Ajanaé Dawkins takes a more empathetic view of the past in ‘Blood-Flex’

Years ago, poet and artist Ajanaé Dawkins started work on a chapbook titled Heirs in which she began to unpack her matrilineage. 

“I had a deep fixation with witnessing the women in my life, the women who raised me, and seeing their interiority and their relationship with the world, and then thinking about our relationship,” said Dawkins, who eventually scrapped this original collection as she began to reassess the power she had as the writer in terms of framing these family stories, as well as the ways in which she might have absolved herself in these initial tellings. “There’s … a poem by Louise Gluck called ‘The Untrustworthy Speaker,’ and in it she writes, ‘I never see myself standing on the front steps holding my sister’s hand. That’s why I can’t account for the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends.’ And I think that’s such a beautiful encapsulation of the inability to see yourself when your lens is always pointed at someone else.”

And yet, the concepts Dawkins initially explored within those earlier poems continued to tug at her as the years passed, particularly as she engaged in running conversations with the women in her family that over time have granted her greater empathy for the things they experienced.

“I say all the time, life humbled me real bad,” said Dawkins, whose perspective first began to soften early in college when she reached the age at which her mom gave birth to her. “My mom … took her finals early because she was nine months pregnant, and I’m walking around this campus with two brain cells, acting the plum fool, partying every weekend, skipping classes because I was out until 4 a.m.”

In the course of this personal reevaluation, the poet also began to take a bigger-picture view, considering the impacts of the early glamorization of womanhood – “There’s a consistent ritual of young girls wearing their mother’s clothes, slipping into their heels,” she said – and the ways aspects of this begin to crumble as an awareness of systemic inequities sets in. 

“As you get older, you become aware of the tensions, the systemic violence, the social issues that start to come up as your body develops, the way you’re treated differently,” said Dawkins, who brings a more grown perspective to the ideas first surfaced in Heirs with her just-released chapbook, Blood-Flex, which the poet will celebrate with an online launch party today (Monday, May 12). “Maybe you start to see the ways your mother or grandmother are treated differently, the ways marriages are unequal, the kinds of domestic violences that take place. And that glamour kind of comes off, and it shifts and becomes something different right as you are stepping into what will eventually be womanhood.”

Dawkins interrogates this process by engaging in a bit of time travel within Blood-Flex, revisiting herself as a young girl to explore how early conceptions of beauty curdled her sense of self in childhood (“Bait Fishing”), the disorienting sensation of “growing a new body overnight,” and the ways she played dress up with her mother’s clothes and makeup in the decades before she began to see the elder surfacing in her behaviors (“Girlhood Ritual #7). 

There are also mea culpas for perceived past cruelties (“Final Poem for My Mother”) and a greater interest in and acceptance of those in the poet’s family tree who have imprinted themselves on her in ways both visible and unseen. “Who is galloping through my blood?” she writes at the onset of one verse.

“And I think that’s a more recent development, within the last few years,” Dawkins said of this growing awareness that she is in many ways a product of those who came before, and which she has seen reflected in everything from the revelation that one of her late grandmother’s was also a poet (“I was like, ‘Girl, what?’”) to her own budding realization that she has started to become her mother. “When I was younger, I would say, ‘I’m nothing like my mother but I’m exactly like my father.’ But the older I get, I’m like, ‘Oh, God. I am my mother’s child.’ … The more responsibilities I have, the more likely I am to open my mouth and sound just like her, like, ‘I just want a clean house.’ It’s an ever-evolving thing where in the different scenarios, contexts, and phases of my life, I see different people who have made me, whether they are alive or not, coming out in my features, in the way I sound, in my anxieties, in the things I care about, and in the ways I love.”

Growing up, Dawkins considered herself an observant child – “Observant is just a kinder, gentler way of saying nosy, right?” she said, and laughed – and it wasn’t until she reached her early 20s that she realized there was information available to her that couldn’t be gleaned from being in possession of a keen eye. “Because I was a witness, and nosy, I mistook that for knowing,” she said. “And I didn’t ask my elders, who had this wide breadth of experience, about the things that shaped them, and about their lives and their own interiority.”

This began to shift when at age 21 she interviewed her great grandmother, selections from which featured in “No One Teaches Us to Be Daughters,” Dawkins’ 2024 exhibition at Urban Arts Space. And it has since carried over into running conversations with her aunt and mother, giving shape to poems such as Blood-Flex’s “At 27, I’m the first person to ask my mom how she felt being pregnant in college,” which emerges as a revealing moment of both witness and validation. 

“Anytime someone is trying to drop some new information familywise, I’m like, yes, let me know who was where and how do they feel and what happened,” said Dawkins, who credited an internal shift with enabling her to take a more generous view of the past than she had in years prior. “I grew up in the Pentecostal Black church, where there’s a deep fixation on generational curses. … And that is a very specific lens to always be looking at the people who came before you, where it’s like, how will I not make the mistakes you made? And part of the shift was me really thinking about all of the really beautiful things that I feel like I inherited and realizing those are far more valuable than anything else.”