OITM: One of the first
things I noticed about Juba
was the publisher, Wildheart
Press. What is Wildheart
Press?

LN: It’s a new independent
press that I started. I was send-
ing my work to various press-
es, and they either had a back-
log, or they wanted to publish
it, or didn’t, but regardless,
there’s not a lot of money... It
was time for the book to be
done. And I felt like, “OK,
well, I can do this. It’s OK.
Mark Twain did it, Ani
DiFranco does it. “

You know, people of color
have all sorts of independent
theater companies, and chap-
books — I made two chap-
books, one by myself and one
with the help of another pub-
lisher — and [just felt like, “I
can do it, and it’s necessary.”

OITM: What isjuba?

LN: Juba began for me
when I was in third grade. We
used to watch this African

 

 

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for causing some-
body else to he gay...

American folklore show on
television, and the refrain
before the show started was
“Juba this, juba that, juba kill

the yellow cat, we break the
bread, they give us the crust...”
I can’t remember the whole
thing. I told my dad it was my

favorite song in the world. He
asked me what it meant, and I
said, “It means that the black
people made magic to poison
the white people during slav-
ery.” And I was so excited
about this resistance we’d had.
My father and my mother are
very into black knowledge, but
he never corrected me...

I grew up later to learn that
it was about the food. It was
saying that, “you know, we
make all these things, and you
give us the mess food.” It

. makes the slaves stronger, but

if the masters had to eat it, they
would die.

OITM: So juba is the food
that the slaves would eat?

LN: Juba is the leftover
crap food. And some of it was
much more nutritious than was
expected. But Juba is also
river, and a hand clap that was
passed down from Africa that
survived. It’s also a dance. It’s
also a type of music that
African people brought with
them. It has become all these
things to me — it’s just this
mystical word. It maintained
my personal resistance to bull-
shit for years.

OITM: You have a number
of poems about children, or
poems that feature young peo-
ple. The longest and one of the
most powerful of the poems in
Juba is “Rhonda, Age 15
Emergency Room.”

LN: So often poets,
activists, we don’t listen to
people who are younger than
us, we don’t recognize what
they have to go through, or that
they exist, and [“Rhonda”] was
the sort of poem that could do
that. You know, I’ve been that
young, and I’ve been through
trauma myself. Queer adults
don’t necessarily know a lot of
queer youth. We forget. We get
so scared in our own homopho-
bia that we’ll be blamed for
causing somebody else to be
gay, that we don’t talk to queer
youth, and that’s dangerous...

I’ve been out since I was
about 9 years old. I came home
and said, “Mom this is my girl-
friend.” She said “Think about
it.” And I thought about it until
I was 16, and I said, “This is
my girlfriend,” and then I
thought about it again until the
first coming out day of college,
andgl came home and I wrote a
letter. After that I didn’t go
home a lot... .

This last time it’s been kind
of amazing because my dad,
contrary to any belief I could
have ever held, has sold my
book to every person in the
neighborhood. I found out the
man had sold my book, you
know, and everybody was say-
ing, “I read your book, I read
your book,” and I thought, “Oh
my god, they know I’m a

 

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