Interview with Staceyann Chin highly respected spoken award-winning, internationally recognized
Staceyann Chin is a well-known LGBTQ+ rights advocate, spoken-word poet, and performer, originally from Jamaica. She moved to New York City in 1997 after being raised by her grandmother. In 1998 she became an “out poet and political activist”, co-wrote and performed in the Tony-nominated “Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway,” earning a 2003 Drama Desk Award. Her one-woman shows, including “Hands Afire” (2000), “Unspeakable Things” (2001), and “Border/Clash” (2005), have received critical acclaim. Her work has been featured in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she has appeared on platforms such as “60 Minutes” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” discussing her experiences growing up and fighting for her rights.
In 2010, she published her memoir, “The Other Side of Paradise,” detailing her challenging upbringing in Jamaica and her journey to self-discovery. She released her first full-length poetry collection, “Crossfire: A Litany for Survival,” in 2019, which won the American Book Award. Organizations like Immigration Equality and the Human Rights Campaign have given her honors in recognition of her achievements. She has a strong voice for underrepresented groups and uses her work to question social mores and promote equality. “A Mother Apart”, is a film about her life and her daughter. About the journey with her own relationship, her mother and with her daughter. It’s a documentary about mothering, and was released in Canada, and it’s now traveling the States, and will be in London on the 23rd and the 25th at BFI Flare 2025.
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What motivated you to carve a path career in poetry and performing art? What books, music, or art inspired you? What are your best childhood memories related to this field?
I think a lot of Lorna Goodison’s poems inspired me, and Toni Morrison’s writing, and Zora Neale Hurston, those inspired me as a young girl. And I also want to say the book, “Anne of Green Gables”, as a very small child, I read it about a girl who was adopted by people who loved her when she didn’t have any family. That also made me think, “Oh, you can be abandoned by your family, but you can go on to have a good life. If you work hard and if you try to be honest and try to be good to people.” That was good for me as well to read. As a young girl, as a teenager, I read a lot of Shakespeare as well. But I remember reading Toni Morrison’s “Tar Baby” and being very moved by it, even though I didn’t understand it. And I remember being moved by “Merchant of Venice” about a girl who had to dress up like a man to go into court and fight for her case. That was very powerful and interesting to me as a young girl. When I came to the U.S., when I left Jamaica, there were also events, it’s not just the books by themselves, but the books and the events of my life. My mother leaving me when I was born, was a very, very big part of what made me want to tell my story.
When you have your mother and your father together in a family and you have your cousins and your aunts and your uncles, there’s a way that you know you are a part of a larger story and you’re very comfortable in it. Even if you fight against it, even if you don’t agree with your mother and your father, knowing that there’s a story that already includes you, it’s a very important part of how it is that people understand themselves. And I didn’t have that growing up. My mother left when I was a baby and I didn’t know my father. And so I longed to be a part of a story. And because I didn’t have any family, I wanted to write that story myself. I felt if I didn’t have a story that I belonged to, then I would have to write that story myself. And so my writing became an attempt at writing myself into history, into a history that I knew existed, but I didn’t see it written down anywhere. And of course, the works of Alice Walker and Jean Rhys and Jean Binta Breeze and Erna Brodber and, just all these Black women writers, all of these feminist writers like Dorothy Allison, all of these amazing, strong women who were telling women’s stories. I feel like Audre Lorde, who wrote essays about being a Black woman, a Black woman who was dealing with cancer, a Black woman who was in the fight for freedom. Ruby Sales, Pat Parker, June Jordan. I had so many of these women, Angela Davis, who became voices that mattered to me and who became sort of mothers to me, without them even knowing it.
What challenges have you faced, at the beginning, in representing your personal path in spaces that may not always be receptive? Has your approach to poetry changed over the years in response to evolving political landscapes?
Absolutely. I have always written what I have lived. And so I began by writing about my mother being absent, my father not being there, coming out as a lesbian in Jamaica, being assaulted because of that, having to leave Jamaica, coming to America, understanding that this country was a very difficult place for an immigrant, even if an immigrant could make a life here. It became my story, kind of making a record of my experience in history. And so, it seems as though as the world changes, as I became a mother myself, as women’s rights changed, as we got the right to marry as lesbians, as we became a part of a national and a global discussion around the rights of Black people with the Black Lives Matter movement, as we became a world that was talking about sexual violence against women, that also became, a part of my history writing where I was talking about a larger, phenomenon of that larger dialogue about human rights in the world. And as now as the world turns its face against a conversation around human rights, one of the books that moved me quite deeply is June Jordan’s , born Palestinian, born Black, where she made a case that the plight of Black people was similar to that of the plight of Palestinian people.
I have read other works that talks about the Jewish Holocaust as a kind of sister story to the Black Holocaust of the removal and the recapturing of Black people and taking them to North America and the Caribbean. And, that has become such a big part of our story, because now when I think about the Holocaust, I’m thinking about the genocide of people as a larger part of that conversation, where it was never just the Jewish people who were in a Holocaust, but the Jewish Holocaust was most thoroughly recorded. And so if it were that we could record the other times in history when a whole people were targeted and killed because of who they are, then we would understand that we have to be as a world vigilant against that kind of phenomenon. Like, is it important for us to put laws in place, to put checks and balances in place that limit the government’s ability, that limit the factors that allow those kinds of things to happen, where entire peoples can be killed or subjugated to a point of almost extinction?
And even now, as women’s rights take a beating in the U.S., as immigrant rights, as we turn away from taking care of the vulnerable, we turn away from becoming, a social welfare state, we turn away from the rights of children, we turn away from, the government looking to make, the lives of ordinary people better with its powers, as we move towards the rise of the oligarchy in America, or the blatant, front-facing power of the oligarchy, a return to what seems to me like the feudal system where one person at the top can decide, let’s just fire thousands of people, let’s just make it so that poor people don’t have access to food, and let’s just make it so that, people who come to this country for refuge can’t come anymore. All of those feel like how a king just decides to say, no, I don’t want this anymore, and overnight, that’s the reality, regardless of the cost to the people who pay taxes.
In African cultures, and also in Traditional Chinese culture, people live together. Staceyann has Afro-Jamaican and Chinese-Jamaican descent
As a Jamaican-born, Black woman, with Chinese heritage, your work exists at the intersection of multiple identities. How do you balance the pressure to simplify or classify your experiences?
I think that I may do the opposite. We live in a world where everyone wants things to be simplified. We want everything to be as easy as. You take your meal out of a box, and you put it in the microwave, and you press a button, and it’s hot and ready to go in one and a half minutes. We like it when all of our news happens in one-minute videos on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram. But life is infinitely more complicated than that, and we ought to be moving towards an exploration and an understanding of that complicated nature of life, because humanity is complicated, and the largest problems on the planet require an exploration of that complicatedness, and complicated solutions are necessary. Let’s take, for example, the war in the Middle East, centering around Gaza and the Israeli people. Those people, the Israeli people and the Palestinian people, have a remarkably complicated relationship, not unlike the people between the white historical context of American white people and the Black enslavement context of Black people in America.
Those relationships are complex, and it always becomes really difficult when we start to act as if they’re very simple things that, “if we just do that, or if we just do that, then it would be solved”. If all of us got together and decided that these are complicated questions that deserve time and effort, and dive into the issues and the understanding of why we are where we are, we would be better off. I think that would require miles, conversations, it would require conferences, it would require people sitting together over a fire, it would require books being written, it would require one conversation at the kindergarten level, yet another kind of conversation in high school or college, and yet an even more complicated one as adults. People’s relationships are complicated, and I don’t think we should be moving toward simplifying it. That said, the very simple mandate of treating people with respect and hearing them out and speaking to them in a way that says, “I am trying to listen to you and I’m trying to respect you”, that is a simple thing to a long, complicated conversation that will lead us to a greater, a better, a more beautiful understanding of where we are, perhaps to create a more peaceful world where each of us have space to live and breathe and thrive, and we can have a safe world where our children and our children’s children grow old together and grow old together as friends, as people who share a planet. Our planet we’re destroying it.
Our president just made it legal for plastic straws to come back again because he said, “Oh, the old straws were soggy”. I mean, that’s not a reason to say, “Oh, I don’t want to deal with soggy straws”, but so go ahead and destroy the planet. It makes no sense. What’s frightening for me is how quiet people are because I think people understand that the complicated nature of life is not an easy one. Everyone wants an easy solution, an uncomplicated solution, but there isn’t one, and when there isn’t an uncomplicated solution, people give up, like ostriches, stick their head in the sand, put the blanket over their heads, go into the closet, cover their eyes and say, no, no, no, I don’t want to see. But we have to understand that when we don’t see, when we don’t participate in the conversation, what happens is that the problems become even more complicated. And they become so large that sometimes they take generations to solve, if we can ever solve them at all. That’s what’s happening in the Middle East.
Yeah, it’s true. Also, with climate change, we have the same problem.
For sure, we move away from our humanity when we really should be moving towards exploring that humanity. We all have in us the capacity for kindness, but we also have in us the capacity for cruelty. If we remain oblivious to our actions and the consequences of those actions, that’s how we kind of wake up surprised. Like, how did we get here?
Like, how did Germany get there with the Jewish Holocaust? The very same way that America is moving towards, God knows what kind of Holocaust, but we know that people are being displaced and people are being asked to register and people are being seen as enemies when they’re just regular people trying to find a way to safety.
Your poetry is both intimate and revolutionary. How do you navigate between personal storytelling and activism in your performances?
For the minority stories, for the stories that are missing from the canon, the stories that are not told at all, the stories that make people uncomfortable when you tell them, telling that story is revolutionary. And you can’t tell that story any other way, but personally, the most effective way is personally when people have to look at you and understand that this is your story. I think when people can’t refute your story, and it’s difficult for people to refute your story when you are the person standing in front of them saying, this is what I experienced. It’s difficult for someone to say you’re a liar when the proof is in your flesh, in your body, in your eyes, in your hair, in your struggle. So the revolutionary is always partnered with the political, the political not divorced from the personal. What makes a thing revolutionary is that it is at the same time personal and it is at the same time deeply political.
Your performances reclaim space for marginalized voices. How do you see the role of poetry in contemporary social movements?
Poetry has always existed in revolutionary moments, and most revolutions can’t happen without songs, without letters, without slogans, without catchy phrases, without things that stir the heart to force the body to move towards action and change. I think the very nature of poetry is that it calls the heart to action, and the heart cannot move without the body. I think change cannot happen without poetry, without songs. Every movement in history can be tracked by its soundtrack of poetry or song. There’s always something to move the people, to have them speak in one voice, to have them shake and scream and stomp and roar. They need words, words that mean similar things to them, words that move them, words that remind them of why they’re doing this impossible task. Revolution, by definition, is movement that is triggered by some kind of poetic, artistic sparking.
Your one-woman show MotherStruck! blends poetry, humor, and vulnerability. What was the most unexpected revelation in developing this work? How has motherhood influenced your activism and writing?
My first wound was the mother’s wound. My mother leaving me was the first hurt of my life, and maybe even for more decades. My mother leaving me was a motivation because I wanted to show her and my missing father that I was going to be a success and that they would regret leaving me. And I think somewhere around my 30th birthday, going towards my 40th, I started to understand that my mother herself had no choice and that if she didn’t want to become a mother and she wasn’t given the space to make that change for herself, that she would be in lots of ways forced to become something that she didn’t want to be. As a result of that, when I had my own child and I was exploring what had happened to me as a result of becoming a mother, I grew to understand that my mother, in many ways, did the best she could. She didn’t want to be a mother and she wasn’t allowed to not be a mother. And so any choice she made was going to be the wrong choice for her and it was going to impact more than just herself. Because she was being forced to bring two children into the world, children that she didn’t necessarily plan for, couldn’t care for, and as a result didn’t want. And writing the show and exploring those questions while I was taking care of my own child increased my sympathy for my mother, increased the understanding I had for her and the lack of choice. Because I was 40 years old, I was in a career that I knew that I would be able to work and take care of my child. Thousands of people were so happy to see me pregnant and looking forward to this child, ready to help should I need it. I had all these wonderful community support systems for me and my child. And it was still terrifying to become a parent, to be completely in charge of and responsible for the safety and security of a whole other human being when I had been a single person my whole life. So I was 40, earning money, respected in my community, had support, and it was still very terrifying to think of myself as a mother. And I think to myself, “what might that have been for my mother at 23?” And it really, really was deeply moving for me to think my mother was 20 years younger than I was when I became a mother. Had no money, had no systems to support her, had no way to become self-actualized, had no way to follow her dreams. And she would be committing to a life of manual drudgery work in order to care for these two children. And when I saw the difference in the choices my mother had and the choices I had, there was a way that my own heart opened to her. In a way that it never had. And as a result of that, I mean, I was very shocked at it, because I thought to myself, “Oh, I’ve done so much work to understand my mother.” And when I was developing the work, I had a greater understanding of my mother. And it also dawned on me at the same time that whatever I did, it wouldn’t be perfect for my daughter. That she would grow up with lots of bruises and difficult feelings about the way I raised her. That maybe she might come back full circle to understand why I did what I did, but that I was not going to escape my own daughter’s feelings about the choices I made for her before she could make those choices for herself. And that really kind of made me get off my high horse and understand that we’re all human, and we’re all trying to do the best we can.
What’s something you haven’t written or performed about yet, but feel the pull to explore in the future?
I’ve returned to Jamaica, and I’m building a world, a space called Kindred on the Rock. It’s a community farm space. It’s intergenerational, trying to make it cross class, trying to make it a space for people who have fled to the city and have not found everything they wanted there to make a return trip, a Mecca back to the rural land, to stand with the dirt under their feet, to dig in the earth and plant and reap, to sit outside in nature, to be far away from streetlights, to explore what it means to be in communion with land. My father is Chinese, and they’re Hakka, from the Cantonese region. I have never been to China, but one of the things I love about being Chinese is that everything that I research, it talks about getting on a path to somewhere. I love that Chinese culture historically accepts that everything is not so quick. You get on that path, and you follow it, and you follow it to the end, and you learn something. I love Chinese culture. By my own relationship to China, I knew we are Hakka, and I know my grandfather was a stowaway on a ship, so there’s no record of him coming, but my father’s father, his name was Tamsun Chin Henn (bacame Thompson Chin in Jamaica), and he came to Cuba, and because he didn’t speak any Spanish, he and a few friends, took a ship, a little dinghy, and then they got to the nearest island they took them to Jamaica, and they spoke English, so they stayed there. My grandfather at 49 married my grandmother who was 25, and they started their family, and they had a whole bunch of children, boys and girls, many of them, including my father who came to Montego Bay and he didn’t even claim me as his daughter … it’s just a very, like, complicated relationship with who you are, but I am Black and I am Chinese, and to Black people I look very Chinese, and to Chinese people I look very Black.
I’ve been in Hakka villages many years ago. I’ve been there because they have the most beautiful houses in China, and I was super interested, and so we visited these beautiful buildings, and there you could see and understand how they made the effort to create this amazing place. They have an inner patio, and it seems like it is in a fortified city. So it’s fascinating also the way people live in these houses, because some are a really big community. They live all together, like in a castle, but they are living in the wall of the castle.
We are building, when I got it, there was one farmhouse. And now there are, like, two other cottages that I’ve built, and I’m building other things around it. And so I’m very interested in that, also because I am Hakka. And I want to say, I want to look and see, “Oh my goodness, there are beautiful houses in Hakka. Is there something that I can take from that and build something in Jamaica that says this is my heritage?” The community I’ve been building and I want to build, has many places inside that one compound. And I’ve been struggling with trying to create common spaces, like the inner court that you talk about. I want to build something like that. But I want the place to be a place of like multiple activities, where so many different kinds of people live and share the space.
You are also a LGBTQ+ rights political activist. Despite many efforts, there are still areas where action is painfully slow. What do you think mainstream media still gets wrong about the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality? What should be done especially nowadays?
I think that the media, the stories in the media always set us against each other. So in places that are black or brown, they usually talk about the homophobia of the local people. At the farm we’re building in the hills now, at Kindred, we have a community around us that traditionally people think that such communities would stone gay people. And yet in the heart of that small village, because we have a deep, resounding, lasting relationship with this small rural farm community, because we support them in many ways, because we listen to the people, because we talk to each other, because they listen to us, because they see us and we see them. We are not just tolerant of each other, but accepting. Even we enjoy each other. So here, there in those mountains, Miss Celeste, who everyone would think, oh my God, Miss Celeste would burn us alive for being gay. Miss Celeste will laugh with us and be the kindest to our LGBTQIA visitors. Young men who would, under normal circumstances, be thought violent against gay people are on stilts with us, laughing, dancing, rushing to come to eat with us when it’s time to eat. Friendships are being formed between people on the hill and people outside. I think gender also. I think that too often the sensationalized coverage of queer politics, they like to set the feminist community against the trans community.
They like to highlight the areas where we struggle for space within the context of the white male patriarchy. They don’t talk about how we have more in common than we have set us apart. We are all minorities, disempowered, marginalized people inside of the white, supremacist, patriarchal culture. And if we remember that, and if we remember that it’s just rich white men who want to put their feet on our neck and that there is enough space for everybody, if we remember that, if we take them on together, if we link arms and take them on, that we have a better chance of forcing them to share the world’s wealth with all of the groups that are currently disenfranchised. I think if we hammer that point in, and again, it brings me back to our first part of the conversation where we need to sit together and see each other as human, and that is the first step towards forming community and forming alliances and creating a revolution that is more unified than the factions that seem to be fighting only for the good of themselves.
International Women’s Day 2025, focusing on the theme “Accelerate Action”. What do you think are the key factors that contribute to this inaction? What advice would you give to young people?
Most people are afraid. They are afraid of losing their space at the table, because at the beginning of most movements, when the women were fighting for, their husbands to not own them anymore, when, Black people were at the various beginnings of the various fights they have had around race, when marginalized communities like the Indian community or the Chinese community, immigrant communities, when they’re fighting for the right, at the very beginning, when you don’t have very much progress, I think it’s easy, because that means you don’t have much ground to lose, so you’re not fearful of losing the house you have or the job you have, or you’re not as afraid as when you have, like for me now, I have a house in America. I have a property that I could lose, I have a child who I could endanger. So action for me requires more risk. Because when I was five, I had nothing to lose. When I was 20, I had nothing to lose. I would just wake up and get my clothes on and be ready for the fight. Now I have to find childcare. Now I have to think about what it might do to my child if I’m arrested. I have to think about, “Oh, will I be able to earn my living if I’m blacklisted?”
There are many, many, many ways that the more you have, the more you’re afraid to lose. And so I think now that the LGBT community has had some progress in their life, there’s a way that people are afraid. If the entire federal government walked out, the government workforce walked out or shut down the government for a week, it would force Americans to come out and protest, to say to Elon Musk, to say to Donald Trump, stop what you’re doing. But because each person is afraid that they will be targeted and lose their own jobs, they don’t do anything. So I think people, when they’re afraid, don’t act as forcefully and without hesitation in the way that they would act when they are themselves at the end of their rope. And that is how it has always been, that when there’s much to lose, there’s hesitation. And there’s someone who said, “When they come for you, …” by the time they come for you, there will be no one left to speak for you. So speak now, and I’m encouraging people now. The advice is speak up, speak up, find a way to speak today, and then you will find tomorrow it’s easier to speak. And then you’ll find the day after it’s easier to go marching. And then you’ll find the day after that, it will become a reflex to get up and move when movement is necessary. But you have to start. Start now, speaking out in your families, speaking out at school, at your jobs, speaking out on your social media page. Like there’s so many ways to resist, you know, not just, oh, I won’t shop at Amazon for one day, but commit more than that. An other thing I want to say to listeners is somebody else years ago, whatever rights you think you have now, someone acted in spite of their fear decades ago, centuries ago, millennia ago, somebody acted on your behalf, never having met you, but they knew that they had to do this so that you could have the seat you’re sitting in now. And it is time for you to do the same for the generations to come ahead of you.
Photos courtesy of Staceyann Chin
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