Interview with aracelis girmay

We are delighted to share our interview with aracelis girmay (Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Stanford University). aracelis is author of the poetry collections GREEN OF ALL HEADS (BOA, 2025), the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007); and editor of the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023), which is the focus of our dialogue below.

What inspired you to put So We Can Know together at this particular moment in US history? Can you explain something of the context out of which it has been forged?

First, I really want to thank you for this ongoingly incredible resource and for attending to the ground and creating space for us to have these public conversations.

I began thinking toward this anthology a little over ten years ago, in 2014, when moving through the terrain of planned pregnancy and then maternity. I read everything I could find and everything that was recommended to me. As I note in the anthology, I was a Black, cis woman pregnant in the United States, a country built on genocide and brutal labor extraction. A country in which Black and Native American people, as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced in 2019, are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. A country of eugenics-based sterilization laws and campaigns that resulted in more than 37 percent of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico (most of them in their twenties) being sterilized, as reported in 1976 by the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In the twenty first century, forced sterilizations have been recorded in California prisons and in for-profit ICE detention centers. And so, from the moment that the US begins as an entity and all the way up to now, we can see the ways that the bodily autonomy of women and people of color and poor people is structurally denied. I thought it would be vital to hear from writers who think critically about gender, race, class, history, power, beauty – not necessarily and only as thinkers, historians, artists, but as “dwellers in the world” to borrow from Cristina Rivera Garza – on their experiences of pregnancy, loss, abortion, and/or birth.

I could not have imagined what stories and analyses people were moving with, but I knew that it was vital and could help us to understand not only the daily structures of our lives but also the ways that our strategies, dreams, lifeforces have always been beyond the architects of these deprived systems. Even as these very systems shape us and diminish so much of what is possible, it is also always true that each of us – our relationships to the world, our humanness, intellects, histories, idiosyncracies, ways to love – exceeds what the state imagines. I am thinking about Toni Morrison’s talk “The Site of Memory” and this moment when she says: “the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” I think about stories and sociality, how we shape our lives according to stories, despite them, and in refusal of them. Hearing from each other continues to be one of the ways we build power and make relational paths, sometimes where we thought there were none, and so on. I hope that the anthology contributes to that building of power, that making way.

Even ten years ago, I could not have imagined that we would find ourselves here with the court overturning Roe v. Wade and thus, according to the law, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. But others were paying better attention than I was. I am thinking about the brilliant historian Jennifer L. Morgan (who, with her daughter Emma Morgan-Bennett, is a contributor to So We Can Know). In August of 2022, Morgan published her article “Reproductive Rights, Slavery, and ‘Dobbs v. Jackson’” in which she helps us to understand that since 1662 “the founding legislators of this country were erecting a legal system in which, among other things, the expansion of the slave economy rendered women’s reproductive lives as matters of political, legal, and economic intervention.” As she notes, these conditions of slavery and enslavement continue to erode legal claims to bodily autonomy into this century, as she says it: “expanding exponentially into the lives of poor and dispossessed Americans across the racial spectrum.”

Though statistics showing the racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes are becoming more widely reported, the lived experiences behind these numbers are often missing, which makes books like this so vital. How did you go about curating and organising this collection, and were there perspectives or voices you felt were particularly important to include?

For a few years I gathered the names of writers whose thinking about class, gender, race, and community I’d long admired, and whose writing on pregnancy, loss, abortion, and/or birth was, or would be, lucid and brilliant in ways I could not imagine. I wrote to people – a few at a time – without knowing, for the most part, their relationships to any of these experiences or, if they said yes, what they’d choose to write about. I hoped that the anthology would be intergenerational and include a range of perspectives and experiences; and to the extent that I could, I thought about this when inviting writers to submit work. This said, I decided at the start of my curation that I would not say no to a single submission and for that reason I decided against an open call for submissions. The work included in the book was almost all previously unpublished work, I could not guess what people would write about and how. So, I received one large wave of submissions and read and took notes and then invited a few other writers to contribute, here and there, thinking always of how we might make the text more intricate, various, and capacious. Still, there are major gaps in this anthology including when it comes to trans pregnancy experiences and the experiences of Indigenous writers.

To your question about organizing the collection: it was immediately evident to me that I could not organize the anthology with discrete themes in mind. There could be no section only about abortion or only about colonial interventions, etc. Each submission is prismatic and teeming with so many themes, and I was increasingly interested in the challenge of variousness and what thinking with this variousness might make possible. So many complex ways of reading and thinking are foreclosed by categorization, and in this anthology, I tried to honor the texts’ expansive and varied resonances as I chose what would come first then next and so on. As I point to in the intro, it was important to me to think of these works as resisting one order and as stunningly entangled. And so, while I did not organize the book into themed sections, I thought of the sections as mini arcs within the larger book. I was interested in what thinking and questions the works, side by side, helped to pose or make possible. For those wanting to locate specific themes, my hope was that the index would be a useful tool for them, even as I understood the project of the index to be more unending, challenging, and extensive than its current version in the anthology. I am thinking now of artist and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s new book INDEX 2025, its citations, references, repetitions, and entanglements in which I feel called into confrontations with my own imaginations and ways of interrogating my reading practices. My sense is that there is more work to do with this anthology’s index in particular, to further study the overlaps of structures and strategies discussed, and to further emphasize that entangled quality out of which each text and the overall body of the book is forged.

It was great to read Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang’s contribution to So We Can Know (co-editors of What God is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, published in 2019).  How do you see your collection as being in relation and dialogue with theirs, as well as other landmark feminist works and collaborations?

I was very moved to find their anthology, kind of late in my own process with this book. I read it front to back and spent several quiet days in its wake. I knew immediately that I wanted to thank them and to tell them about the anthology, and to ask if they might be interested in submitting a text. I was humbled when they said yes – and very moved by their contribution, which is a co-written essay called “The Beginning and the End,” which reflects on the beginning of their undertaking to create the What God is Honored Here? anthology, but also the process of bringing it into the world – editing the tender, difficult work of others and gathering for readings once the book was released. It is an essay that honors the voices of others, some of the uses of language, and the fact that sometimes language and story can bring us into community with others. I also felt especially thrilled by their contribution because it was one example, among many (I think), of how the book exceeds itself and is reaching toward other communities, collaborations, gatherings, and projects. Similarly, I think of this book as being in constellation with This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and Revolutionary Mothering, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. I keep learning more about works with whom the book is in constellation, as is the case with Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance, edited by Sophie Hamacher with Jessica Hankey.  

A central theme in the collection is that of knowing. What does it mean to know, and why is knowing in these ways so important? Relatedly, is there also a place for not knowing, or for practices of forgetting and unknowing? 

This is one of those questions that touches – exactly – the struggle for me in life and in this work in particular. Especially when thinking about the brutality of systems and their myriad resultant traumas, it seems to me critical that tenderness, beauty, strength, “the body’s whole expressive repertoire” as John Edgar Wideman calls it, and imaginative strategies are all a part of what we know and learn to read within any present or history, brutal as it may be. I am also thinking of Kamau Brathwaite’s words, ever since m nourbeSe philip carried them into his virtual memorial five years ago. Brathwaite says: “There is so much undone to be undone.” So much forgetting has been forced upon people by ruling classes who inflict this forgetting as a way to maintain power and the status quo. This is not the unknowing or forgetting I have time for. But the forgetting forged by people who sought to protect generations after them from the traumas of their histories, traumas that can psychically derail us and sometimes do. I understand these impulses. I don’t know that I have a clear way of thinking about that kind of work except that it seems to me to be the result of a kind of vigilance that I do understand.

For me, there are stories I wish I did not have to know or tell but knowing them is a critical part of how I know to not only keep myself vigilant and alive, but to more rigorously think about the structures in place that depend on such horrors. This knowing is part of my analysis and part of how I understand my reality, my complicity, and my work. But with this must also come the discipline of dreaming, softness, joy, celebration, pleasure, otherwise we are left with brutality alone. I am also thinking about another kind of knowing, which has to do with having access to the multiplicity of experiences to pregnancy, abortion, loss, and/or birth. I am thinking about the crystal-clear words of Elizabeth Alexander who describes a decision to have an abortion as being “an unpleasant but untragic experience. It was an experience of self-determination…” So, to encounter distinct voices in distinct relation to their reproductive choices is critical and vital. To know that even across a single life, our stories and choices and the conditions out of which we decide or do not decide, might be complex and various.

On another note, I am also thinking about the relational aspects of this discipline as carried in the words of Vanessa Angélica Villareal in her essay “The Water Clock”: “I want to spare you from the future and its silences, tell you all the names I know that made you possible, place your birth in a timeline that doesn’t begin with you.” And also this: “So in this way, this is my gift: a document that will give you access to answers I never had, reconstruct a timeline that would be lost without my testimony. A point of your many origins. A record of something repeating in me, repeating in you. It’s not your fault.”

What kind of reception has the book had so far? And what kinds of conversations and actions do you hope the collection will catalyse?

The book has quietly but steadily moved into the world. It has been on a few resource lists that I know of – a couple for healthcare providers and community programs, and at least one put out by the public library. We were committed to the idea that this gathering would be a valuable, useful companion and tool for people thinking about pregnancy and/or involved in birth work, and I should mention that every writer donated their contribution so all royalty proceeds will be donated, yearly, to reproductive health and justice organizations that center people of color. In terms of conversations: when the book was newly out, we had a very special reading with the incredible Charis Books and a gorgeous reading at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn and a few workshops and events led by the amazing Maria Hamilton Abegunde and Mahogany Browne and hosted by my dear friend Patrick Rosal at Rutgers-Camden just before the labor strike in 2023. More recently I was invited to be in conversation with Evie Shockley and The Brigid Alliance abortion access project. I also participated in a powerful HUQ discussion organized by cultural worker and photographer Ashima Yadava and hosted in a community space in SF last year. There, folks from i need an a, Maitri, and Access Reproductive Justice presented on their works and strategies and I briefly read excerpts from the anthology. It was not a poetry reading but a think-tank/network meeting, and I felt in that space that the words of these writers changed the air in the room. Their breaths, histories, and specific bodily experiences charged the air and grounded the work, and the stakes, in testimony and analysis. Their voices, that day, increased my clarity about the importance of reading our stories in true relation. That immigrant rights, public education, trans rights, access to food and safe shelter and healthcare, reproductive justice, are all absolutely connected and that it is vital that we understand them as such.

Another thing that has happened, that I did not foresee, is that people have asked me – in person and via email – if they could contribute their stories to a second volume. Maybe people feel compelled to make new volumes as books or zines, or plays and theatre. I have received a few letters from people sharing stories that they hadn’t shared before because they thought they were irrelevant or that it was too late for anything to be done with them. It is very simple and yet I am stunned each time: hearing the stories of others can not only call us out of the perceived isolations of our lives, it can also challenge us to name the larger forces at work, the “secret hands of history” as Sandra Guzmán writes in her fiercely lucid “Then They Came For Our Wombs.” The work of these writers, over and over, denies these structures their invisibility and instead calls them into scrutiny. I think such scrutiny informs action. I am thinking of the opening sentence of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” in which she writes: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”