NaBeela Washington: The Will to Move Forward
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An emerging Black poet, NaBeela Washington was invited to read her poetry by the Takoma Park Poetry Reading Series and has been published in The Cincinnati Review, The Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Juke Joint Magazine, perhappened mag, and others. She recently earned her Masters in Creative Writing and English at Southern New Hampshire University.
Her Twitter handle is @_simplybee.
Rachel Yinger speaks with NaBeela about her poetry below.
“Waiting at Farragut North” is about a personal life experience. Do you find that it is difficult to do justice to your experience through writing, and if so, how do you overcome it?
Words can be very limiting indeed. But it's up to the writer to choose how they want to convey a specific experience. Sometimes, I find that there just aren't enough words to truly describe a critical time in my life, a traumatic moment, the fleetingness and strangeness of life itself.
One thing that helps me protect my overall narrative is by accepting that my experience(s) will continue to be my own and that I will be able to relate to someone, even if that’s just one person. You can't relate to everyone. But most people can understand what you're going through and that's enough to keep me writing—enough for me to keep searching for the right words that best convey my experiences, no matter how difficult it can be to translate them.
You wrote this poem while waiting for a train in DC. When composing a poem, does most of your writing happen spontaneously or do you tend to draft ideas?
As much as I’ve tried to be a consistent writer, my best writing happens when I least expect it. Most of my writing happens spontaneously—I wrote a poem in the middle of Whole Foods recently. And in this particular poem, I was waiting on a train at the Farragut North station in DC. And while I was waiting for the next train home, I was hit by a flood of emotions about my father. The train was slightly delayed so I used that moment to sit with these feelings and I felt compelled to jot them down.
I tend to draft my poems in bits and pieces at a time. I have a ton of notes on my phone, post-it notes, journals, Google Docs, with just phrases, words, moments, exaggerations, secrets, and I use them to create new work. I don't think I ever really plan to write anything until I'm hit with an urge to share something, to share an experience, or to share a set of emotions that hit me randomly.
You incorporate extraordinary visual imagery and sensory detail in your poetry: “rumble,” “gush,” “chill,” “stench,” “jingle.” Why is creating a sensory experience for the reader important to you to include in your work?
I think it's important to create sensory experiences for the reader because that increases their ability to relate to you or a specific moment. Most people know what the stench of a train station, or a space in which a lot of people have inhabited, smells like. So it's important for me to be able to use words that jog the reader's own memory about their own experiences, whatever they may be. Everyone knows what the sound of keys jingling sounds like; what the gush of wind passing feels like. There are certain things I do purposely so that I can grip the reader and say “this is for you too.”
In your author’s note, you mention that this poem is about moving forward and “accepting things you cannot change.” Can you speak more about the significance of this concept and why it is important to you?
This poem is a part of a collection of poems that I've honestly been writing for about 4 years. When I first started writing this collection, I promised myself that I would not give in to what comes naturally to people. Which in this case would be anger that I didn't have a deep relationship with my father early on; that this relationship changed the scope of my life.
In this collection I wanted to accept that those things just are and that those things do not have to define me and that those things, while unfortunate, helped me become who I am today. And that's why this concept of “accepting things you cannot change” it so important. It gives you peace at night, it gives you grace, and most importantly the will to move forward. Because being angry at the people that have harmed you, in any kind of way, really does nothing. It does nothing but affirm that the past cannot be changed. It’s okay to not forget, but it's important to practice acceptance.
You state that you became attached to writing at the age of six. What drew you to writing at such a young age?
I am an only child but I have two cousins, one of which I helped raise. The oldest of the two was autistic, and a mute until about the age of five or six. I had to figure out new ways to communicate with her, to show her that I loved her. So we’d write gibberish together, put stuff on paper, color together, or communicate through pictures and this became essential in the early days of our relationship.
Being able to communicate with people, especially when communication is difficult, or like in this case, a family member couldn't communicate with us at all, helped me appreciate the full spectrum of language and made me fall even more in love with writing. I loved writing before this experience, but I adored writing so much more afterward because it helped me emote and connect to other people, including the folks in my family.
I loved that this poem was composed in the prose format. When writing poetry, do you tend to stick to a particular format/structure? How do you decide what format is best for the poem you are writing?
Form and style are two things that I am still working through to this day. When I compose poems I'm honestly throwing noodles at a wall for what form carries the message or narrative best. In this particular poem, I felt prose worked strongest to cradle those images and sensory details. A poem with line breaks, or something like a Ghazal, might have easily complicated or stripped this away. I figure out what form is best for a poem after those initial fragments are written. It's a part of my revision process.
Can you speak more about the other poems in your upcoming chapbook and the inspiration behind them?
The other poems in my forthcoming collection are all about family and the duality of family; you're automatically born with this inherent love for family but there can be a lot of harm and darkness on the flip side of that. And like I mentioned before, it's all about accepting the things that you cannot change and learning to move forward.
The tentative title of this collection is “Why Do We Set the Table?” and in it I share my history of family through the lens of food and familial trauma. I'm from The South so food, and this sense of placemaking at home, was so critical to me navigating the love, and harm that can happen, in these intimate, private settings.
I understand that you have a degree in visual advertising from The University of Alabama at Birmingham. How does your background in visual advertising influence your writing?
My background in marketing, advertising, and art influences my writing by helping me think about what's marketable and what people relate to; what will sale and how to best share and lift up my work in the community. I don’t write with the intent to sell, but every author will think about the market success of their work overall at some point.
I think my Masters in Creative Writing and English directly influences my writing through those more obvious things, but my Bachelors helps me think about the business side of writing; some of the things that people might not think of and how to essentially monetize my work and increase visibility.
Are there any other current projects you are working on that you would like to share?
I am the Founding Editor at Lucky Jefferson and while that's more of an ongoing larger project, I'm always working on that.
In addition, I'm working on a forthcoming chapbook/collection of poems, a hybrid script or creative memoir, and I’m also preparing to produce a graphic novel at some point.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me! Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thank you so much for this!
