Author Q&A with Jasmine Games

Jasmine Games' debut poetry collection Somebody's Daughter is something else. Deeply personal and precious, she invites readers on a soul-stirring odyssey through the intricate tapestry of Black womanhood. 

Jasmine recently sat down to record a podcast with Miles Bloxson, a radio host and producer at NPR station KUT. Bloxson is the producer of the show "Black Austin Matters” and co-host of the Edward R. Murrow award-winning  podcast "Pause/Play." She is also the creator and host of the podcast and lifestyle brand "Miles To Mogul." Read the transcript of their conversation below but also check out the video recording too!

Miles Bloxson: Everything about this project feels so intentional and so magnetic. It's just a beautiful book, and the title of this book alone pulls readers in. How did you come up with the title? 

Jasmine Games: There was a Twitter trend where people said, 'I'm trying to do this with somebody's daughter.' As a poet, I saw this as the start of a poem. It sparked the idea for the title, 'Somebody's Daughter.' And then when you place it in, context or out of context, it kind of applies to everybody.  I wanted to make sure that it really covered the theme of my book.  

Miles: You start off by dedicating this project to my sisters and my sistas, Black women who were too grown yet still growing. Why was it important to you to create this collection of poems for Black women? 

JG: So, I'm a Black woman with four sisters, and my family is full of women. I care deeply about Black women because they're my friends and family. Even though me and my sisters are all Black women, we're all different. We have different interests and personalities. People often think of Black women as a single group, but we're actually very diverse. We've faced a lot of challenges in this world and society. Growing up, I was constantly told that Black women were not desirable. It was often someone close to me, like a family member, friend, or someone I respected, who would say these things. It hurt to realize that even though they acted friendly towards me, they didn't truly respect me. I really wanted this book to be a bit of a love letter to Black women because we hold a lot and have to be cool with a lot in order to be content with our lives. 

Miles: "Somebody's Daughter" feels like you're letting readers snoop into your private diary. What were you thinking when you wrote it?

JG: I had this idea of collecting all the poems I've written since I was a kid. I mean, I have poems from when I was like 16 or 17 in the book. Then, during the pandemic, I thought, "Hey, I have all these poems, why not turn them into a book?" And that's exactly what I did. As I was putting the poems together, I realized that there was a common thread running through them. It was like I was telling a story, even though I hadn't intended to write a book when I wrote the poems. It made me realize that I really want to document my life, my thoughts, and my feelings.

Miles: Personal poems. It seems like to me, though, some of the poems that you do share with us, I'm like, whoa,  I don't know if I could put that out there, be vulnerable with an audience or people in general because, like you said earlier, those are your vulnerabilities, right? You're sharing them with other people. I don't know if you meant other black women, but you said other black people have said things to you, like how black women weren't desirable. So to put your thoughts out there and be so vulnerable simultaneously, it's a lot, you know?

JG: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways… We get it from everyone, right? We even get it from other black women because of what they were taught to believe about themselves. What kind of bias have they internalized against themselves to make them believe that they don't deserve certain things or they only deserve it if they behave a certain way or if they dress a certain way if they are practicing purity in a certain way. Growing up, we talked a lot about boyhood. We didn't talk a lot about girlhood. When I think back on some of the stories, I'm a storyteller, and I think a lot of the stories that I've seen about girlhood have not really been like black girlhood stories.

And so, it would be interesting to see what it would look like. Like, what does a movie look like? What does a play look like? What does it look like to tell a story that shows,  a young black girl going through all these things, making mistakes, and still being worthy. You know? 

Miles: There are also universal themes about black life, and you share your personal life with the reader as well. What made you interchange the themes throughout the book? You're sharing your stories, but you're also sharing the stories of people around you. 

JG: Yes, that's the difficult part. I think when I was writing it, and I'm just writing the things that I see, I really wasn't thinking about people's authorship to the story.

I was a little worried about that. But now I have family members who are like, I'm ready for you to write mine.  And I'm like, it's gotta come to me. It's gotta come to me. But I think, our stories are intertwined with each other. I can't write about my life, and I can't write about the things that people might see as wrongdoings from my parents without them knowing some of their stories.

Although my biological mom is very strict or was very strict, I think that was rooted in her own desire for me to have as much freedom as an adult that I could, you know, once you couldn't make decisions for me. It comes from her upbringing and what we're taught that we have to raise black children in a certain way for them to be able to survive and thrive in the future. And so I'm very grateful for the life that I have, even though it has its problems because… hey, maybe I wouldn't have wrote a book, you know? So there's a lot to it. It's nuanced, there's lots of good and many things that we talk about in therapy. 

Miles: The book is therapeutic because we don't always share our stories even with other black women. We know that we're going through similar things, but it's like, “nah, everybody don't need to know my business.” It's life. You put a mask on and, you keep it to yourself, and we hold it inside, and we internalize it, and it comes out in other ways. Sometimes that could be disease, sometimes that can affect your health, sometimes that could be anything that we're going through, right?

JG: Oh my gosh. There's a statistic out there that black women are the highest degreed group of people in the United States. Although we are achieving a lot and we're achieving it at a great rate, we're also experiencing life at a great rate.

Sometimes, when we're in the middle of our achievements, people don't actually get to see or consider the fact that we may have had stories that we've had to get through in order to make it to this point. I feel like I've spent a life where I'm quite content with what I've been able to accomplish.

Also, as I was accomplishing these things, I was still holding onto all of my childhood memories, all the things I had to go through, all the things that are in effect today because of what happened in the past. Sometimes, it's like I'm holding a lot today, and this is all I can give you.

Miles: How did you decide what to put in this book and what to keep for yourself?  

JG: Oh, basically, it's like, I don't have a lot of shame. I don't. I have this thing where I really believe in the function of truth-telling in our society. I think when we don't tell the truth. We do a disservice to everyone else because we all begin to live in falsehoods and begin to believe that we're supposed to be able to do it a certain way, or present a certain way, or make it through life a certain way. I'm really big on radical truth-telling. Truth-telling in our society is a form of freedom that we can give ourselves.

I don't have any shame about my story, and  I feel like there's nothing anyone can tell me. There's nothing where you could check me. You could say it, but I've already said it to the world. When I'm deciding which poems to put in there, it's what's most relevant to me in my life.

What are the things that I think about still? And there are some things that I don't include and some things I'm still learning to have the courage to write about. But basically, if it sticks with me, my spirit, and my heart – then I want to include it. And there are some things that I don't include because maybe it's wrapped up in somebody else's story a little too much or I am not ready for the world to know it.

So that's a lot. But also when I was writing this book, I wasn't thinking about, oh my mom's going to read it and my siblings and aunt's going to read it. My grandma bought a book. I wasn't thinking about everybody, you know? So, yeah, it's a new experience.  

Miles: “Don't Bring Home,” really stuck with me. It's literally is the blueprint guide to rules that a black woman passes down to her daughter.

It's all there. And I have to know, was that piece primarily based on your relationship with your mom or was it a collection of women that contributed to, “Don't Bring Home?” 

JG: I would say both of my moms. So when I was younger, my parents divorced and then my mom remarried a woman. And so I've had two moms growing up for most of my life.

That really has informed my parental-to-child experience. And they were getting us out, you know? They were like, “Don't Bring Home.”… I couldn't make anything less than an 85 on a progress report. And then it had to be an A on report cards. And I was pretty good at it.

I could do it. But when I fell under an 85 one time on a progress report, it was not good news. That's the thing: They were strict, you know? No dating till 16. When you started dating, it was like, who told you you could date? I was like, this was the rule!

Miles: There are so many amazing poems in the book. What's your favorite piece and why?  

JG: The last poem in my book is called “Hydrangeas in Bloom.” I saw this tweet that discussed how the colors of hydrangeas change based on the acidity of the soil. They're pretty good at surviving through seasons and things like that. And I really just love that!

There are some poems I had to add to the book to string things together. And I didn't want my book to end on a sour note because I don't think that's what it was about. You know, I think that there's a lot of traumatic things, there's a lot of things that are hard to write, hard to read out loud, but the point is that I'm here, I'm alive, and I'm really pretty damn good. I'm feeling okay, and I look good, you know?

I wrote the book during the pandemic. I was one of those. I was in grad school. And I was one of those students who said, I'm going to go home for a week to visit my parents for spring break. And then I stayed for like two years. Yeah, it was a healing thing being able to live in peace with your parents as an adult with freedom.

They afforded me so much more freedom than I didn't have as a child, so that was great. That's a side note, though. So I was writing that book at their dining room table—the dining room table that I grew up at because the house hasn't changed much. My mom is an English teacher. My biological mom is a retired English teacher.

I read the poem to her, and she edited some pieces of it for me, and I really felt like it was all that healing. And when we're talking about Somebody's Daughter, you know, daughter implies a relationship to a parent, “Somebody's Daughter.” It could have just been a daughter or something.

So, I think there was a part of it, and I think it's unique to my story because I do say, “forgive the soil that grew you,” in the poem. And I don't want to impose that on everybody because everybody's story is different. But for me, what works best is that I extended grace, and I forgave, and we were able to grow and live in a plan C. 

Miles: A plan C?

JG: A plan C where everybody gets to say what they need to happily be in a relationship with each other. 

Miles: I want to read  just a few lines from “Hydrangeas in Bloom.”

Miles: You were talking about the changes in the color of the flowers based on the acidity in the soil, and you connected each theme to a color. 

JG: Your environment changes, and you may have a different experience, but you're still a flower. You're still beautiful, and it just looks different.  

Miles: You illuminate the black experience in this book in every single way. How important was it for you to highlight the black experience and ensure that the stories were told authentically?  

JG: At the end of the day, this is my story and a few other people's stories. But it might not be everybody's, but in terms of the Black experience, I wanted it to feel and to be as authentic as possible. And I did that just by telling and recalling the things that I remembered in life. My dad sitting low in a Cadillac and bumping rap music in the car – that stuff is the joy. 

To be frank, the more wealth you obtain … the more you jump income classes, and things like that. This isn't to say I  have a whole bunch of money, but I've come a long way from my upbringing and my early adult life.

And you become less accustomed to being around black people. And I went to predominantly white institutions. And it's hard when you were raised in the norms of a black society, and then you, as a single individual, move into a place where you're the minority again. Even if there's another black person next to you, they might not even have the same norms that you were raised in. 

Miles: What do you hope the audience takes away from Somebody's Daughter? 

JG: You know,  I really hope that people read this book and come to seek an understanding of themselves.  I hope it inspires them,  to really look at themselves, look at their lives,  and find themselves in the world.  worthy of love regardless. I hope that people will free themselves.  I really like the idea of freedom as education by Bell Hooks, and I really think it is the work… self-work that you do; when you begin to study yourself and you begin to study the world that’s the way you can find freedom to a certain extent.

I hope people read the book and understand themselves better. I wrote the book to understand myself better, so selfishly, I would also say I hope people understand me better. I hope people see me and understand that I have a multifaceted experience of things that I hold within myself, and I hope that I can be seen in ways that I couldn't be seen before. 

Miles: How does it feel to release this project out into the world?

JG: I feel a lot more at peace.  I feel a lot more like no one can tell me what did happen or what didn't happen because this book serves as an artifact of my life. Regardless of the amount of people who read it.  I was taking notes the whole time.  And so in that way, it's given me, my freedom, and it's also helped me work through some of the things that I was anxious about, because although I say I have no shame, and I wrote the book, some things you do get anxious about, you're like, oh, wow, like, y'all read that?

This is the thing I'm really proud of because it's a reflection of me, and if there's something in there that wasn’t as comfortable or if there's something in there that,  you don't think I should be writing about, regardless, whatever it is,  then you'd have to be okay with not accepting me as a whole person.

And I'm at that point in my life where you either want all of me or you could just stay over there. I don't want to live with other people's thoughts in my head. So, for me, the book is giving me freedom and release and a desire to write more.

Somebody's Daughter was released May 7 2024, go and grab your copy now!