OUR PURSUIT OF JUSTICE: encore interviews local poet Martha Afetse

Earlier this summer, at one of SpeakYa Peace NC’s 2nd Friday Pause for Poetry open mics, poet Martha Afetse stood up and asked the room a question: “Does anybody know who Ona Judge is?” 

No one did. 

Ona Judge had turned up on Afetse's feed days earlier—a name she'd never encountered before, attached to a story that moved her deeply. Judge was an enslaved woman at George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation. When she learned she was about to be given away as a wedding gift and sold off, she slipped out during dinner one evening while the family prepared to travel, and disappeared. Washington sent men after her for years. She was never caught. She lived free until the day she died. 

"She had the tenacity to go against the grain and free herself," Martha says to me later as we catch up by phone. "When we know we are human beings, we don't want to be bought and sold as property. … We as Africans here in America have been fighting for our freedom for over 400 years. That really impacts my heart and soul. We were born as human beings, and somehow man has turned that upside down." 

Martha Afetse, who published her poetry collection "Foot Steps to Freedom" in 2023, will join others this week at the Island Arts Poetry monthly open mic on Thursday, August 6 from 6-8 p.m. at Riverview Restaurant in Kure Beach.

Note: SpeakYa Peace NC’s next Pause for Poetry event at The Fuzzy Needle is August 14.

Joining Afetse this Thursday is Joanne Durham, author of “Chasing Justice," who Afetse references multiple times. “It was interesting reading her poetry to see what she felt she could do, while alive, to fight for change,” Afetse says. “She's been chasing justice her whole life, as a young white girl into adulthood, and she expresses that in her poetry. She's chasing justice; I am fighting for justice. She wasn't subjected to the things she writes about, but because I was subjected to generational trauma, I fight—for my ancestors, for myself, for my children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Joanne is trying to understand how she can make a difference, how racism has clouded her own vision of what it means to be free. It's different. Her life experience fighting for justice is different from mine. I'm fighting for justice and freedom; she's trying to understand what she can do to make it possible.”

Read more from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

encore: I think we often forget, or simply are unaware of the weight of generational trauma left in the wake of violence, theft, murder, and the often untold atrocities that have impacted generations of people. What role does art, poetry, storytelling play in the communication and healing across generations?

Martha Afetse: The thing I can say is that misery and pain linger in our psyche, our heart, our soul. Some of us act out. Some of us do crazy things. Some of us manage it. Poetry, for me, has been my mental health, my therapy—a way to try to understand why my people are treated in such a dehumanizing manner. It bothers me that—whether it's education, housing, criminal justice, homelessness, economic deprivation, redlining, whatever aspect of life—racism and systemic white supremacy touch every part of being alive.

Even though I've never grown up hating anyone, I've tried to understand the hate. I've felt it, seen it, experienced it. But I often ask myself: why can't I hate you back? Because that's not how we're made. We're made to love. When I look at my grandparents and how they sustained themselves, it was strictly spiritual because the atrocities imposed on them would have killed off anybody else.

e: Tell me more about you as a writer, a poet, a researcher and what drives and inspires you?

MA: I carry what I consider an open wound. I think it's an ancestral wound that's been passed down through generations. I don't see myself as anybody's property, and I resent that my ancestors were bought and sold. Some of the same privileges that were denied to my great-great-grandfather, 100 years before my birth, were still denied to me 100 years later. He was born in 1848—his mother, Charity, was likely impregnated by her enslaver the year before. I was born in 1947, and I was still denied many of the privileges he was denied a century earlier. It's all by design. So many folks forget that so much of this is not distant history.

e: Do you think there's a redefining that history—or at least softening the edges of what enslaved Africans went through—happening today? A way of denying the realities that paved the way for the world we're living in now?

MA: I think it's been the design all along, and the design hasn't changed. It may shift and get a different version of it, but the design was: if we can be destroyed or stopped. The stumbling blocks have never changed. They were there for my great-great-grandparents. They were there for my grandmother. They were there for my mother. They were there for my father. They were there for my sisters and brothers. They were there for me. They're there for my children. It's a continuum: destroy them by any means necessary, whatever it may take.

I remember reading something from Dr. Makeda Baker's book [‘A Clinical & Historical Analysis of the Psychopathology of the Ice Age Descendants: White Male & Female Dysfunction’], quoting a Virginia legislator from around 1832: if you put out their light, they'll be reduced to the beasts of the field. The goal is to destroy and conquer, and that does not resonate well for us as African American people, Black Americans. It's design. The design hasn't changed, it's just been modified and shifted to look different.

e: There’s some white hysteria around Black populations that has a long history as well—slaveholders fearing uprisings before the Civil War, the early film “Birth of a Nation” painting Black men as a threat to white women at the turn of the 20th Century. Now it feels like perhaps that fear has widened, to anyone outside a heteronormative white Christian parameter.

MA: That's pretty sad, because what do you do? You sleep with one eye open, because we're everywhere? You're going to cross our paths no matter what. When you know you've done wrong, admit you've done wrong. I did not create slavery, you did not create it either, but how do we acknowledge this was one of the worst human atrocities to ever exist? What did we do to the Indians, the Mexicans, the Venezuelans, the Palestinians? It's not the color of anybody's skin causing the harm.

What's agonizing is watching people drop bombs all over the world every day, killing children, women, elderly people, destroying creation. I turn on the TV and it's still killing, still destroying. Then you look at white children walking around with guns, killing their parents, killing kids in schools, our kids subjected to synthetic drugs. You are destroying the human race. How many more children can you kill? How much longer will you support guns that kill people, and try to control women's reproductive rights? White men, you are the problem—cut it out.

There's a poem I wrote that I wasn't going to read this week, but talking with you, I'm revisiting it. It's called "Black Boy," written in January of 1995, about that rage as a Black mother.

Here's a little of it:

Oh Lord, my God, what is happening to our Black boys? Why is life dealing them such a daily blow? Why does each and every day bring a human tragedy? Who can explain the pain I suffer as a Black mother, seeing our Black boys die at the hands of a vicious society that perpetuates genocide upon our children for the sake of progress, the almighty dollar — dying from destructive media, music, drugs, poverty, and a blazing environment that is denigrating and inhumane, dying from a poor education, from an abusive system that blocks his entry into the human arena.

Black boy starts to pay from the day of conception. He comes out of his mother's womb fighting. His mother is fighting racism, discrimination, poverty, each and every day. Black boy has double trouble — the father's sperm is permeated with the pain he suffered from racism. Black boy lies in the womb suffering from that pain, but the rage lies dormant. The rage is sustained because the mother's rage is held hostage. The unborn fetus has no way of expressing this rage, because it is so warm and comfortable inside the womb. Black boy fetus makes a violent entry into a violent world, and the rage begins to surface.

Little by little, the rage evolves in full force. The violent society begins to react to his rage. The parents push back, the schools push back, the criminal justice system pushes back. The Black boy pushes back. The suppressive forces press harder and harder. The Black boy explodes. He is charged. Black boy — there is no justice for him. He does not act peacefully.

Black boy, Black boy, Black boy.