The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Nefertiti Asanti
“…each month I embrace a kind of death within my womb that offers me a life I can live with.”
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Join NOW!“…each month I embrace a kind of death within my womb that offers me a life I can live with.”
...more“Life is incredibly sad, but it’s also funny, joyful, wonderful, and strange.”
...more“Balance is its own beautiful practice.”
...more“It was like wandering through my own labyrinth.”
...more“Writing in this way allows me to put order in this disordered world.”
...more“We wanted to give voice to people who are often spoken for.”
...more“As a writer, to describe even perils can be a form of hope.”
...more“[T]he testimonial form is rebellious; it says that it will record what the state tried to erase.”
...more“You can’t fake knowledge of zip zap zup.”
...more“Stories hurt, stories heal, stories save our lives.”
...more“Listening is the first and most important step to maintaining a storytelling tradition.”
...more“The book is about the complicated problem of loving.”
...more“The grief felt like giving birth, these waves of pain and then receiving.”
...more“That’s the power of art, I think. It is transformative. It can love us all back home.”
...more“I wanted to write a story that doesn’t shy away from the problems but one that’s also hopeful.”
...more“I like marinating in uncertainty for as long as possible.”
...more“My challenge was to tell my own story but also find ways to weave in wisdom and gravitas.”
...more“In my own experience, anxiety entails dwelling on the past.”
...more“Poetry is a mode of thinking through things that I can’t really articulate.”
...more“Making people feel heard and seen and not left out to dry is my job.”
...more“When I first came out as trans, I learned a lot from trans youth; they taught me so much.”
...more“In the act of writing about it and revising it, I’m still having the experience.”
...more“Thinking about blurring those lines got me closer to the truth of the clichés.”
...more“I enjoy and do all of that research, and it must make the translation better.”
...more“The difference with memorializing my story is that I have invited others to live it, for a moment.”
...more“I think about loss as echoes or circular structures.”
...more“I felt like I wanted to do it and not explain it.”
...more“I always knew I wanted to write a queer saint holy book.”
...more“The fact is we’re all living part of one long song.”
...more“And as those masks fall away, we get down to the shame and envy underneath.”
...more