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Letta S. Neely is an African-American lesbian, poet, playwright, writer, feminist, earthkeeper and teacher. A native of Indianapolis, she survived inner-city bussing and went on to attend Indiana University.
Among the prizes she's collected are the 1997 Pat Parker Award and a 1995 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has also won several poetry slam competitions, including the 1997 Amazon Slam, and the 1996 and 1998 Outwrite National Slams.
She is also the author of Juba, her first full-length collection of poems, published last year by Wildheart Press.
On one of the last days of 1998, I visited Letta Neely at the home she shares with partner Renita Martin in Dorchester, MA. We sat down on an overstuffed couch with Lucky the Chihuahua and Indigo the white cat, to talk about publishing, politics, poetry, and food.
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 sending my work to various
presses, and they either had a backlog, 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 chapbooks - I made two chapbooks, one by myself and one
with the help of another publisher - and I just felt like, "I can do it, and it's
necessary."
OITM: What is juba?
LN: Juba began for me when I was in third grade.
We used to watch this African 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 slavery." 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 bullshit for years.
OITM: You have a number of poems about
children, or poems that feature young people. 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 homophobia 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 girlfriend." 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, and I 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 saying, "I read your book, I read your book,"
and I thought, "Oh my god, they know I'm a dyke!" My dad was basically just proud
that he had a daughter who wrote a book, and so he was gonna sell it. People in
Indiana are really blunt, and they tell the truth. They're like, "Well, I didn't
like all of it, but I read it. I'm glad you wrote it. I didn't understand that
part about God, but you know girl, you from the neighborhood, I'm so happy you
wrote it." I'm like, you know, you all are crazy, and I love you.
OITM: So what will you be doing at the Outwrite conference this year?
LN: I'm on a panel with Minnie Bruce Pratt. We're talking about politics and poetry. I haven't formed all
the stuff I'm going to say, but one thing I know that I will say - the fact that
I write means that I'm alive, means that it's political, means that it's
dissident. The things that the poets that I like say, are things that in any
other country, people have died for... Love poems are political. Being able to
write is political. To talk about political prisoners, and to talk about hunger,
and power, and all those issues, is absolutely necessary. The people that I like
do their work regardless of what the consequences are going to possibly be. A lot
of times, we don't get as much money as everybody else gets, we are starving
poets...
OITM: What do you see yourself doing in the future?
LN: What I want to do in my life, is to continue doing this, and to have an urban organic farm. I
teach a lot of little kids, and they don't know where the heck milk comes from.
They don't know where paper comes from. And that is the ultimate danger for us to
be that separated from ourselves, and our own bodies.
