Few among us earn the nomination “creative”. Many devote themselves to contained ambitions, specializing in a singular field and, through it, contributing to the world beyond. Ayodele Nzinga, the Poet Laureate of the city of Oakland, repudiates such rigidity, tending to the world by reaching into whatever realm calls to her. As a seasoned writer, Nzinga’s work spans poetry, plays, and essays.
As an accomplished performer, her work spans acting, music, and spoken word. As a theater director and producer, she founded Lower Bottom Playaz, Oakland’s longest-lived North American theater company. As a thinker, she holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness and a Ph.D. in Transformative Education and Change, and has served as a curriculum consultant for U.C. Berkeley. As a community organizer, her efforts engage the forces of systematized antiblackness and modernity’s many other forms of violence by fostering solidarity through cultural production. It seems, then, that to invoke the term “creative” would also be too narrow an appellation. She is, at bottom, a force for transformation.
View this post on Instagram
We were blessed with the opportunity to garner some of Nzinga’s thoughts on her creative trajectory, Blackness and possibilities for resistance, and the nature of being and being-in-the-world. Even in this brief Q/A, profundities abound, profundities we hope will encourage your further engagement with her vast and continuing ouvre.
See also: Oakland Black Pride Olaywa K. Austin On Their Organization's History, Philosophy, and Festival
For how long have you been writing / creating? Was there a specific point at which you realized writing, directing, and cultural production were your foremost passions? If so, what catalyzed that realization?
I don't recall a time when I did not write, construct worlds in my imagination, or tell stories to explain the world to myself and myself to the world. I wrote and produced a full-length play in high school. I excelled in Forensics and learned a lot about the world from literature. My love of the stage began as a child; I have always appreciated theater's ability to convene a group of interested listeners. All praise to the audience, the readers, the viewers who complete the circuit of thought conceived, animated, served and received/critiqued/manifest alive in the world working. I founded a theater company because there weren't enough houses producing work in which I found value. I began writing for the theater because I craved a greater breadth of roles and subject matter for Black actors.
I started producing because it was a distraction to be tethered by a patron(s) who dreamed in minor keys and to create work that mattered. I create because it's what was whispered in my ear before my first breath. I am not good at blindly following rules or coloring inside the lines. I am, by nature, a maker. Having a theater built for me was a gift.
My residency at Sr. Thea allowed space to grow as a theoretician and a practitioner of the arts. It was where I decided one could write their life's narrative over the predicted story offered by mainstream or the pale. It is the beginning of having the language to embed myself in the ground/discourses on which I stand. Creating is a compulsion for me. Making things helps me to understand the world better.
In your Oaklandside interview, you characterized your work as "an insider conversation that is open to others". This is just a somewhat tangential preamble to a simple question, but I was reminded of the work of Claudia Rankine (poet and author of Citizen) who uses the signifier "you" in her poems to both address a Black audience and to destabilize the assumed white male spectator subject position for nonblack audiences. Are there certain poets / creatives whose work has inspired or otherwise influenced your creating?
I am influenced by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Amir Suliman, Talaam Acey, Saul Williams, Tongo Eisen Martin, James Cagney, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovani, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Nikky Finney, Haki R. Madhubuti, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Lucille Clifton, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka, Kendrix Lamar, Tupac, The Jacka, Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Patrice Some; this could go on for pages, and I would still be leaving out pages of light bearers. These are the voices in my ear as I contemplate the question, and the thought of them invites others.
In his recent project Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie emphasizes the radical potential of a Black outsideness, a space he conceives of as external to the violence of the antiblack world. Do you view your own work in a similar regard / as an attempt to carve out such a space of radical Black Exteriority, or do you see yourself as grappling with the more immediate exigencies of the status quo and its violence? Or can those two projects be intertwined / engaged in simultaneously?
‘Everything is the same thing’ is a mantra that gave itself to me long ago. Alliterating itself as, 'being born is the same as dying' – everything is the same. I don't always understand the things I know or why I know them. But they feed me as they unravel at their own pace. I have come to understand this bit of wisdom as informing what I call my 360° views of how things touch in reality. This thing lies on that thing, that is a result of that thing. Things are interrelated. All stories have beginnings; nothing exists in isolation, and we collectively create 'is.' I am tending anti-Blackness and anti-humanness, which is and is not the same thing- the construct of Black seeks to block my full access to being human. I tend my right to be human absent the hobbling, a world maker, in possession of vast quantities of joy in curious conversation about the event of being alive on a blue ball in space. I tend my right to act in the space of the constructed hyphen from a Black lens centered in my experience of Blackness, actively seeking to deconstruct Whiteness for our mutual survival.
Fugitivity and Exteriority are valid posts on the path in conversations of liberation and interest me. Being – itself is a topic of exploration for me, and I am increasingly unattracted to things that distract me from fully engaging in its promise. I tend to the urgency of what is in front of me and lean into the 'foreverness' feeling/nature of human existence as a continuous event. Not all urgency is created equal. There are urgent issues that will require a 'century work' approach. I am holding the now where fractured realities, invisibility, and non-beingness inform black pessimism. AND I am standing in the larger context of the event of being human beyond being categorized as Black, while at the same time, celebrating Blackness as a clearly defined cultural occurrence with a discernable center.
My work dances between Black centers and the margins and meets where black absolutes are normative and constitute the view from the margin if and when one allows, there is another and occasionally more prominent frame to which 'valid' reality is subject. My grandmother would have described this mutable vantage point as "in it but not of it." The space in which one indulges delusional Whiteness and its centering of self because not to do so is not profitable and perhaps dangerous. One survives these spaces by accessing the space in which Blackness acknowledges the inanity of the construct of Whiteness and regards its indulgent response to it as a survival strategy. An off-center view affords considerations of different measuring sticks and reconsiderations of worth, progress, success, and the potentiality of parallel or completely different systems.
View this post on Instagram
How does your poetic practice inform your theater practice / your directing and acting, or vice versa? Are there times when one cultural arena (say, playwriting) beckons to you more than poetry? Maybe a more succinct question: as a true polymath juggling myriad separate projects, how do you compartmentalize?
Language and expressing ideas and emotions are common to all my creative work. I am in perpetual social inquiry—a never-ending conversation with the universe and the events that animate it about the nature of being human. The work knows its form – a song lyric wants to be a lyric, a poem comes whispering to me about poems, some characters tell me they want to be in a short story, others request theater or collections that inform books. All of it, for me, is the continuation of a conversation I am having. The form in which I create is rarely a choice on my part; it's a combination of what place in the conversation we are, how we got into the room that the conversation is in, what room it is, and why we are there. I don't ever wholly compartmentalize. Everything is the same thing. I lean into a 360° integrated contextual view of 'is,'/this moment, the event of being human in modernity, and where we are as humans in the more extraordinary event of existence. In regard to the latter, this leads to tangents of considerations seemingly compartmentalized.
Conversations on the socio-economic impact of capitalist systems in and of themselves, as they intersect Blackness, and humanity as a whole, flow from or to considerations of the feminine turn in modernity, Blackness, hyphenation, the environment, our relationship to the planet, and other threads within the fabric of my work. I am preoccupied with human thriving. As an artist and a human being, I harbor an innocent and admittedly wistful and naïve/pure approach to the complex concepts of freedom, justice, and the myth of America. In the words of Cornel West, I am "pragmatically optimistic" in my hopefulness for the future I want to live. I am equally hopeful about the future I will not live to see. I wish us a future.
(For our readers, Ayodele just finished directing The Oakland Theater Project's production of Aishah Rahman's 1989 The Mojo and the Sayso). Is directing already famous material intimidating? How is directing material you haven't written different from directing your own work?
It is a challenge when the work has expectations. I like challenges. Each experience turns out to be an excursion into the soul of the work itself. I only do a particular type of work, and in the production of the work, I become a servant of the story. I am intentional in the choices of stories to tell. It's not the past of a piece that I engage that matters; it's what the work, from my perspective, offers in the current moment. Work I didn't write falls into two categories. There is the work of the living and the work of the dead. With all respect, the work of dead playwrights is easier to direct – it doesn't resist evolving in interpretation. I enjoyed my period of intertextual connection with the dead via site-specific adaptations of classic works like my Shakespeare in the Hood Series at the Sr. Thea Theater. The work I write is the most agonizing, demanding, and rewarding. My service to my stories is unending, and I tend to them like most living playwrights.
View this post on Instagram
Are there any future projects, theater-based or poetic or otherwise, to which you're looking forward?
I am currently part of an installation called dreamseeds at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The installation will be up until early September. I am the guest editor of a special edition of Black Bird Press and Review Magazine off the press in August. I'm directing a short film in September, a Black Arts Movement classic, “Flowers for the Trashman,” by Marvin X Jackmon. I am co-publishing an anthology later in the year with Nomadic Press; my online poetry show, SpeakEasy: Winter in America, airs every other month on 4th Wednesdays; I am kicking off a national set of conversations between Poet Laureates in November, and I'll be directing Joe Turner's “Come and Gone” for the stage in November as well.
View this post on Instagram
Photography by: Freddie Collins/Unsplash
Few among us earn the nomination “creative”. Many devote themselves to contained ambitions, specializing in a singular field and, through it, contributing to the world beyond. Ayodele Nzinga, the Poet Laureate of the city of Oakland, repudiates such rigidity, tending to the world by reaching into whatever realm calls to her. As a seasoned writer, Nzinga’s work spans poetry, plays, and essays.
As an accomplished performer, her work spans acting, music, and spoken word. As a theater director and producer, she founded Lower Bottom Playaz, Oakland’s longest-lived North American theater company. As a thinker, she holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness and a Ph.D. in Transformative Education and Change, and has served as a curriculum consultant for U.C. Berkeley. As a community organizer, her efforts engage the forces of systematized antiblackness and modernity’s many other forms of violence by fostering solidarity through cultural production. It seems, then, that to invoke the term “creative” would also be too narrow an appellation. She is, at bottom, a force for transformation.
View this post on Instagram
We were blessed with the opportunity to garner some of Nzinga’s thoughts on her creative trajectory, Blackness and possibilities for resistance, and the nature of being and being-in-the-world. Even in this brief Q/A, profundities abound, profundities we hope will encourage your further engagement with her vast and continuing ouvre.
See also: Oakland Black Pride Olaywa K. Austin On Their Organization's History, Philosophy, and Festival
For how long have you been writing / creating? Was there a specific point at which you realized writing, directing, and cultural production were your foremost passions? If so, what catalyzed that realization?
I don't recall a time when I did not write, construct worlds in my imagination, or tell stories to explain the world to myself and myself to the world. I wrote and produced a full-length play in high school. I excelled in Forensics and learned a lot about the world from literature. My love of the stage began as a child; I have always appreciated theater's ability to convene a group of interested listeners. All praise to the audience, the readers, the viewers who complete the circuit of thought conceived, animated, served and received/critiqued/manifest alive in the world working. I founded a theater company because there weren't enough houses producing work in which I found value. I began writing for the theater because I craved a greater breadth of roles and subject matter for Black actors.
I started producing because it was a distraction to be tethered by a patron(s) who dreamed in minor keys and to create work that mattered. I create because it's what was whispered in my ear before my first breath. I am not good at blindly following rules or coloring inside the lines. I am, by nature, a maker. Having a theater built for me was a gift.
My residency at Sr. Thea allowed space to grow as a theoretician and a practitioner of the arts. It was where I decided one could write their life's narrative over the predicted story offered by mainstream or the pale. It is the beginning of having the language to embed myself in the ground/discourses on which I stand. Creating is a compulsion for me. Making things helps me to understand the world better.
In your Oaklandside interview, you characterized your work as "an insider conversation that is open to others". This is just a somewhat tangential preamble to a simple question, but I was reminded of the work of Claudia Rankine (poet and author of Citizen) who uses the signifier "you" in her poems to both address a Black audience and to destabilize the assumed white male spectator subject position for nonblack audiences. Are there certain poets / creatives whose work has inspired or otherwise influenced your creating?
I am influenced by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Amir Suliman, Talaam Acey, Saul Williams, Tongo Eisen Martin, James Cagney, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovani, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, Nikky Finney, Haki R. Madhubuti, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Lucille Clifton, Marvin X, Amiri Baraka, Kendrix Lamar, Tupac, The Jacka, Rumi, Kahlil Gibran, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Patrice Some; this could go on for pages, and I would still be leaving out pages of light bearers. These are the voices in my ear as I contemplate the question, and the thought of them invites others.
In his recent project Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie emphasizes the radical potential of a Black outsideness, a space he conceives of as external to the violence of the antiblack world. Do you view your own work in a similar regard / as an attempt to carve out such a space of radical Black Exteriority, or do you see yourself as grappling with the more immediate exigencies of the status quo and its violence? Or can those two projects be intertwined / engaged in simultaneously?
‘Everything is the same thing’ is a mantra that gave itself to me long ago. Alliterating itself as, 'being born is the same as dying' – everything is the same. I don't always understand the things I know or why I know them. But they feed me as they unravel at their own pace. I have come to understand this bit of wisdom as informing what I call my 360° views of how things touch in reality. This thing lies on that thing, that is a result of that thing. Things are interrelated. All stories have beginnings; nothing exists in isolation, and we collectively create 'is.' I am tending anti-Blackness and anti-humanness, which is and is not the same thing- the construct of Black seeks to block my full access to being human. I tend my right to be human absent the hobbling, a world maker, in possession of vast quantities of joy in curious conversation about the event of being alive on a blue ball in space. I tend my right to act in the space of the constructed hyphen from a Black lens centered in my experience of Blackness, actively seeking to deconstruct Whiteness for our mutual survival.
Fugitivity and Exteriority are valid posts on the path in conversations of liberation and interest me. Being – itself is a topic of exploration for me, and I am increasingly unattracted to things that distract me from fully engaging in its promise. I tend to the urgency of what is in front of me and lean into the 'foreverness' feeling/nature of human existence as a continuous event. Not all urgency is created equal. There are urgent issues that will require a 'century work' approach. I am holding the now where fractured realities, invisibility, and non-beingness inform black pessimism. AND I am standing in the larger context of the event of being human beyond being categorized as Black, while at the same time, celebrating Blackness as a clearly defined cultural occurrence with a discernable center.
My work dances between Black centers and the margins and meets where black absolutes are normative and constitute the view from the margin if and when one allows, there is another and occasionally more prominent frame to which 'valid' reality is subject. My grandmother would have described this mutable vantage point as "in it but not of it." The space in which one indulges delusional Whiteness and its centering of self because not to do so is not profitable and perhaps dangerous. One survives these spaces by accessing the space in which Blackness acknowledges the inanity of the construct of Whiteness and regards its indulgent response to it as a survival strategy. An off-center view affords considerations of different measuring sticks and reconsiderations of worth, progress, success, and the potentiality of parallel or completely different systems.
View this post on Instagram
How does your poetic practice inform your theater practice / your directing and acting, or vice versa? Are there times when one cultural arena (say, playwriting) beckons to you more than poetry? Maybe a more succinct question: as a true polymath juggling myriad separate projects, how do you compartmentalize?
Language and expressing ideas and emotions are common to all my creative work. I am in perpetual social inquiry—a never-ending conversation with the universe and the events that animate it about the nature of being human. The work knows its form – a song lyric wants to be a lyric, a poem comes whispering to me about poems, some characters tell me they want to be in a short story, others request theater or collections that inform books. All of it, for me, is the continuation of a conversation I am having. The form in which I create is rarely a choice on my part; it's a combination of what place in the conversation we are, how we got into the room that the conversation is in, what room it is, and why we are there. I don't ever wholly compartmentalize. Everything is the same thing. I lean into a 360° integrated contextual view of 'is,'/this moment, the event of being human in modernity, and where we are as humans in the more extraordinary event of existence. In regard to the latter, this leads to tangents of considerations seemingly compartmentalized.
Conversations on the socio-economic impact of capitalist systems in and of themselves, as they intersect Blackness, and humanity as a whole, flow from or to considerations of the feminine turn in modernity, Blackness, hyphenation, the environment, our relationship to the planet, and other threads within the fabric of my work. I am preoccupied with human thriving. As an artist and a human being, I harbor an innocent and admittedly wistful and naïve/pure approach to the complex concepts of freedom, justice, and the myth of America. In the words of Cornel West, I am "pragmatically optimistic" in my hopefulness for the future I want to live. I am equally hopeful about the future I will not live to see. I wish us a future.
(For our readers, Ayodele just finished directing The Oakland Theater Project's production of Aishah Rahman's 1989 The Mojo and the Sayso). Is directing already famous material intimidating? How is directing material you haven't written different from directing your own work?
It is a challenge when the work has expectations. I like challenges. Each experience turns out to be an excursion into the soul of the work itself. I only do a particular type of work, and in the production of the work, I become a servant of the story. I am intentional in the choices of stories to tell. It's not the past of a piece that I engage that matters; it's what the work, from my perspective, offers in the current moment. Work I didn't write falls into two categories. There is the work of the living and the work of the dead. With all respect, the work of dead playwrights is easier to direct – it doesn't resist evolving in interpretation. I enjoyed my period of intertextual connection with the dead via site-specific adaptations of classic works like my Shakespeare in the Hood Series at the Sr. Thea Theater. The work I write is the most agonizing, demanding, and rewarding. My service to my stories is unending, and I tend to them like most living playwrights.
View this post on Instagram
Are there any future projects, theater-based or poetic or otherwise, to which you're looking forward?
I am currently part of an installation called dreamseeds at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The installation will be up until early September. I am the guest editor of a special edition of Black Bird Press and Review Magazine off the press in August. I'm directing a short film in September, a Black Arts Movement classic, “Flowers for the Trashman,” by Marvin X Jackmon. I am co-publishing an anthology later in the year with Nomadic Press; my online poetry show, SpeakEasy: Winter in America, airs every other month on 4th Wednesdays; I am kicking off a national set of conversations between Poet Laureates in November, and I'll be directing Joe Turner's “Come and Gone” for the stage in November as well.
View this post on Instagram
Photography by: Freddie Collins/Unsplash
