AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin in Conversation with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America”)

In my country, you do not sell your home.

Esther Belin: Greetings from the four corners of the American Southwest. Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m guest editor, Esther Belin. We recently had some rain here in Durango, Colorado. Those of you who live in the desert areas know the amazing thrill of a recent rainfall. Moods are lifted, and all around there exists a unifying celebration of life. It’s with this energy that I invite listeners to my conversation with poet and scholar, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. And although our homelands are far from each other—Wesley’s in Liberia, and mine in Diné bikéyah of the Navajo people, we share a deep commitment to our roles as storytellers. Our writing bears witness to the effects of war and invasion in our homelands. Wesley, who now lives in Altoona, Pennsylvania, is a survivor of the civil war in Liberia, and much of her creative and scholarly work centers around that experience. We begin the conversation with the question, what do we carry from our life experience that guides or hinders our writing?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: What are you carrying? I’m carrying a whole world of ghosts. The ghosts of those that were massacred in my country. And the ghosts of all those massacred in senseless wars. It doesn’t hinder me, it inspires me, and it gives me energy. This morning, I listened to the newscast about the war in Europe. I heard a war plane or a missile go over Ukraine and explode on TV. And it reminded me of how many missiles flew over my house in 1990. So what drives me is to give voice to those that never survived. Or also to tell the story of war. So all of that is what gives me energy. I say that as long as I live, I’m going to write about the war.

Esther Belin: I think that’s a really powerful way to tell those stories through poetry. I do that as well, in my work, when I talk about issues that affect Native American tribes in the US. And I’m curious, you know, when did you know that you would need to leave Liberia? And at the time of all of that emotion, did you ever think that you would be going home, going back, returning?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: The war began in 1989. And we were determined not to leave Liberia. We didn’t know what war is like. And I will say that most Americans still do not know what it feels like. So we thought the war would be for a few weeks. I turned 35 in a refugee displace center in 1990. So I was a young professional. I was a professor at the University of Liberia. My husband and I, we had already studied at IU in Bloomington, Indiana, returning home in 1985. We had three little children, one turned five in a refugee displace center. One was six and a half, and the baby turned one. So we were a young family. We had just built our first house out of our salaries. And we were determined to make a life for ourselves in a very difficult time. Because we were being led by Samuel K. Doe, who was a former military man who had overthrown the government in 1980. So we were under a paramilitary kind of reign. We did not plan to leave. So we decided we’re gonna wait a war out, like some of the people in Ukraine today. We had this family, we had this life that we believed in. We even—I was thinking of people and the baby milk—we even stocked up on baby milk, baby formula. I remember carrying a whole suitcase of baby formula on the journey as we fled the house. And because I was afraid my little boy would die. We were afraid that if we fled and were crowded together in a camp, he could contract measles. Measles is a killer still in Liberia. So we did all the preparation to remain. We had one daughter, our oldest, who was born in the US, when we’re studying in Bloomington. The US Embassy made us register her. And then they wanted to evacuate her with one parent. And we didn’t see the anything humane in evacuating is six-and-a-half-year-old child and leaving behind the smaller children. So we refused. So it was in August of 1990, that Charles Taylor had already overrun the first suburb in Monrovia. And that suburb what was next to ours. So all of the shelling that was going to that suburb came to our neighborhood, because we were the next. So we fled on the 1st. And we didn’t go towards the city, we went towards the countryside. And the stories along the way are so horrible. I mean, we walk among the dead and people who had just freshly been killed. And we walked through rebel torture. We were forced to stay in muddy puddles, rain and shine, watch them execute people. And that’s why I want to record the war. Because many of those people have never been punished for opening up women’s bellies in front of us, pregnant women, and destroying their babies. We saw that. And we were in a display center for four months until the West African peacekeeping force liberated most of Monrovia and its suburbs. And then we returned to our suburb called Congo Town, to our home, to shattered buildings. That’s when we decided it was time to leave Liberia.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

One of the things that people don’t know about refugees of war, especially refugees of war, they want to return home. They want to go back home and fix the world that was devastated, that was shattered before their eyes. So when we came, we said we’re going back home in two years. And then the war went on for 12 more years. And little by little, we realized we had children. And we needed to raise in a civil environment. That was many years ago that we decided we were not going to go home the way we wanted to. But we encouraged our first son, who went back to Liberia 11 years ago and renovated our home, literally rebuilt it. And he’s refusing to leave. He’s still there. (LAUGHS) So we are happy that we have a little piece of us there.

Esther Belin: Thank you for sharing that. I think you make a really important point about that connection to home, especially when you are fleeing because of war. And I’m curious now, what was your childhood home like?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Oh, as a child, I think my childhood prepared me for the war. It prepared me for life. My mother had me as a teenager and dropped out of school in sixth grade. In those days sixth graders were old, so she was probably 17. Yeah. So, there was always a battle between my dad and her over custody, because he went on to college, he got a great life and did not marry her as he had promised. So when I was 11, my father sent me and my siblings by other women to the boarding school in his hometown. And it was like a boot camp. For three years I was banished in our little village from my uncles and aunts and my cousins, and I learned my language and my tradition and everything that is now important to my writing. So after three years, and I was brought back to the city, I moved in with my father. Finally my mom gave up. My life in my father’s house was difficult. My stepmom was very abusive. She was childless, and she had other people’s children live in house. And so, under her care, I learned how to work like a slave. And my father was too afraid to say anything. He preferred peace with her. But one of the things that he did was to inspire me to be strong, because he and his sisters were in school, but he never went far, his sisters never went far. But the men were valued. And so he got educated, and all his sisters were poor. And so he was determined that his daughters would be very educated. And so, in all of the abuse, I saw that my father was my biggest fan as a young writer. He bought me a typewriter because he said my fingers were hurting, at night I was writing with my hands. And he was my first fan. He would dance just to see a poem I wrote. If I burned the food writing a poem, nobody would whip me, because, “She wrote a poem! Can’t you see? She wrote a poem!” So that’s what my childhood was. I always wanted to be somebody because my stepmother said I was going nowhere. That’s a Liberian saying, “You going nowhere.” As men, you are never going to be anybody. So I always work harder, under trouble. My father had banned anybody from getting married without finishing college. So I graduated on a Wednesday, and I got married on a Friday the same week. (LAUGHS)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

I told him I will let him have 24 hours of post-graduation time. He was grumbling down the aisles, you know, “This is an insult to my life,” and I’m like, “Congratulations, I graduated two days ago.” (LAUGHING)

Esther Belin: Oh, wow. That’s a great story. Well, let’s hear you read some poetry now. Would you please read your poem, “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America”?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley:

(READS POEM)

Black Woman Selling Her Home in America

After the show, I can reenter my home
and take myself  back.
From room to room, I examine my home
              to see if the possible buyers
did not take a piece of shredded
carpet with them, did not pull down a window blind,
and yes, the television is still standing.

But through the box walls, I feel their fingernails
rising out of the corners of my rooms,
              their presence, these strangers, these spies,
these unknown people who have walked
through my home,
have touched my private places in my home,
done this abominable thing of touring

my bedroom, my sleeping place, where at night
I revisit my ancestors
over and over. My bedroom, where I can steal
              away at night and meet
my mother in the other world.
In my country, you do not sell your home.
You do not sell your home to strangers.

You do not move away so others can possess
your possessions. You plant feet
and umbilical cords deep. I have been
                            selling my home for a year now.
I have been selling myself for years now,
and my possible buyers do not seem to see
the house they cannot see.

Sometimes I wish my home was not as black
as me, that the skin
of my aluminum sidings were not gray
              or black like me. After the show,
I come back home, walking like a broken
woman. I walk in fearfully,
letting myself into my own home

in small particles of dust. I walk in like
you walk into a haunted house,
holding onto foot and arm. Sometimes, I can
              see their large eyes, these buyers, who
walk in with ugly coats, who come in,
their prying eyes, afraid something may spring
at them when they finally move into my home.

Esther Belin: That was so beautiful. The idea of home and the recreation of home is something I write about in my work as well. And I wonder how the concept of home is braided between your life here in the United States and Liberia?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Yes. I always say to people that home is, home never becomes. So for me, Africa and Liberia is home, in all of its ugliness, its struggles. But then there is that other home, which is America. It’s like an adoptive parent and the birth parents being in your life at the same time. So there is a special love, tenderness for America. I always believe that the greatness of America is not in the buildings, not in the politics, not in the wealth, but in a desire to help fleeing refugees and immigrants find a second life. Despite its own ugliness, its own racism, its own struggles to live with itself, America has been the home to refugees fleeing troubles for a very long time. And that, giving us back our lives, and tens of thousands of other Liberians, makes America also home.

Esther Belin: I really appreciate that, that definition, because I share a similar sentiment with the Navajo reservation, where you see a lot of the effects of the federal government and that, you know, cultural genocide. And you see it in the people and also in the land. But I think, for me, the same thing, it’s always home. And I’m curious now, when you started to write, how was it to tell your stories? And, I mean, because your stories are very—they reflect exactly as you witnessed. And it doesn’t seem like you have held back much. And so I’m curious how you’re telling these really intense stories through poetry. You know, did anything come up in that telling that surprised you?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Okay, fortunately, I began writing at 11. And then I began seriously writing at 13. And so, by the time the war came, I already knew the power of the pen, and the power of telling the truth. As I told you, I was an abused child. I recreated my world. I could recreate the villain. I killed the villain. (LAUGHS) So I always created stories where my stepmother was the devil, and that helped me gain power. And even when I was under great abuse, I saw her as the victim, because I could create her in the way I wanted her to be. And so by the time the war came, I was already writing. But also, as a child, I read poets who wrote about the war, like Nigeria’s John Pepper Clark, D.H. Lawrence, and other poets from the world wars were my favorites. So I knew the power of writing trauma as a child. So when the war began, I was writing short stories. And then I realized that I couldn’t write fiction on the run. I knew that you had to create your characters. So you had to remember your characters and their roles, and you have to organize yourself. You couldn’t lose track, and I couldn’t do it as a mother running with small children, a husband, my mom, and her children were 10 in our entire troop of people running together. And I thought, “No, I’m going to use poetry.” So for two reasons, I resorted to writing poetry almost altogether. I realized that also, I could not write about the gory details of the war. With prose, you have to. You have to show every little detail, the bloody details, with no metaphors, you had to write the story, clear and simple. With poetry, you can hide behind metaphors and similes. And then you could quickly write a poem, either on the bombing, fold the little paper, and hide it. And that’s what I did, because the rebels were looking for university professors and scholars and writers to execute. That’s when I resorted to only poetry for a very long time. So yes, I write … I write mostly what has happened. But even though I’m writing the truth, a lot of times I’m still hiding behind all of the tools that poetry gives. Or else it would be difficult to read my poems. And even though I think it’s difficult to read them as they are, but there’s a lot I’m not telling.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Healing Will Come: Elegy after Natural Disaster”)

always, somewhere,
there’s a day when healing comes.
Wasn’t this what life was supposed to bring,
after death, the healing?
Healing refuses to be lost to death,
I say, healing will come.

Esther Belin: Yeah, I was drawn to your poetry because it pulls in the reader using repetition in a natural, guiding way. That’s so lovely. I’m wondering, when, and in what ways have you nurtured a sense of belonging through your poetry?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Through my poetry to nurture others or nurture myself? Which one? Or both?

Esther Belin: I think both.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Well, one of the things that I inherited, or I learned from my father and my paternal grandfather, was a sense of belonging. Belonging to a place that once was. It reminds me of the Native American, where these people who have suffered such tragedies in world history, politically, have this sense of strength and belonging to a tribe, to a people, to a history, to a heritage. And that’s why I was taught that we are important that we belong to a great place. They instill it in you, and, and it doesn’t come from wealth or political influence. So I had this in me. And then having survived African childhood, which is a miracle—when you survive the African childhood, you are a walking miracle. Okay, so then I had this burden to carry the ghosts and the souls and the lives of hundreds of thousands that were killed in a very tiny country. And I felt like, I will still belong to this place, because I belonged to it. So I nurture that sense of belonging in myself and I nurture it in the young people who follow me, who allow me to mentor them, to help them see. When we teach young people who have been, especially in the social media age, who want to all be American or British or Western, or white, and you tell them, “You don’t have to write about Mount Everest.” I ask them, “Have you ever been there?” No, they laugh. “Then why are you writing a poem about Mount Everest? Don’t we have our own mountains and our own rivers, this is where we belong.” We have a proverb in Africa: If you don’t know where you come from, you will not know where you’re going. If you don’t know who you are, you will not know who others are. It starts with you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: The range of your creative and scholarly work explores trauma on several levels. I’m wondering, how do you take care of yourself doing this work?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Well, I take good care of myself. I learned that 20, 24 years ago. It is difficult to be a woman, a mother, the wife of an African man, and I always say African, capitalized African. The African man believes that a woman was created to serve him, to have his babies. If she happens to be educated, well, good for her, or bad luck for her. She gonna have to take care of everything alone. But I married one of the best. But yet he is African, because his parents didn’t—I used to joke to him and say, “Do you want to call them to boil the water first, before you will be boiling water?” You know, one day I started boiling water, the whole pot was black. (LAUGHS) So for a long time, I used to take care of everybody, and never about myself. And then once we had an African friend from Nigeria, originally from Nigeria, my husband’s roommate from college visiting. And he saw me, I was studying, I was doing my PhD after 40, because as a refugee, survivor of war, I realized I didn’t want my kids to grow up poor. So I said, I will go to school, I’ll have two salaries and go back and get my doctorate. So I was working as a grad student and studying and writing. I had a book out. Reading poetry, cooking, cleaning, doing everything. And one day this guy was visiting and he said he was advising my husband. He says, “You know, I live in Rhode Island and people celebrate your wife. You have to take good care of her.” And my husband is sitting there, he’s a nice guy, but he’s also gets, like the African pride, gets upset when another man is advising. So he says, “Why don’t you tell her?” So what the guy said, “Did you hear him? You have to take care of yourself.” So I said, “I hear you.” So when he left I went to the store, and I bought some big pots, big pots. Very big pots, like 34 quart pots. And I bought dozens of plastic storage bowls. And I bought a lot of food. And my husband said, “Are you having a party?” I’m like, “Yes, the party for the rest of my life.”

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: I started cooking, I cooked food that will feed 50 people. And when it cooled I would pack them in a bowls and label the bowls with a date and the name of the food. Different sauces. And then I went and got us freezers. I said, “We’re going to shop for freezers.” He said, “We don’t have money.” I said, “We have it.” I bought freezers for storing food. Then I call a meeting with my husband and I’m like, “Everybody in this family who is more than 14, 14 and up, will be doing their own laundry. Nobody’s clothes should be seen on the laundry room floor, or it will be thrown outside.” And the children are looking at me like, “Mommy?!” I’m like, “Shut up. This is a dictatorship.”

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: So everybody’s like, that’s 16, I said, I can train you. And then my husband said, “What about me?” I said, “Are you 14?” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “You’re doing your own laundry.” And then I started, I started shopping for my clothes in Goodwill. I started seriously walking, three, four days a week and watching my health. And that is the end of the story. I still do today. My house is full of—they’re gone but I have food for weeks. I have two big freezes. I don’t cook every day. I write when I want to write. They all came home for Thanksgiving. My daughter brought her Danish boyfriend. So everybody’s downstairs looking for breakfast. I’m in bed sleeping at 10 o’clock in the morning. So my daughter knocks on the door, because she lives in Denmark, I should be happy to be fixing her breakfast. So she walks in, she said, “Mom, do you sleep in these days?” I said, “Yes, I sleep in these days.” She said, “But we here now.” I said, “Girl, we have food in his house like we are at war. Go downstairs, in the freezer there’s a lot of food. If you run out of food, you can start eating the furniture.” And I cover myself up. Her boyfriend, Danish boyfriend went in the fridge, got some Africans sauce for the peppers. He warmed up his own food. He started eating it, and my sons followed, then my daughter followed. By the time I got downstairs there was no food. Everybody had eaten something. Then my daughter said, “Mom, you have changed!” As a girl, I started changing years ago, I have completed my change. I am a new person. So I take care of myself. I exercise every night. I listen to music a lot. I mentor lots of young people that keep me young. And I eat mostly African foods. It eat one hamburger a year and maybe a hot dog twice a year.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS) I love that. Thank you for sharing your self-care manual. I think we all needed to hear that.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Yeah, thank you.

Esther Belin: I appreciate it. It’s been such a pleasure getting to know you better and to really see how our lives and our writing really intertwine. I think there’s a lot of similarities there. Again, I am so pleased to feature your work in this issue. It is, it’s really important.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: It’s my honor. It’s my honor.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: A big thanks to Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Wesley is the author of many books of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, and When the Wanderers Come Home. You can read two poems by Wesley in the June 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. If you’re not yet a subscriber of Poetry magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetry magazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetry magazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)