Artist Statement

When I was a child living on the cul de sac at Silver Maple Place, I wanted to see with my eyes shut. I knocked my front teeth out testing the transparency of my eyelids. When I started writing poetry, it was my journal. I think in poetry. At first I wrote to make sense of my perceptions, to survive American culture’s dismissal of my depth. I self published my first poetry book at 14, Sunshine @ Midnight, a series of religious meditations: my first effort at seeing in the dark.

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Audre Lorde).

I am a Black woman poet and artist whose ancestors were enslaved Blacks, Indigenous people, and white slave owners in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. To be a creator is a right that my ancestors have bought and paid for. It is my inheritance. Not far back, my maternal ancestors were farmers, millworkers, and domestics in the homes of white folks as housekeepers and nannies. Not far back, on my father’s side, folks were farmers and teachers and counselors. “They say, but sugar, it was our submission that made your world go round” (Maya Angelou). It is now my privilege to have the time, space, and support to bring into expression what we have carried over hundreds of years. As Nina Oteria, I bear the names of my great grandmothers on both sides.

I have often felt “most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (Zora Neale Hurston). My writing and art practice has transformed from survival to healing practice. To begin to heal, you have to acknowledge the wound without normalizing it. “I feel most colored” as I conjure the vividness of colors that pulse through my perception and poems. As I transform my words, I transform myself, I remain myself in color, in flowers, in abstraction.

“Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own” (Alice Walker).

Now, my paintings and poems intersect at the crossroads. In the Black traditions of hoodoo, conjure, rootwork, and voodoo, the crossroads is where the spiritual and physical worlds meet. In Christianity, and in ancient Egypt, the cross, the ankh, is the symbol of eternal life. My paternal great grandfather was a Baptist preacher and my grandfather was called The Preaching Deacon. My spiritual practice and work with the Spirit that identified Itself to me as our ancestral Guide, is the foundation of my creative work. I asked my mother “How deep does it go?” She replied, “As deep as the ocean.” I think of what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “ancestral listening.” I align and all that I need flows to me effortlessly.

I was walking on the beach but my spirit was walking on the ocean floor. The colors of the waves reminded me of a framed stereogram my grandmother had, one of those 3D Magic Eye posters. Jesus on the cross would pop out 3D from cerulean, green, violet flecks if you only looked at it right. My father taught me how to see the image behind the image, the image behind the colors. The Magic Eye: a new way of looking at the world. It is year 5 of keeping my daily dream journal. Visual poems come through that portal too, already completed. As Tricia Hersey says, “Rest is a portal.” I write backwards and forwards until life and the dream touch each other in my mouth, my open tongue, my hand. It is this shift in perception that has saved my life from despair.

Through my creative work, through Black holistic healing (the spirit, mind, body connection) through herbs, salt baths, Spiritwork, meditation, Scripture card readings, rest, and transformative speech, I’m learning to see with my eyes shut. “The body is the rocket launcher…the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled” (Clarissa Pinkola Estés). I travel further than seeing in this dark. Beyond art, beyond worlds, beyond words. For just a moment, close your eyes. Can you sense it?

References:
Audre Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury”
Maya Angelou’s 1987 poem “The Mask”
Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me”
Alice Walker’s 1972 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ 2020 books Dub & Undrowned
Tricia Hersey’s organization, founded in 2016, The Nap Ministry
Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ 1989 book Women Who Run With the Wolves