In early March 2024 Saretta Morgan and Tao Leigh Goffe met virtually to discuss Morgan’s debut collection of poems, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024). Rather than transcribe that exchange, these letters in the months that followed serve as a record of their conversation.

Dear Tao,

Our conversation earlier this month gave me so much new space to think about Alt-Nature. My relationship to the book while organizing the book’s tour this spring has felt a bit claustrophobic. Thank you for reading so generously and for bringing attention to the conversations Alt-Nature is having with other texts, but also outside of texts. And I deeply appreciate you taking the book to Nevada and reading it as you moved through desert landscapes. The fact that I finished Alt-Nature in Arizona, but then moved to Atlanta before it was published is a huge source of sadness for me. It lifts my spirit every time I see the physical book having a life of its own in those deserts.

You asked how Alt-Nature felt formally different from my earlier publications, the two chapbooks I published in 2017 and 2018.

Ya know, even after writing a full-length book of poetry, and now being at work on a novel, I still feel that the chapbook represents my preferred length of thought. I resisted writing a full-length manuscript for years. It was something I could recognize the professional expectations around, but it didn’t appeal to me as something I’d find joy in.

When I decided to try stretching out into a longer form, it was from a place of me accepting that having a full-length is the most legible way to position myself in public discourse with other poets. Not to say that it’s the only way, or the best way. But being recognized as an artist who has thought about something deeply is easier as a “poet who writes books” than, say, being a poet whose writings are dispersed across chapbooks, pamphlets, journals, newsletters, etc. I’m not expressing an ideal in one way or the other, just saying I understood that writing a book would allow me to be in conversation with more people. It also means that a book is an opportunity to set the terms for future encounters. There are ways that I was imagining those futures when writing Alt-Nature, and then ways that I wish I’d thought about them more.

For example, the form of individual poems within Alt-Nature wasn’t something I thought about in terms of the book’s capacity to support public dialogue.

Something that feels significant about my relationship to Alt-Nature with respect to form, is that I tried to let language remain the way it arrived. A large part of my writing practice is asking questions and then listening/waiting. Sometimes I’m waiting for a matter of minutes—I might lay out on the floor with my eyes closed and see what language comes up in my body. Other times the waiting is years of listening for something. And part of that listening is an attention to the way language arrives.

The language in “Dearth-Light,” (which was written and rewritten several times over the course of 5 years) where I was asking myself what it meant to try to love a person, arrived in spurts and obstacles and re-directions. Meanwhile the language in “Consequences Upon Arrival,” where I was thinking about my perpetual status as a guest on stolen lands, arrived like a stream. Or series of streams. All five poems within a matter of a few months.

I can see those qualities reflected visually and temporally in the poems. What’s interesting to me is that because time and space are relative, I can’t know how others experience the spaces and shapes in Alt-Nature. The poet Opal Moore shared with me that for her, the pauses in the book felt like being led through a series of silences. While the poet Ed Roberson shared that for him it felt as though I wasn’t utilizing form at all (you just say things, he said to me, with a gesture of casually releasing an imaginary object onto the table.) Both of those characterizations strike me as deeply true.

Shortly after turning in the final manuscript, I realized that I wanted a shared public experience of the language, so I re-formatted a series of poems from the book into a script. Recently I directed a performance of it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. In that iteration the performers were writers and activists who I’d been in community with while writing Alt-Nature, but the hope is that this performance can be repeated with any bodies, in perhaps any place.

Going forward, I want more of my work to invite the level of physical and emotional exchange between bodies that performance requires. I’m not saying I want to write plays, per se, but texts that people can experience equally alone or with others. And texts that further connect people to their environments, and draw attention to the ways that language, through the vehicles of our bodies, can change the energy in a place.

I’m wondering, for you, as someone who thinks about the movement of people and culture through so many different forms of materiality. Food. Music. Landscapes. Archives. What are some of the ways you’ve learned to recognize how language (or knowledge more broadly) presents itself (or doesn’t) from one material to another, or from one moment to the next?

Dear Saretta,

Most worthwhile interviews end on a note that should truly be a beginning. So, I am glad that we are extending the conversation on Alt-Nature to continue thinking together about the themes your collection of poetry crystallizes—geography, geology, desire beyond colonial landscapes. The book is deeply site-specific to the desert climate of the Southwest, so I was glad I brought it with me on my first trip to Nevada. Somehow I ended up in Vegas, a place I thought I would never go because it had nothing for me. But once seeing past the blackjack tables and slot machines, I was overcome by the mountains, the sandstone, and the ruddy hues of the grains of sand on a tour to Mojave territory and the Valley of Fire. Afterwards, I went to Chinatown with my dear friend and collaborator Cecile Chong and learned about the history of Black Las Vegas. As intimately tied as your poetry is to the U.S. Southwest, it has also given me a lens to think globally about the poetics of the environment, the war against nature, and many of those we are descended from in the Americas and Africa.

Alternative forms of literacy (writing and reading) open forms of legibility that are often dismissed from our cultures and traditions by the West. With the ecological and emotional worldbuilding Alt-Nature gives us it makes sense that a novel is next for you. To hear that Alt-Nature has inspired a theatre performance to take shape, directed by you at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, follows as well. There is so much embodied that presents a kinesthetic archive of encounters. The epistolary as form for us here, responses back and forth, feels fitting to meditate on the time and space between Atlanta, Arizona, Jamaica, Florida, and Appalachia, which we have touched upon. In writing to one another, I feel we are carving a space for what is deemed illegible. Speaking of your title, Alt-Nature, I want to sit with the texture you give when you describe the “way the landscape rises to the top of your skin.”

There is an intergenerational call-and-response with nature that we must be prepared to answer. I feel the book is a conduit with the tender scenes you give us in Alt-Nature that touch on Black and Indigenous relationships to the desert, patriotism, and militarism. I think arrival is a powerful and appropriate frame as opposed to ugly terms like “settler of color critique” applied to Black people whose ancestors were forcibly brought here through the transatlantic trade. To be a perpetual guest on stolen lands is not a problem, but maybe an eternal call we are answering to be in coalition with those whose land continues to be stolen. We were stolen too. At least this was my hope for futurist coalition-building in founding my organization Dark Laboratory in 2020 to address the crossroads of stolen land and stolen life through climate storytelling. Your poetry fits into our constellation of Black and Native thinkers articulating how the land is a storyteller.

Dear Tao,

I took the train from Seattle to Oakland this week. In one of those tiny sleeper cars where I could lay out and watch the landscape for hours. Something I’ve always loved about train rides is the opportunity to see what people are doing with land in different communities. What struck me on this trip was how many tent communities were visible along the way. On the outskirts of urban centers, but also in rural places. I thought about Octavia Butler, as Parable took place in this geography. Or, I should say, it is taking place.

That aspect of the train ride reminded me of how you framed Black Feminist prophecy as a form of speaking to the future, the deep past, and the now simultaneously. I really appreciate your distinction of prophecy as naming not only what is yet to come, but also what has yet to be recognized or named even as we live through it.

You invited me to talk about the influence Hortense Spillers has had on my work. I respect Spillers for the way her work makes sense in my body. Softens things. Or warms them up. For me, the future that her work anticipates is the body it allows me to perceive from.

I’ve finally arrived to a place of understanding myself as a writer where I can properly respect that gift of her work. Respect is a practice. One in which I no longer try to understand everything, or place pressure on myself to analyze or apply it. I can write next to her language. Or write from the position of being impressed upon by her patience and carefulness to beauty.

The epigraph at the beginning of Alt-Nature was a reflection on listening to Spillers give a talk at Barnard in 2017 on the phenomenon of sexual and romantic relationships between enslaved Black women and their white slave owners. Several people in the audience felt that it was important to point out that “real love” did exist in some of those instances, and that such love was one way of recognizing or exercising humanity in inhumane conditions.

I was struck by the fact that dynamics we recognize from here as “love” can so easily coexist with (or perhaps, are formed within) the cultural practice of enslavement, and it put me on this path for years of wondering (through poetry, through organizing, through relationships) what a meaningful kind of love in my life would look like.

You pointed to the last line of Alt-Nature’s epigraph: where that means whatever it needs to mean, and to what you named the “conditional nature of love.” Maybe one reason it’s hard for me to find language that sticks to the question is that love is so deeply contextual. Embedded in its infinite ecologies.

I love that you were drawn to the moment of explicit engagement with Spillers in Alt-Nature, where I quote from, and sit with, her talk on “The Idea of Black Culture.” And her re-framing of it as “critical culture.” In earlier drafts of that piece, I quoted more of her language from the talk. Particularly important for me was her assertion that the most important work of Black culture—the most critical work that any of us can do right now—is to get the planet into hands capable of human response. Of course there are serious questions around what a human even is, but the point is that the planet we live on is under attack, and the people on the planet with the most control of resources are the ones doing the attacking. And equal to their assault on the earth is their assault on Indigenous peoples whose cultures necessitate a different kind of relationship with the earth. So, in that way, the work of Black culture is also (and glaringly) the work of Indigenous resurgence and Land Back and, very explicitly in this moment, a Free Palestine.

I remember having a conversation with a friend, another Black woman poet years ago, in which I said that I didn’t believe it was possible to have a conversation about justice in the United States without centering Indigenous sovereignty. She pushed back on that, and while I disagree with the specific position of her disagreement, it did ask me to reconsider the language of “centering” and what it implies. Perhaps I would say, rather than “centering” that Black culture requires the realization of Indigenous resurgence, the realization of Land Back, and the realization of a Free Palestine.

I’m thinking now of your Jamaica-based project, maroon / mawon / marron (2022–ongoing) and the question of “how does marronage translate across different national contexts?” And I’m thinking of your recent time in the desert, and Appalachia and Jamaica. I’m wondering if you can talk about how you’ve taught yourself to see multiplicity (the now and past, and yet-to-be-realized) across landscapes. And what the process of accumulating iterations over time has shown you about various contexts of Black resistance?

Saretta,

Thank you for sharing the experience of traveling by rail. It is so underrated as a way to experience our country and especially for me as someone who has fallen in love with mountains and geology over the past several years. I hope I can take a journey like you did from Seattle to Oakland one day. There are so many mountain ballads to listen to across our shared climate crisis, which I will return to at the end of this letter.

As to your question about Black feminist prophecy, I feel torn about it, because the notion is used to silence and scorn us on the one hand as heretics and then taken up posthumously by theorists after we are gone as the truth, on the other hand. The writing has always been on the wall. *Listen to Black women* quickly turns to *steal and appropriate from Black women* with empty citation. I once tweeted that citation is ethical and political and a Black man stole the tweet. Go figure. He apologized later. It was so true, he felt he had written it. The problem is that we have been valued historically, to echo Fred Moten’s articulations. Black women, femmes, and those who have been relied on to give birth have been dispossessed, disposed, and disbelieved. Like you, I take my cue from a lineage of theorists like Hortense Spillers for what they have been testifying for generations at this point about mama’s babies. To be born of what may have been conditional or unconditional love is our diasporic quandary, I feel, as Black people.

“I want to wake every morning into love,
where love is the question of how I’m going to help you get free,
where that means whatever it needs to mean.”

Thank you for turning me to Spillers’s “The Idea of Black Culture” for more on her meditations. There is so much poetry in her theory.

“where that means whatever it needs to mean” for me is the unconditional poetics of Black coalition. So many non-Black peoples depend on, or expect, Black coalition, using our suffering as a template for their demands or restitution. When it comes to what you call “Indigenous resurgence,” I agree that the philosophical and ethical questions extend from the ongoing plight of the Indigenous peoples of Palestine and Turtle Island, and on and on. Lately, I have been finding a lot of answers in Rastafarian tenets and other Black cosmologies.

In my work as a visual and sound artist, I am drawn to marronage in translation because of the mountain ballads I have been tuning into during my travels. From Appalachian bluegrass to Chinese New Year lion dances to Black spirituals, there is an intergenerational call and response with nature and our duty to protect it. From the Great Dismal Swamp to Suriname to Seminole territory we are rebellious kin. I hear it in the love Black folks have for country music in Georgia and in rural Jamaica. Many Maroons in Jamaica are of Amerindian Indigenous heritage as well as West African. I have been inspired by Annishinaabe writer Grace Dillon and Jamaican author Nalo Hopkinson’s conversations about these connections that defy imperial borders of what it means to be Indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.

Dear Tao,

I’m writing from coastal Florida, where I’m dog-sitting at my sister’s house. It is the same dog who appears in my book, Federica García Lorca Elisabeth Morgan-Diaz, whose little Black ass is often in trouble. What did we expect, naming her after a queer dreamer disappeared by a dictator?

You asked how I would define war. How that definition has changed this year. Or how it changed those five years of writing Alt-Nature.

The poet Douglas Kearney said something in the liner notes to Cauleen Smith’s collaborative album, The Wanda Coleman Song Book. He said seeing Wanda Coleman read was akin to “moving through the noise that you realize is actually signal.” And later asked, “what is it to tune into a station? That forces you to feel physical pain, emotional pain. Psychological pain for three to five fucking minutes.”

The limitations of engaging with a settler colonial administration as though it’s a governing body capable of ethical action are tied to the limitations of political language about what war is and what our future has the potential to be. Something I ask myself: What are the definitions for war that render its presence physically and emotionally unescapable? I don’t know if we’ll find it in a book that can be read cover to cover. Or any object designed to be bought/sold or otherwise deployed in the accumulation of capital.

Alt-Nature is a record of listening for such a language… at organizing meetings with anti-war veterans; around the fire at water protector camp; to the Trump-supporting Black family in my gun club’s Facebook group; in the explanations as to why so-and-so can’t sign the letter in support of; to indirect suggestions that my pain doesn’t matter; in the water running between brick buildings at the old Phoenix Indian Boarding School; in memories of jail cells; preparing the ground to plant; holding my breath while tending a persistent wound.

I’m curious, as an artist and a researcher, what are strategies you’ve developed for listening generously when your body is calling you to turn away?

Notes

1. “A Future of Walls or Liberation,” Alex Aveñia, 2023.
2. This Land, Season 2, Rebecca Nagel, 2021.
3. “American State of Exception,” Mónica A. Jiménez, 2023.
4. “The Place of Return: Talking Story with No’ou Revilla,” Jennifer Elise Forrester, 2022.
5. “The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor,” Brandon Shimoda, 2017, 2023.
6. “Japanese American Incarceration for Children: Brandon Shimoda on Reading with His Daughter,” Brandon Shimoda, 2022.

Dear Saretta,

Florida is such a landscape of American contradictions. Upon my arrival from the United Kingdom to the United States as a child, my family had grand dreams of living in Miami to escape the cold dreariness of London. We arrived in hurricane season and learned about gun violence. It was a rude awakening to the soundtrack of helicopters overhead. We quickly moved to New York City where things seemed to make more sense for us (though it was Giuliani’s regime).

I think often about all the Caribbean and Latin American dictators who find refuge in Florida. The dog’s name sounds fitting, a tribute to a queer dreamer who was disappeared by a dictator. Amidst ongoing genocide, Florida is a battleground of the type of war I had asked you to define in our initial conversation. I have been asking myself this question a lot lately because the year is 2024 and most of the world has or is about to vote in a major national election.

I like your question about strategies because I believe we must be attuned tactically to this ongoing war as writers. The way historian Vincent Brown defines the war between Western Europe and West Africa as ongoing from the transatlantic trade feels poignant to me in his book Tacky’s Revolt. The Alt-Right is avowedly militant in its readiness to fight and to storm the capital at a moment’s notice with nooses. I often wonder what political formations across national borders are necessary to win the anti-colonial war for the Global Majority. Alt-Nature gives me hope because it does not shy away from contradictions.

“Do I regret my time in the military, my mom wants to know.”

This line struck me because we cannot talk about Black life in the U.S. without the tentacles of the military changing the shape of our families. I think of my uncle who was an army recruiter for decades. Negotiating competing allegiances is second nature. But there is a lot of intergenerational healing that needs to take place based on the trauma of that military violence. In doing so, we must address conservative Black culture, a lot of which resides in Florida. I think often of Caribbean American Trump voters who identify with a dictator because they are dictators in their households. In being a professor of Black studies, I have had to confront my own assumptions in teaching about dictatorship in Haiti. Some of my students have been told by family members that life under dictatorship is something to view with nostalgia because at least there was running water and food on the table. I think we are not often prepared to grapple with the stability that dictatorship brings to a certain class of people. If we ignore the Black, Trump-supporting voices in the gun club, we are not tuning into the reality of what we are facing in November 2024.

Dear Tao,

I'm writing today from For Keeps Bookstore in Atlanta, which is part bookstore, part archive. There's a long table in the center of the store full of rare books, pamphlets, cassette tapes, and programs from African diasporic community events across the world. These things are not for sale, but here to be touched, seen, turned over. To my right: Color Me Flo in paperback and the National Ensemble of the Republic of Guinea’s Ballets Africains. To my left: a tape of Muddy Waters’s Sweet Home Chicago and a basket of photographs. Dozens. A child in a bathtub, two Black people hugging on a sidewalk, someone dressed in white at the center of a baby shower. Someone sipping a rum punch walked in a moment ago to pick a fight. The front door is open and I can hear the music from Mangos Caribbean Restaurant across the street. A Georgia State student who came in to check on the price of a book is now dancing in the doorway on her way out.

I love to encounter an archive this way.

When we talked in March, I shared that my search for images of earlier Black settlers to the U.S. Southwest left me frustrated and unable to see a path that would lead to my own presence. I eventually divested from archives as a place to learn something about the past. I plucked from the images and languages that I could find, then quickly re-territorialized those materials by placing them in conversation with the land via performance, drawing, photography and video work. I had to resist my desire for narratives structured as historical realities, and instead nurture an attachment to communing with archival materials as conduits for new ways of being with the earth.

I’m thinking now of your recent multi-media installation, Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging, at Wave Hill, and how the archival materials were clearly living and breathing, and in some cases visibly decomposing. There were so many registers of expression. I also really appreciated how the installation articulated its own boundaries, which were not equal to the perimeter of the room where it was housed. I wonder if you can talk about how you see the potential of archives to make and remake worlds?

Saretta,

I am writing this final correspondence to you from the Caribbean. The Cayman Islands is a British territory and truly a parallel universe where I feel conflicted and at peace. I am thinking of how happy I was to learn of your recent trip to Portland, Jamaica, which has a deep and mountainous Maroon history. The landscape has protected Black sovereignty as much as Maroons have protected the land. In some ways, as a tax haven that chose to remain colonized by Britain rather than tethered in fate to Jamaica, Cayman is the opposite. However, I have tuned into the rebellious echoes here by listening to Black Caymanian women like Long Celia. In 1820, she famously said, “Slavery be Dead…We be Free!” She suffered the punishment of 50 lashes by the British authority for “uttering seditious words.” A Black woman’s prophecy that would be true in the next decade, emancipation came in 1838. Being here between Cuba and Jamaica, I am thinking about what it means to exist beyond the horizon of US and British colonial desire.

I long for a space of Black feminist retreat like this. For Keeps bookstore is one of the few locations where I felt “this must be the place,” to echo the Talking Heads. I visited once with a friend who teaches Caribbean literature, Sonya Posmentier, in 2018 while we attended the American Studies Association conference in Atlanta. The emphasis on ephemera in the shop was what really excited me. The curatorial vision by owner Rosa Duffy is clear in what she posts to the bookstore’s Instagram account from Amiri Baraka to Walter Rodney to Audre Lorde. If people would read these books, I believe we would move quickly past the cyclic nature of diaspora wars between Black people. Black collecting is a liberatory act, for those who have been told our archives are not real archives. As you say, archives allow us to remake boundaries.

Thank you for going to see my art exhibition Plot and Provision: Crate-Digging in the Bronx. It was intended as an ode to the unfinished drafts of Black revolution that I hear in our music traditions across deep time. A sound installation, it tunes into the mountain ballads of rebellion that connect Black and Indigenous Appalachia and Jamaica. I was fortunate to be in conversation for the debut with artist Kandis Williams and novelist Maaza Mengiste. The conversation reminded me of the first conversation you and I had in March, which brings us full circle to the plot of colonialism. There is so much hopeful plotting and provisioning to do amidst the urgency of our current and devastating political moment. Kandis talked about the irony and politics of student encampments she saw at Northwestern, and Maaza talked about a tribute she made to Palestinian mothers through writing on pink rose petals at the Venice Biennale.

Alt-Nature gives me hope and I know it will do the same for my students at Hunter College. I am teaching a class called “Black Ecologies and Technologies,” for which I cannot wait to assign your poetry. How, I’ve been asking myself for years, will I be ready to teach the day after the 2024 election? I was unprepared in 2016, while teaching at New York University. My students had so much apathy. And, what answers did the curriculum provide? Come what may in November, Alt-Nature, is on my reading list for the fall to answer our inevitable questions on governance which need to shift from democracy to sovereignty, and this requires land back.