Love Through the Choke Weeds
A Conversation with Ariana Benson
Ariana Benson is a brilliant southern Black ecopoet whose debut, Black Pastoral, arrives mid september. Their work explores, with rigor and tenderness, the southern landscape. It addresses the obvious implications for Black folks, the land, and American history and reinterprets others. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ariana about this book, this summer through email.
EcoTheo Review: Something that I found stunning is the persona work as you develop ecological voices. For example, in “Dear Moses Grandy . . . Love, The Great Dismal Swamp” I was struck by tenderness and wrath of the The Great Dismal Swamp. The mocking tone of the boll weevil. Can you talk about developing these voices in nature?
Ariana Benson: Persona is one of my favorite literary devices in poetry. I read a lot of Ai as a model for developing unique voices, and I also studied the specifics of the places and creatures I was hoping to animate. The Great Dismal Swamp, for instance, is a place that is dense and thick with mud and forest and wildlife, so I imagined her voice to be full, choral, almost, in incorporating all the life she holds into one song. So with that poem, I imagined she’d have a lot to say. The boll weevil was a pest that destroyed millions of dollars of cash crops, so I imagined him to be mischievous and irreverent. So specific traits of the land and the creatures I was personifying, and their roles in southern history, played heavily into the development of the voices I imagined they’d speak with.
ETR: What moved me most consistently in this work is the presence of love, tenderness, hints toward the erotic in otherwise devastating circumstances. Then the way these things are weaved in with the interrelatedness of human and nature. How did you maintain such tender and erotic approaches to love in your speakers' voices amidst so much grief?
AB: I’m so glad that love and tenderness come through in this collection, as that was one of my main intentions for the work. I think that, in all of human history, grief and suffering have never existed separate from love and intimacy, so trying to write works that, affectively, illuminated one or the other felt a bit inorganic, both to my personal experiences, and to my understanding of Blackness. We wouldn’t be here, you and I, if love didn’t force its way to bloom through the choke weeds of brutality and despair. Somehow, we survived to live and love on. So I think it felt natural, then, to imagine the confluences of the two. Taking another’s hand into your own, for example, is still an act of closeness, whether it’s in grief or in joy—the togetherness remains the same.
ETR: This work time travels and I felt like I was traveling with the speakers as I read it. It also travels from species to species and the voices of nature and insects are no less complex than the voices of people.. What was the process of traveling through time and voice like for you?
AB: I love this question, because I think one of poetry’s most significant powers is its ability to collapse time by filtering events through the lenses of affect and sensory experience. We, those of us existing in this present timeline, will never be able to fully grasp the depth of horrors that were endured during slavery and in the decades following—we can only read and try to imagine. But we do have some capacity to understand the basic emotions at the core of the human experience: despair, joy, rage, bewilderment, disgust, enchantment… I could go on. And we still exist in (a version of) the same world—there are trees in Virginia, where I’m from, that date back to the Civil War. I believe that if I can imbue my poetry with the feeling and scenery that may be at least obliquely reflective of the past, then maybe I can transport us, if only temporarily and hazily, back to that world.
ETR: I am so interested in the multiple developments of theodicy that show up in this work along with the other religious references. What role does faith play in your work and what capacity does something have to be a god?
AB: Faith plays a major role in my work. I’m someone who believes in God, so by extension, I believe in the land. I believe the trees’ breath is God. I believe the wind in a field’s reeds is God. Because of this, my faith in power and healing extends to nature as well. I think anything gifted to us on this earth has the capacity to hold divinity, and that it’s our job to look for that spirit everywhere we go, to hold reverence for even the smallest blade of grass as if God and his entire kingdom exists within it.
ETR: Something I think about often and that I thought about reading your book is the complexity of the relationship that Black people have with nature and the land in the United States. We are an agricultural people by history, and then land was used like a weapon against us. So much knowledge has been lost from generation to generation and so I appreciated how deeply this work honors its title “Black pastoral,” integrating Black lived experiences and nature. Why was the pastoral critical for you in examining these elements of Black life? Do you have any hopes for the public discourse around Black people’s relationship to nature?
AB: I’ve always loved nature. I’m from southern Virginia, where we have a host of various landscapes: the beach, the swamp, the fields, the urban-adjacent green spaces, and of course, the forest. And I grew up obsessed with flora and fauna. I would spend hours in the school library reading encyclopedia entries about wild carrots and catfish and sparrows—the life that populated my world. But as I grew older, and learned more about my histories, by which I means my ancestors’ histories, I came to have a different relationship with the land. The trees I once climbed with joy held the spectres of ropes on their bending boughs. The fields we drove past and through were tinted red, and smelled like the salt of tears. All that to say, in developing the concept of a Black pastoral, I wanted to build a framework for my own understanding of nature that encapsulated all of that, the wonder and the sorrow. I’ve also found that in public discourse about Black people, especially in political contexts, we are made synonymous with urbanity, as if we all live in “inner-cities” with all the connotations that accompany that fraught term. But even those of us who live in the city are descended from those who worked the land, who tended “nature” with their bare hands. I want to drive home the idea that Blackness and nature can never be separated. That the bond that was forged, though forcibly, is one that remains in our blood.
