HARMONY HOLIDAY in conversation with SANDRA SIMONDS
Los Angeles-based poet Harmony Holiday’s fifth book, Maafa (Fence Books, 2022), is an epic poem that takes the reader through a terrifyingly familiar “paradise of ruins.” In it, we follow Maafa, the resilient, funny, fiercely intelligent heroine, as she moves from the apocalyptic present into the traumas of history and back again.
Driven by her rebellious imagination, she skillfully combines a lyric intensity reminiscent of a poet like Bob Hass, her former teacher at UC Berkeley, with the swerving word play of a poet like Harryette Mullen. In addition, much of Holiday’s oeuvre contemplates and reworks Black avant-garde diaspora aesthetics in the vein of Fred Moten, but from a distinctly feminist perspective.
Holiday’s unwillingness to settle for language and ideas that fit into expected modes or forms gives rise to poems that never feel conventional. As such, all five of her books intersperse the poetic with various sonic and visual elements. Her first book, Negro League Baseball (Fence Books, 2011), for example, came with a CD of music she mixed and curated. In her third collection, Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2017), she includes archival visual elements provoking a raucous, fragmented conversation with the ghosts of Sun Ra, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis (to name a few). Along those lines, her Substack “Black Music and Back Muses” is an ongoing endeavor to contextualize treasures from the archives of Black musical history into the contemporary moment.
Holiday’s spontaneous use of the field of the page reflects the fact that she is also a dancer, choreographer, and experimental filmmaker. Words and phrases in Maafa “haunt with renewal,” by alternately flickering, strutting, and sauntering across the page, separated by wide blank spaces that function much like the pauses and silences of punctuation.
Her poetics mirrors her wide range of interests including Black musical history, family legacy, feminist desire, and performance. Whether she is delving into the legacy of her late soul singer father Jimmy Holiday or inventing mythical, transhistorical characters like Maafa, Holiday’s linguistic gifts are always committed to the lush complexities of truth-telling.
In December 2021, I sent Holiday some questions about Maafa; she responded via Google Doc in the early months of 2022.
—Sandra Simonds
Tallahassee, Florida
August 2022
SANDRA SIMONDS
Maafa begins with the question, “Do we have any black women in the epic hero position?” Can we start by talking about the Black female epic poem? It seems that Maafa (the person, the body) becomes a site of these historical intersections—a place where the horrors inflicted on her ancestors speak through her in the form of poetry, but also a place where she is witness to present-day social and political catastrophes. I’m thinking specifically here of your use of “Say Her Name,” the violence inflicted on Black women as well as their erasure. I was also intrigued by the proposition that the “commitment to witnessing” is also “a commitment to crime.” I wondered what you meant by that: how it connects to the necessity of the Black female epic and specifically as it relates to these endless catastrophes.
HARMONY HOLIDAY
An epic allows you to show rather than tell or instruct. The hyper-didactic has become a burden, for everyone but especially for Black women. We grow weary of teaching and preaching and proving things and maintaining virtue in the face of all manner of oppressive condition or projection and would prefer to just be, and to reach a level of sovereignty in being that amounts to freedom. Epic heroes tend to be sovereign, and with that jurisdiction over themselves even their perceived mistakes are glorious points of adventure and faith. I want that for Black female archetypes, who I refer to in my mind as “Black romantic leads” sometimes. I want romance for us. I also think that calling a book Maafa and not personifying the catastrophe the word describes amounts to more of the pathos of the didactic, whereas I wanted to bring about an alive feminine force whose adventurousness in thought and deed frees her from any mundane attachments to what she represents to others, so that she embodies her name and defies it, turning it around to affirm her deliberate whims. Maafa just wants to have fun, finally.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I think that overly didactic poems can sometimes feel too simple. Not that I’m against good propaganda when necessary. But reading your book, I was struck by how complex your lines are—psychologically, linguistically, musically. I’m thinking of lines like “we need to see inside of the genocide to its heart which must be broken wound up & dreaming of its own murder” and “I love the acoustics of our ruin.” There are many examples of this. What I expected I was going to read was subverted by aspects of play from this diva/deity.
HARMONY HOLIDAY
Thank you for noticing that. I’m so grateful that play feels as prominent on the page as it does in my spirit when I write—not to trivialize the gravity of many of the subjects I approach, but because the expectation of a familiar didacticism makes it nearly impossible to say anything new or invigorating, or to ever achieve the lyrical justice that the strictly didactic believes is its aim. In my experience, the thinking around topics that carry this expectation, from Blackness, otherness, and death to cultural and geopolitical catastrophes, is propelled forward by new relationships to verbal and written expression, novel rhythms, the polyrhythms of double and many-layered consciousness set to language as if it’s a score and not bitterly keeping score. My dream is to outrun the codes of representation™ that are imposed upon many writers while never flinching from the sources of their former imposition. It’s also nice to remind myself and readers of the pitch of the human personality when not playing into false/fashionable notions of righteousness. We don’t have to walk around angrily cursing everything to testify to the accursed attributes of our very flawed and very beautiful society. We can be dancing, in love, running away, chasing dreams, exploring divinity, and full of the radiant malaise I imbue Maafa with. We do not, as Fred Moten reminds us, consent to being a single being.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I would love for you to talk about your poem “Kafka on a Slaveship.” I’m really interested in the ways writers rewrite the canonical. What is the canon? What does that mean for writers who have been left out of that process (canonization) for so long? I just reviewed Roger Reeves’s new book Best Barbarian, and his poem “Domestic Violence” is a negotiation with Ezra Pound. In the poem, Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till, who was imprisoned alongside Pound (and then eventually executed), becomes the central figure of that poem. Till actually shows up in the Cantos, something I only learned from reading Roger’s book. What are you trying to say by using Kafka and other literary figures in your work?
HARMONY HOLIDAY
This title is kind of metonymic. I say Kafka but I mean metamorphosis, Kafka style. Waking up inside of a monster but with your same delicate human Black consciousness, your same yearning heart. Existential crises, these ennoblingly abstract breaks with one’s mundane identity that only Westerners get to have in order to resolve their complexes or escape debilitating guilt, are not exclusive to the consciousness of Westerners. Black people hallucinate transformation and exile in times of distress too. I think, with all of the appropriation of our cultural forms that happens, maybe existentialism really belongs to us. Black life during enslavement required that we reconcile a chasm between how we felt in spirit and how we were forced to function in the flesh. In order to avoid dissociation, I believe many victims of this disconnect internalized the ideas being projected onto them— that they were less than human, in need of masters, broken in ways they could not perceive, in need of white Christianity’s version of a savior, the “Heaven later” version.
“Kafka on the Slaveship” is a quipping and playful and compact look at how to go from waking up in a terror to teasing the terrorizing force with your presence. The slaver becomes a hoe, the speaker his master showing him how to use the tool and the language, which turns violent institutions into sites of reckoning and harvest here. In a way I’m banishing Kafka from his own universe and stealing it in this petite revenge fantasy that is really more like a quick morning dance between dreaming and alertness. Some mornings on slave ships I bet it almost felt like a terrible dream that everyone needed to snap out of, or a collective dysmorphia. A sickly inversion of desperation and power. Gregor Samsa is who we become when we restrain the subconscious for so long it overtakes us. Free Black people are the unrestrained subconscious of our society. Refusing to cannibalize ourselves for entertainment is our existential crisis, soul is.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I thought that the line “Black music is the music of forensics” was really powerful. Can you talk about what you mean? I immediately think of the wholesale appropriation of Black music in America for profit, but the word “forensics” really goes much deeper into the violence of that appropriation because appropriation (as a term) feels very superficial and doesn’t quite address the damage.
HARMONY HOLIDAY
Sounds partly inspired by crime, or what I call “a violent succession of events” in the book. Forensics can be used to solve those crimes or trace them back to their roots, or uproot them, depending on the moods and needs of the time. Traces of each crime are embedded in Black music, so that even the most romantic songs in the tradition possess a crypt full of bodies and absences from whom that romance was stolen or adapted. Many ancient civilizations have structures that were built thousands of years back and tell us about the lives of the people who lived within that society. The group called “African Americans” has music in the place of these ruins. The final section of Maafa is called A Paradise of Ruins for this reason. Our music and our litany of lyrical gesturing becomes the evidence of our passage. And I learn through the playful leaps in that section of the book that this music of forensics and incrimination and redemption is much sturdier than marble, adobe, brick, or even gold, because a song, once memorized by the body, cannot go unsung; it surfaces in every breath, sees you better than any gaze, and makes your every idea relate back to its rhythm. I think a lot of people listen to some Black music because it makes them feel dangerous and mysterious and like they’ve been through some shit they hear channeled in the cadences, but it makes them feel that way because it is that way, it is dangerous, and rigged. You cannot casually appropriate this lyricism, is part of what I’m suggesting by that line, because your attempted theft or frivolity will mark your soul forever. Get out of the audience if you’re here to be entertained or to exoticize those deep Black emotions; you may end up an accomplice in the crimes they’re solving.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I would love to hear your thoughts about masculinity and fathers as they relate to this book. I know a little bit about your own father, Jimmy Holiday, who seemed to have been, from reading other interviews with you, a complicated man. In terms of Maafa, I think of the lines “Maafa, haaaaa, gotcha, awful-ma, father, ma ah fuh—haggle and hobble of vowels, quiteloud echo of mother and father and less and excess and access and after…” as well as the header (No father figures, hear?) which I take to be a play on “here” and the line “I don’t trust father figures.” I sort of took “father” to mean authority or authority figures, and it resonated with me. I found myself rooting for Maafa.
HARMONY HOLIDAY
This book isn’t intentionally about fathers or Black masculinity; if anything it’s gesturing away from that as the center and vortex through which the rest of Black life is understood and seeking a more pantheistic register, where women don’t have to reject or denigrate those influences to surpass them. There’s a tradition of lore about slaves killing themselves or others as acts of love and liberation, the way we as writers may kill off our favorite characters or the way Miles Davis, as a master of playing ballads, tried to play fewer and fewer ballads so that they did not become a crutch. My father, being my ballad and favorite character and complex enough to examine forever, is often where I lean. Maafa is my attempt to liberate us both by reframing the masculine as foil to the hero rather than a deterministic unilateral hero figure himself. Writing about him is a lifelong project, but at this stage it’s more about reappropriation of his image from the interpretations of others and even of my former self. I’m asking how these legacies can be quieter and less driven to clichés for comfort. I’m also asking, although it’s another potential cliché, myself to step up as the primary consciousness driving me to create, and in doing that, I’m trying to sort out my addiction to absence, to his absence and general absenteeism as with the archive, as it becomes ever-presence or haunt or accompaniment. I’m no longer interested in using those obsessions to displace or mitigate myself, and so now instead of understanding the world on his terms, or any man’s terms, in a constant state of empathetic rehabilitation, I’m facing my own terms, my own gaze, its violence or lack thereof, its rage and tenderness and love of beauty and love of pain. I’m making demands from my own heart now instead of avenging his or trying to win his ghost’s gaze with dazzle when I’d rather earn my own respect as I become realer and more significant to myself.
SANDRA SIMONDS
There’s an element that really felt, ironically, grounding in this book: of the witchcrafty, underworldy and otherworldly, forces beyond, telepathy, strange powers of song, the language of the dead (all my dead friends come to me as songs). It feels very comfortable with the non-binary world, the world of in-between, unknowing. I felt a strong sense of openness to magical energies. Not all of these energies are comfortable or comforting—the chaos of the universe is intense—but you seem unafraid of all of it and committed to writing it down.
HARMONY HOLIDAY
I think deterministic thinking and faction-driven ideas are so mind-numbingly boring and useless, that the only tools we have to resurrect poetry from its grifts are other worlds. This world is colonized by semblances and frauds, and the poetic spirit really seems to be atrophying in the service of pseudo radicalisms that ironically domesticate everyone into very predictable lyricism. Whatever wilderness is left for language is so appealing that I’m forced to meet it with reverence, and that respect for the unknown makes it impossible to fear. I think people fear things that cannot be controlled, when they have set out to control. When you set out to learn and examine and coexist with those same forces, it’s much more natural to love them for that chaos that they are. I’m really glad to hear you say that these explorations culminate in a grounding feeling, because I also feel that way and it’s always exhilarating when a personal experience of one’s own poetics translates. We’re in this era where commercial interest in the occult is rampant, and people seem to think technical knowledge of mystical concepts can bypass the soul’s comprehension, or that there’s a script or recognizable pattern one can follow into the depths that only improvisation lets us access. Maafa is seeking and occupying those depths and willing to fumble and show its work to remain there, unprogrammed by routine or expectation, even its own. I always choose to write the things that will keep me excited about writing and thinking instead of the things that will lull me into fantasies of my own omniscience. This way the adventure of listening closely for clues into the best destination is not lost and I can remain unpredictable even to myself, the way most of my favorite music is. Anything too sure of what it is or will be ends up being some variation of a clown, I find, and that goes for poems too.
SANDRA SIMONDS
Can you tell us about any forthcoming projects that we can look forward to?
HARMONY HOLIDAY
There’s a lot. I’m reinvigorated by the world now that I understand that what I thought was altruism or even radicalism is just divine love, and that I’m not obligated to politicize and disclaim my creative mind at every turn to appease the neoliberal machine. Now situating myself within one genre or ideology is even less of a concern and I am just being myself on the page more often. Specifically, I’m working on a book of poems that’s a translation of a popular overly-fetishized text. Not a translation between two foreign languages but a translation from political language to poetry, from self-seriousness to irony, from true to false prophecy. And I’m working on a book on music for Duke University Press called The Black Catatonic Scream, and my Abbey Lincoln bio, and a slow-burning memoir through attention to music and listening. And some film and music and archival projects that help me answer the constant call to adventure beyond the page.
SANDRA SIMONDS
Would you reflect upon the trajectory of your work as a poet? How does Maafa fit into the larger picture of what you are trying to accomplish in writing?
HARMONY HOLIDAY
Maafa was sort of an inevitability after a few books that really felt governed by the specter of my father and maybe every man I’ve ever loved. All of the focus outside myself led to a recoil where I just longed for a vision that prioritized my own consciousness in a way that’s less mediated by the needs of other influences. I’m writing a biography of Abbey Lincoln, and she might have chimed in from the other side to help me reach that sort of minor epiphany that I’m bored with trying to prop up, or even call out, men and almost forgot about us. It’s fun to let a woman just be in a text, to explore a community of selves not contingent on the male gaze, and to take responsibility for her own happiness and her own witnessing. Somehow even though Maafa is catastrophe personified, the self-containedness makes everything lighter, she can watch and observe and bide her time without being reactionary. Hollywood Forever was reactionary and even a little flustered. Maafa is poised and more regal in my body; that’s how the writing felt on a molecular level.
I write a lot about Black music, and it can be a bit lonely as a Black woman to enter that field where mansplaining and a colder, more vertical sensibility are privileged. I feel my way into what is called criticism rather than thinking my way there, and Maafa is also a moment of seizing permission to interpret a culture on our terms, rather than succumbing to others’ projections of our identities.
HARMONY HOLIDAY is a writer, dancer, archivist, and filmmaker. Her five poetry collections include Hollywood Forever and Maafa. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from UC Berkeley. She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at 2220arts in L.A., and is at work on an essay collection for Duke University Press and a biography of Abbey Lincoln.
SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Triptychs (Wave Books) and Atopia (Wesleyan). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and POETRY. Her forthcoming novel, Assia (Noemi Press) is based on the life of Assia Wevill.
