By Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

You’ve seen Eisa Nefertari Ulen’s dynamic journalism in publications like Essence, Emerge and Ms. magazines, and her cerebral essays anthologized in important collections of letters that speak to the Black cultural zeitgeist and how women navigate through the world. Ulen’s writings flow with beautiful cadence and wordplay while tempered by her powerful political and feminist orientation.

As a professor of English at City of New York’s Hunter College, she inspires her students to be writers. With her debut novel, Crystelle Mourning, we ride along with Crystelle who bravely faces her multi-faceted past. Ulen sat down with me at Ft. Greene’s Smooch Café to chat about literary life.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn: Let’s get right into your debut novel, Crystelle Mourning, and some of the women and their issues in this story. There’s a lot of soul searching in this narrative.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen: I didn’t go into the novel with an agenda. Part of what I ended up doing, but wasn’t trying to do, is debunk the myth of the strong Black mother. I wanted to show the mistakes made by Crystelle’s mother. I wanted to show some of the doubt felt by Jimmie’s mother. And with Crystelle, I wanted to look at a woman who is not so strong or capable and kind of falling apart. Part of what Crystelle has to deal with is this literal ghost from her past, and also these figurative ghosts. Not just what happed at the party before Jimmie was killed but what happened in the months shortly after his death.

LAB: The idea of examining mistakes for the sake of growth can be quite a scary feat for some people.

ENU: A lot of the ideas regarding this soul searching came from people like Debrena Jackson Gandy, who I interviewed for a Heart & Soul magazine article. And she said something I’ll never forget. I was doing a piece on holistic life management and she asked me, ‘what if the very lessons handed down to us from our grandmothers, aunties and mothers are the very things that we need to get rid of.’ The things that we were told so that we could survive slavery and segregation and the violent brutality of America and the way this country has violated and dehumanized Black women, these survivalist responses to those attacks and assaults. And she said, maybe those are the things that we need to start to let go of. It sort of opened up a window for me to be more selective. What do I want to inherit from these sisters? Who are my other mothers?

LAB: What led you to this character, this woman, Crystelle?

ENU: I hate to sound spooky and esoteric because writing is hard work. But, really, Crystelle just came to me. But I will tell you the conversation that lead me to her. I was living in D.C. I went to college at Sarah Lawrence but I spent my junior year at Howard University. I was sitting on the stoop on the house that we were renting and these two women were walking down the street, they were young, about 16 or 17 years old. One said to her friend, “I’m just going to go ahead and have his baby before he gets locked up or shot up.” That never left me. I never forgot that. It was…sad. And strong and weak. I didn’t go inside that day and begin writing, but her voice guided me to this story. I’ll never know her name, she’s on my acknowledgement’s page.

LAB: How autobiographical is the character, Crystelle?

ENU: It’s autobiographical in that we are both women who came of age in the 80s and 90s. But the things that have happened to Crystelle have not happened to me. But, the fact that those situations have happened to other women means in a way that it has happened to me.

LAB: Much of your journalism has dealt with profiling amazing women. And there’s also the theme of women’s issues as they pertain to the world. Can you speak a little about these themes in your work?

ENU: I think that comes from the strong women who I was surrounded by during my childhood and most of my adulthood. I come from, as many of us do, a family of strong Black women. And, I guess what might be a little different for me is that I have a consciousness, I think some of the women in my family take it for granted that the women are so powerful and have been for so many generations. And I think in our sub-consciousness we sought relationships with other powerful women. And from that, I was able to develop a feminist consciousness that my mother gave me. She was a 60s activist with my father. She loved Joni Mithcell, Joan Baez and Aretha Franklin, all the powerful women who were creating powerful lyrics. Quality songs back in the 60s, and you had this strong sense of what is meant to be a woman. So my mother passed that on to me in a really organic way and I was able to develop that at Sarah Lawrence College without having to take a woman’s studies class.

LAB: So, what made you come to that decision to pursue writing?

ENU: I was talking to one of my friends, Laura, who was in my high school English class, and we were discussing colleges and which ones we were going to apply to. She said Oberlin. I said, ‘why Oberlin?’ She said that they had a great writing program. And, I remember thinking, ‘wow, you can actually be a writer.’ Which is a ridiculous response for me now that I look back at it. I had been writing for the city youth news paper, I contributed to the high school literary magazine, I’d always kept a diary. I’d been writing all my life and publishing a good chunk of my young life. And, I had been really blessed to have parents who were avid readers. It wasn’t until I got into college that I realized that there was such a thing as Black literature.

LAB: What happened after you graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with this solid identity as a writer?

ENU: I ended up teaching school in Baltimore City and then I came back to New York. Now, while I was in Baltimore, Urban Profile was being published. Urban Profile was a magazine published by Danyel Smith, Kevin Powell, and all these people who I didn’t really know yet, who I would later come to know and call friend and colleagues. It was this sort of new hip, African-American, 20-something, 30-something publication, that dealt with education, politics, and a bit of art. One of the founders Keith Clinkscales, whom you probably know, went on with Vibe and all those other publications. There were a lot of people like Len Burnett who were involved with Urban Profile. If you can find an old issue of Urban Profile, you will find a lot of names on the masthead who were contributing writers and who now appear on the pages of current magazines and who are now authors of books. It was a good magazine. I published a take on Little Red Riding Hood called “Little Red Cap.” It was really meant to be a cautionary tale to avoid the wolves that are out there, those bad guys on the corner, they’ll chew you up and spit you out. So, that was my first published piece in a national publication.

LAB: What happened with your writing when you hit New York?

ENU: I began contributing to local papers like the City Sun, which was such an important publication. The thing about the City Sun was that I could write what I wanted. And, then later on I was writing for places like Vibe and the Source, Essence and Essence.com, which was very exciting, at the time, people were like websites, wow! Heart & Soul, of course. There was this moment that there was so many African-Ameri- can magazines and newspapers, you could really work as a freelancer and not go begging at places like Esquire. Although I would love to write pieces for Esquire, I have nothing against Esquire. But, at the time there were these wonderful publications that I could contribute to, they got what I was writing and I didn’t have to do any translation. I wouldn’t trade in my experiences for anything. It was all very organic.

LAB: Wow, there seemed to be ample room to grow as a writer, and there seemed to have been a great community. I saw an article in Essence from like 1992 talking about Ft. Greene, Brooklyn being the new Black Mecca. What happened?

ENU: Later in the 90s hip hop, spoken word, and magazines all became too corporatized. People became less interested in art. Brothers would rhyme in ciphers on the street corners. It was a wonderful artistic energy that Ft. Greene had. But, gentrification and displacement has a lot to do with why the brothers aren’t on the corner anymore. So many African Americans have been displaced that I don’t even recognize the neighborhood anymore. There are places still left like Two Steps Down and Keur N’deye. I wrote about gentrification and displacement for the Crisis magazine, not too long ago. I was able to vent and get it all out. It pisses me off to no end.

LAB: How do you still function as a writer without that community? Do you still need it?

ENU: As you know, writing is solitary. But, I workshopped Crystelle Mourning. I shared it in a workshop with Jeffery Renard Allen, who helped me develop my craft. I went to Provincetown and attended a workshop with A.J. Verdelle, who authored The Good Negress. I attended workshops with authors I really admired. I also have friends from those great days where we share our work. I’m in a writers group with Bridgette Davis who I met in the early 90s when she did her film Naked Acts.

LAB: What has your experiences been with publishing your first novel, Crystelle Mourning?

ENU: With the publication of Crystelle Mourning, my debut, I feel like I came into it with so much information in terms of the business side, what to expect from my publicist, what my agent should or shouldn’t be doing, things you really don’t concern yourself with because you’re a creative person and not a business person. But I had that information because I had a community. I remember going to the Frank Silvera workshop as a student at Sarah Lawrence College. I would travel to Harlem, do my homework at the Schomburg and go to these workshops. That was the first time I heard that you are supposed to copyright your work, I was like 17 years old and I always remember that.

LAB: How has Crystelle Mourning been received?

ENU: You tell me, how’d you receive it?

LAB: I really liked it. I marvel at that concept of having a plot take place in a weekend, it’s brilliant and seems hard to do, as a writer. I appreciate looking at the past and examining it. That’s what Crystelle did.

ENU: I tell my students that when you go back to books that you’ve read before and you go over the notes in the margins it’s almost like reading an old journal. You are looking at your formal self. And, then this new self is going to find something that your younger self didn’t perceive. I think that Crystelle Mourning has been well received. I’m really happy with the reviews. We’ve done events in Indianapolis with the NABJ conference, in Los Angeles and San Diego. Different cities here in the mid-Atlantic, on the East Coast, D.C., Philadelphia, New York. I did an interview on Bermuda radio.

LAB: Why teaching?

ENU: I had to eat! I think teachers are born and not made. I think I was brought to this earth to teach and write. I love teaching so much. I love working with young people, especially at Hunter College, they’re so eclectic and diverse. They teach me so much I guess when it comes to teaching, I really like learning.