The Fight for Freedom Starts With How We Treat Ourselves and Others

In Freedom House, KB Brookins uses language to imagine Black liberty in personal, political, and public spheres. Through inventive forms, such as a CV and a poem written after playing Lil Nas X’s “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” thirty times, Brookins’ expansive poetry collection expresses a longing for messy and unconstrained selfhood.

They are potent calls both inward and outward, weaving between the many textures of pleasure and rage. Brookins cruises through a range of registers, speaking directly and lyrically about harm and resistance. Everything is fair game: Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, revelations about being read as male, an imagined Black future with comfort, care, and ease. 

This book is a container for the multitudinous sides of a complex voice, bringing the reader into a home where a Black trans poet’s self, along with their legacies and visions of the future, is able to unfurl. 

Joss Lake: What are the essential components of building a “freedom house” in your work and in the world?

 KB Brookins: A lot of the poems are about my personal journeys with things like masculinity. And transitioning is really important to me to be like an invisible trans person right now, because nationwide we’re a lot of places. 44 out of 50 states have at least one piece of legislation that they’re totally advanced this year that is anti-trans in nature. So it’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people being fearful of what they don’t actually understand. I talk a lot about my personal experience as a Black trans person living in Texas, living in the United States, North America in general, and being trans, and what that feels like right now and how because we live in such a place that really discourages people from being who they are.

So it starts personal: Who are you and how much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are? And then I think it’s interpersonal, like how we treat each other. You have to [think about that] before you can say “abolish the police”, for example. You actually have to be practicing that principle in your everyday life, like how you treat yourself and also how you treat others. And how do you get through things like conflict; how do you show up in romantic or physical encounters. Those are questions that I was thinking through and writing through in the book. 

And then, of course, there are the circumstances in which we live in on a national and global scale that are unnatural. It is unnatural for the climate to be changing at the rate that it is changing. And whether you live or die every day comes down to your race. It’s very unnatural for people to be so invested in things that at the end of the day don’t bother anybody, like someone being trans, like someone being queer. And it’s also just unnatural to have police and militant people who carry guns around. And it’s unnatural to have the law dictate things like putting the Ten Commandments up on every school in a state, which is an actual piece of legislation that’s trying to be passed in my state. I want to talk about these things very clearly, and I find poetry to be the best medium in which I can talk about them. Because poetry makes space for audaciousness and makes space for exploring things, maybe, in a way like you and me are talking right now. So I’m using things like metaphor, I’m using things like simile, I’m using things like repetition in rhyme and even form, ripping off the form of the curriculum vitae or ripping off the form of a legal document in order to have a conversation with a reader.

JL: A really beautiful aspect of this book is that we can move through these different layers and it doesn’t feel like anything is left out. I’m curious about how you went about organizing this vast container. How did you decide on the architecture?

KB: Let’s say, a bedroom space in which you’re having more sensitive things that you may not have in an open space, like a kitchen. You walk into someone’s house and then they’ll say like, oh, you got to take your shoes off. Or like, here’s the chandelier and here’s how the kitchen is. I was using that section as an orienting space, introducing some of the themes that will be constant throughout the book. I was thinking of bedroom spaces not necessarily where the more internal dialogue poems happen, but maybe more of those [dialogues] are in the kitchen. A lot of intense intergenerational conversations happen at the kitchen table in my family. So I was really thinking: how do those rooms function in a house and how can I display that through the poems that are in those sections?

JL: I was struck how, in another interview, you were naming the trees in your neighborhood and talking about how you commune with them. How did you come to sort of know the names of the trees and plants around you? I’ve been thinking about how we’ve lost touch with our surroundings.  

KB: If I was to make my KB school, it would definitely be a class there in which you just learn about your local environment. People think that being vegan will save the world, right? But I think actually eating local, would eliminate a lot of the carbon footprint. And most people live in a place in which they can forage in their local area. It’s really important to be in tune with what is happening around you naturewise. We owe it to the things that live that are not just human, to care for and be in communion with those things. Growing up there’s an element of nature where I think a lot about: time and who has the actual time to be outside versus who doesn’t. When I was growing up, when people would be so “pro-nature,” they would always be white, right? So I would just be like, “That’s some white shit.” And then I realize—as I grow up and learn more about the environment and about the history of environmental racism—this is very ingrained in non-white folks, that nature is not for us. 

There never was a time when I was growing up where at a certain time in the year my family didn’t go and take pecans from a pecan tree. And we always had these big bags of pecans that we picked from a specific area. And also my family went to this big family reunion every year in Waco, Texas, and I saw all these different kinds of trees and the elders that lived in that area knew what those trees were.I was always given little bits of nature. 

Then I got older and people have their section of gays, right? The “artsy gays”, the “theatre gays,” and when I moved to Austin, somehow, I got enveloped into the “nature gays.” My fiancé used to be an environmental educator and one way I got oriented here was walking around the neighborhood and her being able to name every tree. I learned a lot about my local landscape from her and other people who are invested in keeping that knowledge alive. 

JL: Are there ways that you help yourself refocus on your intended audience and away from an oppressive white gaze, or is that naturally happening for you?

 KB: In the late 2010s, all of a sudden, people were paying attention to writers of color. And the things that people were gravitating towards were always about Black abjection or like some person of color talking about their trauma and the trauma of their experience of being whatever race it was that they were. And it was just interesting because the assumed audience would always be white people that didn’t understand where they were coming from. And I wonder where that impulse came from. I found myself, once I started taking myself more seriously as a writer, when I started getting critiques, it’d be like, “I don’t understand it. So you should change it.” What is this assumption that like I could be reading Walt Whitman and you love him and you don’t want him to explain things, but you want me to explain things. We’re reading Robert Frost and John Ashbery, which are not easy reads. Robert Frost is like “Great monolithic knees.” And you’re like, “I can work with that.” That doesn’t make sense. You’re cool with that and you’re cool with figuring that out in class, but you’re not cool with me, making a reference to my hometown that people who I’m actually writing this for will understand? And people don’t have to be from my hometown to understand some of these things because Google is free, right? If you really want to know, you could just Google it. And that’s what I do when I come across texts that I don’t understand,  I just Google it, right? So or use context, close textual contextual observations. We learn that in close reading, right? But there’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

JL: Can you talk more about this impulse to include so many different textures and layers of existence. We experience this  sense of self in such a vast and almost  encyclopedic way. Can you talk about the impulse to pull everything into your work?

KB: If I’m going to address a subject matter so large and also so mulled over as freedom, I have to bring in everything, right? And if I’m going to take it from a three-pronged lens of personal, interpersonal, systemic, I have to bring in all of the things that that might include. I’m talking about race. I’m also talking about gender and sexuality, because that’s my existence, right? We can’t really escape our context. Even if I was to write like a sci-fi book, those things would still come in. And then also talking about disability and trying to develop a speaker, I’m like, okay, is it autobiographical? Is it not? That’s kind of up to you to decide, right? It had to be like a book with a very large view. And then also, that’s just how my mind works and how these large concepts like racism work—it’s permeated within the books we pick up and don’t pick up. They get made and don’t get made. And in the environment that we see or don’t see and the interactions that we can and can’t have.

It made sense to riff off of forms. When approaching things like a CV, I’m like, “Well, what if we were really honest about what that experience at that one random nonprofit that we worked at was. What if we were more serious about and honest about what it means to be  a worker or a laborer in today’s late stage capitalism and also, what are those hidden labors?” At the end of the day, our work is emotional labor and the labor of “I just found out that someone that looks exactly like me, died in another place due to police violence. And I’m still clocked in and I still have to be clocked in.” Those large things that feel small in the moment that we have to put up with in order to continue on. Because we live in such a place where you have to prove your housing or you have to earn things like water and all of the things that we actually need to live, we have to work for and like. If I want to talk about that, why wouldn’t I literally just put it in a CV, right? Mission accomplished. 

JL: You write in “T Shot # 4,” “I want the black boy in need to be a river you can’t name even if you send sounds underwater.” Can you talk about the freedom that that can be found in illegibility or if you have a different way of relating to that particular line? 

 KB: I didn’t feel tapped into what a Black boy or Black man’s experience might be until I started transitioning. For Black men and for people who are perceived as Black men like me, there is this hyper visibility. There is a large history of a weird relationship with wanting to emulate whatever that we’ve learned through colonialism. And then there’s also this hyper visibility of everyone [outside of your community] seeing you either as a fetish or a threat. 

This is the conversation on TikTok and Twitter where people are stealing from Black culture and not citing Black people, but making money based off of things like AAVE,  Black food that started in African and Black American traditions and, slang. It’s “Twitter” slang now or “Internet” slang. But no, it’s specifically AAVE and you just took it, right? And then when it really comes down to it, you know, that white rapper or that white lady singing like Drake rap lyrics doesn’t actually want the experience of Blackness. Because the experience of Blackness comes with a lot of negativity due to other people’s perceptions due to hyper visibility. I find freedom in the idea of not feeling like you’ve got to be hyperexposed all the time and having a sense of self for Black men and Black people, which is not so corroded with other people’s ideas of who you are and not so accessible for other people to steal and pathologize. That’s happened a lot. 

Science has a very fraught relationship with Black people and we see that still negatively impacting the way Black people maneuver the health care system and other spaces. At the end of the day, Black men die at very early ages compared to pretty much every other demographic in the U.S. I was thinking about how the perception of me changing has led to some very interesting scenarios, mostly where I think that me not being completely happy, completely chipper is seen as me being aggressive. And I want to aspire in this poem to feel like you can be something that you don’t have to explain or display.