We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dominique Christina. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Dominique below.

Hi Dominique, thanks for joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

Happiness has always been a state of being I find elusive. That is not to say I don’t exist in joy. Because I do. Happiness to me feels situational. So as it relates specifically to my art and the development of it’, I would say because of the nature of my content, happiness isn’t the feeling I have. I don’t think happiness is the feeling attendees have signed when they experience me performing poetry. I bleed on stage. My poetry is confessional and autobiographical. It is replete with stories of abuse and childhood trauma. I show people the graves I crawled out of. I’m meant to do these things. I spent my entire childhood existing in shame., My art is my reclamation. I tell the truth with it. I don’t hide from the things that happened. I name them. I do it over and over again. I model what it looks like to be the hero of your own story.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born into a family that loved language and used it musically. And lyrically. My grandfather walked around the house reciting Shakespeare. My grandmother recited Paul Lawrence Dunbar. My mother introduced me to Poe and Whitman and Nikki Giovanni. I have always understood how available and how possible language is. When I got to college I encountered Kierkegaard and Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison and Elliott. I was a black girl with a fondness for canonical literature and classical language; the weird girl in the room who loved Chaucerian English when others were absolutely annoyed by it. It seemed a gift to me. This hidden language revealed who people were, how they lived, what they carried and even how they died. Writing introduced me also, to divergent ways to regard death itself. I thank John Donne for that. Death be not proud indeed. And I needed that language to explain things I had seen. To re-interrogate the deaths that had already impacted my life. I think there’s always a tension between more solitary modes of intellectual engagement and more activist modes, and I have a great appreciation for both. My grandparents’ activism was quiet I suppose. And situated in academic rigor. They allowed my aunt Carlotta to participate in desegregating Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. They wanted her to demonstrate her brilliance and have the indisputable fact of it punch a hole in the idea of segregation as a legitimate construct. My grandfather admired Noam Chomsky and Chomsky is probably the greatest genius in the history of linguistics, writing texts that very few people with whom he marches would ever read. He goes back and forth between the two modes. It depends on your temperament, and it depends on your calling. Some people are very inclined toward the academic, ivory tower calling. And that can be a beautiful thing – at the end of the day you have to be true to who you are. I know that my calling includes both. Poetry is the commitment to invention and truth-telling. And to be able to both learn from and listen to the younger generation, but also to pass on to the younger generation so much of what has been passed on to me –what I’ve learned from my teachers in university, but also what I’ve learned in the streets and from the jails and group homes and battered women shelters. So in that sense it’s really quite an honor and a privilege to be inside of and be a part of the academy as a poet. It is an honor to bring my community into these hallowed spaces to say, “We exist.”

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My motivation has always been to be understood. I don’t have a hankering to be seen. It just seems to be an inevitability.

I’m loud. I’m talented. I win contests when I enter them.. I write well. I sing well. I’m 6 feet tall. I’m covered in tattoos. People notice me if I’m in the room., I had to figure out to lean into all that and let it work for me.,

My goal is to be fully expressed. To name, and un-name. To remember. To bear witness. To call out to. To call into. To claim myself. Over and over again. To participate in the grand experiment of becoming myself. That’s my goal. To be enamored with my own astonishing ability to survive, and to translate my experiences and get my crazy done before I get off the planet.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

It’s an identity not a thing I dabble in but I would say the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is that we are always generating….always making things new. I love that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dominiquechristina.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/dominiquechristina
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dominiquechristinapoetry
• Linkedin: https://LinkedIn.com/dominiquechristina
• Twitter: @nyarloka
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@TheNyarloka

Image Credits
Jeremy Duhon