Altering Auras, Ideas, and Dreams
Naming and (Re)Claiming Poetry for the Public’s Health
Health Promotion Practice (2022)
This commentary—co-authored with Dr. LeConté Dill and Shanaé Burch—introduces the first-ever standing peer-reviewed poetry section in an academic public health journal. The three of us serve as section editors.
Excerpts
“…It is critical to us as Co-Editors to situate our introduction to this new section of Health Promotion Practice (HPP) in this historical context because, as our ancestor Audre Lorde (1978) reminds us, as three Black public health scholar-artists, “it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.” And we recognize the broader exclusions, acts of violence, and erasures in public health practice, scholarship, and history that have harmed and silenced voices within and across communities of color, queer and trans communities, and dis/abled communities. Because, to borrow from the homie Kendrick, who borrowed from Ms. Sofia,
all our lives/we’ve had to fight.
And our fights have always been accompanied, animated, and amplified by creative modes of resistance, solidarity, and healing. The traditional instruments and modalities of public health research and practice were not forged with our fights in mind, nor do they presently evince signs of honoring and valuing the necessity of creativity for our survival—both in the “real world” and in the world of public health knowledge production, expression, and curation. As Bowleg (2021) reminds us, reflecting on the wisdom of Audre Lorde, the traditional tools of public health scholarship “are at best inadequate, and at worst, inimical to health equity” (p. 237), and “safe and traditional approaches will not dismantle the master’s house” (p. 238). Health equity research and scholarship has long been in need of new/different tools to do the work of dismantling, reparation, and re-creation.”
“Public health at the margins, like life itself there/here, must be understood as a site of resistance and source of radical possibility. It must be as much block party as it is wake, as much second line as it is dirge, as much spring break as it is final exam. That’s the future we seek.”
“…In this spirit, in this pursuit to “stitch a new garment” of health promotion, we aspire to honor the legacy of bell hooks (2015), iteratively and reflexively creating space that centers the margin as “site of resistance–as location of radical openness and possibility” (p. 153). We seek to cultivate, curate, and nourish a space that can help counter the epistemic violence and knowledge erasures that for too long have silenced alternative ways of knowing and foreclosed expression of a fuller spectrum of health narratives and representations. We seek to change the tone and the ownership of the voice of health (in)equity: We can speak our own stories, our own truths—beyond the role of “n’s,” beyond the confines of numbers and language of despair. It is our hope and intention that when future scholars, practitioners, artists, activists, and students look upon this section, they will find a health promotion as much about healing, joy, and resistance as it is about pain, disease, and the shadows of death. They will find poetry as praxis (Petteway, 2021), as data (Dill, 2015), as testimony, as “illumination” (Lorde, 1984, p. 36)—a way forward.”
“…we seek a public health forged not by the silhouettes of our bodies threaded between points on a regression, but by the breath and warmth of our full lives—our words, our affirmations, our embodied knowledges woven within an unapologetically humanized and feeling canon capable of honoring the weight of our pasts, the gravity of our presents/presence, and the struggles and joys of our futures. Public health at the margins, like life itself there/here, must be understood as a site of resistance and source of radical possibility. It must be as much block party as it is wake, as much second line as it is dirge, as much spring break as it is final exam. That’s the future we seek. That whenever you see a bar chart or an odds ratio telling you about your pain, your “at-risk-ness,” your “vulnerability”—and telling you nothing more—that you will be reminded of the words of Lucille Clifton (1993), and know that we will indeed celebrate with you, “on this bridge between starshine and clay.”