Irène Mathieu – C-VILLE Weekly

By Alana Bittner

When expressing the value of writing poetry, Valencia Robin references a quote by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo: “You begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”

Robin says that, when she was young, no one told her poetry could work this way. In high school, the poets she learned about felt “archaic” and intimidating, with little connection to her own life. The urge to write poetry didn’t arise until years later, when she discovered contemporary poets she could identify with. Today, Robin is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Black Renaissance Noire, to name a few.

With support from New City Arts, Robin has paired up with poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu to help Charlottesville teens find the connection to writing that she feels she missed out on as a young person.

“It’s empowering when a person can take control over their own narrative and say what they need to say, exactly how it needs to be said,” says Mathieu.

In February, the pair put out a call for writers that expressly welcomes high school students of color, queer and nonbinary students, low-income students, immigrants, and differently abled students to participate in Poetry of Power, a virtual workshop for young people from marginalized backgrounds. (Scroll down for samples of submitted poems.)

Robin and Mathieu hope to dispel the misconception that poetry is grim or somber. Instead, Robin says they’ll introduce students to “poetry that privileges joy.” This joy can be a form of empowerment, she says, pointing out that “what has sustained communities of color and other marginalized groups is our creative spirit, our songs and poems and other forms of art.” Robin says the idea of “joy and poetry as tools for survival” inspired the name of the workshop.

She cautions, however, that poetry is not a magic wand that will solve all problems. It is a tool that allows “all poets, whether young or old, to make sense of what’s going on in their lives, to unpack what’s confusing, joyful, or painful, and figure out how they feel about it.”

Adolescence brings confusion, joy, pain, and other intense emotions. Through writing, young poets can wrap their minds around whatever they may be struggling with, emerging with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. “To capture your particular way of walking in the world is incredibly empowering,” says Robin.

The workshop addresses the logistical aspects of writing poetry as well. Students get career advice, free author headshots, and the chance to perform their work at a virtual public reading. Organizers have also invited a guest speaker, local student activist and writer Zyahna Bryant, who organized her first demonstration against police injustice at age 12 and published her first book of poems, Reclaim, as a high school senior.

“She’s living proof that age is just a number, that if you feel called to speak and serve, you’re never too young,” says Robin.

Reese Bryan, Nhandi Hoge, Zoe Shelley, Violet Tillman, Autumn King, and Madeline Caduff present original poetry during a virtual reading on April 1. For more information, go to newcityarts.org.

SAD
By Violet Tillman

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder,
And perhaps that is true
I missed the rain during that ice and snow,
and then,
After a long winter of stark forests,
As wisps of life sprouted up from grey soil
My love for the earth flared bright and bold
I’d clawed at each scrap, clinging to any warmth and calling it
spring

Here I am now, April
standing in the forest, putting blackberries in my basket
Tasting a few, seeds stuck in indigo teeth
That soft and whimsical voice calling to me—
Frogs in the creek at dusk, flowers shifting in the breeze, drizzle on the tin roof—
Ushering me out to the cliff by the swollen river that overlooks the hills
Where I end my day to the sun setting low,
Warm

And so, it’s like this:
Stars peek out from clouds
That lingering scent of rain
Wafts up near the trees at the edge of the yard
Where I am lying and thinking quietly that
Absence made my heart grow desperate
While presence, this presence
Was what made my heart grow fond

Girl Team
By Zoë K Shelley

You know what’s sad?
I get told my stomach
Is scandalous
My breasts are bad
Something to be saved for a
Supposed husband?
I don’t agree

You know what’s sad?
Some boy barely older than me
Brings out a phone
And tries to stealthily snap
Several shots
Of me in my swimsuit
But I see him
I don’t know him
He’s sitting all the way over there
What can I do for myself?
How do I save my dignity?

You know what’s sad?
I get told that I shouldn’t wear a bikini
But my brother doesn’t have to wear a shirt
Society, what have you done to me?
I need a support team

You know what’s sad?
When I ask my girl friends
If this happens to them too
Each one has a similar story

But something makes me happy
I have a girl team
Always supporting me
All my stories
And my stress
They listen
When I’m with them
I feel free of
Societies grip on me
I’m grateful
For my girl team

Shared experience: Poet Irène Mathieu explores identity and liberation in Grand Marronage

Local poet and pediatrician Irène Mathieu has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Before she learned to write, she would observe her mother and narrate everything she did. “She found it super annoying,” Mathieu says with a laugh.

Mathieu, who lived in Charlottesville for parts of her childhood, returned last July to begin work at the University of Virginia Health System. Already a published poet with two books, this spring she published her third collection, Grand Marronage, with Switchback Books. The title comes from the name given to communities formed by newly free, formerly enslaved peoples in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean—a name she came across while reading about the history of Louisiana. The term “metaphorically and perfectly captured,” Mathieu says, the question of “how you can be fully free when you’re still living in a society that is built on inequity, racism, capitalism, and the patriarchy.”

In the poem “maron (circa 1735),” Mathieu employs magical realism to turn a girl who is fleeing enslavement into a fig tree to escape the men with guns and dogs that pursue her, as Daphne evaded Apollo in Greek mythology. “I was really interested in that idea of transformation,” Mathieu says, “and how can we as families or society or community transform into a more liberated form of ourselves? That includes not only our personal liberation but also the liberation of others.”

The book is composed of four sections and three voices: that of her grandmother, herself, and Harlem Renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Deeply grounded in the body, many of the poems explore how family history can manifest physically at the cellular level—not only in the case of trauma, but in strength, joy, love, and liberation, too.

While writing poems in her grandmother’s voice, Mathieu was hyper aware of the fact that she couldn’t write them without filtering her grandmother’s experience through her 21st-century lens. Those poems “are the marriage of my grandmother’s stories and my interpretation of them. I’m taking a huge poetic license,” she says. Writing poetry, rather than memoir, allowed her to get to the root of “the emotional truths of the stories my grandmother was telling me, or not telling me,” she says.

In imagining the life of Harlem renaissance writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson—who, like Mathieu’s family, also moved from New Orleans to the mid-Atlantic—Mathieu positions her in conversation with her family, their shared experience of race, gender, and capitalism paralleling each other. And through her own voice, Mathieu provides a contemporary perspective on the experience of a Black Creole American woman while exploring her ambivalence about those identifying terms, particularly the term American.

“In the United States, we look at things literally and figuratively in a very black and white way,” she says, “but reality and history are much more complicated than that.”

After our in-person interview, she reflects more on the experience of passing and colorism that she explores in Grand Marronage and writes in an email, “I am interested in how race is a slippery concept, yet so materially consequential.” She describes her grandmother as “a very light-skinned Creole woman” often mistaken for being “foreign” or European, while Mathieu herself is usually perceived as black. “I have siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles who are routinely assumed to be a wide variety of races, ethnicities, and nationalities. This reality is not special, though; in fact it’s a pretty common result of (North & South) American colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade,” she writes.

“In Grand Marronage I focused on colorism and passing because so much of our experiences are defined by how others perceive us, and yet that perception is entirely subjective and a function of time, place, and culture.”

Another perception she challenges in the book is one generated by the myth of meritocracy, something she’s encountered in her own experience in higher education. She says people assume “you’re black and you made it, so everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But, she says, “This is a capitalist country that is based on racialized capitalism. We have to have a nuance to understand the forces that create the circumstances of our lives and the lives of those we perceive as other.”

In this present moment in our culture, Mathieu sees writing and reading “as a way to get more clarity for a step toward action” that will contribute to a more equitable future. Through her writing, she asks her readers the same question she asks herself every day in her work, both as a poet, and as a pediatrician: “How can we take what we know about the past and present and then commit ourselves to greater action?”

What that action looks like is giving time, money, resources, “or some other material part of your life to the struggle for greater equity.” But, she adds, it’s also about learning the practice of taking up less space and time “if you belong to a group that has historically taken up most of the space and time.”

Through her own voice, Mathieu provides a contemporary perspective on the experience of a Black Creole American woman while exploring her ambivalence about those identifying terms, particularly the term American.