INTERVIEW: Cianga by Nefertiti Asanti
Congo, seen from the heavens
Cianga
Foglifter Press
Interview by
Nefertiti Asanti
On December 9th, 2023, I recorded an interview with Cianga, a young Congolese poet, musician, and visual artist I admire. Cianga’s debut chapbook Congo, seen from the heavens won the annual Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize, hosted by Foglifter Press, RADAR Productions, and Still Here San Francisco. The prize recognizes local emerging queer and trans writers of color in the San Francisco Bay Area who continue to navigate the ongoing threat of displacement and rapid gentrification.
Cianga’s work pulses with love for self, community, and Congo. Cianga muses on perspective, publishing a debut collection, her performance and spoken word roots, and her role—and all our roles—in Congo’s present and future.
Nefertiti Asanti: I wanted to say this is a pleasure for me because I actually was one of the judges for Start a Riot!, and your work was so stand out. It was a really great experience to be [at your book launch] and see the care and intention that you embodied as a poet. Your intentionality comes across.
Cianga: Thank you. My heart is full. That’s what I’ve been saying since the launch. Also, thank you for catching it was a full-length originally, so you’re not far off.
NA: Tell me about the process of putting together Congo, seen… in its current iteration.
Cianga: It was a full-length and it was called Blood Trail. The driving idea behind that comes in one of the poems “The Anger of Man,” and it also comes out in “Hemophobia,” two poems early in the book. When there is injustice, when there’s war, all the mining of Congo’s resources, when the locals are suffering from it—when there’s all this pain, is it supposed to just disappear? That kind of pain just travels or mutates into something else. “Blood Trail” was originally tracing those lines, tracing it across time.
I just was not ready for a full-length. I think I had a good driving idea. I had some sections but it’s hard! Sometimes I feel like I add filler poems, poems that are nice, that I feel like I want to put there but they didn’t really fit with the theme. So I just lacked poems. I did put [the collection] together. Then when I got to the semi-finals for the Cave Canem prize, I said “Ok I got something here!” Something is here, but it’s not quite there.
In my head I still saw the full-length, and I remember talking to D’mani Thomas, “Ah! What do I do? I got accepted here, but I wanna make sure that this feels like a full collection, and it feels like it's powerful enough on its own.” I spent a lot of time developing the collection. Shoutout to all the folks at Foglifter who let me edit.
The strength for me in Congo, seen… has always been the perspective. I wanted folks to not leave with a defeatist idea because despair is a tool that sometimes capitalism uses to make folks feel disempowered. It’s true that you can have that deep, deep pain, but how can you transform that in a way that makes you feel empowered, hopeful, or connected?
So [with] Congo, seen..., this view from the heavens, this view from above the earth is so tiny that we know ourselves to matter so much. We have entire lives within this tiny little blue dot. We are infinitely small, but because of that, we’re also so precious. We, as a people—as nations, as tribes—are so precious.
I wanted to see Congo from that view. That’s the cover. I also got to draw the cover—shoutout to Foglifter for letting me do that.
NA: It’s a beautiful cover, and I think it’s beautiful for the fullness of your artistic inclinations to be expressed through your published work.
Cianga: I’m so grateful because Foglifter was like, “Do your thing!” And I was like “Ok! I got you!”
NA: So you were surprised that Foglifter was so gracious about you taking creative liberties with your work? What was surprising to you about that?
Cianga: I had never published a collection—this is my first chapbook. In my previous experience publishing through journals or just being around folks, I’ve learned that there’s the business side of book-selling. I was always afraid that the business side would overshadow the message. But [Foglifter] was like, ‘No, we want to give you the best experience!’ I was like, ‘My heart!’
[The cover is] from a picture of me as a kid. Speaking of that shifting perspective, if you just Google “African child” or “Congolese child,” you’ll see a picture of a starving or emaciated child. I wanted to capture that striking gaze but with the stars and the glitter. I’m looking very deeply, but it’s a shifted perspective.
NA: What I’m curious about from this experience is what you are taking with you. ou still have that full-length in you—what of that experience do you feel like you can take with you as you embark on the next steps in your publishing process?
Cianga: Overall, the experience of publishing—I think you have to be emotionally ready for it. So much of it is tangible and finite. So many people are only gonna know these poems in the format they’re in the book. I think I’m not going to rush it ever in the future. I think for this collection, it totally worked out, but I think I felt pressure.I was only able to enjoy the process once I felt that the book was cohesive and whole and good. Whatever it takes to get me there emotionally is what I’m taking for sure.
NA: I know that performance is a huge part of your identity as a poet. Tell me about your background in poetry, and specifically how your experience in performance has informed Congo, seen… .
Cianga: I started [doing] slam/spoken word poetry in high school. When I got here to America, I was so scared. I was so scared of American high schools.I remember one day randomly walking in and the history teacher was hosting a slam club. They were performing poetry. I was like, “What is this? This is hella fire.” Up until then, I’d been interested. I wrote my first poem when I was leaving South Africa, actually. It’s a little rhyme-y kind of poem, but it had always been there in my heart. I was obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe—those classical white men. That’s all I’d read and all I’d learned.
The idea that folks were taking poetry and speaking just like they would in a conversation was so striking. I remember the first competition—I have it recorded—I lost miserably, but it felt so great. They held such a warm space. I came back the next year and I madeit to the finals. From then on, every year, I was always on a spoken word team competing and performing around the Bay.
Slam/spoken word is the ability to connect with your audience, so I understand that I’m writing a poem for my community. And if that’s the light, the shadow part is that it’s very emotionally intense to be in those rooms,speaking to what’s real and urgent. There’s a lot of heaviness. I decided to take a break. So I just wrote from 2019 to 2022. I was thinking about how I could translate my performance into my writing. I imagined myself reading the poems.
I’m always mindful of one thing I learned from Chinaka Hodge, an amazing writer. He said something along the lines of, ‘If I’m writing a poem my grandmother doesn’t understand, what am I doing?’ I took that and ran. Spoken word is that check for me; if I perform this in a slam space, is it gonna hit? Why will it hit? Why will it not hit?
I want to make sure that even though it would be easier for [my Dad] to go through it in French he still gets something, that we could still converse about it.
Spoken word has been that check for me. Whenever poems get a little bit too out there, I want to ground them. It puts community first.
NA: The structure of “The Monolith” A Psalm” was breathtaking to me —the music that happens in poetry, the relationship between music and poetry. Can you talk about the process— what the process was like creating this poem in real-time?
Cianga: This poem is years old in the making. Originally, it was not even in this format. I remember writing it after realizing there were an estimated 15 million deaths in the Congolese war from the time it began until 2021. Fifteen million total deaths is around the estimates for the Middle Passage. Those two coinciding numbers were so heavy, weighed so heavy on me. I didn’t want to edit it. …
Music plays a lot in the poem. Originally, there were quotes by a musician. There’s a song I love called “Aukola” from a Congolese artist named Serge Yakashi. He sings, and he has such pain in his voice when he’s screaming, and it’s almost like a cry. I remember trying to depict that, and I was like, wait, why don’t I do that musically? I do have a music minor; what am I gonna do with it?
With Congolese music, much of it is just oral, played by ear. People just have to write new notation systems, so I was like, why don’t I do my own? There’s no universal sheet music for authentic Congolese music. It’s just played by ear or passed down from someone you know. If they know the song, they teach it to you. There are so many songs from my childhood that aren’t recorded,they live in my brain.
I thankfully got to do a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. I was there for music, actually. I was done with poetry. After competing, I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m gonna work on my visual art.’
I was there as a music resident, but there were also poets and other [artists]. I remember freestyling this poem with a drummer that was there. I was like, ‘Hey you do your thing, imma just speak the poem, and let’s converse.’ And we did that. I was the first time I thought, ‘This needs drums.’ I tried my best to get a drummer for the release. It didn’t happen, but I imagine I still will at some point. Every thing, every little dot for me, it’s a conversation with the drummer.
NA: Thank you for that. Thank you for not being done with poetry.
Cianga: I’m happy! I’m happy, honestly.
NA: In your last response, you talked about Congo and the atrocities that have been happening there…how do you see Congo, seen… in conversation with Congo’s present and future?
Cianga: I see it mostly in terms of perspective. I struggled at first with wondering where my activism fit. I wondered, “Where is my fight? Where are my words most needed and necessary?” There aren’t a lot of direct calls to action in the book. It’s not, ‘Let’s boycott the iPhone’. It’s the perspective I think was important because that is often missing.
As a Congolese person, I most want folks to hear and see the diversity of the country, not to be reduced to our war, not to be reduced to our resources. There are people. There are people laughing as much as they are fighting. The poem about the rat which sparked the whole collection is real; we’re trying to send a rat to space. It was absurd, but there are folks living those moments as much as there are children illegally mining. There is such complexity in the country. I want the entirety of our voices to be seen and heard.
For Congolese people reading this book, I want it to feel hopeful. I want it to feel like this is the kind of book I would’ve wanted to read. Shoutout to Foglifter for also allowing me to change the book's title. It was originally Our Weary Talons, which is a line from the opening poem, ‘Etymology.’ But if I was in the library ,I would’ve wanted and loved to see “Congo” in the title for the Congolese folks reading this. I wanted it to feel hopeful. I wanted Congolese folks to feel seen.
For other folks, I wanted to give a view of the Congolese diaspora and Congolese joy. Not just mourning, but also to see joy and life. Not to see just the absence of resources but to see a people. To see the people.
There are so many angles I try to show it from—whether it’s from okra or from just a portrait of the city—I’m really trying to offer a well-rounded look into Congo. Therefore, when it comes time to decide, ‘Well, do I really need this next iPhone?,’ they can think of the entire people and be like, ‘Maybe I can skip this. I don’t need it. These people and their life and their fight mean so much more to me than a small bit of comfort.’
NA: What’s on the horizon for you? What are you working on?
Cianga: I’m like, should I do that artist thing and say, ‘I don’t know if I should announce…’
NA: Do what you want! This is your interview, girl!
Cianga: It’s too much joy. I almost have to look, freezeframe, look at the camera and ask, ‘Is this real?’ I’m actually working on an album. A spoken word album. Thankfully, I was able to lock down with a producer friend who’s amazing. It’s going to be after Congo, seen… . I don’t know the title or whether I’ll keep it the same yet. But I’m reimagining these poems over audio.
My music tends to be more abstract. It might be more like a listening experience. Hopefully it gets published next year. I’m so excited for that.
I’m also working with some NGOs that have reached out and wanted to see if we can collaborate.
Most importantly and urgently in my heart, I do have the full-length I’ve started, and this time it feels ready. I’m so glad I took that time. It’s going to look very different than Congo, seen. Right now, it feels urgent. It feels necessary, and it feels great to write.
