people & happenings
INTERVIEW WITH ’ 24- ’ 25 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE FATIMA SECK
By Julie-Anne Whitney , Public Events Producer
Above : Harriet Jacobs , 1894 Below : Jacobs monuments , Clethra Path
F atima Seck ( FS ), one of our 2024-2025 Artists-in-Residence , sat down with Public Events Producer Julie-Anne Whitney to discuss her residency project — a currently untitled illustrated children ’ s poetry book about Harriet Jacobs .
Harriet Jacobs was born in North Carolina in 1813 . She escaped enslavement in 1835 and by 1842 made her way to New York City where she was reunited with her daughter and brother . In 1860 , she published her autobiography , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , making her the first woman to author a formerly enslaved person ’ s narrative in the United States . Jacobs was also part of the abolitionist movement , raising money for Black refugees and founding two schools for formerly enslaved people . She died in 1897 and is buried at Mount Auburn next to her brother on Clethra Path near Halcyon Lake .
JW : Do you remember when you first encountered poetry ?
FS : My first encounter with poetry was probably Slam Poetry , or spoken word . I must ’ ve been 11 or 12 ...[ Spoken Word ] is as much about the words and the language as how you communicate it , and a big part of storytelling with children is reading aloud .
“ It ’ s about searching for the grand and the large in the small thing — in this one moment .”
JW : What kind of poems were you writing back then ?
FS : It was a little bit of everything ... It was a way to answer some questions . Some things stay with you a little longer and poetry can be a way to say : let me look at you . What is here ? Let ’ s break this open ... Poets are meaningmakers . It ’ s about searching for the grand and the large in the small thing — in this one moment . How is something larger passing through this ? ... I ’ m a big questioner , and poetry feels like an attempt to find answers . I mean , there ’ s never an answer — but there is an attempt to search .
JW : When did you first learn about Harriet Jacobs ? How did she come into your life ?
FS : ... I was teaching at the ICA and giving tours [ on the artworks ] of Simone Leigh when I started learning more about Harriet Jacobs ... She ’ s five or six years old at the beginning of the narrative , and there are so few accounts of Black childhood during slavery . That ’ s when I became very interested in that particular part of her story . Black women ’ s history has always been a big focal point for me , so she has come up before , but in these last couple of years she started to loom a little larger .
JW : Jacobs ’ autobiography deals with difficult , mature , complex material . What parts of her story will inform your children ’ s book ?
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JW : When did you start writing poetry ?
FS : I started writing poetry in college when I was doing a lot of analytical writing . In factbased , well-researched essays , there ’ s a level of feeling that ’ s not being expressed . So I felt more of a need for poetry at that time .
FS : I ’ ve been thinking a lot about how to teach slavery to children , especially in the context of how deeply gruesome and violent an experience it was for people — and I have a lot of thoughts about that — but a big part of it is starting with what experiences they share . That ’ s why I find the first few years of the