before/before

I was in Sudan this past February, on a boat in Sabaloga, cutting through the Nile and the early morning mist, blissfully unaware of the war that would take so much of the country just two months later. I pulled up the Notes app on my phone and, with my mother’s help, made a list I probably should have made years ago, answering a question I should have asked years ago: Who do I come from? 

My maternal grandfather was El-Tayeb Hassabelrasoul El-Kogali. A poet. His mother was named Fatima, and was Rubatabeya, from the Rubatab tribe. Her village of origin is, according to my notes, “somewhere North-ish.” My grandfather’s father was named al-Sharif, born and raised in al-Giref West, though his family base is in Imbeid, near al-Hassahissa. His lineage goes back to the Sufi sheikh and poet Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. 

My maternal grandmother is Habab Abdullahi Elfadil Elmahdi. Her mother, my great-grandmother, Munira, lived until 2009, so I got to spend a fair amount of time with her. Munira’s mother, my great-great-grandmother, was called Nena—a nickname. I know I should ask what her real name was, and write it down so I don’t forget. Nena’s mother was from Suakin. 

My great-grandfather Abdullahi’s mother was from al-Giteina (my notes say to double-check this with my grandmother), and his father, Elfadil, was assassinated by the British for being a descendant of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi, the son of a boat-builder from Dongola. 

All these names and places that I didn’t know until a few short months ago, that I didn’t think to ask for until a few short months ago. The fact of my not-asking, of not knowing for 32 years, reveals to me some of the strangeness in my thinking about lineage and ancestry, about what came before. 

***

I came to poetry as a teenager through slam and spoken word, community-oriented forms. The hermit-poet alone in the tower has never been my experience of poetry. Instead, my poetry life was, right from the beginning, crowded. A tradition of sold-out Tuesday nights at Busboys and Poets. You need other people to put on an open mic. You need other people to assemble a slam team. So the poetry of my early years was, by definition, a team sport.

I was a member of the DC Youth Slam Team from 2008 to 2010. Because of the uncertain nature of funding for the arts, the program bounced around from one host organization to another over the years before finally landing at Split This Rock a few years ago, long after I’d aged out. A beautiful outcome of the program’s lack of an institutional home during my time there was that the Youth Slam Team program belonged more to the DC poetry community in general than it did to any specific organization. We were everyone’s kids, mentored by an array of local poets and musicians who would stop by to hear our poems and set us writing prompts—Lisa Pegram, Asheru, Sage Morgan-Hubbard. Sage taught me I could just stand still at the microphone and speak clearly. Laini Mataka gave me a pair of her brightly embellished cowboy boots, which I still have and cherish 15 years later. These adults were like kindly visiting spirits who would drop by for a bit before returning to their world of grown-up poets. But the poets I spent the most time with, the ones who taught me the most, who shaped my tastes and ambitions, were my teammates, my cohort, my peers. These lateral mentors were my first consistent teachers. We were an often-unsupervised group of kids, obsessing over poems together. Whenever one of us learned something, we would bring it back to teach to the group. 

Years later, this is still how I operate. How do I submit to journals? I asked my friend Nate Marshall in the summer of 2014, at Cave Canem. Can I see your teaching statement? I ask him nine years later, while applying for jobs. What’s a double sonnet? I text the Team Mashallah group chat after first encountering the term on Twitter. Can someone give me a satisfying definition of ‘lyric essay’? How do I write a craft talk? Can I send you a draft of my manuscript? Can I send you a draft of a poem? Is this cover letter okay? Can I send you a draft of my syllabus? Can I wear leather pants to teach a class? 

My earliest teachers were those who walked and continue to walk beside me, who learn alongside me. In this way, my poetic lineage is situated not in the before, in the sense of being in the past. Instead, the poets I come from, are before me in the sense of being right in front of me, returning my gaze, answering my questions and asking their own.