In the Black poetic tradition, water is employed as both symbolism and metaphor. Water is not only used to tell stories of our survival—wade in the water—but it also connects us to our collective strength and highlights our history beyond the middle passage. In Nadia Alexis’s debut poetry collection, Beyond the Watershed (CavanKerry Press, 2025), she follows this tradition, and readers experience water as baptismal, as cleansing, and as an emotional rebirth. Alexis’s watershed moment in this book is her family’s experience of domestic and intimate partner violence. Through poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed teaches readers how to converse about domestic violence without sensationalizing it or probing into the victims’ lives.
Nadia Alexis is a poet and photographer born and raised in Harlem, New York City to Haitian immigrants, and she currently resides in Mississippi. Beyond the Watershed was a finalist for the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize.I was delighted to talk with her in person at the first annual Zora Neal Hurston Summit at Barnard College in New York City. We spoke about her newfound love affair with nature and healing through nature and poetry
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The Rumpus: Beyond The Watershed is an intimate portrayal of domestic violence and the physical and emotional ramifications of said violence. It highlights the therapeutic work you’ve done to heal and regenerate into someone new. How does it feel to display your personal story on the page?
Nadia Alexis: A few years ago, I would’ve felt ashamed that I was putting my business in the street, but this book is coming exactly when it’s supposed to come out, and we need to tell these kinds of stories. My book is a collection of poetry and photography that covers the experiences of me—a Haitian American woman, my immigrant mother, and our experiences with domestic violence. This is a book of resistance, from the things that I have witnessed and experienced. The photographs in the book show a figure that seems to be an image of a woman, but it’s not fully exposed. I wanted to suggest something about the ever-present spirit of the speaker at different stages of her healing journey.
Rumpus: After reading your collection, I realized that we as a society have yet to find an eloquent way to speak about domestic and intimate partner violence. How can we discuss these issues without being intrusive and violating?
Alexis: I’m suggesting that we speak about these subject matters differently. For example, we can talk about it in terms of craft: how I use various symbolisms and imagery to engage with the issues instead of being intrusive in terms of my personal feelings or current relationships. In the book, I used symbolism such as rain and water to convey harm and the haunting of such violence to reduce the sensationalization and intrusive nature of such subjects. I’m less interested in talking about the nitty gritty and more interested in talking about the healing process and how one begins to reconstruct themselves after such violence.
It’s important to be very humane in how we talk about victims and survivors of domestic violence. When it comes to public discourse, we need to move beyond seeing these issues as a monolith—victim and survivor—because people are complex. You know, at some point in my healing journey, I began to see myself in nature: I am the trees, I’m the sun, I’m the sky, and as a result, I’m like the universe. That means that I am a divine being, worthy of love, and a reflection of God. Witnessing myself within nature and also within the nexus of domestic violence allowed me to write better poems because I started seeing the complexities of these issues.
Rumpus: Beyond the Watershed is transgressive in general but especially when we locate this book within Caribbean culture. Growing up, our Caribbean parents and elders used to constantly tell us that it was a carnal sin to expose our family’s secrets.
Alexis: My mom knows that I wrote this book, and she’s heard some of my work. I don’t know how she will feel when she reads the entire book. This book is bigger than speaking about my own experience. Unfortunately, so many of our mothers and grandmothers have experienced these things, but they were afraid to speak about it. There are multiple ways to change what you experience and make it something new, and so I’m using my experience—our experience—to create art that will live beyond me and impact others. It’s not a mandate, but it feels like it’s my responsibility to speak about these things. And if people don’t like it, that’s not my problem.
Rumpus: In Danez Smith’s poem “Dream Where Every Black Person is Standing by the Ocean,” Smith employs water as a symbol to call attention to Black folks’ collective grief and our long history of trauma due to external violence. Like Smith, you are following the Black poetics tradition of using water as a symbol to speak about our collective trauma. Can you speak more about this connection?
Alexis: That poem is one of my favorites. I love the natural elements in that poem and how Smith takes such tragedy and gives Black boys and men a magical world to exist in. That poem is a really good example of multiplicity with nature, and Beyond the Watershed is working with that multiplicity as well. It’s not an environmental book, but it’s a book that’s interested in exploring the different ways that water impacts us or is a part of our experiences via the middle passage and what was done to us across bodies of water.
Rumpus: In the poem “Daddy’s Ritual,” the speaker’s father is longing for something that’s not named, but we experience his longing via his disconnection. Meanwhile, his family is longing for connection and to move away from his emotional and physical violence, but they remain silent. What hits me hard in this poem is that everyone is disconnected partly because they don’t have the language to name their pain. Can you talk about the myriad ways the symbolism of water appears in this poem and how it tells the story of this family’s disconnection?
Alexis: I see the water in this poem as symbolizing generational trauma and the unsaid that gets passed down across those generations. The water is a way for the father to express his longing and lack of peace. It’s a lack of peace that’s unresolved, inherited, and ritualized. And in that ritual, it’s almost as if, if he can’t have peace, then no one can. He calls his father’s name while turning on the faucet, an act of longing and invocation, suggesting a pain he feels given the disconnect between him and his father. The water might represent a desire to remember, to travel elsewhere, to comfort himself, and to feel in control, but it ultimately creates a bigger disconnect between him and his family. Yet, when they all wake up and step into ruin, in a way, they become connected in their experience of the water as a destructive force—one that does not cleanse or bring relief. I see his desire for control as forcing others to face their lack of control yet again. There’s no language to name any of their pain, but they feel it, and it makes a home in their bodies, in the water of their bodies.
Rumpus: The poem “Praise Song for Ma” works as a memorandum and an incantation. It highlights how domestic or intimate partner violence can anchor people to their abuser when they do not have the resources or emotional fortitude to escape and how praying can become their only safe space: Praise the silence. It never leaves us / without our shadows. Praise bees / that remind me I still have breath / in my body.
Alexis: I wrote “Praise Song for Ma” because I wanted to understand why a person would stay in an abusive marriage. I felt compelled to praise the mother because she did the best she could. I think the prayer is about speaking something into existence. It’s not necessarily speaking to God, but maybe to connect with your ancestors. When I first learned that my mom loves bird watching, I didn’t understand it because I grew up in New York, a concrete jungle, and that seemed like a strange thing to do. I wanted to write a poem where this idea appeared, so I went to the park to watch some birds, and I realized why my mother loves bird watching: They are free. I never asked her why, but I imagine that she feels inspired watching them, and perhaps seeing herself in the bird reminds her that she can fly too.
Rumpus: In your book, the person in the photographs is blurred, but we can see their body illuminated, unwavering, and present. What should readers gain from these images as it’s juxtaposed with the text?
Alexis: That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to add photography to the book. There’s a lack of agency that one feels when they are experiencing abuse or witnessing harm against the body. It changes how they see themselves, and it literally rewires their brain. Through the collection, we see the speaker has a lack of agency—the daughters had to confront the father whenever he wanted to hit them or hit their mom—and this made me interested in the body as a shape-shifting vehicle. With poems, you can often see things in multiple ways because of how poems are constructed as objects, and you can do the same with a photograph. I’m hoping that the photographs give readers a brief moment of pause in between the words.
Rumpus: The idea of survival is central to your work, not just in terms of physical survival but also emotional, spiritual, and creative survival. What does survival look like for you now, beyond Beyond the Watershed?
Alexis: Survival for me now means thriving: a life where I am flourishing in different areas and yet still on a journey to creating and experiencing better. My understanding of survival has evolved. I am interested in the idea that we go through a journey of creating ourselves as humans.
I appreciate the moment in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved when Paul D tells Sethe, “You are your best thing.” That as a Black woman, you are still worthy and beautiful and can still go on to live despite what you’ve been through or the difficult choices you’ve had to make is encouraging to me. If we can create ourselves and be our best thing, that means there is freedom there, and play, and experimentation, and messiness, and revision, and just letting yourself be.
Survival, or thriving, beyond this book looks like being in community with folks who are aligned, folks who I feel good with and energized by. It looks like maintaining a wonderful relationship with myself, meditating daily, creating regularly, practicing gratitude, having fun, connecting with my ancestors, journaling, playing, coloring, and allowing myself to receive opportunities, goodness, growth, and more. It’s about living a rich life in a multitude of ways, and I believe Beyond the Watershed has helped me get here and will help me get where I’m headed.
Rumpus: Your collection is deeply rooted in place, whether it’s Harlem, Mississippi, or even an imagined space. How does geography shape your storytelling, and do you find that certain landscapes lend themselves to particular emotions or themes in your work?
Alexis: Place is pretty important in both my poetry and photography, and it’s something I appreciate in the work of others. There’s a pride in being born and raised in Harlem, being a New Yorker, being of Haitian heritage, or being a Southerner by way of Mississippi. Growing up in Harlem, I didn’t get out into nature very much, but I did sit by the river often. It was a way for me to experience peace and be by myself. I also have positive memories of spending time in the river in Haiti when visiting family. I’ve long thought about understanding place as connected to memory. Moving to Mississippi back in 2016 heightened my awareness of place in particular ways. Surrounded by more natural landscape than I was used to, I initially thought a lot about the history of slavery and what the trees and ground around me had witnessed. However, as I spent more time outdoors, my perception of the natural world became more expansive. This made its way into my art and how I walked in the world as a person.
As far as whether certain landscapes spark certain emotions or themes, it’s a mix. I have a poem where the speaker says she runs across the ocean and becomes more woman with each wave, contrasted with another poem, “Aubade After the Storms” where the speaker is plunged underwater by her lover during a rainy day. I think my work is rooted in place because of how much place is rooted in me and how much I’m rooted, to some degree, in the places I’ve lived in or passed through.
Rumpus: Your poetry often moves fluidly between past and present. How do you approach time as a poetic device, and how does memory shape the way you construct your narratives?
In Beyond the Watershed, I’m interested in the idea of journeying through time and space in a linear and nonlinear way. There are chronological elements to the book, but I wouldn’t say it’s completely so. These days, I think about time as a construct or an illusion—that the past, present, and future are all happening at once. When I think about how memory works on a day-to-day basis, memories can pop up out of nowhere, whether they are traumatic experiences or experiences where you feel beautiful and alive. There’s also the idea that you can still feel the same way about something five or ten years later, or that you can put yourself back in old shoes even if you feel differently.
So, in my poetry, I think of memory as a way to time travel. In my poem “Hopscotch,” time isn’t necessarily linear depending on how you read it. I see hints of past, present, and future within the boxes. I think memory is interesting because of how unpredictable it can be and how you can sort of collapse time by bringing the past into the present or bringing the present into the future.
Rumpus: My last question for you is about our favorite writer, Edwidge Danticat.
In her book Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work, she said, “To create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts.” How are you creating dangerously?
Alexis: The fact that Black people write and tell stories and make up their own myths feels dangerous because we were never supposed to do that. I’m creating dangerously by showing up to the page.
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Author photograph courtesy of Nadia Alexis
