Poetry for a World on Fire: an Interview With Aja Monet

“Who’s got time for poems when the world’s on fire?” asks Aja Monet in the heart-achingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly honest ‘For Sonia.’ Her answer, it becomes clear, is that it is precisely when the world’s on fire that the movement, such as it is, needs the nourishment and meaning and soul that poetry provides more than ever. But Monet will not offer words to comfort and soothe at the expense of truth. “These days it hurts to write,” the track continues, “Every sentence is a false promise.”

Her debut album, 2023’s outstanding ‘When the Poems Do What They Do’ is a phenomenal emotional journey through what it means to be a human struggling to remain human in today’s confusing and collapsing world. Joy, pain, celebration, grief, triumph, bewilderment, love, disappointment, hope, and the struggle against hopelessness: it is all there, over an intricate soundscape that in turns rises, throbs and challenges like its subject matter.

Monet, who hails from Brooklyn, NYC but now lives in LA, was in Britain earlier this year to perform at We Out Here, the jazz festival founded by Gilles Peterson. I caught up with her shortly afterward.

Monet describes herself as a ‘surrealist blues poet,’ and when I ask about her influences, she explains that the blues is the thread running through all of them: “I grew up in the nineties so of course hip hop was a huge cultural phenomenon for my generation and in the streets that I lived and walked through in NYC. My mum was an avid listener of Soul and R and B, so that was huge for my family, and reggae was also a major part of my upbringing. But I would say that all of it stems from the blues. You can find traces of the blues in all of that music, it’s what connects it all; the connective tissue for African music on these shores and beyond. The blues is an African tradition, and we can hear traces of it in every genre of music. So it is what informs me, it’s what I am listening for in any song and is at the core of all my major influences.”

Certainly, Monet’s music has the healing quality that comes with the blues: expressing the pain in order to move through it. But for me, Monet’s performances with her band often evoke the call-and-response relationship between a Baptist preacher and their congregation, and I wonder whether the church had any influence on the young Monet: “As I became a teenager, I spent a lot more time in the church. I was grappling with some of the issues in my life and in my family – and church, and the relationship to God, was the place that I needed to go to to resolve things that did not make sense or that felt unjust. The church was a cornerstone for so many reasons.”

In terms of her art, however, the influence related more to honesty and integrity than to any particular style or form: “One of the things about the church is that when you go to praise and worship, you can’t lie in the music, because you are playing for God. It’s one of the few places where music is potent in terms of the truth and the authenticity of the expression – it’s not about bravado, or ego, or how cute you look, or how well you’re speaking, or how amendable you are to people’s feelings. It’s about conveying the depth and the full expression of God and all of its complex sentiments and realities. And that is something you can find in every walk of African life. African spirituality is crucial to who we are and how we make music and what we do; when I think of the church, and my time in the church, I think of African spirituality.”

Part of this spirituality, to my mind, is the collective participation in cultural and artistic expression – breaking down, that is, the barriers between ‘creators’ and ‘consumers’ of art. Monet suggests that “the first responsibility for all people is to themselves and to their self-determination – and the process of art is part of that process of self-determination. Art should be democratized; all people should find themselves living and moving in the world as artists or creators and innovators of their own conditions and their own realities. We will always need meaning-making, and we will always need value-making, and that is cultivated in the creative process and in how one arranges or approaches their imagination. There is a lot of work to be done in the psyche and the cultural imagination of our people, so this is literally the organizing space of the heart, of the mind, and of the spirit. When I sit down to create, the most transformative part of creating art is not the product that people consume, or the peace that people receive, it is the actual process and where one goes and how one delves into that process. That, I think, is the true test of the value of art. Democratizing the creative process for the people is part of what one would hope to do.”

This does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as an ‘artist’, characterized by their distinctive contribution to the field of cultural creation: “There are people that are gifted and are called upon to create in ways that are transcendent of role or title or marketing or capital, and there is no study, no amount of technical skill that will ever amount to some of the ways that gifts are poured into people who are born with those gifts. There are people that are born with a voice and you don’t know why or how and it will stop you in your tracks and there is nothing you can do about it; they couldn’t be doing anything else, and everything else in their life continues to return them back to that gift and to that craft. There are things that one can study and things that can never be taught.”

Over time, Monet discovered that there were some questions that the church could not answer: “As I became older I became more politicized and I learned that the things I was going through, and my family and community was going through, weren’t problems for just me or us and that, whilst, yes, God could help with problems at school or with rent or whatever, there were systemic things that were put into place to make it impossible for us to take care of those things. So whilst we were looking for some lofty figure in the sky spiritually to come help us solve our problems, we learned that there were authoritative figures that made policies that impacted our communities. So then one becomes transformed by that education – it is no longer just you and your problem; now it becomes a collectivized issue that we must organize around and learn the ways that we can combat it and shift and change it. At least that was my hope.”

From an early age, Monet began to throw herself into that organizing. She has a long-standing connection with the Haitian community in Miami and organized artists and cultural workers whilst still at College to raise funds for water filtration systems following the Haitian earthquake of 2010; the cultural connections made through that project made ripples that are still manifesting today.

She is also a long-term participant in the Palestine solidarity movement. I ask her about the deep historical and ongoing connection between the Black Radical tradition in the USA and the Palestine liberation movement, but the question seems to trouble her: “There is a real strange obsession with romanticizing oppressed people’s connections within our struggle. These connections are wonderful, I think we ought to tell those stories – but the reason it is important to be in solidarity with Palestine is not because I’m a Black person in America that knows what it is like to deal with oppression – it is just what is decently humanly right. This isn’t a discussion about perspective; there is no angle other than the truth, and the truth is, people deserve basic human decency and shelter and education and protection and the right to self-determination and to their land. I don’t see it any other way. It’s not about being white or Black or Palestinian or African; it’s just right or wrong. I get a little annoyed that we continue to try to use identity politics to pull people in because I just don’t know how the human heart will survive that sort of insult to character and to common sense. I am disgusted with the fact that people are clinging to their flags, their skin color and their tropes around who they think they are and who they want to be – in spite of,and at the expense of, the genocide that’s taking place, not just in Palestine, but in the Congo and in Sudan. It’s just preposterous, it literally disgusts me. Am I part of my tradition and part of the legacy of the African people who have tried to stand up and to do what’s right? For sure. But at this point – come on now.”

It feels to me like the current moment is very much one of demoralization, at least for those who have (or had) hopes for a world based on equality and justice. The collapse of the movements around Corbyn and Sanders (in which Monet was actively involved) have left a program of annihilation of surplus populations abroad, and persecution of the survivors and their relatives at home, as seemingly the only political game in town in both the USA and Britain, and increasingly the rest of the world also. I ask Monet where she sees hope today, and whether there are any movements from which she takes inspiration. Her answer is – as they all have been – unexpected: “I don’t know if I am inspired by much of anything by humans of late. I love people, don’t get me wrong. I’m not so pessimistic that I do not believe in the power of people to organize and change the conditions of their lives – but I feel less entitled to believe that it is just humans alone who will shift the conditions of our reality. There are other kinds of intelligences, other kinds of information that we must listen to and adhere to and that’s what is inspiring me: the invisible, the unlanguageable, the things that are not so much about our ego and who we are and what we are going to do to change it.

“Nature has the wisdom. The land, the earth, the air, the water, the wind, the sun, the sky – those are the places that I have seen the most change that has inspired me. When the lockdown happened, and everybody had to sit the fuck down and contend with themselves, more change took place across the globe than years and years of organizing by humans who thought that they were the greatest agents of change. The water cleaned up, the air cleaned up – it’s fascinating what humans not doing human shit can mean for the world.

“I’m learning and I’m growing because I age and I lose people and I watch the shifting of conditions in light of losing people. I understand things different than I did when I was younger; and death and grief have an incredible way of teaching you some of the most invaluable lessons. I don’t have the answers, I’m not so easily inspired these days – but music and art has kept me going. And some of the artists and cultural workers that I love inspire me because of the ways they are tapping into other realms and forms of information – and the better one can get at listening to, harnessing and facilitating that, the better we can get to be as people. So we’ll see.”

Monet’s commitment to authenticity–to calling it as she sees it, and not just as she thinks she is supposed to see it – seems to me to be exactly what we need in these times. We need to acknowledge the bleakness of our situation, and the limits of our ability to change it, to get to the place – intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – where we can begin to chart a way forward. It seems to me that the politics her analysis is pointing towards is that of a more holistic – more nature-centred and less anthropocentric – form of Marxism, freed from the shackles of colonel modernity and human entitlement. A Marxism infused with African spirituality – and the blues.

An edited version of this piece originally appeared in the Morning Star