FEATURE: Spotlight: Aja Monet — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Aja Monet

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FOR this Spotlight…

PHOTO CREDIT: Fanny Chu

I am looking at the amazing Aja Monet. The New York-born contemporary poet, writer, lyricist, and activist is based in Los Angeles. Having written several books and volumes of poetry, I was fascinated to hear her wonderful debut album, when the poems do what they do. It is not only one of the best debut albums of this year: it ranks alongside the absolute finest albums of the year full stop! Such an immersive and moving experience. I will come to some reviews of that album. First, here is some biography regarding the amazing Aja Monet:

“Born in New York City to parents of Cuban and Jamaican descent and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, Aja Monet Bacquie began writing poems when she was eight or nine years old. While attending Baruch College Campus High School, she performed spoken-word for school talent shows. Around this time, Monet joined Urban Word NYC—a non-profit organization that offers guidance and public platforms to young writers, particularly those of color—and became a part of a community of aspiring urban writers.

At 19, Monet became the youngest winner of Nuyorican Poets Café’s Grand Slam. She later earned her Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Not long after graduation, she published two chapbooks: The Black Unicorn Sings (2010) and Inner-City Cyborgs and Ciphers (2014). Both were later released as e-books. Monet also co-edited and arranged the spoken-word collection Chorus: A Literary Mixtape (2012) with Saul Williams and writer and actress Dufflyn Lammers.

Monet has performed spoken-word in France (she lived, briefly, in Paris), England, Belgium, Bermuda, and Cuba. During her visit to Cuba, Monet connected with her extended family there—relatives from whom her U.S.-based family had become estranged after Monet’s grandmother fled the island. In 2018, Monet released her first full-length poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, dedicated to women of the Black diaspora and to mothers. The book was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.

The collection includes her best-known poem #sayhername, a dedication to the Black female victims of police brutality often overlooked by news media and activists. Inspiration for the poem came after an event at which Monet read a poem that expressed her solidarity with the struggle of Palestinians. Eve Ensler, who was in attendance, invited Monet to contribute a poem to the #SayHerName vigil. Monet joined Ensler, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others on May 20, 2015 in New York’s Union Square to remember Black women and girls murdered by police.

Monet, who lives in Little Haiti, Miami, co-founded Smoke Signals Studio in Miami—an arts collective dedicated to music, art, and community organizing. She also manages the poetry workshop Voices: Poetry for the People and organized its first annual Maroon Poetry Festival in the Liberty City section of Miami.

In 2018, Monet was a speaker at TEDWomen, where she appeared alongside Georgia legislator Stacey Abrams and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman. Monet has expressed admiration for the work of fellow Black women poets June Jordan, Jayne Cortez, Carolyn Rodgers, Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde, and Phillis Wheatley”.

I am going to come to The Creative Independent’s interview with Aja Monet back in January. Ahead of the release of when the poems do what they do, they discussed finding language in what you've lived, art as a form of service, the oral tradition as a way to live forever, and being drawn to wordlessness:

“When did you first realize that words could make a powerful impact?

My grandmother, she’s a santera but I gravitated towards the church because I knew that there was something deeply spiritual about the way I saw the world as a young girl. I was always into other realms and curious about magic, and the power of the spirit. And prayer was a really big thing for me. So, I would say my first real relationship to understanding the power of language was really in relationship to the church. And maybe not so much the church, but at least the Bible, “In the beginning was the Word.” And growing up in New York, understanding that your word is your bond. That used to be the slogan of the time, “Word is bond.” All those things were a part of my upbringing.

Culturally, as a Black woman in the world, your word has always had weight in terms of one’s capacity to tell the truth. Standing by what words you offer and also, the ability of words to offer new ideas or to speak goodness over someone, to transform and heal. I knew that prayer was a big part of spell casting and magic making, and if one prayed powerfully enough… I grew up in churches where the women who prayed could change the course of one’s life with the power of the words that they spoke over you. So, I was always aware that language and the marriage of voice and intent and vibration, that all of those things went hand in hand. They were never separate. That’s been my orientation in the world and it’s followed me everywhere. It’s a big part of why I can’t see language as just something that belongs on the page. It is alive, a breathing thing. That’s a bit of where my relationship to the power of language comes from.

Storytelling keeps the fabric of the inter-generational continuum together. It sounds like you were an early deep-listener, which is not something everyone is good at but it’s very powerful. What do you tap into and access from past generations to bring forward into the next?

I learned how to listen very young, realizing that part of learning from life was to look at those who’ve come before and just being intrigued by that. It was like every elder I met, they were always reflecting and had a way of being like, “Be as present as you can. You better make the most of life because you never know.”

Black folks, I think we’ve always had a relationship to our mortality. This isn’t to be judgmental, but I do think there’s more propaganda around whiteness and western society being fascinated with immortality in the stories and traditions. And I think from my history as African and Black tradition, we eat death for breakfast on Tuesday. I have a line in one of my poems, “Death is a cousin, or a family member you didn’t know until you meet.” And so, I think it’s just one of those things that, for me, when you talk about your elders and when you talk about listening to your elders, I think it’s about having a sense of humility and grace that there are those who have come before us who have endured and suffered and dreamed and imagined and loved and thought us up. And so, it is our obligation to be in service to that. To learn whatever there is to know so that we can take those things and create something else, and imagine and dream something else up, but informed by our relationship to our ancestors, our genetic memory, and the legacy that we follow in. Time is not linear, but it’s a way of being, an all-encompassing approach to one’s breath and life and existence. I listen to my ancestors when I write and I look forward to the day I can be that sort of elder for someone else.

There’s a beautiful line in one of your pieces, “I know I don’t like money. I only want it to buy mangoes, and cinnamon, and rice, and water, and a place to live, and bathe, and love, and raise growing things.” Challenging times reinforce the truth that community is more important than money and by fortifying a community means that when you really need it, it can really be there powerfully. How important is the coexistence of a social practice with your artistic practice?

I’m a part of the many voices in the air, I’m a reflection. I’m introspective about that often. I also have to be honest with where my limitations are. What are the things that I struggle with, as a person who’s been culturally shaped by this society? I have to talk about and question my individual wants. Some of it is superficial, “I might want to decorate my room this way, so let me get this cool fabric.” And that might seem not important, but those are the things that the artist in me gravitates towards, the ways to beautify spaces around me, and to believe that the pursuit of beauty is valuable and worthy, especially in the time of revolution and uprising, has always been my struggle. To believe that I am worthy of beauty, even as I suffer the ugly around me, has been part of my journey in this time. And to organize around that beauty, to believe that it is worth fighting for has been a big thing. I don’t believe in art for art’s sake in some ways, but I do believe in creative freedom and artistic freedom”.

Before getting to reviews for the mesmeric when the poems do what they do, I have another interview I am keen to include. The New York Times spoke with Aja Monet earlier this month. It is always fascinating reading about and learning from this wonderful poet, writer, musician, and activist. She is someone that everyone should know about:

“Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. “The first thing I ever asked my mother for Christmas was a typewriter,” she added, recalling an early interest in “stories and storytelling, and the ways that people tell stories.”

An English teacher at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan was an early inspiration. “She would read and recite one foot from one desk to the next, and give us encouragement to really see what was happening in the language and what was going on in the stories,” Monet said.

At home, she listened to a different kind of poetry: the R&B singers Sade, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige, and the rapper Tupac Shakur. She knew they were each saying something profound, even if she couldn’t fully process what it was yet. When she won the school talent show with a poem, “I just remember all my teachers in tears in the front.”

Monet didn’t find much community for burgeoning poets like herself, though, so she created her own club: SABA, or Students Acknowledging Black Achievements, a space where others at her high school “with the weird obsession of poetry and art” could convene. After a classmate encouraged her to check out Urban Word NYC, a program that teaches creative writing to minority students, she attended her first poetry slam there and was hooked.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

“To this day it’s probably one of the most pivotal memories in my life,” Monet said. “Because it was the beginning of me being introduced to a whole world, legacy and tradition that I now found myself called to. It deeply felt like a home that I had been waiting to return to.”

The poet Mahogany L. Browne remembered a 15-year-old Monet at Urban Word. “From that moment, I could see the power of her purpose,” Browne said in a telephone interview. She invited Monet to a poetry workshop at a group home for pregnant teens in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, which opened the young writer’s eyes to what poetry and community activism could accomplish. Later, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Monet organized a poetry potluck to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina.

“I just remember feeling so powerless, away from the community of poets that I knew understood what that meant and what it felt like,” Monet recalled of her response to the storm. “It was just jarring to see Black people being killed literally by neglect of this country.”

Those themes and concerns stayed with her, and inform “When the Poems Do What They Do.” The album blends poetry Monet has written over the years with vigorous live instrumentation. “The Devil You Know” pairs dark, psychedelic jazz with searing observations about America, and “Yemaya” centers upbeat, polyrhythmic percussion with words about the cleansing power of water”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

There are a couple of reviews for when the poems do what they do. It has received so much praise and love from critics. I am hopeful that as many people as possible listen to this phenomenal album! I know that Aja Monet has many more releases to come. NPR had their say regarding one of the most astonishing releases of 2023 so far:

“In Black American folklore, music and poetry share the same soul. The poets of the Black Arts movement, particularly Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka, were in touch with jazz as if it were of the same coterie, and they opened the door for the more music-driven spoken-word artists of the 1970s — Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets and The Watts Prophets, jazzmen who inspired hip-hop. All understood that poems not only could be music, but had an inherent musicality: that performance merely brought its natural rhythm and voice to the ear, and that poetry could "lift the veil," as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, and see clearly when music couldn't.

The blues poet and activist Aja Monet is careful about upholding that tradition. In 2021, as the co-founder of the Smoke Signals collective, she released The FREE Tape, a hip-hop-forward, self-described "soundtrack for liberation" made in conjunction with the group's many singers, poets and multi-instrumentalists. Her 2020 poetry collection, entitled My Mother was a Freedom Fighter, is full of lessons on the continuum of activism, one that, for Monet, extends to her great grandmother. It is also full of verses about language and speaking as song, and its pages include a revision of Jay-Z and Kanye's "N****s in Paris" and a plea to recognize all the women who have been muses to songwriters in album credits. On the poem "my parents used to do the hustle," Monet writes, "i gravitated toward turntables and cyphers / disco and latin freestyle / watchin over / enveloped in the cool / jazz of their joy." Her performances carry all of that motion in them — the instincts of cypher and freestyle.

Monet's wondrous debut album, when the poems do what they do, is actively thinking about performative poetry's purpose, and her place in the continuity. Among many other things, on opener "I Am," she is the djembe drum; the gardenia in Billie Holiday's hair; a Bob Marley dreadlock; Marcus Garvey's last microphone. But, most importantly, she is a reflection of community: "I'm only possible because we are," she exclaims. This is not the first time her poetry has been staged with music, but it is her first recording, the first time she has felt like part of an ensemble and the first time her poems feel like songs. Here, she is not only a bard but a bandleader, one tapping the smoothness and urgency of soul to deliver restorative messages at a time when they're much needed.

Gorgeously meditative and potently groovy, when the poems do what they do brings many of Monet's most deeply considered ideas into perfect focus, executing thoughts about solidarity in the process. Produced alongside Chief Adjuah (Christian Scott), with Marcus Gilmore on drums, Elena Pinderhughes on flute and Samora Pinderhughes on piano, the album's arrangements range from soft-simmering jazz ("why my love?") to ambient boogie ("for sonia") to blues epics ("yemaya"). Monet, for her part, is responsive to the band's internal tension. Her performances can be fiercely lyrical or gently intoned; dictating flow or wading into the current. Her voice is a balm and barb, both soothing and piercing, but definitive. Songs build around her climactic execution, yet she also knows precisely when to let the music breathe and speak for itself”.

The final piece I am bringing in is from Pitchfork. They mentioned her volumes of poetry and incredible background. Backed by some phenomenal Jazz musicians, they showed love and respect for the Brooklyn poet’s debut album – one, as they say, possesses a profound and forceful clarity. It is clear that Aja Monet is going to get a lot more attention and eyes trained her way. One of the world’s most astonishing and inspiring wordsmiths:

“In her previous collections, such as My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter and The Black Unicorn Sings, Monet explored themes of childhood, race, and the rhythms of New York City with a rare gentleness and precise eye. Her new record expands upon these subjects, taking us through storm-battered homes and jump rope competitions as she explores Black joy and the blight of capitalism. The unhurried and gentle arrangements that accompany her words—provided by Grammy-winning trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and other acclaimed musicians—only add to the gravitas and wonder.

On opening track “I Am,” tapped rhythms land like errant raindrops on a windowpane; Monet begins describing herself in all her contradictions and complexities, painting herself as, simultaneously, “a kiss that quivers, a machete that bleeds … a brown liquor flirt.” The drumming then ramps up to a crescendo, loud and erratic like a stampede as she pivots to recognize the role others have played in her life. When Monet cries, “I am because of you, we are here together, there’s no me without you” at the end of the song, the percussion sounds like a chorus of affirmation.

When Monet speaks her work aloud alongside curls of percussion and jazzy instrumentation, she creates a unique kind of musical intimacy. “Weathering” begins with a long, languid jazz intro consisting mainly of a muted trumpet over brushed drums and piano. It’s slow and sensual, underscoring Monet’s rapturous lyrics about a lover who “kisses wounds and sets free tornadoes down my spine.” While she frequently invokes the grandeur of the natural world in her writing, she can also inhabit a more colloquial mode; on “Why My Love,” Monet describes an affection for her community that is “Indigenous, ocean-wide, sky-deep” and then “ass-whooping, accountable.” An airy flute flies gracefully overhead, serving as a reminder of the lightness love can provide even in times of darkness.

The record’s highlight is “Black Joy,” which tenderly describes the beauty and vibrancy of Monet’s locale, even when it’s struggling with violence. She notices “twerks and taps, jooks and jives, Harlem shakes, electric slides” as well as neighbors rocking on their porch and barbecuing in their backyards. In the background, there is the echo of street chatter: faint sounds of laughter, a “whoop!” When Monet states that “joy is righteous and ratchet,” we don’t have to wonder what she means; instead we experience it along with her. Here is a glimpse into her desires, fears, and dreams, offered with unflinching honesty”.

Go and investigate the fabulous Aja Monet. I would recommend you seek her poetry out. But, when you get a free moment, go and listen to when the poems do what they do. This is someone that you need in your life! I have my fingers crossed she tours and performs in the U.K. at some point this year – as there are many here that would love to meet her. I have been blown away by Monet and her phenomenal work! She is someone who always produces…