Sarah Nnenna Loveth Nwafor (They/Them) is a queer Igbo Poet, Educator, and Facilitator who descends of a powerful ancestry. They believe that storytelling is magick, and they speak to practice traditions of Igbo orature. When they witness, their forebears are pleased. When Sarah’s not writing; they’re probably sitting under a tree, reading about Love, dancing, or cooking a bomb-ass meal. They can be found on instagram (@sarahnwafor) on twitter (@nwafor_sarah) or on their website: sarahnwafor.com.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: I just wanted to start by saying that Already Knew You Were Coming is such a gift. It makes so much space in such a small book—space for different selves and different identities to take up more room. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you. Thank you for writing it.
Sarah Nwafor: Aw, you’re holding it! That’s so nice, thank you.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yes, of course! Okay, let’s dive right in. So much of Already Knew You Were Coming speaks towards your own relationship with yourself and your varying arrivals and becomings in that self. In the book, you talk to your inner child a lot, and so I’m curious what your relationship is with with them, with your inner child, and maybe even how it’s shifted over the course of writing this. Just to kick things off in a really light manner.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah. Casual, casual. Haha, yeah, that’s a great question. I feel like my relationship with my inner child is actually better than it has been in a very long time and I’m glad for that. During the winter time I had a lot more free time, so I was able to actually just sit. To literally take a day where I don’t have to do anything, right? We talk a lot about, “oh work with your inner child, blah blah,” but it’s like, no, do you actually talk to your inner child? And so my therapist taught me to do that this winter and I’ve been doing that, having conversations with the one in me who’s sad, the one in me who wants to play and seeing what she has to say to me today. Maybe she doesn’t have to say anything, maybe we’re just gonna sit in silence and that’s cool. And to tie it back to the book, seeing the final version of this book has kind of helped give myself some reassurance that I need in my relationship with my inner childs. Capitalism is always stressing us out and telling us, “Oh, you’re not gonna be good enough. So you have to work super, super hard.” And then looking at the book that’s like, Oh, I already knew you were coming, I already knew you were gonna be who you are. So I’m reminded that I can just exist.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Mmm. That sounds so steady and delightful–because of all the work you’re doing! I’m also thinking about the series of poems in the chapbook titled “In Which I am Already the Queer Igbo Elder I Needed.” I love these poems so much, and I think in so many ways, the poems in here are both reaching backwards in generations, in lineage, into past selves, and forward to future generations or future iterations of yourself. I’m wondering if you can talk about the importance of honoring that kind of lineage or legacy, both backwards and forwards, or anything that brings up for you.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, thank you. The first thing that came to my mind when you asked that question was just ancestors, you know? Even if I’m just talking about myself, in honoring my past self and honoring my future self, I have to honor the fact that I come from someone else, who came from someone else, etc, etc. And in Igbo culture we don’t really see time as linear, but circular–everything is happening at the same time as the future and the past, you know? I think this book and this writing process helped me kind of come back to the fact that, in being my most authentic self, I am honoring the ancestors who live with me at all times even when I can’t see them.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, it does talk about that. Thank you for asking me about this question–I love incorporating the earth in my writing because I feel like the Earth is its own poetry. I love being outside, I love working with the earth. In Igbo cosmology working with the earth, Ala, you know, Earth Mother, is really important. She is the person who rules over what it means to be moral, who enacts justice, and so a taboo done to community is done to the earth in our culture. Of course, it’s different from village to village, too. And so, I feel like reacquainting myself with the earth and gardening and even just going for walks or learning the names of plants in my neighborhood, feels like returning to a rootedness. The earth helps me learn so much. Even just timing, because the earth moves so slowly, so intentionally, you know? And helps me remember who I am, when I’m not functioning in capitalism. Going for walks and being with the trees helps my mind free itself. My relationship with the earth feels so romantic, honestly, and playful, which I appreciate–that space for play, which can show up in my art. I literally talk to trees all the time. I talk to the plants in my garden all the time, you know? And I know that they listen, you know–they kind of nosy haha.
So yeah, I feel like being with the earth really helps me open up my mind and root into the inner universes that each person holds, instead of getting all frenzied, like “I got to go to work and then I got to do this other thing.” No just sit under this tree. It’s gonna be okay.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Oh Sarah. That resonates so much. Yes! Okay, everybody needs therapy and everybody needs to just sit under a tree as a daily practice.
Sarah Nwafor: No, for real! I don’t want to butcher their name but I think their name is Andrea Gilson and they’re a somatic therapist–I think they’re called the Somatic Witch on Instagram. In one of their workshops they were talking about the idea of co-regulation, and how we often think that co-regulation is just with other humans or other breathing beings, but that’s not true. We do and can co-regulate with trees. Trees teach us how to breathe. There are studies about how you can calm your nervous system by sitting in nature, and also, humans are nature. So, yes, I agree and I’m very passionate about this because I think that our relationship with the earth says so much about our relationship to systems–if we actually valued the earth as a collective in the way that African and Indigenous peoples do, capitalism just literally could not exist because those two things can’t coexist. So, yeah. The earth is so essential, and I love her.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yes. Yes! Let’s put it on a poster–put it all over my walls. Yes. I also volunteer for a community garden down the road here, and that relationship has been as important as being in this MFA program for sure, and it’s a self-proclaimed anarchist and anti-capitalist farm. It gives whatever it grows to the community and its all volunteer led, essentially, and there’s something so simple and so radical about just growing food and being in relationship with the earth in that way, especially surrounded by all of these like monocropped, corn fields that are overrun by chemicals, and then there’s this abundant little farm in the middle of it.
Sarah Nwafor: That’s deep. Yeah. Yeah, that’s really beautiful. I have two thoughts. One is, I’d love to know what one of your favorite earth bodies is. And then my other thought is like, how queer the earth is, too, and I think that’s another reason the earth shows up in my writing because I do talk about Black queerness so often, and the earth is very queer. Nature is without boundaries or without borders in the ways that humans create them. And that also feels queer, and the earth is affirming of that journey of mine.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah! Say more about that–you find the earth queer in its non-bordered ways of existing?
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, in its non-bordered ways of existing and the ways it doesn’t polarize in the way Western society does. I often think about how the English language is very “if/or.” But nature doesn’t exist like that. You can have the earth and the sky, you can have fire and water next to each other, and they’re just in relationship. That lack of polarity–that harmony–that can be created in friction that exists in nature feels queer to me. Yeah… no borders feels queer.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah, yes, I love that. That’s so true. I’m trying to think about your first question, about what my favorite earth body is… So I grew up in North Carolina and France, back and forth–
Sarah Nwafor: Oh, right! We talked about this because I want to practice French with you. Yes.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah! Right, yes. So, I feel constantly inhabited by multiple landscapes at once, and the rivers are what draw me in–what raised me. And I’m realizing, especially being in Iowa where there is very little undead water or water that is alive and thriving, I’m realizing now how much I relied on water because of how dynamic and fluid it is. I relied on that so much for my healing and for my mental well-being. So I’m struggling without it. What about you?
Sarah Nwafor: That’s beautiful. Rivers are important. That’s one of my goals this year is to really be in right relationship with water–water is an intense element but she’s important. Oh, my favorite earth bodies–let me think. Oh, I really love forests so much. Everything you need is in a forest, you know? They have little streams and creeks. And salamanders. They have soft moss, which is one of my favorite things to touch. And of course trees—trees are ancestors. And there’s also something so spooky too about being in a forest. Even now as an adult I feel like I have to watch myself when I’m in a forest. There’s a level of respect that I need to hold myself with when I’m in a forest. I just feel like trees give me like grandfather energy.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Wow, yes. That’s so true. I had never thought of that—that respect, it’s true that you feel it in your body when you enter a forest, like I got to be on my good behavior, you know? And you feel protected, and sometimes challenged in a way too. Like, “we’re watching. Yeah, we love you… we’re watching.” Yeah.
Okay, so, I feel like this is also connected. I loved the recipes and rituals in here, and I feel like a lot of it also feels based in ritual even for the poems that don’t talk explicitly about it. And I was at a talk this weekend with CA Conrad about poetic ritual and how that brings work to life. So I’m curious if there are any writing rituals, or even rituals beyond writing, that helped bring the poems in here to life or that are important to you.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah. I’ll start with what helped bring these poems to life: definitely going for walks. I love, love walking and moving my body. So where I was living when I was working on this chapbook was right near a cove. And so I would walk there often to clear my mind and that was really helpful. And also definitely the act of talking to my inner self, my inner children, and also talking to my foremothers, my great-grandmother in particular, because there’s some poetry in there that talks about my matrilineal lineage, particularly my mom. And for a while I kept asking myself, like, what am I actually trying to say? There’s an emotional alchemy taking place that I needed to understand a bit more. And so talking to my ancestors and inner world was important in that process. Working with the moon, of course. I love the moon. Also Igbo people run on a lunar calendar, so that felt very important. And to say more about rituals that happen in my day-to-day life, I used to stay up very, very late, but that’s not sustainable. So now I get up really early and I love that quiet. I always write down my dreams in the morning. Always make myself tea, do some kind of movement, whether that’s yoga or dance or breath work, there’s always some movement that has to happen. And then I like to think about my intentions for the day, greet my ancestors, and then I go off and do whatever I’m gonna go do. And then in terms of rituals around my writing, I actually want to be better at that. It’s so easy to get in your head and edit while you’re writing, and so I want to give myself permission to be in flow more and just type type type type and come back to edit after. So yeah, if you have tips around creating writing ritual, let me know.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah, I mean I’m in the same boat. I’ve been so ritual based for so long, and I’ve been using the same one for a long time, and I love that aspect of tradition and sticking with it, but my grad school brain is very dead and I need to revive it. The morning hours where nobody’s gonna bother you are so essential, and I’m trying to very, very clumsily learn how to play the keyboard.
Sarah Nwafor: Me too! Fun!
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Oh, really? I love that! Yeah, yeah. It’s nice to mind-wander inside the house, and to have a space to play and do something poorly but let my brain do its own thing while my fingers are moving.
So, I feel like I started with some really heavy questions, but the last big question I have is thinking about how much the book wrestles with codependency and your path growing through that, and that resonated with me so hard. I’m thinking especially about one of the lines from “Loneliness is the Shape of Air,” when you write, “if personhood is relational, what do I become alone?” Thinking about personhood as relational, in light of the ways we’ve talked about being in a relationship with the earth, and with ancestors, and trees, but also just like being in society, for better or worse. So that really hit me, and I’m wondering if you can talk about what that line means to you and also just about your relationship to codependency and the ways writing the chapbook impacted that.
Sarah Nwafor: Thank you. Oh my goodness.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: I feel like we could spend an hour unpacking just that question.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, codependency is so vicious sometimes. I have so much to say. My first thought is that, for a while, I was in a real fear of codependency, to the point where I was like, I don’t know if I can interact with people. When you’ve been through a trauma, it’s valid to need to just be with yourself sometimes. But now I’m in a space where I’m realizing that working through codependency is not something that I’m gonna do on a checklist, and then be like, “okay, now I’m ready to be friends with people again!” It’s going to be a lifelong working through process, and it’s a lesson of boundaries in particular and rooting in myself that is going to keep coming up. And each time it comes up, I’ll be better with it. But codependency has definitely been a big lesson for me, I think. Yeah, and I think it’s a big lesson for so many reasons, and one is that, as a black feminine-ish person, people expect of me, right? They’re just like, “of course the things you can give are open to being given, right?” And so to come back to yourself and to your boundaries is to disrupt a lot of societal complacency, and this societal complacency for sure shows up in interpersonal relationships. And that can feel hard, and a lot of bravery is required to do that on my end. And then I also am pretty emotionally aware and attuned, both to my feelings and the feelings of others that I witness in a room, and [in] being that way, it makes it easy for me to automatically feel like I have to take responsibility for those feelings that I notice. And part of undoing codependency is realizing, “Oh, I actually don’t have to do that. And everyone here is an adult. And you can handle your stuff and how you react to me is your responsibility.” But my responsibility is to move through this world authentically and in alignment with my values.
It’s a lot of work, but in a way I’m actually kind of glad to be doing this work, because my relationship to codependency, to boundaries, to love—romantic love and platonic love—has spurred me into really taking myself, my boundaries, and spending time with myself, seriously. And viewing boundaries not as a defensive, reactive protection, but really teaching people how to engage with me, right? And in order to teach people how to engage with me, I have to teach myself how to engage with myself. Like, what do I need right before I even go out there outside of myself to set a boundary with someone? What are the boundaries with myself and promises to my inner child that I need to keep? Codependency has been a lesson in that. It’s been a big, big lesson, and it shows up in this chapbook, and I’m grateful for the journey.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Whew, yes. All of that, Sarah. And you’re right, it is a gift—I mean, an exhausting gift, but I’m realizing now that it’s an opportunity to be in deeper relationship with oneself. I think that codependency and recognizing codependency, once you you see it, you have to be like, “Okay, let’s sit down, self. Let’s have some tea. What are our needs? Who is that over there, and who are we?” And figuring out how to find that separation and also, like you said, not just going through the checklist before going back out into the world, but figuring out how we can negotiate being in this world, right now, as we are, while still being in a relationship. Even if those relationships are wobbly while we relearn the ropes.
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, for sure. And for a while I was afraid of being in relationship, and I talk about that in the chapbook, but my therapist was like, “You know, we live in a codependent society.” And we live that way—I’m saying ‘we’ as in the United States—live that way because there’s all this focus on hyper-independence, which of course is not sustainable, you know? And so then when you are living in that extreme, you go to the other extreme, which is ownership, “you belong to me,” enmeshment, all that. And that was hard to hear at first, but then it kind of made me feel a little better, because healing, like everything in nature, happens in cycles. And so when codependency is coming up in this cycle of relationship that I’m in with someone, codependency is trying to alert me to my needs, right? Like this lesson of codependency coming back up is trying to wake me up to whatever need I have at that moment, and comes up cyclically to tell us to talk to ourselves. And I’m grateful that this chapbook has helped me lay some of these fears to rest, actually. The past versions of myself are really living in this chapbook, and those past versions of myself, as you see in the book, struggled with water signs, with Pisces, with relationship, and with loneliness, and my heart to those past versions of myself. But I now know that I can trust myself to be present in the here and now, and of course I will catch myself in codependency at some point, but I’ll catch myself this time, you know?
Zoë Fay-Stindt: I love that. I love that a lot. We’re definitely going to have to talk about this more. So, kind of on that note, who is this book for? Whose hands do you hope will hold it?
Sarah Nwafor: Well, first, I’m always writing for other young queer Black girls. It’s hard out here for us, and so I see you, and I love you very much. And there’s a real loneliness that comes with being one of the marginalized of the marginalized, and so again, much love to you and I hope that you love yourself or can cultivate that with yourself. So always young, Black girls, and the young black girl that I was. And then I hope who[ever] else finds this book is folks who are in their healing journey, particularly in their healing around love—love with themself and love with others. And within that, other queer and non-binary people who are in their healing journey around that. I hope that you find this book and that something from it feels like a sign. That’s what I hope. Other than that, I hope folks get what they need to get from it.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah, yeah. I love that. Last but not least, my final question is just how do you refill your cup? How do you take care of you, and what or who is sustaining you?
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, thank you. One of the things sustaining me is therapy. *laughs* I really like going to therapy, it’s so nice. I’m just like, “okay, so here’s the tea.” Yeah, and now that I’m back in Boston, friendships! I’m really grateful that I can take a train and see someone, talk on the phone and see someone. That being said, I am a social introvert, so as much as friendship sustains me, I think when I’m alone, what sustains me is reading good books, dancing. I love talking to myself. Honestly, I talk to myself all the time. And I’ll just be like, “Wow, I’m so funny!” So that definitely fills me up. Yeah, and I think just finding play in my day, each day that I can.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Mmm, yes, I’m gonna sit with that. I feel like it’s the first thing that capitalism takes from us is play, and it seems really hard to focus on as an adult. We are so resistant to it. We’re like, “play for what, for whose money?”
Sarah Nwafor: Yeah, that’s true. I think what’s helped me with that is reading this book called How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen. That book taught me about the necessity of incorporating play into adult life. Children are what they experience—that’s how they feel about themselves, which is why emotional regulation is so essential for them. So for kids, if it’s not fun, they don’t want to do it. They don’t care. If you’re like, “you have to brush your teeth so you don’t get a cavity,” they’re like, “I’m two. I don’t know what a cavity is.” And so the same is true for us, you know, we can find ways of laughing or making fun of just not-fun things to do. And even when we can’t, because sometimes life is hard and you just can’t laugh at a thing and I want to make space for that, but what has helped me is just being with the feeling. Trying to explore it, which is easier said than done, but that’s what I try to do. Let it lead me.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah, yes. I love that—I’m going to look up that book and the somatic witch, too. Oh, this has been such a heartfill! After such a gray day and so much grading rhetorical analysis essays, I’m so glad to talk to you.
Sarah Nwafor: Oh no… but yay, I’m glad! This was so fun, thank you. Thank you for talking. And I hope we get to be in more conversational spaces together. I know you live across the country, but I think that would be really nice.
Zoë Fay-Stindt: Yeah, I feel like our work speaks so much to each other, and I learn so much from the ways that you’re in the world. And I appreciate you.
Sarah Nwafor: Thank you—I appreciate you, too.
