“For all of the profound inequity in the process of looking for funding, what I’m realizing already is how much the gift of a grant alleviates mental space to even begin to think about writing,” local Madison poet and 2022 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient Natasha Oladokun said. “My brain is still very literally de-fogging from being in survival mode in a pandemic trying to freelance teach and freelance write. It’s so difficult to work when you don’t know how to pay your rent.”
This past January, Oladokun received a year’s worth of funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, which provides writers the opportunity to develop their projects while receiving full financial support. Oladokun’s work has been featured in publications like “American Poetry Review,” “Harvard Review Online,” “Pleiades,” “Kenyon Review Online,” “Indie Film Minute,” and more.
Originally from Virginia, Oladokun found herself in Madison after being named the inaugural poetry fellow of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI)’s First Wave program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. For two years, she led workshops for First Wave’s undergraduate scholars, helping them test their creative boundaries and hone their voices as artists.
“They were just so brilliant and so smart and already so self-motivated. Getting to see these young students not only refine their own craft as poets, but also develop skills in other genres and other art forms was absolutely incredible,” she recalled. “And I know for me, it definitely had an impact on my writing because I think it helped me become a better teacher, an even more attentive teacher, a teacher who was able to think on her feet.”
Having had influential instructors early on in her writing career, Oladokun knows how big of a role a dedicated teacher can play in a writer’s trajectory. “Seeing the amazing teachers that I had and seeing the work that they were doing, I knew that that was also going to be part of the journey for me as well. I knew that I wanted to be able to teach,” she said. “By the time I finished my first workshop I knew I wanted to keep doing this forever.”
Inspired by the work of poets like Lucille Clifton and Li Young Lee, both of whom grapple with ideas of the divine, the body, eros, and passion, Oladokun considers writing to be a spiritual practice. “I think I’ve just accepted that I’m always going to be fighting with God in my poems. I think I’ve just resigned myself to that fact and it feels like a generative spiritual struggle that I find very affirming and very life-giving and honestly, [it] brings me closer to God,” she said. “So for me, so much of my work at least over the last few years has been sort of making sense of my own spiritual beliefs, but also making sense of the very white Evangelical brand of Christianity that I was brought up in and no longer ascribe to.”
In exploring these different questions, Oladokun emphasized the importance of having mentors with whom she feels safe to pursue both intellectual and emotional inquiries. As a fellow with the Cave Canem Foundation, whose tagline is “a home for Black poetry,” Oladokun has found exactly this. Oladokun has had the opportunity to attend two annual week-long summer retreats at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pa. with other Black and African poets, and will attend a final one this year.
“There were things about my experience, about my body and myself that I wanted to explore more in my writing and in the hands of even the best and well-meaning [white] workshop instructor, it can only go so far,” she explained. “And so it pushed me to dig deeper into what it is that scared me the most in my writing and gave me the courage to look in it and do it in an environment where it was safe to experiment and safe to fail, whatever that means, without that failure of experimentation having any kind of commentary or impact on who I was as a person.”
As a Black woman, Oladokun has had her fair share of challenges to navigate within the writing industry. “So much about navigating space as a Black person in the artistic world, before you even get to focus on the craft, [is] having to navigate so much racial politics of just living in your body and it’s exhausting,” she explained. “So to have a retreat and space where, for a week, I didn’t have to think about that, was incredibly life-changing for me.”
In addition to being a poet, Oladokun is also an essayist who uses pop culture to answer larger questions about identity and cultural fixations. She currently has a column entitled “The PettyCoat Chronicles” for literary publication “Catapult,” where she explores America’s current obsession with period dramas that tackle some of the most controversial issues of today, like race and sexuality.
“I love pop culture, I love film, I love movies. I can’t say that I have any formal training in [any] of those areas but that for me is kind of a plus because I can just kind of enjoy what it is that I’m watching or actively consuming,” she explained. “I can sort of enjoy it without preconceived ideas, I kind of just feel like a kid in many ways. […] Poetry feels like I’m trying to answer a particular question in my poem or solve something within myself, whereas with prose I don’t necessarily feel the same pressure to do that.”
With the security that the Elizabeth George grant provides, Oladokun is looking forward to having the time and mental space to sharpen the manuscript for her first book. “It feels like a huge gamechanger to be able to flip the script a little bit and prioritize writer Natasha in front of anything else,” she said. “I just want to be a good steward of the time that I have and be able to go inward in new ways and figure out what this book is going to look like.”
Oladokun is keenly aware of how difficult self-reflection and exploration can be in a world built on racial oppression. “It reminds me of that quote by Toni Morrison where she says, ‘The function and purpose of racism is distraction.’ It’s because the whole design is to distract us from the work that we would otherwise be doing if we weren’t fighting for our lives every moment of the day or fighting for our mental wellness every moment of the day,” she explained.
“I think about that a lot, how much of my life, my short life so far, I’ve already felt the impact of that distraction and trying to survive in a racialized body, in a gendered body, all that stuff, so I’ve been trying to ask myself, ‘What does it mean to quiet down distraction?’”
