For Colored Girls Book Club + Junauda Petrus
Junauda Petrus is the author of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, a soulful young adult novel about two young girls who find love for themselves in each other. Audre hails from the island of Trinidad, but was sent away by her mother to live in Minneapolis with a father she barely knows when caught in an intimate position with another girl. There, she meets Mabel, a Minnesota native who, despite her bouts of physical sickness throughout the summer, starts to heal spiritually in Audre’s company.
Told from the perspectives of both girls, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them is narrated in the accents and speech patterns of both Trinidad and the Midwest. The sections are punctuated with astrological seasons and explore queer spiritual ancestry that make this story simultaneously earthy and other worldly.
We had the chance to catch up with Junauda over Skype to discuss her book. We talked about which character she identifies more with, how her pleasure activist work informed her writing, and healing ancestral trauma.
Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune
FOR COLORED GIRLS BOOK CLUB:
You describe yourself as a pleasure activist. What does that mean, and how has that informed the way you wrote The Stars and the Blackness Between Them? How has it shaped your writing of this story?
JUNAUDA PETRUS:
It’s a term that came as part of the work that I've done with adrienne maree brown around pleasure activism, and I have a piece in that book [Pleasure Activism]. And actually, I think I've been doing pleasure activist work, but it's not a thing that I ever even knew I could pursue. But when I think of my art, and when I think of the power of art, and the reason for art, and the reason why I do art it’s as a healer. It’s as a sort of rememberer of stories and feelings and experiences, especially as a person in the African diaspora, where so much of our spiritual sovereignty and divinity has been taken from us or disgraced in this world. I think in writing [The Stars and the Blackness Between Them], there are so many difficult topics that I'm addressing, and I wanted it to be the sweetest most magical love story between black girls and allowing black girls to be in the center of something important when it comes to their desire and their pleasure, and their romantic excitement.
FCGBC:
I love that. I loved watching Mabel and Audre meet and come into their own and fall in love, and also heal a bunch of stuff with themselves. And in the story, you've created such a robust queer community among black girls, which I wish I had growing up. How is that community building that exists in the book reflected your own experience with queer communities in your life growing up?
JP:
Like you, I didn't have that. I think part of writing the book was a ritual for that, a ritual for how we know that it's okay to understand our relationship with our own desire, particularly as black women, when so much of who we are, our sexuality, our sensuality, our expressions, is consumed and replicated for other people's pleasure? And I think a lot of black women—I'll speak for myself. I had such a hard time accepting that I deserved pleasure, that I deserve to be loved, that I deserve to be seen, that I deserve to be centered, not only in my relationships, but also in my own life. So I think my experience in the book is sort of giving young people what I wished I had: a blueprint, a template for how black girls, whether it's romantic or platonic, whether it's with other black girls or other people—how do we get to be important?
FCGBC:
What I really liked is the structure of the book. I liked that each section was told by either Mabel or Audre, and even within their sections, they were telling stories of other people, and Mabel was seeing Queenie's story from way back, when Whitney and Robyn may or may not have shown up, at that Brownstone party. So how did you choose to tell the story in that way?
JP:
This story couldn't be just from one person's perspective. And I'm glad that it happened that way because it really allowed me to get very curious and very precise, to whatever degree I was capable of, of understanding this queerness from a very Trinidadian-born perspective and not having it be the single-dimensional way of looking at Caribbean queerness—i.e there's queer people and people who kill them—but instead that people actually have a whole culture, and a way of being that's ancestral, in queerness and Caribbeanness. The woman who's like my mama, my literary mama, Alexis De Veaux, who was my mentor in the project, really was instrumental in allowing me to examine and queer the past. I grew up in a household that was multi-dialectic. My mother's Trini, my dad's Cruzan. I was raised in the Midwest, around black Americans from all over the diaspora as well as black Africans, and so I think for me, there's so many different ways that we talk. And I think it's also an aspect of our resistance that we don't speak like white folks. Yeah, they gave us their languages, yeah, they took away our languages. But there's something so indestructible around our blackness, and our Africanness, and it is very palpable in our speech. So I didn't want it to be like this total mental narrative where it's a narrator kind of talking about these girls, but more questioning what are these girls' internal voices? What are the ways that they talk to their homies? And what are the ways their parents talk to them, that really speaks to the blackness that we are?
FCGBC:
Whose work would you say yours is in conversation with? What traditions would you say it falls within?
JP:
The people who gave me permission to live, these black writers. I was fortunate to be growing up in the '80s when Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara... all of these women were making this work that was so us. Unapologetically us. And I think for me, in working on this book I returned to The Color Purple, which, I mean, I have Celie and Shug tattooed on me because that was the first time I saw black queerness, black femme queerness, tenderly and sacredly—through Alice Walker's vision. Even the movie, The Color Purple, I feel like black people love that movie.
FCGBC:
We def do.
JP:
And I think it's because even though it was directed by a white man, it was a story that talked about black feminine intimacy, one that was not all about how men are somehow the center to our lives. Also, there’s Toni Morrison. And Ntozake Shange, and a lot of those kind of experimental black writers. Writers who, in their work, had us sound like ourselves. Writers who were like, no, this is our story. This is how we felt it. This is the sexual violence that happened to us. This is who we were desiring. This is how complicated we were, even though we were forced to have to work as white people's servants. We've always had these interior lives that were really profound, and very much sexual and sensuous. So I think I'm so grateful to those writers at that time who were like, "Yeah, we black women going to write about our real shit. We're not waiting for these white people to cast us as these castoffs."
Photo: For Colored Girls Book Club
FCGBC:
I appreciate your book for exactly this reason. In your book you were like, "Well, this is actually how it is. This is what it is. And if you don't like it, then...” This might be wrong to do, but when you talk, my brain does this mental calculation of "Is she more Mabel or more Audre?”, and I really can't decide. You feel like both, at the same time. Is there a character that you identify with more?
JP:
Hmm. I think in some ways—and this isn't a cop-out—I really feel like both of them in... no, I won't say in equal parts. Maybe Mabel more, because she's a Minneapolis girl. But I don't relate to how healthy her family is, you know? I relate to Audre and a lot of the ways that she had to hold on to mental illness, and [other] people's trauma, but she had people who were there for her, who helped guide her in ways that I think I did too. I also think there's ways that Audre's navigation around her queerness is something I relate to. I think Mable, even though she was figuring it out, too, didn't experience the really intense fear around her queerness that I think Audre had to navigate because of her mom. I didn't come out till I was much older, and I think that's okay, but I also think what would it have been like to have been a young person and not have that as a hang-up?
FCGBC:
The book is pretty inconclusive about whether or not Audre and her mother resolve their stuff. So, I guess this is a question in two parts: one, do you imagine the lives of your characters after the book, and two, do you imagine whether or not Audre and her mother were able to reconcile some of their issues?
JP:
It’s funny, because I do feel like I kind of have a sense of it. Part of me is like, "Do I want to write a second book, in this storyline and this imagination?" Like, do I need to just leave it alone and let it be the beauty that it is? Or, are there ways that I very much am attached and interested in these characters, and after this moment? I don't know. I feel like with Audre, there's ways that so many of us come to a different space with our parents, and it doesn't happen in our adolescence. I think one thing that's exciting is that she has a dad who really has a sense of health and can help her contextualize her mom. With Audre, I think that ultimately, I wanted her to be allowed to become who she needed to be, without her mom's hang-ups. And I think there's enough lifelines for her to continue to blossom to come back to her mother in power. I just feel like so many of us kids and grown folks navigate this shit, navigate these figures that we're kind of dependent on because we're from them and we're curious about them because we're from them, but also we don't have to hold them, we don't have to carry them. We can be free. So that's what I hope would happen for Audre.
FCGBC:
What kind of research did you do for this book, and how did the research play out in the story?
JP:
I went to Trinidad for two weeks to interview people who were LGBTQIA. Just to sit and talk to them about their stories, and what was it like – I had a blast. It was really powerful to go to Trinidad and specifically talk to queer people. And then also talking to all these cool-ass, young, queer Trinis, in their community. You know how we are when us queer folks is all together. We just like, so dope. I didn't want to act as though "The United States and Europe understand how to treat queer people, and the Caribbean is so backwards…” which is the narrative. And to me it’s like there's so many ways that queer Caribbean culture influences Caribbean culture period, you know what I mean? I also did research around astrology, which was a major aspect of the book. I've always loved astrology, and I really got curious about this delving into an African ancestral reflection of astrology. So I interviewed a couple of astrologers, specifically Zyon Gray who does stuff with African ancestral astrology and he was able to get me to think of the Yoruba, the Ifá, and the astrology's intersections. I also interviewed Wendell Johnson, who happened to be incarcerated and who also is an astrologer, and who also happened to be gay. So it was great to kind of talk to him about his sort of ways of being incarcerated, and also just all of those spiritual books and texts that he got to [interact] with. Which is a theme that I've taught in prisons, and a lot of people get this access to thinking and studying and reflecting when they're incarcerated, which, and I speak to this irony in the book, what if we were given this time to actually be with ourselves and study ourselves, as oppressed people?
FCGBC:
That's dope. So I know you're also a filmmaker. How does the medium through which you tell story affect the way you tell the story? Is it something that comes to you when you think of the story, or does the story already come in the form it's supposed to be in?
JP:
I think it can be a little bit of both, depending on the process. Because this initially like I said, this book was a screenplay. And then it became like, "Oh no, this is more... this is a book first." But I think it will be a screenplay. Things are in the works.
FCGBC:
Can you say a little more about that?
JP:
I'm having conversations with people who are cool who I would totally want to work with. So that, to me, is exciting, because I'm like, all right, it was meant to be. And I really am going to make that happen, but then I was grateful to get the richness that comes from a book. Because with a book, you can get into the minutiae of these characters, and these backstories. And then I do performance art and installation stuff. So for me it's like I'm also just kind of a weird person, and I just like to [make] art that kind of consumes people. And I think that's the way that I wanted the book to feel. Like, okay, this is certainly our world, but also the grandma's flying, this girl does things with these herbs, and she's able to go into this grandma's mind. All of these things. For me, I love things to feel like, "Okay, oh my gosh. We just got transported."
FCGBC:
I would love to see how this would translate on a screen, or what that would look like visually represented. What is your writing process like?
JP:
It's very... crazed. Some days I don't write. Sometimes I don't write for weeks. Sometimes I write every day feverishly. I'm an early morning person, so I did a lot of my writing early in the morning. I've had a big family and a house that didn't create a lot of privacy for me and my little dreamy black girl spirit. So I think I carved out the time of early morning to be with myself, and it stayed that way. A friend of mine puts it well: it's like I'm always writing. Even if I'm not writing, I'm always listening, I'm always paying attention. There's so many things in the book that came from just me paying attention. And not from sitting down and writing.
FCGBC:
Is reading involved in your writing practice? Do you like to read when you're writing?
JP:
I think I needed to get deep into [The Stars and the Blackness Between Them], before I read other books. The Color Purple inspired the book in some ways, but I didn't want to read it when I was beginning to write my book. I was very deep into writing my book before I read The Color Purple again, and mostly I was interested in the first-person of it. There's this book that I read that was written by a white author, The Outsiders, which was a book I read as a kid. I read a couple of books written by Trinidadians, but not many of them. I read books that were written by queer women like Sharon Bridgforth, for example. Alexis De Veaux was my mentor. Just to kind of give myself permission to tell the story. Because I think in some ways I had to get over my kind of taboo around queerness, and how sexual could the girls be. Stupid shit like that. Even with young adult books, part of me is like, can can they be smoking weed in here? Can they masturbate?
FCGBC:
Are you reading any books right now? If you're not, what books would you recommend?
JP:
Yeah. I am currently reading The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry. I guess those are all in the queer/trans space. I think when I was writing a book, I was like, I don’t got time to do nothing. But now I am kind of luxuriating in books again. I want to read Nicole Dennis-Benn's Patsy. I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about her work, and it feels like our work's in conversation. I also want to read more poetry. I love writing poetry and my book has so much poetry in it. I think one of my next books will be a poetry collection, so I’m thinking about what that'd look like, just getting inspired and feeling like I'm off the clock because I'm not writing a book right now. I am kind of writing a book, but not in the way I was with this one.