Your poem moves from the simple image of children riding bicycles to the persistent horrors of racism in America to the discovery of freedom in a place that once seemed limiting. The momentum that drives the poem forward is the memories that connect the speaker to her parents. I would love to hear more about the genesis of this poem, and what inspired it. ​

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I wrote the first variation of this poem a few years into moving to the Bay Area in California. People were fascinated at how old I was when I first learned to ride a bicycle, and explaining to them how that limitation was connected to safety in my childhood led me to want to explore more how that had impacted me over the years. I used the imagery of children riding bicycles alongside the persistent horrors of racism in America to illustrate how often someone’s joy lives alongside someone else’s pain, and how I longed to live outside the confines of a town bent on suffocating me. As Claudia Rankine wrote, ‘I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background’. And as Toni Morrison warned us, I was tired of living my life for the ‘one more thing’ that I would need to prove to them. I believed that I needed movement to get away from it all. 

 

Through exploring the questions of my childhood, I came to realise that it was the source of my obsession with movement that guided my life decisions for almost all of my twenties. I thought that if I kept moving, then it meant I was moving forward. That wasn’t always true. Oftentimes the movement was to keep me from being still and sitting with unanswered, heavy questions of my life. Writing more for my healing, therapy, and somatic practices helped me begin to come back to the things that had grounded me in childhood, and that often took the shape of my parents. They had kept me from falling into the heavy trap of the ‘one more thing’ and made sure I knew I was whole and worthy in just my existence. I didn’t need to always frantically be moving. My joys could be found around me. I just had to listen.

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Freedom is such a powerful term, but sometimes gets glossed over because of the ways that it has been misappropriated and emptied of meaning. Could you tell us more about what it means to you? How does freedom sit in relation to your work on Black resistance and joy?

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Right now, in the US, we are in the midst of the co-option of freedom to mean the freedom to do or say anything to the most vulnerable without consequence, of the freedom to only see people who look or believe like you, and freedom to make decisions that only concern you, not the harm it may cause to others around you. This has caused a crisis of humanity. Freedom to me means the freedom to choose joy and to move in my blackness how I desire. Recently I watched Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and in the movie there is this time of dancing and community before the vampires and Ku Klux Klan came to destroy them. The main character describes this as the brief moment that they were free. I’ve been thinking a lot about that and what Black resistance and joy looks like today. When we are together, dancing, singing, rooted in the beauty of our past and the belief that there are Black people in the future, that is when we are most free. Living beyond fear of being destroyed, because we can’t be. 

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For much of the poem, there is a tension between movement (the bicycle, ‘flurry of feet freedom’) and structure or limitation (the bounded backyard, the boxed neighbourhood). What value do you see in structure – whether in this poem, in writing, or in life?

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The tension between movement and structure or limitation is one that I will probably continue to encounter and revisit my entire life. As a Black woman, that tension is ever-present for me. I do believe there is value in structure, however. But it took me moving beyond those structures to view them that way. I see that in the family structures of my childhood that could sometimes feel rigid, but it allowed me a safe space to explore. It may be easy for me to look back and say that having limited spaces I could play or go, or keeping trust within the family unit, made me grow up fearful, but in reality, it did not. Having such strong spaces that affirmed me in my black girlhood, that countered the racist messaging around me, that showed me that people who loved me would always be in my corner, allowed me the space to experiment, to imagine, to write, to craft, to grow. The rectangular box of my childhood was in fact the key to my safe passage to adulthood where I now have a strong sense of who I am and the social justices I care so much about.​

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What are some things you are reading, watching, or listening to that have been inspiring you lately?

 

I feel immensely grateful for the amazing creatives whose works have been inspiring me at a time when I – like many others – so desperately need to radically imagine different paths forward. Right now I am inspired by creative works that deeply connect us across our past, present, and the future. Works that break us out of the limitations thrust upon us by linear time. Some of these works include Ryan Coogler’s original film Sinners and Imani Perry’s book Black in Blues.​

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Do you think your poem speaks to the possibility of an otherwise, and if so, how?

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Growing up, my mother taught us kids that we could ‘create ourselves to freedom’, meaning that we did not have to keep the ways that other people saw us as our own, but rather strip those away and replace them with how we wanted to view ourselves. It is a phrase that lives at the heart of this poem, and one that speaks to the possibility of an otherwise in how we can reclaim spaces in our lives and meet them in new ways that generate life and freedom for ourselves.

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