Queer Questions is a series of short Q&A’s with writers featured in The Black Futurist Projects: New Queer Black reading and performance on July 6th. Check out the Facebook event page for more info and to RSVP.
Taijhet Nyobi is an artist of African descent, trained specifically in script writing and dramatic verse. She has found home and healing through arts education and sees artistic expressions as a platform for the reclamation of culture and the manifestation of liberations.
She was recently a Featured Poet at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts with the Stories of Queer Diaspora Production and her film The Dancer’s Room premiered at the Brava Theater June 15th with The Queer Women of Color Media Arts Program (QWOCMAP). She was also recently cast as an actor for a play, “The Last Unicorns”, that will show the first two weeks in August at Bindlestiff Studio.
1) I found a beautiful line you’d written And then I finally understood, that art is prayer, it is a manifestation, and a reclamation of space not allowed to us. Art is how we take back, it is how we aid the re-imagining of everything we knew before and everything we need to know now. Can you expand on on this?
As a people who are defined as other, the definition of our identities are automatically made inferior. When we make art we take control over how and what is seen. We tell stories within contexts, we tell stories from critical and conscious lens, we tell stories with our well being in mind, we tell stories to prevent the silencing of black voices, we tell stories so that we and our ancestors continue to exist. Art brings our thoughts, protests, and dreams into the physical which is such a threat. This is why we must fight for access to art for all communities. We must fight for art with a strong purpose rooted in educational, political, and spiritual relevance.
2) What’s your vision of the black future? From an artistic, social and cultural standpoint?
Hmm. This is a big question. My vision for the black future is one of transnational kinship between folks of African descent through the arts. The exportation and migration of Africans from Africa is immense, the continent is even more immense. There are distinct populations of people of African descent in the Americas, Asia and Europe, and the notion of blackness is prevalent in every continent. I imagine a global celebration of resilience and a wave of intolerance against injustice.
3) What are your thoughts on how sexuality, race and gender intersect, specifically as it relates to queerness in the African Diaspora?
What we experience in this world affects who and how we love. It affects who we are. How I am black affects how I am woman, how I am woman affects how I am queer. I descend from Africans and those that also came into my lineage, Native and Colonizer. Through that journey my ancestors have acquired a Christian faith. Religion has been the most destructive force in my identity; it has condoned both slavery and the oppression and persecution of non-white and non-straight persons. Because of this I feel queerness in African Diasporic communities in the the United States are tied strongly to dealings of displacement, coping, spirituality, dance, and a longing to reconnect to ancestry.
4) What are you working on now and how does your work tie into your views on culture, community, sexuality and identity?
I am working on a poetry manuscript, Left for Queer. Left for Queer has been a difficult writing process that has been pivotal for my growth as a Black Queer artist. Left for Queer is a response to a question my father asked me when I was outed by my high school basketball coach, “What kind of life do you think you are going to have?” At sixteen I thought my queerness meant the end of the world for me. I had no idea of the amazingly talented and resilient communities that I would come across. This manuscript has allowed me to dig into and honor the wealth and prosperity that our Queer elders and ancestors have left for us. It is also a documentation on how we are currently navigating the struggle that we have inherited.
