an interview with Ola faleti
1. What were your origins in writing and influences? What are your modes and models of creation?
I’ve been enamored with words since my mom taught me how to read at age five. At age eight, I knew I wanted to try my hand at creating my own stories. I had a pen name, and before I knew cursive, I practiced my signature in composition notebooks. My first literary love was fiction, and then I discovered poetry in middle school. College introduced me to the joys of essay writing. Much of what I write doesn’t fit neatly into poetry or prose. Some of my writing influences (then and now) are Helen Oyeyemi, Francesca Lia Block, E.E. Cummings, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and generally, prose-writing poets.
2. What was your initial reaction to the subject and way of representing her in the painting? How did you process the difference from Medusa's historical representations?
Andre’s work is incredible. I was instantly drawn to his use of dramatic, cinematic light. Every portrait I saw in person felt very alive to me, and I felt that way about “It’s Just Hair,” the piece I wrote in response to. The subject felt familiar, like a friend or someone I’d grown up with. There’s a defiance in her; she eschews respectability. And I love that. So when Andre told me about the Medusa connection, tying her cursedness to the “curse” of Blackness, it made a lot of sense to me.
3. What informed or motivated your choice of form? How does form inform the movement of un-cursing?
When it comes to poetry, my default tends to be the prose poem. I wanted the subject’s defiance to be clear in the poem since the subject feels like someone who’s in control of her narrative. There’s a sense of control, I suppose, that the paragraph lends itself to. I’m also a teaching artist, and I recently finished a lesson on ekphrastic poetry with 6th-grade students. I was putting my own lesson into practice, thinking, if she could talk, what would she say? Who is she talking to? What does she want them to know?
4. Did speaking with the artist inform your writing process? Did you experience pressure? What was your emotional experience of the collaboration?
Absolutely! I'm primarily a writer, but I play in multiple mediums. Sometimes, I find more inspiration in the art forms outside of writing. Andre and I talked about the poetic weirdness of the Black experience and diaspora and how that translates across so many themes. Our existence is inherently creative. The conversation was natural and free-flowing. After we talked, I did some freewriting from the subject’s perspective. There were line breaks at first, but I found they broke up the words in a way that didn’t feel right. So I put it in a paragraph form and thought, yes. I wanted this Medusa to sound casual. Unbothered and all-knowing.
5. What do you feel your poem adds to the conversation that Andre's painting starts?
Mythology exists on a few levels here. I think of the snakes and the painting’s title, “It’s Just Hair.” There’s a sense of novelty when it comes to how Black hair is viewed in non-Black spaces and through non-Black gazes. We are powerful people who are subject to stereotypes that fetishize our bodies. It is almost like we’re not human; this painting flips that. Like she’s saying, “You say I’m not human? Well fuck it, I’m a goddess.”
6. How did you craft the persona? — giving voice to the painting in tone and cadence?
Sensing the resistance in the subject, I felt a need to immediately set the tone of a speaker who knows who she is. I did some more research on Medusa, too, finding out that she was a beautiful mortal before Athena cursed her. I thought, what if Medusa was still beautiful and unapologetic? No one else has the power to undo a curse, to set herself free—only she can do that.
7. What does "UnWoven" conjure for you?
UnWoven conjures an undoing and redoing. It makes me think of layers. It makes me think of stitching my own square to an existing quilt. It makes me think of shaving my head and sweeping the shorn curls away.