Cultural Identity, Justice, and Language Motivate My Poetry Practices
January 17, 2025
A Q&A with Danielle Legros Georges
Between 1960 and 1975, thousands of Haitian professionals emigrated to Congo, a fellow Black francophone nation that emerged under the revolutionary new leadership of Patrice Lumumba. As Danielle Legros Georges writes in the introduction to Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story, these émigrés sought to “escape repression in Haiti, start new lives in Africa, and participate in a decolonizing Congo.” Among them were her parents.
Grounded in these personal and social histories, Legros Georges’s poetry collection is a richly layered portrayal of an era of decolonization and rebuilding, a time that sparked with both promise and vulnerability for the Pan-Africanist and Black Power movements. We caught up with her to chat about it. She also presents a lesson to teach her poetry.
Beacon Press: Tell us about your teaching practices. Where do you teach? Who are your students? What topics and texts do you cover? What are your goals as an educator?
Danielle Legros Georges: I recently took an early retirement after teaching graduate students for two decades at Lesley University. When I taught, I was interested in activating the prior knowledge of my students, understanding that they had much to contribute to the learning spaces we were co-creating and supporting their learning goals within the context of broader curricula. Another goal of mine was aiming to provide access to content through multiple methods and lenses.
BP: Tell us about your poetry practices. What topics and themes do you explore in your poetry? How have your family, history, and identity influenced your poetry?
DLG: I’m often motivated to write because I have questions or want to explore or attempt to understand something. A question that occupied me when I was younger was the question of cultural identity: Haitian identity, American and US identity, Black identity, all those spaces on the sides of the now famous hyphens, as well as the unhyphenated spaces. In terms of this area, I was happy to discover that the question was being answered as I was living it, and that I was, in a small way, contributing to the answer, along with other writers and artists; contributing to a way of looking at and occupying multiple identity bases.
The theme of justice is a motivation for me. I also find language, because of its power to define and transform, compelling as subject matter. An example is the moniker often applied to Haiti outside its borders, “the poorest country in the western hemisphere.” This unfortunate designation became the title of a brief poem (in my last book) that attempts to render the Haiti I know as the incredibly complex place it is—as most places are. This experience of Haiti and Haitians gets compressed by that enduring “poorest country” business and twists into such white supremacist, anti-black racist statements as were made by the forty-fifth US President (which I won’t dignify with more commentary). With the poem, I think I was trying to not fall into a Haiti is poor/bad | Haiti is not poor/good binary, or exclusively into a posture of defense. As we know, the country is deeply challenged. What I was going for—though I don’t know I was articulating all this as I worked on the poem—is a painting of a varied landscape, historical and current—and varied portraits of Haitians going about their business of everyday living even with the limiting label hanging above their/our heads. Also, I wanted to raise these questions relative to Haiti and Haitians: Poor in what ways? What has made the country/us poor? In what ways do we fight against poverty, racism, sexism, and other isms? In what ways do we maintain agency in ongoing struggles for self-determination?
BP: Our colleagues invited you to present one of your poems in the format of a sample lesson. Would you like to present your lessons now?
This book’s title draws from “Twa Fey,” a song well known in Haitian popular culture. It is meant to evoke the themes of memory and remembrance; of what we keep, what we remember, what we cast off, what we forget, what we lose. It is also tied to the idea of resistance, connected to the Haitian proverb the day the leaf falls in the water is not the day it rots. In other words: you may fall but you will not perish. A proverb for the underdog. A proverb for a country that has stumbled but has not perished.
- What is the value of memory? How does memory help us in moving forward in our lives?
- What is a proverb?
- What are some proverbs you have found useful?
- What may be differences and similarities between proverbs and poems/the poetic?
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In writing about an historical period, Legros Georges uses a variety of sources.
- What are some of those sources?
- Which of her sources are primary sources? Which secondary?
- What may be differences and similarities between the use of primary and secondary sources?
_______________
Three Leaves, Three Roots contains several list poems.
- Review the definition of a list poem. https://poets.org/glossary/list-poem
- Compare and contrast “What We Missed and Attempted to Replicate” and “What We Found New and Glorious”.
- Identify three of the poems’ themes (one will be obvious J).
- Write your own list poem in which a category of items (like the obvious one) can represent a group’s experience or a culture.
About Danielle Legros Georges
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born professor emerita of creative writing at Lesley University. She served as poetry laureate of Boston from 2014 to 2019 and is the author and translator of several books of poetry. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.