Hope Wabuke on Blood on the Leaves
What inspired the genesis of this book?
I have always been horrified and haunted by what happened to Mary Turner, a young black pregnant woman who was lynched by a white mob in 1918 when she spoke up about her husband’s own lynching. The mob cut open her belly and crushed her unborn child to death and also burned Mary while she was alive. But I didn’t have the language to write about it. All I felt was the horror in my bones. And then one day this poem came out in a sonnet crown. When I finished this poem, I was thinking about lynching, and how trees (and nature) are sites of violence for Black people, not just sites of beauty. That began the book, and the rest of the poems.
You work within form in this book, while your last book interrupted form, why is that?
My last book, The Body Family, dealt with my family’s escape from Idi Amin’s Ugandan genocide in 1976 and recovery in America. I do not have fluent access to my mother tongue, so I was writing in English, the language of the colonizers, and one of my main questions was “how do I decolonize language?” which led to a queering and interruption of form. Writing that book got me to a place where I have seen as much as I can at this moment on that question. Blood on the Leaves required different holders for the words. It is softer and louder, because nature can be both soft and explosive. One of the things I have been wanting to do for a very long time was write a poem for Mary Turner but I didn’t have the words. The sonnet crown gave me the form to find the words, or vice versa. And then form became a running throughline through the book.
What do you want readers to take away from this book?
I would like them to think about how there has always been a relationship between Black people and the land—whether on the continent or in the diaspora. But this has largely been erased or ignored. Black people have a both a joyous and traumatic relationship with nature. In Africa, there is the harmony of working and owning the land until colonization. In the United States and global diaspora, there is the bloody history of working the land through enslavement, and then the terror of nature through lynching and segregation. There is also the joy of the Black present and future when thinking about the relationship of Blackness and nature.
