In this Book

  • gossypiin
  • Book
  • Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia. As a scholar and cultural worker, Ra is invested in exploring relationships between queer articulations of Black femininity, Southern vernacular culture, and the performance of labor. As a steward of Black Studies and Black feminist thought, Ra dreams, organizes, and facilitates spaces of critical reflection and embodied spiritual-political education.
  • 2022
  • Published by: Red Hen Press
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summary
  • 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

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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. 1-4
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. 5-8
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. 9-16
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  1. Gossypium herbaceum
  2. pp. 17-18
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  1. What We Gathered Here to Do
  2. pp. 19-24
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  1. I. Sow
  1. My daddy says I've misremembered
  2. p. 27
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  1. Copresence II
  2. p. 28
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  1. _____'s Rape
  2. p. 29
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  1. Ma Dear
  2. p. 30
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  1. Lil Cotton Flower births themself out of the forced togetherness of a quiet wound
  2. p. 31
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  1. Obscure Origins 2: The Player
  2. p. 32
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  1. Obscure Origins 1: The Sculptor
  2. p. 33
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  1. Lil Cotton Flower sings / them self a song
  2. p. 34
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  1. II. Seedling
  1. The first time I heard the story
  2. p. 37
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  1. after mama sighs
  2. p. 38
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  1. exile in pursuit of the New South
  2. p. 39
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  1. Grandma Sarah's maiden name was Moody
  2. p. 40
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  1. Wild Wimmin Don't Worry
  2. p. 41
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  1. My mother dreams
  2. p. 42
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  1. Grandma Sarah ain't finish the seventh grade
  2. p. 43
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  1. earth bound
  2. pp. 44-45
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  1. A Question of Attunement
  2. pp. 46-48
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  1. III. Flower
  1. I ain't know when I laid down on the floor crying
  2. p. 51
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  1. endurance
  2. p. 52
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  1. the hermit-woman takes a lover
  2. p. 53
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  1. Some nights talking to god
  2. p. 54
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  1. somebody forgot to tell somebody something
  2. p. 55
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  1. amenorrhea
  2. pp. 56-57
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  1. anovulatory or fugitivity at the meeting place of my thighs
  2. pp. 58-59
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  1. the poet stares longingly into a black queer elsewhere and feels themself unravel
  2. pp. 60-61
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  1. madrigal para las vientres negras
  2. p. 62
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  1. Notes toward the integration of a traumatic event or the scene of my own subjection
  2. pp. 63-65
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  1. Miss Graham tells my younger self a blue joke
  2. pp. 66-67
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  1. mammy-made potion
  2. p. 68
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  1. IV. Fruit
  1. Da Peach Squad
  2. pp. 71-73
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  1. One of Four Women Walking Down Peachtree Street Licking Herself
  2. pp. 74-76
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  1. Lil Cotton Flower Tells a Story
  2. pp. 77-80
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  1. Mammy Councils Her Kin
  2. pp. 81-83
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  1. Home is a mouth full of spit for your tender heart
  2. pp. 84-88
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  1. V. Harvest
  1. my mama tells a story
  2. p. 91
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  1. Second Trimester
  2. p. 92
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  1. Grandma Sarah mourns her only son
  2. p. 93
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  1. Copresence I
  2. p. 94
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  1. grief-borne power
  2. p. 95
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  1. When prompted I remember
  2. p. 96
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  1. Overstimulated
  2. p. 97
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  1. Dispatch from a writing workshop in 2015 in which I am the only nigga alive
  2. pp. 98-99
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  1. all the blk things cry sometimes
  2. pp. 100-101
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  1. Copresence IV
  2. p. 102
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  1. This ain't quite memorial
  2. p. 103
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  1. rememory
  2. pp. 104-105
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  1. Lil Cotton Flower's First Will and Testament
  2. pp. 106-110
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  1. Credits
  2. pp. 111-112
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  1. Gratitude
  2. pp. 113-115
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  1. Chorus
  2. pp. 116-119
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  1. Biographical Note
  2. p. 120
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