This is Major

Professor Shayla Lawson and Sonya Clark '89

Sonya Clark: It’s my honor today to have a conversation with Shayla Lawson who came to Amherst as a writer in residence and director of creative writing in 2018. And then in 2020 she became an assistant professor of English. And she quotes, this is coming from her bio, she “does that with an emphasis on creative writing and literature courses that focus on contemporary poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid literary forms”. So Shayla is many, many, many things, like more than I could possibly fit into an introduction, So here are just a few: she's an award winning poet who has published three collections; she's a former architect; she's been a senior level copywriter for brands such as Nike and Google; she's worked with an an apothecary to bring her words into their sensory experience; she even created and toured with a cover band called the Oceanographers to bring to life the music of Frankie Ocean. 

So, Shayla’s writing spans music, journalism, black culture, and pop critique. All of these things feature prominently in the essay collection we're going to talk about today and that collection is called, This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope. 

Shayla exemplifies liberal arts and I'm so pleased to have her as a colleague. So welcome Shayla. I just want to thank you for this conversation already, and… and thank you personally. Your book was one of the things that has brought me equilibrium in this incredibly intense year. How are you holding up? 

Shayla Lawson: I'm doing pretty good. Thank you so much Sonya. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I’m just really happy to see that we have survived this far into what was a very harrowing year for each of us individually and then all of us collectively. So…

SC: Yeah! Yeah! So you know writers have done a lot of the heavy lifting now. They just have, like I said to help me keep my equilibrium but to keep us all sort of in focus on the things that are going on in this world. I'm curious so the book came out in 2020 but nobody knew that 2020 was going to be quite like this. So when did you start it, and then what does it mean for it to come out in this [inaudible] moment?

SL: I started writing the book of 2017. We sold it in 2018. In terms of the moment, I… I couldn't have necessarily predicted that it was going to come out in the midst of a summer in which the issues that the book deals with, revolving around race and toxic systems, I couldn’t have predicted that we would also be in the midst of a pressure cooker where a lot of people were starting to reexamine their relationship to those kinds of things. But I think it's also predictable because especially when we think about the culture that is Amherst and the generation that is coming up. It's a generation that does not tolerate misogyny or a lack of equity. And because of that, it or our devotion to a patriarchal capitalist system, so because of that, because of that demand for more, for greater responsibility on behalf of all culture to recognize and represent more people, I think that it was bound to be time for a book like this to you know, to hit at a time in which it was something on people's broad consciousness. And not just the idea of like some marginal or niche part of our community.

SC: I keep thinking that it's timely but I can't think of a time in my lifetime when your… this book wouldn't have been timely.

SL: Very true. 

SC: I’m horrified that When This is Major would not have been major.

SL: Yeah. Now, like it's not just, you know the lifetimes of like you and I. It's like the lifetimes of more people as well. Cos for us yeah like I know I could have written this… it wouldn't have been as good, but I could have written this book in 2005. You know I could have written this book in any part of my life, and it would have been timely for me. Or for people like me and you. But I love the fact that it's also a conversation that is now timely for more… for more of us. Yeah.

SC: Right. Right. That’s true. That's true. So, I wanna… can we just dig into the title of the book, you know, This is Major. It really is. So, tell us a little bit about I mean, I think the title of the book speaks for itself, but can you tell us a little bit more about it? How you chose it?

SL: Yeah. So, I… sorry I'm hesitating, because typically I'm wearing, I'm actually wearing the necklace that inspired the book. And for some reason today I was like no I do this in every interview so why not you know, take a day off. But I created some years ago a necklace that said ‘major’ because of the ways that I felt marginalized and distant in the community that I was living in at the time. I wanted it as a reminder to myself of what it meant for me to be here you know. And to survive every day. It was also a time in which I had been listening to public radio, and in there… I was in Portland and there's a radio station called KBOO that still independent and very antiestablishment and political. And one of my favorite shows, one of the hosts mentioned the idea that he refuses to accept being called a minority anymore. That he, his…his response to that is the idea that we are not a minority culture. The idea that people of color, the contributions of black indigenous and, you know people across the wide spectrum of what we think of as color are marginalized or minority individuals is a false protection for a culture that is dying. And because of that I started thinking about and I started thinking about Major and the idea of what that means to be something like that. Since I'm a musician, you know I think a lot about major keys and the ways that those are more positive and optimistic. Also being a black woman, I think about how often we show up in the context of like movies and literature in art itself as best supporting characters as opposed to the lead role. And I wanted to write a book that reinserted us into that that lead role because we can read ourselves into literature. We can read books that might have a black woman as their main character but who does the story serve? If the story is still serving a white conception of what it's like to participate in black culture or it's a voyeuristic look at how black people approach aspects of white culture, then are we really bringing ourselves into the dominant narrative? And you know it also ties itself to the quote that Toni Morrison had where she says, “Racists always believe that they are the majority but they never are.” And especially since I was wrapping up the book at a time where Toni Morrison had left us in this physical face, I felt it was also important to recognize that so much of the feeling that I get involving what my responsibility is to literature came from her, as someone who fought so hard to make sure that she could write narratives that focused on black people and did not center that within the context of how they felt or how they related to white culture. And you know all of those things are how we got to the title you know, This Is Major. Initially I just wanted it to be called Major but that caused all sorts of issues, like you know is it supposed to be about the military?

SC: Right. Right.

SL: Is it about, like enrolling in undergrad? Like what is the deal? So, This Is Major became the solution.

SC: I love that. I love the reference to music. I love the reference to Toni Morrison, who did not ask my permission to become an ancestor. But maybe she can wield more power. And I just love the way that this book centers black girls and black women in all of our complexity. Like there's no way that it… there's this way in which the book is full of surprises, if you come at it with specific expectations. Like you're constantly shifting and saying and also, I am this, and also here I am over here. And so, it's just this beautiful, full of humanity and full of complexity and that itself is major. I love that you even honor like the fullness of blackness. You have this quotation where you say, “I wake up every morning that knowing there is a black too cool for even me to know about which makes me happy.” I love that you're just like you know you're bringing forth all of this fullness of culture like there's so many cultural references in there right and so that that could be played as, the kind of cool but you're just like you know I might be cool but there is so much coolness in this culture that even I can't wrap my hands around it. So, deal with that. And I just love that! I love that play. I'm curious about what books… you mentioned Toni Morrison, the late great Tony Morrison, what books did for you? What you hope this book will do for others?

SL: I'm going to get the title wrong but I'm thinking about Sleeping Next to the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen. I'm getting some of the articles in that title wrong I know. But that that was one of the books. And really Harryette Mullen’s work in general I love. Gloria Naylor 'cause Gloria Naylor feels like you're listening into like some really good gossip, you know. Like you're just standing outside my apartment to be like… next to me the elevator, sometimes I can hear people fight, in the elevator. And I'm like “Ooh what's going on?” You know Gloria Naylor feels like that, when it comes to how she writes about intimacy and black culture. Angela Davis, particularly her interviews. I think about Assata Shakur. I think about Harryette Mullen and her book Our Nig, which is you know I talk about in A Black Girl Gets [inaudible] chapter. It’s kind of like one of the… it was the first book published by an African American in the United States, but you know of any gender; of… goodness I could go on forever. I think about Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. And, I mean, I can do this for a long time 'cause it's…

SC: Wait. Wait. So my point in asking this question…yeah I'm interrupted you 'cause you're just like all the books.

SL: I'm like what didn't? You know. Like yeah. I would never have become a writer if it wasn't the place where I could go and… and see myself you know. I couldn't …I grew up in a community, I grew up in a small town, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. I grew up in a predominantly white town with predominantly white schools. I didn't grow up with a good sense of who I was in relation to culture, so books were my way of creating that for myself.

SC: Yeah, and so that… that helpful little piece sort of answers this question, like one of the things that you hope that this book will do for others, right, you know. And… and also say that it belongs to this long legacy of what black women's writing has done, right? And what it has done for each other. Like, again it speaks to the fullness and the complexity. 'Cause all of those authors and thinkers that you mentioned, there's not one pulse point. Those are all facets of a big, huge diamond, that is us, you know. And so I would say that This Is Major has made yet another facet of the huge rock that is us. 

SL: I hope so Sonya [inaudible]

SC: No, I’m telling you like there were things about your book that made me laugh out loud, made me laugh in like chuckle, in irony, you know like made me go and look up some things and listen to some music I haven't listened to in a little while. And so, I wanted… I wanted to talk about the music part because but first of all you wrote a book of essays. This is your first book of essays, right? So, I want to ask you about the shift between writing poetry to writing a book of essays. So that's the first thing, or the next thing I want to ask you about. But then I also want to attend to music and knowing that you have this musicality, the book to me was like a compilation album. You know like I'm married to a musician, so the thing is when you put an album together like you bring them in with this, you take it down to that, you put it to this, and then you move it here and you end there. So, it has this shape. Now any, of course any writer would say that what they're writing has a shape, but in a book of essays, it really felt like songs that are put together in an album. So, maybe you can attend to that. Both the… of the idea of writing a book of essays and also maybe it's connection to music. If this idea of a compilation album even holds. You know an album …

SL: It really does. I definitely think about books as albums, and it's a quote that I’ll steal from a friend of mine Mitchell H. L. Douglas is a poet as well. I remember years ago he… he said to me, I remember him saying that you know, in order to …to publish a book you know like you have to think about a book and poetry as like publishing your singles before you can actually get an album. Like publishing the individual pieces so I definitely took that and like expanded it to think about the way that books are composed as similar to the ways that we think about composing an album and structuring it. So, major has an arc in which there are three poems that acts as the beginning, middle and end. Which also give it a… a major sense of musicality, because your experience is punctuated by these places where you have to change the way that you read or think about pace in order to participate in them. ‘Cos you know you're going along and you know read, read, read, read, read, and it's like, oh well here's a poem or here is a chart that is supposed to you know represents a poem. Now I have to change the way that my ear is paying attention to these things and throughout the journey of the book I continued to call back to certain ideas or sounds. So the ways that the essays are structured is so that there are these callbacks to ideas that happened previously. Like there's a mention, you know and these are things that people might… that are very… they're very subtle but it …it kind of lends itself to the way that anaphora repetition often appears in albums that you'll see the return of a phrase, you know the memory of a phrase whether that be a music note or verse that comes back in another part of the album to kind of give you that link between how they're connected. So a good example of that is, for instance, like in Black Girl Hipster I make this joke about the child watching Roots for the first time and how like it's a really harrowing experience, but then again it's like, yeah but after that you're supposed to still be in bed by like 9:00 o'clock, you know. Don't cry kid. Here's a bag of Cheetos. And then the Cheetos come back in intraracial dating where there is this couple, and the boy refers to the girl that he's trying to break up with, it’s his way of, like, you’re… I'm more like hot Cheetos and you're more like you know somebody I don't want to be with anymore. As like this connection between these cultural references and it's something that you know it's a little bit of a higher-level thought. It's not something I expect people to necessarily pick up on. But I think it's something that composers do as well is that, musically when you're attuned to these ideas, you're thinking about these structures that might not be obvious to people when they're…they’re listening but that are very intentionally placed there in order to… to connect these references. So, for me the connection of that reference is that you know part of why the chapter interracial dating is important because it looks at why culturally black people have been pulled apart from each other and from the possibility of a partnership in community. And so, we call back to a reference that is specifically traumatizing that a lot of black children go through which is looking at you know being told this is your history as an African American, or as a person of the diaspora. Like a part of your history involves, you know members of your family being sent across these on slave ships and being subjugated and so how that continues to affect the ways that we look at each other in intimate spaces, you know. Again, like is that necessarily the connection that people are making when they read those two passages? Probably not. But that's… a lot of that kind of thinking is laced in there and that thinking I consider you know very musical. I feel like it's something that Derek also, you know thinks about in his work.

SC: I…I think that one of the beautiful things about the musicality both in…both in the pros and the structure is that, whether or not people catch that in their deep reading or not, it's still tickling the back of your mind. Like I've seen this before and it makes you feel like you it… it… it… actually forms a sort of intimacy with the book. Like you know, like… like, wait I think I know something about this. This sounds familiar. Conscious or unconscious it does something quite generous to invite the reader in a way of saying yeah… yeah… yeah, you saw this in a different version before. Yeah. And so now you're gonna get… now there's a little bit more complexity. And it's a very generous thing to do as a writer because it requires a lot of complexity to do it, and without doing it in a heavy-handed way. Like, remember this wink, wink. 

SL: Hi!

SC: There’s a way that you can use humor subtly and there's a way that you… you use humor throughout the book. And I… I do think that there's a way in which humor is… is such a powerful tool because it can… your humor and your voice can hold this sort… this sort of sharp contours and contrast, and… and tell hard truths at the same time. So one of the things that I like there's… there's so much unspoken voice in… in the world, but somehow within this book you're getting to this space of like word play and a side eye at culture, you know. And irony and then and then getting a chuckle that lets the truth in. Like the chuckle gives space for that truth to enter in that might be a difficult pill to swallow. Like I was thinking very early on in the book you… you talk about you talk about the American Girl series, you know and I was just looking it up because, I wasn't planning to ask you about this in particular but… but this idea of when you when you mentioned Roots, it made me think about the American Girl series. So I want you to talk a little bit about that, about how consumer at…how consumersism and propaganda work to try and frame who we are, and how we are in the world, and how you bust through that.

SL: And I love that you brought it up because that essay actually came as a result of a conversation that I had with an Amherst student.

SC: Oh lovely!

SL: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The book initially…so the introduction was one of the last things that I wrote to the book. And you know… 'cause the book initially the books art was supposed to be the three poems, beginning, middle and end. And we were talking…you know, me and  the editors were talking about the fact that it needed some… some kind of text to… to introduce people to the idea of this. And instead of like doing a kind of standard introduction I decided to make it another essay. And I had… one of the students that I was mentoring at the time for a thesis we started talking about you know as black girls growing up with American girl dolls and that idea that neither one of us I really wanted a slave doll.

SC: I'm not a slave why do I want one?

SL: Why do I …you know… and how we felt conflicted culturally about the idea that…

SC: What was her was her name again? Addy?

SL: Addy Walker.

SC: Yeah. Addy Walker. Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

SL:  You know beautiful name and beautiful doll like it's a really gorgeous doll. In one of the places that I came to in the midst of writing the essay which came out of reading the work of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote the indigenous people’s history of America, is the reason why you know innately, intrinsically as a child, I did not want to play with a slave doll. The reason why I did not want to play with a slave doll had a lot to do with also the ways that Black pop culture has been corrupted or manipulated to support the idea of a white patriarchy. So, in the indigenous peoples history of America, one of the things that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks about is the stories that we tell ourselves about who indigenous people are as Americans. And the idea for instance that they were given reservations, or that they have been given money as reparations for the land that was taken. We never look at the fact that there were 12,000 tribes, millions of cultures you know that were erased, that were massacred in order for us to be here. 

SC: And how can you give someone something that was theirs?

SL: That was theirs.

SC: I'm gonna take your stuff and then give you some and call it a gift.

SL: Right and so that was the issue you know that… that I had as a child. That you know is the idea of how can you give someone freedom? How can you say that you gave a young girl her freedom? Because it was never yours to take away. You never owned her body. And so, to perpetuate the idea for children that bodies can be owned, that their bodies can be owned. That the… the bodies of children that were born before them and that are in their historical legacy can be something that is owned was what we were bucking against and not the doll itself, you know. It wasn't even like you know a lack of ability to accept a place in which that was part of our history. It was the idea of like why would I want to perpetuate this as a belief system when it's false. You can't… you can't own the land and you can't own peoples’ bodies. And the fact that we have been indoctrinated into a culture that teaches us that those are two things that are real, is something that we are now trying to reeducate ourselves against. But I think you know for… for some of us that begins with as children. We're like wait a minute some of this is not coming together… adding up right.

SC: Yeah. And also like be grateful. Be grateful for the reservation. Be grateful for the freedom. It's just like wait, but the land was already… and the freedom was ours. So you took something. You know.

SL: You took something. And again, you know how insidious it is. Because like what… what kind of… what does playtime look like with the slave doll? Like what are the things you can play with the doll that is a slave? And how does that perpetuate for a young black person or anybody who owns a doll that a black person is meant to exist in these… these places of servitude? That…that is… that is your role. Like that is your historical role. That is your purpose. And that… is this right?

SC: Yeah. And then who was the doll marketed for? And then whose hands does it end up in? Because it was quite expensive. I'm a little older than you are, so the American dolls who came out after I was you know, a girl but you know it's just like wait so who's playing with these dolls and to what end?

SL: I know. It’s also a little creepy.

SC: It’s a little problematic. 

SL: Who’s got an Addy doll? 

SC: It's almost like you wanna go to all these households and like liberate Addy from some households. 

SL: It’s also interesting that you say that because another thing that I don't talk about, but all are thinking much in the book, is that they also tried to release after…I can’t remember, I think it was after Addy that they released a doll that was Creole. And not you know, looking at how Creole culture was a part of Black culture that that had some money, you know that had some pretty clothes, that had a different story. You know it had a story of autonomy and they took the doll off the market after less than a year which had to be because they couldn't sell it. Which means that people were willing to buy into the Addy doll as a story, as a narrative that they would continue to perpetuate, but they were not willing to buy a doll that created a different depiction of what Black history in this country

SC: Yeah. Who had agency. Right. Exactly.

SL: Yeah. You know.

SC: Yeah. That is actually drawing me to another quick moment in the book, the…The Princess and the Frog.

SL: Oh, I love that. 

SC:  That busted…I busted out laughing. You were just like, she didn't even get a prince?

SL: She didn’t get a prince!

SC: She gets a frog!

SL: He’s a frog! He’s cutoff. He’s not even a prince anymore. You know, she is trying to run her business. Like literally trying to run a business. 

SC: But so is…I mean the reason… I mean the reason it’s funny. And this is what I mean, it's like the irony of it and the truth slipped in. You know like this notion of how like Disney saying, oh good on us. You know good for us for this representation. This is like, what are you representing though? And why is that being set up as a parallel to these other representations you know?

SL: Yeah.

SC: So, OK, I know we're coming close to the end and I cannot leave us without talking about color. Because my friend, I remember you saying to me once, I had an orange coat and you said, “I love orange”. Orange, what did you say? Something like orange is more than a color, it's like an attitude or an emotion. Do I have that right?

SL: Yeah. I do think that orange is an emotion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

SC: And so, I wanna… I wanna… I want to talk about the use of color in the book. Of course, of course blackness in all of its complexity there's a whole there's a whole chapter about… about the different words used to describe what blackness is overtime. It's an interlude I believe. Is that right? And… and so there's all of that. There's also you know censoring blackness of the color as a consciousness, race. But also, all the references to color from the hot pink and yellow cover, that itself feels like music. You know like I can't look at those colors without having a sort of synesthetic experience.

SL: Yeah. 

SC: Ntozake Shange’s

SL: For Colored Girls. Yeah.

SC: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuff, and here we share some territory 'cause I've made some work on that piece, and you grew up, like you probably have the whole play memorized.

SL: I am actually wearing my… like I was Lady in Blue. Like this is The Lady In Blue yeah like that was my… my… my throwback today. It was…

SC: That's beautiful! That's beautiful. So, I'm so glad that I'm bringing this up in and then and then you describe the book itself as, “The color of this book is Grace Jones strapped into an electric socket.” And if there is…what a visual image. 

SL: Yeah.

SC: And knowing that you have also I made that beautiful chapbook called Pantone, just I… I just wanted to give you a moment just to address color in the book before we, before we come to our final few moments together. It’s a big topic I know.

SL: Yeah. I've been like OK, let's just get into it. I don't know who said it but, there was the poet that I saw a post one time about how Black girls invented the color yellow. 

SC: I love that too.

SL: I love that. I love thinking about color. I think especially when I was a girl it was something that I had to reclaim 'cause I grew up in a time where there weren't a lot of visual images, positive visual images related to Black women. And Black women as in esthetic and one of the excuses you know which we know is farcical at this point, but you know I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and like really excuses that were used at the time was the idea that, oh you know, we don't put Black women on the cover of magazines, or we don't use them as models because their skin doesn't work well with color. 

SC: Again… again, like I hear your beautiful melodious laugh on this because it's just like, we wear all the color well. Like…

SL: You know which goes with pretty much every color? Brown! And so in hearing that like, it kind of became my spiritual calling because I feel very attached to color as an artist and as a [inaudible]. And so, as, since I chose writing as my primary medium, I find all the ways that I possibly can to bring color into that experience. And how we can think about color differently. And so with the book you know how do Black girls shape color? Not just the idea of looking at us is this very monolithic depiction of blackness? But how are… are we of color? You know like girls, what it means to be a person of color because there's such a wide range in what we look like and how we inhabit and embody different aspects of that color in our shades and then how we exhibit that, you know like the peacocks, in the ways in which we adorn ourselves. And I wanted the book to filled with as much of that adornment as possible. I’m a really big fan of synethesia. I don't know whether I have it or not, but I definitely try to write it into…

SC: I can’t even imagine having read your work that you're not an aesthete. I actually think that were born synesthetes and… and some of it leaves us because again, it's not encouraged. I think about that I think most people are born naturally creative and artistic and also those things get shed away because they're not they're not encouraged. So I want to end with this beautiful notion thinking about Ntozake Shange’s work, thinking about the fullness of color. Like just the, you know we… we think about the rainbow, and we can name colors but of course we know the rainbow is every color and every shade blending into the next and that kind of fullness is the kind of fullness that I experienced in reading this book. And I hope others will have the opportunity to read it too. Because somehow you managed to get a lot in 298 pages and… and when and what… but what you left us with, what you left me with is this sense of like, we're all of this and we're so much more as well. So thank you Sheila. I'm not sure if there's anything else that you want to add to the conversation? If there's something I didn't ask you that you want to address this would be the time.

SL:  I just want to say thank you to Amherst and thank you to all the Amherst students because I I wrote this book at Amherst. I wrote this book during my first two years there and it has… it has you all over it you know. It has your love and your support and your… your vision of a better world. And it's something that I really, really treasure about getting to work with Amherst students and faculty.

SC: I know they're really amazing. We’re really well … we’re…Amherst is lucky to have you.

SL: And you as well Sonya. 

SC: I am grateful to be in this space with you Shayla. So, thank you. Thank you.