gossypiin

by Ra Malika Imhotep

Overview

This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.

Within these pages, the poet is joined by a “sticky trickster-self” named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower’s tall tales.

Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636280257
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia. As a scholar and cultural worker, Ra Malika is invested in exploring relationships between queer articulations of Black femininity, Southern vernacular culture, and the performance of labor. As a steward of Black Studies and Black feminist thought, Ra Malika dreams, organizes, and facilitates spaces of critical reflection and embodied spiritual-political education. Ra Malika resides in Oakland, California.

Read an Excerpt

Gossypium herbeceum

Official use: the root bark of this plant was officially recognized in the USP from 1863–1916 for its effects on the uterine organs. In the nineteenth century the active principle was called “gossypiin.”

Other Afro-American Use: “In 1840 a French writer, Bouchelle, reported that the root bark of cotton was widely used by Negro slaves in America to induce abortion. According to Johns U. Lloyd, “the credit for the discovery of its uses [as an abortifacient] must be given to the Negroes of the South.”

—Faith Mitchell, Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies

 

And so, they must’ve plunged hands deep beneath the field, gently undoing the crop to coax it out of its medicine.

And so, they must’ve taken it, gingerly in their hands, tucked into waistbands, smuggled into kitchens where it became powder and poultice and tea.

And so, they must’ve made place for that which was cast out, a plot to catch their waters: tears, spit, blood and indignation.

And so, they must’ve gotten familiar with the inside parts, the space between, before and after invasion.

And so, they must’ve returned somewhere, dreamt of another place, found themselves on new altars in spaces kin they could only imagine would call home.

Table of Contents

Gossypium herbaceum 17

What We Gathered Here to Do 19

Sow

My daddy says I've misremembered 27

Copresence II 28

_'s Rape 29

Ma Dear 30

Lil Cotton Flower births themself out of the forced togetherness of a quiet wound 31

Obscure Origins 2: The Player 32

Obscure Origins 1: The Sculptor 33

Lil Cotton Flower sings / them self a song 34

Seedling

The first time I heard the story 37

After mama sighs 38

Exile in pursuit of the New South 39

Grandma Sarah's maiden name was Moody 40

Wild Wimmin Don't Worry 41

My mother dreams 42

Grandma Sarah ain't finish the seventh grade 43

Earth bound 44

A Question of Attunement 46

Flower

I ain't know when I laid down on the floor crying 51

Endurance 52

The hermit-woman takes a lover 53

Some nights talking to god 54

"Somebody forgot to tell somebody something" 55

Amenorrhea 56

Anovulatory or fugitivity at the meeting place of my thighs 58

The poet stares longingly into a black queer elsewhere and feels themself unravel 60

Madrigal para las vientres negras 62

Notes toward the integration of a traumatic event or the scene of my own subjection 63

Miss Graham tells my younger self a blue joke 66

Mammy-made potion 68

Fruit

Da Peach Squad 71

One of Four Women Walking Down Peachtree Street Licking Herself 74

Lil Cotton Flower Tells a Story 77

Mammy Councils Her Kin 81

Home is a mouth full of spit for your tender heart 84

Harvest

My mama tells a story 91

Second Trimester 92

Grandma Sarah mourns her only son 93

Copresence I 94

Grief-borne power 95

When prompted I remember 96

Overstimulated 97

Dispatch from a writing workshop in 2015 in which I am the only nigga alive 98

All the blk things cry sometimes 100

Copresence IV 102

This ain't quite memorial 103

Rememory 104

Lil Cotton Flower's First Will and Testament 106

Credits 111

Gratitude 113

Chorus 116

Editorial Reviews

"Ra Malika Imhotep creates poetry from stories from personal and hearsay perspectives, family secrets as well as stories from others. This book of poetry is a mix of Black feminist theory and storytelling that reveals the most vulnerable parts of Black womanhood."—Erika Hardison, Book Riot's  9 POETRY BOOKS THAT CAPTURE THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

"gossypiin is an offering to the Black femme flesh that exists in and outside the parameters of gender. The poems in this collection reread the archive of the antebellum era, both the written and the gossiped, to point to the multiple forms of escape that Black femmes and their kin imagined and employed through the use of cotton root. In gossypiin, the American South is recognized as the geography that midwives 'wild wimmin,' Black femme subjects who turn to reinventing themselves as a fugitive practice. It is this shapeshifting that nuances the canon of trans and queer poetics. For Ra Malika Imhotep, Blackness cannot be detached from (un)gendering and transitioning. In fact, the collection proposes that when one moves 'away from / woman,' one will finally arrive 'into the black' / into blk / into wimmin / blk wimmin.' The 'blk wimmin' is the ancestor, relative, and future ancestor who teaches us to 'come back often' to all that is 'soft and black.'

gossypiin is a prayer for Black trans, queer, sick, disabled, Southern, and 'girl-born' kin everywhere." —Alan Pelaez-Lopez, author of To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement and Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien

"Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin is theory for living whispered in the ears of g enerations of Black folks feminine and women. In its attention to folk ways, the language of our people, it unearths an old tongue made new for us with every turn of a phrase, every means to survival and thriving. Imhotep demonstrates how 'gossipin is a trickster technology . . . a Black feminist hypertext that registers the feeling of an experience of the world in which the self is an unstable plurality continuously unmade.' The word shifts and changes because we must. This book is a conjure of the Black women writers beyond this world and waiting in the next who have charted the path and made the medicine for us to be well. Imhotep’s careful ear listens good to what they have said and whispers it now to us." —Bettina Judd, author of patient.

"This book wags tongues, licks brown skin with peaches, tells tales, and dishes the dirt. Grounded in the growth cycle of Cotton Root Bark, gossypiin links Southern landscapes to black feminist lineage. (Br’er Rabbit be here. Zora Neale Hurston, Grandma Sarah & so many more.) Along with the avatar Lil Cotton Flower, Ra Malika Imhotep explores family history, confronts sexual trauma, and celebrates black femme resistance. 'Wail / out a deep joy. Wet your face / with our common salt.' Read these words to recover the bodies of black women and femmes, to revere our bodies of knowledge." —Gabrielle Civil, author of Swallow the Fish and Experiments in Joy

"Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin presents us with an elixir, blending us with our recent past and our strange present. We can’t begin to imagine the emotional and psychic reality of what has happened in the spaces between our current moment and the past 600 years. What we have are records told in breath passed down with love lilting on the tongue like a prayer. What we have are segmented borders and dizzying self-immolating desires sometimes. Imhotep is aware of this and moves us back to breath, back to scars and love poured into the earth. Imhotep acts as Circe, placing our hands into the hands that gingerly unearthed medicinals that gave our Black ancestors autonomy over their bodies. Throughout the book we experience glimpses into how care and joyful sensuality coexist with heartbreak and betrayal, and how these dualities make for creation." —Jasmine Gibson, author of Drapetomania and Don’t Let Them See Me Like This

"Between choral prayer, prey, and Black spectral shadows, Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin offers us a countervailing softness as remedy, relic, and blooming incision. A lushness propels itself, and Imhotep gathers textured reams and worlds of form and braids them to create a tableau where fragrant possibility rests in the seams, right next to all the specters. Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange are lit sightlines or new desire lines, assembled in a multiplying and interchangeable triumvirate. gossypiin is sinuous and lithe and agitates time—jostles it, touches it, won’t let it sit still. In these newly created arrangements, we come to hold the relics and the residue of today, of yesterday, of last century, and of some future side by side. An incantatory circular logic unfolds then brims with the remembrance of the possible ways to imagine 'What else might surrender mean?'. Let this question rest here among the many questions within this collection that act as window and channel to a resurrected space." —Asiya Wadud, author of Crosslight for Youngbird, Syncope, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body

From the Publisher