Words, sounds and the art of listening with Aja Monet

A few hours before we filmed this conversation, I got a call from Aja Monet’s manager. Aja was running a bit late; her grandmother had passed away that morning. I immediately offered to reschedule, but Aja wanted to keep our appointment. When she arrived, a little frazzled and shaken, I invited her to sit and relax for a minute in the NPR green room.

My mom had died just four months earlier, and I was also deep in a vortex of fresh grief. And so we talked, quietly and a little haltingly, about loss, especially the untethering feeling of losing the women who brought us into the world and guided us through it — the strong women who helped us and challenged us to develop our own strength.

I had recently come to a new understanding in my own grieving process. Something about our relationships with the dead — the reshaping of things, the time travel that becomes possible, the unbreakable power of lineage that we can only experience with those who are no longer with us on this earth. I was in the process of finding a new way to be together with my mother, and understanding how much I am her.

Lineage and legacy, family and community are at the heart of Aja’s work. In her 2015 poem What My Grandmother Meant To Say Was, she wrote: “I am a woman ahead of her time. I shimmered in the scars. I live in the bloodline.” These lines honor the power of our inheritance, the love and courage that gets passed down to us, as well as the damage and pain. During this conversation, Aja and I were both feeling all of those at their fullest.

So when the cameras started to roll, they found us midstream, navigating the currents of memory and the flow of bloodline. We reflected together about the necessity of surrounding ourselves in community, made up of both the living and the dead, and of listening to the voices, past and present, that tell us the stories of our own lives.