Toronto writer Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to AW’s Sharon Berg about her newest collection of poetry.
SB: Artisanal Writer has a focus on craft. I assume that part of the reason you use an alternative form on the page is to challenge the standardization of writing forms (and perhaps the standardization of expectations). It’s assumed in reviews of your writing (e.g., Maisonneuve, Fall 2022) that this means you’re working to free the unheard and suppressed voices in dominant culture. It strikes me you’re working to establish your own voice as well. Can you speak to the difficulty in expressing this duplicity of purpose?
ADA: Narratives are systems of representation, in turn bracketed by the sociopolitical relations and systems that have guided human history, keeping certain powers/people in place: imperialism, colonialism, slavery and its spectres. As a writer, I engage with narratives, I break them down. I create my own story by listening, noticing, then taking note. I write, which helps me get by, and this record in turn becomes evidence of my survival.
As I write, I can’t help but read aloud. It’s impossible for me to not be attuned to the music(ality) of language, as both the product of African storytelling traditions and a self-taught multi-instrumentalist (who, with the exception of training in violin, learned all by ear, by trial and error). My poetry continues to draw its influence from writers of the Black Arts tradition, who centered jazz, blues, and gospel in their works, as workable scores for imagining freedom.
SB: Punctuation has been traced by Naomi Baron to Aristophanese around 200 BC, as a means of assisting people in experiencing a text as it would sound orally. In fact, language is considered alive precisely because it changes over time. From the Contents page of your book onward, you challenge the traditional modern layout of text on a page, including punctuation. Yet, people reading the book will not experience your oral presentation of these poems. How should they interpret your use of white space, less use of punctuation, and multiple pauses in a line? I am quite serious, inquiring if you are using a different coding for how the poems you carve onto the page should be read than, for instance, experimental writing by white authors?
ADA: My use of space, of slashes rather than line breaks, all work in service to convey breaks in thought and breath; the pauses in breath—small silences in between—that make speech audible. In thinking about the page, I am never not thinking off the page. The line breaks that anticipate breath, then word. Story amplified by voice, taking up space, echoing through time.
SB: Does your use of white space in your poetry, both within each line and between the lines, indicate to ‘pause’ in the reading of a text? Or are you also challenging the coding system itself, asking for alternative meanings for the standard code symbols? How does your use of those standard symbols relate to verbal expression within the dichotomy of voices in Canada?
ADA: I’d argue the use of space in Vox is, in a way, sticking to the standard. It patterns itself after the process by which air becomes breath becomes vibration, utterance, word. I am trying to reach something greater than marks on a white field. There is an alchemy that happens between respiration and phonation that Vox attempts to translate into text, decentering the white page as anchor, as ruled (lined, but also heavy with rules), and engaging with sound as presence, as material that cannot be easily translatable, or traced, or stopped. What is language if it doesn’t move, open, complicate?
SB: What themes and inquiries are you pursuing in this collection?
ADA: Voice, as individual subjectivity and the collective amplification of issues. The metaphysics of voice, as both form of agency and measure of agency—the question of who hears you, and how do you know you’re being heard (better yet, listened to). Also: what happens in the space of all we do not say, if there’s still a way to account for what it feels like to be silenced—individually, as part of a collective—right there, typographically, on the page.
SB: What central inquiry or question unifies the collection?
ADA Layli Long Soldier (from Whereas) says: “It’s the rise and fall of the voice we must capture to mean a thing in writing.” In Vox, I am trying to hold in the form of the text the energy of orature. The voice of the poet, the voice(s) the poet hears, the voices of poetic influence, the voice of the performance itself.
SB: What you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
ADA Anticipation. Music. Fury.
SB :How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
ADA: I return again and again to Leonard Cohen’s view of poetry as a “verdict” and Ocean Vuong’s characterization of poetry as a “bridge.” A statement or positionality, but a relational one. I hope Vox can serve as a kind of weathervane that tells us where the wind is blowing, the direction we’re going in, what needs our attention the most.
SB: How would you characterize the stance taken by this work in relation to the most immediate socio-cultural concerns of the readers it is intended for?
ADA: More than anything, Vox challenges the idea that Canadian poets and their respective readers/listeners need not take their vocals beyond the local to become allies in the continual struggle for a more just and sustainable world. I am thinking of Ethiopia. Ukraine. Iran. My heart goes out to all those affected by war across hemispheres, the voices not only being suppressed but erased, in real-time.
SB: How do you think the work responds to the questions it raises in the context of the time and place the work is situated in?
ADA: Like everyone else, the poet exists within a political landscape, whether they decide to play an active role or not. The truthtellers and changemakers have almost always been artists, activists, educators and community workers, seldom politicians. But I also think the division or separation of art from politics is artificial, even impossible—just like the perceived difference between “book poetry” and spoken word. Vox was written directly from a place of political reckoning, of a resolute need to bridge craft to climate (in all senses of the word). Publication, performance, and protest are all ways we can use our respective platforms to draw attention to the crisis(es) of our time, and must.
SB: How did you arrive at the title? What was your intention for the title to do?
ADA: Vox Humana (Latin for “human voice”) is driven by a sense of political urgency to probe the ethics of agency in a world that actively resists the participation of some voices over others. The title also represents an organ reed that sounds like the human voice. Reclaiming the instrument traditionally accessed by the white establishment, and using literary experiments with word/sound/utterance/song, Vox Humana considers the different ways a body can assert, recount, proclaim.
Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. She is the author of three previous full-length poetry books to date: Ex Nihilo, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Terra Incognita, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and The Unmooring. A poem from The Unmooring was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets. Adebe served as the 2019-20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts (Cleveland, Ohio) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto.