In this Book
- gossypiin
- Book
- 2022
- Published by: Red Hen Press
- DEBUT AUTHOR gossypiin is the first book by emerging Black feminist writer, Doctoral candidate, and cultural worker Ra Malika Imhotep
- RECLAIMING THE CULTURAL PRACTICE OF GOSSIP, gossypiin puts Black feminist writers and storytellers into a lively conversation with a Black queer trickster figure. It is an archive, an oral history, and a source text for Black feminists being
- BLACK FEMINIST LENS highlights the Black experience, femininity, interiority, and ownership of identity and body
- POWERFUL, RAW LANGUAGE pulls punches that haunt readers
- IDENTITY POLITICS gossypiin explores the relationship between Black non-binary/agender femininities and Black womanhood
- FOR FANS OF Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing
This harvest of poems is inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies. Through an arrangement of stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival and self-possession. In this way, Ra Malika Imhotep invites us to lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.
Within these pages, the poet is joined by a “sticky trickster-self” named Lil Cotton Flower who tells of their own origins and endings in the Black vernacular traditions of the griot and the gossip. Interspersed throughout the collection, Black feminist wisdoms and warnings meld with the poets own yearnings and Lil Cotton Flower’s tall tales.
Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. 1-4
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 5-8
- Gossypium herbaceum
- pp. 17-18
- What We Gathered Here to Do
- pp. 19-24
- I. Sow
- Copresence II
- p. 28
- _____'s Rape
- p. 29
- II. Seedling
- after mama sighs
- p. 38
- My mother dreams
- p. 42
- earth bound
- pp. 44-45
- A Question of Attunement
- pp. 46-48
- III. Flower
- amenorrhea
- pp. 56-57
- mammy-made potion
- p. 68
- IV. Fruit
- Da Peach Squad
- pp. 71-73
- Lil Cotton Flower Tells a Story
- pp. 77-80
- Mammy Councils Her Kin
- pp. 81-83
- V. Harvest
- Second Trimester
- p. 92
- Copresence I
- p. 94
- grief-borne power
- p. 95
- Overstimulated
- p. 97
- all the blk things cry sometimes
- pp. 100-101
- Copresence IV
- p. 102
- Lil Cotton Flower's First Will and Testament
- pp. 106-110
- Biographical Note
- p. 120