I.S. Jones’ Bloodmercy reimagines the fable of Cain and Abel. In this book, they are sisters who seldom know each other apart from themselves. They are mirrors, but also opposing forces who test one another’s boundaries, devotion, shame, and girlhood. In poems of reverence towards Adam, Eve’s transgressions, Abel’s purity, and Cain’s rebellion, this collection repeatedly teeters the space between grace and mercy.
Jones is a poet I look up to for several reasons, a primary one being her attentiveness towards and fearless relationship with language. Between the ancestral and the modern, between angel song and curses, Bloodmercy challenges the reader to question the boundaries of language and what it allows us to do. Whose looming presence can be found in these pages? How does one heal from their mother’s trauma? How does one move away from their family into being their own self? What role does obsession play in our lives? And what does the future look like for Cain and Abel if they survive their horrible childhood? These are some of the questions Jones asks in her collection, and some of the themes I had the pleasure of discussing with her via
The Rumpus: Let’s start at the beginning. What was the beginning for this book?
I.S. Jones: The year was 2017, almost 2018. I was living in Astoria, Queens. I was in a terrible graduate program. I was living with my sister and our relationship was the most fraught it had ever been. I was moving through a lot of anger and frustration. Both externally—mostly politically—and internally, my life was constantly in turmoil. I was angry and powerless.
The most important piece of advice I ever got as a writer is “write what you know.” (I think writers should also challenge themselves to not write what they know.) Because I grew up so intimately with these Cain and Abel fables, I knew them like the back of my hand. They were the stories I grew up with, stories I fell asleep to. I wrote the first poem, “Cain,” a different version than the one in the book now. I wrote that poem and thought that would be it. But what would us writers be without our obsessions that take hold of us and refuse to let us go? So one poem became two, became five, became twenty.
The following year I had the great honor of reading alongside Patricia Smith for Rachel McKibbens’ Poetry & Pie Night. After the reading, she (Patricia) pulled me aside and asked me what’s going on with my book. I said, “I’m just gonna write a few poems and probably make it into a chapbook.” And she said, “I don’t wanna hear nothing about no chapbook, young lady. You have a book to finish.” And I said, “Yes, ma’am.” Eight years later, here we are.
Rumpus: So “Cain” was the first poem you wrote in the collection?
Jones: Technically, no. The first poem I wrote in the collection was “Self-Portrait As the Blk Girl Becoming the Beast Everyone Thought She Was.” That week Trump was elected the first time, and where I lived in Astoria, there was a noticeable increase of police presence. Astoria was the only gentrified neighborhood in Queens, at least when I lived there. There was a very clear sense of hostility and I hated feeling powerless. I wanted, very deliberately, to write a poem about what police brutality looks like. The poem is an allegory, of course. Me, or the voice of the poem, being the beast, and tearing apart my enemies. That was the first poem but when I wrote it I didn’t think it was going to end up in the book.
When I sent it for the APR/Honickman Prize, I decided I’ll just put it in and take it out later. Trusting your impulses as a writer is so critical. Vievee Francis taught that my impulses are correct. Don’t over-edit my poems, have more faith in my voice.
Rumpus: This book teaches you how to read it. How did you come into that?
Jones: That was the hardest part of this book. Critiques throughout the years were that it was unclear who was talking when, the reason being that their voices were not distinct enough. I had to figure out how to make Cain, Abel, and Eve’s voices distinct so that when I got to the third section where all three of them come together, it was apparent who’s who. I was thinking about the three modes of poetry—lyrical, narrative, and dramatic. Those three modes were a loose blueprint for the three voices. Cain was lyrical. Abel was narrative. Eve was dramatic. I didn’t stick to that firmly, but when I was trying to figure out how to make their voices clearly distinct, that was my first guiding light.
Rumpus: I am curious about the choices you make to mythicize some subjects. I’m particularly thinking of how in a lot of the poems, God/Adam/Baba are used interchangeably. How did you choose to give some subjects this window and not others?
Jones: When I think about the characters and who they represent, Cain is obviously me. Abel is my sister. Eve is my mother. I always imagine Adam and God both as my father, but they’re split down the middle in a way. Adam is his human fallible self, God is the perfect self who can never be questioned. It represented how I felt about my father when I was a child. In my child’s imagination, my father was right below God. To go against my father was to go against the literal word of God. I wanted to find a way to put that in the book without being so heavy-handed about it, especially without giving Adam a poem, because it’s really important for me to sideline the characters who have gotten too much airtime in this original fable. We already know Adam’s story. He was God’s first man.
I really wanted to find a way to capture the way that my father used his presence to impose his will upon me and my siblings, to scare us, to keep us in our place. I wanted to find a way to capture that feeling and let it permeate through the book. There was a time when my parents were separated and I had to have been maybe twelve. Even though he was gone for a long period of time, he still had a hold on the family, even if his physical presence was no longer there. How do I make that presence we felt throughout the book without giving him any poems, without giving him too much of a voice because he already has gotten so much. What if I scale it back?
This book took so long to write because it grew me over the years. I only have a book and a chapbook under my name, but I think that is what a good book does. It gave me the space to learn, explore, and figure things out as I went. The first few years of writing the book was me trying and failing. Not exactly failure, but me figuring out what makes sense and what doesn’t. Sitting with all those old memories, processing them, and filtering them through poems took me a long time. At its core, Bloodmercy is about healing a mother wound. It is about making peace with the past to move on to a brighter future.
Rumpus: In her foreword, Nicole Sealey said, “I reckon that somewhere a religious text is missing a psalm. Find it here in Bloodmercy.” How much of Bloodmercy was intended to be a prayer/psalm when you first started writing it? What are some of your personal practices of prayer and how did those translate into the book?
Jones: I grew up in the Celestial Church of Christ, a denomination of Christianity based in Benin city in Nigeria. Having grown up devoutly in the church and coming from three generations of Celestians, even though I call myself a “loose practitioner,” my bed always faces east. I try to pray every three hours, six hours, nine hours. I often call my mom for prayer on Sundays. I have some friends I also call for prayer. But my practice is very casual. In my religion, women must cover our heads for prayer. So sometimes I’ll just put on a hoodie and say, “Hey, God what’s good?”
After I left my parents’ place, I was trying to make my own language around my faith, and find it for myself as opposed to what I had been told. Rebellion is such a critical part about this book, and a lot of this was me figuring out my questions to God. The questions I think many Christians have—if I’ve done everything you asked of me, Lord, why is there still suffering in the world? Why do all the people that I love and who are good people, why do they get hurt? Why do bad people benefit from all of your labor? If I am meant to praise you, Lord, why are your ways so mysterious?” I wanted a place to ask those questions in a way that didn’t feel disrespectful. “Because I love you, Lord, I must question your ways.” And that’s what this book was about: “Lord, I’m here, answer me.”
Rumpus: Can we talk about your relationship to language? Not just Yorùbá and/or English, but capital L Language, and the risks that language allows you to take, and the mythology that you were able to create for the speaker(s) in this collection.
Jones: For me, mythmaking, even as a child, was a way to create a bridge between what we, humans, understand and know, and what we cannot make tangible sense of. That helped me make sense of everything else. I feel like all of my books at their heart are about language.
Probably the oldest myth about myself my mom always tells me is that for the first five-six years of my life, I didn’t speak any English. I only spoke Yorùbá. The poem “Juice or Milk” is about when I went to pre-K, the teachers came up to me and asked if I wanted juice or milk. I said “juice or milk,” because I was confused, I didn’t know what they meant. The teachers told my parents they needed to teach me more English because I was getting confused between languages. The poem also was to make sense of some child-like logic. Same with the poem, “Cain in the Peopleless Kingdom,” where I try to take child-like logic. Whenever we spoke Yorùbá in the house, it was mostly to call for food and prayer. When I was a child, I thought we spoke in Yorùbá because it’s the language that only the angels understand, since they carry up prayers to God.
My relationship with Yorùbá is still precarious because when I was a child my father often would curse me in Yorùbá, thinking that I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I would memorize those words and try to find them in context in sentences so that I would know when I was being cursed,which is why “Juice or Milk” ends with “I was a child but smart / enough to know a father’s curse. / Smaller men need power just as God needs people to forgive.” I find it fascinating how language could evoke such tangible memories, but also evoke a sense of power and balance.
Rumpus: We see a lot of the speaker’s childhood in this book. One sanctuary for the child speaker was the animals around her. I want to know about your relationship with animals and the decisions of how they came to be in the book.
Jones: When I think about animals, at least within the context of the book, I think about the ways in which we humans are animals, too. We want to believe we’re not because we’re bipedal, have a complex language system, and a complex system in which we negotiate hierarchy among each other. But it is not all that dissimilar from the natural world.
I don’t say it explicitly in the book, but I imply that Abel has a way in which when she touches an animal, she can almost pass down her emotions to them. There’s something very freeing about letting your animal self in, and I was chasing that freedom. There’s something very beautiful about this kind of transmutation of the body from the human self to the self that walks on all fours. Cain repeatedly makes references between her and the bat-eared fox, which I love, because this idea of beauty comes up in the book all the time. Bat-eared foxes are so adorable, obviously. But I wanted to explore this obsession I had with the freedom of letting your animal self in and giving in to its natural desires. We often say, “You’re human; you’re better than this.” But am I really better than this? I don’t think so.
Rumpus: There’s almost a codependent relationship between Cain and Abel where they mirror each other, even though they have such conflicting personalities. How did you tackle that?
Jones: Whenever I think about the sibling nature between them, at least in the Bible, despite the fact that there are so many gaps in the narrative, their relationship always felt codependent. In the original story, Cain was able to kill Abel because it was like killing a part of himself he could not stand. In the original version of Bloodmercy, Cain kills Abel, but I realized that was the easy way out. The actual scary part is, what if we survive our childhood? What if we live long enough to have to reconcile with our mistakes?
In the fable, and even in my book, Cain is obsessed with Abel in a way that sometimes is unclear. I was thinking about Nel and Sula from Toni Morrison’s Sula and how that book was the first archetype I had, for not only the suffocating nature of sisterhood, but in the prologue of that book, Toni Morrison asked the question, “What is a world governed by women, unencumbered by men?” and Sula answers that question. Toni Morrison has given me so many instructions and I cannot imagine my life without her.
I wanted, in a lot of ways, my sister to not be the archetype. Yes, Cain is obsessed with Abel and that is an obsession that grows deeper but you see it in the last poem, Abel comes back home to put the past behind her so she can move on. Originally in the fable, Abel doesn’t get to have a life after, but Cain does. And I wanted to see what that obsession would look like if it escalated.
Rumpus: Because this book is so expansive and outward reaching, I wanted to talk about the community work that you do. You’re launching a reading series in Chicago, if I’m not wrong. What role does it play in your poetics?
Jones: Yes, me and my amazing neighbor, Yazud Brito-Milan, are both transplants to Chicago. We both have a long history in art programming. In Yorùbá the word “kójo” means “to gather.” In Spanish, “canto” means “to sing”. When I came up with the Canto-Kójo Reading Series, I wanted to do something cool with the homies. I wanted to create something that made me feel more grounded in Chicago. And more importantly, I wanted to have a reading series that blended both of our cultures, Spanish and African. I really want a place where folks can come, be unpolished, bring their art, make community, and not feel the need to be in competition with each other.
Rumpus: This book, to me, is a love poem in parts, whether it is platonic love, celebration of girlhood, love as rebellion. But it exists in such close proximity to violence and cruelty. How do you navigate those tensions on the page, and keep yourself safe while re-entering those memories?
Jones: It has helped a ton to have an amazing chosen family who have not only helped me all the years we’ve been friends but have helped me all the years I’ve been working on this book. My best friend, Julian Randall, who was one of the blurbers for the book, said that I’d been working on this book for over seventy percent of our friendship. It helps to remember that because if I was strong enough to write the book, it means the very worst of it is behind me now. Despite everything I’ve had to survive, I have a very beautiful life. The best part about publishing this book and finishing it was making the community I love proud of me. I’m really honored for that, to not only have finished this great thing that I’m proud of, but to have made the people who love me the most in this world proud of me too.
