LeTasha N. Nevada Diggs works with words, sound, video, and bodies. She has been published in Ploughshares, jubilat, Fence, LA Review, Palabra, and Black Renaissance Noir, among others. She is the recipient of several awards; including Cave Canem, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and The Laundromat Project, and Millay Colony.nShe, along with Greg Tate, are the editors of yoYO/SO4 Magazine. Her poetry collection, TwERK, was recently published by Belladonna*.
Margaret Miller: Why Twerk for the name of your first book?
It happened during a phone conversation with Douglas Kearney who designed the book cover. We were joking around with book titles, having fun and Doug said “twerk” and I said, “that’s it!” It made sense. The term itself has been around for over 20 years and yes, it is associated with the dance, a dance much older than 20. At one point, it was a term used in the black gay communities. It is that conjoining of words (and dance) alongside all of this stuff that is happening in the book. It is a level of discomfort and joy with dance; dance that is underground but popular amongst a group of people. The book is about the physicality and dance of languages. These languages and vernaculars and idioms and dialects are granting me permission to explore and to see what I deem as a multilingual America. I don’t believe North America is monolingual. Now there is a population of the United States that is terribly monolingual. Monolingualism in the States translates to me as the U.S. being the minority in a global context. Listen. It’s being spoken right beside you. The corner of my block isn’t monolingual. It is multilingual.
MM: Can you talk about your performances and how you capture the bombardment of language?
Well, I do attempt to write in these languages (I fail often). I’m referring here to projects with composers and choreographers I’ve worked with who are Hungarian-Gypsy, Dutch Caribbean, Austrian, and Maori. Whatever it is, there’s curiosity, boredom, and improvisation. I’ve worked as an electronic musician and as a vocalist in bands and the constant question that I have with myself has to do with improvisation. For me, combining the electronics, vocal manipulations with language, with video, makes sense. It is about how not to get bored with my shit. I also want to challenge the audience a little bit with how I hear things. Some folks do not believe I can hear all these languages at my corner. But I do. Maybe that’s just my ear. To be introduced to what I find is a utopia of cultures and languages that I have some association with or am curious about. For now, I am invested in the initial invitation, to be okay with not understanding exactly what’s being said. I think we’re used to wanting to understand everything. It’s okay not to understand. I consider myself not fluent in English. To be born in the states means English is–I guess–my first language, right? But for whatever reason, I am not fluent and I am okay with not understanding English most of the time. There are different Englishes. What is is that I do in performance and in the book? I want you to be uncomfortable but at the same time allow yourself to not fully understand what’s going on. It’s all good.
Megan Susman: Can I ask you about what you think fluency is?
When I think of fluency, how it is presented in applications, fluency is when you can comprehend the language insomuch that you can speak it, you can converse in it, and you can write in it; your ability to engage in daily conversations within that language. This is how it has been presented to me whenever I look at documents asking: how fluent are you?
MS: I think it’s an interesting discussion because your work does so much of a marriage between so many different languages.
MM: Extending that to the cultural re-appropriation, I thought it was interesting in Twerk that you have a whole section called “Anime.” Can you talk about this idea of pop culture and art?
In the case of “Mr. Popo Hollers at Jynx,” I was ticked at the idea of Mr. Popo trying to pick up Jynx. Both of them are from two different mangas: Mr. Popo’s from Dragonball Z and Jynx is from Pokémon, but a couple years ago a children’s book author wrote an essay about the appropriation of black minstrel characters in Japanese manga, both of them being exactly that. As a result, the illustrators for those two cartoons started to modify their features, and the modification of their futures actually made them less coonish, and yet, hyper-coonish. Mr. Popo went from having big lips to little tiny lips but everyone knew what it was suggesting. I looked at that as an opportunity. Let’s play around with Japanese culture appropriating black minstrel culture from America, but re-appropriate these two black characters to then flesh out blackface from within the United States and connect it to the Netherlands’ Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). Let the voice of Mr. Popo be in third person because in the Japanese versions, he speaks in third person. In the American version he doesn’t speak in third person. How a black character referring to oneself in third is inherently connected to the caricature of the black body in West Culture, in old Hollywood. I did not want the poem to be a critique. I wanted to lay it out there and have the reader think about it. Figure it out on their own. Translate. I wanted to allow Mr. Popo to be what he was illustrated to be.
MM: I was thinking about the idea of translation in Twerk specifically, because of the fact that you use multiple languages and it seems like it involves erasure and what you choose to capture.
What I choose to translate and what I choose to mistranslate.
MM: Exactly. Can you talk about the idea of translation? What it means to you? Some people think there’s a singular way of thinking about translation, but I don’t think it’s a singular thing at all.
MS: Or translation falls on a binary of you translating for content or translating for beauty, for example. There are two different things that happen there.
Sometimes content, often times beauty, oftentimes sound. In the process, sometimes one word in a particular language will determine what the poem is going to be about and from there it becomes a bit of a patchwork of finding another word that sounds nice beside it. Or surprising myself with a word against that word or what makes an interesting visual, like the poem “cucumber”. I didn’t envision the poem to be about fishermen and caterpillars. The sound of the words determined the subject. Is the poem a literal translation? Not particularly. I’m stacking the words up against each other. Sometimes there might be a grammar structure that I might know about that particular language. Sometimes I’ll use the suffix of that language and paste it onto a word from another language just to be obnoxious or because I’m curious to hear it. It is part of the mistranslation I guess. I want you to look at the beauty, the sound, and maybe the meaning later on.
MS: How important it mistranslation to your work? Or is everything just inherently mistranslated anyway?
Good question. I think it depends on the poem. It really does. I can’t say that mistranslation is used throughout.
MS: How have these themes moved throughout your work? Has it changed?
Ichi-ban and Ni-ban. The interest in language has always been there. But I would say particularly with Ichi-ban and Ni-ban, they were written largely in English, and many of the poems were largely narrative and about my neighborhood and family. The curiosity with language was still there. Just younger. I self-published them on an imprint I called Mandate of Heaven Press. So it’s an earlier version of me fascinated with ideologies. I had a short-lived minor in East Asian studies. Then came the irony of naming the books in Japanese with Spanish subtitles. Imperial China at one point was invaded by Japan and I’m fusing it with Nuyorican Spanglish. I’m a crackhead. Or it is just very black of me to mashup something like that? My third chapbook, Manuel is Destroying My Bathroom, was published by Belladonna. I think there might have been one or two macaronics in there. That was when I was attempting to find a legitimate definition for what I do.
MS: What is a macaronic?
A macaronic is a form of poetry that came out of Europe a very long time ago. The verse would utilize multiple languages; using one language to basically build and dictate the grammar. Often the form was used as a form of satire or pun. When I was introduced to the term, I said, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing macaronics.” That said, the more I was working on my stuff, I did not think of it was macaronic anymore. It might be in the tradition but is it a European tradition? Nah. I did not study previous examples from Europe. I do remember findings a group of folks online who focused on macaronics, reached out to them, sent them one of my early poems and got no response. So I cannot really speak on the European tradition. That said, I’m not doing some new shit. In these various journeys through languages–multiple languages–there is a subtext that is very rooted in the Black Arts Movement; that is very rooted in the Nuyorican Literary movement. They are in the backdrop; they want to be in conversation with someone like Clarence Major, who has a book which he wrote in Zuni and English. It is in conversation with someone like Victor Hernandez Cruz who is considered the first to write in Spanglish. They are and want to be in conversation with Hip Hop. These poems I wrote are thinking a lot about identity politics. They are thinking a lot about the urban landscape. They are thinking about how pop culture transforms us. They are thinking about personal shit. There are several in the book. It’s not this separate far off thing. There is still a conversation with my personal genealogy.
MM: Do you want the readers to succumb to the fact that they are not gonna comprehend everything and just delve into the sound?
Boom! That’s it. There was this woman at a reading who said “I don’t…how…I don’t know what you want me to do with this.” I want you to try. “But I can’t read this. This is not in English.” I was like, you can read it. “How? I mean, I don’t know these words.” I know it must have taken you a minute to figure out how to sound out ‘idiosyncratic.’ That’s supposed to be English, right? It probably took all of us a minute to sound it out, so why not with another language? I mispronounce a ton of English words daily! That is all I can ask you to do. Engage it. Don’t shut down.
MM: Do you think all poetry presents some sense of resistance to the reader? I always feel on the outskirts with poetry. I don’t know when, or sometimes how, to delve in.
I don’t think all poetry does that. There are definitely some poets who I respect and I love and are endearing friends, and I will tell them, “I read your book and I don’t know what you’re talking about… you make me feel so dumb… I feel like I need to get a doctorate to understand what you’re doing with this book.” But I love them for that challenge. I return to these books because they challenge me. There are particular books written by friends of mine and folks I don’t know personally, where the engagement is very inviting. What am I saying here? I’m pausing because I’m thinking about my godmother in Brazil, Mae Regina. I gave her a copy of my book. This woman doesn’t speak English. She was really happy to get the book. And she opened up the book to “mungkin (mencintai) mungkin” which is written in Malay, Japanese, and two other languages. She knows Spanish, but just a little bit. This woman is in her 70’s. She sat there and began to read it aloud. She didn’t stop and look at me and say, “What do you want me to do with this?” She just sat there and she took her time. She read this poem out loud. She sounded out each word. So I don’t think the book is difficult because I’m like, a 70-year-old Brazilian woman can open it up and open it to a poem that is written partly in Malay, and just kind, let it exist that way. This book isn’t difficult if you allow it to be heard through your own voice. Fuck it. It’s a coloring book if that makes you step through the door.
MM: Why do you think we have such a need for comprehension? Or this desire to know what this means and not just sit there and be like–?
Arizona. I think it’s the history of this country. The conversations, the back and forth. When we go as early as the 1800s or as recent as 2006, did the policies that emerged during the late 70s and early 80s to promote English-only help us with comprehension? I think the history of this country has basically made us believe we are superior (to a certain degree), when in fact we’re not. Anti-bilingualism is a joke. We are not encouraged to know a second language as much as we are not encouraged to have a passport.
MS: Speaking to the idea of language, the geography of your neighborhood block contains a global population and then there’s you yourself within the global population. You were exposed to a lot of languages, but how did you learn these languages? How did you learn Japanese? How did you learn Spanish?
Let’s go to the Spanish first. Having grown up in Harlem, my classmates were African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican. Spanish I heard all the time, not just with my friends, but at the bodegas, the Laundromats, on buses, in the train stations. The bodegas were run by Puerto Ricans, later by Dominicans. That’s the Spanish part. The Cherokee, I began learning when I was around 17. Maybe 16. I am part Cherokee or to be politically correct, my mom is of Cherokee ancestry. So that’s how I came to know Cherokee. My math teacher and homeroom teacher in high school were of Cherokee ancestry and I babysat their kids. They introduced me to the language and culture. The Japanese came out of my interest in Asian culture. I grew up on Karate movies. Kung Fu movies to be correct. From there it went wild. I studied Japanese for about a year. Playing around with the Spanish and the Japanese sounded a bit like Portuguese. Some of the languages have personal stories connected to them and some are purely out of my interest in language. At one point I began collecting phrasebooks. With Tagalog, I had a best friend who is Filipina. When I picked up the Malay, I did not immediately recognize the relationship between Malay and Tagalog. They share the same language group if I can remember. But I heard the sound first. I did not recognize the sound as familiar until later. I’m learning Maori song because someone has invited me to. Then comes the hard question I ask myself. What’s the point? What am I doing? Is this wrong? And I start asking myself because the appropriation term keeps on fluttering up. Is this appropriation? I think it is. Is this the form of appropriation often viewed through a negative lens? No, I don’t think so. When somebody asks me, how do I select these languages, there is the sound that attracts me, but then there’s also the idea of cooking. If it does not taste good in my mouth, I don’t use it. With as many phrasebooks as I have at home, I don’t use all of them because something is not sounding right or something does not connect to me personally.
MM: Would you say that you emphasize sound more in your writing process when you’re thinking about sitting down to start a poem? What’s your usual process?
It depends on the poem. Like “The Golden Shovels,” they came randomly one week. Someone asked me to submit some golden shovels. My process when engaging any type of form is to make it fit my brain. There are poets who are formalists, are all about form, sestinas galore, and the only way I can engage a form is if I complicate it with my interest in language. One aspect of the golden shovel is picking a line from a previously written poem. I picked several and headed to my phrasebooks looking for something to spark. Oh, “bacche ka potra” in Urdu/Hindi means “nappy.” What type of nappy? So the poem not only becomes about “nappy” but translating the word nappy through multiple cultures and geographies because I don’t speak Urdu/Hindi. It is not so much the sound then, but rather about trying to find what exactly does that word mean for me.
MM: One last question: I was really interested that your collection starts out with a quote from Genesis: “the earth was of one language and one speech.” I thought, yes, this totally works against the collection and with it. The contradiction allows this idea of multilingualism being sort of “one speech.” But I was curious of that use and how you see it play out in Twerk.
The Tower of Babel. There’s an early, very early moment for me watching Ron Perlman play the role of Salvatore the hunchback in Name of the Rose, a film adaptation of the book which I’ve yet to complete. Sean Connery was the monk detective and Christian Slater was the young monk apprentice who gets lucky with a peasant girl that’s being pimped out by the monk. But Ron Perlman is most memorable to me because he spoke in a Babel-ish language in one scene. He speaks it and Christian Slater is at a lost. The hunchback murmurs something else which Sean Connery’s character understood. Sean Connery turned around and repeated it. It called the hunchback’s bluff because, in his head, he had invented this language he assumed no one would truly listen to. So then Christian Slater says, “What language was he speaking?” And Connery says, “All and none.” The book is all and none. It’s none if you decide that I’m not speaking any language at all. It is all if you pay attention. About the Tower of Babel: I love the story because it was another moment for me. It’s connected to Perlman. He’s speaking the language at that very second “language” becomes “languages.” When a second later no one could understand each other and had to just wander around to find another person that could understand them. The very second everything went “phoosh.” One second, you can understand me and I can understand you within this swirl of glottals and slurs and clicks and long vowels. What do we do with this? Yeah, that’s the moment things got disrupted. And lovely. The choosing of these languages? I go with ear and heart. I’m attracted to mainly indigenous and oceanic. It’s also the question of what nationhood means to me in the states, where I don’t feel my national identity is completely American, but on another level, very American. I am American but I don’t feel it because as an African American I did not choose to be an American, historically. We are still to a certain degree, a stateless people. We are still a flagless people in terms of language. We cannot trace directly what might be considered a mother tongue. Where’s the language justice? Maybe what makes me defiant of this marker is what makes me American? The questioning itself allows me to explore what the possibilities are of not a mother tongue, but auntie tongues. What tongues I am related to.
