Source : the age
Aja Monet’s college report said she’d “walk through snow in flip-flops to get to a poetry reading”. That was before jazz gave her words wings. The Brooklyn poet’s recorded debut with trumpeter Chief Adjuah earned a Grammy nomination in 2024.
Her imminent Australian tour follows her second, The Color of Rain, co-produced with Meshell Ndegeocello and Justin Brown. With guests including singer Georgia Anne Muldrow and harpist Brandee Younger, it draws soul and hip-hop into conversations about love, resistance and defending your place in the world.
“You gotta remember yourself,” she says. “You have to remember who you are, what you’re worth, what your value is.”
Worst habit?
I can get into places where I’m not really taking care of myself in terms of eating, or what I’m ingesting into my body. When I’m on tour, one of my bad habits at one point was drinking a lot to try to cope with the travel and meeting so many different people and having to kind of be “on” all the time. You go through these really intense bouts of emotion when you’re on stage, and then you have this exhaust of a high after, where you don’t know what to do with it. I know how to disrupt the habit. I’m self-aware enough to know when something is becoming so habitual to the point where it’s negative.
Greatest fear?
Probably not being able to face myself, to not be able to look in the mirror and know who’s there. I think it has to do with the society and the conditions that we live in, where you’re being pulled in so many directions, and groupthink is a thing. You know, people want to belong. And that can sometimes cloud our judgement in how we move through the world. It can alter our sincerity. It can drastically shape the places that we find ourselves in, and the relationships that we find ourselves in.
The line that stayed with you?
“If you want to see how ugly the world is, place something beautiful in it.” My Pops [poet/teacher Abiodun Oyewole] said this to me many, many, many years ago when I was a teenager, and it’s never left me. He’s an elder from the group The Last Poets. It’s a line that I return to, if not every day, definitely every week.
Biggest regret?
I’m not someone that really enjoys the word regret. I just never felt like regret quite fit the feelings that I had. Regret doesn’t allow me to make room for the fact that I was meeting the moment how I knew to meet it. In the moment, I may be like, “Damn, Aja, you did that. Why didn’t you think about it another way?” But if I live long enough to wake up to see another day, I can do something different.
I can move differently with that awareness. I’ve never fully regretted anything. I think I’ve learned. I appreciate the lessons of every experience. I don’t know how you move forward without that forgiveness. Those moments where you’re like, “Damn, why did I do that?” are invitations for inquiry. I am very curious about my mishaps, my missteps in life.
Tell us about your turning point…
The first time I ever did a performance for an audience of people I did not know was at St Mark’s Church [the Bowery, New York] at age 15 or 16. I went there for a poetry slam with Urban Word NYC. It was my first time performing a poem in front of strangers, where they were judging my poetry, and I did not win. I left a loser in terms of the competition, but a winner in terms of the family and the community and the world and tribe that I discovered that day. That’s when I knew: I’m going to do this for the rest of my life. These are the type of people I want to be around. This is the world I want to live in. I was on fire. I was excited and ecstatic and there was no turning back. I recognised that I was part of a tradition.
The artwork or song you wish was yours?
There’s a Jacques Coursil record called Trails of Tears, and every time I listen to that record, I wish that I could play the horn. It makes me wish I was a musician. Especially living through multiple genocides at this time, you wonder what your art can do. If I could make my poems feel the way that record makes me feel, I would feel meaningful. I would feel like I did what I was supposed to do here. It tells a story. Words come to me, and it makes me want to write. It makes me want to do with words what his horn does.
If you could time travel, where would you choose to go?
If I could time travel, I would go back to the time of the first heartbeat.
Aja Monet is at Max Watt’s, Melbourne, October 22; Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, October 25.
