In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todne Thomas

Your poem, “day of the dead,” tells a story within a multi-generational family structure. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?

The inspiration for this poem came from my son. His grandfather died the year before he was born. One day in our apartment, he looked at family photos and asked who the man in the photos was. It was his question that made me contemplate the space between family–spatial and existential.  

Can you talk about the title and how it weaves into the poem?

The title of the poem “day of the dead” speaks to the mundane ways in which we interact with our departed and bygone days. Mourning and nostalgia are kindred affects.

In the poem, there are strong ties between the women in the family, linked through blood, while the men have a harder time grasping a similar connection. There’s not a soft landing spot for them, but there’s an empathy that they don’t share that connection. How do you think that lack of generational ties plays out within the poem and within society?

That is an interesting reading of the poem that never occurred to me. The gendered aspect of familial connection is not intentional. It is incidental. The father of the narrator and grandfather of the narrator’s son is deceased. But death does not necessarily cancel familial connection. The inquiring boy is young and is questioning what counts as family. He and his questions are held by the narrator, his mother. His queries evoke an explanation, a conversation, a connection, and perhaps even a visitation of his departed grandfather. The call of blood between the living and the dead, across households separated by distance is felt and extended to all.  

Generational ties are a complex thing, right? In our society, distance, conflict, death, social mobility, changed understanding of families, and other factors can shorten or mute generational connections. But then again, we also have a society in which people are using ancestry and other applications to find their family and forge broader family connections. In the poem, distance and death create some barriers to intergenerational connection as a matter of face-to-face communion.  Yet, for my own part, I do not perceive a lack of generational ties in this text.  Once again, just a figuring and working them out through questioning and feeling.

The phrase “Passed on” in the middle gives the connotation of gifting, of inheritance, and even of death and the lack of presence. Can you talk about the layered meaning, and how it influences the tone of the poem?

“Passed on” is a vernacular phrase in the South for the departed, of the dead who have moved to another realm. I like this term. It has momentum. “Passed on” replicates the movement that exists elsewhere in the poem like the descent of blood, or a person’s descent down a mountain trail. “Passed on” is also different than passed away, which connotes a movement away. A person that has passed on perhaps might return for a visit. I think this suggests the potential for presence instead of a perpetual lack of presence.

I am really intrigued by this other reading of the phrase, of “passed on” as gifting or inheritance. What do our ancestors, known and unknown, bequeath to us in the wake of their passing? What gifts, memories, presences or curiosities, in the wake of their arms around us? Passed on as inheritance opens up a beautiful questioning that I like very much.  

As a professor of religious studies, how does your work come into play in your writing?

That is a great question. I think an abiding concern with the spiritual/ancestral and kinship informs a lot of the thinking, noticing, and writing I do. This is present in “day of the dead.” But in many ways, the economy of poetry, its imagery and visionary qualities, and its theoretical insights is very important to my work in religious studies. My first book’s title Kincraft is informed by an observation of poet Elizabeth Alexander on the work of the poetic work she analyzes and her professed “veneration of the sweat of the craft.” And Nikki Giovanni’s insight that “Black love is Black wealth” is very central to my thinking in my second book. So poets are some of my favorite theorists.

What themes do you find your creative work revolves around? What authors or works have been influential for you? 

As I mentioned above, some of the themes I tend to write about are religion, spirituality, and kinship. I’m increasingly more interested in more amorous and oracular themes these days, as well as humor. So we’ll see where that goes.  Authors that really inspire me (in no particular order) are Nikki Giovanni, Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Dawes, Marla Frederick, Jericho Brown, Hortense Spillers, Maya Angelou, Ashon Crawley, Langston Hughes, Todd Ochoa, Octavia Butler, Deborah Thomas, Elizabeth Povinelli, Dianne Stewart, Jacob Olupona, Casey Golomski, Aimee Villareal, and so many others.  

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently finishing a book about a Black church arson in my hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.  

Todne Thomas is an Affrilachian, mother, and anthropologist. She is an associate professor of divinity and religious studies at Yale University. This is her first poetry publication.