Christell Victoria Roach is a poet from Miami, Florida. She is a double major in Creative Writing and African American Studies at Emory University. Her work has been published in SWIMM Every Day, Scalawag Magazine, and the Miami Rail. Roach is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow. She received the Best Undergraduate Research Essay award from Emory University, the Johnston Fellowship for Travel and Writing, and the Academy of American Poets Award at Emory University. She is also the editor-in-chief of Black Star Magazine. She won the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers for a package of poems titled Mango Season.
Q&A
What writing most impacts you?
I consider writing to be an exercise of the blues. It is call and response. There is a twoness that rings in a poem capturing blues—I am impacted by the poems that transcend, that earn that transcendence. If I read a poem and I am stilled… I am responding to it. So, the vulnerable calls, the methodological incantations, the refined voice… I appreciate work that opens up. In poetry and in prose. Work that helps me to see as the speaker sees impacts me.
What experiences have shaped you most as a writer?
Honestly, loss in my family taught me my capacity to feel, to love, to respond. From the loss on my grandmother and great grandmother as a child, to losing immediate relatives I grew up with, loss helped me begin writing. I felt so much that I had to write to synthesize. … Today, my curiosity really comes from the violence of loss. Anthony De Mello writes in his book, The Way to Love, that what you give up violently, you are forever bound to. Having lost so many family members, and monuments in my family’s shared geography, I grew attached to the ways of knowing that helped me bridge those gaps. Reading, writing, and researching are those ways of knowing for me.
What did writing “Mango Season” teach you?
Writing the poems in Mango Season taught me how to enter the pit of empathy, and be patient, open, and willing to be used for song. It taught me how to conjure words when I am speechless, and the feeling is just so loud.
Fruit imagery has special significance in African American culture, notably because of Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit.” What is the importance of the mango, as well as blues and jazz, in your work?
I was raised picking up fruit in our backyard, grabbing it from our neighbor’s trees as we walked home from school, and I always ate them regularly. … I have watched the birthing of fruit, the aging of seeds, and even the decay of trees. All fruit is bodies. When I listened to a contemporary version of “Strange Fruit” covered by two artists I like, Chloe and Halle, I thought of what my strange fruit was. People weren’t really being lynched like they used to, but there was still death and dying. There was still Black death. I thought of the many Black boys we’ve lost to police. I thought of the weird distance I felt, when at home and hearing of Ferguson burning and another Black family ruined. I thought about the nearness to it all, with three brothers out in the world, while Black. I thought of Trayvon, and how sometimes mangoes are eaten by birds, rats, snakes, worms… so many things before it has fully developed, before it has fallen, ripe. … I felt blue as Billie… and so I wrote, I sang my/our Blues; I responded.
What are some of the most important lessons on craft you’ve learned?
I learned how to fold poems from my mentor, Dr. Jericho Brown. He taught me how to close a poem. While I may not be done, there is a way to make sure that the reader does not also feel left undone. The “line-babies” and passions I open the poem with must be addressed in some way in the end of the poem, almost coming full circle. Often, I may return to an image, a specific voice or perspective, or I may even return to the precision of the opening syntax. Regardless, I always sit with a poem and find a way to fold it, so that it may become mobile, and someone can carry it.
Do you have any advice for other student writers?
Your losses do not define you. Actually, they refine you. Your wins are not finite. I always try to write poems in the direction of another poem.
Interview conducted by Gloria Jirsaraie
On the end of Mango Season, and Still Falling Fruit
Love does not want this body
swelled as a June-split mango,
bruised as all tree fruit pre-fall,
sitting atop tufts of dead grass
and snakeskin. This body been
baked for hours in the sun, has
stung the fence and leaves sweet
and untouchable. The branches,
bare and brown, been pulled down
like the arms of praying mothers.
Each pulp-stained head,
a shade of summer we call red. One ripe
stone-fruit, firm on one side, half-
eaten, brown or bruised on the other.
The pulp darkened in the heat, sap
lost all color overnight, and where
the mango sat rotting, a face-like
indent marked the once-alive grass.
Three months of fruit gathered
beneath the tree, brown, bodies.
The leaves gave up their green
as witness, were blown apart
by the constant fall. The tree takes
the shape of my mother, bending
to collect a basket-full of mangoes,
each one she names. The sound
of tree-fruit, thumping to the ground,
is an ever-growing toll. Sounds
like skin hitting skin, like dead weight,
like August.
My father dragged the television out
to the patio, so he could watch the news
and wade in the pool. His stereo played
bluegrass folk from the Florida room.
I was gathering bulbs while he lay.
When the news rung out, I stilled
my hand. When daddy said not another
one, I bent down again. A brown boy
grew ripe in the sun, while a garden
snake began shedding at my feet.
The snake wound like praying hands,
wrung itself free of the dead skin,
and as I picked up a half-eaten mango
it cooled. Black, it sat, with splotches
of red, looking moist beneath a dry shell.
A black widow twitched on a leaf. It, too,
is black and red. Across the yard my father
swims laps. The television has yet to pick
up the boy on the ground. In the house,
mother is making jam, calling for my brothers.
– Christell Victoria Roach