that includes the lines “They say / hurt people, / hurt people, / and I say / that hurt people / healed and healing / make good teachers.” It’s been my experience where we’ve been hurt or where we have failed—and where we still achieved despite those pains and those cracks—I think the universe has prepared us then to help other people.
I’ve been the student that has gotten all F’s and I’ve been the student that has gotten all A’s. I didn’t know then that I was being prepared to be a teacher.
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Deborah Copperud is a writer and podcaster in Minneapolis, MN. Her work has been published in Racket, Great River Review, Blue Earth Review, with an essay forthcoming in Defenestration. She co-hosts the It’s My Screen Time Too and Spock Talk podcasts.
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