My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

by Aja Monet

Overview

I am 27 and have never killed a man
but I know the face of death as if heirloom
my country memorizes murder as lullaby
—from “For Fahd”

Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, My Mother Is a Freedom Fighter is Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters—the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Complemented by striking cover art from Carrie Mae Weems, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.

Praise for Aja Monet:

““[Monet] is the true definition of an artist.”
—Harry Belafonte

““In Paris, she walked out onto the stage, opened her mouth and spoke. At the first utterance I heard that rare something that said this is special and knew immediately that Aja Monet was one of the Ones who will mark the sound of the ages. She brings depth of voice to the voiceless, and through her we sing a powerful song.”
—Carrie Mae Weems

Of Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608467686
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	05/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	148
Sales rank:	912,312
File size:	671 KB

About the Author

Aja Monet is a Caribbean-American poet, performer, and educator from Brooklyn. She has been awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry and the Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, as well as the New York City YWCA’s “One to Watch Award.” She is the author of The Black Unicorn Sings and the co-editor, with Saul Williams, of Chorus: A Literary Mixtape. She lives in Little Haiti, Miami, where she is a co-founder of Smoke Signals Studio and dedicates her time merging arts and culture in community organizing with the Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Author's note xi

The labor movement xiii

I Inner (city) chants 1

The ghosts of women once girls 3

Language frontiers 4

If speaking is belonging 6

What my grandmother meant to say was 7

If ever you find yourself on the j train 9

Wit 11

For the mothers who did the best they could 12

When the poor sing 14

Jungle gym 15

564 park avenue 17

On asking my grandmother about santeria 18

An offering 19

Limbo 20

Ree ree ree 23

Tardiness 25

My parents used to do the hustle 27

Birth, mark 28

Shell shock 30

Reflection 31

Legacy 32

District two 33

Inner healing 34

Footnote 35

Give my regards to brooklyn 36

II Witnessing 41

The young 42

Irreplaceable 45

The first time 46

The whistleblower 48

71st and collins 51

#sayhername 53

Cook county 56

I'm just doing my job 57

Dark matter 58

Black joy 62

It is what it was 66

Survival of the richest 67

Starkville city jail 68

Mobile technology 70

America 72

When in french country 73

Every drop counts 74

For fahd 75

A voice from azadi square 79

The giving tree 80

We are 83

A storm in a teacup 86

Solidarity 87

Sentiments of the colored women 89

Nehanda taught me 92

My mother was a freedom fighter 94

III (Un)dressing a wound 97

When in doubt 99

Billie's flower 101

Album credits should include all the bed maidens 102

Niggas in paris 103

Nobody's fault but hers 104

The body remembers 105

Logan square 107

Is that all you got 110

Let's don't 115

The emerging woman after aborting a girl 116

A small luxury 118

Dream deferred 119

Each poem i take my pedestals and bury them 120

You make holy war 122

Unhurt 125

Slow season in titusville 128

I say i love you 129

Selah 130

Mi vida 134

La riad hammam 135

The ways of the many 136

Daphne 137

A portrait 138

Tomorrow 139

She sweats 143

Daughters of a new day 145

Acknowledgements 149

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/15/2017
Monet (The Black Unicorn Sings), winner of the 2007 Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, explores and celebrates the myriad experiences of black womanhood in this fierce and revolutionary “ode/ to her revolt.” She draws upon rich memories of her Brooklyn childhood in the 1990s, school days passed on Chicago’s South Side, and an inner awakening in Palestine. Monet strikingly illustrates the passage from girlhood to womanhood, recording the tumultuous shifts between despair and joy that can occur along the way. Womanhood becomes both “the way we wound and heal.” The girls who develop into women in these poems exude strength and self-assurance, unafraid of the conflicting demands of a world that too often devalues them. Monet seems to suggest that women become fighters and warriors in response to the violence of racism and patriarchy. In the opening poem, Monet describes a young girl’s budding selfhood: “a deep remembering of what was, she survives all.” That self connects to the women who have come before and will come after: “my mother does not know/ we are sisters.” Monet also writes of poverty, violence, the bonds of solidarity, and much more. In stunning and evocative language, Monet reveals the many ways that “we exist between/ a self for self and a self for others.” (June)

Publishers Weekly

Thank you, Aja Monet.”

—Ava Duvernay



“Interesting, powerful, at times challenging poetry.”

—Roxane Gay



“A triumphant collection."

—O Magazine



“Stunning and evocative... fierce and revolutionary.”

—Publishers Weekly Starred Review



“A bold, intimate and powerful collection of poems.”

—Ms. Magazine



“Aja Monet’s writing blazes in these breathtakingly fierce poems.”

—LitHub



“Generations of women, fighters all, live and breath in Monet's poetry… this book is a torch in the dark.”

—Frontier Poetry



“A testament to the brilliance of Black women, from the South Side of Chicago and beyond.”

—Bitch Magazine



“This might be THE single poetry collection I am most excited about this year.”

—Bustle



“Aja Monet’s poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored; she gives voices to the marginalized and forgotten and imagines worlds in which those voices can ring out.”

—The Los Angeles Review



“My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter turns bodies that have been used as weapons into weapons of liberation. We cannot be contained.”

—Courage Renewal

From the Publisher