Book Review: My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter by Aja Monet

Reviewed by John W. W. Zeiser

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Poems by Aja Monet
Haymarket Books, May 2017
$16.00; 120 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1608467679

“Gestures in good faith do not change oppression,” writes Aja Monet in the forward to her collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. This ethos pervades the nearly 200 pages of poetry. It is unsurprising that this sentiment and the poems housed in the book should find a home at Haymarket Books, whose roster includes radical Left luminaries like Angela Davis and the late Howard Zinn, as well as up-and-coming voices on the Left like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Monet’s poetry, like her activism, is one of resistance and reimagining. It resists simplicity, instead opening up new vistas for the reader and new points of entry into perspectives that are largely ignored; she gives voices to the marginalized and forgotten and imagines worlds in which those voices can ring out. Take for example Monet’s quiet honoring of a mother doing what she must in “district two:”

she used her work address
to get us into school, she
could have gone to jail for wanting
her kids to have a decent education

Or there is her insistence “i am a woman carrying other women in my mouth” in “#sayhername” that demands we acknowledge the spiritual violence black women endure. Yet her vision is not simply about those who have toiled to make things possible or who are not here to commune with the living. She also aims high, no less than what she writes in “mobile technology” to “mobilize a revolution of the mind.”

John W. W. Zeiser is a poet, critic and journalist in Los Angeles. He is a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. You may follow him @jwwz